Guide to the SAG Awards, this Sunday at 8pm EST

The 18th annual SAG Awards will be aired this Sunday at 8pm EST, on both TNT and TBS, live from the Los Angeles Shrine Exposition Center. Here are the nominees for the major film categories, with my picks in italics:

Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture:

The Artist

Bridesmaids

The Descendants

The Help

Midnight in Paris

~This is a tough call. I'm hoping that either The Help or Bridesmaids wins, but really any of these movies could win, as they all have great ensemble casts.

Read the rest of the article and my SAG Awards picks at Examiner.com.

Pina

The documentary Pina is about the life works of choreographer Pina Bausch, who died suddenly in 2009, five days after being diagnosed with cancer. A documentary was supposed to be made about her, but she passed away during the preparations for it; production was canceled, although the dancers involved still wanted to make the film. It focuses on modern dance, which is a little hard to understand for some, and the film was strange but many of the dance sequences were very beautiful.

The movie has four separate sequences: Le sacre du printemps, Café Mueller, Kontakthof, and Vollmond (Wikipedia). In Le sacre du printemps, we see men with rakes cleaning the stage, as it is covered in what looks like sand, but which is actually peat. It's a strange way to start the film, but it does catch the audience's attention. In Café Mueller, we see a cafe with various chairs strewn about, and different people doing repetitive actions in each of the corners and in the middle. Kontakthof, which was my favorite, features a ballroom of sorts; at first, you see younger dancers in a line, but as the camera shifts, all of a sudden older dancers, wearing the same dresses and suits, are in their places. The last, Vollmond, features a flooded stage, as Pina was a fan of using the elements in her work, and the dancers are splashing about and moving through the water.

Man on a Ledge

Man on a Ledge does something that no movie in recent memory has done: it combines two different types of movies, the "desperate man hanging off of a ledge" movie with a heist film, because the "man on the ledge" is covering up the bigger picture, a robbery happening at a nearby building. When you combine these two "genres" with an all-star cast, you get an interesting, crazy ride that never fails to hold the audience's attention throughout its 102 minute runtime.

Former police officer Nick Cassidy (Sam Worthington, The Debt) was sent to prison for a crime he didn't commit - stealing the 40 carat diamond of one of New York's "movers and shakers," David Englander (Ed Harris, Salvation Boulevard) - and when he is released for a day for his father's funeral, he disarms the guards that were assigned to him and escapes. A year or so later, he finds himself perched on the ledge of the Roosevelt Hotel building, threatening to jump and saying that he will only talk to Detective Lydia Mercer (Elizabeth Banks, Our Idiot Brother). Once Mercer is retrieved, she tries to talk him down from the ledge, but she soon finds out that there is a lot more going on here than just a desperate man trying to commit suicide: Cassidy's brother, Joey (Jamie Bell, Jane Eyre) and his girlfriend Angie (Genesis Rodriguez, TV's Entourage), are breaking into Englander's safe to prove that he still, in fact, has the diamond, and the "show" that Nick is doing out on the ledge is simply a cover-up for this.

Albert Nobbs

Early on in Albert Nobbs, Mia Wasikowska's character calls the title character "a weird little man," and the same can be said about this movie: it's a little strange, but somehow it works, and either way you'll be thinking about it long after you leave the theater. As a testament to the acting in the film, Glenn Close has been nominated for an Oscar for playing Albert.

Our title character Albert (Glenn Close, TV's Damages) lives in a hotel in Dublin, where he works as a butler. "He" is actually a she, but nobody else knows, because if Albert was to reveal his true identity, he would not be able to support herself and probably would be working as a maid instead and making lower pay.

(I will refer to her as "him" in this review, however, to avoid confusion)

A Mr. Page (Janet McTeer, Tideland) comes to paint the hotel one day and the hotel owner says he can sleep with Albert in his bed; when Albert is undressing, Mr. Page finds out that he is a woman, and Albert, in the only scene where he is very emotional (like a woman), begs him not to reveal his identity to anyone. Mr. Page has a secret of his own, however, and is more like Albert than Albert would have guessed.

The Grey

The Grey could be used as an anti-tourism ad for Alaska: your plane will crash in the snowy wilderness somewhere and you will get eaten by wolves ... welcome! However, the film was better than I expected - even if it's grisly and bloody in parts - and Liam Neeson gives a great performance, as does his supporting co-stars.

Ottway (Liam Neeson, Unknown) is preparing to fly back to Anchorage with his coworkers. He is a hunter of sorts for the company; he kills wolves when he sees them get too close to where the men are working outside. Ottway just wants to be left alone so he can sleep, he tells the man who sits next to him (Joe Anderson, The Crazies), whom quickly switches seats when he encounters the grouchy Ottway. The plane hits some turbulence mid-flight, and a digital map shows they are somewhere over Alaska.

What follows is most intense plane crash I have seen in any movie, even including some 9/11 films. When Neeson wakes up, he is shivering and his face is half-covered with snow; he appears to be alone, but when he walks over the snowbank, he sees the wreckage of the plane and bodies and suitcases strewn everywhere. He quickly finds himself a hat and a heavier coat out of one of the suitcases, and then looks for survivors - there are no more than ten. They huddle in the plane and try to decide what to do, and Ottway quickly establishes himself as the leader of the group, because of his survival skills. This is a good thing because on their first night they encounter an unpleasant surprise: there is a pack of wolves in the area who are angry at them for disturbing their hunting space. Ottway and the others decide to head for the trees in an effort to avoid the wolves, but the survivors soon begin to be picked off one by one.

INTERVIEW: Chandler Massey, 16-Love and Days of Our Lives

Chandler Massey is currently starring in the feature film 16-Love, where he plays Farrell Gambles, a tennis amateur and the love interest of Ally, Lindsey Shaw's character. I got the opportunity to interview him via phone about the movie, playing tennis, and his character on Days of Our Lives; here's what he had to say.

How long did it take you to learn how to play tennis like you do in the movie?

Actually – fortunately – I grew up playing tennis with my family, so I didn’t have to completely learn.

Did you take tennis lessons when you were a kid?

Yes, I did. I took lessons. I lived in Georgia, and they had these young ALTA and young USTA tennis teams and I was always involved with those.

Read the rest of the interview at Examiner.com.

INTERVIEW: Lindsey Shaw, from 16-Love, Pretty Little Liars, and 10 Things I Hate About You

Lindsey Shaw is currently starring in the film 16-Love (click here for review), which is playing in limited release across the country and on On-Demand. She is also a recurring guest star on the TV show Pretty Little Liars, and from 2009-2010 she played one of the leads, Kat Stratford, in the TV series version of 10 Things I Hate About You. I recently got the chance to chat with Lindsay via phone about the movie and her other roles.

I watched 16-Love and it was really cute. I was wondering how long it took you to learn how to play tennis like that.

Thanks for watching it. When I first booked the role, they hooked me up with a tennis coach right away and I did three-hour practices with him every day. That was for about a week and a half. Then we went down to San Diego for a week of rehearsals first and they matched me with a tennis coach down there as well, for the same thing – every day practices, for two hours a day. It was only for about two and a half or three weeks that I really got to have intensive practice - and then, of course, during filming. It wasn’t long, but it was very intensive.

Read the rest of the interview at Examiner.com.