In Contention

Tag: Conviction

  • ‘Conviction’ on ABC’s Nightline

    Tony Goldwyn’s “Conviction” will open in limited release next Friday, October 15.  I’m a fan.  It “never feels manipulative even though it’s painting in extremely familiar dramatic strokes,” I wrote last week.

    The film was featured on ABC’s Nightline Monday night. Once you get past the unfortunate spelling out of the title’s double meaning, there are interviews with Hilary Swank and the real-life Betty Anne Waters, among others, and a brief mention of the unfortunate ending that was left out of the film.

    “In real life, the Hollywood ending was undercut by a tragic accident,” David Wright narrates. As Waters says, yes, it’s tragic, but Kenny Waters died free. I still think that could have served the film quite well thematically.  Meanwhile, Swank says, “This movie is the reason why I’m an actor.  These types of stories are what inspire me and move me and give me hope.”

    Check out the full video of the segment after the jump.

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  • OFF THE CARPET: Carpe diem

    Two weeks ago in this space I discussed the precariousness of “frontrunner” status in an Oscar race. At the time, coming off of a big surge in Toronto, “The King’s Speech” was the big dog on the porch. But be warned, I said. It’s a marathon, not a sprint.

    Now that “The Social Network” has released, accompanied by glowing review after glowing review, not to mention a media blitz to make the head spin, that film is looking like an alpha in the year’s awards season. And, inevitably, the race is already being reduced to a generational battle between the two…yet it’s barely October.

    Here’s the thing. If you’re a studio still priming your pony, you have to be watching all of this unfold with giddy delight, licking your chops, ravenous. This is the kind of situation easily devoured by savvy marketing in Oscar land, and if I’m a rival contender, I’m remembering my Horace: “Seize the day.”

    But it’s a delicate balance. One doesn’t want to charge out and shoehorn into the discussion, lest you be tossed aside as mere garnish to the main course of these two films. However, playing it too cool and quiet isn’t the safest bet either, as an Oscar win is the culmination of built steam and sustained speed (which be in the form of a long drag or a quick burst of energy at the right during the right frame).

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  • WEEKLY WRAP: Hollywood mourns, foreign race, bait battle

    • A grim week for Hollywood talent, as we said goodbye to Gloria Stuart, Tony Curtis, Arthur Penn and, most prematurely, Sally Menke.

    • Mexico’s “Biutiful” became the starriest entry yet on the Best Foreign Language Film longlist, now up to a round 60 titles.

    • This week’s Long Shot column examined the widely predicted “Social Network”-versus-“King’s Speech” Best Picture battle, wondering what it says about the current state of “Oscar bait.”

    • Just to remind us that there are other films knocking around, the long-awaited trailer for the Coens’ “True Grit” set the web abuzz.

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  • Goldwyn’s ‘Conviction’ keeps an even keel

    I’ve been meaning to write about “Conviction” since I saw it last week and just haven’t really settled on a way to gather my thoughts.  In a nutshell, I liked it.  Quite a lot, actually.  It’s not rousing or inspiring to the point that I had to write immediately (obviously), but it’s relatively harmless and generally quite agreeable.

    That sounds like damning with faint praise I imagine but I was kind of a mess watching it.  All the emotional beats hit me just right.  I’ll admit I got a bit teary-eyed at the sustained chemistry between Hilary Swank and Sam Rockwell, who portray loving siblings with a level of authenticity and complexity that’s difficult to pinpoint.  The script never feels manipulative even though its painting in extremely familiar dramatic strokes.

    Rockwell has received most of the praise so far and he deserves it.  Interestingly enough, though, he doesn’t bring anything more than he has for the last 10 or 15 years in film after film.  He’s always good for better than solid and here he’s just finally getting his due.  He’s one of a precious few actors who sells it perfectly each and every time out.  You just buy him in whatever the role.

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  • Rockwell, Carter, Garfield, Wasikowska tapped for HFF honors

    On the heels of last week’s introductory announcement, it has been announced that Sam Rockwell, Helena Bonham Carter, Andrew Garfield and Mia Wasikowska will be recognized at this year’s Hollywood Film Festival awards.  The press release, in part:

    The 14th Annual Hollywood Film Festival and Hollywood Awards, presented by Starz, are pleased to announce honorees who will be recognized for their achievements at the festival’s Hollywood Awards Gala Ceremony.

