A “Lunch with David” interview with Control‘s Sam Riley, posted on 12.10, was live today but went dead this evening. Let’s forget it, shall we?
There Will Be Blood “becomes an increasingly violent (and comical) struggle in which each man humiliates the other, leading to the murderous final scene, which gushes as far over the top as one of Daniel [Plainview]’s wells. The scene is a mistake, but I think I know why it happened.
“[Paul Thomas] Anderson started out as an independent filmmaker, with Hard Eight (’96) and Boogie Nights (’97). In Blood, he has taken on central American themes and established a style of prodigious grandeur. Yet some part of him must have rebelled against canonization. The last scene is a blast of defiance — or perhaps of despair. But, like almost everything else in the movie, it’s astonishing.” — from David Denby‘s review in teh 12.17 New Yorker.
After the fifth or sixth Best Supporting Actress critics award for Amy Ryan came in, I began to shake my head. Then I threw up my hands. Scratch a critics awards group and they’ll all feign ignorance or indifference about the choices of the other groups, but c’mon…every last critic in the U.S. of A. group is in love with a vivid but broad caricature of a reprehensible low-life? AmyRyanAmyRyanAmyRyanAmyRyan, etc.
Congratulations to the San Francisco Film Critics Circle for having the character and conviction to name Andrew Dominik‘s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford as their Best Picture of 2007. As opposed to, for example, the divided Chicago Film Critics who put up Zodiac‘s David Fincher as a Best Director contender but lacked the intestinal fortitude to nominate Zodiac — a film that deserves to be honored as much if not more than any other ’07 film — for Best Picture.
I’m sorry, but I have trouble responding positively to beautiful actresses like Eva Mendes who insist on wearing mascara and eyeliner. I look at this PETA ad and all I see is the Cleopatra eye makeup and I say to myself, “Why?”
Because his brilliant, blunt-mouthed, smart-ass CIA character in Charlie Wilson’s War is highly amusing, Philip Seymour Hoffman is considered a slam-dunk Best Supporting Actor nominee. But Toby Kebbell, a 25 year-old British actor, does the exact same routine in Control — i.e., playing a brilliant, blunt-mouthed, smart-ass band manager named Rob Gretton — and nobody has said jack squat.
(far left) Toby Kebbell as Rob Gretton in Anton Corbijn’s Control
Gebbell’s version is arguably more entertaining than Hoffman’s, and he delivers a bit more humanity and soul in the process…and Hollywood handicappers haven’t so much as mentioned the guy. So I’m mentioning him. Here’s an mp3 clip of Kebbell doing his here-I-am bit with the Joy Division members.
I should have brought up Gebbell a couple of months ago, not that anyone would have paid the slightest attention. I admit he’s got a dorky-sounding name that’s hard to remember (I had to check his IMDB page three times to get it straight), and it should be spelled like “pebble” instead of “Gebbell.” Perhaps with the Control screeners finally going out…who knows? At least Kebbell will get some work out of it. Maybe.
With nearly everyone admitting that the WGA strike is going to last a good while (i.e., into March or beyond, some say), producers of the Oscar and Golden Globe telecasts need to admit to reality, which is that they’ll be putting on shows that are going to sound, patter-wise, a lot worse than usual because there won’t be any “written” material to work with. Unless, of course, the WGA grants a variance and allows union writers to bang out the usual usual. Which they won’t, of course. (Why make it easier for the producers to promote product?) In which case host Jon Stewart will have to shun any input from his writing team and do all the writing himself…correct? The monologues, the intros, the reaction quips, etc. A tough situation for any performer, but Stewart especially.
Time‘s Richard Corliss has written a quasi-lament about the stark divide between the films that critics give awards to and the ones that paying moviegoers actually enjoy and will want to see celebrated on next year’s awards shows. There’s a problem, Corliss suggests, in the (likely) low viewing levels for these shows, given the probability that films like No Country for Old Men, Atonement, There Will Be Blood (an “audience punisher,” says Corliss) and Sweeney Todd will be the nominees.
“Moviegoers who are TV viewers don’t want horse races,” Corliss declares. “They want coronations — validations that somebody in Hollywood is ready to honor the movies they love. That won’t happen this year. If the Oscars follow the critics’ prizes, there won’t be a hit film among them — not even the hits that reviewers loved.”
Tough titty. The world that we live in is the world that we live in — deal with it. A relatively small group knows (or at least tries to figure out) the true eternal score and shape of things, and 85% or 90% of the mob outside the gates wants to be entertained with films like Enchanted, I Am Legend, Bee Movie and This Christmas. This is what the mob has always done. What kind of movies did they support big-time in the auteur glory days of the ’70s? Star Wars, The Towering Inferno, Earthquake, Pete ‘n’ Tillie, That’s Entertainment, etc. A tiny fraction of mainstream viewers were paying to see films by Fellini, Bergman and Truffaut in the early ’60s, and yet films by these directors are what everyone thinks of when they list the landmarks of that era.
This is the way of things. Most people have little or no taste. Taste results from a thousand distastes, and yet most consumers can’t be roused to even sample 90% of the films being made today so their judgment is negligible. If the ad revenues for the televised awards shows are going to drop because the gorillas in the malls refuse to watch the films being celebrated, then the ad revenues for the awards show are going to drop…and that’s that. (The Oscar show this year is going to be a mega-disaster anyway with no writers shaping the monologue or the patter.)
The Oscar brand matters a lot — the aura is eternal — but if the viewing audience for the shows is going to be somewhat smaller, then so be it. Reduce the Oscar and Globe show budgets accordingly, downscale the whole magilla, get rid of Gil Cates…live within the real-world limits. It’ll still be a pageant, people will still “ooh” and “aah” at actresses wearing the Vera Wang gowns, everyone will still wear tuxedoes and act like giddy high-schoolers…it’ll just be a somewhat smaller enterprise. Not the end of the world.
Movies were once the reigning popular art form. They are now, for better or worse, an art form that is savored and enjoyed by a relatively small percentage of the populace. The invested, the die-hards, the geeks, the educated, the devoted. This is the final truth of it. The culture has separated. The chasm is deep and wide. Pander to the tastes of the mob and you will lose your soul and go to hell when you die.
What matters is the legacy of the Oscars — the potency of the brand as far as the nomination season is concerned, and the ancillary shelf life of the titles. These things are what count, and why Oscar season continues to excite and thrive and be vital. TV ratings will be what they will be. Whatever to that.
“Serious reporting used to be baked into the business, but under pressure from the public markets or their private equity owners, newsrooms have been cutting foreign bureaus, Washington reporters and investigative capacity. Under this model, the newsroom is no longer the core purpose of media, it’s just overhead.” — from David Carr‘s 12.10.07 “Media Equation” column in the N.Y. Times.
In Dave McNary‘s 12.10 piece on the ugly verbal aftermath to the collapse last week’s strike talks, an agent claims that WGA leaders have been naive in highlighting how hardline the majors have been at the bargaining table. “Of course, studios are going to be that way,” he tells McNary. “Why do you think agents have jobs? Anyone who makes deals knows there are times when you loathe the person you’re negotiating with, but you get over it and you make the deal, and if there’s yelling, you send them a bottle of wine.”
Variety critic Robert Koehler has fired back about my having characterized the L.A. Film Critics Association as being “contrarian and damn-the-torpedos in giving their Best Picture award to Paul Thomas Anderson‘s There Will Be Blood — a brilliant, lacerating, suffer-no-softies art film that you need to see twice to get the full benefit of.”
“I’ve cited to both Anne Thompson and David Poland the various fictions they’ve written about re. LAFCA’s awards,” Koehler begins, “namely that our pick for TWBB had to do with going against National Board of Review (Anne) or the Academy (David). And now you say we were generally flying the contrarian flag.
“Again, this fiction that LAFCA is going against something. To be ‘contrarian’ means that there is some accepted norm or standard or position, and that the contrarian operates counter to that position or line. But at the very start of the awards season, when our group convenes at 10 am Sunday with no clue as to who else has voted on what, and with utterly no memory (or care in the world) as to whatever NBR went for (the only title sticking in the mind being possibly The Bucket List), there is simply no contrarian stance at play, because there’s nothing to stand against — because we’re at the start of the awards season.”
Wells mid-point reply to Koehler: You and your LAFCA brethren knew very well at the start of voting that There Will be Blood is not an easy sit. It’s brilliant and piercing, but it leaves you with a kind of beat-up or staggered feeling. A woman friend I saw it with was groaning in her seat — she hated it. I know at least one movie guy who came out of a screening feeling a little stunned and saying “what was that?” I presume you know about this. You’re too sharp not to. It’s not a deep dark secret.
To me, the greatness of Paul Thomas Anderson‘s film, which I’ve described as “diseased,” was not immediately apparent. It’s about as far as you can get from a comfort-blanket movie. Especially with that full-throttle bowling-alley scene at the end. Surely you realize that Academy soft-bellies are going to contort themselves into pretzel shapes when it comes to nominating it for Best Picture, if they do. So you guys knew darn well you were going against the grain of that comfort-seeking mindset.
Back to Koehler’s lettter, which he concluded by saying that “you folks need to step back and take a breath, and reconsider these fictions you’re creating out of thin air. By a wide margin, LAFCA felt by a wide margin that There Will Be Blood was the best American film of the year. That’s all. No chess work, no calculations, no triangulation — nothing but a matter of taste based on seeing more movies over the year than anybody else.
“And Jeff, the group judgement was based — with perhaps no exceptions, since there was simply no time for most or all of us to view it more than once — on a single viewing of TWBB. It’s a great movie on the first viewing. I have no idea what you’re talking about [when you say it needs to be seen twice].”
Rex Reed talking to Dick Cavett 37 years ago about the forthcoming 1970 Oscar awards (covering 1969 films). Reed was fairly cynical, of course, but what strikes me is how familiar his complaints sound. The game, the attitude and the dance steps never change.
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