“Underworld…vampires, Bill Nighy, naah. Hotel for Dogs…great title, kids movie, naah. Already seen The Wrestler, good downer flick, hope Mickey wins. Mall Cop is a slob comedy…nope. Didn’t I read somewhere that Dustin Hoffman gives his best performance in Harvey since…I don’t know, a really long time? S’matter? You just wanna eat something? Sure? Fine.”
You’d never know it from their website, but I think/trust/have been told that the National Board of Review crew will decide their annual movie awards slate on Wednesday, 12.3 The LA Film Critics Association (LAFCA) site says they’ll announce their choices on Tuesday, 12.9. (Wait, don’t they usually vote on a Saturday? I was expecting them to vote on Saturday, 12.6.) And then the New York Film Critics Circle will vote on Wednesday, 12.10.
I’m rooting for a Revolutionary Road upset over Slumdog Millionaire from either LAFCA or NYFCC. Not because I’m against Danny Boyle‘s film in any way. I just think Sam Mendes‘ film needs a little advance traction to get rolling with the L.A. pueriles who are saying they don’t care for it because it’s too morose. I’m telling you, that Death of a Salesman play is such a downer — what a loser! And all those Shakespearean tragedies besides…God! Can’t we have a little hope and happiness in our lives, something to feel good about with the economy being the way it is?
I guess I can imagine Milk taking it in Los Angeles to symbolically refute the passage of Proposition 8. Maybe.
Why is the new Will Ferrell-John C. Reilly comedy called Step Brothers? I’ve known that stepbrothers is a single unhyphenated word since I took part in sixth-grade spelling bees. Is your mother’s mother your “grand mother” or “grandmother”? I hate how marketing guys always do it their own way, get it wrong, thumb their nose at civilization.
Step Brothers, in any event, is not funny. I sat there like an Easter Island statue. No chuckles; not even a smile. I need to say right now that anyone who goes this weekend and laughs uproariously is showing their colors. I’m not saying it’ll mark you as a mongrel for finding it amusing but if you laugh heartily and repeatedly it will say something about your level of refinement and your vistas. The movie is a wallow — a crew of actors sloshing around in a mocha-colored whipped-mud pit and going “who-hooaaa!…being covered in slop is friggin’ hilarious, so the more the funnier….yahhhh!”
I’ll admit that I found the premise — a couple of 40 year-olds (Ferrell, Reilly) still living with their respective single parents and being forced to share a domain when their parents decide to get married — amusing on the surface. But I realized early on that immaturity in and of itself isn’t funny. It never is or has been. Think back — when has a contemporary acting like an immature twit at any age ever been amusing? In your own life, I mean.
I’ll admit that some of what Ferrell and O’Reilly get into is mildly diverting if you’re a good-natured person who likes to be charitable (people were laughing at the screening I attended), but that’s neither here nor there.
The premise connects because the age of supposed maturity (attaining mellow emotionality, knowing how to tie your shoelaces, getting down to a career, etc.) has been taking longer and longer with each generation, and we all know this and probably want to laugh at it to alleviate our concerns.
Guys who came out of World War I felt compelled to get down to marriage and raising kids in their early 20s. Then again the F. Scott Fitzgerald/Ernest Hemingway “lost generation” of the 1920s was the first to put stuff off as they wallowed in personal issues. The Depression toughened the nation up and kept almost everyone (except for the Beats of the late 1940s and ’50s) on the straight and narrow until the mid ’60s when all cultural hell broke loose. It was nonetheless considered a mark of at least some shame in the ’70s for anyone to have delayed on Big Life Moves until their late 20s or early 30s.
The state of social devolution has continued unabated since the ’70s, to the point that it’s now considered totally normal for immature guys to kick around well into their 30s and sometimes into their early 40s. Ten or twenty years from now it’ll be considered almost normal for guys to start thinking about coming to grips with maturity when they hit 45 or 50.
The world is culturally devolving, disassembling and swirling down the toilet bowl. That’s why Step Brothers is a downer — it’s essentially a meditation about the end of the world. I’m kind of kidding, yes, but not altogether. Because the world is ending, in a sense. Mamma Mia! is another indicator. Ditto the red-state bumpkins who resent Barack Obama for wallowin’ around in Afghanistan and Europe instead of taking care of business back home.
