Craig Johnson‘s The Skeleton Twins is the third bang-slammer I’ve seen at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival, the other two being Damien Chazelle‘s Whiplash and Lynn Shelton‘s Laggies. (If I had rushed to Saturday’s 9 pm screening of Maya Forbes‘ Infinitely Polar Bear I might have had a fourth, to go Justin Chang‘s Variety review.) Here’s Geoff Berkshire‘s Variety review of The Skeleton Twins — pretty much a rave.
Made/assembled by Lance Bangs, and sent to my inbox earlier today…even though the piece went live on YouTube yesterday.
So Matthew McConaughey has the Best Actor Oscar in the bag, and the Best Supporting Actor winner will be, of course, Jared Leto. Even people in rural China know that Cate Blanchett is a deadbolt lock for Best Actress. But at tonight’s SAG awards, a surprise. 12 Years A Slave‘s Lupita Nyong’o finally beat American Hustle‘s Jennifer Lawrence for Best Supporting Actress…yes! And American Hustle won the Best Ensemble award, meaning that it’s now it’s at least probable that David O. Russell‘s film will take the Best Picture Oscar, and that Glenn Kenny will owe me $50. Remember when $50 seemed like a moderately hefty sum?
I’ve only three films on today’s schedule, which may sound lazy but is more realistic, I feel, in terms of filing and eating and getting various stuff done. If you see four films you’re constantly running and can barely breathe — it’s awfully tough to file. (It’s difficult enough to write anything with three films to cover.) 75 minutes from now (i.e., 11:15 am) I’ll be seeing Zach Braff‘s Wish I Was Here, the “Kickstarter movie” that’s basically about Braff’s underemployed 30something actor character becoming a homeschooler. Costarring Mandy Patinkin and Kate Hudson. At 2:30 I’m catching a Library screening of Craig Johnson‘s heavily hyped The Skeleton Twins. Kristin Wiig and Bill Hader giving “astonishing dramatic performances” as an estranged brother and sister, etc. Finally there’s a 6:30 pm screening of Ira Sachs‘ Love Is Strange, a relationship drama about a couple of older gay guys (John Lithgow, Alfred Molina) facing convulsive changes after they decide to get married after being together for nearly 40 years.
“A number of people have asked me, what if you had stated your position [about] the morality [in The Wolf of Wall Street]. It’s a bad thing [that] they behave this way, not behaving just in terms of the drugs and the sex [but] the violence of the ‘confidence man,’ taking your confidence and your trust. That’s one guy here and perhaps other guys, or it could become the entire financial establishment. That’s happened many many times in history. So you take this as a microcosm, this kind of thinking is what it’s about. It’s obscene. You say, okay, fine, you go home and you feel you’ve done your duty by watching a film that has an obvious moral statement, you know it’s there, and forget about it. In the meantime, I wanted to get deeper and provoke it, provoke the audience. It came out of just frustration. Frustration and anger about this situation in 2008. Go back and there’s more and more. People get thrown out of their houses, people sleeping in the street, people killing themselves. Why? So you can have a plane ride and have sex on a plane? That is the thinking that disturbs me. Saying, what you do with your private life is up to you. But when it’s affecting people the other way and nobody goes to jail or nobody is really stopped, I don’t understand. Anyway, that’s my reason for doing it this way.” — Wolf of Wall Street director Martin Scorsese to interviewer Paul Thomas Anderson and audience during a 12.15 q & a in Century City, recorded and transcribed by Award Daily‘s Sasha Stone (whom you can hear chuckling through the video).
