The Celebrity Connection: Kate Beckinsale

So I watched 30 Days of Night: Dark Days today. I normally wouldn't watch direct to video sequels, especially of movies I didn't like the first time around, but I covered the script to this one almost a year ago and you can just about guarantee that if I've read the script, I'll check out the finished product regardless. Watching it though I noticed something:

Could Mia Kirshner actually be Kate Beckinsale in disguise? You decide.

Not Only Does Tyler Perry Hate Black People, Now He Apperently Hates Movies Too

Here are some posters from Tyler's Perry's newest travesty Madea's Big Happy Family:

It's bad enough that Perry has profited greatly from making bargain basement soap operas that deal in ignorant black stereotypes while passing them off as serious drama (Madea's Family Reunion is about one of the most offensive mainstream movies I have ever seen), but now he's desecrating the posters of great movies as well? Is this his revenge for his first attempt at serious drama (For Colored Girls) got shafted at the Oscars after he went on record to tell everyone just how powerful and profound it was going to be?

What are your thoughts of this or just Perry in general?

In Memory of Sidney Lumet

I don't often write these posts over fallen heroes because it's a challenge to make a meaningful one when it seems like half the internet has already idolized the deceased before their last breath has even sounded but regardless, Sidney Lumet is an exception.


In this case, it's special because Lumet is not some tragic case and his death doesn't sound out any sorrow in me (he was 86 at the time of his death and was responsible for more great films than some whole careers ever house). Instead it's a way to look back and bask in the memories of one man who dedicated his life to making so many amazing movies.

What makes Lumet even more special for me is that, believe it or not, no one single person changed the way I view movies more than Sidney Lumet did. It all stems from his book simply titled Making Movies. Roger Ebert said that if you only read one book on filmmaking, make it that one and I second this.

This is a book as quotable as any great critic such as Kael, Farber, Bazin or even Ebert himself and is an intimate, loving and thoroughly technical analysis of film as seen through the eyes of the artist creating it.

Maybe most valuable is Lumet's chapter on style which is, to me, the single greatest piece ever written on the subject. Lumet dissects style (the most misused word in film as he calls it) in a way that is profound and makes sense. It made me realize that filmmakers like Burton and Gilliam are not stylists but decorators and that, most importantly, as the French also used to say, you cannot separate style from substance nor substance from style. The two create each other and together make something wonderful.

The example Lumet gives is of his debut masterpiece 12 Angry Men, taking place entirely in one room, starting by filming in close up and gradually pulling the camera back and moving it down so that you can begin to see the ceiling; feeling as though the room is closing in as the tension mounts. The final shot, outside the room, is thus placed high and filmed with a wide lense to allow the sense of relief. You don't notice it, but you feel it, because it makes sense to the story. That's film style.

That was the birth of a career that produced the big names like Serpico, Running on Empty, The Pawnbroker, Prince of the City, Dog Day Afternoon, Network, The Verdict, A Long Day's Journey into Night and most recently Before the Devil Knows Your Dead. These alongside the titles that are not considered as major but still bear the worth to warrant the accolades: Murder on the Orient Express, The Wiz, Equus, Family Business, Q&A, Night Falls on Manhattan, Critical Care and Find Me Guilty, which featured Vin Diesel's best performance.

I think what characterised Lumet's body of work was not some consistent visual style (he gave the movie what it needed like a natural technician) but that he was drawn to intelligent works about intelligent people: often men torn between doing what they believe to be right and doing what's actually best. His movies were not about action and weren’t flashy just for the sake of it; (save The Wiz, which is one of the odd one's out in his oeuvre) but are built upon the suspense of human interaction, of internal drama and of real danger.

Lumet openly admits in his book that some projects he took on just for the money. That's fine, it's not too hard to guess which films fall under that banner, but regardless Lumet always brought style and smarts to them. Lumet made bad films but he didn't often make boring ones.

Thus, I can't shed a tear for Lumet even though I'm sad to see him go. I'm too busy smiling while looking back and remembering everything he left us. America may have lost one of it's last remaining greats but the movies will live on forever.

My Cinematic Alphabet

So I've seen this mem going around the blogging world for at least a week now. Maybe I'm a little late as always (I'm moving in May which will ensure that I once again become more active in the blogging community, I promise) but regardless, here's my version:

One Minute Review - Eat Pray Love (2 out of 5)

Eat Pray Love is about as simple and unassuming as it's title suggest. Of course it is. It's another example of putting stars into big movies and sending them out into the world to find no real dranger or drama. It happened with Brad Pitt in Seven Years in Tibet, Patrick Swayze in City of Joy and now it happens to Julia Roberts here. So what we are left with is a half hearted story in which a white woman travels to three places around the world to do exactly what's in the title after having a mid-life crisis of sorts. Conviently for her she always manages to bump into another American along the way or, when she runs across a foerigner, luckily enough, it is Javier Bardem.

Eat Pray Love was adapted from a best seller by Elizabeth Gilbert who is either the most boring of travelers or the victim of a poor, predictable adaptation. If, along the way, Gilbert achieved something profound in her personal journey, the remnants of it are not to be found here.

Maybe it's the fault of writer/director Ryan Murphy (of Glee fame) who overshoots and understuffs. Murphy has a way of confusing movement with artistry and bigness for something profound. Along with his cinamatographer, Murphy has the camera swoop and swirl and push in and push out and spin around from above, trying to make a lack of material seem big enough to inhabit its own running time. Take a scene in which Roberts, having come from a meeting with her laywer and husband over their divorce, comes upon her husband in the elevator. Instead of allowing a quite moment to pass between them Muphy lets the camera rapidly push in on her and the cuts immediatly to it doing the same thing on him. A small moment is forced to become a big moment and the impact is lost by being underlined. Stretch that to 2 and a half hours and you have about the effect of Eat Pray Love.  

Desert Island CD

Because last year's Desert Island DVD list was such a big smash Castor from Anomalous Material has devised a new list in which we pick 12 songs that we would take with us on a desert island and they all need to be from movie soundtracks. So, in no particular order:

1. Nine Inc Nails - Dead Souls (The Crow)



I think the Crow is a great movie from Alex Proyas and Nine Inch Nails are one of my favourite bands. The band's cover of the Joy Division song is what every cover should be: a faithful interpretation of the original while an update by the new band. Long before The Social Network Trent Reznor was already becoming a VIP soundtrack artist.

2. Elvis Costello - She (Notting Hill)



Costello is one of my favourite vocalists and although I love everything from his snotty early punk days to his transformation into country and pop and everything else under the musical rainbow I don't think he's ever let his silky smooth vocals soar over a song quite like they do on this one.

3. Trisha Yearwood - HowDo I Live(Con Air)



Funny, Con Air was on my Desert Island DVD list as well and maybe this song has something to do with that. Usually not a fan of pop country, there's something about this song that sets the tone for the whole movie, making it more human and grounded than usual big budget action vehicles. When Nic Cage meets his daughter for the first time at the end and hands her the dirty pink bunny while this song plays my heart skips a beat every time.

