The Goonies

It’s time once again to respond to the salutations of those New York secular know-nothings, the National Board of Review…even though they make calls every so often that I agree with. Like this morning’s decision to give their Best Director award to Collateral‘s Michael Mann…yes!
The NBR announced their 2004 movie awards around 11 am this morning (12.1), and will hand them out at their usual Tavern on the Green ceremony on 1.11.05.

I think giving the Best Picture prize to Finding Neverland is from the Planet Neptune. Marc Forster’s moderately-appealing period drama has a sweetly touching finale in which a dying Kate Winslet delights to a private living-room performance of James Barrie’s Peter Pan…fine. But celebrating a piece of chaste Victorian period whimsy over Sideways, Million Dollar Baby, Collateral, Kinsey, et. al.??
I’m not saying the NBR membership should consider medication, but it strikes me as a queer call.
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The NBR Awards are first out of the gate…that’s all they are. People talk about them for a day or so and then they’re forgotten until the following year. Still, that said, they can sometimes portend what other award-givers might be kicking around in the heads.
Does it mean anything that this group of middle-aged Manhattan oddballs completely ignored The Phantom of the Opera? It’s supposed to be an Oscar favorite, and it didn’t make their Top Ten list. I’ve been saying that Phantom should play well with the Academy squares and blue-hairs (I know it’s playing fairly decently with this crowd, having talked to a few of them), and probably end up with a Best Picture nomination. It could still happen, I suppose.
Jamie Foxx (who was at Tuesday night’s Michael Mann party at North with his head pretty much shaved for his role in Sam Mendes’ Jarhead) won Best Actor for Ray — deserved and no surprise. Annette Bening won Best Actress for Being Julia…the fact that the film isn’t grade-A obviously isn’t bothering the NPR any more than it’s bothering people out here.

It may not mean much in the greater scheme, but I’m still delighted that Sideways ‘ Thomas Hayden Church won for Best Supporting Actor and Kinsey ‘s Laura Linney won for Best Supporting Actress.
Alejandro Amenabar’s The Sea Inside was given their Best Foreign Film award…good call. Xan Cassevetes’ Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession should have won their Best Documentary Award, but it came in second to Born Into Brothels.
The NBR’s Breakthrough Performance Actor trophy went to Topher Grace for his work in P.S. and In Good Company…fine. The Breakthrough Performance Actress award went to Phantom‘s Emmy Rossum.
Michael Mann winning their Best Director may conceivably tip things a bit in his favor as far as being named a Best Director nominee by the Directors Guild. If this happens, his Oscar chances will significantly increase.
Congrats to Sideways‘Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor for winning the best Adapated Screenplay award, and to Charlie Kaufman for taking the Best Original Screenplay award for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Mann of Honor

I’ve been writing about Michael Mann’s films and having the occasional random chat with the guy since the mid `90s Heat days, but I’ve never sat down with him and gotten into this or that topic to any degree, much less listened or considered his brain transmissions firsthand.
Well, I’ve now done this in a manner of speaking, having listened to Mann converse with 21 Grams director Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu in front of an audience at the Writers Guild theatre late last night (11 pm to midnight), and then take questions from the audience.
And I came away with an impression that’s never quite penetrated over the last eight or nine years: The guy is a friggin’ celestial physicist. He’s Albert Einstein, and all this time I had him pegged as Robert Oppenheimer or maybe Werner von Braun.

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Collateral star Jamie Foxx, director Michael Mann at Tuesday night’s party at North (photo: John Kopaloff)

The stuff that Mann said last night to Innaritu and various audience members showed he’s got a massive and beautifully ordered data base in his head that can address and finesse every emotional and technical aspect of filmmaking under the sun or moon. It was also clear that he expresses himself in a laid-back, confident, needle-precise fashion that draws on what sounded to me like a Rennaissance Man rich-guy beatnik sensibility.
I was going to quote all the stuff he said last night, but I’d rather just report that Mann used the word “logarithms” twice.
The case that he’s a superb filmmaker has, of course, been made several times over. Since Mann’s latest film, Collateral opened last August, I’ve been making the case that it’s easily one of the best films of the year, and that Mann deserves a Best Director nomination for it. He really, really does, and not just because it’s so precisely and immaculately composed, but it tells a great story, and because a profound emotional chord is struck between the two main characters, hit-man Vincent (Tom Cruise) and cab-driver Max (Jamie Foxx).
In describing Stuart Beatty’s “beautifully harmonic” screenplay last night, Mann said that “everything these two characters have been all their lives is collapsed into one night, and this one night is a crucible.”
I’ve always seen Collateral as a movie about redemption — about waking up and being saved.
I recognize that a lot of people aren’t on the same page. They see it as a quality genre piece…but they’ve put it into a box with a label that says, “Good but no Oscar cigar because it’s a wham-bam urban thriller.”
And it may be Mann’s fate that he’ll be more richly appreciated in 20 or 30 years time, and that in his lifetime Oscar glory will be out of reach, partly because his movies don’t make staggering amounts of money (although they usually do pretty well) and partly because his films are laws unto themselves in certain ways, and because they don’t traffic in brand-name emotion.

But they do make you feel things. Profoundly. They always have. Is anyone going to try and tell me that the trials that Al Pacino’s Lowell Bergman and Russell Crowe’s Jeffrey Wigand go through in The Insider don’t generate serious emotion? Or that Detective Vincent Hanna (Pacino again) holding the hand of the dying Neil Macauley (Robert De Niro) on the LAX airstrip at the conclusion of Heat wasn’t a deeply touching thing?
I’m more moved when emotion leaks out of some hard-guy type, almost of its own will, rather than emotion gushing out of some teary-faced girl in her 20s who’s in touch with her feelings. And I’m definitely more affected when the seeds of the hard-guy emotion are planted early and carefully nourished, and brought out by excellent acting, which is always the case in any Michael Mann film.
David Denby recognized this in his 8.9.05 New Yorker review: “The plot of Collateral is just a movieish contrivance, and the violence no more than thuggishly casual and chic — that is, very enjoyable. But Collateral picks up some genuine weight as this odd couple carry on their weird, terse dialogue. After a while, Vincent takes on a small measure of Max’s gentleness, and Max, passive and dreamy by nature, learns to seize the moment.”
Denby said in the same piece that “shot by shot, scene by scene, Michael Mann may be the best director in Hollywood.
“Methodical and precise, he’s become a master builder of sequences, the opposite of the contemporary action directors who produce a brutally meaningless whirl of movement,” Denby continued. “He analyzes a scene into minute components — a door closing, an arm thrust out — and gathers the fragments into seamless units; he wants you to live inside the physical event, not just experience the sensation of it.”
There are those, of course, who will never get this, and can only see things in terms of practical industry politics.
I was speaking to a veteran Academy member about Mann’s being in the running for a Best Director nomination, and he said, “People respect him and admire him, but I don’t think it’s going to sell.”

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Mann, Foxx, Collateral screenwriter Stuart Beattie at North (photo: John Kopaloff)

I’ve always thought that opinions about a person’s personality or the way they handle the day-to-day has no place in a process that’s supposed to be about applauding artistry, but people always bring it up regardless. And so my friend carped that Mann “doesn’t know from financial restraint, he never has…and he’s got an ego bigger than the Empire State…and the only one who made any money on this film is Tom Cruise. His check is bigger than the money DreamWorks will make off the whole thing.”
I guess he means that other world-class artists are known for being conservative when it comes to spending what it takes to make their creations as good as they can be, and are also known for adopting shoulder-shrugging, comme ci comme ca `tudes when it comes to making creative choices.
If Mann’s Best Director nomination happens, it’ll happen as a bounce-off if and when he gets nominated by the Directors Guild for their own awards presentation. No DGA nom, no Oscar nom — it’s that simple.
I’d like to say that his being named Best Director by the National Board of Review means something, but I don’t think really think so. Those people are just too weird.

Raison d’etre

Much obliged to L.A. Times columnist Patrick Goldstein for plugging me (but not, for some reason, the column by name) in Tuesday’s “Calendar” piece about how Hollywood industry bloggers are influencing the buzz about Oscar nominations.
I hate being thought of as a blogger — I’m a journo with print credits stretching back a ways, and Hollywood Elsewhere is, like, a website. All right, WIRED is a bloggy-type thing but it’s only one of many components.

Goldstein’s motive in writing the piece seems to be…well, it might be a feeling of pique about Hollywood Elsewhere, David Poland’s Movie City News, Roger Freidman’s Fox 411 and Tom O’Neill’s Oscar Derby.com getting into screenings early here and there and, now and then, expressing views about the Oscar worthiness of this or that new film.
Whatever the value of this game, it’s one that a plugged-in print journalist laboring under the mandate of having to write weekly issue- and reporting-driven columns can’t play, although Goldstein did play it when he mentioned in Tuesday’s column that he’d seen James L. Brooks’ Spanglish and that he thinks it’s an Oscar contender.
Of course, Goldstein gets into many more early-bird screenings than I do. He’s always among the first to see anything.
Bottom line: web revenues are climbing, the internet economy is bouncing back, the internet is obviously faster than print (unless you’re unable to write as quickly as you ought to and sometimes have difficulty making your deadlines, like me), and this whole Hollywood blogger stand-out thing makes the Times seem a step or two behind. You know….slower.

Prick Up Your Ears

After Wednesday’s column wrapped 8 or 9 hours later than it was supposed to, I did some cleaning, watched some TV, stumbled over to a pizza parlor and forgot to do the sound clips. Why put up new ones now if they’re only going to be up until tomorrow morning, when the next column appears? I know this makes me sound like a slacker, but I think I’ll just wait and post fresh clips tomorrow.

What Men Want

Radio shock-jock Tom Leykis doesn’t intend irony when he implores his male listeners to “drop that bitch.” He means it, although the thing he’s most sincere about is wanting to expand his audience and rake in as much money as possible. As he has said many times, Likus is definitely in it for the scratch.
It follows that Likus wouldn’t have ever chanted “drop that bitch” on his show if he didn’t think it would help accomplish his goals. He’s got all kinds of market researchers telling him if this or that line is playing or not. He’s not guessing.
The obvious reason Likus has voiced this charming slogan is because there are hundreds of thousands of unhappy, spiritually moribund husbands and boyfriends out there (many of whom, no argument, may be absolute assholes) who’d like nothing more than to tell their significant others where to go and fly the coop and find some hot new fantasy girlfriend…but they don’t because they’re wimps, or because they’re trying to feel hopeful about things and don’t want to give up. Or because they’ve got kids and mortgages and can’t see a way out.

Or, like too many of us, they’re simply terrified of giving up the routine, and so they do their best and haul themselves down to the offices of marriage counselors in the evenings and maybe have tacky little affairs on the side and hold tight to the status quo.
I’m saying this because I strongly suspect that the nation of guys nursing the occasional fantasy of telling their wives to shove it…and let me first say I think this amounts to a majority, because all guys are at least somewhat frustrated in their live-in relationships (what woman isn’t?) and at least think about tomcatting around because they’re basically dogs…yeah, I just straddled species, and this isn’t even a sentence.
These guys do not go to the movies to see the dull horror of their domestic lives replayed on the big screen. They want movies to tell stories that dream about something other than the whisker shavings in their bathroom sink. A movie that thinks about getting out in some way, or at least tries to instruct in ways they might lead these guys to feel things more positively or more deeply, and perhaps as a result feel better about themselves.
I`m saying, finally, that it’s hard to imagine a vaguely unhappy male taking pleasure from a movie about a nice-guy husband with a good job whose domestic life is clouded by his neurotic bitch of a wife…a woman who is seemingly doing damage to her children on some level…a woman who’s admitted to having an extramarital affair…a woman who has her good points and saving graces, but is mainly a guarantee of domestic hell and…jeez, another run-on sentence.
Let’s start again: I can’t see vaguely unhappy guys going nuts over a movie about a nice-guy husband starting to fall for someone else, and that woman being sexy and vulnerable and sincere of heart, and the nice-guy husband thinking about going off with this new girl, but finally abandoning her and turning around and returning to the self-loathing bitch because he can’t bring himself to leave the fort, and then terror-wife saying at the finish, “I’m glad you’re back.”

If a woman is for the most part a negative-minded harridan with low self-esteem issues and given to seeing life as a series of anxious, teeth-gritting rituals, she’s not going to wake up one morning like Ebenezer Scrooge and become someone else. So if you go back to her, you’re saying to yourself, “I need more hell. I’m not unhappy enough.”
I could possibly see going for a story like this if the terror-wife had an alcohol problem, let’s say, and the nice-guy husband feels he has to go back because she’s said she realizes she has to go into the program and he wants to help her succeed. That’s a decent, noble thing to do. But to blow off a seemingly wonderful new rrelationship with a seemingly balanced and wholesome woman to return to a neurotic hell-pig who will give you a shock of gray hair and re-order your life according to Edgar Allan Poe and drive you into the pit?
This sounds about as emotionally appealing as the final 15 minutes of Richard Brooks’ In Cold Blood. A better analogy, come to think, is that last bit in Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious when those Nazi conspirators call out to Claude Rains, who’s just outside the front door of a large mansion, and say, “Alex…will you come in, please? We’d like to talk to you.”
This ramble has a point, but because I haven’t seen the movie that inspired it (although some have) I’m just going to let it go and wait for a screening and hope for the best. I’m just saying life is short and housemates with toxic personalities are worth their weight in strychnine and who needs it?

Xmas Stuffing

“I just got an e-mail from the publicist promoting The Aviator, which screens in nearby St. Louis tomorrow, saying it’s now moved to Christmas Day. Did you hear anything of this? Doesn’t that seem unwise?
Instead of having only one older moviegoers’ draw to compete with on Dec. 17 (i.e., Spanglish), now The Aviator will have Meet the Fockers (more or less, having opened only three days before), The Life Aquatic, Phantom of the Opera and, I would argue, Flight of the Phoenix — a movie about plane-flying characters that looks more adrenalized. Christmas Day is going to be crazy now.” —
Nick Rogers, A&E Editor, The State-Journal Register.

Since the Aviator cat’s out of the bag with last Wednesday’s rave review by Variety‘s Todd McCarthy, it’s okay to respond to his praising of the film’s CG-bolstered aerial photography sequences. They’re not “eminently satisfying,” as he described them, because over and over they reach out from the screen, grab you by both lapels and shout, “Hard drive!” McCarthy says “it’s not that you can’t tell when a flight is being digitally rendered, but it’s all done amazingly well — the degree of artifice surrounding the entire picture allows the computer work to fit in gracefully rather than to stick out.” This is emphatically not so. The aerial shots of Hughes flying those World War I biplanes, the H-1 Racer, the XF-11 and the Spruce Goose constantly demand that the viewer foresake any semblance of belief in what is supposed to be organic reality. More than once these planes fly right into the lens…nothing but flagrant CG show-off crap. The rule is the rule: CG must be invisible or it’s nothing. That shot of Lenin’s statue being helicoptered across the Berlin skies in Goodbye Lenin, for example…totally believable.

Thanks to L.A. Times columnist Patrick Goldstein for the front-page plug in today’s (Tuesday. 11.30) “Big Picture” column, in which he quotes my Million Dollar Baby blurb from last week (“Trust me, it’s a multi-Oscar nominee — Best Picture, Best Director,” etc.). It would’ve been a mite cooler if he’d mentioned Hollywood Elsewhere as my residence and not just referred to me as being linked on Oscarrace.com. After all, he spells out Movie City News in his discussion of David Poland’s Oscar predictions. I’ll have some reactions to Patrick’s Oscar contender assessments in Wednesday’s (12.1) main column.

The mystery of James L. Brooks’ Spanglish (Columbia, 12.17) will begin to unravel early next week. Is it Oscar material or just a (presumably) good relationship comedy? Will Tea Leoni’s performance hit the right notes or…? I keep thinking back to a report I heard several weeks ago, which is that Cloris Leachman, playing Leoni’s wine-drinking, acid-tongued mom, has all the zingers…

Alexander star Colin Farrell has been reading the reviews of Oliver Stone’s historical epic since its Wednesday debut and admits, “It’s been f***ing hammered!” He’s told Toronto journalist Bruce Kirkland that “I don’t usually read [reviews], but I read them this time because I love the film so much and I have so much invested in it emotionally — and I’m worried more for Oliver than for me because he’s highly sensitive, as tough as he is.” Alexander, he emphasized, “is an important thing in my life…a lot of my life has gone into it. My son was born during it, and a lot of my son is there in my performance, whatever my performance is. So it certainly affects me. I can’t abstract myself from it at all. I can’t be subjective. Having said that, I do think a lot of [the negativity toward the film] is personal, with respect to Oliver.”

I am sooo outta here, sooo not working over the next four days. Happy Thanksgiving to anyone paying a visit. I don’t see myself doing any more than six, seven work sessions (adding items, editing stories) between now and Sunday. Chill-out time, man.

Uhmmm…I got it wrong about Mike Leigh’s Vera Drake in a WIRED item I wrote two or three days ago. It played at last September’s Venice Film Festival and not, apparently, at the Toronto Film Festival.

Sticks and Stones

There’s a scene in Lawrence of Arabia that comes just after General Allenby (Jack Hawkins) tells his artillery officers to bomb the hell out of the Turks. “Pound them, Charlie…pound them,” he says.
Cut to Lawrence (Peter O’Toole) and Ali (Omar Sharif) riding their camels at the head of the Arab army at night, looking at the flashes of artillery fire on the horizon and listening to the distant thunder. “God help them,” says Ali. “They’re Turks,” says an unconcerned Lawrence. “God help them,” Ali repeats.

It’s 11:55 pm on Tuesday night, Oliver Stone’s Alexander opens tomorrow, and the Rotten Tomatoes artillery is raining death upon it. When a movie gets hammered this hard, my tough-guy thing goes out the window and I start feeling all soft and mushy. “Poor Oliver,” I hear myself saying. “He tried so hard, wanted so much to make this film great.” Forget it, most of my colleagues are saying. He’s fried, he’s over, the movie’s a mess. “He tried so hard,” I repeat.
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All right, Alexander is a mess. There’s no way around that. You don’t need to hear any details from this corner. Go to Rotten Tomatoes…it’s amazing. The page is soaked in green. 37 pans out of 43 reviews.
“It’s one of the greatest adventure tales of all time,” Stone told the Toronto Sun ‘s Bruce Kirkland the other day. “It’s equal to Sinbad or any of them. You would have to say that this guy outdid Achilles, he outdid Jason, he outdid Dionysus. He’s a god! And the guy did it in his lifetime. It’s a great story.”
But it’s not a great story. That’s the odd thing about it. It’s a military saga writ large, a fascinating ancient myth, a tale of great hunger and ambition and mother-loathing and competing with dad…but a great story it’s not. Not the one that Stone tells, at least. But I still worship Rosario Dawson’s breasts.
I have this half-formed idea kicking around in my head about the fact that Stone started thinking about making a movie about Alexander the Great 30 years ago, and then spent major portions of the past 15 years working to bring his story to the screen.

Maybe sometimes when a film stews inside a filmmaker for too long, it becomes too big like some swollen oversized fetus, and gets all caught up in itself with the umbelical cord wrapped around its neck, and a successful delivery is impossible. This happened also with Toys, Barry Levinson’s long-delayed dream movie.
And yet Clint Eastwood’s years-long effort to make Unforgiven turned out splendidly. But then Clint didn’t write it or work it through in his head (that was David Webb Peoples’ job), so maybe that’s a different deal.
I wrote a big report on Alexander the Great for my Ancient and Medieval History class when I was twelve or thirteen. I really wanted this movie to work. I’m not happy that it doesn’t.
I was even mildly disappointed by the big battle scene between Alexander’s troops and the much larger forces of the Persian king Darius. I was expecting a battle pumped up with adrenaline and ecstasy and all kinds of Oliver craziness, but Stone doesn’t handle it that much better than Robert Rossen did in the 1956 Richard Burton version. And Rossen shot his version without title cards.
I was also surprised to learn that the Persian king’s name, according to Stone’s film, is pronounced Dar-EYE-us. Wow, I’ve been saying it wrong my whole life.

Palookaville

The single overriding concern henceforth for any journo writing about Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby (Warner Bros., 12.17, limited), even cryptically, is to not spill the plot. That means don’t even hint at it…right?
I went into Monday night’s screening expecting some kind of Clint riff on Girlfight, and it is that for the first 100 minutes or so….but then it turns and does something else and it’s like “whoa, daddy…oh, man” time. It hits you like a freight train and leaves you saddened and bent over and coping with the backwash.
Before seeing it the night before last I didn’t know anything about the source material — “Rope Burns: Stories From the Corner”, a short-story collection by the late fight manager and cutman Jerry Boyd, who wrote under the pen name of F.X. Toole — and not one iota of buzz had gotten through. It’s a great thing to see a good movie cold.

Okay, I’m warming it up a little for the readership, but I’m holding my water. I don’t trust critics to keep their hint-hint instincts at bay, so play it safe and put on your blinders and don’t read any reviews on opening day. See it first, I mean.
Repeating my WIRED praise, Baby is a major art film. It is in the same realm of accomplishment and penetration as Clint’s Unforgiven, and may be his best film ever. In the view of at least one major critic who attended Monday’s screening, it emphatically is that.
It follows that it’s an Oscar contender on several fronts — Best Picture, Best Director (Eastwood), Best Actor (Eastwood), Best Actress (Hilary Swank). I’m not alone on this — the four or five serious journos I’ve spoken to who’ve seen it are all seriously impressed. Nobody’s hedging.
All right, one former critic I spoke to was shaking his head, but mainly because he wanted to see something else.
My kids, I fear, are going to be reluctant to see it, much less embrace it. It’s as far away from an MTV heebie-jeebie movie as you can get. Eastwood may be the only major director left in this industry who paces his films without regard to velocity for its own sake…..who just lets his stories unfold according to their own speed. Baby takes its time but it gets where it’s going.
The widescreen cinematography by Tom Stern (Mystic River, Blood Work) is straight and unpretentious, but I love the more-than-occasional detours it takes into darkness and shadows. It felt to me like the return of Gordon Willis or Gregg Toland in their respective heydays.
All the hoo-hah means that Swank is once again up against Annette Bening — they faced each other before in the ’99 race when Swank’s Boys Don’t Cry performance beat out Bening’s in American Beauty.

What’s partly amazing about Million Dollar Baby is how quickly it was thrown together.
I’m told it went into production only last August 1 and wrapped in late October, or something close to that. The script by Paul Taggis (who also wrote and directed Crash, one of the hits of last September’s Toronto Film Festival…which Lions Gate is opening next year) was, I’m told, put into production only a couple of months after Eastwood first read it. Eastwood said okay, hired his cast, called up his crew people and said “let’s go, we’re doing this”…wham.
Here’s a letter from a guy named Kyle Long. He says he’s a legit screenwriter (sold a spec, gotten two jobs since) and not a Warner Bros. plant. I think I believe him:
“I saw this film last night at the DGA. Wow…what a movie! Thanks to the fact that the idiots at WB have yet to produce one trailer or commercial, I wasn’t that excited going in — I just thought it was some chick boxing flick, and who could get excited about that?
“But in my humble opinion, what I saw rivals Sideways as the best movie of the year.
“Without ruining it for you (if you haven’t seen it already), Million Dollar Baby is really two movies in one. The first is an excellent take on a kind of boxing movie that we’ve seen before. It’s funny and inspiring and it just works. The second movie (basically the third act) completely caught me by surprise and moved me to tears on several occasions.
“Based on what I’ve seen so far, it gets nominated in every major category and may be my favorite right now for Best Picture. Paul Haggis is a lock for best adapted screenplay. Eastwood (in his best performance…well, maybe ever) gets a nod, as does Hillary Swank and Morgan Freeman (is there another actor on the planet who delivers voice-over lines better?).

“Eastwood has hit his stride at 74…unbelievable.
“I really can’t believe how poorly a job Warner Bros. has done marketing this flick. I mean, I live in LA, work in the biz and I barely knew about it. Not only will this flick be a critical fave, but it could be a major hit as well (it will play everywhere). Meanwhile, the suits have decided to blow their wad on Alexander, which makes no sense at all.
“This biz can suck the creativity right out of you sometimes and if nothing else, movies like Million Dollar Baby and Sideways recharge me and remind me why I wanted to write movies in the first place. Just a great, great flick.”
I included Long’s rant about Warner Bros. publicity only to debunk this impression. The Burbank crew only just saw Baby a little while ago because Eastwood played it that way. True to form, the guy’s been holding his cards to his chest. Clint runs his own show on his own clock, and won’t be muscled into anything he doesn’t feel like doing.
So lay off WB marketing — they’re just playing cards they’ve been dealt.

Talking Funny

If there’s a choice, movie stars should steer clear of exotic accents unless they can do them perfectly. Sometimes it’s not even a good idea if they can.
For the most part U.S. audiences don’t want their name actors to try and be Laurence Olivier. Stars become stars partly because people like their unchallenging steadiness.
Exceptions crop up every now and then. Owen Wilson is a star because he’s Owen Wilson in everything he does — same delivery, same intelligent-stoner phrasing, no variations. And yet he manages a surprisingly good Kentucky accent in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. I’m impressed.

Renee Zellweger didn’t have a choice with Bridget Jones Diary: The Edge of Reason (Miramax, now dying in theatres everywhere). Bridget is a London working girl and that’s that. Zellweger went with what I remember was a passable English accent in the original Bridget Jones Diary three years ago, but some feel she fudges it in the sequel, and she’s taking a shellacking for this.
A less confident director than Mike Nichols might have asked Julia Roberts to go with a British accent for her performance as Anna, a divorced London-based photographer, in Closer (Columbia, 12.3). But he didn’t, wisely, and it’s fine.
You might think for a minute or two as this London-based drama begins, “Hey, she’s not sounding British”…and then you’ll forget about it. Roberts probably would have blown it if she’d tried. She’s not Cate Winslet.
Ancient-era period dramas can get away with any kind of accent as long as it’s uniform. I have no problem with Colin Farrell and his Macedonian officers speaking in Irish accents in Oliver Stone’s Alexander.
Same deal with Jesus Christ, John the Baptist and the twelve disciples sounding like New York-area goombahs in Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ — a uniform system. It’s also acceptable that Kirk Douglas and his slave army lieutenants in Spartacus use regular-guy American accents and their Roman opponents talk in British or cultivated mid-Atlantic accents.
As long as everyone sticks to the scheme…

Angelina Jolie’s Russian accent (Time critic Richard Corliss describes it as “crypto-Carpathian”) obviously goes against the system in Alexander. The idea, apparently, is to convey that she’s a Medusa snake woman who has no allegiances or agenda other than her own, but it threw me anyway. The campiness seemed overbaked.
Actors shouldn’t do medieval English history dramas without sounding vaguely like like they belong in the milieu, but half-assed attempts are worse than none at all.
Kevin Costner could have easily gotten away playing himself in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, but he went with a mid-Atlantic accent instead and seemed off-center all through the film. His Boston accent in Thirteen Days made me want to hit him, and I still flinch at the memory of his Jim Garrison Nyawlins-speak in JFK.
Clark Gable played Rhett Butler accent-free in Gone With the Wind, and it was one of his smartest moves ever. He would have sounded grotesque with an attempted Charleston drawl.
Even character actors need to watch their step with this stuff. Every time I watch Shane Elisha Cook, Jr.’s Alabama accent (“Ain’t no one runnin’ me off maaah cleem!”) makes me wince.

Blowing Town

This column is shutting down until Monday. I’ll be doing the Thanksgiving thing in Connecticut with my parents. I may tap out a WIRED item or two if boredom creeps in but don’t hold your breath.

Two Strangelove‘s

I said this in a short piece a few weeks ago but it’s gift-buying time so here goes again for good measure. Dr. Strangelove fanatics should think twice before buying Columbia Tristar Home Video’s 40th anniversary two-disc special edition, which hit stores three weeks ago.
The extras are great (four doc featurettes plus a quickie interview with former Defense Secretary Robert MacNamara, who never gets around to actually mentioning the film) but the presentation of the film isn’t right.
The problem is the decision by CTHV to present Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 black comedy in a matted 1.85-like format, with black bars on the top and bottom of the image.
In accordance with Kubrick’s wishes, it should be framed instead in a 1.33 to 1 aspect ratio with an occasional shifting to a rough 1.66 to 1. This is what you get on the still-purchasable CTHV Strangelove DVD that came out in February ’01. That’s why it’s the better buy, even if it doesn’t have as many extras as the new version.

On top of which I did a comparison of the ’04 and the ’01 versions on my TV set, and I swear the ’04 didn’t look as bright or sharp as the earlier version…even though it makes no sense that CHTV would degrade the quality.
Kubrick wasn’t into having his films shown in 1.85 matted formats. He was a full-frame type of guy, and you may have noticed that the full-frame images in his films really are full frame — not just 1.85 images with sides chopped off.
In any event, the framing on the ’01 DVD is quite beautiful, I feel, because of all the extra space in each shot. I don’t know why I just used the word “extra” because it looks just right — exquisitely framed and airy, and no boom mikes popping in.
The irony is that the Amazon.com description of the transfer of the 40th anniversary DVD explains exactly how it should look but doesn’t — or didn’t, to be precise, on the screener I was sent by CHTV a few weeks ago.
The Amazon copy reads, “Because this movie was originally shot using various aspect ratios, the proportions of the screen image will change periodically throughout the movie. This transfer (with its changing aspect ratio) was approved by director Stanley Kubrick himself.”
If anyone has a purchased copy of the 40th anniversary Strangelove that conforms to this standard (which would mean I was sent a screener that hadn’t been formatted correctly by accident), please write in and say so.

Prick Up Your Ears

Vikram Weet of Los Angeles was first to identify last Friday’s dialogue clips.
The “lesson in civics” in Clip #1 is spoken by Otto Kruger in Fred Zinneman’s High Noon; the lawman he’s speaking to is Gary Cooper. The interrogator in Clip #2 is Peter Sarsgaard in a third-act scene from Shattered Glass; the irritating little twinkle-toes with the nasal Toronto accent is Hayden Christensen; the dialogue in Clip #3 and Clip #4 is spoken by Gene Hackman and Jeanne Tripplehorn in Sydney Pollack’s The Firm.
Today’s clips are it for a week because there won’t be a new column on Friday, 11.26. Clip #1 is an actor of international renown using metaphor to lay some moves upon a young man he happens to fancy for the moment; Clip #2 and Clip #3 are two longish confessionals, one spoken by a despairing middle-aged character (and played by a certain Oscar-winning actor) and the other by a renowned Broadway character actor; and Clip #4 is an interrogation scene between a somewhat older woman and a teenage male.
Send in your answers before the holiday starts. I’ll post the winner on Wednesday, 12.1.

More Alexander

“I went to a recent screening of Alexander feeling reasonably sure that it would be superior to Troy, which it somewhat resembled. On the way out, however, I wasn’t at all sure that that’s the case.
“What was Oliver Stone thinking? Angelina Jolie as Colin Farrell’s mother? A mother who ages at least 20 years over the course of the story — which is set in a time when the average life expectancy was, what, maybe 35? — without so much as gaining a wrinkle or a gray hair?
“And all of Alexander’s men speaking in Irish accents? I would never have guessed Macedonia was a stone’s throw from Dublin.
“How about all the pointless flirting with that dancer who looked like he was auditioning for a remake of The Crying Game, or the irritating will-they-or-won’t-they? scenes with Farrell and Jared Leto?

“And what about those dozens of endless, stilted speeches that seemed to stop the film dead every time it needed a strong shot of adrenalin instead?
“And once again, Stone proves that in his world women exist only to be painted in the most vicious and unflattering colors. There are only two major female roles in the film: a demented, snake-charming man-eater of a mom, and an ill-tempered hottie whose few lines are dripping with venom.
“A few of the battle sequences were impressive (and most of the others were ruined by the shaky cinematography, which made the scenes in the Indian jungle stuff seem like Alexander and company had strolled into Jurassic Park by mistake) and the sets looked great…
“But what a horrible waste of Farrell: an inventive, charismatic actor is reduced to little more than a wide-eyed, slack-jawed mannequin, crowned with an amateurish dye job that reminded me of the girls in my junior high who tried to emulate Farrah Fawcett and failed miserably.
“The critics I saw it with were silently respectful for the first hour, but they eventually lost control and began giggling (and at times groaning) at the folly of it all. When Alexander gazed into the bowl of wine and saw the image of his mom as Medusa just about everyone in the room was roaring.
“Warners must be thanking Zeus that they’ve got Ocean’s Twelve and Phantom of the Opera to replace this one on first-run screens within the next few weeks. It’s gonna bomb but good.” — James, Portage, Minnesota.

Wes Speaks

To me, Wes Anderson was always this very smart, ultra-particular, vaguely dweeby guy who happened to be this great filmmaker. Then he evolved into this Manhattan clothes horse with his suits cut a tiny bit shorter and tighter than the norm. And now he’s got shoulder-length hair and a copy line next to his portrait on last week’s cover of Paper that says, “Wes Anderson makes us wet.”
He’s definitely morphed into this other person, and I guess all I’m saying is that it’s interesting when people you’ve known from an earlier stage in life spread out and adopt dramatic flourishes and all. It’s fascinating. In any case, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou is a seafaring adventure thing and kind of splashed all over with salt water…I guess that’s what the copywriter meant, in part.

Anderson and Zissou costars Owen Wilson and Jeff Goldblum did a q & a on Monday night after a Variety series screening at Hollywood’s Arclight theatre. I would have made it but I was off seeing Million Dollar Baby. Moderator Pete Hammond told me all about it the next day.
“[Wes] was very good, very upbeat, but there wasn’t anything that he really said that he hasn’t said before. I opened it by reading an interview he did three years ago when Tenenbaums came out, about what he wanted to do next. He said, ‘I want to do something with big sets and but at the same time smaller and more emotional with a doumentary feel,’ and that’s exactly what he did with Aquatic.
“I asked him this time what he’s going to do next, and he said, ‘I don’t know….I think I’m gonna do something in India.”
Oh, no…he’s thinking about doing a Bollywood film? Or some kind of deadpan comedy about some New York advertising guy who burns out and goes to an ashram in northern India and meets up with the corrupt and bisexual son of Mararishi Mahesh Yogi? The mere thought of Owen Wilson sitting in the lotus position gives me the willies.

Clint Eastwood has just thrown a heavyweight punch in the Oscar race, and the after-effects will be felt all the way until Feb. 27. His boxing movie Million Dollar Baby (Warner Bros., 12.17, limited) had its first-anywhere showing at a very-limited-attendance screening last Friday night on the Warner Bros. lot, and then at a press-infiltrated Academy screening last night (Monday, 11.22) at the Director’s Guild. I’ve spoken to people who attended both, and they’re all seriously impressed or floored. (I was at the DGA screening also, and I fully concur.) Baby is a major art film… easily in the same realm as Clint’s Unforgiven, and, in the view of at least one major critic who attended the DGA screening, his best ever. Trust me, it’s a multi-Oscar nominee — Best Picture, Best Director (Eastwood), Best Actor (Eastwood), Best Actress (Hilary Swank). This means, of course, that Swank is once again duelling with Annette Bening — they last faced each other in the ’99 race when Swank’s Boys Don’t Cry performance beat Bening’s in American Beauty.

I missed the Variety item last Thursday (11.18), but Bob Berney’s Newmarket Films has picked up Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Downfall, that German-produced, end-of-the-Third-Reich, down-in-the-bunker movie that I saw a few weeks ago and quite liked. Obviously angling for a Best Foreign Film Oscar nom, Downfall is “an exceptional historical piece [that’s] all about detail, detail and more detail,” I wrote on 11.3. “Not so much a Hitler character study as a Guernica-sized, pointillist portrait of the last remnants of Nazi culture collapsing into itself.” Pic was written and produced by Constantin Film’s Berndt Eichinger, and costars Bruno Ganz as Adolf Hitler, Alexandra Maria Lara as Hitler’s private secretary, Ulrich Matthes as Joseph Goebbels and Juliane Kohler as Eva Braun.

Time‘s Richard Corliss has declared that Closer (Columbia, 12.3) “runs counter to the numbing predictability of most current films: the inevitable plot points of revenge and uplift, the reduction of human beings to heroes and villains, the avoidance of complexity in sexual matters.” And director Mike Nicohols observes in the same piece, “I thought we were way past being able to shock anybody …but people are shocked [by this film]. It’s not necessarily because of the language but because things that usually go unexplored are explored in public. Some people are armed against it. They say, ‘I just don’t know those people.’ Well, they’re you, man!”

Imelda Staunton’s highly-touted performance in Mike Leigh’s Vera Drake (New Line) is falling off the screen as a Best Actress hopeful. One observer opined last night that Staunton and Drake peaked at the Venice Film Festival and just after, and have been fading ever since. One problem is that after Staunton’s Drake character gets popped for performing abortions, she goes into what amounts to a one- note emotional state of shock…eyes glazed over, look of horror on her face…and nothing more. Another problem is that no one has seen it. New Line is “having a hard time keeping it in theatres,” says one Academy pulse-taker. “In Los Angeles it’s currently hanging on at the Westside Pavilion and it’s already playing at the Pasadena Academy, a slightly discounted art house. Next they’ll probably send it to the Beverly Center, where movies go to die….”