In Contention

Tag: Ed Harris

  • Harris is McCain

    I had to stop and take a second to point this out. The Julianne-Moore-as-Sarah-Palin production still from in Jay Roach’s “Game Change” seemed about right, nothing to write home about, etc. But this still, courtesy of Entertainment Weekly, stopped me in my tracks. THAT’s Ed Harris? I saw McCain straight away and had to search for the actor in there. Brilliant transformation.

    Is that a fat suit or did Harris bulk up considerably? He’s a guy who loves to get way under the skin of a role, so I wouldn’t be surprised if he crammed some Twinkies and Ho-Hos and cupcakes and pizza and ice cream. Then again, last time we spoke (in January), he was as sinewy as ever, so I guess it’s doubtful. Then again…

    “Game Change” is scheduled to air on HBO later this year. Check out the full still after the jump.

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  • 1/24 OSCARWEB ROUND-UP: Rich’s two Americas, meet the foreign film exec committee, Jonze interviews Russell

    • Frank Rich sees two Americas in “The Social Network” and “True Grit.” [New York Times]

    • David Poland sits down with the latter’s cinematographer, Roger Deakins. [The Hot Blog]

    • Meet the executive committee charged with saving esoteric foreign films hopefuls. [The Odds]

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  • 1/19 OSCARWEB ROUND-UP: Affleck’s favorite heist films, Weinstein loves the Jets, Cameron going deep

    • Ben Affleck’s writes up his 11 favorite heist movies. [Daily Beast]

    • The Jets game was the Weinstein priority on Sunday night, not the Globes. [Page Six]

    • Dave Karger gets frisky and sticks with Hailee Steinfeld in lead for his final predictions. [Inside Movies]

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  • WEEKLY WRAP: The circuit takes hold, chatting up DiCaprio and Harris, top 10 lists

    • The week started off with “How to Train Your Dragon” predictably dominating the slate of Annie Award nominations.

    • Kris sat down with Leonardo DiCaprio and got Martin Scorsese on the phone for a large two–part piece on the actor and his impressive year.

    • He also caught up with actor Ed Harris to talk “The Way Back” and director Peter Weir.

    • It was good and bad news for The Weinstein Company as “Blue Valentine” won its ratings appeal with the MPAA, while “The King’s Speech”‘s was shot down.

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  • INTERVIEW: ‘The Way Back’ actor Ed Harris

    When actor Ed Harris was doing the press rounds for his second directorial effort, “Appaloosa,” in 2008, he was frequently asked who was on his wish list of collaborators. He remembers saying a couple of times that he’d like to work with Peter Weir again because he had such a good time on the 1998 film “The Truman Show” (which yielded the actor an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor). And it wasn’t long after that he got his wish as the screenplay for “The Way Back” came his way.

    “I would have done anything he asked me, whatever it was,” Harris says sipping an iced tea outside his Malibu home. “He’s such a thorough, committed director. It’s like the best teacher you ever had. You enjoy writing a paper for the guy, because you know the feedback is going to enlighten you. It’s going to encourage you. It’s going to make you better. And working with Peter is like that because his attention is so laser-like. You know whatever you’re doing he’s paying attention to. One of the things I like to do as an actor is the specificity of any given character but working with Peter enhances that even more. You’re just aware. It makes you focus on the moment-to-moment reality of what you’re doing.”

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  • 11/15 OSCARWEB ROUND-UP: Oscar’s shortest perf, gauging 16 animated submissions, Menken and Moore on ‘Tangled’

    • John Lopez talks to “The Way Back” star and Best Supporting Actor hopeful Ed Harris. [Little Gold Men]

    • From last year, Stinkylulu writes up the shortest performance ever nominated for an Oscar: Herminone Baddeley’s 2 minutes and 26 seconds in 1959’s “Room at the Top.” [Stinkylulu]

    • Scott Feinberg smartly tracks down the HBO doc “High on Crack Street,” featuring prominently in “The Fighter.” [ScottFeinberg.com]

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  • OSCAR TALK: Ep. 39 — ‘Megamind,’ ‘The Way Back,’ Oscar’s actress contenders and more

    Oscar TalkWelcome 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.

    As we move into November, AFI Fest is heating up, campaigns are in full swing (talent being pitched left and right) and pretty soon I’ll be eating turkey and watching “Planes, Trains and Automobiles.” Crazy. We had a slightly shorter window this week, but let’s see what’s on the docket today…

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  • ‘The Way Back’ again

    I took in a second screening of Peter Weir’s “The Way Back” last night after seeing and loving it at the Telluride Film Festival last month (enough to write about it a second time while I was there, in fact).  What was confirmed for me was that the majesty of the film and the overall sense of atmosphere Weir establishes and maintains makes it one of the very best films of the year.

    A few other things stuck out, too.  I was always taken by Ed Harris’s “Mr. Smith” character and his fatherly relationship with Saoirse Ronan, but it’s a defining arc within the piece that is transcendent and could help make a solid case for Harris in the supporting actor race.

    I was also struck by the makeup, which feels authentic and adds a notch of intrigue when this wound or that is revealed.  You’ll recall “Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World” was nominated in the field seven years ago for similar work.  Both of these aspects were touched on in the post-screening Q&A with Harris, producer/co-writer Keith Clarke, producer Joni Levin and executive producer (and longtime agent for Weir), John Ptak.

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  • Peter Weir and ‘The Way Back’ set to enter the race

    Good news for Peter Weir fans.  I’m hearing a press release announcing that the Aussie director’s first film in seven years will be given a fighting chance in this year’s film awards season is imminent.

    The film, of course, is “The Way Back.” Newmarket Films was announced as the distributor on opening day of this year’s Telluride Film Festival (where Weir was in attendance for a tribute and the film saw its world premiere). It was immediately slated for a January 21, 2011 wide release date, but there was no indication that it would have a presence in the Oscar season.

    Just last week, Newmarket president and co-founder Chris Ball pulled back from the company to form a new shingle, Wrekin Hill Entertainment, and “The Way Back” was announced as one of the company’s first releases (jointly with Newmarket). And today it looks like the film will be slated for a one-week Oscar qualifying run in December.

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  • 10/1 OSCARWEB ROUND-UP: Harris on his career, McCarthy remembers Menke, King wants vampires done right

    • Ed Harris opens up about his career (speaking of which, P.S.: I’m hearing a one-week qualifier for “The Way Back” may just happen after all). [MakingOf]

    • Stephen King: Do vampires right! [Entertainment Weekly]

    • Speaking of vampires, Steven Zeitchik sits down with “Let Me In” director Matt Reeves. [Los Angeles Times]

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  • INTERVIEW: Peter Weir

    Telluride Film Festival

    For director Peter Weir, the pacing of his output has become almost as measured as his brand of cinema. The Australian has built a career around art house grandeur, but his work has slowed to a handful of films per decade, in stark contrast to the frequency of the 1970s and 1980s.

    That could be reflective of a professional desire to take his time from project to project, but another hypothesis could be the fact that the general movie-going audience has shown a reluctance to the product Weir and those like him provide. The industry is changing around him, and for his part, the director appears to be a mighty oak in the storm.

    “I’ve sensed this profound change that’s occurring in the industry that’s not purely locked to the Wall Street crisis,” he says in a modest hotel room here at the Telluride Film Festival, where his film, “The Way Back,” saw its world premiere. “That’s obviously a significant part of it, but what I thought was there is a change in taste amongst a growing audience that really likes sequels and likes their films very, very simple and in the area of pure spectacle. They’re not interested in structural character, and I think the studios and others have reacted to that.”

    However, Weir says he thinks it’s all “a bit of baby out with the bath water because they then more or less said, ‘That’s it, that’s the change.’ Well people and audiences don’t change overnight. And I think there’s a large audience left high and dry, the type of people who appreciate a program like here around the world who are saying, ‘What happened? There’s nothing on.’ Everything does change but I think there’s been an over-reaction on the part of distributors and there’s been a kind of deep conservatism that has come in which has led them back to what we call the genres.”

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  • TELLURIDE: ‘The Way Back,’ ‘The King’s Speech’

    The second day of Telluride has brought treat after treat. I decided early this morning to skip the world premiere of Danny Boyle’s “127 Hours” in favor of Tom Hooper’s “The King’s Speech” because I could slide two films in rather than the one. Peter Weir’s latest, “The Way Back” (which didn’t generate many reviews at all from last night’s premiere — most must have been at “Never Let Me Go”) was playing shortly after.

    It couldn’t have been a better decision. I was treated to both the film of the festival so far and a profoundly moving work of art from a modern master.

