Jeffrey Wells

I knew there was something, no offense, that I didn’t like about Robert Downey, Jr. And it wasn’t just those franchise films he’s been making since ’08 (Iron Man, Sherlock Holmes, Avengers) and those would-be tentpolers (like that Perry Mason project) he’s developing. I hate the Holmes brand and that whole corporate steampunk CG bandwagon asthetic, but people with no taste feel otherwise so what can I do?

In any event Downey has appeared in a pair of subversive comedies within the last three years, Tropic Thunder and Due Date, so it’s not like he’s entirely abandoned the indie-ish attitude and acting career he had as the costar of Zodiac, Good Night and Good Luck, Two Girls and a Guy, A Scanner Darkly and Natural Born Killers . He’s getting there, but he hasn’t gone full-sellout.

What bothers me is the vibe Downey has been putting out since the first Sherlock Holmes flick — the vibe of a slick salesman, a marketer, a corporate guy. Which fits in with those reports that he’s become a Republican. With all those Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows posters all over the place and memories still vivid of that feeling of being poisoned as I watched the first Holmes film, I started to wonder just who Downey is these days, deep down, and whether the corporate franchise thing is a phase or a keeper or what.

The basic story, as everyone knows, is that Downey went through a gradual metamorphosis after his long drug-abuse period (’96 to ’01) that had included arrests, prison, rehab and several relapses.

His big switchover to franchise movies has been more or less orchestrated by his producer-wife of six years, Susan Levin, an exec vp production at Silver Pictures (i.e., Joel Silver‘s long-established production company on the Warner Bros. lot). In November 2009 he told Esquire‘s Scott Raab that he credits Susan with helping him kick substance abuse for good. “There’s no understanding for me of the bigger picture in real time in a hands-on way without her,” he said. “Because it was the perfect, perfect, perfect matching of personalities and gifts.” Robert and Susan are reportedly expecting their first child in February 2012.

In 2009 Downey conveyed his politically rightward drift to N.Y. Times reporter David Carr. “I have a really interesting political point of view, and it’s not always something I say too loud at dinner tables here, but you can’t go from a $2,000-a-night suite at La Mirage to a penitentiary and really understand it and come out a liberal. You can’t. I wouldn’t wish that experience on anyone else, but it was very, very, very educational for me and has informed my proclivities and politics ever since.”

So yesterday I talked to a guy who knew Downey way back when. I asked if Downey is a totally converted Republican these days, right down to the bone marrow, or is he just playing the part and making spirit-numbing CG flicks because he wants to get rich? Here’s part of what he said:

“Downey has always been for sale,” he says. “It’s just that nobody was buying before. Right now I don’t think he has any sense of value outside of the products he’s creating and selling. He’s become a merchandiser and a marketer rather than an actor. There were no high bidders before. That’s why he did whatever was there.

“And then in ’03 he meets Susan Levin, who works for Joel Silver, and she says if you want to make money, you have to clean up and stay straight, which he needed to do, and I’ll get you into Joel Silver’s world. And Downey took the deal. He knows who Silver is and what those Sherlock Holmes films are about, and he decided to take that deal when he married Levin and let her steer him into projects.”

This is a second-hand story but this guy says that sometime after The Soloist tanked, Susan Downey was overheard saying “that’s the last art film I let Robert do.”

“His values are pure Republican values.” the guy says. “He’s a serious materialist. He loves the great clothes, the beautiful house, the cool cars. He’s a ‘protect the rich’ guy. Why should the rich have to pay for this or that? The people who have it should keep it, and the people who don’t have it shouldn’t complain. And the one he looks up to the most and has been his philosophical guide is Mel Gibson. The Gibson thing is key. Mel Gibson over the years, and who he is and that way of looking at the world.”

As Roger Friedman reported in 2003, Downey was able to return to movies only after Gibson, who’d been a close friend to Downey since they starred together in Air America (’90), paid Downey’s insurance bond for his appearance in The Singing Detective (’03).

“Downey has looked up to Gibson as an older brother and authority figure and mentor for a long time…Mel said this, Mel said that…all through the ’90s and the aughts,” the guy says. “They shared [the late] Ed Limato as an agent. I ask you, how can you be that close to Mel Gibson for 20 years and not share some of his values? Of all the people Downey was close to Mel was by far the most politically inclined and vocal…he was a kind of guru.

