These are always worth a chuckle, some years more than others.
Will the Golden Raspberry go to “Battleship” or to “Madea’s Witless Protection?”
Such a list of infamy — so many bad movies. Some (“Breaking Dawn Part 2”) not quite deserving of this scorn, but whatever.
“Atlas Shrugged: Part II” earned notice (worst director, John Putch). And a theater-chain financed fiasco, “Oogiloves.”
The Razzies are handed out Feb. 23.
Full list of nomination? Read on…
All the pre-Oscar awards hubbub is pointing toward these self-evident truths.
“Lincoln” is in. So is “Zero Dark Thirty.” And “Les Miserables.” Probably “Life of Pi.” Possibly “Django Unchained.”
“The Silver Linings Playbook”? Also possible. “Argo”? Love that Ben. Probable.
The DGA nominations cast a further cloud over the controversial hit “Django Unchained.” “Zero Dark Thirty” seems to be weathering its blowback well enough.
“Beasts of the Southern Wild”? A long shot.
Veteran Oscar watcher Steve Pond figures it’s an eight picture field.
But he’s leaving out such potential worthies as “Skyfall,” “Flight,” “Amour,” and “The Impossible” (another long shot). With Oscar promising to celebrate James Bond, does that impact whether the best Bond in decades will earn a best picture nod?
What else will earn consideration? What could possibly surprise us on January 10, when Emma Stone and Oscar host Seth “Ted” McFarlane tell us the Oscar field?
MIAMI BEACH — In the half dozen years that he’s been a movie star, Channing Tatum could be excused for skipping the exercise of reading his reviews.
He’s been in some big hits — “G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra,” “Step Up,” but the good notices have been few and far between. “Tatum makes what use he can of his two expressions,” critic Derek Malcolm might crack about Tatum’s turn in “Dear John.” Or The New York Times might call his work as a guilt-stricken cop in “The Son of No One” “one of the year’s most wooden, expressionless star turns.”
The ex-model, onetime stripper seemed written off as just another big screen six-pack, a guy famous for turning up shirtless in almost everything he did.
But 2012 has changed all that. At 32, Tatum is on a roll, with commercial hits (“The Vow” and “21 Jump Street”), the attention of a name director (Steven Soderbergh) and critical acclaim for a newly discovered gift for comedy.
“It’s the ‘10,000 hour rule,'” he says. “It takes that many hours to master something. I don’t know if I’ll ever master it, because every role is a totally new experience. But you can understand the process more. And for me, in acting, times on sets, I’m closing in on 10,000 hours. I’m just starting to understand the whole thing.”
The cherry on the top of this year’s coming out party for Tatum is “Magic Mike,” a dramatic comedy that Soderbergh and screenwriter Reid Carolin built around Tatum’s first job in show business — taking it all off for screaming female fans at a Miami strip club.
“This has almost nothing to do with my experience in that world,” he says. “It’s a movie. It’s fictitious. I only danced for about eight months. But the stuff that happened was so crazy and outrageous that you couldn’t put it into a movie without somebody going, ‘You’re making that up just to sell tickets.’
“I was 18 at the time. I was living in Florida. I dropped out of college where I had played football. And I have a sister. That much of the film is true. But I never OD’d or any of that other stuff.”
In the film, Tatum plays the star stripper of an all male dance revue who takes an 18 year old (played by Alex Pettyfer) under his wing, courting the younger guy’s sister (Cody Horn) as he does.
“The first half of ‘Magic Mike’ really captures my experience of what exposure to this world was like,” Tatum says. “Soderbergh told me, ‘I can’t believe an 18 year old kid went into this world, where the other guys were grown men — guys who had been doing this dancing for years.’ This kid doesn’t know what he’s getting into. I didn’t. “
Tatum had been talking up a movie on this subject for a few years, before his rising star power and the attention of Soderbergh made that dream a reality.
“The one thing I really wanted the movie to capture was the wildness of it all,” he says. “We know what the female stripping world is like, thanks to a lot of movies. But men go to see a strip show for different reasons than women. Men go for a carnal experience. Visual sexual stimulation.
“I think women just go to laugh, and embarrass the friend sitting next to them. Laughing at their friend’s red-face as she’s getting grinded on. That’s been my experience, anyway. They’re not there to get turned on.”
The secret to taking it all off, in public? It’s not just about the workout, about the dance moves (Tatum was an accomplished dancer, even at 18).
“Committing is the key,” he says. “It’s like acting, in a way. You’ve got to sell it.
