Will win!
Has an excellent chance.
Has some chance.
Getting nominated is an honor in itself, right?
The acadamy should be ashaimed of itself.
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Tuesday, January 23, 2007
The Oscar nominees: Color Commentary
Okay, folks, it's that time of the year again, and now, I will fearlessly predict who's going to get what. Again, I will make life easier for everyone by color coding the list thusly:
Will win!
Has an excellent chance.
Has some chance.
Getting nominated is an honor in itself, right?
The acadamy should be ashaimed of itself.
Will win!
Has an excellent chance.
Has some chance.
Getting nominated is an honor in itself, right?
The acadamy should be ashaimed of itself.
Monday, January 22, 2007
Sundance shorts, part one
There are plenty of shorts being shown at Sundance, and this year they're posting them and you can download a bunch. Here's a few:
Black and White Trypps Number Three
Directed by Ben Russell
A guy with a camera focuses on another guy at a rave. That’s the entire movie. A bunch of people jump up and down and nothing else happens. What a crashing bore. The only thing positive one can say is that it makes the feature after it look somewhat better. This is the worst film of the entire Sundance film festival.
Fence
Directed by Ricardo Iscar
& Nacho Martin
The sound was off for most of the screening and nobody really seemed to notice. A bunch of Spanish Fishermen corralled a school of tuna in the open ocean ages ago, and the filmmaker recorded it for posterity. We see the tuna panicking at the surface, and the fishermen hauling them in when they tire out. Like they say about sausages and laws. Not for the feint of heart.
Freeheld
A documentary
by Cynthia Wade
Ocean County (NJ) Police Lieutenant Laurel Hester is dying. The fact that she is gay and has been living with her partner Stacie for years, didn’t really matter one way or another to the people who worked with and for her. However it seem to have mattered to the board of Freeholders of Ocean County, because they decided not to bend the rules a little and when Hester dies, Stacie would be broke and out on the street. This is about a local movement to fight this, because it’s clearly an injustice and nobody actually is defending this action except for one guy on religious principles.
So we have interviews with Laurel and Stacy, some friends and local journalists, and it seems a clear cut case of discrimination. None of the Freeholders would interview the filmmaker, and although we see them at public meetings, we don’t hear their side of the story.
It all ends happily when the Governor intervenes. The thing is workmanlike and well made, and is one of the few short docs that actually has a story to tell.
God Provides
Directed by Brian Cassidy
and Melanie Shatzky
A tour of Post Katrina New Orleans, we see a preacher taking photos to show what God’s wrath is like and a bunch of other people just getting on with their lives. Not as bad as it sounds, although rather boring for the most part.
Master of Reality
Directed by
Matthew Killip
One of those films that are just a bunch of home movies being edited together and somehow manages to get into a festival. This is not really good or interesting. The filmmake tells the story of Ronny Long, who likes horror flicks and is a big wrestling fan. He got in the news by hurting himself when he was a kid. This is actually rather boring.
To Whom It May Concern
Directed by
Mitch McCabe
A woman films herself taking photos of herself over a period of several years. For the film, she purchased some film of the aftermath of 9/11 and the 2004 Republican convention. Her boyfriend edited it and parts of it are actually funny.
Black and White Trypps Number Three
Directed by Ben Russell
A guy with a camera focuses on another guy at a rave. That’s the entire movie. A bunch of people jump up and down and nothing else happens. What a crashing bore. The only thing positive one can say is that it makes the feature after it look somewhat better. This is the worst film of the entire Sundance film festival.
Fence
Directed by Ricardo Iscar
& Nacho Martin
The sound was off for most of the screening and nobody really seemed to notice. A bunch of Spanish Fishermen corralled a school of tuna in the open ocean ages ago, and the filmmaker recorded it for posterity. We see the tuna panicking at the surface, and the fishermen hauling them in when they tire out. Like they say about sausages and laws. Not for the feint of heart.
Freeheld
A documentary
by Cynthia Wade
Ocean County (NJ) Police Lieutenant Laurel Hester is dying. The fact that she is gay and has been living with her partner Stacie for years, didn’t really matter one way or another to the people who worked with and for her. However it seem to have mattered to the board of Freeholders of Ocean County, because they decided not to bend the rules a little and when Hester dies, Stacie would be broke and out on the street. This is about a local movement to fight this, because it’s clearly an injustice and nobody actually is defending this action except for one guy on religious principles.
So we have interviews with Laurel and Stacy, some friends and local journalists, and it seems a clear cut case of discrimination. None of the Freeholders would interview the filmmaker, and although we see them at public meetings, we don’t hear their side of the story.
It all ends happily when the Governor intervenes. The thing is workmanlike and well made, and is one of the few short docs that actually has a story to tell.
God Provides
Directed by Brian Cassidy
and Melanie Shatzky
A tour of Post Katrina New Orleans, we see a preacher taking photos to show what God’s wrath is like and a bunch of other people just getting on with their lives. Not as bad as it sounds, although rather boring for the most part.
Master of Reality
Directed by
Matthew Killip
One of those films that are just a bunch of home movies being edited together and somehow manages to get into a festival. This is not really good or interesting. The filmmake tells the story of Ronny Long, who likes horror flicks and is a big wrestling fan. He got in the news by hurting himself when he was a kid. This is actually rather boring.
To Whom It May Concern
Directed by
Mitch McCabe
A woman films herself taking photos of herself over a period of several years. For the film, she purchased some film of the aftermath of 9/11 and the 2004 Republican convention. Her boyfriend edited it and parts of it are actually funny.
More Sundance, and some Slamdance
I'm lucky to be alive. On the way back from the festival, my plane almost had a headon collision. We felt the turbulence, but since it was dark out, we didn't see the plane. I spent a couple of hours in Texas in between flights, and that was actually very uninformative.
There's a bunch of shorts from Sundance I'm still working on , and a about four features from Slamdance. But in the meantime, here's some more reviews:
ONCE
Samson Films 88 mins.TBA
Written and Directed
by John Carney
An Irish busker(Glen Hansard) is playing is music on a street somewhere in Dublin. Here, after an altercation with a fiend who steals his hard earned swag, meets a Czech woman(Marketa Irglova), with whom he has an interesting conversation, followed by the usual romance. He sings to her and she listens, it turns out that she loves to play the piano, although she’s too poor to have one, selling flowers in the street and having to take care of her widowed mother and kid and all. They sing to each other and lo and behold! You have a delightful little musical.
This is more an extended music video than a recreation of a Broadway blockbuster. The simple story is enhanced by the music, most of which is done Hansard on his busted guitar. It turns out that Hansard and Irgova have been working together in real life for years, so the affection seen is genuine and much of the banter is improvised. There are some secondary characters, but for they don’t actually do much of anything, so we’re left with a just the two Hansard and Irgova chastely making love and music on the screen. It’s amazing how something so slight can be so entertaining.
Whether or not this is going to get a theatrical release is questionable, but if it comes out on cable or DVD, it’s well worth a look.
THE SAVAGES
Fox Searchlight 113 MIN, R
Written and Directed
by Tamara Jenkins
Dark comedy is a very tricky thing, especially if it isn’t done as a live-action cartoon. This isn’t that by any means, and the best part is that it works. This is one of the funniest films about dying of old age that’s been made in years and years.
Lenny Savage (Philip Bosco) is living with his longtime girlfriend Doris in the famous Sun City retirement community, when an altercation with her caregiver leads to problems. Thus, after years of estrangement, their father returns into the lives of his grown children Wendy(Laura Linney) and Jon(Philip Seymour Hoffman). Hilarity ensues. No, seriously.
Wendy is a playwright living in the East Village section of Manhattan, who uses her time temping to send out grant applications. She’s having an affair with her landlord(Peter Friedman) . Jon is a professor at SUNY Buffalo, where he teaches a course of Bertolt Brecht, is writing a book on the subject, and breaking up with his girlfriend(Cara Seymour), who’s visa is about to expire. But Doris’ death leads to an eviction and Jon and Wendy have their lives upended. This is about what happens when the parent becomes the child and vice versa. It’s something that pretty much everyone over a certain age can identify with.
The acting, as one might expect with a cast this prestigious, is excellent, and Hoffmann and Linney have great chemistry together. But it is Bosco, who‘s done almost exclusvily live theater in the past, who steals the movie, he’s both brilliant and pathetic as the old man who’s losing both his marbles and his life. The supporting cast is also fine, with Friedman giving a nuanced and funny performance, and Gbenga Akinnagbe shines in a small part as a caregiver at the nursing home where John and Wendy have put their father. But it’s the sharp writing by Jenkins, who hasn’t done anything of note since “The Slums of Beverly Hills”, which turns this from a mere movie-of-the-week to something so much more.
WE ARE THE STRANGE
U.S.A., 2006, 88 Minutes
Written and Directed
by Michael Belmont
This is the revenge of YouTube. Michael Belmont, using the pseudonym
M dot Strange, made a feature film in his tiny apartment (no basement), and put bits and pieces on the site, which over the months have, for some reason that I cannot fathom, created a rather large following. The film was recommended to me and I actually had to pay to get into the second screening at Sundance (there was no press screening).
If they gave out a booby prize at Sundance, this would definitely win hands down. The “We Are the Strange” is indeed terrible. Not bad, terrible. There’s a difference. Bad can be watchable. This is not. If it wasn’t for the fact that I have to write a review for this thing and the only way to do so is to see the entire film, I would have walked out like pretty much everyone else. This is a film, although it shows imagination and a kind of technical know-how, is down there in “Plan 9 From Outer Space
territory. I’m serious. This is the kind of thing which would provoke violence toward the film-maker. Belmont’s life might be in danger.
This is an action figure movie. I say that because I’m somewhat older and boys aren’t supposed to play with dolls. What we have is a child’s nightmare. The nightmare is that children cannot tell jokes properly until they have at least reached eleven or twelve, and this plays like a joke told by a five-year old. This has almost no plot, no humor, no characters that have the least bit of personality, just badly done artifice.
What there is of a plot has to do with an anime beauty named Blue, who is sent out into the woods by the villain, a thing that goes around saying “Beware: I live!” and can split into two beings, and a doll called M who can’t talk and wants ice cream. It ends with a titanic battle of giant robots, but by the time that point is reached, over an hour of childish rambling has taken place. Not childlike, childish. Like the four year old telling a joke, this is just annoying and pointless. (and parents, if you little one is actually a talented comedian, that’s cool, but those are as rare as hens teeth.). Don’t waste your money.
The Ballad of AJ Weberman
UK, 2007 80 min / Color NR
A Documentary Directed by
James Bluemel and Oliver Ralfe
I came into this film with no expectations. It was supposed to be about a guy who was, to be blunt about it, was Bob Dylan’s official stalker back in the late 1960s and early ’70. Might be an interesting film, I thought. It was, but not just for the reasons I went into the film for.
My movie reviews are not supposed to be about me. Well, to a small extent perhaps, it’s MY opinions after all, but this was different. 99,999 times out of ten thousand the film is not about me, or the reader. Sure there are plenty of films with which the viewer can identify, docs with famous people or people in trouble in ways that they can imagine themselves in. That’s the glory of cinema, after all.
But this, was different. The filmmakers were interviewing Weberman at the place he was crashing. A Sheepshead Bay apartment of a guy named Jay Byrd. Jay BYRD? Oh shit. That Jay Byrd? They showed Byrd’s face. Yeah, it was him, Jeez!
Now I’m pretty sure the reader has probably not have heard of this fellow. He’s a rather obscure folksinger who never had much of a following. However, he and I went out with the same woman at the same time back in the day. A beauty named Paulette Shainer, who I was madly in love with for many years. This wasn’t an unrequited love. Well, not for much of it, but as I faded out Byrd faded in, and after a while we lost touch. It’s a typical story everyone lives through at sometime in their lives. But seeing someone on the sliver screen that one hasn’t seen in the better part of a decade all of a sudden is rather jarring. Suddenly there was a suspense I’m pretty sure nobody else in the world would feel watching this movie. Will Paulette show up? I waited with baited breath. There she was. It seemed she had botox treatments or something, and looks far better than when I saw her last in real life.
There were interviews with Aaron Kay and David Peel, both of whom I knew back in the day. This wasn’t about ME, obviously, I hadn’t been there at the time most of the events discussed took place, but still, the times I WAS there came back out of my unconscious and hit me like a ton of bricks. The attack of déjà vu soon dissipated and I was able to get back into the movie.
Like many of us who hung out around Washington Square Park, Weberman [remember him?] was hanging around the fringes of fame. He got a lot closer than many, actually having met many rock’n’roll heroes while doing his research on his obsession, Bob Dylan, a person, who Weberman actually knew and was somewhat friendly for a while. They would talk on the phone and recorded telephone conversation between the two punctuates the film in the form of animated cartoons, which is all of a sudden a hot way of illustrating audiotapes (it’s much more fun to look at than a reel-to-reel tape recorder or an iPOD.) Of course, it becomes clear that they soon didn’t like each other very much, and that Weberman dedicated much of his life from the late 1960s and early ‘70s to ruin Dylan’s life, which ended up with an interesting confrontation, which Weberman admits was deserved.
Even if you haven’t a clue as to whom any of these people are, this may be worth a look.
There's a bunch of shorts from Sundance I'm still working on , and a about four features from Slamdance. But in the meantime, here's some more reviews:
ONCE
Samson Films 88 mins.TBA
Written and Directed
by John Carney
An Irish busker(Glen Hansard) is playing is music on a street somewhere in Dublin. Here, after an altercation with a fiend who steals his hard earned swag, meets a Czech woman(Marketa Irglova), with whom he has an interesting conversation, followed by the usual romance. He sings to her and she listens, it turns out that she loves to play the piano, although she’s too poor to have one, selling flowers in the street and having to take care of her widowed mother and kid and all. They sing to each other and lo and behold! You have a delightful little musical.
This is more an extended music video than a recreation of a Broadway blockbuster. The simple story is enhanced by the music, most of which is done Hansard on his busted guitar. It turns out that Hansard and Irgova have been working together in real life for years, so the affection seen is genuine and much of the banter is improvised. There are some secondary characters, but for they don’t actually do much of anything, so we’re left with a just the two Hansard and Irgova chastely making love and music on the screen. It’s amazing how something so slight can be so entertaining.
Whether or not this is going to get a theatrical release is questionable, but if it comes out on cable or DVD, it’s well worth a look.
THE SAVAGES
Fox Searchlight 113 MIN, R
Written and Directed
by Tamara Jenkins
Dark comedy is a very tricky thing, especially if it isn’t done as a live-action cartoon. This isn’t that by any means, and the best part is that it works. This is one of the funniest films about dying of old age that’s been made in years and years.
Lenny Savage (Philip Bosco) is living with his longtime girlfriend Doris in the famous Sun City retirement community, when an altercation with her caregiver leads to problems. Thus, after years of estrangement, their father returns into the lives of his grown children Wendy(Laura Linney) and Jon(Philip Seymour Hoffman). Hilarity ensues. No, seriously.
Wendy is a playwright living in the East Village section of Manhattan, who uses her time temping to send out grant applications. She’s having an affair with her landlord(Peter Friedman) . Jon is a professor at SUNY Buffalo, where he teaches a course of Bertolt Brecht, is writing a book on the subject, and breaking up with his girlfriend(Cara Seymour), who’s visa is about to expire. But Doris’ death leads to an eviction and Jon and Wendy have their lives upended. This is about what happens when the parent becomes the child and vice versa. It’s something that pretty much everyone over a certain age can identify with.
The acting, as one might expect with a cast this prestigious, is excellent, and Hoffmann and Linney have great chemistry together. But it is Bosco, who‘s done almost exclusvily live theater in the past, who steals the movie, he’s both brilliant and pathetic as the old man who’s losing both his marbles and his life. The supporting cast is also fine, with Friedman giving a nuanced and funny performance, and Gbenga Akinnagbe shines in a small part as a caregiver at the nursing home where John and Wendy have put their father. But it’s the sharp writing by Jenkins, who hasn’t done anything of note since “The Slums of Beverly Hills”, which turns this from a mere movie-of-the-week to something so much more.
WE ARE THE STRANGE
U.S.A., 2006, 88 Minutes
Written and Directed
by Michael Belmont
This is the revenge of YouTube. Michael Belmont, using the pseudonym
M dot Strange, made a feature film in his tiny apartment (no basement), and put bits and pieces on the site, which over the months have, for some reason that I cannot fathom, created a rather large following. The film was recommended to me and I actually had to pay to get into the second screening at Sundance (there was no press screening).
If they gave out a booby prize at Sundance, this would definitely win hands down. The “We Are the Strange” is indeed terrible. Not bad, terrible. There’s a difference. Bad can be watchable. This is not. If it wasn’t for the fact that I have to write a review for this thing and the only way to do so is to see the entire film, I would have walked out like pretty much everyone else. This is a film, although it shows imagination and a kind of technical know-how, is down there in “Plan 9 From Outer Space
territory. I’m serious. This is the kind of thing which would provoke violence toward the film-maker. Belmont’s life might be in danger.
This is an action figure movie. I say that because I’m somewhat older and boys aren’t supposed to play with dolls. What we have is a child’s nightmare. The nightmare is that children cannot tell jokes properly until they have at least reached eleven or twelve, and this plays like a joke told by a five-year old. This has almost no plot, no humor, no characters that have the least bit of personality, just badly done artifice.
What there is of a plot has to do with an anime beauty named Blue, who is sent out into the woods by the villain, a thing that goes around saying “Beware: I live!” and can split into two beings, and a doll called M who can’t talk and wants ice cream. It ends with a titanic battle of giant robots, but by the time that point is reached, over an hour of childish rambling has taken place. Not childlike, childish. Like the four year old telling a joke, this is just annoying and pointless. (and parents, if you little one is actually a talented comedian, that’s cool, but those are as rare as hens teeth.). Don’t waste your money.
The Ballad of AJ Weberman
UK, 2007 80 min / Color NR
A Documentary Directed by
James Bluemel and Oliver Ralfe
I came into this film with no expectations. It was supposed to be about a guy who was, to be blunt about it, was Bob Dylan’s official stalker back in the late 1960s and early ’70. Might be an interesting film, I thought. It was, but not just for the reasons I went into the film for.
My movie reviews are not supposed to be about me. Well, to a small extent perhaps, it’s MY opinions after all, but this was different. 99,999 times out of ten thousand the film is not about me, or the reader. Sure there are plenty of films with which the viewer can identify, docs with famous people or people in trouble in ways that they can imagine themselves in. That’s the glory of cinema, after all.
But this, was different. The filmmakers were interviewing Weberman at the place he was crashing. A Sheepshead Bay apartment of a guy named Jay Byrd. Jay BYRD? Oh shit. That Jay Byrd? They showed Byrd’s face. Yeah, it was him, Jeez!
Now I’m pretty sure the reader has probably not have heard of this fellow. He’s a rather obscure folksinger who never had much of a following. However, he and I went out with the same woman at the same time back in the day. A beauty named Paulette Shainer, who I was madly in love with for many years. This wasn’t an unrequited love. Well, not for much of it, but as I faded out Byrd faded in, and after a while we lost touch. It’s a typical story everyone lives through at sometime in their lives. But seeing someone on the sliver screen that one hasn’t seen in the better part of a decade all of a sudden is rather jarring. Suddenly there was a suspense I’m pretty sure nobody else in the world would feel watching this movie. Will Paulette show up? I waited with baited breath. There she was. It seemed she had botox treatments or something, and looks far better than when I saw her last in real life.
There were interviews with Aaron Kay and David Peel, both of whom I knew back in the day. This wasn’t about ME, obviously, I hadn’t been there at the time most of the events discussed took place, but still, the times I WAS there came back out of my unconscious and hit me like a ton of bricks. The attack of déjà vu soon dissipated and I was able to get back into the movie.
Like many of us who hung out around Washington Square Park, Weberman [remember him?] was hanging around the fringes of fame. He got a lot closer than many, actually having met many rock’n’roll heroes while doing his research on his obsession, Bob Dylan, a person, who Weberman actually knew and was somewhat friendly for a while. They would talk on the phone and recorded telephone conversation between the two punctuates the film in the form of animated cartoons, which is all of a sudden a hot way of illustrating audiotapes (it’s much more fun to look at than a reel-to-reel tape recorder or an iPOD.) Of course, it becomes clear that they soon didn’t like each other very much, and that Weberman dedicated much of his life from the late 1960s and early ‘70s to ruin Dylan’s life, which ended up with an interesting confrontation, which Weberman admits was deserved.
Even if you haven’t a clue as to whom any of these people are, this may be worth a look.
Sunday, January 21, 2007
Why I hate Park City
IN order to properly do a film festival you have to have the proper frame of mind. I wasn’t in the proper frame of mine, and it was all the fault of the people of Sundance.
Yeah, I have a chip on my shoulder, I did everything I was supposed to do, and was asked to GO this year, they were positive, and they were sending me all the spam they could. Invitations to a whole bunch of screenings were sent out, and this was after they also told me that my application hadn’t been accepted. This is taunting. They told me, no, they didn’t tall me. They usually don’t even send rejections unless people ask why, and they do it really late, late enough that local hotels make lots of money by refusing to give refunds when FULLY PREPAID reservations are made. Few hotels, anywhere in the world do that, but the Chateau Apres Lodge, which has a dormitory (one of the most expensive youth hostels in the country, but the cheap compared with everything else) has made sure that if something happens a month before you show up, then you’re out hundreds of bucks. That’s why I came, to get some value out of this money.
When Sundance comes to town, the prices quadruple in Park City. A small town with beautiful scenery, and a number of picturesque neighborhoods. I hate the place. It’s not the locals who are particularly obnoxious, but the people who arrive to work at the festival. The state of Utah is very anti-booze and bars are only allowed at private clubs, which charge five bucks “membership fee” to all the tourists who want to get a bite to eat, the rest are permanent “private parties”. We hoi polloi, a position that I now fill, aren’t welcome. Well, we’re welcome on the streets, where crowds of curious tourists crowd around doors where corporate sponsors make sure that the famous are fawned over and properly paid with swag. I got a baseball cap and all the Red Bull I can drink. Whoopie! Better than nothing I guess.
However, the people at Sundance have been dicking around the publicist as well as the public. Most of the publicists are hard working, very nice people, However one (a Canadian) invited me to a screening and when I showed up, there was no ticket. He forgot to inform me. Oops. This happens a lot at Sundance.
This doesn’t mean that everyone treats you like dirt. No, in fact most of the people who aren’t paid to be mean are anyway. The lower a person is on the totem pole is probably nicer than those at the top, something that isn’t always the case elsewhere.
The ticketing for the films is somewhat bizarre. If you are trying to get into a sold out screening (in Sundance, EVERYTHING is sold out in advance) it’s best just to show up when the film starts and there’s an excellent chance that you’ll get in via the waitlist. I tried it that way three times and got in every time. Still, it’s iffy, and if you don’t want to wait hours in the freezing cold, then it’s the only real option.
Slamdance is only in one place, but they’re really packed too. The other counter festivals Xdance and something else I don’t remember the name of, were totally empty. That means the only options are going skiing, which is very expensive, or eating at one of those resturaunts you have to wait days to get into. I should have stayed home.
Yeah, I have a chip on my shoulder, I did everything I was supposed to do, and was asked to GO this year, they were positive, and they were sending me all the spam they could. Invitations to a whole bunch of screenings were sent out, and this was after they also told me that my application hadn’t been accepted. This is taunting. They told me, no, they didn’t tall me. They usually don’t even send rejections unless people ask why, and they do it really late, late enough that local hotels make lots of money by refusing to give refunds when FULLY PREPAID reservations are made. Few hotels, anywhere in the world do that, but the Chateau Apres Lodge, which has a dormitory (one of the most expensive youth hostels in the country, but the cheap compared with everything else) has made sure that if something happens a month before you show up, then you’re out hundreds of bucks. That’s why I came, to get some value out of this money.
When Sundance comes to town, the prices quadruple in Park City. A small town with beautiful scenery, and a number of picturesque neighborhoods. I hate the place. It’s not the locals who are particularly obnoxious, but the people who arrive to work at the festival. The state of Utah is very anti-booze and bars are only allowed at private clubs, which charge five bucks “membership fee” to all the tourists who want to get a bite to eat, the rest are permanent “private parties”. We hoi polloi, a position that I now fill, aren’t welcome. Well, we’re welcome on the streets, where crowds of curious tourists crowd around doors where corporate sponsors make sure that the famous are fawned over and properly paid with swag. I got a baseball cap and all the Red Bull I can drink. Whoopie! Better than nothing I guess.
However, the people at Sundance have been dicking around the publicist as well as the public. Most of the publicists are hard working, very nice people, However one (a Canadian) invited me to a screening and when I showed up, there was no ticket. He forgot to inform me. Oops. This happens a lot at Sundance.
This doesn’t mean that everyone treats you like dirt. No, in fact most of the people who aren’t paid to be mean are anyway. The lower a person is on the totem pole is probably nicer than those at the top, something that isn’t always the case elsewhere.
The ticketing for the films is somewhat bizarre. If you are trying to get into a sold out screening (in Sundance, EVERYTHING is sold out in advance) it’s best just to show up when the film starts and there’s an excellent chance that you’ll get in via the waitlist. I tried it that way three times and got in every time. Still, it’s iffy, and if you don’t want to wait hours in the freezing cold, then it’s the only real option.
Slamdance is only in one place, but they’re really packed too. The other counter festivals Xdance and something else I don’t remember the name of, were totally empty. That means the only options are going skiing, which is very expensive, or eating at one of those resturaunts you have to wait days to get into. I should have stayed home.
Friday, January 19, 2007
Sundance the second batch
The Sundance film festival has begun and I'm totally pissed off (more on that later.) There are two opening galas: one in Salt Lake city and one in Park City. We begin this batch with those:
CHICAGO 10
River Road Entertainment 95mins, PG-13
Written and Directed
by Brett Morgen
This is something really strange, an animated documentary. Brett Morgan, who directed “The Kid Stays in the Picture” came up with an interesting idea, use archive footage, when possible, and two different styles of animation when such footage is unavailable. The effect actually works, and is reminiscent of some of the recent work of Richard Linklater. What it does is successfully recreate the chaos of 1968 and the farce of the trial that followed.
In the late fall of 1967, a group of left-wing activists decided to protest the Vietnam war by holding a “non-violent” direct action at the National Democratic convention the following August. Never has something gone so wrong and backfired so spectacularly, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Ruben, et al., gave us Nixon, Watergate, five more years of Vietnam, the Cambodian genocide, not to mention millions refugees. Of course, these were the good guys.
The film begins with archive footage of Lyndon Johnson giving a speech on the escalation of the Vietnam war, and Mayor Daley of Chicago announcing that his city was going to host the Convention and everything would be joy and fun. Yeah, right.
We then go to the court room, where Judge Julius Hoffman(voice Roy Scheider) calls to order the farce of the century. The defendants are eight men: Bobby Seale(Jeffrey Wright) Jerry Rubin(Mark Ruffalo), Abbie Hoffman(Hank Azaria), David Dellinger(Dylan Baker), John Froines(James Urbaniak), Lee Weiner (Chuck Montgomery), Tom Haden(Reg Rogers), and Rennie Davis(), who were accused of conspiring to start the riots that pretty much destroyed the Democratic party and gave us six years of Nixon. They were represented by William Kunstler (Liev Schreiber) and Leonard Weinglass(Himself), who are the other two numbered in the title.
The prosecutor, Thomas Foran(Nick Nolte), had a strong case against the defendants, but not on the charges being tried. The Judge appeared to be senile and declined to have a fair trial, which led to gentle retaliation by the defendants and the whole thing devolved into a circus.
Morgen and his crew at Curius pictures then go back and forth between the archival stuff, which is mostly from the convention itself, and the “Chicago 8's” many personal appearances (they had to pay the lawyers somehow) during the trial, and the animated sequences. The whole thing actually works, and this is actually very educational. Disney it ain't.
Away from Her
Lionsgate, 110mins, TBA
Written and directed
by Sarah Polley
The term senility is now deemed pejorative for some reason, and the condition is now called “Alzheimer's.” But that doesn't change anything. It still robs the mind of itself, and the wasting away of the victim is hard to watch whatever it's called. This expansion of Alice Munro's short story, The Bear Went Over the Mountain,” makes this quite plain.
Grant (Gordon Pinsent) and Fiona Anderson(Julie Christie) have been married for decades and are still in love. Unfortunately, the early signs of Alzheimer's has set in, and Fiona knows that eventually she has to be sent away to a nursing home, and so does Grant, who fears the possibility far more than his wife.
The place, is in fact, very nice, as are the administrator(Kristen Thompson) and head nurse(Wendy Crewson). The problem is that there's a no visitors for the first 30 Days rule” and at the end of that time, she's forgotten all about him and is hanging out with another patient named Aubrey (Michael Murphy).
Most of the film is framed by a conversation between Grant and Aubrey's wife Marian(Olympia Dukakis). The exact reason for this isn't exactly made clear for much of the film, but it's actually rather touching. Aside from this, and a few grainy flashbacks, which are momentary illustrations, the film's structure is entirely straightforward beginning to end. This is Sarah Polley's first film as a director, and she's not really taking any chances here.
Julie Christie is as lovely as ever, and this may be a bit of a snag, as she doesn't really look old enough for the part, but she does a hell of a job, and Pinsent spends the entire film with an air of quiet desperation, which is just perfect. Unfortunately, Alzheimer's isn't that cinematic topic for film. This and older fare such as “I Never Sang for My Father” and “The Notebook” don't get all that engaging in the drama department. Still, it's a worthy effort.
AN AMERICAN CRIME
First Look 92mins, R
Directed and co-written
by Tommy O'Haver
They say that truth is stranger than fiction. Sometimes it is, and the atrocities that have occurred in the unlikeliest of places, in this case suburban Indiana. The banality of evil has rarely been shown in as graphic a manor as it is here. This is one heck of a scary movie.
The framing device is the murder trial of Gertrude Baniszewski(Catherine Keener), who is accused of one of the most notorious crimes of the 1960s, the torture and murder of one Sylvia Likens (Ellen Page). The prosecutor(Bradley Whitford) interrogates various witnesses, which dissolve into flashback.
Sylvia and her sister Jennie Fae(Hayley McFarland) were carnies traveling with their parents(Nick Searcy and Romy Rosemont) throughout the mid-west, when they meet the Baniszewski family on their way back from church. When we first meet Paula(Ari Graynor), Shirley(Hannah Leigh Dworkin), Stephanie(Scout Taylor-Compton) and Marie(Carlie Westerman) they seem to be very nice people. Only baby brother Johnny(Tristan Jarred) seems a little off.
Mom and Dad have to go on the road for a number of months, so Mrs.Baniszewski offers to take them in for a while, (and a fee). We begin to wait with a morbid anticipation, while the sisters integrate themselves into their new family. Then it happens, but this is only forshadowing of the horror to come, as Sylvia accidently betrays a confidence, and by telling the truth, she is the victim of a horrible vengence. This is reminiscent of the notorious Kitty Genovese case, where nobody did anything while a woman was raped and murdered. No one seems to sympathize with poor Sylvia and neighbors Ricky(Evan Peters) and Teddy(Michael Welch), not to mention half the high school, actually join in, in this sick exercise in depravity.
This isn't an easy film to watch. Rarely has a crime drama gotten my dander up in such a way. Tommy O'Haver, who has specialized in fluffy teen romances (both gay and straight), has done the polar opposite of one. This is a true horror film.
Red Road
Tartan Films, 113mins, TBA
Written and Directed
by Andrea Arnold
1984 came late this year. One of the horrors of George Orwell's novel was that everyone was under surveillance all the time, 24 hours a day. Well, this prediction has come true, well not exactly, In Britain, many major cities have cameras everywhere, and just about every neighborhood is monitored by the cops, who only have the best of intentions, right?
Jackie(Kate Dickie) spends her working days monitoring the a vast bank of TV screens looking for crime. She spends her off hours doing nothing in particular, [like having causal sex with a coworker (Paul Higgins)] and is still in mourning for her lost family, who died a number of years before in circumstances that aren't revealed until the end. This tragedy has estranged her from her in-laws, who are pleased and shocked that she's accepted an invitation to a wedding.
But as the banality of Jackie's life continues, she spots Clyde(Tony Curran) walking along the streets of the titular neighborhood she monitors and the plot begins in earnest, as he had something to do with Jackie's personal tragedy. So she begins stalking him, befriending his roommates Stevie(Martin Compston) and April(Natalie Press), and having hot sex in order to frame Clyde for a crime he didn't commit.
The problem with this “thriller” is that it's boring. For much of the film, we just have Jackie doing nothing, arguing with her father-in-Law (Andrew Armour), and watching the monitors in her office. The stalking is slightly better, especially as the relationship between her and Clyde turns slightly kinky. This is the first of a series of films called “the Advance Party concept,” in which the same characters will be in different stories. While the first episode is rather good, I'm not exactly sure whether or not the rest of the series will keep the standards up, although that might not be so hard, all told.
Wait until it comes to cable.
CHICAGO 10
River Road Entertainment 95mins, PG-13
Written and Directed
by Brett Morgen
This is something really strange, an animated documentary. Brett Morgan, who directed “The Kid Stays in the Picture” came up with an interesting idea, use archive footage, when possible, and two different styles of animation when such footage is unavailable. The effect actually works, and is reminiscent of some of the recent work of Richard Linklater. What it does is successfully recreate the chaos of 1968 and the farce of the trial that followed.
In the late fall of 1967, a group of left-wing activists decided to protest the Vietnam war by holding a “non-violent” direct action at the National Democratic convention the following August. Never has something gone so wrong and backfired so spectacularly, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Ruben, et al., gave us Nixon, Watergate, five more years of Vietnam, the Cambodian genocide, not to mention millions refugees. Of course, these were the good guys.
The film begins with archive footage of Lyndon Johnson giving a speech on the escalation of the Vietnam war, and Mayor Daley of Chicago announcing that his city was going to host the Convention and everything would be joy and fun. Yeah, right.
We then go to the court room, where Judge Julius Hoffman(voice Roy Scheider) calls to order the farce of the century. The defendants are eight men: Bobby Seale(Jeffrey Wright) Jerry Rubin(Mark Ruffalo), Abbie Hoffman(Hank Azaria), David Dellinger(Dylan Baker), John Froines(James Urbaniak), Lee Weiner (Chuck Montgomery), Tom Haden(Reg Rogers), and Rennie Davis(), who were accused of conspiring to start the riots that pretty much destroyed the Democratic party and gave us six years of Nixon. They were represented by William Kunstler (Liev Schreiber) and Leonard Weinglass(Himself), who are the other two numbered in the title.
The prosecutor, Thomas Foran(Nick Nolte), had a strong case against the defendants, but not on the charges being tried. The Judge appeared to be senile and declined to have a fair trial, which led to gentle retaliation by the defendants and the whole thing devolved into a circus.
Morgen and his crew at Curius pictures then go back and forth between the archival stuff, which is mostly from the convention itself, and the “Chicago 8's” many personal appearances (they had to pay the lawyers somehow) during the trial, and the animated sequences. The whole thing actually works, and this is actually very educational. Disney it ain't.
Away from Her
Lionsgate, 110mins, TBA
Written and directed
by Sarah Polley
The term senility is now deemed pejorative for some reason, and the condition is now called “Alzheimer's.” But that doesn't change anything. It still robs the mind of itself, and the wasting away of the victim is hard to watch whatever it's called. This expansion of Alice Munro's short story, The Bear Went Over the Mountain,” makes this quite plain.
Grant (Gordon Pinsent) and Fiona Anderson(Julie Christie) have been married for decades and are still in love. Unfortunately, the early signs of Alzheimer's has set in, and Fiona knows that eventually she has to be sent away to a nursing home, and so does Grant, who fears the possibility far more than his wife.
The place, is in fact, very nice, as are the administrator(Kristen Thompson) and head nurse(Wendy Crewson). The problem is that there's a no visitors for the first 30 Days rule” and at the end of that time, she's forgotten all about him and is hanging out with another patient named Aubrey (Michael Murphy).
Most of the film is framed by a conversation between Grant and Aubrey's wife Marian(Olympia Dukakis). The exact reason for this isn't exactly made clear for much of the film, but it's actually rather touching. Aside from this, and a few grainy flashbacks, which are momentary illustrations, the film's structure is entirely straightforward beginning to end. This is Sarah Polley's first film as a director, and she's not really taking any chances here.
Julie Christie is as lovely as ever, and this may be a bit of a snag, as she doesn't really look old enough for the part, but she does a hell of a job, and Pinsent spends the entire film with an air of quiet desperation, which is just perfect. Unfortunately, Alzheimer's isn't that cinematic topic for film. This and older fare such as “I Never Sang for My Father” and “The Notebook” don't get all that engaging in the drama department. Still, it's a worthy effort.
AN AMERICAN CRIME
First Look 92mins, R
Directed and co-written
by Tommy O'Haver
They say that truth is stranger than fiction. Sometimes it is, and the atrocities that have occurred in the unlikeliest of places, in this case suburban Indiana. The banality of evil has rarely been shown in as graphic a manor as it is here. This is one heck of a scary movie.
The framing device is the murder trial of Gertrude Baniszewski(Catherine Keener), who is accused of one of the most notorious crimes of the 1960s, the torture and murder of one Sylvia Likens (Ellen Page). The prosecutor(Bradley Whitford) interrogates various witnesses, which dissolve into flashback.
Sylvia and her sister Jennie Fae(Hayley McFarland) were carnies traveling with their parents(Nick Searcy and Romy Rosemont) throughout the mid-west, when they meet the Baniszewski family on their way back from church. When we first meet Paula(Ari Graynor), Shirley(Hannah Leigh Dworkin), Stephanie(Scout Taylor-Compton) and Marie(Carlie Westerman) they seem to be very nice people. Only baby brother Johnny(Tristan Jarred) seems a little off.
Mom and Dad have to go on the road for a number of months, so Mrs.Baniszewski offers to take them in for a while, (and a fee). We begin to wait with a morbid anticipation, while the sisters integrate themselves into their new family. Then it happens, but this is only forshadowing of the horror to come, as Sylvia accidently betrays a confidence, and by telling the truth, she is the victim of a horrible vengence. This is reminiscent of the notorious Kitty Genovese case, where nobody did anything while a woman was raped and murdered. No one seems to sympathize with poor Sylvia and neighbors Ricky(Evan Peters) and Teddy(Michael Welch), not to mention half the high school, actually join in, in this sick exercise in depravity.
This isn't an easy film to watch. Rarely has a crime drama gotten my dander up in such a way. Tommy O'Haver, who has specialized in fluffy teen romances (both gay and straight), has done the polar opposite of one. This is a true horror film.
Red Road
Tartan Films, 113mins, TBA
Written and Directed
by Andrea Arnold
1984 came late this year. One of the horrors of George Orwell's novel was that everyone was under surveillance all the time, 24 hours a day. Well, this prediction has come true, well not exactly, In Britain, many major cities have cameras everywhere, and just about every neighborhood is monitored by the cops, who only have the best of intentions, right?
Jackie(Kate Dickie) spends her working days monitoring the a vast bank of TV screens looking for crime. She spends her off hours doing nothing in particular, [like having causal sex with a coworker (Paul Higgins)] and is still in mourning for her lost family, who died a number of years before in circumstances that aren't revealed until the end. This tragedy has estranged her from her in-laws, who are pleased and shocked that she's accepted an invitation to a wedding.
But as the banality of Jackie's life continues, she spots Clyde(Tony Curran) walking along the streets of the titular neighborhood she monitors and the plot begins in earnest, as he had something to do with Jackie's personal tragedy. So she begins stalking him, befriending his roommates Stevie(Martin Compston) and April(Natalie Press), and having hot sex in order to frame Clyde for a crime he didn't commit.
The problem with this “thriller” is that it's boring. For much of the film, we just have Jackie doing nothing, arguing with her father-in-Law (Andrew Armour), and watching the monitors in her office. The stalking is slightly better, especially as the relationship between her and Clyde turns slightly kinky. This is the first of a series of films called “the Advance Party concept,” in which the same characters will be in different stories. While the first episode is rather good, I'm not exactly sure whether or not the rest of the series will keep the standards up, although that might not be so hard, all told.
Wait until it comes to cable.
Thursday, January 18, 2007
Things go from bad to worse...Sundance day one.
I should have known that disaster was looming when the Wendy's had a big sign: Take Your Food and Drink onto the airplane with you." So trusting them, I did. They confiscated my coke, my toothpaste and my shampoo, the latter two of which were well within regulation. Then, after a long and boring flight, and a two hour stop in Chicago, we finally got to Salt Lake City, which is cold as all hell, and in the morning I was told that I wasn't going to get my partial refund after all. The people at Sundance didn't mind me going to some press screenings, but they wouldn't let me go, so I'm going to try anyway.
Some of the afternoon was spent with Jeremy, the publisher of Film Festial Today, and his techie Carlos. In the morning, I went to the headquarters and was told that they would think about it and to call around eleven. Then eleven came around and nothing happened. I called on my new cel phone and nothing happened. A few tries later and I was told they were still thinking about it. Then I got credentials for Slamdance. There was no problems at all. However, when Jeremy, Carlos and I went back, we got the runaround. Then a very negative "maybe." there are three press screenings for "Chicago Ten" and there may not be enough space for me. This whole thing is a huge waste of time.
Some of the afternoon was spent with Jeremy, the publisher of Film Festial Today, and his techie Carlos. In the morning, I went to the headquarters and was told that they would think about it and to call around eleven. Then eleven came around and nothing happened. I called on my new cel phone and nothing happened. A few tries later and I was told they were still thinking about it. Then I got credentials for Slamdance. There was no problems at all. However, when Jeremy, Carlos and I went back, we got the runaround. Then a very negative "maybe." there are three press screenings for "Chicago Ten" and there may not be enough space for me. This whole thing is a huge waste of time.
Wednesday, January 17, 2007
Sundance/Slamdance The first batch.
As you may or may not know, I was the only member of the FFT team not to get press credentials, but since I paid for the hotel room and they won't give me a full discount, I'm going anyway, and a number of publicsts were kind enough to let me see pre-festival screenings. With any luck, I'll actually be able to do my job, but if not, I've got a few more I saw in New York plus there will be some at Slamdance. Here is the first batch:
LONGFORD
HBO Films 90mins, NR
Directed by
Tom Hooper
Heroes are often wrong, and when they are they can pay a heavy price. Witness the case of the seventh Earl of Longford, who got involved with a notorious child murderer, and campaigned for her release, something the British people had never forgiven him for.
HBO and the BBC have made a TV movie tracing the sorry events, where a good, but naïve man causes personal disaster by doing what he thinks is the right thing. The film starts on a radio talk show, where Frank Packenham(Jim Broadbent), the aforementioned Earl, is promoting a book, he's just written, and the callers begin to denounce him about his relationship with Myra Hindley(Samantha Morton) the abovementioned serial killer.
Back in the early 1960s, Hindley and her boyfriend Ian Brady(Andy Serkis) had raped, tortured and killed a number of little children. The British media was just as sensational then as it is now, and Myra became the most hated person in British eyes since Hitler.
As Leader of the Government in the House of Lords, he had special interest in prison reform and had visited many prisoners convicted of infamous crimes and had gotten them paroled. This embarrasses Prime Minister Wilson(Robert Pugh), who fires him. As an ex minister who is independently wealthy, he goes full tilt on his pet projects, and it's at about this time, he first hears from Myra. At first, his wife, Lady Elizabeth(Lindsay Duncan), is against his visiting her, but he thinks that everyone can be rehabilitated, and he goes forward regardless of the consequences to him or his family.
The acting is excellent. British movie stars aren't adverse to appearing in TV movies, so HBO has gotten some of the best character actors to play the lead roles. Andy Serikis does a great Hannibal Lector impression, and that he isn't lying about Myra doesn't really sink in for much of the film. Samantha Morton's Myra is all over the place, alternately calculating, sweet and pathetic, and it isn't until the end where we know what really happened. Broadbent is the heart and soul of the piece, of course, and he plays the fool for the entire time. He's sweet and likeable, but aside from his vigor, it's amazing how he could have made it as far as he did in politics. He's an upper-class twit. This gives”do-gooding” a bad name, but it's an interesting film none the less.
American Fork
Alkaline Industries, ??mins, PG-13
Directed by
Chris Bowman
Who the hell is Hubbel Palmer and how did he manages to get all those C-listers in his movie? Apparently, a year or so back, a film he was in that was never seen again, won an award at Slamdance and, and he's done some small parts in some minor films, but that doesn't explain how he got all these people to work at scale on this inferior little trifle. Maybe the fact that the producer worked on “Napoleon Dynamite,” had something to do with it, but still, while that seemed to have struck a nerve with some of the public [I still think it sucked], any imitations are going to be even worse. Witness this…
Palmer plays Tracy Orbison, a nieve supermarket clerk who's still living with his mother(Kathleen Quinlan) and sister(Mary Lynn Rajskub). Aside from the fact that he's huge, and has an eating disorder, he has no real characteristics. Sure he doesn't get laid, but he's happy! It starts as what might be a slapstick comedy, but it isn't. What it IS isn't made clear, it's not funny at all and Tracy just goes forward on a trip to nowhere.
His boss(Bruce McGill) gives him a ticket to a local play starring a nobody named Truman Hope(William Baldwin), and it's love at first sight. He decides to become an actor, and tries to befriend his new mentor, but is betrayed. Then he befriends one of his coworkers (Vincent Caso) and is betrayed again, we have some more betrayals involving William Baldwin. This is more of a Greek tragedy than anything else, and since the entire film revolves around Hubbel Palmer and his alleged charisma, it fails entirely.
The success of “Napoleon Dynamite” may have something to do with the fact that the there are a number of major minor movie stars here, but the fact still is that nobody's going to get anything out of this except maybe most of a month's water bill paid off.
Don't worry about this, it's never going to see the light of day again.
Banished: How Whites Drove Blacks Out of Town in America
Working Films, 86mins, PG-13
a documentary by
by Marco Williams
Before we start, let's get one thing clear: Every inch of land in the United States is stolen. The Europeans stole it from the Indians and the Indians stole it from other Indians and so forth back down to the age of the Mammoths. The same goes for the rest of the world as well. The question is how far back does one go before one's claim is declared invalid.
This is important, considering what happened to some African American families in the first decades of the last century. There were lots of lynchings and other atrocities in the South back then, and among these were throwing families off their land. This has been a dirty little secret in many places in the former Confederacy since before living memory.
So what to do about it? This is a short look into tiny piece of a much larger issue which most of the planet would rather not think about. Documentarian Marco Williams checks out three cases. The Strickland family who's ancestors were thrown out of Forsyth County, Georgia in 1912. The Cobb brothers try to disinter their great grandfather from a graveyard in Pierce City, Missouri, which banished its black residents in 1901, and the people of Harrison, Arkansas, where the KKK still has a large following, tries to figure out how to improve race relations in a place where Blacks are absent. His results are mixed.
Most of the film is about research. Going to the library and checking out ancient real estate transactions and newspapers can be really boring if it isn't done exactly right, but here it is. It's actually rather engrossing.
