Forget what Hanna (Focus Features, 4.8) is about because you’ve seen this fists-of-fury action-girl fantasy stuff before in Kickass, Salt and Sucker Punch — the same crap about a young 115-pound female hardbody wailing on much bigger and heavier adversaries, etc. But if you focus on Hanna‘s throttling symphonic style — the high-grade chops and adrenalized tone and choice fashion-flash photography, and the way it pounds into your head with a loud, throbbing techno-score by the Chemical Brothers — you may feel a special wow.
I saw Zach Snyder‘s Sucker Punch last night, and the first review I read this morning was from Marshall Fine. His admiring assessment mainly said three things: (1) “If you’re looking for Sucker Punch to make sense, see another film,” (2) Yes, it has “some flaws” but (3) “Snyder, in the space of three films” — i.e., this + Watchmen and 300 — “has become the most distinctive visual storyteller since Brian DePalma.”
Calling the LexG’s of the world! Emily Browning as “Babydoll” in Zach Snyder’s Sucker Punch.
That last statement is true in a faintly-tragic, merrily-we-go-to-hell way. Snyder does have a DePalma-esque visual paintbrush married to a crazy-maestro attitude . But I couldn’t let that “some flaws” remark stand so I wrote Fine immediately and said this:
“‘Flaws’? ‘FLAWS’? Sucker Punch is many things, but one of its goals — and it succeeds in record time, before the first act is over — is to torture people like me. Snyder has said he meant to make “Alice in Wonderland with machine guns”…machine guns and thunderclouds and samurai swords and red-eyed, medieval Japanese soldier-giants and hot kewpie-doll babes with false eyelashes, he meant. Either way the putrid remnants of the body of Lewis J. Carroll are now reanimating and reforming and adding flesh and bone and clawing their way out of the grave in order to find Snyder and his wife Deborah and strangle them in their bed.
“Snyder is a kind of visual dynamo of the first order who has created in Sucker Punch a trite-but-fascinating, symphonic, half-psychedlic, undeniably ‘inspired’ alternate-reality world — gothic, color-desaturated, Wachowski-esque — that is nonetheless ruled by so much concrete-brain idiocy and coarsely “mythic” cliches (i.e., an evil father figure so ridiculously vile and gross beyond measure that he makes the cackling, moustache-twirling villains of the Snidely Whiplash variety seem austere if not inert) and ludicrous, charmless, bottom-of-the-pit dialogue and cheaply pandering female-revenge fantasies that you literally CAN’T STAND IT and WANT TO HOWL and THROW YOUR 24 OZ. COKE AT THE SCREEN.
“Snyder is a masterful visual maestro (loved the proscenium arch ‘theatrical’ touches at the very beginning) but also — this is crucial to the Sucker Punch experience — an Igor-like, chained-in-the-basement, genius-level moron at dumbing things down. The movie is a digital torture device for those seeking at least a hint of compelling narrative, a tendril-ish remnant of logic, a tiny smidgen of story intelligence, and dialogue with a hint of flair or some kind of tethered-to-the-world normality.
“Apart from sending people like myself into tailspins of depression, Sucker Punch is essentially about the Warner Bros. corporate uglies giving loads of money to a wild-eyed 21st Century primitive and in so doing trying to turn on the younger female ticket-buyers with fantasies of power and revenge against all the oily men in their lives who’ve sought to exploit or use or treat them with cruelty. It is putrid ComicCon swill of the lowest order.
“In fact, Sucker Punch strongly suggests that there is, in fact, a ComicCon screenwriting software that is being secretly peddled to GenX and GenY filmmakers that insures that the exact same mythical imaginings and the exact same high-flying Matrix-y sword battles and the exact same wild-action-fantasy, go-to-the-next-video-game-level story progressions are repeated ad infinitum.
“Yes, there’s a worlds-within-worlds scheme going on (i.e., a dream-world-within-a-play-being-performed blahdeeblah) but it’s basically about LexG horndog lust and notions of hotpants girly-girls with onlinehookerblowjobslut fantasy names like Babydoll (the lead blondie played by Emily Browning) and Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish), Rocket (as in “you’ll go off like a rocket,” played by Jena Malone), Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens) and Amber (Jamie Chung)…oop-poop-pee-doop! Sucker Punch delivers like VHS porn, and I’m not just speaking of the dialogue but the acting. And to think of these nice, attractive, presumably intelligent actresses collecting a paycheck for their willingess to be chained in Snyder’s basement…the shame of it.
“How infuriating that a guy who really knows how to direct and whip up a frenzy with all kinds of serious, high-style production-design lather, is such a prisoner of his own sub-mental “holy shit, that’s so cool!” imaginings…such atrociously labored, poisonously cliched comic-book/video-game sludge that the mind reels & the stomach turns as the vomit goes splat on the sidewalk.
“This was Snyder’s first creation that came straight from his own imaginings (and also from the head of Steve Shibuya, “the guy who wrote the original score that Sucker Punch is based upon”). The tragedy is that there are no guiding hands or creeds or mechanisms or mentors in 2011 Hollywood to rein Snyder in and urge him to refine or re-shape or otherwise up his game. His producing-partner wife Deborah has obviously goaded him in this flamboyant direction, and the WB corporate hell-hounds are basically saying ‘yeahh, Zach…go for it, whatever, video-game fantasy crap…love it!”
“No offense but Sucker Punch feels to me like a ghastly, deranged and darkly depraved thing…it’s the apocalypse, the end, the flames of hell…and yet, at the end of the day, conversely brown and gooey.”
I once saw Elizabeth Taylor in the flesh. She was standing about ten or twelve feet away in a dense crowd of guys at an after-party at the Roxy, the popular Manhattan roller disco on West 18th, sometime in ’79 or ’80. I managed a glimpse or two of her eyes, and was slightly surprised to discover that they really were as beautiful as I’d been told. I was mesmerized. I think I actually said out loud, “Wow.”
Elizabeth Taylor in either a Cat On a Hot Tin Roof or Butterfield 8 publicity still.
I’d been looking at Taylor in film after film all my life, of course, but those real-life peepers had an extra-glistening, pools-of-passion, send-your-hormones-to-the-moon quality that I’d never quite gotten from a live female before. And they actually did seem to be violet colored, as legend had it.
And now she’s gone at age 79. Everyone and everything fades and recedes and moves on to the next dimension and/or state of being — no exceptions. The once-legendary Taylor, who hit her career and erotic hottitude peak between ’51 (A Place in The Sun) and ’60 (Butterfield 8), has left the earth. Death will happen one day to Chloe Moretz, to Angelina Jolie, to Johnny Depp, to Justin Timberlake, to myself, to Tom O’Neil, to Scott Feinberg, to my two cats….it’s as natural as breathing. But no one likes to think about that, and when somebody like La Liz passes away, it’s like everyone is collectively taking a big solemn gulp and saying, “Uhhm…oh, wow, yeah…of course.”
And the natural urge is to celebrate the highlights. But I can never quite bring myself to do that. Not 100%, I mean.
I’d heard early on that Elizabeth Taylor wasn’t the brightest bulb on the planet. I’d heard a story about her being at a pool party and asking someone what the calendar date was, and that person suggesting that she check the newspaper lying on a table nearby, and Liz doing so and saying the paper was no help because it was from the day before…or words to that effect.
But I heard and read a lot more about her as time went on, and I became persuaded that she was tough and real and super-loyal to her friends…although I never understood why she befriended the freak known as Michael Jackson. I had read once that she saved Montgomery Clift‘s life just after his 5.12.56 car crash by extracting a dislodged tooth that had been stuck in his wind pipe. By all accounts she was a good person to know and share time on the planet with, and also that she was feisty and steady and reliable and no fool. And she liked to drink and have fun and laugh through it all….hah!
I think, in short, that she might have been a somewhat better person than she was an actress. I’m not dismissing her very good ’50s performances in A Place In The Sun, The Last Time I Saw Paris, Giant, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Suddenly Last Summer and Butterfield 8. But she was really quite atrocious — certainly miscast — in the miserable Cleopatra, and with the exception of her brilliant, possibly all-time best performance in Mike Nichols‘ Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, she stopped getting the good roles after that and just wasn’t a very interesting presence in the ’60s and ’70s. She was pretty much out of the game by the early 80s.
Her golden time was the 1950s, period, and she was at her hottest back then also. She started to put on weight after Butterfield 8 (i.e., after she hit her early 30s), and the hard truth is that she looked vaguely plump in Cleopatra, and that roundish, slightly boozy and besotted look never went away after that. I’m sorry but that’s how it pretty much was. But those eyes of hers were givers of rapture and splendor.
