Month: February 2013

Just after the February 2nd Jennifer Lawrence tribute at the Santa Barbra Film Festival, I asked if I could show the tribute reel. It was sent to me yesterday, but when I uploaded it to YouTube the embed code was disabled due to some petty copyright bullshit. I’m uploading it to Vimeo as we speak (who knows if the Vimeo embed codes will be blocked also?) but in the meantime here’s a YouTube link.

And here’s an excerpt from remarks spoken on 2.2 by Santa Barbara Film Festival director Roger Durling:

“Lawrence’s performance as Tiffany, the grieving young widow who befriends, falls for and helps to save Bradley Cooper‘s Pat, is about a million miles away from her turn in The Hunger Games, delivering a deft comic side and a romantic longing flecked with electric energy. She’s a feisty force of nature recalling Cher in Moonstruck in 1987. Like Carole Lombardin My Man Godfrey in 1936, and the way Diane Keaton fleshed out Annie Hall in 1977. Like Barbara Stanwyck in The Lady Eve in 1938, and Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night in 1934.

“But Tiffany is totally contemporary, totally new. She’s flawed and damaged. She’s made mistakes — and continues to make mistakes. But she’s made peace with her
imperfections and tries to persuade Cooper’s bipolar protagonist to do the same.

“Before Silver Linings Playbook Lawrence had done fiery, intense performances; with Silver Linings Playbook Lawrence delivers a fiery, intense, movie-star performance. She dominates the proceedings without artifice or hammy overacting. She is the first breath of fresh air to be breathed into the motion picture industry in a very very long time.”

The Lawrence tribute reel was assembled by Durling and Dana Morrow.

If Andrew O’Hehir wanted to have some kind of impact on the Best Picture race, why didn’t he post this even-tempered but fairly damning Salon article — “Why Argo Doesn’t Deserve The Oscar” — back in mid or late January instead of today? Because baby, it’s all over now.

Excerpt: “The Americans never resisted the idea of playing a film crew, which is the source of much agitation in the movie. (In fact, the ‘house guests’ chose that cover story themselves, from a group of three options the CIA had prepared.) They were not almost lynched by a mob of crazy Iranians in Tehran’s Grand Bazaar, because they never went there. There was no last-minute cancellation, and then un-cancellation, of the group’s tickets by the Carter administration. (The wife of Canadian ambassador Ken Taylor had personally gone to the airport and purchased tickets ahead of time, for three different outbound flights.) The group underwent no interrogation at the airport about their imaginary movie, nor were they detained at the gate while a member of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard telephoned their phony office back in Burbank. There was no last-second chase on the runway of Mehrabad Airport, with wild-eyed, bearded militants with Kalashnikovs trying to shoot out the tires of a Swissair jet.

“All that is supposed to be dramatic license, ‘just a movie,’ ‘based on a true story’ vs. actually attempting to tell the truth. I get it. But I’m less concerned with the veracity of individual details than with the fact that Argo uses its basis in history and its mode of detailed realism to create something that is entirely mythological.

“It’s a totalizing fiction whose turning points are narrow escapes and individual derring-do designed to foreground Affleck and his star power (instead of the long, grinding work of Canadian-American collaboration behind the scenes that made the real rescue possible), an adventure yarn whose twists raise your pulse rate but keep the happy ending clearly in view. It turns a fascinating and complicated true story into a trite cavalcade of action-movie clichés and expository dialogue, leaving us with an image of the stoical American hero (or the Mexican-American hero played by a white guy, anyway) framed in a doorway with a blonde in his arms and the flag flapping behind him. I’m not being metaphorical, by the way; that’s the final shot of Mendez’s homecoming scene.”

Drew Barrymore is converting to Judaism and having her tattoos removed. But even after she’s taken the Torah classes and gone through all the rituals and ceremonies and starts in with the lox and bagels and onions and Mott’s apple juice, she won’t be that much more Jewish than yours truly.

I’m serious. You can say (and you wouldn’t be technically wrong) that being Jewish is a matter of blood and to some degree conviction, but I feel it’s also a matter of personality — how you think, act and behave. Because that’s where I come in.

I sincerely believe that I am, in a sense, “a member of the tribe.” I’m a near-Jew in that I come from an English-mixed-with-German family but I possess most of the standard urban Jewish-male traits — angst, edge, a rat-a-tat mind, guilt, self-doubt, a penchant for dark humor, a glum world view, occasionally combative, a complainer who’s occasionally compulsive. Back in the late ’70s two Jewish pals told me I had as much Jewish guilt as they did if not more so. I have rarely felt so honored, and I have tried to live up to this ever since.

From the mind of Jamie Stuart, the short-video essayist and poet who made that “Man in a Blizzard” short about the 2010 New York blizzard.

There has to be at least a short list of films that have great-sounding titles but are close to unwatchable. Such is In Like Flint, the 1967 James Coburn espionage spoof and sequel to Our Man Flint (’66). I can think of only two others: Things To Do In Denver When You;re Dead and Midnight in the Garden of Evil.

