Day: December 24, 2012

When I think of Jack Klugman, who died this morning at age 90, I don’t think of Quincy or Oscar Madison in the Odd Couple TV series. I think only of his Juror #5 character in Sidney Lumet‘s 12 Angry Men, and the following line: “I played in backyards that were filled with garbage. Maybe you can still smell it on me.” I like the way Klugman spoke quietly in that scene.

I also think of a story Klugman once told on (I think) The Dick Cavett Show. His wife was trying on different evening outfits as he sat nearby in their living room, he said. She was wearing skimpy or no underwear, he said, so every time she took off a dress she was Venus di Milo. And she was near a large living room window. As he sat there Klugman thought to himself, he said, “Gee, I wish I was across the street with a pair of binoculars.”

“What Zero Dark Thirty needs is more viewers to get their heads out of their asses and appreciate the movie as a major fucking work of art,” HE’s Jesse Crall wrote a little while ago. “The [moral] ambiguity of the American CIA agents involved only makes ZD30 more interesting.” But not to the Stalinists. They want movies in the vein of those 1930s films about tractors tilling the soil on Soviet wheat farms. Forward, socialism! Death to degenerate art movies that convey moral ambiguity!

“Yeah, I want a movie where the CIA agents are paragons of decency, heroically saving the pristine ideals of American exceptionalism through their honest overseas campaign,” Crall continues. “Let’s insert some more Captain America vibes into Biggy-Boal’s flick. That’s the ticket.

“Would The Bridge on the River Kwai get shit on because Alec Guinness‘s Col. Nicholson became proud of his completion of the bridge even if it benefitted the enemy? Fuck that. His conflicting thoughts” — initial pride and then “what have I done?” at the finale — “mark one of the coolest character dilemmas in film history. Jessica Chastain‘s reaction to torture and her response to the ‘victim’ of it will also stand out for decades to come.”

That irksome commenter called “Sperky” also said this morning that Silver Linings Playbook “never was.” Nope — it is. It’s not a bigger dog than Lincoln or Life of Pi or Zero Dark Thirty or Les Miserables, but it is a dog on the racetrack, perhaps not fated to win but definitely scampering and panting along with six or seven others. I also think that on some weird level SLP has picked up a little aversion-therapy headwind from the darkness of the last ten days.

A spark of this thought hit me yesterday while discussing things with Glenn Kenny. While SLP obviously has zero connection to Newtown, I suspect that deep down in the heart of the film industry it has become (or is becoming) in some small way a kind of emotional salve or antidote to the evil and malevolent vibes that rocked this country in the wake of that awful act.

I realized this yesterday morning when I came across two Sundance movies about guns and random killing (one of them being Alexandre Moors‘ Blue Caprice, about the 2002 Beltway sniper killings) and I said to myself “I don’t want to see those films…I’ve been wading in that hell pit with Newtown and then Wayne LaPierre‘s statements, and I don’t want to go back there.”

So maybe this is just me but I don’t think so. I think people are really sick over that event, which in the realm of shooting-death tragedies has sunk in almost as heavily as 9/11 did 12 years ago, and they don’t want to taste it in any way, shape or form right now. To the extent that they may want to champion a film that delivers a totally contrary spirit.

I’m not saying Silver Linings Playbook will win because of a horrible tragedy. There can be no discussion of the Best Picture race and the murder of 20 small children in the same article. Which I’m not engaging in. I’m just been observing that sensitive, compassionate people in this town are hugely distraught by what happened on 12.14, and suggesting that some may be subconsciously lunging towards any distraction that feels like a kind of polar-opposite energy source. Maybe.

I haven’t thought this through so it may just be pollen in the air that I’m misinterpreting or something. I only know that I won’t be seeing those two gun-killing films at Sundance, and from that a related thought has taken flight.

An HE commenter named “Sperky” (one of the dumbest-sounding handles I’ve ever heard) has just spitballed that Zero Dark Thirty is dead as a Best Picture winner because of the ridiculous charges that it somehow endorses or celebrates torture. As revolting and wrong-headed as this press gang-up has been (a truly repugnant chapter in awards-season history), I hate to admit this guy may be right.

I also suspect that the only thing that can save Zero Dark Thirty in the Best Picture race is a loud, coordinated, balls-out, full-court-press response by Sony Pictures publicity and the filmmakers and their top defenders, standing (or sitting) together at a press conference and declaring once and for all that ZD30 has been painted with smears by people with an agenda, and that it’s gotten out of hand and that the record is clear among those in the know and so on.

Sony, in short, has to man up. They have to get tough and militant and explicit about this and slap down the film’s accusers and tell them to go eff themselves…or it’s over. It may be over already. I don’t know.

A journalist friend confided this morning that he’s not even sure, given how this film has been colored by negative controversy and the way Academy people aren’t mentioning it in conversation, if ZD30 will even be Best Picture-nominated. I gasped when I heard this. My face literally lost color.

I do know that this morning a CBS This Morning anchor stated that Sony “hasn’t responded” to the ZD30-criticizing letter from Acting CIA Director Michael Morell or to a similar letter written to Sony by Senators Diane Feinstein, John McCain and Carl Levin.

Even with holiday distractions and whatnot, Sony’s silence on this matter has been deafening.

It makes me sick to my stomach to think that a film as masterful as ZD30 can be taken down by a vitriolic ideological mob, but as Samuel Goldwyn might have said if he were here right now, “If people want to smear a film, you can’t stop them.” Except you can stop them, or Sony can, I mean. They can at least try. They might lose, but where is the honor is letting this teardown happen without standing up and explaining in detail how the accusers are dead wrong or wildly off on their own beam?

ZD30 may or may not be a goner, but Sony ought to at least make a valiant last stand, guns blazing. When JFK was being accused of being unfit for the Presidency because as a Catholic he would favor the Vatican, did he let it lie and duck the accusers like Sony has been doing?

A few hours ago on CBS This Morning, senior correspondent John Miller, a former Associate Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Analytic Transformation and Technology who once interviewed Osama Bin Laden, called Zero Dark Thirty “extraordinarily accurate in the way that movies are accurate.”

More: “All of that happened [and] one of the detainees who was…subject to waterboarding actually did give up the name of [Osama bin Laden’s] courier…the wrinkle is that he gave it up before the waterboarding…[but] I think what the film is trying to say is that overall this was a big part of the process of questioning people. Could they have obtained the same formation without the waterboarding? We’ll never know.”

And please, please listen to Miller explaining the content of an internal memorandum from Acting CIA Director Michael Morell (which was circulated a week before the press release that criticized ZD30], and particularly Miller’s summary of the final graph in that memorandum.