It's the reactions by the White residents which is most interesting, because they're all over the map, from full cooperation to utter hostility. The question of reparations is addressed, and while this is one of the more compelling cases for them, Williams' occasional snarkyness ruins it. Still, this is an excellent doc and we can see why it got into Sundance.
LONGFORD
HBO Films 90mins, NR
Directed by
Tom Hooper
Heroes are often wrong, and when they are they can pay a heavy price. Witness the case of the seventh Earl of Longford, who got involved with a notorious child murderer, and campaigned for her release, something the British people had never forgiven him for.
HBO and the BBC have made a TV movie tracing the sorry events, where a good, but naïve man causes personal disaster by doing what he thinks is the right thing. The film starts on a radio talk show, where Frank Packenham(Jim Broadbent), the aforementioned Earl, is promoting a book, he's just written, and the callers begin to denounce him about his relationship with Myra Hindley(Samantha Morton) the abovementioned serial killer.
Back in the early 1960s, Hindley and her boyfriend Ian Brady(Andy Serkis) had raped, tortured and killed a number of little children. The British media was just as sensational then as it is now, and Myra became the most hated person in British eyes since Hitler.
As Leader of the Government in the House of Lords, he had special interest in prison reform and had visited many prisoners convicted of infamous crimes and had gotten them paroled. This embarrasses Prime Minister Wilson(Robert Pugh), who fires him. As an ex minister who is independently wealthy, he goes full tilt on his pet projects, and it's at about this time, he first hears from Myra. At first, his wife, Lady Elizabeth(Lindsay Duncan), is against his visiting her, but he thinks that everyone can be rehabilitated, and he goes forward regardless of the consequences to him or his family.
The acting is excellent. British movie stars aren't adverse to appearing in TV movies, so HBO has gotten some of the best character actors to play the lead roles. Andy Serikis does a great Hannibal Lector impression, and that he isn't lying about Myra doesn't really sink in for much of the film. Samantha Morton's Myra is all over the place, alternately calculating, sweet and pathetic, and it isn't until the end where we know what really happened. Broadbent is the heart and soul of the piece, of course, and he plays the fool for the entire time. He's sweet and likeable, but aside from his vigor, it's amazing how he could have made it as far as he did in politics. He's an upper-class twit. This gives”do-gooding” a bad name, but it's an interesting film none the less.
American Fork
Alkaline Industries, ??mins, PG-13
Directed by
Chris Bowman
Who the hell is Hubbel Palmer and how did he manages to get all those C-listers in his movie? Apparently, a year or so back, a film he was in that was never seen again, won an award at Slamdance and, and he's done some small parts in some minor films, but that doesn't explain how he got all these people to work at scale on this inferior little trifle. Maybe the fact that the producer worked on “Napoleon Dynamite,” had something to do with it, but still, while that seemed to have struck a nerve with some of the public [I still think it sucked], any imitations are going to be even worse. Witness this…
Palmer plays Tracy Orbison, a nieve supermarket clerk who's still living with his mother(Kathleen Quinlan) and sister(Mary Lynn Rajskub). Aside from the fact that he's huge, and has an eating disorder, he has no real characteristics. Sure he doesn't get laid, but he's happy! It starts as what might be a slapstick comedy, but it isn't. What it IS isn't made clear, it's not funny at all and Tracy just goes forward on a trip to nowhere.
His boss(Bruce McGill) gives him a ticket to a local play starring a nobody named Truman Hope(William Baldwin), and it's love at first sight. He decides to become an actor, and tries to befriend his new mentor, but is betrayed. Then he befriends one of his coworkers (Vincent Caso) and is betrayed again, we have some more betrayals involving William Baldwin. This is more of a Greek tragedy than anything else, and since the entire film revolves around Hubbel Palmer and his alleged charisma, it fails entirely.
The success of “Napoleon Dynamite” may have something to do with the fact that the there are a number of major minor movie stars here, but the fact still is that nobody's going to get anything out of this except maybe most of a month's water bill paid off.
Don't worry about this, it's never going to see the light of day again.
Banished: How Whites Drove Blacks Out of Town in America
Working Films, 86mins, PG-13
a documentary by
by Marco Williams
Before we start, let's get one thing clear: Every inch of land in the United States is stolen. The Europeans stole it from the Indians and the Indians stole it from other Indians and so forth back down to the age of the Mammoths. The same goes for the rest of the world as well. The question is how far back does one go before one's claim is declared invalid.
This is important, considering what happened to some African American families in the first decades of the last century. There were lots of lynchings and other atrocities in the South back then, and among these were throwing families off their land. This has been a dirty little secret in many places in the former Confederacy since before living memory.
So what to do about it? This is a short look into tiny piece of a much larger issue which most of the planet would rather not think about. Documentarian Marco Williams checks out three cases. The Strickland family who's ancestors were thrown out of Forsyth County, Georgia in 1912. The Cobb brothers try to disinter their great grandfather from a graveyard in Pierce City, Missouri, which banished its black residents in 1901, and the people of Harrison, Arkansas, where the KKK still has a large following, tries to figure out how to improve race relations in a place where Blacks are absent. His results are mixed.
Most of the film is about research. Going to the library and checking out ancient real estate transactions and newspapers can be really boring if it isn't done exactly right, but here it is. It's actually rather engrossing.
It's the reactions by the White residents which is most interesting, because they're all over the map, from full cooperation to utter hostility. The question of reparations is addressed, and while this is one of the more compelling cases for them, Williams' occasional snarkyness ruins it. Still, this is an excellent doc and we can see why it got into Sundance.
Tuesday, January 09, 2007
One week to nothing
I go to the Sundance film festival a week from thursday and nothing is going to happen, unless...
Thursday, January 04, 2007
Sundance is in two weeks
I got stuck into covering it without press credentials. I was promised them, but there's nothing I can do about it now, and the tickets and reservations were already bought.
I won't go in '08.
I won't go in '08.
Thursday, December 28, 2006
Why Gerald Ford was President.
With the media overload regarding the death of former President Gerald Ford, it’s good to also remember a certain Lester Matz. Ford, as far as I know, never met Mr. Matz, but the latter profoundly influenced the former President’s life and thus the entire history of the world.
Lester Matz was a building contractor living and working in the suburbs of Baltimore, Maryland in the 1960s and ‘70s, and as such was forced to pay out kickbacks to local politicians and bureaucrats to get his permits and other paperwork done on time. One of these corrupt pols was one with a future. His name was Spiro T. Agnew.
Agnew was not only corrupt, he was greedy, a county councilman, he started putting the squeeze on Matz and others because the job didn’t pay very well. When he became county executive in 1962, he continued his wicked ways, and one would think that he would have gone on to bigger and better sources of graft when he was elected Governor of Maryland in 1966, he did, but he still was blackmailing his former sources with exposure and collecting the loot, when two years later he was chosen by Richard Nixon to be his running mate in 1968.
One would have thought, with such a large raise in pay, and all those government perks, Vice-President Agnew would have left his former marks alone, at last. But no. he demanded cash as late as the fall of 1972. Giving the VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES envelopes full of cash in the Old Executive Office Building traumatized Matz, and when he heard that federal prosecutors were investigating corruption in Maryland, something that at the time was endemic in the state, he decided to get immunity and tell all.
In the spring of 1973, Spiro Agnew was the front-runner for the 1976 presidential race, and as what he did with and to Lester Matz and others was unknown to all but a very few people. As far as we knew, Spiro Agnew was a creepy Republican shit, but at least he had integrity. As the Watergate scandal grew exponentially people began to prepare themselves mentally for an Agnew presidency. Now I know, that such a thing is almost inconceivable. PRESIDENT AGNEW?!? Ewww. But as the Ervin hearings dominated the television and the existence of the tapes and the fight over them began, such a thing was well within the realm of possibility.
But Lester Matz changed all that. The Agnew/Matz scandal, though unrelated to Watergate, gave the Nixon administration an even sleazier taint than it already had, and Nixon’s "life insurance" was about to expire. From August to October 1973, when Agnew copped a plea and resigned, it looked like that Congress might have to impeach everybody.
Without Lester Matz, Gerald Ford would never have become Vice President, and later President. Things would have been, most likely a lot worse in 1974, and ’75 had he not come clean.
Tuesday, December 26, 2006
The True meaning of Kwanzaa.
Back in the 1966 a Negro activist (as they were called back then) named Ron Everett, decided to create a holiday. The 1960s was a time of experimentation, and as a black nationalist with Marxist leanings, Everett wanted to start the process of building an all Black paradise by creating a new culture based on a new mythology and alienating African Americans from the common American culture.
He had already had started by the creation of “Ebonics” a formalization of the so-called “Jive” dialect (officially called “African American Vernacular English (AAVE) by linguists), which would instill ethnic pride in speakers and further segregate the Black community from the rest of the nation, the inability to speak standard English, which is necessary to getting a good job, would radicalize Blacks and further the cause of separatism. Around this time, Everett changed his name to Maulana Karenga a little later.
Another way to further the cause of Black separatism was to create a mythical past, where ancient Egypt and medieval Mali were one and the same, a mono-cultural, mono-ethnic paradise which would still be going on if those inferior, evil white monsters hadn’t stolen Black culture, which they had no right to have, and mucked everything up.
True, this myth wasn’t created by Everett, but he publicized it big time, and many people still believe that Alexander the Great destroyed the Great Library of Alexandria eighty years before it was built and Cleopatra VII was a dead ringer for Angela Davis.
The term “Kwanzaa “ is derived from Kiswahili, a language the ancestors of African Americans never spoke, and means “first fruits.” The celebration centers around an imitation of Chanukah, with a type of a menorah called a kinara, which has seven lights instead of eight, and has the innovation of the "Kikombe cha Umoja" or communal chalice, which is shared around.
Each candle represents one of seven principles of Kawaida, which is Kiswahili for “tradition,”what Karenga originally called called Nguzo Saba (originally Nguzu Saba - "The seven Principles of Blackness"),
They are (and here I crib from the official website):
* Umoja (oo-MO-jah) Unity stresses the importance of togetherness for the family and the community, which is reflected in the African saying, "I am We," or "I am because We are."
(Unitiy also means that the leadership of the group knows what’s best for the group, and that dissent is unwelcome. In other words: SHUT UP AND DO WHAT YOU’RE TOLD!)
* Kujichagulia (koo-gee-cha-goo-LEE-yah) Self-Determination requires that we define our common interests and make decisions that are in the best interest of our family and community.
(Notice that this is “communal” and not personal. That also means that the leadership of the group knows what’s best for the group, and that dissent is unwelcome. In other words: SHUT UP AND DO WHAT YOU’RE TOLD!)
* Ujima (oo-GEE-mah) Collective Work and Responsibility reminds us of our obligation to the past, present and future, and that we have a role to play in the community, society, and world.
(Notice the term “collective.” That means that also means that the leadership of the group knows this better than we do, and that dissent is unwelcome. In other words: SHUT UP AND DO WHAT YOU’RE TOLD!)
* Ujamaa (oo-JAH-mah) Cooperative economics emphasizes our collective economic strength and encourages us to meet common needs through mutual support.
(Cooperative economics is good old Soviet-style state planning. Only the leadership of the group…you get the picture)
* Nia (NEE-yah) Purpose encourages us to look within ourselves and to set personal goals that are beneficial to the community.
(This principle is different from the others in that it challenges the individual “to think for themselves” as how to fulfill the commands of the leadership of the group.)
* Kuumba (koo-OOM-bah) Creativity makes use of our creative energies to build and maintain a strong and vibrant community.
(this actually is the only one which is actually good)
• Imani (ee-MAH-nee) Faith focuses on honoring the best of our traditions, draws upon the best in ourselves, and helps us strive for a higher level of life for humankind, by affirming our self-worth and confidence in our ability to succeed and triumph in righteous struggle.
(Faith means trust in the leadership of the group, who know all. Etc, etc. and so forth)
Despite a completely BS premise, Kwanzaa has become very popular because you get presents and ceremonial is always good. The US post office has issued stamps to commemorate the holiday, and people spend millions every year on gifts and decorations.
At least Festus admits it’s bogus.
He had already had started by the creation of “Ebonics” a formalization of the so-called “Jive” dialect (officially called “African American Vernacular English (AAVE) by linguists), which would instill ethnic pride in speakers and further segregate the Black community from the rest of the nation, the inability to speak standard English, which is necessary to getting a good job, would radicalize Blacks and further the cause of separatism. Around this time, Everett changed his name to Maulana Karenga a little later.
Another way to further the cause of Black separatism was to create a mythical past, where ancient Egypt and medieval Mali were one and the same, a mono-cultural, mono-ethnic paradise which would still be going on if those inferior, evil white monsters hadn’t stolen Black culture, which they had no right to have, and mucked everything up.
True, this myth wasn’t created by Everett, but he publicized it big time, and many people still believe that Alexander the Great destroyed the Great Library of Alexandria eighty years before it was built and Cleopatra VII was a dead ringer for Angela Davis.
The term “Kwanzaa “ is derived from Kiswahili, a language the ancestors of African Americans never spoke, and means “first fruits.” The celebration centers around an imitation of Chanukah, with a type of a menorah called a kinara, which has seven lights instead of eight, and has the innovation of the "Kikombe cha Umoja" or communal chalice, which is shared around.
Each candle represents one of seven principles of Kawaida, which is Kiswahili for “tradition,”what Karenga originally called called Nguzo Saba (originally Nguzu Saba - "The seven Principles of Blackness"),
They are (and here I crib from the official website):
* Umoja (oo-MO-jah) Unity stresses the importance of togetherness for the family and the community, which is reflected in the African saying, "I am We," or "I am because We are."
(Unitiy also means that the leadership of the group knows what’s best for the group, and that dissent is unwelcome. In other words: SHUT UP AND DO WHAT YOU’RE TOLD!)
* Kujichagulia (koo-gee-cha-goo-LEE-yah) Self-Determination requires that we define our common interests and make decisions that are in the best interest of our family and community.
(Notice that this is “communal” and not personal. That also means that the leadership of the group knows what’s best for the group, and that dissent is unwelcome. In other words: SHUT UP AND DO WHAT YOU’RE TOLD!)
* Ujima (oo-GEE-mah) Collective Work and Responsibility reminds us of our obligation to the past, present and future, and that we have a role to play in the community, society, and world.
(Notice the term “collective.” That means that also means that the leadership of the group knows this better than we do, and that dissent is unwelcome. In other words: SHUT UP AND DO WHAT YOU’RE TOLD!)
* Ujamaa (oo-JAH-mah) Cooperative economics emphasizes our collective economic strength and encourages us to meet common needs through mutual support.
(Cooperative economics is good old Soviet-style state planning. Only the leadership of the group…you get the picture)
* Nia (NEE-yah) Purpose encourages us to look within ourselves and to set personal goals that are beneficial to the community.
(This principle is different from the others in that it challenges the individual “to think for themselves” as how to fulfill the commands of the leadership of the group.)
* Kuumba (koo-OOM-bah) Creativity makes use of our creative energies to build and maintain a strong and vibrant community.
(this actually is the only one which is actually good)
• Imani (ee-MAH-nee) Faith focuses on honoring the best of our traditions, draws upon the best in ourselves, and helps us strive for a higher level of life for humankind, by affirming our self-worth and confidence in our ability to succeed and triumph in righteous struggle.
(Faith means trust in the leadership of the group, who know all. Etc, etc. and so forth)
Despite a completely BS premise, Kwanzaa has become very popular because you get presents and ceremonial is always good. The US post office has issued stamps to commemorate the holiday, and people spend millions every year on gifts and decorations.
At least Festus admits it’s bogus.
Friday, December 22, 2006
Today is the Winter solstace!
There are four north poles. Yeah, that's right, four. The first is the axial pole, around which the planet spins once a day. The second is the magnetic poll, which is why compases work, and the third is...the other magnetic pole,called the North Geomagnetic Pole, which is similar but different because of the fourth called the South Atlantic Anomaly, which is the beginnings of a thousand year long flipping of the earth's magnetic field. (there are only two south poles, BTW)
I mention this because all three north poles are moving. Keeping the SAA, out of the picture for the moment, the North Magnetic Pole is headed for Eastern Siberia and the North Axial pole is doing it's 26,000 year circle around itself, called the precession of the equinoxes. One complete period of this precession is called a Great Sidereal Year. At the moment, we are in the middle of the "Age of Pices"(the "Age of Aquarius"doesn't start for another six hundred years).
What this means is that the north axial pole is facing away from the Sun when we reach perihelion, the closest point in our orbit. What's an interesting coincidence, is that the perihelion is always somewhere around January the first. In other words, Pope Gregory XIV, didn't know that the New Year on his new calender had anything to do with an actual natural event.
This year, it's on fourth, and thus, we can continue to celebrate the New year 2007 for the better part of a week.
It's all the sweeter with a Democratic congress coming in. So stay warm and be cool....
Wednesday, December 20, 2006
Chappy Channukka!
Today is the sixth day of Hanukkah (or Chanukah), the Jewish festival of lights, The term is Hebrew for “rededication” and refers to the cleansing of the second Jewish temple by the Hasmoneans in 165 BCE. Since the 25th Day of the month of Kislev in the Jewish lunar calendar varies on the secular one anywhere between mid November and late December (I distinctly remember it being in January one year, but I could be wrong), it is frequently considered a cheap imitation of Christmas, but it isn’t.
To find the true meaning of the holiday, we have to go back to 336 BCE, when Alexander III of Macedon, also known as Alexander the Great, took power after the assassination of his father Phillip II. Now the Macedonians were Albanians with Greece envy, and before his death, Phillip had conquered Greece, and Alexander, who had been taught by, among others, the famous Aristotle, was pure Hellenic in attitude, and very much wanted to get revenge on the Persians for the invasion of a century and a quarter before [an interesting side note, Macedonia was a Persian ally during the Persian wars].
So in 334, he decided to conquer Persia, defeating Darius III at Battle of Issus the next year. He turned south and east, passing through Judea on the way to Egypt. Thus the autonomous province came under Greek rule.
Alexander passed through Judea again on his way though Babylonia (Iraq) to what is now Iran, and he basically let the Jews alone as long as they paid their taxes. So things remained as Alexander got all the way to India, died [he was poisoned], and his top generals went to war with each other to inherit the empire.
Between 323 and 300, the Jews sat on the sidelines as the Macedonians duked it out with each other, and a quasi-stable situation developed. The Antigonids, had Europe, the Selucids had most of Asia, and the Ptolomies had Egypt, Cyprus, Judea and Syria.
For the Jews, this was fine. The first three Ptolomies were rather good for everyone involved. The fourth wasn’t so hot. He was a corrupt, inbred moron who the Selucids thought was ripe for the picking. It wasn’t so easy, but they finally managed to wrest Judea from the Ptolomies at the Battle of Panium (198 BC). The king at the time, Antiochus III, died in 187 and was succeeded by his son Selucius IV, who lost a war with Rome, and was soon overthrown by his unstable brother, Antiochus IV Epheminies, which roughly means “ the nutjob”, in 175.
Antiochus started out his reign by invading Egypt, and to the surprise of everyone, he actually managed to conquer the country. For a while, he let a couple of young Ptolomies by kings-in-name, but they revolted when Antiochus went back to Syria, so he came back in 171 and had himself crowned Pharaoh. Meanwhile, the Ptolomy brothers asked Rome for help, and the republic sent an army led by General Gaius Popillius Laenas, who told him that he must immediately withdraw from Egypt and Cyprus. Antiochus said he would discuss it with his council, whereupon the envoy drew a line round him in the sand, and said, "Think about it here." The implication was that, were he to step out of the circle without having first undertaken to withdraw, he would be at war with Rome. Antiochus agreed to withdraw.
Our villain was in an understandably fowl mood, and there was trouble with the Jews. He had forced out the high Cohen a couple of years before, and replaced him with an apostate named Jason. Jason was actually somewhat popular, as Greek culture was actually cooler than Jewish. The more anti-Hellenistic faction argued, and in the name of cultural unity, Antiochus decided to ban Judaism and have a uniformly Hellenistic kingdom. Jason was kicked out, by the antihellinists, Antiochus appointed a new high Cohen and then ordered a statue of Zeus put up in the Holy of holies.
The religious party, led by Mattathias the Hasmonean, started a full scale revolt, which under his son Judah the Maccabee (Aramaic for Hammer), drove the Greeks out of Jeruselem in 165 and later all of Judea, It was a great victory and Jewish independence was assured for at least a century.
In other words, Chanukah is a Jewish "Fourth of July" and a most Zionist holiday. The lights come from a legend which was first mentioned in the Talmud. With the fall of the Hasmoneans and the failure of the revolts against the Romans, the so-called miracle was emphisised and the military victory downplayed, especially since the Hasmonean dynasty wasn't all that great, especially in it's later days.
To find the true meaning of the holiday, we have to go back to 336 BCE, when Alexander III of Macedon, also known as Alexander the Great, took power after the assassination of his father Phillip II. Now the Macedonians were Albanians with Greece envy, and before his death, Phillip had conquered Greece, and Alexander, who had been taught by, among others, the famous Aristotle, was pure Hellenic in attitude, and very much wanted to get revenge on the Persians for the invasion of a century and a quarter before [an interesting side note, Macedonia was a Persian ally during the Persian wars].
So in 334, he decided to conquer Persia, defeating Darius III at Battle of Issus the next year. He turned south and east, passing through Judea on the way to Egypt. Thus the autonomous province came under Greek rule.
Alexander passed through Judea again on his way though Babylonia (Iraq) to what is now Iran, and he basically let the Jews alone as long as they paid their taxes. So things remained as Alexander got all the way to India, died [he was poisoned], and his top generals went to war with each other to inherit the empire.
Between 323 and 300, the Jews sat on the sidelines as the Macedonians duked it out with each other, and a quasi-stable situation developed. The Antigonids, had Europe, the Selucids had most of Asia, and the Ptolomies had Egypt, Cyprus, Judea and Syria.
For the Jews, this was fine. The first three Ptolomies were rather good for everyone involved. The fourth wasn’t so hot. He was a corrupt, inbred moron who the Selucids thought was ripe for the picking. It wasn’t so easy, but they finally managed to wrest Judea from the Ptolomies at the Battle of Panium (198 BC). The king at the time, Antiochus III, died in 187 and was succeeded by his son Selucius IV, who lost a war with Rome, and was soon overthrown by his unstable brother, Antiochus IV Epheminies, which roughly means “ the nutjob”, in 175.
Antiochus started out his reign by invading Egypt, and to the surprise of everyone, he actually managed to conquer the country. For a while, he let a couple of young Ptolomies by kings-in-name, but they revolted when Antiochus went back to Syria, so he came back in 171 and had himself crowned Pharaoh. Meanwhile, the Ptolomy brothers asked Rome for help, and the republic sent an army led by General Gaius Popillius Laenas, who told him that he must immediately withdraw from Egypt and Cyprus. Antiochus said he would discuss it with his council, whereupon the envoy drew a line round him in the sand, and said, "Think about it here." The implication was that, were he to step out of the circle without having first undertaken to withdraw, he would be at war with Rome. Antiochus agreed to withdraw.
Our villain was in an understandably fowl mood, and there was trouble with the Jews. He had forced out the high Cohen a couple of years before, and replaced him with an apostate named Jason. Jason was actually somewhat popular, as Greek culture was actually cooler than Jewish. The more anti-Hellenistic faction argued, and in the name of cultural unity, Antiochus decided to ban Judaism and have a uniformly Hellenistic kingdom. Jason was kicked out, by the antihellinists, Antiochus appointed a new high Cohen and then ordered a statue of Zeus put up in the Holy of holies.
The religious party, led by Mattathias the Hasmonean, started a full scale revolt, which under his son Judah the Maccabee (Aramaic for Hammer), drove the Greeks out of Jeruselem in 165 and later all of Judea, It was a great victory and Jewish independence was assured for at least a century.
In other words, Chanukah is a Jewish "Fourth of July" and a most Zionist holiday. The lights come from a legend which was first mentioned in the Talmud. With the fall of the Hasmoneans and the failure of the revolts against the Romans, the so-called miracle was emphisised and the military victory downplayed, especially since the Hasmonean dynasty wasn't all that great, especially in it's later days.
Saturday, December 16, 2006
Document dump...reviews
Eragon
20th Century Fox, 99mins, PG
Directed by
Stefen Fangmeier
Yes, the book that this was based on was written by a fifteen year old kid named , and his parents published it themselves before it was taken up by a real publisher. Apparently, the book was struck a nerve among a certain age group, otherwise they wouldn't have adapted it. Be that as it may, this is no way a great movie.
According to the prologue, Dragons and their riders kept the peace for thousands of years until an evil bastard by the name of Galbatorix (John Malkovich) took over the works and now dragons are extinct. However, there is one egg, and the heroic (and blonde) princess Arya (Sienna Guillory) has stolen it from his badness, who has sent his evil minion Durza the shade (Robert Carlyle) to get it back. She uses her magic to send it to our hero Eragon (Edward Speleers), a simple (blonde) farm boy with lousy aim [okay, the magic flash might have something to do with it.] Something a fifteen year old kid who's read too much hard fantasy might have thought up.
All the clichés are there. The fact that he's an orphan, his meeting up with Brom (Jeremy Irons), the village idiot, who just happens to be the last of the dragon riders of old. The names of the species of villains come right out of LotR, “the Sword of Shanara”, and every other book with the word “elf” somewhere in it. The only original thing about this paint-by-numbers epic is getting Rachel Weisz to be the voice of Saphira the Dragon, although they could have spent an extra five grand or so to move her lips. The telepathic gag is not only old, but lazy. So's the plotting, but then it was written by a fifteen year old kid, and most of them don't know any better. So of course, it's one big cliché. Young Christopher Paolini, who wrote the novel and it's two sequels may have a future ahead of him, but hopefully he's going to do something original from here one out.
If you want pseudo-medieval battles with fairys and elves, go take Lord of the Rings out off the shelf and let this one slip by. Yeech.
Charlotte's Web
Paramount Pictures, 97mins, G
Directed by
Gary Winick
You have to be careful with classics. They're so easy to muck up. E. B. White's “Charlotte's Web” is a classic if there ever was, right up there with “Huckleberry Finn” and “Winnie the Pooh.” In order to get it right, you have to stay faithful to original source, and even moreso, you have to respect it. The first movie version did this to some extent (Hanna Barbera), but the production values weren't really that good. Which makes this one of the great remakes of all time. This was White's most intelligent children's book, and Gary Winick makes sure that the intelligence remains.
Sam Shepard's voice introduces us to a slightly updated version of “Our Town” or Lake Wobigon, a place where everyone is nice and nothing much happens, and Fern(Dakota Fanning) watching her father (Kevin Anderson) midwife the birth of a litter of pigs, the runt of which, Wilbur(voice of Dominic Scott Kay), is about to get the axe when Fern saves him and he gets transferred, eventually to Fern's uncle Homer's(Gary Basaraba) farm across the way. Here we meet a bunch of refugees from “Babe” with what has to be one of the most prestigious voice casts of any animated or quasi-animated film ever. Okay, John Cleese, Julia Roberts and Steve Buscemi have done quite a bit of voicework in the past, but Robert REDFORD? Kathy Bates? Wow!
Yeah, Roberts is great as Charlotte and Buscemi is always brilliant, and as a CGI enhanced funny animal flick its just fine, but what's surprising are the adults. You have Fern's mom(Essie Davis) consulting with her doctor(Beau Bridges) about her kid's bizarre attraction to the animals in the barn, and you have to remember that the “X-files” angle, and the reaction of normal adults to the messages in the spiderweb.
This is the definitive version. If you have kids, take them to it now, and by the DVD in six months and hope no one else tries to do another version ever again, and thus ruin it for future generations.
The Pursuit of Happyness
Directed by
Gabriele Muccino
There are two reasons to go to movies: one is for entertainment and the other information. Hopefully, you get both. Unfortunately, this is neither. Which is more the pity as everyone does a really good job all around.
The year is 1981. Christopher(Will Smith) and Linda Gardner (Thandie Newton) live with their son Christopher, Jr (Jaden Smith) in one of the less fortunate sections of San Francisco. They invested all their money in a medical device that no one really wants. She works in a laundry doing double shifts as he tries to sell the gadget to doctors and hospitals in the area with little or no success. The bills are beginning to pile up, and Linda is beginning to crack. There is really no hope here, until he sees a sign saying that the Dean Witter brokerage saying that there's an competitive internship program, so he begins to hound the executive in charge(Brian Howe), until he gets an in, unfortunately, he's got those pesky financial problems, the internship is unpaid, which first forces his wife to leave him, then to move further and further down the financial ladder, until he and Chris, Jr have no place to sleep except a public toilet and homeless shelters.
Filmmakers Gabriele Muccino and Steven Conrad have figured out what some critics like: serious melodramas about nice people in pain. This is all about that. We see our Job [Sissyphus, whatever] trying to get that rock out of that hole again and again and again, with little or no success. He gets the internship, but everything else gets worse and worse. While this is based on a true story, the happy ending seems tacked on. Even the comic bits with the medical gadget being stolen, isn't that funny, which brings us to the question: Do we really want to see Will Smith suffer for over an hour and a half? Not really…and what of information?
There isn't any. The film recreates a time gone by extremely well, but so what? “The Pursuit of Happyness” just isn't worth the bucks or time.
Dreamgirls
Written and Directed
By Bill Condon
The oft-threatened return of the movie musical makes good this year with an adaptation of Tom Eyen and Michael Bennett's famous fictionalized history of the Supremes. It's nice that somebody finally got it right [okay, Rob Marshall's “Chicago” got it right too, but that doesn't explain everything else].
One of the reasons that this works is that it's operatic. There's very little spoken dialogue, and everything else is sung. This makes the numbers blend seamlessly from one to the other and that makes the highlights even better.
It's 1962, and Effervescent teenagers Effie White (Jennifer Hudson), Deena Jones (Beyoncé Knowles) and Lorrell Robinson (Anika Noni Rose) are late for their debut at that big Detroit talent show. They lose, but are noticed by car salesman/talent agent Curtis Taylor, Jr.(Jamie Foxx), who immediately gets them a gig singing backup with James "Thunder" Early(Eddie Murphy) and from there it's straight to the top. Well not exactly straight…
There are the complications: Effie is a bit of a diva, Curtis is basically a stock villain, who throws people away like wet Kleenex while treating the rest like puppets. Yes, folks, it's a melodrama with two dimensional characters. However, most of the great musicals from the 1930s and '40s did too, and it was the music and dancing which saved them. This is the case here, as well.
For instance, Effie's showstopper "And I am Telling You I'm Not Going." Is the bomb. Hudson blows everyone away, and that includes Beyoncé, a very difficult feat indeed. The acting is excellent thoughout. Foxx and Murphy give the performances of a lifetime, the four members of the group are smart and sexy and sing their own stuff, and as minor characters Sharon Leal, as the fourth “Dream”, Danny Glover as Eddy Murphy's first manger, and Keith Robinson as Effie's songwriter brother hold their own very nicely, and oh yeah, John Lithgow has a brief cameo which is a real hoot.
This is worth full price.
The Good German
Directed by
Steven Soderbergh
You have to say this for Steven Soderbergh, he isn't afraid to try stuff. Each and every film he's done [with the exception of the “Ocean's 11” films], has been starkly different than anything else he's done. Different isn't necessarily good, nor is it necessarily bad, but in recent years, and that's excepting “Ocean's 12,” he's not done all that well as compared to the glory years bracketing the millennium.
To say that is an improvement over his previous film is not really saying anything, as “Bubble” was truly horrid, However, the question is this better than, or on par with most of Soderbergh's other recent work, and that's a more difficult question.
This time Soderbergh is doing a film noir, and he wants it to have a truly retro feel. Thus he tries to replicate the technique of the times, and this, to some extent does give it that 1940s feel. It's the rest of the film which is a little off.
One problem is its structure. This is a three act picture in which each act has a different narrator. The first is Corporal Tully (Tobey Maguire), a driver and bigwig in the black market. His “day job” is to chauffeur “New Republic” correspondent and honorary captain Jake Geismar (George Clooney) around town while he's covering the Potsdam conference between Stalin, Truman and Churchill. As an act of friendship, he introduces Geismar to his girlfriend Lena Brandt(Cate Blanchett), a local hooker who, before the war, was screwing Geismar himself, and just as this triangle is getting set up, about twenty minutes into the film, Tully is about to offer Lena's husband Emil(Christian Oliver) to Soviet General Sikorsky (Ravil Isyanov), when he's relieved of his narration duties and life offstage only to be found next to palace where the confrence is being held by none other than our old pal Geismar, who then becomes the narrator.
I hate when they do that. It throws you off and makes you waste precious time trying to readjust, which is a bit difficult, as the plot begins to thicken as fast as a frosting in a blender: You have Lieutenant Schaeffer (Dave Power) trying to find Nazi war criminals, Colonel Muller (Beau Bridges) trying to protect some of them in order to start up the cold war and space programs, and various other figures at odds with each other. Lena doesn't help very much until she takes up narration duties for the final few scenes, which ends up like Casablanca, and I don't mean in a good way.
All and all, while the acting is more than professional, the film itself is kind of on the sloppy side, and this sloppiness makes the entire work a bit off kilter, which hurts the whole production. It also doesn't look authentic.
Stick with the videos of the real thing, and wait for “Ocean's 13.”
Home of the Brave
Directed by
Irwin Winkler
The better part of a lifetime ago, there was a great movie called “The Best Years of Our Lives,” which was about GIs returning from the second world war and how they coped with the transition back to their previous lives and the effect on the loved ones they came back to. Updating this premise has been done for a number of wars since then, with varying results. This is not one of the better ones.
First off, there's a semi-gratuitous battle scene. It's the present day, and the platoon we're going to follow is informed that they're going home. However, before then, they have to go on one last mission: deliver badly needed supplies to somewhere that needs it.
But the bad guys (or are they the good guys?) are waiting to blow our guys up, and the mission is foiled. There's lots of blood and gore, which is fine if was a regular war movie where you could get into the action, but this isn't.
This is about people in pain. Vanessa Price(Jessica Biel) has gotten her hand blown off, and is having trouble getting past the physical limitations of her new situation. Jamal Atkins (Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson) is having trouble with the Veterans administration, who won't let him have the therapy he needs or even schedule a doctor's appointment; Tommy Yates (Brian Presley) has lost his best friend(Chad Michael Murray), in battle and when he gets home, he can't really connect with his father(Vyto Ruginis), who's a bit of an ass, of the friend's significant other(Christina Ricci) and Dr, Will Marsh (Samuel L. Jackson) has to reintegrate with a family(Victoria Rowell as his wife, Sam Jones III as his son, and some little girl as his daughter) that no longer really understands him.
The problem with the film is, while Winkler and writer Mark Friedman try, we can't really understand either. The characters generally just mope about, and with the exception of Vanessa, none of them actually TRY to reintegrate themselves. The acting is okay, but not good enough to make things actually engaging. The characters are flat, and by the end, one doesn't care that much as to what's going on. This is not something to waste an afternoon with. Pass it by.
The Secret Life of Words
Written and directed
by Isabel Coixet
One of the reasons that some people prefer foreign films to Hollywood movies are that the latter are much deeper than the former. For instance, this thing is very, very deep. So deep in fact that getting the bends is a distinct possibility.
Hanna (Sarah Polley), is a mysterious young woman working in a factory somewhere in Britain. She does her job very well, but she doesn't socialize too much, and the union and her co-workers convince her boss(Reg Wilson) to force her to take a vacation.
So where does she go? Northern Ireland in the late fall, where it is cold and depressing. While there she hears some fellow talking to another guy on the phone discussing a third fellow named Josef (Tim Robbins), who was badly burned in a flash fire at an offshore oil rig in the North Sea. Since Hanna was once a nurse, she goes up to the guy and volunteers. Yes, this is a dream vacation.
So for the next hour and a bit, we are treated to dialogue. Hanna has conversations with the bouncy Spanish cook Simon (Javier Camara), who's the only person who isn't morbidly depressed, the captain of the rig, Dimitri (Sverre Anker Ousdal), who is only there for the money and isn't very happy ever, the crew's ecologist Martin (Daniel Mays) who thinks he could save the world, and a couple of bisexuals who barely play a role. Then there's Josef.
This is more a filmed play than a real movie. Sure there's the sweeping vistas of the oil rig taken from a helicopter, but most of the film takes place in Josef's sickroom, where the two protagonists talk about life, philosophy and why they are the way they are.
This is Polley's picture and hers alone. She gets the accent right, and manages to go from an emotional automaton to a real-live girl without skipping a beat, and her scene where she reveals her past is quite moving. For those fans of deep, foreign films, this is something to see. You don't even have to read the subtitles.
20th Century Fox, 99mins, PG
Directed by
Stefen Fangmeier
Yes, the book that this was based on was written by a fifteen year old kid named , and his parents published it themselves before it was taken up by a real publisher. Apparently, the book was struck a nerve among a certain age group, otherwise they wouldn't have adapted it. Be that as it may, this is no way a great movie.
According to the prologue, Dragons and their riders kept the peace for thousands of years until an evil bastard by the name of Galbatorix (John Malkovich) took over the works and now dragons are extinct. However, there is one egg, and the heroic (and blonde) princess Arya (Sienna Guillory) has stolen it from his badness, who has sent his evil minion Durza the shade (Robert Carlyle) to get it back. She uses her magic to send it to our hero Eragon (Edward Speleers), a simple (blonde) farm boy with lousy aim [okay, the magic flash might have something to do with it.] Something a fifteen year old kid who's read too much hard fantasy might have thought up.
All the clichés are there. The fact that he's an orphan, his meeting up with Brom (Jeremy Irons), the village idiot, who just happens to be the last of the dragon riders of old. The names of the species of villains come right out of LotR, “the Sword of Shanara”, and every other book with the word “elf” somewhere in it. The only original thing about this paint-by-numbers epic is getting Rachel Weisz to be the voice of Saphira the Dragon, although they could have spent an extra five grand or so to move her lips. The telepathic gag is not only old, but lazy. So's the plotting, but then it was written by a fifteen year old kid, and most of them don't know any better. So of course, it's one big cliché. Young Christopher Paolini, who wrote the novel and it's two sequels may have a future ahead of him, but hopefully he's going to do something original from here one out.
If you want pseudo-medieval battles with fairys and elves, go take Lord of the Rings out off the shelf and let this one slip by. Yeech.
Charlotte's Web
Paramount Pictures, 97mins, G
Directed by
Gary Winick
You have to be careful with classics. They're so easy to muck up. E. B. White's “Charlotte's Web” is a classic if there ever was, right up there with “Huckleberry Finn” and “Winnie the Pooh.” In order to get it right, you have to stay faithful to original source, and even moreso, you have to respect it. The first movie version did this to some extent (Hanna Barbera), but the production values weren't really that good. Which makes this one of the great remakes of all time. This was White's most intelligent children's book, and Gary Winick makes sure that the intelligence remains.
Sam Shepard's voice introduces us to a slightly updated version of “Our Town” or Lake Wobigon, a place where everyone is nice and nothing much happens, and Fern(Dakota Fanning) watching her father (Kevin Anderson) midwife the birth of a litter of pigs, the runt of which, Wilbur(voice of Dominic Scott Kay), is about to get the axe when Fern saves him and he gets transferred, eventually to Fern's uncle Homer's(Gary Basaraba) farm across the way. Here we meet a bunch of refugees from “Babe” with what has to be one of the most prestigious voice casts of any animated or quasi-animated film ever. Okay, John Cleese, Julia Roberts and Steve Buscemi have done quite a bit of voicework in the past, but Robert REDFORD? Kathy Bates? Wow!
Yeah, Roberts is great as Charlotte and Buscemi is always brilliant, and as a CGI enhanced funny animal flick its just fine, but what's surprising are the adults. You have Fern's mom(Essie Davis) consulting with her doctor(Beau Bridges) about her kid's bizarre attraction to the animals in the barn, and you have to remember that the “X-files” angle, and the reaction of normal adults to the messages in the spiderweb.
This is the definitive version. If you have kids, take them to it now, and by the DVD in six months and hope no one else tries to do another version ever again, and thus ruin it for future generations.
The Pursuit of Happyness
Directed by
Gabriele Muccino
There are two reasons to go to movies: one is for entertainment and the other information. Hopefully, you get both. Unfortunately, this is neither. Which is more the pity as everyone does a really good job all around.
The year is 1981. Christopher(Will Smith) and Linda Gardner (Thandie Newton) live with their son Christopher, Jr (Jaden Smith) in one of the less fortunate sections of San Francisco. They invested all their money in a medical device that no one really wants. She works in a laundry doing double shifts as he tries to sell the gadget to doctors and hospitals in the area with little or no success. The bills are beginning to pile up, and Linda is beginning to crack. There is really no hope here, until he sees a sign saying that the Dean Witter brokerage saying that there's an competitive internship program, so he begins to hound the executive in charge(Brian Howe), until he gets an in, unfortunately, he's got those pesky financial problems, the internship is unpaid, which first forces his wife to leave him, then to move further and further down the financial ladder, until he and Chris, Jr have no place to sleep except a public toilet and homeless shelters.
Filmmakers Gabriele Muccino and Steven Conrad have figured out what some critics like: serious melodramas about nice people in pain. This is all about that. We see our Job [Sissyphus, whatever] trying to get that rock out of that hole again and again and again, with little or no success. He gets the internship, but everything else gets worse and worse. While this is based on a true story, the happy ending seems tacked on. Even the comic bits with the medical gadget being stolen, isn't that funny, which brings us to the question: Do we really want to see Will Smith suffer for over an hour and a half? Not really…and what of information?
There isn't any. The film recreates a time gone by extremely well, but so what? “The Pursuit of Happyness” just isn't worth the bucks or time.
Dreamgirls
Written and Directed
By Bill Condon
The oft-threatened return of the movie musical makes good this year with an adaptation of Tom Eyen and Michael Bennett's famous fictionalized history of the Supremes. It's nice that somebody finally got it right [okay, Rob Marshall's “Chicago” got it right too, but that doesn't explain everything else].
One of the reasons that this works is that it's operatic. There's very little spoken dialogue, and everything else is sung. This makes the numbers blend seamlessly from one to the other and that makes the highlights even better.
It's 1962, and Effervescent teenagers Effie White (Jennifer Hudson), Deena Jones (Beyoncé Knowles) and Lorrell Robinson (Anika Noni Rose) are late for their debut at that big Detroit talent show. They lose, but are noticed by car salesman/talent agent Curtis Taylor, Jr.(Jamie Foxx), who immediately gets them a gig singing backup with James "Thunder" Early(Eddie Murphy) and from there it's straight to the top. Well not exactly straight…
There are the complications: Effie is a bit of a diva, Curtis is basically a stock villain, who throws people away like wet Kleenex while treating the rest like puppets. Yes, folks, it's a melodrama with two dimensional characters. However, most of the great musicals from the 1930s and '40s did too, and it was the music and dancing which saved them. This is the case here, as well.
For instance, Effie's showstopper "And I am Telling You I'm Not Going." Is the bomb. Hudson blows everyone away, and that includes Beyoncé, a very difficult feat indeed. The acting is excellent thoughout. Foxx and Murphy give the performances of a lifetime, the four members of the group are smart and sexy and sing their own stuff, and as minor characters Sharon Leal, as the fourth “Dream”, Danny Glover as Eddy Murphy's first manger, and Keith Robinson as Effie's songwriter brother hold their own very nicely, and oh yeah, John Lithgow has a brief cameo which is a real hoot.
This is worth full price.
The Good German
Directed by
Steven Soderbergh
You have to say this for Steven Soderbergh, he isn't afraid to try stuff. Each and every film he's done [with the exception of the “Ocean's 11” films], has been starkly different than anything else he's done. Different isn't necessarily good, nor is it necessarily bad, but in recent years, and that's excepting “Ocean's 12,” he's not done all that well as compared to the glory years bracketing the millennium.
To say that is an improvement over his previous film is not really saying anything, as “Bubble” was truly horrid, However, the question is this better than, or on par with most of Soderbergh's other recent work, and that's a more difficult question.
This time Soderbergh is doing a film noir, and he wants it to have a truly retro feel. Thus he tries to replicate the technique of the times, and this, to some extent does give it that 1940s feel. It's the rest of the film which is a little off.
One problem is its structure. This is a three act picture in which each act has a different narrator. The first is Corporal Tully (Tobey Maguire), a driver and bigwig in the black market. His “day job” is to chauffeur “New Republic” correspondent and honorary captain Jake Geismar (George Clooney) around town while he's covering the Potsdam conference between Stalin, Truman and Churchill. As an act of friendship, he introduces Geismar to his girlfriend Lena Brandt(Cate Blanchett), a local hooker who, before the war, was screwing Geismar himself, and just as this triangle is getting set up, about twenty minutes into the film, Tully is about to offer Lena's husband Emil(Christian Oliver) to Soviet General Sikorsky (Ravil Isyanov), when he's relieved of his narration duties and life offstage only to be found next to palace where the confrence is being held by none other than our old pal Geismar, who then becomes the narrator.
I hate when they do that. It throws you off and makes you waste precious time trying to readjust, which is a bit difficult, as the plot begins to thicken as fast as a frosting in a blender: You have Lieutenant Schaeffer (Dave Power) trying to find Nazi war criminals, Colonel Muller (Beau Bridges) trying to protect some of them in order to start up the cold war and space programs, and various other figures at odds with each other. Lena doesn't help very much until she takes up narration duties for the final few scenes, which ends up like Casablanca, and I don't mean in a good way.
All and all, while the acting is more than professional, the film itself is kind of on the sloppy side, and this sloppiness makes the entire work a bit off kilter, which hurts the whole production. It also doesn't look authentic.
Stick with the videos of the real thing, and wait for “Ocean's 13.”
Home of the Brave
Directed by
Irwin Winkler
The better part of a lifetime ago, there was a great movie called “The Best Years of Our Lives,” which was about GIs returning from the second world war and how they coped with the transition back to their previous lives and the effect on the loved ones they came back to. Updating this premise has been done for a number of wars since then, with varying results. This is not one of the better ones.
First off, there's a semi-gratuitous battle scene. It's the present day, and the platoon we're going to follow is informed that they're going home. However, before then, they have to go on one last mission: deliver badly needed supplies to somewhere that needs it.
But the bad guys (or are they the good guys?) are waiting to blow our guys up, and the mission is foiled. There's lots of blood and gore, which is fine if was a regular war movie where you could get into the action, but this isn't.
This is about people in pain. Vanessa Price(Jessica Biel) has gotten her hand blown off, and is having trouble getting past the physical limitations of her new situation. Jamal Atkins (Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson) is having trouble with the Veterans administration, who won't let him have the therapy he needs or even schedule a doctor's appointment; Tommy Yates (Brian Presley) has lost his best friend(Chad Michael Murray), in battle and when he gets home, he can't really connect with his father(Vyto Ruginis), who's a bit of an ass, of the friend's significant other(Christina Ricci) and Dr, Will Marsh (Samuel L. Jackson) has to reintegrate with a family(Victoria Rowell as his wife, Sam Jones III as his son, and some little girl as his daughter) that no longer really understands him.
