The 79th Annual Academy Awards will happen a bit earlier next year — on Sunday, 2.25.07. Nomination polls will close on 1.13.07 with the nominations set to be announced ten days later — Tuesday, 1.23.07. Final ballots will be mailed a week later (1.31.07) and final polls will close at the end of the day on Tuesday, 2.20.07. It’s been suggested that these earlier dates may make it appear as if the Broadcast Film Critics Association and their Critics’ Choice Awards are influencing things a bit more than their nearest competititors, the Hollywood Foreign Press and the Golden Globes. It’s obvious that the BFCA is as much into ass-kissing and whoring itself out as the HFPA, but the former apparently has hunkies on the first weekend (or the first workable Monday) after the New Year’s holiday weekend, which means the HFPA has to choose between Sunday, 1.14 or Sunday, 1.21, to stage the Golden Globes. Either way the HPGA won’t appear to be exerting much in the way of Oscar influencing, it’s being argued, because 1.14 is one day after Oscar polling closes, and 1.21 is just two days before Oscar nominations. But c’mon…take two steps back and smell the Starbuck’s. Many people feel that the Academy pretty much wiped Oscar off the map as the statuette with the Biggest and Classiest Pedigree…as any kind of vaguely legitimate barometer of serious cinematic distinction when it gave the Best Picture Oscar to Crash. So if you ask me the whole “Oscar, Oscar, Oscar” hoo-hah will be somewhat less important this year as a result, and it may keep going that way. The Globes are the Globes, the BFCA’s are the BFCA’s, the critics are the critics…everything is everything, baby. The Oscar Award show is on the ropes and closer than ever to irrelevance, and if you ask me nothing can be done to save it until the Academy fires producer Gil Cates.
I actually agree with the Broadcast Film Critic’s Association’s decision to give special Distinguished Achievement in Performing Arts Award to ape impersonator Andy Serkis and the King Kong special effects gang on 1.9.06 at the 11th annual Critics’ Choice Awards gala. The group is creating the award to recognize “the singular achievement in creating this character, representing a revolutionary leap forward in synthesizing visual effects with an actor’s performance,” said BFCA president Joey Berlin . The award will be accepted by Serkis and Kong animation guys Christian Rivers and Joe Letteri.
How did Pride and Prejudice manage a Golden Globe nomination for Best Picture (Musical/Comedy)? It’s spirited and infectious and “romantic,” okay, but I don’t see how anyone could try to call it a dramedy even. The Broadcast Film Critics Association wants to be the new Golden Globes and elbow the GG’s aside….fine. But to get there the BFCA nominations have can’t just be numerous — they also have to veer into the ridiculous and be joked about around town. And right now, the Globes are way in front.
The nominations put out today by the Broadcast Film Critics Association are too easy and all-embracing. Ten nominations for Best Picture? Six nominations in each major acting category? And six Best Director noms? Why not seven in each category? Why not eight? Wait…why not nine or ten? Spread the love around! Kiss everyone’s ass! Get as many people to come to the BFCA awards as possible….wheeeeeeee!
Munich Shortfall
I’m not trying to be a hard-ass for the sake of being a hard-ass, but I can’t get on the Oscar boat for Steven Spielberg’s Munich (Universal, 12.23).
It’s a pretty good movie, but the Best Picture hoo-hah seems a tiny bit forced given what this film truly is in the light of day. If you ask me those prognosticators who’ve already said “this is it!” are conning themselves.
One of the Black September hostage-takers during the actual 1972 Munich Olympic Games standoff
Directed by Spielberg and written (for the most part) by Tony Kushner and Eric Roth, Munich is a longish (160 minutes), thoughtful drama about Israel’s revenge campaign against the perpetrators of the 1972 Munich Olympic Games killings of Israeli atheletes. It’s strong, meaningful and well-intended…but I don’t get all the jumping up and down.
I’m talking about the proclamations about it being the new Best Picture front-run- ner. It’s in the running, I guess, but it sure as shit is no shoo-in.
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I spoke last night to a guy who’ll be voting this Saturday with the L.A. Film Critics, and we had both just seen Munich and were talking about the Best Picture Oscar contest, and he said, “I don’t know if [Munich] will even get nominated.”
He may have been overly dismissive, okay, but any seasoned film guy making such a statement should give you a hint about what’s going on here.
I felt the euphoric current at the DGA theatre last year after seeing Million Dollar Baby — I was levitating — but nothing like this kicked in last night inside theatre #5 at the AMC Century City.
Munich wants first and foremost to say something earnest about the legacy of political killing. It’s a movie that doesn’t quite cry out for peace, but is clearly asking for it. It connects here and there in short bursts, but it mainly achieves a general mezzo-mezzo effect of “okay, good point, we get it.”
Which is why I don’t get the effusive praise from Time‘s Richard Schickel and Fox 411’s Roger Friedman and what I presume will be an oncoming tide of kiss-assers …the Spielberg kowtow brigade looking to show obeisance before power.
David Poland was more measured in his “Hot Button” reaction on Monday night, but he still believes from a hard-nosed realpolitik standpoint that Munich is the presumptive Best Picture winner, and that’s just wrong. Perhaps not inaccurate, but dead fucking “wrong” because Best Picture Oscars shouldn’t go to good movies that say the right thing, etc. but don’t inspire major passion.
Really exceptional movies always get people deep down in one way or another. They provoke, excite…make you choke up. They almost always deliver some kind of intrigue that usually builds and gains upon reflection. But I was not so moved last night.
I didn’t conduct a poll in theatre #5 but I could “feel the room” as the film unspooled and I’d be surprised if Munich aroused any go-for-broke fervor. But I’ll bet every last critic who saw it last night, if you were to pop the question, would say it’s a “good film” or “very strong” or “important.”
