Jeffrey Wells

Former Time staffer and James Cameron biographer Rebecca Keegan and recently departed Entertainment Weekly writer/blogger Nicole Sperling are now official L.A. Times entertainment reporters and Oscar season pulse-takers. The idea is to fill the spaces left by the semi-departed Tom O’Neil (who recently reclaimed Gold Derby) and Pete Hammond (now with Deadline).

Two professional white guys who recently saw Tyler Perry‘s For Colored Girls hold differing opinions. One says “there’s no way this movie is getting a Best Picture nomination…there are two or three really good performances but Perry just didn’t succeed at translating the play into a good film.” The other claims “it’s the real deal — maybe too conceptually out there for safe, old, mainstream white Academy tastes, but the performances range from good (Janet Jackson, Loretta Devine) to great (Phylicia Rashad, Thandie Newton) to pretty much masterful (Kimberly Elise, Macy Gray).”

I’m not so sure about the opinion of viewer #2 as he calls himself a “Perry fanboy” and says that the Colored Girls helmer “is one of the most important directors working today, and not just because of his underrated films.” Choke, gag, spit….what? Holy dogshit, he actually did say that. Tie me up and tie me down and splatter a chocolate milkshake all over my face, neck and hair as I scream and struggle to free myself.

So I went back to viewer #1 and said, “Are you sure? I mean, do you think others might share the other guy’s reaction?” Listen, don’t worry about it, he replied. For Colored Girls “is not a Best Picture. It has solid performances across the board, but Perry isn’t a good director and the best parts of the movie are the monologues that come straight from the play. He obviously wanted to do something like Precious but the material just isn’t as strong and it feels like a filmed play rather than a movie.”

Over the last three-plus decades I’ve felt soothed and stirred by the performances of French actress Nathalie Baye, and particularly by her angelic pixie smile. I’ve also succumbed many times to the curious way her little-bird vibe has manifested into erotic intrigue. So I was delighted to lunch with her today at a tres elegant restaurant inside the Helmsley Park Lane on Central Park South. I’m a rabbit running late and way behind the clock, so I’ll pass along the particulars tomorrow.

Nathalie Baye at Garden Cafe inside Helmsley Park Lane hotel — Friday, 10.15, 1:25 pm.

Baye is here to kick off a Film Society of Lincoln Center/uniFrance career tribute that begins tonight and runs through 10.21. My favorite performance? I have three actually. Her stranger on a train in Bertrand Blier‘s Notre Histoire, her Cesar-winning performance in Le Petit Lieutenant, and her costarring role in Blier’s Beau Pere. The first two are being shown as part of the series.

Marshall Fine has really gone over the falls in a barrel — he likes Conviction and is panning Olivier Assayas‘ Carlos. But before responding, let’s carefully examine his reasoning.

Fine’s objection to Carlos “is that in presenting a terrorist as an action hero, it glorifies terrorism as a legitimate path of political action. Would people be singing the praises of this film if it was equally well-made, just as thrilling and exciting — but was the story of Mohamed Atta? A terrorist is a terrorist. Murder is murder.

“A self-styled freedom fighter for the Palestinian cause (though he himself was neither of Semitic extraction nor Muslim), Carlos aligned himself with so-called internationalist liberation groups. Tied at first to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, he cut a swath with high-profile bombings, murders and, his magnum opus, the kidnapping of the OPEC oil ministers from a meeting in Vienna in 1975.

“But most of Carlos’ actions were either failures, went against his leaders’ orders or accomplished nothing, aside from killing innocent people and enlarging Carlos’ reputation. Yet Olivier Assayas‘ film, which casts Edgar Ramirez as the fierce, resolute Carlos, presents him as a militant revolutionary (who is also an opportunist).”

My e-mailed response to Fine: “First of all, you said yesterday that Conviction ‘could have Oscar potential.’ Do you know how Conviction could be given Oscar nominations? If Tony Goldwyn and his terrorist brothers take over the Academy building and threaten to kill Tom Sherak or else.

