I’m not saying As Good As It Gets was a great film or even one of the best of the ’90s, but it has six or seven scenes that deliver a certain kind of emotional bull’s-eye satisfaction by way of first-rate writing and world-class acting. And on top of the long-lamented death of theatrical middle-budget adult dramas, this sort of high-polish, push-the-right-button-in-just-the-right-way confection (which cost $50 million or $77 million in 2018 dollars) is just about extinct, certainly in the theatrical realm. As extinct as screwball comedies or VistaVision westerns or counter-culture drug-dealing dramas.
As Good as It Gets was the last film in which the two leads (Jack Nicholson, Helen Hunt) won Best Actor and Best Actress. The big night wasn’t exactly 20 years ago (it happened on 3.23.98) but close enough.
One of the reasons this James L. Brooks film got funded was a belief that fall awards buzz (or even an actual statuette or two) might really make a difference to the financial bottom line. But if Brooks, Nicholson, Hunt, Gregg Kinnear and everyone else were 20 years younger and As Good As It Gets had been released in ’17, it probably wouldn’t have struck the same kind of emotional chords and might have even been dismissed by the New Academy Kidz (“Representation!…genre films deserve respect!…let’s give some others a chance!”) as typical middle-aged awards bait. For the Oscars have more or less become the MTV Awards (hat-tip to the HE commenter who said this a couple of days ago), and this is the world in which we’re all stuck in living.
Screenwriter Earl W. Wallacesaid the above after Witness, which he co-wrote along with Pamela Wallace and William Kelley, won for Best Original Screenplay. It happened 32 years ago, during the 58th Academy Awards telecast in ’86. For some reason I’ve never forgotten that confessional moment, and the laughter that followed. Wallace says it at 4:33.
What an awful realization or suspicion that everything you do from here on, no matter how hard you try, will never match this one shining moment of triumph. A couple of years later Wallace (who is still with us) hit the jackpot again with his script for the epic miniseries War and Remembrance, and he wrote several TV movies throughout the ’90s. But he was, by the currency of esteem, correct. It never got any better than winning for Witness.
Who among the major nominees for the 2017 Oscars might be nurturing this same concern, if and when they wind up standing at the lecturn tonight with all the world applauding? Answer: They all could be thinking this. Tomorrow is promised to no one. There is only the great and immediate now.
Posted on 8.7.13: If Gregory Peck had been clairvoyant and under the influence of a truth drug on the night he won the Best Actor Oscar for To Kill A Mockingbird in March 1963, he might have said, “Well, this is it…the peak moment.
“I’ve been lucky enough to play starring roles for the finest producers, directors and writers in the business for the last 18 years…Spellbound, Duel In The Sun, Gentleman’s Agreement, The Paradine Case, Twelve O’Clock High, Roman Holiday, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, Moby Dick, The Bravados, The Big Country, Pork Chop Hill, On The Beach, The Guns of Navarone, Cape Fear…and it’s been wonderful.
“I’m saying this because for the next 40 years it’s going to be all downhill. Oh, I’ll make a few interesting films over the next couple of decades but my charmed career period is over and I know it. Some actors only get lucky for five or ten years or so. I nearly had 20. And for that I’m very grateful to the industry and especially to the public. From the bottom of my heart, thank you.”
From someone who was there: “Of the three winners for Best Original Screenplay for Witness, Earl Wallace and his wife Pamela were in the middle of an acrimonious divorce — the conflict had begun with a fight over her sharing ‘written by’ credit — and were not speaking. The third partner, William Kelly, wasn’t speaking to either of them. He did, however, thank the studio Paramount, not knowing that a few days earlier they had fired him off another solo project. Someone had requested that his agents not tell him until after the ceremony, for obvious reasons. Enough to make the Marquis de Sade cry.”
Larry Gelbart’s 1986 introduction: “The successful screenwriter, one who is the author of more than a set of clever license plates, is a poet pragmatist, ready at the drop of a [hat] to change the script so that the part of Mother Theresa can be played by Goldie or Dusty or Whoopie. And if the writer is ready and willing but considered unable, perhaps the problem of water on the brain that the director has no trouble walking across, the writer is either re-written or partnered with one or more collaborators, often unknown to each other until their hands meet over the same award. Here are this year’s triumphant survivors of a system that would have made the Marquis de Sade cry uncle.”
This Screen Junkies Dailies piece popped yesterday morning on Facebook. It’s a fair observation. I know Guillermo del Toro well enough to testify that everything he draws and imagines and eventually puts on screen comes from his creative subconscious. Then again popular movies have a way of blending into the collective unconscious, and it wouldn’t be a crazy leap to presume that Guillermo saw Splash in ’84 (when he was 20) and that an echo of Ron Howard and Brian Grazer‘s film was part of the creative combustion that led to The Shape of Water.
Colin Jost during last night’s SNL Weekend Update: “Hope Hicks, the White House Communications Director and one of his longest-serving advisors, said Wednesday that she planned to resign to pursue other opportunities. You know things are bad when a 29 year-old with no experience and who works directly for the President of the United States thinks, ‘I gotta get out of this dead-end job.'” And after serving in that job for only six months.
Frontline‘s hour-long show on Harvey Weinstein popped last night (3.2), and is now streaming. Cut and dried, dead to rights. Testimony, dimensionality, the big creep. I’m mesmerized by any disaster residue — a burning house, the wreckage of a recent horrific incident. Who isn’t?
From Maureen Ryan’s 3.1 Variety review: “[Weinstein] offers not just snippets of testimony but also a sense of powerful specificity — it’s one more brick in an large and unavoidable wall.”
It also “helps to see the faces of those Weinstein hurt, and it’s important to witness what recalling these incidents does to these women.” Produced and directed by Jane McMullen, Weinstein “reminds the viewer, on a visceral level, that these women are still angry. Not just about being attacked, but at being silenced for so long.
