Month: November 2010

In a comment thread for yesterday’s “Strange Pundits” story, HE reader PastePotPete wrote that he’d recently seen Darren Aronofsky‘s Black Swan (Fox Searchlight, 12.3) and that people generally seemed to find it “astonishing.” And yet despite that reaction “there were a lot of women [in the audience] who seemed to despise the movie. And I didn’t talk to or overhear a single male audience member disparaging it.

Natalie Portman, Vincent Cassel in Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan.

“I think this disparity, which I believe Sasha Stone has brought up on the Oscar Poker podcast, will prevent it from garnering the awards it deserves, aside from Portman’s in-the-bag Best Actress award.”

So I wrote him write back and asked, “Did any of these women explain their feelings?

“My impression since the Venice Film Festival is that some women don’t like Black Swan (and this seems like a very weird reason to slam a film) because Portman’s character is too weak and distraught. Because she’s besieged by feelings of insecurity, anxiety and panic. And because some women resent the fact that she’s allowed herself to become torn and frayed, and is finally undone by her demons.

“Are we to presume that women viewers consider the character of Portman’s performance dishonestly conjured because…what, there are no such women in the performing world? Female artists who are worried about whether they’re good enough or not, about whether they might be replaced, or whether they’ve got enough talent or ambition to really make it? I don’t want to go out on a limb, but I believe there are many male artists out there with the same hang-ups and concerns.

“The implication is that some women don’t like this film because Portman’s self-destructive character isn’t positive enough — that she’s not an upstanding role model and that it’s not good for female characters of this type (or performances about same) to be admired too much or put on a pedestal. Is it me, or is that the single lamest rationale for disliking a film ever put forward in Hollywood history, or at least since the days of Stalinist Russia?

“By the same token did women of 1965 declare that Catherine Deneueve‘s character in Repulsion was also a negative role model, and therefore shouldn’t be admired too highly?”

The big surprise in Laura Israel‘s Windfall, a doc that I saw just before the Toronto Film Festival, is that wind-turbines, the “green” energy source that everyone is in favor of, are oppressors — bringers of discomfort and anguish and headaches and lawsuits. They’re 400 feet tall these days and weigh hundreds of tons and look like huge white Martian invaders out of Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, and they have a proven history of making the lives of people who live near them miserable.

(l.) Windfall director Laura Israel, (r.) cartoonist-activist Lynda Barry

Last night, I’m told, the film played to a sold-out house at the IFC Center. During the q & a Israel and cartoonist Lynda Barry discussed the ravaging and plundering of economically hard-up communiities by the wind turbine industry.

Barry is writing a book about how wind turbines invaded the small burgh where she lives in Wisconsin. She’s already interviewed more than 20 families and has done some initial drawings that have appeared on her website. She also runs the anti-wind turbine development website below.

My first thought when I saw this photo was that Mark Wahlberg, star of David O. Russell‘s The Fighter (Paramount, 12.10/12.17), has some serious forehead creasing going on these days. I’m counting at least three if not four rows. I’ve never had creases of any kind. I can contort my forehead all day and it won’t go there.

Art for David O’Russell’s The Fighter taken from recently received screening invitation.

I’m flattered to report that after this morning’s Love and Other Drugs press conference and the “talent” was walking out, director Ed Zwick leaned over and said he’d really enjoyed a piece that I’d written “about Ernest Becker.” I know Becker for his cultural and philosophical writings, but at that particular moment I couldn’t remember what Zwick was referring to. So I searched and found this 8.27.10 piece. Of course. Came right back.

(l. to r.) Love and Other Drugs costars Jake Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway, director-co-screenwriter Ed Zwick during this morning’s press conference on the 18th floor of the Waldorf Astoria — Saturday, 11.6, 10:55 am.

11.6, 11:20 am.

11.6, 11:35 am.

Jill Clayburgh lived, I’m told, a good full life, but in terms of cultural synchronicity and being an iconic, self-defining actress who ignited her own perfect moment, she had four peak years — 1976 to ’79. Arthur Hiller‘s Silver Streak in ’76, Michael Ritchie ‘s Semi-Tough in ’77, Paul Mazursky‘s An Unmarried Woman in ’78, Bernardo Bertolucci‘s Luna (a misfire) in ’79, and Alan Pakula‘s Starting Over later that same year.