Taylor lived a hell of a life, and stories will be told and re-told about her over the next two or three days that will refresh feelings of affection and respect and nostalgia, etc. She knew and jousted and clinked glasses with all the best people of her time, and sometimes loved and/or went to bed with men of great style and accomplishment and character and pizazz. (Except for Larry Fortensky.) It’s become more-or-less accepted doctrine that Richard Burton was the love of her life.
Does GenX or GenY know or care about Taylor? Probably not very much.
Honestly? I was looking around this morning for that SNL clip from ’78 or ’79 when John Belushi dressed up as Fat Liz eating fried chicken (and being interviewed by Bill Murray), and then pretending to choke on a chicken bone — that was hilarious.
My only other first-hand connection with La Liz has been my numerous sleepovers at the Nicky Hilton-Elizabeth Taylor house on Route 102 in Georgetown, Connecticut, as the guest of cartoonist Chance Browne. It’s a small cottage where Hilton and Taylor stayed for a period in 1950 during their brief rocky marrriage before she sued for divorce (she complained of spousal abuse) — local legend says Hilton threw Taylor out a window during one of their drunken fights.
In 2.12.11 posting called “Miss Tits”, I wrote that “what life’s natural process does to all of us in the end, even the luckiest and most beautiful and most magnificently endowed, is fairly horrific. I presume it’s understood that it was the great love of Elizabeth Taylor‘s life, Richard Burton, who came up with the above nickname during the shooting of Cleopatra.”
I’ve been wrestling with Ron Howard‘s The Dilemma for 10 months, or since I first read an October 2009 draft of Allen Loeb‘s script, which was initially called Your Cheating Heart, a.k.a. Untitled Cheating Project. I didn’t agree with the basic set-up, which is that a semi-mature male in his 40s would be on the fence about whether to tell his best friend that his wife may be playing around. Friends always wise each other up. Anyone who would dither and/or procrastinate about levelling with a pal is no pal — it’s that simple.
The Dilemma shot last summer in Chicago and is now about to open on 1.14.14, or two weeks hence. Last October’s “gay” terminology dustup is over and done with, but no one’s seen the film yet…to my knowledge.
Right now I can say only one thing for sure, which is that Vince Vaughn and Steve James look a lot slimmer in the Dilemma one-sheet than they do in the film. They play a couple of extra-beefy auto designers who’ve hooked up with two svelte brunettes — James is married to Winona Ryder and Vaughn is living with Jennifer Connelly. (That’s believable, right?) Anyway, Vaughn seems to be somewhere between his Wedding Crashers and Swingers appearance, and James hasn’t been this slim since high school.
Vaughn and James “will play Chicago-based engine designers Ronnie Valentine and Isaac Backman,” I wrote last February. “Their significant others are Connelly’s Beth (Ronnie’s live-in girlfriend) and Ryder’s Geneva (Isaac’s wife). The central tension is about Ronnie accidentally discovering that Geneva is playing around on Isaac, and the anxieties and trepidations that stem from his not knowing what to do. Should he just blurt out the bad news to Isaac, his business partner and longtime best friend? And if he does, will Isaac somehow blame him for Geneva’s betrayal? Or should he mind his own business and stay out of the lives of others?
“I was immediately repelled by Ronnie’s response because — hello? — there’s only one thing to do. In such a situation his loyalty would be to his longtime friend, not the wife, and so one way or the other he’d have to share what he suspects. No right guy would have to think about this. He’d start out by stressing to his pal that he doesn’t really ‘know’ anything but that he’s seen something disturbing and that maybe something’s up and maybe not. And then he’d suggest that the friend might want to hire a shamus to learn the facts or whatever. But come what may you must share what you’ve seen and/or suspect.
“The fact that jabbering Ronnie — a guy who’s in denial about almost everything, and who fibs all the time like Alibi Ike and has trust issues with everyone — hems and haws throughout the story is infuriating. By my sights the guy has no convictions or cojones, and who wants to spend 110 minutes with a 13 year-old who mostly goes ‘homina-homina-homina’ when faced with a serious issue?”
The Dilemma is junketing in Chicago next weekend. I’m told that the first Chicago junket screening is on Thursday, 1.6. The first New York media screening is reportedly set for Tuesday, 1.11.
