AFTERTHOUGHTS (50)
THE BEST OF THE VES 2008

And while Sunday night meant the BAFTAs for British film geeks (see Afterthoughts (49) in the Archive), over in La-La Land, American film geeks looked to the Kodak Theatre, where the 6th Annual VES Awards took place.
This year, the Visual Effects Society favoured Michael Bay’s Transformers with four awards, including the big one, Outstanding Visual Effects in a Visual Effects Driven Motion Picture.
Beyond Transformers though, the win that really made me go “Woot!” was…

Battlestar Galactica: Razor:
Outstanding Visual Effects in a Broadcast Miniseries, Movie or Special (Mike Gibson, Gary Hutzel, Sean Jackson, Pierre Drolet)

But, just for the record…

Transformers:
Outstanding Visual Effects in a Visual Effects Driven Motion Picture (Scott Farrar, Shari Hanson, Russell Earl, Scott Benza)
Best Single Visual Effect of the Year [Desert Highway Sequence] (Scott Farrar, Shari Hanson, Shawn Kelly, Michael Jamieson)
Outstanding Models or Miniatures in a Motion Picture (Dave Fogler, Ron Woodall, Alex Jaeger, Brian Gernand)
Outstanding Compositing in a Motion Picture (Pat Tubach, Beth D’Amato, Todd Varizi, Mike Conte)

Additionally, the award for Outstanding Animated Character in a Live Action Broadcast Program or Commercial went to Nicklas Andersson, Mike Mellor, Sylvain Marc, and Florent DeLa Taille, for the Fatlip shots in Chemical Brothers – Salmon Dance.
Not exactly sure what that is, but hey, it’s the Chemical Brothers…

Steven Spielberg was also honoured with the VES Lifetime Achievement Award, for “the contribution that his vast body of work, as both a director and producer, has made to the art and science of visual effects.”

On the downside though, I’d just like to say it’s such a sad thing that not only did Zodiac get no love from the Oscars this year, but VES passed it over too.
Zodiac was up for Outstanding Supporting Visual Effects in a Motion Picture and Outstanding Created Environment in a Live Action Motion Picture (for Washington and Cherry), but lost out to Ratatouille and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End (for The Maelstrom) respectively.
It’s pissy since David Fincher’s use of visual effects in Zodiac is so seamless, it’s practically invisible. I guess VES gave him an invisible award too…
Don’t worry, Mr. Fincher, the Iguana luvs ya…

For a downloadable PDF of the complete nominee list, go here, and to see a complete list of the winners, go here.

Parting shot: Reviews of Razor, Transformers, and Zodiac can be found in the Archive.

(Battlestar Galactica: Razor DVD cover art courtesy of amazon.com; Transformers OS courtesy of wildaboutmovies.com; and Zodiac OS courtesy of impawards.com.)

AFTERTHOUGHTS (44)
HEY, IF IT ISN’T OSCAR! 2008 (2)

So after last night’s post, I searched for a complete complete Oscar nominations list, and was successful at both aintitcool.com and variety.com.
For the sake of completion, here’s a list of all the Oscar nominations I’m excited about this year…

Across The Universe:
Best Costume Design (Albert Wolsky)

Eastern Promises:
Best Actor (Viggo Mortensen)

No Country For Old Men:
Best Picture
Best Director (Joel & Ethan Coen)
Best Supporting Actor (Javier Bardem)
Best Adapted Screenplay (Joel & Ethan Coen)
Best Cinematography (Roger Deakins)
Best Film Editing (Joel &Ethan Coen)
Best Sound Editing (Skip Lievsay)
Best Sound Mixing (Skip Lievsay, Craig Berkey, Greg Orloff, and Peter Kurland)

Once:
Best Song (“Falling Slowly”)

Transformers:
Best Sound Editing (Ethan Van der Ryn and Mike Hopkins)
Best Sound Mixing (Kevin O’Connell, Greg P. Russell, and Peter J. Devlin)
Best Visual Effects (Scott Farrar, Scott Benza, Russell Earl, and John Frazier)

And the nominations from films I’ve mentioned here at the Iguana, but have yet to see are…

Away From Her:
Best Actress (Julie Christie)
Best Adapted Screenplay (Sarah Polley)

The Golden Compass:
Best Art Direction (Dennis Gassner, Art Direction; Anna Pinnock, Set Decoration)
Best Visual Effects (Michael Fink, Bill Westenhofer, Ben Morris, and Trevor Wood)

Juno:
Best Picture
Best Director (Jason Reitman)
Best Actress (Ellen Page)
Best Original Screenplay (Diablo Cody)

