In Contention

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  • Woody does Paris

    Goldie Hawn and Woody Allen in Everyone Says I Love YouAmong the many things I love about Woody Allen — his staying power, his eye for talent, more masterpieces than I can count on two hands — is the fact that whenever anyone refers to “the untitled Woody Allen project,” one usually has to ask which one they mean. His unfailing film-a-year work ethic means there are generally at least two upcoming Allen films floating in the general conversation.

    So, while we’re all aware that his next film after the Big Apple homecoming of “Whatever Works” will be a return to his recently beloved gray skies of London, with Naomi Watts, Josh Brolin, Anthony Hopkins and Freida Pinto in the mix, some details have already emerged of his next project after that one.

    Screen International reports that Woody’s 2011 project will see him continuing his European sojourn, this time with a romantic drama set in Paris. Spanish production outfit Mediapro revealed the information, though a script has yet to be completed.

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  • Mixing Autobots with Decepticons

    Transformers: Revenge of the FallenWhile “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” tears up the box office while simultaneously rubbing the critical fraternity wrong, some of us can’t help but wonder how the money will effect its performance in the technical categories (a concentrated focus of In Contention in Gerard Kennedy’s seasonal Tech Support columns) come year’s end.

    Tom O’Neil is pondering the film’s potential for winning kudos both at the Oscars and the Razzies, which could be an ironic twist for the film.  But no matter how you feel about the film from a critical view, there is no denying the craft on display below the line.

    Most especially, the sound editing and mix is absolutely state of the art.  Nothing compares.  The intricacies of the soundtrack, the balance of heavy metal and tinny particulars, all of it is absolutely award-worthy.  That it is such a dense mix without overwhelming the senses is, I think, a real testament to the work of mixers Gary Summers and Greg P. Russell.

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  • 6/30 Web Round-up

    Sacha Baron Cohen in Bruno• Paul Dergarabedian bangs the Oscar gong for…”Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince?” [Hollywood.com]

    • Kim Voynar wraps up the LA Film Fest. [Movie City News]

    • Claudia Eller calls out Hollywood’s A-list for under-performing at the box office this summer while no-name productions have prevailed. [Los Angeles Times]

    • Brad Brevet kicks the tires on his Oscar coverage. [Rope of Silicon]

    • A whole bunch of words on Hollywood’s creative lull, this time concerning a slew of familiar characters. [USA Today]

    • ‘Brüno’ and Universal pull back the curtain. [The Big Picture]

    • David Poland, meanwhile, video reviews the flick. [The Hot Blog]

    • In honor of Stephen Frears’ “Chéri,” the top 10 “cougars” in films. [Spout Blog]

  • POLL: How do you feel about the Academy’s decision to expand the Best Picture category to 10 nominees?

    It’s been such a busy day I neglected to mention our newst poll, which has been in the sidebar there since last night.  The headline says it all, so be heard.  And if you haven’t already done so in the latest Off the Carpet column, tell us why you say “yay” or “nay” in the comments section below.

  • McWeeny on Ponyo

    Frankie Jonas (voice) in PonyoYesterday was confession time as I got into my own disconnect with the cinema of Hayao Miyazaki, a brand well-respected and certainly cherished the world over but somehow lost on me.  His work “nevertheless represents an imagination that…is a welcome dose of creativity in a business sorely lacking it year after year,” I wrote.

    With that in mind, the following passage from Drew McWeeny’s Motion/Captured review of the film, which closed the LA Film Fest last night, struck me right between the eyes.  I don’t have kids, mind you, but I hear what McWeeny is saying.

    And while we’re on the subject, I like that Drew has made his work such a personal endeavor.  I was at the screening he attended.  His son, Toshi, was right behind me and you could sense his engagement.  So maybe I’m reading it with more of an insider’s take than everyone else will, but that doesn’t affect the truth of his sentiments.

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  • Steve Lopez’s would-be Jackson column

    Steve Lopez as Vromans in PasadenaSpeaking of David Carr, he points us (via his must-follow Twitter page) to a Ventura County Star story today concerning Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez’s recent keynote address for the National Society of Newspaper Columnists.  The part that caught my eye was a segment dedicated to Lopez’s description of his Michael Jackson column, had he decided to write one.

    I heard Lopez speak a little more than a year ago, when he was promoting his then-forthcoming book “The Soloist” (the story of his relationship with Nathaniel Anthony Ayers that was translated to the screen earlier this year with Robert Downey Jr. and Jamie Foxx in starring roles).  He spins a good yarn with the best of them.

    Anyway, Lopez’s piece would have begun in Iraq, when he was covering the Gulf War in 1991 and attempted to gain access to Saddam Hussein’s nearby summer palace.  He took two photographers with him and went as far as they could go, Lopez says.  When soldiers approached them with machine guns and began grilling the three journalists about their thoughts on George Bush and Saddam Hussein, however, one of the photographers started to make too many waves.

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  • The Bagger’s take on Oscar’s shake-up

    David CarrDavid Carr’s Media Equation column at The New York Times today is the most well-reasoned, knowledgeable take on the Academy’s recent Best Picture shake-up yet.  He covers some of the same points I brought up in my Off the Carpet column this morning, but thankfully, he offers something of a rebuttal to the Nikki Finkes of the world who somehow think the studios pushed this decision through.

    News flash: this was horribly depressing news for more than a few in the industry last week.  As Carr shrewdly notes, “[t]he people criticizing the studios for watering down their moment of glory have the wrong villain.”

    Unfortunately, a passing comment concerning Bill Condon’s suggestion that the Academy take the category to 10 paints him as someone to blame, but he was merely doing his post-mortem duties, offering up some ideas to make the telecast better.  Plus, I’ve heard conflicting takes as to whether Condon initiated the idea or whether the Academy had been tinkering with it before he came to the table.  But one shocking truth lies in all that contradictory rubble: there were people on the committee unaware of their own history who were shocked that the category ever included 10 nominees.  Sad but true.

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  • Troubling mixed reaction to ‘Enemies’ afoot

    (from left) Marion Cotillard and Johnny Depp in Public EnemiesIt’s not like we didn’t see a divided take coming on Michael Mann’s latest, but the reviews that are trickling in, updated frequently over at Rotten Tomatoes, are troubling indeed.

    And I have to say, when Rex Reed is one of the few champions of an artistically daring film, what is the world coming to?  David Denby, for instance, has missed the boat to a certain extent, though he certainly finds much to praise.  But this:

    The movie is structured around repeated scenes of wounded men (agents as well as criminals) dying as they look into the eyes of their friends. Yet some of the dying men are barely known to us, and the device, though beautifully staged in each case, doesn’t have the power it should have had. The movie is emotionally neutered.

    Eh, to each his own.

  • Michael Jackson’s filmmaker collaborations

    Michael Jackson in the music video for Billie JeanTomorrow’s installment of The Lists is going to be Michael Mann-centric, but I was all set to write up something brief in the way of qualifying Michael Jackson’s contributions to the movie world until I came across this Christopher Campbell posting at Spout Blog.  It’d be pretty difficult to go much deeper than he has.

    Campbell ranks Jackson’s “filmmaker collaborations,” including music videos directed by the likes of John Singleton, David Fincher, Bob Giraldi and, of course, John Landis and Martin Scorsese.  As expected, the Francis Ford Coppola-directed, George Lucas-produced “Captain EO” is in the mix, as well as Sidney Lumet’s “The Wiz.”  I had totally forgotten about the Spike Lee production “They Don’t Really Care About Us” until I caught it on MTV or the like yesterday.  Campbell places that at #1.

    It’s a shame room couldn’t be made for the “Billie Jean” production, from visionary music video (and eventual so-so film) director Steve Barron (A-Ha’s “Take On Me”).  Promo News recently caught up with Barron for a brief remembrance of the shoot.

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  • OFF THE CARPET: The more the merrier?

    OscarsThe Academy dropped a bombshell announcement mid-week, leaving a mixture of cheers and jeers as well as a number of questions that will be answered slowly but surely as a new Oscar season approaches.

    The chief complaint from those who took umbrage with the decision to open the Best Picture category to 10 nominations is the further dilution of prestige.  What is a nomination worth if it is shared with dubious contenders that wouldn’t have a snowball’s chance in a traditional field of five?

    Others felt the change instantly relegated the medium’s most cherished prize to yet another top 10 list, hardly distinguished in the increasingly dense fray that is the film awards season.

    Those who championed the bold move found comfort in the idea, however hypothetical, that the category could now find room for under-appreciated gems from the indie circuit, or better yet, avoid the unfortunate case of AMPAS members ignoring the intersection of art and commerce (i.e. the Best Picture snubs of “The Dark Knight” and “WALL-E”).

    The “bubble” virtually eliminated, Oscar’s sandbox just got a lot bigger, so what’s the harm in allowing as many kids to play as possible?

    I tend to fall in the former category.  The move is troublesome in that it has a whiff of thoughtlessness, a knee-jerk, reactionary decision and perhaps merely a chance to create a larger advertising opportunity for the organization’s telecast.  And I ask this: What will Pixar’s first Best Picture nomination really mean with an asterisk next to it?

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  • Bustin’ makes me feel good

    GhostbustersFor the video game fans in the house…

    I beat the new “Ghosbusters” game within 24 hours of picking it up.  It’s a moderately fun game, though not at all interesting from a story stand point.  I bring it up because, after all, when Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis began developing the game, they did so with the intention that it would be, essentially, the third “film” in the franchise.  But ultimately the narrative, which could have been quite ambitious given the medium, was simply rehased plot points from the first movie.

    Writing at the Wall Street Journal’s Speakeasy blog, Jamin Brophy-Warren has posted an interesting item, however brief, detailing the game’s road to fruition.  I just wish there was more thought put into the actual plot.  However, there is an awesome sequence in the game that echoes both the cartoon series and the “Ghostbusters in Hell” concept that almost made it to theaters in the 1990s.

    But here’s the real question: there was an “E.T.” game on Atari back in the day?!

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  • Contest winners!

    Mr. Gittes and Zach are the big winners from our “Public Enemies” contests and the proud owners of a new poster.  Gittes nailed the trivia question, which regarded Michael Mann’s “Arms and the Man” project, developed out of talks with journalist Lowell Bergman before “The Insider” came to fruition.  Zach, meanwhile, won out in the thin caption contest field with the following zinger:

    Marion Cotillard in Public Enemies

    Emails have been sent to the addresses provided when you commented, guys.  If there’s a better email address, let me know.  We’ll get the posters to you asap.

    Thanks to everyone for participating!

  • Uh, Roger?

    Peter Cullen (voice) in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

    The day will come when “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” will be studied in film classes and shown at cult film festivals. It will be seen, in retrospect, as marking the end of an era. Of course there will be many more CGI-based action epics, but never again one this bloated, excessive, incomprehensible, long (149 minutes) or expensive (more than $200 million). Like the dinosaurs, the species has grown too big to survive, and will be wiped out in a cataclysmic event, replaced by more compact, durable forms.

    From Roger Ebert’s recent write-up on “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.” Even though he mentions an expectation for boffo business in the next graph, I have to ask: Do you really think a $203 million opening isn’t going to yield more and more unrelenting, big budget, massive event films developed from successful franchises with built-in fanbases? It’s only a matter of time before “Voltron” makes it to the screen. And if they had figured out a live action “Thundercats” by now, I’m it would have hit the multiplexes already, too.

    And the bit about “many of those who do see it will find they simply cannot endure it.”  I wonder when was the last time Mr. Ebert saw a film with an audience.  Against all odds, the public is head-over-heels for this thing.

    Anyway, extinction is wishful thinking, my friend.

  • 6/29 Web Round-up

    Stephen Frears• Rachel Abramowitz catches up with Johnny Depp on the “Public Enemies” publicity trail. [Los Angeles Times]

    • Helen O’Hara remembers Michael Jackson’s movie moments. [Empire]

    • Jenni Miller talks to “Cheri” director Stephen Frears. [Cinematical]

    • Guillermo DelToro’s credo. [The Independent]

    • “Do the Right Thing” still asks burning questions. [Washingotn Post]

    • Hey, remember Julia Ormond? [New York Daily News]

    • David Cairns talks to “Pontypool” director Bruce Macdonald. [The Autuers’ Notebook]

  • Gangster lovin’

    Johnny Depp in Public EnemiesJoe Queenan is one of my least favorite Guardian film contributors — too often perversely hard to please — but I did appreciate the boyish honesty of this piece, in which he sheds his usual cineaste grousing to indiscriminately geek out over guns and fedoras. With “Public Enemies” only a few days away, he extols the simple joys of the gangster genre:

    For those of us who secretly believe that gangster movies are the only ones worth making – despite our obsequious lip service to Truffaut and Antonioni – the timing could not be better. Aficionados of gangster movies view reality as a daisy chain connecting one gangland saga to the next, with ordinary life – family, children, career, lunch – occurring in between. We do not need an uninterrupted stream of gangster movies to survive, and we certainly do not need half-hearted twaddle like Knockaround Guys to function properly – but we cannot tolerate long gaps between high-quality releases.

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  • Respectfully disagree

    Marion Cotillard in Public EnemiesF.X. Feeney, whose Taschen study on the films of Michael Mann is must reading for fans of the director, has gone on the record with Jeffrey Wells as believing the female characters from Mann’s films to be “deeply observed, self-reliant and fully dimensional.”

    The comment follows an earlier Wells posting concerning Marion Cotillard’s strong performance in “Public Enemies,” opening Wednesday.  And while I have all the respect in the world for Feeney and his opinions, I have to respectfully disagree with his take here.

    In writing about Cotillard’s performance in my review of the film, I praised the actress for finding “the right combination of frailty and strength that has defined the few well-developed female characters from Mann’s films,” and I stand by the passing commentary at the end there.  Most of the females in Mann’s work, to my eye, serve as transitional devices more often than not.  Cora Munroe in “The Last of the Mohicans,” Charlene Shiherlis in “Heat” and now, Cotillard in “Enemies,” represent the few examples of the director tapping into women with a compelling trajectory.

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  • Previewing tomorrow’s Oscar column…

    R.I.P. Oscar

  • Has anyone seen this bizarre CNN interview with Joe Jackson???

    I don’t think “WTF” says it, but…WTF???