Posts Tagged ‘A Christmas Carol’
MW on Movies: Avatar, Modern Times, The Bridge on the River Kwai, Spider-Man, Spider-Man 2, Apocalypse Now/Apocalypse Now Redux
Tuesday, November 16th, 2010Avatar (Three Disc Extended Edition Blu-ray Digital DVD Combo) (Four Stars)
Avatar, James Cameron’s` planet-shaking, moon-rocking, eco-worshipping, dragon-riding new science fiction fantasy epic-and-a-half, may not be a perfect movie. But it’s sure as hell an incredible experience. It‘s a genre-movie knockout, a cinematic mind-blast and a technological marvel whose feats of 3D motion-capture and CGI pyrotechnics, and the spectacular and endlessly imaginative alternate world it creates — set on a distant Alpha Centauri moon called Pandora, where the natives are blue and the zeitgeist is green — all keep blowing you away.
Images From A Christmas Carol
Monday, October 26th, 2009Dickens’ timeless tale of an old miser who must face Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Futre, as they help to bring kindness to his otherwise cold, cold heart.
New Clip: A Christmas Carol
Friday, October 23rd, 200924 Weeks To Go Toronto Scores A Single, But Not Much More
Wednesday, September 30th, 2009That sound you heard coming out of the Toronto International Film Festival this year…
Near silence.
The films that came in hot (An Education & Precious) stayed hot, the new film expected to come out hot (Up In The Air & A Serious Man) came out hot, and a total of one title that went in unsure came out with some heat, A Single Man.
Just not that exciting, awardswise.
There were other good movies. But there was not much of a fuse lit. Studios started pushing away from the Gala events at Roy Thompson Hall, often preferring the less tony environs of the Elgin, the newly reopened for movies Winter Garden, and often the college theater energy of Ryerson Hall.
The Road wasn’t killed… but it didn’t come flying out of the week either. Capitalism: A Love Story wasn’t a car wreck… but it was a lot more Sicko than Fahrenheit 9/11.
At $1 million, A Single Man was the biggest sale of the festival… which tells you right away that there were no rush-it-out sure bets like The Wrestler or The Hurt Locker in play at the festival this year.
Creation, Agora, Chloe, Mother & Child, The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, Micmacs, Love & Other Impossible Pursuits, The Young Victoria, Triage, Harry Brown, The Joneses, The Vintner’s Luck, The Boys Are Back, Leaves of Grass, Life During Wartime, Ondine, and London River are part of the long list of high profile titles looking to break out at TIFF and just not doing so. Cannes hits Broken Embraces, Bright Star, A Prophet, and The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus did fine… but didn’t have a next step, propelled by Oprah or anyone else.
The non-Best Picture arthouse breakout may turn out to be the Chinese-made City of Life & Death while the most commercial films might be Whip It (large size) and Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (small size).
But still… the only potentially significant awards story to emerge from TIFF 2009 was A Single Man.
And the only really bad news for a film that was looking for a push out of TIFF was Bright Star, which opened on 19 screens for a 3-day $9,984 per-screen average and expanded to 130 screens and a $5,168 per-screen. The film is running slightly ahead of Cheri, as an example, on weekend per-screen, though after 10 days, Cheri is running slightly ahead of Bright Star because of weekday numbers. I still expect Bright Star to outperform Cheri, but $5 million seems like the high bar domestically. That is unlikely to be enough to make the Best Picture leap, especially in a season with an unusual number of strong female-driven films (Nine, Precious, An Education, Coco Before Chanel, Julie and Julia, Amelia, It’s Complicated and more).
Outside of Toronto, there have also been casualties of timing. Films from Martin Scorsese, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Lasse Hallstrom, Neil Jordan, and Paul Greengrass all are out of the game because they won’t be released this year.
What is clear is that there is plenty of room to fight for a slot at this point. Of my Top 12 – which is really my entire top group at this point – only three of the films are unseen as of this writing (Nine, Invictus, and Avatar). In addition, there are a couple of completely blind items, like Zemeckis’ A Christmas Carol and Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones. Traditionally, films like Sherlock Holmes, The Blind Side, and It’s Complicated are commercial films and not Oscar films… but there is always room for a pop.
