2009 |
2008
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Roger Ebert picks best animated films of 2009
26 December 2009 10:09 PM, PST
| screeninglog.com
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Roger Ebert posted an entry on his blog about his 10 favorite animated films of the year. Ten is quite a big selection for this genre, which is why it's quite hard to leave some out. Still, he managed to do just that.
He picked: "A Christmas Carol," "Coraline," "Fantastic Mr. Fox," "Sita Sings the Blues," "9," "Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs," "Ponyo," "The Princess and the Frog," "Up" and "Waltz with Bashir."
I can't comment on "Ponyo" and "Sita Sings the Blues" because I haven't seen those, but the one film I disagree on with Ebert is "Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs." I would never call it the best of the three.
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- Franck Tabouring
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The ten best animated films of 2009
26 December 2009 3:21 PM, PST
| blogs.suntimes.com/ebert
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True, the once neglected art of animation has undergone a rebirth in both artistry and popularity. Yet having escaped one blind alley, it seems headed into another one: The dumbing-down of stories out of preference for meaningless nonstop action. Classic animated features were models of three-act stories: Recall "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" or "The Lion King." The characters were embedded in stories that made sense and involved making decisions based on values. Now too many stories end in brain-numbing battles, often starring heroes the age of the younger audience members. Here is no food for growth and for the imagination, just brainless kinetic behavior.
The year saw more animated films intended instead for adults, and a film like "Waltz with Bashir" used the freedom of the form to show matters unthinkable in a live action feature. Several of these films were true crossovers, truly freed from the demographic vise.
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- Roger Ebert
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Bazmann’s Christmas Address
25 December 2009 7:00 AM, PST
| HeyUGuys.co.uk
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It’s been a great year for the British film industry. It kicked off with the British invasion of the Oscars, with notable wins for Kate Winslet, and Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire. The huge amount of British Actors plying their trade successfully in Hollywood continued to grow, with Scot Gerard Butler particularly in demand with parts in Gamer, The Ugly Truth and Law Abiding Citizen.
British filmmakers have been responsible for some of the more interesting films this year. Duncan Jone’s Moon was a brilliant yet under appreciated sci-fi drama. Fish Tank and Harry Brown lead the way for low budget drama. Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus finally found a distributor. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince became the highest grossing British movie of all time.
British film festivals Raindance and the BFI London Film Festival saw record attendances, and showcased some great films from home,
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- Barry Steele
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FusedFilm’s Favorite 9 Animated Films of All Time!
23 December 2009 12:08 PM, PST
| FusedFilm
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So its been awhile since we have done an animated top ten or favorites list, in fact I think we have only done one since we have been in existence. Throughout cinematic history there has been many animated films from so many walks of life harping on different genres and different tones from children’s tales to more adult tastes. I have decided to take a look at what I consider the top 9 animated films of all time. I think it is safe to say that Walt Disney/Pixar are the standard and have been the standard for animation for sometime. However films like 9, Ponyo and other international forms of animation like Waltz With Bashir, are quickly hitting the mainstream and capturing the attention of moviegoers everywhere. New Media and Social Media are helping these lesser animated jaunts get noticed by many more people also its becoming more increasingly favored in film festivals like Sundance.
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- Kevin Coll
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The Decade’s Film: 2005-2009
21 December 2009 7:33 AM, PST
| t5m.com
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It had been a successful decade for the comic book movie, with that trend continuing into the latter half of the decade. Just as looked like the public demand for irradiated heroes looked to be diminishing, with lacklustre showings from the likes of Spider-Man 3 and Fantastic Four, out came Iron Man. Coupled with a brilliant script and an excellent performance from Robert Downey Jr as the titular zillionaire industrialist/playboy/freedom fighter/all-round genius, the end result was something truly special. Downey’s career was also revitalised, earning him a role in Tropic Thunder (which would earn him an Oscar nomination). Louis Leterrier’s The Incredible Hulk took a similar approach, this time giving Edward Norton of Fight Club fame a shot at getting under the skin of the green goliath.
They set a tough act to follow, but followed they were by one Christopher Nolan. With the Batman
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- Uprising
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100 best films of the noughties: Nos 11-90
18 December 2009 2:17 AM, PST
| The Guardian - Film News
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The Guardian film team's pick of the top 100 movies of the decade. Check back from 21 December as we unveil the top 10 day by day
11-20
11. Waltz With Bashir
12. Dig!
13. The Beat That My Heart Skipped
14. The Consequences of Love
15. No Country for Old Men
16. Silent Light
17. Japon
18. The Sun
19. What Time Is It There?
20. Before Sunset
21-30
21. Unrelated
22. One and a Two
23. Ivansxtc
24. Let the Right One In
25. Of Time and the City
26. When the Levees Broke
27. You Can Count on Me
28. A Serious Man
29. Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner
30. Control
31-40
31. The Death of Mr Lazarescu
32. Grizzly Man
33. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
34. Être et Avoir
35. Far from Heaven
36. Hidden
37. The Hurt Locker
38. Oldboy
39. The New World
40. The Piano Teacher
41-50
41. Spirited Away
42. Vera Drake
43. American Splendor
44. Capturing the Friedmans
45. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
46. Crimson Gold
47. A History of Violence
48. In the Mood for Love
49. Movern Callar
50. The Night of the Sunflowers
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'Anvil' Wins IDA Documentary Award
7 December 2009 5:02 PM, PST
| Cinematical
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Many people were pissed last month when the Academy revealed its shortlist for the Best Documentary Feature category and Anvil! The Story of Anvil wasn't included. Hopefully fans of the cult doc can relax now, because the film has received two prestigious awards from the International Documentary Association, including the organization's top prize, for Distinguished Feature. Anvil!, which comically follows the titular Canadian heavy metal band on tour and has since made them more famous than ever before, also took home the Ida's award for best music documentary. Director Sacha Gervasi, formerly a roadie for the group, reportedly responded to the film's success by saying, "f**king hell." He, like many others, probably expected Oscar front-runner Food Inc. to win the top award.
It's not at all rare for the Ida and the Academy to disagree on what is the year's best documentary, if only because of qualification issues. Last
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- Christopher Campbell
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My decade: personal perspectives from key arts figures
7 December 2009 9:03 AM, PST
| The Guardian - Film News
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Film-makers, musicians and more look back on their achievements and favourite works from the noughties
Kevin Macdonald, film director
Personally, it's been a fascinating decade. In the late 90s, I was struggling to make TV documentaries but work was drying up. I was a purist, with no interest in working with actors. I hated the idea of dramatic reconstructions because they look so cheesy. Then I worked with actors on Touching the Void and this led to dramatic features, though documentaries remain my first love.
The British film industry has always been about boom and bust. We start out with unrealistic optimism: "We're going to compete with Hollywood!" Then we have the collapse and the correction. We saw it with Alexander Korda in the 1930s, with Rank after the war, and with Gandhi in the 1980s. This decade it happened again.
The collapse of Film4 back in 2002 was part of this problem.
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Spc Troops Pick up Maoz's Lebanon
30 November 2009 1:32 AM, PST
| ioncinema
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As of today, their top three consists of the Golden Lion winning film from Samuel Maoz (Lebanon), the Palme d'or winning Michael Haneke's White Ribbon and Cannes' Grand Prize winning Jacques Audiard's A Prophet. - Sony Pictures Classics will likely not repeat their 2009 blunder. Neither the deservingly far-superior titles of Waltz with Bashir nor The Class walked away with the Best Foreign Picture win last year, but 2010 might favor the art-house specialist -- they'll have three titles and a "60 percent" chance at determining the final outcome.
As of today, their top three consists of the Golden Lion winning film from Samuel Maoz (Lebanon), the Palme d'or winning Michael Haneke's White Ribbon and Cannes' Grand Prize winning Jacques Audiard's A Prophet. For the record, Israel hasn't confirmed their entry, but I would have a difficult time imagining how Israeli Film Academy would choose any other film
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- Ioncinema.com Staff
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Will Departures be this year's sleeper film hit?
30 November 2009 1:31 AM, PST
| The Guardian - Film News
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A Japanese film about a Buddhist mortician is set to be an unlikely commercial success
There aren't many films about the Japanese art of corpse beautification. Still fewer made by a director who previously specialised in soft-core porn and starring an ex-boy band heart-throb. But Departures (Okuribito), which opens in Britain on Friday, is all these things. It won this year's best foreign language Oscar, beating two critically feted films, Waltz with Bashir and The Class.
But why? The film, after all, is hardly a Saturday night no-brainer. Loosely adapted from Aoki Simmons's autobiography Coffinman: The Journal of a Buddhist Mortician, it's about a redundant cellist who finds meaning in his life when he gets a job ceremonially washing bodies, preparing them for entry into the next life. Even in Japan, where films about death and funerals are not uncommon (see Akira Kurosawa's masterpiece Ikiru), the role of the
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- Stuart Jeffries
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Found Film Friday: Germans In The Woods
20 November 2009 5:41 PM, PST
| GordonandtheWhale
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The world of animated film has seen more dramatic fare in the past couple of years, with titles like Persepolis and Waltz With Bashir. The Rauch Brothers are a team of animators who have followed in those footsteps and made their own animated emotion-filled tale. Their black and white short tells the story of Joseph Robertson, an 86-year-old World War II veteran, who fought in the Battle of the Bulge. Now 60 years later, one German soldier he took the life of still haunts him to this day.
Read more on Found Film Friday: Germans In The Woods…
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- James Wallace
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Celebrate Veteran’s Day with a War Movie Overload
11 November 2009 2:33 PM, PST
| FilmSchoolRejects.com
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Instead of doing a cheesy list for Veteran's Day, we here at Fsr decided just to give a run down of all the war-type movies that we've covered over the years (the good, the bad, and the boots on the ground). Some of these you'll be able to pick up at the rental store on your way back home from work, but hopefully your employer was nice enough to give you the day off so you could sit back with a beer, some BBQ and a swelling fervor in remembrance of the monumental jobs done by the bravest members of our society.
And since we're overloading here, we went ahead and included just about any flicks that involve soldiers and wartime. We even included some featuring those limey Brits! Look how far we've come since 1776.
As an added challenge, why not watch all of them?
The General (1927)
Battleship Potemkin (1925)
The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1944)
To Hell and Back (1955)
Operation Petticoat
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- Dr. Cole Abaius
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DVD Review: ‘Fear(s) of the Dark’ Dazzles More Than Scares
2 November 2009 10:03 AM, PST
| HollywoodChicago.com
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Chicago – Though graphic novels may read like great movie storyboards, they often fail to translate into compelling cinema. From “Sin City” to “Watchmen,” filmmakers have tried replicating graphic art with a reverence more suffocating than exhilarating. Images that reverberated with power on the page become coldly calculated on the big screen. No matter how tightly structured a film may be, it must give viewers the illusion of spontaneity. And there’s nothing more tiresome than a horror film in which all the scares feel telegraphed.
DVD Rating: 3.0/5.0
That’s the interesting challenge facing “Fear(s) of the Dark,” a compilation of short subjects from six of today’s most celebrated graphic artists. As an animation exercise, the film is consistently fascinating. Each artist’s approach to the cinematic medium is as distinctive as their trademark visual styles. Though their films are wildly different from each other, they all grapple with
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- adam@hollywoodchicago.com (Adam Fendelman)
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Jonathan Demme To Animate 'Zeitoun' By Dave Eggers
29 October 2009 3:05 AM, PDT
| Screenrush
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Today's news (via Slash Film) that Dave Eggers Zeitoun is to be adapted for the big-screen in animation by veteran director Jonathan Demme may come as something of a surprise to those who have followed the Oscar-winning director's hit and miss career.
We should confess that before Rachel Getting Married came along we'd all but given up on Demme following a string of films that were (at best) bad and (at times) so absolutely terrible as to destroy our faith in cinema as either entertainment or art. But his last film was fantastic and so we can do nothing but look forward to the prospect of the Silence of the Lambs director taking on hot-as-you-like reporter, publisher, novelist and scriptwriter (Where The Wild Things Are) Eggers' remarkable non-fiction tale of a New Orleans family's experiences of the devestating 2005 hurricane and its aftermath.
According to reports, the idea to animate the
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DVD Playhouse--June 2009
3 June 2009 12:41 PM, PDT
| The Hollywood Interview
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DVD Playhouse—June 2009
By
Allen Gardner
The International (Sony) An Interpol agent (Clive Owen) joins forces with a Manhattan D.A. (Naomi Watts) to bring down an arms dealing ring and a corrupt global banking cartel that’s funding them. Superlative thriller was oddly ignored by critics and audiences alike, but expertly blends intelligence (courtesy screenwriter Eric Warren Singer’s masterfully-crafted script) and full-throttle action (director Tom Tykwer stages one of the great film shoot-outs in New York’s iconic Guggenheim Museum), making this dynamite thriller reminiscent of the best work from masters such as John Frankenheimer and Robert Aldrich. Armin Mueller-Stahl is wonderful as a world-weary covert op. Bonuses: Extended scene; Featurettes; Trailer. Widescreen. Dolby 5.1 surround.
