Movie review: Oscar-nominated short films - Los Angeles Times

The races for the live-action and animated short film Oscar tend to operate blessedly outside the Academy Awards hype machine; assembled here into two separate programs, this year's nominees — a stronger batch than last year's — offer thought-provoking contrasts in storytelling and style.

On the live-action side, many of the entries are marked by worlds in collision. Max Z¿hle's suspenseful drama "Raju," breathlessly filmed in Calcutta, depicts the seesawing emotions and ethical quandaries a German couple go through trying to adopt a 4-year-old orphan boy in a teeming Indian metropolis of overt poverty and hidden agency.

Peter McDonald's "Pentecost," meanwhile, finds buoyant Irish humor in the ways sports and church overlap, when a soccer-obsessed altar boy is given an important role in an upcoming Mass.

Belfast is the setting for Terry George's gently poignant "The Shore," in which an expat Irishman (Ciarán Hinds) returns from America with his grown daughter (Kerry Condon) after 25 years, only to be pushed into resolving things with a forgotten buddy and the fiancee he left behind.

Seaside reconciliation also animates Norwegian Hallvar Witzø's quirky but forced "Tuba Atlantic," about an old coot who lives out his last days machine-gunning seagulls, befriending a church-appointed teenage caretaker and trying to patch things up with his long-lost brother via transoceanic wind horn.

Much more effortlessly amusing is Andrew Bowler's neurotic comedy "Time Freak," in which the possibilities inherent in mastering time travel hilariously bump up against its inventor's crushing addiction to the do-overs daily life presents.

Humor is typically prevalent in the animated features that dominate the multiplex, but in shorts, filmmakers often try for more nuanced emotions. Even Pixar's excellent entry "La Luna," from Enrico Casarosa and inspired by an Italo Calvino story, aims for evocative magical realism over gags in its depiction of the moon-sweeping journey a young boy embarks on for the first time with his father and grandfather.

A child's point of view characterizes Patrick Doyon's "Dimanche/Sunday" as well, wherein a boy's day with his extended family — whose unintelligible chattering is equated with the cawing of birds — encompasses boredom, imagination and the fragility of life.

"The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore" is William Joyce and Brandon Oldenburg's movie version of their successful iPad app for kids, whimsically combining visual storytelling flourishes from the silent era (the titular hero resembles Buster Keaton), inventive digital animation and a touching metaphor for the soaring joys of reading.

More offbeat in tone are the entries "A Morning Stroll" and "Wild Life." The former, from director Grant Orchard, is a bracingly loony triptych set in three years (1959, 2009, 2059) and using dimensionally progressive animation each time — from monochromatic line drawing to color-burnished photorealist CGI — to dramatize an encounter between a man on the street and a chicken with a purpose.

The latter is an impressionistic, painterly rendering of an Englishman's migration to the Canadian hinterlands in 1909, which in the hands of Amanda Forbis and Wendy Tilby proves to be a quietly resonant tale of quixotic, opaque individualism. It also serves as a fitting reminder that the short form allows for a wide variety of artistic temperaments, which this collection of Oscar-nominated films admirably showcases.

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Glimmers of Hope for Small Films During Glittery Oscar Promotions - New York Times

Natalie Portman, the star of the ballet thriller “Black Swan,” at the Gotham Independent Film Awards on Monday. She is a likely Oscar contender.

“Brooklyn, Brooklyn in the house!” Darren Aronofsky shouted from the front of the Ziegfeld Theater on Tuesday night. Mr. Aronofsky, the director and Coney Island native, was living out a childhood fantasy when his film “Black Swan” had its New York premiere at that Midtown Manhattan movie palace, which he frequented while growing up. “Mom, I have a confession: I cut out of high school to see ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ in this theater,” he said, later admitting it wasn’t a one-time thing.

Melena Ryzik and colleagues report on all the news and the nonsense of awards season.

Annette Bening, an Oscar contender for “The Kids Are All Right,” at the Gothams, starting the awards season in New York.

Vincent Cassel, an actor in “Black Swan,” at the Gothams.

