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Leading actor

Nominees:
- Brad Pitt (Moneyball)

- Gary Oldman (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy)

- George Clooney (The Descendants)

- Jean Dujardin (The Artist)

- Michael Fassbender (Shame)

The winner is: Gary Oldman (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy)

It’s great to see Fassbender and Oldman featured in this year’s awards, especially the former as he was controversially not among the recent Academy Awards nominees for the same category.  Clooney and Dujardin have been highly praised for their respective roles and are the favourites to win.  Personally, I’d love to see Gary Oldman to lift the prize, because, like his Academy Award nomination – it’s long overdue.

Leading actress

- Bérénice Bejo (The Artist)

- Meryl Streep (The Iron Lady)

- Michelle Williams (My Week with Marilyn)

- Tilda Swinton (We Need to Talk About Kevin)

- Viola Davis (The Help)

The winner is: Viola Davis (The Help)
Competing against Meryl Streep is a bit intimidating…she has been nominated 14 times!  All nominees receive acclaim from Williams’ performance as the vulnerable Marilyn Monroe to Bejo’s delightful Pepy Miller.  Viola Davis is my choice – her role as The Help‘s Aibileen is inspiring, emotional and understated.

Best Supporting Actress

Nominees:

- Carey Mulligan (Drive)

- Jessica Chastain (The Help)

- Judi Dench (My Week with Marilyn)

- Melissa McCarthy (Bridesmaids)

- Octavia Spencer (The Help)

The winner is: Octavia Spencer (The Help)

I love that Melissa McCarthy has been praised for her hilarious performance in Bridesmaids – its not often you see a lady who shits in a sink get nominated for  an Academy Award and a BAFTA!

It is strange to see Mulligan get nominated for a small role in Drive in comparison to her bigger and more pivotal role in Shame and it must have been hard to choose which film to nominate Chastain for after her bumper year of The Tree of Life, The Help and The Debt.  It is surely in the bag for Octavia Spencer – her performance as Minny is the more quietly funny performances and a role she was born to portray.

Best Supporting Actor

Nominees:

- Christopher Plummer (Beginners)

- Jim Broadbent (The Iron Lady)

- Jonah Hill (Moneyball)

- Kenneth Branagh (My Week with Marilyn)

- Philip Seymour Hoffman (Ides of March)

The winner is: Christopher Plummer (Beginners)
It is strange to see Jonah Hill feature in the Best Supporting Actor categories – this is the kid from Superbad, for crying out loud!
Broadbent, Branagh and Hoffman are all previous winners but none of them have been singled out so much as veteran actor Plummer.  My money is on the veteran

Best Director

Nominees:

- Michel Hazanavicius (The Artist)

- Nicolas Winding Refn (Drive)

- Martin Scorsese (Hugo)

- Tomas Alfredson (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy)

- Lynne Ramsey (We Need to Talk About Kevin)

The winner is: Nicholas Winding Refn (Drive)

This is probably the closest category – with Drive, The Artist and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy in the running, the nominees have a pretty even chance of getting that prize.  First things first: Scorsese shouldn’t win.  He is going to receive a Fellowship to BAFTA so he doesn’t need another prize; talk about rubbing it in…!
It’s difficult to agree with Hazanavicius’s homage to silent cinema, Refn’s moody and reclusive Drive, Ramsey’s emotional turmoil drama and the grainy outlook of Tinker Tailor Solider Spy.  Seeing how overshadowed Drive has been during the awards season, Refn deserves the prize for his critically acclaimed film.

Best Film

Nominees:

- The Artist

- The Descendants

- Drive

- The Help

- Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

The winner is: The Artist

Ahhh, Best Film – the big prize.  Always the one people want to receive and the hardest prize to award one film.  All of them are equally brilliant yet each have a certain quality that makes them shine brighter than the rest.  I think The Artist will win Best Film as it has managed to revive a genre most people thought was long gone, which was a gamble that has paid off handsomely.

Be sure to comment or even make your own predictions!

To get back to the trailer at hand, I think it looks great.  With every movie he makes, Pitt is becoming a chameleon and he perfectly embodies Beane’s charismatic charm.  The baseball action looks very good and I think the film will turn out to be quite a bit less sappy than the trailer makes it out to be.  My guess is it it will concentrate more on the behind the scenes drama in the front office of the A’s rather than the off the field drama at home. If the dialogue sounds a touch like Aaron Sorkin, that is because Sorkin did a re-write of Steve Zaillian’s script.  If you will remember, Steven Soderbergh was days away from directing the film when Sony pulled the plug on it.

Along with Pitt, the film re-unites Miller with his Capote star Philip Seymour Hoffman.  Hoffman plays A’s manager Art Howe and you should look up a side by side comparison because Hoffman looks almost nothing like him.  Joining those two actors are Pratt, Jonah Hill, Robin Wright, and Kathryn Morris.  Interestingly enough Hill portrays the real-life assistant GM Paul DePodesta, renamed to Peter Brand in the film because DePodesta is actually a skinny guy.  My guess is he didn’t want to be portrayed as a fat Jewish kid.  One interesting note about the cast is that, unlike Soderbergh’s original vision, the players are being portrayed by real actors and not playing themselves.  Originally, Hatteberg was supposed to play himself but that was nixed.  However former All-Star Royce Clayton will be playing ex A’s superstar Miguel Tejada.  That is a bizarre choice because, once again, they look nothing like each other.  Clayton did appear as himself in the 2002 film The Rookie.

