From late August to roughly mid-November, Capote‘s Phillip Seymour Hoffman was the far-ahead front-runner to take the Best Actor Oscar. But Heath Ledger has surged over the last two or three weeks, and it seems right now as if Ledger is ahead on points…sadness points, empathy points. Ennis del Mar feels like a sadder, more tragic figure than Truman Capote because he isn’t in the least bit brilliant, and enjoys far fewer opportunities and is overcome by “this thing” that he can’t quite make himself deal with. Capote is overcome also…by ambition, by a curiously deep love for Perry Smith, by his own self-interest. But his story is more complex and totally uptown and economically flush, whereas Ennis del Mar’s is rural and fumbling and hardscrabble. Hoffman is such a masterful actor, but Ledger so choked me up. I’m torn by these two performances…torn and divided. I know they’re both great, but I don’t know which way to turn.
Munich Jitters
It’s Wednesday afternoon and everyone’s calling around and asking about Munich …how good, how invincible or vulnerable, and is anyone having shit-fits and if so, who?…whaddaya hear, whaddaya think?
There’s already a half-formed perception that Steven Spielberg’s film isn’t Million Dollar Baby, but some journos are taking their shirts off and waving them over their heads anyway and calling it the new front-runner.
Steven Spielberg conferring with Eric Bana (shades) during last summer’s shooting of Munich
Maybe it is that. I’ll be seeing Munich in about two hours (Wednesday at 7 pm) so I’ll know fairly soon, but in these anxious pre-dawn hours before hitting the beach …er, the AMC Century City complex, it’s probably best to process the Spielberg kowtow with a grain of salt.
Richard Schickel, David Poland, Roger Friedman…can’t quite trust ’em.
You can’t trust Schickel and that Time cover story because as brilliant and insight- ful as he usually is, Schickel is a political operator of sorts, and it seems fair to presume he’s always thinking about his next documentary or subject for his next biography, which may one day (who knows?) be about Spielberg.
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Schickel may be dead-on about Munich, but I can’t buy the shpiel…yet.
You can’t trust Poland’s somewhat measured rave that he posted in his “Hot But- ton” column Monday night, because…smell the coffee…we all have our prejudices and he’s been calling Munich the presumptive front-runner for a long time now, and because he’s been lightly dissing Brokeback Mountain since he first saw it at last September’s Telluride Film Festival.
My antennae reading is that Poland’s been emotionally invested in wanting to steer support away from Ang Lee’s obviously brave and devastating film ever since, and now he’s got a thoughtful and gripping film to fight for, so it’s time to mount that steed and get out that bugle.
And you have to look askance at Roger Friedman’s proclamation in his Fox 411 column (posted late Tuesday night) that “Spielberg’s ‘Munich’ Is the Best Movie of 2005.”
Not because Roger is wrong (I don’t know a damn thing) but because he dismissed Brokeback Mountain as “silly” in a version of the column that ran last night (it’s been deleted, but I saw it last night with my own eyes) and he’s also called it a “strange western.”
To bluntly backhand Munich‘s strongest competitor with a jab like that is thought- less and kinda strange in itself. A movie that has made people weep and now sits at the top of MCN’s Gurus of Gold lists as the most likely Best Picture nominee is “silly”?
Cuddling babies, killing terrorists…two sides of the same sensitive-guy coin
There’s no reason to think Munich isn’t going to be a riveting and stirring film, but will it knock Brokeback‘s stetson off and send it splashing into a mud puddle?
I’ll keep refreshing and adding to this piece over the next 24 to 36 hours as things happen and other voices chime in, but for now…
Next Year’s Balloon
Here are some initial calls about next year’s Ocar contenders. I’d like to hear from anyone who’s read the scripts or can pass along versions of the scripts to yours truly…whatever. I just think it’s time to start looking ahead and planning ahead, etc.
Thanks to Canadian correspondent and rabid script-hound Jean-Francois Allaire for starting me on this jag…
Best Picture: The Departed (Warner Brothers); Babel (Paramount); The Good Shepherd (Universal Pictures); Southland Tales (Universal); Marie Antoinette (Columbia Pictures); The Pursuit of Happyness (Columbia Pictures); Breaking and Entering (The Weinstein Co.); All The King’s Men (Columbia Pictures); A Good Year (20th Century Fox); Stranger Than Fiction (Columbia).
Martin Scorsese, Matt Damon on the set of The Departed
Best Director: Steve Zaillan (All The King’s Men); Anthony Minghella (Breaking and Entering); Martin Scorsese (The Departed); Steven Soderbergh (The Good German); Ridley Scott (A Good Year); Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (Babel); Marc Forster (Stranger Than Fiction); Richard Kelly (Southland Tales).
Best Actor: Will Smith (The Pursuit of Happyness); Matt Damon (The Good Shepherd); Jude Law (Breaking and Entering); Sean Penn (All The King’s Men); Brad Pitt (Babel).
Best Actress: Cate Blanchett (The Good German or Babel ); Maggie Gyllenhaal (Stranger Than Fiction)….need more!
Best Supporrting Actor: Jack Nicholson (The Departed); Hugh Grant (American Dreamz); Gael Garcia Bernal (Babel); Albert Finney (A Good Year); Jamie Foxx (Dreamgirls)
Best Supporting Actress: Zip…anyone?
Best Original Screenplay: Richard Kelly (Southland Tales); Paul Weitz (American Dreamz); Eric Roth (The Good Shepherd); Anthony Minghella (Breaking and Entering).
Best Adapted Screenplay : Sofia Coppola (Marie Antoinette).
Rundown
The first high-profile award announcements will come this Saturday afternoon from the Los Angeles Film Critics, with the final calls starting to leak out sometime around 1 pm or 2 pm.
The National Board of Review — that odd-smelling, Manhattan-based, awards- dispensing group made up of mostly weirdos and wackos (with the noteworthy exception of respected Columbia film professor and scholar Annette Insdorf) would have been first — i.e., today — but the group has delayed their announcements until next Monday, 12.12, due to some omissions on their initially mailed-out ballot.
On the same day the New York Film Critics Circle will announce their picks (expected a final decision around 1 pm Eastern), and since the NYFCC is roughly eight or nine times more respected than the National Board of Review (or is that eighty or ninety times?), the likelihood is that reporters and Oscar assesors will pay even less attention to the NBR winners than usual.
The very next day (Tuesday, 12.13) the Golden Globe nominations will be announced. These noms will be a very big moment for Diane Keaton and The Family Stone…I hope, I hope. And let’s hope that Terrence Howard (Hustle & Flow), bless him, hangs in there as a Best Actor in a Drama nominee.
I don’t have the dates for all the other critics groups but many of them will start to weigh in next week also, or very soon after. Critics groups from Boston, San Francisco, Chicago, Miami, San Diego, Seattle, etc.
Then it’s Christmas and New Year’s and the annual depression and suicide surge that happens ever year, and then…well, here’s the schedule:
* Writers Guild of America and Producers Guild nominations: Wednesday, 1.4.06
* Screen Actors Guild and Directors Guild nominations: Thursday, 1.5.06.
* BFCA Awards: Monday, 1.9.06
* Golden Globe Awards: Monday, 1.16.06
* Directors Guild Awards: Saturday, 1.28.06
* Screen Actors Guild awards: Sunday, 1.29.06
* Academy Award nominations: Tuesday, 1.31.06
* Writers Guild Awards: Saturday, 2.4.06
* BAFTA Awards: Sunday, 2.19.06
* Independent Spirit Awards: Saturday, 3.4.06
* Academy Awards telecast: Sunday, 3.5.06
* Rest Period: March through late June-slash-early July ’06
* Campaigning Strategizing for 2006 Awards (i.e., 2007 Academy Awards) commences and long-term expectations begin to come into focus: Early to Mid-July 2006.
Rumble in the Jungle
I saw King Kong for the second time Monday morning (12.5), and I feel the same way I did after my first viewing Sunday night. About 110 minutes of this three-hour film (i.e., the last two-thirds) are rock ‘n’ roll and worth double the ticket price. And the finale is genuinely touching.
After Sunday night’s screening at the Academy theatre I called the better parts of this monkey movie “damned exciting in an emotional, giddily absurd, logic-free adrenalized way.”
And then I offered a limited apology to its creator, Peter Jackson. “You aren’t that bad, bro,” I said. “You got a few things right this time. The movie is going to lift audiences out of their seats. And I need to say ‘I’m sorry’ for bashing you so much because you’ve almost whacked the ball out of the park this time.”
Almost, I say.
King Kong is too lumpy and draggy during the first hour or so to be called exquisite or masterful, but there’s no denying that it wails from the 70-minute mark until the big weepy finale at the three-hour mark. Monkey die, everybody cry.
The emotional support comes from the current between Kong and Naomi Watts, who is pretty much the soul of the film. I was concerned that the tender eye-rap- port between them would be too much, but it isn’t. It’s relatively restrained and subtle and full of feeling.
And Andy Serkis’ Kong performance doesn’t play like any kind of “Gollum Kong” (which I fretted about a year and a half ago in this space), and in fact he creates something surprisingly life-like, or do I mean ape-like?
The good ship Kong starts out with a spirited montage (scored with a classic Al Jolson tune called “I’m Sittin’ On Top of the World”) that shows what Depression- era 1933 New York City probably looked and felt like on the streets. The recrea- tions of this bygone Manhattan are awesome, immaculate…CGI illusion at its most profound.
So the first ten or so minutes are fine, but then things start to get lunky and pokey and meandering, and the dialogue becomes increasingly stiff and speechy, and before you know it Kong is close to crashing on the rocks and suffering a gash in the hull.
It’s very touch-and-go from roughly the 10 to the 65- or 70-minute mark. I was shifting in my seat and going “uh-oh.” But things take off once Kong snatches Watts, and the energy stays high and mighty from there to the finale.
You can break Kong down into three sections…
(a) The draggy 70-minute first act, which is all New York set-up, character exposi- tion, the long sea voyage to Skull Island, tedious philosophizing and no action to speak of;
(b) the breathtaking, nearly 70-minute Skull Island rumble-in-the-jungle section, including the breathtaking dino-run sequence (an absolute instant classic that’s likely to drive most of the repeat business in and of itself), Kong vs. the T-Rex trio, and the icky spider-and-insect pit sequence;
(c) the 42 or 43-minute New York finale with Kong on-stage, breaking the chrome- steel chains and escaping, trashing Manhattan, finding Watts, and facing planes and fate atop the Empire State building.
If I were a 14 year-old kid talking to friends about all of us seeing Kong a second or third time, I would suggest that everyone try to slip into the theatre after the first hour because who wants to sit through all that talky crap again?
Kong isn’t better than Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures because it’s almost entirely about enthusiasm and has almost nothing to do with restraint (bad word!), but it’s still the most thoroughly pulse-pumping, rousingly kick-ass film Jackson’s ever delivered, and respect needs to be paid.
And I mean especially by someone who’s been bashing the pud out of Jackson for the last four years or so, calling him an indulgent (and overly indulged), excessive, paint-splattering “wheeeeee!” director all this time.
Make no mistake — Kong shows Jackson is still all of these things. But Kong is a movie with a big heart and a stupidly exuberant joie de cinema coarsing through its veins…during the second and third acts, I mean.
And even though Jackson has gone way beyond the point where he’s able to show minimal respect for physics and could-this-happen? issues of logic and probability …a point from which he’ll never return…he manages such amazing visual feats and surges once the film takes off that all objections are moot. Even if some of the action scenes are cartoonishly wham-bam and ridiculous.
Life-size Kong model currently sitting in Manthatan’s Times Square
I’ll get into this a bit more later in the week, but I felt I had to cop to the fact that Jackson has hit one deep into center-left field.
Jack Black’s Carl Denham isn’t at all bad (he’s mouthy and slimy, but he doesn’t reach for outright comedy), Adrien Brody inhabits the playwright-hero to sensitive perfection, and Kong’s snaggle tooth is glimpsed only a few times and a non-issue.
Sometime next week I’m going to run a list of things in King Kong that make little or no sense (and it’s a long list), but right now it’s simply time to acknowledge that the parts of the film that get your blood racing and your emotions worked up work really well.
[Incidentally: I wrote last night that King Kong starts with an overture taken from Max Steiner’s original score for the 1933 film. However, I learned today [Monday] that Steiner’s overture was played before the presentation of Jackson’s film as a mood-setter by the people in the projection department at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences theatre, so it isn’t attached to the film and won’t be heard by regular audiences. That’s a shame.]
Remember This
Match Guilt
I’m feel I should be beating the drum more loudly for Woody Allen’s Match Point (DreamWorks, 12.28) because it’s not just his best in a long time, but one of the best of the year. And I need to stop being wimpy about this.
It really is Allen’s darkest and most precisely calibrated film since Crime and Misdemeanors…clean, cruel and ironic as hell.
Scarlett Johansson, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers in Woody Allen’s Match Point
Any film worth its salt has to have thematic clarity. Match Point‘s theme is clear as a friggin’ bell, and with echoes of George Stevens’ A Place in the Sun and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment,” and it boils down to this:
Be smart and vigilant in life, and maybe you’ll get what you want, or what you think you need. But if you want things to really turn out, be lucky.
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People hate this notion because it means our lives are little silver balls whirling around a roulette wheel. Maybe we’ll plop into a red or black slot at the right time, or into an odd or even number at the wrong time…and maybe something amazing or comical or devastating will come of it. Life is cold, man.
If there wasn’t such a herd mentality in this town, if people weren’t so political and equivocal, Match Point could actually be in the mix for Best Picture.
It’s a slightly better film than Good Night, and Good Luck. It’s not as much of a sad and broken-hearted thing as Brokeback Mountain, but it has as much confidence and self-awareness as Walk the Line. And it’s a good five or ten times better than Memoirs of a Geisha.
The Spanish one-sheet, which, if you ask me, has it all over the U.S. version
Let’s be really honest. I’m not ballsy enough to stand up for the Woody all alone, partly because deep down I’m only 90% supportive of Match Point (I have some problems with this and that aspect, but nothing humungous), but I feel bolder with Oscar prognosticators Pete Hammond, Sasha Stone and Eugene Hernandez listing it among their top five.
So I guess I’m like Bobby Kennedy after Eugene McCarthy got 42% of the vote in the 1968 New Hampshire primary against Lyndon Johnson. I’m going, “Uhh, okay …there’s something happening here and I’m joining the insurrectionists.”
Screw the herd mentality and the hell with political and equivocal. The more I think about Match Point, the better it seems. Woody’s easily a Best Original Screenplay contender, and…well, at least that.
I said last May at the Cannes Film Festival that Match Point isn’t quite as good as Woody’s Crimes and Misdemeanors, but it deals the same kind of cards and has its footing in more or less the same philosophical realm.
And I’ve said this three or four times, but the finale kills.
Set in present-day England (mostly London, Match Point is about a tennis instruc- tor namd Chris Wilton (Jonathan Rhys- Meyers) who relationships his way into an upper-crust English family by way of one of his male students, a cheerful smoothie named Tom Hewett (Matthew Goode).
Chris is soon romancing and then marrying Tom’s sister Chloe (Emily Mortimer), but almost-as-quickly getting involved with Tom’s fiance, a struggling American actress named Nola Rice (Scarlett Johansson).
The story essentially turns on the matter of Nola becoming pregnant and insisting that Chris leave his wife for her, and how Chris deals with the pressure of this.
Rhys-Meyers handles his part skillfully and with exactly the right balance between terrible, gut-wrenching guilt and the suggestion of a sociopathic undercurrent. But it’s Johansson, far and away, who gives the finest performance. She seems in possession of a fierce, almost Brando-esque naturalism here. She grabs Allen’s dialogue by the shirt collar and slaps it around.
Match Point feels a bit pat from time to time. The talk feels a little too polite here and there, and certain aspects of the plot feel a bit forced. But that’s Woody these days, and in this instance, in this realm, that’s pretty damn good.
Sense of Gravity
Do today’s African-American actors radiate a graver, weightier aura…a stronger sense of manly conviction than white actors these days? Do they seem more rooted, less whimsical…more dependably earnest?
Or has it always been this way and white-guy columnists like myself are only just waking up to this? Or is the whole idea bogus and agenda-driven?
Would Mekhi Phifer have been better as Ennis del Mar or Jack Twist?
I got started on this theory when a New York-area guy named Richard Szathmary suggested this morning that if two black actors — Mekhi Phifer and Sharif Atkins, say — had played the kissin’ cowboys in Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain (Focus Features, 12.9) that reactions among younger-male heteros might be less squea- mish.
I’m referring to under-25s in both Flyover Country and in the big cities guffawing derisively at the film’s teaser-trailer. (I really hate bringing up this asinine reaction, but I’ve been told about it time and again.)
The feeling is that Atkins and Phifer falling for each other would somehow seem more solemn and steady and take-it-to-the-bank.
That’s how it seems to Szathmary, at least…a guy who hasn’t seen seen Brokeback Mountain but has his suspicions based on the trailer…a notion that there’s something vaguely flakey and untrustworthy about Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger. Something in their eyes, manner…something deep down.
I’ve seen Brokeback and I completely disagree. Ledger and Gyllenhaal totally inhabit their characters and then some, revving their emotional engines to a high pitch.
It wouldn’t have quite worked, in any case, to have a couple of black actors playing sheepherders-for-hire in a film that begins in the early ’60s, given the relatively few people of color known to have worked the open range forty or forty-five years agi, not to mention the conservative-racist mentality of big-time ranchers back then.
Sharif Atkins
And I can’t help wondering if Ang Lee and James Schamus would have been able to find a pair of marquee-worthy black actors if they’d said “Fine, let’s cast it this way.” The machismo factor among African-American actors is thought to be pretty high. Remember Will Smith’s reaction to briefly kissing a guy in Six Degrees of Separation?
But maybe Szathmary is onto something anyway.
The more I think about these guys and whatever that thing is they seem to possess, the more solid this idea seems.
I’m thinking of a list that includes (but certainly isn’t limited to) Terrence Howard, Don Cheadle, Denzel Washington, Mos Def, Jamie Foxx, Samuel L. Jackson, Phifer, Taye Diggs, Ludacris, Delroy Lindo, Bill Duke, Ving Rhames, Atkins, Ice Cube, Lawrence Fishburne, Sean Patrick Thomas, Henry Simmons, Keith Hamilton Cobb.
I could even include even Sean Combs, whom I believed as a death-row inmate in Monster’s Ball, despite his not being much of an actor.
“The American cinema is dominated by commanding black males,” wrote Szathmary. “Men whom one can picture as real men. Guys who don’t whine and have real voices and calmly and capably make their moves and get things done.”
As the risk of sounding like a cultural bubble-dweller or zombie of some kind, there’s something to this view. A feeling that there’s something more dependable and rock-solid about black guys…except when it comes to Martin Lawrence, the dandified Will Smith and that guy who played the sick-fuck Little Ze in City of God.
Jamie Foxx
At the same time the notion that guys with darker skin have it all over guys of European heritage sounds simplistic and dumb-assed.
On the other hand there was a voice inside me that said “cool” when that fast-flurry rumor popped up last year about Colin Salmon being one of the finalists being tapped to play 007.
I could riff some more about about this and call up ten or fifteen producers, agents and casting directors and chew it over with them, but let’s just throw this one out and get some reader reactions.
Joan and Toni
L.A. City Beat film critic Andy Klein came on “Elsewhere Live” last night (i.e., Thursday) to talk about the leading Best Actress contenders, and all the verbal sifting-through led me to realize something I hadn’t quite come to on my own:
The two finest waker-upper female performances of the year are both underdogs. One isn’t being spoken of very much, and the other isn’t even on the map.
I’m speaking of Joan Allen’s alcoholic, emotionally off-balance mother of four girls in Mike Binder’s The Upside of Anger and Toni Collette’s stressed, hurting, buoy- ant Philadelphia attorney in Curtis Hanson’s In Her Shoes.
Kevin Costner, Joan Allen in The Upside of Anger
Allen is sitting on a few Oscar prognosticator “maybe” lists, but not so you’d notice. It’s high time to refresh the browser. There’s an emotional hair-trigger element that Allen gets hold of in Anger that feels almost giddy at times. She’s bracing and sexy, willful and vulnerable and quirky. (And let’s not forget how sublime she was in Sally Potter’s Yes.)
No one anywhere is talking about Collette at all. Obviously people disagree with my feelings about her. Maybe In Her Shoes getting only a 75% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes had its effect, and maybe the underwhelming box office was a factor, or Fox not going to bat for Collette with trade ads…whatever.
I know what exceptional in-the-pocket acting is — I know what it feels like, sounds like — and I know plenty of others who feel this way, and those who’ve dismissed Collette’s performance out-of-hand are just being slackers.
Allen and Collette’s performances are funny, sad, joyful, exuberant. They raise the emotional thermometer and have all kinds of ins and outs, and the plain simple truth is that none of the other supposed contenders (i.e., the ones on everyone’s lists) are in their realm.
I believe this because…
Toni Collette in In Her Shoes
Reason #1: Reese Witherspoon, the presumed front-runner for her fine inhabiting of June Carter in Walk the Line, gives an assured movie-star performance…yes. Her acting is robust and and authentically down-home. She does more with less and is quite radiant and likable, and she sings like an angel. And she’s almost a supporting character (I said “almost”). And she doesn’t have one of those hair- pulling, “look ma, I’m acting” scenes to work with either.
But at the same time Witherspoon isn’t exactly pushing her boundaries or rewriting the book on acting. She’s great but c’mon…
Reason #2: Judi Dench, another presumed front-runner for her playing a spirited upper-class snob in Mrs. Henderson Presents, can do this sort of thing in her sleep. Academy people always kowtow to world-class British actresses when they get hold of a good part, and that’s happening here. Like I said a few weeks ago, Dench “has a pitch-perfect way of delivering zap lines with just the right tone of upper-class indifference, and yet the joke is always on her.” But it’s a performance that’s straight out of her kit bag.
Reason #3: Sarah Jessica Parker is the one who goes through the big character journey in The Family Stone, starting out all rigid and butt-plugged and then evol- ving into somone calmer and more centered. But she’s not in Witherspoon’s class, much less Allen’s or Collette’s (in part because of how her character is written).
Reese Witehspoon in Walk the Line
Reason #4: Charlize Theron gives an impassioned, balls-out, tough-as-nails performance in North Country, but the movie, a fairly solid drama on its own terms, didn’t cause much of a stir when it came out, and people feel a little Charlize-d out from the Monster hoopla of…what was it, two years ago?
Reason #5: This is a non-reason, but I haven’t seen Felicity Huffman playing a man undergoing a gender-switch procedure in Transamerica, so she’s off the table for now.
Reason #6: Keira Knightley doesn’t have that element of a-churning-river-running- through-her…not at all…not in Pride & Prejudice, and not in any performance she’s given in any film so far. It’s vaguely silly that people have even put her on their lists. Just forget it.
Reason #7: Ziyi Zhang is a barely emotive presence in Memoirs of a Geisha. She’s all makeup and porcelain and dropping her gaze to the ground. She’s young and vigorous and great on her feet with a sword, but quiet acting isn’t her game. She may get swept along in the current of all the below-the-line nominations that Geisha is expected to receive, but she doesn’t deliver on her own and that’s a fact.
Charlize Theron in North Country
Reason #8: Claire Danes doesn’t have nearly enough to work with in Shopgirl, and her character’s a bit opaque and the movie’s underwhelming, so forget it.
Reason #9: Gwyneth Paltrow’s daughter-of-Anthony-Hopkins character in Proof is too gloomy and self-involved. That was my reaction, at least — I felt she was too wrapped up in her woe-is-me blanket, and I found that off-putting after a while. The film has its moments and Paltrow’s performance has merit, but it’s a stretch to talk about Oscar contention.
Reason #10: The White Countess is said to have more than a few problems so however good Natasha Richardson may be, a nomination doesn’t seem to be in the cards.
Reason #11: It’s a little early to say anything, but the word around the campfire is that the same equation may apply to notions of Q’orianka Kilcher being singled out for her work in The New World.
I said no other female performance this year was quite in Allen and Collette’s realm. That isn’t entirely accurate if you allow Robin Wright Penn’s brief but startling turn in Rodrigo Garcia’s Nine Lives into the mix.
Wright Penn may not be on-screen long enough to qualify for contention in the Best Supporting Actress category (in people’s heads, I mean) but she’s absolutely mesmerizing in this film. I wrote about it in October (scroll to the bottom of the page).
Jason Isaacs, Robin Wright Penn in Nine Lives
Forget It
Forget that whole Sundance Film Festival ’06 thing I posted in this section a few days ago, and in the main column last Saturday. Almost all of it was wrong and that’s that.
I’ve been reliably persuaded that a good portion of the titles I mentioned won’t be at the festival, and that some weren’t even submitted (!).
Five or six days ago a friend from the festival circuit sent me a document put together by Film Finders called “Tipped for Sundance,” and it had those 22 films listed.
I went for the information because (a) the Film Finders people are known to be fairly well connected on a business affairs level, (b) the document was passed along only a few days before the official announcements (the trades will be running the stories this week), (c) the document “looked” superficially reliable — it had production info history, sales contact info and phone numbers for each film — and (d) the combined reptutations of Film Finders and the guy who sent me the document convinced me the information was probably jake.
And for the most part, it wasn’t.
Fist in the Air
“I finally got a chance to catch Rent yesterday and wanted to let you that your review in your 11.9 column absolutely nailed it. Columbus did a helluva job transferring this thing to the screen and I agree it worked better in many ways than the play.
“Film allows the viewer to peer deep into its characters souls in a way that the stage (for all its vitality) cannot, and Columbus’s choices were excellent. He let the music speak for itself and didn√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢t let his ego or pretensions get in the way of telling the story.
“I can’t help but think that a more auteur-type (Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee were both attached at one time) would be more inclined to put a personal spin on the material, and thus dilute the essence of Larson’s music. The ego-less direction from Columbis lets the source material to shine through.
Rosario Dawson, Adam Pascal in Rent
“Like many others, I find myself caught in a daily grind of trying to move forth and survive in life’s scramble. Rent reminded me of how important prioritization is. When Rosario Dawson sings to Adam Pascal about how ‘life is yours to miss’ …damn, it hit hard.
“Rent reminded me of why I love art and the way it can help affirm why we’re all here.
“I think many critics are down on this thing due to an anti-Columbus bias (which I previously shared), or they just didn’t enjoy the style, music, etc. They’re missing the boat. This film is much better than Chicago and has an emotional immediacy that is heartfelt and pure.
“So three cheers for Rent and your standing-by-what-you-saw review. It’s another reason why I will remain a loyal reader of your column.” — Kyle Fredette
Brokebackers
“In the Twin Cities where I live, the Brokeback Mountain trailer has been getting lots of snickers at cineplexes and Landmark chain theaters alike. I’m no homo- phobe, and I’m a big Ang Lee fan who will be seeing Brokeback the weekend it opens here. But the collective reaction in some of these theaters has been really something.
“People openly laugh at Heath Ledger’s line ‘Why can’t I quit you?’ A very liberal friend of mine has even taken to doing his own impression of Ledger saying that line, to the howls of all of our other friends.
“While Ledger is very talented and deserves more respect than he gets, I think the idea of the star of A Knight’s Tale uttering that line is hitting people as utterly ridiculous. The line is going to be the thing that most people think of when they think of this movie. Watch over the coming months as it becomes a catchphrase.
“I’m looking forward to this movie and I’m sure it will be deserving of/in contention for numerous awards. But I expect it’s going to get quite a beating from the mass culture, in the way The Crying Game did. I hope I can find a showing in a theater on opening weekend that isn’t ruined by laughter.” — Brian Roche
“I am a 20-something woman, and James Shamus is right, as he usually is about these things, that women like me are the target audience for Brokeback Mountain, and I will be there as soon as it opens here in DC.
