Deadline‘s Pete Hammond is reporting specifics about the Academy’s upcoming May 4th meeting in which everything that needs to be fixed and or streamlined ort re-thought will be discussed en masse by Academy members on both coasts. As any and all topics are fair game, it seems imperative that the issue of minimizing the impact of the likes and dislikes of out-to-pasture Academy members be addressed.
If the Academy wants to be part of the world as it is right now and have the Oscar winners reflect this, it has to reduce the influence of people whose professional peaks happened 15 or 20 or 25 or more years ago. These people will retain membership and all the priveleges that go with that, but their votes won’t count as much as those who are actively working and contributing to the films of today. Simple.
Every year Academy members will be asked online “how recently have you worked on a feature film destined for theatrical or a film or series destined for cable or streaming?” If the last film you worked on was released ten or more years ago, you get a single vote and become a C-grade voter. If the last film you have worked on was released between five and ten years ago, you get two votes and become a B-grade voter. And if you’ve worked on a film made and released within the last five years, you get three votes and becomes an A-grade voter.
How would this system be unfair? What could possibly be the downside? If this system had been in place seven years ago, Brokeback Mountain would have won the Best Picture Oscar.
Less than two days after announcing that he would be cutting back on reviews due to a recurrence of his cancer, Roger Ebert has left the earth. I’m very, very sorry that he didn’t get more time as I know he wanted it and would have made excellent use of it, as he did during every waking minute of his life . My heart goes out to Chaz Ebert and to Roger’s friends and fans and the whole community…Jesus. This hurts. Life is short. Hugs and condolences.
This morning’s exclusive New York Post story about Christopher Abbott‘s decision to quit Lena Dunham‘s Girls doesn’t even hint why. It only says that Abbott and Dunham “began butting heads” as the third season began shooting because Abbott “didn’t like the direction things are going in.”
Anyone who watches the show can put two and two together. Abbott walked because his character, Charlie Dattolo, strikes at least some of us (i.e., myself) as a rich, stone-faced, totally-stuck-on-himself little prick who is probably hung like a cashew. He’s off and on with Allison Williams‘ character but mainly he wants to fuck her occasionally. Or so it seems to me.
All I know is that every time Abbott comes on-screen I say to myself, “Oh, Jesus, here comes that pathetic little asshole with the chilly manner and the shark eyes and the dorky beard and the rounded little girly shoulders….God, this guy is repulsive!”
Abbott knows that even the hippest people out there sometimes get the idea that a character an actor plays is actually who that actor is, and he was afraid of being typecast throughout the universe as a pissy little dickhead, and Dunham wasn’t interested in humanizing him or giving different colors as she only writes guys who are (a) nice but insincere horndogs, (b) confused and angry and arrogant after a fashion, or (c) guys who ejaculate on their girlfriend’s boobs after telling them to crawl around on all fours.
Girls is largely about girls going through all kinds of anger and confusion and frustration and relationships that are basically maddening and probably futile, and the guy characters do not come off that well — let’s face it.
If you want to see a Girls-type thing (Brooklyn, hipster poverty, da coolness) without the male-hate factor, watch Frances Ha when it comes out on May 17th.
I said three months ago that the CG compositions of 1920s Times Square in Baz Luhrman‘s The Great Gatsby are spot-on, and now these new shots of NYC and surrounding environs indicate all the more than the visuals are going to kill if (and this is a big “if”) they’re not too CGish. I first read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s book in my early 20s; I started to read it again in the ’90s but I got bored or distracted by something. I’ve just decided I’m going to crack it open again.
Repeating: “My second reaction was to wonder why Luhrman cast a 70 year-old Indian actor, Amitabh Bachchan, to play a Jewish gangster associate of Jay Gatsby‘s, Meyer Wolfsheim, whom F. Scott Fitzgerald based on Arnold Rothstein. Even if you mentally erase the fact that all big-time gangsters in the 1920s were either Italian, Irish or Jewish, the idea that an Indian guy could rise to the top of the big-time crime world of New York City in the early 1920s is, in itself, absurd.
“So Luhrman gets it almost exactly right in terms of the movies playing in Times Square from the spring to fall of 1922, but he gets it wildly, flamboyantly wrong with the casting of an Indian actor pal as Wolfsheim. Which feels to me like two minds within the same person working at cross purposes, which indicates trouble for the film.”
I’m looking for a PDF of Tom Shepherd‘s Hey, Stella!, a screenplay about the early days of Marlon Brando in the mid ’40s. It was on last year’s Black List. Deadline’s Michael Flemingreports that Kevin McCormick is producing Hey, Stella!, and that a director is being sought. Update: a copy arrived a little after 10 pm. Thanks!
I’m guessing (and tell me if I’m wrong) that 70% or 80% of those glancing at this won’t immediately recognize the actors or recall the title of the film. It’s been out of the conversation for a while now and there’s been no Bluray treatment, only DVDs. I wouldn’t mind seeing it again if they spiffed it up. My most vivid memory is the bullet-into-the-brain shot.
I saw a little bit of footage from Nicholas Winding Refn‘s Only God Forgives (Radius-TWC, 7.19) during last year’s Cannes Film Festival. I sensed right away that this Bangkok-shot cheapie would be some kind of festishy wallow in blood, swords, Ryan Gosling‘s pecs, bad hombres,Kristin Scott Thomas, more bad hombres, etc.
Wiki synopsis: “The film follows Julian (Gosling), who runs a Thai boxing club as a front organization for his family’s drug smuggling operation, as he is forced by his mother Jenna (Thomas) to find and kill the individual responsible for his brother’s recent death.”
