Day: August 1, 2008

Take this with a grain, but Anne Hathaway‘s performance as an emotionally unruly rehab veteran in Jonathan Demme Rachel Getting Married (Sony Pictures Classics, 10.3) is also thought to be a possible Oscar-level thing. Maybe. Depending on the breaks. Let’s see what happens in Telluride or Toronto (or both). Jenny Lumet‘s script is about troubled Kym (Hathaway) returning home for the wedding of sister Rachel (Rosemarie Dewitt), and all the jagged-edge, broken- wing, barb-tongued elements she brings along. Sounds like a hoot…maybe.

Kristin Scott Thomas‘s performance in Philippe Claudel‘s I’ve Loved You So Long (Sony Classics, 10.22) is “going to be one of the nominated Best Actress performances,” says a friend who just saw it today. “It will definitely appeal to the actors….very powerful acting…Thomas is not afraid to make herself look unglamorous…it’s just a small French drama but it’s very, very good.”

Thomas plays a 40ish woman who’s recently gotten out of the slammer for a major crime. Elsa Zylberstein is also superb, he says, as Scott-Thomas’s sister.
The tipster allowed that his enthusiasm for I’ve Loved You So Long may be due in part to “the Mummy effect” — a feeling of being deluged by big-studio crap that makes a viewer especially receptive to anything that works in a modest non-CG, non-idiotic way. Word around the campfire is that Claudel’s film is a likely Telluride Film Festival entree. Sony Pictures Classics chief Michael Barker has been telling viewers that Thomas is “this year’s Julie Christie performance.”
I’ve Loved You So Long hasn’t played any festivals yet. It was seen in market screenings during last May’s Cannes festival. The French title is Il y a longtemps que je t’aime.

Swing Vote is about a New Mexico layabout with a drinking problem (Kevin Costner) who is heavily courted by a couple of major presidential candidates (Kelsey Grammer, Dennis Hopper ) who need his vote to tip the election in their favor. Whacked, improbable…but that’s it. Anyway, it was pointed out yesterday that this premise is fairly similar to that of Garson Kanin‘s The Great Man Votes (1939).

It’s about a boozy widower (John Barrymore) who, it is discovered, is the only registered voter in a key precinct, which leads to politicians from both parties bearing inducements.
There’s no question the two films are using the same basic bones. A friend says the Costner film is considerably different beyond the premise, but so what? I’ve never even seen the Barrymore film. It’s not exactly a must-see. Right now it’s only available on VHS.

The gist of this Eric P. Lucas article in the L.A. Times (8.1) is that Heath Ledger shouldn’t be nominated for Best Supporting Actor nominated because he died a foolish death. He didn’t die trying to save someone from drowning, he wasn’t killed by an IED in Baghdad and a tree didn’t fall on him. He carelessly pulled the plug on himself, and this sad fact, Lucas is saying, shouldn’t be romanticized or glossed over with an Oscar nomination. It would set a bad cultural precedent or send a bad message to youths. Something along these lines.

Another main-title clip — name the film

“The Trolls Among Us,” an 8.3 N.Y. Times Magazine piece by Mattathias Schwartz, is a mildy confusing, difficult-to-read article about a “growing internet subculture with a fluid morality and a disdain for pretty much everyone else online.” Is it fair to call any HE regulars “trolls”? Who are the nihilists? I don’t have a list exactly, but there certainly seems to be an occasional nihilist virus in some of the jottings on this site.

Stephen Frears and Peter Morgan‘s The Deal, which came out on DVD last Tuesday, is about the complex political relationship between Tony Blair (Michael Sheen) and Gordon Brown (David Morrissey), and a reported deal between the two regarding the 1994 election of a new Labor Party leader. I’ve been keen to see it since the early days of The Queen, which is Part 2 of Frears-Morgan Blair trilogy. Frears once told me that The Deal is way too secular to be appreciated by an American audience. Is it?

Although what this guy really means is, “Why don’t you stand up and fire back hard at the racially-driven attacks?”

Commenting on Jon Voight‘s 7.28 anti-Obama article in the Washington Times, Variety editor/blogger Peter Bart wrote yesterday that while he may “appreciate Voight’s fervor,” he worries “about his intellectual equipment.”
Then comes the anecdote, dating back some 38 years: “I remember that moment in the early ’70s when Paramount offered Voight the lead role in Love Story, opposite Ali McGraw. Voight had just achieved stardom thanks to Midnight Cowboy and suddenly had his choice of roles.
“As a young production executive at the studio, I was trying to push Love Story forward and joined colleagues in trying to interest Voight in the part. However the more we prodded, the more reluctant he became.
“He finally blurted: ‘The character in this movie is a Harvard student. He’s bright. He reads books. I could never be believable as that smart young guy.”
“Reading Voight’s op-ed piece these many years later, I realize how right he was.”

Yesterday it took the HE readership 90 minutes to identify the main-title music from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. I thought someone would nail it right away, but nope. Here’s today’s main-title clip. (Yes, this is going to be a little game for a while until the tank runs dry.) If someone doesn’t identify this within 30 minutes or less, HE readers are going to have to take a long hard look into the bathroom mirror and ask him or herself, “How much of a hard-core film buff am I?” Because the clip is not obscure. At all.

Last year The Express (Universal, 10.3), an inspirational sport drama about Ernie Davis, the first African-American to win the Heisman Trophy, was being shot on the Syracuse University campus. I know this because Jett, a Syracuse sophomore last year, told me about it. Now the trailer is up. Here’s the Ernie Davis Wikipedia site, if you want to know the whole story.

McCain’s Moses/”The One” ad — hilarious — basically says don’t vote for hope or change or any notion of things being better. Stick with the tried and true and glum way of government. Mind-blowing. Well…revolting, really. But I’ll bet it’s playing with a certain sector of the public.

The ad uses that shaved-down Obama quote thjat popped last weekend, to wit: “I have become a symbol of the possibility of America returning to our best traditions.” The actual Obama quote reads, “It has become increasingly clear in my travel, the campaign — that the crowds, the enthusiasm, 200,000 people in Berlin, is not about me at all. It’s about America. I have just become a symbol.” Naturally, the lying McCain ad guys are using the abridged version.