I’ll always admire Donald Spoto, particularly because of “The Dark Side of Genius,” his 1983 Alfred Hitchcock biography. But I resolved to stop buying after reading “High Society: The Life of Grace Kelly,” which told me that Spoto had become an ally and protector of his subjects’ reputations. Now it’s being claimed that his Joan Crawford biography, called “Possessed,” continues in this vein.
As an Amazon.com reviewer puts it, “Joan Crawford biographies seem to fall roughly into three categories: (1) Utterly Junky; (2) Interesting Curios with Revealing New Biographical and Career Information; and (3) Respectable Tomes that Defend Joan and Primarily Gather Info from Already-Published Sources. Donald Spoto’s ‘Possessed: The Life of Joan Crawford‘ falls into the latter category.”
“Spoto, who did good work on Hitchcock decades ago and has since become a rolling mill of star bios, tries to cleanse [Crawford’s] portrait,” writes New Yorker critic David Denby, “separating rumor from fact, alleged hysteria from garden-variety unhappiness.
“Must we hate Crawford? Must we think about Crawford at all? Few men go weak in the knees dreaming about her, as they might with Lana Turner or Rita Hayworth; nor is she the kind of woman men could imagine bantering with blissfully as a lover, as they might with Katharine Hepburn or Barbara Stanwyck. She’s the date who raises your blood pressure, not your libido.
“Yet if Joan Crawford is not very likable she would, in a just world, be widely honored for a series of fiercely effective performances and for her emblematic quality as a twentieth-century woman. She was no feminist, but, willy-nilly, she got caught up in the dilemmas of strong women who are also the kind of highly sexual women who need men.
“In her more than eighty movies, she played flappers, working girls, adulteresses, matrons, and, most notably, the anguished heroines of melodrama. Any call for justice to Joan Crawford, however, runs into a dead end: the image of her as a madwoman is too juicily entertaining to give up.
“In 1978, the year after Crawford died, her estranged and disinherited adopted daughter Christina, a failed actress, produced a venomous portrait, “Mommie Dearest,” which alleged both physical abuse and a series of bizarre tests and punishments. In 1981 the director Frank Perry made the sensationally vindictive movie of the same title in which Faye Dunaway, her career as a star fading, grabbed at a chance for glory, or at least notoriety, by launching herself into a spangled caricature of Crawford.
“The collective memory of Crawford quickly hardened into the remorselessness of camp.”
Postscript: I had heard stories all my life about Grace Kelly, the hottest blonde in Hollywood history, having had affairs with almost all of her leading men, and then along came party-pooper Spoto, plausibly debunking most of them. But I don’t want truth and realism — I want magic! I want to hear stories about Gary Cooper‘s portable dressing room rocking with passion during the shooting of High Noon. I know now that the tireless and scrupulous Spoto is averse to this sort of thing, and that’s fine, but that’s also why I’m off the boat.
Your Highness won’t Norbit-ize Natalie Portman‘s Oscar hopes since it comes out post-Oscar (i.e., 4.8.11). But to call this latest trailer “not funny” isn’t the half of it. The blase throwaway tone doesn’t just make me cringe and convulse. It makes me dream about fantasy paybacks. In a word, retribution.
Portman, James Franco and Zooey Deschanel get a pass because…well, they just do. But I’d be okay with the careers of Danny McBride and director David Gordon Green being hurt by this. This trailer completely destroys all the hip-cool vibes created by Pineapple Express.
Notice how Portman gets to perform all the standard 2010 female-action-star stuff in a medieval guise — punch, kickbox, shoot arrows (as Cate Blanchett did in Robin Hood) — but she also peels down to a thong bikini in one swimming hole scene. This is basically a case of Portman and her reps (a) demanding and getting all the socio-political power demonstrations afforded a major female star when costarring in a throwaway idiot-costume comedy, or (b) elevating the 2010 industry horseshit factor to level 12. (I would have been okay, incidentally, with Olivia de Havilland having a thong-bikini scene in Michael Curtiz‘s Robin Hood…no complaints at all.)
Remember how it was Kevin Costner who performed the au natural swimming-hole scene in Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves and not Mary Elizabeth Mastrontonio? Imagine the humor from McBride taking a dip in a pond and Portman watching nearby from a hidden place, checking out his pot belly and pimply ass and man-boobs and going “ahh, my heart goes pitty-pat!”
In mid November Disney Studios chairman Rich Ross told Deadline‘s Pete Hammond that “we have the biggest and best reviewed film of the year in Toy Story 3 [so] we’re going for the Best Picture win…if not this year and not this movie, when?” Disneyland Resort hotel workers have a response: “Some other year, pal. Your Disney corporate colleagues are trying to screw us out of health benefits, so you and Toy Story 3 can symbolically share the blame.”
The facts do seem to suggest that Disney is not treating its employees fairly. But is it fair to link the Oscar fortunes of Toy Story 3 to this dispute? The Pixar guys who created Toy Story 3 are, of course, blameless. But if I was an activist for the Disneyland Resort hotel workers, I would be making this same point, unfair as it may seem. Disney is Disney and all corporations are sociopathic in nature. Eff Mickey.
The more I think about the differences between James L Brooks‘ How Do You Know and Broadcast News, the more I shake my head in amazement. How could the same guy have directed and written something so smart and true 23-plus years ago and then make two 21st Century flops in a row, Spanglish and now this thing?
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Obviously Brooks, 70, isn’t the same guy today as he was when he researched, wrote and directed Broadcast News, when he was in his mid to late 40s. It sounds cruel to say stuff like this, but most creative types experience peak periods of 10 or 20 years, and then they step off the treadmill. They go soft, age out, lose the mojo. Francis Coppola went through this syndrome. Vigor, vitality and being attuned to the culture don’t come easily at any age, but it’s really tough for older wealthy guys to hang on to it.
I only know that there isn’t a single scene in How Do You Know that’s nearly as good as the one above, and this is a relatively minor moment in Broadcast News . But the way Jack Nicholson slowly turns around and looks at the bespectacled news chief when the latter suggests that Nicholson could save a few newsroom colleagues from unemployment if “you knock a million or so off your salary” is classic.
The thing you just can’t buy in How Do You Know is Reese Witherspoon‘s interest in Owen Wilson‘s big-league pitcher, who’s obviously immature, selfish, a dog and more than a bit of an asshole. Wilson is such an absurdly bad boyfriend choice that Witherspoon’s decision to not only slam ham with the guy but move into his place kills whatever respect and/or empathy the audience might have had for her to begin with.
As I wrote on 12.9, How Do You Know “has some lines and little moments that work very nicely. It’s not my idea of a disaster — I can foresee a portion of the critics saying it’s okay — but my main impression was that of a very bizarre, strangely un-life-like film. The writing is simultaneously clever and constipated, and the lighting and the cinematography seem overly poised and prettified. It looks and feels like it’s happening in some kind of Hollywood fairyland that feels a lot like a sound-stage set (i.e., one that’s meant to simulate certain indoor settings in and around Washington, D.C.).
“It seems as if Brooks has entered his formalist, out-of-time, older-director phase. The look and tone and pacing of How Do You Know reminded me of the look and tone and pacing of Alfred Hitchcock‘s films after The Birds — the increasingly rigid and old-fogey-behind-the-camera feeling of Marnie, Torn Curtain, Topaz, Family Plot, etc. (Some believe that Frenzy was an exception; I don’t.) I’m talking about a phase in which a director is not only repeating the kind of brush strokes that felt fresher and less constipated 20, 25 or 30 years earlier, but emphasizing them so as to say ‘I know this may seem unnatural to some of you out there, but this is how I like to do things, no matter how stylistically out-of-touch this film may seem. This is me, take it or leave it.'”
One reason I feel that Witherspoon’s relationship with Wilson is difficult to swallow is that you don’t believe her character would have hot sex with anyone. That’s because Reese Witherspoon has never seemed believable as a naturally sexual being. To me, anyway.
Just as it’s difficult not to have erotic or sexual thoughts about certain actors and actresses, there are actors and actresses on the other side of the spectrum who seem antithetical to any kind of erotic allure or activity. You not only find it difficult to believe in their characters as sexual beings, but they themselves seem anti-sexual — the idea of any kind of physical intimacy seems unlikely or misguided or ill-considered. There are many, many actors and actresses who fall under the latter category (I always avoided any thoughts of John Candy having sex back in the ’80s), but How Do You Know convinced me that Reese Witherspoon is one of those no-sex-we’re-British types. And that’s fine. Not everyone is obliged to radiate smoldering hotness. It takes all sorts.
