Batman v Running Time, Ex Machina v Blockbusters, and More

Can you believe Christmas is just 3 days away? Eeep how fast the month has gone. Let's jump right into news & links...

Women and Hollywood well, this is good timing. Charlotte Rampling is getting an eight film retrospective in NYC starting Wednesday... just in time to remind East Coast AMPAS members of her brilliance before balloting. Do NOT miss The Night Porter (1974) or Under the Sand (2000) if you haven't seen them.
THR looks at make or break moments coming in 2016 from Batman v Superman to MTV's Shannara Chronicles
Comics Alliance Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice is apparently 151 minutes long. Yikes. Here's an idea: cut the death of little Bruce's parents because how many times we gotta see that origin story. The entire world knows it. No need for "previously ons" at this point.
The Wrap Dustin Lance Black and Gus Van Sant are working together again post-Milk. The new project is a miniseries When We Rise about the gay rights movement kicking off with the Stonewall riots

Variety Guy Ritchie's untitled King Arthur movie has been pushed back to 2017 
Variety Star Wars pay scales... back end bonuses don't kick in until the film grosses one billion dollars. Not that it won't pass that in record time (it's already over half a billion globally after that first weekend)
Slash Film modern movies getting the old VHS cover treatment
W Magazine the most provocative fashion photography of 2015. Miley Cyrus, Jessica Chastain, and Cate Blanchett among the subjects
W Magazine Bryan Cranston does a dramatic reading of Drake's "Hotline Bling"
AV Club charts the 24 times 2015 totally lost its shit. Outrage culture is exhausting! 

/Film Cuteness. You can sit in a BB-8 chair (row BB, seat 8 in the balcony) while watching movies in the El Capitan in Los Angeles through February 7th.
The Guardian on the Bechdel Test's origins and Star Wars. Good history feminist politics piece but for the very odd suggestion that gays aren't interested in seeing heterosexual romance onscreen. What the what now? History (and LGBT culture) does not remotely support this notion.
i09 on the devolution of the fan fiction trope "the Mary Sue" with the release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens 
Gawker the complete history of Quentin Tarantino's use of the N word, used 65 times in The Hateful Eight which is second only to its use in Django Unchained  

Prize-Giving. Tis the Season
Playbill The Sydney Theater Award nominees for 2015 have been announced for fans of Aussie actors (i.e. everyone). Cate Blanchett and Hugo Weaving are among them
St Louis Film Critics chose Spotlight as Best Picture and Leo & Brie as best leading actors
Nevada Film Critics Society gave those exact same top 3 prizes but since The Revenant won four prizes it feels like the defacto winner

And Finally...
The Academy has announced the 10 finalists for Best Visual Effects, chosen from that longlist of 20 we shared earlier. The 5 Oscar nominees will come from these 10 pictures...

• Ant-Man
• Avengers: Age of Ultron
• Ex-Machina
• Jurassic World
• Mad Max: Fury Road
• The Martian
• The Revenant
• Star Wars: The Force Awakens
• Tomorrowland
• The Walk

The most surprising miss among the earlier semi-finalists is probably Spectre since James Bond films generally make the finals in the Daniel Craig era, don't they? But this category gets more competitive every year. I'm suddenly less confident about my current predictions (Avengers, Jurassic, Mad Max, Martian, Star Wars). Might Ex Machina, which hasn't left the awards conversation despite an April bow and is 1000% deserving of this particular nomination, actually make it despite not being of their preferred size and with the effects actually in a supporting role for a change? 

SAG Ensemble. Which films get the honor of losing to Spotlight?

The Screen Actors Guild nominations are just one week away. Who do you think will be nominated for Best Ensemble? Spotlight is the only sure things since it screams "ENSEMBLE!" Or at least it whispers "Ensemble" with grave concern and sobriety standing with arms akimbo with rolled up sleeves and khakis. The Martian is probably in since it's well liked, hard to avoid, has a big cast, and it's long been speculated that actors sometimes vote for movies that they wish they could have been in (i.e. movies wherein a bunch of people look to be having fun making it)

But that's only two slots. So where do the other three go? More after the jump...

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NBR takes Fury Road... but to where?

The National Board of Review used to be the unofficial kick off to awards season / best of year honors but though it's still early, the race for "first" got so ridiculous that we've crept into November of late. They lost that distinction but they're still doing their thing super early in December. The first day of it. Welcome to month twelve!

THEY LOOKED AT ME. THEY LOOKED AT ME.

This year they named George Miller's feminist action epic Mad Max Fury Road as the year's best and we salute them since we love it so and it's peak spectacle filmmaking. But Furiosa will be pissed to hear that they mostly ignored the other big female driven films this year.

Let's investigate after the jump...

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Foreign Quickies: Mustang, El Club, Ixcanul

Three quick takes on foreign film competitors from the long list of eligible titles, all screened at AFI.

