If you don’t love listening to vocal-free backing tracks of legendary rock songs, you’re not a real rock ‘n’ roll fan. The singing delivers the soul and the emotion, but the bass, drums, organ, horns, rhythm and lead guitar elements are the brick and mortar. Especially when it comes to some of the more guitar-y Rolling Stones songs like “Star Star.” I would pay through the nose if the Stones would issue CD’s of nothing but instrumental tracks from their biggest hits. Somewhat in the same vein, I’m thinking, as the Beach Boys’ “Stack-O-Tracks” album, which has been around for ages.
A few days ago the Toronto Film Festival consensus on The Danish Girl emerged as follows: (a) Tom Hooper‘s film is a handsome period slog — appropriately delicate but a little on the tedious side, (b) Eddie Redmayne gives his open-hearted, ultra-sensitive all in playing Einar Wegener/Lili Elbe, and (c) Alicia Vikander‘s performance as Gerda Wegener, Redmayne’s spouse and loyal supporter as he goes through his gender-transforming travails, is the most popular element.
Yesterday Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neilposted reactions from several GD hotshots about (a) whether Vikander’s performance should be classified as lead or supporting in the eyes of the Movie Godz, and (b) is it smartest to campaign her in lead or supporting?
Alicia Viklander as Gerda Wegener in Tom Hooper’s The Danish Girl.
Obvious answer #1: You can “sell” Vikander’s performance as a lead if you want to (in somewhat the same way that Felicity Jones‘ handlers flim-flammed everyone into thinking that her performance as Mrs. Stephen Hawking was a lead, not to mention Patricia Neal‘s undeniably supporting performance in Hud being successfully campaigned in the Best Actress category), but if you’re not playing the lead character and you are playing the wife/husband/partner of said lead then you’re giving a supporting performance — period, end of discussion.
Obvious answer #2: If a noteworthy performance has been given by a relatively young and newish face in industry terms, it’s always a smarter move to go for a supporting nomination. Always.
I’m not saying I’m so enthralled by James Marsh‘s Oscar-winning Man on Wire that I’m unwilling to absorb another, just-as-mesmerizing impression of Philippe Petit‘s 1974 World Trade Center feat. Robert Zemeckis‘s The Walk (TriStar, 9.30) might just do that. I would love it if Zemeckis somehow re-charges the story; I just don’t see how it can turn out better than Marsh’s doc. (I’ve heard from a friend that it’s a little dicey in the first half, but the second half is pretty great.) The Walk will have its first big showing at the New York Film Festival eight days hence, or on 9.26. Select journos are naturally expecting some kind of simultaneous L.A. screening.
I’ve decided to be the official mediator between Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone and The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg regarding their dispute about James Vanderbilt‘s Truth (Sony Pictures Classics, 10.16), which ignited yesterday. What actually happened is that Feinberg, who saw Truth in Toronto, attacked the film — a curiously aggressive response four weeks before the opening, not to mention that Feinberg mostly focuses on analysis and trend-spotting. This prompted Stone, who saw and loved it in Los Angeles around the same time, to attack Feinberg. I tumbled for Truth in Toronto and am frankly more on Stone’s side of the fence in this matter, but I can be fair-minded when the occasion requires.
The pro-Truth Stone believes that the film passes along a comprehensive and justifiably damning portrait of corporate cowardice on the part of CBS after the infamous 60 Minutes Killian documents story blew up in late ’04. She points out that if Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee had acted similarly — if he had thrown Woodward and Bernstein under the bus when their story about H.R. Haldeman being named in Grand Jury testimony as the fifth White House official to control the Nixon re-relection team’s slush fund was attacked for being false (even though Haldeman was the fifth official to control the fund) — the All The President’s Men saga would have been quite different.
The anti-Truth Feinberg believes that the film errs in trying to portray Mapes and Rather as flawed heroes, and that it’s too hard on CBS and not hard enough on Mapes, whom he believes didn’t do her job properly and deserved to be canned. He believes that “a narrative motion picture was probably the wrong format in which to re-litigate this saga…ironically, it feels more fitting for a segment on 60 Minutes…[it] just doesn’t quite ring true.”
Leonardo DiCaprio is on top because (a) he’s been humping it in features for 22 years (since This Boy’s Life) and is arguably more “due” than Julianne Moore was before she won last year, (b) because he should’ve won that bitch trophy for The Wolf of Wall Street, and (c) because it is believed in certain quarters that The Revenant is the best AAA art film he’s ever been part of. Johnny Depp is ranked second because of the wig and the husky eyes, but he probably won’t last because Scott Cooper‘s film, as good as it is, doesn’t really break fresh ground. Eddie Redmayne is next for giving 110% to a role that demanded nothing less, and yet his Danish Girl performance feels one-note. (Not Redmayne’s fault but the writing.) You know what else feels a little one-notey? Michael Fassbender‘s lead performance in Steve Jobs. But the relentlessness does leave a strong impression. I was telling myself that Michael Keaton or Mark Ruffalo should be nominated for Spotlight, but I don’t see how you can call either of their performances leads. I put in John Cusack for Love & Mercy because Paul Dano‘s performance will, I’ve been told, be campaigned as a supporting thing — smart move. Geza Rohrig‘s barely verbal performance in Son of Saul is the most harrowing I’ve seen this year from anyone. Michael Caine delivers the goods in Youth, but his best shot is to use the gold-watch, end-of-career tribute pitch. Bryan Cranston as Dalton Trumbo…maybe. (Tip of the hat to HE’s Sean Jacobs for Photoshopping the chart.)
I spent more than 50% of this morning cleaning and tidying the Bloor Street condo where I stayed during TIFF (thanks to old friend Dennis Edell and his wife Leslie), and the other half trying to get going on five or six stories. To little avail, I should add. I took the Bloor train to the end of the line, hopped on the Rocket Express to Pearson Airport and realized when I got to the American Airlines desk at 1:10 pm that I was more than five hours early. I had it in my head that my flight left around 3 pm, and I couldn’t be bothered to double-check. Now I’m working on stories in a lounge — no electrical outlets, of course. Determined to catch up despite feelings of fatigue, depletion.
Mickey Rourke to TMZ: “Tell Donald Trump to go fuck himself…he’s nothing but a big-mouthed bitch bully, and I’d like to have 30 seconds in a room with the little bitch…all right?” Asked whom he wants to become president, Rourke replied, “I like, uhm, the doctor…uhm, the black dude.”
My final Toronto screening was Morgan Neville‘s Keith Richards: Under the Influence, which begins today on Netflix. It’s a warm, intimate, amiable portrait of where the 71 year-old Rolling Stones guitarist and co-founder is at today, but it follows what may seem to some like an unusualstrategy. Instead of taking us back through Richards’ rich and fabled musical history with the Rolling Stones, which is why 99.5% of the potential audience would be interested in seeing Neville’s doc, it largely focuses on the rhythm–and–bluesinfluences of the Stones’ first incarnation (’62 to ’65) when they mainly performed covers of blues standards. The doc doesn’t exactly ignore the Stones after they began to fashion their own unique sound with Aftermath (’66) — the first real-deal, pulled-from-the-marrow Rolling Stones album — but it doesn’t pay a huge amount of attention to this period either. Which, you know, has lasted for half a century. The doc also touches upon country-music influences. A fair amount of footage is just jolly Keith in conversation, recording his new album (“Cross-Eyed Heart“), shooting the shit and picking guitars with musician pallies (including Tom Waits) and strolling around the grounds of his woodsy country mansion in Weston, Connecticut. It more or less reflects the emphasis that Keith created in his 2010 autobiography, “Life,” which I respected and rather enjoyed. Richards’ net worth is over $300 million. He’s happy, makes others happy, does what he wants, etc.
I was determined to see Amy Berg‘s Janis: Little Girl Blue, her American Masters doc about the great Janis Joplin a day or two ago, mainly because I wanted to hear that great legendary voice booming out of large theatre speakers. And I did that. Sat in a full house in a big, 45-degree-angle arena theatre, and we all sank in and went back to Joplinland. I can listen to her any old time with earphones, but this was almost a concert-like experience, I didn’t care if a certain portion of the footage is accessible on YouTube (such as the below clip from Joplin’s break-out performance at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival), and I wouldn’t have minded if Berg had served up a middling, good-enough portrait. But it’s better than that. And sadder than I expected. It reminded me that her run with Big Brother and the Holding Company was the most exuberant period of her life and career, and that the successful, big-time portion of that alliance lasted only from the Monterey Pop Festival to the very end of ’68 — 18 months. Then came her association with the Kozmic Blues Band (’68 and ’69) and the Full Tilt Boogie Band (’70) — a period not devoid of hits or highs but generally spotty. (Rock critic Ralph J. Gleason wrote that the Kozmic guys were a “drag” and that Joplin should “go right back to being a member of Big Brother.”) And then on 10.4.70 she was gone, dead in a Hollywood hotel room, a victim of too-strong heroin. Heavy drugs were so pervasive back then, so dominant and destructive. But the ’60s needed them as much drugs needed the ’60s, and everybody rode the train until it all turned banal with quaaludes and cocaine in the ’70s and early ’80s. And now it’s all back to alcohol, if that. Among your devil-may-care nocturnal types, I mean.
I didn’t see John Crowley‘s masterful Brooklyn (Fox Searchlight, 11.4 limited) here in Toronto, but in Los Angeles a couple of weeks ago. I had initially watched it on a third-generation dupe DVD, but even under those crummy conditions the internals were unmissable. Brooklyn is a gentle, perfectly judged, profoundly stirring romantic classic — not just set in the early ’50s but shot, timed, cut and performed in a way that approximates the aesthetic standards of that era. It’s an amber time-capsule movie with a pulse and what feels to me like a real Irish heartbeat, and a feeling of things blooming and beginning and modest people trying to do the right thing.
Brooklyn could have been released in ’52 alongside High Noon, Singin’ In The Rain and The Bad and the Beautiful and audiences would have nodded and applauded and said the same things people are saying now — “This is a film I could take my mother to, but it’s good enough to satisfy the toughest, most cynical critics…a rooted love story, a film about decent and believable folk as well as tradition, discretion, real love and 1950s Brooklyn family values.”
A good movie doesn’t have to go wham-bam-kaboom and make audiences go “holy shit!…what just happened?” to earn a seat at the Best Picture table, and this is one such occasion. There’s a time and a place for every kind of film, and thank God an effort like Brooklyn has come along — a fine little reminder of the pleasures of emotional simplicity served up in a low-key, no-bull fashion. Cutting-edge cognoscenti might be looking for something flashier or jizzier but people who know from quality will warm to Brooklyn‘s timelessness. A Best Picture nomination seem assured, as I noted last month.
And there can be no doubt that Saoirse Ronan‘s performance as Eilis Lacey, a young Irish immigrant torn between two nice-guy suitors, is solemn and understated and quietly mesmerizing, and therefore a near-lock for a Best Actress nomination. Ditto Crowley for Best Director and Nick Hornby for Best Adapted Screenplay. Yves Belanger‘s elegant cinematography also warrants a nom.
Brooklyn is basically about young Eilis’s journey from Ireland to America to start a new life, and then falling in love with Tony Firello (Emory Cohen), a kindly Italian plumber of 25 or thereabouts who wants to marry her and build a home and start a family. But then she returns to Ireland to mourn the death of her sister, and soon after feels the pull of the heartland and wonders if she should maybe re-think her situation and stay with her own ones. Should she choose an American future or an Irish past?
