Jeffrey Wells

On 8.17, or 45 days ago, I posted an open letter to Academy president Hawk Koch, asking him to arrange a special Academy screening of Keanu Reeves and Chris Kenneally‘s Side by Side. (I also sent Koch a direct letter and gave Kenneally a heads-up.) I don’t know if this effort had anything to do with the Academy deciding to screen the doc on Sunday, 10.7, at 2:30 pm (which will be followed by a q & a with Reeves). But I suspect they’re related. Wouldn’t you?

The Academy listing says that Side by Side is about “filmmakers discussing the pros and cons of digital ‘film.'” Not really. The film very simply but intelligently explains how and why the industry has changed over from film to digital over the last 14 years or so. The disappearance of celluloid and the dominance of digital is the most earth-shaking and to some extent traumatic change that Hollywood has undergone since the advent of sound, , and it would benefit everybody to sink into this history and understand it as fully as possible.

Side by Side tells an important tale. This plus the fact that it’s very intelligently assembled means it ought to be a Best Feature Documentary nominee.

I can feel a mousey indie attitude, a lowballness, a lack of thunder and swagger coming out of Indomina‘s pre-release campaign for Leos Carax‘s Holy Motors (10.17 in NYC). This is one of 2012’s great films, the L’Age d’Or of our time, a landmark madhouse flick. It can’t just be another indie sparkler that opens and closes and goes straight to VOD and Netflix…please. Attention must be paid. Trumpets must be sounded.

Holy Motors is so much bolder and more inventive than Argo or Silver Linings Playbook or Life of Pi it makes me sick to think of the likely disparity in terms of reception and box-office. Les Miserables may wind up as the most popular broad-consensus Best Picture winner of 2012, but Holy Motors is an unhinged free-for-all for the ages.

You should have been in the Grand Lumiere when I saw it during Cannes Film Festival, and to be among a crowd clapping and cheering on their feet when it ended. This. trust me, is what Holy Motors deserved. It doesn’t deserve to just open in a small theatre or two like a church mouse and then just dribble away and end up on VOD, and Netflix.

From my 5.23.12 review:

“I got out of the noon showing of Leos Carax’s Holy Motors about 100 minutes ago…holy moley! Holy Paris, holy Trip City, holy nocturne, holy inferno, holy freedom, holy holy, roly poly, put on the wackazoid. Holy white stretch limo. Holy wigs and fake beards and long nails and spirit gum. And holy Denis Lavant, Eva Mendez, Kylie Minogue and Michel Piccoli! Dali/Bunuel/Lynch/Carax live large. Welcome to Holy Nuttervile in the best, most spirit-releasing sense of that term.

“It’s basically a dreamscape movie about a possibly wealthy guy named Oscar (Lavant) whose job it is to tool around Paris in a big white limo and pretend to be other people, complete with first-rate makeup and latex and wigs and you-name-it. It’s the inner life of a mad director (i.e., Carax) who’s letting his imagination run wild.

“Who pays Oscar or why he would be rich doing this kind of thing, or why he goes home to a small white condo and has two chimpanzees for children instead of the two or three human kids he waves goodbye to in the beginning…forget all that. This movie is about playtime. Anything can, will and does happen, and reality has nothing to do with it. And yet it feels grounded in the stuff. It’s ‘loony’ but believable. And very handsomely shot.

“If only an American filmmaker was this mad, this imaginative, this unchained, this willing to leap. I wonder if any American has it in him or her to create something like this. If he or she did, Americans would probably say ‘what the fuck?’ and stay away in droves. It’s in the realm but well beyond anything David Lynch has ever done.”

Jim Lehrer‘s response to Lawrence ODonnell‘s idea of a real, free-swinging debate was a surprise, O’Donnell says. When he called Lehrer and explained the idea, “There was a long silence at the end of the phone. I was sure he was searching for a polite way of saying that ‘this is absolutely ridiculous, that would never happen, that’s such a Hollywood idea.’ But he said, ‘I’ve been sitting up there, waiting for that to happen for years.'”

