I was going to run this story as an HE stand-alone but Franklinavenue and Slashfilm‘s Germain Lussier beat me to it. In new TV spots Weinstein Co. marketers are claiming that August: Osage County and Philomena are the “winner[s]” of some significant Golden Globe nominations. There are all kinds of flattering ways you can legitimately describe the honor of having been nominated by the HFPA. But you really can’t say that a film has won a nomination. That’s not stretching the truth — that’s a three-card-monte flim-flam. By Weinstein Co. standards if you’re chatting up a really hot lady in a nice bar in the Flatiron district, it’s the same as…well, not the same as going home with her and having mad acrobatic sex for four or five hours, but pretty much the same as making out with her in the back seat of a cab. Or something like that. Being nominated means you’re just talking to her at the bar, period. Okay, maybe she likes you and maybe she’s on her third drink, but it’s just talk.
Day: December 23, 2013
Standing By Original Gravity Review
A boilerplate riff from Deadline‘s Pete Hammond about the Oscar worthiness of Alfonso Cuaron‘s Gravity was posted this afternoon. It includes a new video piece about the merits of the screenplay by Cuaron and his son Jonas (below). It’s a nicely composed look at the year’s mostly visually astounding and innovative film, and I want to once again emphasize my absolute respect and admiration for the brilliant technical craft that went into this $80 million survival flick. But the Hammond piece led me back to my original Telluride review (“Spectacular, Eye-Popping Gravity Could Be Deeper“), and I really do think my reactions were solid and straight and fairly dead-on.
Alfonso Cuaron‘s Gravity “is the most visually sophisticated, super-immersive weightless thrill-ride flick I’ve ever seen. If Stanley Kubrick had been there last night he would freely admit that 2001: A Space Odyssey is no longer the ultimate, adult-angled, real-tech depiction of what it looks and feels like to orbit the earth. Nifty and super-cool from a pure-eyeball perspective, Gravity is certainly the most essential theatrical experience since Avatar. You can’t watch a top-dollar 3D super-flick of this type on anything other than a monster-sized IMAX screen.
White Man’s Burden
As reported by Buzzfeed, the Rome-based marketing outfit Fanatical About Cinema has created some posters for the February release of 12 Years A Slave in Italy. The campaign could be called one of two things: (a) “Chiwetel who?” or (b) “Ragazzi bianchi l’avevano duro durante la schiavitu troppo” (i.e. “White guys had it tough during slavery too”). Clearly Fanatical About Cinema was instructed by BIM Distribuzione, the film’s local distributor, to try and reach Italians who occasionally use the term “mulignan.” What kind of hip ad agency would create this kind of poster for a film like 12 Years A Slave? English translation: “You put-ah Brad and Michael upfront or we hire someone else…kapeesh?”
Oh, and By The Way…?
In his story about Hope Holiday’s outburst, TheWrap‘s Steve Pond says he spoke to Wolf of Wall Street director Martin Scorsese last Friday, and that Scorsese said the following: “[Wolf] is brutal. I’ve seen it with audiences, and I think it plays. I don’t know if it will be to everyone’s taste — I don’t think it will. It’s not made for 14 year olds.” HE correction: Wolf is not brutal for cineastes with any kind of social perspective and spirit in their souls — it’s a huge orgiastic turn-on that all but blows you away. And the film will totally whup ass with 14 year-olds, with all teenagers. It’s just not working with the scolds and the harumphs and the old farts — that’s it, that’s the whole contingent. Oh, and it’s not working for New York‘s David Edelstein. I’m not going to speculate about Edelstein being some kind of scold in terms of personal mores and temperament, and never having gone bonkers with coke or quaaludes in his 20s. He just didn’t find it worthy, is all. That’s allowed. To each his own.
Holiday vs. Scorsese
Every film buff on the planet knows Hope Holiday, a 75 year-old actress whose career peaked 53 years ago. But it was a helluva peak. She played Mrs. Margie McDougal, a lonely lady with a squeaky, spunky voice whom Jack Lemmon‘s C.C. Baxter meets in an Upper West Side bar in Billy Wilder‘s The Apartment (’60). She and Baxter speak about loneliness on Christmas Eve (“‘Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house, not a creature was stirrin’…nothin’…no action!”), and about her husband (“Looks like a little chihuahua”) doing time in a Cuban prison. They close the place down and retire to Baxter’s apartment. Baxter finds Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine) passed out on his bed from an overdose of sleeping pills, and promptly kicks Margie out. “Some sexpot!,” she brays as Baxter slams the door.
(l.) Hope Holiday as Mrs. Margie McDougal, (r.) Jack Lemmon as C.C. Baxter in Billy Wilder’s The Apartment (’60).
Anyway, Mrs. McDougal has stormed back into the world of show business with a Sunday morning Facebook post that attacks The Wolf of Wall Street, which she’d seen the night before. “Three hours of torture,” she calls it. “Same disgusting crap over and over again. After the film they had a discussion which a lot of us did not stay for. The elevator doors opened and Leonardo [DiCaprio], Martin [Scorsese] and a few others got out. [And] then a screenwriter ran over to them and started screaming “shame on you…disgusting.”