Day: February 23, 2015

16 months ago I posted a riff about the Fox Home Video Bluray of Joseph L. Mankiewicz‘s A Letter To Three Wives (’49). I was discussing the film with a friend today, and as this piece didn’t get much action I figured I’d give it a slight rewrite (it wasn’t well shaped or carefully written enough) and give it another go:

“I first saw this…oh, sometime in my teens. Even in that early stage of aesthetic development I remember admiring the brilliant writing and especially the way it pays off. Nominally it’s a woman’s drama about marital insecurity. The plot is about three suburban wives (Jeanne Crain‘s, Linda Darnell, Ann Southern‘s) who’ve just learned before going on a kind of picnic that one of their husbands has “run away” with sophisticated socialite Addie Ross, who narrates the film from time to time (the voice belongs to Celeste Holm) but is never seen.

“But that’s just the story or clothesline upon which Wives hangs its real agenda. For this is primarily an examination of social mores, values and ethics among middle-class marrieds in late 1940s America.

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I’m sorry but I felt myself disengage less than ten seconds after this trailer began playing. The mere suggestion of an “uneven but pleasurably mellow indie,” in the words of Variety critic Ronnie Scheib, puts cold fear in my veins. Alex of Venice is one of those sensitive life-transition dramas, Scheib warns, that “veer toward the understated and mundane” and which “will attract connoisseurs of the laid-back.” God…no!

Vulture‘s Kyle Buchanan and IMDB’s Keith Simanton tied for best score (83% correct) among the Gold Derby Oscar guesstimators. My advocacy attitude equals indifference about how accurate my predictions are, but I must confess to being amused when I was told a couple of hours ago that my 75% accurate pickings were the same as TheWrap‘s Steve Pond and Out.com’s Michael Musto, and that Deadline‘s Pete Hammond and Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone actually tallied lower with 67% scores.

I’ve been told I need to add Jay Roach‘s Trumbo, a biopic of once-blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, to HE’s list of notable, aspirational 2015 films. The period drama, filmed last fall in the New Orleans area, stars Bryan Cranston as Trumbo, one of the most prolific and honored screenwriters in Hollywood history. Costars include Diane Lane, Elle Fanning. Helen Mirren and John Goodman. Dalton Trumbo is renowned for having used “fronts” or having otherwise taken no screen credit for scripts written during his blacklisted period in the ’50s. Kirk Douglas, who claimed credit for being the first to hire Trumbo under his own name on Spartacus, is played by Dean O’Gorman; Otto Preminger, portrayed by Christian Berkel, paid Trumbo the same respect when he gave Trumbo public screen credit for his work on Exodus. Preminger’s film came out two months after Spartacus but who stepped up first? Douglas states on a Criterion commentary track that he provided a drive-on pass for Trumbo during the filming of Spartacus in late ’59 or early ’60. David James Elliott plays Trumbo enemy and rightie rabble-rouser John Wayne. Pic is produced by Michael London‘s Groundswell Productions.

Bryan Cranston as screenwriter Dalton Trumbo in Jay Roach and Michael London’s Trumbo. Pic no release date but will probably pop six months from now at one of the August-September film festivals — Venice, Telluride or Toronto.

A spokesperson for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has provided the following statement to the L.A. Times about the absence of the late Joan Rivers from the “death reel” segment during last night’s Oscar telecast: “Joan Rivers is among the many worthy artists and filmmakers we were unfortunately unable to feature in the In Memoriam segment of this year’s Oscar show. She is, however, included in our In Memoriam gallery on Oscar.com.” Well, that’s bullshit. The Academy’s Board of Governors (and not, I’m told, Oscar show producers Craig Zadan and Neil Meron, who had nothing to say about it) weren’t “unable” to include Rivers. They considered whether to include her and then crossed her out. Their reasoning, one presumes, is that they decided that Rivers was more of a comedian and red-carpet interviewer — a periphery figure — than an actress or filmmaker. But if you think about it Johnny Carson — a guy who never made or starred in a film but who merely hosted the Tonight Show for decades as well as five Oscar telecasts — was just as much of an outlier. When Carson died in ’04 did the Oscar producers blow him off? No — in fact they devoted more time to his legend and passing than they did to the great Marlon Brando, whom they merely included in the death reel on the ’05 Oscar telecast. Carson was deemed such a major Oscar figure that he wasn’t even included in that montage — they gave him his own special tribute. You can argue that Carson was “bigger” than Rivers, but they were both essentially commentators and quipsters and deserving of the same kind of respect, certainly in the eyes of the Godz.

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At last February’s Berlinale I caught Yann Demange‘s urgent, pulse-pounding ’71, and then promptly reviewed it. A bit later Roadside acquired ’71 but decided to hold it until early ’15, apparently hoping that star Jack O’Connell‘s drawing power would surge after the December ’14 release of Angelina Jolie‘s Unbroken, in which he played the late Louis Zamperini. Well, Unbroken was a domestic hit ($115 million) but ’71 isn’t driven by O’Connell’s charisma or star power — it’s really about Demange’s directing skills. You’d think that a violent chase thriller and a suspense film would play fine on its own terms, but the U.S. viewing public can be astonishingly thick and slow to respond to even the best-made films.

In any event ’71 is opening in New York and Los Angeles on Friday. It has a 98% Rotten Tomatoes rating and 79% on Metacritic.

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For me Dick Cavett’s Watergate, which aired on PBS stations last August, was a delicious if too-short summary of all those great ABC Dick Cavett shows that focused on the Watergate scandal between mid ’72 and August ’74. Today director John Scheinfeld informed me that a similar compilation will air in April — Dick Cavett’s Vietnam. Cavett’s show was the only mainstream show that chewed the Vietnam War fat with politicians, journalists, newsmakers and celebrities — John Kerry, Henry Kissinger, Daniel Ellsberg, Muhammad Ali, Woody Allen, Warren Beatty, Jane Fonda, Barry Goldwater, Billy Graham, Alexander Haig, David Halberstam, Senator Wayne Morse, Paul Newman, I.F. Stone, etc.

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I intended to post these last night, but whoopee and then fatigue interfered:

Best Picture: Birdman — Alejandro G. Inarritu, John Lesher and James W. Skotchdopole; Best Director: Alejandro González Iñárritu, Birdman; Best Actor: Eddie Redmayne, The Theory of Everything; Best Actress: Julianne Moore, Still Alice; Best Supporting Actor: J.K. Simmons, Whiplash; Best Supporting Actress: Patricia Arquette, Boyhood.

Best Original Screenplay: Birdman – Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Nicolás Giacobone, Alexander Dinelaris, Jr. and Armando Bo; Best Adapted Screenplay: The Imitation Game, Graham Moore; Best Cinematography: Birdman, Emannuel Lubezki; Best Film Editing: Whiplash, Tom Cross; Best Documentary Feature: Citizenfour — Laura Poitras, Mathilde Bonnefoy, Dirk Wilutzky.

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Thank God the season is over and now on to 2015. The 34 films opening between now and 12.31.15 that seem like the most formidable and aspirational are now posted inside the Oscar Balloon. But I have one last bark in the wake of last night’s four-pronged Birdman triumph — Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay and Best Cinematography. I’m speaking, of course, about the appalling levels of sour grapes, elitism and snide derision from the charming Boyhood gang on Twitter. You guys were deluded predictors all along, and now you’re exuding nothing but class — what can I tell you? If it had gone the other way no fair-minded Birdman admirer would dream of calling Boyhood anything but a remarkable achievement and a profound family epic. But last night some were calling Birdman‘s win a tragedy, and Alejandro G. Inarritu‘s film one of the least deserving Oscar winners ever. How dare you?

Birdman is a film that screams audacity. It is pumped full of fear and anguished exposure and angst and brutal New York-itude, and is obviously one of the most daring, “divisive” and non-coddling Oscar winners ever (many of the old farts despised it) and one of the very few comedies to win. And then it blows through all the derision by winning the top four Oscars and you’re slagging it? You’re doubling down on a hand that’s already lost? Gotta know when to fold ’em, guys. Noblesse oblige and all that.

It needs to be said again that if nothing else the 2014/15 Oscar season has exposed the fraudulence of Oscar-predicting, and particularly the alleged impartiality of industry experts. Every year I’ve declared I’m not a predictor but an advocate, but except for Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone and one or two others everyone else in the Oscar-blogging racket has claimed they were coming from a place of studied cultural impartiality. Well, maybe they were in previous years but not this time. Over the last six months most Best Picture predictors were encamped squarely inside their own rectums with Boyhood flags planted outside.

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