It’s almost showtime, folks! Ready your Oscar picks, sharpen your wits, and join Movieline as Hollywood and Indiewood fete the best of the year. Your friendly Movieline editors S.T. VanAirsdale and Jen Yamato will be on hand at @movieline during Saturday’s Independent Spirit Awards and Sunday’s Academy Awards , so synchronize your watches and join us in tossing back a few and Tweeting up a storm on the big day(s). First up is the Film Independent Spirit Awards, held annually on the beach in Santa Monica. The breezy affair celebrates the best of “indie” film — I put that in quotes since the word takes multiple meanings these days, though technically Film Independent considers films made for $20 million and under to qualify — and is hosted this year by Seth Rogen . A special credit this year goes to John Waters, who’ll provide “The voice of God” for the proceedings. Follow Movieline on Twitter for live-tweets from backstage in the winners’ room when the show begins Saturday at 1:30pm PT (the telecast will air on IFC that night at 10pm ET/PT) and check back here at Movieline.com for a wrap up of the night. Sunday, of course, is the big dance; join S.T. VanAirsdale and Jen Yamato for an 84th Academy Awards live-tweetstravaganza here at Movieline starting at 7pm ET/4pm PT with the red carpet, where we’ll watch as filmdom’s finest dazzles on their way into Hollywood’s glitziest shopping mall! Then let the bubbly-fueled snark rip at for the Oscars telecast Sunday at 8:30pm ET/5:30pm PT , hosted by Billy Crystal . Make sure to leave your Oscar predictions in the comments section before the telecast on Oscar Sunday so we can assign bragging rights to a victor at the end of the night… Catch up on Movieline’s coverage of this year’s Oscar race. Follow Movieline on Twitter .
These deals-in-the-making stories always carry a grain of salt since nothing in Hollywood is ever so sure just about until the cameras roll, but the trade scoop that The Killing ‘s Joel Kinnaman may be your next RoboCop is just too tantalizing. Joel Kinnaman who , you may ask, and rightly so? The Swedish-American actor’s been in a handful of stateside film projects here and there (including the recent Safe House and, briefly, Fincher’s Girl with the Dragon Tattoo ) but the closer I look at his work, the more enticing this casting move becomes. According to a Tweet by Variety’s Jeff Sneider (also confirmed by Deadline and The Hollywood Reporter ), Kinnaman has been offered the lead in Jose Padilha’s reboot of Paul Verhoeven’s 1987 sci-fi pic. “Dealmaking is expected to begin imminently,” writes THR’s Boris Kit, whatever that really means. In any case, it’s the first solid movement on a RoboCop lead since those Michael Fassbender fantasy rumors were waved away by the secretive Padilha. Kinnaman’s not an obvious choice to headline a high profile franchise reboot, but he’s been dancing on the cusp of breakout status for a few years. The 32-year-old Kinnaman got his start in Swedish film, most notably taking the lead in Daniel Espinosa’s crime adaptation Easy Money (AKA Snabba Cash ), based on Jens Lapidus’s novel; the film is being released in the U.S. on July 27 and will be remade in English with Zac Efron , while a Kinnaman-starring sequel, Snabba Cash II , is set for release in Sweden in 2012. According to the Swedish website Ostran.se , Kinnaman was once up for the leads in both Thor and Mad Max 4 (the roles went to Chris Hemsworth and Tom Hardy, respectively), so Hollywood filmmakers have already been looking at him to carry a major studio release. But while he’s obviously pretty easy on the eyes, it’s his screen presence — whether speaking English and Swedish — that’s impressed me the most. Take a look at Kinnaman below and weigh in: Is there cause to be excited if this is indeed your new RoboCop? Snabba Cash trailer: In a scene from Swedish franchise entry Johan Falk: National Target (opposite Mission: Impossible Ghost Protocol ‘s Samuli Edelmann): Behind the scenes on AMC’s The Killing (via Slashfilm ): In the trailer for Snabba Cash II (via Playlist ):
First day advance ticket sales (i.e. sales on the first day tickets are made available) for The Twilight Saga: Eclipse had held the number one spot in Fandango history until this week, when the YA adaptation The Hunger Games took the crown . You hear that? It’s the sound of Lionsgate execs exhaling a month ahead of their franchise-starter’s March 23 debut. The Hunger Games could still drop off considerably after its first week of release, but this is a great early sign for Katniss & Co. [ Deadline ]
As the Academy and its guests gather Sunday to enthusiastically slap congratulatory-calloused backs at the Oscars, an altogether different condition will overtake multiplexes nationwide. There, audiences will be confronted by a one-joke hippie comedy with Paul Rudd and Jennifer Aniston ( Wanderlust ), an Amanda Seyfried thriller withheld from critics before opening day ( Gone ), the Navy SEAL recruitment effort ( Act of Valor ), and frequent Oscar week performer Tyler Perry, departing from his matriarch Madea for a change ( Good Deeds ). Such a weak field is hardly an anomaly; the first months on the calendar historically are the wasteland of the release schedule, sitting in sharp contrast to the Academy’s annual celebration of cinematic “greatness.” A curious paradox is normally in play — at the time Hollywood crows about its best, it often serves up some of its worst. To gauge this phenomenon — and display the movie industry’s staggering self-unawareness — here is a look back at what has been foisted on the public during the last 20 years of Academy Awards weekends:
Woody Allen , whose Midnight in Paris is competing at this Sunday’s Academy Awards , will be bringing his Oscar-nominated 1994 comedy Bullets Over Broadway to the Great White Way in 2013, reports the New York Times. The adaptation has long been rumored to be in the works; Allen himself is writing the book, with songs culled from existing 1920s-era music. Cue obligatory Dianne Wiest quotes! [ NYT ]
Well, it finally happened. The line separating America from America: The Movie found a way to arrange itself into a stick figure and walk off the scene in disgust. In Act of Valor , an elaborate branding exercise for the U.S. Navy SEALs in the form of a Hollywood action blowout, the two mingle freely and openly at last. The movie opens with a statement from directors Mike McCoy and Scott Waugh. They describe the importance of casting real Navy SEALs — “the greatest action heroes of them all,” according to the film’s press notes — to give the film that much-desired feeling of “authenticity.” It was all for us, McCoy and Waugh agree. They wanted to show the audience what it really feels like to fire an automatic weapon and burst someone’s head open from 50 feet away. And so they dragged two chiseled specimens (uncredited, they appear as “Dave” and “Rorke”), out of active duty and in front of the camera and forced them to perform in a really bad war movie. Act of Valor was produced with an unprecedented level of Pentagon cooperation. Four years ago, when the film was conceived, the Navy was looking for 500 new recruits, and a movie seemed like just the thing. Top Gun famously boosted recruitment by 500 percent, and the military now uses popular entertainment vehicles to make its pitch as a matter of course. America’s Army , the 2002 video game created by the military to mimic war games like Call of Duty , now seems like a strategic part of the run-up to the Iraq war. So by “the audience” McCoy and Waugh mean American boys. And the goal of showing them how it feels to be a SEAL means combining the aesthetics of war they know from movies and gaming with the exhilaration of showing off actual American might. And yet there is a larger “us” addressed by the thickly written narration (the script, by 300 screenwriter Kurt Johnstad, gives new meaning to the phrase “fog of war”). All of Valor is designed to emphasize the direct impact of military action on American safety, from the opening rescue of a female CIA agent (Roselyn Sanchez) who is being tortured to within an inch of her life (and the integrity of her tank top) in the Costa Rican jungle to the interception of high-tech suicide vests making their way to major American cities. The plot might be summed up this way: America’s having a war, and everybody’s invited! Everybody, oddly enough, except Iraq and Afghanistan. After an unexplained explosion kills an American diplomat and a whole mess of children in Manila, we meet a SEAL platoon on a San Diego beach, where they are preparing for deployment. “Chief Dave” has already passed his Tom Brady genes on to five kids; “Lieutenant Rorke” is about to have his first child. Being a dad comes up a lot. They never turn to each other between kill shots and swap parenting tips, but if they did it would fit right into the script’s awkward attempt to jam characterization into these two beefy avatars. You can’t help thinking these guys got hosed: All that lethal know-how and they’re bested by dopey dialogue. A lack of continuity, both within and between scenes, makes a fairly simply set-up weirdly difficult to follow. The bad guys are childhood friends Abul Shabal (Jason Cottle), a Ukrainian convert to Islam who is mad about Chechnya, and Christo (Alex Veadov), an arms dealer with unclear motivations. But they are desultory villains, there to provide minimal narrative hinge action. The bigger story is that we are battling a global enemy with weapons connections and no respect for their own lives or the lives of anybody else. From the Philippines and Costa Rica we stop in Somalia, Mexico, and parts of Eastern Europe, and they hate us everywhere. We also have a couple of enemies within our borders: “the media” and “the economy” are cited as key allies in any terrorist plan to take down the United States. Each location provides a stage for some serious military peacocking: The opening rescue has some thrilling shots of an amphibious operation — boats dropped from helicopters! — and the surfacing of a nuclear submarine is so colossally breathtaking it’s hard to believe it’s not an act of nature. Much gadgetry is wielded to no discernible purpose, and at almost every stop live ammunition discharges like a five-cent slot machine on somebody’s lucky night. But there is little sense of how these teams work and strategize together, all the stuff that might actually make for an interesting story. The finale is a first-person-palooza on the Mexican border, a crescendo of incoherent carnage that requires one of the SEALs to perform his own death. The sacrifice and ceremony of that performance is most sickening when it penetrates the protective layer of numbness that builds up over the course of any movie with a body count this high. To feel something means the ignoble plan is working. Yeah, it’s just another movie with things blowing up in highly realistic fashion, and yet it embodies the insidiousness of a culture seduced by sensation and jingoism. Because although the last decade of war has done much to convince us otherwise, this country is not a movie we are watching, and people really do die in the end. Follow Michelle Orange on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Maybe you’re the kind of person who wakes up in the morning and says, “What can I learn today about the psychological effects of blood feuds in contemporary Albania?” But I doubt it. Who even thinks about these things, or cares about them? The strange miracle of Joshua Marston’s modest, well-constructed drama The Forgiveness of Blood — which really is about blood feuds in contemporary Albania — is that once you’ve watched it, you might find that you actually do care. It’s the kind of movie that makes the world feel like a smaller place, suggesting that the similarities connecting us across continents and cultures are more resonant than the things that divide us. The Forgiveness of Blood is set in northern Albania — it was also filmed there, using local, nonprofessional actors. Eighteen-year-old Nik (Tristan Halilaj) is a senior in high school, with his eye on the prettiest classmate and ambitions to open his own Internet café. But one day his father, Mark (Refet Abazi), becomes involved in a land dispute: Mark makes a living for himself and his family by delivering bread to local homes and businesses — his mode of transport is a horse-drawn cart — and he habitually takes a shortcut across land that used to belong to his grandfather. The current owners take umbrage, and an altercation breaks out in which one of them is stabbed to death; implicated in the murder, Mark immediately goes into hiding. But according to codes of law that have been in place for centuries, the aggrieved family is entitled to take the life of a male from the aggressor’s family. Nik is forced into a kind of house arrest, along with his younger brother and two sisters. But because the female members of the household aren’t in danger, Nik’s younger sister, Rudina (Sindi Laçej), must leave school and temporarily take over her father’s business, just to keep the family afloat. This is a vivid, tough little story that enfolds lots of dramatic subthreads: Nik and Rudina live, as most of us do, in a world of cell phones and satellite TV, yet they find themselves bound by antiquated rules of conduct. Nik is just learning his way around the adult world — he preens in front of the mirror, Tony Manero-style, hoping to look good for the girl he’s set his sights on — only to be imprisoned at home, as if grounded by an especially strict parent. It’s a particularly painful kind of cultural emasculation, and he lashes out. And Rudina, a bright girl who seems to enjoy school (it’s hinted that she may have a future outside this rather restrictive community), suddenly has to play the role of the male breadwinner. She’d rather go shoe-shopping with her friends, of course, but the point is that her very sex both protects her and makes her life harder: Her life is of lesser value under the arcane rules governing the blood feud, which means that when the males in her family are compromised, she has to step up to the plate and act like a man. She seems to have the worst of both worlds. Marston’s gift as a filmmaker — he also co-wrote the script with Albanian screenwriter Andamion