What finally smashed me in the face up in Toronto was that with 10 Best Picture nominees and only five in each of the acting slots, it could get pretty weird. Nine and Precious are actress fests. Invictus, A Serious Man, A Single Man, and The Hurt Locker are actor parties. But at the same time, you have to assume an Oscar nomination for Daniel Day Lewis in Nine and for Julianne Moore in A Single Man. How many of the 8 star actresses can be nominated for Nine?
If it’s Day-Lewis, Clooney, Firth, Renner, and Damon… what happens to Mortensen, Wahlberg, Sarsgaard, Stuhlbarg, and Maguire?
If it’s Streep, Mulligan, Cotillard, Weisz, and Sidibe… what happens to Tautou, Cruz, Cornish, Swank, and Theron?
Supporting Actor is looking like the softest category with potential in Gyllenhaal, Tucci, Molina, Duvall, and Kind.
Best Supporting Actress is a MONSTER… Just Nine has Dench, Loren, Hudson, Cruz, and Kidman. Add Ronan, Farmiga, Kendrick. Moore, Adams, Portman… and God knows who else?
So here we are… about two months from things really locking in… and while The Ten doesn’t seem to be in for a whole lot of changes, there are some big fights brewing in the other categories. With 10 nominees, all of these films are more likely to be seen by Academy voters.. making it all the more interesting.
– David Poland
September 30, 2009
More About A Christmas Carol
Wednesday, September 30th, 2009A Christmas Carol Gets A New Trailer
Monday, September 28th, 2009Trailer: A Christmas Carol
Monday, September 14th, 200935 Weeks To Go The Next Oscars Will Be Rated X
Thursday, July 9th, 2009Okay… so all the chatter is about the 10 nominees. Emotional responses… been there, done that.
That said… it’s interesting that studios are facing a widening base of pressure to pursue Best Picture nominations at the very same time they are facing very tough economic realities. (Isn’t in funny – not ha ha – that all those people who were screaming about every film being profitable and the studios being indestructible have shut up now that the DVD problem some of us were writing about 3 years ago has become an on-the-record problem? Beware people who don’t want to hear about what’s next, only what bubbles into the mainstream.) Not only that… Oscar dollars are marketing dollars… and marketing is the area that screams for cutbacks more than any other. (Have you driven around L.A. lately… notice the empty buildings that were massive billboards a couple of years ago?)
It also strikes me, when laying out the season to come, is that the expansion that we all knee-jerked into being such a very big deal seems to be falling into some pretty traditional patterns. Paramount and Warner Bros. have the most pictures in play. Sony Classics has a number of titles, all of which have more muscle in categories other than Best Picture. And everyone else tends towards one-offs.
But as you’ll see… even with the contenders being bunched, the resulting nominations could be quite unexpected.
One publicist brought up an angle that I hadn’t yet considered… what about the movies that don’t get in, even with 10 slots open. How much more pressure will that put on the situation?
But most importantly, how will 10 nominees change the dynamic of desperate efforts to spin trend stories? How can it be The Year Of… anything with such inevitable diversity?
It could, I guess, be The Year of Matt Damon, who has Invictus, The Informer!, the animated Miyazaki film, Ponyo, and maybe even Green Zone coming out.
It could be The Year Of Not Bio-Pics, in spite of the Nelson Mandela film from Eastwood, Invictus, and Meryl Streep invoking Julia Child.
Some will try to make it The Year of The Woman, with Nine leading the way for such hopefuls as Julie & Julia, Bright Star, Precious, An Education, Broken Embraces, the 2 SPC Coco Chanel movies, Amelia, Cheri, and even the female director of The Hurt Locker. And maybe they will have a point… there could be 5 nominations in that group.
Or not.
What is truly shocking to me – and readers will have to have faith that it is purely a coincidence – is that as I laid out the chart to go with this column, my current Top 10 contenders… gulp… are from 10 different distributors.
