Special preview footage from JJ Abrams‘ Star Trek (Paramount, 5.8.09) was shown here tonight for fanboy press and exhibs. We were only shown four scenes, but what we saw was jaunty and full of spirit, handsomely and at times beautifully composed (images of massive, mall-like super-cities rising over the plains of futuristic Iowa were a highlight for me), boasting more than a few loose and nervy performances. My favorite was Zachary Qinto‘s Spock because of his natural Vulcan authority, but I’ve always been a sucker for high intellect.
Relatively new plex on 34th Street where roughly 14 minutes of Star Trek footage was unfurled. Director JJ Abrams offered a few remarks, set up the four scenes. Paramount chief John Lesher also attended and spoke.
The 15 short-listed feature documentaries were announced today by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. For me the biggest mind-blower is the omission of Marina Zenovich‘s Roman Polanksi: Wanted and Desired — one of the sharpest and most persuasive inside-the-legal-system docs ever made, as well as a perceptive portrait of a fascinating and haunted artist. My guess is that some Polanski haters didn’t care for Zenovich’s generally admiring (and yet thorough and fair-minded) approach.
I don’t want to hear about any stupid disqualifiers because it played on HBO for a week or whatever. Academy disqualifiers is this realm are bullshit. Docs are always struggling for attention, and anything they can put together revenue- or attention-wise outside of theatrical should not be a penalty, for God’s sake.
I’m also a bit surprised that Alex Gibney‘s Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson — not a great film but certainly a professionally assembled and earnestly felt one — wasn’t included. And yet the dutiful and less-than-exceptional Trouble the Water — a piece about the devastation of Hurricane Katrina that I’ve been calling the “King Kong of hand-held jiggle-pan docs” — made the cut.
The 15 docs are At the Death House Door, The Betrayal, Blessed Is the Match: The Life and Death of Hannah Senesh, Werner Herzog‘s Encounters at the End of the World, Fuel, The Garden, Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts, I.O.U.S.A., In a Dream, Made in America, the great Man on Wire, Pray the Devil Back to Hell, Errol Morris‘ Standard Operating Procedure, They Killed Sister Dorothy and Trouble the Water.
The Documentary Branch Screening Committee viewed all the eligible documentaries for the preliminary round of voting. Documentary Branch members will now select the five nominees from among the 15 titles on the shortlist.
The 81st Academy Awards nominations will be announced on Thursday, 1.22.09, at 5:30 a.m. Pacific in the Academy’s Samuel Goldwyn Theater.
In the view of Variety‘s Todd McCarthy, Revolutionary Road is “constantly engrossing as it successfully engages the yearning of Frank and April Wheeler to rescue themselves from their decorous, socially acceptable oblivion, just as it clearly defines how the ‘trap’ is stronger than they are. The rows, tender moments and downtime in between are fully inhabited and powerfully charged by Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet.
“For his part, DiCaprio often achieves the kind of double register the film as a whole less consistently captures, as he indicates Frank’s thought process in the split second before he decides what to say. At certain moments, the conjoined cerebral and emotional aspects of his characterization summon the spirit of Jack Nicholson‘s breakthrough performances around the time of Five Easy Pieces.
“Winslet’s perf is less surprising, perhaps, if only because she has shown tremendous range throughout her career. April is a difficult role in that her mood changes sometimes seem inexplicable, but the thesp makes them all seem genuine, which resonates with Frank’s occasional hints that she’s possibly in need of psychiatric help. Winslet’s starkly etched April is steely, strong and brittle, capable of great highs and lows as well as massive uncertainty.
“Pic’s startling supporting turn comes from Michael Shannon, who’s mesmerizing as the clinically insane son of local realtor and busybody Helen Givings (Kathy Bates). He’s a loony who is able to tell the truth about the Wheelers that everyone else so politely avoids; when Shannon is onscreen, it’s impossible to watch anyone else.”
Claire Sutherland‘s just-posted review of Australia is obviously coming from the obsequious side of the room — she doesn’t strike me as tough-minded in the slightest. Here, however, is The Australian‘s Michael Bodey — “intermittently brilliant, largely good but ultimately erratic.”
N.Y. publicist Sophie Gluck has announced that Guillaume Canet‘s Tell No One, which is still playing at the Cinema Village, has now passed $6.2 million in U.S. domestic box office, making it the highest grossing foreign-language film of the year. The DVD and Blu-Ray will come out in the first quarter of 2009.
