The Jonah Hill transformation story is a one-two punch. He’s broken out of comedies by nailing a good dramatic part (i.e.. baseball player analyzer Peter Brand) in a great film, Moneyball. And he’s slimmed down with a healthier diet and (presumably) a more moderate lifestyle. He’s a walking metaphor for “you can up your game and change your life.”
Jonah Hill in Toronto last September. (For some reason I forgot to take a closeup during our chat.)
Some have said that Hill’s thinner shape makes him somehow less funny. I don’t think it’s the weight. I think it’s the 1959 certified public accountant haircut that he’s been walking around with since last September. Audiences expect funny guys to look wild and rambunctious on some level, so Hill just needs to grow the hair out a bit and maybe add some whiskers. That should take care of it. You can’t look too regulated.
Last night I sat down with Hill in a room adjacent to where Moneyball was playing. We went over the usual topics and had an easy chat. The time flew. One of the things that just popped out of my mouth was a suspicion that if Stanley Kubrick had lived and was still churning out films, he’d probably want to use Hill. Kubrick liked personality guys like James Cagney, and Hill, I think, fits that mold. His energy doesn’t push through in Moneyball (it’s a very subtle performance) but it has in most of his films so far, and I think the Great Stanley K. would have seen that.
I just wrote this for the previous piece about the Pitt-Hill Moneyball q & a:
“The 28 year-old Hill slips into a new realm or membrane of some kind in Moneyball. His Peter Brand character is mostly about analytical brilliance, but he’s a guy who loves to stay out of things. His greatest comfort is blending in with the walls and the furniture. The pleasure of Hill’s performance is in the silences, the proddings, the unspoken stuff, the stillnesses, the looks of terror and trepidation.
“It’s a major growth-spurt role, and absolutely deserving of Best Supporting Actor honors, partly because Hill’s decision not to do just raunchy comedies like Get Him To The Greek and The Sitter represents the best impulse that an actor can have, which is to move up the ladder by growing his or her game.
Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill sat for a q & a last night with Entertainment Weekly‘s Dave Karger after a screening of Moneyball at Sony Studios. I’m not ignoring what they said or the still-potent pleasures of the film, but the standout moment was Pitt’s gentle handling of a strange, inappropriate confession from a gloomy guy in the left-front row who said he’d been feeling depressed and was “contemplating suicide.” Everybody in the room whispered “what the fuck?” but Pitt took it in stride and offered a nice brotherly reply.
Brad Pitt at Sony’s Cary Grant theatre following last night’s Moneyball q &a.
Here’s a super-dark YouTube clip with decent audio of the depressed guy. (It starts at the 42-second mark.) Cool-hand Pitt delivered a common-sense riff about the up-and-down-ness of things, and in a relaxed, no-big-deal sort of way. He gave the guy a little “chin up” and “I know it’s tough but it’ll get better.” The sound system was really echo-y so it’s hard to hear much but Pitt said that “life is cyclical…when you’re up and you’re up and when you’re down you’re down…it is tough, man…it’s tough…but man, it’s cyclical.”
After the discussion broke Pitt was mobbed by fans (mostly women) looking for photos and a word or two, but Pitt went over to the sad guy (whose depression, I gather, was over job and money prospects) and talked with him a bit more.
The Pitt-Hill discussion followed a 6:30 pm showing of Bennett Miller‘s Moneyball, which — yes, we need to do this once again — is still easily, absolutely and obviously the best film of the year so far, or is at least tied for that distinction alongside The Descendants.
It’s so much finer and smarter and more skillfully directed, written and performed than all the late-arriving Best Picture twirlybirds (especially and definitely including War Horse and The Artist and Hugo) that…I don’t want to get out the hammer but is there something in the water or what? The Artist, a bright shimmering bauble and a charming, silver-toned curio, is a hotter Best Picture contender than effing Moneyball? An almost comically schmaltzy, old-time manipulative Steven Spielberg horse film deserves more Best Picture love? Are we all living inside the Truman Show dome? If so, would it be okay if I become a heroin addict?
Pitt, Hill, Karger.
