Oh • Yel • LINK • Oh!

Gurus of Gold a new chart reflects the PGA nominations
Variety talks about the lack of screeners for Selma
NYT great profile of Patricia Arquette. People are laying the tributes on thick now for the Oscar campaign. 
THR you know it's Oscar season when people get fired for "smear campaigns" 
The Guardian exchanges pleasantries with Sienna Miller (Foxcatcher, American Sniper):

You've made a good movie for once."  

The Dissolve on the Razzie shortlists - nominations soon
i09 52 years of Spider-Man's mask a spiffy quick visual
Hollywood Elsewhere Josh Gad may play Roger Ebert in Russ & Roger Go Beyond
i09 Eddie Redmayne shares details of his audition for The Hobbit
Playbill Into the Woods breaks into the Billboard top 20 
Film School Rejects on How the Disneyfied Into the Woods loses its allegorical power, especially in regards to the AIDS crisis
Vulture how Looking is reinventing itself for Season 2 (premiering on Golden Globe night, fyi) 
Pajiba on an amazing Boogie Nights story involving Burt Reynolds 
/Film Matthew Vaughn, promoting Kingsman: The Secret Service thinks people have had enough of Nolanified superhero films and want more fun
Playbill god help us all. Cats is returning to Broadway. There are still so many 1980s musicals on the boards here. Wish we could have more originals and fewer returns. P.S. Cats is the first Broadway show I ever saw so I have a certain affection. But still...
Australia Womens Weekly Russell Crowe saying annoying things again. This time knocking actresses for wanting better roles when they're older
In Contention North Texas critics like Boyhood and the usual supporting players. Gyllenhaal & Pike for leads

List-Mania
Variety on ten big spenders. See the insane amount of money the studios spend on ads for their movies. Godzilla tops the list spending big to make big but The Judge also wasted a small fortune 
/Film a grab bag of lists about the film year
Vox Todd Vanderwerff's top ten list   
Adam Male 5 gay men share their top ten LGBT movies list (well, there unfortunately isn't much in the way of "L" here). Interesting to see so little overlap. Nobody ever interviews me for this sort of thing but my list would contain a few of these. 
Comics Alliance best comic books of the year 

How to Pronounced David Oyelowo
There's finally video of Brad Pitt schooling us all on David Oyelowo's name. Here you go!

 And while we're on the topic, Interview did a Q&Andy with him. On why he left the UK and came to Hollywood:

I had a very nice career in the U.K., but heroes of mine are Daniel Day Lewis, Sidney Poitier, Denzel Washington, and when I looked at the zenith of what they do, it came out of Hollywood. So my wife and I took the risk in 2007 of leaving the U.K., coming here, and hoping that I could scale those heights. 

Dizzying heights indeed but Selma's a great step up.

And Finally...
For those of you just returning from a long holiday, don't miss... 

#20-11 Best of the Year, (now updated with honorable mentions)
#10-01 Best of the Year, Nathaniel's List 
Unjust Pride DVD Sony has put the gay heroes in the closet 

..and more interviews with:
Costume Designer Michael Wilkinson Before Superhero Glory, Noah
Actor Finn Wittrock A Brief Scene in an Elevator
Actor Oscar Isaac  A Most Famous Year... Coming Soon
Cinematography Yves Belanger The Man Who Shot Reese 

Review: Selma

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

Lupita Nyong'o and David Oyelowo to Star in Romantic Drama 'Americanah'

Earlier this year Lupita Nyong'o acquired the rights to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's award-winning 2012 novel Americanah, signing on to star as Nigerian émigré Ifemelu, as well as produce along with Brad Pitt's Plan B Entertainment. David Oyelowo has also signed on to star as romantic lead Obinze. The book is divine: beautifully written, emotionally complex, swooningly romantic and often bitingly funny. It's also full of razor-sharp insight on immigration and cultural identity, the shifting concept of home, and blackness in America, Nigeria, and Britain.

The project is guaranteed to be a meaty opportunity for Nyong'o and Oyelowo, but is still several steps away from production. Some questions:

1. Should we worry that the project doesn't yet have a script? I'd say no, in part because of my love for the source material, but largely due to the strength of Plan B producing. They've got a respectable filmography, and the last couple years have been a serious hot streak (Moneyball, 12 Years a Slave, Selma). They shouldn't have trouble attracting top-drawer talent. With the right team in place, this could be someone's shot at a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar.

