10 Links for 10/10/10

Since we won't have another repetitive day like this until 3010 and since I will be well into my 1000somethings when that day arrives (yes, I plan to live as long as Gandalf... though without the scraggly beard) and possibly too senile to blog, I was going to post this great picture of a certain actress in a t-shirt that read "10" that I screencapped a year ago and I cannot find it. Sadness. You get a link roundup instead.

Film School Rejects funny list of "10" themed movies.
Kino London today in film history. 10/10 means both Ed Wood and Orson Welles.
TOH I don't wanna say 'told ya so' given what I wrote a few days ago when I changed my Best Picture charts and bitched about people bitching about The Social Network's box office but a 30% drop only in the second weekend... told ya so! Add a few 10s of millions to your final box office projections.
New York Daily News the 10 guest stars to watch in this TV season. Gwyneth Paltrow on Glee among them.
Show Tracker 10 best moments of the TV year thus far.
LA Times 10 best movies of the year that you might have missed. Go Animal Kingdom!
New York Press 'Top 10 Latin American Movies of the Aughts' to screen in NYC. I've seen 6 of them (all good) but I've always meant to see La Cineaga so I should go. What do you think shoulda been on this list that's not?

 /Film Perfect 10 Tom Hardy should find a big movie quick. The way I see star ascendance trajectories, Bronson was the perfect 'look at me!' move, Inception was the ideal 'gotcha' for the mainstream moviegoers who hadn't been paying attention and the next picture is supposed to be the slam dunk 'I'm a superstar' move. It's no time to vanish from screens! But Mad Max: Fury Road has halted production until maybe 2012? Poor Tommy.
Empire David O. Russell's 10th directorial project (if you include the continually troubled Nailed and his short films) will either be Old St. Louis with Vince Vaughn or Drake's Fortune, a video game adaptation.
Cinematical Reasons why you should be excited for Saoirse Ronan as Hanna. But wait, this list only goes up to 7, not 10. Call the blog police!
*

Yes No Maybe So: The Fighter

Our first glimpse of the highly buzzed David O. Russell boxing picture The Fighter. If it becomes a major player at this year's Oscars I want y'all to remember that I believed it would happen first. Toot Toot. (That was my own horn).



And now the patented foolproof system for judging our own reaction to the trailer: Yes, No, Maybe So™. Join us with your own in the comments.

First things first: It seems obvious that this film will live or die on the chemistry between its central brothers, boxer Mickey (Mark Wahlberg) and his trainer (Christian Bale). It seems obvious from the trailer that their relationship could well float like a butterfly and sting like a bee or whatever the hell boxers are supposed to do. Maybe Wahlberg is the type of performer who has to have a strong director to be properly called an actor -- but that question of his ability is already solved by reteaming him with David O'Russell who is already responsible for his best performance (I Heart Huckabees). Plus we'd like Christian Bale to stop doing these crazy things to his body so maybe mass acknowledgement that he's a good actor will dampen down that particular self-destructive urge for awhile?


On the other hand, haven't we seen enough boxing pictures? Isn't it the #1 most populated sport within the movies -- you'd think there'd be boxing gyms on every corner of every street to meet the need. Boxers are like hitmen: way more prevalent in the movies than they are in real life. But there will be blood... in the movies. Since we've seen so many rise and fall and rise again biopics and so many boxing pictures, what could this possibly add to the bloated over populated genre? I fear it looks a smidge generic... at least visually. Not that you can always tell from a trailer.

The cast sounds good on paper but how do they all come together onscreen? It's possibly delicious that there will be a catfight of sorts between Mickey's mom (Melissa Leo) and his girl (Amy Adams) but it also just might be typical Hollywood poverty porn. You know how they love the 'We're going to Disneyland!' white trash families the movies... or maybe I'm just thinking of the last Oscar baiting boxing pic. So, to make a long story short: I knew that both Leo and Adams were in the movie but who expected that the movie would contain girlfights? Haven't we all wanted to see Amy Adams test her range a little ever since her triumph in Enchanted? So why am I a little worried about her in this context.

How about you?

The Fighter opens in December.
*
*

Oscar Predictions Revised: Picture, Director, Animation, Documentary, Sound

I'm working on revising the Oscar predictions. So far we've updated the extensive foreign film pages (yet, we're already behind again the news is coming so quickly), the animated and documentary categories, the aural categories like best score and song (I could use some help there -- offer it in the comments) and NEW best picture. And yes I know that many people believe that The Way Back will not be released in time. But I don't believe for a second that the current plans will keep.

About Best Director. After a banner year for diversity last year this year looks like a return to the standard. It'll take a while for cinema's burgeoning spread of voices to register on a frequent basis. If you fuse all my predicted nominees together -- that'd be David Fincher, David O. Russell (pictured left), Mike Leigh, Peter Weir and Christopher Nolan -- you've got a 54 year old white auteur with 9 films under his belt who has been nominated once before in this category and is generally perceived as overdue for a win. But why would you fuse them together? That's only something I sometimes do with statistics because I am weird.

I would have loved to predict Darren Aronofsky for Black Swan (because I am a fan* in general, though I haven't yet seen the film), but here's something I fear about the new 10 wide Best Picture system. Though it gave us a nice spread of genre and mood and consensus last year, I fear the noisy mainstreaming of that category will end up drowning out the hoopla for those left of center choices that the directorial branch sometimes honored in their gutsier moments. And if my fears prove correct going forward, that'll be a real shame.

Your thoughts and armchair punditry are welcome in the comments as always.

*fan not stalker. Which I must differentiate because a friend of a friend of a friend did point out his & Rachel Weisz's apartment to me the other day quite unexpectedly, even though movies weren't even the topic of conversation. The exterior was red. That's neither here nor there. I'm just sharing for a bit of organic blog flavoring.
*