Month: December 2015

I would never push a case against Mark Rylance‘s Bridge of Spies performance as 1950s Russian spy Rudolph Abel. Nor would I dispute the general conviction that he’s an all-but-certain Best Supporting Actor nominee. Like everyone else, I knew right away he’d be nominated when I first saw Steven Spielberg‘s reasonably decent espionage film last month. What bothers me is the slamdunk blogaroonie belief that Rylance has it all but won. I like him too as far as it goes.  I just don’t get how he became the absolute #1 love child.

Actually, I do know how this happened. Rylance is a respected, Tony-winning theatre actor, which supplies the usual distinctive air. Being older and especially British also counts for a lot among SAG members and their vague inferiority complexes. And somewhere early on Rylance just became this bowling ball that started knocking pins over left and right. Some of this, trust me, was group-think, follow-the-leader, monkey-imitation reflex stuff. Too many critics and blogaroonies seemed to just feel the rhythm and started saying the same thing over and over — “Rylance for sure, Rylance for sure,” etc.

As of we now stand six big-city critics groups have given him a Best Supporting Actor trophy (including New York, Los Angeles and Toronto).

I have no real argument against this, but on the other hand I’ve been thinking “okay but was he really that good? If he wins, he wins…fine, but does it have to be a Rylance rout?”

And then during an aborted Oscar Poker recording earlier today (I was in Brooklyn and feeling too hoarse and woozy and cranky to go on) Awards Watch‘s Erik Anderson said a noteworthy thing. He said he’d only recently seen Bridge of Spies and that he didn’t get what all the Rylance fuss was about. He thought that Rylance didn’t “do” all that much and some of his performance was actually underwhelming.

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A concisely written, well-phrased, cut-to-the-chase assessment piece by The Atlantic‘s Peter Beinart explains how and why the American body politic has been moving left since Obama, and that this shift is no flight of whimsy. “In the late ’60s and ’70s, amid left-wing militancy and racial strife, a liberal era ended,” Beinart notes. “Today, amid left-wing militancy and racial strife, a liberal era is only just beginning.

“An era of liberal dominance doesn’t mean that the ideological differences between Democrats and Republicans disappear. It means that on the ideological playing field, the 50-yard line shifts further left. It means the next Republican president won’t be able to return the nation to the pre-Obama era.

“That’s what happened when Dwight Eisenhower followed Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman. Ike moderated the growth in government expansion that had begun in the 1930s, but he didn’t return American politics to the 1920s, when the GOP opposed any federal welfare state at all. He in essence ratified the New Deal.

“It’s also what happened when Bill Clinton followed Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. By passing punitive anticrime laws, repealing restrictions on banks, signing NAFTA, cutting government spending to balance the budget, reforming welfare, and declaring that the ‘era of big government is over,’ Clinton acknowledged that even a Democratic president could not revive the full-throated liberalism of the 1960s and ’70s. He ratified Reaganism.

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I wanted to see Star Wars: The Force Awakens a second time following the 12.14 premiere; I wanted to see if my initial positive reaction would hold. I saw it again the following night, and it pretty much did. But it’s not really a grower — i.e., one of those films that take root and yield deeper and richer satisfactions days, weeks or months later. Due respect but enjoyable as it is, SW: TFA is pretty much a one or two-timer. (The Revenant is a grower — I’ve watched it four times now.)

Which is why I was surprised by a 12.27 THR piece by Pamela McClintock that said “repeat viewers…are playing an increased role playing an increased role in the movie’s record-shattering run as the audience broadens out.” Disney distribution president Dave Hollis tells her that “you can’t do these kind of numbers without extraordinary repeat business…we know anecdotally people are seeing it three and four times.”

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Love & Mercy‘s Paul Dano has been handed Best Actor trophies (Gotham Awards, Boston Society of Film Critics, Dallas-Fort Worth Film Critics Association, Florida Film Critics Circle, New York Film Critics Online, San Francisco Film Critics Circle) and lauded as a top-notch Best Supporting Actor contender by several orgs (Critics Choice, Golden Globes, Spirit Awards, London Film critics Circle, Washington D.C. Area Film Critics Association, et. al.) and still the tired-blood Gurus of Gold have him ranked in sixth place in the Best Supporting Actor arena. They have him behind Bridge of Spies‘ Mark Rylance (if you say so), Creed‘s Sylvester Stallone (really?), Beasts of No Nation‘s Idris Elba (okay) and Spotlight‘s Michael Keaton and Mark Ruffalo. Dano channeled Brian Wilson to give a phenomenal, career-defining performance and the Gurus still rank him below two guys who gave expert performances in what everyone acknowledges is an ensemble film? Dano has a critical mass factor like nobody’s business but you know what?

