20:13 for 2013 Screencap Fun: Ghosts, Zombies, Flappers

icymi here's part one.

Screencapping fun! We've frozen early 2013 releases* at the 20th minute and 13th second of their running times. Here's what we found. How many of these have you seen and do you think this moment is telling of the whole?

I had been drunk just once twice in my life and the second time was that afternoon."

In case you are illiterate, Baz Luhrmann's got you covered in his version of The Great Gatsby! (He sure is good at shooting party sequences, though. No filmmaker can touch him in that ultra specific place.)

This next screencap I had to lighten a bit so you could actually see it... Bed sheets are being yanked down... but by what/who?

Click to read more ...

41st Annie Award Nominations

Tim here, with a quick bit of news: the International Animated Film Society has announced the nominees for the 41st Annie Awards. Unsurprisingly, it's heavily tilted towards big studio fare, with Despicable Me 2 dominating the list with eleven nominations, Monsters University and Frozen with ten nominations apiece, and The Croods just a breath behind with nine.

In the short categories (Best Animated Special Production, Best Animated Short), three of the films on the Oscar bake-off list made the Annies' cut: British TV special "Room on the Broom", the Canadian "Gloria Victoria", and Disney's tech-heavy new Mickey short, "Get a Horse!"

The full list of nominees is here. For now, I'll leave you with the nominations for Voice Acting, entirely men aside from Wiig. (The corresponding TV category is 100% male)

• Paul Giamatti as the voice of Chet - Turbo  
• Terry Crews as the voice of Earl – Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs 2  
• Kristen Wiig as the voice of Lucy – Despicable Me 2
• Steve Carell as the voice of Gru – Despicable Me 2  
• Pierre Coffin as the voice of Minions - Despicable Me 2
• Billy Crystal as the voice of Mike – Monsters University 
• Josh Gad as the voice of Olaf - Frozen

And the seven films in contention for Best Animated Feature:

• The Croods
• Despicable Me 2
• Ernest & Celestine
• Frozen
• A Letter to Momo
• Monsters University
• The Wind Rises

We can probably expect Oscar's list to consist of some combination of four or five of these.

The 2013 Animated Feature Oscar hopefuls

Tim here, officially taking over the Film Experience animation beat to share with everybody some news: the final list of 19 features submitted for consideration for the Best Animated Feature Film Academy Award has been announced. There's no guarantee that all 19 will end up qualifying - The Smurfs 2 is on the list, and there seems little reason to assume that it won't follow its predecessor in being disqualified - but as long as 16 make the final cut, we can look forward to 5 nominees in the category. Meaning that every animated feature released in the United States will have a 1 in 3.8 of receiving an Oscar nomination, which are not the most appropriate odds of receiving a prestigious, internationally prominent award.

We'll spend more time in the weeks to come going over all of these titles individually, but I thought it would be a good time to do some immediate sorting. Rather than just dumping the list on y'all, I decided to break it down into groups based on where the film came from and what its prospects might be going forward.

Frozen looks lock'ish

American studio releases with a good chance for a nomination
The Croods (DreamWorks Animation)
Despicable Me 2 (Illumination Entertainment)
Frozen (Walt Disney Animation Studios) - based on the recent wave of warm reviews, it's looking like the biggest lock of them all
Monsters University (Pixar Animation Studios)

American studio releases with little or no chance for a nomination
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2 (Sony Pictures Animation)
Epic (Blue Sky Studios)
Free Birds (Reel FX Creative Studios, dist. by Relativity Media)
Planes (DisneyToon Studios)
The Smurfs 2 (Sony Pictures Animation)
Turbo (DreamWorks Animation)

High-profile foreign productions with strong distributor backing
Ernest & Celestine (GKIDS)
A Letter to Momo (GKIDS)
The Wind Rises (Studio Ghibli/Disney)

O Apostolo is a stop motion feature from Spain

Foreign productions about which I know nothing
The Fake (South Korean, unknown distributor)
Khumba (dist. by Millennium Entertainment)
The Legend of Sarila (dist. by Phase 4 Films)
O Apóstolo (Spanish, unknown distributor)
Puella Magi Madoka Magica: The Movie - Rebellion (dist. by Aniplex of America)
Rio 2096: A Story of Love and Fury (Brazilian, unknown distributor)

UPDATED OSCAR CHART

Box Office: Tom Cruise On Top... Again

Amir here, to fill in for Nathaniel for the 411 on this weekend's box office. I haven't seen any new releases in quite a while, but I'll definitely get to Oblivion later in the week. Looking at the top ten, it turns out I'm not the only one who can't resist Tom Cruise on the screen. The man can do (almost) no wrong when it comes to opening a film at #1, his star power having endured many couch-jumpings, turbulent relationships, rock musical failures and all sorts of other crazy stuff. Oblivion's 38 million dollar gross isn't stellar but it's good enough to put the film on course to easily make its budget back. Ooh, what's that you say? International sales? Well, yes, considering that, Oblivion has already grossed more than its production budget, so we'll count it as a solid success. 

 

Box Office (Wide)

1. Oblivion ($38.1) (new) REVIEW

2. 42 ($18) (cum. 54)

3. The Croods ($9.5) (cum. 154)

4. Scary Movie 5 ($6.3) (cum. 22)

5. G.I. Joe: Retaliation ($5.7) (cum. 111)

6. The Place Beyond the Pines ($4.7) (cum. 11) REVIEW

7. Olympus Has Fallen ($4.5) (cum. 88)

8. Evil Dead ($4.1) (cum. 48)

9. Jurassic Park 3D ($4) (cum. 38) MEMORIES

10. Oz: The Great and Powerful ($3) (cum. 223) REVIEW

There were no other wide releases this weekend, but here's the story I'm interested in: The Croods has quietly become a sensation. It's barely lost any screens and is holding on to its sales really well. I threw a hissy fit when my aunt forced me to take my little cousin to watch it, but I ended up enjoying its cliched thrills quite a bit, high-fiving my cousin frequently when the unlikely cave-superheroes escaped doom at every turn. Could an Oscar nomination be on the cards? I'm skeptical but the massive box office might count for a lot if the field is weak and team DreamWorks play their cards right. 

Three new films ruled the day among limited releases. I'd personally only heard of Rob Zombie's Lords of Salem before I sat down for this post, but Home Run (a sports drama) and Filly Brown (a hip-hop drama) took the top two spots. Further down the screen count pecking order, Francois Ozon's superb new film In the House had the best screen average of any film this weekend ($11,738) and if you haven't seen it, get yourself to a theater as soon as possible. If your thirst for francophone cinema is still not quenched, hilarious Canadian sperm donation comedy, Starbuck, is still playing on 30 screens. 

What did you all see this weekend?
Tom Cruise in a space suit? Tattooed Ryan Gosling? Charlie Sheen, Lindsay Lohan and the has-been team?

Link-Link

Chris Sanders unused storyboards from the new animated film The Croods 
In Contention which Sundance films have Oscar potential?
CHUD What's next for David Fincher? Gone Girl or 20,000 Leagues or...
John August ooh listen here. A whole podcast on the wonderful Raiders of the Lost Ark
Empire Rosario Dawson nabs another female lead role. This time it's Queen of the Night from Atom Egoyan. To what do we owe this sudden upswing in her career? We want to thank whoever/whatever is responsible.

Awards Daily a trippy poster for Danny Boyle's Trance starring James McAvoy and Rosario Dawson
Studio Briefing 39 minutes of Cloud Atlas cut for its Chinese release. Maybe if it were 39 minutes shorter I might not have... no, never mind. Let's not go there again!
Coming Soon The Marvel Studios tv series "S.H.I.E.L.D." has begun filming
Gothamist wonders if TV's "The Carrie Diaries" (i.e. Sex & The City: the Prequel) is getting 1980s NYC all wrong
Bleeding Cool posters for 47 Ronin with Keanu Reeves getting the whitewashed leading Japanese samurai role (fwiw: Keanu has some Asian ancestry so this is kind of like the Johnny Depp as Tonto thing)
MNPP Everyone's favorite moment in Skyfall 

... or maybe you have a different one?

Finally... Have you seen this amazement? 

A dress made up of pictures of Natalie Portman crying twitter.com/milesmaker/sta…

— Miles Maker(@milesmaker) January 22, 2013