Jeffrey Wells

Four days ago The Hollywood Reporter‘s Gregg Kilday posted nine films likely to be Best Picture contenders. I posted the same and then some on January 7th — John Wells‘ August: Osage County, Bennett Miller‘s Foxcatcher, Alexander Payne‘s Nebraska, George Clooney‘s Monuments Men, Ryan Coogler‘s Fruitvale, Paul Greengrass‘s Captain Phillips, John Lee Hancock‘s Saving Mr. Banks, Martin Scorsese‘s Wolf of Wall Street and the Coen brothers‘ Inside Llewyn Davis.

To Kilday’s I would add Jason Reitman‘s Labor Day, Alfonso Cuaron‘s Gravity, Steve McQueen‘s 12 Years A Slave, Richard Linklater‘s Before Midnight (a major Sundance 2013 highlight and an all-but-guaranteed Oscar contender for Best Original Screenplay) and David O. Russell‘s Abscam movie (which starts filming around March 1st, although a voice is telling me it probably won’t be completed in time for release in November or December). Plus, just possibly, Peter Landesman‘s Parkland. Plus one or two or three wild cards that will presumably pop through and cause excitement at the 2013 Cannes or Telluride/Toronto festivals.

Anyway, I’ve read Inside Llewyn Davis (which is very low-key and art-filmy without much of a “narrative” that turns or delivers a payoff in the usual sense) and Parkland (which is very well written but is totally “execution dependent”), but I’d like to read the others. If anyone with relatively recent PDF scripts for the above 14 or 15 films, please send along & thanks.

I was told yesterday afternoon that Penske Media’s Variety would issue a big announcement. It came this morning with three bullets: (a) the daily print edition is being scuttled, (b) ditto the online edition’s paywall (except it’s been more or less gone for several weeks now) and editor Tim Gray is being shunted aside to international to make room for a new editorial triumvirate of Claudia Eller (film), Cynthia Littleton (TV) and Andrew Wallenstein (digital media).

The only time I’ve even seen copies of Daily Variety in recent years is when I’ve walked by the print-giveaway table at the Sundance Film Festival, or just down the hall from media credentials inside the Park City Marriot. Advertisers attached to the idea of dead-tree exposure are henceforth going to have to be content with Variety‘s once-weekly edition.

The absence of print and paywall revenue means “deep” editorial cuts. Deadline‘s Nikki Finke wrote this morning that “Penske’s idea is to transform Variety into a thumb-sucking weekly about the entertainment business, leaving breaking news coverage to Deadline Hollywood.”

Reuters reported today that the Senate Intelligence Committee has “closed its inquiry” into the CIA-sourced information given to Zero Dark Thirty producer-screenwriter Mark Boal as he researched the script. The decision came “one day after Zero Dark Thirty failed to win major awards at the Oscars,” the story noted.

The Senate committee launched its review of ZD30 after chairperson Sen. Dianne Feinstein condemned scenes implying that torture of CIA detainees led to information indicating the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden. There’s no question that in so doing Feinstein single-handedly killed ZD30‘s award prospects, including Kathryn Bigelow being snubbed for a Best Director nomination.

Washington politicians will do almost anything for press coverage that shows them being assertive and decisive when it comes to hot-button issues. ZD30 offered an opportunity, and Feinstein (who turns 80 on 6.22.13) grabbed it. She and her staffers got what they were looking for, and then dropped it when the story had no further relevance or media-heat.

Towards the end of this Jay Leno-Russell Crowe segment there’s a cutaway to a Mattel action figure based on Crowe’s Jor-El character (i.e., Superman’s dad) from Zack Snyder‘s Man of Steel (Warner Bros., 6.14). The studly, armour-plated outfit (Hero Complex called it “alien meets steam punk”) is the same get-up that other manly fellows have worn in God knows how many other cheesy sci-fi fantasy flicks.

Crowe’s Jor-El, in short, hasn’t been re-imagined as much as rendered according to a standard factory concept, and that tells us where Man of Steel is coming from. Crowe is playing Jor-El for the money and the career-fortification, of course, while pinching his nose as hard as he can stand it. All the designer had in mind was “stay as far away as possible from those flowing white robes that Marlon Brando wore in the 1978 Superman.” Which had to happen, of course, as today’s comic-book machismo factor could and should never allow for anyone wearing Liberace-style white robes and a Seigfried and Roy white wig. Poor Brando — he was well paid by the Salkinds but playing Jor-El surely made him fantasize about dying sooner rather than later.

