In Contention

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  • INTERVIEW: ‘Disgrace’ star Jessica Haines

    Jessica HainesWhen I begin my phone conversation with Jessica Haines by telling her how insistently I prodded her publicist to set up our interview – the reverse is so often the case – she responds with a bashful laugh. “I can believe that,” she says, in a warm South African drawl. “Not many journalists have bothered tracking me down to Tunis!”

    Haines sounds endearingly surprised that anyone might be interested in her away from the cinema screen, where she made such a startling arrival this year in Steve Jacobs’s “Disgrace” – which opens in the UK today, on the heels of an all-too-brief Stateside run in the fall.

    This speaks both to the 30 year-old newcomer’s natural humility – if she is aware of just how good she is, she certainly hides it well – and her relative unfamiliarity with the ropes of the industry.

    As if to literalize the point of just how far removed Haines is from Hollywood, I learn that she is in Tunisia not, as I had assumed, on some remote location shoot, but for a decidedly simpler reason: it’s where she lives, thanks to her husband’s banking career.

    “I don’t really know where to call home at the moment,” she says. “My family’s in Natal [the East Coast of South Africa], but I studied in Cape Town and do a lot of work in Johannesburg. My husband’s job is taking us from Tunisia to Kenya soon. I’m just flying in and out all the time.”

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  • The Great Performances: 2003

    Sean Penn in Mystic RiverThere is little doubt in my mind I am going to take some heat this week, so let’s kick it off right away with my belief that Sean Penn deserved his Best Actor Oscar for “Mystic River,” a performance of overwhelming ferocity and staggering emotional power.

    Yes, I too loved Bill Murray in “Lost in Translation,” and would have loved to have seen him win, but he didn’t, and frankly he lost to a stronger performance (in my opinion). I know it is a cliche to say the nomination is the reward, but I would hope that Murray would be happy with that.

    But there were so many great male performances in 2003!

    Robert Duvall was superb in “Open Range” as the wily old rancher who ends up in a gunfight for his life with his friend, played by the also fantastic Kevin Costner, by his side. Tom Cruise gave a great performance in “The Last Samurai” for director Edward Zwick, while Russell Crowe was again brilliant in “Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World,” adding to his string of stunning performances.

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  • 12/4 Oscarweb Round-up

    Stanley Tucci in The Lovely Bones• Peter Knegt talks to “Up in the Air” supporting actress hopeful (and newly minted NBR award recipient) Anna Kendrick. [indieWIRE]

    • Stanley Tucci and how to (reluctantly) play a pervert. [The Carpetbagger]

    • Peter Jackson, meanwhile, doesn’t much care about an Oscar campaign but does hope that people look closely at Tucci and Saoirse Ronan’s performances. [Vulture]

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  • TECH SUPPORT INTERVIEW: The music of ‘Crazy Heart’

    T Bone BurnettThis marks the first of this year’s Tech Support interviews series with below-the-line crafts personnel, an annual feature at In Contention.

    When Scott Cooper’s adapted screenplay “Crazy Heart” was making the rounds a few years ago, it had the kind of soul a guy like T Bone Burnett wants out of a country-western film. But as far as musical accompaniment was concerned, it was a blank canvas.

    A close friend of actor Jeff Bridges dating back to their time together on Michael Cimino’s “Heaven’s Gate,” Burnett was the selling point when the actor began toying around with the idea of playing Bad Blake in the film. With Burnett came longtime friend and musician Stephen Bruton. With Bridges came his own longtime friend, John Goodwin. With a modest writers’ table assembled (including, of course, Cooper himself), the task then became searching for a voice with an array of original songs for the film.

    “There’s a Nashville voice that comes really from Lefty Frizelle,” Burnett says. “And then Merle Haggard was the next, and there’ve been hundreds of people who’ve learned to sing from Merle Haggard and Lefty. Most of the country singers are essentially in that tambour. Jeff is a whole different thing. So we began looking for prototypes, so to speak, and the first prototype to me was Leonard Cohen, who’s a great writer and sang with a deep chest voice like Jeff did. Don Williams as well, who was a big country star in the 70s, big and good, too, and very much an individual. So we started looking for those kinds of voices that could be country music.”

