There’s zero extras! There’s so few extras that you put it in, you push play, and the movie starts. There are no trailers, there’s no bullshit at the beginning that you have to endlessly go through. I have a deal with the studio and it goes like this: Any movie I make that makes over a billion dollars goes out without a bunch of crap trailers for your other movies.
James Cameron, discussing the DVD/Blu-ray release of “Avatar” (which drops tomorrow).
Check out the rest at Entertainment Weekly.
Has any actor in recent years put an Oscar to quite such good use as Tilda Swinton? I admit I wasn’t quite behind her win two years ago for “Michael Clayton,” but I’ve enjoyed watching how, after two decades as a kind of alien fringe goddess, she’s recently morphed into a movie star of sorts — still reassuringly batty in her decisions but now capable of propelling a foreign-language arthouse curio like “I Am Love” to healthy box-office returns in the UK. (The film hits US theaters in June.)
It’s interesting, then, to see an array of lustrous poster designs for the film all playing on the “Tilda Swinton, movie star” meme, placing her front, center and glammed-up to the hilt. Take this unused concept from UK designers All City:
Amid his coverage of the Nashville Film Festival, Nathaniel Rogers at The Film Experience served up a nice little nugget on composer Carter Burwell, the subject of a much-deserved individual tribute at the fest. Naturally, there was much emphasis on his ongoing collaboration with the Brothers Coen, which will continue this year with “True Grit.”
His score for the film is still in the conceptual stages, but his current source of inspiration suggests something typically singular is in the works:
“We don’t always see eye to eye.” Burwell noted when discussing his 14th collaboration with Joel and Ethan Coen. But when it came to the conception of the True Grit score “We both had the same idea at the same time: Protestant hymns.” The composer went on to explain that the lead character, Mattie Ross (to be played by Hailee Steinfeld) was so convinced of her own righteousness that they all thought Protestant hymns would be a fine way to play with her misplaced rectitude … He’s currently looking for appropriate hymn recordings but griped that “they all sound too sweet.”
Hey, remember when an unheralded indie called “Get Low” debuted to standing ovations at Toronto last September? And remember the accompanying talk that Robert Duvall’s second Oscar could be in the bag? And remember when all such talk died as soon as the movie was pushed back to 2010? Such is the give-and-take nature of the festival circuit.
Anyway, it’s baaaaaack. And so, I suspect, will be the Duvall Oscar talk. The trailer sets my Twee Alarm ringing something fierce, but others seem impressed.
Well, you were right. But for the true completists among you — we do promise awards coverage “this deep,” after all — here’s a suitably obscure nugget to wrap up the 2009 parade.
The Ivor Novello Awards supposedly honor the finest in British music composition, and while they receive a reasonable amount of press in the UK for their pop music citations, many aren’t aware that they have a film score category too. With that in mind, the nominees for Best Original Film Score are:
John Powell, “Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs”
Helene Muddiman, “Skin”
Ilan Eshkeri, “The Young Victoria”
Well, now you know. I’d say the nominating committee clearly didn’t see “Moon,” but hell, they saw “Skin.” Curious. Still, any organisation that recognises the songwriting skillz of both Lily Allen and The Duckworth Lewis Method ain’t all bad.
Is “Iron Man 2” really just 10 days away? This is the buzziest thing I’ve seen about it.
One of the more eyebrow-raising omissions from the Cannes official selection announced this morning was Julian Schnabel’s “Miral.” The New York artist’s biopic of Hind Husseini, with a cast including Hiam Abbass, Willem Dafoe and Freida Pinto, had been widely deemed a good bet for the competition lineup, given its lofty arthouse profile and the Cannes success of Schnabel’s last feature, “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” for which he won the Best Director award.
Roger Friedman reports, however, that this year Schnabel was offered only an out-of-competition slot by festival organizers. The director declined the offer, choosing instead to unveil the film on the fall festival circuit: “Miral” will therefore premiere at the Venice Film Festival in September, before moving on to Toronto.Venice, of course, is where Schnabel premiered “Before Night Falls” in 2000 — he has form in both festivals.
If the film turns out well, it won’t be the first time Venice has successfully fed off the bigger festival’s leftovers: both “Vera Drake” and “Brokeback Mountain” debuted on the Lido (and went on to win the Golden Lion) after being turned down by the Cannes selection committee.
Okay, before you ask, “The Tree of Life” is reportedly not ready — though the Cannes selection has apparently seen a cut, so never say never. Four slots in the competition lineup have yet to be filled.
That aside, many of the expected names are present and correct, including former Cannes champs Leigh, Kiarostami, Mikhalkov, Tavernier, Weerasethakul and González Iñárritu. (Beefing up the veteran auteur quotient, Jean-Luc Godard shows up in the very appetizing Un Certain Regard strand, as does 101 year-old Manoel de Oliveira.)
