Month: February 2011

4:07 pm: Tens of thousands in Cairo’s Tahrir Square are reportedly furious following Hosni Mubarak‘s refusal to step down in a speech he just gave a few minutes ago. While saying again that he wouldn’t run for president in September, Mubarak said he’ll transfer powers to Vice President Omar Suleiman, but will “continue the oath of his office” and will “continue to shoulder” his responsibilities and work for a peaceful transition of power.

Earlier: Apparently the Egyptian military has stepped in and told Hosni Mubarak, “Okay, enough is enough, pal…that’s it, you’re out.” Mubarak will give his farewell address on TV fairly soon (i.e., a couple of hours from now). What’s happened, apparently, is some kind of “soft coup.” What this means for the various aims of the Egyptian protestors and the eventual implementation of democratic reform is yet to be seen.

A N.Y. Times story is reporting that “the military’s chief of staff, Sami Anan, made an appearance in Tahrir Square, where he pledged to safeguard the people’s demands and their security. Thousands of protesters roared in approval.

“Gen. Hassan al-Roueini, military commander for the Cairo area, also appeared in Tahrir Square and told the demonstrators, ‘All your demands will be met today.’ Some in the crowd held up their hands in V-for-victory signs, shouting ‘the people want the end of the regime’ and ‘Allahu akbar’ or “God is great,” a victory cry used by secular and religious people alike.

“The moves marked a decisive turn in an uprising that has brought hundreds of thousands into the street in the most sweeping revolt in the country’s history. So far, the military has stayed largely on the sidelines, but Thursday’s statement suggested it worried that the country was sliding into chaos. The military called the communiqu√© ‘the first statement of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces,’ strongly suggestive that it had arranged to take power in Egypt.

“Wael Ghonim, a Google executive and protest organizer whose anti-torture Facebook page helped spark the movement, wrote on his Twitter feed Thursday evening: ‘Mission accomplished. Thanks to all the brave young Egyptians.'”

Last night Deadline‘s Pete Hammond reported that he’s “picking up some interesting trends” in his chats with Academy pallies. “Not just the expected strong support for The King’s Speech (it’s real), but also a surprising amount of backing for The Fighter. It has been the most mentioned movie after The Social Network and could figure significantly by drawing mostly first- and second-place votes.”

“Because you don’t know the answer to that question, I pity you.”

He also noted that while “some” of his Academy pallies “have already cast their ballots, most have not.” So if there’s any point in making a last-minute plea to any fence-sitters out there, it needs to happen right now. So here’s my last attempt to influence the final vote, however slightly or marginally.

BEST PICTURE: I realize that The King’s Speech crowd is unreachable, intractable and adamantine. All they want to do is vote for the movie they like the best. That’s all they care about. It doesn’t bother them that they’re about to contribute to a Great Historical Embarassment along the lines of the Academy’s giving the Best Picture Oscar to Driving Miss Daisy, Chicago, The Greatest Show on Earth, Dances With Wolves and Around The World in Eighty Days. They’ve apparently got some kind of weird enzyme in their system that blocks any sense of shame or hesitancy about this.

Allow me to paraphrase words spoken to a military tribunal in Paths of Glory by Kirk Douglas‘s Colonel Dax: “There are times when I’m ashamed to be a member of the industry-supported, Oscar-following community, and this is one such occasion. Ladies and gentlemen of the Academy, proclaiming to the world that you sincerely believe that The King’s Speech is the Best Picture of 2010 reveals a mediocre sensibility. It will be seen in the eyes of history as a very pedestrian call, and will haunt each of you, due respect, to the day you die. I can’t believe that the wisest and noblest impulse among movie lovers, which is the ability to recognize the difference between a very good and highly likable film vs. one of exceptional craft and dimension and incandescence, can be completely dead here. Therefore, I humbly beg you to come to your senses, forget about what you ‘like’ and think of the contempt and derision that may be your legacy for decades and centuries to come.”

BEST DIRECTOR: You know it has to be The Social Network‘s David Fincher — you know it does. Forget the DGA call. This is your deal. Good effin’ God…please.

BEST ACTOR: Colin Firth, The King’s Speech — a fine performance, a well-liked fellow, a done deal.

BEST ACTRESS: If you’re really going to give the Best Picture Oscar to The King’s Speech, you just can’t go “full fart” by giving the Best Actress Oscar to Annette Bening, as good as she is in The Kids Are All Right. You’d be creating a rep for the Oscar telecast as the Baby Boomer Movie Awards, which will obviously hasten its irrelevance, and the Movie Godz would completely freak out. You have to stay with Black Swan ‘s Natalie Portman and show respect to the millions of women who’ve been flocking to this film and who will push the total gross to over $100 million.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR: You’ve got to stick with The Fighter‘s Christian Bale. Forget about any last-minute shift to The King’s Speech‘s Geoffrey Rush, as wonderful as his voice sounds when it’s been well-amplified with sub-woofer speakers.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Whatever feels right. My favorite performance was given by Amy Adams in The Fighter because it was my favorite character, but the actress I most admire at this stage of the game and therefore must support is the great Melissa Leo. In the words of David Poland, “If you were going to vote for Melissa Leo and are considering not voting for her because of [her self-financed] ads, you are an ass.”

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY: Aaron Sorkin, The Social Network.

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY: If you give the Oscar to The King’s Speech‘s David Seidler, then okay, whatever…it took him years to get there and he did a very good job. And he may have cinched it when he answered that question I asked him during the Santa Barbara Film Festival “It Stars With The Script” panel. But it ought to go, I feel, to Inception‘s Christopher Nolan for the extraordinary vision and originaltiy.

BEST ANIMATED FILM (FEATURE): Toy Story 3.

BEST DOCUMENTARY FILM (FEATURE): Inside Job.

BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM: Biutiful.

BEST ART DIRECTION: Inception.

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY: Roger Deakins, True Grit.

BEST COSTUME DESIGN: Alice in Wonderland.

BEST FILM EDITING: The Social Network.

BEST MAKEUP: You can’t give it to The Wolfman…no! And you can’t give an Oscar to Barney’s Version for putting wigs on Paul Giamatti. Default winner: The Way Back.

BEST ORIGINAL SCORE: The Social Network.

BEST ORIGINAL SONG: “We Belong Together,” Toy Story 3.

BEST SOUND EDITING: Inception.

BEST SOUND MIXING: Inception.

BEST VISUAL EFFECTS: Inception.

If this was a film and Lindsay Lohan was playing a character like herself, listening to the warnings of a judge in court, I’d be geninely impressed. Because she’s not “acting” here, and yet her dolled-up face is a portrait of torrential contradictions. She’s nodding and going “yes, Your Honor” but it’s obvious she’s not there. She’s quietly livid because she’s finally begun to understand that her life is really and truly fucked. Lohan is a very fine actress, but in high-end Hollywood circles she’s seen as beyond repair.

I began reading Stu VanAirsdale‘s latest Oscar Index article in a state of profound excitation. An upset is coming? Really? Or may be coming at least? O joy! But my heart began to sink when I got to the third or fourth graph and I realized that VanAirsdale is just blowing confetti out of his ass and/or doing an air-guitar riff. Fake out! And back came the gloom.

John Madden‘s The Debt, an espionage thriller, will be distributed for Miramax by Focus Features and Universal Pictures International. Focus will open it in the U.S. on Wednesday, 8.31, and UPI will release the film internationally.

I could run this announcement as a boilerplate thing or fill things in with my opinion of the film. I just flipped a coin and it came up heads so here’s my 9.15.10 Toronto Film Festival review of The Debt‘s first 40 minutes:

“By the time I left, John Madden’s The Debt had administered several self-inflicted wounds. Bruises, scratches, cuts, scrapes — they kept coming non-stop. The biggest wince was realizing early on that all the actors — principally Sam Worthington, Helen Mirren, Tom Wilkinson, Ciaran Hinds, Jessica Chastain, Martin Csokas — had been urged to ‘act.’ There wasn’t a moment in the portion that I watched in which they didn’t seem to be (a) speaking lines and (b) using every thespian trick in the book to let us know how their characters are feeling. There’s nothing that kills a movie faster than this.

