Month: February 2012

A highly dubious source confided this morning that a secret high-level meeting of Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences bigwigs happened two nights ago at Kate Mantilini. I wasn’t able to verify if Academy president Tom Sherak, COO Ric Robertson, and CEO Dawn Hudson actually met at 10:30 pm in a rear booth. I’ve only been told that a conversation might have unfolded as follows:

Sherak: I know it’s late, but thanks for coming, guys. (To waiter) I’ll have a Chardonnay and a bowl of whatever the soup is. What’s the special?

Waiter: Split pea with ham chunks.

Sherak: Uggh! I hate split pea.

Waiter: And also tomato basil, chicken noodle and gazpacho.

Robertson: That sounds good.

Sherak: Tomato. I’ll have the tomato.

Hudson: And I’ll just have a Merlot, thanks. So what’s up, Tom?

Sherak: Well, first of all, this meeting isn’t happening because we really can’t discuss what I’m about to bring up. But I feel we need to at least broach the subject.

Hudson: Is this about the 2013 telecast date?

Sherak: That’s for later. I’m talking about the Academy’s reputation in general, and Jean Dujardin‘s Best Actor chances in particular. Dujardin’s SAG award win last Sunday means he’s got a pretty good shot at winning the Best Actor Oscar, and that means The Artist will have a three-Oscar sweep — Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor.

Robertson: That’s bad?

Hudson: I love The Artist. It’s perfect.

Sherak: Me too! I’m easy. It’s fine. But it’s a very soft movie, and this looks to me like another Oscar watershed year — a year in which the honorable Academy membership will affirm its shallowness like they did when they gave the Best Picture Oscar to Driving Miss Daisy in ’89 and The Greatest Show on Earth in ’52 and Around the Wrold in Eighty Days in ’56. Its one of “those years” that will leave a lasting mark, and I’m thinking that’s not good at this stage of the game. Younger audiences see the Academy as a bunch of dilletantes with laughably mediocre taste.

Robertson: People have been taking shots at the Oscars for years. Goes with the territory.

Sherak: Yeah, but it’s worse now. We’re under siege. We have to protect the brand and stand for something besides flabby emotional consensus choices among the Boomer and older GenX lightweights. I’m thinking 10 or 20 years down the road. It’s a matter of honor, of values and of organizational integrity. The Artist is nice movie, but this is embarassing.

Robertson: What can we do? You can’t mandate good taste.

Hudson: I love The Artist! And the dog…what’s his name? Poochie?

Robertson: Uggie.

Hudson: Huggie?

Robertson: Uggie, like the boots. (to Sherak) What are you thinking?

Sherak: What I’m thinking about is something I haven’t been thinking about, if you catch my drift. I know there’s no stopping The Artist or Michel Azzanavasheetos.

Hudson: Vasheetos?

Robertson: Pete Hammond says it rhymes with Dr. Seuss, but Sid Vicious is the safest way to go.

Sherak: So there’s no stopping Sid Vicious. But I’m not comfortable with Dujardin winning Best Actor. He just grins and tap dances and mugs and doesn’t shave in Act Three when his career goes south. We’re talking privately here, and I’m telling you there’s no honor in Dujardin winning. If it happens it’ll be seen as a concession to all the things I’m worried about…all the things that people seem to despise the Academy for. George Clooney or Brad Pitt or Gary Oldman winning, fine. I like Oldman, if you wanna know. Pitt is a happy man, and George is loved by everyone. He’ll be nominated again in a year or two.

Hudson: I love Jean’s moustache. And he’s so charming in person!

Robertson: What can we do about it, Tom?

Sherak: Nothing. Obviously. I guess I’m just venting. I want somebody else to win Best Actor and I wish I could do something to help bring that about.

Hudson: We’ll be fine. It’s going to be a great show.

Sherak: The show will be fine. I’m not talking about the show. I’m thinking about our brand, about our future.

Robertson: I’m afraid we can only do, absurdly, what has been given to us to do. Right to the end.

Explanation & apology: I don’t know what happened but somehow an earlier version of this post disappeared. I managed to find the coded version but the comments were lost.

