For me, the most enticing short-burst appraisal of Darren Aronofsky‘s Black Swan was penned two days ago by First Showing’s Alex Billington.

Two key portions: (a) “Wow. Now I know who I’m going to be rooting for to win the Best Actress Oscar next year”; and (b) “A brilliant, psychologically intense film that takes the audience on a very operatic thrill ride. I truly believe Aronofsky has outdone himself once again. [He’s] achieved a mesmerizing and utterly brilliant fusion of two performance mediums — theater (specifically ballet) and film in an extraordinary way that…we’ve never seen before.”

Updated, corrected: The first MCN Gurus o’ Gold Best Picture chart was posted last night, and it’s nothing. It’s too early, nobody knows zip — everyone’s hedging or spitballing or opting for safe ground. It’s significant, though, that each and every Guru — Greg Ellwood, Pete Hammond, Peter Howell, Dave Karger, David Poland, Sasha Stone, Kris Tapley, Anne Thompson, Suzie Woz — voted for Tom Hooper‘s newly-arrived The King’s Speech.

Of the top sixteen films — Inception, The Kids Are All Right, The King’s Speech, Toy Story 3, The Social Network, Black Swan, True Grit, Another Year, The Fighter, Love and Other Drugs, 127 Hours, Winter’s Bone, How Do You Know, Never Let Me Go, Hereafter, The Tree of Life — eight are looking like possible (but not likely…not yet) soft sisters:

(a) Toy Story 3 — It’s pointless to explain to the Gurus (or to anyone for that matter) that as superb as Toy Story 3 is, predicting that the Academy will nominate it for Best Picture is (a) an acknowledgment of and tribute to its quality as well as a lament about live-action features often coming up short, and (b) is essentially a futile wheel-spinning exercise as it’s probably not going to be Best Picture-nominated, and is all but locked to win the Best Animated Feature Oscar.

(b) How Do You Know/Everything You’ve Got — I’ve been sensing for years that the spirit has been seeping out of James L. Brooks. It would be delightful if he wasn’t “past it” in terms of Oscar-worthy material, but I suspect that he is. He’s not the guy he was in the ’80s and early ’90s. I think he’s aged out. As Good As It Gets was the last time it all seemed to connect in the right way. I don’t think I’m alone is saying that Spanglish was the death knell. Brooks’ apparent inability to decide whether to call his film How Do You Know or Everything You’ve Got obviously indicates a shaky focus.

(c) Winter’s Bone — Never a strong Best Picture contender; the heat has always been with Best Actress contender Jennifer Lawrence.

(d) Hereafter — I’ve read Peter Morgan‘s script, and I’ve considered what Anne Thompson had to say to Kris Tapley about how Hereafter has been playing with the early-looksee crowd. And there’s reason to suspect that it’s not a strike, and that two or three or more pins will be left standing.

(e) Love and Other Drugs — The Ed Zwick factor has indicated from the get-go that this romantic dramedy wouldn’t a hot prospect for Best Picture status. It’s always looked like an Anne Hathaway for Best Actress thing — that’s the only thing I’m half-convinced of.

(f) Another Year — Admired as they always are (and for all the right reasons), Mike Leigh‘s films don’t tend to penetrate the Oscar realm.

(g) Never Let Me Go — Some feel it’s a brilliant masterwork; others are calling it a chilly dispiriting piece about meekly submitting to cruel fate. Indications are that critics and Academy members will continue to express divided opinion.

(h) 127 Hours — The red-arm factor — nausea, aversion — may be a problem down the road, or it may settle down and go away. The Telluride reviews have been very good, but there does seem (key operative term) to be a vulnerability in this regard.

That leaves seven rock-solids — Inception, The Kids Are All Right, The King’s Speech, The Social Network, Black Swan, True Grit, The Tree of Life — and a complete unknown with David O. Russell‘s The Fighter. And who’s to say that True Grit is a major Coen Bros. film? They can be rote — they don’t have to be brilliant.

And what about The Tourist, The Conspirator, Biutiful, The Way Back, etc.?

Bill McCuddy of Forbes.com (and Fox News entertainment guy for several years) wrote yesterday on his Facebook page that he’d seen a sneak of Ed Zwick‘s Love And Other Drugs. He described it as a “light romantic comedy about a girl” — played by Anne Hathaway — “with Parkinson’s disease. Hathaway good [but] movie mediocre. (Bonus points for not doing a ‘shaky prospects at box office’ joke.)”

McCuddy’s view strenuously argues with several non-pro opinions noted in this space for several months running. On top of which it’s not about “a girl with Parkinson’s” as much as about a ladies’ man-slash-viagra salesman (Jake Gyllenhaal) who falls in love with Hathaway and the growth-struggle trip that results, etc. I’ve tried twice since yesterday to engage McCuddy in a detailed discussion, but he didn’t want the attention or he’s lost his phone.

I’ve had justifiable concerns about Zwick for years and have never trusted buzz about the film being a home run or a triple, but I’ve definitely read over and over about Hathaway’s performance being the shit.

Critics aren’t allowed to like Jeannot Szwarc‘s Somewhere In Time (1980), in part because it’s been a huge sentimental hit with the wrong crowd for so many years. I’m not much of a fan, but I am a huge admirer of the final out-of-body and into-the-light sequence that ends the film. No, not the version shown in this YouTube clip, but a version that I saw at a critics’ screening nearly 30 years ago…but which hasn’t been seen since.

I asked about this when I happened to run into Somewhere in Time‘s cinematographer Isidore Mankofsky at the 2004 Newport Beach Film Festival. I told him that I’d always admired the finale as originally composed — a longish, ambitiously choreographed tracking shot meant to show what Christopher Reeve‘s character is experiencing as he passes from life into death.

My recollection is that it was assembled without edits with the camera adopting Reeve’s POV — leaving his body, slowly rising up to the ceiling and then slowly gliding toward a window and into a white light cloudscape, and eventually into the arms of Reeve’s lover Jane Seymour, who’s waiting at the end of a longish tunnel. It sounds a bit sappy, but it was quite moving and technically very cool. But then I’ve always been a sucker for any extended sequence pulled off without cuts or visual trickery of any kind.

Mankofsky told me that as the film was about to be released some executive at Universal decided that the shot went on a bit too long and had it trimmed with a couple of fade-edits. What resulted is the version you see above. This was vandalism, pure and simple. Mankofsky said that as far as he knew the original cut of this closing sequence no longer exists…but he wasn’t entirely sure.

A short pip-pip-pip from the Telluride-attending Glenn Zoller: “I know I’m late in chiming in, but Tom Hooper‘s The King’s Speech is an easy lock for Best Picture, Best Actor (Colin Firth) and Best Supporting Actor (Geoffrey Rush). Very much a crowd-pleaser at Telluride in the same way Slumdog Millionaire, Walk The Line, The Reader, Babel, Brokeback Mountain and Juno have been.”

Here’s Kris Tapley‘s Telluride interview with Hooper, Firth and Rush.

I don’t personally know Michael Douglas, but I know people who know him and have heard he’s not one for sentiment. He’s presumably proud or very satisfied with his work in Wall Street 2 and Solitary Man, but the last thing he’d want would be a sympathy vote for Best Actor. So no more of this talk, a little dignity, no need, etc.

“Gemma Arterton has a slight chance for consideration for Tamara Drewe, certainly for a Golden Globe nod, right alongside Easy A‘s Emma Stone.” — Sasha Stone, “The State of the Race — Dream Big,” 9.6.

Arterton has a chance, yes. She has a chance of surviving the stink-bomb mushroom cloud effect of Tamara Drewe, arguably the most loathsome film of Stephen Frears‘ long and distinguished career. Emma Stone is a gifted personality-driven actress who’s made a breakthrough with Easy A, and that’s all. No, that’s not true — the HFPA whores will nominate almost anyone in a comedy-musical context. I spoke too soon.

Being one of those who excerpted and linked to Eugene Novikov‘s Cinematical review of Peter Weir‘s The Way Back, I feel obliged to link to Kris Tapley‘s counter-review, and particularly his feeling that Novikov’s review “completely misrepresents the film.

“Starting with the first line, Novikov says Weir’s film is ‘sadistically intent on making you feel as much of its subjects’ physical agony as possible,'” Tapley notes. “It’s a struggle, to be sure. This isn’t a happy time in these people’s lives. But there’s nothing here defying convention when it comes to a survival film, so why the hyperbole? And ‘sadistic’ is an unfortunate adjective because it assumes a twisted sort of intention, which isn’t true at all.

“If Weir is being ‘sadistic,’ then I’d love to hear what Novikov thinks Danny Boyle is doing in 127 Hours.”

http://incontention.com/?p=28043#more-28043

Martin Scorsese and Kent Jones‘ Letter to Elia “doesn’t ignore Kazan’s 1952 testimony,” writes The Independent‘s Geoffrey Macnab. “But the film turns out to be as much about Scorsese as it is about Kazan.

“What does it take to be a film director? Scorsese believes that his hero possessed ‘a very thick skin and a very sensitive soul.’ As a child growing up in 1950s New York, Scorsese used to ‘stalk’ new Kazan films, following them as they moved from cinema to cinema. He always watched them alone.

