Year: 2010

I’m way the hell back in the line of journalists looking for one-on-ones with Kristen Stewart during Sundance 2010. I realize that, and I know it’s my own damn fault because I didn’t work it soon enough. My chances are improved, I realize, by the fact that she’s got two films playing there — The Runaways and Welcome to the Rileys. But it’s still going to be hard. What else is new?

Kristen Stewart in Welcome to the Rileys.

But I may as well say this out loud in hopes that the publicists (KStew’s, the ones repping the films) may be reading and thinking things over. Not to put it too clumsily but I’d greatly appreciate a little face-time. 15 or 20 minutes, I mean. Because the Movie Godz have told me they need to take a closer look because the filters have been too thick so far.

I’m making this request as the only columnist who’s written the following about KStew: (a) that she’s “the GenY Marlon Brando/James Dean/Montgomery Clift,” and (b) that during her ComicCon appearance last summer she “looked, frankly, kind of rock-and-rollish with a kind of cigarettes-and-booze attitude…a fascinating actress, but clearly not someone who’s looking for peace as much as truth, even if it scalds.”

A little gut twitch tells me Rileys might — I say “might” — be the better of the two, but we’ll obviously know soon enough. I leave for Park City five days from now.

The Golden Globe awards are happening Sunday night. Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone has asked for GG predictions for a poll she’s doing. I sent the following minus the “Why” and “Personal Preference” portions:

Best Motion Picture, Drama. HE prediction: Avatar? (Lightstorm Entertainment; Twentieth Century Fox). Why: Wow Factor, Money Avalanche, 3D Game-Change. Personal Preference: The Hurt Locker.

Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture, Drama. HE prediction : The Blind Side‘s Sandra Bullock. Why: Bullock is more of a Globey Globey-type girl than Carey Mulligan. Personal Preference: An Education‘s Carey Mulligan.

Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture, Drama. HE prediction : Crazy Heart‘s Jeff Bridges. Why: Convincing alcoholic sloth, career achievement award. Personal Preference: A Single Man‘s Colin Firth.

Best Motion Picture, Comedy Or Musical: HE prediction :

(500) Days Of Summer? (Watermark Pictures; Fox Searchlight Pictures). Why: It’s easily the best of the nominees. Personal Preference: (500) Days of Summer.

Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture, Comedy Or Musical. HE prediction : Julie & Julia‘s Meryl Streep. Why: Gunboat Meryl factor. Personal Preference: Nine‘s Marion Cotillard.

Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture, Comedy Or Musical. HE prediction : A Serious Man‘s Michael Stuhlbarg. Why: None of the other contenders — Informant‘s Matt Damon, Nine‘s Daniel Day-Lewis, Sherlock Holmes‘ Robert Downey Jr., 500 Days‘ Joseph Gordon-Levitt — have built up any steam. Complicating Factor: Stuhlbarg plays a wimp. Personal Preference: Stuhlbarg.

Best Performance by an Actress In A Supporting Role in a Motion Picture. HE prediction : Badass Mo’nique, Precious: Based On The Novel Push By Sapphire. Why: Please…this is hard for me. Personal Preference: Up In The Air‘s Vera Farmiga.

Best Performance by an Actor In A Supporting Role in a Motion Picture. HE prediction : Inglourious Basterds‘ Christoph Waltz. Why: The multitudes have spoken — settled issue — no choice in the matter. Personal Preference: The Messenger‘s Woody Harrelson.

Best Animated Feature Film. HE prediction : Fantastic Mr. Fox (?American Empirical Picture, Twentieth Century Fox). Why: Fox has been gaining, Up has been static. Personal Preference: Fox because of the Willis O’Brien methodology.

Best Foreign Language Film. HE prediction : Broken Embraces (Spain, Sony Pictures Classics). Why: Because it’s far and away the best of the nominees? Personal Preference: Pedro.

Best Director, Motion Picture. HE prediction : Kathryn Bigelow, The Hurt Locker. Why: Decided, locked. Personal Preference: Biggy.

Best Screenplay, Motion Picture. HE prediction : The Hurt Locker‘s Mark Boal. Why: The straight-from-life factor. Boal embedded, took notes, put it all together. Personal Preference: Boal.

Best Original Score, Motion Picture. HE prediction : Avatar‘s James Horner.

Best Original Song, Motion Picture. HE prediction : “I Want To Come Home” from Everybody’s Fine (?Music & Lyrics by Paul McCartney). Why: The Beatles…hello?

I don’t see why any U.S. distributor would hesitate to put subtitles on any British-made film, especially a low-budgeter shot in northern England. There are few things worse than being unable to understand your own language because of a litany of beefy, sickly-looking British actors with the absolute worst haircuts in the world swallowing and gobbledy-gooking their northern patois.

I don’t want anyone to alter their natural speech patterns, mind. I just want to understand what they’re saying. The obvious solution is subtitles, and yet this rarely seems to happen except when the films in question (like Paul Greeengrass‘s masterful Bloody Sunday) have gone to DVD.

I saw about 60% of James Marsh‘s Red Riding installment (i.e., part two of the trilogy) last night, and I finally gave up because I really couldn’t understand half of the fawkin’ dialogue. I understood Paddy Considine, who plays the lead role, and some of what some of the supporting players were saying, but only fragments.

The okay-that’s-it moment came when Considine’s ginger-haired detective colleague told him something fairly important (to judge by his stunned reaction), and of course I couldn’t understand her. And Marsh couldn’t be bothered to rephrase or reiterate the information in some way. And it wasn’t just me. Anthony Kaufman told me outside the screening room that he had watched this same scene repeatedly on a screener and still couldn’t figure it out.

I’m finished with the Red Riding trilogy. The Yorkshire Ripper can keep on killing for all I care. Marsh’s filmmaking style is sturdy and legible, and I was pleased with his use of 2.35 Scope. But I was lost — and I seriously hate muttering guttural British films that make me feel this way.

I’ve been persuaded…actually, I wanted to be persuaded that Amir Bar-Lev‘s The Tillman Story will be a major film to see at Sundance 2010. Because I know what it’ll be going in — i.e., an exposing of Gen. Stanley McChrystal‘s failed bullshit spin and a slam at U.S. war policy in the Middle East. Mother’s milk to me.

Jon Krakauer‘s Where Men Win Glory was an exploration of the life and death of Pat Tillman, the former Arizona Cardinals safety and U.S. Army Ranger who suffered a friendly-fire death in Afghanistan in April 2004.

McChrystal’s roundabout admission last year that he fraudulently approved awarding Tillman a posthumous Silver Star as a result of enemy fire was heavily focused upon by Krakauer’s book and in a 10.14 Daily Beast article.

It is virtually 100% guaranteed that those fine AT&T people will again be unable to provide the necessary iPhone air coverage in the Park City area during Sundance 2010. Just like last year, which was generally an agonizing Waiting for Godot experience for the first five or six days. So why have I bought the Sundance 2010 app? I’ll tell you why. I don’t know why.

I understood last year about Chris Nolan‘s Inception script being impossible to get hold of, but enough of that. Today is 1.15.10, Inception will be playing six months hence (7.16.10), and even hard-to-find scripts always get passed around during this final-approach period. Bright, well-placed fellows have sent me the hot ones before. I’m asking.

ESPN.com’s Bill Simmons, who apparently hears about NBC shenanigans out of his friendship with Jimmy Kimmel (having written for Jimmy Kimmel Live for a couple of years) has tweeted the following: “Next week is Conan’s final week hosting the Tonight Show. His staff is trying to book big guests so he goes out with a bang. It’s true.” (Thanks to HE reader Doug Helmreich.)

Nikki Finke hasn’t reported that that NBC Universal honcho Jeff Zucker has gone into In The Loop lubricated horse cock Peter Capaldi-as-Malcolm mode in negotiations with Conan O’Brien‘s reps, but it sounds like this might be happening anyway.

It seems, in other words, as if Zucker is snarling and clawing and spitting wads of saliva as far and ferociously as he can in order to discourage anyone at GE or anywhere else from thinking “wow, this guy is such a destructive asshole…let’s figure out how to get rid of him!” Zucker is lurching and flicking his tongue and snapping and slamming his alligator tail against the office furniture.

Finke reports that Zucker has taken “a super tough threatening position” with O’Brien’s reps, who are saying that Zucker “wants to jettison Conan altogether and put Jay [Leno] back at The Tonight Show at its usual starting time.” Zucker, they say, is threatening to “ice Conan” and threatening to keep him “off the air for 3 1/2 years.’

The best explanation I ever gave to my kids about what happens when you die was that “you become a baby again, except most don’t remember who they were before they came out of their mommy as babies, so basically they’re starting all over again with a fresh slate.”