I’ll most likely loathe and suffer through Man of Steel. Reason #1: the dog-eared Superman franchise closed up shop after Bryan Singer‘s reboot so cranking out another is a ludicrous move on Warner Bros. and Chris Nolan‘s part. Reason #2: Sucker Punch convinced me that Zack Snyder is 90% about high-idiot style and bullshit comic-book cliches and 10%, if that, about delivering the hard, solid, human-scale, heavy-lifting stuff that makes for a truly good film. I’ll admit that Snyder is as stylistically innovative as Brian DePalma was in his ’70s and early ’80s prime, but just as problematic as DePalma turned out to be — he’s a “me!, me!, me!” type of guy. Yes, I loved the proscenium-arch beginning of Sucker Punch but it was all downhill after that.

From my 3.24.11 Sucker Punch review: “Snyder is a kind of visual dynamo of the first order who has created in Sucker Punch a trite-but-fascinating, symphonic, half-psychedelic, undeniably ‘inspired’ alternate-reality world — gothic, color-desaturated, Wachowski-esque — that is nonetheless ruled by so much concrete-brain idiocy and coarsely “mythic” cliches (i.e., an evil father figure so ridiculously vile and gross beyond measure that he makes the cackling, moustache-twirling villains of the Snidely Whiplash variety seem austere if not inert) and ludicrous, charmless, bottom-of-the-pit dialogue and cheaply pandering female-revenge fantasies that you literally CAN’T STAND IT and WANT TO HOWL and THROW YOUR 24 OZ. COKE AT THE SCREEN.

“Snyder is a masterful visual maestro (loved the proscenium arch ‘theatrical’ touches at the very beginning) but also — this is crucial to the Sucker Punch experience — an Igor-like, chained-in-the-basement, genius-level moron at dumbing things down. The movie is a digital torture device for those seeking at least a hint of compelling narrative, a tendril-ish remnant of logic, a tiny smidgen of story intelligence, and dialogue with a hint of flair or some kind of tethered-to-the-world normality.”

If I’d produced ABC’s red-carpet Oscar segment I would have never in a million years hired the teensy-weensy, bird-like, goody-two-shoes Kristin Chenoweth — she stands 4’11” — to do interviews. She made just about every actress look like Attack of the 50-Foot Woman (even Reese Whitherspoon looked big) and every tallish guy (like the 6′ 2″ Bradley Cooper) look like Gulliver’s Travels.

My heart went out to poor, plus-sized Adele, who’s 5’9″ but was closer to six feet in heels, when she spoke with Chenoweth. You could see what she was thinking — “All right, put your best face on and you’ll be okay, but my God, this little button-sized pixie is making me look and feel like a moose.”

I’ve said before I’m not a fan of Thumbelina girls, and especially those who speak with those squeaky little peep-peep voices that so many ladies use these days. That’s because GenX and older-GenY guys like Seth MacFarlane and LexG/Ballsworth think that munchkin girls with peep-peep voices are hot. If the culture was decrying right now that it’s cooler and hotter to sound like Lauren Bacall or Barbara Stanwyck or Rosalind Russell, the peep-peep women would be doing whatever they could to affect a deeper, sultry-er, cigarette-smoke voice.

On top of which I don’t care for Chenoweth’s general Middle American shopping-mall vibe. “I’m a cute vivacious singer and very positive minded and up with people!,” blah blah. She’s a Christian who hails from Oklahoma (i.e., probably a political conservative) who’s basically a singer(!) and stage actress(!) and an ebullient personality(!) who’s big with tourists who wear shorts. The only thing interesting about her is that she once went out with Aaron Sorkin.

At 12:30 pm I attended a serene and convivial back-yard reception for French Oscar nominees, particularly Amour star Emmanuelle Riva and her director Michael Haneke, at the Beverly Hills residence of Axel Cruau, the Consul General of France. Cannes Film Festival general delegate Thierry Fremaux, Village Voice/L.A. Weekly critic Scott Foundas, Variety‘s Steven Gaydos, Deadline‘s Pete Hammond and MCN’s David Poland were among the guests.

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“I’ve just walked out of Park Chan-Wook‘s Stoker (Fox Searchlight, 3.1). Sorry, nope. If you’re Variety‘s Guy Lodge, it’s “a splendidly demented gumbo of Hitchcock thriller, American Gothic fairy tale and a contemporary kink all Park’s own.” For me it’s the biggest ‘look at how I can out-Brian DePalma and his most excessive and looney-tuney!’ show-off flick I’ve seen in a long, long time. Everything is visual candy to PCW. Half-sensible human motivation and story logic be damned…watch me have fun in my sandbox! Me! Me! Wheee!” — filed from Sundance Film Festival on 1.20.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences got the show it deserved last night. The members own it and one day, trust me, they won’t feel so good about that. As usual the show felt a little schmaltzy, a little out-of-time in a gay Las Vegas-y sense. The show’s producers, Craig Zadan and Neil Meron, got to remind us what a great film Chicago was and how much we miss films of this type. And…I don’t know what else to say. I really don’t. Somebody help me out here.

The engagingly adult, nicely crafted Argo won Best Picture, and apart from the fact that Zero Dark Thirty and Silver Linings Playbook were, are and always will be far more vital and alive and crackling…why am I going through my routine again? It’s over. On to 2013.

I didn’t file a reaction piece right after the Oscar telecast because the only persistent thought I had during the show was “what is this? Why do I feel so removed?” I agreed with or accepted many of the calls, but I felt it wasn’t my type of Oscar telecast. At most my investment felt marginal. When the show ended I knew I needed to get out. I went down to Canter’s and ordered some vaguely unhealthy food. A grilled-cheese-and-tomato sandwich and potato chips and Diet Coke and a coffee. You’re not supposed to eat after 9:30 or 10 pm, and yet there I was. Not “bummed” but vaguely unhappy, for sure.

I’ve been through Oscar shows that made me feel amazed, elated (i.e., Roman Polanski‘s Best Director win for The Pianist) and sometimes outraged (the Brokeback Mountain Best Picture loss) but I can count the emotional current moments from last night’s show on one hand, and none were especially intense. The Les Miserables sing-out, Jennifer Lawrence falling on the stage, Adele‘s confident delivery of Skyfall (and Seth MacFarlane‘s quip about Rex Reed‘s forthcoming review)…what else?

I know that not long after Quentin Tarantino‘s mystifying win for Best Original Screenplay I started playing Jimi Hendrix‘s “I Don’t Live Today” in my head. I shrugged at the William Shatner future-forecast routine and “We Saw Your Boobs” number. Many seem to agree that MacFarlane, who has taken it in the neck from at least one female columnist so far, should have been less “ceremonial” and gone for broke.

I fully respect and in most cases sincerely admire the efforts of the winners, but are you going to tell me that Christoph Waltz didn’t deliver the same kind of curt, deflecting, dryly verbose performance (i.e., “I’m having an enormously good time saying these droll but florid lines while at the same time standing outside my character and in fact outside the film itself”) in Django Unchained that he gave in Inglourious Basterds? Two Oscars for essentially the same performance. Waltz played a good guy in Django and a monster in Basterds, but there isn’t a dime’s worth of difference between them. He knows it, Tarantino knows it, you know it, the Academy knows it.

Are you going to tell me that Brave was the cleverest, most original or most spiritually engaging animated feature of the year? From a 12.26 post: “I’ve experienced moments of satisfaction and even uplift from the best Pixar films, but nothing suffocates my spirit like a glossy, connect-the-dots mainstream animated feature (i.e., big-name actors doing the voicing) looking to sell an empowerment fable about a young person being tested and fulfilling his/her destiny. I half-liked the big cowardly bear but it went no further. Every exaggerated expression and every gut-slam visual or aural effect felt like a tiny cyanide capsule.”

We’re living in aesthetically degraded times. There are an awful lot of unsophisticated, not especially sharp or knowledgable people out there today. That is incontestable. And, it appears, the sensibilities of this group are being expressed by a certain portion of Academy voters. I’m trying to think of another explanation.

Did you see that expression on Joaquin Phoenix’s face when the camera cut to him during the Best Actor sequence? Did you feel what he was feeling a bit? I went there from time to time.

Here’s a pretty decent account of the Vanity Fair after-party, written by Chris Rovzar.

I just can’t think of anything to say beyond this. I mostly feel relieved that the season is over and we can now push our way into 2013, free and clear.

But beyond this I think I missed the absence of any fire-in-the-belly stuff by way of strong political current. There was no sense of cultural conflict, no Michael Moore-ish rants. Everyone in the audience seemed to be on the same go-along page. And on some level I regretted the absence of…if not rancor then at least something a tiny bit uncomfortable.

Consider this recollection, posted this morning, from The Nation‘s Rick Perlstein:

“And then there was 1975, the most bizarrely political Oscar night of all.

“Late in 1974 a director named Peter Davis showed a documentary called Hearts and Minds briefly in a Los Angeles theater to qualify it for Academy Award consideration (watch the whole stunning thing here). It opened with images of a 1973 homecoming parade for POW George Thomas Coker, who told a crowd on the steps of the Linden, New Jersey, city hall about Vietnam, ‘If it wasn’t for the people, it was very pretty. The people there are very backwards and primitive, and they make a mess out of everything.’ General William Westmoreland, former commander of U.S. forces, in a comment the director explained had not been spontaneous but had come on a third take, was shown explaining, ‘The Oriental doesn’t put the same high price on life as does a Westerner. Life is plentiful. Life is cheap in the Orient.’ (Thereupon, the film cut to a sobbing Vietnamese mother being restrained from climbing into the grave atop the coffin of her son.) Daniel Ellsberg was quoted: ‘We aren’t on the wrong side. We are the wrong side.’ The movie concluded with an interview with an activist from Vietnam Veterans Against the War. ‘We’ve all tried very hard to escape what we have learned in Vietnam,’ he said. ‘I think Americans have worked extremely hard not to see the criminalities that their officials and their policy-makers exhibited.”

“A massive thunderstorm raged outside at the Oscar ceremony at the Dorothy Chandler Pavillion on Oscar Night, April 8, twenty days before the final fall of Saigon to North Vietnam’s Communist forces — where after Sammy Davis, Jr.’s musical tribute to Fred Astaire, and Ingrid Bergman‘s acceptance of the best supporting actress award for Murder on the Orient Express, and Francis Ford Coppola‘s award for best director (one of six Oscars for The Godfather Part II: ‘I’m wearing a tuxedo with a bulletproof cumberbund,’ cohost Bob Hope cracked. “Who knows what will happen if Al Pacino doesn’t win’), Lauren Hutton and Danny Thomas opened the envelop and announced Hearts and Minds had won as the year’s best documentary.

“Producer Bert Schneider took the microphone and said, ‘It’s ironic that we’re here at a time just before Vietnam is about to be liberated. Then he read a telegram from the head of the North Vietnamese delegation to the Paris peace talks. It thanked the antiwar movement ‘for all they have done on behalf of peace… Greetings of friendship to all American people.’

“Backstage, Bob Hope was so livid he tried to push his way past the broadcast’s producer to issue a rebuttal onstage. Shirley MacLaine, who had already mocked Sammy Davis from the stage for having endorsed Richard Nixon, shouted, ‘Don’t you dare!’ Anguished telegrams from viewers began piling up backstage. One, from a retired Army colonel, read, ‘WITH 55,000 DEAD YOUNG AMERICANS IN DEFENSE OF FREEDOM AND MILLIONS OF VIETNAMESE FIGHTING FOR FREEDOM…DEMAND WITHDRAWAL OF AWARD.’ On its back, Hope madly scribbled a disclaimer for his cohost Frank Sinatra to read onstage. Sinatra read it to a mix of boos and applause: ‘The Academy is saying we are not responsible for any political utterances on this program and we are sorry that had to take place.’ Upon which, backstage, the broadcast’s third cohost, Shirley MacLaine, berated Sinatra: ‘You said you were speaking for the Academy. Well, I’m a member of the academy and you didn’t ask me!’ Her brother, Warren Beatty, snarled at Sinatra on camera: ‘Thank you, Frank, you old Republican.'”

