Voynaristic By Kim VoynarVoynar@moviecitynews.com
Considering the Best Picture Oscar Contenders
Published under Oscar Outsider. How does a Hollywood outsider evaluate the Oscar contenders? I live in Seattle, outside the allure and glare of Tinseltown, and we generally get press screenings a couple weeks after the movie-world hubs of LA and New York; thus, I’ve only seen half the films on the Gurus o’ Gold Best…
Read the full article »Twilight: Sometimes a Sexual Fantasy is Just a Sexual Fantasy
Twilight may or may not be more than just a teen vampire movie targeting the latent sexual fantasies of teenage girls, but it opened this weekend to just over $72.7 million, and suddenly male film journalists are sitting up and taking notice. The Los Angeles Times has a piece up by Richard Verrier about how shocking it…
Read the full article »Consider the Source: Simon Beaufoy’s Adaptation of Slumdog Millionaire
Published under Oscar Outsider. Picture this: A very white, very British screenwriter has been hanging out in the slums of Bombay (also known as Mumbai) doing research for a screenplay he’s adapting from an Indian novel. He’s been haunting little chai shops, listening to the tales of the locals, absorbing as much as he can…
Read the full article »Prop 8 Boycotts: Witch Hunt or Right?
Does the gay film community have an obligation to continue to support a festival and an organization whose head has been publicly called out for financially supporting a proposition that took away their right to marry? You’d never know it by reading a lot of the trades, who seem by their silence to wish the…
Read the full article »Oscar and the Absence of Femme Films
Published under Oscar Outsider. The box office success (and relatively high profit margins) of femme-focused films like Sex and the City, Mamma Mia! and, presumably, the upcoming Twilight (assuming it does well enough at the box office to make back Summit’s $37 million investment and justify a sequel, which I think it most certainly will) may well have…
Read the full article »Female Nudity in Films: Art or Exploitation?
The issue of nudity in art has been an issue for as long as there has been art, artists, and people to judge their work. When it comes to nudity in film, though, what relevance does the context of the nudity within the storyline or overall thematic elements have in determining whether the nudity is…
Read the full article »Of Kings and Queen: Why Can’t More Films Be This Good?
My first night in LA for AFI Fest, I went to a screening of A Christmas Tale director Arnaud Desplechin‘s 2004 film, Kings and Queen, which was one of those films that’s been on my “geez, I need to see that” list for a while now; the opportunity to catch it on a big screen, with Desplechin in…
Read the full article »How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Family Films
Reviewing a film targeted at younger audiences begs the question: how does an adult critic evaluate a film that’s targeted in every way at a demographic to which the reviewer finds it difficult to relate? And can film journalists who are unable to let go of their grown-up mindset and get into the headspace of…
Read the full article »This Year’s Little Engine That Could
Published under Oscar Outsider. Every year over Labor Day weekend, film fans descend on the small mountain town of Telluride, Colorado for the Telluride Film Festival, a fest that’s rather like an early Christmas morning for cinephiles. We buy our spendy passes not knowing what we’re going to get in return, but trusting that, for…
Read the full article »For My Consideration
Published under Oscar Outsider. In the fall, a movie-obsessed writer’s thoughts turn, not so lightly, to thoughts of Oscar gold. We’re edging ever closer to the precipice that is awards season, and much as we on this side of things like to pretend awards don’t matter … they do. If you live in LA or…
Read the full article »Hounddog Redux
Hounddog‘s heavy baggage was wrought in large part, according to director Deborah Kampmeier, by a disgruntled “finder” who helped secure financing to get the film through post, then demanded his 5% before the film’s team even had money in hand to finish it. When I talked to Kampmeier by phone about what happened to the film…
Read the full article »