I realize, of course, that Moneyball doesn’t deliver conventional satisfactions (no big win at the end, no Natural-style home run, no cute dog) but it’s so amazingly singular and patient and wise and masterful. The fact that Miller allows the soundtrack to go utterly silent on several occasions is awesome in itself. Unlike other sports films and their standard strategems, it probably takes a couple of viewings to really get what Moneyball is throwing.
Plus it contains Pitt’s finest performance of his career and the best swaggering-movie-star performance in a long while. George Clooney doesn’t “swagger” as Matt King in The Descendants — he’s playing an anxious, grief-struck dad who settles into a tough situation and comes out of it in a stronger, slightly less selfish, more father-like place. Pitt’s Billy Beane is also besieged and uncertain, but he’s a little more of a kick to hang with. So perhaps he’s a notch or two ahead of Clooney…maybe.
And 28 year-old Hill slips into a new realm or membrane of some kind. His Peter Brand character is mostly about analytical brainpower, but he’s a guy who loves to stay out of things. His greatest comfort is blending in with the walls and the furniture. The pleasure of Hill’s performance is in the silences, the unspoken stuff, the stillnesses, the looks of terror and trepidation. It’s a major growth-spurt role, and absolutely deserving of Best Supporting Actor honors, partly because Hill’s decision not to do just raunchy comedies like Get Him To The Greek and The Sitter represents the best instinct or impulse that an actor can have, which is to move up the ladder by growing his or her game.
Here‘s the mp3 but good luck with understanding it due to an echo effect caused by the Sony tech guys. Pitt, Hill and Karger’s voices were audible to those in the first few rows, but their amplified voices came out of a pair of speakers in the rear which created a delayed-echo effect. Pitt would say “I’d like-like to give-give credit-credit to Bennett-Bennett Miller-Miller,” etc. Plus the mikes didn’t work half the time. (Pitt threw his to the ground.) Plus there was no light on the trio so you couldn’t really see much.
I’m sorry but the Sony tech guys get a failing grade and five demerits each. If I was their boss I would ream their ass.
Each and every time a job-appointment release is sent out, the new hire is quoted as saying that he/she is “excited” by the upcoming task or challenge or opportunity. They never omit that word…ever. And I can’t remember the last time an appointee has said they’re enthused or aroused or elated or intoxicated or intrigued or enthralled or charged or throttled or invigorated, or that they’re humming or tingling with anticipation.
They never convey an inkling of any particular passion, and in fact go to some lengths to suggest that particularity of any kind is not something they intend to even consider, much less look into.
The under-message is always the same: “It sure is nice to land a high-paying gig, and for starters I’m not going to say anything that will even vaguely hint that I’m anything other than a very grateful go-alonger.”
Even Frederic Boyer, a Frenchman and former Directors’ Fortnight honcho at the Cannes Film Festival, said be was “excited” at being named artistic director of the Tribeca Film Festival. “I could not be more honored and excited to begin this new chapter at Tribeca,” his statement read. “This Festival has matured and developed so impressively from its origins, but there are many more frontiers” blah blah…zzzzzzzz.
Please, please remove that word from job-appointment press releases for the remainder of the 21st Century…please. I’m not saying that anyone who subsequently says they’re “excited” by a new job is presumed to be a corporate drone who will do little more than follow the usual dance steps. I’m not saying that. But from here on anyone who uses the term “excited” in any official context will (and probably should) be regarded askance.
The New York Film Critics Circle and the National Board of Review are sitting down today for a screening of David Fincher‘s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, which, given what Fincher has been saying about it, may be more of a critics pick or a Fincher fanboy fave than what most of us regard as an “Academy film.”
A select group of Fincher fanboys (Hitfix‘s Drew McWeeny, First Showing‘s Alex Billington, etc.) are now watching Tattoo at Sony Studios. I thought my incessant Social Network and Zodiac ravings quaified me as a Fincher fanboy, but I guess not.
The dates and times of subsequent screenings will be made known later today, I’ve been told. I’m hoping to hear a comment or two later today from somebody about how it plays.
