“This is a very odd

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“This is a very odd year. The East Coasters love it because it’s so arty, and the Left Coasters hate it because it’s so arty. Here, it’s considered a year for the ‘classics’ divisions of studios, which exist for prestige, to attract filmmakers, and for the occasional breakthrough hit. On that score, Brokeback Mountain has been the subject of many a wager. As in, ‘No way this movie will ever do over $40 million, no matter what.’ (It’s taken in more than $100 million worldwide.) They’re not races at this point so much as duels: the golden girl (Reese) versus the she-man (Felicity), the political martyr (Rachel W.) versus the domestic martyr (Michelle W.). It is not a big year for the studios. The huge campaign by Sony for Memoirs of a Geisha backfired, and all the Geisha perfume and merchandising sits in stores collecting dust. Meanwhile, their picked-up-by-accident-from-a-fire-sale- at-MGM/UA Capote collects kudos. In many ways, it is the Battle of the Tinies. This is the year the Oscars turned into the Independent Spirit Awards, when no one can really learn or generalize from anything that happens so everyone is sort of depressed and disengaged, because it’s not like they can go back to their studios after the ball and make Capote. They are depressed and disengaged because, of course, they fear their audience is disappearing or their studio head is disappearing or their job is disappearing and they may not be wrong.” — Producer Lynda Obst in her back-and-forth Oscar chit-chat with critic David Edelstein in New York magazine. There have been two postings from each so far — the next posting happens Sunday afternoon (3.5).

“The scariest days of my

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“The scariest days of my life are the days that I’m filming…scary because I’m scared of failure. I’m scared I’m not going to satisfy not just myself, but satisfy my film family, my larger family. I want people to like what I do, and I’m scared that I’m going to fail in doing that. So that’s why every morning when I wake up, I’m always bolt upright five minutes before the alarm clock, whether I’ve had one hour’s sleep, two hours, ten hours…I don’t get ten hours’ sleep, my max is about five…I’m always bolt upright in fear, in fear of failure, in fear of not actually making my mark, in fear I haven’t been able to execute what I wanted to do creatively as good as I could have done it. I think it’s healthy to have that fear. I wake up with that same fear whether I’m doing a commercial or whether I’m doing a major movie.” — Tony Scott talking on the Domino DVD commentary track. This is a stunningly honest statement. I don’t know any driven creative person who doesn’t feel more or less the same way. Is the difference between true creative types and people who want to be creative but haven’t quite made it happen..is the difference that the hard-cores are able to handle that waking-up-scared thing each and every morning, and the others can’t? Or does everyone all over the world wake up with the same feeling, no matter what they do?

“Anyone who claims to take

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“Anyone who claims to take pride in a film not doing as well as its supporters hoped it would is, simply, pathetic,” David Poland has written, obviously referring to yesterday’s Wired item about my feeling a wee bit proud about helping to stop the Munich Oscar train in some small way. Poland has gone after
films and filmmakers and fellow journalists, even, and hurt them to some degree (I still carry the scars), so let’s not have any high-minded judgments about pathetic vendettas. I’m much more of an amiable, shoulder-shrugging, comme ci comme ca type of guy than Poland is any day of the week. My confessing to a twinge of pride in helping to stop Munich (not the film, a tolerably flawed thing that hasn’t aged very well since last December, but the Moses-down-from-the-mountaintop Oscar-campaign attitude generated by that Time cover and “we’re letting the film speak for itself” and Poland’s early proclamation that Munich is the presumptive front runner, etc.) is just a little feeling that I let out. I’m not taking out trade ads…big deal.

I’ve read these stories about

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I’ve read these stories about the battling Crash producers three times now — Sharon Waxman and John Horn‘s, I mean — and both are written so impartially that I can’t tell what’s really going on, but it seems to boil down to this: (a) Bob Yari, the former real-estate mogul who’s moneyed his way into the upper ranks of indie film producing over the last two or three years, has sued the Motion Picture Academy and the Producers Guild for denying him producer credit on Crash, (b) Crash wouldn’t have been made if Yari hadn’t put up a reported $7 million bucks (director-writer Paul Haggis has said as much) but the Academy and Producer’s Guild people who blew him off have seemingly said to themselves (by way of my extraordinary powers of perception), “He’s just an oily operator and a money guy and therefore not ‘one of us’, and we have a solemn responsibility to honor the hands-on producers…the people who really produce the movie on a day-by-day, task-by-task basis…so too bad for Yari but he’s rich so let him cry all the way to the bank“; (c) Yari has produced a lot of films recently that have been weak box-office performers (Prime, The Chumscrubber, Winter Passing, Thumbsucker, A Love Song for Bobby Long…otherwise known as “Bobby Way-Too-Long”) and perhaps he’s looking to do a little make-up bookkeeping, which, if true (and I’m not saying it is), could be a factor is his being acccused of hoarding his Crash profits. Cathy Schulman, a hands-on Crash producer who’s one of those lucky few who will be up on stage at the Kodak theatre Sunday night if Crash wins the Best Picture Oscar, recently filed a lawsuit (which I hear makes excellent reading, but unfortunately is not on The Smoking Gun) accusing Yari of acting from “greed and ego” in failing to pay at least $2 million in producing fees to her and partner Tom Nunan. So that boils it down, I think…Yari wants respect as a real producer and not just a financier but the Producers Guild isn’t buying because they see him as just a guy who writes checks and so he’s sued them to make them pay for this condescending attitude, and Yari seems to be a bit of a skinflint when it comes to paying people who think he owes them money…”seems” being the operative term. The man’s name ends in a vowel and he wants respect. If it were my call, I would give him a producer credit and let him take the stage with Schulman. He’s a player…he’s out there plugging and trying to make a dent…he had the moxie to write the check that made the film possible…c’mon.

