Sasha Stone and I knocked off a pretty good Oscar Poker on Tuesday. The usual Oscar round-up stuff. Sasha put it up last night and forgot to tell me. Here’s a stand-alone mp3 link.
Sasha Stone and I knocked off a pretty good Oscar Poker on Tuesday. The usual Oscar round-up stuff. Sasha put it up last night and forgot to tell me. Here’s a stand-alone mp3 link.
I’m fairly certain this Bodyguard Bluray wasn’t rushed out in the wake of Whitney Houston‘s death. These things are planned months in advance. I saw this Warner Bros. release a little more than 19 years ago, and I remember almost nothing about it. (I had to read the Wiki synopsis to catch up.) All I remember is that Costner took some heat for wearing an unflattering Steve McQueen haircut. Mick Jackson, the director, has done L.A. Story before The Bodyguard, he made Clean Slate (’94) and Volcano (’97) after it…and that was it.
There are those few, those enlightened few, who understood the rhyme and the purity of Haywire, and there are those who will always kowtow to Asian martial-arts machismo-fantasy bullshit — easily the most lethally boring and spiritually depleting genre on the planet. The place where the latter group is hanging out is a place I’ll never want to visit.
I’ver been so bummed by the whole Oscar situation that I didn’t update my Gold Derby predictions until last night, and that was mainly because Tom O’Neil kicked my ass and told me I hadn’t updated “since the Coolidge administration.” All I can say is God help the Academy (i.e., the Oscar telecast) if they have another lineup like this next year. The lack of fire and suspense and just plain interest is breathtaking. Harvey’s win (and no slam on the guy — he’s just doing what he does and God love him) is the film community’s loss.
Sean Baker‘s Starlet, which will premiere at South by Southwest, takes its title from the name of a Chihuahua owned by the lead character, Jane (Dree Hemingway), an aimless San Fernando Valley youth. This indicates, of course, that the film is committed to an oblique strategy of sorts as it conveys…how do I know what it conveys? It’s about Jane and her no-account doper friends and an 85 year-old woman (Besedka Johnson) and a stash of cash.
In real life the only people who smoke are the really young, the lower-middle and lower classes, the anxiety-ridden, the self-destructives, the jerkoffs, losers and wipeouts. But in filmed dramas (i.e., definitely not comedies), almost all young actors smoke. Constantly. Because it gives them something to do with their hands, and because directors want them to feel steady and confident as they’re delivering lines. In short, smoking by actors is a mark of creative insecurity and weakness. The more people smoke in a film, the less I’m inclined to go with it.
It is obligatory, of course, that all publicity efforts and promotional materials must not only ignore but flirt with suppressing the facts about a young actress’s lineage, if she happens to have one of any note. Because the idea of a young person born with a silver spoon always stirs resentment. Ms. Hemingway, as you might have guessed, is a great-granddaughter of Papa, and the daughter of Mariel Hemingway. She’s 24, 5’9″ tall, and a beneficiary of classical Shakespearean acting training at London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Perhaps in some way this background has foritified her portrayal of a white-trash girl in Starlet, but not likely.
An orally suggestive poster for Goon, the violent and presumably vulgar hockey comedy that Alliance is opening tomorrow in Canada, has been 86’ed at various Toronto transit shelters due to complaints, etc. The poster shows Canadian hyphenate Jay Baruchel, who co-wrote (with Evan Goldberg) and costars, making a gesture with his fingers and tongue that seems to suggest…what, analingus?
The film costars Seann William Scott, Liev Schreiber and Baruchel.
As I said on 2.8, “I’m sorry but I’m not getting the same sense of ironic hooligan satire from Goon that I did from the Hanson Brothers drawing blood in George Roy Hill‘s Slap Shot. But I’ll bet that the Goon guys (director Michael Dowse, screenwriters Jay Baruchel and Evan Goldberg) took their inspiration from the Hanson Brothers.
Magnet is releasing the film stateside on VOD starting tomorrow, and in theatres on 3.30. Nobody has told me dick about any LA press screenings.
Ben Zauzmer is a Harvard freshman interested in movies and math, and the creator of Oscarforecast, which presents Oscar predictions based solely on rigorous and dispassionate mathematical analysis. Ben’s calculations include “previous Oscar results, other awards shows, current nominations, critic scores, and guild awards,” he explains. “All of these numbers — over 5,000 data points! — were plugged into a bit of matrix algebra.”
And his system is predicting a Meryl Streep win for Best Actress. By a nosehair (0.7%), but still…Viola Davis gets the shaft? Everyone was sensing the closeness of this race, but I thought everything shifted in Davis’s favor two or three weeks ago. I’m not sure I buy it (or if anyone will), but Davis’s supporters now have a little something to fret about.
Ben ducked out of four categories (Best Makeup, Best Doc Short Subject, Best Animated Short, Best Live Action Short), because, he says, “there wasn’t enough data or indicators to create a reliable percentage score for each movie.”
In any event, here’s his rundown.
“We need to stop glorifying the past and learn how to change for the future, and no film from last year — nominated for Best Picture or not — does that better than Moneyball,” writes Cinemablend’s Eric Eisenberg. “No movie released in 2011 better represents the era in which we are living, and the magnitude of that fact is why Bennett Miller‘s baseball drama should take home the Best Picture prize at this year’s Academy Awards.
“At the end of Moneyball, Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) takes a meeting with John W. Henry, the owner of the Boston Red Sox, who offers the A’s manager a $12.5 million salary to run Boston’s organization. During their conversation, Henry (Arliss Howard), dispenses this bit of wisdom:
“The first guy through the wall…he always gets bloody…always. This is threatening not just a way of doing business…but in their minds, it’s threatening the game. Really what it’s threatening is their livelihood, their jobs. It’s threatening the way they do things…and every time that happens, whether it’s the government, a way of doing business, whatever, the people who are holding the reins – they have their hands on the switch – they go batshit crazy.”
“We, as a nation, are covered in blood. In the last three years we have seen health care reform that could eventually help us reach the standards set by other first-world nations, troop withdrawal from Iraq, and economic reform that has seen the unemployment rate finally start to drop. And every change has been met with debate, dispute, denunciations, and disparagement.
“But then you have the 2004 Red Sox. Embracing the methodology propagated by Beane, the organization won its first championship in 86 years. Change turned into triumph, and that social message is displayed perfectly in Moneyball. And that not only deserves to be celebrated, but needs to be rewarded.”
“I am willing to bet that a huge number of [Academy Award] ballots are cast for pictures and performances purely on hearsay. That is why pictures that make money are preferred to pictures that make history. Industry people have to see the money makers for instruction in ‘new trends.’ Mere merit is no particular inducement.” — A 1970s quote from esteemed film critic Andrew Sarris, as quoted by Paste Magazine‘s Braxton Pope in a 2.22 Oscar assessment piece.
The cheesy Ranker.com sent me a piece called “The Top 7 Manliest Sword-fights on Film.” Before even looking at it, I made a bet with myself that they wouldn’t include any of the sword fights in Ridley Scott‘s The Duellist (’77). And of course, they haven’t. Either they’ve never seen it, or they don’t think Scott’s duels are adrenalized enough. In my book The Duellists is on par with Barry Lyndon.
This is not what concerns Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea about Sacha Baron Cohen. The issue is that he’s played out his string as a put-on absurdist who goes all outlandish and orifrice-y with unsuspecting chumps, etc. It peaked with Borat, began winding down with Bruno and now it’s over with the upcoming The Dictator. (The trailer suggests it’s more of the same.) It’s been 18 months since the Freddy Mercury project was announced — what’s up with that?
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