Quentin Tarantino Names "Midnight in Paris" 2011's Best Film

Quentin Tarantino is the celebrated writer/director of such films as Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction (for which he won a best screenplay Oscar), and Inglourious Basterds (which earned him two Oscar nominations).  He is also quite vocal when it comes to the movies that he likes.  QT is a fan.  This list made the rounds on the Net last week:

Quentin Tarantino’s Official Top 11 of 2011:
1. Midnight In Paris
2. Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes
3. Moneyball
4. The Skin I Live In
5. X-Men: First Class
6. Young Adult
7. Attack The Block
8. Red State
9. Warrior
10. The Artist / Our Idiot Brother (tie)
11. The Three Musketeers

Others considered in no particular order:
50/50
Beginners
Hugo
The Iron Lady
Carnage
Green Hornet
Green Lantern
Captain America
The Descendants
My Week With Marilyn
Fast Five
The Tree Of Life
The Hangover Part II
Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol
The Beaver
Contagion
The Sitter
War Horse

Nice Try Award:
Drive
Hanna
Drive Angry
Real Steel

Best Director:
Pedro Almodovar
Bennett Miller
Woody Allen
Jason Reitman
Michel Hazanavicius

Best Original Screenplay:
Midnight In Paris
Young Adult
Red State
Attack The Block
Our Idiot Brother
Beginners

Best Adapted Screenplay:
Moneyball
The Skin I live In
Carnage
Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes
Hugo
X-Men: First Class

Worst Films:
Sucker Punch
Potiche (Trophy Wife)
Miral
Insidious
Rampart
Straw Dogs
Paranormal Activity 3
Meek’s Cutoff

69th Golden Globe Award Winners - Complete List

The 69th Golden Globes Awards were given out by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association on Sunday, Jan. 15th 2012 in a ceremony broadcast live on NBC.

2012 Golden Globe Awards Winners (For the year ended December 31, 2011):

FILM

BEST DRAMA PICTURE
"The Descendants"

BEST COMEDY/MUSICAL PICTURE
"The Artist"

BEST DIRECTOR
Martin Scorsese, "Hugo"

BEST DRAMA ACTOR
George Clooney, "The Descendants"

BEST DRAMA ACTRESS
Meryl Streep, "The Iron Lady"

BEST COMEDY/MUSICAL ACTOR
Jean Dujardin, "The Artist"

BEST COMEDY/MUSICAL ACTRESS
Michelle Williams, "My Week with Marilyn"

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Chrisopher Plummer, "Beginners"

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Octavia Spencer, "The Help"

BEST SCREENPLAY
Woody Allen, "Midnight in Paris"

BEST ANIMATED PICTURE
"The Adventures of Tintin"

BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE PICTURE
"A Separation"

BEST SCORE
Ludovic Bource, "The Artist"

BEST SONG
"Masterpiece" ("W.E.")
Music and Lyrics by Madonna, Julie Frost, Jim Harry

TELEVISION

BEST DRAMA SERIES
"Homeland"

BEST DRAMA ACTOR
Kelsey Grammer, "Boss"

BEST DRAMA ACTRESS
Claire Danes, "Homeland

BEST COMEDY SERIES
"Modern Family"

BEST COMEDY ACTOR
Matt LeBlanc, "Episodes"

BEST COMEDY ACTRESS
Laura Dern, "Enlightened"

BEST MOVIE/MINISERIES
"Downton Abbey"

BEST MOVIE/MINI ACTRESS
Kate Winslet, "Mildred Pierce"

BEST MOVIE/MINI ACTOR
Idris Elba, "Luther"

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Peter Dinklage, "Game of Thrones"

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Jessica Lange, "American Horror Story"

Cecil B. DeMille Award: Morgan Freeman

Review: I Could Watch "The Fog" Forever (Happy B'day, John Carpenter)

TRASH IN MY EYE No. 136 (of 2004) by Leroy Douresseaux

John Carpenter’s The Fog (1980)
Running time: 89 minutes (1 hour, 29 minutes)
MPAA – R
COMPOSER/DIRECTOR: John Carpenter
WRITERS: Debra Hill and John Carpenter
PRODUCER: Debra Hill
CINEMATOGRAPHER: Dean Cundey (D.o.P.)
EDITORS: Charles Bornstein and Tommy Lee Wallace

HORROR/THRILLER

Starring: Adrienne Barbeau, Jamie Lee Curtis, Janet Leigh, John Houseman, Tom Atkins, James Canning, Charles Cyphers, Nancy Kyes, and Darrow Igus

The Fog is a 1980 horror film from director John Carpenter. A ghostly revenge tale, The Fog takes place in town about to be besieged by a strange, glowing fog during its centennial celebration. This film was also remade in 2005.

