Jeffrey Wells

At yesterday’s “Movers & Shakers” (i.e., producers) panel at the Santa Barbara Film Festival, L.A. Times columnist Patrick Goldstein asked Little Miss Sunshine producers Albert Berger and Ron Yerxa to comment about the Academy’s grossly unfair decision to exclude them from the official group of three who, if LMS wins the Best Picture Oscar, will be allowed to go up onstage and receive a statuette, despite theirBerger and Yerxa being the film’s “real” ground-floor producers.
Yerxa gave a soft-pedalled response, saying that the Producers Guild, which approved Yerxa and Berger as one of the LMS producers, and the Academy “are not fully conversant.” Berger was more emphatic: “We produced this movie. Whatever the Academy may say or determine, we produced this movie.”

I don’t mean to sound like a rabbit-hole cineaste who only processes life in terms of movies and images, but this N.Y. Times photo of Iraqi soldiers dealing with captured gunmen during a sandstorm is like something Vittorio Storaro would have crafted if he was working on a feature about the Iraq conflict. Those burnished orange-sandy hues look like they were rendered with a color filter. Quite beautiful.

Once‘s Glen Hansard and Marketa Iglova giving an outdoor performance of “Falling Slowly” for HP’s Backstage at Sundance 2007.

Filmmakermagazine has put up a Sundance video podcast by the great Jamie Stuart, a guy who delivers so much more than just your typical smart-ass, here’s-what-happened diary-type deal that it’s not funny. Make no mistake — Jamie Stuart is the Stanley Kubrick/Alfonso Cuaron/Richard Lester/Sergei Eisenstein of impressionistic short-video film festival pieces.

The marketing geniuses at MPI Home Video don’t have it on their site (and why should they? too logical!) but DVD Newsletter‘s Doug Pratt tells me the Becket DVD will “street” on May 15th. It’s currently playing at Manhattan’s Film Forum; opening at L.A.’s Nuart on Friday.

“What I do know is that Sundance has become a very big machine in which it has become increasingly difficult for modestly scaled films without stars, without powerful brokers and backing and manufactured buzz to attract attention,” writes N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis in a 1.29 piece.
Especially, I would add, when front-line newspapers like the N.Y. Times overlook — i.e., fail to pay attention to — certain modestly scaled but high-quality films that don’t have stars, powerful backing & manufactured buzz…like John Carney‘s Once.
Manohla may not have deliberately bypassed Once — perhaps she simply never got around to seeing it — but given the raves it’s received thus far (particularly this one from the Chicago Tribune‘s Michael Phillips) on top of it having won the World Cinema Audience Award last Saturday…well, you’d think the Times would have said at least something, no?

Observed during Saturday’s backstage-at-the- Lobero luncheon that followed the Directors’ Panel: a reapprochement between formerly feuding collaborators Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and Guillermo Arriaga. Inarritu went up to the sitting Arriaga and gave him a hug; Arriaga reciprocated with a couple of comradely slaps on the back. Then they left the room together and stood alone out on the brick patio, shooting the shit for nearly ten minutes, no evident tensions whatsover. I thought to myself, “This would make a historic photo…the duelling amigos back together again”…but a voice told me to stay away.

It’s over…Little Miss Sunshine is going to win the Best Picture Oscar. The SAG Awards made this quite clear — done deal, finito, no further discussion. The Departed never punched through (except for the fait accompli of Martin Scorsese winning the Best Director Oscar), Babel had some headwind out of the Golden Globes but no longer (or am I wrong? …I’m willing to consider a Babel win…just tell me how it happens)), and The Queen and Letters From Iwo Jima were never really in the game.

What a boring cavalcade of tedium the SAG Awards were tonight. No shockers, no mild surprises, the same people won who’ve won before…the same old heroin. The Best Ensemble Cast award went to Little Miss Sunshine…terrific, bolstering chances that LMS might actually take the Best Picture Oscar. The oppressiveness of Helen Mirren winning yet again for Best Actress makes her the Mao Zhedong of the ’06 Oscar race. Forest Whitaker, who won Best Actor for The Last King of Scotland, is Zhou Enlai (or Chou En-lai, if you prefer). Jennifer Hudson for Best Supporting Actress…I guess the Dreamgirls fall-off hasn’t hurt her. Eddie Murphy won for Best Supporting Actor…same deal. Down with Murphy. I say, and up with Mark Wahlberg or Alan Arkin.

The Envelope‘s Tom O’Neil is reporting that O’Toole won’t be at tonight’s SAG Awards, but says that Miramax publicist Andrew Goldstein (did Tom mean to write Andrew Bernstein?) has confided that O’Toole “will attend the Oscar nominees lunch on February 5” and then stick around “for a few days” before retreating back to London. He’ll come back for the Oscar show some two and a half weeks later.

A whole N.Y. Times piece about Grindhouse — two high-style wankoff movies made in the spirit of ’70s exploitation flicks, one directed by Robert Rodriguez, the other by Quentin Tarantino — and not a single mention of the film’s most fascinating element, which is how heatedly and lasciviously Rodriguez will photograph actress Rose McGowan in his segment, called “Planet Terror.”

Rodriguez, a very clever and likable guy who, being a kind of lapsed Catholic, appears to regard women as either Madonnas or floozies, tends to make his actresses look hot and saucy in his films. He dressed and photographed Salma Hayek like a pistol-hot wet dream in Desperado and From Dusk to Dawn, and one naturally presumes that the ardor behind his on-set affair with McGowan during filming of “Planet Terror” (which led to the end of his 16-year marriage to Elizabeth Avellan) will be captured, so to speak, in the way in which he dresses and films her.
And yet Times writer Whitney Joiner writes only about the usual technical-attitude genre-homage stuff. Said it before, saying it again: Rodriguez and Tarantino seem to be chronically lazy genre filmmakers, incapable of creating a single honest (i.e., unreferenced) thought or emotion about anything real, indulging time and again in ironic (i.e., insincere) B-movie trappings and posturings — style, pizazz, attitude, etc. They’re both lost…totally lost.