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Ava after Sundance
From the home page
Nsenga Burton | The Root
What do you do when you become the first African-American woman to win the best director award at the Sundance Film Festival? You keep working, says independent filmmaker Ava DuVernay, who is hell-bent on not letting the hype take her off her game. ...
DuVernay is more interested in continuing to make good documentary and fictional films than she is in basking in the afterglow of her historic win. She talked to The Root about her award, what it means for other black women filmmakers and what's next for the Los Angeles native who is taking the independent-film community by storm. ...
Read more of the Ava Du Vernay interview at The Root
Sundance 2012: Cautious optimism
From the home page
Jay A. Fernandez and Daniel Miller | The Hollywood Reporter
A year after one of the most hectic Sundance markets in a decade, the stage is set for a repeat performance. The pace may not be as frenetic this year, though. Several big-ticket purchases from last year's festivals did only middling business in release, but buyers, sellers and producers see the indie scene on the whole as healthy and full of new opportunities in filmmaking, financing and distribution.
"There is a lot of optimism going in," says Ken Kamins, who is selling West of Memphis, the documentary about the West Memphis 3 that he executive produced. "The marketplace is defined by the fact that there are so many movies going to Sundance this year that are having their premieres where worldwide rights are available." ...
Read more at The Hollywood Reporter
Hollywood’s Asian whitewash
From the home page
Stephanie Siek | CNN
America’s embrace of Japanese pop culture, particularly manga and anime, hasn’t resulted in an embrace of Asian and Asian-American actors when those storylines go to Hollywood.
Two upcoming feature films based on Japanese material are already stirring controversy after rumors that white American actors will be cast as characters originally written as Japanese.
Tom Cruise is rumored to be in talks to play the lead role in the Warner Bros. adaptation of Japanese novel “All You Need is Kill,” replacing a Japanese main character. Warner Bros., which is owned by the same parent company as CNN, is also in the pre-production stages of making a live-action version of “Akira,” a graphic novel that was made into a landmark 1988 animated feature film in Japan. All of the actors rumored to be in consideration for the upcoming film’s main characters are white Americans, although casting calls invited actors of “any race” to audition.
That’s troubling to both the series’ devoted fans and advocates of diversity in casting. ...
Read more at CNN.com
Rediscovering Georges Méliès
From the home page
Susan King | Los Angeles Times
Director D.W. Griffith once said of French filmmaker Georges Méliès, "I owe him everything." Charlie Chaplin described him as "the alchemist of light."
Méliès built the first movie studio in Europe and was the first filmmaker to use production sketches and storyboards. Film historians consider him the "father of special effects" — he created the first double exposure on screen, the split screen and the dissolve. Not to mention that he was one of the first filmmakers to have nudity in his films — he was French, after all.
And thanks to Martin Scorsese's critically acclaimed 3-D family film, "Hugo," contemporary audiences are being lovingly introduced to the silent film pioneer. ...
Read more at the Los Angeles Times
Spielberg on the high dive
From the home page
Michael Cieply | The New York Times
LOS ANGELES — “I didn’t get it?”
Steven Spielberg, film rebel, sputtered at the lens in mock fury and disbelief.
“I wasn’t nominated? I got beaten out by Fellini?” he howled, on learning that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences had nominated “Jaws” for a best-picture Oscar, but had snubbed him as the movie’s director.
The year was 1976, and Mr. Spielberg — long haired, loose and tongue firmly in cheek — was hurling outrage at the makers of a sassy documentary about the year’s Oscar contest. “This is called commercial backlash,” the young Spielberg explained, in a final and perhaps not entirely feigned moment of exasperation. “Everybody loves a winner,” he said. “But nobody loves a winner!”
Mugging for the camera at the age of 30, he had found the fault line in his own colossal career. ...
Read more in The New York Times
China’s soft power, on screen
From the home page
Frederik Balfour and Ronald Grover | Bloomberg.com
Bruce Willis’s mob hit-man travels to the future in next year’s movie “Looper.” Thanks to backing from Beijing’s DMG Entertainment, that future is in China.
DMG funded the production on condition the location was moved from France and a role was included for Chinese star Xu Qing. The requirements weren’t just to tap China’s burgeoning cinema audience. With the changes, the movie now qualifies as a Chinese co-production, exempting it from the nation’s 20-film- per year import quota and allowing backers to keep three times as much in box office receipts.
“We are trying to be relevant to a significant market,” said DMG Chief Executive Officer Dan Mintz by telephone from Beijing. “The industry is growing like a rocket ship.”
Looper is one of a rising wave of Sino-U.S. productions as Hollywood looks to expand in a market that’s adding more than 1,400 cinema screens a year. ...
Read more at Bloomberg.com
Spike Lee, 25 years on
From the home page
Michael E. Ross | Short Sharp Shock.
"I guess you could call me an instigator."
Spike Lee, from a Vogue magazine interview
Spike Lee’s first feature film, She’s Gotta Have It got its first maiden voyage at a screening in New York City in October 1985. People watched the film and its frank but riotous challenge of transmitted narratives on sex, race and macho stereotypes. They were rapt, mesmerized … but not so caught up in the dazzling technique they were witnessing, the cinematic voice just announcing itself, that they couldn’t laugh out loud when they recognized their era, their city, their people, themselves.
Lotta water under the American bridge since then. Four presidents, who knows how many wars foreign and domestic, a terrorist attack, change upon change.
And over the 25 years since She’s was officially released on Aug. 8, 1986, Shelton Jackson Lee has chronicled that change through an African American lens. In feature films, television and documentaries, Spike Lee has done what our best directors have always done: push our buttons, rip the envelope open, advance the language of film. With a weave of the literal and the symbolic, the realistic and the whimsical, Lee has carved out a distinctive, refreshingly multifaceted vision of the black national life. ...
Read more at Short Sharp Shock.
Well-known director Shekhar Kapur, who acted in Kaul's film 'Nazar', remembers the filmmaker as one who dedicated his life passionately “to exploring the outer edges of the art of film...He believed the most creative acts happen by accident.”
Actor Anupam Kher views Kaul as one of the pioneers of new wave cinema. “He was a great conversationalist,” he said. ...
More at The Calcutta Telegraph
The trailer for Sucker Punch screams: “Reality is a prison … Your mind can set you free.” It’s a message expressed, to one degree or another, by three new films that explore self-empowerment, fate and where they intersect, or collide.
They all tap into the drive for achieving breakthroughs in personal excellence and self-fulfillment, and the price exacted for either making the breakthroughs or even trying to. They’re expressions of our passion for controlling our destinies, and the challenges that arise in the process.
The Adjustment Bureau examines the thorny (and hardly cinematic) issues of free will, predestination and the power of chance encounters. In the film, which opened March 4, an on-the-rise politician (played by Matt Damon) is forced to endure having his future determined by outside forces, and he struggles to take his destiny into his own hands despite the contrary forces of a shadowy goon squad taking its instructions from “The Chairman.”
In Limitless (which opened Friday and led the weekend box-office), a writer (Bradley Cooper) changes the arc of his professional destiny with a pill that heightens his senses and analytical faculties. He’s ultimately faced with the impact of the drug’s side effects — and the consequences of his own efforts to secure as much of the drug as he can get.
In Sucker Punch, a young woman (Emily Browning) is soon to be lobotomized after being involuntarily committed to a mental hospital by her stepfather. In the film, set in the 1950’s, she resorts to the fertile world of her imagination for the inspiration to escape the asylum with three of her inmate friends. Real and surreal, reality and fantasy are said to abound in equal measure in the Zack Snyder film, opening March 25.
Other entertainments, from The Matrix to Lost to Inception have ventured into the tricky territories of the mind and our deeper existential quandaries. These new films come amid the ongoing pursuit of self-actualization, the achievement of personal goals, in a variety of ways, from yoga classes to cosmetic surgery.
In his 1961 book On Becoming a Person, psychologist Carl Ransom Rogers (regarded as the sixth most influential psychologist of the 20th century), proposed that seeking self-actualization is a basic human trait, and this drive is responsible for much of human behavior. In the book, Rogers defined the process as “the curative force in psychotherapy — man's tendency to actualize himself, to become his potentialities ... to express and activate all the capacities of the organism.”
The new crop of films dovetails, then, with our common existential narrative — speaking to what we’ve always been as humans and, in a world beset with new challenges to pursuing fulfillment, what we’re striving to be all over again.
An Iranian film has won the top prize at the Berlin International Film Festival for the first time. The Golden Bear went to Asghar Farhadi's family drama "Nader and Simin: A Separation."
One of the notable things about the 2011 Berlin International Film Festival was that one of the jury members was not there. Iranian director Jafar Panahi, who is facing six years in prison and a 20-year ban on making films after falling foul of Iran's regime, was appointed as a member of this year's jury as a gesture of solidarity, even though he was unable to attend. ...
Since I last wrote about this year’s Academy Award nominees for Best Picture, there has been a significant shift in the conventional wisdom about the probable winner. “The Social Network,” which was once considered as likely as 90 percent certain to win by betting markets, is now given only about a 20 percent chance. “The King’s Speech,” instead, has become the heavy favorite.
In his wisdom, Oscar has a way of splitting the difference, of dividing the golden spoils between several worthies; the big technical awards go one way while the Golden Dudes for acting, directing and the purely creative work go another. It was much the same that year, but with a twist that confirms just how important demographics can be.
