In Contention

Category: Featured

  • REVIEW: “Last Chance Harvey” (***)

    Overture Films\' Last Chance HarveyRemember “Falling in Love?” I wouldn’t blame you if you don’t. A modest join-the-dots 1984 romantic drama charting the will-they-won’t-they courtship between two married New York commuters, it should never have gone beyond the dimensions of a TV screen…

    …but for the fact that the two commuters happened to be played by Robert De Niro and Meryl Streep. So sensitively crafted were their performances, and so effortless and infectious their chemistry, that they alone made the film worthwhile.

    Watching “Last Chance Harvey,” the sophomore feature from British writer-director Joel Hopkins, I couldn’t help but be reminded of “Falling in Love.” The comparison isn’t entirely fair — “Harvey” is a bit smarter and more acutely observed — but both films are essentially slender, undemanding constructions designed principally to showcase two great actors riffing off each other.

    In the case of “Harvey,” the actors in question are the appealing September-December duo of Dustin Hoffman and Emma Thompson, and the pairing proves immediately irresistible.

    The contrivances of Hopkins’ screenplay and his prosaic filmmaking approach are of little consequence once it emerges that this is a star vehicle, plain and simple. On those terms, it’s a bull’s-eye, one that is bound to register strongly with an audience starved of relationship stories concerning anyone over the age of 40.

    Following their spring release “The Visitor,” a similarly low-key, mature-audience-skewing success, new outfit Overture Films is cunningly slipping “Last Chance Harvey” into theaters in late December, in the hope of awards success for the stars. Given the strength of the performances and the film’s winning charm, it’s a move that could well pay off.

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  • New ‘Torino’ poster, original song and other WB FYC updates

    Warner Bros. Pictures\' Gran TorinoI was just perusing the Warner Bros. awards site and was greeted with an array of updates I wasn’t aware of.  First and foremost, there is the new “Gran Torino” poster image to the left here (click for a slightly larger image).  I dig it as much as the first poster, maybe even a little more.

    Second, in the “for your consideration” section for the film I noticed there is an original song in play, written by Jamie Callum.  I have no idea what it’s called yet, but it’s worth keeping an eye on given how painfully weak that race is this season.

    It’s also interesting that Warners is apparently choosing not to push any actor for awards consideration outside of Clint Eastwood.  I would have expected at least a modest push for Bee Vang, who has a great role opposite Eastwood for much of the script.

    I also noticed that Dave Johannson has been added to Nick Schenk with a “story by” credit.  The film’s IMDb page also reflects this.  Apologies if this was already out there, but it’s the first I’m hearing of it.

    Over on the “Dark Knight” side of things, you get a nice sampling of James Newton Howard and Hans Zimmer’s kick-ass score, as well as a similar rundown of FYC declarations and even a link to the screenplay.  Very cool.  Soon there will be a “score” section and a “making of” section, but right now there’s a section with scattered images from the film, most of them new to my eyes.  I love this one:

    Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight

    Check out the rest at the official Warner Bros. 2008 awards website.

  • Danny Boyle: 8 things I’ve learned from my career in features

    Danny Boyle on the set of SunshineFilmmaker Danny Boyle is set to be feted this evening by the American Film Institute, but with just eight feature films under his belt, the dynamic director of such milestones as “Trainspotting,” “28 Days Later” and this year’s festival favorite “Slumdog Millionaire” is hardly due for a career retrospective.  He’s still going strong, excited by each new project and willing to take his time on whatever strikes his fancy along the way.  But as “Slumdog” begins to stand out as, perhaps, Boyle’s greatest cinematic accomplishment to date, the director shares with us what he’s learned along the way, film-by-film.

    “SHALLOW GRAVE” (1995)
    “I was very lucky to get a really tight, 90-minute, taut script.  Because you kind of don’t know what you’re doing on your first movie and there’s something wonderful about that.  You can never get back to that innocence.  It’s a good thing to start with a thriller, because you’re not going to have a lot of money and thrillers don’t depend on a lot of money.  I say sort of semi-controversially or provocatively, your first film is your best film, always, because it has that innocence about it, about not knowing what you’re doing.”

    “TRAINSPOTTING” (1996)
    “Take risks is the one I got from that.  Really take risks.  I haven’t always clung to it but I certainly always return to it.  And I love that.  That’s what people go to the movies for.  They don’t go to see what’s acceptable.  That’s television.  John [Hodge] adapted it in a way — it was impossible to adapt, so he didn’t try.  He sort of was inspired by it and went off.  And I love that in adaptations.  It’s really irreverent to the skill.”

