Spoutblog‘s John Lichman on the rants, insights, blurtings and whatever from a certain columnist. Thanks. I guess.

Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neil is reporting specific backstage poop on yesterday’s National Society of Film Critics voting that resulted in Ari Folman ‘s Waltz With Bashir taking the Best Picture prize. The voting also included a vote for Eva — WALL*E’s robot girlfriend — as Best Actress. (What member of this distinguished body cast this vote? Fess up!)

WALL*E led on the first ballot, O’Neil writes, but then lost to Bashir because of the huge drop-off of voters once the proxies were disqualified from voting on the second round.

Lots of other flip-flops happened between first and second ballots, he says. The Dark Knight‘s Heath Ledger led on the first Best Supporting Actor ballot but lost on the second to Happy Go Lucky‘s Eddie Marsan. Vicky Cristina Barcelona‘s Penelope Cruz led on the first ballot for Best Supporting Actress, but lost to Edge of Heaven‘s Hanna Schygulla who originally came in fourth place during the first round of voting.

In the first and final Best Actor ballot Milk‘s Sean Penn got 87 votes, The Wrestler‘s Mickey Rourke got 40 and Gran Torino‘s Clint Eastwood got 38.

Nicholas Ray‘s Bigger Than Life, a social critique of the bland and suffocating 1950s, is at the Film Forum until Thursday. It’s not on DVD in this country so I should probably set aside the time. “A superbly shot critique of the suffocating conformity, repression and materialism at the heart of middle-class life,” a DVD Beaver critic exclaims, “Bigger Than Life is the American Beauty of 50s cinema.

“Shooting in Cinemascope, Ray brilliantly uses bold colors, expressionistic shadows, and the precise framing of domestic architecture (particularly of the staircase in the family home), to convey both atmosphere and meaning. Ed’s transformation involves moments of darkly ironic humor, not least his speech at a parents’ evening, where he derides the children as “moral midgets”. ‘Childhood is a congenital disease,’ he declares, ‘the task of education is to cure it.’

“The drugs in the film serve as a catalyst for the emergence of Ed’s hitherto repressed frustrations and anxieties. Yet although Bigger Than Life can be read metaphorically as the playing out of murderous desires, it retains an emotional force because of the intensity by which James Mason conveys his character’s profound torment.”

“I heard someone on the radio once say that they were tired of the prejudice aimed at the overweight, Ricky Gervais has recently said/written. “They said something like ‘you’re not allowed to make fun of gay people, so why are you allowed to make fun of fat people? It’s the same thing.’

“But it’s not the same thing, is it? Gay people are born that way. They didn’t work at becoming gay. Fat people became fat because they would rather be that way than stop eating so much. They had to eat and eat to get fat. Then, when they were fat they had to keep up the eating to stay fat. For gayness to be the same as fatness, gay people would have to start off straight but then ween themselves onto cock. Soon they’re noshing all day getting gayer and gayer. They’ve had more than enough cock…they’re full…they’re just sucking for the sake of it. Now they’re overgay, and frowned upon by people who can have the occasional cock but not over-indulge.

“When a doctor tells me that that’s how you become gay, I’ll stop making jokes about fat people.”

I’ve had The Visitor’s Hiam Abbass in the Oscar Balloon’s Best Supporting Actress category for months, and now the New York Observer‘s Chris Rosen has gone on record in agreement. Finally…somebody! I’m also with Rosen about two of the best underrated performances of ’08 having been given by Che‘s Demian Bichir (the guy who played Fidel Castro) and Santiago Cabrera (the smiling bearded cadre who explained the ventriloquist/”vanilla piss” remark). But of course, each and every performance in the Che films is exactly right.

A filmmaker friend wrote last night that a certain production company “will have an extra bedroom available for the nights of 1.19 through 1.21 departing the 22nd for $200 per night. The condo is not in town so a car or cabs will be necessary to get around.”

I replied as follows, just to mess with him: “The hottest, most energetic Sundance days are always the first four or five — in this instance 1.15 to 1.19, Thursday to Monday. (I always arrive a day before — 1.14 in this instance — to get myself all situated and set up.) The buyers, the buzz and the pulse are a memory by Tuesday. Who’d want to arrive on the 19th? A person looking to avoid excitement?”

I didn’t mention that I kind of half-like it when all the heat dies down. It becomes more about the films at that point, although, truth be told, the films that show for the first time on Tuesday (i.e., 1.20) to the end of the festival have basically been given the bum’s rush by festival programmers, and they know it…everyone knows it. Your film not showing within the first five days at Sundance isn’t exactly a kiss of death, but the symbolism is unmistakable. Yes, yes…there have been and will be exceptions, and thank heaven for that.

The Sundance situation has reversed and I’m now offering rather than looking. I’ve got a shared bedroom (two single beds, you get one) in a two-bedroom condo open for $125-something per night, on a seven-day basis starting Friday, 1.16. The condo has wi-fi, and sits high above (i.e., looks down upon) Park City’s Main Street. Hubba-hubba.

Ari Folman‘s Waltz With Bashir is a strikingly original, deeply affecting animated docudrama about war and morality and monsters within — easily one of the year’s finest. But I wonder if maybe…just maybe the National Society of Film Critics decided to give this Sony Classics release its 2008 Best Picture prize in part because of the awful echoes going on right now in Gaza.

God help those who are about to get caught in the crossfire between Hamas and the Israeli military over the next few days and weeks. Bashir is about Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in ’82, and particularly the slaughter of Palestinian civilians by Christian Phalangists at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. Think about it — how could the NSFC have not had Gaza on their minds?

The Bashir win also symbolizes the vague disquiet and even unhappiness that many feel about the leading Best Picture Oscar contenders. LAFCA, NYFCC and now the National Society of Film Critics have all said the same thing, i.e., “fuck the popularity contest, fuck crowd-pleasing, fuck everything except what we really and truly admire to the hilt.”

Milk‘s Sean Penn and Happy Go Lucky‘s Sally Hawkins won for Best Actor and Best Actress. And Happy Go Lucky ‘s Eddie Marsan (yay!) won for Best Supporting Actor, and Edge of Heaven‘s Hanny Schygulla won for Best Supporting Actress. HGL’s Mike Leigh won for Best Director and Best Screenplay. That’s four big honors for Happy Go Lucky.

Man on Wire (what else?) was named Best Non-Fiction Film.

In Three Days of the Condor, Robert Redford‘s Joseph Turner has forced Faye Dunaway‘s Kathy Hale to miss a New England skiing rendezvous with her boyfriend and lie to him in the bargain. Now that they’re saying goodbye, Turner wonders how it’ll all play out when she finally goes north. Turner. Your boyfriend…he’s a tough guy? Hale : He’s pretty tough. Turner: What will he say? When you tell him what happened? Hale: (sighs) Understand, probably. Turner: Wow…that is tough.

Hoboken’s Erie Lackawanna train terminal, used 33 years ago by director Sydney Pollack as backdrop setting for the farewell scene between Redford and Dunaway in Three Days of the Condor

“As Hollywood faces grim times, there’s a silver lining for 2009,” writes Variety columnist Anne Thompson. “If the studios, God forbid, are forced by the credit crunch to make fewer, less expensive films and spend their own money producing them (as the L.A. Times reports in this grim forecast written before the SAG strike looked less likely), they will take less risks, yes, but they’ll also pay more attention to making strong commercial films with a market niche. In short, they will make better films.”

I agree but in a slightly different way. Having tons of money to burn has never upped the quality of creativity for anyone or anything, and having less money always results in more discipline and a lot of honing, which tends to result in better work. Martin Scorsese had loads of dough to work with on Gangs of New York and look what happened. And he was working on a relative shoestring when he made The Last Temptation of Christ and look what happened.

I was looking for a clip of the last two or three minutes of Patton, which ends with George C. Scott describing the victory procession of an ancient conqueror and concluding with the following: “A slave stood behind the conqueror holding a golden crown and whispering in his ear a warning that all glory is fleeting .” Those last four words make me gulp every time I hear them.

As a dad, I think I understand a bit of what John Travolta is feeling about the sudden death of his 16 year-old son Jett. It goes a bit beyond that, actually, with my oldest son having the same name. Travolta’s Jett was born in ’92, four years after mine. Jett wrote me yesterday saying “there’s now one less Jett in the world…feels weird to see my name in an obit.” My sympathies all around. This is awful.