I haven’t seen the final version of the Vertigo Bluray, which will be part of the Hitchcock Masterpiece Bluray Collection (10.30). But I’m told that James Stewart‘s suit, which was an aubergine-tinted brown in the DCP I saw in late August, is still sort of eggplant colored. I hope that the original earth brown is restored, but if it isn’t…mon Dieu! To think that several movie generations to come have been condemned to accept Peter Schade and Mike Daruty‘s aubergine revisionism!

Thanks and cheers to Mike Frenden for delivering the Vertigo: Aubergine poster in record time.

I still say there’s something vaguely offensive in a Mitt Romney-ish way about a western costing $200-million plus. Nikki O’Finke is mentioning $215 million but the Lone Ranger Wiki page says $260 million. (Is that a typo?) Three years ago this was an Indian spirituality werewolf movie, but that was shelved in favor of….trains!

HE correspondent Lewis Beale has noted the atmospheric production-design similarities to Sergio Leone‘s Once Upon A Time in the West.

So despite a recent admission by Argo director Ben Affleck that the masquerade caper that resulted in seven U.S. Embassy workers escaping from Tehran in 1980 was basically a Canadian job with CIA assistance rather than a CIA + Hollywood job, a slight majority of MCN’s Gurus of Gold currently believes it’s the most likely Best Picture winner. Sure, fine, whatever. It’s early yet.

“The big movers are Silver Linings Playbook and Life of Pi,” some MCN-er (probably David Poland) writes, but where would Life of Pi be without the glowing, levitational support of EW‘s Anthony Breznican and Anne Thompson? Don’t they understand that Pi is Hugo, and if it doesn’t light a big brushfire at the box-office it has nowhere to go but down?

Poland has Lincoln as his #1 expectational, but I don’t think it’s going pan out for Lincoln. I just don’t. A little man is telling me this. I’m not saying Lou Lumenick‘s Guido Bazin is to be trusted, but you can’t ignore him entirely and after hearing Guido’s complaint about Steven Spielberg‘s film being a tad boring…naah, forget him entirely. He’s just some Jersey Shore oaf, a lowlife who eats pizza for lunch and dinner. Eff this guy, toss him out. But Spielberg is over — the ending of War of the Worlds proved that. This plus that overbearing John Williams score sounds like a hurdle, hence my lack of faith.

At the end of the day it’s going to be Les Miserables vs. Argo vs. Silver Linings Playbook vs. Zero Dark Thirty vs. Amour. The post-Toronto pushback crowd (Sasha Stone, Kris Tapley, etc.) are going to bring whatever anti-Playbook talk they can to the table, and that will spread around to some extent and probably weaken it unless Academy members go as apeshit as the crowds in Toronto did. I suspect that Amour, superb as it is within its own spare, brutally honest scheme, is going to depress too many people to be a strong Best Picture contender. So it’ll really be about Les Miserables vs. Argo vs. Zero Dark Thirty, and I think it feels likely at this point that Les Miz will win in the end. Yes, another Oscar for Tom Hooper.

I’m so many hours behind Vulture‘s Jack Black-trashes-Seth MacFarlane thing (posted at 9:15 am by Katie Van Syckle) that I’m almost embarassed to excerpt it now.

Van Syckle: “What do you think of Seth MacFarlane hosting the Oscars?”

Black: “Where did I see him? I saw him on Saturday Night Live. I thought he was serviceable. It might get tiring if he keeps on doing the voices from Family Guy. He might give that a rest. But I think he has legit comedy chops. The way you asked that question seems to suggest you are not a fan of his.”

Van Syckle: “No, I was just trying to ask it provocatively.”

Black: “Well, I should be against him. I should say he is going to fuck it up because he made fun of me one time on his show, and it made me really mad.”

