Year: 2010

Yesterday morning Envelope/Gold Derby L.A. Times guy Tom O’Neil said that The Social Network “has a quality that gives it an edge in the current derby: It reflects the national zeitgeist during this Age of Facebook… Oscar voters want their best pictures to say something important about our times.”

In response to which Rope of Silicon‘s Brad Brevet said that he likes the “cultural and cinematic card” (i.e., championing films that clearly reflect present-tense realities and conditions), as this would have earned The Dark Knight a nomination (and perhaps even a win) over such films as The Reader, Frost/Nixon and Milk. It would have earned WALL*E a nomination. It would define the Academy and the Oscars as progressive rather than regressive and stagnant.

“The past few years of Oscar predictions have become quite boring as the conversation leading up to the show pretty much dictated the winners,” he continues. “Could it be the same again as the Social Network crowd reaches a fevered pitch?” While The Social Network “speaks squarely to the heart of the Gen-Y crowd” and The King’s Speech is “the one film that’s right up the Academy’s alley,” the game will be affected this weekend by Social Network ticket sales ” “another bullet point for the conversation to focus on.”

However, says Brevet, “true cinematic advancement in the Best Picture field won’t come with a Social Network win. Something like Darren Aronofsky‘s ballet thriller Black Swan or Christopher Nolan‘s Inception would mark an actual step forward. Will Nolan get the requisite ‘he deserved it’ Oscar for Batman 3, diminishing its cultural and cinematic significance? And when will one of Aronofsky’s forward-thinking features get the recognition it deserves?

“Oscar pundits wanting to crank the dial need start pushing films and decisions that truly change the landscape.”

Yesterday L.A. Times columnist Patrick Goldstein, writing from a standard city-desk, big-city-newspaper, shoe-leathery perspective, cast doubt upon the general cred of The Social Network by sugggesting that its portrait of Mark Zuckerberg is, in the words of Facebook Effect author David Kirkpatrick, “horrifically unfair.”

One retort (which also posted yesterday) came from New Yorker critic David Denby. He says in his Social Network review that “the debate about the movie’s accuracy has already begun, but David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin, selecting from known facts and then freely interpreting them, have created a work of art…accuracy is now a secondary issue.”

“Movies tend to exaggerate retellings of true-life stories for dramatic emphasis, and…like, whatever, Francis Bacon wasn’t a naturalist,” I wrote a few weeks back. “Welcome to the art world. People want strong points of view, and basically to see the non-provocative stuff pruned down so the provocative stuff can be savored all the more, and so the core issues confronting characters can be addressed in some detail. Didn’t William Shakespeare play more or less by these rules?”

Biutiful‘s submission as Mexico’s official entry for a possible Best Foreign Language Feature Oscar is a big boost. A sad but vivid lower-depths drama with a knockout Javier Bardem performance, it now has a niche that will give it traction all around. I toppled hard when I saw it in Cannes, comparing it to Italian neorealist cinema and so on. Which is why I was stunned and enraged when the Guy Lodge contingent sauntered into the Orange press cafe going “nyick, nyick, nyick, nyick.”

I’d written director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarrritu yesterday afternoon about the news, and he confirmed early last night. He noted that “Academy members were really impacted and proud,” and that “their strong support and response makes me very happy.” Good to go.

Moving Image Source guys Matt Zoller Seitz and Aaron Aradillas have assembled a brief video tribute (sans narration) to the legendary opening credit sequence in David Fincher‘s Se7en (1995). At the very end they give credit to Kyle Cooper for having designed the sequence, presumably in collaboration with Fincher. But why do they go on and on about Fincher in their intro, as if it was primarily his idea? I’m honestly confused.

Success has 100 fathers, and failure is an orphan.

I’m relatively comfortable with this Ranker.com piece called “The 7 Most Annoying Kids in Action Movie History ” because I agree with 83.3% of it — simple. Except I’d put The Phantom Menace‘s Jake Lloyd at the top of the roster. The list includes Edward Furlong in Terminator 2, Jonathan Ke Quan in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Joseph Mazzello and Ariana Richards in Jurassic Park, the wussy Rupert Grint from the Harry Potter films, Shia LeBeouf as Mutt in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and Dakota Fanning in War of the Worlds. (Fanning is quite good, however, in Tony Scott‘s Man on Fire.)

My disagreement, of course, is in Ranker thinking about LeBeouf as a kid — he’s been a young dude all along.

For what it’s worth, the Hollywood Stock Exchange forum has posted MTC (Major Theatre Chain) tracking figures and they’re forecasting a $28 million opening for The Social Network (Sony, 10.1). MTC numbers “come from some mysterious source within a major theater chain,” I’m told, “and are usually pretty accurate.” So yesterday’s projection of $26 million from Boxoffice.com was within the same estimated realm. The figures will be honed on Wednesday and Thursday once everyone factors in online ticket sales and yaddah-yaddah.

A 21-gun salute to CNN’s Anderson Cooper for telling North Carolina Republican congressional candidate Renee Ellmers, an ignorance-baiting opportunist, that one of her remarks about the Ground Zero mosque situation “is the lowest response I have ever heard from a candidate, I have got to tell you.” Ellmers has run a TV ad that deliberately blurs the line between Muslims and terrorists. Is there any way I can avoid calling this woman other bad names?

I know a Beverly Hills woman (now living in Malibu) who has the same drawl and the same inclinations toward intellectual laziness, the same tendency to ignore facts and default to preconceptions that suit her rightist agenda. Her voice has almost the exact same pitch and timbre — it’s eerie.

The Social Network “is absolutely emblematic of its time and place. It is shrewdly perceptive about such things as class, manners, ethics, and the emptying out of self that accompanies a genius’s absorption in his work. It rushes through a coruscating series of exhilarations and desolations, triumphs and betrayals, and ends with what feels like darkness closing in on an isolated soul. And it has the hard-charging excitement of a very recent revolution, the surge and sweep of big money moving fast and chewing people up in its wake.” — from David Denby‘s lengthy but exhilarating review in the 10.4.10 New Yorker.

Roman Coppola directed this New Yorker iPad app promo featuring the whimsical Jason Schwartzman, but the attitude is pure Wes. I just went to find the app on my iPhone and it’s not there — I found only a New Yorker cartoon app and a New Yorker Festival app. Not right, not fair, not kosher, not cool. But the spot’s cool.

One of the nicest dreams ever offered by Hollywood is that death frees you. Not just from having to grapple in a tough, cruel world but, if you pass in your 80s or 90s, from a body that’s been sinking into physical decline. Death means you can be a kid again. This, at least, is a fantasy I considered when my father went a couple of years ago, and it’s what I’m thinking now that Titanic star Gloria Stuart has passed at age 100.

Jim Cameron was obviously charmed by the youth-regression idea — he used it for the finale of Titanic. The Four Poster, a 1952 romantic film with Rex Harrison and Lili Palmer, also went there. I haven’t seen it since the late ’70s, but Harrison and Palmer escape their wrinkled and withered bodies when they push off, and are free to be young lovers again.