Marriage of the Minds

Well, this is some welcome news, even if it means I might have to finally suck it up and subscribe to HBO. Variety reports that Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Wonder Boys, Mysteries of Pittsburgh) and his wife, writer Ayelet Waldman, have a project set up at HBO called Hobgoblin, about conmen and magicians using their skills to battle Hitler during WW2.

Chabon just happens to be my favorite (living) writer, and I’m quite a fan of Waldman, who I’ve been reading and loosely corresponding with since way back when I was mommy blogging on my previous blog, Catawampus, and she was mommy blogging on Bad Mother. Chabon may be the better known of the pair, but I’ve always loved Waldman’s sass and style. I asked her once many years ago how she dealt with “competing” with Chabon when it came to work and she replied simply, “I don’t.” Well, exactly.

This project marks the first time the couple is collaborating on a project — at least professionally. They’ve already survived marriage with four kids for quite a while now, so I expect they’ve hammered a lot of the balance of how they work together out a bit. I’ll be following this project with interest, so stay tuned.

By the bye, if you’ve been wondering what’s up with the adaptation of Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, it’s apparently still a go at Sony with Scott Rudin and the Coens. Good news on that front as well … though I’m still waiting for Kavalier and Clay, which still appears to be “in development.”

Consenting Adults

Still one of my all-time fave short films, directed by pre-Thank You for Smoking Jason Reitman:

Weekend Special: Axe Cop Awesomeness

In honor of Emerald City Comicon, which is happening right here, right now: Axe Cop.

Happy weekend. Remember Wheaton’s Law.

Spotlight: Ann Arbor Film Festival

Much of the indie film world is gearing up for South by Southwest, which runs in Austin (the film part, anyhow) March 11-19. And they have a swell slate, and Austin’s a fun town, and SXSW is always a great party sandwiched around some interesting films, but you already know that. Love SXSW, love the folks who run it, but you already know about that fest, right? Probably you already have your digs set, your plane ticket purchased, your film-and-party slate lined up.

What you may be less aware of is the Ann Arbor Film Festival, which runs March 22-27 in lovely Ann Arbor, Michigan. When I went there a couple years ago, it was C-O-L-D! And it snowed during the fest. In March! But I didn’t care, because the films that Ann Arbor programs are so engaging, and their primary venue, the Michigan Theater, is just a lovely place to celebrate film.
Read the full article »

The Very Rich Indie Filmmaker?

There’s maybe something to be gleaned from this Novelr piece on indie writers making money off self-publishing digitally and selling through the Kindle store. The thing is, will there always be a line in the sand that differentiates books published in an eBook only format from books printed on paper? Probably for a while, sure. But I’ll bet you not nearly for as long as you might think.
Read the full article »

How (Not) to Fest

My good friend and documentaries whiz Basil Tsiokos, — whose blog What (Not) to Doc should be one of your bookmarked regular reads if you’re a filmmaker of any stripe or aspire to be one, or even if you’re just a big fan of watching films — has written an excellent three-parter for IFP offering his expert advice for all you indie filmmakers on making the most of your film festival experience. Whatever type of filmmaker you are, you should stop whatever you are doing and go read all three parts of this right now. Seriously. Go make yourself a cuppa tea, take a break, and read it.
Read the full article »

Oscar Boxing Day Thoughts

I was just chatting with my good friend Eric D. Snider about post-Oscar day, which he glibly dubbed “Oscar Boxing Day.” And I like that term, so I’m using it here. Because even though Boxing Day proper has nothing to do with punching an opponent while wearing oversized mitts, the very name does connote a sense of the losers feeling like they’ve had the wind socked out of them.
Read the full article »

Some Post-Oscar Tidbits

My favorite and not-favorite Oscar moments, which may be updated as I think of more of them …

Hailee “pretty in pink” Steinfeld, looking sweetly age-appropriate. But it cracks me up to have dolled-up television entertainment reporters being all, “Oh, it’s so NICE and REFRESHING to see (insert every young actress ever nominated for Supporting here) dressed so appropriately for her age. She just looks like a little girl playing princess, which is as it should be.” Well, yes, okay, it is. And Ms. Steinfeld will have another moment, if she wants it.

Jeff Bridges grabbing the mic on the red carpet and interviewing his entire family about their Oscar experience. The Dude abides. Always.

The whole set-up-with-zero-payout about the trifecta of art, cinematography and picture felt so completely random. WTF was that about? I mean, if I was placing a bunch of really obscure bets with a bookie, maybe, but who else cares?