My thing was the dancing part of it. I didn’t like taking off my clothes. I wasn’t very big, not some big muscle-bound meathead who could flash the muscles and everything. I could dance. So I got the younger girls.”
For the film, which was shot and set in Tampa, Tatm became the on-set truth-detector. He was the guy who had lived this life.
“There wasn’t a power point presentation that he gave or anything,” says co-star Joe Manganiello of TV’s “True Blood.” “But his experiences were in the script. He was open and frank about his past, with us. He says he did do this and there’s no shame to it. That was all the rest of us needed.”
And preparation? There was the gym time, of course. And rehearsing with a choreographer. And for some, getting used to appearing in the buff.
“I didn’t think I could get more naked in a movie,” Tatum laughs. “They proved me wrong!
“But it was more fun, this time. Stripping was my first performance. My first time up on stage. And it’s very funny that it’s come around to this, me stripping again, performing that way again, in a movie.”
The British comic book “Judge Dredd” made its debut in the mid-1970s, a helmeted lawman who was judge, jury and executioner in a nearly lawless anarchy of the future. Coming out in the recession-wracked ’70s, when civil unrest were common in the U.K., U.S., and other corners of the West, one might see it as a celebration of a kind of Dirty Harry justice — simple, bloody solutions to socio-criminal ills.
Or maybe it was “a satirical response to Thatcherism,” says actor Karl Urban, who stars as the Judge in a new 3D movie, “Dredd 3D.” Margaret Thatcher wasn’t Prime Minister of Britain until 1979, but she was a well-known figure in mid-70s Britain, already the head of the Conservative Party there.
And what about Dredd today?
“Dredd is perfectly placed in our times,” says Urban, best-known for playing Dr. McCoy in the new big screen “Star Trek” franchise. “Our film is the perfect representation of the character that [author] John Wagner created back in ’75. In our movie, I see Dredd as a response to social unrest that’s errupted globally, and to society’s response to that unrest. Dredd is set in a world where the justice system has been given absolute power, the power to summarily execute a perp on the spot.
“Since the creation of Dredd, one can argue that there’s been a continual escalation of Big Brother, watching over all of us, a steady erosion of civil rights. Unfortunately, incidents like 9/11 have given us laws like The Patriot Act, a necessity for this day and age.
Thematically, Dredd was ahead of his time.”
The 40 year-old New Zealander endured months in a gym and weeks in a South African boot camp to get in shape to play the Judge.Afer all, Sylvester Stallone was the character’s previous big screen alter ego. The bigger challenge, Urban says, was acting behind a helmet and mask.
“It’s a challenge to communicate with the audience without the use of my eyes,” he says. “I had to use every other tool I have available to me. Obviously, the voice takes on heightened significance. As does the physicality, the wear the character carries himself. It was important to me to know what humanized Dredd. He’s just a man. He’s not a robot, not a super hero. He has no special powers. Just gadgets. It was important to me to know where his sense of humor lay, what angers him, what amuses him and what he does when he’s tired, or when he’s pumped up.”
The film is earning early praise from comic book fan websites and even the trade publication Variety noted that it “reinstates the somber brutality missing from the U.K. comicbook icon’s previous screen outing.” Urban hopes “we’ve made an instant cult classic. But let’s be honest, movies like this that open in September don’t do nearly the box office that summer films do. So while I would be delighted to play the character again, if it’s just a one-off experience, I’m still proud of it.”
Besides, Urban already has two franchises — maybe three — that he has obligations in. He returns as “Bones” McCoy in the next “Star Trek” film , “Star Trek into Darkness” in 2013. He’s a part of the Vin Diesel “Chronicles of Riddick” series. He may even reprise his secret agent role in the sequel to “RED,” the Bruce Willis/Helen Mirren action comedy. But it’s McCoy where his long-term plans lay, a character he lobbied hard for the chance to play, and a role he relishes.
“Think about it,” he says. “They’re action films, with heroes. And McCoy isn’t really heroic. He’s got this comic humanity that makes him stand out in that universe. Who wouldn’t love playing that?”
