Jeffrey Wells

SPOILER-FREE: I’m sorry if I sound overly effusive these days, but David O. Russell‘s The Fighter is a real wow — a robust and feisty drama about a tough climb to a championship and success by the real-life, now-retired welterweight boxer Mickey Ward (Mark Wahlberg), and about his no b.s., slightly zaftig girlfriend (Amy Adams) and his drug-addicted, serious-jerkoff older brother (Christian Bale). I could put it all kinds of ways but the simple fact is that The Fighter is alive, really alive.

It’s a rugged little blue-collar thing that (I know this sounds like a cliche) pulses with grit and real feeling and emotional immediacy. It’s loose and crafty with a hurried, shot-on-the-fly quality. Which makes it feel appropriately “small” and local-feeling. To watch it is to be in it.

Hollywood has made good films about Massachusetts blue-collar people, but for me they felt “acted” (like The Town and, no offense, The Departed). But Russell and Wahlberg, shooting almost entirely in Lowell on a fast 33-day schedule, have made some kind of real-deal thing here. And the cinematography by Hoyte van Hoytema (Let The Right One In) is brilliant — it feels close and true as it bobs and weaves and circles like a boxer And the soundtrack is full of great music, ’60s and ’70s pop tracks and lots of newer-sounding, heavy-percussion stuff, and it all just seems perfect for the task at hand. In this sense The Fighter is almost like Hal Ashby‘s Coming Home with one right-sounding cut after another playing like a juke box in a diner.

Ten minutes into last night’s screening and I was saying, “Wait…this is good…this is good…this feels right.” The acting is great from every player, especially from Bale (he’s got the big showy part) but also Wahlberg, Adams (who’s finally gotten rid off that goody two-shoes thing she’s been saddled with from her performances in Junebug and Enchanted) and fierce Melissa Leo as the headstrong mother of Walhlberg, Bale and five or six of the gruntiest-looking family of blue-collar sisters you’ve ever seen in your life, let alone a film — they all look like they’ve been eating chili dogs and McDonald’s fries and knocking back shots of Jack Daniels since they were ten. And George Ward and several others are also on it. They all say what they mean and mean what they say, dammit. Nobody’s playin’ fuckin’ games here.

I know I seem to be having kittens over every other film I see these days, but distributors always hold the good stuff back until the end of the year and then wham…a deluge. So it’s almost been one enthusiasm binge after another, and I’ve been thinking it might be fun to dislike or even hate something again, or at least be slightly bored with it. Because it’s very tiring and repetitive to express love and admiration all the time. It can certainly feel that way.

This was my train of thought as I sat down last night to watch The Fighter. I’d read all the exciting notices from Tuesday night’s AFIFest screening in Los Angeles, of course, but I was still ready to possibly go in the direction of Variety‘s Peter Debruge and say “not bad here and there but basically naaah.” Or to parrot Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson when she said that “if all goes right for The Fighter (i.e., reviews/box office/critics and guild prizes), it’s possible” it could become one of the ten Best Picture nominees.

Thompson meant that the film faces political hurdles due to Russell’s shouter rep, but the word “possible” sounded unenthusiastic in a general sense. People would certainly look at her very oddly if she were to write that The Social Network or The King’s Speech are “possible” contenders, after all. She knows what she’s saying.

Well, let me explain something. The Fighter is not a “possible” Best Picture nominee. It’s a lock for it, and if this doesn’t happen something is really and emphatically wrong with the Academy membership because I swear this movie has the same tone of authenticity that On The Waterfront did when it first came out in ’54. Or more so, now that I think of it.

You know you’re seeing performances and a story worked on by several screenwriters and all that, but it feels as honest and as true as this sort of thing can be. Wahlberg has been trying to get this film made for four-plus years, but it feels as if came out in one big rush, and credit for that tone and that atmosphere obviously goes to Russell.

And Debruge, who has called The Fighter “confused” and “kind of a mess” is, no offense…oh, I don’t know what his particular blockage may or may not be but all I can say is that none are so blind as those who will not see. He just can’t get it for whatever reason and that’s fine, but eff him besides. I really couldn’t understand how a movie about a boxer could possibly add something to the table that I hadn’t seen before in 20 or 30 other boxing movies, but The Fighter‘s focus on family feuds and crack addiction and delusion and the necessity of facing brutal truths and looking people you love in the eye and telling them they’re history unless they clean up their act…this is what real families do, and why this movie feels like it’s doing it plain and straight every step of the way.

SPOILER-FREE: Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone has completely creamed and melted and gone purry like a cat over Darren Aronofsky‘s Black Swan and Natalie Portman‘s lead performance. Plus she thinks it won’t have a problem with women voters any more than it will with men voters. “If it’s too extreme for them they won’t vote for it,” she writes, “but what a great fucking movie.”

