Wednesday
Feb242016
What's on your cinematic mind?
Wednesday, February 24, 2016 at 3:57PM It's an open thread as your host is otherwise slammed at the moment. Are Oscar's all that's on your mind or are you a non-conformist this week and otherwise cinematically preoccupied? Do tell in the comments.
P.S. Just as I posted this news broke that Nate Parker's slave rebellion drama The Birth of a Nation, the Sundance sensation, has a release date now. It'll be a wide release (!) on October 7th, 2016 from Fox Searchlight. October is a good month for Oscar releases.
Reader Comments (46)
At this moment on my cinematic mind is the fact that the Oscars aren't really on my mind at all right now. In fact, for the first time since I don't know when, I won't even be watching live. Working on a play opening next month whose (non-American) director finds it amusing to schedule rehearsals during the Super Bowl and the Oscars. (In any event, I was also invited to a birthday party *and* a Prince concert in Oakland on Sunday, so if I wasn't rehearsing, I'd be missing the Oscars in the Bay Area.) Bottom line: I'm not all that excited about them this year.
Costume Design, Visual Effects and the shorts - ARGH!
Birth of A Nation will be at TIFF methinks.
WOW. After these two years of outcry (especially this year's outcry), Nate Parker is basically a lock for a nomination.
Top 10 most likely for Lead Actor:
Casey Affleck, Manchester by the Sea
Nate Parker, Birth of a Nation
Tom Hanks, Sully (After two obvious missed bids (Captain Phillips and Bridge of Spies) that were far better things to single out than actual nominees (Bale in 2013 and Cranston in 2015) in a less than five year frame, he'd need to absolutely screw up to miss now.)
Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Snowden
Michael Fassbender, Assassin's Creed (even if the rest of the Academy doesn't go for it in any way? It's Michael Fassbender doing a multiple characters gimmick in a Christmas release.)
Chris Pratt, Passengers
Mark Wahlberg, Deepwater Horizon
Ryan Gosling, La La Land
Miles Teller, (ugh) Arms and the Dudes
Benedict Cumberbatch, Doctor Strange
My Oscar Party is on my mind right now. We just finished our menu of best picture themed gourmet hot dogs and I thought you fellow cinephiles *cough* *nerds* might be interested. =)
“Junk Bond”
Drenched in brown gravy and topped with bacon, crumbled Fritos and Velveeta cubes, this cheap Oscar Meyer wiener on a white bun may feel good going down, but it’s bound to hurt when the market crashes.
“Russian Spy”
Served on a white bun with ketchup, mustard, relish, and sweet onions, this Russian kielbasa sausage has been gaining access to State secrets by passing itself off as a classic American hot dog!
“Immigrant”
Send your huddled masses our way! We’ve got a 100% all-beef hot dog served New York style on a white bun with orange mustard and green sauerkraut (so you can remember your heritage)!
“War Boy”
This 100% all-beef hot dog comes roaring in on a piece of thick-cut, egg-battered French toast, with Gruyere cheese and its very own strawberry jam blood-bag! Then the whole thing is doused with powdered sugar! What a lovely day!
“HAB Hash”
We scienced the sh*t out of this hot dog by chopping it and frying it up with potatoes we grew in our crew’s Habitat. Served on a toasted white bun with a fried egg on top. We’d serve it with ketchup but we ran out seven days ago.
“Bear Attack”
Remember that time you almost died in the wilderness? Commemorate it with a slashed 100% all-beef hot dog in a whole wheat bun topped with plenty of gore (chili sauce, hot sauce, red bell pepper, tomato, red onion, and radish)!
“Boston Herald”
Take a break from investigating the latest buns and wieners scandal and try our 100% all-beef hot dog: Samuel Adams-battered, deep-fried, served in a whole-wheat bun and topped with baked beans and cheddar cheese.
CHILDREN’S MENU
“Plain Hot Dog”
Turn around so we can open Door and serve you a plain hot dog on a plain white bun. There’s nothing else on it because Ma has been bad.
I would have loved to have developed a hot dog for Carol. Oh well.
Ian, that is an amazing menu!
I am FINALLY seeing Sicario this weekend. It took Netflix around 8 weeks to send it to me, despite that it was continually #1 in my queue and I rent from them every week. I am also renting Appropriate Behavior, based on your recommendation.
