Month: October 2012

I’m presuming that Robert De Niro has agreed to accept a Kirk Douglas Award in Santa Barbara on Saturday, 12.8.12, because it’ll push the buzz along for DeNiro’s Silver Linings Playbook performance, which is almost certain to be nominated in the Best Supporting Actor category. It should be a good evening with various DeNiro homies (David O. Russell? Martin Scorsese?) giving tribute speeches.

It also indicates that Santa Barbara Film Festival chief Roger Durling, a diviner of currents in the wind and a fan of SLP, is banking that De Niro will be more favored in this category than Lincoln‘s Tommy Lee Jones or Arbitrage‘s Nate Parker or Argo‘s Alan Arkin or Magic Mike‘s Matthew McConaughey.

The event will also be an official celebration of the fact that De Niro, who’s appeared in a lot of painfully bad movies over the dozen years or so, has finally hit the jackpot with (a) a lively, funny, heart-touching performance in (b) a genuinely good film. (He’s given mushy performances before, but in crap like Everybody’s Fine, New Year’s Eve and The Big Wedding.) I think DeNiro started to “come back,” if you will, with a cagey performance as a creepy parole officer in Stone, which I greatly admired. Others thought his self-deluding dad in Being Flynn was a knockout, but I wasn’t a fan. Sorry.

Durling recently hosted a party at LA’s London Hotel to celebrate the 2013 Santa Barbara Film Festival, which will run from 1.24.13 through 2.3.13.

Tim Matheson, Roger Durling at recent SBIFF party at LA’s London Hotel.

“When you transfer a book to the screen, something’s going to give. It seems to me there are three essential things about Jack Reacher. First, he’s smart. Second, he’s still and quiet yet menacing. Third, he’s five-foot-seven.” — Author Lee Child talking about finding the perfect movie version of Reacher in a 9.25.12 Playboy interview. Are the last five words of the quote made up? You tell me.

I stayed up late watching the debate replays and then I awoke early this morning, and so I was nodding out on the couch a while ago when the phone rang. It was a seasoned Oscar-campaign guy I’d called yesterday afternoon. And he told me this anecdote about speaking to an actress a few years ago who was all but certain to be in the game, and she said to him, “So this is your specialty, you do this every year. What am I in for?”

And he said the following: “It’s like you’re twelve years old and you’ve just been given a free pass to Disneyland. You and your friends, all the rides you want, free food, go to town. And you get there and it’s all true. And you notice there are other kids there…other kids and their friends and some with their parents…but it’s still wide open and there’s no waiting and it’s glorious. Time of your life.

“And then a few hours pass and it’s the late afternoon and you’re feeling a little tired and say, ‘Well, that was really great, but let’s head home now.’ And the people who gave you the Disneyland package say, ‘Oh, didn’t we tell you? You have to stay until tomorrow morning. We’ve got it all mapped out for you. No naps, no breaks. And right now you have to go back on the roller coaster.'”

HE reader “Criterion 10” attended a discussion with the Criterion Co.’s Kim Hendrickson and Curtis Tsui at Columbus, Ohio’s Wexner Center Tuesday evening, during which they mentioned Criterion’s upcoming On The Waterfront Bluray “and how they were having a difficult time deciding which aspect ratio in should be presented in. And so, they said, it will be presented in all three: 1.33:1, 1.66:1 and 1.85:1.”

1.33

“Criterion 10” has called and double-confirmed, and glory be to God. This is the first significant setback to Bob Furmanek and the 1.85 aspect ratio fascists. Criterion has apparently decided to follow the example of Master of Cinema’s dual a.r.-ed Touch of Evil Bluray. This is wonderful news. If I were drinking I’d be popping the champagne tonight, you bet! It’s been nothing but defeat, defeat and more defeat for the light and space theology, but now, today, finally, maybe….a shaft of light!

1.66

Update: The Waterfront triple-aspect-ratio news has been confirmed in the Criterion forum.

I wish I could see the faces of those 1.85 fascists who’ve given me shit on this issue over the past couple of years. I can’t wait to hear from Pete Apruzzese and the rest of them. This is the best aspect-ratio news since Glenn Kenny posted Jay Cocks‘s Barry Lyndon “smoking gun” letter from Stanley Kubrick, which proved that Leon Vitali was wrong about Lyndon‘s correct aspect ratio being 1.78 and the right aspect ratio was 1.66.

