With that in mind, I’ve devised a list of films that I’m excited to see (for the first time or not) and talk about in the coming 12 months. Later in the week, we’ll take a look at some movies we saw at festivals in 2008 which now have a release date in 2009, and also films which have no release date, but which we expect to see show up on the festival circuit in the coming months. But we’re going to get the macro out of the way first: after the jump, you’ll find three Big, Stupid Hollywood Movies which I’m assuming will be awful, but possibly in an interesting way. Do share the titles you have your own eyes on in the comments.
Because there’s nothing like waiting until the last minute to do some holiday shopping, we’ve compiled this handy-dandy shopping guide to the best DVDs of 2008 that you can use now, or wait until the dust settles and clean up with any cash that Santa or Hanukkah Harry happened to leave you. It’s broken down by the person you’ll be shopping for to make things easier, even if that person happens to be yourself.
When noted, we’ve picked the Blu-ray version over the standard definition, because we try to be all about 1080p and other technical terms whenever possible. But, the regular versions are just fine as well. Still, it’s true what they say: once you go HD you’ll never go back.
I didn’t see Che. Last night was the first night since I’ve been here that I had an opportunity to go to bed at a reasonable hour and, after a week of dozing off in screenings on three hours of fitful sleep, I took it. Regrets? Reading the recaps and reviews, I have a few. I mean, if Anne Thompson is right, the Cannes cut will, like the Cannes cut of Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales, never again see the light of day. Comparing Che to that film and others which were brought to Cannes straight out of the oven and half-raw, she blogs:
From the department of Bloggy Frenzies We Missed While We Were Out: The Playlist has an excellent post on the music used within Ben Stein’s aforementioned intelligent design propaganda film, Expelled. It all started on Monday, when James Boyce posted a story on the Huffington Post titled, “Yoko Ono Sells Out John Lennon To Creationist Manufactroversy.” We assume that’s a contraction of “manufactured controversy”, even though as far as I’m aware, the film’s opponents have done a better job of promotingExpelled via fuss than the filmmakers themselves. Ack! Maybe i09 is right––maybe Expelled is actually a reverse-psychology conspiracy designed to bring down the intelligent design movement. Or maybe not.
Chuck Tryon points to this story, in which he’s quoted, about an upcoming Luke Wilson film called Tenure, set in the wild world of academia. Tryon, a tenure track professor himself, notes the challenges the filmmakers will have in making his lifestyle cinematic: “[S]ince my ongoing pursuit of tenure typically involves me sitting in front of my laptop until 1 a.m., I don’t know how interesting that would be to watch.”
At io9, Charlie Jane Anders assesses the problem with sci-fi prequels: “I love small, intimate portrayals of people’s lives. But that’s not what I look for from movies with “Star” in the title. (Well, maybe A Star Is Born.)”
Vulture sends word that Deitch Projects will host an exhibition later this month built around Michel Gondry’s Be Kind Rewind. The installation will allow visitors to make and watch their own “sweded” films. This will be the gallery’s second feat of Gondry art synergy; in 2006, they hosted art by Gondry related to The Science of Sleep.
21, directed by Robert Luketic and starring Kevin Spacey, will open the 2008 SXSW Film Festival. David Hudson has early details on the rest of the lineup at the link.
Mike Jones reviews a few writeups of the Baghdad International Film Festival, which was apparently THE hipster event in Iraq last week. Yes, seriously.
“Ego overmatches imagination in the work of the vast majority of critics, bloggers and editors,” sniffs The Reeler, who has once again declared war on Top Ten lists.
Speaking of lists, the Village Voice/LA Weekly Critics Poll is out. Southland Tales, which placed high on the Best Film lists of the Voice’s J. Hoberman and Nathan Lee, also tied The Bucket List as the year’s Worst Film.
Your Christmas weekend time suck is here, in the form of indieWIRE’s massive 2007 Critics Poll. There Will Be Blood takes top honors, but as usual, the real fun lies in investigating the individual ballots and spotting the idiosyncrasies. Behold Andrew Bujalski’s single vote for Best Supporting Actor! Marvel at the critic who gave almost equal love to Ken Jacobs and Blades of Glory! But before you do, decide whether you’re thrilled or infuriated to see Southland Tales land ten full places ahead of Atonement (I’m the former. I think.)
