“My idea of a cool and studly fast car movie is Drive. My idea of a complete waste of time is James Wan‘s Furious 7 (Universal, 4.3.15). I have the same amount of belief in the real-world versimilitude in this trailer as I do in a Road Runner cartoon. Sky-diving cars with special chutes that open and close at just the right time? Sure thing. The bit with the late Paul Walker running along the top of a bus teetering on a cliff isn’t bad conceptually, but Wan waits too long and expects us to believe that a guy could leap…what, 40 or 50 feet and fall into a car and not crack his ribs and elbows and forearms? If anyone had the courage and the character to make a real car movie (i.e., something that restores the aesthetic of the car chase in Bullitt or either of the Gone in 60 Seconds films) I would pay to see it repeatedly. The people who made Furious 7 are, no offense, corporate-fellating scum.” — from an 11.1.14 HE post titled “Obviously Fake CG Cretin Porn.”
What’s the big deal about the British Film Institute theatrically re-releasing the absolutely last and totally final cut of Ridley Scott‘s Blade Runner (2007, 117 minutes) in England on 4.3? It’s been available on Bluray for a little more than seven years so who gives a shit? Warner Bros. screened this version (unicorn, no narration, no happy ending) in October and November 2007 at special venues in New York, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Toronto, Austin, Boston and Melbourne. 33 years ago. Fiddled and re-fiddled with ad infinitum. Played out. Over. Let it go. On to the “Silver Deckard” sequel.
10 months hence we’ll see Harrison Ford bring Han Solo back to life, and then sometime in 2017 Ford will revive Blade Runner‘s coolest replicant, Rick Deckard. Maybe in a lead or supporting capacity, but definitely in a Blade Runner sequel that’ll shoot in the summer of 2016. Denis Villeneuve (Prisoners, Incendies) will direct from a script by Michael Green and original Blade Runner co-author Hampton Fancher, based on an idea by Fancher and producer Ridley Scott. My usual response is to say “why?” and “1982 was then, this is now” and so on. But maybe. Reactions?
With the Best Picture Oscar nearly in the bag for Birdman, this morning I wrote the usual Oscarologists a question many didn’t want to hear. Who has attempted an honest, warts-and-all, what-really-happened explanation about why so many Gurus of Gold and Gold Derby-ites predicted a Boyhood Best Picture victory for so many months? Me: “Some of you have to ask yourself and your Boyhood brethren, ‘Were we just smelling our own asses the whole time or was there something out there that seriously conveyed that Boyhood was a winning horse?”
This morning Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neil and I discuss the current state of Oscar-releated mea culpas and second thoughts in the wake of the Birdman surge.
Only three responded to my letter — Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neil (with whom I recorded a 25-minute discussion” about an hour ago) Variety critic Scott Foundas and an entertainment journalist who asked for anonymity.
But first, an excerpt from an “oh, fuck it, fine…Birdman wins!” piece posted this morning by Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone, a longtime Boyhood ally who is basically ascribing the popularity of Birdman to old-boy industry narcissism, which is an idea advanced earlier this month by Grantland‘s Mark Harris.
The 2014/15 Oscar season will experience a crashing finale seven days from now, and the Spirit Awards will happen the day before. (I’m picking up my Spirit press pass and ticket tomorrow.) Only two major Oscar caregories are generating suspense: Birdman vs. Boyhood for Best Picture and Alejandro G. Inarritu vs. Richard Linklater for Best Director. Except for the crazy BAFTAs all signs point to Birdman and Inarritu prevailing, but the Oscar blogoscenti keep insisting that the Academy membership is too hazy-minded to predict and that Boyhood and Linklater might pull off a surprise. Maybe. Both are striking first-rate achievements, and if the tide goes against Birdman…well, okay. The Godz won’t be happy but it won’t be a tragedy.
I can only imagine the elation that will spread across the land when Julianne Moore takes the Best Actress Oscar for a performance that everyone respects in a tedious film that almost everyone has either ignored or not even seen. Ditto when Eddie Redmayne prevails as Best Actor (I’ve pretty much given up on my Michael Keaton dream…an up-and-down career, world-class chops and a great Oscar narrative doesn’t count when you’re up against a cute British puppy dog). Double ditto when J.K. Simmons wins for Best Supporting Actor and Patricia Arquette takes it for Best Supporting Actress. And it’ll be cool when the authors of The Grand Budapest Hotel and The Imitation Game or Whiplash win the Best Original and Best Adapted Screenplay Oscars.