“So they’ve been close all through the last 20 years despite Air America having been a failure, both commercially and critically. Usually people sort of run away from people with whom they’ve made a bomb with, but not here.

“Downey is in the factory business now, the manufacturing business. It’s a different business than being an actor. He’s in the cartoon business. He’s being successful in cartoons. And the way it works is, you keep doing those movies until people get sick of you and those movies are not available anymore. Bruce Willis did these movies in the ’90s until it ran out for him. He kept doing them when he could do them. This is what Downey is doing now. As long as there are offers, and the calendar has slots to fill, you just say ‘what is the deal?’ and ‘what are the dates?'”

Sony’s exec vp publicity Andre Caraco has issued a letter to critics that admonishes New Yorker critic David Denby (and by extension his editors) for ignoring Sony’s strict review embargo policy concerning David Fincher‘s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo — i.e., no reviews before 12.13. Denby’s review, says Caraco, will appear tomorrow morning, on 12.5, which Caraco calls “completely unacceptable.”

The thrust of Caraco’s letter is a warning to critics that Denby’s “violation” in no way constitutes a green light for everyone to break ranks and post their own reviews tomorrow morning, or before 12.13. The cat is not out of the bag, security is still being maintained, etc.

Caraco states that “we have been speaking directly with The New Yorker about this matter and expect to take measures to ensure this kind of violation does not occur again.” What does that mean? A Sony blacklisting of Denby?

If there are no further violations Denby’s review, be it positive or negative or mezzo-mezzo, will set the tone of the conversation about Fincher’s film for the next week.

Dragon Tattoo was screened last Monday for the New York Film Critics Circle and the National Board of Review and to a select group of Los Angeles-based Fincher fanboys. It was then shown to a small group of critics and columnists (including myself) last Friday morning at Sony’s L.A. lot.

“By allowing critics to see films early, at different times, embargo dates level the playing field and enable reviews to run within the films’ primary release window, when audiences are most interested,” Caraco states. “As a matter of principle, the New Yorker‘s breach violates a trust and undermines a system designed to help journalists do their job and serve their readers.”

This is a curious event in that Denby and fellow New Yorker critic Anthony Lane are almost always bringing up the rear, review-wise. As far as I’m aware the New Yorker refuses to publish in fluid digital time, sticking to a policy of refreshing material only when the new print edition appears on Monday morning. And so Lane and Denby’s pieces rarely appear concurrent with a film’s release — they usually follow a film’s opening by three or five days and sometimes as long as a week or so later.

When was the last time a New Yorker review appeared a full week ahead of an embargo date and over two weeks ahead of a film’s nation release? I’m assuming this has happened on occasion over the last two or three decades, but I haven’t done the research. I’m tempted to write that the last time a New Yorker review caused this much of a stir was when Pauline Kael‘s early-bird piece on Robert Altman‘s Nashville (“The funniest epic vision of America ever to reach the screen”) came out many weeks if not months ahead of its opening.

In my book Shame director Steve McQueen has been inspected and identified to a fare-thee-well by New Yorker critic Anthony Lane. I would go so far as to say that for readers of Lane’s 12.5 review, which first appeared six days ago, the McQueen mystique is no more. He will continue to create and make films and whatnot, but from this point on he has no clothes.

“McQueen, a Brit who attended art schools and worked in visual installation before turning to feature films, was lauded for Hunger (2008), and rightly so, although even that movie, about an I.R.A. hunger-striker” — played by Shame‘s Michael Fassbender — “was imperilled by the coolness of its own gaze. The wall of a jail cell, smeared with excrement as an act of protest, was filmed with such compositional care that it became, in effect, a work of abstract art, allowing us to forget what it actually was: human waste, applied with human rage, and surely unbearable to the human nose.

“McQueen could hardly be hipper, yet he remains, to an extent, an old-fashioned aesthete, drawn to extreme behavior in his characters not because of any trials of spirit that they undergo but because he is challenging himself to unleash the wildest material that he, wielding his camera, can then possess and tame.

