In Contention

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  • Poking the Oscar stick at the distributorless

    Cover of The Men Who Stare at GoatsMichael Cieply, writing at The Carpetbagger (which, if you haven’t been aware, has been transformed into a year-round film blog at The New York Times rather than solely focusing on the awards season), has put up brief addressing a few titles that, as of yet, have no U.S. distributor but are very much on the minds of studios looking for latter year Oscar hopefuls.

    “It’s time to think about the Oscars,” Cieply writes, “or it is if you happen to be a film distributor with ambitions for the award season that, thankfully, won’t start for the rest of us until at least September.  At least a handful of movies with awards potential, but no U. S. distributor so far, are being watched closely by players in the game.”

    Cieply then goes on to list six titles in play: Alejandro Amenábar’s “Agora,” Jane Campion’s “Bright Star,” Jon Amiel’s “Creation,” Jean-Marc Valle’s “The Young Victoria” (reviewed by Guy earlier this month — he wasn’t a fan), Peter Weir’s “The Way Back” and Grant Heslov’s “Men Who Stare at Goats.”  Three of those were listed specifically my year-in-advance Oscar column back in February and, of course, all but one have been listed in our contenders section for over a month.  The list comes from the mouth of an anonymous industry source who’s looking, however, so I’ll admit it has more stroke than my petty ponderings.

    The inclusion of the Weir film is a surprise, however.  Just last month actor Ed Harris told me he was off to Bulgaria to shoot his portion of the film, a historical epic revolving around escapees from a Siberian Gulag in 1940.  So that film is still very much in the making and likely won’t hit theaters (if I were to make my best guess) until 2010.

    Of the others, I would bet “Agora” could really hit the ground running this season if it isn’t dashed by its own ambitions.  The rest…well, we’ll see.

  • Kevin Macdonald steps up to ‘The Eagle of the Ninth’

    Cover of The Eagle of the NinthI first heard about Kevin Macdonald’s plans to adapt Rosemary Sutcliff’s “The Eagle of the Ninth” way back in 2006 when I sat down for a lunch interview with screenwriter Jeremy Brock (who co-wrote Macdonald’s “The Last King of Scotland”).  The machinery being what it is in this town, you have to wait until a trade gets a hold of it before it’s real “news,” and so here’s Variety’s story.

    I like that Macdonald is diving headlong into features, one after another.  I’m especially glad to see he’s not disenchanted after some troubling times on “State of Play.”  The last time I talked to him he was fuming over the then recent departure of Brad Pitt from the film.

    In any case, “Eagle” (which I see will still be written by Brock) deals with “a wounded Roman soldier and his loyal Celtic slave who try to solve the mystery of the Ninth Legion, a brigade of Roman soldiers that vanished after heading into the untamed Highlands of Scotland 15 years earlier,” according to Variety.  I’ve been meaning to pick up a copy of Sutcliff’s book for some time.  Anyone here read it?  Thoughts?

    Jamie Bell is set to star and Focus will distribute.  In the meantime, I’m still chomping at the bit to see “State of Play” (which I won’t catch until April 8).  I hope it works.  Macdonald is one of the good guys, so here’s hoping he keeps a steady heading.

  • Why the public should never be allowed to vote for anything

    Guy Ritchie at the Empire AwardsExcept maybe the occasional president. And, okay, a reality-TV contest or two. But film awards — no. As spectacularly wrong as organizations like the Academy, and the odd critics’ groups, can get it sometimes, nobody can rival the collective movie-going public for sheer cluelessness when it comes to determining the best of the art form.

    Case in point: the Empire Awards, voted for by readers of the eponymous film magazine, which took place in London on Sunday. Of course, it’s a fluffy, meaningless ceremony — a good excuse for a party more than anything else — but their choices are, nonetheless, a worrying barometer of just how low independent and/or adult-oriented cinema lies on the radar of most cinemagoers.

    Exhibit A, and the real groaner of the night: the public’s choice for Best British Film. While the rest of us have been singing the praises of, say, “Hunger” or “In Bruges” (both nominated, rather miraculously in the case of the former), the Empire readership apparently lives in some parallel universe where the best that British cinema had to offer in 2008 was, er, “RocknRolla.”

