In Contention

Tag: Moulin Rouge

  • Guy’s top 50 of the decade: #1-10

    Maribel Verdu in Y tu Mama TambienAnd then there were ten.

    Before I wrap up the list that I’ve trickled out over the last five days, I suppose I should write a few words on the decade that was. I entered the 2000s as a 16 year-old boy in Johannesburg who thought he knew a lot about movies. I left it as a 26 year-old man in London who knows a lot more than he did then — but realizes that he knows a lot less. There is still so much to see that I’ve barely touched upon — from this past decade alone.

    Probably no filmgoing decade in my lifetime will be as crucial to me as the one that passed, in terms of the shift and growth in my sense of how to read (and write) film.

    I may have already known that I loved movies, but in the 2000s I gained a sharper sense of how to love them, what I really respond to in a film — and the 50 titles gathered here (along with many, many others) helped fine-tune that notion.

    With that kind of personal learning curve attached to the decade, it’s hard to stand back and judge how it might stack against previous ones; strong, weak or average, it’ll always feel like my decade. As I compiled the list, however, did arrive at the conclusion that it started better than it finished. Sheer mathematics supports this personal view — the top 10 films I’m about to reveal all landed in the decade’s first half, and I don’t think that’s merely down to the advantage of distance.

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  • The best films of a decade

    Tom Cruise in Minority ReportThis column has been the elephant in my living room for months.

    Putting together a list of the year’s best films is easy. It’s fresh. It’s in your mind. It’s, in many ways, the expected culmination.

    Putting together a list of the decade’s best films is a different chore altogether. Yearly rankings fly out the window as a proper gauge, because tastes shift and impacts either dwindle or deepen. Revisiting films is called for, but fitting in the works you missed along the way is also imperative. It can be maddening.

    And the truth is, you can’t see everything. All you can do is try to be as honest about how you feel as you can. And even then, no list can be definitive on a personal level, let alone authoritative.

    And so the whittling begins, and in many ways, the process is the reward. The ultimate collective is a mere reminder of the journey through 10 years of film product. But some things stuck out along the way.

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  • indieWIRE lists the decade’s worst Oscar snubs

    Dennis Quaid in Far From HeavenThe end-of-decade reflective mood is obviously catching. In yesterday’s Long Shot column, I looked back on the last ten years of the Academy Awards, singling out some of their most inspired choices and positive developments. You responded in great numbers, rare goodwill towards the Academy dominating the comments thread for a change.

    Of course, however, we all know that it’s more fun to bury the Oscars than to praise them. So today, indieWIRE’s Peter Knegt has compiled something of a flipside to my piece, listing the 50 most egregious snubs in the past decade of Oscar nominations.

    It’s an eclectic list, Knegt’s only requirement for inclusion being that a nomination for the film or individual in question had to be at least within the realm of possibility.

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  • THE LONG SHOT: What are precursors for, anyway?

    Anne Hathaway at the 2009 Critics Choice AwardsI didn’t time my holiday to coincide with the sleepiest week of awards season, but that’s how it panned out anyway. While I spent 10 days drinking my way along the canals of France’s Burgundy region, divorced from my computer screen and, I admit, any thoughts of Oscar whatsoever, the industry, too, took a collective siesta.

    As people assimilated the minimal revelations of this year’s festival run (Gosh, people like “Precious?” Who knew?) and steeled themselves for the annual madness ahead, the Producers Guild of America clearly aimed to take advantage of the lull by announcing the expansion of its feature film nominees to 10. The blogosphere stirred briefly, dutifully posted the press release, and went back to sleep.

    The PGA was probably hoping for more of a reaction than it got, but that’s what happens when you ape a larger organization’s move three months after the fact…as everyone suspected you would, anyway.

    The truth, however, is that the news was as dispiriting as it was unsurprising. Because for all the organization’s feeble claims that the copycat move was made purely in the interests of artistic diversity, all it does is expose a serious identity crisis that afflicts many of the season’s precursors.

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  • The song, not the singer

    Penelope Cruz in NineIt’s a few days old, but I only just found this nugget buried at the tail of a (rather good) David Poland rumination on the potential demise of The Weinstein Company — and since many of you seem to be hungry for details of Rob Marshall’s “Nine,” I thought it worth sharing. Poland has been casting “Nine” as a “problem movie” for a while now, but here he elaborates slightly on his concerns:

    It has test screened… results were mixed… they face a problem with hardcore theater types being unhappy with a majority (all but 7) of the show’s songs being cut… but as “The Producers” showed, loyalty to a stage version is not necessarily a good bet.