“The result is pure and pitiless, and, in the case of Shame, oddly disapproving. The film has an NC-17 rating, and it will prompt the customary gasps of outrage, but no viewer, however prim, could be harsher on the uncontrollable Brandon than the director is. At no point is the philanderer permitted to look as if he might be enjoying himself, and Fassbender, who was, frankly, much sexier and more devilish in X-Men: First Class, is required to spend much of his time staring with blank intensity into the middle distance.

“Whether Brandon is ashamed, as the movie’s title proposes, is open to debate; he looks merely shattered to me, roped to his own runaway habits, and although he does have one discernible rush of self-loathing: cramming his carnal detritus into garbage sacks, all you can think is, How charmingly retro! A guy who still buys porno magazines!

“Later, in one tidal wave of a night, he comes on to a woman in a bar, gets hoofed in the face by her boyfriend, swings by a gay club for a brief encounter (any port in a storm), and then rounds off the evening with a nice warm threesome. His companions, in that climactic bout, are played by DeeDee Luxe and Calamity Chang, two names that made me happier than anything else in the film.

“No such joy for Brandon; while his body is enmeshed with theirs, his face is trapped in a desperate rictus, as if he were nearing the loudest sneeze of his life, and what McQueen treasures here is the sullen aftermath, with the drained lecher sitting and crying beside the rotting piers of a wharf. And that’s what happens to naughty little boys.”

Here’s hoping that Paddy Considine‘s Tyrannosaur — easily the most critically respected commercial dud of 2011, at least in the U.S. — receives some love tonight at the Moet British Independent Film Awards, which happens tonight at London’s Old Billingsgate. (Chris Dalrmple says the live stream will be on lovefilm.com) At the very least Tyranny‘s Olivia Colman needs to win for Best Actress…right?

Tyrannosaur is up for Best Film, Best Director (Considine), Best Debut Director, Best Actress (Colman), Best Actor (Peter Mullan), Best Supporting Actor (Eddie Marsan) and…is that it? I heard somewhere that it was nominated for seven. Whatever.

A good movie, said Howard Hawks, is one that has “three great scenes and no bad ones.” It shouldn’t be too much to ask that a Best Picture Oscar winner should live up to this, right? A day or two ago I asked the readership to answer how the current Best Picture candidates measure up to Hawks’ law. Nobody bit so I’m trying again.

(l to. r.) Bennett Miller, Howard Hawks, Alexander Payne.

Most of us know what “great scenes” are but I’ll define them anyway. Great scenes are ones that hit a solid truth note. They’re emotionally true in whatever way, or they deliver some bedrock, put-it-in-the-bank observation about life or human behavior or just the way things are. Great scenes sink in and touch bottom without any manipulation of any kind. They just deal the cards plain and straight, and when they’re over you always say to yourself, “Wow, that’s good…that’s how people are all right.”

It’s my sincere belief that they’re isn’t a single great scene in The Artist, but maybe I’m wrong. Perhaps someone can name one or two? Just don’t say the opening movie-premiere scene with Jean Dujardin‘s bowing and prancing around and grinning at the audience because that’s just amusing set-up and exposition. Okay, the dancing finale at the end is pretty good — it’s happy, sparkling — but it doesn’t exactly push a truth button.

The Descendants, on the other hand, has several great or near-great scenes. Shailene Woodley‘s Alexandra diving underwater to let her grief out. Sid the doofus (Nick Krause) telling Clooney’s Matt King about his good points and then mentioning what happened to a family member the previous November, and Clooney silently absorbing that without talking about it. Clooney and Woodley visiting the Kaua’i vacation home of Matthew Lillard and Judy Greer (i.e., Brian and Julie Speer). Robert Forster‘s cranky granddad chewing out Clooney for not providing better for his “loyal” wife. Clooney looking at the photos of his late relatives on the wall of a family compound. Julie visiting the hospital room and letting Clooney know that she knows. Clooney and the girls watching TV at the end. That’s seven — four more than necessary.

Moneyball has a few also. I’m not saying the ones I’ve listed are great-great but they’re at least half-great and some are better than that. Brad Pitt‘s Billy Bean having his “who are you?” chat with Jonah Hill‘s Peter Brand. The Billy-introduces-Peter-to-the-scouts scene in the conference room. All of the firing-of-players scenes, but especially Brand’s firing of first-baseman Carlos Pena. All confrontation scenes between Billy and Phillip Seymour Hoffman‘s Art Howe, but especially the one when Billy explains that he can’t start Pena. Billy’s daughter (Kerris Dorsey) asking him if he’s going to get fired, and his telling her “don’t go on the internet or read newspapers or talk to people.” The bitter argument scene between Billy and Grady Fuson (Ken Medlock). The “whaddaya havin’ fun for?” scene in the locker room. The phone-trading scene with Billy and Peter and the offscreen A’s owner. The Boston conversation between Billy and Red Sox owner John Henry (Arliss Howard). That’s nine. Subtract one or two and you’ve still got a surplus.

It’s too early to get into War Horse but I’ll admit that the middle section has two very good scenes — the attack-on-Aquaba horseback charge and the Paths of Glory infantry attack followed by Joey running through the chaos of battle scene. But these are spectacle and choreography scenes, for the most part. They don’t deliver any “bedrock truths” except that war sure is threatening with all the bullets and shrapnel flying through the air and war sure is scary and upsetting to an innocent horse.

“I am suspending my presidential campaign because of the continued distraction and hurt upon me and my family….the impact upon family, the impact upon you, my supporters…and the impact upon the ability to continue to raise the necessary funds to be competitive.”

“L’audace, encore de l’audace, tourjours de l’audace!” Did this become an oft-quoted French proverb because Georges Danton said it, or because Field Marshal Archibald Percival Wavell and General George Patton repeated it? I don’t know the origin of “Who dares, wins…who sweats, wins…who plans, wins” either. Nor do I have any idea who coined the phase “he who hesitates, masturbates.” But they’re all phrases to live by.

Who was the first to use the phrase “four o’clock in the morning courage”? The first time I read it was in Paul Theroux‘s The Mosquito Coast.

I guess there’s something to be said for Martin Scorsese‘s Hugo having only dropped 56% from last Friday compared to Arthur Christmas plummeting 64% and The Muppets nose-diving 77%. The lesser Hugo drop is related, I guess, to its playing in 1840 theatres compared to 3376 Arthur houses and 3440 Muppet situations. And is due to the fact, I suppose, that it’s a good 3D storybook film with a great ending.

Boxoffice.com‘s Phil Contrino says he’s thinking Hugo will make “around $50 million” at the end of the day, “but it could be less if Sherlock Holmes 2 and Alvin and the Chipmunks 3 take a much bigger chunk out of its audience. Unfortunately, opening during the holidays does not allow a film the luxury of finding its audience. There’s too much competition.”

In a certain sense this is how certain favored films in the current award season (you can guess which ones) make me feel. Not that I see myself in any sense as agitated or starved or crawling on the ground with exhaustion.

The recently arrived-upon view of several critics and columnists — including Vulture‘s Kyle Buchanan, CNN’s J.D. Cargill, Coming Soon‘s Ed Douglas, Movieline‘s Stu Van Airsdale, EW‘s Dave Karger, Deadline‘s Pete Hammond, In Contention‘s Guy Lodge, The Wrap‘s Steve Pond and Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson — is that The Artist is a more likely Best Picture winner than The Descendants.

On one level I understand. They’re saying that the Motion Picture Academy is very easily impressed and a cinch to win over with “entertainment.” They’re saying that a generally pleasing silver-screen bauble and a really cute yappy dog are a hard-to-beat combination. On another level I’m appalled. Even if I believed that The Artist is the strongest Best Picture candidate I wouldn’t predict it on the Gold Derby chart. I couldn’t and wouldn’t.

So many don’t seem to understand the basic prediction equation. Several “experts” saying that they think others will support film X is a way of saying that others should support film X because others are supporting it. The Gold Derby team is aware, surely, that most people are Zeligs at heart.

Comicbookmovie.com has run a quote from legendary comic-book writer Alan Moore (V for Vendetta, From Hell, Watchmen) about Frank Miller‘s notorious quotes about the Occupy movement.