    You’d hardly expect a film as challenging and specialized as “Hunger” to take a public award, but “In Bruges” occupies precisely the same genre territory as Guy Ritchie’s dismal last effort, with the crucial difference that it does so with wit, intelligence and a modicum of originality. It’s hardly news that the public doesn’t place much stock in such virtues, but it’s depressing all the same.

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  • Critics sink ‘Boat’

    January Jones (right) in The Boat That RockedI mentioned last week that I had reservations about Richard Curtis’s new comedy “The Boat That Rocked,” which opens here in the UK on Friday. Every inch of the film’s marketing thus far (and there’s been a lot of it) gives me the impression of a talented team trying aggressively hard to have fun, but it all looks too calculated for my liking.

    And the tepid trade reviews the film is getting seem to suggest I had reason to be suspicious. Screen International strikes with the sharpest claws, going so far as to describe it as Curtis’s “personal Titanic.” (And they aren’t referring to the 1997 blockbuster, either.) Fionnula Halligan writes:

    There’s no sign of anyone in charge of this bloated Working Title vessel, which lurches and leaks its way through a series of flimsy setpieces before gracelessly coming to a watery grave … Problematic 134-minute running time turns what should have been a breezy comedy about radio broadcasters on a pirate ship into a draining experience and notices/word-of-mouth are unlikely to be forgiving.

    What transpires on Curtis’s Radio Rock feels historically bogus (would a DJ in 1966 really say “this will make you moist”?), if visually accurate. But what is most striking is the wasted opportunity here: surely life on the real Radio Caroline must have thrown up far more dramatic and comedic potential than Curtis is able to take on board here.

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  • R.I.P. Maurice Jarre

    It’s taken a full day for me to get around to posting an appreciation of the late Maurice Jarre, who died yesterday at the age of 84.  Most will note his exemplary work on classics such as “Lawrence of Arabia,” “Doctor Zhivago,” “A Passage to India” and “Witness.”  Indeed they should.

    The esteemed composer landed nine Oscar nominations and three wins in a career that spanned five decades.  His last scores of note may have been the one-two Bruce Rubin punch of “Ghost” and “Jacob’s Ladder” in 1990, or perhaps István Szabó’s “Sunshine” a decade ago.  There is an embarrassment of riches in the man’s portfolio, but as a child of the 80s, I must go against the expected grain and give you 1985’s “Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome”:

    I don’t expect it to get any love elsewhere, do you? And I live to fill in the gaps. But in all seriousness, farewell to a legend.

    Additionally, Jon Burlingame, who generally covers the film music world for Variety among other outlets, has written up an appreciation in the Los Angeles Times.  French president Nicolas Sarkozy, meanwhile, has paid tribute to his fellow countryman.

  • Good news for ‘Friday Night Lights’

    Kyle Chandler in Friday Night LightsLots of TV talk lately.  It happens, I guess, but I’ve been biting my nails waiting on the fate of NBC’s “Friday Night Lights” for a while now.  When the network gave up on it I thanked my lucky stars I could see it exclusively on DirecTV, but NBC has been re-running that third season this year so that’s nice.  Now comes news that the show will see network life for two more seasons.  From the AP:

    A person close to the production said Monday that it has been renewed for two more 13-episode runs and will be on the air through the 2010-11 season. The person, who lacked authorization to discuss NBC’s decision, spoke on condition of anonymity.

    “Friday Night Lights,” a Texas football-and-family drama starring Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton, has struggled in the ratings but has been a critical bright spot for NBC, drawing consistently good reviews and Emmy and Peabody awards.

    “Lights” hasn’t been the “best stuff on TV” material it was in its first season, but I still very much enjoyt he show and think it deserves the time to play out the course of its various characters.  Strange that I became such a fan of the series when I was immediately turned off by Peter Berg’s 2004 film for whatever reason.  And someone give Kyle Chandler a silver screen role he can really dig his teeth into already.

