Day: November 23, 2014

In the latest Mike Fleming-Peter Bart discussion riff on Deadline (posted today around noon), Bart puts down Birdman because it doesn’t play with Average Joes. “Critics don’t like to admit it, but the conditions under which you see a film strongly influence your opinion,” he says. “Birdman is a good example. If you see a film like this with a pack of cinephiles like at Telluride, everyone gets every inside joke, and you instinctively go along with the crowd. I made it a point to see Birdman with a paid civilian audience and it was like screening it in a mausoleum. No laughs, just occasional grunts and lots of walkouts.”

No shit, Peter? The average ticket-buyer has always been on the common side of the equation. He/she is simply less sensitive and attuned to wit and innovation and “da coolness” than movie-mad festivalgoers, and so a film that plays well at Telluride or Sundance is naturally going to have less of a heartbeat in front of a crowd of popcorn-munching Joes. Never judge a film by how it plays with those guys…please.

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I saw about 80% of Jennifer Aniston‘s Cake at the Toronto Film Festival, but I caught it again today (12 noon screening, Pacific Design center) start to finish. It’s basically an acting showcase drama with a highly commendable performance from Aniston, for which she’s currently taking bows around town in hopes of landing a Best Actress nomination. The film over-plays the meditation card and eventually becomes tedious — everybody just ambles along in this thing, behaving and commenting and sometimes weeping and arguing but never doing all that much. (Except, that is, when Aniston and her long-suffering assistant, superbly played by Adriana Barraza, drive to Mexico for pain pills.) But given that it’s a relatively weak year for actresses it’s not that crazy to suggest that Aniston, on the merit of her performance alone, could make the cut. And in so doing she might develop a new career groove in which she makes fewer crap-level successes like We’re The Millers and Horrible Bosses.

Cake star & exec producer Jennifer Aniston during this afternoon’s q & a at the Pacific Design Center. She’s dropped the weight she put on for the film, and her blonde hair looked fantastic. (Seriously, if I was a blonde female I’d want my hair to look just like hers. Really.) A young woman from the audience asked if she could have a hug, and of course Aniston obliged…but it felt a bit weird.

Cake is basically an indie slog about acute pain management and working past emotional anguish over some really bad stuff that happened a year or so back. The problem is that Aniston’s middle-aged character, deglammed and scar-faced and dropping handfuls of Percocets for the pain, wears out her welcome around the one-hour mark. The movie fails to pivot (in the Howard Suber sense of that term), and as much as you may enjoy her sharp-tongued commentary about anyone and anything she happens to find irritating or infuriating (including, to her immense credit, Orange County righties), you just don’t want to hang with this suffering crabhead any more. Enough.

But at least Aniston (who exec produced) really gives it hell. She can be quite deft and subtle when she wants to be, always letting you know what’s happening inside with just the right amount of emphasis. And she certainly looks like a wreck with her stiff movements and brown stringy hair and somewhat heavier appearance.

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Note: Incorrect Best Director and Best Actor charts were posted Sunday morning. These are the correct ones.

The Boyhood screener arrived last night. The fold-out jacket is quite elaborate and almost flamboyant by IFC standards. Obviously IFC Films honchos and their award-season strategists sat down a couple of months ago and agreed to put a big chunk of their funds into this. “Screeners are key,” somebody said, “and if we play up Boyhood‘s importance by emphasizing rave reviews on an attention-getting jacket, it’ll be money well spent.” IFC Films screener jackets have never looked this swanky. This one equals if not betters the usual award-season screener packaging from the major distributors.

It’s interesting to note that the 11.22.63 Dr. Strangelove screening would have happened at the former Leow’s Orpheum (now AMC Leows Orpheum 7), which is way the hell up on Third Avenue and 86th Street. Nowadays nobody holds screenings north of 68th or 72nd Street on either side of town. I don’t think I attended an invitational screening on 86th Street during my entire 2008-to-2011 New York experience. And note the time — 8:30 pm. No invitational screenings start at that hour these days. For as long as I’ve been a journalist they’ve all begun at 7 or 7:30 pm. This harkens back to the ancient theatrical tradition of Broadway plays starting at 8:30 pm.