Jeffrey Wells

“Whatever Little Miss Sunshine is about, it isn’t about anything bad,” Oscarwatch.com’s Sasha Stone wrote yesterday morning, echoing Richard Corliss‘s just-posted views in Time. “It’s all good. It deals with the goodness of humanity underneath it all; it has an idealist’s view of people. It is the only one of the five [Best Picture nominees] that does.

“The country needs to vote for Little Miss Sunshine because to do anything else opens the door to the truth. We can’t handle the truth, not right now, not when we don’t really know what’s coming next.
“Like the psychiatrist who tells Alvy Singer in Annie Hall that “the universe won’t be expanding for billions of years yet, Alvy, so why don’t we enjoy ourselves while we’re here?”, films like Little Miss Sunshine, Crash, Million Dollar Baby and A Beautiful Mind affirm our need to believe that we are all honorable, good people. Moreover, [that] good people win even when they’re losing.”
And yet each of the above-listed films burrows into some pretty dark places. They may have presented positive portraits of their characters and worked with sanitized and/or tidied-up plots, but they don’t give the impression of shirking or sugar-coating life in its more subterranean realms. Family dysfunction, career failure, suicide, insanity, euthanasia, racism — hardly escapist-minded subject matter.

Armond White‘s N.Y. Press review of Becket is more than a little similar to an appraisal I wrote last year….odd. Easily the most single-minded Manhattan- maverick critic (at times almost peculiarly so), White is an absolute must-read because of his occasional grand-slams — reviews that pinpoint not only the artistic dimension but the agenda of certain films, like when he called Billy Elliott “a balletomane chickenhawk fantasy.”
“Ostensibly the story of King Henry II appointing his confident Thomas a’ Becket to be Archbishop of Canterbury and then reneging on his bequest — a decision that historically split England’s religious affiliation — Becket is mostly fascinating as a love story between two men,” he writes. “Jean Anoulih‘s stage play is strengthened by the conflict of worldly affection and spiritual devotion when Becket’s born-again allegiance to God takes precedent over his fealty to Henry. This movie version is deeper than anything the makers of Brokeback Mountain could ever conceive — or admit to.
“Reseeing Becket in light of the recent so-called breakthrough for gay film subjects makes one realize how advanced mainstream filmmaking used to be. Peter O’Toole‘s Henry and Richard Burton‘s Becket profess their regard for each other with bold openness and extravagant anguish. Precisely because this affection remains Becket’s subtext, it is never treated as a self-congratulatory end in itself. O’Toole and Burton are artistically free to fully vent their characters’ emotions.”
Director Peter Glenville “subtly encodes this historical epic with sexual intimations: Henry and Becket’s tandem escapades, phallic candles, bareback horseriding, etc. But he takes a dry approach to the complications of lost-love and how these legendary leaders deprived themselves — Becket through an excess of religious fervor, opposing the King’s edict out of personal arrogance; Henry through unchecked emotionalism and personal vengeance.
“This psychological depth gives Becket an edge over the other ’60s dramas about the Plantagenet rulers (A Man for All Seasons, The Lion in Winter, Anne of the Thousand Days) and puts it close to the sophistication of Lawrence of Arabia and, yes, My Own Private Idaho.”

Village Voice critic Ed Gonzalez pisses on Becket! Fine, permissible, whatever. The guy has chutzpah.

“Going into the Sundance Film Festival, word was not good,” writes Hollywood Reporter critic Kirk Honeycutt. “Coming out of the festival, you realize how little value this ‘word’ actually possesses. All that acquisition frenzy wasn’t because of the high altitude. Sundance audiences’ thunderous ovations for every movie are getting to be a joke, but in many cases they were deserved.”
And yet Honeycutt seems content to half-breeze through his own festival experience, resigned for the most part to providing cursory descriptions of the films he saw that, with a couple of exceptions, affected him in some kind of thoughtful, jolting, semi-arousing way. But no grappling or wrestling, no laying down of the Honeycutt law.
“If anything epitomizes Sundance 2007, it is the acknowledgment not just in the documentaries but also in the lightest of feature films that the world is in a bad place right now. After seeing a couple of documentaries about atrocities in one day, a festivalgoer said to me that he felt like spending the next day in bed. Yet he was very glad he saw them.”

“We are in another of those historical moments, with grim death gargling at you around every corner and people being slaughtered like sheep. Of course, Academy voters could heed the incendiary Zeitgeist and vote for Babel, a film about international chaos, or Letters from Iwo Jima, depicting the last days of a losing war. The Queen shows a head of state stubbornly resisting the popular will, and The Departed is a chic bloodbath.
“Or, surveying this bleak terrain, the Academy membership might turn to the one feel-good movie nominated for Best Picture. Voting for a comedy that celebrates life — eccentric but essentially loving family life √ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Ǩ¬ù would be an affirmation of what Hollywood has done since its Golden Age: try to make America forget what makes it gloomy, and bring it a little Sunshine.” — Time‘s Richard Corliss reading the post-Saggie tea leaves.
HE postscript: I’ve been asking myself for the last five or six minutes why Corliss (or his editor) has capitalized “zeitgeist.” Just as I know that sometime down the road, editors are going to stop capitalizing the words “internet” and “web.” Two or three years Wired magazine declared that capitalizing these two was inane/ludicrous/nonsensical….but once the east-coast editorial establishment decides on a stylistic affectation, there’s no getting them off it.

Heard this happened yesterday, couldn’t find the story, gave up: Marcheline Bertrand, 56 year-old former actress, producer (Trudell) and mother of Angelina Jolie, died Saturday of cancer at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. Sad, too soon, sorry.

And The Winner Is… blogmeister Scott Feinberg has written a very thoroughly thought-out, fairly persuasive explanation why Little Miss Sunshine is going to win the Best Picture Oscar. I love this little film but I’d personally rather see Babel or The Departed take it. Both are more exciting to watch and think about later.

“This year, producers and actors went for Little Miss Sunshine, directors liked The Departed, and the Globes went with Babel. So the Bagger can confidently say, with all the authority of his one year of experience, that The Win in best picture is up for grabs.
“If Little Miss were to sneak past the best the studios and their specialty divisions had to offer, it would be yet another message that the longshot is sometimes the best shot. Everything that was wrong about this film turned out to be the right. Too many cooks came up with something audiences loved and at least some factions of the Academy find compelling.” — from David Carr‘s riff about Sunday night’s SAG Awards and what that ceremony (possibly) foretells.

“Can we stop this before you go ahead any further? We can’t have this kind of language in this film, to this degree.” — Warner Bros. honcho Alan Horn to Departed producer Graham King, having gotten a very clear idea from early dailies that no brakes were being applied whatsoever on the use of salty street patois (“ya muthah fucked me,” etc.). (Quote passed along by King during Sunday’s “Movers & Shakers” panel at the Santa Barbara Film Festival.)

“You are not entitled,” Bill Condon tells N.Y. Times reporter Laura Holson about winning an Oscar, “an honor he won in 1999 for writing Gods and Monsters and for which his Chicago script was nominated,” she writes. Winning the fabled gold statuette “is a gift,” he adds. “That sense that you deserve it is wacky.”
“We were never going to win [the Best Picture Oscar], even if we were nominated,” Condon says, laughing. “The money we would have spent on the campaign, the insane amount of money we saved…people spend like drunken sailors, you know.” In Patton, George C. Scott says to an audience of soldiers, “I’d never give a hoot in hell for a man who lost and laughed.” I would. Condon’s attitude about the Dreamgirls shortfall is extremely classy and attractive. He’s one of the best people in this town; he’s coming from a very serene and confident place.

It may be too late and it may be a futile notion, but it’s time for all good people to rise up and band together in order to stop Eddie Murphy from winning the Best Supporting Actor Oscar. If anyone wants to launch a website to help amplify this feeling and (who knows?) maybe trigger a turnaround of opinion, I’ll contribute $100 bucks…seriously. He’s the one bad guy in the bunch who, I feel, really doesn’t deserve to win. Surely others feel this way?

I’ve seen that bored-indifferent, man-am-I-rich, leave-me-alone look on Murphy’s face too many times, and I’d be tickled if the Oscar camera could catch him scowling when Mark Wahlberg or Alan Arkin win instead. He may have the Oscar in the bag, but I keep hearing he’s not very well liked in the industry and that he’s regarded as a bit of an asshole. Plus he was too cool to show up for any one of those three swanky Dreamgirls press events that Terry Press threw last year. It’ll just take a little blogosphere surge to make it happen…maybe. Or maybe not.
I respect Murphy, and I certainly don’t hate him . I used to love him in the early to mid ’80s. I relished his spirited voice-acting in the two Shrek films, he was inspired in Bowfinger, and pretty funny in both Nutty Professor fims (especially the second one), but there’s that air of arrogance and impudence that rubs me the wrong way. Plus I can’t get over that run of truly awful big-studio films he made from the mid ’80s to the late ’90s.
Murphy needs to be leaned over a barrel for making Doctor Dolittle, Metro, Vampire in Brooklyn, Beverly Hills Cop III, The Distinguished Gentleman, Boomerang, Another 48 Hrs., Harlem Nights (hated it!), Coming to America (really hated it!), Beverly Hills Cop II (nowhere near as good as the original) and The Golden Child. 11 depressing films! I went through hell watching them.
I’m willing to let this go. If Murphy wins, whatever. He’s pretty good as James “Thunder” Early, especially during his on-stage performing scenes. But he really isn’t great or phenomenal in the part, and there isn’t much of a character arc. In the third act Jamie Foxx dismisses a song idea, then he does a line of something, and the next scene he’s dead…offscreen. Nor is there a whole lot of depth to the guy, and there’s very little connective tissue in his story. It’s an extended cameo, really.

N.Y. Times Oscar blogger David Carr (a.k.a., “the Bagger”) linked to a site (“the Shanghaiist”) with six or seven Japanese- produced Tommy Lee Jones commercials for Suntory Boss coffee drink.

Sorry, but I ‘m not getting whatever it is I’m supposed to get. The juiice isn’t seeping in; I’m not feeling the tingle. The spots aren’t that clever or witty or “cinematic.” They’re decent, servicable, not terrible, etc., but all they do is make you wonder how much Jones was paid.