In Contention

Category: Daily

  • Nolan and Fincher on the impression left by Malick

    Those are three heavyweight names to stuff into one headline, but thanks to some shrewd marketing on the part of Fox Searchlight Pictures, it’s a reality.

    Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life” continues to roll out in its platform release, landing in a boatload of new cities this weekend. As the film prepares to go wider, the studio has tapped the thoughts of filmmakers Christopher Nolan and David Fincher to get their perspective on the famed auteur.

    “His work is immediately recognizable, but it’s very tough to put your finger on why that is,” Nolan says in a new featurette launched at Apple. “The technique is not immediately obvious.”

    Fincher, meanwhile, notes that “with Malick, you’re seeing something that was thought about and meditated over. You’re seeing someone who’s making choices that are specifically designed to evoke a feeling.”

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  • First look at ‘Moneyball’ via ET

  • ‘Tabloid’ poster

    Last week the trailer for Sundance Selects’ “Tabloid,” one of Errol Morris’s best films in some time, hit the net. The poster has also been floating around, so I thought I’d toss that up as well. Have a look at the full image after the jump.

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  • ‘Green’ means go see it

    It didn’t really hit me how excited I (still) was for “Green Lantern” until the lights dimmed and the green hit the screen. It can’t be understated how much of a long-time-coming type of thing this is, a theatrical version of such a vast cosmic comic book creation. And given the mechanics of the world, the amount of digital wizardry needed to conjure it, not to mention some dense continuity that never presented a clear-cut story for the screen, it’s understandable that it took so long.

    But things started to change in 2004. Geoff Johns, a long-time DC guy who had written on a number of the company’s books (and already had a nice film education under his wing from his time as a Richard Donner mentee), started re-tooling the DC universe, beginning with one of his favorite characters: Hal Jordan. The “Rebirth” storyline led into a revitalized line of books featuring the Green Lantern Corps, a more than 3,000-member strong organization of intergalactic peace keepers, with Jordan right in the center of things. The elements Johns began tinkering with and re-envisioning — which were themselves building toward the “Blackest Night” and “Brightest Day” comic events of the last two years — began to reveal a way into the material for the screen. And now, “Green Lantern.”

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  • On the Academy’s other rule changes

    With the big news out of the way, there are a few other annual house-cleaning rule alterations that ought to be addressed.

    First up, the Best Animated Feature Film category — which seems to get a face-lift in the rule book every summer — will now have anywhere from three to five nominees. As it was, in a year with 16 qualifying titles, five nominees would be selected. Less than the magic number 16 would yield just three nominees. Now, if 13 to 15 films qualify, four of them will be nominated by the branch. Under that, I’m assuming it’s just three as always.

    VERDICT: I’m okay with this, I suppose, but the qualifying numbers still feel quite arbitrary. Still, this keep quality-heavy films that happen to be quantity-thin for animated output from being slighted.

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  • AMPAS shakes up the Best Picture scenario

    The Academy has added a new twist to the Best Picture category, which was shaken up two years ago with the expansion of the field from five to 10 nominees. According to a late-breaking press release Monday, the organization has elected the field to include anywhere from five to 10 nominees, depending upon what percentage of number one votes contenders receive during the ballot-counting process.

    Think of it as kinda/sorta like the Best Original Song category, which can have anywhere from two to five nominees, but in order to place, a hopeful must first land a certain “score” from the branch. In this instance, the “score” would be the percentage of number one votes received by a given film, with 5% being the minimum. Assuming they hold onto the rule, we could have different years with different numbers of Best Picture nominees, etc.

    It’s interesting because the race could shake out predictably — given that a handful of films are agreed upon leading up to the nominations announcement, with one or two already conceded as barely making the cut — or it could be ignited even more with a dash to squeeze into that top percentile. Who knows? But I’m a BIG fan of this measure. It seems like a happy medium between the exclusivity of five nominations and the perceived diminishing of the honor of 10. And maybe even a bit more dialed in. Not to mention, the resulting number of nominees could be a nice representation of the Academy’s stance on an overall year of film. Nicely done.

    Full press release follows…

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  • ‘Straw Dogs’ poster

    Rod Lurie’s “Straw Dogs” will be hitting theaters this September. The trailer hit last month. Today, the poster. I’m glad marketing went head-on by not just invoking, but straight up reconstituting the striking imagery from the original film’s one-sheet. If you’re gonna do it, might as well go all out. Lurie revealed it today via Twitter. Check out the full image after the jump.