  • Not feeling it

    My consistent disinterest in anything Sam Raimi has ever touched aside (“Spider-Man 2” and maybe “For Love of the Game” excepted), why do I hate every inch of this “Drag Me To Hell” trailer?  Is it the choice to force Allison Lohman into the role of a leading lady I can buy (which I can’t)?  Is it the the use of David Arnold’s “Kasuf Returns” from “Stargate” plopped over the last half of the trailer to over-amplify the urgency I should feel at the film’s goings on (which it doesn’t)?  Is it the eye-rolling nature of the horror genre for God knows how many years, something Raimi has come to exemplify, at least in my own mind?  Is it the Mac guy, distracting as always?

    Maybe it’s all of the above.  But chalk this up right next to “Inglourious Basterds” as one of a few films I most certainly wouldn’t call “anticipated” this year:

  • David O. Russell steps up

    David O. RussellAfter the respective five-year gaps following “Three Kings” and “I Heart Huckabees,” it’s nice to see David O. Russell with a couple of irons in the fire. (Well, nice if you’re a fan at least — which I am.)

    With his long-delayed comedy “Nailed” (which has endured various financial troubles) finally due later this year, now Variety reports that Russell has another project on the horizon, this time an adaptation:

    David O. Russell is attached to direct “The Silver Linings Playbook” for the Weinstein Co. The “Three Kings” helmer is also adapting the screenplay, which is based on Matthew Quick’s debut novel.

    Story centers on Pat Peoples, a down-on-his-luck former high school teacher who has just been released from a mental institution and placed in the care of his mother.

    I confess the novel skipped my radar, but the blurb describes it as “an enchanting first novel about love, madness and Kenny G,” so I’m guessing the whimsy quotient is suitably Russell-friendly, which fine by me.

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  • SUNDAY CENTS: ‘Monsters’ ball

    Monsters vs. Aliens“Monsters vs. Aliens” came storming out of the gate with a $58.2 million opening this weekend. That comes from an ultra-wide 4,104 theaters, the fourth-widest release ever for a non-sequel, and that’s enough to top the debuts of “Shrek,” “Madagascar” and every other DreamWorks animated non-sequel aside from “Kung Fu Panda.” It also handily beats the $45 million debut that “Horton Hears a Who!” managed during this same time period last year.

    Paramount marketed the life out of this thing, and 3D in general, and it appears to have paid off. With a budget reportedly topping $150 million and at least another half of that spent on promotions, it will be a welcome sigh of relief for the studio brass to see that it caught on with families this week.

    Last week I predicted low on “The Haunting in Connecticut” because I thought audiences might be tired of horror product. After all, this was the seventh horror film to go wide in the 13 weeks of 2009 so far. Silly me. Audiences came out in droves, earning the film $23 million and the ninth biggest debut in Lionsgate’s history.

    Who are these people chomping at the bit to see anything even remotely scary? Is it the same group of people seeing all of them or is there a guy out there who thinks, “’The Last House on the Left’ looks lame. But ‘The Haunting in Connecticut’ looks awesome!” I’m pretty sure I can spoil the endings to all of them at once right now: You wasted your money.

    Back in seventh place is “12 Rounds” with $5.3 mil. John Cena is clearly no Dwayne Johnson and he may not even be Hulk Hogan. Remember “Suburban Commando?” Of course you do. Anyway, this debut tallied less than Cena’s debut, “The Marine,” and it marks another step backward for director Renny Harlin. The man behind classics like “Cliffhanger,” “Die Hard 2” and “The Long Kiss Goodnight” saw his last film go straight to DVD, and now this. I blame Geena Davis, who left him during production of his last great epic: “Deep Blue Sea.”

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  • When not watching films, reading about them

    Cover of Cecil B. DeMille: A Life in ArtMy wife has often called film my heroin, as I confess to be more than just a little bit addicted. When not watching and writing about cinema, I can usually be found either in our family room in the winter months or on the deck by the pool in the summer with the latest new film book or biography in my hand.

    I have always loved reading, discovering Classics Illustrated, that incredible comic book series at a young age in the 1960s, and laying eyes on the first Famous Monster of Film Land shortly after that. My grandmother took me to the library where I followed a sign that said “film.” Thinking they were showing a movie, I wandered over and found an entire floor devoted to books on movies.

    Talk about a wet dream for that 11- or 12-year-old kid! She got me my own library card and I took out six or seven books at a time, focusing on my first love at the time, horror, and then absorbing John Wayne, Elia Kazan, John Ford, Orson Welles, everything I could find.