4. R. Kelly - I Believe I Can Fly (Space Jam)



There was a time, circa grade 6 or 7 where, when I wasn't playing basketball with friends I was wathing Space Jam and when I wasn't watching Space Jam I was listening to the Space Jam soundtrack and it was this song that always struck me the most. I love how it builds to the huge emotional payoff at the end.

5. Another Day (Rent)



I love musicals and Rent is my favourite and this song just embodies everything I love about it.

6. Michael Bolton - Go The Distance (Hercules)



There are two Disney songs I love and this is one of them. Just such a lovely song.

7. Part of Your Wold (The Little Mermaid)



Here's the other one

8. Come What May (Moulin Rouge)



Just another one of those wonderful songs that makes a good musical into a great one.

9. Whitney Houston - I Will Always Love You (The Bodyguard)



The ultimate diva sings the ultimate ballad

10. Bruce Springsteen - Streets of Philidelphia (Philidelphia)



Few movies have as great an opening credit montage as Philidelpia and that is in part due to Springsteen's heart wrenching ballad. His song from The Wrestler could just as easily have been included but I went for the more ionic one. I just wouldn't want to live the rest of my life without The Boss

11. Josh Groban - Belive (The Polar Express)



Another soaring ballad but another one of my favourite songs from one of my favourite movies. Would come in handy come Christmas time as well.

12. Train - Ordinary (Spider-Man 2)



I guess I need one rock song to offset all the schmaltz

The Adjustment Bureau ( 4 out of 5)

Rumor has it that when the original Young Turks of the Cashiers du Cinema gathered years after the fact for a round table discussion one of the topics was with regards to how they had argued so hard towards the director as the artist of his own work that when he was finally given artistic freedom, he didn’t know what to do with it.

That is, in one way or another, the logic behind the Adjustment Bureau as explained by Terrence Stamp’s Thompson in one of those film stealing monologue scenes. It’s that free will is just an illusion. Sure we can chose what tie to wear and what tooth paste to use, but give a person real power over themselves and we get the Dark Ages or World Wars. Thus there is a Chairman who has a plan devised for everyone and when we step off course, he sends his men to give us all a nudge back into fulfilling the destiny that was set out for us.


That’s the story told anyway in the new film of the same name which places Matt Damon and Emily Blunt into, what is essentially an old fashioned melodrama with the ideas surrounding them loosely based on a Phillip K. Dick short story that, just possibly, Alex Proyas also had in mind when he dreamed up his masterpiece Dark City. It’s the foregrounding of this romance that essentially holds the movie together, giving it human momentum within a story that hasn’t been given half as much though by its writer/director George Nolfi as say was given to the aforementioned Dark City or even Inception for that matter, but then again, the old adage still stands: love conquers all.

Damon plays David Norris, a former bad boy turned senate hopeful in New York who looks poised to win until a picture of some former college hijinks is put into print and Norris loses. In the bathroom, before his speech on election night he meets Elise (Blunt) and immediately establishes a connection until she is chased away, no name or number having been given, by a pair of guards looking for her for crashing a wedding upstairs.

Norris, smitten and frustrated, manages a speech that night that is honest and compelling and looks like it will set him on course for a win come next term. Meanwhile, on a bus to his new job, he meets up with Elise and they manage to exchange numbers. However, this wasn’t the plan for Norris who, upon arrival to the office, finds men in suits erasing memories from his co-workers. They give chase but are inescapable. Their hats, we are later told, allow them the power to go through doors and be teleported around the city like magic. It’s a neat trick that doesn’t get much more logical an explanation than this.

Norris is told of this mysterious Chairman and this divine plan that has been written for everyone and is mapped out in convenient animated books which, despite their power, look less impressive and versatile than Ipads. Apparently God hasn’t caught up with the times. But now, reeling myself back in, I’ve gone and made an important assumption that the film wisely doesn’t. These men don’t stand in for angels nor the Chairman for God, although the parallels are there: we know this Chairman, we are told, by many different names and have met him but never know as he appears in a different form to everyone.

The thing is, Norris was never meant to meet Elise and her presence, if a relationship is allowed to develop, will throw both of their destinies off course and will ultimately, if Thompson is to be believed, ruin both of them. Therefore, the agents follow Norris, “nudging” him every once in a while in order to keep him on the fast track to greatness and away from Elise. The logic here though is a bit murky: if the agents need to keep nudging Norris back on track, aren’t they changing also, by doing so, the destinies of those around them, in a Butterfly Effect-like manner, or are there other agents who need to come in and nudge everyone else back on course after an initial nudge? That must require a lot of man power. Maybe in the sequel we can go backstage at the Bureau and see the Chairman going through the recruitment process.

The film is wise in that it doesn’t explicitly draw a religious parallel, which would ultimately ground it in some sort of reality and make it into something it isn’t, although it does suggest a certain spiritual subtext by which Nolfi, on several occasions, films Damon in long shot amidst beautiful, sprawling backgrounds which were, depending on how you look at it, either the design of human artistry or part of an overall destiny in which one small man is passing through.

And then the story ultimately becomes a romantic thriller in which Norris, with the help of one optimistic agent played by Anthony Mackie, tries to avert the agents, who aren’t, in one of the films many little nice touches, so much bad guys as simply men doing their job, and get back to Elise, even if it means changing the course of his entire life. It’s a nice premise for which Damon and Blunt can cast a likable couple that we generally hope find each other and features a world in which chases are handled by foot and not computers and are filmed in long takes and edited with logic not a blender.

And that’s what you get for your money. Here’s a film that is well acted and made and spreads a little bit of logic in with a little bit of illogic. It doesn’t have the sweep of say Inception, but unlike that film is does have an emotional drive towards some sort of foreseeable end point, which makes it not nearly as compelling but engaging for its own simple, earnest reasons. It won’t provide any food for thought that will justifiably leave anyone discussing it several weeks from now but then again, neither did Inception.

I'll Probably Eat Lunch in This Town Again: A Tale of My Falling Out with the Movie Business (Part 4)

Read Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

So X's three week vacation was over and I was excited to start on some sort of regular daily routine. I won't go into regular detail on everything I did during the day for fear of stretching out this series of posts into infinity but what a normal day looked like was thus: come in, get my lap top set up, check e mail, create a daily list of things to get done with X, make phone calls until around 10:00 am (by which time it is closing time for most foreign territories that fit into that time zone) and then go about other daily tasks such as creating e-blasts (a mass e mail sent to all the distributors in a certain territory to announce either the availability of a title or an upcoming screening at a local film festival), going over deals, and other such things. It wasn't an exciting routine although there always seemed to be something to do and even though we went from 9:00 am till 6:30 pm (which, at $400 a week was less than minimum wage), the day usually went quick.

There are three main tasks that I had was specifically involved with during this time that I was involved in and that I will break down separately: 1) prepping for TIFF 2) penetrating the TV market and 3) prepping a delivery to Australia.

