In Contention

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  • TECH SUPPORT: Best Visual Effects — Volume One

    Tech Support at In ContentionWhile cinematographers and film music composers may sometimes find themselves featured in the media more than many of their crafts artist colleagues, the one “tech” discipline awarded by the Academy that often brings people into the movie theaters on its own is visual effects.

    The category is whittled down to three nominees after the year’s content is narrowed to a list of seven “bake-off” contenders. The bake-off finalists consistently give insight into the branch’s thinking even if missing a prediction after their announcement isn’t unheard of. The makeup branch has a similar system.

    An expensive art form, which often involves hundreds of crew members working behind the scenes, the visual effects arena seems to be finding new ways to “wow” audiences every year. The Academy’s branch has tended in recent years to reward computer-generated imagery (CGI) as opposed to classic practical effects actually captured on camera. This category is also usually the home of blockbusters and moneymakers. “The Golden Compass,” last year’s surprising winner, was a very rare nominee considering its disappointing box office. For it to win was even rarer.

    I suspect that Jon Favreau’s “Iron Man” is leading the way this year. Immensely critically respected and with fantastic box office to back it up, I’d be quite surprised and taken aback if it failed to get a nomination here. The creation of the title character alone put it in contention. This is not to mention Jeff Bridges’s transformation and the war zone explosions.

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  • Oops…

    The Oscarweb Round-up was posted out of date order this morning.  Apologies.  It’s down there now, tagged and in the proper place.

  • Casting the 2008 election

    Rope of Silicon has a sweet feature up today: “Casting the 2008 Election.”  It’s one of those lists I wish I had thought of, and for the most part, it’s spot on, some real zingers: Bruce Campbell as Mitt Romney, Harold Ramis as Keith Olbermann, Kevin Spacey as Mike Huckabee.  Some of the choices don’t really work, though: Tobey Maguire as John Edwards, Nicolas Cage as Joe Biden.  And though the choice of Mary-Louise Parker for Campbell Brown is inspired, I always get a Margaret Colin vibe.

    Anyway, a great diversion these days.  Head on over to Rope of Silicon for the full list.  I’ll leave you with my fave:

    Casting the 2008 Election

  • 10/16 Oscarweb Round-up

    Tim Burton• Patrick Kevin Day gets some choice words from costumer Jacqueline Durran about the shoot-from-the-hip nature of working with Mike Leigh. [Los Angeles Times]

    • Tim Burton is too busy to see “The Dark Knight.” [Hero Complex]

    • Josh Brolin was initially insulted at the offer to play George W. Bush. [USA Today]

    • Shock of shocks: the kooks depicted in “Religulous” are pissed. [CNN]

    • Erik Lundegaard charts Presdential depictions through cinematic history. [MSNBC]

    • Even though they were staying at the Hilton across the street from the Ziegfeld, John McCain and Sarah Palin declined Oliver Stone’s invitation to the Gotham premiere of “W.” [New York Daily News]

    • Michael Cieply writes up a nice preview of Gus Van Sant’s “Milk.” [New York Times]

    • In honor of Don Cheadle stepping in for Terrence Howard on “Iron Man 2,” the top 13 character switcheroos.  Word up on #2. [Premiere]

  • ‘The Road’ potentially bumped to 2009

    Viggo Mortensen in The RoadI had heard earlier this week that John Hillcoat’s “The Road” might be pushed to 2009, but was sworn to secrecy.  Well, Dave Karger is talking about it now, so I guess it’s fair game.

    The film isn’t finished (not that that has stopped The Weinstein Company from releasing a film in 2008), but Karger nails it: Viggo Mortensen is the real loser here.  A few weeks back, he seemed to be a formidable contender with three big films in the pipeline.  With lukewarm receptions for “Appaloosa” and “Good” dousing spirits for those poerformances, a shove to 2009 for “The Road” would likely eliminate him altogether.

    Ah, the ever-shifting nature of an Oscar season.

  • Boy, David Poland sure is pissed he wasn’t FIRST!

    Dealing with babies in public really isn’t worth it so I’m yanking the post.  My sole intention was to defend Guy, who did not deserve to be disrespected in this manner.

    Earlier:

    Movie City News

  • More bad news for ‘The Reader,’ new pics

    Kate Winslet in The ReaderBrad Brevet over at Rope of Silicon has received some second-hand information from post-production of Stephen Daldry’s already controversial “The Reader.”  He’s also posted a couple of new images from the film, bu here’s the grist for the rumor mill:

    I got a tip from someone claiming to be close to the production saying “editing is not even half-finished” but the biggest problem is apparently the score. Our tipster says, “Although Alberto Iglesias will probably do the score, the other two finalists are still in the game – Ozren K. Glaser, a brilliant young Croatian composer and Nico Muhly, a dark-styled Peter Glass assistant.”

