“Fee-fi-fo-fum, this fairy-tale retread is pretty dumb,” says Variety‘s Justin Chang about Bryan Singer‘s Jack the Giant Slayer (Warner Bros., 3.1). What happened to the Bryan Singer of yore…the hip clever guy who made The Usual Suspects, Apt Pupil and Valkyrie even? God help us but this is the world in which we live right now — a world in which the only films that seem to get funded are (a) aimed at the submental, milkshake-slurping family trade and (b) aren’t in the least bit “execution dependent.”
“Feeding the recent appetite for revisionist screen fantasies (Snow White and the Huntsman, Mirror Mirror, Once Upon a Time), Jack the Giant Slayer feels, unsurprisingly, like an attempt to cash in on a trend, recycling storybook characters, situations and battle sequences to mechanical and wearyingly predictable effect,” Chang comments. “A disappointment coming from the usually more distinctive Bryan Singer, the Warners release will struggle to score the mammoth returns needed to recoup its not-inconsiderable budget, with an indifferent 3D conversion unlikely to offset f/x fatigue even among the youngish audience being targeted.”
Everyone knows by now that Antoine Fuqua‘s Olympus Has Fallen (Film District, 3.22) and Roland Emmerich‘s White House Down (Sony, 6.28) are both basically Die Hard in the White House (with supplemental action scenes happening in and around Washington, D.C.). Fuqua’s version opens three and a half weeks hence as well as three months prior to White House Down, which obviously gives it an edge. The New York press junket happens in 11 days.
For all I know Fuqua’s version is the one to see. To be fair, his reputation is actually pretty decent as far as ensemble action pieces (Training Day, Brooklyn’s Finest) are concerned. But it seems as if Olympus Has Fallen might be a little clunkier than White House Down because (a) fairly or unfairly, any film starring Gerard Butler is automatically suspected of being problematic because Butler has (with the exception of Coriolanus) starred in so much crap, (b) it costars Morgan Freeman as the Speaker of the House, and we all agree that Freeman has shot his wad as a wise, calm governmental authority figure (plus his hair is too white — he looks like Samuel L. Jackson in Django Unchained) and (c) it was shot in Shreveport, Louisiana, which indicates budgetary constraint and therefore a possible cheeseball quality.
Emmerich’s version will almost certainly look pricier, and it has a tonier, slicker-sounding cast (Jamie Foxx, Channing Tatum, Jason Clarke, Maggie Gyllenhaal) but let’s not go overboard here — it’s still a Roland Emmerich film.
Olympus Has Fallensynopsis: “When the White House (Secret Service Code: Olympus) is captured by a terrorist mastermind and the President (Aaron Eckhart) is kidnapped, disgraced former Secret Service Agent Mike Banning (Gerald Butler) finds himself trapped within the building. As the national security team scrambles to respond, they are forced to rely on Banning’s inside knowledge to help retake the White House, save the President, and avert an even bigger disaster.”
White House Downsynopsis: “When a paramilitary group led by Stenz (Jason Clarke) take over the White House, John Cale (Channing Tatum) a Secret Service agent, must rescue the President of the United States James Sawyer (Jamie Foxx).
Buter peaked with his performances in Phantom of the Opera and as the muscular King Leonidas in 300, but then came the romantic flyweight flicks (P.S. I love You, The Ugly Truth, Playing for Keeps) plus Law Abiding Citizen, The Bounty Hunter, Machine Gun Preacherand Chasing Mavericks, which nobody even saw. Preacher, I think, was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
Four days ago The Hollywood Reporter‘s Gregg Kildayposted nine films likely to be Best Picture contenders. I posted the same and then some on January 7th — John Wells‘ August: Osage County, Bennett Miller‘s Foxcatcher, Alexander Payne‘s Nebraska, George Clooney‘s Monuments Men, Ryan Coogler‘s Fruitvale, Paul Greengrass‘s Captain Phillips, John Lee Hancock‘s Saving Mr. Banks, Martin Scorsese‘s Wolf of Wall Street and the Coen brothers‘ Inside Llewyn Davis.
