In Contention

Category: Daily

  • Michael Jackson’s filmmaker collaborations

    Michael Jackson in the music video for Billie JeanTomorrow’s installment of The Lists is going to be Michael Mann-centric, but I was all set to write up something brief in the way of qualifying Michael Jackson’s contributions to the movie world until I came across this Christopher Campbell posting at Spout Blog.  It’d be pretty difficult to go much deeper than he has.

    Campbell ranks Jackson’s “filmmaker collaborations,” including music videos directed by the likes of John Singleton, David Fincher, Bob Giraldi and, of course, John Landis and Martin Scorsese.  As expected, the Francis Ford Coppola-directed, George Lucas-produced “Captain EO” is in the mix, as well as Sidney Lumet’s “The Wiz.”  I had totally forgotten about the Spike Lee production “They Don’t Really Care About Us” until I caught it on MTV or the like yesterday.  Campbell places that at #1.

    It’s a shame room couldn’t be made for the “Billie Jean” production, from visionary music video (and eventual so-so film) director Steve Barron (A-Ha’s “Take On Me”).  Promo News recently caught up with Barron for a brief remembrance of the shoot.

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  • Bustin’ makes me feel good

    GhostbustersFor the video game fans in the house…

    I beat the new “Ghosbusters” game within 24 hours of picking it up.  It’s a moderately fun game, though not at all interesting from a story stand point.  I bring it up because, after all, when Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis began developing the game, they did so with the intention that it would be, essentially, the third “film” in the franchise.  But ultimately the narrative, which could have been quite ambitious given the medium, was simply rehased plot points from the first movie.

    Writing at the Wall Street Journal’s Speakeasy blog, Jamin Brophy-Warren has posted an interesting item, however brief, detailing the game’s road to fruition.  I just wish there was more thought put into the actual plot.  However, there is an awesome sequence in the game that echoes both the cartoon series and the “Ghostbusters in Hell” concept that almost made it to theaters in the 1990s.

    But here’s the real question: there was an “E.T.” game on Atari back in the day?!

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  • Contest winners!

    Mr. Gittes and Zach are the big winners from our “Public Enemies” contests and the proud owners of a new poster.  Gittes nailed the trivia question, which regarded Michael Mann’s “Arms and the Man” project, developed out of talks with journalist Lowell Bergman before “The Insider” came to fruition.  Zach, meanwhile, won out in the thin caption contest field with the following zinger:

    Marion Cotillard in Public Enemies

    Emails have been sent to the addresses provided when you commented, guys.  If there’s a better email address, let me know.  We’ll get the posters to you asap.

    Thanks to everyone for participating!

  • Uh, Roger?

    Peter Cullen (voice) in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

    The day will come when “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” will be studied in film classes and shown at cult film festivals. It will be seen, in retrospect, as marking the end of an era. Of course there will be many more CGI-based action epics, but never again one this bloated, excessive, incomprehensible, long (149 minutes) or expensive (more than $200 million). Like the dinosaurs, the species has grown too big to survive, and will be wiped out in a cataclysmic event, replaced by more compact, durable forms.

    From Roger Ebert’s recent write-up on “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.” Even though he mentions an expectation for boffo business in the next graph, I have to ask: Do you really think a $203 million opening isn’t going to yield more and more unrelenting, big budget, massive event films developed from successful franchises with built-in fanbases? It’s only a matter of time before “Voltron” makes it to the screen. And if they had figured out a live action “Thundercats” by now, I’m it would have hit the multiplexes already, too.

    And the bit about “many of those who do see it will find they simply cannot endure it.”  I wonder when was the last time Mr. Ebert saw a film with an audience.  Against all odds, the public is head-over-heels for this thing.

    Anyway, extinction is wishful thinking, my friend.