Steven Spielberg conferring with Eric Bana (shades) during last summer’s shooting of Munich
And it is that. Munich is a smart and stirring ride. It’s still with me this morning, still pinging around in my rib cage…and yes, I respect where it’s coming from and how Spielberg has organized the journey, for the most part.
And yes, of course, I agree with and support what Munich is saying about the rotten karma that comes out of any act of murder.
Munich is saying that however well justified or rationalized those revenge killings may have been, the air was still befouled and the spiritual effects upon three of the Mossad team — sensitive Israeli assassins played by Eric Bana, Mathieu Kosso- vitz and Ciaran Hinds — were disturbing and unsettling.
(Honestly? I felt almost relieved that two other guys on the team — Daniel Craig’s character and some older guy — don’t seem to pay the price as much. I don’t know why exactly, but I was vaguely comforted by these two being hardcore enough to just do the friggin’ job sans guilt trips.)
As a man with two sons, as a film critic, as a movie fiend…I side with any movie that says “killing is bad” or “killing others…even those who may deserve to die …will let loose a virus in your soul.”
But Munich rarely rises above the level of being dutiful, thoughtful and morally correct. All it is, really, is a sprawling here-and-there procedural with a gathering sense of moral disquiet. That’s a fine and respectable thing, but it doesn’t exactly set off tremors or firecrackers.
Eric Bana, Geoffrey Rush
Michael Lonsdale (whose performance as the investigator in Fred Zinneman’s The Day of the Jackal is one of my all-time favorites) is the best element in Munich. I also quite enjoyed the performance by Mathieu Almaric (last seen in Kings and Queen) as Lonsdale’s churlish son.
There is hoopla over Munich because it’s on the cover of this week’s Time and because the Best Picture situation is very much in flux and everyone’s looking for another Million Dollar Baby to sweep them off their feet.
I can sense a psychological eagerness to consider an end-of-the-year Spielberg movie about the ethical costs and karma of revenge…about the quandaries facing Jews and anti-Zionists in the Middle East as their conflict persists. Journos are primed because it’s that time of year and this is Spielberg-getting-all-morally- earnest-in-December and because everyone’s been saying “Munich is coming, Munich is coming” since last spring.
And everyone wants to savor Spielberg’s second big-statement movie about what good people have done when Jews have been killed because they’re Jews…killed by haters, racists, Nazis, anti-Zionists.
Oskar Schindler did what he did in Schindler’s List and became known to the audi- ence (as he had to his biographers) as a good, compassionate, peculiar, complex man. And the Mossad team led by Eric Bana are reasonably decent guys who go out and do what they do, and the virus of murder and retribution gets into their hearts and systems and they begin to pay the price.
And poor Eric Bana’s character gets the worst of it because he finds it hard to concentrate on making love to his lusciously sexy wife in their Brooklyn apartment because he can’t get those images and sounds of the massacre at the Munich airport in ’72 out of his head…images and sounds he absorbed from TV coverage because he wasn’t there.
I’m not trying to be a smart-ass, but this bizarre sex scene reminded me a tiny bit of Woody Allen’s Alvy Singer not making love to Carol Kane in Annie Hall because he can’t stop talking about the Kennedy assassination and the Warren Report.
Is Munich profound? Is there anything earth-shaking here? In what way does this film step out and grab you by the shirt collar and say, “Wake up!” In what way does it rock anyone’s world in terms of technique, even?
Okay, it feels in some ways like a ’70s film…but that’s not making me shudder or leap out of my seat as I acknowledge this.
The most riveting portions, as you might expect, are about how the killings of the members and supporters of the Munich operation (the core group was known as “Black September”) are carried out, and what goes wrong. The strongest happen early on — a killing in Rome and then another in Paris, which involves a family man and his daughter.
There’s a particularly effective portion involving a pretty woman at a London hotel who gets briefly involved with Bana and Hinds, and a killing results, and then another killing. I don’t want to spoil but the whole cause-and-effect sequence is both sad and shocking.
Tony Kushner’s script gives each Doubting Thomas character a speech just as he starts crumbling, or just before fate is about to take a hand. There’s a certain wordy literalness going on here that isn’t quite as effective as Spielberg and Kushner would like it to be.
Munich ends in New York City with a long shot of a certain downtown landmark. A friend feels this shot was overdoing things a bit, but at least Spielberg doesn’t go in for a closeup, and the CG image is quite realisitic and haunting.
I have gotten to the point where Janusz Kaminski’s cinematography is starting to blatantly turn me off. He has become the one dp whose work really and truly irri- tates me.
Every film Kaminski has shot for Spielberg — War of the Worlds, The Terminal, Catch Me If You Can, Minority Report, A.I., Saving Private Ryan, Amistad and now Munich — has looked more or less the same to me, regardless of the theme or mood. I’m referring to the Kaminski palette of slightly desaturated color, a slightly misty soft-focus look, starchy white light flooding through windows during daytime scenes, a lack of sharpness, and a bizarre fondness for grain.
I think that calling this film Munich was a little bit of a chickenshit move. It should have simply been called Vengeance . I realize that the “Vengeance” book it’s partly based upon has blemishes against it, but vengeance is what this movie is primarily about, and Spielberg should have just copped to that.
Next Year’s Balloon
Here are some initial calls about next year’s Ocar contenders. I’d like to hear from anyone who’s read the scripts or can pass along versions of the scripts to yours truly…whatever. I just think it’s time to start looking ahead and planning ahead, etc.
