In Contention

Tag: Matt Damon

  • WEEKLY WRAP: Festival pick-ups, the season’s fetes and the PGA’s 10

    Robert Duvall in Get Low• We wrapped up Toronto as Lee Daniels’s “Precious” took the festival’s audience award, putting it on a solid track for Oscar.

    • We got a look at the first trailer for “Harry Brown,” which may or may not be an awards film for actor Michael Caine.  John, you’ll recall, isn’t feeling it.

    • We saw ‘Meatball’ dominance at the box office in this weekend’s Sunday Cents column.

    • This week’s Off the Carpet column kicked off our weekly Oscar coverage with a call for perspective on the perceived Best Picture frontrunners, while a new weekly column from across the pond — The Long Shot — introduces a different perspective mid-week.

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  • POLL: What did you think of Matt Damon in ‘The Informant?’

    It’s been a LONG time since our last poll (and that “Avatar” trailer intriguingly split the readership right down the middle).  So I figured this weekend’s biggest awards-flavored release, “The Informant!,” was a good point of entry.

    One of our loyal readers asked in the Sunday Cents column whether Matt Damon’s performance had enough steam to make it into Oscar contention once the rest of the field has shown itself, and I think that’s a fair enough question.  I personally think it’s the actor’s best work to date and will have more than enough gas to get him there, but I’d like to know what readers thought of the work in general.

    So have your say in this week’s sidebar poll.  What did you think of Damon’s performance?  Expand further in the comments section if you like.

  • INTERVIEW: Steven Soderbergh

    Steven SoderberghToronto Film Festival

    Steven Soderbergh freely admits how much luck has played into his career, beginning with winning the coveted Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1989, the victory that launched his career and his first major work, “sex, lies and videotape.”

    “First of all the film was not supposed to be part of the competition but when another film was removed they bumped mine into that category,” he explains, “and then Francis Ford Coppola, who was supposed to be head of jury, couldn’t do it, so Wim Wenders took over. Without those two sets of circumstances would anything good have come out of Cannes for me? You have to ask yourself those things. Luck was with me, and I am fine with that. It’s knowing what to do with that luck.”

    Soderbergh is a relaxed guy in this posh hotel suite. For some reason Warner Bros. chose the Royal York Hotel for their press days, away from festival village, and a cab (or subway) ride away from the action. I don’t mind the break, and frankly I admire Soderbergh very much, so I was looking forward to meeting him and speaking with him about his film “The Informant!” (opening today) and his career.

    At this stage in his life, as he nears 50, Sodebrergh smiles and says he sees so much comedy in the world around him these days.  “You have to see the humor in things don’t you,” he asks.  “When I read ‘The Informant’ for the first time I saw it as a comedy, which many other people did not. But think about it, there have been films like this done as drama, Michael Mann’s ‘The Insider,’ which I like very much, so I chose not to go in that direction.

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  • 9/18 Web Round-up

    Matt Damon in The Informant!• Matt Damon on packing on the pounds for “The Informant!,” among other things. [USA Today]

    • Which earth crisis documentary is for you? [Beyond the Multiplex]

    • In honor of “A Prophet,” newly submitted as France’s foreign film Oscar representative, a list of the best-ever prison films. [Awards Daily]

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  • TORONTO: ‘The Informant!,’ ‘Jennifer’s Body,’ ‘Up in the Air,’ ‘Hugh Hefner’

    Megan Fox in Jennifer's Body(Please note, as opposed to Kris and Guy, I tend to grade films on a 5-star scale.)

    Day two of the festival is always among the busiest because the major studios are here and they want you to see their films. Movies with buzz coming out of Toronto quite often end up in the Oscar race.

    “Slumdog Millionaire” exploded out of this festival last year and went all the way to eight Academy Awards.  Who would have thought coming in to Toronto that Danny Boyle’s film would rock the fest? So which film will it be this year?

    If Venice and Telluride can tell us anything it is that Jason Reitman’s “Up in the Air” is winning critics over and should land George Clooney in the Oscar race once again for Best Actor.  Kris certainly loved the film when he saw it, and frankly, so did I.

    But Clooney will not be alone here in the race for Best Actor.  One of his good friends will be right there with him: Matt Damon for his amazing work in “The Informant!.” Today was one of those good days when I bounced from good film to great film back to good film, to great documentary. I may have seen the best of the fest on Friday.

    Let’s get into some reactions…

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  • 9/9 Web Round-up

    Matt Damon in The Bourne Ultimatum• Roger Deakins, Alexandre Desplat and Colleen Atwood added to Hollywood film fest honorees. [Variety]

    • Matt Damon talks “Bourne 4.” [Empire]

    • Viggo Mortensen planning an early retirement after the release of “The Road?” [Cinema Blend]

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  • SHORT TAKE: “The Informant!” (***)

    The Informant!

    Venice Film Festival

    That jaunty exclamation mark handily sets the tone for Steven Soderbergh’s “The Informant!,” a flip, frisky entertainment that may well represent the year’s most audacious feat of adaptation.

    Of course, the trailer already (and unavoidably) pulled the covers from the film’s biggest trick: that writer Scott Z. Burns (“The Bourne Ultimatum”) has reimagined Kurt Eichenwald’s dense non-fiction thriller about a mid-1990s agribusiness price-fixing scandal as a rapid-fire corporate comedy of errors, like “The Insider” as filtered through the dry whimsy of Preston Sturges.

    It’s a double or nothing strategy that merrily pays off, offering rich comic dividends as the true-life nature of the material elevates its absurdity, but — far more surprisingly — not sacrificing the sense of consequence and complexity in the events at hand.

    Critically touching on both the antisocial nature of corporate American greed and the inefficiency of the government in curbing it, the film actually makes an elegant companion piece to its its festival compatriot, Michael Moore’s “Capitalism: A Love Story” (reviewed here).

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  • 8/28 Web Round-up

    Joseph Gordon-Levitt• “Avatar”-izing James Cameron’s past characters. [MTV Movies Blog]

    • Following “The Hurt Locker,” Kathryn Bigelow aiming for a similar visceral style for “Triple Frontier.” [The Playlist]

    • Joseph Gordon-Levitt: the new Heath Ledger? [The Guardian]

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  • Steven Soderbergh’s ‘The Informant!’ gets a trailer

    Could be softball fun or could be an ace up WB’s sleeve. Matt Damon looks outstanding.  First time since “Moulin Rouge!” that a movie title features an exclamation point?:

  • PAGE TO SCREEN: “Playing the Enemy” by John Carlin

    Playing the Enemy by John CarlinThere are few things as antithetical to great drama as an unmitigated hero, a character rendered almost inhuman by unfailing nobleness and valor. In fiction and non-fiction alike, we are inevitably more compelled by the flawed and conflicted of our kind – whether in lurid warts-and-all celebrity biographies or more subtly probing character studies. In film, true-life heroes often make for worthily sanitized Oscar bait (from “Gandhi” to “Milk”), but they rarely provoke great art.

    Few figures bear out this truth as handily as Nelson Mandela – a man who is surely the greatest political hero of our time, but who has nonetheless inspired a number of crashingly dull books and films. It’s not that the man wants for character or complexity: Mandela’s deserved (if artfully self-engineered) modern sainthood belies his early days as a fierce firebrand, but few biographies (and to date, no biopic) have bridged that gap, or made much of an attempt to study the man beneath the myth.

    So it comes as no surprise that John Carlin’s “Playing the Enemy,” which forms the inspiration for Clint Eastwood’s recently-titled film “Invictus,” does little to change this, casting the first black president of South Africa less as a freestanding character than as a perma-haloed symbol of democratic benevolence. Of course, in this instance, Carlin’s intent was not to write another Mandela biography – just as it should be stressed that Eastwood’s film isn’t really a Mandela biopic.

    In narrowing his focus to South Africa’s monumental victory in the 1995 Rugby World Cup, the currency of which extended beyond simple sporting patriotism to a kind of symbolic consolidation of the country’s international post-apartheid rehabilitation, Carlin’s aim is precisely to dehumanise Mandela to an extent. At the book’s core is the somewhat tenuous thesis that Mandela almost single-handedly enabled this against-the-odds triumph via an elaborately strategized charm offensive – though Carlin pays sporadic attention to Mandela the man, his chief interest lies in the mid-1990s invention of Mandela the brand, and the influence it could wield.

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  • EXCLUSIVE: Eastwood’s Mandela film titled ‘Invictus’

    (from left) Matt Damon and Clint Eastwood on the set of InvictusIt’s interesting how news bites trickle down.  A passing comment from our own Chad Hartigan over at Twitter stirred the stagnant buzz nest of Clint Eastwood’s still-filming Nelson Mandela project for me, so I did a little digging.

    Anyone who follows the film awards season is well aware of the project, which will star Morgan Freeman as the esteemed former president of South Africa and Matt Damon as Francois Pienaar, captain of the South Africa Springboks rugby union team that won an unlikely World Cup trophy in 1995 as the nation was in the midst of post-Apartheid transition.  The story was committed to print in John Carlin’s book “Playing the Enemy” in 2008.  Eastwood mentioned at the Santa Barbara Film Festival in January that Carlin’s book covered similar territory to his as-of-then untitled film but didn’t mention whether Anthony Peckham’s screenplay was a proper adaptation of the volume.

    But back to that Twitter message.  It read, quite simply, “Eastwood’s film called Invictus.”  So I called Malpaso, Eastwood’s production company.  I asked if this was indeed the case and was told, swiftly, “that’s still all in the works.”  No confirmation was forthcoming.  Fair enough.  I got Chad on the phone and tracked down his source, which was an internal industry email that read: “Please note, Clint Eastwood’s untitled Nelson Mandela film is now titled ‘Invictus.’”  A quick email to his source at Warner Bros. and I got the confirmation.  We have a title.  But what does it mean?  Read on to find out.

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  • Year-in-advance winner predictions

    Yes, I’m insane, but before I leave off this year’s year-in-advance week, by request, I thought I’d throw up a random set of winner predictions and see if I was close to the target next February.  Last year I managed three correct guesses (four if you count Winslet for the wrong movie), two of them in the tech categories, so maybe I can at least up that tally.  I really want to predict Clint’s movie for Best Picture, but I have some weird sense of irritation at predicting an untitled movie.  Oh well, who cares?

    Best Picture: “Nine”
    Best Director: Rob Marshall, “Nine”
    Best Actor: Morgan Freeman, “Untitlted Nelson Mandela Project”
    Best Actress: Michelle Pfeiffer, “Chéri”
    Best Supporting Actor: Matt Damon, “Untitlted Nelson Mandela Project”
    Best Supporting Actress: Mo’Nique, “Precious”
    Best Adapted Screenplay: “Nine”
    Best Original Screenplay: “Up”
    Best Art Direction: “Amelia”
    Best Cinematography: “Nine”
    Best Costume Design: “Chéri”
    Best Film Editing: “Nine”
    Best Makeup: “The Wolf Man”
    Best Music (Original Score): “Broken Embraces”
    Best Music (Original Song): “Nine”
    Best Sound Editing: “Green Zone”
    Best Sound Mixing: “Nine”
    Best Visual Effects: “Avatar”
    Best Animated Feature Film: “Up”

    Those will all be wrong.  Each and every one of them.

    (And in case you missed it: OFF THE CARPET: Handicapping 2009 a year in advance!?)

  • OFF THE CARPET: Handicapping 2009 a year in advance!?

    Ewan McGregor and Hilary Swank in AmeliaAhh.  The dust is settling.  And on the horizon, just visible through the mist and waiting to drive us all up the wall once again: the 2009 Oscar season.

    I’ve been writing this year-in-advance column for probably six years now, and I always look forward to gazing ahead.  No one dives in so pathetically deep this far out as yours truly, but in exchange for not having a life for the past few months, I get to unload this burden the day after our annual season’s peak and forget about little gold men entirely for a few months.

    It’s quite liberating.

    The most interesting thing about the season to come, from my vantage point, is the lack of a dreaded “frontrunner status” for any of the contenders.  Some might say Clint Eastwood’s Nelson Mandela project (which is not called “The Human Factor,” mind you — the director says the film is currently untitled and is based on John Carlin’s book “Playing the Enemy”).

    Others might say Rob Marshall’s “Nine” (coming from a money-tight company hoping to avoid echoes of “Memoirs of a Geisha”).  But I don’t see a “Geisha” from here, or a “Charlie Wilson’s War,” expected heavies waiting to miss the mark.  The field is curiously flat, and as a result, excitingly broad.

    Let’s get to it, shall we?

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  • Who almost starred in the season’s Oscar nominated films?

    Linus Roache in Batman BeginsThe folks at notstarring.com have put together a list of the year’s Oscar contenders and the stars who turned down opportunities to star in them.  There is, of course, Nicolas Cage in “The Wrestler” and Russell Crowe in “Australia.”  Heath Ledger is also mentioned for the latter (somehow I didn’t know that).

    “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” given its lengthy gestation period in Hollywood, had a slew of names attached: Steven Spielberg, Spike Jonze and Ron Howard in the director’s chair, Tom Cruise, John Travolta and Rachel Weisz in front of the camera.

    Those of us who follow Batman casting decisions closely know all the names that pop up in the “Dark Knight” section, though somehow I never realized Linus Roache was going to reprise his role of Thomas Wayne in flashbacks.  I feel like that would have worked and been a nice element to tie the film more closely to “Batman Begins.”

    There are plenty others to read through, including Matt Damon and Chris Evans being considered for the roles that eventually went to Josh Brolin and James Franco respectively in “Milk.”  There’s even a beefy section on “Wanted.”  Go have a look.

  • SANTA BARBARA: Clint Eastwood hailed as a Modern Master

    Clint EastwoodSo Clint Eastwood arrived in town tonight without all the pizazz you might have expected, as I reported from this evening’s Arlington Theatre event.  But inside the place was bananas.  Every single seat in the theater was filled, many of the locals vocalizing their shock on the way down the aisles.  “I’ve never seen it this packed before,” many of them said as they found a place to settle in and behold the career the festival was honoring.

    Moderator Leonard Maltin seemed to bite off a little bit more than he could chew.  Seriously, an hour and a half in and we were just getting to 1971.  I figured the 1980s would be a blur and indeed they were — Who wants to remember “Heartbreak Ridge” and “Firefox?” — but I would have liked some discussion on “Bird,” maybe, or “Pale Rider.”  But Maltin warned at the top that if he didn’t get to your favorite film, please understand.  We’re talking about six decades here.

    Early in the discussion Maltin spent a lot of time picking Eastwood’s brain on his early career — a contract player at Universal, roaming around the lot soaking up what information he could, getting the gig on television’s “Rawhide” and, of course, Sergio Leone’s spaghetti Westerns that didn’t find release in the states until rights were cleared up regarding Akira Kurosawa’s “Yojimbo.”  On the whole it was one of those kiss, kiss sessions, but the crowd was pumped.

    Every film that might be mentioned briefly in passing seemed to find this pocket of applause or that.  The “Dirty Harry” stuff was an obvious favorite (of course we were treated to the infamous “I gots ta know” sequence), but “Gran Torino” really brought the house down, especially the old guy vs. the homies scene that might have been Eastwood’s Oscar clip had the performance been nominated a week ago.