1.85

Update: Back home at 9:40 pm, and clearly Barack (no more calling him Barry) had his feet planted and his groove back. I’ve read all the tweets, and am starting to catch video highlights. The consensus has given the win to Obama decisively. I can’t wait to watch the whole thing start to finish.

Earlier: I’m too chicken to watch the debate tonight. I’ll be catching a screening at 7 pm, I mean, and watching the replay at 10 pm. But I really don’t trust Barry O’Bama to man up and call Mitt Romney an opportunistic liar and a scumbag and lay down the facts. And if he doesn’t tell it straight and true a lot of voters out there, male and female, are going to say “he’s just not tough enough” and possibly vote for Romney. It could happen.

Barry has always been an overly diffident, mannered, circumspect fellow in debates. He needs to channel another personality tonight, or else.

“In Holy Motors you never know where Leos Carax will take you and you never know what, exactly, you’re to do once you’re there,” writes N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis. “Sometimes you may be amazed or delighted; other times, you may feel restless or uninterested. No matter: there’s always another new vision coming up.

“It’s a gift for moviegoers to have this much freedom, and exhilarating. You want three acts? How dull. A pretty protagonist? Oh, please. The triumph of the human spirit? Go away. Mr. Carax has nothing for you. What he has are weird tales; beautifully whirling, gyrating bodies; an anguished song, a sense of drift and the steady (heart) beat of lament.

“If that sounds confusing, it isn’t. Although the movie doesn’t have an obvious narrative through line, its episodes are nonetheless deeply connected by mood, visual style and Mr. Lavant. They are connected, in other words, by Mr. Carax’s singular, fluid artistic vision. And while at times it feels as if Holy Motors had been cobbled together from a million movies, it mostly, wonderfully, feels unlike anything else: it’s cinema reloaded.”

Joe Wright, Brad Pitt and Chanel No. 5 need to pull the current ad and put up an alternate version right away before it’s too late. People are chortling, reputations are suffering, etc. Just put the other version up. They must have shot four or five, right?

Whenever a fall movie presents semi-adult themes, attitudes and stylings, journalists and industry spokespersons always voice respect for the distributor having taken a huge risk. Let’s all give a hearty round of applause for this or that distributor having released a film that’s not aimed at the ADD-afflicted, raised-on-videogames generation! Because we’re living in a zip-zip dipshit digital culture that has trouble getting into films with any kind of meditative, slow-and-steady vibe, or those which focus on character or subtlety or anything low-keyish.

“Paramount was very courageous in making this movie,” Flight director Robert Zemeckis said during last night’s q & a from New York,” but they really did want to make it and they left us alone.”

“The Master is a very difficult film to sell,” Exhibitor Relations analyst Jeff Bock told TheWrap‘s Todd Cunningham. “It is very obtuse, and in almost every way, a dreary arthouse film. The fact that it went into wide release and [earned] what it has is a triumph in itself.”

Last week Not Fade Away exec producer and music supervisor Steve Van Zandt told me that due to test-screening responses, director David Chase had to insert narration that explained that the Beatles became popular in the U.S. only about three weeks after the JFK assassination, and explained that May to Labor Day 1967 became known as the “summer of love.” Because otherwise under-30s wouldn’t get it. Jesus.

If you want a snapshot that explains precisely how bone-dumb a good portion of the moviegoing public is, consider this excerpt from my review of Twilight: New Moon, which ran on 11.18.09:

“The thing that defines the badness of New Moon is an extended circular tracking sequence showing Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) sitting in her room, immobile and depressed after her vampire lover Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) has broken things off and moved away. Director Chris Weitz moves the camera around her three times, which gives the audience three views of her front lawn as it changes with the seasons — greenish brown during October, totally brown with leaves being raked in November, and finally snow-covered in December.

“Except someone decided that this visual information wasn’t explicit enough for some in the audience, and so little white titles have been inserted, appearing each time the camera moves around and behind Bella’s back, that say ‘October,’ ‘November’ and ‘December.'” Obviously because some test-screening viewers had said they couldn’t figure what was happening with the weather.

It’s an old lament but because of this idiot mentality very few of the great films of the ’70s (Dog Day Afternoon, All The President’s Men, All Night Long, The Outfit, etc.) would be green-lighted today if they were presented as fresh concepts. I know it sounds cranky but in some respects we really are living in a cultural ape hell. If Ben Hecht, D.H. Lawrence, Lytton Strachey, Honore de Balzac, John Reed, William Blake, H.L Mencken or Samuel Taylor Coleridge were to be time-travelled into present-day Los Angeles they would be dead by their own hand within 24 to 48 hours.

