Month: November 2014

This morning Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone and I talked for 74 minutes about all the angles and dangles of the Best Picture situation. Expanding Selma glow, Birdman dazzle, slight Boyhood droop, ongoing Gone Girl backhanding despite aesthetic chops and impressive commercial success, The Theory of Everything vs. The Imitation Game, etc. Plus a detour about the collapse of Bill Cosby‘s career. Sasha’s best remark: The movie that wins the Best Picture Oscar is (a) the puppy you can’t hate and (b) the movie that gives you something to vote for. Again, the mp3.

I went to a Selma screening on the Paramount lot last night. I wanted to see if it would expand or sink in a bit more. Honestly? It did somewhat. It went up on my approve-o-meter. Somewhat. A lady I was with gave it a 9. I had it at 7.5 after my first viewing but I bumped it up to an 8 last night. I still think it’s a little too talky or speechy (and scenes that aren’t about speeches are mostly about situational assessments and strategy sessions, mostly by MLK and his homies, secondarily by Tom Wilkinson‘s LBJ and Tim Roth‘s George Wallace), too self-regarding at times, generally too slow and too darkly lighted in too many indoor scenes. The lady friend said that for her, many of the talky scenes actually delivered serious emotion. Okay. I recognize again that I’m in the minority and that I should probably just shut up from here on. I respect Selma, I have no argument with Selma, I want Selma to do well, etc.

(l. to r.) Ava DuVernay, David Oyelowo, producer Dede Gardner during post-screening q & a.

Selma director Ava DuVernay, Monique Thompson following last night’s Selma screening at Sherry Lansing Theatre on Paramount lot.

Read more

Three or four days ago an especially malicious form of adware got into my Macbook Air. Before I knew it pages for Mackeeper kept popping up out of nowhere and strange ads were occupying the spaces of regular ads on the HE home page. [See below] It seemed wiser not to download just any adware-blocking or adware-expunging software unless it was recommended by a trusted source, so I decided to start with Apple tech support. Two of the tech guys I spoke with (out of a total of five) were “helpful” and conscientious as far as it went, but the adware still remained. I asked each one if they could recommend any particular adware-destroying software, but they said they didn’t know of any or couldn’t say, etc. Thanks, fellas! Yesterday afternoon I went down to the Mac store at the Grove and asked a Genius Bar guy, and he said no problem — we just have to download and install Adware Medic, which he promptly did. The adware fungus was erased and out of my Macbook Air ten minutes later. Thank you very much, Apple tech support, for keeping mum about Adware Medic despite my repeated pleas.

What happened to the idea of the studios sending out Bluray along with DVD screeners? Or at least as options that a recipient can choose in advance? There’s nothing lacking about the Ida screener — it looks wonderful on my 60″ Samsung plasma. But high-def versions of films new and old are increasingly common these days via the VOD streaming options, and we’re all getting used to high-def resolutions so why not send out Blurays? It’s not as if creating or pressing Blurays is a more expensive process.

David Poland (@DavidPoland) tweeting the night before last to A.J. Schnack (@ajschnack) about the chances of Laura Poitras‘s Citizenfour to win the Best Feature-Length Documentary Oscar, or at least be voted one of the five nominees: “Doc branch isn’t shy about issues [so] CitizenFour is about 95% likely to be nominated. But it’s about 10% likely to win. Full Academy doesn’t like issues.”

Yes, I know — they like to feel emotionally stirred. Which is why Rory Kennedy‘s Last Days in Vietnam, which is about a few Americans risking the well-being of their careers in order to help their South Vietnamese friends escape retribution from the North Vietnamese just before the fall of Saigon. And yet some of us feel quite emotional — I think the word is actually “scared” — about the NSA having set up a vast domestic monitoring mechanism that will allow a “bad” government, should one ever be elected, to mess with people like George Orwell never imagined. Citizenfour is about a stand-up guy who went through a lot of grief in order to point this out and say to his countrymen and to the world, “Do you guys understand what’s happened here?” And Citizenfour caught this dramatic decision live, as it happened.

Fledgling journo with the great Sterling Hayden on the Manhattan (i.e, Plaza Hotel) set of Frank Pierson’s King of the Gypsies, sometime in the fall of ’77 or thereabouts — my very first movie-set interview.

South side of Melrose between Westmount and Westbourne, roughly a week ago.

One of the really glorious things about being relatively young is the vibrant color of your hair. The color of Peter O’Toole’s hair in What’s New, Pussycat was an almost heavenly nut brown, robust and gleaming. The color had all but disappeared by the time I interviewed O’Toole 15 years later (for GQ, about his role in The Stunt Man) at his home in Hampstead Heath.

It’s not so much “dangerously” cute as odiously or corporately cute in a typically calculating, premeditated way…no?

Read more

Manhattan Wise Guy #1: “Finally saw The Gambler and it wasn’t as bad as everyone has been saying. Aside from the upbeat ending, of course, which blows. Saw N.Y. Post critic Lou Lumenick at the screening. He was wearing one of the most exhilarating sweaters of this century.” Manhattan Wise Guy #2: “What a dog. Loved John Goodman and Michael K. Williams but I thought it was dreadfully written. And I’d just re-watched the original and thought it hadn’t aged well.”

A little while ago I got into a polite back-and-forth with a friend about the qualitative differences between J.C. Chandor‘s A Most Violent Year and Ava Duvernay‘s Selma, which I saw again last night. I found myself responding a bit more supportively to Selma — it went up slightly on my rate-o-meter — but even its best scenes don’t approach the quality of this art-of-the-sell clip. THere’s nothing in Selma that’s as well-written or interesting or mesmerizing, really, as this. This scene is on a whole ‘nother level, particularly due to Oscar Isaac‘s Buddhist Zen calm. The way those 20somethings stand still as statues and respond with the slightest of expressions except for the guy who smirks, and Isaac’s response to that. The vibes in this scene are world-class. This is Ricky Roma in Glengarry Glen Ross material. You can feel it.

Read more

An ex-girlfriend recently said on Facebook that she “loves” this four-month-old ASL Grease video by Paul and Tina Sirimarco. I watched it…okay, cool, I get it. Paul and Tina seem like nice, kindly, up-attitude people, and they seem more happy than most couples I know. But who listens to “You’re The One That I Want” while driving? I’ll tell you who. People who go to see stage revivals of Grease and Chicago when they visit New York City once every five or ten years, that’s who. People who are unfailingly kind and sensitive and polite, and who wouldn’t mind being a little famous and maybe trading in on that and (who knows?) moving into a bigger, roomier home one day, and maybe vacationing in Cancun or Monte Carlo or Orlando Disney World if fortune permits. People who might have seen Gone Girl but focused only on the plot (as opposed to the actual substance of that David Fincher film) and were kind of bummed by the downbeat ending. People who would probably look at me blankly if I asked them what they thought of Birdman, Citizen Four, Boyhood, A Most Wanted Man, The Babadook, Locke, Nightcrawler, The Drop, etc.

Read more

In The Age of Adaline (Lionsgate, 4.24.15), everlasting youth is apparently offered as a pleasant fantasy for the female demographic. Dorian Gray lite, Forrest Gump serendipity…something like that. And yet a similar idea in “Long Live Walter Jameson,” a 1960 Twilight Zone episode, delivered a darker, creepier vibe.

Read more

In a just-posted piece about how the immediacy of online conversations and judgments brought about the downfall of Bill Cosby, Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson links to a Guardian piece by Lili Loofburow. The piece argues, Thompson says, “that TV recap culture has created an ‘ethical community’ of viewers, who engage with [TV] shows not just as entertainment, but as cultural texts.” Excuse me but I’ve been looking at movies this way my whole life. It’s a very rare film that isn’t a cultural text or artifact or reflection of something or other. Are there any film fanatics who don’t feel this way? No film exists as a stand-alone fantasy that evaporates when it’s over. Okay, some do, but most don’t. All films are about echoes, meditations, ping-backs. Morality, cultural character, sexual politics, political winds…you name it. No movie is an island. Everything, like, reflects everything.

“Not every Mike Nichols production was great. The first time I met him was in 1975, when, as a fledgling magazine writer, I spent days on the Culver City lot where he was shooting The Fortune, a seemingly can’t-miss period comedy starring Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty. It missed by a mile, an outcome that seemed apparent to Nichols as well. But again, as I could now see in close-up, he was relentless in trying to fix it, never forsaking his urbane optimism and preternatural calm. As befit a former performer, he showed extraordinary patience with actors, including at least one who had a habit of turning up late and not always in peak condition.” — from Frank Rich’s Vulture piece about the late director, posted late this morning.

The exaggerated expressions worn by Warren Beatty and especially by Jack Nicholson suggest why Mike Nichols‘ The Fortune didn’t work. They were more or less trying to inhabit or reanimate the spirits of Laurel and Hardy, or so it seemed. A limited edition Twilight Time Bluray is streeting early next month (I think…Screen Archives doesn’t like to post dates).