Movies Are My Life

Golden Globes surprises, snubs and sure things: 6 things you must know about theOscar warmup

Deservedly nominated is Leonardo DiCaprio with his sensationally over-the-topperformance as a flamboyant plantation owner in Quentin Tarantino’sjaw-dropping, mind-blowing Django Unchained.
Photo by Andrew Cooper/The Weinstein Co.
Lincoln has copped seven Golden Globe nominations, more than any other filmeligible for accolades this year.
Photo courtesy of Touchstone Pictures
Salmon Fishing in the Yemen had a lasting impact of members of the HollywoodForeign Press Association: They honored the movie with no fewer than threenominations.
Salmon Fishing in the Yemen/Facebook
Zero Dark Thirty is Kathryn Bigelow’s account of the search for Osama Bin Laden.
Zero Dark Thirty/Facebook
The nominations announcement brought very good news to dark horses Richard Gerefor his role in Arbitrage with Susan Sarandon.
Photo by Myles Aronowitz
On the other hand, the news wasn’t nearly so good for Matthew McConaughey (shownhere with Zac Efron in The Paperboy).
Courtesy photo

First, the bad news: Ricky Gervais won’t be back this year to unleash his snark at the awards show often viewed as a warmup for the Oscars. This isn’t meant as a slap at Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, who have been signed on as co-hosts instead of Gervais for the 70th annual Golden Globe Awards. But for those us who enjoy hearing rude remarks as much as gushing gratitude at events of this sort, well, we can only hope for at least a cameo appearance by the mischievous Brit wit.

As for the Golden Globes themselves: If you’re an admirer of Lincoln, Argo and/or Silver Linings Playbook, you’re doubtless feeling jolly, since those films — along with the forthcoming Django Unchained, Les Miserables and Zero Dark Thirty — are among the most-mentioned on the list of Golden Globe nominations announced Thursday.

Winners won’t be revealed until Fey and Poehler take the stage at the extravaganza set to air Jan. 13 on NBC. But it’s not too early for six utterly random observations.

A PRESIDENTIAL FRONT RUNNER: For the past few weeks now, some Oscar handicappers have pegged Lincoln as the odds-on fave for Best Picture, reasoning that while other films may have their champions, Steven Spielberg’s sweeping yet intimate historical drama would end up being the consensus choice of Academy voters. Those prognosticators will feel even more confident about their prediction now that Lincoln has copped seven Golden Globe nominations — including Best Drama, Best Director, Best Actor in a Drama (Daniel Day-Lewis), Best Supporting Actor (Tommy Lee Jones) and Best Supporting Actress (Sally Field) — more than any other film eligible for accolades this year.

GONE FISHING: On the other hand, no one has been predicting much Oscar love for Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, a pleasant romantic comedy that, to be brutally honest, came and went fairly quickly last spring. But it must have had a lasting impact of members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association — they honored the movie with no fewer than three nominations, for Best Comedy or Musical and for lead players Ewan McGregor and Emily Blunt.

As Jon Weisman of Variety has duly noted: That’s three times as many Golden Globe nods as Cloud Atlas, Flight, Anna Karenina or Hitchcock can crow about it.

LEO RISING: The Hollywood Foreign Press Association, they sure love them some star power. Indeed, the organization’s most virulent critics have long dismissed HFPA members as a shameless bunch of star . . . well, as perhaps too obsequious when it comes to dealing with celebrities. But, really, it’s hard to complain too much about any group that celebrates the sensationally over-the-top performance by Leonardo DiCaprio as a flamboyant plantation owner in Quentin Tarantino’s jaw-dropping, mind-blowing Django Unchained.

It’s worth noting, of course, that in addition to giving DiCaprio a Best Supporting Actor nomination, HFPA voters also nominated his perfectly cast co-star, Christoph Waltz, in the same category. Both actors richly deserve their commendations.

But while it’s arguable that Waltz’s shrewdly calculated portrayal of a fastidiously polite yet remorselessly proficient bounty hunter is a subtler piece of work, my money is on Leo to bring home the gold.

THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM: Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow’s account of the search for Osama Bin Laden, has been accused — so far, mostly by people who have not actually seen the film — of condoning the use of torture during the “enhanced interrogation” of terrorist suspects by U.S. intelligence agents. It may or may not say something about the validity of those claims that the Hollywood Foreign Press Association has given so many nominations to the film.