Thanks to Canadian correspondent and rabid script-hound Jean-Francois Allaire for starting me on this jag…
Best Picture: The Departed (Warner Brothers); Babel (Paramount); The Good Shepherd (Universal Pictures); Southland Tales (Universal); Marie Antoinette (Columbia Pictures); The Pursuit of Happyness (Columbia Pictures); Breaking and Entering (The Weinstein Co.); All The King’s Men (Columbia Pictures); A Good Year (20th Century Fox); Stranger Than Fiction (Columbia).
Martin Scorsese, Matt Damon on the set of The Departed
Best Director: Steve Zaillan (All The King’s Men); Anthony Minghella (Breaking and Entering); Martin Scorsese (The Departed); Steven Soderbergh (The Good German); Ridley Scott (A Good Year); Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (Babel); Marc Forster (Stranger Than Fiction); Richard Kelly (Southland Tales).
Best Actor: Will Smith (The Pursuit of Happyness); Matt Damon (The Good Shepherd); Jude Law (Breaking and Entering); Sean Penn (All The King’s Men); Brad Pitt (Babel).
Best Actress: Cate Blanchett (The Good German or Babel ); Maggie Gyllenhaal (Stranger Than Fiction)….need more!
Best Supporrting Actor: Jack Nicholson (The Departed); Hugh Grant (American Dreamz); Gael Garcia Bernal (Babel); Albert Finney (A Good Year); Jamie Foxx (Dreamgirls)
Best Supporting Actress: Zip…anyone?
Best Original Screenplay: Richard Kelly (Southland Tales); Paul Weitz (American Dreamz); Eric Roth (The Good Shepherd); Anthony Minghella (Breaking and Entering).
Best Adapted Screenplay : Sofia Coppola (Marie Antoinette).
Rundown
The first high-profile award announcements will come this Saturday afternoon from the Los Angeles Film Critics, with the final calls starting to leak out sometime around 1 pm or 2 pm.
The National Board of Review — that odd-smelling, Manhattan-based, awards- dispensing group made up of mostly weirdos and wackos (with the noteworthy exception of respected Columbia film professor and scholar Annette Insdorf) would have been first — i.e., today — but the group has delayed their announcements until next Monday, 12.12, due to some omissions on their initially mailed-out ballot.
On the same day the New York Film Critics Circle will announce their picks (expected a final decision around 1 pm Eastern), and since the NYFCC is roughly eight or nine times more respected than the National Board of Review (or is that eighty or ninety times?), the likelihood is that reporters and Oscar assesors will pay even less attention to the NBR winners than usual.
The very next day (Tuesday, 12.13) the Golden Globe nominations will be announced. These noms will be a very big moment for Diane Keaton and The Family Stone…I hope, I hope. And let’s hope that Terrence Howard (Hustle & Flow), bless him, hangs in there as a Best Actor in a Drama nominee.
I don’t have the dates for all the other critics groups but many of them will start to weigh in next week also, or very soon after. Critics groups from Boston, San Francisco, Chicago, Miami, San Diego, Seattle, etc.
Then it’s Christmas and New Year’s and the annual depression and suicide surge that happens ever year, and then…well, here’s the schedule:
* Writers Guild of America and Producers Guild nominations: Wednesday, 1.4.06
* Screen Actors Guild and Directors Guild nominations: Thursday, 1.5.06.
* BFCA Awards: Monday, 1.9.06
* Golden Globe Awards: Monday, 1.16.06
* Directors Guild Awards: Saturday, 1.28.06
* Screen Actors Guild awards: Sunday, 1.29.06
* Academy Award nominations: Tuesday, 1.31.06
* Writers Guild Awards: Saturday, 2.4.06
* BAFTA Awards: Sunday, 2.19.06
* Independent Spirit Awards: Saturday, 3.4.06
* Academy Awards telecast: Sunday, 3.5.06
* Rest Period: March through late June-slash-early July ’06
* Campaigning Strategizing for 2006 Awards (i.e., 2007 Academy Awards) commences and long-term expectations begin to come into focus: Early to Mid-July 2006.
Rumble in the Jungle
I saw King Kong for the second time Monday morning (12.5), and I feel the same way I did after my first viewing Sunday night. About 110 minutes of this three-hour film (i.e., the last two-thirds) are rock ‘n’ roll and worth double the ticket price. And the finale is genuinely touching.
After Sunday night’s screening at the Academy theatre I called the better parts of this monkey movie “damned exciting in an emotional, giddily absurd, logic-free adrenalized way.”
And then I offered a limited apology to its creator, Peter Jackson. “You aren’t that bad, bro,” I said. “You got a few things right this time. The movie is going to lift audiences out of their seats. And I need to say ‘I’m sorry’ for bashing you so much because you’ve almost whacked the ball out of the park this time.”
Almost, I say.
King Kong is too lumpy and draggy during the first hour or so to be called exquisite or masterful, but there’s no denying that it wails from the 70-minute mark until the big weepy finale at the three-hour mark. Monkey die, everybody cry.
The emotional support comes from the current between Kong and Naomi Watts, who is pretty much the soul of the film. I was concerned that the tender eye-rap- port between them would be too much, but it isn’t. It’s relatively restrained and subtle and full of feeling.
And Andy Serkis’ Kong performance doesn’t play like any kind of “Gollum Kong” (which I fretted about a year and a half ago in this space), and in fact he creates something surprisingly life-like, or do I mean ape-like?
The good ship Kong starts out with a spirited montage (scored with a classic Al Jolson tune called “I’m Sittin’ On Top of the World”) that shows what Depression- era 1933 New York City probably looked and felt like on the streets. The recrea- tions of this bygone Manhattan are awesome, immaculate…CGI illusion at its most profound.