I posted the followng on 9.26.12: A standard Zen 101 question is “why does the bird fly?” If your answer is “because that is the way for him…it’s his gift, his burden, his calling, his joy…the bird flies because he must,” you’ll probably have a place in your heart for Ang Lee‘s Life Of Pi. But if your reply is “what’s he gonna do, ride a Harley Davidson?,” then you might have issues with this 11.21 20th Century Fox release, which will have its world premiere tonight at the New York Film Festival.

Just as Anthony Minghella‘s Cold Mountain was described by the smart-asses as “a movie about a man walking through the woods” and Martin Scorsese‘s The Age of Innocence was called “a movie about cufflinks,” Life of Pi — a constantly eye-filling adaptation of Yann Martel’s 2001 novel — is going to be called “a film about floating in a lifeboat for months with a Bengal tiger.” By the primitives, I mean. It’s a spiritual journey flick, of course, but some people have no patience for that stuff.

Thing is, I have plenty of patience for meditative musings and I still thought Life of Pi was kind of a languid, inconclusive, space-casey thing…although quite gorgeous on a compositional, frame-by-frame level.

I think that Life of Pi is going to be regarded as a major visual feast by the visual-delight-for-the-sake-of-visual-delight crowd — the pure cinema geeks — and as a visually enthralling curiosity by the vast majority of the viewing public, as a non-starter by a significant portion of the family audience (i.e., as a bore by kids and their legendary short-attention spans) and as a respectable also-ran in the Best Picture contest. 2.24 Update: I turned out to be technically right.

No one will dismiss or disrespect it. It is a reasonably sturdy work of art. It is worth seeing. It is food for thought. It might even kick in with religious types of all shapes and colors. But there’s no way it gets into the Best Picture game. Sorry. 2.24 Update: I was obviously dead wrong with this statement.

That’s because it doesn’t tell much of a campfire story and it doesn’t really tie together, not for me anyway, and I’m saying this as one who experienced satori as a lad in my early 20s after taking LSD and reading the Bhagavad Gita, and therefore one who will always welcome notions of the mystical and the concept of clear light. But as God and Vishnu and Sri Krishna are my witness, I found it to be a mild little parable about the brutal, bestial nature of life and the relentless rough and tumble, and how we have to a choice to live in this world and be governed by these brutal terms or to see beyond these terms and achieve some level of transcendence — and that’s fine.

I also took to heart the lesson about how it sure sharpens your survival game if you have a hungry Bengal tiger to feed while you’re floating across the Pacific ocean. That’s true. I myself have been sharpened by this and that tiger on my own path.

But I found little or nothing mystical (or even mystically allusive or intriguing) in Life of Pi. What I found was heaps and mounds and waves of delirious CG eye candy in service of a very slow-moving tale children’s tale — honestly, this is a Sunday morning Clutch Cargo cartoon writ large and flamboyant and visually state-of-the-art — with a sluggish middle section on the high seas.

I’m not going to recount the story beat for beat (look it up) but 17 year-old Suraj Sharma plays young “Pi” Patel, and Irrfan Khan plays the adult Pi who tells his story to an author, played by Rafe Spall (and previously played by Tobey Maguire before Lee decided his performance wasn’t working).

The opening in the zoo (even the animals in this section look CG-ish) to Khan’s chat with Spall to Sharma sampling various faiths and religions as a kid to the sinking of the cargo ship takes…what, about 35 or 40 minutes? Then we have what seems like a full hour of struggling to survive on the boat and raft. And then a final 20 minutes of so talking to Spall again (who says the story is “a lot to take in”) and to the Japanese investigators and their surprising decision to choose a metaphorical story over a literal-sounding one.

Life of Pi is constantly inventive and diverting and obviously eye-filling, but there is next to nothing revelatory in the tale except that we all are given a choice to choose between a tale of the tiger and the hyena and the zebra and the open seas, or a tale about hunger and thirst and desperation and murder on the high seas, and that most of us tend to prefer a more literal and less metaphorical version of things.

I’m a tiger guy myself, but I appreciate the point of view of the meat-and-potatoes crowd who will snort and say, “Aww, horseshit…tell us what really happened!” I could write a review of Life of Pi by Joe Pesci‘s character in Goodfellas and/or one of Denis Leary‘s pals in the Rescue Me firehouse, and I could make it funny. But I don’t want to be snide or disrespectful. But you know what one of those guys would say.

