Cinemascope

I shall call it: The Olden Comp-Ass.
I tried to love it, I truly tried. And thus I adored Dakota Blue Richards, a charming gal with an unfortunate stripper’s name, and I thought the look of the movie and the designs were spectacular. Also, isn’t Alexandre Desplat the best composer out there right now?
But The Golden Compass was disastrous. I thought Narnia was mediocre but the Prince Caspian trailer that was tacked on to the beginning of the movie was the best thing in it. At least it had some groove to it.
The essence of a fantasy movie is to create an unbelievable world and then populate it with believable characters. They can be talking bears, but their mentality should be human, and their actions identifiable. And from the moment Nicole Kidman (doing for twice what Glenn Close could have done for half) persuades the girl to join her, the movie lost all credibility.
Worst of all: this isn’t even proper eye-candy. The Golden Compass is a snooze inducer. If I hadn’t known it’s based on much loved novels I would’ve thought this is a mega-buck exploitation flick, mixing it up with the worst from Pirates of the Caribbean, Narnia, Harry Potter and the Lord of the Rings.
There was one tiny glimmer of hope at what seemed to be the 3/4 mark: after a climactic battle sequence (so-so) there was a sense of urgency to the plot, and I thought “here we go, the last act will be worthwhile”. But no last act: the kid gets on the air-ship, vows to rescue James Bond from who-knows-what and the movie fades out. Oh, you want a franchise? Well, I pray this one bombs bigger than Pearl Harbor and that a sequel will never be made, this might teach Hollywood a lesson that before you plan parts 2 & 3 try and get the first one right. This movie has no heart.

Nikki Finke wrote this earlier:

I don’t want to name names, but three longtime Hollywood major players are gravely ill. All represent many years of movie/TV dealmaking and talent relations and industry leadership. Normally, I wouldn’t mention this. But all three are such giants that I figure people will want to be sure to say their goodbyes. The town is in for some sad, sad times.

Any ideas who are the soon to be deceased?

Check this out: it’s a rather amusing site, that is cleverly (and quite stealthy) setting up the background to Wall-e, Pixar’s 2008 animated feature. It’s the web-site for an uber-conglomerate, called Buy n Large, that has legally purchased the right to re-brand the direction NORTH, and has its head London offices situated in Buckingham Palace. The Buy n Large corporation, for instance, bought a news network, where you can read that one of their malls in Wisconsin was granted city status. The amount of details crammed into this quasi-corporate site is staggering.

(Hat-tip: Daniel Kutz)

The list:

Best Film: NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN
Best Director: TIM BURTON, Sweeney Todd
Best Actor: GEORGE CLOONEY, Michael Clayton
Best Actress: JULIE CHRISTIE, Away From Her
Best Supporting Actor: CASEY AFFLECK, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
Best Supporting Actress: AMY RYAN, Gone Baby Gone
Best Foreign Film: THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY
Best Documentary: BODY OF WAR
Best Animated Feature: RATATOUILLE
Best Ensemble Cast: NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN
Breakthrough Performance by an Actor: EMILE HIRSCH, Into The Wild
Breakthrough Performance by an Actress: ELLEN PAGE, Juno
Best Directorial Debut: BEN AFFLECK, Gone Baby Gone
Best Original Screenplay (tie):
DIABLO CODY, Juno and NANCY OLIVER, Lars and the Real Girl
Best Adapted Screenplay: JOEL COEN and ETHAN COEN, No Country For Old Men

Top Ten Films:
(In alphabetical order)
THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD
ATONEMENT
THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM
THE BUCKET LIST
INTO THE WILD
JUNO
THE KITE RUNNER
LARS AND THE REAL GIRL
MICHAEL CLAYTON
SWEENEY TODD

Top Five Foreign Films:
(In alphabetical order)
4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS, 2 DAYS
THE BAND’S VISIT
THE COUNTERFEITERS
LA VIE EN ROSE
LUST, CAUTION

Top Five Documentary Films
(In alphabetical order)
DARFUR NOW
IN THE SHADOW OF THE MOON
NANKING
TAXI TO THE DARKSIDE
TOOTS

Top Independent Films
(In alphabetical order)
AWAY FROM HER
GREAT WORLD OF SOUND
HONEYDRIPPER
IN THE VALLEY OF ELAH
A MIGHT HEART
THE NAMESAKE
ONCE
THE SAVAGES
STARTING OUT IN THE EVENING
WAITRESS

Teaser poster for Chris Nolan’s The Dark Knight:

(via Awards Daily)

Israel’s Maariv daily newspaper (and its sister website) reports today that the Israeli actors playing alongside Adam Sandler in You Don’t Mess With the Zohan have finished shooting their parts. The paper runs on-set photos of local semi-celebs cozying up to the star:

Adam Sandler with Israeli model-actress Yamit Sol

Adam Sandler with Israeli actor (and voice of Spongebob in Hebrew) Ido Mossari
Photo credits: Maariv Daily Newspaper

The NBR’s announcement of their top films for 2007 comes later today and kicks the awards season into full swing (the Golden Globes nominations are a week away). Although I don’t hold the people of the NBR in high esteem I do concede that their over-hyped self-importance makes their list a self fulfilling prophecy: Academy members may just be influenced by it (and, true, they have some genuine good picks here and there).

But before they have their say I have to have mine:

Ratatouille
&
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

I have this inkling that these two movies will be much bigger this award season then most prognosticators give them credit.

Cristian Mungiu’s Romanian entry 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days has been the most talked about foreign movie of the year, since winning the Palm D’Or at Cannes and then winning The European Film Awards prizes for Best Feature and Best Director on Saturday. Many Oscar prognosticators see it as a sure-fire Foreign Language Oscar nominee.

But I think not. I predict it will not be one of the five nominated Foreign Language films. Not because of the abortion theme, but because the style of the movie-making is all but indigestible to American viewers. In the same way that the Dardenne brothers or Bruno Dumont have never been nominated. 4 Months is stark, naturalistic, mirthless, devoid of music, it looks like a documentary or an improvised piece and it’s easy to miss the stand out filmic achievements Mungiu has brilliantly pulled off (starting with the movie’s ironic self-referential title).

nope

yup

The only place this movie could have gotten the attention of Academy voters is the Live Action Short category, which in recent years is the only Oscar category to acknowledge bold, stark European nouveau-realism, such as Andrea Arnold’s Wasp (Arnold’s feature debut, Red Road, was later ignored) or Martin Martin McDonagh’s Six Shooter.

This makes me believe at present the France’s Persepolis is the front runner to win the Foreign Language Oscar. Women love this movie. Beating out nominees The Counterfeiters (Austria), An Unknown Woman (Italy), Days of Darkness (Canada) and Ben X (Belgium).
One of these could also make the list, or at least the short-list of nine finalists: Caramel (Lebanon), Beaufort (Israel) - wouldn’t it be great if the all-male Beaufort, set in Lebanon, will go against the mostly female Lebanese Caramel? - and The Year My Parents Went on Vacation (Brazil). And it’s not far-fetched to believe that the same elderly Academy members that may detest 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days will be fond of the sunny, amusing but old fashioned nipple-fest of I Served the King of England (Czech Republic)

Two stories worth reading:

1.

Judd Apatow talks about the casting of penises in Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story:

Jake (Kasdan) had extras casting for someone that was comfortable showing their penis. And then they brought him a big stack of polaroids, and it was all these guys in their underwear, which led to this odd conversation of ‘How do we know what it looks like?’ Because it could be terrifying. You actually do need the right-looking penis, because the wrong penis could sicken people. If the penis is too large, men might get sad and stop laughing in comparison with this enormous penis. But as we went through the stack, only one guy just was naked. He had the funniest little smile on his face and Jake thought, ‘That’s the guy.’ And that’s who he hired.

All this makes the movie’s title seem all too literate. What’s next for Hollywood? A full time on-set penis wrangler?
Apatow says also that the DVD will include a “cockumentary” of the penis casting session and a 30 minute longer… ummm… cut of the movie titled “The Self-Indulgent, Almost Unbearably Long Director’s Cut“. Longer Cox? How tempting.

2.

