No ZDT, eh? I would be hugely surprised if the quirky, contrarian-minded LACFA picks Silver Linings for Best Picture, and flabbergasted if they go for Lincoln, Argo or Les Miz. The Master has faded and they know it. And Life of Pi and Beasts of the Southern Wild simply don’t have the horses. If they had real vision and brass balls (which of course they don’t) they’d celebrate the mad abandon of Anna Karenina. The only left-field contenders I can think of are The Grey or Looper…is that what you’re thinking, Glenn? One of these?
If I was Rian Johnson…no, fuck that, I’m not Rian Johnson and never will be. Although I sometimes bat tweets his way like it’s a Sunday tennis game with Eric Clapton.
So the MUBI guys are doing a Tony Scottcelebration, and while reading their copy I was once again reminded that no journalist seems to care why this sharp guy with a red baseball cap, this creative go-getter, this dynamic turbine of a director killed himself last August. Nobody is asking any questions, at least, and it just seems odd.
When a guy who lived in front of a worldwide crowd reaches up and turns out the light, I think it’s fair after a decent interval to (a) ask what really happened, and (b) to expect a candid answer. Life is constantly about experience and facts and questions and learning, and I want to know, dammit, what the hell led him to that bridge. It happened four months ago, and I think enough time has elapsed for Scott’s widow or brother Ridley or someone in the family to just man up and tell it straight. I didn’t know Tony Scott personally, but I talked with him three or four times and I felt as if I did know who he was through his films. We all felt that to differing degrees. And it doesn’t feel right for this this issue to just sit there like a blank sheet of paper.
Producer Friend: “I have to say that I’m stunned that you liked Les Miz. I really thought that our tastes were in synch. Not always, I guess. Did you see Todd’s Hollywood Reporter review? I expect many of those to come. Zero Dark Thirty is the movie of the year (along with The Grey, which stands not a chance).”
Me: “I didn’t ‘like‘ the film exactly. Certainly not as a gathered-together whole. I was swept up and intensely moved by the last 40 minutes. There’s a difference between giving the entire film a pass and succumbing to the final act, I think.”
Producer Friend: “The truth is that Tom Hooper‘s use of constant close-ups, the dutch angles and the wide-angle lenses were very odd choices. I was bored to death by much of it. I thought Cohen/Carter were silly and over the top and that Russell Crowe was just dismal. Kudos to Anne Hathaway, though. When I nominate do you recommend that I put Les Miz ahead or behind Zero Dark Thirty?”
Me: “Zero Dark Thirty is a far more rooted and relentless film of our time than Les Miz…please. It is genuine instant history, and so on-the-stick.”
Nick Clement, a Connecticut film buff who has always burned brightly and has always celebrated the important stuff in the right way (even when he falls for films that I consider dubious or worse), wrote the following this morning: “I’m just wondering if you can shed any light on WTF is going on with the release of Silver Linings Playbook? It still hasn’t opened anywhere in CT — another weekend comes and goes and it’s still not here…and it seems like it’s crested at around 500 screens total — what are they doing?
“Same goes for Anna Karenina, which isn’t playing in any decent theater in the Hartford area. What gives? Why make these movies, promote them for MONTHS on end in trailer form, and then never release them? There are plenty of people in CT who would watch these two movies…don’t get it, makes no sense — do you know anything?”
Response: I said from the very beginning that the girly-girls who’ve supported generically coy dumbass romcoms staring Kate Hudson, Katherine Heigel and Cameron Diaz may not show up right away for SLP even though it delivers exactly what they like and want because it also traffics in anxiety and meds and sports and therapy and other cross-currents that dippy girls aren’t familiar with and/or feel a little bit threatened by.
I’m presuming that the Weinsteiners are looking to tough it out with SLP in limited release throughout December in hopes of being named Best Picture or snagging Best Actress (Jennifer Lawrence) or Best Actor (Bradley Cooper) or Best Supporting Actor (Robert De Niro) trophies by this or that critics group or from HFPA or Oscars noms in January, and then break it wide. But it does seem odd that avid film buffs can’t see it at all in Connecticut or at least in your area, according to your letter.
In fact SLP is now playing in Greenwich, and will break open a bit (i.e., show up in the Hartford area) around Christmas, I’m told by a Weinstein rep.
“Still thinking about how brilliant Killing them Softly is,” Clement adds. “My father and I went to see it over last weekend and we loved it.”
A friend told me this morning that “every time I ask an actual Oscar voter ‘what are your favorite films?,’ they all say the same thing: Lincoln and Les Miz.” I admit that I flinched at first…aaack. And then I weighed it on the scale, and I thought it all through, I sighed, I exhaled. And I wrote him back:
“‘Lincoln or Les Miz‘ — that’s your standard sleepyhead sentiment talking…the current chant of the tired, the aging and (no offense) those who are not busy being born. People who are defaulting to safe & familiar emotions…to the old and crusty idea of what a Best Picture winner has looked, felt like, strutted & sounded like in the past. Tried and true. Fortified by history. Tradition. Same old. Belongs to the ages. Blah blah.
“Having seen it last night I completely get and feel the beating heart of Les Miz (particularly during the last act) and I’ve worshipped the great Abraham Lincoln my entire life (or since I was seven or eight), but we’re talking about the movies here. Not the play and the music and the great sadness & heartache behind Les Miz (which is unmistakably there) but the Tom Hooper film that delivers it on a screen (big or teensy). Same with the effort by Mr. Spielberg. It shouldn’t be a vote for the great patience and political finesse and tragic ending of Abraham Lincoln, but for the honorable and finely acted but mildly stodgy and milky-white-light Janusz Kaminski movie that Spielberg composed.
“The only truly alive & crackling movies on the planet earth in the Best Picture competition right now are Zero Dark Thirty and Silver Linings Playbook. These are the only completely honorable choices that have fresh juice and truly pronounced spit and conviction and vigor to burn, and which are about life as it’s being lived & felt & grappled with right now (or at least over the last three or four years). Yes, Silver Linings look at the present through the prism of ’30s screwball mixed with Russell’s own anxious, edgy mentality, but it belongs to the here & now. Les Miz‘s here-and-now factor is in the echoes of the Occupy movement in the lamentations of the early 19th Century poor, but only to a degree. It is basically generic compassionate humanist schmaltz, albeit done with great feeling during the last act.”
“I have to separate myself from the haters on Les Miserables,” I explained to friends this morning. “Because as uncomfortable as I was during the first two hours, I succumbed once Eddie Redmayne and the fiery young lads (including the very noteworthy Aaron Tviet) raise the flags and man the barricades, which starts about 40 minutes before the end. And it sunk in. It got to me.
“And I finally understood, having never seen the stage musical, what Les Miz mania is all about. And I became, at least as far as this section was concerned, a Les Miz queen.”
Otherwise the film, as passionately and energetically composed as it is, felt like a chore to me, something to endure and get through rather than sink into and revel in with my heart wide open. All that agony, all that cruelty. “This is a movie about grime and dirt and suffering at the hands of cruel horrid gargoyles,” I muttered at the halfway mark. One can only stand so much horrific behavior and the infliction of agony in any realm.
For me the tattered, labored, forced-march emotions and general intensity, those constant closeups and that relentless operatic warbling wore me down more and more. I wanted to retreat about an hour in but I stuck it out, and was glad, finally, that I did.
My first glance at my watch happened at the 40-minute mark. I checked it two or three times over the next hour or so. But I forgot all about the time once the the 1832 June Rebellion in Paris began. Although it’s a grind getting there.
Anne Hathaway will definitely snag a Best Supporting Actress nomination for those looks of panic and ache and desperation as she sings her Fantine role — she really does have to play Judy Garland over the next two or three or four years. Hugh Jackman fully deserves a Best Actor nomination as the tale’s moral heo, Jean Valjean — the feeling and the vocal reach are entirely there and sustained start to finish. I had no problem at all (unlike some I’ve spoken with) with Russell Crowe as Inspector Javert — he can sing well enough and holds his own and brings the necessary gruff steel. And Redmayne is surprisingly strong, steady and solid as Marius, a student revolutionary who tumbles for Amanda Seyfried‘s Cosette (adopted daughter of Valjean, biological daughter the late Fantine).
Also excellent are Tviet, Samantha Barks (as the jilted-in-love Eponine), Sacha Baron Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter as the scummy Monsieur and Madame Thenardier, and little Daniel Huttlestone as Gavroche, a street kid who stands with the barricaders.
And yet if you remove the sweeping effect of the final 40 minutes I mostly agree with today’s reviews by The Hollywood Reporter‘s Todd McCarthy and to a somewhat lesser extent by Variety‘s Justin Chang.
Key McCarthy quote: “A gallery of stellar performers wages a Sisyphean battle against musical diarrhea and a laboriously repetitive visual approach in the big screen version of the stage sensation Les Miserables. Victor Hugo‘s monumental 1862 novel about a decades-long manhunt, social inequality, family disruption, injustice and redemption started its musical life onstage in 1980 and has been around ever since. But director Tom Hooper has turned the theatrical extravaganza into something that is far less about the rigors of existence in early 19th century France than it is about actors emoting mightily and singing their guts out.
For Les Miserables “is a film that, when all the emotions are echoed out at an unvarying intensity for more than 2 1/2 hours on a giant screen, feels heavily, if soaringly, monotonous. Subtle and nuanced are two words that will never be used to describe this Les Miserables.”
Two ladies that I came with were weeping, and I get it, I get it. Their feelings are absolutely valid. The aches and passions of this classic tale are strong and elemental and speak to compassion and charity and cries for social justice, which is why it has played so long on stage and touched so many. But how many Les Miz fans have ever participated in an Occupy demonstration?
God help me and call me a sap, but I really fucking love the ending with the banners waving and the barricades up and the proudly defiant “Can You Hear The People Sing?”
I’d been told that Gus Van Sant, Matt Damon and John Krasinki‘s Promised Land (Focus Features, 12.28) was Capra-esque, which means upbeat in a sort of sappy, dipshitty sort of way + emotionally on the nose. I was also told it has a little Local Hero in its bloodstream. Well, it’s not channeling Frank Capra or Bill Forsyth. It plays its own tune, and is, I feel, an entirely decent “message” film (i.e., fracking sucks) that feels nicely balanced and shaded and well acted. It flows along.
Only one thing feels miscalculated. I’m speaking of a third-act surprise that kinda knocks everything off-balance because it feels perversely thrown in because some producer said “you know what? this movie needs a third-act jolt.” But I wouldn’t call it fatal. It’s just one of those “did they really need to do that?” moves.
Promised Land is a liberal-humanist social drama that follows a predictable path. You can tell that from the synopsis and the trailer and the poster. But the writing and the unforced acting styles put me at ease early on and I just went with it. It’s a kind-hearted, well-acted, reasonably intellligent thing — naturally, agreeably paced. In fact, I watched it twice. Okay, not intentionally. If you don’t take the screener out the feature automatically plays again so I just sat there and submitted.
At the outset Damon is a nice guy with an Iowa farm background who’s all suited up and smiley and working for an evil natural gas company called Global Crosspower Solutions. He arrives in a small Pennsylvania town to sell a drilling project to the locals and pass a lot of money around. And the usual questions about the chemicals used in fracking (i.e., high pressure drilling for gas) and the water table being poisoned and cows dying and all that. But enough of the locals want those fat Global checks.
And then an environmentalist (Krasinki) comes along and starts letting people know the facts. And Damon starts getting pissy and resentful (he hasn’t been trained by Global about how to deal with green types?) and feeling a little bit guilty besides, and then a lot guiltier. And you know where it’s all heading.
Damon and Krasinki handle their lead roles nicely. Also believable and planted are Hal Holbrook‘s jowly, fair-minded guy and an anti-fracking advocate, Rosemarie DeWitt‘s local teacher with eyes for Damon, and the always impressive Scoot McNairy as a resentful farmer. It’s too bad that Frances McDormand‘s natural gas rep (an ally of Damon’s Steve Butler) isn’t developed sufficiently and winds up seeming arid and floundering at the end, but I shrugged this off.
One of my favorite bits is when Krasinki delivers a Sesame Street-level demonstration of what fracking is to a classroom filled with 10 year-olds. It’s highly amusing because the idea is to reach the (probably) uniformed audience — we’re the ten-year-olds! Hah!
Promised Land probably isn’t going to be nominated for anything, but there’s no shame in just being a decent, good enough small-town drama. I didn’t feel burned or fucked with. It’s a smart, pleasant sit.
I don’t know when I last listened to this Moody Blues track, but it was probably the Pleistocene era. Simple, concise, unpretentious. It’s off The Magnificent Moodies (released in July ’65), and recorded before Denny Laine and Clint Warwick left the band and especially before Mike Pinder and Ray Thomas got into acid and Edwardian lace shirts and big choruses and psychedelic dreamscapes.
The gist of this 12.5 Pete Hammond Deadline piece (“Zero Dark Thirty Gives Sony Early Awards Heat But Will It Last?”) is that a lot of people don’t know what to stand by Best Picture-wise, but they don’t like the idea of giving the Oscar to another Middle-Eastern conflict film made by the great Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal.
I’m presuming that older Academy milquetotast types are telling Hammond “Bigelow again?” and “more Middle East terror tension?” and “why can’t we find a nice consensus movie that fits the warmly emotional paradigm that we all want to give the Best Picture Oscar to, and…you know, without anyone getting blown up or double-tapped…something that explains who we are and what we really want and need?”
Some would like to give it to Lincoln or Les Miz but they’re not feeing the current in the rapids and they can feel the ardor cooling down (certainly with Lincoln). They’ve found a film that “fits that warmly emotional paradigm” in Silver Linings Playbook, of course, but that’s not knocking everyone down either. Cattle are happiest when they’re being led along. And if they’re not being led along they wander around in search of water and grass. What Hammond is telling us is that Academy members don’t know which way to turn.
They have two choices. They can go with the unassailable Zero Dark Thirty — the flinty, pruned-down CIA docudrama with Jessica Chastain‘s super-tough heroine, or with the jazzy, spazzy, warmly emotional and hyper-intelligent Silver Linings Playbook, the movie that restored respect to the seriously tarnished romantic comedy genre and confirmed that director-writer David O. Russell is at the top of his game these days, and that Bradley Cooper (NBR’s Best Actor winner as of today) and Jennifer Lawrence are forces of nature and growth-spurters extraordinaire.
The National Board of Review is a mostly discredited organization that carries no real weight or sway, but the fact that they’ve given their Best Picture award to Zero Dark Thirty feels like a whoo-hoo nonetheless. They’ve also given their Best Director award to ZDT‘s Kathryn Bigelow and Best Actress trophy to Jessica Chastain…three fresh biggies for ZDT!
Memo to Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson: Daniel Day Lewis has always been a top Best Actor contender, but Lincoln itself has either run out of gas or never had it to begin with. Certainly not the high-octane brand. Yes, it’s Steven Spielberg‘s best since Saving Private Ryan, but events aren’t falling into place. It’s over or close to it.
There’s also a little Silver Linings momentum kicking in with Bradley Cooper snagging the NBR’s Best Actor trophy. Cooper, it seems, has acquired solid-gold cred today as a Best Actor contender. No pushing him off to the sidelines or going “yeah, maybe” anymore. David O. Russell also won the Best Adapted Screenplay award for Silver Linings Playbook. SLP haters need to bow and back off and scatter for the time being.
I’ve seen Django Unchained, and if you ask me the NBR giving their Best Supporting Actor award to Leonardo DiCaprio is bullshit. They’re kowtowing to a big movie star. DiCaprio’s venal plantation-owner character has no arc, no depth…it’s just showboating. SLP‘s Robert De Niro is a far more deserving recipient. Ditto Lincoln‘s Tommy Lee Jones, The Master‘s Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Arbitrage‘s Nate Parker, or Magic Mike‘s Matthew McConaughey.
Ann Dowd winning Best Supporting Actress for Compliance is a nice thing and well deserved — good for her.
Congrats to HE’s very own Rian Johnson for winning the NBR’s Best Original Screenplay for Looper.
Wreck-It Ralph won for Best Animated Feature. The Oscar in this category will go for this or Tim Burton‘s Frankenweenie…right? The Best Directorial Debut award has gone to Benh Zeitlin for Beasts of the Southern Wild…great.
Michael Haneke‘s Amour has won the Best Foreign Language Film award. And Searching for Sugar Man has won the Best Documentary award.
