Day: August 5, 2014

A color version of Nebraska is showing this Sunday night (8.10) on EPIX, and I for one wouldn’t miss it for the world. Online voices are claiming that the EPIX showing will be some kind of travesty, but don’t you believe it. In an interview last year with Fade In‘s F.X. Feeney, director Alexander Payne said that while a color palette is “not right for the film,” he “saw the color version once” and “liked it. It was really pretty. Some shots look even prettier in color. We made it look like a color from about 1970 or ’71, like the colors in Five Easy Pieces, for example.”

In an 11.20.13 Variety piece, the Nebraska director was quoted saying he hopes “no one ever sees” the color version of Nebraska, which he was contractually obliged to deliver so Paramount wouldn’t lose money on certain markets –“several,” Payne apparently said — that have color-only stipulations.

“’I’ll…give you a colored version for those specific TV outlets in Moldova and Sierra Leone and Laos or wherever,’” Payne told Paramount execs. “So I made a color version. I hope no one ever sees it.”

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This scene, I submit, contains one of Henry Fonda‘s greatest acting moments. It’s from William Wellman‘s The Ox-Bow Incident, of course — a 1943 film, set in 1880s Nevada, about a lynch mob looking to avenge an uncomfirmed killing of a well-liked local rancher. Fonda plays Gil Carter, the former boyfriend of Rose Mapen (Mary Beth Hughes) who has recently married a snooty San Franciscan named Swanson (George Meeker). Watch Fonda’s gradually shifting reactions to Swanson, particularly starting at the 1:40 mark. That very slight tilt of the head at 1:45…perfect! Fonda was 37 at the time of filming. Jane was about five; Peter was two or three.

James Corden, the relentlessly spirited pudgy guy who played Paul Potts in One Chance (which the Weinstein Co. still hasn’t released after a year in stir) and who costars in Begin Again and the forthcoming Into The Woods, will probably succeed Craig Ferguson as host of CBS’s Late, Late Show. If it happens a Brit will succeed a Scot and Corden will become the first corpulent male to host a late-night talk show. (Am I wrong? Every late-night talk show since Steve Allen has been in shape.) From my perspective Corden’s on-camera personality always seems to be happy, full of mirth, serene, always smiling. He doesn’t seem to know from glum or moody. He was put on this earth to spread cheer. One of those guys who always seems to be saying, “Oh, I love this…that’s funny!…I’m having so much fun…hee-hee-hah-hah!”

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So last spring Vince Vaughn shot Term Life, a noirish crime pic for Universal distribution, and now he’s reportedly in talks for a major role in season #2 of HBO’s True Detective. In the view of HuffPostLive‘s Ricky Camilleri, the latter may prove to be Vaughn’s biggest shot in the arm since The Wedding Crashers. Because right now Vaughn is really hurting — more or less in the same spot Matthew McConaughey was in (i.e., “King of the Empties“) before he turned things around three years ago.

“Vaughn’s comic shtick” — Delivery Man, The Internship, Couples Retreat — “has grown tired for audiences in the same way it grew tired for McConaughey’s shirtless, lady-charming leading men of 2003 to 2010,” Camilleri declares. “McConaughey needed Dallas Buyers Club, The Wolf Of Wall Street and, of course, True Detective, in the same way Vaughn now needs True Detective. The difference now is that this HBO show is already an established hit that can have the stars of its choosing. McConaughey helped make it that by lending his name, performance and Oscar win to the first season of the show. If Vaughn lands True Detective he can rebrand himself as a viable and layered movie star with mystery and wit.”

There’s an apparent presumption out there that when push comes to shove, the leading Oscar Discriminators (i.e., blogging mafia, SAG members, Academy rank-and-file) are going to maintain that you can assign Best Picture heat to only one World War II movie during the 2014 award season, and that means you’ll have to choose between Angelina Jolie‘s Unbroken, David Ayer and Brad Pitt‘s Fury and Morten Tyldum‘s The Imitation Game. The Brad-vs.-Angie angle = Tyldum will have to struggle just to stay in the conversation. It also means that Angie’s film will be seen as the alpha-minded WWII movie with heart (he survived! life didn’t break him! let that be an inspiration to all!), Ayer and Pitt’s will be the opposite end of that spectrum (the war in Europe was a lot more savage than anything Samuel Fuller dared to show) and Tyldum’s will be the seen as half brain-teasey and half tut-tutting (i.e., why prosecute a decoding genius who shortened the war just because he’s gay?). Look, calm down…okay? Get hold of yourselves. It’s August, for God’s sake.

I’m down with the Brad-vs.-Angie meme as far as it goes but the “only one World War II Movie can be a serious contender” notion is lame. Subject matter is the least interesting aspect of a good or noteworthy film. Subject matter is simply the starting point. It’s the journey that matters. That and the way the light falls upon the characters during magic hour.

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