Jeffrey Wells

On Tuesday, 2.5, Connecticut Rep. Joe Courtney posted a complaint about Lincoln having dishonored his state’s voting legacy by showing two fictitiously-named Connecticut representatives voting against the 13th Amendment on January 31, 1865. On Wednesday everybody wrote about it including myself. When I asked for a comment I was told Lincoln screenwriter Tony Kushner was on a plane. That’s where I left it.

One presumes Kushner eventually landed and made his way to a heated room with a computer, all the while mulling Courtney’s beef and talking it over with friends and colleagues. Sometime Wednesday or more likely Thursday Kushner wrote a reply to Courtney, and at 1:49 am this morning it appeared in the Wall Street Journal‘s Speakeasy section by way of Christopher John Farley.

Boiled down, Kushner said that (a) yes, Courtney is correct but (b) he’s okay with having marginally fictionalized history (not just by misrepresenting the votes of two Connecticut Congressmen but depicting the vote as being “organized state by state, which is not the practice of the House”) because he and director Steven Spielberg “wanted to clarify to the audience that the Thirteenth Amendment passed by a very narrow margin that wasn’t determined until the end of the vote.”

Really boiled down: “Ask yourself, ‘Did this thing happen?’ If the answer is yes, then it’s historical. Then ask, ‘Did this thing happen precisely this way?’ If the answer is yes, then it’s history; if the answer is no, not precisely this way, then it’s historical drama.”

Reasonable rationale: “In making changes to the voting sequence, we adhered to time-honored and completely legitimate standards for the creation of historical drama, which is what Lincoln is.”

Kicker: “I hope nobody is shocked to learn that I also made up dialogue and imagined encounters and invented characters.”

The first thing I thought when I saw this poster for Brian Helgeland‘s 42 (Warner Bros., 4.13), the Jackie Robinson biopic starring Chadwick Boseman as J.R. and Harrison Ford as Branch Rickey, was “who slides with his right fist raised in a victory salute?” Because it looks like bullshit, like the marketing guys are trying to appeal to fans of today’s self-aggrandizing, cock-of-the-walk athletes.

But guess what? For some unfathomable reason Robinson did slide into bases like that. Here are some photos. The bottom line is that the poster still looks phony even if Robinson did that fist thing every time. Partly because his mouth is open as if he’s shouting “yeaaahhhh!” It looks like an advertising con, and if I were running the marketing on this movie I would tell the art guys to not use it. Fine for the movie, not fine for the poster.

Imagine how beautiful this image would be on its own terms if Robinson’s right hand was more or less open-palmed and going for balance, like any athlete’s hand would be at such a moment. I’ve slid into bases. I know what’s involved so don’t tell me. The fist thing is odd.

At first I thought there must be something wrong with me to be laughing louder and louder at this pedestrian wipe-out piece, which went up on 2.5. But I couldn’t help it. Partly, I think, because it’s a metaphor for the random cosmic brutality of things. All I know is that the more people who get hit, the funnier this thing is. Partly because getting wiped out like that it a bullshit Hollywood device born of cheap screenwriting sloth, and you can’t help but laugh at that crap. Or spit at it.

Anne Hathaway getting hit on her bicycle in One Day, for instance. She’s just going to peddle right into a busy two-lane street after emerging from a quiet side alley, just shoot right into the street without looking? I don’t think so.

One wonders, of course, why some of the bus drivers in some of these sequences hit the brake after impact but never before. Mostly they just slam on through and mow those people down like bowling pins.

I realize, of course, that city dwellers do sometimes get hit by buses and cars. Mostly old people, I’m guessing. In “Sword of Damocles” Lou Reed sang about seeing “a kid get hit by a bus.” Poor Richard Bright got killed by a bus in ’06. But I’ve been a big-city dweller for about 35 years and I’ve never seen anyone get hit or come upon the aftermath of such an accident…not once.

I myself have never come close to getting hit by anyone or anything, ever. I am part cat, part monkey and part coyote on the pavement. My instincts are like lightning. I see and smell everything coming my way before it gets there.

This is the first semi-effective, decently-cut trailer for Abbas Kiarostami‘s Like Someone In Love, a curiously fascinating film about longing and obsession within a story that resolves nothing and in fact feels oblique and inconclusive…but is oddly riveting and wise and indelible nonetheless. IFC Films is opening it theatrically on 2.15 along with the usual download options. The 64% Rotten Tomatoes rating is entirely unjust and unreflective of its true nature.

