Month: October 2011

I’m blowing off a screening of Tower Heist to attend the Hollywood Awards at the Beverly Hilton. It starts with an hour of cocktail chit-chat from 6 to 7 pm and then will run from 7 pm to 9 pm (or something like that). Every actor, director and producer chosen for an award has to attend because if they don’t, someone else will be chosen and they’ll attend so there’s no way to win except to show up, etc. Everybody gets that. Nobody cares. It’s the first pre-, pre-, pre-senior prom.

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George Clooney will accept the Actor award for his performance in The Descendants, Moneyball director Bennett Miller will be handed the Director Award; the cast of The Help will receive an Ensemble Award, Williams will get an Actress award for her performance in My Week With Marilyn, Christopher Plummer will be handed a Supporting Actor award for Beginners, Mulligan a Supporting Actress Award for her work in Shame, Diablo Cody will get a Screenwriter Award for Young Adult, and Albert Nobbs star Glenn Close will receive a Career Achievement Award.

Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone, Gold Derby‘s Tom ONeil and I riffed on the usual-usual yesterday. Here’s a non-iTunes, stand-alone link.

A few days ago Spike Jonze, Simon Cahn and Olympia Le-Tan‘s stop-motion short Mourir Aupres de Toi (To Die By Your Side) surfaced online. It was first seen at last May’s Cannes Film Festival as some kind of partnership deal with Jonathan Caouette‘s Walk Away Renee. It’s set inside Shakespeare & Co., the old-time Paris book store.

One of the interesting things is that the Macbeth skeleton’s head looks like the skeleton of a cat’s head.

This is one of the most overtly carnal stop-motion shorts I’ve ever seen. Particularly due to a couple of hand gestures made by the red-haired vampire girl.

Here’s a “making of” short that appeared last April.

Why does the trailer allow us to hear Asa Butterfield pronouncing his character’s full name, i.e, Hugh Cabret? Won’t that alienate the bubbas out there who don’t like to hear any French-sounding words? Paramount changed the title from Hugo Cabret to Hugo for precisely this reason, right? In fact, why not play it safe and dub the film so that Hugo’s last name can be changed to Flabbergast or Appleseed or Wishbone? Wipe that French off the map!

Question for those who saw Hugo at the NY Film Festival: Is Hugo specific enough to identify the Paris train station where most of he action takes place? Is it Gare du Nord, Gare de l’Est, Gare d’Oreans, etc.? Or it just a generic storybook Paris with a single unidentified train station? Because giving it a name would confuse the kiddies?

Q: What’s with the Metropolis-like wire-framed robot figure? A: Brian Selznick‘s book “The Invention of Hugo Cabret” “is the true story of turn-of-the-century pioneer filmmaker Georges Melies (played by Ben Kingsley in the film), his surviving films “and his collection of mechanical, wind-up figures called automata,: says the Wiki page. “Melies actually had a set of automata, which were either sold or lost. At the end of his life M√©lies was broke, even as films were screening widely in the US. He did work in a toy booth in a Paris railway station, hence the setting.”

Paramount will release Hugo on 11.23.

This is bad. This can’t be good. Okay, maybe it’s better than it seems but if William Shakespeare‘s ghost had the ability to keep tabs on Hollywood adaptations of his plays, there would be much concern right now. “It’s bad enough for Roland Emmerich ‘s Anonymous (Sony, 10.28) to assert that Edward de Vere was the actual author of my plays,” the outraged ghost might complain, “but the idea of sci-fi/fantasy journeyman-drone Joss Whedon (The Avengers, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel) shooting an adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing…that’s past the point of tolerance!”

From HE reader/journalist Gabe@ThePlaylist, posted earlier today: “I mostly liked Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, and I’m not sure if I’m just touchy about 9/11, or that you genuinely have to be an asshole to HATE it. But it kinda gave me a headache, and the kid was unbearable. Still, except for me, not a dry eye in the house. I haven’t seen a movie work like that in awhile.

“It turned me around on a lot of things: (as) Favorite Stephen Daldry movie by far…though I am not a fan; (b) Favorite Sandra Bullock performance. Again, definitely not a fan; (c) Max Von Sydow‘s character feels gimmicky. Of COURSE he’ll get Oscar attention. Though I would throw it Bullock’s way, and I think Jeffrey Wright has a great scene near the end that straddles the line between ‘I am answering a lot of questions for myself right now’ and ‘I am touched by the context you’re bringing to this.’ Only great actors make those similar reactions into completely different attitudes; (d) Some of the mother/son stuff is TOUGH. I think there’s a lot of misplaced rage people have when they lose a loved one, and when it’s a hyperactive child, it’s tenfold. I was impressed how dark and affecting this was.

“I think, as far as Academy voting [is concerned], it works on every necessary level. Tugs appropriately at the heartstrings, has just enough edgy content, plays with colorful editing and ‘edgy’ unconventional storytelling, and grandma will love it.”

I’m sorry, but I’ve finally seen Sony Home Video’s Caine Mutiny Bluray and the best I can give it is a B. I don’t think it’s all that fabulous looking. It’s more vibrantly colored and offers more detail than the previous DVDs so yes, it’s an improvement. But for a film shot in three-strip Technicolor, it doesn’t have that natural glow and special richness that ought to be there. The color feels a bit grainy and “pushed,” and a little too blown-up looking at times. Too many pinkish or spray-tanned faces.

And I honestly do feel, as I said a week or so ago, that the 1.85 masking is pointless and that it diminishes the compositions. Many of the scenes feel somewhat hemmed in and pushed down, like they’re in some kind of jail. I say to hell with Universal and Columbia having decided to scam-crop their 1.37 movies down to 1.85 starting in 1953. Movies from that era don’t breathe at 1.85. The Caine Mutiny should have been masked off at 1.66. My eyes know what they know, and they know what’s right.

Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neil and The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg do another Oscar chit-chat. The Best Picture contenders of the moment, they say, are still The Artist, The Descendants, Moneyball, The Help and Midnight in Paris…obviously not counting the big unseens. Noteworthy: Feinberg remembers and pronounces the name of Michel Hazanavicius, director of The Artist.

O’Neil: “The Artist is not going to win a single critics’ Best Picture award. It’s very lightweight. The story is a little bon-bon.”

Feinberg: “There’s a lot of affection for The Descendants, but I don’t see it as a Best Picture winner. I don’t see Clooney pulling it out again [for a Best Actor Oscar].” Also: “If you don’t like kids or horses, forget War Horse.”

Could Moneyball happen? Feinberg: “I think it could. I don;t see it as a baseball movie. Like the book, it’s less about baseball than about ideas and doing things in a smaller, smarter way. This is the way Hollywood has to operate too.” Less of an emphasis on big stars and big bucks, he means, and more of an emphasis on just “getting on base,” so to speak.

“And the fact that Brad Pitt is in it, doesn’t hurt.”