Month: September 2013

You could say that Alex Gibney‘s The Armstrong Lie (Sony Classics, 11.8), which I saw a good portion of last night at Sony Studios, is only nominally about the ethical outing of Lance Armstrong, the competitive cycling superstar who won the Tour de France seven times (between 1999 and 2005) only to be stripped of his titles in 2012 for doping and thereby exposed as an opportunistic liar. The film is really about the worldwide belief system known as moral relativism, which basically says “it’s not cool to lie or cut corners or cheat or steal, but if you do these things…uhhm, well, you wouldn’t be the first and…uhhm, if they come after you it’s probably better to deny, deny and double-deny and give them no quarter until there’s absolutely no viable option other than to come clean. And you can even grow that into a plus if you play your cards right and wear the right attitude (i.e., I was blind but now I can see).”

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When Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels costarred in the Farrelly Brothers’ Dumb and Dumber (’94) they were roughly 32 and 39 years old, respectively. Obviously not spring chickens but relatively buoyant, fresh-faced, elastic of bod. Now they’re costarring in the Farrelly’s Dumb and Dumber To, which I suspect will be funny and inventive (I was a fan of the Farrelly’s Three Stooges flick), but now we’re talking about a 51 year-old and a 58 year-old playing the same characters. Dumbasses in their 30s vs. dumbasses in their 50s are different equations. You’re supposed to mellow down and gather a little wisdom out as you get older. You can fall into dumb-shit situations when you’re youngish but guys with creases on their faces are supposed to be craftier and less susceptible.

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The following was posted on Facebook by The Canyons director Paul Schrader this morning, roughly five or six hours ago or around 7 am. In the lead-up to The Canyons Lohan had a chance to present a composed, sober-seeming version of herself but she (a) bailed on the Venice Film Festival, (b) never showed for ad photo sessions, and (c) blew off New Yorker critic Richard Brody as well as Film Comment, which had pledged to run a cover story on her? What is her basic malfunction?

Every time I come back to Los Angeles I miss that Manhattan-centric, delightfully comprehensive Harvey Karten email that lists all of the screenings happening over a three-week period. (Karten founded the Online Film Critics Society and the New York Film Critics Online.) It doesn’t contain every last screening but it has a large portion of them, and it’s certainly something to work from as you put your week together. Why doesn’t some LAFCA person in Los Angeles provide the same service? I don’t like having to scramble around and sift through e-mails and sometimes pester friends to see what’s doing. A decade or so ago somebody used to run a priveleged-access website that had all the LA screenings — disappeared five or six years ago.

Backyard of a comfortable Los Angeles home in Hancock Park — Wednesday, 9.25, 9:05 am.

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Oliver Hirschbiegel‘s Diana, which opened in Britain a few days ago and which eOne is releasing stateside sometime this fall, has a 3% positive Rotten Tomatoes rating. Face it — it’s a train wreck. And a major career pothole for Naomi Watts (who plays Diana Princess of Wales). How can Hirschbiegel make a film as masterful as Downfall and then follow it up with a couple of moderate mehs (2007’s The Invasion and ’09’s Five Minutes of Heaven) and then an out-and-out stinker like Diana? How do you un-learn how to make a film fit together just so and make it hit the mark?

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A story posted late yesterday afternoon (9.24) by The Hollywood Reporter‘s Pamela McLintock says that Martin Scorsese‘s The Wolf of Wall Street won’t be ready for a sneak screening at the upcoming New York Film Festival.” That’s the breakout news. Otherwise McLintock confirms what Kris Tapley‘s 9.23 In Contention piece suggested, which is that Wolf, currently clocking at 180 minutes, may not be ready for its scheduled 11.15 release and may not be a contender in this year’s Oscar race. So it’ll be a December release then? Again, for God’s sake…show respect for Scorsese and release the long version (three hours sounds great!) and let Wolf be its own sprawling unruly self, if that’s a fair term to apply. “Paramount and Scorsese are hoping that the movie, based on former broker Jordan Belfort‘s best-selling memoir, will be completed by Christmas in time for an awards run,” McLintock writes. “If not, Wolf would be pushed back to next year.” No!!!