So the first ten or so minutes are fine, but then things start to get lunky and pokey and meandering, and the dialogue becomes increasingly stiff and speechy, and before you know it Kong is close to crashing on the rocks and suffering a gash in the hull.
It’s very touch-and-go from roughly the 10 to the 65- or 70-minute mark. I was shifting in my seat and going “uh-oh.” But things take off once Kong snatches Watts, and the energy stays high and mighty from there to the finale.
You can break Kong down into three sections…
(a) The draggy 70-minute first act, which is all New York set-up, character exposi- tion, the long sea voyage to Skull Island, tedious philosophizing and no action to speak of;
(b) the breathtaking, nearly 70-minute Skull Island rumble-in-the-jungle section, including the breathtaking dino-run sequence (an absolute instant classic that’s likely to drive most of the repeat business in and of itself), Kong vs. the T-Rex trio, and the icky spider-and-insect pit sequence;
(c) the 42 or 43-minute New York finale with Kong on-stage, breaking the chrome- steel chains and escaping, trashing Manhattan, finding Watts, and facing planes and fate atop the Empire State building.
If I were a 14 year-old kid talking to friends about all of us seeing Kong a second or third time, I would suggest that everyone try to slip into the theatre after the first hour because who wants to sit through all that talky crap again?
Kong isn’t better than Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures because it’s almost entirely about enthusiasm and has almost nothing to do with restraint (bad word!), but it’s still the most thoroughly pulse-pumping, rousingly kick-ass film Jackson’s ever delivered, and respect needs to be paid.
And I mean especially by someone who’s been bashing the pud out of Jackson for the last four years or so, calling him an indulgent (and overly indulged), excessive, paint-splattering “wheeeeee!” director all this time.
Make no mistake — Kong shows Jackson is still all of these things. But Kong is a movie with a big heart and a stupidly exuberant joie de cinema coarsing through its veins…during the second and third acts, I mean.
And even though Jackson has gone way beyond the point where he’s able to show minimal respect for physics and could-this-happen? issues of logic and probability …a point from which he’ll never return…he manages such amazing visual feats and surges once the film takes off that all objections are moot. Even if some of the action scenes are cartoonishly wham-bam and ridiculous.
Life-size Kong model currently sitting in Manthatan’s Times Square
I’ll get into this a bit more later in the week, but I felt I had to cop to the fact that Jackson has hit one deep into center-left field.
Jack Black’s Carl Denham isn’t at all bad (he’s mouthy and slimy, but he doesn’t reach for outright comedy), Adrien Brody inhabits the playwright-hero to sensitive perfection, and Kong’s snaggle tooth is glimpsed only a few times and a non-issue.
Sometime next week I’m going to run a list of things in King Kong that make little or no sense (and it’s a long list), but right now it’s simply time to acknowledge that the parts of the film that get your blood racing and your emotions worked up work really well.
[Incidentally: I wrote last night that King Kong starts with an overture taken from Max Steiner’s original score for the 1933 film. However, I learned today [Monday] that Steiner’s overture was played before the presentation of Jackson’s film as a mood-setter by the people in the projection department at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences theatre, so it isn’t attached to the film and won’t be heard by regular audiences. That’s a shame.]
Remember This
Munich Jitters
It’s Wednesday afternoon and everyone’s calling around and asking about Munich …how good, how invincible or vulnerable, and is anyone having shit-fits and if so, who?…whaddaya hear, whaddaya think?
There’s already a half-formed perception that Steven Spielberg’s film isn’t Million Dollar Baby, but some journos are taking their shirts off and waving them over their heads anyway and calling it the new front-runner.
Steven Spielberg conferring with Eric Bana (shades) during last summer’s shooting of Munich
Maybe it is that. I’ll be seeing Munich in about two hours (Wednesday at 7 pm) so I’ll know fairly soon, but in these anxious pre-dawn hours before hitting the beach …er, the AMC Century City complex, it’s probably best to process the Spielberg kowtow with a grain of salt.
Richard Schickel, David Poland, Roger Friedman…can’t quite trust ’em.
You can’t trust Schickel and that Time cover story because as brilliant and insight- ful as he usually is, Schickel is a political operator of sorts, and it seems fair to presume he’s always thinking about his next documentary or subject for his next biography, which may one day (who knows?) be about Spielberg.
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Schickel may be dead-on about Munich, but I can’t buy the shpiel…yet.
You can’t trust Poland’s somewhat measured rave that he posted in his “Hot But- ton” column Monday night, because…smell the coffee…we all have our prejudices and he’s been calling Munich the presumptive front-runner for a long time now, and because he’s been lightly dissing Brokeback Mountain since he first saw it at last September’s Telluride Film Festival.
My antennae reading is that Poland’s been emotionally invested in wanting to steer support away from Ang Lee’s obviously brave and devastating film ever since, and now he’s got a thoughtful and gripping film to fight for, so it’s time to mount that steed and get out that bugle.
And you have to look askance at Roger Friedman’s proclamation in his Fox 411 column (posted late Tuesday night) that “Spielberg’s ‘Munich’ Is the Best Movie of 2005.”
Not because Roger is wrong (I don’t know a damn thing) but because he dismissed Brokeback Mountain as “silly” in a version of the column that ran last night (it’s been deleted, but I saw it last night with my own eyes) and he’s also called it a “strange western.”
To bluntly backhand Munich‘s strongest competitor with a jab like that is thought- less and kinda strange in itself. A movie that has made people weep and now sits at the top of MCN’s Gurus of Gold lists as the most likely Best Picture nominee is “silly”?
