Day: December 30, 2007

Nothing fills me with such spiritual satisfaction as my annual naysaying of New Year’s Eve — the refusal to (a) attend a New Year’s Eve party or take part in any mass celebration thereof, or (b) to enjoy myself if I weaken and attend some kind of New Year’s Eve soiree regardless. I hate the idea of celebrating renewal by way of a clock, and especially in the company of those who make a big whoop-dee-doo about it.
My all-time best New Year’s Eve happened in Paris on the 1999-into-2000 Millenium year — standing about two city blocks in front of the Eiffel Tower and watching the greatest fireworks display ever orchestrated in human history.
And then walking all the way back to Montmartre with thousands on the streets after the civil servants shut the subway down at 1 a.m. That couldn’t have happened eight years ago. Must be a mistake.

Politico‘s Jeffrey Ressner on the year’s top ten political movies — No End in Sight, The Lives of Others, Breach, Sicko, In the Valley of Elah, The Kingdom, A Mighty Heart, Persepolis, Charlie Wilson’s War and The Bourne Ultimatum. Of these, my personal favorite is The Lives of Others, which I keep processing as a fall of ’06 film and not an early ’07 release (which of course it was). The second best, hands down, was In the Valley of Elah — the most neglected top-drawer film of the year.

Two days ago Red Carpet District‘s Kris Tapley said I was “back on the ‘Oscar prognostication should be about spotlighting quality‘ thing again.” No — last Thursday’s post was about how the Oscar race is about the debate — pushing and ragging on this and that contender and what the various views and convictions that emerge say about who and what we are — and not the winners, which nobody except Oscar queens ever remembers.

This okay but unexceptional Chicago Tribune piece about great movie endings reminds me that no matter what you may or may not think about There Will Be Blood as a whole, the ending — the final line, I mean — is almost certainly the year’s best.
The second best ending, of course, belongs to No Country for Old Men — the combination of that final line (“Then I woke up”), the cut to a silent and meditative Tess Harper across the kitchen table, and then back to Tommy Lee Jones…beat, beat, cut to black.
The year’s third-best ending — I’m not being facetious — was delivered by the Farrelly Brothers‘ The Heartbreak Kid. Ben Stiller‘s character, realizing he’s again succumbing to the old obsessive hungers and behaviors, saying “fuck me!” — and a fast cut-to-black. Perfect! Ranks with the finale of Some Like It Hot as one of the best movie-comedy endings ever. (Which obviously doesn’t imply that I’m praising the rest of the film with equal fervor.)

Not a misprint, misunderstanding, misnomer or mis-anything: Woody Allen‘s Barcelona-based film, due in ’08’s late summer or early fall, is really going to be called Vicky Christina Barcelona — one of the most atrocious titles ever conceived by a first-rank film maker, regardless of subject matter, theme, metaphor or what-have-you.

This on top of VCB being Allen’s third Johansson pic over the last four is, I suspect, giving even his most ardent admirers, particularly in the wake of the disastrous Scoop, an uncertain feeling.
The romantic triangle pic (Spanish painter Javier Bardem and two American expats played by Scarlett Johansson and Rebecca Hall) may, for all I know, turn out to be one of Allen’s very best. I just know it’s facing an uphill sereception with that title.
Risky Biz Blog’s‘s Steven Zeitchik has re-confirmed the VCB title in a recent post about Allen’s next film, which will be set, for a change, back in Manhattan.

Eight miles high…back in the early afternoon.

“Whether it precedes a biographical film or a historical drama, ‘based on a true story’ has come to convey several, often contradictory, ideas simultaneously to wary filmgoers: The events about to transpire on screen really happened, to the very people you’re about to see, at the same time, and to the same end.
“Except, of course, when they didn’t happen and the people didn’t exist and we scrambled the time frame and changed the ending. (Hey, we said ‘based on.’) This is our story, we’re sticking to it, and we’ve left the fact-checking to picky historians, outraged family members, alert critics and Wikipedia.” — from Ann Hornaday‘s 12.28 L.A. Times piece called “New rules for ‘based on a true story.'”

The lip-synching is off here and there and they should have found someone who sounds more like Mel Gibson, but otherwise this 12.29 WGA strike video is pretty good. I laughed out loud three times. The Frank Morgan/Wizard of Oz finale is best, followed by the Star Trek: Wrath of Khan bit.

“From Wall Street’s perspective, we estimate the impact of accepting the [writers’] proposal is largely negligible,” Bear Stearns wrote in a report last week.
If the AMPTP gave the striking WGA everything its negotiators are asking for, the world-renowned banking, brokerage and investment firm estimates that “the $120 million figure would carry an average impact of less than 1% on annual earnings per share for the media companies.
“That does not factor in any concessions by the writers’ side (the WGA), where the principal issue is a desire for a piece of ad dollars from new-media distribution. The potentially small financial impact suggests that studios (Alliance of Motion Pictures and Television Producers) are more concerned about setting a precedent in new-media revenue sharing.”
According to Wikipedia, Bear Stearns had total capital of approximately $66.7 billion and total assets of $350.4 billion as of November 2006. According to the April 2005 issue of Institutional Investor magazine, Bear Stearns is the seventh largest securities firm in terms of total capital.