In Contention

Category: Daily

  • Should we be buying into ‘Zoo?’

    When compiling my first round of Oscar predictions last week, I somehow found myself gliding instinctively over Cameron Crowe’s upcoming true-life comedy “We Bought a Zoo” — despite its starry profile, big studio backing and plum holiday release date. Glancing over Kris’s predictions to the right, I noticed he’s done the same.

    Admittedly, Crowe’s last two features — 2001’s intriguing but unmoored “Vanilla Sky” and 2005’s utterly wretched “Elizabethtown” — have rather diminished the stock of the writer-director who won an Oscar ten years ago for “Almost Famous.” And “We Bought a Zoo” — a seemingly lightweight, family-friendly film adapted from Benjamin Mee’s memoirs of his quest to revive a failing wildlife park — could strike some as too fuzzy a prospect for big-league awards.

    Meanwhile, that Fox is skipping the festival circuit might be interpreted as an indication that they view the film as a likely commercial play rather than a critics’ cause. It’s worth noting, meanwhile, that this is Crowe’s first feature on which he shares a writing credit — with chick-flick fixture Aline Brosh McKenna, who struck the right fluffy note with her adaptation of “The Devil Wears Prada,” but likewise has stumbled badly with her follow-up efforts.

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  • James Earl Jones, Dick Smith and Oprah Winfrey to receive Academy’s Governors Awards

    Okay, so nix her as a host possibility. Oprah gets the Hersholt.

    Dick Smith is an inspired pick for an Honorary Oscar. It’s interesting that I’m watching Tim Burton’s “Planet of the Apes” right now, which saw makeup artist Rick Baker shafted by the Academy, just as his mentor is announced for this honor. Baker talked a bit about Smith at Comic-Con last month.

    And James Earl Jones, well. Who’s going to argue with that? Anyway, the press release, in part:

    The Board of Governors of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences voted tonight to present Honorary Awards to actor James Earl Jones and makeup artist Dick Smith and the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award to philanthropist Oprah Winfrey. All three awards will be presented at the Academy’s 3rd Annual Governors Awards dinner on Saturday, November 12, at the Grand Ballroom at Hollywood & Highland Center®.

    [Photo: Columbia Pictures]

  • ‘Twixt’ trailer

    Now that Francis Ford Coppola’s experimental film “Twixt” has been announced for a Toronto premiere, the trailer has hit the web (via TIFF’s You Tube page). It’s largely composed of the footage we saw at Comic-Con, which was lived-edited into two different assemblages during the panel there. That’s Tom Waits narrating, by the way. Check out the trailer by clicking hte image below, or watch an embed after the jump.

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  • ‘Drive’ poster

    So, this little movie called “Drive” hits US theaters in just over six weeks, and you may have gathered by now that I kind of like it. After a spiffy trailer debuted last week, a fresh poster was due, and Film District have obliged with a one-sheet that makes no bones about how they’re pitching this thing — as The Ryan Gosling Show first and foremost, with the film’s sleek thriller qualities very much in the rear-view mirror. With American audiences current lapping up Gosling’s charms in romcom “Crazy, Stupid, Love,” it’s probably canny to emphasise the cool of their in-demand star, while the kitsch hot-pink typeface (the same used for the film’s credits) offers a hint of the 1980s pastiche to come. (That corny-sounding tagline, meanwhile, references the film’s most delicious soundtrack cut.) Not the most creative design, then, but one I can see gracing a lot of teenagers’ walls in the months to come.

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  • On the origins of ‘Martha Marcy May Marlene’

    Sean Durkin’s stunning debut feature “Martha Marcy May Marlene” has been running a steady marathon in terms of buzz-building ahead of its late-October release: first came breathless critical plaudits and the Best Director prize at Sundance in January, while a well-received appearance in the Un Certain Regard strand at Cannes kept things humming through the summer lull.

    Expect the acclaim to continue through the fall festival run: it’s booked for Toronto, though as Kris speculated last week, it’ll probably pop up in Telluride beforehand. (Finally, I’d count on a London Film Festival date in October.)

    The buzz isn’t there by sheer good fortune: as I wrote in my Cannes review, Durkin’s film is a startlingly assured and unsettling fusion of meticulous character study and full-throttle psychodrama, centered on a sharply etched breakout performance by Elizabeth Olsen that handily defies any pundits to define the young actress by her more famous twin sisters.

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  • ‘Like Crazy’ trailer

    One film Paramount is high on for the awards season (and is surely a breath of fresh air for the awards team, given its indie sheen) is Drake Doremus’s “Like Crazy.” The film already played Sundance and was a big hit there, so perhaps a slow burn through the season will get it some more attention. The trailer has dropped via Apple, so check it out by clicking the image below or watch an embed after the jump.