Deadline is reporting that Zalman King, director of high-toned erotic features like Two Moon Junction, Wild Orchid and Red Shoe Diaries and producer/co-writer of Adrian Lyne‘s 9 1/2 Weeks, died today at age 69 from cancer. King and wife Patricia Louisianna Knop co-wrote 9 1/2 Weeks (’86), which co-starred Mickey Rourke and Kim Basinger, and Wild Orchid (’89), starring Rourke and Jacqueline Bisset plus several episodes of Red Shoe Diaries, the Showtime series.

Let no one accuse Hollywood Elsewhere of not standing by its opinions despite financial consequences. My anti-Artist jihad has apparently resulted in a lack of Phase Two ads from the Weinstein guys. Many thousands down the drain. But it’s fair game and totally their call. I hear what they’re saying, and no worries. For what it’s worth an ad on HE doesn’t mean I follow suit with obsequious endorsement. It just means that the Oscar conversation is happening on this site and…you know, whatever, have at it. I know that Artist ads are currently on The Wrap, Deadline, Hitfix and L.A. Times. C’est la guerre.

My first significant activity after returning to Santa Barbara yesterday was a second viewing of Amy Berg‘s West of Memphis, a tightly compelling and superbly woven doc about the nearly-20-year saga of the West Memphis 3. (My first was in Park City a week and a half ago.) It played at the Lobero theatre, and was followed by a q & a with Berg and John Byers, stepfather of one of the three murder victims.

West of Memphis participant John Byers, director Amy Berg during last night’s post-screening q & a at Santa Barbara’s Lobero theatre.

Byers sparked a Twitter kerfuffle last night when he slammed Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky‘s three documentaries about the West Memphis 3 case (Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills, Paradise Lost 2: Revelations and Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory), obviously because he resents the dredging up of circumstantial evidence in the mid ’90s that indicated to police that he was a suspect in the deaths of the three boys. He said last night that the docs were compromised because several portions were “staged.”

“Do you think they’ll ever make a movie about a big-market baseball team, and they have the money, and they still suck?” Last night Jon Stewart asked Brad Pitt why Oscar movies don’t go negative on other movies like Presidential candidates do in political campaigns. Uhm, well…in my own modest and personal way I’ve been engaged in surgical negative Oscar campaigning for years now. No biggie, just saying.

I dropped by my place during my visit to Los Angeles and picked up a just-arrived Bluray of Billy Wilder‘s The Apartment, which I’d ordered via Canadian Amazon. Joseph LaShelle‘s black-and-white Scope images are radiant and shaded and really beautiful this time out. I felt as if I was truly seeing them for the first time. They’re clean and film-like and yet not, to my eyes, scrubbed or DNR’ed. The best part? You can see the eyeliner and face powder on everyone. Even on Jack Lemmon, Fred MacMurray and Ray Walston.

Honestly? I’m on the fence about doing South by Southwest this year. Am I going to spend at least $1000 to $1200 (and probably closer to $1500) on basics to fly there and stay in a flophouse so I can see…what, 21 Jump Street and one or two other films that might be worth the hassle and expense? This is my concern, dude. I’m not saying the value isn’t there. I’m saying I don’t see it yet. This is a process, not a judgment.

Last year Bridesmaids debuted in Austin, and so did Undefeated, Weekend, Natural Selection and The Beaver. For me there was also Buck, although it had premiered at Sundance 2011. What is playing there this year that might be equal to this? Beats me. So I asked a few people for thoughts.

“I think it’s a pretty sensational line-up on paper,” replied Hitfix‘s Drew McWeeny. “SXSW was built on the low-fi, the marginal voices. It’s only really been the last five or six years where they’ve made the effort to balance the big and the small, the broadly mainstream and the intensely personal. They don’t do the same kind of Hollywood movies that Cannes does, for instance. I would argue SXSW has more idiosyncratic taste in terms of what they call ‘Hollywood.’ I doubt Cannes would play Observe & Report, but they sure were glad to show Pirates of The Carribean 4.

“I think if you don’t embrace each festival for its individual voice, then you probably shouldn’t go. Sundance is not Berlin is not SXSW is not Cannes is not Toronto. SXSW is sort of brash and scrappy and has a distinct attitude. It is in every way an Austin festival. I really liked what Matt Dentler did with it, but I would argue that Janet Pierson and her team have taken huge, huge strides in terms of cementing a place in the festival world that I would argue is as vital as any other fest out there.

