The Links (Are Out Today)

These Links Have Little Do With Oscars.
Woot! We're (almost) clear!
Movie|Line the new Spider-Man suit. Try to contain your excitement that it's the same as the old one with bigger eyes. 
Stale Popcorn the week in Kidmania. (It's so gratifying to enjoy Nicole Kidman with the whole world again.)
Salon a mash note to Bailey Buntainn (the mini Megan-Hilty) on the increasingly stellar Bunheads 
/Film The Coen Bros rewriting Unbroken for Angelina Jolie to direct. Whoa. Smart movie Angelina.
Coming Soon James McAvoy make take on the remake of The Crow... although given the concept of The Crow I fail to see why it needs a remake OR a reboot. The idea is that the crow moves on to a new fresh corpse once you've had your vengeance.

Oscar Leftovers
TMZ Quvenzhané Wallis causes an explosion in puppy purse sales (Courtney isn't the only girl that got excited about them.)
HuffPo a producer of the Oscar winning short Paperman kicked out of the Dolby for throwing paper airplanes on Oscar night! 
The Verge Oscar winning doc short Inocente is the first Oscar winner funded by Kickstarter. Methinks it won't be the last 
IndieWire behind the current vfx problem in Hollywood. What the Life of Pi winner was talking about before the orchestra drowned him out.  
Towleroad was "amazing" the most overused word at the Oscars? 

Oscar Commercials?
I hadn't even thought of this as a topic but two of my friends had something to say...
Kari Artwork did his own zombie unicorn painting inspire that Tim Burton Samsung ad? 
Tribeca Film Joe Reid on the movie-star commercials that aired during the program 

Today's Must Watch
David Bowie recruits one of his modern day descendants Tilda Swinton for his new music video. YESSSSSSSSSSSSS 

For her next art project I would like Tilda Swinton to star as David Bowie and remake all of his music videos.

Yes, No, Maybe So: "Inside Llewyn Davis"

Hello, lovelies: Beau here, searching for distractions from the onslaught of crap coming our way in the next few months, and the fact that I still haven't seen Before Midnight. (insert vicious, hyperbolic rant here.) Luckily for me, the trailer for the new Coen Bros. is just the ticket.

YES:

Carey? Carey... are you in there?

• Coen Brothers. Duh.
• Carey Mulligan. Duh.

Click to read more ...

Burning Questions: Repeat Viewing Discoveries

Michael C here. Now that Toronto has kicked the Fall movie season into high gear it’s useful to remember that for most of these films February’s impending Oscar ceremony is the beginning of the story, not the end. An Academy Award is a great leg up when it comes to securing a film’s legacy, even if it’s only as a footnote, but the real test of a film’s shelf life will be its ability to stand up to the gauntlet of repeat viewings. The test of time is much more accurate measure of a film’s worth than awards season's five month carnival of hype.

You only need to look back to recent movie history to see how the years can build up some films while grinding others down without mercy. I cannot recall the last time I’ve read a film lover reference a great scene from former big event films like Babel or The Queen. Yet the reputations of other less celebrated films from that time period like Eastern Promises or Let the Right One In grow with every passing year.

So this leads me to the question I’m curious to have answered:

Which recent films are coming alive on repeat viewings?

I’m not talking here about complicated films which reward repeat viewings. Yes, dense films like Gosford Park and LA Confidential play better with a foreknowledge of the story, but their quality was clear even when lost in the weeds of the initial viewing. No, I’m talking about films that hit us as average or even so-so the first time around but which linger in the memory and nag at us and then – BAM – sucker punch us with their previously unseen strength when revisited.

This happened to me recently when I was struck to realize that I had watched the Coen brother’s True Grit no less than half a dozen times. I had a positive, if somewhat underwhelmed, reaction to the western in theaters. It was the usual A+ stylistic Coen brothers job, but hit me as an unusually straightforward genre exercise from them. I wouldn’t have even bothered to picked up the DVD if not for the fact that my parents wanted to see it and the only way to get them to watch a movie is to personally interrupt an episode of NCIS with it.

Once I owned it I was surprised to find True Grit become my go-to feature. I now understand that the Coens did with True Grit what Tarantino did with Jackie Brown. Tarantino says he wanted Jackie Brown to be a hangout movie. The sort of film you watch first for the plot but return to for the downtime between the big moments, just to spend time with the characters. I realized that on repeat trips to Grit I wasn’t looking forward to the big set pieces as much as I was anticipating the odd little encounters like the unexpected run in with a bearskin clad backwoods doctor who wants to bargain for the teeth from a corpse Mattie cut down from a tree. Or the way the film's main heavy, Barry Pepper’s Lucky Ned, turns out to be unexpectedly reasonable when they finally catch up to him. (Admittedly it also helps to know in advance everything Bridges is saying) I suppose I should have known better than to trust my snap judgment when it came to the Coens, whose Big Lebowski is one of the great repeat viewing success stories of the last twenty years. I suppose it’s time I gave Burn After Reading another spin.