I’d like to buy Nicolas Cage in a historical context, but I can’t. He can only portray present-day wackazoids. I realize that Cage has been making films hand over fist in order to pull himself out of a financial abyss, but there needs to be limits. The second I saw Ron Perlman , I went, “Okay, I know what this thing is.”

Season of the Witch is obviously CG porn. The more they pile on the visual effects, the worse films like this seem. The landscapes in this trailer are somewhat less convincing than those in Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). Some look worse than those swirling sand-cyclone effects in The Mummy.

Those Gurus of Gold Zeligs who recently capitulated to alleged conventional wisdom that The King’s Speech will take the Best Picture Oscar may want to consider a just-posted Scott Feinberg column that offers three reasons why The Social Network will take it instead.

Reason #1, says Feinberg, is that the Academy “has demonstrated a clear preference, of late, for zeitgeist-capturing works (Crash, No Country for Old Men, The Hurt Locker, etc.) over the period-piece dramas that used to be their cup of tea, and The Social Network is clearly more timely/relevant to the world in which we live today than The King’s Speech.”

Reason #2 is that The Social Network “has performed extremely well at the box-office, registered strongly with moviegoers (and Oscar voters) in all demographics, and become an enduring part of our cultural discussion to an extent that I don’t believe The King’s Speech can match.

Reason #3, which Feinberg feels is the most significant, is that The Social Network “has something going for it that The King’s Speech does not — something that has proven to be a deciding factor in numerous other close best picture races: a big-name director, David Fincher, who is overdue-for-recognition from the Academy.”

I’m feeling Skyline-d, District 9-ed, 2012-ed and Monster-ed out right now. Tired, dusty, battle-fatigued, blitzkreiged, fagged and shagged with aching joints. And now another shaky-cam disaster/alien-invasion movie — Battle: Los Angeles — is set to land on 3.11.11. And then JJ Abrams‘ Super 8 arrives on 6.10.11. Wait…will Peter Berg‘s Battleship (due in 2012) involve aliens?

Does Battle: Los Angeles look good? Yeah. What’s my level of interest in seeing it on a scale of one to ten? About a seven, if that.

Battle: Los Angeles costars Aaron Eckhart, Michelle Rodriguez, Bridget Moynahan, Michael Pena, etc. I’ll get around to listing the others down the line. It would appear that 34 year-old director Jonathan Liebesman (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning is a very ambitious Spielberg-Abrams-Kosinky-Cameron wannabe eager-beaver tech-head….just what the corporations are looking for!

At the end of his 11.10 report about Tuesday’s AFIFest screening of The Fighter, Deadline‘s Pete Hammond wrote the following: “With The Fighter now finally unveiled for the masses and press screenings starting this week on both coasts, there are very few mysteries left in the season.

“Paramount’s other holiday entry, the Coen Brothers‘ True Grit (12.22), is still to be seen and just about the last that could provide fresh Oscar meat , at least in the major categories. Otherwise, the lineup is fairly clear with no surprises on the horizon — unless Yogi Bear (Dec 17) is better than anyone dreamed.”

The next day it hit me that Hammond had failed to mention the latest film from director James L. Brooks, whose unopened films were once presumed to be at least potentially award-worthy. And yet Hammond, who always hears what’s going on, didn’t mention How Do You Know (Sony, 12.17). I’m not suggesting this is any definitive indicator, but it feels like some kind of telling anecdote. There once was a time (i.e., pre-Spanglish) when such an omission would have been unthinkable.

With a little more than a month before the 12.17 release date, the buzz has gone south on Joseph Kosinki‘s TRON: Legacy. A second-hand source has seen the heavily-hyped sequel to the 1982 original, and claims it’s “a technical marvel, but uninvolving and remote despite Pixar’s attempts to infuse emotion into the father-and-son scene.”

“The primary source, obviously Pixar-friendly, feels that Team Lassiter (includingToy Story 3 screenwriter Michael Arndt, Incredibles director Brad Bird) “needed to be involved from the beginning, and not consulting after the fact.”

He also reminds that Disney “has decided against re-releasing the original 1982 film on Bluray for fear of alienating the younger audience out of fear they may dismiss it as a cheesy, kitschy movie.

“This obviously creates a problem as evidenced by the latest trailer, since the film is a direct sequel and knowledge of the backstory is necessary. Tracking is said to be disappointing at this stage, but there’s another month to go so here’s hoping.”

Kosinki, who was being called “the new Cameron” last summer, “has a bright future,” the guys feels, “so this may be regarded as his Alien 3 with better things yet to come.”

How bad can Bruce Robinson‘s The Rum Diary be? Who knows, but Anne Thompson‘s 9.27 Indiewire report about the long-delayed Johnny Depp period film based on the Hunter Thompson book, didn’t raise anyone’s hopes. She wrote that producer and Film District partner Graham King “hopes” that The Rum Diary “will go out through FilmDistrict next fall.”

In short, The Rum Diary is such a cool film that the distribution company, which is co-owned by the film’s primary producer, might decide to release it a year from now, give or take. Or not. Nobody’s sure just yet.

One way to hurry things up, according to the notoriously unreliable IMDB, is to grab a New York-to-Moscow flight on 3.30.11 in order to catch The Rum Diary‘s world premiere the following day — on Thursday, 3.31. The round-trip is only $650 and change, but the nonstop flights are roughly ten hours. The trip would be be tax-deductible, of course, and I’ve never been to Moscow, but would it be worth it?

In case you haven’t figured it out, a big reason why a bit more than half of the film critics have gone thumbs-down on Roger Michell‘s Morning Glory is because they see this above-average comedy as an endorsement of the dumb-down currents in the media and the culture that are making their jobs more and more unstable. Seriously — re-read some of the pans with this idea in mind and you’ll see what I mean.

(l. to r.) Rachel McAdams, Diane Keaton, Harrison Ford in Morning Glory.

Critics have obviously been jettisoned from newspapers over the last few years in much the same way that crusty older news guys like Harrison Ford‘s Mike Pomery, an old-school Dan Rather type, have been put out to pasture by TV networks. And so they’re hardly snickering at Pomery’s predicament. They’re saying, “Hey, that’s us!” They resent that Morning Glory presents Ford mainly as a grumpy, semi-alcoholic bear who doesn’t get it, and not as a semi-good guy who represents an in-depth news tradition that’s being slowly weakened or diminished.

And so they don’t see Roger Michell‘s film as a story about a plucky young TV morning-show producer, Rachel McAdam‘s Becky Fuller, trying to survive in a tough racket by pizazzing up a show called Daybreak with any stunt she can think of. They see a film that regards Becky as fairly cute and cool and they’re saying, “Wait…what?”

They feel that Morning Glory ought to condemn or at least frown upon Becky, as Broadcast News clearly condemned and frowned upon William Hurt‘s shallow news anchor Tom Grunick. And they feel that Morning Glory is basically embracing the modern media’s general tendency to embrace fluff over substance, tweets over news articles and Ben Lyons-type movie enthusiasts over critics with experience and taste with a background of serious study and decades of film-watching.

A review by the Christian Science Monitor‘s Peter Rainier spells out this attitude fairly clearly.

“Morning Glory is about how Rachel pulls Daybreak out of the basement by, you guessed it, dumbing it down ever further into imbecility,” he writes. “This might be an acceptable premise for a comedy except for one thing: The filmmakers endorse the imbecility. Morning Glory is a tribute to low standards and high ratings – just the sort of thing Hollywood can get firmly behind.

“I realize this movie is, essentially, cotton candy, but it has an acrid aftertaste. Becky, a human whirligig epoxied to her BlackBerry, is portrayed as a vivacious sprite. Her anything-for-ratings ambition is supposed to be, well, cute.

“Her big move comes when she pairs the morning show’s longtime, long-suffering host Colleen Peck (Diane Keaton) with curmudgeonly blowhard Mike Pomeroy (Ford), the network’s resident hard-news legend who has been sitting out his contract after being shifted out of his evening anchor spot. These cohosts despise each other. While Colleen is willing to don a fat suit and tussle on air with a sumo wrestler, the grave-faced Mike, who has won every journalism award known to man, won’t even do one of those obligatory cooking-class segments. (He won’t even utter the word ‘fluffy.’)

“Instead of standing up for the type of journalism that Mike represents, director Roger Michell and screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna (The Devil Wears Prada) denigrate him as a scowly relic from a distant era. The film’s payoff arrives on cue when, grudgingly, inevitably, he comes around.

“Keaton at least looks as if she’s having fun as the alternately daffy and hard-edged former Miss Arizona who’s seen it all. Ford, however, keeps himself in a constant state of humorless high dudgeon, and his Scrooge routine gets very old very fast. He acts like someone who never told a joke – or heard one.

“Broadcast News, of course, is the template for this movie, but a bit of “Network” might have been welcome, too. The dismal dumbing-down that Paddy Chayefsky’s Network predicted for the future of TV has been more than fulfilled, but, whereas Chayefsky was mad as hell about it, the folks behind Morning Glory are just fine with it.

“Is it fair to judge a dippy romantic comedy by its ideas – or lack of them? I think it is, if, as is the case here, the ideas, such as they are, are central to the comedy. Morning Glory isn’t targeting the dumbing down of TV news. It’s pandering to the audience that craves the dumbness.”