Seeing this title turn up, suddenly, post-“Super Storm Sandy” — on Netflix streaming made me laugh. And wince. There’s all this new polling out that suggests, thanks to that storm, the extended drought in the Red State midwest, “the hottest year on record,” the lack of snow and the verification by Big Insurance statistics, that the last people in America to start “believing” in global climate change have finally come around. So Netflix wasn’t offering Al Gore a victory lap with this vilified-by-Fox Oscar winning documentary. They were offering all those folks who spent the past seven years hearing how he was leading an evil conspiracy a chance at a hearing and seeing the truth for themselves. To those of us who saw this 1989 series by the British science show host James Burke, Gore wasn’t some “out there” cynic trying to profit from a “global scam.” He was just confirming what Burke had predicted 17 years earlier. But in any event, it’s worth re-posting my “Inconvenient” review here, just for those who may be encountering this world-changing documentary for the first time. In the Old Testament, Jeremiah was the prophet heaped with scorn as he warned and warned the Israelites of a coming reckoning. That seems to be the role Al Gore is taking on. The former vice president and failed presidential aspirant has found his voice in telling the world “An Inconvenient Truth,” the title of Davis Guggenheim’s new documentary about Gore and global warming. |
Deadline.com is reporting that Josh Brolin has the lead in the October release “Sin City” sequel titled, “Sin City: A Dame to Kill For.”
Robert Rodriguez is co-directing with Frank Miller, the comic book author no doubt chastened by the beatdown he took for “The Spirit.”
Brolin is the rock at the center of “Gangster Squad,” which opens Friday and promises to do well in a lean January box office.
If, as they say, “Best directors direct best pictures,” the Oscar field got a LOT simpler/clearer today. No, the DGA nominations don’t correspond exactly with Oscar nods, but the DGA has spoken.
And it’s Affleck and Spielberg, Hooper and Bigelow and Ang Lee — directors of big studio pictures — who nailed down the DGA nominations.
Lee, Spielberg, Hooper and Bigelow all have Oscars to their credit already.
That means that Joe Wright (“Anna Karenina”), Juan Antonio Bayona (“The Impossible”) and a few other worthies outside of the major studios are longer shots at nailing down significant nominations. I had hopes for indie icon Richard Linklater (“Bernie”) had figured Bob Zemeckis (“Flight”) had a shot at Oscar gold. But the Oscar field will probably look a LOT like this.
BEN AFFLECK
Argo
(Warner Bros. Pictures)
Mr. Affleck’s Directorial Team:
· Unit Production Manager: Amy Herman
· First Assistant Director: David Webb
· Second Assistant Director: Ian Calip
· Second Second Assistant Directors: Clark Credle, Gavin Kleintop
· First Assistant Director (Turkey Unit): Belkis Turan
This is Mr. Affleck’s first DGA Feature Film Award nomination.
KATHRYN BIGELOW
Zero Dark Thirty
(Columbia Pictures)
Ms. Bigelow’s Directorial Team:
· Unit Production Manager: Colin Wilson
· First Assistant Director: David A. Ticotin
· Second Assistant Directors: Ben Lanning, Sarah Hood
· First Assistant Director (Jordan Unit): Scott Robertson
· Second Assistant Directors (Jordan Unit): Jonas Spaccarotelli, Yanal Kassay
· Second Second Assistant Director (Jordan Unit): Tarek Afifi
· Unit Production Manager (India Unit): Rajeev Mehra
This is Ms. Bigelow’s second DGA Feature Film Award nomination. She won the DGA Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Feature Film for The Hurt Locker in 2009.
TOM HOOPER
Les Misérables
(Universal Pictures)
Mr. Hooper’s Directorial Team:
· Unit Production Manager: Patrick Schweitzer
· First Assistant Director: Ben Howarth
· Second Assistant Director: Harriet Worth
· Second Second Assistant Director: Dan Channing Williams
This is Mr. Hooper’s second DGA Feature Film Award nomination. He won the DGA Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Feature Film for The King’s Speech (2010) and was previously nominated for the DGA Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Movies for Television/Mini-Series for John Adams in 2008.
ANG LEE
Life of Pi
(Twentieth Century Fox)
Mr. Lee’s Directorial Team:
· Unit Production Manager: Michael J. Malone
· Unit Production Manager (Taiwan): Leo Chen
· First Assistant Directors: William M. Connor, Cliff Lanning
· Second Assistant Directors: Robert Burgess, Ben Lanning
· Unit Production Manager (India Unit): Sanjay Kumar
· First Assistant Director (India Unit): Nitya Mehra
· Second Assistant Director (India Unit): Ananya Rane
· Second Second Assistant Directors (India Unit): Namra Parikh, Freya Parekh
· Second Assistant Directors (Montreal Unit): Derek Wimble, Renato De Cotiis
This is Mr. Lee’s fourth DGA Feature Film Award nomination. He won the DGA Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Feature Film for Brokeback Mountain (2005) and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) and was nominated for Sense and Sensibility in 1995.
