121 sea-faring days 'til Oscar

Oscar night will be here before you know it! It's time for your daily Oscar trivia. Today's is Biblical epic style... sort of.

So God created the great creatures of the sea and every living thing with which the water teems and that moves about in it, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good.
-Genesis 1:21

Oscar's favorite sea-faring and/or sea-creature adventures are after the jump but soon we will have to add The Shape of Water (now opening December 1st -- one week earlier than as originally planned) to this list. Where do you think it will land in the following list:

OSCAR'S DOZEN FAVORITE 
SEA-FARING or SEA-CREATURE MOVIES

01 Titanic (1997) - 14 nominations | 11 wins including Best Picture

02 Life of Pi (2012) - 11 nominations including Best Picture | 4 wins

03 Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) - 8 nominations | 1 win for Best Picture (and by extension it's remake Mutiny on the Bounty (1962) 7 nominations including Best Picture...

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Beauty vs Beast: Hercules or Hades?

by Nathaniel R

Jason is on vacation so I'm stepping in for this week's episode of Beauty vs. Beast. Post Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast Disney seems to be greenlighting live-action retreads of virtually all of their animated films. How long until casting news on Three Caballeros? I kid I kid... but will second or third tier stuff get this treatment... like, say, 1997's Hercules? Make your case as to who should reign victorious in the comments

Last week's battle pitted The Truman Show's Truman (Jim Carrey) against his fake sugary screen wife Meryl (Laura Linney).

For once, a man emerged victorious in a gender split battle. Endearing baffled Truman took 64% of your votes, though y'all felt disloyal for turning on The Lovely Laura Linney!

I think Tom spoke for most of you when he said...

This may be the only time I don't vote for Laura Linney"

75th Anniversary: The Wolf Man

by Tim Brayton

This weekend marks the 75th anniversary of one of the most special of all horror classics: it was on December 9, 1941 that Universal Pictures released The Wolf Man. And in so doing, the studio that did so much to invent American horror cinema made one of its most lasting contributions to popular culture.

The Wolf Man was not the first werewolf movie (though it can be easily argued that, at the time it was released, it was the best), but its success did more to pave the way for future werewolves in film and literature than any other individual work of art...

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Review: The BFG

Eric here, with thoughts on the new Steven Spielberg release, The BFG.   

Spielberg lends his patented magical touch to this film adaptation of Roald Dahl’s children’s story The BFG.  It’s the tale of little orphan Sophie (Ruby Barnhill), who meets a friendly elderly giant (Mark Rylance) who instills dreams into children.  They go off together to Giant Country, where we meet other giants who eat children, and Dream Country, where The BFG shows her how he harvests dreams.  Then they enroll the Queen of England in an attack on the bad giants.

The first third of the picture establishes the meet-cute of our two leads, and it’s standard fantasy fare, albeit with a sleek look that blends the live action and CGI material quite successfully into one neat universe.  It’s all a little sparkly and cute, and pitched as most kids’ movies are to generate response for twinkly endearment.  At the end of this act, when we meet the bad giants, the film gets its first jolt of real gas... 

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The Furniture: Orlando's Otherworldly Pageantry

"The Furniture" is our weekly series on Production Design. Here's Daniel Walber...

Sally Potter’s Orlando is a work of otherworldly character. It does not take place in a fantasy land or on a distant planet, but all the same it does not really seem to take place in our own reality. This might seem an obvious thing to say about a movie whose protagonist is an Elizabethan nobleman (Tilda Swinton) who lives for centuries and abruptly becomes a woman midway through the story, but there’s more to it than that. Its mood is one of near-anachronistic magic, built with a narrative logic that resists the strict signposts of linear storytelling, and lit by a shimmering queer sensibility.

Each of the film’s changing atmospheres has something quite specific to say. The central Istanbul section, filmed in the ancient walled city of Khiva, Uzbekistan, uses architecture to isolate Orlando in the disorienting fog of war. A later chapter, labeled “SEX,” wraps the Lady Orlando and her lover, Shelmerdine (Billy Zane), in the windswept Victorian fantasy of a Bronte novel.

But the singular triumph of the production design team, led by Ben Van Os (Girl with a Pearl Earring) and Jan Roelfs (Gattaca), is the Elizabethan first act. Here is when the young Lord Orlando is the most vulnerable, the most restricted, and the most confused.  [More...]

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