Month: November 2015

Today I attended a press/Academy lunch at Craig’s for Spotlight director Tom McCarthy, who is literally the toast of the town right now. Received last weekend from a producer pal: “I thought it was wonderful. It may be the first time I really liked Liev Schreiber — he was amazing. Keaton amazing. Ruffalo amazing. It will definitely win the ensemble cast award from the Screen Actors Guild. A major contender for Best Picture.”) Nobody except LexG is anything less than over-the-waterfall in praise for this fact-based drama, which was produced by Steve Golin, whom I ran into recently at the Middleburg Film Festival. (The other producers are Blye Faust, Nicole Rocklin and Michael Sugar.) Also in attendance: Open Road honcho Tom Ortenberg, Spotlight award-campaign consultant Lisa Taback, Jackie Bisset, Dermot Mulroney, Nic Coster.

Spotlight director Tom McCarthy chatting with Gregg Ellwood at Craig’s — Monday, 11.9, 1:10 pm.

Spotlight producer Steve Golin.

Last Friday attended a Musso & Frank luncheon for Kent Jones‘ Hitchcock/Truffaut (Cohen Media, 12.2), which is vying, naturally, for a Best Feature Documentary nomination. Which it fully deserves. Just as I fully deserve to eat free food occasionally. (Actually that analogy doesn’t work — scratch that.) Jones’ doc is as good and scholarly and reverential as films of this sort get. If you don’t know your Hitchcock, you will after seeing it.

I first saw Hitchcock/Truffaut in Paris last May, a week prior to its 5.19 Cannes Film Festival debut. I called it “a sublime turn-on — a deft educational primer about the work and life of Alfred Hitchcock and, not quite equally but appreciably, Francois Truffaut. Efficient, well-ordered, devotional.”

(l.) Kent Jones, director and co-writer (with Serge Toubiana) of Hitchcock/Truffaut as well as the top programming dog at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, and (r.) Cohen Media’s Daniel Battsek at Musso & Frank — Friday, 11.6, 1:40 pm.

Kent was his usual cool, erudite, laid-back self. Dressed in a Stanley Kubrick-like dark blue suit.

I asked him again about getting screen-capture images of some Psycho images of Hitch shooting the Phoenix hotel room scene (Janet Leigh, John Gavin) — images I’d never seen before. Apparently they’re under some kind of copyright lock and key or whatever. Jones had nothing to tell me about these images last May, and he still doesn’t. I’ll never see these images up-close.

Hitchcock/Truffaut “didn’t tell me anything about Hitchcock or his many films or Truffaut’s renowned ‘Hitchcock/Truffaut‘ book (a feature-length q & a interspersed with frame captures from Hitch’s films) that I didn’t already know, but that’s okay — almost every detail of the book’s material was absorbed into my system decades ago.

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A Bluray of the most HE-loathed movie of 2015 arrived two or three days ago. The second I opened the package the stomach acid returned. “What’s wrong is that movies like this are deathly boring and deflating and toxic to the soul. They’re anti-fun, anti-life, anti-cinema, anti-everything except paychecks. Furious 7 is odious, obnoxious corporate napalm. It is fast, flashy, thrompy crap that dispenses so much poison it feels like a kind of plague. Wan’s film is certainly a metaphor for a kind of plague that has been afflicting action films for a good 20-plus years.” — from my 3.31.15 review.

Look at what Goldfinger (’64) and Thunderball (’65) made when you adjust for inflation — $550 and $600 million domestic, which is way above the grosses of any Bond films since. From Russia With Love (’63) did better than all the Roger Moore Bonds except for The Spy Who Loved Me, and roughly as well as all the Brosnans and two out of three Craigs (Skyfall being the bang exception). But even Skyfall is dwarfed by Goldfinger/Thunderball, and is evenly matched by You Only Live Twice. Even little, new-to-the-marketplace Dr. No (’62) — the first 007 starring a relatively unknown Sean Connery — took in $150 million by 2015 standards. The lowest earners of all were the two Daltons — The Living Daylights and License to Kill.

The latest Gurus of Gold multi-category chart has Steve Jobs‘ Michael Fassbender in the lead for Best Actor Oscar. Even if you put aside Fassbender’s reported reluctance to campaign, he’s certain to lose this standing before long due to the fact that (a) the movie is a commercial stiff and (b) there are things to dislike about it from a critical-aesthetic perspective, the most prominent of these being the toxic dislikability of Fassbender’s Jobs character. I liked Jobs on the page but I didn’t like him when Fassbender stepped into his shoes….sorry. Honestly? Winning is an impossibility at this stage, and Fassbender even being nominated may become an iffy thing down the road. Or maybe not. I don’t know everything. But I’m certain that the bloom is off and it’s probably all downhill from here on.

Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone has added a spoiler warning introduction to the latest Oscar Poker, which drew scattered complaints after being posted last night due to certain revealings about Brooklyn and Room. If you’ve read a few reviews of Brooklyn you won’t be alarmed but spoiler whiners can be hyper-sensitive about this stuff. Again, the mp3.

