Costume Designers Guild Winners

COSTUME DESIGN (Period Film): 12 Years a Slave- Patricia Norris
COSTUME DESIGN (Contemporary Film): Blue Jasmine- Suzy Benzinger
COSTUME DESIGN (Fantasy Film): The Hunger Games: Catching Fire- Trish Summerville

And Now Things Get Serious (PGA Nominations)

Happy New Year.  Musings and Stuff took an unexpected break for the holidays, and all the exhaustion that comes with this time of year, but it's time to start fresh as the 2013 Oscar Race is ever solidified (for better or worse) by today's announcement of the nominees of the best of the year from the Producers Guild Association of America.

The nominees are:

• 12 Years a Slave
• American Hustle
• Blue Jasmine
• Captain Phillips
• Dallas Buyers Club
• Gravity
• Her
• Nebraska
• Saving Mr. Banks
• The Wolf of Wall Street

The PGA have been a streak with the Best Picture Oscar since No Country For Old Men's victory in 2007, so the outcome here will more than likely be our eventual king of 2013.  Some the usual suspects (Captain Phillips, American Hustle, Gravity, Nebraska, 12 Years a Slave) arrive and are safe, but the remaining line-up is a bit harder to read, prompting confusion and more questions.

Is Blue Jasmine, long ago abandoned as the Cate Blanchett-only show, now a possible Best Picture nominee?

Can Dallas Buyers Club, fresh from its inexplicable SAG Ensemble nomination, join the fray?

Are Wolf of Wall Street and Her, passionately loved (and some corners hated) auteur projects, safe?

Just how telling is that lazy nomination for Saving Mr. Banks?

And of the snubs-- neither Inside Llewyn Davis, Lee Daniels' The Butler, Fruitvale Station, August: Osage County, Prisoners or All is Lost made the cut.  Are they DOA?  Interestingly, the Weinstein Company and their typically plentiful crop of prestige films didn't make the cut this year.

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE (Almost didn't feel the need to include because it's just so depressing)

• The Croods
• Despicable Me 2
• Epic
• Frozen
• Monster's University

Quentin Tarantino's Top 10 of 2013

It's only October, but auteur/personality Quentin Tarantino has unveiled his top ten of the year, or at least so far.  It's a very Tarantino-like list, but there's something to said for filmmakers who dole out their personal favorites and an enduring fascination to that.  A fun experiment for all prolific filmmakers, me thinks.

In alphabetical order:

• Afternoon Delight (Jill Soloway)
• Before Midnight (Richard Linklater)
• Blue Jasmine (Woody Allen)
• The Conjuring (James Wan)
• Drinking Buddies (Joe Swanberg)
• Frances Ha (Noah Baumbach)
• Gravity (Alfonso Cuarón)
• Kick Ass 2 (Jeff Wadlow)
• The Lone Ranger (Gore Verbinski)
• This Is the End (Evan Goldberg, Seth Rogan)

Things I Learned On My Summer Vacation

The summer movie season came and assaulted the senses and poof, it's gone.  The Labor Day weekend signals the end of that special parcel of time when Hollywood throws all its bombast in our faces, but the sign posts have been there for a few weeks now, evident by the dominance of Lee Daniels' The Butler solid box office play and three week straight strangle hold as the number one film of the nation.  It's not so much that the Forest Whitaker-Oprah Winfrey Civil Rights drama has posted the most significant numbers in the stratosphere (they certainly are impressive, especially given the subject matter) but more so because the dog days of August are when Hollywood typically gives up and regroups for fall.  It may be too early to tell how the cinematic offerings of the past few months will hold up and where there legacy lies, but first impressions are typically all that matters (especially in today's climate where a film lives or dies based on opening night grosses), but there's always takeaways, residual damages and lessons to be learned.  Here's Musings and Stuff's rundown of the good, bad and ugly of the 2013 Summer Movie Season.

First off, seventeen of Hollywood's offerings raked in over $100 million at the box office, which is a healthy sign that the theater-going habit isn't quite dead yet.  The top of the charts, unsurprisingly is Iron Man 3, which joined the worldwide billion dollar club and started summer 2013 with a bang, thanks to The Avengers afterglow.  The Marvel machine is healthy enough it hardly matters the film, strangely critically accepted, wasn't all that.  The real test, however, should be found in the grosses and the critical impact made by lesser Marvel standalone vehicles Thor and Captain America as each will have individual offerings in the next 365 days.  The remaining sixteen films tell a startlingly different story.

