In Contention

Category: Daily

  • Continuing the 3D debate

    AvatarEarlier this month, I wrote a piece detailing my wariness about the current 3D vogue amid the various claims being made that it will alter life (or at least cinema, which for many of us is the same thing) as we know it.

    Now, with “Avatar” Day having stoked anticipation for James Cameron’s purportedly “game-changing” film in some quarters — and significantly dampened it in others — the debate about the technology’s value carries on.  I expect the film’s run-up and eventual release will provide plenty more occasion for alternately sceptical and enraptured opinion pieces about the trend.

    I’m still in no position to comment about the potential (or otherwise) of “Avatar” — even if I had wanted to attend “Avatar” Day, given that I was in a tent in rural Wales at the time, the opportunity escaped me. I subsequently watched the trailer online, only to be informed (perhaps a little defensively) by others that the images only really popped in 3D.

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  • Aaron Johnson as John Lennon in ‘Nowhere Boy’

    Hat tip to The Playlist for digging up this newish still from one of my most anticipated films of the year, Sam Taylor-Wood’s “Nowhere Boy.” The film, a study of John Lennon’s early years, will premiere on the closing night of the London Film Festival in October. As Lennon, 19 year-old Aaron Johnson faces a tall order, but he looks suitably soft-faced and wistful:

    Aaron Johnson in Nowhere Boy

    (Moral guardians, lower your pitchforks: 19 year-olds can drink here.) Older images, including glimpses of Kristin Scott Thomas as Lennon’s Aunt Mimi and Thomas Sangster as Paul McCartney, after the cut.

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  • Get a clue

    Meryl StreepThere are so many things wrong with this Digital Spy piece about the Best Actress race, it’s difficult to know where to begin. Article writer Marcell Minaya seems to have filched gossip columnist Roger Friedman’s recent (largely baseless) statement that the category is bereft of contenders, and disguised it as Academy insider talk:

    The Oscars executives have allegedly been struggling to form a list of best actress nominees.

    An Oscar insider said: “It’s only just dawning that there’s a distinct lack of potentials in the best actress category. It’s been a pretty lacklustre year for movies in general but it seems that no one wrote any decent lead roles for women … There are many to choose from when it comes to supporting actresses but very few in the lead.”

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  • Hollywood remembers ‘The Wizard of Oz’

    The Wizard of OzAs you have probably been made aware, Tuesday marked the 70th anniversary of the release of “The Wizard of Oz” in the U.S., a milestone which has inspired a number of tribute pieces this past week — including our own edition of The Lists dedicated to the classic.

    For their part, the LA Times has taken the simple but effective approach of asking a range of artists from the world of film (and elsewhere) what the film means to them personally, and has turned up some interesting responses.

    It’s an imaginative selection of interviewees they’ve assembled, ranging from directors Jon Favreau and Zach Snyder to oddball musician Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips, which only goes to show the vast extent of the film’s reach and appeal. Still, the response I liked the most came from probably the most obvious source: Guillermo Del Toro, whose “Pan’s Labyrinth” is arguably the film’s closest contemporary cousin.

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  • Thoughts on Best Cinematography?

    It’s proving to be the most difficult category to navigate in this recent update.

  • Tarantino on ‘There Will Be Blood’

    From that Sky Movies stuff, which yielded Tarantino’s top 20 films released since 1992:

    (Courtesy: The Film Experience)

  • ‘Agora’ trailer

    In yesterday’s inaugural edition of Oscar Talk, Kris and Anne Thompson discussed the bad buzz swirling around Alejandro Amenabar’s Rachel Weisz-starring historical epic “Agora,” which has been fruitlessly seeking a distributor since premiering at Cannes in May — and will continue the hunt at Toronto.

    Right on cue, here comes the trailer, and … let’s just say that Anne’s prediction of a “noble failure folly” looks ominously on-target. I’ve loved much of Amenabar’s work, but if I could barely keep my eyes open through the trailer, it doesn’t bode well for the film. Your thoughts?

  • WEEKLY WRAP: ‘Inception’ unwrapped, ‘Shutter’ unseated

    Leonardo DiCaprio in Inception• One day after the film’s trailer surfaced, we turned up some fresh plot information about Christopher Nolan’s “Inception.” Fan hysteria ensued.

    • Just in case you’d forgotten, “Shutter Island” was booted into 2010. Fan hysteria ensued.

    • To a quieter reaction, Julie Taymor’s “The Tempest” joined Scorsese’s film on the sidelines for next year.

    • In submitting “The White Ribbon,” Germany gave the foreign-language race its first major official contender.

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  • Cheer up, Meryl — you have your masterpiece

    Meryl StreepYou may well have spotted this very funny (and frequently accurate) Onion piece doing the web rounds today, in which a writer claiming to be Meryl Streep shoots down her career with all the withering disdain of Miranda Priestly.

    The gist of the argument is that, as fine an actor as Streep is, she has — whether through bad luck or bad choices — never made a truly great film.

    I can see the temptation to agree. Certainly the latter stretch of Streep’s filmography is spotty: even if you remove the outright embarrassments, (“Prime,” “Mamma Mia!”) or even the respectable-but-still-throwaway entertainments (“Julie & Julia,” “The Devil Wears Prada”), you’re left with a lot of worthily middlebrow titles engineered more as performance showcases than as vital, durable cinema.

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  • How ‘Up in the Air’ factored in the ‘Shutter’ bump

    George Clooney in Up in the AirVariety’s Pamela McClintock was written a detailed piece examining the financial ins and outs of the recent postponing of “Shutter Island,” coming to the conclusion — as did Kris following the announcement — that the move is purely a practical one on the part of Paramount chief Brad Grey. Quite simply, she explains, the film stands to make more of a profit in February, free from the expense of awards-season marketing.

    But while everyone has picked up on how the move potentially improves the fortunes of Paramount awards hopeful “The Lovely Bones,” McClintock suggests that it is Jason Reitman’s increasingly buzzy “Up in the Air” that is a more significant factor in this conversation. In picking Reitman’s far smaller film over Scorsese’s as a 2009 Oscar pony, the studio has pragmatically opted for the title that is cheaper to market — and to campaign:

    Unofficially, Par has decided to throw its support behind George Clooney dark comedy and awards hopeful “Up in the Air,” directed by Jason Reitman. That film isn’t yet dated. Rumors are that it will be released in early December, but Par says a date won’t be decided upon until after the film makes its world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival.

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  • Previewing Rourke Inside the Actors Studio

    Mickey Rourke has filmed an episode of “Inside the Actors Studio” with James Lipton, which should make for fascinating viewing.  After all, this is a probing atmosphere and while Rourke can be somewhat forthcoming and certainly a grand storyteller, he can also be guarded about things.

    Hulu has an exclusive preview of the episode up with various snippets.  There’s discussion of a talk he had with Muhammad Ali before a scary fight during his boxing years, an anecdote about how he landed his role in “The Pope of Greenwich Village” and what he expects from directors, among other things.  The most moving account is certainly this bit about his brother, Joey — the bravest person he says he ever met:

    One more after the jump, as Rourke describes, with more levity, how he decided to “try this acting shit” and gives Lipton a pound. Yeah, a pound.

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  • Announcing In Contention’s 2009-2010 awards coverage

    OscarsThe summer season is winding down, the festival season is gearing up, and within the month, we’ll be neck-deep in Oscar chatter that won’t let up for roughly 200 days.  It’s what you come to the site to read, so here’s what you can expect.

    First, a new feature at In Contention.  Later today I’ll be posting the first installment of Oscar Talk, what will eventually be a weekly podcast discussion between yours truly and indieWIRE‘s Anne Thompson.  Today Anne and I will offer up a festival preview among other things, and we’ll try to do another one from Telluride, but we won’t pick it up weekly (and consistently) until September 25, after the madness of Venice, Telluride and Toronto has calmed down.  I’m really excited as this is something the two of us have considered for a while now, just a weekly discussion of movie and awards news from two of us in the trenches — hopefully we won’t bore you.  Watch (er, listen) for that on Fridays.

    Our festival coverage is taking a bit of a quantum leap this year.  We’ll be taking on Venice and Telluride for the first time as Guy heads down to Italy for the former on September 1 and I hustle up to the Colorado mountains for the latter on September 4.  John will once again cover Toronto for us beginning September 10 and Guy will handle the 53rd BFI London Film Festival beginning October 14.  I will also be covering the AFI and Santa Barbara fests here in Southern California once again.

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  • Catching up with the cinema bookshelf

    Cover of Paul Newman: A LifeSo much of my life is spent in the dark watching flickering images on a screen. Not that I am complaining; it is a life I wouldn’t trade for the world, but I do enjoy being outdoors. My wife, my two daughters and I live 50 miles outside of Toronto in a small country village called Seagrave in a century home. With about an acre of property, we have a large deck and a swimming pool for the girls. I hear friends talk about moving or buying a new home, but we will die here. Never will this house be sold as long as I am alive, and the plan is to allow the girls to have it, share it as a summer home when Sherri and I are gone.

    We spend a lot of time on the deck reading. Sherri, the classics and latest best sellers, me, all things cinema. Once in a while I will read a book that is highly praised or recommended to me by one of my girls — “The Lovely Bones” was the last one, I think, and a superb biography of John Adams — but for the most part all I read are books about cinema.

    Biographies tend to be the ones I read most, though I am becoming much more difficult to please when reading a biography of an actor or a director. I like explorations of genre and have in the past enjoyed collections of criticisms, the best being those by Pauline Kael, Roger Ebert, Kenneth Turan and John Simon.  This summer, as I am working at home on my own next three books, I had the chance to do quite a bit of reading, and I thought I would share some of the better ones with you today.

    The best book I read last year (and have picked up from time to time over the summer) was the superb biography “Victor Fleming: An American Master” by Michael Sragrow, which quite superbly explores the little known career of the man who directed “Gone with the Wind” and “The Wizard of Oz.”  Loved by actors, admired by producers, and well thought of by critics of the time, Fleming is perhaps the least known of the directors of the Golden Age. This was one of those books I loved because I was learning something throughout, which to me is the best kind of book to read.

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  • 8/28 Web Round-up

    Joseph Gordon-Levitt• “Avatar”-izing James Cameron’s past characters. [MTV Movies Blog]

    • Following “The Hurt Locker,” Kathryn Bigelow aiming for a similar visceral style for “Triple Frontier.” [The Playlist]

    • Joseph Gordon-Levitt: the new Heath Ledger? [The Guardian]

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  • Brits fall for ‘Hurt Locker,’ ‘Broken Embraces’

    Lluis Homar and Penelope Cruz in Broken EmbracesIn what is surely the richest weekend of the year for discerning British cinemagoers since the glut of Oscar contenders in January, both Kathryn Bigelow’s “The Hurt Locker” and Pedro Almodovar’s “Broken Embraces” hit UK screens today.

    You could be forgiven for not knowing that, though. While Almodovar’s film has enjoyed a prominent marketing campaign here in London, that Warholesque poster shot of Penelope Cruz ubiquitous on buses, tube tunnels and phone boxes (I can see one right now from my living-room window), “The Hurt Locker” has, sadly, been an all-but-invisible presence.

    The local broadsheets are doing their best to raise the film’s fortunes, however, as Bigelow’s film continues to slay the critical community on either side of the pond. In a fairly rare trifecta, The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw, The Independent’s Anthony Quinn and The Times’s Kevin Maher all afford the film 5-star reviews.

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  • ‘The Men Who Stare at Goats’ trailer

  • FIPRESCI names ‘White Ribbon’ best film of the year

    A scene from The White RibbonIt’s been a very good week for Michael Haneke’s Palme d’Or winner “The White Ribbon.” One day after being selected as Germany’s official entry in the Oscar race, it has received a prestigious addition to its trophy cabinet in the shape of the FIPRESCI Grand Prix for Film of the Year. (Before you complain that the award is a few months premature, the eligibility period runs from July 2008.)

    You probably recognize FIPRESCI (International Federation of Film Critics) as the body that hands out its own awards at a wide range of film festivals throughout the year. (Of course, “The White Ribbon” also nabbed a Cannes FIPRESCI gong back in May.)

    But the Grand Prix, which was inaugurated in 1999 and is (rather randomly) handed out at the opening ceremony of the San Sebastian fest in September, represents the culmination of a year’s worth of honors, and must rank as one the most all-inclusive awards in existence. As you can see from the list of previous winners below the cut, Haneke’s win here places him in some illustrious company.

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  • Optimum remakes ‘Great Expectations’ and ‘Brighton Rock’

    Sam RileySince starting up a decade ago, British outfit Optimum Releasing has done sterling arthouse distribution work in their home country: this year alone his seen them bring “The Hurt Locker,” “The Wrestler,” “Gomorrah” and “In the Loop,” among others, to UK screens. But until now, they haven’t had much profile on the production side of things.

    That’s set to change as Optimum dips into the British canon to bring two major literary adaptations to the screen: Charles Dickens’s “Great Expectations” and Graham Greene’s “Brighton Rock.”

    The former project is being shepherded by veteran producer Stephen Woolley (an Oscar nominee for “The Crying Game”), while novelist-turned-screenwriter David Nicholls (“Starter for Ten”) is on script duty. No cast is in place yet, but the film is scheduled to begin shooting next year.

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