Crouching Tiger won for Best Foreign Language Film, Best Art Direction, Best Original Score and Best Cinematography; it was dissed for the other Oscars on the basis of a thin story (and correspondingly thin dialogue), and on the strength of Soderbergh’s double-barrel directorial triumphs, which pretty much included Ang Lee out of a Best Director nod. Still, and clearly, Lee wouldn’t walk away from Oscar night empty-handed.
Partly for that reason, the three left were easier to decide: Roberts would win Best Actress for Erin Brockovich. That took the heat off Oscar as far as giving Soderbergh his just due. He wouldn’t walk away from Oscar night empty-handed, either.
And so it came down to Gladiator and Traffic for Best Picture, and here’s where demographics may have played a hand.
In his 2003 book All About Oscar, author Emanuel Levy writes: “There is at least one generation between Academy members and active filmmakers (those nominated for awards) and two generations between Academy members and average filmgoers … Age differences and generations gaps inevitably make the Academy vote more conservative, lagging behind the industry’s aesthetic and technical innovations. This built-in conservative bias in the Academy vote, which is reflected in the kinds of movies that won Best Picture, is almost inescapable.”
This, to some extent, is why Traffic was a longer shot than people may have thought, despite its critical acclaim and box-office success (more than $100 million in box office).
The fact that Traffic and Erin Brockovich were both nominated for Best Picture automatically meant one of them wouldn’t make it. But look at it demographically:
Academy voters tend to be older and more conservative — more of the era in which vast, big-canvas historical epics like Ben-Hur and Lawrence of Arabia were held up as the ne plus ultra of movie entertainment. This gave Gladiator a decided edge. Now consider: Soderbergh’s two Oscar hopefuls were essentially pulled from modern-day life and the evening news; for those older voters, who had (and still have) a strong presence in the Academy, Soderbergh’s films shackled them to the world’s real-life everyday agonies.
Gladiator wins.
The 2011 Oscar derby may not come down to slicing and dicing voters’ age-related rationales that finely, but you never know. The King’s Speech and The Fighter are classic stories of overcoming obstacles, and the low expectations of others, in order to succeed. Academy voters might say: “Never mind The Social Network; the saga of that Facebook contraption is a little too bloodless, too hermetic to get our hearts around.” Academy voters have proven they love a tale of the Comeback Kid, the little guy who claws his way to victory against all odds … the outsider on the rails who beats the smart-money favorite, by a little or a lot.
This year, could that scrapper be King George VI or a determined kid from Boston looking for a title shot? It ain’t over til the envelope opens, on Feb. 27th.
Best Motion Picture Drama
The Social Network
Best Actress in a Motion Picture, Drama
Natalie Portman, Black Swan
Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture, Drama
Colin Firth, The King's Speech
Best Director Motion Picture
David Fincher, The Social Network
Best Screenplay Motion Picture
Aaron Sorkin, The Social Network
Best Motion Picture, Comedy or Musical
The Kids Are All Right
Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture, Comedy or Musical
Annette Bening, The Kids Are All Right
Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture, Comedy or Musical
Paul Giamatti, Barney's Version
Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture
Melissa Leo, The Fighter
Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture
Christian Bale, The Fighter
Best Animated Feature Film
Toy Story 3
Best Foreign Language Film
In a Better World (Denmark)
Best Original Score Motion Picture
Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, The Social Network
Best Original Song Motion Picture
"You Haven't Seen the Last of Me," Burlesque
Music and lyrics by Diane Warren
TELEVISION
Best Television Series, Drama
Boardwalk Empire
Best Performance by an Actress in a Television Series, Drama
Katey Sagal, Sons of Anarchy
Best Performance by an Actor in a Television Series, Drama
Steve Buscemi, Boardwalk Empire
Best Television Series, Comedy or Musical
Glee
Best Actress in a Television Series, Comedy or Musical
Laura Linney, The Big C
Best Actor in a Television Series, Comedy or Musical
Jim Parsons, The Big Bang Theory
Best Performance by an Actress in a Mini-Series or Motion Picture Made for Television
Claire Danes, Temple Grandin
Best Performance by an Actor in a Mini-Series or Motion Picture Made for Television
Al Pacino, You Don't Know Jack
Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in a Series, Mini-Series or Motion Picture Made for Television
Jane Lynch, Glee
Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Series, Mini-Series or Motion Picture Made for Television
Chris Colfer, Glee
Best Mini-Series or Motion Picture Made for Television
Carlos
Cecil B. DeMille Award
Robert De Niro
Gareth Edwards, a pleasant, somewhat shy young man from the English midlands, remembers an early unveiling of Monsters , his first feature, with a mixture of horror and nausea. The picture, till then largely unseen, had just been selected for the increasingly influential South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas. Eager to get some sense of what uninvolved civilians thought of the thing, he arranged a public screening.
“Until then, about four or five people had seen it,” he explains. “So I was very, very nervous. The credits came up at the end – the point everyone normally claps – and there was no applause. The lights came up. Nobody clapped. I thought: ‘Oh my God. This is horrific.’ So I made my way to the bar and nobody made eye contact. But after a while I realised they were all a bit traumatised. This was not the film they’d expected.”
The story sounds plausible. Read a brief synopsis and you could be fooled into thinking that Monsters is just another alien invasion thriller. Set in the aftermath of a mass extraterrestrial visitation, the picture follows a photographer, keen to get a snap of the giant invertebrates, as he escorts his boss’s daughter through occupied territory just south of the border between the US and Mexico. …
Despite its verité energies, Monsters feels like the work of an ordered, focused brain. Nobody could watch the movie without detecting certain political undercurrents. In particular, the film-makers appear to have things to say about the US’s current paranoia concerning illegal immigration. A wall divides Mexico from the US. The barrier is allegedly in place to protect against extraterrestrial incursions, but the parallels with current right-wing demands for a similar structure – directed at another class of “alien” – are impossible to ignore.
“Erm, yeah. There were attempts at a political allegory,” he admits with a smidgeon of reluctance. “But, oddly, my main interest was in the ‘war on terror’. Here is this threat. How many people should the state kill to defeat it? Why are western lives regarded as more valuable? To be honest, we would have had the wall if we’d shot the film anywhere else. But it does work as an allegory for the immigration issue. That’s fine. I always think that what people read into a film says more about them than it does about the film. I like that.”
Read the rest at The Irish Times
The movie theater that might
From the home page
Michael E. Ross for seattlepi.com
In the six years since it opened in south Seattle, the Columbia City Cinema, the independent movie theater at 4816 Rainier Ave. S., (in the Odd Fellows Hall building) has come to endear itself to moviegoers weary of trekking downtown for movies. The theater regularly screens first-run films, sometimes films opening the same day at the bigger multiplexes downtown.
The cinema, which opened upstairs in the building in 2004, has been facing the same economic challenges in recent years as its loyal patrons. "We have been playing catch-up and improvising from the beginning," said owner Paul Doyle. "It's been like the endgame in chess."
Read more at seattlepi.com
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Already being hailed as “the movie of the year,” The Social Network opens in theaters on Oct. 1. The film, directed by David Fincher and written by Aaron Sorkin, chronicles the rise of Facebook, the brainchild of Harvard dropout Mark Zuckerberg and a clutch of like-minded associates.
It’s a logical match: the story of how Zuckerberg created Facebook in 2003 wedded to motion pictures — the original social media. There have been other films exploring the dotcom phenomenon. The big challenge has always been making a captivating film out of the slow, chin-pulling process of a Web site’s genesis. It’s hard to build an engrossing tale when the most spectacular special effects are algorithms and code.
The Social Network is poised to be something else again. The film’s directed by David Fincher (Se7en, Zodiac, Panic Room), who knows his way around compelling narrative. The script was written by Aaron Sorkin, who’s proven with NBC’s long-running The West Wing series and the feature Charlie Wilson’s War that he’s capable of building true drama out of the largely cerebral. (The West Wing was celebrated for characters whose walking and talking in the White House nonetheless yielded strong storylines and characters we cared about). Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor handles the music.
The cast is another reason to shortlist this one. Jesse Eisenberg stars as Zuckerberg; he’ll be assisted by Justin Timberlake, Andrew Garfield and newcomer Rooney Mara (Girl With the Dragon Tattoo).
The Social Network may be one of those rarities from Hollywood: a film of-the-moment enough to explain who and what we are right now, and how we got here. Friend this one on Oct. 1.
MICHAEL E. ROSS
Toronto: The film festival Oscar watches
From the home page
Steven Zeitchik, Los Angeles Times
Four years ago, a controversial British film called "Death of a President" stormed into the Toronto International Film Festival. The media was abuzz about its premise, which imagined that George W. Bush had been assassinated and Dick Cheney had ascended to the presidency.
It became the hottest ticket of the festival that year and inspired intense debate about the limits of artistic and political expression — before fizzling in commercial release.
Toronto, the preeminent North American gathering for top-tier filmmakers that starts Thursday and runs through next weekend, generates more heat and contention than almost any other festival. But the movies that wind up with staying power — and with past awards contenders including "Slumdog Millionaire" premiering here in the last few years, there is no shortage of them — are not always the ones garnering the most headlines.
Read more at The Los Angeles Times
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An un-American ‘American’
Bill Gibron, PopMatters
There are no high octane chase scenes. There’s merely some elaborate slow burn cat and mouse set inside the antique walls of an ancient Italian city. There’s also no viable villain, though our hero does spend a lot of time trying to avoid some gun-toting baddies as well as his own brooding dysfunctional personality. There’s also limited contact with the outside world, most of the suspense coming directly from our lead’s crisis of conscience and his inability to be intimate. Toss in numerous nude scenes featuring a fetching Mediterranean starlet, a major superstar mancrush at the helm, and a savvy artist turned filmmaker behind the lens and you’ve got the makings of The American, a film destined to be loathed or loved by those expecting thrills, but winding up with something completely different and unique.
Read more at PopMatters
Netflix’s stream of consciousness
From the home page
Ryan Nakashima and Michael Liedtke
The Associated Press
LOS ANGELES — Netflix Inc. will pay nearly $1 billion during the next five years for the online streaming rights to movies from Paramount, Lionsgate and MGM in a deal that could help convert even more people to the idea of getting their entertainment piped over high-speed Internet connections.
The agreement announced Tuesday marks another breakthrough in Netflix's bid to stock its online streaming library with more compelling material, so it can keep its subscription service relevant as on-demand video systems supplant its core business of renting DVDs through the mail. The online streaming push also helps the company reduce its postage bill for mailing DVDs.
The deal also makes the three studios' joint pay TV venture, Epix, immediately profitable.
Streaming movies provide more instant gratification than renting DVDs through the mail or from a store because the video can be delivered within 30 seconds over a high-speed connection. ...
Read more at The Huffington Post
Hear Larry Magid of CNet in an interview with Netflix VP Steve Swayse
Patricia Neal dead at 84
From the home page
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Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
There was an avidity and fire in the eyes of Patricia Neal, but the movies often took that fire for granted. The actress died of lung cancer Sunday at 84, in Edgartown, Mass. on Martha’s Vineyard. Even when she was young, in Hollywood and making her way through a variety of cultured ingenue roles in the post-World War II era, Neal was not like the others.
That voice, for one thing. From the beginning of her acting career it bestowed the Northwestern University drama star (1943-‘45), born Patsy Louise Neal in the Kentucky coal mining town of Packard, with instant distinction and a sound to remember, beyond “husky” or “gravelly.”
Any good screen performer comes to the job equipped with the essential triad of the eye, the smile and the voice. It’s wonderful when they all go together. And when they don’t quite go together — when the voice doesn’t seem to belong to the rest of the package, at first hearing, but is indelible and wonderful all the same — a good screen performer becomes a memorable one. ...
More by Michael Phillips at the Chicago Tribune
Grant Cogswell, the Movie
From the home page
Grant Cogswell, The Stranger
To spend time on the set of a Hollywood movie in which your younger self is one of the central characters is the ultimate ego trip. It makes it easier to forget that a year and a half ago I was unemployed, essentially homeless, and pushing the last of my salable possessions in a shopping cart four miles across the flats of the San Fernando Valley in order to sell them for exactly seven dollars. That was shortly before I first met Stephen Gyllenhaal.
The way this came to pass is that in 2005, former Stranger news writer Phil Campbell published a book about his time managing my 2001 campaign for Seattle City Council, and that a little over a year later, director Stephen Gyllenhaal (yes, they are related, he is their father) bought the rights to put the story to film. Joel David Moore, the scientist from James Cameron's Avatar, plays me; Jason Biggs, best known as the star of the American Pie movies and now athletically closing in on middle age, plays Phil. …
Complete surreality: being in the fifth-floor offices of the King County Council that I last stepped into as my first political campaign (an initiative against the stadiums) wound down. I was 27. Today they are mocked up to imitate the old City Hall. Chaos of a movie set, the endless gray crates, water bottles, marks crosshatched in colored tape on the carpet. We go into the council chambers (a foam-core city seal on plain pine board overlaying the silhouette of Dr. King) and I sit, and someone laughs and comments that I am finally a councilman, and I think: I am so glad I never became a councilman.” ...
Read the rest at The Stranger
Nuclear dread
From the home page
The New York Times
“The cinema of atomic dread, which culminated in the 1980s doomsday visions of “The Day After” and “When the Wind Blows,” is effectively dormant. The prime years of the cold war inspired apocalyptic images that now seem like relics of a more paranoid time ...
“The point of ‘Countdown to Zero’ — made repeatedly and with unnerving force, through nightmare possibilities evoked by talking-head experts, graphics and archival footage — is that it is time to start worrying again.
“Lucy Walker, the film’s director, said she appreciated the challenge of an ‘unfashionable topic,’ adding, ‘Just because we’re not talking about it doesn’t mean it isn’t still dangerous.’”
Read more in The New York Times
Dennis Hopper
From the home page
MICHAEL E. ROSS | 06.01.10
Of all the Hollywood features and the library’s worth of docs in his half-century career, it’s Hopper’s directorial debut, Easy Rider (1969), that was arguably his triumph, the perfect dovetailing of vision and circumstance. Like Orson Welles 30 years before him (with Citizen Kane), Hopper was in some ways cursed by his freshman success; it set expectations that were, for a variety of reasons, impossible to achieve.
Using the cultural language and cadence of the ‘60s, Hopper tapped into something that ran deeper than one particular era: the root of American possibility, with all its attendant joys and hazards. Hopper and co-star/co-screenwriter Peter Fonda are Billy (Hopper, wearing buckskins) and Wyatt (Fonda, his jacket, helmet and gear adorned in full-color, whizbang stars and stripes), two California bikers fresh from a drug score that will set them up for the indefinite future. Flush with cash and enthusiasm, the pair roar off to look for America.
With the benefit of a pitch-perfect soundtrack, Easy Rider offers some of the most emotionally naked images of modern American wanderlust: Open to the View-Master vistas they move through, Wyatt and Billy are together on the open road, our metaphorical river, avenue of the American dynamic. As a tandem in transit through a nation in transition, they echo and anticipate other vagabond unions in the culture, in a pursuit of freedom and revelation: Hawkeye and Chingachgook, Huck Finn and Jim, Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty, Raoul Duke and Dr. Gonzo, Thelma and Louise. ...
Read more in PopMatters
Seattle, city of movies
From the home page
The Seattle International Film Festival — for movie fans the truly movable feast of the film festival year — is up and running through June 13. SIFF’s theme for 2010 — “Go Inside Film, Get Outside Yourself” — couldn’t be more tailor-made for the tight economic times we’re navigating, and the downbeat introspection these times have engendered.
And SIFF has long had an ace in the hole: Sheer volume. This year’s edition will feature 189 feature-length films, 54 documentaries and 150 shorts from 67 countries, reaffirming SIFF’s presence as the biggest film festival in the country on the basis of screenings and duration. And SIFF shares the wealth, with festival films screened at 11 locations around Seattle, and in nearby Kirkland and (more distant) Everett. The festival’s gone quietly about its business since the 70’s, acquiring little of the mainstream stardust of Cannes or the rough-country-chic panache of Sundance and Telluride, but achieving must-attend status among a broad range of students and lovers of film. This year’s model should only burnish an already secure reputation.
MICHAEL E. ROSS
The 2010 SIFF schedule The festival's history
Cannes 2010
From the home page
“This year's lineup at the Cannes Film Festival is leaner and less star-studded than usual, but you wouldn't know that from Wednesday's high-glamour opening ceremony.
“Hollywood celebrities from Eva Longoria to Salma Hayek strutted their stuff on the red carpet for the premiere of Ridley Scott's "Robin Hood," which opened the French Riviera's 12-day film extravaganza. ...
“Still, despite its high-wattage start, the festival's 63rd edition has fewer household names among the actors and directors to be featured here. The pared-down roster of 19 movies in competition is dominated by emerging filmmakers from Asia, Eastern Europe and elsewhere.
“Jury president Tim Burton played down the relative lack of big names at Cannes, saying he and his fellow jurors — including British actress Kate Beckinsale and Puerto Rico's Benicio del Toro — were going into the competition without preconceptions."
More at Yahoo! News
Lena Horne
From the home page
Lena Horne was 25 and the world was at war when she recorded the song "Stormy Weather," in a lavish production number that graced the film of the same name. The scene was riddled with superstars: Cab Calloway, the Nicholas Brothers and Katharine Dunham and her troupe of world-class dancers. But Lena stole the show with a passionate performance of a song she helped make a classic. She would perform it countless times in the decades to come; so would others. This version, full and unexpurgated, is the template.
Image credits: Home page: Michael Douglas in Wall Street 2: Twentieth Century Fox. Aaron Sorkin: © 2010 Platon. The Social Network poster art: © 2010 Sony Pictures. Stephen Gyllenhaal and Grant Cogswell: Hilary Harris/The Stranger. Dennis Hopper: Charley Gallay/Getty Images. Kate Beckinsale at Cannes 2010: AFP/Getty Images. This page: Michael Douglas in Wall Street 2: Twentieth Century Fox.
Aaron Sorkin: © 2010 Platon. The American poster art: © 2010 Focus Features. Patricia Neal: David Shankbone, republished under Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license. Jason Biggs, Joel David Moore: "Grassroots" production still. Easy Rider poster: © 1969 Columbia Pictures.
From the home page
Nsenga Burton | The Root
What do you do when you become the first African-American woman to win the best director award at the Sundance Film Festival? You keep working, says independent filmmaker Ava DuVernay, who is hell-bent on not letting the hype take her off her game. ...
DuVernay is more interested in continuing to make good documentary and fictional films than she is in basking in the afterglow of her historic win. She talked to The Root about her award, what it means for other black women filmmakers and what's next for the Los Angeles native who is taking the independent-film community by storm. ...
