The winners for the 67th Annual Golden Globe Awards are below. I am not going into any detail because you all don’t care!

Some of the bigger winners were James Cameron, Sandra Bullock, Robert Downey Jr., Jeff Bridges, and Jason Reitman.

Here are the results of the categories we all care about – winner is in bold!

BEST MOTION PICTURE – DRAMA

• Avatar (20th Century Fox)
• The Hurt Locker (Summit Entertainment)
• Inglourious Basterds (The Weinstein Company)
• Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire (Lionsgate)
• Up in the Air (Paramount Pictures)

BEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTRESS IN A MOTION PICTURE – DRAMA

• Emily Blunt – The Young Victoria
• Sandra Bullock – The Blind Side
• Helen Mirren – The Last Station
• Carey Mulligan – An Education
• Gabourey Sidibe – Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire

BEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTOR IN A MOTION PICTURE – DRAMA

• Jeff Bridges – Crazy Heart
  
• George Clooney – Up in the Air
• Colin Firth – A Single Man
• Morgan Freeman – Invictus
• Tobey Maguire – Brothers

BEST MOTION PICTURE – COMEDY OR MUSICAL

• (500) Days of Summer (Fox Searchlight Pictures)
• The Hangover (Warner Bros. Pictures)
• It’s Complicated (Universal Pictures)
• Julie & Julia (Columbia Pictures)
• Nine (The Weinstein Company)

BEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTRESS IN A MOTION PICTURE – COMEDY OR MUSICAL

• Sandra Bullock – The Proposal
• Marion Cotillard – Nine
• Julia Roberts – Duplicity
• Meryl Streep – It’s Complicated
• Meryl Streep – Julie & Julia

BEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTOR IN A MOTION PICTURE – COMEDY OR MUSICAL

• Matt Damon – The Informant
• Daniel Day-Lewis – Nine
• Robert Downey Jr. – Sherlock Holmes
• Joseph Gordon-Levitt – (500) Days of Summer
• Michael Stuhlbarg – A Serious Man

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE FILM

• Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (Sony Pictures Animation)
• Fantastic Mr. Fox (Fox Searchlight Pictures)
• Coraline (Focus Features)
• The Princess and the Frog (Walt Disney Pictures)
• Up (Disney•Pixar)

BEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTRESS IN A SUPPORTING ROLE IN A MOTION PICTURE

• Penelope Cruz – Nine
• Vera Farmiga – Up in the Air
• Anna Kendrick – Up in the Air
• Mo’Nique – Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire
• Julianne Moore – A Single Man

BEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTOR IN A SUPPORTING ROLE IN A MOTION PICTURE

• Matt Damon – Invictus
• Woody Harrelson – The Messenger
• Christopher Plummer – The Last Station
• Stanley Tucci – The Lovely Bones
• Christoph Waltz – Inglourious Basterds
  

BEST DIRECTOR – MOTION PICTURE

• Kathryn Bigelow – The Hurt Locker
• James Cameron – Avatar
• Clint Eastwood – Invictus
• Jason Reitman – Up in the Air
• Quentin Tarantino – Inglourious Basterds

BEST SCREENPLAY – MOTION PICTURE

• Neill Blomkamp and Terri Tatchell – District 9
• Mark Boal – The Hurt Locker
• Nancy Meyers – It’s Complicated
• Jason Reitman – Up in the Air
• Quentin Tarantino – Inglourious Basterds

BEST ORIGINAL SCORE – MOTION PICTURE

• Michael Giacchino – Up
  
• Marvin Hamlisch – The Informant
• James Horner – Avatar
• Abel Korzeniowski – A Single Man
• Karen O and Carter Burwell – Where the Wild Things Are

The first trailer to The Fantastic Mr. Fox, Wes Anderson’s throwback to The Mouse and the Motorcycle-style stop motion animation starring George Clooney, Meryl Streep, and the rest of Anderson’s usual gang, was met with mixed reviews. Some loved the aesthetic, some found it distracting; personally, I loved it. He seems to have taken Ronald Dahl’s original story and married it to a style that’s completely distinct from anything we’ve seen on the big screen, perhaps ever.

