In Contention

Tag: David Fincher

  • OFF THE CARPET: Indies on the march

    (from left) Evan Rachel Wood and Mickey Rourke in The WrestlerMaybe mid-way through the Toronto Film Festival, two things are strikingly clear: Darren Aronofsky has the goods with “The Wrestler” and Danny Boyle’s streak of successful versatility at the helm continues with “Slumdog Millionaire.”

    Both films, which enjoy pre-Toronto success at Venice and Telluride respectfully, are also evidence that surprises will happen this time of year.  And with an uncharacteriztically level playing field in Toronto this year, we should be thankful they are getting a fair shake.

    One of them is set for distribution, however, while the other is waiting out a buyer.  But will “The Wrestler” find a home and see a release in 2008 or will an awards-heavy distributor pick it up and save it for a rainy day in 2009’s awards season?

    Both options are on the table, it’s just a matter of who bites first, and what they bring to the table.

    On the horizon, everyone is awaiting their post-Toronto peeks at films like “Australia,” “Revolutionary Road,” “Milk” (landing a trailer this week) and “The Soloist.”  David Fincher’s 20 minutes of footage from “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” may have been caught off guard by over-zealous bloggers in Telluride, but the damage may not have been as considerable as some may have thought.

    Speaking of “The Soloist,” chatter is making its way out of the Paramount camp that Robert Downey Jr. is outstanding as LA Times columnist Steve Lopez and hopes are high for a Best Actor nomination.  And as far as “Milk” is concerned, prognosticators may have the wrong idea going in as to which supporting performance has the awards-worthy chops.  More on that at a later date.

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  • 9/3 Oscarweb Round-up

    I\'ve Loved You So Long• Mark Olsen counts down Toronto’s must sees. It’s an indie dominated list (and fest, really) with more than a few surprises. [The Envelope]

    • Pete Hammond talks to Tom O’Neil about the Telluride success of “Slumdog Millionaire” and “I’ve Loved You So Long,” as well as the whole “Button” footage dust-up from yesterday. [Gold Derby]

    • Regarding the dust-up, Jeffrey Wells defends himself. [Hollywood Elsewhere]

    • Then he slams Anne Thompson’s cinematographical skills. [Hollywood Elsewhere]

    • But Brad Brevet, in nicely rounding up the whole mess for your reading pleasure, wonders whether the damage has already been done. [Rope of Silicon]

    • Which, digging through all of that, is there more to the Paramount/Fincher friction than we might know? [The Playlist]

    • In happier news, Nancy Kriparos introduces herself as Sasha Stone’s Toronto correspondent this year. [Awards Daily]

    • Michael Cieply previews Toronto from the angle of ’70s New York nostalgia dominating a number of films playing the fest. [New York Times]

  • Another vote of confidence for ‘Button’

    Kris linked earlier to Anne Thompson’s defence of the 20-minute taster of “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” — a riposte to the underwhelmed response from certain corners of the blogosphere.

    Encouragingly, Thompson’s Variety colleague Todd McCarthy is of the same mind. Saying the footage “pushes all the right buttons,” he elaborates:

    The footage looked artistically and technically impeccable, and quite different in style from Fincher’s previous work. The ambitious aging technique, employed to tell the story of a man who is born with the features of an old man and gradually grows bigger and younger, was seamless in the footage Fincher presented.

    I must say I took the criticism with a pinch of salt when I heard it — I think it’s impossible to draw conclusions on such a structurally and thematically complex work based on so little footage. As far as I’m concerned, until we can see the entirety of David Fincher’s vision, his film is innocent until proven guilty.   

  • ‘Button’ footage raises concerns at Telluride

    Brad Pitt in The Curious Case of Benjamin ButtonWell I was willing to let the first murmurs go by without commentary, but the more I poke around, the more I’m hearing that the footage from David Fincher’s “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” shown last night at the director’s tribute is underwhelming to say the least.

    This is disconcerting.  As much as I loved Eric Roth’s screenplay, I also made it a point of mentioning that it had a lot of room to be interpreted peculiarly on screen.  It’s the sort of narrative that could fly off the rails in the transition and it seems that perhaps — just perhaps — this could be the case.

    I’m keeping my hopes up for the moment, but it seems Jeffrey Wells conveyed these sentiments from one attendee:

    It just wasn’t particularly exciting or engrossing, one explained. Excellent visual effects (old Pitt as a baby, etc.) and fine cinematography but with a kind of enervated, waiting-for-something-to-happen quality. The footage showed portions of the entire film, the other friend said, but in a way that kept you from getting into it with cuts coming too abruptly. And so people were kind of…whatever, grunting and muttering on the way out.

