Month: December 2010

I have my Lesley Manville obsession, and TheWrap’s Steve Pond has a thing about Javier Bardem‘s performance in Biutiful. I feel the same way, actually, as does Ben Affleck and Entertainment Weekly‘s Dave Karger and Ryan Gosling, Sean Penn, Guillermo del Toro, et.al. Here’s how Pond puts it:

“Every awards season is rife with injustices, but one in particular stands out so far this year. Javier Bardem’s performance in Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu‘s haunted, crushing tone poem Biutiful is a towering achievement, a magnificent performance that should comfortably sit on every list of the great acting accomplishments of the year.

“Without saying much – Jesse Eisenberg likely spouts more words in the opening three minutes of The Social Network than Bardem does in the whole of Biutiful — Bardem subtly evokes and embodies a world-weary Everyman living with a ticking clock and the weight of the world on his shoulders.

“Guillermo del Toro has called Bardem’s performance ‘monumental’; Sean Penn said it’s the best thing he’s seen since Marlon Brando in Last Tango in Paris.

“When I saw King’s Speech, I thought Colin Firth gave the best performance I’d seen in a couple of years,” Ben Affleck told me at a party for The Town a couple of weeks ago. “Then I saw Biutiful.” He shook his head. “Javier is on another level from the rest of us.”

“Memo to Academy members: SAG and Globe voters blew it, badly. Don’t you do the same.”

All these admirers plus the jury at last May’s Cannes Film Festival had no problem seeing Biutiful and recognizing what they’d seen in Bardem’s performance. But this kind of thing, let’s face it, doesn’t play as well with Average Joes. Many if not most American moviegoers (including film industry types) are simply too grief-averse — too married to the idea of a movie lifting your spirits or acting like some kind of friendly quaalude — to summon the character to see Biutiful. Can we be honest? Can we call a spade a spade? “Grief averse” is a polite way of saying “too shallow.”

The Chicago Film Critics Association had the good taste and sound judgment to hand Another Year‘s Lesley Manville one of their five Best Actress nominations, so backslaps and “howdy hey” for that. Otherwise they gave eight nominations to David Fincher‘s The Social Network — Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor, etc. — and six noms each to Black Swan, The King’s Speech, Winter’s Bone and True Grit.

The final round of voting for the CFCA awards will conclude at 5:00 pm Central on Sunday, 12.19. The winners will be announced on the morning of Monday, 12.20.

Blue Valentine‘s Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams were nominated for Best Actor and Best Actress, respectively, and both Amy Adams and Melissa Leo were nominated for Best Supporting Actress for their performances in The Fighter.

Hey, what about Mother‘s Kim Hye-Ja and A Prophet‘s Niels Arestrup?

I’m calling it the dullest, least imaginative, most generically nothing Oscar poster in history. These things don’t have to be busy or nervy or nutso, but they have to do something…c’mon. Deco moderne? This could have been designed by the art-school cousin of the head of the DMV in Sacramento.

Matt Shapiro‘s Cinescape summary is significantly better than that other one. More emotional, a bit more thematic…and I love that roomful of overlapping dialogue at the very beginning. But the Killers’ “Dustyland Fairytale” begins to feel obnoxious after a while, and the piece itself, like the other one, is a little too whizflashbang.

I think it’s finally time to admit that Sony Classics, no offense, flubbed Lesley Manville‘s Oscar chances by putting her up for Best Actress. I’ve been arguing for weeks that the aching heart of Another Year should have been pushed as a Best Supporting Actress contender, but Sony Classics thought otherwise and now it looks like her goose may be cooked.

Another Year‘s Lesley Manville.

Manville won the National Board of Review’s Best Actress award, great, but she hasn’t even been nominated in that category by the Critics Choice, Golden Globes or SAG, which suggests she has a possible outside shot, at best, at an Oscar nomination. I’d love to be proved wrong, but I think it’s highly unlikely that she’ll make it. And if she does, there’s no way in hell she’ll win. But if she’d been put into Best Supporting Actress contention, she’d be a likely Oscar nominee since she would have probably made the cut with the Golden Globes and SAG and BFCA, and there’d be a reasonably good chance that she might actually win the Best Supporting Actress Oscar. What a shame, what a sadness.

This morning I asked some journalist pals if they believe Manville has any kind of shot at a Best Actress Oscar nomination at this stage, and if they believe she might be in a better position if Sony Classics had taken my advice and put her into Supporting instead. Here’s what some said:

Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson: “Manville is clearly a leading actress, so I don’t think [putting her up as] supporting would have made any difference. In the case of [Another Year director/writer] Mike Leigh, the Academy actors take him seriously and check out his films. It’s amazing that he’s landed as many nominations as he has over the years, and for such unlikely candidates as Brenda Blethyn in Secrets and Lies and Imelda Staunton in Vera Drake. Yeah, Sally Hawkins was overlooked but it was a crowded category, as it is this year. The question is, will the Academy voters watch the Another Year DVD? I think the Academy is a classier, tonier group that will also be more likely to watch Blue Valentine, btw.”

Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neil: “Lesley Manville can uncork a bottle and get blotto with self pity because she ain’t getting nommed at the Oscars — that’s now clear. That lead race is just too packed with A List divas giving big grandstanding roles, pushing Manville out. But I don’t think the Globes would’ve fallen for a ploy of category fraud if Sony Pictures Classics had tried to place her role in supporting. The HFPA eligibility committee is getting tough these days. But at the SAG Awards, the actor decides which category they’re going into. If SPC had entered Manville into supporting, that might’ve worked. Yes, she might’ve gotten nommed and that, in turn, might’ve positioned her for Oscar recognition. That was her only hope. Turns out you were right, Jeff.”

Rope of Silicon‘s Brad Brevet: “My faith in her getting an Oscar nomination has dwindled to the point she may be the last one in. So that would be a ‘no’ to the win. Yes, yes, yes — she should have been in supporting, which is what I wrote about in October. It’s a tragedy in Oscar terms, but at least most everyone I read still continues to talk about her and the performance every time she’s overlooked. So that’s, at the very least, a plus.”

TheWrap‘s Steve Pond: “It’s still possible that the Academy will fix this and nominate her, but are enough voters going to even watch the movie now? I doubt it. I think it really needed some awards and nominations to move it further up in those piles of screeners. Yes, Manville would have been better off in supporting. And unlike the case of The Kids Are All Right, where it would have betrayed the movie to campaign Bening for lead and Moore for supporting, Sony could have made a completely reasonable argument for Manville in supporting. I agree that they blew it here — but let’s face it, the voters are the ones who really blew it. And not just in Manville’s case.”

Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone: “Fox Searchlight is, quite simply, a better publicity machine than Sony Pictures Classics. I predicted [Conviction‘s] Hilary Swank shortly before the announcement because I figured that Searchlight would have stopped at nothing to make that happen. On top of which Swank is very popular in the SAG. And that voting body doesn’t do well with foreigners: Andrew Garfield, Jacki Weaver, Lesley Manville. Keep in mind that they have a huge membership. They randomly select a ‘nominating committee.’ But they do this in such a fashion that it can’t possibly account for taste. Any old person with a SAG card votes on these. Oscar is much more exclusive and selective. Therein usually lies the difference. But it does show how the acting categories this year are kind of all over the map.”

All I know for sure is that it’s an outrage that Hillary Swank got Best Actress nominated by SAG for Conviction, and not Manville. Congrats to Fox Searchlight for doing a slambang job in getting Swank nominated, but right is right and Manville, I feel, has been cheated out of a completely justified moment in the Oscar sun.

I asked Sony’s Michael Barker and Tom Bernard if they wanted to say anything, but they passed. If I were them I would have said something along the lines of “we loved Lesley Manville’s performance so much that we just couldn’t think of it as anything other than a lead performance. It’s too strong, too penetrating. She’s the essence of that film. Whatever happens Oscar-wise, were enormously proud of her and the entire team behind Another Year.”

The three main Fighter guys — director David O. Russell, star-producer Mark Wahlberg and costar Christian Bale — did the Charlie Rose Show last night. What’s Bale’s accent? He sounds like he comes from some kind of naybuhhood.

Christian Bale during last night’s taping.

I saw Ken Russell‘s The Music Lovers (’71) exactly once, but it’s one of my favorite Russell films, despite the tortured and sometimes grotesque tone of it. I’ve certainly never forgotten Richard Chamberlain‘s lead performance, or this performance scene of Peter Tchaikovsky‘s “Piano Concerto No. 1.” No one initially applauds at the end of the performance because they’re too moved, or so I recall.

Here, if you’re interested, is Van Cliburn performing the whole beautiful thing.

Last night I attended a NY Times “Times Talk” interview with Times critic Jason Zinoman interviewing Somewhere director Sofia Coppola and star Stephen Dorff. No photos or recording were allowed, but my own interview with Coppola (which happened three days ago at the Standard) was just as good.

