Grantland award-season columnist Mark Harris, who seems to file every three weeks or so, has embraced the popular view that Alfonso Cuaron‘s Gravity is a Best Picture lock as well as the admittedly popular but curious view that Sandra Bullock is all but guaranteed a Best Actress nomination. I accept the latter scenario but can’t understand what everyone is so excited about. Unless everyone is secretly embracing the Sasha Stone view that it’s a very significant thing for a 49 year-old actress to carry a huge film like Gravity and lend a certain emotional quality and obviously contribute to its success, and that a vote for Bullock is a vote for better, stronger roles for 45-and-older women, which I agree with. I just don’t get what’s so great about her performance. Because all I get from it are needles.
Eccentric and intemperate as this sounds, I’m going to London for three days next weekend in order to catch a BFI London Film Festival debut on Sunday, 10.20 of John Lee Hancock‘s Saving Mr. Banks — presumed to be a major factor in the awards race (certainly in terms of performances). This will be the first time it’ll be shown to critics. Two and a half weeks later it’ll open L.A.’s AFI Film Festival on 11.7 and then open commercially on 12.13, but it’ll be fair game eight days from now. Disney (which is very high on the film) will be screening it next week for select Los Angeles elites (but not critics). I get their strategy. They want the presumably positive reviews and the buzz to start with the AFI debut, and that’s fine. I haven’t been to London for a few years…what the hell. I’ve been in the tank for Kelly Marcel‘s screenplay for months, and I totally respect Hancock for his special touch. I even liked The Alamo.
This refers to a two-day-old discussion of Russ & Roger Go Beyond, Christopher Cluess‘s screenplay about the making of Russ Meyer‘s Beyond The Valley of the Dolls, which was written by Roger Ebert. I wondered aloud “what Ebert — fat, brilliant, bespectacled, desk-bound — could have possibly known about hot lascivious chicks and the charged sexual atmosphere of the late ’60s.” I said I didn’t know what Roger was up to in the ’60s “but I don’t believe he was up to very much.” Well, I’ve heard some hilarious second-hand stories since I wrote that and…uhm, I’m taking it back. Roger wrote brilliantly and apparently never missed a deadline but he also led quite the ribald life. During the Nixon, Ford and Carter administrations, at least. Let’s leave it at that.
I’ve never wanted to attend those Jason Reitman “Live Read” presentations at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. That’s because they always read scripts of already-released films that everyone knows. Why not some hot, not-yet-produced scripts? The cream of the current Blacklist, for instance? Is it Reitman’s presumption that people won’t show up for readings of works they’ve never heard of? Timid thinking. Paul Thomas Anderson‘s Boogie Nights was read during last night’s opener. Taylor Lautner, Don Johnson, Judy Greer, Nick Kroll, Jim Rash, Nat Faxon and Kevin Pollack.
Here’s an example of how an intriguing Bluray jacket design can make a very old and familiar film seem almost new again. The problem for me is that this 1973 Robert Altman neo-noir…I should probably shut up until I see the disc but my impression, having seen this film nine or ten times, is that it can’t look all that much better in terms of heightened resolution or texture. A Bluray upgrade probably can’t improve that much upon the DVD, or so I suspect. The style of Vilmos Zsigmond‘s widescreen cinematography (always moving, slowly gliding left to right and vice versa, never static) is what matters. He shot inventively but under an Elliott Kastner budget. Maybe the soundtrack will be improved.
Earlier today Deadline‘s Michael Fleming urged director Paul Greengrass and producer Scott Rudin to get going on Memphis, their long-gestating docudrama about the last chapter in the life of Martin Luther King. Fleming wrote this because (a) he’s apparently a fan of the Memphis script, but mostly because (b) Oliver Stone and Jamie Foxx are reportedly interested in making some kind of sprawling King biopic with DreamWorks and Warner Bros. Except he doesn’t mention something that Greengrass told me at the after-party for the recent Captain Phillips premiere in Los Angeles. Greengrass had cast an Atlanta-based preacher — apparently an eloquent speech-giver and sermonizer — to play King in Memphis, but the poor guy passed away “three or four months ago,” a friend confides. Greengrass was dispirited by this loss (he didn’t want to go into it during our chat but it was clearly a sore subject for him) and apparently lost his directorial mojo as a result. Or something like that. I should have pushed for more information but an instinct told me to go easy. The next day I tried to learn the preacher’s name but got nowhere. I cold-called three or four feature casting agencies in Atlanta…zip. All I know is what Greengrass told me.
Here are four of fourteen just-released posters from Lars Von Trier‘s Nymphomaniac. Proving once again that sex instantly loses its allure when you go graphic and explicit. Especially under bright lights. As tens of thousands of cheaply shot porn films have made clear. Which doesn’t mean that Von Trier’s film is necessarily reflective of these. Nobody knows anything, but Stellan Skarsgard…wow.
Dallas Buyer’s Club (Focus Features, 11.1), sure to snag nominations for costars Matthew McConaughey (Best Actor) and Jared Leto (Best Supporting Actor), is an inspirational fact-based drama about an actual guy (the late Ron Woodruff) going through a very tough time but doing himself proud in the end. So why is the poster telling us that McConaughey’s Woodruff is smooth, cocky and cool? Because the poster guys want the film to look glamorous and inviting. To hell with the fact that Jean Marc Vallee‘s fact-based film is tough, real and honest. Let the ticket buyers figure that out later. Dallas Buyer’s Club is having a big invitational screening on 10.17 in Los Angeles. I’ll be there with bells on.
