Day: August 9, 2011

N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis has trashed The Help, calling it a “big ole slab of honey-glazed hokum.” And she’s pretty much dismissed every performance in the fiim except for Viola Davis‘s, which means, I suspect, that unless the entire world disagrees Davis has the heat and Octavia Spencer is out and that’s it.

(l. to r.) Emma Stone, Octavia Spencer and Viola Davis in The Help.

Same thing from New York‘s David Edelstein and Movieline’s Stephanie Zacharek: Davis is a solid standout in an overly gauzy, so-so film.

Which is too bad because I feel Spencer’s performance is also quite special. She’s broad at times but she touches bottom. If you ask me it’s her and Davis, her and Davis, her and Davis. Wait…Zacharek to the rescue. “The whole idea of The Help is that a maid isn’t just a maid, and Davis and her co-star, Octavia Spencer, breathe life into that idea,” she says. “As the quietly crusading Minny, Spencer has some of the movie’s best comic moments, though she never lets us lose sight of the justifiable anger and frustration that have come to rule her life.”

Davis “keeps her cool even as she warms your heart and does her job, often beautifully,” Dargis writes. “She doesn’t just turn Aibileen, something of a blur in the novel, into a fully dimensional character, she also helps lift up several weaker performances and invests this cautious, at times bizarrely buoyant, movie with the gravity it frequently seems to want to shrug off.”

Edelstein is saying that The Help “belongs to Viola Davis..it’s a tough, beautifully judged performance — it gives this too-soft movie a spine.”

For what it’s worth, The Help isn’t doing too badly — 74% — at Rotten Tomatoes so far.

Some of us can tell right away when we’ve seen an Oscar-calbre performance. Others can spot this and which category the actor/actress can reasonably be expected to compete in…just like that. If you had to think last year about whether Another Year‘s Lesley Manville should have run as Best Actress or Best Supporting Actress, you were already behind the eight-ball. It was dead obvious she had to run in as supporting, even with literalists like Coming Soon‘s Ed Douglas more or less saying that Manville is a lead, the film is mainly about her, her character has the strongest and saddest arc, etc.

Earlier today Cinema Blend‘s Katey Rich tweeted that The Help‘s Viola Davis is a Best Actress contender, despite it being thuddingly obvious that the only category Davis can possibly hope to compete in is Best Supporting Actress. (And who decided by the way that Davis is the big Help contender and not Octavia Spencer?) It doesn’t matter if Davis’s character carries the weight and dignity of the film on her shoulders… which she does. She can’t hope to win against Streep/Close. On top of which Davis is “due” so the obvious move is to go for Best Supporting. Case closed, end of story.

Don’t Lesley Manville her! Don’t Ed Douglas her! Give Davis a fighting chance!

I don’t know what I ought to know about music, so I’m guess I’ll be listening to this weekly podcast so I’ll have a clue the next time I’m shuffling around Hollywood Ameoba (Sunset and Cahuenga). Co-hosted by the currently untethered Jett Wells and Syracuse U. pally Nathan Matisse, now working in some fringe capacity at Wired. Did Keanu Reeves invent the term “whoa”? No, but he owns it. You can’t say it without thinking of him in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.

My whole life has been about avoiding and hating films like this, and doing everything I can to persuade others to follow suit. I’d also like to devote my next life to same, even if I come back as a horse or a rabbit or a drop of water in a fountain.

The one thing I didn’t like very much about Rise of the Planet of the Apes is Ceasar’s unnaturally deep, vaguely creepy voice. This was a concession, I felt, to a basic Hollywood notion that formidable warrior figures have to sound snarly and tough and commanding in some primal way. But if you’ve seen footage of a talking ape (as I have) you know they don’t have deep, dark voices but ones that are on the soft, high-pitched side. They sound like very old white men. So while the line “Ceasar is home” worked, the delivery didn’t.

Reports about Anne Hathaway‘s stunt double having driven her Catwoman chopper right into an IMAX camera yesterday (i.e., Monday) on the set of The Dark Knight Rises don’t say if the camera was totalled or partly damaged or what. The TMZ Video shows the bike hitting the camera at a relatively slow speed, and that some of the damage (whatever it amounts to) will be from the IMAX camera having been dropped by the cameraman.

What does an IMAX camera cost? $350,000? A half million? Even if was completely destroyed (which I doubt), keep two things in mind: (1) There’s a mention on The Dark Knight‘s iMDB page that “while filming [a] chase scene with the Joker and the SWAT vans, one of only four IMAX cameras in the world at that time was destroyed.” And (2) this pales compared to the 1958 incident on the set of Ben-Hur when a $100,000 65mm camera was totally destroyed during the filming of the chariot race. The Dollartimes inflation converter says a 1958 dollar would be worth $7.72 in 2011, so the smashed Ben-Hur camera cost filmmakers the equivalent of $772,000.

The same basic despair expressed by my recent “Hillary Should Have Won” riff was concurrently written and reported about by The Daily Beast‘s Leslie Bennetts. “During the last few days, the whispers have swelled to an angry chorus of frustration about [President] Obama’s perceived weaknesses,” she wrote. “Many Democrats are furious and heartbroken at how ineffectual he seemed in dealing with Republican opponents over the debt ceiling, and liberals are particularly incensed by what they see as his capitulation to conservatives on fundamental liberal principles.”

The American middle-classes have never and will never take to the streets to vent anger about anything, ever. Despair and quiet grumbling and prescription drugs is as far as it goes over here. But wouldn’t it feel…well, therapeutic on some level if something could happen in the streets of the U.S. of A. that would express basic fundamental rage about how the corporate elites are turning (have turned?) this country into South America, and how the radical legislative right has gone completely insane, etc.?

I know what’s going on in England right now — young have-nots are enraged at drastic cuts in social spending by David Cameron‘s conservative government. It’s obviously a vastly different picture and climate, but this country so needs to get mad, mad, Peter Finch-mad.