In Contention

Category: Daily

  • AFI FEST: ‘Doubt,’ ‘The Good, the Bad, the Weird,’ ‘Gomorrah’

    Song Kang-ho in The Good, the Bad, the WeirdAFI Fest is moving along rather quietly this season.  Most eyes have been turned toward the opening gala “Doubt” and centerpiece screenings like “Che” and “The Wrestler,” while most are probably just waiting for the next big reveal on Sunday as “Defiance” closes us out.  Tonight’s Danny Boyle tribute is sure to draw a crowd, while Michelle Williams and Jeff Goldblum will be here to peddle their Oscar hopes over the weekend.

    The movies are really just last gasps of the festival season at this point, though.  Not a lot of new terrain, but plenty to chew on for a cinephile.  I try to keep up, but I don’t pretend to be as dogged as John and Guy have proved to be.  It takes a special kind of torture.  But AFI is really coming off as a distraction more than anything, what with a number of Oscar hopefuls yet to be unveiled at a time when, generally, all cards are on the table.

    But we’ll push through.  A couple more looks this week:

    (more…)

  • 11/7 Oscarweb Round-up

    (from left) Ron Howard and Brian Grazer• Jeffrey Wells is basically cool with “Doubt.” [Hollywood Elsewhere]

    • Anne Thompson chimes in, too. [Thompson on Hollywood]

    • Steven Zeitchik draws parallels from this year’s political figures to the films in the Oscar hunt. [Risky Biz Blog]

    • Patrick Goldstein goes after the Oscar bloggers! [The Big Picture]

    • David Poland responds! [The Hot Blog]

    • …now that that’s over…

    • Ron Howard and Brian Grazer are set to receive the PGA’s Milestone Award. [Variety]

    • Anthony Breznican chats it up with James Bond himself, Daniel Craig. [USA Today]

  • U.K. ‘Che’ teaser

    Courtesy of the Telegraph comes this British teaser trailer for “Che,” which makes it look rather more gung-ho and biopic-styled than it really is.

    I’ve been struggling with the two films slightly in the week since I saw them. I was more persuaded by Soderbergh’s vision than Kris, but I’m not sure if I was all that moved. The lack of urgency in the filmmaking may just be carrying over to its staying power in my memory — but then, I was suffering from festival fatigue when I saw them. I really need to rewatch both films in a couple of months to see where I stand.

    Anyway, enjoy:

  • Dream big

    I think, as of today, Deepa Mehta is officially the bravest woman in movies.

    My reason for saying this? Well, she’s only taking on the small task of filming Salman Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children,” a novel so vast in scope and fanciful in tone that no filmmaker has dared touch it since its publication in 1981. Screen Daily reports:

    The film-maker announced the film with Rushdie today, at the eighth annual Mahindra Indo-American Arts Council Film Festival following last night’s New York premiere of her latest film, Heaven On Earth.

    The partners will start writing in March and expect to begin production at the end of 2010 on Rushdie’s 1981 allegorical tale about the country of his birth. The story is told through the eyes of Saleem Sinai, one of many characters born at the stroke of midnight on August 15 1947 when India gained independence from the British Empire.

    The idea of Rushdie adapting his own work is intriguing — on the one hand, he has no screenwriting experience, but on the other, “Midnight’s Children” is such a dense, idiosyncratic piece of storytelling that perhaps only he can really unpick it.

    Mehta, meanwhile, is an interesting choice for the material — someone whose work combines keen social awareness with occasionally dreamy visual impressionism. Her Oscar nomination for “Water” notwithstanding, she’s never quite made a completely great film in my eyes, but this could be her moment. A film of “Midnight’s Children” can only be spectacular, whether in its success or its failure. Good luck to her.

  • Official ‘Defiance’ website launches

    Paramount Vantage has launched the official site for Edward Zwick’s “Defiance,” which closes out this year’s AFI Fest on Sunday.

    Throughout the site, you can hear samples of James Newton Howard’s beautiful (and Oscar-bound) score.  You can also dive into the history of the narrative with lots of awesome and informative bells and whistles.  One of my favorite sections is the “Surviving the Winter” tab.  Some of the film’s most stunning photography is shown off during this stretch of the story, likely landing Eduardo Serra his third nomination in the process.

    Beautiful stuff.  Vantage is always great with this kind of thing, using the online experience to really amplify their product.

