Daily

“Your need to take Oprah down is bizarre,” Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone wrote yesterday in response to my “Oprah Facing Reality” piece. It’s not a takedown thing, I replied. I was simply noting the Grand Canyon-sized gulf between a serious award-quality performance like Lupita N’yongo‘s in 12 Years A Slave and a highly respectable performance like Oprah Winfrey‘s in The Butler. I was simply saying (with no neurotic agenda of any kind) that you can’t compare the two — they don’t exist in the same realm.

“Both women give great performances,” Stone wrote. Wells response: Oprah gives a very fine performance in The Butler, but Stone isn’t showing respect for the word “great.” We all need to apply exactitude and proportion in our use of the English language or it just becomes Swahili. “One [performance] happens to be in a film [that] all of the critics and festival goers like so far,” Stone explains. “But that doesn’t mean you can draw such conclusions as this early on. There will be many names bandied about all season long. And it’s really, really early.” Wells response: I’m not sure but I think what Sasha really meant to say was, “It’s September, for God’s sake.”

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Variety‘s Justin Chang: “I take it we’re in the same boat. I haven’t seen 12 years A Slave…” Grantland‘s Mark Harris: “And neither have I. Yeah, nothing’s changed since I wrote that Grantland column a few days ago.” Chang: “We’ll both be up to speed soon.” Harris: “It’s just that I just keep saying to myself…” Chang: “That…what, that it’s only September and we all need to calm down?” Harris: “Yeah, okay, I said that but my thinking has evolved. I mean, what are the people who went to Telluride and Toronto supposed to do? Forget that they saw 12 Years A Slave? Expunge it from their memories? These are the hot times, right now…the post-festival rumpus, the runaround, fingers to the wind. We can’t stick our heads in the sand, Justin. We have to get with the program.”

Is there anyone who’s seen Steve McQueen‘s 12 Years A Slave (i.e., not Mark Harris) who doesn’t feel that Lupita Nyong’o‘s performance is searing and breathtaking and yaddah-yaddah? Is there anyone who’s seen 12 Years A Slave and The Butler who believes that Oprah Winfrey‘s very good-but-not-quite-stupendous performance in the latter even approaches the calibre of Nyongo’s, much less competes with it? I’ve been contending all along that if Winfrey wasn’t a super-mogul billionaire she wouldn’t be in the conversation in the first place, but at least now she’s up against someone who’s hit a genuine grand slam. The other contenders in this category are, in this order, Sally Hawkins in Blue Jasmine, Margo Martindale in August: Osage County, June Squibb in Nebraska, Octavia Spencer in Fruitvale Station and (maybe) Carey Mulligan in Inside Llewyn Davis. What does Mark Harris think about all this other than “it’s September, for God’s sake”?

I’m watching this Grace of Monaco teaser without headphones in a noisy Coffee Bean cafe at the corner of 14th and Ninth Ave., but I’m guessing that the balding older guy reclining in the back seat of a Rolls Royce convertible as it rolls up to a scenic spot above Monaco is Alfred Hitchcock (who is played in the film by Roger Ashton-Griffiths)? Ditto the portly guy seen in distant silhouette in the next clip? Olivier Dahan‘s drama, which is curiously not about the 1955 and ’56 courtship and marriage between Grace Kelly and Prince Rainer nor about her death in 1982, will open on 11.27 via the Weinstein Co. No way in hell will I ever accept Tim Roth as Rainer…forget it. They should have cast Tom Hanks.

This morning I saw the alleged “Final Cut” of Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man (’73). But the word “final” is deceptive because it’s not the fabled 99- or 100-minute version but a 94-minute “middle” version. For marketing purposes Rialto Pictures is calling it the end-all and be-all, but in the mind of any honest archivist it’s not. It’s certainly preferable to the butchered 87-minute cut that was released in 1973 but it’s an an “almost but no cigar” restoration. Hardy has said that the 94-minute cut has his “blessing” and that’s fine, but it doesn’t appear to be the version he initially cut together. To repeat, the 94-minute “middle version” lies in the foggy netherworld between the 87-minute theatrical cut and the 99- or 100-minute long version. Archivist Steve Phillips has catalogued much of the material contained in the version I saw this morning (which the printed press materials say is 94 minutes long but you never know). Here’s Phillips’ Wicker Man home page. The middle version reminded me what a superb actor Edward Woodward was and always will be in the minds of his fans. He never failed to deliver right on the mark. The man had balls, class, conviction, diction, passion.