Jett: “St. Vincent playing with Sufjan is cooler, to be honest, than Sufjan alone. Sufjan and St. Vincent are beautiful indie performers at the top of their games. Nice indie tandem to make the Oscars feel a little less stiff.”
HE: “What about Thile, Foubert and McCallister? What do they bring to the table, and who among them is your favorite? And why?”
Jett: “I don’t know the others all that well. Not the same star power. St. Vincent is my favorite from her earlier albums. I listened to her a lot when I was at Syracuse and post-college. Savage live performer. Love Sufjan too but for different reasons. He’s my generation’s less depressing Eliott Smith.”
HE: “You’re hazy on Thiel, Foubert and McAllister? But you’re a music guy. You know the industry.”
Jett: “They’re not big artists. They’re performers. Difference.”
Since I took the below photos from my perch in Spirit Awards press tent, Call Me By Your Name‘s Timothee Chalamet has won for Best Actor and Three Billboards‘ Frances McDormand has won for Best Actress. As I’m writing this Black Panther‘s Chadwick Boseman is announcing the nominees for the Best Feature award, and the winner is…wait for it…Get Out. Yeah, that’s what they think and you can’t fight City Hall. C’est la fucking vie.
“I eliminated The Post first. To me, it was the most boring movie. I remember that era, and that Kay Graham flew in to LBJ’s parties every weekend down on his ranch — that I would have liked to have seen! I give it nine yawns out of ten.
“Then Three Billboards — there were a lot of things about it that bothered me. I heard the writer-director [Martin McDonagh] talk, and he seems like a very nice guy, but his film offered an awful take on what middle America is like. It was pretentious and false. If it was meant to be a farce, I didn’t find it funny. I don’t find bigotry funny, I don’t find a grownup hitting children funny, I don’t find someone blowing up a police station funny. These people were just caricatures.
“Then I eliminated Get Out. It’s a good B-movie and I enjoyed it, but what bothered me afterwards was that instead of focusing on the fact that this was an entertaining little horror movie that made quite a bit of money, they started trying to suggest it had deeper meaning than it does, and, as far as I’m concerned, they played the race card, and that really turned me off.
“In fact, at one of the luncheons, the lead actor [Daniel Kaluuya], who is not from the United States [he’s British], was giving us a lecture on racism in America and how black lives matter, and I thought, ‘What does this have to do with Get Out? They’re trying to make me think that if I don’t vote for this movie, I’m a racist.’ I was really offended. That sealed it for me.”
Dry, dismissive response from Daily News critic Bob Strauss in 5, 4, 3, 2…
Question to Best Supporting Actress Spirit Award winner Allison Janney that I would’ve asked if the clock didn’t run out: “You played a deplorable in I, Tonya. Have you ever spoken to any actual hinterland deplorables who’ve seen it, and if so what were some of their reactions?”
I, Tonya‘s Allison Janney in Spirit Awards press tent following her winning Best Supporting Actress award.
The night before last I caught Eli Roth and Joe Carnahan‘s Death Wish. I didn’t completely despise it. I chortled two or three times. The performances by Bruce Willis and Vincent D’Onofrio are reasonably decent. But it’s not my idea of really well-written (they should have stayed with Joe Carnahan’s original 2015 script), and is therefore not very believable. I was sitting there going “fake, oversold, uhn-uh, nope, bullshit, not right, cliche, sloppy,” etc.
But at the same time it was occasionally competent enough to make me wonder if Death Wish might improve its game, at least during the first act. It never did. It’s mainly a fantasy wallow for righties and NRA enthusiasts and lost-in-their-own-realm LexG-types, and one that constantly nudge-nudges those who are already in the pro-gun camp.
It’s certainly not as precise or zeitgeisty as Michael Winner and Charles Bronson‘s 1974 Death Wish (exploitation films work better if they dial it down and take their time in delivering the payoff moments). It’s nowhere near as good as the first John Wick (’14), and not as occasionally satisfying as Antoine Fuqua‘s The Equalizer (ditto), which was otherwise a second-rater.
There’s a place in my head for top-tier rightwing action flicks about showing no mercy to scurvy bad guys. I still say the all-time best in this realm is Tony Scott‘s Man on Fire (’04), and for reasons far too numerous to list here.
The most important thing to remember if you’re going to make one of these things is to (a) avoid happy-family cliches and (b) stay away from trying to message the audience with thin slices of conservative theology. Death Wish flubs it on both counts.
Its first-act depiction of the family life of Chicago-based surgeon Paul Kersey (Willis, married to Elizabeth Shue‘s Lucy Rose and about to send Camila Morrone‘s Jordan off to college) is way too alpha and serene. This will come as a shock to Roth and Carnahan, but real-life families occasionally irritate or bore each other, and sometimes they even argue. And then comes an “oh, please!” when Willis asks a friend of Jordan’s what book she’s reading, and she says it’s a school assignment, and that the author is Milton Friedman, the conservative economist who advised Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. (I don’t remember if she mentioned a title, but it was probably “Capitalism and Freedom.”) I wonder if this scene is from Carnahan’s original screenplay or what.
I’m a Taylor Sheridan fan as far as it goes (respected and admired Wind River without actually “liking” it), so I can’t come up with any reason to not be at least marginally interested in Sheridan’s Yellowstone (6.20.18). The ten-episode western series (rich cattle rancher, family issues, violent altercations) was written by Sheridan. Kevin Costner, Wes Bentley, Kelly Reilly, Luke Grimes, Danny Huston, Cole Hauser, Gretchen Mol, Jill Hennessy, Patrick St. Esprit, etc. Do I have a Paramount Network app on my Roku box? Can’t be an issue to get one.
