I’ve met Jason Clarke socially two or three times, and there’s no correlation between the dude he is at the dinner table — loose, casual, funny, kind-hearted — and the glum, dismissable guys he’s always being hired to play in films.
Clarke has had four interesting roles over the last decade — John “Red” Hamilton in Public Enemies, the CIA torturer guy in Zero Dark Thirty, Ted Kennedy in Chappaquiddick and “Malcom” in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. Otherwise he’s always getting cast as cuckolds (in Mudbound, All I See Is You and the forthcoming The Aftermath) or guys who end up dead (First Man, Everest) or as villains.
The real-life Clarke is bathed in charm and alpha vibes, but put him before a movie camera and he turns into a downhearted gloomhead who’s always coping with the shitty end of the stick. Unfair, not right, reboot required.
Worse in their view, the NBR has given its Best Actor trophy to Viggo Mortensen, whose chances of winning any acting awards had been dismissed by NAPSCA reps after he mistakenly used a verboten term in a post-screening discussion.
In a joint statement, NAPSCA co-chairs Brooke Obie and Inkoo Kang have said that “the NBR is obviously entitled to hand out its top awards to any film or filmmaker or performer it chooses…we wouldn’t want to inject ourselves into any private voting dynamic. However, we would be derelict in our duties as moral and ethical arbiters if we didn’t express disappointment that they chose to honor Green Book, which, as we’ve patiently explained, fails to reflect the current politically correct values and conversations that we would prefer to see in commercial cinemas these days.
“Peter Farrelly‘s decision to tell a story set in 1962 obviously goes against the grain of current progressive thought, and we strongly disagree with this. We will be meeting later today to discuss measures that will hopefully nip this in the bud.”
The other NBR awards:
Best Director — Bradley Cooper, A Star Is Born
Best Actress — Lady Gaga, A Star Is Born
Best Supporting Actor — Sam Elliott, A Star Is Born
Best Supporting Actress — Regina King, If Beale Street Could Talk
Best Original Screenplay — Paul Schrader, First Reformed (yes!)
Best Adapted Screenplay — Barry Jenkins, If Beale Street Could Talk (really?)
Best Animated Feature: Incredibles 2 (give me a break!)
Breakthrough Performance: Thomasin McKenzie, Leave No Trace
Best Directorial Debut: Bo Burnham, Eighth Grade
Best Foreign Language Film: Cold War
Best Documentary: RBG
In the view of Vulture‘s Mark Harris, Green Book’s Oscar campaign hasn’t necessarily derailed. Which is another way of saying it may be on track. Harris actually allows that the film’s A+ CinemaScore “suggests that the audience (at least the primarily older, largely white audience that showed up) is loving what it sees.”
HE to Harris #1: That’s been obvious from the get-go, bruh. I was there for the first big Toronto Film Festival screening, and people were levitating when it ended. I was told yesterday that a paying audience somewhere in the Hartford area clapped when it ended. Last month my 30 year-old son and his 29 year-old wife told me they “LOVED” it. And look at what just happened with the National Board of Review! But you know what I love? The way you indicate that the film’s admirers are behind the curve…on the slightly doddering, fuddy-dud side.
Harris says that Universal is hoping to ape the award-season success of last year’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, “which made more than half its money after its ninth week of release and earned Academy Awards for Frances McDormand and Sam Rockwell. There were loud critical complaints that in Three Billboards, the black characters were plot devices, abstractions designed to facilitate the growth curve of the white protagonists. That didn’t matter to Academy voters, nor will it matter to some of them that Green Book is a movie that could have been made 30 years ago.”
HE to Harris #2: That was one of the first things out of my mouth last September, Mark. That except for the material dealing with Don Shirley being gay, Green Book could have been made in 1987. But — hello? — it’s still a really good film. It walks softly and uses a deft touch, applying just the right English and timing to make this kind of story deliver just so. And it doesn’t harm anyone. And it believes in mutual respect and compassion. And it isn’t selling a “white savior” or a “magic negro” story. It’s just about a couple of 1962 guys, one of them being a blustery old-school racist and the other being on the priggish, constipated side. It delivers in low-key fashion from start to finish, and it believes in modesty and hugs and the taking of small steps.
“But Academy voters themselves, almost 30 percent of whom have joined only in the last four years, are changing, too, so who knows?,” Harris writes with a note of hope and optimism. He means that the New Academy Kidz might push back against Green Book while embracing, say, Barry Jenkins‘ If Beale Street Could Talk, a movie that muses along and winds up flatlining toward the end, like a Wong Kar Wai flick that’s run out of gas.
“It used to be a certainty that you’d never go broke selling white people stories of their own redemption, and that may still be true,” Harris allows. “But in 2018, it suddenly seems possible that you’ll never get rich that way either.”
The concern of the moment is that recently opened critical and film-festival favorites (Widows, Green Book, Boy Erased, The Front Runner, Can You Ever Forgive Me?, Beautiful Boy) are underperforming or limping along while generic family-friendly sludge movies (Ralph Breaks the Internet, Creed II, Dr. Seuss’ The Grinch, Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, Bohemian Rhapsody, Instant Family, A Star Is Born) are making all the dough.
The general social-pledge attitude of the moviegoing audience used to be that (a) they would pay to see low-rent, mass-appeal popcorn fare (horror, CG-driven, superheroes, stupid comedies) all through the winter, spring, summer and early fall, but that (b) they’d willingly shift gears and pay to see prestigious, well-reviewed, award-contending movies in November and December.
