With a few more days left before the Oscar nominations are revealed, it is time to look at what the non-professionals anticipate will be among those contenders announced Thursday morning. Last Monday, we posted our own predictions for the Academy Award nominees and invited readers to weigh in with their own forecasts. A lot of comments concentrated on what shouldn’t happen, like The Dark Knight shouldn’t be nominated for Best Picture and Dustin Lance Black shouldn’t be nominated for his screenplay for Milk. And apparently The Curious Case of Benjamin Button could be this year’s Dreamgirls. However, there were some interesting trends among the many who chimed in. Check out some highlights after the jump.
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• The Perfect Ratio isolates a heretofore unanalyzed aspect of The Wackness‘ appeal. “[Olivia] Thirby plays the indie-standard ideal female, what I like to call the “Quirky Aggressive”…Advice: Quirky Aggressives are only beloved in indie films. Please do not try to be one in real life…For the first few months your dude will be all like, “OMG, you’re so cool and funny! You’re not like other girls!” because you said something about giving “Nietzche a BlowJ” or some Quirky Aggressive-esque bullshit, but then after about six months the charm wears off…”
• “I like to watch movies in a theater, on a big screen. At worst, I like to watch them on television, on a smaller screen,” Michael Tully disclaims, before reviewing the latest offerings at YouTube’s Screening Room. “Having said all of this, perhaps I’m not the right person to write about [the Screening Room]. Or in a strange twist of logic, maybe this makes me the perfect person for the job!”
• Blah blah blah Inglorious Bastards, blah blah blah believe it when I see it and only care on a much colder day in hell than that.

• At Cinematical, Erik Davis notes that although some bloggers fretted that Sony Pictures Classics would allow The Wackness to “disappear in limited release … and be eaten by a Cabbage Patch Kid, or whatever,” the film actual opening weekend “numbers [were] pretty frickin’ awesome.” And yet, are said fretting bloggers “congratulating SPC on a job well done? Nope. Not at all.”
• Nick Schwartz is unemployed. “Or, ‘between things,’ as I’ve been told to say,” he writes at ShortEnd Magazine. This leaves him lots of time to watch movies from the Brooklyn Public Library, read James Agee, and contemplate conflict avoidance: “I’m not some kind of idealistic idiot. ‘Shut The Fuck Up!’ might be some kind of bizarre, fanciful, Lumet-inspired concept of how New Yorkers are supposed to handle conflict.”
• Who would make a final color-corrected master of their movie so that 70% of the theatrical audience wouldn’t be able to see the colors properly?” asks David S. Cohen at Thompson on Hollywood. “Apparently, the Wachowski Brothers.”
• At Bright Lights After Dark, C. Jerry Kutner sends a Happy Birthday message to Janet Leigh, via appraisal of her little-seen, dancing-in-the-Manhattan-streets musical triumph, the Bob Fosse-choreographed My Sister Eileen. See a related clip above.
  

Note: This review appeared in slightly different form during the Tribeca Film Festival.

I saw The Wackness last spring at a special screening held for the critics participating in the Moving Image Institute last week. Afterwards, Sony Classics president Michael Barker was asked about critical response to the film thus far. Barker disclaimed that “most major critics” hadn’t yet reviewed the film, but then said something surprisingly candid about the makeup of the film’s detractors. “What’s the demographic of the critics who don’t like it?” he began, starting a statement with a question in expert post-Robert Evans mogul style. “Female. Single. Mothers with teenage kids––they don’t like the movie.”

Who ever is doing research over at Sony deserves a raise. I fit just two of those descriptors, and I don’t like it, either.

Maybe it’s true that even professional critics struggle to get beyond their own natural demographic biases. A certain (very young, very male) segment of the film blogosphere lashed out at Sony for buying The Wackness towards the close of Sundance––not because they didn’t like the film, but because they loved the film so much that they were moved to protect it from what they saw as the risk of a mis-managed mainstream release. I thought this campaign was absolutely inane at the time—in the virtually non-existent narrative buying climate of Sundance 2008, the boys should have been happy that their pet project was picked up at all––but having finally seen the thing, I’m at no loss to explain why those writers have embraced this film. With its full-on, fully uncritical glorification of adolescent male self-indulgence and permanent immaturity, The Wackness is a kind of cinematic embodiment of certain tendencies that make the sub-AICN movie web go round.

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Jonathan Levine’s crowd-pleasing (in terms of audience awards at festivals, not in terms of uplifting Hollywood endings) film The Wackness opens in limited release tomorrow. In case you haven’t noticed from the ads and the soundtrack, it takes place in the New York City of 1994, a special time for the place because Rudy Giuliani had just become mayor and was beginning to clean up the city, Goldie Wilson-stylee (OK, not really Goldie Wilson-stylee, but who doesn’t love a good BTTF reference?).

NYC in the ’90s was quite special for me. It’s when I moved here. And moved here a second time (I’ve since moved here a third time), and watching The Wackness made me nostalgic for the decade. It also made me think of some of the other films from or set in that period, a number of which kind of define my experience with the city.

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Yesterday, we presented a clip pretending to be a film from the ’60s. Now, here’s a clip that’s pretending to be from the ’90s. Are the ’00s really that bad that we can’t own up to making films in this decade? Perhaps, but I still love both retro recreations. Today’s video is part of the viral marketing campaign for The Wackness, a movie set in 1994. And fitting for its period, the promotional clip is in the form of a mock public-access show hosted by the film’s protagonist, teenage drug dealer Luke Shapiro (as played by the film’s star, Josh Peck).

It’s been a long time since I last watched public-access television (though it had to be more recently than ‘94), so I never thought about the idea that it was almost like the predecessor to YouTube, on which we are now all watching this fake public access spot. Think about it: Wayne’s World today would be about two guys taping an internet-based talk show; Tom Green would have been famous first on YouTube; and ten years ago, all your favorite YouTube stars would have had to go to the local college in order to broadcast themselves. Only they wouldn’t have reached a fraction of the population they reached through the internet.

Paramount may soon be under investigation by the MPAA for allegedly marketing inappropriate content to children. Specific TV ads for Iron Man and Drillbit Taylor have been highlighted by the Better Business Bureau as being targeted to kids aged 12 and under. Apparently this isn’t kosher since both movies are rated PG-13. Of course, anyone who has been to or worked at a movie theater knows, there’s no stopping kids under the age of 13 from buying tickets to such movies. But that doesn’t mean it’s suitable for PG-13-rated fare to be directly marketed to the younger audience.

Both movies have been advertised during Nickelodeon shows Zoey 101 and Drake & Josh, which are primarily viewed by preteens and other youths. Stephanie Sanchez at IESB.net, reporting on this story, adds that the MPAA should also address Paramount’s marketing of Strange Wilderness, which she saw advertised during Spongebob Squarepants and Drake & Josh while watching the programs with her kids, aged 4 and 6. Considering that comedy is Rated R, it would seem obvious that it shouldn’t be targeted to the Nick crowd, but perhaps Paramount has trouble differentiating demographics when advertising through sister media (Paramount and Nickelodeon are both owned by Viacom).

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Of the 14 films that I saw during Tribeca Film Festival, only three were so under-accomplished that they begged the question of why they were programmed in the first place. This is an improvement over past years. Meanwhile, I saw four films that qualify as serious discoveries. With the exception of Shane Meadows’ Somers Town, over which I’ve already raved, these films are imperfect but thrillingly risky, and fascinating in their flaws. It’s maybe worth noting that only one of these titles arrived in Tribeca as a World Premiere, and that film, The Guest of Cindy Sherman, is set and was made just blocks away from the festival’s theoretical (but no longer physical) home. It’s shocking that there isn’t currently a festival in New York City that’s seriously focused on celebrating locally-produced work. Tribeca, so in need of a refined identity, might want to take note that the niche is up for grabs.

My notes on each of the 14 films, in order of preference, follow after the jump.

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I saw The Wackness (which has its New York premiere tomorrow at the Tribeca Film Festival) at a special screening held for the critics participating in the Moving Image Institute last week. Afterwards, Sony Classics president Michael Barker was asked about critical response to the film thus far. Barker disclaimed that “most major critics” hadn’t yet reviewed the film, but then said something surprisingly candid about the makeup of the film’s detractors. “What’s the demographic of the critics who don’t like it?” he began, starting a statement with a question in expert post-Robert Evans mogul style. “Female. Single. Mothers with teenage kids––they don’t like the movie.”

Who ever’s doing research over at Sony deserves a raise. I fit just two of those descriptors, and I don’t like it, either.

Maybe it’s true that even professional critics struggle to get beyond their own natural demographic biases. A certain (very young, very male) segment of the film blogosphere lashed out at Sony for buying The Wackness towards the close of Sundance––not because they didn’t like the film, but because they loved the film so much that they were moved to protect it from what they saw as the risk of a mis-managed mainstream release. I thought this campaign was absolutely inane at the time—in the virtually non-existent narrative buying climate of Sundance 2008, the boys should have been happy that their pet project was picked up at all––but having finally seen the thing, I’m at no loss to explain why those writers have embraced this film. With its full-on, fully uncritical glorification of adolescent male self-indulgence and permanent immaturity, The Wackness is a kind of cinematic embodiment of certain tendencies that make the sub-AICN movie web go round.

