In Contention

Tag: Ron Howard

  • 11/7 Oscarweb Round-up

    (from left) Ron Howard and Brian Grazer• Jeffrey Wells is basically cool with “Doubt.” [Hollywood Elsewhere]

    • Anne Thompson chimes in, too. [Thompson on Hollywood]

    • Steven Zeitchik draws parallels from this year’s political figures to the films in the Oscar hunt. [Risky Biz Blog]

    • Patrick Goldstein goes after the Oscar bloggers! [The Big Picture]

    • David Poland responds! [The Hot Blog]

    • …now that that’s over…

    • Ron Howard and Brian Grazer are set to receive the PGA’s Milestone Award. [Variety]

    • Anthony Breznican chats it up with James Bond himself, Daniel Craig. [USA Today]

  • Heh

  • The year’s evolving Oscar race reveals the weakest season in recent memory

    Frank Langella in Frost/NixonWith rumors that “The Road” may be bumped to 2009, (not Harvey Weinstein’s choice of release year) and “The Soloist” already moving on, along with the rumblings that “Frost/ Nixon” does indeed lack that edge I wrote about not so long ago, one can feel the Oscar race shifting day to day. Even “Changeling,” once thought to have a decent shot at Best Picture and Best Director nominations, is now looking like a maybe in the race, as 2008 and continues to confound audiences and critics.

    2008 has been a rather weak year at the movies with only “Stop Loss,” WALL-E,” “Iron Man” and best of all, “The Dark Knight” making much of an impact before the Toronto International Film Festival. When that 10-day event did not really produce a frontrunner as it has in years past, all eyes turned to New York and London.  Eastwood’s film received decidedly mixed reviews out of New York while “Che” continued to struggle with the length of the picture.  In London, Ron Howard’s political work, “Frost/ Nixon” has not been knocking the critics out as hoped.

    I’ve been worried about the film for some time.  But the screenplay is based on an award-winning play, Frank Langella is giving the performance that won him accolades on Broadway, but hey, in my view, Howard just isn’t the right director for this sort of film. Give it to Sidney Lumet who, in his 80s, has more edge to his work than Howard. It’s not that he is a terrible director.  On the contrary, he has made some very good films, the criminally under valued “The Missing” among them, but a picture like this needs the very things he lacks as a director.

    So where are we in terms of the Oscar race now, if these films are indeed falling off the radar (the jury is still admittedly out on “Frost”)?  What if the remaining releases are not very good at all and the Oscar race is saddled with an array of mediocre films, which has not happened for many, many years? In fact, the last time I can think of a slew of weak films making up Oscar’s major line-up was 1968, when curiously, “2001: A Space Odyssey” and “Planet of the Apes” were left off the list, shunned for their sci-fi brilliance.

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  • REVIEW: “Frost/Nixon” (**)

    Universal Pictures\' Frost/NixonLondon Film Festival

    For director Ron Howard and screenwriter Peter Morgan, “Frost/Nixon” was always going to be a tricky beast to handle. A film adaptation of Morgan’s own stage play that was itself very much about the powers of television, the relationship between text, medium and audience has shifted in ways I’m not sure the film’s makers have fully accounted for.

    It is one thing to portray a momentous televisual event on the stage, where the intimacy and crackle of live human interaction allows for a very different, and rather more immediate, experience of the proceedings. It is quite another to recreate said event for  television’s closer cousin — with the legendary interviews between David Frost and Richard Nixon that form the spine of the narrative widely available, the film has to recreate the spontaneous feel of history in progress, and in doing so, reveal something in a 30-year-old document that we haven’t already seen.

    It’s a tall order, and with Morgan’s script hewing closely to its source, Howard responds to it in the manner he knows best: with the most prosaic of visual aesthetics to hand, a doggedly linear approach to storytelling and the spotlight thrust squarely on a reliable pair of actors. The approach only gets him so far.  Howard’s hands-off direction makes for an oddly bloodless viewing experience, with a lot of talk standing in for any fresh perspective (or frankly, much of a perspective at all) on the events.

