Posts Tagged ‘A Single Man’

Miramax has long been considered a haven for independent financing and distribution, but with it being limited to only a few films per year who will pick up the slack?

Every few months or so, I get into this strange mood where I think the film industry has become all hype and no substance and I feel nostalgic for the movies I used to love.  Typically during these periods, every film I see only seems to confirm that sense and I grow increasingly disappointed until something finally snaps me out of it.

This time last year, I found myself in the midst of one of my film industry doldrums and I walked into Greg Mottola’s coming-of-age film Adventureland expecting yet another gross-out teen comedy like his previous film Superbad.  However, what I encountered was a film that restored my faith in the medium.

I remember the moment exactly.  Kristen Stewart’s character Em and Jesse Eisenberg’s character James are simply driving in a car as the Velvet Underground’s “Pale Blue Eyes” plays on the radio.  They have just left a bar after Em’s secret lover and his wife walk in and the couples share an awkward and loaded exchange.  Em is clearly thrown by the encounter and the scene that follows basically shows her reaction to it.  As she drives, Em’s face goes from sad to angry to disappointed to confused in a matter of seconds, displaying all of the complicated emotions she feels.  And it was during that scene that I remembered how much I love film and how powerful film could be.  It wasn’t just Stewart’s incredible performance or the music choice or the way Mottola filmed it, it was the combination of all those things.  It was the realization that I was seeing a truly extraordinary moment of creation happening on the screen and I had suddenly regained that passion for movies I had experienced as a child.

I’ve recently felt myself moving toward another bout of movie despondency so I popped in my Adventureland DVD and prepared to have my faith restored.  On a whim, I watched the previews before the film and one of them happened to be a roundup of Miramax films, the same company that distributed Adventureland.

As the preview rolled, I realized how many Miramax films I’ve enjoyed throughout the years.  I mean, this is the production/distribution company that first sparked my love for movies all the way back in 1996 with the release of Anthony Minghella’s The English Patient.  I may not have fully understood all the film’s themes at eight years old, but I certainly appreciated the beauty.  The passionate yet tragic love story of the central characters and the gorgeous cinematography are the reasons the film remains one of my favorites even today.  Miramax was the company that sparked my love of musicals too.  Sitting in a half-empty theater in the middle of the day watching Chicago was a positively transformative experience.  The sex appeal and the combination of stage performance and cinema that only film could supply was positively incredible.  Miramax was even the company that taught me about post-modernist referencing: I delighted in the way Wes Craven’s Scream deconstructed the horror genre and was positively astounded by the endless layers of pop culture reference Quentin Tarantino used in the Kill Bill films.  So I began to wonder, what happened to Miramax?

Miramax began some thirty years ago in New York as an independent production and distribution company founded by Bob and Harvey Weinstein.  The goal of the company—named for the Weinsteins’ parents Miriam and Max—was to produce and distribute independent films which were often more notable for their artistic value than their potential box office earnings.  Between their opening in 1979 and 1993, Miramax distributed such films as Sex, Lies and Videotape and Reservoir Dogs.  However, it really began to flourish after the Walt Disney Company bought it in 1993.  After the sale, with more financial backing at their disposal, the Weinsteins were able to run the company fairly independently of the rest of the Disney family.

The Weinsteins had always been fairly aggressive in their business practices, from acquiring films to acquiring promising filmmaking talent, and that same style carried over in their Disney period.  Nowhere was this aggressive business style more apparent than the company’s Oscar campaigns.  Perhaps the best example of a successful Miramax campaign came in 1998 when Shakespeare in Love beat Saving Private Ryan for a Best Picture Oscar.  According to a New York Magazine article from 1995, Miramax spent an estimated $5 million campaigning for the film and its arguable whether it would have been so fortunate without such significant backing.  Miramax carried on in this manner with one successful Oscar-winning film after another.  And then 2005 rolled around.

The Weinsteins had a tenuous relationship with former Disney CEO Michael Eisner over issues like financing and creative matters and when it came time to renew the brothers’ contracts in 2005, the negotiations went so poorly they ultimately decided to leave to create The Weinstein Company.  Miramax continued relatively unchanged under the direction of Daniel Battsek until this past January when Disney closed the its New York and Los Angeles offices and made it a part of the larger Disney infrastructure, thereby reducing the production output to only a handful of films per year.  Though companies like Summit Entertainment and even The Weinstein Company have showed interest in purchasing Miramax from Disney, it’s likely the $700 million asking price, as reported by The Deal Magazine, will mean the company will stay in Disney’s possession for years to come.  However, the real question in all this madness is what company can audiences expect to take up the creative slack?

Miramax’s most obvious heir is The Weinstein Company.  In it’s few short years, it has already made some impressive films like quite a few of this year’s Oscar nominees including Inglourious Basterds, Nine and A Single Man.  And it has quite a few promising films in the pipeline including two Sundance Favorites, The Company Men starring Ben Affleck and Chris Cooper and Blue Valentine starring Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams.  However, another independent company that might give the Weinsteins a run for their money is Summit Entertainment.  Former Paramount Vice Chairman Robert G. Friedman and Patrick Wachsberger established Summit in April 2007, but it’s already shown some promise.  It produced and distributed this year’s Best Picture winner The Hurt Locker and with the cash cow that is The Twilight Saga as one of its properties, Summit shows no signs of disappearing anytime soon.