To my mind Like Someone In Love is heads and shoulders above Kiarostami’s Certified Copy, which I partly admired but mostly hated.

On 5.20.12 I wrote that Like Someone In Love “has provided more pleasure and intrigue than any film I’ve seen at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. It’s a trifle on one level, but it’s plain and true and masterful — a pitch thrown straight without a shred of pretension. I’m probably going to fail in trying to describe what it amounted to for me, but that’s okay. I only know that the slowness of the pace of Like Someone To Love and the way this and that detail is revealed like cards in a solitaire game is fascinating and then some.”

Yesterday afternoon Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neil pointed out that Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone and Entertainment Weekly‘s Thom Geier are the last Lincoln diehards. Everyone else is picking Argo to win Best Picture but not these two soldiers, and you know something? I admire their decision to lash themselves to the mast and if necessary go down with the ship.

It’s not easy to stand alone against the chuckling of your peers. It takes sand. I’ve been there and I know how it feels. But it’s what separates the men from the boys. If you really believe then you need to say “eff the odds and to hell with predicting — this is the best film of the year and standing by it is an expression of who I am and what I am.”

This is what Sasha is thinking, I mean. I don’t think this is what Geier is saying or thinking, or at least not with any conviction.

I stood by The Social Network during the 2010-2011 season despite the deranged and altogether shameful King’s Speech capitulation by the Academy, the guilds and most of the go-along prognosticators. There is no filmmaker or journalist with any self-respect who would argue with a straight face today that The King’s Speech is a better, bolder, taller achievement than The Social Network, but quite a few people went along with this appalling notion two years ago. The fact that I pooh-poohed and in fact spat upon the King’s Speech cavalcade is one of the things I am truly proud of in my life.

O’Neil’s commentary: “Sasha has been a diehard Lincoln soldier for eons, but she briefly caved in to the momentum behind “Argo” after it swept the Producers, Screen Actors’ and Directors’ Guilds, then climbed back up on her feet and mustered new courage to resume her fight for “Lincoln.” Noting how rarely a film has managed to win Best Picture without its director being nommed in modern times (just once — that notorious Driving Miss Daisy example), she says, “I have to adhere to the stats in the face of confusion — I am just built that way.”

“Poor Thom is waffling a bit too. At one point in our podcast chat, he admits that the other 23 Oscarologists may be right, but then he suddenly snaps out of it, rallies behind his choice of Lincoln and says, ‘I find it hard to imagine that when you’re filling out a ballot with 26 categories, the only thing you’re checking off is Argo for Best Picture…? It’s possible that it could pick up some technical awards. It might pick up adapted screenplay over Lincoln. It could get editing. But it’s kind of hard for me to imagine an Argo sweep, which is what you tend to get with a Best Picture winner.”

Time has posted nine Oscar-related video chats with ten actors — The Master‘s Amy Adams, Lincoln‘s Sally Field and John Hawkes, Beasts of the Southern Wild‘s Quvenzhane Wallis, Les Miserables‘ Anne Hathaway and Hugh Jackman, Django Unchained‘s Christoph Waltz, Argo‘s John Goodman, The Impossible‘s Naomi Watts and Zero Dark Thirty‘s Jessica Chastain.

Candid material. Nice production values. Cheers to director Paola Kudacki for shooting in beautiful black-and-white.

Every year directors, actors and other significant contributors in Oscar-nominated films are interviewed, photographed and placed on a very classy pedestal by the big media outlets, and the underlying message is that these guys are the coolest kidz on the block, the most accomplished, the best of the best. And they are for the most part. But I’ll bet you could give the same interview treatment to people who make B and C-grade movies — directors and stars of AFM-level Eurocrap movies, super-marginal indies, schlocky downmarket horror and action flicks, romcoms and sub-mental comedies — and ask them the same kind of questions and shoot and light them with the same ace-level production values, and the final import wouldn’t be much different. Just saying.

I don’t see what the big deal is about Hugh Jackman forgetting…ohh, whatsisname ….the guy, you know, who starred in Lincoln….oh, right, “Lewis.” Hey, has anyone seen Lewis around? Over there…see him? Hey, Louie! It’s me, Hugh! People blank out every so often. It happens. No need to point a finger like Movieline‘s Frank DiGiacomo did this morning.

For the record: I have always despised Brightcove/Macromedia embed codings for their absurd length and size, and because it takes as much as a full minute to appear on a typical browser. This Hugh-and-Anne video refused to appear on Safari for over a minute, which led to give up and kill Safari and swtich to Firefox.

Magnolia will soon be releasing Into The White, a World War II wilderness-survival film from director-cowriter Petter Naess. iTunes and On Demand on March 7th, and then a limited theatrical break in April. Based on a true story and costarring Florian Lukas and Rupert Grint, the Norweigan-made ensemble drama is about crash-landed British and German soldiers forced to seek shelter in the same cabin. Yes, I agree, fine message — we have to get past our petty animosities and pool our resources for the greater good.

Into The White opened in Norway, New Zealand, Sweden and Spain last summer, and in England in late September. The British reviewers gave it a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 50%. I’ve read six or seven reviews thus far and while it appears that the film isn’t a work of towering originality or mythical greatness, it’s still something I want to see.

Zero Dark Thirty screenwriter-producer Mark Boal spoke last night at L.A.’s Loyola Marymount University in concert with a program called “First Amendment Week.” The talk happened at 6 pm at Burns Back Court. At one point Boal addressed the torture issue. Here’s an excerpt with very minor edits:

Zero Dark Thirty screenwriter-producer Mark Boal.

“Much has been made of the card at the beginning of the film that says ‘based on firsthand accounts of actual events.’ To be honest, of all the controversial topics, that’s the one I get the least. Because that’s exactly what Zero Dark Thirty is — a film that is based on firsthand accounts of actual events. I know — I talked to the people who experienced those events.

“But the card didn’t say Zero Dark Thirty is an exact rendition (no pun intended) of actual events, and we certainly don’t pretend that it is. It’s not a videotaped transcription of a six-volume Senate report — [and] that’s probably a good thing.

“At the end of the day, merging film and news is a balancing act between fact-finding and storytelling. It comes with a distinct set of responsibilities to the subjects, the audience, and history. Movies from All the President’s Men to Black Hawk Down to The Social Network have all [done this].

“Because I was a reporter before I was a filmmaker, I think I have a decent grasp on how to blend fact and fiction into drama that reveals the essential truth of the story I’m trying to tell. But not everyone appreciates the value in mixing fact and fiction.

“While New Yorker critic David Denby wrote a generally positive review, which I appreciate, he criticized us for wanting ‘to claim the authority of fact and the freedom of fiction at the same time.’ And there, Mr. Denby got it exactly wrong by being exactly right.

“Without the freedom of fiction, we couldn’t share this story with millions who deserve to understand it, question it, and debate it. Without the authority of fact, we wouldn’t have a story to share, issues to understand, questions to ask, or controversies to debate.

“I believe any artist blending fact and fiction has a special responsibility to set
expectations about that blend, to be open and honest about the mix, and stay true to the essential story being told.

“I think we’ve done that, and I think we got the balance right. Certainly, it seems like the public feels that way. We’ve been gratified by audience reactions and reviews and, well, great box-office business.

“But like other movies that have blended real events with created ones, in very different ratios — from Bonnie and Clyde to The French Connection to JFK — we’ve managed to stir the pot a bit.

“Most of the conversation around Zero Dark Thirty surrounds the fact that this film was the first to graphically depict very realistic scenes involving enhanced interrogation — torture — and their relationship to the ultimate discovery of bin Laden in Abbottabad. And we’ve been criticized from pretty much every direction about that.

“From the left, we’ve been accused of defending torture because there are disagreements in some quarters as to exactly which detainee undergoing exactly which form of interrogation first produced the lead that led to bin Laden. And thus, their argument goes, if it’s not crystal clear that enhanced interrogation produced the lead, we shouldn’t have included it, because it gives the impression we’re endorsing its effectiveness.

“I can’t understand the logic to that. If we left the torture out, we’d be whitewashing history.

“And of course, as Kathryn has said, ‘depiction is not endorsement. If it was, no artist would be able to paint inhumane practices, no author could write about them, and no filmmaker could delve into the thorny subjects of our time.’ Or to put it in very 2013 terms: retweets don’t equal endorsement. Depiction — and retweets — are about exposing ideas to people and letting them make their own judgments.

