My sincere (if unsurprised) congrats to Social Network screenwriter Aaron Sorkin for his taking the WGA Award earlier this evening for Best Adapted Screenplay, and also to Inception’s Chris Nolan for winning the Best Original Screenplay WGA trophy — very much deserved. And now for six hours of cramped, sleepless hell on a Delta red-eye to JFK, leaving in 23 minutes.
The Santa Barbara Film Festival Director’s panel concluded about four hours ago. I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to post but here it is. Peter Bart moderated a discussion between Black Swan‘s Darren Aronofsky, Inside Job‘s Charles Ferguson, The King’s Speech‘s Tom Hooper, Toy Story 3‘s Lee Unkrich, The Fighter‘s David O. Russell and Winter’s Bone‘s Debra Granik.
Aronofsky took the prize, if you ask me. Funny, fast on his feet, honest, straight dealer. Hooper and Russell tied for second place. Unkrich, Granik and Ferguson tied for third.
Bart’s two best lines: (a) “Last year we had [the formerly involved] Kathryn Bigelow and Jim Cameron. Have any of you ever hooked up with another director?,” and (b) “He who defers rarely sees.”
I was jerked awake when Russell used the term “movie gods,” although he didn’t mean it in an HE way. He was referring to the gods who decide which films will be green-lighted and which won’t be. But it was flattering nonetheless to think that the term is catching on to some degree.
Aronofsky #1: “Actors are always in control. At is most intense movie acting is a 30-second burst of emotion and then we call cut. So I never pushed Natalie [Portman] too close to the edge. Working with Mickey Rourke, who doesn’t respect directors or scripts or other facets of the filmmaking process, definitely changed the way I work.”
Aronofsky #2: “An elderly important Italian dignitary came into the theatre before Black Swan was about to screen at the Venice Film Festival, and he got a long standing ovation. And at the end of it I leaned over and said to him, ‘I’m really, really sorry for what’s about to happen.”
Aronofsky #3: ” I could play Russell or Hooper. We could all say each other’s lines. But on February 28th, we’re all going to get back to work.”
Entertainment Weekly‘s Dave Karger handled things quite nicely as the moderator of the Virtuosos Award ceremony at the Lobero last (i.e., Friday) night. The honorees were Another Year‘s Lesley Manville (funnier and looser than she was before the Oscar nominations), Winter’s Bone‘s John Hawkes (relaxed, funny, self-deprecating), Animal Kingdom‘s Jacki Weaver and True Grit‘s Hailee Steinfeld (much taller than she seems in the film).
This afternoon’s tweet relates to yesterday’s Anne Thompson/Indiewire story about Queen Elizabeth II saying flattering things about The King’s Speech.
Toronto Star critic Peter Howell has put on his straw hat and white bucks and red-and-white sport jacket and done the old soft-shoe about how the Gurus of Gold don’t dictate or act as tastemakers — “we just predict.” That’s their claim, yes, and to some extent it’s true.
But the Gurus know full well (and David Poland most of all) that when they vote for a certain film as the likeliest Best Picture nominee or winner it becomes a beacon for the Zeligs out there, for all the Academy members who aren’t sure where to turn and are basically just looking for warmth and assurance and the safety of a crowd.
And that is what people all over the globe want more than anything else — not to stand tall and alone and be “right” (whatever that means), but to know the balm of acceptance and companionship and bon ami and the embrace of brothers and sisters.
The urge to blend in and belong is a very strong one. It exists, I would imagine, in about 80% or 90% of the human population. The rebel, iconoclast and independent thinker club (to which I belong) constitutes, at best, 10% of humanity, and perhaps even less. And the Gurus know this, and yet they pretend that they’re just idly sitting on the sidelines, watching the action in the center arena like hockey fans and calling it as best as they can, and they are so full of shit I can barely stand it. They are kingmakers and they know it.
Howell puts it thusly: “A fellow [Sundance] traveller looks up at me from beneath his snow-fringed toque and exclaims, ‘Hey! Aren’t you one of those Gurus o’ Gold?’
“‘I am indeed,’ I replied, proud at my first street recognition as a Guru, but also a little wary. I noticed with relief that he had no shotgun. Utah is part of the Wild West, after all.
“‘Why are you guys bailing on The Social Network?’ my transit inquisitor continued. ‘Why are you following the other sheep and promoting The King’s Speech?’
“I sighed deeply and began the critic’s speech I’ve given many times on this topic. I love The Social Network, but it’s my sworn duty as a Guru o’ Gold to predict what the nearly 6,000 members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences are likely to choose for Best Picture and other Oscars,” and that’s all.
That’s the ostensible duty, all right, but the final effect is something else entirely.
I’m asking myself if I should book a flight to Moscow to catch the 3.31 theatrical opening of Bruce Robinson‘s The Rum Diary. This isn’t the loneliest, saddest and most unloved Johnny Depp film of all time (that would be 1997’s The Brave), but it’s certainly the loneliest of this century. The $65 million film (according to IMDB Pro) is also slated to open in Sweden on 9.23.11.
Posters copied from a UK site called theshiznit. The font on the Black Swan re-do is too small; ditto The Kids Are All Right.
In the view of Deadline‘s Pete Hammond, a personally-funded FYC Oscar ad, like the one Melissa Leo recently ran for a few days, can be a politically risky thing.