On paper — which is all we have at the moment, after all — it’s the first two of the aforementioned directors that I’m most excited to see in competition: “Another Year” will mark Leigh’s first trip to Croisette since the undervalued “All or Nothing” in 2002, and boasts the almost unfeasibly Leigh-ian cast of Imelda Staunton, Jim Broadbent, Phil Davis and Lesley Manville.
Meanwhile, Kiarostami’s “Certified Copy” — a romantic drama starring Juliette Binoche, and the director’s first film to be shot outside his native Iran — has had me curious for the better part of two years now. I sensed this might be afoot when Binoche was revealed as the official face of this year’s festival.
(More thoughts, and a complete list of films in the official selection, after the cut.)
We have less than a month left until Cannes likely triggers the first mass Oscar chatter of the year. (More so if Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life” is included in tomorrow’s Official Selection announcement.) These are precious days, then … enjoy them while they last.
Of course, if my “precious” is your “miserable,” and you’ve spent the last five weeks suffering Oscar-talk withdrawal, the indefatigable Nathaniel Rogers over at The Film Experience has your fix. You’ll remember that Kris decided against doing year-in-advance nomination predictions this year, which makes this very thorough Oscar forecast the first of its kind I’ve seen this year.
Needless to say, a hefty pinch of salt is required at this foetal stage in the competition — Nathaniel himself headlines his predictions with the caveat “for fun and discussion.” Still, his lists raise some interesting possibilities: most notably, a Best Picture slate with a very different populist-specialist balance to last year’s ten.
If you can’t fix it, you’ve got to stand it. And so it is, apparently, with me and 3D.
As I’ve written before, I’m not a big fan of Hollywood’s favorite rediscovered gimmick. As a gee-whiz novelty — expertly embellishing the odd genuine event film like “Avatar” — it works a treat. As a now-regular moviegoing ritual — awkwardly grafted onto dreary blockbusters like “Clash of the Titans” and “Alice in Wonderland,” making them even more invasive and exhausting than they need to be — it’s rapidly becoming an irritant. And until some genius fashions 3D glasses that can fit comfortably over an existing pair of spectacles, I’ll remain hostile.
Clearly, however, I’m going to have to find a way to love the third dimension, as it continues to seep outside the effects-driven blockbuster box, and even into the arthouse. The gentrification, if you will, of 3D took a forward leap this week with the news that both Martin Scorsese and Werner Herzog will be shooting their next projects in 3D.
Remember all that talk last year about how actors saw “Avatar” as a threat to the future of their profession? Well, it seems the costume designers should be shaking in their boots as well.
Thanks to Peter Sciretta at /Film, news has trickled down that the reason we haven’t gotten a glimpse of Ryan Reynolds in full dress from Martin Cambell’s “Green Lantern” is that there isn’t a practical costume in effect. Writes Sciretta:
The suit that Ryan wears on set is a grey tracking motion/performance capture suit with led lights. I’ve heard that Ryan Reynolds has been joking on set that Warner Bros is going to make him into a Na’vi when the final cut is released. His joke, not mine. The Green Lantern suit you will see in the final film will be almost entirely created using computers.
Any Meryl Streep fans still sulking over over her twelfth consecutive Oscar loss last month should dry their eyes right about now. This morning brings the news that the actress has just been honored by a rather tonier Academy, as the American Academy of Arts and Letters has appointed Streep to their ranks.
Streep joins former honorees like Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen in the American Honorary class of membership, reserved for individuals whose work fall outside the institution’s traditional remit of music, art and literature. She is, however, the first person to be named solely for her achievements in acting.
If that’s not better than a little gold statue, I don’t know what is.
A quick glance through the list of the Academy’s living members (ranging from Philip Glass to Frank Gehry, Toni Morrison to Stephen Sondheim, Sam Shepard to Philip Roth) drives home the stunning scale of this honor.
Production designer Guy Dyas has always associated himself with films that boast elaborate art direction. Even during his early years as a concept artist, the films were design-heavy. “Men in Black,” “Wild Wild West” and “Galaxy Quest” are examples. Later: Tim Burton’s “Planet of the Apes” and elements of the Wachowski brothers’ “The Matrix Reloaded” benefited from his imagination.
Dyas has only completed six films at the head of the art department, but they all carry a stamp of scale in their design — most notably in “Superman Returns” — that seem to indicate a first Oscar nomination is likely on the horizon. (He has four guild nods, mind you.) And as I slowly (keyword) begin to saddle up to the new season’s offerings across various categories, I must say, I am and have been intrigued with the design opportunity presented in Christopher Nolan’s “Inception.”