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  • Something else to remember Laura Ziskin by

    Across the movie blogs today, you’ve probably seen news of the sad passing of Hollywood super-producer Laura Ziskin, who lost a long battle with breast cancer over the weekend. Most of the obituaries have her name welded to the word “Spider-Man” in their headlines — certainly, her revival of the franchise in 2002 remains the most profitable work of her career. Still, that superhero franchise is hardly the only thing we owe her: also on her producing résumé are two films that shaped the careers of their female stars, “Pretty Woman” and “To Die For,” while industry legend has it that she was a key champion of “Fight Club” in the face of dismayed execs. One credit of hers I haven’t seen mentioned too often, however, is the 1987 Roger Donaldson thriller “No Way Out” — a remake, but one of my favorite pulp pieces of its era, and a reminder of what a terrific movie star Kevin Costner was back in his pre-Oscar prime. The trailer doesn’t really flatter the film, but if you’ve never seen it, let this be your excuse.

  • Madonna’s ‘W.E.’ joins Weinsteins’ scattered 2011 slate

    Having done all right with the last film to cover the romantic tribulations of King Edward VIII — it was called “The King’s Speech,” it won a few Oscars, you might have heard of it — The Weinstein Company clearly feels there’s an appetite among audiences for more on that chapter of British royal history, with Edward’s story center stage this time.

    So it is that that Harvey and his minions have bought the US distribution rights to Madonna’s sophomore directing effort, “W.E.” — a decades-spanning portrait of the affair between the one-time future King of England and Wallis Simpson, the American divorcée for whom he abdicated the throne, fused with a fictional modern-day story of a young New Yorker inspired by their romance.

    Starring Andrea Riseborough and James D’Arcy as the historical couple, and Abbie Cornish as the woman obsessed with their romance, it all all sounds suspiciously like “Julie & Julia” with crowns replacing the chef’s hats — which, combined with the novelty factor of the film’s celebrity writer-director, leads me to think the Weinsteins may view this more as a light commercial play rather than the hefty awards bait of their last monarchy biopic.

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  • Malick goes deeper underground

    First up, some good news for our British readers: the distribution wrangles surrounding “The Tree of Life” have been resolved, and Fox Searchlight will bring the film to UK screens on July 8. Not much longer until you can join the conversation.

    Given Terrence Malick’s usual work rate, it feels almost perverse to begin talking about his next film while his current one is still in theaters, but that’s precisely what his new go-to cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki does in a fascinating Sight & Sound interview.

    So far we know little about the untitled work, already in post-production, beyond its all-star cast of Ben Affleck, Javier Bardem, Jessica Chastain and Rachels Weisz and McAdams, but Lubezki reveals this much: if you thought “The Tree of Life” was esoteric, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

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  • ‘Tabloid’ trailer

    One of the most compelling films I saw at last year’s Telluride Film Festival was Errol Morris’s new documentary, “Tabloid.” The film is “masterful work with Morris’s trademark sense of humor splattered all over it,” I wrote at the time. “One of his best films in years.” I’m looking forward to seeing it again. Sundance Selects picked the film up for US release and Apple has just debuted the trailer. Check it out by clicking the image below or watch an embed after the jump.

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  • ‘Beginners’: Plummer’s late Oscar vehicle?

    We may be almost halfway through the 2011 release schedule, and as usual, there’s been little in the theaters to trouble the Oscar-minded obsessives among us. That’s not to say the last six months have wanted for deserving work — in a perfect world, one where all good films are created equal, “Certified Copy” star Juliette Binoche would be tough to beat for Best Actress, while “Meek’s Cutoff” would be a slam-dunk Best Picture nominee, but we hardly need to go into the dully pragmatic reasons why those are mere pipe dreams.

    Only two immediate post-Cannes releases, “The Tree of Life” and “Midnight in Paris,” have prompted some awards discussion with their critical provocation and surprising box office, respectively — but beyond a near-certain cinematography nod for the former and a possible writing nod for the latter, further prospects depend largely on the performance of autumn’s big-name prestige draws, as well as a few hot festival purchases from Cannes, Sundance and even Berlin.