Sorry to say but Robert Welkos does a terrible job at interviewing ace filmmaker Earn Kolirin for yesterday’s L.A Times. Kolirin’s charming Israeli movie, The Band’s Visit, opens Friday in Los Angeles and New York for an Oscar qualifying run, before rolling out wider February 8.
First, Welkos constantly misspells Kolirin’s name as Kilorin, and misspells Kolirin’s writing debut “Zur Hadassim” (directed by Kolirin’s less prestigious filmmaker father, Gideon Kolirin). One can’t help feel that the online version posted has not been copy edited or fact checked.
Then he trumps up, all over again, the over-hyped story of the movie being disqualified by the Academy’s and the HFPA’s Foreign Language Films committees. All the while forgetting to update the readers that is has just won two awards - for best actor and the Discovery award - at the European Film Awards and been nominated for an Independent Spirit Award, for best Foreign Film (the Spirit Awards categorizes “foreign film” according to the country of production and not the language spoken, that’s why the mostly English speaking The Band’s Visit will go up against the all-English speaking Once). The fact that The Band’s Visit - charming, witty and Tatiesque as it is - will have had trouble qualifying for a Foreign Language Academy Award nomination has been voiced in Israel ever since the film’s debut in Cannes in May (and reported over at my Hebrew language film blog). But Welkos let Kolirin spell out a less than fortunate metaphor:

Kolirin compares the dispute to a songwriter’s lyrics and somebody complaining: “Look, we read your song and it consists of three verbs and one adjective.”
“You would say to them, ‘Yes, you’re right, but you’re not understanding the song,’ ” Kolirin said. “Is this the correct way of evaluating a song? I don’t know. It’s strange.

Well, no. The understanding of the song is irrelevant if you’re sending the song to an “all-adjective-song-writing competition”, which is what the Foreign Language Oscar is about. When sent to an “understanding-the-song” competition The Band’s Visit is doing just fine, and everyone acknowledges its charm and talent. Maybe the Oscar’s rules will change, which could be the result of this film disqualification. And this is what Band’s producers kept forgetting when sending out a mostly English language film to the Oscars, when local voices warned that this jeopardizes the chances of other Israeli films in the contest should they be ousted - which is exactly what has happened (only now Band’s producers drum the disqualifying ticket for PR purposes and for playing the underdog, which - as an Israeli - makes my stomach turn in disgust, and diminishes my love for this movie).
Here’s another metaphor, just as lame: The producers of The Band’s Visit sent a 300 pound boxer - and a very good one - to a feather weight boxing match, hoping that no one will notice their contender is just a bit bigger than the rest. And when, lo and behold, someone actually used a scale to measure the kid, they try to use every excuse in the book, with crocodile tears, from “but he’s a really good boxer, just let him into the ring” to “this is cultural discrimination! Our boxers are heavier, that’s just the way us Israelis are built, you can’t disqualify us because our nutrition - as a young, struggling, enemy surrounded country - is different than yours”.

To the people of The Band’s Visit, some of which I know, some are friends, some have grown to hate me over the last several months for covering this, others (such as Kolirin) I don’t know personally but hold in great admiration: you have a fantastic movie, it’s absolutely adorable, and I hope it finds the biggest audience possible, because it also does Israeli movie a great service - BUT your handling of the film, the Oscars Foreign Language debacle and the spinning of it has been deplorable.

This thing is as brilliant as it is crazy. A Spanish champagne company gives Martin Scorsese money to shoot a nine minute commercial. Scorsese, in turn, says he wants to shoot a 3 and a half pages long scene from a movie Alfred Hitchcock never finished writing called “The Key to Reserva”. I happen to know - as all Hitchcockophiles do - that Hitchcock never wrote, or intended to write, such a movie, it was clear from the get-go that Scorsese’s having a ball with this project. His comic deliverance is superb.
Then we move from the “making-of” part (shot by “Eternal Sunshine” and “Be Kind Rewind” DP Ellen Kuras) to the-movie-within-the-movie, shot exquisitely by master DP Harris Savides (”Zodiac”), the Gordon Willis of this generation. And it’s a blast: without a word spoken, it’s a send-up of The Man Who Knew Too Much wrapped around Notorious played to the tune of North By Northwest. The ending is a riot. With Thelma Schoonmaker as the editor (and guest-star), and Rob Legato (”Titanic”, “The Departed”) in charge of special effects, this piece is visually stunning, but it also a cinephile’s delight, mixing suspense with comedy. This is one of Scorsese’s best bits.

See it in full screen HD quality here.

Or, in it’s low-res glory, right here: