• Jennifer Boulden writes a singular piece on Fort Smith, Arkansas, her home and the setting of “True Grit.” [Awards Daily]
• Jeffrey M. Anderson stumps for “Buried” over “127 Hours.” [Cinematical]
• The HFPA gets grabby over a revenue dispute with Dick Clark Productions, vis a vis the Golden Globe awards telecast. [Entertainment Weekly]
Welcome to Oscar Talk.
In case you’re new to the site and/or the podcast, Oscar Talk is a weekly kudocast, your 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 en route to Oscar’s stage and we’re here to address it all as it unfolds.
AFI Fest has concluded, the first Academy Award ceremony of the year hits this weekend and we find ourselves in the thick of things. Between Galas, premieres, parties and the usual, there’s plenty to chew on, so let’s see what’s on the docket today…
Last night was closing night of the 2010 AFI Fest, and they put a bow on things by offering up the Los Angeles premiere of AFI alum Darren Aronofsky’s “Black Swan.” I decided to head over to the Chinese Theatre to give it another look. At this stage in the season, Telluride feel like ages ago and it’s nice to saddle up back to a film like this after you’ve seen and therefore know what you’re getting into.
Aronofsky offered his usual self-deprecating patter before hand, introducing stars Vincent Cassel, Barbara Hershey, Winona Ryder and Natalie Portman, as well as producer Scott Franklin. He noted that the Chinese is his “favorite theater in the world” and that he can recall visiting Los Angeles as a kid and catching a film with his parents. When he attended the AFI, he would always head over to the theater (which isn’t far from campus) to see new releases every weekend.
He was pumped for Sylvester Stallone to be in the house and went through the expected thank yous before unleashing the film on yet another unsuspecting crowd, and from my vantage, it seemed to go over well. One person outside the theater afterward was heard saying, “I don’t even know what emotion to feel right now.”
• Tim Gray weighs in on Oscar’s potential slide to January. [Variety]
• Darren Aronofsky is closer to jumping on board the “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” sequel than we thought/feared. [Deadline]
• Oliver Stone is pretty worried about Michael Douglas’s health concerns. [Associated Press]
The press release, in part:
The Independent Filmmaker Project (IFP), the nation’s oldest and largest organization of independent filmmakers, announced today that director Darren Aronofsky, actors Hilary Swank and Robert Duvall, and Focus Features CEO, James Schamus, will each be presented with a career Tribute at the 20th Anniversary Gotham Independent Film Awards™ on Monday, November 29th at Cipriani Wall Street, New York, New York.
Signaling the official kick-off to the film awards season, the Gotham Independent Film Awards™ is one of the leading awards for independent film. Anchoring the evening’s seven competitive awards for Best Feature, Best Documentary, Breakthrough Director, Breakthrough Actor, Best Ensemble Performance, Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You and the new Festival Genius Audience Award, are four Tributes to film community icons.
This year’s Tribute selection represents a range of individuals – all veterans well-versed in the journey between lower-budget independent films and large-scale studio releases…
“We are moved and honored to give tribute to four cinematic film luminaries, all of whom have had their roots in independent film, and have steadfastly focused on the art of film, irrespective of the size of the budget of their work” said Joana Vicente, Executive Director of the IFP. “This year’s tributes personify independent spirit and have created an astonishing breadth of work that we are proud to celebrate. James Schamus won the producing award in 1996 and Darren Aronofsky was our Breakthrough Director in 1998. We are thrilled to honor them again for their deserving careers. Robert Duvall and Hilary Swank’s work have enriched our lives; from the smallest of indies to the largest of Hollywood features, we are in awe of their talent and look forward to what lies ahead.”
[Photo: Fox Searchlight Pictures]
• James Franco, also starring in “Howl” this year, selects his favorite poems. [Vulture]
• In remembering film editor Sally Menke, Lawrence Bender discusses the “Hi, Sally” Tarantino tradition. [Arts Beat]
• Anne Thompson talks, well, a whole bunch of stuff with a busy Guillermo Del Toro. [Thompson on Hollywood]
• All-time greatest Oliver Stone line: “I like mirror. I wrote Scarface. Go fuck yourself.” [Vulture]
• Potential Oscar nominee James Franco got a “D” in his NYU acting class. [Showbiz 411]
• Read Tim Burton’s poem about Johnny Depp, circa 1991. [Cinematical]
Today was a long one here at Telluride. Three screenings (which has been my consistency throughout the fest), an interview, transcribing, etc., etc. The night mercifully brought little that interested me, so I’ve finally found some time to work.