Read more of the Ava Du Vernay interview at The Root
Sundance 2012: Cautious optimism
From the home page
Jay A. Fernandez and Daniel Miller | The Hollywood Reporter
A year after one of the most hectic Sundance markets in a decade, the stage is set for a repeat performance. The pace may not be as frenetic this year, though. Several big-ticket purchases from last year's festivals did only middling business in release, but buyers, sellers and producers see the indie scene on the whole as healthy and full of new opportunities in filmmaking, financing and distribution.
"There is a lot of optimism going in," says Ken Kamins, who is selling West of Memphis, the documentary about the West Memphis 3 that he executive produced. "The marketplace is defined by the fact that there are so many movies going to Sundance this year that are having their premieres where worldwide rights are available." ...
Read more at The Hollywood Reporter
Hollywood’s Asian whitewash
From the home page
Stephanie Siek | CNN
America’s embrace of Japanese pop culture, particularly manga and anime, hasn’t resulted in an embrace of Asian and Asian-American actors when those storylines go to Hollywood.
Two upcoming feature films based on Japanese material are already stirring controversy after rumors that white American actors will be cast as characters originally written as Japanese.
Tom Cruise is rumored to be in talks to play the lead role in the Warner Bros. adaptation of Japanese novel “All You Need is Kill,” replacing a Japanese main character. Warner Bros., which is owned by the same parent company as CNN, is also in the pre-production stages of making a live-action version of “Akira,” a graphic novel that was made into a landmark 1988 animated feature film in Japan. All of the actors rumored to be in consideration for the upcoming film’s main characters are white Americans, although casting calls invited actors of “any race” to audition.
That’s troubling to both the series’ devoted fans and advocates of diversity in casting. ...
Read more at CNN.com
Rediscovering Georges Méliès
From the home page
Susan King | Los Angeles Times
Director D.W. Griffith once said of French filmmaker Georges Méliès, "I owe him everything." Charlie Chaplin described him as "the alchemist of light."
Méliès built the first movie studio in Europe and was the first filmmaker to use production sketches and storyboards. Film historians consider him the "father of special effects" — he created the first double exposure on screen, the split screen and the dissolve. Not to mention that he was one of the first filmmakers to have nudity in his films — he was French, after all.
And thanks to Martin Scorsese's critically acclaimed 3-D family film, "Hugo," contemporary audiences are being lovingly introduced to the silent film pioneer. ...
Read more at the Los Angeles Times
Spielberg on the high dive
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Michael Cieply | The New York Times
LOS ANGELES — “I didn’t get it?”
Steven Spielberg, film rebel, sputtered at the lens in mock fury and disbelief.
“I wasn’t nominated? I got beaten out by Fellini?” he howled, on learning that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences had nominated “Jaws” for a best-picture Oscar, but had snubbed him as the movie’s director.
The year was 1976, and Mr. Spielberg — long haired, loose and tongue firmly in cheek — was hurling outrage at the makers of a sassy documentary about the year’s Oscar contest. “This is called commercial backlash,” the young Spielberg explained, in a final and perhaps not entirely feigned moment of exasperation. “Everybody loves a winner,” he said. “But nobody loves a winner!”
Mugging for the camera at the age of 30, he had found the fault line in his own colossal career. ...
Read more in The New York Times
China’s soft power, on screen
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Frederik Balfour and Ronald Grover | Bloomberg.com
Bruce Willis’s mob hit-man travels to the future in next year’s movie “Looper.” Thanks to backing from Beijing’s DMG Entertainment, that future is in China.
DMG funded the production on condition the location was moved from France and a role was included for Chinese star Xu Qing. The requirements weren’t just to tap China’s burgeoning cinema audience. With the changes, the movie now qualifies as a Chinese co-production, exempting it from the nation’s 20-film- per year import quota and allowing backers to keep three times as much in box office receipts.
“We are trying to be relevant to a significant market,” said DMG Chief Executive Officer Dan Mintz by telephone from Beijing. “The industry is growing like a rocket ship.”
Looper is one of a rising wave of Sino-U.S. productions as Hollywood looks to expand in a market that’s adding more than 1,400 cinema screens a year. ...
Read more at Bloomberg.com
Spike Lee, 25 years on
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Michael E. Ross | Short Sharp Shock.
"I guess you could call me an instigator."
Spike Lee, from a Vogue magazine interview
Spike Lee’s first feature film, She’s Gotta Have It got its first maiden voyage at a screening in New York City in October 1985. People watched the film and its frank but riotous challenge of transmitted narratives on sex, race and macho stereotypes. They were rapt, mesmerized … but not so caught up in the dazzling technique they were witnessing, the cinematic voice just announcing itself, that they couldn’t laugh out loud when they recognized their era, their city, their people, themselves.
Lotta water under the American bridge since then. Four presidents, who knows how many wars foreign and domestic, a terrorist attack, change upon change.
And over the 25 years since She’s was officially released on Aug. 8, 1986, Shelton Jackson Lee has chronicled that change through an African American lens. In feature films, television and documentaries, Spike Lee has done what our best directors have always done: push our buttons, rip the envelope open, advance the language of film. With a weave of the literal and the symbolic, the realistic and the whimsical, Lee has carved out a distinctive, refreshingly multifaceted vision of the black national life. ...
Read more at Short Sharp Shock.
Life after Harry
From the home page
From the home page
Tim Masters | BBC News
There is a chapter in the Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows novel called “The Seven Potters.”
Any book about making of the Harry Potter movies is likely to contain a chapter entitled “The Three Davids.”
Producers David Barron and David Heyman, and director David Yates have been the triumvirate in creative control of the Harry Potter franchise for the final four films.
Now, as Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 hits cinemas worldwide, they are adjusting to life without J.K. Rowling's boy wizard.
Read more at BBC News
There is a chapter in the Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows novel called “The Seven Potters.”
Any book about making of the Harry Potter movies is likely to contain a chapter entitled “The Three Davids.”
Producers David Barron and David Heyman, and director David Yates have been the triumvirate in creative control of the Harry Potter franchise for the final four films.
Now, as Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 hits cinemas worldwide, they are adjusting to life without J.K. Rowling's boy wizard.
Read more at BBC News
Delhi: Mani Kaul dies at 66
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From the home page
The Calcutta Telegraph
New Delhi, July 6 (PTI): The Bollywood fraternity deeply condoles the death of noted film-maker Mani Kaul. Since his twenties, Kaul had built up an iconic presence in the Mumbai film industry.
New Delhi, July 6 (PTI): The Bollywood fraternity deeply condoles the death of noted film-maker Mani Kaul. Since his twenties, Kaul had built up an iconic presence in the Mumbai film industry.
Well-known director Shekhar Kapur, who acted in Kaul's film 'Nazar', remembers the filmmaker as one who dedicated his life passionately “to exploring the outer edges of the art of film...He believed the most creative acts happen by accident.”
Actor Anupam Kher views Kaul as one of the pioneers of new wave cinema. “He was a great conversationalist,” he said. ...
More at The Calcutta Telegraph
Hollywood, N.Y.
From the home page
From the home page
Jordan Zakarin | The Huffington Post
A spotlight shines through where a dark cloud once hung, bringing light once again through the power of cinema. Some of the world's best main stream, independent, foreign and documentary filmmakers have descended upon lower Manhattan once again, as the Tribeca Film Festival opens for its tenth anniversary season.
From April 20th - May 1st, the city's downtown theaters will hold screenings of 93 rigorously selected films, host panel talks involving a number of famed directors, celebrate with a family festival and even and screen an old-time "drive in" movie. It's a community celebration made even more special by the tragedy from which it was borne; founded by Robert DeNiro, producer Jane Rosenthal and husband Craig Hastkoff, the festival was initially conceived an effort to revive what had become a ghost part of Manhattan. ...
Read more at The Huffington Post
A spotlight shines through where a dark cloud once hung, bringing light once again through the power of cinema. Some of the world's best main stream, independent, foreign and documentary filmmakers have descended upon lower Manhattan once again, as the Tribeca Film Festival opens for its tenth anniversary season.
From April 20th - May 1st, the city's downtown theaters will hold screenings of 93 rigorously selected films, host panel talks involving a number of famed directors, celebrate with a family festival and even and screen an old-time "drive in" movie. It's a community celebration made even more special by the tragedy from which it was borne; founded by Robert DeNiro, producer Jane Rosenthal and husband Craig Hastkoff, the festival was initially conceived an effort to revive what had become a ghost part of Manhattan. ...
Read more at The Huffington Post
Tribeca @ 10: An oral history
From the home page
Jay A. Fernandez | The Hollywood Reporter
Robert De Niro was in midtown New York and heading downtown when the second plane hit the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. Jane Rosenthal, his producing partner, was even closer, a block and a half from the first tower, on West Street. She would have been at the foot of the tower, except her driver had, miraculously, slowed at a yellow light. Filmmaker Edward Burns, on his way to do an interview for Sidewalks of New York, had just stepped out of the subway at Chambers Street. Director Martin Scorsese was at his East Side 62nd Street home preparing to go to a Brigitte Lacombe photography exhibition. From her office at 42nd and Sixth Avenue, HBO Documentaries president Sheila Nevins looked out her window and saw the smoke and dust rising.
As one response to that searing moment, the Tribeca Film Festival was launched in 2002 to help downtown New York overcome the devastating impact of the terrorist attacks, which enveloped the neighborhoods surrounding the World Trade Center in fear and financial ruin. Since then, it has generated $600 million in economic activity and has become a permanent community-building event in the heart of the city. ...
More at The Hollywood Reporter
Robert De Niro was in midtown New York and heading downtown when the second plane hit the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. Jane Rosenthal, his producing partner, was even closer, a block and a half from the first tower, on West Street. She would have been at the foot of the tower, except her driver had, miraculously, slowed at a yellow light. Filmmaker Edward Burns, on his way to do an interview for Sidewalks of New York, had just stepped out of the subway at Chambers Street. Director Martin Scorsese was at his East Side 62nd Street home preparing to go to a Brigitte Lacombe photography exhibition. From her office at 42nd and Sixth Avenue, HBO Documentaries president Sheila Nevins looked out her window and saw the smoke and dust rising.
As one response to that searing moment, the Tribeca Film Festival was launched in 2002 to help downtown New York overcome the devastating impact of the terrorist attacks, which enveloped the neighborhoods surrounding the World Trade Center in fear and financial ruin. Since then, it has generated $600 million in economic activity and has become a permanent community-building event in the heart of the city. ...
More at The Hollywood Reporter
Sidney Lumet: King of the gray area
From the home page
From the home page
Michael E. Ross | Culcha
It’s a shame that, in a 50-year career directing films that spanned the human emotional range, Sidney Lumet will probably be best remembered for one, volcanic, over-the-top scene: the one in Network, in which Peter Finch, as messianic anchorman Howard Beale, screams “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not gonna take this anymore!”
It was a breakthrough moment in the culture, in a film that dovetailed with the first emergence of television as a totally ubiquitous presence in our lives. But the riotously satirical performances Lumet coaxed from his actors in Network were the exception to the rule. More often than not, Lumet presided over performances that made fuller use of every color in the emotional palette.
Witness Henry Fonda’s blend of logic and stubborn humanism as the holdout juror in 12 Angry Men. Or Fonda’s portrayal of a U.S. president trying to resolve a nuclear crisis in Fail-Safe. The president, reaching for reason in a near-hopeless situation, in an instant (“Damn it, Grady, this is the president!”) becomes the agent of making the crisis worse.
Look again at Lumet’s direction of The Verdict, in which Paul Newman plays a down-at-heels Boston lawyer presented with a potentially lucrative malpractice case — and with various temptations that led to moral dilemma.
Go back and watch a pre-007 Sean Connery and Harry Andrews in The Hill, a study of life in a British Army prison for wayward British soldiers. The first-blush setup suggests Connery (a prisoner) as the hero, and Andrews (as his guard and nemesis) as the villain, but amid the backdrop of World War II, the relationship revealed gradations of power and authority at odds with seeing things in black and white.
This study of conflict and emotional complexity may be Lumet’s cinematic signature. In May 1997, Boston Herald writer James Verniere said that "at a time when the American film industry is intent on seeing how low it can go, Sidney Lumet remains a master of the morally complex American drama.”
What Lumet was then is what he thankfully remained: In these films and others, a specialist in exploring the gray areas that don’t so much decorate our lives as much as they define them.
It’s a shame that, in a 50-year career directing films that spanned the human emotional range, Sidney Lumet will probably be best remembered for one, volcanic, over-the-top scene: the one in Network, in which Peter Finch, as messianic anchorman Howard Beale, screams “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not gonna take this anymore!”
It was a breakthrough moment in the culture, in a film that dovetailed with the first emergence of television as a totally ubiquitous presence in our lives. But the riotously satirical performances Lumet coaxed from his actors in Network were the exception to the rule. More often than not, Lumet presided over performances that made fuller use of every color in the emotional palette.
Witness Henry Fonda’s blend of logic and stubborn humanism as the holdout juror in 12 Angry Men. Or Fonda’s portrayal of a U.S. president trying to resolve a nuclear crisis in Fail-Safe. The president, reaching for reason in a near-hopeless situation, in an instant (“Damn it, Grady, this is the president!”) becomes the agent of making the crisis worse.
Look again at Lumet’s direction of The Verdict, in which Paul Newman plays a down-at-heels Boston lawyer presented with a potentially lucrative malpractice case — and with various temptations that led to moral dilemma.
Go back and watch a pre-007 Sean Connery and Harry Andrews in The Hill, a study of life in a British Army prison for wayward British soldiers. The first-blush setup suggests Connery (a prisoner) as the hero, and Andrews (as his guard and nemesis) as the villain, but amid the backdrop of World War II, the relationship revealed gradations of power and authority at odds with seeing things in black and white.
This study of conflict and emotional complexity may be Lumet’s cinematic signature. In May 1997, Boston Herald writer James Verniere said that "at a time when the American film industry is intent on seeing how low it can go, Sidney Lumet remains a master of the morally complex American drama.”
What Lumet was then is what he thankfully remained: In these films and others, a specialist in exploring the gray areas that don’t so much decorate our lives as much as they define them.
Sidney Lumet (1924-2011)
From the home page
From the home page
Gregg Kilday | The Hollywood Reporter
Sidney Lumet, who directed such impassioned, often furious, movies as Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon and Network, died Saturday morning at his home in New York City. He was 86.
The cause of death was lymphoma, his stepdaughter Leslie Gimbel told The New York Times.
Lumet, who received five Oscar nominations and seven DGA nominations for his work, was awarded an honorary Oscar in 2005 for his “brilliant services to screenwriters, performers and the art of motion pictures.” ...
Read more on Lumet at The Hollywood Reporter
Sidney Lumet, who directed such impassioned, often furious, movies as Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon and Network, died Saturday morning at his home in New York City. He was 86.
The cause of death was lymphoma, his stepdaughter Leslie Gimbel told The New York Times.
Lumet, who received five Oscar nominations and seven DGA nominations for his work, was awarded an honorary Oscar in 2005 for his “brilliant services to screenwriters, performers and the art of motion pictures.” ...
Read more on Lumet at The Hollywood Reporter
Breakthrough you
From the home page
From the home page
Michael E. Ross, Culcha
The trailer for Sucker Punch screams: “Reality is a prison … Your mind can set you free.” It’s a message expressed, to one degree or another, by three new films that explore self-empowerment, fate and where they intersect, or collide.
They all tap into the drive for achieving breakthroughs in personal excellence and self-fulfillment, and the price exacted for either making the breakthroughs or even trying to. They’re expressions of our passion for controlling our destinies, and the challenges that arise in the process.
The Adjustment Bureau examines the thorny (and hardly cinematic) issues of free will, predestination and the power of chance encounters. In the film, which opened March 4, an on-the-rise politician (played by Matt Damon) is forced to endure having his future determined by outside forces, and he struggles to take his destiny into his own hands despite the contrary forces of a shadowy goon squad taking its instructions from “The Chairman.”
In Limitless (which opened Friday and led the weekend box-office), a writer (Bradley Cooper) changes the arc of his professional destiny with a pill that heightens his senses and analytical faculties. He’s ultimately faced with the impact of the drug’s side effects — and the consequences of his own efforts to secure as much of the drug as he can get.
In Sucker Punch, a young woman (Emily Browning) is soon to be lobotomized after being involuntarily committed to a mental hospital by her stepfather. In the film, set in the 1950’s, she resorts to the fertile world of her imagination for the inspiration to escape the asylum with three of her inmate friends. Real and surreal, reality and fantasy are said to abound in equal measure in the Zack Snyder film, opening March 25.
Other entertainments, from The Matrix to Lost to Inception have ventured into the tricky territories of the mind and our deeper existential quandaries. These new films come amid the ongoing pursuit of self-actualization, the achievement of personal goals, in a variety of ways, from yoga classes to cosmetic surgery.
In his 1961 book On Becoming a Person, psychologist Carl Ransom Rogers (regarded as the sixth most influential psychologist of the 20th century), proposed that seeking self-actualization is a basic human trait, and this drive is responsible for much of human behavior. In the book, Rogers defined the process as “the curative force in psychotherapy — man's tendency to actualize himself, to become his potentialities ... to express and activate all the capacities of the organism.”
The new crop of films dovetails, then, with our common existential narrative — speaking to what we’ve always been as humans and, in a world beset with new challenges to pursuing fulfillment, what we’re striving to be all over again.
Berlin: ‘Nader’ wins Golden Bear
From the home page
From the home page
Der Spiegel Online
An Iranian film has won the top prize at the Berlin International Film Festival for the first time. The Golden Bear went to Asghar Farhadi's family drama "Nader and Simin: A Separation."
One of the notable things about the 2011 Berlin International Film Festival was that one of the jury members was not there. Iranian director Jafar Panahi, who is facing six years in prison and a 20-year ban on making films after falling foul of Iran's regime, was appointed as a member of this year's jury as a gesture of solidarity, even though he was unable to attend. ...
Handicapping Oscar, statistically
From the home page
From the home page
Nate Silver, The New York Times
Since I last wrote about this year’s Academy Award nominees for Best Picture, there has been a significant shift in the conventional wisdom about the probable winner. “The Social Network,” which was once considered as likely as 90 percent certain to win by betting markets, is now given only about a 20 percent chance. “The King’s Speech,” instead, has become the heavy favorite.
Like Crazy tops Sundance
From the home page
From the home page
Steven Zeitchik and Mark Olsen, Los Angeles Times
Reporting from Park City, Utah — A story of young love challenged by geography emerged as the big winner at the Sundance Film Festival on Saturday night.