The Tree of Life

Directed by Terrance Malick

Written by Terrance Malick

2011

“There are two ways through life,” intones the Mother, “the way of nature, and the way of grace.  You must choose which one you’ll follow.”  Mother is married to Father, and together they have three sons. They live in a modest house in central Texas, and the light – directly from the sun, diffused by the clouds, reflected and refracted by the world around – shapes their faces.

Everything bends towards the light.  From a singularity in the void sprung light  so intense that it pushed space out to the farthest limits of the universe.  In those first few minutes, photons yielded atomic nuclei, which through electromagnetic forces eventually pulled electrons into their orbits.  Clouds of hydrogen and helium gases were shaped into nebulas, and illuminated with every brilliant color in the visible spectrum.  Gravitational pressures condensed large quantities of gaseous molecules into solid forms, which were drawn to balls of light that burned nearly as hot and as bright as in the beginning.  Radiation from those stars slammed into the rocks, in some instances causing hydrogen and oxygen to combine into water on the surface.  Electricity coursed through the seas, charging bits of matter, until, in at least one instance, cellular division began.  Prokaryotes to eukaryotes.  Single-cell to multi-cell organisms.  Photosynthesis to respiration.  Life moved to the edge of the water, and then on to land, taking ever more diverse shapes.  Trees sprouted from the crust and reptiles stood on hind legs, every living thing reaching back up towards the light.

Each of us is born to a mother and father, but our lives are our own.  We are the only fully sentient creatures; with our instincts suppressed, we must learn about the world through our experience of it.  Our first lessons come through touch and sight, which teach us about pleasure and pain.  From those basic senses we develop our consciousness, and we come to understand ourselves as autonomous beings.  We recognize differences in the bodies of others, and we become all too aware that our own bodies are susceptible to deformity.  Through systems of reward and punishment, we internalize concepts of right and wrong.  We comprehend abstract relationships, like property and ownership.  We become aware of inequities, not just in possessions, but in abilities and in the love we receive from those around us.  Those inequities inspire fear and resentment and defiance.  We build structures, physical and metaphysical, to situate ourselves in and shield us from the greater world.  We measure our losses, and we experience grief.  And we create representations – be they a child’s watercolor painting or a Brahms concerto – to try to understand these experiences, and express the meaning that we find in them.

Of course all representations are necessarily incomplete, and the further an artist reaches towards a comprehensive portrait of the human experience, the more incomplete the project will ultimately be.  But it is only those truly ambitious attempts that can inspire awe.  Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life is such an attempt, quite literally situating individual characters within cinematic depictions of the creation of the universe and the dawn of life on earth.  Both the culmination of a career and a bold departure, the film aims to give shape to those ideas, feelings and impulses that escape articulation, but lie at the heart of all human motivation.  Sprawling, contradictory, and yet undeniably vibrant, The Tree of Life is an experience not defined by congruence but by resistance, analogous to the feeling of rushing water flowing between your finger tips; sensual, but never entirely graspable.

Largely built on the tension between narrative and abstraction, the film centers on the O’Brien family of Waco, Texas, but positions them within the grand cosmological order. Early on, in the present tense, Mr. O’Brien (Brad Pitt) and Mrs. O’Brien (Jessica Chaistain) learn that one of their three sons was killed in combat overseas.  They inform their oldest son Jack (Sean Penn), now an architect working in a major city, of his brother’s death, inspiring in Jack a journey that is as much metaphysical and spiritual meditation as it is remembrance. He takes us back to his 1950s boyhood (where he is played Hunter McCracken), recalling the forces that shaped him – his mother’s kind heart  and playful spirit that belies a sheltered passiveness; his father’s sternness, ranging from practical to abusive, and stemming from his frustration and failure; and the conflicting  jealousy and protectiveness he felt for his two younger brothers.

Collecting images that are at once archetypal and deeply personal, The Tree of Life evokes those moments in an individual’s life where his actions expose him to the weight of time and space, even if he does not fully understand what drives him to do what he does.  Walking down the street, Mr. O’Brien talks to young Jack about the ways of the world, when suddenly the boy tosses away the stick he was carrying and begins to model his posture and stride after that of his father.  Jack abuses his brother’s trust, first goading him into sticking a coat hanger into an unplugged, harmless lamp socket, and then later inflicting great pain by shooting his finger with an air rifle. At a friend’s urging, Jack steals a negligee from a neighbor’s house, which overwhelms him with shame, and he throws the article in a river.  Young boys play in the streets, running through clouds of pesticide sprayed by the city, and strapping cans to their feet to lumber up and down stretch of asphalt.  Each of these scenes is staged to accentuate the mechanics of movement, and Malick, along with cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, move the camera in time with the physical action on the screen: following the arc of a swing set, the rush of water over the edge of a cliff, or the slow growth of plant life up from the ground.  The camera circles its human subjects, pushing and pulling against them, mimicking the twitching and extending of muscle tissue, while the light draws out the texture of individual skin cells.

