In Contention

Tag: Alejandro Amenabar

  • 11/18 Oscarweb Round-up

    Philip Seymour Hoffman in Pirate Radio• The swashbuckling spirit behind “Pirate Radio.” [Los Angeles Times]

    • Anne Thompson wants to know where the screeners of “The Hurt Locker” are.  Probably waiting on “New Moon” box office receipts. [Thompson on Hollywood]

    • The gall: Why Roger Corman doesn’t deserve an Oscar.  Apparently there’s a “pro” side on the way. [Cinematical]

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  • ‘Agora’ trailer

    In yesterday’s inaugural edition of Oscar Talk, Kris and Anne Thompson discussed the bad buzz swirling around Alejandro Amenabar’s Rachel Weisz-starring historical epic “Agora,” which has been fruitlessly seeking a distributor since premiering at Cannes in May — and will continue the hunt at Toronto.

    Right on cue, here comes the trailer, and … let’s just say that Anne’s prediction of a “noble failure folly” looks ominously on-target. I’ve loved much of Amenabar’s work, but if I could barely keep my eyes open through the trailer, it doesn’t bode well for the film. Your thoughts?

  • Mixed early word for ‘Agora’

    Rachel Weisz in AgoraI’ve had slight misgivings about Alejandro Amenabar’s much-awaited historical epic “Agora” for a while, and I’m not really sure why. It’s certainly nothing to do with Amenabar’s own track record. For me, “The Others” stands as one of cinema’s great ghost stories, and while “The Sea Inside,” for which he won an Oscar four years ago, wasn’t quite up to his previous film’s immaculate standards, it was a rousing, intermittently stunning effort.

    Perhaps it’s because, even in his most conceptually elaborate work like “Open Your Eyes,” his work has such an intimate scale that the prospect of him taking on a massive sword-and-sandal endeavor like “Agora” doesn’t quite gel. Perhaps it’s because star Rachel Weisz has shown such wildly inconsistent taste in her selections of late. I have no idea, but I’m not particularly comforted after reading the rather mixed slate of reviews that followed the film’s unveiling at Cannes this morning.

    The Hollywood Reporter dithers over the film, declaring it a bit of a slog, but one that repays the effort, with “an unfaltering performance” from Weisz:

    Amenabar gets most of the epic staples out of the way relatively early: flatly acted scenes of textbook exposition, overly earnest extras, main characters who wander unscathed through hordes of butchery and, of course, frequently swelling music. The story then becomes a timely parable on religious intolerance, inexorable fundamentalist violence and the powerlessness of reason and personal freedom in the face of both.

    It is a pleasure to see Weisz’s scenes of scientific inquiry, which capture the passion of research and discovery without artifice or pretension. That the scientist is a woman makes it all the more engaging.

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