Year: 2013

Hollywood Reporter award-season columnist Scott Feinberg has compiled a list of 15 documentaries that he feels are most likely to wind up on the Academy’s documentary branch “short-list,” from which the five Best Documentary Feature nominees will be chosen.

Feinberg’s 15 are (1) Jehane Noujaim‘s The Square, (2) Joshua Oppenheimer‘s The Act of Killing, (3) Zachary Heinzerling‘s Cutie and the Boxer, (4) Gabriela Cowperthwaite‘s Blackfish, (5) Penn Jillette and Teller‘s Tim’s Vermeer, (6) Morgan Neville‘s 20 Feet From Stardom, (7) Sarah Polley‘s Stories We Tell, (8) Tom Donahue‘s Casting By, (9) Claude Lanzman‘s The Last of the Unjust, (10) Joe Brewster and Michele Stephenson‘s American Promise, (11) Jason Osder‘s Let the Fire Burn, (12) Jacob Kornbluth‘s Inequality for All, (13) Martha Shane and Lana Wilson‘s After Tiller, (14) James Toback and Alec Baldwin‘s Seduced and Abandoned and (15) Steve Hoover‘s Blood Brother.

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As CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite read the official confirmation that President Kennedy had died from gunshot wounds in Dallas, two guys in white shirts and ties stood behind him. Watch the guy on the left as Cronkite concludes the announcement with the words “two o’clock Eastern standard time…some thirty eight minutes ago.” At this point Cronkite looks down and tries to maintain his newsroom composure (he’s clearly choking up) as he puts his glasses back on — a silence of four to five seconds. At the four-second mark the guy behind Cronkite on the left (the late Don Hewitt?) glances at Cronkite, apparently wondering if Cronkite is melting down. A half-second later Cronkite speaks again (“Vice President Johnson…”) and the guy quickly turns his head back to the desk.

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If you walk out the front entrance of the palatial, Las Vegas-scaled Sunrise Nha Trang hotel, where I’m staying, and cross the main boulevard (Tran Phu) and step down to the beach, you’re reminded of Cannes. A lot. Tran Phu has the same pine trees and middle-strip divider with plants and flowers that grow along the Blvd. de la Croisette. The same crescent-shaped beach, same calm waters, same green hills and islands and peaks in the distance. The main difference is that the swanky hotels are grander and taller than the ones in Cannes. Plus Nha Trang has no old town or Palais du Festival, but that aside the resemblance is striking.

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Yesterday was a long one. A road and train trip from Hoi An to Nha Trang from 7:30 am until just after 10 pm last night. I wanted to visit the My Lai massacre museum near Quang Ngai so we drove down early yesterday morning — a two-hour trek with all the rain and the traffic and road construction. I was told it would take another 11 or 12 hours to drive to Nha Trang so I bought a train ticket from Quang Ngai to Nha Trang, which would take about eight hours, I was told. It took ten. The down-at-the-heels, less-than-fully-hygienic train left at 1 pm and chugged along at a moderate pace for 400 kilometers, stopping for 10 or 12 minutes at each station. It was hellish, in a sense, but I didn’t want to be encased in a luxurious tourist cocoon. I wanted to feel and smell and taste the real Vietnam like an average local. Well, I got that.

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I for one can’t wait to see the Showtime airing of “Another Day/Another Time: Celebrating the Music of Inside Llewyn Davis” on Friday, 12.13 at 10 pm eastern, 7 pm Pacific. The original taping was at Manhattan’s Town Hall on 9.29. Produced by T Bone Burnett, Inside Llewyn Davis director-writers Joel and Ethan Coen and producer Scott Rudin, the show will feature performances by Joan Baez, Patti Smith, Jack White, Marcus Mumford, the Avett Brothers, Rhiannon Giddens, Punch Brothers, Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, Willie Watson, The Milk Carton Kids, Colin Meloy, Lake Street Dive and Llewyn Davis star Oscar Isaac.

In an 11.21 interview with The Playlist‘s Rodrigo Perez, Wolf of Wall Street screenwriter Terrence Winter describes Martin Scorsese‘s latest film precisely as I’ve been describing it since last August (which is when I finally got around to reading Winter’s script) — Goodfellas on Wall Street.

