The 12.21 Charlie Rose Show in which There Will Be Blood director Paul Thomas Anderson and star Daniel Day-Lewis appeared. The interview runs 55 minutes.
3rd Avenue and 23rd Street — Thursday, 12.27.07, 7:15 pm
63rd Street and Central Park West; Starbucks work station — Friday, 12.28.06, 5:25 pm
Almost-finished construction on site of what used to be the Mayflower Hotel — Friday, 12.28.07, 3:25 pm
“You’re never as open to wonder and horror as when you’re a child,” Orphanage producer Guillermo del Toro tells MTV.com’s Josh Horowitz. “When you’re a child, you can really be enthralled and reach an absolutely ecstatic stage of joy with any wonder in the world. And by the same token, you can reach an incredibly deep paroxysm, like a panic of horror, deeper than any adult.
“It [therefore] takes a lot for an adult to regress to those intense emotional stages. And in the movies, obviously, the best way to present a fable or a myth is through the eyes of somebody that can experience it fully.”
Also: “I openly like to embrace the fantastic. Actually, I try to give the fantastic a very mundane feeling. I would love monsters to exist…I would love to see Godzilla on my way to work, destroying a city a mile or two away. I would love that.” Or at the very least, a Godzilla building being part of the Tokyo skyline, which Del Toro could enjoy while visiting that city for press junkets.
I’m sorry for not being a devout watcher of The Wire (there’s always the DVD box sets), but HE reader Tim Sherrick has pointed to an interesting featurette on the final season dealing with the media entitled “The Wire: The Last Word.”
Don’t look for anything too fierce or scorching from HBO’s Recount, a multi-layered account of the backstage drama that took place in Florida during the disputed 2000 Gore-Bush election.
A strikingly lean Al Gore at the 2000 Democratic National Convention
A story posted two days ago by Politico‘s Jeffrey Ressner implies that the two-hour telefilm, directed by Jay Roach and set to air next May, may have been slightly softened in order to keep Bush operatives — those lockstep political strategists generally credited with having helped steal the 2000 election (with the crucial compliance of the U.S. Supreme Court) from Gore — from causing a stir about the film’s depictions of their moves and manuevers.
“Eager to avoid the last-minute flap over accuracy that beset the ABC miniseries The Path to 9/11 last year, the makers of HBO’s upcoming docudrama allowed real-life figures depicted in the project to make script notes, visit the set and offer advice to director Jay Roach,” Ressner reports.
“They also gave relatives of the main characters small roles to placate their concerns.
“Studios and networks that produce stories based on true events will often make extraordinary efforts to avoid the bad press that can erupt if questions emerge about the bias or truth behind a project.
“Before Universal Pictures’ A Beautiful Mind> took home four Academy Awards in 2002, its Oscar chances were nearly derailed when a rival studio leaked rumors that Ron Howard‘s film about a schizophrenic math genius left out key parts of his troubled life, including reported homosexual and anti-Semitic incidents.
“And when HBO made a Peter Sellers biopic in 2004, the actor’s son raised a fuss about the accuracy of the film’s source material.
“Recount, which wrapped shooting in Florida earlier this month after six weeks of production, was written by actor Danny Strong (of Buffy the Vampire Slayer).”
Two opposing views of Paul Thomas Anderson‘s There Will be Blood — the yea from Matt Zoller Seitz, the nay from N.P. Thompson.
Blood “isn’t perfect or entirely satisfying, but it’s so singular in its conception and execution that one can no more dismiss it than one can dismiss a volcanic eruption occurring in one’s backyard,” Seitz observes. “It cannot be diminished — as Hard Eight, Boogie Nights and Magnolia could, and to my mind, rightly were diminished — as another instance of a facile, energetic director hurling homage at the audience.”
Having seen it on 11.28, Thompson writes that “in the clear light of late autumn drizzle, There Will Be Blood appeared to be no more and no less than what it truly is: a bomb, and an overwrought one at that. It may be a tonier work than the detestable Boogie Nights, but Anderson’s underlying crudeness and his overkill ‘”sensibility’ haven’t evolved an iota. (Yes, Virginia, I can hear the jihadists singing in the comments section already.)
“A friend who hated the movie as much as I did asked afterwards, as we dodged rain in the Oaktree Cinema parking lot, ‘Did that amount to anything beyond a couple of games of one-upmanship?’ I confessed I hadn’t thought of Blood in those terms. Still, her question perfectly encapsulated the anorexic one-dimensionality of the picture, and I had to agree.”
A Strategic Vision poll released Friday “finds that John Edwards has the support of 28% of likely Democratic caucus-goers, his best standing in Iowa over the past six months. Edwards now trails Clinton by only one point and Obama by two points, well within the poll’s margin of error of 4.5 percent.”
Okay, fine…Edwards has been surging lately, which is generally good news for the anti-Clintonites. But a new L.A. Times/Bloomberg poll has Obama a distant third behind Clinton and Edwards…what? Is this some kind of last-minute shudder by Iowa’s closet racists? Is the Times/Bloomberg pollers missing out on the younger, more affluent voters (Obama’s constituency) due to a significant percentage of them off skiing or visiting friends and therefore not at home to receive polling calls? The same poll has Obama slightly ahead in New Hampshire still…strange.
With zero chance of the WGA strike being settled by 1.13, Variety‘s Anne Thompson is reporting that “word from within the Hollywood Foreign Press Association is that one possible scenario is for the Globes to proceed without the live NBC telecast.”
Uhhmm…is there another option? Faced with a choice between staging the Golden Globes without the TV broadcast and cancelling the whole shebang (due to nominees declining to cross WGA picket lines and writers unable to contribute quips and podium repartee), it would be pretty damn surprising if the HFPA chose the latter option.
Cut out the NBC broadcast and ” the show could go on,” Thompson reasons, “with celebrities attending and moving on to the all-important after-parties at the Beverly Hilton” — which the studios are booking and planning, she hears. You’re presumably hearing this also, Bill Higgins? Thompson adds, however, that “so far NBC is going forward with plans to telecast the show live.”
There’s one upside to the Golden Globes not being broadcast. The individually scripted, sure-to-be-awkward podium patter will only be heard live by the Golden Globe attendees and not the worldwide viewing audience, so the shock or “gulp” or embarassment factor will be limited to those present at the Beverly Hills Hilton ballroom and those reading online and trade press accounts as it happens.
The downside is that those of us depending on e-mailed and text-message bulletins from the ballroom for news of the winners won’t have anything to write about in terms of color, observations or what-have-you.
Thompson writes that “in retrospect, it would have been smarter for the HFPA to approach the WGA themselves much earlier and request a waiver (as Film Independent did for the Indie Spirits Awards), rather than going through Dick Clark Productions and NBC. Thus the angry WGA struck back at a major network by withholding the waiver.
“If the show is not televised, NBC will lose the revenue it would have generated via advertising (the Globes show earns strong ratings), and the Globes will lose the money they would have been paid. But at this point it is much more important to the HFPA (which has enough cash in its coffers to miss one year’s telecast) for the Globes show to go on with celebrities walking down that red carpet (even with no writers to pen the presentation speeches) to present and accept awards than for them to face the possibility that most stars will not cross an active picket line.”
I agree with Rope of Silicon‘s Brad Brevet‘s belief that the Best Actor Oscar is pretty much Daniel Day Lewis‘s for the taking. If any one scene from There Will Be Blood is the clincher, I suspect it’s probably the one called “I’ve Abandoned My Child!,” which Brevet has posted along with five others.
Lewis shows us Daniel Plainview‘s reluctance to play the part of a sinner, and then his irritation at the goading from Paul Dano‘s Eli to really and truly atone before God, and then his increasing rage at Eli’s turning up the emotion and the frenzy. The comes an odd synthesis of pleading and snarling — half confession (possibly sincere on some level), and half “I’ll get this sanctimonious preacher one day if it kills me.”
In his introduction of these six Blood clips, Brevet cautions viewers to watch them in sequential order — as I do also. Be sure, in particular, to watch “I Will Bless the Well” before “That’s It, Ladies and Gentlemen.”
These scenes contain no spoilers. They’re morsels, samples, hors d’eouvres. Except for “I’ve Abandoned My Child!,” that is. It contains a cupcake-sized spoiler. Okay, a spoiler the size of a McDonald’s Happy Meal. Change that — it’s the size of a regular small cheeseburger without fries or coke. All it really tells you is that Plainview is a fierce conniving monster, but then you knew that going in…right?
Park and 24th (or something close to that) — Thursday, 12.27.07, 3:35 pm
Broadway, just south of Prince — Thursday, 12.27.07, 6:20 pm
This is another travelling day, which means more down time. I’m looking forward to the day when I can file from cars, trains and planes without breaking a sweat. I foresee some kind of check-in around 5 or 6 pm eastern.
Re-edited on 12.28: The thousands who complain each and every year about the shallow obsessiveness behind the Oscar race reporting keep missing a basic fact, which is that tracking and handicapping the possible nominees and likely winners isn’t primarily about picking winning horses (although it is), or the gowns worn by female nominees or the Oscar telecast ratings or any of that other stuff which we all know to be transitional effusions of little if any value.
The reason the Oscar race grabs us the way it does each year is because it’s primarily about the championing of values. Day-to-day values, eternal values, cinematic values. It’s a yearly ritual in which we seek to define who and what we are by way of fighting for a consensus of judgment — among critics, the viewing and reading public, the various industry branches — about the values expressed in movies about things that matter, and about how artfully or movingly these things are conveyed.
The Oscar race, in short, is not the World Series or the Kentucky Derby or the Daytona 500 or the damn Superbowl. It’s a much more primal cultural exercise than some of us are willing to admit.
It’s a debate about various themes, visions and ways of dealing with life as presented in the top films (including films that never came to be regarded as “top” but should have been). And the debate is the point of it. It’s all that matters. The numerical winner is always forgotten within days, certainly weeks of Oscar night. So the race is about winning, yes, but at the same time not really. It’s really about what we figure out about ouselves — how deeply we care about this or that view or reflection or magical conjuring — as we approach the Big Moment, which is almost always an anti-climax unless there’s a big Pianist-like upset.
And of course, about standing by certain filmmakers, craft-persons and performers because they seem to be best at taking us on this or that journey. Some journeys won’t mean as much next year, let alone five or twenty years down the road. Some will gain. Some will evaporate — and those of us who choose to celebrate the evaporations in the lead-up to the Oscars will have to face the music down the road.
To what extent is the tenacious, resourceful, at times fiendish Daniel Plainview a portrait of core drives and feelings in our culture? Do we need a little more Chris McCandless in our lives, except for the part about blowing off our parents? Does the world of There Will be Blood resonate with our own, and if so, in which ways? And how should we respond if it is? Am I Robert Graysmith? Are you? Have we thought long and hard enough about abortion, and has there been another film that has made us feel the anguish of going through a late-term procedure as dramatized in 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days?
To what extent are some of us shaking our heads like Tommy Lee Jones‘ Sheriff Tom Bell and wondering how the hell things got this way? Do we believe that a man in his 30s can go back to his native country and somehow redeem himself for having abandoned a childhod friend and helped to destroy his life? How many of us have felt a sense of transitioning from one personality or identity to the next, a la I’m Not There? And if there’s no general resonance element in Todd Haynes‘ film, why do we find it fascinating?
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