  • 6/29 Web Round-up

    Stephen Frears• Rachel Abramowitz catches up with Johnny Depp on the “Public Enemies” publicity trail. [Los Angeles Times]

    • Helen O’Hara remembers Michael Jackson’s movie moments. [Empire]

    • Jenni Miller talks to “Cheri” director Stephen Frears. [Cinematical]

    • Guillermo DelToro’s credo. [The Independent]

    • “Do the Right Thing” still asks burning questions. [Washingotn Post]

    • Hey, remember Julia Ormond? [New York Daily News]

    • David Cairns talks to “Pontypool” director Bruce Macdonald. [The Autuers’ Notebook]

  • Gangster lovin’

    Johnny Depp in Public EnemiesJoe Queenan is one of my least favorite Guardian film contributors — too often perversely hard to please — but I did appreciate the boyish honesty of this piece, in which he sheds his usual cineaste grousing to indiscriminately geek out over guns and fedoras. With “Public Enemies” only a few days away, he extols the simple joys of the gangster genre:

    For those of us who secretly believe that gangster movies are the only ones worth making – despite our obsequious lip service to Truffaut and Antonioni – the timing could not be better. Aficionados of gangster movies view reality as a daisy chain connecting one gangland saga to the next, with ordinary life – family, children, career, lunch – occurring in between. We do not need an uninterrupted stream of gangster movies to survive, and we certainly do not need half-hearted twaddle like Knockaround Guys to function properly – but we cannot tolerate long gaps between high-quality releases.

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  • Respectfully disagree

    Marion Cotillard in Public EnemiesF.X. Feeney, whose Taschen study on the films of Michael Mann is must reading for fans of the director, has gone on the record with Jeffrey Wells as believing the female characters from Mann’s films to be “deeply observed, self-reliant and fully dimensional.”

    The comment follows an earlier Wells posting concerning Marion Cotillard’s strong performance in “Public Enemies,” opening Wednesday.  And while I have all the respect in the world for Feeney and his opinions, I have to respectfully disagree with his take here.

    In writing about Cotillard’s performance in my review of the film, I praised the actress for finding “the right combination of frailty and strength that has defined the few well-developed female characters from Mann’s films,” and I stand by the passing commentary at the end there.  Most of the females in Mann’s work, to my eye, serve as transitional devices more often than not.  Cora Munroe in “The Last of the Mohicans,” Charlene Shiherlis in “Heat” and now, Cotillard in “Enemies,” represent the few examples of the director tapping into women with a compelling trajectory.

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  • Previewing tomorrow’s Oscar column…

    R.I.P. Oscar

  • Has anyone seen this bizarre CNN interview with Joe Jackson???

    I don’t think “WTF” says it, but…WTF???

  • Oliver Stone talks ‘Wall Street 2’ on Real Time

    Bill Maher is taking a brief mid-season break from live “Real Time” shows for the next couple of weeks.  Friday night’s show, when not an awkward schmooze fest on some of his guests’ part, made for a delightful three-part one-on-one discussion.  The guests were Cameron Diaz, Oliver Stone and Billy Bob Thornton, but as you’d imagine, the most fascinating discussion was the Stone segment.

    The director talked about religion, “the death of journalism” regarding the current administration’s decision to withhold images from Abu Ghraib, and, most applicable to what we do here, the forthcoming sequel to his 1987 film “Wall Street.”  Stone says he plans to start filming in August for an early 2010 release.  The “Wall Street” talk begins around the 7:00 minute mark:

  • ‘Moon’ takes top prize at Edinburgh

    Sam Rockwell in MoonThe Edinburgh International Film Festival closed today with an awards ceremony that culminated in Duncan Jones’s sci-fi debut feature “Moon” landing the fest’s most coveted prize, the Michael Powell Award for Best British Feature. The jury, headed by Joe Wright and including Oscar-nominee Frank Langella, said of the film:

    We award “Moon” for its singular vision and remarkably assured direction as well as for the inspired manner in which it transcends genre. The central performance by Sam Rockwell embodies the film’s emotional complexity and compelling philosophical perspective.

    The award is an aupicious one; recent winners that have gone on to considerable international success include “My Summer of Love,” “Control” and Oscar-winner “Tsotsi” (yes, it’s British). I suspect Jones might land a few more citations, particularly of the Best First Film variety, before the year is out.

    (More details, and a full list of awards, after the cut.)

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  • Live action Luxo Jr.