Lars and the Real Girl:
Best Original Screenplay (Nancy Oliver)

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street:
Best Actor (Johnny Depp)
Best Art Direction (Dante Ferretti, Art Direction; Francesca Lo Schiavo, Set Decoration)
Best Costume Design (Colleen Atwood)

I’m still bummed by Eastern Promises’ lack of Oscar presence, and concerned about the chances of “Falling Slowly,” though one must recall last year, when Dreamgirls had three songs up for the award, and Melissa Etheridge swooped in for the kill.
You never know, really.
Having mentioned “Falling Slowly,” though, here’s what Glen Hansard had to say about the nomination:

"It's insane. God, what a day it's been! I'd like to say I was out having a walk and wasn't bothered and took it all in stride but the truth is I didn't sleep last night and we just killed time until it came on TV, but then they only announced the major categories. We're in the Czech Republic so my friend in the States called me and we couldn't believe it. We were jumping up and down. It was hugely melodramatic and Irish. We cracked a bottle of champagne and got drunk before 3:00. It was only in the shower I realized what a riot this has been. We made the film in January 2006. We went to Sundance and won an award in January 2007 and now we have an Oscar nomination so I'm thinking January is my lucky month.”

Good on you, Glen!
Now if only the WGA strike gets resolved—fairly—within a month, so we can actually have an Oscar night, instead of an unattended event people won’t cross picket lines for…

Again, congratulations, one and all. (You can check out the now complete list here.)
Awards will be presented on February 24, 2008.

Parting shot: Reviews of Across The Universe, Eastern Promises, No Country For Old Men, Once, and Transformers can be found in the Archive.

(Oscar OS courtesy of hollywoodreporter.com.)

AFTERTHOUGHTS (43)

43.1 HEY, IF IT ISN’T OSCAR! 2008
As per my usual Oscar routine, I watched the live announcement of the major nominations (on BBC). I then quickly scuttled over to oscar.com, for the rest of the nominations.
Apparently though, what’s up at the site at the moment may not be a complete complete list (only one of the three Best Animated Feature Films is listed; Best Cinematography has four nominees listed), so if there are any nominations I’m unable to mention below, well, that’s the reason.
At any rate, the nominations I’m excited about are…

Across The Universe:
Best Costume Design (Albert Wolsky)

Eastern Promises:
Best Actor (Viggo Mortensen)

No Country For Old Men:
Best Picture
Best Director (Joel & Ethan Coen)
Best Supporting Actor (Javier Bardem)
Best Adapted Screenplay (Joel & Ethan Coen)
Best Cinematography (Roger Deakins)
Best Film Editing (Joel &Ethan Coen)
Best Sound Editing
Best Sound Mixing

Once:
Best Song (“Falling Slowly”)

Transformers:
Best Sound Editing
Best Sound Mixing
Best Visual Effects

Nominations from other films I’ve mentioned here at the Iguana, but have yet to see are…

Away From Her:
Best Actress (Julie Christie)
Best Adapted Screenplay (Sarah Polley)

The Golden Compass:
Best Art Direction

Juno:
Best Picture
Best Director (Jason Reitman)
Best Actress (Ellen Page)
Best Original Screenplay (Diablo Cody)

Lars and the Real Girl:
Best Original Screenplay (Nancy Oliver)

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street:
Best Actor (Johnny Depp)

As always there are some disappointments.
One of the most glaring is probably that Eastern Promises is severely under-represented. One nomination, and since all indications point to Daniel Day-Lewis stealing the gold for There Will Be Blood…
But then again, there are some welcome sights, like “Falling Slowly” getting in there for Best Song. It’s up against three songs from Enchanted though, so we’ll just have to see.

Congratulations, one and all. (You can check out the sorta complete list here.)
Oscar Night is on February 24, 2008. Hopefully, the WGA strike will be over by then…

43.2 FOR THE SAKE OF ART 2008
And since we are talking about awards, the Art Directors Guild also recently announced their nominations for the 12th Annual ADG Awards.
And the nominees for Excellence in Production Design in 2007 that got me all pumped are…

300 (Fantasy Feature Film; PD: James Bissell)
Heroes: Episode 1020 “Five Years Gone” (Single Camera Television Series; PD: Ruth Ammon)
Lost: Episode 322 “Through The Looking Glass” (Single Camera Television Series; PD: Zack Grobler)
No Country For Old Men (Contemporary Feature Film; PD: Jess Gonchor)
Pushing Daisies: Episode 101 “Pie Lette” (Single Camera Television Series; PD: Michael Wylie)