Hundreds of lefties were milling around the Occupy Los Angeles encampment last night when a friend and I visited around 10:30 pm. The city had announced an intention to evict the squatters for sanitation (and no doubt irritation) reasons, and so the word had gone out for people to join the protest and possibly dissuade the bulls from making their move. The cops surrounded the encampment early this morning but then backed off. No one was forcibly removed save for a few arrestees. But sooner or later the Occupy-ers will be gone.
I was there strictly as a non-militant, picture-snapping dilletante, as were many others. (Strategy p.r.’s Emily Lu was there with a friend.) I visited Occupy Wall Street a couple of times in September in the same capacity. At least I’m passing along images to several thousand people, whatever that’s worth.
We all know that the Occupy movements across the country are ragtag congregations that don’t have any particular focus other than to deliver a kind of mass theatrical be-in statement about flagrant financial criminality among the 1%, but it’s better than people wandering around in states of numbed-out fantasy and lethargy and other LexG-style mood pockets, which is what the powers-that-be would certainly prefer. The fix is in for the one-percenters, and at least the Occupy-ers are saying what they think and feel about that.
Police Chief Charlie Beck was quoted saying in a Huffington Post story filed this morning that “there is no concrete deadline” for removal of the nearly two-month-old Occupy LA camp. “About half of the 485 tents had been taken down as of Sunday night, leaving patches of the 1.7-acre park around City Hall barren of grass and strewn with garbage,” the story reports.
“The chief said he wanted to make sure the removal will be done when it was safe for protesters and officers and ‘with as little drama as possible.’
“We want to make sure that everybody knows the park is closed and there are services available, that there are alternative ways to protest,” LA mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said in an interview with MSNBC. “By the way, we will be opening up the steps of City Hall for protests, they just can’t camp out.”
Villaraigosa, a former labor organizer, earlier said he sympathizes with the movement but felt it was time it moved beyond holding on to “a particular patch of park” and that public health and safety could not be sustained for a long period.
I’m sorry if this annoys fans of the late, great Ken Russell, but he never made a better film than…you thought I was going to say Song of Summer, right? I mean Women in Love (’69), the last and only theatrical Russell film that got it more or less right — sensually crafted, high-toned, erotic, impassioned — without going over the top. I love his artist-bio wacko period (Mahler, Savage Messiah, The Music Lovers) and I’m a huge fan of Altered States, but Women in Love was/is the pinnacle.
My last encounter with the great Ken Russell happened on 7.30.10 at Manhattan’s Walter Reade theatre: “I regret to report that last night’s Film Society of Lincoln center showing of Ken Russell‘s The Devils — a kickoff of a seven day, nine-film Russell tribute — was a disappointment in some respects. Russell attended with Devils costar Vanessa Redgrave, and it was, of course, delightful to see them sitting together, and to share in the love.
Legendary director Ken Russell, Vanessa Redgrave following last night’s FSLC screening of The Devils — Friday, 7.30, 9:55 pm.
“But FSLC showed the wrong version of this 1971 classic, the print was less than mint, projection was substandard, and a befogged Russell offered no hard answers about the Devils controversy.
“I’m not faulting the 83 year-old Russell for not being a younger man, God knows. What matters is that he’s attending each and every FSLC screening and ‘making the effort’ and so on. But the fact of the matter is that Russell wasn’t very snap-crackle-pop when asked about this and that.
“The Devils print looked vaguely cruddy — poorly aligned, underlit, green scratches here and there — and was not the promised 111-minute ‘rape of Christ’ version but the 108-minute version that was originally released in the U.S. This was a massive letdown. FSLC had promised the notorious version, and I’m sure I wasn’t the only one in the room who felt burned.
“I asked series programmer (and Film Comment editor) Gavin Smith what had gone wrong, and he said it had something to do with Warner Bros. not ‘allowing’ the unrated print (which is sitting in England) into the country due to some legal blah-dee-blah. I’m still not clear on this. A FSLC screening sells tickets, of course, but isn’t a “commercial” screening as much as a museum-type showing. Will Warner Bros. ever stop messing with this film?
“In a post-screening q & a Russell offered no inside explanation as to why Warner Bros. has twice offered and then withdrawn The Devils from commercial release over the last two years. (I wasn’t persuaded that he knew the particulars about the DVD and the iTunes versions being yanked after being announced and/or offered.) All he said was that ‘they don’t want it shown,’ and something about their obstructions more or less constituting the same kind of political repression that is depicted in the film. The whole Warner Bros. thing is just infuriating, I swear.