Unlike other American filmmakers of his generation – Scorsese, Coppola, and all those directors who professionally came of age in the 1970s, in the shadow of Godard and the revolutions of the French New Wave – Malick has not explored stories and themes in terms of their potential for pure cinema.  Rather, his films have sought to bend the rhythms of cinema back towards the rhythms of life, to create cinema that feels like life, replicating the act of living not through some false stab at realism, but through a heightened type of expressionism.  His films are composed upon deliberately slow, languid tempos, but the beats are propulsive.  Visually they move in concert with the tonal, almost operatic scores that accompany them, building and descending, breaking down and regenerating like muscle tissue, but always moving forward.

Inescapable comparisons only serve to clarify the distinction between Malick and his peers.  Take the kinetic swagger of Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967) next to the desolate trudge of Badlands (1973), in which robbery, murder and self-destruction are not an ethos but a process.  Or the classic war movie romanticism of Saving Private Ryan (1998) alongside the despairing humanism of The Thin Red Line (1998), in which violence is not measured by the spilling of an individual’s intestines, but by the injuries inflicted  on nature and the collective soul. Days of Heaven (1978) is a sweeping American parable resting on sustained depictions of agrarian labor, binding acts of love and death to the cadence of the seasons, rendering the near-mythic mundane.   And The New World (2005) strips down the legend of Pocahontas and John Smith to a consideration of the most basic modes of communicative interaction between men and women separated by more than oceans – touch, commerce, ritual, battle, etc.  In each of these films, Malick explores the motivations of characters, but not in terms of those characters being cinematic entities, but biological ones.

The Tree of Life is Malick’s most direct exploration of the wells of human motivation, particularly when it comes to our capacity for cruelty and compassion.  Competing scenes of children strapping a toad to a bottle rocket and a boy rising from his chair to defend his brother from his father’s fists flying across the dinner table ask us to ponder if our curiosity, our callousness, our indignation, and our empathy are byproducts of evolutionary adaptations, or whether they are some spark inside of and beyond ourselves that illuminate our consciousness.  In the extended creation sequence, a velociraptor stands over a wounded parasaurolophus, ready for the kill.  But at the last moment, the predatory dinosaur steps back and runs away.  Can this fairly be called an act of mercy?  Is mercy an inherently human trait?  If it is – or is not – is it the result of biochemical randomness, or is it a deliberate act of the soul?  Ultimately, Malick seems to find some sort of peace amid the tempest, recognizing these dualities – nature and grace, mother and father – are names we give to describe the constant wrestling inside of us; that wrestling which compels us to walk through each new door, on the other side of which we see ourselves and others again for the first time.

There is a fight at the heart of all of Malick’s films, a fight against the medium itself.  Cinema, not dissimilar from creation itself, is the act of bending light around the lens of a camera, imprinting it on emulsion or digital pixels, creating images that are objects unto themselves.  Malick creates images, but uses them to evoke those physical and emotional experiences that make up the human condition: pushing, pulling, tearing, and regenerating.  It is resistance to cinema, but resistance that only makes cinema stronger.  Breaking down.  Building up.  Bending towards the light.

Louis Godfrey

The Tree of Life

With a scope that dwarfs most entire directorial careers, Terrence Malick’s fifth feature is destined to be the subject of endless interpretation and speculation. Readings will range from the autobiographical, to the Biblical, to the psychoanalytic, to one that would paint the film as nothing more than a legendary filmmaker gone mad with hubris, but despite the widened canvas and newfound technological ambition, The Tree of Life shares with his other four features an unparalleled attention to the minute details of existence that tend to slip through the cracks of cinematic representation.

Tree, now Malick’s first-ever Palme D’Or winner, is everything it’s purported to be: a dizzying space ballet, an extended riff on mortality and God, a prehistoric travelogue, and an intimate portrait of a family parceled out across the span of multiple decades, but it’s the latter category takes up the most of the film’s 138 minutes and whose emotional energy is meant to propel the rest of the film’s excesses. The film’s first half-hour is its most frustrating: as we witness Mrs. O’Brien (Jessica Chastain) receive awful news from the postman, and word travels to her workaholic husband (Brad Pitt), while decades later their adult son Jack (Sean Penn) seems to carry the weight of the world, and his family’s grief. This is all heavily intercut with the nature imagery and portentous voiceover that Malick is known for, only this time nature gets its own narrative: with the aid of extensive and mostly flawless CGI, Malick goes back to the beginning – all the way back – to take in the forging of the Universe and of life and land on Earth. (Yes, this includes a scene with some dinosaurs, but it’s mercifully brief – and their behavior is distinctly Malickian.)

After this extended flight of fancy, the film settles down for an extended period as we meet the younger O’Briens and their three boys in the 1950s, most prominently the young Jack (Hunter McCracken), who we witness grow from birth to quietly rebellious boyhood. His father is a stern, occasionally cruel Navy man and frustrated entrepreneur whose visions of greatness for his family sometimes clashes with his children’s individual coming of age. The struggles between father and son, child and expectation, awe and danger, are in constant flux throughout this portion of the film, keeping the ever-present air of nostalgia from becoming too prominent. Malick’s careful direction of actors so crucial to his other films is present here, particularly in McCracken and Pitt’s scenes together, which evoke equal parts love, confusion, and terror. While the film is notably bloodless – its characters rarely, if ever, lapse into outright violence or lust – a streak of darkness keeps the proceedings from seeming like rose-colored revisionism, most indelibly in a moment when Jack briefly considers doing away with his father altogether.

With the aid of DP Emmanuel Lubezki (The New World, Children of Men), Malick uses an alternately subjective and free-floating camera to observe Jack and his brothers’ existence with incredible sensitivity. A singularly Catholic moment in which Jack returns home after having committed what, for a relatively well-behaved young boy, seems like the most terrible transgression possible, his trembling approach towards his mother – who knows he’s done something wrong, and looms over him on the front lawn awaiting his explanation – is imbued with the boy’s sense of dread, guilt, and shame. Alexandre Desplat’s score is just as sympathetic – Jack’s troubles are dramatized as being as seriously and as deeply felt as all things are at that age, with absolutely no sense of ironic distance.

It’s that steadfast commitment to open-faced sincerity that makes The Tree of Life such a perilous high-wire act. Many individual scenes -  Penn’s grown-up Jack pouting in his beautiful apartment with a beautiful woman, the dinosaurs, the Nova-esque depiction of evolution, a climactic reunion that might represent the afterlife or some kind of universe-ending singularity (or both) – flirt with or outright cross over into the wonky, the sentimental, or the ill-conceived. Yet, despite these lapses, the film manages to hold together thanks to its surfeit of emotional verisimilitude. For all the talk of God that permeates the whispered voiceovers and the constant focus on the sun, and for all its cinematic daring, The Tree of Life works most powerfully as an elaborate paean to memory, whether it’s God’s, nature’s, or our own.

Simon Howell

Film people (this writer included) tend to be jaded and bitter, always ready to scoff at teenagers who can’t wait to see the next Twilight or are counting the days to the new Batman movie. Yet, film catnip such as a new Terrence Malick makes even the most serious filmgoer wait and gasp at the sight of a ticket for The Tree of Life. That’s why it was very shocking to hear the booing at the press screening, among, yes, a few applauses and mostly baffled silence. It was going to be impossible to survive such hype to any movie, let alone one with such flaws as the fifth film in 40 years directed by the maestro.

Yes, it is one of the most stunning achievements in image and sound in the medium’s history; unfortunately it is so ambitious and almost every frame is loaded with such heavy symbolism, that its discourse becomes completely unintelligible. There is something about love being the tree of life or something like it, but then again, who knows.  Somewhere in there there’s a story of a family in the 50’s; the strict father (Brad Pitt) is trying his best but sometimes he comes across as an asshole, there is a stoic mother and three children, one of them will grow to be Sean Penn (though he is present for only about seven minutes of the movie). Around them there are flowers, clouds, volcanoes, a foetus, more clouds and a couple of dinosaurs. Everything is stunningly photographed (it will finally get cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki his way overdue Oscar) but it ultimately feels like something is missing.

Who would’ve ever thought a few weeks ago that The Tree of Life would disappoint so many and the new film from the director of Brice de Nice and the Bond spoofs OSS117 would be so loved? Indeed, The Artist, from director Michel Hazanivicius, has been a great pleasure of the festival. A good old-fashioned romantic comedy, so old-fashioned that is black and white and silent, The Artist chronicles the rise of an actress and the fall of a leading man as silent Hollywood starts to embrace sound. Lovingly crafted (even the screen ratio is 1.33, like most Rudolph Valentino movies), smart and geeky without being pretentious,  the movie reminded the audience that it is okay to enjoy movies and there is no shame in it.

That is not the case with the two films that have caused the most walk-outs this year:  the French L’Apollonide; Souvenirs De La Maison Close (Memories of the brothel) and the Dutch Code Blue.  Memories is set in a Paris bordello at the end of the 19^th century, where some very uninteresting whores receive some mildly unpleasant men. It bears every cliché of the French art house movie, though it has some mysterious feeling; however, after a few minutes the only mystery is how Bertand Bonello keeps getting his films financed.  Urszula Antoniak’s Code Blue is this year´s lonely-older-woman-desperate-for-attention film.  After a very promising beginning, in which we meet the protagonist, a nurse who cares for the elderly terminal patients, things go down the drain when we realize that his profession doesn´t really serve any greater purpose, and the nurse starts to do some very objectionable things, more for shock value than anything else.

Objectionable things also happen in the gripping, disturbing Sundance winner Martha Marcy May Marlene, a great first film by Sean Durkin. A girl escapes a cult and tries to adjust back to regular life; she has been so brainwashed that it is increasingly difficult for her (and the audience) to clearly distinguish between memory and reality. Cleverly edited and perfectly acted, Marcy shows that when dark themes are treated without pretentiousness, the results can be amazing.

Finally, the appearance of a Lebanese film is usually a welcome sight and this year, Nadine Labaki’s Where Do We Go Now? was a welcome antidote to Bonello’s whores.  The director of Caramel returns with another sweet comedy/drama (with a few songs thrown in) about a town in which Muslims and Christians peacefully coexist. When the reality of the Middle East threatens to break such harmony, the women (from both religions) take it upon themselves to avoid the bloodshed.  Unfortunately, things in real life are not that simple, but Where Do We Go Now? at least shows that, perhaps, these problems might be resolved in different ways.

Eduardo Lucatero

Though some American audiences were lucky enough to see the trailer attached to certain runs of Black Swan, for most this is the first glimpse at Terrence Malick’s anticipated new film Tree of Life. Awe-inspiring may be heavy praise for a trailer, but no other words seems accurate enough to describe the poetry of the images. The story centers around a family with three boys in the 1950s. The eldest son witnesses the loss of innocence, and stars Brad Pitt, Sean Penn and Jessica Chastain. It is making it’s world premiere at the upcoming Cannes Film Festival.