Cuddling babies, killing terrorists…two sides of the same sensitive-guy coin
There’s no reason to think Munich isn’t going to be a riveting and stirring film, but will it knock Brokeback‘s stetson off and send it splashing into a mud puddle?
I’ll keep refreshing and adding to this piece over the next 24 to 36 hours as things happen and other voices chime in, but for now…
Next Year’s Balloon
Here are some initial calls about next year’s Ocar contenders. I’d like to hear from anyone who’s read the scripts or can pass along versions of the scripts to yours truly…whatever. I just think it’s time to start looking ahead and planning ahead, etc.
Thanks to Canadian correspondent and rabid script-hound Jean-Francois Allaire for starting me on this jag…
Best Picture: The Departed (Warner Brothers); Babel (Paramount); The Good Shepherd (Universal Pictures); Southland Tales (Universal); Marie Antoinette (Columbia Pictures); The Pursuit of Happyness (Columbia Pictures); Breaking and Entering (The Weinstein Co.); All The King’s Men (Columbia Pictures); A Good Year (20th Century Fox); Stranger Than Fiction (Columbia).
Martin Scorsese, Matt Damon on the set of The Departed
Best Director: Steve Zaillan (All The King’s Men); Anthony Minghella (Breaking and Entering); Martin Scorsese (The Departed); Steven Soderbergh (The Good German); Ridley Scott (A Good Year); Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (Babel); Marc Forster (Stranger Than Fiction); Richard Kelly (Southland Tales).
Best Actor: Will Smith (The Pursuit of Happyness); Matt Damon (The Good Shepherd); Jude Law (Breaking and Entering); Sean Penn (All The King’s Men); Brad Pitt (Babel).
Best Actress: Cate Blanchett (The Good German or Babel ); Maggie Gyllenhaal (Stranger Than Fiction)….need more!
Best Supporrting Actor: Jack Nicholson (The Departed); Hugh Grant (American Dreamz); Gael Garcia Bernal (Babel); Albert Finney (A Good Year); Jamie Foxx (Dreamgirls)
Best Supporting Actress: Zip…anyone?
Best Original Screenplay: Richard Kelly (Southland Tales); Paul Weitz (American Dreamz); Eric Roth (The Good Shepherd); Anthony Minghella (Breaking and Entering).
Best Adapted Screenplay : Sofia Coppola (Marie Antoinette).
Rundown
The first high-profile award announcements will come this Saturday afternoon from the Los Angeles Film Critics, with the final calls starting to leak out sometime around 1 pm or 2 pm.
The National Board of Review — that odd-smelling, Manhattan-based, awards- dispensing group made up of mostly weirdos and wackos (with the noteworthy exception of respected Columbia film professor and scholar Annette Insdorf) would have been first — i.e., today — but the group has delayed their announcements until next Monday, 12.12, due to some omissions on their initially mailed-out ballot.
On the same day the New York Film Critics Circle will announce their picks (expected a final decision around 1 pm Eastern), and since the NYFCC is roughly eight or nine times more respected than the National Board of Review (or is that eighty or ninety times?), the likelihood is that reporters and Oscar assesors will pay even less attention to the NBR winners than usual.
The very next day (Tuesday, 12.13) the Golden Globe nominations will be announced. These noms will be a very big moment for Diane Keaton and The Family Stone…I hope, I hope. And let’s hope that Terrence Howard (Hustle & Flow), bless him, hangs in there as a Best Actor in a Drama nominee.
I don’t have the dates for all the other critics groups but many of them will start to weigh in next week also, or very soon after. Critics groups from Boston, San Francisco, Chicago, Miami, San Diego, Seattle, etc.
Then it’s Christmas and New Year’s and the annual depression and suicide surge that happens ever year, and then…well, here’s the schedule:
* Writers Guild of America and Producers Guild nominations: Wednesday, 1.4.06
* Screen Actors Guild and Directors Guild nominations: Thursday, 1.5.06.
* BFCA Awards: Monday, 1.9.06
* Golden Globe Awards: Monday, 1.16.06
* Directors Guild Awards: Saturday, 1.28.06
* Screen Actors Guild awards: Sunday, 1.29.06
* Academy Award nominations: Tuesday, 1.31.06
* Writers Guild Awards: Saturday, 2.4.06
* BAFTA Awards: Sunday, 2.19.06
* Independent Spirit Awards: Saturday, 3.4.06
* Academy Awards telecast: Sunday, 3.5.06
* Rest Period: March through late June-slash-early July ’06
* Campaigning Strategizing for 2006 Awards (i.e., 2007 Academy Awards) commences and long-term expectations begin to come into focus: Early to Mid-July 2006.
Rumble in the Jungle
I saw King Kong for the second time Monday morning (12.5), and I feel the same way I did after my first viewing Sunday night. About 110 minutes of this three-hour film (i.e., the last two-thirds) are rock ‘n’ roll and worth double the ticket price. And the finale is genuinely touching.
After Sunday night’s screening at the Academy theatre I called the better parts of this monkey movie “damned exciting in an emotional, giddily absurd, logic-free adrenalized way.”
And then I offered a limited apology to its creator, Peter Jackson. “You aren’t that bad, bro,” I said. “You got a few things right this time. The movie is going to lift audiences out of their seats. And I need to say ‘I’m sorry’ for bashing you so much because you’ve almost whacked the ball out of the park this time.”
Almost, I say.
King Kong is too lumpy and draggy during the first hour or so to be called exquisite or masterful, but there’s no denying that it wails from the 70-minute mark until the big weepy finale at the three-hour mark. Monkey die, everybody cry.
The emotional support comes from the current between Kong and Naomi Watts, who is pretty much the soul of the film. I was concerned that the tender eye-rap- port between them would be too much, but it isn’t. It’s relatively restrained and subtle and full of feeling.
And Andy Serkis’ Kong performance doesn’t play like any kind of “Gollum Kong” (which I fretted about a year and a half ago in this space), and in fact he creates something surprisingly life-like, or do I mean ape-like?
The good ship Kong starts out with a spirited montage (scored with a classic Al Jolson tune called “I’m Sittin’ On Top of the World”) that shows what Depression- era 1933 New York City probably looked and felt like on the streets. The recrea- tions of this bygone Manhattan are awesome, immaculate…CGI illusion at its most profound.
So the first ten or so minutes are fine, but then things start to get lunky and pokey and meandering, and the dialogue becomes increasingly stiff and speechy, and before you know it Kong is close to crashing on the rocks and suffering a gash in the hull.
It’s very touch-and-go from roughly the 10 to the 65- or 70-minute mark. I was shifting in my seat and going “uh-oh.” But things take off once Kong snatches Watts, and the energy stays high and mighty from there to the finale.
You can break Kong down into three sections…
(a) The draggy 70-minute first act, which is all New York set-up, character exposi- tion, the long sea voyage to Skull Island, tedious philosophizing and no action to speak of;
(b) the breathtaking, nearly 70-minute Skull Island rumble-in-the-jungle section, including the breathtaking dino-run sequence (an absolute instant classic that’s likely to drive most of the repeat business in and of itself), Kong vs. the T-Rex trio, and the icky spider-and-insect pit sequence;
(c) the 42 or 43-minute New York finale with Kong on-stage, breaking the chrome- steel chains and escaping, trashing Manhattan, finding Watts, and facing planes and fate atop the Empire State building.
If I were a 14 year-old kid talking to friends about all of us seeing Kong a second or third time, I would suggest that everyone try to slip into the theatre after the first hour because who wants to sit through all that talky crap again?
Kong isn’t better than Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures because it’s almost entirely about enthusiasm and has almost nothing to do with restraint (bad word!), but it’s still the most thoroughly pulse-pumping, rousingly kick-ass film Jackson’s ever delivered, and respect needs to be paid.
And I mean especially by someone who’s been bashing the pud out of Jackson for the last four years or so, calling him an indulgent (and overly indulged), excessive, paint-splattering “wheeeeee!” director all this time.
Make no mistake — Kong shows Jackson is still all of these things. But Kong is a movie with a big heart and a stupidly exuberant joie de cinema coarsing through its veins…during the second and third acts, I mean.
And even though Jackson has gone way beyond the point where he’s able to show minimal respect for physics and could-this-happen? issues of logic and probability …a point from which he’ll never return…he manages such amazing visual feats and surges once the film takes off that all objections are moot. Even if some of the action scenes are cartoonishly wham-bam and ridiculous.
Life-size Kong model currently sitting in Manthatan’s Times Square
I’ll get into this a bit more later in the week, but I felt I had to cop to the fact that Jackson has hit one deep into center-left field.
Jack Black’s Carl Denham isn’t at all bad (he’s mouthy and slimy, but he doesn’t reach for outright comedy), Adrien Brody inhabits the playwright-hero to sensitive perfection, and Kong’s snaggle tooth is glimpsed only a few times and a non-issue.
Sometime next week I’m going to run a list of things in King Kong that make little or no sense (and it’s a long list), but right now it’s simply time to acknowledge that the parts of the film that get your blood racing and your emotions worked up work really well.
[Incidentally: I wrote last night that King Kong starts with an overture taken from Max Steiner’s original score for the 1933 film. However, I learned today [Monday] that Steiner’s overture was played before the presentation of Jackson’s film as a mood-setter by the people in the projection department at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences theatre, so it isn’t attached to the film and won’t be heard by regular audiences. That’s a shame.]
Remember This
Vincent, Tom Cruise’s hit-man character in Collateral, is diamond-like — hard and sharp and full of glints and reflections. For me it’s a hot-cold thing…acting that burns through not because of some forced intensity, but an artful hold-back, cold-steel strategy.
Cruise, never much for passivity, wants a Best Actor nomination for this tour de force. He’s not out of line. His Vincent is a monster and a cripple, but at the same time a kind of tough-love therapist. By the end of the film he’s saved the life of Jamie Foxx’s procrastinating Max as surely as if he’d taken a bullet for him. (Which he does, in a way.)
The more you think about Tom/Vincent, the more the ironies accumulate. Deftly played by a guy known for his own hard-wired intensity, this gray-suited assassin seeps through as a fairly sad figure despite Cruise barely revealing his emotional cards. Sad but oddly charitable, almost evangelical.
Cruise won’t win. The top contenders are Jamie Foxx’s Ray Charles performance in Ray and Paul Giamatti’s touchingly morose wine connoisseur and failed novelist in Sideways. But he deserves to be one of the five finalists, along with Javier Bardem in The Sea Inside and Liam Neeson in Kinsey.
This, in any event, is why Cruise showed up at UCLA’s Royce Hall on Monday evening. To goose his Oscar chances…without appearing to be precisely doing that.
It was billed as an American Film Institute event called “An Evening with Tom Cruise.” MTV personality and journalist Chris Connelly was the moderator. There were two soft leather chairs at center stage, and a huge screen just behind them for showing film clips. The tickets were $20 bucks a pop. The auditorium was just about filled, but not quite.
There was a lavishly catered press reception before the event. Dressed entirely in dark brown (his sister-publicist LeAnn Devett swore that his close-cropped hair hadn’t been dyed that color, but it looked that way to me) and wearing a two or three-day stubble, Cruise stood near the main entrance and talked to anyone who had the patience and the moxie to wait 15 to 20 minutes to push through and wait their turn.
I’m too aloof for that kind of grovelling. What would I say if I got to the guy? I guess we could talk about our mutual friendships with Cameron Crowe and Robert Towne. And I could ask why his Last Samurai character managed to survive that samurai-on-horseback charge straight into a hailstorm of machine-gun bullets. And I guess I could float my pet theory that Cruise’s character was actually a werewolf — i.e., killable only with silver bullets.
A journalist friend who’d interviewed Cruise at press junkets was complaining that “he doesn’t give you anything.” A lot of journos feel that Cruise’s patter is too much about precision, exactitude, presentation. He never relaxes, never lets his guard down.
His fans see things differently. It’s one thing to look at the big grosses for Cruise’s films in the pages of Variety, and another to actually feel the ardor. The fans at Royce Hall were squealing, whooping…it felt almost Beatle-esque when Cruise walked on stage just after 8 pm. “We love you!,” cried a group of college-age girls to my left. “We love you too!” said another group to the right.
Cruise was obviously “on,” but he seemed fairly open to the give and take. He didn’t act or sound like an especially icy type. He seemed more in the realm of being intense, focused….not so much a controller as an uber-regulator. He showed an obvious liveliness of spirit and seemed eager to really listen to people, although perhaps a bit too eager to laugh at times. I forgave him for that.
The show lasted just under two and a half hours. Every 20 minutes or so, the house went dark and Cruise clips were shown. And yet no clips from All The Right Moves or The Outsiders or Curtis Hanson’s Losin’ It. And no acknowledgements than any of these films might have been letdowns for the audience, or for Cruise, which of course happens from time to time.
I couldn’t hear any groans when they ran clips from Days of Thunder (i.e., Top Car) and Far and Away, but then the sound levels were high.
Connelly was crisp, polished and TV pitchman-like. Always going for the jovial chummy tone. Cruise said at one point that he used to imitate Donald Duck as a youth, and Connelly urged him to do it for the crowd. Cruise gave it a shot and made a sound like a duck farting. Connelly to crowd: “What about that? Not bad!”
Cruise is a pretty good mimic though. He did an excellent Jack Nicholson a while later (i.e., acting the bar-rage scene from The Last Detail). I read somewhere he’s great at doing an Al Pacino/Tony Montana. He did a first-rate imitation of Jon Heder doing his Napoleon Dynamite voice.
The place went wild when they showed the famous clip of Cruise dancing in his underwear in Risky Business. The crowd was clapping in time to that Bob Seger beat. “I’ve never done anything like this in which they show clips,” Cruise said later on. “This is pretty amazing.”
Cruise posing for photos with fans after Monday’s AFI Royce Hall event
Cruise recalled that when he first got to Los Angeles and hadn’t worked anywhere, he went to an open audition and read some lines. The casting director asked him, “New to California?” Cruise said yes. “Staying long?” Depends, Cruise answered. The casting director said, “Get a tan.”
He was also told during this stage, “Do movies. You’re too intense for television.”
Connelly asked him about always being recognized and dealing with the fame game. He quoted a line from Bob Dylan’s recently released book: “Privacy is something you can sell, but you can never buy it back.”
The clips reminded me that Cruise was on the physically chunky side in the early to mid `80s, and that he suddenly slimmed down when he appeared in Rain Man in ’88. Cruise said he became a Scientologist right around (or was it right after?) doing Martin Scorsese’s The Color of Money in ’86. I guess he went on some kind of Scientology diet.
“Before making The Color of Money, I had seen Raging Bull five times,” he said at one point. “If I like a movie I see it over and over. Now with DVD I sometimes just sit and re-watch scenes.”
He recalled that when he started shooting Taps and didn’t know how well he or the film would perform, he said to himself, “If this is it, then this is it…enjoy it for what it is.”
“I was always the kid who climbed to the top of the tree in a rainstorm,” he said later. “I’ve always wanted to risk it all.”
Cruise said more than once that “money doesn’t matter” to him as much as going for the challenge and the creative excitement. He said he only wants “a fair exchange in regard to what I’m worth.” Monetarily, he declared, “I’m doing okay.”
“I’ve never met a normal person,” he said toward the end of the chat. “Every person is unique. Every person has a story to tell. Films are personal, character is personal…”
When he was younger he always used to call people “sir.” His publicist Andrea Jaffe finally told him, “Look, you’re freaking people out. Stop saying ‘sir’ and ‘yes sir.'”
He told an amusing story about the months-long shooting of Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, and how long it took his costar Sydney Pollack (who’d directed him in The Firm) to understand that sometimes Kubrick was more into blocking and thinking things through than actually filming. But EWS only cost $250,000 per week to shoot, or $1 million a month, he said. (That’s relatively cheap for a big-studio film.)
After many, many months of shooting, Cruise went up to Kubrick and said, “I gotta go, Stanley.” Kubrick said okay “and I left,” said Cruise. “And the movie was done.”
He said his goal is to climb Mount Everest. He said he was open to doing a musical. He said he was also willing in doing a straight play, although he seemed a little hesitant about this. His most emphatic statement of the night was, “I was born to make movies,”
Right now he’s doing final pre-production work on Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, which starts shooting in early November and will be out next June. Then he’ll start work on Mission Impossible 3. During the q & a portion near the end I wanted to ask Cruise about the creative conflicts that resulted in Narc director Joe Carnahan’s leaving that project, but I wasn’t chosen.
An agent friend said to me later that evening, a couple of hours after the show was over, that the fans love him because Cruise projects regular-guy vibes — “He’s someone they feel they can relax with over a drink” — and because women think he’s cute and guys want to be like him.
