The final Best Feature Documentary short list is out and yes, it’s true — Sydney Pollack‘s Sketches of Frank Gehry, Christopher Quinn‘s God Grew Tired of Us, and Christopher Creadon‘s Wordplay have been given the shaft.
Every year pedestrian docs are put on the list and some really exceptional ones are blown off. We can only assume this is because those who choose the finalists aren’t all that hip or perceptive. If not, what are we to assume…the opposite? People have been snickering about these guys for a long time. They earned lifelong notoriety for blowing off Grizzly Man last year.
I can say for sure that there are three respectable so-so’s (and in my opinion films of a much lesser calibure) among the finalists: (a) Blindsight, Lucy Walker’s perfectly fine but obvious doc about six blind Tibetan students tryign to ascend Mt. Everest; (b) Stanley Nelson‘s Jonestown: The Life and Death of People’s Temple, which, in my view, pulls too many punches (“What happened in Jonestown was NC-17, but Nelson’s doc is strictly PG-13…there’s no anger or fire in it…no ghastly details, none of the horror, not enough particulars about Jones’ sleazy seducer tendencies”); and (c) Barbara Kopple‘s Shut Up & Sing, the Dixie Chicks vs. conservative Bush-lovers doc, which is only pretty good.
The other short-listers are Can Mr. Smith Get to Washington Anymore?, Deliver Us from Evil, The Ground Truth, An Inconvenient Truth, Iraq in Fragments, Jesus Camp, My Country, My Country, Sisters in Law, Storm of Emotions, The Trials of Darryl Hunt (the Bend Film Festival double-winner!), An Unreasonable Man and The War Tapes.

This Michael Fleming description of Matthew Carnahan‘s Lions for Lambs, which Robert Redford will direct and co-star in for Tom Cruise and Paula Wagner‘s revived United Artists, is more intriguing that the one I read in his Variety column in mid-October.

It’s basically three intertwining, almost Babel-like storylines: Cruise as “a congressman who interacts with a journalist (Meryl Streep); Redford as an idealistic professor who attempts to inspire a privileged student in his class; and a third storyline about a pair of American soldiers wounded in enemy territory, one of whom is Redford’s former student.” I can see this…it sounds good.
The third storyline takes place, if I recall Fleming’s earlier summation correctly, in Afghanistan. I think now is the time for everyone to remember that in The Hot Rock, the 1971 caper flick which Redford co-starred, the words that trigger a state of instant reactivated hypnosis in a safe-deposit-box manager are “Afghanistan banana-stan.” Think about that.

If I were an insolent, lazy-assed Mercer Hotel employee or Naomi Campbell‘s maid, I would much rather duck an oncoming flying table phone (i.e., lightweight plastic, not that dense or heavy) than a Cruise-missile like cell phone. Cell phones are small, hard and dangerous, and if you get squarely beaned by one I imagine it would hurt like hell. Then again, it depends on the celebrity’s throwing arm and how angry he/she is.

“I saw The Fountain yesterday, and I have to say it’s just about the trippiest film since 2001. They should hand out bongs to every patron because this puppy demands to be seen stoned. It’s kind of a mess, but I admire Aronofsky’s chutzpah and the essential message that loves survives death. And those last 15 minutes? I felt like I was having an acid flashback.

“Sitting behind me, incidentally, were the geezer triumvirate of Jeffrey Lyons, Rex Reed and Susan Granger. The film ended, and they collectively gasped ‘what was that about?’ They need to chow down on some hash brownies.” — Manhattan-based film journalist Lewis Beale.

“I have real issues with how the Village Voice writes about film,” former New York Press critic Matt Zoller Seitz has told The Reeler‘s Stu VanAirsdale in a piece about the woes of that once great downtown weekly. “The language they use; the tone that they take; the political attitudes that are infused into almost every single piece that runs.
“But the breadth of their coverage? Nobody can touch it. It’s the gold standard. Nobody comes close, not even the New York Times, because the New York Times won’t bust out some little off-the-wall, American independent film. They won’t run an 800 or 1,000-word feature on a filmmaker from Asia or Europe just because they think they’re interesting.
“The Voice has been traditionally the only game in town; they’re the guys who have been holding down the fort for eclectic filmgoing. And either they’re going to continue to do that or they’re not. The tone that the writing takes is secondary to the breadth of the coverage, and that’s what I’m going to be looking for.”

