At the end of the day, “The Help” could potentially be the #1 film at the box office for three straight weeks, a feat no film — not even “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2” — could manage in 2011. That’s plenty of fuel for the upcoming Best Picture push. And though it may be the dog days of summer, with no real competition out there, that kind of nuance will just fade away when publicity starts banging the drum on the film’s box office.
(Courtesy: Exhibitor Relations)
Disney held it’s big premiere for “The Lion King 3D” today at The El Capitan Theatre in Hollywood, fit with live African bongo music, a green carpet (made of fake grass) and a “Hakuna Matata” dress code. Not a bad way to spend an early Saturday afternoon, and I’ve been looking forward to this for a little while now, I must say.
First thing’s first: the 3D. It’s actually quite wonderful. I was struck by how much the conversion had to work with, as there is a lot of depth built into the film as is. Whether it’s the foreground/background of the ants and zebras in the prologue, the use of Red-billed Hornbill Zazu in flight or just the opportunity to lend striking separation in sequences like the pulp Nazi-inspired “Be Prepared” number, there was just a lot of opportunity to make the 3D effective. That’s always helpful.
The movie, for me, is a perfect one, and my favorite animated film ever. I’ve always been taken by it’s story, taking cues from Shakespeare and painting one of the studio’s most indelible, thematically potent gems. I haven’t seen it in a theater since the summer of 1994, and I was choking up five minutes in.
Welcome to Oscar Talk.
In case you’re new to the site and/or the podcast, Oscar Talk is a weekly kudocast, your one-stop awards chat shop between yours truly and Anne Thompson of Thompson on Hollywood. The podcast is weekly, every Friday throughout the season, charting the ups and downs of contenders along the way. Plenty of things change en route to Oscar’s stage and we’re here to address it all as it unfolds.
After months of sporadic special edition updates, we’re back to the weekly grind today. So check back here every Friday from here on out for our musings on the Oscar season, which is right around the corner with the start of the fall festival circuit. We go on for quite a while today. Let’s jump in and see what’s on the docket…
Guy offered up the new poster for Michel Hazanavicius’s “The Artist” yesterday. Today we get a look at the trailer for the film, which played at Cannes, is set for Toronto and will more than likely pop up in Telluride, too. The first Gurus chart of the year had it very much in contention for a Best Picture nomination, so you can count this as one of the big possibilities of the upcoming season. Check out the trailer via Apple by clicking the image below or watch an embed after the jump. (But beware. It seems to me it lays out the whole damn story.)
If you can get them in quickly, we’re going to be recording tomorrow’s podcast in a few. I forgot to put this up earlier in the week, but anyway, maybe there is something pressing you want to run by us. Try to keep it to one question if you can. Rattle them off and we’ll see what we can get to.
Paddy Considine’s directorial debut was one of the international success stories at this year’s Sundance fest, nabbing awards for both Olivia Colman and Peter Mullan’s performances, as well as one for Considine’s direction. I saw the film, a bruising, thoughtful portrait of abuse and emotional isolation in suburban England, and found the hype more than justified on the acting front. Mullan is as superbly tender-tough as we’ve come to expect from him, but it’s Olivia Colman — perhaps best known for her expert underplaying in the UK sitcom “Peep Show” — who’s the revelation here. I’ll save my full impressions of her stunning performance for a review soon, but I will say that if Meryl Streep makes half as worthy a case for an Oscar nomination later this year, I’ll eat my literal hat.
The film will get a fresh blast of wind in its sails at next month’s Toronto Film Festival; Strand Releasing already has the US distribution rights, but has yet to announce a release date. (UK audiences have only until October 7 to wait.) Meanwhile, The Guardian unveiled a trailer this morning that gives but a hint of the acting firepower on offer here. Check out the embed after the jump.
One of the biggest delights of the year for me was Corey Stoll’s performance as Ernest Hemingway in Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris.” I had a giant grin on my face, ear to ear, the whole time he was on screen. So I’m glad David Poland dedicated one of his long-form interviews to the actor.
