Day: November 12, 2012

I finally saw Paolo and Vittorio Taviani‘s Ceasar Must Die over the weekend. About four hours ago I drove down to the Four Seasons to speak to them — an honor. The Tavianis, 81 and 83 respectively, are mythic. The first movie review I ever had published in New York City was a spring 1978 piece on the Taviani’s Padre Padrone for the Chelsea Clinton News.

Vittorio and Palo Taviani at the Four Seasons — Monday, 11.12, 12:55 pm.

Here’s the mp3 but it’s a little rough as the Tavianis don’t speak English and a translator was back-and-forthing.

Ceasar Must Die is a documentary (almost entirely, I mean) about Italian prisoners putting on a presentation of William Shakespeare‘s Julius Caesar. The idea is basically that guys who’ve known violence and savagery in their lives and are now paying for these sins are enlivened and emboldened and humbled and otherwise moved by the acting out of this famous melodrama.

I liked it. The scheme, the acting, the black-and-white photography. It’s clean and sharp and humane and itself moving. It’s the official Italian submission for Best Foreign-Language Film.

Caesar Must Die was the surprise winner of the Golden Bear at the last February’s Berlin International Film Festival . The Hollywood Reporter described the outcome as “a major upset,” and Der Spiegel said it was a “very conservative selection.”

Here’s how I put it nine months ago: “A jury led by Mike Leigh looked at the doc and apparently decided the following before making their announcement: ‘Giving the prize to the Taviani brothers is not just a vote of approval for their latest film but also a way of honoring their past works and particularly the cinema of the ’70s and ’80s. We will also be saluting creative endeavor by artists of advanced years, which is something we all need to honor and support because we’ll all be there before you know it. This award will also be perceived as a metaphorical renunciation of the lamentable tendencies of the present. So it will be the right thing to do all around, and when it’s done we can all go home and smile at ourselves in the bathroom mirror.'”

Time and again I’ll be sitting in a restaurant or bar and a young couple who shouldn’t be a couple will stroll in and sit down at a table, and I’ll be just stunned. The attractiveness disparity is almost mindblowing. He’s a jowly beefalo who hasn’t seen the inside of a gym in two or three years and she’s a svelte super-model with hazel eyes, flaring cheekbones and an obviously well-toned bod, and yet she’s apparently throwing it to this guy and gasping. And I’m sitting there going “what the eff?”

A couple of hours ago I was eating a salmon burger at Astroburger (which I always call Mojoburger) when another one of these oddball couples came in, and once again the old saying about “birds of a feather flock together” was out the window. The woman wasn’t quite Angelina Jolie-level hot, but she was definitely approaching that ballpark. And the guy looked like Ryan Gosling in Lars and the Real Girl.

How does this happen? It didn’t used to happen when I was in my 20s and ’30s. Women wouldn’t talk to beefalos in the ’70s and ’80s. There were no beefalos. Beefalos sure as hell never got to talk to hot women. You had to look at least moderately attractive to even have a chat with a hot girl. You sure as hell couldn’t look like you ate quatre-fromage pizza for breakfast, lunch and dinner and threw down four to six 16 oz. cans of beer. And if she gave you the time of day you wouldn’t get very far unless you exuded the same level of coolness and attractiveness (inwardly and outwardly) to make any kind of progress.

All I can figure is that the guy at Mojoburger was a successful musician or something, but still. I realize that physical attractiveness has always been a component and that serious charm and seductiveness is in the mind and the wit and the laughter. Just ask Cyrano de Bergerac. All I know is that this is the first time in the history of the species in which guys who are way, way below the level of the girls they’re sitting with in terms of conventional hotness…these beefalo guys are making out like crazy these days.

I’m again pleading with the Oscar Punditocracy to pay a little less attention to what the Oscar nomination preferences of the guilds and the Academy might be, and to man up and embrace the eternal by emphasizing more of what’s in their own hearts and minds and dreams. To play it more like me, in short.

Some attention has to be paid to the Oscar campaigns, of course. Okay, vigilant attention. I obviously do that. My ad income is all about this attention. I’m a realist. But the lifeblood of columnists, commentators and reporters who annually eyeball the award season should first and foremost be exuberant, straight-from-the-heart celebrations of films that do “it” rather than “that.”

We all know what it feels like when a film that we’re seeing for the first time is doing “it.” There’s some kind of special alchemy thing that kicks in. Some kind of exceptional fast-river-current delivery and rarified emotional pollen mixed in with a universal energy field. We all know when we’re seeing and feeling “it”….a movie that’s happening, alive, crackling, expanding….flooding into our systems, doing something extra, turning our heads and saying “we’ve baked a cake with a little bit extra in the way of flavor or ingredients!”

It may be just a pear cake, okay, but it’s done in such a way that your taste buds are feeling a very special and particular excitement that you’ve never quite experienced in precisely the same way. And that makes it an “it” rather than a “that.”

I could name a 2012 “it” film and a lot of people would go “oh, God…again!” and put me down so here are a few others: Holy Motors, Beasts of the Southern Wild, The Master, Amour, Anna Karenina, Bernie, No.

A “that” film is one that is following or echoing a certain form or genre or relaxation, and in a way that makes you say to yourself “okay, this is doing that” rather than “wow, this is doing it!” A “that” film could be, let’s say, an exceptionally bright and well-modelled historical-political spin on a caper film. Or an expertly and very passionately composed adaptation of a hugely popular musical play from the ’80s. Or a dirge-like historical procedural about a Very Important Man trying to bring about a Very Important Thing. I understand the comforts of a “that” movie. It feels nice to have “that” in your head. But the ones that last over the years and the decades are the “it” flicks.

How often are “it” flicks recognized as the best of the year? Now and then. But a lot of times movies that SCREAM “that” at the top of their lungs, movies like The Artist and Chicago, are the ones that win in the end. And that’s depressing. That’s awful. The spirit dies. Taste of ashes. Jump off a bridge.

We all have to play the game, but the emphasis should be on the current and the exaltation that comes from scrupuloulsy ignoring what the less-hip crowd (i.e., less hip than people like us) thinks or likes. Eff those people. We know better! We are the champions, not them!

I wrote the following 15 months ago, or on 8.24.11: “Every year I ask what could be more worthless or contemptible in the eyes of any fim lover with the slightest trickle of blood in his or her veins than a group of online journos saying, ‘What we might personally think or feel about the year’s finest films is not our charge. We are here to read and evaluate the feelings and judgments of that crowd of people standing around in that other room….see them? Those older, nice-looking, well-dressed ones standing around and sipping wine and munching on tomato-and mozzarella bruschetta? Watching them is what we do. We sniff around, sense the mood, follow their lead, and totally pivot on their every word or derisive snort or burst of applause at Academy screenings.’

“If I could clap my hands three times and banish the concept of Gurus of Gold and Gold Derby Oscarologists from the minds of my online colleagues and competitors, I would clap my hands three times. (Even though I love Tom O’Neil and am a regular Gold Derby contributor.) For it is the task of Movie Catholics (which includes all monks and priests and followers of the faith) to stand up and lead at all costs.

And it is bad personal karma to put aside what every fibre of your being tells you is the ‘right’ thing to do in order to proclaim (and therefore help to semi-validate and cast a favorable light upon) the occasionally questionable sentiments and allegiances of others.

“And I mean especially if these temperature-gauging, tea-leaf readings contribute to a snowball mentality or growing assumption that a certain Best Picture contender has the heat. There is no question in my mind that to some extent the Gurus of Gold and the Gold Derby gang contributed to 2010’s and 2011’s Best Picture win by The King’s Speech by advancing the notion each and every week that it would probably take the prize.

“And that, if you don’t mind me saying so, is a terrible thing to live with. A stain upon our souls.

“How would you feel if you were 92 years old, let’s say, and on your death bed and looking back upon your professional Hollywood life and saying to yourself, ‘In my own small but possibly significant way, I probably helped to create a perception of groundswell momentum and inevitability that led to the Best Picture triumphs of The Greatest Show on Earth, Around The World in Eighty Days and Driving Miss Daisy“? How would you feel about that? Good?

“True Catholics are players on the field, not watchers from the stands. They need to convey their own passions as personally, ardently and persuasively as possible, and to give as little credence as possible to the alleged preferences of a politically-motivated, comfort-seeking, sentimentally-inclined and recently suspect industry group.”

It’s been pointed out time and again that the Academy had a reasonable, fair-minded history in their Best Picture preferences from the mid aughts to ’10 but then ldid an about-face in ’11 and, in a startling cave-in to British kowtowing and comforting gutty-wut sentiment, gave the Oscar to an admirable-but-far-from-good-enough contender. And the The Artist won last year. For the sake of our souls, capitulations of this sort must never happen again.

If I was a filmmaker worth interviewing and I was getting peppered by David Poland with those little bee-bee pellet questions….ping! ping! ping! ping! ping!…I think I would shut down pretty quickly and just turn hostile and snide and sullen. I hate those little ping-ping questions. You should just talk to people, I feel, and groove along and share observations about this or that, and then weave questions in as they come to mind. Look at Apatow’s face as he answers question after question. He’s being ping-pinged to death.

“The dance is, how can I do something very insightful but at the same time make it funny and make it amusing, and figure out what is the balance between comedy and drama?,” Apatow says about two-thirds of the way through. “How can I get as much drama [that is] required in the movie and still be allowed to be funny, and not have the humor step on the drama? You don’t want the comedy to be sweaty. You want it all to be organic. You don’t want it to be pushed. It has to really come out of these situations.

“But I am trying to make the movies really funny. And I do want the ability to stop and..y’know, take hunks of time to not be funny at all, and then you have to figure out how to get back to funny without being weird. There are people who have done this very well.Cameron Crowe, James. L Brooks and Neil Simon especially, in his plays. And i look to their work as examples of how to do it. They were always big inspirations for me.

Are you happy, satisfied…ping, ping, ping?

“I am generally pretty happy guy. As happy as a neurotic insecure hypervigilant man in an existential crisis can be at any moment. But yeah, I appreciate where I’m at…it’s been super fun.”

Being ping-pinged by Poland makes an interview feel “sweaty” and “pushed.”