…Read more

Egotastic has a couple of artfully lit but not particularly safe for work clips from Elegy, which feature a naked Penelope Cruz in bed with Ben Kingsley. I don’t know much about this film––it premiered at Berlinale, where Jurgen Fauth described how Cruz’s “breasts even become a plot point”––but surely, this is the most pre-release attention ever given to anything directed by Isabel Coixet, and that’s probably ultimately a good thing. Still, it points to an alarming trend of indie/art films which position the 65 year-old Kingsley as a sex symbol to much, much younger women. If it takes three examples to make a trend, we can easily find the other two in Kingsley’s next film to hit the American marketplace, Sundance crowd pleaser The Wackness.

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The Onion’s A.V. Club says this deserves to “float around the ‘ol blogosphere,” and I agree. Because if we can get enough people to support experimental films based on scenes from TV’s Full House, then one day I’ll be able to watch Candace Cameron and Dave Coullier on a big screen at Anthology Film Archives — oh wait, that’s already happening this very week with Michael Robinson’s Light is Waiting (GreenCine has a review from its NYFF screening). Well, then, I await an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art next. Really, that’s where our high art should be going: backwards, and glancing at the low art of the past. I mean, this is the year in which we see Ben Kingsley make out with Mary-Kate Olsen (in The Wackness), so it’s obviously a time for mixing cultures by blurring the lines between high and low cultural artifacts.

Just to give you what little background on this video is known (or needs to be known): it took artist Paul Slocum three years to make, and all of those actors reenacting the scene were paid. I’d love to find out if some kind of grant funded the project, because the endower surely needs a medal. Or a kick in the pants.

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Even those who were less than enthused by Jonathan Levine’s The Wackness when the film debuted at Sundance had good things to say about the film’s soundtrack, which uses early-to-mid-90s hip hop to set the mood of New York City circa 1994. The Playlist’s post on music used in the film gives me the justification to do something I’ve wanted to do for my entire professional film blogging career: post the video for Biz Markie’s “Just a Friend.” Sure, The Wackness might have Mary-Kate Olsen and Ben Kingsley making out in a phone booth, but the story of Biz and a girl named BlahBlahBlah is a true romantic epic.

• The Tribeca Film Festival continues its mission to wow us with quantity over discovery by booking a full sidebar of festival leftovers like Savage Grace (which will have been on the festival circuit for about 50 weeks by the time it hits lower Manhattan courtesy of Robert DeNiro and American Express) and The Wackness (which will make its multiplex debut via Sony Classics a month or two after its Tribeca screening). But, as always, the festival’s Restored and Rediscovered program offers hope, including screenings of new prints of Fellini’s Toby Dammit, and Curtis Harrington’s Cat People–inspired, young-Dennis Hopper-starring Night Tide.
• While we’re on the topic of festival exports: Nanette Burstein’s American Teen will open the 2008 edition of Sundance at BAM on May 29.
• Would it even be news that a new Patrick Swayze movie is having its world premiere in Austria, if Swayze’s battle with cancer wasn’t currently grade-A tabloid grist, and if his health didn’t preclude his attendance? Yes––but only because Uwe Boll is distributing the movie.

As a former fat guy, I have to salute actor Ron Lester, who went on the Today Show yesterday showing off his slim figure (see the segment here). You may remember Lester as the really, really fat high school football player “Billy Bob” from Varsity Blues, or his identical character from Not Another Teen Movie. Back in 2001, he lost 315lbs. — 43lbs. of it extra skin that had to be removed — and even lost 2 inches worth of height (thanks to the weight lost from his head). He did this by gastric bypass surgery and it was primarily for heath reasons, but damn if he doesn’t look much better, too.

The problem is, according to the person submitting this story to Fark.com, he may now be handsomer but he may also have cost himself his acting career. Obviously he had been employed in the past for his physique more than his acting talent, and now he’s missing that thing that guaranteed his being hired (his only significant movie post-surgery was Karate Dog). Certainly he’d rather be alive, though, than typecast. It’s not like he just went out and got plastic surgery thinking he’d be better off in an industry obsessed with good looks. But I did immediately think of Jennifer Grey and Meg Ryan as two prime examples of how physical changes, which were intended to be favorable, ended up more damaging career-wise. …Read more