Two days ago, the movies lost a giant talent who did as much to define the moviegoing era in which he worked as anyone before or behind the camera.  You probably didn't know his name, but there's no doubt that you knew his voice.  Don LaFontaine was "the trailer guy" whose booming baratone voice invited us to join him "In a world where..." over and over in a career that lasted four decades.  It wasn't just that trailers changed during LaFontaine's life:  they shaped themselves around his talent, that voice that held within it all the possibility of greatness that stirs within us when we imagine an unseen film and think "That's gonna be AWESOME!"  Time was that the trailer was a series of clips linked by huge, hyperbolous titles ("40 YEARS IN THE MAKING!") and perhaps an announcer enthusiastically reading the names of the cast and promising "The feel good romp of Nineteen Sixty-Six!"  But through LaFontaine's work, the trailer became not just a live-action one-sheet, but instead an expression of potential, and attempt to get you to mainline all a movie could be for two high-intensity minutes.  And during that same era, the High Concept became king.  Blame/Credit Lucas, Spielberg or Jerry Bruckheimer all you want, but it was Don LaFontaine who persuaded us that it wasn't just that you could explain a movie in 30 seconds:  you could FEEL it too.  Did we often feel let down by those titles he persuaded us would be so cool?  Sure, how couldn't we be?  They were only movies after all, with no booming voice there to tell us that "Now, as time runs out, one man must stand for something or lose everything!"  And what could ever actually be that cool?

In the last few years, people became more aware of the impact his work had on them in part thanks to a fun Geiko ad and his self-parodying appearances on Family Guy.  I've been doing a (kinda lame) Don LaFontaine impression for years, but only about a decade ago learned who I was actually mimicking, thanks to the high-profile part he took in the super-awesome TV campfest Beyond Belief:  Fact or Fiction.  But whether we "knew" him or not, we were all fans, and paid homage every time we ever hustled to get to a theater in time for the trailers.  He was a giant in his own time, and the movies of the future  will never look quite as good without him.  I'm glad I lived In a World Where Don LaFontaine plied his trade.  Rest in peace, Don.  I'm sure the Afterlife's gonna rock.

8/29/08

I know it's hardly a new cinematic advance, but I'd never caught a mainstream movie at an IMAX location because the exercise seemed kinda pointless.  Yeah, the screen is huge, but so is the ticket price.  And the movie in question is the same regardless of size.  Not so in the case of The Dark Knight, roughly 1/5 of which was actually shot with IMAX cameras, so I decided to get my third look at the Summer's uber-blockbuster at the Select Medical IMAX Theater at Harrisburg, PA's Whittaker Center for Science and the Arts (I assume all IMAX locations are similar mouthsful).  And I was not disappointed.

In its' IMAX form, the movie toggles back and forth between two ratios, the theatrical 2.35:1 projected across the middle of the screen like a letterboxed DVD, and the Good Stuff projected in a square that stretches to your local IMAX's full towering height.  The regular movie is quite large, larger, I'm sure, than you've seen it before, but it's the IMAX footage that's worth plunking down your excessive ticket price for.  It's clear like nothing you've seen, and the depth is stunning.  As Batman soars through the skies of Gotham City and Hong Kong, you'll be forgiven a bit of vertigo even as you sit snug in your seat.

So, what's in IMAX?  Mostly three large Joker-related setpieces:  the bank-robbery opening, the action sequence when Harvey Dent's prison transport is in transit, and the Batman vs. Joker climax.  Other than that, most exteriors and a few stray shots such as the montage of images that follow a key character's death and Commissioner Gordon's rousing speech at the end.  It can be odd to go to the full IMAX ratio for a single establishing shot and then right back to widescreen:  it'll be something when somebody gets crazy enough to shoot a whole movie this way someday.

So other than ooohs and aaahs, what does one get out of watching the IMAX Dark Knight?  Clarity, for one thing:  Christopher Nolan's movie is quite subtle for a big-ticket blockbuster, and it's nice to be able to study the frame in such detail so all the little bits and pieces of the Joker's plans and Batman's counterattacks can be seen moving point to point to point.  Plus, there's the joy of seeing great acting (some of the year's best) with the ability to study all the little nuances of the actors faces filling your entire field of vision.

