The San Francisco, San Diego and St. Louis film critics announced their best-of lists yesterday, and I have to confess to a sense of growing tedium. Okay, there are two or three variations (thank God), but mainly they’re all marching in lockstep with the status-quo faves. Half award-giving, half photo-copying.
At least the St. Louis gang gave their Best Supporting Actress award to Doubt‘s Viola Davis — good call. And their Best Actress award to Revolutionary Road‘s Kate Winslet — check. Their Best Picture award went to The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button…okay. But their remaining awards were the same old Slumdog/Boyle/WALL*E/Man on Wire blah-dee-blah. Wait…they gave Burn After Reading their Best Comedy award! Agreed and then some.
I respect the judgment (as well as the local sentiment) that led the SF contingent to pig out on Milk — i.e., Best Picture, Best Director for Gus Van Sant , Best Original Screenplay to Dustin Lance Black, Best Actor (tied with The Wrestler‘s Mickey Rourke) for Sean Penn. But too many critics orgs have tumbled for Happy Go Lucky‘s Sally Hawkins . It’s starting to feel like a cross between a personality fetish (how can anyone actually fall for Hawkins’ Poppy character?) and a herd mentality thing.
The only stand-out calls from the San Diego film critics was handing their Best Actress award to Kate Winslet for The Reader and not Revolutionary Road — figure that one out — and Tom McCarthy‘s The Vistor winning for Best Original Screenplay.
Otherwise they went the lazy conformist route — Slumdog Millionaire for Best Picture, Danny Boyle for Best Director, The Wrestler‘s Rourke and Tomei for Best Actor and Best Supporting Actress respectively, Ledger for Best Supporting Actor, etc. The Best Documentary award went to Man on Wire…of course. Best Animated Film, WALL*E…what else?
The San Diego-ans also handed their Body of Work award to Richard Jenkins (The Visitor, Burn After Reading, Step Brothers, The Tale of Despereaux) as a sop for not winning Best Actor.
I suck at this Bush Shoe-Throwing Game. My highest score has been 13 or something. You think it’s easy? The trick is to throw the instant Bush pops up; hesitate and he drops right down again. He’s very agile, good reflexes, no easy target. Plus the soundtrack is distracting, messes with your concentration. And the blood-hit effect is unnecessarily vicious.
I’m not saying I’m so persuaded or even in the mood to go poking around, but since we’re all pretty clear on the likely Oscar nominees, I’m wondering if there’s any yearning out there to see this or that contender taken down. I’m really not feeling any of the old fire myself (it’s been a bit of a tepid year) but does anyone out there feel anything? In terms of wanting a film or filmmaker out of contention, I mean?
Alliance of Women Film Journalists Special Mention Awards: (1) AWFJ Hall Of Shame Award to 27 Dresses; (2) Actress Most in Need Of A New Agent: Kate Hudson ; (3) Movie You Wanted To Love But Just Couldn’t (Tie) — Mamma Mia! and The Women; (4) Best Of The Fests — Hunger; (5) Unforgettable Moment Award (tie between The Dark Knight (Joker’s first scene) and Slumdog Millionaire (young Jamal jumps into the poop….what?); (6) Best Depiction Of Nudity or Sexuality (tie between Elegy and The Reader); (7) Best Seduction — Vicky Cristina Barcelona; (8) Sequel That Shouldn’t Have Been Made Award — tie between Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and Saw V; (9) The Remake That Shouldn’t Have Been Made Award — The Women; (10) Cultural Crossover Award — Slumdog Millionaire; (11) Bravest Performance Award — Mickey Rourke in The Wrester; (12) Best Leap from Actress to Director Award — Helen Hunt, Then She Found Me; (13) Most Egregious Age Difference Between Leading Man and Love Interest —
The Wackness, Ben Kingsley and Mary-Kate Olsen.
“Over the years, Detroit bosses kept repeating, ‘We have to make the cars people want.’ That’s why they’re in trouble. Their job is to make the cars people don’t know they want but will buy like crazy when they see them. I would have been happy with my Sony Walkman had Apple not invented the iPod. Now I can’t live without my iPod. I didn’t know I wanted it, but Apple did. Same with my Toyota hybrid.” — Thomas L. Friedman in his 12.14 N.Y. Times column.
Muntadhar al-Zeidi, the Egyptian journalist who threw two shoes at President Bush yesterday during a Baghdad press conference yesterday, is suddenly a new Middle-Eastern folk hero, and no wonder. Thousands of Iraqis “took to the streets today to demand al-Zeidi’s release, to hail him as a hero and to praise his insult as a proper send-off to the unpopular U.S. president,” says this AP story by Qassim Abdul-Zahra and Omar Sinan.
I agree with the angry masses. Like Peter Finch‘s Howard Beale did in Network, Muntadhar al-Zeidi has articulated a popular rage. Throwing those shoes
was an act of civil disobedience no different than Boston patriots throwing tea into the harbor. He did an impolite thing, but he didn’t use a weapon or hurt anyone and he said what an awful lot of people (myself included) feel. If the Iraqi authorities were smart, they’d let him go. With this act they would be saying to the Iraqi people, “We hear you” and “issues of bad manners to a visiting head of state aside, we don’t entirely disagree.”
HE reader Andrew Corks writes that he “saw Let The Right One In this year at the Tribeca Film Festival, where it took one of the top prizes, and was blown away by the overall quality of the film. It has an uncanny ability to successfully cross all genres — horror, love story, comedy, coming-of-age — combined with genuine acting and spectacular cinematography.
“Now that Let The Right One In has now picked up its second major critic’s society award, why is it still absent from the Oscar Balloon and general Oscar talks?”
Wells to Corks: I’m not looking to put it down or exclude it from anything. It’s one of the most unusual, originally conceived, genre-bending films I’ve seen in a long time. A really magnificent creep-out and a beautiful adolescent love story combined. I just didn’t like it all that much. Or rather, I like having seen it but didn’t like the way I felt as I watched it. I didn’t care for the funny-looking girl who played the little vampire. I thought the little blonde boy was way too much of a candy-ass. I didn’t like the low-rent fleurescent lighting, the constant snowstorms, the drab instiutional palette. I recognize without hesitation that it’s an exceptional film. I’m just looking forward to the American remake.
Here‘s a video of an encounter last Friday night between some anti-Che Guevara right-wing Latins and Che director Steven Soderbergh. It happened during a q & a at the Zeigfeld Theatre after a screening of both Che pics, in tandem. The video appears in mini-form on Indiewire. (Thanks to Eugene Hernandez for the tip-off.)
It’s appalling that American Film Institute’s 10 Best Films of ’08 included Iron Man — a first-rate comic book action CG flick that is nonetheless a generic wish-fulfillment power-dreams movie aimed at adolescent males of all ages. A movie, in other words, with absolutely no river running through it whatsoever other than….okay, a certain aura of coolness exuded by star Robert Downey, Jr., a vibe of wowness because the film was very profitable, and the respectable career-bump panache enjoyed by director Jon Favreau.
I guarantee that one of the AFI jurors voting for Iron Man was documentarian and filmmaker-interview smoothie Elvis Mitchell.
The rest of the AFI choices — The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Dark Knight, Frost/Nixon, Frozen River, Gran Torino, Milk, WALL*E, Wendy and Lucy, The Wrestler — are fine and good, but any list that leaves off Revolutionary Road, Slumdog Millionaire, Doubt, The Visitor, Nothing But the Truth and Che has definitely side-stepped some of the snap and pizazz.
Lukas Moodysson‘s Mammoth is a Manhattan-based yuppie-values drama that also involves time spent in Thailand by the husband character, played by Gael Garcia Bernal. (With a little tsunami action?) The wife/mother is played by Michelle Williams. Pic will screen in the main competition at the Berlin International Film Festival 2009. This European TV clip contains a longish trailer for the film.
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