    Let’s dive in…

    “The Way Back” (****)

    Peter Weir has made a career out of visual feasts with thematic resilience. Some might consider him the David Lean of our time, and with good reason. But the key difference is that Weir has slowly developed an art house niche out of epic scale filmmaking.

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  • PAGE TO SCREEN: “The Long Walk” by Slavomir Rawicz

    In one of the year’s more groan-worthy feats of movie marketing magic, Disney recently slapped their plucky horse ’n’ housewife drama “Secretariat” with a paradox of a tagline in “The Impossible True Story.” No sooner had they done so than assorted sniggering blogger types responded with a perfectly reasonable question: if the story is impossible, how can it be true?

    That said, whoever ends up handling Peter Weir’s currently distributor-less “The Way Back” may rather wish they had bagged this ropey tagline first. Adapted from the ghostwritten 1956 memoir by Slavomir Rawicz, a former Polish cavalry officer and Gulag labor camp survivor, the film tackles a story that is indeed “impossible” in the Disney-dictionary sense – read: extraordinary – but also, to some extent, in the literal one: two years after his 2004 death, Rawicz’s account was entirely discredited by historians.

    In the book, following the 1939 invasion of Poland, a 25 year-old Rawicz is arrested, tortured and unjustly convicted of treason by the Soviets. Sentenced to 25 years’ hard labor in the remote Gulags of Siberia, he is placed in a POW chain-gang and subjected to a gruelling two-month journey northwards, whereupon the scarcely less arduous drill of prison life begins.

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  • The Great Performances: 2005

    Heath Ledger in Brokeback Mountain2005 was the year of Heath Ledger’s beautiful, moving performance in “Brokeback Mountain,” which I saw for the first time in Toronto.  It instantly became the talk of the festival, and the film became the one to beat for the Academy Award.

    Ledger was astonishing as the taciturn cowboy who is more surprised than anybody when his soulmate turns out to be another cowboy, portrayed superbly by Jake Gyllenhall. If there is a more deeply felt moment in film history than Ledger gently adjusting Gyllenhall’s shirt at the end of the film, his eyes filled with tears, I don’t know what it is. That’s loss, that is absolute heartbreak, that is one of the greatest acting performances of the decade.

    Phillip Seymour Hoffman would win the Oscar for his transformation into “Capote” and he’s very good, but just not in the same league as Ledger. I wondered from time to time if “Infamous” had been released earlier if Toby Jones might have won the Oscar instead of Hoffman. Each becomes Capote in a very different manner, and side by side it is difficult to choose the stronger portrayal. Certainly I prefer Hoffman’s as it is darker, and for me more realistic, but there can be no denying Jones.

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  • The Great Performances: 2002

    Chris Cooper in Adaptation2002 was probably one of the greatest years for performance excellence in film history, from leading actor right through all the supporting players. They could have easily nominated 10 actors in each of the four acting categories, and still missed some.

    Though Adrien Brody won the Oscar for “The Pianist,” which was a huge shock, I have always felt that Jack Nicholson gave one of his finest performances in “About Schmidt.” I suspect he and Daniel Day-Lewis in “Gangs of New York” may have split the vote in some way, allowing for Brody’s win.

    Michael Caine was up for “The Quiet American” after that film scored with critics at many precursor fests, and Nicolas Cage was the fifth nominee in “Adaptation.” Great performances all, deserving performances all, but there were so many other noteworthy turns.  Like Robin Williams’s chilling performance in “One Hour Photo” as a deranged photo lab worker obsessed with a family. Equally brilliant was Leonardo DiCaprio as the young fraudster in “Catch Me If You Can” while Tom Cruise gave one of his very best performances in Steven Spielberg’s “Minority Report.”

    One of the year’s very best films, “Road to Perdition,” contained one of the year’s best leading performances from Tom Hanks, as a lethal killer on the run from his own mob.  And though I loathe the work of Richard Gere, I must confess he did some of his finest work in “Chicago,” winning a Golden Globe for his performance, but no Oscar nod.

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  • The Great Performances: 2000

    Tom Hanks in Cast AwayMichael Douglas was robbed.

    The already Oscar-christened actor gave a career-best performance in 2000 in Curtis Hanson’s “Wonder Boys,” but he got no love from the Academy. Worse, his performance was easily among the five best of the year and won the Los Angeles Film Critics Association Best Actor prize.

