In Contention

Tag: Cold Weather

  • Indie Spirits, HBO and Weinstein party down on Oscar eve

    Yesterday was a bit of a whirlwind.  The Indie Spirits was a lovely affair, though they really need to figure out the show aspect because it kind of fell apart this year.  I didn’t see it on television so maybe it was edited into shape, but in the room, it just felt like chaos.

    I spoke to Aronofsky — for the first time since he finally made my list, he noted.  The guy is paying attention.  I wished him the best of luck tonight but he shrugged it off, knowing much of anything beyond Natalie Portman winning just isn’t in the cards.  Nevertheless, it’s been a long, wonderful journey for the film, especially when you look at those box office numbers.

    Mostly I was stoked to see an old college buddy, “Cold Weather” producer Brendan McFadden.  He and director Aaron Katz are still working on that werewolf buddy cop script we told you about recently, and there’s a western in the cards, too.  Here’s hoping those ambitious projects take off.

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  • 2/11 OSCARWEB ROUND-UP: Franco couldn’t care less, love letter to Annette Bening, Hammond polls voters

    • James Franco: “If it’s the worst show in the history of the Oscars, who cares?”  I love this guy. [Screening Room]

    • David Poland on how the Academy is missing a golden opportunity by essentially banning Banksy from the ceremony.  Not that Banksy would even humor his suggestions, but still. [The Hot Blog]

    • Nick Davis writes a big ole’ love letter to Annette Bening.  (More on her in today’s Oscar Talk.) [Nick’s Flick Picks]

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  • 2/9 OSCARWEB ROUND-UP: Stewart talks ‘Speech’ sets, McMurtry and Ossana on ‘True Grit,’ Nolan/Del Toro Q&A

    • Steve Pond goes blue in the face trying to explain, again, the preferential ballot to people who just don’t get it. [The Odds]

    • Nathaniel Rogers chats with “The King’s Speech” production designer Eve Stewart. [The Film Experience]

    • Jamie Bell: Oscar prognosticator. [Movieline]

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  • ‘Cold Weather’ trailer

    Here’s a welcome breath of fresh air amid the oppressive mechanics of Oscar season. Some of you might remember that my personal Top 10 of 2010 featured a few films only hitting US theaters this year — and here’s the first of them. Aaron Katz’s “Cold Weather,” a bracing fusion of gentle indie shuffle and playful noir leanings, opens on Friday, and I implore you to take a chance on it. Apple has a shiny new trailer that does a neat job of reflecting the film’s brittle atmospheric charms, if not its cockeyed humor. (It also offers a taste of the year’s most strikingly original score.) Check it out by clicking on the image, or watch the embed after the cut.

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  • LIFE WITHOUT OSCAR: Chad’s best of 2010

    When it came time to choose a snappy title for my year-end retrospective, the one that seemed to fit best is the one given to all my columns at In Contention this year. Oscar and I have shared a mutual disinterest in what the other feels to be award-worthy for a few years now and it doesn’t look like the trend is going to change much in 2011. For those interested, my top 20 last year garnered a whopping three nominations between them (two coming in the Best Animated Feature category).

    If there was any kind of trend or narrative to my taste this year, I guess it would be the rise of documentaries. Nearly 50% of my top 20 is comprised of the medium (including a few hybrids that blur the line), compared to a single entry last year. My guess it has more to do with a growing disenchantment towards lazy screenwriting than a noticeable uptick in quality non-fiction film. Regardless, truth was truly more interesting than fiction for me in 2010.

    Elsewhere, a number of high ranking films have to do with relationships and their struggles, possibly connected to the fact that breaking up with my girlfriend of four years was probably the defining event of my year, personally. Sometimes a movie hits you when and where you need to be hit.

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  • Watching and waiting: Guy’s best and worst of 2010

    What kind of year was 2010 at the movies? You tell me. It’s virtually impossible to find one yardstick to measure 365 days of cinema for a collective audience whose interests seem ever more segregated.

    If your film interests are covered largely by the multiplex, chances are 2010 was an unusually unrewarding year for you, challenging even Hollywood’s standard quota of déjà vu — unless, of course, you’re an animation fiend, in which case there was a broad enough range of carefully crafted work to keep you happy.

    If you tend to bypass the mall on your way to the arthouse, however, there was any amount of adventurous indie and world cinema, both newly unveiled and backlogged from previous years, to chew on — if, of course, you’re privileged enough to live in a regrettably narrow radius. And if you’re an Academy voter sifting through the crop of generously campaigned prestige fare, 2010 looks rather like the usual, only a little more so.

    For me, 2010 was both immeasurably improved and somewhat complicated by the festival circuit — access to which is a luxury I shall never take for granted, but also one that inevitably skews my sense of how the film yearbook reads in the real world. When you’ve had access to most of the big-ticket winter warmers by early autumn, and when the likes of Cannes afford you a head start of many months or even years on certain international art films, things rather lose their shape.

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  • INTERVIEW: ‘Cold Weather’ director Aaron Katz

    When the director of a gentle indie character study—even one joshingly praised as “mumblecore with a plot” by certain critics—cheerfully tells you that his next project is more of a “werewolf buddy cop comedy,” you could be forgiven for expecting a thick veil of irony to cover the remark.

    But Aaron Katz, it turns out, is as guileless and unfussy as the films he makes, describing his foray into genre play with a boyish excitement and sincere sense of movie-love. “There are a lot of big films that come out in the summer now, but not the kind that I really love,” he says, fairly late in our Sunday afternoon conversation. “In the 80s early 90s, we had films like ‘Die Hard’ or ‘Beverly Hills Cop’ – genuinely fun and weirdly classy and restrained compared to blockbusters today. So we’re trying to write the kind of entertainment that we’d want to see, but still, you know, very much us.”