    As a film critic and published author, I receive many film-related books to read and comment on, which I do when time permits. So I thought I might share some of the best reads I have enjoyed lately in this week’s column.

    “Victor Fleming: An American Master” by Michael Sragrow is the best film biography I have read in a long, long time, likely since Richard Schickel’s seminal work on Elia Kazan. Fleming, of course, is the director behind two of Hollywood’s most essential classics: “The Wizard of Oz” and “Gone With the Wind,” both in the same freakin’ year. He was a man’s man, who took no garbage from anyone and was known to bully the talent into doing their job. The research for this book is superb because Fleming left no personal papers, making the writer’s job a massive jigsaw puzzle, but one he finished to utter perfection. A master work of a bio.

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  • Giving up on two

    With TV on the mind, did anyone else give up on “Kings” after the second episode? Truth is, the pilot didn’t grab me like I thought it would. Despite an allegiance to anything Ian McShane commits himself to, I can’t go along with this one anymore. A bit inflated beyond it’s own means, and yet, strangely trite and, I don’t know, facile as allegories go.

    Also — “Heroes” is gone from my DVR forever. I think the comic geek in me forced me to keep up with it this long, but its convultued silliness has been irritating since season one. I was in the middle of an episode a few weeks back and I just said, “Screw it,” hit stop, deleted the four episodes I had stored up, canceled future recordings, washed my hands of it. Sometimes enough is enough and letting go is oh so refreshing.

  • A CW gem

    A while back a friend turned me onto the CW’s “Supernatural,” a series I never really had much of an interest in given a certain admitted bias against the network’s high-sheen programming. I figured it was piggy-backing on the success of “Buffy” and “Angel,” shows that never appealed to me, and the beefcake, vanilla nature of the leads also seemed a bit of a snooze.

    Most of the way through season four, and I can’t stop watching. Generally I like to let something like this run its course and go back to see the full run on DVD when I catch it mid-stride (like “Battlestar Galactica”), but when I picked it up early in the third season, I caught myself up with conversations and a few Internet searches and that had to be enough, because it’s an addiction at this point.

    This probably reads as stale perspective to many who have watched the show since the beginning (and there are plenty of devoted fans out there), so forgive me that. However, I have a few acquaintances who’ve told me they had an interest in the show, but stayed away for the same reasons that kept me away for a few years. I guess I’m hear to tell those folks and anyone with a similar view point to give it a shot. It really, really works. Jared Padalecki’s and Jensen Ackles’s on-screen chemistry never gets stale and the writing remains creative and crisp week in and week out.

    There isn’t an official trailer I can find on YouTube, but here’s a pretty good fan-made package:

  • Server change

    FYI, we changed servers last night, so if you notice any hiccups, bear with us.

  • Stay cool

    Over a month after Sean Penn defeated Mickey Rourke in what was possibly the tightest acting race in recent memory, Cinematical’s Jeffrey Anderson has come up with an interesting take on how the outcome may actually benefit Rourke, and indeed “The Wrestler.” In short, he says, losing the Oscar allows them to retain their edge:

    The Wrestler is just a couple of months old now, but it has already gained a certain type of following. It has actual fans; people love this movie rather than just admire it. Milk has become a good movie for students to watch in school, but The Wrestler is a film that they will choose to watch, in their free time. It’s a cult film now. And cult films don’t win Oscars. It automatically disqualifies them from cult status. A cult film is something that people discover on their own. If the Academy acknowledges it, then it has been plucked away and turned into something official. It has a stamp of approval, and cult films are all about not being approved.

    I tend to agree, and this encapsulates why the Oscars tend to be antithetical to “cult” status — films seeking the former aim for a majority vote, while films seeking the latter tend to build on minority appeal. You only need look back to, say, “American Beauty” to see how the Academy’s endorsement can temper a once-venerated film’s cinéaste cache, while an also-ran like “The Insider” only gains in critical stature.

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  • Older and wiser

    Hope Davis’s recent complaint about the issue of Hollywood ageism, prompted by being offered characters well over her actual age, seems to have struck a bit of a chord this week. The Guardian’s discussion of the matter was also recently picked up on in the New York Times, while Cinematical contributed to the discussion by celebrating Julia Roberts’ willingness to acknowledge her over-40 status in “Duplicity.”