To hear it from Variety‘s Andrew Barker, Brad Furman‘s not-so-great Runner Runner (20th Century Fox, 10.4) might be worth seeing for Ben Affleck‘s performance as “a deliciously despicable douchebag.” Excerpt: “In spite of the mostly undeserved flack he gets for his acting chops, it’s hard to think of a better thesp than Affleck to play [the role of online-poker magnate Ivan Block], and his performance here ranks alongside Boiler Room and Mallrats in that regard. At times one detects a certain eye-rolling impatience with the material as he races distractedly through a few of his master-of-the-universe monologues, yet that’s precisely what the character requires, and Runner Runner‘s appeal increases dramatically whenever Affleck enters the frame.”

It’s not just the straight-up blend of brute gangster melodrama and slapstick comedy, but the masterful cutting by Sidney Wolinsky, one of the show’s three editors, under the supervision of Sopranos creator David Chase. The kids, “Bye-bye!,” the wheel, the bystanders, the sound of the skull cracking and squishing. Hilarious and yet dramatically satisfying. Hall of fame.

Dave “weather vane” Karger, the Fandango smoothie whose Oscar predictions always seem to reflect the Academy’s lowest-common-denominator sentiments, isn’t going with The Butler‘s Oprah Winfrey as the most likely Best Supporting Actress winner. He’s instead picking 12 Years A Slave‘s Lupita N’yongo to take the prize. For a guy who always defaults to the soft center and almost never stands alone, this is a significant bellwether. Karger, in fact, is predicting a 12 Years a Slave sweep — Best Picture, Best Director (Steve McQueen), Best Actor (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and Best Adapted Screenplay (John Ridley). He’s going with Blue Jasmine‘s Cate Blanchett for Best Actress, of course. Karger also has All Is Lost‘s Robert Redford listed as his second-most-favored Best Actor contender.

“My own wish, for whatever it’s worth, is that Louis B. Mayer, the Brothers Warner, Harry Cohn, Adolph Zukor and the others had puffed their chests and said the following in the thirties: ‘To hell with Gyssling and his threats. To hell with the anti-Semitic bastards in the country who want to see us drown. To hell with the Anti-Defamation League, which is telling us we can’t do anti-Nazi pictures or pictures with Jews in them because it would call attention to ourselves. We built a magnificent entertainment business, and we’re going to make the pictures we want to make.” But they didn’t say that. They negotiated, they evaded, they censored their creative people, they hid, they schemed to preserve their business in the future. They behaved cravenly. But they did not collaborate.” — David Denby in a 9.23 New Yorker piece that harshly criticizes Ben Urwand‘s “The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact With Hitler.”

Roman Polanski‘s Venus in Fur was the final competition film I saw at last May’s Cannes Film Festival. Spoken in French, it’s a one-set, two-character piece (set inside a smallish theatre in Paris during an evening rainstorm) that began as an English-language play by David Ives. It was re-written by Ives and Polanski for the screen. It seems to mirror on some level the relationship between Polanski and his wife Emmanuelle Seigner, who costars along with Mathieu Almaric, who portrays the Polanski stand-in, a stage director, and who vaguely resembles the younger Polanski of the ’80s. Other than that it’s…well, I don’t want to abruptly dismiss any work by a great filmmaker but it really does feel like a minor work in a minor and restrictive key. Seigner delivers a snappy, saucy, highly-charged performance — I’ll give her that.

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“And somewhere, sometime, you should try to catch Pawel Pawlikowski‘s Ida, the Polish film that was in Telluride and Toronto,” a colleague writes. “Black-and-white, 1.37 Academy ratio — looks like a Dreyer film shot in 1962 Poland. Alexander Payne was the first to rave about it in Telluride. Directed by the guy who made My Summer of Love with a ripe Emily Blunt a decade or so back.” Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu told me to see Ida in Telluride and what did I do? I missed it. Hollywood Reporter critic Todd McCarthy raved about it in Toronto. Peter Debruge‘s Telluride review in Variety called it “a joyless art film.”