TRAVIS BYRAM'S MOVIE REVIEWS

10. GREEN BOOK The retrospective rundown: Having been crowned the Academy's movie of the year less than a year ago, it only took a few seconds after Julia Roberts read the name to realize a mistake had been made. And not a La La Land / Moonlight debacle either. I've heard it perfectly described as the second installment in the Driving Miss Daisy cinematic universe. This is not to say Peter Farrelly's Green Book is terrible. The chemistry between Tony Lip (Viggo Mortensen) and Dr. Shirley (Mahershala Ali) is what keeps this engine running. But the white savior narrative (not the only Best Picture on here with that problem, either) is so glaring. Tony saves Shirley from getting beat up by white supremacists, saves him from a police investigation of a gay hook-up Shirley had in a YMCA. And, of course, Tony saves him from loneliness when Shirley is invited to Christmas Eve dinner. The onscreen friendship is palpable, but who would ever go with centering a narrative on Tony...

I'm late! Let's jump into it. 5. PARASITE I opened up Bong Joon-ho's Snowpiercer on Netflix my freshman year expecting for a decent action/thriller headed by Chris Evans. What I got was a spectacular action thriller that stated no matter where you are in life there will be a class system separating the poor and rich. Building off that theme we are treated to the foreign darling of the year, the Palme d'Or winner and possibly even Best Picture winner by next month, Parasite . Difficult to review without revealing too much, just know through a single connection Kim Ki-woo (Choi Woo-shik) begins to weasel his entire family into the wealthy Park brood's mansion. The rest, as every BuzzFeed article you see scrolling through Facebook announces, will shock you. Startlingly original, most films on this list ranked higher I have seen some version of. To Parasite 's credit, there is nothing like it. Find your local arthouse theater and go see it! 4. UNCUT GEMS Aft...

10. CLOUD ATLAS This may be where I lose some of you. Goodness knows the Wachowski sisters and Tom Tykwer lost a lot of the audience for their 2012 sci-fi time zooming epic. This might be the most ambitious film of the decade (Linklater's 12 years has nothing on filming Tom Hanks as a Russian gangster, Halle Berry as an old Asian man, and a Jim Broadbent subplot about escaping a nursing home?!) They all tie in to form one of the most bizarre mosaics of cinema ever assembled. I lapped up every second, all 10,320 of them. Perhaps I'm fascinated by the ripple effect of time, how maybe nothing we do is original because we've been humans for so long, but I plan on rewatching Cloud Atlas for the years to come, fruitlessly and lovingly trying to decipher its message. 9. FRUITVALE STATION We've been blessed by a decade of Michael B. Jordan, and before franchises started deciding to put him in all their properties, he gave us the greatest tragic performance of the 2010's...

Before you see this list, I'd like to announce this blog is as old as the decade. That is to say for ten years, starting on January 15th of 2010. It read: "I gotta say this is pretty sweet. I like just writing and stuff, mostly about movies, which I really enjoy, so expect movie reviews and everything. Just a blog to fill time." Wow. The words of a young genius. I was 13 at the time and according to onthisday.com,  The Hurt Locker  had just scooped up Best Picture at the Critics Choice Awards. A slow Friday for the world. When I walked out of the theater seeing  Slumdog Millionaire  when I was 12, movies were still strikingly new to me. I had just been allowed to see my first R-rated film in the theaters, Clint Eastwood's still-doozy of a film  Gran Torino . I was a rule-follower. I didn't know what pirating was (and still have only done it once!). I was four years away from being able to see one on my own, so my mom and aunt accompanied me. I walked out o...

*MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD FOR  BLINDED BY THE LIGHT (and GREEN BOOK )* I felt a real bond with Spike Lee when Julia Roberts announced  Green Book  as the best film of 2018. You can see him here jumping up, looking like the grape mascot from the Hanes commercials, fuming in his aisle, his blaxploitation crime thriller  BlacKkKlansman  just having won him his first Oscar for Adapted Screenplay. It was a short-lived victory for Spike, because  Green Book  (the next entry in the  Driving Miss Daisy  cinematic universe, my friend joked) has been accused of perpetuating the stereotype of the white savior film. And the bippidy-boppidy Italian stereotype that Viggo Mortensen portrayed. Like your favorite $6 plate of lasagna from your local Italian restaurant (maybe Mario's? maybe something with "La" in the title),  Green Book  went down easy with a lot of familiarities, no harmful spices. The white driver has Christmas dinner with the black ...

What an odd awards season it's been so far. A middle-of-the-road Queen biopic bested Black Panther , A Star Is Born and BlacKkKlansman for the best drama of the year at the Globes, crowd-pleaser Green Book took Best Comedy and Best Production from the PGA Awards, and the Netflix darling Roma took the Critic's Choice Award for Best Picture. Neither Green Book or Roma are up for Best Ensemble at the SAGs. It's a true shot in the dark for who's taking home Best Picture, as opposed to the pitting of two films against each other we've gotten the past few years ( Three Billboards... vs. Shape of Water , La La Land vs. Moonlight , Spotlight vs.  Revenant ) and I love it! Nobody will be so sure who's getting what on Oscar night. Before the nominations are announced tomorrow, here are my picks. BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY: The Favourite First Reformed Green Book Roma Eighth Grade (my generation, the ones raised on writer/director Bo Burnham's hysterical ...

2018 was indicative of many things: the biggest being departure. I said goodbye to the comforts of college back in May, where I was working on my own script called "Black Chicken." I told myself that's why I wasn't working on this blog, because all of my creative attention was being poured into my senior project. But honestly, seven months after I graduated, I realized I had lost the lust for this little website. Why review superhero movies when everyone's already going to see them? I thought. The act of critiquing or lauding someone's art has left me. Nothing I wrote last year came close to the buzz of creating, of sculpting a character's jokes or figuring out where to put my B plot. I hope this is temporary, as movie reviewing is what's kept me active here on Blogspot. But for now, it might be for a while, as I hope to turn to making art instead of just writing about how bad I want to be these actors, these directors, these storytellers. That asid...