Let Them All Link
Tuesday, December 8, 2020 at 11:20PM • New York Times Agents, stars, and production companies are pissed at Warner Bros for their HBO Max same day as theatrical plans... which they apparently announced without warning any of their financial partners who will likely lose millions as a result. Ouch
• TFE in case you missed my despondency when the Warner Bros plan was announced
• Daily Beast Steven Soderbergh interview on why he's working with HBOMax and his chemistry with Meryl Streep and his new film Let Them All Talk
More after the jump including Gucci, Spider-Man 3, Oscar Producers, and Top Ten List season...
• /Film Tom Holland's third Spider-Man film is going to have all the major players from the previous Spider-Man films... including Kiki Dunst and Alfred Molina (yes, they're doing the multi-verse)
• Variety Oscar producers announced for April's show including Steven Soderbergh!
• Advocate One Day at a Time officially ended after four seasons. No new home found but the bigger tragedy (four seasons is pretty good) is that it came and went and the Emmys never gave it up for Rita Moreno. WTF?
• IndieWire Tarantino's Star Trek script is Kirk heavy because he's apparently obsessed with Chris Pine
• Coming Soon Michlle Pfeiffer returning for Ant-Man 3. Can they actually give her something to do this time?
• Cartoon Brew how to mount a successful Oscar campaign for an animated short
• Deadline Jeremy Irons is joining the cast of MGM's Ridley Scott's all star project Gucci
Top Ten Season is in swing
I always marvel that people are able to do these lists so early. I HAVE SO MANY MORE FILMS LEFT TO SEE.
• Vulture three beautifully written lists from Alison, Bilge, and Angelica. Only Russia's Beanpole, Italy's Martin Eden, the documentary Time, and Steve McQueen's Lovers Rock show up on multiple lists so there's a lot of variety.
• The New Yorker Richard Brody loves Kajillionaire more than anybody we've heard of but his passions are many as he ranks his top 36 (!)
• NYT a beautiful personal essay from Manohla about how watching movies has changed during quarantine before the top ten list which is topped by Martin Eden and closes out with Beanpole (we're hearing those two titles a lot, aren't we?) A.O. Scott's list is topped by Borat Subsequent Moviefilm and closes out with the still to come Soul from Pixar.
• HuffPost Matt Jacobs supplies a top 17 including recent releases Nomadland, Sound of Metal, and yet to be released Promising Young Woman and Nomadland
• Vanity Fair Richard Lawson really loves The Nest... it's not just him. I remain unimpressed partially because the second half is so strong that it makes the first feel more than a little undercooked or like an album with all filler for the first six songs before the bangers come.
• Artforum Amy Taubin jams way more than 10 movies (and some TV items, too) into her list and sometimes picks just a single scene as is the case with her inclusion of Da 5 Bloods.
Reader Comments (21)
With Soderbergh producing I do we get a ceremony that's
One third Ocean's style stylish celebrity love-in.
One third experimental, digitally shot, improvised hard-core arthouse.
One third cast of Magic Mike stripping to a best song medley.
I hope Michelle Pfeiffer does get more to do for Ant-Man 3 but also make a few appearances in the other films of the MCU as I think she and Michael Douglas' character might have some involvement as it relates to the Fantastic 4.
Who isn't obsessed with Chris Pine?
Wait. HuffPo still exists?
BEANPOLE was frigggin fantastic even on my tv screen at home. Would have been even more gorgeous on a big screen. Will definitely be on my top 10.
Some of those 10 best links are wrong, at least when I click on them. The link for VANITY FAIR takes me back to the NEW YORKER list.
For the Oscars I think Oscar should embrace the past a bit more.
I'm so confused how Beanpole and Martin Eden - both of which are great - are 2020 releases. Beanpole was at Cannes in 2019. They were both at several US film festivals in mid to late 2019. I saw them both what seems like so long ago now that I thought we were revisiting a Top Ten list from 2005.
Soderbergh? Interesting. Expect yellow filters, nervous camera style and intertwined storylines. Well get Best Supporting Actress during the best original song presentation.
What Marvel/Disney/Sony are aiming to do with phase four - yes - Wandavision / Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness / Ant Man 3 and Spider-Man 3 is something beyond ambitious...
... if they pull it off, they would deserve every single recognition that they would be up to. We cinephiles that are also comic-book fans know where this going to (Multiverse, Kang the Conqueror, just a couple of already known leaks) and has many of us, shaking in anticipation.
@CharlieG As weird as it is, most critics and observers consider a film to be eligible for a 10 Best list in the year of its commercial release, not film festival debut (if they are different.) CRASH (the terrible one, not the good one) had its festival debut in September, 2004, at TIFF. However, it didn't get a commercial release until the spring of 2005. That's the year it competed for Oscars and, in an unforgivable turn of events, actually won them against BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN. December 2005 was also the year it popped up on most people's 10 best lists, those with such bad taste that they deemed it worthy.
Dan & Charlie - but why is it weird to use commercial reelease? You can't see everything at a festival (usually you have to make merciless decisions even if you try to see 4 or 5 movies on a day) and unless you're attending 5 or 6 festivals a year (very very difficult if you're on a budget) how are you going to see everything that people are talking about unless you're a critic who gets multiple screening invites?
I've always used commercial releases at the Film Bitch Awards because festival releases are so ultra niche that most readers won't see the films for another year. If that. Sometimes festival releases don't ever come out because nobody picks hem up so you are maybe 1 of, i dont know, 300 people in the world who saw that movie.
now, obviously times are changing. The system is such a mess now that I'm considering changing my stance because it's less and less easy to track what actually came out and where. But it's still so sad that there can be no uniform audience engagement with a movie.
This whole Warner Bros. thing is such a disaster it seems like it must have been arranged by the Entertainment Attorneys Association or something. I can sort of kind of see how they could pay off all the talent with big bonuses, but they seem to have totally screwed over Legendary, in both profits and future endeavors. It seems like it will be litigated long beyond Covid.
And about these year end lists, are they assuming the same calendar "year" as the Oscars? If not, it's going to be a mess for Oscar voters. You'd need some sort of spreadsheet to show you what is even eligible for nominations and why and how.
@Nathaniel I actually think it's the best choice. These people who insist on festival premiere as the markers kind of seem like, well, almost snobs. The vast majority of us poor slobs have to buy a ticket at a theater. We're not hopping from Sundance to Berlin to Cannes. But I can understand how others might think it's weird.
Dan, Nathaniel: For a film's year, I go with first public showing - be it a festival, a commercial release, online release etc., anywhere in the world. For me, it's not about being a festival snob. (If anything, I have a bit of reverse snobbery about festivals.) What it means is I've got a rule that feels consistent. So, to me, Crash is a 2004 film, Martin Eden is 2019, City of God is 2002, etc. That said, Oscar eligibility can be different and lining them up can be tricky - as can the year in which I myself first had the opportunity to see a film. So, the trick is to embrace the trickiness! First year of release is one thing, Oscar eligibility year may be something else etc. I just try to go with the flow. But yes, for a movie's "date", I go with first public showing (as far as I can ascertain it).
Edward -- that's all well and good but if you do this professionally and you have to vote on things or present your lists you dont have the option of hindsight or discovering a movie when it comes out and then placing it retroactively in your awards. So for me it's agony trying to decide how to rule on these things... which is why i've always in the past gone by release date.
though this year i'll have to reconsider i guess because i dont even understand what's been released and sometimes when people claim something has i can find no proof or itz exxistence ;)
They need to bring back Sam Raimi and Toby Mcguire who still the best Spider Man!
@Edward. That works if you're only comprising lists for yourself that you can update every few months. As Nathanial says, some people have to turn one in in December and then move on. I'm hearing good things about the new BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ, which had it's debut at Berlin in March. I think it's also played Europe. It hasn't had a single screening in the US as far as I can tell. So if I can't put it on my 2020 list, because I haven't seen it, and I can't put it on my 2021 list because that's too late, then the film can't be recognized that way at all.
Hey hey - the link from Artforum brings me to the Vulture list, fyi!
Nathaniel, Dan: Yes, I can see the difficulty in end-of-year lists. To clarify, I was thinking more about my academic work, where I use date of first release in my writing for consistency - but that's not dependent on end-of-year lists, and so I don't have the difficulty you have. Apologies that I didn't make that clear before.
Dan, re: Berlin Alexanderplatz, maybe you can have your cake and eat it. If you find you want to list the film, put it in your 2021 list, declare that your 2021 list honours films first released in 2021 in your country, but also note that BA is a 2020 film in terms of its first release. Something like that? I'm also thinking of a film like Zhang Yimou's Hero, Oscar-nominated for 2002 for Best Foreign Language Film but not properly released in the US until 2004. It would be understandable that people would want to post it in their 2004 list but it would also be a point of clarification to say that it was a 2002 film originally.
@Edward. Even dating a film for academic writing can be tricky. The default is usually first commercial screening in any country. There are examples, like CRIES AND WHISPERS (US debut 1972, Swedish debut 1973), where a film has appeared commercially outside of its home country before a domestic release. But generally a festival screening or two doesn't count even in academic writing as the film's official release date. Festivals are considered "trade screenings," for one thing. This is why Jonathan Caouette's TARNATION could play Sundance before the music rights had been cleared--which took the better part of a year after Sundance, and an investment of a LOT of money. I know people can just buy a ticket to a film festival and walk into a movie and often times the festival screening is labeled "the premiere", but in terms of the law and most writing including scholarship those are basically considered pre-release, semi private screenings. In my new book on Pasolini, I had to go into some detail to explain how it was that NOTES FOR AN AFRICAN ORESTES had screenings in 1970 (MIDEM trade screening--work in progress) and 1973 (Venice Film Festival), but that 1975 (its commercial debut) is how it would normally be listed. (To make things even more complex, the US release date was 1980. No doubt someone in 1980, in the US, had it on their ten best list that year.) Peace. :)