wired

There are sad films and depressing films. Sad movies make you hurt in a good way…a basically gloomy feeling that nonetheless doesn’t feel oppressive, and comes with an emotional anchor that puts you in touch with some aspect of your past. Depressing movies make you feel like you don’t want to feel anything. They make you irritated, skittish, cynical. In short, the final act of Million Dollar Baby isn’t depressing but sad. Unless, of course, you’re one of those who doesn’t distinguish between the two.

Everyone’s telling me that Meet the Fockers (Universal, 12.22) is funny, agreeable, harmless, etc. (I missed the all-media screening and my Universal p.r. pals had no other options.) But now Dustin Hoffman’s “thing” quote is boomerang-ing back in the from of these two remarks by the L.A. Weekly‘s David Chute: (1) Fockers, he says, is “a big-budget Dharma & Greg episode with toilet jokes,” and (2) “the desperation is occasionally leavened by the charms of the star cast: Robert De Niro, for example, does incredulous disgust better than anyone on Earth, and entire sequences here are choreographed to inspire his slow burn. In the next installment he should play a movie critic.”

It’s time to weed out the weaker sisters among the Best Actress candidates, and they are…sorry to say this and I mean no offense…Vera Drake‘s Imelda Staunton and Being Julia‘s Annette Bening. Staunton gives a two-note performance in that Mike Leigh film — loving, easygoing Vera before she gets busted, and freaked-out, zombie-like Vera after the bust. Not good enough! Bening is pretty good as the grande dame of the 1938 British stage…okay, very good, but the film is undeniably weak, and Bening is resultantly fading and that’s a fact. The topliners are three: Million Dollar Baby‘s Hilary Swank, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind‘s Kate Winslet, and Maria Full of Grace‘s Catalina Sandino Moreno. And totally forget Kill Bill‘s Uma Thurman….get outta here!

The “remains to be seen” New York Times gremlin has struck again, this time in Charles McGrath’s story about boxing movies and applied — oddly, curiously — to Million Dollar Baby , which makes people weep and seems like a sure-fire hit. “Boxing still looms largest as a subject for literary types and for filmmakers paying homage to the past,” McGrath comments. “Like Raging Bull, Million Dollar Baby may turn out to be an elegy for a kind of movie they almost don’t make anymore,” adding in another portion of the article that “how this will play with audiences, as opposed to the critics, remains to be seen.” What?

I seem to only write about things I’m seriously excited or angry about in the WIRED space. Well, here’s an exception! It’s Saturday morning and the holiday shutdown is taking effect as we speak. Time to roll out those evergreen stories and maybe start choosing my picks for Oscar Balloon ’05.

My friend Anne Thompson, who has done many favors for me, has been brought aboard The Hollywood Reporter as deputy film editor by her old bro, film editor Gregg Kilday. She officially starts on Jan. 17th. The money is good and she gets medical and dental and why not, right? Reporter cool, job cool, everything cool….maybe even John Travolta’s next film, which wasn’t written by Scott Frank for reasons I don’t need to go into at this time.

Somehow I missed this quote from Colin Farrell about his costarring with Jamie Foxx in the Michael Mann-scripted and directed Miami Vice, which will begin shooting in April for Universal. (A friend of a guy I know has been offered a job on the shoot.) Why do another TV adaptation so soon after S.W.A.T.? “I’d do anything to work with Michael Mann,” he answered. “And the script is great. The worst thing about the project is the title, but as a piece in and of itself it’s brilliant…[It] goes deep into the undercover world. It’s Mann doing his heavy and tough stuff, with the kind of great dialogue you saw in Heat and Collateral.” Does anyone have a copy of the script? Strictly on the q.t., of course.

And I know I asked about getting a look at this before, but does anyone have a copy of Sam Mendes’ Jarhead?

Uma Thurman is arrestingly focused and hard-core in the Kill Bill movies, but I don’t quite get her being nominated for Best Dramatic Actress award by both the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and the Broadcast Film Critics Association for her work in Kill Bill, Vol. 2. Just as Truman Capote once said of Jack Kerouac’s stream-of-beat-consciousness prose in On The Road, “That’s not writing, that’s typing!,” I would say of Thurman’s Bill perfs, “That’s not acting, that’s martial-arts training!” For the most part, anyway.

All but one of the award-calibre lead male performances this year are based on real life guys, but all of the major nominated lead female parts are fictional. Of the six lead male performances nominated his morning (12.15) by the Broadcast Film Critics Association, five — Javier Bardem’s in The Sea Inside, Don Cheadle’s in Hotel Rwanda, Johnny Depp’s in Finding Neverland, Leonardo DiCaprio’s in The Aviator and Jamie Foxx’s in Ray — are representations of actual lives, fretting and strutting their hour upon the stage. Only Paul Giamatti’s wine-worshipping would-be author in Sideways was made up by a writer.

The biggest squeaker in this morning’s New York Film Critics Circle voting was over the Best Non-Fiction Film award going to Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, according to the group’s chairman Thelma Adams. “There has been a big pendulum swing against that movie,” Adams confided late this morning. One of the concerns, said Adams, was “is it really a non-fiction film?” F9/11‘s biggest competitor, was Jonathan Caouette’s Tarnation, while Kevin McDonald’s Touching the Void, she implied, was somewhere in the rear with the gear. Sideways did as well as it did not only because “it’s a great film all around,” Adams said, but also because “there’s not a bloc of people who hate it,” as with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which “some [critics] feel very passionately negative about.” Million Dollar Baby, she said, “was not a knockout…if the NYFCC voters had agreed it was a perfect movie it would have been our #1 choice. Baby was behind Sideways in the voting, but not right behind it.” Eastwood’s Best Director award was decided upon towards the end of the voting, she believes, “because by that point we had already given four awards to Sideways.”

Clint Eastwood has just been handed the New York Film Critics Circle’s Best Director award for his work on Million Dollar Baby….terrific. There was obviously a bit of Sideways vs. Baby wrangling going on among the elite New York-area critics, with the Eastwood win smacking of some kind of spread-it-around compromise gesture. But good for Clint. Maybe between this and the Golden Globe nominations for Baby, he’ll loosen up and start playing the awards-hustle game. “That’s all it is,” said Kris Kirstofferson’s financial-shark character in Alan Pakula’s Rollover, in the midst of slapping down some wimpy associate. “It’s a damn game!”