The small seacoast town of Antonio Bay is celebrating its Centenary, but it doesn’t know that doom is approaching in the form of a strange fog that hides the forms of long-dead denizens of the sea. One hundred years prior, six of the town’s founding fathers reneged on a bargain with a ship’s captain; now, the captain has returned from the deep with his crew to avenge themselves on the descendants. A local disc jockey (Adrienne Barbeau), a sexy drifter (Jamie Lee Curtis), and a fisherman (Tom Atkins) are all that stand between Antonio Bay and ghostly doom.

John Carpenter’s The Fog is a moody, little gem of a horror flick. Carpenter mixed the campfire tale and pulp nonsense with his own unique brand of imaginative madness and created an enduring scary movie. Although the characters are flat and the SFX suspect, the overall package in quite entertaining. I’ve seen this several times, and it always a spine-tingling tale of terror for me. The Fog is no more flawed that the standard horror film, but one glaring weakness is that the end is a bit of a letdown. Still, the film is a nice, creepy ghost story though it lacks the pyrotechnics audiences have come to expect from horror/fantasy films. But it does one thing very well. Like the best ghost stories, it keeps you guessing – wondering what was real or imagined and wondering just when, not if, the ghosts will return.

7 of 10
B+

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"The Fog" Remake Lost in a Fog

TRASH IN MY EYE No. 155 (of 2005) by Leroy Douresseaux


The Fog (2005)
Running time: 100 minutes (1 hour, 40 minutes)
MPAA – PG-13 for violence, disturbing images, and brief sexuality
DIRECTOR: Rupert Wainwright
WRITER: Cooper Layne (based upon the 1980 screenplay by John Carpenter and Debra Hill)
PRODUCERS: David Foster, John Carpenter, and Debra Hill
CINEMATOGRAPHERS: Nathan Hope with Ian Seabrook (underwater)
EDITOR: Dennis Virkler

HORROR/THRILLER/MYSTERY with elements of fantasy

Starring: Tom Welling, Maggie Grace, Selma Blair, DeRay Davis, Kenneth Welsh, Adrian Hough, Sara Botsford, Cole Heppell, Mary Black, Jonathon Young, R. Nelson Brown, and Rade Sherbedgia

In the new horror flick, The Fog, Antonio Bay, a small community on Antonio Island, is about to celebrate the dedication of a monument to its four founding fathers. However, a thick fog, with seemingly mystical powers, engulfs the seaside town bringing with it a curse tied to the founding of Antonio Bay. Nick Castle (Tom Welling, Clark Kent of “Smallville”) and his girlfriend, Elizabeth Williams (Maggie Grace), must solve the mystery of the fog and the malevolent, vengeful spirits it hides if they are going to save Antonio Bay.

Apparently, famed horror movie director John Carpenter (Halloween, Ghosts of Mars) currently struggles to get financing in order to make new films. The irony of this is that 2005 has seen the release of two remakes of earlier films. In January, audiences got an interesting re-imagining of Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13, and now two weeks before Halloween, we get a remake of Carpenter’s well-regarded 1980 film, The Fog. This new film has a bigger budget and something else that the original film didn’t have, computer generated special effects. The result is an entertaining ghost story/thriller that is the fast food equivalent of a horror movie – a favorable respite one is just as likely to forget as to remember.

The film has something absolutely necessary for even a half-decent horror flick, creepy atmosphere, and on a few occasions in the film, that creepy atmosphere can be described by using phrases like “heart pounding” and “spine-tingling.” The film’s problems are the directing, script, and cast. The Fog drags and lists like director Rupert Wainwright’s previous effort at making a mediocre horror film, Stigmata (1999). One has to wonder what Wainwright did to get the assignment to direct this film. The only thing that he has directed since Stigmata is a failed TV series, “Wolf Lake,” in 2001. His claim to fame before Stigmata was directing seminal rap group N.W.A.’s video for “Straight Outta Compton” and directing videos for MC Hammer. You don’t need a cooking school graduate to make Big Mac’s, so the producers or the studio might as well have hired a film school student and given him class credit to make the same run-of-the-mill scary movie that Wainwright did.

