George tips us to the preview for 2081, which he thinks has a good shot at being nominated for Best Live Action Short.

Based on the short story Harrison Bergeron by celebrated author Kurt Vonnegut, 2081 depicts a dystopian future in which, thanks to the 212th Amendment to the Constitution and the unceasing vigilance of the United States Handicapper General, everyone is finally equal… The strong wear weights, the beautiful wear masks and the intelligent wear earpieces that fire off loud noises to keep them from taking unfair advantage of their brains. It is a poetic tale of triumph and tragedy about a broken family, a brutal government, and an act of defiance that changes everything.

It’s nice to see a numerical title this year that doesn’t involve 9’s.
(Oh wait, 9×9=81.)

From Studio Daily, an interview with frequent Michael Mann collaborator and Public Enemies cinematographer, Dante Spinotti. This can serve as a launchpad for your own feelings about the HD lensing, and your reactions to the film in general.

Dante Spinotti: …we looked at the potential that the digital camera gave us. First, you see what you’re doing right away. Artists who write or paint, all these people see what they do. Even if you write music, you can listen to it and make adjustments. You have time to think. Not so in making a movie. The final product is based in the fundamental decisions you make in the last two minutes before you roll the camera. With traditional photochemical film, you could say it’ll look like this or that. But it’s not like seeing exactly what you’re photographing. So that’s one major objective.

Also, the way the digital camera sees in the shadows is great, especially in a case like Public Enemies where you’re aiming for a very strong realism. That means you can light in a way that the audience is participating in an event as opposed to looking at something that’s constructed and lit so the film has a look. It’s a very different approach. This is also because the camera can be on the shoulder of the operator, so the operator is like a person looking at what’s happening. Because of the elasticity you have in lighting, especially in the darkness, you don’t need to use the kind of a lighting that depends on spotlights and traditional Hollywood lights. You can work with existing lights and adjust them…

Once you make tests and decide which camera you’re going to use, you don’t look back. You make the camera be a part of the movie. I think Public Enemies worked out in an interesting way. Even the aspect of doing a period film with modern technology was interesting.

Several readers have already remarked on the documentary intimacy of the cinematography. The high-def flexibility gives the film an urgent sense of tension. Far from looking too modern to me, at times the low-light night scenes leeched the color just enough to create a pastel grayscale palette approximating delicately tinted black-and-white. A familiar visual language being spoken in the tones of an offbeat dialect. The depth of field and surreal clarity were only part of the sensation. There’s a fluid freedom to the camerawork that feels like hand-to-handheld combat, an immersive headlong dive right inside the action.

Dashing from stage to stage, from the Tonys to the Emmys, Neil Patrick Harris has a cummerbund busier than Hugh Jackman’s. EW all but confirms this morning’s Variety rumor.

Multiple sources are now confirming that the legen…dary How I Met Your Mother cad has formally signed on to emcee the 61st annual ceremony, which airs Sept. 20 on CBS. An official announcement is expected early next week.

Harris, meanwhile, is coming off of a rapturously received Tony hosting stint. He’s also one of CBS’ biggest stars, so the cross-promotional possibilities with HIMYM (which kicks off its new season the night after the Emmys) are endless.

Thanks to limeymcfrog for tipping us to Roger Ebert’s 4-star review for Tilda Swinton in Julia, a movie that had completely slipped past our radar.

Tilda Swinton is fearless. She’ll take on any role without her ego, paycheck, vanity or career path playing a part. All that matters, apparently, is whether the movie interests her, and whether she thinks she can do something interesting with the role. She almost always can. She hasn’t often been more fascinating than in “Julia,” a nerve-wracking thriller with a twisty plot and startling realism.

We have not seen this Tilda before — but then, we haven’t seen most of the Tildas before. This one is an alcoholic slut who lacks what we are pleased to call normal feminine emotions. She’s just been fired from another job. Her pattern is to get sloppy drunk every night and drag a strange man to bed. She needs money. Her neighbor Elena (Kate del Castillo) comes to her with an offer. Her young son is now living with his millionaire grandfather, who won’t allow her to see him. She needs somebody to help her kidnap the child.

The outline of the plot reminds me of another eponymous heroin who was tough as nails, Gloria, which should have won an Oscar for Gena Rowlands.

“Julia” should have a big ad campaign and be making a lot of noise, stirring up word-of-mouth. It’s being treated as an art film. It’s good enough to be an art film, but don’t let anyone pigeonhole it for you. It’s one doozy of a great thriller. And the acting here is as good as it gets — not just from Swinton, but from Saul Rubinek as her one remaining friend, and by Bruno Bichir as Diego, who she meets in Tijuana. You want to be careful who you meet in Tijuana.

Swinton here is amazing. She goes for broke and wins big time.

This sounds fantastic. The sort of leading role Tilda Swinton deserves but seldom finds. We’ll want to keep our eyes on this one. Directed by Erick Zonca, who gave us The Daydreams of Angels in 1998. Click to Ebert’s site at the Sun-Times for more of his enthusiasm, but be warned that the review is more spoilery than I prefer. Not so much by revealing specific plot details, but by describing elements of the screenplay structure that would be more fun to discover on the screen.

