Jeffrey Wells

Weather.com says it’s 71 degrees in New York right now (i.e., 10 am). That’s a lie. It feels like the Guatemalan lowlands — humid, sticky air — in the rainy season. And I’ve left my umbrella at home. Last night the E train wasn’t running again, the L train crawled along as usual, and I waited 15 or 16 minutes for the G train a little after 11 pm. There’s no air to speak of on the platforms, and more than a few Brooklyn stops offer a faint aroma of urine to the weary traveller.

It goes without saying this is what most of us are looking for in our lives — weeds growing through cracked sidewalks, sporadic rainshowers, sticky air, crack dens, interminable late-night waiting on subway platforms and the smell of piss.

This morning I was walking Joey, my son’s dog, around the intersection of Hart Street and Tompkins Avenue. It’s as if somebody walked around with a huge bag of paper-product garbage — empty coffee cups, fast-food wrappers, newspaper shreds, used toilet paper — are just threw it around until every square yard was littered. What kind of people live like this? I’ve been to Europe and Africa and Mexico and in every corner of this country, and this is easily the scuzziest neighborhood I’ve ever seen or smelled.

Last night I was walking by a group of young guys on a stoop — it was around 12:30 am — and they were all eyeballing me and the camera around my neck, etc. I was thinking “they’re the lions and I’m the wildebeest, and they’re trying to detect if I’m old or weak enough to be taken down.”

I’m moving to a new crib if I can on Sunday or Monday. I’ve had it with Bed-Stuy. And maybe, just maybe, New York can deliver on some traditional fall weather. I remember what late September used to feel like in the tristate area. You could wear sweaters in the evening. Now it’s Panama City.

Living in the cheaper areas of New York City isn’t really “living” — it’s making do as best you can, getting along, surviving, toughing it out. With occasional piles of dogshit on the sidewalk.

And yet today I’ll be attending a luncheon on east 58th Street, thrown by the Hamptons Film Festival and Frank P.R. And then i’ll attend a screening of Tahrir at the Walter Reade theatre at 3:15 pm. And maybe just for fun I’ll catch an 8:30 pm showing of Thief (i.e., part of the Tuesday Weld festival) at the same venue. So it’s not all bad.

Four months after the Led Zeppelin-scored Girl With The Dagon Tattoo teaser broke in early June, the first longish, plot-indicating, dialogue-prominent trailer is up. Three minutes and 45 seconds. Rooney Mara performs with a slight Swedish accent; Daniel Craig (who, by the way, attended last night’s ides of March screening at MOMA) with his natural British accent. No more “feed-bad movie of Christmas” tagline.

Moneyball director Bennett Miller in 8th floor conference room at Sony headquarters — Wednesday, 9.21, 4:45 pm. We talked for roughly 35 minutes. I’ll run the piece tomorrow.

I decided lat night that Mychael Danna’s Moneyball score is a major reason why the film works as well as it does. It understands exactly what the emotional spirit moments are all about.

Yellow peril.

Read more

Just to shake things up and/or keep the fans off-balance, Liam Neeson has done a movie that may — I say “may” — play above and beyond the level of a typical post-Taken Neeson paycheck venture. And director-cowriter Joe Carnahan, having all but devalued his once respectable brand with Smokin’ Aces and The A Team, is trying his hand with a rugged survival-in-the-wilderness story.

The Grey (Open Road, 1.27.12) is about a bunch of guys stranded in Alaska after a plane crash, and trying like hell not to become wolf food. I don’t know how many guys are in the group, but if you’ve seen The Edge you know there’s a kind of whammy-chart predictability with this sort of thing. The formula says that Neeson will be the last man standing at the finale, un-eaten and unbowed.

I don’t want to see any CG wolves in this thing. By this I mean CG wolves that grab you by the shoulders and shout, “This is a CG wolf!”…okay?

I’ll be catching the second half of Martin Scorsese‘s George Harrison: Living in the Material World at a New York Film Festival press screening in a little while. And then I have a Bennett Miller interview at 2:30 pm. I’ll have a break from 3:30 to 6:30 pm before attending the MOMA screening of The Ides of March followed by an after-dinner. So no more filing until the late afternoon.

