War Horse “wasn’t as manipulative as I expected,” a New York-based critic confesses. “But I was hoping for an emotional catharsis at the end and I didn’t get it. So I’m calling it good Spielberg but not great Spielberg, and very heavy on the overdone John Williams score. If the Academy really thinks this is as good as it gets — in a year that has given us The Descendants, Drive and Moneyball — that would be a profound shame.”
Disney screened War Horse for 10 or 12 journalists last week at the Animation screening room on the Burbank Disney lot. A guy who saw it and is a huge fan (“If you like animals…”) told me it was him and 10 or 11 others. It was also shown to a bunch of Manhattan guys a short while ago — EW‘s Owen Gleiberman, Rex Reed, Hoberman, etc. Not all of the NYFCC members but a lot of them.
This morning I was kicking around the reactions to War Horse and The Descendants with a friend, and he/she said that The Descendants holds up well on a second viewing “but I just don’t know if it’s a Best Picture winner. This feels like a really lackluster year for movies in general.”
To which I replied: “It’s absolutely truthful and real and so well sculpted. Those last 20 or 25 minutes or so starting with Robert Forster coming to visit his daughter in the hospital room and then Judy Greer arrives and Clooney’s goodbye and that final gaze at that virgin property in Kauai and onto the dumping of the ashes and then the three of them on the couch at the very end is perfect.
“It isn’t a BIG SHAMELESS EMOTIONAL GUT-GRAB WHAMMO movie, true, but God help us if we’re only sufficiently moved to hand out the Best Picture Oscar to films of that sort. The magical realism of Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close might take it in the end, but heaven save us from the inevitablity of poor scared horsey and all those shells bursting everywhere.”
To which he/she replied: “I don’t know. I am not giving up yet on Dragon Tattoo. It may turn out that Incredibly Loud or War Horse will seem too affected or syrupy sweet for Oscar voters and they’ll look for something exciting to vote for. I remember when it was Bugsy up against Silence of the Lambs and how everyone thought Bugsy would win because it was an ‘Oscar movie.’ But in the end, it wasn’t. Bugsy didn’t offer up a Hollywood ending, though Silence really did — the bad guy got punished.” Or eaten, rather.
“The Descendants is the closest to a winner we have right now. I don’t think The Artist will finally cut it, and not Moneyball either. It’s gonna be The Descendants vs. whatever’s coming next.”
With The Descendants holding a 91% Rotten Tomatoes rating, N.Y. Post critic Lou-Lou Lumenick (who used to be friendly but over the last year or so has gone into a Poland-styled eye-contact-avoidance and glacial-polar-bear silence whenever I come within 15 or 20 feet) has given costar Judy Greer a major endorsement.
Judy Greer in The Descendants.
“Perhaps the most delightful surprise [in The Descendants] is Judy Greer, whose best-friend parts have invariably been better than the romantic comedies in which she frequently appears. Given a rare dramatic role as Matthew Lillard‘s cheated-upon wife, she steps up to the plate and knocks it completely out of the park. Like the movie, Clooney and Payne, she will not be forgotten during awards season.”
Add this to what A.O. Scott/Manohla Dargis said in the N.Y. Times a couple of months ago and what I wrote about Greer in October and…well, add it all up.
L.A. Daily News reporter Bob Strauss has filed a story titled “This Year’s Oscar Tumult Reflects Awards Show’s Changing Culture.” It’s basically a post-Ratner, post-calamity assessment of All Things Oscar, right here and now. Oscar telecast producer Brian Grazer, AMPAS honcho Tom Sherak and Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone are quoted. And me.
“It’s really the awards season that people who love films live for,” said Jeffrey Wells, editor of the website Hollywood-Elsewhere.com. “Finally, you get to see a lot of pretty interesting films released from late September through December. This is when your movie-lover blood is up, and the Oscars have simply become the last awards show of the season, they’re the finale. It doesn’t mean that they’re the most important.
“The Oscars mean something in historical context, I respect that and that’s what drives it. But it really has come down to just being the last event in a fairly long procession that really begins with the Toronto and Telluride Film Festivals in late summer.”
Descendants star George Clooney led his fellow cast members and the entire audience at the Academy theatre in a chorus of “Happy Birthday” for Descendants costar Shailene Woodley, who turned 20 today. The film began showing around 7:55 pm; an after-party in the lobby followed.
(l. to r.) Descendants director Alexander Payne, costars Amara Miller, Nick Krause, Matthew Lillard, Judy Greer, Beau Bridges, Robert Forster, Shailene Woodley, George Clooney.
Descendants costar Nick Krause (l.) as he appears in the film, and (r.) as he appeared tonight.
Nine or ten weeks ago I wrote about meeting Descendants costar Shailene Woodley at the Sheridan bar during the Tellluride Film Festival. What I didn’t report was that 10 or 15 minutes after saying hello I accidentally whacked Woodley in the chin with the back of my left hand. I was telling a joke or delivering some impassioned opinion…whap! I went “oh, no…my God!” and profusely apologized and gave Woodley a slight hug, but I felt like an absolute fool.
Descendants costar Shailene Woodley at Four Seasons hotel — Tuesday, 11.15, 3:55 pm.
Sasha Stone was standing a couple of feet away, and right after it happened she looked at me as if I’d just run over a small kitten or vomited all over the President of the United States. Her hands were covering her mouth; her eyes were popping out of her head.