Likewise, it may or may not say something about those claims if the movie actually takes home a few Globes

GOOD NEWS, BAD NEWS: Getting a Golden Globe nomination can raise the profile (and the hopes) of Oscar hopefuls heretofore considered long shots. So Thursday morning brought very good news to dark horses Richard Gere (Arbitrage), Rachel Weisz (The Deep Blue Sea), Jack Black (Bernie) and John Hawkes (The Sessions). On the other hand, the news wasn’t nearly so good for the conspicuously unnominated Matthew McConaughey, who had been considered a Supporting Actor contender for either Magic Mike or Bernie (or, for that matter, The Paperboy).

Another Texas boy, director Wes Anderson, was similarly slighted, even though his Moonrise Kingdom was nominated in the Best Comedy or Musical category.

EVERYBODY IS A STAR: Unlike the Motion Picture Academy, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association does not offer awards in technical categories. There are no awards for costumes, make-up, editing, production design, special effects and sound effects — categories in which Les Miserables likely will loom large on Oscar night.

Which means, of course, there’ll be more than enough time during the Golden Globes telecast for all those awards that go to nominees who toil in TV. (Hey! Let’s give it up for Alec Baldwin!)

But it also means that, for the most part, people who pick up awards will be people you’ve actually heard of. Unfortunately, this year, Gervais won’t be around to put them in their place.

unspecified

Movie Review

Meta-comedy remake Anaconda coils itself into an unfunny mess

Photo by Matt Grace

Jack Black and Paul Rudd in Anaconda.

In Hollywood’s never-ending quest to take advantage of existing intellectual property, seemingly no older movie is off limits, even if the original was not well-regarded. That’s certainly the case with 1997’s Anaconda, which is best known for being a lesser entry on the filmography of Ice Cube and Jennifer Lopez, as well as some horrendous accent work by Jon Voight.

The idea behind the new meta-sequel Anaconda is arguably a good one. Four friends — Doug (Jack Black), Griff (Paul Rudd), Claire (Thandiwe Newton), and Kenny (Steve Zahn) — who made homemade movies when they were teenagers decide to remake Anaconda on a shoestring budget. Egged on by Griff, an actor who can’t catch a break, the four of them pull together enough money to fly down to Brazil, hire a boat, and film a script written by Doug.

Naturally, almost nothing goes as planned in the Amazon, including losing their trained snake and running headlong into a criminal enterprise. Soon enough, everything else takes second place to the presence of a giant anaconda that is stalking them and anyone else who crosses its path.

Written and directed by Tom Gormican, with help from co-writer Kevin Etten, the film is designed to be an outrageous comedy peppered with laugh-out-loud moments that cover up the fact that there’s really no story. That would be all well and good … if anything the film had to offer was truly funny. Only a few scenes elicit any honest laughter, and so instead the audience is fed half-baked jokes, a story with no focus, and actors who ham it up to get any kind of reaction.

The biggest problem is that the meta-ness of the film goes too far. None of the core four characters possess any interesting traits, and their blandness is transferred over to the actors playing them. And so even as they face some harrowing situations or ones that could be funny, it’s difficult to care about anything they do since the filmmakers never make the basic effort of making the audience care about them.

It’s weird to say in a movie called Anaconda, but it becomes much too focused on the snake in the second half of the film. If the goal is to be a straight-up comedy, then everything up to and including the snake attacks should be serving that objective. But most of the time the attacks are either random or moments when the characters are already scared, and so any humor that could be mined all but disappears.

Black and Rudd are comedy all-stars who can typically be counted on to elevate even subpar material. That’s not the case here, as each only scores on a few occasions, with Black’s physicality being the funniest thing in the movie. Newton is not a good fit with this type of movie, and she isn’t done any favors by some seriously bad wigs. Zahn used to be the go-to guy for funny sidekicks, but he brings little to the table in this role.

Any attempt at rebooting/remaking an old piece of IP should make a concerted effort to differentiate itself from the original, and in that way, the new Anaconda succeeds. Unfortunately, that’s its only success, as the filmmakers can never find the right balance to turn it into the bawdy comedy they seemed to want.

---

Anaconda is now playing in theaters.

movies film