Year: 2014

On Thursday, 11.6, or the same night that J.C. Chandor‘s A Most Violent Year screened at AFI Film Fest, the Hammer Museum in Westwood hosted a cool-sounding Joni Mitchell event, which, being a lifelong fan, I would have liked to attend. It was a screening of The Fiddle and the Drum, a 2007 film about a social-lament ballet that was scored by Mitchell and choreographed by Jean Grand-Maitre. The 71 year-old, cigarette-smoking Mitchell sat for a q & a in the Hammer courtyard following the screening. She also plugged her new compilation album, “Love Has Many Faces,” which pops on 11.24.

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Let it never be said that I was anything but attentive, engaged and impressed by Morten Tyldum‘s The Imitation Game when I saw it in Telluride two and half months ago. It’s a touching, intelligent, well-crafted film. But a piece I posted on 9.9 called “The Crowd Demands” is nonetheless valid. I noted that Game, boiled down, is “almost entirely” about how the World War II-era superiors and co-workers of the great Alan Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch) “didn’t care for his personality or resented his genius, or a combination thereof.” It’s really a film about a group of bright careerists relentlessly giving a genius grief, over and over and over. Except for Keira Knightley, of course.

“In scene after scene we watch Alan Turing’s Bletchley Park colleagues express irritation and disdain about his aloof, superior manner and general lack of social skills,” I wrote. “It reminds us of a lesson that we all have to learn and swallow early on, which is that you must be pleasantly sociable with people you work with (or hang or go to school with) because they’ll make your life hell if you’re not.

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Repeating again HE’s standard laments about Best Picture voting among guilds and Academy members: (a) For decades AMPAS members have made themselves infamous for succumbing to soft, tepid emotional impulses, which is largely due to the preferences of deadwood members — the over-the-hill crowd that doesn’t work that much (if at all) and whose tastes are conservative, smug and myopic; (b) Most Academy voters tend to vote like abused, emotionally-needy children; (c) The Academy almost always goes for Emotional Push-Button films (EPB) over Esoteric Think Pieces (ETP) with occasional exceptions or detours for films made by Way Overdue Artists (WOA); and (d) EPB films (otherwise known as films that meet the all-important Steve Pond criteria) are ones that deliver that “big thing”…that lump-in-the-throat feeling that melts you down by delivering some profound bedrock truth about our common experience.

And by this standard or tendency, the feeling seems to be that the latest well-received EPB (Selma) may be strong enough to be nominated, and that the strongest ETP (Birdman) hasn’t a chance against the still-leading EPBs (The Imitation Game, The Theory of Everything) and that A Most Violent Year, while brilliantly made, is essentially a Sidney Lumet-cloned ETP that doesn’t speak to our 21st Century mood or situation as much as address a specific New York culture of 30-plus years ago, which is what makes it “thinky”. And that Boyhood is still everyone’s favorite #2 or #3 or #4, and that Whiplash is far and away the choice of the under-35s, whose viewership is needed for the Oscar telecast, and that Interstellar might slip in with a Best Picture nom but it won’t win anything more than a tech Oscar or two. It should also be noted that many are clinging to the belief that Unbroken will clear the table when it finally screens on 11.30. Is that more or less it? Maybe so, but for the 79th time I have to say it feels humiliating and degrading to sit around wondering what the deadwooods will like.

I decided this morning that Jessica Chastain‘s snapdragon performance in J.C. Chandor‘s A Most Violent Year (mafia daughter first, loyal bookkeeping wife of Oscar Isaac second) has to be highly ranked among Best Supporting Actress contenders. Right under Birdman‘s Emma Stone, I’m thinking. Mainly because we like snapdragons! But also because a vote for Chastain’s Violent performance will be regarded as a vote against the strong-arm tactics by Interstellar producers when they contractually prevented her from promoting A Most Violent Year or her performance in it. She’s fine in Interstellar, of course, but her acting in Chandor’s film is two or three times richer and tastier; ditto the role itself. There’s really no question about this.

I’ve come to a semi-profound realization about Los Angeles, one connected to my longstanding irritation with this bleached-out burg, and, correspondingly, why so many people say they love it when the nighttime energy manifests but are always inside during work hours. And it’s fairly basic. For there to be occasional serenity in anyone’s life outside their doors and dreams and meditations, there has to be some approximation of that easy feeling that comes from natural tree cover and respite from the sun’s glare. I never met a leaf I didn’t like, but Los Angeles has never been much for that.

