Boston Herald critic Jim Verniere picked up this poster at Intemporel, a Paris shop at 22, rue Saint-Martin. He paid about 320 euros, or about 30 euros off the official price.
It’s generally agreed that the Academy’s new Best Picture tabulation system (i.e., a film must earn at least 5% of the first-place votes to earn a Best Picture nomination) does no favors for those “very good but not quite creme de la creme” contenders that might have landed Best Picture nominations in ’09 and ’10 as one of the “lower five,” so to speak. Movies like A Serious Man or Blue Valentine or The Kids Are All Right or Up In The Air.
TheWrap‘s Steve Pond has now proven the point by measuring the strength of various Best Picture nominees from ’09 and ’10 within the new rules framework. The smaller, less mainstreamy films that might have become one of the bottom-five Best Picture contenders under the “old rules” are now facing a tougher situation. You could even call it a stacked deck. According to Pond, a bit less than 30% of all the 2011 Best Picture nomination ballots won’t even count because their first-choice picks probably won’t result in a 5% tally.
“Using the old system, my 2010 simulation” — using critics votes from Movie City News — “took 11 rounds to produce 10 Best Picture nominees,” Pond writes. “At the end of those 11 rounds, only 10 ballots (six percent of the total) had been discarded, because those critics opted entirely for films that ended up out of the running. The new system, though, uses just one round of counting and redistribution to come up with the nominees. Using that system, a full 43 ballots, representing almost 28 percent of the total vote, ended up having no impact on the slate of nominees.
“Critics who voted for The King’s Speech or The Social Network [in the simulated vote] helped their top choices get nominated. Ones who went for Biutiful or Shutter Island had their ballots redistributed to help out another pick. But the ballots of critics whose top picks were True Grit, Blue Valentine, The Kids Are All Right and 17 other films were left sitting on the table. That’s because they voted for the 21 films that fell into the gap between one and five percent of the vote.
In other words, “Because they voted for films that narrowly missed being nominated, they were unable to influence the outcome the way they would have under the old process, when those films would eventually have been eliminated and the ballots redistributed to help each voter’s other selections.
Pond did the same kind of simulation with MCN’s 2009 critics’ lists “and the results were similar,” he says, “with the number of unused ballots going from well under 10 percent to more than 25 percent.
“Certainly, you can’t draw direct comparisons between tallying 156 critics lists and 5,000 Oscar ballots; the critics, for one thing, are more likely to champion obscure films than Academy members, which might well lead to higher levels of unused ballots. And Davis insisted that Academy figures place their number of unused ballots at less than 10 percent under the new system. But my demonstration makes it clear that stopping after one round will increase the number of Academy voters whose ballots don’t affect the results, and Academy [honcho] Bruce Davis did not dispute that finding.”
42West announced the full cast of Woody Allen‘s The Bop Decameron, which will begin shooting in Rome on 7.11. And it’s hard to imagine that a film costarring Jesse Eisenberg, Greta Gerwig, Penelope Cruz, Roberto Benigni, Woody Allen, Alec Baldwin, Judy Davis and Ellen Page could be a problem. Costars include Ornella Muti and Alison Pill (i.e., Zelda Fitzgerald in Midnight in Paris). I’ll be expecting at least one scene featuring Eisenberg or Gerwig buzzing around on a scooter.
A couple of weeks ago I drove out to El Monte and bought a little white Chinese-made scooter for $1500 — brand new, tax and license and registration, all in. It costs $60 bucks to fill up my car and $5 to fill up the scooter tank, and it gets about 100 mpg. And I can get to places much faster on the scooter than I can with the car, and you never have to pay for parking, ever. And it’s a lot of fun. I rode a scooter through Paris three weeks ago and it was heaven.
I’m going to the premiere of Larry Crowne (Universal, 7.1), in which Tom Hanks plays a laid-off 50ish guy who joins an LA Scooter club, etc. I read this morning that a few dozen scooter riders “will accompany Hanks and possibly costar Julia Roberts on an escorted Scooter convoy through the streets of Hollywood en route to the Larry Crowne world premiere on June 27.”
I wrote my Universal p.r. pally about riding along with this swarm so I can shoot video and stills and whatnot.
This is one of the most romantic and beautiful couple-in-love photos I’ve ever seen in my life. It was taken last night in Vancouver by Getty Images’ Rich Lam, and wasn’t, it would appear, “staged.” It’s not just in the same league as that “Kiss by the Hotel de Ville” photo taken in Paris in 1950 by Robert Doisneau as well as Alfred Eisenstaedt‘s “sailor kissing a nurse in Times Square on V-J Day” — it’s also a lot sexier.
Official caption: “A couple kisses while police walk in the streets during riots following the Stanley Cup finals in Vancouver, Canada, on Wednesday, June 15. Vancouver broke out in riots after their hockey team, the Vancouver Canucks, lost in Game Seven of the Stanley Cup Finals.”
HE reader Bill McCuddy suggested this morning that my recent riff about Midnight In Paris “being better the second time would make a good column where we all weigh in. Not the bona fides but surprises that underwhelmed the first time and then get better with each subsequent viewing.
“For me, two come to mind immediately. One is Michael Clayton, which I only liked the first time and love now. The other is Duplicity, which is so much fun to listen to now. Great writing, giant shaggy-dog story, good fun. Other suggestions?”
Wells to McCuddy: Tony Gilroy makes movies that take a while to settle in and make you realize how good they are. Last January I wrote a mea culpa piece about my not being more initially enthusiastic enough about Michael Clayton. But I’m not so sure about Duplicity.
This morning a publicist working for Nicholas Winding Refn‘s Drive was wondering why I was so keen to see it at the LA Film Festival this weekend, since I’d already seen it in Cannes. That’s true, I said, but with only half of my hearing. My right ear was totally clogged during my Thursday evening screening (5.19) in the Grand Palais, I explained, and I’d love to see it again now that both ears are back in operation.
Nice things that put you in a great mood are rarely interesting. It’s always more fun to write about anger or irritation and opposition of some kind. But losing almost all of the hearing in my right ear made me feel weak and vulnerable in the most awful way, and getting it back two and half days later made me feel ecstatic, renewed…saved. There’s nothing like having one of your senses severely impaired to make you really appreciate, etc.
Bath water had seeped into my right ear canal on the morning on Thursday, May 19th, my last full day at the Cannes Film Festival, and I couldn’t get it out to save my life. I tilted my head back and forth and slapped the side of my head repeatedly. I jumped up and down like a pogo stick. I started applying some ear drops and an ear-cleaning solution that I’d bought at a pharmacy. Nothing worked. And no one had sharply yanked my ear (the cause of Thomas Alva Edison‘s hearing problem) or hit me on the side of the head (which is what Brian Wilson‘s father had done, causing his singer-songwriter son to go deaf in one ear) and I hadn’t allowed it to get infected or anything. It was just bath water! But after a while I began to wonder if it was something else.
My left ear was okay but I couldn’t hear a damn thing on the other side. All I could hear was a droning inner-ear noise that sounded like distant crickets or locusts on a hot summer night. My Drive viewing was probably affected in some vaguely negative way by this, although I didn’t let on in my review. I was feeling a bit freaked but I told no one.
My right ear was still clogged late Thursday night and all day Friday. I arrived in Paris around 10:30 or 11 am on 5.20 and lived with it all day and that night. The ear drops, etc. Everything that was said to me I had to lean forward and say, “Come again?” Saturday morning, same thing. And then around noon I was driving my rented scooter down a cobblestoned hill in Montmartre, and….whusshhhhhh. My ear opened up. I could suddenly feel air seeping in, and I was hearing in glorious stereo again. It was like escaping from prison but without any guards or cops chasing me. I was free. All the intense worry about possibly having to deal with some kind of ongoing hearing issue disappeared. Wow! It was the most the purely happy moment I’ve known in a long, long time.
For what it’s worth I saw Woody Allen‘s Midnight in Paris again last night. (My first viewing was on 5.11 at the Cannes Film Festival.) I presumed it would play more or less the same, but to my surprise it gained. It’s a little bit cleaner and more carefully structured than I remembered. So I understand the popularity — it’s a very likable and highly satisfying film in a sort of easygoing, light-touch way.
The Westside Pavillion theatre I saw it in (#1) was completely filled. It’s weird to see movies projected at what looks to me like a 1.5 to 1 aspect ratio. Landmark definitely chops off the sides of the image; I’m just not sure to what degree.
“I don’t think it’s possible to discuss it without using the terms ‘thinking man’s fantasy film’ or ‘time-trip movie’ or ‘a down-the-rabbit-hole excursion’,” I wrote on 5.11, “so I’ll just say it’s Allen’s most charming and engaging film in this vein since The Purple Rose of Cairo…how’s that? And certainly his overall best since Match Point.”
I felt suitably adrenalized while watching Fred Cavaye‘s Point Blank (Magnolia, 7.29), and moderately pleased while thinking about it later. Set in Paris, it’s a violent chase film about a hospital worker and his pregnant wife hurled into a high-pressure, do-or-die, move-it-or-lose-it situation. Cops, thieves, criminals, corruption, fists, guns, etc.
You’ve seen aspects of this before but the pacing feels just right. It’s fast and furious but not overly pushed or accelerated to the point of audience fatigue or numbness. And the dynamic — an innocent man pools forces with a lone-wolf criminal as they try to escape the wrath of numerous high-level baddies — feels relatively fresh or at least unhackneyed.
The French-langugage title is A Bout Portant.
It’s a little nutty here and there, but the action is more realistic — guys actually escape from their pursuers every so often, or at least manage to catch a breath from time to time. And the cutting is more ’70s-style (similar to the action beats in William Friedkin‘s The French Connection) than standard-issue U.S. crime thrillers, which have become way too fast and hyper for the most part, and have been all but ruined by the influence of the hyper-manic pacing and the oppressive Paul Greengrass shakycam aesthetic.
I’m especially angry at the idiotic and stifling notion in American crime thrillers that bad-guy pursuers must always be somewhere between a quarter-step and a half-step behind the pursued, and that get-aways can only happen at the very last millisecond and never before. It’s insane. Cavaye pulls back from this a bit.
Point Blank could use a little more breathing space and a bit more interplay between the regular-guy protagonist (Gilles Lellouche, playing a hospital orderly with a kidnapped pregnant wife) and the freelance desperado (Roschdy Zem) whom he teams up with out of necessity and desperation. But other than that this is an above-average thriller. There’s not a lot of residue when it’s over but these kind of films rarely linger. They’re just wham-bammers.
Marshall Fine is complaining about having been recently subjected to 20 minutes’ worth of ads and trailers at an AMC theatre prior to showtime. He should try attending a movie in Paris. On 5.27 I sat down just as the 7:45 pm show of Very Bad Trip 2 was starting at the Pathe Wepler, adjacent to Place Clichy. I sat through 27 minutes‘ worth of trailers and consumer ads before the feature began. (I timed it exactly.) The average time for trailers and ads in a typical U.S. theatre is what? 10 or 12 minutes worth?
Five or six days ago Sasha Stone posted a list of films she believes are the most likely contenders for 2011 Best Picture nominations. She began by listing the favorites posted by the mysterious “Peter” at Awards Corner. Sasha and I discussed this during yesterday’s Oscar Poker recording. So I’ve decided to post my own top ten.
HE’s Most Likely 2011 Best Picture Contenders (in this order): 1. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (d: Stephen Daldry, screenwriter: Eric Roth); 2. The War Horse (d: Steven Spielberg); 3. The Ides of March (d: George Clooney); 4. The Iron Lady (d: Phyllida Lloyd); 5. We Bought A Zoo (d: Cameron Crowe); 6. God of Carnage (d: Roman Polanski); 7. Young Adult (d: Jason Reitman, w: Diablo Cody); 8. The Descendants (d: Alexander Payne); 9. Moneyball (d: Bennett Miller); 10. J. Edgar (d: Clint Eastwood).
HE’s A-Little-Less-Likely Roster: The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (d: David Fincher); Shame (d: Steve McQueen); The Tree of Life (d: Terrence Malick); Win Win (d: Tom McCarthy); Beginners (d: Mike Mills). The Impossible (d: Juan Antonio Bayona); Larry Crowne (d: Tom Hanks); Hugo Cabret (d: Martin Scorsese); On The Road (d: Walter Salles); Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (d: Thomas Alfredson); The Whistleblower (d: Larysa Kondracki); Wuthering Heights (d: Andrea Arnold); In the Land of Blood and Honey (d: Angelina Jolie).
Here’s Peter’s list with my after-comments:
1. David Fincher‘s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. HE comment: It’s a pop genre movie — a creepy thriller, a punk whodunit with shaved eyebrows. It’ll probably be great entertainment but it’s not Oscar material.
2. Terrence Malick‘s The Tree of Life. HE comment: Malick doesn’t make Oscar movies. Damnation by L.A. Times citic Kenneth Turan has probably sealed the deal — the over-50 Academy types will reject it. Parts of Tree are radiant, transcendent. It should make the cut, but it probably won’t.
3. Steven Spielberg‘s The War Horse. HE comment: If this film about a sad hard-luck horse turns out to be in the vein of Robert Bresson‘s Au Hasard Balthazar, a classic about a sad and saintly donkey, then no one will be a more committed supporter than I. But if War Horse turns out to be another cloying and shamelessly sentimental Spielberg film, then it must be stopped at all costs. That’s all I’m going to say.
Thomas Horn, Ton Hanks during filming of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.
4. Clint Eastwood‘s J. Edgar. HE comment: Maybe. The script is a fairly dry thing, a little bit perverse. It may jbe quietly…who knows? But I have my doubts. I’m not feeling major heat.
5. Martin Scorsese‘s Hugo Cabret. HE comment: Never count on a Scorsese film operating outside of the northeast criminal goombah territory to achieve anything too exceptional — there are always problems when he ventures outside this realm. Then again this is a 3D film, etc.
6. Roman Polanski‘s Carnage. HE comment: Terrific play, sure-to-be-knockout performances, the direction of Roman Polanski. A very likely contender.
7. David Cronenberg‘s A Dangerous Method. HE comment: Forget it — Cronenberg doesn’t make Oscar films.
8. Woody Allen‘s Midnight in Paris. HE comment: A very charming, agreeable and popular film, but it won’t stand up to the fall/holiday competition.
9. Stephen Daldry‘s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. HE comment: Definitely.
10. Blah-dee-blah‘s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part II. HE comment: Definitely.
11. Alexander Payne‘s The Descendants. HE comment: Definitely.
12. Phyllida Lloyd‘s The Iron Lady. HE comment: Probably, but Lloyd (Mamma Mia!) scares me.
13. Mike Mills‘ Beginners. HE comment: Good enough to be among the ten; may or may not make it.
Georeg Clooney in Alexander Payne’s The Descendants.
14. Blah-dee-blah‘s My Week with Marilyn. HE comment: Doubtful, from what I’ve been told. Possibly Michelle Williams‘ Marilyn Monroe performance for Best Actress, but Kenneth Branagh, I’m hearing, is truly exceptional as Laurence Olivier, and in fact steals the film.
15. Andrea Arnold‘s Wuthering Heights. HE comment: Maybe.
Sasha Stone’s Awards Daily projection:
1. War Horse; 2. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close; 3. Midnight in Paris; 4. The Iron Lady; 5. J. Edgar; 6. The Descendants; 7. Harry Potter, etc.; 8. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo; 9. Super 8; and 10. The Artist.
Celluloid Junkie‘s Patrick von Sychowski tweeted a little while ago that he’s “seen [the] French thriller Point Blank at Hospital Club…pure adrenaline…I predict a Hollywood remake within 18 months.”
Magnolia Pictures acquired North American rights to Fred Cavaye‘s thriller, “billed as an action film in the vein of Tell No One,” last February. Gilles Lellouche stars “as a man racing against time through the streets of Paris to save his pregnant, kidnapped wife,” etc.
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