I must say, as cheesy as it appears (I’m getting a “Van Helsing” vibe), I was totally bummed when Universal’s “The Wolf Man” was pushed to 2010. The techs look great all around, especially Shelly Johnson’s cinematography. (If I’m being honest, Allen Daviau’s work behind the camera on “Van Helsing” was, frankly, some of the best of 2004.)
Anyway, have a look:
By now we’ve seen two versions of the poster for Martin Scorsese’s “Shutter Island,” each of them quite similar and not altogether appealing. Then I saw this Japanese version and thought, “That’s what I’m talkin’ about’”:
By the way, there’s a Japanese trailer for the film up at the official Japanese site.
I actually got up early this morning for this. Feels like my younger, not-so-jaded movie-going days. Then again, not so much.
It was “Avatar” fail part 2 with the trailer site still not available as of 7:04. Then the URLs were not valid until 7:39. You could, however, view the the trailer at MSN’s French site, Microsoft effectively scooping Apple because of the latter’s incompetence. Seriously, why have a big countdown on your site for a week and then drop the ball at the goal line?
Meanwhile, the Apple site lists the film as: “From the director of the ‘Titanic.’” The “Titanic?” Wow.
Anyway, the trailer is, of course, beautiful. But I imagine the avatars will catch many off guard. This is such a vibrant, unique new vision that the instinct is, interestingly enough, to recoil. But settle in and try to feel the vibe. I think the imagery is slightly too rushed in appearance, cut together in a dizzying montage that isn’t as effective as it could have been. Beyond that first dolly shot of Worthington looking at the avatar in the tank, there aren’t many chances to marinate in the imagery. But this is just a teaser after all.
Head on over to Apple and take a look at the new trailer, then come back here and give us your thoughts. Six new stills after the jump.
• Production designer Rick Carter (“A.I.: Artificial Intelligence,” “Avatar”) to be feted at Hollywood Awards. [Variety]
• Making the “prawns” of “District 9” look alien but sympathetic. [Hero Complex]
• Robert Rehme elected to head of Academy Foundation. [The Wrap]
It’s a few days old, but I only just found this nugget buried at the tail of a (rather good) David Poland rumination on the potential demise of The Weinstein Company — and since many of you seem to be hungry for details of Rob Marshall’s “Nine,” I thought it worth sharing. Poland has been casting “Nine” as a “problem movie” for a while now, but here he elaborates slightly on his concerns:
It has test screened… results were mixed… they face a problem with hardcore theater types being unhappy with a majority (all but 7) of the show’s songs being cut… but as “The Producers” showed, loyalty to a stage version is not necessarily a good bet.
The film is still in post and you can be sure that all kinds of jiggering is being done, just as it was with “Chicago.” Just like “Class” in that show, there is a song on the bubble that may or may not make it. They added 3 brand new songs for the film and seriously reworked a 4th. The film is running good bit longer than “Chicago” (about 30 minutes at the last screening), though fixing that is a big part of what makes Harvey Harvey.
Last month I briefly wrote up Nicolas Winding Refn’s “Bronson” out of the Los Angeles Film Festival. As we approach the 2009 awards season, it still remains one of the best films of the year, in this viewer’s opinion. Audacious, twisted and featuring an instantly classic performance by actor Tom Hardy. A new trailer has been released. Take a look:
He may be one of our greatest living filmmakers, but these are strange days in the career of one Mr. Werner Herzog. First he finally cops his first Oscar nomination this year for an immaculately executed middle-arthouse documentary that nonetheless stands deep in the shadow of his greatest work.
Then he goes to the opposite extreme of form, function and taste with his frankly barmy-looking genre experiment “Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans,” which we’ll soon be seeing at Venice and Toronto. While we’re still scratching their heads over that prospect, some folks aren’t even aware that he has a second pulpy American policier bowing at Toronto.
As “District 9” remains the number-one topic of conversation among American moviegoers, not least for its invocation of the apartheid era, I’m surprised to see a number of prominent critics have either missed or ignored the most obvious of its symbolic historical references: the tragedy of District Six.
A vibrant, multi-racial residential pocket of Cape Town that was declared “whites-only” in 1966, prompting the forced removal of over 60,000 people and the eventual demolition of the entire area, it stands as one of the key symbols of South Africa’s darkest days — and is plainly the primary touchstone for Neill Blomkamp’s allegory.
Some have discussed the connection, of course — starting with that title, it’s hardly subtle — but if you weren’t aware, and were grabbed by the film, you might like to do some further research.
indieWIRE’s Peter Knegt reports on a few new developments on the documentary side of things at the upcoming Toronto fest, chief of which is the addition of a further five titles to the feature doc lineup.
Three of the five will be having their world premiere at Toronto, including Bob Richman’s “Ahead of Time,” a study of the life of venerable Brooklyn-born intellectural Ruth Gruber, and Icelandic production “The Sunshine Boy,” which details a mother’s coming to terms with her son’s autism.
The film, however, that I suspect most eyes will be on is “Waking Sleeping Beauty,” the directorial debut from esteemed, Oscar-nominated Disney producer Don Hahn (“The Lion King,” “Beauty and the Beast”), which covers a section of recent cinematic history held dear by many:
This isn’t a fairy tale, but rather the true story of how the Disney animation team went from stagnation in the mid-1980s to a startling rebirth with a staggering output of hits – Who Framed Roger Rabbit, The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Lion King and more – over a ten year period. Director Don Hahn, who was a key contributor on many of these works, brings an insider’s perspective to the film.
Speaking of “District 9,” which doesn’t look to go away any time soon, Chris Lee at Hero Complex has just posted a great interview with director Neill Blomkamp, coming at things from the angle of the film’s low price tag of $30 million. It dovetails nicely with this Film Junk piece, titled “What Hollywood Can Learn From ‘Disctrict 9,’” which makes it a point of mentioning, in case you weren’t aware, that blockbuster budgets are bloated.
Getting back to Lee’s piece, he goes through a pretty decent laundry list of reasons the budget came in so low on the film, from the ease of implementing CGI with the film’s cinema verite approach, to eschewing a high-salary star in favor of newcomer Sharlto Copley, to hiring locals as extras in order to boost the local economy. “These were seriously impoverished people,” Blomkamp tells Lee. “Destitute people. The township alone had 70,000 people. But if you hire different groups each day, you get that money into the community.”
The biggest expense of the production came with the rental of military equipment, Lee says, all of which was borrowed from the United Nations. I really like the closing quote Lee picks from LA Weekly critic Scott Foundas: “I can’t wait to see what Blomkamp does next and I very much hope he gets even less money to do it.”
An acquaintance and AMPAS member who was at the “District 9” Academy screening last week, the one Peter Bart reported as a big success based on applause and overall audience reaction, has written to set the record straight:
I was there at the Academy “DISTRICT 9” screening and I think people are getting too carried away. The Academy members also saw JULIE And JULIA this past weekend and that was the one that had the best turnout I’ve seen in years to a screening. The turnout for “DISTRICT 9” was pretty good and the reaction was very good, but I don’t think that the overall reaction was that great to be honest.
The reaction to JULIE AND JULIA was good but a little subdued (I think that they loved the Julia Child segments, the Amy Adams sections less so). During “DISTRICT 9” there were several walkouts (I think that the hand held camera work drove some people nuts and some found the accents a bit hard to understand) . I am saying this, however, as someone who LOVED the film and would be happy to see it nominated frankly, but the fact that this got a phenomenal reaction is someone trying to put too positive a spin on it. Don’t get me wrong I would love to see it happen. The film is that good. We will have to wait and see, I guess.
CBS is reporting that “60 Minutes” creator and cornerstone of CBS News Don Hewitt has died after being diagnosed with a small, contained tumor earlier in the year. He was 86. The news comes one month and two days after Hewitt’s long-time colleague, Walter Cronkite, passed away at 92.