    The film is still in post and you can be sure that all kinds of jiggering is being done, just as it was with “Chicago.” Just like “Class” in that show, there is a song on the bubble that may or may not make it. They added 3 brand new songs for the film and seriously reworked a 4th. The film is running good bit longer than “Chicago” (about 30 minutes at the last screening), though fixing that is a big part of what makes Harvey Harvey.

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  • What will win the PGA?

    Tonight, we will receive our biggest precursor pointer to date, as the Producers Guild of America becomes the first of the guilds to make its final pronouncement.

    In case you’ve forgotten, the five films vying for the PGA’s top honour are “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” “Frost/Nixon,” “Milk,” “Slumdog Millionaire” — and the one nominee to fall foul of Oscar voters, “The Dark Knight.”

    “Slumdog Millionaire” appears to be the safest bet, even if its producer, relative newcomer Christian Colson, is less of an industry insider than his fellow nominees. (After all, the field includes such popular figures as Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall, and previous winners Brian Grazer, Ron Howard, Bruce Cohen and Dan Jinks.)

    But with “Slumdog” hurtling towards all-but-inevitable victory on Oscar night, not having missed a single stop on the awards trail so far, that shouldn’t matter. It’s by far the most well-liked film in contention, as well as being a profitable indie with a scrappy-fighter backstory. I doubt the PGA will resist.

    Back when the nominees were announced at the start of the month — doesn’t that seem a long time ago? — Kris suggested that “The Dark Knight” was the “likely winner.” It made perfect sense at the time: these are producers, after all, so they value financial prowess as much as artistic achievement. (Previous PGA nominees include “Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone” and “My Big Fat Greek Wedding.”)

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  • At least SOMEONE has seen ‘Australia’

    Some people are getting very excited about the gushing praise Oprah Winfrey heaped upon “Australia” in yesterday’s edition of her show, which was entirely dedicated to the movie. She proclaims it “the best movie I’ve seen in a long, long, long, long time,” so I guess she kind of liked it.

    While it’s heartening to hear warm words for the film, I think people may be placing a little too much stock in them — simply because it’s the only opinion of the film that has been expressed so far. I love Oprah, but we all know she’s not the most discerning voice out there.

    On the other hand, this does remind me of a similar show she devoted to “Moulin Rouge,” in which she said something to the effect that the film gave her the same kind of moviegoing rush that she got when she saw “The Wizard of Oz” as a kid. When I saw the film, I knew exactly what she meant. Hopefully, she’s onto something again here.

    Anyway, for those who are interested, here’s a rather haphazardly edited highlights reel of yesterday’s show. You’ve gotta love Oprah’s giddy enthusiasm at the start:

  • Baz Luhrmann on his “crushing ambition”

    I’ve already expressed my eagerness for Baz Luhrmann’s “Australia,” probably my single most anticipated film of the year. I was thoroughly enraptured by the trailer that had many others passing snide pre-judgments on the film. (Bizarrely, words like “corny” and “artificial” were frequently thrown up as pejoratives, indicating that the self-irony of Luhrmann’s previous work entirely escaped certain audiences.)

    Now my appetite has been further whetted by this lengthy profile of the film that appeared in today’s Sunday Times, in which Luhrmann and his stars make the scale of their ambition abundantly clear. And that ambition, to go by this quote from Nicole Kidman, is to create something as vast, iconic and quintessential as the title suggests:

    This is the last of a dying breed, this kind of movie. They don’t build stuff like this any more. To feel that air and see people ravaged by the elements, as hard as it is, it’s exquisite. I dreamt of making a film that had the passion and the weight of the films I grew up watching — Gone with the Wind, Doctor Zhivago. When Baz and I first started speaking about this, seven years ago, I said there needed to be a film about our land that speaks on a much broader scale.

    No pressure, then. Luhrmann, meanwhile, acknowledges the flak he will likely receive (already expressed by some readers on this site) for that bald, broad title, but his defence is both intelligent and mischievous:

    Why “Australia?” Well, first of all, to get people all uppity about it, so there’s a lot of comment. I think about films like Lawrence of Arabia, Out of Africa, Casablanca, Hawaii, by James A Michener: epics that use one word to describe a place. The film can’t be definitive about Australia, but ‘What does it mean?’ is not a bad place to start when you’re creating a story.” Sixty years ago, Casablanca meant “faraway, exotic.” I think even now, to the rest of the world, ‘Australia’ just means big, somewhat mysterious, somewhat misunderstood. This is a land far, far away. It has a sense of fairy tale about it.”

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