In Contention

Category: Daily

  • Bingham at The Mint

    Hate to be an advocate, but last year’s Best Original Song winner Ryan Bingham hit the stage for a modest private showcase last night at The Mint in West L.A. and just nailed it.

    The new album, “Junky Star,” hits shelves September 7 and was produced by T Bone Burnett, as mentioned previously.  It’s like a Springsteen album, focused, intense, but free-wheelin’.  It’s exactly the kind of music you want to hear this guy turning out.

    Bingham spent some years in Austin and made his way as a country artist.  He’s been here in Los Angeles for four years now, but his sound isn’t country.  It’s quite progressive, actually, with an awareness, respect and even dedication to traditional melodies and sonic sense.  But it retains an authentic sheen that makes it quite unique.

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  • ‘Tree of Life’ alone in Apparition stable

    Things looked so upbeat for fledgling distribution outfit Apparition when they started out last year. Masterminded by former Picturehouse head Bob Berney, the company was christened with the acquisition of one of 2009’s best films, Jane Campion’s “Bright Star.” A classy roster of titles followed, including “The Young Victoria,” “Fair Game,” “The Runaways” and, most eagerly awaited of all, Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life.”

    They didn’t quite know what to do with everything they had — “Bright Star” was unfortunately buried by ill-thought scheduling and idle marketing — but they did manage to eke out an Oscar win for “Victoria” before their first birthday, and also nabbed one of the starrier titles at this year’s Sundance fest: the Kristen Stewart and James Gandolfini starrer “Welcome to the Rileys.” Not bad going, particularly in the current indie climate.

    How quickly things change in Hollywood. Just before Cannes, Berney caught industry watchers off-guard by pulling out of Apparition, and the company has been reeling from the shock ever since. Anne Thompson reports that co-founder Bill Pohlad has taken the drastic measure of shutting down their New York office and nearly halving the staff.

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  • ‘Paranormal Activity 2’ trailer

    If you go see “The Twilight Saga: Eclipse” this summer, you’re likely to see the new trailer for “Paranormal Activity 2.” Last year’s DIY thriller scared up a healthy box office with an innovative approach to distribution, but the idea of a sequel is dubious to many.  The trailer has been released at the film’s official site and I have to say, it’s not really moving the needle for me.  Click on the image below to have a look or check out the embed after the jump.


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  • ‘Bagman’ trailer

    Mike Fleming reported at Deadline yesterday that George Hickenlooper’s “Bagman” (formerly “Casino Jack,” or maybe it still is, who knows), which debuted at Sundance and could be a power play for lead actor Kevin Spacey if it’s ever picked up, is being shopped around town after a distribution deal with Metropolitan fell through.  So I guess it’s a good time to toss up the trailer, which I stumbled across at Hollywood Elsewhere:

  • The first iPhone movie is here…almost

    Last year, when I erroneously thought the iPhone 3GS would include video editing software, I asked how long it would be before the first movie fully shot and edited on an iPhone would hit.  Well the 3GS didn’t have editing software, but the newly released (and I hear buggy-as-hell) iPhone 4 does.  Commenter Chuck says this couldn’t have actually been edited on the iPhone 4, but it was shot exclusively with it and has a hell of a picture:

    I’m sure someone has dicked around and shot a home porno or something by now.  Or baby videos.  And I guess there’s this.  But we’re still waiting on something substantial to be shot and EDITED on the iPhone.  Brave new world.

  • ‘Amelie’ tops list of decade’s best cinematography

    The folks at Movieline got their hands on a list of the top 50 films of the decade, from a cinematography standpoint, as laid out by voters at American Cinematographer magazine. Topping the list: Bruno Delbonnel’s work on “Amelie.” Delbonnel is a favorite among DPs. After all, “A Very Long Engagement” won him the ASC honor in 2004 and he received his third Oscar nomination of the decade for last year’s “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.” But it’s still a surprising call.

    Another delightfully unexpected pick is Jeff Cronenweth’s lensing of “Fight Club,” but I was personally irritated to find John Toll’s serene, thematically potent work on “The Thin Red Line” go completely unrecognized in the top 10 (he finally shows up at #17).  I’d also say Roger Deakins, though at his usual top notch on “No Country for Old Men,” probably should have seen top 10 representation for “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” instead.  His work on the western just misses at #11.

    I’ve been asked many times to offer up a list of the top 10 shots of the decade as a bonus to my annual top 10 shots of the year columns, but I don’t think I can do it.  For one thing, it’s obviously a ton of work, but with so many shots in so many movies, I just think it would be tough to whittle it down.  Too tough.

    Check out the full list from American Cinematographer after the jump.  (Note they’re picking from 1998 to 2008).

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  • ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows’ trailer

    The “Harry Potter” franchise has been a nice cash cow for Warner Bros.  So it was a stroke of genius to split the final novel, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” into two film adaptations, virtually assuring an extra $800 million or so.  The “Twilight” series took note, too.  The all-encompassing trailer for the two-parter wizard denouement has hit the web via Yahoo! Movies and, well, they’ve always known how to cook up fetching trailers for this series.  I still think its finest hour was the first 60 minutes of “The Goblet of Fire” and was generally “meh” on the third film, which is the favorite for most.  So I guess I’m just out of step with the rest on these.  Check out the new trailer by clicking the image below or have a look at the embed after the jump.

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  • Poland, Breznican on a January Oscars

    This issue has obviously been put to bed, but it’s still an idea in the ether many are thinking about these days.  Around the 4:30 mark in this “Doubling Down” video chat between David Poland and USA Today’s Anthony Breznican the two discuss the lingering notion:

  • ‘Get Low,’ ‘Monsters,’ ‘Skeletons’ among Edinburgh winners

    I have an irritating habit of missing key prizewinners at film festivals, so it was with some astonishment that I perused the list of films honored at the close of the Edinburgh Film Festival — only to find that I’d seen most of them. Considering the brevity of my visit, and my mostly random selection procedure, I can only conclude that the less I prepare for a fest, the better I do.

    Clearly, it’s not because I have a natural nose for a winner — I’d never have guessed that Aaron Schneider’s sluggish, self-regarding folk tale “Get Low” was a likely winner of the festival’s Audience Award, yet the public evidently responded to it more than I did. No accounting for tastes, I suppose.

    This particular award has proven something of a good luck charm in recent years, with winners like “Tsotsi,” “Man on Wire” and “The Secret of Kells” all going on to bigger things — perhaps last year’s Toronto buzz for the Robert Duvall vehicle wasn’t a false alarm after all.

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  • ‘Four Lions,’ ‘Thunder Soul’ take audience awards at LAFF

    The poor Los Angeles Film Festival has had to battle major sporting events at every pass this year. Beats being screwed by World Cup refs, I guess.  The final press release, in part:

    Today Film Independent…announced its 2010 Los Angeles Film Festival audience award winners before the Closing Night film, Despicable Me. The Los Angeles Film Festival, presented by The Los Angeles Times, with its central hub at L.A. LIVE, began Thursday, June 17 and ended today.

    The Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature went to Four Lions directed by Christopher Morris and the Audience Award for Best Documentary Feature went to Thunder Soul, directed by Mark Landsman. Roberto Hernández and Geoffrey Smith’s Presumed Guilty won the Audience Award for Best International Feature.

    The Audience Award for Best Short Film went to Dock Ellis & the LSD No-No, directed by James Blagden. The video for OK Go’s This Too Shall Pass, directed by James Frost, OK Go, and Syyn Labs won the Audience Award for Best Music Video.

  • EDINBURGH: ‘Monsters,’ ‘The Dry Land,’ ‘Mouth of the Wolf’

    My brief trip to the Edinburgh Film Festival came to an end Friday evening, as I hopped on a bus to Glasgow for a weekend with friends — sadly, that means I missed Tilda Swinton’s flashmob dance event, but I’m waving my right hand in the air as I type. It’ll have to do.

    I had planned to do a separate post for each of my final two days at the fest, but the notable films from that period can be squeezed into a single roundup. It’s perhaps kinder not to dwell on the likes of Britfilm “The Kid” — a paperback misery memoir put to film that bottoms out with Natascha McElhone trying to out-monster Mo’Nique in National Health glasses and oddly well-conditioned hair — while some titles are already old news Stateside.

    I dipped into Icelandic director Dagur Kári’s “The Good Heart,” for example, to see if the critical pounding US critics gave it in April was justified. Alas, it was: after this and “The Extra Man” (easily the worst film I saw here) Paul Dano should be wary of any script that calls on him to shack up with batty old codgers in Manhattan. Thankfully, my final day provided me with two of my favorite discoveries of the week, a happy conclusion to a cheerily-run festival that has been needlessly mauled in certain media quarters.

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  • On the sound of ‘Toy Story 3’

    It’s been a while since I linked over to the guys at SoundWorks Collection, who consistently do a marvelous job of conveying the intricacies of sound design, editing and mixing with making-of vignettes.  Most recently they turned their gaze to Pixar’s “Toy Story 3,” which boasts talents like Michael Semanick, Tom Meyers and Michael Silvers on the sound track.  Click the image below to shoot over to SoundWorks Collection or check out the embed after the jump.

