IanHolm Tagged Articles at Cinematical

In what seems like a repeat of last year, the 2008 Annie Award nominations include a Pixar movie and a movie about penguins. The top contenders for the 2007 Annies, which recognize the best in animation, were Cars and Happy Feet. The former ended up winning the big award, Best Animated Feature. However, a couple weeks later it was Happy Feet that won the corresponding Oscar, so the Annies can not be looked at to predict the Academy's decision. In 2008, though, the two awards should actually match. The only real contender for both the Annie and the Oscar is Pixar's Ratatouille. There isn't much chance of this year's penguin movie, Surf's Up, winning either award. If there's any minor competition for Pixar, it's from Persepolis. The other two nominees for the Best Animated Feature Annie are Bee Movie and The Simpsons Movie.

Ratatouille was the leader in nominations at 13, while Surf's Up received the second highest amount with 10. In addition to the top award, the two films are competing in the categories for writing (also competing: Simpsons and Persepolis), storyboarding (also competing: TMNT; Meet the Robinsons; Bee Movie), production design (also competing: Beowulf), directing (also competing: Shrek the Third; Simpsons; Persepolis), character design (no other competitors), character animation (no other competitors, but Surf's Up received two mentions here) and animated effects (also competing: Spider-Man 3; Disney short How to Hook Up Your Home Theater; Ratatouille received two mentions here). One category that Bee Movie seriously missed is voice acting, which features three nominations for Ratatouille -- for Janeane Garofalo, Ian Holm and Patton Oswalt.

One thing that is interesting about the Annies is how the awards can be distributed to many different movies. Last year, Over the Hedge won the directing, storyboarding and character design categories, Flushed Away won in writing, voice acting, animated effects, character animation and production design categories and Happy Feet took away no awards. Then again, the year before, Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit picked up ten trophies and then went on to pick up the Academy Award. So, the 2008 Annies could go any number of ways.

Now that The Hobbit looks like it will actually happen, it's time to once again talk about the film's casting. And it appears Sir Ian McKellan will most definitely return as Gandalf. He is quoted in The Guardian as saying that he would be "very pleased" to return to the iconic role, which he played in the three Lord of the Rings movies. He also stated that he will do it regardless of whether or not Peter Jackson is brought back to direct the "prequel". In fact, McKellan claims he has received Jackson's blessing to do the film without him. And so the actor said that if he's physically capable of playing the character, he will certainly do so. Of course, he hasn't officially been asked to return, let alone cast, in The Hobbit. But surely he will be offered the part, right?

Obviously, he must be cast. Aside from the fact that he's iconically associated with the character, McKellan was even recognized with an Oscar nomination for playing Gandalf in The Fellowship of the Ring. But the main reason for McKellan to return -- and I'm sure he recognizes this, as does Jackson -- is for the fans. Some fans will be extremely disappointed if Jackson doesn't direct The Hobbit, but nearly all of the fans should boycott the film if the production goes with a new cast. It will be hard enough accepting someone other than Ian Holm playing Bilbo Baggins, which could very well happen since Baggins is much younger in the earlier story of The Hobbit than in the LOTR trilogy. But if Jackson didn't come back to direct, the film could end up in the hands of Sam Raimi, who we can assume would do the project justice by casting McKellan. Yet despite the new healthiness of The Hobbit, we still can't be sure it will happen very soon. So, if for some terrible reason McKellan isn't "functioning," as he says, who could possibly be considered to replace him? Michael Gambon, perhaps?

There is a long tradition of the mid-life crisis movie -- audiences seem to respond to watching a breakdown from a safe distance. City living, suburban boredom, family crisis -- all of these can be the source of a good old-fashioned film freak-out. Throw in a wacky psychiatrist a la Running With Scissors, and you've got yourself a movie.

Variety has announced that New Yorker Films has made a distribution deal for Oren Rudavsky's The Treatment. The film is based on the Daniel Menaker's novel of the same name and follows an upscale private school professor and his relationship with an unconventional therapist. The film stars Famke Janssen, Chris Eigeman and Ian Holm with a script penned by Rudayvsky and Daniel Saul Housman. The film sounds like your typical urbanite in crisis story with plenty of quirky observations about family, psychiatry, and urban isolation.

Films like The Treatment don't break any new ground with their subject matter; Woody Allen has pretty much made a career out of the male mid-life crisis, so I think he's got it covered. New Yorker films better hope they've hit the right combination of actors, writer and director to make this story worth the re-visit.

After months of rumors (the best of which involved Ray Romano and, I believe, Brad Pitt, which appeared briefly on the movie's wikipedia page), Coming Soon has managed to track down the official cast for Pixar's next film, Ratatouille. For those of you who missed the wonderful teaser, the movie is about Remy, a Parisian rat who, quite reasonably, dreams of being a great chef. What with him being a rat and everything, his foodie impulses are not welcomed by his family, particularly when he uproots the lot of them and moves them to Paris, where they take up residence in "a Parisian restaurant made famous by an eccentric French chef."

It has now been confirmed that Remy will be voiced by Patton Oswalt, and the chef by Brad Garrett (look, it's a fiesta of actors from sitcoms built around comedians!). Also appearing in as-yet unrevealed roles will be Brian Dennehy, Janeane Garofalo, Ian Holm and Pixar good luck charm, John Ratzenberger.

The film, which is being directed by Brad Bird and will inevitably be perfect, is due out in June of 2007.

[via Upcoming Pixar]

There's nobody better at delivering overwritten and/or expository dialogue than Chris Eigeman. From the three near-masterpieces he starred in for MIA indie auteur Whit Stillman in the 90s, to his twenty-episode arc as love-interest for Lorelai on that hallmark of overwritten genius, Gilmore Girls, there's no one out there as capable of making an artificially literate script seem natural. In Metropolitan, his 19-year-old preppie casually counsels a friend, "barbarism is cloaked with all sorts of self-righteousness and moral superiority" -- in the midst of a conversation that was ostensibly about detachable shirt collars. Such densely packed rejoinders flow out of Eigeman's mouth with perfect naturalism, to the point where one wonders why he isn't called in last-minute by big-money productions to deliver all of the rough, expository dialogue that Hollywood script doctors can't quite smoothe out. This guy could have made Crash seem witty and urbane.