The script is a re-imagining if one considers arbitrarily making changes to the source material as a sign of imagination; in fact, most of what is changed from the original film seems to have been done for the sake of change or because it, when combined with CGI, would make a cool scene, although cool doesn’t equal logical here. The characters are underdeveloped and treated in such an offhanded way that they don’t even make sympathetic victims. There is so little to so many of the characters that literally every one except maybe three seems like extras.

The cast leaves something to be desired. Tom Welling is sort of a cute beau-hunk, but his acting talent only goes as far as the material. He doesn’t have the chops to rise above the watery tale Cooper Layne wrote for this film. Maggie Grace is good at showing anxiety or pouting on cue when another character is so unfair to hers; that’s pretty much what she does on the hit TV show, “Lost,” and it serves her well here. DeRay Davis’ Spooner is a token; I don’t think the studio and filmmakers fooled the audience in that regard. Spooner has one really great line near the end of the film, and gets a few chuckles early in the flick. Lately, horror movies have become just like The WB TV network – all white, as in television shows full of pretty young white actors.

The Fog 2005 will make a fine cheesy horror rental. Unlike 2005’s Boogeyman, The Fog 2005 doesn’t totally screw up the excellent frightful atmosphere it establishes in the first act with a dreadful second and third act. Even Wainwright, Layne, and a weak cast can’t take the bite out of a ghost story that mixes in the mysteries of the deep seas. Try as they might, incompetence and mediocrity can’t outright destroy one of horror master John Carpenter’s better blueprints.

5 of 10
C+

Saturday, October 15, 2005

Seven Films Battle for 3 "Best Makeup" Oscar Nominations

7 Features on Oscar's Makeup Palette

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences today announced that seven films remain in competition in the Makeup category for the 84th Academy Awards®.

The films are listed below in alphabetical order:

"Albert Nobbs"

"Anonymous"

"The Artist"

"Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life"

"Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2"

"Hugo"

"The Iron Lady"

On Saturday, January 21, all members of the Academy's Makeup Branch will be invited to view 10-minute excerpts from each of the seven shortlisted films. Following the screenings, members will vote to nominate three films for final Oscar consideration.

The 84th Academy Awards nominations will be announced live on Tuesday, January 24, at 5:30 a.m. PT in the Academy's Samuel Goldwyn Theater.

Academy Awards for outstanding film achievements of 2011 will be presented on Sunday, February 26, 2012, at the Kodak Theatre at Hollywood & Highland Center®, and televised live by the ABC Television Network. The Oscar presentation also will be televised live in more than 225 countries worldwide.

Review: Mario Van Peeples' "Panther" Burns Hot (Happy B'day, Mario Van Peeples)

TRASH IN MY EYE No. 116 (of 2004) by Leroy Douresseaux

Panther (1995)
Running time: 123 minutes (2 hours, 3 minutes)
MPAA – R for strong violence and language
DIRECTOR: Mario Van Peebles
WRITER: Melvin Van Peebles (based upon his novel)
PRODUCERS: Preston L. Holmes, Mario Van Peebles, and Melvin Van Peebles
CINEMATOGRAPHER: Edward J. Pei
EDITORS: Kevin Lindstrom and Earl Watson
COMPOSER: Stanley Clarke

DRAMA/WESTERN

Starring: Kadeem Harrdison, Bokeem Woodbine, Joe Don Baker, Courtney B. Vance, Tyrin Turner, Marcus Chong, Anthony Griffith, Bobby Brown, Angela Bassett, Nefertiti, James Russo, Jenifer Lewis, Richard A. Dysart, M. Emmet Walsh, Anthony Johnson, Wesley Jonathan, and Chris Rock

Panther, the film project of father/son filmmakers Melvin (dad) and Mario (son) Van Peebles, is not biopic about the Black Panthers (or The Black Panthers for Self Defense), so much as it, like Oliver Stone’s JFK, myth making, and myths are often based upon real people and actual events. As a side note, Robert De Niro is one of this film’s producers, but he did not receive screen credit.

The Van Peebles tell the story from the point of view of a fictional character named Judge (Kadeem Harrdison). A Vietnam vet attending college in Oakland in 1967, he catches the attention of a slowly growing organization of black men in his neighborhood, The Black Panthers for Self-Defense, who are tired of marching and praying to get the white power structure’s attention to the needs of the black community. They want action, and they want guns to defend themselves. With coaxing from Panther co-leader, Huey Newton (Marcus Chong), Judge joins the group in time to watch it rise and earn the ire of the police and the FBI and fall as cheap drugs pour into Judge’s neighborhood.

