Academy members had better get on the stick before Christmas this year because they’ll need to send in their Oscar nomination ballots no later than Thursday, January 3rd. (The Academy should have gone for Monday, January 7.) Which films will this effect the most? Possibly Les Miserables, On The Road, Zero Dark Thirty, Django Unchained and Quartet, but only two of these have any serious heat as we speak.
Steven Spielberg‘s Lincoln (Disney, 11.9) is a somewhat authentic, deliberately paced, honorably acted, highly thoughtful History Channel movie that mostly concentrates on Abraham Lincoln‘s struggle to pass the 13th Amendment (i.e, the abolishment of slavery) in Congress. Spielberg’s approach to the material — an adaptation of Doris Kearns Goodwin‘s “Team of Rivals” by Tony Kushner — is appropriately reverent, sturdy and subdued. It feels like a history lesson, and plays like a musty political procedural literally happening in the mid 1860s. It seems to unfold at the horse-drawn pace of that era.
In other words it’s a highly literate, passionately performed and very thoughtful bore, and for all the right reasons.
I myself was never bored, mind — I love history and period realism — but I would argue that the story of the passing of the 13th Amendment is an interesting saga with some great dialogue (Tommy Lee Jones‘ anger moments might be the best thing about it), but it’s not a riveting one. It’s not really movie material, certainly by today’s standards. It’s Showtime or PBS or History Channel material writ large by the Spielberg brand and the soulful skills of Daniel Day Lewis. Anyone who cares about doing this kind of thing correctly will understand and respect what Spielberg has tried to do, and in many ways has succeeded at.
But they will also admit to themselves that there’s something grindingly dutiful and a bit plodding about Lincoln, and that it gives you the feeling that you’re trudging through the narrative mud like a foot soldier in Grant’s Army. In some ways Lincoln is not that tonally different from Robert Redford‘s The Conspirator. And you know what that means.
It opens with a crassly calculated, totally bullshit scene in which Lincoln shares quiet words with four Union soldiers (two white, two black) under the cloak of night, and it’s amazing how phony it feels when one of the black soldiers, played by David Oyelowo, politely tells President Lincoln that he’s irked and disappointed that men of color aren’t allowed to become officers. And then he recites a portion of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, and he walks away from Lincoln as he continues to recite, withdrawing like a member of a chorus in an early 1950s stage production of Brigadoon.
Yes, DDL’s titular performance is quietly arresting. A little recessive and self-regarding, perhaps, but he seems to have genuinely captured the A. Lincoln that I’ve been reading about for decades — the folksy but sly politician, the low-key, self-amused teller of jokes and cracker-barrel tales, the rigorously thoughtful and perceptive lawmaker, patient and wise but dogged by melancholia and a wife who provided little peace. It’s all there. His performance is never quite kicky or adrenalized enough — it’s largely about stillness and speaking softly and stoic restraint — to make you sit up in your seat and go “wow!” And yet it gains upon reflection. I left the theatre thinking this is certainly among the year’s best, and yet I’m not sure I need to savor his performance again. I think I’ve absorbed all there is. Same with Lincoln itself. I have a chance to see it again tonight, and I’m thinking “Eh…maybe not.”
Largely because I was tremendously irritated by dp Janusz Kaminski having gone with that same milky, bleachy lighting style that he’s used in so many Spielberg films. All those desaturated grays and browns and pallid complexions and interior, gas-lit shadows fit into the milieu, of course. They define the tone and mood of the film. But this is a Kaminski signature that we’ve seen time and again (Minority Report, Munich, A.I., The Terminal) so his work on Lincoln doesn’t feel like he’s tried to illuminate a specific story or theme or whatever. It’s Janusz in default mode.
There is so much milky, bleachy light pouring through the windows of the Lincoln White House that you’d think aliens from Close Encounters (the ones who hovered over Richard Dreyfuss‘s pickup truck and gave him a sunburn) have landed on the South Lawn.
Other things about Lincoln disappointed or pissed me off.
Did you know that the chamber of the U.S. House of Representatives inside the Capitol building, which looks almost exactly the same today as it did in 1865, has several large windows, and that milky, bleachy light pours through during daylight hours? You didn’t know that? The chamber has no windows, you say? Well, you’d better check with Janusz Kaminski, my friend!
I didn’t believe that the 16th President travelled around without security protection of any kind. Daniel Day Lewis’s Lincoln never causes any kind of commotion when he shows up here or there. Nobody goes “whoa…it’s the President!” Instead they all go “oh, hey there, Mr. President…how goes it?” He just walks or roams around like any guy, riding in a carriage like some middle-aged tailor or accountant or physician. No oolah-boolah or “stand back!” vibe of any kind.
