Word: drama
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...family, A History of Violence earned a heap of critics' prizes and two Oscar nominations. Now Cronenberg is, for the moment, a helmer for hire. His new film, which opens this Friday in some U.S. cities, was written by Steve Knight, author of the multi-ethnic London underworld drama Dirty Pretty Things, and it has a lot in common with that movie and with A History of Violence...
...thing. With blockbusters and buddy comedies filling most of the multiplex screens, movies with a slower pulse and a higher IQ almost have to be marketed as bait for the Academy Awards. Audiences are told that if they don't see this political exposé, or that family-crisis drama, they won't be in the know on Oscar night. It's like homework, but with George Clooney or Brad Pitt as the professor...
...George Clooney and Brad Pitt took Ocean's Thirteen to Cannes, but they don't need a film festival to get attention for their caper movies. They do for a dark, corporate-chicanery drama like Michael Clayton. or a murky, elegiac western like The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. So the big boys are here to exchange their star luster for the ego boost, and maybe the Oscar boost, a good showing at Toronto can bring. That's how American Beauty and Crash, both Academy Award winners for Best Picture, got started...
...last two features at the Venice Film Festival. On Wednesday I flew back to New York, and that evening I caught a screening of Julie Taymor's Beatles movie, Across the Universe. Yesterday I got to Toronto, where my first movie was the Jodie Foster revenge drama The Brave One. Today, wearing my two Toronto press badges along with the one I brought from Venice (just to show off) and my TIME ID, I'm sporting more bling than P. Diddy...
...sense of how The Sopranos changed television, get a pen and make a list of the 20 best TV dramas before 1999. This Mafia saga showed just how complex and involving TV storytelling could be, inspiring an explosion of ambitious dramas on cable and off. In Tony Soprano's world, it wasn't the Mob that kept pulling you back into old, destructive patterns; it was your family--your controlling mother, your maddening wife, your feckless kids. Meanwhile, the big-F Family drama of the declining Mafia business offered popcorn entertainment alongside the deeper insights. Some fans may have hated...