Murataj — is that he makes us care about these characters without forcing us to eat the knobby, dirt-encrusted root vegetables of cross-cultural awareness. You know what I’m talking about: The world of independent filmmaking is full of movies designed to congratulate well-informed, literate liberals on how well-informed and literate they are — we watch as peasants and otherwise “compromised” people, who live in countries outside North America (or even the poorer communities within it), suffer through their daily lives. Then we’re allowed to pat ourselves on the back for allowing our eyes to be opened to their plight. Marston doesn’t play that game here, and he didn’t play it in his first feature, Maria Full of Grace , either: That picture told the story of a young Colombian woman who becomes a drug mule to raise money for her family. The picture could have been a pile-up of the most tense horrors imaginable, but Marston has the rare gift of knowing when to ease up on the clutch: He focuses on individuals, on their faces and their feelings, sometimes at the expense of your garden-variety dramatic buildup. His movies have their own kind of narrative intensity, but they’re not thrillers masquerading as human-interest stories. With Marston, the interest is all human. That’s especially true in The Forgiveness of Blood . In the movie’s early moments, when I saw that horse-drawn bread cart rambling across a scrubby-yet-beautiful semi-rural landscape, I groaned. Was this going to be one of those good-for-you movies that’s pure punishment to watch? The picture does have its unnerving moments, points at which you find yourself inside the head of a particular character and you’re not sure you want to be there. But Marston doesn’t overreach dramatically. Mostly, he simply trusts the faces of his actors: Halilaj’s Nik has a gawky-charming teen-scarecrow look — he’s all long limbs and awkward pauses, particularly when he’s in the presence of that pretty classmate. And even though Rudina isn’t really the movie’s main character, as Laçej plays her, she’s its quiet, somber soul. Rudina observes the proceedings around her with resigned exasperation: Just when her life should be moving forward, it’s being pulled backward through hundreds of years of tradition. That tension is gentle but potent, and it’s what keeps The Forgiveness of Blood coursing along. By the end, you’ll care more about Albanian blood feuds than you ever thought you could. Follow S.T. VanAirsdale on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
“Unless they’re assured that nothing entertaining is going to happen on the Red Carpet, the Academy is not admitting Sacha Baron Cohen to the show.” Previous succinct gems . [ Deadline ]
Happy Oscar week! Time for another one of Movieline’s virtual awards roundtables , this time featuring nominated filmmakers behind this year’s contenders for Best Foreign-Language Feature. Meet our distinguished panel:
Everybody knows that George Clooney broke out on The Facts of Life in the mid-’80s. But in the quarter-century before the once and possibly future Oscar-winner and all-around Hollywood royal’s media profile encompassed morning-show house tours and magazine covers from Esquire to Vanity Fair , where was the 25-year-old Clooney developing his public persona? Where else? Tiger Beat ! Just in time for this week’s Oscar build-up, the indispensable film-culture resource Looker points us to the heartthrob repository and its revelatory Clooney feature from February 1986. Parts of it sound uncannily familiar — the Descendants star’s self-effacing charm (“I ran outside in my rabbit suit shouting, ‘What’s happening?’ and I was known as Chicken Little for a long time!”), bachelor swagger (“I’m really bad at a lasting relationship — you can tell because I’ve never had one!”) and bracing humility (“I don’t think I dislike anything about this business except for the fact tat there are so many actors out of work!”) all come through loud and clear. But other parts of it of it are like, “Say whaaaa?” To wit: George Clooney has (or had, anyway) a temper! And a very large car: “The problem is that, especially in this business, you’re always on the edge, everything is so temporary. Sometimes, if I’m driving my car and the guy in front of me wants to turn left when he wasn’t signaling for a turn, I just want to ram into him! I go nuts, crazy! I have this big Oldsmobile that could drive over everything and that’s what I feel like doing. I have this bumper sticker on my car because I broke the dashboard with my fist: ‘Don’t worry about things you don’t have control over.'” Priceless . And this bit about “time for myself”: “I love my new apartment and being there just listening to music or studying my script.” Your move, Brad Pitt . [ Looker ]
