News: Aronofsky Leaves "The Wolverine"

     You may have heard the news yesterday, but in case you missed it, Darren Aronofsky (who most recently received his first Oscar nomination for "Black Swan") left what was to be his next directing gig, "The Wolverine", a prequel to the X-Men series that was going to study chronicle some of the character's early years in Japan. The film is going to star Hugh Jackman (the man who has brought the comic book character to life in all his on-screen appearances) and the buzz on street about the script is very positive, but for now the film has no director. The reason behind Aronofsky's departure is somewhat unclear. The official press release from Aronofsky said that he wanted to "spend more time with his family", and could not be out of the country for about a year (the film is going to be mostly shot in Japan). He is in the middle of divorce proceedings with his wife, actress Rachel Weiz, and in order to do better in the custody battle over their child it has been said that he needed to stay in the states. Today though, contrary rumors have surfaced that he split over creative differences. After "Black Swan"'s success with multiple Oscar nominations, Aronofsky was apparently feeling his oats, and demanded complete and total creative control over the film (the sort of control that Christopher Nolan has over the Batman films). According to the rumor, the studio than offered Aronofsky more money in an attempt to satisfy his ego, but money was not something that Aronofsky was interested in. After this, Fox told him walk, as they where unwilling to completely hand over the reigns of the comic book series to the independent director.

    If this is true, I find it incredibly disappointing. If one thing has been proven true time and time again in the world of cinema, it's that truly great films only occur when the person with the artistic vision is allowed to implement things the way that they see it (of course, someone with a blog called auteurfan would think that). It is true that films without much studio input where total creative freedom is given to the director can also be enormous flops, and given what must be a large budget for "The Wolverine", I can't say I am to surprised to hear that the studio is antsy about letting go of the reins, but films made by committee will always produce safe, conservative mediocre films that will make the usual blockbuster money, but won't reach the heights of culturally relevant films such as "The Dark Knight" and "Avatar". If you read the article I linked to about the sad state of the Hollywood studio system (it's under the news story, "A System in Shambles"), this news is yet another tragic example of the lethargy that has set in Tinseltown. I don't know if it will ever be fixed, but until the studios are willing to bet more on artistic talent, I'm afraid we will have to settle for the usual formulaic slop we have been getting for the last decade or so.

If I Picked the Winners: Best Actress 2010

     I finally conclude my 2010 Oscar coverage with a ranking of this year's Academy Award nominees for Best Actress. With the dearth of well-written roles for woman over the last few decades, Best Actress commonly isn't the star-studded affair it use to be when you had the likes of Katherine Hepburn, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Olivia De Havilland, and Ingrid Bergman competing for the Oscar. Also, the movie's from which the Best Actress nominees come from a far more typically smaller, lesser known films than the one's their leading male counterparts are nominated for. In fact, over the last twenty years, only three Best Pictures winners have also won the Oscar for Best Actress ("The Silence of the Lambs", "Shakespeare in Love", and "Million Dollar Baby"), and seven times the winner of the category came from a film that wasn't even nominated for Best Picture. Leading up to this nominations, the buzz on the street was how robust this year's Best Actress category was. As the awards season came into clear view though, a lot of the pre-proclaimed "award worthy" performances didn't pan out, and while it still was an above-par year compared to recent award seasons, we still ended up with three nominees from movies very little people actually saw, and two from movies that were not apart of the Best Picture race.

     For my own personal nominees ballot, there are not a lot of names that jump out begging for replacing of the actual nominees with one great exception: Lesley Manville in "Another Year". Of course, as I have stated before, the likely reason for her absence from being included in Oscar's big party is category confusion. It was hard for many people to decide whether she belonged in the Best Supporting Actress category, or as a lead in the Best Actress category, and her lackluster campaign did really get a clear message across as to which category people should vote for her. Her role in the film is a genuinely tough one to categorize, but had I been able to vote, I think I would have included her as a Best Actress nominee. It really is a shame she was not included in one of the two categories though, because she gave the best performance of any female this year. The only other performance that I might have included instead of some of the other nominees is Julianne Moore in "The Kids Are All Right". While the woman who played her partner was nominated, Annette Bening (who did give the better performance in my opinion), a large part of the film was about the interaction between the two ladies, so it would have been fitting for both of them to have received nominations. Getting two lead nominations from the same film though is an extremely rare occurrence, so it was not too surprising only one of them received a Best Actress nomination. Enough speculating about the "could of"s and "should of"s, let's get on to the actual nominees.

News: A System in Shambles

     This week came the news that Universal declined to green-light the James Cameron-produced and Guillermo Del Toro-written-and-directed adaptation of the H.P. Lovecraft novel "At the Mountains of Madness". The movie had a reported $150 million budget and, this is the key, was to be rated R. The R-rating pretty much guaranteed that, despite the big names attached to the film (including Tom Cruise as one of the film's stars), it would not get made. While I am not particularly a big fan of Del Toro's (I found "Pan's Labyrinth" to be extremely overrated) it saddens me to see an original passion project such as this not see the light of day. Unfortunately, it speaks to the state of a stagnant, decaying system that fails to take any gambles on original work. This is especially the case for any filmmakers interested in making a big-budget rated R film, as Gore Verbinski found out trying to adapt the excellent video game "Bioshock" into an R-rated film.

     The news of Del Toro's smashed dreams did lead to one positive creative outburst though, a fantastic article I happened to stumble across that sums up to current situation which has left us with a sea of generic PG-rated family fare and typical PG-13 crap. The author of article, Drew McWeeny, succinctly details the state of the industry and the frustrations I feel with it better than I ever could hope to, perfectly nailing the complex causes of Hollywood's bloated rotting corpse. If you're at all frustrated with the total lack of originality and overall crappy value of most movies today coming from the studios, I highly recommend you read it by clicking here. In response to the authors open ended questions that conclude the article, I don't really have any great answers either. The only thing I can say that we can do to even begin to address the sad state of cinema we found ourselves in (for major studio releases), is to take responsibility of what we see as filmgoers. This means that we can not continue to see sequels out of obligation just because we have seen the originals. If it looks like a cash ploy, it probably is, so skip it and send the studio a message we don't want more sequels. This also means taking more chances on original movies, even if it doesn't look like your typical cup of tea. If you see a movie that is not a sequel or some carbon cut-out formulaic romp, give a chance, even if you have your doubts. This may not sound like much, but it's a start, and at last you'll feel like you're backing new and adventurous cinema.