“From the right, we’ve been criticized for depicting the interrogation scenes as more brutal than they actually were, or because we show some torture practices being performed by Americans working for the CIA when they were actually performed by Americans working for the military. Or by the CIA working with the military at Abu Ghraib.

“But every interrogation technique portrayed in the film was performed by Americans, some lawfully, some not, in the war on terror. They are part of this story. As one commentator put it, ‘Because torture was in the mix during all of the early interrogations, it would be wrong to ignore it, and impossible to say it had no effect.’

“No less an authority than Leon Panetta said publicly, ‘The whole effort in going after bin Laden involved ten years of work, in piecing together various pieces of intelligence that were gathered. And there’s no question that some of the intelligence gathered was a result of some of these methods.”

“We used to say you know you did a good job when you pissed off both sides of the aisle. But both of criticism, from the left and from the right, squarely miss the point.

“The United States tortured people as a matter of national policy, authorized by the White House, approved by the Department of Justice, and disclosed to the Congress. There was never a question of leaving these acts, as reprehensible as they are, out of the story of the hunt for bin Laden, or it wouldn’t be an honest story.

“The brutality and inhumanity of rough interrogations are clear as day in the film. I don’t see how you can watch those scenes and not feel the suffering of the person being interrogated. At the same time, the scenes accurately depict the role that rough interrogations played in the hunt. Sometimes they produced bad information, sometimes they produced nothing, and sometimes they produced a useful scrap.

“Torture is in the movie, because torture is part of the story. It is part of the history.

“Was the torture effective? Was it necessary? Was it terrible? Was it wrong?

“I have my view – I think it was dead wrong. Some people I respect come to the opposite conclusion. But in the end, you have to decide for yourself. As the Bard wrote, ‘the play’s the thing.’ So is the film. Zero Dark Thirty doesn’t try to tell you what to think. It simply encourages you to think. And therein, catch the conscience of the country.”

No matter how you slice it a Rotten Tomatoes score in the low ’80s is cause for comfort. One out of every five critics having an issue with the film in question is nothing to sweat. RT ratings almost never seem to place in the ’70s or high ’60s. Once they drop below 80 they tend to plummet down to the low 60s. If they don’t do this it’s unusual.

This is all to say in a half-assed, mealy-mouthed, beating-around-the-bush sort of way that Steven Soderbergh‘s Side Effects is a smart, tightly wound, character-driven thriller of sorts. I saw it before Sundance and I was going to tap out my review today. Tomorrow for sure.

Yesterday Connecticut Rep. Joe Courtney complained in an open letter to Steven Spielberg that Lincoln has dishonored the reputations of two Connecticut Congressmen as well as Connecticut itself by incorrectly showing that said Congressmen voted against the 13th Amendment when the votes were taken on January 31st, 1865. Courtney wants Spielberg to publicly admit the mistake before the 2.24 Oscar telecast, and also dub it out before the film goes to DVD/Bluray.

“As a Member of Congress from Connecticut, I was on the edge of my seat during [Lincoln‘s recreation of the] roll call vote on the ratification of the 13th Amendment outlawing slavery,” Courtney writes on his website. “But when two of three members of the Nutmeg State’s House delegation voted to uphold slavery, I could not believe my own eyes and ears. How could Congressmen from Connecticut — a state that supported President Lincoln and lost thousands of her sons fighting against slavery on the Union side of the Civil War — have been on the wrong side of history?

“After some digging and a check of the Congressional Record from January 31, 1865, I learned that in fact, Connecticut’s entire Congressional delegation, including four members of the House of Representatives — Augustus Brandegee of New London, James English of New Haven, Henry Deming of Colchester and John Henry Hubbard of Salisbury — all voted to abolish slavery. Even in a delegation that included both Democrats and Republicans, Connecticut provided a unified front against slavery.”

I figured Lincoln screenwriter Tony Kushner, a man of honor and respect, had to have a good reason (perhaps a dramatic one?) for, according to Courtney, ignoring the historical record, so I asked Disney publicist Stephanie Kluft if this matter could be explained. She ignored me but studio publicists are always slow on the pickup. Update: Kushner’s husband Mark Harris wrote back promptly (I didn’t see his reply right away — it was hidden in the folds of the original message) and explained that Kushner was on a plane and thus unreachable. So there it is.