In Contention

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  • Best Actor watch: Hal Holbrook

    Hal Holbrook in That Evening SunIn his roundup of highlights from the Nashville Film Festival, Nathaniel Rogers chalks up a highly plausible contender for Best Actor honours this awards season: Hal Holbrook in “That Evening Sun,” an indie debut feature from Scott Teems.

    Playing an 80 year-old farmer desperately trying to hang on to his land, Holbrook’s performance has already drawn praise at last month’s SXSW  fest, where the film won an ensemble award. Amid a rave for the film itself (“an exceptionally fine example of regional filmmaking”), Variety declared Holbrook’s turn the best of his career, calling it “a vividly detailed yet subtly rendered performance.” Rogers clearly agrees:

    It’s based on the short story by William Gay about a farmer who escapes the old folks home and returns to his beloved farm only to find it occupied by new tenants. The film is well directed by Scott Teems, graduating from short films to his first feature, and an Oscar campaign could materialize for Holbrook if this movie gets a solid enough release. Holbrook plays a stubborn old ornery codger… one could say it’s an Eastwoodish role with less of Clint’s squinty menace and more of Hal’s weary sensitivity.

    There’s a theory I can absolutely buy into. From Richard Farnsworth to Richard Jenkins, the Academy has shown a soft spot for veteran character actors in gentle independent dramas, while their affection for Holbrook was made clear last year when they nominated him for a film they otherwise couldn’t have cared less about. Hell, in a weaker year, he could easily have won. (On a trivial note, the 84 year-old thesp could beat his own record as the oldest male acting nominee.)

    No indication yet of what kind of release the film might enjoy, but it sounds like one to keep an eye on. Powerful trailer after the cut.

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  • Switching channels

    Women on the Verge of a Nervous BreakdownIt’s been a full two decades since “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,” Pedro Almodovar’s engagingly ramshackle, day-glo farce with a baldly self-explanatory title, garnered the then enfant terrible of European art cinema his first Oscar nomination and put him on the road to crossover respectability.

    Twenty years, ten films and two Oscars later, the auteur’s mainstream gentrification is complete, with the rather bizarre news that an Almodovar-produced TV drama series based on “Women” is in the works for Fox. Completing one of the odder talent pairings in recent memory, a pilot is being penned by “Grey’s Anatomy” scribe Mimi Schuir. Allow me a moment for that to sink in.

    It’s not that I mind Almodovar being embraced by a broader medium — to do so would be akin to those tiresome underground music fans who turn on their favourite bands the second they receive a smidgen of radio play. I’m actually pretty thrilled to see such a challenging, eccentric filmmaker finding this level of pop influence; if it brings new audiences to his rougher, earlier work, so much the better.

    Moreover, Almodovar’s ascendancy to the title of ‘America’s favourite Euro auteur’ has, by and large, been achieved by audiences adjusting to his sensibility rather than the other way round. (I would venture that “Talk To Her” is the most quietly subversive Best Original Screenplay of all time.) That he continues to alternate warm, humanist audience-pleasers like “Volver” with more probing, sexually contentious fare like “Bad Education” proves he’s no less audacious a filmmaker than he was in his early days — just a more mature and technically proficient one.

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  • ‘Funny People’ an ‘award-level thing?’

    Adam Sandler in Funny PeopleI don’t mind admitting that I wasn’t entirely won over by the trailer for Judd Apatow’s “Funny People,” which, for all its smartness, seemed to me a little too calculated in its bid for laughing-through-the-tears pathos. Like pretty much everyone else, James L. Brooks struck me as an obvious point of reference — but whether we were talking Brooks on a good or bad day was unclear to me. It’s just a (very long and over-expository) trailer, after all.

    Now Jeff Wells has chatted to a couple of folks who have seen it, and is passing along the word that Apatow has seemingly channeled Brooks on a very good day indeed. Awards-season good, even:

    Possibly an award-level thing, a director friend said this morning, although he was just passing along the chatter. It’s more in the realm of Sandler for Best Actor and Apatow’s script for Best Original Screenplay, he speculated, than a Best Picture shot…but you never know.

