I’m sorry but my 12.12 phoner with Albert Brooks is generally easier and more enjoyable than this Brooks-Poland chat. But Poland gets some great stuff about the particulars of financing and the various frustrations and roadblocks that Brooks suffered through in the ’70s and ’80s.
I presuming this was recorded before the SAG nominations, as Brooks seems to be in a relatively good mood.
What a great relief and comfort it is that a significant portion (though not a majority so far) of the elite critics are giving War Horse the slapdown that it deserves.
The Playlist‘s Todd Gilchrist says Steven Spielberg‘s film “comes to us overloaded with nostalgia [and] a joylessly persistent sense of nobility…Spielberg dials up the sentimentality to almost unbearable levels [as] War Horse is the type of film for which the term ‘Oscar bait’ was invented, precisely because it feels like there’s no motivation for it to exist except to win awards.”
And Variety‘s Justin Chang says it’s “beautifully composed” but “falls short of the sustained narrative involvement and emotional drive its resolutely old-fashioned storytelling demands.”
And yet it’s ironic that the barbed-wire scene has drawn oddly divergent opinions from Hollywood Reporter critic Todd McCarthy and Box Office‘s Amy Nicholson. McCarthy’s review is mildly approving (or at least forgiving) but he finds the barbed-wire scene problematic, and yet Nicholson praises it in the midst of an otherwise blistering pan.
“The best ten minutes of the movie are pure theater,” Nicholson says, “in an eerie stretch when two enemy soldiers meet in No Man’s Land for a horse rescue operation. If you can forgive that amidst this mass slaughter of man and beast, the entire front takes a time-out to save one living thing, the scene is a masterpiece of hushed tension and bleak humor. And tellingly, it’s the one scene in the movie that doesn’t announce how you should feel.”
And yet McCarthy notes that “when Albert and a German youngster recklessly venture out into No Man’s Land to try to save Joey, who has entangled himself in barbed wire, the essential realism of the cinema begins to show up the symbolic artificiality and essential implausibility of the young men’s private detente.
“Onstage, the barbed wire incident is properly appalling emotionally and morally, but decidedly abstracted due to the dramatic lighting and virtuoso puppetry; onscreen, the reaction is more, ‘oh, poor horse, and why can’t warring nations get along just as these two fellows do?'”
McCarthy adds that “what follows next runs even deeper into audience-pleasing wish-fulfillment and sentimentality, topped by a grandly phoney ending that will set many tears flowing but feels overweening artificial, partly because of the Gone With the Wind-style colored lighting in which it’s bathed.Along with the universal thematic notes, the eager-to-please elements assert themselves increasingly as the film marches forward; neither aspect was necessary to stress.”
Dark Knight Rises star Christian Bale and a couple of homies and a cameraman were roughed up yesterday by plainclothes Chinese thugs. Bale was trying to visit Chen Guangcheng, a blind Chinese lawyer and civil rights activist who’s been under house arrest in China for over a year, blah blah, same old, etc.
They goons chased the Bale gang in their van for an hour after the altercation. If I’d been at the wheel I would have gone all Ryan Gosling on their asses. I would have suddenly stopped, shoved the van into reverse and tromped on the accelerator and slammed the rear of my van into the goon car. Or better yet, I would have circled around and slippped in behind the goon car. like Steve McQueen did in Bullitt, and tailed them. Or I would have taken out a pistol and shot their tires out.
A friend has described this trailer for Dario Argento‘s Dracula 3D as “unintentionally hilarious.” But I’m getting an agreeably classic Hammer vibe, particularly a recollection of Terence Fisher‘s The Horror of Dracula (1958), the first Hammer film in which Lee played the immortal seducer.
Yes, the praying mantis is a problem. And yes, most 40-and-under connoisseurs of horror will find Argento’s film comical. Perhaps most 40-and-over connoisseurs will agree. But I’m intrigued.
The death of Christopher Hitchens, the barbed and brilliant essayist and anti-religionist and enjoyer of drink and tobacco, was announced last night. Hitchens’ departure point was the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston after an 18-month bout with esophegal cancer. He was 62.
“You can tell a man who boozes by the company he chooses…”
Hitchens was a militant atheist, renowned in part for having declared that “the real axis of evil is Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.” He despised Henry Kissinger and Bill Clinton and the Tea Party and ignoramuses of all creeds and persuasions, but he also really, really didn’t believe in any sort of soul travel at the moment of expiration.