    That having been said, I don’t think Douglas actually deserved the Oscar in 2000.  That honor belonged to Tom Hanks in “Cast Away” for a performance that was nothing less than astounding. For two and a half hours Hanks commands the screeen, moving into silent film territory for a stretch, the actor using strictly his body and face for the performance. Anyone who has ever, and I mean ever, doubted his range needs to take a hard look at this film.

    The five nominees for Best Actor in 2000 were Hanks, Russell Crowe for “Gladiator,” Ed Harris in “Pollock,” Geoffrey Rush in “Quills” and Javier Bardem in “Before Night Falls.” For me, Douglas was the most glaring omission, followed by George Clooney’s Gable-esque work in “O Brother, Where Art Thou?,” which I think remains one of the actor’s very best pieces of work.

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  • The Great Performances: 1998

    Edward Norton in American History XFor all my bitching about Roberto Benigni winning Best Actor in 1998 for his incessant mugging in “Life is Beautiful,” I was also thrilled the Academy watched enough films and paid enough attention to realize that Edward Norton was deserving for his magnetic turn as a neo-Nazi who sees the light in “American History X.” Norton was electrifying as Derek, the charismatic leader of a group of skinheads, handpicked by the older gentleman, played with menace and sleaze by Stacey Keach, who believes in what Hitler taught and seeks to spread the word to the youth of California.

    Norton gave the best performance by an actor I saw in 1998, but the Academy got caught up in the groundswell of support of Benigni’s movie, a fable set in a death camp. I’m not a fan, either of his overwrought, over the top performance, or the film itself. No rant, you all know what I think there.

    That said, there was a bounty of great male performances in 1998, many of which went unnoticed by the Academy. They did their best to get it right, though.  Joining Norton and Benigni for nominations were Nick Nolte in “Affliction,” Ian McKellen, superb in “Gods and Monsters,” and Tom Hanks as the weary soldier in Steven Spielberg’s magnificent “Saving Private Ryan.”

    Not even nominated, however, were Warren Beatty for his brilliant turn as the truth-talking senator in “Bulworth,” Joseph Fiennes in Best Picture winner “Shakespeare in Love,” Jim Carrey in “The Truman Show,” George Clooney in “Out of Sight,” Brendan Gleason in “The General” and John Travolta in “Primary Colors” or “A Civil Action,” take your pick.  And perhaps the most deserving of all: Jeff Bridges as The Dude in “The Big Lebowski,” the actor’s finest work, in my opinion.

    Each of the aforemenetioned men gave stronger performances than the eventual Oscar winner, yet failed to nab a nomination.  Jeez!

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  • The Great Performances: 1995

    (from left) Clint Eastwood and Meryl Streep in The Bridges of Madison CountyBased on some of the comments I received last week regarding my article on great acting, I took the suggestion of a young lady and am kicking off a series of articles, one per week, that will explore the best performances ofeach year, beginning today with 1995.  So let’s go back and work our way towards 2008 and discover the great film performances we know about, and maybe a few we do not.

    The Academy did a pretty fine job in 1995 when it came to the acting nominees.  Sure there was some shock when John Travolta was snubbed for his superb work in “Get Shorty,” and those hoping for a three-peat with Tom Hanks missed it when the actor was not nominated for his solid work in “Apollo 13.” I personally would like to have seen Clint Eastwood nominated for his wonderful work in “The Bridges of Madison County,” but there are just five slots open, and so many fine pieces of acting.

    One could also argue for Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt, both excellent in David Fincher’s “Seven,” or Bruce Willis, who was nobly brilliant in “Twelve Monkeys,” and perhaps even Jack Nicholson in “The Crossing Guard.”

    Nobody could argue with Nicolas Cage in “Leaving Las Vegas,” Sean Penn in “Dead Man Walking” or Anthony Hopkins for “Nixon” as Best Actor nominees.  And frankly I believe Penn gave the best performance of the year, one for the ages in fact. However, Richard Dreyfuss in “Mr. Holland’s Opus?” Seriously?  I love Dreyfuss and I think he’s even been short-changed in the past, but come one.  He does fine work and it’s not his fault the script asks him to be mushy and sentimental, but I have struggled with his nomination over Hanks, Travolta and Eastwood for many years.

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