In the 7.21 New Yorker, there are two familiar but distinctively shaped impressions of The Dark Knight from critic David Denby — awed praise for the performance of Heath Ledger, and another lament (the fourth so far from a cultivated dead-tree critic) about feeling throttled and numbed-down into a state that of confusion and lethargy. I thnk it’s fair to say at this juncture that Dark Knight contrarians are now officially a mini-movement — Denby, Edelstein, Ansen and Thompson.
“The great Ledger…shambles and slides into a room, bending his knees and twisting his neck and suddenly surging into someone’s face like a deep-sea creature coming up for air. Ledger has a fright wig of ragged hair; thick, running gobs of white makeup; scarlet lips; and dark-shadowed eyes. He’s part freaky clown, part Alice Cooper the morning after, and all actor. He’s mesmerizing in every scene. His voice is not sludgy and slow, as it was in Brokeback Mountain. It’s a little higher and faster, but with odd, devastating pauses and saturnine shades of mockery.
“At times, I was reminded of Marlon Brando at his most feline and insinuating. When Ledger wields a knife, he is thoroughly terrifying (do not, despite the PG-13 rating, bring the children), and, as you’re watching him, you can’t help wondering — in a response that admittedly lies outside film criticism — how badly he messed himself up in order to play the role this way. His performance is a heroic, unsettling final act: this young actor looked into the abyss.
And here’s the scolding downer stuff…
“Many things go boom [in The Dark Knight}. Cars explode, jails and hospitals are blown up, bombs are put in people’s mouths and sewn into their stomachs. There’s a chase scene in which cars pile up and climb over other cars, and a truck gets lassoed by Batman (his one neat trick) and tumbles through the air like a diver doing a back flip. Men crash through windows of glass-walled office buildings, and there are many fights that employ the devastating martial-arts system known as the Keysi Fighting Method.
“Christian Bale, who plays Bruce Wayne (and Batman), spent months training under the masters of the ferocious and delicate K.F.M. Unfortunately, I can’t tell you a thing about it, because the combat is photographed close up, in semidarkness, and cut at the speed of a fifteen-second commercial. Instead of enjoying the formalized beauty of a fighting discipline, we see a lot of flailing movement and bodies hitting the floor like grain sacks.
“All this ruckus is accompanied by pounding thuds on the soundtrack, with two veteran Hollywood composers (Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard) providing additional bass-heavy stomps in every scene, even when nothing is going on. At times, the movie sounds like two excited mattresses making love in an echo chamber. In brief, Warner Bros. has continued to drain the poetry, fantasy, and comedy out of Tim Burton’s original conception for “Batman” (1989), completing the job of coarsening the material into hyperviolent summer action spectacle.
In other words, Denby “can’t rate The Dark Knight as an outstanding piece of craftsmanship. Batman Begins was grim and methodical, and this movie is grim and jammed together. The narrative isn’t shaped coherently to bring out contrasts and build toward a satisfying climax. The Dark Knight is constant climax; it’s always in a frenzy, and it goes on forever.
“Nothing is prepared for, and people show up and disappear without explanation; characters are eliminated with a casual nod. There are episodes that are expensively meaningless (a Hong Kong vignette, for instance), while crucial scenes are truncated at their most interesting point — such as the moment in which the disfigured Joker confronts a newly disfigured Harvey Dent (a visual sick joke) and turns him into a vicious killer. The thunderous violence and the music jack the audience up. But all that screw-tightening tension isn’t necessarily fun.
“The Dark Knight has been made in a time of terror, but it’s not fighting terror; it’s embracing and unleashing it — while making sure, with proper calculation, to set up the next installment of the corporate franchise.”
This last graph sounds like it came from the same well as that rant I published last Tuesday (“Boom Fart, Whee! and Splat”), to wit: “The world is collapsing, descending into chaos, destroying itself with tribal warfare and asphyxiating itself with fossil fuels. And in a certain spiritual way, corporate Hollywood product is a part of this implosion/self destruction.”
