I’ve seen Rob Marshall’s Nine and Clint Eastwood’s Invictus, but I am not allowed to write about them just yet. And I got my screening invite today for Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones. They start at the end of the week. I’ve been reading the Alice Sebold novel, which is as cool as I had heard. So I didn’t read Harry Knowles’ early review too carefully. I want to make up my own mind. But clearly, he loves the movie.
I got an invite to James Cameron’s L.A. Avatar premiere on December 16, but I can’t go to the film because I’m showing The Lovely Bones to Sneak Previews—our last night. So I’ll pop by the party afterwards. The first LA press screenings are December 10th and 14th.
by Anne Thompson, posted to Awards, Critics Groups, Golden Globes, Oscars, Directors, Clint Eastwood, James Cameron, Peter Jackson on November 23, 2009 at 4:06pm PST | Permalink | Comments (7)
I have always dug Joseph Gordon-Levitt, from success d’estime Brick to Searchlight hit 500 Days of Summer. But did I know he had Donald O’Connor in him? No! Check out his gut-splitting, floor-to-ceiling rendition of Singing in the Rain’s “Make ‘Em Laugh:”
by Anne Thompson, posted to TV on November 23, 2009 at 3:24pm PST | Permalink | Comments (1)
A lot of people are scratching their heads over the whole Twilight phenomenon. When I made a fuss about it before Comic-Con in 2008, many fan boys didn’t have a clue. By July 2009 there was a raging Twilight backlash at the male-dominated Con. Even last week, I was amused by all the clueless Dads at the Twilight: New Moon premiere who’d rather be shot than admit to reading one of the books. Why were they there? To check it out.
Rubber-necking is a key explanation for why the second movie did twice as well as the first, opening to $142.8 million, the third-biggest opening ever. Curiosity post-Twilight film and DVD, plus extraordinary marketing on the part of Summit, pushed New Moon into must-see, event-movie, check-it-out status—even though Chris Weitz’s film is arguably worse than its predecessor.
Read Moreby Anne Thompson, posted to Box Office, Fall, Franchises, Twilight, Genres, Sequel, Headliners, Rob Pattinson, Independents, Summit on November 23, 2009 at 11:40am PST | Permalink | Comments (34)
It’s no surprise, given that composer Marc Shaiman worked with co-producer Adam Shankman on the musical Hairspray, that he will do the music director honors for the 82nd Academy Awards. Shankman cited Will Ferrell and Jack Black’s comedy numbers as examples of the hilarity that he hopes Shaiman will bring to the occasion: “He’s a genius! And he’d be the first to tell you!”
“With Marc on board, we are sure to have some great musical and, hopefully, hysterical moments,” said producer Bill Mechanic.
Shaiman has five Oscar nominations under his belt, for original score (The American President, The First Wives Club and Patch Adams) and original song (“A Wink and a Smile” from Sleepless in Seattle and for “Blame Canada” from South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut). Shaiman has also been nominated for four Emmys, of which three were for his work on Oscar telecasts; he won the Emmy in 1992 for co-writing Billy Crystal’s “Oscar Medley” for the 64th Academy Awards. The Oscar telecast will air March 7 on ABC.
by Anne Thompson, posted to Awards, Oscars on November 23, 2009 at 9:32am PST | Permalink | Comments (0)
Along with fall award season pump-primers The Hollywood, London and AFI Fests, another key fest on the award season calendar is the Santa Barbara International Film Festival, which takes place at the height of Oscar voting this February, from the 4th through the 14th. (Oscar nominations are announced on February 2.)
This year the fest will honor Modern Master James Cameron (Avatar) and Outstanding Performance of the Year Colin Firth (A Single Man), as well as four recipients of the new Cinema Vanguard Award: Vera Farmiga (Up in the Air), Peter Sarsgaard (An Education), Stanley Tucci (Julie & Julia, The Lovely Bones) and Christoph Waltz (Inglourious Basterds). (I look forward every year to moderating SBIFF’s annual writers’ panel.)
