Four or five days ago a journalist pal and I were kicking around the award-season prospects of August: Osage County, and I asked him, “No Margo Martindale for Best Supporting Actress?” And he said, “Doubtful — people want nothing to do with that movie. Unfairly, Julia is a better bet than Margo for supporting.” Well, he was right SAG-wise about Roberts being the Supporting Actress pick, but wrong about Osage County — the Weinstein Co, release won a SAG nomination for Best Ensemble and Meryl Streep was nominated for Best Actress.

Most journalists were shrugging their shoulders about this film after the initial Toronto screening, and now the actors have put it back in the game. There are two worlds, two planets, two separate realms around this time of year. There is the realm of the earnest, devotional, film-worshipping, infinity-regarding X-factor journalists and smarty-pants columnists like myself, and there is the realm of the guilds. The guilds don’t live on the other side of the canyon — they live in another state.

I’ve already riffed about the Robert Redford snub — I don’t want to talk about it. SAG members also ignored the stellar, world-class performances in Martin Scorsese’s Wolf of Wall Street (they actually blew off Leonardo DiCaprio and Jonah Hill?) and Joel and Ethan Coen‘s Inside Llewyn Davis, which would be at the top of my list of Best Ensemble performances. SAG membership didn’t receive Wolf of Wall Street screeners but the Davis blow-off…c’mon. Think for two seconds about those Llewyn Davis performances…John Goodman, F. Murray Abraham, Carey Mulligan, the Garfeins, the guy who plays Mel…what is SAG? What is the membership made of? Who are they?

Read more

In an act of what can only be called smug and clueless defiance, Screen Actors Guild members this morning refused to include Robert Redford‘s career-capping performance in All Is Lost among the five SAG Best Actor nominations. I’m not just angry at these tools but…well, confused. Critics and columnists and people who know what’s aesthetically right and wrong have been patiently explaining the inevitability of Redford since Cannes, pointing to the stoic dignity of his historic, all-but-wordless emoting aboard the Virginia Jean. The Redford dismissal is probably more of a reflection of a lack of interest in (i.e., insufficient understanding of and respect for) All Is Lost than a thoughtful response to Redford’s performance, but still…the shallowness!

A journalist friend recently told me about speaking to a very well-known actor at a party. He said the actor had told him he’d popped in a screener of All Is Lost and then turned it off after ten minutes or so. The actor’s explanation went something along the lines of “I saw what this was going to be…all alone, no dialogue, the threat of death…and I quit.” Advanced-age ADD is what home screenings are all about. This is why All Is Lost has to be seen in a theatre, why it has to be paid close attention to. I’m really seething about this. Cauldron of acid in my stomach. I’ve always thought of the SAG membership as a bit whimsical and flakey and on the immature side, but this!

John Goodman‘s druggie jazzman offers a dismissive little riff during the road-trip section of Inside Llewyn Davis. He basically says jazz musicians are more expressive because they play more notes or chords than folk singers. I’ve seen Davis four times and Goodman’s bit didn’t register, but I suddenly cracked up when I heard it last night during…what, my fifth viewing? That’s what Coen brothers humor is sometimes. “Funny” doesn’t kick in like a Jay Leno joke. It needs to percolate.

Prior to last night’s Saving Mr. Banks screening at Disney studios, Tom Hanks told Variety‘s Maane Khatchatourian that original “Mary Poppins” author P.L. Travers (who is portrayed a bit cantankerously by Emma Thompson) would not have been a Banks fan. “She would absolutely hate [our film],” Hanks said on the red carpet. “She would say, ‘Why don’t you make a movie about the poetry that I wrote?’ She would hate this movie. But that’s what’s great about it. But she’d also be here seeing it.” This reminds me of Mark Harris‘s recent tweet that called Banks “a nice Disney-corporate-retreat film about how studios always know best and writers are crazy and only Americans understand emotions.”

The San Diego Film Critics Society and the Phoenix Film Critics Society have presumably seen Martin Scorsese‘s The Wolf of Wall Street, and yet they’ve excluded it from their best-of-the-year lists. In my book this suggests a lack of insight and sophistication. I’m presuming they’ve rejected Wolf because of the debauchery — too vulgar, sleazy, outrageous. Did a portion of the San Diego and Phoenix voters equate it with The Hangover Part III or something? Because this is an extremely moral film that operates in the realm of Fellini Satyricon with a nod towards any scholastically respectable study of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The debauchery is a metaphor. The Phoenix and San Diego film connoisseurs are entitled to vote for whatever and whomever they want, of course, but there’s no legitimate excuse for not at least acknowledging Wolf as one of the year’s finest.