Listening to the post-show blither-blather about fashion hits and misses. But okay, since I was listening anyhow … if I was going to have an opinion on the fashions, it would be that I hated Melissa Leo’s dress. She looked so lovely otherwise, but I would have loved to have seen her in something sleek in black or silver tonight. Loved Jennifer Lawrence’s simple, sexy red. Loved Hathaway’s Valentino. Loved the black lace on Russell Brand’s mom.

Hated the opening thing with the mom/grandma. Ugh. File under bad idea.

Definitely a mom theme going on, with resplendently pregnant Portman, radiant postpartum Penelope, and Celene Dion, who I guess just had twins. Glad that Hailee Steinfeld was not in maternity wear. She seems like a nice, level-headed kid. I hope she doesn’t Lohan.

Liked Hathaway and Franco overall. Actually, dang … I really like Hathaway a lot. Franco seemed stoned the whole time — what was with the squinting? Steve Martin with thinning hair makes me feel old. Mila Kunis looks great in lavender.

The mash-up of the Harry Potter song was awesome.

Melissa Leo having a vocabulary malfunction is exactly why we love her. More, please.

WTF was up with the Oscar guy commentator going off about King’s Speech being a great feel-good movie that people love and it makes them feel all happy-happy, and then specifically referencing Blue Valentine as “ugh, depressing, who wants to see that?” What a load of BS. I saw The King’s Speech last night finally, and I liked it, for what it is. It’s feel good, it has populist appeal, it’s the kid who’s popular for being a nice guy with a winning personality.

Blue Valentine is dark and daring and gritty, Ryan Gosling is soul-felt and terrific and Michelle Williams even better (she may just be the actress of her generation when all’s said and done), even the end credits sequence is relevant and artful.

… oh, and the Charlie Sheen joke was funny, I get it. But not. It’s sad to see someone nose-diving in the wake of addiction.

After Oscar

It’s the Oscar Countdown!

It’s almost Oscar night, and you can almost, but not quite, feel the excitement all the way up here in Seattle. Everyone’s dying (yes, dying!) to know which designer’s dress their favorite actress will wear, who will show up looking like their mother dressed them for prom, who’s going to be voted Cutest Couple, and who has the brightest, toothiest grins … and the worst outcomes of plastic surgery. Then Justin Bieber gets the Oscar for Best Documentary and we all go home.

See, I’m being snarky there because watching the Oscars is for losers who don’t have anything else pressing to do with their time, like making homemade goat cheese or baklava or playing Dungeons and Dragons, right? The cool kids don’t know what movies are nominated for the Oscars, don’t read about the Oscars, don’t wonder who will win the Oscars, and they most certainly do not watch the Oscars. Or at the very least, they don’t own up to watching the pre-show red carpet festivities.

The rest of us, whether we (admit we) care who wins or not, are waiting with more or less bated breath for Oscar’s Big Day. Other people have been writing about this year’s Oscars since last year’s Sundance, thinking seriously about who will win and who will not for months now. Even if you don’t agree with them, you at least appreciate that someone has been carefully weighing these matters with gravitas since this time last year, moving this nomineee up a slot one week, then down two the next, so that all you have to do is comment vociferously on how stupid the pundits are and how much you disagree with them.

I, on the other hand, haven’t given it much thought at all, so my guess is about as good as yours.

I used to do a column here called Oscar Outsider, which I kind of miss now that I don’t do it anymore. I particularly enjoyed exploring things that not everyone was writing a lot about — contrasting the then Oscar-nommed Slumdog Millionaire screenplay with its fairly obscure source material, for instance. It went on to win the Oscar for Simon Beaufoy, and whether you still like the film, or are now in the camp of “I hate that movie,” the screenplay, as an adaptation, was pretty brilliant.

Last year’s Adapted Screenplay winner was Precious: Based on the Novel Push By Sapphire (one of the most unwieldy film titles ever, but whatever … the title “Push” got usurped by that lousy Dakota Fanning flick, so they had to do something). I can’t particularly argue against the Precious screenplay winning this category, because if you’ve read the source novel, well … it was a challenging book to adapt to a screenplay, and Geoffrey Fletcher did a fine job of it.

