“The odds greatly favor death coming with a sudden terrible shock,” a friend once told me, “or from a long agonizing illness.” Polish president Lech Kaczynski, his wife Maria, and several Polish political and military leaders have ducked the second scenario. Their plane hit a treetop as it attempted a landing in heavy fog this morning near Smolensk, about 225 miles southwest of Moscow, and then broke apart and exploded into flames. Awful. The mind reels.
Polish president Lech Kaczynski, Barack Obama in 2009.
Kaczynski, 61, was arriving in Smolensk “for a ceremony commemorating the murder of more than 20,000 Polish officers by the Red Army as it invaded Poland,” a N.Y. Times story reports. TV footage “showed chunks of flaming fuselage scattered in a bare forest. An official with the Russia’s Investigative Committee said possible causes were bad weather, mechanical failure and human error.
“The crash came as a staggering blow to Poland, killing what may be a tenth of country’s top leadership in one fiery explosion.”
“If failure, as the saying goes, is an orphan, then Charles Ferguson‘s No End in Sight can be thought of as a brief in a paternity suit, offering an emphatic, well-supported answer to a question that has already begun to be mooted on television talk shows and in journals of opinion: Who lost Iraq? On Mr. Ferguson√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s short list are Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz and L. Paul Bremer III. None of them agreed to be interviewed for the film. Perhaps they will watch it.” — from A.O. Scott‘s 7.27 review in the N.Y. Times.
Bush administration boob & bad guy L. Paul Bremer III (l.) and retired Army general Jay Garner in Iraq in 2003
I took another stab last night at reading Aaron Sorkin‘s script of Charlie Wilson’s War, and now, on page 32, I’m finally feeling the heat of it. (I don’t know why I couldn’t get into it before.) I’m particularly revved about what Philip Seymour Hoffman will do with the part of Gust Avrakotos, a Middle Eastern intelligence operator. The script is a pleasure to read, but Hoffman’s part is delicious. It’s like ice cream.
Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts in Charlie Wilson’s War
Charlie Wilson’s War is the true story of how a play-it-as-it-lays, cruise-along Texas Congressman (Tom Hanks), Hoffman’s CIA agent and a rich Houston socialite named Joanne Herring (Julia Roberts) joined forces to lead “the largest and most successful covert operation in history,” according to one synopsis.
The efforts of these three, it says, “contributed to the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, with consequences that reverberate throughout the world today.”
I finally saw Charlie Ferguson‘s No End In Sight last night, a brilliant but devastating doc about the Bush administration’s disgusting mismanagement of the situation in Iraq following the March 2003 invasion. The pain and rage we’ve caused over there is incalculable. I came out of this film seething with anger at the Bushies. It made me want to see them strung up. And now along comes this big-studio upper about Americans — three likable renegades — doing the right thing and making it up as they go along and changing history. Charlie Wilson’s War is based on truth, but it reads like a feel-good ’80s nostalgia ride for people who want to remember a time when Americans were effective in that area and even liked, as opposed to how things are today in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The MIke Nichols film is about Charlie, Gust and Joanne travelling the world (Joanne not as much — Roberts’ role is smaller than Hoffman’s and much smaler than Hanks’) and forming unlikely alliances among Pakistanis, Israelis, Egyptians, arms dealers and lawmakers. “Their success was remarkable,” it says here. “Funding for covert operations against the Soviets went from $5 million to $1 billion annually. The Red Army retreated out of Afghanistan.
“When asked how a group of peasants was able to deliver such a decisive blow to the army of a superpower, Pakistani President Mohammad Zia ul-Haq responded simply, ‘Charlie did it.'”
There was a Big Unaddressed Element in Michael Fleming‘s 9.21 Variety story about Crash director Paul Haggis suddenly abandoning Against All Enemies, a feature adaptation of Richard Clarke‘s best-seller about the roots of 9/11, and his jumping into “talks” to direct Tommy Lee Jones and Charlize Theron in The Garden of Elah .
The BUE is why did Against All Enemies, a Sony project with Sean Penn playing Clarke, suddenly disassemble? An ICM source close to the situation says Fleming’s story creates a misleading impression since “there’s always been this little movie” — i.e., the Garden of Elah project — “that Haggis has wanted to do before Enemies, which, for the longest time, has been set for a March or April ’07 start date.”
Haggis never returns calls, but here’s a scenario involving Penn. A person who usually hears reliable info passed part of this along (he first heard it around the time of the Telluride Film Festival) and the core of it has been confirmed again today by another party in a position to know.
Sony execs, it’s being speculated, finally saw a finished version of All The King’s Men in July/August, realized they almost certainly had a bomb on their hands, and decided this was imminent partly due to Penn’s less-than-charismatic lead performance as Willie Stark. (The $3,709,000 it’s expected to earn this weekend means it has bombed, and as much as Penn’s performance has been admired by some criitcs, lovable and charismatic he’s not.)
This determination led to attempts to try and figure a way to uncast Penn as the Enemies lead. One way to push him out was to renegotiate (i.e., reduce) his fee. (Before he won the Best Actor Oscar for Mystic River Penn was probably struggling in the under $5 million range, and after the Oscar he probably got his quote up to the $8 to $10 million range…maybe.) Penn’s CAA agents balked and wouldn’t reduce it, and Haggis stood by Penn, and so Sony pulled the plug.
The Penn-wouldn’t-reduce-his-fee-so-Sony-pulled-the-plug story is precisely how it was passed along to me. The rest is informed speculation. If it turns out to be true it could be read as another instance of a big studio saying no to out-of-proportion demands from a big-name movie star.
Another possible factor is that Sony had developed concerns about the box-office potential of Against All Enemies, given the decent but less-than-explosive responses to United 93 and World Trade Center.
Sony may have also developed cold feet due to the political storm that came out of the anti-Clinton-administration inaccuracies in ABC TV’s Path to 9/11, which covered some of the same territory as the Clarke book, and perhaps because they saw a potential for troublesome controversy in Against All Enemies, which had onscreen speaking parts in an early screenplay for Bill Clinton, Condoleezza Rice and Dick Cheney (but not President Bush).
Fleming reported that Warner Independent Pictures will distribute Garden of Elah (which is ashitty title, by the way…what does “Elah” mean?) domestically, because WB owns the underlying material from which Haggis wrote the script. Elah is an adaptation of Mark Boal‘s Playboy magazine piece “Death and Dishonor” about a mysterious disappearance of an Iraq War veteran.
“Jones will play a career soldier whose son mysteriously goes AWOL, shortly after returning to the U.S. from the front lines in Iraq,” Fleming’s story reads. “Theron will play a local police detective who helps him get to the bottom of the soldier’s disappearance.
“Pic is a fictionalized version of a true story, in which retired Army vet named Lanny Davis uncovered that his son had been murdered during a night of carousing. He’d been attacked by members of his own platoon who were still hopped up from a ferociously violent battlefield tour in Baghdad.”
I’ve spoken with four Civil War viewers, and the general consensus is that director Alex Garland has over-muddied the narrative of this armed domestic conflict flick, or has otherwise bent over backwards in order to discourage audiences from perceiving too many real-life parallels or culture-war animosities.
Garland’s original idea had been “what if the George Floyd rioters and the January6th insurrectionists grew into hardcore military armies and engaged in a serious shooting war?”
But then he and A24 apparently got coldfeet and decided to muddy the waters in order to avoid lighting incendiary fuses in an election year.
But if you put aside Garland’s incongruous or vaguely described red herrings (the anti-government rebels defined as a Texas-California alliance, an “Antifa massacre”, a suppressed Florida rebellion) and boil out the snow, Civil War seems clear enough to me. You’d have to be in a deepdenialpit not to grasp the basics.
The war is basically between (a) rural-minded, diversity-resistant whites…fatigue-wearing MAGA forces loyal to a journalist-despising, Steve Bannon-resembling, martial-law embracing authoritarian President vs. (b) a diversity army (POCs of varying shades with sprinklings of white progressives) that initially seems less heavily-armed and more guerilla-style until the last half-hour when it suddenly transforms into a major, fatigue-and-helmet-wearing military force that storms the White House.
I’ve actually spoken to two viewers who aren’t entirely persuaded that Nick Offerman‘s U.S. President, a blustery, God-invoking bullshitter who has thrown out the Constitution by granting himself a third term, is a Trumpian figure…they’renot? Nor are they entirely certain that the White House assaulters are the diverse anti-fascist “good guys”.
Trust me, Garland makes it quite clear who is who in this thing and yet these fellows are saying “wait, who do they represent again?”
HE is telling you straight and true to dismiss the comment thread smoke-blowers who are arguing that the real-world parallels are too vaguely contoured to mean much. But they do amount to what I’ve stated here…really. Sasha Stone shares this perception.
Yes, Garland has certainly over-muddied the narrative, but at least he’s reversed the ambiguity in one instance — the instantly iconic Jesse Plemons interrogation scene.
Please understand that Civil War doesn’t really kick in until Plemons arrives, but after that point it’s a much more vigorous and accelerated deal with an ending that, as I mentioned Tuesday morning, made me feel so ecstatic I almost experienced a ZeroDarkThirty-ish boner.
I need to see this again ASAP. I’ll probably catch a commercial screening tonight.
…but then it finally turns fierce and riveting in a holy-shit way during the last 40 minutes, and then it ends with a “yes!…oh, yes!” moment that I can’t and won’t describe, but it felt so good my eyes were almost damp with joy.
You can criticize me all you want, but this last scene delivered the kind of emotional satisfaction that I hadn’t experienced since the home-invasion finale in ZeroDarkThirty.
During the first 65% I was saying to myself “this is pretty good dystopian stuff but not as good as Children of Men.” Then it finally got into gear.
Yes, it’s about journalists (Kirsten Dunst, CaileeSpaeny, Wagner Moira, Stephen Henderson) covering a brutal civil war between (a) fatigue-wearing nativist whites with Trumpian, anti-POC mindsets (the fascist, Trump-modelled U.S. President is played by Nick Offerman) and (b) secessionist Western Forces (a California + Texas alliance that’s well-armed and helicoptered and determined to wipe out every last Offerman follower…shoot ‘em down like dogs)…an army that seems to be mostly composed of left-progressive whites, blacks, Asians and Hispanics…
Boil the snow out and we’re basically talking about a blues-vs.-reds Armageddon.
And yes, CivilWar is obviously a slaughterhouse metaphor for the extreme left-right polarization that we’ve all been enduring for last 20-plus years but especially since Trump was elected in ‘16.
But don’t let the critics fool you into thinking it’s more about combat journalism than combat (although it’s told from a journalist perspective), and that it takes some kind of centrist, non-committed view of the war between the cultures…fiercely separate tribes despising each other to such a degree that nobody has any humanity left…it’s been burned and blown out of everyone.
And don’t let the critics fool you about which side this film is on. The journalist characters are just devices — if not distractions then certainly window-dressing and not the real subject (at least in my opinion).
Civil War is a blistering war-is-hell saga, yes, but there’s no dodging the fact that director Alex Garland sides with the lefties.
A24 and the critics have pooled forces in order to sell two deceptive descriptions — i.e., that the film is kind of neutral by not taking sides, and that it’s about combat journalism and not the war they’re covering.
And please understand that the second half of the following paragraph, excerpted from a 3.26.24review by Empire’s John Nugent, is bullshit:
There is dying bravely and honorably (like Ralph Meeker died in PathsofGlory or like Harris Yulin died in Scarface…”fuck you!”) and there is dying like a whimpering dog (like Robert Loggia died in Scarface, two minutes before Yulin). Trust me — CivilWar makes a very clear statement about the latter.
And let’s not forget Winston Churchill’s famous statement that “nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.”
HE wants Poor Things‘ Emma Stone to win the Best Actress Oscar on Sunday night, and if not Stone then Anatomy of a Fall‘s Sandra Huller…please.
I’m just looking forward to a day in which identity won’t count for that much in Oscar voting. If you dip into your soul and bring the stuff that matters, then you’re eligible to be nominated and perhaps even likely to win. Quality, quality, quality of delivery.
Academy members voting to reject commonplace prejudice or blanket dismissals in decades or centuries past is primarily about them and not the actor or performance in question. Wokesters have been playing this trendy little game for six or seven years now, and it’s time to shut it down.
When the day comes that quality is valued more than equity or virtue-signalling, actors like Lily Gladstone will have to sink or swim based on their own chops, instincts and abilities…whether or not they can bring the necessary craft, depth and soul…a performance constructed from deep within or not at all.
Does anyone think that Da’Vine Joy Randolph‘s locked-in Best Supporting Actress win has anything whatsoever to do with identity? Okay, maybe a little but she’s been winning all season long because of how good she is in Alexander Payne‘s The Holdovers…period. I knew she was a slam-dunk Oscar nominee a half-hour after the film had begun screening in Telluride’s Werner Herzog theatre. I leaned over and muttered this to Sasha Stone.
Does anyone think that May December‘s Charles Melton was an early Best Supporting Actor favorite because he rode an identity horse (South Korean lineage + being a symbolic stand-in for underaged victims of sexual assault)? You’d better believe it, and thank God that nag gave out on him.
Does anyone believe that Sayonara‘s Miyoshi Umeki won her Best Supporting Actress Oscar over identity, way the hell back in 1958? She won because she played a selfless, devotional wife who died (along with Air Force husband Red Buttons**) due to racial prejudice. Plus her performance was significantly more affecting than the ones given by Carolyn Jones (The Bachelor Party), Elsa Lanchester (Witness for the Prosecution), Hope Lange (Peyton Place) and Diane Varsi (Peyton Place).
I realize that Gladstone’s identity campaign has stirred a sizable army of woke gladhanders and that the odds favor her winning, but this shit has to stop. It really does.
Posted by World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy on 3.6.24: “Can Gladstone win the Oscar despite not being nominated by BAFTA and her role being a supporting turn? She appears in less than 1/3 of Killers runtime (56 minutes), whereas Stone is practically in every scene of Poor Things. If Gladstone had been campaigned in the Supporting category then she’d already have that Oscar in the bag.”
Posted on 7.11.07...right smack in the downswing of the Iraq invasion, roughly 15, 16 months before Bush became toxic. The same year that saw the release of No Country for Old Men:
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Last weekend’s Oscar Poker podcast was postponed due to Sasha being under the weather (cough, scratchy voice)….apologies. We recorded the current one (“Suspended Animation”) yesterday. Here’s the link.
Without an agenda or any sense of urgency, Sasha and Jeff acknowledge that there’s nothing to discuss about the Oscars other than the Best Actress situation (i.e., Emma Stone vs. Lily Gladstone) and that nothing will be finally and absolutely known until the SAG Awards on 2.24, which is two and a half weeks hence. (Good God.)
Sasha believes that the Golden Globes, Critics Choice and BAFTA awards are next-to-meaningless and that only when the big guilds are heard from we understand what the real sentiments are.
Sasha also mentions that now is the time for the various campaigners to turn up the heat and also for whisper campaigns, and Jeff asks “who is whispering anything about Gladstone?” because no one (and I mean NO ONE) has whispered a damn word. Because they don’t dare.
"The eccentrics are really the only real critics these days. There are so many formerly respectable, self-styled film gurus who've just laid down and accepted their hackdom in the last decade. For anyone who prefers serious criticism, the nutters are all we have." -- comment about August 2010 article titled "Nutter Critics."
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