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Under discussion:

Woman in the Dunes  (1964)

Kevin and I are currently working on a podcast about spirituality in film. A movie I recently saw I really wanted to talk about, which won’t make it into the podcast is Woman in the Dunes (Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1964), an art house classic recently available through Criterion. A search on Rotten Tomatoes brings up a lot of discussion around this movie, but none I’m satisfied with.

Woman in the Dunes opens with an entomologist vacationing in the desert, collecting insects and he misses his bus. A couple villagers invite him to stay the night. They take him to a house in the bottom of a large sand pit where a woman lives. The man climbs down a rope ladder into the pit and the next morning the ladder is gone. The purpose of his kidnapping: To help the woman shovel sand each night which is hauled up and sold by the villagers above. Some vague reference is made that she must shovel or the sand will overtake her house, then the next and so on, but the science of why she’s stuck there is clearly irrelevant. She chooses to be there. The man does not and his attempts to climb the walls of sand sifting into their hole are futile. (more…)

Under discussion:

Waitress  (2007)

Juno  (2007)

Now that Juno has won a big festival prize and Fox Searchlight has revamped its release plan to make the teen sex melocomedy look more like a prestige picture, various bloggers are have begun to seriously consider the film’s Oscar chances. I still think Searchlight would be better off selling this movie to teenagers than to the Academy dinosaurs, but if everyone else is doing it, I’ll play along.

I’m sure Searchlight will push for nominations for screenwriter Diablo Cody and lead actress Ellen Page. I think both pieces of work are sufficiently spectacular (in multiple senses of the word) to secure a nod, but despite the Academy’s love of ingenues, I think when it comes down to vote time the general consensus will that both will do better work once their talents mature a bit. This must be what everyone else is thinking, too, because out of nowhere, people are starting to talk (see the comments on this post) about Jennifer Garner’s work as the title character’s would-be adoptive baby mama as worthy of a Best Supporting Actress nomination. It’s not–which doesn’t mean it won’t get nominated, but I think that would be serious over-praise. It’s not bad work by any means, but there are at least three finer performances in that movie.

Searchlight probably doesn’t have the guts to push Jason Bateman for Best Supporting Actor, but man, I’d like to see them try. He’s absolutely the catalyst for everything Garner does, as well as much of Page’s performance in the film’s middle section. He transforms from the heroine’s confidant to, essentially, the film’s villain in the space of a single scene. And we’ve never seen subtlety like this from Bateman before. Even fans of his straight-man work in Arrested Development should be impressed. The big story of 2007 will be the emergence of the comedy with unexpected depth (it’s actually a throwback to the 30s, but that’s a discussion for another time). The performances of Bateman, Page and Michael Cera in Juno embody that theme, and deserve to be recognized as such.

A side note: Searchlight’s sudden post-fall festival focus on Juno must suck for the team behind Waitress. Certainly, no one could be mad that a film made for about a million dollars has grossed $20 million, but back in June, Keri Russell looked like a lock for a Best Actress nomination. Now … she doesn’t.

• With the WGA strike looking almost certain to begin by the end of the week, new complications seem to arise every minute. ??Now two studios, Universal and New Line, have forbidden contracted scribes from complying with the WGA’s “script validation program.” It’s a rule insisting that, in the event of a strike, writers must submit evidence of all projects-in-progress to the guild. New Line sent a letter to their writers, which flat-out stated that adhering to the WGA rule wil be considered “a breach of your writing agreement.” The AMPTP has already ruled that the WGA rule is illegal; WGA, natch, disagrees. More here.
• Heath Ledger and Sean Penn are in talks to star in Terrence Malick’s next film, Tree of Life. The project has been in development for years, but of course, nobody knows anything about it. Except, at one point, it was going to star Colin Farrell and be shot partially in India, and neither of those things are happening anymore.
• Rebecca Miller (wife of Daniel Day-Lewis, and his director in The Ballad of Jack and Rose) will direct Julianne Moore, Winona Ryder and Robin Wright-Penn in The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, based on Miller’s novel. The plot concerns a dutiful wife” (presumably Wright-Penn?) “whose husband falls for a younger woman” (Ryder?), “freeing her to explore her buried sensuality and leading to a ‘a very quiet nervous breakdown.’”