I grew
up in southeastern Idaho – a land of potato fields, extinct volcanoes, Mormons,
and exactly two seasons of the year. In Idaho, it’s either the mild,
extraordinarily dry summer or the deep, bitter, windy, punishing winter. Fall
and spring are each very pleasant and last for about ten minutes apiece.
In that
way, Hollywood is a lot like Idaho. There are two main seasons and nothing else
really counts. With Hollywood film releases, it’s either the gigantic,
expensive, generally brainless summer blockbuster season or it’s the serious,
calculated, prestige-project winter awards season.. Both the Academy of Motion
Picture Arts and Sciences and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association collect
their votes for the Oscars and the Golden Globe awards in December and January.
This means November and December are packed with the kinds of high budget, high
profile, high gloss pictures that are meant to be award-worthy. So if you’re a
movie fan, this means the holiday season is busy not just with buying presents,
attending parties, and navigating the icy roads, but also because you’re trying
to make it to the theater every weekend.
This
week I’d like to look at a few of the more interesting films coming our way
during the winter awards season.
November
7 will see the release of Interstellar, director Christopher Nolan’s
first picture since he shut down the Batman franchise in 2012. In the film,
Earth is environmentally devastated and unable to sustain our population any
more. Matthew McConaughey plays Cooper a widower engineer who is asked to help
man a space expedition through a worm hole in hopes of finding a more habitable
place for humanity to live. He has to decide if he wants to stay with his two
daughters and watch the planet die, or leave his girls possibly forever in
order to save the human race. I anticipate Cooper making that decision within
the first 30 minutes of the film and spending the rest of the movie exploring
freaky hostile planets on the other side of the universe. If you go to Interstellar,
plan on beautiful, glossy images; unexpected plot developments that make you
wonder what kind of film you’re watching exactly; and probably an ending that
you will spend the rest of the night talking about with your friends. Award
voters tend to be big fans of films with an epic scope and of genre pictures
that take sci fi or westerns or musicals a little beyond their usual borders. Interstellar
will probably fit that bill.
One week
later, Foxcatcher comes to theaters. It tells the true story of John
DuPont, a multimillionaire member of that DuPont family, who was a huge
supporter of amateur athletics. He even went as far as to turn part of his Foxcacher
Farm estate into a wrestling training facility for young Olympians. DuPont’s
mental illness and paranoia ultimately led him to murder Dave Schultz, an
Olympic champion freestyle wrestler. The film is directed by Bennett Miller
whose films Capote and Moneyball have both been smart and
unsentimental takes on true-life stories. The fact that the insane murdering
millionaire is played by Steve Carrel only makes the film that much more
intriguing. The Academy loves to acknowledge it when formerly silly actors take
on serious, dark, and/or disturbing roles. If Carell pulls off his performance,
look for him to be nominated for making the transition from Michael Scott to
the dark side.
One film
I’m particularly interested in coming out in December is Ridley Scott’s Exodus: Gods and Kings, a retelling of
Moses and the Ten Commandments. Mel Gibson’s extremely lucrative The Passion of the Christ reestablished
the Bibical epic as a prestige movie project and different directors have tried
them with varying degrees of success in recent years. The director of Alien, Blade Runner, American
Gangster, and Black Rain taking
on Moses just sounds fascinating to me. Of course, he’s directed ancient
history epics before with Gladiator and
the Kingdom of Heaven – but I’ll be interested
to see how Scott addresses the inherently religious or spiritual components of
this particular story. Having Batman as Moses definitely makes it more
commercial than it might otherwise be.
There
are a lot of other interesting, big budget, big ambition movies coming out this
season and I hope to find time for them all before the season is over. Unlike
winter in Idaho or Michigan, the winter movie season passes all too quickly.
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