Today’s Disconnect press conference featured costars Jason Bateman (whose performance as a stressed-out dad is the best of his career), Paula Patton, Alexander Skarsgard and Max Theriot. Here’s the mp3. At the very beginning Bateman refers to “Jeffrey’s website” being an educational thing. I’m presuming he was referencing HE as Bateman told me a year or two ago that he’s a reader. If so, thanks. If not, fine.
Disconnect costars Jason Bateman, Alexnder Skarsgard; press conference moderator Dave Karger reflected in glass on left.
The gathering happened at the SLS hotel (465 La Cienega Blvd., south of Burton Way) at 2 pm. Fandango‘s Dave Karger moderated and fielded questions.
The SLS is basically a pricey kid hotel — everybody on the staff and in the lobby was in their 30s and late 20s. I hate kid establishments of all kinds — kid bars, kid sushi restaurants, kid beach clubs. On the other hand I don’t like places that are mostly patronized by white-haired types either. So I don’t like places that are too young and I don’t like places that are too old — I like ’em in between.
The mp3 is fairly short, by the way — only about 9 minutes.
*l. to.) Thieriot, Bateman, Skarsgard, Patton.
During last night’s KCET post-screening q & a: (l.) moderator/host Pete Hammond, (r.) Disconnect producer William Horberg.
The great Tim Buckley died of a smack overdose at age 28 in 1975. Twenty-two years later his son Jeff, also a respected musician, drowned at age 32. I’m sorry but when I think of the Buckleys I think (a) “dad’s second album (i.e., “Goodbye and Hello“) was great” and (b) “both checked out early, and what was up with that?”
Studio publicity guys used to shrink actresses in studio-issued glossies so they wouldn’t be taller than their male costars. Ingrid Bergman was around 5’10” and Humphrey Bogart was around 5’7″ or 5’8″. It looks as if Bergman’s feet were bigger than Bogart’s. She probably could have taken him in a wrestling match.
I missed Henry Alex Rubin‘s Disconnect (LD, 4.12) in Toronto, but I finally saw it last night and it’s my idea of a 90% wowser. Except for a questionable slow-mo moment at the very end this is a grade-A ensemble drama that ranks right up there with Amores perros, Traffic and Short Cuts. Seriously. I’d read about the standing ovation in Venice but the plot summaries put me off and I was afraid it might be another Crash of some kind, but it’s much, much better than I expected. It’s certainly among 2013’s best so far.
There are 40 or 50 ways this movie could have blown it or gotten it wrong in some way, and time after time it gets it right. I was sitting there in my seat going “okay, that worked…that was good…no problem with that one…yup, that was good…solid delivery”…and it just kept going like that. Don’t listen to Variety‘s Guy Lodge — he was in a pissy mood or something. I realize this is a social-concern drama about everyone being out of touch with themselves and those closest to them due to cyber absorption and yaddah yaddah, and I know that sounds like a bit of a groaner but it’s not, trust me.
Disconnect works because it delivers in the writing, direction and acting. Andrew Stern‘s screenplay feels credible and compelling and is very finely threaded, always pushed along by believable turns and real-seeming characters behaving in what they believe are their best interests. Rubin’s direction is unforced naturalism par excellence, and the result is a story that always feel right and steady-on-the-tracks — nothing ever feels like a stretch (except perhaps that one moment at the very end when slow-mo kicks in). And the performances are honestly inhabited and true-feeling and just about perfectly rendered.
Jason Bateman is so good as a somewhat distracted and over-worked but essentially decent dad that he is hereby forgiven for having costarred in Identity Thief and as far as I’m concerned has earned himself a “get out of jail” pass for the next two or three years. Also planted and persuasive are Andrea Riseborough as a go-getter TV news reporter, Max Thieriot as a kid who performs on a sex website, Frank Grillo as an ex-cop who works as a cyber security expert, Colin Ford as a kid who, along with a heartless pal, deceives and humiliates a fellow student, Paula Patton and Alexander Skarsgard as marrieds coping with the death of a child but more precisely identity and financial theft, fashion tycoon Marc Jacobs as a sex-site exploiter, Hope Davis as his Bateman’s wife and the mother of Ford’s victim and so on.
I have to finish a couple of things and then shower and get down to a Disconnect junket press conference at 1 pm, but I want to make clear the things that moved Arianna Huffington to write this 3.26 praise piece aren’t the same things that got to me. Yes, our social behavior has changed over the last decade with everyone texting and emailing and not really paying attention to the organic with perhaps some of us not nurturing family relationships the way we should, but what matters to me are believable characters and motivations, straight-sounding dialogue and performances that feel right and un-actorly.
I guess what I’m really saying is that I’m probably one of the most cyber-absorbed people in the planet right now and this isn’t going to change. Constant writing and texting and checking Twitter and whatnot is my life and my vitality and my security. And I love it. I’m happier now than I was in the print days, that’s for sure. Give me more of this, and please let me just cruise along like this until I die of a heart attack on a street corner in Montmartre while clutching a Bluray of a 1.37 version of Shane. When I’m 88 years old or something. Or 98.
Huffington’s synopsis is well written: “Disconnect interweaves three stories, each involving characters whose lives have reached a crisis exacerbated by their dependence on technology at the expense of real human connection. There’s a couple that has recently lost a baby. Instead of grieving together, they turn away from each other and lose themselves in online distractions. There are two boys who use the power of social media to take advantage of another boy’s loneliness and isolation — itself partly caused by his father’s obsession with work and email. And there’s a woman reporter who becomes involved with a 18-year-old webcam porn performer who lives in a house run by a porn kingpin, played by Jacobs.”
I’ll have more to say about this as the release date approaches. I can only reiterate this is one of those films you might glance at from a distance and say to yourself “okay, maybe Netflix” but it’s much better than that — definitely an exception to the rule.