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  • ‘Up in the Air’ wins big at NBR

    Anna Kendrick in Up in the AirThe real question with today’s National Board of Review announcement wasn’t who won, but who didn’t win.

    A couple of ties and a list of honorees that seemed to canvas the entire crop of filmmaking product from 2009 adds something of a diluted quality to the proceedings, I must say.  Of course, it is worth noting that major titles like “The Lovely Bones” and “Nine” were not only absent from the list of the group’s top 10 films of the year, but they weren’t visible anywhere, in any category.

    The big winner was Jason Reitman’s “Up in the Air,” which took down Best Film, Best Actor (George Clooney in a tie with “Invictus” star Morgan Freeman), Best Supporting Actress (Anna Kendrick) and Best Adapted Screenplay.

    “Invictus” also did well, nabbing a Best Director citation for Clint Eastwood (someone the NBR has shown, time and again, that they can’t resist) in addition to Freeman’s shared award and a mention in the Freedom of Expression category.

    (More, including a full list of winners, after the jump.)

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  • Ryan Bingham’s first live performance of ‘The Weary Kind’

    From yesterday’s press day for “Crazy Heart” in Beverly Hills, courtesy of Steve Pond at The Odds (who has an interview with the youngster up now).  Watch for our Tech Support interview with Bingham and T Bone Burnett later this afternoon.

  • Golden Globes announce 15 animated contenders

    Hardly something to stop the presses for, but the Hollywood Foreign Press Association has revealed the 15 eligible titles vying for a Best Animated Feature nod at the Golden Globes.

    It’s the same as the 20-title longlist from which the Academy will pick its nominees, minus the following five films: “Astro Boy,” “The Dolphin: Story of a Dreamer,” “Tinkerbell and the Lost Treasure,” “A Town Called Panic” and “The Secret of Kells.” A pity in the latter two cases. (Irish festival hit “Kells” surprised many with a Best Feature nod at the Annie Awards earlier this week.)

    In case you forgot, the Globes have expanded the category to include five nominees this year. Nominations are announced December 15. As you were.

  • Is Hans Zimmer someone to watch for ‘Sherlock Holmes?’

    (from left) Jude Law and Robert Downey Jr. in Sherlock HolmesI’ve been hearing from vested interests for a long time now that Hans Zimmer’s score for Guy Ritchie’s “Sherlock Holmes” is something quite extraordinary.  I haven’t paid a lot of mind because it’s all jockeying for position and putting your best foot forward this time of year, etc.

    But the chatter is getting louder lately as more and more people see the film in-house.  It’s the one element that keeps being brought up and I have to wonder if there might be something to this.

    I have no idea what to expect.  Frankly I would have assumed something fairly standard for a film like this, but truly, Zimmer has been doing great work even in films that missed on nearly every other level (like, say, “The Da Vinci Code”).  He’s a seven-time nominee after all, despite his flirtations with action-oriented entertainments.  So it’s fair to assume we may be in for a pleasant surprise.

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  • 12/3 Oscarweb Round-up

    Natalie Portman• Donna Freydkin talks “Brothers” and  transitioning to an adult role with Natalie Portman. [USA Today]

    • Laura M. Holson talks to Tom Ford and others about the former Gucci creative director’s feature film debut, “A Single Man.” [New York Times]

    • Roger Ebert four-stars “Up in the Air.” [Chicago Sun-Times]

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  • Freeman’s Mandela “less impersonation than incarnation”

    Morgan Freeman in InvictusIt goes without saying that New York Times executive editor Bill Keller has a more informed perspective on Nelson Mandela than most of the critics currently assessing Clint Eastwood’s “Invictus.” Keller was, after all, the NYT’s Johannesburg bureau chief in the time that Mandela came to power.

