“We’ve pushed the buttons too far. We’ve been greedy and selfish. Everybody knows what we’ve done to the rivers and the oceans; the fact that there’s only 35 years’ worth of fish in the oceans; the fact that the polar ice caps are melting. I think that right under the surface of everybody’s consciousness is the full understanding that we’re in for a really tough ride and everybody is really afraid to face it. The attitude is: ‘Let me amass my pile and we’ll worry about that 10 or 20 years from now.'” — Little Miss Sunshine costar and presumptive Oscar nominee Alan Arkin speaking to Time magazine. (A Time magazine “Numbers of the Year” report actually says the oceans will be fished out within 50 years, so we can all relax — an extra 15 years to sort things out. Pass the shrimp!)
Notes on a Scandal (Fox Searchlight, 12.27) is a sort of upscale, British-flavored Fatal Attraction minus the grand guignol… with a strong dose of sad-wicked lesbo suppression driving the engine. Skillfully adapted by playwright Patrick Marber (“Closer”) from a Zoe Heller novel called “What Was She Thinking?,” it’s easily one of the best written, best-acted potboilers of this type that I’ve ever seen — particularly when it comes to Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett‘s performance as a pair of schoolteachers caught up in each other’s obsessions and vulnerabilities in a manner that goes way beyond intense.
Richard Eyre’s direction, Philip Glass‘s pulsating score (a perfect compliment to Dench’s obsessive emotional condition), the sense of restraint in Bill Nighy‘s performance as Blanchett’s much-older husband, and also in 17 year-old Andrew Simpson‘s as Blanchett’s teenaged lover. I worship the precisely-honed dialogue and particularly Dench’s voiceover narration (“she and I share an understanding of the quotidian awfulness of things”). I could easily see it another couple of times, just to savor the fusing of all the elements.
Anyway, I recorded some interview comments spoken by Blanchett, Nighy and Marber the other day, and have posted them in this order….
Looking east at 8th Avenue and 52nd Street — 12.21.06, 5:35 pm; slice of Key Lime pie that I barely touched at the end of a lunch today at the Harvard Club; head of bull elephant allegedly shot by Theodore Roosevelt, on wall in Harvard Club; nice to think about but that’s all.
“The Bagger” — a.k.a., N.Y. Times Oscar columnist David Carr — has tallied up all the positive-attitude L.A. Times articles about Dreamgirls and concluded that, column-inch for column-inch, the film is getting a bit more cunnilingus from that paper than may be absolutely warranted.
Carr also suspects that maybe, just maybe, L.A. Times staffers are glad- handing Bill Condon‘s widely-liked musical a bit more than necessary with the idea that David Geffen, the film’s somewhat fearsome, Godfather-like producer, may own the Times before too long…maybe.
“The LAT and its Oscar website, The Envelope, has dived deeper into the [Dreamgirls] tank and more often than almost any media outlet,” Carr writes. “The Bagger is no cynic — he actually enjoyed We are Marshall — but he has watched story after story emerge from his esteemed West Coast competitor and wondered if someone, certainly not him, would begin to think thusly:
“Dreamgirls is the long-beloved project of David Geffen, the Los Angeles macher who owned the film rights to the story and who has been rumored to be in talks with the Chandler family about teaming up on a bid for the LAT. No one knows what, if anything, Mr. Geffen is going to do, but if you worked at the paper, might not the possibility that you would soon be calling him boss or He Who Must Be Obeyed have an impact on the amount of attention Dreamgirls gets?”
