Thursday, February 22, 2007

The Golin Touch?

Steve Golin has received his first academy award nomination this year. Who is he?

Why he's the producer of Babel...a film that requires a great deal of disbelief but at the same time has garnered tremendous award attention, including the golden globe for best drama and 7 academy award nominations.

Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu has been highly regarded for his previous projects, namely Amorres Perros and 21 Grams, but this film has given him more attention then ever.

Producter Steve Golin has been the man behind many innovative films including Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Shifting gears, could Golin help another international director and his unique film?

At last years academy awards ceremony Gavin Hood's film won the academy award for best foreign language film for Tsotsi (South Africa).

Hood (pictured right) is the director of a little film called Rendition set to be released in November 2007. This film has a very prestigious cast and could perhaps be the beginning of Golin films appearing as major critical award contenders.

The film which is filmed in Morroco (like Babel) in a mutli-layered story (like Babel) I can gather tells the story of a CIA agent in Egypt troubled by seeing a harsh interogation by Egyptian secret police.

The story sound semi-interesting but more interesting is the Academy award nominee/winner studed cast:

- Actor Reese Witherspoon (winner, Walk the Line)
- Actor Jake Gyllenhaal (nominee, Brokeback Mountain)
- Actor Meryl Streep (14 nominations including Devil Wears Prada, 2 wins)
- Actor Alan Arkin (3 nominations, including Little Miss Sunshine)

I'm definitly interested to learn more about this film as the year progresses.

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3 comments:

Sher said...

I know you are excited about Sunday! It won't be the "Oscars" without RC! You know...the church planned a fellowship and budget meeting for 6:00 on Sunday night. They weren't concerned about the Oscars. I'm not sure our life group has decided what we are doing yet. We'll see....

Anonymous said...

Wow. That's quite the list. And in addition to those, the always amazing Peter Sarsgaard is also on the list. Wow. I'm looking forward to this.

Will said...

Thanks for the heads-up on Rendition. I'm actually toward the end of gathering info for my annual "What's Coming Up This Year" post.
Thanks also for the funny review of Babel. Can't remember if that represents your opinion or not, but I got a good laugh while also disagreeing with him. Yes, I think it's the weakest of the films in the trilogy as a film, but you've got to end a trilogy just the same. And I think the major factor Josh is overlooking is the matter of writer's selection. OK, by the way the film is written, there's a sense in which rather unusual things seem inevitable. But we've got to remember that what is actually happening here is that fairly unusual things happened in the story, and the writer foresaw who would be involved and decided to follow them beforehand. For an example, it's not that the little boy is such a crack shot. It's just that when he managed to shoot at the bus, we already "happened" to know the person who gets shot.
I'm convinced that different people have different suspensions of disbelief, but I'm still with you on the general principle here: sometimes my suspenders of disbelief are simply not that long. :-)