I'm also excited to see some of the spring and summer teasers and trailers, especially for Maggie's Plan and Pete's Dragon.
Ian, I don't know you but I love you
I haven't seen the list of presenters, but I hope we get a good mix of youngsters and oldsters. I get so sick of seeing all the kids up there every year. I'm still hoping Julie Andrews gives out Best Picture. Maybe with Julie Christie. And I want Dustin Hoffman, Gene Hackman and Robert Redford up there too.
Beloved (1998) was released wide in October to its detriment.
Have you seen the trailer for the new Verhoeven movie starring Isabelle Huppert Elle?
I pulling for Jason Leigh since she's actually overdue.
Wondering if you've been watching The People v. O.J. Simpson. It's campy in the best way--and it looks like Sarah Paulson has a good chance to finally snag that Emmy!
CREED should have gotten a screenplay nomination. I loved that the conversations lingered in key scenes, going through the ups and downs of (sometimes subtle, sometimes expressive) micro-emotions. So much good writing.
Would CREED's screenplay have been considered Original or Adapted? The character of Adonis Creed is original, surrounded by characters adapted from the earlier films.
Ian, I feel terrible for how much I laughed about the last hot dog joke. And maybe it's best you didn't have a chance to develop a CAROL hot dog. "We're not hot dog people, Harge..."
I don't eat meat, but I am trying some of these hot dogs with soy protein sausages. Loved them.
I mean it, I feel like cooking something to see the Oscars instead of eating popcorn!
So it's settled, we are all going to Ian's house to watch the Oscar's and to eat Hot Dogs.
Lovely menu Ian - you should do this for a living.
On my mind is the first installment of THR's "Brutally Honest Voter's Ballot". I laughed, I cringed, and I shook my head in disbelief a couple of times. Which proves that it's an authentic ballot from a very real voter.
Watching "The Night Manager" on BBC - Tom Hiddleston & Olivia Coleman - fabulous, just fabulous.
Speaking of release dates and Oscars, I ass you what is in my cinematic mind: are you afraid - as I am - of a potential rebirth of The December Glut after the successful campaigns of The Big Short and The Revenant?
Currently in shock having just got back from seeing Bone Tomahawk!
I was the tiniest bit surprised by the October choice for BIRTH OF A NATION, if only because of what a crowdpleaser it's reported to be. I wonder if it could have had a chance at big bucks being a smartly timed bit of summer counterprogramming, even if that's risky. October is Searchlight's Oscar sweet spot, so if it was going fall, of course it would land there.
San Fran Creed is considered the seventh movie in the Rockey franchise therefore it is eligible for adapted screenplay.
Random thought: isn't it nice to see an actress (Meryl Streep) paired as a couple with an actor (Hugh Grant) 11 years her junior? The actual couple from FLORENCE FOSTER JENKINS had a 7 year gap anyway (with her the senior), but it is just nice to see Frears (or the casting agent) open the gap up even more.
Thanks /3
Very creative stuff, Ian. I especially love the "Ma has been bad" line for Room's hot dog.
I still have five movies from the major categories I'd like to watch before Sunday. The Big Short is the only Best Picture nominee left for me, while The Danish Girl, Trumbo, Carol and Joy also await. I'm thinking about finally seeing Carol tomorrow afternoon and The Big Short will most definitely be happening before Sunday, too.
I've been watching some Oscar movies I'd never seen before on TCM for their annual 31 Days of Oscar festival. Today I saw Anatole Litvak's fun and exciting noir-musical Blues in the Night (1941) with a rare acting performance by Oscar-winning director Elia Kazan, as well as the James Cagney FBI-vs.-gangsters-picture 'G' Men (1935). The former had its title song nominated while the latter wasn't actually nominated for anything. TCM showed it anyway because it was a write-in favorite among the voters in the Original Story category. Imagine if the Academy still accepted write-in votes today.
