In Contention

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  • SUNDAY CENTS: Photo finish!

    *All historical figures cited are adjusted to today’s dollars.

    One last bit of excitement before the summer ends and Tapley starts posting random Redskins photos on Sundays. We have a dead heat race for the top spot at the box office, but estimates are handing the crown to “The Last Exorcism.” If it does, indeed, win the weekend, it will be the first time Lionsgate has had two consecutive number one films.

    The official estimate is $21.3 million, which puts it just a fraction behind the $23.1 million debut of “Exorcist: The Beginning” on this same weekend of 2004. It’s also a smidge behind the $24.5 mil debut of Lionsgate’s similar looking 2009 shocker, “The Haunting in Connecticut,” but let’s remember that this is a no budget endeavor with no recognizable actors that the studio had to market with smarts and Eli Roth’s name.

    Incidentally, they couldn’t use Roth’s name to market his own movie, “Hostel Part II,” to a debut past $9.5 million, but the man can’t win them all. Now we just sit back and wait for the inevitable porno knock-off called “The Last Circumcision.”

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  • Tyler Perry, Oscar nominee?

    One thing I like about David Poland as an awards analyst is that he often makes an effort to expand the tight circle of contenders by bringing little-buzzed names into the conversation. Needless to say, this kind of punditry can lead to a lot of dead ends, but every now and then he lands on a genuine sleeper — which is why this casual aside in his Friday box-office column caught my eye:

    Of the current 16 [Lionsgate] $20m domestic openers, 7 are Tyler Perry (which is why For Colored Girls… is a lock to end up in this year’s Oscar race come December)…

    In case it hasn’t been on your radar, he’s talking about “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf,” Perry’s filmization of Ntozake Shange’s landmark 1975 stage study of the African-American female experience. The play, a poetry-based piece taking on issues of abuse, rape, abortion and eventual empowerment, is pretty strong medicine; it’s difficult to imagine how it might work on film, and how it’ll mesh with Perry’s brash creative sensibility.

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  • Blockbuster to file for bankruptcy

    With Blockbuster Video preparing to go into Chapter 11 next month, it seems like it’s the end of an era…even if it was a long, painful, downward spiral of an end.

    The first video store I ever frequented was a company called Doorstep Video in the early 1990s.  But not long after I began going to the Blockbuster across the street, a typical store, on the corner of Brenner and Fairson Avenues in Salisbury, North Carolina.  I remember it well.

    I remember discovering movie after movie walking the aisles as a high school student nursing the flame of cinema passion.  I remember buying VHS copies of “2001: A Space Odyssey,” “A Clockwork Orange,” “Goodfellas,” “Taxi Driver,” “Heat,” “The Usual Suspects,” “Apocalypse Now,” “Platoon” and “Midnight Express” there.

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  • FRIDAY FORECAST: End of the Road

    *All historical figures cited are adjusted to today’s dollars.

    It’s the last full weekend of the summer, the last weekend of me being 27, and the last weekend for Friday Forecast on InContention. A time of introspection. A time of reflection. A time of paying another $20 to see those blue things in 3D again. I can’t wait to not see it again… for the first time.

    The dog days of August are notoriously tough on the multiplex as kids start heading back to school so don’t expect any Oscar nominations for this week’s crop of films. Leading the pack is “The Last Exorcism” from Lionsgate. This could be the first time in that company’s history that one of its films takes the top spot away from another one of its films. A low budget faux-documentary, Lionsgate picked up distribution rights and has sold it fantastically with sharp trailers and posters.

    Exorcism is a foolproof box office meme, with Sony able to milk a $37.3 million debut for “The Exorcism of Emily Rose” in September 2005. That film had some movie stars and a true story hook, while Lionsgate is definitely no Sony, but we should still be looking at a strong opening for the film. Something like $18 million, but if Lionsgate can get some stories printed about audience members puking, then you can bump that up to $22 million.

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  • ‘The Cove’ set for prime time debut

    I sometimes wonder what Louis Psihoyos might have been able to convey to a massive television audience if Fisher Stevens hadn’t bum-rushed the microphone when “The Cove” won Best Documentary, and/or Oscarcast producers Adam Shankman and Bill Mechanic hadn’t decided to play Psihoyos off before he had a chance to speak up (all on account of a harmless banner Ric O’Barry unspooled and held on high).

    In any case, the film has been on DVD for some time now and has found a modest audience, but it’ll have its prime time television debut this Sunday, August 29.  Animal Planet will premiere the film at 9:00pm EST, so tell a friend.

    Meanwhile, as Guy reminded us yesterday and Anne and I discussed this morning, the documentary feature category is looking like a race for the ages this year.  What do you think will be left standing when the awards dust clears at the Kodak in February?

    [Photo: ScienceNewsBlog]

  • The toys hit a billion

    Anne and I discuss “Toy Story 3” as the Best Picture category’s best bet coming out of the summer movie months in today’s Oscar Talk.  Much of that has to do with critical approval, yes, but plenty has to do with the monstrous box office take the film has generated.

    I’ve already written about the potential impact of something like that, but it’s worth pointing out that today the film will cross $1 billion worldwide, the second Disney film to do so this year (the other being “Alice in Wonderland,” which, well, wasn’t as well received critically, to put it mildly).  And both films, by the way, are 3D efforts, so that crap isn’t going away for a while.  I can’t wait for them to retrofit “True Grit” so we can see bullets whizzing at us off the screen.

    Anyway, big news and a big congrats to this franchise for hitting virtually every mark perfectly on the way to assumed awards season glory.

    [Photo: Walt Disney Pictures]

  • OSCAR TALK: Ep. 29 — Summer’s best bets, fall festival preview, stiff documentary competition

    Oscar TalkWelcome to Oscar Talk.

    In case you’re new to the site and/or the podcast, Oscar Talk is a weekly kudocast, a one-stop awards chat shop between yours truly and Anne Thompson of Thompson on Hollywood. The podcast is weekly, every Friday throughout the season, charting the ups and downs of contenders along the way. Plenty of things change on route to Oscar’s stage and we’re here to address it all as it unfolds.

    There’s a lot on the plate today as we dive headlong into the madness one more time.  Summer is giving way to fall (though a check of the weather wouldn’t make you guess as much), and with it, the first major stage of the long haul: festival season.  Let’s see what’s on the docket today…

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  • First foreign Oscar submissions

    I was waiting for news of these to begin trickling in… in my memory, the flood of official submissions for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar usually begins earlier than August. Anyway, we’re there, so expect a lot more of these updates between now and October 1, the Academy’s formal (if not entirely inflexible) deadline for participating countries to enter their films.

    The first three confirmed entries come from Taiwan, Romania and Iraq — the latter two countries awaiting their first nominations in the category, while Taiwan seeks to return to the race for the first time since its sole win, with “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” a decade ago.

    The most high-profile of the three is Romania’s pick: Florin Serban’s debut feature “If I Want to Whistle, I Whistle,” was one of the few critically embraced Competition titles at February’s Berlin Film Festival, where it scooped the runner-up Silver Bear prize. As is my wont at festivals, it seems, I missed it both at Berlin and at Edinburgh, though I’ve heard glowing reports from colleagues of the film, a character study of a teenager, on the brink of release from a detention center, whose rehabilitation is disrupted when his neglectful mother re-enters his life.

    (More, including trailers for all three films, after the jump.)

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  • Hello, goodbye

    If any of you are wondering why we haven’t written anything about the tragic passing of anime director Satoshi Kon at the unripe age of 46, it’s because I’ve been struggling to think of something meaningful to say about a filmmaker I felt I was still getting to know. Truth be told, I’ve only seen two of the four features the man directed, one of them shamefully recently at that; I had long meant to catch up with 2006’s “Paprika,” but only got round to it last month, after the (wholly warranted, as it turns out) talk of “Inception” parallels began swirling.

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  • Deadline for Oscar docs looming

    As we enter the fall festival season with an Oscar prediction sheet still covered in question marks, there is at least one category where almost all the viable contenders have already been seen. I speak, of course, of Best Documentary Feature, a race already crowded with possibilities from earlier fests and the summer release calendar, and with a submission deadline less than a week away.

    Over at The Odds, Steve Pond informs us that filmmakers have until September 1 to enter their docs for Oscar consideration, having completed qualifying theatrical runs (one week minimum) in the past 12 months. Sifting through the titles in play, Pond likes the chances of such heavily-buzzed titles as “Restrepo,” “Inside Job” and “A Film Unfinished.”

    All three films take on weighty subjects — respectively, the conflict in Afghanistan, the global economic crisis and (a well-known pet theme of the Academy) the Holocaust — which should stand them in good stead with a voting branch not renowned for its sense of humor.

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  • ‘Tamara Drewe’ trailer

    This afternoon I received a copy of Posy Simmonds’s graphic novel “Tamara Drewe,” which has been adapted as a film by director Stephen Frears.  A nice bit of promotion, though I must admit, this has been way off my radar all year.  Guy was no fan at all when he saw it at Cannes, but it’s set to hit the festival circuit in the coming weeks.  The trailer just launched via Yahoo! Movies.  Check it out by clicking the image below or watch the embed on the jump.

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  • Ving Rhames would like to thank the Academy

    “This is for ‘Lilo & Stitch.’”

  • TECH SUPPORT: Best Sound Editing — Volume I

    Now matter how many times I watch the Oscars, someone will always ask, “So what is the difference between the two sound categories?”