“After he had paid his 12 or 15 cents for a ticket, he was ‘safe and at peace’. Kazan’s On The Waterfront showed a New York that he recognized. He grew up in the same tenements that Marlon Brando, Eva Marie Saint and co lived in and knew the type of characters Kazan portrayed: the street toughs and the kids who kept pigeons on the rooftops. The film that had the most profound impact on Scorsese, though, was Kazan’s East Of Eden, with its febrile performance by James Dean and its anguished account of a family coming apart at the seams.

“A Letter To Elia works on many different levels. On one hand, it is a mini-masterclass on Kazan’s work from a director of similar stature. On another, it is a perceptive character study.

“Scorsese is fascinated by Kazan’s background as an Anatolian Greek whose family emigrated to the US and then fought for their stake there. But the film doesn’t lumber us with many personal details. Scorsese’s real focus is on the movies. It is his contention that ‘maybe you learn more from the work than the man’. By studying Kazan’s films, especially his autobiographical America America (1963), you discover far more than you might from interviews or biographies.

“The most fascinating aspect of the documentary is how much Scorsese reveals about his own obsessions. He plays certain scenes from East Of Eden showing Dean in a dark corridor, off to confront his prostitute mother, again and again. He even makes us look afresh at Brando’s ‘I could have been a contender’ monologue from On The Waterfront.

“Only an hour long, the film is unlikely to have much play in cinemas. It will not have anything like the exposure of Shutter Island or The Departed. However, this is a film admirers of Kazan, and of Scorsese, will be desperate to see.”

Last night I read Jeffrey Goldberg‘s Atlantic piece about the apparent likelihood that if Barack Obama doesn’t man up and do something about Iran’s nuclear-bomb capability (aside from economic sanctions, which aren’t likely to influence anything), Israel will probably bomb Iran’s nuclear sites sometime next year. Which will bring hard rain down upon everyone and everything, to put it mildly.

“You don’t want a messianic apocalyptic cult controlling atomic bombs,” Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu tells Goldberg. “When the wide-eyed believer gets hold of the reins of power and the weapons of mass death, then the world should start worrying, and that’s what is happening in Iran.”

Israel, Goldberg explains, “is worried about an entire complex of problems, not only that Iran, or one of its proxies, would destroy Tel Aviv; like most Israeli leaders, he believes that if Iran gains possession of a nuclear weapon, it will use its new leverage to buttress its terrorist proxies in their attempts to make life difficult and dangerous; and he fears that Israel’s status as a haven for Jews would be forever undermined, and with it, the entire raison d’etre of the 100-year-old Zionist experiment.

“Robert Gates, the American defense secretary, said in June at a meeting of NATO defense ministers that most intelligence estimates predict that Iran is one to three years away from building a nuclear weapon. ‘In Israel, we heard this as nine months from June — in other words, March of 2011,’ one Israeli policy maker told me. “If we assume that nothing changes in these estimates, this means that we will have to begin thinking about our next step beginning at the turn of the year.”

“The Netanyahu government is already intensifying its analytic efforts not just on Iran, but on a subject many Israelis have difficulty understanding: President Obama. The Israelis are struggling to answer what is for them the most pressing question: are there any circumstances under which President Obama would deploy force to stop Iran from going nuclear? Everything depends on the answer.”

The article begins as follows:

“It is possible that at some point in the next 12 months, the imposition of devastating economic sanctions on the Islamic Republic of Iran will persuade its leaders to cease their pursuit of nuclear weapons. It is also possible that Iran’s reform-minded Green Movement will somehow replace the mullah-led regime, or at least discover the means to temper the regime’s ideological extremism. It is possible, as well, that ‘foiling operations‘ conducted by the intelligence agencies of Israel, the United States, Great Britain, and other Western powers — programs designed to subvert the Iranian nuclear effort through sabotage and, on occasion, the carefully engineered disappearances of nuclear scientists — will have hindered Iran’s progress in some significant way. It is also possible that President Obama, who has said on more than a few occasions that he finds the prospect of a nuclear Iran ‘unacceptable,’ will order a military strike against the country’s main weapons and uranium-enrichment facilities.

“But none of these things — least of all the notion that Barack Obama, for whom initiating new wars in the Middle East is not a foreign-policy goal, will soon order the American military into action against Iran — seems, at this moment, terribly likely. What is more likely, then, is that one day next spring, the Israeli national-security adviser, Uzi Arad, and the Israeli defense minister, Ehud Barak, will simultaneously telephone their counterparts at the White House and the Pentagon, to inform them that Netanyahu has just ordered roughly one hundred F-15Es, F-16Is, F-16Cs, and other aircraft of the Israeli air force to fly east toward Iran — possibly by crossing Saudi Arabia, possibly by threading the border between Syria and Turkey, and possibly by traveling directly through Iraq’s airspace, though it is crowded with American aircraft.

