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

We Need To Talk About Linking

MTV Tom Hiddleson singing the praise of his new Thor 2 director Patty Jenkins. He just loves Monster (2003) and Kenneth Branagh assigned it to him as prep before Thor 1; how weirdly coincidental.
Go Fug Yourself has kind words for Amanda Seyfried and hilarious words for Justin Timberlake.
Awards Daily Sasha thinks this has been a weak year for cinema -- I'm guessing because of the lack of consensus on a single masterpiece. I'd say the opposite. I can't get over how good this year is. It's so exciting to be looking at an awards season that might not have a frontrunner. Consensus makes it boring. Bring on the passionate discussion of what is "Best" please!

Acidemic in praise of crazy "chicks of death" dangerous women from Flash Gordon (1936) through Rosemary's Baby (1968) to Trouble Every Day (2001)
Reelizer How beautiful is this poster for The Iron Giant by Kevin Tong? Me want.

"The Iron Giant" © illustrator Kevin Tong

Movie Morlocks Kimberly from Cinebeats on Werner Herzog's excellent adapation of Nosferatu starring Klaus Kinski. Such a good movie. 
MNPP JA loves Carey Mulligan and thinks you do, too. Exciting projects she's lining up. 
/Film taking storyboarding to the next level with Darren Aronofsky's Noah's Arc movie.  

Ultra Culture bitches about Rotten Tomatoes in order to praise Terri (which was recently nominated for one of Gotham's prizes)  
Towleroad Zachary Quinto to play a gay ghost on American Horror Story. 

Empire offers up a final We Need To Talk About Kevin poster with "Joker" coloring. I love movie posters but when a movie makes this many and keeps changing it up I start to worry that they don't know what they're selling anymore. 

Finally...

The Lost Boy thinks that Viola Davis is going to win the Best Actress Oscar. That seems to be going around. Here she is at the Women in Hollywood Awards.

The imagination is so potent. And that's really why we're actors because it's the power of transformation, the power of not being you, of going into a world that is different but ultimately real. And I always felt I had that I had that power even as a little black girl with the afro and using the crisco for moisturizer for my skin. I always felt that everything was possible. That I always had the power to be anything i wanted to be.

As I was walking the red carpet someone asked "What sets you apart from everyboy in the room?"

"Well... I'm black."

[Laughter] and then she launches into an honest and beautiful speech about Cicely Tyson "throwing her a rope" as a young dreaming girl and the need for stories about women of color in the movies. She is awesome.

Theater Decor, Movie Prices, "Anonymous" Costumes

On my way home from morning appointments I usually slip into movie theaters to see if anyone has a matinee showing that piques my interest. Though I get my share of press screenings and screeners, I love to see movies in regular release. There was a Margin Call showing at the perfect time at the gorgeous new Elinor Bunin Munroe theater at Lincoln Center but -- argh -- they don't offer matinee pricing and I just don't do full price in the morning. We can only control so many things about the egregious costs of living and one of them for me is that I do not pay full price if I see a movie in the morning. You gotta draw the line somewhere since movie theaters seem to raise their prices at least twice a year. (Do any of you get raises twice a year? Show of hands? Nobody?! Why do movie theaters keep raising their prices?!)

So I stopped at my the Loew's Lincoln Square which does offer matinee $ but nothing at the time I needed and last time I bought a ticket merely as time filler I suffered mightily for it. But I was amused to see this costume display for Anonymous when I entered the lobby since I had just been talking to the director (the aforementioned morning appointment) and was carrying an Anonymous book under my arml the movie was suddenly enveloping me. T'was inescapable! 

The film's costume design is by Lisy Christi, who is best known for doing Michael Haneke pictures. (Quite a leap to Roland Emmerich, aesthetic-wise, eh?)  Oscar loves this time period (the movie stretches from 1560 to 1603) so could the costume branch be interested? Maybe this will be the third Roland Emmerich movie to win nominations? His movies generally make a mint at the box office but only The Patriot (2000) and Independence Day (1996) have previously entered the Oscar conversation.

At the very least it won't hurt that Vanessa Redgrave is playing Oscar's all-time favorite royal. Didn't Andy Warhol once say 'In the future every actress will be famous for playing Queen Elizabeth for 15 minutes.' ???

Enough of my silly babbling. Your turn! Any interest in Shakespeare conspiracy theaters? Does your movie theater dress things up with displays? And do you love starting your day with a cheap matinee show? 

Oscars Horrors: Hellboys and Albinos

In this series, Team Experience is looking at Oscar nominated or Oscar winning contributions from or related to the horror genre. Horror has many hooks (and other deadly pointy things) but it's historically lacking in Oscar bait.

HERE LIES... Hellboy's makeup, sent to the grave from Benjamin Button's cradle in the 2008 competition for Best Achievement in Makeup for 2008; aging in reverse buried ageless supernatural creatures. 

Have you ever found yourself wholly confused by what Oscar's makeup branch looks for in a movie? Aside from aging prosthetics, where latex is lathered on to  take movie stars from cradle to grave in bloated biopics, there seems to be no consistency in how they vote. Benjamin Button's aging, which was surely heavily computer abetted, won the Oscar whilst Nicole Kidman's nose in The Hours was ruled ineligible due to computer touchups years earlier.  If you stop to recall that that the subgenre of movies that is most obviously makeup dependent (the zombie movie) has never received one makeup effects nomination it sets the head spinning right off one's shoulders. What are they looking for? It's my dream to corner one of them one days and ask just that question.

The case of Hellboy II: The Golden Army is an interesting one because, though the movie is rife with beautiful prosthetics work, many of the characters appeared in the earlier film Hellboy (2004) for which Mike Elizalde and Thomas Floutz did not receive nominations. Technically makeup work within a sequel must be sufficiently "new" to qualify. Was it the adorable site of Little Orphan 'Code Name: Hellboy' in the prologue flashback? 

The makeup work was so perfect that child actor Monste Ribé could even brush his fake teeth!

Why was the amazing sight of Ron Perlman as the adult Hellboy in 2004 not enough for a makeup nomination? Perhaps we're so accustomed to seeing genre favorite Ron Perlman buried in latex and prosthetics that it's only the site of him without (like in Drive this year) that warrants any double takes and "how did they do that?" wonder!

Or maybe the nomination came from those twin Royal elves Prince Nuada (Luke Goss, pictured) and Princess Nuala (Anna Walton) and their albino skin and weirdly creepy scarring?

Either way I hope the makeup artists or Guillermo del Toro got around to thanking Ralph Bakshi and Frank Frazetta for the Fire & Ice inspiration... "NEKRON!!!!!"

Have you ever seen the Hellboy movies?
Hellboy would sure be a tough costume to pull off for Halloween.

Gotham Awards: The Tree of Marcy May's Sheltered Descendants

The Gotham Award nominees were announced today. Though they're not affiliated I like to think of them as the East Coast Spirit Awards on account of the similar types of films they tend to honor (independent and lower budgeted films) and the slightly confusing windows of eligibility. The ceremony will be held on November 28th, 2011 here in NYC which is the same day that the New York Film Critics Circle have just announced as the date on which they'll name their winners. So mark those calendars. Awards Season begins in earnest on Monday November 28th, 2011. So the season will be almost exactly three months long this year what with the Oscars arriving on Sunday February 26th, 2012.

Best Feature:

• Beginners (Mike Mills)
• The Descendants (Alexander Payne)
• Meek's Cutoff (Kelly Reichardt
)
• Take Shelter (Jeff Nichols
)
• The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick)

'One of these things is not like the others, one of these things is not the same.' The black sheep of this shortlist family is The Descendants which is decidedly more mainstream than the other contenders: big movie star, crowd-pleasing rather than crowd-risky, obviously on its way to Oscar nods.

Several categories and few opinions after the jump.

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