Of course, most are looking forward to a mind-bending story with equally outrageous visual effects, but if we know anything about Nolan, it is that he is a monk when it comes to preserving practical filmmaking wizardry as much as possible. So while “Inception” is sure to showcase innovative CGI, I imagine its set designs will be just as awe-inspiring — certainly if a recently released quartet of production stills and behind-the-scenes shots are any indication.
As you know, I’m a big fan of this Focus summer release, which puts a neat mainstream spin on progressive sexual politics, and boasts Julianne Moore’s best performance in eight years to boot. It’s interesting (and, I think, appropriate) to see this trailer putting the film’s comedic properties front-and-center rather than going for the highbrow Oscar grab — some viewers might find themselves surprised by how artful and moving it is. It hits screens on July 7; read my Berlin review here.
Just over a week away from the announcement of the official selection for this year’s Cannes Film Festival, and any festival-related news is received gratefully by the blogging community. Today, those who deemed Tim Burton too “Hollywood” a choice as this year’s jury president might be appeased by a host of more arthouse-leaning names lined up for jury duty.
Chief among them are actors Gael García Bernal and Giovanna Mezzogiorno, both worthy selections to join Burton on the competition jury; that announcement surely means Bernal starrer “Even the Rain,” a Spanish-language epic telling parallel stories of Christopher Columbus and Bolivia’s Water Wars, will not appear in competition, as some speculated it might. Thanks to Anne Thompson for passing along the news.
More exciting to me is the news that Claire Denis, one of the greatest filmmakers at work today, will be presiding over the Un Certain Regard section, where she herself competed with “I Can’t Sleep” in 1994. It’s a nice gesture towards a filmmaker who isn’t quite the Cannes fixture you might expect — she hasn’t been represented at the fest since “Trouble Every Day” played out of competition in 2001. Atom Egoyan, meanwhile, will head up the Cinéfondation jury.
(Earlier, this story accidentally credited the incorrect source — apologies to Brendon Connelly and /Film UK.)
Following his surprise Oscar nomination for “The Secret of Kells,” which only recently landed in U.S. theaters, Irish animator Tomm Moore is already deep into his follow-up, “Song of the Sea.”
The film, which should go into production later this year, will be another excursion into Irish folklore, this time taking the mythical Selkie creatures — also the subject of John Sayles’s 1995 film “The Secret of Roan Inish,” if memory serves — as its inspiration.
Most intriguing is Moore’s admission that he is “experimenting” with 3D stereo effects within his handdrawn 2D aesthetic, though he makes no promises that they’ll turn up in the final film. After the cut, meanwhile, a conceptual trailer for “Song of the Sea” promises more of the stylized stained-glass visuals that so impressed the Academy’s animation branch. (Thanks to /Film UK’s Brendon Connelly for the link.)
I’ve largely steered clear of the frantic speculation over Christopher Nolan’s “Inception” that has done the online rounds for several months now. For one thing, I’d like to spare the film the pressure of overhype — some fans appear to be expecting something between “Memento: Bigger, Longer and Uncut” and the second coming of Christ — but for another, if the film really is the remarkable crypto-puzzle we’re all hoping for, I’d rather remain as ignorant of its secrets as possible.
Nonetheless, it’s hard to read this L.A. Times piece by Geoff Boucher — one of the blessed few to have read Nolan’s script and visited the set — and not get a little excited. I admit I skimmed over some of the specifics, but any summer blockbuster that inspires assorted references to Sigmund Freud, Ian Fleming, M.C. Escher and Haruki Murakami (the latter comparison courtesy of star Ellen Page) can only succeed or fail in interesting ways, right?
Nolan himself describes the sci-fi film as an attempt to “[approach] dream and the dream life as another state of reality,” and brief that initially didn’t mess with the cool genre storytelling he’d devised. After the cut, he describes how things got darker, messier and more intimate.
In retrospect, Geoffrey Fletcher’s Best Adapted Screenplay win for “Precious” at last month’s Academy Awards shouldn’t have come as quite the shock it did. In the last few years, Oscar voters have been especially kind to newcomers in the writing races, with this year’s pair of freshman winners, Fletcher and Mark Boal, coming on the heels of three others who struck gold for their first feature credit: Michael Arndt, Diablo Cody and Dustin Lance Black.
How do you follow that kind of debut success? In the case of many of those names, we’re on the verge on finding out. Arndt has lain low since striking gold with “Little Miss Sunshine” in 2006, but will be back on the radar this summer with “Toy Story 3” — for which, unusually for a Pixar production, he has sole script credit.
Cody may have struck out with “Jennifer’s Body” last year, but is having more luck on the small screen with “The United States of Tara.” Boal, meanwhile, is continuing his happy partnership with Kathryn Bigelow, as the two are readying the South American-set thriller “Triple Frontier” for shooting.