Clayburgh’s feminist-icon phase had peaked with An Unmarried Woman, but it seemed to pretty much fizzle out five years later with the failure of Costa Gavras‘ Hanna K. (’83). For all intents and purposes, that was the last “Jill Clayburgh film.” She appeared and acted and certainly had a “life” after Hanna K., but not as a name actress with any exceptional expectations.

Claudia Weill‘s It’s My Turn (’80) was a minor love story (woman-in-relationship falls for Michael Douglas‘s retired baseball player, winds up jilting b.f. Charles Grodin). She played a conservative Supreme Court Justice who tangles with liberal Justice Walter Matthau in Ronald Neame‘s First Monday in October (’81), a tame little film. This was followed by I’m Dancing As Fast As I Can (’82), a valium-dependency, life-crisis drama directed by Jack Hofsis and written by David Rabe.

And then came the Hanna K. death blow. A muddled but interesting pro-Palestinian drama, it was critically panned and abruptly withdrawn from distribution by Universal, apparently due to political pressure from pro-Israeli factions. Clayburgh played an American-Jewish attorney assigned to defend a Palestinian accused of terrorism. But the plot was overshadowed by her character’s conflicting romantic entanglements, one of them with a character played by Gabriel Byrne.

It was three years before Clayburgh’s next film, a injustice melodrama titlled Where Are The Children? Her next, Andrei Konchalovsky‘s Shy People (’87), was a success d’estime costarring Barbara Hershey and Martha Plimpton. It was regarded as a worthy but minor effort, and it had the unfortunate stamp of being a Cannon release.

Clayburgh played a distinctive eccentric in the commercial flop Running With Scissors (’06), and has a too-small role as Jake Gyllenhaal‘s mom (and George Segal‘s wife) in the about-to-open Love and Other Drugs.

Does anyone happen to have a shooting draft of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck and Christopher McQuarrie‘s screenplay of The Tourist? Just curious.

The critics [who’ve] pummeled Love & Other Drugs “were not really watching the movie they were being shown, but were too busy finding a way to disconnect emotionally from a surprisingly emotional film,” MCN’s David Poland has written. “It isn’t a Viagra sex comedy. It’s Love Story and Sweet November combined with a Viagra sex comedy.

“I got a very strong feeling that [director] Ed Zwick and [producer, co-wriiter] Marshall Herskovitz were going back to the work that they didn’t quite hit out of the park in adapting David Mamet‘s Sexual Perversity in Chicago as About Last Night.

“Here, they get a lot of the raunchiness of Mamet, but in combination with a big melodramatic story that is, by its nature, very close to crossing the line into male-unwatchable mush…and they overcome the obstacles.

“And it’s not, as some would position it, just because we spend a lot of first act time with Anne Hathaway‘s naked body splayed across the screen. It’s because of very smart writing and a truly award-worthy performance by Hathaway. This kind of part has eaten up some really talented actresses over the years and Hathaway just grabs the whole thing by the balls, makes very decisive acting choices, and pulls rabbits out of her hat through the whole movie.

“The only reason Love & Other Drugs isn’t a truly great film is the problem of Jake Gyllenhaal, an actor who I adored when he was younger and who has me more and more perplexed over time. On paper, he is a great choice. Young, dumb, and full of cum. But he needs to evolve in this story. And while he does okay with the role, you just never get the kind of light out of him that seeps out of Hathaway’s every pore.

“I’m not saying this is a perfect film. It’s not. But it is a daring, challenging piece, and deserves to be seriously considered for all of its strengths, as well as the weaknesses. And when I look at Gurus and see that Hathaway has fallen completely off the chart, that’s a shame, because she glides through it with great assurance, no doubt supported by a strong director who helped her push and keep those boundaries.

From my 10.30 review: “It’s not Alexander the Great. It just works, is all. LOAD has charm and pizazz and, okay, sometimes strained humor, and yet it never slows down or goes off the rails, or at least not to any worrisome degree.