I’ll be watching with the usual bells on, of course, but I suspect I’ll be feeling bored much of the time and that I might have a problem or two with Neil Patrick Harris. But maybe not. Bring on 2015, which is looking like a hell of a year.
Best Picture: Should win/ought to win/favored by MovieGodz — Birdman; would win if American ticket-buyers had anything to say about it — American Sniper.
Best Director: Should win/ought to win/favored by MovieGodz — Birdman‘s Alejandro G. Inarritu. Might win and if so that’ll be okay — Boyhood‘s Richard Linklater.
There’s this imaginary guy I’ve been visiting at Cedars Sinai. He went into a coma early last October and just came out of it yesterday. I wasn’t there when he awoke but he called today to say thanks for stopping by all those times. His mother told him about my four or five visits.
Then he said he’d gone online this morning and visited the latest Gold Derby and Gurus of Gold charts, and he wanted to know what the hell had happened to Angelina Jolie‘s Unbroken, which was the Best Picture front-runner for weeks on end. “Where’d it go?” he said. “What happened? It was the leading Best Picture contender…it was all over but the shouting and the formalities. Every last default-minded, deferring-to-Dave Karger Oscar expert had it at the top of their lists. What’s the most likely film to win Best Picture? Why…Unbroken! What else? And now it’s vanished.”
I tried to break it to him easy. “What happened,” I explained, “is that Universal finally screened it, and a few days later the air had seeped out of the balloon. And then it just disappeared.” He asked me why. “It was the Christian torture-porn thing,” I said. What’s that? “There was something in the movie that said that the more a guy has been beaten and tortured, the braver and more beautiful and closer to God he is.” Oh, the guy said, suddenly sounding weaker and less curious.
“Right now the only chance Unbroken has at the Oscars is Roger Deakins‘ nomination for Best Cinematography,” I said. “But it would be surprising to a lot of people I know if Birdman‘s Emmanuel Lubezki loses out.”
I’m trying to compile a list of villains who turn out to be not entirely bad at the end of a film. Bad, aggressive guys who you feel sorry for or otherwise semi-redeem themselves at the end of a film. Rutger Hauer‘s Roy in Blade Runner. Alan Ladd‘s assassin in This Gun For Hire. Tom Cruise‘s Vincent in Collateral. 10 and 1/2 years ago I described Vincent as “diamond-like — hard and sharp and full of glints and reflections,” adding that Cruise’s performance “burns through not because of some forced intensity, but an artful hold-back, cold-steel strategy. The character is a monster and a cripple, but at the same time a kind of tough-love therapist. By the end of the film he’s saved the life of Jamie Foxx as surely as if he’d taken a bullet for him. The more you think about Tom/Vincent, the more the ironies accumulate. Deftly played by a guy known for his own hard-wired intensity, this gray-suited assassin seeps through as a fairly sad figure despite Cruise barely revealing his emotional cards. Sad but oddly charitable, almost.” Who else needs to be on the list?
Yesterday In Contention‘s Kris Tapley assessed the out-of-the-blue Birdman surge and the apparently strong likelihood that Alejandro G. Innaritu‘s film has the Best Picture Oscar in the bag. It’s an astute piece but some assertions/observations need addressing.
Assertion #1: “No one was really expecting this of Birdman, and boom, there it is.” True — I had been urging people to vote for Birdman all along but I wasn’t expecting a PGA or SAG win. I had more or less wilted and accepted the Boyhood-is-all-but-inevitable theology…and then lo and behold!
Assertion #2: “I’ve always sensed some softness in the Boyhood steamroller.” Indeed — it’s been soft all along. I sensed that softness as I watched and absorbed Boyhood at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival, but tea-leaf readers kept insisting it had the Best Picture goods, and after a while most of us started to think, “Hmmm, yeah, maybe it does…okay, fine.”
All along I’ve been saying — insisting — that among 2014’s Best Picture contenders, Alejandro G. Inarritu‘s Birdman is the only ecstatic, drop-dead brilliant contender. And all along a majority of the online know-it-alls (Gold Derby, Gurus of Gold, Steve Pond, Sasha Stone, Mark Harris, et. al.) have been saying the Best Picture Oscar will nonetheless go to Richard Linklater‘s Boyhood. And all along I’ve said that would be (a) a personal disappointment but (b) a fine, supportable decision because Boyhood is an inspired, spirit-lifting landmark of sorts — a stunt film with soul, finesse and an engaging scheme.