    Shocking?  Not at all, since this film was never going to be finished in time for Harvey Weinstein’s preferred release date and filmmakers involved have said as much.  But composers are the most expendable aspects of a film’s creative process, fired more often than any other element because sometimes it just isn’t working.  Igelsias has long been marked as the composer for “The Reader,” so I’m not sure why there are other “finalists” in the running.

    Whatever the case, more bad news for a film that will likely be preceeded by all of this negativity.  But at least we have new pics!

    Check out the rest at Rope of Silicon.

  • CONTEST: Win a DVD of Errol Morris’ ‘Standard Operating Procedure’

    Alright, we have two copies of Errol Morris’s controversial Abu Ghraib documentary “Standard Operating Procedure,” so I thought we’d have a little contest.  But the creative part of my brain shut off when I set about figuring out what that contest would BE, so I decided to lean back on ole’ faithful: a caption contest!

    Poking around the net, I found the following shot of Mr. Morris to be the best fodder for the proceedings, so have at it.  Give us your best caption for the photo below.  The two best zingers get a nice, shiny copy of the film.

    Win a copy of Standard Operating Procedure

  • REVIEW: “Frost/Nixon” (**)

    Universal Pictures\' Frost/NixonLondon Film Festival

    For director Ron Howard and screenwriter Peter Morgan, “Frost/Nixon” was always going to be a tricky beast to handle. A film adaptation of Morgan’s own stage play that was itself very much about the powers of television, the relationship between text, medium and audience has shifted in ways I’m not sure the film’s makers have fully accounted for.

    It is one thing to portray a momentous televisual event on the stage, where the intimacy and crackle of live human interaction allows for a very different, and rather more immediate, experience of the proceedings. It is quite another to recreate said event for  television’s closer cousin — with the legendary interviews between David Frost and Richard Nixon that form the spine of the narrative widely available, the film has to recreate the spontaneous feel of history in progress, and in doing so, reveal something in a 30-year-old document that we haven’t already seen.

    It’s a tall order, and with Morgan’s script hewing closely to its source, Howard responds to it in the manner he knows best: with the most prosaic of visual aesthetics to hand, a doggedly linear approach to storytelling and the spotlight thrust squarely on a reliable pair of actors. The approach only gets him so far.  Howard’s hands-off direction makes for an oddly bloodless viewing experience, with a lot of talk standing in for any fresh perspective (or frankly, much of a perspective at all) on the events.

    To be honest, we could have seen this coming. It’s difficult to think of a director less-suited to take on the intricate, minutiae-obsessed writing of Peter Morgan than Howard — a director who, even in his finest films, has always been interested in the big picture first, with characters serving history rather than the other way round.

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  • 10/15 Oscarweb Round-up

    Anne Hathaway in Rachel Getting Married• Tom O’Neil mulls over the Hollywood Film Festival honorees. [Gold Derby]

    • Peter Bart is paralyzed in front of his absentee ballot after watching two Presdential fuck-ups in “W.” and “Frost/Nixon.”  WTF? [Peter Bart]

    • Jeffrey Wells ponders the glut of Best Actress contenders at Sony Pictures Classics. [Hollywood Elsewhere]

    • David Frost makes it clear that he wasn’t the underdog when he went toe-to-toe with Richard Nixon. [The Times]

    • Kim Voynar goes from Voynaristic to The Oscar Outsider in a new schtick at MCN. [Movie City News]

  • THE LISTS: Top 10 movie-related costumes for 2008

    Paramount Pictures' CloverfieldIt’s that time of year.  Candy fills the aisles of grocery stores, retail outlets are reaching that awkward phase when Halloween decorations lie next to Christmas items (they unleash them earlier and earlier each year) and, if you’re lucky to be some place where they actually have seasons, leaves are decorating the ground.

    It’s also that time when Halloween stores move into every vacated department store on the block with their latest array of timely Oscar costumes based on your favorite movies from the last 10 months.  There are the holdovers from years past, of course.  Captain Jack Sparrow here, Superman there.  And let’s not forget the ever-popular rubber Presidential likenesses.  So what can we expect?

