For years, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has had a rule against showing TV commercials for movies during the Oscar show itself. This was an attempt to keep the ceremony as pure as possible. It was also to avoid problems -- people might smell conspiracy if, for example, the studio that bought the most ad time during the show also happened to win the most Oscars.
But now, according to Variety, the Academy has voted to change the rule and start allowing movie ads during the show, effective with next February's telecast. This could be huge in terms of building excitement for new films. The Oscars' massive worldwide audience is obviously the right crowd to show movie ads to, and the studios will undoubtedly roll out their best stuff to capitalize on it. The Oscar show doesn't draw as many viewers as the Super Bowl (currently the most sought-after place to debut a highly anticipated new trailer), but at least the studios can count on everyone in the Oscar audience being a movie fan. That's not necessarily the case with the Super Bowl.
Another reason to be excited about this is a stipulation the Academy has made: They're allowing brand-new, not-yet-aired commercials only. What's more, each distributor is only allowed one. It's not clear whether that's one commercial that can air multiple times during the show, or one shot, period. But either way, it means the studios will have to carefully select the ONE upcoming film that they most want to promote, and then produce the best possible commercial for it. And that's good news for the movie fans watching the show.
Pencils down, foreigners! Wednesday was the deadline to submit a film to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for consideration in the Best Foreign-Language Film award at the Oscars, and 51 countries came up with something. Nations with particularly active film industries, such as Spain, France, and Italy, submit something pretty much every year; at the other end of the spectrum, there's the Middle Eastern nation of Jordan, which submitted a film (Captain Abu Raed) this year for the very first time.
If you're not familiar with the system, it works like this. (You can read the whole set of rules at the Academy's site.) Every country is allowed to submit only one film, and the Academy basically leaves it up to the individual nations to determine how that entry is chosen. The film need not have played in the U.S. yet (they usually have not, in fact), but it must have played theatrically for at least a week in its country of origin. It doesn't matter what language it's in, either, as long as it ain't English. Last year, Australia's submission was in Chinese. (For reals!)
The Academy's committee for this award sorts through the submissions and eventually narrows the field down to a nine-film shortlist. From that list, the five official Oscar nominees are chosen, and then of course there's one winner, which is usually about the Nazis.
Wikipedia has a complete list of this year's submissions, but I'll hit some of the highlights for you after the jump.
The last time Angelina Jolie received an Oscar nod was for playing a mental patient in 1999's Girl, Interrupted, for which she took home the statue for Best Supporting Actress. To give you an idea of how long ago that was, consider this: Winona Ryder -- and not Jolie -- was a box-office draw back then.
Now, after years of strong and sometimes overlooked performances (ahem, A Mighty Heart), Jolie is once again receiving battalions of Oscar buzz, this time for her role in Clint Eastwood'sChangeling (get your exclusive first look at the poster above).
Based on real events that transpired in 1920s Los Angeles, Changeling is the tale of a mother (Jolie) whose abducted son is seemingly returned to her by the LAPD. Turns out the boy is not her flesh and blood, however -- or so she adamantly claims -- and thus Mama Jolie sets out to wring the truth from a corrupt police department unwilling to listen to her.
Changeling opens in limited release Oct. 24 and expands wide on Oct. 31.
As we've started to get our fair share of trailers for the coming prestige projects -- Frost/Nixon, The Soloist, Zack and Miri Make a Porno -- I was curious as to why we'd yet to get one for Clint Eastwood's period drama, Changeling, if it were set to open by the end of next month. Particularly after Kim's Cannes review, I wanted to get a proper glimpse beyond a brief clip...
Perhaps hearing my prayers or just tiring of my complaints, Yahoo! Movies saw fit to post the trailer (watch it after the jump as well), in which a young mother (Angelina Jolie) in 1928 Los Angeles finds herself standing up against a corrupt police department when her missing son is returned, or rather replaced by a different child altogether.
Even if the same piece of score hadn't been used in both of their trailers, I'd still have felt a need to draw a correlation between this and last October's missing-kids-and-corrupt-cops powerhouse, Gone Baby Gone (of course, it doesn't hurt that Amy Ryan shows up in both of them). From Eastwood's end comes a particular tinge of Mystic River, and so far as I'm concerned, all of those signs point to something substantial waiting for us when Changeling opens in limited release on October 31.
After winning top honors at the Venice Film Festival, Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler rapidly became the must-see of the Toronto International Film Festival, with huge lines at the press and industry screening this afternoon seemingly unaffected by the news that Fox Searchlight had purchased the film. After seeing The Wrestler for myself, I feel the need to extend a note of caution about the film, which sailed into Toronto buoyed by advance raves for Mickey Rourke's performance as Randy "The Ram" Robinson, a low-level professional wrestler -- and we soon see how really, both those words could be in quotation marks -- whose '80s glory days are long over, scraping by at low-level, low-paying matches until a heart attack forces him to leave the ring and look at his life in the shadow of death. Many have already written about the parallels between Mickey Rourke and the swaggering, scarred wrestler he plays -- early success, fame and notoriety, a series of mis-steps and mistakes taking it all away bit by bit as the years advanced -- and the charge Rourke's own rise and fall offers a filmmaker like Aaronofsky looking to explore ruin and redemption.
But don't believe the hype -- or, more importantly, look past it; if a complicated, messy personal life were all it took to deliver a great performance, Paris Hilton and O.J. Simpson would have more Oscars than Katharine Hepburn. Rourke's work as Randy is physical, invested, powerful and sprawling -- but it's also quiet, sad and hauntingly wounded, too. And The Wrestler offers viewers far more than just Rourke's performance -- which, it must be said, is excellent -- if they're willing to not flinch from what it has to say: The Wrestler is a fascinating, rich, unblinking look at the dark, hunched mean streak that lies curled and poisonous inside of so much American popular entertainment and of so much American life. It's early to say this, but The Wrestler is one of the most grimly exciting, magnetically repellent movies we've had in a long time; it's flat-out one of the best American movies of 2008.
The New York Post ran a little piece yesterday about hearing a rumor that Mark Cuban's Magnolia pictures has signed to distribute Steven Soderbergh's Che, which James and I saw at Cannes and very much enjoyed. I emailed Cuban earlier to ask whether the rumor is true, and got back from him "working on it," which to me sounds very promising. Cuban's a smart guy and he's not afraid to take risks; now he'll just have to figure out how to package and market the damn thing.
Many of us who loved the film at Cannes pondered over drinks after that screeing who would be brave enough to pick it up for distribution, and whether if it did get picked up it would show in one part in its entirety with an intermission, as we saw it at there, or two separate films, or perhaps one greatly edited shorter film. I'm glad to hear that someone's going to pick it up, and I'm curious now to see which way Cuban will play the release of the film. Any thoughts from those who've seen it as to which you'd prefer?
When the worlds of Washington, DC political intrigue, infidelity, fitness centers and internet dating intersect and collide in a darkly hilarious fashion, you must be watching a film by the Coen brothers. Burn After Reading, Joel and Ethan Coen's follow-up to last year's critically lauded award winner, No Country for Old Men, was actually written by the duo as they were adapting No Country, but the two films couldn't be more different.
The colliding worlds in Burn After Reading involve a CIA analyst named Osbourne Cox (John Malkovich), who's summoned to a top-secret meeting only to find out that the secret is he's being demoted due to his drinking problem. Cox blows a gasket and quits rather than taking the demotion, planning to spend his new-found spare time working on his memoirs and refining his drinking. Cox is married to Katie (Tilda Swinton), a icy pediatrician with the worst bedside manner imaginable, and she's less than sympathetic to her husband's life crisis.
The Telluride Film Festival has wrapped up and we're gearing up for our non-stop coverage of the Toronto International Film Festival, which starts tomorrow. Just in case you missed any of our coverage from the Telluride Film Festival, here's a roundup of what we saw there. Most of these films will also be playing at Toronto as well; if you attended Telluride or are going to TIFF, be sure to let us know which films you love or hate -- we always enjoy hearing what our smart Cinematical cinephiles think about the films they catch at fests.
Slumdog Millionaire (dir. Danny Boyle): Fans of director Danny Boyle's work will find much to appreciate in his latest film, Slumdog Millionaire, a sweeping, hopeful story about a boy in the slums of India who becomes an instant celebrity after he wins millions on India's version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire? ... read more
Adam Resurrected, adapted by Noah Stollum Stollman from the book of the same name by Yoram Kaniuk and directed by Paul Schrader, is a darkly abstract and haunting film featuring Jeff Goldblum in his finest, most layered performance ever. Goldblum portrays Adam Steiner, a tragic clown shattered by the horrors of the Holocaust. A clown and ringleader of his own highly successful circus act in pre-War Berlin, Adam finds himself, his wife, and their two young daughters caught in the roundup of Jews. Ironically, his audience was once full of soldiers in Nazi uniforms; now the very people Adam spent his life making happy are just as happy to see him and his family exterminated.
