Month: November 2009

In terms of using the right kind of connective tissue that works for the story and for the audience simultaneously, New Moon (Summit, 11.20) isn’t half the film that Twilight was. It’s slow and infected with the sequel virus. It’s gaseous and flatulent and meandering. This won’t matter box-office wise, but it pretty much sucks. That swoony romantic current that Twilight had has taken a powder this time out.

Firing Twilight director Catherine Hardwicke was a lousy idea, and so was getting Chris Weitz to take her place. I don’t know what tricks Hardwicke used to make Twilight play as well as it did, but I do know that Weitz isn’t nearly as good with this kind of material as she was. Twilight is to New Moon as Star Wars is to Return of the Jedi, or even The Phantom Menace. I mean, it really blows.

Where Twilight felt curiously absorbing and true and plugged into something relatively fresh and exciting (for me anyway), New Moon is slow and draggy and ponderous with dialogue that occasionally smells to high heaven, and laden with seriously crappy (i.e., “pony”) CGI and a running time — 130 minutes — that is way, way too long.

The acting is fine, or at least not too distracting. Hard-wired Kristen Stewart pretty much carries it; hunky Taylor Lautner, surprisingly, delivers a taut muscular vibe and isn’t half bad for a young stud-muffin type; and Robert Pattinson seems to be acutely disinterested and sleepwalking, even, when he’s on-screen (which isn’t often) and is otherwise missing for most of the film.

The main problem is that Melissa Rosenberg‘s sceenplay, based on Stephenie Meyer‘s book, has a draggy, yeah-yeah, so-whatty tale to tell, and the pacing is slack and the story tension is nil. I began to feel bored less than 15 minutes in.

I sat up, slouched down, put my hand over my face, went to the bathroom, cleared my throat, groaned, tapped my feet. The girl sitting next to me sat like a bag of coffee beans off the boat from Columbia during the whole film. “Does she have a pulse?” I wondered to myself. I couldn’t stop shifting around. I actually began to feel a little bit sickly after an hour or so.

Stewart — my favorite younger actress these days — is sufficiently focused and fiercely talented enough to make more than a few of the scenes work, but I mainly felt sorry for her. “She’s stuck in a sequel and doing the best she can under the circumstances,” I told myself.

The thing that defines the badness of New Moon is an extended circular tracking (or Steadicam) sequence that Weitz shot of Stewart (i.e., Bella Swan) sitting in her room, immobile and depressed after her vampire lover Edward Cullen (Pattinson) has broken things off and moved away. Weitz moves the camera around her three times, which gives the audience three views of her front lawn as it changes with the seasons — greenish brown during October, totally brown with leaves being raked in November, and finally snow-covered in December.

Except someone in the Summit high command decided that this visual information wasn’t explicit enough for some in the audience, and so little white titles have been inserted, appearing each time the camera moves around and behind Bella’s back, that say “October,” “November and “December.” Just stunning. Unbelievable! Truly one of the most embarassing passage-of-time sequences ever included in a major motion picture.

Sacha Gervasi‘s Anvil!: The Story of Anvil has been left off the just-announced short list of the Academy’s Best Feature Documentary contenders. One of ’09’s most offbeat and emotionally engaging (one could even apply the term “heart-warming”) docs, Anvil! was expected to at least make the short list, but no. I wrote a few months back that it’s so earnest and touching in a shlumpy, blue-collar, middle-American hangdog way that it might win.

Jeez, I haven’t seen the original Bottle Rocket short in 15 or 16 years. L.M.Kit Carson, who helped Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson with the funding to complete it (and who got it into Sundance and showed the short to Polly Platt, etc.) showed me a tape of it, as I recall. And this isn’t even the whole thing.

I’ve been working on a list of ’09 films and filmmakers that achieved one of two things. One, they simply gave me enormous viewing pleasure. (Or even if an aspect of them did.) Or two, they introduced me to some new aesthetic or style or attitude that I hadn’t really absorbed before but which I felt comfortable with — i.e., in a calm and accepting frame of mind — as I left the theatre. In short, a list of my favorite films that I liked for my own damn reasons, and the hell with taking the pulse of the town.

I’m talking about a Best Picture list, for example, that includes Michael Mann‘s Public Enemies because I loved the ending so much. (Among other things.) And a Best Supporting Actor list that includes In The Loop‘s James Gandolfini and Peter Capaldi. And…well, you know, like that.

Awards-season favorites can and will be included, of course, but the films that I’ve been nudging aside in my head because they haven’t caught a good political wind deserve some time in the sun.

I have to leave for a Gotham Awards event and then a New Moon screening but I’m posting this now because I’m figuring everyone has a favorite or two along these lines.

“While this second chapter of Summit Entertainment’s four-part franchise is as good as Twilight and arguably a shade better, New Moon is indisputably darker in its depiction of the throes and woes of adolescent love, especially when one gets dumped,” writes Variety‘s Jordan Mintzer, reviewing out of Paris.

“That’s how things kick off for Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart), whose 18th birthday begins with a nightmare and ends with vampire heartthrob Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) telling her he’s moving away, with no plans of maintaining a long-distance relationship. Bella quickly slips into a massive depression that resembles a full-scale heroin withdrawal, while her cop dad (Billy Burke) and barely visible school pals can do little but look on.

“Stewart is the heart and soul of the film, and not only because her Bella is surrounded by characters who literally have neither one nor the other. She gives both weight and depth to dialogue (‘You’re just warm…you’re like your own sun’) that would sound like typical chick-lit blather in the mouth of a less engaging actress, and she makes Bella’s psychological wounds seem like the real deal.”

Envelope/Gold Derby guy Tom O’Neil is predicting that Inglourious Basterds will win the Best Picture Oscar.

Trust me — this won’t happen. We’re living in anxious, racially attuned, recession-afflicted times, and that means Up In The Air — the only film by my measure that has that dignified, settled, summing-up-everyone-and-everything vibe — or Invictus will take it. Enjoyable as it is and admired in some quarters, there is no discernible echo and spiritual after-effect in Inglorious Basterds.

I’m not alone in this thinking. In Contention‘s Kris Tapley has Basterds and director-writer Quentin Tarantino ranked pretty far down.

I’m gathering/presuming that Hurt Locker screeners for Academy members will be mailed out before December 1st. If this doesn’t happen PDQ and if (God forbid) somehow The Hurt Locker somehow doesn’t get Best Picture nominated (which is unthinkable), the fault will be entirely Summit’s. This great war film has to be seen to kick in. A Crash-like screener mailing to everyone on the planet is the only way to go.

“At the start of the awards season, I had The Hurt Locker at the top of my top ten picks list,” writes columnist Anne Thompson. “But right now quite a few other movies are getting more noise. That doesn’t matter in the end. Finally, the Academy voters will dig back to all the films they saw this year, especially when they don’t have time to see all the marginal indies in their DVD stack. It’s more likely that they will remember the movies that the critics pick for their top ten lists at the end of the year, or that other awards groups like the Gothams, Critics Choice or Golden Globes anoint as must-sees.

“Finally, though, screeners are the best reminder. So where are those The Hurt Locker DVDs?

“At the New Moon party I asked [this of] Summit’s Rob Friedman, who denied that director Kathryn Bigelow was refusing to send out screeners because she wanted people to see the film on the big screen. (Ideally, that’s where it should be seen; it’s still playing in NY and LA.) Summit will send Academy screeners soon; they’ve already gone to the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.”

It’s not perfect, but this two-faced Avatar poster is much grabbier than the last one I’ve seen (or at least remember seeing) for the U.S. market. I’ve been experiencing a huge blockage with the Na’vi cat noses all along. There’s something in me that just doesn’t care for them. They just don’t strike me as particularly cool.

I’m not looking to dig my claws in and say “this is my last and only reaction to this film” — I’m just saying the noses haven’t stopped bothering me, and I sort of wish that they would. I’m looking forward to this impression going away. I’m not married to it.

A third prominent African-American commentator (and the fourth overall as far as this column is concerned) has joined the Precious takedown campaign. The writer is Washington Post Metro columnist Courtland Milloy, who has trashed Lee Daniels‘ film with almost an Armond White-like vitriol.

“In Precious, Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry have helped serve up a film of prurient interest that has about as much redeeming social value as a porn flick,” he wrote today. “In it, we glimpse a sweaty, faceless brute of a black man raping the girl while her mother watches from a doorway. Two children are conceived in incest.

“I watched the movie at a theater in Alexandria where showtimes are nearly around the clock, from 10:15 a.m. to 12:15 a.m. The audience was mostly black women and teenagers. When the lights came up, all of the moviegoers appeared sullen and depressed.

“After escaping the abuse of her home life, Precious ends up in a halfway house. She is still functionally illiterate and has two babies to care for, one with Down syndrome.

“Strangest of all, many reviewers felt the movie ended on a high note. Time, for instance, wrote that Precious ‘makes an utterly believable and electrifying rise from an urban abyss of ignorance and neglect.’ Excuse me, the movie ends with the girl walking the streets, babies in her arms, having just learned that her father has died of AIDS — but not before infecting her.

“The story is set in 1987, before AIDS treatment became widely available. Precious is as good as dead.

“At the Cannes Film Festival, members of a mostly white audience gave Precious a 15-minute standing ovation. I guess they can hardly wait for the sequel. Rolling Stone gave Precious 3.5 stars out of four. Three X’s would be more like it.”

The 2007 blowoff of Benicio del Toro‘s landmark performance in Things We Lost in The Fire by critics groups, Oscar pundits and Academy members is one of the most shameful (certainly incomprehensible) wrongos in the history of award-season politicking and handicapping. The people who ignored Del Toro’s work as Jerry the junkie will one day have to stand before the Movie Godz with bowed heads and explain themselves, which will surely be a painful thing all around.

Benicio del Toro in Things We Lost in the Fire; Michael Stuhlbarg as he doesn’t appear in A Serious Man.

I’m wondering now who will get Del Toro’ed this year? Life can be unfair and sometimes cruel, especially on the awards circuit. Who will fate slap down with nary a glance?

I’m sensing right now that A Serious Man‘s Michael Stuhlbarg might be a candidate. (I’m telling myself I shouldn’t mention this for fear of this piece being misinterpreted as a flat-out prediction of same.) I know for certain that Stuhlbag’s performance will be one day be savored as a delicious bit of tonal balancing. His persistent and yet faintly farcical performance is of a different flavor and dimension that Del Toro’s in Fire (which I feel, no offense, is a greater achievement), but it is arguably a more difficult thing to have gotten right. Every second Stuhlbarg is on-screen he seems to be simultaneously acting in a farce and a hellish deadpan tragedy, which of course is what A Serious Man is.

For whatever reason a beautiful Blu-ray of David Lynch‘s The Elephant Man, long admired for Freddie Francis‘s ravishing monochome scope photography, is available in Europe but not here. Another standout is Stuart Craig‘s fascinating production design, which almost makes a character out of the aesthetic ravages of industrialism in late 1800s London.

Anthony Hopkins in David Lynch’s The Elephant Man (1980).

John Hurt

“One thing that’s really changed [in the last few years] is the independent landscape,” Hurt Locker screenwriter-producer Mark Boal said in a recent (11.15) Hollywood Reporter ‘Award Watch’ roundtable. “I didn’t know much about it, but I learned in the process of writing The Hurt Locker and producing it. That was a four-year thing, all in, and by the end of that period I felt like, ‘Wow, I’ve learned a little bit about how independent films work.'”

“And in the last year,” Boal concludes, “I’ve watched that entire business model crash and burn. I don’t know that the film I set out to make four years ago could get made again today.” Amazing! Today’s business environment might well prohibit (or come close to squelching) the next Hurt Locker-type boldfacer.