It’s beginning to look a lot like 1991. A former Disney starlet is on track for a Best Actress nomination. One of cinema’s greatest villainous performances is a sure thing for an acting Oscar. And, due to a relatively disappointing crop of Academy Award contenders, an animated feature is being talked about for Best Picture. One major difference between now and 1991, however, is now there’s a separate Oscar category for Best Animated Feature. While that doesn’t mean Wall-E can’t be the first animated film nominated in the top category since Beauty and the Beast, it does potentially mean that it shouldn’t be.

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It’s already been called the most important civil rights film of the decade, but only time will tell if Milk has any real impact on the gay marriage issue or any other related civil rights matter. Obviously the film, which is set thirty years in the past, can be appropriated by the campaign to overturn Proposition 8, but if that campaign is successful, it will be difficult to prove with certainty Milk contributed to the end result.

The Birth of a Nation may have inspired a reformation of the Ku Klux Klan and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner may have opened some minds to wider acceptance of interracial marriage (which had just recently been legalized). However, as Time magazine reported earlier this year, it’s quite rare for cinema to really change the world. A movie like Philadelphia easily gets moviegoers thinking about AIDS and discrimination, for instance, and Sicko exposes some of the supposed benefits of universal health care, yet most of these kinds of message films preach primarily to the choir.

But at least five films have made an actual difference, either on a local or national level. Will Milk join the small group of movies detailed below?
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Matt Drudge is linking to an Irish Times report on a documentary called Not Evil Just Wrong, which Irish filmmakers Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAleer claim “is the film Al Gore and Hollywood don’t want you to see.” The film purports to reveal “how extreme environmentalism is damaging the lives of ordinary people,” and the filmmakers have set up a PayPal account in the hopes of raising money for distribution. As the copy reads on their website, they’re “asking ordinary Americans to be part of cinematic history by making sure a documentary that finally tells the truth about their lives is shown across the nation.”

The trailer, embedded above, suggests that the Not Evil is typical reactionary propaganda, full of ominous music, quickly edited collapses in logic (such as when one man’s concern over the potential closing of an unidentified factory is followed up by an expert warning that “100s of millions of people would die”), and provocative but unfounded statements like, “They want to go back to the Dark Ages and the Black Plague!” But you know … that’s fine. Everyone should be allowed to make over-the-top, aggressively partisan cinema if it that makes them and their friends feel better about what they believe, right?

But it’s the PayPal campaign rankles, if only because of the extreme amount of cash involved. …Read more

The 30-minute Barack Obama infomerical just ended on the East Coast, and since it was partially directed by An Inconvenient Truth Oscar winner Davis Guggenheim, it makes total sense for us to write about it on a movie blog! Spoilers after the jump!

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• AFTRA will announce the results of their guild’s ratification vote on a prospective contract with the AMPTP today. It’s said to be “widely anticipated the terms will be accepted,” despite SAG’s pressure on their overlapping union to vote no in order to get a new/more favorable deal.
• Robert Schwartz looks at three of New York’s outdoor summer film festivals, including Rooftop Films.
• William “Cruising” Friedkin will direct the Milan premiere of the opera based on An Inconvenient Truth.
• Kinky Boots, one of those newfangled British comedies where somebody saves something through the power of something that somebody else thinks is naughty, is going to become a Broadway musical.

Michel Gondry’s Be Kind Rewind may have failed to make much of an impact at the box office, but as Liz Shannon Miller reports at NewTeeVee, it did touch off a serious wave of low-budget remake making on the web. Of the three “Sweded” mini-masterpieces she considers, by favorite is the above take on An Inconvenient Truth. Watch it, and join the fight to keep polar bears from taking our jobs. Related: this plus The Pleasure of Being Robbed makes two recent works to employ use of a fake polar bear. I just have to find one more fake polar bear in popular culture, and I can pitch a trend piece to the New York Times!

