In Contention

Tag: Up

  • WEEKLY WRAP: Buried treasure, reading pleasure

    Leonardo DiCaprio and Michelle Williams in Shutter IslandEntirely slipped my mind to do this on Friday, but here’s what we (and you) were talking about this week:

    • At 2009’s halfway mark, this week’s list shone a light on the year’s most undersung films thus far.

    • In Page to Screen this week, we eagerly sank our teeth into Dennis Lehane’s “Shutter Island.”

    • As the respective “Ice Age” and “Transformers” rehashes battled for box-office glory, “Up” quietly became Pixar’s second-highest grosser.

    • Meanwhile, soon-to-be titan “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” garnered mixed-to-positive notices.

    • Burton, Lasseter, Miyazaki, Zemeckis … the upcoming Comic-Con just got a lot more auteur-heavy.

    • Speaking of comics, “The Green Lantern” has a lead … and his name is Ryan Reynolds.

    • Away from the big screen, we discussed the joys of bargain-bin DVDs.

    • And stirred up debate with a celebration of Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ.”

  • TECH SUPPORT: Kicking the tires on a new season

    Daniel Day-Lewis in NineToday marks the beginning of a fourth year of Tech Support here at In Contention. Over the past four years, we’ve sought to bring the otherwise under-reported crafts categories and crafts artists the attention they seldom receive, despite their enormous contributions to the art of cinema.

    This year, we plan on looking at nine of the categories – Art Direction, Cinematography, Costume Design, Film Editing, Makeup, Original Score, Sound Editing, Sound Mixing and Visual Effects – twice thoroughly between now and the morning the nominations are announced. Best Original Song will be previewed once, when we have a better idea of eligible contenders.

    I will be offering the analysis of these categories but Kris will also be joining me for the first time this year with Tech Support features and interview pieces throughout.

    Last year, a contemporary film – “Slumdog Millionaire” – managed to triumph in five of the 10 categories, a truly remarkable achievement, while “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” unsurprisingly took three others.  (Meanwhile, the year’s blockbuster “The Dark Knight” managed one.)  It will be interesting to see whether this year will be seen as having tech sweepers like “Millionaire” and “Button” or a greater spreading of the wealth, as we saw in 2007, when eight different films shared the 10 crafts awards!

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  • Could ‘Mr. Fox,’ ‘Carol’ join toon Best Pic hopefuls?

    Fantastic Mr. FoxJoBlo has an exclusive first look today at the central character from Wes Anderson’s “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” a Scott Rudin-produced animated Roald Dahl adaptation.  The film was recently shifted from Fox over to Fox Searchlight for the purposes of distribution, lest a small, niche film such as this be lost in the shuffle.  But I have also heard murmurs (none of them confirmed, mind you) that the film will be pushed for a Best Picture nomination now that there are 10 slots up for grabs.

    What is confirmed, however, is that Henry Selick’s “Coraline” will be campaigned for the top prize by Focus Features (while Richard Curtis’s “The Boat That Rocked,” recently speculated in this space as being primed for Oscar, will not).  And of course, Disney/Pixar will be hitting the pavement in favor of “Up.”  Before long, the question becomes, “Well if they’re going for it, we should, too.”  Which leads me to wonder…

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  • 9/7 Web Round-up

    David Lynch• Jeffrey Wells offers his own mid-year assessment of 2009’s best and worst so far. [Hollywood Elsewhere]

    • How New Line mutated from house of horror to chick-flick central. [The Hollywood Reporter]

    • Memo to “Baywatch: The Movie” producers: it’s about the jugs, not the jokes. [The Guardian]

    • Too lowbrow for you? Here’s David Lynch on his unlikely collaboration with musos Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse. [Sight & Sound]

    • Apparently, Meryl Streep gained 15 pounds making “Julie & Julia.” Wow, she really does want that third Oscar. [Thompson on Hollywood]

    • Francis Ford Coppola talks movies, wine and why he wanted Scorsese to direct “The Godfather Part II.” Really. [Esquire]

    • An “Up” doubter (commercially speaking, anyway) eats his words. [The New York Times]

    • Not movie-related (yet), but a “Catcher in the Rye” sequel without J.D. Salinger’s involvement? Stop the madness. [The Wall Street Journal]

  • ‘Up’ becomes Pixar’s second-highest grosser ever

    UpI expect Chad may get into some of this later in today’s Sunday Cents column (unless his silly inflation observation gets in the way), but Pixar’s “Up” grossed another $6.5 million today, bringing the domestic total to $264.8 million, surpassing the $261.4 million “The Incredibles” racked up in the fall of 2004 to become the studio’s second-highest domestic grosser ever behind 2003’s “Finding Nemo.”