“Carlos makes clear what kind of history he had and what kind of guy he probably was — it spells it out in scene after scene after scene. As with most finer films, Carlos doesn’t instruct the audience about how to feel or think about him. It shows and dramatizes and allows them to piece it all together on their own.

“Everyone knows the world was on fire with revolutionary fervor in the late ’60s and early ’70s. A fuse had clearly been lit. It lasted into the mid to late ’70s for some. You’re saying Carlos the Jackal was in no way and at no time a legitimate political figure or thinker — he was simply an egotistical criminal thug who liked to admire himself naked in the mirror. I suspect on the other hand that he was a passionate believer in leftie causes and an egotistic asshole. You’re saying that Olivier Assayas knows he was just a thug and is being dishonest and even immoral by celebrating this guy as an action hero. But Carlos did do all this stuff shown in the film so the only way to go in your view is to keep his exploits hidden? To enforce a moratorium on any and all accounts of his life?

“I would submit that we’re all a mixture of elements — we all have nobility and spiritual aspiration and bravery in us and at the same time we like our Marlboros and our love of color and excitement and those smokin’ hot women, etc.

“On top of which leftie terrorists had a point in the ’60s and ’70s. Terror is a fact of history. It recurs and recurs. Terror is what angry activists resort to when they’ve been ignored or disenfranchised or dismissed or diminished by the political world.

“People have been making their political points with violence for a long, long time. The French resistance were terrorists during World War II, or they were no doubt regarded as common murderers by the German officers who were killed by them during the French occupation. The acts of rebellion against the British in the late 1700s by American freedom fighters were violent in nature — I’m sure they were derided as terrorists by the British. The ancient Hebrew resistance against the Roman occupiers made them common murderers in the eyes of the Roman authorities. The Algerians fighting for independence from the French were terrorists, surely, in the eyes of Charles DeGaulle.

“Were there any reprehensible scumbags among the Algerians or the French resistance or the American freedom fighters? Probably. The point is that all historians and filmmakers go for the color and the flair and the irony and the bang-bang-bang. And while Carlos was almost certainly the insensitive egotist and narcissist that Assayas portrays him as, I’m not persuaded that he wasn’t motivated by some sincerely-held political beliefs. At least in the beginning stages of his terrorist career.”

Fine’s response (received at 11:25 am): “The difference to me between resistance/freedom fighters and terrorists is that resistance fighters target the enemy to weaken their will to fight whether it was the American revolution or Algeria or the French (or some of the French) during WWII. Was there collateral damage? Of course — but civilians usually weren’t the target.

“But Carlos and bin Laden and their ilk use terror against innocent people who have no part of the struggle. That’s the definition of terror. It’s as simple as that. Even in the 70s, I saw a difference between the Weathermen and someone like Carlos.

“And while people like you and other critics might be able to understand and convey the nuance of Carlos’ character flaws, the average viewer will just see him as an action hero, no matter Assayas’ intent. He was a terrorist. I don’t care how smart or charismatic or interesting he was; at the end of the day, he was a terrorist. Period.

“Which brings me back to my question: If this were a movie about Mohamed Atta or Osama bin Laden — would you be as excited by it?”

Wells response: An Assayas movie about Atta or bin Laden? I could go for a film about Atta, sure. He was a monster, but I doubt if he saw himself in that light. It took discipline to learn how to fly and to carry out the attacks and a certain kind of sick and demented courage to kill himself (and hundreds of others) by flying a jet into a building, knowing he would be instantly crushed or splattered and/or roasted to death. So yes — it would be a chilling film to watch, but I’d be very interested in seeing it, especially if it was made by Assayas.

Vince Vaughn‘s 10.14 statement about the “gay electric cars” joke in that now-reedited trailer for Ron Howard‘s The Dilemma was a little too grim and butt-plugged. We wanted to hear that guy in The Wedding Crashers do a free-associating riff and lay it down in a kind of motor-mouth style. Instead Vaughn sounded constipated. He was saying what his people told him to say rather than what he really thinks.