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  • Tell us what you thought of ‘Crazy, Stupid, Love’

    I missed the screenings of “Crazy, Stupid, Love” and haven’t made it to the theater to see it since it released this weekend. But, by request, here’s a place for those thoughts if you’d like to share. I have to say, though, that the split in opinions on this one have me really intrigued. So I’ll definitely see it sooner than later, but tell us what you thought.

  • Tell us what you thought of ‘Cowboys & Aliens’

    I already glossed over my feelings on Jon Favreau’s “Cowboys & Aliens” at Comic-Con. In short, I find it to be an incredibly taxing exercise with zero character development, vacant of energy and held together by incredibly lazy screenwriting. But for the sake of the western, I hope it does well at the box office. So if you happen to see the film this weekend, come on back here with your thoughts.

  • Starting the prediction game

    Right, I stayed out of the Oscar prediction racket for a while — partly to give myself a vacation from any such thoughts after 2010’s long, wearying season, and partly because I found myself struggling to blindly sort a pile of late-year prestige titles that struck me from afar as a little lean.

    The latter problem hasn’t really resolved itself, but with the recent revelation of key autumn festival slates, a kind of faint shape to the season is starting to emerge — and with Kris already having kicked off the guesswork earlier this month, I thought I may as well draw up a list of pre-festival nomination predictions, a first draft ready to get substantially rewritten as the hits and misses of Venice, Telluride and Toronto emerge.

    As my predictions took shape, two films emerged dominant: one of them the big-name spectacle near the top of everyone’s list (Spielberg’s “War Horse,” of course), the other the foreign wild card that I’ve nurtured a strong hunch about ever since its breakfast-hour Cannes screening. Yes, the Weinstein-backed silent Hollywood homage “The Artist” looks nothing like a conventional Oscar juggernaut at first glance — but that could be its strength if a number of the more typically baity awards prospects lean toward the generic.

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  • Telluride guessing game

    (UPDATED: 8/29)

    Now that the Toronto and Venice line-ups have been unveiled (though we have a few more Toronto announcements to come), I figured I’d take a few stabs at sussing out the Telluride crop this year. I haven’t been a good journalist and called around or anything. Just spinning my wheels.

    One studio that always has a big presence at Telluride is Sony Pictures Classics, and this year, honchos Michael Barker and Tom Bernard have a full plate once again. Of that stable, David Cronenberg’s “A Dangerous Method” is hitting both Venice and Toronto. It’s very possible, then, that it will kick things off in the Rockies.

    Roman Polanski’s “Carnage,” meanwhile, was announced as a Venice play this morning. It would be easy enough for the team to bring the film there and not worry about getting the filmmaker in town (seeing as he can’t legally step foot in the country), saving his press run for Venice. (7/28 UPDATE: The film has been set for New York fest, so it seems unlikely we’ll see it in Telluride.)

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  • ‘The Ides of March’ banner poster

    Hitting the internet simultaneously with that well-received trailer yesterday was this unusual poster for George Clooney’s Venice curtain-raiser “The Ides of March.” It’s always nice to see designers attempting something a little more conceptual than the norm — indeed, the simple split-face gimmick here could almost be taken as an ironic rebuttal to floating-head convention. Most interesting, however, is the tripling of the core composition into a UK quad-style format: it’ll be a duller poster when it’s inevitably chopped vertical for multiplex use, but it does raise the point that with posters all debuting online these days, there’s little initial reason for a standard format. Anyway, nice job — check out the full one-sheet after the jump.

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  • Venice competition includes Polanski, Cronenberg, Alfredson

    These days, so much media speculation precedes the announcement of any major festival lineup that the eventual unveiling comes almost as an anti-climax — or at least it would do if the long-expected films weren’t so appetizing in the first place. As was the case with the Toronto lineup on Tuesday, the just-revealed programme for this year’s Venice Film Festival is as heavy on highlights as it is light on surprises, and that’s good enough for this Lido-bound journo.

    In recent years, as Berlin has receded, Venice has grown into an increasingly bolshy competitor to Cannes, taking a slightly riskier, younger approach to Competition programming while nabbing enough sexy, big-name auteur titles to draw the headlines. It’s a balance that has paid off handsomely in recent years: “The Hurt Locker,” “Brokeback Mountain,” “Black Swan,” “I Am Love” and “A Single Man” all debuted in Venice before going on to greater success elsewhere.