Speaking of There Will Be Blood, critics poll participant Filmbrain has posted some “sketches, fragments, and other half-baked ideas” about what he declares is “easily the best film of the year.” His key contention: it’s a love letter to Stanley Kubrick.
Tomorrow is Burbanked’s second blogoversy, and he’s celebrating with a ten day party.
Finally, here’s another time suck, if you need a break from all that critic pollery: Marisa Tomei joins Natalie Portman in the ranks of unwitting screencap porn stars. NSFW, via The WoW Report.
If Southland Tales is to survive its Cannes drubbing and crap box office to become the cult classic that it has the potential to be, it will be thanks to two primary factors: in-depth, after-the-fact considerations of the film’s power to seduce even those who want to resist its sloppiness and vulgarity, like this one from Steven Shaviro; and the Justin Timberlake musical number at the center of the film, which is the target of much of Shaviro’s swoon.
Shaviro’s certainly not alone in this–virtually everyone I’ve talked to who finds themselves unable to entirely dismiss Southland Tales talks of that scene, set to “All These Things That I’ve Done” by The Killers. I’ve thought that it was the final image of the scene that really did it for me–Timberlake’s facial expression when the hallucination starts to fade is maybe the only truly felt moment of acting in a film that’s otherwise pretty much about bad acting–but Shaviro nails something about the whole cocoon of it:
It’s that time of year again: Mr. Skin counts down the Top 20 Movie Nude Scenes of 2007. Marisa Tomei takes the top slot (that’s punny, right?) for her work in Before the Devil Knows We’re Dead. The Mr. Skin crew were either really impressed with how well she’s aged since My Cousin Vinny, or they just couldn’t resist the alliterative treat that is “topless Tomei-toes.” I know I can’t. [Via Rex]
Matt Dentler traces Frownland’s road to victory: “It was almost precisely a year ago that I fished Ronnie’s film out of the submissions, put it on, and was instantly hypnotized. For all those filmmakers out there who feel you have to have “connections” and “legacy” to get attention or noticed, Frownland is proof against that.”
Vulture points to an MP3 on Zeon’s Music Blog of “Teen Horniness is Not a Crime”, sung by Sarah Michelle Gellar in character as Southland Tales‘ ambitious porn star Krysta Now. Zeon’s verdict is that it’s “not very good [but] it’s supposed to be a joke anyway so maybe it is intentionally crappy.” Personally, I don’t understand how anyone can resist a lyrical couplet like “‘Cause these statistics do not lie/Just ask those nerds who shot up Columbine/They weren’t getting laid/No.”
Here’s a look at the notable films opening this week that we’ve previously covered here on SpoutBlog:
Redacted: Bill O’Reilly can finally get a look at the film he’s sight-unseen been threatening to boycott, while Magnolia finally gets to put that whole all-press-is-good-press maxim to the test. Here’s my review from Telluride; for a recap on the possibly-contrived battle between director Brian DePalma and producer/distributor Mark Cuban, see here, here and here.
Beowulf: Is director Robert Zemeckis not doing press for this film because he knows it’s a bad idea to compete with the post-Comic-Con gushage over Angelina Jolie’s nakedness?
Smiley Face: Kevin and Paul are big fans of Gregg Araki’s stoner comedy, which came off a successful festival run to be all but abandoned by its distributor. The film opens on one screen in L.A. today before going straight to DVD. Listen to Paul’s interview with Araki here.
Margot at the Wedding: Noah Baumbach’s follow-up to The Squid and the Whale is disappointing, despite Nicole Kidman’s strong performance as a wicked sister. Read the review here.
Could any film ever hope to overcome a festival drubbing like the one that greeted Southland Tales at Cannes 2006? Screened in competition, in an early incarnation clocking in at 2 hours 40 minutes (director Richard Kelly later claimed it had been a rough cut all along, but that’s apparently not how it was billed to the press at the time), Kelly’s follow-up to the slow-burning cult hit Donnie Darkowas roundly, emphatically, infamously booed. Sometime after the first shockwave of bad buzz hit the States, a handful of critics rose to defend Kelly’s vision. The rest of us sat back and waited a year and a half to get a look for ourselves.