And a hundred-foot-high Two-Face is delightfully hideous

A final thought on the movie, having had the opportunity to pile on a couple extra viewings since filing my original review.  I think some people misunderstand a key aspect of The Joker's character:  he's a force of the universe, pure chaos personified, and we never get to know him in any way other than by watching his actions.  He talks, A LOT, but what he says is always for effect.  There's no insight into his backstory or motivation to be found in his ever-shifting explanations for his facial scars, his talk of "knowing" the people he kills in their final moments or his talk to the wounded Harvey about how he's not one of the "schemers" because every one of these speeches is designed to move the person he's talking to like a piece on a chessboard.  The Joker is always playing, and he's a master of psychology.  But for the movie's purposes, what he really is is a mirror.  He can't make you do anything you're not willing to do yourself.  Well, expect maybe die.

Did I mention the IMAX sound is really cool?  I mean shake you in your seat cool.  $13.00 ticket cool.

Cool.

8/10/08

Well, what do you know:  as of today, Shrek 2 has gone from being inexplicably the third highest-grossing movie of all time to inexplicably being the forth highest-grossing movie of all time.  The Dark Knight has shot toward the all-time #1 ranking with unprecidented speed, within 20 million of 2nd place Star Wars (you heard me, Lucasphilles, no Episode designations for Original Trilogy movies on this site!) and within 160 million of all-time champ Titanic.  There's really no reason to believe the Batman blockbuster can run down James Cameron's epic romance, but it should get closer than anyone thought possible.  Its' weekend-to-weekend depreciations are slowing down (from 52% to 42% to 39%) suggesting a leggy run into the fall is possible.  But even if Knight is the major Oscar contender some believe it to be (and how refreshing would the Academy thinking that kind of outside the box be?), it'll be long out on DVD by that time, preventing an Oscar bounce that could cause it to surge to the title.

Either way, we should rejoice about this much:  The Dark Knight is one more movie that's among the all-time Top 10 blockbusters because people actually loved it.  The current top 10 leans so heavily toward movies (the aforementioned Shrek sequel, plus the Dead Man's Chest follow-up to Pirates of the Carribbean and two chapters in the Star Wars Prequel trilogy) coasting on people's love for their predecessors.  It's a fact of modern box office life that we all rush out to the theater so quickly that most of a movie's fate is decided before anybody knows whether it's any good or not, and it's the nature of the movie geek to feel an itch to see a letdown title like Spider-Man 3 more than once trying to will it to quality.  But I do hate to see mediocrity rewarded so often and so strenuously.  So it's nice to let the Knight take its' historic victory lap, joining Titanic, Star Wars, ET The Extra Terrestrial, Spider-Man and Lord of the Rings:  The Return of the King as the top-grossing movies that didn't leave us cursing hype.

If some of you guys wanted to skip a 5th or 6th viewing to see Swing Vote, I wouldn't exactly complain, but hey, you can't win 'em all.

7/30/08

The Truth is out there, and it's not good.  As a loyal X-Files fan back to the day the longest-running network sci-fi series premiered, I did my duty last Friday and left work early to catch a 2:30 showing of the first new Mulder and Scully adventure in 6 years, The X-Files:  I Want to Believe.  It was clear at the time that precious few of my fellow X-Philles had joined me, but I was duly shocked to see the box office returns:  $10,021,753 in its' first three days, less, I suspect, than 20th Century Fox had hoped for on Friday alone.

Does this mean the end of the franchise?  Probably, at least for a decade or so.  But it'll be a shame to see Chris Carter and company be unable to have a reckoning with their mythology's finish line:  an alien invasion coinciding with the end of the Mayan calendar in 2012 (and let me go on the record as saying that having been rooked already by Frank Black and his Millennium Group pals, I'm not falling for the notion that the world will end at that time, no matter how many upcoming blockbusters tell me so).  I'd love to say that the fans "deserve" that grand finale, but we all know this is a business, and when we don't buy our tickets, we get what we deserve.  Yes, I Want to Believe is something a little different, a moody meditation on facing the future in troubled times that's not only virtually mythology-free, but even a little light on paranormal activity of any kind.  But the fact is that if you as an X-Phille want the franchise to continue, you have to go to see the movies.  Perhaps robust DVD sales might allow that 2012 sequel to get the green light, but I doubt it.  And I'm saddened.

