Tag: The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
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‘Amelie’ tops list of decade’s best cinematography
The folks at Movieline got their hands on a list of the top 50 films of the decade, from a cinematography standpoint, as laid out by voters at American Cinematographer magazine. Topping the list: Bruno Delbonnel’s work on “Amelie.” Delbonnel is a favorite among DPs. After all, “A Very Long Engagement” won him the ASC honor in 2004 and he received his third Oscar nomination of the decade for last year’s “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.” But it’s still a surprising call.Another delightfully unexpected pick is Jeff Cronenweth’s lensing of “Fight Club,” but I was personally irritated to find John Toll’s serene, thematically potent work on “The Thin Red Line” go completely unrecognized in the top 10 (he finally shows up at #17). I’d also say Roger Deakins, though at his usual top notch on “No Country for Old Men,” probably should have seen top 10 representation for “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” instead. His work on the western just misses at #11.
I’ve been asked many times to offer up a list of the top 10 shots of the decade as a bonus to my annual top 10 shots of the year columns, but I don’t think I can do it. For one thing, it’s obviously a ton of work, but with so many shots in so many movies, I just think it would be tough to whittle it down. Too tough.
Check out the full list from American Cinematographer after the jump. (Note they’re picking from 1998 to 2008).
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THE LISTS: Top 10 Oscar nominee fields
In exactly one week’s time, we’ll have a brand new list of Oscar nominations to pore over, pick apart and eventually file away in our subconscious with the other 81 editions of this annual collective. For Oscar geeks, nomination day is in many ways more exciting than the ceremony itself, celebrating a broader spectrum of work and throwing up far more surprises along the way.For all that, once the winners are announced, the nomination list as a whole tends to be disregarded, returned to only by trivia buffs and the geekiest of Oscar geeks. (Guilty on both counts.) And that’s shame, because a field of five nominees can often be more illuminating viewed collectively than even the worthiest of individual champions.
Today’s list, then, is devoted to that most elusive of Oscar holy grails: the perfect nominee field.
Yes, more often than not, the Academy will nominate several notable achievements in a single category. But rarer than hen’s teeth are the robust Oscar categories that feature a full house of five outstanding nominees, five contenders that would all be worthy of a win in any other year. No unremarkable coaster nominees sliding in on the coattails of a popular picture. No bad films with an expensively studio-bought nominations. No filler. No fat. Just five superb achievements.
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The best films of a decade
This column has been the elephant in my living room for months.Putting together a list of the year’s best films is easy. It’s fresh. It’s in your mind. It’s, in many ways, the expected culmination.
Putting together a list of the decade’s best films is a different chore altogether. Yearly rankings fly out the window as a proper gauge, because tastes shift and impacts either dwindle or deepen. Revisiting films is called for, but fitting in the works you missed along the way is also imperative. It can be maddening.
And the truth is, you can’t see everything. All you can do is try to be as honest about how you feel as you can. And even then, no list can be definitive on a personal level, let alone authoritative.
And so the whittling begins, and in many ways, the process is the reward. The ultimate collective is a mere reminder of the journey through 10 years of film product. But some things stuck out along the way.
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Stunning
Do you know how many people saw The Assassination of Jesse James?…You and seven other people. Paul Blart grossed nearly $200 million worldwide. I’ll take Paul Blart all day, every day.
–Producer/financier Ryan Kavanaugh in a recent Esquire profile. Does this make anyone else PROFOUNDLY sad? Are guys like this and other hedge fund types really going to pan out as the future of this industry? December 21, 2012 can’t get here soon enough if that’s the case.
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Sam Rockwell’s campaign gears up
Just last week we told you about Duncan Jones’s concentrated grassroots effort to nab Sam Rockwell an Oscar nomination for his tour de force performance in “Moon.” It is a film that, unfortunately, came and went at the marketplace, yet was one of the best films of the summer. And Rockwell, as he’s proven time and again for years now, has the chops and deserves the props.Jones has chimed in once again one the matter at his blog, Man Made Movies, and lays out all the Tweeting and petitioning goodness. You can even buy a T-shirt for the cause. Don’t you have a new movie to be preparing, Duncan!?
Seriously, though, it’s worth noting that, in the wake of this, Sony Pictures Classics, as well as Rockwell’s own representation at the publicity firm I/D Public Relations, are getting serious about an Oscar campaign. It will be an uphill climb because, due to the film being a British production, it isn’t eligible for a number of the awards that might have put it on the domestic radar, such as the Gothams or the Independent Spirits. The film did, however, show up in a number of high-profile categories when the British Independent Film Award nominees were announced earlier in the week.
Whether Rockwell nails the honor or not is ultimately beside the point. “He deserves to be in the conversation,” Sony Classics honcho Michael Barker told me. “He’s one of these guys like Philip Seymour Hoffman, who we had in films like ‘Love Liza’ and ‘Owning Mahowny,’ where you just said, ‘One of these days [he’ll be nominated].’”
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Which films will be remembered in 50 years?
It is nothing new for a film to be released, find no audience, no critical favor, and disappear to be discovered by a new generation and raised to the level of masterpiece. In fact, this has been going on since the silents.Charlie Chaplin’s masterpiece “City Lights” was released four years after the advent of sound, and though popular at the time with both audiences and critics, it was some years later that it was finally hailed as Chaplin’s finest work. “The Wizard of Oz,” one of the most beloved films of all time that celebrates a 70th anniversary this month, was a dismal box office flop when released in 1939. It wasn’t terribly popular with the critics either, but years later it was finally championed as a work of art and, of course, now the film is considered one of the greatest films of all time and perhaps a more worthy Best Picture choice than the eventual winner that year, “Gone with the Wind.”
The “Citizen Kane” tale is so well documented I need not continue, and John Ford’s magnificent “The Searchers,” written off as just another John Wayne western, was discovered by film school professors who taught its brilliance to such young minds as Martin Scorsese, John Milius and Francis Coppola. Even Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” failed out of the gate with both audiences and critics, but within a year of its release, many of those same critics had changed their minds about the film. Within 10 years it was being declared as important a film as “Citizen Kane.”
When “Gandhi” won eight Academy Awards in 1982, no one was terribly surprised. Yet within a year there were rumblings within the Academy that a mistake had been made and the rightful winner should have been “E.T. : The Extra-Terrestrial,” now recognized as a sublime work of art. And that same year, “Blade Runner” began its life as a major flop, only to re-discovered on home video over the years and become a cult classic.
Looking back over the last decade or so, which films released since will be recognized 50 years from now? Which films that were passed over by audiences, critics and/or the Oscars will be hailed as masterpieces in the years to come? I took a stab as choosing a group of films I believe could fall under this label.
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1976: the last hurrah of the American western
The western was not yet dead in 1976 when four high-profile installments were released to varying degrees of success. Four years later, of course, Michael Cimino’s “Heaven’s Gate” would kill the genre for several years (and United Artists for longer), and though it has seen ups and downs in the years since, for the most part, the western remains one of the least popular genres with studios.In my opinion, Cimino’s film was never as bad as the critics said it was at the time. Many of them were lying in wait for a Cimino failure, hoping to ambush him for the lies told during the press interviews for ‘The Deer Hunter,” which won the man an Oscar and was the Academy’s choice for Best Picture. He was not a Vietnam veteran, he had never seen Russian Roulette used as torture, in fact he had never been out of America until he made the “The Deer Hunter.” This all but ruined Cimino’s reputation, which is somewhat sad because the man had a hell of an eye for detail.
That of course was the issue with “Heaven’s Gate”; though stunning in its detail, the film is insufferably slow and ponderous, with perhaps two truly stunning sequences, the best among them the community roller skating sequence, which pulsates with energy driven by a young man, the film’s composer David Mansfield and his fiddle, as they skate around the rink, veering in and out of surrounding bodies.