It was a local-boy-made-good moment for “Black Swan,” which opens in select cities on Friday. For the premiere the red carpet extended down the block, the paparazzi screamed for the stars — Natalie Portman, in a décolleté black gown, Mila Kunis, in a cream one, Barbara Hershey, Winona Ryder, Vincent Cassel — and afterward, everyone gathered at a party in the chandeliered St. Regis hotel, which was decked out in tarnished mirrors and strategically placed black and white feathers. The mood was jubilant, and the look was slightly creepy, appropriate for a fantasy- and horror-tinged story of a perfectionist ballerina (Ms. Portman) madly preparing for “Swan Lake.”

Downtown on the same night, in the back room of an Italian bistro in Chelsea, “The Kids Are All Right” was having a little soiree, one so low key that even the presence of two of its stars, Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo, caused barely a ripple among the restaurant patrons out front. The film, about lesbian parents (Ms. Moore and Annette Bening) who must deal with meeting their children’s sperm donor (Mr. Ruffalo), was a Sundance Film Festival hit and an indie success story when it opened this summer. Both films represent the vision of dedicated directors, who labored for years to get their work on screen despite having impressive credits. And both could wind up in a catbird seat come Oscar night. Already this week they have earned accolades, scoring multiple nominations from the Film Independent Spirit Awards, which will be handed out the day before the Oscars at the end of February. As a director Mr. Aronofsky was also honored Monday night at the Gotham Independent Film Awards, the traditional opening day of statuette campaigning in New York. (“Black Swan” and “The Kids Are All Right” were nominated there too but lost the top prizes to “Winter’s Bone,” a lower-budget drama set in the Ozarks.)

As surely as the holiday season brings sugarplum fairies and eggnog, it also means the start of a few months of fiercely competitive self-promotion for Hollywood. The weeks leading up to the Oscars are a fanciful slog of cocktail parties, luncheons, lesser award shows and industry screenings, all of which I chronicle daily in my role as the Carpetbagger columnist. Already there is a short list of films that are likely to be anointed with one of the 10 best-picture spots, including, in addition to “Black Swan” and “The Kids Are All Right,” “The Social Network,” “Inception,” “The King’s Speech” “Toy Story 3,” “127 Hours” and “Winter’s Bone.” “The Fighter,” a boxing film from David O. Russell, and “True Grit,” the Coen brothers remake of that John Wayne classic, are latecomers to the still wide-open race, adding drama to the ever-shifting predictions from Oscarologists.

One thing my compatriots agree on: The contest for best actress will be noteworthy. Besides Ms. Bening, Ms. Moore and Ms. Portman, Jennifer Lawrence, the 20-year-old star of “Winter’s Bone,” and Nicole Kidman, playing a grieving mother in “Rabbit Hole,” are being lauded for standout performances. (In what may be a glimpse of the competition to come, the Spirit Awards nominated six actresses instead of the usual five this year; Ms. Bening got a nod, but Ms. Moore didn’t.)

Directors rarely admit to Oscar considerations when making a film, but Lisa Cholodenko, the director and co-writer of “The Kids Are All Right” with Stuart Blumberg, is an exception. “We did so many revisions,” she said, having a cigarette outside her party on Tuesday, “and we were so painstaking about making sure these characters were spot on, and that they worked and they worked together and they were funny and complicated and dramatic and all the things we knew they could be. And at the end of the day we thought: If we get the right people to play these parts, and it all comes together in the right way, these are like Oscar parts.”

But even with Ms. Bening and Ms. Moore attached “The Kids Are All Right” was difficult to make. “I was with the project for five years,” Ms. Moore said at the party. She hung on through all the revisions and delays because, she said, she liked Ms. Cholodenko’s work, her colloquial style and the story. Ms. Cholodenko, whose previous films “High Art” and “Laurel Canyon,” made her an indie darling, built the film around her two stars. “I was desperate to work with them,” she said. Still, her budget was scraped together.

The same was true for Mr. Aronofsky. He got a taste of the awards hullabaloo with his previous film, “The Wrestler,” about a washed-up fighter played by Mickey Rourke, and has been plotting a ballet film for years. “ ‘Black Swan’ was probably harder to make than any film I ever did,” he said. “I thought because I was doing something sexy with Natalie Portman and Vincent Cassel,” who plays the ballet company’s director, “I thought it was going to be really easy. And then we had to split our budget by two-thirds to get it made.” (The film, from Fox Searchlight, cost $13 million; “The Kids Are All Right,” which cost less than $4 million, was bought by Focus Features after Sundance.)

In Hollywood terms those are pittances. (The forthcoming Disney movie “Tron: Legacy,” for example, has a production and marketing budget of at least $150 million.) But it’s worth noting that both “Black Swan” and “The Kids Are All Right” wound up at the boutique divisions of major studios, which still have the distribution and marketing might the smaller indies can only dream of. The distance between economic reality and Oscar glitter may be the greatest for “Winter’s Bone,” a modest film, in budget and style, which was a surprise Gotham winner.

“It’s a huge deal to have work that can’t be on billboards, necessarily, be spoken about, and have clips shown, and have a discussion ensue,” said Debra Granik, the film’s director. She admitted to having serious nerves about awards season. “The contraction of the lungs, the viscera, the capillaries — it’s just not a way to live,” she said.

But for the anointed few there is more agita, and promotion, ahead.

“I’ve done 20 days of press,” Mr. Ruffalo said at the party for “The Kids Are All Right,” “for a movie I worked 6 days on.”

Mekado Murphy contributed reporting.

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Will Potter films have their own legacy? - Boston Globe

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Authors imagine. It’s their job. In some cases, they build a whole world from the ground up — as J.K. Rowling certainly did in her phenomenally successful Harry Potter series. Readers imagine too, filling in the parts of that world the words only suggest.

For the first few years of Potter mania, from the UK publication of “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone’’ in 1997 through “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire’’ in 2000, the field was wide open for the shared imagination of author and readers. When Hogwarts was all in the mind’s eye, no two versions were quite alike, and each new reader who entered Rowling’s wizarding world found it ripe for both discovery and invention.

That changed when the movie versions began to land in 2001, arriving like an echo two or three years after each book’s release. Moviemakers imagine, too, but it’s their job to fill in the details for us. How exactly does that house on Grimmauld Place make itself visible? What does Diagon Alley look like? How about Dumbledore’s office? And, for that matter, what do Harry, Ron, and Hermione really look like? Now we know; or, at least, we’ve been handed a version that can be hard to shake.

And so, the most successful book series in history (some 400 million volumes in 67 languages) begat the most lucrative international film franchise ever (as measured in pure box-office dollars). The last book in the series came out in 2007, and now, right on time, the movie series is set to come to its own protracted close.

Warner Bros. has decided to split the last book, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,’’ into two movies, the better to tell the sprawling, 759-page story and, presumably, to squeeze out a few more golden galleons along the way. Part one opens Friday; part two is expected to open next July.

The books seem assured a lasting legacy, but how about the movies? Do they stand on their own as cinema, or are they skating by on borrowed magic? Do they add to the books, or supplant the reader’s own imagination? For parents new to the Potter world, do you introduce kids to the books first, or the movies? Consider this the reflections of one muggle parent, Potter fan, and film buff.

I’ll say up front that I love the books. Not necessarily for literary merit (I think they’re great yarns, but I might never have thought to pick them up if I didn’t have kids) but because the stories and characters became such an integral part of my parenting years. My wife and I are pop-culture skeptics, at least when it comes to how we raise our two sons (born in 1994 and 1998), and Harry Potter gave us a full-blown media extravaganza we could buy into without too much trepidation.

We read each book out loud as a family, even when the boys were well able to read them solo, and even when the books began to expand to Tolstoyesque proportions. I took a couple of days off work when “Deathly Hallows’’ came out, and we turned off the phones, stayed away from newspapers and the Internet, and powered through the book in one marathon four-day reading session. We were that worried about accidental spoilers — and that anxious to learn how it all ended.

