Tom Cruise plugged Lions for Lambs on Tonight Show with Jay Leno last night. NBC webmasters would like you to see the clip on the Tonight Show website, but the site is hopelessly constipated and stuck its own glue so the clip won’t load.
For some of us, picking Oscar-race favorites at this stage is about choosing players and films that we truly feel were among the year’s finest. (Like Zodiac, for instance — unquestionably one of the year’s five best entries.) But for others, 75% to 80% of their Oscar prognosticating is about bowing down in front of the throne of this or that big-league distributor. Strictly a show of obeisance before power…no different than the protocol observed among New Guinea headhunters in the presence of this or that tribal chieftain, especially when entering his hut.
Which is why films and filmmakers being promoted by smaller distributors — Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead, Control, Once, Sam Riley, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Sidney Lument, etc. — don’t fare as well as they should when it comes to the Gurus of Gold and Buzzmeter choices.
With the exception of Jerry Seinfeld‘s overly enthusiastic opening & closing remarks for NBC’s “TV Juniors” show, this short about a Bee Movie writers conference (which was shown at the Cannes Film Festival promo event last May) is a lot funnier and cooler than anything in Bee Movie itself. Just sayin’…
Update: No one has yet seen Charlie Wilson’s War, but the Gurus of Gold consensus so far is that Julia Roberts is a prime Best Supporting Actress contender. The Gurus are voting this way for the usual reasons — i.e., to show obeisance before the power of Roberts’ legend and the economic power of Universal Pictures. (Note: I erred earlier today in thinking that Variety‘s Anne Thompson had herself decided that Roberts in a likely contender in this category. She was in fact quoting from the Gurus of Gold list.)
The bottom-line is that I’ve read an ’06 draft of Aaron Sorkin‘s script of Charlie Wilson’s War and Roberts’ role — she plays Joanne Herring, a real-life Houston multi-millionaire — is fairly small. Sorkin and director Mke Nichols might have enlarged the part since, but it was almost cameo-level on the page.
On top of which the trailer suggests that Roberts’ performance is mainly about that not-quite-right Texas accent and selling that openly scheming, anti-Communist, sexually-provocative routine with Hanks as they discuss finding a way to help Afghanistan’s Muhjadeen resistance fight the Soviet invaders. Buttressed, of course, by that problematic blonde coiffure favored by conservative Houston ladies of a certain age.
So forget it, okay? Not enough screen time, no dimension to the role, limited acting chops, big hair = not in the game.
The N.Y. Times has now jumped into the Band’s Visit vs. Beaufort spat, with the Jerusalem-based Isabel Kershner reporting in a 10.30 story that “unnamed producers” of The Band’s Visit have been quoted as “accusing the makers of Beaufort — and director Joseph Cedar in particular — of having drawn the academy’s attention to the rule about the predominance of English, leading to the disqualification of The Band’s Visit.
After this story appeared in an Israeli newspaper on 10.14, Cedar “was quoted…as acknowledging that his producers had raised the issue with the Israeli academy, but denying any contact with the American one.
Cedar tells Kershner that “having to defend himself against accusations of being behind the disqualification of The Band’s Visit is “ludicrous, preposterous. I can understand the argument that the academy rules may be too strict, [but] we have absolutely zero to do with the disqualification. We didn’t make the rules, or put the English in that script.”
It’s very…I don’t know, reassuring to see that Cate Blanchett‘s Dylan performance in Todd Haynes‘ I’m Not There is the far-ahead favorite among MCN’s Gurus of Gold and the The Envelope‘s new Buzzmeter prognosticators.
Having read my clarification on Sunday, 10.28, about some of the maneuvers that may or may not have lead to the disqualification of The Band’s Visit over language issue (i.e., over 50% of the films’ dialogue being in English, according to the Academy’s foreign film committee), the film’s producer Ehud Bleiberg has written to explain his position on the qualification issues.
“One, the team of The Band’s Visit believes that the English dialogue in the film is around 23 to 25 minutes in an 85 minute film and isn’t predominant in the film. The silence, expressions, and music are the predominant elements of the film.
“Two, The English is incorrect a lot of the time, requiring subtitles throughout the entire film.
“Three, In the (Beverly Hills) Academy rule book there is one important rule that says that Academy reserves the right to make rulings that do not follow their guidelines .
“These are the three main reasons why we felt our film would be eligible for the Best Foreign Language Academy Award, despite having been told in the late stages there may be an issue with the dialogue.
“Also, he Academy decided to disqualify the film based on dialogue vs. dialogue only. From what we have heard, the only person who has seen our film is the person who was clocking the dialogue. We have reason to believe that if there wasn’t so much noise and controversy surrounding the film before their viewing, they might have seen the film differently.
“As it is, they didn’t seem to take into account points A and B above or the difference between English, Arabic and Hebrew. For example, if a film has the English dialogue ‘he was walking,’ that comes to three words, whereas in Hebrew it’s only two. Also, the songs that are sung in Arabic were not included in the dialogue clocking, even though they were significant to the story.
“At the time of our appeal, to our disappointment, none of the other members of the (LA) Academy had seen the film in order to consider points A, B, and C. The team of The Band’s Visit believes that after winning the majority votes in 8 of the top categories of the Israeli Film Academy Awards including Best Picture, Director and Screenplay, it is the film that would have best represented Israel at the upcoming (U.S.) Academy Awards in the Best Foreign Language category.
“Sony Pictures Classics has faith in this film,” he says, “and we are now trying to push the film for other categories including Best Director and Best Original Screenplay. We hope that once the Academy has had a chance to see the film, they will be as impressed with it as the rest of the world has been.”
Bleiberg questions the accuracy of Yair Raveh‘s story “that he heard Beaufort‘s producers sent the Israeli Academy a letter from their international sales agent Bavaria Films, saying they counted the words in The Band’s Visit, it has 60 percent English and therefore will be probably be disqualified.”
Bleiberg says that Bavaria’s sales agent couldn’t have precisely tabulated the amount of English, Hebrew and Arabic in The Band’s Visit because “no DVD screeners were made available to anyone.”
However, he says, after The Band’s Visit won Israel’s Ofir Award for Best Film, Ilana Sharon, director-manager of the Israeli Academy, requested and got from Eilon Rtzkovsky. Bleiberg’s partner producer, two DVDs of The Band’s Visit in order to screen the film and determine if the language issue might be an issue before sending the film on to the L.A. Academy.”
Main foyer of AMC Century City following this evening’s all-media screening of Bee Movie — Tuesday, 10.30.07, 9:20 pm
Heavy cats — Tuesday, 10.30.07, 9:45 pm
When this photo was taken in May 1972, Los Angeles was choking in smog (catalytic converters hadn’t been installed) and the traffic situation was considered to be pretty bad, especially during rush hours. Today, 35 years hence, traffic in this town is beyond any reasonable concept of toleration. I remember reading a news story in the mid ’90s that by 2010 the average driving speed in Los Angeles would be 11.2 miles an hour. That’s only two years hence. The situation feels pretty close to that now.
A drive that used to take 30 minutes in the early ’90s now takes at least 45 to 50 minutes, if not an hour. The only way to get around these days is to ride a scooter or a motorcycle. Otherwise you have to surrender to constant confinement. Cars are like little isolation cells that people ride around in, talking on their phones and listening to NPR and podcasts and getting more and more frosty and burrowing deeper and deeper into their ticks and fears.
A friend recently passed along an observation from screenwriter and longtime Los Angeleno Robert Towne to the effect that L.A. will soon be a town of absolute gridlock, and that during high-traffic hours the travel time from, say, the Pacific Palisades to downtown will eventually take just as long as it used to in the pre-World War I horse-and-buggy days. In this town and in this respect, cars have completely cancelled out their value in terms of speed. Ten years from now it’ll be almost like Blade Runner.
The only thing to do in L.A. these days is to stay indoors and not go anywhere, ever, unless it’s after 10 pm and before daybreak. It’s a city choking on itself. Travelling from Brooklyn to Manhattan and back on the subway is a much faster proposition these days. If I could clap my hands and move to Manhattan into a comparable space without the grief, I would clap my hands.
I’d love to know what the one-paragraph synopsis is for Terrence Malick‘s Tree of Life project, if anyone knows and wants to share. Getting a copy of the script would be even better. Heath Ledger and Sean Penn are said to be in talks to star and costar, respectively. River Road Entertainment’s Bill Pohlad will produce with Sarah Green, who helped produce Malick’s The New World.
Does that title scare anyone besides myself? Any title that ends with the words “of life” carries a potential for big trouble. Fountain of Life, Hot Dog of Life, Vacuum Cleaner of Life…they all stink. I’m especially concerned with a suggestion in Gregg Goldstein‘s Hollywood Reporter story that one-third of the film might take place in India.
In a “Big Picture” column piece based upon Marc Norman‘s “What Happens Next: A History of American Screenwriting,” a book that came out last week, L.A. TImes guy Patrick Goldstein says Norman “isn’t especially optimistic” about relations between screenwriters and studio execs over the coming years, primarily because “the old studio patriarchs have been replaced by executives who think they’re more in touch with the public taste than most writers.
As Norman puts it, “There’s now a generation of executives who wonder why the writer couldn’t be more like a court stenographer who can just put the executives’ ideas into writing,” says Goldtsein. Hey…wasn’t this precisely the attitude of Peter Gallagher‘s Larry Levy character in Robert Altman‘s The Player. Remember that creative-meeting scene when he asks an assistant to read stories from a newspaper at random, and Levy explains how each story could be a movie with the right attitude and ingredients?
I received Norman’s book in the mail the same day that Goldstein did, probably. I started to flip through it a couple of times but something always came up. How many hundreds of thousands of people regard the words “something came up” as the story of their lives?
Last Friday Variety‘s Todd McCarthy called Jerry Seinfeld‘s Bee Movie (Dreamamount, 11.2) “less than inspired… amiable but no more…short on surprise and originality…content with whimsical notions and mild jokes,” etc. The all-media crowd is finally having a looksee this evening and tomorrow night, myself included.
In his Hollywood Reporter review, Kirk Honeycutt said that “unfortunately, bees just aren’t that funny” and “they aren’t intriguing cartoon creatures. Nor is the odd story Seinfeld and his collaborators dreamed up very inspired. The film labors too hard for its comic moments and never discovers a cartoon logic that will allow bees and humans to interact.”
After all that hard work and all that hoopla at last May’s Cannes Film Festival with Seinfeld flying off the roof in his bee costume on a wire….jeez. The upside is that the family crowd is probably going to go for it big-time.
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