I voted for the Cinema Eye Honors for nonfiction film this year, so I was hardly an impartial attendee at last night’s show at the Times Center, where Waltz with Bashir took four awards, prompting the sole representative of the film in attendance, art director David Polonsky, to quip, “They’re giving me trouble at the airport later.” Because of my role in helping to select the winners, I’ll refrain from commenting on the awards themselves (indieWIRE has the full list of winners). As for the show itself, it’s come a long way from last year’s somewhat scrappy installment at the IFC Center. In 2009, the Cinema Eye team gracefully expanded to a much larger venue (and packed the house) while producing, overall, a much tighter program.
For our pre-Oscar show, we wanted to give our predictions of who will take home the little naked men, but we also wanted to give a running commentary on the awards as they happen. We reached a compromise. We’ve decided to put on our own Oscar ceremony, so we can react to our own predictions, all while providing witty and humorous insights. Watch out for a few upsets! Even we were surprised! (We’ll also be providing commentary on the actual show, via twitter, which you can follow right on SpoutBlog).
Karina joins us to talk about live-twittering the Oscars and the Independent Spirit Awards. She also talks about a compelling new documentary called Moving Midway.
Contests: Tell us which movie you think should be turned into a graphic novel, for a chance to win the graphic novel version of Waltz With Bashir. Tell us which film has the best production design of all time, and you could win a companion tome to the forthcoming film, Watchmen. E-mail both to filmcouch (at) spout (dot) com.
As economic woes turn to economic nightmares, comparisons to the Great Depression are a time a dozen. But what about movies? How did the movies of the ’30s respond to the crisis of the day? A series of pre-code Depression era films is being shown now at Film Forum, under the title Breadlines and Champagne. We take a look at American Madness, A Man’s Castle, and Our Daily Bread.
But what of the current crisis? Are there a slew of modern day Depression movies in the works? Maybe. Tom Hanks is rumored to be starring as a pensive barista in an adaptation of the riches-to-rags bestselling book, How Starbucks Saved My Life.
True/False, that annual magical haven for nonfiction lovers in Columbia, Missouri, has announced a portion of their 2009 festival lineup. In addition to some festival circuit usual suspects (Sundance 2009 winners We Live in Public, Rough Aunties, Burma VJ and Afghan Star; LAFF 2008 winner Loot, and the Oscar-nominated Waltz with Bashir), there are a number of sneak previews and premieres that sound, based on their two-sentence pitches, to be well worth a look:
In 10 out of 14 years, the winner of the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Leading Role has gone on to win the Academy Award for Best Actress. If this year marks the 11th such congruence, Meryl Streep will take home the Oscar. Yet there is an odd circumstance with the Academy’s nominations that hurts Streep’s chances. Another one of the Academy’s Best Actress contenders also received a SAG Award Sunday night: Kate Winslet, who won the supporting actress trophy for The Reader. At the Oscars, this role has been recognized as a lead performance, one that is likely a favorite to win.
Yes, it is a strange situation, one that shocked and confused Oscar prognosticators (especially this writer) on Thursday morning. Winslet’s Reader performance was campaigned as a supporting role, and she was recognized as such by the Golden Globes, the Broadcast Film Critics Association, the Chicago Film Critics Association and of course the Screen Actors Guild. A few organizations did nominate her for a lead award for The Reader, though few people take the Satellites seriously, and the BAFTA Awards are different than most in that they permit Winslet to compete against herself in the same category (she is also nominated for Best Leading Actress for Revolutionary Road).
Some now believe the Academy’s deviation will in fact cost Winslet the Oscar she could have won in the supporting field. Either voters will be confused about what film she’s nominated for (unless I’m simply less observant than elderly Academy members, which may indeed be the case), or she will now split the majority vote with Streep and thus allow Anne Hathaway or Melissa Leo to slip ahead (Angelina Jolie is believed to have no shot). Another idea is that voters will dismiss Winslet due to doubts over which category the performance belongs in. But since enough members of the Academy made it a point to nominate her as lead actress in the first place, this is hardly a reasonable theory.
A prolific director of intimate, vitrolic, globally minded narrative shorts, Topaz Adizes got a taste of star studded Hollywood productions, having worked on Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven and Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, before embarking on a terrific run of directorial efforts, including City (2006) and Letting Go (2008). Currently at work on his first feature, a globe trotting multi-strand piece titled Americana, he’s at Sundance this year with a short initially envisioned as a passage in that longer film, Trece anos, which can be seen above. We discuss the usual after the jump. …Read more
The nominations for the 81st Annual Academy Awards were announced this morning, and they likely have upset a large number of people in the comic book geek community. Yes, the most obvious snubs have to do with The Dark Knight, which failed to garner nods for Best Picture, Best Director or even Best Screenplay — yes, obviously Heath Ledger was at least nominated. And at least the comic book adaptation did get a few craft awards, including Best Cinematography. Could we blame the Academy’s usual penchant for Holocaust movies? Perhaps, since The Readerwas a surprise nominee for Best Picture and Best Director. What else was overlooked and what else was shockingly present? My immediate thoughts after the jump:
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. …Read more
The Carpetbagger has posted the nine semi-finalists for the Best Foreign Film Oscar Nomination. Comparing this list to the list of 67 films submitted for consideration by their countries of origin, the only real notable omission I can spot is Italy’s Gomorrah; I’ve sen some bloggy chatter already lamenting the exclusion of Let the Right One In, but that film was passed over for submission by its home country of Sweden in favor of Everlasting Moments (which did make the shortlist). The full list, with links to the films we’ve covered (as you’ll see, we have a lot of catching up to do), after the jump.
The shortlist has been announced for the 2009 Cinema Eye Honors. The list includes a number of titles that many felt were unjustifiably snubbed from the Oscars shortlist, some based on qualification quibbles, including Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, My Winnipeg, The Order of Myths, Stranded: I’ve Come From A Plane That Crashed Into The Mountain, and Waltz With Bashir. Omitted: Dear Zachary, a number of Oscar shortlisted titles including I.O.U.S.A., and each of the top five highest grossing non-fiction films of 2008, including Religulous.
I’ve pasted the full shortlist after the jump with links back to previous coverage of the films on SpoutBlog. Though I haven’t personally seen all of these, between everyone on the Spout team we’ve previously covered all but two.
2008 was not the banner year that ‘07 turned out to be, but there were still plenty of movies worth watching. Sometimes end-of-year lists look like straight Oscar predictions, with little deviance from critic to critic, not so this year. Some of our favorite stuff was not playing in a theatre near you, some of it was. For the record, our complete lists are after the jump.
But first! Wholphin 7 is out now! The geniuses over at McSweeny’s have once again curated a delightful collection of rare and unseen short films. We share our thoughts about a few favorites. One film we both loved, Glory at Sea, is available for free here.
“If they had to do it all over again, would DreamWorks co-founder Steven Spielberg and his partner Stacey Snider have left their lucrative deal at Paramount Pictures, where their slate of films had thrived, if they had foreseen the worsening financial environment?” According to Anne Thompson, DreamWorks is having a lot of trouble raising money during the credit crunch, and Spielberg and Snider may have to settle on a smaller business plan. On her blog, Thompson simplifies things: “But it’s Steven Spielberg! It doesn’t matter. The banks aren’t lending to anybody. It’s sheer bad luck.”
Ari Folman is following up his winning animated doc Waltz With Bashirwith an adaptation of Stanislaw Lem’s sci-fi short story The Futurological Congress, which will begin as live-action then transition to animation. “Think of your favorite young actress. She’ll appear that way at the beginning, and then as the film goes on, she’ll be drawn like she’s 50,” Folman explains. So, like Kate Winslet in The Reader, but as a cartoon rather than with distracting aging makeup.
Barry Sonnenfeld will direct another sci-fi action comedy called The How-To Guide for Saving the World, which sounds like The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy if Arthur and Ford had been able to use their book to twart the Vogon’s demolishon of Earth.
Billy Ray will direct his own adaptation of the supernatural novel Conjure Wife, which has been filmed three times previously. The premise sounds like Bewitched as a horror film.
Adam Shankman, who raised his comedy rep recently with Prop 8: The Musical (and may lower it again now with Bedtime Stories), has added another musical and another f/x extravanza to his pipeline. The former is the high-concept Bob the Musical; the latter is the long-in-works revival of Sinbad.
For fans of relatively offbeat animation, 2008 seems to have been a banner year. Pixar produced perhaps their most acclaimed effort yet with Wall-E, which is drawing considerable heat for a best picture nomination. Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashirthrilled and horrified audiences in Competition in Cannes with subject matter and personal introspection not usually broached by animated films. Yet the most satisfying animated film that surfaced in 2008 may well have been Nina Paley’s delightful Sita Sings The Blues, which marries the tunes of obscure 30’s blues songstress Annette Hanshaw to a retelling, by three hip, Gen-Y Indians, of the Indian myth Ramayana and a mildly autobiographical story of a Seattle-based female cartoonist loosing her husband to his job in India. The film, a nominee for this year’s Gotham Award for the Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You after an impressive festival run that began at this year’s Berlinale, screens at MoMA on Thursday and Saturday. Clearly a dedicated postmodernist, after the jump Paley discusses Sci-Fi channel’s Eureka, Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture and the strange ambiguities of influence.
After being rumored in September ‘07, a Karate Kid remake starring Will Smith’s son Jaden has finally been confirmed by Variety. Was this the longest period between a leak and a legit announcement? Considering the rumor had been followed by news that the elder Smith denied the project and the casting, there was probably just a lot of ironing to do on their deal to bring back the franchise, the latest of which will be set and filmed primarily in China (not Japan??).
Only 14 movies have been submitted for consideration for the Best Animated Feature Oscar, which means there will again be only 3 nominees. Those titles eligible include this past weekend’s box office winner, Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa, as well as Pixar’s Wall-E and the better-be-recognized Waltz with Bashir.
The International Documentary Association announced their nominees for their annual awards today. The five features to get the nod are Kassim the Dream, Stranded, Man on Wire,Young @ Heart, andWaltz With Bashir. It’s an interesting batch of nominees, for sure. For one thing, it excludes some the year’s most seen American documentaries. Though Young @ Heart and Man on Wire made multiple millions and are thus considered nonfiction hits, both of the religion twins, Religulous and Expelled (currently the #2 and #3 highest grossing nonfiction films of the year, respectively, behind U23D) were excluded from the honors. Also interesting is the nod for the mostly animated Waltz with Bashir, which Sony chose to keep in the New York Film Festival rather than pull for a qualifying run.
IDA also announced today that in addition to the career award that they’d previously planned to give to Werner Herzog, the December 5 ceremony will also honor Rob Epstein with the Pioneer Award, and Stefan Forbes, director of my favorite political doc of the year thus far, Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story, will get the Jacqueline Donnet Emerging Filmmaker Award.
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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Tell us which movie you think should be turned into a graphic novel, for a chance to win the graphic novel version of Waltz With Bashir. Tell us which film has the best production design of all time, and you could win a companion tome to the forthcoming film, Watchmen. E-mail both to filmcouch (at) spout (dot) com.
The Carpetbagger
The shortlist has been announced for the 2009 Cinema Eye Honors. The list includes a number of titles that many felt were unjustifiably snubbed from the Oscars shortlist, some based on qualification quibbles, including 