Regardless of what the future may hold, I’m sure there will always be films to help remind me why I fell in love with the medium in the firs place.  And if not, I can always pick something from the Miramax library for a little reminder.

Jeff Bridges, who has four nominations under his belt, is this year's front-runner for Best Lead Actor for his powerful performance in "Crazy Heart"

Continuing our analyses of the top categories for the upcoming Academy Awards, here is an in-depth look at the nominees up for Best Actor in a Leading Role by our own Marisa Carpico. Tell us what you think!

Also see Best Supporting Actress

Best Actor in a Leading Role

Jeff Bridges already won the Screen Actor’s Guild Award and the Golden Globe for his role in Crazy Heart, so he’s expected to win the Oscar as well.  However, he faces some strong competition from Jeremy Renner, who won an award from the National Board of Review, for his role in The Hurt Locker.  If Bridges and Renner don’t win, the next most likely candidate is George Clooney for his charismatic performance in Up in the Air.  Surprisingly, Colin Firth’s powerful performance in A Single Man gives him an advantage over Oscar-veteran Morgan Freeman, whose portrayal as Nelson Mandela is impressive, but his nomination wasn’t exactly a considered a sure thing so he is the least likely to win.
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With Oscar season now officially upon us, it is time to take a look back and see which films have made Movie-Thoughts’ Top 10 of the year. Granted we’ve only been around since last August, so our list isn’t as well crafted as it might be if we were around for a whole year. However, such lists are just meant to be fun anyways, right? So let’s get to it.

Our list is based solely on how writers Clifford Bugle and Marisa Carpico rated all the movies they reviewed on a scale of 1.0 to 10.0. There were lots of ties, but they were sorted out according to the suggestions of the writers.

1. Avatar -  9.0
2. A Single Man -  9.0
3. Inglourious Basterds -  8.5
4. An Education -  8.5
5. The Hurt Locker -  8.5
6. District 9 -  8.5
7. 500 Days of Summer -  8.5
8. The Book of Eli -  8.5
9. Precious -  8.0
10. The Merry Gentleman -  8.0

How does our list compare with yours? We’re excited to know, so send us your list of the Top 10 movies of the year via our Contact page or this post’s comments section.

Short Take: Visually stunning, with depth beyond the aesthetic

Director: Tom Ford (Début)

Screenwriters: Tom Ford (Début), David Scearce (Début)

Cast: Colin Firth (Bridget Jones’s Diary, Love Actually, Mamma Mia!), Julianne Moore (Blindness, Children of Men, The Hours), Matthew Goode (Watchmen, Match Point), Nicholas Hoult (Skins, About a Boy)

Length: 1 hr 41 mins

Synopsis: Eight months after his partner of 16 years, Jim (Goode) dies in a car accident, college English professor George (Firth), decides to end his life.  As George arranges his affairs on what is supposed to be the final day of his life, he is pulled away from his decision to die after visiting his longtime friend Charley (Moore) and spending time with an intriguing and handsome student, Kenny (Hoult).

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Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zoe Deschanel in director Marc Webb's "500 Days of Summer," written by Scott Neustadler and Michael H. Weber

The Writer’s Guild of America has announced its nominees for the year’s  Best Original and Best Adapted Screenplays. The nominees for Best Original include the following:

500 Days of Summer (Scott Neustadler and Michael H. Weber), Avatar (James Cameron), The Hangover (Jon Lucas and Scott Moore), The Hurt Locker (Mark Boal), and A Serious Man (Joel and Ethan Coen).

The nominees for Best Adapted include the following:

Crazy Heart (Scott Cooper – based on novel by Thomas Cobb), Julie and Julia (Nora Ephron – based on separate books by Julie Powell and Julia Child), Precious (Geoffrey Fletcher – based on the novel Push by Sapphire), Star Trek (Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman – based on Star Trek as created by Gene Roddenberry), and Up in the Air (Jason Reitman and Sheldon Turner – based on novel by Walter Kirn).

Notable films that were not eligible for the WGA awards because they were not written under the guild’s jurisdiction were: District 9, Inglourious Basterds, The Road, A Single Man, and Up.

Source: Variety

A still from "Coraline"

The American Film Institute has released their choices for the top 10 films of 2009. The list comprises the following films (in alphabetical order):

Coraline, The Hangover, The Hurt Locker, The Messenger, Precious, A Serious Man, A Single Man, Sugar, Up, and Up in the Air.

Being that Up in the Air hasn’t yet been released into theaters nationwide, its inclusion on this list might act as great promotion and cause the film to have a bigger opening weekend than it would have. The Hangover might also enjoy boosted DVD sales.

Select groups representing these respective films will receive AFI’s awards at a ceremony in Los Angeles on January 5th.

Source: Variety

Quick Opinion: What the hell is The Hangover doing on this list? Certainly there were more deserving films that could have taken its spot in AFI’s top 10 of the year, such as Star Trek or Ingloureous Basterds, to name a few. But to play Devil’s advocate for a moment, many people have been lobbying for years for comedies to get more credit from organizations like AFI because while a successful comedy may not be “artistically superior” (as not every comedy can be Annie Hall) it nevertheless may be impressively effective in garnering the reactions its genre seeks to induce. To The Hangover‘s credit its reception was surprisingly positive from critics, and since its release it has penetrated pop culture thoroughly. Is this grounds for being mentioned with films like Precious, The Messenger, and Coraline? Tell us what you think.