Adam in the present is a prisoner of his memories of those terrible years, and now resident ringleader of a fictional asylum for Holocaust survivors in the Israeli desert. He's a man with a fractured soul, and as a result of his unrelenting anguish and guilt, he astounds the doctors in charge of the asylum by the ability of his mind to make his body bleed and even grow malignant tumors as he repeatedly dies and is reborn.
To paraphrase an IM conversation I just had with a friend regarding the trailer for Gus van Sant's forthcoming biopic, Milk: he thought the trailer was "incredible", whereas I felt it painted openly gay elected official Harvey Milk in a bit too saintly a light, at least within those two-and-a-half minutes, much to his chagrin.
I'm not saying that the real-life Milk wasn't a key figure in the fight for gay rights; I'm not saying that he deserved to be assassinated by Dan White (Josh Brolin); I'm not saying that Sean Penn doesn't look or sound just like the guy (that, I cannot speak for) and won't turn in an impressive performance. All I can speak for is the trailer itself and how I felt towards it.
So, as I go to put the 1984 Oscar-winning doc The Trials of Harvey Milk in my Netflix Queue, in the name of knowing better, would any of you care to attest for both the accuracy and anticipation behind this project?
One of the best things about watching a lot of movies for a living is that occasional joyous thrill of sitting in a darkened theater being overwhelmed by a film, and knowing immediately that, without a doubt, you've just seen something that will absolutely end up on your top ten of the year. When that film is written and directed by a first-time director, it's even better, because you know you've just been witness to the start of a film career that promises to be something special. French novelist-turned-director Phillipe Claudel's much-talked about freshman effort, I've Loved You So Long, which has its North American premiere last night here at Telluride following an award-winning showing at Berlin and a hugely successful run in France, is one of those films.
The film, which stars Kristin Scott Thomas, opens with the reunion of two sisters who haven't seen each other in 15 years. The opening credit sequence goes back and forth between Juliette (Thomas), sitting alone at a table in an airport, looking as lost and desolate as a war refugee, and younger sister Lea (Elsa Zylberstein), coming to pick Juliette up, nervously dropping her keys as she walks in. Without a single word of dialogue to enlighten us as to what's wrong with Juliette, we know this much: this is a woman who has suffered some horrific trauma; she is lost to herself, locked away, not there.
TITLE:I've Loved You So Long DIRECTED BY: Phillipe Claudel STARS: Kristin Scott Thomas, Elsa Zylberstein, Laurent Grevill, Serge Hazanavicius, Frederic Pierrot
WHAT IT'S ABOUT: After being estranged from her family by and act of violence for 15 years, Juliette (Kristin Scott Thomas) returns to move in with her younger sister, Lea (Elsa Zylberstein), her husband, father-in-law, and two young daughters.
WHY WE'RE EXCITED ABOUT IT: Always a solid actress worth watching, Thomas is already getting end-of-season awards buzz for her performance in this French-language film. The intriguing trailer promises a intelligent, suspenseful film with a focus on character and relationships, and Thomas's performance looks to be outstanding.
How do you follow-up a broad comedy starring the biggest names in Hollywood, George Clooney and Brad Pitt? If you're the Coen brothers, you apparently hit the car in reverse and make your next effort a darker story and cast relative unknowns. Variety reports that the newly minted Oscar winning directors Joel and Ethan Coen have cast Tony-nominated stage actor Michael Stuhlbarg (The Pillowman) and TV's Richard Kind (Mad About You; Spin City) for the two lead roles in A Serious Man, their next film after this fall's Burn After Reading. The actors will play brothers in the 1967-set black comedy, which returns the Coens to Fargoterritory by placing the story in their home turf of Minneapolis.
In fact, when we first learned of A Serious Man, more than a year ago (and almost a year before the Coens each won 3 Academy Awards, for writing, directing and producing No Country for Old Men), the script was described as being "in the vein of Fargo." Now we get a little inkling more about the plot of Serious: Stuhlberg will play a professor named Larry Gopnik, whose wife is leaving him and whose "socially inept" brother (Kind) won't leave the house. Hopefully, to further repeat the analogy to their double-Oscar-winning 1996 film, the Coens can cast Frances McDormand as the wife, she can then win another Academy Award and Kind (pictured above) can, like William H. Macy before him, finally go from near-obscurity to well-known, well-respected supporting actor within the next decade.
