Month: February 2009

Nate Silver, the numbers-and-poll-crunching whiz kid whose accurate primary and general election predictions were posted last year on fivethirtyeight.com and won him immense respect, has delivered an analysis of the Oscar contenders and delivered one big surprise — i.e., that Benjamin Button‘s Taraji P. Henson will win the Best Supporting Actress Oscar. No way. Bank on Penelope Cruz.

Silver claims there’s a 71.1% likelihood that Mickey Rourke will win the Best Actor Oscar. The late Heath Ledger has an 85.8% chance of winning the Best Supporting Actor Oscar. (Do ya think so?) Kate Winslet, he says, is a 67.6% favorite over Meryl Streep, who only tallies a 32.4% likelihood. (A voice tells me she might win anyway.)

Best Director contender Danny Boyle, the auteur of Slumdog Millionaire, has a 99.7% chance of winning, and Slumdog Millionaire itself is 99% favored to win Best Picture.

The U.S.-only version of Bertrand Tavernier‘s In The Electric Mist, a truncated thing that will turn up in DVD stores on March 3rd, wasn’t as hard to watch as I’d been led to believe by certain critics. Ever since Tavernier’s longer, more atmospheric cut played at the Berlin Film Festival earlier this month, the word has been that the 15-minute-shorter U.S. cut is “brisker but less coherent,” as Variety‘s Leslie Felperin put it.

Felperin also wrote that the shorter version ends with a “tacky summing up” and a self-consciously spooky final twist that “makes [it] play like a made-for-TV movie.” Actually, it uses the exact same final shot that ended Stanley Kubrick‘s The Shining, although it’s coming from a different place.

The underlying idea, in any case, is that ghosts are swirling all over, under and through southern Louisiana’s swamplands and low-lying small towns, reminding their more receptive residents of the journeys our ancestors took, the burdens they carried, what this country used to be and still needs to be, dammit, if at all possible.

The 102-minute U.S. version is a familiar whodunit-type deal that’s far from terrible. The problem is that the pacing and exposition feel a little too choppy and rushed. This is a movie that needs to breathe, and you can just tell that the guy who recut Tavernier just wanted a whodunit that unfolds along traditional lines. The guy was obviously saying all along, “Trim the flavor and cut to the chase.”

I was semi-aroused and intrigued with this 102-minute version, being content with and even soothed at times by Tommy Lee Jones‘ performance as Dave Robicheaux, the slightly mournful and laconic lawman hero of several James Lee Burke novels. Yes, Jones has played this kind of weary fellow before, and as far as I’m concerned he can on playing this kind of guy until he’s 90 if he wants to.

Some of the Electric Mist cast and the white-haired Tavernier during the shoot.

The whodunit side, I have to say, isn’t as interesting as just being in the world of the film and the story. This is a flick about mood, aroma and personality. There are niggling plot points to consider, yes, but only people who read crap in airports and love vacationing in Vegas and Cancun and Atlantic City will care about that. I’ve been through lone-wolf investigative dramas like this all my life. We’ve all watched them to death and are sick of the same old hash, and we want something more, dammit. Which is what Tavernier was on about, or so I gather. Tryng to explore the unspoken seep-through stuff.

The problem with the shorter version is that it needs more moisture and mosquitoes. It needs to slow down even more than it does now and let the old natural swamp vibe just seep in and intoxicate. This, I presume (and also according to what L.A. Weekly critic Scott Foundas wrote), is what Tavernier’s version tries to do.

The IMDB says Tavernier’s version will open in France on 4.15.09 and in Belgium a week later. One hopes that discs of his cut will find their way to these shores before too long. The best thing, of course, would be for special screenings of Tavernier’s version to show at the Film Society of Lincoln Center through Kent Jones, at the Film Forum, at the American Cinematheque in Los Angeles, and at other venues for serious film lovers around the country.

There’s this New York interview with 35 year-old supermodel Kate Moss that went up yesterday. The idea is to plug a Kate Moss for Topshop collection of urgent-style apparel. But I’d be remiss if I didn’t allude to the slideshow that’s attached to the article. It’s funny how people can look younger than their years for a long period, and then out of the blue they look somewhat older. No crime in this, but Moss could be 40 or 41 now. That’s the lifestyle catching up, of course.

Or, as “the Bagger” put it today, if I “owned every one of the Academy’s 5,800 votes, what injustices would be rectified?” Okay, here’s what.

One, Revolutionary Road would be a Best Picture nominee. Two, Michael Shannon, a beautiful glint-of-madness actor with things to do and miles to go before he sleeps, would win for Best Supporting Actor. Three, The Dark Knight would still not be one of the five Best Picture nominees because it wore me down by being too damn long. Four, WALL*E, just for fun, would be. Five, The Visitor‘s Hiam Abbass would be a Best Supporting Actress nominee, and she might even win.

Let’s go for five more. Six, Kate Winslet would win the Best Actress Oscar for her work in Revolutionary Road and not The Reader. Seven, Gomorrah would be a Best Foreign Film nominee, for Chrissake. Eight, Steven Soderbergh‘s Che would be a Best Picture nominee. Nine, Clint Eastwood‘s iconic Gran Torino performance would be one of the five Best Actor nominees. And ten, I would create a Best Walk-On, Smaller-Than-Supporting Performance Oscar.

“The first thing you should know about Gomorrah,” says New Yorker critic Anthony Lane, “is that no fewer than three members of its cast have been arrested on suspicion of illegal activities. There could be no more unimpeachable testament, surely, to the integrity of Matteo Garrone‘s film, which is about organized crime in Naples. Many of the actors were recruited from the area, presumably on the basis that they already knew the ropes, not to mention the Kalashnikovs.

“There are five stories, layered and stuck together, raising the possibility that Garrone modelled the whole thing on a lasagna verde. We get them morsel by morsel, and the brisk dicing between them can catch the viewer unprepared.

“There is Toto (Salvatore Abruzzese), age thirteen, who spies a dropped gun in the street, returns it to local thugs, and, in reward, becomes a mini-mule in the drug trade. There is a pair of teen-agers, Marco (Marco Macor) and Ciro (Ciro Petrone), fools in love with a gangsterish ideal; “I’m numbah one! Tony Montana!” they cry, acting out their pantomime of Scarface in an empty tenement, where a sunken, unused bath echoes not just old Brian De Palma movies but much older tubs, in the balneae of Pompeii, across the bay.

“There is also Don Ciro (Gianfelice Imparato), whose name hints at potency, but who is, in fact, a frightened hireling in a cheap blouson, distributing cash to those families who exist on the say-so of the Camorra. And there is Franco (Toni Servillo), the most accomplished gentleman on view, and the one most at ease with evil; aided by a reluctant sidekick, Roberto (Carmine Paternoster), he arranges for the disposal of industrial waste. That sounds like a filmmaker’s convenient symbol, but, if you live in certain parts of southern Italy, the poisoning of the land is right in front of your nose, and under your skin.

“Last, and best, of the central figures is Pasquale, played by Salvatore Canta-lupo. (Has any bunch of actors had better names?) Pasquale is a Thurberish drone, keeping his head down but unable to stop lifting up his eyes to resplendent things. He is a tailor, working his fingers off in the service of couture, or, rather, of its speedy, backroom simulacrum. In a bid to earn more, he accepts a secret offer to tutor Chinese immigrants in his delicate art, and what follows is a touching nocturnal farce. Bundled into the trunk of a car, he arrives not at some dripping sweatshop but at a spotless workplace, lined with eager apprentices who applaud his entrance as though he had come to conduct them: ‘They called me Maestro!’ he whispers to his wife, creeping back at dawn.

“Moments like this achieve what so few American movies seem to be doing just now: they take on a big subject, unwieldy and unglamorous — in this case, the illegal economies that thrive under globalization, and on which we unwittingly feed — and dig out from it a cluster of private dramas that are highly specific, and yet which could, you feel, find an answering gleam almost anywhere on the planet.

“Toward the close, at a truck stop, Pasquale glances at a TV and sees a clip of a radiant Scarlett Johansson parading at a movie premi√®re, wearing a dress that he himself ran up at cut price, or perhaps its costlier identical twin; the expression on the tailor’s face is, you might say, his final master class, proving the beauty of ruefulness.”

This 1959 clip shows that the mystery-guest segment of the old What’s My Line? show was harmlessly amusing. (Certain amusements, I’m saying, are definitely harmful.) If a present-tense show tried reviving this I’d probably watch. I chose this clip because Gore Vidal was one of the panelists, and because Arlene Francis says to James Cagney at the end that “you’re a wonderful performer and we don’t see nearly enough of you in films.” A year or so later she starred with Cagney in One, Two, Three.

The Guardian‘s Peter Bradshaw today came up with a list of the ten weirdest (i.e., most embarassing) Oscar presentation speeches of all time. Good idea, but who’d tap out such a thing without links to video clips? This makes Bradshaw’s article seem the weirdest of all.

An absolutely terrible-looking video of The Wrestler‘s Mickey Rourke and Milk‘s Sean Penn thanking the Boston Society of Film Critics for the “discerning indecisiveness” that resulted in the org splitting the Best Actor award between these two. The BSFC ceremony was held at the Brattle Theatre on 2.8.09, the video was posted on 2.10.

Last night I paid to see Tom Tykwer‘s The International, having missed the Manhattan press screening. And I knew right away that the downish critical response (Rotten Tomatoes ratings of 52% and 55% from the rank-and-file and creme de la creme, respectively) was at least somewhat unfair and inaccurate.

This is a pretty nifty shot when you consider that the rear-wall glass should but doesn’t reflect the presence of a camera in front of Watts and Owen. Very nice CGI, this.

For The International is another smart and mostly satisfying “tween.” A thriller that isn’t (as someone else has already said, I’m sure) a Bourne thing but not a LeCarre-type deal either. And yet it’s not half bad on its own terms until the tension slackens and a kind of manic action vibe takes over during the final 25%.

You could call The International an old-fashioned ’70s thriller that tries, yes, to ape the moody paranoid vein of Alan Pakula‘s The Parallax View — unsuccessfully — and yet one that benefits from a sensible and modest approach, no-nonsense direction, solid performances (particularly from Clive Owen and supporting players Armin Mueller-Stahl and Brian F. O’Byrne), nicely aromatic Euro-backdrops and an agreeably tidy, well-ordered script by Eric Warren Singer.

Some of the popcorn munchers in theatre #13 at the AMC Empire were laughing and hooting during that final 25%, though. A guy sitting behind me began loudly tapping his feet on the floor and complaining to his friend. The International feels a little too literal and earnest in the final laps, agreed, but it doesn’t deserve cat-calls. I wasn’t about to stand up and say “will you guys shut the fuck up?” but I was definitely thinking about this. I was close but I wimped out. Which at times has been the story of my life.

There was this corpulent black kid sitting three seats to my left whose main activity was eating popcorn and candy and slurping down his 48-ounce drink. This 11 year-old African-American beach balloon took his jacket off and then put it back on and then took it off again, chatted with his Jabba-sized mom and dad incessantly, and hit the bathroom (or took a video-game break) twice. The more this little junk-food eating machine failed to watch, much less appreciate, what was going on the screen, the more allegiance and affection I felt for The International.

The International is about a sociopathic bank, called IBBC, that we soon discover is into all kinds of unsavory criminal fundings. IBBC is an anagram, of course, for the real-life BCCI, which flourished in the ’70s and ’80s before getting caught up in a criminal investigation in the early ’90s. The bank’s relationship with underworld elements led to the nickname “Bank of Crooks and Criminals International.”

Anyway, it’s about an unshaven, tie-less and tireless Interpol agent (Owen) who’s determined to expose the IBBC’s malignancy, particularly its pattern of offing anyone who may have the goods and rat to the authorities. The timing of having a bank as a “bad guy”, of course, is perfect. “This is the essence of the banking industry,” one character says early on, “to make us all slaves to debt.” Right.

Early on Owen picks up an investigative ally in the New York D.A.’s office, played by Naomi Watts. Every time they get close to talking to someone who might offer proof of the IBBC’s ties to terrorism and gangsters, the whistle-blower, of course, gets offed. Even a hired Irish hitman (O’Byrne) who’s done some of the offing winds up dodging bank bullets.

But The International is into working with you rather than fucking with your head, so you can follow what’s going on without a great deal of effort. The script goes from point A to B to C and on down the logical line. There’s something very pleasurable and ’70s-like about this. It kept me aroused but made me feel relaxed at the same time. Until, that is, the final portion, at which point the exposition started to feel a little ploddy. A voice inside began to say, “C’mon, c’mon…we need more than just this!”

The International begins to fall apart right after the peak action sequence — an automatic weapons shoot-out at Manhattan’s Guggenheim Museum. But up until that point it’s an almost completely satisfying medium-grade thriller. That is, if you’re like me and not like one of those wildebeest assholes in theatre #13 last night.

The Parallax parallel is in the view — the final resolution, in fact — that taking down today’s nefarious evildoers just isn’t within the power of an impassioned good-guy protagonist. However true or untrue that may be, this isn’t a very satisfying way to end a thriller.

The only standout in the latest Envelope/Gold Derby prediction poll is the support for Best Actor contender Mickey Rourke from myself, In Contention‘s Kris Tapley, Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone and Mike Olsen. Gold Derby daddy Tom O’Neil cautions that Rourke’s chief competitor, Sean Penn, still leads among all the Gold Derby pundits.

Meanwhile, Slumdog Millionaire‘s dp Anthony Dod Mantel has been handed the top prize by the American Society of Cinematographers.

And WALL*E, Slumdog Millionaire and Man on Wire have taken three choice ACE Awards for editing.

Jeffrey Wells to Bertrand Tavernier (sent in an e-mail just now that I might as well share): “Bertrand — We haven’t spoken since Cannes in ’04 or ’05, but I hope you’re well. I’m writing to say that I’ve just found a copy of In The Electric Mist at a DVD store in Manhattan, even though it’s not supposed to be released until March 3rd. And I’d like very much to see your 15-minute-longer version of this film.

Snapped inside an anonymous Manhattan DVD store this evening — Sunday, 2.15, 8:20 pm.

“I’ve read all about all the troubles, mainly by having read Scott Foundas‘ article in the L.A. Weekly. I wasn’t at the Berlin Film Festival, however. Is there any way I can see your version from my Manhattan base? Does someone in this country has a disc they can let me look at? Might there be a NYC screening of your cut? I naturally want to write a comparison piece. Sorry for all the grief, but it seems only right that U.S. critics should at least see your version and write about it, even if it’s not available to the general public over here. (Unlike viewers in Europe, who are being shown your director’s cut.)”

“We can’t lose with Jerry Lewis at the Oscars next Sunday,” Chicago Tribune critic Michael Phillips wrote today. “Like the clashing personalities showcased in Lewis’ greatest film, two scenarios present themselves.

“Scenario 1: The perpetually divisive screen icon takes a gracious pill and accepts the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award with his own brand of charm, plus a couple of inoffensive jokes, steering clear of any references to ‘broads’ or homosexuals or his ‘kids.’

“Scenario 2: Lewis forgoes the gracious pill. He seizes the moment. And he tells the Academy how he really feels about never having been nominated for a regular Oscar.

“The 82-year-old writer, producer, director and star will no doubt be greeted by one of those ‘waves of love’ moments Lewis once referred to, on his old talk show, describing how audiences flood him with adoration.

“But Lewis was never recognized by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for any of his efforts in, well, motion picture arts or sciences. (Lewis patented the video-assist playback system, which he first used on The Bellboy in 1960.)

“Part of it relates to the age-old prejudice against comedy. Robert Downey Jr.’s supporting actor Oscar nod for Tropic Thunder is a gratifying exception to the rule. But I’m here to tell you: This is a matter of the wrong statuette for the right guy. Lewis should’ve won an Oscar a long time ago.

“1964, to be exact. That year, the Oscars recognized the screen achievements of 1963, and in 1963 Lewis released his masterwork, The Nutty Professor.”

I respect Lewis’s Professor but I’ve always been a bigger Bellboy fan.