Panther is a hodge-podge epic that is part historical drama, part propaganda, part myth, and a little bit documentary. At the time of the film’s release, a lot of critics and “people who were there” were critical of the film’s inaccuracies. But Panther isn’t history so much as it really is myth making. It’s all a matter of perspective, and the filmmakers take a time and a group of people whom they admire and making a rousing historical mini-epic out of that. It’s almost like a comic book in which the Panthers are super heroes fighting super evil cops and corrupt government officials, all of whom are manipulated by malevolent, shadowy figures in Washington D.C.

Many of the filmmaking aspects of the film are quite good or at least respectable, but none of that matters. The enjoyment of Panther comes from the total package, and how you feel about it. The Panthers were and are so controversial; how you feel about them and how you feel about their portrayal in the film will decide how you feel about and what you think of the film. I like it. I like the action movie/comic book heroes aspect of the film. It’s great to watch young black men fight the deliciously evil pigs of this film.

7 of 10
A-

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"Moneyball" is Money

TRASH IN MY EYE No. 2 (of 2012) by Leroy Douresseaux


Moneyball (2011)
Running time: 133 minutes (2 hours, 13 minutes)
MPAA – PG-13 for some strong language
DIRECTOR: Bennett Miller
WRITERS: Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin; from a story by Stan Chervin (based upon Michael Lewis’s book "Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game")
PRODUCERS: Michael De Luca, Rachael Horovitz, and Brad Pitt
CINEMATOGRAPHER: Wally Pfister (D.o.P.)
EDITOR: Christopher Tellefsen
COMPOSER: Mychael Danna

DRAMA/SPORTS/BIOPIC

Starring: Brad Pitt, Jonah Hill, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Robin Wright, Chris Pratt, Stephen Bishop, Brent Jennings, Ken Medlock, Nick Searcy, Glenn Morshower, Reed Thompson, and Kerris Dorsey

Moneyball is a 2011 sports drama and biographical film starring Brad Pitt. The film is a fictionalized version of events in the 2002 season of the Major League Baseball team, the Oakland Athletics (A’s). Moneyball follows the real-life A’s general manager (GM), Billy Beane, as he uses computer-generated analysis to field (or put together) a competitive and winning baseball team. The Moneyball movie is based on Michael Lewis’ 2003 book of the same name, and Oscar-winner Scott Rudin is also one of the film’s executive producers.

Oakland Athletics’ general manager Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) is upset that his team lost to the New York Yankees during the 2001 playoffs. The end of the 2001 season also means that several of the A’s star players are leaving to sign with other teams for much more money than the A’s are willing to or have the ability to pay. As GM, Beane is constrained by the lowest payroll in baseball, so he needs to find another competitive advantage. Beane meets Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), a young Yale economics graduate with radical ideas about how to assess a baseball player’s value and about how to put a team together. But this new approach is controversial, and as the A’s lose, the pressure mounts on Beane.

Acclaimed film and television writer, Aaron Sorkin wrote the third version of Moneyball’s screenplay. Sorkin also wrote The Social Network, for which he won an Academy Award. Like The Social Network, Moneyball is a film about someone who introduces something radical and controversial to an institution, in this case baseball, which everyone insists cannot be changed. Another thing Moneyball has in common with The Social Network is that Moneyball is also about a guy who goes out and makes something and does it as well as or better than other men that have many more resources than he has.

Director Bennett Miller (Capote) makes this story work as a film by focusing on Beane, and to a lesser extent Brand. Millers puts Beane’s struggles and the A’s ups and downs side by side. Separately, Beane and the A’s are compelling, but together, their story is exhilarating.

As Billy Beane, Brad Pitt gives one his more unusual performances. To sell this story, Pitt, as the lead character, does not rely on his star power or handsome looks. Indeed, whenever his “muscle-ly” arms make an appearance, they seem out of place. Pitt’s performance is subtle, quiet, and graceful. When Pitt needs to be intense, he is intense, so much so that I could feel it coming off the screen; however, Pitt delivers this intensity in an entirely non-intense way. I believed that Pitt was Billy Beane.

Of all the biographical sports dramas I’ve seen, Moneyball is like no other. This is a baseball movie for baseball people, but this is also a good movie for good movie people.

8 of 10
A

Friday, January 13, 2012