Each day this week, Christopher Campbell will take a look back at a “classic” film that played the Sundance Film Festival. Today’s installment: Scott Hicks’ Shine(1996).
1996 was a monumental year for independent film. It began with a Sundance Film Festival that, according to Peter Biskind’s book Down and Dirty Pictures “would go down as Ten Days That Shook the Indie World,” because of the tremendous buying frenzy that occurred, including the infamous acquisition of The Spitfire Grill by Castle Rock for $10 million. The year then transpired with a slew of popular specialty titles that boosted business at many arthouse multiplexes while also exposing them as being unsuited for large crowds (the boom in indie film attendance was something I experienced first hand, having that year begun my first career at NYC’s Angelika Film Center). And the year ended (in 14-month Hollywood terms) with an unprecedented number of specialty films receiving nominations for Academy Awards.
Most astonishing, certainly, was the fact that four of the five Oscar nominees for Best Picture were specialty titles, one of which had been discovered at Sundance. The film, Shine, might not have had a chance at such an honor, however, if Miramax and Harvey Weinstein had gotten their way. …Read more
In the new movie Eagle Eye, three characters participate in a re-creation of the famous crop duster sequence from Hitchcock’s North by Northwest. Only the plane from NbN has been replaced with an electrical tower and power lines, and it takes Shia LaBeouf, Michelle Monaghan and Anthony Azizi to perform Cary Gran’t part (Azizi also substitutes for the pilot and the farmer, I guess).
Such an homage is not surprising coming from director D.J. Caruso, whose last picture, Disturbia, is currently involved in a lawsuit for being an uncredited remake of Hitch’s Rear Window. This time, fortunately, Caruso borrows enough from other films, including Hitch’s second version of The Man Who Knew Too Much, 2001: A Space Odyssey and I, Robot, to keep from being sued by any single party. Eagle Eye will likely also remind audiences of The Dark Knight, if not for the similar cell phone surveillance tactics then for Caruso’s even less capable talent for directing car chases.
While Caruso does a good job at allowing his audience to compare him to better filmmakers (yes, even I, Robot’s Alex Proyas), he doesn’t give us the world’s worst redo of the crop duster bit (that is probably this). But he also doesn’t come anywhere close to giving us the best. And for such a famous scene that is so widely studied and imitated, giving us merely another so-so re-creation is very disappointing. After the jump, you’ll find some of my favorite tributes to North by Northwest, mostly paying homage to that one beloved sequence.
Variety’s story on the death of Anthony Minghella has the first details on cause of death, and sadly, it appears that it was unforeseen. The filmmaker apparently “suffered a brain hemorrhage at 5 a.m. Tuesday morning at Charing Cross Hospital in London, where he had undergone a routine operation on his neck.”
Spout interviewed Minghella when his last released film, Breaking and Entering, had its U.S. premiere at the 2006 Denver Film Festival. You can watch that interview above.
UPDATE: The Guardian says the “routine operation” was motivated by “cancer of the tonsils and neck.” The surgery took place last week and the prognosis looked good, until “he developed a haemorrhage last night and they were not able to stop it.”
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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Each day this week, Christopher Campbell will take a look back at a “classic” film that played the Sundance Film Festival. Today’s installment: Scott Hicks’ Shine (1996).