To be eligible for the Academy Awards, a documentary feature must play theatrically, at least two showings a day, for at least a week in both Los Angeles County and the borough of Manhattan. (For documentary shorts, it only has to play in one location or the other.) And they have to do it by the end of August to be eligible for next year's Oscars, too -- which means time's a-wastin'!
That's where the International Documentary Association's DocuWeek comes in, screening more than a dozen worthy features and shorts in L.A. and New York so they'll be eligible for Oscar consideration (and so audiences can enjoy them, too, of course). Some of the films didn't get distribution deals when they played at film festivals, so they had no chance of earning Oscar eligibility without something like this.
New York's DocuWeek is happening now, running all day every day through Thursday at Village East Cinema and IFC Center. L.A.'s DocuWeek will be Aug. 22-28 at the ArcLight in Hollywood and Sherman Oaks. The films are more or less the same in both cities (four features and four shorts play in L.A. but not New York), and there are some real gems here.
Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father (pictured) has already emotionally devastated about half the Cinematical staff (including myself, Will Goss, Monika Bartyzel, and Erik Davis), and you should take advantage of any opportunity you have to see it. An Unlikely Weapon tells the story of the photographer who snapped that famous shot of a Saigon policeman shooting a Viet Cong guerrilla in the head, and the aftermath of the photo. Glass is about love-him-or-hate-him film composer Philip Glass. War Child profiles a Sudanese refugee who has become an international rap star.
The list goes on. Check out the links for the full programs -- and if you're in New York or L.A., go see some docs!
An editorialist named Eric P. Lucas says in Friday's Los Angeles Times that since Heath Ledger's death was the result of his own recklessness, he therefore should not win an Oscar for his performance in The Dark Knight.
"It's time to stop the canonization of Heath Ledger," Lucas begins. "He's just a pretty good actor who did away with himself and broke the hearts of his family and friends, and he shouldn't get an Academy Award to memorialize his death. ... Each year more than 100,000 Americans die of alcohol or drug abuse. It would be madness to commemorate one such death with the greatest honor in cinema. Please give the Academy Award to someone who's had the courage to stick around."
Lucas asserts that Ledger's performance isn't all that great anyway -- "a can-can dance of snuffling pseudo-psychopathia," he calls it -- but that's irrelevant to his larger point. It would seem that even if Ledger's Joker truly did represent the finest acting of the year, his personal behavior should disqualify him from Oscar consideration.
To Lucas I say this: Wanna watch me make this pencil disappear?
I actually agree with a lot of what he writes about how certain people's drug- or alcohol-fueled deaths make them more iconic than they would have been otherwise. Did Kurt Cobain's suicide rob my generation of its greatest poet? Nah. I think the only group that really suffered a major loss when Cobain died was the heroin industry. And I think it's silly when people talk about getting emotional when they see Ledger in The Dark Knight, as if the death of someone they never met still makes them misty-eyed all these months later. So let it not be said that I am not a heartless bastard.
For years, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has had a rule against showing TV commercials for movies during the Oscar show itself. This was an attempt to keep the ceremony as pure as possible. It was also to avoid problems -- people might smell conspiracy if, for example, the studio that bought the most ad time during the show also happened to win the most Oscars. 
As we've started to get our fair share of trailers for the coming prestige projects -- Frost/Nixon, The Soloist, Zack and Miri Make a Porno -- I was curious as to why we'd yet to get one for 
The New York Post ran a little piece yesterday about hearing a rumor that Mark Cuban's Magnolia pictures has 
Slumdog Millionaire (dir. Danny Boyle): Fans of director Danny Boyle's work will find much to appreciate in his latest film, 
How do you follow-up a broad comedy starring the biggest names in Hollywood, 
To be eligible for the Academy Awards, a documentary feature must play theatrically, at least two showings a day, for at least a week in both Los Angeles County and the borough of Manhattan. (For documentary shorts, it only has to play in one location or the other.) And they have to do it by the end of August to be eligible for next year's Oscars, too -- which means time's a-wastin'! 
An editorialist named Eric P. Lucas says in Friday's Los Angeles Times that since 