    This year’s Competition lineup would appear to continue the pattern: for every long-established auteur in line for the Golden Lion, there’s at least one buzzy up-and-comer arriving on the back of a breakthrough hit.

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  • ‘The Ides of March’ trailer

    George Clooney’s “The Ides of March” is set for a Venice premiere in September. It may or may not make it to Telluride, but in any case, I’ve been hearing lately that Evan Rachel Wood and Philip Seymour Hoffman are killer in the film. (Marisa Tomei, I’m told, doesn’t figure in as much.) Anyway, judging by the new trailer at Yahoo! Movies, it has me at “Hello.” We might be talking about this one throughout the season.

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  • ‘Descendants,’ ‘Moneyball,’ ‘Twixt’ among Toronto premieres

    As usual, there are few surprises in the newly unveiled lineup for September’s Toronto Film Festival — which is largely because, as usual, the lineup consists of pretty much everything.

    We know by now to expect a cherry-picked selection of proven successes from previous festivals, including Cannes (“The Artist,” “Drive,” “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” “Melancholia”), Sundance (“Martha Marcy May Marlene,” “Tyrannosaur,” “Take Shelter”) and Berlin (“Coriolanus”). Equally, and of more interest to festival veterans, there’s the usual generous handful of prestige US premieres, many of them with an eye on awards season — including Alexander Payne’s “The Descendants,” Bennett Miller’s “Moneyball,” Rodrigo Garcia’s Glenn Close vehicle “Albert Nobbs” and Francis Ford Coppola’s “Twixt.”

    Meanwhile, the Toronto lineup also offers some pointers as to what we can (and can’t) expect to see at Venice only days before. It was already in ink that George Clooney’s Lido curtain-raiser “The Ides of March” would play both fests; now, thanks to the TIFF classifying them as “North American” rather than “World” premieres, we can confirm (albeit to no raised eyebrows) that David Cronenberg’s “A Dangerous Method,” Steve McQueen’s “Shame,” William Friedkin’s “Killer Joe,” Todd Solondz’s “Dark Horse” and Madonna’s “W.E.” will also do the double.

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  • Three days left to catch ‘Melancholia’ in LA

    I should really have drawn attention to this earlier, but as Jeff Wells pointed out on Hollywood Elsewhere, Lars von Trier’s Cannes hit “Melancholia” began a one-week, once-a-day screening run at Los Angeles’ out-of-the-way Laemmle Fallbrook 7 theatre on Friday — a handy opportunity for local film buffs with free afternoons to sneak a look at the film months ahead of its November 11 release in the US. (Most European viewers haven’t quite so long to wait.)

    As you can gather from my enthusiastic Cannes review of the film, it’s worth getting impatient for. One of von Trier’s most elegant and elegiac works — the silly controversy over his unwise Nazi-related comments at the festival is a red herring that doesn’t reflect remotely on the surprisingly subdued film — it showcases the man in full command of his formal powers, as well as a fascinating ensemble, the pleasures of which extend beyond Kirsten Dunst’s fairly rewarded performance.

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  • ‘Avengers’ assemble in concept art revealing Hulk

    Okay, one more superhero dip before we leave Comic-Con behind. Click for larger, expanded version.

  • COMIC-CON: It all ends

    Well, like I said. Another year, another Con.

    For a convention I expected to be a bit more laid-back than usual, it sure was anything but. I guess I put that on myself by hustling back to LA for a concert and back down again to wrap things up, but even having covered just a sliver of the event (compared to the thorough coverage from outlets with multiple on-hand correspondents, who do it so well), boy am I glad it’s over.

    If you’ve read the coverage then you know my extended thoughts, but here’s a recap nevertheless.

    The highlight of the entire weekend was, for me, finally seeing Nicolas Winding Refn’s “Drive.” The film is an invigorating experience, an artful meditation that takes the most simplistic of narratives and turns it into a thorough character study.

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  • COMIC-CON: ‘Haywire’ trailer

    I missed Relativity’s panel featuring Steven Soderbergh’s “Haywire” and the John-Cusack-as-Edgar-Allan-Poe flick “The Raven.” This was very much a bummer, seeing as “Haywire” star Gina Carano has been a personal crush ever since she suited up as, well, Crush, in the rebooted American Gladiators. So the trailer, released via Apple, is the first of the footage I’ve seen. I’m not quite sure why Soderbergh is bathing in the warm water of commercial plays lately (this and “Contagion”), but I’ll give it a look. Nothing is standing out, though. Other than my…crush. Anyway, check out the trailer for “Haywire” by clicking the image below, or watch an embed after the jump.

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