Blueprints: "The Disaster Artist"

Jorge Molina continues with the 2017 Oscar nominated screenplays...

One of the most overused film tropes out there is the big pep talk that a leader gives his or her team before they get into some sort of defining battle. It’s meant to inspire, motivate, eliminate any form of self-doubt, and give them the necessary strength to embark on their journey. 

But what if the task at hand is the production of what would become one of the canonically worst films of all time? And what if its leader is a proto-European actor with a lot of heart and devotion, but almost no social skills? Let’s take a look at how the writers for The Disaster Artist managed to inject these doomed elements with sincerity...

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Review: Loveless

Seán McGovern on Russia's Foreign Film Oscar nominee opening tomorrow in select US cities 

There's a moment in Andrey Zvyagintsev's masterful film Loveless when a volunteer search and rescue venture into the forest to look for missing boy, Alexey. Tipped-off by the boy's classmate, the team, flanked in their fluorescent jackets, comb over every inch of a massive, abandoned building in the forest. Fixtures and furniture are freezing and rotting in the building. Art deco detailing crumbling around them. Burst pipes, detritus. No sign of life. As I was watching I kept asking what this building was. Why was it built? When? Was it still here? These questions were not even addressed, let alone any kind of answer. And this is Loveless: A fog of cold indifference shrouds these characters and their world of empty-hearted progress. This is a film about loss, and not only the loss of a child...

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The Furniture: Canadian Brutalism Comes to L.A. in Blade Runner 2049

Daniel Walber's weekly series on Production Design. Click on the images to see them in magnified detail.

While planning the look of Blade Runner 2049, director Denis Villeneuve asked production designer Dennis Gassner for something very specific: brutality. As Canadians, Villeneuve and Gassner know a whole lot about that, at least architecturally. Canada’s big cities are inflected by brutalist buildings, stark and intimidating structures that have made their mark on cinema. Enemy is a good example, along with a lot of David Cronenberg’s early work.

Of course, Blade Runner 2049 takes place mostly in Los Angeles and was shot in Hungary. But its use of brutalist design transcends the specificity of place, resembling a vaguely Canadian nightmare as much as any waking version of California...

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What did you see this weekend?

by Nathaniel R

Weekend Box Office (Feb 9th-11th)
W I D E 800+ screens	L I M I T E D excluding prev. wide
1. 🔺 Fifty Shades Freed $38.8 NEW REVIEW	1. 🔺 La Boda de Valentina $1.1 on 331 screens NEW
2. 🔺 Peter Rabbit $25 NEW	2. 🔺 Pad Man  $760k on 152 screens NEW
3. 🔺 The 15:17 To Paris $12.6  NEW	3. 🔺 Oscar Nominated Short Films $615k on 180 screens NEW
4. Jumanji $9.8 (cum. $365.6)	4. 🔺  A Fantastic Woman $121k on 20 screens (cum. $232k) CAPSULE | REVIEW
5. The Greatest Showman $6.4 (cum. $146.5) REVIEW | ANOTHER HIT MUSICAL	5. 🔺 The Insult $109k on 50 screens (cum. $454k)

Fifty Shades Freed  continued its franchise's box office power by opening at #1 again. This weekend's bow also brought the franchise's total box office haul over the billion dollar mark. That's a lot of green for something barely blue...

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A quick look back at the Oscar Nominee Luncheon

by Nathaniel R

photo via Rebecca Keegan

The Oscar Nominee Luncheon -- which we must belatedly now obsess over -- is one of the greatest Oscar traditions, for a variety of reasons which have nothing to do with lunching. One of the secrets to its wonderfulness is possibly that it's not telecast so it still maintains some kind of insider cachet. Nevertheless the media are invited so it's not "private" per se. And even if it were, in our social media age the stars serve as their own kind of media outlet, too, with their selfie madness...

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