Day: September 27, 2007

HE reader Dan Brown saw Paul Thomas Anderson‘s There Will Be Blood at Austin’s Fantastic Fest last night, and his first reaction is that Daniel Day Lewis will indeed get an Best Actor Oscar nomination. “The film really belongs to Lewis,” he says. “He commands every frame he’s in and is a pleasure to watch. It’s a great character and he really sinks his teeth into it.”

Which is an apt phrase given that Anderson, who attended the screening and sat for a q & a session afterwards, said “he was thinking of Dracula” when he wrote Lewis’s character.

“The film is an awesome achievement,” says Brown, “and a great step forward for Anderson. A lot of the criticism being directed at Wes Anderson lately does not apply to this Anderson, who is clearly moving in different directions with each new film but still has a strong visual style.

“I know the film won’t be well received by everyone. The two and a half-hour running time might be off-putting for Middle American styrofoams but I was really into the movie right from the start.” The most interesting sounding aspect, he adds, is that “the first 15 to 18 minutes of the film are dialogue-free.”

Brown’s final comment: “I’m betting you’ll like it.”

Variety‘s Marjorie Baumgarten was also there, and has called Anderson’s film “a true American saga — one that rivals Giant and Citizen Kane in our popular lore as origin stories about how we came to be the people we are. In The Treasure of the Sierra Madre it’s not the gold that destroys men’s souls but greed; in There Will Be Blood, the commodity that drives the greed is oil.”

East Coast Journalist to HE: If Viggo Mortensen ain’t a front-runner for Eastern Promises, I don’t know who is.” HE to East-Coast Journalist: He’s not only not a front-runner — he may not even be a contender.

The centerpiece of his performance — a naked knife fight in a bathhouse — isn’t anyone’s idea of transcendent revelation. (Boiled down, it’s just Cronenberg being fetishy. ) The Russian machismo that permeates this film (the knives, tattoos, sneering attitudes towards women) along with the bowls of borscht and all the Russian culture crap makes this film an endurance test of the lowest order. It oozes ickyness through ever pore.

And that turnaround at the end — “I am naught actually slick-snarly Russian gangster with razor-cut hair….I yam actually [spoiler deleted]” — is an act of screenwriting desperation.
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The top five Gurus of Gold Best Actress contenders are Marion Cotillard (La Vie en Rose), Julie Christie (Away From Her), Keira Knightley (Atonement), Ellen Page (Juno), and Cate Blanchett (Elizabeth: The Golden Age).

Julie Christie in Away From Her.

The second five (positions #6 through #10) are Angelina Jolie (A Mighty Heart), Laura Linney (The Savages), Halle Berry (Things We Lost in the Fire), Cate Blanchett again (in I’m Not There), Julia Roberts (Charlie Wilson’s War), Marketa Irglova (Once), Jodie Foster (The Brave One) and Charlize Theron (In The Valley of Elah).

Cotillard is a lock. Christie is very probable. Knightley is a maybe (because some believe that her role in Atonement is close to supporting-level). Page is said to have a headwind but I’m not so sure — she’s smart, gutsy and very likable but her Juno performance is basically a force-of-personality thing. A Blanchett nom for Elizabeth: The Golden Age is out of the question because the movie is a joke, but she’s absolutely miraculous as Blonde on Blonde Dylan in I’m Not There. (Harvey, you know what to do.)

Jolie gave the best performance of her life as Marianne Pearl in A Mighty Heart, but the quick box-office death of this film (which shouldn’t matter) seems to matter to some. Linney is excellent in The Savages, but the movie’s a grim sit. Paramount/DreamWorks won’t let me see Things We Lost in the Fire so I don’t know about Berry. Julia Roberts has too small a role in Charlie Wilson’s War to qualify. Marketa Irglova is fresh and lovely in Once, but she’s not in the game. Foster gives a full-of-feeling performance in The Brave One but I don’t think it’ll happen (in part because the shoot-em-up story is too ’70s, in part because the ending was too much, in part because the movie fizzled). For my money Charlize Theron is better in Elah than she was in North Country, but that doesn’t cut any ice with the people who are determined to keep this film down and tied up in a burlap bag.

