The reign of New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther came to an end in the late ’60s after he showed time and again that he was becoming more and more oblivious to what was hot and happening in the culture. (He scolded 1963’s Dr. Strangelove for the disrespect shown to the government and the military, and he called Bonnie and Clyde “a cheap piece of bald-faced slapstick comedy that treats the hideous depredations of [the lead characters] as though they were as full of fun and frolic as the jazz-age cutups in Thoroughly Modern Millie.”) I think Today critic Gene Shalit demonstrated the same kind of disconnect fairly decisively yesterday morning with his review of Brokeback Mountain. I won’t dignify his remarks by repeating them. Here’s a GLAAD link to a video clip. You tell me.
Yesterday the Screen Actors Guild listed the cast of Brokeback Mountain as possible recipients of the org’s Best Cast (i.e., Ensemble) Award, and the names are Linda Cardellini (Heath Ledger’s second-act girlfriend), Anna Faris (the gabby married wife in that dance-hall scene), Jake Gyllenhaal, Anne Hathaway, Heath Ledger, Randy Quaid (Joe Aguirre, the gruff sheep owner) and Michelle Williams. Of course, the SAG rocket scientist who put this list together ignored Roberta Maxwell, who only gives the most deeply felt and devastating brief performance in the film (unlike Faris, who gives…what’s the term?…the chirpiest?). Peter McRobbie, Jack Twist’s snarly dad, and Kate Mara, who plays Ennis del Mar’s oldest daughter, were also blown off. Nice going, guys. You listed Faris because she’s better known, right?
Last Holiday (Paramount, 1.13), another go-girl Queen Latifah movie, is based on a 1950 Alec Guiness film of the same name. Directed by Henry Cass and written by J.B. Priestley, the Guiness version is about a mousey office worker who’s told he hasn’t much time to live and so he withdraws his savings, heads off to Europe and has the time of his life. And to judge by the the trailer, the Queen Latifah version uses the exact same set-up. [Note: the following is not a spoiler because the Guiness film is 55 years old, but somebody out there is going to squawk so here’s the warning …okay?] What I’ve always liked about the Guiness is that it has two twists — one, he finds out his doctor made a mistake and he’s not dying, and two, a delighted Guiness gets into his car with this wonderful news still ringing in his ear and five minutes later gets into an accident and is killed. I haven’t seen the remake and I’m just spitballing, but what are the odds that Queen Latifah checks out in a similar way? Opinions? Suspicions? Check out the trailer and guess again.
If you’re making a movie about something truly ugly and detestable, does that mean you shouldn’t let the photography be too pretty? I said a week or so ago that Lajos Koltai’s Fateless “is the most visually immaculate Holocaust death-camp drama ever made (does that sound right?)…situations of hunger, despair and the ashy aura of near-death have never been rendered with such remarkable pictorial finesse.” And today N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott is making more or less the same point: “The visual beauty of [the film] is unmistakable, and also a bit disconcerting…[there is verisimilitude] in Fateless and yet one finds oneself noticing, along with the emaciated bodies and ambient cruelty, the delicacy of the light and the painterly composition of the frames.”
I checked with New Line publicity and it’s true: there will be an extra-long version of Terrence Malick’s The New World on the DVD. That means longer than the 155-minute New York-and-LA version that closed last Tuesday night, and obviously much longer than the 137- or 138-minute version that will re-open on 1.20.06.
Whoa…wait a minute. Hollywood Reporter columnist Anne Thompson has written in her Risky Business column that “right now, Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain and George Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck are leading the Oscar pack.” In other words, Clooney’s film has the second-highest Best Picture heat factor after Lee’s. I’m not saying she’s wrong and I realize that Clooney & Co. have done a brilliant job of promoting their drama about journalistic ethics and personal courage, but if GNAGL has in fact surged as high as Thompson claims, people — Academy members — are losing sight of the overall. They like it because they fondly remember the ’50s and Edward R. Murrow and the values he stood and fought for, etc., but c’mon: GNAGL is a well crafted, very respected film for what it is within its modest perimeters. It’s basically a solid black-and-white, better-than-mezzo-mezzo drama that was cleverly shot like a Playhouse 90 live broadcast from the 1950s. A very sturdy thing, okay, but how can anyone call it a gusher? For a movie to win a Best Picture Oscar it has to least try to say something profound about the the ground we all stand on and the air we all breathe. (I mean, unless it’s a revolting aber- ration like Chicago.) GNAGL is a passion piece about a very rock-steady good guy who said and did the right things, but it’s very particular and historical and doesn’t strike any universal chords or illuminate anything about life on the street…not the one I live on, at least. It’s about life inside a very elite Manhattan bunker some 60 years ago, which was under very peculiar and particular pressures at the time. I’m not saying it won’t be nominated for Best Picture, and I guess it doesn’t matter if journos proclaim this or that film as the second-hottest contender because there’s only one Best Picture winner at the end…but how Good Night, and Good Luck went from being a respected and competitive Best Picture contender to being first runner-up beneath Brokeback Mountain is a bit of a shocker. I would go so far as to say this has been my biggest what-the-fuck? moment of the day so far.
Remember that recent New York Times piece by Peter Edidin about fickle typeface guys and graphic-arts designers that voiced a complaint about the allegedly incorrect use of Helvetica for a CBS logo seen in Good Night, and Good Luck? Well, it appears that Edidin’s sources were wrong and GNAGL wasn’t. The film’s art director Christa Munro has clarified matters with designer Mark Simonson, who has passed along her comments on his website. The beef was that GNAGL takes place in 1954 but Helvetica wasn’t invented until 1957. But Munro told Simonson that “Helvetica was not used in the film, contrary to what was claimed in the [Times] article. She said, rather, that the sign shown in the example frame was set in Akzidenz Grotesk, a face which predated (and in fact was the basis for) Helvetica, and that this choice was based on extensive research of CBS’s graphic design during the period depicted in the film.”
