I was so taken with my first viewing of Hany Abu-Assad‘s Omar, a Palestinian-produced thriller about betrayal and double-agenting in the West Bank, that I caught it again last night at the Palm Springs Film Festival.

It’s a taut, urgent, highly realistic thriller that squeezes its characters and viewers like a vise.

Omar is among the Academy’s short-listed Best Foreign Language Feature contenders, and with my personal favorites, Asghar Farhadi‘s The Past and Yuval Adler‘s Bethlehem (which is quite similar to Abu-Assad’s film) out of the running, I guess I’m an Omar guy at this stage.

Omar costars Waleed_Zuaiter (l.) and Adam Bakri (r.) following last night’s screening at Palm Spring Int’l Film Festival

I’m a serious admirer of the two leads, Adam Bakri, who plays the titular character, a Palestinian youth whose decision to take part in an assassination with two friends seals his fare, and Waleed Zuaiter, an Israeli agent who presses Omar into his service as an informer.

Bakri and Zuaiter did a q & an after last night’s screening.

Bakri, probably 21 or 22, is making his feature film debut with Omar. He’s currently living stateside (either LA or NY). He was wearing a really handsome military-styled dark blue jacket, and so I asked him where he got it. Zara at the Grove, he said, so maybe he’s living here.

From Jay Weissberg‘s Variety review, filed during the 2013 Cannes Film Festival: “As he did with Paradise Now, Abu-Assad refuses to demonize characters for their poor choices. Only too aware of the crushing toll of the Occupation on Palestinians, he shows men (the film is male-centric) making tragic, often self-destructive decisions as a result of an inescapable environment of degradation and violence.

“With Omar he’s finessed the profile, depicting how the weaknesses that make us human, especially love, can lead, in such a place, to acts of betrayal. It’s as if he’s taken thematic elements from Westerns and film noir, using the fight for dignity and an atmosphere of doubt to explain rather than excuse heinous actions. Viewers with a firm moral compass, who see killing as an act always to be condemned, won’t need Omar to tell them what’s right and wrong.”

Ten years ago the Palm Springs Int’l Film Festival was a respected, smartly-programmed venue for foreign films with a few celebrities and photos ops on the side. Now it’s a star-studded, rock-your-paparazzi, award-season megashow with A-class celebs, limos, security goons and guys like me taking pictures and…uhm, oh yeah, right, a smartly-programmed venue for foreign film on the side.

August: Osage County‘s Julia Roberts, Meryl Streep prior to last night’s Palm Springs Film Festival gala award ceremony. I only attended the after-party. Pic is totally stolen from JustJared.com.

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Notice how Today correspondent Gael Fashingbauer Cooper stealthily avoided dicey or inflammatory allusions in her 1.4 piece about insensitive people ruining movies for others in theatres due to talking, texting, bringing babies, etc. This is how it’s done if you want to avoid land mines. Old ladies, babies, texters, etc. Those darn rude people!

The National Society of Film critics has given its Best Picture prize to Joel and Ethan Coen‘s Inside Llewyn Davis — the second reputable group (after the Toronto Film Critics Association) to see through the melancholia and stand up for this brilliantly sardonic mood-trip whatever. At the same time the NSFC blew off Martin Scorsese‘s The Wolf of Wall Street in all categories. A little too radical, guys? Pushes things too far, not enough punishment for Belfort, etc.?

The Coens also won for Best Director, beating out Gravity‘s Alfonso Cuaron and 12 Years A Slave‘s Steve McQueen. Inside Llewyn Davis‘s Oscar Isaac won for Best Actor (Ejiofor and Redford were top runners-ups) and Blue Jasmine‘s Cate Blanchett won for Best Actress. To the NSFC’s credit, Blue Is The Warmest Color‘s Adele Exarchopoulos was the first runner-up to Blanchett.

They gave their Best Suppporting Actor prize to Spring Breakers‘ James Franco…the fuck? More so than Dallas Buyers Club‘s Jared Leto and The Wolf of Wall Street‘s Jonah Hill?

This Franco crap has gone far enough, all right? He played that part with his gold teeth and his corn rows and his pumped-up muscles and “mah sheeyit.” Not once did I say as I watched Spring Breakers, “Wow, Franco’s really nailing it here”…not once!

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Sent this morning — two previous requests have been sent over the last week or so: “Please consider chatting with me briefly about The Wolf of Wall Street, Oliver. Your Wall Street perspective alone demands…er, requires this. In a sense you and Gordon Gekko/Michael Douglas fathered Jordan Belfort — he was one of those “greedy little shits” of the late ’80s who got into stockbroking partly because Gekko’s swagger and “greed is good” speech turned him on. C’mon, man — you created him. In a certain sense, I mean. Henry Frankenstein didn’t mean to create Boris Karloff‘s “monster” either, but that’s what happened.

“I also need you to address the view that The Wolf of Wall Street is the new Scarface. (I riffed on this on 12.13). Like Scarface was in ’83, Wolf has been decried by older conservatives, slow-on-the-pickup critics, industry lightweights and in some cases women. Wolf‘s crime, they feel, has been its failure to deliver sufficient payback to Leonardo DiCaprio‘s Belfort, for seeming to enjoy the amorality of its lead characters at the expense of some moral scheme. Or for being too long or too excessive in its portrayal of Belfort’s wild-ass shenanigans. Over-the-top excess is very clearly the point, of course.

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I saw Stuart Rosenberg‘s The Laughing Policeman (’73) in two shifts last night. I bought the DVD at Amoeba earlier in the evening for only $5. I came back, watched the HBO Herblock doc (not bad, good enough, fine) and then popped in the Policeman DVD around 9:30 or so and started to watch. Within 15 or 20 minutes I was out. I woke up a little later, went to bed, couldn’t sleep, got up and watched the Rosenberg again. It’s a character-and-atmosphere film first and a big-city whodunit second. (Or third.) The plot doesn’t add up but it’s a fairly decent film. Realistic mid-range policiers with movie stars haven’t exactly disappeared but when was the last good one? Bruce Dern played his usual grinning or glaring eccentric — half-weird, half-cagey. Either you got Dern or you didn’t. Dern’s detective to an angry back guy in Mission district: “What are you gonna do, eyeball me to death?”

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The movie-producing career of Saul Zaentz peaked three times when One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, Amadeus and The English Patient won Best Picture Oscars. 20 years at the top with a white beard. He also had something to do with Daryl Duke‘s Payday, one of my all-time favorite Rip Torn movies. For sure, Zaentz lived a rich, accomplished and combative life. A legendary Berkeley-based producer of upscale Oscar-bait movies (The Unbearable Lightness of Being was another) who began in the music business in the ’50s, Zaentz was 92 when he passed yesterday. Lawsuits, lawsuits, lawsuits and threats of lawsuits. I’m not saying Zaentz never experienced infancy, youth or middle age. He might well have, but he never appeared to be anything other than that cantankerous but well-spoken old guy with the white beard…that’s all I’m saying. Lawsuits, lawsuits, lawsuits and threats of lawsuits. Zaentz’s last project was Goya’s Ghost, which I never saw and which you can’t even stream. “Zaentz brought a series of lawsuits against John Fogerty, claiming defamation of character for the lyric ‘Zanz can’t dance but he’ll steal your money.'” — from Zaentz’s Wiki page.

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The only Chris Nolan films that have aged well are the smallish or mid-sized ones — Following, Memento and Insomnia. The dark, brooding, big-wallop films that he began making eight years ago — Batman Begins, The Prestige, The Dark Knight, Inception, The Dark Knight Rises — don’t play as well as when they first came out. They’re a bit of a slog to sit through. I tried re-watching Inception last summer and I just couldn’t stay the course. And I popped in the Dark Night Bluray last night and…well, I enjoyed Heath Ledger‘s “Joker” performance. (That will never go away.) But it still felt a bit burdensome and…I don’t know, self-regarding or something. All big-concept, corporate-funded entertainments are like this — ecstatic response after the first screening, and then the Bluray collects dust on the shelf.

Heath Ledger, Pete Hammond on stage of Santa Barbara’s Lobero Theatre — Wednesday, 2.8.06, 8:25 pm.

Nolan needs to scale it down and do something more intimate and mid-rangey for his next project. I’m presuming that Interstellar is going to be more of the same.

But Ledger, man…I still think about the guy. I was thinking how things might have gone for him if he was alive and crackling today. What films he might have made, what roles he might have stolen from whomever actually played them. He died about two weeks shy of six years ago. I was covering Sundance ’08 but I’d came down with a 48-hour fever. I was my second year at the old “cowboy hat” establishment (i.e, the Star Hotel). Unable to sleep because of muscle ache but unable to relax…lying on a couch in a state of depressed delirium.

Then the news broke and I knew I had to write something. I couldn’t blow it off. Had to post as soon as possible. I was only able to bang out two or three graphs before collapsing on the couch for a breather, and then another two or three. I could barely think, much less write.

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Writers Guild nominees were announced today, and once more (in the wake of yesterday’s Producers Guild nominations) the screenplay for Joel and Ethan Coen‘s Inside Llewyn Davis got the back of the hand. Original Screenplay noms: American Hustle, Blue Jasmine, Dallas Buyers Club, Her, Nebraska. Adapted Screenplay noms: August: Osage County, Before Midnight, Captain Phillips, Lone Survivor, The Wolf of Wall Street. Documentary Screenplay noms: Dirty Wars, Herblock — The Black & The White, No Place on Earth, Stories We Tell, We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks.

New Yorker film critic Richard Brody has written another eloquent explanation-and-defense of Martin Scorsese‘s The Wolf of Wall Street. Read the whole piece, of course, but my favorite paragraph is at the end: “The movie’s detractors will, in the light of history, look as ridiculous as those who, in the early nineteen-thirties, decried Howard Hawks’s Scarface, requiring that it be released with a didactic prologue, a didactic insert, a didactic ending, and a subtitle (‘The Shame of a Nation’).”

There are several producers and distributors who are true Movie Catholics — who really believe in movies as a delivery device for excitement, opening minds, spreading wisdom, spiritual transportation, etc. Two of the best, surely, are producers Scott Rudin (Inside Llewyn Davis, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Captain Phillips, Frances Ha, Margaret, Moneyball, The Social Network) and Annapurna’s Megan Ellison (Her, American Hustle, Foxcatcher, Zero Dark Thirty, Killing Them Softly, Spring Breakers, The Master). These two have to be regarded as Kings of the Hill.

Down half a notch are Working Title’s Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner (Rush, Les Miserables, Anna Karenina, Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy, A Serious Man, United 93).

Production and distribution-wise, of course, there’s the Weinstein Company (August: Osage County, Killing Them Softly, Silver Linings Playbook, Django Unchained, 20 Feet from Stardom, Fruitvale Station, The Butler) and Fox Searchlight (Birdman, 12 years A Slave, Beasts of the Southern Wild, The Sessions, The East, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Dom Hemingway), Sony Classics, IFC Films, Magnolia and so on.

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