    (Courtesy: Gizmodo, via Cinematical)

  • Miyazaki’s ‘Ponyo’ closes LAFF

    Hayao MiyazakiI’ve come to the awkward, “I’m the only one” conclusion that, despite my best efforts, the cinema of Hayao Miyazaki just doesn’t paddle my boat.

    Looking back over the animator’s past works again throughout the week in preparation for this write-up, and having taken in his latest, “Ponyo,” just a few weeks back, I still find myself struggling to maintain an interest in these films.  “Ponyo” is probably more in line with “My Neighbor Totoro” or “Kiki’s Delivery Service” than the director’s more ambitious fare, but it nevertheless represents an imagination that, despite my aversion to the work, is a welcome dose of creativity in a business sorely lacking it year after year.

    “Ponyo” is a loose adaptation of Disney’s “The Little Mermaid,” though Ariel’s mermaid has been swapped for Ponyo’s gold fish and there isn’t a villain within earshot.  But a narrative lacking an antagonist is par for the course for Miyazaki, perhaps one of the reasons I never warmed to his work but still a brazen way to go about visual storytelling business.

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  • Deepak Chopra on his friend, Michael Jackson

    This Keith Olbermann interview with doctor and author Deepak Chopra, one of Michael Jackson’s closest friends and confidants, is required viewing for anyone wanting to get past the knee-jerk “a pedophile is dead” stupidity flooding the net, the air waves, etc., in the wake of the entertainer’s untimely demise Thursday.  The interview comes on the heels of a Huffington Post op-ed Chopra penned early Friday morning, worth more than any cheap dime-store speculation from misanthropes and uneducated buffoons.

    Thankfully the interview briefly gets into the issue of Jackson’s lupus condition, which obviously speaks to the plastic surgery that eventually became an obsession with health that so many are quick to forget or ignore, choosing instead the line that he was attempting to transform himself into a child or some other such nonsense.  There is a Wolf Blitzer interview with Chopra that was even longer, which kick-started his many media appearances this weekend.  If you can find that, give it a look, too.

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  • Contest reminder

    If you haven’t already, don’t forget to take a stab at our “Public Enemies” poster contest.  We’ll accept captions throughout the weekend.

  • Oscarcast nixes honorary awards

    Jerry Lewis accepting the Jean Hersholt Award at the 81st Annual Academy AwardsAnyone know the reason why the Academy is so restlessly change-happy this week? Not content with doubling the Best Picture field and potentially eliminating the Best Original Song category, they’ve also decided go ahead and cut all honorary awards from the March telecast.

    Instead, the hitherto irregularly awarded Honorary (AKA lifetime achievement), Irving G. Thalberg Memorial and Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Awards will be announced in September and handed out at a private dinner in November. AMPAS  president Sid Ganis explains in the press release:

    “For some years now, the Board has struggled to balance the desire to truly honor worthy individuals with the time limitations that the Oscar® telecast imposes on these honors … By creating a separate event for recognizing these outstanding people in the movie industry, we’re insuring that each honoree will be given his or her full due, without compromise.”

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  • Could Focus be priming ‘Boat’ for Oscar?

    Rhys Ifans in The Boat That RockedVariety’s Pamela McClintock and Ali Jafaar are reporting tonight that Focus Features will distribute Richard Curtis’s “The Boat That Rocked,” rather than parent Universal, and instead of the originally planned August 28 release date, the studio has pushed it to November, right in the middle of the Oscar season.

    The article notes the fact that Focus is “more adept at marketing less commercial fare” as reason behind the move, but it also notes “Focus prexy James Schamus said his team is working with Curtis to trim about 20 minutes from the film, which originally ran 129 minutes. A chief complaint from critics was the film’s length.”

    You’ll recall, the film took a pretty big critical shellacking upon release in the UK in the spring.  It also failed to light up the international box office, pulling in, as McClintock and Jafaar note, a mere $25.1 million against a $50 million budget.  But while everything is certainly a business maneuver in this industry, one can’t help but wonder whether Focus is thinking, with a thin Oscar slate going into the fall (though animated feature “Coraline” is sure to pop up in the animated field), “Boat” could be whipped into an awards contender.

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  • Johnny Depp pitches ‘Enemies’ on Letterman