• How many days did Bill Murray re-live in “Groundhog Day?” [Chicago Tribune]
• Screenwriter Roberto Orci to receive Imagen Awards’ Norman Lear Writer’s Award. [Variety]
• David Poland sits down with three more Super Movie Friends to talk “Inglourious Basterds.” [The Hot Blog]
Sets and props can create a time period, an era or simply the feel of a scene. And the individuals involved in this process are awarded by the Academy in the category of Best Art Direction.
Ironically, the art director of a film is not recognized here. Rather, the production designer – the art department and design head – is awarded alongside the set decorator, who is in charge of the props and overall dressing of the set.
Like Best Costume Design, which I covered a few weeks ago, this category has a tendency to reward period pieces. Even so, fantastical features do tend to show up more often, with nominees frequently overlapping the two genres, seen in a winner such as “Pan’s Labyrinth.”
John Myrhe has triumphed in this category for both of his collaborations with Rob Marshall, and I fully expect him to earn his fifth nomination this year for “Nine.” Recreating the Italy of Federico Fellini will put his talents to the test.
Janet Patterson has found herself a three-time nominee for her costume work. This year, she is also acting as production designer of Jane Campion’s “Bright Star.” Every indication we have from the film so far is that both her work and the film will be the sort that this branch will embrace.
Sarah Greenwood has managed two nominations in recent years for collaborating with Joe Wright, both for “Atonement” and “Pride & Prejudice.” With “Sherlock Holmes,” she will once again be recreating a period England, albeit on a much larger scale. If the film proves popular, I fully expect Greenwood to be in the hunt.
• Production designer Rick Carter (“A.I.: Artificial Intelligence,” “Avatar”) to be feted at Hollywood Awards. [Variety]
• Making the “prawns” of “District 9” look alien but sympathetic. [Hero Complex]
• Robert Rehme elected to head of Academy Foundation. [The Wrap]
• “Skin”: An apartheid story no one would screen. [The Independent]
• Robin Wright Penn files for divorce from husband Sean Penn. [CNN]
• Noah Forrest picks 10 films you should be excited about this fall. [Movie City News]
• “District 9” and the legacy of high-brow sci-fi. [Film School Rejects]
• Roger Ebert talks “Inglourious Basterds” with Quentin Tarantino. [Chicago Sun-Times]
• Patrick Goldstein weighs in on the Redbox brouhaha. [The Big Picture]
One of the most exciting aspects of Quentin Tarantino’s breed of cinema for this cinema obsessive who held the guy in a rather glowing light back in the mid-1990s was the idea that all of the directors’ films were connected in some way. It went beyond the simplicity of, “Hey, cool, Vincent Vega from ‘Pulp Fiction’ and Vic Vega from ‘Reservoir Dogs’ are brothers.” It said something about the power of creativity, manifesting a vast fictional world and playing God with its characters. It was something, for me, that defined Tarantino as unique.
Perhaps because the novelty wore off, perhaps because he got slightly bored with it, Tarantino eased off the throttle on this particular aspect of his films somewhere along the line, leaving people to making stabbing guesses, such as the idea that Samuel L. Jackson’s piano player in “Kill Bill” is actually Jules from “Pulp Fiction” walking the earth. Or perhaps it all just got a bit subtler, I don’t know. I would have liked a vast expansion of all of this, however. It could have been rather defining and exciting.
Rodrigo Perez at The Playlist has stumbled onto a connection between “Inglourious Basterds” and “True Romance” that keeps the Tarantinoverse light burning a little longer.
• Amid sticky financial days for The Weinstein Company, Harvey Weinstein tells you to “sit tight” and “don’t bet against” him and brother Bob. [New York Times]
• It must be going around, because ditto Universal execs Mark Shmuger and David Linde. [Los Angeles Times]
• Sharon Waxman is frustrated at the word-count of the Weinstein piece yielding little insight into the company’s financial woes. [The Wrap]
Marshalling an ensemble is something that the 46-year-old director has always excelled at, and throughout his career he has made a habit of resuscitating ailing careers – most recently, the late David Carradine in the martial arts double Kill Bill. But with his latest film, it’s Tarantino’s willingness to cast outside his Hollywood postcode that deserves praise: with Inglourious Basterds, he’s taking risks on German stars such as Til Schweiger, August Diehl and Daniel Brühl.
From this James Mottram story in London’s Independent newspaper. I find it hard to fault most of the performances in the film, actually. Save for Brad Pitt and, to a lesser extent (shockingly) Eli Roth, of course. But for the most part, I think Tarantino was pretty shrewd in the casting.
By the way, scroll down to the various comments from actors on the crew. Roth’s thoughts are the most insightful, but Pitt’s win best in show.
*All historic figures cited are adjusted to today’s dollars.
Internet hype doesn’t always translate into box office success, but “District 9” was able to live up to the buzz and debut with a strong $37 million and the top spot this weekend. For a film that cost a reported $30 million to make, this is obviously a huge win for Sony and one of the bigger surprises of the summer. As a buddy succinctly put it in a tweet: “’District 9’ might be the only movie this year I want to see that I didn’t know I wanted to see six months ago.”
Credit the fantastic marketing and an interesting/original concept in a summer-friendly genre for the success. The first two weeks of August are typically robust but then the month just dies and only two movies released past the 14th of the month have debuted higher than “District 9” (“Freddy vs. Jason” and “Mortal Kombat”). Audience reception is fantastic so I can see this one sticking around enough to reach $85 million or so. Now, who else is going as Wicus with a prawn arm for Halloween?