“When I say ‘poorly aligned’ I mean that the image projected last night was too large for the screen — that the ‘throw’ was miscalculated — resulting in a significant amount of the film’s image being cropped by the projector’s aperture plate. Throw in the poor lighting and the green scratch marks and it was indisputably a substandard experience. I love film as much as the next guy, but the iTunes version of the The Devils that I rented for my iPhone? Perfect, brightly lit, immaculate.
“I asked Russell after the q & a why Song of Summer, the 1968 BBC film that he considers his all-time career best, wasn’t being shown in the series, and he just looked at the floor. (Maybe he didn’t hear me clearly.) When I asked Smith about this he didn’t seem aware that Russell once called Song of Summer ‘the best film I have ever done.’ My impression is that the FSLC never gave the idea of showing this film much thought.”
It began with In Contention‘s Kristopher Tapley triggering a major flabbergast by saying, “Speaking for myself, I think War Horse wins the lion’s share. Including pic/dir.” Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone: “You think it’s going to WIN Best Picture???” Tapley: “I do, yes.” Wells insert: “Double whoa.”
And then MSN’s Glenn Kenny joined in: “I haven’t even seen War Horse (and may not!) but will bet real money right now it will not win Best Picture.” Tapley: “Why’s that?” Kenny: “Unlike Saving Private Ryan, its antiwar fervor doesn’t tap into a resonant zeitgeist theme (in Ryan’s case, ‘greatest generation’).” Tapley: “Hmmm, that’s debatable.” Kenny: “Making Academy members cry won’t suffice. It needs to be a massive pop cult phenom as well. I say it won’t.
And then Mr. Beaks (i.e., Jeremy Smith) chimed in: “Hi! I’ve not seen War Horse yet! Care to shut up about it?” Wells to Beaks: “Tough titty. Nobody shuts up about anything on Twitter…nobody.”
That same densely forested Bourne Wood, Surrey location that we’ve all seen in Ridley Scott‘s Gladiator (that big fireball battle sequence between the Romans and those hairy Germanic guys), Scott’s Robin Hood (castle-attack scene with Russell Crowe‘s troops advancing) and Children of Men (attack on the van) makes yet another appearance in War Horse.
The instant I saw that big muddy field bordered by those telltale pine trees in War Horse, I went “c’mon…this place again?” Tim Burton‘s forthcoming Dark Shadows uses it also; it was also seen in Captain America.
During this afternoon’s MSN live chat between War Horse director Steven Spielberg and Grantland‘s Mark Harris, “War Horse has no deliberate homages to any director — not to John Ford, not even Gone With The Wind with the red sky.” (Not a precise quote but close enough.)
I’ve never understood odds or point spreads (i.e., kind of but not really), but Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neil is reporting that War Horse has dropped in terms of Best Picture racetrack odds, obviously because of reactions to WH screenings over the past two or three days. On 11.1 the top predicted favorites were The Descendants (36%), War Horse (20%) and The Artist (17%) and now it’s The Artist (37%), The Descendants (35%) and War Horse (13%). For what it’s worth. O’Neil says he’ll be running a piece tomorrow about “how far War Horse has fallen since we’ve [all] seen it.”
The first two thirds of Cameron Crowe‘s We Bought A Zoo (20th Century Fox, 12.23), which had a nationwide sneak last night, tries too hard to be endearing, or so it seemed to me. For 80 minutes or so it’s a not too bad family-type movie that works here and there. In and out, at times okay and other times oddly artificial. And then it kicks into gear during the last third and delivers some genuinely affecting sink-in moments and a truly excellent finale.
Matt Damon, imprisoned Bengal tiger in We Bought A Zoo.
The smarty-pants Twitter community was generally thumbs-up about Zoo following the sneak so I guess my mixed sourpuss feelings represent a minority view.
