Day: January 7, 2014

Tonight the Broadcast Film Critics Association threw a Celebration of Black Cinema at L.A.’s House of Blues. The highlight was a knockout set by 20 Feet From Stardom singers Lisa Fischer, Darlene Love, Merry Clayton, Tata Vega and Judith Hill. Thanks to the BFCA’s Joey Berlin, Sam Rubin and Shawn Edwards for a truly great evening; ditto event producer Madelyn Hammond. 20 Feet is on the Best Feature Documentary short list. Here’s hoping the gals get to perform on the Oscar telecast. (Apologies for murky sound — forgot Canon SX280 HS, had to shoot with iPhone.)

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On 2.11 Fox Home Entertainment will release an “unrated extended cut” of Ridley Scott‘s The Counselor — 138 minutes, or 21 minutes longer than the 117-minute theatrical version. The legions of Counselor haters might take a pass, but I can’t wait for my freebie. It’s the absolute best film ever made that wound up with a 34% Rotten Tomatoes rating. Ask F.X. Feeney, Wesley Morris, Scott Foundas, Manohla Dargis, LexG, etc.

Yesterday I asked several industry people the following: “What does your gut tell you what the most popular Best Picture contender might be? Put another way, which Best Picture contender seems to have the most respect combined with the least amount of negatives? Could that film be American Hustle, which is apparently gaining in esteem despite the fact that it’s not as good as Silver Linings Playbook or The Fighter? Or Dallas Buyers’ Club? Or Gravity or Philomena?”

It goes without saying the old-fart contingent won’t be embracing The Wolf of Wall Street, which is the only high octane rocket-fuel movie out there — the only one that takes a flying leap off the high-diving board and goes “yeaahhh!”

It’s basically 12 Years A Slave, American Hustle and Gravity at the top. Or is that old news now? Slave “is universally acclaimed and a chance for Academy to say ‘we get it,'” says a journalist friend. The “gradual climber” seems to be Hustle but the more correct term is probably “incher,” as in inching along. Two marketing friends are telling me that the 70-plus softies really like Philomena. A director friend says he’s only hearing about 12 Years A Slave and Gravity. Saving Mr. Banks, Wolf of Wall Street, Dallas Buyers Club and Nebraska are all in. Maybe Her, maybe August: Osage County, maybe…who knows?

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Since the Toronto Film Festival I’ve explained two or three times that I’m not the biggest fan of Stephen Frears‘ Philomena. My argument isn’t so much with the film, which is based on Martin Sixsmith‘s “The Lost Child of Philomena Lee,” as with the ethical stance taken by Judi Dench‘s Philomena character at the finale. I was enraged when she berated Steve Coogan‘s Sixsmith character for behaving in a feisty and judgmental way, and even angrier when she forgave the aging Irish nun who had kept her in the dark about the whereabouts of her put-up-for-adoption son, and likewise kept her son from learning the whereabouts of his mother when he returned to Ireland to find her.

Judi Dench (l.) and Philomena Lee (r.) at some lah-lah screening for Philomena in London or Toronto or New York or wherever.

To me the latter act was no different than a Chilean widow forgiving Augusto Pinochet for having murdered her son or husband in the wake of the 1973 coup against Salvador Allende.

I nonetheless agreed to speak yesterday to the real Philomena Lee, who is currently visiting Los Angeles on a promotional tour to help the film’s Oscar chances. Right off the top I felt myself warming to Philomena’s voice and manner, which is gentle and unassuming. I began by sharing my feelings about the film’s finale, and we progressed from there. We spoke about this and that for 34 minutes, and by the time we finished I felt much closer to Ms. Lee than to the film. Go figure. I still have issues with Frears and Coogan, but Philomena is a gracious lady and a pleasure to talk to.

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In a piece about Roger Ebert in the wake of this death, the downshifted film and theatre critic John Simon wrote the following: “I firmly believe that the film critic should have a special expertise, like any kind of art critic. Like a physician, he should know more about medicine than a layman who picks an over-the-counter drug for a cold; like an architect, he should know more about architecture than a mere gaper at buildings.

John Simon

“The opinions of common men about film may be of genuine interest, but are of no major importance. To be sure, a failure in medicine is made manifest by the patient’s demise; a failure in architecture, by a collapsed building or a permanent eyesore. For failure in criticism, there is no such manifest evidence. Only time has the last word, but the good critic foreshadows it.”

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I paid no attention whatsoever to this short Errol Morris / N.Y. Times doc about the JFK assassination when it appeared six weeks ago. It’s obviously just a chat with Josiah “Tink” Thompson, a murder investigation expert who wrote “Six Seconds in Dallas,” which asserts a conspiracy. Morris’s mini-doc is haunting, but if you want the real goods watch the video of a Thompson lecture after the jump. Watch the whole thing but pay particular attention to the finale, which synchs up Dealey Plaza dictabelt sounds with the Zapruder film.

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All hail the Directors Guild of America on this grand and glorious morning — a day of celebration for Martin Scorsese, the legions of Wolf of Wall Street devotees and all the American passengers on all the ships at sea. In nominating Scorsese for Best Director the DGA has rejected the Hope Holiday mentality about Scorsese’s epic of excess and debauchery in the realm of the financial elite. Make no mistake — the tables have turned and the Holiday contingent is looking for tall grass. “Sometimes there’s God, so quickly!” — Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire.

The other DGA nominees are Gravity‘s Alfonso Cuaron, Captain Phillips‘ Paul Greengrass, 12 Years A Slave‘s Steve McQueen (take that, Armond White!) and American Hustle‘s David O. Russell. Congrats to them also.

The 66th Annual DGA Awards Dinner will happen on Saturday, 1.25 at the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza.

On 1.21.72, right in the middle of the grandest, funkiest and most fabled era of auteurist glory, Dick Cavett asked four directors — Robert Altman, Mel Brooks, Peter Bogdanovich and Frank Capra — if Hollywood was dead. He didn’t mean L.A.-centric filmmaking but the big-studio system that reigned from the ’20s through the ’50s. He was also observing that corporations and corporate-think had taken over from old-school moguls like Harry Cohn and Daryl F. Zanuck and Louis B. Mayer. It’s interesting that Capra, an old-school conservative and a somewhat derided sentimentalist at the time, had the most prescient response: “This has been said many times before…Hollywood is down at the moment, yes…[but] film is not gonna die, I’ll tell you that. If not in Hollywood then someplace else. Maybe Hollywood is dying as a geographical point but…we haven’t really scratched the surface.”

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