Matthew McConaughey Lost Weight For a Film – Does That Mean He'll Get an Oscar?

Our friends at Grolsch Film Works have a website where you can find out what they’ve been up to and read/watch interesting stuff about films. Every week we'll be plucking the highlights. This is that.

A tattooed thug suddenly appears and attacks our hero/steals an old lady's purse: better known as Lazy Screenwriting 101. While Hollywood has a tendency to whack on a few temporary tattoos of incomprehensible Chinese characters to signify any actor is supposed to be "tough" or "criminal" (you realise that means "breadsticks bouncy castle", right?), once in a while someone gets real smart with it. While we're not exactly about to rush out and get these done ourselves, we still love these cinematic tats and the way they absolutely transform actors into the iconic characters we see on screen.

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When you think about it, the pairing of director David Gordon Green and Nicolas Cage seems like such a tantalising match that it’s a wonder it hasn’t happened sooner. Both possess a slightly off-kilter sensibility and obvious talent to burn, but have drawn plenty of attention in the past decade or so for the bewildering inconsistency of their career choices. Admittedly, Green made a recent return to his low-key roots with the charmingly enigmaticPrince Avalanche (following a host of ribald, shapeless comedies); but Cage has sleepwalked through more low-rent thrillers than you or I have had hot dinners, cementing his status as a walking internet meme in the process.Joe, then, is not just a triumph, but a relief. A powerful study of masculinity filtered through auburn-hued Americana (in which respect it echoes Jeff Nichols’ Mud), it cements Green’s recovery, and features Cage’s best, most carefully-shaded role since Adaptation.

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Jared Leto and Matthew McConaughey, following in the footsteps of Robert De Niro in Raging Bull and Christian Bale in The Machinist, have done what every committed actor aspires to do at one point or another in their career. They've lost a few pounds. Astonishingly, McConaughey lost a reported 47-pounds to play his role here in Dallas Buyers Club, the latest film from Canadian director Jean-Marc Vallée (Café de Flore). Oscars, anyone?

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"The first tape left a lot of questions unanswered," says Officer Rick Boyd (Bill Tush) in the prologue to Daylight (named for the small Indiana town on whose outskirts the film's different elements converge), "and unfortunately even after three years, the second one just raises more." This comes as a clear programme of intent: a mystery will follow, in two discrete halves distributed over two different tapes whose footage will constitute everything we subsesquently see in the film. The tapes document the last recorded days of Child Protective Services operative Jennifer Borman (Jennifer Bacon) and her two assistants David McCracken (David McCracken) and Josh Riedford (Josh Riedford) as their investigations into some possible cases of child abuse lead them inexorably (if circuitously) to the lakeside Irons residence from which they, along with Father Patrick Andersen (Patrick J. Andersen) and nine-year-old Sydney Irons (Sydney Morris), will disappear entirely, leaving behind only a trail of corpses, footprints - and videotapes.

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Keep your peepers peeled for more Grolsch Film Works updates next week. Go to grolschfilmworks.com to see what’s happening right now.