This is the thread where we discuss matters pertaining to the detrius that accompanies the "End of the Year in Cinema" -- 2010

vanity label = indie, duhz

I prefer "boutique"

How has it taken this long for the Brits to make a Wallis Warfield pic for Oscarbait?

apparently it's a 15 for repeated use of "fuck"

has anyone here bothered to see it?

the people i know who've seen it say the cliched thing: it's almost parodically oscar-baity

but they're people who are rly invested in the oscar race

i think it'll be a better film than, say, 'frost/nixon'

Sight and Sound

btw, re our fighting about "what counts" as this year's films alla time, I see S&S named A Prophet the best film of '09, and this year it's tied for 8th.

didu like any foreign-lang films this year, nrq?

think similar happened for 'four months...' which had only been festival/press shown when it topped the poll and got released early the next year and (probably) charted again

im pretty sure there are non-fetival-y films that come out in nov-dec that just get missed altogether from the following year's list

xpost

of the s&s list i liked 'carlos', haven't seen 'boonme', didn't like 'a prophet', didn't like 'headless woman' (which i guess charted last year?), haven't seen but probably won't like 'film socialisme', can't really remember what else i've seen...

haven't seen but probably won't like 'film socialisme'

:o

yeah can't believe it when people write off films w/o seeing them first

It was a particularly rough year for non-English film distribution in flyover country. Struggling to remember anything of note beyond A Prophet and last year's mi****brow Oscar winner. (Carlos just opened this last weekend.)

Also managed to forget that Brokeback topped S&S's '05 list.

Poking around In Contention thx to that link above, found this: http://incontention.com/2010/11/24/the-long-shot-when-youre-strange/

Happy I'm not the only Oscar watcher who thinks the directors' branch has lost their mojo.

Ha!

Cut to David O. Russell, repeatedly ignored by awards bodies for brilliant imaginative leaps in such films as “Three Kings” and “I Heart Huckabees” – now earning the first serious Oscar buzz of his career for a meat-and-potatoes boxings drama that has inspired repeated use of the adjective “solid.”

it is almost parodically 'solid' but it will get bale a nomination of some kind

in a list of ten DOR has a clear shot, five maybe not

i haven't seen 'the king's speech' but i wouldn't bet it's less orthodox than 'the fighter', and im not sure what the other big contenders are really

is 'true grit' going to be eligible?

Eric, I'm guessing Dogtooth and Wild Grass didn't play near you? a week somewhere?

Allegedly.

xpost ... Dogtooth opens next week or two, I think. (Forgot Wild Grass was this year. I thought it was '09.)

I guess The Fighter is supposed to lead to another best supporting actress double-up ... something like the 20th time that's happened in that category? I can't stand Amy Adams, tho, so I'm hoping it's just hot air from publicists.

Oops, sorry. The 29th time. (Not counting the year Tom Jones got three of 'em in there.)

i was v disappointed by 'wild grass'

head is a bit fuzzy, was 'white material' in last year's s&s list?

it's only just out in the US tho i guess most US critics wd have seen it, but anyway, weird that it wasn't in this year's list while 'a prophet' was

It was a particularly rough year for non-English film distribution in flyover country

It's really bad. These days I rely almost exclusively on Netflix for these (I've had Wild Glass in queue for months).

We're to the point in film distribution modeling that a movie can probably show up in these polls three, four years in a row without it being a shock.

Maybe it hasn't been much of a vintage year for non-flyover country, either. Here are the 25 best-rated movies that opened in NY this year, according to a web-crix group I'm in.

1 Carlos (Olivier Assayas)
2 Dogtooth (Yorgos Lanthimos)
3 Winter's Bone (Debra Granik)
4 Exit Through the Gift Shop (Banksy)
5 Toy Story 3 (Lee Unkrich)
6 Social Network, The (David Fincher)
7 Le Amiche (Michelangelo Antonioni)
8 Mother (Bong Joon-ho)
9 Lourdes (Jessica Hausner)
10 Wild Grass (Alain Resnais)
11 Inception (Christopher Nolan)
12 Restrepo (Sebastian Junger & Tim Hetherington)
13 Prophet, A (Jacques Audiard)
14 Father of My Children, The (Mia Hansen-Love)
15 Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work (Ricki Stern & Annie Sundberg)
16 Animal Kingdom (David Michod)
17 127 Hours (Danny Boyle)
18 Red Riding: 1980 (James Marsh)
19 Tillman Story, The (Amir Bar-Lev)
20 Shutter Island (Martin Scorsese)
21 Bluebeard (Catherine Breillat)
22 Greenberg (Noah Baumbach)
23 Splice (Vincenzo Natali)
24 Everyone Else (Maren Ade)
25 Four Lions (Chris Morris)

http://www.filmdetail.com/2009/12/03/sight-and-sounds-top-films-of-2009/

ah ok, 'white material' came below '35 shots'

'35 shots' had had an actual release so maybe more people had seen it; the impression i get is that it is 'less highly regarded' than 'white material'

a minor anomaly i guess

meanwhile 'a serious man' was not in either the 2009 or 2010 lists, which i think is kind of wack -- i hadn't seen it in 2009 and didn't vote for it this year coz i voted for a 'film from the previous year' before and felt odd about it

Which movie was that?

35 Shots opened in March here for a two-week screening, so I'm considering it for year-end inclusion.

'i'm not there', which came out in the uk in like december 2007 but scored in the list for that year owing to festival play

xp

I'd feel weird about listing I'm Not There too.

Rimshot, et al.

Yeah, I think 35 Rums probably did "officially" play in the Twin Cities in '10, but now I can't even be bothered to remember if that was an "opening" or a "screening" at the Walker Art Center.

White Material did not do much for me. Even Denis loyalist Armond thought it was 'oooh, exotic poetic Africa'.

Impatiently waiting for my "for my consideration" screeners of Trash Humpers, Amer, Human Centipede and A Serbian Film, tbh.

i don't no the thing abut movies is that ILX seems to only like sesquipedalian grandiloquence like exit thru the gift shop and wouldn't know how to apreciate a popcorn flickeroo if their sex life depended on it

am curious abt Trash Humpers tho i thought Korine's celeb-impressionist movie rather sucked.

sesquipedalian grandiloquence like exit thru the gift shop

does not compute.

35 shots played here (missouri) in 09

i don't no the thing abut movies is that ILX seems to only like sesquipedalian grandiloquence like exit thru the gift shop and wouldn't know how to apreciate a popcorn flickeroo if their sex life depended on it

^^^ connoisseur of bad grammar

and yeah, afaik no one likes white material better than 35 shots

also ilx likes tons of terrible popcorn films: Worst Film of the top 50 of the "ILX Top 100 Films of the 2000s Poll" Poll

our popcorn uses the wrong canola oil apparently

alfred go watch breakfast at tiffanys in ur studio apartment while u sob into your mimosa glass

I can't appreciate champagne.

Screw that canola shit. Coconut oil all the way.

canola oil and OJ is the way to go

i really think the best flick this year was tots i love you philip morris

canola oil is gangster bullshit

1 Carlos (Olivier Assayas)

Should I aim to watch all 339 mins of this in one sitting? That three-disc screener scares me a bit.

I'd break up the discs with coconut oil chasers.

I think the NYT review called White Material Denis' best since Beau Travail (which I don't love either)

fuck beau travail

No, fuck The Intruder.

I saw the Spector documentary tonight. The two or three reviews I glanced at beforehand were middling. I don't get that at all--I thought it was fantastic. Two medium-sized quibbles: 1) barely any mention of the Christmas album, and no mention of its doomed release date (Nov. 22, '63), 2) use of a big flashy concert clip of "River Deep" from '70 or so, immediately prior to hearing the record for real. If you like that Las Vegas-y side of Tina Turner, you'll like this segment; I don't, so it was pointless. One relatively minor omission: no mention of End of the Century. One omission that's so gaping, I have to believe there's some kind of legal injunction behind it: the name Ronnie Spector is not uttered once. Past that, I wouldn't change a thing. You could go the film as kind of a Capturing the Friedmans/Thin Blue Line exercise, and get caught up in questions of guilt or innocence; there's a good film there. For me--and not to diminish the life of the woman who may or may not have been murdered by Spector--that was almost backdrop to 90 minutes of Spector holding court. He seems to be in the early stages of Parkinson's, and seems to have a touch of dyslexia, too, but he's just so incredibly smart and funny about so many things. I know; he's in jail for murder. But hearing him talk about what drove Duke Ellington and Miles Davis, or the phoniness of his high school graduating class, or this mob guy from New York named "Skeezy" who stole "Be My Baby" for his movie, or working on "God" and "My Sweet Lord" back-to-back, all of it was amazing. He even finds Tony Bennett's elevation to MTV icon as amusing as I do. Actually, he's obsessed with Tony Bennett to a degree that's comical. Can't wait to see this again.