Below is a photograph (or daguerrotype) of the White House during the Lincoln administration. Looks pretty nice, doesn’t it? A clean shot of the same place but without the fountain. How hard would it have been for Spielberg to create a CG image of the entire structure? Too hard, apparently. There isn’t a single establishing shot of the White House or the U.S. Capitol (the huge dome of which had recently been completed in early 1865) in the entire film. No images of how the White House South Lawn or Pennsylvania Avenue or the Treasury building or the Potomac might have looked. Lincoln never goes for the big wow shot because, I’m guessing, it would have been too costly given the expected modest revenues. But they’ll spend the bucks on big CG compositions when Spielberg shoots Robopocalypse.
In short, the outdoor capturings in Lincoln don’t look like 1860s Washington. They look like period-dressed Petersburg, Virginia, where the film was mostly shot, and other areas in Virginia (including Richmond).
Lincoln‘s interior sets, minimally lighted when those trademark Kaminski floodlights are absent, have been expertly littered with the clutter of papers and ink bottles and leather gloves and snuff boxes, but Lincoln is almost entirely composed of medium shots of shadowy interiors, medium shots of shadowy interiors and, just to break up the monotony, medium shots of shadowy interiors. And 90% of the time containing four or five or more middle-aged men arguing about politics and horse-trading and votes and whatnot. And the occasional young man (or small groups of young men) looking on in wonderment or admiration.
I was half-joking when I said I wished that Lincoln had been shot in Aroma-rama or Smellovision, but I was half serious also. I wrote that I was hoping for an atmospheric bathroom scene with maybe an insert shot of an 1860s toilet or a bathtub or whatever, and of course there isn’t. That was understood from the get-go, but it would have been cool.
Spielberg doesn’t show Lincoln’s assassination in Ford’s theatre, but his decision to go with an alternate way of conveying this event struck me as highly unimaginative.
And if you know your Lincoln history the bed he was placed upon at the Peterson rooming house wasn’t big enough for his tall frame, so he was laid down diagonally, corner to corner. This is ignored in Lincoln. The bed that DDL lies on has plenty of room.
Pretty much every performance has conviction and panache — Sally Field‘s Mary Todd Lincoln, Joseph Gordon-Levitt‘s Robert Todd Lincoln, Gulliver McGrath‘s Tad Lincoln (except for the scene when he learns of his father’s death), David Strathairn‘s William Seward, Jackie Earle Haley‘s Alexander H. Stephens, Bruce McGill‘s Edwin Stanton, Gloria Reuben‘s Elizabeth Keckley, Jared Harris‘s Ulysses S. Grant, James Spader‘s William N. Bilboe, John Hawkes‘ Colonel Robert Latham, Hal Holbrook‘s Francis Preston Blair, etc.
The bottom line? Lincoln is a good film, deserving of respect and worth seeing, but it happens at an emotional distance and feels like an educational slog.
On 9.5.12 I sat down with Stephen Holt inside the press lounge of the Toronto Hyatt and spoke of the about-to-begin Toronto Film Festival and the just-concluded Telluride Film Festival. Central Park Five, Amour, Argo, Anna Karenina, The Master. We did about 14 minutes before a TIFF staffer told Holt and camera guy Cody Michaels that no recordings were permitted. (Editing by Kevin Teller.)
For whatever reason this nine-week-old video wasn’t posted until this morning (11.8).
Excellent art. Another step in the right direction. Wells to ZDT guys: I’m in Vietnam from 11.19 through 11.30 so…okay? You know what I’m saying. Uhm…let’s see here…it’s Jessica Chastain for a possible Best Actress nom and Jennifer Ehle for a possible Best Supporting nom…right? Ehle was seriously solid in Steven Soderbergh‘s Contagion.
Ignore the initial, trailer-plug portion of this piece because it soon shifts into an absorbing explanation of how the backdrop and atmosphere around the airfield were almost entirely created on a hard drive. And then it explains how portions of a fuselage set were literally rolled and turned upside down against a green screen on a sound stage. (Hat tip to Rope of Silicon‘s Brad Brevet.)
The initial 2008 Patton Blu-ray edition “looked bad — smeary, overly de-noised, robbed of detail — and if you need cold, hard, indisputable evidence, compare this full-sized screenshot from the first release to this one from the all-new 1080p, AVC-encoded transfer.
“In the former, notice how there’s no texture to George C. Scott‘s face. Notice how his dog’s fur is weirdly smooth. Notice the distinct lack of detail in the driver’s uniform. In the shot from the remaster, however, fine film grain is visible, textures are keenly defined, and the picture appears infinitely more natural and lifelike. Go on, grain-haters, I challenge you to defend the first shot. It can’t be done.” — from Casey Broadwater‘s 11.5 Bluray.com review.
“What happened last night is this: The brown people and the black people and the women handed the white men’s asses to them as unsentimentally as white men have bought and sold and manipulated America for centuries now. Welcome to the future.” — from an 11.8 assessment pIece by Gawker‘s Cord Jefferson.
“It would do conservatives well to look at some numbers today: 75 percent is the chunk of the Latino vote that went to Obama, according to polling data, along with 93 percent of blacks. Seventy-three percent of Asians broke for the president, and only 44 percent of women voted for Romney. [And] adding to the GOP’s woes is that, in just a couple decades, the U.S. is going to be a country where brown people outnumber white people by a lot — then they’re double-fucked.
“The grim realization that the world is a far different and more diverse place than it once was has fallen like a shadow over the GOP since its defeat last night, turning its already pallid complexion an even lighter shade of alabaster.”
I was searching around for this Brian Williams-Donald Trump clip last night, and couldn’t find it. Ditto the Karl Rove denial argument against giving Ohio to Obama. Both surfaced this morning. YouTube clips need to turn around faster. Nobody wants to wait four or six or eight hours.
DVD Beaver‘s Gary W. Tooze always goes too easy and is too much of a grain monk for my tastes, but he’s having server issues and he needs a little PayPal action to get things going again. If you have a heart, you’ll help out. Tooze never writes me back and is therefore deficient in my book, but he delivers great high-rez screen capturings in his Bluray reviews.
The most authoritative Peter Jackson/Tolkien fansite of all, theonering.net, has compiled a list of all the U.S. theatres showing the high-frame-rate (HFR) version of The Hobbit. But I don’t trust it because of the eight LA theaters listed, the respected Arclight Hollywood isn’t included but the Arclight Sherman Oaks is — absurd. Check the New York area listings and it’s clear these Australian guys don’t know the geography or the culture very well.
Susan Lacy‘s Inventing David Geffen, an American Masters documentary, will air on PBS on 11.20.12. I watched it twice last summer in preparation for a PBS press event with Geffen at the Beverly Hilton. After covering this I posted a combination review and commentary on 7.22. With the show airing in two weeks I might as well re-run the piece.
Inventing David Geffen “is a somewhat candid backrub piece that pretty much allows the 69 year-old supermogul to tell his life story the way he wanted it told. Which feels okay as you’re watching it, I guess. It doesn’t excite but doesn’t offend either. And I watched it twice in a row, which says something.
“Lacy includes an occasional blunt comment (one-time litigant Neil Young shares a few choice phrases) about Geffen’s combative nature and scrappy business dealings so as to give a feeling that the doc doesn’t ‘flatter,’ but it mostly does flatter in a sense because it underlines how an awful lot of people are scared of Geffen, and therefore respectful. They all kiss the ring.
“Lacy’s doc is an engrossing sit because Geffen is a fascinating player, full of emotionality (some of it angry and combative) and contradictions and humor and fierce will. As a columnist I love rich hardballers (Geffen is worth over $5 billion) who are tough and know all the angles and how to play everything to their advantage, but Lacy’s doc is not about that territory. Not really.
“Inventing David Geffen is an agreeable thing, nostalgic for the ’60s and ’70s, flavorful and amusing at times and ‘honest’ as far as it goes but basically friendly and affectionate. Lacy obviously likes Geffen, and after watching her film it’s hard not to feel the same. He’s a kick, he’s been around, he’s lived it, he knows everyone.
“But if after seeing this film you want a less varnished portrait that’s probably closer to the real deal, dust off the late Tom King‘s 2001 biography — “The Operator: David Geffen Builds, Buys and Sells The New Hollywood.” Now that had real juice and adrenalin and aroma and nerve, you bet! Geffen hated it, calling it a hatchet job and conniving and agenda-driven, but if you read Lisa DePaulo’s June 2001 New York article about how King and Geffen’s relationship began amiably with a written agreement to give King access and then deteriorated and got worse and worse until everything was poison, it’s hard to accept Geffen’s view that King just set out to trash him with little regard for truth or fairness or appropriate journalistic standards.
During the PBS press q & a event Geffen said he’d “had no input into this film, honestly,” referring to Lacy’s doc. “I had nothing to do with the makeup of those questions. I wanted to tell the story as accurately as I can. I had no idea what this was gonna be. I didn’t think I was a good candidate for this thing. But I was happy with it.
“I’m proud of all the things I’ve done,” he said. “I [see] this film and I think, ‘wow, you did have all that.’ I don’t think about the past. I think about what I’m doing now. I really don’t reflect on my career. I don’t like to talk about myself. I avoid it as much as possible. When I saw the film, I thought ‘wow’…I was impressed.”
All through the sometimes depressing and occasionally scary fall election season N.Y. Times Fivethirtyeight columnist and stats guy Nate Silver chilled out the entire liberal community from Seattle to Miami, San Diego to Bangor. I slept better because of this guy. He recently projected Obama’s electoral count to be 300-plus, and he was right. Obama won all the swing states except North Carolina, had a “pretty decisive win,” etc. And yet Silver wasn’t that good last year at predicting Oscars.