Adam Sandler’s AARP Era is Here
Plus: Denver Film Festival, IMAX wows & yet another Golden Globes TV show
I didn’t win any awards during my brief trip to the Denver Film Festival this week, and yet I still have a laundry list of thank-yous to get through — not the least of which to the festival itself, which hosted Christopher Rosen and me during our stay. From the festival volunteer who picked me up at the airport to the energetic audiences to the guys at the hotel check-in desk who were excited to see No Other Choice, the cinephile energy in Denver was palpable — and it wasn’t just me. After our conversation that followed a screening of his new film Dead Man’s Wire, director Gus Van Sant told me he was surprised by how much the tense, energetic thriller had the audience laughing, up until literally the final moment of the credits. There are other ways to know you’ve got an audience in the palm of your hand, but laughter is probably the most fun one.
You’ll hear much more from Van Sant in next week’s episode of the Prestige Junkie podcast, which will include the whole conversation Chris and I had with the director onstage at Denver’s historic Holiday Theater. For even more from on the ground in Denver, including insight from the festival’s artistic director Matthew Campbell and CEO Kevin Smith about how it all comes together, you can also listen to the live recording of my other podcast, Fighting in the War Room, hosted in the beautiful Tattered Cover bookshop. My heartiest thank-you goes to everyone who turned up for one or both events — it was a pleasure getting to talk with some of you and swap Letterboxd handles.
I’ll be on the road again next week, heading to Los Angeles for a busy few days leading up to the Academy’s Governors Awards next Sunday. If you have an event or a screening I absolutely can’t miss, please let me know: katey@theankler.com!
In the meantime, I’ve gathered some bits and bobs of awards news that grabbed my attention this week, including evidence that time marches on for all of us and the invention of something we’re calling, whether we like it or not, Golden Week.
The Pictures Didn’t Get Small After All
Move over, Nicole Kidman: the new way to experience the magic of seeing a movie on a big screen is a photo taken from an angle no moviegoer ever gets to see — and one that might seem downright frightening at first glance.
In what’s been a banner year for large-format moviegoing, there’s a specific kind of image that keeps going viral, first for Sinners, then for One Battle After Another and now for the handful of big-screen showings Frankenstein received before launching on Netflix this Friday. You can see it above, with Michael B. Jordan and Miles Caton looming on a large screen, and below, with Leonardo DiCaprio hanging out of a speeding car.
The Frankenstein version might be the most jarring, with Oscar Isaac bursting through doors that seem like they’re part of the theater itself — he’s got flames behind him, too.
All of these photos are taken from the projection booth, often by longtime Los Angeles projectionist Taylor Umphenour, who shares the pictures on his Instagram page. The images are usually grainy and static compared to what’s unfolding on the screen; they’re also the best encapsulation I’ve ever seen of the immersive, thrilling experience that the best IMAX screens can offer.
I love these photos that capture movies as if they were a theme park ride, particularly for films that are both thorny and strange, in addition to their spectacle. You can talk all you want about that indescribable feeling we get when the light begins to dim, but these photos, startling as they are, capture that experience in a way that goes beyond purple prose. The robust ticket sales for large-format movie screens tell the same story, but these images really make you feel it. And if you think these are impressive, wait: the projection booth photos for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey next summer are gonna blow your mind.
Adam Sandler’s Early Bird Special
It’s been more than a decade since Counting Crows lead singer Adam Duritz graced the cover of AARP Magazine and sent an entire cohort of ’90s kids into a panic spiral, but the blows to Gen X are far from over. AARP announced this week that Jay Kelly star Adam Sandler — yes, that babyfaced star of Happy Gilmore and Billy Madison from what I swear wasn’t that long ago! — will be receiving the Career Achievement Award at this year’s Movies for Grownups awards ceremony.
The award will be handed out at a Jan. 10 ceremony in Beverly Hills, which takes place the day before the Golden Globes, two days before Oscar nomination voting begins and amid an overwhelming array of other awards season events. (More or another one of those in a minute.) The Movies for Grownups Awards — or the M4Gs for us diehards — will air many weeks later, on Feb. 22 on PBS, but the bump from having an in-person event in those busy days before Oscar voting begins is still significant.
Whether or not a TV audience ever actually tunes in, the Movies for Grownups Awards remain one of the most consistently charming and often correct precursors in this hectic period of Oscar campaigns. Last year, they shone a light on very deserving contenders like Sing Sing (winner of the best ensemble prize) and Thelma (best intergenerational story) that were unfortunately quieter at the actual Oscars, and gave the best actress nominations to Nicole Kidman (Babygirl) and Marianne Jean-Baptiste (Hard Truths) that they so richly deserved. With all due respect to Academy voters, I sometimes wish they would listen harder to the M4Gs.
Golden Globes Detail Next TV Ploy
I’m a firm believer that we deserve to have more awards shows on our televisions, not less, and that they should be allowed to run as long as they damn well please. However, I’m still not entirely sure what the audience will be for “Golden Eve,” a pre-Golden Globes event that will honor Helen Mirren with the Cecil B. DeMille Award, set to broadcast on Jan. 8 on CBS and Paramount+. The event will also pay tribute to this year’s still-unnamed recipient of the Carol Burnett Award.
Earlier this year marked the first time that the Globes spun off its honorary awards into a separate ceremony, similar to how the Academy has made the Governors Awards its own standalone event. Last year’s event was an in-person affair, similar to the New York Film Critics Circle Awards and the AFI Luncheon, which also took place the same week. Clips of Ted Danson and Viola Davis’s acceptance speeches were posted online, but there was no accompanying primetime special. Now it’s all going on television, and will be part of what the Globes are claiming for themselves as “Golden Week,” despite the presence of many more unaffiliated events happening at the same time. (Kind of par for the course for the, ahem, embattled org.)
Will anyone tune in to an awards show with just two winners, both of whom are predetermined? The Golden Globes are promising “curated retrospectives, rare archival footage and personal tributes from friends, collaborators and industry peers,” which sounds about like the tribute reels you might have seen when they still gave out these awards during the main show. It would be incredible to get something more like the old Barbara Walters pre-Oscar interview shows, with in-depth interviews and faux-casual footage of the stars at home making coffee. I’m not going to get my hopes up for that just yet — this is the Golden Globes, after all — but I refuse to rule it out either.
Michael & Lionsgate Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’
Let’s set aside the well-reported messiness behind the scenes of the Michael Jackson biopic, Michael, or even the fact that star Jaafar Jackson seems to be doing a pretty credible job playing his famous uncle in the newly released trailer for the 2026 Lionsgate movie. Can we take a moment to ponder the behind-the-scenes negotiations that led to this movie not only being advertised as “from the producer of Bohemian Rhapsody” — something fairly common in movie marketing, particularly for a movie as financially successful as Bohemian Rhapsody — but also naming that producer specifically?
With all well-deserved respect to Graham King, who has also produced multiple great Martin Scorsese movies (including an Oscar win for The Departed), I did not know that his name was one typically expected to get butts in seats. Heck, Marvel usually settles for just being advertised as “The studio that brought you Iron Man.” (No love for Kevin Feige.) But here’s King, a four-time Oscar nominee as a producer, flexing for Michael. Time will tell if the movie, which also stars Colman Domingo and Miles Teller, ends up in the awards race next year; it must overcome not just Jackson’s well-documented controversies but also the massive reshoots. But if it does, expect the true King of Pop on the campaign trail to be Graham.