Hewitt spear-headed the most successful television news show of all time in “60 Minutes,” and has been portrayed in film by Grant Heslov (George Clooney’s “Good Night, and Good Luck.”) and Philip Baker Hall (Michael Mann’s “The Insider.”) Hewitt came under fire, as dramatized by Mann’s film, when he caved into corporate interests by refusing to air a segment in which former tobacco executive Jeffrey Wigand blew the whistle on malfeasance practices at the Brown & Williamson tobacco company. But that, however damaging, is certainly not his legacy.
Hewitt was one of the titans who ushered in an age of televised news content, but his passing, along with Cronkite’s, continues to sound the bell of a forgotten or, at least, diminished period of high respect for the profession.
Over at IMDb there is a new feature called “The Power of Film” (lofty title, that), which has listed out the top 15 films of the millennium as voted on by IMDB users, i.e., fans, the public, regular folks.
The IMDb top 250 is an ever-changing mish-mash of high-,middle- and low-brow entertainment that always makes for an amusing cross section of what the public thinks of cinema from one moment to the next. “The Godfather” and “The Shawshank Redemption” trade off the #1 spot consistently, save for the spike of interest in this major new release or that, films that insinuate themselves high early on but inevitably fall down the list as more viewers get a look.
The new feature, unsurprisingly, features Christopher Nolan’s “The Dark Knight” at the top, but strewn throughout is a diverse mixture including the “Lord of the Rings” triology, German Oscar-winner “The Lives of Others” and Pixar entries “WALL-E” and “Up.” And speaking of Oscar, MTV’s Terri Schwartz has spun her wheels on the idea that, with a larger slate of Best Picture possibilities, the IMDb list could prove an omen for the potential blend of eclectic and entertainment cinema so many expect the Academy’s line-up to resemble from this year forward.
(Schwartz’s thoughts and IMDb’s list after the jump.)
In the ole’ inbox from 20th Century Fox this morning:
We apologize for the inconvenience, but due to overwhelming demand to see the special scenes from James Cameron’s epic motion picture AVATAR, our AVATARMOVIES.COM RSVP site experienced technical difficulties. As a result of the crash you must re-select a screening time. Please note you may not get the original time you selected. Also new ticket confirmations that will be generated by your selection here will be the only accepted form of admittance.
Get it together, guys. And it’s AVATARMOVIE.COM, by the way. Oh, and when you go back to the site, you’re greeted with this:
The tickets for the special screening of James Cameron’s Avatar are SOLD OUT. Avatar opens worldwide on December 18.
Oy.
More on the fiasco at Hollywood Elsewhere.
• “Skin”: An apartheid story no one would screen. [The Independent]
• Robin Wright Penn files for divorce from husband Sean Penn. [CNN]
• Noah Forrest picks 10 films you should be excited about this fall. [Movie City News]
With Sid Ganis on his way out as president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the search for a replacement has come to an end. Tom Sherak, a representative of AMPAS’s Executives Branch, has parlayed his seven-year stint on the Board of Governors and a one-year go at treasurer into the new head of the organization.
“Sherak, a marketing, distribution and production executive with more than four decades in the motion picture industry, is currently a consultant for Marvel Studios,” the press release reads.
Nikki Finke is rather beside herself at the news, chastising Sherak as a “major advocate” for what she calls “he worst idea ever in the modern history of the Oscars: the recent decision to have 10 feature films vying in the Best Picture category.” She also uses the fact that Sherak was “responsible for lobbying the board to choose Jerry Lewis to receive the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award at the last Oscars” as a mark against him. You’ll recall there was something of a controversy around that particular award last year.
Elsewhere, Tom Hanks left his post as a Actors Branch Governor to take on elected duties as first vice-president, while Producers Branch Governor Kathleen Kennedy and Writers Branch Governor Phil Robinson were elected vice-presidents. Feature Animation Branch governor John Lasseter was elected secretary.
Full press release after the jump.
