I can’t believe that the 1995 Sundance Film Festival happened over 18 years ago, but it did. Look at how many selections are considered indie classics (or at least semi-classics) today — Before Sunrise, The Usual Suspects, The Basketball Diaries, Shallow Grave, Safe, The Doom Generation, Brothers McMullen, Heavy, Little Odessa. This was when Sundance was still modest and manageable and not the hypefest it later became. Bryan Singer was hot as a pistol after that first Suspects screening — you couldn’t talk to him for more than 15 seconds before someone pushed their way in. Peter Chelsom‘s Funny Bones wasn’t a classic, but seeing it led to an opportunity to interview Jerry Lewis at the Stein Erickson. Two weeks later I withdrew from Entertainment Weekly reporting for a while so I could compose a whopper-sized Los Angeles article called “Right Face,” about the struggles of conservative-minded writers and actors in the film industry.
A beach-frolic shot from Terrence Malick‘s Knight of Cups (Christian Bale, Natalie Portman, sandy feet, waves, laughter) is being called an exclusive and the pic’s “first official still” by The Hollywood Reporter‘s Pamela Mclintock. Which it is, apparently, except loads of similar shots were posted last May by Indiewire and other sites. I don’t feel the thrill.
The Hollywood Reporter‘s exclusive image from Knight of Coups.
One of many shots that appeared online last May.
Footage from Cups, which will presumably be ready for release sometime in 2014 (although with Malick you never know) is being screened for Cannes buyers by Glen Basner‘s FilmNation. (Last year Basner’s team blocked me from attending buyers’ screenings of Mud, and therefore kept me out fo the conversation until just before it opened stateside — thanks, guys!) McLintock writes that “the film’s tightly guarded plot is said to be about celebrities and excess.” Don’t you believe it. Knight of Cups, trust me, is going to be about whatever is swimming through Malick’s head as he’s cutting it — nothing more and nothing less.
The only serious standout element in JJ Abrams‘ Star Trek Into Darkness, the only thing that makes you sit up and go “whoa, wait…this is good,” is the lead villain performance by Benedict Cumberbatch. The poor guy has a somewhat oddly shaped face and weird demon-cat eyes so he’ll never play the good guy, but he’s a serious world-class actor with a kind of young Richard Burton quality and an energy field that just grabs hold and lifts all boats.
Cumberbatch is playing an impassioned, duplicitous intellectual-terrorist-with-feelings named John Harrison (there’s more, actually, but this all that I can divulge), and of course he has to end up vanquished, but he’s so volcanically vital and charismatic that I wish he wasn’t stuck having to fulfill the fate of a baddy-waddy. I wish the rule book could have been thrown out in his case.
“Don’t believe the hate,” says Marshall Fine about the critically-pummelled The Great Gatsby. “It’s not a terrible film; indeed, it’s a surprisingly affecting one. And I’m no Luhrmann apologist. I’m one of those who thought Moulin Rouge was silly and overrated. As for his indigestible Australia from 2008, well, at least the continent itself survived.
“Yet I found myself pulled into the emotional world of Luhrmann’s Gatsby despite only a couple of really outstanding performances and an in-your-face phoniness to the imagery which the film wears as a badge of honor. In translating F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel about the 1920s, Luhrmann turns it into an indictment of conspicuous consumption and the erosion of the human spirit that inevitably results.
“In spite of the trappings of 3D and a Jay-Z-infused soundtrack, Luhrmann finds the beating heart at the center of this overstuffed enterprise. It rests firmly in the person of Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jay Gatsby, who single-handedly breathes life into a film that is nearly sunk by the glum Carey Mulligan and the lightweight Tobey Maguire.
“DiCaprio’s Gatsby is still an untrustworthy weasel with delusions of grandeur and a willingness to do almost anything to get what he wants — but his collapse, when that ruthlessness proves his undoing, is that much more moving because of the heft DiCaprio brings to the role. See it for DiCaprio and you won’t be sorry.”
