Ask Nathaniel...

It's that time again. Each week I choose 10-12 questions to answer. (No, I can't answer them all... I just choose the ones that spark an answer. Not everything does!) If you feel compelled to ask perhaps I'll feel compelled to answer? [Please note: This week there is a ban on Meryl Streep questions. She hogs this column as much as she hogs Oscar nominations ;) ]

Ask away!

TV @ The Movies: "Supernatural" ♥ Nicole Kidman?

Don't misunderstand . I don't actually watch Supernatural but you know how some nights you're bone-tired and whatever is on is what you end up half-watching. (I think my TV must have been on the CW due to Ringer). I always perk up when TV shows reference movies and wonder what possessed the writers. 

Sam (Jared Padalecki) and Dean (Jensen Ackles) discussing witches

In the episode the supernatural hunting brothers are investigating mysterious murders connected to this guy Don (played by James Marsters) and his wife (played by another Buffy alum Charisma Carpenter... so it's like Spike & Cordelia got married. Ewwww!)

Dean: So the scorned wife is into the dark stuff.
Sam: And Don's just in the dark.
Dean: Hmmm. it's kind of like Bewitched. You know Don is Darren and doesn't even know it. Lot of laughs 'till you cheat on your wife.

Sam: A Bewitched reference? Really?
Dean: [Lustfully] Dude. Nicole Kidman was in the remake. Redhead. Hellooooo.

This is the first time I've ever heard the BEWITCHED (2005) referenced in a positive way anywhere in my life !!! 

Beauty Break: Rose, Uma, Michelle & Tilda

Thanks to reader Emmanuel for sending me this photo...

Rose Huntington-Whiteley, Uma Thurman, Michelle Yeoh and Tilda Swinton this week in Milan. What a photo, eh? This was taken at a launch party for the Vertu’s ‘Constellation’ smart phone. I thank the smart phone for requiring this much collective gorgeousity for its debut.

Though she's clearly the odd girl out here, what with three bonafide screen goddesses on the coach, I don't have the heart to photoshop Rose out (but, yes, I was tempted). She got such a severe beating for Transformers: Dark of the Moon and please... we've seen much worse when it comes to models acting! You know I'm right. People were just ready to pounce because she replaced Megan Fox and because it's Transformers which only requires that the girlfriend be fuckable.

More photos after the jump...

Click to read more ...

Yes, No, Maybe So: "In the Land of Blood and Honey"

A few readers have expressed dismay that I never talk about Angelina Jolie's directorial debut. There have even been suggestions that I have it in for Angelina. If by "in" you mean LOVE HER, than yes, I most definitely have it in for her. She once walked right past me and made eye contact (in a non-professional setting -- i.e. i wasn't reporting on anything and she wasn't promoting anything)  and I absolutely treasure the memory. The reasons for not covering her film before are several but dull and almost all of them boil down to two things:

1. This is not the kind of blog that fawns endlessly on every detail of pre production and filming and multiple marketing events before a movie is released. The Film Experience prefers actual movies -- even old ones (gasp!) -- to theoretical and future movies, as out of fashion as that may be on the internet. 

2. I really didn't expect it to come out this year!

I never plan to change my ways on #1 but I have totally been proven wrong about #2 so let's do a Yes No Maybe So 

IN THE LAND OF BLOOD AND HONEY

YES

• Looks sensitively directed, shot, edited*, scored ** and acted (from both of the leads. Some of those looks just break your heart). Sensitivity is something such films need in abundance lest they hit the atrocity notes too hard. War films -- particularly modern war films -- tend to wallow so much in the atrocity that it's almost desensitizing in addition to being just fucking depressing. Our capacity for violence is worrisome as is the capacity for watching it and than just going about your daily business like it's nothing.
  
  * it's impossible to tell anything about a films editing from a trailer. We know this but it's still easy to pretend that trailers have all the  same qualities as their movies.
  
  ** it's usually impossible to tell anything about the way a film is scored, too... since most trailers don't use their final score. But the temp music they were using was good.

NO 

• n/a

MAYBE SO

• The dialogue is very straightforward, with characters speaking themes and situations aloud. That's not always inappropriate in heightened settings like war where subtext generally becomes text,  everything being stripped down to its most primal parts... but will it be too on the nose?
• The trailer works well with its pinpoint focus on the Lover as the Other but it hits the note repeatedly. This begs the question of what else there is to the movie and can a once passionate love affair, destroyed by fear and suspicion, be enough to sustain the whole narrative?

"In the Land of Blood and Honey"

Are you a yes no or maybe so? My mind flashed briefly to Shot Through the Heart that Linus Roache television movie: anyone remember that one?

Do you see Oscar potential here? I'm doubtful mostly (and cynically) due to the lack of Hollywood glamour on screen and the lack of American characters. Many well meaning foreign war films are made each year and Oscar rarely takes notice.

What would you like Angelina Jolie to do for an encore? 

Oscar Horrors: Poltergeist's Polter-ghastliness

Oscar Horrors continues...

HERE LIES... Poltergeist's ghosts and ghouls.  The Oscar loss for Cuesta Verde’s original residents of evil still haunts me to this day. Spielberg’s other 1982 production featuring otherworldly visitation beat Carol-Anne and Company to the FX gold. The restless undead may have lost out on hauling an Oscar back to the Beyond that day, but you never know if they might sooner or later... maybe... come back...

“Poltergeist,” stresses the creepy voiceover that ends the trailer, “It knows what scares you.” Thus so, too, do Richard Edlund, Michael Wood and Bruce Nicholson, the scare-mongering trio responsible for its Oscar nominated (and Bafta winning) visual effects. These were the guys (along with 106 other crew members) who threw JoBeth Williams around her bedroom before dropping her into a cadaver-filled watery grave. They scared seven shades of senselessness out of all of us by making us think every clown doll we saw thereafter might very well drag us under our beds. 

They made us believe that our televisions might be conduits for the ‘TV people’ to enter our plane of earthly existence to cause all manner of paranormal activity. Whatever you do, guys, don’t tell us thattelevision is evil!

And that’s in between merely making doors slam shut of their own accord, building near-impossible furniture displays out of possessed kitchen chairs and making unearthly light gush forth from some otherworldly portal-slash-closetspace. In short, and to paraphrase Poltergeist’s most famous line: these guys brought ‘“them” here’. I mean, who didn’t think that evil entities were hiding within the unsettling fuzz of the TV static after seeing Tobe Hooper’s family get repeatedly spooked out?

everyday objects suddenly possessed

This is why Poltergeist’s scare tactics work their spell so well. The visual effects team, transposing the imagination of Spielberg and director Tobe Hooper,  took commonplace objects and familiar environments and made them feel odd and uncanny, possessed with unwanted life where none is meant to be. The most effective scares were conjured via the careful, sly and playful subversion of the things we know to be safe and free of fear. That’s the inspired labour of Edlund, Wood and Nicholson’s work - the fruits came via the spectacular spectral show.

However justly celebrated E.T. was, Poltergeist’s ghouls were a marvel of weird and wonderful technical wizardry. They should be remembered for the impact they had on the early 1980s horror map, Oscar win or no. But maybe Poltergeist’s very best visual effect was a living, breathing flesh and blood embodiment of special extrasensory perception? The vocal and attitudinal magic weaved by Zelda Rubinstein as Tangina Barrons was key to all the polter-joy and ghastly-geist. I don’t believe there’s an existing Oscar category for Inherent Spectral Awesomeness. If there were, Tangina would banish all competition to the televisual beyond with one wave of her hand.

16 More Oscar Horrors