Craig's MovieBlog

Poking My Head Up Before Watchmen Comes Out

I know.  Nothing on the Globes, nothing on the Oscars.  That’s right – the inspiration just isn’t there.  I’ll just say this:  I loved the Oscars this year and what they did with the show.  They could have killed the second musical act (with Beyonce and Zac Efron) to save time, but the show finished ahead of schedule anyway.  They also could have done some more thinking about who was giving the speeches to the various nominees.  DeNiro to Penn was awesome, but Cotillard to Kate Winslet?  How was that not Emma Thompson?  Adrien Brody to Richard Jenkins?  Cuba Gooding Jr.?!?!?

And with that, let’s move on.

Watchmen is coming out this week and David Poland has pointed out some interesting commentary from one of the cast members. 

Matthew Goode plays Andrew Veidt/Ozymandias in the movie, expected to be one of the biggest hits of 2009.

But the 30-year-old actor – who has previously appeared in Match Point and Brideshead Revisited – went on the offensive after learning hardcore fans are saying he doesn’t suit the character before even watching the film.

He said: “The negative feedback is relayed by my friends. I think the fanboys aren’t particularly happy – there are a load of people they’d have rather had in before me.

“It’s already being slated before they’ve seeing anything.

“But if fanboys still hate the film after going and seeing it, they can all line up and s*** my d***.

“I don’t give a f***.”

Matthew added: “I’m having a child and that’s more important to me – so I don’t give a f***. Grow a d***.”

Is it bad that I think that he actually has the proper perspective here?

Now, there are people that have seen the film, like David Edelstein of New York Magazine, who says, it is an “awe-inspiring corpse: huge, noisy, gaseously distended by its own dystopia.”

Good times.

Match Point May Be Woody's Best in Years

Jeffrey Wells comes out strongly in favor of Match Point.  Is it possible that Woody Allen has found his footing again?  This year alone, he released Melinda and Melinda and Match Point.

I'm feel I should be beating the drum more loudly for Woody Allen's Match Point because it's not just his best in a long time, but one of the best of the year.

It really is Allen's darkest and most precisely calibrated film since Crime and Misdemeanors ...clean, cruel and ironic as hell.

If there wasn't such a herd mentality in this town, if people weren't so political and equivocal, Match Point could actually be in the mix for Best Picture.

It's a slightly better film than Good Night, and Good Luck. It's not as much of a sad and broken-hearted thing as Brokeback Mountain, but it has as much confidence and self-awareness as Walk the Line. And it's five or ten times better than Memoirs of a Geisha.

Screw the herd mentality and the hell with political and equivocal. The more I think about Match Point, the better it seems. Woody is easily a Best Original Screenplay contender, and... well, at least that.

I said last May at the Cannes Film Festival that Match Point isn't quite as good as Woody's Crimes and Misdemeanors, but it deals the same kind of cards and has its footing in more or less the same philosophical realm.

And I've said this three or four times, but the finale kills.

Set in present-day England (mostly London, Match Point is about a tennis instructor named Chris Wilton (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) who relationships his way into an upper-crust English family by way of one of his male students, a cheerful smoothie named Tom Hewett (Matthew Goode).

Chris is soon romancing and then marrying Tom's sister Chloe (Emily Mortimer), but almost-as-quickly getting involved with Tom's fiance, a struggling American actress named Nola Rice (Scarlett Johansson).

The story essentially turns on the matter of Nola becoming pregnant and insisting that Chris leave his wife for her, and how Chris deals with the pressure of this.

Rhys-Meyers handles his part skillfully and with exactly the right balance between terrible, gut-wrenching guilt and the suggestion of a sociopathic undercurrent. But it's Johansson, far and away, who gives the finest performance. She seems in possession of a fierce, almost Brando-esque naturalism here. She grabs Allen's dialogue by the shirt collar and slaps it around.

Match Point feels a bit pat from time to time. The talk feels a little too polite here and there, and certain aspects of the plot feel a bit forced. But that's Woody these days, and in this instance, in this realm, that's pretty damn good.

Oscars 2006

It's November 7th, 2005, and it's very possible that we have not seen a single film that will be nominated for Best Picture.  Sure, there's been Capote, Good Night and Good Luck, A History of Violence, Crash, Jarhead, and Cinderella Man, but there's a good chance that none of those will hit their mark, and all five nominees will come from the remaining pool of movies that haven't yet been released (and there are only 8 weekends left in 2005) to qualify.

Frankly, I think this sucks.  We end up with crappy movies all year long, then the studios cram everything into November and December, but if those films don't get the boost of a nomination, they're gone... dead on the vine.  Good luck seeing them in a theater versus Blockbuster.

Anyway, here's a piece in the New York Daily News from Jack Mathews about the movies to come this year.  Also, I'm including Jack's top 10 hopefuls:

1. Munich, directed by Steven Spielberg, starring Eric Bana
2. Brokeback Mountain, directed by Ang Lee, starring Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal
3. Memoirs of a Geisha, directed by Rob Marshall, starring Ziyi Zhang and Ken Watanabe
4. The New World, directed by Terrence Malick, starring Colin Farrell
5. The Producers, directed by Susan Stroman, starring Nathan Lane, Matthew Broderick, Uma Thurman, and Will Ferrell
6. Mrs. Henderson Presents, directed by Stephen Frears, starring Judi Dench and Bob Hoskins
7. Walk the Line, directed by James Mangold, starring Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon
8. King Kong, directed by Peter Jackson, starring Adrien Brody, Jack Black, and Naomi Watts
9. Syriana, directed by Stephen Gaghan, starring George Clooney and Matt Damon
10. Match Point, directed by Woody Allen, starring Scarlett Johansson and Jonathan Rhys-Meyers

Match Point Trailer and The Shining: The Power of Editing

It's odd that I ran across both of these clips today, as one is clearly a joke, and one is clearly a genuine trailer... but they both end up saying the same thing: you can lay down your music, and edit something up so that it can tell whatever story you want.

Here's Match Point by Woody Allen, and The Shining by, um... I dunno... Cameron Crowe?  Maybe James L. Brooks?   ;)