In a letter directly to Martel, Barack Obama described his book as “an elegant proof of God, and of the power of storytelling.” I’m going to vote for Barack Obama, but if he says the same thing about the film I would challenge him to explain in detail precisely where the proof of God is.

What this movie delivers without question is proof of devotion to and obsession with CG visuals. If there is “proof of God” in Life of Pi, there is also proof of God in Happy Feet, Jurassic Park, Come Back Little Sheba, Who’ll Stop The Rain, T2, Hatari!, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Elmer Gantry, The Rains of Ranchipur, Titanic, The Silver Linings Playbook, Siddhartha, Dude, Where’s My Car?, From Here to Eternity, Stanley Kramer‘s Judgment at Nuremberg and Cecil B. Demille‘s The Greatest Show on Earth.

In its most primitive and basic form, Life of Pi is magical realism by way of what can almost be described as a CG cartoon — none of it feels “real” except for the interview portions and the portions showing Sharma/Khan as a young kid. I understand that the “unreality” of most of the film is deliberate, of course — a visual correlative to an imagination and a mindset of a man who is enthralled by and determined to find the mystical and exceptional in his processing of life. But we’re still left with the fact that the majority of the movie doesn’t look “real”, and by that I mean less real than Avatar.

Life of Pi is “painted” up the wazoo, and I don’t care if there was an actual Bengal tiger who acted in certain scenes — I don’t believe it anyway. It’s all about the hard drive. It’s all about the paint and the brushstrokes and the hanging of the canvas on the art gallery wall.

To try again, Life is Pi is a parable about the savagery of life but not, by my sights, a movie that points to or articulates anything meaningful in a mystical sense. It basically says that it’s a dog-eat-dog, hyena-eats-zebra, tiger-eats-hyena and carnivorous-plant-island world out there….survival-of-the-fittest, tooth-and-claw, watch your back and be resourceful. But (I’m repeating myself) it sure sharpens your game if you have a hungry Bengal tiger to feed, etc. Life is hard (which is entirely God’s doing) but you don’t have to think or be “hard.” If you wish to rise above instinct and raw survivalism, you can. The choice is yours. The journey is there for the taking if you want it.

I respect enormously the commitment to a precise and particular vision on Lee’s part (and that of producers Gil Netter and David Womark, and before that producer-shepherd Elizabeth Gabler and directors M. Night Shyamalan and Alfonso Cuaron), and Fox 2000 in financing it and 20th Century Fox in distributing it. This is not a movie that dives right into commercial conventionality, and into what most people (certainly what most younger people) want. These things in themselves are to be respected, particularly given the production costs and whatnot.

After Wednesday afternoon’s screening I heard a colleague talking about how she’s an atheist but she was shattered by it. Another person in her realm was very impressed by it. So I may be in the minority and that’s fine. Life of Pi deserves respect and whatever hossannahs it can get. I don’t want to stand in the way of that.

Brian Bethune of Maclean‘s once described Martel’s book as “a head-scratching combination of dense religious allegory, zoological lore and enthralling adventure tale, written with warmth and grace.” That’s pretty much what Ang Lee’s film is if you substitute “written” with “composed.” It’s fine for those who will get off on it. It’s quite the visual feast but it’s really a doodle. It’s a movie that lights or doesn’t light a match in the head of the viewer, and if you’re one of those who gets that special “something” out of it, great.

But truly great movies deliver the goods to the perceptive and the not-so-perceptive simultaneously, and that is why Life of Pi is not Best Picture material. For the not-so-perceptive, it’s an CG-driven eye-candy adventure with a slow and even draggy middle section, and a story that’s kind of interesting but also kind of “meh.” That is what 80% to 85% of viewers will think or say.

Update: In response to HE reader Mark G., the 3D is very nicely rendered. The tiger leaps out, the chunks of meat pop through, etc. I just don’t feel that much enthusiasm for 3D these days…sorry. I could have easily gone with Life of Pi being screened in 2D. That’s not a comment about the quality of the 3D work — that’s a comment about me.

Further update: Variety‘s Justin Chang, The Hollywood Reporter‘s Todd McCarthy and Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson have all posted friendlier reviews than my own. MCN’s David Poland is more on my side of the fence.