The new general attitude seems to be “fuck the prestige human-drama movies…we’ll watch them on Netflix or Amazon when they come around in three or four months.” Even in the case of a feel-good flick like Green Book, which audiences are completely in love with (I heard yesterday that it got a standing ovation in Hartford from a regular paying audience)…even with Green Book they seem to be going “ehh, well, maybe not…I can wait.”
What’s happening here? What’s happened to the good old “okay, we’ll pay to see well-made, adult-friendly movies during the year-end holidays” contract? The willingness to engage with adult, semi-complex, reality-reflecting movies seems to be dwindling.
Question: Imagine if Sidney Lumet‘s The Verdict had never been made and released in ’82, but had been made by, say, Steve McQueen or David Fincher or David Gordon Green and released over the Thanksgiving holiday. If the McQueen-Fincher-Green version has been just as good as the Lumet, would it also be getting the bum’s rush from audiences? Or would it prove the exception to the rule?
The Verdict opened on 12.10.82, and wound up making $53,977,250, or $140,340,850 in 2018 dollars.
Here’s an audio file of a Vice q & a that happened at Manhattan’s SVA theatre the night before last (11.25). The participants are Vice director-writer Adam McKay, star Amy Adams, composer Nicholas Britell, and producers Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner and Kevin Messick. Thanks to Blackfilm’s Wilson Morales for providing the file. Again, the mp3.
Best Feature: Chloé Zhao‘s The Rider HE comment: Paul Schrader‘s First Reformed is a fuller, more impactful film with a better ending.
Best Actor: Ethan Hawke in First Reformed. HE comment: Deserved.
Best Actress: Toni Collette in Hereditary. HE comment: Collette’s performance is top-grade, but I’m surprised they didn’t give it to The Wife‘s Glenn Close.
Best Screenplay: First Reformed, Paul Schrader HE comment: Deserved.
Best Documentary: Hale County This Morning, This Evening HE comment: Haven’t seen it..
Bingham Ray Breakthrough Director Award: Bo Burnham, Eighth Grade HE comment: Should have been a tie between Burnhamn and Hereditary‘s Ari Aster.
Jury Award for Ensemble Performance: Rachel Weisz, Olivia Colman and Emma Stone in “The Favourite” HE comment: Deserved.
Audience Award: Won’t You Be My Neighbor? HE comment: Sure.
Since Federico Fellini‘s La Strada, what films have ended similarly? The main protagonist finally realizing who and what he is, and with no path to redemption.
There’s Woody Allen‘s Sweet and Lowdown, of course, but the ending was a fairly blatant homage to Fellini’s original. You could argue that the ending of The Godfather, Part II fits the description. A slow dolly-in upon Michael Corleone, alone at his Lake Tahoe manse, thinking back to who he was 19 years earlier, right after the 12.7.41 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Except the frosty Michael doesn’t indicate an emotional reaction. (It’s not in him.) And there was a creepy episode (#15) of Boris Karloff‘s Thriller series called “The Cheaters”, and it ended with the lead protagonist (played by Harry Townes) looking at himself in a mirror and seeing a beast. Others?
The Rene Magritte-like Birds of Passage poster speaks for itself. I believe that’s a skull under the red tunic. The Bumblebee poster looks odd, off. An absence of clarity, of balance. Randomly thrown together. Hailee Steinfeld is anguished about something? John Cena seems forlorn about something.
On 11.22 Hollywood Elsewhere posted a grand tally of just under 90 2019 films (“The Whole Shebang“) — The Irishman, Once Upon A Time in Hollywood, Gemini Man, You Are My Friend, Triple Frontier, Official Secrets, Greyhound, Little Women, The Woman in the Window, etc. The presumption is that a significant portion of these will probably feel at least moderately satisfying to smarthouse viewers.
From AP’s Bernardo Bertolucci obit, posted in today’s N.Y. Times: “‘Maybe I’m an idealist, but I still think of the movie theater as a cathedral where we all go together to dream the dream together‘ — Bertolucci upon receiving a DGA award for The Last Emperor (’87).
From “Reverence, Churches and Moon Dust,” posted on 7.17.06: “Every time I walk into a plex or a screening room it’s like entering St. Patrick’s on Fifth Avenue or Sacre Coeur in Paris. If you’re not feeling awe as you enter a theatre, why go? What is moviegoing if not a ritual about great possibility? The chance that something jolting or transcendent might happen?”
“The dramatic theme is roughly the same we’ve been seeing in drug-dealing movies for decades, which is that (a) dealing will pollute your soul and (b) sooner or later anyone who seeks to profit from big-time drug dealing will wind up dead on the floor. Sooner or later all dealers form gangs and go to war with each other, etc. The principal Wayuu characters start out simple and pure and just looking to better their lives, and by the end they’ve all taken a bullet or several.
“The perspective is interesting, but it’s basically the same bouillabaisse. During the last third you’re saying to yourself, ‘Okay, everyone’s gonna die, this scourge will consume itself, the black birds of death are circling.'”
The Orchard will release Birds of Passage on 2.13.19.
I was raised to understand that life is generally not a breeze or a bowl of cherries, and that you won’t experience much in the way of fulfillment or security without putting in a lot of hard work and also applying a fair amount of discipline and caution at all times, at least during weekdays.
I was also brought up on the idea that the best women work just as hard as men, and that the best marriages — the ones that work out, at least — are partnerships based on two ideas. One, life is nothing without joy, kindness, caressings, imagination, optimism and healthy diets. And two, neither party can lean too much on the other and that both have to contribute what they can and pull their own weight, etc. What’s past is past, and it’s best to look forward.
