Here's to the Movie's That Missed
May 31st 2007 05:22
Hollywood's award season is violently overpopulated! Check out such arty-popcorn movies as last years Dreamgirls on the Internet Movie Database and you'll find nothing short of an embarassment of riches in terms of award wins and nominations.
From the Oscars to the MTV Movie Awards, from the Golden Globes to the infamous Razzies, the Independent Spirit Awards to the eight million awards handed out by various Guild's and even the triumphant if contraversial Image Awards (celebrating African-American performances in the entertainment industry in lieu of the Oscars seeming incapacity to do so) there is an award ceremony in Hollywood to suit every taste and enough awards to get around to everyone...
You'd think wouldn't you?
Well apparantly not. Every year a list of films just doesn't seem to make it as far as the award ceremonies. The reasons can vary from contraversial subject matter to lack of exposure to prejudice against cast due to age, race or lack of gravitas due to the lead's past service on a soap opera.
2006 was by no means an exception, and so here's a brief pause from the goss to remember those films that missed out on the gold...
FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION
This movie was a maverick! The presence of writer/director Christopher Guest is enough to display that. With a ensemble cast of undeniable (if outsider) talent it generated a great deal of Early Oscar Buzz and then fizzled out when people actually saw it and realised that it was just plain god-awful!
The film imitates reality. A low-budget B-movie with a cast of young emergent talent and veteran character actors receives some online buzz and slowly careens off into the ridiculous.
With brilliant send-ups of the Hollywood film making process and the awards season hype - including a brilliant rip-off of Entertainment Tonight - it starts off with a semblance of co-hesion and realism and then like its story just descends into the farcical and absurd while still expecting the audience to relate to the action on screen.
Still it did have its moments and managed to display two scene-stealing performances by veteran actress Catherine O'Hara - she playerd Macauly Culkin's mother in the first two Home Alone movies - and Parker Posey - lately of Superman Returns.
Both actresses were virtually required to play themselves - a la Bette Davis in All About Eve - and they do so with polish, comic timing that defies belief and unquestionable finesse. A better script and a less overtly eccentric movie and they may just have managed to grab some attention as well as some buzz. Good luck in the future girls!
FACTORY GIRL
Now this was the movie that was supposed to convince the world that Sienna Miller - lately of the "I screwed Jude Law" club - could act. Too bad nobody saw it because she really CAN act! And I'm not speaking figuratively. This is a seriously brilliant film that died on the buzzline because everyone was so sick of Miller's relationship antics, to say nothing of derogatory comments she made while on the set about... well you name it! I've got one word for you Sienna: PUBLICIST! Miller plays 60's/70's superstar-socialite Edie Sedgwick in a performance of rare quality and depth. The story is well measured, well scripted and well constructed. It's a period piece and a special interest, almost documentary effort, but that does not reduce it's quality by any means.
Co-star, Australian super-hottie Guy Pearce likewise suffered this films early demise. Thanks to his co-stars bad rep his brilliant portrayal of Andy Warhol was largely overlooked by the major Hollywood awards. Sedgwick specialists unanimously decried this movie as "inneccurate". Many claimed it portrayed Warhol in a singularly negative light. Knowing little but the basics about Sedgwick and Warhol I have to confess I saw no such thing. All I saw was a beautiful, sometimes sad, often-times funny but always relevant and inspiring story. Hopefully a DVD release will soon follow and more people will get a chance to see just what has been so largely and unfortunately missed.
HOLLYWOODLAND
Hollywoodland is a film that screamed out Oscar! With a cast led by Adrien Brody and backed by perpetual Hollywood sweetheart Dianne Lane along with veteran Bob Hoskins it seems like a cast made in heaven. More importantly still it's a film ABOUT Hollywood - and Hollywood loves films about itself! Oscar Oscar Oscar!!!
Did I mention it co-starred Ben Affleck?
Now there's the rub. No one needs to be told that Ben Affleck's career is on the skids, including Ben Affleck himself, who submitted to accepting a supporting part no doubt because he knows better than anyone that every film he has made since Reindeer Games has fallen flatter than a pancake!
Hollywoodland is the story of an ex-cop private investigator with his own set of personal "issues" (Brody) retained to examine the circumstances surrounding the suspicious suicide of 1950's TV Superman star George Reeves (Affleck). As the story progresses the audience learns that Reeves was having a long term affair with Toni Mannix (Lane) - wife of a big-wig at MGM (Hopkins). Likewise he hated his TV-role and by the looks of it life in general.