But even if we'll never see Fox Mulder turn back that alien threat that's dominated his entire adult life, I Want to Believe provides he and his partner (now in all senses of the word) Dana Scully with some quality emotional closure:  and for my money, that's reason enough for fans burned by the show's brutal final seasons to seek it out while they still can.

6/7/08

I love going to the movies.  Not just seeing movies on the big screen, but the whole theater thing.  I love buying the tickets, getting concessions, making the trip, the communal experience with the other patrons (OK, once in a while that one's a pain, but you can always move to a new seat...).  And I really love going to different theaters.  The nooks and crannys of every different theater I know, and even all the different screens of the different multiplexes, fascinate me.  I've heard a lot of people say that every modern theater is the same.  I think they're nuts.  But there's very little writing done about theaters, and I'm gonna do something about that, for my own little corner of the cinematic universe.  Today I begin the pretentiously titled The Theaters Project, an irregular series of articles I'll be doing about the theaters that make up my movie universe.  What they're like, for those interested in going, the things maybe only I notice, and the memories I have of going there.  I really enjoyed writing the first entry, about Gratz, PA's Sky-Vu Drive-In.  Hopefully you'll enjoy tapping into my brain's database of useless movie theater info.

6/6/08

If you follow the site regularly (how many people actually do that is unknown...) you've probably noticed the slowing of updates over the last few months, particularly where the Blog was concerned.  I've had an outside writing project (one I could actually end up getting paid for) taking up a lot of my time, and so for the site, I've been limited to trying my best to stay as caught up as possible on reviews.  With yesterday's posting of Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay (which I actually saw back on April 27), I am finally caught up on the reviews, and hopefully will be able to stay that way for a while.  This allows me to take a little time to catch you up on some things I haven't had time to mention:

-Probably the coolest thing that's ever happened where the site was concerned:  on May 13, I received an e-mail from Jim Chelossi, the inventor of the paper coffee cup sleeve credited to Patrick Dempsey's character in Made of Honor.  Apparently, he'd been unaware that a movie with a character who'd invented his invention existed, and found out on this site.  I don't think he was planning to sue or anything, but he suggested that he'd probably go to see the movie now.  Of course, since it's not very good, I should probably feel guilty about that.

-Earlier this year, I mentioned that I'd applied for membership in the Online Film Critics Society, so it's only fair that I mention that the application was rejected.  The form e-mail I got assured me that most members have to apply more than once, and this site is only 18 months old.  Depending upon how that project I alluded to above goes, my priorities might shift, but I can always apply again next year.  Hope, luckily, springs eternal.

-The last few weeks have seen the long-overdue return to duty of the single biggest influence on this site, my and a whole lot of other people's all-time favorite film critic, Roger Ebert.  Two years ago this month, surgical complications imperiled his life and sent him into months of rehabilitation before a partial return late last year that ended abruptly with more complications from a subsequent surgery early this year.  The voice that so famously debated the late, great Gene Siskel on TV throughout my childhood has been silenced, replaced by an Anthony Daniels-sounding computer contraption.  But I've seen him in TV interviews and he seems to have lost none of his love of life and the movies, and the greatest movie-related prose known to man once again flows from his fingertips.  For anybody who knows only his TV work, you owe it to yourself to check out www.rogerebert.com, where decades of reviews and features are archived.  The site is also home to the delightfully curmudgeonous Jim Emmerson, who began as its' editor but gamely filled in for Ebert on as many movies as he could bear to see during his absence and maintains an intriguing blog that's about 70,000 times more detailed than this one.  The site began as a simple home for the Ebert archive, but during the recent crises has grown to include Emmerson and Roger's wife Chaz, who recently traveled to Cannes to file letters to him about what she'd seen.  That's always been the wonder of Ebert's appeal:  he's delightfully pompous and will be the first to tell you he knows more about the movies than you do (which in my case, I do not dispute), but is also a squishy humanist who knows how to enjoy junk when it's good junk.  He's pretty much every movie fan's know-it-all buddy, and I've learned over the last couple years that the whole moviegoing experience isn't quite as much fun without being able to compare notes with him afterwards.  Welcome back, Roger!

There are some other topics I'd like to hit at greater length and hopefully the next few weeks will allow me a little more blogging time and hopefully reward the patience of those who've become really tired of the early April blog entry that's been on my opening page for the last two months.

