Day: August 26, 2013

It’s conceivable that three 2013 films about the African-American experience in this country will snag a Best Picture nomination — Steve McQueen‘s 12 Years A Slave (which runs 134 minutes), Lee Daniels‘ The Butler (technically known as Lee Daniels’ The Butler) and Ryan Coogler‘s Fruitvale Station. But it’s more likely that only one will really compete. Because there’s an assumption out there, possibly influenced by a benignly racist mindset, that only one black film can be nominated for Best Picture and that if all three push hard they could end up cannibalizing each other.

Maybe it’s not such a racist thing. If there were three big-scale superhero films opening this year that were thought to be as good (or almost as good) as The Dark Knight, only one would make any headway as a Best Picture contender…right? (People would say, “Oh, come on…we can’t have two superhero movies competing for Best Picture…please!”) Same thing if there were three first-rate dramedies about women involved in tough competitive urban careers — only one would be singled out for possible Best Picture consideration. And so on.

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My final predictions for the lineup at the 2013 Telluride Film Festival, which won’t be revealed until Thursday (or will it be Wednesday?), are the same that everyone else is kicking around: Joel and Ethan Coen‘s Inside Llewyn Davis, J.C. Chandor‘s All Is Lost, Alfonso Curaron‘s Gravity, Alexander Payne‘s Nebraska, Ralph Fiennes‘ The Invisible Woman, Steve McQueen‘s 12 Years A Slave, Abdellatif Kechiche‘s Blue Is The Warmest Color, Jason Reitman‘s Labor Day…what else?

The Telluride departure countdown (40 hours to go) is intensified by the fact that I’m still in Santa Barbara as we speak. I won’t be back in LA until the early afternoon. I’m starting to grind away at the enamel on my teeth.

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I’ve said two or three times before that any action- or FX-driven thriller using an overhead shot of the lead protagonists (i.e., characters who probably won’t die) jumping off the top of a building or out of a high window almost certainly sucks. It means that the director is either too stupid to realize what a whorey visual cliche this is (skyscraper-jumping first appeared 25 years ago in Tim Burton‘s Batman) or he/she doesn’t give a shit. I’m not exaggerating — a jumping or falling scene in the year 2013 really is a mark of mediocrity. So you can probably rely on Neil Burger‘s Divergent (Summit, 3.21.14) sucking eggs to some extent.

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I was thinking this morning about the influence of the late Elmore Leonard, particularly the way the late crime novelist would occasionally put the article or main object at the end of a sentence. Which seemed odd to English composition teachers and…well, to me also, at first, but then I got used to it. And then it seemed a little odd when dialogue didn’t do that.

I’m mentioning this because it was almost exactly a year ago (i.e., at the 2012 Toronto Film Festival) when I noticed an Elmore sentence in Silver Linings Playbook.

Neurotic dad Robert De Niro is pleading with local cop Dash Mihok to not escort manic-eccentric Chris Tucker “back to Baltimore” until the Eagles game is over. “What’s the problem?,” De Niro says, clutching his green Eagles handkerchief. “He’s not goin’ anywhere. Just let him finish the game, that’s all. The handkerchief is working. We’re killing the Seahawks, twenty-seven-ten. What’s the matter with you? Let him stay, please!” And Mihok says, “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, ‘the handkerchief’. And I’m glad that the Seahawks are losing and we’re winning, but I gotta take Danny McDaniels back to Baltimore, alright? He can contest his case from Baltimore.”

I believe that without Elmore Leonard, Mihok would have used a more conventional sentence structure and said “I don’t know what your handkerchief has to do with it” or “What do you mean ‘handkerchief?'” or something along those lines. Screenwriter David O. Russell would not have put the article at the end — “I don’t know what you’re talking about, ‘the handkerchief.'” Just saying.

The responses to this riff, I realize, will have nothing to do with Leonard and everything to do with how much this or that pisshead hates Silver Linings Playbook. But that rant is history now. It was a peculiar thing to feel or say in the first place. SLP was and is brilliant. It resonated all over the place with sophistos and Average Joes alike, and it made $132 million theatrically — fuck-you money as far as the naysayers are concerned. It should have won the Best Picture Oscar, and it would have if hadn’t been for the votes taken away by the respectable but tedious Lincoln.