To Kilday’s I would add Jason Reitman‘s Labor Day, Alfonso Cuaron‘s Gravity, Steve McQueen‘s 12 Years A Slave, Richard Linklater‘s Before Midnight (a major Sundance 2013 highlight and an all-but-guaranteed Oscar contender for Best Original Screenplay) and David O. Russell‘s Abscam movie (which starts filming around March 1st, although a voice is telling me it probably won’t be completed in time for release in November or December). Plus, just possibly, Peter Landesman‘s Parkland. Plus one or two or three wild cards that will presumably pop through and cause excitement at the 2013 Cannes or Telluride/Toronto festivals.
Anyway, I’ve read Inside Llewyn Davis (which is very low-key and art-filmy without much of a “narrative” that turns or delivers a payoff in the usual sense) and Parkland (which is very well written but is totally “execution dependent”), but I’d like to read the others. If anyone with relatively recent PDF scripts for the above 14 or 15 films, please send along & thanks.
I was told yesterday afternoon that Penske Media’s Variety would issue a big announcement. It came this morning with three bullets: (a) the daily print edition is being scuttled, (b) ditto the online edition’s paywall (except it’s been more or less gone for several weeks now) and editor Tim Gray is being shunted aside to international to make room for a new editorial triumvirate of Claudia Eller (film), Cynthia Littleton (TV) and Andrew Wallenstein (digital media).
The only time I’ve even seen copies of Daily Variety in recent years is when I’ve walked by the print-giveaway table at the Sundance Film Festival, or just down the hall from media credentials inside the Park City Marriot. Advertisers attached to the idea of dead-tree exposure are henceforth going to have to be content with Variety‘s once-weekly edition.
The absence of print and paywall revenue means “deep” editorial cuts. Deadline‘s Nikki Finkewrote this morning that “Penske’s idea is to transform Variety into a thumb-sucking weekly about the entertainment business, leaving breaking news coverage to Deadline Hollywood.”
Reuters reported today that the Senate Intelligence Committee has “closed its inquiry” into the CIA-sourced information given to Zero Dark Thirty producer-screenwriter Mark Boal as he researched the script. The decision came “one day after Zero Dark Thirty failed to win major awards at the Oscars,” the story noted.
The Senate committee launched its review of ZD30 after chairperson Sen. Dianne Feinstein condemned scenes implying that torture of CIA detainees led to information indicating the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden. There’s no question that in so doing Feinstein single-handedly killed ZD30‘s award prospects, including Kathryn Bigelow being snubbed for a Best Director nomination.
Washington politicians will do almost anything for press coverage that shows them being assertive and decisive when it comes to hot-button issues. ZD30 offered an opportunity, and Feinstein (who turns 80 on 6.22.13) grabbed it. She and her staffers got what they were looking for, and then dropped it when the story had no further relevance or media-heat.
Towards the end of this Jay Leno-Russell Crowe segment there’s a cutaway to a Mattel action figure based on Crowe’s Jor-El character (i.e., Superman’s dad) from Zack Snyder‘s Man of Steel (Warner Bros., 6.14). The studly, armour-plated outfit (Hero Complex called it “alien meets steam punk”) is the same get-up that other manly fellows have worn in God knows how many other cheesy sci-fi fantasy flicks.
Crowe’s Jor-El, in short, hasn’t been re-imagined as much as rendered according to a standard factory concept, and that tells us where Man of Steel is coming from. Crowe is playing Jor-El for the money and the career-fortification, of course, while pinching his nose as hard as he can stand it. All the designer had in mind was “stay as far away as possible from those flowing white robes that Marlon Brando wore in the 1978 Superman.” Which had to happen, of course, as today’s comic-book machismo factor could and should never allow for anyone wearing Liberace-style white robes and a Seigfried and Roy white wig. Poor Brando — he was well paid by the Salkinds but playing Jor-El surely made him fantasize about dying sooner rather than later.