“Well, Frank Miller is someone whose work I’ve barely looked at for the past twenty years,” Moore begins. “I thought the Sin City stuff was unreconstructed misogyny, 300 appeared to be wildly ahistoric, homophobic and just completely misguided. I think that there has probably been a rather unpleasant sensibility apparent in Frank Miller’s work for quite a long time. Since I don’t have anything to do with the comics industry, I don’t have anything to do with the people in it.

“I heard about the latest outpourings regarding the Occupy movement. It’s about what I’d expect from him. It’s always seemed to me that the majority of the comics field, if you had to place them politically, you’d have to say center-right. That would be as far towards the liberal end of the spectrum as they would go. I’ve never been in any way, I don’t even know if I’m centre-left. I’ve been outspoken about that since the beginning of my career. So yes I think it would be fair to say that me and Frank Miller have diametrically opposing views upon all sorts of things, but certainly upon the Occupy movement.

“As far as I can see, the Occupy movement is just ordinary people reclaiming rights which should always have been theirs. I can’t think of any reason why as a population we should be expected to stand by and see a gross reduction in the living standards of ourselves and our kids, possibly for generations, when the people who have got us into this have been rewarded for it. They’ve certainly not been punished in any way because they’re too big to fail.

“I think that the Occupy movement is, in one sense, the public saying that they should be the ones to decide who’s too big to fail. It’s a completely justified howl of moral outrage and it seems to be handled in a very intelligent, non-violent way, which is probably another reason why Frank Miller would be less than pleased with it. I’m sure if it had been a bunch of young, sociopathic vigilantes with Batman make-up on their faces, he’d be more in favor of it. We would definitely have to agree to differ on that one.”

“I am best friends with George [Lucas] and I’m very obedient to the stories that he writes,” War Horse director Steven Spielberg says in a new Entertainment Weekly article. “I’ll fight things I don’t believe in but ultimately if George wants to bring interdimensional beings into Crystal Skull, I will do the best job I possible can to acquit George’s idea and make him proud.”

He creatively defers to a man who’s been renowned since the late ’80s as one of the worst, most hackneyed story conceptualists in movie history? The guy who created Jar-Jar Binks and built a large portion of the first Star Wars prequel around Jake Lloyd, and who later cast Hayden Christensen as Annakin Skywalker? That’s it. Game over.

Plus: Nonsensicalist Tim Queeney reports that “according to a late night phone call from a friend who is high in the Lincoln production team, Spielberg plans to ‘go with his gut’ and make some changes to the historical story of Abraham Lincoln, played in the film by Daniel Day Lewis. Most people probably won’t even notice. Here’s a quick rundown:

“Mary Todd Lincoln: Spielberg has reportedly found the Mary Todd role too ‘downbeat.’ The Todd Lincoln character was dropped and Charlize Theron has been brought in to play Swedish singer Jenny Lind, who falls in love with Lincoln in the movie. The film will show Lind and Lincoln meeting on the ramparts of Ft. Sumter as it is bombarded by Confederate forces at the start of the Civil War in 1861. Lincoln will save Lind by swinging from the fort’s flagpole onto a waiting Union Navy aircraft carrier. Tom Cruise has a uncredited cameo as a fighter pilot who covers Lincoln and Lind’s escape by napalming Rebel batteries at Ft. Moultrie.

“Siege of Petersburg: Spielberg feels a siege with ‘a lot of extras standing around in trenches’ is not cinematic so he has re-imagined the siege as a sunset railroad chase in which Gen. U.S. Grant (played by Sam Worthington) pursues Gen. Robert E. Lee (Chris Hemsworth) in an attempt to win back a magic whiskey bottle, with both generals on handcars crossing rickety trestles and transiting tunnels with lots of steam and improbable light sources.

“Ford’s Theater: Test audiences found the Ford’s Theater assassination ‘a bit dry’ and didn’t like John Wilkes Booth’s use of Latin, so Spielberg shot a new ending with a duel and a lavish musical number. First, Lincoln and Booth square off in a lengthy bare-chested sword fight across the rooftops and bridges of Washington. After Lincoln dispatches Booth, Lincoln and Lind ride chariots down Fifth Avenue in New York City during a ticker tape parade, singing Neil Young‘s ‘Southern Man’ and ending at the foot of the Statue of Liberty as Tom Cruise and a squadron of F/A-18 Super Hornets does a low-level flyover.”