A seasoned and sardonic Industry Guy who agrees with my 11.15 review of Lincoln has written the following: “You get so much guff for being tough on Steven Spielberg that I thought you should know this time, with your Lincoln review, you’ve mysteriously pulled your punches.
“And there’s a lot to punch. AO Scott and Kenny Turan seem to be so dazzled by the names on this project that they’re looking past the film’s giant weaknesses, especially Tony Kushner‘s script. For every human expression there are (at least) a hundred lines of history lesson dialogue. The ratio of stock characters to compelling ones is worse.
“Daniel Day Lewis is brilliant, so I’m dazzled too on that count. But he’s in another dimension. It’s like Marlon Brando in a Disney afterschool special. People need to watch Advise and Consent to see how the making of laws can be handled dramatically. Preminger did it, because he had a POV about people. SS and Kushner appear to have none. So you get a movie about laws, and not people. Deadly mistake.
Although the anti-Silver Linings Playbook cabal is fairly microscopic, it has a way of seeming more influential than it probably is as far as the guilds, Academy members and general audiences are concerned. In addition to the frowners mentioned in today’s “Hang On To Your Argo” post (principally In Contention‘s Kris Tapley and Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg), the others are Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone, Badass Digest‘s Devin Faraci (although he also has positive things to say about it, oddly), UGO’s Jordan Hoffman and First Showing‘s Alex Billington.
Last night Magic Mike costar (and, if you ask me, serious Best Supporting Actor contender) Matthew McConaughey sat for a q & a at North Hollywood’s TV Academy theatre with Pete Hammond. The chat followed a screening of Magic Mike, and before an audience that was largely female. McConaughey, who struck me as earnest, articulate, no dummy, charming and down to earth, made quite the impression.
Magic Mike costar and Dallas Buyer’s Club star Matthew McConaughey — Thursday, 11.8, 9:10 pm.
McConaughey is a genuine award-season contender, I feel, for two reasons. One, he “hits a solid triple as Dallas, the owner-manager of the strip club Xquisite, nailing every line and delivering the requisite hoots and cock-of-the-walk sleaze,” as I said in my 6.26 review. And two, because he turned his career around a couple of years ago by dropping the shallow romcom vein he’d been mining for years, and he deserves applause for that.
The odd thing was that McConaughey looked so thin that he seemed unhealthy, and he had dark hair and a dark moustache that made him look like John Wilkes Booth. But the unhealthy look is intentional, it turns out, for a film called The Dallas Buyer’s Club.
McConaughey has lost 38 pounds, he said, in order to play the late Ron Woodruff. Club is “loosely based” on the life of Woodruff, “a drug taking, women loving, homophobic man who, in 1986 was diagnosed with full blown HIV/AIDS and given thirty days to live,” a synopsis says. “Other AIDS patients sought out his medications, and with the help of his doctor and a fellow patient, Ron unintentionally created the Dallas Buyers Club, the first of dozens which would form around the country, providing its paying members with alternative treatments.”
On 7.18.12 I wrote that I’d been noticing the fruits of McConaughey’s career-change strategy for a year or so. “Sometime in 2009 or ’10 he must have told his agent, ‘I know I went along with these shitty romcoms before but it has to stop…you’re fucking killing me, man…will you get me out of this?…enough of the quarter-inch-deep, pretty-boy Kate Hudson flicks…that way lies death.’
“My first acknowledgement that McConaughey had changed course was in a 5.3.11 review of The Lincoln Lawyer, to wit: ‘For nearly 20 years McConaughey has under-achieved. The few good films he’s been in have been mostly ensembles (Dazed and Confused, U-571, We Are Marshall, Tropic Thunder) while many of his top-billed or costarring vehicles have been romantic dogshit, especially over the last decade. Now comes The Lincoln Lawyer, the first completely decent, above-average film McConaughey has carried all on his own. By his standards that’s close to a triumph.”
“I should now state that I no longer regard McConaughey as a Beelzebub-like figure, which is how I described him in a 4.21.09 piece called ‘The Devil Probably.’ And that I no longer think of him as ‘King of the Empties,’ which is how I put it on 7.16.06. He’s wised up, done the work, redeemed himself…no more condemnation.”
McConaughey has been exceptionally good in Bernie, Killer Joe and Mud. His upcoming projects include True Detectives, Thunder Run and The Wolf of Wall Street.
My Vietnam excursion (11.19 through 11.30) means I’ll be missing out of the first wave of Les Miserables press & industry screenings, which will begin with a bang on Saturday, 11.24, or during the Thanksgiving time-off cycle. Universal has set 12.11 as the review embargo date although tweeting responses are cool from the get-go. Les Miz director Tom Hooper will be doing q & a’s before or after the six screenings slated for 11.24.
Year after year, conventional default thinking among Oscar handicappers is that the leading Best Picture contenders (a) say something recognizably true about who we are individually or as a culture right now, (b) are powerfully performed and stylistically edgy or striking in some way, (c) are emotionally affecting, (d) are commercially popular (The Hurt Locker being an exception) and (e) are not comedies.