Have any of you had any recent repeat viewing discoveries? Do you see a consensus emerging around any titles that flew under the radar in theaters? Let me know in the comments.

Follow Michael C. on Twitter at @SeriousFilm. And read his blog Serious Film.

Take Three: Tommy Lee Jones

Craig here with Take Three. Today: Tommy Lee Jones who is currently working it out with Streep onscreen in Hope Springs.

Take One: No Country for Old Men (2007)
In the Joel & Ethan Coen's No Country for Old Men, the ostensible main character is weary Texas lawman Sheriff Ed Tom Bell played by Tommy Lee Jones, though his co-star Josh Brolin is the film's nominal hero. Jones, though, an ‘old man’ on the verge of retirement and tired of the country he’s patrolled for so long, brings a melancholic meaning to the film’s title. Sheriff Bell had more of a life/backstory in McCarthy’s novel (much of which the Coens left out) wherein he discusses his experiences in WWII, which hint at a desire to shy away from violent combat/confrontation, and his life is generally laid out in more detail. What we do learn of Bell in the film is from the slivers of significant information Jones imparts in his refined characterisation.

The actor is typically, movingly good in the key scene where Bell visits his uncle Ellis (Barry Corbin). We see their playfully wry relationship in an exchange of sarcastic pleasantries over Ellis's ‘outlaws cats’ -- a perfectly daft moment that features one of Jones' very best comically weary glances – but the visit is also rife with understated detail that speaks volumes about Bell as a man. Shot in profile staring out a window at the desolate and godless expanse of the Texan desert, and discreetly withholding his true inner thoughts, Bell enigmatically responds to Ellis about why he’s quitting the law.

I always figured when I got older God would sorta come into my life somehow... and he didn't."

Two more takes after the jump

Click to read more ...

Monologue: "Lone Biker of the Apocalypse"

Michael C. here to drop off your regularly scheduled Monday Monologue

This week marks the 25th anniversary of the Coen brothers' screwball, baby-knapping comedy Raising Arizona. Rewatching the film it is striking just how distant the rowdy hayseed comedy feels from cool control of the brothers' recent output. This isn't meant as an accusation that they have gone soft in their middle age. Quite the contrary. But even as they have produced a handful of unequivocal masterpieces I still harbor a soft spot for their wild younger days, much the way a Woody Allen fan can't help but pine for the anarchic spirit of Bananas no matter how much he appreciates the cinematic mastery of Crimes and Misdemeanors.

Take the scene where a premonition of doom visits Cage's H.I. soon after swiping one of the "Arizona Quints" to complete his family unit with Holly Hunter's Ed:

That night, I had a dream. I drifted off thinking about happiness, birth and new life, But now I was haunted by a vision of... He was horrible. The lone biker of apocalypse. A man with all the powers of Hell at his command. He could turn turn the day into night and lay to waste everything in his path.

He was especially hard on little things-the helpless and the gentle creatures. He left a scorched earth in his wake befouling even the sweet desert breeze that whipped across his brow. I didn't know where he came from or why. I didn't know if he was dream or vision. But I feared that I myself had unleashed him. For he was the fury that would be as soon as Florence Arizona found her little Nathan gone. 

The characters are both beloved Coen brother templates. The Biker (memorably embodied by former pro boxer Randall "Tex" Cobb) is one in a long line of remorseless heavies that reached their apex in Anton Chirgurh, while Cage's H.I is in the grand tradition of Coen brothers morons that continued through the escaped bumpkins of O Brother right up to the glorious idiocy of Brad Pitt's Chad Feldheimer.

Likewise giving even their most dimwitted characters memorable turns of phrase like "befouling the sweet desert breeze" is an unmistakable Coens trademark. See: Lebowski, Big.

What stands apart is the wild, improvised feel of the sequence. The series of gags that introduce the Biker - including the grenading of a cute, fluffy bunny - would be right at home in a Road Runner cartoon. The capper on the whole sequence is a doozy of a shot where the camera, which we had assumed to be the Biker's POV, goes unexpectedly airborne and flies right through a window landing in the open mouth of Mrs. Arizona as she screams. The moment can't help but bring to mind the fluid insanity of Sam Raimi's Evil Dead series.

When Joel and Ethan have returned to screwball material in flicks like Burn After Reading the execution more closely resembles the deliberate style of Arizona's follow-up, Miller's Crossing. And while I repeat this is neither good nor bad, and that all great artists evolve, I can't deny I would kill to see what some meticulously controlled later day title like, say, A Serious Man would look like if it was made with the same unhinged, shoot from the hip style the Coens brought to Raising Arizona a quarter century ago.

Recent Monologues:
"My name is Charlene" -Missi Pyle in Spring Break
Megan and the Dolphins - Melissa McCarthy in Bridesmaids