Month: January 2016

The National Society of Film Critics, a respected 53-member organization, has given its Best Picture award to Tom McCarthy‘s Spotlight. Their Best screenplay award also went to Spotlight, which was co-written by McCarthy and Josh Singer. Totally approved, no arguments, adding to the general consensus, etc.

The NSFC’s Best Director award went to Carol‘s Todd Haynes.

And yet they also gave their Best Actor award to Creed‘s Michael B. Jordan — clearly a pushback against Leonardo DiCaprio‘s award-season Revenant narrative (i.e., “he suffered, he froze, he ate a buffalo liver”) and just as clearly some kind of joke as no one anywhere has seriously spoken of Jordan’s decent-enough performance as being award-level…c’mon!

The NSFC did very well, however, by handing their Best Actress award to 45 Years costar Charlotte Rampling. Thumbs all the way up on this one. Plus anything that might slow down the momentum of Room‘s Brie Larson is, I feel, a good thing. She’s going to be nominated, of course, but that scene in which she freaks out after seeing her son safe in the back seat of a police car is an absolute disqualification.

Naturally the NSFC gave their Best Supporting Actor award to Mark Rylance for his skillfully subtle, bordering-on-somnambulant performance as Russian spy Rudolf Abel in Steven Spielberg‘s Bridge of Spies. Rylance is the safe default choice this year for critics who take comfort in voting exactly as they’ve been told by other lazy consensus followers.

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Ridley Scott is a highly respected, exacting and resourceful visualist with a fascinating filmography, and to hear it from Scott Feinberg and others he may well win an Oscar next month for his direction of The Martian — one of the shallowest, most audience-friendly, Orlando Disney World films he’s ever made. If he wins it’ll essentially be a gold-watch career achievement Oscar. Because just about every film he’s made since The Duellist has been better (more innovative, less predictable, more visually striking) than that Jerry Bruckheimer-level space-rescue movie that Sasha Stone loves so much. Scott films that aren’t as good as The Martian: Legend, White Squall, G.I. Jane, Someone To Watch Over Me, 1492: Conquest of Paradise, Hannibal, A Good Year, Body of Lies, Robin Hood, Prometheus. Scott’s finest (in this order): Alien, Blade Runner, Thelma and Louise, The Duellists, The Counselor (director’s cut), Black Hawk Down, Matchstick Men, American Gangster, Kingdom of Heaven (director’s cut), Gladiator.

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I’ve been attending the Palm Springs Film Festival for the last few years, and at the end of every one I’ve asked myself “was that really worth it?” I used to think of the PSFF as a warm-up for Sundance. Now it’s basically a big-media paparazzi pigfuck that every significant Oscar contender is obliged to attend, and all you can do as a columnist is…well, not much. Write observations, attend the events, listen to the try-out acceptance speeches, snap a few photos. You drive all the way out there and stay in some old-style place for two or three nights for $400 or $450 bucks and for what? It’s a tax write-off and not entirely unpleasant (Variety‘s Sunday brunch party is always agreeable), but I decided to ignore it this year. Too much grief for too little yield.

Last year’s headline said it all: “Puttin’ On Ritz in Chilly Corporate Bunker Once Known as Palm Springs.”

Posted two years ago: “Ten years ago the Palm Springs Int’l Film Festival was a respected, smartly-programmed venue for foreign films with a few celebrities and photos ops on the side. Now it’s a star-studded, rock-your-paparazzi, award-season megashow with A-class celebs, limos, security goons and guys like me taking pictures and…uhm, oh yeah, right, a smartly-programmed venue for foreign film on the side.

“I didn’t attend last night’s big awards hand-out at the Palm Springs Convention Center but I attended the after-party at the Parker Palm Springs. For about 40 minutes. Great, I got in without a hitch…now what? Position yourself near this or that award-season contender so you can chat for 90 seconds before the next pushy, socially anxious reveller makes his or her move? It’s a zoo. I’m a quiet sitdown kind of guy. I’d rather hang out with my cats. Or…you know, do an interview in a hotel room or a cafe. But not this.