    So I called a non-vested guy who’s seen it, and here’s what he said: “Really funny, a really sweet movie, a lot of veracity…really a brilliant film. Everybody’s game goes up a lot. It’s a James L. Brooks-level thing and a great role for Adam. It’s a perfect blend of everything Sandler has done in a serious vein. The film could be a bit of a marketing problem because it’s about show business but it’s so real.. It’s about a famous guy, a comedian, having to deal with the fact hat he has no life and nobody to turn to. But he gets better [through a relationship with a younger comic]…it’s basically a love letter to having a family.”

    No specific mention of Leslie Mann, who struck me on paper as the film’s likeliest awards prospect, but that was a shot in the dark. Anyway, I seem to recall hearing near-identical chatter about “Spanglish” before it finally surfaced, so I’ll remain guarded. (I’m expecting something better than that fiasco, of course, but I’m just sayin’.) Encouraging buzz, nonetheless.

  • Visions of ‘The Road’

    Out there was the grey beach with the slow combers rolling dull and leaden and the distant sound of it. Like the desolation of some alien sea breaking on the shores of a world unheard of. Out on the tidal flats lay a tanker half careened. Beyond that the ocean vast and cold and shifting heavily like a slowly heaving vat of slag and then the grey squall line of ash.

    No adaptation this year is as dependent on matters of location and production design as John Hillcoat’s take on Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road,” a novel in which landscape is the narrative’s dominant antagonist. If the film can’t visually evoke McCarthy’s tangible sense of the familiar made alien through desolation, then it’s dead in the water.

    On the other hand, the sparsity of McCarthy’s prose leaves a lot of room of visual interpretation — contrary to what some have suggested, the novel is a highly cinematic work. So I’m intrigued by this gallery of conceptual “style frames” for the film, a collection of paintings, sketches and photo montages that give a vivid sense of the story world Hillcoat and his team have come up with. And on this evidence, at least, it looks to me like they’ve nailed it:

    The Road

    A couple more of my favourites after the cut. Check out the full collection here.

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  • Which moments hooked you?

    (from left) Lon Chaney and Mary Philbin in The Phantom of the OperaI love the current poll series about the most influential films of all time, but it got me thinking about the moments in movies that hooked me on cinema forever. You know, the ones we see as kids that have an enormous impact on us, forever bonding us to this art form we all so love?

    For me, as I’ve mentioned before, it was a scene in “The Ten Commandments,” Cecil B. DeMille’s remake of his own epic, which I saw in 1972 (I think) in a re-release of the picture. In the days before video (yep, that old) the studios would re-release their films every few years and this was a major re-release for Paramount. My dad, also a movie junkie (though not as bad as his son), had talked about this for years and now that it was back we were going.

    Admittedly, I was a tad cynical at 12 years old.  I fully expected to be disappointed.  Still I wanted to see it because I enjoyed going to the movies. Little did I know my life would be changed forever.

    We piled into the car and made the drive to the theater, which was packed with familes similar to ours. The lights went down and for the next four and a half hours I was swept back in time, stunned by the size and scope of the film, amazed at the colors, and most of all, astonished at Charlton Heston. Never before had I realized how an actor could command the screen.  I never felt like I was watching a performance, either.  In awe I watched the Exodus scene as literally thousands of actors moved out of Egypt, led by Moses.

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  • ‘Whatever Works’ clip

    Guy told you yesterday about those mixed-to-positive notices that have been rolling out of Tribeca for Woody Allen’s “Whatever Works.” I’m hopeful the film works since I’m certainly on the Larry David bandwagon and I snapped to attention last year with “Vicky Cristina Barcelona,” one of the year’s best films and Allen’s best work since “Sweet and Lowdown.”

    Well today I stumble onto this clip from the film, which is pretty short and doesn’t give you much.  But it’s something.  Have a look:

  • ‘Bruno’ poster

    Bruno

  • End of days

    Ever since the detrimental Telecommunications Act, the world’s information sources have been owned by, what, five or six entities?  It’s been the downfall of the press as we know it for over a decade.  So if General Electric sells NBC/Universal to Time Warner (via Thompson on Hollywood), that’s lateral disaster.  One more cat gets even fatter.  The conglomerates hold sway.  The apocalypse approaches.

    I’m starting to buy into the old geezer mentality.  Get a good seat.  Grab the popcorn.  Watch the doom and gloom unfold because that’s all we can do.

  • Coppola goes to Cannes after all

    Francis Ford CoppolaAfter turning down an out-of-competition slot at Cannes earlier this week, it seems Francis Ford Coppola has had a change of heart. Variety reports that his new film, “Tetro,” will open the festival’s Directors’ Fortnight on May 14, marking the much-awaited film’s world premiere.