Other Feature Film nominees I’ve mentioned ‘round these parts before but have yet to see are…

The Golden Compass (Fantasy Feature Film; PD: Dennis Gassner)
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (Period Feature Film; PD: Dante Ferretti)

But the high point for me for this year’s ADG awards will most certainly be stop-motion animation grand master Ray Harryhausen receiving the honourary Outstanding Contribution to Cinematic Imagery Award.
Ray Harryhausen is a hero of mine from my grade school days. This is the man who painstakingly brought to life the mythical beasties that threatened the lives of cinematic heroes like Sinbad and Jason, made dinosaurs battle cowboys, and flying saucers and giant octopi and prehistoric monsters leave great swathes of property damage in their wake.
He brought a kid’s dreams to life on screen, and made that kid a lifelong devotee of cinema.
I will be forever indebted, Mr. Harryhausen. Congratulations.

Another honour for the evening is the awarding of the Lifetime Achievement Award to Stuart Craig, who did the production design for Richard Donner’s Superman: The Movie, and won awards for his work on David Lynch’s The Elephant Man, Anthony Minghella’s The English Patient, and Stephen Frears’ Dangerous Liaisons.
Craig’s work will best be known to today’s generation of movie-goers though, through the Harry Potter franchise.

Congratulations, one and all. Awards night is on February 16, 2008. (The complete list of nominees can be found here.)

Parting shot: Reviews of 300, Across The Universe, Eastern Promises, No Country For Old Men, Once, and Transformers can be found in the Archive, along with episodic recaps/reactions to Heroes, Lost, and Pushing Daisies.

(Images courtesy of hollywoodreporter.com [Oscar OS], impawards.com [No Country For Old Men OS], and rayharryhausen.com.)

DISTURBIA
(Review)

Shia LaBeouf.
You may not know how to spell his name just yet, but chances are, if you’ve seen Transformers (review: Archive July 2007), you know this kid and you know his face. And though he’s been banging around for a while now (maybe you saw him in Constantine, or in The Greatest Game Ever Played, or in Bobby, or maybe even Disney’s Even Stevens), Steven Spielberg seems to be making a big push to crown him the first official star of Hollywood’s latest generation of actors.
After the Spielberg-produced Transformers, Shia is going to be up on the big screen with pop culture icon Indiana Jones, in the upcoming Indiana Jones and the City of the Gods.
But if there is indeed some evil Spielbergian Master Plan, that Plan starts here, in D.J. Caruso’s Disturbia.

Kale Brecht (LaBeouf) lost his father (Matt Craven) in a tragic car accident a year ago. Since then, he’s had a number of run-ins with the law. The latest ends in his house arrest, for which his mother Julie (Carrie-Anne Moss) needs to pay the state $12 a day for.
Consigned to his house and most of the front- and backyard by a “tether,” tormented by the neighbourhood kids, cut off from his Xbox and his iTunes, and suffering “chronic boredom,” Kale discovers the “reality without the television,” as he starts spying on his neighbours, particularly newcomer Ashley (Sarah Roemer, from The Grudge 2).
But Kale soon begins to suspect his neighbour, Mr. Turner (David Morse), has a murderous secret, and his house arrest quickly proves to be much more than he bargained for.

Now, if anything works in this agreeable popcorn thriller, it’s clearly LaBeouf, who anchors the audience with a credible performance of a teen-ager unsuccessfully dealing with the grief and guilt of a parent’s death.
From the opening prologue, which ends with that great reaction shot as Kale realizes his father is dead, LaBeouf presents an identifiable protagonist who, for all his subsequent fixation on Turner and his suspected crimes, is still at heart, a teen-ager with raging hormones.
LaBeouf proves up to the task, as he juggles all this, while still maintaining the charm and charisma that is speedily making him a household name.
And in Roemer, the film finds a leading lady who meets LaBeouf on the same level. Roemer’s performance may not be as solid as LaBeouf’s (we learn a lot more about Ashley from Kale’s monologue about her than what we actually see on-screen), but she holds up nonetheless.
It’s the other cast members who don’t fare quite as well.

While Carrie-Anne Moss does her best with a slightly underwritten part, Aaron Yoo (who plays Ronnie, Kale’s goofy best friend) is the stereotypical comic relief, and David Morse, is, well, David Morse. The man can do “Creepy Dude” in his sleep, and probably does. It may have been more interesting to have had an actor cast against type as Turner, instead of Mr. King Creepy Dude.