The film twists and turns through a long and inspired list of potential murder suspects before reaching the very mundane conclusion that Reeves' death was indeed most likely suicide! You could not help but leave the cinema feeling like you'd just wasted a great deal of time - it was VERY long!
Dianne Lane stole the movie naturally. But believe it or not Ben Affleck (her screen lover) not only held his own but gave the best performance of his career and thoroughly Oscar worthy! He even leaves Adrien Brody - a far better actor - in the dust!
Affleck as Reeves was charming, dark, dangerous, ineffectual, tortured and tormented and at every turn believable. Frankly had the movie been about George Reeves rather than about his death it probably would have been a better story all round and B-Aff (as he was known in kinder days) would have been looking at Best Actor Oscar buzz rather than Best Supporting.
Eitherway, it's going to take a long time for anyone to forget Gigli and Jersey Girl. A few more performances like Hollywoodland and we'll talk turkey. But at present he has no movies planned. It seems Affleck is on hiatus and in five years time maybe we'll see him have a comeback.
INFAMOUS
Presently screening at Dendy Cinemas accross Australia, Infamous is unquestionably one of the biggest losers of the 2005/2006 (and no doubt the 2007) movie award season. This is the Truman-Capote-writes-"In-Cold -Blood" biopic that did not manage to make it to the screens fast enough.
The Phillip Seymour Hoffman Capote beat them and garnered Hoffman a Best Actor Oscar and instant and well-deserved Hollywood clout.
Now, however, critics are watching Infamous and shouting foul! Hoffman doesn't have a corner on Britisher Toby Jones' portrayal of the diminuitive Capote while the Hoffman vehicle Capote, a disorganised, flat and poorly scripted movie by comparison, doesn't have a corner on the wit, scandal and polish of Infamous, which hypothesises that Capote had a homosexual affair with convicted murderer Perry Smith (Daniel Craig no less!) while researching Smith's involvement in the murder of the Clutter Family of Kansas.
Including a line up celebrity cameo's (everyone from Sandra Bullock, to Gwyneth Platrow, to Isabella Rooselini, to Sigourney Weaver, to Hope Davis and Peter Bogdanovich) it's one helluva movie that just didn't make it out in time and is now being screened well outside Oscar season in blatant admittance of its inability to gain attention at the various Hollywood award ceremonies thanks to Hoffman and Capote's earlier efforts.
It's a dead shame sure but frankly you snooze you lose!
THE BLACK DAHLIA
This is unquestionably one of the biggest diappointments of 2006. The "Black Dahlia" murder case is one of the most infamous in the world's history of crime - and all the more photogenic because it happened in Hollywood and to an actress (Elizabeth Short) who just might have had all kinds of seedy connections to any number of big wigs. Basically it's the story of a young woman in the late 1940's who, like so many thousands, wanted to be an actress but never made it. Through fair means or foul - most probably foul - she met a horrible grizzly end and was violently murdered and then later abandoned on a roadside in L.A. where she was discovered, badly beaten, her body cut in half and her face disfigured.
This movie, starring Josh Hartnett, Scarlett Johannson, Aaron Eckhart and dual-Oscar winner Hilary Swank held everyone's attention from the minute it was announced. However, what should have been an insightful and provocative look at a despicable act of crime turned out to be a frivolous and hideously weird adaptation of an airline-novel touting its own ridiculous solution to the "Black Dahlia" murder.
Lacking in suspense, in reality, in plot, in pace and in action it does nothing but give chills in all the wrong places and emerges as something of a kooky exercise in icky-murder-meets-film-noir. In doing so it set the genre back about twenty years!
Hartnett and Swank both give excellent performances, while Johannson and Eckhart might as well not have wasted their time given the characters they were playing. All in all it was the worst film of 2006 and a horrible and undignified disappointment.
CHILDREN OF MEN
This picture did actually go on to garner some Oscar nominations. Sadly they were in the technical categories that very few people really care about. There was no Best Picture nominations, no Best Director, Best Actor, Best Supporting, Best Actress, no nothing! And frankly shame Oscar shame!
This was the best of the overlooked films of 2006 with an extraordinary cast led by Clive Owen and Julianne Moore and supported by the legendary Michael Caine. Each gives a powerhouse performances while the script and the direction ensure that this brillient vision of the future - a sterile world desperate to repopulate - is rendered on screen a brilliant action thriller and a thought provoking and extremely relevant drama.
At the very least nominations for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Supporting Actor for Michael Caine were warranted here. It is not often that a movie manages to be both box-office and an actual piece of art. When this rarity comes along it deserves more than just a mention. Go buy this on DVD you will not be disappointed!
MARIE ANTOINETTE
Sofia Coppola took a great risk becoming a director as it was clear from the start that Hollywood would be comparing her every venture to the iconic work of her father (the brain behind The Godfather movies: Francis Ford Coppola). She opened fire with The Virgin Suicides and instantly proved herself to be a dynamic and innovative talent to be reckoned with. She then followed with the instant classic Lost in Translation - for which she won a very deserved Oscar for Best Director.
Her planned third film, Marie Antoinette garnered instant attention and the awards grape vine was buzzing long before shooting even started. When Coppola cast Kirsten Dunst as the infamous French Queen it gave people pause. This was clearly going to be a film out of the ordinary.
It premiered at the Cannes film festival (in full swing again just now) and was infamously booed by French audiences! This gained the movie a great deal of press but fast killed its chances of Oscars glory. Clearly people had expected an inspirational work on the-foolish-Queen-who-indulge d-and-made-merry-and-then-rea lised-the-error-of-her-ways-w hen-it-was-too-late.
Rather Coppola delivered the story of a naive teenager suddenly handed the world on a platter and displayed what she did with it - no excuses attached.
Dunst gave a touching human performance along with a superb cast, most notably Australia's Judy Davis as the comic and icy Comtesse du Noailles. But what seemed to annoy people the most about this film was the inclusion of a soundtrack featuring 1980's pop music and remixes of classical fare. The fact that the songs applied to an age of decadence, indulgence and visual excess (Marie Antoinette personified!) seemed to pass them by somehow.
As a result of the number of people ready to despise this film it developed an unshakeable negative stigma that dogged it all the way to Hollywood where it received a single Oscar nomination/win for costume design leaving Coppola overlooked for direction and Dunst and Davis for performance.
This beautiful film is slowly being recognised by fans as a cult classic and hopefully an extra laden special edition DVD release is not far off.
Well that's it for 2006. With Sundance over in the US, Cannes going strong in France and a heap of film festivals due to air the artistic works for the year a whole new batch of buzz is well on its way. So far 2007 has been the year of the blockbuster sequel and we are yet to see a concerted line-up of talent and contraversy. Still, it's only just about to strike June... there's still time.
From the Oscars to the MTV Movie Awards, from the Golden Globes to the infamous Razzies, the Independent Spirit Awards to the eight million awards handed out by various Guild's and even the triumphant if contraversial Image Awards (celebrating African-American performances in the entertainment industry in lieu of the Oscars seeming incapacity to do so) there is an award ceremony in Hollywood to suit every taste and enough awards to get around to everyone...
You'd think wouldn't you?
Well apparantly not. Every year a list of films just doesn't seem to make it as far as the award ceremonies. The reasons can vary from contraversial subject matter to lack of exposure to prejudice against cast due to age, race or lack of gravitas due to the lead's past service on a soap opera.
2006 was by no means an exception, and so here's a brief pause from the goss to remember those films that missed out on the gold...
FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION
The chance of a lifetime for a brilliant cast, chronically abused by a story that swiftly descends into the abyss...
This movie was a maverick! The presence of writer/director Christopher Guest is enough to display that. With a ensemble cast of undeniable (if outsider) talent it generated a great deal of Early Oscar Buzz and then fizzled out when people actually saw it and realised that it was just plain god-awful!
The film imitates reality. A low-budget B-movie with a cast of young emergent talent and veteran character actors receives some online buzz and slowly careens off into the ridiculous.
With brilliant send-ups of the Hollywood film making process and the awards season hype - including a brilliant rip-off of Entertainment Tonight - it starts off with a semblance of co-hesion and realism and then like its story just descends into the farcical and absurd while still expecting the audience to relate to the action on screen.
Still it did have its moments and managed to display two scene-stealing performances by veteran actress Catherine O'Hara - she playerd Macauly Culkin's mother in the first two Home Alone movies - and Parker Posey - lately of Superman Returns.
Both actresses were virtually required to play themselves - a la Bette Davis in All About Eve - and they do so with polish, comic timing that defies belief and unquestionable finesse. A better script and a less overtly eccentric movie and they may just have managed to grab some attention as well as some buzz. Good luck in the future girls!
FACTORY GIRL
Poor Sienna...
Now this was the movie that was supposed to convince the world that Sienna Miller - lately of the "I screwed Jude Law" club - could act. Too bad nobody saw it because she really CAN act! And I'm not speaking figuratively. This is a seriously brilliant film that died on the buzzline because everyone was so sick of Miller's relationship antics, to say nothing of derogatory comments she made while on the set about... well you name it! I've got one word for you Sienna: PUBLICIST! Miller plays 60's/70's superstar-socialite Edie Sedgwick in a performance of rare quality and depth. The story is well measured, well scripted and well constructed. It's a period piece and a special interest, almost documentary effort, but that does not reduce it's quality by any means.
Co-star, Australian super-hottie Guy Pearce likewise suffered this films early demise. Thanks to his co-stars bad rep his brilliant portrayal of Andy Warhol was largely overlooked by the major Hollywood awards. Sedgwick specialists unanimously decried this movie as "inneccurate". Many claimed it portrayed Warhol in a singularly negative light. Knowing little but the basics about Sedgwick and Warhol I have to confess I saw no such thing. All I saw was a beautiful, sometimes sad, often-times funny but always relevant and inspiring story. Hopefully a DVD release will soon follow and more people will get a chance to see just what has been so largely and unfortunately missed.
HOLLYWOODLAND
Coulda shoulda woulda won Oscars...
Hollywoodland is a film that screamed out Oscar! With a cast led by Adrien Brody and backed by perpetual Hollywood sweetheart Dianne Lane along with veteran Bob Hoskins it seems like a cast made in heaven. More importantly still it's a film ABOUT Hollywood - and Hollywood loves films about itself! Oscar Oscar Oscar!!!
Did I mention it co-starred Ben Affleck?
Now there's the rub. No one needs to be told that Ben Affleck's career is on the skids, including Ben Affleck himself, who submitted to accepting a supporting part no doubt because he knows better than anyone that every film he has made since Reindeer Games has fallen flatter than a pancake!
Hollywoodland is the story of an ex-cop private investigator with his own set of personal "issues" (Brody) retained to examine the circumstances surrounding the suspicious suicide of 1950's TV Superman star George Reeves (Affleck). As the story progresses the audience learns that Reeves was having a long term affair with Toni Mannix (Lane) - wife of a big-wig at MGM (Hopkins). Likewise he hated his TV-role and by the looks of it life in general.
The film twists and turns through a long and inspired list of potential murder suspects before reaching the very mundane conclusion that Reeves' death was indeed most likely suicide! You could not help but leave the cinema feeling like you'd just wasted a great deal of time - it was VERY long!
Dianne Lane stole the movie naturally. But believe it or not Ben Affleck (her screen lover) not only held his own but gave the best performance of his career and thoroughly Oscar worthy! He even leaves Adrien Brody - a far better actor - in the dust!
Affleck as Reeves was charming, dark, dangerous, ineffectual, tortured and tormented and at every turn believable. Frankly had the movie been about George Reeves rather than about his death it probably would have been a better story all round and B-Aff (as he was known in kinder days) would have been looking at Best Actor Oscar buzz rather than Best Supporting.
Eitherway, it's going to take a long time for anyone to forget Gigli and Jersey Girl. A few more performances like Hollywoodland and we'll talk turkey. But at present he has no movies planned. It seems Affleck is on hiatus and in five years time maybe we'll see him have a comeback.
INFAMOUS
It's all in the timing...
Presently screening at Dendy Cinemas accross Australia, Infamous is unquestionably one of the biggest losers of the 2005/2006 (and no doubt the 2007) movie award season. This is the Truman-Capote-writes-"In-Cold -Blood" biopic that did not manage to make it to the screens fast enough.
The Phillip Seymour Hoffman Capote beat them and garnered Hoffman a Best Actor Oscar and instant and well-deserved Hollywood clout.
Now, however, critics are watching Infamous and shouting foul! Hoffman doesn't have a corner on Britisher Toby Jones' portrayal of the diminuitive Capote while the Hoffman vehicle Capote, a disorganised, flat and poorly scripted movie by comparison, doesn't have a corner on the wit, scandal and polish of Infamous, which hypothesises that Capote had a homosexual affair with convicted murderer Perry Smith (Daniel Craig no less!) while researching Smith's involvement in the murder of the Clutter Family of Kansas.
Including a line up celebrity cameo's (everyone from Sandra Bullock, to Gwyneth Platrow, to Isabella Rooselini, to Sigourney Weaver, to Hope Davis and Peter Bogdanovich) it's one helluva movie that just didn't make it out in time and is now being screened well outside Oscar season in blatant admittance of its inability to gain attention at the various Hollywood award ceremonies thanks to Hoffman and Capote's earlier efforts.
It's a dead shame sure but frankly you snooze you lose!
THE BLACK DAHLIA
The movie was a bigger butcher than the infamous real life murder it claims to portray...
This is unquestionably one of the biggest diappointments of 2006. The "Black Dahlia" murder case is one of the most infamous in the world's history of crime - and all the more photogenic because it happened in Hollywood and to an actress (Elizabeth Short) who just might have had all kinds of seedy connections to any number of big wigs. Basically it's the story of a young woman in the late 1940's who, like so many thousands, wanted to be an actress but never made it. Through fair means or foul - most probably foul - she met a horrible grizzly end and was violently murdered and then later abandoned on a roadside in L.A. where she was discovered, badly beaten, her body cut in half and her face disfigured.
This movie, starring Josh Hartnett, Scarlett Johannson, Aaron Eckhart and dual-Oscar winner Hilary Swank held everyone's attention from the minute it was announced. However, what should have been an insightful and provocative look at a despicable act of crime turned out to be a frivolous and hideously weird adaptation of an airline-novel touting its own ridiculous solution to the "Black Dahlia" murder.
Lacking in suspense, in reality, in plot, in pace and in action it does nothing but give chills in all the wrong places and emerges as something of a kooky exercise in icky-murder-meets-film-noir. In doing so it set the genre back about twenty years!
Hartnett and Swank both give excellent performances, while Johannson and Eckhart might as well not have wasted their time given the characters they were playing. All in all it was the worst film of 2006 and a horrible and undignified disappointment.
CHILDREN OF MEN
Julianne Moore, Clive Owen and Michael Caine and not an Oscar between them!
This picture did actually go on to garner some Oscar nominations. Sadly they were in the technical categories that very few people really care about. There was no Best Picture nominations, no Best Director, Best Actor, Best Supporting, Best Actress, no nothing! And frankly shame Oscar shame!
This was the best of the overlooked films of 2006 with an extraordinary cast led by Clive Owen and Julianne Moore and supported by the legendary Michael Caine. Each gives a powerhouse performances while the script and the direction ensure that this brillient vision of the future - a sterile world desperate to repopulate - is rendered on screen a brilliant action thriller and a thought provoking and extremely relevant drama.
At the very least nominations for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Supporting Actor for Michael Caine were warranted here. It is not often that a movie manages to be both box-office and an actual piece of art. When this rarity comes along it deserves more than just a mention. Go buy this on DVD you will not be disappointed!
MARIE ANTOINETTE
A negative receotion at Cannes beheaded this movies chances early on in the piece...
Sofia Coppola took a great risk becoming a director as it was clear from the start that Hollywood would be comparing her every venture to the iconic work of her father (the brain behind The Godfather movies: Francis Ford Coppola). She opened fire with The Virgin Suicides and instantly proved herself to be a dynamic and innovative talent to be reckoned with. She then followed with the instant classic Lost in Translation - for which she won a very deserved Oscar for Best Director.
Her planned third film, Marie Antoinette garnered instant attention and the awards grape vine was buzzing long before shooting even started. When Coppola cast Kirsten Dunst as the infamous French Queen it gave people pause. This was clearly going to be a film out of the ordinary.
It premiered at the Cannes film festival (in full swing again just now) and was infamously booed by French audiences! This gained the movie a great deal of press but fast killed its chances of Oscars glory. Clearly people had expected an inspirational work on the-foolish-Queen-who-indulge d-and-made-merry-and-then-rea lised-the-error-of-her-ways-w hen-it-was-too-late.
Rather Coppola delivered the story of a naive teenager suddenly handed the world on a platter and displayed what she did with it - no excuses attached.
Dunst gave a touching human performance along with a superb cast, most notably Australia's Judy Davis as the comic and icy Comtesse du Noailles. But what seemed to annoy people the most about this film was the inclusion of a soundtrack featuring 1980's pop music and remixes of classical fare. The fact that the songs applied to an age of decadence, indulgence and visual excess (Marie Antoinette personified!) seemed to pass them by somehow.
As a result of the number of people ready to despise this film it developed an unshakeable negative stigma that dogged it all the way to Hollywood where it received a single Oscar nomination/win for costume design leaving Coppola overlooked for direction and Dunst and Davis for performance.
This beautiful film is slowly being recognised by fans as a cult classic and hopefully an extra laden special edition DVD release is not far off.
Well that's it for 2006. With Sundance over in the US, Cannes going strong in France and a heap of film festivals due to air the artistic works for the year a whole new batch of buzz is well on its way. So far 2007 has been the year of the blockbuster sequel and we are yet to see a concerted line-up of talent and contraversy. Still, it's only just about to strike June... there's still time.
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