Southland Tales may never be able to live down that first, fateful, fatal screening, but you can’t say Richard Kelly didn’t try to reverse the damage; in fact, he spent a good portion of the 18 months following the film’s ill-fated premiere streamlining his disasterpiece. The 2 hour 24 minute cut premiering in theaters tomorrow boasts a newly-fashioned prologue (wherein a July 4th barbecue is interrupted by a mushroom cloud, touching off World War III), a re-recording of Justin Timberlake’s narration (stoney and oblique, but purposefully so), and the exorcism of one or two subplots (Janeane Garofalo used to be in this film; now she is not).
Most auspiciously, Kelly brokered a deal with Sony that required him to shave a sizable chunk off the running time in exchange for their bankrolling of 90 new effects shots. It would seem that this money was put to good use: I’m not someone who usually takes much pleasure from good CGI, but if there’s one thing we should all be able to agree on when it comes to Southland Tales, it’s that the effects are truly special. Particularly in the film’s spectacular final twenty minutes, Southland Tales contains some of the most purely beautiful digital effects that I’ve ever seen on a big screen.
And the rest of it? It really comes down to what you’re willing to let Kelly get away with.
“Comedy is pain and frustration and crushing embarrassment; in other words comedy is much like real life,” writes Dan Leo at NewCritics. His essay, Funny Ha Ha, is not about Andrew Bujalski’s film. It’s mostly about how “the whole trick is to go through the day suffering all one’s usual defeats and calamities and somehow to see yourself as a sitcom character, or, if you’re feeling really grandiose, like a big-screen funny person like Jack Black or Vince Vaughn or Ralph Fiennes.” It’s also about sex.
It’s all part of NewCritics’ Comedy Blogathon, which began yesterday, and continues through Saturday. The idea, according to the invitation email, is to answer the question, “What is the purest comedic moment you have ever experienced?” To participate, you can write your own post on your own blog, include a link to this post on NewCritics, and your entry will be sweept up into the madness. I haven’t decided what I’m going to do yet. I might just review Southland Tales–because if The Rock saying “pimps don’t commit suicide” isn’t pure comedy, I don’t know what is.
Sofia Coppola tries to sell her canned champagne via YouTube.
The Showtime series that brought you voting zombies is moving to NBC.
The stoner comedy of the year is going straight to DVD. How is that a bad thing for stoners?
The extremely slim Natalie Portman unrobed for Wes Anderson’s short film, causing the entire internet to transform into twelve-year old rib cage fetishists.
Paul Thomas Anderson’s hotly anticipated There Will Be Bloodpremiered this week in Austin to rave reviews.
On FilmCouch, Paul and Kevin take a look at movie greed, by way of Wall Street and The Price of Sugar.
The computer containing the script for Francis Ford Coppola’s next project has been stolen.
Rueing the day you sunk your chunk of change into the ApplePaperweight? Jaman is here to help.
Richard Kelly’s re-tooled Southland Tales screened at Harry Knowles’ Fantastic Fest this weekend, and reaction, though still mixed, skewed decidedly more positive than at the film’s infamously disastrous debut at Cannes over a year ago. “Most of the complaints about the film are accurate to varying degrees,” writes Todd Brown at Twitch. “That said, for those who make it through the initial overload of information and can latch on to Kelly’s vibe, Southland is also a dazzlingly smart, funny, and engaging work, one that fuses political fears with apocalyptic religiosity and techno-dread and wraps it all in a glossy, colorful package.”
But Mike Curtis disagrees: “One wonders if the whole thing were just a huge joke on us the audience, the investors, Hollywood, and everyone else desperately watching to see how he’d follow up on Donnie Darko. A big ‘Psych!’ shout out to all of us - and we stand here confused - was this a joke, a mess, or just a failed multi-layered thingamabob?”
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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Oh, 2008 … where has the time all gone to? It seems like just yesterday that we were 
I didn’t see 
Funny how 
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Your Christmas weekend time suck is here, in the form of indieWIRE’s massive 
It’s that time of year again: Mr. Skin counts down the 
Here’s a look at the notable films opening this week that we’ve previously covered here on SpoutBlog:
