by Indy Datta

Movie awards season has started, then, with the announcement over the last couple of weeks of the nominations for the British Independent Film Awards and the European Film Awards. Pretty much every week between now and the Oscars in February will bring more awards season news, and Mostly Links will be there on the spot, bringing you the latest, until it gets too boring. Talking points from the BIFAs included the freezing out of Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights and Terence Davies’ The Deep Blue Sea, and the sweep of nominations for StudioCanal’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Far be it from Mostly Links to note that, if Tinker Tailor is considered a valid nominee for an indie film award, presumably anything short of the new Harry Potter is eligible. On the EFA side of things, is the best picture nomination for The Artist just the start of its triumphant march towards Oscar, or is it more notable that it didn’t get nods for direction or screenplay?

Wuthering Heights is one of this week’s UK new releases in a field with many other intriguing or noteworthy releases, from Johnny Depp’s long-gestating passion project The Rum Diary, which also marks the return to directing of Withnail & I‘s Bruce Robinson, to the winter’s first Christmas movie, Aardman’s Arthur Christmas. I’ve already seen Wuthering Heights (as Sven might say: first half good, second half not so good), and the excellent Black Pond, so if I can make it to the pictures this weekend it will probably be to see Errol Morris’s Tabloid – a documentary about Joyce McKinney, briefly notorious in the 70’s in Britain for allegedy kidnapping a Mormon missionary, driving him to Devon, chaining him to a bed and sexually assaulting him. McKinney is suing Morris now.

The US releases look a little lacklustre this week. Clint Eastwood’s cross-dressing Oscar-bait biopic J Edgar (which I keep mentally changing to J Arthur) has had mostly awful reviews, but critics have reserved their real scorn for cross-dressing Adam Sandler comedy Jack and Jill. Surprisingly!

Also out this week, William Monahan’s cross-dressing Keira Knightley crime thriller London Boulevard, which breaks the first rule of film-making: never cast Colin Farrell as a Londoner.

In other stuff:

Lars Von Trier sings!

Arthur recreates! (seriously, if you haven’t seen this, click that link)

Next week on MostlyFilm: sitcoms, Hollywood musicals, asian art films, and painting.