In a portion of a piece about the downish aspects of being a movie star called “Being Famous Mostly Sucks,” N.Y. Times columnist David Carr (a.k.a. “the Bagger’) writes that “the money is nice and all, but what if you want to just be with your pals and have a good time? That is never going to happen if you leave the house.
“It’s not that fans are trying to bum you out by getting an arm on you. They are just being themselves, which is to be riveted by the sight of someone who they have seen on their television. Everyone who approaches a famous person has a need for validation. I saw her, him or it. We had a moment. She seemed really great or horrible or freakish. We all want a taste of this, not so that we can savor it, but so that we can report back to our friends. And some of the motives, especially of the press, are less than friendly.
“As a writer, the Bagger has found that just about the time he is ready to sink his fangs into somebody, the area he is about to chomp on is already full of bite marks. That does not excuse a freak like Christian Bale, who is on the web dripping in vulgar entitlement, but it makes the whole celebrity disengagement a lot easier to understand.”
“There is a kind of moral certainty to the film — deeply corrupt, remarkably brutal — that makes everything make sense within the four corners of the movie. It’s full of likable, familiar types, but they just happen to have the habit of blowing people’s brains out. What does it say about culture when primordial evil expresses itself in a kid who might live right down the block?” — N.Y. Times Oscar columnist David Carr — a.k.a., “the Bagger” — riffing yesterday on Matteo Garrone‘s Gomorrah. Fairly well said.
“On a day when news of more than 75,000 layoffs came down in all sectors of the economy, it is silly to point to a single one that suggests Armageddon is nigh, but the Bagger can tell you seeing Anne Thompson‘s name on the cut-down list at Variety sent a shudder through the community. It’s the kind of layoff that signals that something in the middle is breaking, that something besides retrenchement is underway. You can’t roll someone like Ms. Thompson out of the back of the truck and pretend everything is hunky dory. It’s not.” — from a N.Y. TimesDavid Carr/”Bagger” posting earlier today.
Last-chance Sundance screenings and the distraction of the Dowd-Anderson fisticuffs caused me to miss this Bagger video two days ago. N.Y. Times Oscar blogger and Sundance guy David Carr tries snowboarding with Woody Harrelson and falls four times. Backwards. Landing on packed snow.
A critic friend just told me I’m not missing very much by not being at this morning’s Eccles showing of Adventureland. But a producer friend who saw it last night said he “loved it…a more realistic version of 500 Days of Summer, which is much more stylized.”
N.Y. Times columnist/reporter David Carr (right profile, notepad), producer Albert Berger (Little Miss Sunshine).
“Tom Bernard of Sony Pictures Classics once equated the Sundance Film Festival proceedings to ‘making drug deals in the snow.'” — from an off-to-Sundance, see-you-there jotting by N.Y. Times Oscar-race columnist David Carr, a.k.a. “the Bagger.”
As expected, the award-giving party thrown by the New York Film Critics Circle last night at Strata (Broadway at 21st) was a convivial, stimulating, enjoyable thing. Thanks to the NYFCC and IHOP publicity for inviting me. The food and drink were choice and abundant. The swanky, two-tiered room was filled with distributors, publicists and all manner of talent. And the best critics, bloggers and entertainment writers around. My idea of a class-A event.
Almost all the winners were there — Happy Go Lucky‘s Mike Leigh (Best Picture, Best Director) and Sally Hawkins (Best Actress), Milk‘s Sean Penn (Best Actor) and Josh Brolin (Best Supporting Actor), Rachel Getting Married‘s Jenny Lumet (Best Screenplay), Vicky Cristina Barcelona‘s Penelope Cruz (Best Supporting Actress), etc.
The most amusing moment happened when N.Y. Times columnist David Carr (a.k.a. “the Bagger”) invited Envelope columnist Tom O’Neil and myself to do an on-camera interview, and began things by asking “how many Oscar bloggers does it take to screw in a light bulb?”
Three or four minor issues surfaced during the four-hour event, but nothing to ruffle anyone’s feathers. Not mine, anyway. I wouldn’t bring them up but I may as well for the sake of colorful reporting.
One, the acceptance speeches rambled on and on and were, for the most part and by common consensus, boring. Josh Brolin‘s lubricated comments were blunt (he called Russell Crowe an asshole) but he could have used a red pencil or a friend signalling him from a nearby table. It was very difficult to sift through the French accent of Man on Wire‘s Phillipe Petit, who accepted the Best Doc award for director James Marsh, who couldn’t attend because he’s directing a new film, Nineteen Eighty, in England.
Vicky Cristina Barcelona‘s Penelope Cruz accepting the NYFCC’s Best Supporting Actress award.
Lisa Schwarzbaum, critic for Entertainment Weekly, resented some recent backstage reporting about the how the NYFCC voted last month — she feels the voting should be kept private — which resulted in said journalist being banned from the NYFCC event, which he attended anyway after threatening to make a stink. For what it’s worth I love reading reports about how this or that critics group voted — which films led initially only to fall behind when second and third ballots happened (or when proxies were disqualified), who argued with whom, who said what, etc. Critics groups should learn to roll with this. It’s the way of today’s world — nothing is private, everything is public, every imaginable personal embarassment is on YouTube, etc.
I spoke briefly to playwright/screenwriter Tony Kushner (Angels Over America, Munich). I asked him what the deal was with Steven Spielberg ‘s long-delayed Abraham Lincoln movie, the screenplay for which Kushner been been working on since ’07. (Earlier?) Kushner said (a) he’s not aware of any hesitancy or disinclination on Spielberg’s part to shoot the Lincoln film (all actions to the contrary), and (b) that he’s now on his fourth draft. I told him I had spoken to Liam Neeson three and a half years ago about Neeson’s great hunger to play Lincoln under Spielberg’s direction.
Spielberg “has become a kind of delaying sadist regarding the Lincoln film,” I wrote last March. “Chicago 7 this, Tintin that…and we never hear diddly about the Lincoln project. It’s a classic avoidance syndrome thing (a kid avoiding a homework assignment, a guy who keeps putting off doing his taxes). If a benevolent God took any kind of interest in human affairs, Spielberg would (a) officially abandon the Lincoln film and (b) arrange for another esteemed director to step in so it can finally move forward.”
Last month N.Y. Times columnist David Carr, a.k.a., “the Bagger,” was at an industry screening of Stephen Daldry‘s The Reader and “totally flipped his lid,” he writes in the third person, “when the couple next to him chattered happily through a scene in which a young man walks silently through a concentration camp. ‘Are you twits really going to talk your way through a scene at a concentration camp?’ he hissed.”
Twits! The growing fashion these days, of course, is to pull out a gun and start shooting when someone talks during a film, or at least pull out a squirt gun and let ’em have it two or three times in the back of the neck, or in the ear. Such luxuries, of course, are out of bounds for a Times guy. But more and more I’m detecting a John Wayne frontier-justice attitude about theatre gabbers. Critic-columnist Marshall Fine recently expressed sympathy for the motives of the Philadelphia shooter. “Awww, I didn’t hurt him!”
“Though Slumdog Millionaire has a hoary plot device, the kind of narrative armature that could have come out of the vaults of Warner Brothers five decades ago, the ability of Danny Boyle to find both the movie and the humanity in that story make it a tough Oscar competitor,” saysN.Y. Times Oscar guy David Carr, a.k.a., “the Bagger.”
“[Still], the more Slumdog Millionaire rolls, the harder the push-back will get. Nothing is writ. And it won’t be long before we start hearing, ‘Sure, it was a darling movie, a surprise really, but that third act? Please.'”
That’s exactly the opposite view I have of Slumdog Millionaire. It’s a buzz-kick movie but also a rough one to get through because of all the cruelty and violence visited upon the lead character (played in his adult years by Dev Patel) in the first and second acts. It’s hard, it’s a chore, but then along comes that third act and the film starts to sing. The third act saves it, and the train-station finale knocks it out of the park .
At Friday’s Revolutionary Road after-party at 21, the legendary old-time haunt on West 52nd Street that, for me, will always summon memories of the backroom scene between Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis in Sweet Smell of Success. Funded by Paramount Vantage, the event was another Peggy Siegal special.
“There are times when the limitations of the printed word come into focus,” writes N.Y. Times columnist David Carr in today’s issue. “Like when there is a need to convey how it sounded when Robert Pattinson, who stars as the vampire heartthrob Edward Cullen in the forthcoming movie Twilight, stepped onto a riser at the King of Prussia Mall outside Philadelphia [last] Thursday evening in front of more than 1,000 mostly teenage girls.”
“In collective pitch, frequency and volume the sound would make a shuttle launching seem demure, a Jack White guitar solo retiring, a jackhammer somehow soothing. To reach into history, it may have approached Beatles-at-Shea-Stadium loud, replete with the weeping, swooning and self-hugging, and only the ambient flutter of cellphone cameras and furious texting by way of modern update. All of it was arrayed over a mostly unknown British actor who plays a character in a movie that will not be released until Friday.
“‘What’s with all the screaming?’ Mr. Pattinson asked when he came out. He absently ran his hand through his hair. Pandemonium ensued. He tugged at his white T-shirt in response, ever so nervously. Oh, boy. Then he laughed good-naturedly at the absurdity of it all. The smile was just a bit too much. A girl in a ‘Team Edward’ shirt fell into the arms of her friend. ‘I can’t stand it!’ she said.”
“The question now,” as N.Y. Times media columnist David Carrwrote today, “is how many people will be left to cover it.” Print people, he means. Yes, I too read this story online. I never read the print version of the Times, although, as I’ve said repeatedly over the last four or five years, I would be very saddened to live in a world in which you couldn’t buy the print edition. As I do six or seven times a year when I’m in a sentimental, old-fashioned mood.