As breathlessly reported by Variety's Jeff Sneider via Twitter: "Ladies and gentlemen, The Master primed for limited release on Sept. 14, will expand the following weekend!" The Weinstein Co. will release early in prime awards season moving the pic up from an October release, rolling the Philip Seymour Hoffman-starrer wide on September 21. The bad news for Austin, Texas film geeks: The timing seems to contradict speculation that Anderson's hotly anticipated pic might debut at Fantastic Fest, which runs September 20-27, though it may still screen there post-limited release. A Venice, late Toronto, or Telluride premiere is likely. [Variety]
"Best Director is a nomination I can see for Beasts; it looks and plays like no other movie you'll see this year. But Best Actress? Remember, it's not like throwing a 13-year-old or even a talented 9-year-old up against four adults. The kid you're seeing onscreen is 6. And yeah, comparing actresses is always apples and oranges, but with the other four, whoever they end up being, we'll be able to talk about their performances and not the fact that they were bribed with candy on long days, or had their lines rewritten because long words were too hard to say, or were filmed without being aware of it in the hope that natural moments would be captured. Well, maybe the candy thing happens with adults. But to quote the star herself, 'I didn't even know about acting. That was just me.' Also: Telling a kid that young that now her job is to go be interviewed by a lot of grown-ups and have her picture taken so that she can win a prize? Ugh. Yecch. Gross." [Grantland]
Although he converted to marry his devoutly Catholic wife in 1926, Graham Greene was famously called to the faith during his time in Mexico, where he exiled himself in 1938, after an over-stimulated review of a Shirley Temple movie threatened him with extradition to the United States on libel charges. It was in Mexico that Greene conceived the first novel in his “Catholic trilogy,” The Power and the Glory, about a priest on the run during the Cristero War.
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When one reporter caught up with Michelle Rodriguez at Cannes, the Fast & Furious star waxed ecstatic about Lee Daniels' Southern potboiler The Paperboy — but she's not holding out hopes for a Nicole Kidman Oscar nod. And she's definitely not worried about making controversial statements explaining why. "I fucking loved it," she told Vulture. "One of my friends said, 'She’s going to get nominated for an Oscar for that.' I was like, 'Nah, man. She’s not black!' I laugh, but it’s also very sad. It makes me want to cry. But I really believe. You have to be trashy and black to get nominated. You can’t just be trashy." [Vulture]
Happens to the best of us: "'At the beginning people [say], "You’re going to be going to the Oscars," and you’re like, "Whatever, doesn’t matter, don’t think so." But after a while it does penetrate. After a while you’re like, "Anyway, so I’m going to the Oscars…"' He laughs. 'And you start to believe it. And I did. I thought I was going. And then I found out I wasn’t and I was upset. I was very upset by it. The first reaction was "What the fuck…?"' He sounds frustrated that he had let himself get sucked in. 'It’s a vanity thing. It does become important to you. And it shouldn’t.' On reflection, he decided that he had learned something about misplaced priorities. 'A good little lesson.'" [GQ]
Also in Wednesday afternoon's Biz Break: A Taken star takes on another thriller in L.A., Logan Marshall Green gets set to play Tennessee Williams, and Matthew McConaughey and Cuba Gooding, Jr. take a look at White House historical drama.
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Every year, studios, exhibitors and press gather in Vegas for the annual hype harvest that is CinemaCon (née ShoWest), glimpsing first looks, clips and other previews of hotly anticipated movies to come. Surprises invariably appear, for better or worse, and conversations naturally ensue. Fine. What is not fine — at all — is grounding an Oscar frenzy in 10 minutes of footage from an unfinished film with a release date eight months away.
