FYI, the predictions for Best Foreign Language Film and Best Documentary Feature have been added to the sidebar. No charts for these categories, as they aren’t given to the shift and slide in buzz like the rest. You just take a stab and go with it. These seem to make sense for now, but I’ll probably make some changes down the line.
Tag: Best Documentary Feature
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9/16 Oscarweb Round-up
• Sasha Stone rounds up a few of the foreign language film submissions coming in. [Awards Daily]• Peter Bart seems to think the Coen brothers’ best opening weekend yet for “Burn After Reading” has more to do with turning “cold” into “hot” than with Brad Pitt extracting laugh after laugh in trailers for the past few months. [Peter Bart]
• Sony Pictures Classics nabs the Toronto documentary hit “Every Little Step.” [The Hollywood Reporter]
• Hirokazu Kore-Eda’s “Still Walking” edges out “Goodbye Solo” and “The Wrestler” for the best of Toronto as Eugene Hernandez polls critics and bloggers at the fest. [indieWIRE]
• Keira Knightley keeps the “Duchess” publicity tour going with a stop under Donna Freydkin’s microscope. [USA Today]
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Docs scramble for the deadline
Today’s New York Times carries an interesting piece about the crunch of documentaries currently being screened in Manhattan to empty houses – all in the name of Oscar eligibility. A simplified rule change now requires that, in order to qualify for the awards, feature docs must be screened for a week – on both coasts – before August 31.
However, in a rather surreal bit of logic, the filmmakers involved are doing their utmost not to attract audiences, presumably so as to avoid peaking too early in terms of media coverage:
“I didn’t advertise, I didn’t seek reviews,” said Roberta Grossman, producer of “Blessed is the Match: The Life and Death of Hannah Senesh,” the story of a Jewish-Hungarian resistance fighter during World War II. “My goal for this run was to qualify for the Academy Awards, period.”
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‘No End’ on YouTube
One of the best films of last year (and a certifiable toss-up with “Taxi to the Dark Side” for Best Doc if you ask me), Charles Ferguson’s “No End in Sight” has landed it’s own YouTube channel this week.
According to the press release, it will become “the first widely released feature film to screen in its entirety on YouTube starting on September 1 and continuing through the 2008 presidential election on Tuesday, November 4.”
Check out the channel here, where you can currently view the trailer and a few other related videos.
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‘Religulous’: Variety is a believer
Concerns have been expressed on this site that Larry Charles’ and Bill Maher’s “Religulous” would emerge as an exercise in left-leaning smugness, taking potshots at easy, cherry-picked targets to equate faith with absurd naivete. Certainly, the jokey, swiftly-edited trailer didn’t do much to shift this feeling.But Variety’s review of the film paints a decidedly different picture. Going so far as to call it “brilliant (and) incendiary,” they describe the film as a study that, while not neglecting its obvious comic angles, tackles its subject with appropriate profundity and inquisitiveness:
To the film’s credit, Maher never engages in Michael Moore-style gotcha tactics, but rather asks questions that raise more questions, in the form of a Socratic dialogue. To believers expecting a blind hatchet job, this will prove both thought-provoking and a bit disarming; skeptics may be surprised (as Maher is) by the occasionally smart replies to his queries.
Though the review does make reference to Maher’s occasionally flip comic tactics (contradictory subtitles accompanying interviews, and the like), the critic seems a little taken aback by a solemn conclusion to the film:
Ending minutes, though, will catch auds up short: Suddenly, the laughs die down, and as in his closing monologues on “Real Time,” Maher turns deadly serious with a final statement that will stir raging arguments in theater lobbies.
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Ridiculous
You know, I enjoy Bill Maher’s work very much. More often than not, despite adamant opinions, he has the ability to come down in an even-handed manner on more than a few issues, hot button and otherwise. But one thing that has always driven me mad has been his absolute ignorance and over-dependence on hyperbole when addressing issues of religion.
I respect feelings of atheism. I’ve been there. I’m no religious fruitcake that gets pissy when someone denounces religion, either. Indeed, agnosticism has never been unattractive to me. But I have my spirituality and I respect and admire what is actually inherent and shared in religions across the world (something I think plenty would benefit from simply noticing, rather than quarreling over differences).
Maher has never been capable of this. Ever. And when he really digs into religion, he generally does it in the safety of a left-leaning panel on “Real Time” who wouldn’t exactly see fit to disagree with him (though there have been precious few exceptions).
With that in mind, does anyone expect Maher and Larry Charles’s “Religulous” to be anything more than a surface level dissection of beliefs with clever editing to make people look like morons? Kind of like, oh, portions of the Larry Charles-directed “Borat?” My anticipation for this film has frankly been victimized by a sense of dread for some time because of all of this.
Here’s the trailer:
httpv://youtube.com/watch?v=kSa2j6UoU78
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OFF THE CARPET: Stuck in the middle with…what?
Since we’ve finally reached the midway point of 2008, it seemed as good a time as any to post the first “Off the Carpet” column since our year in advance take over four months ago.First and foremost, I’m in a unique situation this year. Being in London since mid-May, I’ve found myself looking from the outside in on a lot of projects. The UK generally has later release dates, meaning later press screenings. And so, films like “WALL-E” and “The Dark Knight,” I won’t be commenting on them (and, therefore, won’t have an educated viewpoint on their Oscar prospects) until I’m back in the States in three weeks.
In a lot of ways, it’s just like the old days (for those who remember the old, clunky Oscar Central stuff, or perhaps the sporadic columns at Oscarwatch (now Awards Daily). I’m back in the position of fan first, commentator second in some areas, and it’s been a bit of a thrill, I have to say. Especially in a year of Bat-hype nearly approaching the hysteria of the summer of 1989.
But with that in mind, I also humbly recall that my Oscar-guessing mind was in a slightly better place back then, removed from the fray, having the true instincts of an observer on which to depend. But all of that is beside the point. The real question is, right now, half way through the year, which films have even laid a claim for film awards attention in the brutal season that will be here before we know it?
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Reel Geezers on ‘Polanski’
I rarely link to these, but since Lorenzo from the Reel Geezers has some personal insight into Mr. Polanski, I thought it’d be worth tossing up the video. The Reel Geezers review “Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired”:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FvE4HQwo-o
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Stone on ‘Polanski’
Sasha Stone recently caught up with the doc “Polanski: Wanted and Desired,” which I believed bowed on HBO this week (I miss TV). She takes the middle road in assessing the film’s Oscar potential as follows:I found the movie convincing, breathtaking at times and above all, sad. The Academy might like it since it is a sympathetic portrayal of the hell celebrities must live in day in and day out. On the other hand, the Oscar voters who “see every documentary” aren’t likely the kind who have a swarm of photogs following them everywhere.
Touché. Check out the rest here.
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Is ‘Silhouette City’ this year’s ‘Jesus Camp?’
Clive James, in his review of “American Movie Critics” for the New York Times Book Review in 2006 wrote, “…it’s the movie itself that tells you it means business. It does that by telling a story. No story, no movie.” “Silhouette City,” a new film by Michael Wilson, is a documentary about the rapid rise of religious extremism in America. It’s a haunting account of where the Christian evangelical movement has been and where it’s going, and it is impeccably researched.
The film begins by covering an obscure Christian survivalist group called The Covent, The Sword and the Arm of the Lord. The CSA created a survival camp near Bull Shoals, Arkansas where they trained, stockpiled weapons and preached an apocalyptic end to the world. “We’re storing food,” one of the young girls in the film says. “We can’t tell you where or how much. We’re preparing.”