Here’s a recording of the

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Here’s a recording of the chat I had earlier today with Rachel Boynton, director of the just-opened documentary Our Brand of Crisis (Koch Lorber), a fascinating political doc that just opened at Manhattan’s Film Forum and will be playing in 15 other U.S. cities within the next five or six weeks. Read Laura Kern’s N.Y. Times review for background. I began by asking Boynton whey it took her nearly four years to complete her film, since most of it was shot in late 2002. And she replied….

“Seriously…fuck you and your plebian

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“Seriously…fuck you and your plebian McDonald’s taste in cinema.” — reader Bill Weber over my confessing to feeling “a twinge of pride” over being part of the team that helped take down Munich. It’s hard to explain, but Munich struck me as a pretty good film with third-act problems, but the more I thought about it the less interesting it became. Then I saw it again last December and it didn’t kick back up…it just did the same thing. I may watch it again when it comes out on DVD, but I don’t especially want to.

16 Blocks (Warner Bros., 3.3)

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16 Blocks (Warner Bros., 3.3) is a predictably gritty urban thriller that doesn’t screw up too badly. It’s Richard Donner‘s finest film in a long time, but that’s not saying a whole lot considering his direction of Timeline, Lethal Weapon 4, Conspiracy Theory, the piss-dreadful Assassins, the revoltingly glossy Maverick (which an attorney friend of mine called “a 75 million dollar Elvis Presley film”), the over-boiled Lethal Weapon 3, the manipulative Radio Flyer, and so on. Call it Donner’s best “street” film since Lethal Weapon, even though 16 Blocks walks and talks like a hack job from start to finish. It uses an idea that felt half-fresh 33 years ago in Sidney Lumet‘s Serpico — corrupt cops ready to kill in order to keep themselves from being prosecuted for taking bribes. Richard Wenk‘s script is pure formulaic horseshit about an aging, alcoholic, seen-better-days cop (Bruce Willis) reclaiming his honor by refusing to let a prisoner (Mos Def) be killed by his corrupt pals (led by former partner David Morse). Willis’s older-guy makeup and gut-first waddle-walk seem show-offy, Def’s mincing voice starts to really bother you after a while, the editing cheats all over the place (in the manner of the knocking-on-two-doors sequence at the end of The Silence of the Lambs), Glen MacPherson‘s photography is all long lenses and whip pans, and the whole thing is basically a wank. But it’s not hateful because it has a few half-decent jolts. If it shows up on a flight you’re on six months from now, you could do worse things with your time.

Another good David Carr/”Carpetpagger” rant

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Another good David Carr/”Carpetpagger” rant in the N.Y. Times about some especially irksome social ticks and tendencies in the Oscar game. I’ll just address the complaint about industry journo-bloggers flogging the “Pet Cause” (David Poland on Munich, Roger Ebert on Crash ). I’ve jumped into this swimming pool from time to time (my anti-Peter Jackson and Chicago rants), and I see Carr’s point that “if you harp relentlessly on an agenda, many people will soon wish that you and your pet cause would go for a long walk.” But I’m not at all sorry for pushing The Fog of War two years ago and running that “Message to the Academy” statement in early ’01 that pleaded with voters to hand Steven Soderbergh the Best Director Oscar for Traffic and not for Erin Brockovich, which might have helped avoid a split vote in some small way. And if I’m really honest I have to confess to a twinge of pride over having been one of those voices who helped keep Munich from being serious considered as a Best Picture winner…for being one of those who stood up and fired back against that pompous and preemptive Best Picture campaign that began with a slightly smug-looking Spielberg on the cover of Time alongside the words “secret genius.” Nothing has given me more journalistic satisfaction all year than to be one of the guys who helped throw a cable around the legs of that film and see it teeter and fall and crash into the ground like one of those big “walkers” in The Empire Strikes Back.