    Click on the image below to check out the site:

    www.defiancemovie.com

  • I want it

    Joke

    (Courtesy:/Film)

  • Dave Karger says Obama’s win could help ‘The Dark Knight’ come Oscar time

    Heath Ledger in The Dark KnightFrom a recent post at EW’s Oscar Watch:

    I thought the sequence involving the two ferries (in which a group of commuters and a group of convicts have the power to blow up each others’ boats but don’t) was a bit too reality-show-ish for my taste. But I know most viewers loved it. Either way, that part of the film speaks to the innate goodness of human behavior. And let’s remember that Oscar ballots are due next January 12, just a week before Barack Obama is inaugurated. It’s safe to say most Hollywood types will also see that event as an example of innate human goodness. All of this only helps The Dark Knight‘s chances, don’t you think?

    Hm.  Nice point.  But the Best Picture chances of “The Dark Knight” are still extremely dependent, as David Poland noted today, on how films like “Revolutionary Road,” “Australia” and “The Reader” pan out.  If those films start to fall by the wayside, then we can REALLY start getting serious.

  • New ‘Tale of Despereaux’ trailer

    I find myself wondering what kind of a shot at a Best Animated Feature nod this film could have. “Waltz with Bashir” is anything but guaranteed, so perhaps something like this could leap-frog into the competition.

    (Also at Yahoo! Movies.)

  • 11/6 Oscarweb Round-up

    Leonardo DiCaprio• David Poland sees the passage of Proposition 8 in California as a marketing opportunity for Focus Features and “Milk”… [The Hot Blog]

    • …before running down the “short race” that is the Oscar season of 2008. [Movie City News]

    • Tom O’Neil and Pete Hammond keep on digging at Dave Karger’s predictions. [Gold Derby]

    • Ari Folman talks “Waltz with Bashir.” [The Guardian]

    • Kevin Days reports on the vintage autos used in Clint Eastwood’s “Changeling.” [Los Angeles Times]

    • More chatter about the Best Picture potential of “The Dark Knight.” [Test Pattern]

    • Martyn Palmer talks “Titanic” with Leonardo DiCaprio and the star’s desire to purge himself of the image the 1997 blockbuster molded for him. [The Times]

  • What was the debut of the year?

    Chances are it’s not a prize that studios are going to mount furious campaigns for, but the Guardian First Film Award has the classiest slate of nominees I’ve seen all year. Not so much an award as a nice little citation in their year-end Film&Music edition, their critics have drawn up a list of the ten best directorial debuts from the last 12 months, and have invited their readers to vote for the winner.

    They’re going by the UK release schedule, which is why you have 2007 fare like “Persepolis” rubbing up against more recent releases on the list. (And why “Waltz With Bashir” or “Synecdoche, New York,” surely the year’s most discussed freshman effort, aren’t on it.)

    So the ten are: “Caramel” (Nadine Labaki); “Control” (Anton Corbijn); “Eden Lake”  (James Watkins); “In Bruges” (Martin McDonagh); “I’ve Loved You So Long” (Philippe Claudel); “The Orphanage” (Juan Antonio Bayona); “Persepolis” (Vincent Parannaud and Marjane Satrapi); “Shotgun Stories” (Jeff Nichols); “Unrelated” (Joanna Hogg); “Water Lilies” (Céline Sclamma).

    Not much American content there, but hey, that’s the kind of year it’s been. I haven’t yet seen “Eden Lake” or “Unrelated,” I’m afraid to say, but besides that fact, I can’t argue too much with any of these inclusions. (Clearly I’m getting too sanguine.) What would you vote for? What have they left out?

    I’m still trying to break a three-way tie in my head between “Control,” “Persepolis” and “I’ve Loved You So Long,” which you may remember I kind of liked. (I’m just happy for an excuse to use the “Control” poster as illustration — seriously, has there been a better one in the last couple of years?) Check out all the details, and vote if you’re so inclined, here.

  • Could an earlier ‘Milk’ release have killed Prop 8?

    Sean Penn in MilkI find myself just now making sense of the passing of Proposition 8 here in California, an appalling measure that, however naive it may be to admit, I really thought had no chance of passing.

    Well, it has.  Homosexual couples are banned from exchanging vows like the rest of the country, and beyond rage and outright disgust, I’m left saddened and somewhat unable to fully enjoy Obama’s convincing victory.

    What the hell is wrong with this country when one of the most liberal states in the union, a battleground, in fact, for gay rights, passes such a despicable pieces of legislation?  But more to the point of our beat here at In Contention, I’m left wondering whether an October release for “Milk” could have made a difference.

    A large portion of the film is dedicated to the fight against Proposition 6, a 1978 ballot measure that would have cost homosexuals working as educators their jobs.  Their careers were at stake 30 years ago.  Yesterday, it was their right to wed — and with wicked political conniving, the proponents of Prop 8 made this year’s fight about school in the end, just like Prop 6.  “They’ll teach gay marriage in schools,” ignorant imbeciles would scream.  “They’ll tell my son it’s okay for a man to marry a man.”  Well, “they” would be right, but that’s beside the point.

