Month: July 2011

Let no one doubt that Hollywood Elsewhere is an influential, shaker-upper column. Not just in terms of influencing the conversation about Oscar nominees and the Best Picture race. But also in terms of getting people fired. Or one guy, at least. Which doesn’t feel very good if the facts are what they seem. Call me chagrined and somewhat appalled.

I learned a few hours ago that Ivan Infante, a screenwriter and maker of short films who’s been the most friendly and recognizable face at West L.A.’s Laser Blazer for nine years, was canned last Wednesday by owner Ron Dassa, and that one factor in his termination was a piece I ran on 7.20 — 11 days ago — about the sagging fortunes of Laser Blazer. It was called “Saddest Video Store.”

Like all retail video stores Laser Blazer has been going downhill for the last couple of years, so Dassa would have had to cut bait sooner or later. The business has been running at a loss, so Infante, who’s been the store’s product buyer for several years, figured the blade would drop by September or October. It happened sooner, he strongly suspects, for reasons of spite and revenge over the 7.20 article.

Infante says Dassa told him it was also because the article made him suddenly realize that the business was doomed, despite Dassa having assessed Laser Blazer’s financial situation on a regular basis all along. That’s bullshit, of course.

But there does come a time in every dying business when an owner realizes he needs to reduce overhead. Dassa claims he had to cut Infante because he couldn’t afford to pay his salary. Okay, I believe that part. But not 100%.

I think the severing was probably 60% or 70% about revenge for the article, and 30% or 40% about facing economic reality. Okay, 55% to 45%.

Laser Blazer owner Ron Dassa

The first email blast I got was that Infante had been whacked because of the piece. But what was in the article that was so damaging to Laser Blazer’s income or rep? “Business is down,” I wrote. Hello? Video retail is down everywhere. “The mood is down,” I wrote. As it naturally would be inside any store that feels like a storage closet due to a lack of air-conditioning. “Excess inventory is being sent back to distributors”…is that what ticked Dassa off? “And the air conditioning is on the fritz, and in fact hasn’t been repaired for several weeks,” I wrote. That was a simple climatorial fact. You can’t run a business in the summer without a.c.

So Dassa was angry at Infante for sharing honest and/or obvious information about the store’s diminishing business, and particularly for sharing the fact that Dassa had refused to fix the air-conditioning system since it stopped working last February, and he wanted to take revenge because Infante, he felt, was using HE to agitate Dassa to get the a.c. fixed. Or something like that. It sounds semi-plausible to me.

I just don’t see whacking a good employee after he’s been with you for nine years without showing a little kindness. Dassa offered no goodbye severance check, no farewell party, no thanks or hugs….just a chilly, straight-from-the-shoulder “you tried to pressure or embarass me about the air-conditioning so you’re gone…sorry.” I don’t blame Dassa or any businessman for cutting costs when he’s forced to, but I wouldn’t cut a guy loose who’d been with me for nine years without giving him a little renumeration and maybe a farewell dinner or something. End it with a little class and grace.

If anyone in any aspect of video business is reading this, understand that Infante knows film backwards and forwards and that he’s very good with people and that he’s loyal and trustworthy and considerate and well-liked, etc.

Here’s the piece that caused the ruckus.

Barack Obama has bent over backwards to Republican swine over the debt reduction fight, and right now he looks weak as hell to me. He’s the “adult in the room,” yes, but how I wish he had the courage to be more than just reasonable and mild-mannered. I think of Obama these days and right away I get irritated. He’s a moderate conservative, and I thought I was voting for a guy who would try to be much, much more.

It would be so great if a serious liberal could challenge Obama in the primaries and give him trouble and speak the truth and let some light into the room.

I’m saying this with a presumption that Obama will be re-elected in 2012. As he should be, given the alternatives. He’s a sane, perceptive and highly intelligent U.S. President. Most voters of any education or reasonably adult perceptions will almost certainly choose to keep him for a second term rather than vote in the glib and shape-shifting Mitt Romney or, God forbid, Michelle Bachmann or some other lying, slithering, corporate-kowtowing Republican serpent.