“I especially hate it when actors exchange ominous ‘looks’ in a scene. Looks in which actor says to another, ‘Are you sensing the same vibe I’m sensing?’ Or ‘I’m getting concerned about how things are going — how about you?’ Scenes in which an actor conveys his/her feelings about another by looking at them longingly or angrily or coldly or playfully are, for me, mute nostril agony.

“And I think it should be carved in stone that you can never have an older actor or actress be portrayed in a younger incarnation by another younger actor/actress, or vice versa. It never works, and always kills the movie in question.

“In this film — a thriller about three young Israeli Mossad agents who captured an Adolph Eichmann-like Nazi war criminal in mid 60s East Berlin, and their older selves dealing with lingering consequences — we are asked to believe the following pairs: (a) Worthington aging into Hinds — ridiculous, absurd; (b) Chastain aging into Mirren — laughable, in a pig’s eye; and (c) the 44 year-old Csokas, speaking with his usual bizarre New Zealand-by-way-of-Hungary accent, aging 40 years hence into the 61 year-old Wilkinson, his speech patterns utterly devoid of the Csokas patois.

“I felt angry and insulted. My feelings wouldn’t have been any different if Madden had come up to where I was sitting during the showing and urinated on my leg. There’s no getting over this aspect. It alone kills The Debt, although there were may other assists in this regard. I could describe four or five others but I’d just be describing variations on the same sprawling green lawn composed of identical blades of shit grass.”

For what it’s worth, I can faintly sympathize with Nikki Finke‘s reportedly extreme discomfort with having a present-day photo of her circulated by Rupert Murdoch‘s The Daily. Last week I sat down with Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neil and Paul Sheehan for an Oscar race discussion. When I saw the first portion of the video yesterday I almost fell out of my chair.

All I can think when I watch it is how I really have to (a) start up with 24 Hour Fitness again when I get back to West Hollywood and (b) drive down to Mexico for some affordable plastic surgery to fix those godawful bags under my eyes and and for my appalling turkey neck. It just sends me into a tailspin of depression. That bloated fuck in the video is not the guy I see in the bathroom mirror. Why can’t I age like Cary Grant did? Why can’t I at least look more like Todd McCarthy? I’m starting to resemble Albert Finney, for God’s sake.

I shared my sense of horror with O’Neil, and he told me to knock it off and that I look fine and that I’m paranoid, and that he should have told me sit up straight because my slumping created the illusion of a turkey neck I really don’t have, etc. It was nice of him to try and cheer me up.

I could’ve seen Peter Mullan‘s Neds at the Marrakech Film Festival last December, but a bad-wifi mood pocket interfered. Now I really want to see it due to Neds having defeated The King’s Speech to win the Best Film prize at the Evening Standard‘s British Film Awards in association with the London Film Museum.

Andrew Garfield won the org’s Best Actor award for his work in The Social Network and Never Let Me Go, and Kristin Scott Thomas won the Best Actress prize for her lead performance in Leaving.

Neds (i.e., “non-educated delinquents”) “draws on Mullan’s own experience of Glasgow’s gang culture,” says a British newspaper account. “[It has] a gritty realism which has sparked genuine clashes among rival gangs in Scottish cinema audiences.

“Presenting the award at a star-studded ceremony, actress Emily Watson — who has just made Steven Spielberg‘s War Horse with actor/director Mullan — said Neds was ‘raw and unflinching and very difficult to watch.’

“She urged Mullan, whose last film as director, The Magdalene Sisters, was released eight years ago, not to wait so long until his next.”

This happened last weekend in the state of Washington. The thief may simply be a skilled actor or perhaps even a sociopath. But he seems to me like one of the nicest felons ever.

It’s interesting that the trailer never shows us the predator’s face. Prior to the Toronto Film Festival I read an idiotic and misleading synopsis of David Schwimmer‘s film that mentioned security and a dad obsessing about how to protect his family and blah, blah, blah. Never once mentioned false cyber relationships or a violation of a young girl.