The irony, of course, is that if you explore any scientific fact through to its ultimate knowability, you’ll find yourself regarding an aspect of a grand cosmic design. All science leads to God…if you pull back from the Christian-idiot definition of the term. Needless to add I feel great rapport with this trailer, three months old and copied from Sasha Stone’s Awards Daily. Does the doc discuss the “God particle”? If so, The Unbelievers isn’t quite right as a title. Because all scientific thinkers are mystics at heart.
On 7.24.12 I wrote the following:
“The discovery of the Higgs boson or ‘God particle‘ — a subatomic element that informs the size and shape and contour of all physical matter, ‘the missing cornerstone of particle physics” — was announced yesterday. Don’t look now, but this is almost (I say ‘almost’) like the discovery of the black monolith on the moon in 2001: A Space Odyssey. And yet it’s been there all along. The supreme scientific equation…proven.
“The ‘intelligent design’ crowd is celebrating this all across America, you bet. I despise what Christianity has become in this country, but I happen to believe in intelligent design also, in a sense. There is obviously a unified flow and an absolute cosmic commonality in all living things and all aspects of the architecture. The difference is that I don’t attach a Bible-belt morality to this overwhelming fact. To me God is impartial, celestial, biological, mathematical, amoral, unemotional, miraculous and breathtaking.
“However you define the altogether, He/She/It has absolutely zero ‘interest’ in whether you or your great-uncle or next door neighbor are adhering to the Ten Commandments or having an abortion or helping a homeless person or what-have-you. The molecular perfection and mind-blowingly infinite implications of God are way, way beyond ground-level morality.
“People whose lives are, in their minds, basically about finding spiritual fulfillment and deliverance after they’re dead are ridiculous figures. They’re certainly appalling. The only reason religions are good for society is that they keep the nutters (i.e. those who would otherwise be seeking solace in alcohol or drugs or in the ravings of some antisocial cult leader) in line, and they instill a sense of moral order and temperance among people who lack the intelligence or drive or hunger to seek spiritual satori on their own.”
“Would you still be attracted to me now if we happened to meet for the first time…today, as I am now? Would you come over and talk to me and try to pick me up if you saw me on a train?” Answer: Damn straight, no hesitation, in a New York minute. Is that an honest answer? Perhaps not, but any wife who asks her husband of 10 or 15 years that question doesn’t want candor. She wants to hear that the current is crackling and the batteries are still charged. She doesn’t want to feel like a leftover. Who does?
That said, I think it’s fair to say that guys will rarely toss ambush questions at their wives or longtime girlfriends. When women ask them they’re basically saying “okay, here’s your chance — will you give me the answer I want to hear or not?” Guys never do this. Guys never say “I want to believe in a fantasy — will you tell me that this fantasy is real? Because if you don’t, I’m going to be very disappointed in you.”
If you’re going to be stuck with a shitty movie, you want it to stink so badly that it becomes “funny.” You want people talking back at the screen, throwing empty drink containers and making howling-coyote noises. Then we can all relax and have a good time. I’ve enjoyed this kind of film. It’s a perfectly legitimate form of entertainment.
But there are two kinds of funny-bad. The first is when the actors convey to the audience that they know they’re in a turkey and that it’s cool for everyone to start hooting and making jokes. The second is when they seem to be conveying sincere belief in the material and are trying as best they can to sell it on a genuine level. Then it’s not that funny because you’re feeling tremendous sympathy, or more exactly pity. Don’t these guys realize they’re hurting themselves by acting in this piece of shit and looking like cheap whores?
I’m sorry to say that Olympus Has Fallen is the second kind of bad. I wish it were otherwise. At best it has three or four good laughs and, okay, one of them (a sight gag involving the nation’s 16th President) is intentional. Otherwise it’s a low-budget, Shreveport-y, ultra-sadistic bullshit video-game version of a Die Hard-in-the-White House movie.
The main problems are (a) Gerard Butler‘s simplistic, one-note performance as White House secret service man Mike Bannon — all the wit and charisma of a linebacker in an NFL game, (b) sedative-style dialogue, (c) a mystifying devotion to wheezy cliches (a rugged defrocked hero gets to redeem himself through acts of manly valor, the supportive, teary-eyed wife following the hero’s saga from the sidelines, a coolly sadistic criminal mastermind, a middle-aged American turncoat in league with the baddies, a billowing American flag and the sound of crisp military drums during opening credits), (c) too many boot-kickings, (d) too many tough guys going “whugh!” and “uggh!” and “mughh!” as they fight hand to hand, (e) too many generic orange-fireball explosions and (f) way, way too many bullets fired.