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Are the Central Park Five the next West Memphis Three? The teenagers wrongfully convicted in the vicious 1989 rape and beating of jogger Tricia Meili — and only released after the actual attacker came forward in 2002 — will be showcased in a forthcoming Ken Burns documentary entitled, appropriately enough, The Central Park Five. And while the film was funded in part by Burns's longtime patrons at PBS, the two-time Oscar nominee and four-time Emmy winner (who co-directed the project with his daughter Sarah Burns and son-in-law David McMahon) is taking the film to Cannes next month with the hope of finding a theatrical distributor: "We want to do it [theatrically] because the running time makes it manageable, and there's something urgent about it," he told TV Guide this week. This sounds... familiar?
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Having had the chance to work with one of his heroes, Paul Newman (in 1989’s Fat Man and Little Boy), John Cusack turned to a Newman classic for a round of Movieline’s My Favorite Scene. “There’s a scene of Paul Newman in The Verdict that I would use as the best example of economy and what a close-up is supposed to mean,” Cusack explained during our chat for The Raven. “It’s the example where the film does what no other art form can do – a book can’t do it, and theater can’t do it, it’s only for film, and it’s the best example of it.” Pay attention, kids – Professor Cusack’s Film Language 101 is in session.
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ActionFest, the annual all-action-movie film festival in Asheville, N.C., honored stunt coordinator Jack Gill this weekend with its Man of Action Award. Gill used the platform to discuss his ongoing campaign to add an Oscar category for stunt coordinators, explaining to a panel audience why it’s taken 21 years — and how he’s talking to the voting Academy members of a special committee, one by one — to convince them that stunt professionals are artists just like other film technicians honored on Hollywood's biggest night.
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While no one is in any rush to revisit the most recent Oscar season, I'd be remiss not to point you back to our virtual roundtable of nominees for Best Foreign Language Feature — specifically, Canadian filmmaker Philippe Falardeau, whose classroom drama Monsieur Lazhar makes its way into limited release this weekend. He's pretty awesome, having brought a lot of the most poignant and intriguing points of view of any of the generous nominees who spent their Oscar week with Movieline.
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It took a little while to get out, but this young man's lightning-round riff on all 75 Best Supporting Actress Oscar-winners is the textbook definition of better late than never. Guess who: "I'm only in this movie for four minutes and you gave me an Oscar!"
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You might have noticed a glaring omission in this morning's Weekend Receipts, but probably not: Even I couldn't be bothered to remember that an Eddie Murphy movie not only opened on Friday (to catastrophically bad reviews; the Rotten Tomatoes "fresh" rating remains at a super-rare 0%) but also concluded the weekend with a brutal $6.25 million gross &mdash making for a sixth-place finish and a $3,360-per-screen average. This would make A Thousand Words the third straight Murphy-led film to open under $7 million — quite the opposite from last fall's reasonably successful ensemble effort Tower Heist and his voice work in the blockbuster Shrek franchise. Factor in his Oscars-hosting debacle, and you kind of have to ask yourself: Is this it for Eddie?
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This is pretty much perfect: "since i am blamed whenever people don’t like it, but never praised when they do, and since most critics forget that they liked or hated something two years ago and cite it as a strength or weakness two years later, i’ve come to be philosophical about the show. if people don’t like the comic who hosts, they hate the show. if no comic hosts, they hate the show and demand that a comic be summoned. when he’s edgier, like chris rock, we get slammed. when he’s bland, like ellen, we get slammed. but a few things are clear. this is the oscars. they still mean something after 83 years, at least in the industry. unlike the mtv awards, their audience is not exclusively 9-18 year olds. unlike the golden globes, the voters are people who actually make movies, not pretend to be journalists. some things are simply inappropriate. it’s a dance every year to figure out what those are. every single line on the oscar show is negotiated. unless you’ve been there, you have no idea how it is put together. it’s like nothing else on earth. i’m writing a book about it, but i have to throw in my sexual escapades to make sure it sells." [Filmdrunk]
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I have no idea how this concept eluded me for two years, but there it is: The 3rd annual 20/20 Awards were announced recently, honoring the best films of 1991 after two decades worth of distance and hindsight. Great idea — even though the event turned out just about as anticlimactically as this year's real thing. That's what happens when Oscar apparently gets it right.
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