A Version of Sleepless in Seattle I'd Want To See

Or at least a trailer for it

Thanks Zach

Oscar Nominations

The Full List

Oscar Nomination Predictions

Best Picture:
Brokeback Mountain (Which will be the most nominated film)
Capote
Crash
Good Night, and Good Luck
Walk the Line

The first four are total locks for nominations. Walk the Line could be replaced with Munich, The Constant Gardener, King Kong, or A History of Violence.

Best Actor:
Philip Seymoure Hoffman - Capote (who will win the Award on March 5)
Heath Ledger - Brokeback Mountain
David Strathairn - Good Night, and Good Luck(and how cool was Hoffman giving Strathairn mad respect at the SAG awards Sunday night?)
Joaquin Phoenix - Walk the Line
Russell Crowe - Cinderella Man

The first four are sure things. Crowe is actually a coin flip and may lose that spot to Terrence Howard for Hustle and Flow as he has been getting all the right kind of buzz and has been by my understanding being talked about by all the right people.

Best Actress:
Reese Witherspoon - Walk the Line (She is a lock to win the award)
Felicity Huffman - Transamerica
Judi Dench - Mrs. Henderson Presents
Charlize Theron - North Country
Kiera Knightley - Pride and Prejudice

Again the first four are sure things for a nomination, but the fifth spot is a dead heat between Knightley and Ziyi Zhang for Memoirs of a Geisha.

Best Director:
Ang Lee - Brokeback Mountain
George Clooney - Good Night, and Good Luck
Paul Haggis - Crash
Bennett Miller - Capote
Steven Spielberg - Munich

The first three are for sure nominations. Miller I'm fairly confident but that movie is so quiet and small he may be passed over in favor of Fernando Meirelles, Peter Jackson, or David Cronenberg. The same is true for Spielberg. Poor James Mangold.

So there you have it. I'm hoping for some kind of epic surprise as always, and after Giamatti being left off the Best Actor list for Sidewise last year it sure is a possibility. I'll be back later today with some reaction to the real nominations.

He Won't Stop Until He Dies

Three stills from the shooting of Rocky VI

Thankfully someone has said everything I need to say on the issue


Thanks Jeremy!

Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood Is Going to Happen

And with Daniel Day Lewis in the lead just as Paul was hoping for. This is officially the leading Best Picture nominee for 2007.

Thanks Jen for the heads up!

The Producers Review

The musical version of The Producers shows how much nerve Mel Brooks has lost in thirty-five years. The original Producers remains to this day a bad-taste masterpiece largely because Brooks understands that the average audience embraces tastelessness when it is presented as camp – as a highly stylized flamboyant excess. That is the point of the original film. The behavior of the lead characters in the original is repellent, but the seriousness of their greed and lying and self-centeredness is very funny because it is pitched at a different tone than the comedy of the dancing Nazis. If Brooks can get you to laugh at a mass murderer like Hitler, then laughing at a pair of selfish criminals is automatically acceptable. Where the musical remake goes totally wrong is that it presents everything in the film as camp. The new film’s tone establishes right from the opening number that “camp” is the only tone the film is interested in. The new version of The Producers fails so spectacularly precisely because it fails to offend at all. This time around the Busby Berkley-inspired rotating swastika offends to about the same degree as the characters’ manipulations, and all of it has been softened by the relentlessly campy tone. This approach might be acceptable if there were some craft on display that could be appreciated, but the songs are at best pedestrian and the direction is static and dull. The performances, with the lone exception of a perfect Uma Thurman who gets the best song, are a mess. Nathan Lane has the timing fine, but he is not threatening, something that Zero Mostel most certainly was in the original. Matthew Broderick has the unenviable task of recreating one of the greatest comedic performances ever, and the only time he doesn’t embarrass himself is when he directly mimic’s Gene Wilder’s gestures or vocal mannerisms. Lenny Bruce said there is nothing sadder than an aging hipster, but the new film version of The Producers offers a compelling argument that there might be nothing sadder than an aging vulgarian.

Match Point Review

Match Point is the most consistent Woody Allen picture in about fifteen years. Not since Husbands and Wives has he shown such detail to the simple craft of storytelling, and this is what should give hope to longtime Allen fans who might have begun to question how many good films the great director may have left in him. The film does not break new ground thematically, but simply by setting the film in London it feels fresh. Jonathan Rhys-Meyers is cast well as Chris Wilton, a tennis pro always looking to climb up the social ladder. His inherently cold features help make the character more menacing than might have been intended. It lends the character a steely confidence when a different actor might have played the character more passively. Matthew Goode turns in a fine supporting performance alongside $Emily Mortimer and the always reliable Brian Cox as the rich family Chris befriends. Nola Rice, the femme fatale, appears at first to be a familiar character in Allen’s work – the emotionally erratic sexually voracious woman. However, Allen smartly alters this stereotype in intriguing ways. Although the first scene overplays the character’s hand, Scarlet Johansson brings an intelligence and a presence to the part the grounds it. She is beautiful, but she is not unstable. She is a three-dimensional person, not simply the personification of the lead male’s erotic desires. The screenplay has a fatalism that will be familiar to anyone who knows Allen’s non-comedies, a fact that bleeds some of the drama out of the third-act of the film as many people will see how it is going to end. But good storytelling is as much about how events unfold as it is about how the story ends. Match Point offers the encouraging experience of a great director and writer rediscovering his muse thanks to a new city and new actors.

Munich Review

Munich differs from all of Steven Spielberg’s previous historical epics because, for the first time, the director is using the past to comment on the present. One of Spielberg’s peerless talents is the ability to create tension filled sequences. Munich’s structure, following the exploits of a group of Israeli agents hunting down the terrorists responsible for the murder of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, allows Spielberg to put this talent on display throughout the movie. Each of these sequences is varied so that the film avoids becoming visually repetitive even though it clocks in at close to three hours. Though the film works strictly as a thriller, the excellent script traces the gradual emotional and psychological changes that occur to Havner (Eric Bana), the man leading the group. While he never questions the importance of what he does, or really the moral authority to do it, the film does not flinch from the consequences of living in a constant state of alertness fueled by paranoia and fear. The film acknowledges both the visceral thrill and the interior decay that results from vengeance – a word that once served as the film’s working title. Munich does not carry the weight of history that say Schindler’s List does partly because Munich exists not in a black and white world of good and bad actions, but instead reveals a world full of grays. Munich, although about historical events, is very much about what America asks of itself during the war on terrorism. The screenplay is savvy enough to make these themes universal so that the film will not lose its power over time, but setting the film’s final sequence with the World Trade Center in the background should tip audiences to the fact that Spielberg has created a very personal reaction to current events. Taken with the same year’s politically pointed remake of War of the Worlds, Munich reveals Spielberg to be, at sixty, a director committed to making important films that address the tenor of the times.

And Here are the Directors Guild Nominations

The only place Steven seems to be getting any love for the best film of his career.

Screen Actors Guild Nominations

Here they are

No real surprises.

The Cloudy Oscar Forecast Should Clear Some After This Morning

The nominations for each Oscar category are decided upon by the members of that branch - in other words cinematographers nominate cinematographers, directors nominate directors etc. etc. etc. Because of this the nominations for each of the various individual guilds acts as the best barometer for who will be picking up Oscar nods. The Writer's guild nominations yesterday were very promising. It will be a very good thing if The 40 Year-Old Virgin is nominated for best original screenplay. This morning the Director's Guild and the Screen Actor's Guild will unveil their nominations. The producer's guild passed on almost all of the "big" productions, instead focusing on such worthy small efforts as Good Night and Good Luck, Brokeback Mountain, and Capote leaving Munich, King Kong, and Memoirs of a Geisha behind. This will be the last big spurt of awards until the Golden Globes are presented on the 16th.

The Ten Best Films of 2005

While I have many more reviews to post, many of these very films, it is time. Links take you to the AMG site for the film if I wrote the review:

10. Walk the Line

9. The Aristocrats - The film that made me laugh harder than any else this year. A fine look at comedy and comedians. For the record, Steven Wright tells my favorite version of it. Sarah Silverman was the only one to make me cringe.

8. Syriana

7. No Direction Home

6. Broken Flowers

5. Capote - Bennet Miller's directorial debut reminds one of the best work by Jonathan Demme. Capote is patient, observant, and very humane - the difference being Demme has never taken on someone who acts so inhumanely as a protagonist.

4. Brokeback Mountain

3. The 40 Year-Old Virgin

2. Munich

1. Good Night, and Good Luck