Somebody said it last summer (maybe Poland): Each movie is its own little war.

The top five Gurus of Gold Best Actor contenders are Daniel Day Lewis (There Will Be Blood), Tommy Lee Jones (In The Valley of Elah), James McAvoy (Atonement), Johnny Depp (Sweeney Todd) and Emile Hirsch (Into the Wild).

Daniel Day Lewis in There Will Be Blood

The vulnerable wildebeests at this stage seem to be Depp and Hirsch — the former because of growing presumptions that Sweeney Todd will be regarded as being too bloody to be a Best Picture contender, and that the fiendish slitter of all those throats may get pulled down along with the film, and the latter because of the sentiments of that producer I heard from earlier today, which, I’ve been told, have been voiced by others.

Lewis’s chances are obviously undefined until people start seeing and reacting to There Will be Blood. I’m pretty sure that Jones and McAvoy are locks.

Two guys may wind up taking Hirsch and Depp’s place — American Gangster‘s Denzel Washington and Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead‘s Philip Seymour Hoffman. They both kill in their respective roles as a Harlem-based, Al Capone-styled heroin wholesaler and a drug-dependent, morally downswirling businessman who hatches a plot to rob his parents’ jewelry store.

The guy who should be in the top five, no question, is Control‘s Sam Riley. I don’t care if anyone knows him or how new he is to the business. His performance as late Joy Division singer Ian Curtis is astoundingly well-calibrated. The fact that Riley never seems to be “acting” is the genius-level ingredient. And yet not one Golden Guru voted for him, and they should be ashamed of themselves for blowing him off in so total a fashion. I mean it — each and every Guru needs to go outside, light a cigarette (even if they don’t smoke), take a 20-minute walk and ask them- selves why they failed to even mention one of the absolute finest performances of the year by an actor of either gender. I’m sorry, but this falls under the heading of “dereliction of duty.” For this oversight alone, this team needs to be regarded as the Gurus of Shame.

The Guru’s second five are Denzel, Eastern Promises‘ Viggo Mortensen (forget it), the Charlie Wilson’s War star Tom Hanks (conceivably), Michael Clayton‘s George Clooney (he got his Oscar for Syriana…won’t happen) and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly‘s Mathieu Almalric (an Oscar for a guy blinking his left eyelash?).

What’s so disturbing about Chris Matthews saying the following about Fred Thompson? “Can you smell the English Leather on this guy, the Aqua Velva, the sort of mature man’s shaving cream, or whatever, you know, after he shaved? Do you smell that sort of — a little bit of cigar smoke? You know, whatever.”

I think it’s hilarious — it’s like great dialogue from a smart movie. Not Paddy Chayefsky as much as…I can’t think of which screenwriter’s stuff sounds like this precisely, but I love it. Sounds like a real guy talking.

Speaking of Chayefsky: “He had at that time perhaps an hour to live, although prompt treatment would have saved his life. As a staff doctor he was seen without preliminaries. His vital signs were taken, including an electrocardiagram which revealed occasional ventricular premature contractions. An intern took his history, and then he was promptly, simply…forgotten to death.

“Simply mislaid. Mislaid among the broken wrists, the chest pains, the scalp lacerations. The man whose fingers were crushed in a taxi door. The infant with a skin rash. The child swiped by a car. The old lady mugged in a subway. The dere- lict beaten by sailors. The teenage suicide. The paranoids, drunks, asthmatics. The rapes, the sceptic abortions…the overdosed addicts, the fractures, hemmorhages, concussions, boils, abrasions. The colonic cancers, the cardiac arrests…the whole wounded madhouse of our times.”

Assisted by editor David Tedeschi (Shine a Light, No Direction Home), Martin Scorsese will assemble a doc about the life of the late George Harrison, the quietest, most solemn-minded Beatle who played a mean crying guitar. His playing on “So Sad,” “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” etc. (Is that Harrison playing on Badfinger‘s “Day After Day,” or someone who sounds like him?) He was also one of the most economical lead guitarists in rock music history. That mad jangly riff on “Hey, Bulldog” still has a great tumultuous quality.