Still, despite sections terribly reminiscent of past films (The Blair Witch Project, Poltergeist, as well as the obvious and oft-mentioned Rear Window—it’s not like this is the first time anyone’s used the Rear Window gambit, after all), Disturbia does succeed in its modest aims.
As I mentioned earlier, it’s an agreeable popcorn thriller. It’s not exactly riveting, but it is engaging. But perhaps most importantly, its success at the box-office is a clear signal that LaBeouf is on the cusp of Hollywood stardom, an idea that Spielberg seems more than happy to see come to fruition.

(Disturbia OS courtesy of impawards.com.)

TRANSFORMERS
(Review)

It’s curiously apt that Transformers is produced by Steven Spielberg and directed by Michael Bay, as it feels like nothing so much as an attempt at a classic Popcorn Spielberg film, pumped up on adrenaline and testosterone.
Sam Witwicky (Shia LeBeouf, recently seen in Disturbia and soon to be seen in Indiana Jones and the City of the Gods) is an American teen-ager seriously crushing on Mikaela Banes (Megan Fox, from Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen and TV’s Hope & Faith), a girl who doesn’t even know he exists. He’s got a bling-wearing Chihuahua called “Mojo,” who happens to be popping pain pills at the moment for a leg injury. He’s also busy selling some of his explorer grandfather’s stuff on eBay for his car fund.
But after he wrangles an A- from his History professor (one of his father’s conditions for getting Sam a car), he ends up taking an Internet-savvy alien robot home.
And though there are a couple of other plot threads that run through the first two-thirds of the film, the grand coming-of-age tale of a boy and his first car is the core of Bay’s Transformers, and it’s an effective and affecting hook that manages to hold all of the film’s other elements together, though just barely.

Considerable stretches of Transformers succeed admirably in the popcorn entertainment department; this film can move when it wants to. When Bay pulls out his standard bag of tricks (yes, lots of things go bang and boom here), aided as he is by impressive CGI courtesy of ILM and Digital Domain, you really do believe a vehicle can turn into a robot and piss on a man. Oh, and cause massive amounts of property damage too.
But it’s perhaps in the number of plot threads—survivors from a Decepticon attack on a US military base in Qatar; the efforts of the Pentagon to deal with the threat; the actions hacker Maggie Madsen (Rachael Taylor, soon to be seen in the English-language remake of Shutter) takes to decipher a signal used by the enemy—that the ride gets a tad wonky.
The film’s pacing is never quite as sharp as it should be, its rhythm mostly erratic, ultimately making it feel it really is as long as its running time indicates, always a no-no with movies that run over two hours.
Characters drop on and off the narrative’s radar like a Decepticon on buggered stealth mode, and some of the comedic aspects—particularly some of the Transformer hi-jinx, a borderline loony character played by John Turturro, and a hacker played by Anthony Anderson—though certainly not as blatantly off-key as those found in Spider-Man 3 (see review in Archive May 2007), still do manage to grate at certain points of the film.
And some of the dialogue, particularly from Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen, who gave voice to Prime in the cartoon; he’s also been Eeyore, the Red Skull, Captain Crabnasty from—heh—My Little Pony and Friends, and Glitterbot from—double heh—Rainbow Brite and the Star Stealer) tends to be clunky and awkward.

Clearly, the film could have done with some judicious editing and quite possibly, the deletion of a character here and there.
I have a feeling though that many will choose to overlook these problems in the film since the action set pieces do their work like gangbusters. And LeBeouf goes a long way in giving the audience a relatable protagonist, in making us care, not just about him, but about his car/guardian/friend too.
Yes, for a bunch of pixels that speaks in snatches of songs and sound bytes, Bumblebee is surprisingly an endearing fictional construct. Certainly not on the level of a Gizmo or an E.T., mind you, but affecting nevertheless.

Contrary to what its iconic theme song claims, there really isn’t much more than meets the eye with Transformers.
It’s a Michael Bay film. It’s got money shots aplenty, handsful of underwritten characters, and it’s got loads of stuff that blow up real good. It’s fun, manipulative, and ultimately disposable popcorn entertainment. (Allowing your brain cells to chill out during the 144-minute running time is advisable.)
What is surprising though, is that the Popcorn Movie King throne vacated by Spielberg and assaulted by would-be usurpers like Roland Emmerich, Stephen Sommers, and most recently, Gore Verbinski, could very well be snatched up by Bay, of all people.
He’s taken his patented action formula and applied it to the PG-13 family friendly film franchise template, and produced a flawed, yet crowd-pleasing hybrid, with the resultant boffo box office that all studio heads just love.
Watch carefully, kiddies, we’re watching Bay transform before our very eyes.

(Transformers OS courtesy of wildaboutmovies.com.)