We all knew that Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio‘s The Wolf of Wall Street, a possible 2013 Oscar contender, would get picked up by someone, and now comes the news that Paramount, which released Scorsese’s Hugo, is that partner, supporter and sugar daddy.

There are three problems with TWOWS, which chronicles the rise and fall of Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio), a Wall Street trader whose success leads him down a path towards substance abuse and, eventually, jail time. One, we know that guys like Belfort are (or at least were) skunks and pirates…what else is new? Two, as I pointed out a few weeks ago, it’s bad karma for a lead actor in an expensive film to wear hideous gray double-breasted suits with peak lapels. And three, nobody wants to see Leo with dyed black hair any more than they wanted to see him with lumpy J. Edgar Hoover makeup.

This won’t matter much to Average Joes, but publicist Bumble Ward, whom I consider to be a great human being and a compassionate soul with palpable emotions and an engaging personality, has been zotzed at 20th Century Fox, and it just seems a shame. She was hired roughly a year ago as executive vp of publicity for film marketing, and had been a pleasure to work with all along.

There are certain kinds of people who survive if not flourish in a somewhat frosty, edgy, high-stakes corporate environment like Fox’s and others who seem better suited to Fox Searchlight and the indie-flavored p.r. realm, and Bumble, I suppose, is one of these.

The instant I heard the news I thought to myself, “Is this partly because of the handling of Life of Pi? Did the fact that I was allowed to see it out here concurrent with the N.Y. Film Festival debut and then I wrote a review in which I didn’t exactly go hog-wild…was this a factor to some degree?”

If so I feel guilty as hell. I’ve been told that there was friction about who got into that screening and who didn’t, and that this may have been one of the factors…who knows? I’ve also been told that my guilt is either misplaced or not worth wallowing in, but I feel badly all the same.

Best of luck to Bumble and to Life of Pi, a film that I respect and admire.

The New York Film Critics Circle has decided to junk last year’s 11.28 early-vote strategy (which caused too many problems) and will vote instead on Monday, December 3rd. Which means, presumably, that the all-but-worthless National Board of Review voting will now be announced before the NYFCC and Los Angeles Film Critic Association voting. Right?

The name of the game right now, presumably, is “stop Les Miserables” — that is the challenge that critics of vision and presumed backbone will have on their plates six weeks from now. Last year’s challenge was “stop The Artist.” I got down on my knees and begged them not to give it their Best Picture prize, and to their eternal discredit they ignored me. But I’m getting ahead of things.

I obviously haven’t seen Les Miserables, and it may well deserve to win at the end of the day. But you know what I mean. Everything else is getting marginally discredited for this and that reason and nothing else seems to “fit” the paradigm, and I’m starting to feel already that the fix is in. Obviously I don’t mean that in a Chicago Black Sox sense. I mean that people want a certain type of classy, carefully poised but lowest-common-denominator emotional-bath film to win, and guys like Tony Angelotti know that and it seems as if the scheme is slowly falling into place and it’s not even Halloween yet.

An Oscar prognosticator generally agrees but says that “the only thing that Les Miserables seems to lack is the cool factor.” Les Miz is classic material, he means, that doesn’t seem to offering anything especially new that might synch with or provide commentary on the present-day zeitgeist. That’s an assumption, of course, and therefore a long spitball.

The 12.1 to 12.3 voting will give distributors of December openers like Les Miserables, Django Unchained and Zero Dark Thirty two or three more days of fine tuning…big deal.

This morning NYFCC chairman Joshua Rothkopf told Deadline‘s Michael Fleming that “our function as a group is to be as best informed as we can be, and we wanted to make sure we had every opportunity to see everything under consideration for the best in film. This is not as Machiavellian as people might think, but in order to fulfill that function to be as fully informed as possible, I made this decision and the group agreed with me.”

All hail Silver Linings Playbook — a modest movie in one sense but one that really and truly works (despite what the crabheads are saying), and in a way that gives a hug to blue-collar American family values and football fanaticism and Sunday dinners and all that extended-family stuff that I don’t even relate to or believe in. The point is that SLP believes in this stuff, and in healthy turnarounds and good music and throwing away old baggage and running and getting lucky with the right girl and hugs and happiness at the end.

They could have at least dropped the Lego Baumgartner from a height of three or four miles instead of….what, a half mile at most? They could have taken two LBs up in the balloon and given us the money shot of Lego Baumgartner dropping out and turning into a speck as he plummets toward earth and then dropped the other one out and shown the swirling velocity and the chute opening, etc.