Manhattan life is plagued by many irritations. I hate the fact that subway car doors frequently don’t open for several seconds after the train stops at a station. (In Paris you can manually open the doors yourself with that silver latch handle thing.) But the biggest drag these days (for me anyway) are the slowpokes on the street and especially in the subways. I’m not saying they have to race around like crazy rats, but what’s wrong with walking with a purposeful stride? Very few charge around like yours truly, it seems, and the ones that are really slow and obstructionist and are always blocking the sidewalks in groups of five or six or more…I was going to say it’s the tourists but I’m starting to think it’s almost everyone these days except for X-factor types. For me walking around Manhattan is exhilarating exercise, especially if you walk with a little bounce in your step; for the vast majority it’s apparently something to be endured by reducing energy expenditure as much as possible and shuffling around like 80somethings.

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I saw an IMAX 3D version of Victor Fleming‘s The Wizard of Oz at 10 am this morning at Leows’ Kips Bay. The screen was fairly small so I wouldn’t call it a genuine IMAX presentation, but the 3D was real enough. I have to be honest and say that while it felt interesting to watch this 1939 classic in 3D, the experience didn’t floor me. The conversion was very nicely done, I felt — tasteful, subtle, unintrusive. So subtle, in fact, that after a while I kind of forgot that I was watching 3D. The same thing happened when I watched the 3D-converted Titanic. The 3D process just starts to take a back seat to the content of the film. You get used to it and then you start to forget about it.

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I think we all knew this, but now it’s reflected in a chart — fine. Update: It was announced two or three hours ago that Steve McQueen‘s period film has won the Toronto Film Festival Audience Award. If Joe and Jane Popcorn liked it in Toronto, it suggests that Academy bluehairs might be open to it also. Three days ago Grantland‘s Mark Harris told the LA/NY award-season cognoscenti to calm down (“It’s September, for God’s sake”), but what’s he thinking now, I wonder?

Here’s that 1990 Peter Ustinov interview for the Criterion Spartacus laser disc. Ustinov’s recollections of Charles Laughton (from 9:00 to 15:00) are priceless, particularly his mimicking of Laughton’s blinking and twitching. Ustinov’s description of Laughton — “An extremely vulnerable and sensitive soul who went through life just waiting to be offended” — strikes a chord. When I wake up and start my day I know that something appalling or offensive is just waiting around the corner, and that the only way to keep this encounter from happening is to stay indoors and just write. But if I do that I’ll eventually run out of material.

During the Toronto Film Festival I was told to steer clear of Matthew Weiner‘s You Are Here, a kind of mixed-bag relationship dramedy with Owen Wilson, Zach Galifianakis, Amy Poehler and Laura Ramsey. Part of me didn’t want to see this anyway because I can’t stand Galifianakis so I passed. As it turned out most of the reviews were negative. But a complaint voiced by Hitfix‘s Gregory Ellwood in a recent TIFF sum-up piece rubs me the wrong way.

“Weiner’s passion project about two buddies getting their lives back on track couldn’t decide what it wanted to be,” Ellwood writes. “A drama? A comedy? A farce?” My immediate reaction was “why does a movie have to decide what it precisely is in terms of tone and approach? Why can’t it be a blend? Why can’t a film accomodate differing attitudes and moods simultaneously or at least shift between them? Isn’t that what life is like sometimes?

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How many scripts would be out the window if there was suddenly a worldwide ban on all plots driven or influenced by alchoholism, drug addiction, economic desperation caused by drugs or booze, low-rent assholery and obesity (i.e., traits largely owned by the lower-middle-classes and underclass)? A third? More? I for one would be ecstatic if this rule were to be implemented. I realize that Hollywood perversely needs the primitive-appetites class because they lead to bad situations and thereby provide lots of raw material. But the less these tendencies are part of your own life (or the lives of your friends and family members) the more boring they seem. If I never see another movie about an alcoholic (unless it’s something exceptional like Leaving Las Vegas) or drug addict (unless it’s something exceptional like The Basketball Diaries) it’ll be too soon. What if the MPAA could rate films ALMCL (“about lower middle-class losers”) in addition to moralistic ratings concerning sex and violence?

Jason Statham programmers are almost always about lowbrow grunt-rage, but I was half into the idea of seeing this thing because of the presence of James Franco and Kate Bosworth (too slim and pretty to be living in Yeehawville?) in adverserial roles. But Gary Fleder directing and Sylvester Stallone producing and co-writing probably means exactly what you think it means.