I have my Lesley Manville obsession, and TheWrap’s Steve Pond has a thing about Javier Bardem‘s performance in Biutiful. I feel the same way, actually, as does Ben Affleck and Entertainment Weekly‘s Dave Karger and Ryan Gosling, Sean Penn, Guillermo del Toro, et.al. Here’s how Pond puts it:
“Every awards season is rife with injustices, but one in particular stands out so far this year. Javier Bardem’s performance in Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu‘s haunted, crushing tone poem Biutiful is a towering achievement, a magnificent performance that should comfortably sit on every list of the great acting accomplishments of the year.
“Without saying much – Jesse Eisenberg likely spouts more words in the opening three minutes of The Social Network than Bardem does in the whole of Biutiful — Bardem subtly evokes and embodies a world-weary Everyman living with a ticking clock and the weight of the world on his shoulders.
“Guillermo del Toro has called Bardem’s performance ‘monumental’; Sean Penn said it’s the best thing he’s seen since Marlon Brando in Last Tango in Paris.
“When I saw King’s Speech, I thought Colin Firth gave the best performance I’d seen in a couple of years,” Ben Affleck told me at a party for The Town a couple of weeks ago. “Then I saw Biutiful.” He shook his head. “Javier is on another level from the rest of us.”
“Memo to Academy members: SAG and Globe voters blew it, badly. Don’t you do the same.”
All these admirers plus the jury at last May’s Cannes Film Festival had no problem seeing Biutiful and recognizing what they’d seen in Bardem’s performance. But this kind of thing, let’s face it, doesn’t play as well with Average Joes. Many if not most American moviegoers (including film industry types) are simply too grief-averse — too married to the idea of a movie lifting your spirits or acting like some kind of friendly quaalude — to summon the character to see Biutiful. Can we be honest? Can we call a spade a spade? “Grief averse” is a polite way of saying “too shallow.”
Typepad log-in problems have blocked would-be commenters over the last two or three days, but I think things are okay now. It had something to do (idiotically) with the server clock being off and causing a synchronicity problem. In any case, Film Society of Lincoln Center associate program director Scott Foundas tried to respond two days ago to blogger reactions to the LAFCA voting, but was blocked by the malfunction. Here’s what he wrote:
“[LAFCA Best Supporting Actor winner] Niels Arestrup did not ‘exhaust’ his Oscar eligibility last year. In fact, he was never — and never will be — eligible for an Oscar because of the current Academy rule (much revised over the years) stating that any film nominated for Best Foreign Language Film can not be nominated in a subsequent year in any other categories, regardless of when it actually opens in the U.S. Had A Prophet been released for a qualifying run in 2009, then Arestrup would have been eligible at the 2010 Oscars. Had the film not been nominated for Foreign Film at the 2010 Oscars, then Arestrup would have a shot in the spring.
“This is the sort of thing one would assume would be common knowledge amongst such an august group of awards-season ‘experts,’ but then we all know the old adage about making assumptions…
“As for the suggestion that neither Arestrup nor Kim Hye-Ja will surface again during the remaining awards season, ‘just as it was the first and last we heard of LAFCA’s 2009 best actress Yolande Moreau,’ I suppose that was true of Moreau if one discounts Moreau’s similar wins at the National Society of Film Critics, the Cesar Awards [French Oscars], and even that hotbed of obscurantist cinephilia, the Newport Beach Film Festival.
“At the very least, you can expect to see Arestrup (who also already won a Cesar for his performance) and Kim’s names in the mix in the annual nationwide polls of film critics conducted by The Village Voice, Film Comment and Indiewire. Look back to the reviews these films received at the time of their release, and you will find that the performances in question — and the movies that contain them — were among the best received of the year.
“Sorry that the companies responsible for releasing the films in question didn’t paper the pages of Variety with ‘For Your Consideration’ ads or organize any cocktail soirees to parade their talent before the Oscar-blogging cognoscenti, thereby instantly ruling them out as contenders in the minds of some. (Hey, they’re no Frankie and Alice.) The job of film critics, however, remains to review movies, and not just the hype surrounding them.”
Typepad log-in problems have blocked would-be commenters over the last two or three days, but I think things are okay now. It had something to do (idiotically) with the server clock being off due to the time change. In any case, Film Society of Lincoln Center associate program director Scott Foundas tried to respond two days ago to blogger reactions to the LAFCA voting, but was blocked by the malfunction. Here’s what he wrote:
“[LAFCA Best Supporting Actor winner] Niels Arestrup did not ‘exhaust’ his Oscar eligibility last year. In fact, he was never — and never will be — eligible for an Oscar because of the current Academy rule (much revised over the years) stating that any film nominated for Best Foreign Language Film can not be nominated in a subsequent year in any other categories, regardless of when it actually opens in the U.S. Had A Prophet been released for a qualifying run in 2009, then Arestrup would have been eligible at the 2010 Oscars. Had the film not been nominated for Foreign Film at the 2010 Oscars, then Arestrup would have a shot in the spring.
“This is the sort of thing one would assume would be common knowledge amongst such an august group of awards-season ‘experts,’ but then we all know the old adage about making assumptions…
“As for the suggestion that neither Arestrup nor Kim Hye-Ja will surface again during the remaining awards season, ‘just as it was the first and last we heard of LAFCA’s 2009 best actress Yolande Moreau,’ I suppose that was true of Moreau if one discounts Moreau’s similar wins at the National Society of Film Critics, the Cesar Awards [French Oscars], and even that hotbed of obscurantist cinephilia, the Newport Beach Film Festival.
“At the very least, you can expect to see Arestrup (who also already won a Cesar for his performance) and Kim’s names in the mix in the annual nationwide polls of film critics conducted by The Village Voice, Film Comment and Indiewire. Look back to the reviews these films received at the time of their release, and you will find that the performances in question — and the movies that contain them — were among the best received of the year.
“Sorry that the companies responsible for releasing the films in question didn’t paper the pages of Variety with ‘For Your Consideration’ ads or organize any cocktail soirees to parade their talent before the Oscar-blogging cognoscenti, thereby instantly ruling them out as contenders in the minds of some. (Hey, they’re no Frankie and Alice.) The job of film critics, however, remains to review movies, and not just the hype surrounding them.”
Typepad log-in problems have blocked would-be commenters over the last two or three days, but I think things are okay now. It had something to do (idiotically) with the server clock being off due to the time change. In any case, Film Society of Lincoln Center associate program director Scott Foundas tried to respond two days ago to blogger reactions to the LAFCA voting, but was blocked by the malfunction. Here’s what he wrote:
“[LAFCA Best Supporting Actor winner] Niels Arestrup did not ‘exhaust’ his Oscar eligibility last year. In fact, he was never — and never will be — eligible for an Oscar because of the current Academy rule (much revised over the years) stating that any film nominated for Best Foreign Language Film can not be nominated in a subsequent year in any other categories, regardless of when it actually opens in the U.S. Had A Prophet been released for a qualifying run in 2009, then Arestrup would have been eligible at the 2010 Oscars. Had the film not been nominated for Foreign Film at the 2010 Oscars, then Arestrup would have a shot in the spring.
“This is the sort of thing one would assume would be common knowledge amongst such an august group of awards-season ‘experts,’ but then we all know the old adage about making assumptions…
“As for the suggestion that neither Arestrup nor Kim Hye-Ja will surface again during the remaining awards season, ‘just as it was the first and last we heard of LAFCA’s 2009 best actress Yolande Moreau,’ I suppose that was true of Moreau if one discounts Moreau’s similar wins at the National Society of Film Critics, the Cesar Awards [French Oscars], and even that hotbed of obscurantist cinephilia, the Newport Beach Film Festival.
“At the very least, you can expect to see Arestrup (who also already won a Cesar for his performance) and Kim’s names in the mix in the annual nationwide polls of film critics conducted by The Village Voice, Film Comment and Indiewire. Look back to the reviews these films received at the time of their release, and you will find that the performances in question — and the movies that contain them — were among the best received of the year.
“Sorry that the companies responsible for releasing the films in question didn’t paper the pages of Variety with ‘For Your Consideration’ ads or organize any cocktail soirees to parade their talent before the Oscar-blogging cognoscenti, thereby instantly ruling them out as contenders in the minds of some. (Hey, they’re no Frankie and Alice.) The job of film critics, however, remains to review movies, and not just the hype surrounding them.”
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