Empire States: So What Do These Oscars Mean For Women In Hollywood?
Posted on Thursday March 11, 2010, 16:42 by Helen O'Hara in Empire States
It's been a few days now since the 2010 Academy Awards finally saw a woman (only the fourth nominated) take home the Best Director and Best Picture prizes. Speech of the night, by pretty much anyone's reckoning, also went to a woman - Best Actress winner Sandra Bullock. A few cautiously laudatory articles about women in Hollywood have followed - here and here for example - but they all feel a little forced. Here's the thing: Kathryn Bigelow's win is a great thing for her, a well-deserved acknowledgment of a brilliantly made film that never got its due. And Sandra Bullock's the most likeable actress in Hollywood, a star whose classiness during awards season (even turning up to collect her Razzie) just confirms the impression that she's a lovely person - and she's a very good actress, whether in dramatic turns in the lik... Continue reading... Comment Now (11 comments)
Back To TopEmpire States: Secret Cinema: The Experience
Posted on Wednesday March 3, 2010, 12:08 by Helen O'Hara in Empire States
This weekend, I finally went along to see something I've been hearing about for ages: Secret Cinema, the event where they don't tell you what you're going to see but you go along anyway. And while my verdict's mixed, I do think this has massive potential for film fans, because most of my objections were specific to the event I attended. The deal is this: after ponying up your wodge of cash (and it is a bit of a wodge), you are told where to head about two days before the scheduled screening. In addition to a time and place, we were assigned identity cards, in German and referencing the DDR (immediately prompting me to start speculating about The Lives Of Others, The Baider-Meinhoff Complex and Goodbye Lenin), which we were supposed to bring along. Turning up to Shepherd's Bush on a rainy Sunday afternoon, I found a massive queue of people headed for the venue, which had a big sign outside reading Potsdamer Platz in case anyone was still in doubt (yes, that should maybe have give... Continue reading... Comment Now (3 comments)
Back To TopEmpire States: The Trouble With Michael Moore
Posted on Sunday February 21, 2010, 09:00 by Helen O'Hara in Empire States
 On most things that matter, I agree with Michael Moore. I think that mass gun ownership is more likely to produce social harm than social good. I think the provision of universal health care is a moral issue and private health care is just horrific. I think - stop me if I'm too controversial here - Bush was a bad President and some bankers deserve a good slap upside the head. I really, really wish I could sing Moore's praises to the heavens for his films tackling these subjects, but the damn movies make it impossible.
While I’m willing to give most of Bowling for Columbine and sections of Sicko a pass, Fahrenheit 9/11 and Capitalism: A Love Story are two of the biggest missed opportunities in modern cinema history. For the love of Zeus, the former was targeted at George W. Bush; the latter at the fricking banking industry, in 2009! There are no bigger sitting ducks, and yet Moore wandered in, scattered buckshot wildly in all directions and missed the damn d... Continue reading... Comment Now (8 comments)
Back To TopEmpire States: Great Film, Shame About The Poster
Posted on Wednesday February 10, 2010, 15:14 by Helen O'Hara in Empire States
I was lucky enough to see Drew Barrymore's directorial debut Whip It recently, and I'm telling you right now that it both rocks and rolls. Starring Ellen Page, Kristen Wiig, Juliette frickin' Lewis, Marcia Gay Harden and Barrymore herself, it's the story of a girl encouraged to be a beauty queen by her mother, who instead turns to the violent, slightly demented sport of roller derby. It is, in other words, a sports movie for girls, and while it pretty much hits all the beats of that genre, it does so in a really smart and funny way. My feisty, feminist, Doc-Martens-with-roses-on wearing flatmate and myself came out of the film literally bouncing and grinning and wondering why on Earth this didn't do better at the US box office*. But not to worry: the distributors here in the UK have decided to go a different route with the poster - and the result is this:... Continue reading... Comment Now (31 comments)
Back To TopOff The Wire: The Oscar Back-And-Forth
Posted on Tuesday February 2, 2010, 19:31 by Helen O'Hara in Off The Wire
Helen: Well, here we are – and it feels like it’s a pretty predictable mix. Avatar and The Hurt Locker lead the way, both with nine, with Inglourious Basterds, Precious and Up In The Air snapping at their heels. This year’s awards feel suspiciously like a two horse race between Bigelow and Cameron’s movies (will Oscar reward the money, the scale and technical innovation or the sheer ability?) but perhaps I am unwisely discounting Tarantino and Reitman too early. Precious, I feel, is a lock only for Best Supporting Actress, which will go to Mo’Nique or there is no justice.
But let’s focus on Best Picture to begin with. We can discount any film that didn’t also get a Best Director nod from winning, I think. So goodbye (but well done for joining the party) District 9, The Blind Side (definitely the WTF nomination there), An Education, A Serious Man and (the mig... Continue reading... Comment Now (18 comments)
Back To TopOff The Wire: Should Spider-Man Have Gone 3D?
Posted on Wednesday January 20, 2010, 07:30 by Helen O'Hara in Off The Wire
So this morning we've learned that the next Spider-Man film will have a budget of about $80 million. That puts it on a lower budget than Sherlock Holmes, lower than X-Men Origins: Wolverine (by nearly half). Heck, it's less than Fast & Furious, which cost about $85m, and only just more (not adjusting for inflation) than the first X-Men movie. So what does this mean for the film, and might Spidey have been better going for balls-out 3D instead? Let's look at what the budget means first. That sort of money certainly implies that we're going to see less action - or at least less newly-developed, complicated, CG action. Wall-crawling and web-shooting is probably in; multiple trips around the city by web, massive fire effects, large things collapsing and CG character work* is probably out. The first X-Men movie is the one to think about here: the action there was pretty small and scattered until the final show-down (which would barely make the opening reel of... Continue reading... Comment Now (25 comments)
Back To TopCasting Couch: A Bright Side For The Spider-Man Reboot: A New Hope For Mary-Jane
Posted on Wednesday January 13, 2010, 09:02 by Helen O'Hara in Casting Couch
I really enjoyed Sam Raimi's first two Spider-Man films, and loved bits of his third*. But one thing always bugged me about them, and that's Mary-Jane Watson. Kristen Dunst can be a funny and likeable actress, but in these films she felt out of place, miscast and too blonde despite the dye job. Her MJ was basically wet: she was Gwen Stacey (always a more shy and retiring Spidey heroine) by another name, and made anyone who read the comics wish she'd stayed blonde, been renamed and died on the bridge at the end of that first film. Of course, Gwen Stacey eventually turned up, in the shape of the normally redheaded Bryce Dallas Howard. But on behalf of a couple of close friends who happen to be redheaded, casting a redhead as the blonde Stacey does not make up for casting a blonde as one of pop culture's favourite redheads. Bryce Dallas Howard could have made rather a good MJ, but Gwen Stacey she was not. Swop her and Dunst and we might've been on to something. This isn't to slag Du... Continue reading... Comment Now (12 comments)
Back To TopEmpire States: Is it just me, or is Oscar Season this year sort of...weak?
Posted on Friday January 8, 2010, 11:40 by Helen O'Hara in Empire States
Every year, between October and December, a host of period epics, intimate relationship dramas and literary adaptations flood our screens, each striving for that ultimate Hollywood accolade: Oscar recognition. Through the dozens of smaller gong-givings that precede the big night - regional Critic's Circles, professional Guild awards, the Golden Globes and Independent Spirit Awards - the pursuit of the little gold man is Hollywood's most talked about race. But is it just me or does the race this year seem, well, more muted than normal? It's not that there aren't good films in contention; it's just that quite a few of them were released outside the usual Oscar season, and those that came out in the timeframe were, well, sometimes disappointing. The Hurt Locker is excellent - but it came out in the summer, before Oscar season began. So did Inglourious Basterds. The Producer's Guild shortlist of nominees included District 9, Star Trek and Up, all summer movies, as was ... Continue reading... Comment Now (25 comments)
Back To TopEmpire States: What's The Starriest Cast Ever?
Posted on Wednesday December 30, 2009, 17:48 by Helen O'Hara in Empire States
Isn't it nice that, between endless slices of David Tennant-y goodness* on the BBC this Christmas, they've managed to squeeze in a few films? Notably, yesterday, the 1978 Death on the Nile, which stars (deep breath) Peter Ustinov, David Niven, Bette Davis, Mia Farrow, Jane Birkin, Maggie Smith, Angela Lansbury, Olivia Hussey, George Kennedy and Lois Chiles, with Jon Finch and Simon MacCorkindale for bonus points. Which got me wondering about the value of a starry cast**. In recent years, of course, we've seen A-list-plus ensembles in Ocean's Eleven (and its sequels) or Tropic Thunder or the very recent Nine, and the indie A-list likes of The Royal Tenenbaums. Even superhero movies are now in on the act: consider the number of big names in the Christopher Nolan Bat-films or Iron Man. This has, of course, been happening for as long as stars have existed, and been a regular ploy ever since Grand Hotel demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt t... Continue reading... Comment Now (48 comments)
Back To TopEmpire States: Are There Only Three Superhero Stories?
Posted on Tuesday December 1, 2009, 08:45 by Helen O'Hara in Empire States
Watching Spider-Man 3 on TV recently, it occurred to me that there's a pretty strict formula for superhero franchises. Film one: the origin story. Film two: Our Hero attempts to give up the mask, but duty calls. Film three: Our Hero goes bad, but all's well that ends well. Superman and Spider-Man follow the formula exactly; other series fold one or more stories into the same film. The two Christopher Nolan Batman films so far have followed the plan, with discussion in the second of the dark lengths to which Batman should go to fight his enemies. But even when a series of three films doesn't exactly adhere to the formula, the same elements keep popping up. X-Men: The Last Stand manages to cover both giving up the mask and going bad (perhaps to make up for X2 largely not bothering), while Fantastic Four does the origin tale and the quitting story all at once. Hellboy briefly goes bad in the first film, and quits at the end of the second; <... Continue reading... Comment Now (21 comments)
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