/3rtful: The increasing prevalence and respect for sequels makes me want a third category, Expanding Screenplay. (But I'd also prefer Adapted to become Adapted/True Story and for movies that are nakedly heavily improvised (Mike Leigh, Borat, The Wolf of Wall Street) to get special awards.) That wouldn't JUST involve most sequels, but also nakedly wild adaptations like Chi-Raq and most superhero adaptations. So, if that existed, let's give 2015 as an example:
Mad Max: Fury Road
Ant-Man
Chi-Raq
Creed - Winner
Star Wars: The Force Awakens
Ian: My idea (for at least five ceremonies now) has been to make food inspired (sometimes only very loosely) by the best stuff that HASN'T been nominated for Best Picture. This year, the menu involves Carol, Inside Out, Ex Machina, Straight Outta Compton and The Force Awakens. Other highlights that have been on the menu are Melancholia, Drive, Looper, ParaNorman, The World's End, Short Term 12 and Marvel Studios' 2014, among others.
LadyEdith: Just gross, gross, gross. Five biggest notes: 1. An understanding of acting that values raw pain and noise over emotional complexity. 2. Calling the Revenant a Road Runner movie boils the Road Runner cartoons to just their raw mechanics, not their kinetic nature and dark comic tone. 3. Inside Out "a very pretty soap opera"? Um...all the intentional humour? 4. The Big Short as a "courageous" movie. 5. No one knows the difference between Mixing and Editing? Look it up every year and think about what that means.
Oscars are all that's on my mind, the 1963 Best Actress lineup in particular. Here it is:
Leslie Caron in The L-Shaped Room
Shirley MacLaine in Irma La Douce
Patricia Neal in Hud
Rachel Roberts in This Sporting Life
Natalie Wood in Love With The Proper Stranger
Okay, it was a weak year for the category, but did it really have to be that bizarre? I'm going with the IMDb year which means that Caron is 1962 for me. Roberts is bordering on supporting. Neal, the Oscar winner, IS supporting (and could have switched categories with Lilia Skala's rather large role). Wood's performance is disgusting and MacLaine isn't much more than an acceptable 5th slotter. Which raises the question what I would have done.
Shirley MacLaine in Irma La Douce
Jeanne Moreau in Bay Of Angels (for Peggy Sue: La Baie Des Anges)
Geraldine Page in Toys In The Attic
Rachel Roberts in This Sporting Life
Lilia Skala in Lilies Of The Field
Now that's better. Or should I replace MacLaine with Tippi Hedren from The Birds? Um, no. This is my lineup. How strange that I'm always agreeing with myself.
Most of your gifs really bother me and are on the verge of making me not return. Do you have to have so many? That damned dog from SotL... I'd love to push it into the hole, after viewing it so many times on this site. And... I'm a dog lover! Enuff is enuff.
I'm wondering what your take is on Keira Knightley's three upcoming movie? Colette, Collateral Beauty and Catherine the Great? Could it be her year in 2017? :)
Ian--awesome. I'm going to steal these ideas.
Not cinematic, but actressy--just watched the first ep of War and Peace, and a couple of eps of The Fall, so now wondering if I should buy tickets to see Gillian Anderson in Streetcar. Worth a quick trip to NYC? Did any of you in the U.K. see the production at the Old Vic?
I'm still hopelessly focused on the Oscars... particularly the fun speculation of who will present Best Picture.
http://oscar.go.com/news/oscar-news/oscars-2016-presenters-and-performers-the-complete-list
I'll guess Morgan Freeman. He's on the very short list of "duh, he should present Best Picture" icons - a former winner, has been in tons of actual Best Picture winners, everyone loves him. And given the controversy, he'd be a perfect choice. (He'd certainly be a better choice than Will Smith.) Who else on that list would be a good choice who isn't nominated this year or already presenting because they won last year?
Leigh -- we've already discussed Colette here but the other two i guess we need to jump on.
@Ian, your menu is amazing.
@Paul Outlaw - I'm also having trouble feeling really invested in the Oscars this year. I like a good handful of the movies, am really excited about/love maybe 1 or 2 of them, but otherwise I'm sorta meh. And trying to watch all the major nominees has felt more like an assignment than fun. I guess I'll try to see The Big Short before the ceremony so I'll have seen all the Picture nominees. Sometime later I'll fit in Danish Girl, Steve Jobs and Creed, but that's it. No Trumbo, no Hateful Eight.
@DJ
Are you done with Tarantino? Because all of his features are required viewing at least once.