Now, apart from having finally escaped from the long, agonizing downswirl and diminishment of the last year and a half, he knows the truth of it. Apart from a final and absolute shutting down of all circuits, Hitchens now knows (or knew, at least, for an instant as he gave it up) whether some form or sense of cosmic ecstasy and spiritual transference comes with death, or he now knows (or knew during that same instant) that dying really is nothing more than the flatlining of everything, including the slightest thread or dream of the eternal.
I ran into Hitchens twice — the first time just before at a New York Film Festival panel discussion in late September 2001 called “Making Movies That Matter: The Role of Film in the National Debate” (my account of which I reprinted in an April 2006 article) and the second time in a 59th Street hotel three or four years ago. He was a bit gruff and tart both times, but that’s where great minds tend to go when they’re not lifting themselves and the level of conversation off the ground.
I’m glad, at least, that his pain has come to an end, and that whatever serenity-by-way-of-finality death provides, he has it now. I’m especially glad and grateful that Hitchens was around and punctuating the conversation as long and perceptively and excitingly as he did.
“The word ‘serious’ typifies the intellectual arrogance of elite media publications,” CityArts‘ Armond White writes in a 12.14 post. “‘Serious’ now replaces what journalists in the ’80s more honestly — cravenly — termed ‘sexy.’ In aesthetic terms, the Dragon Tattoo remake is no more ‘serious’ than Cars 2 (and less enjoyable).
“What journalists now consider ‘sexy’ is getting as close to the film industry process as possible — as in seeking to influence the Academy Awards race and angling for quotes in ads which, essentially, was the essence of [David] Denby‘s advance rave.
“His opening line, ‘You can’t take your eyes off Rooney Mara,’ shamelessly uses adspeak to convey pop enthusiasm. But Denby’s imitative Pauline Kaelism is unconvincing; by suspiciously elevating the undistinguished Mara (scion of the New York Giants and Pittsburgh Steelers fortunes), Denby conforms to the same class flattery that was so egregious in last year’s critics’ celebration of The Social Network.”
The Artist, The Help, The Artist, The Help, The Artist, The Help, The Artist, The Help, The Artist, The Help, The Artist, The Help, The Artist, The Help, The Artist, The Help, The Artist, The Help, The Artist, The Help,The Artist, The Help, The Artist, The Help,The Artist, The Help, The Artist, The Help, etc.
These and War Horse and another I could mention are basically CHILDREN’S MOVIES. Simple tales, simple strategies, dark forces vanquished, etc. What is wrong with many of the critics out there and most SAG members, etc.? Do they need emotional assurances and hugs and shiatsu massages this badly? Are their own lives really that unfulfilled and/or bereft?
The GoGo in-flight wifi that I paid $12 bucks for sucks so I can’t really watch this, but right off the top I have a problem with the title “Cinematic Joy,” and especially if the editor is a guy named “MrBenZuk.”
Wait…the wifi is working better now. I’ve seen about 55 seconds worth. The best year-end montages express interior stuff — themes, moods, unspoken things. Mmmm…I’m not sure Zukky is after that.
There are so many things in Asghar Farhadi‘s A Separation that attract admiration or delight, but one of my favorite parts is the finale. I’m not giving anything away by saying it doesn’t end with a definitive answer but a question, and particularly with a choice not yet made. For me it’s nothing short of brilliant. The audience that I saw A Separation with in Telluride was clearly delighted. I’m trying to think of an American film that has played its cards this way.
TheWrap‘s Steve Pond has suggested that Golden Globes emcee Ricky Gervais could make a joke or two about Angelina Jolie‘s In The Land of Blood and Honey being nominated for a Best Foreign-Language Film GG nominee because the HFPA just wants her to attend, etc. I honestly don’t think there’s a joke there. Jolie’s film is entirely solid and 100% respectable. Jolie could be fat and homely and unmarried and it still could have been nominated.
Our LAX-to-JFK Virgin flight just passed over Republican City, Nebraska. Is there a town in Oregon or Northern California called “Liberal Corners” or “Leftyville”?
The guy in front of me has a little extra leg room because he’s sitting right behind the plastic, blue-tinted panel that divides first class from coach, so he’s doing pretty well. But with that extra comfort he just had to go for a little more and lean his seat back, right into my 18 inches of private space and my 13″ Macbook Pro. Uhm…Fred? I’m trying to work here and it’s pretty tight as it is without you being a thoughtless dick about it. Okay, thanks…much appreciated. He doesn’t know how lucky he is. If he hadn’t complied I would done the old accidental-spillage-of-Coke-on-his-head routine.