I’ll most likely loathe and suffer through Man of Steel. Reason #1: the dog-eared Superman franchise closed up shop after Bryan Singer‘s reboot so cranking out another is a ludicrous move on Warner Bros. and Chris Nolan‘s part. Reason #2: Sucker Punch convinced me that Zack Snyder is 90% about high-idiot style and bullshit comic-book cliches and 10%, if that, about delivering the hard, solid, human-scale, heavy-lifting stuff that makes for a truly good film. I’ll admit that Snyder is as stylistically innovative as Brian DePalma was in his ’70s and early ’80s prime, but just as problematic as DePalma turned out to be — he’s a “me!, me!, me!” type of guy. Yes, I loved the proscenium-arch beginning of Sucker Punch but it was all downhill after that.
From my 3.24.11 Sucker Punch review: “Snyder is a kind of visual dynamo of the first order who has created in Sucker Punch a trite-but-fascinating, symphonic, half-psychedelic, undeniably ‘inspired’ alternate-reality world — gothic, color-desaturated, Wachowski-esque — that is nonetheless ruled by so much concrete-brain idiocy and coarsely “mythic” cliches (i.e., an evil father figure so ridiculously vile and gross beyond measure that he makes the cackling, moustache-twirling villains of the Snidely Whiplash variety seem austere if not inert) and ludicrous, charmless, bottom-of-the-pit dialogue and cheaply pandering female-revenge fantasies that you literally CAN’T STAND IT and WANT TO HOWL and THROW YOUR 24 OZ. COKE AT THE SCREEN.
“Snyder is a masterful visual maestro (loved the proscenium arch ‘theatrical’ touches at the very beginning) but also — this is crucial to the Sucker Punch experience — an Igor-like, chained-in-the-basement, genius-level moron at dumbing things down. The movie is a digital torture device for those seeking at least a hint of compelling narrative, a tendril-ish remnant of logic, a tiny smidgen of story intelligence, and dialogue with a hint of flair or some kind of tethered-to-the-world normality.”
If I’d produced ABC’s red-carpet Oscar segment I would have never in a million years hired the teensy-weensy, bird-like, goody-two-shoes Kristin Chenoweth — she stands 4’11” — to do interviews. She made just about every actress look like Attack of the 50-Foot Woman (even Reese Whitherspoon looked big) and every tallish guy (like the 6′ 2″ Bradley Cooper) look like Gulliver’s Travels.
My heart went out to poor, plus-sized Adele, who’s 5’9″ but was closer to six feet in heels, when she spoke with Chenoweth. You could see what she was thinking — “All right, put your best face on and you’ll be okay, but my God, this little button-sized pixie is making me look and feel like a moose.”
I’ve said before I’m not a fan of Thumbelina girls, and especially those who speak with those squeaky little peep-peep voices that so many ladies use these days. That’s because GenX and older-GenY guys like Seth MacFarlane and LexG/Ballsworth think that munchkin girls with peep-peep voices are hot. If the culture was decrying right now that it’s cooler and hotter to sound like Lauren Bacall or Barbara Stanwyck or Rosalind Russell, the peep-peep women would be doing whatever they could to affect a deeper, sultry-er, cigarette-smoke voice.
On top of which I don’t care for Chenoweth’s general Middle American shopping-mall vibe. “I’m a cute vivacious singer and very positive minded and up with people!,” blah blah. She’s a Christian who hails from Oklahoma (i.e., probably a political conservative) who’s basically a singer(!) and stage actress(!) and an ebullient personality(!) who’s big with tourists who wear shorts. The only thing interesting about her is that she once went out with Aaron Sorkin.
At 12:30 pm I attended a serene and convivial back-yard reception for French Oscar nominees, particularly Amour star Emmanuelle Riva and her director Michael Haneke, at the Beverly Hills residence of Axel Cruau, the Consul General of France. Cannes Film Festival general delegate Thierry Fremaux, Village Voice/L.A. Weekly critic Scott Foundas, Variety‘s Steven Gaydos, Deadline‘s Pete Hammond and MCN’s David Poland were among the guests.