I explained in my “Ten Shot Rule” piece that the fewer bullets fired in an action film, the better it tends be and vice versa. (The rule was based on Shane firing only about ten bullets.) Antoine Fuqua, the director of Olympus Has Fallen, never heard of the ten-shot rule. He seems to believe in an opposite equation. The more brutality, the better. And better still if you throw in several bad-ass, well-armed Koreans who know from martial arts.
In my 1.8.13 review of Ruben Fleischer‘s Gangster Squad , I reported that 478,446 machine-gun bullets are fired in that Warner Bros. film. I brought my counter to yesterday’s screening and Olympus Has Fallen fires off 512,754 bullets. If Fuqua had only kept the count down to 100,000 or less…if he only knew the value of restraint.
The film industry needs to take a restraining order on the guys who wrote this thing — Creighton Rothenberger and Katrin Benedikt. I’m serious. Or…whatever, invade their homes at 4:30 am and arrest them, put them in chains, put black hoods over their heads, drive them out to the desert and lock them into an underground jail cell and keep them there for a minimum of 18 months.
And talk about fallen — Fuqua has stabbed himself in the head with this thing. Olympus Has Fallen is at least four or five levels below John McTiernan‘s Die Hard. It’s like some kind of factory-level exploitation film made by the second cousins of Danny and Oxide Pang.
The fake White House (apparently built somewhere in Shreveport) looks like a fake White House. The front lawn is too small. The first-floor windows don’t look right.
The great Melissa Leo is beaten up and made to scream and howl and utterly humiliate herself. What was she thinking? She won her Oscar for The Fighter so she could collect a paycheck to act in a film like this? To what end? Mortgage payments?
The film starts [NON-SPOILER because it’s in the trailer] with a mindless car-accident scene in which future Democratic candidate for U.S. Senator from Kentucky Ashley Judd, playing the wife of Aaron Eckart‘s U.S. President, goes over the side of a bridge inside a limousine. At first the limo is teetering on the edge of the bridge Beetlejuice-style, and Butler rushes over to pull Eckhart and Judd out of the back seat. But Eckhart resists and holds his wife for a moment too long, and by the time Butler yanks him out it’s too late and Judd goes over the side. It is somehow decided that Butler allowed the First Lady to die so he’s subsequently taken off White House detail. Absolute nonsense.
Several months later Korean terrorists stage a ridiculous aerial attack on Washington, D.C. — blastaway, blastaway blastaway all! Into the valley of death rode the crazy Koreans! Good action sequences always stay within the realm of the somewhjat conceivable and never tip into the ridiculous, as this one does. Dut-ditty-dut-ditty-dut-ditty-dut-ditty-dut-dut-dut…budda-budda-budda-budda-budda-budda…BOOM! Bud-dut-dut-budda-DOOM!
The less said about the supporting performances by Morgan Freeman (who should never again play a Washington authority figure), Angela Bassett, Dylan McDermott, Robert Forster and Cole Hauser the better.
Here’s hoping this film doesn’t adversely affect Judd’s attempt to unseat Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. I want her to win.
The invaders are led by Kang (Rick Yune), a Korean terrorist in really good shape with a narrow waist and serious arm muscles and a big buffed-up chest. Every time Yune was on-screen I was silently sneering and going “you third-rate asshole and your cheap macho bullshit…Alan Rickman played almost the exact same character 25 years ago and here you going through the motions…you think you’re up to something cool and you’re not…putz.”
I’m ready and willing to ease up on my John Ford takedowns and I could really and truly go the rest of my life without writing another word (much less another article) on The Searchers. But yesterday the Hollywood Reporter posted a Martin Scorsese essay on The Searchers — mostly a praise piece — and I feel obliged to respond, dammit. But really, this is the end.
Scorsese’s basic thought is that while The Searchers has some unfortunate or irritating aspects, it’s nonetheless a great film and has seemed deeper, more troubling and more layered the older he’s become. Which is well and good but you always have to take Scorsese’s praise with a grain of salt, I think. A lifelong Film Catholic, Scorsese has always been a gentle, generous, big-hearted critic. Show him almost any mediocre film by a semi-respected director and nine times out of ten he’ll look on the bright side and turn the other cheek. Has he ever written anything even the least bit mean or cutting or dismissive?
My basic view of The Searchers, as I wrote three of four years ago, is that “for a great film it takes an awful lot of work to get through it. I don’t know how to enjoy The Searchers any more except by wearing aesthetic blinders — by ignoring all the stuff that drives me up the wall in order to savor the beautiful heartbreaking stuff (the opening and closing shot, Wayne’s look of fear when he senses danger for his brother’s family, his picking up Wood at the finale and saying, ‘Let’s go home, Debbie’). That said I can’t help but worship Winston C. Hoch‘s photography for its own virtues.
For me, Scorsese’s wisest observation is that John Ford personally related to John Wayne‘s Ethan Edwards, the gruff, scowling, racist-minded loner at the heart of this 1956 film.
Ford “was at his lowest ebb” when he made The Searchers, Scorsese writes. “Ford’s participation in the screen version of Mister Roberts had ended disastrously soon after a violent encounter between the filmmaker and his star Henry Fonda. For Ford, The Searchers was more than just another picture: It was his opportunity to prove that he was still in control. Did he pour more of himself into the movie? It does seem reasonable to assume that Ford recognized something of his own loneliness in Ethan Edwards and that the character sparked something in him. It’s interesting to see how it dovetails with another troubled character from the same period. Like James Stewart‘s Scotty in Vertigo, Edwards’ obsessive quest ends in madness.”
Jeffrey Hunter, John Wayne
Film lovers know The Searchers “by heart,” Scorsese writes, “but what about average movie watchers? What place does John Ford’s masterpiece occupy in our national consciousness?” Wells to Scorsese: In terms of the consciousness of the general public, close to zilch. In terms of the big-city Film Catholic community (industry aficionados, entertainment journalists, film academics and devoted students, educated and well-heeled film buffs, obsessive film bums), there is certainly respect for The Searchers but true passionate love? The numbers of those who feel as strongly as you, most of whom grew up in the ’50s and ’60s, are, I imagine, relatively small and dwindling as we speak.
I’m pleased to note that some of my complaints about Ford have at least been acknowledged by Scorsese. “A few years ago I watched it with my wife,” he writes, “and I will admit that it gave me pause. Many people have problems with Ford’s Irish humor, which is almost always alcohol-related. For some, the frontier-comedy scenes with Ken Curtis are tough to take.
“For me, the problem was with the scenes involving a plump Comanche woman (Beulah Archuletta) that the Hunter character inadvertently takes as a wife. There is some low comedy in these scenes: Hunter kicks her down a hill, and Max Steiner’s score amplifies the moment with a comic flourish. Then the tone shifts dramatically, and Wayne and Hunter both become ruthless and bullying, scaring her away. Later, they find her body in a Comanche camp that has been wiped out by American soldiers, and you can feel their sense of loss. All the same, this passage seemed unnecessarily cruel to me.”
Here’s what I wrote way back when:
“John Ford‘s movies have been wowing and infuriating me all my life. A first-rate visual composer and one of Hollywood’s most economical story-tellers bar none, Ford made films that were always rich with complexity, understatements and undercurrents that refused to run in one simple direction.
“Ford’s films are always what they seem to be…until you watch them again and re-reflect, and then they always seem to be about something more. But the phoniness and jacked-up sentiment in just about every one of them can be oppressive, and the older Ford got the more he ladled it on.
“The Irish clannishness, the tributes to boozy male camaraderie, the relentless balladeering over the opening credits of 90% of his films, the old-school chauvinism, the racism, the thinly sketched women, the “gallery of supporting players bristling with tedious eccentricity” (as critic David Thomson put it in his Biographical Dictionary of Film) and so on.
