In 2912 situations, Judd Apatow‘s This Is Forty did about $4 million yesterday with $12 million projected by Sunday night. I had estimated right off the top that it would do about as well as Apatow’s Funny People, which I rather liked. But a $12 million weekend in nearly 3000 theatres is a soft opening. I’m assuming that the current Rotten Tomatoes score of 50% reflects the general sentiment among first responders, but maybe not. Reactions?
From a 12.12 HE post: “Somehow the issues and speedbumps that I felt or sensed when I first saw This Is 40 in late October dissipated when I saw it again [at the premiere]. So this is one of those ‘it’s pretty good but it works a lot better if you see it twice‘ movies.
A 12.22 N.Y. Times story by Scott Shane calls into question a statement by Acting CIA director Michael J. Morell that Zero Dark Thirty “exaggerates” the role of coercive interrogations — torture — in obtaining information about the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden. “While Mr. Morell’s account is close to that given last year by Leon E. Panetta when he was C.I.A. director,” Shane writes, “other agency officials who served under President George W. Bush have put greater emphasis on the usefulness of the harsh interrogation methods.
“This year, Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., who oversaw the agency’s counterterrorism operations when the methods were in use, wrote in The Washington Post that the hunt for Bin Laden “stemmed from information obtained from hardened terrorists who agreed to tell us some (but not all) of what they knew after undergoing harsh but legal interrogation methods.”
“And Mr. Bush’s last C.I.A. director, Michael V. Hayden, wrote last year in The Wall Street Journal that “a crucial component” of the information that led to Bin Laden “was information provided by three C.I.A. detainees, all of whom had been subjected to some form of enhanced interrogation.”
The failure to accept ZD30‘s clearly ambiguous portrayal of torture — i.e., it was possibly effective but perhaps not — is mostly a politically correct, liberal-circle-jerk phenomenon. The film simply says that torture was in play during the Bush era and that maybe it helped in some slight or residual way. Rodriguez and Hayden were invested in the Bush-era applications of torture and so they’re looking to justify it, but how likely is it that they’re flat-out lying?
Joe and Jane Popcorn won’t give a damn about this issue, I can tell you that much.
If Ben Affleck were to take leave of his senses and declare a serious interest in running for John Kerry‘s soon-to-be-vacated Massachusetts Senate seat and really go for it, he’d probably land the Democratic nomination. He’s up on the issues, talks a good game and has an obvious brand-level magnetism (i.e., that Robert Redford-as-Bill McKay quality) that no other Massachusetts Democrat could compete with. And he’d probably beat presumed Republican candidate Scott Brown.
But with Affleck’s directing career (Argo, The Town, Gone Baby Gone) in a boom cycle, running for the Senate would be a step down. He’s obviously well positioned to remain a top-ranked hyphenate (and perhaps even move beyond his current status as the new Sydney Pollack) for the next 25 to 30 years. So why lower himself into the swamp of politics, especially given the fact that even if Affleck wins this year he’ll have to re-run in 2014 to keep the Senate seat?
“There was one time where somebody who I respected said ‘come do this right now, I think you can win.’ And I just realized when I got asked that question that it was the last thing I wanted to do. Plus, I kind of felt like I just got past all this bile in my own life” — a reference to his Bennifer period — “and then you’re going to just jump back into this ugliness? I mean, talk about long knives. It’s horrendous way to live. You know, your family and blah blah blah. I guess I lost a little bit of that idealism. I don’t know.
“So, no, the answer is: I don’t want to run for office. And I don’t even like working in partisan politics. People get so wound up and so ugly now. I find that doing things that are independent where you can really actually make a difference, where you can affect policy, you can affect change, means more than doing the partisan political thing.”
Then again in a less than 48-hours-old interview with CBS News‘ Bob Schieffer, Affleck said he was too busy at the moment to really consider the Massschusetts situation, but he didn’t issue a Shermanesque denial either. “I do have a great fondness and admiration for the political process in this country,” Affleck said, “but I’m not going to get into speculation about my political future. One never knows. I’m not one to get into conjecture.”
In other words, Affleck been a political-issues junkie for much of his life and is no doubt flattered to hear such talk being kicked around, and so he’s kind of half-winking for the time being. But it’ll probably go no further than that.
Derek Cianfrance‘s The Place Beyond The Pines (Focus, 3.29) “is basically an upstate New York crime story about fathers and sons,” I wrote on 9.8. “It’s also about cigarettes and bank hold-ups and motorcycles and travelling carnivals and nobody having enough money and anger and bullheadedness and the general malaise that comes from living in the pure hell and suffocation of Schenectady and those Siberian environs…I’ve been up there and it’s awful so don’t tell me.
“It’s also about men and their lame cock-of-the-walk issues in Cianfranceville, or the Land of the Constant Macho Strut and the Eternally Burning Cigarette, and if you can swallow or suck this in, fine…but I couldn’t.