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It hit me last night that I’ve never posted a 2015 Worst Films list, and that I’d better get down to it today. I’m figuring we’re still in a New Year’s Eve hangover mode and that 2016 doesn’t really begin until Monday, 1.4. The problem with worsties is that I rarely see movies with really bad advance word. Reverse Tolstoy: All good movies have qualities and undercurrents that are very particular and specific to themselves while all bad movies exude pretty much the same poison. So it’s probably better to just ask HE readers to post their own hate lists. Please, fire away.

What was my absolute personal worst, a movie I despised more than all the other toxic releases combined? I’m going to go with John Eric Dowdle‘s No Escape, which I paid to see at the Westside Pavillion last August. Review quote: “This is the kind of movie that makes you feel nauseated and humiliated. You want to escape before the closing credits start and hide your face and not look at anyone else who was in the theatre with you. You just want to run down to the garage and get the hell out of there.”

And: “No Escape caters to the fears of every whitebread moron who’s afraid of visiting anyplace the least bit exotic or even a wee bit unfamiliar, and who prefers to go on Carnival Cruises and visit Disneyland France and Cancun and Club Med hideaways.”

My second most hated viewing experience was Magic Mike XXL. Excerpt from my 7.3.15 review: “I called Steven Soderbergh‘s Magic Mike ‘one of those summer films that comes along once in a blue moon — a fun romp filled with yoks and swagger and whoo-hoo, but also sharp, wise and shrewdly observed, and flush with indie cred.’ Magic MIke XXL, by contrast, is a film that smirks and piddles around but also pisses on you. A big yellow stream shooting out of the screen and onto my lap.”

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I was struck this morning by a phrase in Larry Karaszewski‘s appraisal of James Bridges‘ Mike’s Murder (’84), as contained in a March 2012 “Trailers From Hell” essay. Larry notes how the film really captures the enervated spirit of ’80s Los Angeles, “the emptiness, the transitory lives, the relationships of people who only see each other every six months but still think they’re close.” Hey, that’s me. Well, kind of. I feel a genuine kinship with several people whom I almost never hang out with. I “see” some of them at screenings, parties and film festivals, but we never get together just to get together, not even “every six months.” Partly because some of these pallies are far flung (geographical distance isn’t what it used to be) and partly because I spend all my time banging this column out.

Straight question: How many HE readers have close friends whom they trust impeccably and feel entirely relaxed with, but whom they see once or twice a year, if that?

“A few days after seeing the newly manufactured, disposable Legal Eagles, I noticed that Debra Winger‘s last picture to be released, Mike’s Murder, was listed in The New York Times TV schedule, and that the Times‘ advice was ‘Skip it.’ Please, don’t skip it next time it comes around. I wasn’t able to see this film during its unheralded, minuscule New York run in 1984, but I caught up with it on HBO last year. [I]t has two superb performances — a full-scale starring one by Winger, and a brief intense one by Paul Winfield. She’s a radiantly sane young bank teller who has an affair with Mike (Mark Keyloun). She likes him — you can see her eagerness, even though she knows how to be cool and bantering with him…”

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Imagine how much bolder and stronger — sexier, certainly — this scene from Rainer Werner Fassbinder‘s Love Is Colder Than Death (’69) would be without the cigarette fetish. Lighting the fucking cigarette, extinguishing the flame, sucking in the smoke, lighting another one, blowing the smoke out…God. Props which signify nothing so much as emotional cowardice, and which actors the world over rely upon to this day. Ulli Lommel is pretty like Alain Delon but Gisela Otto is ravishing. And yet all Lommel can talk about, deadpan-style, are adolescent acts of rage and malevolence. Fascinating.

Inarritu thought #1: “Why can’t we trust that people can have an incredible, spectacular, exciting rollercoaster, but with respect of their intelligence? Why do big films, these pizzas and these hamburgers, have to be about nothing?   [Why do] they have to extract any intelligence or humanity or truth from [these films]…why?”

Inarritu to Ryuichi Sakomoto: “The only thing I said to him was that I think the silences and the sound of nature are going to be so important…minimalistic…the music has to be like a breeze, without really taking over.”