To me, Hammond seemed to be suggesting that the only politically acceptable form of award-season advertising is the kind created and funded by distributors and their highly paid marketing gurus. Heaven forbid that someone like Leo, the Fighter costar who’s a near lock to win the Best Supporting Actress Oscar, might want to elbow her way past the refusal of magazines to put over-45 ladies on their covers by taking some glammy shots of herself and booking a few website ads to show them off.
The ads half-alluded to the fact that Leo is superb in The Fighter, of course, but also to the fact that she’s highly spirited and attractive.
Ads are always judged in terms of style, class and tone, and Leo’s now-disappeared ads, I feel, got it right. They were fine. She looked great. No harm done. We’ve all been so trained to squint our eyes and arch our backs whenever an individual takes out an ad of any kind. Only corporations and major companies can do this!
Hammond’s view is primarily due to faint but lingering memories of the notoriously self-generated Chill Wills Alamo ad campaign of 1960, which sought to generate support for Wills’ Best Supporting Actor-nominated performance. It was widely seen as an embarassment, and it failed to boot — Peter Ustinov won for his performance as Lentulus Batiatus in Spartacus.
Leo told Hammond that she “did hear a lot of very positive comments, particularly from women of a certain age who happen to act for a living and happen to understand full well the great dilemma and mystery of getting a cover of a magazine. I also heard there were negative comments, but no one said them to my face, sadly. I like to hear what people think. I could explain myself.”
Here’s an engaging At The Movies segment in which mirrorfilm.org’s Kartina Richardson delivers her Four Faces of Nina explanation of Darren Aronofsky‘s Black Swan, and about how the film is essentially about opposing identities at war.
Kartina Richardson of mirror.org
The four psychological components of Natalie Portman‘s ballet dancer, Richardson explains, are the imp, the baby, the housekeeper and the center. But the main-event battle is between the imp, the nihilist spreader of chaos, and the fretting housekeeper. The center laments as the imp “sabotages,” the baby wails and the housekeeper “cleans up the mess.” Meanwhile “the bathroom is Nina’s only escape from public scrutiny,” Richardson notes.
Here is Richardson’s prose rundown of same.
The At The Movies video is also worth watching if you haven’t caught co-host Iggy Vishnevetsky, the brilliant Russian wunderkind critic, in action. He has a smooth voice and manner, but has been instructed to read copy and behave exactly like all movie talk co-hosts have read and behaved since the beginning of time, and so he comes off as having been constrained and almost half-neutered.
When Iggy informs co-host Christy Lemire that he doesn’t agree with her praise of Black Swan, you can feel the both of them furiously projecting “calm” and “gracious” and mellow-yellow glide patterns. I’m sorry, Roger, but as bright and stimulating as this show has been so far Iggy and Christy are, in a McLuhanesque sense, just two more Stepford co-hosts.
I wrote a year or two ago that the only way to break through this robot bind (and overcome the demands of those experienced TV producers who always make everyone sound and behave exactly the same) is to introduce drinks on the set. Glasses of wine or light beer, I mean — no hard stuff. And allow/encourage Iggy and Christy to imbibe and get gently bombed during taping. And show the glasses of cheer as they speak. Not to make them slurry or sloppy or rude but irreverent and happy and a little more impulsive.
It’s very nice that Queen Elizabeth has seen and approved of The King’s Speech , as Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson reports. The 84 year-old monarch called it “moving and enjoyable” and “was clearly amused by some of the lighter moments.” Well, what’s she gonna say? She’s invested every which way. Thompson ends by saying “that’s one more for team King’s Speech…your move, Social Network.”
I bought this All About Eve Bluray at Laser Blazer about two hours ago. And as I was leaving I remembered, of course, that it won the Best Picture Oscar for 1950. And this led me to wonder what today’s cuddly-bear Academy voters would think of this Joseph L. Mankiewicz classic if they were transported back 60 years.
Cuddly-bear voters are the ones who are drawn to movies that provide the kind of warm, reassuring comfort-blanket emotions that are found in The King’s Speech and who therefore aren’t voting for The Social Network because it’s too chilly and arcane and there’s no one likable to root for.
So if the Cuddlies were to be transported one by one in Rod Taylor‘s time machine back to February 4, 1951, their general sentiments about All About Eve would probably go as follows:
“It’s a very good film, but I just didn’t care about anyone, and it’s all happening within this narrow little world of theatre people. Yeah, great dialogue, but witty banter only goes so far. Where’s the heart? And nobody seems to learn anything. Everyone in this film except for Thelma Ritter, Celeste Holm and Gary Merrill is unstable or scheming or generally unpleasant. Bette Davis is a bitter insecure meltdown case and screeching all the time, Anne Baxter is positively reptilian and George Sanders is one of those poison-pen critics with ice water in his veins. And what happens at the end? Okay, just desserts — Baxter is going to get hers. But emotionally I just felt…I don’t know. It didn’t reach me.
“I’m not putting All About Eve down, mind. It’s fine, it’s a good film, very well directed. But I like Father of the Bride better. I can’t help it but I love it. You don’t watch that film — you feel it. Poor, stressed out, economically suffering Spencer Tracy! Losing his daughter and also gaining a son, and going through hell the whole time. You just feel for him.”
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