No, Uli Edel‘s The Baader Meinhof Complexdoesn’t romanticize terrorism, as the Guardian‘s David Cox seems to believe. It’s angry and provocative, yes, and very well made, but not all that sexy. Not in a way that got me going, at least, as I explained in 9.30.08 review.
I called it “a strong but bleak account of the impassioned but self-destructive insanity that took hold among radical lefties in the late ’60s and ’70s, and which manifested with a particular ferocity and flamboyance among the Baader-Meinhoffers. [It] mainly sinks in as a revisiting of a time in which a small but dead-serious sector of the left-liberal community temporarily lost its bearings and in some cases jumped off a cliff in order to stop what they saw as a form of absolute establishment evil.
“I’m glad I saw it, I’m glad it was made, I respect and admire the contributions of everyone on the team (Edel, producer-co-writer Bernd Eichinger, exec producer Martin Moszkovicz and cast members Martina Gedeck, Moritz Bleibtreu, Johanna Wokalek, Bruno Ganz, Nadja Uhl, Jan Josef Liefers, Stipe Erceg, Niels Bruno Schmidt, Vinzenz Kiefer, Alexandra Maria Lara), and I’m glad it’s doing well commercially in Germany and elsewhere.
“But The Baader Meinhof Complex is a gripping but awfully strange and even weird story about some very extreme, go-for-broke people who didn’t know when (or how) to chill out and seemed, in the final analysis, to be more than a little in love with death.”
I’ve lived in Los Angeles since the ’80s, and I’ve never seen a sight quite like this. A friend who lives in Mar Vista says the scent of burnt wood is everywhere. So strong it woke her up, she says.
“If Valkyrie succeeds, even moderately, MGM wins a modicum of credibility in image-is-everything Hollywood,” Brooks Barnes and Michael Cieply have written in today’s (11.17) N.Y. Times. “A failure brings fresh sniping that the studio does not know what it is doing, making the job of attracting top-notch talent even harder.
“Financially speaking, the stakes are considerable. With a stated production budget of $75 million — competitors insist it is closer to $90 million — Valkyrie is the most expensive film made for distribution by MGM under Harry Sloan‘s watch. The studio will now spend about $60 million to market the movie — if nothing else, to make the point that it can play in the big leagues.
“(Quantum of Solace was much more costly, but it was co-financed and co-distributed by Sony Pictures Entertainment. The movie sold $70.4 million worth of tickets in North America in its first three days of release, the biggest opening ever for a James Bond film.)
“Valkyrie will also test the mettle of [the film’s star), the 46-year-old Tom Cruise: If it fails, his status as a superstar, damaged by a rough parting with Paramount Pictures in 2006, slips another notch. And this time United Artists — clipped by a Cruise flop last year in Lions for Lambs — slips with it.”
Articles like this one are not going to stop, and the only way for MGM to spin things in a more favorable direction is to show it to select journalists and perhaps assemble a few positive reactions. In today’s environment, of course, it’s presumed by most marketers that once you screen a high-profile film the word will seep out no matter who promises what or how trustworthy they are.
But right now, and especially in the wake of Barnes and Cieply’s article, there’s probably more upside to showing Valkyrie and, let’s face it, a likely continuation of more downside whispering if they keep it hidden.
A week ago I was sent an e-mail detailing the Che release plan and passed it along. Most of the information was correct but the part about Guerilla (i.e., part 2) being released on 2.20.09 wasn’t. If IFC had simply launched a Che website all ambiguity would be removed. If such a site exists it’s a well-kept secret. In any event here’s the correct info:
The full-length roadshow version Che (composed of Che, Part 1:The Argentine and Che, Part 2: Guerilla) will be released as a special one-week event on 12.12.08 in New York City at the Ziegfeld Theater and in Los Angeles at The Landmark. (Had that right.) Che will re-open on January 9th in New York and Los Angeles as two separate admissions. A national rollout will follow to the top 25 markets on January 16th and 22nd with further expansions planned. The two parts will be released simultaneously in each market.
On January 21, IFC will also make the separate parts available on IFC In Theaters, its video-on-demand platform. The two parts will be available in 50 million homes nationwide on all major cable and satellite providers in both standard and high definition versions.