Columnist Scott Feinberg has very plainly and eloquently put the whole Melissa Leo self-financed ad brouhaha in its place, and taken a swipe at Deadline‘s Pete Hammond in the bargain. Read it and tell me Feinberg hasn’t put this issue to bed and then some. That rash-minded boob who told The Hollywood Reporter‘s Tim Appelo that “she’s lost my vote” needs to consider all the angles and pro-Leo arguments that Feinberg has voiced.

If you listened closely to what was said at tonight’s Oscar panel at the 92nd Street Y — called “Reel Predictions: Countdown to the Oscars” — you heard several subtle, polite and deftly worded putdowns of The King’s Speech. So subtle that I can’t offer (i.e., remember) a single money quote, but the sound of Tom Hooper‘s drama being needled throughout the evening for being too pat and tidy, too “safe,” and not all that interesting was music to my ears.

Quite possibly the blurriest and/or least distinct photo anyone has ever taken of N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott (l.) and Columbia film professor Annette Insdorf (r.), either together or separately.

These and other light-fingered reprimands were voiced by Columbia University Film Professor Annette Insdorf, the discussion’s moderator, and at least two of the four panelists — N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott and author/film journalist Mark Harris. Remarks by author and essayist Molly Haskell didn’t exactly flatter The King’s Speech, but they didn’t downsize it either. Or so I recall.

42West marketing director Amanda Lundberg restricted herself to explaining how award season marketing is basically a process of monetizing client assets and that line of country. My mind glazed over.

Harris briefly brought up the Melissa Leo brouhaha about her self-financed ads, but nobody else had anything to add and before you knew it Insdorf had changed the subject.

Insdorf is one of the brightest and most knowledgable film mavens on the planet, but at times she plays, I feel, the gracious diplomatic card to a fault. Butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth when it comes to voicing any sort of negative judgment, or encouraging it in others. And so it seemed to me that she too often led the discussion in directions that were more college-classroomy than critical or exploratory or…whatever, Bill Maher-ish.

If you ask me there were entirely too many clips of Oscar-nominated films shown. The evening would have been much more interesting, in fact, if Insdorf had just tossed them altogether. It’s February, after all. Haven’t we seen the same clips from the same films over and over and over?

(l. to r.) 92 Y Oscar panelists Amanda Lundberg, Mark Harris, Molly Haskell and A.O. Scott; host Annette Insdorf.

Insdorf noted that while personal loyalty is a strong and consistent behavioral trait in many of the year’s Best Picture contenders — certainly in The King’s Speech, The Fighter, The Kids Are All Right, Toy Story 3, True Grit and Winter’s Bone — it is absent from The Social Network in the behavior of Jesse Eisenberg‘s Mark Zuckerberg, and that perhaps this was a factor in the industry’s choosings. Scott and Harris quickly jumped in and said that Eisenberg’s capacity for betrayal didn’t affect their enjoyment of The Social Network one iota; indeed, it made the film all the more intriguing.

I wanted to ask my question of the moment, to wit: “Why after choosing three tough films with tough subjects for Best Picture — The Departed, No Country For Old Men, The Hurt Locker — has the Academy, like a lapsed alcoholic, gone back to favoring a very good-but-not-great, lump-in-the-throat, comfort-blanket movie like The King’s Speech?” But I candy-assed out and didn’t raise my hand. I guess I’ve lost the fire in the belly. February 27th can’t get here soon enough.

There was also a certain element of suspense in my trying to take photographs of the panelists without getting busted by the 92nd Street Y ushers. The place has a strict no-photography rule. That’s to keep flashbulbs from going off, I’ve always presumed, but how could a non-illuminated snap or two from my little 14 megapixel Canon Elph be a problem? But it was. At one point I thought I was about to get heave-ho’ed. My inability to get close enough to the stage and/or sufficiently focus, in any event, resulted in the worst shots I’ve ever captured of a public event.