Month: December 2014

Marshall Fine on Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice, posted on 12.15: “It’s as if filmmaker and novelist [Thomas Pynchon] alike are commenting upon the art form by denigrating it, poking mirthless fun. Even as Anderson trots out notable actors playing what could be memorable characters — Reese Witherspoon, Benicio del Toro, a wildly lascivious and knowing Martin Short and a hammer-headed Josh Brolin — he strands them on little islands of his own whimsy.

And if that’s not enough: “I was an early fan of Anderson but over his past three films he seems to be playing a game of chicken with the audience: Bet I can make you watch without actually revealing anything about what you’re watching. How long will you remain engaged with a work that seems to purposely challenge the viewer to understand what the filmmaker’s getting at?”

Terrence Malick‘s Knight of Cups appears to be some kind of riff on La Dolce Vita or 8 1/2 or something along those lines. The Christian Bale character is some kind of louche Hollywood guy with too much dough, too many choices, too many women, not a lot of discipline…adrift in corruption, plagued by misgivings. Or something like that. Do the characters (Bale, Cate Blanchett, Natalie Portman) talk to each other in it? Using words, I mean? Or will they mainly talk to themselves a la Tree of Life and To The Wonder? Is there any kind of (excuse this inexcusably vulgar term) story or is this just another impressionist Malicky meandering? I’m slightly intrigued but until it’s been proven to me that Cups is composed of actual scenes in which (a) characters have goals and demons and interact with each other and (b) a semblance of a story happens due to things actually happening, I’m not paying $2500 to see this puppy at the Berlinale. No way. And don’t call me a Philistine for not wanting to muddle my way through another To The Wonder again. Stories and characters used to manifest in Malickland…really. Doubters need to check out Badlands and Days of Heaven.

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George Stephanopoulos: “Are there any second thoughts, at all?” Seth Rogen: “At this point it’s too late to have any.” Why didn’t Stephanopoulos ask Rogen if he and Evan Goldberg would pitch and make the exact same movie if they could do it all over again? Or if he felt The Interview would have been diminished if a fictitious Asian dictator has been substituted? Or if he agreed with Aaron Sorkin‘s N.Y. Times anti-press screed?

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The more a lead character is brutally beaten and the more he suffers, the nobler and purer of heart and closer to God he is, and the more deserving of worship. This was basically the idea or strategy behind Mel Gibson‘s The Passion of the Christ, which obviously paid off with conservative hinterland Christians. This idea has now been more or less appropriated by Angelina Jolie, which surprised me. All along I thought Angie was just another fair-minded humanist liberal but there’s obviously a strain of conservative sentiment within. How it got there or why is a mystery, but it’s somewhere in her psyche.

Is it worth it to fly to the Berlinale in February and stay at some Airb&b pad for four or five days and shell out at least $2500 so I can be among the first to see and review Terrence Malick‘s Knight of Cups? I think not. You never know with Malick these days. Will Knight contain dialogue or will the actors just whisper and roam around? Will it have a story of any kind? Will it make any sense? The fact that it’s been in the editing room for a couple of years suggests that Malick has been tossing the lettuce leaves pretty high in the air. I’ll wait until it plays at Cannes Film Festival, thanks. I attended the Berlinale last year when the big attraction was the debut of Wes Anderson‘s The Grand Budapest Hotel, but that was a Fox Searchlight deal (air fare, hotel for three days). It just seems a bit much to fund a big Berlin thing all on my lonesome. On top of which I didn’t care that much for my Berlinale experience, to be honest.

Christian Bale, Natalie Portman during filming of Terrence Malick’s Knight of Cups in 2012.

A lot of people and a lot of movies have been nominated by the Broadcast Film Critics Association, a.k.a., the givers of the People’s Choice Awards.** These guys know how to spread the love around. Birdman leads the pack with 13 nominations followed by The Grand Budapest Hotel (11 noms) and Boyhood (8 noms). Reminder with special attention to Hollywood Reporter awards handicapper Scott Feinberg — the film with the most nominations among all the award groups tends to generally kick ass and win the Best Picture Oscar…do the math.

Dan Gilroy‘s Nightcrawler‘s Jake Gyllenhaal was nominated for Best Actor and the film was nominated for Best Picture…go Gilroy brothers! Ava DuVernay‘s Selma was nominated five times including Best Picture and Best Director. Chris Nolan‘s Interstellar collected four nominations but not for Best Picture or Best Director. The BFCA’s largesse was further indicated by the giving of four nominations to Unbroken, which has been shut out by the critics groups and blanked by the SAG and Golden Globe nominations. But the BFCAs gave it nominations for Best Picture, Best Director (Angelina Jolie), Best Cinematogrpahy (Roger Deakins) and Best Adapted Screenplay (Coen brothers, William Nicholson, Richard LaGravanese).

Kevin Costner, Jessica Chastain and Ron Howard will receive special awards at the BFCA awards ceremony, which will happen on Thursday, January 15th.

** The BFCA nominations were revealed out last night but embargoed until Monday morning.

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“There’s no black or white, left or right to me any more…there’s only up or down.” — Bob Dylan as quoted by Martin Scorsese in No Direction Home: Bob Dylan.

When I first saw Mike Binder‘s Black or White last summer I knew that Kevin Costner‘s performance as Elliot, an angry, grieving attorney who’s drinking too much, was one of his all-time best. Not just a well-measured performance of skill and feeling but one that was “up” in a Dylanesque sense. Which is to say a kind of head-turner, which is to say a kind of high. Because it was basically about the old Jimmy Cagney thing of “planting your feet, looking the other guy in the eye and telling the truth,” which meant no crapping around with those little charm-school games that actors sometimes resort to. And it wasn’t one of Stanley Kubrick‘s “interesting” performances either. It was take-it-or-leave-it real which, in my mind, is always an “up” thing because the technique is more or less invisible.

Costner, I felt, had gotten under the skin of this somewhat testy grandfather of a mixed-race girl and made him whole, but he had also shown courage in playing Elliot in the first place. Because he and Binder pretty much did it alone.

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In a N.Y. Times op-ed piece titled “The Sony Hack and the Yellow Press,” screenwriter Aaron Sorkin has bitchslapped the editors and journalists who’ve published the Sony material stolen by the “Guardians of Peace” hackers in Thailand. These editors and journalists are slime, Sorkin is saying. That includes me, right? I’m a personification of slithery green ooze for joining in and riffing on the ramifications and so on? And what about my offering a clarification and defense of Amy Pascal? I thought that was okay.

“If you close your eyes you can imagine the hackers sitting in a room, combing through the documents to find the ones that will draw the most blood,” Sorkin writes. “And in a room next door are American journalists doing the same thing. As demented and criminal as it is, at least the hackers are doing it for a cause. The press is doing it for a nickel.”

The most interesting paragraph, for me, is the one in which Sorkin gives a new title to the much-described, much-gossiped-about Jobs project, for which he wrote the screenplay. That project is called Steve Jobs, Sorkin says. Seriously? Steve Jobs? What, like Michael Clayton and Dolores Claiborne? Sounds sucky, man. A whole different ring. Dump it and go back to Jobs. Or call it something else.

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The N.Y. Times is reporting that Sony attorneys, including litigator David Boies, have demanded that news agencies ignore any ill-gotten information that has come from hacked Sony emails and data. Pay no attention to those situations and scenarios behind the curtain because the information is “stolen,” which of course it has been. News orgs can stay with the story but no more tasty email excerpts can be posted or published. In the three-page letter Boies said that the studio “does not consent to your possession, review, copying, dissemination, publication, uploading, downloading or making any use” of the information. You guys are reputable, front-line journalists, Boies is saying, and so you must disregard what all the other websites who are covering this story will almost certainly not disregard. You must abstain. You must not promote or assist the hostile desires of the Bangkok-based, most likely North Korean-backed hackers.

While there’s some contentment about Paul Thomas Anderson‘s Inherent Vice having earned $330,000 this weekend in five New York and Los Angeles theaters, there’s also concern that it might not match the earnings of previous PTA films (The Master, There Will Be Blood, Punch-Drunk Love, Magnolia, Boogie Nights) by the end of the road. I was half-and-half on The Master, seriously impressed by Blood, generally pleased with Love and Magnolia and delighted with Boogie Nights. But I’ve had difficulty with Inherent Vice both times I’ve seen it. My first reaction after the New York Film Festival showing was that I might not be smart or patient enough to get it, and that maybe the curtains would part upon my second viewing. Well, that didn’t happen. There’s always round three but I don’t know that I’m up for it. I really don’t want to hang with Joaquin Phoenix‘s Doc Sportello again, man. I hated his company like nothing else. Vice is far from thoughtless or haphazard and certainly deserves respect for PTA’s meticulous composition and use of…was it one or two Neil Young tunes? But I didn’t give a damn who did what (and neither did Thomas Pynchon — I get that) and I didn’t care about anyone in the entire cast except Martin Short. Pynchon fans might argue that Inherent Vice is an entirely different bird than Robert Altman‘s The Long Goodbye and Joel and Ethan Coen‘s The Big Lebowski, but these films are still quasi-detective stories about low-rent loser types trying to make sense of a complex Los Angeles demimonde and scratching their heads and shrugging their shoulders at the perverse and ungainly sprawl of it all. I recognize that Vice is more liked than disliked by critics and that the HE comment symphony may take a few pokes at me, but I’m used to that. What’s the verdict?

A friend who attended an Annie screening last Thursday afternoon confides that a more-or-less easygoing, well-positioned film journalist left at the halfway point, muttering that “life is too short.” The tagline for David Rooney‘s Hollywood Reporter review assures that “the sun’ll come out tomorrow, by which time this toxic mess should be forgotten.” Variety‘s Ronnie Scheib has written that “while there are several possible good reasons to remake the Depression-set musical Annie in 2014, none of them seem to have informed [director] Will Gluck’s overblown yet undernourished treatment.” In a review titled “Barf, Says Sandy,” Stephen J. Whitty writes that after the film ended he overheard a little girl complain to her mother that there “wasn’t enough of the dog in the movie.” Whitty’s comment: “Oh, I don’t know. I saw a dog, all right.” I tried like hell to make Thursday’s 5 pm screening (held a bit earlier to accommodate the family crowd) but I couldn’t get there in time. Now I might have to pay to see it. I do feel it’s important to do that, reactions notwithstanding.

I’ve been relishing David Denby‘s film reviews for over 35 years, or since the late ’70s when he began reviewing for New York magazine. He began co-reviewing with Anthony Lane at The New Yorker in late ’98, and now, 14 years later, he’s been de-berthed of that responsibility. Lane will henceforth carry the whole load. Denby will stay on, banging out whatever New Yorker pieces come to mind and that’s fine, but why, I wonder, is he being…I don’t want to say “put out to semi-pasture” but he has been relieved of his big-dog status. Denby is only 71, which can be a kind of middle-aged period for some writers. There’s obviously a lot more in the tank. If I were Denby I’d launch my own site and review everything and anything. I’ll always love Denby’s writing — he always brings you into his realm. You feel as if you’ve watched the film with him and that he’s examined and re-examined things through to the bottom. He’s got to keep going and going — there’s no other option. Oh, and by the way? It’s allowable to note that Reese Witherspoon and original Wild author Cheryl Strayed are built differently, which they are.