“But whenever I bring up BBM to any heterosexual male under 30 I just get the ‘independent films are all about gay cowboys eating pudding’ thing from South Park. These men are well-educated and enjoy independent film. And I don’t think there is so much of a cringe factor as one might think for these young-ish men watching two dudes in love. I just do not think that is the problem.
“As much as I love South Park (and personally think that their characterization of independent film is quite funny), I have to blame Matt and Trey for the chortle and giggle factor that I have run into. However, I also think that if these men got their asses into the seats and watched the film I think most of them would enjoy it. But please, take me with a huge grain of salt as I really liked Ang Lee’s The Hulk.” — Haley Aurora
“Okay, message received: Jeffrey Wells is full-steam behind Brokeback Mountain as the film of the year. Groovy. And your worries about a bubba backlash against it, spurred by homophobia, are entirely realistic and well-founded.
“But with respect, is it possible you’re overlooking the other side of the coin here?
“What I mean is, if one is going to be upfront about the fact that there will be people who will skip this movie, dump on this movie, refuse to like or admit liking this movie because of what side they take in the moral debate over gay rights…is it not only fair but simply intellectually honest to also concede that there will be people who will reflexively praise and exalt it, without having seen it because they take the opposite side and want to see a gay-themed movie succeed?
“I’m not accusing you of outright bias. You’ve seen the film, it’s obviously gotten to you in a profound way, and you’re convinced of it’s innate quality. But if it’s going to be fair-game (and I believe it ought to be) to read between the lines of negative reviews and question whether an element of homophobia is clouding the reviewer’s decision, would you not agree that it’s equally fair-game to do the same for the positive reviews?
“Not every critic is going to agree that this is a great or even good film. But how many of them will be, you’ll pardon the expression, bending over backwards to be positive about it for fear of appearing in cahoots with the religious right wackjobs who will probably be trashing it?
“I’m from Massachusetts and am regularly in the social company of various gay, bisexual or otherwise pals. I’ve supported just about every gay rights cause that’s come down the pike. I’m a full-bore enemy of religious fundamentalism in all it’s forms. I want to see a serious gay-themed movie make a mainstream impact to help society grow up a bit over the whole issue…
“And thus far, I think this movie looks like a chore. I’m sorry, but thats the impression I have right now. It’s possible my impressions are wrong, but for trailer-one this has looked to me like a drippy, soap-opera-ish, Titanic/Gone With The Wind/Cold Mountain chick-flick melodrama, and I’m regarding the prospect of seeing it with the same basic feeling you’ve expressed over sitting through the future Harry Potter sequels.
“But when I tell people this at least half of them look back at me in shock, as though I just implied that AIDS was a plague from God or that the Holocaust hadn’t occured. And I’m not seeing this discussed anywhere in the critical press, so far. Instead, the prevailing theme is Brokeback Mountain will be great, and anyone who doesn’t think so is a Christian right homophobe. And frankly, that’s just plain uncool.” — MST Mario
Wells to MST Mario: You contemptible closet-Christian bigot homophobe skeptical Ang Lee-dissing prick!
“Seriously, MST, I hear you and you’ve made some good points, but trust me on these two points: Brokeback Mountain in no way resembles Titanic or Gone With the Wind or anything along those lines. It’s austere, under-stated, and doesn’t try to massage you into feeling anything. Secondly and more importantly, it’s not a gay or gay-themed film. It really isn’t, despite what you may be presuming.
“I program a series of fine-film cinema locations here in Melbourne Australia, and last weekend I held the first public screening of Broekback Mountain in Australia as part of a promotional weekend launching a loyalty card. I attended the screening with my partner after having watched the film at an exhibitor’s screening the week prior.
“I enjoyed the film greatly at the exhib’s screening, perhaps only finding it a little longer than it could have been, but that’s probably my exhibitor’s hat talking. It actually wasn’t until I was driving home that evening that the weight of the film dawned on me and I was left profoundly moved by it. All night I wanted to talk about the film but forbid myself, not wanting to set expectations too high for my partner.
“I agree that the film is certainly worthy of a Best Pic nomination as well as a win, but from where I am standing the U.S. is a very conservative place at the moment and I wonder about the film’s box-office performance there and whether it will get the support it will need from the expanse between the east and west coasts.
“Perhaps the old adage that any publicity is good publicity” stands in this case. Who knows? Maybe if Oprah likes it, it’s in with a chance with the women of middle America.
“What I want to ltell you was that when I was at the screening, I found myself surprised by the reaction it received from the audience. Admittedly the cinema is in a very upscale location in the suburbs of Melbourne and the audience was partially made up of film buffs who jumped on the opportunity to see the film 2 months out from local release.
“But there was not a peep from anyone during the film’s more intimate scenes, 80% of the audience sat in their seats during the closing credits and when the film ended I overhead nothing other than quiet comments along the lines of ‘amazing,’ ‘brilliant,’ ‘incredible’ and other assorted superlatives. There were also plenty of tears and gasps during the film’s more shocking moments.
“It’s this reception that has me thinking that regardless of the U.S. reception, the film should find considerable success internationally.” — Kristian Connelly, Film Programmer, Cinema Europa, Traditional & Gold Class Village Cinemas, Australia
“I can understand why you’re on the Brokeback horse, but you better be paying real attention to those snickers in those heartland theaters.
“America is homphobic. To its core. And this is a film — no matter what you feel — about two guys in love. About two guys who have (rather explicit) sex with each other. And no matter how sensitive or how well-made, Brokeback mountain ain’t gonna fly in flyover country.
“And please dump your prejudices and realize that Pride and Prejudice is the kind of lush, middle-brow based-on-a-classic picture that Hollywood just loves to gift with Oscar noms.” — Lewis Beale
Match Guilt
I’m feel I should be beating the drum more loudly for Woody Allen’s Match Point (DreamWorks, 12.25) because it’s not just his best in a long time, but one of the best of the year. And I need to stop being wimpy about this.
It really is Allen’s darkest and most precisely calibrated film since Crime and Misdemeanors…clean, cruel and ironic as hell.
Scarlett Johansson, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers in Woody Allen’s Match Point
Any film worth its salt has to have thematic clarity. Match Point‘s theme is clear as a friggin’ bell, and with echoes of George Stevens’ A Place in the Sun and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment,” and it boils down to this:
Be smart and vigilant in life, and maybe you’ll get what you want, or what you think you need. But if you want things to really turn out, be lucky.
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People hate this notion because it means our lives are little silver balls whirling around a roulette wheel. Maybe we’ll plop into a red or black slot at the right time, or into an odd or even number at the wrong time…and maybe something amazing or comical or devastating will come of it. Life is cold, man.
If there wasn’t such a herd mentality in this town, if people weren’t so political and equivocal, Match Point could actually be in the mix for Best Picture.
It’s a slightly better film than Good Night, and Good Luck. It’s not as much of a sad and broken-hearted thing as Brokeback Mountain, but it has as much confidence and self-awareness as Walk the Line. It’s five or ten times better than Memoirs of a Giesha, and the Munich comparisons will soon be clear.
The Italian one-sheet…right?
Let’s be really honest. I’m not ballsy enough to stand up for the Woody all alone, partly because deep down I’m only 90% supportive of Match Point (I have some problems with this and that aspect, but nothing humungous), but I feel bolder with Oscar prognosticators Pete Hammond, Sasha Stone and Eugene Hernandez listing it among their top five.
So I guess I’m like Bobby Kennedy after Eugene McCarthy got 42% of the vote in the 1968 New Hampshire primary against Lyndon Johnson. I’m going, “Uhh, okay …there’s something happening here and I’m joining the insurrectionists.”
Screw the herd mentality and the hell with political and equivocal. The more I think about Match Point, the better it seems. Woody is easily a Best Original Screen- play contender, and…well, at least that.
I said last May at the Cannes Film Festival that Match Point isn’t quite as good as Woody’s Crimes and Misdemeanors, but it deals the same kind of cards and has its footing in more or less the same philosophical realm.
And I’ve said this three or four times, but the finale kills.
Set in present-day England (mostly London, Match Point is about a tennis instruc- tor namd Chris Wilton (Jonathan Rhys- Meyers) who relationships his way into an upper-crust English family by way of one of his male students, a cheerful smoothie named Tom Hewett (Matthew Goode).
Chris is soon romancing and then marrying Tom’s sister Chloe (Emily Mortimer), but almost-as-quickly getting involved with Tom’s fiance, a struggling American actress named Nola Rice (Scarlett Johansson).
The story essentially turns on the matter of Nola becoming pregnant and insisting that Chris leave his wife for her, and how Chris deals with the pressure of this.
Rhys-Meyers handles his part skillfully and with exactly the right balance between terrible, gut-wrenching guilt and the suggestion of a sociopathic undercurrent. But it’s Johansson, far and away, who gives the finest performance. She seems in possession of a fierce, almost Brando-esque naturalism here. She grabs Allen’s dialogue by the shirt collar and slaps it around.
Match Point feels a bit creaky from time to time. The talk feels a little pat here and there, and certain aspects of the plot feel a wee bit forced. But that’s Woody these days, and in this instance, that’s pretty damn good.
Sense of Gravity
Do today’s African-American actors radiate a graver, weightier aura…a stronger sense of manly conviction than white actors these days? Do they seem more rooted, less whimsical…more dependably earnest?
Or has it always been this way and white-guy columnists like myself are only just waking up to this? Or is the whole idea bogus and agenda-driven?
Would Mekhi Phifer have been better as Ennis del Mar or Jack Twist?
I got started on this theory when a New York-area guy named Richard Szathmary suggested this morning that if two black actors — Mekhi Phifer and Sharif Atkins, say — had played the kissin’ cowboys in Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain (Focus Features, 12.9) that reactions among younger-male heteros might be less squeamish.
I’m referring to under-25s in both Flyover Country and in the big cities guffawing derisively at the film’s teaser-trailer. (I really hate bringing up this asinine reaction, but I’ve been told about it time and again.)
The feeling is that Atkins and Phifer falling for each other would somehow seem solemn and steady and take-it-to-the-bank.
That’s how it seems to Szathmary, at least…a guy who hasn’t seen seen Brokeback Mountain but has his suspicions based on the trailer…a notion that there’s something vaguely flakey and untrustworthy about Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger. Something in their eyes, manner…something deep down.
I’ve seen Brokeback and I completely disagree. Ledger and Gyllenhaal totally inhabit their characters and then some, revving their emotional engines to a high pitch.
It wouldn’t have quite worked, in any case, to have a couple of black actors playing sheepherders-for-hire in a film that begins in the early ’60s, given the relatively few people of color known to have worked the open range forty or forty-five years agi, not to mention the conservative-racist mentality of big-time ranchers back then.
Sharif Atkins
And I can’t help wondering if Ang Lee and James Schamus would have been able to find a pair of marquee-worthy black actors if they’d said “Fine, let’s cast it this way.” The machismo factor among African-American actors is thought to be pretty high. Remember Will Smith’s reaction to briefly kissing a guy in Six Degrees of Separation?
But maybe Szathmary is onto something anyway.
The more I think about these guys and whatever that thing is they seem to possess, the more solid this idea seems.
I’m thinking of a list that includes (but certainly isn’t limited to) Terrence Howard, Don Cheadle, Denzel Washington, Mos Def, Jamie Foxx, Samuel L. Jackson, Phifer, Taye Diggs, Ludacris, Delroy Lindo, Bill Duke, Ving Rhames, Atkins, Ice Cube, Lawrence Fishburne, Sean Patrick Thomas, Henry Simmons, Keith Hamilton Cobb.
I could even include even Sean Combs, whom I believed as a death-row inmate in Monster’s Ball, despite his not being much of an actor.
“The American cinema is dominated by commanding black males,” wrote Szathmary. “Men whom one can picture as real men. Guys who don’t whine and have real voices and calmly and capably make their moves and get things done.”
As the risk of sounding like a cultural bubble-dweller or zombie of some kind, there’s something to this view. A feeling that there’s something more dependable and rock-solid about black guys…except when it comes to Martin Lawrence, the dandified Will Smith and that guy who played the sick-fuck Little Ze in City of God.
Jamie Foxx
At the same time the notion that guys with darker skin have it all over guys of European heritage sounds simplistic and dumb-assed.
On the other hand there was a voice inside me that said “cool” when that fast-flurry rumor popped up last year about Colin Salmon being one of the finalists being tapped to play 007.
I could riff some more about about this and call up ten or fifteen producers, agents and casting directors and chew it over with them, but let’s just throw this one out and get some reader reactions.
Joan and Toni
L.A. City Beat film critic Andy Klein came on “Elsewhere Live” last night (i.e., Thursday) to talk about the leading Best Actress contenders, and all the verbal sifting-through led me to realize something I hadn’t quite come to on my own:
The two finest waker-upper female performances of the year are both underdogs. One isn’t being spoken of very much, and the other isn’t even on the map.
I’m speaking of Joan Allen’s alcoholic, emotionally off-balance mother of four girls in Mike Binder’s The Upside of Anger and Toni Collette’s stressed, hurting, buoy- ant Philadelphia attorney in Curtis Hanson’s In Her Shoes.
Kevin Costner, Joan Allen in The Upside of Anger
Allen is sitting on a few Oscar prognosticator “maybe” lists, but not so you’d notice. It’s high time to refresh the browser. There’s an emotional hair-trigger element that Allen gets hold of in Anger that feels almost giddy at times. She’s bracing and sexy, willful and vulnerable and quirky. (And let’s not forget how sublime she was in Sally Potter’s Yes.)
No one anywhere is talking about Collette at all. Obviously people disagree with my feelings about her. Maybe In Her Shoes getting only a 75% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes had its effect, and maybe the underwhelming box office was a factor, or Fox not going to bat for Collette with trade ads…whatever.
I know what exceptional in-the-pocket acting is — I know what it feels like, sounds like — and I know plenty of others who feel this way, and those who’ve dismissed Collette’s performance out-of-hand are just being slackers.
Allen and Collette’s performances are funny, sad, joyful, exuberant. They raise the emotional thermometer and have all kinds of ins and outs, and the plain simple truth is that none of the other supposed contenders (i.e., the ones on everyone’s lists) are in their realm.
I believe this because…
Toni Collette in In Her Shoes
Reason #1: Reese Witherspoon, the presumed front-runner for her fine inhabiting of June Carter in Walk the Line, gives an assured movie-star performance…yes. Her acting is robust and and authentically down-home. She does more with less and is quite radiant and likable, and she sings like an angel. And she’s almost a supporting character (I said “almost”). And she doesn’t have one of those hair- pulling, “look ma, I’m acting” scenes to work with either.
But at the same time Witherspoon isn’t exactly pushing her boundaries or rewriting the book on acting. She’s great but c’mon…
Reason #2: Judi Dench, another presumed front-runner for her playing a spirited upper-class snob in Mrs. Henderson Presents, can do this sort of thing in her sleep. Academy people always kowtow to world-class British actresses when they get hold of a good part, and that’s happening here. Like I said a few weeks ago, Dench “has a pitch-perfect way of delivering zap lines with just the right tone of upper-class indifference, and yet the joke is always on her.” But it’s a performance that’s straight out of her kit bag.
Reason #3: Sarah Jessica Parker is the one who goes through the big character journey in The Family Stone, starting out all rigid and butt-plugged and then evol- ving into somone calmer and more centered. But she’s not in Witherspoon’s class, much less Allen’s or Collette’s (in part because of how her character is written).
Reese Witehspoon in Walk the Line
Reason #4: Charlize Theron gives an impassioned, balls-out, tough-as-nails performance in North Country, but the movie, a fairly solid drama on its own terms, didn’t cause much of a stir when it came out, and people feel a little Charlize-d out from the Monster hoopla of…what was it, two years ago?
Reason #5: This is a non-reason, but I haven’t seen Felicity Huffman playing a man undergoing a gender-switch procedure in Transamerica, so she’s off the table for now.
Reason #6: Keira Knightley doesn’t have that element of a-churning-river-running- through-her…not at all…not in Pride & Prejudice, and not in any performance she’s given in any film so far. It’s vaguely silly that people have even put her on their lists. Just forget it.
Reason #7: Ziyi Zhang is a barely emotive presence in Memoirs of a Geisha. She’s all makeup and porcelain and dropping her gaze to the ground. She’s young and vigorous and great on her feet with a sword, but quiet acting isn’t her game. She may get swept along in the current of all the below-the-line nominations that Geisha is expected to receive, but she doesn’t deliver on her own and that’s a fact.
Charlize Theron in North Country
Reason #8: Claire Danes doesn’t have nearly enough to work with in Shopgirl, and her character’s a bit opaque and the movie’s underwhelming, so forget it.
Reason #9: Gwyneth Paltrow’s daughter-of-Anthony-Hopkins character in Proof is too gloomy and self-involved. That was my reaction, at least — I felt she was too wrapped up in her woe-is-me blanket, and I found that off-putting after a while. The film has its moments and Paltrow’s performance has merit, but it’s a stretch to talk about Oscar contention.
Reason #10: The White Countess is said to have more than a few problems so however good Natasha Richardson may be, a nomination doesn’t seem to be in the cards.
Reason #11: It’s a little early to say anything, but the word around the campfire is that the same equation may apply to notions of Q’orianka Kilcher being singled out for her work in The New World.
I said no other female performance this year was quite in Allen and Collette’s realm. That isn’t entirely accurate if you allow Robin Wright Penn’s brief but startling turn in Rodrigo Garcia’s Nine Lives into the mix.
Wright Penn may not be on-screen long enough to qualify for contention in the Best Supporting Actress category (in people’s heads, I mean) but she’s absolutely mesmerizing in this film. I wrote about it in October (scroll to the bottom of the page).
Jason Isaacs, Robin Wright Penn in Nine Lives
Forget It
Forget that whole Sundance Film Festival ’06 thing I posted in this section a few days ago, and in the main column last Saturday. Almost all of it was wrong and that’s that.
I’ve been reliably persuaded that a good portion of the titles I mentioned won’t be at the festival, and that some weren’t even submitted (!).
Five or six days ago a friend from the festival circuit sent me a document put together by Film Finders called “Tipped for Sundance,” and it had those 22 films listed.
I went for the information because (a) the Film Finders people are known to be fairly well connected on a business affairs level, (b) the document was passed along only a few days before the official announcements (the trades will be running the stories this week), (c) the document “looked” superficially reliable — it had production info history, sales contact info and phone numbers for each film — and (d) the combined reptutations of Film Finders and the guy who sent me the document convinced me the information was probably jake.
And for the most part, it wasn’t.
Fist in the Air
“I finally got a chance to catch Rent yesterday and wanted to let you that your review in your 11.9 column absolutely nailed it. Columbus did a helluva job transferring this thing to the screen and I agree it worked better in many ways than the play.
“Film allows the viewer to peer deep into its characters souls in a way that the stage (for all its vitality) cannot, and Columbus’s choices were excellent. He let the music speak for itself and didn√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢t let his ego or pretensions get in the way of telling the story.
“I can’t help but think that a more auteur-type (Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee were both attached at one time) would be more inclined to put a personal spin on the material, and thus dilute the essence of Larson’s music. The ego-less direction from Columbis lets the source material to shine through.
Rosario Dawson, Adam Pascal in Rent
“Like many others, I find myself caught in a daily grind of trying to move forth and survive in life’s scramble. Rent reminded me of how important prioritization is. When Rosario Dawson sings to Adam Pascal about how ‘life is yours to miss’ …damn, it hit hard.
“Rent reminded me of why I love art and the way it can help affirm why we’re all here.
“I think many critics are down on this thing due to an anti-Columbus bias (which I previously shared), or they just didn’t enjoy the style, music, etc. They’re missing the boat. This film is much better than Chicago and has an emotional immediacy that is heartfelt and pure.
“So three cheers for Rent and your standing-by-what-you-saw review. It’s another reason why I will remain a loyal reader of your column.” — Kyle Fredette
Brokebackers
“In the Twin Cities where I live, the Brokeback Mountain trailer has been getting lots of snickers at cineplexes and Landmark chain theaters alike. I’m no homo- phobe, and I’m a big Ang Lee fan who will be seeing Brokeback the weekend it opens here. But the collective reaction in some of these theaters has been really something.
“People openly laugh at Heath Ledger’s line ‘Why can’t I quit you?’ A very liberal friend of mine has even taken to doing his own impression of Ledger saying that line, to the howls of all of our other friends.
“While Ledger is very talented and deserves more respect than he gets, I think the idea of the star of A Knight’s Tale uttering that line is hitting people as utterly ridiculous. The line is going to be the thing that most people think of when they think of this movie. Watch over the coming months as it becomes a catchphrase.
“I’m looking forward to this movie and I’m sure it will be deserving of/in contention for numerous awards. But I expect it’s going to get quite a beating from the mass culture, in the way The Crying Game did. I hope I can find a showing in a theater on opening weekend that isn’t ruined by laughter.” — Brian Roche
“I am a 20-something woman, and James Shamus is right, as he usually is about these things, that women like me are the target audience for Brokeback Mountain, and I will be there as soon as it opens here in DC.
“But whenever I bring up BBM to any heterosexual male under 30 I just get the ‘independent films are all about gay cowboys eating pudding’ thing from South Park. These men are well-educated and enjoy independent film. And I don’t think there is so much of a cringe factor as one might think for these young-ish men watching two dudes in love. I just do not think that is the problem.
“As much as I love South Park (and personally think that their characterization of independent film is quite funny), I have to blame Matt and Trey for the chortle and giggle factor that I have run into. However, I also think that if these men got their asses into the seats and watched the film I think most of them would enjoy it. But please, take me with a huge grain of salt as I really liked Ang Lee’s The Hulk.” — Haley Aurora
“Okay, message received: Jeffrey Wells is full-steam behind Brokeback Mountain as the film of the year. Groovy. And your worries about a bubba backlash against it, spurred by homophobia, are entirely realistic and well-founded.
“But with respect, is it possible you’re overlooking the other side of the coin here?
“What I mean is, if one is going to be upfront about the fact that there will be people who will skip this movie, dump on this movie, refuse to like or admit liking this movie because of what side they take in the moral debate over gay rights…is it not only fair but simply intellectually honest to also concede that there will be people who will reflexively praise and exalt it, without having seen it because they take the opposite side and want to see a gay-themed movie succeed?
“I’m not accusing you of outright bias. You’ve seen the film, it’s obviously gotten to you in a profound way, and you’re convinced of it’s innate quality. But if it’s going to be fair-game (and I believe it ought to be) to read between the lines of negative reviews and question whether an element of homophobia is clouding the reviewer’s decision, would you not agree that it’s equally fair-game to do the same for the positive reviews?
“Not every critic is going to agree that this is a great or even good film. But how many of them will be, you’ll pardon the expression, bending over backwards to be positive about it for fear of appearing in cahoots with the religious right wackjobs who will probably be trashing it?
“I’m from Massachusetts and am regularly in the social company of various gay, bisexual or otherwise pals. I’ve supported just about every gay rights cause that’s come down the pike. I’m a full-bore enemy of religious fundamentalism in all it’s forms. I want to see a serious gay-themed movie make a mainstream impact to help society grow up a bit over the whole issue…
“And thus far, I think this movie looks like a chore. I’m sorry, but thats the impression I have right now. It’s possible my impressions are wrong, but for trailer-one this has looked to me like a drippy, soap-opera-ish, Titanic/Gone With The Wind/Cold Mountain chick-flick melodrama, and I’m regarding the prospect of seeing it with the same basic feeling you’ve expressed over sitting through the future Harry Potter sequels.
“But when I tell people this at least half of them look back at me in shock, as though I just implied that AIDS was a plague from God or that the Holocaust hadn’t occured. And I’m not seeing this discussed anywhere in the critical press, so far. Instead, the prevailing theme is Brokeback Mountain will be great, and anyone who doesn’t think so is a Christian right homophobe. And frankly, that’s just plain uncool.” — MST Mario
Wells to MST Mario: You contemptible closet-Christian bigot homophobe skeptical Ang Lee-dissing prick!
“Seriously, MST, I hear you and you’ve made some good points, but trust me on these two points: Brokeback Mountain in no way resembles Titanic or Gone With the Wind or anything along those lines. It’s austere, under-stated, and doesn’t try to massage you into feeling anything. Secondly and more importantly, it’s not a gay or gay-themed film. It really isn’t, despite what you may be presuming.
“I program a series of fine-film cinema locations here in Melbourne Australia, and last weekend I held the first public screening of Broekback Mountain in Australia as part of a promotional weekend launching a loyalty card. I attended the screening with my partner after having watched the film at an exhibitor’s screening the week prior.
“I enjoyed the film greatly at the exhib’s screening, perhaps only finding it a little longer than it could have been, but that’s probably my exhibitor’s hat talking. It actually wasn’t until I was driving home that evening that the weight of the film dawned on me and I was left profoundly moved by it. All night I wanted to talk about the film but forbid myself, not wanting to set expectations too high for my partner.
“I agree that the film is certainly worthy of a Best Pic nomination as well as a win, but from where I am standing the U.S. is a very conservative place at the moment and I wonder about the film’s box-office performance there and whether it will get the support it will need from the expanse between the east and west coasts.
“Perhaps the old adage that any publicity is good publicity” stands in this case. Who knows? Maybe if Oprah likes it, it’s in with a chance with the women of middle America.
“What I want to ltell you was that when I was at the screening, I found myself surprised by the reaction it received from the audience. Admittedly the cinema is in a very upscale location in the suburbs of Melbourne and the audience was partially made up of film buffs who jumped on the opportunity to see the film 2 months out from local release.
“But there was not a peep from anyone during the film’s more intimate scenes, 80% of the audience sat in their seats during the closing credits and when the film ended I overhead nothing other than quiet comments along the lines of ‘amazing,’ ‘brilliant,’ ‘incredible’ and other assorted superlatives. There were also plenty of tears and gasps during the film’s more shocking moments.
“It’s this reception that has me thinking that regardless of the U.S. reception, the film should find considerable success internationally.” — Kristian Connelly, Film Programmer, Cinema Europa, Traditional & Gold Class Village Cinemas, Australia
“I can understand why you’re on the Brokeback horse, but you better be paying real attention to those snickers in those heartland theaters.
“America is homphobic. To its core. And this is a film — no matter what you feel — about two guys in love. About two guys who have (rather explicit) sex with each other. And no matter how sensitive or how well-made, Brokeback mountain ain’t gonna fly in flyover country.
“And please dump your prejudices and realize that Pride and Prejudice is the kind of lush, middle-brow based-on-a-classic picture that Hollywood just loves to gift with Oscar noms.” — Lewis Beale
In today’s Wall Street Journal, John Lippman reports that about three and a half weeks ago Warner Bros. agreed to pay $17.5 million to a group of people “who held rights related” to the Dukes of Hazzard TV series. The payout involved a collossal mistake: Warner Bros. and the producers of the upcoming Dukes of Hazzard feature (opening August 5th) never secured the movie rights. The Hazzard TV series itself “was based on a 1975 United Artists film called Moonrunners,” Lippman recounts. “Producer Bob Clark acquired [the Moonrunners] script by Gy Waldron, which Waldron also directed. In 1978, Warner Bros. acquired the rights to make Moonrunners into the Hazzard TV series. But according to Mr. Clark’s lawsuit, the studio never acquired the movie rights.” The $17 million payout represents about a third of the film’s original budget of $55 million.
Romances between immensely attractive, super-successful movie stars don’t last for all kinds of reasons. I won’t go into all the usual factors but one thing that really throws a monkeywrench into these relationships is when their children — i.e., the movies they make together — turn out badly.
The Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie alliance is toast. I don’t actually know if they’re “with” each other and it’s none of my damn business anyway, but they’re in Mr. and Mrs. Smith together and if my observation has any validity they’re doomed as a couple because their child is a rank embarrassment…thoughtless, pointlessly prettified, emotionally neutered.
Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie in Mr. and Mrs. Smith
It’s Charlie’s Angels 2 bad, Xanadu bad, Hook bad, Howard the Duck bad. It’s soulless, unfunny (except for some of costar Vince Vaughn’s lines), bombastic, totally sterile and inhuman. Did I leave out hateful?
I don’t want to go over the top here so let me take a breath and step back for a minute or two and collect myself. (Beat.) Okay, I’ve done that…fine. I’m calm. I’m breathing easy. This movie has cancer of the soul. It made my skin crawl.
But it’s tracking really well and 20th Century Fox is going to get a very big opening weekend out of it, and then the word will go out and the public will do whatever. I’m told that the $110 million-plus tab was fronted by New Regency Pictures so Fox probably won’t be hurt that badly.
Mr.and Mrs. Smith might even turn a modest profit. (I just winced after writing that.) I told a friend at Fox News this morning what I think and he replied, “Really? I’ve heard good word of mouth.” And the Hollywood Reporter‘s Michael Rechtshaffen is calling it “a blast” and “explosively funny.” There’s really no accounting for taste.
Rechtstaffen says that Pitt and Jolie “expertly [toss] off the type of well-sharpened banter that was the domain of Gable and Lombard and Tracy and Hepburn, [and] make one swell combative couple.” Forget the banter. The only thing these two have going for each other in this film is the fact that they’re attractive and well photographed.
What happened here? Doug Liman, the director, is one of the hippest and brightest guys working in the big leagues right now. I’m a fan from way back (loved Swingers, adored Go, really liked The Bourne Identity) and I’m just in shock about this.
Remember that wild Las Vegas car chase in Go? Fantastic and funny, beautifully staged and edited…and there isn’t a shred of the same cleverness or whoopee humor in any of the Smith action sequences.
That Matt Damon car-chase sequence through the streets (and over the sidewalks and down the stone staircases) of Paris in The Bourne Identity? It was nearly a classic, right up there with the John Frankenheimer Paris chase sequence in Ronin…and that old Bourne magic vanishes when the Smiths hit the road.
I’m speaking of a freeway car-chase shootout in the third act that reminded me of the highly-touted freeway blastaway in The Matrix Reloaded, which wasn’t that great in retrospect.
Don’t studio execs understand that without a fresh idea or subversive attitude of some kind that sequences filled with bullets and velocity and crashing metal are numbing and infuriating, not to mention totally over?
Doug Liman during shooting of The Bourne Identity.
I’m referring to the Fox and New Regency executives who rode herd on this because Mr. and Mrs. Smith feels a lot more like their film than Liman’s. I know that Liman was very precise and exacting on the set, but this movie is an almost total perversion of everything the words “a Doug Liman film” have meant to me over the last eight or nine years, so I’m figuring studio muscling had to be at least part of the equation…right?
If it wasn’t then I don’t know what to think. I’m stunned.
Ludicrous isn’t the word for the basic idea, which is that John Smith (Pitt) and his wife Jane (Jolie) are both highly skilled assassins who’ve kept their professions hidden from each other and so both are totally clueless until fate intervenes.
The only way to run with this set-up is to accept it as a metaphor. A look at a marriage gone dry in a soulless, money-obsessed culture, and how a typical fast-lane couple manages to renew their desire for each other and fall back in love again.
They accomplish this feat by trying to kill each other. It gets them hot and bothered and re-arouses their libidos.
The problem is that the metaphor isn’t developed or played with to any degree. The internals barely register. You don’t given a damn about Pitt or Jolie’s hearts or souls, much less their marriage, because the film is so invested in gloss and hardware and terrific clothes and one stupendously dull video-game action sequence after another.
Angelina Jolie
Except, that is, for some marital-therapy sessions between Pitt and Jolie that Liman uses as bookends. (I’m guessing these were from the post-principal additional photography shoots, thrown in to humanize their relationship.) Their rapport in this footage feels loose and less constrained in a semi-improvised, Soderbergh-y way. It’s the only thing Pitt and Jolie do in this film that feels the least bit engaging.
I really can’t believe this Rechtshaffen review. He calls it “adult-skewing.” He says “it could have easily been a Hitchcock vehicle.” The “bottom line” tagline above his review says it’s “The Bourne Identity meets The War of the Roses.”
If you want a less obliging, more hard-nosed opinion, consider Todd McCarthy’s
5.29 review in Variety.
If you want a really good film about married-to-each-other assassins, go rent John Huston’s Prizzi’s Honor.
Kelly’s Return
I wrote a piece last March about Donnie Darko director Richard Kelly for the print version of Radar, which had its newsstand debut in mid May. Here’s the article off the Radar site.
Most of what I originally wrote never saw print because Radar wanted the piece tight and quick. The Radar guys are doing a good job. They’ve assembled an attractive, well-designed read, and the online component has been getting some media attention lately, but I figure it can’t hurt to run the Kelly piece in its original form:
In less than two hours, Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko went from being the most buzzed-about new film at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival to something of a disappointment. As far as a good number of buyers and journalists sitting in the audience at Park City’s Eccles theatre were concerned, that is. Lights down, lights up…thud.
Richard Kelly, director-writer of Donnie Darko and the forthcoming Southland tales, snapped at the West Hollywood location of Le Pain Quotidien on 3.17.05
Then Darko tanked in theatres when it opened ten months later, and the 26 year-old Kelly (just four years out of USC film school) began his jail sentence in hell.
“I went into a long period of depression,” he says. “2001 was a pretty miserable year. 2002 was nearly as bad. I felt like my career was sliding off the edge of the coast.”
Darko is about a schizophrenic high school kid (Jake Gyllenhaal) who sees into the future while coping with the attentions of a tall phantom rabbit with silver teeth. It gets the loneliness of being a smart perceptive kid living on his own wavelength…which is probably why (eureka!) Darko eventually caught on as an under-30 cult flick. (The DVD has made $10 million, and the director’s cut, re-released into theatres last summer and out on DVD last February, has taken in about $4.7 million.)
Sometime last fall, after three years of being a what’s-your-name-again? director whose projects couldn’t get financing, the fog lifted.
The word got around that Kelly had a pulse again because his script for Domino (New Line, 8.3) — a smartly aggressive action piece that Tony Scott was directing about the real-life Domino Harvey (Keira Knightley), a Beverly Hills model who became a bounty hunter — whupped ass.
It also began to seep through that Kelly’s long-planned Southland Tales — a futuristic, darkly comic, vaguely musical L.A. fantasia — had solved its funding problems and was preparing to shoot in July.
Darko star Jake Gyllenhaal, Kelly during filming in ’00.
It was Darko`s dispiriting reception that led Kelly to write Southland Tales “at the height of my depression,” in the spring and summer of ’01. It was about anger and frustration, but also wanting to put together “something really epic, a big tapestry about Los Angeles…given my state of mind at the time, it was bound to be subversive.”
Scott (Man on Fire, Top Gun) became a fan of Tales after reading it in ’02, and translated this enthusiasm into an insistence that Kelly write the Domino script.
Getting this gig “certainly helped my career,” says Kelly, but the tide really turned when a British distribution executive named Ben Roberts, who had distributed Darko in the U.K. before getting hired to run Universal International, “fought really hard” to persuade Universal Pictures to greenlight Southland Tales for $15 million.
A key reason Tales was able to get rolling, according to Kelly’s producer Scott McKittrick, was the commitment of actors like Dwayne Johnson (a.k.a., “the Rock”), Seann William Scott and Sara Michelle Gellar to lower their fees, which was largely about their admiration for Darko.
Kevin Smith, who did the voice-over commentary with Kelly on the Darko DVD, is playing a legless Iraqi War veteran.
Tales is set in Los Angeles of 2008, over the 4th of July weekend. It’s partly about the loneliness of life in L.A. and trying to hustle a living in the entertainment industry, and partly about coming political chaos — the action occurs in the wake of political hysteria that has turned the country into an ultra-surveilled police state.
Kelly says some of the music will be composed by Moby. (The film’s website has a quote from Perry Farrell, which seems to indicate he’s also part of the mix.) He also warns against anyone looking for any kind of traditional break-into-song scheme.
“If you don’t like musicals there’s no way this will fall into the category of offense,” he says. “When people see it they’ll go `Hmm…that’s subtle.’ In the end, I may be the only human being on earth who actually considers it to be a musical.”
An early visualization of the police-state atmosphere in Southland Tales.
Kelly, who turned 30 on 3.28, is Irish-looking — fair skin, freckles — and has an easy-going manner. He calls himself “an aging frat guy who likes to go out and have a good time.” But when he puts on his filmmaker’s cap he becomes the Sorcerer’s Apprentice and a different mentality comes through.
It’s not like Kelly is against commercial films, but so far the indications are that he’s into satiric, subversive, sci-fi mindblower-type stuff …and come what will of it. His current passion is for Philip K. Dick (the author of “Blade Runner” and “I Can Remember It For You Wholesale,” which became Total Recall) and, as Southland Tales shows, the whole illuminate-the-present-by-showing-a-twisted-future thing.
The son of a NASA engineer, Kelly was born and raised near Richmond, Virginia. His talent at drawing and painting got him into art studies at USC, but he transferred to film studies when art courses drove him crazy.
Kelly might be lonely and a bit of a dweeb at heart (like all writers…don’t get him started on women). He talks like a grounded adult and seems to know about focus and discipline. But ask him a question and he digresses and meanders. (You have to keep going back and ask it repeatedly — he’ll eventually cough up an answer.)
Becoming famous “has certainly helped me get more dates with women,” he comments. “All the sorority girls at USC thought I was interesting but kind of dark and weird. They were more into the guys from Orange County who were going to be stockbrokers. I got made fun of a lot for being a cinema student, and after a while it started to get to me. I started to doubt myself, and writing Darko was my response to that self-doubt.
Kelly isn’t all about ominous heavy-osity. He once made an “aggressively stupid” frat-boy movie in film school — a Super 8 effort called The Vomiteer.
Jake Gyllenhaal, Jena Malone in Donnie Darko
“It was just me being an idiot frat guy with a fraternity brother…being that guy, a guy who can’t stop vomiting, and he’s isolated because of that. It was a ridiculously stupid short film…it was basically about me trying stage to really good puke scenes. We found different ways of using the hose and having it come out of his mouth.”
But his next student film, The Goodbye Place, was more serious and ambitiously filmed, and when it was done and shown to his fellow students, Kelly knew (or at least began to believe) that he had the makings of real filmmaker.
USC’s film school “is a very cutthroat environment,” he recalls. “If your film sucks, you’re going to hear that. Everyone goes to USC thinking they’re going to be the next George Lucas, and when they get there they realize it’s a lot harder. But after I showed this film at the end of my junior year, I got an overwhelming feedback. The instructors were giving me pats on the back.”
Kelly’s favorite films of all time, he says, are two Kubricks — 2001: A Space Odyssey and “the masterpiece, one of the most profound films ever made,” Barry Lyndon.
Kelly’s most recent gun-for-hire gig was writing a screenplay for a $100 million, special-effects-heavy World War II film about the sinking of the USS Indianapolis, based on Doug Stanton’s “In Harm’s Way.”
The Warner Bros. production would be about the torpedoing of the famed U.S. destroyer in July 1945, as well as the horrible five-day ordeal that roughly 900 sailors went through in the water while waiting to be rescued. Over 300 were eaten by sharks, and only 317 survived. Kelly calls it “the tightest thing I’ve ever written.”
Painting depicting the rescue of the survivors of the sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis in July, 1945.
Because of the 317 men who lived, Kelly has titled his WWII script Optimistic. Does this suggest a basic philosophy? There’s a temptation to presume that.
Attention: For a taste of the mood and some of the musical inclinations of Southland Tales, check out the very cool website that Kelly has been developing and constantly adding to over the last few months.
Batman Shutout
Devin Gordon’s recent, very glowing Newsweek article got me excited about seeing Chris Nolan’s Batman Begins (Warner Bros., 6.15), and then I was invited to see it last night (Thursday, 6.2) at 7 pm.
But my friend at Warner Bros. assumed I knew where the screening room was and I didn’t, and I couldn’t find the damn thing and now I’ll have to wait until Monday night’s showing.
First I went to the old Warner Bros. headquarters at 75 Rockefeller Plaza, which is where Warner Bros. used to have a screening room when I was living here and starting out 25 years ago. No go, and the guy at the desk didn’t have a clue where it might be.
The bicycle rickshaw guy who peddled me over to Columbus Circle, taken on our way up Sixth Avenue — Thursday, 6.2.05, 7:12 pm.
I kept asking and pleading, and then another lobby security guy in a blue sports jacket finally said, “Columbus Circle!”
It was 7:05 pm…shit! I sprinted over to Sixth Ave. but there were no cabs, so I took one of those coolie bicycle cabs — 20 bills! — up Sixth and over to Columbus Circle, and it was kinda cool riding in one of those things. These coolie cabs can really maneuver around traffic and make good time. But I felt badly for the driver when we hit the slight uphill grade going west on Central Park South. The poor guy was huffing and puffing and sweating like a dog.
The guy dropped me off and I finally found the Warner headquarters on the side of the building but again, no go. Screening? Who? Batman? What?
By this time it was 7:25 pm and I knew the game was over. As I stood in the lobby Larry King walked in and some well-tended middle-aged woman came up to him and went “Lahrry!” and gave him a hug and an air-kiss. This only made me feel worse, for some reason.
I walked outside and sat down on some kind of shiny knee-high chrome sculpture…dejected, depressed and faintly pissed.
And So It Starts
A guy named Chuck Rudolph wrote Wednesday with a beef about my Cinderella Man review, and I responded to him point for point. Here’s how it went down:
“I just read your piece on Cinderella Man shortly after reading a review by one of the best critics out there (and one on your temp turf), Matt Seitz of the New York Press.
“I thought your piece did a fair job of summing up what you found to be the film’s perks without grandstanding or overselling, yet I couldn’t help but wonder why you seemed content to skim the surface and never get into the real meat of the film.
“Cinderella Man is obviously going to be considered a serious film by a lot of people, so why not treat it as such with a sharper review?”
Russell Crowe (left) as Jim Braddock in Cinderella Man.
Wells to Rudolph: I got into the meat that is there, as presented and assembled by Howard. I don’t think he made a feel-good movie about the Depression. I think he made a movie about a guy who got focused and motivated by life kicking him and his family in the ass. I relate to this. This is how it works sometimes. This is how it worked with Jim Braddock.
Ron Howard’s films will always be indictable for attempting to stir the emotions in ways that are not in synch with the aesthetics of raw unvarnished realism. Matt isn’t wrong in saying what he’s said, but it’s just a way of looking at this thing. It’s not the only way. You should go to see it before spouting off.
Rudolph: You write that Braddock lucked into his underdog run…
Wells: He did, pretty much.
Rudolph: “And that suggests his second chance at a boxing career ran no deeper than such.”
Wells: As Tennessee Williams once wrote, “Sometimes there’s God…so quickly!”
Rudolph: “You go on about the performances (and you’re probably right about Giamatti), but you seem disinterested in the nature of the characters that are being performed and what they represent in the film’s scheme. (Paddy Considine is of so little importance his character is really called “friend-of-Jim Braddock”?)
Wells: Considine’s character is a representation of the leftist social ferment that was brewing back then. Big fucking deal. It’s okay that he’s there, it’s another thread in the weave, but I’m not going to disgress into a big political thing because of this character.
Rudolph: Overall you seem to be playing down the fact that this is a Ron Howard movie (‘a few Ron Howard-y touches here and there, but not so you’d really notice’) because you know what that entails but you fell for it anyway: manipulative bullshit.
Wells: It’s manipulative, but it’s not bullshit. It is recognizably real in terms of facts, emotionality, behavior. The story is based on truth.
Rudolph: “I may be oversimplifying but as someone who through experience has come to more or less believe in the auteur theory (by way of Truffaut, recently reprinted in the Jules and Jim DVD), and the statement that ‘I don’t believe in good and bad films. I believe in good and bad directors.’ There’s nothing in your piece that indicates, no matter how much you want to talk about Howard not pushing the buttons too much, that this is anything other than a Ron Howard movie, i.e. a movie that glosses over facts and ignores reality in order to make his subject more audience-friendly.”
Wells: I don’t doubt that Howard has ignored something (or some things) in Braddock’s story. And so fucking what? Everybody cuts and prunes and shapes in order to achieve the end that they’re after. Elia Kazan chopped out two thirds of Steinbeck’s East of Eden to make the movie that he made. Does that mean he’s a manipulative bullshitter?
Rudolph: “Who cares about the emotional buttons when Howard so easily manipulates deeper themes to sell his audience lies about themselves and this country?”
Wells: Howard will always sugar-coat (but not as much as he used to) and romanticize and fiddle around with things in order to make what he wants to come out, come out. This is not a criminal offense.
Rudolph: “Maybe you think he does a good job of examining the social conditions of Braddock’s life and makes a fair case for him as an honest underdog champion, but then why not talk about it in your review?”
The real Jim Braddock (left) and Max Baer, in snaps taken sometime around 1934 or ’35 or thereabouts.
Wells: He does a fairly decent job of depicting the social conditions. It didn’t seem deceptive or dishonest to me. I recognized the Depression milieu he created as more or less the same Depression milieu I’ve been absorbing through books, movies, articles and documentaries since I was ten or twelve years old. I used to hate Ron Howard and his overly massaged and commercial approach to moviemaking, but he’s a much better, significantly more honest filmmaker now. He’s not making Far and Away here.
Rudolph: “What’s sticks out to me in Seitz’s review is the line ‘the movie encourages us (just as the Depression-era media encouraged fight fans) to view Braddock as an emblem of the common man’s aspirations.’ What that’s saying is that Howard is hustling audiences with this movie just like fight promoters hustled crowds back during the Depression.
Wells: Is Matt saying that the people who identified with Braddock and fell for the come-from-behind legend were being sold a bill of goods and were suckers? That the real Braddock story was…what?….less difficult or more layered than the ones we’re shown in the film, or the one that was conveyed to the masses by newspaper writers back in the early to mid ’30s? If this is the case, okay. The reality probably was blurred to some extent. But this doesn’t invalidate the central theme of the film, which is that when life puts your feet to the fire and really clobbers you two or three times, you can either get going and fight back…or you can fold your tent and become a drunk or whatever.
Rudolph: I would hope that a contemporary film about this subject would have the intelligence to at the very least acknowledge this symmetry, but knowing Howard’s track record it seems doubtful that Seitz is off-base here, and your review more or less confirms that for me — the film didn’t have you looking any deeper than the superficiality Howard was shoving down your throat, and that you’re praising him for doing it in such a mild-mannered fashion only speaks to the insidiousness of his touch. You sound like one of the people who got hustled, and you’re happy about it.
Russell Crowe as the legendary Jim Braddock, Paul Giamatti as his manager Joe Gould in Ron Howard’s Cinderella Man.
Wells: I am content that what Howard showed me was a reasonable facsimile of life (and particular lives) back then. I recognized what I saw as a reasonably accurate depiction of a lot of things, both sociologically specific and metaphorical and spiritual and what-have-you. I don’t feel the hate about this film that I’ve felt about Howard’s films in the past. I hate crapola in all its forms. I don’t feel this way about Cinderella Man.
Rudolph: “I guess I’m just disappointed that you seemed to have been suckered by the film. Your nose for bullshit is usually pretty strong and you not too long ago even coined the incredibly perceptive term “ape cage” in your ’05 preview (which my friends and I have been using ever since to describe movies like, well, Cinderella Man)…but this review makes it sound like you’ve fallen into that very demographic.”
Wells: It’s a stirring, compassionate film. It does not shovel what I could call bullshit. It massages things to tell a kind of truth that has a basic validity. Ron Howard and Ken Loach live on different planets. Frankly? I like the post-Apollo 13 Howard for his filmmaking chops and tendencies better than I do Loach.
I know — that makes me an idiot. But Ken Loach is not God. He’s just a middle-aged British guy who feels and sees things a certain way, and has drawn certain conclusions and put them into his films. Fine. That doesn’t make him the Dalai Lama.
No explanation or relation to anything in today’s column, but this happens to be one of the more alluring snaps I’ve ever taken. And not just that. I can seriously see this photo hanging on a gallery wall some day. It’s got something. Maybe because it was taken in a kitchen.
Interior of the Brooklyn-based office of Hollywood Elsewhere — Tuesday, 5.31, 4:40 pm.
Sock That Choppy
I loved Crouching Tiger and all, but it’s no secret there are more ardent fans of martial-arts movies than myself.
I like aerial chop-socky the way I like musical numbers in a ’50s Arthur Freed musical — visually exciting and beautifully performed, etc., but if there’s too much exposure to restricted worlds of this sort you can start to go a bit nuts. Sublime choreography, Chinese mythology, inspired cutting…I get it but all right already.
Kung Fu Hustle Stephen Chow performing obligatory single-hero-vs.-eighty-bad-guys fight sequence…done before by the Wachowski brothers and Quentin Tarantino, but never so hilariously.
That said, Stephen Chow’s Kung Fu Hustle, which I saw last night at the L.A. premiere at the Arclight, is truly something else. Part parody and partly a genre redefiner, it’s easily the funniest and most imaginatively nutso chop-socky flick I’ve ever seen.
Sony Classics is opening Hustle in New York and L.A. on April 8th and wide on April 22nd, and I can’t see it not being a huge action hit. If you’ve got genre skeptics like me saying it’s cool, you have to figure the action fans will be all the more enthusiastic….right?
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Chow is a friendly, mild-mannered sort in person (we spoke last night at an after-party at The Palm in West Hollywood), but creatively he’s quite clearly a madman. Mad like Mozart or Picasso or Orson Welles. In the grip of a fine madness….unbound and flying on faith.
Kung Fu Hustle is not just imaginative and off-the-planet….it’s insane.
You can argue that when a genre film starts veering into genre parody, that’s the beginning of the end…but maybe not. The James Bond films were getting heavily spoofed in the mid ’60s and they’re still around.
Stephen Chow at West Hollywood’s Palm Restaurant– Tuesday, 3.29, 10:05 pm.
Maybe Chow-styled lunacy is what the martial arts genre needs at this stage. Even more illogical and indulgent…losing its mind and taking a leap off the cliff.
Chow, 42, is obviously the new Jackie Chan. He’s a longtime martial arts devotee and fan of Bruce Lee known for nonsense humor (which is apparently known as “moleitau”) and playing the fool. The only other film I’ve seen of his is Shaolin Soccer , which was released in ’01. I haven’t seen Chow’s God of Cookery or King of Comedy, but I can guess what they were like.
Hustle is an effects-driven Hong Kong goofball comedy (i.e., “comedy-fu”) by way of The Matrix .
The setting is some urban pre-Communist Chinese burg, and the plot is about a gang war of sorts between the inhabitants of a slum called Pigsty Alley (which isn’t an alley but a big U-shaped tenement) and the top hat-wearing Axe Gang, which is run by Brother Sum (Chan Kwok-kwan).
Chow plays Sing, a comic kungfu smartass with a fat sidekick (Lam Tze-chung), who eventually turns out to be a man with a mission in the Keanu Reeves/Matrix mold.
Special menu for Kung Fu Hustle dinner at Palm restaurant — Tuesday, 3.29.05, 9:40 pm; collapsable Kung Fu top hat.
There are all kinds of rumbles, ass-kickings, foot-crunchings and whatnot. The edge is in the inspired, cartoon-like lunacy of the visual imaginings, the choreography and the CGI. And also from the occasional surprise turn, like when a certain studly, good-looking warrior with a great fighting style gets his head sliced off like that…whoa.
There’s a great Roadrunner chase sequence between Sing and a fightin’, formidable character called The Landlady (Yuen Qiu)….surreal-funny, totally amped.
The final turn comes when Sing is hired by Brother Sum to break an all-powerful martial arts master called The Beast (Leung Siu-lung) out of some kind of insane asylum, and soon after realizes that he has a super-hero’s destiny. This revelation comes only at the very end, thus allowing Chow to do his dopey-ass comic stuff for most of the duration.
I asked Chow (and his interpreter, who stood next to him) if he was comfortable calling Kung Fu Hustle a martial-arts satire. “What’s a satire?” he asked.
I re-phrased by asking if Hustle is laughing at martial arts films, or laughing with them? Chow asked what the difference is. I said laughing at is basically about criticism and laughing with is about affection. “Definitely with,” he said.
Sony Pictures Classics chief Tom Bernard offering toast to Kung Fu Hustle star-writer-director Stephen Chow.
The schmoozing at the Palm eventually gave way to a sit-down dinner. Sony chief Tom Bernard dinged on his wine glass and offered a toast to Chow, and a few minutes later Ray director Taylor Hackford did the same, praising Chow for his wit and visual pizazz.
Critics and Asian cinema scholars David Chute and Andy Klein (writing now for L.A.’s City Beat) were there also, along with Movie City News editor/columnist David Poland and a few other journos. My thanks to publicists Melody Korenbrot and Ziggy Koslowski for inviting me.
I fell off my diet by eating filet mignon and lobster, but eating steak is okay by the Atkins Diet so I guess I didn’t screw up too badly.
Sydney’s World
There are classic chase scenes and classic suspense sequences, but it’s rare to come across a really superb two-in-one. I don’t know if this has gotten around, but such a sequence — and it’s a major wow, trust me — is in Sydney Pollack’s The Interpreter (Universal, 4.22).
At the same time, it’s too bad that Universal’s marketing department has spoiled the climax by including it in their Interpreter trailer.
I’ve provided the link because it’s a free country and we can’t ignore what Universal has done, but do yourself a favor and don’t watch it. If the trailer plays before a film you’re about to see over the next month or so, run out to the lobby…seriously.
Nicole Kidman (r.) in scene from Sydney Pollack’s The Interpreter (Universal, 4.22).
It’s standard practice for trailers to show the audience a clip of every “money” scene in a forthcoming film and therefore, in the case of thrillers, ruin 90% of the surprises. But the Interpreter giveaway is especially bad because of the unusual character of what’s being ruined.
This sequence doesn’t just get you on a visceral level — the finesse that went into the editing is truly dazzling.
Let me explain by turning to a famous film lover’s book “Hitchcock Truffaut” (Random House), and an example of what makes a typically good suspense scene, as told by Alfred Hitchcock to Francois Truffaut.
A non-suspenseful approach, explains Hitch, would be to show a group of men eating in a restaurant when suddenly a bomb explodes and everyone is killed…shocking but that’s all. The suspenseful approach, he says, is to show the audience that a bomb is wrapped in a package under a restaurant table, and then tell them what time it will go off. Then a minute or so before detonation, have the men start to get up and leave but have one of them say, “Wait, I want to finish my coffee.”
Pollack and his editor, William Steinkamp, have taken a nervier approach in The Interpreter .
Instead of tipping the audience off about the certainty of coming destruction, they indicate that something bad is brewing…without revealing exactly what. They show various opposing forces (cops, bad guys, innocents) focusing on the same space or activity, and edit and score this scene so as to create a feeling of a fuse getting shorter and shorter and something about to pop.
Certain people are watching others, some are oblivious to anything but their own moves, some are playing their end of the court but are unaware of the overall, and so on. And it builds and builds and then…
Just don’t watch the trailer.
I have thought this through and I am showing restraint in comparing this scene to the Popeye Doyle subway car chase scene in William Freidkin’s The French Connection. The tension penetrates just as deeply, the editing is just as assured…it’s a marvel.
And on top of the sheer mechanics of this scene, it flashes the viewer into real-life associations that stay with you — I shouldn’t be any more specific.
The film itself is about as smart and satisfying as a mainstream political thriller can get. It doesn’t just push buttons — it delivers a compassionate theme and uses that familiar Pollack element of a love affair that might happen or work out…but it’s not in the cards.
This may sound like trivial terminology, but a screenwriter friend is calling The Interpreter “the ultimate over-25 date movie. There are no movies like this around right now that my wife and I like to go to together.”
Sean Penn
A friend is telling me Penn is too gnarly and internally bothered to succeed in a leading man mode. I think he’s blind. Penn’s innate ability to suggest a feeling of having suffered emotional wounds is precisely what makes his Interpreter performance work as well as it does.
Perhaps my friend is forgetting that Penn had an emotional breakthrough in 21 Grams. With audiences, I mean…it changed everything. It turned him into this decent hurting 40ish guy who smokes.
The careful strategic weaving of the dozens of story strands that have to fit together just so and pay off in the right way in a film of this sort (a discipline that Pollack used to fine effect in The Firm and Three Days of the Condor) is damned near immaculate.
And the performances by Nicole Kidman and especially Penn (bringing a certain grit and gravitas to what might have seemed like a fairly standard romantic lead role with someone else playing it) are ripe and impassioned and true to the mark.
Theory
I don’t mean to offend anyone or sound too clunky in my thinking, but I’ve always thought people who frequently go to serious action movies (as opposed to an off-the-ground variation like Kung Fu Hustle) are expressing feelings of social impotence.
The swift, decisive, lethal moves of on-screen combatants give the disenfranchised, pushed-around male masses a temporary feeling of spiritual strength and assurance, or so goes the theory.
Which explains, obviously, why they’re so popular with young males, the most impotent group in any society.
A scene from Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon.
It follows that in the case of hardcore fans, the more outlandish the action the greater the feelings of powerlessness.
Before anyone gets angry they should know I’m including myself in this equation. I got a definite charge from watching Tom Cruise blowing all those guys away with stylish dispatch in Collateral. But what his “Vincent” character did was in the realm of reality, or at least one that I accepted as being vaguely tethered to it.
It can be said that the widespread popularity of martial arts films in Asia, which are known for their flights into total cartoon fantasy of flying super-heroes with endless reserves of energy….it can be said that their popularity shows that feelings of social impotency run far deeper in Asia than they do here.
This is hardly a new observation, but how about some reactions?
Kid Flicks
“I loved your article about cultivating young cinema lovers. As a father of two young children — Bain, 5, and Lillie, 3 — I find myself in the same position of making sure my children grew up to not only good people but also appreciating good art.
“I’ve found that along with many of the films that you and Jett mentioned my kids will also watch silent films with me. Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton films are really popular around here, but my son also really liked Metropolis and The Cabinet of Dr. Calagari.
“Other non-animated favorites are John Boorman’s Excaliber, The Adventures of Robin Hood, any Tim Burton movie (except the totally forbidden Planet of the Apes) and Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast.
“For a long time my son would watch Dr. Strangelove over and over, referring to it as the ‘airplane Movie.’ I seriously doubt that the themes of the film were apparent to him, but somehow I think that hearing Sterling Hayden’s ‘purity of essence’ speech may have made an impression.” — unnamed husband of Karen McKibben.
“I definitely identify with your article on kids and movies. I have two young children, and I end up censoring what they watch over quality issues much more than content issues…although I’m sure at six years old my son doesn’t understand why Superbabies 2 isn’t worth the rental fee.
“It has paid off from time to time, though. A few months ago my hyperactive five year-old daughter sat perfectly still for two hours while we watched Rear Window, and she has asked to watch it again several times since. To be honest, I get a little choked up when I hear her give out a conspiratorial chuckle over what’s buried in the flower garden.” — Randall Pullen
“I saw Taxi Driver with my mom in Mexico City when I was twelve, and it changed me. I didn’t quite understand everything but it opened my eyes to a new kind of filmmaking. I don’t think your idea is bizarre. Bad movies teach youngsters that the world is black and white place where good and evil are easily identifiable and definable things. i think good movies show the world as complex and often baffling, where we all have the capability of being either good or bad, often on the same day.” — Tom Engel.
Pollack at UCLA
Sydney Pollack (l.) addressing UCLA Sneak Preview class after showing of The Interpreter — Monday, 3.28.05, 9:55 pm.
Blam Blam
It’s unusual for a 44 year-old guy from the fringe indie or straight-to-video world landing a directing gig with a mainstream studio like New Line.
Unusual because of age-ism (i.e., generational tribalism and the belief that new directors have to be in their late 20s or early 30s with two or three MTV music videos to their credit), and because of an unwritten stipulation that if a director hasn’t gotten on-board with a high-profile producer or distributor by age 40, he/she is probably “done” and been relegated to the sidelines.
No, this isn’t Gus Spielberg, Steven’s younger, smarter brother who lives in Arizona — it’s Shoot “Em Up writer-director Michael Davis.
A noteworthy exception is Michael Davis, a Steven Spielberg lookalike whose success story is about one of the longest gestations in Hollywood history.
New Line has just committed to fund production of Davis’s script, a John Woo-type urban actioner called Shoot ‘Em Up, with Davis directing.
New Line president Bob Shaye has made it clear he wants the high-octane action flick rolling by September. He’s also signed Davis to a two-picture option agreement, and I’m told that Davis is now being wooed by agents for representation.
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This is serious pay-dirt for a 1987 USC grad who’s directed a few lower-profile, straight-to-video films (the most admired is Eight Days a Week, winner of the audience award at the 1997 Slamdance Film Festival), and who has also worked as a storyboard artist off and on for roughly fifteen years, never quite putting his mitts on the brass ring.
I’ve read Shoot `Em up and it feels to me like a great New Line genre film in the tradition of The Hidden, the first Rush Hour, Blade and so on. It’s fast, punchy, sardonically funny, and aimed at younger guys and connoisseurs of action choreography-for-its-own-sake.
Journos are always being told that major stars are interested in playing a role in this or that script, but the talk is apparently valid this time. A serious “big name” is eye-balling Shoot `Em Up‘s lead male role, “Mr. Smith,” a terse hard-boiled type with the usual Joffrey Ballet abilities during gun fights.
A stick-figure image from Michael Davis’s 17-minute animatic Shoot ‘Em Up tape that conveys the choreography of the action scenes.
Why would a major star be looking at what sounds on the surface like a rote New Line actioner being made “for a price”? Because Shoot `Em Up ain’t rote.
The crusty, cynical noir-flavored tone is familiar, but the big action scenes have a kicky “haven’t been here before” quality. They take the Hong Kong Woo aesthetic to absurd new heights, but in a way that feels freshly insane, oddly logical and edgy-funny. It’s screwball formula nihilism with a twist.
Woo fans have seen a certain aspect of it before. The central Shoot `Em Up hook — a tough guy loner protecting a new-born baby boy from an army of goons trying to bring his just-begun life to a close — is borrowed from a sequence near the end of Woo’s Hard Boiled (’92).
Apart from the script itself, the element that sold Shoot ‘Em Up more than anything else was Davis’s decision to compose a 17-minute animatics reel, made from roughly 17,000 line drawings, which gives the viewer an idea of how the action scenes will play. (I could describe the action sequences and all, but this would spoil the fun down the road…right?)
I got a look at this tape last weekend and it definitely sells you on Davis as well as the piece itself. You figure any guy who cares this much about explaining how the action stuff will play has his gear wired tight and can be trusted to make it happen on film.
The people who pushed Shoot ‘Em Up into “go” project status are producer Don Murphy (along with his Angry Films team Rick Bennattar and Susan Montford, who will co-produce), New Line creative executive Jeff Katz and vp development Cale Boyter.
Copy insert from Davis’s animatic Shoot ‘Em Up tape.
Murphy had known Davis from USC film school in the late ’80s, and had kept in touch with him over the years. He knew he finally had something to push and maybe sell when Davis showed him the Shoot `Em Up script in the fall of ’03. It was hard and fast and could be made relatively cheaply…but Murphy wasn’t certain he could sell Davis as the director.
Murphy pushed it with New Line execs, although the first exec to make a call on it — senior vp production Stokely Chaffin — didn’t care for the “newborn baby dodging bullets” angle and said no. Murphy persisted and found an ally in Katz, who says he found the script “on the scrap heap…sometimes that’s how you find your little gems.”
Katz sent it along to Boyter, and the two of them eventually took it production chief Tobey Emmerich, who passed it along to Shaye.
Early on Murphy told Davis that “the biggest thing you can give me is some reason why [New Line] would let you direct it.” The animatics tape was the answer. “It said, look, he’s already visualized this thing, and look at how well these sequences play even with stick-figure drawings,” says Murphy. In so doing, Davis “really went the extra mile.”
Murphy knew Davis slightly “when I went to USC grad school in the late ’80s,” he says, “although he was two years ahead of me. He was one of those guys you meet and figure right away when they get out of school they’re going to be the schizzle. His shorts were great and he had an agent when he was still in school. But then we all got out and did what we did, and with Michael it was like…what happened?”
“I made some mistakes,” Davis says. “I was not politically savvy. I was an innocent and had no sense of politics and because I didn’t understand the political landscape in Hollywood, it hurt me. I always thought just sheer talent would be enough. I had an agent in film school. I could have gone with Richard Lovett or Jeremy Zimmer, but I went with a boutique agency instead.
“I also didn’t invest in networking and socializing. I just didn’t follow up on meetings. I guess I’m such a perfectionist….I didn’t want to just call up and be the fuller brush man, and I had too much self-doubt to just put myself out there and call these people.
“Stacy Sher at Jersey tried to help me get my first agent, and she’d take me out to lunch, wondering what I’d be doing. I didn’t keep up with her. I didn’t return the effort she put into me.”
The balancing factor was Davis’ way with a stand-out concept or oddball scene.
For Eight Days a Week he came up with the idea of a young horny protagonist having sex with food (i.e., shtupping a watermelon). If you ask me this bit was ripped off by the makers of American Pie. (How could the Weitz brothers claim otherwise?) Davis says he was “up” for directing that film until a certain Universal executive remembered the studio’s “mandate for hiring 25 year-old directors! I was too old…I was in my 30s!”
(John Hughes, one of Hollywood’s most successful miners of the teen aesthetic, was in his 30s when he made all those ’80s teen comedies. He turned 40 in 1990.)
Davis was a year or two ahead of Murphy at USC, graduating in ’87. He was a bit more contemporary with Jay Roach, Steven Sommers, Michael Lehman, John Turtletaub.
Davis has written 33 screenplays (ten of them produced) and directed five movies based on his scripts, the best of these being Eight Days a Week and 100 Girls, which went to video in the U.S. and “opened on 100 screens in France.” He’s done storyboard work for Pee-wee’s Playhouse and Tremors.
Murphy always “made me feel comfortable,” Davis recalls. “Over the years I’d send him my latest straight-to-video movie, and he always returned my phone calls. His attitude was always, ‘What can I do to help you?'”
It was a seven-month process, he says, before Shoot `Em Up got traction at New Line.
“Most producers shotgun things,” says Davis. “They send a script out, and if it doesn’t get heat they move on. Don is different.
“Jeff Katz liked Shoot ‘Em Up, but it stalled with Stokely. Don being Don, he wouldn’t let them pass on it. Katz loved the material..he was saying he’d never seen an action piece like this before. Then Cale Boyter saw it, got it and pushed it along. Then they all saw the reel.”
Davis “is not a young guy but this movie is happening and the agencies are going crazy for it,” says Katz.
“[Murphy] told me I had to turn myself onto this. So we had a meeting with Davis and he looks like a pudgy Steven Spielberg. He’s this very happy-go-lucky guy, and what he did was map out a very inventive way to sell the gunplay. Shaye saw the tape and said yeah, this is good, get me the script.”
Writer-directors with talent, moxie and opportunistic backgrounds have about ten years to make their mark or establish a serious foothold of some kind after leaving film school. Most get there by their late 20s or early 30s. If they haven’t made it by 40 or thereabouts…toast.
Being a late bloomer myself (I didn’t really get down to journalism until I was 27), it’s nice to know that a slightly older guy has busted through, and for the right reasons.
Oscar Balloon ’05
Here’s the first assembly of ’05 Oscar Balloon picks. The same can be found down in the new mustard-colored Oscar Balloon box at the very bottom of the column.
Anyone with a line on any film or actor or behind-the-camera filmmaker of any stripe that they believe (and I mean on the basis of having read a script or actually having heard or been told something substantive, as opposed to hunches or assumptions) should be included, please forward the info and if it sounds credible, I’ll put it in.
BEST FEATURE: The Producers (Universal); All The King’s Men (Columbia); Untitled Spielberg Munich Olympics Project (Universal), Memoirs of a Geisha (Columbia); The New World (New Line); Jarhead (Universal), Elizabethtown (Paramount); Walk The Line (20th Century Fox); Cinderella Man (Universal); Syriana (Warner Brothers); Oliver Twist (Sony/Columbia).
BEST DIRECTOR: Steven Spielberg (Untitled Munich Olympics Project ); Ron Howard (Cinderella Man); Sam Mendes (Jarhead), James Mangold (Walk The Line), Terrence Malick (The New World); Rob Marshall (Memoirs of a Geisha); Roman Polanski (Oliver Twist).
BEST ACTOR: Matthew Broderick (The Producers); Viggo Mortensen (A History of Violence); Colin Farrell (Ask The Dust; The New World); Joaquin Phoenix (Walk The Line); Jake Gyllenhaal (Jarhead), Russell Crowe (Cinderella Man), Johnny Depp (The Libertine); Sean Penn (All The King’s Men); Eric Bana (Unititled Spielberg Munich Olympics Project).
BEST ACTRESS: Cameron Diaz (In Her Shoes); Gwyneth Paltrow (Proof), Zhang Ziyi (Memoirs of a Geisha); Reese Witherspoon (Walk The Line); Salma Hayek (Ask The Dust).
BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR: Nathan Lane (The Producers); Jamie Foxx (Jarhead), Peter Sarsgaard (Jarhead), Ben Kingsley (Oliver Twist); Paul Giamatti (Cinderella Man); James Gandolfini, Anthony Hopkins, Jude Law (All The King’s Men).
BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Susan Sarandon (Elizabethtown); Hope Davis (Proof, The Weather Man); Toni Collette, Shirley MacLaine (In Her Shoes); Kate Winslet, Patricia Clarkson (All The King’s Men).
BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY: Terrence Malick (The New World); Cameron Crowe (Elizabethtown).
BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY: Mel Brooks and Thomas Meehan(The Producers); Stephen Gaghan(Syriana), Steve Zaillian (All The King’s Men), William Broyles, Jr.(Jarhead), Susannah Grant (In Her Shoes).
Brando Blow-off
“You’re absolutely right about Brando getting short shrift at the Oscars. At least they kept the show reasonably brisk, but a full-up Brando tribute wouldn’t have consumed that much more time.” — Jay Smith
“I felt exactly the same way about Brando — he was robbed. It was insulting and stupid. Anything to do with Brando refusing to take his Oscar in ’73? An oversight? Who is responsible? They had a great opporunity to salute a legend and they lost it. Imagine the quotes they could have got from all the living Oscar-winning actors…De Niro, Pacino, etc. Shameful.” — Dale Launer, director-screenwriter.
“Maybe he wasn’t liked, maybe he didn’t play the game, maybe he took some air of the idea that someone could walk away…but tell me who did more for the performances and the quality of work that the whole night is supposed to be about? Oh right…Johnny Carson.” — Tom Van
Marlon Brando
“You were right on target with your Brando comments. He’s probably the greatest thespian who has ever lived, and he delivered the best acting performance in cinematic history in Last Tango in Paris. I wonder if the oversight had anything to do with his personal troubles in his final years. If so, shame on the Academy.” — Ron Cossey
“Damned right they should have done a special thing for Brando, with Scorsese or somebody putting his complex and contradictory career into perspective. (Forget comedians– why doesn’t Scorsese just host the whole thing with commentary over the clips and footnotes at the bottom of the screen?)
“But Brando isn’t the only one who deserved that kind of separate attention– and I suspect this is the reason they didn’t do it. If they’d done one for him, it would have raised the question of why they didn’t do one for Ronald Reagan.
“By any decent logic, they should have acknowledged that a major place in history — not film history, but history– is held by someone who was once one of theirs. The problem, of course, is that a lot of people in Hollywood hated him as president, and if they were forced to recognize that maybe they were wrong then and that he did play a crucial role in ending a vast and terrible tyranny, they’d have to consider the possibility that they could be wrong about Bush and what’s happening in the middle east right now. And that, of course, won’t do.
“So instead of honoring either Brando or the man who said ‘Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,’ the Academy chickened out by flashing them wordlessly on screen to bookend Fay Wray and Russ Meyer. But after all, how could we expect mere mortals like them to merit the level of loving tribute Hollywood reserved last night only for a true idealist and saint like the gulag-builder Che Guevara? Team America has never seemed more prescient.” — Mike Gebert.
“It’s baffling to me that there was evidently no influential figure to push for a Brando tribute reel.” — Josh Martin.
“It seems clear to me that The Academy didn’t produce any special tribute to Brando because they didn’t feel they owed him anything. I can understand that. After all, he dissed them first. How could they give him special treatment after what he did while reducing other loyal members of the academy to a second each in a montage?
“Separate special memorials eat up too much time anyway. If they were that big a star (like Brando), they had enough press when they actually died. I had my fill of ’50s film clips of Marlon on MSNBC last summer. We didn’t need another review of his career last night. I can understand when they do it for Johnny Carson or Bob Hope because they had a special relationship with the actual Academy Awards TV program.” — P. Mccarthy.
Oscar Fallout
“I wasn’t looking forward to the Oscars this year, and almost didn’t watch for almost the first time I can remember. I’m not a fan of Chris Rock. But I did watch, and I enjoyed it, though it didn’t rank with the more memorable shows. Perhaps the straitjacket of the show actually made Rock funnier to me. You’re right about Johnny Carson, and, yeah, they should give Steve Martin whatever he wants next time.
“The Pepsi Spartacus commercial was such an affront to me that I will go out of my way to avoid Pepsi at all costs until the memory of that ad fades. Ugh. Sean Penn coming to Jude Law’s defense only seemed to play into the perception of him not having much of a sense of humor. Yeah, Clint should have been nominated for his M$B score. And yup, Collateral deserved more than a nod for Best Cinematography.
Clint Eastwood, director-producer of Million Dollar Baby and winner of the Best Director Oscar.
That The Aviator won is almost criminal, because the replication of early two-strip Technicolor processes left me scratching my head wondering if I was seeing a bad reel in the print when I saw the blue peas — and I’m a moviegoer who loved the Technicolor history documentary on the Robin Hood DVD! Who exactly got the homage to early color that they were doing? (I didn’t get it until I looked up the film’s trivia section at IMDB.) That conceit was the worst part of that movie. I had no problems with the CGI effects, and I’m usually pretty hard on that.” — Jay Smith
“The evening ultimately turned into a high mass for Clint Eastwood — the patron saint of on-time and under-budget filmmaking; the Hollywood trooper; the team player; the heartbreak kid; the poster boy for ageism in reverse; the proponent of simple storytelling for simple folk; the guardian against mass market/CGI-driven entertainment; the let’s-not-do-a-first-take,let’s-use-the-rehearsal-footage waste-management pro.
“I know you’re a fan of Million Dollar Baby but when it comes right down to it, the movie is nothing more than an old-fashioned melodrama torn from the pages of Warner Bros.’ own playbook from the 30s and 40s — only then they had actors with the grit and seeming street smarts to bring it all to vivid life: talents like Cagney, Bogart, Garfield, Pat O’Brien and the Dead End Kids. Now we have Clint playing Clint and Morgan Freeman tackling a role no different than all those serial killer movies at which he’s become so expert.” — Steve Chagollan
“Do you think that Collateral might have lost the cinematography Oscar because it was shot digitally? The images of LA at night were stunning, and to shoot so many scenes in the taxi…amazing work. That said, Robert Richardson√ɬØ√Ǭø√ǬΩs Aviator cinematography was worthy of the Oscar. The recreation of the Technicolor processes was amazing and the overall look of the film well worthy of the Award.” — Edward C. Klein, Salem, Oregon.
“I think the funniest moment at the Oscar in the last ten years was the Dave Letterman-hosted 1995 ceremony (a year that honored Forrest Gump and Pulp Fiction in different ways). There was that skit with several top names — Jack Lemmon, Martin Short, Paul Newman, Albert Brooks — acting to a sock monkey. The runner-up would be Billy Crystal’s intro to the 2000 ceremony, complete with Crystal spoofing Spartacus and showing up in drag as Mrs. Robinson.
— Michael Bergeron
“I can’t really stand it that so many people are crying over Eastwood not getting nominated for best score. Guarantee that if Lennie Niehaus wrote the same music note for note, no one would have cared (see Unforgiven). The real tragedy (well, not tragedy….life will go on) is that there were several great scores this year that came up empty in the awards department, while the five Oscar nominees ranged from okay to…okay.
Spartan, The Incredibles, I, Robot (the movie sucked but Beltrami knocked the music out of the park), The Motorcycle Diaries, Friday Night Lights and Kinsey are just a handful of great scores that went mostly unmentioned this year, yet everyone is crying over Eastwood’s ten notes. If he wasn’t going to win for Mystic River, he sure as hell wasn’t going to be recognized for Million Dollar Baby.
“It’s not even that the score was bad — it served its purpose. But there were far, far, far many better ones deserving of recognition, and now their composers have to sit around being told how Eastwood is superior to them too. If Danny Elfman or Carter Burwell haven’t won an Oscar yet, I think Eastwood can stand to miss out a few more times.” — Eddie Goldberger
Pepsi Spartacus
“So you liked Kirk Douglas and the gladiator army selling Pepsi — have you seen the ad with Gene Kelly’s Singing in the Rain remixed to sell VW Golfs? Here’s the link . The spot is pretty seamless, but I can’t help but cringe. I’ve been told that if I were to ever associate msyelf with something similar, I would be killed.
“Similar, but not selling anything, was the video mashup of the Beatles and Jay-Z. Someone took the initiative and blended A Hard Day’s Night footage with Jay-Z clips. Amusing if only to guess which Beatle would be the DJ and which was going to bust a move. [Editor’s Note: There was a link in this letter to the Jay Z video, but it didn’t work. If anyone has found one that works, please send it along.] — Chris Clark
Day and Date
“DVD’s or pay-per-view simultaneous with a theatrical opening sounds like a dream come true to me.
“Theatres won’t die out — they’d just be thinned out. Then maybe
a large percentage of the annoying crowd (families with 30 children in tow, talkers, etc.) would stay home. It’d be cheaper to rent a flick for $12 then it would be to pay admission for every child in your neighborhood. Ticket prices would go up, sure, but then maybe the quality of the experience would too.
“I’ll be honest — it’s getting harder and harder to pay upwards of $10 a person to see a movie maybe three days into the run and already there are a ton of scratches, pops and cigarette burns, not to mention faulty sound equipment. The experience is about as good sometimes for big budget fare in the theatre as it would be in my living room.” — Shawn Robare.
Asian Bootlegs
“Consider two developments regarding bootleg DVDs here in Asia:
“Movies open here on Thursdays…. the co-ordinated global released films actually get shown here one to two days sooner than the USA (by the time difference). The ticket prices vary from $2 to $8 for the equivalent service of a first class international flight (electric reclining seats and waitress service).
“I don’t subscribe to the bootleg industry, but apparently the bootlegs are now ‘off the master’ and nearly as good as the released DVD. Somebody is selling out at the major studios. I saw a snippet of a friend’s Million Dollar Baby copy and it was perfect.” — Paulus.
Crowds in Calcutta waiting for fresh shipments of pirated DVDs. Well, not really.
“You presented some interesting ideas about the future of film distribution. I for one would hate not to be able to see films on a big screen. I don√ɬØ√Ǭø√ǬΩt care how big a screen I have at home — I want the magical experience in a darkened theater.
“One scenario you didn√ɬØ√Ǭø√ǬΩt mention was digital projection. I haven√ɬØ√Ǭø√ǬΩt been able to see a film presented in this format, but from what I√ɬØ√Ǭø√ǬΩve heard it√ɬØ√Ǭø√ǬΩs stunning. If theaters start showing films this way and the films are worthy, just maybe people will start to fill the theaters again.
“Of course it doesn√ɬØ√Ǭø√ǬΩt help that they charge a small fortune to get in the door. My family and I wait until films come to the local Theater Pub where a ticket is $3 and you can enjoy dinner and a beer or glass of wine and see a decent film the way it was meant to be seen. And you don√ɬØ√Ǭø√ǬΩt have to put up with the poorly managed Regal Cinemas where all they want is your hard earned money and could care less if the film is focused or the sound is properly adjusted. And don√ɬØ√Ǭø√ǬΩt get me started on the conditions of the bathrooms!” — Edward C. Klein, Salem, Oregon.
Flipside
“I realize you liked Rock’s Oscar bit when he interviewed patrons at L.A.’s Magic Johnson complex. I’ve read a few other critics (including Tom Shales) who also seemed to like it. But you and Shales and the others may just be deluded honkies.
“Another interpretation of Rock’s interviews is that ‘urban’ audiences may just be completely out of touch with real cinematic quality. Unlettered, culturally limited boobs (as opposed, of course, to the hip, smarty-pants Rock). If a white guy had done those interviews, after all, the bit would have been correctly derided as racist, condescending and patronizing, as someone making fun of the less educated.
Chris Rock.
“But it’s better — okay, at least — if Rock (looking silly indded with earrings in both lobes) does it, right? Are you guys sure of that? And the presence of Albert Brooks is no guarantee either way that the skit was either racist or innocent. It just indicates how clueless Brooks himself may be about stuff like this.
“Good job on the Brando obit, by the way.
“Also, do you really imagine that, say, five years ago when you’re in a Mexican restaurant and there’s a mariachi-type version of this year’s winning song, you’ll truly remember it? I think not. Indeed, I don’t think any of us will remember any of the nominated songs one year from now.” — Richard Szathmary.
The obiter dicta (i.e., words in passing) in Brian Lowry’s recently posted Variety review of Constantine (Warner Bros., 2.18) sounds somewhat predictable: “Pic does win a few points for style if not substance.” The opening graph, though, has a strong alliterative punch: “Keanu Reeves’ latest man-in-black fantasy is slightly better than The Matrix sequels, which is tantamount to damnation with faint praise. Casting its star as a chain-smoking exorcist — someone who’s literally been to hell and back — this adaptation of the graphic novel “Hellblazer” blazes few new trails and bogs down in a confusing narrative muddle. Atmospheric and noirish in the manner of a poor man’s Blade Runner, pic possesses powerful imagery but lacks feature-length substance and will need a bountiful harvest of opening-weekend souls before a stench resembling brimstone dowses its box office flame.”
To the list of presumed front-runners for the Best Foreign Film Oscar(Cronicas, Downfall, Les Choristes, The Sea Inside, House of Flying Daggers), I’m told I should add Darrell Roodt’s Yesterday, a South African drama about a struggling AIDS-afflicted couple with a young daughter. (“Yesterday” is the name of the mother character, played by Leleti Khumalo.) I missed seeing it on Friday night (1.14) because the screening coincided with my son’s flight to Boston from Long Beach Airport. HBO had something to do with making (or financing) it, although they aren’t mentioned on the IMDB, but I’m told the film may open theatrically in February.
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