Jeffrey Wells

“One of the subversive conceits of No Country for Old Men is that for all the experience and skill” tucked under the belt of Tommy Lee Jones‘ Sherill Bell, “he is more of a passive character than an active one, functioning as a kind of Greek chorus who comments on and contextualizes the action rather than being at the heart of it.” Thank you, Kenneth Turan, for specifically agreeing with HE on this point.

Today’s east coast and midwest attendance figures for No Country for Old Men are in, and it’s looking very strong. Joel and Ethan Coen‘s masterpiece is playing in 28 situations with a minimum expectation of $25,000 a print, although the Miramax release could end up with a per-screen average above $30 thousand, which will translate to $700,000 for the weekend.

Red Carpet District‘s Kris Tapley believes that The Great Debaters, Juno, The Kite Runner and Once may have an Academy edge this year because their feel-good currents are more instinctually appealing than the rampant downerism of Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, In the Valley of Elah, Into the Wild, Margot at the Wedding, Michael Clayton, No Country for Old Men, Beowulf, There Will Be Blood, Things We Lost in the Fire, Zodiac, etc.

I can sympathize with anyone who felt bothered or brought down by Margot‘s relentless neuroticism, but the other dark-toned dramas listed by Tapley are — hello? — major uppers for anyone with any appreciation at all for the rudiments of bright, impassioned, sharply crafted filmmaking.

These efforts by Sean Penn, Sidney Lumet, Susanne Bier, David Fincher, Joel and Ethan Coen, Tony Gilroy, Paul Thomas Anderson, Robert Zemeckis and Paul Haggis are, before anything else, thrilling to sit through. They don’t bore, they don’t twaddle around, and they constantly engage, disturb and provoke. Even Margot at the Wedding has its virtues in this regard. Any industry person who doesn’t understand this needs to find a job making refrigerators or selling cars.

There is no such thing as a very good or great movie that brings people down, regardless of subject matter. “Sad” or “solemnly moving” is not the same thing as “depressing.” There is nothing lower in the movie-watching universe than the kind of person who sits through Au Hasard Balthazar and comes out saying “whoa, bummer…the donkey died.” The only truly depressing movie experience is when you’re watching something gross, tacky, incompetent or ineffective.

There’s one film I’ve seen that will, I believe, benefit from a general hunger out there for positivism and bliss vibes, and that’s Marc Forster‘s The Kite Runner. It’s the one Middle Eastern-based film that creates a sense of intimacy, kinship and bonding with Middle Eastern (i.e., Afghan) characters, which is something that I suspect most viewers want to experience, even if they don’t know it yet.

And I’m including in this equation the “leave us alone”-ers (i.e., the donkeys who are refusing to see any film tethered to the current Middle-East situation). Because The Kite Runner is a soother, not an agitator. It’s about guilt and looking for atonement, but it finally offers peace and comfort.

All the other “sand” movies are treating Middle-Easterners as threatening or faceless figures enmeshed in terrible tragedy, which makes them seem almost like banshees, swirling around our diminished sense of morality and taunting us for our wrongheadedness in going to Iraq in the first place. But The Kite Runner invites us to share universal feelings — guilt over past misdeeds, the longing to put things right — through the experience of an Afganistan-born writer (Khalid Abdalla), and therefore builds bridges by reminding us that we’re all brothers and sisters under the skin.

I saw The Kite Runner with a small group of Academy members four or five weeks ago, and I felt this glowing vibe in the room as the lights came up. I don’t happen to feel that The Kite Runner is as good a film as many of the dark dramas listed in the above item. I respect it and admire it as far as it goes, but it’s more of a 7.5 or an 8 out of 10. But feeling is believing, and that “glow” vibe often leads to good buzz and Oscar noms and all the rest of it.

The Valkyrie trailer is up and running on Yahoo. Tom Cruise talks like Tom Cruise — no European inflection or accent of any kind, and no attempt at even a mid-Atlantic accent in order to sound like he’s from the same rarified heritage as the British-accented Kenneth Branagh, Terrence Stamp, Bill Nighy, etc.

And that’s fine. Movie stars don’t do accents. If Kevin Costner had just spoken like his Bull Durham self in the Robin Hood film, he wouldn’t have been the butt of all those jokes. Nobody would have said anything. He would have been in the clear.

In response to yesterday’s Beowulf piece that said (a) Ratatouille‘s producer John Lasseter has been against the idea of Beowulf being classified as animated, and (b) there is no sensible explanation for anyone taking this position (i.e., the fact that it began with actors emoting in front of green screens is only one component in a very sophisticated visual scheme), Beowulf producer and co-screenwriter Roger Avary has sent along a statement. And as much as I defer to Roger’s authority, I can’t say I’m with him 100%.

“The thing about Beowulf is that it’s a hybrid,” he begins. “It’s both live action and animation, and we’re going to be seeing much more blurring between the mediums in the future. Any mixed signals that Lasseter may be receiving are a direct result of his and the Academy’s inability to categorize the direction in which Zemeckis is taking the form.

“There is certainly puppeteering involved in much of Beowulf, but the nuances of performance and motion of the characters entirely belong to the talent. When Hrothgar lifts his head, moves his eyes, and twitches his lips — it’s Anthony Hopkins making those choices.

“Lasseter, who is a master filmmaker, shouldn’t allow himself to feel threatened by the future. Perhaps he’s insecure and feels that his films can’t hold their own against live action films in a single, merged ‘Best Film’ category that is inclusive of all movies, regardless of the techniques involved in bringing their stories to life. As an Academy member, this is what I’d like to see.

“To segregate animation in this day and age to its own separate award category is to ghettoize it. But then, maybe that’s what Lasseter wants. Maybe he feels that a smaller field will increase his potential to reach a goal. We’re not intimidated like that.”

Avary is 100% correct in calling Beowulf a hybrid, but it is certainly much, much closer to animation that it is to realism. It presents a computer-composed magical realm (demons, monsters and flying dragons galore) from start to finish except for the live-actor performance element. The eye tells you over and over in a thousand different ways that Beowulf is presenting a lavishly reconstructed realm with today’s animation tools.

It is therefore not naturalism, and never will be. Which means it can never, ever be considered in the same light as Four Months, Three Weeks & 2 Days or No Country for Old Men or any other film that uses stark, unadorned, relatively untreated images to portray an aspect of life that most of recognize as the way it is out there when you go for groceries or drop by 24 Hour Fitness or pick up caulking at Home Depot — ghost-free, faun-free, dragon-free. Beowulf is animated, animated, animated.

Maybe the Academy should split the Best Animated Feature Oscar — giving one each year to hybird marvels like Beowulf that use human actors and one to old-school gems like Ratatouille? In the old days they used to hand out separate Best Cinematography Oscars — one for color, one for black-and-white. (The final black-and-white Oscar went to Haskell Wexler for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf in ’66.) Why not a Best Hybrid Animated Feature Oscar along with the traditional one? Where would be the harm?

It’s going to be neck-and-neck between the reportedly painful Fred Claus — 77, 37 and 14 — and American Gangster if it only drops 40% or so, which could happen given the good word-of-mouth. They’re both likely to reach the mid 20s, although Claus could be closer to $30 million depending on the kid turnout. Lions for Lambs — 69, 28 and 8 — is getting most of its support from the over 30 crowd. It will be lucky to reach $10 million.

“One year from now…”

Lions for Lambs director and costar Robert Redford, who’s lived in Utah since the early ’60s, has told Washington Times reporter Kelly Jane Torrance that Republican Presidential hopeful Mitt Romney‘s campaign personality is “plastic.” I would used the term “folksy grotesque,” but sometimes understatement works better.

Robert Redford; Mitt Romney

Utah Mormons “are very adept at not being fazed and speaking fluently and gracefully,” Redford says in the piece. “Why? Every single male who’s a Mormon goes on a mission for two years when they’re 19 or 20, so they learn how to deflect blows and stay on message. No wonder Utah is the place that all these Republican senators go. It’s perfect. So when you see Mitt Romney, he’s already been practicing how to deflect blows and stay on message. But it’s plastic.”

It’s starting to be a common view that the qualities that help a candidate win the Democratic presidential nomination are the same qualities that don’t necessarily play in Redville in the general election. After Kerry lost in ’04 I told a friend that the next Democratic candidate is going to have to “bubba up” to win. Today the stats seem to suggest that Barack Obama, who reportedly only has about 25% of likely Democratic primary-voter support, does better with the conservatives than Hillary Clinton probably will in the big election next fall. The Republicans are wetting themselves over the prospect of attacking Clinton starting in the spring.

“Among Democrats, Hillary Rodham Clinton‘s formidable standing — 50% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents are supporting her — is unshaken despite escalating criticism by her rivals and disappointing reviews of her performance at last week’s debate,” says an 11.8 USA Today story by Susan Page.

“But she has significant vulnerabilities,” Page writes. “Her unfavorable rating, 45%, is a dozen points higher than that of any other contender.”

Another 11.8 USA Today piece, this one by Jill Lawrence, reports that “more than eight in 10 Republicans and more than half the married men in a new USA TODAY/Gallup Poll say they definitely wouldn’t vote for Hillary Rodham Clinton for president.”

A friend of Pixar animation chief John Lasseter has written to say Lasseter has no axe to grind against Beowulf, and that Beowulf director Robert Zemeckis is “on the record having said that Beowulf was not animation…anyone can be mislead by the mixed signals from that camp.”

He also claims that “a former Sony exec called to express shock that the academy said it was animation, as he’d worked there when the company developed it, he’s seen it, and can’t believe it is animation, which means frame-by-frame technology, which includes puppets, stop motion, etc.”

“Puppets” and “stop-motion” were animation or special effects tools that were first used in the 1920s by Merian C. Cooper and Lewis O’Brien, and later in the 1950s by Ray Harryhausen. “Frame by frame” harkens back to the days of hand-pointed animation cells created by the Disney guys for Bambi and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Due respect, but these are antiquated terms. The digitally animated realities of 2007 cinema exists in a different realm. It is no country for old men.

I’ve been told by two good sources that Lasseter has been against the idea of Beowulf being classified as animated, and this “friend” hasn’t disputed this. And there is no sensible explanation for Zemeckis saying it’s not animated. It’s looney of him to take this position. I’ve seen the film and it’s not live action…please. The fact that it began with actors emoting in front of green screens is only one component in a very sophisticated visual scheme.

Politico.com’s Jeffrey Ressner and Ben Smith reported last night that California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has “spoken” to opposing sides in the WGA strike situation and “has had staff members reach out to both sides, as well as to the federal mediator trying to get them to hammer out a deal about future residuals and other issues.”

Ressner-Smith also repeated a Deadline Hollywod Daily report that “an e-mail [has] made the rounds intimating that an ‘ex-president'” — Bill Clinton? Jimmy Carter? — “has offered to serve as a buffer between the two sides.”