    Coincidentally enough, the issue also crops up in a recent Guardian interview with the delicious Catherine Keener. Ostensibly to publicise Michael Winterbottom’s “Genova” (a sadly rather negligible work, though Keener is stellar is always), it’s more of a reflective career profile, opening with the staggering (to me, anyway) revelation that she is 50 years old. (Seriously?!) Here, she describes the pleasures of ageing as a character actress rather than as a movie star:

    “Interesting characters are pretty rare if you really want to be the lead. That’s the usual complaint of actresses my age, and they’re not wrong. They depend on you being beautiful. Since I’m not cast for my physicality, I’m not that interested in those parts. I find that playing so many characters in so many films is a way to stay in the moment.”

    She says she feels sisterly towards other women actors her age, and would concur that Hollywood remains ageist and sexist, especially when it comes to big-budget material. Somehow, she has found a niche that avoids these traps. She despairs a bit of the new generation of women coming up: “Everyone seems so frigging young and naive. They had some survey of younger women and they asked them what they aspired to be. The most popular answer was to be the assistant to a movie star – not the movie star, but the assistant!”

    Yeah, as if Catherine Keener isn’t sexy. Anyway, she’s a really smart, engaging interviewee; read the rest here. Meanwhile, with Michelle Pfeiffer shortly to appear on our screens as Rupert Friend’s decades-older seductress in “Cheri,” something tells me this isn’t the last we’ll hear on the “older women in Hollywood” issue in the months to come.

  • ‘Mysteries of Pittsburgh’ trailer

    Am I the only one who had completely forgotten that “The Mysteries of Pittsburgh” was even coming out in two weeks’ time? Read into that what you will, but you’d expect the adaptation of a novel as successful and widely beloved as Michael (“Wonder Boys”) Chabon’s 1988 debut to be a bigger deal.

    Still, that’s what happens when you hand it to the writer-director of “Dodgeball” and cast the yet-to-ignite likes of Sienna Miller. And its reviews at last year’s Sundance fest didn’t exactly set the world alight. Neither, for me, does this trailer. File this under “wait and see.”

  • Time for the below-the-liners

    Jeff Wells got the following from a tipster following yesterday’s news that the Oscars will be bumped a few weeks to avoid the 2010 Winter Olympics:

    The reason for the new Oscar date…is that a lot of the below-the-line [guys] who work the Oscars will be working the opening and closing Olympic ceremonies in Vancouver and will be out of the country during the ramp-up to the show. They just need the time.

    Makes sense to me.

  • Enough already

    Right, so Michael Sheen obviously ignored my career advice to lay off the biopics for a while. That’s okay. He’s a lot more famous and successful than I am, so I guess he probably knows best.

    But seriously, a third go-round playing Tony Blair in yet another factional Peter Morgan-scripted project? If you haven’t heard already, “The Special Relationship” is a planned BBC/HBO collaboration covering the political allegiance between Blair and Bill Clinton at the tail-end of the century. From the Guardian:

    Michael Sheen is due to return as the former prime minister for the third time, alongside Helen McCrory, reprising her Cherie Blair from The Queen. Dennis Quaid is attached to play the ex-US president, reportedly beating Russell Crowe, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Alec Baldwin and Tim Robbins to the role. Julianne Moore is lined up to play Hillary Clinton. Morgan intends to sidestep casting of Monica Lewinsky by showing the former intern solely in archive footage, including video of her closed-door testimony to Congress.

    Sure, Sheen has that particular impression nailed, but what does he (or we, for that matter) stand to gain from reprising it once more? He’s a gifted actor, no doubt — but I can’t be the only one who’d like to see him expand his range a little. (In any case, wouldn’t it be interesting to see another actor’s interpretation of the role?)

    Much the same, in my opinion, goes for Peter Morgan, who is apparently set to make his directorial debut with this. I’d love to see his evident grace and wit as a dramatist put to work on something loose and fictitious — perhaps even more genre-based. Anyway, kvetching aside, I’m sure this will be a typically classy, intelligent effort. Just wake me when it’s over.