If Daniel Day Lewis wins his second Best Actor Oscar for There Will Be Blood, he’ll be joining a fraternity of only seven other two-time winners — Marlon Brando, Gary Cooper, Tom Hanks, Dustin Hoffman, Fredric March, Jack Nicholson and Spencer Tracy. As far as I can reason, there are two things working against Lewis joining the club.
One, his Blood character, Daniel Plainview, is a single-minded misanthropic fiend — the person many workaholics fear they might actually be deep down, which is not a pleasant notion. Plainview has a certain malignant burn-through quality, yes, and he really is quite the powerhouse, especially in the beginning, but he lacks the demonic charisma of, say, Anthony Hopkins‘ Oscar-winning Hannibal Lecter. You have to at least half-like a character to vote for the performance.
And two, Lewis is the Terrence Malick of acting, coming back to do Gangs of New York after working as a shoemaker in Florence. Point being, do some actors have an odd grudge over his sparse workload? As in, “I have to work and study and party-whore my ass off to land jobs and sometimes suffer financially for the lack of work, and then Lewis just sweeps in after years of leisurely puttering around in Ireland and Europe and delivers another brilliant performance and gets nominated for an Oscar?” This is a small-minded way of looking at things, but actors, it is often said, are fundamentally children.
Postscript: I got the idea for this item from “loyalfromlondon.” I started my first draft of it with “As loyalfromlondon says” but I didn’t like the way that sounded. So I decided to say thanks at the end but then I forgot because two or three other things came up. Then I post the piece and the London guy writes to complain that he’s been fucked over because I didn’t extend a “thanks.” Twice.

Continuing their mission to persuade every big-name French actress to doff duds (and in the wake of their recent Juliette Binoche coup), the editors of the January 2008 French Playboy have landed Ludivine Sagnier as their latest agent provocateur. Sagnier is best known for her lead role in Francois Ozon‘s Swimming Pool (’03). She was also in Ozon’s 8 Women, Laurent Tirard‘s Moliere, Christophe Honore‘s Love Songs and the recent anthology film Paris, je t’aime.

Bucket List director Rob Reiner tells N.Y. Times guy David Halbfinger that he first read the script “with the eyes of a 62-year-old baby boomer increasingly mindful of his own horizons, artistic and otherwise. ‘I like to think of myself as a very young old person,’ Reiner says. ‘But you start thinking, how many years am I going to have to be productive?’ Especially in our business, youth is so stressed. You start thinking, how many more movies am I going to get to make?’ Maybe, if I’m lucky, I’ll make five more.'”
There is only one calculation and one motto for any creative person on this planet: “I am committed to and will make things out of the dreams and visions I have, one way or the other. And I will continue to do so until the day I drop. If that means five months or 50 years now, same difference.” The number of books, songs, paintings, articles, movies, sculptures and scripts you have time to produce is immaterial. There is only what you do, and the certainty that you will do that every day and every week until Lee Harvey Oswald pops his head out of the window and takes that shot, which he will definitely do sooner or later. Until then, it’s clear sailing.

Drunken hooligans dressed as Santa Claus ransack New Zealand Hoyts multiplex…let’s go to the videotape.

“There’s one documentary that’s been put out recently that has generated a lot of interest called Freedom to Fascism. And we’re moving in that direction. Were not moving toward Hitler-type fascism, but we’re moving toward a softer fascism.
“Loss of civil liberties, corporations running the show, big government in bed with big business. So you have the military industrial complex, you have the medical industrial complex, you have the financial industry, you have the communications industry. They go to Washington and spend hundreds of millions of dollars. That’s where the control is. I call that a soft form of fascism, something that is very dangerous.” — Republican presidential nomination contender Ron Paul, speaking to Tim Russert on the 12.23.07 Meet the Press.

This 12.23 N.Y. Times piece by Judd Apatow and Leslie Mann, called “Holiday on Thin Ice,” is a pseudo-transcription of an argument Apatow and his actress-wife have every year. Their discussion has two themes: (a) Apatow is a mildly inconsiderate, passively selfish gift-giver and (b) Mann can be testy and grasping when she puts her mind to it.
And as long as we’re talking back-and-forth dialogue, it goes without saying that “Holiday on Thin Ice” doesn’t begin to compare to “Dont Have a Cow, Man,” that famous exchange of e-mails between Apatow and Mark Brazill, the creator of That ’70s Show, over Brazill’s belief that Apatow stole an idea he had for a TV comedy series called “The Grungies,” about a Seattle grunge band shot in the light-hearted slapstick mode of “The Monkees.” (It helps to know that Topher Grace was one of the stars of That ’70s Show.)

Stephen Sondheim‘s Sweeney Todd numbers “are more like art songs than show tunes, attempts at Brechtian insight and scale, which I presume is Sondheim’s design: Anyone looking for hummable toe-tappers of the ‘chicks and geese and ducks better scurry’ variety should go play elsewhere. Only a shallow person would expect an actual melody to accompany lyrics of such nihilist significance as ‘There’s a hole in the world like a great black pit/ and it’s filled with people who are filled with shit/ And the vermin of the world inhabit it.’ This is complex, important music, people! Not for simple, cheerful folk by any means.” — from Stephanie Zacharek‘s Salon review.

Over my decades of watching and loving movies, I’ve had a big problem with one and only one cinematographer — Janusz Kaminski. He’s obviously a widely-admired pro, but I’ve never liked and never will like those bleachy, sunny flood-lit shots that he’s put into so many Steven Spielberg films. When I hear he’s the dp I think right away, “Uh-oh, here we go with the milky desaturated colors again.” It’s just hit me that he’s a side reason that I’m not as big a fan of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly as I could be. That said, I love his work on Jerry Maguire.

14 cities (including Boston!) are being treated to a special midnight sneak of Paul Thomas Anderson‘s There Will Be Blood on Saturday, 12.29. PTA put together this special “haircut” video for fans to announce the sneaks. The Paramount Vantage release opens in NY & LA on Wednesday, 12.26.

The updated Movie City News list of journo/critic picks: No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood, Zodiac, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and Once. Is anyone taking this in? Two films that have long been considered dead in terms of potential Best Picture consideration — Zodiac and Once — are, in the view of dozens of top-dog writers whose lives are devoted to evaluating movies as best they can, among the top five of the year. Hats off to the Zeligs, go-alongers and Academy fuddy-duds who turned their backs months ago.

Two Huffington Post-ings about the Jamie Lynn Spears pregnancy situation, one from tabloid editor Bonnie Fuller (yes, Bonnie Fuller) full of moral outrage, another from New York comedian Andy Borowitz.

HE reader James Kent just wrote the following: “With the whole WGA strike going on, what impact do you think that could have on Best Picture nominations this year? As the entire academy nominates Best Picture, I’m wondering if there might be enough bad blood among SAG, WGA and DGA members that they might steer away from a big studio production in favor of the little guy?”
In other words, if it comes down to a choice between nominating a deserving big-budgeter like Sweeney Todd or American Gangster and a deserving mid-level or low-budgeter, will the rank-and-file vote against the expensive movie as a way of saying eff-you to the big studios and the producers they’re in league with? Sounds too sweeping and simplistic to me. If this turns out to be any kind of factor (which I’m doubtful of), then yes, Atonement, American Gangster and Sweeney Todd could conceivably lose votes. But which prospective Best Picture nominees are truly independent and unsullied by big-studio lucre?