TRAVIS BYRAM'S MOVIE REVIEWS

Awards season has kicked off! The Critic's Choice, SAGs and Golden Globe nominations have all been announced, and there have been several consistencies in those three! One is the presence of Reese Witherspoon, someone who hasn't led a good movie since her Oscar-winning turn in Walk the Line . Call it an Oscar curse, but fare like This Means War and Water for Elephants have plagued her career since the Academy Award win. Last year she came back as the object of McConaughey's affection in the amazing Mud , but Wild sees her anchoring an entire film, mostly, and I know this backpacking pun will come up a lot, on her shoulders. Buh dun tss. Wild is based on Cheryl Strayed's account of her travels on the Pacific Coast Trail. I was very much unfamiliar with her adventures, and though this might say something about me, I only knew it from seeing it in Borders (this was a while ago after all) as an Oprah Book Club book. Witherspoon's performance has been repeatedly lauded...

After enduring the tragedy that was "Iron Man 3", I felt disappointed in summer blockbusters.  That was, until I saw "The Great Gatsby," which featured stunning style and gorgeous cinematography.  But my expectations were turned for the better when I saw something that was, decidedly the anti-"Gatsby," an independent film with rave reviews, a guitar-based soundtrack and a leathery Matthew McConaughey.  That film is one of the year's best (already, I know) and that film is "Mud." "Mud," like its title, begins deceptively simple with two young country boys going out on their cheap motorboat exploring.  Right away the movie flashes similarities to one of my favorite 80's films "Stand by Me," and that's a direction you can never go wrong in.  I'm a sucker for films with kids who try to act grown up, it makes their coming-of-age story that more interesting. The kids in question are Ellis and Neckbone (they never d...

Had I not read Sara Gruen's electrifying novel of the 1930's Depression era Circus there was no chance I was going to catch "Water for Elephants," what with the "dude from 'Twilight'" Robert Pattinson and Reese Witherspoon, looks like a chick-flick right? Perhaps the chick-flick part is true, I must say that about the movie, the audience was about 80% elderly folks, probably 90& women. I read the novel when I was in late 6th grade mostly due to the lure of the critical appraisal the book had sprawled all over it's back cover and the look of a man entering a circus tent. I read the thing in a matter of days. It was so captivating: The setting of the Depression era circus, the sinister villain August, the enchanting heroine Marlena, and the down-on-his-luck underdog Pollack Jacob Jankowski who, after his parent's death joins the circus...it all seemed like a larger than life tale. And who could forget the humor of the older Jacob, who rec...