Day: February 7, 2013

The first thing I thought when I saw this poster for Brian Helgeland‘s 42 (Warner Bros., 4.13), the Jackie Robinson biopic starring Chadwick Boseman as J.R. and Harrison Ford as Branch Rickey, was “who slides with his right fist raised in a victory salute?” Because it looks like bullshit, like the marketing guys are trying to appeal to fans of today’s self-aggrandizing, cock-of-the-walk athletes.

But guess what? For some unfathomable reason Robinson did slide into bases like that. Here are some photos. The bottom line is that the poster still looks phony even if Robinson did that fist thing every time. Partly because his mouth is open as if he’s shouting “yeaaahhhh!” It looks like an advertising con, and if I were running the marketing on this movie I would tell the art guys to not use it. Fine for the movie, not fine for the poster.

Imagine how beautiful this image would be on its own terms if Robinson’s right hand was more or less open-palmed and going for balance, like any athlete’s hand would be at such a moment. I’ve slid into bases. I know what’s involved so don’t tell me. The fist thing is odd.

At first I thought there must be something wrong with me to be laughing louder and louder at this pedestrian wipe-out piece, which went up on 2.5. But I couldn’t help it. Partly, I think, because it’s a metaphor for the random cosmic brutality of things. All I know is that the more people who get hit, the funnier this thing is. Partly because getting wiped out like that it a bullshit Hollywood device born of cheap screenwriting sloth, and you can’t help but laugh at that crap. Or spit at it.

Anne Hathaway getting hit on her bicycle in One Day, for instance. She’s just going to peddle right into a busy two-lane street after emerging from a quiet side alley, just shoot right into the street without looking? I don’t think so.

One wonders, of course, why some of the bus drivers in some of these sequences hit the brake after impact but never before. Mostly they just slam on through and mow those people down like bowling pins.

I realize, of course, that city dwellers do sometimes get hit by buses and cars. Mostly old people, I’m guessing. In “Sword of Damocles” Lou Reed sang about seeing “a kid get hit by a bus.” Poor Richard Bright got killed by a bus in ’06. But I’ve been a big-city dweller for about 35 years and I’ve never seen anyone get hit or come upon the aftermath of such an accident…not once.

I myself have never come close to getting hit by anyone or anything, ever. I am part cat, part monkey and part coyote on the pavement. My instincts are like lightning. I see and smell everything coming my way before it gets there.

This is the first semi-effective, decently-cut trailer for Abbas Kiarostami‘s Like Someone In Love, a curiously fascinating film about longing and obsession within a story that resolves nothing and in fact feels oblique and inconclusive…but is oddly riveting and wise and indelible nonetheless. IFC Films is opening it theatrically on 2.15 along with the usual download options. The 64% Rotten Tomatoes rating is entirely unjust and unreflective of its true nature.

To my mind Like Someone In Love is heads and shoulders above Kiarostami’s Certified Copy, which I partly admired but mostly hated.

On 5.20.12 I wrote that Like Someone In Love “has provided more pleasure and intrigue than any film I’ve seen at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. It’s a trifle on one level, but it’s plain and true and masterful — a pitch thrown straight without a shred of pretension. I’m probably going to fail in trying to describe what it amounted to for me, but that’s okay. I only know that the slowness of the pace of Like Someone To Love and the way this and that detail is revealed like cards in a solitaire game is fascinating and then some.”

Yesterday afternoon Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neil pointed out that Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone and Entertainment Weekly‘s Thom Geier are the last Lincoln diehards. Everyone else is picking Argo to win Best Picture but not these two soldiers, and you know something? I admire their decision to lash themselves to the mast and if necessary go down with the ship.

It’s not easy to stand alone against the chuckling of your peers. It takes sand. I’ve been there and I know how it feels. But it’s what separates the men from the boys. If you really believe then you need to say “eff the odds and to hell with predicting — this is the best film of the year and standing by it is an expression of who I am and what I am.”

This is what Sasha is thinking, I mean. I don’t think this is what Geier is saying or thinking, or at least not with any conviction.

