The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg has posted an oral-history piece about how Harvey Weinstein‘s hard-charging and in some ways ethically shady Best Picture campaign for Shakespeare in Love overwhelmed the campaign for DreamWorks’ Saving Private Ryan.
It’s called “‘Harvey Always Wanted More’: Weinstein, Spielberg and the Oral History of the Nastiest Oscar Campaign Ever.”
Hollywood Elsewhere doesn’t dispute that Weinstein’s Oscar-season blitzkreig was a key factor in Shakespeare in Love winning the Best Picture Oscar, but I’ve always suspected that the main reason was the fact that Saving Private Ryan caused its own defeat.
One, Ryan actually did peak during the 24-minute D-Day Omaha Beach sequence, and two, director Steven SpielbergCHEATED HIS ASS OFF with that early time-jump cut that suggests the old coot having an emotional breakdown in the Omaha Beach cemetery is either Tom Hanks or Edward Burns.
“Hanks is dead, the awful pretentious voice of the actor playing General Marshall is treacling away, we hear ole Honest Abe’s letter again and I am now waiting for the shot of Ed Burns with the big-boobed girls back at the cemetery.
“Why do I know that is coming? Well, only two members of the squad are left [at the end of the film], Burns and the cowardly translator, and I know it can’t be him because he was not with Hanks and the squad during the twenty-four minutes of glory at the start of the film. So ithastobeBurns standing there among the graves.
“Now the morphing shot comes, and I am looking at the old face of Matt Damon at the cemetery.
“Well, you can’t do that. Don’t you see, hewasn’tfuckingthere. He knew nothing of the attack on the beach, knew nothing of the odyssey that followed, and he never had a chance to hear about it. The only spare moment he had was when he was telling us all about his brothers and the ugly girl and setting the barn on fire.
“When he was great, and he was great, Spielberg was a phenomenal storyteller. All gone. That or he doesn’t care.”
“The greatest offense comes from Harrison Young‘s awful over-acting as the 75-year-old Ryan. His face is stricken with guilt as he shuffles through the Omaha Beach cemetery, and he walks like a 90-year-old afflicted with rheumatism.
I’m not going to offer any sweeping judgments about the just-announced 2018 Sundance Film Festival slate, except to suggest that with a competition slate that is 53% female (i.e., nine of the 17 directors eligible for the festival’s top prize are women) it would appear that 2018 Sundance is going to be just as progressive-minded (i.e., “socialist summer camp in the snow”) as last year’s festival, if not more so.
I’m going to take it two or three sections at a time. Today I’m pasting Premieres (feature and documentary), Midnight & Spotlight. I’ve bold-faced the titles that I have a special interest in seeing, but I’d appreciate thoughts about anything I might be unfairly dismissing. I’l consider the other sections tomorrow.
Premieres (18):
After The Wedding (Director and screenwriter: Bart Freundlich, Producers: Joel B. Michaels, Harry Finkel) — Seeking funds for her orphanage in India, Isabelle travels to New York to meet Theresa, a wealthy benefactor. An invitation to attend a wedding ignites a series of events in which the past collides with the present while mysteries unravel. Based on the Academy Award-nominated film by Susanne Bier. Cast: Julianne Moore, Michelle Williams, Billy Crudup, Abby Quinn.
Animals (U.K.-Ireland-Australia – Director: Sophie Hyde, Screenwriter: Emma Jane Unsworth, Producers: Sarah Brocklehurst, Rebecca Summerton, Cormac Fox, Sophie Hyde) — After a decade of partying, Laura and Tyler’s friendship is strained by Laura’s new love and her focus on her novel. A snapshot of a modern woman with competing desires, at once a celebration of female friendship and an examination of the choices we make when facing a crossroads. Cast: Holliday Grainger, Alia Shawkat.
Blinded by the Light (U.K. – Director: Gurinder Chadha, Screenwriters: Sarfraz Manzoor, Gurinder Chadha, Paul Mayeda Berges, Producers: Gurinder Chadha, Jane Barclay, Jamal Daniel) — In 1987 during the austere days of Thatcher’s Britain, a teenager learns to live life, understand his family and find his own voice through the music of Bruce Springsteen. Cast: Viveik Kalra, Hayley Atwell, Rob Brydon, Kulvinder Ghir, Nell Williams, Aaron Phagura.
The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind (United Kingdom – Director and screenwriter: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Producers: Andrea Calderwood, Gail Egan) — Against all the odds, a thirteen year old boy in Malawi invents an unconventional way to save his family and village from famine. Based on the true story of William Kamkwamba. Cast: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Maxwell Simba, Lily Banda, Noma Dumezweni, Aissa Maiga, Joseph Marcell.
Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile (Director: Joe Berlinger, Screenwriter: Michael Werwie, Producers: Michael Costigan, Nicolas Chartier, Ara Keshishian, Michael Simkin) — A chronicle of the crimes of Ted Bundy from the perspective of Liz, his longtime girlfriend, who refused to believe the truth about him for years. Cast: Zac Efron, Lily Collins, Haley Joel Osment, Kaya Scodelario, John Malkovich, Jim Parsons.
I Am Mother (Australia – Director: Grant Sputore, Screenwriter: Michael Lloyd Green, Producers: Timothy White, Kelvin Munro) — In the wake of humanity’s extinction, a teenage girl is raised by a robot designed to repopulate the earth. But their unique bond is threatened when an inexplicable stranger arrives with alarming news. Cast: Clara Rugaard, Rose Byrne, Hilary Swank.
Late Night (Director: Nisha Ganatra, Screenwriter: Mindy Kaling, Producers: Ben Browning, Howard Klein, Jillian Apfelbaum, Mindy Kaling) — Legendary late-night talk show host’s world is turned upside down when she hires her only female staff writer. Originally intended to smooth over diversity concerns, her decision has unexpectedly hilarious consequences as the two women separated by culture and generation are united by their love of a biting punchline. Cast: Emma Thompson, Mindy Kaling, John Lithgow, Paul Walter Hauser, Reid Scott, Amy Ryan.
The Mustang (Director: Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre, Screenwriters: Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre, Mona Fastvold, Brock Norman Brock, Producer: Alain Goldman) — While participating in a rehabilitation program training wild mustangs, a convict at first struggles to connect with the horses and his fellow inmates, but learns to confront his violent past as he soothes an especially feisty horse. Cast: Matthias Schoenaerts, Connie Britton, Bruce Dern, Jason Mitchell, Gideon Adlon, Josh Stewart.
Jonah Hill‘s rascally, conniving performance as 20something arms dealer Efrain Diveroli (a real-life guy who is not and never was a fat-ass) is the big reason to see War Dogs this weekend. Jonah, Jonah, Jonah…back in Superbad territory but with less schtick and colder blood. The highs, lows and demonic detours of a sociopathic, three-card-monte hustler! I just wish the film was more about crazy-fuck Jonah and less about Miles “don’t be a pervert” Teller, who’s playing the straight man, another real-life arms dealer named David Packouz.
Not that the film dies or slows down when it’s focusing on Teller — he’s fine, holds up his end. But Jonah is in charge of the surge moments. Half the time you’re thinking “okay, this is good, moving along but where’s Jonah” or, you know, “what’s Jonah’s next big bullshit play gonna be”?
Jonah’s Efraim is the kind of guy who’s always performing, selling and scheming. The kind who never deals straight cards but who can usually con-talk almost anyone into saying “yes” or at least “okay, maybe.” Or weasel his way out of a jam. I hate guys like this in real life, but I love watching them operate from a theatre seat.
Director Morten Tyldumspeaking to EW‘s Sara Vilkomerson about Passengers (Columbia, 12.21): “Every generation has its love story. I feel like this is it. And [making it was] exhausting. It’s big emotions, it’s desperation, it’s love, it’s happiness, it’s fear, it’s anger. You will laugh and cry and hold your breath and be at the edge of your seat. It has chills. It also will make you smile and laugh a lot. We wanted a playful movie.”
Got that? Big love, big fear, big anger, big desperation, big chills, big smiles, big playful. All on a super-big, super-luxurious space ship with artificial gravity plus swanky lounges, grade-A bedroom suites, gyms, swimming pools, a droll robot bartender (played by Michael Sheen), all kinds of great coffee and cappucino, etc.
As noted, I’ve a read a revised draft of Jon Spaihts’ Passengers script, and as far as I know it’s more or less what was shot last fall by Tyldum and costars Chris Pratt, Jennifer Lawrence and Laurence Fishburne. Maybe the script has been significantly rewritten. If the film plays according to the synopsis in Vilkomerson’s piece, then plot cards have indeed been reshuffled. And that’s fine.
Ben Younger‘s Bleed For This, the overcoming-tragedy story of middleweight boxing champ Vinny Paz, is obviously a movie-movie. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. All the hallmarks of a strong boxing flick including a flirting-with-nutso lead performance, given by Miles burn-it-down Teller (who also got into a bad auto accident in Whiplash). Bleed has already been shown to a select few, and will be screening for a few more this summer. I don’t know about a Telluride appearance but it’ll definitely play Toronto. Open Road will debut it commercially on 11.4.
Comedy is tragedy that bends…right, Alan Alda? But something is telling me that an attempt to create humor out of the financial anxiety being endured by today’s 20somethings (which I’ve gotten a good taste of through my sons) with Miles “don’t be a pervert, man” Teller and Anna Kendrick…this feels like it may be a little short of Up In The Air when it comes to capturing the times.
Tonight the Santa Barbara Film Festival will honor five outstanding directors — Whiplash‘s Damian Chazelle, Boyhood‘s Richard Linklater, Foxcatcher‘s Bennett Miller, Citizenfour‘s Laura Poitras and The Imitation Game‘s Morten Tyldum. Moderator Scott Feinberg will, of course, be expected to avoid any questions that won’t be kissy-face in nature, but if he wanted to conduct a Mike Wallace-style interview, what would his questions be? Tyldum would be asked for his opinion on the Weinstein Co.’s “Honor The Man, Honor The Film” Phase Two campaign. Miller would be asked if his next film will be another creepy downer. Poitras would be asked to comment about some people’s opinion that it would have been somehow more noble for Edward Snowden to surrender to U.S. authorities and do a couple of decades in jail. Advance warning: I’m going to ask Chazelle to put on Ed Douglas’s “Yo, Whiplash!” hat so I can snap a photo.
I’ve only seen American Sniper once, as part of an 11.11.14 double-header when Clint Eastwood‘s film was shown with Ava DuVernay‘s Selma. I’m mentioning this because today I spoke to Sniper‘s Oscar and WGA-nominated screenwriter Jason Hall following the Santa Barbara Int’l Film Festival writers panel, and he told me that the version I saw was a bit rough and incomplete and that a few slight trims were made for the final version. I resolved then and there to see it again, and soon. I was thinking about doing this anyway. Catch it with an audience of Average Joe ticket-buyers, I mean.
During this morning’s Santa Barbara Int’l Film Festival writers panel, held at the Lobero Theatre and moderated by Anne Thompson.
SBIFF writers panel moderator Anne Thompson, Imitation Game screenwriter Graham Moore, Theory of Everything screenwriter Anthony McCarten.
American Sniper screenwriter Jason Hall conferring with ten film students who are visiting SBIFF as part of Student Film Studies Program, launched this year by fest director Roger Durling
That’s me under the SBIFF projection inside Santa Barbara’s Lobero theatre. Pic snapped during this morning’s writer’s panel.
Some superhero movies (like the two Captain America flicks) are just good films, but the superhero megaplex virus is fed by a widespread sense of diminishment, impotence and insignificance, felt most acutely by under-35s who are either just starting to realize or have recently realized how un-heroic and unexceptional their lives are likely to be. On the other hand Miles “don’t be a pervert, man” Teller is one of the paycheck fantastics.
I can’t respect a storyteller who doesn’t respect the finality of death. You can’t finesse or modify or bullshit your way around the Big Finish. To say this or that deceased character can be brought back to life is like saying that leaves on the ground can be dyed green and moistened and pasted back on the branches of trees. It was a stretch when James Cameron divulged a couple of years ago that Stephen Lang‘s Colonel Miles Quaritch would return for one or more of the Avatar sequels…after taking a huge arrow in the chest at the end of the 2009 original. Now it’s been announced that Sigourney Weaver‘s character, who also died in Avatar, will return in the three sequels. Cameron’s rationale, offered three years ago, is that “no one ever dies in science fiction.”
I’m ready and willing to ease up on my John Fordtakedowns and I could really and truly go the rest of my life without writing another word (much less another article) on The Searchers.
But yesterday the Hollywood Reporter posted a Martin Scorsese essay on The Searchers — mostly a praise piece — and I feel obliged to respond, dammit. But really, this is the end.
Scorsese’s basic thought is that while The Searchers has some unfortunate or irritating aspects, it’s nonetheless a great film and has seemed deeper, more troubling and more layered the older he’s become.
My basic view of The Searchers, as I wrote three of four years ago, is that “for a great film it takes an awful lot of work to get through it.”
I don’t know how to enjoy The Searchers any more except by wearing aesthetic blinders — by ignoring all the stuff that drives me up the wall in order to savor the beautiful heartbreaking stuff (the opening and closing shot, Wayne’s look of fear when he senses danger for his brother’s family, his picking up Wood at the finale and saying, ‘Let’s go home, Debbie’). That said I can’t help but worship Winston C. Hoch‘s photography for its own virtues.
Scorsese’s wisest observation is that John Ford personally related to John Wayne‘s Ethan Edwards, the gruff, scowling, racist-minded loner at the heart of this 1956 film.
Ford “was at his lowest ebb” when he made The Searchers, Scorsese writes. “Ford’s participation in the screen version of Mister Roberts had ended disastrously soon after a violent encounter between the filmmaker and his star Henry Fonda.
“For Ford, The Searchers was more than just another picture: It was his opportunity to prove that he was still in control. Did he pour more of himself into the movie? It does seem reasonable to assume that Ford recognized something of his own loneliness in Ethan Edwards and that the character sparked something in him. It’s interesting to see how it dovetails with another troubled character from the same period. Like James Stewart‘s Scotty in Vertigo, Edwards’ obsessive quest ends in madness.”
Jeffrey Hunter, John Wayne
Film lovers know The Searchers “by heart,” Scorsese writes, “but what about average movie watchers? What place does John Ford’s masterpiece occupy in our national consciousness?”
Wells to Scorsese: In terms of the consciousness of the general public, close to zilch. In terms of the big-city Film Catholic community (industry aficionados, entertainment journalists, film academics and devoted students, educated and well-heeled film buffs, obsessive film bums), there is certainly respect for The Searchers but true passionate love? The numbers of those who feel as strongly as you, most of whom grew up in the ’50s and ’60s, are, I imagine, relatively small and dwindling as we speak.
I’m pleased to note that some of my complaints about Ford have at least been acknowledged by Scorsese. “A few years ago I watched it with my wife,” he writes, “and I will admit that it gave me pause. Many people have problems with Ford’s Irish humor, which is almost always alcohol-related. For some, the frontier-comedy scenes with Ken Curtis are tough to take.
“For me, the problem was with the scenes involving a plump Comanche woman (Beulah Archuletta) that the Hunter character inadvertently takes as a wife. There is some low comedy in these scenes: Hunter kicks her down a small hill, and Max Steiner’s score amplifies the moment with a comic flourish. Then the tone shifts dramatically, and Wayne and Hunter both become ruthless and bullying, scaring her away. Later, they find her body in a Comanche camp that has been wiped out by American soldiers, and you can feel their sense of loss. All the same, this passage seemed unnecessarily cruel to me.”
Here’s what I wrote way back when:
“John Ford‘s movies have been wowing and infuriating me all my life. A first-rate visual composer and one of Hollywood’s most economical story-tellers bar none, Ford made films that were always rich with complexity, understatements and undercurrents that refused to run in one simple direction.
“Ford’s films are always what they seem to be…until you watch them again and re-reflect, and then they always seem to be about something more. But the phoniness and jacked-up sentiment in just about every one of them can be oppressive, and the older Ford got the more he ladled it on.
“The Irish clannishness, the tributes to boozy male camaraderie, the relentless balladeering over the opening credits of 90% of his films, the old-school chauvinism, the racism, the thinly sketched women, the “gallery of supporting players bristling with tedious eccentricity” (as critic David Thomson put it in his Biographical Dictionary of Film) and so on.
The closing shot of John Ford’s The Searchers
“The treacliness is there but tolerable in Ford’s fine pre-1945 work — The Informer, Stagecoach, Young Mr. Lincoln , Drums Along the Mohawk, They Were Expendable , The Grapes of Wrath and My Darling Clementine .
“But it gets really thick starting with 1948’s Fort Apache and by the time you get to The Searchers, Ford’s undisputed masterpiece that came out in March of 1956, it’s enough to make you yank the reins and go ‘whoa, nelly.’
“Watch the breathtaking beautiful new DVD of The Searchers, and see if you can get through it without choking. Every shot is a visual jewel, but except for John Wayne‘s Ethan Edwards, one of the most fascinating racist bastards of all time, every last character and just about every line in the film feels labored and ungenuine.
“The phoniness gets so pernicious after a while that it seems to nudge this admittedly spellbinding film toward self-parody. Younger people who don’t ‘get’ Ford (and every now and then I think I may be turning into one) have been known to laugh at it.
“Jeffrey Hunter‘s Martin Pawley does nothing but bug his eyes, overact and say stupid exasperating lines all through the damn thing. Nearly every male supporting character in the film does the same. No one has it in them to hold back or play it cool.
“Ken Curtis‘s Charlie McCorry, Harry Carey Jr.’s Brad Jorgensen, Hank Worden‘s Mose Harper…characters I’ve come to despise.
“You can do little else but sit and grimace through Natalie Wood‘s acting as Debbie (the kidnapped daughter of Ethan’s dead brother), Vera Miles‘ Laurie Jorgenson, and Beulah Archuletta‘s chubby Indian squaw (i.e., ‘Wild Goose Flying in the Night Sky’)…utterly fake in each and every gesture and utterance.
“I realize there’s a powerful double-track element in the racism that seethes inside Ethan, but until he made Cheyenne Autumn Ford always portrayed Indians — Native Americans — as creepy, vaguely sadistic oddballs. The German-born, blue-eyed Henry Brandon as Scar, the Comanche baddie…’nuff said.
“That repulsive scene when Ethan and Martin look at four or five babbling Anglo women whose condition was caused, we’re informed, by having been raised by Indians, and some guy says, ‘Hard to believe they’re white’ and Ethan says, ‘They ain’t white!’
“I’ll always love the way Ford handles that brief bit when Ward Bond‘s Reverend Clayton sees Martha, the wife of Ethan’s brother, stroking Ethan’s overcoat and then barely reacts — perfect — but every time Bond opens his mouth to say something, he bellows like a bull moose.”
Final thought: The more I think about the stuff in Ford’s films that drives me crazy, the less I want to watch any Ford films, ever. Okay, that’s not true but the only ones I can stand at this point are The Horse Soldiers, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The Grapes of Wrath, The Informer, The Lost Patrol, The Last Hurrah and, believe it or not, Donovan’s Reef.