 The Screen Actors Guild will unveil their winners this Sunday night simultaneously on TBS and TNT. As a very good indicator for what can happen at the Oscars, all eyes will be on the actors to see what and who they crown. As a group, the SAG mania can be overtly misleading. In 2003, the Best Actor race was down to then three-time nominee Sean Penn for Mystic River and first-time nominee Bill Murray for Lost in Translation. Both gentlemen had won their Golden Globe categories respectively before being trumped over at the Screen Actors Guild Awards by pop culture tornado of Johnny Depp who had just received his first Oscar and SAG nominations for Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. If anything Depp winning just proved that Murray would surely lose because any votes going to a comedy performance will be split between the two. Penn emerged victorious on Oscar night.
Last year, Oscar-winner George Clooney had started building momentum and seemed nearly assured to win his second Oscar for Alexander Payne’s The Descendants. Clooney had won the Critics Choice and Golden Globe awards but on the night of the SAG awards, he lost to Jean Dujardin in the eventual Best Picture winner, The Artist. Those last three weeks of the season catapulted Dujardin to the forefront and the little-known French actor beat out megastars Clooney and Brad Pitt. I can’t help but think Daniel Day-Lewis could suffer the same fate on Sunday. Read more on Screen Actors Guild Awards Preview…
Get it while it’s hot! I don’t expect this to be online long before it is removed, but check out the trailer for the latest Coen Brothers film, Inside Llewyn Davis, which has dropped before schedule online. I am more than excited for this film loosely based on folk singer Dave Van Ronk (Oscar Isaac). Carey Mulligan, Justin Timberlake, F. Murray Abraham, John Goodman, Garrett Hedlund, and Adam Driver also star, but stop reading and watch it right now, after the jump.
Read more on Trailer for Coen Brothers’ ‘Inside Llewyn Davis’ Leaks Online…
The film based on the WikiLeaks drama finally got an official title this week. The Fifth Estate stars Benedict Cumberbatch as Julian Assange and Daniel Brühl (Inglourious Basterds) as his colleague Daniel Domscheit-Berg, and will be directed by Bill Condon (Kinsey). Principal photography has begun on the film, which is scheduled for a November 15th, 2013 release date. The Fifth Estate also stars Laura Linney, Anthony Mackie, David Thewlis, and Alicia Vikander (who appeared #3 on my list of breakthrough actors this year). See the official press release after the jump.
Read more on Dreamworks Begins Production on ‘The Fifth Estate’…
 Sundance is winding down and in our second to last video, we recount the quiet day that we had. After the fiasco I had with youtube delaying yesterday’s video, we decided to keep this one short. We review the three films Joey saw (Lovelace, The Way Way Back and Emmanuel and the Truth About Fishes) and I tease some of fun interviews I had. Enjoy!
Read more on Park City Dispatch – Episode 7: Lovelace, Fun Interviews, and The Way Way Back…
Categories: Festivals Tags: Amanda Seyfried, Film, Jessica Biel, Joey Magidson, Lovelace, Miriam Cutler, Peter Sarsgaard, Sam Rockwell, Steve Carrell, Sundance Film Festival, Terence Johnson, The Way Way Back, Toni Collette
And the nominees are:
Argo – Erik Aadahl and Ethan Van der Ryn
Django Unchained – Wylie Stateman
Life of Pi – Eugene Gearty and Philip Stockton
Skyfall – Per Hallberg and Karen Baker Landers
Zero Dark Thirty – Paul N.J. Ottosson
When it comes to the Oscars, one of the questions I hear most often is what the heck is the difference between Sound Mixing and Sound Editing? So I figured I would start with explaining their differences first, before diving into the nominees for Best Sound Editing.
Read more on Oscar Circuit: Sound Editing…
Paul Leonard Newman was born on January 26, 1925, just outside the great city of Cleveland, Ohio (Shaker Heights). He made his Broadway theater debut in 1953, starring in William Inge’s Picnic. Newman had continued success on stage while appearing in small television productions like Tales of Tomorrow and Appointment with Adventure, before making his silver screen debut in The Silver Chalice (1954), which was a box office flop. However, the actor found acclaim with his performance as boxer Rocky Graziano in Somebody Up There Likes Me just two years later.
Read more on Circuit 3: Paul Newman…
 Director Miguel Gomes’ aesthetically enchanting Tabu didn’t quite capture my affections like it did many of the nation’s top critics, but it is indeed a film the cinephile eye won’t soon forget. In particular, Rui Poças’ cinematography will linger in your memory for years to come. His use of black-and-white expertly plays off Tabu’s themes of romanticism and nostalgia, accentuating the allurement of Portugal’s colonial period leading up to its end in the early 1960s. For such a dark time in both Portugal and colonized Africa’s past, the black and white tones evince a timeless lusciousness to each scene, emphasizing an Africa that never lost its innate ability to natively shine in spite of enslavement. In fact, it’s the Portuguese colonists who suffer the most – their individual dilemmas are exposed to the viewing audience as byproducts of Western culture. We tend to be overly dramatic, our romanticist tendencies ridiculous and foolish when set against the backdrop of a mellow Africa, a part of the world that history once referred to as “The Dark Continent.” Tabu, despite some pretty bizarre narrative choices and quasi-forgettable characters, succeeds in showing us that “darkness” isn’t a physical entity defined by landscapes and people — it’s an internal one brought to fruition by those with power over others. Ironically, those in control are powerless to stop their dark tidings from rising to the surface. Read more on Tabu (***)…
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