Month: December 2012

“She’s not Miss Congeniality, but that’s not going to find Osama bin Laden,” says a former CIA associate who knows the real-life “Maya,” the flinty character played by Jessica Chastain in Zero Dark Thirty. This source and others are quoted in a 2.10 Washington Post piece about the CIA analyst whose contributions to the bin Laden hunt were crucial,” reports Mark Miller.

The Zero Dark Thirty attention has “sent waves of envy through the agency’s ranks.”

The real Maya’s “defenders say the operative has been treated unfairly, and even her critics acknowledge that her contributions to the bin Laden hunt were crucial. But the developments have cast a cloud over a career that is about to be bathed in the sort of cinematic glow ordinarily reserved for fictional Hollywood spies.

“The character Maya, which is not the CIA operative’s real name, is portrayed as a gifted operative who spent years pursuing her conviction that al-Qaeda’s courier network would lead to bin Laden, a conviction that proved correct.

“At one point in the film, after a female colleague is killed in an attack on a CIA compound in Afghanistan, Maya describes her purpose in near-messianic terms: ‘I believe I was spared so I could finish the job.’

“Colleagues said the on-screen depiction captures the woman’s dedication and combative temperament.”

I’ll talk about alleged or supposed private stuff between acquaintances or filmmakers or whomever until the cows come home, but I never write about it. And so yes, I agree that it’s little bit icky to get into this but I did coin the power-couple term “Biggy-Boal” so I feel I have to riff on this somehow. The fact is that Buzzfeed‘s Kate Aurthur has reported today that a certain aspect of the partnership known as Biggy-Boal is no more.

In her words: “Sources who know Bigelow and Boal are saying they are no longer together and are trying to keep that quiet as they promote [Zero Dark Thirty].”

“At best, their togetherness is a manifestation of a productive working team,” Aurthur writes. “At worst, Bigelow, a woman, needs Boal, a male investigative journalist, to add legitimacy to her hard-hitting films. Perhaps it’s both.” Wells: Of course it’s both!

“In a two-day-old New York piece about their partnership, Mark Harris “asked the two of them about whether they planned to collaborate again and noted, ‘Across the table, they exchange, not for the first time, a let’s-coordinate-our-answers glance.’ And then Boal said, ‘I think we both want to…it’s up to the movie gods.”

“‘For his part, Boal seems to be moving on — on Monday, he announced he’s forming his own company, Page One Productions, to adapt reporters’ stories into films. Bigelow is not involved.”

Another except from the Harris article:

“Bigelow’s partnership with Boal, who met her about ten years ago when she inquired about a story he’d written for Playboy, has taken her into new and rewarding territory, his journalistic cred a complement to her unsentimental, realist aesthetic. Their collaboration — she calls herself ‘a delivery system for Mark’s content‘ — is so intense that many assume it is, or was, romantic, something the two have never acknowledged, denied, or discussed. In conversation, that intensity is something to behold.”

For whatever embarassing reason the Raymond Chandler-invented expression “tall glass of water” never crossed my path until last Saturday when Mel Gibson used it to describe Kathryn Bigelow and I said “good one…is that yours?” and he said “hell, man…you don’t know your Chandler” and proceeded to shpiel on it. It means not just tall, of course, but a person of considerable character, history and overall content who, if you really want to know her, requires a fair amount of slow sipping, tasting, contemplating and so on.

Another instance of pathetic, low-class, self-destructive behavior. Being an adult requires simple, constant applications of self-control, often small but sometimes difficult, and if that’s not in your quiver then you might as well pack it in. On the other hand, why did this never happen to me or my friends when we were 15 or 16?

Why does this kind of thing seem to be a 21st Century phenomenon? Is it a metaphor for the fraying of the social fabric and the sociopathic celebration of self-worshipping impulse? If so, I honestly wish (and I’m not trying to sound like a grunting thoughtless animal) I could have partaken when I had the chance. I had it so rough as a lad of 15 or 16. It’s difficult to even think back on it.

