Anne Hathaway has been cast as Catwoman opposite Christian Bale and Tom Hardy in The Dark Knight Rises. Terrific.
Anne Hathaway has been cast as Catwoman opposite Christian Bale and Tom Hardy in The Dark Knight Rises. Terrific.
The Academy’s Foreign Language Film Award committee has decided on a shortlist of six finalists and the exec committee has shortlisted three for a total of nine. The finalists are Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu‘s Biutiful, Rachid Bouchareb‘s Hors la Loi (Outside the Law), Denis Villeneuve‘s Incendies, Susanne Bier‘s In a Better World, Yorgos Lanthimos‘ Dogtooth, Tetsuya Nakashima‘s Confessions, Oliver Schmitz‘s Life Above All, Iclar Bollain‘s Even The Rain and Andreas Ohman‘s Simple Simon.
Unwarranted shaftings? Predictions? A voice is telling me that Incendies has the edge to win. Maybe.
Last night Salt Lake City was all but devoid of snow with the temperature nudging 40. But Park City was/is blanketed and in the mid 20s. Snow showers this morning, and happening again as we speak. An hour more on the column and then over to the Park City Marriott (a short walk) to pick up press badge, press materials, etc.
Mark Pellington‘s I Melt With You, which will have its first Sundance showing on Wednesday, 1.26, is about four 40ish pallies (Thomas Jane, Jeremy Piven, Christian McKay, Rob Lowe) “going down the rabbit hole of bacchanalian excess.” Because they’re hurting inside, of course. Drinking only makes things worse, guys. Get a clue.
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Entertainment Weekly‘s Dave Karger, among the leading advocates of a King’s Speech Best Picture win scenario, yesterday confessed that The Social Network‘s sweep of the Broadcast Film Critics and Golden Globes awards has given him pause and that “my No. 1 Best Picture pick is hanging by a thread.”
The odd thing is Karger’s statement that Speech‘s “trouncing” of The Social Network in terms of BAFTA nominations constitutes “conflicting signals.” The Brits are obviously and genetically in the tank for The King’s Speech (history, culture, tradition) so describing them as “a voting body that has significant overlap with the Academy” is a moot point.
Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone said this morning that this weekend’s PGA awards and the following weekend’s DGA and WGA awards “will give us a much firmer grasp of where this is going.” Firmer grasp about what? I replied. Isn’t it all but over? What category competition do you find uncertain or inconclusive?
“The guilds determine how Best Picture will go,” she replied. “PGA, Saving Private Ryan. DGA, Saving Private Ryan. SAG ensemble, Shakespeare in Love. Best Picture Oscar, Shakespeare in Love.
“Even if by a thread, Karger is PREDICTING a Crash/Shakespeare in Love-type freak accident. But that means, if there is to be any hope at all for the film, it HAS to win the SAG ensemble. But I think The Fighter wins there. So I can’t imagine any film winning without a major guild award. I am fairly certain that the last one to do it was Chariots of Fire, so Karger is predicting a Chariots of Fire type of win.
“The guilds will firm up The Social Network‘s dominance, as they did with The Departed, No Country, Slumdog and The Hurt Locker. Without them, TSN cannot win.
“It should win PGA (Rudin, for godsakes), the DGA (who else can beat Fincher?), the WGA (Sorkin owns that category) and so all that’s left is the SAG. If it wins there, game over.”
In a piece called “Here’s Why The King’s Speech (As Good As It Is) Won’t Win Best Picture,” EW critic Owen Gleiberman brings up “the zeitgeist factor…it doesn’t happen every time, but the movie that ends up winning the Academy Award for Best Picture often taps into and gives voice to something that’s happening in the culture at large.”
There’s a Brooks Barnes 1.19 N.Y. Times story about six Dramatic Competition selections in Sundance 2011 “that were shaped in the Sundance Institute’s workshops — a record.” But what got me is Barnes’ description of one of these entries — Elgin James‘ Little Birds, a darkish relationship story about two teenage girls — as “buzzy.”
This led to watching the video piece about James and the film, and his remark about how a friendship can get to “the point where you love someone and at the same time they’re stealing your oxygen.”
My sense of James, based on the video and Barnes article, is that he’s been honed by tough if not brutal experiences, and that he’s drawn upon his history as a troubled youth and gang member in making this film, and that he’s basically straight and unpretentious. So Little Girls is on my list. I’m sensing that catching it at the Library will be a better way to go than in a press screening. If anyone connected to the film can help with a ticket, let me know.
For some curious reason a few British newspapers have recently revisited an eight-year-old story about an indifference to the plight of European Jewry in the late ’30s and early ’40s on the part of King George VI, who is portrayed by Colin Firth in The King’s Speech. The original reporting (by the Guardian‘s Ben Summerskill in an April ’02 article) was accurate, but the purpose of the recent rehash by “Vulture’s” Claude Brodesser Akner last November was apparently to smear the film. Icky, of course, but it was nonetheless legit of Scott Feinberg to report about this story (and particularly the apparent motives behind its release) six weeks ago. And it does seem a tiny bit harsh of Kris Tapley and Roger Ebert to twitter-bash Feinberg for having simply reported the facts with an eye toward restraint and suspicion.
The big public Hobo screening happens at the Egyptian on Friday, 11:30 pm. The big private Hobo party starts at midnight and lasts until 3 am. There’s talk about Rutger Hauer sipping Bloody Marys with selected press a few days later. The idea of this film unseen, I fear, is probably more potent that the reality of it, seen. Will it be said down the road that the trailer was the better distillation, as in less is more?
My Delta flight from JFK arrived at Salt City City airport at 7:40 pm. 100 minutes later I was checking into the Park Regency condos. The place felt stuffy and overheated so I let some nice frigid mountain air in — did the trick. The wifi is pretty good so no mood pockets. Park City restaurants will probably stay open late tomorrow night or certainly by Thursday, but tonight they all shuttered at 10 pm. The nothingness is almost thrilling. “Ah-don’t tell me / I’ve nothin’ to do…”
A friend insists that Jennifer Lopez‘s handling of a recent Ellen DeGeneres hidden-camera prank is the most likable and funny she’s been since Out of Sight.
I’m guessing that the Brian DePalma fan club isn’t what it used to be. 30 years ago his admirers, led by Pauline Kael, were legion. I was one of the faithful after his early to mid ’70s run ending with Carrie, but I began running hot and cold throughout the ’80s and ’90s, and didn’t really get off the boat until Mission to Mars (’00) — that, for me, was the final deal-breaker.
I know that my first stirrings of doubt in DePalma began with The Fury (’78) and then started to really take root with Blow Out (’81), a ripoff of Michelangelo Antonioni‘s Blow Up (’67).
All I saw in the former, a paranoid political thriller with John Travolta and Nancy Allen, was an attempt at construction that never finally felt complete. Push the button, yank the chain. DePalma has never been much of a story-teller. It’s a cliche to say this but he’s always been a guy who lives for elaborate camera choreography as an end it itself. To me the characters and especially the dialogue in his films have always felt hackneyed and hand-me-downish.
What was the old Michael O’Donoghue line from Saturday Night Live around this time? “Every year Brian DePalma picks the bones of a dead director and gives his wife [Allen at the time] a job.”
Am I interested in watching this forthcoming Criterion Bluray version when it arrives on 4.28.11? Yeah. Maybe it’ll play better than it did the one and only time I saw it in a New York screening room during the first year of Ronald Reagan‘s presidency. But it’s telling, obviously, that I haven’t felt the slightest interest in catching it again. My memory is a little hazy, but I think I was somewhere between unimpressed and pissed-off when I first saw Blow Out. I just couldn’t get past the fact that Antonioni’s version had sunk in and stayed in my head while DePalma’s evaporated the second it ended.
[Filed from the air, 34,000 feet above Ohio.]
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