Word: oscars
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Hayao Miyazaki has dreamed beautifully on film for ages; Japan's master of anime won an Oscar for his rapturous Spirited Away. Now he adapts a novel by Diana Wynne Jones about Sophie (voiced by Emily Mortimer), a Cinderella type who, under a witch's spell, instantly becomes a 90-year-old crone (Jean Simmons) and takes residence in the portable home of the birdman Howl (Christian Bale, speaking in Clint Eastwood's gruff whisper...
...noirish melodrama. The filmmakers made Deep Throat a smoker, which some say he was not, to give him a Robert Mitchum air, which was surely not something we would now impute to Felt. But Hal Holbrook gives a gnomic, cranky performance as Deep Throat. (Shouldn't there be an Oscar for best performance by an actor you can barely see?) And director Alan Pakula added menacing off-camera sound effects to Holbrook's scenes--a mysterious bump, the sudden squeal of tires as a car departs. Finally, chillingly, Holbrook tells the reporter that his investigative zeal is now placing...
...pretty much whatever I wanted," Michael Cunningham remembers fondly, "because nobody was likely to pay attention." That was before Cunningham wrote The Hours, his moving reimagination of the novel Mrs. Dalloway and the life of its author, Virginia Woolf. The book won a Pulitzer. Nicole Kidman got an Oscar for the movie. Just like that, Cunningham's precious obscurity was gone. "It's harder to feel the necessary degree of recklessness when people are paying attention," he says. "You have to be willing to fail...
Howard has a vested interest, but he thinks Joe Gould is the kind of role that could earn Giamatti an Oscar. At the very least, it's fine territory on which to build the next act of his career. As Gould, unlike such gigs as Limbo,the slave-trading orangutan in Planet of the Apes, or Kenny (Pig Vomit) Rushton in Private Parts, Giamatti gets to play more than just one exquisitely sweaty comic note. Howard thinks people are only now waking up to Giamatti's ability. "I so loved him as Pig Vomit, and that, balanced with the detail...
...early '90s?Mr. & Mrs. Bridge, Howards End and The Remains of the Day?lit a fire under the damp logs of failure, compromise and regret. These were elegant films, but also powerful movies, tragedies in a whisper. The Hollywood establishment nodded Merchant-Ivory's way, with 31 Oscar nominations and six statuettes; but Merchant still had to work his charm, hard, to finance their pictures. Not to worry. Another meal from this consummate host, this gourmet of life (he owned a restaurant and wrote several books on cuisine) ... and the feast would continue...