    There will be plenty of “Dark Knight”-themed wear, each item more embarrassingly realized than the next.  Iron Man will be popular with a lot of the tiny youngsters, as older kids might feel strange in a plastic faux-metallic robot get-up.  They’ll stick with Napoleon Dynamite or another year of Borat before they subject themselves to that.

    Whatever the costume, one thing is always pretty much guaranteed: the costumes are gonna suck.  These things are mass-produced and don’t fly off the conveyor belt fast enough.  Creativity is lacking, it’s all a painful mess.  The only answer is good ole’ fashioned ingenuity…and we’re here to help.

    Below you’ll find our list of the top 10 movie-related costumes of 2008, with an eye toward some brand of originality throughout (though the unavoidability of obvious picks creeps in here and there).  Herewith is our guide to a memorable Halloween season:

    Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler10. Randy “The Ram” Johnson
    For all the little tikes who worship (or worshiped) the ground Michael Hayes, Dallas Page, Shawn Michaels and the Ultimate Warrior walked on, don your best set of tights and break out the fake blood for a tour around the neighborhood as the lead character in Darren Aronofsky’s “The Wrestler.”  For added “umph,” bring along a female friend, scantily clad as stripper/love interest Cassidy, or get some other kids to go in with you as nemesis wrestlers.  Accessories that’ll sell it: metal chair for out-of-the-ring clobberin’, entrance music accompanying you from house to house (maybe bring a boombox for the occasion).

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  • Spam issue

    Just a note, if you’ve posted comments and noticed they didn’t pop up, I’ve discovered that the spam filter has been working overtime.  Some of our own Gerard Kennedy’s posts were in there.  So don’t think we’re censoring here, it just happens that we’ve got an over-zealous filter.  Keep trying and eventually it’ll recognize the IP.

  • ‘Last Chance Harvey’ added to AFI Fest line-up

    Overture is getting serious about this film’s Oscar prospects.  Here’s the press release, in part:

    The director, [Joel] Hopkins, as well as [Dustin] Hoffman and [Emma] Thompson, are confirmed to attend.
    “AFI holds a standard of excellence for all things film and beyond.  We are honored that LAST CHANCE HARVEY was chosen for the festival this year.  It’s a film that Overture is proud to share with audiences worldwide and we’re delighted AFI will be its premiere destination”, commented Overture Films’ CEO Chris McGurk.

    “We consider ourselves very fortunate to have the opportunity to add LAST CHANCE HARVEY as a Centerpiece Screening. This is a classic romantic film with two of the most beloved stars, Dustin Hoffman and Emma Thompson, who make a wonderful screen pairing. We held a few places in our schedule just in case a film like this would become available after we had locked our programming and in this particular case our strategy paid off very well,” said AFI FEST Artistic Director, Rose Kuo.

  • London Film Festival: six to watch

    So the 52nd annual London Film Festival begins tomorrow, bringing with it a feast of cinema cherry-picked from the rest of the fests, with a couple of new titles thrown into the mix too.

    As promised, I will be keeping you updated with proceedings, starting with tomorrow’s world premiere of “Frost/Nixon.” I’m seeing the film bright and early in the morning, and will have a review for you before the day is out.

    As I’ve said before, this year’s London lineup is a little more low-key than usual, but that’s the kind of year it’s been for movies. All the major festivals have struggled a bit this year, but London at least has the advantage of filtering their best bits, meaning plenty of hot films will appear, from “Slumdog Millionaire” to “Che.”

    But those tickets are hard to come by, and when one moves beyond the big, sexy drawcards, the waters get a bit murkier. With almost 200 films (not counting shorts) screening from every corner of the globe, there’s a lot to explore. I’ve been immersed in festival press screenings for the last fortnight, and have still seen only a fraction of what the festival has to offer.

    In the interest of providing alternatives then, let me offer up a handful of lesser-hyped titles that are really worth catching. More detailed reviews will be provided as the festival progresses, but for now:

    1234 (dir. Giles Borg)

    Lots of buzz circling around this under-the-radar crowdpleaser. A sweet-natured character comedy (with an ace soundtrack) about a lovelorn geek struggling to start up an indie band in boho East London, “1234” had the most packed press screening of the festival so far, and is bound to be a Brit hit. Ditch “Nick and Norah,” and catch this instead.

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  • Pixar’s ‘Up’

    Thoughts on the new poster?

    Pixar's Up

  • More on “Gran Torino”

    When I was writing up today’s poll, I realized I had completely forgot about that Louisa Schein piece from a few weeks back that was focused on the Hmong actors Clint Eastwood has cast in “Gran Torino.”  It was the first of a two-part study and I never came back to it.