And I don’t even have any tables to sell.
Obviously, a July list is going to change a lot. Universal, for instance, has a Paul Greengrass film that may or may not be ready for release into this season. If it is, then it probably leaps into that Top 10 projection. But today… it’s just a bill. (FYI… see Schoolhouse Rock if you don’t understand).
But for now, in my first 10 are The Weinstein Company, Summit, Lionsgate, and Overture… and though Lionsgate has been there with Crash, still… 4 stand-alone indies. This is a good reason to have the 10 nominations, no? Not to mention that its been a decade since Disney/non-Miramax has had a Best Picture nomination. Plus Sony Classics and Focus.
That’s only 4 slots for major studios after all the talk about The 10 being a boon primarily for big, less effete commercial pictures. (Like Invictus, right?)
Of course, change, as I wrote, is very likely. Paramount isn’t in my Top 10 right now… but has 3 films on the launching pad, any of which or all of which could end up being nominated.
Even more so, there are a bunch of movies that no one has seen that are obvious possibilities. (Watch out for that “Oh, people are seeing that… they aren’t very excited” buzz, which is already ramping up on the dubious highway against The Lovely Bones and Avatar.) Shutter Island, A Christmas Carol, Star Trek, and The Lovely Bones are the top of that list, with three Oscar-winning directors and a surprise smash hit that people really liked.
Precursors be damned. Sundance didn’t help much. Precious and An Education were the two BP potential films emerging, though the first will be driven by a “it’s important for you” campaign and the second is a classic Euro coming of age piece that will race on old school elegance and the emergence (and gentle British charm) of Cary Mulligan. (Also, look for heavy screenplay chatter around Humpday). Cannes was pretty much an Oscar bust, though a few titles will be discussed. And the commercial cinema has been enormously uninteresting this year, though we may have seen a couple of films in The Ten that have already been released… but really, only because it’s ten.
In other words, it’s very, very early in what promises to be a very long Oscar season. Next stop, Toronto.
– David Poland
July 9, 2009
Best Picture Chart
Thursday, July 9th, 2009
BEST PICTURE
|
|||||
Picture
|
Studio
|
Director
|
Stars |
Comment
|
|
The Nomination 90% Locks (in alphabetical order) | |||||
Dec 11
|
Invictus |
WB
|
Eastwood
|
Freeman
|
When Eastwood Met Apartheid |
Nov 25
|
Nine |
TWC
|
Marshall
|
Day-Lewis
Et al |
Lots of beloved actors dance and sing a forgettable score based on an unforgettable movie |
May
|
Up |
Disney
|
Docter
Petersen |
–
|
A truly great movie that will get enough support to break out of the animated ghetto |
The LeadIng Contenders To Fill The 10 Slots (in alphabetical order) | |||||
Oct 9
|
An Education |
SPC
|
Scherfig
|
Mulligan
Saasgard |
A charmer. |
Dec 18
|
Avatar |
Fox
|
Cameron
|
?