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  • Oscar watch 2009: Paul Greengrass talks ‘Green Zone’

    Matt Damon in Green ZoneIt’s no secret that Paul Greengrass’s “Green Zone” is one of my most anticipated films of 2009.  Part of a slew of Universal product that could find itself in the running for Oscar this time next year, the film is a loose adaptation of Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s best-selling “Imperial Life in the Emarald City” and hopes to break the recent streak of popularly challenged dramas reflecting the conflict in Iraq.

    L.A. Times journo John Horn has filed a brief but interesting back-and-forth with Greengrass about the production, which has been in the editing lab for nearly a year because of the amount of footage the director has shot on location around the globe.  Starring Matt Damon, Greg Kinnear and Amy Ryan, “Green Zone” might just be the film to bring audiences into the cinematic Iraq War discussion — or maybe it won’t.

    I’m also looking forward to Kathryn Bigelow’s “The Hurt Locker” this year, which grabbed major raves in Toronto last September.  Here’s a bit from Horn’s piece:

    “It is not a movie about Iraq,” Greengrass said on the London set of his film last spring. “The hope is to make a strong, contemporary thriller that is set in Iraq. Thrillers thrive on extremity, and there is no more extreme environment than immediate post-invasion Baghdad,” he said. (Indeed, the cinematographer’s slate used during production titled the film not “Green Zone” but “Green Zone Thriller.”)

    The film follows Roy Miller (Damon), a warrant officer leading a team of 18 Army soldiers searching for weapons of mass destruction in late 2003, just after the American-led invasion.

    Instead of a cache of deadly chemicals, though, Miller’s team finds disorganization and ineptitude, and Miller soon grows desperate.

    “It’s a race against time to find those weapons,” the 53-year-old British filmmaker says. “It’s a race against time to catch Saddam Hussein. It’s a race against time to establish essential services. And it’s a race against time to win the confidence of the Iraqi people.”

    Check out the rest here.

  • 11/27 Oscarweb Round-up — THANKSGIVING EDITION

    • EW rounds up eight memorable Thanksgivings at the movies. “The Ice Storm” wins for me. No contest. [Entertainment Weekly]

    • Anne Thompson on the indies hoping to score in the acting races. [Variety]

    • Dave Karger lays out the Oscar prospects for “Milk” and “Australia.” [Entertainment Weekly]

    • Todd Martens reports on some alternative Best Original Song contenders. Yay for Jenny Lewis. Boo for Mariah Carey. [Los Angeles Times]

    • Miyazaki’s “Ponyo on the Cliff” has an English-language voice cast. Step up Cate Blanchett, Matt Damon and Tina Fey. [The Guardian]

    • Some Oscar predictions from the ever-perspicacious pen of Nick Davis. [Nick’s Flick Picks]

    • And Brad Brevet weighs in with some updated picks of his own. [Rope of Silicon]

    • A.O. Scott calls “Milk” a “marvel.” I’m starting to think we might have our winner here. [New York Times]

    • Uh, so apparently TomKat are remaking “Last Tango in Paris.” April Fools’ Day was, like, eight months ago, but whatever. [SpoutBlog]

    • Finally, just to cheer you up on your day of gratitude, Hollywood is doomed. [Forbes]

    Sorry, I made it as festive as I could. Happy Thanksgiving, y’all.

  • TORONTO: ‘Che,’ ‘The Wrestler’

    Benicio Del Toro in CheTwo masterpieces, one right after the other.  This was the day I had been waiting for.  I caught Steven Soderbergh’s “Che” today, all four hours and 20 minutes of it.  It’s a glorious achievement from a brilliant mind, one of the few directors who seeks to challenge himself constantly.  “Che” is audacious and bold filmmaking because not everyone will like it or even understand it perhaps.  Soderbergh digs deep into the mind of a brilliant man and allows us a lucky glimpse.

    Moments after the film ended, with barely a moment to regroup, I saw Darren Aronofsky’s “The Wrestler” — and now I understand what all the fuss is about.  If Mickey Rourke is not nominated for Best Actor for an Academy Award, there really is no justice.  But Hollywood can be quite the unforgiving town…

    (Reviews after the jump.)

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