But it has been about more than books, of course. Parents of Potter fans know the litany: Potter-themed Halloween costumes and birthday parties, the wand duels and the midnight book-release parties. In my house, there was that curious anticipation when both sons neared their 11th birthdays — a mix of preteen pragmatism (they know there’s no such place as Hogwarts) and a remaining glimmer of hope that maybe, just maybe, an owl would be arriving with a message for them. My older son also credits the first Harry Potter computer game with turning him on to gaming.

The movies only amped up the Potter hype. We thought seriously about avoiding the first, “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.’’ We had the first four books under our belts by that time, and my then-7-year-old had started reading them on his own. The movie posed a dilemma: Would seeing it only spoil things?

We went anyway. And after about 15 minutes (during the initial Norbert scene in Hagrid’s hut, to be precise) he quietly asked if we could leave the theater. “I think I like using my imagination better,’’ he told us later. (Now that’s magic.)

As a family, we’ve since made our peace with the movies, and we’ll be seeing the new film in IMAX as soon as we can get in. The films have gotten better over time — darker too, but that reflects the progression of the books. And as kids get older they develop that capacity for separation that helps them enjoy the spectacle of the movies while maintaining a deeper affection for the books.

Rowling reportedly pushed for Terry Gilliam as director, but we got Chris Columbus instead for the first two movies (“Sorcerer’s Stone’’ and “Chamber of Secrets’’) — long on wonder and faithfulness to the books, but ultimately thin on story and character development. I recently watched the first film on DVD with my younger son, and he condensed the whole experience down to about half an hour, skipping from favorite scene (Diagon Alley!) to favorite scene (Sorting Hat!). Movies one and two are like illustrated pop-up books, and what fans tend to like about them is the way they make the Potter world come to life.

Director Alfonso Cuaron took the closest thing to an auteur tack with “Prisoner of Azkaban.’’ I liked the movie at the time, but the rest of the family resolutely does not, and for the primary reason that the movie makes Hogwarts look decrepit and, frankly, a little depressing, with the warm, fire-lit glow of the first two movies traded in for a palate of various shades of steel gray.

Mike Newell took the reins for “Goblet of Fire,’’ but for me the series started to really gel with “Order of the Phoenix,’’ directed by David Yates, who stayed on board for “Half-Blood Prince’’ and now both installments of “Deathly Hallows.’’ Working with screenwriter Steve Kloves, who has been aboard for all but one of the movies, Yates manages to create real, full-blooded cinema experiences with some terrific action scenes and a sense of the character changes that Harry and friends experience (and which are explored at length in the books). Yates is perhaps no visionary, but he knows how to make a movie that stands on its own, and he has brought a welcome consistency to the second half of the film cycle.

The Potter movies have issues — that lack of overarching, connecting vision is one, especially when compared to that other recent fantasy cycle, Peter Jackson’s “The Lord of the Rings.’’ But the Potter films have virtues too, starting with some ravishing set designs, the cream of British acting talent (topped by Alan Rickman’s turn as Snape, with an honorable mention to Imelda Staunton’s Umbridge), and a group of appealing younger actors who started as children and managed to convincingly inhabit their roles (and robes) over the long course of filming the series.

As of 2011, there will be a new generation of fans who don’t have to wait for either the books or the movies. (Too bad for them — that anticipation was a large part of the fun.) I have read comments from new fans on some sites who recommend seeing the movies first and then reading the books. The movies, they reason, are like a shorthand introduction to the plots and characters; saving the books means you get to sit back and savor all the details after that first brief taste.

I still say, especially to parents: Read the books first and let young readers fill out that imaginary world for themselves. A firm rooting in that self-made world will help allow them to view the Potter movies as just one more imaginative take on the books’ world, and one they can compare to their own equally valid version. There is nothing my sons like better after watching one of the movies than discussing how scenes were left out or changed — and how they might have done things differently.

Rick VanderKnyff is a senior producer for MSN.com. He can be reached at knyff1@hotmail.com.

© Copyright 2010 Globe Newspaper Company.

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Clash Of the Titan: Spielberg Films Will Duel - New York Times

What the new genre of foreclosure photography reveals about the human side of the Great Recession.

A moratorium on offshore drilling ends before three commissions conclude their reports on the gulf gusher, Andrew Revkin writes.

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