“In these conversations, which will be fraught, the Israelis will tell their American counterparts that they are taking this drastic step because a nuclear Iran poses the gravest threat since Hitler to the physical survival of the Jewish people. The Israelis will also state that they believe they have a reasonable chance of delaying the Iranian nuclear program for at least three to five years. They will tell their American colleagues that Israel was left with no choice. They will not be asking for permission, because it will be too late to ask for permission.”

“Essentially a two-hander carried by Don and Peggy, last night’s electrifying Mad Men episode once again reinforced just why the 60’s set series deserved last week’s Best Drama Emmy,” says producer Richard Drew in an Atlantic.com discussion. “This really was TV at its best and yet more proof that we’re in a golden age of the medium. No wonder movie attendance is on the downturn.

“Last night’s show used the famous Cassius Clay/Sonny Liston rematch as a backdrop, but the real battle was between Don and Peggy, as they bonded and battled through the night, ostensibly over a Samsonite account but in reality the discussions were about much, much more.

“Neither character left the office for the whole episode and though a few characters came and went, essentially it was just Don and Peggy for a whole hour of TV. Yet the pace never slackened. Sometimes acting like father and daughter, at times brother and sister, and occasionally even squabbling lovers, this was a wonderfully unpredictable episode. A lesser show would have had Don and Peggy indulging in a one-night stand, but Mad Men is smart enough to always keep us on the edge. The drama could have gone in so many different directions.

“I love the bond between Don and Peggy, the secrets they share and the jagged mix of frustration and respect they feel for one another. By the end of the episode both had reached a temporary detente — but there’s no doubt there’ll be further battles ahead.”

Here’s a blow-by-blow summary from Movieline‘s Stu Van Airsdale.

With a more or less unanimous “not good enough” verdict delivered at last week’s Venice Film Festival, Sofia Coppola‘s Somewhere — which won’t open until 12.24, and will probably be hiding out for the next couple of months — can now relax. Impressions of it not being a Lost in Translation-level thing — a mildly meandering mood piece — means it’s probably out of the awards game. Which takes the load off. I won’t see it for a while, but Richard Corliss‘s Time review (filed from Venice) seemed like the best-written assessment.

“Over the past decade, directors of movies and TV shows have gone nuts with shaky-cam technique. Bless Coppola for keeping her camera still, but she goes to the other extreme, of European minimalism. Like [Stephen Dorff‘s] Johnny, the movie is an object in stasis. In the whole movie the camera moves only a few times, and then just to give a slighter wider or closer view of the same static image (like Johnny’s head caked in makeup goo for a monster mark).

“Other directorial ideas smell of freshman film school: the opening shot, of Johnny driving in a wide circle six or eight times, matched by the closing shot, of Johnny leaving his car to walk straight down a highway. The film is sometimes too obvious, often too opaque.

“The blase-faire strategy extends to the main character. Coppola is to be cheered for not editorializing about Johnny; he’s not a walking placard for Hollywood excess, not a desperate artist. He’s really not much of anything. And he’s not played by a star whose previous roles could give a hint to his internal makeup.

“In Lost in Translation, Murray’s soft, saddish face, and of course his quarter-century playing louche funnymen, brought a comic attitude to the quiet, precisely observed proceedings. Dorff, 37, started acting on TV when he was Chloe’s age, in an episode of The New Leave It to Beaver, and starred in Backbeat (as original bass player Stu Sutcliffe) and Blade. Handsome, but not distractingly so, he has an agreeably crinkled face that could reveal his character’s emotions, if Johnny wanted to convey any.

“What Dorff lacks, no insult intended, is a clearly defined movie personality that would help clue the viewer to what’s going on inside Johnny — and, for that matter, inside the film.

“Those secrets must be gleaned from the gifted young actress playing Johnny’s daughter. The younger sister of Dakota Fanning, Elle gives Cleo a fresh, winning goodness. She likes rock ‘n roll, cooking, figure skating and Twilight. She’s something you don’t find in most movies, especially movies about movie people — a nice, normal kid — and Coppola must have been tempted to make Cleo the central character. But the writer-director resists any plot device as stark as redemption. Johnny is on his own at the end of the film, and viewers will have to intuit that, for this Hollywood nomad, Cleo’s heart is his true home. She is the somewhere he needs to get to.”

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,2016207,00.html#ixzz0yljxUZ9I