The BAFTA nominations mean nothing in terms of Atonement Oscar odds. Joe Wright‘s film is still dead as far as its Best Pictures prospects are concerned. The British simply stood up for a hometown film, is all. Made in England, produced by Brits, based on book by British author, British actors, about England during World War II…hats in the air and 14 nominations! That said, it still is and will continue to be an exceptional, high-grade film. That no one really loves.
Update due to talkbackers claiming the film is loved by many, etc.: Of course it’s liked, loved and selling tickets. Which is why I used “really” to define the kind of love that counts, matters, means something in terms of awards. People admire Atonement as far as it goes, but this hasn’t been enough in terms of trophies on the mantlepiece.
“In a way, what Cloverfield does is put a name on the unthinkable,” director Matt Reeves tells L.A. Times guy Mark Olsen in a piece posted yesterday afternoon. He’s alluding to the 9.11 echoes — collapsing skyscrapers, mass evacuations across the Brooklyn Bridge, travelling dustclouds engulfing downtown streets — that makes the film “a repository for the collective unease felt in the wake of a national tragedy,” as Olsen puts it.
It’s intended, in other words, “to explore the very real and obvious fears we are all living with everyday, to let the audience have the experience but in a much more safe and manageable way,” says producer JJ Abrams.
But the subhead of Olsen’s piece — “JJ Abrams aims to provide an old-time rush” — is way off. The basic concept aside, there’s little about this film that stirs specific memories of rampaging monster flicks from the ’50s — those black-and-white B classics like The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms or It Came From Beneath The Sea — or the color-photographed Japanese variants of the late ’50s and ’60s.
As I suggested last week in my inital review, Cloverfield is significantly different from those stop-motion or guy-in-a-monster-suit movies in two ways.
The old monster films were chock-a-block with attempts at rational explanations for the invasion (a beast awakened from a primordial sleep by nuclear testing, etc.) while the characters in Cloverfield don’t know anything and in fact barely get around to asking questions. (There’s one half-assed moment in which the actors try to piece it all together, but the dialogue is in the vein of “whoa, Wikipedia, dude.”)
And the old-time old monster flicks were always about prehistoric-looking beasts or variations thereof — King Kong, Rodan, Mothra, Gorgo, etc. The titanic Cloverfield brute is so divorced from this tradition and in fact is so “nonsensical” that he/she/it stirs associations that are more surreal than anything else. It’s more “whaat?” than “oh my God!,” this thing.
It’s almost a monster film by way of Luis Bunuel. I wrote before that the title could be It Came From Somewhere Deep in the National Psyche, but what we actually see is like a young boy’s nightmare or, as I wrote last week, like a half-nutty, half-horrible dream in the head of a Manhattanite on the morning on 9.12.01.
“I believe there are a whole lot of people who want to have that kind of catharsis and who don’t necessarily want to see documentaries about the very issues they are grappling with internally,” Abrams tells Olsen.
This is going to sound crabby, but honestly — honestly — the second I saw this photo on Anne Thompson‘s blog I knew that the only adjective that allows for the appearance of these huge, almost rope-like cobwebs is “Spielbergian.”
TMZ is reporting that Brad Renfro, 25, was found dead at his Los Angeles home this morning. No cause determined, but it’s well known that the poor guy had grappled with drug problems (smack being one of the substances) for a long while. The report says Renfro “had been working valiantly to stay clean, especially since [last] summer.”
Renfro had recently completed filming The Informers, a Gregor Jordan film based on a Brett Easton Ellis novel set in the ’80s. His costars were/are Winona Ryder, Billy Bob Thornton, Kim Basinger, Mickey Rourke and Brandon Routh.
Renfro “has had a rough time personally since moving from Tennessee to Los Angeles,” the report says. “His parents split, and we’re told he did not have real guidance from adults as he tried navigating the treacherous movie industry.”
Renfro first splash was in Joel Schumacher‘s The Client (’94), but his breakout role — performance-wise — was in Bryan Singer‘s Apt Pupil (’98), which he shot when he was 15 or thereabouts. His last decent film was Terry Zwigoff‘s Ghost World, which was released six years ago.
“Tuesday, January 15, 2008 — a date that shall live in Academy Awards infamy,” writes L.A. Weekly critic Scott Foundas in a piece titled “How Do You Say ‘Oscar Scandal’ in Romanian?” He’s referring to the shafting earlier today of Cristian Mungiu‘s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days by the Academy’s foreign-language committee.
“I’ve had better days,” producer and Foreign Language nominating committee chairman Mark Johnson told Foundas late this afternoon. Referring to a recently instituted two-phase nominating process, Johnson said, “I thought we had made big strides last year, but apparently not big enough.”
When Foundas asked if “further retooling (including the possible involvement of more active Academy members earlier in the nominating process) may lie in the future” — code for 86ing the geriatric fuddy-duds whose aesthetic taste buds have obviously become a problem — Johnson was unambiguous. “That’s what has to be done, because in my mind it can’t continue like this. I don’t believe these choices reflect the Academy at large.”
If you’re going to link to a piece in which an EW guest columnist (Juno screenwriter Diablo Cody) complains about what she feels is an unflattering drawing, as Red Carpet District‘s Kris Tapley did this morning, shouldn’t you show readers what she’s on about?
“Direct your gaze, if you will, to the illustration (or ‘illo,’ as they say in the publishing game) in the center of this page,” she writes. “That black-lipped, beady-eyed ghoul is supposed to be me!
“Now, I’m hardly the cutest columnist to occupy this space, but I had no idea I resembled a tubercular Friar Tuck with sperm for eyebrows. You hear that whistling sound? That’s my self-esteem plummeting from ‘obscene” to ”healthy.’ Perhaps this is EW‘s concession to readers who complain that Stephen King’s column isn’t scary.”
The thing that got me right away about the new El Cid DVD (which looks pretty good, by the way — certainly better than the old Criterion laser disc) was the main-title music by Miklos Rozsa. Rozsa’s scores always seemed to carry more punch and soul on their own terms than the films they were meant to enhance. (Here’s a faster-loading mp3 version.)
