Judgment

The supporting actors and actresses have been broken down. Percentages are pretty high on at least eight of the ten predicted to be announced next Tuesday morning. With ten more available acting slots, there are potentially 17 performances in the running to grab them. Good luck to all of them since it has practically been decided who the winners will be already.

THE LOCKS
Since 1998, every winner of the Screen Actors Guild Awards have been nominated for an Oscar. That makes things pretty easy, don’t it? Congratulations to Jeff Bridges (Crazy Heart) and Sandra Bullock (The Blind Side) on their impending nominations. As with all, we will examine their chances to win the Oscar at a later date. Plenty of time for that. Since 2001, there have been 33 leading men and women who have been nominated from the following five groups: The BFCA, the Golden Globes, the Chicago Film Critics Association, the Screen Actors Guild and the BAFTAs. All 33 were nominated for an Oscar. This year there are five that fall into that illustrious category. One of them being Bridges. The other four are George Clooney (Up In The Air), Carey Mulligan (An Education), Gabourey Sidibe (Precious) and Meryl Streep (Julie & Julia)

Filed under: Awards, Oscar Watch

Continue reading The Movieman’s Oscar Nomination Predictions: Actor/Actress

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It’s not possible to watch Adam Green’s Frozen without thinking of Open Water. Well, it is possible, but that means you’ve never seen nor heard of Open Water. Frozen takes the same premise — divers stranded in the ocean — and turns it into three skiers stuck on a ski lift with no hope of being found until the resort opens again a week later. Plus, it’s cold. A fact that the title should have clued you in to. The film opens in a week, and you can check out Cinematical’s review of it here.

Adam Green came up with this idea when he saw a background weather forecast shot of empty ski chairs at the Big Bear ski area in California, which reminded him of how scary it can be when the lifts stop. As the movie illustrates, there’s a lot more to fear than just the drop to the ground. We talked to Adam at Sundance, and he let us know about the production, the actors, and what it took to bring this to the screen. One thing I accidentally caught off-camera was how many Iceman jokes Shawn Ashmore had to put up with. The answer: tons.

Head on after the break for the full video interview from a snowy exterior in Park City.

Filed under: Sundance, Interviews

Continue reading Sundance Interview: ‘Frozen’ Director Adam Green

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You need a FarmVille game strategy to advance in your FarmVille life. The basics include the best animals, best crops and best trees. Once you have them, your farm will prosper and you will be one farmer to reckon with. Start sending out a warning to your Facebook friends!

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Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps
Michael Douglas returns as Gordon Gekko, the role he originated in 1987’s Wall Street and Oliver Stone is once again at the helm. Gekko has been cooling his heels behind bars all these years but now he’s out and presumably looking to bask in capitalism once again. The “getting your personal effects back after years in the slammer” bit is sort of a cliche, but there’s a cute twist on it here. We’ll see if this lives up to the original on April 23.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
A Swedish film in which an investigative journalist and a hacker (the lady with the ink) join forces to solve a forty year old murder. Looks like there’s already a U.S. remake in the works, though my money is on the original. Watch for this one on March 19.

Bass Ackwards
A particularly indie looking indie film about a man who embarks upon a cross-country road trip in a VW bus after ending a disastrous affair with a married woman. I have nothing against road trip movies but I don’t see anything particularly special about this one. This just premiered at Sundance and will be in theaters sometime in 2010.

Filed under: Action, Drama, Thrillers, Trailer Trash

Continue reading Trailer Park: Tatooed Mothers With Dragon Toes

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There are FarmVille shortcuts your neighbors hope you never learn simply because they are valuable information that can improve your game. These things can help you attain a higher level faster than the other players and earn you more coins than you can count. It’s for sure that when you learn of these FarmVille shortcuts, you’ll hope too that your neighbors will never know about them.

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There are sixty million people, who want to play this popular game of Facebook. Everyone wants to know the secret behind, getting FarmVille cash fast. It is an adventure but it is easy to collect the coins. All you have to do is, keep visiting the farms and help people out. The only difficult part of the game is, finding a way to earn more farm cash.

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Awards: The big winners include Winter’s Bone (Grand Jury Prize, Dramatic), Restrepo (Grand Jury Prize, Documentary), Animal Kingdom (World Cinema Jury Prize, Dramatic) and The Red Chapel (World Cinema Jury Prize, Documentary), with audience awards going to happythankyoumoreplease and Waiting for Superman. Check out the full list of winners here.

Celebrity Sightings: Most of the celebs have left town by now, so let’s check out a few leftovers: People has a rundown of where celebs were seen eating in Park City. The main course in the article looks at an East-meets-West feast with Orlando Bloom, Mark Ruffalo and Juliette Lewis of Sympathy for Delicious. As for photos from the awards, the LA Times has a photo of host David Hyde Pierce (with festival director John Cooper) during his rap performance, in case you missed it live (hopefully it ends up on YouTube).

