Matt Damon – This Had Oscar Buzz

223 – We Bought A Zoo

After the notorious failure of Elizabethtown, Cameron Crowe took a few years off and attempted to rebound with a warm-hearted family film, 2011’s We Bought A Zoo. The film starred Matt Damon in the very loose true story of a father struggling to raise his two children in the wake of his wife’s death, and finds the solution to their problems in a local zoo listed for sale with a few loyal animal wranglers (including contrived love interest Scarlett Johansson) still tied to the property. Though the film became a modest hit, its punchline title and feather-weight tone was not taken seriously by critics or awards bodies in a season filled with other stories filled with children and grief.

This episode, Matt Damon joins Meryl Streep as the only performers in our Ten Timers Club. We also discuss the varying degrees of failure in late stage Crowe films, Crowe’s AARP Movies for Grownups Best Director nomination against heavy hitters, and 2011′s many Oscar contenders featuring children.

Topics also include Diane Warren finally having her Oscar, the fake We Bought A Zoo Twitter account, and Content Creator Kits.

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197 – Downsizing

And we’re back to your regularly scheduled episodes! This week, we return to our non-EW episodes with one of the more divisive high-profile bombs in recent years, 2017′s Downsizing. A globalization satire from Alexander Payne and his Sideways co-writer Jim Taylor, the film follows an everyman played by Matt Damon who decides to join the masses deciding to shrink themselves for the sake of green initiatives and a little outsized wealth. The film ran the 2017 fall festival gamut, opening the Venice Film Festival to raves only to see increasingly negative receptions at Telluride and Toronto. In the long wait to its eventual Christmastime release, the negative perceptions settled in and the film became a box office bomb.

By Oscar time, its biggest chances lied in the supporting turn from SAG, Globe, and Critics’ Choice nominee Hong Chau as a political activist forced into downsized life as punishment. This episode, we’ll be talking about the 2017 Supporting Actress race and how she was shut out at the last minute. We’ll also discuss Damon’s constant foot-in-mouth syndrome, 8 Kinds of F*cks, and the National Board of Review’s Top Ten Films of 2017.

Topics also include our thoughts on this year’s Cannes, talking head documentaries, and Paramount’s big year of bombs.

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183 – Margaret (with Patrick Vaill)

#TeamMargaret, your day is here! This week, we are joined by actor Patrick Vaill to discuss the contentious backstory and reemergence story that is Kenneth Lonergan’s Margaret. Originally filmed in 2005, the film follows Anna Paquin as Lisa Cohen, a New York City teenager who witnesses a horrific accident and her search for restitution when she deems herself partly responsible. But Lonergan’s ambition with the film and its themes resulted in an arduous editing process, resulting in the ire of the film’s producer and Fox Searchlight. The years-long process led to lawsuits and the intervention of Martin Scorsese in the editing room, ultimately delivering a film that quietly snuck into a few theatres amidst contentiousness. Soon, a critical mass began to build along with change.org petitions and online outcry, and now Margaret is seen by some as one of the greatest films of the new century.

This episode, we discuss the various available versions of the film and Lonergan’s distillation of post-9/11 New York. We also unpack the brilliant central performance by Paquin, along with a stellar supporting cast of actresses including J. Smith-Cameron as Lisa’s actress mother, Jeannie Berlin as Lisa’s surprise confidante, and a one-scene-wonder Allison Janney (who joins our Six Timer’s Club).

Topics also include formative double features of The Apostle and Kundun, standing ovations for Andrea Martin, and what makes up J. Smith-Cameron’s “EGOT of television acting.”

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132 – Promised Land

Most remembered as “that movie about fracking”, this week we are talking about 2012′s Promised Land. Originally developed and written by John Krasinski and Dave Eggers, the film began as a potential directing vehicle for Matt Damon before the star brought on his Good Will Hunting director Gus Van Sant to take the reins. Damon stars as a representative of a fracking company attempting to lease land in a small town, but this reunion was released too late in the season to register as more than an afterthought.

This episode, we get into the film’s mild and confusing approach to being an issue movie and Damon’s history as one of THOB’s most discussed performers. We also talk about the film’s rushed turnaround, its minor precursor mentions with both AARP’s Movies for Grownups and the National Board of Review, and the Oscar season that saw Hunting pal Ben Affleck miss out on a Best Director nomination for the Best Picture frontrunner.

Topics also include the Oscar nominated fracking documentary Gasland, unrewarded older male performances opposite nominated actresses, and “Dick Poop”.

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089 – The Rainmaker

Francis Ford Coppola is a legendary director among Oscar lore thanks to the Corleone family, and this week’s episode pairs him with a name that resulted in much ‘90s cinematic prestige: John Grisham. After a string of hit adaptations that danced with major Oscar consideration, Coppola took his shot at Grisham’s The Rainmaker. But despite good reviews (and a Globe nomination for supporting actor Jon Voight), the film earned mild box office that halted the Grisham hot streak. Led by an emerging Matt Damon, the film was also overshadowed just one month later by the release of Good Will Hunting.

This episode, we revisit the box office success and Oscar near-success of films adapted by the mega-popular works of the legal thriller / airport staple John Grisham. We also discuss Coppola’s late career phase of largely unseen and unheralded films, the stacked 1997 Best Actor field, and The Rainmaker’s bursting cast list of glorified cameos and supporting players.

And this episode brings the return of two of our favorite topics: Claire Danes and the Entertainment Weekly Fall Movie Preview.

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056 – All The Pretty Horses

This week, we have a deceptively titled film that was also sold deceptively to audiences in 2000. Billy Bob Thornton’s Cormac McCarthy adaptation All The Pretty Horses was supposed to be an old-fashioned romantic epic filled with sweeping landscapes and big emotions – but what audiences got on Christmas morning was a bleak western about cowboys who just wanna cowboy. Famously, the film was cut down from a 3.5 hour epic into two hours by Harvey Weinstein and it still makes for a very scattered and lethargic movie.

For this episode, we take a look back at both Matt Damon and Penelope Cruz’s star personas, his as a go-to leading man with a string of pre-Bourne bombs and hers as an unfairly treated tabloid figure. We also look at the back stage stories that were depicted in Peter Biskind’s Down and Dirty Pictures, Lasse Hallström as unexpected benefitor of Horses’ failure, and the Oscar year that was capped brilliantly by Björk’s swan dress.

And for listeners clamoring for our thoughts on the beginning of the TIFF lineup, we spend the beginning of the episode discussing what we’re most excited for, including Harriet, Marriage Story, and Meryl in a Blossom hat.

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039 – Suburbicon

2017 was a rough year for Paramount and their awards slate, but none of their films bombed as hard as George Clooney’s Suburbicon. Retooled by Clooney and his writing partner Grant Heslov from a Coen Brothers’ script that sat unproduced for 30 years, the Coens’ brand of misanthropic crime saga is infused with a very white perspective on racism in middle America. The film was DOA on the fall festival circuit and evaporated even faster with audiences.

As if his foot-in-mouth comments weren’t enough, 2017 was also a year that earned no favor for for Suburbicon’s miscast Matt Damon – particularly when he also led Paramount’s other misfire Downsizing. This week, we discuss how Damon killed his post-The Martian favor, Oscar Isaac’s inevitability as a future Oscar nominee, and Clooney’s status as a de facto pick for early predictions despite increasingly diminishing returns.

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