Scorsese and Tedeschi can cut and interview all they want, but Harrison’s greatest cinematic moment will always be that Hard Day’s Night scene with Kenneth Haigh as the trend-obsessed ad man. Harrison: “She’s a drag, a well-known drag. We used to turn the sound down on her and say rude things.” Haigh: “You can be replaced, chicky-baby.” Harrison: “I don’t care.”

Harrison has always been known as the most spiritual of the Fab Four, but he wasn’t an incarnation of Shri Krishna either. He smoked himself into an early death, kept a place in his heart open for Harry Nilsson (one of the unregenerate party animals in the history of the human race), and especially liked Nilsson’s “You’re Breaking My Heart.” According to a cheap tell-all book, Harrison never stopped strumming his acoustic guitar as he received a blowjob from a girl at a party in Los Angeles, and thereafter said “thanks, luv” and strolled out of the room.

Nobody’s just one color or mood or flavor. Everyone’s complicated and inconsistent and contradictory. If Harrison-the-holy wasn’t known for occasionally flawed or weird behavior his rep would be insufferable.

Variety‘s Michael Fleming reports that the doc “is being constructed as a theatrical release, and the Harrison family will supply materials from its extensive archive. Interviews and early production will begin later this year, and the film will take several years to complete.” Several years?

I was invited to last night’s Entertainment Weekly soiree to honor and welcome L.A. bureau chief Sean Smith (formerly of Newsweek), even though Smith’s been on the job for eight weeks. It was a truly elegant event — relaxing, soothing lighting, fragrant evening air, no blaring music. The best party I’ve been to in months — nicer than anything I attended during the Toronto Film Festival and that’s saying something.

Entertainment Weekly managing editor Rick Tetzeli (l.) and recently installed L.A. bureau chief Sean Smith at last night’s chit-chatter — Wednesday, 9.26.07, 7:15 pm

Smith and EW reporter Nicole Sperling talked about the just-launched online feature called Hollywood Insider that will be composed of nine or ten stories per day (just like HE!). Some of it will be trade stuff, said Sperling, and will cover movies, music, TV…the entire spread. Five staffers (Sperling, Shirley Halperin, Dave Karger, Joshua Rich and Lynette Rice) are expected to bang out three items per day.

The guests were all top-dog, cream-of-the-crop publicists. I may have been the only non-EW journalist in attendance. The party was held at Craft, an elegant Century City restaurant that sits under the shadow of “the building with the hole in it,” otherwise known as “the Death Star” because it’s where CAA is headquartered.

I was so fried and frazzled from my usual 12-hour work day and so underfed (no breakfast, lunch or dinner except for three or four tangerines, some coffee and two or three Diet Cokes) that I succumbed to the abundant Sauvignon Blanc and — brilliant! — got drunk. I verbally embarassed myself only once, I think. Live and learn.

I was noticing as I came up the escalator inside the “Death Star” building that the faces of the people on the down escalator and in the cavernous lobby had a certain old-world, blue-blood quality. Like the people you tend to see in the Harvard Club on west 44th Street. That’s CAA for you — they pick and choose very carefully and don’t let any mongrels into the club.

A producer friend has chosen to disregard the things about Into The Wild that absolutely work — the intimate communing with nature’s grand cathedral, the serenely beautiful ending, Emile Hirsch‘s performance — because of her feelings about the real Chris McCandless, and out of this believes that Sean Penn‘s film may be the weakest wildebeest among the herd of supposed Best Picture nominees (to go by yesterday’s Gurus of Gold posting).

“No way is it a Best Picture nominee,” she wrote this morning. “This is a beautifully shot, self-centered, self-absorbed [film] about a selfish, psychologically damaged brat named Chris McCandless who died of starvation and poisoning while living in a bus in the Alaskan woods. How is this heroic? Why in the world would we admire this guy? He’s pathetic, not heroic. My screening companion asked me if he was mentally ill.

“McCandless’ quest for meaning would have been better served helping people instead of indulging his sense of au natural purity and while contemplating his navel. His story is a tragedy not because he died, but because he died for nothing, proving nothing, finding nothing.

