Alternative Film Guide

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences‘ Margaret Herrick Library has launched a searchable online catalog highlighting more than 30,000 motion picture scripts available for research at six Southern California collections: the Academy’s Margaret Herrick Library, the American Film Institute’s Louis B. Mayer Library, the Frances Howard Goldwyn Hollywood Regional Library, the University of [...]

The African-American Film Critics Association (AAFCA) has chosen Paul Haggis’s ensemble drama Crash as the Best Film of 2005. Set in Los Angeles, Crash depicts various forms of prejudices by intersecting different stories and characters. Haggis (Million Dollar Baby) also wrote the screenplay with Bobby Moresco.
Besides Crash, the other films that made up the AAFCA’s [...]

King Kong (2005)
Director: Peter Jackson. Screenplay: Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, and Peter Jackson; from Merian C. Cooper and Edgar Wallace’s story for the 1933 film. Cast: Naomi Watts, Jack Black, Adrien Brody, Thomas Kretschmann
 
The biggest disappointment about Peter Jackson’s King Kong is that, despite all the p.r. regarding Jackson’s fascination with the Merian C. [...]

Recommended reading: Matthew Testa’s Dec. 7 interview (I just found it. . .) with Pulitzer-winning author E. Annie Proulx, whose short story “Brokeback Mountain” inspired the current critical and box-office hit.
One brief quote from the interview:
“Excuse me, but it is NOT a story about ‘two cowboys.’ It is a story about two inarticulate, confused Wyoming [...]

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has announced that three hundred and eleven feature films will compete for the Academy Award for Best Picture of 2005. That is a 16.5% increase from 2004, and it is also the first time in 32 years that more than 300 motion pictures have vied for [...]

The National Film Registry of the U.S. Library of Congress has added 25 more films to its roster. According to Librarian of Congress James H. Billington, "the films we choose are not necessarily the ‘best’ American films ever made or the most famous, but they are films that continue to have cultural, historical or aesthetic [...]

In the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert and Steven Spielberg chat about the controversy surrounding Munich.

At GreenCine Daily, David Hudson has links to a variety of voices, all talking about Munich.

Moving on. . .

At the BBC, Woody Allen’s Match Point, and the New Yorker’s fascination with [...]

The New York Times reports that the European box office has shrunk in 2005, especially in Germany, France, Italy, and Spain. (On the other hand, the United Kingdom held its own, while Poland and Russia had major box-office revenue increases.) The Times article asserts that one chief reason for the decline was a lack of [...]

According to Zinema.com, the biggest 2005 hits at the Spanish box office were: George Lucas’s Revenge of the Sith (€18.6m*); Santiago Segura’s comedy about a fascist cop, Torrente 3: El Protector / Torrente 3: The Protector (€17.5m); Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds (€16.4m); Mike Newell’s Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (€13.7m); [...]

Obit: English-born Belita, the Sonja Henie of the Bs, died in France on Dec. 17. Besides taking part in the 1936 Olympics, Belita skated her way in a couple of 1940s trifles, Ice-Capades (1941) and Silver Skates (1943), before settling for minor film roles outside the rink. In later years, she admitted, “I hated [...]

Obit: Aurora Miranda, Carmen’s sister, died of natural causes on Wed.. Dec. 21, in Rio de Janeiro. Born in Rio on April 20, 1915, Aurora started her show business career in the late 1920s, singing on the radio and with her sister Carmen at Rio’s then prestigious Cassino da Urca. Her biggest hit came out [...]

Utah Film Critics Association Awards - 2005
The 2005 Utah Film Critics Association award winners were announced on December 25, 2005.
2005 Utah Film Critics Association Awards - Brief Article
 

 
Best Film: Brokeback Mountain
Runner-up: Me and You and Everyone We Know by Miranda July
Best Foreign-Language Film: Kung Fu Hustle by Stephen Chow
Runner-up: Downfall by Oliver [...]

Obit: Actress Argentina Brunetti, 98, a founding member of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and a supporting player in Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), died in Rome on Dec. 20. Born in Buenos Aires, Brunetti came to Hollywood in 1937 to dub into Italian the voices of MGM stars Jeanette MacDonald and Norma [...]

10th Florida Film Critics Circle Awards - 2005
The 10th Florida Film Critics Circle Award winners were announced on December 24, 2005.
 

 
Best Film: Brokeback Mountain
Best Foreign-Language Film: Kung Fu Hustle by Stephen Chow
Best Director: Ang Lee, Brokeback Mountain
Best Actor: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Capote
Best Actress: Reese Witherspoon, Walk the Line
Best Supporting [...]

The Utah Film Critics Society has followed the lead of most other film critics across the U.S. by picking the doomed love story Brokeback Mountain as the Best Film of 2005, and Ang Lee as Best Director (with Woody Allen finally making one critics’ list, as a runner-up for the taut crime drama Match Point). [...]

Today Online reports that Singapore’s submission for the Best Foreign-Language Film Academy Award, Erik Khoo’s acclaimed Be with Me, has just been disqualified because much of its dialogue is in English.

Editor & Publisher’s editor Greg Mitchell offers a lengthy and highly informative essay on "The Death of Daniel A. McGovern, Director of Historic Atomic Bomb Footage."

26th London Film Critics’ Circle Awards - 2005
The 26th London Film Critics’ Circle Award winners were announced at the Dorchester Hotel on February 8, 2006.
2006 London Film Critics’ Circle Awards Winners - Article
("*" denotes the winner in each category)
 

 
Best Film:
* Brokeback Mountain
The Constant Gardener
Crash
A History of Violence
King Kong [...]

Obit: Actress Beverly Tyler, 78, a leading lady in mostly B-films of the 1940s and 1950s, died of a pulmonary embolism in Reno, Nev., on Nov. 23. Tyler landed an MGM contract in the mid-1940s, but the studio relegated her to supporting and decorative leading-lady parts. Her best known films are The Green Years (1946), [...]

"It was never going to be ‘The Paul and Bob Show,’" says actor-director Robert Redford (Brubaker, as actor; Ordinary People, as director). "Instead, the idea of me presenting a friend who was also a colleague to speak about what inspired him - his salad-dressing company, his racing interests, his camp for children - those were [...]

The London Film Critics’ Circle has announced the nominees for its 2005 film awards. The Constant Gardener, a tale of love, murder, and political corruption, and the revamped adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice led the pack with 7 nominations each. Both films were nominated for Best British Film of the Year, and The [...]

Kevin MacDonald’s 1999 Oscar-winning documentary, One Day in September, has been reissued on DVD now that Steven Spielberg’s Munich is hitting U.S. screens. Narrated by Michael Douglas, MacDonald’s film includes an interview with the only survivor of the Palestinian terrorist group involved in the murder of 11 Israeli athletes and coaches during the 1972 Olympic [...]

Toronto Film Critics Association Awards - 2005
The 2005 Toronto Film Critics Association Award winners were announced on December 21, 2005.
 

 
Best Film: A History of Violence
Best Canadian Film: A History of Violence
Best Foreign Film: The World by Zhang Ke Jia
Best Director: David Cronenberg, A History of Violence
Best Actor: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Capote
Best [...]

Munich (2005)
Director: Steven Spielberg. Screenplay: Tony Kushner and Eric Roth, from George Jonas’ book Vengeance: The True Story of an Israeli Counter-Terrorist Team. Cast: Eric Bana, Geoffrey Rush, Daniel Craig, Mathieu Kassovitz, Ciarán Hinds, Hanns Zischler, Ayelet Zurer, Michel Lonsdale, Gila Almagor, Mathieu Amalric, Moritz Bleibtreu, Marie-Josée Croze, Lynn Cohen, Omar Metwally, Valeria Bruni [...]

The BBC reports that Chen Kaige’s kung fu epic Mo gik / The Promise had the biggest-ever movie opening in China, with a box-office take of US$9m in its first four days of release. Since the article doesn’t explain if this record-breaking opening takes into account inflation, I assume that it doesn’t.
Mo gik, which [...]