Because We Were Born’s co-director Jean-Pierre Duret began his career in the mid-80s as a boom operator and sound assistant on the films of Louis Malle and Jacques Doillon, and more recently, he’s led the sound work on the films of Francois Ozon, Agnes Jaoui and the Dardennes Brothers. This pedigree surely helped Born, Duret and Andrea Santana’s thrid nonfiction film set in Northeast Brazil, land a premiere slot last fall at the Venice Film Festival, a placement that even the Variety review admitted “may have minimized the attention it garnered as it may have gotten lost among the large number of films showing there.” After moving on to Rotterdam and opening theatrically in France, Born’s future festival schedule is currently somewhat up in the air. It’s hard to say what the ideal showcase for this game-changing work of neo-verite might be — it’s probably not the pizza-and-beer Alamo Drafthouse atmosphere of SXSW, nor the “issues only, please” doc programs of some, well, less fun festivals –– but if it ends up in your town, you’d be well served to run toward it as fast as you can.
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It’s only a couple of short weeks before the 2008 Oscar nominees are announced, and the internet is abuzz with prognostications. One hotly debated topic is whether or not Wall-E can pull off a Best Picture nomination, or even a win. It would be the second animated film to be nominated in the category, after Beauty and the Beast, which got the honor before the Animated Feature prize existed. Will the stodgy old Academy seat Wall-E at the kid’s table, giving it an easy win in the animation category, or will it be allowed to play with the big boys?
A best pic nomination for Wall-E would be a rare honor for animation in general, but it would also be a long over due rarity for another reason: Wall-E would only be the second best pic nominated film in the history of the Oscars to be set in the future. The only one to date is A Clockwork Orange. When you consider how many nominees are period pieces (I didn’t care to count), this represents a massive bias on the part of the Academy. It’s clear that they love the past, but they hate the future.
What would the history of the Academy Awards look like if the Hollywood elite wasn’t terrified of speculative fiction? Below, seven movies about the future that should have been nominated for Best Picture:
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io9 has confirmed an earlier report that Ridley Scott will direct an adaptation of Brave New World, Aldous Huxley’s classic dystopian future novel. Scott says that Leonardo DiCaprio approached him about adapting the book, and it looks like he will star in the film as well. This is exciting news; not only does it herald the return to science fiction for the director of Blade Runner and Alien, it also means that Leo, who is working on a live action adaptation of Akira, has two dystopian future projects in progress.
Brave New World is one of my favorite books, and Blade Runner is one of my favorite movies, for many of the same reasons, but I’m still having trouble getting excited about this news. Scott’s work on Blade Runner was amazing, but that was 26 years ago, and he hasn’t made a science fiction film since. I’d like to believe he can jump back in the saddle, but considering what he’s been up to for the past two and a half decades, I have my doubts. While the quality of Scott’s filmography is admittedly debatable, it’s safe to say he’s made some pretty terrible movies, Kingdom of Heaven and A Good Year come to mind. Even his films that have some potential end up falling short. American Gangster, while not a bad movie, felt like only like a sufficient execution of a script Scorsese would have passed over in the nineties.
Even if Scott can get his Blade Runner mojo working again for Brave New World, it could still be really bad. …Read more
On October 28 the world will plunge into an irradiated nightmare, littered with the wreckage of civilization, overrun by savage super mutants. Or, my world will be, anyway. Next month is when the hotly anticipated new video game Fallout 3 will be released. It’s been over a decade since the first Fallout, a now classic post-apocalyptic role-playing game. How has the franchise maintained such a devoted fan base? Simple: great story, great characters, great setting, and killer cinematics.
The games have always been deeply indebted to post-apocalyptic cinema. The opening sequence of the first game is almost identical to the one in The Road Warrior, and the similarities don’t end there. As the Max Payne movie is (hopefully) about to prove, there is an elegant solution to the problem of video game movies sucking: make movies about games that are already steeped in cinematic influence. In other words, a Fallout movie would kick serious ass. It would have a similar feel to classics like The Road Warrior, but Fallout has its own brand of dark humor and retro-futurism.
After the jump, I take a crack at assembling a dream cast for such a film. I’m going to stick to characters from the first game, where it all began. Chime in with your own picks in the comments.
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