The age-old Steven Spielberg = sweeping emotionality equation had led five Gold Derby experts — Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg, Village Voice‘s Michael Musto, Movieline‘s Stu Van Airsdale plus Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neil and Paul Sheehan — to forecast a War Horse Best Picture win. Five others have picked The Descendants, and two have gone for The Artist. I’m the only Moneyball guy, and Rolling Stone‘s Peter Travers is picking The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.
Anne Hathaway‘s Dark Knight Returns catwoman get-up will be fairly utilitarian. Not too much different from Julie Newmar’s. A simple wrap-around mask, no cat tail, and no hair-concealing head mask or face-cover a la Michelle Pfeiffer‘s version. And no S & M midriff-exposure a la Halle Berry.
It goes without saying that when Hathaway gets into fights with much taller, bigger and stronger guys in this upcoming Chris Nolan film, she’ll whip their asses like they’re eight year-old boys.
Prior to last night’s Moneyball screening at the AMC Lincoln Square I saw a somewhat longer and more plot-specific and dialogue-specific trailer for Tower Heist than the one released on 7.28. I was sold. It persuaded me that due to Eddie Murphy‘s standout performance, Tower Heist will probably be a funnier Ocean’s 11. The idea alone of Murphy doing Gabby Sidibe…the mind reels.
The embedded trailer here is an international version that somewhat resembles the one I saw last night, but isn’t exactly the same. The downside is that 15 or 20 of the jokes will now fall flat because everyone will have heard them 30 or 40 times by the time the film opens in November.
I couldn’t help myself. I had to slip into the AMC Lincoln Plaza earlier tonight to check out the 9:30 pm Moneyball show and see how it looked. What I saw would break Bennett Miller‘s heart, and definitely Wally Pfister‘s. The general darkness of the image was appalling, horrific. The foot lambert level must have been 9 or 10 instead of the proper 14. And the sound was definitely lower than the sound levels for the trailers.
I had tears in my eyes. Miller and Pfister have worked so hard and so well, and then the AMC guys come along and fuck it all up for the customers. People all around me had paid $13 bills each to see a version of Moneyball that definitely blew chunks on a presentation level, and they didn’t even know how bad it was. But I did. I couldn’t take it after 20 minutes or so.
This wasn’t an accident or the projectionist slacking off, trust me. I’ve suffered through sub-par Lincoln Square presentations before and this shit is POLICY. These guys are institutionally committed to diminishing the visual and audio levels of movies that would look and sound a hell of a lot better if they were projected properly.
Team Lincoln Square doesn’t mess around with their IMAX presentations — those are fine. But they’re definitely degrading the audio-visual content in regular theatres. As far as I’m concerned they are the sworn enemy of quality projection.
And I’m a formerly licensed projectionist and I know from light and sound levels so don’t tell me. As Burt Lancaster said to Mickey Saughnessy in From Here to Eternity, “I ain’t tellin’ you — you’re tellin’ me.”
Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone and I recorded an epic-length Oscar Poker this morning — i.e., 90 minutes. But it was a really good one, I thought. We began with Boxoffice.com’s Phil Contrino riffing about the Lion King 3D vs. Moneyball box-office battle, and then it was off to the races on anything and everything. Here’s a non-iTunes, stand-alone link.
Just a reminder that Kris Tapley‘s In Contention now lives in a closet inside a drop-down menu inside the orange-and-blue scattershot nightmare that is Hitfix. He and Guy Lodge are essential reads so please bookmark and act accordingly.
How do you go from being a multi-millionaire to living in a van on a street in South Central? Hold on, let me think…drugs? This is easily the most noteworthy Sly Stone story since the bogus rumor about his having had an affair with Doris Day in the early ’70s.
I’ve admired and sympathized with the ongoing Occupy Wall Street demonstrations because they’ve expressed a justified fury on the part of twentysomethings about how their financial futures have been shackled and all but ruined by Wall Street’s sociopathic money-moving games. As you might expect some NY cops got rough and maced some women, and some screaming resulted.
With my Toronto Film Festival distractions and nobody talking about it since, I missed the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s 9.14 announcement that the first three episodes of Oliver Stone‘s The Untold History of the United States will no longer screen at the 2011 New York Film Festival. I found it slightly bothersome that the reason given for the cancelleation was “scheduling conflicts.” Which of course conveys nothing and in fact blows smoke.
I don’t know what happened but you don’t announce a long-awaited film event at the NY Film Festival and then un-announce it unless some sudden and unanticipated force has intervened. Stone has been editing the Untold History series for a long, long time, and it’s no secret that the miniseries would be a political hot potato from Showtime. It was reported last summer that Untold has attracted some pro-Israeli venom.
I tried to get an answer earlier today about what really went down from both Stone and NY Film Festival co-honcho Scott Foundas…zip.
The three segments that were going to be shown would have focused “on the events leading up to America’s entrance into World War II, the war itself, and the unjustly forgotten figure of former U.S. Vice President Henry Wallace,” said a NYFF release.
The Untold screening would have been followed by a panel discussion featuring Stone, co-writer Peter Kuznick, historian Douglas Brinkley and The Nation‘s Jonathan Schell.
In place of the Untold History episodes, Stone will still apppear at NYFF to present a 25th Anniversary screening of Salvador.
Update: HE reader “reverent and free” has written in to say that “the three episodes in question were indeed ready because one of the researcher/writers, Eric Singer, attended a screening of them earlier this year and blogged about it on his website. But he seems to have removed the post now. I don’t have a screenshot unfortunately.”
Here’s an episode list from a posting last year.
I’m not the only one who’s been hoping that Rick Perry would win the Republican Presidential nomination because that would mean an Obama victory. But now, all of a sudden, he’s being seriously trashed by the Fox News gang. Fox News’ Brit Hume this morning: “[Rick] Perry really did throw up all over himself in the [last] debate at a time when he really needed to up his game….[he’s] about one half step away from almost total collapse as a candidate.”
Maureen Dowd: “In a flash, Rick Perry has gone from Republican front-runner to cycling domestique, riding in front of the pack and taking all the wind — or in this case, hot air — to allow the team leader to pedal in the slipstream.”
Everyone on the front lines has now seen (or will be seeing today) Moneyball. I know some people think I’ve been pushing too hard or too enthusiastically, and I don’t just think they’re nyah-nyah naysayers who say this stuff in order to pop me — I know they are because I know this film is the shit, and that it’s an all-around winner and a keeper. But if you feel the urge to counterpunch, please have at it.
Repeating: “It’s mystical, statistical, spooky, emotional and wonderfully original. And wonderfully “pure” in a sense. The complexity mixed with the spirituality and the political reality of things…just brilliant.
Ditto: “Put another way, it’s about organizing a baseball team in a different nerdy way (saber-metrics and all that) and the political pushback that Pitt and Hill have to deal with from almost everyone, but — this is the exceptional surprise element — it’s also about how the forces and wills of the Gods suddenly step in and make things happen when they feel like it. Angels over the outfield. So call it a nerdy baseball movie mixed with spirituality and politics and adult-level complications…sublime.”
