It’s not much, but it’ll whet the appetite for those chomping at the bit for the big trailer debut this week:
Category: Daily
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Na’vi action figure from ‘Avatar’
You knew merchandising would kick in on this thing eventually. Thanks to Devin over at CHUD, we get a look at the proposed line of action figures for James Cameron’s “Avatar.” This is fairly newsy, since to the best of my knowledge, outside of those who saw the Comic-Con footage, this is the public’s first glimpse at a full Na’vi/Avatar body:
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P.T. Barnum and ‘Showman’ — Hugh Jackman’s Oscar shot?
I don’t know why this came to mind so quickly. There is no director yet and the screenplay is yet to be hammered out, but I couldn’t help but wonder, with the announcement of the P.T. Barnum biopic “The Greatest Showman on Earth,” whether Hugh Jackman might finally find himself in the awards hunt for a change.I don’t mean to boil a simple news item down to an awards angle, which can be a knee-jerk reaction to this stuff in this racket. But really, can anyone think of a more suitable role for Jackman? Maybe it’ll just end up being fluff, I don’t know. But there’s a real opportunity here.
The film is apparently part of a string of musicals Jackman and partner John Palermo plan to usher to the screens, as the genre attempts to make a valiant comeback. And now’s as good a time as any for frothy entertainment to capture the public’s imagination. “The Sound of Music” won the big award during some dreary times, after all. And the script is taking the old school route, written with actors in mind throughout. Anne Hathaway (who you’ll recall held her own quite well opposite Jackman on Oscar’s stage back in February) will co-star.
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Poland, Julie, Julia, bon appetit
I literally agree with every single word he has to say here:
(Courtesy: The Hot Blog)
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The see-sawing ‘Burning Plain’
Thanks to the reader (modestly unnamed) who sent me a reminder of the recently released U.S. trailer for Guillermo Arriaga’s “The Burning Plain,” a film that has endured a wildly uneven buzz trajectory since debuting at Venice nearly a year ago.Hailed out the gate as a strong 2008 Oscar vehicle for Charlize Theron, despite mixed notices for the film itself, it then dropped from view entirely, languishing in distributor-less purgatory for months on end. Its UK release came and went in March with zero fanfare and tepid reviews, and its U.S. prospects looked little better.
I offered some thoughts on the film then, deeming it worthy as performance showcase (young Jennifer Lawrence, in particular, is a revelation) but dramatically thin and structurally obvious as storytelling.
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Action versus politics
Anticipating a fresh batch of “Hurt Locker” press ahead of the film’s UK release later this month, The Times’s Kevin Maher takes an angle on the film that I’m surprised hasn’t been more of a media issue so far: the fine line the film walks between conscientious political filmmaking and gung-ho entertainment.One of the things I admire about Kathryn Bigelow’s film is its forthrightness in depicting the visceral thrill of warfare: it’s a courageous approach to take in a cinematic landscape where heavily weighted anti-war statements are de rigueur.
“The Hurt Locker” paints its own unflattering portrait of U.S. military involvement, of course, but it remains resolutely an action film first — one more interested in capturing the physical sensation of combat than miring itself in rhetoric.
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‘The Cove’ represents a real opportunity for AMPAS
After week after week of missed opportunities to see Louie Psihoyos’s harrowing documentary “The Cove,” I finally got around to it last night at the Arclight (one of only two theaters currently showing the film in Los Angeles). I was absolutely floored. Devastated, rocked, affected — it’s the reason films are made.I won’t get into a proper review now since the film is in release and plenty of opinion pieces have already landed, but I haven’t felt so galvanized by a cinematic experience in a long time. And as opposed to last year’s “Dear Zachary,” which was equally effective but left the viewer with an inevitable feeling of helplessness, “The Cove” has me wanting to empty my wallet, quit my petty job, detach myself from all amenities and actually DO something.
It got me thinking, too. This month’s Oscar update obviously places a bet on Michael Moore’s “Capitalism: A Love Story” to benefit from the expanded Best Picture category. But I think the Academy has a real opportunity to move the needle on a serious issue by shining its spotlight on Psihoyos’s film.