“Boiled down, Pines is about the conflicted, problematic, sociopathic or otherwise questionable tendencies of two fathers (Ryan Gosling, Bradley Cooper) and how their sons (Dane DeHaan and Emory Cohen, respectively) are all but doomed to inherit and melodramatically carry on that legacy and that burden, so finally and irrevocably that their mothers (respectively played by Eva Mendes and Rose Byrne) might as well be living-room furniture, and the influence of schools, community values and/or stepfathers matter not.
“If you can roll with this world-of-Cianfrance view — i.e., wives and mothers are good for sex and breeding and cleaning and making meals and running errands and occasional guilt-tripping but when it comes to the issue of a son’s character and destiny, it’s almost entirely about dad — you might be able to roll with The Place Beyond The Pines. But I wasn’t able to. I respect Cianfrance’s ambition in telling an epic, three-act, multi-generational tale that spans 15-plus years, but I don’t respect or believe what he’s selling.
“Except for the bank-robbing and road-chase sequences I didn’t believe a single moment in this film. Okay, I bought some of it but only in fits and starts.
“You can’t have Gosling play a simple-dick man of few words who entertains audiences with his talent as a motorcycle rider and then turns to bank-robbing on the side — that’s way too close to his stunt-driving, getaway-car character in Drive.
“Plus I don’t respond well to movies with female-voiced choral music (a device that suggests that a caring, all-seeing God is watching over us) on the soundtrack plus other musical implications of doom and heavyosity.
(l. to r.) De Haan, Cooper, Mendes, Gosling and Cianfrance before Toronto Fiim Festival screening.
“Plus I hate movies about blue-collar knockabouts and greasy low-lifes and teenage louts who constantly smoke cigarettes. The more a character smokes cigarettes the dumber and more doomed and less engaging he or she is — that’s the rule. If you’re writing or directing a film and you want the audience to believe that a character is an all-but-completely worthless scoundrel or sociopath whom they should not care shit about, have that character smoke cigarettes in every damn scene.
“The principal theme of The Place Beyond The Pines is the following: “Dads Are Just About Everything and Mothers Don’t Matter Much, but Cigarettes Sure Run A Close Second!”
“In short, I thought the movie was unreal, oppressive, dramatically forced bullshit, although it receives a shot in the arm from Dane DeHaan (In Treatment), who looks like a mixed reincarnation of Leonardo DiCaprio and Benicio del Toro as they were in the mid ’90s, although he’s a lot shorter (5’7″).
“I also felt that Mendes and Byrne are too hot to live in Schenectady. Beauty almost always migrates to the big cities where the power and the security lie, and in my experience the women who reside in blue-collar hell holes like Schenectady are far less attractive as a rule. There’s a certain genetic look to the men and women of Upper New York State, and they aren’t the kind of people who pose for magazine covers or star in reality shows.
N.Y. Times columnist David Carrgave me hope this morning that the lazy-default voters might not go for the slow, talky, rotely portentous aspects of Steven Spielberg‘s Lincoln, and that something else might take the Best Picture Oscar. I really love that there is no one dominant favorite this year. Whatever wins, much howling and gnashing of teeth are assured when the Big Moment comes.
Why did Feinberg ignore the SLP hate brigade when he tapped this out? One presumes that Glenn Kenny and others in his camp would like an answer.
The absolute best film of 2012 is Zero Dark Thirty, I feel, but my emotional favorite is Silver Linings Playbook (which is in no small measure beautifully written, acted, timed and sculpted). The bravest, ballsiest contender of the year is Anna Karenina. Lincoln is dutiful and dreary and a paper tiger. Argo is well-crafted and widely admired but it lacks a thematic undertow. Les Miserables has an extremely passionate fan base, but it has also worn a lot of people down. Life of Pi has attracted huzzahs and respect, but not that much elation. The Master will live on, but it’s a film for critics and cineastes (i.e., guys like myself) and it has a vague, inconclusive and (be honest) somewhat frustrating finish.
I took part in a Huffington Post discussion yesterday (me and five other guys) about what is essentially the myth of Oscar smear campaigns. Nobody starts bad buzz, but they fan it all to hell once it’s out there — that’s the worst you can say, I think. Thanks to HuffPosters for inviting me to participate, and thanks in particular to host Ricky Camilleri, who extended a nice pat-on-the-back by saying he’s an HE reader.
N.Y. Times columnist David Carr on Lincoln: “I spent a week watching Lincoln last night…[it’s] unfaithful to the job of entertaining a movie audience…everybody gets into a room and just starts talking, for the whole movie…it ticks off all the boxes, a lot of great performances about an important story…it was 2 and 1/2 hours…it ended five times, or four…I lost count.”
“I’ve got a Spielberg issue because he’s a bit of a gasbag…[the fllm] sounds so exciting…but any time he gets involved in history, the portend overwhelms everything….Saving Private Ryan, Amistad, all this endless signalling…for crying out loud.”
I partially agree with the fiendish Wayne La Pierre in one respect: I am personally sick to death of movies that revel in style-violence. Or, put another way, of filmmakers (like Django Unchained director Quentin Tarantino) who delight in decorative blood, bullets and death for what is essentially decoration sake or the momentary surge of a cheap popcorn “guy high”.
Violence obviously can’t be excluded from any realistic impression or distillation of life on this planet, but there’s a difference between honesty and “wheee!” presentations of “ecstatic” cruelty and savagery. If you’ve witnessed real-life violence you know what it feels like (i.e., chilling, godawful), and if you understand this you know that movies almost never go there.
I say this having fully enjoyed great violent gun battles in dozens of great films. They’re too numerous to count but the downtown L.A. shootout in Heat, the shootout out in that small El Paso hotel in The Getaway, the climactic gun battle in The Wild Bunch, and Tony Montana‘s final moments of life in Scarface are at the top of the list. I could name 100 such favorites. But I hate violence that feels glib, cruel in an indulged-auteurist sense, cynical and festishy. I especially hate films that wallow in this while claiming at the same time that they’re against social evils like slavery.
This morning the NRA’s chief propagandist Wayne LaPierresaid that the best way to stop nutters like Adam Lanza would be to put armed guards in schools. “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” LaPierre said. The only way to stop monsters like La Pierre is to ignore them and follow the lead of other countries that have passed sensible gun-control laws.
A 12.20 N.Y. Times editorial pointed out the following: (a) “The N.R.A. presents itself as a grass-roots organization, but it has become increasingly clear in recent years that it represents gun makers. Its chief aim has been to help their businesses by increasing the spread of firearms throughout American society”; (b) “The clearest beneficiary [of the N.R.A.’s political-legislative effort] has been the gun industry — sales of firearms and ammunition have grown 5.7 percent a year since 2007, to nearly $12 billion this year, according to IBISWorld, a market research firm”; (c) “The industry has, in turn, been a big supporter of the N.R.A. It has contributed between $14.7 million and $38.9 million to an N.R.A.-corporate-giving campaign since 2005, according to a report published last year by the Violence Policy Center, a nonprofit group that advocates greater gun control”; (d) “Officials from the N.R.A. have repeatedly said their main goal is to protect the Second Amendment rights of rank-and-file members who like to hunt or want guns for protection. But that claim is at odds with surveys that show a majority of N.R.A. members and a majority of American gun owners often support restrictions on gun sales and ownership that the N.R.A. has bitterly fought.”
It’s fine to riff about the Academy’s foreign language committee shortlist but the race is over. The 2012 Foreign Language Feature Oscar is going to go to Michael Haneke‘s Amour. Locked, forget about it. (Right?) The only thing that pops out is the wholly unwarranted exclusion of Christian Petzold‘s Barbara, which I saw and greatly admired at Telluride.
Leos Carax‘s Holy Motors wasn’t France’s official submission so that was that, but this is unquestionably one of the great 2012 films, foreign-made or not. Jacques Audiard‘s Rust and Bone suffered the same fate.
The Barbara snub isn’t on the level of the committee’s blow-off of 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days and/or Olivier Assayas‘s Carlos (can’t recall if it was shortlisted or not but it wasn’t nominated) but it’s a glaring omission all the same. It’s at least encouraging that the latest film from 4,3,2 helmer Cristian Mungiu, the somber and austere and entirely satisfying Beyond The Hills, did make the shortlist.
Nine films out of 71 entries were chosen. I’ve listed them in order of my own personal preference:
1. No (Chile), d: Pablo Larraín (if Amour weren’t in the running, No would be the frontrunner).
2. Amour (Austria) — d: Michael Haneke (guaranteed winner).
3. Beyond the Hills (Romania), d: Cristian Mungiu (brilliant — Mungiu is a Bresson-level auteur)
4. A Royal Affair (Denmark), d: Nikolaj Arcel (a strong, well-written, well produced historical drama — intelligent and compelling).
5. Sister (Switzerland), d: Ursula Meier (saw it in Cannes — a skillful, penetrating, honestly assembled character piece).
6. The Intouchables (France), d: Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano (will almost certainly be one of the final five nominees).
7. The Deep (Iceland), d: Baltasar Kormakur.
8. Kon-Tiki (Norway), d: Joachim Ronning and Espen Sandberg (watched the screener, was underwhelmed)
9. War Witch (Canada),d: Kim Nguyen (haven’t watched screener).
The shortlist will be pruned to five nominees during a marathon session lasting from Friday, 1.4 through Sunday, 1.6, during which the Academy’s foreign-branch voters will watch three of the shortlisted films each day, etc. Oscar nominations will be announced on Thursday, 1.10, in the early ayem.