All ’60s spy spoofs suck horribly — the Flint films, Dean Martin‘s Matt Helm films, Get Smart, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Casino Royale (’67), the James Bond take-off with David Niven, Peter Sellers, Woody Allen, etc.

In Like Flynt is a derivation of “In Like Flynn,”a 1940s slang term. The Wiki page says it means “having completed a goal or gained access as desired,” and that it’s “sometimes used to describe success in sexual seduction.”

Expanded: “The term is often believed to refer to movie star Errol Flynn. Flynn had a reputation for womanizing, consumption of alcohol and brawling. His freewheeling, hedonistic lifestyle caught up with him in November 1942 when two under-age girls, Betty Hansen and Peggy Satterlee, accused him of statutory rape. The trial took place in January and February 1943, and Flynn was cleared of the charges.

“According to etymologist Michael Quinion, the incident served to increase Flynn’s reputation as a hound, which led to the popular phrase ‘in like Flynn.’ Columnist Cecil Adams also examined the term’s origins and its relationship to Flynn. Many early sources attesting the phrase say it emerged as war slang during World War II.

That’s really terrific about Mindy McCready killing her late boyfriend David Wilson‘s dog before offing herself. McCready to pooch: “Ahh luv you, doggie, but I gotta die so I can join my fella and that means you gotta go too, poor fella. Yeah, sorry, I know…but it’ll be quick, I promise.”

The last dog I read about being killed due to its owner committing (or intending to commit) suicide was Blondi, Adolf Hitler‘s German Shepherd who was poisoned before Der Fuhrer and Eva Braun took cyanide. That’s nice company to be in, Mindy, if you’re reading this from purgatory.

Depression is an ugly bear that can take you straight to hell, all right, but some people greatly increase the likelihood of suicide by boozing heavily and keeping guns handy. That’s what McCready and Wilson (who also shot himself) did. Otherwise I’m sure they were fine, fine people.

In shooting herself McCready abandoned two sons — 6-year-old Zander and 10-month-old Zayne.

My only beef with these obviously sophisticated guys, who know their stuff cold, is that they’re hung up on films that walk, talk, look and act “serious” and “important.” And so they blow off Silver Linings Playbook, a film about Regular Joes that gets the whole “steaks, salads, cocktails” thing in 24-hour diners. And they also ignored Anna Karenina…not cool. Otherwise they have my respect. Sharp, intelligent analysis.

Oscar-predicting Harvard whiz kid Ben Zauzmer, who got 75% of his predictions correct last year, doesn’t give a hoot in hell for all this Emmanuelle Riva talk. He’s sticking with Jennifer Lawrence for Best Actress. He’s also predicting (a) Argo for Best Picture, Daniel Day Lewis for Best Actor, Tommy Lee Jones for Best Supporting Acto, and Anne Hathaway for Best Supporting Actress. Bens’ twitter handle is BensOscarMath.

Mark Caro‘s Os-Caro Quiz has been kicking Oscar buffs’ asses for 23 years. I went through it and was irked by all the research I had to do . I like movie quizzes that make me feel like I know everything. This made me feel like I don’t know enough. It vaguely depressed me but not really.

Scott Feinberg‘s Hollywood Reporter interview with Best Actress nominee Emmanuelle Riva has prompted a fresh assessment. I’m as moved by her acting in Amour as the next guy and I respect her body of work. I’ve always felt mesmerized by her erotic aura in Alain Resnais‘s Hiroshima Mon Amour, and I love the idea of an 85 year-old trooper not only being nominated but being spoken of as a possible winner. That, at least, would be a surprise in a ceremony that seems all too predictable right now.

But someone has to speak candidly about Riva’s acting in Amour. She gives a fine, unvarnished, honest-feeling performance, but what is it really? She’s playing a woman of her age going through — sadly, infuriatingly — what almost every 80-something or 90-something person goes through, and therefore in a certain sense she’s just skillfully and honestly delivering what she knows. Which is a bold and true thing. I just don’t find it levitational. To me her performance is a 7.5 or an 8.

What her character, Anne, goes through in Amour naturally invites profound sympathy (we all feel for our parents and grandparents going through similar trials) but Riva’s task is basically about conveying resignation and melancholia and, toward the end, pain, anger, humiliation and resolve.

Boil it down and praise for her performance is essentially a response to the fact that we all personally relate in this or that way, and the likely fact that Riva clearly knows whereof she acts and may quite possibly “be” Anne in this or that respect. (Though I hope not too much.)

I’m not trying to diminish her performance. It’s quite strong and impossible to dismiss. I’m just assessing it from a realistic perspective.

My somewhat hazy recollection of Howard Zieff‘s Hearts of the West (’75) is that (a) it was overly broad, obviously an attempt to engage the rubes, (b) its reliance on crude, on-the-nose behavior diminished the realism and dignity of the characters, and (c) I didn’t believe for one second that Jeff Bridges was any kind of writer — he struck me as an actor with insufficient verbal skills and not much education.

I’m mentioning this because Hearts of the West is playing at a currently running Film Comment film series, which is profiled in a 2.17 piece by N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis.