AMPAS followed up the controversial announcement expanding the best picture category from 5 nominees to 10 with further changes that tinker with the process for choosing the nominees for best original song and that relegate the Irving Thalberg Award, the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award and the honorary Oscar for career excellence to a November gulag attended by 500 invitees.
There seems to be a misperception that the changes are intended to make better awards when in fact they have little to do with the integrity of the honor and everything to do with convincing people to tune into the advertising gold mine that is (or was) the TV show. Ghettoizing the honorary awards is an especially bad idea, but it will definitely make for a faster paced ceremony. Most people who only see a few movies a year and who only talk about them in the week or two leading up to the Oscars always complain about the boring speeches by the oldsters they’ve never heard of, but eliminating them cheapens the Oscars even further than adding 5 more best picture nominees.
“He has this way of speaking in hyperbole and quotation marks at the same time, which is a genius thing. There’s this sense of the postmodernist about his very compliments where it’s slightly removed from earnestness, but earnestness is there too. It’s kind of great.” – Bill Pullman on working with David Lynch
This chat with Bill Pullman is the second of the round table interviews I participated in for Jennifer Lynch’s Surveillance. Mr. Pullman was a very nice guy and he seemed happy talking about the project. He has a laid back personality that you’d almost confuse as befuddled, but he’s sharp and thoughtful. It’s similar to how he often comes across in the movies.
The Rumor: Since February ‘08 we’ve been following rumors that they’re bringing LiC favorite Arrested Development to the big screen.
Why it could be true: Most of the cast who have been asked – seemingly all of them…seriously, every time one of them does a junket or a round table or an interview, somebloggerasksaboutit – have expressed interest in the project and the trades even reported last November that series creator Mitch Hurwitz was “close to a deal with Imagine and Fox Searchlight to write and direct a feature adaptation” of the Emmy-winning sitcom.
Why it’s probably not: Every account of whether the film is a reality or not shares one fact in common: there’s no script yet. Michael Bay might argue to the contrary, but you can’t really make a movie without a script. Until there’s a script, this movie is little more than a fantasy.
Do we care? We were huge fans of AD during its original TV run and we were sad to see it never caught on with audiences, but we’ve said our goodbyes and we’ve moved on. Whenever we get a craving for a frozen banana, or a chicken dance, or a ride in the stair car, we pop in a DVD. Frankly, we’re pretty sick of TV shows being turned into movies (though we’re happy to patiently wait a couple of years for people to realize the comic genius that was Land of the Lost) so, no, we’re not really looking forward to this one.
The verdict. It’s definitely possible and it’s clear the right forces want it to happen, but until there’s a script the likelihood is about 50/50 at best. Even if a script is finished, there are still a million things that could go wrong before cameras roll, especially with such a large cast of people who would have to be brought back together. Our opinion? Arrested Development is going to stay arrested.
We ran character poster #8 from Shane Acker’s 9 the other day and now the ever-enterprising Alex Billington at First Showing has tracked down the others:
To Protect Us: Voiced by Christopher Plummer, 1 is the scientist’s first and eldest creation and as such, he is the self-proclaimed leader of the group. Clever and sly, but also domineering and quick-tempered, 1 is threatened by the arrival of the newest member, 9, whose higher intellect leads him to question 1’s authority. Buzznet
Forget about Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. It’s already gotten clobbered by critics and it’s already made more at the box office than a dozen better movies combined. See it if you want, but there’s really nothing left to say about it, is there?
On the other hand, there’s another little action movie coming out this weekend in Los Angeles and New York. It’s not opening on 4000+ screens, but it’s pretty great and proof that you can make an action movie and still have a brain in your head.
The movie is Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker. It tells the story of an elite bomb disposal squad working to keep the streets of Baghdad safe for Iraqis and Americans alike. It’s not strictly apolitical – I think it’s an anti-war picture in that it shows the excoriating effects of war on the men and women we ask to fight for us – but it’s not literally an anti-Iraq war picture either. It’s bigger than that and frankly better than any of a number of Iraq-themed films that have come out in the last few years.
I’m almost afraid to run this trailer because I really want this movie to be great, but the trailer is…well…mostly wretched. Decide for yourself.
I’m reminded of the trailer for Ghost Town that was equally unpromising (well maybe a bit more promising than this), but turned out to be kind of good.
After that, we promised ourselves never to underestimate the comic powers of Ricky Gervais again.
[UPDATE: K found the US version of the trailer and it's samey, yet better. Check it out after the jump]
Michael Jackson was rushed to UCLA medical center earlier this afternoon following an apparent cardiac arrest and the LA Times has confirmed a popular gossip website report that the pop star was pronounced dead soon after arrival – this according to “city and law enforcement sources.”
Jackson’s personal and legal troubles, his sometimes erratic behavior and his increasingly strange physical appearance over the last many years cloud what a magnetic and massively popular entertainer he was throughout the ’70s and well into the ’80s.
Of course, he’s most famous for his career as a pop music icon and that’s how we’ll always remember him, but LiC will save a special place for a memory of The Scarecrow in Sidney Lumet’s big screen adaptation of the popular Broadway musical, The Wiz.
“It doesn’t seem to me that women are nonviolent. I think we’ve just been societally taught to keep it under wraps until we’re either drowning our children or shooting our husbands.” – Jennifer Lynchon women and violence
Jennifer Lynch’s thriller Surveillance starring Bill Pullman and Julia Ormond opens in limited release tomorrow and I recently participated in a series of separate round table interviews with Ms. Lynch and her cast. Here is the first one with Lynch by herself.
In the film, Pullman and Ormond play two FBI agents who show up in a small Midwestern town where three people have information that could help the agents solve a possible serial murder: a gun crazy cop, a drug addict and an 8-year-old girl. Unfortunately, no one’s story quite adds up and nothing is as it first appears.
Lynch is of course the daughter of LiC favorite David Lynch and this is her first feature since 1993’s critically divisive Boxing Helena. She seemed a bit nervous at first, but was clearly excited to be back making films and (justifiably) proud of the work she and her cast and crew had done.
Assorted outlets are reporting that Farrah Fawcett has succumbed to her long battle with cancer.
Best known for her TV appearances (Charlie’s Angels) and this poster which hung on the wall next to my bed throughout the late ’70s, she also had a film career comprised of many movies that won’t be making a lot of top 10 lists, but that occupied a disproportionate part of my childhood including films like Logan’s Run, Saturn 3 and The Cannonball Run.
In 1986, she received a Golden Globe nomination for her role in the drama Extremities and she was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award for her 1995 role as Robert Duvall’s wife in The Apostle.
From Shane Acker’s 9 the first film ever animated in Post-Apocalyptic Rag Doll Vision (suck on that Katzenberg!), here’s a closer look at the character 8.
It’s hard out here for a rag doll so 8 has tagged along as the muscle of the group. You can see he’s got half a scissors to help do the dirty work.
This is fun and all, but I fear I’ve just locked myself in to rolling out 1 through 7 in the next couple of months leading up to the release of 9 in theaters on 9/9/09.
Looking for shelter this weekend from Michael Bay’s robot derby? Look no further than this week’s collection of limited releases where there is something for almost every taste. Want a lurid thriller with something on its mind? Check out Jennifer Lynch’s Surveillance. Looking for an action movie with a frisson of arthouse cred? Give Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker a try. In the mood for a harrowing, socially relevant drama? Look for The Stoning of Soraya M. at a theater near you. Seriously. Transformers is going to make like $160 million from its Wednesday opening through the weekend. It doesn’t need your 10 bucks. Besides, if you’re lucky enough to see a movie in the auditorium next door, you’re sure to hear the robot movie anyway…it’s like two movies for the price of one! Los Angeles Note (corrected): Director Jennifer Lynch will participate in a Q&A following the 7:30pm show and she’ll introduce the 9:50pm showing of Surveillance at LA’s Nuart Theater on Friday 6/26 and Saturday 6/27. The film’s co-star Julia Ormond will join Jennifer for the 7:30pm Friday show.
IFC has announced that Lars von Trier’s controversial horror filmAntichrist starring Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg will begin its US release in New York and Los Angeles on October 23rd. The film will be available on VOD two days earlier. No word yet whether either version will be edited for content or if they’ll be unrated. Too bad the video game won’t be available in time for Christmas.
Here’s the trailer for the latest from Richard Kelly (Donnie Darko). Cameron Diaz and James Marsden play a couple in financial straights whose problems appear to be solved when Frank Langella offers them a mysterious box that will give them a million dollars everytime a button inside it is pressed. The problem is, pressing the button also kills a person they don’t know.
Got a burning question for Cyrus Nowrasteh about his film The Stoning of Soraya M. which opens on Friday? On Thursday, June 25 at 4pm PST, Facebook is hosting a “live video conversation” with the director here. You can RSVP to the event so your Facebook friends know you’ll be there. You can also favorite the movie here.
Read what LiC had to say about the film starring Shohreh Aghdashloo (The House of Sand and Fog)here.
Blogsylvania recently went hairy ape shit (read all about it at The Playlist) when Sharon Waxman randomly claimed in a piece in The Wrap that Harvey Weinstein and Universal were pushing Quentin Tarantino to trim 40 minutes out of Inglourious Basterds after it premiered to mixed reviews at Cannes.
During the festival, Anne Thompson had said that after 3 months of editing Tarantino delivered “a dripping-wet print to Cannes…at a running time of two hours, 27 minutes…19 minutes less than he needed to retain final cut.” She said Tarantino would be returning to the editing room where he’d likely add a scene and then do some “fine-tuning and tweaking and timing” with editor Sally Menke.
That’s a far cry from having to take out 40 minutes. As pointed out by The Playlist and others who’d seen the movie, the 40 minute number was not really even possible.
Well, in an interview in GQ, Harvey Weinstein says it’s all B.S. and he should probably know. Read Harvey’s own words after the jump.
Nikki Finke just posted a release from a press conference given this morning in Beverly Hills where Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences President Sid Ganis announced that next year’s Oscars would feature 10 nominees for best picture.
This was the practice up through the 1943 ceremony, but why are they returning to it? It sounds like another attempt to broaden the appeal of the telecast. If your favorite movie gets nominated, you’re more likely to tune in.
Is there a downside to this? Well, it makes the nominations about as meaningful as the first round of the NBA playoffs where more than half of the teams get in.
I don’t know. I’m realizing as I write this it’s pretty much a non-issue as far as my movie-going year is concerned, but I’ve already gone to the trouble of typing it up so I’m posting it.
James Cameron and Sam Worththington on the set of Avatar.
So little is known about James Cameron’s highly anticipated Avatar (12/18) that the Internet goes into convulsions when so much as a video game adaptation screencap is released.
Be sure to keep an extra change of clothing handy now that Cameron has shown 24 minutes of the film to exhibitors at Cinema Expo in Amsterdam because you’re liable to get something on you if you’re not careful.
In introducing the 24-minute assemblage, Cameron said much of it came from the first third of the film but that there were also glimpses from unfinished portions of later battle scenes involving warring sides clashing over control of the fantasy world Pandora.
The filmmaker also said the action gets nonstop in the latter portions of the film, which throughout is populated by strange life-forms in a world of unprecedentedly rich fantasy elements. Worthington plays an avatar — a remote-controlled character created by melding his crippled human form into a super-human being — whose fate lies ultimately in doing battle with his own former race.
Fox made media covering the event agree not to report details of the Avatar images or to interview audience members for reactions. But from the sustained applause at the conclusion of the presentation, suffice to say Fox didn’t hurt itself at the event.
Yes, I know special motion-capture equipment had to be invented by WETA and ILM in order to complete the special effects for the film, but let’s see if they invented a word processor that will help James Cameron tell a story.
What is it with directors I love taking on projects that bore me? There aren’t too many potential movie ideas less intrinsically interesting to me than Steven Soderbergh’s probably doomed Moneyball, but if I made a list of such films, it would surely include Aaron Sorkin’s film about the creation of Facebook announced last summer.
News that David Fincher is in “early talks” to direct does little to get my pulse racing, especially since his name is attached to a lot of things that aren’t going to happen.
Next week, Columbia will probably hire him to take over Moneyball and Martin Scorsese will sign on to Twitter: The Movie.
Passenger Side, the latest film from Canadian brothers Matthew and Joel Bissonnette made its world premiere at LAFF on Friday night and you can read the LiC review here. This is writer/director Matthew’s third feature and the second time he’s worked with his actor brother Joel. I sat down to talk with the pair on Sunday afternoon.
I suppose I’ll start with the most obvious question: Passenger Side is the story of two brothers and you guys are two brothers. Was this autobiographical in any way?
Matthew: Not really, no. Other than it has brothers.
Joel: I would say yeah, but not in such a delineated way. Just more in the quality of who they are and the way they talk. There’s a real familiarity to me in the characters and to he and I, but the story and the events and the particulars of it not so much.
M: Let me put it this way. I think it’s much easier to make up stories than characters and I think you borrow more from people you know in terms of their tone and personality and stuff like that. The narrative you can sort of make up anything. I think it’s difficult to conceive of a person I’ve never met before but it’s quite easy to think of a sequence of events that could happen to a human being.
I know exactly one LiC reader who knows Nickelodeon’s Avatar: The Last Airbender and they’re not terribly excited about M. Night Shyamalan’s big screen adaptation so I skipped the formality of running this teaser last night. I figured the pictures I ran a few weeks back were good enough.
Alas, today is a new day and no one knows what the news gods will deliver. Besides, I kind of like the trailer. It does a pretty great job of capturing the flavor of the cartoon.
For those of you who have no idea what the you’re looking at, the last Airbender is a kid who…aw hell, just go look it up at Wikipedia.
If this movie isn’t a hit, could it be The Last Shyamalaner?
We’ll find out next summer when The Last Airbender blows into town on July 2, 2010.
Apple has the US trailer for Hayao Miyazaki’s Ponyo which closes the Los Angeles Film Festival on Sunday and opens in theaters on August 14th, 2009.
I love the hand-drawn, fluid simplicity of it.
The Little Mermaid-inspired tale of a goldfish’s quest to become human wowed critics at the Venice Film Festival in 2008 and broke box-office records in Japan.
The US release features the voices of Cate Blanchett, Matt Damon, Tina Fey, Frankie Jonas, Cloris Leachman, Liam Neeson, Lily Tomlin and Betty White.
I spent some time over the weekend interviewing Chilean born filmmaker Alicia Scherson whose film Turistas just made its US premiere at LAFF in the narrative competition. It tells the story of a woman who ends up spending several days in a national park with a young backpacker from Norway after she’s abandoned by her husband following an argument. You can read the LiC review here.
What was the inspiration for Turistas? What was the genesis of it?
Sort of the first image I got was of this woman who gets out of the car to pee and then while she’s peeing she sees this insect and just by looking at the insect really close she has this kind of, not a revelation, but this moment she sort of feels her life is going to change in a way. So that was the first image I had and I started there, sort of building the story on both sides. The other thing is I knew I wanted to shoot in nature so I guess I forced the story to go into nature somehow.
McPaper has a pile of nifty concept art from Tim Burton’s upcoming Alice in Wonderland (March 5, 2010) starring Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Anne Hathaway and others.
I like the hallucinatory style. It’s of a piece with Burton’s other work, but it has a refinement that stands on its own.
Wah Do Dem (What They Do) – USA 2009
Directed by Sam Fleischner and Ben Chace. Starring Sean Bones, Norah Jones, Kevin Bewersdorf and Carl Bradshaw.
Narrative Competition – World Premiere
You’re a filmmaker and you’ve just won a cruise to Jamaica in a raffle. What do you do? You make a movie centering on a cruise to Jamaica, of course. That’s what Sam Fleischner has done anyway. Wah Do Dem tells the story of New Yorker Max (Sean Bones) who gets dumped by his girlfriend (Norah Jones in a cameo) a few days before the cruise they’ve won is scheduled to set sail. Depressed and unable to find anyone to go with him, he decides to go alone and ends up having an adventure beyond anything they write about in the guidebooks.
It was all LAFF all the time this weekend at LiC so that doesn’t leave me much to talk about at the Watercooler other than the things I’ve already written about or will be soon. It’s been a good festival so far. There haven’t been any transcendent cinematic moments yet, but everything has been good to very good.
Apologies for not hanging out in the comments section as much as usual. Between watching movies and posting, time has been short and Wi-Fi has been sporadic.
What’s going on in the wide wide world of cinema? Did anybody catch any of the new releases or any of the films we’ve been talking about lately that may have expanded like Moon or Tetro?
I was never too keen on the subject matter – The Oakland A’s general manager who turned a small market baseball team into a winner by bucking conventional wisdom with statistical analysis – but I’m surprised to hear that Columbia Pictures has put Steven Soderbergh’s Brad Pitt starring Moneyball into limited turnaround. This means Columbia won’t be picking up the tab but Soderbergh is free to set it up elsewhere. However, if Soderbergh is unable to find new financing by Monday, Columbia could continue without him.
According to Peter Bart and Michael Fleming’s Variety BF Deal Memo blog, Columbia head Amy Pascal found the final draft of Steven Zaillian’s script diverged too much from the original she approved. She pulled out just 96 hours before the film was set to begin production.
We don’t ordinarily care too much about the business end of movies, but if Soderbergh gets booted off the project, that would pretty much be the end of LiC’s interest in the movie even if Brad Pitt sticks around.
In the Loop – UK 2009
Directed by Armando Iannucci. Starring Peter Capaldi, Tom Hollander, Chris Addison, Gina McKee, Mimi Kennedy, James Gandolfini, Anna Chlumsky, David Rasche and Steve Coogan.
Summer Showcase
Based on The Thick of It, the BBC TV comedy about the inner workings of British government, In The Loop is the kind of dialogue-based comedy where you miss jokes because you’re still laughing at the one that came before it. Writer/Director Armando Iannucci has reassembled his writing team of Jess Armstrong, Simon Blackwell, Ian Martin and Tony Roche and they’re joined by several Thick cast members including Peter Capaldi, Chris Addison, James Smith and Joanna Scanlan.
Sunday: 6/28/09 The Watercooler
Talk about the weekend's movie watching, or anything else that's on your mind.
Thursday: 7/2/09 Weekend Forecast
A look at the upcoming weekend's theatrical releases.
Saturday: 6/27/09 Movies You May Have Missed Updated semi-regularly, these are DVD releases of interesting films that may have slipped under your radar.
Assorted outlets are reporting that Farrah Fawcett has succumbed to her long battle with cancer.