Another strong contender for Best Actress, Julia has been in limited release since May. As Ebert says, Magnolia Pictures needs to be pushing this harder. Yes, it’s got an arty French pedigree — but so does Taken. Poster after the cut.

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Capping off Gay Pride Month, Stephen Holt attends the Provincetown International Film Festival, and shares his impressions.
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John Hurt as Quentin Crisp, An Englishman in New York

“CHAMPAGNE AND PEANUTS”
Provincetown Film Festival 2009 Wrap-Up by Stephen Holt

I found my first trip to the Provincetown International Film Festival, and also my first trip to Provincetown, Mass. itself, an unparalled delight. I felt like I had died and gone to Gay Heaven. And since writer/director Woody Allen quite plainly proclaims in his new film “Whatever Works”, the Festival Opener, that “God is Gay,” well, that made everything make perfect sense.

It sometimes is impossible to separate the atmosphere of the city or town where a film festival is taking place from the film festival itself, and in intoxicating Provincetown, that is certainly the case. The GLBT community is NOT a minority in this tiny, historic seaport resort town that is on the absolute northern-most tip of Cape Cod. It is a legendary artists’ mecca. A tiny peninsula surrounded on three sides by water, it is the place where the Pilgrims actually landed and where American Theatre can essentially be said to have been born in the Provincetown Playhouse, where Eugene O’Neill’s first plays were performed, often with the ocean itself serving as its’ striking backdrop.

It is where playwright Tennessee Williams famously auditioned Marlon Brando for “A Streetcar Named Desire,” and where he is said to have written most of it. And his gay ghost certainly seems to be haunting the town as he is mentioned, with pride, in nearly every conversation. Provincetown, interestingly, pre-dates Fire Island.

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The tributes for Karl Malden are pouring in.  Thanks to readers Alexander and Erik for sending in the news.  It’s kind of old news by now but it’s never too late to honor a great man.

Nominated twice, once for the above, and won for A Streetcar Named Desire.

Gregory Ellwood over at Hitfix has posted the teaser poster for Precious and wrote the following:

If there is any movie I can’t wait to see again this year it’s “Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sappire.” The winner of this year’s Sundance Film Festival’s grand jury and audience award, “Precious” is a powerful dramatic film that has silenced every skeptic I know who has seen it.

Although anxious to see it, this is definitely a film that requires emotional preparation.

Clocking in with a 91% Metacritic rating, with a film that will surely become one of the best of the year, it is time to start taking Ms. Bigelow, and her moody, brilliant war film, seriously.  We were already taking it seriously last year when it was pulled from the roster.  Many films wouldn’t be able to withstand that bump in its release date; this one does.  It might just turn out that Bigelow stands a chance at not just being nominated for director, but actually winning.  It’s too soon to tell, of course, so this is all just gunsmoke in a sandstorm but hey, what else is there to do.

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The LA Times’ last man standing, Kenneth Turan gives major props to Michael Mann’s Public Enemies, but particularly in the way it looks:

Simultaneously an art film and a crime film, Mann’s latest work (he shares screenplay credit with Ronan Bennett and Ann Biderman) may not give you a ton to hang on to emotionally, but the beauty and skill of the filmmaking keep you tightly in its grasp.

Manohla Dargis, though, calls it pure cinematic art:

Michael Mann’s “Public Enemies” is a grave and beautiful work of art. Shot in high-definition digital by a filmmaker who’s helping change the way movies look, it revisits with meticulous detail and convulsions of violence a short, frantic period in the life and bank-robbing times of John Dillinger, an Indiana farm boy turned Depression outlaw, played by a low-voltage Johnny Depp. Much of what makes the movie pleasurable is the vigor with which it restages our familiar romance with period criminals, a perennial affair. But what also makes it more than the sum of its spectacular shootouts is the ambivalence about this romance that seeps into the filmmaking, steadily darkening the skies and draining the story of easy thrills.

I’m still on the fence as to whether it’s a Best Pic contender or not.  But I figure with ten slots, it has a much better chance than it would have otherwise.

Some chippies are a pushover for any hard-boiled hood. But this swanky dame from Salon is on the square:

The glamour quotient in “Public Enemies” is high, and in a landscape of contemporary movies in which “sophistication” is seemingly a dirty word, it’s a relief to see actors in period dress rather than outlandish Willy Wonka get-ups and superhero costumes.

Even the movie’s violence has a grown-up gloss: Mann doesn’t necessarily glorify Dillinger’s violence, but he is attuned to all the ways in which, in the movies, cruel acts can also have a brutal elegance. When Dillinger and his cohorts storm into any of the various banks they rob during their big spree, Mann and Dante Spinotti (who frequently works with Mann) shoot these glorious, fragile institutions with a suitable degree of respect: With their polished oak railings and delicately veined marble pillars, they’re like temples under assault…

Depp is as close to being a ’30s-style movie star as we’ve got these days, and his Dillinger offers a peculiar mix of star quality laced with pathos: Even as he flashes that instant charmer of a smile, there’s also something gaunt and haunted about him, as if he were living his life in reverse, as if he already knows how it’s all going to end.

The rest of the review isn’t a rave by any measure, but it racks up a solid 80 on metacritic. I’m just happy Ms. Zacharek didn’t ventilate anybody’s fedora.

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