Documentaries: Officially Too Much of a Good Thing?

Glenn here. After decades of trying to attain the same critical and cultural awareness as feature films, it appears documentaries are now suffering from a case of too much of a good thing. We’re in a day and age where documentaries are so common that it’s impossible for the Academy’s documentary branch to keep up. Apparently 151 docos have been submitted - an average of three a week! - for this year’s Oscars and just like Diane Keaton, something’s gotta give. 

Last year the Academy set up a secret online forum of sorts for documentary branchmembers so they could post recommendations of titles to help whittle down the number of contenders. “Nobody’s recommended that anthopological documentary about North Atlantic fishermen? Fine, I’ll just watch Blackfish.” I like the idea in concept, but Leviathan was highly acclaimed so what then? Admittedly, it would be nice if they devised a year-round system that didn't require voters to watch a glut of 150 films in just a few months. It certainly can't be doing the films any favours. And yet they’ve fought hard for docos to get cinema releases and to have a prominent place at the Oscars and in the general discussion of film so, really, maybe they shouldn’t be complaining?

I can’t imagine this year’s mystery Oscar forum ignoring the likes of Sarah Polley's Stories We Tell (already shipped to voters), Gabriela Cowperthwaite's Blackfish, music docos like Morgan Neville's Twenty Feet from Stardom (the year's highest grossing non-comedy/pop concert doc) and Greg Camalier's Muscle Shoals, Joshua Oppenheimer's controversial The Act of Killing, Teller's Tim's Vermeer, American Promise by Joe Brewster and Michele Stephenson (reviewed at NYFF), Martha Shane & Lana Wilson's After Tiller, Alex Gibney's The Armstrong Lie, Eroll Morris' The Unknown Known, Rick Rowley's Dirty Wars, Zachary Heinzerling's Cutie and the Boxer and Roger Ross Williams' God Loves Uganda to name a bunch. It is too much to ask they check out the four-hour At Berkeley? See how great this category is nowadays? This branch has the exact opposite problem to the animated film category!

It's easy to assume certain titles they won't pay attention to at all, but which audiences should be adviced to seek out. They're rarely attracted to cinematic figure fronted docs like Sophie Huber's Harry Dean Stanton: Partly Fiction, Jeffrey Schwarz's I Am Divine or Rodney Ascher's Room 237 about Stanley Kubrick's The Shining.. Nor do they care for the many niche fashion docos that are released every year like Matthew Miele's Scatter My Ashes at Bergdorf's or Fabien Constant's Mademoiselle C. How about festival hits, the eligibility of which remains in limbo with us until a formal list is announced. There's Stephen Silha, Eric Slade & Dawn Logsdon's Big Joy: The Adventures of James Broughton, Jehane Noujaim's The Sqaure (reviewed at NYFF) and Rathy Panh's astonishing The Missing Picture, which will also compete for Cambodia in the foreign language category. 

I could go on and on. These were just the high profile titles. Then there are the small titles that inevitably weasel their way into the category based on the strength of their filmmaking. Remember the Weinstein’s won for Undefeated despite it making little impact at the box office. Are you looking forward to this year's documentary race? I think it's always going to be exciting when there are so many high profile, high quality efforts. I expect the critics prizes are going to go fairly evenly between Stories We Tell and The Act of Killing, but what are your favourites of 2013 so far?

Furthermore, the Academy have announced the eight documentary shorts that will compete at next year's awards. They are:

• CaveDigger, Karoffilms
• Facing Fear, Jason Cohen Productions, LLC
• Jujitsu-ing Reality, Sobini Films
• Karama Has No Walls, Hot Spot Films
• The Lady in Number 6: Music Saved My Life, Reed Entertainment
• Prison Terminal: The Last Days of Private Jack Hall, Prison Terminal LLC
• Recollections, notrac productions
• SLOMO, Big Young Films and Runaway Films

Any eagle-eyed readers seen either of them?

Link Flood

Slant Gravity, IMAX, and the horrors of front row seating
The Guardian a Carrie promotion stunt here in NYC. Imagine seeing this in real life.
The Verge the original teaser trailer to Star Wars is curiously light on Han Solo
Variety Destin Cretton, hot off the empathetic and special Short Term 12 may direct Glass Castle based on the bestseller with Jennifer Lawrence in the starring role
Deejay Italia Cher on Italian television calls Madonna a "magic bitch"

My New Plaid Pants Bubble Boy and Prisoners? Twins!
Boy Culture Josh Hutcherson is "mostly" straight
CHUD undeterred by those Prometheus reviews, Ridley Scott is moving ahead with Blade Runner 2 and may bring Harrison Ford along with him
/Film Darren Aronofsky promises huge complicated visual effects for his biblical epic Noah ... does that mean Matthew Libatique can finally win a cinematography Oscar? (that question is inspired by this recent divisive post on Gravity)
/Variety Toni Collette romantic comedy Lucky Them gets a distributor. This is how massive the TIFF selection  is each year. I did not even know that Toni, one of my very favorite actors, even had a movie playing there!

Finally, /Film shares the shortlists for the new Fantastic Four cast. The weird thing is that though I like nearly every actor and actress mentioned I think most of them are pretty terrible choices for those roles. Except for maybe Margo Robbie as Sue Storm. Interesting that her career is suddenly hot after a failed tv show (Pan Am). It's gotta be buzz about her sexcapades in The Wolf of Wall Street, right? I think my problem in picturing a successful Fantastic Four movie is that that comic book property has, like Wonder Woman, a retro feel. I don't mean that as a bad thing but Hollywood definitely does and they're always worry about how to young down that type of property. But that doesn't work. Some things are just "square" you know, to use an antiquated term. They need to think more along the lines of that bang-up job Marvel did interpreting Captain America for the 21st century by rooting him first so boldly in the early 20th century where he feels so natural. 

Exclamatory Titles

We're celebrating the 1968 film year sporadically as countdown to the Smackdown! 

The first time I consciously remember obsessing over exact typography in a film title was in 1995 when David Fincher's Se7en emerged and then again when Moulin Rouge! hit in 2001. With the latter I got angry every time I saw someone type that title without the exclamation point. Bazmark movies require their specific punctuation. (See also: Romeo + Juliet. It's just not the same at all with an ampersand!) 

Surveying 1968's film releases recently I couldn't help but wonder if that era, a seminal time for the world and the cinema, and that year specifically was the peak of exclamatory film titles? No less than four major films released that year asked you to shout their titles rather than politely sound them out.

BOOM! with Liz & Dick. Which also wins our Best Tagline of '68 for "together they devour life"
OLIVER! the only exclamation point film title to ever win the Best Picture prize (though not the only nominee obviously)
BANDOLERO! with Jimmy Stewart, Dean Martin & Raquel Welch. The exclamation point wasn't exclamatory enough so they had to add all caps in the tagline "a NEW kind of western"
STAR! with Julie Andrews ! as Gertrud Lawrence

Are you fussy about people using exactly correct titles? I am. I mean if you say Moulin Rouge without the exclamation point it's just a dusty Jose Ferrer biopic, don'cha know.

The only excuse for ditching the exclamation point is when you're just not feeling it.

♪ ...or by a comma when the feeling's not as strong... ♫

(Geraldine is such a cocktease.)

Be Careful What You Wish For: Lubezki's First Oscar?

"Oscar giveth. Oscar taketh away."

I've said it often and each year the phrase reasserts its truthfulness. One might also substitute this with "Be careful what you wish for." Oscar maniacs know this warning well. They beg for a first Oscar for Winslet or a third for Streep, for example, and then those things come true and no one is really satisifed with the way it came to pass. And that's just two recent examples. I don't much believe in "locks" in Oscar races in the way most pundits and Oscar fans do -- especially pre-Christmas locks. Upsets do happen, fates don't align, narratives don't take hold and so on. But if there's one or two Oscars this year that I feel are most probable at this juncture, yea even unto lock-dom, it's not Best Actress Cate Blanchett (though she's in third place for "most likely"), but the visual effects and cinematography of Gravity. 

Famed DP Emmanuel Lubezki is a true genius not just a "genius" in the overindulgent fandom sense. His work is exquisitely lit and beautifully composed but never in quite the same way, each time his light beautifully enveloping and serving the film at hand.  If you think of it like vocal range he's a Mariah Carey/Cyndi Lauper 4 octave diva while most other DPs, even the really fine ones, are closer to the standard 2 octave pop stars. I've wanted him to win the Oscar so many times and I still consider it insane that he lost for both Children of Men (2006) and The Tree of Life (2011).

Oscar Trivia, Computer Trouble, and more after the jump

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Monty & The Seasons First Oscar Screeners

Monty, my beloved gray furball, is the web's original cat Oscar pundit. So once again we beg his feline proclamations. They are usually mysterious and non-committal but there are also the unambiguous dismissals,  100% prescient predictions and dumb blunders... just like any pundit might make.

The first screeners of the season arrived last night: indie hit Mud and Sarah Polley's documentary hopeful Stories We Tell. I presented them to him. Which would Monty favor?

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