I want to rent A Time to Leave again, if only for the memory of that beautiful actor in the lede. Jeanne Moreau was fucking terrible.

Inception, The Social Network won at the Writers Guild

BAFTAs: Speech, Portman, Fincher, snore

http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/41565434/ns/today-entertainment/

pleased for christopher lee

Melvil Poupaud is beautiful in a whole buncha things, Alfred.

Cinematographers' guild award to Inception; hideous!

http://www.goldderby.com/films/news/1138/lenser-wally-pfister-wins-asc-prize-for-inception

Pfister pretty good, but Deakins should always win.

I try to be very timely when it comes to year-end-lists. I saw the Phil Ochs film tonight, and I'm ready to draw up a Top 10:

1: The Agony and the Ecstasy of Phil Spector
2. Carlos
3. The Social Network
4. Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work
5. Strange Powers: Stephin Merritt and the Magnetic Fields
6. Kings of Pastry
7. Get Low
8. Phil Ochs: There but for Fortune
9. Cameraman: The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff
10. Somewhere or Cyrus[/i]

Carlos has a big advantage in that I only saw it once, and may not get a second chance to see the full version in a theatre for quite a while--its impact was visceral, (for me) deeply tied in with the music, and I'm not sure how it would hold up a second time. My two biggest disappointments--I expected to love both--were Winter's Bone and Boxing Gym. Two that I thought were well-made but that I watched dispassionately: Inside Job and Client 9. (I think I'm five films into the economic meltdown now--five documentaries; six if you count the Wall Street sequel--and they're all starting to blur together.) Most overrated film for me was True Grit. And, realizing that there is always much that I never get out to see, the one unseen film that I feel would have the best shot at making my list is Meek's Cutoff, based on how much I liked Wendy and Lucy.

I'll be back in a couple of months with my 2009 wrap-up.

The Agony and the Ecstasy of Phil Spector

Yes! This was epic! Blew me away too since I had less than no expectations for it.

Wasn't Spector amazing? I felt like Squeaky Fromme: as (probable) murderers go, he couldn't be any more charming.

ACE (editors) award to The Social Network

A.O. Scott on good actors in lousy films.

Mr. Cage may have been driven to some of this by well-publicized financial difficulty, and some of his admirers have surely been puzzled by his choices. But it can never be said that he phones in a performance.

pfft someone didnt see Season of the Witch

neeson's kind of a drag in Unknown too, im sad to say

top Cesar award to Of Gods and Men (which opened in NY today):

http://www.awardsdaily.com/2011/02/cesars-award-the-social-network-the-ghost-writer/

Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule gives his year end lists and a round-up of other ones.

Black Swan cleans up at the Spirit Awards.

http://www.usatoday.com/life/people/2011-02-26-indie-spirit-awards_N.htm

so, just as bad as the Oscars.

no way. Oscars will definitely award Best Picture to The King's Speech. Spirit Awards will look much better in comparison.

hey Dale Dickey won Spirit best supp actress for Winter's Bone, so all is forgiven

mildly lol opening bit to those awards where Joel McHale had his hand stuck under a rock in his dressing room and she came in with a chainsaw.

Muriel Awards happening shortly

Hey has anyone seen The Arbor? I saw the director on a panel at the LIFF and they showed a clip that looked kind of bad. But it won a prize and has been getting some press...

― Death Cabron For Cutie (admrl), Sunday, December 19, 2010 7:51 PM

. . .

Well, I just saw a 3-4 minute clip which featured (IIRC) what sounded like offscreen recorded interview synced to actors on set mouthing the words of the interviewees. Is the whole film like that? It's the type of distancing effect that bothers me when it isn't used well, it seems to do disservice to the person originally speaking, but honestly, I saw it totally out of context, so I have no way of knowing how this really functions in the film itself. Clio Barnard (sic?) was a very likeable and generous panelist, but sometimes nice, clever people can make not so great films. I do want to see it, though. I'll watch most (most) British films, tbh.

― Death Cabron For Cutie (admrl), Sunday, December 19, 2010 8:49 PM

The Arbor opened in NY this week, and I had very mixed feelings about it -- to the point where Mubi has me as the voice of dissent.

http://mubi.com/notebook/posts/3197

oh I guess I shoulda posted that here:

why are 'british' films shit?

I'm not going to preempt Eric and start the new detrius thread, but the NYFCC will be voting this year on... Nov 28.

http://www.indiewire.com/article/2011/10/19/new_york_film_critics_move_up_their_awards_date