This afternoon started with a screening of one of Guy’s favorite films of the year, “The Illusionist.” I wasn’t as enthusiastic as he was, but I kind of want to hold off on putting my thoughts down while I let it marinate a bit. It’s not a difficult film or anything, it’s just a visual feast that should be turned over a few times before settling on a view point, I think.
After that it was off to the Venice hit, Darren Aronofsky’s “Black Swan.” Hundreds of people were turned away at the door and this, without a doubt, has been the festival’s hottest ticket. The Lido can take a bow on that one. Actually, Aronofsky’s twisted thriller seems the best place to start, so…
Two days into the Venice Film Festival, and still the only film I consistently hear people talking about is “Black Swan” — even as the film accrues its share of detractors, it seems Venice fest director Marco Müller has broken the traditional curse of festival curtain-raisers, kicking off this year’s Lido activity with a film people actually give a damn about. (As Variety’s Justin Chang rather succinctly put it on Twitter: “In the battle of opening-night films: Venice 1, Cannes 0.”)
Meanwhile, its kinship with Aronofsky’s previous feature, “The Wrestler,” has grown from an interesting side-note broken a few days ago into the most recurrent point of discussion around the film; Aronofsky addressed the matter directly in the film’s press conference yesterday, from which USA Today offers this quote:
The more I looked into the world of ballet, I actually started to see all these similarities to the world of wrestling … They both have these performers that use their bodies in sort of extremely, intense physical ways. Their entire performance is based on intense physicality.
Venice Film Festival
It’s the juvenilization of the term “fairy tale” that has led many people to associate them inextricably with happy endings. At their most literary, fairy tales can be moral and often very unhappy narratives of yearning, obsession and eventual redemption, even if it comes with rather a large sacrifice attached; Hans Christian Andersen specialized in compromised happy endings, notably in “The Little Mermaid” and “The Red Shoes,” that would have made Walt Disney wince.
If you squint slightly at “Black Swan,” the boldly deranged and beautifully despairing new film from Darren Aronofsky, you can see that it is, when push comes to plié, a contemporary fairy tale of sorts: the story of a little girl, in the fierce grip of controlling adults, who wants nothing more than to dance, and learns that she must exchange part of herself for the opportunity.
That much I can say without breaking the spell for those who have not seen it. For while “Black Swan” may reveal itself as a fairy tale, that’s only after it has successfully masqueraded as a taut, witty and wickedly kinky thriller that pulls off the tricky double-bluff of following precisely the narrative course one has mapped out for it, yet emerging as all the more surprising for that adherence.
It goes without saying one of the most anticipated films of the fall movie season is Darren Aronofsky’s “Black Swan.” Going by the trailer, we’re in for a slice of genre goodness that taps many of the muscles the director has flexed early in his career.
In an interview with MTV, Aronofsky offers an intriguing bit of trivia: his latest film and 2008’s “The Wrestler” actually started out as one film. It seems his 10-year-old original concept involved a professional wrestler falling in love with a professional ballet dancer. The mind reels.
I imagine it would have been fascinating territory to cover, but the germ split off into two separate films. Eventually Aronofsky worked with Robert Siegel’s on an original screenplay and saved the ballet stuff for the film opening the Venice film festival in just two days.
There are two films I’m most looking forward to in 2010: the Coen brothers’ “True Grit” and Darren Aronofsky’s “Black Swan.” The trailer for the latter has just hit the web courtesy of Apple and it looks like an absolute stunner. I’m hearing, awards wise, that it’s probably more of a Best Actress play for Natalie Portman than a Best Picture possibility, but we’ll know all of that sooner or later. The trailer certainly reveals the film as a showcase for Portman, but Barbara Hershey also could be someone to watch for in supporting. Check out the trailer by clicking the image below or watch the embed on the jump.
[FURTHER UPDATE: Focus has confirmed that “The American” will not, in fact, be appearing at Venice.]
[UPDATE: “Black Swan” has indeed been confirmed as the Venice opener, and will play in Competition. More soon.]
I’ve been saying for some time that this year’s Venice Film Festival looks to be a very good vintage, capitalizing on the number of highly anticipated auteur works that weren’t quite ready in time for Cannes. Even with Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life” still a major question mark — some are even suggesting it won’t surface this year — there’s plenty to get quivery about besides, as is clear from this tasty Variety piece.