Matt Damon is better-than-decent in the lead role of Benjamin Mee, a nice guy who for complex emotional reasons decides to buy a zoo in the Thousand Oaks area. Scarlett Johansson is believably forceful as the head zoo keeper (or whatever the correct title is), and Thomas Haden Church is under-utilized as Damon’s advice-giving older brother. The stand-out performance comes from 14 year-old Colin Ford, I feel. There’s also a surprisingly inconsequential, poorly written one given by Elle Fanning, who by the way wears too much eye makeup.
The first two thirds are better at delivering family-friendly studio schmaltz than War Horse, but that’s not saying much. It suffers from on-the-nose dialogue and a bad case of the cutes, which is what happens when Crowe’s magical realism vibe doesn’t quite lift off the ground because the exact right notes haven’t been found or hit. The movie never really transforms into a suspension-of-disbelief thing. You’re constantly aware that you’re sitting in a theatre seat watching actors speak that tangy, semi-natural-sounding, spiritually upbeat Crowe dialogue and listening to the usual nifty Crowe-selected rock tunes (“Cinnamon Girl”, “Bucket of Rain”, etc.).
But the last third kicks in with better-than-decent emotional conflict and payoff scenes, and the heart element finally settles in from time to time, and there’s a great diatribe against the use of the word “whatever” and an exceptional father-son argument scene and nice use of refrain (“Why not?”). Endings are half the game, and by that rule or standard We Bought A Zoo saves itself. It won’t kill you to see it, and you might like the first two-thirds more than I did. Whatever.
Johansson gets to do a lot of arguing and shouting in this thing, and at some point I began saying to myself, “Jesus, I wouldn’t ever want to be in an argument with her…she’s really angry and adamant and unyielding.” And I began to think that I might be sensing, maybe, how her marriage to Ryan Reynolds came apart.
Damon, Johansson, Cameron Crowe during filming of We Bought A Zoo
The film is based on Benjamin Mee‘s true-life, this is what really happened book of the same title, but it’s been personalized by Crowe to some extent and is basically about recovering from loss, grief, trauma. Crowe’s marriage fell apart in 2008 and his career hit a land mine in 2005 with Elizabethtown and then stalled again with mysterious shutdown of Deep Tiki in late ’08/early ’09 so Zoo is actually his story on one level or another, I suspect.
But my basic feeling about We Bought A Zoo is similar to a line that former Secretary of State James Baker once said about a senior Iraqi official during the 1991 Gulf War: “A good diplomat with a bad brief.”
We Bought A Zoo is harmlessly decent family pap, but it rests upon a fundamentally rancid notion that zoos are cool. Zoos are emphatically not cool. I’ve been to zoos three or four times in my life and I like checking out the giraffes and lions and orangutans as much as the next guy, but they’re built on the conceit that animals living sullen and diminished lives inside cages are entertaining, and that looking at these creatures from the safe side of a cage and chuckling at their behavior and smelling their scent somehow enhances our lives by connecting us (or our kids) to nature. Which is, of course, horseshit.
Outside of the makers of this film and zoo owners and clueless lower-middle-class Walmart types, I don’t think there are any intelligent and compassionate people on the planet who believe zoos are a good idea. At best they’re an unfortunate idea. A message during the end credits informs that Mee’s zoo in England (i.e., Dartmoor Zoological Park) is a highly respected one, but it’s still a zoo.
Last month’s exotic animal slaughter in Ohio reminded a lot of us that it’s fundamentally wrong to keep exotic animals in cages to satisfy some bizarre emotional longing to bond with them, which, outside of respectably maintained zoos, is some kind of low-rent, Middle-American scumbag thing. Remember how Tony Montana kept a Bengal tiger chained up on the grounds of his mansion?
Zoos are prisons, and it’s dead wrong to sentence animals to life terms in them, however spacious and well-maintained their cages or how loving and caring and compassionate their keepers may be. Zoo animals don’t live in “enclosures,” as zoo-keepers prefer to call them these days. They live in effing jail cells just like Jimmy Cagney and George Raft did in Each Dawn I Die, or Elvis Presley in Jailhouse Rock.
Crowe is renowned for using great rock-music tracks in his film, but I doubt if he ever considered using Presley’s “I Want To Be Free” for We Bought A Zoo. I thought of it last night when I was driving home from the screening, I can tell you.
