In Contention

Tag: We Bought a Zoo

  • ‘We Bought a Zoo’ trailer

    Just in time to capitalize on Scarlett Johansson’s nude photo scandal (that was low, sorry), the trailer for Cameron Crowe’s latest, “We Bought a Zoo,” hits the web. The first half of this early glimpse really makes it look like a return to character study form for Crowe, while the second half lays on the heavy saccharine (I winced at “I like the animals, but I love the humans”). So the proof will be in the pudding, as they say, but Matt Damon looks to be giving a solid performance here and, well, I’ll try to remain positive. The last Crowe outing frankly took a lot out of me. Check out the trailer via Apple by clicking the image below, or watch an embed after the jump.

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  • OFF THE CARPET: Strong year for double-dippers

    We find ourselves right in the middle of the big Toronto press junket, er, film festival, where 200-plus films are landing, many of them as world premieres, and the landscape of this year’s Oscar race is really beginning to take shape.

    As I looked out at the various films in play this year, it suddenly occurred to me that, perhaps more than ever, there are a lot of double-dipping actors and actresses in the hunt. Not all of these performances are or will be awards bait necessarily, but there could still be cases for more than a few saddling up to dual nominations this year.

    At the top of that list would have to be Brad Pitt. After already giving what many believed to be his best performance to date in Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life,” the paparazzi-hounded star found himself the recipient of a lot of great ink for his work in “Moneyball” when it screened in Toronto at the end of the week. Wisely, Fox Searchlight will be planning a supporting actor push for the actor in Malick’s film, which is both practical (given his clear lead in the other film), and organic (given that, at least in my opinion, he is supporting to Hunter McCracken’s lead in “The Tree of Life”).

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  • Should we be buying into ‘Zoo?’

    When compiling my first round of Oscar predictions last week, I somehow found myself gliding instinctively over Cameron Crowe’s upcoming true-life comedy “We Bought a Zoo” — despite its starry profile, big studio backing and plum holiday release date. Glancing over Kris’s predictions to the right, I noticed he’s done the same.

    Admittedly, Crowe’s last two features — 2001’s intriguing but unmoored “Vanilla Sky” and 2005’s utterly wretched “Elizabethtown” — have rather diminished the stock of the writer-director who won an Oscar ten years ago for “Almost Famous.” And “We Bought a Zoo” — a seemingly lightweight, family-friendly film adapted from Benjamin Mee’s memoirs of his quest to revive a failing wildlife park — could strike some as too fuzzy a prospect for big-league awards.

    Meanwhile, that Fox is skipping the festival circuit might be interpreted as an indication that they view the film as a likely commercial play rather than a critics’ cause. It’s worth noting, meanwhile, that this is Crowe’s first feature on which he shares a writing credit — with chick-flick fixture Aline Brosh McKenna, who struck the right fluffy note with her adaptation of “The Devil Wears Prada,” but likewise has stumbled badly with her follow-up efforts.

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