In Contention

Category: Cinejabber

  • CINEJABBER: For Your Consideration, ‘Die Hard,’ Best Picture

    Catch up with the idea behind these weekend posts here.

    Jeffrey Wells reminded me last weekend of Movieline’s latest restoration effort, i.e. providing scans of back issues and therefore keeping the magazines of the 1990s available and adding a bit of history to the newly designed outlet.  It also reminded me of an idea I had at Variety three years ago when I was writing the trade’s Oscar blog, Red Carpet District.

    Something people don’t know is that there is a small closet of a room (or at least it was a closet at the old digs across the street from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, not sure about the new tower down the street) full of handsomely bound back issues of Variety.  You’re talking decades of the print publication at your fingertips.

    But while it’s fun to go back and read old industry stories and news items, the best part is to grab a latter year volume, say something from December-January or February, and get a load of the for your consideration ads.

    (more…)

  • CINEJABBER: Drifting along in the same stale shoes

    Catch up with the idea behind these weekend posts here.

    And speaking of the weekend, thank God it’s here.  That’s all I can say.  I’m still pushing through Peter Weir’s catalogue.  Next up: “Dead Poets Society,” which I probably haven’t watched since I owned the VHS.  But more and more, I’m finding that “The Way Back” is more reflective of his early work, and it perhaps has the most in common with “Gallipoli.”

    After that I’m thinking about re-visiting Kurosawa’s work.  Much of the early stuff I’ve never seen, actually, and it’ll be a nice reprieve from Oscar madness during the season.  Boy is that absolutely necessary.

    But I also need to hunker down and finish reading Charles Portis’s “True Grit.” I’m hoping to do something special list-wise around the release of the Coens’ new adaptation and as much as I loathe the first film, I never sat down and read the novel until recently.  It’s a real charmer and easy to see why the Coens were drawn to it’s no-nonsense prose.

    (more…)

  • CINEJABBER: MacTired

    Catch the idea behind these weekend posts here.

    I got nuthin’.  Five screenings, one of them an all-afternoon epic…I’m wiped out this week.  Which made a last-minute Red Box rental of “MacGruber” pretty much what the doctor ordered tonight.

    Open thread.  Thoughts?

  • CINEJABBER: One more time to kill the pain

    Catch the idea behind these weekend posts here.

    I don’t have much in the way of a conversation starter this week.  However, I was happy to see Emma Stone’s career taking off with the news that she’ll be offered the Mary Jane Watson role in Sony’s “Spider-Man” reboot.

    Many first took notice of the actress in last year’s “Zombieland” but most really perked up with her “Easy A” performance.  Personally, I’ve been quite taken by her since her big screen debut in Greg Mottola’s “Superbad.”

    I never took to Kirsten Dunst in the role, by the way.  There’s a certain sultriness to the character that Dunst (an actress I don’t like in general, “The Virgin Suicides” excepted) just didn’t have.  Stone has that in spades, though I feel like there’s still something slightly off.  Maybe it’s just the general idea of a “Spider-Man” reboot that I still can’t wrap my head around.  Who knows?  But this would be a smart choice by a young star at the beginning of her career.

    (more…)

  • CINEJABBER: The “M” word

    I received an email today from a reader addressing a concern I’ve long had at the back of my mind, but I never really figured out a way to deal with it. In a nutshell, we discuss films early, generally before release around these parts, and when a large majority of you get a chance to have a look, the conversation ship has sailed.

    I don’t want that, obviously, and I imagine it’s difficult to find a place to re-inject the talking points with our day-to-day topics running full speed, so I figured the best way to deal with it would be a general discussion post every weekend for you to cut loose about what you might have seen or what you’d like to discuss amongst yourselves.

    It’s a no-brainer, really, but I just never got around to actually, you know, doing it.

    So we’ll call it “Cinejabber” (I guess) and I’ll kick start the conversation this week, in case no one has any ideas (though I imagine there are those who’d like to discuss any number of films finally in release).

    Reading Sasha Stone’s recent “hold your horses” item about the comparisons to “Citizen Kane” surrounding “The Social Network,” she noted peripherally, “When ‘Inception’ came out and was hailed as ‘masterpiece’ it angered critics, and viewers, that anyone would dare use a word like that to describe a big studio movie out of Warner Bros. Or maybe it was that the word shouldn’t really be applied to a film until a decade or so has gone by.”

    (more…)