“Certain people might get pissy about it. A guy I talked to in the men’s room after the screening was going “eeew, it’s two different movies…eeew, it doesn’t blend…eeew, it veers too sharply between broad comedy and disease-anguish and hot sexuality and heartfelt love and heavy emotionalism.

“LAOD isn’t any one thing, and that’s the fascination of it. It’s not dark enough to be The Apartment, it’s not easy and it’s not ‘farce’ and it’s not just hah-hah funny, and it’s not dramedy as much as comedy with a thorny and guarded edge. The tone is farcical one minute, dry and glib the next, and then it devolves into Josh Gad-Jonah Hill-level humor, but thankfully not too often or for too long. And then it turns melancholy.”

Tom O’Neil‘s brand-new version of GoldDerby.com is up, live and running, and containing a new poll of likely Oscar winners from 11 pundits (including yours truly). But disagreement exists between the “Oscar experts” and site’s editors (i.e., O’Neil and four other guys) about the most likely Best Picture winner.

The pundits are saying that The Social Network will win but O’Neil & Co. are saying no — it’ll be The King’s Speech. This is war!

But for me the biggest puzzle lies in the Best Supporting Actress category. Most of the pundits have picked The Fighter‘s Melissa Leo to win even though no one has seen David O. Russell‘s film. (The first Manhattan screening is happening on Thursday, Nov. 11th.) They’ve also picked Helena Bonham Carter performance in The Kings Speech as the second most likely to win, and she’s only pretty good, trust me — there’s nothing in her performance to make anyone swoon or drop to their knees. She does a fine, sturdy job but that’s all.

And then comes Rabbit Hole‘s Dianne Weist in third place and Made in Dagenham‘s Miranda Richardson in fourth — and again, neither performance is really all that stupendous. The only performance that’s really and truly award-worthy is Jacki Weaver‘s crocodile-smile grandmother in Animal Kingdom.

And relatively few have gotten behind Rosamund Pike, who gives the best performance by far in both Made in Dagenham and Barney’s Version. What’s that about, pundits? And as long as we’re voting for performances we haven’t seen, what about Hailee Steinfeld in True Grit? And what two that we have seen — i.e., Barbara Hershey in Black Swan and Sissy Spacek in Get Low?

“Good actors never use the script unless it’s amazing writing. All the good actors I’ve worked with, they all say whatever they want to say.” — Jessica Alba in the just-released December issue of Elle.

The reason that TV news reporters and commentators aren’t permitted to donate money to political candidates, I gather, is because this would shatter whatever image of fairness and neutrality they might otherwise have. What is that, a joke? Who cares about this when it comes to the on-air staffs of the ultra-liberal MSNBC and ultra-conservative Fox News? Who in the world presumes that anyone on either team is the least bit neutral?

Would anyone care at all if it came out, say, that Glenn Beck or Sean Hannity or Bill O’Reilly had given money to a right-wing candidate? These guys are presumed to be in the tank for the right — their partisanship is the reason they have followers — so what does it matter? Why can’t news people privately support whomever they want to privately support? Chet Huntley and David Brinkley are no longer co-hosting the NBC Nightly News.

With a recent report suggesting that Jodie Foster‘s The Beaver might be released straight to DVD (or not), Digital Spy‘s Simon Reynolds wrote early this morning that the Mel Gibson comedy (which reportedly will end in a way that’s strikingly similar to 127 Hours) will open in England on February 11th.

Which means that long-lead British critics will get to see it in screenings in late December, or certainly in early January. Which means that In Contention‘s Guy Lodge will have a jump on U.S. critics, for sure, unless Summit lets U.S. critics see it concurrently….not likely!

E! Online says that The Beaver, starring Mel Gibson in the lead role and Foster as his wife, has run into a series of problems, including distributor Summit failing to set a release date for the movie.

A source said: “It’s going straight to DVD. I heard it from Jodie.”

However, an insider at Summit reportedly insisted that the company is still planning a feature film release, which is likely to happen in 2011.

Gibson, who has recently faced speculation about his private life, last month had a cameo in next year’s Hangover 2 axed after protests amongst the rest of the film’s staff.