The flinty, straight-talking Haskell Wexler, one of the greatest and most influential cinematographers of the 20th Century, has left the earth at age 93. Hats off, head bowed. Wexler’s career lasted about 55 years, beginning with the 1960 documentary The Savage Eye to John Sayles‘ Silver City in’04. He enjoyed a peak period of about 15 years (’63 to ’78) when he shot Eliza Kazan‘s America, America (’63), Franklin Schaffner‘s The Best Man, Mike Nichols‘ Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Norman Jewison‘s In the Heat of the Night and The Thomas Crown Affair. After directing the respected Medium Cool (’69) Wexler served as “visual consultant” on George Lucas‘s American Graffiti and then pushed on with Milos Forman‘s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (which he was fired off after shooting about 87% over some muddled FBI-related concern), Hal Ashby‘s Bound for Glory and Coming Home. Wexler also completed the work of dp Nestor Alemendros on Terrence Malick‘s Days of Heaven. I interviewed Wexler during Sundance ’06 about his documentary Who Needs Sleep?, and it was during that discussion that he woke me to the fact that it’s pointless to work more than 14 hours a day, that your focus after that point isn’t worth anything. Haskell was a tough old bird, a real Type-A personality.

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If I could lethalize the Yahoo Search virus by clapping my hands three times, I would clap my hands three times. It attached itself to my Chrome browser months ago, and no matter what I do (and I’ve tried and tried) I can’t get rid of the godawful thing, and it’s easily the stupidest search engine I’ve ever had the misfortune to use. I hate what it delivers, I hate that stupid purple scheme, just glancing at the logo makes me sick. Yahoo Search attaching itself to Google is like that infant alien wrapping itself around John Hurt‘s face.

The total number of January 2016 releases that I might be able to sit through without too much difficulty is…uhm, three. Okay, make it four. But really only two. I’m talking about (a) a pair of actioners about tough guys doing the rugged heroism thing, (b) what appears to be just another stupid, vulgar boner comedy, and (c) a troubled western that probably isn’t much good but you never know. Be optimistic.

The only 2016 commercial release that I damn well know will be good if not excellent in a droll, understated way and which I’m expecting to see next month (even though it won’t open until February 5th) is Joel and Ethan Coen‘s Hail Caesar!

The safest January bets are Michael Bay‘s 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Bengahzi (Paramount, 1.15) and Craig Gillespie‘s The Finest Hours (Disney, 1.29). Neither will offer much in the way of thematic undercurrents, but at least they’re dealing with real-life events and will therefore need to deliver the goods in an “execution dependant” way.

I expect competency, at least, from Bay’s film, which is about that 9.11.12 mob attack upon an American compound in Benhgazi that resulted in the deaths of U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and U.S. Foreign Service Information Management Officer Sean Smith. Will Bay include a line or even a scene that points the finger at then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for not having done all she could to prevent this disaster? Seems doubtful. Bay is primarily a technician. He’s never come within 100 yards of political content in his previous films. He just wants to ride the smooth seas.

And then there’s Dan Mazer‘s Dirty Grandpa (Lionsgate, 1.22), which costars Zac Efron and Robert DeNiro and may, I suspect, turn out to be oddly likable. No predictions, just a hunch. Because DeNiro has lately been on a kind of roll.

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Since my late teens I’ve never been sick for more than a 48-hour period. Okay, 72 if you’re talking first symptoms to full recovery. This damn thing I have now has been going since last Tuesday night, for God’s sake. Conditions are somewhat better today as I’m at least strong enough to tap out a few items. “You’re all alone with what goes on inside your body” — a line from Olivier Assayas‘ Late August, Early September. (Hat tip to Joe Leydon’s 7.7.99 review.)

My illness didn’t really kick in until Wednesday so I’ve no excuse for missing Dave McNary’s 12.21 report about the release date of Guy Ritchie‘s King Arthur movie (technically titled Knights of the Round Table: King Arthur) having been moved from 7.22.16 to 2.17.17. If a downmarket CG action-epic is likely to bomb in mid-July it’s going to bomb just as badly if it opens the following February, so the reasoning behind the Warner Bros. date-shift probably has something to do with needing more time to finesse the CG plus saving dough on p & a costs. King Arthur, in any event, is the new Jupiter Ascending — the Warner Bros. space-fantasy that was initially slated to open in July 2014 but was bumped to February 2015. 2015 has really been a banner year for Warner Bros. — an all-but-certain loss when Ritchie’s pic opens, Jupiter Ascending has lost well over $100 million, Pan (which I didn’t even bother to see) having lost between $130 and $150 million and Ritchie’s The Man From U.N.C.L.E. having lost a bundle also. Things could turn around next year with Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice, Suicide Squad and Fantastic Beasts, but who outside of fanboys is honestly looking forward to seeing the latter two?

I was just thinking that it’s a shame that Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow‘s De Palma, a five-years-in-the-making documentary which screened in Venice and New York last September, won’t be screening at Sundance ’16. Every Christmas I get a little hungry for fresh watchable movies, knowing full well that I won’t have this satisfaction until I hit Park City, which isn’t for another three and a half weeks.

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I initially assumed that the beautiful mountaintop avalanche that Leonardo DiCaprio witnesses during the final third of The Revenant was digitally created. Then I read in a 12.22 N.Y Times interview with director Alejandro G. Inarritu that it was entirely real. David Segal writes that Inarritu “is known for exasperatingly high standards and fiendishly complex stagings, which in this movie included a helicopter-induced avalanche that had to be perfectly timed with several actors and a horse.” Not quite — just Leo and a single horse share the shot. A helicopter triggers an avalanche, one presumes, by hovering over virgin snow at the top of a mountain and thereby pushing loads of the stuff off a cliff. Another way to have done it would have been to fly a physical effects guy to the peak and have him detonate an explosive. A seriously impressive feat by any standard or measuring stick.

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