The Jack Lemmon Film Collection(Sony) Five films from the two-time Oscar winning actor, focusing on his early career: Phfft! is a zippy comedy from 1954, one of Lemmon’s earliest films, in which
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- The Hollywood Interview.com
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Hoffman And Penn Shine At Cesar Awards
28 February 2009 6:10 AM, PST
| WENN
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Hollywood actors Dustin Hoffman and Sean Penn were the toast of the French movie industry on Friday night - with tributes at the annual Cesar Awards.
Hoffman received a lifetime achievement prize at the glittering ceremony in Paris, France while Penn was a guest of honour at the event.
Penn took to the stage to present the prestigious Best Film award to French movie Seraphine, which went on to win six more trophies including Best Actress for Yolande Moreau.
The Milk star's own movie, Into The Wild, was nominated in the Best Foreign Film category, but lost out to Israeli animated documentary Waltz With Bashir.
The night's other big winner was gangster film Mesrine which landed three trophies, including Best Actor for Vincent Cassel and Best Director for Jean-Francois Richet.
French school drama Entre les murs (The Class) - which won the Cannes film festival in 2008 - was lauded with the Cesar for Best Adaptation.
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Oscars: 'Departures' Takes Foreign Language Film
22 February 2009 8:13 PM, PST
| GetTheBigPicture.net
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Best Foreign Language Film:
The Baader Meinhof Complex
The Class
Departures
Revance
Waltz With Bashir
Winner: Departures
Pardon the pun, but this is the first real departure from the script tonight, with Japan's official entry in the Foreign Language category upsetting Watlz with Bashir, which had loads of momentum coming into the Academy Awards. But this is one of the great Oscar categories simply becuase it exposes hundreds of millions of people to films like Departures, which they'd otherwise not be familiar with.
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- Colin Boyd
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Drawing From Memory By Nick Dawson
20 February 2009 1:05 AM, PST
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Leading up to the Oscars on Feb. 22, we will be highlighting the nominated films that have appeared in the magazine or on the Website in the last year. Nick Dawson interviewed Waltz With Bashir writer-director Ari Folman for our Fall '08 issue. Waltz With Bashir is nominated for Best Foreign Film.
It’s been said that the job of the filmmaker is to put on screen things that have never been seen before. And while cinema is essentially an infant art form, these days there are still relatively few films that move into genuinely new territory. Waltz with Bashir, which opened this year’s Cannes Film Festival, is one of those films.
In this unique documentary, Israeli director Ari Folman attempts to reconstruct the missing memories from his
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- Jason Guerrasio
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Weekend viewing
12 February 2009 3:00 PM, PST
| CultureMagazine.ca
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There's not much to see this weekend, so it might be a good time to catch up on other stuff. Waltz with Bashir, for example, is still playing at the Bytowne, and I can now tell you that it's pretty good. If you are looking for something new, why not check out The International? What seemed like ridiculous hysteria when the trailer came out last summer now seems relevant, doesn't it? Banks are evil. They will apparently use an Atm to murder you or something.
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- cultureemag@gmail.com
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Slumdog & Milk Honoured At Writers Guild Awards
8 February 2009 6:15 AM, PST
| WENN
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Slumdog Millionaire and Milk were the big winners at The Writers Guild of America awards on Saturday - walking away with the board's most prestigious honours.Gus Van Sant's Milk received the award for best original screenplay for Dustin Lance Black's writing, while Slumdog Millionaire's writer Simon Beaufoy won the gong for best adapted screenplay for his reworking of Vikas Swarup's novel Q & A.
Israeli animated film Waltz with Bashir's Ari Folman won the Guild's best documentary screenplay.
In TV, Tina Fey picked up yet another gong for her hit show 30 Rock - winning best comedy series along with her ten-strong team of writers. The show also won best writing in the episodic drama category.
Mad Men picked up the best dramatic series, with In Treatment taking home the best writing in a new series at the simultaneous ceremonies in Los Angeles and New York.
Paul Giamatti-starring TV mini-series John Adams was honoured with the best long form adaptation for Kirk Ellis' take on the novel written by author David McCullough.
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