In Contention

Tag: Michael Douglas

  • Sanata Barbara’s Kirk Douglas Award goes to… Michael Douglas!

    The press release, in part:

    In recognition of his contributions to the world of film, Michael Douglas will be bestowed with his father’s honor, the 2011 KIRK DOUGLAS AWARD FOR EXCELLENCE IN FILM from the Santa Barbara International Film Festival. The 6th annual black-tie Gala dinner will take place at The Four Seasons Biltmore in Santa Barbara on Thursday, October 13, 2011.

    “The first time I saw Michael Douglas act was in a play at UC Santa Barbara, so it is fitting that a career that started here should be honored here” commented Kirk Douglas. “To tell the truth, I wanted Michael to be a lawyer. I secretly hoped he would be bad so I could tell him to forget it. He wasn’t. But as proud as I am of his achievements on screen, I am even prouder of the humanitarian work he has done for the United Nations and other organizations. I am very happy to give this award to my favorite actor/producer who also happens to be my firstborn son.”

    The tribute will stand as one of the most memorable events in SBIFF history as a film legend of one generation honors the next. Previous recipients of the award include such enduring stars as John Travolta, Ed Harris, Quentin Tarantino, and Harrison Ford.

    Also worth noting is that Michael Douglas was the Honorary Chair of the festival when it first began 27 years ago and he was also the very first Modern Master recipient. So, full circle and all that.

  • 1/18 OSCARWEB ROUND-UP: Gervais should have been meaner, cut ‘127 Hours’ ending, working class contenders

    • Ricky Gervais on Golden Globes hosting controversy. [Hollywood Reporter]

    • Devin Faraci, meanwhile, thinks the comedian wasn’t mean enough. [Baddass Digest]

    • Naomi Serviss hearts seeing Michael Douglas at the show. [The Wrap]

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  • Douglas and Yauch are beating it

    Lost in all the general Oscar discussion as of late is some great news on two fronts.

    You might recall Oscilloscope higher-up and Beastie Boy rapper Adam “MCA” Yauch was diagnosed with cancer in his salivary gland a year and a half ago.  Recently it was falsely reported that he was cancer-free, but he has come out to clear the record but also assure everyone he’s hopeful in the wake of the lump’s removal.

    Meanwhile, Michael Douglas, who was hit with throat cancer some months back, says his tumor is gone and he’s on the road to recovery.

    Neither is out of the woods yet, obviously, but it’s great to hear that things are moving in a positive direction.  We certainly wish Yauch and Douglas a speedy recovery.

    [Photo: Getty Images]

  • ‘King’s Speech’ leads Globe nods, ‘True Grit’ shut out

    True to form, the Golden Globe nominations are a buffet of the good, the bad and the unconscionably hideous — with perhaps a touch more emphasis than usual on the third of those this year. I refer, of course, to those largely mortifying Comedy/Musical races, where HFPA voters solved the lack of obvious contenders this year by giving in to their randiest star-shagging urges.

    Welcome to the Best Picture race, “Red,” “The Tourist” and (pauses to cross himself and say three Hail Marys) “Alice in Wonderland.” Or, you know, not. Congratulations on your double-shot of well-deserved Best Actor nominations, Mr. Depp. Or, you know, not. Sorry, Sally Hawkins, we liked you just fine in “Made in Dagenham,” but Angelina Jolie was obviously working harder in her movie. Or, you know, not.

    Still, even as we strike down upon the HFPA with great vengeance and furious anger, I’m feeling pretty chipper about some things: reviled as it is by many, “Burlesque” is the kind of grandly gaudy goof-off that I’m happy to see livening up the category, while my biggest air-punch of the morning came when my actress of the year Emma Stone’s name was read out for “Easy A.”

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  • OFF THE CARPET: Leading men in the spotlight

    About a year ago I took to examining the 2009 Best Actor race.  The frontrunners for five slots seemed to be, in order, George Clooney, Colin Firth, Jeremy Renner, Morgan Freeman, Daniel Day-Lewis, Viggo Mortensen and Robert De Niro.

    A day later press members received their first invites to “Crazy Heart” screenings and were notified that the film would be released in 2009.  Jeff Bridges hit the ground running and never let off the gas until he was past the finish line.

    A year earlier we were looking at a pair of politico-biopic portrayals, either one of which would make a handsome winner: Frank Langella and Sean Penn.  But we were fairly sure the latter would be on his way to the podium one more time.

    But soon after, Mickey Rourke’s festival buzz caught serious fire and forged an atmosphere of doubt.  The season’s narrative seemed to be changing, and yet the early buzz carried through and brought Penn his Oscar.

    So that’s two drastically different directions – in as many years – that a lead actor race can take.  Given the mid-October fulcrum shared here, let’s consider our perspective on the Best Actor category right now.

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  • OSCAR TALK: Ep. 37 — The early year forgotten, Michael Douglas’s dueling Oscar campaigns, the animated feature race 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.

    After a week with four on the mic, it’s back to just Anne and myself as we mull over something of a slow news week. But there’s always some grist for the mill here and there, catch-up screenings, parties, etc., so let’s see what’s on the docket today…

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  • 10/20 OSCARWEB ROUND-UP: ‘Complete Metropolis’ coming to TCM, buzz for Leo, Cameron on the usual talking points

    • Jeffrey Wells reminds of the forthcoming TCM airing of the restored “Metropolis” and one hour documentary “Metropolis Refound.”  I’ll…be…there. [Hollywood Elsewhere]

    • Steve Pond conveys positive word on Christian Bale and (as reported for months here) Melissa Leo’s performances in “The Fighter” from ShoEast. [The Odds]

    • Naomi Watts on “Fair Game,” Valerie Plame and politics in Hollywood. [HitFix]

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  • 10/13 OSCARWEB ROUND-UP: Stone worried for Douglas, Aronofsky close on ‘Wolverine,’ assessing a shorter ‘Carlos’

    • Tim Gray weighs in on Oscar’s potential slide to January. [Variety]

    • Darren Aronofsky is closer to jumping on board the “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” sequel than we thought/feared. [Deadline]

    • Oliver Stone is pretty worried about Michael Douglas’s health concerns. [Associated Press]

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  • Stone charges back with subprime ‘Money Never Sleeps’

    It’s taken me some time to get around to writing about Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps” because watching the film was like have your bubble burst (no pun intended).  Where the director’s 1987 original worked from a tight, disciplined script that never took its eye off the ball, this follow-up is a loose, less refined piece of work with a forehead-smackingly bad ending.

    Also, due respect to Rodrigo Prieto (one of the best lensers working in the business), I feel there is something lost without Robert Richardson’s hand behind the camera.  The lenser hasn’t worked with Stone since 1997’s “U Turn,” but he gave the original film a palpable energy (as he does any film he shoots, whether it’s for Stone, Scorsese or Tarantino).  The energy on screen in the sequel is cooked up, awkward, false.  There’s an obsession with quirky transitions and visual flourishes (which comes to a head in an over-bearing closing credits sequence) that Stone can’t seem to relinquish.

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  • Go get ’em

  • 9/1 Oscarweb Round-up

    • Thomas Gladysz on the rarity of giving an Honorary Oscar to a film historian, in this case, 2010 honoree Kevin Brownlow. [The Huffington Post]

    • Roger Ebert sprinkles four stars on “The American,” which opens today. [Chicago Sun-Times]

    • Gregory Ellwood makes 10 predictions about the 2010-2011 Oscar season. [Awards Campaign]

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  • OFF THE CARPET: Taking the temperature

    Now that we’re on the other side of Cannes, I felt it was a good time to put a finger to the wind, stare into the tea leaves, shake the magic 8-ball and basically just take stock of where we’re at roughly three months away from the start of the 2010-2011 film awards season.

    The festival, covered diligently by Guy Lodge around these parts (we thank him), brought little to write home about where Oscar potential is concerned.  The truth is, it rarely does.  But as the year takes shape, things start to linger.  A film like “Inglourious Basterds” can transform muted if appreciative response on the Croisette into a foaming-at-the-mouth bid for a surprise upset in just a few months’ time.