Van Syckle: “On what show? Where did he make fun of you?

Black: “I don’t remember exactly, but it was basically pigeonholing who I am as saying that I am just a guy that relies on being really loud.”

Van Syckle: “But this film proves otherwise, right?”

Black: “Yeah, fuck him. I still haven’t seen the fuzzy-bear movie. Have you?”

Honestly? This puts Black’s Best Actor campaign on the map. It ups his visibility and makes him an urgent, necessary inclusion. Jack Black for Best Actor! Seriously! It takes balls of steel to dismiss a just-hired, officially approved Oscar host. This is why Black is cool. Plus he gives a great performance in Bernie. Watch the screener.

John Schlesinger‘s Sunday Bloody Sunday (Criterion Bluray, 10.23) is one of the saddest, most natural-seeming, most satisfyingly worked-through adult relationship movies ever made. It arrived in 1971, at the beginning of that great ’70s streak that everyone looks back upon now with such fondness and lament.

The chances of such a film being made today in this country or the UK even — first-rate actors, sublime screenplay, unsentimental, strewn with subtle human truths — are almost nil. The culture has changed, the business models aren’t there…it’s shattering when you think about it. Okay, a film like this could be made, but where are the recent adult-level dramas that work as well?

Sunday is “an almost perfect realization of Penelope Gilliatt‘s original screenplay, which is, I think, just about the best original screenplay since Eric Rohmer‘s Claire’s Knee,” wrote N.Y. Times critic Vincent Canby. “Gilliatt…has the extraordinary ability to create intelligent characters who don’t sound like mouthpieces, to capture those looks and sounds of the surface of things that suggest the universes just beneath, and to write dialogue that is simultaneously rueful and funny, and as spontaneous as love itself.”

I love the moment at the very end when Peter Finch, playing a gay Jewish doctor who’s in love with young male sculptor (Murray Head) who is also openly seeing Glenda Jackson‘s 30ish divorcee, breaks the fourth wall and speaks directly to the camera.

“When you’re at school and you want to quit, people say ‘You’re going to hate it out in the world.’ Well, I didn’t believe them and I was right. When I was a kid, I couldn’t wait to be grown up, and they said ‘Childhood is the best time of your life.’ Well, it wasn’t. And now, I want his company and they say, ‘What’s half a loaf? You’re well shot of him’; and I say ‘I know that…but I miss him, that’s all’ and they say ‘He never made you happy’ and I say ‘But I am happy, apart from missing him.

“All my life, I’ve been looking for somebody courageous, resourceful. He’s not it…but something. We were something.”

The Sunday Bloody Sunday Bluray (presented in a 1.66 to 1 aspect ratio, which is no doubt making 1.85 aspect ratio fascists seethe with rage the world over) has been reviewed by DVD Beaver and Bluray.com. Those sites always get first looksees. I’ve been told I’ll eventually receive a review copy. I certainly hope so. I really love this film. I consider its re-emergence to be one of the major cinematic events of 2012. Truly.

NYFF Memories from Film Society of Lincoln Center on Vimeo.

The Rolling Stones were no raunchier or hornier or more insolent or sullen and/or more inclined to experiment with exotic weeds or chemicals than the Beatles or the Kinks or any other British band in the early to mid ’60s. They were just bluesier mostly. More honky tonk. Who said “women should be obscene and not heard”? None of the Stones.

Crossfire Hurricane will debut on HBO on November 15th.

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There’s nothing wrong with Indiewire‘s Peter Knegt running an article about the perceived strengths and demerits of Ang Lee‘s Life of Pi. But calling it “The Case For And Against The Front-Runner Status of Life of Pi” is like reading a piece in The New Republic that begins with an acknowledgement that Mitt Romney‘s election as U.S. President of November 6th is a distinct possibility. On what planet?

At best Life of Pi is the Hugo of 2012, and perhaps a bit less than that. It’s probably destined to be nominated a Best Picture nomination, okay, and maybe Best Adapted Screenplay…possibly. But calm down. Strictly tech awards.

“It’s stolen the buzz from Silver Linings Playbook, Argo and The Master” = it opened the New York Film Festival four nights ago and made a big splash in our minds, and then we all went to the after-party at the Harvard Club…whoo-hoo!”

This new Killing Them Softly one-sheet is not just effective marketing but a great piece of commercial art. (Who’s responsible? Weinstein in-house or an agency?) It tells the viewer that Andrew Dominik‘s melodrama has a head on its shoulder, that it’s more about serious content than popcorn, and is some kind of political metaphor crime flick with style to burn. Sight unseen (save for those of us who saw it in Cannes) it ups the prestige factor. Part hair-on-the-walls, part Jackson Pollock.

“Surprisingly, Andrew Dominik‘s Killing Them Softly isn’t your father’s tough-talkin’ George V. Higgins gritty crime pic,” I wrote on 5.22 from Cannes. “Well, it is but it persistently and rather curiously pushes concurrent political commentary about the ’08 financial collapse, Obama, hope, cynicism, ruthlessness and American greed.

“So this isn’t The Friends of Eddie Coyle, mon ami, but a Metaphor Movie. The political newscast and Obama-speech clips are interwoven a bit more persistently than is necessary. But the ending of Killing Me Softly, no question, hits it right slam on the head. I chuckled. I left the theatre with a grin.

“The plot is basically about Brad Pitt‘s Jackie Cogan, a hard-as-nails hitman, being hired to rub out a few guys involved in the robbing of a Boston poker game, as well as an unlucky rackets guy (Ray Liotta) who didn’t really do anything but tough shit — he’s on the list regardless. And yet the first 25% to 30% of the film is Pitt-less, focusing on the perps and their grubby, slip-shod realm.

“Cogan, a down-to-business, cut-the-shit assassin, is about doing the job, period. Rationality, efficiency, no personal issues or baggage — an exemplar, in a sense, of ‘clean living,’ which is what Dominik, during the just-finished press conference and somewhat flippantly, said the film is partly espousing.

“Above all Cogan is no believer in community and equality and Barack Obama’s high-falutin’ talk about sharing and ‘we’re all in this together.’ Eff that.

“Killing Them Softly, then, is a fairly novel thing — an ‘Obama’s rhetoric is full of shit’ crime movie. Okay, not Obama’s per se, but his inspirational come-together theme of the ’08 campaign (a clip from his acceptance speech in Chicago is used at the beginning and end) or the generic uplift rhetoric of ‘America the beautiful.’ Pull the wool off, take the needle out, wake up to what America is.

“Most of Softly, like any good crime pic, is about character, dialogue, minutae, this and that manner of slimeball scumbag, rain, sweat, snack, bottles of beer, guns and old cars (i.e., ratty old buckets, classic muscle cars, ’80s gas guzzlers). Nobody in Killing Me Softly ever heard of a Prius.

“Pitt delivers a solid, snarly performance as the bearded, leather-jacketed Cogan. But running a close second is Scoot McNairy as a scuzzy thief who’s out of his depth. He does more than just scuzz around and suck in cigarette smoke. He exudes fear and anguish along the usual cocky irreverence required of any bottom-tier criminal. He should and will be seen again, and often.

“Other stands performances come from Richard Jenkins, Vincent Curatola and the Australian Ben Mendelsohn, acting with his native accent, as the sweatiest and gunkiest no-account junkie west of the Pecos.

“Given a choice between an unfettered, down-to-basics George V. Higgins crime drama and what Softly‘s double-track variation is, I’m mostly pleased with the latter. We all know the about the lure of rugged, tangy, straight-punch crime films, which much of Softly is. We’ve been there many, many times. So why not a crime film that goes for something else on top of the usual-usual? Ladies and gents, it’s okay with me.”