    Writing in The New York Times over the weekend, Jesse McKinley covered some of this terrain:

    In many ways, the battle sparked by this latest proposal echoes the one that inspired Mr. Milk’s most famous crusade.

    “It’s surreal,” said Cleve Jones, a veteran civil rights activist who is portrayed by a curly headed Emilie Hirsch in the film. “It’s like there’s a 30-year cycle.”

    Call it life imitating “Milk,” or vice versa, but the parallels between the campaign chronicled in the movie and the real-life battle over Proposition 8 are striking. Social conservatives pitted against gay activists? Check. A Republican governor (and former movie star) siding with gay Californians? Check. Close polls, a nationally watched campaign, the potential for heartbreak?

    Check, check, check.

    But, again, that was the weekend.  Now, it’s the day after.  And I can’t help but wonder what “Milk” might have meant for today’s cause, if anything, had it landed in the marketplace last month.

    Some of the film’s most inspiring and, indeed, captivating moments come during the sequence that details the Prop 6 fight.  Consistently, Harvey Milk (Sean Penn’s career-best portrayal) makes the point, to paraphrase, “We have to make them understand that they know us.”  That message, I think, might have carried a lot of heft if voters had made it to the polls four weeks later.

    But I’m not a studio head and I don’t make these decisions.  A studio’s priority is, of course, to shareholders, and “Milk” is likely to make more money in its current release plan than something earlier in the season.  But you can’t help but wonder what might have been.  And you can’t “give ’em hope” after the fact.

  • Michael Crichton, author of ‘Jurassic Park,’ dies at 66

    Michael CrichtonI truthfully wasn’t even aware that Crichton was struggling with cancer.  But apparently, the awful disease has taken him from us.

    I remember being charged on Crichton’s work after seeing “Jurassic Park” in 1993.  Sure, he already had fans from the days of “The Andromeda Strain,” “The Great Train Robbery” and, later on, “Disclosure,” but the dinosaurs that caught the film-going world’s imagination first drew me to the author’s work.

    I picked up “Sphere” (which blew my mind), “Congo” and “The Lost World” immediately.  It was painful to see his works ravaged by the film industry, but he made his mark on the small screen with “ER” (one of the most successul shows of all time) and the original treatment that became “Twister” (part of a mid-90s glden age for action movies).

    The last time I was really entranced by a Crichton novel was “Airframe” in the late-90s, a project that has failed to make the move to the big screen to date, despite attracting talent like Richard Donner and Sigourney Weaver over the years.  I never picked up “Timeline” (though I saw Donner’s awful film) or “Prey” (though it proved to be a constant airport temptation).  Perhaps his work on an old script, “Westworld,” will still make it to the screen with the help of “Shattered Glass” scribe and helmer Billy Ray.

    The last Crichton novel published was 2006’s “Next,” a genetic research thriller that, like so much of his work, didn’t seem satisfied merely telling a story.  Crichton was always more interested in the cautionary aspects of his yarns and how they might be better capture the zeitgeist.

    For me, a one-time fan and perhaps likely to dive back in with this sad news, Crichton will be missed.

  • Rousing Best Actor race shaping up

    Brad Pitt in The Curious Case of Benjamin ButtonIn a year I maintain to be disappointing, I must confess that the sprint to the finish is looking more and more exciting all the time, with an exceptional crop of actors vying for Best Actor nominations. This could very well be the year that Clint Eastwood wins an acting Oscar, or that the previously washed-up Mickey Rourke wins for “The Wrestler.”

    At this writing I have 12 actors who could potentially land in the field of play, though in fairness, four of the films have not been widely seen and I am going on the buzz and speculation within the industry right now.

    There seems to be a lot of belief that Richard Jenkins, a wonderful character actor who has been around forever, could land a nomination for “The Visitor.”  He came back into the public eye as the dead father in HBO’s critically acclaimed “Six Feet Under” and has been working consistently ever since.  This year he did a nice job as the heart and soul of the Coen brothers’ “Burn After Reading.”  If the studio can mount a decent campaign and keep him in the minds of the voters, he may nab a nomination.

    But he could easily be left out. Remember Michael Douglas in “Wonder Boys”? After the film’s November re-release for awards consideration helped him win the Los Angeles Film Critics Association award for Best Actor, everyone was stunned when he failed to land a nomination with the Academy.

    (more…)

  • 11/5 Oscarweb Round-up

    Barack Obama• Tom O’Neil and Pete Hammond take aim at Dave Karger’s Oscar predix. [Gold Derby]

    • Peter Bart praises Sean Penn’s performance in “Milk,” says it soars to the top of the kudo list. [Peter Bart]

    • Xan Brooks picks five films President elect Obama should check out now that he’s headed to the White House. [The Guardian]

    • Plus, it’s not too early to start pondering actors who might take on the role of Obama on the big screen. [Premiere]

    • Peter Knegt writes up the early days of the 2008 AFI Fest. [indieWIRE]

    • T.L. Stanley sits down with “Elegy” star (and Best Supporting Actor hopeful) Dennis Hopper. [Gold Rush]

    • Anthony Breznican talks to Kate Winslet about her potential one-two Oscar punch this year. [USA Today]

    • Dave Karger picks three unsung performances that deserve an Oscar push (he’s always good with these). [Entertainment Weekly]

    • Appalling.  “Milk” takes on a whole new importance. [Los Angeles Times]

  • Hang your head, Britain

    It’s at moments like this that I would like to point out that I’m not really British. Yes, I live there. Yes, I have a British passport and a somewhat malformed British accent. But I was born in South Africa and hold those last two items in a South African flavor too. For the moment, at least, I’m calling myself South African.

    The reason for the cultural distancing? Well, it has something (okay, everything) to do with the fact that “Mamma Mia!” is on course to become the highest-grossing film of all time in the UK.

    It is currently sitting in second place, with £67.4 million — with the record £69 million gross of “Titanic” only a heartbeat away. It will more than likely happen — 16 weeks into its run, recently released “singalong” versions (shudder) are giving it renewed life.

    Words fail me. True, I can’t stand “Titanic” either. But at least it was a massive, self-mythologising event of a movie, one that broke some ground in the industry (if not in the artform) and represented a clear ‘moment’ in pop culture history. It was a film, in other words, whose stature and influence befitted such records.

    “Mamma Mia!”, on the other hand, has Meryl Streep belting “The Winner Takes It All” on a pastel-hued Greek island, like the floor show at some ghastly Sandals resort. If this is any cultural representation of the current British generation, we’re as confused as we are doomed.

    And you thought America was the only country whose credibility was at stake today.

    On a side note, it’s interesting to draw a parallel here with “The Dark Knight.” With Christopher Nolan’s film devouring the US box-office this summer, there have been calls for the Academy to fall in line with public tastes and consequently recognise its significant cultural achievement with a Best Picture nomination.

    By that rationale, should the Brits start lobbying BAFTA for a “Mamma Mia!” sweep, come February? It only seems fair, complicating factors of crapness aside.

  • “I have doubts!”

    Meryl Streep in DoubtTo bring it back to Oscar talk for a moment, the first curiosity is that people are still talking about the film when asked to refrain from doing so until an actual print is shown, but that aside, Dave Karger presents the case again (to back up his top 3 assertion in the recent issue of Entertainment Weekly) that John Patrick Shanley’s “Doubt” is heading for a Best Picture nomination.  He remarks:

    It’s looking fairly likely that four of the film’s actors—Streep, Hoffman, Amy Adams, and Viola Davis—will earn acting nominations for their work in the movie. Since the Academy Awards began, 22 films have received four or more acting nominations. All 22 of them also made it into the Best Picture race. So for now, Doubt‘s got Oscar history on its side. But if one member of its acting quartet begins to lose momentum (Adams is probably the shakiest of the four, since her role is the least showy), then I could very easily end up being dead wrong.

    I won’t go into my thoughts on the film yet, no matter how much the chatter makes me want to (especially since I’m beginning to suspect I have a minority opinion — at least among those who’ve seen it so far).  But suffice it to say, I think all this rationalizing might be a touch off base.  One, probably two of the actors are secure.  Of the others, one needs publicity to keep an eye on the ball (brief but powerful, as expected), while one needs the coattails of major awards attention.  We’ll see.

  • 11/4 Oscarweb Round-up — ELECTION EDITION!

    Frank Langella in Frost/Nixon• Tom O’Neil thinks there is a conspiracy to portray “Changeling” as a flop. [Gold Derby]

    • David Poland is as mad as hell about embargo crashing and he’s not going to take it anymore… [The Hot Blog]

    • …right after Patrick Goldstein says, “Screw it, here goes…” [The Big Picture]

    • Anne Thompson passed along some gossip concerning “The Reader.” [Thompson on Hollywood]

    • Peter Knegt writes up the approaching season with the Sony Classics hat-trick in mind. [indieWIRE]

    • Sylviane Gold looks at the history of “Frost/Nixon,” from screen to stage to screen. [New York Times]

  • I don’t have the energy for this right now…

    Yeah, I mean, I agree.  And yeah, I get it.  It’s all pretty stupid.  But after two or three solid weeks of journalistic drama to sort through and a genuine fatigue of all the harping, I basically don’t give a shit.  Movies.  Just give me the damn movies and everyone shut the hell up already.