4/6/08

I awoke this morning to the sad news that Charlton Heston had passed away.  I'm sure the last five years, after his diagnosis with Alzheimer's, were very difficult for him and his family.  I respect, and in some ways appreciate, their desire to keep the details of that time as close to their vests as they have since his announcement of the condition back in 2002.  But I will always remember him for his vitality, because he may very well have been the greatest pure Movie Star who ever lived, able to bring limitless energy and presence to larger-than-life roles as Biblical Legends, US Presidents and Sci-Fi Heroes.  Right up there with William Shatner among the actors with the most utterly distinctive speaking cadences, he had a way of taking good lines and turning them into instant catchphrases.  Practically everything he says in my favorite Heston vehicle, Planet of the Apes, is still regularly quoted, right alongside "It's people! Soylant Green is people!" and a less famous, but personal favorite: The Omega Man's "Build coffins, that's all you'll need."  OK, one more:  I'm a total sucker for his particular delivery of his Beneath the Planet of the Apes exit line:  "It's... DOOMsday!".  His first really iconic role came in that most larger-than-life of movie spectacles, Cecil B. DeMille's 1956 remake of his own The Ten Commandments.  It's absurd, it's outrageous, and it swings for the fences in every single frame:  no other stars could have pulled off its' eternal struggle between Moses and Rameses but Heston and Yul Brynner.

Like many similarly scaled stars, Heston couldn't always find vehicles fitting his talents, so he spent much of his career enlivening movies that, truth be told, weren't all that great.  Solar Crisis and Alaska are two times I was particularly grateful to have him around in the middle of dreck.  But sometimes those B-movies turned out to be winners, too, like his 1980 showdown with Palace's favorite B-movie star, Nick Mancuso in Mother Lode.  The last time US audience saw him, in the agreeably goofy 2001 Jean-Claude Van Damme adventure The Quest, he had the same spunk and grit as ever, and that same year his cameo as a vengeful ape patriarch was the highlight of Tim Burton's misbegotten Planet of the Apes remake (his human-hating exit line "Damn them!  Damn them all the Hell!" perfectly reversed the iconic close of the original film and just generally sent me into geek spasms).  His final film, 2003's My Father, Rua Alguem 5555 disappeared somewhere along the European Festival circuit and has never been seen in the US.

I know there are some for whom Charlton Heston the actor will forever be eclipsed by Heston the activist, proud Republican and NRA President.  It is, after all, the nature of too many of my fellow liberals to be tolerant of any lifestyle choice except conservative politics.  But today I mourn the passing of one of the last Old School movie stars, who never met scenery he wouldn't chew or a movie he couldn't make better just by filling it up with his sheer charisma.  There's no enduringly squishy image of Charlton Heston to linger on:  his best characters were angry, bitter, Men's Men with no time for sentiment.  So I'll simply close on the greatest words he ever uttered:  "You maniacs!  You blew it up!  Oh, damn you!  Damn you all to Hell!"  Pan back, fade to black, and just listen to the waves crash against the shore.  We'll miss you, Chuck.

2/25/08

I have come here to bury No Country For Old Men, not to praise it, but I will say this about the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences' pick for the Best Picture of 2007:  it was better than Crash.  And the Oscar show built around its' coronation was one of the best in years, tight, modest and virtually gaffe-free.  Once again, Jon Stewart proved to be a fine host, one who knows how to keep the evening moving (way to get us East Coasters in bed before midnight!) and to grab hold of those moments when the show is really working.  It's hard to imagine I'd be this satisfied with an Oscar broadcast that peaked with the Best Original Song race, but a fine race it was, with quality performances of five worthy nominees and then a victory by the only one whose movie I hadn't seen.  But who could have argued against Once's "Falling Slowly" after Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová nailed it so spectacularly?  And then for Stewart to correct the orchestra's faux pas of playing Irglová off the stage by bringing her back out to say a few words was just perfect.  The Daily Show host also killed with a first-rate monologue (one that included surprisingly and mercifully few political jokes).  There were few truly memorable outfits (the one theme that seemed to dominate the fashion part of the evening was distractingly off-center necklaces), and the hastily written babble uttered by the presenters was notable primarily for its' lunkheaded banality.

