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« December 2007 | Main | February 2008 »
Monday, January 28, 2008 - 13:54:04
"When you get into the edit suite after shooting a movie, you feel a responsibility to an actor who has trusted you, and Heath gave us everything. As we started my cut, I would wonder about each take we chose, each trim we made. I would visualize the screening where we'd have to show him the finished film—sitting three or four rows behind him, watching the movements of his head for clues to what he was thinking about what we'd done with all that he'd given us. Now that screening will never be real. I see him every day in my edit suite. I study his face, his voice. And I miss him terribly." - - "The Dark Knight" director Chris Nolan on Heath Ledger.SCREEN ACTOR'S GUILD AWARDS
Best Ensemble: "No Country for Old Men"
Best Actor: Daniel Day-Lewis, "There Will Be Blood"
Best Actress: Julie Christie, "Away from Her"
Best Supp. Actor: Javier Bardem, "No Country for Old Men"
Best Supp. Actress: Ruby Dee, "American Gangster"
Daniel Day-Lewis dedicates his award to Heath Ledger.
Sunday, January 27, 2008 - 14:42:01
OSCAR UPDATE IX - January 27, 2008Ethan Coen and Joel Coen ("No Country for Old Men") won the top prize from the Director's Guild of America last night. This should set the stage for their victory on Oscar night, and it's a good sign for the film for Best Picture.
"There Will Be Blood" won the top cinematography award from the ASC.
The Screen Actor's Guild weighs in tonight with a live ceremony beginning at 5:20 p.m. CST on TNT and TBS. Last year, three of the five winners in the film category went on to win Oscars (Whitaker, Mirren, Hudson). Only Eddie Murphy and "Little Miss Sunshine," which took home the top ensemble prize, missed out.
Here are my very quick SAG predictions:
Best Ensemble: "Into the Wild"
Best Actor: Daniel Day-Lewis, "There Will Be Blood"
Best Actress: Julie Christie, "Away from Her"
Best Supp. Actor: Javier Bardem, "No Country for Old Men"
Best Supp. Actress: Cate Blanchett, "I'm Not There"
Saturday, January 26, 2008 - 17:46:48
The main image of the official Warner Bros. "The Dark Knight" website. I remarked to my moviegoing friend just yesterday how I was still angered and sad over this. I'm am truly sorry that, after "The Dark Knight," we will never see another performance from from Heath Ledger.Here's a video clip from Oprah's interview with Daniel Day Lewis where he talks about Ledger's death. I saw "There Will Be Blood" last night. His performance is, without question, the finest I've ever seen a film actor deliver. Mr. Day-Lewis may be in a league of his own, but he certainly recognized that Heath Ledger wasn't far behind. This interview demonstrates what a compassionate and classy guy Daniel Day-Lewis is. Bravo.
Friday, January 25, 2008 - 07:52:55
My moviegoing friend pointed out this piece on Heath Ledger by Mary Elizabeth Williams of Salon."When I remember him -- a word that still doesn't sound real or right yet -- I will see a montage in my mind of indelible on-screen moments. I'll see him, blissfully bored, waving his hand through a Bunsen burner flame in "10 Things I Hate About You." I'll see him clutching a bloodstained shirt in "Brokeback Mountain," his face crumpled in haunted longing. I'll see him declaring his love with his last, self-destructive breath in "Monster's Ball." I'll see a flawless face that conveyed the rage, loss, menace and profound ardor of such fascinating, flawed characters. And I will be desolate and disappointed and angry as hell that there will be no more new moments to come."
Right on. I write often about film reviews that I read that are grand in their endeavor and outcome; A.O. Scott's reviews of "Little Children" and "Into the Wild" and Anthony Lane's devastating and hilarious review of "Star Wars: Episode III" are always top of mind.
Today, I read another one by New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis on "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days," the Romanian film that took the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, yet was mysteriously shut out of consideration for a Best Foreign Film Oscar earlier this week.
"In “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days,” a ferocious, unsentimental, often brilliantly directed film about a young woman who helps a friend secure an abortion, the camera doesn’t follow the action, it expresses consciousness itself. This consciousness — alert to the world and insistently alive — is embodied by a young university student who, one wintry day in the late 1980s, helps her roommate with an abortion in Ceausescu’s Romania when such procedures were illegal, not uncommon and too often fatal. It’s a pitiless, violent story that in its telling becomes a haunting and haunted intellectual and aesthetic achievement."
This is an exceptional review.
Oscar contender "There Will Be Blood" arrives in Little Rock today at Matt Smith's Market Street Cinema. The film is nominated for eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor. David Denby of The New Yorker described it as "an enthralling and powerfully eccentric American epic." Manohla Dargis of The New York Times writes, "the film is above all a consummate work of art, one that transcends the historically fraught context of its making, and its pleasures are unapologetically aesthetic. It reveals, excites, disturbs, provokes, but the window it opens is to human consciousness itself." Philip Martin, writing in today's Arkansas Democrat Gazette agrees: "It is a consensus masterpiece."
Rambo IV titled creatively "Rambo" is here along with "How She Move," "Untraceable" and "Meet the Spartans." Also, for those of you that missed "Michael Clayton," it is back in theaters. It received Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Director, Actor, Supporting Actor, Supporting Actress, Original Screenplay and Original Score.
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