In one of the year’s more groan-worthy feats of movie marketing magic, Disney recently slapped their plucky horse ’n’ housewife drama “Secretariat” with a paradox of a tagline in “The Impossible True Story.” No sooner had they done so than assorted sniggering blogger types responded with a perfectly reasonable question: if the story is impossible, how can it be true?
That said, whoever ends up handling Peter Weir’s currently distributor-less “The Way Back” may rather wish they had bagged this ropey tagline first. Adapted from the ghostwritten 1956 memoir by Slavomir Rawicz, a former Polish cavalry officer and Gulag labor camp survivor, the film tackles a story that is indeed “impossible” in the Disney-dictionary sense – read: extraordinary – but also, to some extent, in the literal one: two years after his 2004 death, Rawicz’s account was entirely discredited by historians.
In the book, following the 1939 invasion of Poland, a 25 year-old Rawicz is arrested, tortured and unjustly convicted of treason by the Soviets. Sentenced to 25 years’ hard labor in the remote Gulags of Siberia, he is placed in a POW chain-gang and subjected to a gruelling two-month journey northwards, whereupon the scarcely less arduous drill of prison life begins.
Assembling the assets for my annual take on the best single shots of the year was more of a chore this time around than ever. Perhaps one need only look to a lackluster list of Oscar nominees in the Best Cinematography category to gauge just how underwhelming much of the work behind the camera was in 2009. In fact, just one shot from a film shortlisted by the Academy in the field showed up on the list.
Back in a November installment of Off the Carpet, I 
Right, there comes a point every year in predicting the Oscar nominations when you realize you’re just shuffling names to dodge commitment. I’ve reached that point, so it’s time to put myself out my misery.
Via AMPAS 
Along with the WGA, the American Society of Cinematographers will also be announcing nominees Monday. Guesses as to which way they’ll go?
It seems Steve Pond was willing to 
Wrapping up my perspective on the year today, a personal list of superlatives, Oscar categories and other silly nonsense.
Every now and then this season, I’ve sat down and taken on the fool’s errand of deciphering what 2009, the year in film, has been “about.” It’s silly because a given film year is the result of years and years of preparation and development, so to think a collective thematic consciousness settles in is a bit of a stretch.
Without any doubt, one of the most difficult Oscar categories to predict is Best Makeup. Like Best Visual Effects, the final three nominees are chosen from a previously announced shortlist of seven.
As always, the year’s adapted screenplay race is much more competitive than the original screenplay race. But what’s intriguing to note is that of the anticipated “big four” still to be widely screened, three of them are right in the thick of this discussion.