@3rtful - no, I'm not. I've seen almost all his movies and plan on seeing Jackie Brown, the one I missed. But I didn't love Django and after everything I've ready about Eight, it just sounds like a long, indulgent, misogynistic slog to sit through. I'd maybe force myself to watch it if it was shorter, and I'd love to see what Leigh and some of the other actors do in it, but oh well.
Maybe, maybe, if it's on Netflix a year from now and I'm super bored I'd watch it, but even then there's still way too many other movies I'd rather see instead.
Jackie Brown is so radically different from everything else he's done. You may want to watch Eight before seeing Brown to increase you're eventual appreciation of it.
Huh. Interesting. I had not heard that about Brown before. Thanks for the heads up!
The Light Between Oceans trailer! Are y'all going to do a "Yes No Maybe So?" for it? It's my most anticipated film of 2016. It will be refreshing to see Fassbender in something a little bit more naturalistic again.
@ DJ
Meh is the word.
@ DJ and /3rtful
Tarantino is only required viewing if you feel you must participate in the conversation. Films I haven't (yet) seen: Deathproof, H8-8.
Jackie Brown (thanks Elmore Leonard) still by the far the best.
@Pam -- Gillian Anderson in Streetcar is a MUST. I saw the NT Live version that screened locally. She blew me away.
@Paul Outlaw
You'll enjoy Death Proof. Watch it asap.
Although it is uncharitable of me, I'm imagining the look on Leonardo DiCaprio's face if he didn't win. Like the face he wore during the Titanic awards season.
But who would win instead? I respect Bryan Cranston and Eddie Redmayne too much as sincere hardworking professionals for them to shoulder the vitriolic backlash. And they'll have more good parts later.
Awarding Matt Damon is too similar to awarding DiCaprio with the "hurrah! White male movie star survives!" theme.
So I guess it's Fassbender who could survive the backlash. He'd probably be getting one someday, why not now in this generally undistinguished line up?
@ adri
I salute your lack of charity.
@ /3rtful
You're going to have to be a little more convincing than that. I don't intend to watch another Tarantino in this life without major (MAJOR) justification.
adri: I don't really get the idea that there'd be a lot of (if any) backlash on Damon winning. Though, yes, The Martian is about survival, Damon has to deliver a lot of dialogue and has to communicate a clear character arc, which he does well. The meat and potatoes of acting. Compare that to DiCaprio, who has neither a lot of dialogue or a clear character arc, really, and only the groan worthy nebulous concept of "commitment" to excuse that this is the most obvious career honours win EVER. If career honours weren't involved, watching critics and actors fall over themselves to go here would be like food critics and chefs saying the best food in the world is frosting.
@Nat - how'd I miss that post! Thanks for the link.
Yeah would love to read your thoughts, especially since its Babs directorial comeback too :)
Paul Outlaw: I'm a fan of Tarantino, but a reasonable one. Death Proof is crap. It stupidly accentuates his sexual fetish to the point of gut rot (I'm pretty sure no one poses in a way that their feet are going outside the window while the car is in motion), randomly switches almost the entire cast in the middle (and grinds to a halt, because the second half is mostly worse than the first, in spite of having the best sequence of the piece) and I wound up thinking that Stuntman Mike was just completely lame as a slasher villain. He's a bit too characterized (Because Tarantino) to be comparable to Jason Voorhees, Michael Myers or Leatherface (not that those three have NO implied characterization, but, through having no dialogue, they do have less than Mike), but he doesn't seem to enjoy his murdering enough (probably the only way this stuntman could have worked) to be comparable to Freddy.
@Paul Outlaw
Death Proof is the final movie in Tarantino's badass girl trilogy which started with Jackie Brown, followed by Kill Bill. If you love the actress Tracie Thoms you'll appreciate the dialogue he gave her and the stuff she gets to do because she herself is a stunt woman in the movie.
1. Whether I can drag myself to see the Revenant before the Oscars come. Chances look increasingly grim. Ugh, I'm sure it won't be bad but I just...don't want to
2. Speaking of Oscars, David Simon's lovely blogpost recently about behind-the-scenes work on Show Me a Hero, where he recounts a throwdown he had with Oscar Isaac (involving Winona Ryder) over the script. Such a fascinating look at the creative process with people we all love, and as well as some surprising edge from Oscar Isaac, who seems to have such a cuddly public persona. I know it's not quite "cinema" but it's very relevant!