It’s time to ease up on Precious after yesterday’s double-header. But as a friend has passed along Raina Kelley‘s well-written “The Problem With Precious” essay (11.5) in Newsweek, I may as well keep the ball in the air a bit longer.

“Depending on who you are, where you grew up, and, frankly, the color of your skin, you’ll most likely react in one of two ways to Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire,” Kelley begins. “The film tells the story of Claireece (Precious) Jones and her struggle to survive a life overfull with misery. Pregnant for the second time with a child fathered by her own father, abused physically, emotionally, and sexually by her mother, Precious is also illiterate, obese, and friendless.

“Precious is not an easy movie to watch, and there are people in the black community who wish that you wouldn’t. They insist that it is yet another stereotypical, demonizing representation of black people. The other camp, however, is thrilled to see a depiction of a young African-American woman that, while heartbreaking, is a portrait of the black experience that has been overlooked on the sunny horizon that stretches from The Cosby Show to House of Payne.

“Unfortunately, both of those reactions miss the movie’s most searing message.

“I wish I could agree with those who say Precious is just one more movie that feeds our vision of ourselves as victims. Even that would have been better than what lies underneath: the fact that black people have begun to accept as unchangeable the lot of those stuck in the ghetto.

“How else to explain that while the film is set in 1987, no one seems outraged that so little has changed in the inner city in the more than 20 years since? Precious is a period piece that feels like a documentary. The public-education system is still failing to raise graduation rates above 50 percent in the worst neighborhoods. The public-welfare system has yet to offer a real path out of poverty, and child-protection services is still struggling to protect children. While I agree that we’ve gotten too comfortable seeing ourselves on film as martyrs and underdogs, so what? The real devastation at the heart of this film is that it can’t offer Precious a more concrete way out of her predicament.

“Yes, Precious is changed at the end of the movie, able not only to read and write but also to move toward a better life. But that isn’t enough. I wanted just a hint that she would also escape the hell that was (is) urban poverty. Precious was lucky to find the alternative school that could help her. But that’s fiction. In reality, there are far more Preciouses than there are teachers to help them. Movies such as this one allow us to forget that.

“Still, I understand people who complain about the lack of positive role models more than those who applaud just for telling this story. In their admiration of Precious’s strength and resilience, these people also implicitly accept the status quo. Precious’s parents are certainly villains, but they are also red herrings. Her situation feels so extreme that we lose sight of the bigger picture. I’m tired of movies presenting black people as grateful to find a helping hand to rise above their abusers. Not because we’ve seen this movie before — starring Sidney Poitier, Michelle Pfeiffer, Hilary Swank, Morgan Freeman, and even Matthew Perry — but because the story never changes.

“How about a ‘based on a true story’ tear-jerker that ends with some tangible improvements in the lives of impoverished children? Where’s the African-American Norma Rae or Silkwood? Hell, I’d even take an all-black remake of Brubaker. Anything that sends the message that one person — even one who is poor, black, fat, female, and abused — can change the system. Then I won’t feel like my tears have gone to waste.”

I’ve spoken to In Contention‘s Kris Tapley about Lee Daniels‘ Precious, and he’s not a flag-waving, come-this-way devotee. But he did officially predict yesterday that it would win the Best Picture Oscar, and he did call it the Best Picture front-runner on 10.21. And I think this view needs to be reconsidered.

Precious is probably a guaranteed Best Picture nominee, and it will translate all the awards heat into box-office revenue between now and early March, and good for that. And hey-ho to the people running the Precious campaign so far — excellent work. But it won’t take the Oscar. Count on it.

Precious is primarily about a film about compassion and reaching out, but mainly in the third act. Otherwise it’s an exploitation film that deals in ghastly abhorrent behavior. It drags the audience down into a pit of gross squalor and baldly manipulative chain-pullings. I respect Precious for providing the emotional comfort and catharsis that Gabby Sidibe‘s character (and the audience) so desperately needs, and I love Mariah Carey‘s quietly gripping performance. But I’ll never see it again. Because the first two acts are way too appalling.

I’m not sure there’s a whole lot of interest or enthusiasm for the Precious experience among Academy voters. There was an Academy screening of the film last Sunday night (11.8), and I’m told by two sources that only a bit more than 300 people showed up. (Roughly 1000 people showed up for a recent Academy screening of This Is It, the Michael Jackson doc, and District 9 allegedly drew a much larger crowd last August.) And the biggest applause was for Mo’Nique and Gabby Sidibe rather than Daniels. So they may be good to go for acting noms but the film? Maybe, perhaps…who knows?

Nobody will admit it, but Precious has been very effectively sold to mainstream white critics as an all-black, Oprah Winfrey-approved movie they need to respect if not praise because it’s a family-values film that wears its heart on its sleeve in the third act. And if they don’t wear this very same heart on their presumably liberal sleeves in their articles and postings then maybe, just maybe…well, who’s to say what they really feel deep down?

A producer friend reminded me a little while ago that “most people don’t want to see movies with unattractive stars.” Another guy I spoke to, industry-employed, says that “the problem with Precious is that this girl is in your face…the other part of it is that people have come to this film ready to accept, because of the marketing, that it would be an inspirational story, but the reaction I got from two guys was ‘I expected to be teary-eyed but I was dry-eyed throughout.'”

There’s a limit, I think, to the amounts of abuse and cruelty that audiences will sit through in a film — a line that Precious crosses, I feel. “At the end of the day it’s a movie, and you’re trying to get people to go to the movie, and you have to do something to get people out of their fucking homes,” the industry guy said. “At the end of the story she leaves at 17 with a child or two, and you’re left at the end with…what? And we’re supposed to ease up on the mother after the confession scene in Mariah Carey‘s office? The mom is a complete Satanic creature…beyond the pale.”

“This is a very flawed movie that’s playing on white guilt,” he continues. “Oprah and Tyler Perry are doing it to you. People can’t admit to guilt, but this is what’s in play.”

It’s been said that DreamWorks marketing honcho Terry Press tried playing the white-guilt card with Dreamgirls, and that it backfired in her face. “I don’t get up in the morning without remembering — this is an all-black cast in a musical, knowing an all-black cast has never won an Oscar,” she told L.A. Times columnist Patrick Goldstein in a 12.5.06 article. And it didn’t even get nominated for Best Picture.

There’s also the latent feeling, as expressed earlier today by Anthony Smith, that the basic situation in the film — i.e., the prolonged sexual and emotional abuse of a young girl by an evil mother and her rapist stepdad — is and should be repellent to middle-class African Americans because this sort of thing is an aberration that creates a demeaning stereotype about the lower end of African-American culture.

What does it say, exactly, about white moviegoers’ attitudes and beliefs about black culture that they’ve accepted the sexual-child-abuse story in Precious as being somewhat representative of a certain kind of down-at-the-heels African American family? I wonder how a movie like this would play if it was about sexual child abuse by a mother and father who were white lower-class crackers in Alabama or Southern Indiana? What would the reaction be if the same story involved a Spanish-speaking family in East LA or North Bergen, New Jersey? I’m just asking, wondering.

Are the makers of Precious trying to get us to see it by playing on vague feelings of racial guilt and that longing we all share of wanting to understand and somehow lend support to sad disenfranchised people by listening to their story and, for a couple of hours at least, living in their world?

Here’s a just-posted piece by The Envelope‘s Tom O’Neil that addresses the Precious situation. He thinks it might win but he’s basically hedging his bets.

I took the time to speak today to an obviously bright and articulate 29 year-old African American guy named Anthony Smith, who tells me he’s had two acquisition jobs so far (with Sony and First Look under Ruth Vitale) and has an MBA from Dartmouth, and who knows how to write fairly well. He recently sent an “open letter” to certain industry folk about Lee Daniels‘ Precious, claiming that it pushes dangerous stereotypes about values and conditions among African-American families. He’s the only African-American guy I know of besides Armond White who’s strongly criticized this highly praised Lionsgate release, and I wanted to suss him out a bit.