    The addition of Coppola adds some welcome lustre to a sidebar that frequently gets unfairly neglected in favour of the Official Selection (where “Tetro” was previously offered a place). The Director’s Fortnight may also attract attention for showcasing significantly more US talent than the selection of competition films announced yesterday, which included a mere two American titles (and only one from a Yank filmmaker, at that).

    In contrast, five American features make the Fortnight lineup, including Sundance talking-points “Humpday” and “I Love You, Philip Morris.” (Meanwhile, Lee Daniels’ much-garlanded Sundance sensation “Precious” (AKA “Push”) will appear in the Un Certain Regard strand of competition.

    Though the media focus tends to remain on the 20-odd films up for the Palme d’Or, Cannes runs far deeper than that. Some have complained that yesterday’s competition lineup, with its high quotient of previous winners and established auteurs, feels a bit too safe and insular (though “safe” hardly seems an apt adjective when the likes of Gaspar Noe and Lars Von Trier are involved), but it’s not just new talent lurking in the sidebars.

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  • Caine confirmed in small role in ‘Inception,’ Gordon-Levitt also joins the cast

    Michael CaineI just got off the phone with Michael Caine for a piece I’ll have up momentarily concerning his rather striking performance in John Crowley’s “Is Anybody There?,” but while I had him cornered I thought I should ask him point blank about his potentially staring in Christopher Nolan’s “Inception,” a rumor that’s been bouncing around unconfirmed as of late.  As it turns out, Caine will be in the film, albeit in a very small role.  Here’s what he had to say specifically:

    I have a little part in it, yes.  Just a tiny part.  Chris and I are very good friends so I’ll do that little part.  I think I’ll work about three days.  It’ll be extraordinary, wait until you see this one.  I think if I say another word he’s going to kill me!

    Also officially joining the cast today is Joseph Gordon-Levitt, stepping in for James Franco (who had scheduling conflicts).  Here’s The Hollywood Reporter on that news:

    A veil of secrecy exists over loglines, though the project, which Nolan also wrote, is described as a contemporary sci-fi actioner set within “the architecture of the mind.”

    It is known that Gordon-Levitt is taking the role to have been played by James Franco, who bowed out over scheduling issues. He would play an associate of DiCaprio’s character, a CEO-type.

    The cast sure is filling out nicely.  But I’m just…dying to know what the heck this movie is about.  “Set within the architecture of the mind” isn’t cutting it for me anymore, and now I have Michael friggin’ Caine telling me “it’ll bee extraordinary.”  The last time he went on the record regarding a Nolan film, an Oscar resulted.  Aggggh!  Maybe I should take a lead from J.J. Abrams and patiently wait for what’s coming to me.

    Keep an eye out later today or over the weekend for that interview.

  • Mixed-to-positive notices for ‘Whatever Works’

    Evan Rachel Wood in Whatever WorksEven with the success of “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” having partially righted the course of Woody Allen’s career, I can’t help holding my breath when the reviews roll in for his latest effort. Few auteurs inspire more haphazard uses of the term “return to form” (roughly applied to anything that doesn’t go completely off the rails from the word go), with so many critics seeming to forget that Allen’s best form is, well, anyone’s best form. (“Vicky” was a delight, to be sure, but Barcelona is a long way away from “Manhattan,” if you will.)

    In the case of “Whatever Works,” which just opened the Tribeca fest, the trade reviews — while uniformly encouraging — vary between gently disciplining expectations and wildly inflating them. Performing the latter task is David D’Arcy’s all-out rave in Screen International,which declares the film Allen’s best in over a decade:

    Writing a New York story and shooting at home has given Allen a sureness to his voice. The dialogue here has a familiar ring yet a crackling freshness … Whatever Works transcends Allen formulas thanks to David, who is taller, balder and more foul-mouthed than the usual types Allen himself has played. Spitting out his lines, David finds a deeper nastiness here than the everyday bile of his character on the autobiographical Curb Your Enthusiasm. Allen does wonders with a character who isn’t seeking to be loved.

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  • The Boss fights hunger

    Bruce SpringsteenYou all know I’m a Bruce Springsteen fan, so no need for the background on that.  When I was at the two Los Angeles shows last week I saw that the Los Angeles Community FoodBank had a set-up with some memorabilia for sale, all proceeds going to the fight against hunger in the area.  Springsteen has been affiliated with the organization for some time now.

    I received the following email from a guy working with the New Jersey FoodBank as a result of my Boss posts last week and I thought I’d relay it here since, after all, it’s a good cause, and there might be some folks interested:

    I got excited when I saw that you were a Springsteen fan because the PR firm I work for does pro bono work for the Community FoodBank of New Jersey, which has a solid relationship with the Boss. Starting [April 22], fans can go on the Backstreets Web site (www.backstreets.com/hunger/), donate $25 and be in the running for one of 14 prints of Bruce taken by prestigious photographers over the past 30 years. Each of the prints is autographed by the respective photographer and the donations go to the FoodBank, which is pretty cool.

    Since this has nothing to do with the content of In Contention, I figured I would just shoot over this note simply to let you know about it…I figured a guy who goes to see Bruce two days in a row might appreciate this.

  • ‘Straw Dogs’ remake moves forward, some feel the need to bitch about it

    James MarsdenIt seems the knee-jerk reaction to director Rod Lurie’s decision to remake the Sam Peckinpah film “Straw Dogs” is just as you’d expect.  Certain outlets see red and use their web space to bitch about the necessity of such a film.  The Playlist and Rope of Silicon have rants up about it, if you want to wallow in the views of a couple of guys who have apparently conditioned themselves to call foul at the gall of a move like this.

    Thing is, Lurie is more than aware of the predicament he’s putting himself in by moving forward on this project.  Though it cracks me up that the film is being held on high as a gem of cinema not to be tampered with.  But some of these folks don’t seem to get what Lurie is going for with this film.  How could they?  They haven’t bothered to pick up a phone or get the goods on his view of things.  Take this aside from the former:

    The whitebread milquetoast of James Marsden playing Dustin Hoffman, in a remake of a controversial and acidic Sam Peckinpah classic about wimps and the savage nature of man? Sacrilege!

    The last time I talked to Lurie about this project, he said he was remaking “Straw Dogs,” not Sam Peckinpah’s “Straw Dogs.”  Lurie wasn’t raised like Sam Peckinpah and he doesn’t have the same outlook on life as Sam Peckinpah.  He also never intended for his David Sumner to be a Jewish mathematician (though I think there’s plenty “wimp” stuff to go around with a silver spoon type).  He wants to investigate how the events of this narrative would affect a different set, hence the casting of the “whitebread” Marsden and the role change to a Hollywood screenwriter.

    Bottom line, I’m glad Lurie’s doing what he wants to do.  In this age of remakes aimed at cashing in, I think it’s safe to say reworking a 38-year-old thriller that no one particularly loved when it was released is nothing if not a passion project, so good on him for doing what he wants to do.

    For more even-handed viewpoints: Devin Faraci has an interesting take on how to change up the events of the narrative at CHUD, while Jeff Wells writes that Marsden’s casting means Lurie “naturally doesn’t want his film to be compared too precisely” to the original.  But I think the reasoning is much more thoughtful than that.

    (P.S.: I’m more than aware of my own tendency to knock films or ideas in advance based on my own views and opinions.  This one just rubbed me wrong this morning, so I had to be a hypocrite for a spell.)

  • Almodovar, Campion, Lee in Cannes lineup

    Abbie Cornish in Jane Campion's Bright StarThe official list of films competiting for the Palme d’Or at next month’s Cannes Film Festival is out, and while it’s not a very surprising list — it’s been a given for some time that “Inglourious Basterds,” “Broken Embraces” and “Antichrist,” among others, would be in the mix — it still an exciting one, packed to the gills with auteur works from both regular visitors (Michael Haneke, Ken Loach) and long-absent ones (Jane Campion, Alain Resnais).

    I’ll dig into the selection in more depth later, but for now, here’s the list:

    “Broken Embraces” (Pedro Almodovar)
    “Fish Tank” (Andrea Arnold)
    “Un Prophete” (Jacques Audiard)
    “Vicenre” (Marco Bellocchio)
    “Bright Star” (Jane Campion)
    “A L’Origine” (Xavier Giannoli)
    “Map of the Sounds of Tokyo” (Isabel Coixet)
    “The White Ribbon” (Michael Haneke)
    “Taking Woodstock” (Ang Lee)
    “Looking for Eric” (Ken Loach)
    “Spring Fever” (Lou Ye)
    “Kinatay” (Brillante Mendoza)
    “Enter The Void” (Gaspar Noe)
    “Thirst” (Park Chan-Wook)
    “Les Herbes Folles” (Alain Resnais)
    “The Time That Remains” (Elia Suleiman)
    “Inglourious Basterds” (Quentin Tarantino)
    “Vengeance” (Johnnie To)
    “Face” (Tsai Ming-liang)
    “Antichrist” (Lars Von Trier)

  • Go ‘Trek’ yourself

    Create your own here.

