On one level this poster for Ken Burns, Sarah Burns and David McMahon‘s Central Park Five conveys in a rather clunky way that the doc deals with race. On another it implies that the subject — the 1989 Central Park Jogger rape case and the five Harlem youths who were wrongly found guilty of the crimes and imprisoned for years — will be treated in a stark and simplistic fashion. In a way that’s true. Here’s my Telluride Film Festival review.
The only part of this Joe Wright-directed Chanel No. 5 spot that doesn’t quite work is the line “dreams take over.” My dream of being a successful hotshot journalist came true, but for most people dreams die or shrivel up or never quite happen. Or they get sensibly downsized. Or gradually forgotten about.
It must have been tough for Pitt to say these lines just so. My understanding is that he was paid about $4 or $5 million for this.
Notice how quickly Felix Baumgartner drops and how his body turns into a little speck in roughly three or four seconds. And then compare that to the six-second drop that Daniel Craig takes off a bridge at the beginning of Skyfall. First Tony Scott and now Baumgartner — reality trumps the 007 bullshit.
Update: Yes, of course…a much thinner or lighter atmosphere 23 miles up means you’ll fall much faster. Heavier molecular density slows falls that happen only a few hundred feet off the ground. But there’s still a reality vibe from this video that kicks the shit out of that opening sequence in Skyfall. “Oh, go on…you’re too much of a realist!…the Bond films aren’t about realism” But they used to be, to some extent.
A few days ago a Tom O’Neil-fed notion about Tom Hooper’s Les Miserables becoming a “monster” Oscar sweeper crept into the conversation. Okay, maybe. But a couple of nights ago a counter-notion was implied (i.e., not firmly asserted) by a fellow who knows a Les Miz contributor. The notion is that it might be more of an acting vehicle thing (particularly benefitting Hugh Jackman and Anne Hathaway) than an overall Oscar fireworks thing. A solid, admirable, workmanlike job but that’s all.
This is joined in my mind with observations…reminders, I mean…from Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neil as well as Glenn Kenny on yesterday’s Oscar Poker that the Les Miserables material is familiar and classic and not exactly thrilling in and of itself, and that the stage musical is over 25 years old and quite traditional and retro-defaulty by today’s standards, and Tom Hooper‘s innovation of having the actors sing live on the set is (this was a Kenny riff also) doesn’t necessarily mean that the film will work splendidly. Live singing may seem to some like an exciting new approach to shooting movie musicals, but what will finally matter is whether or not Les Miserables works altogether…whether the entire working mechanism harmonizes in a way that inspires “wow, that was truly exceptional!” or “that was an entirely respectable rendering of a classic musical that was all the rage in London and Broadway back in the ’80s.”
If the latter impression dominates and Les Miserables becomes merely one of the Best Picture contenders instead of (according to O’Neil’s maddeningly coy tipster) possibly the Best Picture contender, then you’ll have an uncertain and perhaps even mysterious Best Picture race on your hands — an egalitarian race without a frontrunner or heavyweight contender, a competition among jacks and knaves and outliers without a big gorilla (or gorillas) that everyone’s looking to beat.
I fully expect, mind, that many of your typical 62 year-old white male Academy members will default to Les Miserables because of its traditional, classical bones and humanist aspirations and because of its (presumed) showiness and those (expected) emotionally grandstanding performances, blah blah. But if it finally settles in as a highly respectable venture rather than a revolutionary knockout, the stage will be set for some kind of Best Picture street fight.
Les Miserables is the new favorite among the Gold Derby contributors….a sudden “massive shift,” in the words of Tom O’Neil.
To repeat, there’s a wisp of a suggestion floating around (like dandelion fuzz) that Les Miserables may turn out to be more of a striking, highly respectable, performance-driven costumer (with Hugh Jackman and Anne Hathaway benefitting in particular) than a breathtaking, across-the-board, Oscar-sweep phenomenon…a solid, admirable, workmanlike job that may not necessarily inject spiritual adrenaline into the soul…well-made, fine and commendable but, in the words of Richard Masur in Risky Business, “not quite Ivy League.”
If so, as I explained in the above riff, the Best Picture race becomes a brawl, a contest of nearlies and highly respectable not-quiters without any swaggering big dogs.
Argo is some kind of apparent front-runner right now, but you and I know that beyond the “engaging true-life political suspense story” with great period detail aspect it doesn’t have the subtext or enough emotionality to be any kind of big, swinging Grand Poobah hoo-hah. It’s a very satisfying film, a feather in Ben Affleck‘s hat and very well liked (and a likely commercial hit at the end of the day, particularly counting overseas revenues) but let’s not get carried away, Pete Hammond (who put Argo in the top position in last night’s Gold Derby recalculations, and in so doing bailed on Silver Linings Playbook).
Last week’s Lincoln screenings (particularly last Monday night’s at the New York Film Festival) made it clear, I think, that Steven Spielberg‘s A & E drama is going to be a Best Picture nominee without any hope of winning. C’mon, be honest. It’s an acting thing (Daniel Day Lewis, Tommy Lee Jones, possibly Sally Field) and a Best Adapted Screenplay thing for Tony Kushner…maybe.
Robert Zemeckis’s Flight (which screens for LA press later this afternoon) may emerge as a Best Picture contender or not, but early reactions suggest that Denzel Washington is all but certain to land a Best Actor nomination, and that he may even wind up as a front-runner, particularly in view of the general opinion that Daniel Day Lewis’s Abraham Lincoln performance is more in the realm of admirable or respectable or highly honorable rather than jolting or live-wire.
Zero Dark Thirty could become a late-emerging front-runner, but the trailers are selling a procedural, a “how it was done” story that follows the Argo fundamentals (top-secret mission, Islamic authorities kept in the dark, suspenseful third-act climax followed by flght to safety). It will have to play on some level like Fred Zinneman‘s Day of the Jackal — a thriller about a plot or mission with an outcome that is common knowledge, but which is nonetheless gripping or highly intriguing from start to finish.
Post-Toronto screenings of David O. Russell‘s Silver Linings Playbook have resulted in pushback from certain Oscar bloggers. “This?,” they’ve been saying. “This is what you were so excited about in Toronto? Well, we’re going to stand in the way of that.” I think it’s a guaranteed Best Picture nominee, but the sourpuss-and-sorehead resistance may push it to the sidelines. It’s certainly an acting nomination vehicle (Jennifer Lawrence, Robert DeNiro, Bradley Cooper). The naysayers could be overcome, of course, if SLP clicks with the rank-and-file like it has at the Toronto and Hamptons festivals.
The Master has not gone over with that 62 year-old white guy crowd (i.e., the ones who don’t work out as much as they used to), and therefore it’s probably all but finished as a Best Picture contender. Please understand this is not an HE quality judgment or a reflection of what the Movie Godz have decided. Joaquin Phoenix for Best Actor, for sure, and Phillip Seymour Hoffman for Best Supporting Actor, most likely, and Amy Adams for Best Supporting Actress. Almost certainly a Best Cinematography nomination for Mihai Malaimare, Jr.
For the 179th time, Quentin Tarantino doesn’t make Oscar movies (i.e., ones that resonate on some personal or universal level re shared emotionality or some human condition element). He makes audacious, swaggering, high-style, verbal-flash Quentin movies, and that is why I believe Django Unchained will not seriously figure as a Best Picture winner. Probably a nominee, okay, but Tarantino is a stylist first and last and everybody knows that. He refuses to come to grips with life as it is actually being experienced out there. He makes fantasias that primarily function as self-serving, self-referential acts of stylistic masturbation and ’70s grindhouse nostalgia.
Ang Lee‘s Life Of Pi may be Best Picture nominated — it deserves respect and allegiance — but I don’t believe it has a prayer of winning.
Beasts of the Southern Wild deserves to be Best Picture nominated, and it will be if the Movie Godz hold any sway, but it’s been doing a slow fade over the last few weeks. Just ask Pete Hammond what his Academy pallies have been saying.
The Promised Land trailer suggests that unless it delivers in some sort of wildly surprising way and is much, much better than generally anticipated, it hasn’t a chance.
Watch out for alleged journalists who giggle together after a screening of some popular, well-reviewed film that allegedly connects on some basic emotional level. I was sharing an elevator with a couple of people I know after a private screening of a film I really like, and they were giggling like 13 year-old schoolgirls….”Hee-hee-hee-hee.” That meant they were dismissing it for some perceived failing. “Fuck are you laughing about?,” I snorted.
After last Tuesday’s Anna Karenina screening at RealD I walked by a group of 20something giggiy girls. I gave them the dirtiest look imaginable as I silently muttered to myself, “You’re laughing…laughing at one of the most brilliantly conceived and stylistically audacious films of the 21st Century?” (Movieline‘s Jen Yamato was standing with this group, and confirms the women were “mixed” on the film, “but I wouldn’t say it was because the material was heavy…if I was giggling post-film (and that’s totally possible) it was probably because I was basking in the afterglow of Aaron Johnson‘s man beauty.”)
If you’ve just come from a private screening or an allegedly strong, emotionally intense film or one that obviously stands out in terms of ambition if not execution, try and find the class to not giggle in the elevator on the way down or in the hallway outside the screening room. If you didn’t like it convey your views and feelings in subtle tones of regret, but don’t have yourself a cheap laugh. I’m suggesting this as a form of etiquette. You don’t have to show politeness, of course. If you want to devolve into teenage giggling spasms, knock yourself out.
MSN’s Glenn Kenny and I played catch a couple of hours ago for Oscar Poker #97. Glenn had just returned from this morning’s NY Film Festival press screening of Robert Zemeckis‘ Flight so we naturally got into that. And then we uncorked the Wells-Kenny grievance issues. It was clear, as always, that the pointed thrusts and abrasive scorn that occasionally color the back and forth on HE don’t manifest when you’re having a chit-chat. There’s your caustic internet voice and there’s your amiable personality in conversation, and they’re two different birds. Here’s a stand-alone mp3 link.
I read with profound depression that 10.12 Deadline report about Millenium Films having hired Legally Blonde screenwriters Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith to write ExpendaBelles, an Expendables spinoff focusing “on the feminine side of the mercenary business.” But why would anyone want to hire a team of female mercenaries to accomplish any job requiring brute aggression?
As a kicker Mike Fleming named several female action stars, but there’s only one…okay, two I’d be reluctant to face in a fight. I’m speaking of Haywire‘s Gina Carano and maybe Kill Bill‘s Uma Thurman, largely because she’s tall and can probably kick like a mule. I am otherwise unimpressed.
Robert Zemeckis‘ Fliight, which screened this morning for NY Film Festival press, “may have elements of action filmmaking and courtroom drama, but it is, ultimately, a character study about the sickness of addiction,” writes In Contention‘s Kris Tapley. “It captures the embarrassment, the denial, the rage and, crucially, the chronic fallibility that comes with it.
And in Tapley’s view, Denzel Washington‘s performance as Whip Whitaker “fires on all cylinders [and runs] through a complex range — charismatic, embattled, defiant, broken and, ultimately, humbled. [It] marks his most accomplished performance in some time, one certainly rating higher than the two that brought him Oscars in the past.” Or it tops Denzel’s Training Day and Glory perfs.
John Gatins‘ screenplay “pulses with an authenticity that suggests personal experience, but [is] married to a narrative that all but asks whether impairment might have sparked [Denzel’s] inspiration to save a hundred lives in a bold way, it becomes something more complex.”
Not to beat a dead horse, but this is exactly what I getting at in my 9.23 piece called “A Wing and a Prayer.” “From what I’m hearing Denzel’s condition when he saves his plane from crashing is what saves the day. If he’d been 100% sober he might not have rolled the plane over and landed it upside down,” I wrote. This led to that thought about driving half-bombed when I was living in Connecticut in the ’70s, and the idea “that I drove better when half-bombed because I was less intimidated by the possibility of something going wrong. I drove without fear, without hesitation. I took those hairpin turns like a champ.” And I was bitchslapped by several commenters for saying this.
“The film gets going in a hurry,” Tapley explains. “Whitaker’s ear-to-ear grin, the bouncing song choices, a near-numbing crash sequence and the beginnings of the malfeasance drama. But once the plot-driven stuff moves aside it starts to settle in somewhere in the second act and, for some, the gear shift might not work. It just depends on if you’re invested in the character enough to follow that next path, and personally speaking, I was.
“Awards-wise, it’s a little tough to say at the moment. Washington faces a difficult Best Actor race but he’ll get the campaign of his life, surely: this is Paramount’s baby this year. The screenplay deserves some real consideration, but it could fall short of films with more overt gravitas and/or fare not perceived in such commercial territory. I really couldn’t say until more get a look and I can ask around, but I certainly think it’s a great counter-intuitive choice in a year packed with the usual bait and I hope it finds its audience.”
Here’s another approving review from The Hollywood Reporter‘s Todd McCarthy.
If I wasn’t living in such a self-absorbed, self-regarding bubble I would have grabbed my camera last night and taken several photos of the Endeavour as it crawled through those mildly unappealing areas of Los Angeles (near Inglewood City Hall and the L.A. Forum and down Crenshaw Blvd. and Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd.). I had all night to do it — the journey from LAX to the California Science Center still hadn’t arrived as of noon today — and I crapped out. Shameful, no excuse.
Flight is a gripping suspense film, a friend says, about whether or not a fellow we don’t exactly admire but whom we nonetheless want to see saved or redeemed will do right by himself…or not. It’s entirely driven by character. In Leaving Las Vegas Nic Cage was fairly decisive about what he intended to do (i.e., drink himself to death), but in Flight Denzel Washington, portraying a self-destructive commercial airline pilot, teeters this way and that.
The suspense is such that my friend, who saw Flight a week and a half ago, still has scratch marks on his left arm made by his wife — her way of responding to Denzel’s predicament. Take that with a grain or not.
The KidRockVideos copy reads as follows: “The goal of [this] film is to tear down the one-dimensional political stereotypes…it reminds that what really matters is that we’re all Americans, with diverse thoughts, opinions and stances on issues. We are millions of unique, individual parts, the sum of which comprise a whole that is the shining beacon of freedom throughout the world. The film reminds us to be proud of our differences, and to never forget that we’re all in this together as Americans.”
HE response: I don’t want to know, much salute or embrace, a little less than half of the people in this country. The US of A is admired for its movies and music and wide-open landscapes and its great cities, but it’s also widely mocked and in many cases despised by millions worldwide for the bass-ackward, climate-change-denying attitudes that are largely due to American yokelism (religious, rightwing, racist, gay-hating, NASCAR, country music, etc.) and all the Tea Party nutters and conservative corporate toadies they’ve voted into office, particularly the House of Representatives.
A significant portion of this country has devolved into over-the-cliff lunacy and fact denial over the last decade, particularly since Obama’s election four years ago. Put them into green reeducation camps or convince them to secede from the union — seriously. They’re little more but stoppers and foot-draggers with unhealthy eating habits. They’re nice people when you visit (I had a really great time in Shreveport when I visited in late 2010) but later with the shitkicker music and pickup trucks and muscle cars and conservative flag-waving and all that other stuff.
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