Three things pop in Scott Dadich‘s Wired interview with Star Wars: The Force Awakens director J.J. Abrams. One, Dadich has used the word “pressure” and more specifically the phrase “No pressure, right?” And that means Dadich is a dead man as I really and truly hate journalists who ask “so how much pressure was it to nail this given the huge expectations?” (I explained why on 9.24.14.) Two, the top-of-the-page photo of Abrams is possibly the coolest ever taken of the guy, ever. And three, a passage in which Abrams talks about working with Episode VIII director Rian Johnson (i.e., another special friend-of-HE) is interesting. Here it is:

“The script for VIII is written. I’m sure rewrites are going to be endless, like they always are. But what Larry [Kasdan] and I did was set up certain key relationships, certain key questions, conflicts. And we knew where certain things were going. We had meetings with Rian and Ram Bergman, the producer of VIII. They were watching dailies when we were shooting our movie. We wanted them to be part of the process, to make the transition to their film as seamless as possible. I showed Rian an early cut of the movie, because I knew he was doing his rewrite and prepping. And as executive producer of VIII, I need that movie to be really good. Withholding serves no one and certainly not the fans. So we’ve been as transparent as possible.

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I have no respect whatsoever for another “yay Casablanca!” doc that shits all over the original 1.33 or 1.37 aspect ratio by framing the clips in 1.85. The content of the doc isn’t bad but seriously…this is a huge fail for producer-director Gary Leva. Really — what he’s done here is truly awful. And why is this doc being sent around at all? To recognize what anniversary or promote what product? Didn’t Hillary Clinton say back in ’07 or ’08 that Casablanca was her favorite film? Other studio-era films (like HE’s own Treasure of the Sierra Madre) need celebrating more.

If you’re new to Casablanca, remember to get the 2008 Bluray and not the 2012 70th Anniversary version, which is too dark and is mainly for grain fetishists.

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This morning’s Oscar Poker chat, in which Sasha Stone and I were joined by AwardsWatch.com’s Erik Anderson, ran about two hours. Brooklyn, By The Sea, Room, Best Actress, the curious persistence of Steve Jobs despite the air being out of the tires, the bizarre support for The Martian, Best Actor, etc. Again, the mp3.

I’m obviously late in posting this, but last night Revenant director Alejandro G. Inarritu spoke strongly and very critically about Donald Trump‘s anti-Mexican-immigrant rhetoric. He did so as a guest of honor at the annual Los Angeles County Museum of Art & Film gala. Here’s the best part:

Alejandro G. Inarritu, wife Maria Eladia Hagerman at last night’s LACMA gala.

“Unfortunately, there are currently people proposing [that] we build walls, instead of bridges. I must confess that I debated with myself, [wondering] if I should bring up this uncomfortable subject tonight. But in light of the constant and relentless xenophobic comments that have been expressed recently against my Mexican fellows, it is inevitable.

“These sentiments have been widely spread by the media without shame, embraced and cheered by leaders and communities around the U.S. The foundation of all this is so outrageous that it can easily be minimized as an SNL sketch, a mere entertainment, a joke. But the words that have been expressed are not a joke. Words have real power; and similar words in the past have both created and triggered enormous suffering for millions of humans beings, especially throughout the last century.

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There’s good buzz about Ryan Coogler‘s Creed (Warner Bros., 11.25), in which Sylvester Stallone‘s Rocky Balboa trains Michael B. Jordan‘s Adonis Johnson Creed (son of Apollo) for a big fight. A few others have heard the same talk. So why isn’t Warner Bros. screening it more liberally (i.e., for people like myself)? Hubba-hubba, guys. It opens in two and a half weeks.

Just today Deadline‘s Mike Fleming, one of the few journalists who’s seen it, said that he “wouldn’t be surprised if Sly Stallone’s subtle performance gets him nominated.” There was also a line in Josh Rottenberg’s 10.30 L.A. Times profile of Stallone that said Stallone’s “quietly soulful performance in Creed already has some Oscar pundits considering him as a potential supporting actor nominee.”

Michael B. Jordan, Sylvester Stallone in Ryan Coogler’s Creed (Warner Bros., 11.25)

It’s understood that Creed is basically a good “audience movie.” Fleming called it “uplifting” and a movie that “dropped me right back into how I felt watching those first few [Rocky] films…[it] might rebirth a franchise.”

It sounds good enough to show at the currently unfolding AFI Fest, but it’s not on the slate. (There’s been talk about a possible sneak preview between now and the festival’s conclusion next Thursday night, and that the sneak could be Creed…but who knows?) You’d think that the buzz for the film + Stallone would have required the screening of a Creed trailer at yesterday’s Deadline Contenders event at the DGA and perhaps even a Stallone drop-by, but I’m told that didn’t happen either.

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Leaving aside my vague feeling of depression after reading a LexG tweet saying that he liked Room better than Spotlight, mainly because Room made him cry and Spotlight didn’t, how did Spotlight play for the HE community? And how did the rooms feel as everyone was filing out? Translation: Apart from the usual X-factor responses from HE readers, how enlightened are paying audiences for admiring Spotlight as much as the Metacritic & Rotten Tomatoes gang, or (much-feared alternate scenario) do they not seem to be appreciating it as fully as they could/should? In which case I would have no choice to but characterize them (I’m sorry but is there another way to put this?) as…well, not so much rock stupid as devolved beyond hope.