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  • REVIEW: “The Wrestler” (***1/2)

    Mickey Rourke in The WrestlerAFI Fest

    Darren Aronofsky went back to the drawing board on “The Wrestler,” a film that wallows in nuance, spearheaded by a performance of grace and subtle charisma.

    After “The Fountain” failed to catch on in any meaningful way (though this viewer considered it one of the best films of 2006), the director ravaged by a studio system that condensed his vision to an essence he wasn’t fully comfortable with, Aronofsky took up the reins of the most modest, straight-forward project he’s tackled in 10 years.  The result is as affecting as it is numbing.

    Mickey Rourke stars as Randy “The Ram” Robinson, a one-time head of the class professional wrestler who makes his living (barely) working in the independent circuit.  His body as beat up as Aronofsky’s confidence must have been two years ago (he wears a hearing aid as a result of his work description and the look of a broken mare across his face), Randy is in some ways the ultimate blue collar guy.

    Forget Joe the plumber, we’ve got Randy the wrestler.

    He gets by on what little income he can manage from his stake of this event gate or that, sleeping in his big Dodge van (a Ram, of course) when he isn’t able to meet the rent on his trailer.  His afternoon hang-out is the local dive strip club where he is friendly with Cassidy (Marisa Tomei), over the hill but with a goddess’s body and a heart of gold to match.  She becomes even more attractive, somehow, with the revelation that she has a 9-year-old son, a point of connection for Randy, who has been estranged from his daughter Stephanie (Evan Rachel Wood) for many years.

    After an extreme match with a Mick Foley-esque contender leaves Randy a bloody mess, the wrestler suffers a heart attack, the truth tossed into his face like a cold bucket of water: stop wrestling or you’ll die.  That puts a damper on the road to a rematch with The Ayatollah, rekindling the good ole’ days with a former foe who sells cars now in Arizona.  Think Hulk Hogan taking on The Iron Sheik today, 24 years after the electrifying Madison Square Garden showdown that ushered Hogan to stardom.

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  • 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:

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  • INTERVIEW: Dennis Hopper

    Dennis HopperThe voice on other end of the line sounds nothing like the many wild and somewhat insane characters Dennis Hopper has portrayed throughout his career, which now spans more than 50 years. This is a man who has walked with James Dean (his mentor), John Wayne (who affectionately labeled him a “pinko”) and Francis Ford Coppola.

    As a director, Hopper was part of the movement that would bring the New American Cinema into play, closing the 1960s with his biker flick “Easy Rider,” and though he won prizes at Cannes and was hailed around the world, he has rarely directed since.

    Hopper portrayed perhaps the single most terrifying character in a film with his seething work as Frank Booth in David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet.’  The same year he was nominated for an Oscar for his work as the town drunk seeking redemption with his son through basketball in “Hoosiers.”  Even Hopper was stunned that the Academy failed to nominate him for Lynch’s film instead.  He remembers roaring, “HOOSIERS?  You’re kiddin’ me, man” when being told of the nomination. “Blue Velvet” was a film the Academy obviously feared, allowing a single nomination to David Lynch for his dreamy, surrealistic direction of the classic.

    Currently Hopper is celebrating the upcoming DVD release and a low-key Oscar campaign for Best Supporting Actor in “Elegy,” a fine little film in which he portrays the poet best friend of Ben Kingsley’s introspective professor — Sir Ben as Hopper calls him.

    “I was a big fan of Isabel’s [Coixet, the film’s director] work”, he explains. “So when my agent called and said I had an offer to be in a film with Sir Ben Kingsley and Penelope Cruz, I jumped in. It was a very human story, the sort of film I like to see, and being a big fan of Philip Roth helped me along. The film had comedy and tragedy, and most of all characters I think we can all identify with.”

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  • TECH SUPPORT: Best Film Editing — Volume One

    Tech Support at In ContentionNo matter how good the storyline, plot, acting, photography and other elements of a film may be, any poorly edited film will be difficult to watch, understand and enjoy.  An editor has the task of not only finding the appropriate length of a film but also putting together scenes so they flow coherently, both visually and story-wise.