    To be honest, we could have seen this coming. It’s difficult to think of a director less-suited to take on the intricate, minutiae-obsessed writing of Peter Morgan than Howard — a director who, even in his finest films, has always been interested in the big picture first, with characters serving history rather than the other way round.

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  • Can Ron Howard give ‘Frost/Nixon’ the edge it needs?

    Ron HowardIn 2000 I remember reading a post on Ain’t It Cool News by Harry Knowles.  Having seen an unfinished cut of “How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” the Ron Howard film based on the beloved Dr. Suess story and animated program, Knowles believed that the film would redefine Howard as a filmmkaer, elevate him to a higher level and be the film he would be remembered for.

    Knowles felt it was a greater achievement than “Apollo 13” and pretty much anything else the director had done, that Howard had given us the fantasy film we had been waiting for. Admittedly the effects were incomplete, but Knowles was confident what he saw was a masterpiece.

    Granted it was Harry Knowles, but then, of course, the film was released, critically crucified, reasonably successful before hitting DVD where it is not even regarded as a Christmas classic. You know why? Because it was not very good.

    Whatever Knowles saw, and I am sure he saw something he felt was exciting, did not transfer to the final cut. Instead we had a busy film with a massively over-the-top performance from Jim Carrey and these bizarre little creatures with odd makeup called “Whos.” Christine Baranski was in heat for the green misanthrope, though she had not seen him since he was a wee Grinch, and the town’s mayor was still the pompous windbag he had been in school when he had humiliated our hero and sent him off to the mountain where he now resides.

    They searched the continent of North America to find the right little girl to play Cindy Lou Who, and I suppose Howard thought they had found her.  Wrong.

    One year later Howard won the Academy Award for ” A Beautiful Mind,” one of those wildly over-praised films that somehow win Oscars over better efforts like “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring” or “In the Bedroom,” or the un-nominated “A.I. : Artificial Intelligence.”

    For my money, Ron Howard has struck gold just once, with the brilliant “Apollo 13,” a superb piece of filmmaking. The Academy awarded the film with nine nominations, but stunningly, despite having won the Directors Guild Award for Best Director, Howard was not among Oscar’s list of helmers. What a terrible slap in the face that must have been!

    In the years since “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” Howard has matured as a director, giving us a superb western that nobody saw called “The Missing,” with outstanding performances from Cate Blanchett and Tommy Lee Jones, and the extraordinary “Cinderella Man,” for which he and Russell Crowe should have earned Oscar nominations.

    If this generation of directors has a filmmaker that resembles Frank Capra, I suppose Howard is the closest we have, though I am not suggesting he is in the same league. Howard is a good director, not a great one.

    Which brings me to my point: I wonder if he can bring the edge needed to make a film like “Frost/Nixon” work?

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  • International ‘Frost’ trailer lands

    The site filmtrailer.dk (link via Awards Daily) has posted what appears to be the international trailer for Ron Howard’s upcoming “Frost/Nixon.”  No comment really.  Looks “safe,” I guess.  The meat of the thing will be the interview sequences, of course.  And we’ll see if Peter Morgan has opened the story up from the stage in a way that appeals.  I think it’s a bit dramatic to be using Clint Mansell’s “Fountain” score toward the end, though…

  • “A duel between two powerful lone wolves”

    Yeah, Opie actually called it that.  A bit much, but anyway…

    Guy already passed along the news this morning that Ron Howard’s “Frost/Nixon” will open the 52nd annual London Film Festival on October 15.  But I also stumbled onto this preview/interview with Howard at The Times of London that offers a little more insight than the Screen International story.

    Here’s more from the director:

    Peter Morgan calls it a thinking person’s Rocky and I agree with him…I loved the audacity of the story, this famous British guy being turned down by the US networks and then cobbling together his own network to clobber the Americans with their own stick. It’s just this tremendous act of entrepreneurial courage.

    And some key lines from Ben Hoyle’s copy:

    The stage play of Frost/Nixon opened at the Donmar Warehouse in Covent Garden, London, in August 2006 before transferring to the West End and later Broadway. Howard said that he read the script early on in the initial run. When he discovered that a frantic bidding war for the film rights was already under way, “I jumped on a plane to London with my wife and went to see it.” What he found was “one of the best theatre experiences of my life”…

    Critics adored the performances but some complained that Morgan had oversimplified the story, playing fast and loose with the interview transcripts and suggesting that the interviews sealed Nixon’s ignominy in the minds of the American people…Both Morgan and Howard empha-sise that Frost/Nixon is an impression of what happened in and around the interviews, not a docudrama.

    Check out the rest here.

  • ‘Frost/Nixon’ to bow at London fest

    Good news for me and my fellow Brits: for once, we’re going to get something first. Although Ron Howard’s baity “Frost/Nixon” hasn’t been kept that tightly under wraps, confirmation has arrived that the film will have its world premiere at the 52nd London Film Festival, where it will open proceedings on October 15.

    It’s an auspicious slot, as LFF artistic director Sandra Hebron has a habit of picking successful films to kick off the fest. Previous openers include “Almost Famous,” “Gosford Park,” “Vera Drake,” “The Constant Gardener,” “The Last King of Scotland” and last year’s very London-centric “Eastern Promises.”

    As you can see, prestige films with a UK element are favoured, so the selection of Howard’s film, an adaptation of a very British stage hit, comes as no surprise. There have been a couple of misfires in the opening slot over the years (Ang Lee’s strangely forgotten “Ride With the Devil,” Jane Campion’s underrated “In the Cut”), but for now, the odds are against “Frost/Nixon” going the same way.

    Either way, it’s a nice feather in the cap for a lovely, very public-friendly festival that gets stronger with each year: last year’s dynamite lineup included “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford,” “Lust, Caution,” “4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days,” “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” and, in the surprise-screening slot that I was lucky enough to attend, “No Country for Old Men.” Hebron has done a brilliant job thus far; I expect her streak to continue in 2008.

  • Hammond on ‘Frost/Nixon’

    Apologies for digging up a nearly three-week old article – somehow this escaped my notice until now. Buried in Pete Hammond’s typically thorough Cannes review is this very positive aside about Ron Howard’s much-anticipated “Frost/Nixon:”

    Howard could, and probably will, find himself in competition with Eastwood in the directing category. His funny, complicated and fascinating film (we’ve seen it – it’s completed but so far avoiding the fest circuit and bypassing election season) is brilliant, even matching his Oscar-winning “A Beautiful Mind.”

    Frank Langella as Nixon and Michael Sheen as David Frost, the man who conducts a series of TV interviews with the former president, are equally superb re-creating their Broadway and West End triumphs. Both are best actor candidates unless the studio decides to try to squeeze one or the other into supporting, which really seems unlikely. 

    I wasn’t aware that cat had been let out of the bag on that prospect, but there you go. I admit I’ve been sceptical that Howard was the right man to realize Peter Morgan’s play, but if Hammond’s views are indicative of the critical reception to come, this could be a watershed film for him.

    Hammond also echoes Kris’ prediction chart on the issue of category placement for the two leads – though if I were Michael Sheen, I’d find a way to wriggle into supporting, fast. 

  • Great Oscarless directors

    Alfred Hitchcock, Charlie Chaplin, Howard Hawks, Stanley Kubrick, Preston Sturges, Ernest Lubitsch, Hal Ashby, Alan J. Pakula, Sidney Lumet, Spike Lee, Paul Thomas Anderson.

    Collectively they represent some of the greatest directors in the history of the cinema, and together they share one rather unbelievable fact…not one of them is a Academy Award winner for Best Director.

    Each has the distinction of nominee, of course.  But to think that filmmakers such as James Cameron (The King of the World, remember?), Richard Attenborough, Ron Howard, Sir Carol Reed (for “Oliver,” man?), John G. Avilden, Michael Cimino, Robert Benton, Robert Redford, Robert Wise (for “The Sound of Music??”) and George Roy Hill, to name a few, have Oscars on their mantles and the giants above do not is simply insane to me.

