2015 Best Picture Nominees, Part 3 [Potpourri]

Before the Oscars delight and frustrate us this Sunday, it's time to look at the last two movies up for Best Picture. Since these movies don't have anything in common (besides generic crap like 'growing up', 'falling in love', and 'becoming a man'), let's just call this the Potpourri category. Before you read these, be sure to check out the reviews of the other six nominees HERE and HERE.

Now, on to Boyhood and The Grand Budapest Hotel:

My Family Reviews 'Into the Woods'

The holidays mean many things to me: present opening, family outings (and innings) that are mandatory and often welcome, hot chocolate drinking that makes me sick for hours after the last sip has been sipped, and forcefully making my family watch movies with me and then reviewing them. This year, the first of the movies we watched together was the delightful Into the Woods, and the family members present were me, my parents, my sister, and my brother-in-law. Here is our review.

Into the Woods, the film version of the Stephen Sondheim musical, tells the story of The Baker and The Baker's Wife, who find out that their fertility issues (there are buns in their

It's Time To Get Excited About the 'Into the Woods' Movie

Into the Woods is being made into a movie, and I'm very excited, and I'm sure I'll talk at length about it in the months ahead. But for now:

Hanging Out With Tina Fey

...or, rather, hanging out in close proximity to Tina Fey. That was the wonder experienced by Tableau Your Mind when I went to the Delacorte Theater in Central Park to see Stephen Sondheim's Into The Woods. Since the musical doesn't open until today, I don't want to dwell on the show (the three leads are great, Amy Adams' comedic timing is a little off, the metaphors can be a little heavy-handed but the musical is nonetheless beautiful, etc.). Instead, I want to dwell on the amazingness of an actual sighting of Tina Fey, TV's most prominent female comedian and showrunner as well as a woman who shies away from public appearances. Because she's just like us!

It all happened because I Don't Feel Bad About It happened to use the restroom at the same time as her. I, on the other hand, shared a restroom with the guy who wrote Hair, who I assumed was a homeless person. Anyway, it's incredible the excitement that a public sighting of Tina Fey elicits. Not just in me, but in everyone around her. Vendors she spoke to, women she passed on the way to her seat, ticket takers, little boys and girls in glasses who wanted a picture with her. Obviously, I knew all of this because I was passively stalking her. Which was easy, since I was sitting 4 rows behind her for the entire 3 hour show.

PROOF

I felt like Greta on 30 Rock, when she tells Liz Lemon that 'I know how much you like TV. Sometimes I watch you watching it.' There I was, sitting in Central Park, with Donna Murphy and Denis O'Hare acting up a storm in front of me. And I was watching Tina Fey watching it. After a few minutes I turned away, afraid of the stalker I'd become. And as I did so, I saw at least fifteen other people do the exact same thing, the moment of creepazoid clarity occurring at the same time, like how those two dudes invented calculus simultaneously. We were suddenly aware of our own voyeuristic tendencies, and it was just as terrible as calculus. Worse, maybe.

It's a weird culture we've built, that's for sure.