Yesterday we featured the trailer for official Toronto selection “Beautiful Boy,” which could be an acting play in the awards season for stars Michael Sheen and Maria Bello. Today we get a look at the poster, which has Sheen front and center. Check out the full image after the jump.
• Thomas Gladysz on the rarity of giving an Honorary Oscar to a film historian, in this case, 2010 honoree Kevin Brownlow. [The Huffington Post]
• Roger Ebert sprinkles four stars on “The American,” which opens today. [Chicago Sun-Times]
• Gregory Ellwood makes 10 predictions about the 2010-2011 Oscar season. [Awards Campaign]
Venice Film Festival
It’s the juvenilization of the term “fairy tale” that has led many people to associate them inextricably with happy endings. At their most literary, fairy tales can be moral and often very unhappy narratives of yearning, obsession and eventual redemption, even if it comes with rather a large sacrifice attached; Hans Christian Andersen specialized in compromised happy endings, notably in “The Little Mermaid” and “The Red Shoes,” that would have made Walt Disney wince.
If you squint slightly at “Black Swan,” the boldly deranged and beautifully despairing new film from Darren Aronofsky, you can see that it is, when push comes to plié, a contemporary fairy tale of sorts: the story of a little girl, in the fierce grip of controlling adults, who wants nothing more than to dance, and learns that she must exchange part of herself for the opportunity.
That much I can say without breaking the spell for those who have not seen it. For while “Black Swan” may reveal itself as a fairy tale, that’s only after it has successfully masqueraded as a taut, witty and wickedly kinky thriller that pulls off the tricky double-bluff of following precisely the narrative course one has mapped out for it, yet emerging as all the more surprising for that adherence.
UPDATE (9:37am): Here is the officail release at Deadlin.
EARLIER: Notorious Hollywood blogger Nikki Finke has scooped up longtime Oscarologist Pete Hammond for awards reporting duties at Deadline.com for the upcoming Oscar season.
Hammond — who as of late has been writing a seasonal column for the LA Times — knows his stuff, has plenty of resources at his disposal and offers a unique insider’s point of view, fitting right into Finke’s industry-focused wheelhouse. I imagine the work will be very similar to the man-about-town stuff we’ve been reading at The Envelope for the last few years.
Meanwhile, I’m told a deal has been struck whereby all of Hammond’s material that runs at Deadline will also run at Movieline.com, so make that two outlets getting into the Oscar game in a big way this year. The reason, if one couldn’t guess, is simple: dollars and cents.
I’ve spaced it a bit on Shawn Ku’s “Beautiful Boy,” which is set to play the Toronto film festival next month. There’s something a bit opportunistic and obvious to me about making a movie concerning the impact of a school shooting on the shooter’s parents, but nevertheless, Michael Sheen and Maria Bello appear to be bringing their “A” game here. If a buyer looking for an acting awards run bites, that could change the course of the season somewhat. We’ll know in a few weeks. Check out the trailer after the jump.
I’m getting a look at Randall Wallace’s “Secretariat” tonight. It may or may not be an awards play for Diane Lane. I’ve heard both sides of the argument. In the meantime, a new poster has been released by Disney, and yeah, it looks a little familiar. But what else are you going to put on a poster about horse racing? Check out the full image after the jump.
Director Anton Corbijn’s sophomore feature is not an Oscar film. Unfortunately, such a classification immediately conjures skepticism, cynicism and wariness of a project slated for late summer/early fall release. But the fact is, just because a studio knows a film won’t appeal to the sensibilities of awards season doesn’t mean it’s a turkey: it’s not a bad thing to not be an Oscar film.
What “The American” is, however, is a measured, calculated, at times quite fascinating exercise in observing human behavior. It’s the ultimate in “show, don’t tell,” a film with a central brooding, finely tuned performance from George Clooney that isn’t what you’d expect from the actor.
It’s a quiet film, one that forces you to just simply watch and listen. Corbijn and Clooney are putting on a very different kind of show for the viewer, one that doesn’t dazzle with spectacle and big budget intrigue. They strip the mechanics of performance and visual storytelling down to an essence that the best filmmakers will surely appreciate, and most audiences will surely reject.
I don’t know if everyone caught “The Late Show” last night, but last year’s Best Original Song winner, Ryan Bingham, took the stage with his band The Dead Horses to rock out the first single on their new album, “Junky Star.” The album, produced by Oscar co-winner T Bone Burnett, released today.
Here’s a clip from the show. A few rave review bites of the new album after the jump.
With the fall festival circuit merely hours away (Guy is already getting settling in Venice), we’ve got a pair of clips from two anticipated titles to pass along today.
First, there is Sofia Coppola’s “Somewhere,” which is exclusive to Venice and features Stephen Dorff and Elle Fanning in what isn’t likely to be an Oscar movie, but could play well to European audiences on the Lido. The clip, courtesy of Reelz Channel, features some of Dorff’s performance as an actor navigating the PR necessities of his latest film. I cracked up when he stepped off the apple box at the end.
Meanwhile, MTV has a clip from “Never Let Me Go” that goes a long way (in just over a minute) toward indicating the thick, moody atmosphere the film will establish. It features Keira Knightley and Carey Mulligan, though it’s more of a showcase for the former. The film will play Toronto later this month.
Check out both clips after the jump.
When you step off the plane and the first faces you encounter — not yet out of the baggage claim, even — are those of a friendly, familiar PR team who immediately furnish you with a press release, it’s fair to say that you’re very much at a film festival, even if Venice hasn’t yet officially drawn the curtains on this year’s edition.