I needed earphones to hear this on my Windows Toshiba laptop, but it sounds nice and robust on the iMac.

“I think it’s refreshing for an audience to get to breathe and not feel bombarded,” Coppola said about her film, “and to feel a kind of quiet…not have the same thing all the time. A lot of people tell me they think about it a lot after they’ve seen it, [that] it stays with them.”

Our conversation was all over the map, but it was relaxed and enjoyable, I felt. I chose not to prod or invade with heavy questions. It felt better to just glide through the clouds. “I’m not one of those early morning writers…I’m not a morning person,” she said at one point. “We have a place in Paris [but] my boyfriend’s band, Pheonix, has been on tour in the US, [and] I like being in New York. I always want to do something else [after doing a certain kind of film] but I’m not sure what….but I like doing a film the small way with a small crew. I try to do that, [make a film] every couple of years. I’m usually working on it. I’ll take a little pause to regroup or whatever.”

It runs out that HE’s recent TypePad problems were entirely the fault of the goons at HE’s server, Orbit/ThePlanet. “The basic problem was the server time clock began falling out of sync because of a bad motherboard,” HE’s tech guy, Brian Walker , explains. “As the time fell further offbase we began to notice symptoms like TypePad not validating logins because our server said the logins were not happening in real time.

“[But] when the techs gave us a new motherboard they messed up the time reset, making comments that were posted in the last 24 hours have a bad timestamp (3 days in the future). The techs fixed the clock ‘for real’ and we tinkered with the bad comments from the last 24 hours to get everything back up to speed. During that time many people had login problems and others could login and seemingly post, but their posts would not show up on the site due to the server clock. But all should now be well in HE Land.”

The Film Experience‘s Nathaniel Rogers has highlighted the names of several actors who should have been included in SAG’s Ensemble Award noms but weren’t. Black Swan‘s Benjamin Millepied. The Fighter‘s Jack McGee and Sugar Ray Leonard. The Kids Are All Right‘s Yaya daCosta. The King’s Speech‘s Eve Best (i.e., Mrs. Simpson). And The Social Network‘s Rooney Mara, Douglas Urbanski (i.e., that exquisite cameo as Larry Summers), John Getz, Rashida Jones (i.e., Zuckerberg’s attorney), Denise Grayson (Eduardo’s lawyer) and Brenda Song (Eduardo’s nutso girlfriend).

(l.) The real Larry Summers; (r.) Douglas Urbanski as Summers in The Social Network.

Director Blake Edwards, 88, has passed. It’s become an HE tradition to always say something a little too honest on these occasions, so here goes. For the last 45 years Edwards has been celebrated as a master of slapstick, but I found most of his stuff laborious, in part because so many of his films (certainly beginning in the early ’70s) exuded a square establishment sensibility. A respected auteur, surely, but he always seemed to me like a schmaltzy, well-paid, Malibu-colony type of guy.

I never sensed, in short, that Edwards’ film were about anything more than (a) the fact that he had a certain instinct for comic timing and orchestrating pratfalls, a gift that arguably put him in the same realm as Mack Sennett (but nowhere near that of Buster Keaton), and (b) that he enjoyed livin’ the high life and therefore felt compelled for some reason to stock his films with evidence or reflections of this. And I always hated the way his films were lighted and shot in typical big-studio “house” style.

Edwards had a good run with Peter Sellers, of course, but Sellers’ greatest director friend/ally was Stanley Kubrick, not Edwards.

Truth be told, there are only two Edwards films I really and truly admire (as opposed to liking or tolerating). One is Experiment in Terror (’62), a creepy no-frills noir about a terrorized bank teller (Lee Remick) and a cop (Glenn Ford) trying to protect her. The other is SOB (1981), an inside-Hollywood satire that feels somewhat realistic (Edwards finally got down with this one) and is full of roman a clef characters (Robert Vaughn as Bob Evans, Marisa Berenson as Ali McGraw, Shelley Winters as Sue Mengers, etc.)

The Edwards films I regard as “fine,” “okay” and/or “relatively decent” are Breakfast at Tiffany’s (except for Mickey Rooney‘s awful performance), Days of Wine and Roses (a very good drama), A Shot in the Dark (moderately funny at times), What Did You Do in the War, Daddy? (loved some of this), The Party (some brilliant portions), Wild Rovers (decent western), 10 (overrated but funny at times), and the low-budget That’s Life (Jack Lemmon facing old age and male menopause depression — an honest and decent film).