    The difference is quite significant.  It is so important that the sound branch is only one of two “tech” branches in the Academy (the other being music) that gives out two separate awards.  Best Sound Mixing awards the individuals who bring the entire soundscape – music, dialogue, effects – together into a balanced mix.

    Best Sound Editing, on the other hand (perhaps better described by its previous name, Best Sound Effects Editing), rewards the artificial creation of sounds to be inserted into the film, but were not captured during the shoot.

    The category, despite its very specific nature, is nevertheless like many other “tech” categories.  Both “loud” films (often war films) and blockbusters are among this category’s favorite fetishes.  And like virtually all categories, being a Best Picture contender can be a big help.

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  • Back to Monday for Oscar?

    Some of our younger readers may think of the Academy Awards as a weekend-capping tradition, having taken place on a Sunday for the last 12 years running. However, seasoned Oscar-watchers will remember the days when, rather than rounding out the week, the ceremony kicked it off, falling on Monday so as not to interfere with the weekend box-office.

    Now, Variety reports that we may be returning to a Monday night Oscarcast, this time to scoot out the way of the NFL:

    The league’s players and owners are negotiating a new Collective Bargaining Agreement that will add two games to the regular season — a decision that could theoretically land Hollywood’s biggest event and the Super Bowl on the same day. The move from 16 to 18 games, according to sources, is a fait accompli and will go into effect for the 2012-13 season.

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  • Gérard vs. Juliette

    A couple of weeks ago, Emma Thompson ruffled a few feathers when she dismissed the talents of one Audrey Hepburn, so it’s apparently open season on knocking gamine screen beauties off their perch. Today serves up another actor-on-actor fight, this time between two living legends of French cinema. It may be a fairer fight — in this case, the victim is alive to defend herself — but it’s a considerably less polite one.

    In short, if you’ve ever wondered why Gérard Depardieu and Juliette Binoche, arguably the two most ubiquitous French stars of the past quarter-century, have never worked together, we now have our answer. Depardieu, to put it mildly, doesn’t think much of his beloved, Oscar-winning compatriot.

    Never the most discreet of interviewees — as those who recall his self-sabotaging remarks during his 1990 Oscar campaign will know — he has now taken it upon himself to share this opinion with the world.

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  • LIFE WITHOUT OSCAR: 1969 and 1970

    Catch up with the idea behind this series here.

    As the 60’s came to a close, Oscar decided to embrace its dirty side and give X-rated “Midnight Cowboy” the top prize. Coming a year after “Oliver!” makes it quite a juxtaposition and the film remains one of the most interesting picks by the Academy, particularly as it triumphed in the “Year of the Western.”

    “The Wild Bunch,” “True Grit,” “Paint Your Wagon” and “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” all found themselves up for top prizes in a year that Tapley would probably have died to cover. Also great to see “Z” become the second foreign language Best Picture nominee in a year that Wikipedia claims is still the highest rated Oscar telecast ever. Take note current producers- there was no host and it lasted 145 minutes.

    The 70’s were introduced with “Patton” earning Best Picture. War, epic, biopic, strong male lead; it completely fits the bill for a Best Picture winner. Of course, George C. Scott would famously become the first actor to refuse his award this year.

    It was also the year The Beatles finally won an Oscar (for “Let it Be”) but had already broken up and failed to appear. Timely as ever, Academy.

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  • Paging Jean-Luc Godard

    After deciding to give an Honorary Oscar to Jean-Luc Godard, it seems the Academy is having trouble tracking the auteur down:

    The motion picture Academy has spent almost 24 frantic hours trying to reach the iconoclastic filmmaker (“Breathless”) to inform him he’s getting an honorary Oscar — and by late Wednesday they still hadn’t been able to find him.

    Presumably he has no idea he’s received the honor.

  • ‘Biutiful’ goes to Roadside, ‘Good Things’ to Magnolia

    This announcement has been imminent for a couple of weeks now, but I guess the i’s (and lowercase j’s) and t’s are finally crossed and dotted.

    Alejandro González Iñárritu’s “Biutiful” will be distributed by Roadside Attractions and Liddell Entertainmnet.  Roadside also has indie “Winter’s Bone” in the mix this year and got its awards season feet wet for the first time last year with “The Cove.” There will, I imagine, be a considerable push for Javier Bardem in the lead actor race.

    The film was generally well received, but while there were rabid advocates, there were also a fair share of detractors, making for a tale of two movies.  Our own Guy Lodge called it “an effortfully solemn amalgamation of personal crises and social concerns” that “paints from too limited an emotional palette for its high-stakes story of parental duty, in the face of hovering mortality, to hit home the way it should.”

    The film will play the fall festival circuit.  I’ll have a look then.

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