    I would assume the answer here is lack of demographic comeptition to an extent.  “Monsters vs. Aliens” was the only animated film within earshot of “Up”‘s May 29 release date until “Ice Age” came along this weekend.  And there hasn’t been much else for the kids beyond “Night at the Museum: Battle for the Smithsonian.”  That’s a solid month of focused box office play for the film.

    Obviously “Nemo”‘s $339.7 million is safe and will likely remain safe for a long time to come (and it’s worth noting that “Up” opened in the same frame), but Pixar’s latest has nevertheless become a personal record-breaking success for the studio?  And yet it’s not even in the top 25 for the decade, which tells you the leaps and bounds box office has made in the last 10 years.

    So, congrats to all involved.  Well-deserved.  Check out my interview with “Up” director Pete Docter here if you missed it.

  • 2009’s Oscar drought…same old song and dance

    Michael Caine in Is Anybody There?Over at Variety, newly minted editor-in-chief Tim Gray writes what we’ve been mentioning around these parts for a while: the first half of the 2009 film year is decidedly bereft of anything that might be deemed “Oscar-worthy” come January 2010.

    Aside from “Star Trek” and “Up,” the recognized critical faves of the year thus far, the best films I have seen are Kathryn Bigelow’s “The Hurt Locker,” Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck’s “Sugar,” Duncan Jones’s “Moon” and Michael Mann’s “Public Enemies,” but I expect only two of those could stir the awards pot.

    Critics have also responded, intriguingly, to Sam Raimi’s “Drag Me to Hell,” but I think we all know it’s safe to strike that one from the awards roster.  And Focus Features’ “Coraline” is likely to make an impact on the animated feature race, but beyond that, you’d be hard-pressed to offer much in the way of a solid list as we approach the mid-way point.

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  • SUNDAY CENTS: Audiences accept Bullock’s ‘Proposal’

    The ProposalWith absolutely nothing targeted towards the date crowd yet this summer, Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds took the stalest looking romantic comedy all the way to the top of the box office with $34.1 million. That’s far and away Bullock’s best debut as she’s used to figures in the high teens and then leggy runs after that. For Reynolds, well, it’s not even his biggest opening this summer but he now has thousands of Grandma’s to count as new fans. Given the dearth of direct competition, I think this has enough gas in the tank to get to $100 million.

    Way past that figure is “The Hangover,” dropping a microscopic 18% in second place for $26.9 million and $152.9 million total. There’s not much left to say here except that this is a film that tapped into the zeitgeist and there’s no duplicating or explaining it. Moving on.

    “Up” also held well, passing the domestic total for “WALL-E” and it’s still in the top three. While the film certainly stands on its own, some of that success is due to “Ratatouille” and “WALL-E” building the company’s reputation amongst adults. They set ‘em up, and Carl Fredricksen knocks ‘em down.

    Fourth place is where you’ll find the other new release, “Year One.” Plagued with bad buzz from vitriolic internet users, a $20.2 million opening isn’t actually half bad. The Friday to Saturday drop is, however, and this will be lucky to get to $50 million total. It may not make it’s money back until way down the line but nobody’s getting fired over this one and Michael Cera will live to see another painfully awkward day.

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  • EDINBURGH: Animated pleasures

    Mary and MaxToday’s Edinburgh talk may have centered on festival opener “Away We Go” (more on that to come), but the day’s real delight was “Mary and Max” (***1/2), an alternately disarming and disconcerting feature debut from claymation maestro Adam Elliot, who won a 2003 Academy Award for his short “Harvey Krumpet,” and carries that film’s decidedly adult-level cuteness into his new effort.

    As “Up” continues accumulating valentines from critics across the board, “Mary and Max” forms some interesting parallel points to Pixar’s mega-hit, with both films employing the gentleness of the animated form to address difficult themes of loneliness and social isolation, and doing so via an unlikely friendship between misfits young and old.

