Month: October 2008

The basic idea behind the well-attended, star-studded Hollywood Film Festival Awards, which have been an annual event now for 12 years and which took place last night at the Beverly Hilton, is to put names out there — i.e., to get people thinking about this or that contender as a major contender or even a possible front-runner when the real awards action starts happening later this year — the critics, Golden Globes, Academy noms, etc.

Angelina Jolie, Clint Eastwood at last night’s 12th Annual Hollywood Film Festival Awards ceremony at the Beverly Hilton — Monday, 10.27.08, 9:10 pm. Eastwood was given the HFF Director of the Year award.

More than a few of the films honored last night haven’t been seen, as their makers pointed out again and again, which obviously underlined the spitball element. HFF founders Carlos de Abreu and Janice Pennington were in effect offering guesses and hunches about which films and filmmakers may be in play, and the filmmakers, by showing up and taking bows, were saying, “We appreciate the hunch, and…whatever, who knows, maybe it’ll lead to something else.”

And so Clint Eastwood was named HFF Director of the Year, which lends a certain heft to the fortunes of the forthcoming Gran Torino (and to the just-opened Changeling). And Dustin Hoffman, whose performance in Overture’s Last Chance Harvey is the most affecting and appealing thing he’s done since he played Bob Evans in Wag The Dog 11 years ago, as well as his first stand-alone lead role since Mad City.

And Kristin Scott Thomas graciously accepted the HFF’s stamp of approval for her devastating performance in I’ve Loved You So Long, and Josh Brolin received a mild boost for his Best Actor prospects off his performance in W. And Ben Stiller, whose remarks about the speculative nature of the HFF Awards were easily the evening’s funniest, was put into a position for a Golden Globe nomination and perhaps a win for his direction of Tropic Thunder.

Hollywood Film Festival after-party surrounding Beverly Hilton outdoor pool — Monday, 10.27.08, 10:10 pm

Josh Brolin, honored last night as the HFF Actor of the Year.

The other honorees included James Franco, whose Pineapple Express and Milk roles led to being handed the HFF Hollywood Breakthrough Actor Award; Marisa Tomei, recipient of the HFF Supporting Actress of the Year award for her work in The Wrestler; Dark Knight producers Christopher Nolan, Charles Roven and Emma Thomas for Producers of the Year.

Plus Happy Go Lucky‘s Sally Hawkins, HFF Breakthrough Actress of the Year; Doubt director-writer John Patrick Shanley, HFF Screenwriter of the Year Award; WALL*E’s Andrew Stanton, Animation of the Year, Milk screenwriter Dustin Lance Black, HFF Breakthrough Screenwriter of the Year; Danny Elfman, HFF Composer of the Year Award, and so on.

Here are some mp3 files of some of the accepting speeches — Stiller‘s again, Eastwood‘s, Hoffman‘s and Brolin‘s.

Monday, 10.27.08, 9:14 pm

Twilight star Robert Pattinson accepted the New Hollywood Award. He sounded the same tone as Stiller, saying in effect “why am I here accepting an award for a film nobody’s seen?” He did say this, however: “It’s all hype.”

Before the event started I went up to Frost/Nixon director Ron Howard to congratulate him on that pro-Obama political spot that appeared last week, which I love (and I’m not alone).

The news seeped through yesterday that L.A. Times Envelope editor and reporter Sheigh Crabtree has taken a buyout deal and is off to other pastures. A friend told me last night she hasn’t been around that much over the past couple of weeks. If you’re reading this, Sheigh, I’m sorry for the trauma and hope you land something else soon. But what is there? What in the way of nourishment or mild comfort can be had these days for a first-rate pro with a print history? Damn little, it would seem. But let’s think positively.

Print journalism these days is like the third act of Goodfellas. Every other day you’re Ray Liotta talking to Robert De Niro in front of the diner. Liotta: What happened? De Niro: They whacked him…fucking whacked him. Liotta: Ohhh, God.

I’m sorry to read about L.A. Times film critic Carina Chocano getting the hook over at the L.A. Times. Tough deal, but it’s going this way for so many good critics, reporters and editors these days. I’m not sorry for my good fortune in owning a respected site that can only grow and strengthen, putting me for once on the right side of the equation with a truly secure foothold, but I’ve been through layoff traumas and know what it feels like. My heart goes out to all print people suffering through the Big Implosion.

When Chocano first got the gig she was seen by some within LAFCA (the Los Angeles Film Critics Association) as not “Catholic” enough. She hadn’t gone to catechism, wasn’t really and truly “of the cloth,” etc. But she’s a good writer, she has a passionate heart and, for my money, knows movies well enough. I hope she lands somewhere or figures something out soon.

“I thank God for Judd Apatow,” Zack and Miri director Kevin Smith has told N.Y. Times reporter David Itzkoff, “because he shattered what I assumed was a $30 million ceiling.” The story is basically about how the Apatow imprint is all over under-30 humor these days, and how the Apatow brand “has reinvigorated Hollywood’s appetite for R-rated humor,” and how Smith may not be getting full credit for working in this vein before Apatow started mining it. Caution: Itzkoff’s story is dated 10.24. Three days ago!

The sudden departure of DreamWorks partner (or former DreamWorks partner) David Geffen has been written about by N.Y. Times reporter Michael Cieply. Which again raises the question, who cares about this stuff except industry reporters and their editors? My energy levels plummet each and every time I read about this or that corporate hotshot making a move. I’m not saying these guys aren’t newsworthy. I’m saying that the reading about big dicks buying and selling Monopoly hotels offers, for me, zilch in the way of intrigue. Because it’s the same story every time.

Note that Ed Meza‘s 10.27 Variety story about the big 70mm retrospective that’ll be shown at next year’s Berlin Int’l Film Festival doesn’t actually say that each and every film will be shown in 70mm — it says only that the program will show films that were shot in 70mm. I’m not assuming David Lean‘s Lawrence of Arabia won’t be shown in 70mm (as 70mm prints of that 1962 classic do exist), but will William Wyler‘s Ben-Hur and Joseph L. Mankiewicz ‘s Cleopatra be shown in this format?

I’m not aware that 70mm prints of these films exist, and the Variety story fails to provide the specifics. A 70mm print of Ben-Hur would project an aspect ratio of 2.76 to 1. Ben-Hur hasn’t been seen in this aspect ratio since the roadshow engagements happened in 1959 and ’60. I shouldn’t talk but I don’t remember hearing from anyone that a good-condition 70mm print of Cleopatra is intact and screenable either. Am I wrong? I’m asking.

Meza adds that Franklin J. Schaffner‘s Patton, Stanley Kubrick‘s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins’ West Side Story, Wise’s The Sound of Music and Gene Kelly’s Hello, Dolly! will bne shown during the program. Again, it is presumed that 70mm prints of at least some of these films will be projected in Berlin, but the Variety story isn’t specific.

A just-posted CNN.com story by Abbie Boudreau and Scott Bronstein reports that “more than 50,000 registered Georgia voters who have been ‘flagged’ because of a computer mismatch in their personal identification information. At least 4,500 of those people are having their citizenship questioned and the burden is on them to prove eligibility to vote.

“Experts say lists of people with mismatches are often systematically cut, or ‘purged,’ from voter rolls. It’s a scenario that’s being repeated all across the country, raising fears of potential vote suppression in crucial swing states.

“‘What most people don’t know is that every year, elections officials strike millions of names from the voter rolls using processes that are secret, prone to error and vulnerable to manipulation,’ said Wendy Weiser, an elections expert with New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice.

“That means that lots and lots of eligible voters could get knocked off the voter rolls without any notice and, in many cases, without any opportunity to correct it before Election Day.”

On top of which a 10.24 N.Y. Times story by Dan Frosch reports that “a national voter group filed a lawsuit against Colorado Secretary of State Mike Coffman alleging that as many as 30,000 voters had been purged from the rolls in Colorado. According to the Advancement Project, which filed the lawsuit in Federal District Court in Denver, Mr. Coffman, a Republican, illegally disqualified thousands of voters by removing them from voter rolls within 90 days of Election Day, which is prohibited by federal law.”

AICN has exclusively posted the trailer for Susan Montford‘s While She Was Out (12.12), an effective, pared-down thriller about Kim Basinger vs. a crew of low-rent, white-trash predators led by Lukas Haas. (Yes, the cute little Amish kid with the big black hat in Witness has grown into a grungy guy with the demeanor of a sociopath animal.) Is Montford the new Kathryn Bigelow?

Here’s a riff on the film by AICN’s Moriarty, and a take by Latino Review‘s George “El Guapo” Roush

“And finally, Barack Obama has to give comedians something to work with. Seriously, here’s a guy who’s not fat, not cheating on his wife, not stupid, not angry and not a phony. Who needs an asshole like that around for the next four years?” — from Bill Maher‘s latest “New Rules,” aired last Friday night.

Julian King, the missing 7 year-old in the Jennifer Hudson family murder case, has been found dead inside an SUV parked on a street. It’s an ongoing tragedy that won’t stop hammering this poor Chicago-based family. Devastating.

I posted my first story/item about Barack Obama during the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, or roughly 21 months ago. Today, in any event, marks the beginning of the final week of ’08 Presidential campaign. Eight and a half days from now, all present-tense anxieties will be stilled and we’ll all start to feel a huge depressing shift in the current.

It’s probably unrealistic to hope for 60 Democratic U.S. Senators once the dust has settled, but it’ll be beautiful if it happens. An FDR-like New Deal overhaul of priorities would be possible. The next step would be to go out and really do something about the right-wing crazies once and for all. If I could exterminate the lot of them by clapping my hands three times, I would clap my hands three times. No, that’s going too far. I didn’t mean that. What if the worst of them could be forcibly relocated to Alaska? Then they could all get together and eventually secede with Palin leading the charge and running the show. That wouldn’t be a bad thing at all. It really wouldn’t.

I sat down early Sunday evening inside a spacious, softly lit Culver City cafe and spoke with Frozen River star Melissa Leo. She’s blonde-ish these days (part of a look she’s using for the currently filming Welcome to the Rileys, in which she plays the estranged wife of James Gandolfini) and very thin and…well, looking good, which is to say sexier, healthier-seeming and more spiritually centered than the frazzled trailer-dweller she plays in that three-month-old Sony Classics release.

Melissa Leo outside of Akasha in Culver City — Sunday, 10.26.08, 6:35 pm

After catching her portrayal of that desperate, financially strapped mom trying to make ends meet by smuggling illegals over the Canadian border, I told myself (as did many others) that Leo is the first hands-down Best Actress contender of ’08. It’s one of those performances that are not so much “acted” as occupied or lived in. A character gripped, turned around and held onto.

And yet Leo is now one of three Best Actress contenders in Sony Classics releases — herself, Anne Hathaway in Rachel Getting Married and Kristin Scott Thomas in I’ve Loved You So Long . The declared policy from SPC co-president Michael Barker is that none of these three will reap a disproportionate share of press ink and/or trade ads, but one can’t help but wonder. Doesn’t the newer movie or performance always seem to get the grease?

Leo certainly seems the most indie-ish of the three. Meaning that she appears to be the most self-sufficient and stand-aloneish by way of being (or seeming) less on the corporately-funded limousine circuit. Plus the earthy intensity and hardscrabble conviction that she puts out every time she stands up and opens her mouth in a film, or shares an opinion about any strong belief over a dinner table. She’s the real deal.

Leo in Frozen River

Leo is certainly one of the two or three most gifted and intensely watchable American actresses of a certain age working in movies today. (Along with Meryl Streep and…I don’t know who else to name right now. It’s too hard to decide.) I became convinced of this five years ago after catching her as Benicio del Toro‘s suffering domestic partner in Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu‘s 21 Grams.

“Look at me, I did it on my own, landed the best role of my lifetime and hit it out of the park,” her face and life and career seem to be saying about the Frozen River deal and the general here-and-now.

A friend suggested last night that Leo is the female Richard Jenkins in the ’08 Oscar race. He half-believes they should actually do interviews together, going out of the circuit as the Ma and Pa Kettle of talented indie-level award campaigners. He’s not being a smart-ass — it’s just that he feels they would get a little more attention this way and stand a better chance of inspiring Academy members to actually pop in those Frozen River and The Visitor DVDs.

This fellow also believes that the presumed and/or expected award-quality performances from Meryl Streep in Doubt, Kate Winslet in Revolutionary Road and The Reader, Angelina Jolie in Changeling, and Cate Blanchett in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button — all big-name actresses with more heavily-bankrolled campaigns behind them — may stand a better chance of being nominated. “Why the hell would that necessarily be?” I argued. “Because it makes Academy members feel better, to vote for venerated brand names?”

“Well, maybe Leo will win the Spirit Award for Best Actress,” he then said. No…no consolation prize! Leo has been too good in too many other films. She’s too talented and intense and has worked too hard and long and well to be fobbed off. This is her year, her time.

According to her IMDB page Leo has acted in 13 films since completing Frozen River. OKay, so maybe it’s actually ten or twelve or fourteen, but she’s obviously not letting the grass grow.

Anyway, here‘s the mp3. You can hear our discussion pretty well at first, although gradually the music gets louder and then groups of four and six are seated nearby and start in with the yappy-yap-yap, and before you know it Leo and I are leaning forward a bit more in order to hear. And then the yappies start in with the red wine and the giggling, and then laughing uproariously every so often. And then the owners turn up the music even louder, and this time it’s Mick Jagger. The only thing is missing is a trio of guitar-strumming Mexican guys coming up to the table and singing “Por un Amor.”