Deals: In line with their penchant for controversial films, IFC has picked up Michael Winterbottom’s polarizing crime drama The Killer Inside Me for a reported $1-1.5 million. They‘re looking at a late summer/early fall release. Now the world (well, U.S. moviegoers) can experience the same disgust as the audience member who shamed Sundance for showing the film. Later in the day, Roadside Attractions bought Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone for low six-figures with plans to release the film this summer. Meanwhile, Oprah Winfrey has bought the documentary A Family Affair to air on her new network and Aamir Khan tells Anne Thompson that he’d like to distribute Peepli Live himself.

Our coverage, some tragic news and other near-end linkage after the jump:

Filed under: Documentary, Independent, Awards, Sundance, IFC, Distribution, Obits, Cinematical Indie, Roadside Attractions

Continue reading Sundance in 60 Seconds. Saturday, January 30, 2010

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Only eight geeks remain in Cinematical’s first-ever On-Screen Geek-Off Tournament and it is, surprisingly, shaping up to be a real nail-biter Cine-Geek election. I expected some close calls throughout this wholly arbitrary tournament, but I wasn’t expecting them to be this close.

As of this writing, the gap between Election’s Tracy Flick and Real Genius’ Chris Knight was a mere 122 votes. Louis Skolnick vs. Garth Algar? 86 votes. Napoleon Dynamite vs. Andy Stitzer? 76 votes. But the real bare-knuckle brawl came down between McLovin and Data by a margin of just four votes!

So please, spread the word for round four. We need as many votes as possible, if only because I don’t think my frazzled geek nerves can take any more calls like Round 3 brought us.

Dr. Egon Spengler (Harold Ramis), Ghostbusters vs. Chris Knight (Val Kilmer), Real Genius

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Filed under: Comedy, Fandom, Comic/Superhero/Geek, Polls

Continue reading The Geek-Off Tournament: Round #4!

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The optimum way to see a documentary like Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross’ The Shock Doctrine is at a film festival, such as Sundance, where it made its North American premiere this week. Unfortunately, I saw it in my living room, which is probably how most people in the U.S. will see it thanks to the Video-On-Demand cable channel Sundance Selects, which began airing the film immediately following its Park City debut.

Not to say the festival experience makes it a better film, but at least attendees of the first Sundance screening had the benefit of a post-film discussion featuring the film’s directors and Naomi Klein, the author of the book upon which it’s based. It’s safe to assume she explained her arguments regarding “disaster capitalism” and the faults of Laissez-faire economics better than the film does. And Winterbottom and Whitecross are possibly the only ones who can defend what they had intended with their ultimately disjointed translation of Klein’s thesis.

I had only the internet to use as a reference and clarifier in the end. What I learned afterward about the film and Klein’s involvement in its production is that she basically walked away due to its increasing departure from what she felt an adaption of her 2007 book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism should look like. From what I understand, Klein’s work is more investigative journalism, while Winterbottom and Whitecross have concentrated on a history lesson based upon her expose of Milton Friedman’s methods of economic shock therapy.

Filed under: Documentary, Independent, Sundance, Theatrical Reviews, Home Entertainment, Politics, Cinematical Indie, War

Continue reading Sundance Review: The Shock Doctrine

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Jeff Bridges has already been nominated and/or won several awards for his performance as “Bad Blake” in Crazy Heart (93 screens), including a SAG award, a Golden Globe and a Los Angeles Film Critics Award. And, of course, many people have pointed out the film’s similarity to Tender Mercies (1983), the feature that finally won Robert Duvall an Oscar (after being passed over for things like The Godfather and Apocalypse Now) — not to mention that Duvall is actually in the new film, too. These awards, and potentially an Oscar nomination, are just our way of suddenly waking up and saying, “you know who’s really good? Jeff Bridges.” Frankly, Crazy Heart is a “just okay” film, but he’s great in it. I guess there’s just something about sad country singers that captures the voters’ attention (with the added bonus that Bridges’ character is an alcoholic).

I won’t begrudge Bridges his hard-earned Oscar, but it’s a case worth looking at. The reason Bridges generally goes unnoticed (with four Oscar nominations scattered over three decades) is because he’s so good, and because he works so often. He has worked in many leading roles, but he’s not exactly what you’d call a big movie star, and he has worked in many supporting roles, but he’s not exactly what you’d call a character actor. He disappears into each role, but he does it without calling attention to the disappearing act, as Brando did. Some actors choose to work less often, and thereby turning each movie into an event. Chaplin was a famous case, and Daniel Day-Lewis is a good example today; he has appeared in just fifteen major movies over a 30-year career. But Bridges works a couple of times each year, and it’s easy to take that quantity for granted.

Filed under: Columns, 400 Screens, 400 Blows

Continue reading 400 Screens, 400 Blows - Busy Bridges

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