I put that together from Buddhism, from that old “life is a fountain” line, and from Warren Beatty and Buck Henry‘s Heaven Can Wait. Most people want (or need) to believe in some kind of serial continuity. We all suspect that the Woody Allen view of death is probably correct, but we’d rather not go there. We’d rather invest in some vague idea that (a) when your body dies that’s all she wrote, but (b) something in you keeps on by transferring or re-inhabiting (i.e., finding a new host) or going all Stanley Kubrick cosmic.

Or by returning as a dog or something. Wasn’t that a plot of an ’80s cop comedy?

So what happened between Roger Ebert and The Lovely Bones? The film’s presentation of heaven (a mixture of Alice Sebold’s story, which envisions a kind of continuity, and Peter Jackson‘s need to keep work coming into WETA) really rubbed Ebert the wrong way. He didn’t just say “not a vision that enthralls me” but “good God, man…how dare you?”

In Ebert’s view, The Lovely Bones “is a deplorable film with this message: If you’re a 14-year-old girl who has been brutally raped and murdered by a serial killer, you have a lot to look forward to. You can get together in heaven with the other teenage victims of the same killer and gaze down in benevolence upon your family members as they mourn you and realize what a wonderful person you were. Sure, you miss your friends, but your fellow fatalities come dancing to greet you in a meadow of wildflowers, and how cool is that?

“The makers of this film seem to have given slight thought to the psychology of teenage girls, less to the possibility that there is no heaven, and none at all to the likelihood that if there is one, it will not resemble a happy gathering of new Facebook friends. In its version of the events, the serial killer can almost be seen as a hero for liberating these girls from the tiresome ordeal of growing up and dispatching them directly to the Elysian Fields. The film’s primary effect was to make me squirmy.

“It’s based on the best seller by Alice Sebold that everybody seemed to be reading a couple of years ago. I hope it’s not faithful to the book; if it is, millions of Americans are scary. The murder of a young person is a tragedy, the murderer is a monster, and making the victim a sweet, poetic narrator is creepy. This movie sells the philosophy that even evil things are God’s will and their victims are happier now. Isn’t it nice to think so. I think it’s best if they don’t happen at all. But if they do, why pretend they don’t hurt? Those girls are dead.

“I’m assured, however, that Sebold’s novel is well-written and sensitive. I presume the director, Peter Jackson, has distorted elements to fit his own ‘vision,’ which involves nearly as many special effects in some sequences as his Lord of the Rings trilogy. A more useful way to deal with this material would be with observant, subtle performances in a thoughtful screenplay. It’s not a feel-good story. Perhaps Jackson’s team made the mistake of fearing the novel was too dark. But its millions of readers must know it’s not like this. The target audience may be doom-besotted teenage girls — the Twilight crowd.”

All things are God’s will, Roger — the good, the evil, the ugly and the banal. God, who is not a celestial football coach urging humans to do their best in their fight against the opposing Devil team, doesn’t pull strings in order to make good stuff happen occasionally. He/She just floats around up there like vapor and says, “Whatever, guys…it’s your show. I’m not in this. You know…absentee landlord and all the rest of that Al Pacino Devil’s Advocate crap?”

The creation that He/She put together has always been easy access for all types and all manner of behavior. You have to try and do good for yourself and others within the short time that you have on this planet and that’s all. Because we’re all headed for the mulch pit.

I guess I’m supposed to be all cranked up about Warner Home Video’s forthcoming Dr. Zhivago Bluray. The truth is that I kind of am. Mainly — naturally — because of Freddie Young and Nicolas Roeg‘s 35mm cinematography. My favorite shot is one of the most nonsensical in film history — i.e., the closeup of Yuri’s deceased mother inside her casket after it’s been sealed and lowered into the grave, but with just enough light for the camera to catch her bluish features.

It’s a long and tedious milquetoast “romance” — a chick flick, really — with some elements that mesmerize all the same. The kindly paternal tone in Alec Guiness‘s voice as he speaks to Rita Tushingham. That wall of ice covering the freight-car door during that eternal train trip. That scene when the advancing Russian troops are turned by the deserters, and then the British-accented officer stands on top of a water barrel and tries to persuade them to hold fast in the ranks, and then he falls through the top, soaked, and is shot. Klaus Kinski‘s fury as he shouts “I am the only free man on this train!” Julie Christie‘s blonde hair and gleaming blue eyes. The troops raising their fists and yelling “Strelnikov!” in perfect unison as Tom Courtenay‘s train passes by. Guiness’s final line: “Aahh. Then it’s a gift.”