“But he’s not that guy,” my friend argued. “He’s royalty and acts like royalty. He always gets the biggest perk packages when he shoots a film. He lives in a royal realm. He’s not an average type of guy at all.”
Okay, I said, but isn’t that what made him a star in the first place? Not being average?
And don’t people like worshipping royalty? Isn’t that built in to our genes? The urge to show obeisance before power?
“I’m just saying he’s not the guy he presents himself to be,” she said.
To the Wolves?
It’s no secret that I really like Charles Shyer’s Alfie. I don’t think it plays well; I know it does. It may not have the jolt or punch that the original Michael Caine version had in `66, but it’s a believably acted, exquisitely edited, richly scored character piece. It’s not quite Rules of the Game, but it’s a long way from a burn.
I especially liked that Alfie has the character and intelligence not to go all mushy at the end and deliver a conventionally happy turnaround ending. This despite the fact that one of Paramount’s Alfie trailers seems to suggest that Jude Law’s lead character, a hard-core hound who casually hurts women’s feelings through the film, hooks up with costar Marisa Tomei at the end and makes like a father to her young son, etc.
The problem is this: I was told earlier this week that Alfie is “not tracking.” This means it isn’t showing up in moviegoer surveys as something that a good-sized percentage of the audience wants to see. Apparently Law’s name isn’t enough of a draw on this score. He’s seen as more of an “industry star” than a public one.
The standard way to raise awareness and create want-to-see with an upcoming film is to show nationwide “sneaks” the weekend before it opens so people will see it, like it and spread the word. The only reason you don’t do this is if distribution execs are concerned that the word of mouth may not be so hot, which could result in the opening weekend tally coming in lower.
Paramount is apparently not planning any Alfie sneaks this weekend, so draw your own conclusions. I understand why, and at the same time I don’t. This movie sells itself and doesn’t screw anyone over. Law gives his most movie-star-ish performance ever. He really leaves that character-actor attitude in the dust.
I think distribution should be like parenting. Your love should always be absolute and bountiful. Especially when it’s time for your child to meet the world and fend for himself. You shouldn’t raise, bathe, feed, nurture and teach your little boy only to push him out the front door on his very first day of school and say, “Okay, buddy…the bus is down the street….see ya later!” You have to stand by your child, hold his hand, show support and keep showing it.
It’s not just that deceptive trailer. The Alfie one-sheet is also a bit lame. By emphasizing only the fact that Jude Law is good looking and not indicating there are all kinds of layers to this film (which there are), they make it look like lightweight fluff.
Alfie isn’t that. It’s a far better film than what Paramount marketers are trying to suggest, and I just can’t imagine average filmgoers seeing this en masse and going “eh.”
Courage
“Dude, you have to calm down about the election. Kerry is going to win this thing and win it big. When you see these poll numbers that don’t look good for Kerry, take a look at the internals. They invariably oversample GOP voters (assuming more Republicans will turn out to vote than Democrats).
“That’s not the case. It wasn’t the case in 2000, when all the polls had Bush winning by 6-8% and he wound up *losing* the popular vote. And it certainly isn’t the case this year, when Democrats are more fired up than they’ve ever been and millions of first-time voters will pick Kerry. Hang in there.” — Clay Clifton
Last Lap
I ran into the mythical producer’s rep Jeff Dowd (a.k.a. “the Dude”) Tuesday night at the Grove. He told me he was on his way to Ohio today to do some kind of get-out-the-vote work for the Kerry campaign. Dowd’s positivism about what he’s certain will happen next Tuesday is almost a contact high.
Dowd also told me that George Butler’s Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry is now viewable for free online. The URL is www.thekerrymovie.com.
Big Lebowski star Jeff Bridges (l), original “Dude” and one-man Kerry vote-driver Jeff Dowd
Dowd had nothing do with the following, but here’s a well-reasoned endorsement from the pages of The New Yorker:
“[John] Kerry’s performance on the stump has been uneven, and his public groping for a firm explanation of his position on Iraq was discouraging to behold. He can be cautious to a fault, overeager to acknowledge every angle of an issue; and his reluctance to expose the Administration’s appalling record bluntly and relentlessly until very late in the race was a missed opportunity.
“But when his foes sought to destroy him rather than to debate him they found no scandals and no evidence of bad faith in his past. In the face of infuriating and scurrilous calumnies, he kept the sort of cool that the thin-skinned and painfully insecure incumbent cannot even feign during the unprogrammed give-and-take of an electoral debate.
“Kerry’s mettle has been tested under fire — the fire of real bullets and the political fire that will surely not abate but, rather, intensify if he is elected — and he has shown himself to be tough, resilient, and possessed of a properly Presidential dose of dignified authority. While Bush has pandered relentlessly to the narrowest urges of his base, Kerry has sought to appeal broadly to the American center.
“In a time of primitive partisanship, Kerry has exhibited a fundamentally undogmatic temperament. In campaigning for America’s mainstream restoration, Kerry has insisted that this election ought to be decided on the urgent issues of our moment, the issues that will define American life for the coming half century.
“That insistence is a measure of his character. He is plainly the better choice. As observers, reporters, and commentators we will hold him to the highest standards of honesty and performance. For now, as citizens, we hope for his victory” — New Yorker editors.
Xan Cassevettes, director of Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession, after last Monday’s Movie City News screening at the Pacific Design Center. MCN is holding a series of weekly screenings of possible/likely Oscar-worthy films and they’re open to all awards voters including AMPAS, SAG, WGA and BFCA members. I have a problem with the seating (there’s not enough leg room) at the PDC auditiorium, but it’s otherwise a very agreeable amtosphere for seeing films.
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