Day: February 17, 2013

Mark Boal‘s Zero Dark Thirty screenplay has won the Writers Guild of America’s award for Best Original Screenplay. This may or may not have been intended as a rebuke to the Stalinists who tried to take ZD30 down with charges that Boal and Kathryn Bigelow‘s film endorses torture, but it feels like one from this corner. This is the kind of recognition that this film needed and richly deserved. Congrats to Biggy-Boal, Megan Ellison and everyone else who gave their all to this film. Presumably this paves the way for a Best Original Screenplay Oscar win.

Earlier: Chris Terrio‘s Argo screenplay won the WGA’s Best Adapted Screenplay award. Jesus, this is boring. In the wake of this Bilge Ebiri tweeted the following: “Congrats, Hollywood award-givers. In a year with so many amazing films, you’ve managed to form a consensus around the merely okay yet again.” Kris Tapley replies: “It’s so silly to expect otherwise. ‘Generally agreeable’ wins in a competition where so many are polled.”

On 11.15.12, The Independent‘s Anthony Quinn wrote the following: “A film called Amour sounds like a date movie, and I suppose Michael Haneke‘s drama could be one — but only if it were your very last date on earth.” After Sasha Stone told him that Amour was her idea of a date movie, Jett took his girlfriend, Caitlin, to see it. You can imagine the effect it had.
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I have three…no, four responses to “The Feel of the Year,” Jon Weisman‘s 2.15 Variety piece about the Oscar-season obsessions of myself and Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone.

One, thanks to Weisman for the attention. He describes me as an impassioned neurotic, but it’s nice to be described.

Two, he’s sidestepping a fundamental fact, which is that I file five or six times daily — riffs, rants, reviews (original or counter-punch), personal-foible pieces, photos, nostalgia, Bluray or DVD reviews, aspect-ratio and grainstorm commentary. This is part literary composition, part copy-spitball-and-reshuffle, and part jazz. I go with whatever’s happening at the moment, which often includes whatever’s been posted that particular day or whatever has ignited in my head. I obviously don’t want to bore anyone, but if I were to stop and say “wait, hold on…didn’t I post something vaguely similar to this six or 20 days ago?,” the process would grind to a halt. It’s all part of the stream. In this sense nothing is “fresh” and yet everything is. If you meet a friend at a local diner for breakfast every Friday morning, 52 weeks a year, he/she is going to say familiar things, over and over. You’re going to get used to their patter. Now, imagine if you had breakfast with this person every damn morning.

Three, Weisman says I’ve written that “there’s something wrong with you if you don’t share [my] view on a given film. At Hollywood Elsewhere, it never seemed possible to simply like Silver Linings, as I did — if you didn’t love it, you might as well have hated it. If you found elements too expository or the ending to be too tidy or what have you — if you didn’t think it was the absolute best — you not only were anti-cinema, you were life-challenged.” If I’ve conveyed this, I apologize for throwing too many logs in the fire. I have never asserted the absurd view that people have to feel exactly the same way about SLP as myself. Because it’s not people who disagree with me that I’ve taken to task. It’s the outright haters who’ve sought to dismiss SLP as romcom fluff or an outright failure — ludicrous. Haters are not figments of my imagination. It’s also that I tell myself that I have a modest ability to peer into the hidden emotional folds and psychological fissures of certain commenters, and from this I can sense when their judgments are impulsive, slapdash and/or less than fully considered. Do I make mistakes or overplay my hand from time to time? Yeah. But I trust my instincts.

Fourth and finally, Weisman writes that “the cumulative effect of the writing of Stone and Wells gives the impression that they believe there’s an objective leader in a subjective field — even beyond what the 6,000 members of the Academy come to decide. Ultimately, that nagged me.” He’s right in one sense and I take his criticism as valid…as far as it goes. Everything is subjective. Nonetheless, I can hear a certain ringing of a bell when a movie is really doing it right in a classic or eternal way. I’ve heard it over decades, and I’ve come to trust that sound. In other words, I’m saying that I hear movie “voices” in a non-religious, non-denominational Joan of Arc sense. Go ahead and make fun, but I believe in those omens and signals.

The Lincoln accuracy issue about Connecticut’s 13th Amendment voting was first raised by Connecticut Rep. Joe Courtney on Tuesday, 2.5. I ran my first riff on 2.6 and summarized Lincoln screenwriter Tony Kushner‘s response on Friday, 2.8. Today N.Y. Times columnist Maureen Dowd threw in her two cents, and she’s pretty much in Courtney’s corner.

She also includes an account of the script-editing process in which Kushner says — naturally, no surprise — that it was Spielberg who decided to “leave the scene [in which two Connecticut reps vote nay on the 13th Amendment] unchanged.” And she quotes Kushner as saying that the Connecticut mistake won’t be corrected on the Lincoln Bluray/DVD. Don’t like it? Tough.

A key concern of Spielberg and Kushner was to convey that the vote for the 13th Amendment, which happened in the House of Representatives chamber on January 31, 1865, was a very close one. A nail-biter. And yet, As Dowd reminds, history “shows that the first two votes cast were ‘Nays’ by Democratic congressmen from Illinois, Lincoln’s own state. Wasn’t that enough to show the tension?”

“Harold Holzer, a Lincoln historian attached to the film, pointed out the mistake to Spielberg and Kushner, telling them that voting in those days was done alphabetically by lawmaker.

“But Kushner said the director left the scene unchanged because it gave the audience ‘place holders,’ and it was ‘a rhythmic device‘ that was easier to follow than ‘a sea of names.’ They gave fake names to the Connecticut legislators, who were, he said, ‘not significant players.’

“Yet The Wall Street Journal noted, ‘The actual Connecticut representatives at the time braved political attacks and personal hardships to support the 13th Amendment.” One, the New London Republican Augustus Brandegee, was a respected abolitionist and a friend of Lincoln. The other, the New Haven Democrat James English, considered slavery ‘a monstrous injustice’ and left his ill wife to vote. When he said ‘Aye,’ applause began and the tide turned.

“I’m a princess-and-the-pea on this issue,” Dowd writes, “but I think Spielberg should refilm the scene or dub in ‘Illinois’ for ‘Connecticut’ before he sends out his DVDs and leaves students everywhere thinking the Nutmeg State is nutty.

“Kushner says that won’t happen, because this is a ‘made-up issue’ and a matter of ‘principle.’ But as Congressman Courtney notes: ‘It was Lincoln who said [that] truth is generally the best vindication against slander.'”