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  • Actors winning Best Director — always deserved?

    Of course not. Quite often the Academy gets behind an actor for the simple reason they pulled of the film without screwing too much up.

    How else can one explain Mel Gibson’s win for “Braveheart” but failure to be nominated for his masterpiece “The Passion of the Christ” and “Apocalypto,” easily two of the finest directed films of the last ten years? Somewhere along the road, the Academy fell in love with actors who try their hand at directing (unless your name is Sean Penn or Barbara Streisand) and began giving away Oscars, quite often over more deserving directors.

    Poor Martin Scorsese has watched actors win the Best Director prize over his work three times. In 1980, of course, Robert Redford won for his drama “Ordinary People” over Scorsese’s searing “Raging Bull,” while ten years later Kevin Costner won the Oscar for “Dances with Wolves,” besting Scorsese for “Goodfellas.” But hey — this is the Academy…right? Clint Eastwood also bested Scorsese’s “The Aviator” in 2004 with a win for “Million Dollar Baby.”

    One year after Redford won his Academy Award for Best Director, Warren Beatty took home the award, much deserved for his criminally under-appreciated epic “Reds.” But he would watch in shock as “Chariots of Fire” ran to the Best Picture award over his film. The following year, a minor British actor, Richard Attenborough directed “Gandhi,” which the Academy fell in love with, honoring the achievements of the film’s subject rather than the effort itself, which even at the time seemed old-fashioned and rather ordinary. Attenborough himself, on the way to accept the Directors Guild Award for the film, stopped to chat with Steven Spielberg to make clear what everyone in the room seemed to know: that Spielberg should have won the award for “E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial!”

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  • Woah…I think we have a real makeup contender

    Putting together a list of makeup contenders was a little difficult for the year-in-advance column this year. I ultimately settled on “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” (a film that will be integrating plenty of effects, makeup key among them), “The Other Boleyn Girl” (eh…I know) and “The Dark Knight” (maybe voters will be impressed by the effects used on Heath Ledger’s Joker and, late in the film, Aaron Eckhart’s Two-Face).

    Frankly, I didn’t see much else worth considering…until I came across this shot of Frank Langella in Ron Howard’s “Frost/Nixon.”

    Sure, I figured some makeup would be used on this film to bridge the gap in appearance between Langella and Richard Nixon. Certainly more than the stage production, which didn’t get too crazy, even for a theatrical performance. But I didn’t expect to find Langella completely lost under the effects. He’s unrecognizable in this, the closest shot of the actor in the film I think we’ve seen yet.

    If the film turns into a sweeper, we’ll certainly need to watch out for it here.

  • OFF THE CARPET: 2008, a year in advance

    Another year, another set of wins…and another look ahead at what’s in store NEXT year.

    It’s never too late to take a long gander at what we might see dominating the film awards landscape in 365 days, and with that in mind, I’ve been doing my usual mulling over the possibilities for a few weeks to put together the sadly thorough examination of the 2008-09 award season that follows. Let’s get into it. There are some major considerations to take into account. right off the top.

    Like Leonardo DiCaprio, for instance, who is set to be the entertainer of the year. With performances in “Body of Lies” (Ridley Scott) and “Revolutionary Road” (Sam Mendes), DiCaprio is working with a duo of awards-proven talent this year. Perhaps that will work against him, much like it did in 2006, and no major Oscar success will come knocking. But we’ll wait until we see the performances. Each of them could be enticing.

    This year’s Best Picture Oscar victor Scott Rudin is back again, by the way, with “Revolutionary Road,” recently inherited by Paramount Vantage and probably one of the true “frontrunners” this far out that we could put our finger on. The only other film in Vantage’s arsenal is Edward Zwick’s “Defiance,” which could simply be a commercial success, but might find its way to multiple nods like “The Last Samurai” and “Blood Diamond” in recent years.

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