The key to a healthy economy and culture is a strong, stable, adequately compensated middle-class, but that ideal has been steadily undermined for over three decades, or since the financial deregulation policies of the Reagan era began to take hold. This is the central, unassailable message of Jacob Kornbluth and Robert Reich‘s Inequality For All — a wise and perceptive documentary that doesn’t push an agenda as much as lay it down on the kitchen table, plain and straight. The cancer of our culture is extreme income disparity. The 1% oligarchs own 38 percent of the financial wealth of America, while the bottom 60 percent owns 2.3 percent of the wealth in America. If this isn’t a recipe for anger and despair, I don’t know what would be. Moral and social rot will continue to manifest in the form of pathetic and tedious wealth envy — i.e., “if only I could live like Kim Kardashian.”

Read more

A day or two ago a New York media guy wrote to say he saw David O. Russell‘s American Hustle “yesterday” (two days ago, I’m presuming) and that “it’s DOR trying to be Scorsese.” (Not a novel observation.) The reason I’m posting this is the kicker: “Every critic I talk to says their favorite of the year is Spike Jonze‘s Her.” Is this an indication of where the N.Y. Film Critics might go? Variety‘s Tim Gray indicated a few weeks ago that Her will be seen as a challenge to the rank-and-file. (Don’t you just love it when it when complacent industry farts pooh-pooh films as good as this?) Here’s my 10.13.13 review.

I don’t know if extra-special, super-secret screenings of Martin Scorsese‘s The Wolf of Wall Street will happen for the New York Film Critics Circle and the National Board of Review before they vote next week, but I do know that Broadcast Film Critics Association members (myself included) have been invited to a Wolf screening on Friday, 12.6, around midday. There’s a simultaneous New York City screening happening at the same time. I was sort of hoping for a screening earlier in the week. If I was running the NBR and NYFCC I would order a delay in the voting so Wolf could be included. Maybe this won’t be necessary, as noted, but who knows? Not me.

If The Social Network had been made three years later and released two weeks ago, it would be the hands-down favorite to win the Best Picture Oscar right now. It would be the quality alternative that the 12 Years A Slave crowd could transfer their allegiance to if they felt the tectonic plates shifting, and which the Gravity softies could respect and probably vote for at the end of the day. I watched this clip again because (a) I love it, (b) I wanted to re-assess Dakota Johnson in lieu of her forthcoming 50 Shades of Grey role, and (c) I was wondering if Justin Timberlake will ever seem quite so charismatic or play another scene as good. Luck might not be with him — you can never be sure. This might be his all-time Hollywood peak right here.

Read more

“I’m not saying this is a great performance, but I would say that it’s a complete performance. From beginning to end, I think the character is there.”

The quote is from Bruce Dern in an 11.27 interview with TheWrap‘s Steve Pond. Speaking, of course, about his inhabiting of the sullen, irascible, partly-out-to-lunch Woody in Alexander Payne‘s Nebraska. This is, no shit, one of the most eloquent and affecting things any actor has ever said about his or her performance. It’s such a good quote that it made me wonder if Dern had sat down and thought it through and refined it until the words were just right. Or is he just getting really good at campaigning? I honestly think this quote is as affecting as anything Dern delivers on-screen in Nebraska, and perhaps even more so.

And then it hit me. I was sitting in a cafe in Tijuana when it finally sank in. Of course!

Read more

Yesterday afternoon TheWrap‘s Steve Pond reported that Scarlett Johansson‘s impressive voice-only performance in Spike Jonze’s Her won’t be eligible for a Best Actress Golden Globe. I wrote in my 10.13 Her review that Johansson’s performance as a software program named “Samantha” “may be her most expressive ever.” But “the part has fallen victim to a Hollywood Foreign Press Association rule that says voice performances are not eligible for acting awards,” Pond reports.

And yet I can’t strongly disagree with a response by Wrap commenter “Joe S.” “Let’s face it, Scarlett is only being considered for acting awards because she’s a celebrity,” he writes. “It wasn’t long ago that ‘no name’ actors did the bulk of voice-over work and there was never even a thought of awards consideration. None. Zero. Nada. And if Scarlett looked like Julie Kavner or the late Marcia Wallace, there would be NO CHANCE IN HELL of [any awards attention]. Scarlett’s is akin to a phone-sex performance so [do] you think there would be a push if the voice performance was, say, from Linda Hunt or Gabourey Sidibe??”

I disagree that Johansson’s performance is “akin to phone-sex” — it goes much deeper than that. But I do wonder if she would be getting the same level of attention if she wasn’t, you know, hot and foxy.

I’m in Tijuana on a secret mission. I woke up at 4:30 am, left at 5:10 am, got here just before 8 am. Presumably (hopefully?) the secret mission will be fulfilled within a few hours, or at the very least by tomorrow morning. I haven’t been to Tijuana since the late ’90s. It used to be a bit skanky and squalid; now it feels almost as tidy and corporatized as any mid-sized American city. To some Mexico might seem a bit exotic in a vaguely odorous way, but if you’ve just come back from Vietnam it feels like home turf. I’m sitting in a nice upscale restaurant called Marenca (Jose Clemente Orozco 70, Centro, 22000 Tijuana), and they have good complimentary wifi.

An essay by A.O. Scott called “The Big Picture Strikes Back,” appearing in the 12.1 Sunday N.Y. Times Magazine, discusses evidence of “directorial presence” in the not-entirely-corporatized art form known as movies, and in so doing praises J.C. Chandor‘s All Is Lost, Alfonso Cuaron‘s Gravity and Richard Linklater‘s Before Midnight.

Near the end of the piece Scott mentions “the audacity of Gravity, with its big budget, big movie stars and huge box office, and the even greater boldness of All Is Lost, which blithely ignores some of the most basic axioms of moviemaking. The cast consists of one person, who utters a few dozen words and whose story is told with virtually no exposition. We don’t know his name, his profession, his back story or anything else. Nothing has been done to make him relatable or representative or universal, even as he becomes all of those things.

Read more

Many were surprised this morning when Asghar Farhadi‘s The Past wasn’t included among the five announced Spirit Award nominees — Blue is the Warmest Color, Gloria, The Great Beauty, The Hunt, A Touch of Sin — for Best International Film. Hitfix‘s Greg Ellwood noted that The Past “isn’t as beloved as [Farhadi’s] A Separation, granted, but the exclusion of The Past is puzzling. Farhadi won the Spirit Award in this category for A Separation in 2012. The Past has had strong reviews since Cannes and it’s certainly better than The Hunt or The Great Beauty. Odd to say the least.” If you ask me The Past is way, way more believable and on-target. More enticingly textured and satisfyingly adult than The Hunt. More emotionally precise, delicate, affecting. The Past performances alone tower over those in The Hunt.”

This review contains massive third-act spoilers: I was fairly to moderately pleased with much of Spike Lee‘s Oldboy (FilmDistrict, 11.27), which I saw a couple of weeks ago. It seemed to me a vigorous, well-disciplined, good-enough remake of Park Chan-wook‘s audacious, same-titled original. I realize that I’m expected to hate or at least disapprove of Lee’s version and ask why did he remake it and that no one can touch the original, etc. But it’s not half-bad, really. Josh Brolin shoulders the lead role of Joe Doucett (a nod to original character Oh Dae-su, played by Choi Min-sik) with a fittingly grim, terse, low-key attitude. And the extended warehouse fight sequence (which lasts four or five minutes) is grippingly staged, I thought. And thank God Lee doesn’t go in for tongue-severing, which struck me as completely needless in Chan-wook’s original.

My problem with Lee’s Oldboy is all about the rewriting of the big “surprise” ending, which of course isn’t a surprise to tens of thousands as it’s basically the same used in the ’03 film, which every fan of extreme Asian action cinema is totally up on. I’m nonetheless declaring for the second time that what follows blows the big third-act reveal all to hell.

Read more

In this Inside Llewyn Davis clip, John Goodman‘s drug-addled character declares that the Brooklyn Bridge is the most traditional New York City-area place to commit suicide from, and that anyone jumping instead from the George Washington Bridge is some kind of confused loser. He means that the Brooklyn Bridge has acquired more notoriety as a suicide spot, most likely due to Steve Brodie having jumped off the bridge 127 years ago (7.30.86) and lived. A site called Dark Destinations claims that the Brooklyn Bridge “has more suicides than any of the other bridges in the city, including the George Washington and Verrazano-Narrows, which are actually much higher from the water.” But the GW bridge is no slouch. It averages about six deaths a year. 18 people died from GW jumps in 2012, 13 in 2010 and 10 in ’04. There’s also that story told by William Holden‘s Max Schumacher character in Network, the one about him oversleeping and throwing on his raincoat and jumping into a cab and saying “Take me to the middle of the George Washington Bridge!’ and the cabbie turning around and pleading, “Don’t do it, buddy…you’re young, you have your whole life ahead of you.” I don’t know about 1961 (i.e., when Inside Llewyn Davis takes place), but by today’s standards the GW and Brooklyn bridges are fairly evenly matched.

Congrats to 12 Years a Slave, Nebraska and All Is Lost for landing seven, six and four Spirit Award nominations, respectively. Congrats to Nebraska‘s Bruce Dern for landing a Best Actor nom, which obviously adds a measure of heat to his Best Actor Oscar campaign. Congrats also to Inside Llewyn Davis and Frances Ha for landing Best Feature noms, and to Davis‘s Oscar Isaac for his Best Male Lead nomination. Ditto to Best International Film nominee Blue is the Warmest Color, which I’m presuming will take the cake.

A Best Cinematography nomination went to Inside Llewyn Davis‘s Bruno Delbonnel — good for that and all artfully desaturated color schemes. It seems curious that the black-and-white cinematography from both Nebraska‘s Phedon Papamichael and Frances Ha‘s Sam Levy were overlooked.

Somehow or some way Richard Linklater‘s Before Midnight, which snagged a Best Screenplay nom and a Best Actress nom for Julie Delpy, should have been nominated for Best Feature.

Spirit Awards rules forbid nominations for non-American films except in the Best International Film category, otherwise Blue‘s Adele Exarchopoulos would surely be among the Best Female lead nominees.

Read more