wired

Clint Eastwood has just thrown a heavyweight punch in the Oscar race, and the after-effects will be felt all the way until Feb. 27. His boxing movie Million Dollar Baby (Warner Bros., 12.17, limited) had its first-anywhere showing at a very-limited-attendance screening last Friday night on the Warner Bros. lot, and then at a press-infiltrated Academy screening last night (Monday, 11.22) at the Director’s Guild. I’ve spoken to people who attended both, and they’re all seriously impressed or floored. (I was at the DGA screening also, and I fully concur.) Baby is a major art film… easily in the same realm as Clint’s Unforgiven, and, in the view of at least one major critic who attended the DGA screening, his best ever. Trust me, it’s a multi-Oscar nominee — Best Picture, Best Director (Eastwood), Best Actor (Eastwood), Best Actress (Hilary Swank). This means, of course, that Swank is once again duelling with Annette Bening — they last faced each other in the ’99 race when Swank’s Boys Don’t Cry performance beat Bening’s in American Beauty.

I missed the Variety item last Thursday (11.18), but Bob Berney’s Newmarket Films has picked up Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Downfall, that German-produced, end-of-the-Third-Reich, down-in-the-bunker movie that I saw a few weeks ago and quite liked. Obviously angling for a Best Foreign Film Oscar nom, Downfall is “an exceptional historical piece [that’s] all about detail, detail and more detail,” I wrote on 11.3. “Not so much a Hitler character study as a Guernica-sized, pointillist portrait of the last remnants of Nazi culture collapsing into itself.” Pic was written and produced by Constantin Film’s Berndt Eichinger, and costars Bruno Ganz as Adolf Hitler, Alexandra Maria Lara as Hitler’s private secretary, Ulrich Matthes as Joseph Goebbels and Juliane Kohler as Eva Braun.

Time‘s Richard Corliss has declared that Closer (Columbia, 12.3) “runs counter to the numbing predictability of most current films: the inevitable plot points of revenge and uplift, the reduction of human beings to heroes and villains, the avoidance of complexity in sexual matters.” And director Mike Nicohols observes in the same piece, “I thought we were way past being able to shock anybody …but people are shocked [by this film]. It’s not necessarily because of the language but because things that usually go unexplored are explored in public. Some people are armed against it. They say, ‘I just don’t know those people.’ Well, they’re you, man!”

Imelda Staunton’s highly-touted performance in Mike Leigh’s Vera Drake (New Line) is falling off the screen as a Best Actress hopeful. One observer opined last night that Staunton and Drake peaked at the Venice Film Festival and just after, and have been fading ever since. One problem is that after Staunton’s Drake character gets popped for performing abortions, she goes into what amounts to a one- note emotional state of shock…eyes glazed over, look of horror on her face…and nothing more. Another problem is that no one has seen it. New Line is “having a hard time keeping it in theatres,” says one Academy pulse-taker. “In Los Angeles it’s currently hanging on at the Westside Pavilion and it’s already playing at the Pasadena Academy, a slightly discounted art house. Next they’ll probably send it to the Beverly Center, where movies go to die….”

Herald Tribune film critic Joan Dupont has written of Audrey Tatou, the radiant lead in Jean Piere Jeunet’s A Very Long Engagement: “From her films, it looks as if she is the only French actress to play the waif. She has stretched from cute Am√ÉÀÜlie to resolute Mathilde, a girl who wears the slightly morbid Japrisot stripe with panache.” Dupont refers to Sebastian Japrisot, the author of the original ’91 Engagement novel, as well the famed The Sleeping Car Murders.

Another Hollywood entity has been lacerated by the dreaded “remains to be seen” in a New York Times Arts and Leisure article. In Dennis McDougal’s 11.21 piece about Kevin Spacey’s battle to make his Bobby Darin biopic Beyond the Sea (Lions Gate, 12.17), he notes that Spacey “essentially becomes Darin in the film,” but adds, “Whether that will help revive his career, which has flagged in recent years as he spent his talent on routine fare like Pay It Forward, K-PAX and The Life of David Gale, remains to be seen.” That settles it…Spacey (and his movie, in all likelihood) are all but finito. Nobody survives “remains to be seen.” Less than a month ago Nancy Hass’s piece about Scott Rudin seriously wounded two upcoming prestige pics with the following sentence: “Whether Closer, with its searing look at relationships and adultery, or the zany Aquatic, directed by Wes Anderson and starring Bill Murray, will combine emotional depth with box-office magic remains to be seen.” Aaaahhhh!

I was in West L.A.’s Laser Blazer last night (Friday, 11.19) and I heard one of the clerks mention Natalie Portman. What about her? I asked. “My friend’s in love with her,” the guy answered. “Tell him to see Closer then,” I said. “So they didn’t cut her nude scene?” he asked. “No, they did cut it but it doesn’t matter,” I replied, “because what they left in is fine, trust me. She’s got a beautiful ass.” The guy and three behind-the-counter colleagues who were listening crowed in unison, “Whoaaa-hoohhh!” The guy said to me, “I think you just sold four tickets!”

Alexander (Warner Bros., 11.24) is tracking well and should open decently, but if it tanks the following week the studio marketing guys can always lay the blame on the pseudo-gay content, just like ’04 campaign handicappers (accurately) blamed John Kerry’s loss on gay-marriage initiatives. Right?

If you’re looking for insight into adolescent male sexuality and the influence of movies upon same, the Christian film-critic view is never less than four-square. Consider the suspicions of Bob Waliszewski, a film critic with Focus on the Family and www.pluggedinonline.com, as quoted by the New York Times‘ Sharon Waxman in her 11.20 story about Oliver Stone’s portrayal of a bisexual world conqueror in Alexander, to wit: “There will be people who see Alexander the Great’s bisexuality as applauding that lifestyle, and unfortunately it will lead some young boys, young men down a path that I think they’ll regret someday.”

Apologies for screwing up sound clips # 3 and #4 in today’s Prick Up Your Ears. I fixed it and it’s now working….

Remember that scene in Jerry Maguire after Bob Sugar (Jay Mohr) fires Jerry (Tom Cruise) at lunch, and then they both run back to the office to beef up their client list — Sugar calling to dissuade his clients from signing with Maguire, and Maguire trying to persuade his clients to come with him, etc.? This is pretty much what’s been happening since PMK/HBH’s Pat Kingsley fired 23 year veteran Leslee Dart on Wednesday. The reason Kingsley acted so decisively and at such an inopportune time (i.e., right in the middle of Oscar season), I’m told, was because Dart had been talking to several clients about coming with her to a new p.r. company she intends to start up, possibly in partneship with former Miramax publicist Marci Granata but not, despite the rumors, with currently-employed Miramax publicist Amanda Lundberg, who says she’s flattered by the rumor but is pregnant (due next April) and under contract with Miramax until August ’05.

Those who haven’t seen Kevin McDonald’s Touching the Void, hands-down one of the year’s finest films, should know it’s showing on PBS stations on Sunday evening, 11.21, at 9 pm. (L.A.’s KCET is showing it at this time, anyway — go to http://www.pbs.org/previews/touchingthevoid to see what your local airing time is.) Watch it closely, consider the dramatic devices it uses, and tell me if you think it meets the criteria for a documentary. I think it should be Oscar-nominated for Best Picture and not Best Feature Documentary.