And then last night the roof fell in with chunks of sheetrock and ceiling styrofoam on the floor and all the Boyhood supporters stumbling around and rubbing plaster dust out of their eyes and going “what happened?” For Birdman won the Producers Guild of America’s Best Picture equivalent trophy, i.e., the Darryl F. Zanuck Award. Boom.
All across Oscarland and particularly among the prognosticators, wise guys are figuring ways to spin this so it seems as if they half-knew and half-expected this to happen all along. Hilarious.
Needless to add there is nothing but joy and elation up in Park City. If I wasn’t a sober guy I would have bought a bottle of champagne and guzzled it. For the first time since the triumph of Kathryn Bigelow‘s The Hurt Locker, which I had pushed from its first screening at the ’09 Toronto Film Festival, HE’s personal Best Picture pony appears to be surging and within reach of a big win.
Maybe. Don’t count your chickens. There could always be a backlash. (Sasha Stone tweet: “When Birdman becomes the frontrunner people will start to hate it too. Like clockwork.” Did she say “start” to hate it?) But this feels awfully good, I must say.
This morning’s biggest Oscar Dawn surprise was the Best Actress nomination handed to Two Days, One Night‘s Marion Cottilard, which happened without any evident campaigning. Five weeks ago I posted a piece about what I was calling “the Cotillard surge,” as indicated by three then-recent critics group awards. Re-read it, Oscar handicappers, and weep:
Marion Cotillard in Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardennes‘ Two Days, One Night.
“After winning the New York Film Critics Circle award for Best Actress a week ago, Two Days, One Night‘s Marion Cotillard won the same award yesterday from the Boston Film Critics Society and the New York Film Critics Online. Today she was nominated for the same award by the Online Film Critics Society. A few hours ago I wrote some colleagues and asked why they were ignoring what I called “the Cotillard surge.” I also asked why none of the critics groups have even mentioned presumed Best Actress frontrunner Julianne Moore except the LAFCA lunch-breakers, who named her the Best Actress runner-up behind Boyhood‘s Patricia Arquette.
“You can’t be total ostriches,” I said. “I’m as much of an industry whore with my hand out as anybody else, but at least I’m acknowledging that Cotillard has definitely elbowed her way into the Best Actress race…you can’t just keep saying ‘Julianne Moore is due’ over and over.”
“I’m gonna write about this,” said Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone,”but Julianne so has this.” (A couple of hours later she posted this.) “Moore has this, I get that, yes,” I replied, “but it seems right now as if you and yours are hiding your heads in the sand about the Cotillard surge. She doesn’t fit into the narrative and I get that, but she’s happening right now. You can’t push this idea away over and over. You have to let it in.”
An award columnist asked, “Is there an Oscar consultant hired for her campaign? Will the DVD be sent to AMPAS members? If no & no, she’s a bye-bye.”
Niki Caro‘s McFarland, USA (Disney, 2.20.15) will close the Santa Barbara Int’l Film Festival. And it’s better than that. “It’s not another one of these sport films,” a friend says. “It’s got its own special quality.” Another friend says that Caro invests a lot in the high-school runners, their families and the small-town culture, etc. There’s a little bit of a stigma to closing a festival like Santa Barbara, but McFarland, USA is, in this context, an exception…they’re telling me.
I’ll be in Manhattan for six days starting on Sunday, and one of the things I’d like to do is catch Jake Gyllenhaal and The Affair‘s Ruth Wilson in Nick Payne‘s Constellations, which opens officially on 1.13.15. A likely Best Actor nominee (but who knows?) for his bug-eyed sociopath role in Dan Gilroy’s critically hailed Nightcrawler, Gyllenhaal will be topline three (and possibly four) 2015 films of a seemingly significant nature — Antoine Fuqua‘s Southpaw, Balthasar Kormakur‘s Everest (9.28.15) and Jean Marc Vallee‘s Demolition, a romantic drama that doesn’t involve any kind of physical demolition activity. The possible fourth is David O. Russell‘s long-absent Nailed, which will receive British theatrical distribution next year and will probably be available stateside as a VOD concurrently or soon after.
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