“G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra” takes second place after a 59% drop to $22.5 million. That actually could have been worse so Paramount will take it. The running total is already $98.8 million and that’s enough to encourage the inevitable sequel. Might I suggest the title “G.I. Joe: The Recasting of Channing Tatum?”
Third place goes to “The Time Traveler’s Wife” with $19.2 million. I’ve got nothing to say about this because quite frankly, this movie bores me. I like Rachel McAdams so I wish she’d hurry up and make a movie that looks halfway tolerable again.
“Julie & Julia” dropped a respectable 38% to $12.4 million and that should be the largest drop it experiences during its run. No other direct competition comes into play until “All About Steve” after Labor Day so I expect Meryl and Amy to be the number one choice for adult females for a while.
When I committed my considerably negative thoughts on Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds” last week, I made it a point of indicating a true diamond in the rough, Christoph Waltz’s unsettling performance of Col. Hans Landa, the quietly sadistic “killer of the Jews” who owns the screen every time he graces it. “Waltz definitely deserves the high marks he received out of this year’s Cannes Film Festival,” I wrote at the time. “It’s a vivid new spin on a classic villain persona, the still-waters-run-deep kind of stomach-twisting presence that takes real skill to pull off. Waltz makes it look pretty easy.”
It is therefore refreshing to read this brief profile of the actor in The New York Times, revealing a humble, grounded, blue-collar actor who is happy to get the recogniztion but has clearly been around the block enough times to know you keep looking forward.
In the piece, Waltz discusses, rather honestly, his opinions on the acting profession, an awareness of future pitfalls that could await his late-blooming Stateside career and, of course, the process of working with Tarantino.
You’ll be reading more and more about Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds” (review) over the next week or so as the film prepares for an Auguest 21 release, but two specific pieces caught my eye today that I had to share.
Writing at Salon’s Beyond the Multiplex blog, Andrew O’Hehir, who seems to have disliked the film but tries to steer clear of reviewing, conveys the sentiments of those who take what could be perceived as the easy road and have painted Tarantino, perhaps rightly, as an inconsiderate child whose work here is aimless, thoughtless, and in a nutshell, irresponsible:
Film critics and responsible authority figures in both Germany and Israel have almost unanimously announced that they dread “Inglourious Basterds,” and can’t see how it will contribute anything positive to the dreary world of post-Holocaust discourse.
In a separate piece across the pond in The Times, Tarantino seems to respond directly to this.
I’m not claiming to know [Quentin Tarantino] personally either, but I know enough of him to assert that he simply makes the sort of movies he wants to see, and that the Hitchcock likening of films as “slices of cake” are more apt to his Tarantino’s filmography than any of that vitriol. He’s infectiously in love with the movies, he writes terrific dialogue and he does what makes him happy. You’re basically pistol-whipping a puppy when you so harshly attack a guy like that.
Commenter Robert Cameron, in response to yesterday’s item concerning a Jeffrey Wells skewering of Quentin Tarantino and “Inglourious Basterds.”
I’m not advocating or making a statement here in the slightest. I’m merely putting out a colleague’s thoughts to the readership to gauge a reaction:
I don’t know Tarantino, but I believe he’s stuck his finger up his ass and given it a good sniff and smelled lilacs and gardenias so many times that he’s lost his mind, which is to say he’s lost whatever sense of proportion he may have once had about the relationship between juicy creative imaginings (which he’s obviously had a rollicking good time with in years past) and the way life actually is when you get dressed and put your shoes on and get in your car and put the key in the ignition and deal with the situation.
From Jeffrey Wells’s skewering of Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds.” The early graphs about “arrogance” and “sadism,” by the way, are what I was getting at when I wrote that the film depicted “a world that might appeal to an angst-ridden child, perhaps. The rage that courses through its veins is pure, concentrated tantrum.”
• Charles Burress chats up legendary animator Hayao Miyazaki. [Los Angeles Times]
• John DeVore goes fly fishing in Vermont for the “A River Runs Through It” Blu-ray junket. [Premiere]
• A.O. Scott wraps up the summer with a tired old argument against the dumbed down summer movie season. [New York Times]
• Nikki Finke takes umbrage with the “Nation’s Pride” trailer being used to promote “Inglourious Basterds.” [Deadline Hollywood Daily]
• Graeme McRanor sits down with “District 9” composer Clinton Shorter. [Jawbone.tv]
• Top 10 movie pregnancies. [The Film Experience]
Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds” isn’t as indulgent as “Death Proof” or “Kill Bill: Vol. 2,” but it doesn’t have the filmmaking panache and wit of the moving image to forgive it its sins like “Kill Bill: Vol. 1,” either. It’s a slightly more contained bout of silliness, but it’s silliness nevertheless.
The film is trademark bloated Tarantino, featuring scene after scene that could have been curtailed or expedited, which might have significantly affected an off-putting 150-minute running time. But Tarantino lost his “no” men years ago, while distribution honcho Harvey Weinstein continues to serve as an enabler of sorts.
So more of the same is what we get.
But to look deeper at “Inglourious Basterds” is to find a world that might appeal to an angst-ridden child, perhaps. The rage that courses through its veins is pure, concentrated tantrum, and somewhat passé at that. After all, what thematic purpose is served by a film — however brazen and even “fun” in its historical revisionism — that takes relentless aim at the Nazis, of all foes?
The director might have found suitable commentary with a sense of parallel or metaphor, something, anything connecting the on-screen carnage to our own state of pent-up hatred toward foreign aggressors, for instance. But that doesn’t seem to be visceral enough for Tarantino, who takes glee at a prolonged take of a human head being scalped, or the rat-a-tat obliteration of another under a hail of gunfire.
Boys will be boys, I guess. But when will that cease to be enough for Tarantino apologists?