Drake Doremus' "Like Crazy," a romantic drama starring Anton Yelchin and Felicity Jones as a star-crossed couple and Oscar nominee Jennifer Lawrence as the third wheel, took the U.S. dramatic grand jury prize, the festival's highest honor.
The award was the second of the evening for the film; the jury had previously handed a special prize to Jones.
Reporting from Park City, Utah — A story of young love challenged by geography emerged as the big winner at the Sundance Film Festival on Saturday night.
Drake Doremus' "Like Crazy," a romantic drama starring Anton Yelchin and Felicity Jones as a star-crossed couple and Oscar nominee Jennifer Lawrence as the third wheel, took the U.S. dramatic grand jury prize, the festival's highest honor.
The award was the second of the evening for the film; the jury had previously handed a special prize to Jones.
Crouching Fighter, Hidden Speech?
From the home page
From the home page
Michael E. Ross
In the 2001 Oscar race for Best Picture, it came down to four. Traffic, the edgy, surreal and excellent Steven Soderbergh film exploring the drug trade through a weave of multiple storylines, was thought to be a lock. Its ripped-from-headlines topicality and the originality of Soderbergh’s direction of Stephen Gaghan’s fierce, muscular script were thought to give it an edge over contenders like Ridley Scott’s Gladiator, the tale of betrayal and vengeance set in ancient Rome and starring Russell Crowe.
Soderbergh seemed to double his chances for Best Picture with his directing Erin Brockovich, the Julia Roberts vehicle about one determined environmental crusader going up the system (based on a true story). And then there was Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Ang Lee’s lush, visionary story of four warriors in the Qing dynasty, was the other top contender, one that had already won a raft of international awards.
Soderbergh seemed to double his chances for Best Picture with his directing Erin Brockovich, the Julia Roberts vehicle about one determined environmental crusader going up the system (based on a true story). And then there was Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Ang Lee’s lush, visionary story of four warriors in the Qing dynasty, was the other top contender, one that had already won a raft of international awards.
In his wisdom, Oscar has a way of splitting the difference, of dividing the golden spoils between several worthies; the big technical awards go one way while the Golden Dudes for acting, directing and the purely creative work go another. It was much the same that year, but with a twist that confirms just how important demographics can be.
Crouching Tiger won for Best Foreign Language Film, Best Art Direction, Best Original Score and Best Cinematography; it was dissed for the other Oscars on the basis of a thin story (and correspondingly thin dialogue), and on the strength of Soderbergh’s double-barrel directorial triumphs, which pretty much included Ang Lee out of a Best Director nod. Still, and clearly, Lee wouldn’t walk away from Oscar night empty-handed.
Partly for that reason, the three left were easier to decide: Roberts would win Best Actress for Erin Brockovich. That took the heat off Oscar as far as giving Soderbergh his just due. He wouldn’t walk away from Oscar night empty-handed, either.
And so it came down to Gladiator and Traffic for Best Picture, and here’s where demographics may have played a hand.
In his 2003 book All About Oscar, author Emanuel Levy writes: “There is at least one generation between Academy members and active filmmakers (those nominated for awards) and two generations between Academy members and average filmgoers … Age differences and generations gaps inevitably make the Academy vote more conservative, lagging behind the industry’s aesthetic and technical innovations. This built-in conservative bias in the Academy vote, which is reflected in the kinds of movies that won Best Picture, is almost inescapable.”
This, to some extent, is why Traffic was a longer shot than people may have thought, despite its critical acclaim and box-office success (more than $100 million in box office).
The fact that Traffic and Erin Brockovich were both nominated for Best Picture automatically meant one of them wouldn’t make it. But look at it demographically:
Academy voters tend to be older and more conservative — more of the era in which vast, big-canvas historical epics like Ben-Hur and Lawrence of Arabia were held up as the ne plus ultra of movie entertainment. This gave Gladiator a decided edge. Now consider: Soderbergh’s two Oscar hopefuls were essentially pulled from modern-day life and the evening news; for those older voters, who had (and still have) a strong presence in the Academy, Soderbergh’s films shackled them to the world’s real-life everyday agonies.
For these voters, the Best Picture choice was clear: Gladiator was a movie whose subject matter was what you went to the movies for. Traffic was a movie whose subject matter was what you went to the movies to get away from.
Gladiator wins.
The 2011 Oscar derby may not come down to slicing and dicing voters’ age-related rationales that finely, but you never know. The King’s Speech and The Fighter are classic stories of overcoming obstacles, and the low expectations of others, in order to succeed. Academy voters might say: “Never mind The Social Network; the saga of that Facebook contraption is a little too bloodless, too hermetic to get our hearts around.” Academy voters have proven they love a tale of the Comeback Kid, the little guy who claws his way to victory against all odds … the outsider on the rails who beats the smart-money favorite, by a little or a lot.
This year, could that scrapper be King George VI or a determined kid from Boston looking for a title shot? It ain’t over til the envelope opens, on Feb. 27th.
Sundance, home of reinvention
From the home page
From the home page
John Horn and Chris Lee, Los Angeles Times
Most actors would kill for Patrick Dempsey's credits. The 45-year-old performer not only stars in the highly rated television series "Grey's Anatomy" but also boasts the movie hits "Valentine's Day" and "Enchanted."
Yet when Dempsey — Dr. McDreamy to his TV admirers — looks at the trajectory of his career, he fears being pigeonholed as the likable, romantic comedy hunk who can't play anything else. "If you're typecast, you really have to take the initiative and change people's opinions about you," Dempsey said. "You have to be very proactive."
So this weekend Dempsey will fly to Park City, Utah, for the Sundance Film Festival, where his movie "Flypaper" will have its world premiere. While Hollywood movers and shakers go to Sundance for any number of reasons — the parties, the swag, the skiing, the deals — any number of actors and filmmakers now head to the nation's top showcase for independent movies with a distinct professional goal: to reinvent their image.
Yet when Dempsey — Dr. McDreamy to his TV admirers — looks at the trajectory of his career, he fears being pigeonholed as the likable, romantic comedy hunk who can't play anything else. "If you're typecast, you really have to take the initiative and change people's opinions about you," Dempsey said. "You have to be very proactive."
So this weekend Dempsey will fly to Park City, Utah, for the Sundance Film Festival, where his movie "Flypaper" will have its world premiere. While Hollywood movers and shakers go to Sundance for any number of reasons — the parties, the swag, the skiing, the deals — any number of actors and filmmakers now head to the nation's top showcase for independent movies with a distinct professional goal: to reinvent their image.
Golden Globes 2011: The winners
From the home page
From the home page
From various news sources
Best Motion Picture Drama
The Social Network
Best Actress in a Motion Picture, Drama
Natalie Portman, Black Swan
Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture, Drama
Colin Firth, The King's Speech
Best Director Motion Picture
David Fincher, The Social Network
Best Screenplay Motion Picture
Aaron Sorkin, The Social Network
Best Motion Picture, Comedy or Musical
The Kids Are All Right
Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture, Comedy or Musical
Annette Bening, The Kids Are All Right
Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture, Comedy or Musical
Paul Giamatti, Barney's Version
Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture
Melissa Leo, The Fighter
Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture
Christian Bale, The Fighter
Best Animated Feature Film
Toy Story 3
Best Foreign Language Film
In a Better World (Denmark)
Best Original Score Motion Picture
Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, The Social Network
Best Original Song Motion Picture
"You Haven't Seen the Last of Me," Burlesque
Music and lyrics by Diane Warren
TELEVISION
Best Television Series, Drama
Boardwalk Empire
Best Performance by an Actress in a Television Series, Drama
Katey Sagal, Sons of Anarchy
Best Performance by an Actor in a Television Series, Drama
Steve Buscemi, Boardwalk Empire
Best Television Series, Comedy or Musical
Glee
Best Actress in a Television Series, Comedy or Musical
Laura Linney, The Big C
Best Actor in a Television Series, Comedy or Musical
Jim Parsons, The Big Bang Theory
Best Performance by an Actress in a Mini-Series or Motion Picture Made for Television
Claire Danes, Temple Grandin
Best Performance by an Actor in a Mini-Series or Motion Picture Made for Television
Al Pacino, You Don't Know Jack
Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in a Series, Mini-Series or Motion Picture Made for Television
Jane Lynch, Glee
Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Series, Mini-Series or Motion Picture Made for Television
Chris Colfer, Glee
Best Mini-Series or Motion Picture Made for Television
Carlos
Cecil B. DeMille Award
Robert De Niro
Another alien nation
From the home page
From the home page
Donald Clarke, The Irish Times
Gareth Edwards, a pleasant, somewhat shy young man from the English midlands, remembers an early unveiling of Monsters , his first feature, with a mixture of horror and nausea. The picture, till then largely unseen, had just been selected for the increasingly influential South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas. Eager to get some sense of what uninvolved civilians thought of the thing, he arranged a public screening.
“Until then, about four or five people had seen it,” he explains. “So I was very, very nervous. The credits came up at the end – the point everyone normally claps – and there was no applause. The lights came up. Nobody clapped. I thought: ‘Oh my God. This is horrific.’ So I made my way to the bar and nobody made eye contact. But after a while I realised they were all a bit traumatised. This was not the film they’d expected.”
