Month: January 2014

I was standing next to the great Bruce Dern at last Saturday night’s Palm Spring Film Festival gala. He was wearing a tux, smiling and chatting, posing for photos. And I happened to look down and notice that he wasn’t wearing a pair of uptown Bruno Magli or John Varvatos or even Florsheim evening shoes (shiny black leather, a genuine or pseudo-Italian “statement”, lace-ups or buckles) but what looked like black running shoes or, worse, orthopedic comfort shoes. Right away I came up with my own Dernsy: “Jesus, I love the guy…he’s gotta be the greatest raconteur in the world and his Oscar campaign has been inspired, and then he kinda screws it up — in the eyes of discerning journalists, at least — a little bit anyway — by wearing old man shoes!”

Let me explain something: I’ve walked around the streets of Rome, Milan and Florence on warm evenings, and white-haired Italian guys never, EVER wear comfort shoes. It’s a point of pride. They would rather be stricken with a heart attack and collapse on the street than wear those clunky things. I’m not saying old guys can’t wear comfortable shoes at home or while walking around the neighborhood or the mall, but when you’re out at night and hanging with the swells you have to wear classy, high-style, Cary Grant-at-El Morocco footwear, even if it hurts. Even if it shortens your life.”

“It’s not hyperbole to suggest that [Matthew] McConaughey will win every award for which he is eligible, both because he is a Movie Star stooping to work in television, and because he is jaw-droppingly great. McConaughey has reinvented himself in the last few years, using his leading man swagger in service to each performance, rather than a substitute for one. Even if nothing else about True Detective worked — and so much of it works spectacularly — McConaughey would be worth the price of admission. (Harrelson’s terrific in his own right, and could also win many trophies if he’s willing to position himself as a supporting actor, even though they’re both clear leads.) — from Alan Sepinwall‘s review of HBO’s True Detective (debuting on Sunday, 2.12).

The 2014 South by Southwest Film Festival (.3.7 to 3.15) will kick things off with Jon Favreau‘s Chef (Open Road, 5.9), a formulaic-sounding comedy about a high-class chef (Favreau) experiencing career failure and rebirth through a food-truck business. Then again it seems likely that Favreau — the star, director, producer and writer — will inject some serious foodie passion. On the other hand my cockatoo sensibility would be happier with a thinner guy in the kitchen. Favreau may or may not be the most calorically challenged of today’s big-time movie directors, but he clearly loves to eat as much as make movies or anything else. Good cast — Robert Downey, Jr., Scarlett Johansson, Sofía Vergara, Dustin Hoffman, John Leguizamo, Bobby Cannavale, Garry Shandling, Amy Sedaris and Oliver Platt. Wiki thumbnail: “When Miami-born chef Carl Casper (Favreau) tries and fails to open a restaurant in Los Angeles, he returns to Miami to fix up a food truck he names El Jefe Cubanos and reacquaints with his ex-wife (Vergara). He plans to drive across the country to reclaim his success in L.A.”

Jon Favreau in Chef (Open Road, 5.9)

Bruce Dern isn’t competing against Matthew McConaughey for a Golden Globe award. The Nebraska star has been nominated for Best Actor, Comedy/Musical while the Dallas Buyers Club star is up for Best Actor, Drama. But they’ll almost certainly be eyeball-to-eyeball in the Oscar race, and the real competition, of course, won’t be about their performances as much as their campaign narratives.

Dern’s, of course, is “I finally got to be an award-nominated lead actor at age 77 after a lifetime of supporting roles — you too can be a lead in your own life!” McConaughey’s is “I was a Texas bongo party-boy actor who almost drowned in a Kate Hudson romcom swamp, but three years ago I decided to reinvent myself and got into quality stuff (Bernie, Magic Mike, Mud, Dalls Buyers, Wolf of Wall Street, HBO’s True Detective) and look at me now! McConaissance!”

The word on MM’s performance in HBO’s True Detective is so good that it might put him over the top in the best Actor Oscar race….maybe.

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This morning a friend at 42 West asked me to post the new green-band trailer for Jason Bateman‘s Bad Words (Focus Features, 3.14). “Due respect but what’s the point of a GREEN-BAND trailer for a smart, nervy, occasionally profane, envelope-pushing movie like Bad Words?,” I replied. “Agreed, there’s a lot more to Bad Words than just nervy dialogue, but surely the RED-BAND trailer is more to the point. Putting out a GREEN-BAND trailer for Bad Words makes as much sense as putting out a RED-BAND trailer for a re-release of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.”

