Uptown’s January movie preview assures the dead of winter 2011 won’t leave Winnipeg audiences cold — cinematically speaking, that is
Highlights for January include Barney's Version (starring Paul Giamatti and Dustin Hoffman).
Unless you’re talking about curling up under a quilt to watch some gem on DVD, January and the movies seemingly weren’t made for each other.
It’s conventional wisdom within the industry — and among critics — that the first month of the year is almost unfailingly the shittiest. One entry on the Cinematical blog at Moviefone.com asked, Which January Movie Was the Worst? The discussion even has its own Facebook page.
No one month has a monopoly on badness — but to illustrate, let’s take a look at January 2010. The month is often distinguished by dubious-looking horror films; this year, it was vampire subgenre entries Daybreakers and Legion.
January 2011 will bless us with Nicolas Cage in Season of the Witch, Guy Pearce in Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark and Anthony Hopkins in The Rite. For fans of Richard Jenkins, recently seen giving himself an acid facial in Let Me In, there’s The Cabin in the Woods.
(I still remember the release of 1998’s Deep Rising, with Treat Williams on a jet ski being chased through the bowels of a luxury liner by a giant squid’s tentacles. It says a lot when Treat Williams is the lead in your action/horror film. I also consciously avoided 1999’s Virus, staring Jamie Lee Curtis.)
It’s not all insults to the already- maligned horror genre; we’ll also have The Green Hornet, with Seth Rogen, which has been getting groans at every preview I’ve seen with an audience. Save for one moment, that is, in which Rogen shoots himself in the face with a gas gun; if that’s not the funniest bit in the movie, I’ll buy the local Sony rep lunch.
But there’s a chink of sunlight for us Winnipeggers — January is often the month in which limited-release ‘prestige’ pictures finally make it here. That’s the advantage of being a second-string city in the eyes of marketers; we have some good movies to comfort us during what is often the coldest month of the year.
Director Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan, starring Natalie Portman, got here earlier than expected (it opened this past Friday), but there are other big ones on the way. Perhaps the most notable is Barney’s Version, the adaptation of Mordecai Richler’s Giller Prize-winning novel, starring Paul Giamatti and opening Jan. 14.
It’s been a (mostly) stellar year for Canadian films, and the buzz on this adaptation suggests it’ll appropriately commemorate of the upcoming 10th anniversary of Richler’s death. (That, and possibly renaming a street or library in Montreal after the author, whose city is affectionately and unabashedly represented by the movie.)
Another in the "finally!" category is Waiting for Superman, which The Oprah Winfrey Show called "the movie that could revolutionize America’s schools." The documentary, which opened in limited release in September, focuses on the plight of America’s struggling public school system, and is directed by Oscar winner David Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth). The film has an extended run at Cinematheque from Jan. 28 to Feb. 10.
Winnipeg’s premiere arthouse cinema is in fact the nucleus of a lot of exciting activity next month: Jan. 12 to 19 sees multiple screenings of a 35mm print of Wings of Desire, which won director Wim Wenders the Best Director Award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1987.
Widely acclaimed, the beautifully photographed black and white film is rated 98% on Rottentomatoes.com. However, perhaps the best encapsulation of local anticipation is what one Winnipeg filmmaker/cinephile status updated on Facebook: "Wings of Desire on 35mm film coming to the Winnipeg Cinematheque! Am I dreaming? Is this for real???"
Speaking of local auteurs, January’s most notable homegrown item is the public premiere of Winnipeg filmmaker Adam Smoluk’s Foodland, produced through the National Screen Institute of Canada’s Features First Program. Smoluk is the youngest filmmaker ever selected to the program, and the first screenwriter in over 20 years to be nominated for the John Hirsch award for most promising Manitoba writer, in 2009.
All of which is to say: expect good things from Smoluk’s second feature. His first, the microbudgeted Horsethieves, was an unexpected winner of the Audience Choice Award at the 2005 Winnipeg International Film Festival. Foodland plays Jan. 5 to 13 at Cinematheque.
In closing, here’s one for the "here’s hoping" category: Somewhere, the newest feature from Oscar winner Sofia Coppola, which opened in select U.S. theatres on Dec. 22. Coppola’s 2003 Lost in Translation almost universally acclaimed, it seemed, whereas her 2006 follow-up Marie Antoinette decidedly split the critics and got booed at Cannes.
For this critic, though, the lady’s done no wrong yet — it’s a question of whether she can threepeat. I just hope we in the Peg Pen get to find out sooner rather than later; there’s no word on its local release date.
No worries, though — I’ve got plenty of burnt Turner Classic Movies to plough through.
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