I stood by The Social Network during the 2010-2011 season despite the deranged and altogether shameful King’s Speech capitulation by the Academy, the guilds and most of the go-along prognosticators. There is no filmmaker or journalist with any self-respect who would argue with a straight face today that The King’s Speech is a better, bolder, taller achievement than The Social Network, but quite a few people went along with this appalling notion two years ago. The fact that I pooh-poohed and in fact spat upon the King’s Speech cavalcade is one of the things I am truly proud of in my life.

O’Neil’s commentary: “Sasha has been a diehard Lincoln soldier for eons, but she briefly caved in to the momentum behind “Argo” after it swept the Producers, Screen Actors’ and Directors’ Guilds, then climbed back up on her feet and mustered new courage to resume her fight for “Lincoln.” Noting how rarely a film has managed to win Best Picture without its director being nommed in modern times (just once — that notorious Driving Miss Daisy example), she says, “I have to adhere to the stats in the face of confusion — I am just built that way.”

“Poor Thom is waffling a bit too. At one point in our podcast chat, he admits that the other 23 Oscarologists may be right, but then he suddenly snaps out of it, rallies behind his choice of Lincoln and says, ‘I find it hard to imagine that when you’re filling out a ballot with 26 categories, the only thing you’re checking off is Argo for Best Picture…? It’s possible that it could pick up some technical awards. It might pick up adapted screenplay over Lincoln. It could get editing. But it’s kind of hard for me to imagine an Argo sweep, which is what you tend to get with a Best Picture winner.”

Time has posted nine Oscar-related video chats with ten actors — The Master‘s Amy Adams, Lincoln‘s Sally Field and John Hawkes, Beasts of the Southern Wild‘s Quvenzhane Wallis, Les Miserables‘ Anne Hathaway and Hugh Jackman, Django Unchained‘s Christoph Waltz, Argo‘s John Goodman, The Impossible‘s Naomi Watts and Zero Dark Thirty‘s Jessica Chastain.

Candid material. Nice production values. Cheers to director Paola Kudacki for shooting in beautiful black-and-white.

Every year directors, actors and other significant contributors in Oscar-nominated films are interviewed, photographed and placed on a very classy pedestal by the big media outlets, and the underlying message is that these guys are the coolest kidz on the block, the most accomplished, the best of the best. And they are for the most part. But I’ll bet you could give the same interview treatment to people who make B and C-grade movies — directors and stars of AFM-level Eurocrap movies, super-marginal indies, schlocky downmarket horror and action flicks, romcoms and sub-mental comedies — and ask them the same kind of questions and shoot and light them with the same ace-level production values, and the final import wouldn’t be much different. Just saying.

I don’t see what the big deal is about Hugh Jackman forgetting…ohh, whatsisname ….the guy, you know, who starred in Lincoln….oh, right, “Lewis.” Hey, has anyone seen Lewis around? Over there…see him? Hey, Louie! It’s me, Hugh! People blank out every so often. It happens. No need to point a finger like Movieline‘s Frank DiGiacomo did this morning.

For the record: I have always despised Brightcove/Macromedia embed codings for their absurd length and size, and because it takes as much as a full minute to appear on a typical browser. This Hugh-and-Anne video refused to appear on Safari for over a minute, which led to give up and kill Safari and swtich to Firefox.

Magnolia will soon be releasing Into The White, a World War II wilderness-survival film from director-cowriter Petter Naess. iTunes and On Demand on March 7th, and then a limited theatrical break in April. Based on a true story and costarring Florian Lukas and Rupert Grint, the Norweigan-made ensemble drama is about crash-landed British and German soldiers forced to seek shelter in the same cabin. Yes, I agree, fine message — we have to get past our petty animosities and pool our resources for the greater good.

Into The White opened in Norway, New Zealand, Sweden and Spain last summer, and in England in late September. The British reviewers gave it a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 50%. I’ve read six or seven reviews thus far and while it appears that the film isn’t a work of towering originality or mythical greatness, it’s still something I want to see.