    This is a category where I often feel “most” editing is confused with “best.”  I wholeheartedly agree that it is challenging to coherently put together a film with lots of action, musical scenes or a non-linear narrative – the sorts of films typically nominated in this category. Though I personally feel that often the most accomplished editing can be seen in the relaxed creation of appropriate pace and tone, stealth editing that goes unnoticed.

    This is also, happily, not a field that tends to bring back past nominees at the expense of newbies.  Few working editors have more than four career nominations and at least two to three newcomers seem to be nominated every year.

    Historically, this category has had an incredible crossover with Best Picture.  Though in recent years, that has changed, the last three years having had only a 2/5 crossover with the big category. Last year’s winner, “The Bourne Ultimatum,” is a very rare example of a winner that was not even nominated for Best Picture.

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  • 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.

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  • INTERVIEW: Danny Boyle

    Danny BoyleRoughly halfway through my interview with Danny Boyle, the small, rather alarmingly wallpapered room we’ve been seated in is, by some technical error, suddenly flooded with the opening beats of “Orphans,” the first track off Beck’s “Modern Guilt” album.

    Boyle immediately leaps to his feet to report the problem, though he can’t help nodding in
    time to the music. “That’s the new Beck, isn’t it,” he notes excitedly. “Fantastic stuff. Now’s not the time, but fantastic stuff.” The music vanishes. Boyle flops back onto the couch, straightening out his rumpled plaid shirt.

    It’s a fittingly surreal interlude for an audience with Boyle, demonstrating both his utterly unflappable personality and his keen interest in every sight and sound around him — whether invited or not. It’s a heightened awareness that is apparent in every one of his films; few directors make films as busy as Boyle’s, films as alive to the possibilities of environment, movement and music. His is a sensation-driven cinema that comes into full fruition in his astonishing new film “Slumdog Millionaire,” a breathless rush of visual and narrative energy that marries fanciful storytelling to a rich, perceptive study of a 21st-century nation.

    It’s also his first film with an entirely non-Western context, something which seems to have further fired Boyle’s creative impulses. “India is just … everything at once,” he enthuses, gesticulating wildly to convey the scale of it all. “It’s got these amazing extremes of wealth and poverty and religion and landscape, but in the West we go to a lot of trouble to separate those extremes. Nothing is separate in India. That makes it an incredible place to set a story, particularly one that is so tough and so joyful all at once.”

    True to form, “Slumdog Millionaire” tells a pretty incredible story, a rags-to-riches tale in the most literal sense. It’s a story that hinges on the fairytale conceit of destiny, but as Boyle notes, that notion still plays into contemporary Indian society. “There’s a bond between the classes there, however far apart they are in terms of wealth. They get each other because they pretty much come from the same place — destiny makes all the difference.”

    Boyle pauses to pour himself a fresh cup of tea, cheerfully dismissing the waitress’s offer of bottled water. (An Englishman through and through, he still resides in Mile End, an unfashionably working-class corner of East London.) It’s late in the day, he’s tired and, he sheepishly admits, a little hung over — the previous night saw “Slumdog” close out the London Film Festival, with all the flashing lights and partying that entails.

    While it should be noted that a “tired” Boyle still projects more energy than most of the normal human population, this level of media attention is new to him. For all the acclaim his previous work has garnered, he’s never before made a film that received the awards buzz that “Slumdog Millionaire” is receiving (remarkably for an edgy, foreign-set picture with not a single name star attached).

    “It’s brilliant, it’s insane,” he says, shaking his head. “It seems I just came here from L.A., and now I’m off to L.A. tomorrow. But you can’t release a film like this, something so potentially alien to audiences, and not work hard to promote it. Fox Searchlight are working me ragged, which is fantastic.”

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  • AFI FEST: ‘Hunger,’ ‘Che’

    Benicio Del Toro in CheFour days and three screenings into the 2008 AFI Fest, I’m one-for-two and looking to add to the “win” column as much as possible in the next week.  It hit me this afternoon, though, that no two films could be better suited to an introductory update from the festival, two exercises in subverting the conventions of the biopic.  One succeeds, one fails, but both maintain a certain spirit that you don’t find in the work of many filmmakers today.  And interestingly, both are set for distribution by the always courageous IFC Films.