Inarritu thought #2: The Revenant is “a commentary about how this time [the frontier exploration days of the early 1800s] that has been portrayed as individualism, as the heroic American dream…was actually a story of huge greed, amazing exploitation of human beings…this is the seed, for me, of the capitalism that we live in now: completely inconsiderate of any con­sequences for nature.”

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Two weeks ago I requested readers to post or send in their personal, straight-from-the-heart 2015 Top Ten lists (i.e., “Calling All List Queens“). I realize that The Revenant doesn’t go wide until next Friday (1.8) but I need to put the hubba-hubba to the road. Today marks the last four days of the polling period, which ends on Monday, 1.4. As mentioned earlier HE reader Adam Lapish is collating the info. Once it’s all finished I’ll post the list as a sink-in thing that’ll hold for a day or so.

Three days ago I mentioned that Hollywood Reporter critic Todd McCarthy had chosen The Tribe, a vocally silent Ukranian film about violent thieves and pimps at a boarding school for the deaf, as his #1 2015 film. Intrigued, I asked for an online screener and was graciously sent one by a Drafthouse rep. Reaction: I got through it. Barely. Obviously striking and “different,” but at the end of the day The Tribe is basically a stunt film. And too long. I admired the static camera strategy but half the time I was in the dark about what was actually happening or being “said”. The abortion scene was gruesome and painful, but it strains credibility that the gang is dependent on two (2) girls turning tricks in trucks. Two? And the girls have nothing to say about this? They’re terrorized into compliance and never give a moment’s thought to escaping, informing the staff, going to the cops? Yes, I understand that it’s some kind of reflection of Russian society back in the mid to late ’90s, in the chaotic aftermath that followed the overturn of Communism, etc. But knowing that doesn’t help. Respect for the concept but this is the last all-silent film about psychopathic Ukranian deaf kids that I watch for a while. Yeesh. On the other hand I’m not likely to ever forget it. “Misery porn” indeed.  I’m sorry.

With the exception of curious oddities like The Artist or jackpot favorites like Return of the King or Slumdog Millionaire, Best Picture Oscar winners tend to deliver some kind of capturing or vacuuming of the American current — a piece of the culture, the experience, the heartbeat, the anxieties, the hustle, the broken dream. Spotlight, American Beauty, The Hurt Locker, Crash, Million Dollar Baby, No Country for Old Men, The Departed, A Beautiful Mind — all of these films have flirted with this general element, as did many of their competitors (The Social Network, Brokeback Mountain, Traffic, In The Bedroom, Sideways, Capote, Michael Clayton). So which 2016 films fit this profile? Which appear to have the basic ingredients (at least aspirationally) of a Best Picture winner?

Damn few, and possibly fewer than that. I don’t know anything (who does?) but I have a fairly good nose for this stuff, and right now I can’t smell any films on the 2016 slate with any kind of serious Best Picture jangle. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it agin — 2016 looks and feels weak.

Two days ago I posted my latest 2016 roster riff (“Likely 2016 Quality Contenders: Second Pass”). I’ve refined it since and re-classified a few films on the list, but boil it all down and there seem to be only four or five films that fit HE’s Best Picture paradigm, at best, and not even these when you think twice about them — David Gordon Green‘s Stronger (real-life guy’s recovery from the Boston marathon bombing tragedy), Ang Lee‘s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, John Hancock‘s The Founder (biopic of McDonald’s kingpin Ray Kroc), Jodie Foster‘s Money Monster (political thriller) and Gary Ross‘s Free State of Jones (historical race-card drama).

Uh-Oh Factors: (a) David Gordon Green doesn’t do Oscar-friendly (anyone see Our Brand Is Crisis?), (b) Ang Lee might be slightly out of his depth with the downish-sounding Billy Lynn’s Halftime Walk, (c) the story of Ray Kroc sounds a little ho-hummy and predictable, (d) the basic plot driver in Money Monster (financial TV personality is held hostage by a viewer who lost all of his money after following a bad tip) sounds tight and confining, and (e) Ross has made a couple of decent mid-range social dramas (Seabiscuit, Pleasantville) but he’s not & never will be an award-season power hitter; plus he has a lifetime demerit for directing the first Hunger Games.

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