But the winners were in fine form:  a shortened awards season kept the number of speeches that seemed over-rehearsed to a minimum.  The Coen Brothers did the thing I most appreciate from victors whose movie I didn't care for:  they never once suggested that their film had saved the world or (as star Josh Brolin did at the SAG awards) that I was an idiot.  Best Actor Daniel Day-Lewis was gracious and poised as always, while Best Actress Marion Cotillard cornered the market on Upset Glee.  The biggest shock of the evening had to be Tilda Swinton's Best Supporting Actress win.  Although I liked Amy Ryan's Gone Baby Gone performance better, Swinton was also excellent in Michael Clayton and I've always been a fan of her work, so it was an exciting moment coupled with a wonderfully dry and witty speech.  Javier Bardem, who gave in to the self-important vibe of the evening at the SAGs, here was just the opposite.  His words to his mother in Spanish were a sweet Oscar moment from a man who'd claimed the award by portraying the year's scariest psychopath.  And kuddos to Diablo Cody, a wonderful story all her own, for knowing the exact moment to eject from her Best Original Screenplay speech (when she was just starting to break down) rather than make a spectacle of herself.  I got 6 of 8 of my predictions right, missing only the two actresses.

Odd that the evening included no clips from the nominated films, but silly montages were also kept to a minimum.  The joke about montages of binoculars and people waking up from bad dreams would have been funnier had the show not felt the need to do a montage of bees to celebrate the forgettable and unnominated Bee Movie (apparently forgetting Stewart's earlier comment about Norbit's makeup nomination that the Academy tends to shy away from films that aren't good).  Perhaps what made the show work best was producer Gil Cates decision to almost entirely do away with nonsense:  no impressionistic dance companies giving us the nominated costumes, no opening sequence cutting Stewart into clips from There Will Be Blood.  And for those of us who've been underwhelmed by recent Best Picture winners (and contenders, for that matter), there was the nice run through the 79 previous Best Pictures reminding us of two key facts.  1)About half of them are now acknowledged as no better than mediocre, and 2)most cycles of Best Picture genres (the Important Movies of the late 40's, the musicals of the 60's, the period epics of the 90's) run no longer than 4 or 5 years.  So hopefully we're just about to turn the page from dreary quasi-thrillers.  Luckily, the next Coen Brothers movie (Burn After Reading) is going to be a comedy.  It wouldn't hurt the next Best Picture to lighten up as well.

2/14/08

While it's not exactly Peace on Earth or anything, the once seemingly unreachable goal of Peace in Hollywood has been achieved:  the Writers Guide of America has ended its' 3 month-long strike and work has resumed on screenplays that probably desperately need it.  While the strike's effect on TV was swift, hard and easily quantified, the damage it's done to the movies of the next few years will be harder to measure.  Bear in mind that every film before a camera for the last 3 months was there without a writer, and if even 10% of screenplays are in their finished form on the first day of shooting, it's a lot.  Plus, the next wave of productions (starting with those rushing forward to complete principal photography before a possible actors strike at the end of June) have lost valuable time to be fine-tuned.  I'd imagine that this fall we'll start playing that game of taking every off story beat, every tin-eared line of dialog, and every obvious twist and wondering:  "Was that crap because there was no writer around to make it better, or was it just crap for the usual reasons?"  In most cases, we'll never know for sure.

As for the deal itself, you'll never find me begrudging creative people the fruits of their labors.  I think we're all hard-wired one of two different ways:  either we side with The Talent or with The Man, and I'm not one to be seen anywhere near The Man unless He's cutting me a check.  The studios still take in an amazing percentage of the income from everything that follows a movie's actual theatrical release and I'm glad the WGA was able to get a foothold in the revenue from online distribution, particularly since if you thought this strike was bad, imagine how bad the next one would have to be to pry loose any of the billions the studios will be making online by then.  As a TV viewer, I've suffered acutely and as a movie fan I will suffer the pinpricks of this strike for years.  But the next time I schedule a paid day off from my day job, you won't hear me complaining about the fundamental right to Collective Bargaining and the occasional painful work stoppage that comes along with it.

Welcome back, writers.  Now do better!