TIFF, although one of the world's biggest film festivals, isn't a major film market for the small guys. One of the nice things about TIFF is that it continues to maintain it's image as the public's film festival which is more about appreciating movies than making deals. That's not to say that deals aren't made there, because they are but it's not as formal as say Cannes or Berlin and it's usually only the big players who carry any weight at TIFF (since it's mostly the big movies that get played there). If you think about AFM or Cannes, sales companies will go there, set up a booth, display their promotional material and hand out screeners to interested buyers (which is what my phone calls were following up on). You won't see this going on at TIFF (it happens but mostly in hotel rooms and lobbys) and TIFF mainly attracts the likes of the Entertainment Ones or The Weinstein Companys; the big guys with money to throw around. Cannes however, because it is mostly all about business will attract all kinds of small and independent companies, like ours, trying to sell all kinds of films.

Therefore, TIFF wasn't as high on our radar as the other major markets were (Cannes, AFM and Berlin, plus Mipcom, which is a TV festival held in Cannes in October). That didn't mean there still wasn't prepping to do as X would be around, going to parties, meeting people, getting tips on what is looking good and seeing if there is anything worth acquiring (X's plan, for the record, was to have three new titles to reveal at Cannes. If his website is correct, he has, since, September, acquired just 1 new title). The problem with this company is that what X basically acquired was the leftovers that no one else wanted. Any company worth their salt already has their claim to the best stuff well in advance of the festivals (although I did spend a brief stint on the phone trying to find out the availability of Fubar 2).

However, one of my jobs was to download a list of all the films that were playing and check them on IMDBpro to see if they were available and if not who had gotten the sales rights and/or what countries did they already have distribution with. The reason for this was twofold. On one hand, it gave X a good idea of what films were available, in which case he would investigate whether or not they were worth checking out as well as, if we saw that one company was distributing such a film and we had one just like it, that, in sales, is what we call an angle.

The other TIFF assignment was to download the patron list to see who was attending, mark off who looked like someone we should talk to and e mail them to try and set up a meetings as well as RSVP to parties and other administrative duties.

TV was where X wanted to be. It was his belief that theatre and video were dying breeds and therefore ondemand and PayTV was where the future was and he wanted a piece of that pie (as well, I think he knew that the majority of the titles we backed were not worth the time to put into theaters and would only appeal to niche audiences on video). Therefore, having not much experience with TV, he left it up to me to dig deep into the TV market, find out who's who and what's what and try to get these movies in front of the people who could get them broadcast. We started with the States with two titles that were available there, although, to be fair, I can't imagine any big channel in the U.S. ever playing either of them. One being sci-fi movie, I targeted sci-fi channels as well as family channels for the other one as it was my opinion that it would play best as a harmless vanilla comedy that wouldn't offend anyone.

But this wasn't good enough for X. He wanted the HBO's, the Turners, the Star TVs, the big, global broadcasters. I had no faith in this exercise but it got me through the day. I called up HBO, many times trying to get through to someone in charge of acquisitions however, anyone who has ever called HBO without a direct name and/or number, knows it's next to impossible to get passed the switchboard. However, I did manage to track down the names and numbers of the acquisitions people for Turner, The Hallmark Movie Channel, as well as some little family channel and AMC. I also managed to set up phone interviews with AMC and Starz (the former of which didn't want the movie but wanted to tell us what they would like to see if we ever came across it and the latter had already seen the movie several years ago and passed on it then but wanted to have the same kind of conversation). It was progress.

As one last little note on this before moving on, I also did manage to get a screener sent to the Spiritual Cinema Circle which is a club that sends out monthly DVDs to members of movies that deal with Spiritual (not religious) subject matter and since our little movie involved God and the ghost of George Burns, I thought, why not? I never stuck around long enough to find out the outcome of any of these connections.

The most interesting thing I did during the remainder of August and the beginning of September was to hunt down all the materials for a delivery. The good news, was that the delivery was to Australia, an English speaking country (which eased the pressure a little) but the bad news is is that the delivery date was fast approaching and we didn't have all the materials. A delivery, in brief, is when you have sold a movie and you are sending the distributors all the materials it will take for them to format the film's release to their region. This includes, but is not limited to, the 5.1 sound, the M&E, a Dialogue Transcript, the Billing Block, the HD Master, the DVD Bonus features (if applicable), the Textless Backgrounds, etc.

Let me do a quick breakdown: 5.1 speaks for itself; M&E stands for "music and effects" which is exactly that, but without the inclusion of the dialogue (foreign countries need this for dubbing); a dialogue transcript is a print-out of all the dialogue and at what time it occurs in the film (which is needed for creating subtitles); the Billing Block is what you see on the bottom of posters where all the names of who did what are listed, HD Master I assume speaks for itself, as does DVD bonus features; Textless Background is the entire film without any text inserts. This is needed because, if a film starts with an image and over top reads: "Once upon a time in a galaxy far, far away..." that will need to be translated into the country's language and put back in into the finished film.

We had exactly none of this. The problem was that the filmmakers behind the film were young first-timers who didn't really know what they were doing and since their movie had more or less made them all the money it was going to, they didn't really seem to care anymore. They had said that they didn't have any of the materials and put us in touch with a nice and helpful man named Oliver at Roadside Attractions in LA who were looking after the North American DVD release. Oliver gave us one-time access to the master at Fotokem so that we could make a copy of it but said that all of the other materials he had sent back to the filmmakers on burned DVDs. Despite this, they still claimed that didn't have it and didn't know anything about it. It was a brutal back and forth that was about the equivalent of clubbing seals. After Oliver had kindly, despite his business, offered to burn us what he had (the 5.1 and bonus features), the filmmakers decided they did have that after all and sent it to us.

Fine, now what about the M&E (which, once again, wasn't as important due to it being sent to an English speaking country, but would still be needed in the future) and Dialogue Transcript? The filmmakers sent me on another wild goose chase to another company in New York who did not have a dialogue transcript but directed me to another man in another company who might, as he had created the Spanish subtitles for the DVD. He didn't exactly have a complete dialogue transcript but he sent us his notes anyway and they would do for now. At this point we also had 4 people who were telling me that no M&E had ever been created. Fine enough, we'd do it and charge the filmmakers.

This task was done. So was I...