Of all the Oscar categories, the screenplays are my favorites, probably because they speak to my own interest in writing and because the nominees and winners sometimes feel random, and every now and again winning a screenplay Oscar can completely change the winner’s life (see: Matt Damon and Ben Affleck). On the other hand, I see a lot of independent films in a year, many of them with better screenplays than some of the nominees, and those writers will never get any love outside of maybe the Independent Spirits. But even those awards feel like they’ve gotten more and more big-name and studio driven. Bah.

Anyhow. So I’ve done Oscar predictions in various random ways over the years, on the theory that just about any method of picking Oscar winners that the average person could come up with would hit, on average, just about the same percentage of accuracy as the predictions Oscar pundits spend months fine-tuning. And for the most part, these various prediction methods have been surprisingly accurate.

(As an aside, one of my favorite random prediction methods — aside from using a Magic-8 Ball, which is always fun — was James Rocchi’s Ernest Borgnine predictor. James has the theory that to accurately predict the Oscars, all you had to do was think like Ernest Borgnine, and you’d mostly be right. And I think he had the highest accuracy percentage among Cinematical writers when he did that, so maybe he was onto something.)

All this doesn’t make it any less fun and profitable for pundits to spend months every year talking about Oscars and trying to predict Oscars and getting into sometimes hilarious arguments about who should win versus who will win. I mean, yes, it’s hard to take the Oscars seriously sometimes, but on the other hand they are deadly serious business in Hollywood, so what are you going to do but watch them anyhow?

This year, I decided to actually given the nominations some carefully considered thought before making my own Oscar picks — who I think will win, and who I think SHOULD win. Then I polled my daughter Neve, who turned 14 yesterday and has actually seen most of the nominated films with me, on her picks, just to get a perspective from the teen demographic. So without further ado, here they are

Best Picture

WHO SHOULD WIN: Inception

WHO WILL WIN: The King’s Speech

POSSIBLE UPSET: The Social Network

AND NEVE’S PICK … I think The Social Network has a good chance of winning. Or maybe Black Swan.

Best Actor

WHO SHOULD WIN: Javier Bardem

WHO WILL WIN: Colin Firth

POSSIBLE UPSET: Mark Zuckerberg. Er, I mean Jesse Eisenberg

AND NEVE PICKS: … Jesse Eisenberg

Best Supporting Actor

WHO SHOULD WIN: John Hawkes

WHO WILL WIN: Geoffrey Rush

POSSIBLE UPSET: Christian Bale

AND NEVE PICKS …Christian Bale

Best Actress

WHO SHOULD WIN: Michelle Williams

WHO WILL WIN: Annette Bening

POSSIBLE UPSET: Michelle Williams (I really hope this is this year’s “Holy crap!” moment …)

AND NEVE PICKS … Annette Bening

Best Supporting Actress

WHO SHOULD WIN: Hailee Steinfeld

WHO WILL WIN: Helena Bonham Carter

POSSIBLE UPSET: Melissa Leo … although I’d kind of like to see the Greek Chorus of sisters from The Fighter storm the stage and get into fisticuffs with Helena Bonham-Carter. That would be an awesome Oscar Moment.

AND NEVE PICKS … Melissa Leo

Best Director

WHO SHOULD WIN: Darren Aronofsky

WHO WILL WIN: Tom Hooper

POSSIBLE UPSET: David Fincher

AND NEVE PICKS … David Fincher

Best Adapted Screenplay

WHO SHOULD WIN: Winter’s Bone, Debra Granik and Anne Rosellini

WHO WILL WIN: The Social Network, Aaron Sorkin. I hate that he will likely win for this.

POSSIBLE UPSET: True Grit … but don’t hold your breath for an upset on this one.

AND NEVE PICKS … Toy Story 3, which would be pretty awesome.

Best Original Screeplay

WHO SHOULD WIN: Inception, Chris Nolan

WHO WILL WIN: The Kids Are All Right, Lisa Cholodenko and Stuart Blumberg

POSSIBLE UPSET: The King’s Speech, David Seidler

AND NEVE PICKS … Inception, Chris Nolan

Best Documentary

WHO SHOULD WIN: Exit Through the Gift Shop. Inside Job is brilliant, but the sheer creative genius and daring of Exit puts it at the top for me.

WHO WILL WIN: Exit Through the Gift Shop

POSSIBLE UPSET: Inside Job

AND NEVE PICKS: Exit Through the Gift Shop. I think it definitely has a fair chance of winning.