Watch in HD at Apple Trailers

Here’s the official synopsis:

From Terrence Malick, the acclaimed director of such classic films as Badlands, Days of Heaven and The Thin Red Line, The Tree of Life is the impressionistic story of a Midwestern family in the 1950’s. The film follows the life journey of the eldest son, Jack, through the innocence of childhood to his disillusioned adult years as he tries to reconcile a complicated relationship with his father (Brad Pitt). Jack (played as an adult by Sean Penn) finds himself a lost soul in the modern world, seeking answers to the origins and meaning of life while questioning the existence of faith. Through Malick’s signature imagery, we see how both brute nature and spiritual grace shape not only our lives as individuals and families, but all life.

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The Tree of Life opens May 27, 2011.

Originally Posted in Creative Loafing.

2009 is already halfway over, and the fall movie season (with all the originality and Oscar-bait it has to offer) is just around the corner. What follows is my list of the 25 films I’m most interested in seeing in the second half of 2009. Read all the way to the bottom for some honorable mentions and films that flat out didn’t make the cut, despite the big-name talent behind the production. (I’m looking at you Scorsese and Apatow.) Then let me know in the comments what you’re looking forward to seeing in the next six months.

Read on for the my 25 most anticipated films of the rest of 2009.

25) Big Fan (August 28)

I know the Sundance hit wasn’t praised for its production values, but The Wrestler scribe Robert D. Siegal looks like he has written another winner about a loser. Patton Oswalt plays a very big New York Giants fan who, though a misunderstanding, is beaten up by his favorite player. From there his life goes into emotional turmoil, and Oswalt is said to give a fearless dramatic performance.

24) Nine (November 27)

I’m a sucker for Musicals and anything Fellini so here we are with Nine. This is another in a series of film-to-stage-to-film adaptations: In this case the movie is Federico Fellini’s 1963 classic 8 ½, about a film director dealing with an artistic crisis and all the various woman in his life simultaneously. The cast consists of six Oscar winners (Nicole Kidman, Judi Dench, Penelope Cruz, Marion Cotillard, Sophia Loren, and acting God Daniel Day Lewis) and Fergie.

23) Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench (TBA)

Touted as the “first Mumblecore musical” David Chazelle‘s debut feature has delighted audiences on the festival circuit. The film (shot on 16mm black and white) follows the lively romance of a jazz trumpeter and a tap-dancing beauty on the streets of Boston. The film looks like the perfect blending of old and new.

22) The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle (TBA)

Davis Russo’s feature film debut has turned heads at festival circuits all year. The film is about bizarre experiments involving janitors and deliciously addictive cookies. These cookies, as it turns out, cause strange visions, wild mood swings and some quasi-male pregnancies. The janitors band together as they become midwives for one another, each man giving birth to a small blue fish. Oh, what a beautiful synopsis.

Listen to podcast #135 for a full review

21) The Lovely Bones (December 11)

Peter Jackson’s long awaited adaptation of Alice Sebold’s novel is almost here. The story is about a young girl who has been murdered and watches over her family and her killer from heaven, observing how their lives have changed. Jackson looks like he is returning to the kind of supernatural drama of Heavenly Creatures (my favorite film of his).

20) Ponyo (August 27)

It’s Hayao Miyazaki, so how could one not be excited. With this feature he has gone for a more old school look with a water color and pastel-like animation style and using as little CGI as possible. The story is a take off on The Little Mermaid, but this time it’s a goldfish princess who longs to be human.

19) The Princess and the Frog (December 11)

Disney’s long awaited return to hand drawn animation had me hooked five years ago when the project was announced. Featuring Disney’s first African-American princess, the film takes place in the beautifully detailed New Orleans’ French Quarter during the Jazz Age.

18) Agora (December 18)

Alejandro Amenabar‘s latest may have gotten mixed notices at Cannes, but I must say the film looks spectacular. This uncommonly high-minded epic set in Roman Egypt’s famed city of Alexandria concerns a slave who turns to the growing surge of Christianity to pursue freedom while falling helplessly in love with his master, famous atheist philosophy professor Hypatia (Rachel Weisz).

17) Life During Wartime (TBA)

Todd Solondz has always made polarizing films and dealt with the most taboo subjects. This film is said to be a loose sequel to his 1998 classic Happiness. Many of that film’s characters now inhabit what seems to be about a war-torn world. Unfortunately I don’t think Paris Hilton is in this one as was originally reported. But it should be interesting nonetheless.

16) Cold Souls (August 14)

Sophie Barthes debut feature has already been compared to the work of Charlie Kaufman. The wacky post-modern comedy is set in the not too distant future where corporations can extract human souls and sell them as commodities. The story centers on Paul Giamatti (playing himself) who decides to try the procedure to help him get into a soulless character for the stage. His plan backfires when he tries to retrieve his soul and learns it has been sold on the Russian black market.

15) The Road (October 16)

This post-apocalyptic tale looks depressing as hell, and I can’t wait. We could either have another Children of Men on our hands (which is good btw) or another Blindness (not so good). There is The Proposition director John Hillcoat helming the adaption of Cormac McCarthy‘s Pulitzer-Prize winning novel and starring Viggo Mortensen, Robert Duvall, Guy Pearce and Charlize Theron. I think were in good hands.

14) Where the Wild Things Are (October 16)

I would have put Spike Jonze‘ latest higher on the list if not for the current post-production hell it’s currently in. The trailers look spectacular, but the test screenings have been near-disasters and I’m a little worried on how the overall product is going come out. Will it pander too much to younger audiences or will it be a tedious art film? But we do have hipster novelist Dave Eggers involved, and the vocal talents are outstanding.

13) World’s Greatest Dad (August 21)

Robin Williams looks as if he could actually be good here. He plays a sad sack of a high school poetry teacher with an insufferable sex-crazed jackass of a son. But when a tragic event occurs, Williams’ character turns it into an opportunity to make his long-crushed dreams come true. Vulgar comedy extraordinaire Bob Goldthwait looks like he could have a crossover hit on his hands.

12) Beeswax (TBA)

Andrew Bujalski‘s follow up to 2005′s Mutual Appreciation was a hit at South by Southwest along with Joe Sawnberg‘s Alexander the Last. The film will follow the complicated lives and loves of two identical twin sisters, one of which is a paraplegic.

11) Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (TBA)

In a bizarre choice of material, film-making icon Werner Herzog has made a remake (or sequel) to Abel Ferrara‘s Bad Lieutenant. This time out, Nicolas Cage stars as a crooked, drug-addicted cop whose life spins (somewhat hilariously) out of control. The film also stars Eva Mendes, Exhibit and Val Kilmer — and already feels like it could be a cult classic.

10) Thirst (July 31)

Oldboy auteur Chan-wook Park enters the lucrative world of the vampire genre with his latest film. The film follows a small town priest who, during a failed medical experiment, becomes a vampire. This, of course, leads him down the road to anguish and depravity — but he still struggles to maintain his humanity.

9) Broken Embraces (November 20)

Pedro Almodovar‘s latest looks like his most gorgeous film yet, and it’s lovely to see Penelope Cruz in an assortment of dazzling wigs. The film tells the story of a blind filmmaker (Lluís Homar) and how he lost not only his sight but love of his life (Cruz).

8 ) The Illusionist (TBA)

This is the new feature from France’s new animation king Sylvain Chomet, his first since the Oscar-nominated Triplets of Bellville. Another exciting element is the fact that the film’s screenplay was written over 30 years ago by the legendary comic filmmaker Jacques Tati. This means we may very well catch a glimpse of the iconic Monsieur Hulot once again (in animated form of course).

7) In the Loop (July 24, VOD: July 15)

Based off the British TV series The Thick of It, this comedy has been described as “Dr. Strangelove meets The Office.” The political farce centers on a British Secretary of State and his entourage trying to halt a war they may have accidentally started, through any means necessary. The reviews for this one have been enthusiastically positive.

Listen to podcast #141 for a full review

6) Humpday (in limited release now)

The Bromance to end all bromances. Lynn Shelton‘s latest was a sensation at Sundance with many critics citing it as the first Mumblecore film that could crossover into the mainstream. Two old buddies go to a party at a sex positive commune, get wasted and dare each other to enter a gay porn contest. The next morning the two find themselves unable to back down from their bet. But how is the wife of one of the guys going to take this turn of events?

Listen to podcast #141 for a full review

5) Antichrist (October 23)

I’m so up for the bat-shit craziness this film has to offer. Who doesn’t want to see a NC-17 horror film that looks like a perfume ad? Ok, maybe not as many as I think, but I’m there. What if I told you there is supposedly a talking fox and the mutilation of Willem Dafoe’s little man? Lars Von Trier‘s (or “the greatest director in the world” as he likes to call himself) film centers on a grieving couple who retreat to a mysterious cabin in the woods. Then some bad things happen.

4) The Hurt Locker (in limited release now)

What else can I say about this one? Kathryn Bigelow‘s film is the most universally acclaimed so far this year (along with Up) and the #1 art house event of the summer. We follow an elite Army bomb squad in a city in Iraq in brilliant uncompromising detail. Just watch this clip and you shall see what everyone is talking about.

3) The Tree of Life (TBA)

It’s still up in the air whether the film will be released this year or next, but I have my fingers crossed. Director Terrence Malick is notorious for his long post-productions, but any Malick film is a huge event. (This would be his fifth film of his 40 year career). The descriptions I’ve heard about this one are mind-blowing, and Malick has reportedly been planning this film for over 30 years. Life will follow the evolution of an 11 year old boy. The audience will see the world through his eyes, full of beauty and love and his visions of history. But as the boy gets older, he gets his first glimpses of death and sickness and parental conflict (Brad Pitt will play the father). The world then becomes a harsh unforgiving place. Sean Penn is will play the boy as a disillusioned adult yearning to find meaning in his life again. There will also supposedly be a time-line of the history of the world that goes back far enough to include the dinosaurs. Talk about ambitious!

2) Avatar (December 18)

James Cameron’s “cinema changing” film is so close. The buzz I’ve heard from all around has been uniform ally great. (Sample buzz: “Avatar will change movie industry forever. Thank you Jim” … “It’s nothing you can imagine, it’s real. Cameron made a new planet and took a cam there.” … “THIS WILL CHANGE MOVIES FOREVER. Trust me, it will.” All I can say is that the film stills are simply mind blowing.