To Be Continued...The Conclusion Awaits

The King Spoke and He Said: The Oscars Kind of Sucked This Year

• 2010 will be remembered as the year that nothing worth remembering happened at the Oscars.
• Anne Hathaway could very well be a great Oscar host with lots of life and energy (if she'd give up the oh my gosh I'm hosting the Oscars references), but what was with James Franco? He looked like that if he didn't go backstage and start cooking up a shot he was going to go into withdrawl.
• I think the Academy found their host next year in Kirk Douglas.
• It's sad that the most talked about thing this year was Melissa Leo dropping the F-bomb.
• There was a moment when Wally Pfister was accepting his award when he thanked Christopher Nolan for being his master and Nolan half smiled as if to say, "Yeah thanks even though it should be me up there."
• Apparently Ophrah talking about the human condition did nothing for Joel Cohen who decided he'd rather pick his ear than listen.
• Randy Newman has been nominated for Best Song 20 times and won twice which is kind of ironic because he essentially made a career out of writing the same song over and over again (to be fair, his songs were one of the things that kept the Princess and the Frog from being great). Out of four nominees, only the 127 Hours song had any personality at all. However, in his attempt to be "good TV" Newman did give one of the funniest and lightest speeches.
• Tom Hooper managed to make thanking his mom actually sound sweet and meaningful.
• I have no idea who this kid who won best short feature is, but he's certainly going places.
• Susanne Bier won an Oscar. This makes me happy. She's one of my favourite directors and doesn't get enough credit for what she does.
• You can tell Aaron Sorkin is a great writer. He gave the most literate and confident speech. He reminds me a bit of David Mamet.
• I desperately wanted the Social Network to win more awards just so there could be more hilarious cutaway shots of David Fincher looking completely unimpressed as people thanked him.
• Was it just me or were Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis really awkward to watch?
• The opening montage was so uninspired that I thought for a second I was watching Saturday Night Live
• The opening monologue wasn't much better. Where is Carrie Fischer when you need her?
• Billy Crystal managed to revive the show a little and a video was played of Bob Hope doing one of my favourite Oscar lines "Or as it's called at my house: passover," but this was awkwardly melded into a way to introduce Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law
• Speaking of: if there has to be 2 hosts, these 2 get my vote for next year.
• Since when have the honorary Oscar recipients ever been brought on stage and not allowed to make a speech?
• How did David O. Russell and Christian Bale work together without anyone getting hurt?
• I got 2 wrong this year and 3 wrong last year. I'm getting better

The King Will Speak at Tonight's Academy Awards

I write 2 Oscar posts. The one I am doing right now and the one I will write after the show. I personally don't see the need for any more than that because what makes the Oscars fun is the concept of the Oscars and what they represent, which is glamour and old Hollywood excess. It doesn't matter who wins. Winning an Oscar is about the equivalent of picking a name out of a hat (except foreign film). The voter need not see a single one of the nominated films to cast their ballot and they don't even need to be the one doing the voting. So, the awards are meaningless, which is why I don't dwell on them and don't get up in arms over Christopher Nolan not getting nominated or whether or not Toy Story 3 should be allowed to be nominated in Best Picture and Best Animation. Life's too short, let's just enjoy the ride and see how my ability to predict political voting is this year.

Best Foreign Film: This category is always up in the air and one I get wrong because A) I haven't seen all of the movies and B) the voters have to have seen all the movies. Regardless, I'll take my best guess and do what I did last year, going with the Golden Globe choice of Civilization because I think Susanne Bier is a brilliant filmmaker who doesn't get nearly the credit she is due in North America.

Best Animated Feature: The truly best film in this category will not win. Nothing has a shot over Toy Story 3, which made the most money in 2010 and tricked just about everyone into thinking it was a great movie due to 10 minutes at the end.
Who Should Win: The Illusionist
Who Will Win: Toy Story 3

Best Adapted Screenplay: I think this will be one of the categories where the true best will shine and may be one of the only awards, besides Original Score, that the Social Network will walk away with.
Who Should Win: The Social Network
Who Will Win: The Social Network

Best Original Screenplay: I always wonder what the Academy considers to be a good screenplay. Is it the dialogue, the structure, the characters? If it's dialogue and character than Inception doesn't have a chance, not it it does anyway. I actually have the insider advantage here as I covered the screenplay for The King's Speech about a year ago and indeed, it was very good. I wonder if I'll get a raise when it wins?
Who Should Win: The King's Speech
Who Will Win: The King's Speech

Best Director: The Golden Globe went to Fincher, the DGA went to Hooper; the DGA usually is the definitive word. If Hooper wins this one, and I think he will, The Social Network doesn't have a chance at best picture as it will probably also sweep the acting awards as well and Oscar generally doesn't argue with the DGA. Poor Aronofsky, his time will come eventually.
Who Should Win: David Fincher
Who Will Win: Tom Hooper

Best Supporting Actress: This is a tough one. I think we can strike out Jacki Weaver because Animal Kingdom doesn't have the push behind it that would lead to a win. Melissa Leo and Amy Adams could potentially split the vote and cancel each other out for The Fighter, leaving Helena Bonham Carter and Hailee Steinfeld. Oscar loves the British but Steinfeld should win for her scene alone in True Grit between herself and the crooked business man. Last year in the writing category I picked the actual best script and was wrong so I think I'll go with the obvious this year instead.
Who Should Win: Hailee Steinfeld
Who Will Win: Helena Bonham Carter

Best Supporting Actor: It's down to Christian Bale and Geoffry Rush. Oscar likes weight loss and weight gain but King, I think, is going for a sweep and Oscar almost always votes British so I will too.
Who Should Win: John Hawkes
Who Will Win: Geoffry Rush

Best Actress: I think this one is fairly obvious although I'm not so sure Portman truly was the best as she was just one part of Black Swan's whole. I found Nicole Kidman in Rabbit Hole to be far more engaging to Portman's "acting" in Black Swan. However, Oscar likes stars who put themselves through physical strain and Portman certainly did that, plus, Kidman gave one of those "quiet" performances that Christina Bale, at the Golden Globes, said no one really ever gets noticed for.Wouldn't it be fun if Oscar pulled a punch and let Anette Benning, who is just as deserving, have the win?
Who Should Win: Nicole Kidman or Anette Benning
Who Will Win: Natalie Portman

Best Actor: Let's continue to vote British.
Who Should Win: Jesse Eisenberg
Who Will Win: Colin Firth

Best Picture: Not much to say here. Once again, despite 10 nominees, just as it always was when there was 5, the race comes down to two. The Social Network was the best movie of the year for me, but the King's Speech is more of an Oscar movie and currently has much more momentum behind it. Plus, if Hooper and Firth win there's no chance for the Social Network to take it.
Who Should Win: The Social Network
Who Will Win: The King's Speech

One Minute Review: The Last Song (2.5 out of 5)

The Last Song is a perfectly serviceable Nicholas Sparks adaptation which is, more often than not, right around where Nicholas Sparks adaptations lay. It has the Sparks standbys: the budding romance between two unlikely lovers who start out on the wrong foot, the inevitable death of a key figure, and the trials and tribulations of maintaining a relationship between two people who's backgrounds are so wholly different and the pretty bow-tie that everything is always wrapped up in.

The thing is though, that Sparks is such a middle-of-the-road writer (doing about what he has to and not much more) that his work requires a director who can cut through the melodrama and provide the proper background against which it can soar. The Notebook (still the best Sparks adaptation) found the scope and breadth to provide exactly the right note on which the audience could invest in it. The Notebook was  thus less a Nicholas Sparks adaptation and more a romance in the classic Hollywood vein of a pedigree we rarely ever see anymore. Melodrama can be big but it can't be shameless. That's often where Sparks fails as he meanders aimlessly from one heart tug to the next.

The Last Song sits right in the middle: it's nice, kind of sweet, tugs on the heartstrings a little and then fades away. Maybe it's because the story revolves around a character who is infinitely less interesting than just about everyone around here. Maybe that's partly to blame on star Miley Cyrus who can do broad children's entertainment (for what it's worth) but struggles here with the nuance of involving drama. 

Faring better is Greg Kinnear, so warm and natural, conveying emotions without even so much as trying, as Cyrus' father who is the most emotionally involving thing in the movie until he's unfortunately secured into the role of script convenience in the third act. 

And then the movie ends, leaving one no better or worse from having seen it. A collection of episodes that don't really find the emotional pull to add up to anything substantial. If you want to think of it in relative terms: It's not as good as The Notebook or A Walk to Remember and nowhere near as awful as Nights in Rodanthe.

The Top 10 Movies of 2010

I'm with William Goldman who says there is is no such thing as the 10 best movies of the year, only the ten that the writer liked the best. It may be possible to argue for the best movies of the year but that would probably require that all the critics sat down and did a shot-by-shot analysis of ten of the same movies and spoke about things such as canted angles and split diopters and mise-en-scene and wide lenses and long lenses and long takes and deep focus and all those other vast technical things that make up filmic language and affect the way we see things, mostly unconsciously.

That's why I have named my list the Top 10 Movies of 2010. They aren't the best (I haven't seen every movie in 2010 so how could they be?), but rather the ones that moved me in some way the most because it is my belief that all art has the ability to move us in one of two ways: emotionally or intellectually (the best of which often does both) and that's what this list of films did.

The list however, isn't complete. I thought I could do better (which explains it's delay in arriving) but I've finally given up. As of this writing I still haven't seen The King's Speech, Somewhere, 127 Hours or Another Year. It is what it is.One of the film's is from 2009. Deal with it. It's my list. I saw it in 2010 and it deserves the recognition. Just to be fair, I've put it at number 10 if that makes the blow a little easier.

I'm also doing something a littler different this year. Instead of making a separate post for the worst films I'm just going to list them without explanation. Life's too short and it's hard coming up with ten different ways to say something sucked.

So, at long last, here is my 10 favourite films, but first, those honourable mentions that would have made the list were it not for those other 10 (some of them, of course, are from last year but were seen in 2010):

Sin Nombre, Whatever Works, Management, Shutter Island, Rudo Y Cursi, Hot Tub Time Machine, Away We Go, Summer Hours, Death at a Funeral, Everlasting Moments, Orphan, The Losers, Sugar, The Cove, The Messengers, In the Loop, Just Wright, You Don't Know Jack, Knight & Day, The Invention of Lying, Inception, Amreeka, Moon, Legend of the Guardians, Salt, The Karate Kid, 2012, Dinner for Schmucks, Flame & Citron, Bandslam, Taking Woodstock, Easy A, The Princess and the Frog, The Road, The Book of Eli, Pirate Radio, District 13: Ultimatum, Trucker, Morning Glory, Winter's Bone, Remember Me, The Trotsky, Public Speaking, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, She's Out of My League, Unstoppable, A Small Act.

10. Michael Jackson's This is It - Michael Jackson's This is It doesn't sound like a good idea on paper. It's a collection of footage shot before the death of the pop icon, rehearsing for his upcoming comeback tour. However, despite how excellent the music is and what a true professional Jackson was, what this document truly reflects is just how few gifted contemporaries Jackson had. In a day when songs sound more like they were spit out of computers with no human involvement and performers sing in concerts to tapes and put on spectacles to mask lack of talent, Jackson actually sang, on a stage, to music that can be reproduced entirely by real instruments, when his voice didn't have the power to reach the notes it needed he utilized back up singers and he knew his songs inside and out and just exactly how every one of them should be. This is It is thus a bittersweet farewell to one of pop music's last true talents.

9. Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World - This film proved that if filmmaking is moving towards being nothing more than computer generated flashes of light and sound that it may as well still be funny and entertaining and involve characters that we like and want to go on the journey with. Chalk it up to the combination of Michael Cera's ever charming screen personality and Edgar Wright's frantic imagination and ability to squeeze visual comedy out of every crevice of the film. Wright, a director of excesses who, finally after three tries, has found a platform in order to let his tendencies soar as opposed to bog down a story, goes to great painstaking detail in order to create the actual feel of a graphic novel and video game, while still allowing enough room for the characters to shine through, even if the story does dive into repetition. You wouldn't want every movie to be like this, but you're glad this one is.
8. Chloe - Mistaken and written off by many as trash, Atom Egoyan's Chloe is another dark and intelligent exploration of the lives of people who are all, in some way, emotionally connected. Like Egoyan's other works, but more straight forward this time, Chloe starts out at a distance and than slowly zooms in in order to reveal relationships in a light in which they didn't appear before. Taking the shape of an erotic thriller but delivering a fascinating character study of sex and need and desire, Chloe is also one of the few films that takes sex seriously and deals with it in an intelligent and mature manner.

7. True Grit - True Grit is, I guess, the only straight genre film by the Coen Brothers and shows that the madcap duo can play by the rules just as well as they can bend them. Stripped back and adhering to the conventions of the traditional western (while also finding the language and humor of the book that was lost in the earlier John Wayne adaptation of the same name) the Cohen's prove what master storytellers they are, building a film by creating one great scene after another. True Grit is thus like a collection of short films that all run together. There's the scene with our young heroin haggling with a crooked business man, Rooster Cogburn's courtroom scene and so on, building up to a whole which is probably the entertainment of the year.

6. Hereafter - Another misunderstood film, this is an intelligent and compelling meditation on life and death that ends with the ultimate truth on the subject: that no one really knows. It involves three separate stories from around the world, who are connected by their encounters with death and who will all ultimately come into contact with one another. But the film, masterfully directed by Clint Eastwood, is not so much about story or plot as standing back and quietly meditating on how fragile life really is, how unexplainable the mysteries of the universe are and how little control we really have over the time we have here. The film doesn't claim it believes in a Heaven or not, but opens itself up to the possibility that there is, just maybe, something profound out there that just cannot be explained. Than again, maybe not.

5. It's Kind of a Funny Story - Ryan Fleck and Anne Boden make genre films that stand outside of genre conventions and instead present real character dramas. They've made one film about a drug addicted teacher, one about a foreign baseball player and now one about a kid who checks himself into the mental ward at a hospital. Despite what a plot outline would suggest, the film avoids all opportunity to make fun of the colourful people who populate the ward and instead focuses on their hero and his journey toward discovering that maybe life isn't as bad as he thinks it is as he is accompanied by another young girl and another (Zack Galafinakis in a brilliant dramatic turn) mysterious fellow who has closed off his baggage from the world. The film avoids every opportunity to become cutesy or preachy and instead just follows this boy up to a realization that is both nice and utterly realistic in its open-endedness.

4. Rabbit Hole - Like Hereafter, Rabbit Hole is another meditation on death and all the mysteries of the universe from a completely different angle. This one is a quite, stripped back drama about a family coping with the loss of their young son. One of them is distant and has emotionally removed herself from the world, finding group meetings a joke and scorning her mother (Diane Wiest stealing the show) for trying to relate to her and the other who is open and confused and resents how his wife is trying to erase their son as if he never existed. The film raises all the hard questions and delivers none of the easy answers as what begins as a simple drama slowly expands into questioning the entire nature of the universe.

3. Greenberg - There is a scene in which Roger Greenberg (Ben Stiller in his best performance since Your Friends & Neighbours) steps gallantly into a swimming pool, stands at the edge, being filmed in a close up from the side of his face, nobly prepares to swim a length and then sputters, coughs and gags his way to the ladder on the other side of the pool. That scene essentially defines Greenberg whose most noble actions end up pathetic attempts to prove nothing in particular. And as hard as it is to like this pompous man who fails at life, spends his time writing complaining letter to large corporations, has just recovered from a mental breakdown and is now taking some time off to just do nothing, Stiller kind of has you admiring the guy at the same time. Maybe that's the genius of Noah Bambauch's film: it never quite let's you know how to feel about this guy who can't quite do anything right, especially the on-again off-again romance he develops with his brother's assistant, but is still kind of admirable in his dedication to doing nothing at all. Greenberg is so fascinating because he is everything you wish you could have been and also every reason why you didn't.

2. Black Swan - Black Swan is another character study in which director Darren Aronofsky follows a character unmercifully towards their own destruction as they try to reach for something that is just ever so slightly out of their human reach. This time it's a ballet dancer who has been set up with the nearly impossible task of taking the lead in a new version of Swan Lake. She's perfect for the role of the White Swan but is too meticulous and rigid for the part of the Black Swan and is slowly driven made in her attempt to unlock her personal hang-ups (parental, emotional, sexual) in order to unleash her inner black swan. Barbara Hershey, as her over bearing mother steals the show.

1. The Social Network - Here's a film that conveys a story that exists inside a paradox: the world's most popular social networking site was creating by a guy with next to no social skills whatsoever. The Social Network is thus a fascinating study of how one kid, so oblivious to the world around him, went on to create a phenomenon that has defined a generation and changed the way we relate to people and communicate with one another. The film is perfectly directed by David Fincher and written by Aaron Sorkin, who manages to create amazing dialogue that explains complex things in a way that is both compelling and yet can be understood by anyone watching. Like Fincher's last masterpiece Zodiac, The Social Network creates drama not through plot twists and turns but by piling mounds of information onto an exciting case. Jesse Eisenberg also deserves credit for his role as Matt Zuckerberg who gets to act the best scene in his career as Zuckerberg addresses a lawyer who he has been largely ignoring. As close to perfect as any other film this year.

The Bottom 10 Films of 2010:

Honourable Mentions: Valentine's Day, The Ugly Truth, Dead Snow, Ghosts of Girlfriend's Past, Franklyn, I Can do Bad All By Myself, Pandorum, The Final Destination, Sorority Row, Grown Ups, Couples Retreat, Did You Hear About the Morgans?, Whiteout, Armored, Nine, The Spy Next Door, Legion, Daybreakers, The Bounty Hunter, Furry Vengeance, Going the Distance, Love and Other Drugs

10. The Lovely Bones
9. Twilight: Eclipse
8. Killers
7. Year One
6. Kick-Ass
5. The Other Guys
4. When in Rome
3. The Boondock Saints: All Saints Day
2. I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell
1. Sex and the City 2

Rabbit Hole (5 out of 5)

Rabbit Hole is one of those movies that starts out about the death of a child and slowly opens up into new ideas and new realizations until it finally opens up into profound questions about the infinity of the universe, the mysteries of space and time, the complexities of happiness and the impossibility of life and death. It makes you realize just how finite and un-malleable time really is, how large and impossible life can be, how truly insignificant we are within whatever it is out there beyond the solar system that we have no concept of and that could, beyond all living logic and reason, stretch on forever and ever amen. It makes us appreciate the little, simple things that we can grasp onto and understand because, when it all comes down to it, it is, all we really know in this big, complex mess of a world. What’s above the clouds and beyond the stars isn’t for us to know, which is fine, we've got our own stuff to deal with anyway.


That’s what Rabbit Hole is about: it’s about whittling the world down into manageable things in order to take steps forward, one day at a time, to find order in the mess and ultimately guide a life into, hopefully, happiness with as little destruction and suffering along the way.

Oh yes, this is a movie of ideas. All true drama is. Howie (Aaron Eckhart) and Becca (Nicole Kidman) have lost their young son. Howie moves on while trying to appear as if life continues. He willingly goes to the loss groups and finds comfort in watching a video of him and his son on his Iphone.

Becca however, seems composed and yet cold, putting everything inside. She's confused but doesn’t know about what, can’t stand the pathetic people at the group, wants to rid the house of everything that reminders her of her son and resents her mother (Diane Wiest), who also lost a son, for trying to relate to her. Her son, after all, was a 4 year old who ran out on the road while her brother was a 30 year old heroin addict who overdosed.

Soon Becca, off from work, begins following the boy who hit her son until they finally meet face-to-face and talk in the park. She finds comfort in him, realizing that he is just a boy, riddled with guilt, trying to move on. Was he going too fast that day? It hardly matters in the grand scheme. The two spark up a friendship of sorts in so much as that they feel that each is probably essential to the others recovery or else just a way for Becca to continue to hold on as best she can. He may have taken her son but, is he really to be blamed? Is anyone?

And then the movie, without breaking it’s narrative simplicity or quiet emotional power, begins pulling back to reveal larger, more profound concepts, not just about life and death, but about the universe and the possibility that maybe there is another, alternate one where, right now, in their suffering, these people could be happy.

It’s not so much a question of Heaven, but rather a question of if this is all there is. Is life only as it appears before us; what you see is what you get? Or are there things out there, working, somewhere else out of our sight, where things are better, happier, nicer? Where little boys can’t be taken away because they aren’t 30 year old heroin addicts? And maybe there isn’t and such thinking is just a means to grab on to any semblance of hope in order to cope with the hand you’ve been dealt. The movie doesn’t try to answer these questions. How could it? These thoughts are simply the logical extension of death, which, in a sense, gives one a whole new perspective on life.

The film was directed by John Cameron Mitchell who has done an about face from the flamboyance and excess of his first two features Hedwig and the Angry Inch and Shortbus. Here Mitchell isn’t flashy or sexy but rather stark and desolate as he allows his characters to cope with this situation on their own natural emotional terms. Sometimes humour sneaks through, but then again, why wouldn’t it, as humour seems the only natural way to cope with tragedy.

And then the film ends, as Hereafter did, with the three most profound words that can come in any work that deals with life and death: I don’t know. That is, after all, all we every really know on the subject.

The Golden Globes 2011 Plus a Celebrity Connection

To all the people who spend weeks and/or months writing about awards shows in advance, making predictions, guessing who will what to whom and when and live blogging and all that jazz, well I am not for you, or you are not for me, or however Shakespeare put it. In other words, it's kind of a waste of time. Of course awards shows are fun to watch and talk about for about five minutes after the fact, but other than that, who cares?Like year end lists, awards don't represent what the Best Movie of the year is, how could it, there is, to quote William Goldman, no such thing; simply the reflection of which movie a group of people decided they liked more than the others. But regardless, while I should really be finishing that Rabbit Hole review or working at becoming a better critic, here's my 2 cents on what happened last night:

• Jason Segel, my favourite comedic leading man, got the biggest laugh of the red carpet when he did a rendition of Meat Loaf's I Would do Anything for Love. When a Jim Steinman musical finally happens, if ever, I vote Segel in the lead.
• Some have praised Ricky Gervais for mocking a ridiculous institution to it's face but I don't know, his routine throughout the night felt more like simply an amplification of last year. He tried to be quicker and more offensive while forgetting to be clever or laugh-out-loud hilarious and most of his targets were easy ones. The Charlie Sheen joke was Letterman grade stuff, suggesting the Hollywood Foreign Press take bribes was funny when he did it last year and really, Robert Downey Jr. rehab jokes jumped the shark when Downey announced the best special effects category at the Oscars a couple years ago. My vote for next year: Joan Rivers.
• Speaking of Downey he stole the show, as expected, with a line to Gervais, ""Aside from the fact that it's been hugely mean-spirited, with mildly sinister undertones, I'd say the vibe of the show is pretty good so far, wouldn't you?" And then went on with an introduction that started off funny and dragged on longer than it should have. 
• The only movie that deserved recognition, The Kids Are All Right won for best Picture - Comedy. Really, was The Tourist, Red or Burlesque better than Morning Glory, Hot Tub Time Machine or Easy A? 
• Clair Danes won for her performance in Temple Grandin and it was sweet to see the real Temple Grandin sitting there with her and yet all I could think of how William Goldman said he will never vote for "alcoholics or retards" because they are the easiest roles to play.
• Christian Bale showed up as Charles Manson doing Jesus and yet, outside of saying "shit" on network TV said something profound when he thanked Mark Whalberg for giving a quiet performance, the ones that no one ever recognizes, for him to give a loud one. There's something to be pondered here about the nature of acting and whether or not "award" type of performances are really great acting or not. I guess that explains why Colin Firth took it over Jesse Eisenberg.
• David Fincher looked miserable, just adding to his reputation as being an impossible man to work with. Seeing him win reminded me of one of my favourite Fincher stores as told by Sharon Waxman in Rebels on the Backlot. When one of the Fight Club producers heard Helena Bonham Carter's line to Edward Norton "I want to have your abortion," she begged and begged Fincher to change it. Finally he agreed on the condition that he got to change it to whatever he wanted and it would have to stay. Fine she agreed, nothing could be worse. Until she heard the new line: "Best f**ck I've had since kindergarten," and she begged him to put the other one back. 
• Al Pacino, you've won so many awards, why, all these years later, can you not compose a coherent acceptance speech?
• David O. Russell didn't headbutt anybody. Guess it's good George Clooney wasn't on site.
• Good for you Diane Warren, it's a great song even if the movie is suppose to be crap.
• Trent Reznor won a Golden Globe. Both of us have apparently grown a lot since The Downward Spiral.
• Dear Lea Michele: you are not attractive, you cannot act and your voice just sounds like a poor man's Vanessa Hudgens. Make of that what you will. 
• Inception didn't win anything. Good. It won't win Oscars either. It doesn't deserve them and it makes me sad to think that movies like True Grit or Rabbit Hole didn't get a nominations so that this one could. 
• Robert De Niro's speech was a better indictment of the HFPA than anything Gervais did and his quip to Matt Damon, "I loved you in The Fighter" was hilarious. Usually de Niro is so stern. Good for him. 
• All that said, Helena Bonham Carter made me think of Hitchcock's Vertigo in which Jimmy Stewart tries to transform a woman into a a former dead love:

Could Hena Bonham Carter actually be Edward Scissorhands in Disguise? You Decide

I'll Probably East Lunch in This Town Again: A Tale of my Falling out with the Move Business (Part 3)

Read Part One

Read Part Two

Let me speak a bit about offers. In the world of independent film, especially piddly little ones like the ones we were dealing with, which really (with the exception of a Canadian zombie movie) would be a waste to put into theaters, the most desirable deal is cash up front. That's probably the most desirable deal in any event but with movies in which there is a good chance that they won't perform, everything other than cash up front is more or less a last resort.

Cash up front minimizes the risk of the sales company losing money and puts the entire onus on the distribution company. The other kind of deals (the only kind I was ever offered) are what I will call 50/50 deals (although they can break down into any percentage and usually have a third number thrown in there to cover expenses). In this situation the distribution company takes it's cut in order to cover the expenses of releasing the movie and then the profit would be split between the sales company and the distribution company, that way, essentially insulating there investment. In the event that the movie did no business they would only be out their expenses.

As you can probably understand, such a deal is not desirable being it is essentially the equivalent of throwing the movie into the wind and seeing how it will land. If it does well, then great we've made good money and if not all our effort in not only selling the movie but preparing the delivery has gone down the tubes. Unless there is a lot of hot buzz around the movie or you have a big star to sell it's name on, this is risky business. Cash up front ensures that we get paid for our work and whether or not the movie does any business is someone else's problem. That's the best place to be in the movie business: put the risks on someone else, take the money, and run. X always used to say that the movie business was the "F**k Business." You have to f**k them before they f**k you.

The problem that I was running into while X was away on vacation was that the majority of the companies that I followed up with had indicated that they were going to pass because they were currently trying to focus on bigger titles. No company after all wants to focus forever on the cheap stuff no one wants to see, unless of course they are a niche company that focuses on either a certain genre (horror for example) or just gets by releasing the cheap stuff. X did talk about one day moving into bigger stuff and I truly hope that he does because it's certainly hard to get by peddling the stuff that you only got because no other sales company wanted to touch it.

Before I go on let's have a word on the actual definition of independent film. A lot of time the terms independent and Hollywood film get thrown around without the users actually knowing what distinguishes the two. The simple misconception is that if we see it in a multiplex it must be a Hollywood film and if we see it in an independent theatre it must be an independent movie. Not so much the case. An independent film is a film that is produced outside of a Hollywood studio. One of the summer of 2010's big hits The Expendables was an independent film.

I'll do my best to explain while keeping things as simple as possible (because nothing is ever simple or straight forward in the movie business). Big studios have different divisions one of which is Production in which there is a President of Production and maybe a VP and so on and then it hires on producers and gives them production deals. Ultimately it is for a producer to go out, find material, bring it into the studio and oversee it's development from buying the rights to the book (or whatever) hiring the screenwriter, getting rewrites, hiring the director, etc. Joel Silver is a Hollywood producer as is Jerry Bruckheimer, Steven Spielberg and Brian Grazer. Art Linson used to have a production deal with Fox but I'm not sure of his status now. Julia Phillips and Don Simpson used to be hired studio guns as well during their lifetime.

An independent film is produced by a company that has no ties to one of the big studios. The production company, often owned or co-owned by the filmmakers themselves, makes the movie and then tries to sell it to distributors  (sometimes if you're good you can have all the foreign rights sold before the film is even completed. Atom Egoyan's Chloe had made it's entire budget back before even opening in North America). This is why you often get so many logos and so many credits at the beginnings of movies these days (one for the production company, the sales company, the distributor, etc). In the olden days, when everyone was under contract, the studios did everything from hire their writers, their actors, their directors and release the movies into their theaters. Today, with the increasing cost of getting a film made, it's safer business to include more people into the pot. Mirimax (back before Disney took them off the independent market) used to produce their own product until they realized that it made better business sense to simply acquire already completed films.

Kevin Smith's View Askew is a good example of an independent production company. Smith writes and directs and co-produces with Scott Mosier under the View Askew name (although, and maybe I'm wrong on this, they change the company name on every film for insurance purposes so that, if anything happened on one film, they don't bankrupt the whole company). After the film is finished they (or a sales agent, I don't know how it works for them) sells the film to a distribution company (in this case we'll continue with Mirimax who made Smith a household name) who will get the movie into theaters, advertise it, etc.

That's why festivals (except for maybe Toronto which, despite being one of the world's biggest film festivals, stills holds onto it's image as a public festival and not a major North American market) are so important: it is a place where filmmakers try to get their product acquired and where sales companies go to get their product distributed (be it to theater, video, TV, airlines, etc). Before I leave this topic, I don't want to have made things too simplistic. There are many independent distribution companies that have production departments and so on and so forth. Again, nothing is as simple as black and white.

There's also one more option for a sales company which is to shop the film to an agent (a very last resort), who will try to sell it to their specific client base. It's essentially adding another middle man into the mix and is only to be considered after there has been no interest generated in a title from our own efforts. The advantage to this is that they assuredly know their own territory's market better than we do and their connections may be able to reach farther than our means had allowed us to on our own.

So, while X was away, I got a nibble on a zombie movie, but it was a 50/50 deal (I think this one was around 35/35/30 or something), but mostly people weren't interested in our poor little movies that could. I don't blame them. The movies, on a whole, weren't very good. That's not to say there isn't an audience for them, there probably is, and we weren't there to like the movies, we were there to sell them.

Part of the job was in trying to come up with unique sales angels and so some of those three weeks at home were spent making notes on certain companies in certain territories and coming up with angels. If we wanted to sell Y title in the U.K. I would search for TV, Video and Theatrical companies in that territory and make notes on what kind of titles they dealt with or any like titles they had recently acquired: Hey, I see you just picked up Paper Heart with Michael Cera, I bet you'd like Youth in Revolt with him too, want to have a look at a screener? We had a zombie movie that, once we had exhausted the possibilities on the horror market, started selling it in the gay market as two of the characters were homosexual and started making even more sales that way. One of the producers for one of the films had come up with the idea to announce that the sequel had been greenlit. Hey, if you like this one, get the rights to the sequel before it's even out. Between you and me, the sequel very well could have been greenlit, but there is currently no intention of it ever being made. Two sales for the price of one. The F**k business.

At the end of those three weeks I was feeling pretty good and ready to get back into the meat an potatoes of things once X returned. I had made some minor mistakes along the way but I was still in the learning process and each of those mistakes was a learning experience. It was time to really get into the swing of the sales thing and also time to prepare for TIFF. I couldn't wait.

To Be Continued...

Mike's Christmas Haul: DVD Edition

Let me preface this. First of all my birthday is on January 3 so some of this is a birthday haul as well. Some of this is also from boxing day shopping. Rogers Video (Canada's Blockbuster) had a sale on used DVDs where if you bought one you got 2 free. Beat Goes On, the place where I buy a lot of my hard-to-find movies used, had a boxing day sale where everything was 40% off. Barnes & Nobel also had a half off sale on Criterion Collection DVDs so some of these came from that as well.

One of my favourite sitcoms. Every season was on sale at Best Buy for $9.99.

This one came from Rogers Video. I haven't seen it.

This is one of the movies I wanted to see before making my best of list. It also came from Rogers.

Review here.

A beautiful farewell.

This movie was always kicking around and so I never got it and then it went out of print so I figured, I found a copy, may as well get it now. Thus concludes my quest to own all Chaplin features.

The only Dario Argento movie that I've seen that I've liked is Susperia, but this one is supposed to be one of his masterpieces as well. I guess we'll see.

My least favourite Daron Aronofsky movie, I always felt that a brilliant version of this movie is sitting on a cutting room floor somewhere, but with all the Black Swan love, I figured I'd give it another try.

One step closer to owning all Disney animated features. Just Lion King remains.

This was 2/$15 at Wal-Mart and I was getting one so I figured I'd pick this up as well as it seemed to work for a lot of people even though I'm only a so-so Polanski fan.

It's about time I picked this one up.

Another from Rogers.

2/$15 at Wal-Mart. Not one of Scorsese's best but still worth having because I have almost everything else from the master. Review Here. And more Here

Out of print Mike Figgis movie from his experimental digital period that also gave birth to Timecode and Hotel. This one is the best, and hardest to find, of the three.

God bless you Criterion.

Worth it for Ordet alone.

I've never seen this show but always wanted to, so when it came on sale at Best Buy I figured I'd pick it up.

Spike Lee's little seen musical masterpiece. I completely forgot about this movie and didn't even realize it had been released on DVD. I'm glad I stumbled upon it by accident when making my Christmas list.

All of the seasons where on sale at Best Buy for $9.99. Unfortunately this is the only one they had in stock by the time I got there.

The last Woody Allen movie I wanted to be in my collection.

I'll by anything Bergman so I was happy when Criterion announced they would be releasing this hard-to-get Bergman film.

After the 40% off I only paid around $25 for this 3 Disc edition of the Kurosawa masterpiece.

I had this recommended to me by one of my Film Studies teachers who I still keep in periodic contact with. I hope she's write about how great it is.

Minor Jim Jarmusch is still better than no Jim Jarmusch at all.

I've been waiting to get my hands on Last Year at Marienbad since seeing it for the first time many years ago so I'm so happy that Criterion finally released it. One day I'm going to write a great piece on this masterpiece.

Many consider this Godard's best recent movie. I guess we'll see.

Love Patrice Lacount.

Another recommendation from that Film Studies teacher when it comes to Godard. I think I now have just about every Godard movie I need until someone (wink, wink Criterion) releases Weekend.

I now own most of Louis Malle's major works (except Elevator to the Gallows) so I think I'll try to see some of the more obscure works before delving any deeper into his filmography. Any recommendations?

I have a love-hate relationship with Antoninoni in so much as that his movies are not pleasant to watch usually (especially for a Fellini lover) but some of them, like this one, his first in colour, are absolutely fascinating.

My love for Melville continues.

David Mamet's underrated crime film was finally released by Criterion so it was only a matter of time before I snagged it up. I now own all major Mamet films.

Review Here

Review Here

2 Kurosawa masterpieces at 40% off.

I love Tati and this is one of my favourites of his. So funny and lovely as Tati was famous for.