    (via The Hot Blog)

  • Gaiman: Cast David Bowie as the Joker in ‘The Dark Knight Returns’

    I forgot to mention this in the item below regarding that Wired piece featuring Neil Gaiman and the current goings-on in the comic world.  The subject of “unfilmable” comics came up, with “Watchmen” having landed in March and Gaiman’s own “Sandman” at the top of such a list for some fans.

    Regarding Frank Miller’s “The Dark Knight Returns” — which has, as always, been bandied about as a potential film project in the wake of “The Dark Knight,” some have speculated for “Watchmen” helmer Sack Snyder — Gaiman notes, in passing, a fascinating casting proposition that would frankly be kind of awesome:

    I was reading photostats of Watchmen that Alan would hand me months before they hit the stands, and I would puzzle over everything, putting it all together in my head. That’s a different thing than Dark Knight Returns, where the details of the story are more malleable and simple. Batman comes out of retirement. Cute Robin arrives on the scene. Joker kills himself. Is Batman dead or not? He’s not. There’s not much to unpack. If someone cast David Bowie, as he is now, as the Joker, I think The Dark Knight Returns is doable.

    Alright, someone, somewhere.  Let’s make this happen.  (Although Tim Curry would probably be better.)

    (from left) David Bowie and the Joker from The Dark Knight Returns

  • Neil Gaiman pens a love letter send-off to the Caped Crusader

    Cover of Batman #686I don’t know how many readers became regulars as a result of last year’s “Dark Knight” awards march, but I do know there are quite a few who share my enthusiasm for comics and Batman comics in particular.  This post is certainly aimed at that crowd, but anyone eager to get their hands on a great story, in any medium, this is for you, too.

    With the 70th anniversary of the character coming next month, author, screenwriter and comics scribe Neil Gaiman has been charged with writing up the final chapter of Batman’s existence in the books as we’ve known them throughout that history.  “Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?” is his “love letter” to the Bat, fashioned after Alan Moore’s similar send-off to Superman 20 years ago: “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?”

    Wired recently posted an in-depth interview with Gaiman, already high off the successful adaptation of his novel “Coraline” this year, and you get some great insight into his off-the-wall graphic denouement, which culminates with a sequence at once touching and unsettling, an homage of sorts to the finale of Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.”  Asked whether the character has lived in his heart for a while, given the deep attention and appreciation for his history in just two swift volumes, Gaiman had this to say:

    When I was 5, I was in a car with my dad and he mentioned that there was this Batman TV show in America about a man who dressed up in a costume and fought crime. The only bat I ever knew was a cricket bat, so what I thought he looked like was rather odd, based on that. Months later, the series hit the U.K., and I remember watching and being affected by it. Really worrying, genuinely worrying, on a deep primal level, “Will he be OK?” That is the way it was with every deathtrap. If I missed the end of an episode, I’d get my friends to tell me he was OK.

    Because of the Batman TV show, my dad picked up Smash! comics for me, which reprinted a Batman cartoon strip, which were much more about continuity than the television program. Those were my gateway drugs into Batman. Even when batman went twee in the ’60s, Neal Adams reinvented him as a long-eared, shadowy character. And when I was in my 20s, Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns came out and I found myself writing my first piece of academic criticism on it.

    I wanted my comic to contain all of that, from the story to the art. I wanted it to have that love in there. I wanted to write the last Batman with honor and love.

    If you haven’t read these two books, I encourage you to do so, even if you aren’t up to snuff on what’s going on in the series at the moment.  It reads as an independent study of the Dark Knight’s final hour.  You can find “Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?” in the pages of “Batman” (#686) and “Detective Comics” (#853).  And catch the rest of that Wired interview here.

  • I vote Polamalu

    Just a little Trojan support.  But Fitzgerald or Roethlisberger would be cool too.  Peterson will come, in time.  Or at least he better.

    Back to movies…