In Contention

Tag: Kirk Baxter

  • OSCAR GUIDE: Best Film Editing

    I’m afraid you’ll find that I’m having trouble getting all that excited about this year’s race for Best Film Editing. How can I when the absolute best editing job of the year (from a true master, no less) was shunned altogether, while a cruel joke was played in the form of “Inception” editor Lee Smith getting the shaft, too.

    The below is a decent set of contenders with an array of virtues. It’s just a shame that the editor’s branch is so slavishly devoted to Best Picture frontrunners, especially when truly exceptional work that doesn’t necessarily find itself dovetailing with Oscar bait is ignored each and every year. Nevertheless, the statistic remains: in 30 years, no film not nominated here has gone on to win Best Picture.

    The nominees are:

    “Black Swan” (Andrew Weisblum)
    “The Fighter” (Pamela Martin)
    “The King’s Speech” (Tariq Anwar)
    “127 Hours” (Jon Harris)
    “The Social Network” (Angus Wall and Kirk Baxter)

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  • 2/10 OSCARWEB ROUND-UP: ‘Gasland’ director fires back, Wahlberg/Russell on Aronofsky, hoping Banksy stays away

    • Mark Wahlberg and David O. Russell on Darren Aronofsky’s departure from “The Fighter.” [Inside Movies]

    • Eric Kohn writes up the Oscar shorts. [indieWIRE]

    • Josh Fox fires back at gas industry accusations about the accuracy of his documentary, “Gasland.” [Facebook]

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  • TECH SUPPORT: Final analysis, part two

    Yesterday I began a final look at the crafts categories. Today, a look at the four remaining fields: Best Art Direction, Best Cinematography, Best Costume Design and Best Film Editing.

    BEST ART DIRECTION

    The precursors of the BFCA, BAFTA and Art Directors Guild have been fairly consistent in citing four titles in this category. Last year’s winner, Robert Stromberg, seems poised to dip again for creation of a 3D world on Tim Burton’s “Alice in Wonderland.” Eve Stewart, on the other hand, will likely be returning to the fold after an 11 year absence for “The King’s Speech.”

    Guy Hendrix Dyas and Jess Gonchor also have got all necessary precursors, and have fashioned surefire Best Picture nominees, in “Inception” and “True Grit” respectively. It is true that they have had difficulty being nominated in the past but Gonchor has also never had such an Oscar-friendly opportunity, whereas the impressive, integral-to-the-story nature of Dyas’s work has been especially embraced by the precursors.

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  • Toasting the ‘Social Network’ DVD release

    Sony pulled out all the stops last night with a big to-do soiree on behalf of the DVD/Blu-ray release of “The Social Network.” You go to these things, you expect a certain level of restraint, and then I’m pulling up to Spago and they’ve got the red carpet rolled out and the flashbulbs are popping and, well — it wasn’t an intimate Il Cielo thing, that’s for sure.  It was a great time, though.

    Tons of cast and crew were on hand.  I finally got some face time with Jesse Eisenberg, who made me totally nervous, to be quite honest.  He has a flustered (but endearing) way about him, and is a true gentleman.  Nevertheless, it seemed to me he wanted out of there.  Hey, it’s a lot to deal with for a young, unassuming actor like him.  He’s right at the front of a massive Oscar campaign for a highly successful film.  What can you say?  Good luck to him.

    I’ve of course already spoken to composer Atticus Ross and film editor Kirk Baxter, but it was nice to put faces to the names.  Trent Reznor couldn’t attend.  Also from the crew was cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth, a great guy.  His first film was Fincher’s “Fight Club” back in 1999.  And Fincher was there.  Didn’t get a chance to speak with him.  Aaron Sorkin and Armie Hammer as well.  A brief exchange with Andrew Garfield.  Most everyone turned out.

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  • TECH SUPPORT INTERVIEW: The construction of ‘The Social Network’

    One of the immediately striking things about Aaron Sorkin’s screenplay for “The Social Network” is its assemblage, the manner in which he chose to tell the story with cascading elements of the narrative. And when you bring on a meticulous craftsman like David Fincher to direct a film already detailed in its larval stage, you can bet that the attention to each moving part and how it fits into the whole will be amplified.

    So it is that the construction of “The Social Network” — and the contributions from its below-the-line crew toward those ends — could be the most defining aspect of a film dominating the precursor awards circuit to date.  I recently spoke to film editors Angus Wall and Kirk Baxter, sound mixers Ren Klyce and Michael Semanick and composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross to discuss those various moving parts, as well as their collaboration with a filmmaker who shows great respect for their art forms.

    Wall and Baxter don’t go back all that far with Fincher, believe it or not. They’re first pass on one of his films was 2007’s “Zodiac,” which was largely Wall’s film but Baxter was brought on to help out a bit. “Once I was in there I was difficult to move,” Baxter says.

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  • TECH SUPPORT: Best Film Editing — Volume II

    So important but so hard to notice. That’s how I would describe the work of our best film editors – those cutting artists who blend and juxtapose frames together to make films coherent, establish a flow and also set the mood in a manner that suits the screenwriter’s words and the director’s vision.

