Day: August 3, 2014

Last Thursday TheWrap‘s Steve Pond asked if Richard Linklater‘s Boyhood, which has been celebrated industry-wide as novel and striking and even masterpiece-y (and earnestly praised on this site), can leapfrog the Spirit Awards moat and become a Best Picture nominee at the Oscars. I think it can and most likely will be nominated, as long as the Oscar-blogging mafia (less than 15 people when you boil it down) keeps pushing it as Best Picture-worthy over the next five and a half months.

Pond even went so far as to say “it could actually win.” Because, if I’m following the thinking, no other film (a) took twelve years to make and (b) follows a family of characters as they age and trudge through their dramas and find their paths and survive with their spirits not only intact but in some cases afloat. A win is certainly possible — not likely but certainly possible — because Boyhood does seem to be the one film that has that all-encompassing, life-embracing sprawl or theme that the other presumed hotties seem to lack in this or that way. It seems to have the biggest heart, at least from the vantage point that we’re all currently sharing.

“If enough of the major [critics] groups come out for Boyhood, it’ll essentially force Academy members to come to terms with it,” Pond writes.

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To put an end to the bullshit and as a sop to the Stalinists who live for the dream of sentencing this or that free-thinking columnist to a term in a Siberian gulag, I am informing the only two serious sexists within the HE commenting community — LexG and Dulouz Gray — that if either one taps out one more remark that I consider to be cruel and unduly dismissive or hateful towards women, they are absolute toast on this site. I don’t think anyone else has posted comments that could be called consistently ugly towards women, but I will henceforth monitor the HE comment community like a hawk.

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If you have any kind of hunger for real-world adventure or if you’re any kind of gearhead, James Cameron‘s Deepsea Challenge 3D (Disruptive, 8.8) is an essential — a fascinating, highly intelligent, smartly assembled doc (co-directed by John Bruno, the late Andrew Wight and Ray Quint). Definitely catch it in IMAX if you can. The subject, of course, is Cameron’s solo seven-mile descent to the bottom of the Mariana trench — 35,787 feet — on 3.26.12. He did this inside a privately-designed, funded and constructed submarine called the Deepsea Challenge, and all the time I was watching the doc I was saying to myself, “Amazing, I love this, Cameron and his team are so hard-core…but why the fuck is Jim making three Avatar sequels? Isn’t a trilogy enough, for God’s sake?” You get the idea that he’s making three because he wants a lot more money — i.e., our movie money — so he can self-fund even more undersea explorations.

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What Saving Private Ryan did for D-Day in terms of gorey combat realism, David Ayer‘s Fury does for the grueling experience of Brad Pitt‘s tank crew during the last weeks of World War II. Or so says N.Y. Times reporter Michael Cieply, who has apparently seen Fury (Sony, 11.14) and has been given free rein to (a) prepare the cognoscenti for the cinematic carnage to come as well as (b) start the conversation that may — I say “may” — result in Fury becoming a serious Oscar hopeful.

I’m theoretically down with that notion as long as nobody pulls out a baseball bat.

Fury “promises to be one of the most daring studio movies in an awards season that will bring several World War II films,” Cieply states, by delivering “relentlessly authentic” depictions of the combat realm that “the popular culture has rarely seen.”

Cieply emphasizes that Pitt’s “Wardaddy” character uses his knife on enemy soldiers in particularly savage ways. This footage “may shock viewers who have watched American soldiers behave brutally in Vietnam War films at least since Apocalypse Now,” Cieply writes, “but have rarely seen ugliness in the heroes of World War II.” Wardaddy “crosses lines, both legal and moral…not even Lee Marvin’s Sergeant Possum in Samuel Fuller’s The Big Red One, another knife killer, went quite so far.”

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I’m feeling so intimidated by HE’s recent sexism debate and particularly the accusatory positions of Melissa Silverstein, Sasha Stone and Glenn Kenny that I was having second thoughts about looking up Marilyn Monroe‘s skirt. I was exiting the Four Seasons hotel, having attended Saturday’s The Giver press conference and done a one-on-one with director Phillip Noyce, when I suddenly decided to snap a couple of shots of the mini-version of Seward Johnson’s Marilyn Monroe in The Seven Year Itch sculpture. Which I did quickly enough. Then I realized I’d been looking at photos of the inspiration for this sculpture (i.e., Monroe’s skirt being blown upward by a gust of air through a Manhattan subway grating) since I was knee-high to a grasshopper, but I’d never had a chance to “be the grating,” so to speak. No biggie, I told myself. Thousands of Chicagoans have surely done the same thing with the 26-foot-tall version of Johnson’s sculpture. But I still felt it would be somehow “wrong” of me to do this. What would Silverstein think? Or Kenny, a reigning uber-feminist if there ever was one? Then I broke free of that politically correct muck in my head and went behind and stood down and snapped the shot. A Four Seasons parking attendant gave me a look but I stood up like James Cagney and looked him right in the eye, steady and calm and centered, and he quickly looked away.

Outside the Four Seasons hotel — Saturday, 8.3, 2:25 pm. Johnson’s Monroe sculpture is very exacting in every respect.

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