“I find it shocking that this film is being so well received across the board,” he said. “I think artistically it’s not excellent and socially it’s dangerous.” He didn’t disagree with my assessment that the behavior and pathology of Mo’Nique‘s mom-from-hell character qualifies Precious as a kind of horror film. “The reason I’m attacking the credibility is that there’s no explanation for Mo’Nique‘s character,” he said. “There’s no cause and effect…it is mental illness or what? I think the message is extremely dangerous.”

In his 11.10 “open letter,” Smith writes that “the central themes in black communities across the U.S. and in Harlem are not ones of incest, rape, teenage pregnancy, physical and mental-child abuse, obesity, poverty, welfare, illiteracy and AIDS. And yet director-producer Lee Daniels has said of Gabby Sidibe‘s Precious character, ‘I know this chick. You know her. But we just choose not to know her.’ Well, I don’t know Precious, and I have a hunch that most other black Americans don’t know her either.”

Smith went to see Precious last weekend at West L.A.’s Landmark, he says, “and there were four teenage girls sitting behind me, and they might not have been old enough to even be in that movie but they were laughing at some of it…they thought it was funny.

“All these glowing west coast and east coast positive reviews are very disturbing to me” he said. “The behavior by Mo’Nique’s character and her husband/boyfriend rapist is definitely an aberration, and these critics weren’t courageous to even address that honestly. [NY Times critic] AO Scott lives in Brooklyn…and his not questioning any of this is some kind of disconnect.

“This is in line with Tyler Perry because it’s in line with his taste, but I’m really shocked at Oprah…is this the best she can recommend? The friends of Precious saying ‘we know this, we see this on a daily basis’…I think they’re lying, they’re downright lying.”

Smith said he sent his letter to L.A. Times Op-Ed editors, but no response so far. He hasn’t sent it to the L.A. Weekly, he says.

“It is 2009 and sadly, Hollywood is stuck in the dark ages,” his letter concludes. “An industry that touts the membership of progressive-minded professionals and artists is, in fact, staunchly conservative in its refusal to finance, produce and distribute quality motion pictures by and for people of color.

“I make a sincere plea to all key decision makers at the major studios to rethink their diversity strategy. Include more talent diversity in your major label features and tentpoles. For pictures predominately about people of color, of different cultural origins, sexual orientations and religious affiliations, consider making honest investments in development, to actually produce a quality picture. These stories, like your audiences, deserve to be treated with integrity.”

Last night Envelope/Notes on a Season columnist Pete Hammond wrote with some enthusiasm about a Sunday DGA screening of Jim Sheridan‘s Brothers (Lionsgate, 12.4), the remake of Susanne Bier‘s 2004 film with Jake Gyllenhaal, Tobey Maguire and Natalie Portman costarring.

Tobey Maguire, Jake Gyllenhaal in Jim Sheridan’s Brothers.

Hammond asked “why no bloggers are buzzing about Brothers even with its Dec. 4 opening less than a month away”? Well, I’ve been writing about this film for over two years now, beginning with a start-of-filming announcement and into a 10.1.08 report that MGM had bumped Brothers out of a once-planned 12.4.08 release.

But to answer Hammond, no one’s blogging about Brothers because Lionsgate has been lagging on press screenings invites, or at least none as far as this inbox is concerned. I’m told there’s some kind of “special screening” in Manhattan slated for 11.22, and an L.A. premiere screening set for 12.1. Sheridan is currently in Toronto preparing to shoot Dream House, a psychological thriller with Daniel Craig starring. He flies to Ireland tomorrow and returns to this side of the pond a week or so later.

Sheridan’s remake follows Bier’s basic story. Maguire and Gyllenhaal are the brothers separated by character and philosophy (as well as four inches of height). Maguire is the older, “responsible,” married brother who goes off to Afghanistan and gets into a situation that results in a MIA report sent home. Portman plays Maguire’s wife. Gyllenhaal is the younger fuck-up brother who begins to fill his brother’s familial duties when Maguire disappears during a skirmish and is presumed dead.