The Envelope‘s Tom O’Neil fears that Jon Stewart may turn out to be “the worst Oscar host ever” when he takes the mike on the Kodak theatre stage on March 5th. O’Neil allows that Stewart has an “edgy defiant ‘tude that attracts young hip TV viewers,” but says he’s “a comic assassin” whose tuxedoed material may be too withering and ascerbic and “has the potential of being a catas- trophe of epic Cecil B. DeMille proportions.” As former House speaker Sam Rayburn used to say, “Aww, shit, sonny.” Everyone knows the secret to being a good Oscar host is to maintain an underlying tone of affection, and O’Neill is presuming that Stewart hasn’t figured that out or plans on ignoring it because Chris Rock did last year? I’m with David Thomson on this. He told L.A. Times reporter Rachel Abramowitz for her piece on the Stewart hire that “the Oscars have grown into this appalling circus…and we’re trapped with it, and very often the films are not worthy. I don’t think the host is terribly important, but to the degree that we’re fed up with the show, a new host is fresh meat. A new host can say, ‘I’ll only do it if I can do it my own way.’ That’s the real bargain — whether the real host is given liberty or the academy sits on him. If they give Jon Stewart his freedom, it would be a merciful touch. He’s always against pomp. Maybe he can be fun.”
Either sports-movies-with-plots-you’ve-seen-17-times-before get you or they don’t. They’re almost a genre. But the good ones are always a bit different…they always pay off in some unforeseen way. I was afraid that Remember the Titans would make me nod off, but it didn’t. (And yet…frankly…thinking back upon Remem- ber the Titans, I can’t remember very much.) I thought Friday Night Lights would be the same old stuff, but it had a lot of good actors and that grainy-funky photography and had those bleak Odessa, Texas, backdrops and the team lost the big game at the finale…and it turned out to be fairly exceptional. You could see what Dreamer: Based on a True Story would be from ten miles away, but it was smoothly made and agreeably acted and it didn’t rankle. That said, I haven’t seen Jerry Bruckheimer’s Glory Road (Disney, 1.13) but it’s an African-American Hoosiers set in Texas with Josh Lucas as Gene Hackman. Set in ’65 and ’66, Lucas plays a Texas Western coach named Don Haskins who led the first all-black starting line-up for a college basketball team to the NCAA national championship. The big hurdle was racism. Forty years ago there were virtually no black college players in the South, and with schools that had black players there was an unwritten rule that you could play one black player at a time at home, two on the road, and three if you were losing badly. Anyway, Haskins can’t find any decent white players so he recruits blacks from northern cities and brings them to Texas Western to play basketball and you know the rest. But I hear it’s pretty good (and that Jon Voight has another terrific supporting role a la Michael Mann’s Ali under ten pounds of makeup). Bottom line is that Disney wouldn’t be having a big nationwide sneak this Saturday if the movie wasn’t connecting.
“Jarhead has more in common with Beckett, Sartre and Banuel than it does with Oliver Stone,” in the view of director Sam Mendes. “In America, they assumed I was trying to make an Oliver Stone movie and that I’d failed.” I don’t think that was the problem. The problem was that nothing really happened. Not to sound too primitive, but that was it.
The 21st Santa Barbara International Film Festival, which runs from February 2nd to 12th, will kick off with Oscar-winner Robert Towne‘s Ask The Dust starring Salma Hayek and Colin Farrell and finish with Jason Reitman‘s very sharp and funny Thank You For Smoking with Aaron Eckhardt, Maria Bello, Katie Holmes,Rob Lowe, William H. Macy and Robert Duvall. I don’t recognize the films yet, but there will be discussions with and tributes paid to Towne, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Heath Ledger, Felicity Huffman, Maria Bello and Naomi Watts. The festival will also present the second annual “Attenborough Award for Excellence in Nature Filmmaking” to director James Cameron (who?…wait a minute…didn’t he direct something about eight or nine years ago…?).
Reader Mike Gebert just wrote and said, “The Oscars could be hosted by Jenna Jameson for all I care, but if the Best Picture nominees are Capote, Brokeback Mountain, Crash, Good Night and Good Luck and Munich, then haven’t the Oscars basically become the Independent Spirit Awards and completely severed any ties with the main American moviegoing public?” And I replied, “First of all, Munich probably won’t make it. But otherwise…hello?…Brokeback Mountain is on its way to becoming a sizable popular hit (it hasn’t even begun to be seen by mainstream America), and Crash connected very nicely before going to DVD. And Capote, thank goodness, will now be seen by more people as a result of its likely Oscar nomination for Best Picture. Oscar winners have been huge financial hits in the past, but those days are pretty much over because the big studios have all but taken themselves out of the Oscar-contending game. Are you suggesting that the finalists should be picked from among the biggest moneymakers? It’s an old analogy of mine, but as movieogers we all live in a Planet of the Apes nation with movies for the smart chimps and movies for the gorillas. You know this, and yet you say it’s disappointing that there aren’t more gorilla movies among the likely Best Picture nods? The days of big-studio movies like Gone With the Wind, The Best Years of Our Lives, The Bridge on the River Kwai, My Fair Lady amd The Godfather are over…but the era of Very Good and In Some Cases Emotionally Riveting Films like the ones that are likely to be nominated is now upon us…and that’s that. I’m not saying it would be impossible for a big studio to finance a Gone With the Wind or Bridge on the River Kwai or The Godfather these days, but obviously those days have all but slipped away. You know it, I know it…get used to it.”
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