1) Inglorious Basterds (August 21)

Well what did you expect? I’m a Quentin Tarantino fanatic (yes, I even loved Death Proof) so how can I not be excited? The lukewarm Cannes reception, mediocre trailers and the supposed reediting haven’t deterred me one bit. The complex “Nazi scalping” plot looks ingenious, and the international cast doesn’t look bad either: Brad Pitt, France’s Melanie Laurent, England’s Michael Fassbender, The Office‘s B.J. Novak, Diane Kruger, and even Mike Myers. Then there’s Germany’s Daniel Brühl, Til Schweiger, and major Oscar contender Christopher Waltz.

Check out the review from the secret screening held at the Fantasia Film Festival in July

Now, I did leave off some notable films. Scorsese’s latest Shutter Island just does not look interesting to me, and Judd Apatow’s Funny People has a surprisingly unfunny trailer. (But I’ll see it anyway, simply for Leslie Mann.) I guess I just don’t know enough about the Coen brothers’ latest A Serious Man to get excited about it. For honorable mentions I would put Soderbergh’s The Informant!, Ricky Gervais’ The Invention of Lying (the trailer makes the film look to slight to me). And Richard Kelly may have actually made a film I give a shit about with The Box.

George Clooney and Grant Heslov’s production company Smokehouse Entertainment have left their longtime friends at Warner Brothers and have signed a two year contract with Sony.  It kind of feels like strange timing after Sony just screwed over longtime collaborator Steven Soderbergh and his baseball docu-drama Moneyball. 

It kind of feels like the end of an era with this announcement.  This was one of the great actor studio partnerships of the past 20 years.  It began with the Clooney / Soderbergh company Section Eight.  It included such intelligent adult fare as Good Night and Good Luck, Michael Clayton, Syriana, Far From Heaven, Insomnia, Criminal, and A Scanner Darkly.  They would recoup their losses through The Ocean’s Eleven Trilogy.  Whatever you thought about these films they took risks and tried to inject some originality and intellect into Hollywood.  Their critical successes did outweigh the honorable failures (The Good German, Leatherheads).  Section Eight disbanded in late 2006 and Clooney started Smokehouse Entertainment with Heslov.  The company has just wrapped The Men Who Stare at Goats.  Now Sony doesn’t seem as artist friendly as Warner Brothers.  But that might be why they want to work with Clooney to help build up a catalogue of prestige pictures.  Or Clooney may be planning to make some more profit friendly films to ensure the production of more artistic fare in the future.  It would be interesting to know the details of their agreement.  Let us hope it’s for the best.  But Smokehouse does still have six films in development with Warner Brothers.  And they do look interesting.  Here’s a list of the films:

THE CHALLENGE

Screenplay by Aaron Sorkin. An adaptation of Jonathan Mahler’s nonfiction book chronicling the historic Supreme Court case in which two lawyers sued the Bush administration on behalf of accused terrorist Salim Hamdan.

OUR BRAND IS CRISIS

A satirical comedy about American spin doctors competing in the same Presidential election in Bolivia. Based on the documentary by Rachel Boynton, with a script by Peter Straughan (MEN WHO STARE AT GOATS).

FARRAGUT NORTH

An adaptation of Beau Willimon’s critically acclaimed play, set during the Iowa primary of a presidential race.

ESCAPE FROM TEHRAN

The true story of how the CIA used a fake movie project to smuggle hostages out of 1979 Tehran. Chris Terrio is writing the screenplay.

THE TOURIST

A contemporary spy thriller about a spy who risks everything to reveal a conspiracy after he’s accused of a murder he didn’t commit. Based on the bestselling book by Olen Steinhauer. Tony Peckham is writing the screenplay.

THE INNOCENT MAN

Based on the bestselling nonfiction book by John Grisham, the true story of murder and injustice in a small town in Oklahoma. Adapted by David Gordon Green.

It’s official now Steven Soderbourgh is has left Moneyball.  Sony called quits on the project 96 hours before filming was about to begin (but still costing the studio $10 million).  For a film starring Brad Pitt (name me a film he starred in that didn’t make a profit!) that was a big deal.  Soderburgh reportedly made some drastic changes to Steve Zillian’s script, by making room for some documentary elements (inserting bits form hours of interview footage with the real players already shot).  The story involves Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane and his successful attempt at putting together a baseball club on a budget by using computer generated analysis to draft his players.  Sony now needs to find a director and fast.  Something tells me that Pitt will not linger too long.  His time is money.

Cloverfield director Matt Reeves has finally shed some light on the American version of Let the Right One In. In a recent interview with the Los Angeles Times, Reeves said: “The film is now officially titled Let Me In, which is a more accurate English language translation of John Ajvide Lindgvist’s original novel. A second draft of the screenplay is completed. The Americanized story is set in the snow covered mountains of a Ronald Regan-era Colorado. “Currently, Matt Reeves and casting director are searching for the latest pre-teen actors to play the lead roles: Eli and Oskar, or will they be typical American names? Let The Right One In, was originally a Swedish production directed by Tomas Alfredson. The Let Me In release date is scheduled for Fall 2010.

Amy Adams is currently in talks to star alongside Mark Walberg and Christian Bale in David O. Russell’s The Fighter.  The film which is set to begin shooting later this summer stars Walberg as “Irish” Mickey Ward and will portray the boxer in his early days in the gritty streets of Lowell, Massachusetts to his rise to the world lightweight champion with the help of his half Brother (Bale).  Adams will play a tough talking bartender who ends up dating Ward.  Mellissa Leo has also joined the cast.  The film is set for a fall 2010 release. 

