Day: December 5, 2007

Date: 12.5.07, 6:02 pm. To: Tim Burton, Dariusz Wolski — director and cinematographer of Sweeney Todd. From: Jeffrey Wells, Hollywood Elsewhere. Re: Today’s Sweeney Todd screening for Boston critics.

Gentlemen: I’m just writing to let you guys know that all the post-production work you sank into getting Sweeney Todd to look and sound just right was ruined today as far as the Boston critics were concerned, and all by some kid in a projection booth and a manager who didn’t care very much.

Leows Boston Common, 175 Tremont Street, Boston, Mass.

I saw Sweeney Todd last Thursday (11.29) in the big Paramount theatre on the Melrose lot, and it was beautiful…exquisite. It looked and sounded perfect in every way. Needle-sharp focus. Crisp full sound. More than enough projector light (i.e., foot lamberts) so that every last value in your somber-colored, almost black-and- white palette was on the screen.

I saw it again today at a 2 pm critics’ screening at Leows Boston Common 19, and the projection and sound were way below par. The delight that I experienced last Thursday had been reduced by a good 30% or 40%. The focus wasn’t quite 100% at first — I had to go out and complain and ask the projectionist to please improve it. The sound levels were pathetic at first, and even after they turned them up very slightly after I complained there was something odd about the mix — the orchestra seemed to overwhelm the voices.

On top of which the screen was lit with a red-pink glow on the lower right and lower left due to brightly-lit exit signs, which naturally fucked with your delicate gray- black color scheme.

I talked to a couple of critic friends about the lousy projection after the screening; I also spoke to the publicists who were handling it. They all agreed that the Leows Boston Common can be a substandard or at the least problematic place to see films, but what are ya gonna do? As one top critic said, “Welcome to our town.” I know that when I complained about the above issues the manager very faintly grinned during our conversation. Faint grins do not connote hard-core attitudes.

I don’t know how the Boston critics felt about your film (they’re voting this Sunday). Maybe they loved it regardless. But I know I felt much greater enthusiasm for it last week than I did today. It just wasn’t presented with the right oomph & pizazz. The word is “degraded.”

I’m just hoping that the National Board of Review having given its ’07 Best Picture award to No Country for Old Men (as well as one for Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Ensemble Cast) doesn’t…you know, taint things in some way. Let’s not go there. The bad-news group gave their Best Director award to Sweeney Todd‘s Tim Burton, so there was either a big Best Picture scrap between these two or…you know, they wanted Burton bad at the awards ceremony.

Michael Clayton‘s George Clooney was named Best Actor…I give up. Away From Her‘s Julie Christie named Best Actress…fine. Best Supporting Actor award went to Casey Affleck for The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford…fine…and the Best Supporting Actress awatrd went to Amy Ryan in Gone Baby Gone Best Documentary: Body of War. Best Animated Feature: Ratatouille.

What’s The Bucket List doing on their roster of ’07’s Ten Best films? I don’t think that’s going to result in Jack Nichiolson showing up for the awards ceremony so why’d they do it? Nobody but nobody is over the moon about this thing.

Wells to “Aguirre,” the ghost of Klaus Kinski — what was all that blah-blah about The Kite Runner being an NBR favorite to win Best Picture?

“Films do a have a tendency to live a long time, and sometimes they even change the audiences so that [viewers] 10 years from now are affected by more unusual films,” Francis Coppola remarked last Monday night at Manhattan’s Paris theatre after a screening of Youth Without Youth. “In fact, I can remember in my own career reading the reviews of the first Godfather film. Even our friends here at Variety gave it a terrible review.”

Really? A terrible review to an all-time classic by the entertainment industry’s leading trade? I did a search and found A.D. Murphy‘s review, published on 3.8.72, and Coppola, it turns out, was exaggerating. Murphy was not a huge fan and was obviously dismayed, but what he wrote was not a savage pan.

“With several million hardcover and paperback books acting as trailers, Paramount’s film version of Mario Puzo’s sprawling gangland novel, ‘The Godfather,’ has a large pre-sold audience,” Murphy began. “This will bolster the potential for the film which has an outstanding performance by Al Paclno and a strong characterization by Marlon Brando in title role. It also has excellent production values, flashes of excitement, and a well-picked cast.

“But it is also overlong at about 175 minutes (played without intermission), and occasionally confusing. While never so placid as to be boring, it is never so gripping as to be superior screen drama. This should not mar Paramount’s b.o. expectations in any measure, though some filmgoers may be disappointed.”

Tip of the hat to the art guy with New York‘s “Vulture” team who slapped together this Sweeney Todd bloodletting chart. The copy claims that “no fewer than ten throats are slit in pretty much the most graphic way possible, with geysers of blood spewing in all directions.” I don’t remember more than seven or eight. I guess I’ll be doing a precise count at today’s 2 pm screening at the Boston Common 19.

I wouldn’t normally predict the National Board of Review‘s picks, which will be revealed sometime around 2 or 3 pm this afternoon, but since I’ll be in a Sweeney Todd screening that will start at 2 pm I may as well take a shot. I’m doing so knowing that the NBR has become an even worse joke than before due to the reported ouster of Annette Insdorf from the executive photoplay committee. The NBR picks will be old news by tonight and all-but-forgotten by tomorrow so I don’t know why anything bothers.

