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

Sasha Stone gets preemptively defensive about being a detrius-enabler and caps off a big "fuck you haters" post with a YouTube clip of Morbs' favorite movie I will never see.

http://www.awardsdaily.com/2010/09/the-state-of-the-race-moving-the-dial-good-luck-with-that/

It's on.

And, because it makes NRQ happy to keep the history up top:

This is the thread where we discuss matters pertaining to the detrius that accompanies the "End of the Year in Cinema" -- 2004
This is the thread where we discuss matters pertaining to the detrius that accompanies the "End of the Year in Cinema" -- 2005
end-of-2006 film stuff (detrius 2, the Richard Donner Cut)
This is the thread where we discuss matters pertaining to the detrius that accompanies the "End of the Year in Cinema" -- 2007
This is the thread where we discuss matters pertaining to the detrius that accompanies the "End of the Year in Cinema" -- 2008
This is the thread where we discuss matters pertaining to the detrius that accompanies the "End of the Year in Cinema" -- 2009

I don't wanna read any of this til December

Or Sasha Stone ever.

didnt wreckanize the name, so yeah

Morbs' favorite movie I will never see

Why the dogmatic stance, foole?

Dogmatically facetious.

Anyway, it's looking more and more like I'm going to have to go on a viewing/blog-updating glut to make my OFCS requirements this year.

I had no time for their Best First Films poll. We should've gotten The Bellboy in there.

Me neither and ditto.

so is anything from before the september festivals a best picture contender? presumably inception could get nominated, but no way is it winning. anything else?

Filling 10 slots, at least Inception will get one. what were the most acclaimed/profitable Jan-Aug pics?

Common wisdom says there are four this year that seem possible. Beyond Inception, there's The Kids Are All Right, Toy Story 3 and Winter's Bone.

Using the term "wisdom" as loosely as is possible.

yeah i guess toy story 3? can you be nominated in both animation and best picture now there are ten picture slots?

Up just did it last year. The expansion was arguably made to accommodate Pixar's yearly weepie.

take that pixar

A "Best of 2010" year-end screenings e-mail... fuck. Maybe I'll declare everything after November 1 ineligible.

Gotham nominations (I still don't understand these awards):

http://gotham.ifp.org/

random.

anyone seen Hereafter? is it sloppy melodramatic goo or good?

John Wells? I figured The Company Men would be/would be received as a shit drama about life during the recession. I figured this because John Wells directed it tbh.

I just read tnite that this person created "ER", which I thot was Michael Crichton

Hereafter is stupid.

I guess it's sorta kinda refreshing that only 2 of the 5 Gotham nominees have yet to open in the States.

surprised that 'black swan' is an indie

so was The Wrestler (sort of), why mess w/ what resurrected your career?

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0947798/companycredits

lord knows

sounds unlikely to me that you would get natalie portman without a distribution guarantee

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.

i like firth a lot and i think it's sweet how everyone's mom has a crush on him.

My mom was a communication disorders professor, and if there's a heaven, she's watched "Mr. Darcy Vs. Stuttering" about 9000 times by now.

yeah it's the mr darcy thing that made him, when i guess a lot of the moms weren't even moms

Basically what Plax said is what I keep hearing from people and, I mean, <3 u guy but c'mon that's so boring.

maybe those ppl have a point!!!

Colin Firth is part of the Brit actor tradition of noble suffering. In most of his big movies after P&P he's played the sap, the cuckold, the sad gay man, etc. I mean enough.

i've never actually seen P&P but that tendency of firth's is why i dig his mr. darcy in theory -- getting an actor most comfortable with self-loathing sad sacks to say darcy's bitchy lines is probably a pretty efficient way of getting deep into the character quickly.

I did like that P&P, but CF is indeed good in anything, like that travesty of Noel Coward that came out 2 years ago, Easy Virtue.

In more scintillating detrius news, Dogtooth on DVD Tuesday!

http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/film_salon/2010/12/30/scenes_2010_dogtooth

he didnt have a defined public persona when that came out tho, ppl just thought he was dreamy

right i'm not saying they cast him because he plays sad sacks, just that somebody looked at him and said "this guy would be a good mr. darcy" and they were (again, theoretically) right and his later work just illuminates the ways in which they were right.

he's a decent actor but i dislike watching him. i've only ever liked him in Another Country.

lacking the guts to nominate Christian Bale:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_film_razzies

yeah because the hard-hitting keepers of awards justice The Razzies would normally nom a golden globe winner to put Hollywood in its place.

they did last year with Sandra Bullock (who was a good sport about it).

nominating twilight for an anti-oscar is way more boring than nominating colin firth for a real one

you have just explained why the Razzies need to be taken over by me.

Hitchens on The King's Speech.

Bullock was for a different role though.

Hitchens on The King's Speech.

love this guy and everything but you know he sat in this movie with a smile slowly spreading over his face as he realized, unable to believe his luck, that he was gonna get to write an essay about The Shitty Side Of Churchill

The King's Speech is riddled with gross falsifications of history.

history's dumb anyway

haha otm

(as someone who love/hates a history of the english-speaking peoples though, that line about how awful churchill's celebrated style can be when he's "barking up the wrong tree" is otm)

he was gonna get to write an his fourteenth essay about The Shitty Side Of Churchill

probly not gonna see much of SAGs, let me know if Borgnine lives through his speech.

you know the SAG lifetime award means something when Tim Conway does the tribute.

shd go here

A Screen Actors Guild thread

yeah, let's have a Costume Guild thread too

as-yet-unreleased "unknown pleasures" (I'm seeing the Ozon film tonight):

http://www.filmlinc.com/fcm/jf11/terraincognita.htm

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