It’s pretty upsetting when you see more documentaries than most Americans, and yet you haven’t seen any of the 15 docs deemed best of the year by the Academy. This is my case this year, and I guess I was slacking. Or maybe the real problem is that Oscar has shortlisted too many films that haven’t been released commercially. In his IN DEPTH look at the shortlisted docs, Kurt Cobain About a Son filmmaker AJ Schnack points out that only 6 of the films have pursued a true theatrical release and 2/3 have not been available for review by critics nor have they reported their box office. For commentary on Schnack’s earlier analysis of both this year and last year’s eligible docs, check out Karina’s post from last week.

So, there’s my excuse. Anyway, I still have many months to see the docs that are most likely to receive the five nominations. My guesses of what I need to see before Oscar night: Sicko, No End in Sight, Lake of Fire, Body of War and War/Dance (or Taxi to the Dark Side, if the Academy allows so many Iraq War docs). Of course, if I want to be a true doc fan, I should make sure to see all 15, as well as a lot of other films left outside the shortlist.

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AJ Schnack has written a great post on the so-called “doc depression”. And no, we’re not talking about the emotional trauma that follows a screening of Lake Of Fire--though “depressing” documentaries likely have something to do with it, this depression is purely financial.

Only three nonfiction films are on track to gross a million dollars or more this year, making it the slowest year for documentary box office since 2001. There are are lot of potential factors–the always handy Iraq/political fatigue; the fact that studios and their indie arms are mainly distributing docs with name-brand directors (which, if you take Man From Plains‘ opening weekend as evidence, are less than safe bets); the unfortunate reality that docs that are winning awards at festivals are not getting picked up by powerful distributors, and thus, if they’re entering the marketplace at all, they’re relying on grassroots promotions to slowly build a successful run–but I think AJ’s really on to something when he cites the logjam that has become the fall release schedule:

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• Advancing the dangerous notion that an Oscar is the first step to the Nobel Prize, Variety asks An Inconvenient Truth director Davis Guggenheim and producer Laurie David to confirm that “the film played a part” in Al Gore’s Nobel lauding. Meanwhile, the Guardian reveals that the film’s recent battle for educational clearance in Britain was engineered by “a Scottish quarrying magnate who established a controversial lobbying group to attack environmentalists’ claims about global warming.”
• According to Pamela McClintock, Across the Universe has managed “by the far the best showing among specialty releases so far this fall” by drawing repeat visits from teenage girls. Meanwhile, the under-marketed expansion of The Assassination of Jesse James was, as could only be expected, a failure, grossing less than $400,000 on 163 screens.
• Taylor Hackford will direct his wife, Helen Mirren, in Love Ranch, about “a couple who opened the first legal brothel in Nevada and the violence that resulted when their relationship was tested by infidelity.”

• Hollywood’s sexiest Lefties, George Clooney and Leonardo DiCaprio, may be teaming up to bring the, um, tragedy of Howard Dean’s presidential campaign to the screen. Clooney would direct and DiCaprio would star in Farragut North, based on a play written by one of Dean’s former aides, about “an inspiring, though unorthodox, presidential candidate [whose] career is done in by more seasoned politicos who thrive on poisonous partisan politics, dirty tricks and back-stabbing.”
• In other liberal disappointments, a British judge ruled yesterday that Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth contains “nine scientific errors”, and can only be used as a teaching tool in classrooms if accompanied by “fresh guidance notes to balance Mr Gore’s ‘one-sided’ views.”
• Troma’s Lloyd Kaufman is hardly sleeping on his new job as chairman of the Independent Film and Television Alliance. In the three weeks since his election, according to Variety’s DaveMcNary, he’s already made a trip to DC to lobby on behalf of IFTA and push his three-part plan: “continuing IFTA’s campaign against media consolidation; focusing on new technologies, such as protection of copyright and keeping Internet access on a level playing field (’net neutrality’); and stepping up international outreach.” He’s been so busy that he apparently hasn’t had time for a new headshot–the Variety story features a pic of Kaufman on the set of Poultrygeist.