Things were looking up for the western after “True Grit” pulled in solid bank last year. But after “Cowboys & Aliens” took a massive dump at the box office this summer, well…I’m trying to keep the faith. We have a few projects on the way, others still percolating. One of them is Mateo Gil’s “Blackthorn,” featuring Sam Shepard as Butch Cassidy and proceeding from the premise that the famed outlaw made it out of Bolivia alive. The trailer was released today via Apple. Check it out by clicking the image below, or watch an embed after the jump.
I recall our learned friend Anne Thompson responding with scepticism when I mentioned over a Cannes lunch that I expected Michel Hazanavicius’s “The Artist” to be a major player in this year’s Oscar race. Looks like Anne has come round to the idea over the summer, as she — together with Steve Pond and David Poland — placed the film in her top spot on the Gurus o’ Gold’s Best Picture chart. I’d be right there with them. The Weinstein Company’s marketing push for the audience-friendly silent-cinema homage begins today with a supremely elegant poster that puts its Cannes-honored star to the fore, and nails the film’s vintage romantic allure. Nicely played. Check it out after the jump.
I’m trying not to think too much about my hometown film festival right now — with the chaos of Venice only a week away, the idea of diving into another five-films-a-day fortnight shortly afterwards seems somewhat deadly. Still, with this week essentially amounting to the calm before the storm, now is as good a time as any for the London Film Festival to announce that they’ll be kicking off their 55th edition with Fernando Meirelles’s starry erotic drama “360.”
It’s a choice that’ll bring the requisite glamor to the fest’s opening night — the cast includes Jude Law, Rachel Weisz (set to be the fall festival season’s most ubiquitous face), Anthony Hopkins, Eminem and Ben Foster — but I must admit to being somewhat disappointed.
The LFF raised its international profile considerably in 2008 and 2009 by opening with major world premieres (“Frost/Nixon” and “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” respectively), and while I’m aware of the difficulty of securing such coups, a curtain-raiser that has already been seen and critically assessed at Toronto — whatever its merits — just doesn’t carry the same level of excitement.
Luc Besson’s “The Lady” doesn’t have domestic distribution in place yet, but the wheels are already turning as a teaser trailer dropped at Yahoo! Movies today. Meanwhile, a Shepard Fairey-designed poster based on the artist’s own piece celebrating Burmese revolutionary Aung San Suu Kyi has also hit. This film could certainly be an awards play for actress Michelle Yeoh and actor David Thewlis. It’ll be part of our festival preview in next week’s Off the Carpet column. For now, check out the full image after the jump.
Here’s the pre-Toronto guesses from the group, via Movie City News. Additionally, we were polled on picks for an actor and an actress that could pop up as a “surprise” nominee. People like Michelle Yeoh and Charlize Theron don’t really qualify for me (the former dripping with bait, the latter stretching herself again in a role many expect to find traction). Ditto Gary Oldman, certainly. So I went with Kristin Scott Thomas and Rhys Ifans, one of which potentially has a stealth studio push coming, the other getting talked up by everyone I know who has seen the film. In any case, we’re just getting our engines humming, I guess.
(EDIT: Now that Poland has corrected his typo, the order is slightly different.)
With the deadline for submissions not even six weeks away, expect a number of posts in this vein before then; for now, however, the number of formal entries for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar has swelled to a modest five.
While the first two in the game, Greece and Poland, were reasonably high-profile contenders — the latter’s entry, in particular, sounds like something of a perfect Oscar storm for this category — the most recent three are rather less prominent. Romania, Morocco and Venezuela are all angling for their first ever nomination in the Oscar race.
Of the three, Romania’s running duck in this race is perhaps the most surprising. The Academy has remained wholly resistant to the country’s critically hailed cinematic renaissance in the last decade; indeed, the snubbing of Palme d’Or winner “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” was one of the final straws that prompted a new voting system in the category. It’d be just like the Academy to finally relent for a film low on the radar, so perhaps Marian Crisan’s “Morgen” could be the one.
The summer movie season has come to an end, and what an interesting season it was.
