Director: Jay Roach
Starring: Bryan Cranston, Diane Lane, Helen Mirren
Last fall, Quentin Tarantino got himself in a bit of hot water for an interview in which he suggested that Ava DuVernay's Selma wasn't really snubbed at last year's Oscars because it was a film better suited to being a TV movie. Despite the fact that TV is currently the "it" medium where all the most talked about work is being done right now, the implication in suggesting that it should have been a TV movie is that it's wasn't good enough, that it's a work of high-brow mediocrity designed to be consumed by the wide-ranging television audience, rather than a challenging work of art designed for a more specific and discerning film audience. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, of course, but that opinion was dumb. Selma is a masterpiece that deserved far more than the 2 Oscar nominations it got, and it's a film that I believe will stand the test of time as one of the best that 2014 had to offer. Now Trumbo, on the other hand? This is a glorified TV movie, one so superficial, so facile, so unwilling to challenge its audience in any way that it would have had to have been made more than a decade ago, well before TV started to mean "prestige," just make it onto the air.