“I’ve just walked out of Park Chan-Wook‘s Stoker (Fox Searchlight, 3.1). Sorry, nope. If you’re Variety‘s Guy Lodge, it’s “a splendidly demented gumbo of Hitchcock thriller, American Gothic fairy tale and a contemporary kink all Park’s own.” For me it’s the biggest ‘look at how I can out-Brian DePalma and his most excessive and looney-tuney!’ show-off flick I’ve seen in a long, long time. Everything is visual candy to PCW. Half-sensible human motivation and story logic be damned…watch me have fun in my sandbox! Me! Me! Wheee!” — filed from Sundance Film Festival on 1.20.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences got the show it deserved last night. The members own it and one day, trust me, they won’t feel so good about that. As usual the show felt a little schmaltzy, a little out-of-time in a gay Las Vegas-y sense. The show’s producers, Craig Zadan and Neil Meron, got to remind us what a great film Chicago was and how much we miss films of this type. And…I don’t know what else to say. I really don’t. Somebody help me out here.
The engagingly adult, nicely crafted Argo won Best Picture, and apart from the fact that Zero Dark Thirty and Silver Linings Playbook were, are and always will be far more vital and alive and crackling…why am I going through my routine again? It’s over. On to 2013.
I didn’t file a reaction piece right after the Oscar telecast because the only persistent thought I had during the show was “what is this? Why do I feel so removed?” I agreed with or accepted many of the calls, but I felt it wasn’t my type of Oscar telecast. At most my investment felt marginal. When the show ended I knew I needed to get out. I went down to Canter’s and ordered some vaguely unhealthy food. A grilled-cheese-and-tomato sandwich and potato chips and Diet Coke and a coffee. You’re not supposed to eat after 9:30 or 10 pm, and yet there I was. Not “bummed” but vaguely unhappy, for sure.
I’ve been through Oscar shows that made me feel amazed, elated (i.e., Roman Polanski‘s Best Director win for The Pianist) and sometimes outraged (the Brokeback Mountain Best Picture loss) but I can count the emotional current moments from last night’s show on one hand, and none were especially intense. The Les Miserables sing-out, Jennifer Lawrence falling on the stage, Adele‘s confident delivery of Skyfall (and Seth MacFarlane‘s quip about Rex Reed‘s forthcoming review)…what else?
I know that not long after Quentin Tarantino‘s mystifying win for Best Original Screenplay I started playing Jimi Hendrix‘s “I Don’t Live Today” in my head. I shrugged at the William Shatner future-forecast routine and “We Saw Your Boobs” number. Many seem to agree that MacFarlane, who has taken it in the neck from at least one female columnist so far, should have been less “ceremonial” and gone for broke.
I fully respect and in most cases sincerely admire the efforts of the winners, but are you going to tell me that Christoph Waltz didn’t deliver the same kind of curt, deflecting, dryly verbose performance (i.e., “I’m having an enormously good time saying these droll but florid lines while at the same time standing outside my character and in fact outside the film itself”) in Django Unchained that he gave in Inglourious Basterds? Two Oscars for essentially the same performance. Waltz played a good guy in Django and a monster in Basterds, but there isn’t a dime’s worth of difference between them. He knows it, Tarantino knows it, you know it, the Academy knows it.
Are you going to tell me that Brave was the cleverest, most original or most spiritually engaging animated feature of the year? From a 12.26 post: “I’ve experienced moments of satisfaction and even uplift from the best Pixar films, but nothing suffocates my spirit like a glossy, connect-the-dots mainstream animated feature (i.e., big-name actors doing the voicing) looking to sell an empowerment fable about a young person being tested and fulfilling his/her destiny. I half-liked the big cowardly bear but it went no further. Every exaggerated expression and every gut-slam visual or aural effect felt like a tiny cyanide capsule.”
We’re living in aesthetically degraded times. There are an awful lot of unsophisticated, not especially sharp or knowledgable people out there today. That is incontestable. And, it appears, the sensibilities of this group are being expressed by a certain portion of Academy voters. I’m trying to think of another explanation.
Did you see that expression on Joaquin Phoenix’s face when the camera cut to him during the Best Actor sequence? Did you feel what he was feeling a bit? I went there from time to time.
