In Contention

Tag: The Necessities of Life

  • 1/21 Oscarweb Round-up

    • Sasha Stone chimes in with her final predictions. [Awards Daily]

    • As do the guys at Vulture, who are remaining loyal to “WALL-E” to the end. [Vulture]

    • Meanwhile, T.L. Stanley finally gives up on “Doubt.” [Gold Rush]

    • The venerable David Thomson plays the “will be/should be” game, with some curiously disconnected predictions. (Lena Olin? Really?) [The Guardian]

    • Moving away from punditry, James Hansen just doesn’t think much of Canada’s foreign-language entry. [The Film Experience]

    • Still at Sundance, Jeff Wells kinda likes the new film from the insanely prolific Steven Soderbergh. [Hollywood Elsewhere]

    • Tarantino is apparently rushing to finish “Inglourious Basterds” (sic). Take your time, QT. [Thompson on Hollywood]

    • David Carr wonders whether Mickey Rourke’s imminent Oscar nomination will be enough to rescue the long-delayed “Killshot.” [The Carpetbagger]

    • Finally, EW continues their “Worst Snubs” countdown, and their picks are uniformly great. (Hell yes to Spacek, Murray and Leaud.) [Entertainment Weekly]

  • Foreign film shortlist revealed, ‘Gomorrah’ snubbed

    This is the most vile of all Academy committees.  They prove their disdain for truly great cinema year in and year out (let’s not forget last year’s snubs of “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” and “Persepolis” early on), and they’ve done it again this year, skewering Matteo Garrone’s blistering “Gomorrah,” leaving it for the dogs, cast aside, abandoned.

    The almighty foreign language film committee has chosen the following to proceed to the next stage of the season:

    “3 Monkeys” (Nuri Bilge Ceylan — Turkey)
    “The Baader Meinhof Complex” (Uli Edel — Germany)
    “The Class” (Laurent Cantet — France)
    “Departures” (Yojiro Takita — Japan)
    “Everlasting Moments” (Jan Troell — Sweden)
    “The Necessities of Life” (Benoit Pilon — Canada)
    “Revanche” (Gotz Spielmann — Austria)
    “Tear This Heart Out” (Roberto Sneider — Mexico)
    “Waltz with Bashir” (Ari Folman — Israel)

    Turns out Guy correctly foresaw only four of these in his post this morning.  From these, I’d anticipate “3 Monkeys,” “The Baader Meinhof Complex,” “The Class,” “Everlasting Moments” and, the likely winner, “Waltz with Bashir” to make the final five.

    (Thanks to Blake for passing along the list, and kudos to him for anticipating the “Gomorrah” shaft.  I just wanted to disregard all that talk about the committee having an issue with the film’s violence, but you can’t give these bozos the benefit of the doubt, I guess.)

  • More foreign film submissions trickle in

    With the deadline for submissions for Best Foreign Language Film coming at the end of the month, these are virtually being announced on a daily basis. The latest:

    Canada, whose “The Barbarian Invasions” took the gold in 2004, has selected French-Inuit period drama “The Necessities of Life.” The film, a period piece about the relationship between a hunter (played by Natar Ungalaaq from “Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner”), dying in a Quebec City hospital, and a young Inuit orphan, premiered at the recent Montreal Film Festival, where it won the audience award.

    Variety describes it as “a finely wrought drama” and “a model of emotional restraint.” Hopefully my fellow contributor John can offer a local perspective on the selection.

    Elsewhere, Finland has chosen “Home of Dark Butterflies,” another Montreal entry. The film is centred on a group of teen boys at an isolated reform school, got only a middling Variety review — they criticise it for “veering into melodramatic excess.”