Getting More Immersed with Indiewire
Immersed in Blu-ray: Hitchcock and Bogart
Immersed in Books: Farber on Film
The 43rd Annie Awards Saturday night at UCLA’s Royce Hall was a love fest for Pixar’s Inside Out, which grabbed 10 awards, including Best Animated Feature, and is primed for the Oscar. The Good Dinosaur, which dominated VES animator on Tuesday, took the Animated Effects prize for a Pixar sweep. Read more
Who ever thought you’d have to make the case for Star Wars winning the VFX Oscar? But with all the buzz surrounding Mad Max: Fury Road and The Revenant bear, which earned three additional VES awards for ILM, there are no guarantees. And that’s the point: ILM has done such outstanding photo-real work on the J.J. Abrams’ record-breaking Star Wars reboot — zeroing in on $2 billion worldwide at the box office — that there might be a tendency to take the work for granted. Read more
Although Burr Steers dislikes the word “kitsch” for its cheap connotation, he had a hard time denying that Pride and Prejudice and Zombies isn’t kitschy, especially after admitting that the biggest influence was Tony Richardson’s The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968), which is great kitsch. Read more
The contenders include the return to a post-apocalyptic wasteland and a galaxy far, far away, the (surreal) collapse of the financial system, a metaphysical journey in the frozen wilderness, and The Boston Globe’s exposure of the Catholic Church sex abuse scandal. Read more
Here are the highlights of my interviews with the Oscar-nominated animated feature directors: Pete Docter (Pixar’s Inside Out), Charlie Kaufman & Duke Johnson (Starburns Industries’ Anomalisa), Mark Burton & Richard Starzak (Aardman’s Shaun the Sheep Movie), Alê Abreu (Boy and the World from Gkids) and Hiromasa Yonebayashi (Studio Ghibli’s When Marnie Was There, also from Gkids). What you come away with is a group of contenders grappling with family, identity and greater self-awareness. Read more
Last week Disney released Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs on Blu-ray with a slew of new bonus features along with Steven Spielberg’s Oscar-contending Bridge of Spies with Tom Hanks and Mark Rylance. Read more
This “Anomalisa Landing” clip demonstrates the sophisticated storytelling and aesthetics behind the stop-motion Oscar contender from Charlie Kaufman & Duke Johnson. Read more
Steven Spielberg gave his sound team a gift by opening Bridge of Spies with a Hitchcock-inspired chase through the New York subway with no dialogue and a sense of mystery surrounding Soviet spy Mark Rylance (nominated Best Supporting Actor).
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Oscar nominee and ACE winner Margaret Sixel had a major advantage on Mad Max: Fury Road: her candor. Read more