In the meantime I’ll be looking forward to Sasha Stone‘s Moneyball piece, as she saw it last night and tweeted a very positive reaction. Read Robert Willonsky‘s Village Voice review (“It really happened, it’s really corny, and it’s really great“) and a view by The Observer‘s Rex Reed (“A subtle, elegant and altogether triumphant film about a subject I thought I was tired of, told with an artistry and freshness that is positively thrilling“).

If I had to predict right now, I’d list my Best Picture Oscar favorites in this order: Moneyball, The Descendants, War Horse (who knows?), The Help, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (ditto), Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (ditto) and possibly Midnight in Paris.

I’m not talking about personal favorites, mind. I’m doing a Dave Karger thing here, predicting what the Academy will sanctify. Which I hate doing because it gives me indigestion.

The likeliest Best Director nominees are Bennett Miller (Moneyball), Alexander Payne (The Descendants), Steven Spielberg (War Horse), Tomas Alfredson (Tinker, Tailor, etc. — the kneejerk British kiss-ass factor among Academy members) and David Fincher (Dragon Tattoo — payback for last year’s Social Network loss to Tom Hooper).

Best Actor picks are, in this order, Brad Pitt (Moneyball), George Clooney (The Descendants), Gary Oldman (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy), Woody Harrelson (Rampart), Michael Fassbender (Shame, Dangerous Method) and possibly Leonardo DiCaprio (J. Edgar).

Best Actress toppers include Meryl Streep (The Iron Lady), Charlize Theron (Young Adult), Glenn Close (Albert Nobbs), Rooney Mara (Girl With Dragon Tattoo).

Best Supporting Actor: Christoper Plummer (Beginners) and Jonah Hill (Moneyball)…who else?

Best Supporting Actress: Janet McTeer (Albert Nobbs), Judy Greer (The Descendants), Jennifer Ehle and/or Kate Winslet](Contagion)

I’ve been saying for years that Steven Spielberg will be out of his depth with the Lincoln movie, which he’ll soon begin directing in the Richmond area. He’s basically a Tintin/Raiders/E.T./Catch Me if You Can/Amistad/Robopocalypse type of guy, and he knows that we know this. And leopards don’t change their spots.

But at least this forthcoming Civil War drama have Daniel Day Lewis‘s performance as Abraham Lincoln, which we all know will be some kind of thrilling-exceptional-historic. It can’t not be.

Spielberg has told the Orlando Sentinel‘s Roger Moore that “the movie will be purposely coming out after next year’s election” — i.e., sometime in December 2012 — because he doesn’t “want it to become political fodder.”

What is he talking about? What’s wrong with noting historical-political parallels between the past and the present? How is that a negative? If Paul Thomas Anderson or Oliver Stone or David Fincher were directing Lincoln, would any of them say they don’t want anyone pointing to political parallels?

This indicates Spielberg’s general discomfort with political subject matter. He’s always defaulted to sentiment and emotion. The man makes movies in order to swell hearts.

Never forget that Spielberg sent Tom Cruise‘s teenage son into a hopeless battlefield encounter with the Martians in War of the Worlds…and let him live. And then threw in Gene Barry and Ann Robinson, costars of the original War of the Worlds, as the kid’s grandparents.

“We’re basing [the film] on Doris Kearns Goodwin‘s book, ‘Team of Rivals,'” Spielberg said, “but we’re only focusing on the last four months of Abraham Lincoln‘s life.” In other words, it’s not really based on Goodwin’s book but about the closing chapter of the Civil War and the very end of Lincoln’s saga.

Six years ago Liam Neeson told me the film would span from Lincoln’s inauguration to assassination. Then it was reported that Tony Kushner ‘s script would begin with the Emancipation Proclamation and end with Lincoln’s death. Now it’s down to Lincoln’s final 120 days of life — December 1864 to April 1865.

Lincoln “is “not a battlefield movie,” Spielberg told Smith. “There are battles in it, and being in Virginia, we have access to those historic battlefields. It is really a movie about the great work Abraham Lincoln did in the last months of his life.”

Tomas Alfredson‘s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (Focus Features, 12.9) is one dense opaque stew. And so crisply realized. Wait…what does that mean, “crisply realized”? Crisp like a Saltine or Heinz cracker? I’d better start over and just call it simultaneously ambiguous and clean and masterful in the manner of a slowed-down pulse. It’s a film that you need to see at least twice — once to sit in your seat and go “aaahh, yes…so adult and complex and underemphasized” and a second time to pay even closer attention and tie up the loose ends.

It’s a furrowed-brow spy film, cautious and probing and undashing, submerged in a world of half-clues and telling looks and indications…London fog and brain matter and ’70s technology…it’s just atmospherically dead-on. And that’s certainly pleasurable in itself.

I don’t want to get into this too deeply because the film doesn’t open for another nine or ten weeks but I can at least say that Gary Oldman‘s performance as George Smiley has to be considered…no, trumpeted as Best Actor-worthy. I’ve read a couple of reviews that claim he’s not aping Alec Guinness‘s performance as Smiley in the 1979 British miniseries version. Well, he does seem to be doing that. To me, at least. Oldman barely moves in this thing, but oh, how he delivers! The man is an absolute pleasure just to watch…to simply regard. The stillness of him is sublime.

Oldman is doing the old minimalist two-step, of course, but in a more expressive way than, say, Glenn Close in Albert Nobbs. Her character is extremely cautious and guarded in order to hide her true identity. Oldman’s Smiley isn’t hiding himself in the slightest, but his manner is naturally circumspect and cerebral and analytical. As a matter of professional purpose and demeanor he’s chosen to be this way, and there’s something gassy about this from an audience perspective.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is cut from the same cloth as Martin Ritt‘s The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. The story is about treachery and betrayal and misdirection, but more profoundly about the political murk and tedium of British civil-service submission. A hunt for a traitor, for traces of memory. A movie about staffers and freelancers and gray hair, gray faces, Burberry overcoats, endless cigarettes and glasses of whiskey. I’ve read the John LeCarre book and seen the Guinness version so I was able to stay with the plot particulars and keep it more or less together in my head, but others….aah, let’s wait until December.

So it’s a fine Le Carre immersion but….how to put this? It feels hermetic. I somehow never got the sense that the boys of MI6 and MI5 are all that heavily connected to the government or to great power, or that they really are “on the front lines against the Soviets,” as Ciaran Hinds proclaims early on. It’s like their world is entirely cut off from everything else. Like the action is all taking place in a large asylum.

And yet it didn’t lose me for a second. LeCarre stories have always been my cup of tea. I love spook stuff. And I can’t stop humming over Oldman’s underplaying & immaculate restraint. What a jewel of a performance. And Tom Hardy as Ricky Tarr! I have to say that the finale felt a bit anticlimactic on some level. I have three or four other gripes, actually, but there’s plenty of time. This is such a fine and subtle film — a kind of pleasure cruise for adults who eat this shit up. It’s amazing that it was made for theatrical, but glad it was made. Have I said “Hail Oldman!”?

Thanks to Focus Features for allowing me to see Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy yesterday evening, and thus sparing me the cost and trouble of flying to London and all that. I was apparently the only one seeing it in Manhattan. The spy drama was also shown to others on the West Coast so yesterday was obviously the day. Thanks very much.

“From an awards-season perspective, Christopher Plummer has everything going for him,” Grantland‘s Mark Harris observes. “He has been chronically underrecognized by Academy voters — it’s still inexplicable to me that he wasn’t nominated for his brilliantly acidic portrayal of Mike Wallace in The Insider. And his second-billed (but really supporting) role in Beginners feels laboratory-designed for awards:

“Getting to play a stoic gay man who doesn’t come out until he’s 75 and then learns he’s dying of cancer is a little like bowling a strike after getting spotted nine pins, which makes the fact that Plummer’s portrayal is so understated and simple the true mark of his talent.”

Harris goes on to say that Plummer’s “chewy” supporting role coming up in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo as well as Barrymore, the one-man stage performance film that just played in Toronto, may present complications. No, they won’t. As I wrote a week ago, they’ll be strictly backup — i.e., momentum fuel — for Beginners.