    Of course, the relationship at the core of “Mary and Max,” which details the accidental but long-enduring friendship of correspondence between a neglected 8 year-old girl in Australia and a middle-aged New York man emotionally crippled by Asperger’s Syndrome, will likely raise far more eyebrows than “Up,” which is probably why the film is still seeking a U.S. distributor months after its warm reception at Sundance.

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  • 6/15 Web Round-up

    Eddie Murphy in Delirious• In case it wasn’t obvious, Paradise Falls from Pixar’s “Up” was inspired by Venezuela’s Angel Falls. [Associated Press via Chicago Sun-Times]

    • Today’s superhero movies have artistic roots in the UK. [BBC]

    • Speaking of which, here’s a girl’s guide to Comic Con 2009. [Los Angeles Times]

    • Anyone else tired of non-news items like this regarding a potential “Arrested Development” movie?  Who cares? [Collider]

    • Martin Scorsese works hard to bring little-seen classics to the web. [CNN]

    • The potentially exciting web site in question. [The Auteurs]

    • Beat writers make their way to the big screen. [The Independent]

    • The Brit-Hitch love-fest (in light of the director’s BFI retrospective) continues. [The Guardian]

    • “Imagine That” might have tanked this weekend, but this Chris Lee remembrance of Eddie Murphy’s comedy turning point — “Delirious,” which celebrated a 25th anniversary last month — is still worth a look. [Los Angeles Times]

    • In honor of the limited reelase of Duncan Jones’s “Moon”: 10 unhappy movie astronauts? [Spout Blog]

  • SUNDAY CENTS: Bad ‘Hangover’ for new openers and holdovers

    The Taking of Pelham 123After denying “Up” the bragging rights of a repeat at the top of the box office at the last minute, “The Hangover” has accomplished that feat itself.

    The R-rated comedy dropped a minuscule 26% to add another $33.4 million to the bank and give it a very real shot at $200 million-plus. That’s a benchmark reserved for very few comedies and only the best of the best like “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” and “Crocodile Dundee.”  Speaking of those two, it’s a pity Nia Vardalos didn’t look to Paul Hogan’s career for a glimpse at the dangers of repetitive ethnic-centric comedy. If there’s a bigger success story than “The Hangover” this summer, we are in for some big shockers.

    Speaking of shockers, I saw the movie this week and I didn’t like it at all. Aside from some fresh stuff from Zach Galifianakis, it was pretty stale to me. It’s no “Wedding Crashers,” that’s for sure.

    “Up” also held up extremely well, dropping only 31% and staying in the runner-up spot with $30.5 million. It now seems likely to pass “Cars” and wind up the sixth highest grossing Pixar film when all is said and done.* I’ve always said that miscarriages in cartoons equals big bucks and finally somebody listened.

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  • Twisted summer movie theories

    Alison Lohman in Drag Me to HellAlright, I had to let Hunter Stephenson’s rather suspect LGBT theory at /Film, vis a vis Kevin from Pixar’s “Up,” slide earlier in the week.  I’m not seeing it.  However, this Peter Sciretta item (which references an IMDb message board post) drawing parallels between Sam Raimi’s “Drag Me to Hell” and eating disorders is a fascinating one that deserves the space.

    Here’s a portion of the argument:

    [IMDb commenter] Micobiella thinks that Sam Raimi’s Drag Me To Hell isn’t actually a horror movie, but instead a story of a farm girl with an eating disorder, who starves herself to fit a certain image and begins hallucinating and going crazy. Apparently you can watch the entire movie from this viewpoint, with few exceptions, and it all makes sense…

    Allison Lohman’s character Christine Brown admits that her mother had an addiction, and at one point in the film we see an overweight photo of Christine as a child in front of a sign that read “SWINE QUEEN”. She doesn’t want to become addicted to food. She doesn’t want to be like her mother. At the beginning of the movie, she is listening to a tape trying to correct her southern accent. She doesn’t want to be a farm girl. She has a good boyfriend, and is trying to move her way up with a career at the bank.

    She never touches food, because she is afraid it will make her fat and disgusting. According to the theory, there really isn’t a scary demon from hell, she’s just imagining everything. Hunger is making her irritable, she imagines the old woman’s creepy hand tapping on the desk when it was really just the other banker. Early in the film she passes out in her car and drives into a bunch of other cars in the parking lot. The woman from the bank never followed her, she imagined everything…

    The food is a key factor in most of the hallucinations. Notice that when food is introduced on screen, Christine gets attacked by the spirit. Every time the spirit appears at her house, she is in the kitchen. When she locks the spirit outside of her room, see sees the spirit in the form of a shadow of Pig hooves.

    And so on and so forth. Intriguing.

  • 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]

  • SUNDAY CENTS: Dark clouds ‘Hangover’ Ferrell

    The Hangover(6/8 UPDATE: Variety is reporting this morning that, in a rare occurrence, “The Hangover” topped “Up” once actual numbers rolled in.  “Final figures will show that ‘Hangover’ grossed $45 million from 3,269 runs,” Pamela McClintock writes. “‘Up’ should finish at $44.3 million to $44.4 million from 3,818 theaters.)

    “Up” has now joined “Paul Blart: Mall Cop” and “Madea Goes to Jail” as the only 2009 releases to spend more than one week at the top of the box office. (EDITOR’S NOTE: Strike that.  See update above.) A slim drop of 35% led to a weekend gross of $44.2 million and kept Carl Fredrickson floating above the competition en route to what surely will be one of the highest grossing totals of the summer. With $137 million in the bank already, it is pacing ahead of the 10-day tallies of “WALL-E,” “Ratatouille” and “Cars.” Anybody willing to bet on “Toy Story 3” breaking Pixar’s hot streak next summer? Didn’t think so.

    Coming in a close second is “The Hangover.” Starring a bunch of nobodies (relatively speaking) and from a director five years removed from his last hit, there’s no reason this should have made $43.3 million this weekend. But it did and the only explanation is that audiences loved it. Test screenings started the word of mouth and it rolled all through the marketing campaign and what many of us saw coming as a possible sleeper hit of the summer has turned into something else entirely: a bona fide blockbuster. Even if it fails to double its debut (doubtful with word of mouth so good), it would still be a massive success for Warner Bros. No word yet on how much of the gross came from people so hungover that they forgot they already paid to see the movie the previous night as well.

    Third place went to “Land of the Lost,” an unmitigated disaster. $19.5 million is what Universal would have hoped for in one day when they greenlit this sucker with a budget north of $100 million. Will Ferrell and dinosaurs seem like a smart combo to me but the trailers and buzz for this one labeled it a stinker long ago and nobody could decipher whether it was for kids or young adults. Director Brad Silberling has now sunk two potential franchise starters in a row (with “Lemony Snicket” being the other) and has to be sweating his career right now. And Danny McBride deserves better.

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  • WEEKLY WRAP: ‘Invictus,’ ‘Bones’ and a billion remakes

    Matt Damon in InvictusSlipped my mind to do this on Friday, but better late…

    • We broke the news that Clint Eastwood’s upcoming Mandela film finally has a title: “Invictus.” (And if you’re wondering what it means, we explain that too.)

    • And with that, much “Invictus” talk ensued, as we learned that Eastwood directed the film at Morgan Freeman’s request, and that it’s going up against “The Lovely Bones” in December.

    • Speaking of “The Lovely Bones,” this week’s edition of Page to Screen put Alice Sebold’s bestselling novel under scrutiny.

    • Our slightly disappointing (to some, at least) poll of cinema’s most influential films entered its final stage.

    • With the news of a “Total Recall” remake the final straw, we got on Hollywood’s case for being so apparently allergic to original material.

    • This week’s list counted down the all-time greatest champs in the Best Foreign Language Film category. (Hint: The just-released “Departures” ain’t on it.)

    • We considered the wealth of female filmmakers in the mix for awards consideration this year.

    • A bit of respect for the great Elia Kazan.

    • “Up” stormed the box office, as we all knew it would.

    • Finally, in sadder, and much less expected, news, we said goodbye to actor David Carradine.