The problem with the film is, while Winkler and writer Mark Friedman try, we can't really understand either. The characters generally just mope about, and with the exception of Vanessa, none of them actually TRY to reintegrate themselves. The acting is okay, but not good enough to make things actually engaging. The characters are flat, and by the end, one doesn't care that much as to what's going on. This is not something to waste an afternoon with. Pass it by.
The Secret Life of Words
Written and directed
by Isabel Coixet
One of the reasons that some people prefer foreign films to Hollywood movies are that the latter are much deeper than the former. For instance, this thing is very, very deep. So deep in fact that getting the bends is a distinct possibility.
Hanna (Sarah Polley), is a mysterious young woman working in a factory somewhere in Britain. She does her job very well, but she doesn't socialize too much, and the union and her co-workers convince her boss(Reg Wilson) to force her to take a vacation.
So where does she go? Northern Ireland in the late fall, where it is cold and depressing. While there she hears some fellow talking to another guy on the phone discussing a third fellow named Josef (Tim Robbins), who was badly burned in a flash fire at an offshore oil rig in the North Sea. Since Hanna was once a nurse, she goes up to the guy and volunteers. Yes, this is a dream vacation.
So for the next hour and a bit, we are treated to dialogue. Hanna has conversations with the bouncy Spanish cook Simon (Javier Camara), who's the only person who isn't morbidly depressed, the captain of the rig, Dimitri (Sverre Anker Ousdal), who is only there for the money and isn't very happy ever, the crew's ecologist Martin (Daniel Mays) who thinks he could save the world, and a couple of bisexuals who barely play a role. Then there's Josef.
This is more a filmed play than a real movie. Sure there's the sweeping vistas of the oil rig taken from a helicopter, but most of the film takes place in Josef's sickroom, where the two protagonists talk about life, philosophy and why they are the way they are.
This is Polley's picture and hers alone. She gets the accent right, and manages to go from an emotional automaton to a real-live girl without skipping a beat, and her scene where she reveals her past is quite moving. For those fans of deep, foreign films, this is something to see. You don't even have to read the subtitles.
Thursday, December 14, 2006
the Color Coded Golden globe predections
Haven't Seen
Will win
Possiblity
No way in Hell.
DRAMA
Will win
Possiblity
No way in Hell.
DRAMA
"Babel"
"Bobby"
"The Departed"
"Little Children"
"The Queen"
ACTRESS (DRAMA)
Penelope Cruz - "Volver"
Judi Dench - "Notes on a Scandal"
Maggie Gyllenhaal - "Sherrybaby"
Helen Mirren - "The Queen"
Kate Winslet - "Little Children"
ACTOR (DRAMA)
Leonardo DiCaprio - "Blood Diamond"
Leonardo DiCaprio* - "The Departed"
Peter O'Toole - "Venus"
Will Smith - "The Pursuit of Happyness"
Forest Whitaker - "The Last King of Scotland"
*Leo may cancel himself out.
MUSICAL OR COMEDY
"Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan"
"The Devil Wears Prada"
"Dreamgirls"
"Little Miss SUnshine"
"Thank You For Smoking"
ACTRESS (MUSICAL OR COMEDY)
Annette Bening - "Running with Scissors"
Toni Collette - "Little Miss Sunshine"
Beyonce Knowles - "Dreamgirls"
Meryl Streep - "The Devil Wears Prada"
Renee Zellweger - "Miss Potter"
ACTOR (MUSICAL OR COMEDY)
Sasha Baron Cohen - "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan"
Johnny Depp - "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest"
Aaron Eckhart - "Thank You for Smoking"
Chiwetel Ejiofor - "Kinky Boots"
Will Farrell - "Stranger Than Fiction"
FOREIGN-LANGUAGE FILM
"Apocalypto'"
"Letters from Iwo Jima"
"The Lives of Others"
"Pan's Labyrinth"
"Volver"
ANIMATED FILM
"Cars"
"Happy Feet"
"Monster House"
SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Adriana Barraza - "Babel"
Kate Blanchett - "Notes on a Scandal"
Emily Blunt - "The Devil Wears Prada"
Jennifer Hudson - "Dreamgirls"
Rinko Kikuchi - "Babel"
SUPPORTING ACTOR
Ben Affleck - "Hollywoodland"
Jack Nicholson - "The Departed"
Eddie Murphy - "Dreamgirls"
Brad Pitt - "Babel"
Mark Wahlberg - "The Departed"
DIRECTOR
Clint Eastwood - "Flags of Our Fathers"
Clint Eastwood - "Letters from Iwo Jima"
Stephen Freers - "The Queen"
Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu - "Babel"
Martin Scorcese - "The Departed"
SCREENPLAY
"Babel"
"Little Children"
"Notes on a Scandal"
"The Departed"
"The Queen"
ORIGINAL SCORE
"The Painted Veil"
"The Fountain"
"Babel"
"Nomad"
"The Da Vinci Code"
ORIGINAL SONG
"A Father's Way - "Pursuit of Happyness"
"Listen" - "Dreamgirls"
"Never Gonna Break My Faith" - "Bobby"
"The Song of the Heart" - "Happy Feet"
"Try Not to Remember" - "Home of the Brave"
Sunday, December 10, 2006
Color commentary on the LA film critics awards
The awards season has begun. My color coded comments:
Haven't seen.
Yes.
No.
Haven't seen.
Yes.
No.
2006 Los Angeles Critics Association winners:
Picture: "Letters From Iwo Jima"
Runner-up: "The Queen"
Director: Paul Greengrass, "United 93"
Runner-up: Clint Eastwood, "Flags of Our Fathers" and "Letters From Iwo Jima"
Actor: Sacha Baron Cohen, "Borat" and Forest Whitaker, "The Last King of Scotland" (tie) (both good, but not good enough)
Actress: Helen Mirren, "The Queen"
Runner-up: Penelope Cruz, "Volver"
Supporting actor: Michael Sheen, "The Queen"[he was very good, but not great]
Runner-up: Sergi Lopez, "Pan's Labyrinth"
Supporting actress: Luminita Gheorghiu, "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu"
Runner-up: Jennifer Hudson, "Dreamgirls" (she should have gotten the award)
Screenplay: Peter Morgan, "The Queen" (it was good, but not the best)
Runner-up: Michael Arndt, "Little Miss Sunshine" (This was a ripoff of "Nat. Lampoon's Vactation")
Cinematography: Emmanuel Lubezki, "Children of Men"
Runner-up: Tom Stern, "Flags of Our Fathers" and "Letters From Iwo Jima"
Production design: Eugenio Caballero, "Pan's Labyrinth" (while this was a much better movie, Arnofsky's "the Fountain" was better)
Runner-up: Jim Clay and Geoffrey Kirkland, "Children of Men"
Music: Alexandre Desplat, "The Queen" and "The Painted Veil"
Runner-up: Thomas Newman, "The Good German" and "Little Children"
Foreign-language film: "The Lives of Others"
Runner-up: "Volver" (The best foreign films were "13 Tzametti" and "The Host", but neither is going to get anything)
Documentary/non-fiction film: "An Inconvenient Truth"
Runner-up: "Darwin's Nightmare"
Animation: "Happy Feet"
Runner-up: "Cars"
Douglas Edwards experimental/independent film/video award: "Old Joy" (Kelly Reichardt) and "In Between Days" (So Yong Kim) ("Old Joy" sucked.)
New generation award: Jonathan Dayton, Valerie Faris (directors) and Michael Arndt (screenwriter), "Little Miss Sunshine" (A derivitive film which was nice but not great).
Career achievement award (previously announced): Robert Mulligan (?)
The Golden Satellite award nominees.
The color code: Will WinShould Win
Yeah, they should have been nominated
Shame on YOU GS people!
ACTRESS IN A MOTION PICTURE, DRAMA
Penelope Cruz -- "Volver" (Sony Pictures Classics)
Helen Mirren -- "The Queen" (Miramax)
Judi Dench -- "Notes on a Scandal" (Searchlight)
Gretchen Mol -- "The Notorious Bettie Page" (HBO)
Maggie Gyllenhaal -- "Sherrybaby" (IFC)
Kate Winslet -- "Little Children" (New Line)
ACTOR IN A MOTION PICTURE, DRAMA
Derek Luke -- "Catch a Fire" (Focus)
Joshua Jackson -- "Aurora Borealis" (Regent)
Forrest Whitaker -- "The Last King of Scotland" (Fox Searchlight)
Ryan Gosling -- "Half Nelson" (ThinkFilm)
Patrick Wilson -- "Little Children" (New Line)
Leonardo DiCaprio -- "Blood Diamond" (Warner Bros)
ACTRESS IN A MOTION PICTURE, COMEDY OR MUSICAL
Julie Walters -- "Driving Lessons" (Sony Pictures Classics)
Annette Bening -- "Running with Scissors" (Sony Pictures Entertainment)
Meryl Streep -- "The Devil Wears Prada" (20th Century Fox)
Toni Collette -- "Little Miss Sunshine" (Fox Searchlight)
Jodie Whitaker -- "Venus" (Miramax)
Beyonce Knowles -- "Dreamgirls" (Dreamworks/Paramount)
ACTOR IN A MOTION PICTURE, COMEDY OR MUSICAL
Joseph Cross -- "Running with Scissors" (Sony Pictures Entertainment)
Aaron Eckhart -- "Thank You for Smoking" (Fox Searchlight)
Sasha Baron Cohen -- "Borat" (20th Century Fox)
Peter O'Toole -- "Venus" (Miramax)
Will Ferrell -- "Stranger than Fiction" (Sony Pictures Entertainment)
AFI's top
AFI NAMES TOP FILMS OF THE YEAR
'Borat,' 'Dreamgirls,' 'Little Miss Sunshine' named as best
The films, in alphabetical order, include "Babel," "Borat: Cultural Learnings Of America For Make Benefit Glorious Nation Of Kazakhstan," "The Devil Wears Prada," "Dreamgirls," "Half Nelson," "Happy Feet," "Inside Man," "Letters From Iwo Jima," "Little Miss Sunshine" and "United 93."
Of course, they forgot "Superman Returns" and shouldn't have included "Babel" and "Half Nelson" (the latter sucked big time) "Letters from Iwo Jima" I haven't seen yet.
Monday, December 04, 2006
The Golden Satellite award nominees.
The awards season has begun, and this is as good a place as any to start....
(analysis later)
ACTRESS IN A MOTION PICTURE, DRAMA
Penelope Cruz -- "Volver" (Sony Pictures Classics)
Helen Mirren -- "The Queen" (Miramax) yes
Judi Dench -- "Notes on a Scandal" (Searchlight)
Gretchen Mol -- "The Notorious Bettie Page" (HBO)
Maggie Gyllenhaal -- "Sherrybaby" (IFC)
Kate Winslet -- "Little Children" (New Line)
ACTOR IN A MOTION PICTURE, DRAMA
Derek Luke -- "Catch a Fire" (Focus)
Joshua Jackson -- "Aurora Borealis" (Regent)
Forrest Whitaker -- "The Last King of Scotland" (Fox Searchlight)
Ryan Gosling -- "Half Nelson" (ThinkFilm)
Patrick Wilson -- "Little Children" (New Line)
Leonardo DiCaprio -- "Blood Diamond" (Warner Bros)
ACTRESS IN A MOTION PICTURE, COMEDY OR MUSICAL
Julie Walters -- "Driving Lessons" (Sony Pictures Classics)
Annette Bening -- "Running with Scissors" (Sony Pictures Entertainment)
Meryl Streep -- "The Devil Wears Prada" (20th Century Fox)
Toni Collette -- "Little Miss Sunshine" (Fox Searchlight)
Jodie Whitaker -- "Venus" (Miramax)
Beyonce Knowles -- "Dreamgirls" (Dreamworks/Paramount)
ACTOR IN A MOTION PICTURE, COMEDY OR MUSICAL
Joseph Cross -- "Running with Scissors" (Sony Pictures Entertainment)
Aaron Eckhart -- "Thank You for Smoking" (Fox Searchlight)
Sasha Baron Cohen -- "Borat" (20th Century Fox)
Peter O'Toole -- "Venus" (Miramax)
Will Ferrell -- "Stranger than Fiction" (Sony Pictures Entertainment)
ACTRESS IN A SUPPORTING ROLE
Abigail Breslin -- "Little Miss Sunshine" (Fox Searchlight)
Lily Tomlin -- "Prairie Home Companion" (New Line)
Blythe Danner -- "The Last Kiss" (Dreamworks)
Rinko Kikuchi -- "Babel" (Paramount/Vantage)
Cate Blanchett -- "Notes on a Scandal" (Fox Searchlight)
Jennifer Hudson -- "Dreamgirls" (Dreamworks/Paramount)
ACTOR IN A SUPPORTING ROLE
Donald Sutherland -- "Aurora Borealis" (Regent)
Adam Beach -- "Flags of our Fathers" (Dreamworks)
Leonardo DiCaprio -- "The Departed" (Warner Bros)
Alan Arkin -- "Little Miss Sunshine" (Fox Searchlight)
Brad Pitt -- "Babel" (Paramount/Vantage)
Jack Nicholson -- "The Departed" (Warner Bros)
MOTION PICTURE, DRAMA
"Half Nelson" (ThinkFilm)
"The Departed" (Warner Bros)
"The Queen" (Miramax)
"The Last King of Scotland" (Fox Searchlight)
"Babel" (Paramount/Vantage)
"Little Children" (New Line)
MOTION PICTURE, COMEDY OR MUSICAL
"Little Miss Sunshine" (Fox Searchlight)
"Thank You for Smoking" (Fox Searchlight)
"The Devil Wears Prada" (20th Century Fox)
"Stranger than Fiction" (Sony/Columbia)
"Venus" (Miramax)
"Dreamgirls" (Dreamworks/Paramount)
MOTION PICTURE, FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM
"The Lives of Others" (Germany - Sony Pictures Classics)
"Volver" (Spain - Sony Pictures Classics)
"Changing Times" (France - Koch Lorber Films)
"Water" (Canada - Fox Searchlight)
"Syrian Bride" (Israel - Koch Lorber Films)
"Apocalypto" (Mexico - Icon Entertainment International)
MOTION PICTURE, ANIMATED OR MIXED MEDIA
"Cars" (Disney/Pixar)
"Ice Age 2: The Meltdown" (20th Century Fox)
"Happy Feet" (Warner Bros)
"Flushed Away" (Dreamworks)
"Pan's Labyrinth" (Picturehouse)
MOTION PICTURE, DOCUMENTARY
"Deliver Us from Evil" (Lions Gate)
"Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple" (Firelight Media/PBS)
"An Inconvenient Truth" (Paramount/Vantage)
"The US vs. John Lennon" (Lions Gate)
"Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man" (Lions Gate)
"The War Tapes" (Senart Films)
DIRECTOR
Martin Scorsese -- "The Departed" (Warner Bros)
Clint Eastwood -- "Flags of Our Fathers" (Dreamworks/Warner Bros)
Pedro Almodovar -- "Volver" (Sony Pictures Classics)
Stephen Frears -- "The Queen" (Miramax)
Alejandro González Iñárritu -- "Babel" (Paramount/Vantage)
Bill Condon -- "Dreamgirls" (Dreamworks/Paramount)
SCREENPLAY, ORIGINAL
André Téchiné, Laurent Guyot, Pascal Bonitzer -- "Changing Times (Koch Lorber)
Elena Soarez, Luiz Carlos Barreto, Andrucha Waddington -- "House of Sand" (Sony Pictures Classics)
Guillermo Arriaga, Alejandro González Iñárritu -- "Babel" (Paramount/Vantage)
Pedro Almodovar -- "Volver" (Sony Pictures Classics)
Peter Morgan -- "The Queen" (Miramax)
Paul Laverty -- "The Wind that Shakes the Barley" (IFC)
SCREENPLAY, ADAPTED
William Broyles, Jr.; Paul Haggis -- "Flags of Our Fathers" (Dreamworks/Warner Bros)
Jason Reitman -- "Thank You for Smoking" (Fox Searchlight)
William Monahan, Siu Fai Mak, Felix Chong -- "The Departed" (Warner Bros)
Todd Field, Tom Perrotta -- "Little Children" (New Line)
Garrison Keillor -- "A Prairie Home Companion" (New Line)
Bill Condon -- "Dreamgirls" (Dreamworks/Paramount)
ORIGINAL SCORE
Gabriel Yared -- "The Lives of Others" (Sony Pictures Classics)
Clint Eastwood -- "Flags of Our Fathers" (Dreamworks/Warner Bros)
Philip Glass -- "Notes on a Scandal" (Fox Searchlight)
Nathan Johnson -- "Brick" (Focus)
Hans Zimmer -- "Da Vinci Code" (Columbia)
Gustavo Santolalla -- "Babel" (Paramount/Vantage)
ORIGINAL SONG
"Upside Down" -- Jack Johnson, "Curious George" (Imagine/Universal)
"You Know My Name" -- Chris Cornell, "Casino Royale" (MGM/Sony)
"Love You I Do" -- Henry Krieger, Siedah Garrett, "Dreamgirls" (Dreamworks/Paramount)
"Never Let Go" -- Bryan Adams, Trevor Rabin, Eliot Kennedy, "The Guardian" (Disney)
"Listen" -- Henry Krieger, Anne Previn, Scott Cutler, Beyoncé Knowles, "Dreamgirls" (Dreamworks/Paramount)
"Till the End of Time" -- Nick Urata, Devotchka, "Little Miss Sunshine" (Fox Searchlight)
CINEMATOGRAPHY
Ricardo Della Rosa -- "House of Sand" (Sony Pictures Classics)
Tom Stern -- "Flags of Our Fathers" (Dreamworks/Warner Bros)
Vilmos Zsigmond -- "The Black Dahlia" (Universal)
Philippe Lesourd -- "A Good Year" (Fox 2000)
Dante Spinotti -- "X-Men: The Last Stand" (20th Century Hotel)
Matthew Libatique -- "The Fountain" (Warner Bros)
Zhao Xiaoding -- "Curse of the Golden Flower" (Sony Pictures Classics)
VISUAL EFFECTS
Michael Owens, Matthew Butler, Bryan Grill, Steven Riley -- "Flags of Our Fathers" (Dreamworks/Warner Bros)
John Knoll -- "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest" (Disney)
John Bruno -- "X-Men: The Last Stand" (20th Century Fox)
Dan Glass -- "V for Vendetta" (Warner Bros)
Jeremy Dawson, Daniel Schrecker -- "The Fountain" (Warner Bros)
Everett Burrell, Edward Irastorza -- "Pan's Labyrinth" (Picturehouse)
Kevin Ahern -- "The Da Vinci Code" (Columbia/Sony)
FILM EDITING
Mark Helfrich, Mark Goldblatt -- "X-Men: The Last Stand" (20th Century Fox)
Joel Cox -- "Flags of Our Fathers" (Dreamworks/Warner Bros)
Stephen Mirrione, Douglas Crise -- "Babel" (Paramount Vantage)
William Goldenberg -- "Miami Vice" (Universal)
Virginia Katz -- "Dreamgirls" (Dreamworks/Paramount)
SOUND (EDITING & MIXING)
Steve Maslow, DM Hemphill, John A. Larsen, Rick Klein -- "X-Men: The Last Stand" (20th Century Fox)
Alan Robert Murray, Bub Asman, Walt Martin, John Reitz, Dave Campbell, Gregg Rudloff -- "Flags of Our Fathers" (Warner Bros/Dreamworks)
José Garcia, Jon Taylor, Chris Minkler, Martin Hernandez -- "Babel" (Paramount/Vantage)
Willie Burton, Michael Minkler, Bob Beemer, Richard E. Yawn -- "Dreamgirls" (DreamworksParamount)
Chic Ciccolini III, Kevin O'Connell, Greg P. Russell -- "The Da Vinci Code" (Columbia/Sony)
ART DIRECTION & PRODUCTION DESIGN
K.K. Barrett -- "Marie Antoinette" (Columbia)
Henry Bumstead, Jack G. Taylor Jr., Richard Goddard -- "Flags of Our Fathers" (Warner Bros)
John Myhre, Tomas Voth, Nancy Haigh -- "Dreamgirls" (Dreamworks/Paramount)
Eugenio Caballero -- "Pan's Labyrinth" (Picturehouse)
Owen Paterson, Marco Bittner Rosser, Sarah Horton, Sebastian T. Krawinkel, Stephen Gessler -- "V for Vendetta" (Warner Bros)
COSTUME DESIGN
Milena Canonero -- "Marie Antoinette" (Columbia)
Jenny Beavan -- "The Black Dahlia" (Universal)
Yee Chung Man -- "Curse of the Golden Flower" (Sony Pictures Classics)
Sharen Davis -- "Dreamgirls" (Dreamworks/Paramount)
Patricia Field -- "The Devil Wears Prada" (20th Century Fox)
(analysis later)
ACTRESS IN A MOTION PICTURE, DRAMA
Penelope Cruz -- "Volver" (Sony Pictures Classics)
Helen Mirren -- "The Queen" (Miramax) yes
Judi Dench -- "Notes on a Scandal" (Searchlight)
Gretchen Mol -- "The Notorious Bettie Page" (HBO)
Maggie Gyllenhaal -- "Sherrybaby" (IFC)
Kate Winslet -- "Little Children" (New Line)
ACTOR IN A MOTION PICTURE, DRAMA
Derek Luke -- "Catch a Fire" (Focus)
Joshua Jackson -- "Aurora Borealis" (Regent)
Forrest Whitaker -- "The Last King of Scotland" (Fox Searchlight)
Ryan Gosling -- "Half Nelson" (ThinkFilm)
Patrick Wilson -- "Little Children" (New Line)
Leonardo DiCaprio -- "Blood Diamond" (Warner Bros)
ACTRESS IN A MOTION PICTURE, COMEDY OR MUSICAL
Julie Walters -- "Driving Lessons" (Sony Pictures Classics)
Annette Bening -- "Running with Scissors" (Sony Pictures Entertainment)
Meryl Streep -- "The Devil Wears Prada" (20th Century Fox)
Toni Collette -- "Little Miss Sunshine" (Fox Searchlight)
Jodie Whitaker -- "Venus" (Miramax)
Beyonce Knowles -- "Dreamgirls" (Dreamworks/Paramount)
ACTOR IN A MOTION PICTURE, COMEDY OR MUSICAL
Joseph Cross -- "Running with Scissors" (Sony Pictures Entertainment)
Aaron Eckhart -- "Thank You for Smoking" (Fox Searchlight)
Sasha Baron Cohen -- "Borat" (20th Century Fox)
Peter O'Toole -- "Venus" (Miramax)
Will Ferrell -- "Stranger than Fiction" (Sony Pictures Entertainment)
ACTRESS IN A SUPPORTING ROLE
Abigail Breslin -- "Little Miss Sunshine" (Fox Searchlight)
Lily Tomlin -- "Prairie Home Companion" (New Line)
Blythe Danner -- "The Last Kiss" (Dreamworks)
Rinko Kikuchi -- "Babel" (Paramount/Vantage)
Cate Blanchett -- "Notes on a Scandal" (Fox Searchlight)
Jennifer Hudson -- "Dreamgirls" (Dreamworks/Paramount)
ACTOR IN A SUPPORTING ROLE
Donald Sutherland -- "Aurora Borealis" (Regent)
Adam Beach -- "Flags of our Fathers" (Dreamworks)
Leonardo DiCaprio -- "The Departed" (Warner Bros)
Alan Arkin -- "Little Miss Sunshine" (Fox Searchlight)
Brad Pitt -- "Babel" (Paramount/Vantage)
Jack Nicholson -- "The Departed" (Warner Bros)
MOTION PICTURE, DRAMA
"Half Nelson" (ThinkFilm)
"The Departed" (Warner Bros)
"The Queen" (Miramax)
"The Last King of Scotland" (Fox Searchlight)
"Babel" (Paramount/Vantage)
"Little Children" (New Line)
MOTION PICTURE, COMEDY OR MUSICAL
"Little Miss Sunshine" (Fox Searchlight)
"Thank You for Smoking" (Fox Searchlight)
"The Devil Wears Prada" (20th Century Fox)
"Stranger than Fiction" (Sony/Columbia)
"Venus" (Miramax)
"Dreamgirls" (Dreamworks/Paramount)
MOTION PICTURE, FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM
"The Lives of Others" (Germany - Sony Pictures Classics)
"Volver" (Spain - Sony Pictures Classics)
"Changing Times" (France - Koch Lorber Films)
"Water" (Canada - Fox Searchlight)
"Syrian Bride" (Israel - Koch Lorber Films)
"Apocalypto" (Mexico - Icon Entertainment International)
MOTION PICTURE, ANIMATED OR MIXED MEDIA
"Cars" (Disney/Pixar)
"Ice Age 2: The Meltdown" (20th Century Fox)
"Happy Feet" (Warner Bros)
"Flushed Away" (Dreamworks)
"Pan's Labyrinth" (Picturehouse)
MOTION PICTURE, DOCUMENTARY
"Deliver Us from Evil" (Lions Gate)
"Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple" (Firelight Media/PBS)
"An Inconvenient Truth" (Paramount/Vantage)
"The US vs. John Lennon" (Lions Gate)
"Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man" (Lions Gate)
"The War Tapes" (Senart Films)
DIRECTOR
Martin Scorsese -- "The Departed" (Warner Bros)
Clint Eastwood -- "Flags of Our Fathers" (Dreamworks/Warner Bros)
Pedro Almodovar -- "Volver" (Sony Pictures Classics)
Stephen Frears -- "The Queen" (Miramax)
Alejandro González Iñárritu -- "Babel" (Paramount/Vantage)
Bill Condon -- "Dreamgirls" (Dreamworks/Paramount)
SCREENPLAY, ORIGINAL
André Téchiné, Laurent Guyot, Pascal Bonitzer -- "Changing Times (Koch Lorber)
Elena Soarez, Luiz Carlos Barreto, Andrucha Waddington -- "House of Sand" (Sony Pictures Classics)
Guillermo Arriaga, Alejandro González Iñárritu -- "Babel" (Paramount/Vantage)
Pedro Almodovar -- "Volver" (Sony Pictures Classics)
Peter Morgan -- "The Queen" (Miramax)
Paul Laverty -- "The Wind that Shakes the Barley" (IFC)
SCREENPLAY, ADAPTED
William Broyles, Jr.; Paul Haggis -- "Flags of Our Fathers" (Dreamworks/Warner Bros)
Jason Reitman -- "Thank You for Smoking" (Fox Searchlight)
William Monahan, Siu Fai Mak, Felix Chong -- "The Departed" (Warner Bros)
Todd Field, Tom Perrotta -- "Little Children" (New Line)
Garrison Keillor -- "A Prairie Home Companion" (New Line)
Bill Condon -- "Dreamgirls" (Dreamworks/Paramount)
ORIGINAL SCORE
Gabriel Yared -- "The Lives of Others" (Sony Pictures Classics)
Clint Eastwood -- "Flags of Our Fathers" (Dreamworks/Warner Bros)
Philip Glass -- "Notes on a Scandal" (Fox Searchlight)
Nathan Johnson -- "Brick" (Focus)
Hans Zimmer -- "Da Vinci Code" (Columbia)
Gustavo Santolalla -- "Babel" (Paramount/Vantage)
ORIGINAL SONG
"Upside Down" -- Jack Johnson, "Curious George" (Imagine/Universal)
"You Know My Name" -- Chris Cornell, "Casino Royale" (MGM/Sony)
"Love You I Do" -- Henry Krieger, Siedah Garrett, "Dreamgirls" (Dreamworks/Paramount)
"Never Let Go" -- Bryan Adams, Trevor Rabin, Eliot Kennedy, "The Guardian" (Disney)
"Listen" -- Henry Krieger, Anne Previn, Scott Cutler, Beyoncé Knowles, "Dreamgirls" (Dreamworks/Paramount)
"Till the End of Time" -- Nick Urata, Devotchka, "Little Miss Sunshine" (Fox Searchlight)
CINEMATOGRAPHY
Ricardo Della Rosa -- "House of Sand" (Sony Pictures Classics)
Tom Stern -- "Flags of Our Fathers" (Dreamworks/Warner Bros)
Vilmos Zsigmond -- "The Black Dahlia" (Universal)
Philippe Lesourd -- "A Good Year" (Fox 2000)
Dante Spinotti -- "X-Men: The Last Stand" (20th Century Hotel)
Matthew Libatique -- "The Fountain" (Warner Bros)
Zhao Xiaoding -- "Curse of the Golden Flower" (Sony Pictures Classics)
VISUAL EFFECTS
Michael Owens, Matthew Butler, Bryan Grill, Steven Riley -- "Flags of Our Fathers" (Dreamworks/Warner Bros)
John Knoll -- "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest" (Disney)
John Bruno -- "X-Men: The Last Stand" (20th Century Fox)
Dan Glass -- "V for Vendetta" (Warner Bros)
Jeremy Dawson, Daniel Schrecker -- "The Fountain" (Warner Bros)
Everett Burrell, Edward Irastorza -- "Pan's Labyrinth" (Picturehouse)
Kevin Ahern -- "The Da Vinci Code" (Columbia/Sony)
FILM EDITING
Mark Helfrich, Mark Goldblatt -- "X-Men: The Last Stand" (20th Century Fox)
Joel Cox -- "Flags of Our Fathers" (Dreamworks/Warner Bros)
Stephen Mirrione, Douglas Crise -- "Babel" (Paramount Vantage)
William Goldenberg -- "Miami Vice" (Universal)
Virginia Katz -- "Dreamgirls" (Dreamworks/Paramount)
SOUND (EDITING & MIXING)
Steve Maslow, DM Hemphill, John A. Larsen, Rick Klein -- "X-Men: The Last Stand" (20th Century Fox)
Alan Robert Murray, Bub Asman, Walt Martin, John Reitz, Dave Campbell, Gregg Rudloff -- "Flags of Our Fathers" (Warner Bros/Dreamworks)
José Garcia, Jon Taylor, Chris Minkler, Martin Hernandez -- "Babel" (Paramount/Vantage)
Willie Burton, Michael Minkler, Bob Beemer, Richard E. Yawn -- "Dreamgirls" (DreamworksParamount)
Chic Ciccolini III, Kevin O'Connell, Greg P. Russell -- "The Da Vinci Code" (Columbia/Sony)
ART DIRECTION & PRODUCTION DESIGN
K.K. Barrett -- "Marie Antoinette" (Columbia)
Henry Bumstead, Jack G. Taylor Jr., Richard Goddard -- "Flags of Our Fathers" (Warner Bros)
John Myhre, Tomas Voth, Nancy Haigh -- "Dreamgirls" (Dreamworks/Paramount)
Eugenio Caballero -- "Pan's Labyrinth" (Picturehouse)
Owen Paterson, Marco Bittner Rosser, Sarah Horton, Sebastian T. Krawinkel, Stephen Gessler -- "V for Vendetta" (Warner Bros)
COSTUME DESIGN
Milena Canonero -- "Marie Antoinette" (Columbia)
Jenny Beavan -- "The Black Dahlia" (Universal)
Yee Chung Man -- "Curse of the Golden Flower" (Sony Pictures Classics)
Sharen Davis -- "Dreamgirls" (Dreamworks/Paramount)
Patricia Field -- "The Devil Wears Prada" (20th Century Fox)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)