I love this No Country for Old Men photo, which I came across while reading a N.Y. Times story a few days ago. Why do juicy pics like these only emerge at the end of a campaign? I would have circulated this starting last fall.
Here are HE’s reactions to some of the just-announced Golden Globe nominations:
Best Drama: American Gangster, Atonement, Eastern Promises, The Great Debaters, Michael Clayton, No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood. Response: What is that, seven nominations? Why not ten like the Broadcast Film Critics list? The HFPA’s belief that David Cronenberg‘s Russian penis movie is among the year’s best dramas while not even including Zodiac and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is amusing, at the very least. History will judge their lack of vision and backbone accordingly.
Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture — Drama: Cate Blanchett (Elizabeth: The Golden Age), Julie Christie (Away From Her), Jodie Foster (The Brave One), Angelina Jolie (A Mighty Heart), Keira Knightley (Atonement). Response: The Blanchett nomination is a joke. Conventional wisdom says it’s Christie’s to lose…and she could manage that if she doesn’t get out there and “work it” — which she’s said to be reluctant to do. The jackals and the wild dogs of Kenya can smell this attitude, and if they’re “smart” (in a vicious, dog-eat-dog, rules-of-the-game sense of the term), they’ll gang up and take her down. She’s definitely a vulnerable wildebeest.
Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture — Drama: George Clooney Michael Clayton), Daniel Day-Lewis (There Will Be Blood), James McAvoy (Atonement), Viggo Mortensen (Eastern Promises), Denzel Washington (American Gangster). Response: They nominate Mortensen, Washington and Clooney but blow off HE faves Benicio del Toro and Sam Riley? I don’t care how repetitious I sound by bringing this up time and again, but this is a matter of breathtaking epic-scale denial. Del Toro and Riley gave landmark performances, and HFPA nominators are playing political suck-up games by nominating Clooney, Washington and Mortensen, all of whom (a) will look good on the red carpet but (b) gave very good but not quite award-level performances.
Best Motion Picture — Musical Or Comedy: Across The Universe, Charlie Wilson’s War, Hairspray, Juno, Sweeney Todd. Comment: The Across the Universe nomination is a sop and a joke. Arterial fire-hydrant issues aside, the winner really ought to be Sweeney Todd. If the blood kills it, Juno will gake the prize. Why isn’t Once nominated in this category? It’s easily superior in every respect to Across the Universe — more intimate, better acted, more honestly emotional, etc.
Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture — Musical or Comedy: Amy Adams, Nikki Blonsky, Helena Bonham Carter, Marion Cotillard, Ellen Page. Comment: All sublime performances, but Cotillard deserves to win. Of course, she could very possibly lose because La Vie en Rose came out so long ago, blah blah. Picturehouse needs to bring Cotillard back to Los Angeles in early January and keep her there.
Best Supporting Actor: Casey Affleck, Javier Bardem, Philip Seymour Hoffman, John Travolta, Tom Wilkinson. Comment: Travolta is the weak sister in the group. Bardem will probably prevail, especially given his Spanish heritage and the HFPA’s presumed favoritism for foreign-reared contenders.
Best Supporting Actress: Cate Blanchett, Saoirse Ronan, Julia Roberts, Amy Ryan, Tilda Swinton. Comment: How formidable is the Ryan blitzkreig? Will the HFPA membership knuckle under and go along, or will they grow a pair and stand up for Blanchett or Swinton? Ronan is in there to round out the pack. The Roberts nomination is a case of the HFPA simply wanting her to attend the awards show.
Best Screenplay: Diablo Cody Juno), Joel Coen & Ethan Coen (No Country for Old Men), Christopher Hampton (Atonement), Ronald Harwood (The Diving Bell & the Butterfly), Aaron Sorkin (Charlie Wilson’s War). Comment: The Coens, of course, but it wouldn’t surprise me if Cody, who’s slightly better at working a room than Joel and Ethan, nabs it.
A friend just wrote to say that “the biggest disappointment in the Best Actor category is Tommy Lee Jones not getting any love for In The Valley of Elah.” Jones was superb in that film, yes, but I liked him even more in his somewhat quieter No Country supporting performance…and he was shut out there also.
In keeping with the lousy-projection standards theme of my 12.5 and 12.6 postings, HE reader Grant McFadden has passed along comments by director Stanley Kubrick during a 1987 Rolling Stone interview with Tim Cahill. Commercial projection is perhaps a bit better today than it was 20 years ago (certainly if you factor in standards at theatres like L.A.’s Arclight), but generally speaking only that.
Here’s a portion of what Kubrick and Cahill said to each other on this subject:
Cahill: There’s a rumor that you actually wanted to approve the theaters that show Full Metal Jacket. Isn’t that an example of mindless anxiety?
Kubrick: “Some people are amazed that I worry about the theaters where the picture is being shown. They think that’s some form of demented anxiety. But Lucasfilms has a Theater Alignment Program. They went around and checked a lot of theaters and published the results in a [1985] report that virtually confirms all your worst suspicions. For instance, within one day, fifty percent of the prints are scratched. Something is usually broken. The amplifiers are no good, the sound is bad, the lights are uneven.”
Cahill: “Is that why so many films I’ve seen lately seem too dark? Why you don’t really see people in the shadows when clearly the director wants you to see them?”
Kubrick: “Well, theaters try to put in a screen that’s larger than the light source they paid for. If you buy a 2000-watt projector, it may give you a decent picture twenty feet wide. And let’s say that theater makes the picture forty feet wide by putting it in a wider-angle projector. In fact, then you’re getting 200 percent less light. It’s an inverse law of squares. But they want a bigger picture, so it’s dark.
“Many exhibitors are terribly guilty of ignoring minimum standards of picture quality. For instance, you now have theaters where all the reels are run [with a norizontal platter system]. And they never clean the aperture gate. You get one little piece of gritty dust in there, and every time the film runs, it gets bigger. After a couple of days, it starts to put a scratch on the film. The scratch goes from one end of the film to the other. You’ve seen it, I’m sure.”
Cahill: “That thing you see, it looks like a hair dangling down from the top of the frame, sort of wiggling there through the whole film?”
Kubrick: “That’s one manifestation, yeah. The Lucas report found that after fifteen days, most films should be junked. [The report says that after seventeen days, most films are damaged.] Now, is it an unreal concern if I want to make sure that on the press shows or on key city openings, everything in the theater is going to run smoothly? You just send someone to check the place out three or four days ahead of time. Make sure nothing’s broken. It’s really only a phone call or two, pressuring some people to fix things. I mean, is this a legitimate concern, or is this mindless anxiety?”
The day before flying to Boston (11.29) I wrote that while I was okay with Charlie Wilson’s War, I liked and admired Aaron Sorkin‘s 5.25.05 version of his Charlie Wilson’s War script somewhat more. I said it’s “obvious that the movie has been shaped in order to be less complex, much more upbeat and explicitly depoliticized, which to say scrubbed clean of all specific Al Qeada and 9.11 mentions.”
Houston socialite Joanne Herring, attorney Dick DeGuerin
It appears now that the Sorkin’s script may have been defanged and deballed due to legal pressure brought upon War producers by Joanne Herring, the right-wing Houston socialite and millionaire played by Julia Roberts in the film.
Yesterday’s Rush & Molloy column (12.12) in the N.Y. Daily News quotes Herring as saying she “practically choked” when she read Sorkin’s original screenplay,” which “ended with a shot of the Pentagon in flames, implying that Herring and Wilson (played by Tom Hanks) had abetted Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda crew.
“Can you ever predict a war?” Herring says to Rush-Molloy. “The shelf life of a Stinger missile is five years. There’s no weapon we got them that can be used today.” [HE note: This is a witless smokescreen rebuttal as neither the movie not Sorkin’s screenplay states or implies that weaponry purchased for the Afghan Muhjadeen in the ’80s was used against the U.S. later on.]
Herring showed the script to Wilson and “we wept and wailed and gnashed our teeth,” Herring says. “Then they brought in some legal muscle — Dick DeGuerin, the celebrated hot-shot Houston attorney who got an accused Houston murderer off and also defended U.S. Rep. Tom DeLay on conspiracy and money laundering charges. “DeGuerin got the attention of Universal and the producers,” the story says, [and] Herring, was thereafter “assured that the script would be changed.”
The column says that Herring flew to last Monday’s L.A. premiere “with Houston pals, who included former Secretary of State James Baker…[and] to everyone’s great relief, she and Wilson liked what they saw on the screen.”
That’s because all the movie says now, boiled down, is that despite the effective efforts of Wilson and Herring in arming the Muhjadeen and thereby helping to defeat the Russian invaders, the U.S. “fucked up the end game” in Afghanistan because no one nurtured political or cultural ties with key regional players and combatants in the war’s aftermath.
The film includes a scene in which Wilson’s committee declines to fund the construction of a school, at which point Hanks/Wilson talks about how “we always go into these countries to change things [and then] we always leave…but the ball keeps bouncing.”
Sorkin’s script is much tougher and more explicit in explaining the particular U.S. errors and oversights from the time of the Russian withdrawal to 9.11.01. As much as I like the final version of the film myself, I wish Universal and director Mike Nichols had sidestepped Herring and DeGuerin and been more faitthful to Sorkin’s original work, which is to say more faithful to the reality of what really happened over there.
“[When] a window-washing platform gave way last Friday, two brothers preparing to clean the black-glass skin of an apartment building on the Upper East Side fell 47 floors. Why did one die and the other survive, though he is grievously injured?
“Five days later, the answer can still be only guessed at. Officials and window-washing colleagues of the two brothers speculated that they tried to ride their platform to the ground, as one window washer said he had been trained to do in such an accident.
“If so, they were relying on basic physics — the platform would have generated some small amount of wind resistance, slowing the fall — and luck.
“Fortune, if there is any to be found, was with the brother who survived, Alcides Moreno, 37. He was conscious and sitting up soon after firefighters arrived.
“He was on top of what was left of the platform that they were working on,†said one official who was at the scene.
“The brother who was killed, Edgar Moreno, 30, may have been thrown off the platform as it hurtled toward the ground. The official, who did not want to be identified because he was not authorized to speak about the investigation, said part of his body was under the platform.
“It was a distinctly urban kind of tragedy, one that brought to mind a distinctly different kind of accident — long-distance falls by military pilots or sky divers whose parachutes failed to open, and who survived.” — from an actual 12.12.07 N.Y. Times story by James Barron and Al Baker.
It might be a good thing all around for the sourpusses out there to stop trashing Mamma Mia (Universal, 7.18.08) sight unseen. The director, after all, is Phyllida Lloyd. The suspicion that ABBA’s music may be the all-time ultimate in sickening ’70s Euro synth-pop needn’t be a stopper. And just because Mamma Mia has been a hugely popular rube musical for years …that’s what I’m talking about. This sort of thing ends here. Wait six months. Give the film a chance.
Cinematical put up some new Mamma Mia photos today…cool.
The plot (straight from the IMDB): 18 year old Sophie (Amanda Seyfried) has a problem. Its almost her wedding day and she doesn’t know who her father is. It could be any of her mothers (Meryl Streep) past suitors: Sam (Pierce Brosnan), Bill (Stellan Skarsgard) or Harry (Colin Firth). The only way for her to find out is to invite all three to her wedding to see what happens.
Broadway World has an exclusive video clip of the opening credits to Tim Burton‘s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (Dreamamount, 12.21). It’ll certainly give you an idea about where the aesthetic emphasis lies, or at least what’s important to Burton. My favorite parts of the film have little if anything to do with vivid red plasma. I’m speaking of at least 95% of the running time.
Curious as it may sound, I have to take care of some things that require leaving the bunker. Irksome but necessary. Back on the case by 4:30 pm eastern.
L.A. Times writer Rachel Abramowitz recently did a dual interview with Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman about The Bucket List (Warner Bros., 12.25) and various notions related to the film’s subject, which is nominally death but primarily the things that give life value. In so doing she got three good Nicholson quotes about (in this order) life, religion and smoking.
Quote #1: “Because of living a checkered life, I have a lot of different…views about it. Really, what you’d better know is, you’re in the laps of the gods about it all. I’m not an adventurer and a traveler like [Freeman] is…I am kind of a home person that way, and I traveled a lot earlier on in my life, but still there’s plenty of places I want to go to. There are endless things you want to do, books you wanted to read, corners you wanted to clean, this you wanted to get right, that thing you wanted to put right with, it is endless.”
Quote #2: “I’m not anti-religious in any way, but I like ‘The End of Faith’ [by Sam Harris] because they just took Galileo off the heretics list. There are certain areas where I’m not going to challenge anyone’s sense of mystery, but I don’t want reason to be held back by someone’s idea of fundamentalism, and that happens….you can’t go on behaving as though the world is flat.”
Quote #3: “Look, nobody should smoke. It is not so much that you fear that moment when somebody comes in and says, ‘That’s it. You’re dead. You smoked too much.’ Well, that’s not the real fear. The real fear is going through now the process and thinking, ‘I’m dying of stupidity.’ This is the self-recrimination about it.”
“As for There Will Be Blood, about which you will be reading much more in the pages of the L.A. Weekly over the coming weeks, I will say only this: There are great films (like No Country For Old Men) and then there are films that send shock waves through the very landscape of cinema, that instantly stake a claim on a place in the canon.
“Often, such vanguard works fail to be fully understood or appreciated at the moment they first appear, as some of the initial reviews that greeted Psycho, 2001 and Bonnie and Clyde attest. There Will Be Blood belongs in their company, and I consider myself fortunate to belong to a group with the foresight to recognize it in its own moment.” — from L.A. Weekly critic Scott Foundas‘s 12.9 rant against certain interpretations voiced by myself, Variety‘s Anne Thompson and Kris Tapley and The Envelope‘s Tom O’Neil about last Sunday’s Los Angeles Film Critic Association voting.
Hey, how come Foundas didn’t rap David Poland‘s knuckles also? Variety critic Robert Koehler complained last Monday that the MCN know-it-all wrote a LAFCA-voting interpretation that was along the same lines as what Thompson and I had penned.
There Will Be Blood is certainly a seismic piece of work that’s been generating temblors and aftershocks, but it’s also something of a sick puppy. It embodies “diseased greatness” (and yes, I realize this is the third or fourth time I’m used this term since coining it last month), but surely Foundas and Koehler understand there are groundwater reasons why a critic like Time‘s Richard Corliss would call it an “audience punisher.” A woman friend wrote the other day to confess that she “hated it and felt trapped in my seat…I just wanted to leave immediately after and never sit through it again. Which I guess translates into Best Film of 2007…lol!”
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