But Obama’s refusal to act like a man — to talk straight and stand his ground like a strong, scrappy liberal and call those deranged, Tea Party-fellating radicals by their right name and most of all to use the bully pulpit of his office to explain what’s really going on and what the right’s agenda is truly about — is infuriating. In his 7.31 piece called “The President Surrenders,” N.Y. Times columnist Paul Krugman noted that Republicans “will surely be emboldened by the way Mr. Obama keeps folding in the face of their threats…and that the reported terms of the deal…amount to an abject surrender on the part of the president.”

If I could clap my hands three times and have a genuinely tough liberal hombre in the Oval Office, somebody who thinks like Bill Maher and talks almost as plainly and who would all but spit in the Republicans’ eye, I would clap my hands three times.

Obama has made the term “adult in the room” seem synonymous with “the capitulator,” “the man with no balls,” “the guy who doesn’t know how to play poker like a man” and so on.

LexG drove out to the deepest West Valley the other day to confront Lars Von Trier‘s Melancholia ((Magnolia, 11.11) during its ultra-low-profile, Academy-qualifying L.A. engagement. I sat on his review for two or three days but here it finally is. He somehow manages to actually write about the film without going into his “woe is me, I needs me some white wimmin’ and if I don’t get what I need I’m gonna kill myself” routine. Very commendable.

Alexander Skarsgard, Kirsten Dunst in Melancholia.

“Functioning as almost a companion piece to his more outrageous Antichrist, Lars von Trier’s Melancholia is an emotionally audacious movie of two halves. The first depicts the encroaching mental breakdown of depressed bride Justine (Kirsten Dunst) on a notably unhappy wedding day as a distant planet called Melancholia approaches Earth. The second half skips ahead as the Melancholia continues its ominous approach we witness the doomed last days of now-thoroughly-shut-down Justine along with her more functional but also emotionally ragged sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and Claire’s husband (Kiefer Sutherland) and young son (Cameron Spurr)

“Dunst and Gainsbourg deliver distinct, shattering characterizations, and that give-and-take contrast extends to the subtly audacious narrative as well. The two-part structure allows Von Trier to revisit and mirror certain motifs, images, and themes from the internalized Justine section (depicting mental anguish) again in the more sci-fi-ish, suspenseful and visual Claire segment, where the end of the world has become an externalized physical threat.

“It’s an auteurist triumph, bringing full circle the more pulpish elements of Von Trier’s earlier work with the emotional rawness of Breaking the Waves with just a little of the formal experimentation of his dogme years, but now with the impeccable visual panache of Antichrist.

“Dunst is the real deal here, functioning as LVT’s muse in a story that’s in a way almost first and foremost about the director’s own notorious mindset and provocations; Dunst has gone to the dark side before, most impressively in John Stockwell‘s crazy/beautiful, but this is a whole ‘nother level — an indelible portrait of complete dejection that’s easily the intensity-equal of Natalie Portman in Black Swan.

“Dunst is so good, in fact, it’s almost getting lost in the shuffle how raw Charlotte Gainsbourg is — the two performances, again, complement each other perfectly.

“Supporting cast is a veritable if unsurprising roll call of Von Trier-worthy maniacs, from Udo Kier to Charlotte Rampling to Jesper Christensen to John Hurt to the father-and-son Skarsgaards (Stellan and Alexander), but definitely worth noting is how easily Sutherland, perhaps taking a cue from his awesome old man’s roving-artist ’70s work, makes the transition to European Art Cinema in a decidedly un-Jack Bauer role.

“I’m not entirely sure where Brady Corbet managed to earn his ‘work with insane provocative overseas auteurs club’ card after Funny Games and this, but he pops up here doing his Rich Man‘s Kyle Gallner routine in the first half, wherein the cynical familial, corporate, and romantic relationships represent either a reason for, or a wonderfully indulgent justification of, Justine/Von Trier’s nihilistic despair.

“Others have cited a certain shared series of cinematic and thematic interest that recur between Melancholia, Another Earth and Tree of Life, but for my money this is the strongest of the bunch, the one that best melds the otherworldly implications of a giant perilous universe with the interpersonal breakdowns of its characters. But when they write the definitive film-summation book on 2011, lumping these three (and probable others to come) together might not be a bad place to start, this year almost starting to look like a more cosmic extension of last year’s dark ruminations on mortality (Enter the Void, Inception, Black Swan, Hereafter, etc etc.)

“In a nutshell: highly recommended.”

About 13 months ago I posted an observation about a tendency of younger women to project thin little pipsqueak voices and use mallspeak accents and phrasings in order to sound average and blend into the crowd. I flashed back to this a few nights ago as I listened to Cowboys & Aliens star Olivia Wilde talk to Jimmy Kimmel. She’s beautiful but her voice has no particular flavor and distinction.

Wilde is supposed to be a star in the making but she sounds like a checkout girl. Her voice is almost stunning in its flatness, and it makes her sound glib and unexceptional. She opens her mouth and…that’s it? A woman with a face as exquisite as Wilde’s ought to have some kind of soulful, cultured, knowing, inner-oomph voice to go with it…but no.

I had the same reaction to Blake Lively‘s voice when she visited Late Night with David Letterman to plug The Town. This? She sounds like a sixteen year-old from a suburb of Akron or Denver or Orlando, or…I don’t know, somebody who works for a downtown Manhattan accounting firm. She doesn’t sound like a tenacious lady who’s been around and taken legendary iPhone pics of herself in the bathroom and portrayed a frayed floozy in The Town and who will soon be swirling around Europe with Leonardo DiCaprio.

Who has a voice that matters? One with a little sass and intrigue and conviction, that cracks at times or has a breathy quality? Emma Stone, for sure. Elle Fanning has a voice with faint undercurrents of hurt and need. Amy Adams has a voice in The Fighter that suffers no fools. Katie Holmes‘ voice has a genuine something-or-other…a “been-around and known some disappointment” quality. Kristen Stewart sounds like she’s actually lived a life and has some convictions about this and that. Cameron Diaz sounds like a girly-girl, but her voice has a playful spirited quality and she knows how to sound hurt and nihilistic. Debra Winger has a real voice. Sassy Fran Drescher obviously had a voice in the ’90s. Michele Rodriguez has a voice right now.

Here’s that June 2010 piece I mentioned, called “Chirpy Minnie Mouse.”

“It hit me a day or two ago that an awful lot of women these days — actresses and broadcasters to some extent, but mainly average, non-famous women in the under-30 range (including movie publicists) — speak with thin little pipsqueak voices. Couple this with a general tendency to use mallspeak accents and phrasings (which 85% to 90% of under-30 women have done in order to sound like everyone else) and it almost seems as if inane peep-peep voices have become a kind of generational signature.

“Go to any bar and restaurant and walk around and listen to women’s voices…’peepity-peep-peep’ and ‘squeakity-squeak-squeak,’ over and over and over.

“For whatever reason these women have decided that sultry, smoky, husky voices — the kind that Lauren Bacall and Glenda Jackson and Anne Bancroft and Patricia Neal used to play like soulful wind instruments — aren’t as appealing or have perhaps been categorized as unattractive, and that they need to project more of an amiable ‘oop-poop-pee-doop’ Betty Boop thing.

“I’m obviously not reporting scientific data, but it does seem as if an awful lot of Minnie Mouse voices are being feigned or emphasized these days, and that the rich, intriguing tonalities found in the wonderfully adult voices of Meryl Streep or Ann Sheridan in the 1940s, or Jessica Lange or Katherine Hepburn or Greer Garson or Faye Dunaway or Jodie Foster aren’t heard as much.

“You can’t be one of those super-cool women who wear short skirts and long jackets and speak with a peep-peep voice. You have to sound like Anouk Aimee or Simone Signoret or Joan Crawford or Jane Russell….that line of country.

“I really do think it’s affected to some extent. Chosen. Performed. Almost anyone can go deeper or higher if they want.

“There’s that old story about director Howard Hawks telling a young Lauren Bacall (i.e., before he cast her in To Have and Have Not) that it’s sexier to speak in a lower register, and that she should give it a shot. Bacall took Hawks’ advice and trained herself to speak with a deeper voice. It was that simple.

“So if Bacall can do this, anyone can in either direction. And I think — suspect — that a lot of younger women have persuaded themselves, perhaps not consciously, that squeaky-peepy works best in today’s environment. Mistake.”