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  • 7,300 ‘Days of Thunder’ later

    I grew up with a father who couldn’t be pried from the TV every Sunday, sometimes Saturdays for the Busch races, too.  So, naturally, I hated NASCAR.  Everything about it.  The kneejerk taunts of redneck ridicule were easy for me to saddle up to as well.

    But really, the older I got the more boring anti-NASCAR sentiment became.  Generally it’s ignorant prejudice, if we’re being honest, and even though I probably haven’t watched a race beginning to end since the one I attended at Bristol in the late-1980s, I every now and then get the urge to stick up for what is nevertheless one of the most popular sports in the world.

    With that in mind, I sort of delighted in reading Jenna Fryer’s AP story on the 20th anniversary of Tony Scott’s “Days of Thunder,” a film I must confess to loving.  Robert Duvall’s minute or two soliloquy to a parked car is, seriously, top notch stuff in my book.  Fryer makes early points about how the film reflected a number of real events but later explains an exaggeration of bump and grind on the track turned off a great many.

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  • Lawrence at your disposal

    I meant to make mention of this earlier, but actress Jennifer Lawrence will be participating in a post-screening Q&A this evening after the 7:40pm screening of “Winter’s Bone” at the Arclight in Hollywood.  She did the very same thing yesterday after a screening at the Landmark in West LA.

    If you’re a local and you’d like to hear a smart young actress talk about her brilliant work in the film, I’m sure it would be worth your while.

  • Man with a fútbol

    The whine of harmonica from my favorite piece of film music ever caught my attention on the television a moment ago.  I looked up to see a short version of the following commercial, featuring Argentina’s Lionel Messi and Spain’s David Villa.  Pretty neat.  Though nothing will likely ever touch Michael Mann’s (American) football promo from a few years back.

  • ‘A Family,’ ‘Make Believe’ win at LAFF

    I haven’t been able to cover this year’s LA fest with the diligence I had hoped, given that I’ve had company for nearly two weeks.  But today the jury winners were announced, so as a quick break from World Cup drama today, the press release, in part:

    Today Film Independent…announced its 2010 Los Angeles Film Festival award winners at a brunch at CHAYA Downtown. Audience award winners will be announced tomorrow afternoon…

    “There were thousands of movie fans at the festival this year, discovering new stories from our talented filmmakers,” said Film Independent Executive Director Dawn Hudson. “We are delighted to have the support of the Los Angeles film-going community for these films and their creators”

    The two top juried awards of the Los Angeles Film Festival are the Narrative Award and Documentary Award, each carrying an unrestricted $50,000 cash prize, funded by Film Independent, for the winning film’s director. The awards were established by the Festival encourage independent filmmakers to pursue their artistic ambitions.

    “In a year that celebrated an exhilarating spectrum of American and international cinema, it’s so fitting that these jury awards reflect the incredible diversity of the Festival,” said Festival Director Rebecca Yeldham.

  • ‘The Social Network’ trailer

    The teaser for David Fincher’s upcoming “The Social Network” hit the net at Mashable yesterday.  If you’re somehow unaware, it’s a biopic (weird to say that, no?) on Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg from a script by Aaron Sorkin, based on Ben Mezrich’s novel “The Accidental Billionaires.”  There is no footage, just a lofty tease that gives the impression the film will be, shall we say, quite sincere.  It’s left to be seen how Columbia flacks and the 42 West component behind producer Scott Rudin (as always) will coalesce during the season, but it’s certainly a sight-unseen favorite for the race.  Check out the trailer by clicking the image below or watch the embed after the jump.

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  • AMPAS welcomes 135 new members

    Well, we already knew Jeremy Renner had got the nod. And no surprise that many of his fellow acting nominees from this year’s Oscar race — Christoph Waltz, Mo’Nique, Carey Mulligan, Vera Farmiga and Anna Kendrick among them — have now been granted Academy membership. (Lest you think that the invitation automatically follows a nomination, Saoirse Ronan only gets in now, two years after her nod.)

    Other inclusions from Oscar’s class of 2009 include directors Lee Daniels and Juan  Jose Campanella, writers Mark Boal, Geoffrey Fletcher, Neill Blomkamp, Nick Hornby and Tom McCarthy, cinematographers Barry Ackroyd and Christian Berger, musician T-Bone Burnett, editors Bob Murawski and Joe Klotz, sound designer Paul N.J. Ottosson and costumer Catherine Leterrier.

    More thoughts, and the full list of 135 invitees, after the cut.

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