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HuffPost‘s Ricky Camilleri and Chris Rosen join Vanity Fair‘s Hollywood editor Katey Rich exchange predictions about this Sunday’s (i.e., four days hence) Golden Globe awards. Noteworthy: Rich recounts what she saw and heard at Monday night’s NYFCC award ceremony regarding the behavior of City Arts critic Armond White and his tablemates.

The designers of this poster are, of course, conveying an attitude about the forthcoming Oscar telecast. HE interpretation: “We obviously don’t know what Ellen’s monologue will be like, but trust us — we aren’t doing ANYTHING differently this year. In fact we’re probably going to be even more generically Oscar this year than any generically Oscar show you’ve ever sat through. As far as we’re concerned it’s 1990. Jokes aimed at viewers in Shanghai and other none-too-hips, Las Vegas-styled dance numbers, pomp and circumstance…the whole shot. But at least no sexist songs like ‘We Saw Your Boobs.'”

This is some kind of landmark in the annals of Entertainment Weekly covers, which are always aimed at dumb girls and therefore flat and obvious as shit. This puppy is out there, if nothing else. Context, intrigue, perversity, etc. Some kind of metaphorical necrophiliac attitude mixed with the nervy irreverence of director David Fincher. Not to mention a “come again?” quality. If you’ve read Gillian Flynn‘s “Gone Girl” (or even the Wiki page plot summary), you…aahh, forget it. Then again Fincher isn’t sticking that closely to the book so all bets are off.

The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg has posted a long quote from City Arts critic Armond White about his reported heckling of 12 Years A Slave direct Steve McQueen two nights ago at the New York Film Critics Circle award ceremony in midtown Manhattan. The quote boils down to White claiming that the remarks attributed to him about McQueen weren’t spoken by him, that Variety‘s Ramin Setoodeh reported “a malicious lie,” and that whatever White did say wasn’t intended for general consumption but for those at his table.

City Arts critic Armond White.

White has also described himself as “the strongest voice that exists in contemporary criticism,” and claimed that a “Communist-style” NYFCC committee is apparently determined to deep-six him, at least as far as his NYFCC membership is concerned.

“The comments that I supposedly made were never uttered by me or anyone within my earshot,” White has told Feinberg. “I have been libeled by publications that recklessly quoted unnamed sources that made up what I said and to whom I was speaking. Someone on the podium talked about critics’ ‘passion.’ Does ‘passion’ only run one-way toward subservience?”

White is saying that what he said came from a passionate place, and that the nature of his remarks weren’t subservient in nature. Do the math.

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All acting glory is fleeting. In older cultures (especially France) you can coast on your past accomplishments for years but here it’s “what have you done in the last few weeks or months?” And if you haven’t done anything noteworthy in the last few years, forget it. Especially if you’re a 50-plus female. You’re not just gone but forgotten. And then five or ten years later somebody like me comes along and asks, “Hey, whatever happened to…?” That’s the worst of it, I think. Some actors just blend into the fog.

Andie McDowell at a relatively recent occasion.

So here it is (and believe me when I say I’m trying to avoid sounding dismissive in any way, shape of form): whatever happened to Andie McDowell?

With Sundance ’14 right around the corner I was thinking this morning about McDowell, whom I’ll always recall as the Belle of the Ball at Sundance ’89 when Steven Soderbergh‘s sex, lies & videotape had its big premiere there. I also recall running into her at a Sundance filmmaker’s brunch in ’96, and watching her pow-wow with Robert Redford a few minutes later.

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Meryl Streep to Female Academy Members: “Emma Thompson‘s performance in Saving Mr. Banks rang my bell and has my respect, but the real-life Walt Disney was an anti-Semitic, woman-dismissing shit. So do what you want but I’ve though twice about supporting Banks for Best Picture, given the essentially dishonest and fanciful depiction of Disney that it presents.”

Meryl Streep at last night’s National Board Of review awards ceremony in Manhattan. (Photo stolen from Variety.)

This seems like a fair interpretation of what Streep said last night at the National Board of Review award ceremony in Manhattan. Variety‘s Ramin Setoodeh is reporting that while Streep’s “nine-minute tour-de-force” speech was a love sonnet to Thompson, the legendary actress “also made a point of blasting Disney for his sexist and anti-Semitic stances.”

Quoting Disney animator Ward Kimball, Streep said that “some of his associates reported that Walt Disney didn’t really like women” and that he was basically a “gender bigot…he didn’t trust women or cats.” Streep quoted from a letter that his company wrote in 1938 to an aspiring female animator: “Women do not do any of the creative work in connection with preparing the cartoons for the screen, as that task is performed entirely by young men.”

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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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