My favorite cafe along rue Caulaincourt in Montmartre, obviously during the summer months.

Okay, you can obviously get some shade therapy here, but there’s little to be had outside of Beverly Hills, Brentwood, Bel Air, Hancock Park and upper Santa Monica. You basically need to be loaded or to placate yourself with visits to Griffith Park or Franklin Canyon.

Except, of course, when the sun does down, which is when everyone’s attitude suddenly changes and L.A. becomes a certain pulsing, splendorous, heat-of-the-night thing, which anyone with any kind of appreciation for perverse, off-kilter beauty has been seeing for decades.

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This afternoon I enjoyed nice easy chats with Al Pacino and Greta Gerwig, the leads of Barry Levinson‘s The Humbling (Millennium, 1.15.15), which had its first peek-out in Toronto. There’s no point in claiming it was 100% praised, but for me there’s an amusing easy-chair quality about The Humbling. It’s a mildly perverse thing, shot in and around Levinson’s home in Redding and other Fairfield County environs (where I hail from). For my money Pacino’s Simon Axler, an aging, louche, has-been actor, is worth the price — Al really knows from jaded aplomb. And I enjoyed the combustible, tilt-angle relationship that occurs between him and Gerwig’s Pegeen Stapleford, a lesbian who decides to have a whirl at a heterosexual dalliance when Pacino rolls into the room, partly because she had a crush on him when young.

Pacino and I lasted 24 minutes, and then I did 18 with Greta. I asked Pacino to confirm that autograph story that Peter Rainer shared the other night; turns out Rainer told it just right. I also asked Pacino who does the best Tony Montana impression he’s ever seen, and he said Johnny Depp.

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I didn’t see this Midnight Rider tragedy train video when it popped about ten days ago. It appears that a description of the accident provided by hair stylist Joyce Gilliard to The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Johnson in a 3.4.14 article was inaccurate. The video shows that the edge of the Altamaha river was a good distance from the point of impact. Gilliard’s experience as related by Johnson: “With the train howling past just inches behind her, Gilliard threw herself onto two metal wires that stretched between the girders and along the gangplank, thrust her head out over the river below” –not! — “and shut her eyes.” There goes my Butch-and-Sundance theory, but I’ll tell you what I would have done if I’d been under that trestle and had suddenly seen that train coming. I would have teamed with another crew person and thrown that bed over the side like that.

As I said on 11.9 (“Over The Hump“), I’ve let the whole Interstellar thing go, particularly my soupy/bassy sound obsession. But I can’t ignore this photo sent yesterday by the Rochester-based Jay Shooke. Several 8 x 11 sheets with this message were “taped up all over at [Rochester’s] Cinemark Tinseltown IMAX,” he says, obviously in response to complaints.

“In contrast with such lovable loafs as Seth Rogen and Danny McBride, who have supplanted him as cinema’s man-children du jour, [Jim] Carrey’s comic instincts still tend toward the sinister, and many of this film’s jokes live or die depending on which side of the cruel-clever divide they fall.” — from Andrew Barker‘s Variety review of Dumb and Dumber 2. Barker is not just observing but half-agreeing that “lovable oaf” humor is preferable or more digestible than “sinister” humor, which tends to mean social-criticism humor with bite. Humor without a point, in other words, is more inviting or worthwhile than humor with a point. I’ve posted this Michael O’Donoghue quote 28 or 29 times since this column began, but Barker needs to read it: “Making people laugh is the lowest form of humor.”

I screwed up the mp3 link to my recent interview with The Babadook director Jennifer Kent. Profuse apologies. This should work.

In this scene from J.C. Chandor‘s A Most Violent Year, David Oyelowo alludes to Jessica Chastain‘s mobbed-up dad, who’s in prison the whole time and is never seen but is very much a presence in the film. Mob guys on the inside are always talking to guys on the outside, of course, and if they want someone hurt or fucked with, it tends to happen. Oyelowo is playing it cool and acting like it’s water off a duck’s ass, but he knows this. A Most Violent Year is one of the year’s finest films, no question. Right up there with Birdman, Gone Girl, Boyhood, Whiplash, Nightcrawler, The Drop, Locke, etc. More commanding, better written and more finely-tuned than The Gambler, Selma or American Sniper — easily the biggest push-through of 2014 AFI Fest. Sorry, dawg, but whaddaya want me to do…lie?