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Why Richard Corliss stinks for thinking Netflix stinks
This Richard Corliss column over at Time, titled “Why Netflix Stinks,” is so wrong-headed and off the mark that I find myself scratching my head, wondering whether there was some AOL/Time Warner mandate to offer up a sniping and skewed account, but it’s not like there is any real competition between the conglomerate and Amazon.com (which could own Netflix in the near future), so I’m basically left thinking Corliss is just stuck in an ancient time he’s unwilling to relinquish.To begin with, “real well-stocked video stores” are a relic of a forgotten time. Corliss betrays a disconnected sense of reality with an anecdote about a lower Manhattan store with 55,000 titles, failing to realize the chain locations the people between the coasts have to deal with.
Have you been to a Blockbuster Video lately? An overall disdain for the medium seems to permeate, generally owing to an apparent bottom-of-the-barrel standard for hiring, entry-level positions for those finally moving into the private sector. And the catalogs are maddening, consumer theory writ large: 50 or 60 copies of “12 Rounds,” but don’t figure on finding “City Lights” buried somewhere.
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Roger Ebert on list-making and The Spectator’s latest
It seems The Spectator has conducted a greatest films poll, available online here. Roger Ebert used the opportunity to offer up some thoughts on list-making in general and one of his favorites (the only one in which he participates), the Sight & Sound poll in particular:All lists of the “greatest” movies are propaganda. They have no deeper significance. It is useless to debate them. Even more useless to quarrel with their ordering of titles: Why is this film #11 and that one only #31? The most interesting lists are those by one person: What are Scorsese’s favorites, or Herzog’s? The least interesting are those by large-scale voting, for example by IMDb or movie magazines. The most respected poll, the only one I participate in, is the vote taken every 10 years by Sight & Sound, the British film magazine, which asks a large number of filmmakers, writers, critics, scholars, archivists and film festival directors.
That one at least has taken on a canonical aspect. The list evolves slowly. Keaton rises, Chaplin falls. It is eventually decided that “Vertigo” is Hitchcock’s finest film. Ozu cracks the top ten. Every ten years the net is thrown out again. The Sight & Sound list at least reflects widespread thinking in what could be called the film establishment, and reflects awareness of the full span of more than a century of cinema.
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8/3 Web Round-up
• Steven Miessner, the Academy’s white-gloved “keeper of the Oscars,” dead at 48. [USA Today]• Steve Weintraub talks “The Princess and the Frog” with directors Ron Clements and John Musker (at Comic-Con). [Collider]
• The unmade films of Stanley Kubrick, including “Foucault’s Pendulum,” “Napoleon” and “Perfume.” [Empire]
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Winner of one Oscar nomination, including Best Picture
The Academy’s recent controversial decision to bump the Best Picture category up to 10 nominees has been mulled over, digested, regurgitated and mulled over again at this point. There’s nothing really new that can be added to the conversation/debate/speculation, but as I was going through my updated Oscar predictions for Monday’s column, I suddenly realized I had a film in the predicted 10 that didn’t pop up in the predicted five in any other category.My immediate reaction was, “Well that’s silly, Kris, take it out of there. Or find a feasible place for it elsewhere, too.” After all, while three and four nominations aren’t necessarily unheard of for select Best Picture nominees throughout the years…a lone Best Picture nominee? Really?
But why not? The dynamic shifts so much with this new paradigm that it’s quite feasible for a film, which might not have valiant champions for its various parts, to be one of the most passionately supported efforts for the sum of those parts. Over the 10 years the Academy tried this experiment between 1932 and 1943, we saw nine films receive single nominations for Best Picture: “She Done Him Wrong” (1932), “Smilin’ Through” (1932), “Here Comes the Navy” (1934), “The House of Rothschild” (1934), “Ruggles of Red Gap” (1935), “Libeled Lady” (1938), “Grand Illusion” (1938), “One Foot in Heaven” (1941) and “The Ox-Bow Incident” (1943).
You’ll find out the mystery film (which sits at #10 on the chart, mind you) on Monday, though perhaps it’s not so hard to guess. I discovered more and more with this update that I’m anticipating this to be a “time capsule” year for the Academy more than ever.
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Rob Marshall and ‘Pirates’ … why not?
It seems I’m one of the few people who isn’t particularly bothered by the admittedly surprising prospect of Rob Marshall directing the fourth go-round of “Pirates of the Caribbean.”Variety first floated the news yesterday that the Oscar-nominated choreographer-turned-filmmaker is in talks to take the reins of Disney’s megabucks franchise from Gore Verbinski, prompting a stream of “what is he thinking” remarks around the web.
While sideswiping Marshall’s upcoming “Nine” as a “problem movie,” David Poland rather melodramatically suggests that it might be “the single worst idea in history.”
Jeff Wells, meanwhile, foresees this damaging Marshall’s Oscar prospects for “Nine.” (Not that the stench of the “Da Vinci Code” franchise turned the Academy off Ron Howard. And I doubt Marshall will be a contender for the win anyway, but that’s another discussion.)
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Bad things come to those who wait
It’s so often these days that we see poorly cut trailers for otherwise high-pedigree films that we tend to brush them aside. “Well, it has to be better than that,” we say.
Refreshingly, however, this trailer for Richard Eyre’s romantic thriller “The Other Man,” due for a late-September release after gathering dust since last year’s rocky Toronto debut, does a fine job of suggesting just how abysmal the film really is. (Not particularly accurately, mind you: it’s cute that in the wake of “Taken,” they’re trying to sell this as another “Neeson kicks ass” effort, but I can assure you that the chess match is about as physical as things get here.)
You may recall that I gave the film a rather generous 1.5 stars last October (I figured the presence of Laura Linney alone merits an extra half-star, even if she has nothing to do), and went on to name it the year’s worst. But hey, at least it gave “The Reader” the chance to slap “Only the second-dreariest Bernhard Schlink adaptation of 2008!” on its DVD cover. Always a silver lining.
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WEEKLY WRAP: Festivals, foxes and funny people
• In the week’s most dramatic news, Universal rather cleared its awards slate by bumping both “The Wolf Man” and Paul Greengrass’s “Green Zone” to 2010.• Against expectations, we were won over by Meryl Streep’s latest bid for that elusive third Oscar, “Julie & Julia.”
• The Venice Film Festival unveiled a typically well-planned lineup, with “The Road” and Michael Moore’s “Capitalism: A Love Story” leading the American charge.
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Tell us what you thought of ‘Funny People’
I’m briefly on the record with some thoughts on Judd Apatow’s “Funny People,” but I’m really looking forward to hearing what everyone else thinks of this film. Viewers ought to be trickling out of matinees by now, so cut loose with your reactions in the comments section below.
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Thompson shifts to indieWIRE this weekend
A couple of weeks ago the news dropped that Anne Thompson would be pulling up the stakes on her Thompson on Hollywood Variety blog and shifting it over to indieWIRE.My immediate reaction was that the fit was better. Thompson always seemed like an outsider at Variety, an awkward figment of a newer, fresher approach to journalism than that outlet has been willing to fully embrace.
I’ve known Anne a couple of years now and have come to consider her a good friend in a business more full of “business associates” than actual confidants. I wished her the best when the news fell and again today, as Eugene Hernandez announces the “new” Thompson on Hollywood and Anne herself writes up her final post under the Variety masthead, I’d like to do so again.
It’s an exciting get for indieWIRE, a good bunch of guys who understand the business the way Anne does.
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Remembering ‘Raging Bull’
The first time I saw “Raging Bull” was in 1980, the second day the film was in theater after release. I was an acting student at the time, heading to the theater with my friend Kevin McDonald, who went on to fame as one of the “Kids in the Hall” stars and film roles in “Galaxy Quest,” denim guy on “Seinfeld” and loads of voice work.Like me, Kevin was a film junkie, and we both had been looking forward to the new Scorsese film. Our paths went very different ways, but I know for a fact he recalls this evening with much fondness as what we saw changed our lives forever. Two and a half hours later we left the theater exhausted, drained and stunned by the event. We talked incessantly about the film on the subway as we headed back home and convinced our classmates to see it with us the next night, if I recall correctly.
There was little doubt Robert De Niro would win not only the Academy Award for Best Actor but every other acting award n the planet as well, but I remember being shocked when Scorsese himself did not follow suit. When the Oscar nominations were announced, Scorsese and his film were up for eight, but the writing was on the wall: Robert Redford‘s “Ordinary People” was going to win the lion’s share, no doubt about it.