|
The big muscle movie that is embraced as The Future? |
Oct 2
|
Capitalism: A Love Story |
Over
|
Moore
|
–
|
If it’s up to Moore’s past |
June
|
The Hurt Locker |
Sum
|
Bigelow
|
Renner
|
A masterwork of humanity and explosions |
Aug 7
|
Julie & Julia |
Sony
|
Ephron
|
Streep
Adams |
This year’s Prada? |
Nov 6
|
Precious |
LG
|
Daniels
|
Sidibe
‘Nique |
Another test of how much The Academy likes Black people |
Oct 2
|
A Serious Man |
Focus
|
Coens
|
Stuhlbarg
Kind |
The Coens, right? |
The Commercial Chasers (by release date) | |||||
May
|
Star Trek |
Par
|
Abrams
|
Urban
|
A surprise box office win now looking like a #4 slot for the summer will likely return it to “it’s tv” notion |
July
|
Public Enemies |
U
|
Mann
|
Depp
|
Critics more in love than people |
Oct 2
|
Shutter Island |
Par
|
Scorsese
|
DiCaprio
|
A out and out thriller, but so was Cape Fear and with 10, it would have made it |
Feb
|
Coraline |
Focus
|
Selick
|
–
|
A glorious film… will the older voters watch it? |
Oct 9
|
The Informant! |
WB
|
Soderbergh
|
Damon
|
How broad the comedy? |
Oct 23
|
Amelia |
FxSch
|
Nair
|
Swank
|
Looks fogged in |
Nov 6
|
A Christmas Carol |
Dis
|
Zemeckis
|
Carrey
Oldman |
Another visual breakthrough… will the script match? |
Dec 4
|
Brothers |
Lions
|
Sheridan
|
Maguire
Gyllenhaal |
Great actors piece… but can it get real movement? |
Dec 11
|
The Lovely Bones |
Par/DW
|
Jackson
|
Weiss
Ronan Wahlberg Sarandon |
We’ll know when we see it. |
The Arthouse Chasers (by release date) | |||||
June
|
Tetro |
AmZ
|
Coppola
|
Gallo
Ehrenreich |
Masterful, but tiny. |
June
|
Cheri |
Mir
|
Frears
|
Pfeiffer
|
Seems more liked than loved |
Sept 25
|
Coco Before Chanel |
SPC
|
Fontaine
|
Tautou
|
We’ll see |
Nov 20
|
Broken Embraces |
SPC
|
Almodovar
|
Cruz
|
Not as hot as expected out of Cannes |
Dec 25
|
The White Ribbon |
SPC
|
Hanaeke
|
–
|
Critics film? |
???
|
Bright Star |
BB
|
Campion
|
Whishaw
Cornish |
Brand new distributor… but Berney has been here before |
Could Join The Racers (by release date) | |||||
Aug 28
|
Taking Woodstock |
Focus
|
Lee
|
–
|
More light than Oscar |
Sept 18 | The Burning Plain |
Mag
|
Arriaga
|
Theron
|
A tough, tough, brilliant little film… if no nod for Theron, cops should be called
|
Sept 25
|
Fame |
MGM
|
Tancharoen
|
–
|
The original had that feeling |
Oct 16
|
The Road |
TWC
|
Hillcoat
|
Theron
Mortensen |
Cormac McCarthy again… from the brilliant director of The Proposition |
Nov 13
|
The Fantastic Mr Fox |
Fox
|
Anderson
|
–
|
Fox is serious about this film |
Nov 20
|
The Blind Side |
WB
|
Hancock
|
Bullock
Bates |
Would be a shock, but good material |
Dec 25
|
Sherlock Holmes |
WB
|
Ritchie
|
Downey
|
Not really going to happen… but one must bow to Downey’s popularity |
Dec 25
|
Nancy Meyers Comedy |
FoxS
|
Nancy
|
Streep
Baldwin Martin |
Could ascend in a hurry when we see it. |
Will They Race This Year? (in alphabetical order) | |||||
???
|
Biutiful |
U/Foc
|
Gonzalez-
Inarritu |
Bardem
|
|
???
|
Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky |
SPC
|
Kounen
|
Mikkelsen
|
|
Dec?
|
Green Zone |
U
|
Greengrass
|
Damon
|
Most likely to move up fast if the movie is ready for release… much harder for indies |
???
|
Intrigues At Tire-Larigot |
WB
|
Jeunet
|
–
|
|
???
|
The Last Station |
?
|
Hoffman
|
Plummer
Giamatti |
|
???
|
Love Ranch |
Think
|
Hackford
|
Mirren
|
|
Dec?
|
Men Who Stare At Goats |
Over
|
Heslov
|
Clooney
Bridges |
|
Dec?
|
Ondine |
ParV
|
Jordan
|
Bachleda-Curus
|
|
Dec? | Up In The Air |
Par
|
Reitman
|
Clooney
|
|
2010? | Shanghai |
TWC
|
Håfström
|
Cusack |