“Let me add my voice of support to the people outraged by the bullying and persecution of people for their differences, whatever those differences may be,” Vaughn’s statement reads. “Comedy and joking about our differences breaks tension and brings us together. Drawing dividing lines over what we can and cannot joke about does exactly that — it divides us. Most importantly, where does it stop?”

Here’s what Vaughn should have said: “If you want to write funny and make people laugh, you have to speak in common everyday terms. Trust me, I know what I’m talking about…okay? And as much as I agree with the need to condemn hate speech in all its forms, beefy guys who slurp beers in Chicago bars during happy hour understood and laughed (or at least snickered) at that line. And those beefy guys are okay people in my book. Decent, bill-paying, fair-minded schlubby types who don’t want any kind of hate in their lives or in their heads.

“The line I spoke simply meant that electric cars aren’t studly or swaggery enough in a Clint Eastwood sort of way — that’s all. The line wasn’t putting down gay people or implying anything negative. It simply meant that the thinking and the symbolism behind electric cars them is a little bit guilty and constricted and regimented in a p.c. kind of way, however necessary and eco-friendly those cars happen to be, and that Steve McQueen would never drive one.

“That’s all it was. Just a joke that average people who are totally down with Anderson Cooper and are not homophobes happened to get. The Thought Police don’t like to hear this, but funny is what people laugh at.

“The other day Jeffrey Wells took some heat for saying there are two definitions of gay. The first simply means being homosexual, and the second means a cross between p.c. overdosing and lacking a certain guy-ness — a kind of sloppy apartment, softball-adept, baseball-hat wearing, hot-dog-eating, Jack Lord in Hawaii Five-O quality. The second definition of ‘gay’, Wells said, is reflective of a certain gelatinous, salad-eating metrosexual thing — a ‘watch your language and be respectful of others and watch your attitude’ attitude. We all know what he was talking about even if if some of you say that you don’t. Leave that shit outside when you’re talking to me…okay? No offense.

“Some said no to Wells. They said there is only one definition of gay and splitting the definitions is denigrating gays all the same. Okay, maybe so. We’re not assholes and we don’t want to imply or pass along harmful things so maybe we’ll just cut the fucking line out of the film. But there’s something just a teeny bit Soviet about what I’ve been hearing.

“Can I be honest? Can I just say it? Fuck it — LexG said it better than I can: ‘Going green is gay, energy-efficient vehicles are gay, and sandals are incredibly gay. And saying that isn’t on par with dragging Brandon Teena into a cornfield, and does not even remotely in any microscopic way contribute to actual homophobia or hate speech.’ But we’ll probably lose the line anyway because we don’t want to be seen as dicks, and I’m sure we can all rest easy that because a two-second snippet has been cut from the trailer and — this is Ron and Brian’s call — the film itself.”

Somewhere around the two-minute mark this starts to get hilarious.

Yesterday Movieline‘s Stu Van Airsdale posted a Best Picture Oscar chart. The leading ten, he says, are (starting from the top) The Social Network, The King’s Speech, Black Swan,127 Hours, True Grit, The Kids Are All Right, Inception, Toy Story 3, The Fighter and For Colored Girls.

Look — I thought I explained a while back that Tyler Perry is too mediocre a filmmaker for anyone to even imagine that he might get lucky with For Colored Girls on the strength of it being based on a respected mid ’70s B’way play. He’s a niche director who’s made a lot of money, but his movies make people like me groan. The odds of For Colored Girls turning out even half-decently are not very high. People need to stop dreaming about this film.

And enough with putting FCG on these lists because Perry is the only African-American director in the pack. If FCG becomes a miracle turnaround, great. But no counting the eggs before they’re hatched, and no quotas.

Once the general community comes to its senses about Perry’s film, they need to rally around Blue Valentine. Really, truly. The Best Picture roster needs at least one super-passionate, go-for-broke love story. Plus Blue Valentine fills the slot for the too-cool-for-school John Cassevetes “little movie” category.