Lionsgate is obviously much more interested in promoting Precious than Brothers at this stage, and who can blame them? But conspicuously not screening a film that will be released nearly three weeks hence seems like a weird way to play it. Being a huge fan of Bier’s original work, I refuse to believe that a film with this story and a cast of this calibre wouldn’t deliver in a significant and applaudable way.

“This powerful and timely story of a decorated Marine, presumed dead in Afghanistan, who comes home to great conflict within his family and within his own head, is a poignant and explosive look at the toll that combat exacts from veterans’ lives,” Hammond writes. “It feels especially pertinent now in the wake of the Ft. Hood tragedy and shows that war doesn’t really end for some vets once they return.

“Sheridan received a tremendous ovation Sunday afternoon when he was introduced for a q & a after a very well-received Directors Guild of America screening. The free-wheeling director engaged in a refreshingly honest and thoughtful conversation about the film’s bumpy journey to being remade.

“Sheridan pointed out that he doesn’t normally like the idea of remakes, but this one seemed irresistible, if full of minefields. In the end he believes it is quite faithful to the spirit of the Danish original and said Relativity Media, which financed the film, even did research screenings on Bier’s movie to get a take from an American audience for help in shaping the redo.

“[Sheridan] also mentioned there were some reshoots as he tried to get a grip on what the movie should be.

“The film was finished by November 2008 but Relativity agreed to hold it for a year to get just the right release date. Sheridan says selling any film with a war theme is tricky and fall is a better time for this particular subject matter. With Summit’s widely acclaimed Iraq war flick, The Hurt Locker opening last summer, it was probably a wise move.”

Jim Sheridan, Jake Gyllenhaal.

I’m very interested in snagging a PDF of Peter Morgan‘s Hereafter, if anyone has access. This is the now-shooting Clint Eastwood film, of course — a reportedly supernatural piece about three characters “touched by death in different ways,” etc.

Hereafter costars Matt Damon, Cecile de France, Marthe Keller (Marathon Man, Bobby Deerfield, Black Sunday — U.S. theatrical career seemingly killed by Fedora and The Formula), Mylene Jampanoi and Thierry Neuvic.

I’m forming an idea that whatever Invictus may or may not be, Hereafter may settle in and really touch home. It would be seen, of course, as a contemplation of realms beyond by a director obviously edging a bit closer to the take-off point as the years fall away, etc. We’re all going there sooner or later so what does it matter how soon or far off? Quality, not quantity.

Eastwood began shooting Hereafter last month in Paris, and then went to London. Filming in San Francisco and Hawaii is next. Eastwood, Kathleen Kennedy and Robert Lorenz are producing. Steven Spielberg, Frank Marshall, Tim Moore and Morgan are exec producing. Warner Bros. will open Hereafter in December 2010.

I’ve forgotten if there’s a review embargo in effect for Roland Emmerich‘s 2012, but let’s assume there is and state unequivocally that this is not a review. But I do need to say that this mother-of-all-disaster-movies — this stunner, this train wreck, this howler that is Deep Impact, The Poseidon Adventure (Hackman/Winters/Lynley/Buttons version), Titanic, Airport and Hot Shots times infinity multiplied by five hits of blotter acid with CG that will make you plotz in your gourd — is absolutely, categorically and certifiably insane and must be seen because of this fearless wackazoid quality.

That’s all I’m going to say except hats off to John Cusack, the mother of all genius paycheck whores. This movie, believe it or not, is a Cusack score and not a fumble. Let’s raise a glass to Emmerich-level insanity and the nerve it took to make a film like this. As the medic said at the end of David Lean‘s The Bridge on the River Kwai, “Madness! Madness!”

I just filled out my projected Top Ten Best Picture list for the Envelope Buzzmeter chart Most seem to be following an equation that includes six or seven Best Picture contenders with serious chops (Up In The Air, Invictus, An Education, A Serious Man, etc.) along with three or four slummers, which is to say films that exude a certain crowd-pleasing popcorn aroma (Avatar, District 9, Inglourious Basterds, Up).

I’m going right now with Up In The Air, The Hurt Locker, Invictus, An Education, Nine, A Serious Man, Precious, A Single Man, Avatar and Inglourious Basterds — eight real contenders and two slummers. What really matters, of course, is whether a potential Best Picture nominee has a Best Director nomination to fortify it. This is what people will be seriously weighing when push comes to shove.