“And his rage against his family? They didn’t beat him, hurt him, deprive him. They were sad and confused people who lied about their past to protect their children, not hurt them. They didn’t seem so horrible after all compared to what he did to them and to his sister, wich was just cruel. Not to call or write for two years? What a reprehensible thing to do. Certainly not the stuff of true heroism.”

For years I’ve clumsily mispronounced the name of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but yesterday’s N.Y. Times Maureen Dowd column about Ahmadinejad’s Manhattan visit has solved the problem for good. Katie Couric, she writes, “has dryly has told people that she remembers how to pronounce his name with the mnemonic ‘I’m a dinner jacket.'”

Why didn’t the guy who posted this YouTube version of Hotel Chevalier run the whole thing? The short is 13 minutes, and this is only 9 minutes and 35 seconds. It went up eight hours ago and hasn’t been taken down…yet. But it should be. Because it arbitrarily edits.

Fox 411’s Roger Friedman ran into original Sweeney Todd creator Stephen Sondheim at last night’s Recording Academy’s New York Chapter’s Honors show, and asked if Sondheim has seen Tim Burton‘s movie version of the classic musical. Yes, Sondheim answered, and he likes it.

But “it’s not the Broadway show,” Sondheim cautioned. “It’s only an hour and 45 minutes. A lot of the score has been cut. They’ve made it its own thing. You have to go in knowing that. But what they’ve done is great.”

105 minutes with a lot of the score excised? That sounds like a good thing. You have to be nervy and authoritative in adapting any kind of stage show…anything from another performing realm that’s highly regarded. You can’t be too slavish and obsequious. A guy who’s seen it told me last night that on its own terms Burton’s film is very tight and together and self-defining. But it’s not an Academy film, the guy said, because “it’s too bloody.”

New York/Vulture‘s Tim Murphy attended a soiree the night before last for song painter Joni Mitchell and her album Shine (her first since ’98’s Taming the Tiger) at Soho’s Violet Ray Gallery. Easily the most soulful and influential female poet-composer-performer of the late 20th Century (as well as the most emotionally arresting, elegantly phrased, bravest and saddest), Mitchell spat out the blunt truth when Murphy asked why she’d recorded no new tunes since the days of the Monica Lewiinsky scandal.

“I was angry at the politics. Especially [at Bush]. Angry at the American people. At Christians. At theology — the ignorance of it. And I didn’t want to write about it. I removed myself from society and painted. It was a method of avoiding the anger, not addressing it.

“I couldn’t listen to music for ten years, I hated it all. It all pissed me off. Music just became grotesquely egocentric and made for money. It wasn’t music — there was no muse. Music requires a muse. The producer is not a muse. He’s a manufacturer. Contemporary music made me want to punch people. I couldn’t stand any of it. The whoring, the drive-by shooting of it all. I don’t care how well crafted it is. America is in a runaway-train position and dragging all the world with it. It’s grotesquely mentally ill.”

Mitchell’s reputation as a world-class phraser, searcher and sufferer will last for the next several centuries. She’s a heavy cat among kittens. Nobody has recorded a more touching and transcendent version of “Unchained Melody” than Mitchell. Her early ’70s to early ’80s stuff was rock perfect. Especially The Hissing of Summer Lawns and Hejira. Those “six white vapor trails across the bleak terrain” and ” the hexagram of the heavens.” That “poppy poison-poppy tourniquet [that] slithers away on brass like mouthpiece spit.” I’ll take these lyrics with me into the next life.

I saw Mitchell play at Studio 54 in ’81 or ’82, and I stood fairly close (ten or twelve feet from the mike stand) and just smiled and beamed out every positive-energy combustion I had inside me, and after a couple of songs she caught my eye (or vice versa), and I don’t care if this makes me sound like a fan but I was grovelling at that moment and I couldn’t have felt more rapture. It happened 25 years ago, and I’ll be damned if it doesn’t feel now like that Everett Sloane moment on the Staten Island ferry in Citizen Kane when he saw the girl in a white dress with a parasol.

I just checked the lyrics to “Refuge of the Road,” and all this time I thought the line went “hard of humor and humility,” as in “hard of hearing.” I loved that line! But apparently Mitchell actually sings “heart and humor and humility.” Very disappointing…very.