Year: 2011

Remember the days when Cameron Crowe was the eloquent hip guy, the cool guy, the ex-Rolling Stone reporter and smoothly accomplished, musically-driven director-screenwriter who made smart, rich, soulful movies (Almost Famous, Jerry Maguire, Say Anything) that the vast majority of elite critics used to embrace with the exception of Vanilla Sky, of course, and before the absolute meltdown calamity of Elizabethtown?

I’m asking this because today’s announcement about the Thanksgiving sneak of We Bought A Zoo signifies that he’s now in league with the goody-two-shoes PG family crowd. This is a guy who used to hang out with degenerate rock bands on the Sunset Strip in the ’70s. This is a former boy genius who articulated to the world how cool it was to be “uncool,” and who reminded all journalists the value of being honest and unmerciful. What happened to his hip cred? What would Lester Bangs say?

20th Century Fox’s decision to do a nationwide commercial sneak of Cameron Crowe‘s We Bought a Zoo on 11.26 — four weeks before the Matt Damon-Scarlett Johansson-Thomas Haden Church family film opens nationwide on 12.23 — is brave and radical and unprecedented. In all sincerity, hats off.

Mat Damon, Scarlett Johansson in We Bought A Zoo.

This is being done, of course, in order to present the film directly to Joe and Jane Popcorn and in so doing bypass the big-city online smartass crowd, which, Fox apparently suspects, will probably piss on it. I for one admire Fox’s brass in doing this. They’re not hiding behind high stone walls or cowering in their boots, and are more or less following Disney’s War Horse approach — let Joe Hinterland see it concurrently with the critics and thereby remove the cynical filter of early online reviews.

“Once in a while, we’re lucky enough to have a picture to which audiences of all kinds and all ages respond so strongly, that it demands a big and unexpected event,” said Fox marketing honcho Oren Aviv. “We Bought a Zoo is that kind of picture — and Thanksgiving is a great time to share it via this special very early preview.”

Best HE Comment (from “dino velvet“): “This has the whiff of FUCK, we’re up against Sherlock 2, MI4, Dragon Tattoo, Tintin, Alvin and the Chipmunks 3 AND War Horse.”

Cameron and his tech homies need to upgrade three problematic CG shots: (1) A little CG sailboat that Titanic passes on the way out of Southampton has always looked ludicrous; (2) there’s a wide shot of Titanic pulling out to sea in which the first officer (i.e., the guy who shoots himself in Act Three) is shown walking across the deck, strolling along like a little CG playdough robot; and (3) there’s a Kate Winslet face-paste used as she and Leo are running from approaching sea water that never worked…fix it.

I have to admit this seems overly broad but spottily amusing. A Snow White movie that has nothing to do with fable and everything to do with our pornographic obsession with the appearance of youth. For me, it’s the very first Tarsem Singh film that hasn’t seemed (emphasis on the “s” word) like an outright problem.

I tried watching The Immortals last weekend, and it gave me a throbbing headache. To me Singh is a commercial slut.

Yesterday I mistakenly ignored Pete Hammond‘s Deadline story about how DreamWorks had officially submitted The Help to the HFPA/Golden Globeys as a Best Picture contender in the Comedy or Musical category. That was because Hammond’s lead — “Bridesmaids, The Artist, Paris Try To Buck Oscar’s Prejudice Against Comedy” — sounded like an evergreen about how comedies can’t get no awards respect.

Hammond’s kicker is that two days ago (i.e., Monday) “an HFPA committee rejected The Help in comedy and determined it would compete as a drama, where it will go head-to-head with Disney/DreamWorks’ other big hopeful, War Horse (assuming both get nominated, as seems likely).

“It’s not surprising,” Hammond comments. “At a recent event I attended, a lot of HFPA members were voicing concerns about having to judge The Help as a comedy. The film was indeed initially sold by Disney and DreamWorks with an emphasis on its lighter elements, and past Globe winners in the category such as Driving Miss Daisy were similar in tone.

“Still, that would have meant Viola Davis would compete in the Best Actress-Comedy or Musical category, and no matter how you slice it, her character — a civil rights-era maid — just wasn’t that funny.”

War Horse “wasn’t as manipulative as I expected,” a New York-based critic confesses. “But I was hoping for an emotional catharsis at the end and I didn’t get it. So I’m calling it good Spielberg but not great Spielberg, and very heavy on the overdone John Williams score. If the Academy really thinks this is as good as it gets — in a year that has given us The Descendants, Drive and Moneyball — that would be a profound shame.”

Disney screened War Horse for 10 or 12 journalists last week at the Animation screening room on the Burbank Disney lot. A guy who saw it and is a huge fan (“If you like animals…”) told me it was him and 10 or 11 others. It was also shown to a bunch of Manhattan guys a short while ago — EW‘s Owen Gleiberman, Rex Reed, Hoberman, etc. Not all of the NYFCC members but a lot of them.

This morning I was kicking around the reactions to War Horse and The Descendants with a friend, and he/she said that The Descendants holds up well on a second viewing “but I just don’t know if it’s a Best Picture winner. This feels like a really lackluster year for movies in general.”

To which I replied: “It’s absolutely truthful and real and so well sculpted. Those last 20 or 25 minutes or so starting with Robert Forster coming to visit his daughter in the hospital room and then Judy Greer arrives and Clooney’s goodbye and that final gaze at that virgin property in Kauai and onto the dumping of the ashes and then the three of them on the couch at the very end is perfect.