    Academy Award-nominated actress Helena Bonham Carter will receive the “Hollywood Supporting Actress Award,” actor Sam Rockwell will be honored with the ” Hollywood Supporting Actor Award, ” actress Mia Wasikowska will receive the ” Hollywood Breakthrough Actress Award, ” and actor Andrew Garfield will be recognized with the ” Hollywood Breakthrough Actor Award. ”

    “These honorees have been steadily laying the groundwork of choice projects upon which to build their Hollywood careers, and this is their year to really stand out,” said [founder Carlos] de Abreu.

    Full list of awards recipients announced thus far after the jump.

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  • OFF THE CARPET: King…for the moment

    Tom Hooper’s “The King’s Speech” is on top of the world right now.  Telluride buzz was hot and it carried all the way through the Toronto International Film Festival to a coveted People’s Choice award.  The race is already being boiled down in some quarters to this old school Academy play versus a Gen-Y instant classic opening in just under two weeks.  You couldn’t ask for more if you were The Weinstein Company with this film as your prize pony…

    …except maybe a season half as long as it actually is.  Hooper’s film finds itself in a very precarious spot right now.  Just ask awards consultants at Paramount Pictures.

    After coming out strong with the of-the-moment “Up in the Air” last season, taking the same Telluride-Toronto crowd-pleasing path, their film slowly boiled down to an also ran and even came up short in the one category it seemed assured going into the Academy Awards.

    It’s easy to peak early in an Oscar season.  It takes tactical endurance to really come out on the other side with something to show for yourself and “The King’s Speech” is burning fuel fast and early.  But I imagine if anyone understands this it’s Harvey Weinstein, who, if he does find himself in a battle with “The Social Network” for the big prize, will be going toe-to-toe with one of his former Miramax executives, Cynthia Swartz (who has overseen Best Picture marches for “Crash,” “No Country for Old Men” and “The Hurt Locker” in recent years).

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  • 9/14 Oscarweb Round-up

    • Ben Affleck discusses “The Town” across the pond. [Daily Telegraph]

    • The Best Picture race begins to take shape for Sasha Stone. [Awards Daily]

    • Michael Cieply talks to Kevin Spacey about his work as “Casino Jack” and his involvement with “The Social Network.” [New York Times]

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  • OFF THE CARPET: The year of the woman, take two?

    It wasn’t by coincidence that the three photos decorating the season’s introductory installment of this column two weeks ago represented lead actress contenders in the 2010 Oscar race. After all the talk of 2009 being “the year of the woman,” owing much to the number of female directors who found themselves in the mix (and inevitably leading to Kathryn Bigelow’s history-making moment at the Kodak), I’m sensing an even better argument for 2010 as a singular season for the fairer sex.

    Let’s start with the performances. By my count, there are already eight nominatable offerings from lead actresses this year (which contrasts drastically with a dearth of supporting hopefuls).  This is just going by what I’ve seen, mind you.

    For starters, Natalie Portman has dazzled the early festival season with her work in “Black Swan.” Lesley Manville, meanwhile (should she remain a lead focus), sets a high bar in “Another Year.” Despite my feelings on the film, Carey Mulligan really settles into a next-level groove in “Never Let Me Go,” and Jennifer Lawrence, of course (like Mulligan last year), has already become the year’s star-in-the-making story in “Winter’s Bone.”

    Dovetailing with the performances themselves, there are also films that seem to reflect the theme in narrative. In “Secretariat,” for instance, Diane Lane capably (if a bit histrionically) portrays headstrong Penny Chenery, a woman of virtue in an era when she was expected to keep her head down and clean house. Similarly, Sally Hawkins absolutely kills as the Norma Rae-ish Rita O’Grady in “Made in Dagenham,” fighting for equal pay in a similar time (and she’s likely to be joined in the hunt by co-star Miranda Richardson for a fiery supporting turn). And we can’t forget the palpable feminism apparent in summer indie “The Kids Are All Right,” where Annette Bening and Julianne Moore both bring their “A” game.

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  • TIFF: ‘Conviction’ reviews trickling in

    I had hoped Fox Searchlight would screen Tony Goldwyn’s “Conviction” here in LA during Toronto, but I guess I kind of understand why they didn’t.  I’ve heard nothing but “meh” things on the film since day one (the first reaction I heard was from someone who saw it before the studio even picked it up).  That ambivalence is reflected in Brad Brevet’s C+ review of the film out of Toronto.

    Brevet calls it “a rather simple film” and notes that “the emotional impact of the story comes through in the end after what is a rather mundane and cliched story of the innocent man in jail and the person working hard on the outside to get him out.”  Well, I guess I could have gleaned that from a synopsis.  Dig, Brad!  Oh, here we go:  “At no point does this seem like new territory, but outside of being about ten minutes too long, it’s a film that works despite its rather traditional dramatic nature.”