“It is very much [in that vein],” Winters says. “It’s sort of written in the same style, voice-overs, it’s a very fast movie, it’s really a wild roller coaster ride. I’m really proud of it and incredibly proud to be working with Marty and those guys.”

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31 years ago I was interviewing Jack Nicholson at the Carlyle. The promotional agenda was Tony Richardson‘s The Border, but the subject was mainstream audiences, and more particularly that classic Samuel Goldwyn line that “if people don’t want to see something, you can’t stop ’em.” Nicholson put it more succinctly: “They don’t want that — they want this.”

What they’ve seen and enjoyed before, he meant. Comfort, familiarity, assurance, command. A nice five-foot wave they easily catch and surf back to shore on their boogie boards. They don’t want metaphors and meditative undercurrents. As Nicholson put it back in February ’82, “They want their meat loaf and mashed potatoes and gravy on the side.”

Which is why, as Rope of Silicon‘s Brad Brevet reported earlier today, the public has bought 538,100 tickets to see J.C. Chandor‘s All Is Lost since it opened on 10.18 compared to 30.7 million tickets to see Gravity. It’s also been reported that Gravity has racked up $500 million worldwide.

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I find it amusing that one of two things probably happened in the creation of this Nymphomaniac orgasm-mugshot poster. One, Shia LaBeouf talked Lars von Trier into letting him pose with a cigarette rather than join the crowd. Or two, Von Trier was shrewd enough to realize that one (but only one) person should be depicted as a rebel. “I’m obviously in this film, but I have other things on my mind,” LaBeouf seems to be saying. “I might even be indifferent to shuddering orgasms…maybe. In any event I like imagining that I’m James Dean in 1955.”

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“It is most likely that scissors were invented around 1500 BC in ancient Egypt,” says the Wiki page. “The earliest known scissors appeared in Mesopotamia 3,000 to 4,000 years ago.” The Noah page says that “the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh, composed about 2500 BC, contains a flood story almost exactly the same as the Noah story in Genesis” and that most Biblical-era historians and scholars believe that the two floods are one and the same. It is therefore conceivable that scissors were (a) around during Npah’s time and (b) that Noah might’ve used a pair to trim his locks. But professional-looking buzz cuts were impossible. You can’t be too much of a stickler for hair realism in Hollywood epics. You have to be tolerant of eccentricity among hair stylists and vanity among actors. But I draw the line at accepting the existence of electric barber shears 2500 years ago.

Russell Crowe as Noah in Darren Aronofsky’s Noah.

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Thursday, 11.21, 1:12 pm on a train from Quang Ngai to Nha Trang. The charm of decades-old trains is a mixed bag. Look around and it could be 1958 or ’48. At least six hours (and quite possibly more) to travel 300 kilometers.

I’m not saying that Hoi An’s Boutique hotel isn’t a soothing, in-all-ways appealing, first-class experience. It is. I’m saying that I’ve stayed in places like this before and I’ll stay in places like this again. They’re great but they deliver what boils down to a blue-chip, top-of-the-line McDonald’s experience in terms of familiar deluxe elite splendor. And that’s fine. The clientele is very happy here. I’m happy here. I’m just saying I’d rather be swerving around water buffalos on a scooter.

Rubble stirred up by the recent typhoon, which was actually downgraded to a tropical storm by the time in hit Vietnam.

So I’ll be missing the first American Hustle media screening in Los Angeles on Sunday, 11.24 (the invites just went out). No one will be allowed to “review” until Wednesday, 12.4 at 9 am, but the Twitter responses will be fast and furious starting…oh, around 9:30 or 10 pm on 11.24. I’m back on 11.25 so my first viewing will be on Friday, 11.29. The response from people like myself will either be (a) “yes, yes…we feel the same way!” or (b) spotty counter-punching. Sometime around 11.29 or 11.30, remember, is when the same earlybirds will most likely be starting to view Martin Scorsese‘s Wolf of Wall Street.