1/28/08

Am I the only one for whom it just felt wrong for the Screen Actors' Guild to hold a glitzy awards gala at the same time they've supported the WGA in shutting down all the season's other awards shows?  I mean, either "In this difficult time, with so many people out of work, it would just feel wrong to celebrate" or not.  But on the SAGs went last night, with the season's first truly hideous dress (although Debra Messing was as beautiful as ever while wrapped in it), "I saved the world" acceptance speech (at least Javier Bardem can be buried on holy ground now), and outrageously aggrandizing statement by a presenter (good thing those 5 Best Female Actor in a Supporting Role nominees reminded us what it means to be human, because I really had forgotten).  All that said, while viewed on my DVR with with a heavy finger hovering over my Fast Forward button at all times, the evening had more than the usual SAG ceremony's share of highlights:

-How could you not love Josh Brolin's “In your face, Lamar Kukuk and all your little friends I've actually heard of” speech accepting the Best Ensemble Cast award for No Country For Old Men?  He pulled off the challenging feat of being hilariously bitter about his own success, and his rants about Bardem's 497 awards season victories, the major studios coming crumbling down because his movie made just north of 50 million dollars and his intention to go on talking as long as he damn well pleased were priceless.  I'm really glad you had the chance to make your "freaky little movie", Josh, but yes, I still hate the ending.

-Charles Durning's Lifetime Achievement Award was wonderful to watch.  While a LAA for some guy who's dominated Hollywood for decades and won his share of awards while doing it is utterly pointless, handing one out to a guy like Durning who's been in the trenches entertaining us for years without piling up dozens of blockbusters or 497 awards makes the award really special.  How appropriate that his clip montage started with a moment from the abysmal Two of a Kind that made me think "Yeah, he was all that made that movie bearable!"

-Not only did Daniel Day-Lewis richly deserve his Best Actor prize for There Will Be Blood, but his speech dedicating the award to the late Heath Ledger and just talking about his two favorite of his roles (I'm right there with him on the last scene of Brokeback Mountain) was tremendously moving.

-What a better round of Best Picture (OK, Best Ensemble Cast) nominees than anyone else had!  If only Hairspray, American Gangster and 3:10 to Yuma had been real players throughout this awards season...

A few other things worth noting:  The SAGs sure do love Ruby Dee (she shared their Lifetime Achievement Award in 2001), and I won't dispute the power of her one big scene in American Gangster, but I still don't feel like she racks up enough screen time to merit the award (I've never been a fan of awarding tiny supporting performances over others that had to hold up their end of large amounts of screen time).  And I don't know about Julie Christie's exit line ("If I've forgotten anyone, it's because I'm still in character") or the fact that it got a bigger reception than Ensemble Cast presenter Tom Cruise, apparently the only man in the room with freaky religious beliefs.

But at least let no man say we didn't have a chance to wonder if Angelina Jolie's baggy dress means she's pregnant again at least one time this awards season.  If there are no Oscars... well, Josh Brolin wasn't going to get to give a speech there anyway...

1/24/08

After taking a few days to digest Tuesday's two big movie news stories, a few thoughts:

-The death of Heath Ledger was one of those mercifully rare moments that just hits every movie fan with the reality that the people we see on the big screen are not protected by the magic rules their characters live by.  Funny how it's not so hard to accept the death, even an untimely one, of a beloved performer whose career was winding down or on the back burner, but for someone whose star was rising like Ledger's, it just feels... impossible.  Few recent performances moved me in quite the way his Oscar-nominated breakthrough role in Brokeback Mountain did, and his upcoming work in The Dark Knight looks like it may well be the thing he'll always be remembered for.  I really hope that the media doesn't work to spoil this final gift he left for us with their childish need to generate "curses" around performers whose lives are cut short.  His family, his memory, and our distressingly low level of public discourse deserve better.

-Of course, that shocking news cut the feet out from under an already underwhelming round of Oscar nominations.  My favorite category?  Best Actor, where top-shelf work from Johnny Depp, George Clooney and Tommy Lee Jones and an excellent turn from Viggo Mortensen go up against what looks (I should know in a few days) like another amazing performance from Daniel Day-Lewis.  No fat in that category.  In the absence of snubbed Hairspray and Zodiac, the other nominations closest to my heart were Atonement for Best Picture (but no nomination for Joe Wright?  Much more so than the other films in the field, Atonement is a director's movie:  I can't imagine how he slipped through the cracks), Tom Wilkinson and Tilda Swinton for their supporting performances in Michael Clayton, her fellow Best Supporting Actress nominees Amy Ryan for Gone Baby Gone and Saoirse Ronan for Atonement, Sweeney Todd's Art Direction and Costume Design nods, Atonement and 3:10 to Yuma's nominated scores, the great songs from Enchanted and August Rush in the best Original Song race in years, all three visual effects nominees (The Golden Compass, Pirates of the Caribbean:  At World's End, and Transformers; nice to know the Academy still knows what elite achievement is in that field), and Sicko for Best Documentary Feature.  Nods that irked me:  Ruby Dee has that one great scene in American Gangster, but we ARE talking about the 5 best supporting actresses of the entire year... Jason Reitman deserved his Best Director nod last year for Thank You For Smoking, but he packed Juno with wrong-headed stylistic choices.  In an Oscar world where mainstream entertainment is no longer allowed, why does Pixar fluff like Ratatouille keep getting a free pass in the screenplay categories?  And, of course, I'm more than a little irked to see the endlessly overrated No Country For Old Men all over the list, but I know I'm swimming against the tide there.

All in all, one more reason for the striking writers and their studio-running opponents to get a deal done:  I need my Oscar show!  A full breakdown and predictions will follow closer to the big day.

1/19/08

With the Golden Globes presumably boxed up and headed to their recipients via UPS, we can now turn our attention to Tuesday's Oscar nominations.  There's really no point predicting them (we can all agree that in most cases a monkey could get 3 of 5 in each category if you just showed him the nominees for every other awards show), so instead I'd like to focus on what I hope the Academy does.  And yes, I am talking realistic hopes here, not my dream of a Kevin Bacon Best Actor nomination for Death Sentence or The Mist for Best Picture.  The following things could happen:  they just, to varying degrees, probably won't:

-DON'T FORGET THE MUSICALS:  Only two movies from my Ten Best List have a realistic shot at making some noise (a third, Sicko, is a likely Best Documentary Feature nominee).  Sweeney Todd is coming off Golden Globe wins for Best Musical or Comedy and Johnny Depp as Best Actor in same, both of which make it easy to forget how meaningless those categories can be in the grand scheme of things.  But Tim Burton's gotten some Best Director love during the season, and I think the movie should be a real force in the technical categories.  Six or seven nominations, including Best Picture, Actor, and Director, are possible, but so is exile to the show's first 90 minutes (assuming there is a show this year).  Then, there's Hairspray, whose high sprits and optimism run counter to most current movie trends and will likely lose the "glass half-full" vote to Juno.  But it's an excellent film that will likely stand the test of time and has great performances all over the place.  It's hard to think of many Supporting Actor feats comparable to how well John Travolta convinces you that he's actually a woman.

-REMEMBER ZODIAC:  It amazes me to see list after list breaking down the opinions and Top Ten Lists of assorted groups of critics.  Inevitably No Country For Old Men and There Will Be Blood come out on top, and in most cases right behind them is David Fincher's wonderful serial killer saga Zodiac.  But it's received virtually no awards season love, when particularly Fincher and writer James Vanderbilt deserve consideration.  In a cast full of steady performances, John Carroll Lynch stands out as the squirly suspect Arthur Leigh Allen.  Step up, Academy and give Zodiac its' due!

-DON'T NOMINATE THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM'S VISUAL EFFECTS:  You heard me!  Yes, Paul Greengrass's much-loved thriller (merely liked by me) is another of the movies being denied the Awards season love its' profile among both audiences and critics would suggest is due.  But to see The Bourne Ultimatum on the Visual Effects shortlist next to the likes of Transformers, The Golden Compass and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End is a joke.  I'm still (yeah, I know it's been about forever) smarting over Gladiator's visual effects win over Hollow Man:  It's not Best Movie With Visual Effects!  Extend that thought to every technical category, if it's not too much to ask.

-BUILD A TIME MACHINE AND GET THE KING OF KONG BACK INTO THE DOCUMENTARY FEATURE RACE:  Oh, wait, I said I wasn't going to ask for impossible things.  But I still can't believe that  The King of Kong:  A Fistful of Quarters, perhaps the year's most honored documentary (go ahead, count 'em up if you don't believe me) wasn't even on the Academy's 15-movie shortlist to be eligible for a nod.  Yeah, I know, it's not about anything "important", and it's hard to get into this category if you're not about sick kids, World War II or Michael Moore (at least Sicko made the cut), but again, the category isn't Best Subject for a Documentary.

All that remains now is to sit back and wait for the announcement, while holding my breath that I love either Atonement or There Will Be Blood enough when I see them within the next week or so to feel a rooting interest in the Oscar race that currently eludes me.  Otherwise, there will be only boredom.

1/14/08

OK, Aliens vs. Predator:  Requiem was terrible.  Premonition:  frustrating and incoherent.  Epic Movie?  Almost unbearably amateurish.  But for sheer torturous lack of entertainment value, nothing Hollywood unleashed in 2007 could compare with last night's attempt to honor the year's best:  NBC's appalling, literally unwatchable Golden Globes Winners Special.  For every one of you who's ever sat through an awards show and cursed the Host, the Presenters, the Acceptance Speeches, the Clip Montages, the Performances of the Nominated Songs and the Announcements of Unpopular Categories; here, at last, was a show for you:  the Serlingesque Hell of Access Hollywood hosts Billy Bush and Nancy O'Dell (the nightly news anchors for people who couldn't care less about a nuclear North Korea, but are deeply concerned about Britney's kids...) standing at a podium and vamping their way through the announcement of every Globe category won by someone who they suspected might look FABULOUS at the moment their name was called (sorry, Jim Broadbent, that apparently doesn't include you).  Occasional cut-aways to some guy from Entertainment Weekly assuring us this was all vital because it would surely predict who'd win the Oscars (the last three Best Pictures didn't win a Globe, but let's not let that get in the way of a good story...) only increased the pain.

But enough about the show (my brain struggles to suppress it even as I write):  as for the awards, I'm really regretting not posting predictions yesterday because I'm sure no one here buys that I had a niggling feeling that Atonement was much more of a Globe picture than either No Country for Old Men or There Will Be Blood.  I was also very pleased to see some love for Sweeney Todd over the favored Juno.  Across the board, the Globes threw over Indie Hollywood and its' works and went with solidly old-school Globe stuff:  the costume drama, the lavish musical, and people from France.  I'm good with that, because for the first time this season, I feel like these are EXACTLY the movies the Hollywood Foreign Press liked best for the year, Oscars be damned.

As they likely will, if the show is anything like The Golden Globes Winners Special...

1/6/08

Welcome to the second year of my own personal online movie soapbox.  I've got big plans for this year, starting with my just-placed application to the Online Film Critics Society (I don't expect to hear back from them for a few months, but keep a finger crossed for me).  I've got a few new ideas for the site, starting with going back and adding blog entries that updated/expanded upon my feelings about certain films to the page with their original review.  Check out Live Free or Die Hard, Spider-Man 3 or Transformers to see what I'm talking about.

And yes, I know that I pretty much let commentary on the unfolding awards season get swallowed up by my Christmas shopping, but honestly the whole thing this year falls somewhere between boring and depressing.  As one critic's group after another declares whether they support No Country For Old Men or There Will Be Blood, Daniel-Day Lewis or George Clooney, I can't help but wonder if these groups have seen more than a dozen movies this year.  Not that I begrudge them their opinion, just that I don't buy that this relentless unanimity IS their opinion.  One group, sure, ten groups, no problem, seventy-five percent of all bodies handing out awards, I can buy it.  But you're going to tell me that there's not one little sliver of the US film critiquing population that can gather a dozen members (and in many of these group's cases, that's all we're talking about) and have even something as widely loved as Zodiac or Atonement take home a Best Picture prize?  Seems to me what we have is too many people fearing they'll be proven "wrong" if they go with their gut rather than try to predict the Oscars.  Isn't it true that every news piece about an organization bestowing a prize comes complete with a scorecard of how often their picks match the Oscars, as if the only purpose of anyone telling you what they thought was the best of the year was to give you advice as to how to bet in your office pool?

And to make matters worse, it's now shaping up like that second half of the awards season that everyone's racing to sell their cinematic soul to won't even happen, at least not in any recognizable form.  You just know that SAG is going to extend its' boycott of the Golden Globes to the Oscars, and frankly both bodies picks have become so rote and dispiriting in the last few years that they'd better be ready to back them with a good show.  I don't get SAG's position:  how much money has its' constituency made based on the Foreign Press Association and/or the Academy declaring them worthy of top roles and big contracts?  Yes, I understand that these programs are money makers for the networks they're striking against, but the moment they allow their members to attend SAG or Spirit Awards shows that will also be televised, they're walking on a razor's edge of hypocrisy.  And the 2008 awards season becomes an ever more pointless exercise.