    Wouldn’t “traditional” be a guarantee that the story would work?  In any case, I’m just having fun here.  Most I’ve talked to seem to think Sam Rockwell could charge to the front of the supporting actor derby.  Brevet writes that the actor plays the character “with enough eccentricity to make it believable, but never so much that it feels like a caricature trying to be larger than the scene.”

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  • OFF THE CARPET: Once more into the breach

    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.

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  • Fall festivals ready for their close-up

    In the last couple of weeks the major fall film festivals have unveiled aggressively competitive line-ups, and the amount of potential awards product landing at Venice, Telluride, Toronto and New York is, as usual, vast.

    There are plenty of overlapping exhibitions but as for firsties, Venice will get dibs on Darren Aronofsky’s “Black Swan,” Julie Taymor’s “The Tempest,” Julian Schnabel’s “Miral,” Ben Affleck’s “The Town,” and Richard J. Lewis’s “Barney’s Version” before the films make their way to other fests.  Sofia Coppola’s “Somewhere” will be exclusive to the Lido.

    New York, meanwhile, landed a real coup by boasting the world premiere of David Fincher’s “The Social Network,” which will not be at the other fests.

    Toronto is again packed to the gills with product (too much, if you ask me, but it’s a media circus after all).  Clint Eastwood’s “Hereafter” will see its first bow there before heading off to New York in October.  Tony Goldwyn’s “Conviction” will also debut, as well as John Madden’s “The Debt,” Rowan Joffe’s “Brighton Rock,” Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden’s “It’s Kind of a Funny Story” and Nigel Cole’s “Made in Dagenham.” World premieres searching for distributors at the fest include Robert Redford’s “The Conspirator,” John Cameron Mitchell’s “Rabbit Hole” and Dustin Lance Black’s “What’s Wrong with Virginia,” any of which could end up being awards season possibilities.

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  • TECH SUPPORT: Best Film Editing — Volume I

    I still remember when I was 12 and getting into the Oscars for the first time. My Dad said, “How can you tell if the film has good editing?” To a very large extent, I had to concede his point, as the best editing is often that which we don’t explicitly notice. Rather, it simply “becomes” the film as we become immersed in what is on the screen, not remembering that everything was staged from different angles on different days.

    Film Editing brings films to agreeable length, coherent narrative and appropriate pacing so as to engage the audience in accordance with the director’s vision.  The Academy Award for the art form has definitely shown a tendency toward “showy” editing in the past, though.  War films, musicals, action films and movies that are not told linearly all frequent this race. But perhaps the best predictor of the editing nominees is what is occurring in the Best Picture race.   Most of the nominees show up here.  Now that we have ten Best Picture nominees, I would think at least four nominees will also be there.

    All things considered, Lee Smith’s editing of Christopher Nolan’s “Inception” has got to be considered the leader in this race. The film was well received, is a Best Picture favorite, was certainly told in a “unique” manner and Smith was nominated last time he and Nolan worked together. I fully expect him to earn his third nomination this year.

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  • ‘Never Let Me Go,’ ‘Rabbit Hole’ among Toronto premieres

    Toronto International Film Festival organisers unveiled a typically cluttered lineup of galas and premieres for this year’s edition — including, as usual, a number of films pencilled in as 2010 awards contenders.

    Of the 50 titles announced thus far, half will be world premieres: those include such highly anticipated works as Mark Romanek’s “Never Let Me Go,” John Cameron Mitchell’s “Rabbit Hole,” Robert Redford’s “The Conspirator,” Tony Goldwyn’s “Conviction” and Rowan Joffe’s “Brighton Rock.” The remaining half have either appeared at previous festivals — with a hefty contingent from Cannes, including Mike Leigh’s “Another Year,” Alejandro González Iñárritu’s “Biutiful” and Woody Allen’s “You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger” — or look set to make their debut at Venice the week before.

    With Venice due to reveal its own lineup tomorrow, the fact that such still-unseen titles as Ben Affleck’s “The Town,” Francois Ozon’s “Potiche,” Julian Schnabel’s “Miral,” John Madden’s “The Debt” and Tom Hooper’s “The King’s Speech” are all marked only as North American premieres would appear to confirm that they are all Lido-bound. (I’m surprised, however, that Guillaume Canet’s “Little White Lies” will be making its first appearance at Toronto rather than at a European festival.)