That’s it folks. Carry on with arguing amongst yourselves up until show time, and then we can pick apart all the fashion choices, good and bad — and the winners, for better or worse. See you after the Oscars …

More on Hollywood as Brand

Clearly, David and I disagreed on the validity of the premise of Mark Harris’ GQ piece “The Day the Movies Died.” Over on the Hot Blog, David more or less tore Harris’ arguments to shreds in making his own points. But while I don’t agree with every argument Harris makes, and I don’t disagree, necessarily, that tonally his piece is a bit of a Chicken Little, look out the Hollywood sky falling melodrama… on the other hand, I agree with Harris that the sky is falling and has been for some time.
Read the full article »

Building the Indie “Brand” — If We Build It, Will the Audience Come?

I was just mulling over the importance of indie filmmakers and regional film fests in the afterglow of the Oxford Film Festival and the slew of upcoming regional fests, when lo! A trend (well, if you can call two articles a “trend”) arose this month on pieces about the whys and wherefores of Hollywood making shitty movies. Apparently I’m not the only one who’s been thinking about why this is so.
Read the full article »

Bieberiffic

Over at All These Wonderful Things, AJ Schnack posted a piece over a week ago about the Justin Bieber flick, Never Say Never, breaking into the top 10 all time moneymaker docs list at number 8. Apart from my own neglect in thinking of the Bieber film as a doc — which I guess it is, in a manner of speaking — the most interesting tidbit from the piece is this:
Read the full article »

Girls On Film

No, not the Duran Duran song (though I have that stuck in my head now).

What would guy-centric movie scenes look like with chicks playing the roles instead? That’s what website The Girls on Film set out to find out. So they’re taking movie scenes with male actors and reshooting them (essentially shot-for-shot, so far as I could tell without a frame-by-frame analysis) with female actors. And at first I thought it was gimmicky but as it turns out, it’s really a fascinating project.
Read the full article »

The Atlas Shrugged Trailer … Shrug

They said it couldn’t be done. And maybe it shouldn’t have been.

It’s taken over 50 years for Ayn Rand’s seminal, 1,000+ page work, Atlas Shrugged, to get adapted for the big screen. I’ve lost count of how many writers, directors, big-name stars, and studios have been attached at various points to this mammoth project. Angelina Jolie. Not Angelina Jolie. Randall Wallace (whose script culled the novel down to a 2 1/2 hour film and was supposed to be not bad). Lionsgate. Not Lionsgate. Vadim Perelman. Not Vadim Perelman. Miniseries. No, not a miniseries! One movie. No, wait, three movies! You practically need a spreadsheet to keep track.

Look, I am not one to beat down anyone for trying their best to make a film independently, as producer John Aglialoro has been trying to do with Atlas Shrugged for over 15 years. That’s tenacity, people.

And I am not going to get on a soapbox about Objectivism, which, as it happens, I know a few things about because there was a time, many years ago before I became an Evil Socialist Liberal, when I identified with much of Rand’s philosophy. I met my ex on an Objectivist discussion board, so in a way I guess you could say I owe my four younger children to Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged.

And I know that it’s not really fair to judge a movie solely by its trailer, and that good movies have wretched trailers, and vice versa. However … okay, you’re just going to have to go watch this trailer for yourself. Go ahead, now. No, really, it’s okay. But maybe brace yourself a bit.

Back? Okay. Now maybe it’s just me, but I never fully appreciated just how atrociously bad Ayn Rand’s ear for realistic dialogue was until I heard it expressed in this trailer. Maybe part of it is the direction and the delivery, but sweet Mother Mary! What is with all the yelling, and the laughably earnest line delivery, and the dude who looks like he’s trying to channel Philip Seymour Hoffman but doing it badly?

I get that to a large extent their hands were likely tied on the dialogue. The Ayn Rand Institute and Leonard Peikoff (who sold rights to the novel to Aglialoro) probably had all kinds of stipulations in there about not changing Rand’s language and having to pull dialogue directly from the book. And if they had changed it up too much, the Objectivist fan base for the film would have had a conniption. They take their Rand very seriously.

I’ll reserve complete judgment until I watch the entire film. Maybe it all comes together really well, and it will be as moving and emotional and artistic as a film based on an Objectivist novel can possibly be (have you ever heard Objectivist poetry? I have. I wish I hadn’t.). But good Lord. This is just part one, there are two more parts slated … I just hope the last film isn’t three hours of John Galt’s big speech and nothing else, because that? Would be excruciating.

If you’re interested, by the bye, you can read about what it took to get the film made over here.