The closing shot of John Ford’s The Searchers
“The treacliness is there but tolerable in Ford’s fine pre-1945 work — The Informer, Stagecoach, Young Mr. Lincoln , Drums Along the Mohawk, They Were Expendable , The Grapes of Wrath and My Darling Clementine .
“But it gets really thick starting with 1948’s Fort Apache and by the time you get to The Searchers, Ford’s undisputed masterpiece that came out in March of 1956, it’s enough to make you yank the reins and go ‘whoa, nelly.’
“Watch the breathtaking beautiful new DVD of The Searchers, and see if you can get through it without choking. Every shot is a visual jewel, but except for John Wayne‘s Ethan Edwards, one of the most fascinating racist bastards of all time, every last character and just about every line in the film feels labored and ungenuine.
“The phoniness gets so pernicious after a while that it seems to nudge this admittedly spellbinding film toward self-parody. Younger people who don’t ‘get’ Ford (and every now and then I think I may be turning into one) have been known to laugh at it.
“Jeffrey Hunter‘s Martin Pawley does nothing but bug his eyes, overact and say stupid exasperating lines all through the damn thing. Nearly every male supporting character in the film does the same. No one has it in them to hold back or play it cool — everyone blurts.
“Ken Curtis‘s Charlie McCorry, Harry Carey Jr.’s Brad Jorgensen, Hank Worden‘s Mose Harper…characters I’ve come to despise.
“You can do little else but sit and grimace through Natalie Wood‘s acting as Debbie (the kidnapped daughter of Ethan’s dead brother), Vera Miles‘ Laurie Jorgenson, and Beulah Archuletta‘s chubby Indian squaw (i.e., ‘Wild Goose Flying in the Night Sky’)…utterly fake in each and every gesture and utterance.
“I realize there’s a powerful double-track element in the racism that seethes inside Ethan, but until he made Cheyenne Autumn Ford always portrayed Indians — Native Americans — as creepy, vaguely sadistic oddballs. The German-born, blue-eyed Henry Brandon as Scar, the Comanche baddie…’nuff said.
“That repulsive scene when Ethan and Martin look at four or five babbling Anglo women whose condition was caused, we’re informed, by having been raised by Indians, and some guy says, ‘Hard to believe they’re white’ and Ethan says, ‘They ain’t white!’
“I’ll always love the way Ford handles that brief bit when Ward Bond‘s Reverend Clayton sees Martha, the wife of Ethan’s brother, stroking Ethan’s overcoat and then barely reacts — perfect — but every time Bond opens his mouth to say something, he bellows like a bull moose.”
Final thought: The more I think about the stuff in Ford’s films that drives me crazy, the less I want to watch any Ford films, ever. Okay, that’s not true but the only ones I can stand at this point are The Horse Soldiers, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The Grapes of Wrath, The Informer, The Lost Patrol, The Last Hurrah and, believe it or not, Donovan’s Reef.
Hollywood Reporter critic Todd McCarthy has written a smart essay about who might direct a forthcoming televised version of Stanley Kubrick‘s Napoleon, which Steven Spielberg has said he’s hoping to produce. The piece has many sage observations, but I was especially taken by McCarthy’s clever notion about who would be best suited to direct Kubrick’s 186-page screenplay, which would run about three hours but could theoretically expand into a six-hour miniseries.
That person would not be Spielberg, McCarthy claims, as Napoleon embraces the same misanthropic view of human nature as Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon. “An ideal director should be someone whose style is precise, analytical and cold — an analytical sort with a skeptical, if not caustic, view of human motivations and a belief that intelligence and rationality are very often trumped by destructive traits, particularly hubris,” McCarthy writes.
That is Kubrick in a nutshell, and about as far away as you can get from the “fundamentally optimistic and ennobling attitude that is almost always dominant in Spielberg’s work,” he says.
“Who, then, among big-name Hollywood directors, could realize Napoleon — or, more likely, parts of Napoleon — in a way that would be most compelling and still properly honor Kubrick? Seven clear-cut candidates would be David Fincher, Paul Thomas Anderson, Martin Scorsese, Kathryn Bigelow, Ridley Scott, Christopher Nolan and Peter Weir.”
