Day: December 28, 2013

If I were an Academy member and filling out my nomination ballot this weekend, as I presume hundreds are right now, I would go with The Wolf of Wall Street, 12 Years A Slave, Inside Llewyn Davis, Her, Dallas Buyer’s Club, American Hustle, Gravity, Nebraska, Captain Phillips and Before Midnight in my top Best Picture slots, in that order.

I hope it’s understood that any rationale or pretense for even half-respecting the Academy’s tastes will be null and void if voters don’t at least nominate Wolf for Best Picture. I know it can’t and won’t win, but Academy members will look like absolute fools (to history if not to the present-tense community) if they ignore it altogether. It’s the only world-class nitroglycerine movie out there, not to mention the only one that’s saying anything important in an immediate social-calamity sense.

WoWS is not about the big Wall Street players and the schemes that all but levelled the U.S. economy in 2008, but it’s certainly about American morals and values as they presently exist among the under-40 go-getters, and about a manifestation of the biggest social cancer afflicting this country today — the concentration of 1% wealth and general income inequality.

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I was beaten up pretty badly on Twitter yesterday, but mainly because a lot of people out there assume that anyone using the term “ape” is throwing a racial slur. I never even glanced at that allusion. I’m so far away from that pathetic mindset that it doesn’t exist in my head, although I recognize it’s a sore point with others. So I guess I’m apologizing but on some level it almost feels chickenshit to do so. The allusion in question is so Jim Crow, so foul, so Duck Dynasty — why even acknowledge it? Why live in the primordial past by admitting that the association means something or matters to anyone with a brain?

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Yesterday I spoke to Morgan Neville, the veteran documentarian who’s been riding the high of a lifetime since 20 Feet From Stardom ignited 11 months ago at the Sundance Film Festival. A bliss-out by any yardstick, 20 Feet is now one of the 15 shortlisted docs that may become a finalist at the 2014 Oscars. Partly or largely because it reflects Morgan’s music-industry fervor and his amiable alpha-guy vibe. Conversationally he’s cool and down-to-it. We covered the usual bases, had a nice easy chat.

Dana Williams (I think), Judith Hill, Tata Vega, Merry Clayton, Morgan Neville at last January’s Sundance Film Festival.

The most important thing to get about 20 Feet From Stardom is that it’s not just a film about backup singers Darlene Love, Lisa Fischer, Merry Clayton, Judith Hill, Claudia Lennear and Tata Vega. It’s a story about dealing with the frustration of not being fully heard, of not quite reaching your goals, of having to grim up and persevere for decades until it finally happens. The “it”, semi-ironically, is Neville’s film. The acclaim for 20 Feet plus the Oscar attention has put these ladies — all back-up singers in a sense — over in a big way.

Proof will come on New Year’s Day when the best-known of the four — Love, Clayton, Hill and Fischer — sing “The Star Spangled Banner” before the big game between….hold on…need a second…between the Stanford Cardinals and Michigan State Spartans. If this doesn’t rouse slumbering Academy members who still haven’t popped in the 20 Feet screener then I don’t know what.

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There are 50-plus songs here in The Wolf of Wall Street but the soundtrack album has only 16 tracks. And the song that pops through the most, the one I was humming after I saw it the first time, is Jimmy Castor‘s “Hey, Leroy, Your Mama’s Callin’ You.” It’s on Track #10. Fun, cool, danceable…a spry cousin of “El Watusi.”

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Yesterday the first photo from David Fincher‘s Gone Girl, an adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s psychological thriller about an apparently sociopathic husband (Ben Affleck) who has issues with his wife (Rosamund Pike), was posted on 20th Century Fox’s Twitter page. Pic has been rolling in California and Missouri (Cape Girardeau is one location) since last month. Tyler Perry, Neil Patrick Harris, Missi Pyle, Patrick Fugit, Casey Wilson and Emily Ratajkowski costarring. “Gillian adapted it and I think it’s very, very faithful to her book,” Affleck told EW‘s Jeff Lebrecque last month. “If you read the book and liked it, you will definitely like the movie.” (Flynn is a former EW writer.) Fox will open it on 10.3.14.

Affleck is just doing the scene and no biggie, but the 60ish couple (apparently the parents of Rosamund Pike’s character) are noticably “acting.” The husband’s left hand on his wife’s left arm conveying concern, alarm. I don’t like that shit. Don’t “act” — behave.

“Saving Mr. Banks is produced by Disney, and stars Tom freaking Hanks as Walt himself. Of course Disney — the man and the corporation — will prevail! But it could have been a fairer fight in the movie, and what was presented as a joyless, loveless pedant finally giving herself over to the delight and imagination of the Wonderful World of Disney could just as easily been presented as a creative, passionate person, with dignity and real emotions, getting steamrolled by one of the most powerful companies in the world. Chim-chim-cheroo.” — Final graph from Margaret Lyons’ 12.27 Vulture piece about how the reputation of a very interesting woman has been more or less slandered.

The harumphs and none-too-brights who either missed or dismissed the metaphorical/satirical import of The Wolf of Wall Street this week should look to their 18th Century predecessors, writes HE correspondent Dave DuBos. In 1729 Jonathan Swift anonymously published a satirical essay titled “A Modest Proposal.” The piece suggested that poor Irish citizens might ease their economic despair by selling their children as food for rich gentlemen and ladies. DeBos is suggesting that WoWS dissers are “direct descendants of those clueless fools in 1729 England who responded by saying ‘surely Mr Swift does not mean for us to eat the children of the poor!'” Satire now, as then, is for the few who get it.