“Curse of the Golden Flower (Sony Pictures Classics, 12.14), Zhang Yimou‘s strangest and most troubled film, abounds in hysterical, mannered Tang Dynasty-era palace intrigue and dehumanized CGI battle sequences,” declares Variety‘s Robert Koehler. “Zhang captured a rich wife’s sequestered life poetically in Raise the Red Lantern, but a similar sense of isolation in Curse turns almost suffocating, as royals tear themselves apart with much actorish emoting along the way. Despite superstars Chow Yun-fat and Gong Li leading the lavish enterprise, pic is unlikely to approach international B.O. numbers of Zhang’s far more vigorous period epics, Hero and House of Flying Daggers.”

Harvey Weinstein has made an exclusive DVD deal with Blockbuster Video — the Orwellian anti-Christ of DVD retail — by which all Weinstein Co. releases will be solely available at Blockbuster beginning in January ’07. The four-year agreement cuts out Netflix, Movie Gallery and I don’t know how many others.
The piece says that the Weinstein Co. has “also been strengthening ties” with Wal-Mart. I guess that means that Wal-Mart will have lots of “for sale” copies, I guess.
The basic offshoot is that if you want to rent Factory Girl, Shut Up & Sing or Bobby next spring, you’ll have to hold your nose and visit a Blockbuster store, which I refuse to do on general principle. The deal must have been really sweet for Harvey to have done such a thing. It must be a cash-flow issue that needed fixing. Variety‘s Steven Zeitchik provided the scoop.

I would normally have Thursday night’s All The President’s Men 30th anniversary screening at the Academy (which will include a chat between producer-star Robert Redford and Newsweek critic David Ansen) at the top of my list, but there’s a big-deal Children of Men screening in Westwood with an after-party that Alfonso Cuaron and Clive Owen are attending… so that’s that.

I’m not all that heartbroken because I felt I’d connected with the All The President’s Men mystique and present-tense relevancy factors after watching two brilliant mini-documentaries last Fenruary that were part of Warner Home Video’s All The President’s Men double-disc special edition DVD. (Which I briefly mentioned at the time.) Both were made by Los Angeles-based documentarian Gary Leva .
The docs — an 18-minute piece called Woodward and Bernstein: Lighting the Fire and another called Out of the Shadows: The Man Who Was Deep Throat — are especially valuable and noteworthy because they’re serious looks at the state of U.S. journalism today rather than typical celebrate-the-movie puff pieces. They’re basically about how journalism has gone downhill since the days of Watergate and, by implication, how attempts to muscle journalists under the Bush administration are just as bad if not worse today than they were under the Nixon administration in the early ’70s.
The Academy people should make video-audio recordings of tomorrow night’s event and put them up on their site.

I have one or two quibbles with this generic early Oscar buzz rundown from the San Francisco Chronicle‘s Ruthie Stein, but none that are worth arguing about. Naah, let’s argue. Her second-tier Best Picture group (i.e., not the most likely but hanging in there) include Little Children (all but dead due to non-existent box-office and Jackie Earl Haley ick factor), The Illusionist (pic’s little-engine-that-could hit status has won industry-wide respect, but Best Picture talk is zip), Flags of Our Fathers (Stein acknowledges mixed reviews and a disappointing audience response but theorizes that the Academy’s respect for Eastwood may see it through — that was the case three or four weeks ago, not now), and the tag team known as “German Shepherd” — i.e., The Good German (which won’t happen), and The Good Shepherd (ditto).
Stein also has Factory Girl‘s Guy Pearce in as a possible Best Actor contender …nope. His Andy Warhol is the best I’ve ever seen (and his screen time is being expanded as we speak) but the part if obviously a supporting one, and I can’t imagine anyone saying different.

Borat producer Jay Roach telling MTV.com’s Josh Horowitz that there’s “hope” for a Borat sequel makes for an insubstantial item. As in very. “We’ve talked a lot about [a sequel]… we have talked about ideas to try different stuff,” Horowitz quotes him as having recently said. To have not discussed a sequel after that $26 million opening weekend would have been moronic The Borat character could obviously just keep rolling and offending ad infinitum in sequels or on the tube. (And to make it worse, MTV.com is running those awful Da Vinci Code special-edition DVD video clips as I write this.)

Martin Campbell‘s Casino Royale (Columbia, 11.17), which I finally saw Tuesday night (a certain Sony strategist kept me from seeing it beforehand), is more killer than I expected. It’s a hard package of smart, not-too-formulaic, tough-as-nails filmmaking with barely a remnant of the smart-ass sexual conquistador attitude that permeated the late Sean Connery, Roger Moore and Pierce Brosnan Bonds. I’d read it was exceptional and had a return-to-early- Connery quality, but I suspected this talk might be overblown. It’s not.

Color still from a scene that’s presented in black-and-white during the first five or six minutes of Casino Royale

That whole shaken-not-stirred, sexual-smoothie-in-a-tuxedo, Walther PPK stud-with-a-quip thing has been thrown out the window, finally and praise God. The influence of producers Michael Wilson and Barbara Broccoli is finally dead, dead…and ding-dong to that! Wilson-Broccoli have naturally been trying to sell the notion they were four-square behind this new incarnation, but don’t buy it. They’ve been the invisible-car bad guys — stooge caretakers — since they grabbed the reins in the mid ’90s. The startling coolness of this new film happened in spite of Wilson-Broccoli, not because of them.
Due in no small part to Daniel Craig‘s totally-unto-itself, ace-level performance, Royale is certainly the best James Bond film in over 40 years and is close to being the best Bond ever. I still feel on some level that Dr. No and From Russia With Love have an old-hat specialness because the early ’60s era in which they were made isn’t that far removed from the early ’50s zeitgeist that informed the early 007 novels from Ian Fleming, and because they’re lean and unencumbered by the high-tech, bigger-is-better stuff that began to envelope the films in the mid ’60s.
But that’s what’s so pleasurable about Casino Royale — the return to low-techitude. No Q, no outlandish gadgets, lots of running and hand-to-hand fighting and straight shootings. I’m too whipped to write well (it’s been one of those days) but cheers to Craig, Campbell, screenwriters Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and Paul Haggis. And a big pat on the back to whomever dreamt up the ending, which is the first bulls-eye in the history of the franchise. Every single Bond film including Dr. No and From Russia With Love has ended on a chuckly romantic kick-back note, but not this time.
People actually applauded at the end tonight’s screening, which is something I haven’t heard from a Bond crowd since The Spy Who Loved Me.

The Envelope‘s Tom O’Neil is reporting that in lieu of the near-collapse of Flags of Our Fathers, both commercially and as an Oscar contender, Warner Bros. and the Clint Eastwood team have rethought their Letters From Iwo Jima game plan and decided to release it in late December after all, which obviously puts it into the Best Picture Oscar competition. Technically, I mean.

They’re doing this not just because Flags is all-but-dead as a Best Picture contender, but because it’s a weak year all around and how can a Letters entry hurt at this stage, all things considered?
“Warner Bros. will give it a qualifying run in a few Los Angeles and New York theaters during the last week of 2006, O’Neil wrote earlier today, “[and] then open it wide in February after Oscar noms are announced.” He added that it “isn’t known if Iwo Jima made last Friday’s cut-off for Golden Globe eligibility. So far the Hollywood Foreign Press Association has not responded to our inquiry.”
I got no help from Warner Bros. publicists this evening, but I’ve been told by an excellent source that the new Letters plan is indeed in place. Letters From Iwo Jima was officially booked a few days ago into select indie-type venues, I heard tonight. It’s been characterized all along as an art-house film, so that fits.
In my mid-October Flags of Our Fathers review, I wrote that in light of the weak- ness of Flags, “the Japanese movie is going to save the situation or not. It would be better, Oscar-wise, for it to be released this year instead of just Flags of Our Fathers on 10.20.

“Letters From Iwo Jima may or may not be the movie that turns the situation around, but I know this: Flags of Our Fathers doesn’t have a powerful right hook and doesn’t even box all that well, and even with the aura of this being Clint’s latest and all, I’m not sure its even going to wind up as a Best Picture nominee.
“So let’s hear it from the other team. This year, I mean. Because right now the only thing that will save matters is a Hail Mary pass.”