    Part two was published on October 4 and, well, here it is.  Better late than never.  Schein digs into more cast members this time, mainly those cast as the Hmong family that lives next to Eastwood’s Walt Kowalski character.  But she winds the story down with this bit of insight into how “Gran Torino” might have lit a fuse for prospective Hmong filmmakers:

    Once Gran Torino is in theaters, the wait will be on for a film that not only tells the Hmong story, but does so from a Hmong point of view. As longtime actress, and production assistant for the Minnesota casting call, Sandy Ci Moua, puts it: “I see this as a catalyst for more Hmong to get into filmmaking.” During casting Sandy was a major advocate for the hiring of Hmong actors. Now she wants something more. “Not just acting in someone else’s movie, but writing, casting and producing – the things that make the story go.”

    Read the rest here.

  • POLL: What do you make of “Gran Torino”‘s Oscar prospects?

    Sorry we let the sidebar poll go stale.  But it was a nice round-up of opinion.  After two weeks, 28% of our readers think “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” is the frontrunner heading into the fall months, with “Milk” nipping at its heels.  But it’s time for a new query, no?

    I thought about using the question in the post below as fodder for this week’s poll, regarding Heath Ledger’s likelihood of a nomination in the lead category for “The Dark Knight.”  But I thought I would take an element from that post and concentrate on it here: the mysterious “Gran Torino.”

    Clint Eastwood’s film has been way back on the back burner for many prognosticators who aren’t able to let him pull a fast one and catch them off guard once again.  We’ve reviewed the screenplay here at In Contention and some scattered reports have circulated about the on-the-set particulars of the production, but for the most part, we’re in the dark.  Lots of potential, but nothing tangible to chew on.

    So I leave it to a vague poll: what do you think of the film’s Oscar prospects, given what little we have to go on?  I’ve narrowed it to four equally vague answers, and for that I apologize, but I thought I’d get a read on what you all were thinking on this lurking awards hopeful.  Tell us in the sidebar poll!

  • Will Heath Ledger muscle into a crowded lead actor field?

    Heath Ledger in The Dark KnightAdd another one to the list.  It looks like Thelma Adams has joined Pete Howell in predicting Heath Ledger for a lead actor nomination in WB’s “The Dark Knight.”  We first mentioned this idea in back in June, before the film landed in cinemas, and it has slowly snowballed into a possibility for a couple of pundits.

    It really depends on what Warner Bros. decides to do with the performance, however.  But if the studio tries its hand in the lead category, I really don’t think it will matter.  The guy is getting a nomination.

    I hate to “go there” with the first concentrated Bat-talk in a month or so (you know, since some of our more bizarre readers can’t handle talking about comic books in a serious discussion).  But it’s worth talking about at this point.  WB hasn’t declared a strategy, hasn’t launched an awards site, hasn’t shown its cards at all really, other than to announce a January re-release for the film aimed at securing last minue Oscar goodwill.  And, of course, the Academy will decide for themselves which category Ledger belongs in.

    Conventional wisdom dictates that Ledger would have a much less turbulent ride to a nod in the supporting category, with a traditionally weaker field and less opportunity for Academy members to balk at the notion of a comic book portrayal sliding in.  But if you ask me, this is the performance of the year — and not just because I say so, of course.  Ledger’s Joker has inched toward infamy, become a pop culture staple and earned its place alongside the greatest of screen villainy.  You’ll see his guise all over the country in 17 days.  His chances at a lead nomination are as good as they are in supporting, because at the end of the day, whatever the campaign, his is the most talked-about portrayal of 2008.

    I don’t think there are too many people who would questiont that.  The only variable has been where Ledger can win the award, and you’ll get no argument here that the supporting category is an easier path.  But then again, is it?  The supporting actor hopefuls have slowly congealed into five solid contenders, at least two of them sporting the scenery-chewing chops that could dilute Ledger’s work ever-so-slightly in the field.  Maybe it isn’t a walk-away there, any more than it would be in lead.  So why not go for the gusto?

    It’s all very timely at the moment, seeing as Warner Bros. has lost a dog in the race as of this weekend.  Until “Gran Torino” suddenly sneaks up on all of us, “The Dark Knight” is the studio’s awards season hopeful.  But we’re just spit-balling for now.  More than likely we will come across an FYC ad or an awards site and Ledger will be listed in the supporting category as expected.

    But don’t be surprised.  Don’t be surprised.

    Have your say.  Should Heath Ledger be campaigned as a lead or supporting actor for “The Dark Knight?”