That last rule is a big one, and many journalist know-it-alls who present themselves as highly perceptive free-thinkers follow it absolutely. Any film that is even half-comedic must be relegated to the second-tier. (Exception: American Beauty.) Which is why a skillfully made but not especially deep or socially resonant film like Argo — at heart a political caper flick that is obviously more earnest and less glitzy than Ocean’s Eleven, but isn’t all that different from it — is STILL outpointing Silver Linings Playbook on the Gurus of Gold Best Picture list. And despite SLP being more emotionally affecting, and in various ways reflective of our manic culture, and containing far stronger performances.
The biggest Guru friends of Silver Linings Playbook are still Fandango‘s Dave Karger, MCN’s David Poland, TheWrap‘s Steve Pond and L.A. Times entertainment reporter Glenn Whipp. The chief SLP Guru naysayer is In Contention‘s Kris Tapley. Apparent modified frowners are EW‘s Anthony Breznican, The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg and L.A. Times reporter Mark Olsen.
On Morning Joe this morning Newsweek columnist David Frum called Republican leaders “cowards” and said that rural rightwing brainiacs have been been lied to by a “conservative entertainment complex” — i.e., Fox News. A conservative and a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, Frum said that the GOP had been “overrun by fear-mongers.” (The key passage starts at 5:38.)
“The problem with Republican leaders is that they’re cowards,” Frum said, adding that the party’s base of donors “went apocalyptic” in the last four years. “Republicans have been fleeced and exploited and lied to by a conservative entertainment complex,” he said. Morning Joe‘s Joe Scarborough asked Frumn to “name names,” to whcih Frum replied that there are “too many.”
Frum said he’d spoken with Tea Party morons and found that a majority was convinced that taxes had increased under Obama and that the federal government had spent more than $1 trillion on welfare each year. Both claims are bullshit. “The followers, the donors and the activists are so mistaken about the nature of the problems the country faces,” Frum said.
Key quote: “The people who put the cement shoes on Romney’s feet are now blaming him for sinking.”
Doug Liman and Tom Cruise‘s All You Need Is Kill, based on a Japanese scifi “light” novel by Hiroshi Sakurazaka, uses a Groundhog Day approach to violent action thrillers. Question: When is Cruise going to suck in the fact that he’s a half-century old and that it’s time to become the guy Harrison Ford was in the ’90s? An action star, I mean, but not the Energizer Bunny.
Tom Cruise as Lt. Col. Bill Cage in Doug Liman’s All You Need Is Kill.
Cruise’s Lt. Col. Bill Cage “is dropped — untrained and ill-equipped — into what amounts to little more than a suicide mission, [and] is killed within minutes. But Cage awakens back at the beginning of the same hellish day, and is forced to fight and die again…and again. Direct physical contact with the alien has thrown him into a time loop, dooming him to live out the same brutal combat over and over.”
Gen. David Petraeus has resigned as director of the Central Intelligence Agency because of a little action on the side? Unless he was sleeping with a double-agent Mata Hari who was working for Al Qeada, the question is obviously “why?” What is this Nathaniel Hawthorne Sunday-school obsession that Americans have about puritanically condemning the painful but not uncommon way of things when a marriage has lasted two or three decades?
Gen. David Patreaus and wife Holly sometime within the last two or three years.
David and Holly Patreaus when he graduated from West Point in the mid ’70s.
What does a perfectly normal and, I would add, perfectly understandable infidelity (powerful men of a certain age often succumb to temptation, particularly when their wives haven’t aged in a flattering way)…what does this have to do with being able to do your job in an effective manner?
I’m not trying to be cruel, but please…compare the above photographs and come down off your moralistic horse and be honest. Cut the crap. The Patreaus’s have been married for 37 years. It’s perfectly normal for powerful husbands in their 40s, 50s or 60s to think about the unthinkable when sufficiently motivated.
You know what I mean. The French don’t look at affairs this way. Nor the Italians. I’m not saying something like this isn’t difficult or that it isn’t humiliating for poor Holly Patreaus — obviously it’s a rough episode all around. But again…who out there is genuinely surprised? Be honest.
MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchellannounced the Pateaus resignation an hour ago, reading Petraeus’ farewell letter on air. Petraeus wrote that he had gone to the White House on Thursday and asked the president “for personal reasons” to resign. “After being married for more than 37 years I showed extremely poor judgment by engaging in an extramarital affair,” he wrote. “Such behavior is unacceptable, both as a husband and as a leader of an organization such as ours.”
Men all across the world are sympathizing as we speak.
Paula Broadwell’s reported involvement with Petreaus triggered his resignation.
“It had long been rumored that something was going on between Petraeus and Broadwell,” Kaplan writes. “Her book, co-written with Vernon Loeb, is widely regarded as a valentine to the general. When she was embedded with him in Afghanistan, they went on frequent 5-mile runs together. But Petraeus went on 5-mile runs with many reporters, and few people who knew him took the rumors seriously.
“In his personal life, he’s always been seen as a straight shooter, a square. Few could have imagined that his end would come as the result of a morals scandal.”
Powerful people have affairs, and they’ve been happening since Ceasar and Cleopatra. Leave them alone. Sexual connections between consenting adults, within or without the sanctity of marriage, are nobody’s damn business except those immediately involved.