“Cabin In The Woods makes huge sense for them. It’s not just a good horror film, it’s also a crazy clever meta-argument for why horror films matter at all and why we need red meat in our movie diet. 21 Jump Street makes sense the same way. The film is aggressively funny and a very sharp rip on the entire notion of updating TV shows for the cheap nostalgia cash-in. For the studio making a reboot of Spider-Man and a Men In Black 3 this summer to release a film that farts in the face of franchise thinking with as much cheek as 21 Jump Street, it’s downright punk rock.

“And if you’re still undecided, just read the plot synopsis for Frankie Go Boom. And I quote: ‘A flick by Bruce about his little brother Frank who’s a crybaby fuck who shouldn’t do lame-ass embarrassing shit if he dozn’t want people 2 see it.”

“If you’re not in by now, don’t book the plane ticket. Someone else can use your seat in the theater.”

I responded to McWeeny as follows: “I’m not looking for star-power. And I’m not looking for Sundance or Toronto or Berlin or anything other than a good nourishing film festival. I just don’t want to be asking myself on day #3 or #4 ‘why did I drop $1500 to come here?’ I’ll tell you right now that movies like Frankie Go Boom are DEFINITELY NOT WORTH MY HARD-EARNED CASH. Fuck it if that’s the cream of the crop. I’m just asking where are the three or four films that I’m probably going to feel really bad about missing?”

A fellow journalist said roughly the same thing: “I debated going myself, but the real motive is not to miss anything.”

A near-miss on the 101 Freeway early this afternoon left me hugely impressed with my driving skills. I was next to the farthest left lane, speeding along at 75 or so when a young Asian-American woman in a white Honda SUV turned sharply left without a signal. She was just a few feet ahead. I’m sure I was in her blind spot. This is why they tell you to quickly look over your left shoulder before changing lanes.

I was breaking the law myself by talking on my cell phone, holding it to my right ear with my right hand. And I was concentrating on expressing a complicated thought when it happened so I wasn’t really paying attention. But the same instant that SUV lady barged into my lane, I veered to the left less than a split-second later, and a collision was barely avoided. “God, I’m good!,” I said to myself five or ten seconds later. Thank fortune there was no one in the far left lane in my blind spot.

SUV Lady obviously saw that she almost hit me and retreated to the middle lane, but then veered left again three seconds later and passed some other guy, and then went back to the middle.

A minute or so later I drove alongside her vehicle to check her out and see if she was loony-looking or whatever. She was young and fairly attractive and not on her cell phone, and not looking or even glancing my way. Or she saw me coming and figured, “Okay, here comes that guy I almost hit….I’m just gonna stare straight ahead and pretend he’s not there.” I eyeballed her all the same, made her think about it. I just saved you and me a heap of trouble, Miss Saigon. Drive a little more carefully next time.

Markus Schleinzer‘s Michael, a “somewhat chilly, jewel-precise” study of an Austrian child molester, “is the absolute best film I’ve seen at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival so far,” I wrote on 5.14.11. “It isn’t pleasant to watch, but it’s briliiant — emotionally suppressed in a correct way that blends with the protagonist, and aesthetically disciplined and close to spellbinding.”

Michael will play at Manhattan’s Film Forum from 2.15 through 2.28. An absolute must-see, if only to get into the argument.

I wrote the following reply to a Glenn Kenny post on 5.14: “Those who wrote or implied that Michael is ‘Haneke-Lite… sadistic sucker bait for rubes who can’t distinguish faux art film from real’ are playing a familiar game…they find a film emotionally discomforting so they resort to the default dweeb putdown — i.e., you’re just not smart or educated enough to understand what a sucker you are. I’ve seen Michael & I know what it really is, and what astonishing & stunning bullshit this is from the ‘pallies’ who are using the elitist line.”

Knowing I’d worked for Cannon Films in the mid to late ’80s, a guy asked me this morning about Dolph Lundgren and the making of Masters of the Universe . I replied as follows: “All I did was write the press notes and visit the set, once. I remember very little because I knew it was a cheeseball enterprise from the get-go and I didn’t give a shit about any of it. The idea of the Golan & Globus machine attempting to arouse the geek/comic-book fanbase was hopeless from the start…pathetic.”

“What was the atmosphere at Cannon when the film opened with close to no publicity and flopped?,” he wrote back. “Everyone knew it was a tank early on so there was this air of funereal resignation all through production and post-production…everyone just going through the motions,” I answered.