In Contention

Tag: Atonement

  • OFF THE CARPET: 2008, a year in advance

    Another year, another set of wins…and another look ahead at what’s in store NEXT year.

    It’s never too late to take a long gander at what we might see dominating the film awards landscape in 365 days, and with that in mind, I’ve been doing my usual mulling over the possibilities for a few weeks to put together the sadly thorough examination of the 2008-09 award season that follows. Let’s get into it. There are some major considerations to take into account. right off the top.

    Like Leonardo DiCaprio, for instance, who is set to be the entertainer of the year. With performances in “Body of Lies” (Ridley Scott) and “Revolutionary Road” (Sam Mendes), DiCaprio is working with a duo of awards-proven talent this year. Perhaps that will work against him, much like it did in 2006, and no major Oscar success will come knocking. But we’ll wait until we see the performances. Each of them could be enticing.

    This year’s Best Picture Oscar victor Scott Rudin is back again, by the way, with “Revolutionary Road,” recently inherited by Paramount Vantage and probably one of the true “frontrunners” this far out that we could put our finger on. The only other film in Vantage’s arsenal is Edward Zwick’s “Defiance,” which could simply be a commercial success, but might find its way to multiple nods like “The Last Samurai” and “Blood Diamond” in recent years.

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  • The top 10 shots of 2007: part two

    Today we round out the top 10 shots of the year with the final five.  Check out part one if you missed it.

    Let’s dive in:

    #5

    Michael Clayton

    “MICHAEL CLAYTON”
    Director of Photography: Robert Elswit

    We were completely ripping off New York filmmaking from the 1970s, things like “Klute” and pretty much everything Owen Roizman has ever shot.  But Tony’s sense of these things was not lots of little pieces; he loves making kind of graphic frames that play as long as possible.

    –Robert Elswit

    Robert Elswit had a hell of a year in 2007, finally getting his due from the American Society of Cinematographers who awarded his work in Paul Thomas Anderson’s “There Will Be Blood.”  There was another film featuring Elswit’s unique signature, however, that flew under the radar for its considerable attention to composition and camera movement: Tony Gilroy’s “Michael Clayton.”

    Much is made of the film’s final sequence, a long shot focused on Clayton as he rides away from the hysteria in his life, desperate for his cab driver to “just drive.”  But a companion shot from earlier in the film was just as arresting, if not more so, as a purposeful point of transition to the second half of the endeavor.  A long tracking shot that never misses a beat, both behind and in front of the camera, the scene detailed is the expert, painfully clinical execution of Arthur Edens, played to an award-worthy T by Oscar nominee Tom Wilkinson.

    The final image is steeped in theme, and an initial tracking sequence under Edens’ opening monologue pulls the viewer into the film’s interior world, but this particular shot is so cold as to be frozen in its depiction of something at once gruesome and strangely beautiful, fluid.  I’m not privy to whether it may have been a directorial decision, though I suspect it may have been, but it is the crown jewel in a film packed with precision from Elswit.
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