Nick Vivarelli’s article reiterates the titles — including Sofia Coppola’s “Somewhere” and Julian Schnabel’s “Miral” — that have long been all-but-guaranteed to show up at Venice, but adds some tantalizing new ones. Chief among them is Darren Aronofsky’s ballet psycho-thriller “Black Swan,” which will premiere as the festival’s opening film on September 1.
The press release breaking the news, and more Venice possibilities, after the cut.
When I remarked in a post yesterday that the upcoming awards season looks a little short on the high-profile biopic contenders so beloved of Academy voters, I had a feeling I was forgetting something obvious. And so I was: “The Fighter,” David O. Russell’s biopic of against-the-odds boxing champ “Irish” Micky Ward, starring Mark Wahlberg in the title role.
In Friday’s episode of Oscar Talk, Kris expressed his high hopes for the film, singling out Christian Bale (as Ward’s half-brother and trainer Dicky Eklund) as a rumored standout. His faith is reflected in the updated predictions to your right, including potential bids in the two top races, as well as three acting categories. (Melissa Leo is currently tapped for Best Supporting Actress, but Amy Adams could be in the mix too.)
Anne Thompson responded somewhat skeptically to Kris’s enthusiasm, suggesting that Russell’s film (should it turn out well, of course) is in a position to take some in the industry by surprise — always a good place to be from an awards-campaign standpoint. Meanwhile, it would appear that the film’s minders are opting not to build up buzz via the fall festival track: in this Collider interview, Wahlberg explains that they’ll likely skip Toronto and the rest, choosing instead to “go out and go big” with a December release.
Obviously this would have been more pertinent a year ago, but, alas:
(Courtesy: MakingOf)
I’m going to sound about three times my actual age for saying this, but I’ll say it anyway: I could not care less about 3D.
I know it’s important, I know it’s fun, I know it’s the future. I know all this largely because almost 20 years ago, a group of cheery traveling 3D promoters visited my elementary school in New Jersey, and told the packed assembly exactly the same thing.
“Hey, 3D! Yay, 3D! Everybody see in 3D!” they sang, before showing us some jazzed-up motocross footage in the third dimension. Does anybody else remember sitting through the same demonstration?
I wasn’t thrilled then, and while I’m aware of the massive leap and bounds the technology has made since I was 7 years old, I’m not particularly thrilled now. I like a gosh-wow gimmick as much as the next man — a stupid part of me wishes I’d lived through Smell-O-Rama — but once the novelty of items popping off the screen settles in, I find 3D a dispensable accessory: an extra “D” doesn’t amount to a lot of beans in the cinematic departments I really care about — writing, storytelling, performance.
It has been a very long time since I sat myself down in a wooden pew, but I think it’s safe to say that the last church recital I attended didn’t begin with a speech by a rebel auteur from Brooklyn, didn’t involve any electric guitars, and it certainly wasn’t accompanied by video imagery of Mickey Rourke. But then, the last church recital I attended wasn’t by Clint Mansell.
A short stroll from my home in quiet North London, the Union Chapel is a converted (but still active) Victorian church that moonlights as an alternative music venue — perhaps the city’s loveliest — and tonight it played home to the extraordinary film composer and his musical cohorts.
A cosy, candle-lit suburban chapel may seem a slightly odd setting for an evening that was largely devoted to the considerably harsher screen worlds of Darren Aronofsky, whose Mansell-penned film scores formed the bulk of the evening’s program, but it quickly proved a comfortable one.
It’s no secret around these parts that I’m a pretty committed disciple of composer Clint Mansell. I was absolutely beside myself — livid — when his work on Darren Aronofsky’s “The Fountain,” potentially the best score of the decade, was unceremoniously snubbed by the Academy two years ago. So it was delightful to read through this Pete Paphides piece in The Times of London, an interview with Mansell charting his course from pop rock star to serious film music collaborator as he prepares to take to the stage at London’s Union Chapel Monday with his Los Angeles string ensemble, Sonus Quartet. The group will be playing selections from Mansell’s film score catalog.
Much of the article (which has sporadic, fleeting quotes, a style that drives me mad) details Mansell’s collaboration with Aronofsky. The two met in New York over a decade ago when Aronofsky was fresh out of film school looking to produce his black-and-white mind-bender “Pi.” But there is also finally comes around to Mansell’s collaboration with filmmaker Duncan Jones on “Moon,” which eschewed the composers typical stylistic particulars in favor of a more traditional approach (that is no less atmospheric and of a piece with the film’s expert craftsmanship).