Five long years after the publication of Alanna Nash‘s “The Colonel: The Extraordinary Story of Colonel Tom Parker and Elvis Presley,” producers David Permut and David Binder have acquired the screen rights. But given the tragic slant of the story, it sounds HBO-ish to me.
The film will inevitably register as a downer of some kind, as any kind of honest translation of the book will basically be the story of a greedy Svengali‘s brilliant promotion of Presley (from the mid to late ’50s), followed by the slow ruination of his musical reputation and career (from the early ’60s onward) by cutting Presley off from the world (i.e., no European concert tours), turning him into a joke by putting him in those godawful ’60s movies, looking the other way at Presley’s drug dependency and basically grabbing all he could until Presley turned things around somewhat with that 1968 TV concert comeback show.
It’ll be, in short, a tragedy about how Parker went for the short-end money and all but killed the King’s career, but also about how Presley was a none-too-bright soft touch who let himself get pushed around by Parker, lacking the character to say “you’re fired” and not getting himself back into a semi-serious rock groove until it was almost too late.
Permut and Binder’s film will be called The Colonel. The role has Randy Quaid‘s name written all over it. Parker was in his mid ’40s when Elvis’s career began to take off; Quaid is in his late ’50s. Who else would be right or it? Somebody big and fat with a natural oozing-sleazeball quality.
The reserved, dignified and sonorous Paul Scofield, one of the greatest stage actors of the 20th Century who starred in relatively few films, has died at age 86. His landmark role was his Oscar-winning portrayal of Sir Thomas More in Fred Zinneman‘s A Man for All Seasons (’66).
Scofield had one of the most beautiful speaking voices I’ve ever heard come out of an actor’s mouth. Listen to this short mp3 clip from a portion of A Man For All Seasons in which the meaning of the keeping of an oath is explained. Although the words were written by Robert Bolt, in my heart I’ve I’ve always thought of Scofield as the man who understood, sculpted and knew the truth of them best.
I love this line from the Associated Press obit about Scofield’s “unforgettable voice [being] likened to a Rolls-Royce starting up or the rumbling sound of low organ pipes.”
My second most vivid Scofield memory is suffering through Peter Brooks‘ King Lear (’71), in which Scofield played the lead. I only saw about 2/3 of it (the agony became too much and I had to leave) but it ranks as a legendary downer for its gray, grim dreariness. I can’t even remember Scofield’s performance. I’ve blocked it out.
The AP obit doesn’t even mention Scofield’s performance as the art-loving Nazi Colonel in John Frankenheimer‘s The Train (’64), which is one of the key reasons for that film’s continued potency. I also enjoyed his graceful, low-key performance as a Russian spook named Zharkov in the little-remembered Scorpio (’73), a decent Michael Winner-directed espionage thriller that costarred Burt Lancaster and Alain Delon.
Scofield was fine but unremarkable as the patrician father of Ralph Fiennes‘ Charles Van Doren in Quiz Show (’94), but his last legendary screen moment was his performance as Reverend Danforth in The Crucible (’96), particularly when, as EW‘s Owen Gleiberman noted, he “wrapped his great basso profundo” around lines like ”Now we shall touch the bottom of this…swamp.'”
McCain lite is a pretty good retort to Hillary right now. So is “what the hell did she really actually do during the ’90s that involved 3 am courage”? So is “where are her tax returns”? For anyone with a modicum of perspective, the fact that Clinton is not only willing but eager to play it butt-ugly and burn the house down in order to take the Democratic nomination is ample damnation.
[Photo montage borrowed from Huffington Post]
The dynamic will change — it’s already changing — but I can’t shake this godawful sensation I have in my stomach that Pennsylvania’s Reagan Democrats have bought into the fear card that Hillary has thrown into the center of the table, and that the die is cast The older white women love her, and their shlumpy husbands — in Pennsylvania and perhaps elsewhere — may be thinking it’s better to have a combative battle-axe with a fierce glare and puff-bags under her eyes than the other guy with a new, turn-the-page hymnbook.
It’s awful — a downer of massive proportions — but Obama is in a situation now and something has to happen. He has to somehow get it on with the Pennsylvania lowbrows and make the vote in their state close…or there may be trouble. He has to at least keep a strong edge in the overall popular vote or certain spineless superdelegates could fold and Clinton could storm the convention and make a tough case, despite the delegate math that she can’t win on.
God save us from the timidity, sluggish thinking and pathetic malleability of the Dunkin’ Donuts Democrats.
Is there not a certain analogy between the older white women who are standing by Hillary and the “downtown” jury that found O.J. Simpson not guilty in his 1994 murder trial? Did the mostly African-American jury not set a murderer free out of logic-free loyalty because they felt they had to stand by a black man in order to defy, for once, decades of prejudicial handling of African American defendants by a one-sided justice system? What is the difference, deep down, between this and millions of older women standing by Hillary despite her contentious cat-scratch vibe and monstrous negatives that will give not only pause but indigestion to millions of voters in the general election out of a sense of profound loyalty to a woman candidate, regardless of her brief?
The more boutique-y and quality-oriented the Oscars become (“quality” being in some cases synonymous with being less emotionally engaging or accessible), the less popular they will be with the “just looking to be entertained” serf class. That’s where it’s all heading so can we please, please stop with the analysis pieces sounding the dark gong about how much less the Oscars mean these days in terms of generating box-office punch?
“The Oscar bounce has all but disappeared,” N.Y. Times media guy David Carr wrote in a 3.3 column. “In part because the awards have been moved up in the year and the window in which a nomination could be used to attract to a wider audience has become shorter.
“In his book ‘Picures at a Revolution,’ Mark Harris recounts how The Graduate, one of the nominees he wrote about, had a two-year run, including before and after the Oscars. Nowadays, perfectly wonderful films like Sidney Lumet‘s Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead and Sean Penn’s Into the Wild are pushed out of theaters (and out of competition) within a few weeks to make room for other bets.”
Stop right there. If you have a taste for well-sculpted, wonderfully acted melodrama by way of Greek tragedy, Lumet’s film is wonderful. But if you just want something spunky, brisk and thrilling, I can imagine people who aren’t that bright or sensitive calling it a chore and a downer. Same with Into The Wild. If you don’t have a high regard for the film’s naturalist theme or a deep respect for Jon Krakauer‘s novel or an admiration for Emile Hirsch‘s acting or Sean Penn‘s directing chops, it’s not necessarily a “wonderful” film at all.
“As a result, the so-called Oscar movie is a very precise business exercise,” says Carr. “It must be reviewed ecstatically, be seen by loads of adults and receive love at the warm-up awards shows before the Oscars. These kind of films have no toy revenues, no prequels or sequels, and little penetration with youth audiences (give or take the occasional Juno). With that kind of math, it’s a little like playing nickel slots with half-dollar coins.”
Whatever happened to Kenneth Lonergan‘s Margaret, a drama shot in 2005 with Anna Paquin, Matt Damon and Mark Ruffalo in the lead roles? Produced by Scott Rudin and Sydney Pollack and exec produced by Anthony Minghella, it’s said to be still in the cutting room with plans to get it out sometime this year. A CHUD article posted today by Jeremy Smith sifts through various quotes, reports and indications.
Matt Damon, Anna Pacquin in Kenneth Lonergan’s Margaret
I for one am scared by this IMDB synopsis, which makes the film sound like a mopey downer about coping with guilt. I’m obviously not saying it is this kind of film. I would expect otherwise, given the pedigree of the creative team. But why hasn’t it at least shown up at one of the festivals? Why hasn’t something happened?
“Margaret centers on a 17-year-old New York City high-school student who feels certain that she inadvertently played a role in a traffic accident that has claimed a woman’s life,” the synopsis reads. “In her attempts to set things right she meets with opposition at every step. Torn apart with frustration, she begins emotionally brutalizing her family, her friends, her teachers, and most of all, herself. She’s been confronted quite unexpectedly with a basic truth: that her youthful ideals are on a collision course against the realities and compromises of the adult world.”
A friend from Boston wrote this morning to say that she “didn’t see a single one of the nominated movies this year. The only one in the whole bunch that I saw was Once, and it was fun to see them win best song. A lot of people I talked to only saw Juno and none of the others. What percentage of people do you think are like me and didn’t see any of those movies?
“Too many seem to have too much violence, too many downer stories. We want to see something uplifting. I love Tilda Swinton but I have no desire to see Michael Clayton. Away From Her, too depressing. Other people who saw Atonement said the same thing I did — they couldn’t get invested in the characters.”
I answered that what she’s feeling is valid to some extent, but “movies are not supposed to be pills that you take to feel better. They’re not travelling carnivals with elephants and jugglers. They’re supposed to be aesthetic journeys and emotional hikes that get us in touch with things that too many of us tend to push away (or anesthetize ourselves from) in our day to day. They’re supposed to be compressions and condensations that create indelible moments, insights and excavations into our collective soul.
“We’re only here for 80 or 90 years, we need to figure some stuff out before we pass on, and good movies are part of the learning-and-realizing process.
“I don’t like downer movies either, but ‘uplift’ can turn rancid in the wrong hands. The bottom line is that 85% to 90% of the time movies looking to provide uplift are awful. I just want movies that are really engaging by virtue of being well made by talented people, and which tell fundamental or hidden truths and generally shed light in this or that way.”
She replied, “What if nobody actually saw all those movies? Isn’t that something you should talk about?”
I’m replying as follows: “These are some of the best movies that the filmmaking culture is turning out now. Every year there are at least 20 or 25 films that are somewhere between excellent, very good or good enough to watch and think about later. If regular people in Boston and Saskatchewan are living such insulated and cut-off lives that they can’t be bothered to go to some of these films unless it has an advertised ‘happy pill’ vibe then the hell with them. They’re children. I have no time for childishness, and neither does anyone else of any worth. Life is short.”
New York’s medical examiner report was predictably dry and succinct and non-judgmental, but the implication is that Heath Ledger didn’t care to calculate or remember which prescription drugs he’d taken, much less assess their combined effect upon his body. You can say “accident” over and over but the blunt answer is that Heath did it to himself. Like I wrote the day he died. A tree didn’t fall on him. Actions have consequences.
The pharma-names of the drugs found in his system are “oxycodone, hydrocodone, diazepam, temazepam, alprazolam and doxylamine.” The common names are OxyContin, Vicodin, Valium, Xanax, Restoril and Unisom.
Everyone presumably knows that OxyContin — “hillbilly heroin” — isn’t a painkiller as much as a recreational drug that serious stoners take in order to experience a nice opiate-like high. Hydrocodone is found in Vicodin. Diazepam and alprazolam = Valium and Xanax. Alprazolam and doxylamine are sleeping aids commonly known as Restoril and Unisom. In other words, Heath loaded himself down with one heavyweight floater-downer, a fairly heavy-duty pain killer and four relatively mild drugs for alleviating anxiety, settling down, feeling loose and catching zees.
Do you think he said to himself, “Let’s see…I’ve got five or six downer meds in my system. I still don’t feel completely relaxed though. Maybe if I popped another Oxy? I wonder what Mary Kate would say…?”
The report didn’t mention the apparent amounts of each drug that Ledger had in his system. It would help to know this.
I’ve watched a DVD screener of Rob Reiner‘s The Bucket List (Warner Bros., 12.25) three times over the last week and a half — once for my own reasons, and the other two times to show it to friends. Nobody liked it very much. A director friend called it “a lazy, complacent old man’s film.” That’s pretty close to my reaction. It’s a mild-mannered movie about dying from cancer — not awful or painful but nothing all that special.
Fox 411’s Roger Friedman recently called it the “downer movie of the year.” Not really — it just has tired blood.
I have to get back on the Mass Pike again and head for Syracuse, but allow me to impart two things before leaving. One, the above shot is an fair approximation of my own facial expression as I watched The Bucket List. And two, here’s the best line in the entire film — spoken by a bed-ridden Jack Nicholson to a bed-ridden Morgan Freeman right after Freeman’s “wife” has left their joint hospital room.
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