Year: 2013

The great classical pianist Van Cliburn has passed at age 78. The man had a cavernous soul and miraculous fingers. He had a distinguished and fulfilling run, peaking at age 23 when he won a Tchaikovsky competition in Moscow and soon after landing on the cover of Time magazine on 5.19.58. So he peaked 55 years ago but at least he peaked. Very few of us get to the stand on top of the highest mountain.

From Joe Leydon‘s Moving Picture Blog: “I met the late, great Van Cliburn only once, decades ago, during my days at The Shreveport Times, when the famed pianist returned to his hometown to perform with local symphony. (Sorry, Time: He really was a Louisiana native.)

“But he told me something during our brief interview that has always stuck in my mind: ‘If I have talent,” he said, ‘it’s a gift from God. But if I have a career, it’s a gift from the audience. Because they don’t have to come see me, or buy my records.'”
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I for one am totally past the traumatic 2012 Oscar battles and into the present, but to hear it from TheWrap‘s Steve Pond, the year-long “season” was interesting and certainly change-ridden at times, but altogether civil and mild-mannered. The Best Picture race was described six days ago by Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone in much more dramatic terms. She and Pond experienced the same basic saga on a story-by-story basis, and yet their impressions diverged.

I feel a greater kinship with Sasha’s version, no offense.

Consider Pond’s recap of the journey of Silver Linings Playbook, a film that will be getting to Average Joes and turning their spigots on long after Argo and Life of Pi have been relegated to “uh-huh…yeah, I saw those films…pretty good, well made.” Here’s Pond’s summary:

“David O. Russell‘s film did not come into Toronto with anywhere near the buzz of Argo or Paul Thomas Anderson‘s The Master or [even] Terrence Malick‘s To the Wonder; it came in quietly and under the radar, after months of tweaking by the director who was coming off the 2010 Best Picture nominee The Fighter.

“But its premiere at Roy Thomson Hall, which came one day after the Argo premiere in the same building, came as a delicious shock. “Silver Linings is a perfectly calibrated comedy that is also deeply moving,” I wrote after the screening. “[I]t’s another major step in Russell’s comeback from movie limbo, and a mainstream film with enough heart and clout to immediately figure into a number of Oscar races, definitely including Best Picture.”

“That night, Russell wasn’t so sure he wanted the acclaim. ‘I like being the underdog,’ he told TheWrap at the party that followed his premiere. ‘Now we just have to see if we can stay the underdog for the next two months.’ He didn’t exactly do that, with the film landing eight Oscar nominations and becoming the first movie since 1981’s Reds to score noms in all four acting categories.”

Pond doesn’t mention the vicious anti-SLP campaign that kicked in a few weeks after Toronto, but speaking as an infantryman in the Turkish Army as General Allenby’s shells exploded all around for weeks on end (“Pound them Charlie…pound them!”), I can tell you it was relentless. It was awful.

I’m past it and have moved on, as noted, but Pond’s piece brought it up again. A movie that so many loved and which has now crossed $100 million and which held to a 92% average on Rotten Tomatoes and 81% on Metacritic, and won four Spirit Awards and corralled eight Academy Award nominations (including noms in all four acting categories) along with JLaw’s Best Actress Oscar)…but God, the hate! A movie as perfect in its own way as a film of this type (a schizzy psycho-dramedy about meds, sports, superstition, love and denial) could be, and yet countered by currents of acidic blood and blocked from greater Oscar glory.

I got my first taste of the coming rancor on the evening of 9.28.12, which I described in “Incredulous Parking Garage Rage.” From that moment on the Toronto Silver Linings high was over. By the time SLP opened on 11.16 the Hate Brigade had been formed as surely as the Irish Republican Army had assembled in 1922.

I was so appalled and upset by this current that, meager as my pulpit might be, I wanted to fire back with my own British artillery, and I think on some gut emotional level I decided that the General Allenby counter-strike had to be aimed at Lincoln. In my mind and to its immense and lasting credit, SLP was in several ways everything that Lincoln was not. There was also my ongoing theory that Steven Spielberg has had his ass kissed too much over the last 35 years and that…well, that the somber reverence and historical portentousness of Lincoln represented a kind of polar-opposite aesthetic — “an Oscar-worthy film has to maintain a tone of importance and gasbaggery!” — and that this idea needed to be punctured or defeated or at least temporarily stopped in its tracks.

So basically the Lincoln “takedown campaign,” if you want to call it that (and I maintain to this date that I did nothing more than simply try to counter-balance the excessive Lincoln gush), was a kind of revenge hit on the SLP haters. I know that it didn’t actually work out that way in reality, but that’s how I was feeling it on some strategic or emotional level. I’m just being honest. It’s over now and on to 2013, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel a certain satisfaction in the fact that Lincoln never really caught on during awards season except for Daniel Day Lewis‘s stellar performance and the many trophies that came his way.

Yesterday producer Glenn Zoller, an always thoughtful and generous fellow, sent me a short called Valibation, directed by Todd Strauss-Schulson (A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas) and produced by Ken Franchi.

“Valibation is pretty good — well acted and professionally produced with a certain visual discipline — and in some ways is very good, but it runs 21 minutes. Short films should not run longer than 14 minutes, and if you can bring them in at 10 or 12 minutes, so much the better. I was told this a long time ago. This could be trimmed down to 12 or 14 minutes and still make its points. Leaner is always better.

“It’s basically David Cronenberg‘s Videodrome with a tech update,” I went on. “I regret to admit the early part, before the gross stuff begins with the iPhone embedded in the guy’s hand and all, is a lot like me and my obsessive life. The CG messaging stuff is cool. I get it, it hits home. But the joke or the metaphor has more or less been delivered by the 11:00 mark, and after that you’re just waiting for it to end.

“And then towards the end the lead actor starts watching Singin’ in the Rain at 1.78 to 1? Stanley Donen shot it in 1952 at 1.33 and this bozo is watching it with the tops and bottoms chopped off? And then we get a close-up of his ass as he whacks off? The guy is a self-absorbed dick. This short is about basically about self-loathing. Ir’s basically really good for the first few minutes, then it’s pretty good until until the 10- or 11-minute mark and then it starts to slowly go downhill because we get it and can sense what’s coming.”

Chelsea Davison as Lena Dunham as Hanna Horvath riffing on “Maya” in a “sort of…uhm, feel my way into it?” improvisational audition for Zero Dark Thirty. Davidson (here’s her Twitter page) is a New York-based actress-comedian–copywriter with a Cleveland-area phone.

There are three kinds of pain-in-the-ass parking-lot drivers out there. I hate them with every drop of blood in my heart, and I’m just trying to decide which is the worst.

Is it (a) the person who eases into a space and yet doesn’t turn their car off for some reason and just sits there idling, which indicates to others that he/she may be pulling out and which sometimes creates parking-lot jams because people stop and wait when they see a car just sitting there with the effing tail lights on? These stationary idlers are perfectly aware of the trouble they’re creating, and they do it anyway.

Is it (b) the person who walks up to their car, gets in, turns it on and does absolutely dead fricking nothing for two, three or four minutes? Just sitting there endlessly, pondering life and death and the whereabouts of Godot as they try to remember if they need to buy more cat litter?

Or is it (c) the person who parks in a space and then just chills like a department-store dummy, keeps the car running and then, after sitting there for 45 or 60 or 120 seconds, very slowly backs out about six to eight feet — ahhh, they’re leaving! — and then drives back into the space again because — ohh, I see! — they wanted to park a bit more precisely parallel to the white lines.

Once you’ve parked your car, turn it the hell off. And if you’re getting into your car to leave, turn on the ignition and then carefully but expeditiously pull the hell out without any of that middle-aged lady “sitting there and checking your phone messages for two or three minutes” crap. I swear to God people should be given tickets for pulling this stuff.

I ran into producer, director, actor and one-time legendary resturateur Tony Bill at JJ Abrams‘ Irish shindig last week. I reminded him that we’d done an interview in New York in ’82 when he was promoting Six Weeks, a Dudley Moore-Mary Tyler Moore drama that Bill was hired to direct more or less at the last minute. In any event I felt a nice easy vibe, and this led to my calling the next day and suggesting a little phoner. We got around to it a day or two ago — here’s the mp3.

Tony Bill, James Franco on the set of Flyboys (’06)

I wish I could remember to just take it easy and stop yapping so much when I interview someone.