We saw three billion-dollar grossers for the first time ever in one year, let alone one three-month spread (thank you, 3D). We saw a bit of a glass ceiling for comic book movies, proving nothing is a sure thing in that game. We saw indie darlings with more stamina than the big dogs and we saw R-rated comedies find impressive footholds.
But what does it mean in the spectrum of a film awards race, seeing as we have one knocking on our door in a bit more than a week’s time? Let’s consider.
First and foremost, as reported here last year (and confirmed by Variety a few weeks ago), Warner Bros. Pictures is all set for a balls-to-the-wall Best Picture push for “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2.” With 10 digits in the bank and counting, and with a breathtaking critical pass, now is the time, and it’s a smart tactic. DVDs will be out right in the thick of the season, adding fuel to the fire. And it’ll be a nice counter to the other in-houses pushes, dramas like “Contagion,” “J. Edgar.,” and “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.” (The studio could also go screenplay hunting for Dan Fogelman and “Crazy, Stupid, Love” if it wants.)
I originally posted this in the previous comment thread, but since the web seems to have latched onto this story, I think it’s worth highlighting more prominently. The media is determined to interpret Sean Penn’s fairly reasoned personal reservations about “The Tree of Life” as some kind of ego-driven attack — but before everyone starts taking sides in the Penn-Malick Celebrity Deathmatch, it’s worth reading the second half of his statement to Le Figaro, which doesn’t seem to have been translated by the English-speaking press. My rough translation below paints a rather more gracious picture:
But it’s a film I recommend, as long as you go in without any preconceived ideas. It’s up to each person to find their own personal, emotional or spiritual connection to it. Those that do generally emerge very moved.
So, what we have have here is a statement of respectful artistic dissent from someone clearly still proud to have been involved with the picture. Not as much fun as a highbrow bitchfight, granted, but there it is. At ease, everyone.
[Photo: Fox Searchlight Pictures]
It seems actor Sean Penn is still upset about the fact that so much of his performance in “The Tree of Life” was left on the cutting room floor. I guess he and Adrian Brody can drown their woes in a few down at the pub. Said the actor to French magazine Le Figaro:
I didn’t at all find on the screen the emotion of the script, which is the most magnificent one that I’ve ever read. A clearer and more conventional narrative would have helped the film without, in my opinion, lessening its beauty and its impact. Frankly, I’m still trying to figure out what I’m doing there and what I was supposed to add in that context! What’s more, Terry himself never managed to explain it to me clearly.
The thing is, I don’t entirely disagree with him. The bookend nature of his role is the weaker element of the film, particularly the reprise at the end. But I do think the early stuff works because it’s a brilliant, human lead-in to the film’s central question: “Why hast thou forsaken me?” Penn asking the almighty “Where were you” when his character’s brother died leads to the film’s extended cosmos sequence, and that is key, something I dug into when I wrote about the film at length in May.
So, “The Help” took the top spot at the box office in a rather thin weekend for new releases. But it’s the hold that matters, and this one clearly has staying power. Combined with the impact it’s having with Academy types, that makes a contender, folks, and you’ll see the film, Davis, Spencer and the costumes chalked up for nominations in tomorrow’s predictions update. We’ll just have to see how much staying power it has, because mid-August is an early release for an Oscar hopeful. There’s really not much else to say elsewhere.
(Courtesy: Exhibitor Relations)
I have to say, even though the pieces were there and I tend to respond overwhelmingly to father/son dramas, I was really surprised at how little I felt emotionally while watching Gavin O’Connor’s “Warrior.” And O’Connor really excels at this stuff, in general, for me. But it didn’t come together this time.
I feel pretty much alone here because the film has been affecting a number of critics and press members for the past month or so now and the room I was in tonight was all energy and tears, right there with it. But I don’t know, there is something in the fabric of the writing that kept me at arm’s length.
So Nick Nolte’s Paddy Conlon character was an asshole father to sons Tommy (Tom Hardy) and Brendan (Joel Edgerton). I know this because I’m being told over and over and over again. I know it, but I don’t feel it. Being presented with a thousand-day sober man looking to make amends really shoots that in the foot and you start wondering why his kids can’t just stop being pricks. Something, anything, that would have keyed us into their perspective would have gone a long way.