If you were in that first crowd, you might not be fully convinced by this new trailer. However, you will realize that the movie seems prety darn funny — quite a bit funnier than the director’s last output, The Darjeeling Limited. And once again, Clooney proves he has a voice of the gods.

Click on the picture below to head over and watch the trailer at Apple.com. The Fantastic Mr. Fox will be released on November 13 of this year.

New Fantastic Mr. Fox Trailer from Apple Trailers

Just like with famous chef Julia Child’s recipes, this film loves to smother itself up with butter, but just the right amount to make it tasty and satisfying.

If I made food like she did I'd squeal with delight too.

Now, I’m not saying that this film is in any way, shape or form edible, but once you see those delectable recipes that Julie Powell and Julia Child cook up on screen you’ll want to eat it up. Aside from that, the film has a purely balanced selection of comedy and drama as you teeter back and forth between Julie’s life in New York as she tries to finish up the recipes within the span of a year (and blogging it up) to Julia’s new life in Paris back in her prime as she finds a new passion in the kitchen. Despite the huge gap in time when both of their ‘adventures’ take place, this film weaves them together with ease.

Meryl Streep simply put does what she always does, and that’s getting lost in her role. She completely jells in the mold of Julia Child’s persona, the semi-large woman who ends up taking the cooking world by storm with her ambition and giggly personality. Granted, it did take awhile to get used to her accent. Once you got past that, it was yet another good performance out of the seasoned actress. Honestly though, you felt bad for Amy Adams as she played the self-indulgent Julie Powell, due to all of the misfortune she endures through the majority of the film. At some points I wished that her character Giselle from Enchanted would prance in and bring a huge grin to her face. Regardless of the somewhat somber persona that her character gave off, she did well but was outshined by Streep.

The supporting cast (the first husbands, if you want to go that far) were sort of here and there. Stanley Tucci as the caring husband of Julia Child was that kind of rock in a relationship a lot of people dream of. As a matter of fact, I occasionally wondered when Paul Child was going to start turning away from being such a noble and absolutely perfect husband. Not to say that I wanted things to go wrong, but the relationship with them seemed so ridiculously perfect that this pessimist had a really hard time swallowing it. Chris Messina became kind of the anti-Paul as Eric Powell. His character was just there, barely any substance to him; the story would most likely have been fine if he had been absent through most of Julie Powell’s section. Messina does okay with what he has but, like the rest of the supporting cast just mentioned, is little more than just a fleeting thought.

Nora Ephron was able to lead us kindly through both worlds and maintain the differences in the lives of the two women. Though her style was not too uncommon, it still did the job and helped provide us with a fine film. Despite that unrealistic, ‘too perfect’ overtone that Julia’s life seemed to have, it still was somewhat refreshing to see the contrast with Julie’s struggles. And if I had to make some sort of gourmet concoction out of a hoof, you would struggle, too.

This movie, though a couple of ingredients in the recipe were a bit stale, managed to conjure up a nice, inspiring and slightly girl-power-infused film. Make sure you don’t go into the theater with an empty stomach, you’ll regret it!

Rating: ★★★☆☆ 

JoBlo breaks out the first exclusive picture from Wes Anderson’s upcoming feature, Fantastic Mr. Fox. Based off of the Ronald Dahl novel of the same name, this stop motion animated movie is actually one of my more anticipated movies of the fall. Featuring the lovely voice talents of George Clooney as Mr. Fox, Meryl Streep, Bill Murray, Brian Cox and many others, this Twentieth Century Fox pic is something on many’s radar, from Anderson fans to animated. Enough chit chat, here are the pictures below!

Let me clear the air by saying that I was unwillingly dragged to see “Mamma Mia!”, the latest Hollywood interpretation of a stage musical.

Clearly, I’m not the type of person the people behind the film adaptation of “Mamma Mia!” were trying to please.  People like me, who are generally against musicals can and should find a better way to spend their time at the movies and leave the people who are actually interested in this film to see it.  However, I truly feel bad for anybody dragged to this incessantly corny and nearly insufferable movie musical that is so bad, even the presence of Meryl Streep can’t save it.

So, if I normally resist big, lavish movie musicals such as this, am I really the right person to review “Mamma Mia!”?  Well, I’d say no, but I’ll let you be the judge of that.  I’m not reviewing this movie for the fans of the musical, because I know that they’ll be pleased with what they get; I’m reviewing it for everyone else.  Now, that’s not to say that I automatically give every single musical I see a negative review.  I really enjoyed 2005′s “The Producers” as well as “Chicago” from 2002, and last year’s “Sweeney Todd” was my pick for the second-best film of 2007.  What ultimately made me not like “Mamma Mia!”, I guess you could say, was the simple fact that the film seriously missed every single mark it was trying to hit.  This movie is meant to be a fun, breezy hour and forty-eight minutes at the theater, but I thought there wasn’t any fun to be had and due to its dragged-out songs, there was nothing breezy about it.  Whereas “Sweeney Todd” played like a smooth flowing and hauntingly beautiful opera, and rather successfully at that, “Mamma Mia!” instead plays out like karaoke night in Greece.

Well, let’s face it.  Musicals aren’t meant to have elaborate or intricately crafted plots and that’s the case here (which invites another comparison to “Sweeney Todd” that I’ll make later).  The plot for “Mamma Mia!” is paper-thin and it always comes to a complete halt whenever the next musical number starts up.  So, the light and bright Sophie Sheridan (Amanda Seyfried) is about to get married to stud muffin Sky (Dominic Cooper), who incidentally has cloudy eyes.  Sophia’s one wish, though, is to have her father attend her wedding and give her away to her McDreamy.  The only problem is that her catamite of a mother named Donna (Meryl Streep) slept with three different men around the time Sophia would have been conceived.  That means that there are three possible candidates for the title of ‘Dear Old Dad’: Bill (Stellan Skarsgard), Sam (Pierce Brosnan) and Harry (Colin Firth).  And yet another problem is that Donna doesn’t want any of them at the wedding.  But as we all know, they’ll inevitably stay and that will cause serious romantic decisions to be made in one weekend that would normally take more than a weekend to decide to be made in, well, one weekend.

The plot’s only true purpose is to act as an engine to get us from one musical to the next, and that’s one of the biggest problems I’ve always had with musicals.  I can understand the necessity for an uncomplicated plot, but still, why can’t the writers at least try to bring more to the storyline so that the movie doesn’t feel like it can simply end at any given moment if one of the three men just came up and revealed that they are the father of Sophie?  Plus, I think it’s safe to say that you can pretty much guess who the father is by the way the camera lingers on each individual bachelor.  Now, I will admit that “Sweeney Todd”  does have a similarly thin plot, but the difference there is that the songs of that movie essentially were part of the plot.  It avoided that choppy style because the songs actually moved everything forward.  Here, the songs seem to be there just for the heck of it and while they may be mildly enjoyable, the choreography that accompanies them just makes everything feel like an overdone production of Riverdance.  And I’ll say this: if I had to sit through one more musical number where men and/or teenage boys tried to imitate professional dancers on a pier, I’d have been ready to throw my bag of popcorn at the screen.

For a musical meant to have purposefully bland performances made even more bland by professional actors such as Meryl Streep and Pierce Brosnan, then there’s something wrong in the acting department.  Meryl Streep has always been a terrific actress, but she’s given virtually nothing to work with here.  Oh, she can sing just fine and is definitely capable of holding her own whenever she bursts  into song, but it’s the in-between stuff that had me scratching my head in wonderment, trying to discern how Streep couldn’t be up to her own standards.  Also, her two shallow, giggly girlfriends portrayed by Julie Walters and Christine Baranski are the character equivalents of nails on a chalkboard.  And the serious overacting of Amanda Seyfried as Sophie doesn’t help much, either.

I think the best thing about “Mamma Mia!”, though, is the scenery of Greece.  Every outside scene carries vibrant sunshine, aqua-blue ocean and lime-green trees that at least give the movie points for eye candy.  And if I had to say something good about the cast, it would be that Colin Firth and Stellan Skarsgard do pretty decent work and are the most interesting to watch.

However, when a musical is iffy on the music and very noticeably at that in addition to being a challenge to sit through, then something went wrong somewhere.  I think it’s safe to say that the people who want to see “Mamma Mia!” will probably end up liking it, but me personally, I prefer my musicals to lay off the annoying choreography and make the songs pieces of the plot, rather than roadblocks to it.

Rating: ★½☆☆☆