    And now Peter Sciretta of /Film has unloaded this first hand reaction:

    I’m all for conserving the director’s artistic vision, and I’ve enjoyed most of Fincher’s work, even if Zodiac could have been 30 minutes shorter on the back end. So when I first heard rumors of the studio pushing Fincher to cut back, my first response was to write it off as another movie studio exec that just didn’t get it. But as it turns out, they might be right.

    The footage I screened tonight was met with disappointment and concern. There are moments of magic and wonder, but interrupted and surrounded by moments which had me questioning, “Is this really the best footage he has?”

    Sciretta has some nice words to say about Brad Pitt and the cinematography, but regardless of the brief high marks, I don’t think I’m alone in saying: “Gulp…”

  • New ‘Button’ TV spot

    A new spot for “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” popped up on the Olympics last night.  There’s a rather sub-par clip of the commercial up on YouTube.  Hopefully something better will land soon.

    Eric Roth’s screenplay, by the way, is an out and out masterpiece.  I’ll be reviewing it in this space a week from tomorrow.  I was floored.  If David Fincher can come close to expressing those words on the screen, it’ll have to be considered one of the year’s best films.

    Here’s the spot:

    Anne Thompson, meanwhile, is stirring the shit with some comments out of the studio regarding a lengthy cut from Fincher:

    The early word on The Curious Case of Benjamin Button: again, David Fincher has handed in a movie to Paramount that is quite long. That hurt his last pic for Paramount, Zodiac. This film is polished to a fine sheen, I understand. The word from one viewer: “shiny.”

    Well, there is always the old agage: “No good film is too long, no bad film is short enough.”  We’ll see, but the script is 160 pages (that could admittedly use some paring down), so it’s not like the studio didn’t know what it was getting in to here.

  • Now that it’s in English…

    httpv://youtube.com/watch?v=DelAqaM_p1Y

    And in Quicktime here.

  • The soon-to-be extinct ‘Benjamin Button’ trailer…

    …looks positively AMAZING. Catch it while you can. I’m sure it’ll get yanked soon enough.

    The visual effects look so exquisite and seamless.  Director David Fincher has supposedly been pretty tight-lipped about his recipe in that arena for a while, but it looks to be a truly unique blend of CGI and makeup artistry.

    httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjnd0wsISY0

    Wow.

  • Pitt finally going to get some Oscar love?

    Over the course of his impressive career, Brad Pitt has not always been appreciated for the fine actor he is. This is an actor who could easily take the cheap way out and do one goofy romantic comedy or silly film after another, but who instead takes bold risks with his career, always challenging himself, and though sometimes falling flat on his face, growing as an actor.

    Pitt is not the first actor to grow in maturity through the years; look at John Wayne, badly under appreciated for much of his career, though his work in “The Quiet Man”, “Rio Bravo” and especially “The Searchers” was astounding. His last performance, as the gunfighter dying of cancer in “The Shootist,” richly deserved Oscar attention which sadly never came.

    Actors, the great ones, live to challenge themselves, never content to continue doing what they have done before, they need change, they live for challenge.

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  • Call it 170

    Reading through Jeffrey Wells’s Hollywood Elsewhere this afternoon, I see he’s spitballing about the length of the script for David Fincher’s upcoming “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” written by Eric Roth.

    I made a call and got a different figure: 170 pages — with some considerable narration to boot.

    Wells’s point seems to be, “uh-oh, it’s gonna be long.” But as far as I’m concerned, a good movie can’t be long enough. So, you know, so be it if “Button” clocks in close to three hours long.

    A commenter at Hollywood Elsewhere, meanwhile, had this to say:

    I know somebody who’s seen a rouch (sic) cut (possibly just the assembly) and says it came in at 3 and a half hours.

    They also said it was a REALLY good 3 and a half hours, so there you go.

    Well, indeed. There you go. We’ll know more soon enough, but this is one of my most anticipated efforts of the season.

    Additionally, Roth is taking off from a 64-page short story, so we can bet on a lot of original material that, hopefully, adds to the emotional context of the original work. And the cover of the recently re-released short story, by the way, showcases the words “The inspiration for the upcoming motion picture,” so I wonder if, at the end of the day, the script might be deemed an original work because of what will likely be a profound, if necessary, departure from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s words.

  • 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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