2. Who should direct? It's only natural that Ava DuVernay's name should come to mind, given her skill with romantic drama and epic political context. It would make hers a 3-for-3 David Oyelowo filmography, and she certainly already has the in with Plan B Entertainment. But since the story is so indivisible from the non-American experience, and so specifically Nigerian in perspective, perhaps a Nollywood director might be a better choice. Perhaps Biyi Bandele, whose adaptation of Adichie's novel Half of a Yellow Sun came out earlier this year to mixed reviews, would be interested in another shot at the author's work?

3. Will Beyoncé help with the movie's PR? When Beyoncé dropped her secret album last year, she gave Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie a major profile boost by sampling her TED talk "Everyone Should Be a Feminist on the song "***Flawless", which sent Americanah rocketing up the Amazon sales charts. (To be honest, that's also how I first heard of the book.) Maybe the movie release can be preceded by a tie-in Beyoncé single that samples dialogue from the movie? Harness the power of Bey and you have the makings of a serious box office hit on your hands.

It's impossible not to admire Lupita Nyong'o's initiative and savvy in carving out her career, snapping up the rights to an interesting project herself and then backing that up by attracting major talent and industry clout. No production date is set; join me in hoping that this moves forward smoothly.

Have you read Americanah? Who else do you think should be brought on to the production?

‘Selma’ Wins Big at the AAFCA Awards & NAACP Image Award Nominations

Margaret here with a look at the nominees for the 2014 NAACP Image Awards, as well as the winners of the African American Film Critics Association year-end prizes.

It continues to be a good season for Selma, which racked up eight Image Award nominations-- especially impressive when you consider that there are only seven categories. (Six of its nominations are for acting.) Period drama Belle and James Brown biopic Get On Up both received five nominations each, and the music industry romantic drama Beyond the Lights earned three.

The AAFCA announced their awards, naming Selma best picture alongside nine other outstanding films. The AAFCA Top Ten Films of 2014 are as follows in order of distinction: 

• SELMA
• THE IMITATION GAME
• THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING
• BIRDMAN
• BELLE
• TOP FIVE
• UNBROKEN
• DEAR WHITE PEOPLE
• GET ON UP
• BLACK OR WHITE

A complete list of AAFCA winners, and Image nominees (some interesting stuff - now with double the Viola Davis!)  after the jump...

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Oscar's Acting Categories Take Shape. Or Do They?

If you're an Oscar chart junkie, you'll see some key shifts on all four acting charts which are now updated. The biggest switcheroo is Jessica Chastain moving to Supporting Actress (the original prediction back in April) which shakes that field up more than it creates a vacuum with the Best Actress race and both Foxcatcher men dropping out of the predicted lead actor shortlist.

Papa, how can I be too high in rank to dine with the servants and too low to dine with my family?

Best Actress has been hard to suss out beyond two sure things: Julianne Moore as a professor with early on-set Alzheimers and Reese Witherspoon as a woman trying to forgive herself and start anew by hiking the PCT. Both of those films are major star vehicles in that they put their leading actress and her considerable gifts front and center without obstructed views. Gone Girl and The Theory of Everything also look somewhat likely to produce nominees but those are definitely two-lead films which Pike and Jones must share with their screen hubbies. On the podcast this weekend we'll talk more about this race because the field still seems wide open beyond those four names. And, if past years are any indication, one of them could surprisingly drop out. There are a lot of viable women hoping to unseat them, which makes "where are the best actress candidates?" articles in major outlets like THR and The Washington Post absolutely mystifying or ignorant or sexist or something. Something not right is the point. Particular maddening is that THR article which claims two dozen viable Best Actor candidates beyond the presumed frontrunners but will even list the most longshot of longshots like Eller Coltrane (Boyhood) and Al Pacino (The Humbling) and Kevin Costner (Black and White) -- none of which have any heat -- as "credible" contenders but can't think of ANY slightly under the radar women other than Jenny Slate (Obvious Child)? That's wearing some serious blinders to support your thesis. [more...]

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