    The big narrative stand-outs for most were Alejandro González Iñárritu’s “Biutiful” and Mike Leigh’s “Another Year.” Perhaps the latter has an easier Oscar path ahead, given that it was more unanimously accepted and could ultimately be a soft lob for Academy types.  Sony Pictures Classics swooped in and nailed down domestic distribution, so I think we’re looking at a bona fide Best Picture nominee to go along with likely bids for Best Actress (Lesley Manville) and the usual expected tip of the hat from Leigh’s fellow screenwriters.  Maybe even a Best Director nod, too.  And yet the film didn’t win a single festival prize.  See how this works?

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  • SHORT TAKE: “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps” (**1/2)

    Cannes Film Festival

    “Is greed good?” Gordon Gekko asks near the beginning of Oliver Stone’s glib, gleaming and endearingly trashy sequel to his 1987 corporate morality tale. Delivering the line, a looser-haired but stiffer-skinned Michael Douglas can barely resist licking his lips and winking; this is his earlier, Oscar-winning performance turned inside-out, emerging as lascivious pantomime, and he wants us to be certain he’s in on the joke.

    Provided you are, too, “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps” is one of the more pleasantly surprising studio pictures of the year thus far, and a significant improvement on its po-faced (and, 23 years on, now fearsomely dated) predecessor. If the sequel could never have been deemed “necessary,” it’s certainly as handily timed as can be. As the original served as dumb but not ineffective allegory for the coke-fuelled iniquities of 1980s capitalism, the new film not only does the same for credit-crunch sobriety in the post-2000s, but allows Stone his “Toldja!” moment to boot.

    Not that the film is nearly as concerned with socio-economic commentary as it is with smirking self-parody: it arguably blew its best gag in the trailer, as Gekko’s bread-loaf-sized cellphone is returned to him on his exit from prison, but there’s plenty more idle fun where that came from, culminating in a slithery cameo from the original film’s star, a bronzed glamazon on either arm, that may as well have been credited: “and starring Charlie Sheen as himself.”

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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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  • Gordon Gekko 2009

    Michael Douglas on the set of Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps

    (Courtesy: Daily Mail)

  • TORONTO: Douglas tops in the tedious ‘Solitary Man’

    Michael Douglas in Solitary ManPeople tend to forget that Michael Douglas won his first Academy Award not as an actor but as a producer, bringing the classic film “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” to the screen in 1975.

    His father Kirk had given him the project after years of trying to get the things going and Michael went outside the industry to find the money to make the picture, approaching music giant Saul Zaentz. The rest, as they say, is history, and Douglas became a major player in the business who has no doubt gone toe-to-toe with many a studio executive to get what he wants for his films.

    I wonder, however, even with an acting Oscar eventually to his credit (for Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street”), has Douglas ever been given his proper due as an actor?

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  • 9/15 Web Round-up

    Jason Reitman on the set of Up in the Air• James Rocchi sits down with Jason Reitman to talk “Up in the Air.” [AMC TV]

    • Jeffrey Wells bangs the Best Picture drum for Rodrigo Garcia’s as-of-yet un-acquired “Mother and Child.” [Hollywood Elsewhere]

    • Michael Douglas talks “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.” [Empire]

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  • 6/10 Web Round-up

    Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator• A belated Happy Birthday to Kim Voynar, who digs back into the not-so-subtle themes of “Up.” [Movie City News]

    • Counting down the worst movie politicians. [Empire]

    • Taking a look at the key films of Palme d’Or winner Michael Haneke’s career. [Daily Telegraph]

    • Patrick Goldstein talks to Tony Kaye about his most recent off-the-wall art project. [The Big Picture]

    • A.O. Scott looks back at Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street.” [New York Times]

    • Speaking of which, Michael Douglas is all set to receive a lifetime achievement award from AFI. [Los Angeles Times]

    • Christopher Campbell aggregates all the speculation over who should play B.A. Baracus in the new “A Team” movie.  Shouldn’t we just hand it over to Craig Robinson and be done with it? [Spout Blog]

    • IMAX popularity sparks copycats.  Enough tweaking the distribution, let’s get back to basics.  You know, like quality of product? [Wall Street Journal]