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  • Tell us what you thought of ‘Super 8’

    Paramount is rolling out J.J. Abrams’s “Super 8” 24 hours ahead of schedule today with an IMAX-heavy release in over 300 theaters. That’s the #Super8Secret, and it reads to me as a desperate, though perhaps smart attempt to get some high-dollar ticket sales in the bank for a low-tracking film in advance of the weekend. Whether some like it or not, I have my own feelings on this one. But so will you. Since it’s making its way to the public today, we might as well jump the gun on this post, too. So cut loose with your thoughts below when you get around to the film this weekend.

  • Super h8ed it

    Where to begin on “Super 8?” It’s so clearly the kind of film directors tend to make, unmolested, after a major hit, the kind where someone really needed to be pulling the strings and smoothing the edges and seeing the forest through the trees. “But I’m J.J. f***ing Abrams.” (I’m sure he’s a splendid chap.)

    It’s a nostalgia wank, but you already knew that. I find myself wondering if the pitch meeting was little more than Abrams promising Steven Spielberg that the famed director’s oeuvre would be all but gilded and bronzed right there on the screen. But that can be forgiven…if there’s a story.

    And there’s not. Well, there’s not a complete story. There’s a lot of mayhem that feels injected into a coming-of-age yarn that itself needed some tinkering, and then there’s a climax that is meant to bring it all together, but ultimately whiffs worse than Begbie’s scratch in “Trainspotting.”

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  • The experimental urges of ‘The Tree of Life’

    Kris already acknowledged the disproportionate number of Malick-related posts on the site of late, but it’s not often one gets a conversation piece of this magnitude landing in the early summer schedule, so we’re just going to roll with it. (The film would no doubt have been a big deal in any season, but Fox Searchlight’s decision to dodge the autumn prestige deluge with an immediate post-Cannes release is proving rather wise in terms of publicity gained.)

    Anyway, I was drawn to this Fandor piece about the influence of experimental cinema on Malick’s Palme d’Or winner, most evident in the early 20-minute sequence that maps out the earth’s evolution. Along with several other critics, my review noted echoes of Godfrey Reggio’s landmark 1982 tone poem “Koyaanisqatsi” in the sequence, but it appears that some lesser-known experimental films played a more direct role in its creation.

    New York-based Scott Nyerges, whose avant-garde shorts haven’t been seen much outside the festival circuit, was approached by Malick’s production company for permission to license 12 seconds of his 2008 short “Autumnal” (embedded after the cut).

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  • Tell us what you thought of ‘X-Men: First Class’

    Oddly enough, I have very little to say about “X-Men: First Class.” There was a rush to celebrate the film that felt hasty. It gets a number of things right (like the Xavier/Lensherr relationship, which is spot on), but it also feels like director Matthew Vaughn is a bit tone deaf, as the energy of the film felt incredibly unbalanced (perhaps owed to re-shooting with Bryan Singer, I’m not sure — and I haven’t been a big fan of Vaughn’s work so far). In any case, the film opens this weekend, and east coast midnight screenings should be letting out shortly, so you’ll all have your own opinions to offer. Cut loose with them here when you get around to it.

  • Looking beyond the shadows of ‘The Tree of Life’

    Yes, yes, more talk on “The Tree of Life.” I’ll be honest. I’ll be surprised if there is a film that occupies the space of “best” in my consideration of 2011’s film offerings, not to spoil the end of year shenanigans or anything (though one never knows what can happen to perception over the next six or seven months). It’s such a rich, rewarding, flawed, imperfect, real experience. I cannot wait for a third viewing.

    In the meantime, I delighted in digging into Anthony Breznican’s lengthy deconstruction of the film over at Entertainment Weekly. Interestingly, he draws a lot of the same interpretations I did when I wrote about the film in depth last week, and he notes that in conversation, despite a heavy consideration of “subjectivity,” many viewers are coming away with similar interpretations about this or that. Chalk it up to one more note of universality in Terrence Malick’s latest.

    The piece is naturally full of SPOILERS, as Breznican tackles (with what he self-deprecatingly calls “hack analysis”) the entirety of the film, beginning to end, and turns up some interesting bits of insight. I was personally fascinated by his takeaway on water imagery in the film.

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  • ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’ teaser poster (NSFW)

    Early this morning, Sony revealed the (official) trailer for David Fincher’s “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.” The studio has also unveiled the film’s official website, which debuts the first one-sheet for the film. Check out the full image after the jump.

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