But to her immense credit, Woodley smiled and shrugged and waved it off. I don’t know if she was dealing with any pain and she was covering it up for my sake or if it really was nothing, but I was immediately impressed by her generosity and poise. Another kind of actress might have bent over and acted shocked and wounded and held her nose and gone “oh…oh, wow…Jesus!” and invite everyone’s sympathy. But Woodley, whatever physical sensations she was actually feeling, was super-cool and gracious. I decided right away that she was a Howard Hawks woman.
I brought up the Telluride chin-whap when I saw Woodley a couple of hours ago in a Four Seasons suite, and she said the exact same thing about it being nothing, barely caused her to blink and so on. Anyway, she’s got my vote. Here’s our brief discussion about this and that.
Deadline‘s Mike Fleming is reporting that the English-language version of Angelina Jolie‘s In The Land Of Blood And Honey will not be released in English-speaking territories or anywhere else for that matter. Instead FilmDistrict will release the version that Jolie shot in the language once known as Serbian-Croatian and now called Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian .(It’s also called Bosanski/Hrvatski/Srpski or BHS. It’s also known as Splotnee-Gloob-Glooby-Slobonik, if you’re from the part of the world.). The film, slated to open in NY and LA on 12.23, will obviously carry subtitles. Which means that the subtitle-averse brainiacs out there are going to take a pass…right?
“Between you and I (please don’t publish my name with this): I’ve seen War Horse, and the Best Picture sentiments are spot on,” writes a big-city critic. “The only thing that could derail it is The Artist, and only if Weinstein pulls off his usual manipulation. Also, keep in mind that 90 percent of the cast and crew on The Artist came from Hollywood. The movie was also shot there. So we could another Crash situation here.” Wait…what? I’m not getting the analogy.
“But as far as traditional Best Picture winners go, you won’t find a better match than War Horse. And on its own terms the movie is sensational — really great, rousing, moving stuff. Think Saving Private Ryan minus the gore, and with a horse instead of Matt Damon. That horse can act!”
A 10.30.11 N.Y. Times story by Michael Cieply states that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences “has taken in roughly $80 million a year from the Oscars, which account for perhaps 90 percent of its revenue, while spending about $30 million to produce the [Oscar telecast].” So the total revenue is around $88 or $89 million, and then you subtract $30 million to produce the show and you’re left with $58 or $59 million. Subtract the usual usuals (overhead, salaries, screenings, advertising) and you’re still looking at a lotta dough left over, and then the process repeats itself the next year and another $88 or $89 million rolls in. That’s a good business to be in.
The unfolding of the predicament of George Clooney‘s Matt King “is surprising, moving and frequently very funny,” says N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott in his review of The Descendants. “Director Alexander Payne — immeasurably aided by a dazzlingly gifted, doggedly disciplined cast — nimbly sidesteps the sentimental traps that lurk within the film’s premise. He somehow achieves the emotional impact of good melodrama and the hectic absurdity of classic farce without ever seeming to exaggerate.
“There are times when you laugh or gasp in disbelief at what has just happened — an old man punches a teenager in the face; a young girl utters an outrageous obscenity; Mr. Clooney slips on a pair of boat shoes and runs, like an angry, flightless bird, to a neighbor’s house — and yet every moment of the movie feels utterly and unaffectedly true.
“A lively and complicated mesh of plots and subplots takes shape” within The Descendants, “but the most striking and satisfying aspects are its unhurried pace and loose, wandering structure.
“In most movies the characters are locked into the machinery of narrative like theme park customers strapped into a roller coaster. Their ups and downs are as predetermined as their shrieks of terror and sighs of relief, and the audience goes along for the ride. But the people in this movie seem to move freely within it, making choices and mistakes and aware, at every turn, that things could be different.
“Each person who shows up on screen, even for a minute or two with nothing especially important to accomplish, has an odd and memorable individuality. The Descendants seems to unfold within a vast landscape of possible stories. [And] Mr. Payne, with a light touch and a keen sense of place — this Hawaii is as real and peculiar as the Nebraska of About Schmidt or the California wine country of Sideways — has made a movie that, for all its modesty, is as big as life. Its heart is occupied by grief, pain and the haunting silence of [Matt’s comatose wife] Elizabeth, whose version of events is the only one we never hear. And yet it is also full of warmth, humor and the kind of grace that can result from our clumsy attempts to make things better.
“To call The Descendants perfect would be a kind of insult, a betrayal of its commitment to, and celebration of, human imperfection. Its flaws are impossible to distinguish from its pleasures. For example: after what feels as if it should be the final scene, a poignant, quiet tableau of emotional resolution and apt visual beauty, Mr. Payne adds another, a prosaic coda to a flight of poetry.
“Without saying too much or spoiling the mood, I will say that I was grateful for this extra minute, a small gift at the end of a film that understands, in every way, how hard it can be to say goodbye.”
Could I suggest something? Put Patton Oswalt into the one-sheet. He’s the funny guy in this film…the anchor guy, the bullshit-deflating reality-check guy, the deserves-to-be-nominated-for-a-Best-Supporting-Actor-Oscar guy. All this one-sheet is saying right now is “fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy night!” Which is cool for people like me and Charlize Theron fans, but I don’t know about Joe Popcorn.
It turns out that the Wikipedia-supplied running time of Cameron Crowe‘s We Bought A Zoo (20th Century Fox, 12/23) is pretty far off the mark. It’s not 90 minutes but roughly 124 minutes, according to a Fox source. That’s not an official running time, but it’ll be in that general vicinity (i.e., maybe a bit shorter) when all is said and done.
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