In her Variety column today, Anne Thompson contrasts Sam Mendes’ star-studded, Oscar-positioned, somewhat tonally revisionist adaptation of Revolutionary Road with the work and life of author Richard Yates. Thompson reminds what unlikely source material this is for a re-teaming of the beautiful young stars of the highest grossing film of all time, relating in detail the plight of “the long-suffering Yates,” who lived in “squalid” solitude, never sold more than 12,000 copies of a single novel, and hated the only produced film his writing ever had anything to do with.

In his day, Yates was asked by its editor to stop submitting fiction to the New Yorker, a publication which had no use for the writer’s “mean-spirited view of things.” In describing how Mendes and crew revised the material to make its protagonists “warmer and more sympathetic” (and chose to take their dreams seriously where Yates drily mocked and criticized), Thompson implies that Hollywood has no use for the acid element of Yates’ view, either.

Never known for their radical choices (inexplicable, occasionally, but rarely daring), the National Board of Review split the difference with their 2008 honors, citing predictable crowd pleasers (Slumdog Millionaire was named the Best Film of the year) and well-feted indies (Man on Wire for Best Documentary, Frozen River for Directorial Debut), alongside a few actual, suprisingly surprising choices. Let the Right One In and Edge of Heaven for Best Foreign Film? Okay! Changeling as one of the 11 best films of the year? Aww, NBR — your milquetoast cred remains intact. Never change!

indieWIRE has the full list.

The nominations for the 2008 Independent Spirit Awards are out, and there are a lot of causes for excitement. IndieWIRE has the full list; here are a few of the many reasons to celebrate:

• Silent Light, which still hasn’t officially been released in the US (although a run at NY’s Film Forum is pending), was nominated for best Foreign Film, alongside Cannes winners Hunger, Gomorrah and The Class, and the upcoming IFC release The Secret of the Grain.
• Three big nominations for Medicine for Melancholy: director Barry Jenkins and producer Justin Barber were nominated for Best First Feature, Jenkins was named alongside Nina Paley and Lynn Shelton as contenders for the Acura Someone to Watch Award, and James Laxton earned a nomination for Melancholy’s distinctive cinematography.
• Sean Baker competes against himself for the John Cassavetes Award for the best feature made for under $500,000; Prince of Broadway and Take Out were nominated alongside The Signal, Turn the River, and In Search of a Midnight Kiss.
• SpoutBlog favorites The Order of Myths, Encounters at the End of the World, The Betrayal and Man on WireUp the Yangtze join in the Best Documentary category; Myths director Margaret Brown was also nominated for the Lacost Truer Than Fiction prize, which goes to an upcoming nonfiction filmmaker.
• On the bigger film front, Rachel Getting Married, The Wrestler and Vicky Cristina Barcelona were amongst the most nominated films; Woody Allen will compete in the Screenplay category against fellow Oscar winner Charlie Kaufman.

The full list of nominees can be found here. The Spirits will be handed out, as per tradition, the night before the Oscars in Santa Monica.

What’s going on with Steven Soderbergh’s Che? Heard anything recently? I haven’t seen any hard news published in any half-way reputable outlet since Cannes (aside from this report from IndianTelevision.com that Che will soon premiere on––wait for it––Indian television, but the film’s international release has never been in doubt). But that hasn’t put an end to the speculation.

On June 14, Jeff Wells did a post based on a conversation a friend of his had with some other guy who’s “familiar with the comings and goings of” Wild Bunch, the sales agency who funded Che and have been looking for a buyer for it since Berlin. The gist, as Wells passes it along through the various degrees of distance, is that Wild Bunch has given up trying to sell the current cut to a U.S. distributor, and Soderbergh’s too busy shooting his next movie to worry about refining his cut, and everyone’s just sort of shrugging their shoulders and cutting their losses.

I didn’t come across this story until today, when I finally decided to do some digging on a rumor I heard about the film last month when I was in Las Vegas. …Read more

If you’re on the East Coast or time zones further down the clock, you may have been already out the door by the time the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and NBC finally, officially conceded their mutual defeat: there will be no Golden Globes, there will only be Golden Globe winners, announced at a one-hour press conference telecasted by––gulp––NBC News. It took several hours for the film and entertainment blog worlds to chew up this news and thoroughly spit it out. Here then, a timeline, culled from my RSS reader, of the blogosphere’s coming to terms with The Fall of Globes, without a doubt the greatest tragedy of our…week. So far.

6:02 PM EST––The Cold Hard Facts: “The mechanics of the one-hour announcement itself are muddled. The original idea was that at some point during the parties the HFPA would stop the proceedings and make the declaration of the winners. Cameras would be poised on the nominees at the different parties, so that there would be reaction from Atonement’s Keira Knightley, for example, at the Universal/Focus party. This concept was scratched by the WGA.” — Anne Thompson

7:21 PM––Let’s Focus On What’s Really Important: “Who aren’t you wearing?! … Sorta hard to have a ceremony when no stars are gonna show … we’re just sayin’.” — TMZ

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Nikki Finke says her sources tell her that the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and NBC have worked out a compromise to be able to produce a Golden Globes telecast that the WGA can’t picket. Nikki’s using the word “scraped” in her headline, but that doesn’t really sound accurate at all; it seems that the show will go on, just without the montage bloat.

The plan is to apparently throw “a news event where the actors can still get all glammed up”––basically, a glorified press conference, with most of the “content” stemming from the winners’ ostensibly improvised acceptence speeches.  Presumably, such a set up would allow NBC to keep their ad revenue whilst the HFPA gets to keep both their licensing fees and a teeny-tiny shred of dignity. Even better for us the viewers, Steven Spielberg will get to accept his Cecil B. DeMille lifetime achievement award, whilst we’ll be spared the clip reel attempt to legitimize Hook.

• Oh, the perils of being an organization built on starfucking: if the Hollywood Foreign Press Association can’t get the WGA to issue a waiver to allow writers to pen lame banter for the Golden Globes, then there’s a strong chance that most stars will refuse to cross the (real or theoretical) picket line to attend the ceremony. No stars=no photo ops=virtually no point in going through with the awards. Variety says the HFPA’s chances at landing a waver look slim, although the WGA just issued a similar pass to the SAG awards.
• In other awards news: Juno and Into the Wild lead the nominations for the Critics Choice Awards; Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg, one of my favorite films of this year, and Bruce Greenwood McDonald’s The Tracey Fragments made the Toronto International Film Festival Group’s list of the Top 10 Canadian Films of the Year. Winnipeg will also open the Forum sidebar at the Berlin Film Festival in February. It’s screen alongside Green Porno, a collection of three short films by Isabella Rosselini about the sex lives of insects.
• This story is days old, but I missed it: a German producer has acquired the remake rights to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.

Amy Ryan has snagged at least five awards in the past four business days (I lost count after the NBR, New York critics, LA critics, DC critics and San Francisco critics) for her work in Ben Affleck’s Gone Baby Gone, and has thus usurped Cate Blanchett as the presumptive frontrunner in the Best Supporting Actress Oscar race. This is, to me, a fairly shocking turn of events, and judging by the noise it’s creating amongst Oscar bloggers, I’m not totally alone in my surprise.

It doesn’t help that Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There––the film that prompted Harvey Weinstein to promise to shoot himself if it didn’t net Blanchett an Oscar nomination––has been all but shut out of the critical derby thus far. I was particularly surprised to see the film earn nary a nod from the New York Film Critics Circle–it certainly has no shortage of local, effusive defenders. And yet, the film has sort of slunk into the shadows of the season. Putting Harvey’s silly, trigger-happy bravado aside, it’s no secret that The Weinstein Company is hurting for hits, and so far, There is part of the problem; still on less than 150 screens and consistently dropping 30% from weekend to weekend, I don’t see how the distributor will be able to justify any kind of expansion unless there’s a major, major reversal in awards momentum.

The question is: where’s the loudest man in pseudo-indie distribution when his films really need him?

…Read more