Duncan Jones will follow up his critically acclaimed Moon with the Berlin centered thriller Mute.  Screen daily reports that the film will be produced by Stuart Finnegan with a $25 million budget (very comfortable compared to Moon’s $4 million).  Jones has described the piece as a “big city mystery story that takes place in a future Berlin.”  Jones sites Ridely Scott’s Blade Runner as an inspiration for the films visual style.  He has also hinted that Sam Rockwell may be a part of the UK – German coproduction.  Finnegan, the producer also described the film:

“Mute is about a woman whose disappearance causes a mystery for her partner, a mute bartender. When she disappears, he has to go up against the city’s gangsters”

In an interview with io9 Jones gives further details about the concept and story.

http://io9.com/5278323/duncan-jones-next-science-fiction-film-has-unique-villains

The New French trailer for Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds is quite an improvement for the American.  Mostly (in my opinion) because there is less Brad Pitt.  But the editing is sharper, it’s funnier and we get a better idea of the large scope of the story.  American audiences seem to be getting sold the action while the French are being sold the by the films dark sense of humor.  We get to see more of French actress Melanie Laurent who is said to be the films real star along with Christopher Waltz.  I’m a little more confident now about August 21st.

A new trailer for Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds makes it on to the web.  The film received a lukewarm reception at Cannes (some even considering it Tarantino’s worst film by far).  It currently getting a huge reedit with the Harvey Weinstein pressuring him to scrap at least 40 minutes from the original 2 hour 40 minute cut.  The trailer hints at a complex and potentially clever plot.  But unfortunately a lot of the intended laughs and “cool dialogue” fall completely flat (with Brad Pitt’s accent bordering on shrill).  It worries me a bit.  But let us hope Tarantino succeeds in the end and gives us a film that is at least worthy of his filmography.  Decide for yourself.     

]]> http://www.soundonsight.org/new-trailer-for-inglorious-basterds/feed/ 0 http://www.soundonsight.org/the-curious-case-of-benjamin-button-2/ http://www.soundonsight.org/the-curious-case-of-benjamin-button-2/#comments Mon, 16 Feb 2009 16:57:20 +0000 Al Kratina http://www.soundonsight.org/?p=3016 [Read the Rest]]]>

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
2008, USA
Directed by David Fincher
Written by Eric Roth (screenplay and screen story), Robin Swicord (screen story), F. Scott Fitzgerald (short story)
Produced by Cean Chaffin, Kathleen Kennedy, Frank Marshall
Starring: Cate Blanchett, Brad Pitt, Julia Ormond, Taraji P. Henson

In the Oxford English dictionary, the definition of ‘whimsy’ does not, sadly, include the phrase “magic realism for the senile.” Nor does it reference the fact that anything whimsical must include a 75% recommended aphorism content, and be read aloud in a combination of southern drawl and numb-tongued slur, like Paula Dean reading Aesop’s fables after a stroke. And, of course, the dictionary lacks an appropriate discussion of folk sayings, flights of fancy, and geriatrics croaking out life lessons amid death rattles.

In fact, the definition of whimsy would be much simplified were it simply to be replaced with a screening The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, director David Fincher’s 2008 Oscar contender. The film is so very charming, balancing its bittersweet moments with quirky affectations, that it comes off more as a recipe for exotic chocolate than a film. But instead of being coated with cocoa dust and cayenne, it stinks like Geritol, Rub A535, and death. This is a retirement home movie, a down-home, apple-pie epic that’s all about wisdom, experience, and everything else grandfathers babble about when plaque clogs their synapses.

But this story of a man who ages backwards is not a bad film, by any means. Fincher’s assured direction keeps what could have been a sleeping pill moving at a brisk pace, despite the fact that the film is longer than most comas. Brad Pitt, who plays a man born a mewling, wrinkled maggot who grows younger as he matures, turns in a capable performance, even if he does seem slightly bemused by the whole premise. Cate Blanchett, as love interest Daisy, is only slightly overcome by her own immense talent. And Taraji P. Henson, as a caricatured black maid who raises Benjamin, has earned herself one of the film’s 13 Oscar nominations, essentially for imparting deep emotional resonance in endlessly repeating “Oh, Lawd!” As well, the cinematography, from Claudio Miranda, creates one of the most beautiful looking films of the year.

Still, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is an empty exercise. It doesn’t say anything that a particularly verbose fortune cookie couldn’t impart, and takes considerably longer doing it. The problem is that it’s so contrived, from the plot to the forced charm to the demographic pandering, that begs to be noticed by 50-year-old film critics and Academy voters. Though watchable, and disarming in its own way, it’s entirely too quaint, too obvious, to amuse anyone who doesn’t plagiarize their opinions from O Magazine. But for all its flaws, and all its triumphs, it remains the best definition of whimsy I’ve ever seen.

- Al Kratina

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Episode 81 will focus on the magical, heart-warming film, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. With its life-spanning story, moving back and forth, it has brought up some comparisons to the sentimental Oscar favorite Forrest Gump. Is the usually edgy director pandering to the Academy and a mainstream audience? We will discuss if we think these accusations are in any way valid. In the second half of the show we rewind the clock back a year and focus our attention on David Fincher`s mesmerizing account of the infamous, never-solved Bay Area serial killings as seen in his hit thriller Zodiac.

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