There are Top 10s galore this time of the year, but no doubt Ben Affleck is taking a bit of extra notice on this one. Uber critic Roger Ebert gave Argo his choice for the Best of 2012.
He called the year “one of the best recent years in cinema,” noting that he wrote over 300 reviews over the year, which is a personal record. He also noted that it was “unusually difficult” to leave out films in the top ten.
Picking Argo, Ebert noted that the feature had the “classic values of a Hollywood thriller” and noted the story, based on true events, “reveals surprises about a story we all lived through. It is told with classic comedy and tension.”
Oscar power-house Lincoln placed third on Ebert’s list after Ang Lee’s Life of Pi. He called Daniel Day-Lewis’ performance “powerful,” while describing Pi as a “miraculous achievement.”
Also making the list was Sundance winner Beasts of the Southern Wild and perhaps surprisingly considering the momentum of the Oscar race, End of Watch Oslo, August 31 and A Simple Life.
Notables not making the cut in the top ten at least include Zero Dark Thirty, Django Unchained, Les Misérables and Silver Linings Playbook.
Ebert has long taken a course of his own. You can see his comments on his Top 10 here.
Roger Ebert’s Top 10:
1. Argo by Ben Affleck
2. Life Of Pi by Ang Lee
3. Lincoln by Steven Spielberg
4. End Of Watch by David Ayer
5. Arbitrage by Nicholas Jarecki
6. Flight by Robert Zemeckis
7. The Sessions by Ben Lewin
8. Beasts of the Southern Wild by Benh Zeitlin
9. Oslo, August 31st by Joachim Trier
10. A Simple Life by Ann Hui
David Svoboda, the “I Like The Tin Man” Kid from 1983’s A Christmas Story!
Tomorrow is Jesus’ birthday, so who better to usher it in then the true star of A Christmas Story? Looking like Aviator Snoopy mated with the Joker, this kid stole the show. Merry Christmas!
Fun Fact: The “I Like The Tin Man” kid grew up and went on to write a short film called The Last Blow Job.
Oscar-winning Lord of the Rings screenwriter Philippa Boyens is back for another romp in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth playground with The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, and she recently sat down with Movieline to talk about the fantasy novel’s adaptation to the screen. 
Boyens, who is Hobbit director (and co-writer) Peter Jackson’s foremost Tolkien expert — although Stephen Colbert would beg to differ — refers to the Middle Earth creator using the honorific “Professor” and her reverence and esteem for the author are just about as infectious (in a good way, naturally) as Gollum’s “Precious” ring. By the end of the interview, she had us referring to Tolkien as Professor too, as she discussed the changes and adaptations she and her writing partners made to the text, the sad story of Balin the Dwarf, why fans should be very, very excited for 2043, when the copyright runs out on Tolkien’s Middle-Earth compendium, The Silmarillion, and more.
From a technical perspective, if you’re not going to have Smaug in this movie you need a secondary antagonist. How did you decide on Azog, and what resonance did he provide for you thematically?
You hit the nail on the head because when we were first looking at this as a piece of storytelling, we wanted to get to the dragon. We did try getting to the dragon in one draft, actually. But you had to lose so much along the way. We also understood that the Necromancer is too ephemeral at this moment – too much of a shadowy character that’s not fully understood. It’s a great mystery story, but there’s a big problem because there’s no actual, physical enemy. And yet the dwarves had a…
Full Story »I just finished reading Brett Martin’s profile of Bill Murray for the January issue of GQ, and while the story and Murray are highly entertaining, I’m tiring of reading profiles in which Murray simultaneously demonstrates how funny and how aimless he is.
Martin observes that Murray has become a kind of “wandering, perpetual performance artist, everywhere and nowhere, wherever the wind or spirit carries him: indie movies, golf tournaments, college frat parties, your karaoke booth right now.”
I appreciate that Murray likes being the Johnny Appleseed of meta-comedy, but I think it’s time for him to stop spreading joy to a handful of people at a time and get back to making thousands of people in cineplexes across the country aspirate Diet Coke because they’re laughing so hard.
Here’s the passage in the story that most makes me want to chuck my vintage Ghostbusters wallet in the East River. It’s Murray talking about how he’s thinking about writing and making a funny movie again:
“It’s really a question I have. I think there’s something that I can bring to a comedy today, but I don’t know where to bring it,” he says. “I’ve actually thought about having a manager again. Just to clear my head and have a plan.” He pauses, as if working it out in his mind. “Eh, it’s not that attractive to have a plan. I know that if I ever feel that I need to make a funny movie, I’ll figure out how to write one. I’ll get it done. If I ever get some ambition, I’m gonna get some shit done.”
He does a mock-offended eye roll/blink. “What? It could happen.”
That comment is only slightly more energetic than Murray’s comments to Full Story »
Given the behind the scenes false starts that seemed to plague the production of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey – lawsuits, studio bankruptcy, a change in directors — it’s perhaps a tad ironic that beginning the story of Lord of the Rings before the story of Lord of the Rings was never a problem. No, for Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, and Philippa Boyens, the power troika behind the flick, beginning an episodic, rollicking, children’s adventure story cum three-film epic was the easy part. Deciding where to end, however…
Spoilers follow.
How does one pinpoint a climax for a first film in a trilogy before the whole story is even a third of the way over? With what may be the turning point of J.R.R. Tolkien’s entire massive legendarium, suggested Boyens.
“We understood that you had to arrive the characters at an emotional location as opposed to a geographical location. Instead of just getting them to a geographical point on the journey, it was more important for to arrive them at an emotional place so that you didn’t continue to tell the same emotional story,” the Oscar winning scribe told Movieline.
“It’s very hard for Bilbo to be that little Hobbit who has to find his courage,” she continued. “I mean, that could go on and on and on and on. [But when] the ring comes to Bilbo and in that moment he chooses not to take Gollum’s life, that has enormous resonance for the entire mythology.”
Occurring almost exactly 30 percent of the way through Tolkien’s The Hobbit, the scene comes immediately after Bilbo finds the One Ring and puts it on for the first time in order to escape from the clutches of the treacherous Gollum, who he has…
Full Story »The “D” is silent, though the name of Django Unchained’s eponymous gunslinger sounds like a retaliatory whip across the face of white slaveholders, offering an immensely satisfying taste of antebellum empowerment packaged as spaghetti-Western homage.
Christened after a coffin-toting Sergio Corbucci character who metes out bloody justice below the Mason-Dixon line, Django joins a too-short list of slaves-turned-heroes in American cinema, as this zeitgeist-shaping romp cleverly upgrades the mysterious Man in Black archetype to a formidable Black Man. Once again, Quentin Tarantino rides to the Weinsteins’ rescue, delivering a bloody hilarious (and hilariously bloody) Christmas counter-programmer, which Sony will unleash abroad.
After Inglourious Basterds and Kill Bill, it would be reasonable to assume that Django Unchained is yet another of Tarantino’s elaborate revenge fantasies, when in fact, the film represents the writer-director’s first real love story (not counting his Badlands -inspired screenplays for True Romance and Natural Born Killers). At its core is a slave marriage between Django (Jamie Foxx) and Hildi (Kerry Washington), torn asunder after the couple attempt to escape a spiteful plantation owner (Bruce Dern, blink and you miss him).
Brutally whipped and then resold to separate bidders on the Greenville, Miss., auction block, Django and his bride — whose outrageous full name, Broomhilda von Shaft, blends epic German legend with the greatest of blaxploitation heroes — possess a love too great to be shackled by slavery. But getting even with Dern’s character doesn’t feature on Django’s agenda. After settling the score with his former overseers early in the film, he cares only about reuniting with his wife.
Django Unchained could also qualify as a buddy movie — an odd twist, considering that Corbucci’s original Django was a loner (as played…
Full Story »Golden Globe nominees Naomi Watts and Ewan McGregor turned out for a special screening of their epic tearjerker The Impossible and talked to me about how they summoned the emotional wherewithal to play a couple whose family is torn apart by a tsunami.
The picture’s director, J.A.Bayona also attended and told me he had no qualms about casting a Scottish and an Australian actor to play the real-life Spanish couple on which the harrowing story is based. Bayona pointed out that the film never clarifies the couple’s nationality. Besides, the actual husband and wife who inspired the story were on the carpet and they were clearly supportive of the film.
Check out my full interview below:
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Promised Land is not the first nor even second collaboration between filmmaker Gus Van Sant and actor Matt Damon. Van Sant helped usher in the age of Matt Damon and Ben Affleck with their Oscar-winner Good Will Hunting back in 1997 and Damon and Ben’s younger brother, Casey Affleck worked with Van Sant in Gerry. Fast forward nearly a decade and a script Damon had been collaborating on with John Krasinski from a story by Dave Eggers set in a small town needed a director. Damon, who had originally planned to direct the feature, realized he could not because of his packed schedule, so he reached out to his old friend Gus Van Sant and the result, which will head to theaters later this month, has caught the wind of Oscar chatterers.
Van Sant discussed his latest pic and why he “always wants to work with Matt” during a NYC screening of Promised Land.
“The genealogy of this is that John Krasinski was observing a mining operation in Alaska and spoke to Eggers later about writing a screenplay about installing wind power,” Van Sant said at the post-Promised Land screening. “Matt Damon was going to direct [Promised Land] himself but then decided he didn’t have time. They thought the project might go away, but then he contacted me – and a year ago, I said yes…”
Van Sant said Damon packed schedule had once kept him from playing in one of the director’s most celebrated recent films. He had originally been slated to play Dan White in the 2008 Oscar-winner Milk, but again the actor’s long queue of roles interfered.
But, Promised Land posed the next opportunity and the planets aligned. “When you…
Full Story »Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke has a distinctively aggressive relationship with his audience that ranges from the provocation of Caché and The Piano Teacher to the outright antagonism of Funny Games and Benny’s Video. Amour, his latest work and the winner of the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, might be considered Haneke’s version of a love story, and its grimness is of a much quieter but no less impactful sort. It is, more than any of Haneke’s previous work, infused with compassion, but of a sort that cuts like a knife. For all that it is, as promised, about love, it’s also a subtly punishing affair that grinds you into the ground as you watch an elderly couple deal with one member’s slow deterioration of health and sanity.
Amour starts with firemen breaking into a beautiful Parisian apartment. The bedroom door has been taped up, and inside is the corpse of Anne (Emmanuelle Riva), lying on the bed, scattered with flowers — and it’s here that Haneke inserts the title card, to ensure you know that this will not be a syrupy tale. We cut back to when Anne was alive and living with her husband Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant), both in their eighties. They attend a concert being given by one of Anne’s former students — a trip that, with the accompanying streetcar ride home, marks the film’s only venture out of the apartment, a location that becomes confining until it shifts into a sort of hiding place to dwell on the misery that life must end, and sometimes does so in messy, undignified failings of the flesh.
Riva and Trintignant are the latest in a long line of Annes and Georges that Haneke’s presented over the years (the names have recurred in his films from 1989’s…
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