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Then McCarthy suggests what seems to me like the perfect fellow, “a now highly prominent international director who has only ever undertaken his own projects and has never done anything on this scale but whose work is just as exacting and chilly as Kubrick’s and is probably his intellectual equal: Michael Haneke.
“I have little doubt that Kubrick himself would have loved The White Ribbon, and I believe that, if Haneke shot, in his own style, any portion of Kubrick’s script more or less as he wrote it, we’d have something as close to what Kubrick would have done as any director now on Earth could manage.”
Yesterday’s “Napoleon evolved into Barry Lyndon” riff brought me back to this 5.31.07 piece, which I still quite like:
“Stanley Kubrick ‘always admitted he took too long to make Barry Lyndon,’ former Kubrick assistant Leon Vitali tells The Reeler’s Jamie Stuart. ‘There was about a year of pre-production, a year-plus of shooting, then he took an awful long time to edit. And by the time it was ready to come out, I would say, the blockbuster action movies had become de rigeur. That was what the people really wanted to see. So when this film came out it was received as strange, slow, completely out of context to what was going on.
“‘And I think people were expecting something a little closer to A Clockwork Orange, which, of course had caused such a furor. It was living! A Clockwork Orange was playing for over a year in London. And Barry Lyndon was trashed by many critics, equally so in the UK. That really hurt Stanley a lot. He was very depressed about it. Very upset about it. He took it to heart.
“‘It took a long, long time really before…I can tell you exactly when it was…it was in the early ’90s. The BBC ran a series of his films on television. It was all the films from Lolita, Strangelove, 2001, Clockwork, Barry Lyndon, The Shining …The Radio Times, which is like a TV Guide, but more of a magazine, I suppose — they gave each film a critical breakdown. Well, they gave Barry Lyndon five stars, because they believed that was the true Odyssey film: you start with someone who’s lowdown; he travels all the way around Europe; gets himself into the upper-echelons of the British aristocracy; then there’s a slow decline back to where he came from. It’s a classic Odyssey story.
“‘They gave it five stars and all the other films got four stars, but perfect critiques. And they said if it hadn’t been for the fact that wBarry Lyndon was playing along with these other films, they would have given all those films five stars. I realized there’d been a real turning point, especially toward the end of Stanley’s life, where we were getting feedback from a lot of critics that suddenly said: ‘I’ve just seen Barry Lyndon again and I did not realize at the time what a wonderful film it was.’ They went so lyrical about it.’
“I — not Stuart, not Vitale — have seen Barry Lyndon at least fifteen times. Possibly a bit more than that –I’ve lost count but who counts and who cares? It’s brilliant, mesmerizing, exquisite — a dry, note-perfect immersion into the climate and mores of William Makepeace Thackeray‘s novel, and, by its own terms, one of the most perfectly realized films ever made.
“But the problem — and this needs to be said (or re-said) with all this passionate but vaguely snobby Lyndon gushing going on — is that it turns sour at a very particular point. And, in my eyes, it is just a notch below great because of the dead zone section in the second half.
“I’m speaking of the moment when Barry (Ryan O’Neal) blows pipe smoke into the face of his wife, Lady Lyndon (Marisa Berenson). Something happens at that moment, and from then on it’s “oh, odd…the energy is dropping, and I’m starting to enjoy this less.” For another 30 to 40 minutes (or what feels like that amount of time), Barry Lyndon gets slower and slower — it becomes more and more about stately compositions and dispassionate observation.
“Then, finally, comes the duel with Lord Bullington (Vitale) and Barry gets his groove back. Then that perfect, dialogue-free scene with Lady Lyndon signing checks with Bullington and Reverent Runt at her side, and she signs the annual payment to her ex-husband. And finally, that perfect epilogue.
“There’s one other draggy component that diminishes Barry Lyndon, and in fact makes the dead-zone portion even deader than it needs to be, and that’s Berenson’s performance. Even now, the mere thought of her glacial expression — there’s only one — in that film makes me tighten with irritation.”