  • 6/5 Web Round-up

    James Cameron on the set of Avatar• Carmike Cinemas honcho S. David Passman III gets back to basics, like cleaning the bathrooms. (This story hits home with me because I grew up going to a shoddy Carmike theater.) [Company Town]

    • Headline of the month.  Not film related, but necessary for your morning LOL dose. [MyFoxBoston.com]

    • Drew McWeeny dives head-long into the tank for Ubisoft’s “Avatar” video game with a detailed description of what must have been a breath-taking E3 demonstration. [Motion/Captured]

    • Why Cannes awards mean squat for Oscar. [The Playlist]

    • How “Slumdog Millionaire” is changing filmmaking in India. [The Guardian]

    • Dumb list du jour… [Premiere]

    • Paul Dano, “prince regent of independent film,” rides the subway.  Just, you know, FYI. [The Times]

    • Sam Mendes drew on Hal Ashby for “Away We Go” (he just missed the poignancy). [The Hollywood Interview]

    • Searching for the Berkeley home that inspired Carl’s “Up” abode. [San Francisco Chronicle]

    • CAA reaches out to James Cameron to represent the director’s new Fusion Camera System technology. [Deadline Hollywood Daily]

  • 6/4 Web Round-up

    (from left) Danny McBride, Will Ferrell and Anna Friel in Land of the Lost• Chatting with “Land of the Lost” producers (1970s series and 2009 film adaptation) Sid and Marty Krofft. [Washington Post]

    • Seven actors who need to return to their roots. [Cinematical]

    • 12 movies to make men cry. [Entertainment Weekly]

    • Peter Sohn: the Korean face of “Up”‘s Wilderness Explorer Russell. [Chosun Ilbo]

    • Anne Thompson finds a parallel between “Britain’s Got Talent”‘s Susan Boyle and French import “Sraphine.” [Thompson on Hollywood]

    • Kim Voynar taps into her inner Bill Maher for a rant against the economics of a night at the movies. [Movie City News]

  • John Ratzenberger: Pixar’s “good-luck charm”

    John RatzenbergerI’m glad someone finally got around to doing this story.  In the pages of USA Today this week, Susan Wloszczyna has written up a nice little feature on actor John Ratzenberger, who has provided voice talent to every Pixar film since the studio’s first ground-breaking effort “Toy Story” back in 1995.  Here’s a taste:

    The folks at Pixar, which has gone on to even greater success with such Oscar-winning titles as The Incredibles and WALL·E, decided to adopt the actor as their good-luck charm. And it seems to have worked. The tradition continues this summer with Ratzenberger as a kindly construction worker in Up, the studio’s 10th film and now No. 1 at the box office.

    Did he ever think being a pushy plaything would lead to long-term employment? “No, but I didn’t think that the first time I sat at the bar on Cheers, either,” Ratzenberger says. “People ask me, ‘What is the secret to Pixar’s success?’ About 80% of what comes out of Hollywood is angry and cynical, whereas everything from Pixar is heartfelt and hopeful. That is who these people are. That is their world view.”

    He has been the studio’s pet actor for so long, he is no longer sure why the animators decided to keep on hiring him. “I’m just happy they do.”

    I also like this aside with thoughts from “Up” director Pete Docter:

    Pete Docter, director of Monsters, Inc. and Up, says Ratzenberger’s vocal ability also has something to do with it. “He’s the ultimate Pixar character actor,” he says. “He’s someone so clear, I know that guy after only two lines of dialogue. Having him in every film is like our Hitchcock cameo.”

    What’s your favorite Ratzenberger/Pixar role?  I might have to go with “WALL-E,” actually.

  • Lou Romano’s pre-production artwork for ‘Up’

    Up development painting by Lou RomanoIf you went out this weekend and fell in love with “Up” (which didn’t hold up that well for me on a second viewing, though I’m sure I’ll talk more about that in the coming weeks), then you’ll love this treasure trove of development work artist Lou Romano did on the film.  Romano has worked with Pixar for a couple of years now.  You might recall the stuff he did on “The Incredibles.”

    Romano was charged with cooking up production paintings to reflect color and lighting design as well as establish an artistic direction “to help inspire the look of the film,” according to his blog.  Those of you who’ve seen the film will recall the image to the right from Ellie’s Adventure Book, so it’s nice that Romano’s work can sometimes be featured in the actual film.

    Here’s my favorite image, a final color script capturing the entire film in one piece (click for larger image).  Two more after the jump, but you can see all of it (and there’s a lot) here.

    Up final color script by Lou Romano

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