A fest with influence during the earlier Oscar nomination season is Palm Springs (January 5 to 18), which is giving Mariah Carey its breakthrough performance award for Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ By Sapphire. Past recipients of the award include eventual Oscar-winners Marion Cotillard and Jennifer Hudson. Other fest honorees this year are Morgan Freeman (Invictus) and Farmiga’s Up in the Air co-star Anna Kendrick.
Along with critics top ten lists and group prizes and shows like the Golden Globes and BAFTAs, well-promoted fest awards help to build momentum toward that collective sense of a winner, a snowball that gets bigger as it rolls toward an Oscar nomination, front-runner status and hopefully, a win.
by Anne Thompson, posted to Awards, Oscars, Festivals on November 23, 2009 at 9:12am PST | Permalink | Comments (0)
Beware the cross-cultural remake.
David Benioff is a gifted writer (The 25th Hour). Jim Sheridan is a gifted director (In America). Tobey Maguire, Jake Gyllenhaal and Natalie Portman are gifted actors. So what went wrong on the road to Relativity and Lionsgate’s American adaptation of Danish writer-director Susanne Bier’s extraordinary 2004 movie Brothers?
It’s the risk you take when you try to transplant something that was organic to one culture to another. The original Danish script (by Bier and frequent collaborator Anders Thomas Jensen) dug into the dynamics of two brothers. When the upbeat, upstanding family man, a career soldier (Ulrich Thomsen), is lost in a helicopter crash in Afghanistan, the unmotivated black sheep of the family (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) rises to the occasion to help his brother’s widow (Connie Nielsen) and kids and grows into a better man. When the wounded vet, who has performed unconscionable acts in order to survive a POW camp, finally returns home, he finds that a happy family has grown up in his absence. His wife and daughters barely recognize the man they once adored. They prefer the other brother on whom they’ve come to depend. And all hell breaks loose.
Read Moreby Anne Thompson, posted to Awards, Oscars, Independents, Lionsgate/Roadside, Writers, Screenwriters on November 23, 2009 at 7:45am PST | Permalink | Comments (2)
On opposite sides of the world, my 20-year-old college student daughter Nora and I both enjoyed 2012, which was more fun than I was expecting. Director Roland Emmerich (Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow) crafted a truly global movie, starting off in a mine shaft in India and proceeding to blow up Yellowstone National Park and destroy the world’s most revered monuments, from the White House and The Vatican’s Sistine Chapel to Brazil’s Christ The Redeemer (Critics were mixed.) After its second weekend, the utterly implausible disaster E-ride has already racked up $268-million worldwide. “#1 Movie in the World!” reads the LATimes ad headline.
Nora, studying abroad in Kunming, China, went to see 2012 on the day it opened all over the world. (The other western movie playing there now is Michael Jackson’s This is It.) She got a kick out of watching the wreckage of her home town Los Angeles, which slides into the Pacific. Here’s her report on watching 2012 in China:
The movie was 40 kuai to get into on a Friday night, or about $5.50 U.S., or we could have decided to buy the DVD for 10 kuai, $1.50, at one of my neighborhood’s several DVD shops. I was the only foreigner in the theater because I went with one of my best Chinese friends, Xiao Zhou, who speaks great English, and this was crucial because when the movie broke into Tibetan and French I needed her to quickly read the Chinese subtitles and tell me what was happening. She turned to me at one point in the movie and said, “This is so cool! First they destroy your hometown and then everyone flees to my home country to be rescued!”
Everyone cheered at the moment when John Cusak opens the map and declares that they’re going to China. I guess the idea was that they were fleeing to the highest point in the world, the Himalayas, and they couldn’t very well have them fleeing to Tibet so they decided on Western Sichuan. It was interesting, they barely ever actually speak Chinese in the movie, it’s all Tibetan, but that didn’t seem to stop the audience from loving it. When Danny Glover as the president came on the guy next to me said, “Oh! Ao Ba Ma (奥巴马),” Obama in Chinese.