Around the Inter-Web

Awards Daily: A plea to support good movies this weekend, as opposed to most weekends.
Buzzfeed: Woody Allen's biggest hits, unadjusted and memed-- where will Blue Jasmine land?
Cinema Blend: The current state of whatsits on the "Batman vs. Superman." Could Ryan Gosling be the latest Caped Crusader?  For those you care, Armie Hammer doesn't want it...
Deadline:  "Say hello to my little...wizard." Harry Potter helmer Peter Yates might be in the running to direct a remake of Scarface...
Empire: Billy Bob Thornton cast in Fargo, television show based on the movie.  Speaking of Thornton, the trailer has dropped for the long-gestating Jayne Mansfield's Car, which he stars in and directed.
First Showing: Miles Teller, currently shining in The Spectacular Now, as Reed Richards in the Fantastic Four reboot?
Flavorwire: Features top ten lists of all-time favorite movies from the likes of Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese, Christopher Nolan...and Lena Dunham.
Hollywood Reporter: Ben Stiller's The Secret Life of Walter Mitty will be the centerpiece gala at this years 51st New York Film Festival. Captain Phillips will open.
In Contention: Rates the Oscars hosts of the last decade-- where will Ellen DeGeneres' second stab fall?
MovieWeb: Christopher Nolan's latest top-secret science fiction film, Interstellar will feature every actor in Hollywood when all is told.
mxdwnmovies:  Three more Avatars on the way, and to be shot simultaneously-- yay or nay?  And will this become the new studio norm for franchise filmmaking.
The New York Times: "Stop Blamming Jaws"-- an excellent dissertation on why Hollywood's 1st blockbuster shouldn't be finger-pointed to the tentpole-y ways that motivate the current Hollywood powers that be.

The Canyons starring Lindsay Lohan

 Thompson on Hollywood: A defense of the much-maligned Lindsay Lohan film The Canyons (which opened in NY this weekend and is also available on VOD and iTunes.)  Can the film live down that infamous New York Times article?

Blue Jasmine

The nerve, the twitch that hit the zeitgeist in recent years, that tinge of uproar sparked by the brief Occupy movement, inspired by the corrupt antics of those richer-than-sin is but the blip of the surface that's keenly and acutely observed in Woody Allen's latest-- a rich and potent character study of one woman's riches to rags saga.  It's also inspired the most provocative and surprising drama the filmmaker has tackled in years, decades even, as if Allen was hit by a primal nerve, one in which he sought to create a crowd-pleasing morality fable centered around a once wealthy woman, not just on the verge of a nervous breakdown, by in the full-on throes of one.  Blue Jasmine, a sparkling melodrama, seems to document a sudden and welcome shift, not to mention a glimmer of topicality for the illustrious auteur.  For decades, Allen has held a gilded light on the neurotic and prickly dwellers on the upper echelons of society, at first as noted observer, than as insider-- in Blue Jasmine, Allen retreats and through the prism of a most absorbent character study, he has perhaps given the proletarians the feel good movie of the year.

Jasmine French (Cate Blanchett) is a modern day royal, one of the many superbly coiffed, well spoken members of high society, or she was, now she's tapped out due to the crafty bookkeeping by her high yields husband Hal (Alec Baldwin), and stuck in an eternal existential state of why me.  With no skill set to speak of, the loss of the societal camaraderie she once knew and recent bouts of mania, Jasmine has little choice but to journey west to San Francisco and mooch off her working class sister Ginger (Sally Hawkins) with little else but her own snobbish haughtiness to sate her.  Something is amiss right from the start of the film, as Jasmine, a woman so desperate to maintain authoritative civility,  appears lost on the doorsteps of her sister's apartment in one of the very first scenes, as if she's stuck in a nightmare waiting to wake up back at her summer home in Southampton where she can play the consummate hostess, the only role that ever naturally suited her.

Weekend Box Office

Wolverine came, and easily took the top place at the weekend box office, but it was more of a whimper than a boom-- the X-Men franchise still has some rehabilitation to stabilize the creative drudge that came from X-Men: The Last Stand (2006) and X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009.)  It was hardly the news story of the weekend however.

1. The Wolverine- $55 million (new)
2. The Conjuring- $22.1 million / $83.8 million total (-47%)
3. Despicable Me 2- $16 millin / $306.4 million total (-35%)-- now the second highest grossing domestic title of 2013, behind Iron Man 3.
4. Turbo- $13.3 million / $55.7 million total (-37%)
5. Grown Ups 2- $11.5 million / $101.6 million total (-42%)- this marks Adam Sandler's 13th title to gross north of $100 million domestically-- how do we feel about that?
6. Red 2- $9.4 million / $35 million total (-47%)
7. Pacific Rim- $7.5 million / $84 million total (-52%)
8. The Heat- $6.8 million / $141.2 million total (-26%)
9. R.I.P.D.- $5.8 million / $24.3 million total (-53%)
10. Fruitvale Station- $4.6 million / $6.3 million total (+529%)

BELOW THE TOP TEN

The big news story was the astounding opening weekend gross for Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine, which earned $613,000 on 6 screens this weekend for a per-screen average of $102,167.  That's the biggest per-screen average of the year so far, the biggest of Woody Allen's career (slightly above the $99,834 Midnight in Paris posted just years ago) unadjusted for inflation, the biggest per-screen victory ever accounted in Sony Pictures Classics' history (again, unadjusted) and enough to encourage the possibility that the critically accepted, already award-buzzed about film will expand well in the coming weeks.

Here's the Per-Screen Average Breakdown of 2013 So Far:

1. Blue Jasmine- $101,167 (6 screens)
2. Spring Breakers- $87,667 (3 screens)
3. The Place Beyond the Pines- $69,864 (4 screens)
4. Fruitvale Station- $55,184 (7 screens)
5. Before Midnight- $49,483 (5 screens)
6. The Bling Ring- $42,879 (5 screens)
7. Iron Man 3- $40,946 (4,253 screens)

Wolverine and Woody

Hugh Jackman returns as the clawed superhero on which he is most familiar with The Wolverine, the only major release to debut this weekend.  Director James Margold (Walk the Line, Knight & Day) hopes to undue the damage brought on the spin-off franchise by the dwindling returns of the Wolverine's first solo entry which in 2009 earned awful reviews and despite a strong open, experienced a drastic fall.  The first days results proved a sigh of relief for the studio executives at 20th Century Fox, as it collected $21 million on its first day of release (including a sold $4 million from Thursday late shows-- an uptick of recent films like Pacific Rim and World War Z.)  While it will fall short of the $85 million opening of X-Men Origins: Wolverine, the long end may appear brighter for the better reviewed flick which received an A- CinemaScore.  Here's how the X-Men series stands cash flow wise:

X-Men (2000)- $54 million opening ---> $157.2 million total
X2: X-Men United (2003)- $85 million opening ---> $214.9 million total
X-Men: The Last Stand (2006)- $102 million opening ---> $234.3 million total
X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009)- $85 million opening ---> $179.8 million total
X-Men: First Class (2011)- $55 million opening ---> $146.4 million total

On the limited side of the openings, Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine is hoping to achieve one of the strongest per-screen averages of the year.  Allen's highest per-screen average so far was Midnight in Paris, which debuted on 6 screens for an average of $93,000.

UPDATE: Blue Jasmine will indeed have one of the more notable limited openings of the year as its first day gross was an estimated $176,000 for a stellar per-screen of $29,000.  It's positioned to open on par (or even perhaps slightly better) than Midnight in Paris.  Fruitvale Station (review), meanwhile, expanded into wide release for a Friday gross of $1.4 million, good enough for the tenth slot.

The Talented Ms. Blanchett

Remember that period in the late 90s and early 00s where Cate Blanchett appeared in nearly every film released within the calendar year.  The Aussie appeared in no less than twenty feature films between the years 1997 and 2003, arguably her biggest peak of ubiquity.  Within that period she received countless praise, her first Academy award nomination (she currently has five career nominations with one win to record for those interested in taking tally), built a body of work that was built around an endless degree of shapeshifting, navigating films from small to gargantuan, from period to contemporary, amassing a career that seemed early on poised to threaten the great Meryl Streep on terms of versatility and degrees of difficulty; yes the poison of being called a "technical" actress has haunted both.  Recently, Blanchett has had a vastly smaller appearance on screens (in the last two years, Joe Wright's Hanna and last winter's The Hobbit were the only films), taking sabbatical on stage and, assuming, enjoying ones down time.  Things seem ripe to change in the near future, as Blanchett appears to entering another wave of ubiquity, starting off this week with the release of Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine, which has been earning strong early reviews for her riff on a modern Blanche Dubois.  The awards machine already seems to have kicked off in her favor, a sight familiar to the actress.  She also has roles in George Clooney's WWII fall release The Monuments Men, a return trip to Galadriel in The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug and the Australian drama The Turning due later this year.  That's not all, 2014 looks majorly packed as well with vocal work in How to Train Your Dragon 2, the Middle Earth finale The Hobbit: There & Back Again, two Terrence Malick projects, one entitled Knight of Cups and the other untitled, which might just be the same movie for all we know, and the leading role in Todd Haynes' Carol.  All this plus a film in the works by David Mamet and the 2015 re-telling of Cinderella, where Blanchett will play the Evil Stepmother.  Whew!!!!!!  Fasten your seat belts.

"Blue Jasmine" and the Woody Allen Oscar Game

The year was 1977.  Star Wars was the biggest hit of all time, soon to become the biggest cinematic obsession of, perhaps all time, but it was Annie Hall that won the Best Picture Academy Award for that year.  It was also Woody Allen's first Oscar win (he won for Direction, as well as Original Screenplay, for which he won with Marshall Brickman), of which, he didn't show, as would become accustom.  He has since won two more Academy Awards-- both for screenwriting, for Hannah & Her Sisters and Midnight in Paris-- in becoming the Academy's favorite screenwriter.  The awards game with Woody Allen films is a bit more hit and miss nowadays then during his prime, but further prodding shows that within his film a year since in the early 1970s, it's safe to assume that his films --> Oscar nomination ratio is one of the most durable and consistent in history.  He's also one a director with one of the very best ratios of Oscar-nominated performances.  On the heels of excellent early word on Cate Blanchett's performance in his upcoming and enticing looking Blue Jasmine, here's a look back at Allen's past Oscar triumphs.

As a preamble, out of all the acting nominations that have been bestowed for Woody Allen films, many of them are richly deserved nominees.  Nevertheless, the Academy has shown a certain reluctance to nominate perhaps arguably the greatest actor he has ever guided, his greatest muse, partner and well, things kind of didn't end well, but Musings and Stuff commends Mia Farrow, despite the fact that the AMPAS never did.

"Blue Jasmine" and the Annual Struggle to Maintain Devotion to Woody Allen

"I don't think I can take it.  For some reason my Xanax isn't kicking in."

 

Every year, more and more around this time like clockwork, Woody Allen releases his latest film.  It's insane to think it through, actually, considering the consistency.  It's a minor miracle of sorts, considering all the inanity that comes along with the release of a motion picture these days.  That he can write one off each year whilst still maintaining a top-drawer ensemble and finding funding to boot.  The mixed bag of America's favorite screenwriter is that the last two decades have been a decidedly mixed bag.  To the point that we must meet his next project with such a cautious optimism-- I sort of parental, "I hope he doesn't screw this one up" sort of vibe.  All that being said, his latest-- a dramedy inspired in sorts by the Bernie Madoff scandal of excess gone to stink (which couldn't be more timely, come to think of it)-- Blue Jasmine on first glance looks, dare I say, rather juicy.  Cate Blanchett plays the lead, an unhinged woman whose wealth and marriage have gone down the tube, and she is supported by an eclectic ensemble cast including Sally Hawkins (in a hopeful return to the promise she exhibited in 2008's Happy-Go-Lucky), Alec Baldwin, Bobby Cannavale, Peter Sarsgaard, Louis CK, Michael Stuhlbarg and most peculiarly, Andrew Dice Clay.  One reason for the hope must surely be presented in the form of Blanchett herself, who hasn't headlined a film in quite a few years, and on first glimmer looks perfectly on cue. 

Even so, it's a bumpy ride in Allen-land these days, as evident from the joyous surprise (and even more surprisingly, Oscar-winning) Midnight in Paris.  He quickly followed the Best Picture contender and his highest grossing film to date with the absolutely negligible To Rome With Love.  And while Match Point and Vicky Cristina Barcelona rank as astounding successes in the last decade-- When You Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, Whatever Works, Cassandra's Dream and Anything Else, um, don't.  Examine: