Alternate Takes 08.29.09: Oscar Season

Posted by Shawn S. Lealos on 08.29.2009

As the summer movie season comes to a close, Alternate Takes looks at the rest of the year's movie slate and predicts which movies will come out as Oscar contenders.



Welcome Alternate Takes, I am Shawn S. Lealos and you have entered my world.

If you haven't already, you should check out my other column here on 411 called The Movie/TV 3R's. It's just like the one you all enjoy in the wrestling zone except with no puRgatory and I focus on the week's highs and lows in both the Movie and Television world. Check me out every Tuesday - and you can start RIGHT HERE as I talk about everything from Inglourious Basterds and Family Guy to Jason Bourne and The Wizard of Oz. It even has a fancy new banner! Also, if you haven't read my latest two reviews, do it now. August presented us with two of the best movies of the summer in District 9 and Inglourious Basterds. Read my review and go support these great movies.

Previously on Alternate Takes

Week 65 - Quentin Tarantino, the written works

Week 64 - The Making of Peter Jackson's debut film Bad Taste

Week 63 - The career of David Twohy

Week 62 - Chick Flicks for guys

Without any further ado, Week 66 ...



This week pretty much wraps up the summer movie season. For horror fans, this is a pretty solid finale to the summer but for everyone else it might seem to end with a whimper after the roar of last week's Inglourious Basterds. The biggest releases are both horror sequels, the first is Rob Zombie's follow up to his reboot of the Halloween franchise. The first film polarized audiences with most people hating it. It does have its fans and I can see what they like about it but I found the movie not abysmal but more of a huge disappointment. I wanted to like it and came away with neutral feelings, never a good thing. The second movie this weekend is the fourth Final Destination flick. It seems a lot of people are passing off this franchise making it sound as bad as the Saw franchise. It is not and has always been both an original and fun series. This is not about the boogey man or some horrible monster. This is just about the fun of the kills, all practical although still over-the-top, which is where the fun comes in. The movies have all been a good time and 3D should ramp the fun to another level. I probably won't see it but the franchise is nowhere near as bad as some Internet haters would have you believe. The next release is Oscar winning director Ang Lee's latest film, Taking Woodstock. There are things to like about this film including the great director, Liev Schreiber and the fantastic comedian Demetri Martin. Finally, there are two smaller movies I want to mention here. The first, Big Fan stars Patton Oswalt as a New York Giants fan who gets beaten up by his favorite player. It is called a dark comedy and sounds interesting. The last film is Play the Game, a movie that promises us Andy Griffith getting his mack on. How can you miss that?

With those movies to choose from, I am veering off course once again. I have worn the horror Takes to death and if you want to read about alternate horror movies check out Week 15 (Universal Horror Movies), Week 16 (Midnight Meat Train Alternate Takes), Week 26 (Slasher Flicks), Week 31 (2008's Top 5 horror films), Week 34 (Exorcism Films), Week 35 (3D Horror Films), Week 36 (Horror Movie Smackdowns), Week 39 (More Slasher Flicks), Week 43 (Last House on the Left Alternate Takes), Week 54 (The Evil Dead) and Week 64 (Bad Taste). You might understand why I want to write about something other than horror this week. As for Woodstock, I wrote about Musical Films in Week 41, so this week I am going to completely switch things up.

This week I am doing a countdown through the upcoming "Awards Season" films. Here are...



HONORABLE MENTIONS

THE INFORMANT! - Matt Damon looks hilarious in this Steven Soderbergh adaptation of the book by the same name. It tells the true story of a whistleblower who brings down the company he works for, without knowing the true ramifications of his actions. Soderbergh has been nominated for three Oscars, winning one of them (Traffic).

NINE - Rob Marshall directs this adaptation of the Broadway musical about a film director who tries to find harmony in his life. Marshall was nominated for an Oscar for his last musical Chicago, and the film went on to win the big award that year. I can give one guarantee for this film - Daniel Day Lewis will earn his fifth Oscar nomination as the lead.

UP IN THE AIR - George Clooney (Oscar winner for Syriana) and Jason Reitman (Oscar nominee for Juno) team up for the adaptation of a novel about a man who flies around the country firing corporate executives. He has no life outside of this job and gets by with cheap sex, alcohol and drugs. This one could be a sleeper this season.

5. AVATAR



DECEMBER 18, 2009
Directed by James Cameron
Starring Sam Worthington, Sigourney Weaver, Michelle Rodriguez, Giovanni Ribisi, Zoe Saldana

In 1997, Jim Cameron won the Oscar for Best Director for his film Titanic, one of eleven awards the film picked up. When accepting his award he stood with it held high over head and exclaimed he was King of the World. That was the last fiction film we saw from the director until this Christmas. What took so long?

"All right. I'm gonna write something so that right after Titanic, we go into really pushing the envelope," Cameron said. "And my guys shouted me down. Whereas on The Abyss, with the water weenie character, we'd gone kind of one level beyond, or maybe a level and a half and the same thing with Terminator 2. You know, the liquid metal dude, we could just barely do that. Or we could imagine doing it. And, you know, Stan Winston said something very interesting when I first showed him the 3D footage. Not from Avatar, but right before that, from the documentaries. I said, "Yeah, and I'm thinking about doing a 3D film. I'll do something small to start out with, and build up." He said, "No, no, no. You do your biggest and your best idea." He said, "You do your Star Wars in this." And Stan could be like that. He just was so crazily intuitive. Boom, right to the idea. I thought, "He's right."

This movie will push the boundaries of 3D to levels it has never seen. He wrote the script fifteen years ago and his F/X company at the time, Digital Domain, told him what he wanted to do was impossible at that time. Since that time he began working with Peter Jackson's WETA studios and, with lots of money and practice, they finally reached the level they needed to make the movie he always dreamed of using photorealism and the latest 3D technologies. This movie is going to be huge.



4. THE ROAD



OCTOBER 16, 2009
Directed by John Hillcoat
Starring Viggo Mortensen, Charlize Theron, Guy Pearce, Robert Duvall, Kodi Smit-McPhee

I really hope the trailers for this movie are deceiving. The Road is the latest film based on a novel by Cormac McCarthy. His most recent adapted work went on to win the Coen brothers their first Oscars for No Country for Old Men. If you thought No Country was nihilistic, you ain't seen nothing yet.

The Road is the 2007 Pulitzer Prize winning novel that follows an unnamed father and son journeying together toward the sea across a post-apocalyptic landscape, some years after a great, unexplained cataclysm has destroyed civilization and almost all life on Earth. The trailer shows some big scene with the Man's wife, all of which must take place in flashbacks since she committed suicide before the story began. The father is dying and wants to lead his son to safety with "good people" but only finds violence, including a roving band of cannibals.

Viggo Mortensen plays The Man and young Kodi Smit-ScPhee is The Boy. Charlize Theron plays the Wife and will have a larger role than her character in the book. Director John Hillcoat (The Proposition) believes it is ok "to depart from the book as long as you maintain the spirit of it." This will be a great movie if it keeps the spirit of the novel and from early word, it sounds like Hillcoat might have an outside chance at a director nomination as well.



3. A SERIOUS MAN



OCTOBER 2, 2009
Directed by the Coen brothers
Starring Michael Stuhlbarg, Richard Kind, Sari Wagner Lennick, Fred Melamed, Aaron Wolff

The Coen brothers are directors that will always attract me to their projects no matter how strange or abstract the film seems. Looking at the trailer for their latest film A Serious Man, I still have no idea what the movie is about except it looks pretty damn quirky, a good thing for a Coen brothers film.

Unlike the nihilistic No Country for Old Men and their whimsical Burn After Reading, this movie has no A-list stars to carry the plot. There is no Brad Pitt, George Clooney or Javier Bardem to bring the high expectations of those previous efforts. Instead we are given Michael Stuhlbarg, a New York theater actor, who plays a Midwestern college physics professor in 1967 whose life falls apart when his wife asks for a divorce, his children rebel and a student begins to bribe him for better grades - all at the same time.

This is called the Coen's most personal film as the professor character is loosely based on their father. The movie sounds extremely similar to the movie Barton Fink, with a man in way over his head who sees no way out. It is classic Coen and I cannot wait for this film to come out.



2. WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE



OCTOBER 16, 2009
Directed by Spike Jonze
Starring Max Records, Catherine Keener, Mark Ruffalo, Lauren Ambrose, Chris Cooper, James Gandolfini, Catherine O'Hara, Forest Whitaker, Paul Dano

This would normally be my most anticipated film, if not for the number one movie on my list.

I will start with the director. Spike Jonze is one of the most talented directors working in Hollywood today. He made his name with music videos. If you want a taste of his talent look at his work - "Buddy Holly" (Weezer), "If I Only Had a Brain" (MC 900 Ft. Jesus), "Sabotage" (The Beastie Boys), "Praise You" (Fatboy Slim), "Wonderboy" (Tenacious D) and his masterpiece - Christopher Walken dancing through a hotel in "Weapon of Choice" (Fatboy Slim).

However, his true masterpiece is the 1999 film Being John Malkovich and that should be all you need to know to get excited about this movie, based on the bestselling children's book. Want more reasons to watch it, check out the trailer. This will be the most beautiful movie of the year.



1. THE LOVELY BONES



DECEMBER 11, 2009
Directed by Peter Jackson
Starring Saoirse Ronan, Rachel Weisz, Mark Wahlberg, Stanley Tucci, Susan Sarandon, Rose McIver, Amanda Michalka

This movie is going to kick all kinds of ass. Peter Jackson is finally reeling himself back in and shooting a small, personal movie and this has all the beauty and magic of his awesome nineties film Heavenly Creatures. Now, that doesn't mean Jackson is going to shoot a little ordinary movie though. This story is magnificent.

Based on the novel by the same name, The Lovely Bones presents us with a lead character that dies at the beginning of the story. Susie is a young girl who is raped and murdered, her murderer never found. Playing Susie is Saoirse Ronan, the award winning breakout star of Joe Wright's Atonement. Jackson said Ronan reminded him of a "younger Cate [Blanchett], I can see her having the sort of career and making the types of films that Cate has been making." Jackson was the director who discovered a young Kate Winslet and cast her in her first role in Heavenly Creatures. She has a great opportunity here as her character, after she dies, goes to a Purgatory type area where she watches down on her family.

Everyone in her life, from her father (Mark Wahlberg), mother (Rachel Weisz), grandmother (Susan Sarandon), sister (Rose McIver) and boyfriend Ray (Reese Ritchie), are falling apart due to her death. While her dad refuses to believe the case will remain cold, the police officer on the case (The Soprano's Michael Imperioli) can't find any evidence to lead him to make an arrest. The trailer looks like a thriller but I trust Jackson to give us something much, much more than that.

This is, in my opinion, the frontrunner for the Best Picture Oscar of all the movies still to come.

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