    Let’s dive in…

    “HUNGER” (***1/2)
    Who the hell is Steve McQueen anyway?  Talk about bursting onto the scene out of nowhere — with what could have been an unfortunate namesake — and carving a spot for yourself that no one will soon dispute.  “Hunger” is one of the year’s best films, a curiously intimate dissection of the blanket, no wash and hunger protests of IRA prisoners held at HM Maze Prison in Lisburn, Northern Ireland in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

    Spearheaded by a committed (to say the least) performance from Michael Fassbender, the film may be the most visually dynamic effort to hit cinemas in 2008.  McQueen deservedly won the Caméra d’Or (for best first feature) at this year’s Cannes International Film Festival, but a case might have been made for a technical citation for lenser Sean Bobbitt.  He captures the most mundane and intimate moments with an epic craftsman’s touch, guided no doubt by McQueen’s own preoccupation with lingering in this most uncomfortable — and unfortunate — of settings.

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  • Helmers of the English language, the best and why: part two

    Peter JacksonThis is the second part of a feature running down the 10 best filmmakers working in the English language.  For part one, click here, and stay tuned in the coming weeks for a similar feature on European helmers.

    PETER JACKSON
    I know this one will bother some people but what Jackson accomplsihed with “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy was fucking historical. Who would have thought the man who made the small, personal thriller “Heavenly Creatures” could guide a film as big as “The Ten Commandments?” Furthermore, he gave the Tolkein story heart and soul, never sacrificing character for scope.

    “The Lord of Rings: The Return of the King” was such a staggering work of brilliance I never wanted it to end (some felt like it never did, with multiple denouements).  But after investing nearly 12 hours with these characters, I wanted to know every last detail of what would become of them. And “King Kong” (I love it!) was among the best films of its year, a massive work with superb visual effects, spectacular art direction and design and a terrific Naomi Watts performance.

    I look forward to “The Lovely Bones,” one of the very few books I have read in the span of two days, unable to put it down. If any director can take us to the heaven described in that book, it is Jackson.

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  • Helmers of the English language, the best and why: part one

    David CronenbergMy recent article on Clint Eastwood drew an excellent response from Nathaniel Rogers (a regular commenter) that led me to this article. In that piece, I make clear my admiration for Eastwood, his artistry and the fact I believe him to be among the three finest directors working in movies. I stand by that, because I do not feel every film a director makes needs to be a masterpiece, as long as they are growing and continually trying to reach for something new.  Even the greatest of artists fail, and in fact they learn more from failure than they ever do success.

    Before the knives are drawn and tossed my way I will remind all that this is my list, just an opinion. I have selected what I believe to be the finest 10 directors working in the English language (five today, five tomorrow). I am positive that there will be disagreement, but that’s what keeps the world turning. Bear in mind that one film does not a genius make, and that a body of work (at least four films) was essential for the list.

    With that, the filmmakers…

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  • Riveting ‘Reader’ trailer

    Is it just me or is this trailer for Stephen Daldry’s “The Reader” firing on all cylinders.  I was glued to it.  I never read Bernhard Schlink’s novel, but I wish I had picked it up somewhere along the line.  Click the image below for a peek at the film:

    The Reader

  • Memo to Christopher Nolan: Come back!

    The Dark KnightBy now you’ve probably read Geoff Boucher’s substantial interview with Christopher Nolan at the Los Angeles Times. As Kris mentioned, it’s strategically placed to launch “The Dark Knight” into the awards season. And Nolan has, in my view, a very strong claim for a Best Director nomination. Whether or not he receives it has more to do, realistically, with Ron Howard, Sam Mendes, Danny Boyle, Gus Van Sant, Steven Soderberg, Clint Eastwood, David Fincher, Baz Luhrmann and a slew of other directors waiting for their films to arrive.

    There will be plenty of time for Oscar jockeying and opinion slinging, something we all do well here at In Contention. But I write this piece not to lobby for Mr. Nolan, but to plead with him. As “The Dark Knight” nears the $1 billion worldwide mark, it’s become apparent — if not obvious — that Warner Bros. will be looking towards a third installment. How could they not? The question on their mind –- and mine -– is whether Mr. Nolan will return to direct.

    In his interview with Mr. Boucher, Nolan said that he was still considering it, and that he appreciated the studio’s patience in allowing him time to recover from the monumental undertaking of “The Dark Knight.”. But Mr. Nolan also notes something curious. His ambivalence towards making a third Batman film appears to be that there aren’t any good part threes. If you take a trip through cinema history, you’ll see that he’s right, mostly.