At the moment, things are still at the assembly stage: I’m currently sitting in the wi-fi lounge of the festival center — a cavernous space of 30-foot ceilings, gold-mosaic marble walls and rippling red curtains that is surely the most incongruously grandiose room ever set aside for the Great Unshaven of film journalism — watching garrulous workmen argue about the placement of couches, while others disentangle the wires sprouting from a teetering tower of AV equipment.
Tomorrow, by the time I roll into the first 9 a.m. screening of “Black Swan” — caffeine-wired and perhaps still pajama-clad — you’d never know they’d been there.
• Peter Sciretta rounds up early reactions to Mark Romanek’s “Never Let Me Go.” It’s across-the-board praise and admiration. [/Film]
• Nathaniel Rogers takes note of one of the biggest Oscar sleepers: Jacki Weaver in “Animal Kingdom.” [The Film Experience]
• Sasha Stone talks marketing in the age of cynicism, ending with a hope that the Academy can turn a blind eye to the snark of tweeners. (It almost always does, no?) [Awards Daily]
In a few hours’ time, a shiny and sensibly priced orange plane will whisk me off to the city of water, romance and the most expensive fleapit hotels this side of, well, anywhere for my second consecutive dive into the Venice Film Festival. Truth be told, I’m not quite ready for it… a surfeit of pre-travel errands has meant I’m still leafing through the fest’s vast 62-page press screening schedule, still trying to cobble out some semblance of an itinerary.
A neat, contained festival preview, therefore, wasn’t really on the cards: I tried to narrow things down to a “10 most anticipated” list, but I’m far too hungry for the entire buffet to limit myself to that.
In its place, then, I offer an indication of what the festival is serving up on a day-by-day basis; not only will you get an idea of when, in the next fortnight, your own horse in this race will come to attention, but you can also see some of the cineaste’s Sophie’s choices that lie ahead of me.
My scribbly Venice calendar after the cut.
Amid the growing buzz for the films about to make the festival rounds over the next two weeks, it’s easy to forget that one rather high-end title is hitting theaters as soon as Wednesday.
Anton Corbijn’s hitman drama “The American,” starring George Clooney, was once expected to be in the festival pack — certain rumours had it opening Venice at one point — but Focus Features took us off-guard, settling instead on a release date that pre-empts the festival rush.
Naturally, this change of course prompted chatter that the film wasn’t awards fodder (not something it ever especially appeared to be) and that it was more of a commercial play. That, however, certainly isn’t the impression left by this extensive LA Times piece on the film, which emphasises the “European” nature of the film’s tone and pacing — a gentle way of saying that it lies on the slower, more oblique end of the spectrum.
It goes without saying one of the most anticipated films of the fall movie season is Darren Aronofsky’s “Black Swan.” Going by the trailer, we’re in for a slice of genre goodness that taps many of the muscles the director has flexed early in his career.
In an interview with MTV, Aronofsky offers an intriguing bit of trivia: his latest film and 2008’s “The Wrestler” actually started out as one film. It seems his 10-year-old original concept involved a professional wrestler falling in love with a professional ballet dancer. The mind reels.
I imagine it would have been fascinating territory to cover, but the germ split off into two separate films. Eventually Aronofsky worked with Robert Siegel’s on an original screenplay and saved the ballet stuff for the film opening the Venice film festival in just two days.
So nine years ago yesterday I started a crappy, embarrassing little amateur site on Yahoo!’s now defunct Geocities platform and called it Oscar Central. It was a way to blow off steam in film school, maybe fold an offline hobby (Oscar-watching, predicting, obsessing) into an online community that seemed to already have healthy numbers. Plus, hey, it was the early years. I figured some low tech internet training was far from the worst thing I could be doing.
That’s a long way of saying today kicks off my 10th season of Oscar coverage online, and in that decade, plenty has changed. One thing has remained the same, however, and that is a focused interest, both from myself and a growing readership, in the admittedly arbitrary and somewhat solipsistic process of awarding the “best” in filmed art and entertainment.
To put it more succinctly: Here we go again.
The 2010-2011 Oscar season takes its first real steps Wednesday as the 67th annual Venice Film Festival sets sail on the Lido. That opening night will see Darren Aronofsky’s “Black Swan” get its toes wet as Fox Searchlight tests the season’s waters, perhaps with a worthy follow-up to the director’s 2008 awards title “The Wrestler,” perhaps not. Two days later the 37th annual Telluride Film Festival lifts its curtain in the mountains of Colorado, bringing any number of “surprise” bows (we all know what they’ll be but, again, I’ll respect the fest’s wishes in this space), before Toronto’s media circus fills in the cracks and brings us to mid-September and the fiery beginnings of Oscar’s 83rd barbecue.
• Rooster Cogburn must be a leftie this time out, because his patch covers his right eye! See! [American Thinker]
• Naturally, Thomas Friedman goes to bat for “Waiting for Superman.” [New York Times]
• Lane Brown points out a strong season of lead actress contenders on the horizon. [Vulture]
Funny, last year Berlin Film Festival organizers waited until November to make this announcement — I guess they thought that since the fall festival season begins this week, they may as well ride the buzz-wave a bit. Anyway, Isabella Rossellini has been tapped the preside over the jury at the festival’s 2011 edition in February, stepping into the half-eaten shoes of this year’s president, Werner Herzog:
The Italian-American actress and director Isabella Rossellini will be the President of the Jury for the 61st Berlin International Film Festival (February 10-20, 2011).
“It’s fantastic that Isabella Rossellini will be the President of the Berlinale Jury in 2011,” says the festival’s director Dieter Kosslick. “She is a multifaceted, creative film artist with extensive experience in European, American and international cinema.”
Since I imagine many of you are watching tonight, here’s a space to talk it up. Interesting that the end of the television awards season today gives way to the beginning of the film awards season tomorrow.