    The Academy Award for Best Film Editing is, more than any other category, very much tied to the Best Picture race. Despite a blip from 2005-2007, this category always has at least three – usually four, sometimes all five – of its nominees also nominated in the big category. Now that there are 10 nominees, however, one cannot help but wonder if we are ever going to again see a nominee here also not cited in Best Picture.

    Apart from Best Picture contention, being a war film, action film or musical never hurts here. I must say, however, that since I last previewed this category in August, I continue to believe that the three titles I had leading the way then are still out in front.

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  • ‘127 Hours,’ ‘Social Network’ up for Hollywood fest honors

    The press release, in part:

    The 14th Annual Hollywood Film Festival and Hollywood Awards, presented by Starz, are pleased to announce that producers Danny Boyle and Christian Colson will be honored with the “Hollywood Producer Award,” screenwriter Aaron Sorkin will get the “Hollywood Screenwriter Award,” and Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall will be honored with the “Hollywood Editor Award” at the festival’s Hollywood Awards Gala Ceremony…

    “We are honored to recognize these exceptionally talented artists for their outstanding work and creative vision at this year’s Hollywood Awards Gala,” said [founder Carlos] de Abreu.

    Full list of honorees announced thus far after the jump.

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  • Fincher’s ‘Social Network’ nails human frailty

    The best films are rarely about just one thing, but rather that one thing as reflected through a variety of narrative prisms.  And there is something to be said about a film that manages to distill an era while profoundly conveying a character study within.

    David Fincher’s “The Social Network” may be the quintessential story of young Machiavellian entrepreneurship in an age of streamlined communication, but it is also a story of the social disconnect that can be as galvanizing as any other source of ambition…for better or worse.  The Mark Zuckerberg of Fincher’s film uses the sting of that disconnect to spark a fire of creativity, and the film very much concerns itself with the gauntlet of his motivation.  (The New Yorker’s profile, culled from rare extensive interviews with the 26-year-old billionaire, is a wonderful primer for the dramatization.)

    In some sense, the film could be viewed as a distant cousin of Darren Aronofsky’s “Black Swan,” both presenting protagonists flawed by their own aggressive drive.  But while Nina is a tragic figure of self-destruction, Zuckerberg is a tragic figure of self-alienation.

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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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  • ‘Button’ sparkles on Criterion Blu

    Cover of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button Criterion Blu-rayThe Criterion release of David Fincher’s “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” is a superlative piece of home entertainment to say the least, especially on Blu-ray.  Claudio Miranda’s photography was absolutely gorgeous as it was in cinemas, but being largely digital, the transition to high definition is seamless and probably belongs in the top tier of Blu-ray releases thus far from a visual standpoint.

    Technical attributes aside, I can’t say enough about the epic making-of documentary that is featured on the film’s supplemental materials disc.  At nearly three hours, it all but dwarf’s the film’s already massive running time.

    Opening with a rather emotional personal story from Fincher that recounts his father’s death at the hands of pancreatic cancer, the brief intro gives you more than enough insight into the director’s reasons for taking on the project, which of course had been bouncing around Hollywood for two decades when the wheels were finally put into motion.

    In fact, the doc does a brilliant job of showcasing the years of non-starts that producers Kathleen Kennedy and Gary Marshall had to suffer through on the way to finally realizing the project on screen.  No matter your opinion of the film, you have to respect that kind of dedication.

    There is an exceptional amount of behind-the-scenes footage stitched together by talking-head interviews with principles both above and below the line.  But most interesting were accounts of the day-to-day troubles of working in post-Katrina New Orleans, which ranged from a depleted trolley car fleet (which the production was dependent on for period correctness) to a lack of public works personnel to assist in the production (because the department had been whittled down considerably due to countless lay-offs).

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  • TECH SUPPORT INTERVIEW: The crafts of ‘Benjamin Button,’ part two

    Tech Support at In ContentionYesterday was the first of our two-part look at the crafts artists behind “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.” Today, I feature conversations with cinematographer Claudio Miranda, visual effects supervisor Eric Barba and film editors Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall, who have all received Oscar nominations for their work on the film.

    When asked about the enormity of the project, Wall rhetorically asks, “‘How do you eat a whale? One bite at a time.  The metaphor we always used is that we always look not at the peak but our feet. It was a two-year process and you have to be sure of every decision you make every day because it affects the end project.”

    Miranda admits he was intimidated by the task of breaking down the script. “I had to just try to imagine how this would be realized on screen,” he says, “going through each task at hand, devising a plan for all the different looks, especially with some things on blue screen.”

    Barba was especially scared that the main character would have to be created by visual effects for the first 50 minutes. “We had to make it work or else it wouldn’t be believable,” he says. “I had to think of the enormity of having to do what up until now hasn’t been done.”

    As regards the man at the helm, Baxter agrees with his colleagues who were featured yesterday that David Fincher is “extremely helpful and very very clear. He knows when to be loose and when to be a lot more specific. He’s got great intuition on what his crew needs from him.”

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