Over-Analyze This The close of Oscar season is near enough (two weeks and three days away) that a post-mortem is coming to mind: with all the new Oscar blogs that sprouted up this year (Red Carpet, The Envelope, USA Today‘s O-Factor, Anne Thompson’s Risky- Biz) Oscar-race riffing has been incessant and every wrinkle picked over … Read more
Scent of Toast I haven’t done any serious calling around about embattled Paramount Pictures president Gail Berman, but I received a letter this morning [Sunday, 2.12] from a woman who seems very knowledgable and connected to people in the creative community, and what she says about Berman and her situation (as well as the perceptions … Read more
If you go to a movie this weekend chances are you’ll run into the poster for Oliver Stone‘s World Trade Center (Paramount, due in late summer or early fall) hanging in the lobby. And if you’re at all like me, you may experience a slight involuntary twitching when you stand there and take it in. … Read more
Love Is Strange Mozart and the Whale, which screened yesterday afternoon at the Santa Barbara Film Festival, is a Rain Man-type love story with a jumpy heart. Jumpy as in child- like, energetic, anxious. A romanticized, tidied-up version of a complicated real-life love story, it’s about a youngish couple (Josh Hartnett, Radha Mitchell) with autism, … Read more
I’m thinking of a film about two men in love with each other, but one of them loving a bit less. Their lusts and longings are entirely about women and children are sired, but nothing approaches their feelings for each other. They’re constantly pried apart by social-political concerns and they never quite mesh, but the … Read more
Quince…what? Day after day and hour after hour during the Sundance Film Festival I asked every journalist, distributor and agent I ran into what they’d seen and liked (or half-liked). I must have asked this question 60 or 70 times over the eight days I was up there… And nobody mentioned Quinceanera, a small-scale drama … Read more
Dick’s MPAA Flap Kirby Dick is complaining that the MPAA illegally copied, apparently for internal purposes, a “digital version” of his new film This Film Is Not Yet Rated, which a several journos saw at a press screening yesterday morning and which screens at 9:30 pm tonight at the Sundance Film Festival. More to the … Read more
Docs Own It So far the most affecting highs of Sundance 2006 are not coming from the features but the documentaries. No narrative except Little Miss Sunshine has generated any kind of noticable wattage, but everywhere you turn people are talking up the docs. Yesterday afternoon I saw Freida Mock’s conventional but nonetheless moving and … Read more
For the first time since the ’93 Sundance Film Festival, I haven’t gotten a jump on things by arriving early in Park City — Wednesday night, say, or early Thursday afternoon — and filing the usual hot story about the food I’ve bought at Albertson’s and the people I’ve run into in the aisles. I … Read more
Dog Has Its Day Of the dozens of definite-interest films playing at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival (which I haven’t even begun to try and summarize), Nick Cassevetes’ Alpha Dog has easily gotten the most press…and yet it’s showing at the very end of the fes- tival (Friday, 1.27 at the Eccles, and Saturday, 1.28, … Read more
I finally saw Debra Granik‘s Down to the Bone last night and got the wisdom of what almost every deep-focus movie journalist and critic has been saying since it (barely) opened in New York and Los Angeles nearly six weeks ago, which is that it’s grimly real but has something that doesn’t let up. This … Read more
Cheaters There are three serious things wrong with Warner Home Video’s new double-disc “special edition” DVD of The Wild Bunch (on sale Tuesday, 1.10). The wrongos may not seem like a big deal to some of you, but in my book they constitute a serious cheat on the part of Warner Home Video, enough for … Read more