I’m not disputing the ghost-of-Klaus Kinski‘s prediction that The Kite Runner will take Best Picture, but a voice is telling me that it’s a 50-5O teeter-totter between this and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. (They may go even further and give their Best Director award to Julian Schnabel.) It would be right and fitting to start the ball rolling for No Country for Old Men with a Best Picture win…

I can’t do this. I can’t do this. I really can’t do this. Whatever they choose, they choose. The groups that matter are the L.A. Film Critics (who will vote, I think, this coming Saturday), the Boston Film Critics (who’ll vote Sunday) and the New York Film Critics Circle (who will powwow early next week).

Each and every time I re-review the Oscar handicapper favorites, I’m reminded that I’m constitutionally incapable of standing completely off to the sidelines and trying to guess which films and filmmakers that Academy members are favoring at the moment. I try to ask around and listen and “read the town” as much as the next guy — I respect the industry perceptions of guys like Pete Hammond as much as anyone else, and perhaps more so — but I can’t keep my own feelings and convictions out of it. The mindset of the dispassionate handicapper-statistician is too bloodless and clinical.

George Clooney, Benicio del Toro

And frankly, I don’t know how anyone in this game can go 100% dispassionate and still sleep at night. You’ve got to make it personal these days. Or at least half-personal. Dispassionate reporting and sage analysis are so…print. We are all advocates. A columnist or critic is nothing without convictions and cojones that he/she is willing to lay on the line.

One of the things I love about Envelope columnist Tom O’Neil is that he predicts from his heart. He raises the antenna and puts his ear to the rails, but at the end of the day he can’t seem to keep his own passions out of the equation. That’s me also, which is why I had a mild seizure yesterday when it hit me that a majority of Buzzmeter contributors had named Michael Clayton‘s George Clooney as a Best Actor contender while ignoring — as they have been all along — Benicio del Toro‘s wings-of-angels performance in Things We Lost in the Fire.

It doesn’t matter — it can’t matter — that industry Zeligs are saying “Clooney, Clooney” because it’s just too…I don’t know what…insulated? In this context it doesn’t matter if Del Toro has the “votes” or not. The point is that his performance in Fire is at least ten or fifteen times greater than Clooney’s, and I’m saying this with a full acknowledgment that Clooney gave a sturdy, convincing, first-rate performance in Tony Gilroy‘s film. But he’s just not in the same league with Benicio, and it’s wrong, lazy and disproportionate to assert otherwise because some lazy-heads are espousing this view at parties after their second glass of wine.

The Academy chattering class (or is it really the journo-chatterers?) can’t do this, and if they are doing this it is the responsibility of the Oscar-watching columnist-bloggers to split their heads and hearts in the Wells-O’Neil fashion and say “no, it’s wrong. Just wrong. This isn’t a high-school popularity contest, and the Movie Gods will never forgive us.”

It’s all well and good to pass along what is connecting and what isn’t with industry audiences, but if these alleged favorites don’t correspond on some deep-down level with what an observer knows to be genuinely commendable or artful on some level, a columnist-observer is obliged, at the very least, to ask questions. Or, if he/she chooses, argue against the prospective nominee. You can’t just be a lamb in the field and go “baaah.”

The bottom line is not that I haven’t agreed with the calls made by the Motion Picture Academy over the years, but that I don’t respect the myopic and provincial and always political thinking that have so often part of their calls. The only thing I really and truly respect about this racket is the advertising money that comes in during Oscar season.

“No one here is making sport of the emotional discontents of other human beings,” writes The Envelope‘s Mark Olsen in a piece about Juno screenwriter Diablo Cody‘s “Wino Forever”-ing of her husband’s name on her arm tattoo. “But when a public figure’s self-created mythology becomes such a foundational part of their persona — bound up as it is in Cody’s case in confessional self-promotion — it all comes to seem like, well, fair game.”

How can a piece of art that portrays Vice President Dick Cheney as a denial-advocate regarding Iraq and Iran intelligence reports be called “politically inflammatory“? Nora Ligorano and Marshall Reese‘s black-and-white prints, now hanging in in a New York Public Library exhibition called “Line Up,” are “mug shot-style diptychs in which a member of the Bush administration appears in profile and face forward, holding a police identification sign and the date on which he or she made a statement of questionable veracity relating to Iraq.” I mean, nobody’s pushing the envelope here.

Israeli film blogger Yair Raveh, writing on his recently launched English-language version of Cinemascope, shares my concern about the Oscar chances of Cristian Mungiu‘s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. Raveh isn’t just dubious about this winner of the European Film Award for Best Feature and Best Director (plus the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or last May) not taking the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. He doesn’t even think it’ll be nominated.

“I predict it will not be one of the five nominated Foreign Language films,” Raveh states. “Not because of the abortion theme, but because [Mungiu’s] filmmaking style is all but indigestible to American viewers.” Academy fuddy-duds, he means.

Raveh says a nomination won’t happen for the same reasons that films by Dardenne brothers or Bruno Dumont have never been nominated. 4 Months is “stark, naturalistic, mirthless and devoid of music. It looks like a documentary or perhaps an improvised piece, and it’s easy to miss the stand-out filmic achievements Mungiu has brilliantly pulled off, starting with the movie’s ironic self-referential title.”