Daily

After catching Alexander Payne‘s Nebraska at the Cannes Film Festival, I wrote that Bruce Dern‘s portrayal of the snarly, alcoholic, partly deluded Woody — good as it is — is essentially a supporting performance. It doesn’t matter if it resulted in a Best Actor prize at Cannes. A lead actor shoulders the burden of the story and conveys some kind of meaningful arc, and Woody doesn’t shoulder anything in Nebraska — he is, in fact, the burden. Woody doesn’t man up or chicken out. He doesn’t carry the weight or fail to do so. He is strictly color and consternation and snarl-crackle-pop.

Bruce Dern, Will Forte in Alexander Payne’s Nebraska.

But In Contention‘s Kris Tapley disagrees, and so, he says, does Paramount’s marketing team. They intend to run Dern for Best Actor. Due respect but they should reconsider. Really. I love Dern as a guy to shoot the shit with and I fully admire and respect his Woody performance and I’d really like to see him win. Woody + career achievement award = good vibes all around. But it has to be for Best Supporting Actor. Why make it tough on yourselves? Dern will be a slam-dunk in that category.

Here’s how Tapley and I kicked it around. I also asked Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone to jump in at the last minute:

Read more

In my 2.9.13 review of Peter Landesman‘s Parkland script, I wrote that “some of the descriptions of JFK’s wounds and certain procedures followed in the trauma room indicate that Parkland (Open Road, 9.20) will be fairly bloody and graphic here and there. Not for the squeamish unless, of course, editing intercedes.” Apparently editing has interceded because the Parkland trailer is announcing a PG-13 rating. That or the MPAA guys weren’t that riled about gobs of blood and brain matter spilling onto Zac Efron‘s operating table.

In Bennett Miller‘s Foxcatcher (Sony Classics, 12.20), Steve Carell plays chemical heir John du Pont who went to prison for the 1996 murder of former Olympic wrestler David Schultz (Mark Ruffalo). “Carell’s face is changed and his physicality changed,” Miller tells Entertainment Weekly. “If I say I’m going to make a movie about a guy who’s a schizophrenic murderer, there are probably a dozen actors who would immediately appear on anybody’s casting list. And Steve would not be on any of [them]. And that’s a good thing. Because it’s unexpected.”

(l.) Steve Carell as John du Pont in Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher (Sony Classics, 12.20); (r.) the real du Point in 1996 after two-day standoff with police following murder of Olympic gold-medal wrestler Dave Schultz.

Read more

For the first time I have an idea of what Ridley Scott‘s The Counselor (20th Century Fox, 10.25) will actually sound and feel like, dialogue- and behavior-wise. The previous trailers have been all moody whirlysmash cut-cut-cut impressionism. Brad Pitt‘s line about how drug dealers “don’t believe in coincidence” was, of course, first spoken by John Vernon in Don Siegel‘s Charley Varrick. What is this, the sixth or seventh trailer we’ve seen for this film?

The American rural right showed its racist colors when Barack Obama began running for president in ’07. Then came the Tea Party, a rural-southern-white movement that was more of a response to the Obama metaphor (multi-culturalism is the new reality, whiteys don’t exclusively run the show any more) than Obama himself. Obama has been in office five years now. Is there anyone who thinks that it’s a “whoa” to talk about the racist under-agenda in this country? Yes — The Butler director Lee Daniels. When CNN’s Piers Morgan asks if he thinks America is a more or less racist country since Obama’s election, Daniels says, “Wow…that’s a powerful question!”

A little while ago Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone mentioned a form of pushback that I’m calling the Perv Retort. If you’re a straight male columnist and you’ve gotten really riled up by the performance of a young and beautiful actress (like Blue Is The Warmest Color‘s Adele Exarchopoulos), it’ll be presumed by the community at large that you’re expressing a form of libidinal arousal and are therefore off-balance to some extent. Therefore your opinion has to be at least partly discounted because you’re probably using one hand to write and the other hand to do something else.

Same thing if you’re a gay male columnist and you’re really taken with a performance by a young male actor or a really good-looking actor in his 30s or 40s, even. It will be widely presumed that your perceptions have been colored by your day-dreaming about this actor in a certain context, and therefore your opinion about his performance being award-worthy goes right into the trash can.

Read more

Read more

Legendary crime novelist Elmore Leonard, who wrote thousands upon thousands of the most beautifully shaped sentences and digressive dialogue riffs I’ve ever read in my life and who incidentally influenced the living shit out of me, has ascended and is now hanging out with Dennis Farina. A stroke took him down. He was 87. A Detroit guy through and through. Well, a Bloomfield Hills guy. **

Leonard wrote and wrote and wrote for…what, sixty-five years straight? He never stopped working and enjoyed a brilliant hot streak during the ’80s and ’90s. And he boiled the bullshit out of his prose each and every time he put pen to paper. And he was nice enough to talk with me on the phone a few times during my reporting days with Entertainment Weekly and People and the L.A. Times Syndicate. He didn’t even hiccup when I called him “Dutch” a couple of times.

Read more

It was announced earlier today that Randy Moore‘s Escape From Tomorrow, the black-and-white Disneyland-meets-The Shining fantasia that played Sundance ’13, will be released commercially on 1.1 by Cinetic Media’s PDA. Pic will open theatrically as well as day-and-date on VOD. The public will see a somewhat shorter version than the one that played at Sundance. Here’s what I wrote after seeing it last January:

“Set entirely in Disneyland and shot in black-and-white, it’s basically a riff on The Shining with a vein of social criticism about pudgy, desperate, flabby-brained Americans indulging themselves with sugar, booze and fantasy while corporations control and exploit them like cattle. Is this not the central middle-class affliction of the 21st Century?

Read more

Dick Van Dyke‘s hot-shit Jaguar caught on fire earlier today when he was driving on the 101 near Calabassas. The car melted but DVD got out okay and everything’s fine. But since when do late-model Jaguars, which are very expensive, very well-made cars, burst into flames? Van Dyke to Jaguar salesman: “And what are the chances…you know, just between you and me and the walls with no recording devices…what are the chances of this little honey bursting into flames when I’m on the freeway?” Jaguar salesman to Van Dyke: “Oh, fairly remote, I’d say. Okay, maybe a 5% chance. But that’s the chance everyone takes when they buy a Jaguar. Under the wrong conditions they can turn into tinderboxes. But hey…just concentrate on the 95% chance that it won’t happen.”

Dick Van Dyke

Read more

Almost every damn year the same thing happens. Journalists who’ve attended the Berlin or Cannes festivals praise a knockout performance in a small or foreign indie release (like Adele Exarchopoulos in Blue Is The Warmest Color) and mention the idea of this actor or actress being a contender on the awards circuit, and right away the middle-of-the-road handicappers say “well, that’s very nice but veteran industry types and journalists in this country are more comfortable with nominating familiar faces, and so we think that the following brand-name actresses are the likeliest contenders.”

Except by saying and writing this crap they’re perpetuating default thinking. They’re not describing industry complacency — they’re winking at it and nudging it along.

Read more

Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neil has urged his Oscar experts (including myself) to make some predictions. It’s a bit silly to do this before Telluride/Toronto/New York but what the hell. Out of ten Best Picture spitballers, four are predicting David O. Russell‘s American Hustle, two are betting on Martin Scorsese‘s Wolf of Wall Street and two are predicting Alexander Payne‘s Nebraska. Except Nebraska is not going to win Best Picture — get real. It’s a good film, but on the Payne scale it’s a middle-ranger. Bruce Dern has a good shot in the Best Supporting Actor race (forget Best Actor) and it’s conceivable that June Squibb could prevail as a Best Supporting Actress contender.

Here are my transitional, know-nothing picks for the leading Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor contenders:

Read more