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  • Oren Moverman, Kurt Cobain and the biopic

    One of my favorite current film writers, Ryan Gilbey, has an excellent piece in today’s Guardian on the subject of biopics — in particular, on the rise of the postmodern biopic in the face of Hollywood’s increasingly tepid stabs at the form. It’s a good read, but far better is the unabridged version of the article at Gilbey’s own blog, which contains some fascinating nuggets cut by the Guardian subs.

    Among them is this intriguing tidbit on an upcoming Kurt Cobain biopic from writer Oren Moverman. Moverman was, of course, a semi-surprise Oscar nominee earlier this year for his screenplay of “The Messenger,” but more pertinently to the subject at hand, he also co-wrote Todd Haynes’s oblique Bob Dylan study “I’m Not There.”

    Talking to Gilbey after the cut, Moverman explains that his next stab at the life of a rock icon won’t be quite as avant-garde as Haynes’s film (or Gus van Sant’s “Last Days,” for that matter), but he has no intention of ceding to the ‘greatest hits’ biopic structure so favored by Hollywood screenwriters.

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  • ‘Conviction’ poster

    Last week Fox Searchlight launched the official trailer for Tony Goldwyn’s “Conviction,” which elicited, shall we say, strong reactions from the readership.  Today they’ve released a larger version of the poster image that accompanied the trailer.  Take a look after the jump.

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  • ‘Conviction’ trailer

    One of the year’s obviously baity titles (which screened as early as the first quarter of the year for some) is Tony Goldwyn’s “Conviction” (formerly “Betty Anne Waters”).  The film stars Hilary Swank as Waters in the true story of a young woman who puts herself through law school to represent her wrongfully convicted brother (played by Sam Rockwell, and about whom I hear great things).  As for the trailer, thick accents?  Check.  “This is an important story” narrator?  Check.  Lofty music from multiple other weighty films?  Check.  Awards savvy studio?  Check.  (Searchlight also has Mark Romanek’s “Never Let Me Go” on the way, which also debuted a trailer earlier this week.)

    Watch the “Conviction” trailer, via Apple, by clicking on the image below, or check out the embed after the jump.

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  • ‘Betty’ now ‘Conviction,’ TWC nabs ‘Miral’

    Apologies for the two week dry spell.  I thought I’d be able to update along the way as I trekked out to Ohio to play meet the parents (which, thankfully, couldn’t have gone better), but alas, quick stops in hotels and 10 hour driving days made that much more difficult than I thought it would.

    Anyway, I’m back in pocket now with a (relatively) cleared out schedule for the rest of the summer.  Nothing much is happening on the western front besides the Seattle film fest.  Chad is out of town for the moment and couldn’t put up the box office columns, but it appears “Shrek Forever After” took the top spot for a third-straight week.  I don’t imagine anyone has much to say about that, in any case.

    Two nuggets dropped today, however.  The first involves Julian Schnabel’s “Miral,” which is a heavily anticipated, potential Oscar title for many readers and could be a play for “The Visitor” breakout Hiam Abbas.  The Weinstein Company has acquired domestic distribution rights, adding to a stable that already includes Sundance titles “Blue Valentine” and “The Company Men,” as well as “The King’s Speech” and UK hit “Nowhere Boy,” among others.  It’ll be interesting to see how that very Sony Classics-esque slate is handled during the season.

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  • OFF THE CARPET: Handicapping 2010 a year in advance

    Hilary Swank in Betty Anne WatersUncle.

    I told myself I wasn’t going to write this column this year, let alone make predictions, but some of you were just too cute in your emails and Twitter DMs asking for something akin to my annual year-in-advance take on the race, so I struck a balance: a column and contenders list, but no charts and no predictions.  Fair enough?

    The 2010 Oscar season looks, from afar, to be a muted affair.  Most of the films that look like competitors on paper have a distinctly “small” vibe.  Of course, no one knows when a film like “The Blind Side” will decide to come along and sweep the heartland and the Academy at large off its feet.  Maybe Tony Goldwyn’s “Betty Anne Waters” will play that role this year.  Maybe not.

    There are a considerable amount of actors and actresses with multiple performances on the way, more than usual, I’d say.  And most encouraging, the original screenplay field seems to be much more robust than the adaptations.

    Last year the big dogs looked to be “Amelia,” “Invictus” and “Nine,” and we all know how that turned out.  In fact, it happens with some frequency.  So why bother getting too deep into all of this now?  And to say nothing of the fact that, perhaps mercifully, nothing on the horizon appears to have that level of awards-baiting appeal.  No major filmmakers looking to cozy up to Oscar.  No big stars that seem overdue and are going for it with an obvious role.  None of that, really.

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