The bloggerati have been salivating all day over the apparently distinct possibility that the under-performing, flopping-around-like-a-flounder-on-the-sand Cowboys & Aliens will come in second for the weekend behind the horribly vile, reprehensible, apocalypse-summoning Smurfs. I’ve been too settled and soothed in Santa Barbara to care, but I know that David Poland‘s Cowboys & Aliens pan is good stuff.

Sunday morning update: Variety‘s Andrew Stewart is reporting that reps for Smurfs and Cowboys & Aliens are both estimating $36.2 million for the weekend, “leaving no room for a clear winner until [actuals] are released on Monday.”

Earlier: “According to Universal’s North American box office stats, Cowboys & Aliens opened only #2 Friday with $12.994 million, beaten by the $13.29 million debut of Sony Pictures’ The Smurfs,” Nikki Finke reported about five hours ago. “But Universal is still claiming its Western/scifi mashup should come in #1 for the weekend at $36.78 million, behind the little blue guys toon’s $36.02 million. Or is that only wishful thinking at this point?

“Smurfs is really overperforming while Cowboys & Aliens is way behind expectations to the point of tanking.”

Either somebody at Movie City News didn’t get the memo, or David Poland decided to ease up on Islamic Jihad just this once. For the first time in many years Movie City News today linked to a story of mine on Hollywood Elsewhere. It’s been a longstanding policy of Poland’s to ferociously ignore anything I write. My policy, on the other hand, has always been to link to a Poland riff or post an excerpt whenever he writes something cool or nervy (like when he zings Nikki Finke).

I’m a fair-minded Anglo-Saxon Protestant — I don’t do Jihads. I’m presuming I’ll be back on the MCN Shit List after this, but it was nice to see the link.

I drove up to Santa Barbara this morning to attend a screening of Mike Cahill and Brit Marling‘s Another Earth, which opened on 7.22 to mostly positive reviews. I wrote on 7.19 that while “it’s partly a sci-fi fantasy about the approach of a second earth, it’s mainly about loss and recovery and redemption” and as such is one of the year’s most intriguing indies, particularly for its emotional, skillfully under-written quality.

At today’s lawn luncheon following 11 am Santa Barbara screening of Another Earth — (l. to r.) costar William Mapother, star-cowriter-co-producer Brit Marling, Santa Barbara Film Festival honcho Roger Durling, director-cowriter Mike Cahill.

The first thing I did when I slipped into the darkened Riviera Theatre during the 11 am showing was to take a nap. The floor was so hard it almost hurt to lie on my back but I went right out. I woke up for the q & a. Costar William Mapother, star-cowriter-coproducer Brit Marling and director-cowriter Mike Cahill kicked it around with Santa Barbara Film Festival director Roger Durling.

Then everyone went over to a nice outdoor garden party at a beautiful classic Spanish home, hosted by owners Marilyn Jorgenson and Errol Jahnke. Lots of nice food and not too many guests, and everyone in a nice mild mood. The back yard had fenced-in chickens and a dog who liked playing tug-of-war with a stick.

The sun was so hot that after an hour or so I began to slowly melt like the Wicked Witch of the West…”destroying my beautiful wickedness!” Plus I was wearing mostly black just like Margaret Hamilton in The Wizard of Oz so it all fit together. You don’t ever want to be standing in the hot sun with a slight wine buzz-on. It doesn’t feel right.

I spoke to Marling for a few minutes. I asked how many times she’d done the same dog-and-pony show with Cahill and Mapother since the Sundance debut six months ago. I wasn’t trying to trip her up by asking how bored she was getting from doing interviews, but simply how many times. Her answer — i.e., that she loves doing them and that today’s event was really special — told me she’s very political. Then she let her guard down and admitted there’s only one more to go…fine.

We spoke briefly about Nick Jarecki‘s Arbitrage, a financial chicanery drama in which she plays Richard Gere‘s daughter along with costars Eva Green and Susan Sarandon. It’s now being edited with a possibility of screening at Sundance 2012, Jarecki told me.