For their forthcoming Critics Choice Awards, the Broadcast Film Critics Association (which I’m a mixed-emotions member of) has given 13 nominations to Steven Spielberg‘s Lincoln, 11 to Tom Hooper‘s Les Miserables, 10 to David O. Russell‘s Silver Linings Playbook and 9 to Life of Pi. I’m a fan of the final 40 minutes of Les Miserables so I can partially support or sympathize with the accolades, but the Lincoln thing has sent me into the pit. This organization has been trained like dogs to respond to certain prompts and commands, and they’re doing exactly what’s expected of them.

If this indicates Zak Snyder‘s approach to Man of Steel then I feel an emotional deflation coming on. From the soundtrack, at least. Male choral singing in Crimson Tide, okay. Titanic-styled choral singing here…to what end? An attempt to nudge if not goad the audience into spiritually reinvesting in a spent comic-book fable that began the year that Angels With Dirty Faces was released? Greenlighted solely because of brand familiarity and therefore a presumed lock to appeal to Joe and Jane Popcorn?

A second reboot of an iconic franchise that began as a kind of remake (certainly an ongoing reimagining) in 1978 with the Chris Reeve series…eyes flat, pulse weak. This is Big Brother-ism.

I did a quick sitdown this afternoon with Zero Dark Thirty star and guaranteed Best Actress contender Jessica Chastain (“Maya”) and costar Jason Clarke (“Dan,” the likable, even-keel CIA torture-and-Lamborghini-buying guy). Alert and yet settled, easy to talk to, right on it…snap. This is their third film together, having previously costarred in Lawless and Texas Killing Fields. I’ll be hitting the ZDT premiere and after-party tonight for more of this. Again, the mp3.

(l.) Zero Dark Thirty star Jessica Chastain; (r.) Jason Clarke.

“The Hobbit barely leaves the driveway. It lasts for 11 minutes short of three hours, and takes us to the end of chapter six in Tolkien‘s original novel, which falls on page 130 of the official movie tie-in edition. That’s half an hour per chapter, or one minute and 20 seconds per page. The work of the sombre Hungarian auteur Bela Tarr, whose grinding tale of apocalyptic poverty The Turin Horse ran to a mere 155 minutes, feels nippy by comparison.” — from Robbie Collin‘s 12.9 Telegraph review of Peter Jackson‘s The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.

In this precise order here are Hollywood Elsewhere’s 20 Finest Films of 2012 by the measurings of verve, pizazz, stylistic audacity, blood-rushing excitement and/or sheer emotional enjoyment: 1. (Tied for first place) Silver Linings Playbook and Zero Dark Thirty. 2. Anna Karenina, 3. Holy Motors, 4. The Master, 5. Amour, 6. The Dark Knight Rises, 7. Argo, 8. Arbitrage, 9. Beasts of the Southern Wild, 10. Les Miserables (because of the last 40 minutes), 11. Magic Mike, 12. Moonrise Kingdom, 13. The Sessions, 14. Bernie, 15. Rust and Bone, 16. On The Road, 17. Trishna, 18. Killing Them Softly, 19. Lincoln, 20. God Bless America,

Special Indie Commendation: Ava Duvernay‘s Middle of Nowhere and the lead performance of Emayatzy Corinealdi.

Runner-Uppers: Rampart, Side by Side, Haywire, Roman Polanski: A Film Memoir, The Three Stooges, Michael, 21 Jump Street.

Oh, and forget the sloppy and indulgent Django Unchained. It works more or less for the first hour but then it’s pretty much downhill.

Any complaints about mistakes, omissions, duplications are welcome and in fact requested.

The American Film Institute has announced its top ten movies of 2012 which are (obviously listed alphabetically) Argo, Beasts of the Southern Wild, The Dark Knight Rises, Django Unchained, Les Miserables, Life of Pi, Lincoln, Moonrise Kingdom, Silver Linings Playbook (will Glenn Kenny and Kris Tapley take the AFI to task? are you guys men with serious backbone or are you scurrying mice?) and Zero Dark Thirty. The picks largely reflect the taste of AFI vice-chairperson Tom Pollock, but he’s a wise and perceptive (if political-minded) fellow so that’s cool.