86th Academy Award Nominations List! AMERICAN HUSTLE and GRAVITY Lead with 10 Nods
You don’t always have to have the most nominations to win Best Picture, but it certainly helps. American Hustle and Gravity, in this case, might just have hurdled past 12 Years a Slave in the Oscar race, scoring 10 nominations each, while 12 Years got nine. Full analysis later. Anyway, here’s the complete list: Best Picture American Hustle Captain Phillips Dallas Buyers Club Gravity Her Nebraska Philomena 12 Years a Slave The Wolf of Wall Street Best Actor Christian Bale, American Hustle (Sony Pictures Releasing) Bruce Dern, Nebraska (Paramount) Leonardo DiCaprio, The Wolf of Wall Street (Paramount) Chiwetel Ejiofor, 12 Years a Slave (Fox Searchlight) Matthew McConaughey, Dallas Buyers Club (Focus Features) Best Actress Amy Adams, American Hustle (Sony Pictures Releasing) Cate Blanchett, Blue Jasmine (Sony Pictures Classics) Sandra Bullock, Gravity (Warner Bros.) Judi Dench, Philomena (The Weinstein Company) Meryl Streep, August: Osage County (The Weinstein Company) Best Supporting Actor Barkhad Abdi, Captain Phillips Bradley Cooper, American Hustle Michael Fassbender, 12 Years a Slave...
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Michael Douglas is Hank Pym in ANT-MAN
It looks like last’s week rumors that Edgar Wright’s Ant-Man would focus more on Scott Lang than Hank Pym are true. Marvel has announced that Michael Douglas has joined the cast of the upcoming Marvel movie as Dr. Henry Pym. That means Rudd could only be playing Lang. So what’s this movie about then? Well, Scott Lang’s Ant-Man origin story is this: The father of a dying girl, Lang breaks into Hank Pym’s house to steal the Ant-Man suit and uses it to find and rescue Dr. Erica Sondheim, the only person who can save his daughter. When Lang attempts to give the suit back to Pym, old Ant-Man tell Lang to keep it and uphold the law. Kevin Feige has already stated that Ant-Man will be more of a “heist movie” than your standard superhero fare. So we’re basically in store for a...
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Misunderstanding Movies: Anti-Heroes, Gatsbys and THE WOLF OF WALL STREET
“Our best movies have always made entertainment out of the anti-heroism of American life; they bring to the surface what, in its newest forms and fashions, is always just below the surface.” – Pauline Kael. It could be said that the hardest thing about being an artist who creates in a popular form is not the friction between art and commerce. Rather, it’s that once a work is available to the public, the artist loses control over the interpretation. Movies, television shows and music belong to the audience once they become available to it. It’s how a song/album critical of the US’s involvement in Vietnam can become the anthem of a president. And it’s how Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street can be accused of glorifying male bad behavior instead of denouncing it. The main complaint about The...
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THE WOLF OF WALL STREET & GOODFELLAS: Martin Scorsese’s Best Double Feature Yet
Martin Scorsese has two tendencies: the first is to make films that all follow a thematic or stylistic pattern, building off of one another and forming a canon of work that has since proved him to be a great auteur. Then there’s his tendency to break away from that and make something seemingly totally different than any of those defining films but which still, to varying extents perhaps, appeal to the masses. But where does his new film, The Wolf of Wall Street, fit in? It is one of the funniest films he’s ever made, in my opinion, and it isn’t necessarily violent, not in the traditional sense anyway. But, when paired with 1990’s Goodfellas, Scorsese’s main stylistic techniques and of course his thematic focuses are really made apparent. And this is by no means a negative pairing I’m...
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BEYOND THE HILLS: Another Masterpiece From Cristian Mungiu
Beyond the Hills – **** Beyond the Hills is, at its core, a film about two female friends and former lovers who are separated not literally by distance but rather the space that exists between those want to get away and those who want to stay. One, Sister Voichita (Cosmina Stratan), happens to be an Orthodox nun in a small Romanian village that she never left. The other, Alina (Cristina Flutur), is the nun’s old roommate from their traumatic days at an orphanage who ran off to Germany once old enough to flee. To the nun and the others at her monastery, Alina is a lost lamb, imbued with evil, upon her return to the village. It’s enough to drive Alina quite literally mad. Still, Beyond the Hills is as much a critique of religion as director Cristian Mungiu’s...
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Paul Rudd is ANT-MAN
UPDATE: It’s official! THR has reports that Marvel confirmed Paul Rudd is Ant-Man! PREVIOUSLY: A few weeks ago we learned that Marvel was closing in on either Joseph Gordon-Levitt or Paul Rudd for the role of Hank Pym in Edgar Wright’s Ant-Man. Now it looks like Marvel has selected Paul Rudd as the miniaturizing superhero. Way back when the shortlist was uncovered, I said that Rudd just feels more like a Marvel hero than JGL. He’s was the obvious choice. So I can’t imagine that Joseph Gordon-Levitt being busy with other things (which I won’t mention here because I refuse to acknowledge that it’s happening) was really the reason they went with Rudd. There really was no alternative when you look at the stable of cinematic heroes. Now, The Wrap’s report mentions this isn’t a completely done deal. They are still in negotiations. But at...
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