127 Hours

Great movie. James Franco is pretty much the heart and soul, as the final 3/4 of the movie pretty much stars him in a crevasse fighting for his life. Parts of the movie reminded a bit of Titanic--you knew the end result before going in to the movie, but the story on the way there was what made it interesting. I am glad that Franco has been earned a fair share of nominations for his performance, and think that he should get an Oscar nom also--but there is slim chance he will beat Colin Firth (although if somebody does beat Firth, it will be him).

I really liked some of the things that Danny Boyle did with the shooting. Going in, I had been warned of the split screen sections, and more artsy shots (i.e. the water traveling up the hose on the camelback), but I tended to enjoy both. The split screen multiple camera angle moments gave scenes that could have been otherwise a bit plain, an extra depth. I wondered how this story would really play out, and how they would manage to entertain an audience by showing Franco caught under a rock for an hour and a half--but they did. By giving Ralston some background in the early scenes, and in the scene with the female hitchhikers, you start to get who he is. The scene that really got me was a few days into him being trapped, when he was starting to lose it, and he put on the talk show voice and was interviewing himself. Really glad that Boyle decided to team up with AR Rahman again too(oscar winner for the Slumdog soundtrack).

As I said above, this was the James Franco show--he made the movie. Not suprised that the movie as a whole hasn't earned much recognition, it is not quite oscar winning material. I think that many people were weary of the main event of the movie...Franco hacking his arm off. They didn't shy away from showing the details in the movie either--it was probably just about as much as I could handle--but it didn't take away from the movie as a whole. And of course, as I have found recently, the actual footage at the end of the movie of the real Aron Ralston got the waterworks going (the footage at the end of The Fighter did it too!).

My Rating: B+