The Golden Satellite Nominees come out earlier than any other awards group. This makes their choices mostly off where Oscar is concerned. A robust Oscar contender will often make the cut, though, and will be the only common link between these and every other award on down the road to Oscar. They have so many films represented and can sometimes be a great indicator of the...
Monthly Archives: November 2009
Anne Thompson’s plug for Oscar Talk: In Contention‚Äòs Kris Tapley and I have actually seen most of the Oscar movies now, and even though we‚Äôre not supposed to write about all of them yet, we do talk about the sexy musical Nine, Clint Eastwood‚Äôs Invictus and the mixed reaction to Peter Jackson‚Äòs The Lovely Bones. We also get into the rising...
Thanks to BSC Review for pointing out this ten minute Avatar featurette. Here is why I’m showing up for Avatar. It is because, most of the time, Jim Cameron delivers. He delivers on action for a certainty. But he also delivers on story, whether it has its moments of cornball dialogue or not (you can count on it). Avatar will have to be a good story to work. The...
Back in the early days of Oscar watching, the trades and the long lead film critics got to see movies early. There wasn’t a thumbs up, thumbs down for Oscar mentality back then. They weren’t looking at horses readying themselves for a race and making a judgment on whether the horse could go the distance or not. Now, so many people are given the opportunity...
I can’t recall the last time David Letterman was so enthusiastic about a movie as he seemed to be about Brothers on Wednesday night’s show. I’ll have to watch this clip again to pull his exact quotes, but I think he says he enjoyed it as much as any other other film in the past 10 years. The kind of movie that studios have forgotten how to make, he...
The usually curmudgeonly Todd McCarthy has been won over by Invictus: Once again in his extraordinary late-career run, Eastwood surprises with his choice of subject matter, here joining a project Freeman had long hoped to realize. In fact, the filmmaker has frequently dealt with racial issues in a conspicuously even-handed manner, most notably in “Bird,” and...