Ridley Scott‘s The Counselor doesn’t belong in a discussion of 2013’s worst films because it was far and away one of the most cunningly written, the most perverse, the most succinctly edited, the ballsiest and…well, probably the most unconventional film of the year, hands down. It was certainly the finest 2013 film that received a failing grade from Rotten Tomatoes (35%) and Metacritic (48%).

I hated Nicholas Winding Refn‘s Only God Forgives, which I saw in Cannes, more than any other film I saw this year…down on my knees, howling with disgust. Amat Escalante‘s Heli is a respectable, highly disciplined Mexican art film, but it was easily the ugliest thing I sat through all year — sorry. Everyone seemed to agree that Adore, the Australian drama about a pair of moms (Naomi Watts, Robin Wright Penn) banging each other’s sons, was a miscalculation for the ages. I found Scatter My Ashes at Bergdorf’s moderately diverting. And I worshipped the black-and=white 3D section of Sam Raimi‘s Oz The Great and Powerful, even though the rest of the film more or less blew. I didn’t find Paul Schrader‘s The Canyons to be all that good, but it wasn’t deplorable. Jobs was a plodder for the most part, but I wasn’t grossly offended.

Read more

HE salutes New Yorker film essayist Richard Brody for selecting Martin Scorsese‘s The Wolf of Wall Street as tied for first place among his Best Movies of 2013. Good man! On the other hand Brody has chosen Terrence Wackadoodle‘s To The Wonder as the other top-of-the-list champ…the fuck? Wait, it gets worse. Brody is declaring that All Is Lost and Before Midnight are among the four shittiest films of 2013 (along with Gravity and The Great Beauty). Brody doesn’t literally mean they’re the pits — he means that that in his head, they delivered “the greatest disproportion between the emblazoned ambition and the mediocrity of the result.”

The excellence of John Michael McDonagh‘s The Guard, which everyone liked or loved, all but assures that the Sundance-bound Calvary, which also stars Brendan Gleeson, will deliver the goods. Sardonic Irish dramedy, “a priest tormented by his community,” guns and religion and perhaps a little sex. Co-starring Chris O’Dowd, Aidan Gillan, Dylan Moran and Kelly Reilly (Flight). Calvary opens in the UK and Ireland on 4.11.14.

If anyone at Warner Bros. or Legendary had been stupid enough to ask the above question or even use the word “metaphor” they would have been fired off the film in a heartbeat. But if you had to choose a metaphor, what would it be? C’mon, think of one. The simultaneous starvation and poisoning of good-movie culture (or what’s left of it) by corporate-minded zombie execs and their original-idea phobia and embrace of CG-driven remakes and franchises?

To put a cap on it, here’s the final tally of HE’s Best Films of 2013 (but only numbering twelve): (1) Martin Scorsese‘s The Wolf of Wall Street — the year’s finest film and the most audacious Fall-of-the-Roman-Empire metaphor flick of all time; (2) Steve McQueen‘s 12 Years A Slave; (3) Joel and Ethan Coen‘s Inside Llewyn Davis; (4) Spike Jonze‘s Her; (5) Jean Marc Vallee‘s Dallas Buyer’s Club; (6) J.C. Chandor‘s All Is Lost; (7) Abdellatif Kechiche‘s Blue Is The Warmest Color; (8) David O. Russell‘s American Hustle; (9) Alfonso Cuaron‘s Gravity; (10) Asghar Farhadi‘s The Past; (11). Richard Linklater‘s Before Midnight; and (12) Noah Baumbach‘s Frances Ha. Add Shane Carruth‘s Upstream Color for an even 13.

A few days ago Marshall Fine was attending the opening-night party for the Dubai International Film Festival (12.6 to 12.14) “and I run into Avatar villain Stephen Lang who, as you may recall, was killed at the end of the first film. What are you up to? I asked. About to start shooting the Avatar sequels, he says. ‘But your character died,’ I said. He just laughed and said, ‘Yeah, well, we’ll see.’

Read more

Read more