Miramax – This Had Oscar Buzz

171 – The Mighty

This week, we are talking about Sharon Stone and The Mighty. Adpated from the young adult novel Freak the Mighty by Rodman Philbrick, the film follows a burgeoning friendship between a silent giant teenager Max (Elden Henson) and a King Arthur obsessed neighbor with a rare metabolic disorder Kevin (Kieran Culkin). But the film’s real awards play was a Globe-nominated Stone, inhabiting the role of Kevin’s mother Gwen shortly after her first nomination for Casino. However, a firmly locked Supporting Actress race left Stone fighting for fifth place, ultimately missing out to Rachel Griffiths in the equally forgotten Hilary and Jackie.

The film was one of Miramax’s many titles in 1998, and shifted to a awards lower priority once Shakespeare in Love and Life is Beautiful began to take off. This episode, we discuss the film’s very broad performance from Gillian Anderson, James Gandolfini joins our Six Timers Club, and we look at back at Oscar’s love for “suffering parent” roles and other adjacent tropes.

Topics also include the shared loving gaze of Redgrave/McKellen/Fraser, Lara Flynn Boyle in Wayne’s World, and Cincinnati cinema.

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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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012 – An Unfinished Life

This week’s episode takes you back to September 2005, when the exit of the Weinsteins from Miramax resulted in a fire sale of delayed releases finally arriving in theatres to the most modest of fanfares. Least trumpeted of all was An Unfinished Life, starring Robert Redford, Jennifer Lopez, and Morgan Freeman.

Here we have a film to fill your This Had Oscar Buzz bingo card: Lasse Hallström. An adaptation of a book about a grieving family. Scar makeup of debatable quality. A bear shows up. And of course, the oh-so-trustworthy source of test screening reactions from online message boards building up our hopes of a Camryn Manheim nomination.

What makes a life “unfinished”? As we discuss this week, it might just be having a name like Griff, living in the generalized American west, and (our favorite) winning an award we have never heard of before!

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