    That modestly stated “us” nods to a distinct stylistic trademark the 29 year-old Oregon native and his collaborators have established across three features in just five years: his 2006 debut, “Dance Party, USA,” and Spirit-nominated follow-up, “Quiet City,” both balanced the talky, lo-fi youth idling of much contemporary Amerindie cinema with an unusually crisp visual sensibility.

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  • Finally, the 10 best of the 2010 LFF

    For those of you who were loyally following my London Film Festival coverage this year, I must apologize for leaving it somewhat in limbo. Though I did eventually find time for a lengthy discussion of fest closer “127 Hours,” a snowballing workload put paid to my hopes of squeezing in a few more review roundups. And frankly, since the festival wrapped on Thursday after four weeks of press screenings, I so relished having ownership of my days again that I let things lie longer than I intended.

    But by way of a belated send-off, here’s a gathering of the films that made the LFF for me this year. I saw precisely 60 films at the festival, in addition to 27 I’d already seen at previous fests, so I was naïve to hope I might get round to discussing most of them.

    Some of the  clunkers (glum German childbirth drama “Blessed Events,” Ferzan Ozpetek’s lead-footed gay comedy “Loose Cannons”) barely merit appraisal; other, more interesting, disappointments (Xavier Dolan’s meticulous but terminally precious love triangle “Heartbeats,” Benedik Flieugauf’s visually startling but sketchily conceived sci-fi “Womb”) at least deserved a few paragraphs. Ah, well.

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  • LONDON: ‘Cold Weather,’ ‘Carlos,’ ‘Little White Lies’

    Okay, so my weekend plans to catch up on my LFF review backlog didn’t entirely pan out — though the schedulers have, at least, kindly slowed the snowball effect by screening a number of films today that I had already seen. Strange as it sounds, given that it’s been on the festival track for five months now, Mike Leigh’s “Another Year” (reviewed in Cannes) finally premiered in its home country this evening, while Julian Schnabel’s “Miral” continued to dismay critics at this morning’s press screening — as I treated myself to a smug lie-in.

    The weekend, however, was one of multiple festival treats for me, including my first dip into this year’s particularly enticing Treasures From the Archives sidebar, featuring a broad array of immaculately restored classics and curios.

    Joshua Logan’s “Picnic,” a widely forgotten Best Picture nominee from 1955, was an unexpected candidate for this treatment, but the gleaming new print of this creaky but affecting slice of small-town Americana repaid the archivists’ gamble — the film’s ambitious narrative-hopscotch structure remains fresh, the scattergun ensemble acting less so, but the real purpose of the outing was seeing master DP James Wong Howe’s luscious color lensing primped, polished and projected on London’s classiest cinema screen.

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  • SUNDAY CENTS: Wonder toys

    *All historical figures cited are adjusted to today’s dollars.

    As it turns out, Armond White was unable to convince most Americans to not see “Toy Story 3.” Pixar’s eleventh animated feature became their highest debuting in history with a $109.0 million weekend. That also makes it the third biggest June debut and third biggest animated debut of all time, while instantly placing it in pole position to wind up the most successful film of the summer.

    Maybe it was the 3D, maybe it was the weak market, or maybe it was nostalgia for Jim Varney but the film was able to one up the $89.8 million debut of “Toy Story 2,” although its $27,100 per theater average is virtually identical to the figure posted by its predecessor. Reviews amongst those who don’t receive weekly death threats are universally positive and this should have the staying power to flirt with $400 million by the end of its run.

    Are we looking at the second threequel to get a Best Picture nomination and the first without similar recognition for the previous installments? In a word, yes.

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  • IFC nabs Katz’s ‘Cold Weather’

    I want to take a moment amid this typical distribution announcement to offer a big congrats to my friends Aaron Katz, Ben Stambler and Brendan McFadden, director and producers of SXSW sensations “Cold Weather.” It’s a special thing to secure major distribution for your first flick and Aaron has been working hard ever since he nabbed that filmmaking degree in the Carolina Piedmont.

    Katz’s last film, “Quiet City,” made my top 10 in 2007, and if I’m honest, I actually thought “Cold Weather” was a step down creatively.  But the filmmaking is nevertheless more refined (cinematographer Andy Reed moving over to the RED camera makes his skills leap off the screen even more).  I can’t wait to see what the boys do next.

    The press release, in part:

    IFC Films, the leading American distributor of independent and foreign films, announced today that the company has acquired North American and multiple foreign rights including Asia, the Middle East and East-Central Europe to Aaron Katz’s critically acclaimed COLD WEATHER…IFC Films will release COLD WEATHER via its IFC in Theaters platform which brings critically-acclaimed independent movies to on-demand viewers at home the same day they premiere in theaters.

    President of IFC Entertainment Jonathan Sehring said: “We’ve always been fans of Aaron Katz’s work but, with COLD WEATHER, he has made a great step forward as a filmmaker. It’s great fun to see him play with the detective/mystery genre and he’s aided by a wonderful cast and fantastic creative team. This is one of the most original American independent films of the year and we can’t wait to bring it to audiences via all of our various platforms.”

    Bravo.

  • Aaron Katz’s ‘Cold Weather’

    I wasn’t on board with Aaron’s films in school, fell head over heels for “Quiet City,” and I have no idea what “Cold Weather” is about, but I’m interested: