Is 12 Years A Slave this year’s The Social Network or Brokeback Mountain? Will Wolf of Wall Street be this year’s Goodfellas or this year’s Casino or The Aviator? Will American Hustle be this year’s…I don’t know what American Hustle is or will be or might be. Nobody does. Let’s leave it alone for now.
Blowoff Shock Calculus
I can’t find the link but a couple of days ago some guy tweeted…this isn’t a direct quote but it represents the basic gist…that the Likeliest Oscar Winner In Any Category Corresponds to the Level of Surprise, Shock or Feigned Outrage if Said Contender Doesn’t Win. Imagine any nominee in any category and then try to imagine what the reaction will be if he/she doesn’t win. If you can’t honestly imagine people having a shit fit because he/she has lost, he/she probably won’t win. Something to kick around.
Philomena Snags PG-13 Rating
The Weinstein Company has persuaded the MPAA to overturn its initial, incredibly lame decision to give Stephen Frears‘ Philomena an R rating, and thereby changing it to PG-13. It was all over the second use of an eff word in the film. (The MPAA will let you slide with one eff but two means an R.) The Weinstein argument was presented to the appeals board by Bert Fields, Motion Picture Consulting LLC’s Ethan Noble and Philomena star, producer and co-screenwriter Steve Coogan.
I Can Dance, Make Romance
I wince almost every time I read a Tim Gray Variety report about the latest award-season screening or event. The only fall release he hadn’t done ecstatic cartwheels over is All Is Lost. (A week or two ago Gray suggested that the title sounds too downish and despairing for the make-us-feel-good crowd.) Otherwise he’s been thumbs-uppy about nearly everything. At the same time I understand all too well why Gray and other glad-handers play it this way. If you want those advertising bucks you have to keep things groovy and backrubby. You don’t have to love everything you see but you’d be wise to write your reviews and riffs in a way that emphasizes the fluttery alpha.
Even the auteur-level directors you’ve admired for years will keep you at arm’s length and maybe pass along a complaint or two to the marketing guys if you don’t pleasure them. Even an interest in wanting to talk to an actor you really like and admire, like Nebraska‘s Bruce Dern, won’t pan out if you’re not 100% loving the movie or if you say that Dern should have gone for Best Supporting Actor because if he did he’d (a) definitely get nominated and (b) would most likely win. (Every time I’ve said this I’ve added that it’ll be terrific if he defies the odds and gets nominated for Best Actor — go, Bruce!) But that’s not good enough. Right now I have a better chance of interviewing Vladimir Putin than Dern.
Nazi Germany’s Band of Brothers
You could make a Band of Brothers-like miniseries about all the young men who’ve ever suffered and died on a battlefield. Young soldiers fight for their countries, not ideologies or policies or political parties. Any war, any army is grist for this mill. You could even make a case for the genocidal Serbians if you did it right. (Although that would be tricky.) You know what I’d like to see one day? An HBO miniseries about four young Vietcong cadres fighting against the Americans in a seven-year saga, starting with the January ’68 Tet Offensive and ending with the last U.S. helicopter flying out of Saigon in April ’75. No American producer would have the cojones to do this, of course.
Cold January Morning
Word around the campfire is that The Challenger Disaster (airing Saturday, 11.16 on the Discovery and Science channels) is an engrossing, well-made docudrama. I haven’t seen it yet, but I wonder if it will mention the ghastly revelation that at least three crew members survived the explosion and were conscious until the shattered crew compartment smashed into the ocean at 2000 mph — a drop of 65,000 feet that took about two minutes and 45 seconds.
“Are You Not Entertained?”
When I was a young lad, I always envisioned Noah as a wisened, oldish, bent-over type. Spirited and spiritual but with a white beard, walking staff, heavy cloak, etc. Ian McKellen‘s Gandolf. The concept behind Darren Aronofsky and Russell Crowe‘s Noah is sexier, of course. He’s basically an older Robin Hood. Fit, brawny, studly, deep-voiced, spear-carrying. A solemn, caring and sensual Noah who sees to the erotic satisfaction of his wife Naameh (Crowe’s Beautiful Mind costar Jennifer Connelly) every so often.
The Flatness
The usual Clockwork Orange drill would have to apply if I were to see Maleficient, I’m afraid. Straightjacket, eyelid-clamps, guy in white coat applying eyedrops, etc. Contorted, unrepentant, forked-tongue evil is the flip side of pure-as-the-driven-snow goodness. Blame the corporate entertainment mentality for delivering the same kind of villain in film after film after film.
Not So Magical
Cold Case JFK, airing tonight on PBS at 9 pm, re-explores the JFK assassination with expert testimony and fresh technology. The big takeaway is that firearms experts Lucien and Michael Haag have concluded that the magic bullet — the one that caused seven two wounds in President John Kennedy and five in Governor John Connally, and yet was found on a stretcher in pristine shape — is not a joke. The most ridiculed shooting scenario in the history of modern forensics is scientifically supportable, they’re saying. Bad news for the conspiracy gang, of course, but they’re used to that by now.
Captives
The first American Hustle journalist screenings will happen a few days before Thanksgiving. As I won’t be back from Vietnam until late Sunday, 11.24, I may as well resign myself to everyone else seeing it (and perhaps posting reactions) before me. It won’t be tragic if this happens — just irritating.
All Hail Omar
Less than a week after catching Yuval Adler‘s Bethlehem I saw another ace-level melodrama about the Palestinian-Iraeli conflict last night — Hany Abu-Assad‘s Omar. It tells a roughly similar story about a Palestinian youth informing for the Israelis and being suspected by his own. In fact, my description of Bethlehem — “a lucid, tightly wound thriller that regards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through a filter of double-agenting, family matters, betrayal and anxiety” — pretty much applies to Omar. I’m not sure which film is better, but they’re both expert grippers. So we’ve got two superb films about similar subjects — Bethlehem the official Israeli entry and Omar submitted by the Palestinian territories. How can the Academy’s foreign-language committee select one and not the other?
Mistress, So To Speak
This presumably provocative Neil LaBute film premiered at last April’s Tribeca Film Festival. I was wondering when it would reappear. HE correspondent HE Clayton Loulan, who attended, wrote that “the question on everyone’s mind was will this film erase or mitigate the sins of LaBute’s Lakeview Terrace and The Wicker Man? The short answer is yes, but the longer answer likely has to do with how the ending hits you.”