STEVEN SPIELBERG
Lincoln
(DreamWorks Pictures/Twentieth Century Fox)
Mr. Spielberg’s Directorial Team:
· Unit Production Manager: Susan McNamara
· First Assistant Director: Adam Somner
· Second Assistant Director: Ian Stone
· Second Second Assistant Directors: Eric Lasko, Trevor Tavares
This is Mr. Spielberg’s eleventh DGA Feature Film Award nomination. He won the DGA Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Feature Film three times for Saving Private Ryan (1998), Schindler’s List (1993) and The Color Purple (1985). He was also nominated in this category for Munich (2005), Amistad (1997), Empire of the Sun (1987), E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial (1982), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and Jaws (1975). Mr. Spielberg was honored with the DGA’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2000.
Cirque du Soleil movies are a lot like ballet films – long on beauty and artistry, short on story.
The long Woody Allen Euro-sojourn is over. For now.
“Blue Jasmine,” which Sony Classics just grabbed the rights to, is Woody back in New York for the first time since that awful Larry David comedy “(Whatever Works”) he did a few years back.
It’s a New York housewife in existential crisis comedy, and the cast is — “Alec Baldwin, Cate Blanchett, Bobby Cannavale, Louis C.K., Andrew Dice Clay, Sally Hawkins, Peter Sarsgaard and Michael Stuhlbarg.
Louis C.K.? Dice Clay?
The saga of the “West Memphis Three” reaches a thrilling if somewhat anticlimactic conclusion in “West of Memphis,” a documentary financed by Peter “Lord of the Rings” Jackson and directed by Amy Berg.
Berg, who directed the damning Catholic priests and child abuse documentary “Deliver Us from Evil,” pulls together a riveting story built on one of the most notorious murder cases of recent history. In 1993, three very young boys were murdered and dumped in a ditch in West Memphis, Arkansas. The West Memphis Three, socially outcast teenagers, were caught, tried and convicted and spent nearly two decades in prison despite rampant evidence of medical examiner incompetence and police and prosecutorial misconduct.
The case was kept alive and in the public eye largely on the strength of a trio of documentaries by Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky. Their “Paradise Lost,” films inspired ongoing media interest in a case that seemed both sensational – allegations of ritual sexual abuse and Satanic/occult murder – and closed thanks to “the finality of judgment.”
One of the teens confessed. Witnesses came forward alleging one of the boys, aptly-named Damien, was into the occult. The state of the bodies seemed so awful that only devil worshippers could be responsible, or so the theory went.
“We’ve got a story that is very, very believable,” one interview subject recalls hearing. “So believable, it’s almost perfect.”
That story, manipulated by the local police and trumpeted by an ambitious prosecutor, is the one lead they pursued. It worked and won convictions.
Berg, working with a private investigator Jackson and longtime companion Fran Walsh hired, interviewing a retired FBI profiler Jackson & Co. put on the payroll, and interviewing the victims’ families (who were, the closing credits tell us, compensated for the interviews), weaves this tortured tale into a compelling narrative that has twists and turns, blind alleys and lots of interviews with Damien Echols in his jail cell.
Jackson appears on camera, talking about the steps they took to immerse themselves in the case. Musician Eddie Vedder got deeply involved. And Johnny Depp. The “WM3” became a cause celebre among the celebre. And then Natalie Maines of The Dixie Chicks got sucked into it and played an even bigger part in casting doubt on the guilt of the Three.
It’s a fine summation of this complicated story, one that focuses heavily on Echols and his sweeping declarations about the state of justice in Arkansas and America. Enduring almost 18 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit entitles him to that. And to the fact that Echols and a woman he met by mail and married while in prison, Lorri Davis, are producers on the film.
But for all the ebb and flow of this saga, the TV news footage and snippets of newspaper stories about the case sampled here, the omission of more than a passing mention of the “Paradise Lost” films robs “West of Memphis” of some of its credibility. If anybody anywhere knows anything about this case, it’s because of those two filmmakers – Berlinger and Sinofsky. They wouldn’t agree to be interviewed here?
Maybe they were concerned that Jackson’s money would allow him and Berg to take credit at the end when they haven’t been there since the beginning.
Which is the worst thing you can say about this otherwise righteous, if somewhat star-struck film. The “Paradise Lost” guys moved the ball down the field, all the way to the end zone. Now, a new owner and his backup quarterback are spiking the ball.
MPAA Rating: R for disturbing violent content and some language
Cast: Damien Echols, Lorri Davis, Holly Ballard, Mark Byers, Terry Hobbs, Peter Jackson, Eddie Vedder
Credits: Directed by Amy Berg, written by Amy Berg and Billy McMillin. A Sony Pictures Classics release. Running time: 2:26
