Sunday, December 28, 2014 at 6:00PM 
I sizzle
I scorch
But now I pass the torch
The ballots are in
And one girl has to win
She's perky
She's fun
And now she's number one
K-Kick-It...Torrance!
T-T-T-Torrance!
Sunday, December 28, 2014 at 1:23PM
Manuel here offering up the sequel to last week’s Battle of the Holiday Releases you didn’t know you needed. Those Middle Earth dwellers are nothing if not resilient warriors and thus it comes as no surprise that The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies held on to #1 for the second week in a row despite some competition from a singing witch and a martyred soldier, both proving quite the challengers. That bodes well for the awards prospects for Rob Marshall’s big screen adaptation of Into the Woods and Angelina Jolie’s uplifting war drama Unbroken. Box office alone does not win awards (or nominations) but it surely doesn’t hurt. It was a busy Christmas week -- even embattled and corporate freedom of speech poster boy The Interview made a dent in a little over 300 screens.
Random Trivia: This is the first time since December 2007 when two live-action musicals have made it to the Top Ten. Can you name them? Hint: they also involved Disney & Sondheim.
TOP SIXTEEN
01 HOBBIT: BATTLE OF THE FIVE ARMIES $41.2 (cum. $168.5)
02 UNBROKEN $31.7 NEW (cum. $47.3)
03 INTO THE WOODS $31.02 NEW (cum. $46.1) Interview
04 NIGHT AT THE MUSEUM: SECRET OF THE TOMB $20.6 (cum. $55.3)
05 ANNIE $16.6 (cum. $45.8)
06 HUNGER GAMES: MOCKINGJAY PT1 $10 (cum. $306.65) Review
07 THE GAMBLER $9.3 NEW (cum. $14.3) Review
08 THE IMITATION GAME $7.93 (cum. $14.6) Review, Glenn's take
09 EXODUS: GODS AND KINGS $6.75 (cum. $52.5) Review
10 WILD $5.4 (cum. $16.3) Review, interview, podcast
11 BIG HERO 6 $4.8 (cum. $199.9) Review, Brief take
12 TOP FIVE $3.8 (cum. $19.2) Brief take
13 THE PENGUINS OF MADAGASCAR $3.2 (cum. $66.9) Review
14 INTERSTELLAR $3 (cum. $177.3) Review
15 BIG EYES $2.98 (cum. $4.4) Open Thread
16 THE INTERVIEW $1.8 (cum. $2.8)
There’s a fascinating discussion to be had about the way Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper (notching the highest limited box office for Christmas Day record) and James Franco/Seth Rogen’s The Interview (making history by well, being released?) were released the same day as Ava DuVernay’s Selma. Together they make quite the triptych on American politics, don’t you think? While Tim Burton's Big Eyes struggled, The Weinstein Company must be happy with the way The Imitation Game is expanding (cracking the Top Ten while being in less than 1000 screens; has it made it near you?).
PLATFORM (Under 100 screens)
01 AMERICAN SNIPER $0.61 4 locations NEW (cum. $0.85)
02 SELMA $0.59 19 locations NEW (cum. $0.91) Review, podcast, premiere
03 MR TURNER $0.25 24 locations (cum. $0.49) Review, Interview
04 INHERENT VICE $0.2 16 locations (cum. $0.96) Conversation, FYC Josh Brolin
05 WHIPLASH $0.18 87 locations (cum. $5.45) Review, JK Simmons
06 CITIZENFOUR $0.06 40 locations (cum. $2.1) Podcast, FYC Editing
07 THE HOMESMAN $0.059 61 locations (cum. $2.1) Review, brief take
08 THE BABADOOK $0.058 47 locations (cum. $0.6) Interview
Below these, two foreign language films bolstered by good reviews opened at two locations: Two Days One Night, featuring the luminous Marion Cotillard ($0.48 for the five-day frame) and Oscar-shortlisted Leviathan ($0.023 for the week).
What did you catch Christmas Day?
Sunday, December 28, 2014 at 11:11AM 
With Into the Woods and Unbroken opening so well over Christmas, one has to think that their Best Picture chances have been bolstered. Both are currently in that foggy area of "will they or won't they?" a siamese twin to "how many Best Picture nominees will we get?" punditry.
If you look to the current Best Picture Chart, I think you'll agree that the eventual fates of anything beyond the top five (Selma, Birdman, Boyhood, The Theory of Everything, and The Imitation Game) seem uncertain. If you compare my chart to the current Gurus of Gold (in which we made suggestions as to what films voters should be screening this week) you'll see that the top ten films are basically the same albeit in a slightly different order and with the consensus being that I'm underestimating Foxcatcher and overestimating Into the Woods.
Obviously Grand Budapest Hotel will be enjoying multiple nominations but can it manage the biggies like Best Picture & Best Director & Best Actor? If we were still in ye olden times of only 5 nominees would it be our 'lone wolf' auteur triumph? I am undoubtedly the most bearish of any of the pundits about its fate but it's only because I have long lamented the fate of Wes Anderson pictures with AMPAS. One sounds like a complete nutter when one says it out loud but the following statement is in fact true "No Wes Anderson live action picture has ever been nominated for ANYTHING outside of Best Screenplay." No, not even Best Production Design which nearly all of them have deserved.
And what of the Fincher continuum? Will Gone Girl be another Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which justmissed a Best Picture nomination despite love across multiple Academy branches?
We're at war here.
It's been ages and ages since an NBR Best Picture winner didn't make the Oscar lineup but did the simmering A Most Violent Year open too late (i.e. two days after voting even begins) for a race that requires the full boil around New Years?
One of These Will Win Birdman, Boyhood, Selma
Sure Things The Imitation Game, Theory of Everything
Probably? Grand Budapest Hotel, Whiplash
But What About? Gone Girl, Unbroken, Into the Woods, Foxcatcher, A Most Violent Year
Longshots Interstellar, Nightcrawler, Mr Turner, American Sniper
Why Aren't They In the Conversation? Wild, Ida
So many questions. So many theoretical answers. Oscar ballots go out tomorrow so the next week is absolutely crucial. If we get 9 Best Picture nominations again I think it's safe to say that the Academy's executives just need to admit that their shifting number of Picture nominees experiment is a failure and round it back up to a Top Ten or return to the old five-wide standard.
How many nominees do you think we'll get?
Saturday, December 27, 2014 at 7:00PM 
Michael C. here with your weekend review
Among the many achievements of Ava DuVernay’s tremendous Selma, the biggest may be that it rescues Martin Luther King from canonization as a two dimensional political saint. In the thirty years since Reagan declared a national holiday in his honor, the rough edges have been sanded off King’s legacy, its complexities all but deleted from the public consciousness. The remaining image is a positive but reductive one. To focus solely on King the martyr, standing at the podium, speaking about his dream of a world without prejudice is to gloss over all the messy grunt work that actually went into altering the course of history.
Now we have Selma, which not only restores King’s humanity, but his agency as a shrewd political strategist. The result is a film that doesn’t just bring the 1965 Selma marches blazing out of the history books but reflects current society back at us with riveting urgency.
I can already feel myself fighting a reluctance to go on extolling Selma’s importance for fear it might appear I am awarding the film bonus points for good intentions and right thinking. So let’s be clear: Selma is above all a triumph of filmmaking, proving that tackling Oscar-friendly material need not lead to a finished film that exudes a tepid, play-it-safe attitude. I can’t recall a moment where I found DuVernay’s film falling short, its grasp equal to its considerable reach at every turn.
Like many of the best biographical films, Selma avoids a birth-to-death retelling of King’s life, letting a narrow portion stand in for the whole. DuVernay’s film picks after King has delivered his “I have a dream” speech”, portraying the months when he organized a series of marches from Selma to Montgomery to protest the infringement on voting rights for southern blacks. With the recent passage of the Civil Rights Act ending legal segregation, President Johnson expects a grateful King to refrain from stirring up trouble, but he is dismayed to find King will not be deterred or even delayed. Instead, Dr. King plans to exert pressure on LBJ by goading the worst of the racist southern bullies into attacking peaceful protesters in front of TV cameras so the ensuing horrors can be beamed directly into the homes of sympathetic northern white audiences.
Selma’s portrayal of the appalling violence endured by protesters is heart stopping in its immediacy. I don’t think I will ever forget the image of a policeman on horseback emerging from a tear gas haze brandishing a whip at fleeing protesters. But where a lesser film would see such material as an end on to itself, Selma uses it as the jumping off point to a wider, more complex picture. The film recalls Lincoln in its depiction of the behind the scenes wheeling and dealing that makes historic change possible, but DuVernay's is the sharper, more disciplined affair, lacking Spielberg’s weakness for schmaltzy emotional crescendos. The script by Paul Webb, reworked by DuVernay, doesn’t shy away from making pointed political critiques either. Scenes contrasting King’s organization against a less effective local civil rights group make an unambiguous statement about the need for protests to be media savvy in pursuit of tangible political goals.
Special salute also to Bradford Young’s striking cinematography, which keeps things intimate and visceral, a million miles away from the stilted honey-drenched lighting other “important” films lay on a with a trowel.
Bradford Young and David Oyelowo on set
David Oyelowo’s mighty performance as King dominates the film, as it must, but one of the pleasant surprises of Selma is how generous it is with its expansive cast. Stephen Root, Tessa Thompson, Oprah Winfrey, Wendell Pierce, Giovanni Ribisi, Martin Sheen – this is only a partial list of the actors afforded moments to shine. And in her limited screen time as Coretta Scott King, Carmen Ejogo conveys the range of their relationship as both a marriage and a political partnership.
And then there are Tom Wilkinson and Tim Roth, a pair of old English pros delivering the character actor goods as two very different southern politicians, President Johnson and Alabama Governor George Wallace, respectively. Roth wisely underplays a figure plenty loathsome without any additional hamming and Wilkinson does justice to the sharp writing by mapping out a marvelously nuanced LBJ. The climactic confrontation between LBJ and Wallace is a corker, packed with the tension of unspoken motives and opinions - right up until some of them get said aloud, that is.
David Oyelowo, is a wonder as King but not quite in the way one expects from a great man biopic performance. One is never tempted to drag out the hoary old, “I felt like I was watching the real person!” cliché. He’s close enough to King to be entirely believable, but his performance is not a feat of mimicry. His best moments are not in duplicating the history book highlights, but in showing how that commanding presence transferred to the quieter behind-the-scenes moments - a fraught confrontation with his wife, a sad audience with the father of a slain protester, a tense altercation over the phone with the president. When the actor is given free rein to let loose with a full blast of King’s oratory it is all the more spellbinding for carrying with it the accumulated power of these smaller moments.
It is shocking to reflect that it took until 2014 for such landmark events to be brought to the big screen. It would have been easy in this case for DuVernay to skim the surface and end up with a satisfying film just by depicting the material at all. By choosing to steer the movie into such ambitious territory DuVernay has proven herself a force to be reckoned with. As a portrait of political unrest in action, Selma could not be more relevant. As the arrival of a directorial heavyweight it is essential viewing. Combine all this with a take on a vital segment of modern American history surprisingly under-explored on film thus far and Selma qualifies as a cinematic event.
Grade: A
Oscar Prospects: Across the board
Related Posts | Previous Reviews
Ava DuVernay, David Oyelowo, Reviews, Selma Saturday, December 27, 2014 at 4:15PM Abstew continues the contenders series highlighting one performance per opening weekend
Chris Pine as Cinderella's Prince in Into the Woods
Best Supporting Actor
Born: Christopher Whitelaw Pine was born August 26, 1980 in Los Angeles, California
The Role: After a labored development over the years (the musical opened on Broadway how long ago?!?) and much controversy before it was even released (they cut what songs exactly?!?), the film version of Stephen Sondheim's beloved musical Into the Woods finally made its way to the big screen courtesy of Disney and Chicago's Oscar-nominated helmer, Rob Marshall. The story interconnects classic characters from fairy tales (Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, and Rapunzel) and shows how the story continues after their happily ever afters. Joining in the colorful cast of characters is Chis Pine playing the charming Prince to Cinderella.