I know Warren Beatty (or I call him from time to time at least) and he and Bill know each other and are roughly from the same Hollywood generation, having broken into the film business in the early ’60s. So there’s that. And I knew Julia Phillips really well, or well enough for her to fire me as her friend two or three times, and she and Bill and Michael Phillips co-produced The Sting (’73). So there’s that also.

Plus I used to love going to Bill’s celebrated 72 Market Street restaurant, which he managed from ’84 to ’00 or thereabouts. Plus I’ve always respected his directing of My Bodyguard (’80), Five Corners (1987), Crazy People (1990), A Home of Our Own (’93) and Untamed Heart (’93, also know as Baboon Heart). I never saw his most recent effort, Flyboys (’06), which he shot digitally at a relatively early stage in the digital revolution.

Bill and his second wife, Helen Buck Bartlett, co-run Barnstorm Films in Venice. Being a guy who flourished when virtually all movies were “execution dependent,” Bill ruefully admits that those days are gone. The kind of films favored by mainstream producers these days — low-balling, pre-sold, non-execution-dependent stuff about vampires and monsters along with your standard CG-driven films based on comic books and fairy tales and action franchises — are, Bill says, not exactly in his wheelhouse. But he’s still at it, still banging away and looking for whatever. And he’s very easy to talk to.

Bill’s performance in Shampoo as Johnny Pope, a low-key, faintly sardonic Hollywood producer who gently romances Goldie Hawn and spars with Beatty’s seductive but clumsy hairdresser, is his best, I think. He wore a moustache and drove a hot car and had a smooth manner, and never offered anything more than a very faint grin. There’s a great scene in which he and another guy are interviewing Hawn for a possible job on a commercial to be shot in Egypt, and Hawn’s flaky, space-case answers indicate that she’s more than a little distracted, if not intellectually challenged. After she leaves Bill looks out the window, exhales, shakes his head slightly and goes, “Wow…this town.”

“Fee-fi-fo-fum, this fairy-tale retread is pretty dumb,” says Variety‘s Justin Chang about Bryan Singer‘s Jack the Giant Slayer (Warner Bros., 3.1). What happened to the Bryan Singer of yore…the hip clever guy who made The Usual Suspects, Apt Pupil and Valkyrie even? God help us but this is the world in which we live right now — a world in which the only films that seem to get funded are (a) aimed at the submental, milkshake-slurping family trade and (b) aren’t in the least bit “execution dependent.”

“Feeding the recent appetite for revisionist screen fantasies (Snow White and the Huntsman, Mirror Mirror, Once Upon a Time), Jack the Giant Slayer feels, unsurprisingly, like an attempt to cash in on a trend, recycling storybook characters, situations and battle sequences to mechanical and wearyingly predictable effect,” Chang comments. “A disappointment coming from the usually more distinctive Bryan Singer, the Warners release will struggle to score the mammoth returns needed to recoup its not-inconsiderable budget, with an indifferent 3D conversion unlikely to offset f/x fatigue even among the youngish audience being targeted.”

Everyone knows by now that Antoine Fuqua‘s Olympus Has Fallen (Film District, 3.22) and Roland Emmerich‘s White House Down (Sony, 6.28) are both basically Die Hard in the White House (with supplemental action scenes happening in and around Washington, D.C.). Fuqua’s version opens three and a half weeks hence as well as three months prior to White House Down, which obviously gives it an edge. The New York press junket happens in 11 days.

For all I know Fuqua’s version is the one to see. To be fair, his reputation is actually pretty decent as far as ensemble action pieces (Training Day, Brooklyn’s Finest) are concerned. But it seems as if Olympus Has Fallen might be a little clunkier than White House Down because (a) fairly or unfairly, any film starring Gerard Butler is automatically suspected of being problematic because Butler has (with the exception of Coriolanus) starred in so much crap, (b) it costars Morgan Freeman as the Speaker of the House, and we all agree that Freeman has shot his wad as a wise, calm governmental authority figure (plus his hair is too white — he looks like Samuel L. Jackson in Django Unchained) and (c) it was shot in Shreveport, Louisiana, which indicates budgetary constraint and therefore a possible cheeseball quality.

Emmerich’s version will almost certainly look pricier, and it has a tonier, slicker-sounding cast (Jamie Foxx, Channing Tatum, Jason Clarke, Maggie Gyllenhaal) but let’s not go overboard here — it’s still a Roland Emmerich film.

Olympus Has Fallen synopsis: “When the White House (Secret Service Code: Olympus) is captured by a terrorist mastermind and the President (Aaron Eckhart) is kidnapped, disgraced former Secret Service Agent Mike Banning (Gerald Butler) finds himself trapped within the building. As the national security team scrambles to respond, they are forced to rely on Banning’s inside knowledge to help retake the White House, save the President, and avert an even bigger disaster.”

White House Down synopsis: “When a paramilitary group led by Stenz (Jason Clarke) take over the White House, John Cale (Channing Tatum) a Secret Service agent, must rescue the President of the United States James Sawyer (Jamie Foxx).

Buter peaked with his performances in Phantom of the Opera and as the muscular King Leonidas in 300, but then came the romantic flyweight flicks (P.S. I love You, The Ugly Truth, Playing for Keeps) plus Law Abiding Citizen, The Bounty Hunter, Machine Gun Preacherand Chasing Mavericks, which nobody even saw. Preacher, I think, was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Four days ago The Hollywood Reporter‘s Gregg Kilday posted nine films likely to be Best Picture contenders. I posted the same and then some on January 7th — John Wells‘ August: Osage County, Bennett Miller‘s Foxcatcher, Alexander Payne‘s Nebraska, George Clooney‘s Monuments Men, Ryan Coogler‘s Fruitvale, Paul Greengrass‘s Captain Phillips, John Lee Hancock‘s Saving Mr. Banks, Martin Scorsese‘s Wolf of Wall Street and the Coen brothers‘ Inside Llewyn Davis.

To Kilday’s I would add Jason Reitman‘s Labor Day, Alfonso Cuaron‘s Gravity, Steve McQueen‘s 12 Years A Slave, Richard Linklater‘s Before Midnight (a major Sundance 2013 highlight and an all-but-guaranteed Oscar contender for Best Original Screenplay) and David O. Russell‘s Abscam movie (which starts filming around March 1st, although a voice is telling me it probably won’t be completed in time for release in November or December). Plus, just possibly, Peter Landesman‘s Parkland. Plus one or two or three wild cards that will presumably pop through and cause excitement at the 2013 Cannes or Telluride/Toronto festivals.

Anyway, I’ve read Inside Llewyn Davis (which is very low-key and art-filmy without much of a “narrative” that turns or delivers a payoff in the usual sense) and Parkland (which is very well written but is totally “execution dependent”), but I’d like to read the others. If anyone with relatively recent PDF scripts for the above 14 or 15 films, please send along & thanks.

I was told yesterday afternoon that Penske Media’s Variety would issue a big announcement. It came this morning with three bullets: (a) the daily print edition is being scuttled, (b) ditto the online edition’s paywall (except it’s been more or less gone for several weeks now) and editor Tim Gray is being shunted aside to international to make room for a new editorial triumvirate of Claudia Eller (film), Cynthia Littleton (TV) and Andrew Wallenstein (digital media).

The only time I’ve even seen copies of Daily Variety in recent years is when I’ve walked by the print-giveaway table at the Sundance Film Festival, or just down the hall from media credentials inside the Park City Marriot. Advertisers attached to the idea of dead-tree exposure are henceforth going to have to be content with Variety‘s once-weekly edition.

The absence of print and paywall revenue means “deep” editorial cuts. Deadline‘s Nikki Finke wrote this morning that “Penske’s idea is to transform Variety into a thumb-sucking weekly about the entertainment business, leaving breaking news coverage to Deadline Hollywood.”

Reuters reported today that the Senate Intelligence Committee has “closed its inquiry” into the CIA-sourced information given to Zero Dark Thirty producer-screenwriter Mark Boal as he researched the script. The decision came “one day after Zero Dark Thirty failed to win major awards at the Oscars,” the story noted.

The Senate committee launched its review of ZD30 after chairperson Sen. Dianne Feinstein condemned scenes implying that torture of CIA detainees led to information indicating the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden. There’s no question that in so doing Feinstein single-handedly killed ZD30‘s award prospects, including Kathryn Bigelow being snubbed for a Best Director nomination.

Washington politicians will do almost anything for press coverage that shows them being assertive and decisive when it comes to hot-button issues. ZD30 offered an opportunity, and Feinstein (who turns 80 on 6.22.13) grabbed it. She and her staffers got what they were looking for, and then dropped it when the story had no further relevance or media-heat.