A "Blade Runner 2049" Teaser is Here!

Chris here. Denis Villeneive has scored his biggest box office hit with Arrival (it's inching close to $100M) but he could score an even bigger hit next year with Blade Runner 2049. The sequel is bound to spur steady curiosity and shrieks of sacrilege from the original's faithful over the next year, but Villeneuve should be the force that unites both factions. And to ease (or maybe exacerbate) those thoughts, we have our first look at the visuals with the just released teaser! We'll save the full YNMS for a more revealing trailer, but I have some thoughts...

• That's a lot of voiceover for a teensy trailer. Uh oh, did they not learn from the original's struggles?
• Denis Villeneuve and Roger Deakins, reunited and it feels so good.
• Ryan Gosling gives good coat. With all that mood and stoicism, this teaser plays like Only God Forgives but, you know, not terrible.
• We see you on that piano, Ryan. La La Land crossover fanfiction!
• With these mostly dusty hues, it's a relief to know that this might be a decades late sequel that doesn't borrow too much from its original, no?
• Deckard seems to have gone all McMansion while in hiding. Maybe Sean Young is lurking somewhere after all.

What do you think of this first look?

Who's Joining Jenkins & Chazelle in the Best Director Shortlist?

While working on Oscar chart updates, Best Director suddenly felt quite loose and ripe for shifting favor. While the Directors Guild Nominations will surely clarify that race to an extent those aren't until January 12th, a week after Oscar nomination voting begins. Right now though the coveted nominations for Best Director look fairly up in the air beyond the two thirtysomething wonder boys who have been showered with the most honors already: Damien Chazelle (La La Land) and Barry Jenkins (Moonlight). 

La La Land is only Chazelle's third feature (though many would mistake it for his second) and Moonlight is only Jenkins second (though many would mistake it for his first) so they're relative newbies. Oscar, however, is an octogenarian institution and they aren't always comfortable handing everything over the reigns to fresh blood. In fact the Best Director's race isn't usually that amenable to multiple fresh faces. You have to go back to 2009 to find an Oscar year with two directors nominated that were this green in their filmmaking careers (Jason Reitman's Up in the Air was his third feature and Precious was Lee Daniel's second) and they definitely weren't the frontrunners. For a long this year we were predicting a shortlist of all first-time nominees in the directing category but that hasn't happened since 1999. It's not a common occurrence.

Oscar's love of long-since proven directors suggests good news for Gibson (Hacksaw Ridge), Eastwood (Sully) or Scorsese (Silence) but the only one of those films with any noticeable precursor heat is Hacksaw Ridge and are they really going to welcome Gibson back in the year of angry white men upsetting the world with their prejudices? 

Kenneth Lonergan and Denis Villeneuve both have heat with Best Picture probables Manchester by the Sea and Arrival respectively but performance pictures like Manchester can sometimes suddenly be absent when the director's nominations are read out and critically acclaimed sci-fi pictures can also stumble come nomination morning due to genre biases. They might be in but they might not.  In a year when the buzz hasn't totally settled on a handful of auteurs, Oscar can sometimes surprise with a left field foreign or indie choice but even that seems hard to parse this year since so many different pictures have small passionate devotees but not huge mouthy legions of them. 

Are we overthinking this? Check out the New Best Director and Best Picture chart and report back. 

Best Director Chart Revisions

by Nathaniel R

This morning's update - the Best Director chart. And just as I'd finished those chart updates the Silence trailer arrived so we'll discuss that later today. So much happens all at once.

Speaking of. You don't want to see the way my doorman looks at me whenever I walk into the building - there's always a new stack of packages from the studios to sign for. Today alone there have been 4 deliveries of multiple packages. Why must campaign teams wait until the day before Thanksgiving to send everything? It's overwhelming really. It's the same as the studios waiting until the second half of December to release all movies ever. 

But back to the topic at hand - Best Director Hopefuls. We'll divvy them up into 3 categories after the jump...

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Say What? "Blade Runner 2049"

Chris here. Exactly one year out from release, we've now learned that Denis Villeneuve's upcoming Blade Runner sequel is officially titled Blade Runner 2049. Should 2049 likely be the time in which the sequel is set that keeps the followup quite accurate in the timeline considering 35 years will have passed between films. However, this still raises lingering questions about Harrison Ford's Deckard and aging - is the film backing off of Ridley Scott's confirmation of Deckard's replicant status. With Villeneuve and Ryan Gosling on the Oscar trail this season, we're hoping to get more hints in the coming months.

Adding to the mystery is our first set photo, with stars Ryan Gosling and Harrison Ford oddly keeping it cazh considering the original's chilly aesthetics.

Tell us in the comments: what are director, producer, and stars discussing? What's casting that loving glow in Gosling's eye for Villeneuve? What's Ford indicating about Scott?

TIFF: Relating to Amy Adams in "Nocturnal Animals" and "Arrival"

Nathaniel R reporting from TIFF. The festival is winding down now but my mind keeps drifting back to the Amy Adams double feature on day two. If there were gif walls featuring all of Amy Adams close-ups in both of her movies this year, they would accurately describe this critics innermost thoughts about the movies they came from. Read on and I'll elaborate (without spoilers) though we'll obviously revisit and go into more detail when both movies actually...ahem... arrive in mid November which is unofficially 'Amy Adams Month' according to distributors.

ARRIVAL (Dir. Denis Villeneuve, US)
Paramount Pictures. Opens on November 11th

In this gripping and sensationally crafted sci-fi drama, adapted from the short story "Story of Your Life" by Ted Chiang, Amy Adams plays Dr. Louise Banks. Dr Banks is a prominent linguist who is recruited by the government to attempt to communicate with extra-terrestrials. They have arrived on Earth or, rather, are hovering above it in twelve space crafts each in a separate area of the world, appearing to do nothing at all. Will the world's fearful governments nuke the ships or can Dr Banks save the world (if it's even threatened?) by learning why they've come?

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