I’m as good at guessing or calculating Oscar winners as the next guy, but I’ve never had much interest in Academy navel-gazing or microsopic tea-leaf readings. I really only care about (a) what I want to see win and (b) the apparently likely winners that have no business winning anything. The little man in my chest is telling me something or someone mostly un-predicted will win. Here are my predictions in the major categories plus some of the films and filmmakers that I feel should be winning.
Best Picture of the Year: Obviously Argo. Should win: Zero Dark Thirty. Would Love to See Win Despite The Odds: Silver Linings Playbook.
Best Director: Why does it have to be Ang Lee? I really can’t figure this. No one in earshot has expressed any strong feelings about Life of Pi over the last few weeks. Do people give Oscars to directors of films they mostly respect and admire, but no one is really nuts about? Why can’t the winner be Amour‘s Michael Haneke? Should win: Silver Linings Playbook‘s David O. Russell. Would Love to See Him Win Despite The Odds: Russell.
Best Actor: Obviously Lincoln‘s Daniel Day-Lewis.
Best Actress: Jennifer Lawrence, Silver Linings Playbook. If Amour‘s Emmanuelle Riva takes it, fine. It would actually be a fascinating moment. Lawrence is young, talented, rich…she’ll be totally fine. But I can’t believe that Riva will pull an upset. The little man in my chest can’t see it. It’s a pipe dream that, I suspect, is at least partly about certain columnists wanting to see a left-field occurence of some kind.
Best Supporting Actor: Robert De Niro, Silver Linings Playbook. Because (a) he’s so alive and full of heart in SLP and (b) he campaigned like Bill Clinton did in ’92.
Best Supporting Actress: Obviously Anne Hathaway, Les Miserables.
Best Adapted Screenplay: The Movie Godz don’t want this to happen but the winner will almost certainly be Argo‘s Chris Terrio. I wouldn’t mind if Tony Kushner wins for Lincoln because he’s a good fellow. I don’t blame him for the Connecticut wrongo — that was Spielberg’s doing.
Best Original Screenplay: Zero Dark Thirty, Mark Boal. The very least the Academy can do to make up for that shameful (and regrettably successful) ZD30 takedown effort by the Stalinists. Might Win: Amour, Michael Haneke. It will be nothing short of a howling travesty if Django Unchained wins.
Best Animated Feature: Wreck-It Ralph, Rich Moore. But I don’t really know or care. Most animated films bore me.
Best Cinematography: I know Seamus McHarvey won’t win for Anna Karenina, but he should and that’s all I care about. Who’s going to win? Life of Pi‘s Claudio Miranda because the 3D images look like pretty CG candy? I will take it as a still personal rebuke if Lincoln‘s Janusz Kaminski wins.
Best Costume Design: No question it’ll be Anna Karenina‘s Jacqueline Durran. Right?
Best Documentary: Searching for Sugar Man. Should Win: Dror Moreh‘s The Gatekeepers.
Best Editing: Argo, William Goldenberg. Should Win: Zero Dark Thirty, Dylan Tichenor and William Goldenberg.
Best Foreign Language Film: Obviously Michael Haneke‘s Amour. If Amour didn’t have it in the bag the winner would be/should be Pablo Larrain‘s No.
It hit me about five years ago that the source of my Spielberg animosity was Spielberg disillusionment, and that the essence of this began with my turnaround on Close Encounters of the The Kind, which I loved and worshipped when I first saw it in 1977. And yet I can no longer stand to watch it. The basic lesson (which also applies to many of the films of John Ford from the late ’40s on) is that sentiment doesn’t age well. Here’s how I put it on 11.19.07:
“A 30th anniversary, 3-disc, triple-dip Close Encounters of the Third Kind DVD came out on 11.13. It’s a Blade Runner-style package with the original ’77 version, that awful extra-footage, inside-the-mother-ship version that came out in ’80, and the director’s cut that came out in ’98 or thereabouts. Reading about it reminded me to never, ever see this film again.