It’s very curious that Another Earth and Lars von Trier‘s Melancholia are so similar — both being about approaching planets getting closer and closer, but really about people with significant emotional and spiritual issues. And that these films were first seen at 2011 film festivals only four months apart. Cahill, Marling and Mapother all said they haven’t seen the Von Trier.

(l. to r.) Cahill, Marling and Durling during q & a at Riviera Theatre, which followed 11 am screening.

It’s conceivable that Tomas Alfredson‘s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (Focus Features, 11.18) might play the New York Film Festival following its Venice Film Festival debut, but it definitely won’t play the Toronto Film Festival. Deadline‘s Pete Hammond reminded me this morning that he reported this four days ago (on 7.26) in his piece about Oscar-season shufflings. My bad — I focused that day only on Paramount’s decision not to put Jason Reitman‘s Young Adult into any of the fall festivals.

On the other hand Hammond buried his revelation about Tinker, Tailor in the fourth paragraph of his story, so I’m not entirely out to lunch.

I asked yesterday if Tinker Tailor might eventually be confirmed as a Toronto Film Festival attraction or perhaps as a New York Film Festival closing-nighter or centerpiece. It would make sense to screen it at one of these two festivals following its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival, or concurrently with Venice at Telluride.

I asked the Focus Features gang and the N.Y. Film Festival crew for help, and they both stonewalled me. Even when I asked them to at least confirm yea or nay about Toronto being a no-go…silence. Focus played hide-the-ball last year with Sofia Coppola ‘s Somewhere, showing it at Venice but otherwise dodging the fall festivals. Will they repeat this strategy for Tinker Tailor? Possibly, but I wouldn’t be surprised if a NYFF deal is announced soon.

I wonder what ESPN’s Bill Simmons thinks about Young Adult side-stepping the festival circuit. On 7.6 he said during an ESPN B.S. report with Chris Connelly that he’d caught a screening of Adult and felt it was “tremendous.” I need to write or call him.

Last night Politikien‘s Nils Thoren ran comments from Danish director Lars Von Trier about reports that the now-shuttered Facebook page belonging to Anders Behring Breivik, the 32 year-old rightwing terrorist responsible for the recent Oslo bombing and the 69 murders on the Norweigan island of Utoya, listed Von Trier’s Dogville (’03) as Breivik’s third-favorite film.

(l.) Melancholia and Dogville director Lars von Trier; (r.) Danish People’s Party figurehead Pia Merete Kjaersgaard.

Von Trier is of course no more responsible for Breivik’s carnage than Catcher in the Rye author J.D. Salinger was responsible for Mark David Chapman‘s 1980 killing of John Lennon. And yet Breivik’s stated admiration of Dogville does suggest that Von Trier’s 2003 drama may have influenced him on some level.

Breivik’s Facebook page listed Dogville as his third favorite film right behind Gladiator and 300, and “even von Trier could easily discern the similarities between the carnage at Utoya and the film’s ending,” Thoren writes.

Dogville, one of Von Trier’s best, ends with Nicole Kidman‘s Grace, who’s been exploited and sexually abused by Dogville’s citizenry, ordering the pistols who work for her gangster dad (James Caan) to mow them all down with machine-gun fire.

“I feel badly about thinking that Dogville, which in my eyes is one of my most successful films, should have been a kind of script for him,” Von Trier said. “It’s horrific.

“My intention with Dogville was totally opposite. Namely, to ask whether we can accept a protagonist who takes revenge on the entire village. And here I take the absolute distance from revenge. It’s a way to nuance the protagonist and our feelings and perhaps even uncover it, so it just is not black and white ‘.

And yet Thoren reports that “even Trier believes that Dogville‘s final scene brings very unpleasant memories of Utoya.”

“And you can ask if I regret making the film,” Von Trier is quoted as saying. “And yes, if it was an inspiration, I’m sorry that I made it. But of course I have educational purposes with my films, even if I hesitate to admit it, and my views are the complete opposite of Breivik and his deeds.”

Von Trier said he also believes that all of Denmark needs to look inward after the tragedy in Norway.

“The other day asked a Belgian journalist Von Trier, a Dane, how he feels about the reported fact that Breivik’s manifesto repeatedly emphasizes Denmark as the only decent country because of the Danish policy towards Muslims,” Thoren writes.

“‘It makes me really hurt, but I understand it well,’ Von Trier replied. ‘We might have saved the children and young people on the island [if we had] done much more with Danish People’s Party. For it is the change in attitude which they have provoked, and as we just have let happen, we are paying the price for now.’

“I am no expert in politics, but as I see it, there has for years been a strong Danish tradition of fears of Islam. They have committed atrocious legislative efforts to annoy the minority here and pursue a policy that is well in line with what Breivik preaches. The fhostility to foreigners then spreads to the entire Nordic region and is also present in the minds of Breivik and gives him perhaps the excuse he needs. Therefore I can not see anything other than that we as a nation bears a responsibility for the tragedy in Norway.”

Is there a link between saying what one thinks about immigration and then resorting to violence?

“Of course. And everyone must say what they want. Freedom of speech is the whole cornerstone of our democracy. But it does not exempt [one] from liability. And we have sent the signal that it’s okay to spread hatred against Muslims. Especially after the Danish Peoples Party has been the government’s support party. Because when you lean up against the party and say: Okay, the positions we take in the bargain. So you legitimize them. ”

“I think there is a direct line from Pia Kjaergaard‘s humanity and to Utoya. One must demand that Kjaersgaard steps forward and takes her share of responsibility for what has happened in Norway. For it is a change of attitude, as she and her party have successfully represented

Pia Merete Kjaersgaard “is a co-founder and current leader of the Danish People’s Party, a nativist, national conservative political party in Denmark,” says her Wiki page. “She has become one of the best known politicians in Denmark during recent years, partly for her stance against multiculturalism, unwavering anti-immigration stance and partly for her parliamentary support for the center-right governments of Anders Fogh Rasmussen and Lars Lokke Rasmussen since 2001.”

In Contention‘s Guy Lodge believes right now that The Artist, The Descendants, The Ides of March, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, The Tree of Life and War Horse are the most likely 2011 Best Picture nominees. Yes, six.

Nobody knows anything but I say “no” to The Artist (too French) and The Tree of Life (too Malicky). My Best Picture guesstimates: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (highly affecting emotional current), The Descendants (quality death-in-a-family film), The Iron Lady (obligatory British-ruling-class entry), Moneyball (professional baseball meets Social Network-like approach), War Horse (poor sad traumatized horse), We Bought A Zoo (another family film) and possibly The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo…depending how extreme Fincher goes and what kind of a hit it becomes. Yes, seven nominations. Or six.

Having seen Farragut North, I know it’s possible that The Ides of March might qualify, but it’s mainly about a younger opportunist getting punished for being disloyal and I’m not sure how much that will resonate with Academy blue-hairs. I suspect that Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is going to register as too cerebral and subdued and intellectually labrynthian to penetrate as a Best Picture pick. Maybe. I don’t know anything, but I know the Le Carre book and the British miniseries.

“The facts of the crisis over the debt ceiling aren’t complicated,” writes N.Y. Times columnist Paul Krugman in a 7.28 posting. “Republicans have, in effect, taken America hostage, threatening to undermine the economy and disrupt the essential business of government unless they get policy concessions they would never have been able to enact through legislation.

“And Democrats — who would have been justified in rejecting this extortion altogether — have, in fact, gone a long way toward meeting those Republican demands.

“As I said, it’s not complicated. Yet many people in the news media apparently can’t bring themselves to acknowledge this simple reality. News reports portray the parties as equally intransigent; pundits fantasize about some kind of ‘centrist’ uprising, as if the problem was too much partisanship on both sides.

“Some of us have long complained about the cult of ‘balance,’ the insistence on portraying both parties as equally wrong and equally at fault on any issue, never mind the facts. I joked long ago that if one party declared that the earth was flat, the headlines would read ‘Views Differ on Shape of Planet.’

“But would that cult still rule in a situation as stark as the one we now face, in which one party is clearly engaged in blackmail and the other is dickering over the size of the ransom?

“The answer, it turns out, is yes. And this is no laughing matter: The cult of balance has played an important role in bringing us to the edge of disaster. For when reporting on political disputes always implies that both sides are to blame, there is no penalty for extremism. Voters won’t punish you for outrageous behavior if all they ever hear is that both sides are at fault.”