“It isn’t a BIG SHAMELESS EMOTIONAL GUT-GRAB WHAMMO movie, true, but God help us if we’re only sufficiently moved to hand out the Best Picture Oscar to films of that sort. The magical realism of Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close might take it in the end, but heaven save us from the inevitablity of poor scared horsey and all those shells bursting everywhere.”

To which he/she replied: “I don’t know. I am not giving up yet on Dragon Tattoo. It may turn out that Incredibly Loud or War Horse will seem too affected or syrupy sweet for Oscar voters and they’ll look for something exciting to vote for. I remember when it was Bugsy up against Silence of the Lambs and how everyone thought Bugsy would win because it was an ‘Oscar movie.’ But in the end, it wasn’t. Bugsy didn’t offer up a Hollywood ending, though Silence really did — the bad guy got punished.” Or eaten, rather.

“The Descendants is the closest to a winner we have right now. I don’t think The Artist will finally cut it, and not Moneyball either. It’s gonna be The Descendants vs. whatever’s coming next.”

With The Descendants holding a 91% Rotten Tomatoes rating, N.Y. Post critic Lou-Lou Lumenick (who used to be friendly but over the last year or so has gone into a Poland-styled eye-contact-avoidance and glacial-polar-bear silence whenever I come within 15 or 20 feet) has given costar Judy Greer a major endorsement.

Judy Greer in The Descendants.

“Perhaps the most delightful surprise [in The Descendants] is Judy Greer, whose best-friend parts have invariably been better than the romantic comedies in which she frequently appears. Given a rare dramatic role as Matthew Lillard‘s cheated-upon wife, she steps up to the plate and knocks it completely out of the park. Like the movie, Clooney and Payne, she will not be forgotten during awards season.”

Add this to what A.O. Scott/Manohla Dargis said in the N.Y. Times a couple of months ago and what I wrote about Greer in October and…well, add it all up.

L.A. Daily News reporter Bob Strauss has filed a story titled “This Year’s Oscar Tumult Reflects Awards Show’s Changing Culture.” It’s basically a post-Ratner, post-calamity assessment of All Things Oscar, right here and now. Oscar telecast producer Brian Grazer, AMPAS honcho Tom Sherak and Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone are quoted. And me.

“It’s really the awards season that people who love films live for,” said Jeffrey Wells, editor of the website Hollywood-Elsewhere.com. “Finally, you get to see a lot of pretty interesting films released from late September through December. This is when your movie-lover blood is up, and the Oscars have simply become the last awards show of the season, they’re the finale. It doesn’t mean that they’re the most important.

“The Oscars mean something in historical context, I respect that and that’s what drives it. But it really has come down to just being the last event in a fairly long procession that really begins with the Toronto and Telluride Film Festivals in late summer.”

Descendants star George Clooney led his fellow cast members and the entire audience at the Academy theatre in a chorus of “Happy Birthday” for Descendants costar Shailene Woodley, who turned 20 today. The film began showing around 7:55 pm; an after-party in the lobby followed.

(l. to r.) Descendants director Alexander Payne, costars Amara Miller, Nick Krause, Matthew Lillard, Judy Greer, Beau Bridges, Robert Forster, Shailene Woodley, George Clooney.

Descendants costar Nick Krause (l.) as he appears in the film, and (r.) as he appeared tonight.

Read more

Nine or ten weeks ago I wrote about meeting Descendants costar Shailene Woodley at the Sheridan bar during the Tellluride Film Festival. What I didn’t report was that 10 or 15 minutes after saying hello I accidentally whacked Woodley in the chin with the back of my left hand. I was telling a joke or delivering some impassioned opinion…whap! I went “oh, no…my God!” and profusely apologized and gave Woodley a slight hug, but I felt like an absolute fool.

Descendants costar Shailene Woodley at Four Seasons hotel — Tuesday, 11.15, 3:55 pm.

Sasha Stone was standing a couple of feet away, and right after it happened she looked at me as if I’d just run over a small kitten or vomited all over the President of the United States. Her hands were covering her mouth; her eyes were popping out of her head.

But to her immense credit, Woodley smiled and shrugged and waved it off. I don’t know if she was dealing with any pain and she was covering it up for my sake or if it really was nothing, but I was immediately impressed by her generosity and poise. Another kind of actress might have bent over and acted shocked and wounded and held her nose and gone “oh…oh, wow…Jesus!” and invite everyone’s sympathy. But Woodley, whatever physical sensations she was actually feeling, was super-cool and gracious. I decided right away that she was a Howard Hawks woman.

I brought up the Telluride chin-whap when I saw Woodley a couple of hours ago in a Four Seasons suite, and she said the exact same thing about it being nothing, barely caused her to blink and so on. Anyway, she’s got my vote. Here’s our brief discussion about this and that.

Deadline‘s Mike Fleming is reporting that the English-language version of Angelina Jolie‘s In The Land Of Blood And Honey will not be released in English-speaking territories or anywhere else for that matter. Instead FilmDistrict will release the version that Jolie shot in the language once known as Serbian-Croatian and now called Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian .(It’s also called Bosanski/Hrvatski/Srpski or BHS. It’s also known as Splotnee-Gloob-Glooby-Slobonik, if you’re from the part of the world.). The film, slated to open in NY and LA on 12.23, will obviously carry subtitles. Which means that the subtitle-averse brainiacs out there are going to take a pass…right?