The story sounds plausible. Read a brief synopsis and you could be fooled into thinking that Monsters is just another alien invasion thriller. Set in the aftermath of a mass extraterrestrial visitation, the picture follows a photographer, keen to get a snap of the giant invertebrates, as he escorts his boss’s daughter through occupied territory just south of the border between the US and Mexico. …
Despite its verité energies, Monsters feels like the work of an ordered, focused brain. Nobody could watch the movie without detecting certain political undercurrents. In particular, the film-makers appear to have things to say about the US’s current paranoia concerning illegal immigration. A wall divides Mexico from the US. The barrier is allegedly in place to protect against extraterrestrial incursions, but the parallels with current right-wing demands for a similar structure – directed at another class of “alien” – are impossible to ignore.
“Erm, yeah. There were attempts at a political allegory,” he admits with a smidgeon of reluctance. “But, oddly, my main interest was in the ‘war on terror’. Here is this threat. How many people should the state kill to defeat it? Why are western lives regarded as more valuable? To be honest, we would have had the wall if we’d shot the film anywhere else. But it does work as an allegory for the immigration issue. That’s fine. I always think that what people read into a film says more about them than it does about the film. I like that.”
Read the rest at The Irish Times
The movie theater that might
From the home page
Michael E. Ross for seattlepi.com
It'd be the plotline of an engaging Hollywood movie, but it's happening in real life in Seattle, and you, dear moviegoer, get to help write the happy ending.
In the six years since it opened in south Seattle, the Columbia City Cinema, the independent movie theater at 4816 Rainier Ave. S., (in the Odd Fellows Hall building) has come to endear itself to moviegoers weary of trekking downtown for movies. The theater regularly screens first-run films, sometimes films opening the same day at the bigger multiplexes downtown.The cinema, which opened upstairs in the building in 2004, has been facing the same economic challenges in recent years as its loyal patrons. "We have been playing catch-up and improvising from the beginning," said owner Paul Doyle. "It's been like the endgame in chess."
Read more at seattlepi.com
MPAA chases the pirates
From the home page
From the home page
Jon Healey, Los Angeles Times
Two Hollywood studios have won a legal victory over a new type of foe in their battle against online piracy: a company that referred advertisements to sites that streamed pirated movies and television shows. But the case was resolved in a way that doesn't set a precedent that could be used against online ad networks -- like, say, Google.
U.S. District Court Judge George H. Wu signed a consent judgment Wednesday ordering Triton Media of Scottsdale, Ariz., to pay $400,000 to Warner Bros. Entertainment and Disney Enterprises. (The defendant is not to be confused with Triton Media Group of Sherman Oaks.) The judgment bars Triton from operating or assisting eight sites named in the studios' original complaint -- free-tv-video-online.info, supernovatube.com, donogo.com, watch-movies.net, watch-movies-online.tv, watch-movies-links.net, thepiratecity.org and havenvideo.com -- and any similar venture.
Lisa Stone, a vice president and senior content protection counsel for the Motion Picture Assn. of America, said the case was the first time the studios had sought to hold a company liable for the infringements committed on sites to which it referred ads.
Read the rest in the Los Angeles Times
Two Hollywood studios have won a legal victory over a new type of foe in their battle against online piracy: a company that referred advertisements to sites that streamed pirated movies and television shows. But the case was resolved in a way that doesn't set a precedent that could be used against online ad networks -- like, say, Google.
U.S. District Court Judge George H. Wu signed a consent judgment Wednesday ordering Triton Media of Scottsdale, Ariz., to pay $400,000 to Warner Bros. Entertainment and Disney Enterprises. (The defendant is not to be confused with Triton Media Group of Sherman Oaks.) The judgment bars Triton from operating or assisting eight sites named in the studios' original complaint -- free-tv-video-online.info, supernovatube.com, donogo.com, watch-movies.net, watch-movies-online.tv, watch-movies-links.net, thepiratecity.org and havenvideo.com -- and any similar venture.
Lisa Stone, a vice president and senior content protection counsel for the Motion Picture Assn. of America, said the case was the first time the studios had sought to hold a company liable for the infringements committed on sites to which it referred ads.
Read the rest in the Los Angeles Times
Gordon Gekko 2.0
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From the home page
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Randall Lane, The Daily Beast
The funniest part of the decidedly unfunny Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps takes place in the first 15 seconds: Gordon Gekko, reclaiming his belongings upon his release from prison (“gold money clip: no money”), is handed back his cell phone, in all its football-sized, 1987 glory. It seems that Gekko, poster child of the junk bond era, is officially a dinosaur. …
Gekko has resonated across three bubbles because he was authentic—the Academy agreed, awarding Michael Douglas his only acting Oscar—bringing the go-go ’80s to life. He was a small dose of Carl Icahn, a larger piece of Michael Milken, and yet another swath of Ivan Boesky, three titans from the days of high-yield bonds, hostile takeovers, and insider trading scandals whom Douglas brought to life collectively. ...
For the 2010 version, Gekko 2.0 again embodies an era, though the real-life inspiration is less obvious, requiring a peek at the very end of the final credits, when two names anonymous to almost anyone without a Bloomberg terminal, Dan Loeb and Jim Chanos, provide a clue to who shaped Stone’s new Wall Street world view.
Read the rest at The Daily Beast
The funniest part of the decidedly unfunny Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps takes place in the first 15 seconds: Gordon Gekko, reclaiming his belongings upon his release from prison (“gold money clip: no money”), is handed back his cell phone, in all its football-sized, 1987 glory. It seems that Gekko, poster child of the junk bond era, is officially a dinosaur. …
Gekko has resonated across three bubbles because he was authentic—the Academy agreed, awarding Michael Douglas his only acting Oscar—bringing the go-go ’80s to life. He was a small dose of Carl Icahn, a larger piece of Michael Milken, and yet another swath of Ivan Boesky, three titans from the days of high-yield bonds, hostile takeovers, and insider trading scandals whom Douglas brought to life collectively. ...
For the 2010 version, Gekko 2.0 again embodies an era, though the real-life inspiration is less obvious, requiring a peek at the very end of the final credits, when two names anonymous to almost anyone without a Bloomberg terminal, Dan Loeb and Jim Chanos, provide a clue to who shaped Stone’s new Wall Street world view.
Read the rest at The Daily Beast
A writer's crack up, and part way back
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Lynn Hirschberg, W
In 2008, when Aaron Sorkin read the 13-page proposal for a book that would attempt to detail the birth of Facebook, he stopped at page three and called his agent. It wasn’t the allure of the Internet that captured his attention—Sorkin, who created and wrote 88 episodes of The West Wing and films like The American President, had moderate disdain for the Internet, viewing it as a land of vastly overempowered amateurs. ... What entranced Sorkin, who has always gravitated toward the overlapping and conflicting spheres of idealism and power, was the realization that the invention of Facebook contained all of his favorite themes: the longing for acceptance, the wish for success, the idea that work will give you a home, and that home will solve your problems. ... As Sorkin saw immediately in the proposal, the Facebook saga was the speeded-up version of nearly every business narrative: In just five years Facebook went from a dorm room prank to a global brand worth billions. In that story was the foundation for an even larger, classically American subject—what you lose when you win.
Read the rest at W
In 2008, when Aaron Sorkin read the 13-page proposal for a book that would attempt to detail the birth of Facebook, he stopped at page three and called his agent. It wasn’t the allure of the Internet that captured his attention—Sorkin, who created and wrote 88 episodes of The West Wing and films like The American President, had moderate disdain for the Internet, viewing it as a land of vastly overempowered amateurs. ... What entranced Sorkin, who has always gravitated toward the overlapping and conflicting spheres of idealism and power, was the realization that the invention of Facebook contained all of his favorite themes: the longing for acceptance, the wish for success, the idea that work will give you a home, and that home will solve your problems. ... As Sorkin saw immediately in the proposal, the Facebook saga was the speeded-up version of nearly every business narrative: In just five years Facebook went from a dorm room prank to a global brand worth billions. In that story was the foundation for an even larger, classically American subject—what you lose when you win.
Read the rest at W
Facebook at the movies
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From the home page
Already being hailed as “the movie of the year,” The Social Network opens in theaters on Oct. 1. The film, directed by David Fincher and written by Aaron Sorkin, chronicles the rise of Facebook, the brainchild of Harvard dropout Mark Zuckerberg and a clutch of like-minded associates.
It’s a logical match: the story of how Zuckerberg created Facebook in 2003 wedded to motion pictures — the original social media. There have been other films exploring the dotcom phenomenon. The big challenge has always been making a captivating film out of the slow, chin-pulling process of a Web site’s genesis. It’s hard to build an engrossing tale when the most spectacular special effects are algorithms and code.
The Social Network is poised to be something else again. The film’s directed by David Fincher (Se7en, Zodiac, Panic Room), who knows his way around compelling narrative. The script was written by Aaron Sorkin, who’s proven with NBC’s long-running The West Wing series and the feature Charlie Wilson’s War that he’s capable of building true drama out of the largely cerebral. (The West Wing was celebrated for characters whose walking and talking in the White House nonetheless yielded strong storylines and characters we cared about). Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor handles the music.
The cast is another reason to shortlist this one. Jesse Eisenberg stars as Zuckerberg; he’ll be assisted by Justin Timberlake, Andrew Garfield and newcomer Rooney Mara (Girl With the Dragon Tattoo).
The Social Network may be one of those rarities from Hollywood: a film of-the-moment enough to explain who and what we are right now, and how we got here. Friend this one on Oct. 1.
MICHAEL E. ROSS
Toronto: The film festival Oscar watches
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Steven Zeitchik, Los Angeles Times Four years ago, a controversial British film called "Death of a President" stormed into the Toronto International Film Festival. The media was abuzz about its premise, which imagined that George W. Bush had been assassinated and Dick Cheney had ascended to the presidency.
It became the hottest ticket of the festival that year and inspired intense debate about the limits of artistic and political expression — before fizzling in commercial release.
Toronto, the preeminent North American gathering for top-tier filmmakers that starts Thursday and runs through next weekend, generates more heat and contention than almost any other festival. But the movies that wind up with staying power — and with past awards contenders including "Slumdog Millionaire" premiering here in the last few years, there is no shortage of them — are not always the ones garnering the most headlines.
Read more at The Los Angeles Times
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Bill Gibron, PopMatters
There are no high octane chase scenes. There’s merely some elaborate slow burn cat and mouse set inside the antique walls of an ancient Italian city. There’s also no viable villain, though our hero does spend a lot of time trying to avoid some gun-toting baddies as well as his own brooding dysfunctional personality. There’s also limited contact with the outside world, most of the suspense coming directly from our lead’s crisis of conscience and his inability to be intimate. Toss in numerous nude scenes featuring a fetching Mediterranean starlet, a major superstar mancrush at the helm, and a savvy artist turned filmmaker behind the lens and you’ve got the makings of The American, a film destined to be loathed or loved by those expecting thrills, but winding up with something completely different and unique.
Read more at PopMatters
Netflix’s stream of consciousness
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Ryan Nakashima and Michael Liedtke
The Associated Press
LOS ANGELES — Netflix Inc. will pay nearly $1 billion during the next five years for the online streaming rights to movies from Paramount, Lionsgate and MGM in a deal that could help convert even more people to the idea of getting their entertainment piped over high-speed Internet connections.
The deal also makes the three studios' joint pay TV venture, Epix, immediately profitable.
Streaming movies provide more instant gratification than renting DVDs through the mail or from a store because the video can be delivered within 30 seconds over a high-speed connection. ...
Read more at The Huffington Post
Hear Larry Magid of CNet in an interview with Netflix VP Steve Swayse
Patricia Neal dead at 84
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There was an avidity and fire in the eyes of Patricia Neal, but the movies often took that fire for granted. The actress died of lung cancer Sunday at 84, in Edgartown, Mass. on Martha’s Vineyard. Even when she was young, in Hollywood and making her way through a variety of cultured ingenue roles in the post-World War II era, Neal was not like the others.
That voice, for one thing. From the beginning of her acting career it bestowed the Northwestern University drama star (1943-‘45), born Patsy Louise Neal in the Kentucky coal mining town of Packard, with instant distinction and a sound to remember, beyond “husky” or “gravelly.”
Any good screen performer comes to the job equipped with the essential triad of the eye, the smile and the voice. It’s wonderful when they all go together. And when they don’t quite go together — when the voice doesn’t seem to belong to the rest of the package, at first hearing, but is indelible and wonderful all the same — a good screen performer becomes a memorable one. ...
More by Michael Phillips at the Chicago Tribune
Grant Cogswell, the Movie
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To spend time on the set of a Hollywood movie in which your younger self is one of the central characters is the ultimate ego trip. It makes it easier to forget that a year and a half ago I was unemployed, essentially homeless, and pushing the last of my salable possessions in a shopping cart four miles across the flats of the San Fernando Valley in order to sell them for exactly seven dollars. That was shortly before I first met Stephen Gyllenhaal.
The way this came to pass is that in 2005, former Stranger news writer Phil Campbell published a book about his time managing my 2001 campaign for Seattle City Council, and that a little over a year later, director Stephen Gyllenhaal (yes, they are related, he is their father) bought the rights to put the story to film. Joel David Moore, the scientist from James Cameron's Avatar, plays me; Jason Biggs, best known as the star of the American Pie movies and now athletically closing in on middle age, plays Phil. …
Complete surreality: being in the fifth-floor offices of the King County Council that I last stepped into as my first political campaign (an initiative against the stadiums) wound down. I was 27. Today they are mocked up to imitate the old City Hall. Chaos of a movie set, the endless gray crates, water bottles, marks crosshatched in colored tape on the carpet. We go into the council chambers (a foam-core city seal on plain pine board overlaying the silhouette of Dr. King) and I sit, and someone laughs and comments that I am finally a councilman, and I think: I am so glad I never became a councilman.” ...
Read the rest at The Stranger
From the home page
The New York Times
“The cinema of atomic dread, which culminated in the 1980s doomsday visions of “The Day After” and “When the Wind Blows,” is effectively dormant. The prime years of the cold war inspired apocalyptic images that now seem like relics of a more paranoid time ...
“The point of ‘Countdown to Zero’ — made repeatedly and with unnerving force, through nightmare possibilities evoked by talking-head experts, graphics and archival footage — is that it is time to start worrying again.
“Lucy Walker, the film’s director, said she appreciated the challenge of an ‘unfashionable topic,’ adding, ‘Just because we’re not talking about it doesn’t mean it isn’t still dangerous.’”
Read more in The New York Times
Dennis Hopper
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MICHAEL E. ROSS | 06.01.10Of all the Hollywood features and the library’s worth of docs in his half-century career, it’s Hopper’s directorial debut, Easy Rider (1969), that was arguably his triumph, the perfect dovetailing of vision and circumstance. Like Orson Welles 30 years before him (with Citizen Kane), Hopper was in some ways cursed by his freshman success; it set expectations that were, for a variety of reasons, impossible to achieve.
Using the cultural language and cadence of the ‘60s, Hopper tapped into something that ran deeper than one particular era: the root of American possibility, with all its attendant joys and hazards. Hopper and co-star/co-screenwriter Peter Fonda are Billy (Hopper, wearing buckskins) and Wyatt (Fonda, his jacket, helmet and gear adorned in full-color, whizbang stars and stripes), two California bikers fresh from a drug score that will set them up for the indefinite future. Flush with cash and enthusiasm, the pair roar off to look for America.
With the benefit of a pitch-perfect soundtrack, Easy Rider offers some of the most emotionally naked images of modern American wanderlust: Open to the View-Master vistas they move through, Wyatt and Billy are together on the open road, our metaphorical river, avenue of the American dynamic. As a tandem in transit through a nation in transition, they echo and anticipate other vagabond unions in the culture, in a pursuit of freedom and revelation: Hawkeye and Chingachgook, Huck Finn and Jim, Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty, Raoul Duke and Dr. Gonzo, Thelma and Louise. ...
Read more in PopMatters
Seattle, city of movies
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The Seattle International Film Festival — for movie fans the truly movable feast of the film festival year — is up and running through June 13. SIFF’s theme for 2010 — “Go Inside Film, Get Outside Yourself” — couldn’t be more tailor-made for the tight economic times we’re navigating, and the downbeat introspection these times have engendered.
And SIFF has long had an ace in the hole: Sheer volume. This year’s edition will feature 189 feature-length films, 54 documentaries and 150 shorts from 67 countries, reaffirming SIFF’s presence as the biggest film festival in the country on the basis of screenings and duration. And SIFF shares the wealth, with festival films screened at 11 locations around Seattle, and in nearby Kirkland and (more distant) Everett. The festival’s gone quietly about its business since the 70’s, acquiring little of the mainstream stardust of Cannes or the rough-country-chic panache of Sundance and Telluride, but achieving must-attend status among a broad range of students and lovers of film. This year’s model should only burnish an already secure reputation.MICHAEL E. ROSS
The 2010 SIFF schedule The festival's history
Cannes 2010
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“This year's lineup at the Cannes Film Festival is leaner and less star-studded than usual, but you wouldn't know that from Wednesday's high-glamour opening ceremony.
“Hollywood celebrities from Eva Longoria to Salma Hayek strutted their stuff on the red carpet for the premiere of Ridley Scott's "Robin Hood," which opened the French Riviera's 12-day film extravaganza. ...“Still, despite its high-wattage start, the festival's 63rd edition has fewer household names among the actors and directors to be featured here. The pared-down roster of 19 movies in competition is dominated by emerging filmmakers from Asia, Eastern Europe and elsewhere.
“Jury president Tim Burton played down the relative lack of big names at Cannes, saying he and his fellow jurors — including British actress Kate Beckinsale and Puerto Rico's Benicio del Toro — were going into the competition without preconceptions."
More at Yahoo! News
Lena Horne
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Lena Horne was 25 and the world was at war when she recorded the song "Stormy Weather," in a lavish production number that graced the film of the same name. The scene was riddled with superstars: Cab Calloway, the Nicholas Brothers and Katharine Dunham and her troupe of world-class dancers. But Lena stole the show with a passionate performance of a song she helped make a classic. She would perform it countless times in the decades to come; so would others. This version, full and unexpurgated, is the template.
Image credits: Home page: Michael Douglas in Wall Street 2: Twentieth Century Fox. Aaron Sorkin: © 2010 Platon. The Social Network poster art: © 2010 Sony Pictures. Stephen Gyllenhaal and Grant Cogswell: Hilary Harris/The Stranger. Dennis Hopper: Charley Gallay/Getty Images. Kate Beckinsale at Cannes 2010: AFP/Getty Images. This page: Michael Douglas in Wall Street 2: Twentieth Century Fox.