Mustang (France) Opens November 20th in select cities. Cohen Media Group.
Given that 2015's loudest topic may well be the need for fresh cinematic female voices, the French/Turkish production Mustang deserves $100 million blockbuster status instead of art house ghettoization with a $300,000 gross which is what they're infinitely more likely to get. Director Deniz Gamze Ergüven and screenwriter Alice Winocour, two very talented women, team up to tell the riveting story of five spirited sisters living with their hands-off grandma who keep colliding with the confines, literal and metaphoric, of the patriarchy. An innocent 'schools out for the summer' beach romp prompts the end of their adolescent abandon as their horrified conservative uncle steps in to shape them up, train them to be subservient wives, and marry them off to respectable families. Though the premise is reminiscent of Sofia Coppola's elegiac and dreamy Virgin Suicides, the execution is not. Ergüven and Winocour are more physically grounded and rambunctous in their presentation and there is no distancing conceit of viewing the sisters through the eyes of boys. Mustang has successfully rowdy comedic moments, an earthy non-exploitive sensuality, often clever visual framing, and even a hard-won scrappy optimism to balance out its tough reality checks. In short: it's excellent. Let's hope the Foreign Film Oscar Committee agrees. A- 
(See also: Amir's TIFF Review)

Ixcanul (Guatemala) -Kino Lorber will distribute in the US. Dates TBA
At the well attended premiere of this memorable Guatemalan Oscar submission (their first!), the director brought out, not one of the actresses, but an older woman dressed in South American finery who was some kind of public official/icon (the applause was so loud I missed her title/name). The takeaway of the intro was that Guatemala has a tiny but newly excited film industry and they're extremely proud of this little movie. As well they should be. Ixcanul (or Volcano) looks at a poverty-stricken Kaqchikel family, living next to an active volcano and working on a coffee plantation. The volcano, in addition to being a beautiful and alien visual backdrop for a movie is also a monolithic wall, blocking their view of the rest of the world; Mexico and the United States, to the North, are more myth than reality. The family hopes to marry their sexually curious daughter off to their comparatively rich boss and thereby lift all their futures. Needless to say, things don't go as planned. While the actions of nearly all the characters are often enraging, Ixcanul is never mean spirited, condemning the exploitation of their ignorance rather than the ignorance itself. (One heartbreaking emergy trip to a nearby city shows the family utterly at the mercy of an untrustworthy translator since they don't even speak Spanish in the mountains.) Bustamante's well crafted film is authentically steeped in a nearly alien culture but its humanity is entirely familiar. B

El Club (Chile) - Music Box Films will distribute in the US. Dates TBA
My first encounter with the acclaimed director Pablo Larrain was the violent Tony Manero, a film about a Chilean sociopath obsessed with winning a Saturday Night Fever lookalike contest. It was altogether unsavory and though the director's command was evident I couldn't wait for it to end. The second was the wondrous No, starring Gael García Bernal as an unlikely hero who helps rid his country of their dictator through an unlikely ad campaign. Though not without its necessarily dark moments -- all the Larrain films I've seen take place during the Pinochet era in Chile -- it was an exuberant, moving, and technically amazing film which I was happy to champion; it went on to be nominated for Best Foreign Film at the Oscars. The third encounter is, sadly, more reminiscent of the first in its absolute mandate to rub your face, artfully, in brutal shit.

The film begins deceptively as a mellow observational drama about a strange retirement community in a yellow house by the sea. Shortly, though, the curtain of ambiguity is lifted by an uninvited drunk stranger who stands outside the house spewing a hostel tirade of obscenities. The house, you immediately realize, is a shelter/prison for criminal priests that the Catholic Church is hiding away and the man shouting was one of their victims, repeatedly raped as a young boy. The depressing reveal deepens when you realizes that there are houses like this all over the world. 

Fans of disturbing cinema might admire Larraîn's chutzpah but everyone else should steer clear. Though the film has strong performances, particularly Antonia Zegers as a despicable nun and Marcelo Alonso as a remarkably stone-faced priest sent to assess the inhabitants of the house, it's a tough sit through spiritual rationalization, disturbing psychologies, and actual brutality [SPOILER WARNING] Animals are viciously killed in the film -- albeit just barely off camera -- and I never would have seen it if I had known. [/SPOILER]. Even the resolution, which could be read as spiritually uplifting is ambiguous; it played for me more like a sick pitch-black joke about "penance" and "redemption". (I will be wary of seeing another Larraîn film despite my love for No.) No Rating.

Topic Du Jour: Female Directors

If you haven't read Vulture's list of 100 female directors Hollywood could be hiring you should. It's a great 'shut your mouth' argument for those suits that hilariously say 'well, we would hire female directors if there were any!' Bless Kyle Buchanan for spearheading this -- though I hope he had interns helping.  Naturally there will be passionate responses. Diversity arguments will always promote some degree of snark -- see Anthony Mackie's recent comments about the Black Panther movie's search for a director -- and nitpicking, including here.

But we nitpick with love.

David Poland argues that "strategy," not shaming, is what's required and that statistics and math won't help. He neglects to detail the strategy though. As for myself I (mostly) love the list and think it's important that a wake up call like this is out there -- what did happen to Laverne herself, Penny Marshall, who directed so many huge hits in the 80s and 90s? It's smart to make the list far reaching and extensive but some of the people are not reasonable for an argument either because their careers have been over for so long or because...wait for it... they aren't good directors. (Obviously there are many bad directors with penises who get lots of work. But we'd like them to find other jobs, too!)  

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