There was a time in the 1950s and 1960s when 20% of the films coming out of Hollywood were westerns. There were 26 prime time western programs on television, all popular, and John Wayne ruled as the top box office star. By the 1970s, westerns were made less frequently, and Wayne’s box office throne had been usurped by another star of the genre: Clint Eastwood.
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INTERVIEW: Jeremy Renner
Jeremy Renner doesn’t have one of those handy “I always wanted to be an actor” stories. His journey to the screen was, much like the man, a rather unpretentious, play-it-by-instinct series of events that began to unfold in college.“I was fumbling around with different majors like most people do,” the actor says, calling from somewhere on the road to Los Angeles in Northern California. “I was a criminology major and I was interested in science. I took an elective, which was an acting class, and that was a pretty wonderful place for me to express 19 years of repression, and I fell in love with it. I fell in love with the stage.”
Even though Renner is making his screen impact felt in films like “28 Weeks Later,” “The Assassinantion of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” and Kathryn Bigelow’s “The Hurt Locker,” opening in limited U.S. release today, he says he still holds a special place for theater. “There’s something that you can’t get anywhere else,” he says, “that living, breathing sort of synergy that kind of happens on stage and with your audience, it’s a wonderful cohesive feeling.”
Nothing he had performed could serve as any sort of preparation for his role as an Army bomb squad officer, a cog in the wheel of the military’s Explosive Ordinance Detail (EOD). Mark Boal’s thoroughly researched screenplay first crossed Renner’s path when he was in London filming Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s “28 Weeks Later.” Producer Greg Shapiro approached him with the material and the character leapt off the page at the actor.
“It wasn’t one of those things that I needed to decide to do it or not,” Renner says. “There was no choice in the matter to me. I’ve never been so affected or so interested in a project. I just thought that EOD was a whole world that had never been explored in cinema. On paper, he was one of the best-written characters I’d seen in a long time. I had so many questions and answers, at the same time, to what made this guy tick and I was just so curious I couldn’t wait to figure it out.”
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Renner on ‘Jesse James’
I’ve been sitting here transcribing an interview with “Hurt Locker” actor Jeremy Renner (watch for that later today or tomorrow) and came across a portion where we discussed 2007’s “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford,” my pick for that year’s best film and one of the best of the decade. I don’t imagine finding a place for it in the actual interview piece but I wanted to toss up Renner’s thoughts on the making of the film:Andrew Dominik is great with actors but it was one of the longest jobs I’ve had. I feel like I could have shot anything I was in in probably a week and it could have been done but it was just stretched out for so long. But the cast is phenomenal, riding horses and shooting guns, you get to play cowboys. That’s a little boy’s dream come true if you ask me. There were some moments shooting this thing when I was so bored out of my mind as an artist. I was so unmotivated. I’m sitting with Sam Rockwell and Sam Shepard and it’s probably three degrees outside and we’re shivering, it’s four in the morning, we’ve been out there for six hours, we haven’t done anything. We have potato sacks on our heads. We could be anybody! What are we doing! We were all just very frustrated as actors. But then I went to the monitor and saw what they were shooting down below, and “Holy moly.” It was just moving art. Gorgeous. Then I’m like, “Okay, I understand. I’m glad to be a part of this process.” Even though it didn’t do well in the box office I think that film is going to stand the test of time. I was so happy to be a part of that. Very blessed.
By the way, does anyone watch Renner’s ABC series “The Unusuals?” I don’t follow TV news too closely so I actually found out about the show’s unfortunate cancellation from Renner himself, but I have to say, it’s one of my favorites right now. Too bad it wasn’t picked up for another season.
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‘Revolutionary Road’ — snubbed today, sure to be remembered forever
One of the biggest surprises of the awards season for me is the fact that “Revolutionary Road” is being all but forgotten by many critics groups and has certainly slipped off the Oscar radar as a result. Is the film deserving? Absolutley. I think it is one of the best films of the year and among the finest I have seen this decade, but for whatever reason — and who can explain these things — it has not gotten a great deal of press.This is a major accomplishment, a work of art superbly directed by Sam Mendes who in eight years has become one of the most exciting directors in modern cinema. Though I count myself among those who though his breakthrough film “American Beauty” was very good but also radically over-praised, his follow-up, “Road to Perdition,” was superb and should have been among the nominees for Best Picture and Best Director in 2002, vastly superior to “Chicago.”
His third film, “Jarhead,” was darkly beautiful to look at but didn’t quite work with audiences who are still not interested in films about Afghanistan or Iraq (whichever installment). Mendes possesses a gift with actors, one of those directors like Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese and more recently, Paul Thomas Anderson. He’s able to bring out their best work. It seems no surprise he married an actress.
He is also patient with a narrative, allowing it to unfold with the knowledge the audience connects with the actors. With “Revolutionary Road,” he has cranked out a crowning achievement in a career just getting started, and yet like so many other masterworks, it may slip through the cracks, barely noticed.
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I have to say it
Some folks have really had the wool pulled over their eyes as it pertains to “Che” this year. That’s a shitty thing to say, I know, but it’s weird when you sense the spell of a maverick filmmaker cast so precisely over viewers just asking to be spellbound. Suddenly subversion for its own sake and the amplified “sophistication” of a filmmaker — who seems to be flipping his audience off with each endeavor lately — equals bravura filmmaking and top-notch artistry.
I beg to differ — emphatically. Which isn’t to say there aren’t elements of “Che” that grabbed me and really bowled me over (like the pitch-perfect ensemble performance, for instance). But the hero-worship, on screen and off, is simply too much. I can’t get into it now; I’ll be here all day. I’ll dig in later.
Interestingly, some of these same champions were knocking “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” 12 months ago for similar choices. Funny how that happens.
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Some suggestions for Special Edition DVDs
Every week, much to the delight of my children, several packages arrive at my door containing DVDs, movies that are not yet released in the home market that I am expected to review. Tough work, ain’t it? Seriously, I would do what I do just for the free movies.That said, I have followed the history of DVD very closely and the manner in which several studios double dip with their releases. Most recently we have “The Godfather Restoration,” which is superb, but represents the third such DVD release for these films. The first came in 2001, The Godfather Trilogy, and then each film was released on its own so folks not wanting Part III could pass (sorry Kris).
Another film that went through many incarnations before the Ultimate Collector’s Edition was “Blade Runner,” though last year’s final release should be the final release. Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now” went through several variations before coming to us in the ultimate edition, minus, of course, “Hearts of Darkness,” the splendid doc about the film’s making. What might have been cool is to see some footage of Harvey Keitel as Willard (if it exists).
But it all leads me to wonder which films out there deserve a double disc/special edition release.
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Nick Cave on film, music and committees
I can’t think offhand of an upcoming film score that I’m more eager to hear than Nick Cave and Warren Ellis’ work for “The Road.” Their dark, elegiac score for “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford,” which wove together a panoply of Americana with a smattering of modern influences, was one of the great overlooked achievements of last year.Of course, “The Road” reunites Cave and Ellis with director John Hillcoat, with whom they collaborated on “The Proposition” — the fascinating Outback “Western” that Cave himself also scripted. “The Proposition”‘s score was another sonically dense, richly atmospheric affair, and I expect them to repeat the feat on “The Road.”
All of which brings me to this interesting little interview with Cave, taken while he was recording for “The Road” in London. He’s long been one of the most articulate, intelligent guys in rock music, and he offers quite generous insight here into his deliciously strange creative process. There’s also this rather matter-of-fact perspective on working for film:
The whole film business, everything is done by committee, it would seem. So what you feel about what you’ve created is highly irrelevant in the process of making a film. You hand something in and the worth of it is judged by people you’ve never even seen, so it’s mentally frustrating in that way, but at times it’s hugely enjoyable because the kind of agony of original creation, of having to think of the actual idea and the theme and what you’re going to write about and all that kind of stuff, which is really very difficult, the toughest part of songwriting for me, is not there. You’re simply supplied everything by what’s on the screen.
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The western keeps on truckin’
It’s no real secret that yours truly is in the tank for the western genre. Being brought up on the films of Sergio Leone and Clint Eastwood tends to make an impact in a young man’s life. I watch Charles Bronson square off with Henry Fonda on a daily basis. I’m knee-deep in research on the genre for a grad school thesis.I dig it, okay?
The resurgence of saddles and spurs on the big screen has been moving steadily through the industry. I don’t think anyone expects a return to the 1950s, with pistol-toting heroes plastered on every television screen and nearly every silver screen across America, but I see these efforts taking on more introspective subject matter, perhaps giving way soon enough to the neo-western. And it is, after all, time.
Today I see that screen tests may have been revealed of Thomas Jane in the upcoming DC Comics adaptation “Jonah Hex” The film is set to be directed by the team behind “Crank,” Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor. This might be real, might not, since the duo is filming “Crank 2” in Los Angeles at the moment. But I can’t say I’m loving it…seems quite amateurish. Regardless, “Hex” is a hell of a property with some storylines that just sing, and seeing it on the big screen will do this western fanatic a lot of good.
Meanwhile, of course, Ed Harris is set to release “Appaloosa” later this year, formerly under the New Line Cinema banner and now, presumably, as another in a long tradition of genre entries from Warner Bros. Pictures. Harris stars along with Viggo Mortensen and Renee Zellweger.
These efforts are coming on the heels of a tweak in the genre as of late, with the more abstract works of Cormac McCarthy making their way to the screen (“No Country for Old Men,” “The Road” and, soon, “Blood Meridian”) and David Milch showing in the sadly cancelled HBO series “Deadwood” that the genre could be taken to levels almost Shakespearean. Meanwhile, a revamp of “The Lone Ranger” is looking like a go, with the team behind the “Pirates of the Caribbean” films hoping to bring an element of sensationalism into the mix.
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Could two potentially great film scores get the AMPAS shaft this year?
It’s a debate that never gets old regarding the music branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. When is it going to clean house regarding shady rules that seem to fly in the face of what the organization sets out to do each and every year: honor the best in cinematic achievement?The foreign film committee had a major shakeup last year, and promises of attention were made, but it’s high time the same happened with the musicians. One of the rules seems poised to become a serious talking point later this season, however.
Within Rule 16B of the Academy’s eligibility guidelines — launched into infamy last year when the caca hit the fan regarding Jonny Greenwood’s “There Will Be Blood” score — you’ll find the key language:
Only the principal composer(s) or songwriter(s) responsible for the conception and execution of the work as a whole shall be eligible for an award. This expressly excludes from eligibility…scores assembled from the music of more than one composer.
Specifically, it’s Rule 16B-5f. And it will likely affect two promising works of film music composition this year.
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As Cannes winds down, TIFF looms…
With Cannes on the downswing, it becomes time to to start making preparations for the annual Toronto International Film Festival, for which screening announcements begin next month. I have been covering Toronto for more than 15 years and can safely say it is Christmas to a film critic.Each September I move into the Delta Chelsea Hotel for the duration of the festival — it makes no sense to make the 90 minute drive home each night as the days begin at dawn and often tie into the following morning. My wife and girls make the drive into the the city for the weekend and swim while I screen. And if time permits, I take Sherri to a Gala screening at Roty Thomson Hall.
Over the course of each festival I see between 30 and 50 films (50 being my personal high, in fact) and though it sounds like tons of fun, and I would not miss it for the world, it is exhausting to say the least.
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Fresh face
Snapped in the Bank Street tube station on the Central Line. I like the Region 2 cover art.