Here’s a pretty decent account of the Vanity Fair after-party, written by Chris Rovzar.
I just can’t think of anything to say beyond this. I mostly feel relieved that the season is over and we can now push our way into 2013, free and clear.
But beyond this I think I missed the absence of any fire-in-the-belly stuff by way of strong political current. There was no sense of cultural conflict, no Michael Moore-ish rants. Everyone in the audience seemed to be on the same go-along page. And on some level I regretted the absence of…if not rancor then at least something a tiny bit uncomfortable.
Consider this recollection, posted this morning, from The Nation‘s Rick Perlstein:
“And then there was 1975, the most bizarrely political Oscar night of all.
“Late in 1974 a director named Peter Davis showed a documentary called Hearts and Minds briefly in a Los Angeles theater to qualify it for Academy Award consideration (watch the whole stunning thing here). It opened with images of a 1973 homecoming parade for POW George Thomas Coker, who told a crowd on the steps of the Linden, New Jersey, city hall about Vietnam, ‘If it wasn’t for the people, it was very pretty. The people there are very backwards and primitive, and they make a mess out of everything.’ General William Westmoreland, former commander of U.S. forces, in a comment the director explained had not been spontaneous but had come on a third take, was shown explaining, ‘The Oriental doesn’t put the same high price on life as does a Westerner. Life is plentiful. Life is cheap in the Orient.’ (Thereupon, the film cut to a sobbing Vietnamese mother being restrained from climbing into the grave atop the coffin of her son.) Daniel Ellsberg was quoted: ‘We aren’t on the wrong side. We are the wrong side.’ The movie concluded with an interview with an activist from Vietnam Veterans Against the War. ‘We’ve all tried very hard to escape what we have learned in Vietnam,’ he said. ‘I think Americans have worked extremely hard not to see the criminalities that their officials and their policy-makers exhibited.”
“A massive thunderstorm raged outside at the Oscar ceremony at the Dorothy Chandler Pavillion on Oscar Night, April 8, twenty days before the final fall of Saigon to North Vietnam’s Communist forces — where after Sammy Davis, Jr.’s musical tribute to Fred Astaire, and Ingrid Bergman‘s acceptance of the best supporting actress award for Murder on the Orient Express, and Francis Ford Coppola‘s award for best director (one of six Oscars for The Godfather Part II: ‘I’m wearing a tuxedo with a bulletproof cumberbund,’ cohost Bob Hope cracked. “Who knows what will happen if Al Pacino doesn’t win’), Lauren Hutton and Danny Thomas opened the envelop and announced Hearts and Minds had won as the year’s best documentary.
“Producer Bert Schneider took the microphone and said, ‘It’s ironic that we’re here at a time just before Vietnam is about to be liberated. Then he read a telegram from the head of the North Vietnamese delegation to the Paris peace talks. It thanked the antiwar movement ‘for all they have done on behalf of peace… Greetings of friendship to all American people.’
“Backstage, Bob Hope was so livid he tried to push his way past the broadcast’s producer to issue a rebuttal onstage. Shirley MacLaine, who had already mocked Sammy Davis from the stage for having endorsed Richard Nixon, shouted, ‘Don’t you dare!’ Anguished telegrams from viewers began piling up backstage. One, from a retired Army colonel, read, ‘WITH 55,000 DEAD YOUNG AMERICANS IN DEFENSE OF FREEDOM AND MILLIONS OF VIETNAMESE FIGHTING FOR FREEDOM…DEMAND WITHDRAWAL OF AWARD.’ On its back, Hope madly scribbled a disclaimer for his cohost Frank Sinatra to read onstage. Sinatra read it to a mix of boos and applause: ‘The Academy is saying we are not responsible for any political utterances on this program and we are sorry that had to take place.’ Upon which, backstage, the broadcast’s third cohost, Shirley MacLaine, berated Sinatra: ‘You said you were speaking for the Academy. Well, I’m a member of the academy and you didn’t ask me!’ Her brother, Warren Beatty, snarled at Sinatra on camera: ‘Thank you, Frank, you old Republican.'”