Other Alternates: Secretariat is too square and conservative, and it won’t be making enough money to elbow its way in. Mike Leigh‘s Another Year could easily make the grade. The Way Back hasn’t been seen by those who couldn’t afford Telluride. Made in Dagenham is a relatively decent, well-acted film about women getting the wages they deserve in a 1968 Ford auto plant, but don’t get your hopes up.

Why would Brooks Barnes run a recent N.Y. Times story about HBO’s forthcoming Phil Spector biopic with Al Pacino without mentioning the obvious inspiration? I’m speaking, of course, about Vikram Jayanti‘s The Agony and the Ecstasy of Phil Spector, which opened at Manhattan’s Film Forum last June and received lots of publicity and praise during a brief run.

Pacino and screenwriter David Mamet and producer Barry Levinson can say they just decided to make a movie about Spector out of the blue because they know all about his murder case and love his music and so on, but how many people are going to believe them? Spector has been in the slammer for over a year (since May 2009) and had been more or less forgotten until Jayanti’s doc put him back into the conversation three months ago.

The decent thing would have been for Pacino/Mamet/Levinson to give a nod to Jayanti in the article and also toss him a fee for providing the inspiration. Barnes, at least, should have asked the questions or mentioned the doc or something.

Next Wednesday I finally get to see Andrew Jarecki‘s All Good Things, a bad-marriage-leads-to-murder drama “inspired” by the history of rich-guy Robert Durst (Ryan Gosling) and the probably-foul-play-related disappearance of his wife Kathie (Kirsten Dunst) in 1982. My interest is based solely on my admiration for Jarecki’s Capturing The Friedmans, the 2004 doc that was also about creepy weird stuff inside the home of a New York-area family.

All Good Things was originally skedded to open via the Weinstein Co. in the summer of ’09. It didn’t happen and the film changed hands. Magnolia will open it in Manhattan on 12.3.10 “with national expansion to follow.”

Under some protest I saw The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest at last weekend’s Hamptons Film festival, and the same thought I had while watching The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo returned. Noomi Rapace‘s shark-eye performance as Lisbeth Salander is a bit of a drag. It’s the easiest thing in the world to be impassive and show no emotion, and that’s all she does in both films. She gets all frozen and still and blank-faced, and holds onto this like a gila monster.

I’m mentioning this because a 10.14 Entertainment Weekly/Popwatch piece by Keith Staskiewicz mentions that Rapace has made the Hollywood rounds and is reportedly close to signing onto The Last Voyage of Demeter, a Dracula flick, on top of already-bagged roles in Sherlock Holmes 2 and Mission: Impossible 4. I get the part about attracting female audiences because of the Girl movies, but there’s absolutely nothing happening inside or behind her eyes. She’s a punk mannequin poseur.

As I wrote in a 9.30 piece called “Betty Ann Brockovich“, Tony Goldwyn‘s Conviction (Fox Searchlight, 10.15) is on the rote and humdrum side. It’s one of those come-from-behind stories about a working class woman (Hilary Swank) with a fairly demanding life who achieves the seemingly impossible task of….zzzzzzz. Sorry. Where I was I?

I love how Marshall Fine tries to turn it all around and give Conviction points for being plain and unpretentious and using “straightforward storytelling.”

“There’s no equivocation here — you know who you’re supposed to be rooting for right from the beginning. And the movie tells the story from start to finish, without pausing to show off the director’s stylistic chops at the expense of the film. Linear plots – what a concept!

“Yet there currently is an arm of film criticism that disdains exactly that: movies that tell a story from start to finish, about characters who are human, identifiable and even (perhaps especially) likable. You can throw a stone at any press screening in Manhattan (or any of a number of urban centers) and hit more than one critic for whom that description is their idea of a movie that is stodgy, old-fashioned and not worth their time.”

Fine goes too far, however, when he calls Conviction “an old-fashioned underdog drama in the best sense of the term, the kind of crowd-pleaser that The Blind Side was last year.” It may be the same “kind” of film, but it isn’t as involving or well assembled or top-flighty as The Blind Side — not by a damn sight. Fine then concludes by saying Conviction “could have Oscar potential.” Oh, yeah?