    So it’s interesting — if not particularly meaningful — that he, of all people, is thoroughly persuaded by Morgan Freeman’s portrayal of the former South African president, gushing in a profile of the film that Freeman’s work is “uncanny — less an impersonation than an incarnation.”

    Keller acknowledges, as have several critics, that Freeman hasn’t mastered specifics such as the accent (he rather diplomatically says that Mendela’s voice is “less about accent than cadence”), but excuses this on the grounds that Freeman has more abstractly captured Mandela’s spirit.

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  • Grammy nods for ‘Basterds,’ Giacchino… and Steve Martin

    UpI’m always interested to see what cinematic musical achievements the Grammy Awards single out for recognition each year, largely because their pop sensibilities are so different (and their eligibility criteria so much looser) from those of the Oscars that they may as well exist on different planets.

    Last year, for example, they selected “The Dark Knight” as the year’s best score, though it didn’t manage a nomination from the Academy. A similar shaming shows up this year, as the Grammys show the respect for Bruce Springsteen’s “The Wrestler” theme that the Academy’s music branch did not.

    An earlier cut-off date means a few late-2008 titles show up here, including “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” “Milk,” “Slumdog Millionaire” and “Cadillac Records” — a song from the latter counting for one of Beyonce’s field-leading 10 nominations, incidentally. (I won’t even say anything about the non film-related categories.)

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  • THE LONG SHOT: The more you know

    Abbie Cornish in Bright StarHere’s something I’ll bet a lot of you wouldn’t have guessed: once upon a time, when my pants were short and my South African accent heavy, I was a very good Oscar pundit. I won every pool going. I beat the lame TV critics’ guesses and laughed in their televised faces. When that got old, I entered a radio “predict the Oscars” contest and won ZAR200 in mall vouchers. (Okay, that’s $26 – it was worth more in the 90s.)

    Since those heady days of glory, however, things have changed. The internet came along, for starters, and proved to be a hell of a lot smarter than me. But my own predictions – particularly at the nomination stage – got more wayward by the year; gone were the days of going five-for-five in one category after another.

    When it comes to picking the winners, meanwhile, I’ve begun losing Oscar pools to my brother, a mostly disinterested architect with an uncanny knack for calling the Academy’s most gauchely sentimental instincts. (He nailed the Best Foreign Language Film upset by “Departures,” for example, simply by reading a one-line plot synopsis of each nominee. I can learn much from him.)

    Why the lapse in form lately? It’s simple, really: I’ve started seeing the movies.

    That is to say, I’ve started seeing the movies in time. Back in the days when I had no access to press screenings or festivals, I was wholly at the mercy of South African release schedules, which usually meant I was lucky if one of the Best Picture nominees landed before Easter.

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  • Obligatory “guess the NBR” post

    I don’t really have the energy to predict this thing another year.  I mean, we can all take a million different stabs at the top 10, take a gander at the actors who have multiple roles, which the NBR likes to recognize (I mean seriously, who ISN’T going to pick Stanley Tucci for supporting actor), make the requisite calls in favor of the obvious “breakthrough” possibilities, etc., etc.  If I had to pick a Best Picture winner, I guess I’d lean toward “Precious” or “The Hurt Locker,” but seriously…whatever.

    Some of you would probably like some space to predict, however, so consider this your opportunity.  Thoughts on tomorrow’s announcement?

  • Do the Coens have their eyes set on a singing cowboy?

    singing cowboyA few hours ago I sat down with T Bone Burnett and Ryan Bingham to talk about the songs from “Crazy Heart.” I’ll be cooking up that piece as the introductory installment of our Tech Support interview series with below-the-line and craft personnel tomorrow, but Burnett mentioned something that totally caught my attention about a potential Coen brothers film..

    Of course, the Coens have had a number of projects stall out over the years, or more to the point, they’ve managed to leave some things on the back burner.  Everyone is still waiting for stuff like “To the White Sea” and “Hail Caesar,” after all.  But Burnett told me that it was actually the Coens who told him about Ryan Bingham, the singer/co-writer of “The Weary Kind,” who they were exposed to while filming “No Country for Old Men” in Marfa, Texas a few years back.