    You can start with the Batman franchise. “Batman Forever,” while not nearly as awful its dreadful follow-up, “Batman and Robin,” still stunk, painfully. Everyone who enjoys cinema, of any sort really, has labored through “The Godfather Part III.” Meanwhile, “Back to the Future Part III” was hokey, “The Matrix Revolutions” was incoherent and “Spider-Man 3,” clearly, never should have been made.

    “Once Upon a Time in Mexico” contained none of the mastery or coolness of “El Mariachi,” or even “Desperado.” And then there’s “Superman III,” “Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge of the Sith,” “Rocky III,” “Blade: Trinity” and “Terminator III: Rise of the Machines.” Gross.

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  • ‘Doubt’ lands at AFI

    Meryl Streep in DoubtMiramax honcho Daniel Battsek and actresses Meryl Streep and Amy Adams joined director John Patrick Shanley tonight in introducing the world premiere of “Doubt” as the AFI Fest’s opening gala presentation.  The film, adapted from Shanley’s stage play, has quickly become the lead Oscar pony for a studio that dominated the awards circuit last season.

    The film was projected digitally, as prints haven’t yet been made, and it was deemed “wet behind the ears” at the top by Battsek; Shanley hadn’t even seen the cut in full himself yet.  We’re talking right off the AVID, but it was complete and seemed to capture the respect of the crowd in attendance.

    Watching the film, I was suddenly reminded of one of the year’s developing themes for American cinema: accountability.  It’s front and center in “Frost/Nixon,” a journalist-as-hero yarn about Richard Nixon’s overdue apology to the American people.  It’s certainly lurking beneath the surface of “W,” a character study first but an attempt at explanation on other levels.  “WALL-E” warns of a lack of accounting for our actions, while “The Dark Knight” presents a hero who understands the accountability he owes to himself.  “Gran Torino” will be working on similar levels.

    Anyway, I’ve gone into all of that before, but it stuck out to me again tonight.  Meryl Streep steps in for Cherry Jones as a nun hunting a troubling confession for much of the film’s two hour running time.  The zeitgeist can’t help but insinuate itself into the symbolism and it just reminds, yet again, that 2008 is an amazingly internal year for filmmaking in this country.  Nothing stands out as groundbreaking.  Nothing approaches classic status.  But everything lurks on a sustained, subdued level of reflexivity.  It’s kind of fascinating.

    But the AFI Fest has taken flight.  There are a lot of films showing over the next week that I’m going to try my best to cover.  It seems I’m pulled 10 different ways these days, and I have to tip my hat to Guy for the gusto to really dive into London for us this year.

    I’m eager to finally check out entries like Steve McQueen’s “Hunger” and Ji-woon Kim’s “The Good, the Bad and the Weird.”  I’m really looking forward to the Heath Ledger tribute screening of “Ned Kelly” on Tuesday, as well as the Danny Boyle event at the end of the week.  And, of course, the full monty: “Che” at the Chinese tomorrow night.

    It should be a whirlwind, all roads leading to Edward Zwick’s “Defiance” in the closing night gala.  Tis the season…

  • TECH SUPPORT: Best Sound Editing — Volume One

    Tech Support at In Contention Swoosh.  Bang.  Grunt.  Clink.  Crash.

    These sorts of sounds can add a lot to a film’s mood and plot even though they are not recorded during filming and have to be created and mixed in later on.

    The individuals who create these effects are rewarded for their efforts in the category of Best Sound Editing.  The category used to be called Best Sound Effects Editing, which, in my opinion, is a better name.  Supervising sound editors and their teams are generally the individuals rewarded here.

    This category used to only have three nominees but was expanded to five two years ago.  This makes the category somewhat more difficult to predict, though there are five films this year that really strike me as frontrunners.

    Ever since “Monsters, Inc.” scored here in 2001, animated films, particularly those of Pixar, have fared very well.  I’d be very surprised if Andrew Stanton’s “WALL-E” failed to continue that trend.  Sound effects are key to any animated film so many of the sounds have to be created.  There is nothing to be captured while filming because, well…there is no filming!  For Stanton’s effort in particular, the sound effects were especially pivotal given the minimal dialogue.

    Jon Favreau’s “Iron Man” was another summer film where the sound effects were crucial to the film.  The explosions, clanks of armour and numerous experiments of Downey all required sound manifestation.  A huge hit and critically respected, the film in really depended on its sound editing and it flowed perfectly into the visual sights.  I’d be quite surprised if it didn’t get nominated here.

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