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By Nora Chute, posted to on November 22, 2009 at 1:47pm PST | Permalink | Comments (2)
In the eleventh installment of Oscar Talk, In Contention‘s Kris Tapley and I have a go at last weekend’s Governors Awards, Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, the documentary short list and Hal Holbrook’s performance in That Evening Sun. Over at Awards Daily, Sasha Stone assembles a bigger group to grapple with some of these and other questions.
On the jump, I’ve pasted Stone’s useful breakdown of the different branches of the Academy. You can see how dramatically the actors branch dominates. Want to predict the Oscars correctly? Figure out how each of those branches will vote for the contenders. The producers, executives and publicists tend to be more mainstream, while the writers and directors are more upscale, and the different crafts appreciate the art of moviemaking in a different way. Then add up the numbers.
Read Moreby Anne Thompson, posted to Awards, Oscars, Directors, Quentin Tarantino on November 20, 2009 at 1:31pm PST | Permalink | Comments (3)
Based on the torrid rate of Fandango and MovieTickets.com advance online ticket sales, it’s not a huge surprise that The Twilight Saga: New Moon broke the midnight ticket sales record set last summer by Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince , reports the LAT:
According to four people close to the movie, “The Twilight Saga: New Moon” sold more than $22.2 million worth of tickets in midnight shows last night, the all-time record set this summer by Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.
by Anne Thompson, posted to Box Office, Fall, Franchises, Twilight, Headliners, Rob Pattinson, Independents, Summit on November 20, 2009 at 9:59am PST | Permalink | Comments (0)
Ex-Gucci designer Tom Ford, 48, has David Geffen to thank not only for his old office complex on Sunset, but for advising him to invest in himself. That he did, with his remarkably assured $7-million film debut, A Single Man. It’s not surprising that the film has style to spare. But it also boasts the strongest performance of Colin Firth’s career. His role as a 1962 college professor grieving the loss of his lover of 16 years won him best actor at Venice and has pushed the British veteran into the Oscar race for the first time. The hottest acquisition title on the fall festival circuit, A Single Man was scooped up by The Weinstein Co., which opens the film December 11.
1. Have you always been a movie obsessive?
Tom Ford: Oh yes. I have been since I was a kid. Let’s start with The Wizard of Oz, which I saw when I was three years old. As a young gay man growing up, I watched every movie that you’d see on The Late Show. Then living in New York in the late seventies and early eighties, there was a certain culture to knowing every old Hollywood film. And that just continued to expand when I was in architecture school. I remember being blown away by Fritz Lang’s Metropolis for the first time. And I’ve been film obsessed ever since.
Read Moreby Anne Thompson, posted to on November 20, 2009 at 6:14am PST | Permalink | Comments (3)
Screenwriter Jessica Bendinger (Bring it On) is going interactive to promote the November 24 release of her Simon & Schuster novel The Seven Rays. She’s inviting aspiring screenwriters to adapt any portion of the book into a 2-5 page screenplay in order to win an in-depth consultation with her.
One catch: the contest is also a promo for Final Draft, so the writers have to use that software (a free demo is available for download). The contest opened on November 15, 2009 and closes on February 15, 2010 at 12:00 am PST. The Grand Prize winner gets a one-on-one script consultation for their screenplay with Bendinger. Five second-place winners can pitch an original piece to a producer, agent, development exec and Bendinger via iChat or Skype. And ten third-place runners-up win a copy of Final Draft scriptwriting software. The contest rules are here.
Read Moreby Anne Thompson, posted to Marketing, Writers, Screenwriters on November 19, 2009 at 7:58pm PST | Permalink | Comments (0)
This Avatar international featurette invites viewers to engage with the exotic planet Pandora and the human hardware that James Cameron and Co. designed for this movie. We see Sam Worthington arriving on the hostile planet where scientist Sigourney Weaver and pilot Michelle Rodriguez do their rounds, under the watchful eye of tough-talking macho-security chief Stephen Lang.