    “One of the things they have on the horizon includes a singing cowboy and they were thinking Ryan Bingham would be good,” Burnett said.

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  • Ones to watch at Sundance 2010… maybe

    Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling in Blue ValentineI always get a curious thrill from looking down the list of films selected to compete at the Sundance Film Festival — the 2010 batch of which has just been announced by festival directors John Cooper and Trevor Grath.

    You know there are at least one or two titles there that we’ll all be talking about in precisely one year’s time, just as “Precious,” “An Education” and “The Cove” have blossomed from festival darlings to surefire awards contenders in the space of 11 months. What’s far harder to tell is which of the 58 titles listed here might be “the one.”

    Still, last year I played something of a guessing game with the lineup, singling out one film from each of the competition’s four strands that seemed of particular interest to me: my faith in “An Education” was, obviously, handsomely repaid, while “Big Fan” (a winner at this week’s Gotham Awards), “Afghan Star” (the UK’s foreign Oscar entry) and Doors documentary “When You’re Strange” have done respectably for themselves.

    OK, I missed “Precious” — so as far as that particular game goes, I’m going to quit while I’m behind. Still, what follows is a selection of ten titles that I’m keeping an eye on.

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  • Sight & Sound names ‘A Prophet’ best of 2009

    (left to right) Adel Bencherif and Tahar Rahim in A ProphetNo annual Top 10 list carries more weight with me than that compiled by Sight & Sound, the UK’s premier film magazine. One of the most thorough and prestigious collectives out there, it’s collated from the individual lists of over 60 international critics, including the likes of Kenneth Turan, Mark Kermode, Amy Taubin, Armond White and IC friend Tim Robey.

    The S&S list usually chimes in quite neatly with my own personal taste: last year’s edition (topped by Steve McQueen’s “Hunger”) featured six titles that ultimately landed on my own end-of-year rundown. This year’s is no different: regular readers will recognize a number of titles that I’ve been banging on about all year, including a most gratifying double-dip for the great Claire Denis. (Where was all this support for “White Material” when I needed it in Venice?)

    All in all, it’s a pretty impeccable selection of films, one that gives the lie to those saying 2009 is a weak year. I’d like to see the Academy even try to put together a Top Ten as strong as this…

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  • A.O. and ‘Aguirre’

    This installment of New York Times critic A.O. Scott’s Critics’ Picks landed last week sometime, but I just now stumbled across an embed.  “Aguirre, the Wrath of God” has a firm place in my top 15 films of all time, so it goes without saying, I was interested.  I thought I’d pass along:

  • Listen to Overtone’s ‘Colorblind’ from ‘Invictus’

    Clint Eastwood and Matt Damon with OvertoneOn Wednesday we featured the original song “9,000 Days” from Clint Eastwood’s “Invictus” from South African boy band Overtone (featuring vocalist Yollandi Nortjie).  Today we’re happy to bring you the second track, “Colorblind.”

    Overtone was reportedly “talent-scouted” by Eastwood’s wife Dina when she attended the group’s tribute to Freddy Mercury.  Eastwood dug the melodies and asked for a few demos to be used in the film.  So on one hand, it’s nice that he’s giving a leg up to an up-and-coming group.

    The song is used in the film, quite suddenly, as the background music for a dramatic helicopter entrance by Morgan Freeman’s Nelson Mandela.  I say suddenly because the cue quite literally seems to come from nowhere and the scene would probably be better served without it.

    And that’s before we get to the song’s obvious downfall: lyrics and melody.  It sounds like some soft pop, radio-exhausted ballad, but the words hit everything so square on the nose that it’s almost embarrassing.  But that’s just my opinion.  Have a listen below and give us your thoughts.

    [audio:http://www.incontention.com/audio/colorblind.mp3]