Right now my Best Director projections are based only on films I’ve seen, to wit: Jason Reitman (Up In The Air), Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker), Lone Scherfig (An Education), Joel and Ethan Coen (A Serious Man) and Tom Ford (A Single Man).

I’ve seen Precious, Up and Inglourious Basterds, of course, but it still shakes down as a temporary no-go for Lee Daniels, Peter Jackson, Pete Docter, Quentin Tarantino and James Cameron…for now. If and when it appears that Invictus has the right stuff then maybe Clint Eastwood will step in and bump Ford…maybe. Or the Coen brothers…I haven’t decided yet.

Michael Cieply‘s financial assessment piece in today’s N.Y. Times about potential revenues from James Cameron‘s Avatar states the following:

(a) “Published reports have put the production budget at more than $230 million“;

(b) “[But] when global marketing expenses are added, Avatar may cost its various backers $500 million“;

(c) “Fox’s biggest investment in Avatar may be on the marketing side, where the company is planning to spend about $150 million around the world”;

(d) Rupert Murdoch‘s News Corporation “is carrying a much smaller share of Avatar’s production cost, as a pair of private equity partners — Dune Entertainment and Ingenious Media — pick up 60 percent of the budget”;

(e) “If domestic ticket sales reach $250 million — a level broken in the last year by five films, including Star Trek and The Hangover — Fox and its allies would appear to be headed into the black.”

I’m lost — totally lost. MCN’s David Poland posted a pretty good slice-and-dice reaction piece last night. Says what I was thinking and then some.

It’s almost fascinating that Universal marketing has decided to try a suggestive/arty mode for its recently revealed one-sheet campaign for Joe Johnston‘s The Wolfman (2.12.10). If Val Lewton were making werewolf movies today and designing his own posters, these are the kind of material he’d probably turn out.

There’s a paywall up on the Newsday site, but Lewis Beale has written a piece about apocalyptic movies called “2012 and The Road lead doom boom on screen.” And the only thing wrong with it is that — huh? — Beale and his editors chose to ignore the real-life gloom-and-doom doc that film cognoscenti are all over right now — i.e., Chris Smith‘s Collapse.

Beale says he hasn’t seen Collapse and that it was never mentioned in conversations with his editors, but if it had been the dialogue would have probably sounded something like this:

Beale: “Uhh, there’s this other thing, this doc called Collapse that…uhhm, pretty much explains how we’re all fucked and the whole system is doomed to stop functioning due to oil shortages.”

Editor: “Is this one of those wake-up, love-the-earth movies? Don’t they show enough of those on PBS and the Nature Channel?”

Beale: “No, it’s not one of those. It’s an intellectual, cold-facts horror film…kind of a thinking man’s 2012.”

Editor: “Well, we don’t want to get into that. Too real. We’re selling newspapers to mom and pop and Uncle Freddy. People who just want to eat popcorn and watch movies that…whatever, make ’em laugh and show stuff getting blown up.”

Here’s Beale’s piece, in any event:

“The Road opens with the sound of explosions and the vision of a fire that obliterates the sky. Is it a nuclear holocaust? Planet-wide environmental disaster? Rogue comet?

“The thing about the post-apocalyptic wasteland in the film, which opens Nov. 25th, is that whatever turned Earth into a pestilential wasteland is never really specified. So as a father and son (played by Viggo Mortensen and newcomer Kodi Smit-McPhee) make their way across a bombed-out landscape, trying to avoid cannibals, thieves and other sub-human life forms, The Road mirrors the concerns of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Cormac McCarthy novel on which it is based: what is important isn’t why things happened, but what happens afterward. And how the bond between a father and son can triumph over adversity.

“An extreme environment like the one in the movie ‘is a projection of our worst fears,’ says The Road director John Hillcoat. ‘In a way, as individuals we face that day when we have to leave this world, and it’s a projection of that fear on a global scale. It also brings out the best and worst in humans. How do you hang onto humanity?’

“The Road is not the only film to ask this question. In fact, apocalyptic fantasies seem to be all the rage these days. The animated feature 9, released last summer, is about a group of automatons dealing with an Earth in which humans have died off. 2012, opening Friday, is a cosmic disaster flick based on Mayan prophecy which alleges the world will end on Dec. 21, 2012. And The Book of Eli, opening in January, stars Denzel Washington as a hero who carries a book that could save a post-apocalyptic society.

“This fascination with total destruction is because ‘we’re all prophets of doom,’ says James Berger, author of After The End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse. ‘In part, it has to do with our relation to our mortality,’ he adds. ‘There is also this total critique of the world as it is, the corruption of society is so tremendous, it can’t be reformed. There is the perverse pleasure of seeing it go down. It’s done, it’s cooked, stick a fork in it.’

“These films are about ‘our lack of control over our own destiny — our fear that larger forces are at work that we know nothing about or that we have no say in,’ adds critic Marshall Fine of HollywoodandFine.com. ‘It’s the issue of control — that we want it and, for whatever reason, suddenly find out we don’t have it.’

“Not that this is anything new. The concept of the apocalypse has been with us since Biblical times — the Book of Revelations, anyone? — but really picked up speed beginning in the late 19th century, when writers like H.G. Wells began to explore the negative consequences of the industrial revolution. Then World War I, with its mass slaughter, only made these fears more palpable.

“‘The advent of new military technologies [during the conflict] made war brutal and grotesque in new and overwhelming ways,’ says Berger. ‘It was hugely destabilizing.’

“But then came the nuclear age, and the idea of total global destruction became a reality. Add in environmental, biological and terrorism-related concerns, and you get the perfect cocktail of paranoid, or maybe not so paranoid, fears.

“‘You don’t have to be a scientist to know that if we don’t change our ways, the end of the world is here,’ says Harald Kloser, co-writer and producer of 2012. ‘The end of the world is not a fiction if we don’t change real soon. And the question is, have we passed the point of no return.’

“Hollywood, never afraid to plug into the zeitgeist, picked up on the End Times mentality pretty quickly. The 1936 film Things To Come, written by Wells, pictures a pre-nuclear world destroyed by a catastrophic war. Pictures like Panic In Year Zero (1962) and On the Beach (1959) dealt with the aftermath of nuclear terror. Silent Running (1971) and The Omega Man (1971 — remade in 2007 as I Am Legend) channeled environmental and biological fears. And The Road Warrior (1981), probably the best of the end-of-the-world films, dealt with nuclear war, political paralysis and a post-apocalyptic fight over resources (in this case, oil) that seemed all too real.

“‘There’s always something that’s scaring people, which can be used as an overlay on movies with a disaster or threat at their center,’ says Fine. “Communism, nuclear war, terrorism, global warming — there are plenty of things that have or will make us worry about the world coming to an end that movies can exploit to make a buck.’

“If anything, The Road takes this genre and gives it a new twist, since it is so intimate and character driven.

“In fact, Hillcoat says two non-apocalyptic movies served as a sort of template for the film: the 1948 Italian film Bicycle Thieves, about a desperate father searching for the stolen bike that is his source of income, because ‘[the father and son lead characters] are starving and trying to survive, and the father’s morals start to slide’; and the 1940 feature The Grapes of Wrath, in which farmers are driven from Oklahoma by drought, since it involves ‘a complete sort of breakdown, and the people are on the road, and there are apocalyptic overtones.’

“No matter what the source material they refer to, however, it seems apocalyptic films are not going away. And that’s because the fears they plug into will always be with us — especially in a post-9/11 world.”

“There is an undercurrent of the possibility of an apocalypse happening that makes these movies go deep emotionally,” says Kloser. “That’s why people are drawn to destruction. It connects them with their deepest inner fear.”

I’m proud and pleased to announce that I’ve been officially welcomed into the fold of the Broadcast Film Critics Association. This’ll be great as far as time screening invites and receiving screeners are concerned, and of course it’s a nice thrill to be honored with a membership in the first place.