What we don’t see so much: the nine-foot blue aliens that have freaked some folks. This is a soft walk-up—which, by the way, the movie itself will do, pulling the viewers into this new world. The L.A. press won’t get to see the final product before December 10, the same date as the London premiere.
by Anne Thompson, posted to Directors, James Cameron, Genres, Sci-fi, Studios, Twentieth Century Fox, Video on November 19, 2009 at 6:49pm PST | Permalink | Comments (0)
It’s been a long haul for the film adaptation of the 2006 Cormac McCarthy bestseller The Road, which producer Nick Wechsler acquired before it was published. With backing from 2929 Entertainment and distributor The Weinstein Co., he approached Australian director John Hillcoat after he had made the much-admired 2005 western The Proposition, a stylishly gritty take on the genre written by Nick Cave and starring Guy Pearce and Danny Huston as estranged brothers.
For his part, actor Viggo Mortensen was anxious about the naked exposure the movie would require: the man and his boy are on their own in a world stripped of all life but for roaming bands of violent human scavengers many of whom resort to cannibalism to survive. Mortensen was also worried about finding a child actor capable of carrying it off. But Kodi Smit-McPhee fit the bill. (Here’s my video Mortensen interview.)
After a rigorous shoot which was delayed by weather around Mt. St. Helens, the movie went through a lengthy edit. Hillcoat reluctantly submitted himself to the preview process, showed the film to many filmmakers and friends, took input and notes from the Weinsteins, and finally worked his way through to something everyone was reasonably happy with, including McCarthy. While certain things wound up on the cutting room floor—deemed too tough for audiences to handle on the big screen—the novelist said he liked the film and asked only that four lines from the novel be reinstated.
The two parts of my Hillcoat interview from Telluride are on the jump:
Read Moreby Anne Thompson, posted to Genres, Drama, Independents, Weinsteins, Video, Interviews on November 19, 2009 at 1:23pm PST | Permalink | Comments (0)
Kevin Smith has been open about his difficulties directing Bruce Willis on the set of his new comedy co-starring Tracy Morgan, A Couple of Cops. “He’s undirectable,” he said. At the New Moon premiere Smith kidded producer James Jacks, saying, “Dude, why didn’t you tell me!” The movie may have turned out okay (here’s an early AICN review), but point is, Smith and I agreed, the glory days for stars are over.
With Hollywood in recession and the star system on the decline, fewer big-budget live-action movies are getting made and most stars can’t get their price anymore. Most are just searching for a good part. The golden era when stars can misbehave, throw their weight around, demand perks and make lives miserable is finally coming to an end. “He’s the lion in winter,” Smith said of Willis.
Smith does a Bruce Willis riff here—point is, he eventually came up with a part for the guy.
by Anne Thompson, posted to Genres, Comedy, Video on November 19, 2009 at 11:44am PST | Permalink | Comments (0)
The Academy documentary branch has named their short list of fifteen films (full list on jump), which will be narrowed down to five on Oscar nominations morning February 2.
Winning the Oscar would seem to have been a disqualifier this year, as the doc committee snubbed this year’s highest-profile documentary, Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story as well as It Might Get Loud, whose director David Guggenheim won the Oscar for An Inconvenient Truth. This group tends to lean toward social activism like The Cove or Food Inc. (the only film to score top noms at the Gotham, Cinema Eye, and IDA Documentary Awards) more than music movies. Showbiz doc Every Little Step did score a slot, along with the Civil Rights era Soundtrack for a Revolution, but Anvil! The Story of Anvil did not. There was room for one fashion world portrait (Matt Tyrnaur’s Valentino the Last Emperor) but not two (R. J. Cutler’s The September Issue). And ex-heavyweight champion Mike Tyson’s recent news appearances, telling Oprah he wanted to “sock” Robin Givens, or his brawl with airport paparazzi, did not help the cause of James Toback’s Tyson. Instead, Facing Ali, a tribute to another champion, made the list.
Check out the latest Gurus ‘O Gold Oscar poll.
[Photo: Burma VJ]
Read Moreby Anne Thompson, posted to Awards, Oscars, Genres, Documentaries on November 18, 2009 at 4:14pm PST | Permalink | Comments (4)
Updated 11/23/2009