“I’ll always love the opening seconds of Steven Spielberg‘s once-legendary film, which I saw on opening day at Manhattan’s Zeigfeld theatre on 11.16.77. (I wasn’t a journalist or even a New Yorker at that stage — I took the train in from Connecticut that morning.) I still get chills thinking about that black-screen silence as the main credits fade in and out. And then John Williams‘ organish space-music creeps in faintly, and then a bit more…slowly building, louder and louder. And then that huge orchestral CRASH! at the exact split second that the screen turns the color of warm desert sand, and we’re in the Sonoran desert looking for those pristine WW II planes without the pilots.
“That was probably Spielberg’s finest creative wow-stroke ever. He never delivered a more thrilling moment after that, and sometimes I think it may have been all downhill from then on**, even during the unfolding of Close Encounters itself.
“In my entire filmgoing life I have never experienced such a radical transformational arc — emotional ecstasy when I was young, aesthetic revulsion when I got older. No other film or filmmaker (except for Ford and Frank Capra) has brought this out in me.
“I saw CE3K three times during the initial run, but when I saw it again on laser disc in the early ’90s I began to realize how consistently irritating and assaultive it is from beginning to end. There are so many moments that are either stylistically affected or irritating or impossible to swallow, I’m starting to conclude that there isn’t a single scene in that film that doesn’t offend in some way. I could write 100 pages on all the things that irk me about Close Encounters. I can’t watch it now without gritting my teeth.
“The bottom line is that everything about that film that seemed delightful or stunning or even breathtaking in ’77 (excepting those first few seconds and the mothership arrival at the end) now makes me want to jump out the window.
“My CE3 pet peeves, in no particular order:
“The way Bob Balaban wails to no one in particular during the Sonoran desert scene, “What’s happening? I don’t understaaahhhhnd!”
“That stupid mechanical monkey with the cymbals.
“The way those little screws on the floor heating vent unscrew themselves.
“The way the electricity comes back on in Muncie, Indiana, at the same moment that those three small UFOs drones disappear in the heavens. Ludicrous.
“The way those Indian guys all point heavenward at the the exact same moment when they’re asked where the sounds came from.
“Melinda Dillon stumbling around in the dark and going “Bahahahhahhree!”
“That older couple standing by the roadside with inexplicable beatific expressions, as if they’re regular UFO fans and they’ve come out for their nightly entertainment.
“That idiotic invisible poison gas scare around Devil’s Tower.
“That awful actor playing that senior Army officer who denies that the poison-gas evacuation a charade.
“The mule-like resistance of Teri Garr‘s character to believe even a little bit in Richard Dreyfuss‘s sightings.
“The awe-struck expressions of all those government guys as they stare at the mother ship under the shadow of Devil’s Tower. They all turn into four year-olds with those goo-goo, gah-gah eyes.
“The worst element of all is the way Spielberg has all those guys who are supposed to board the mother ship wearing the same red jumpsuits and sunglasses and acting like total expression-less robots. Why? No integrated or explained reason is offered whatsoever. Spielberg is just amused by the idea of them looking and acting that way.
“The bottom line is that CE3K is one unlikely, implausible, baldly manipulative cheap-seats move after another. Spielberg knows how to get you — he’s always been good at that — but there’s rarely anything under the “get.”
“The ending of No Country for Old Men is obviously irritating to some, but the thematic echoes and undercurrents from the last scene stay with you like some kind of sad back-porch symphony. Spielberg’s films have almost never accomplished anything close to this. I’m not sure they have even once.
“Has anyone tried watching the ‘little girl in red’ scene in Schindler’s List lately? I love most of that 1993 film, but this scene gets a little bit worse every time.”
February 2013 Update: Two or three weeks ago I ordered the new Bluray of Ford’s The Quiet Mann, mainly because of Ford’s splended sense of visual balance and because I wanted to savor the colors. It arrived during my time in Sundance/Santa Barbara but I haven’t watched it since I got home. Why? Because as beautiful as I know it will be, I know I’m going to be subjected to so much nauseating Irish blarney that my head will come close to exploding.
** Obviously Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T., Indiana Jones and the Temple of Dom, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Schinder’s List, Saving Private Ryan and Lincoln are very fine films, but he never delivered another single “moment” that was quite as thrilling or transportational as that music-crescendo crash at the start of CE3K.
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