12:40 pm Update: The New York Film Critics Circle has just handed its Best Actor prize to Milk‘s Sean Penn, its Best Foreign Film award to Cristian Mungiu‘s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days , and its Best Documentary award to James Marsh‘s Man on Wire.

11:45 am Update: The New York Film Critics Circle has just handed its Best Supporting Actress award to Vicky Cristina Barcelona‘s Penelope Cruz, who took the same honor yesterday from the L.A. Film Critics Association. And Frozen River director Courtney Hunt won for Best First Film.

11:25 am Update: Oh, my God — Happy Go Lucky‘s Mike Leigh has just been named Best Director by the New York Film Critics Circle. What is this? Are the New York crickets going to give HGL their Best Picture prize also? It’s a fine, well-made film as far as it goes, but c’mon…it’s not some drop-dead masterwork teeming with visual splendor. It’s just a lively, well-honed thing about a woman who drives people crazy with her happy vibes.

Previously: The New York Film Critics Circle began voting around 9:45 am, and they’e given Sally Hawkins their Best Actress award for her performance in Mike Leigh‘s Happy Go Lucky, and Milk‘s Josh Brolin has won for Best Supporting Actor. And WALL*E, of course, for Best Animated Film.

Hawkins won the same award yesterday from the L.A. Film Critics Association, and Brolin was nominated in the Best Supporting Male category yesterday morning by the BFCA.

I’m okay with Hawkins’ win, but at the same time not quite overjoyed. As I’ve said several times, I admire Hawkins talent and pizazz but loathed her HGL character. On top of which Kate Winslet‘s Revolutionary Road performance has gotten blanked, blanked and blanked again. Why is this happening? And what about poor Kristin Scott Thomas? Something’s really and truly not right here. Meryl Streep, Melissa Leo, Anne Hathaway and Kate Beckinsale have also been elbowed aside.

It’s interesting that the BFCA didn’t even nominate Hawkins. No accounting for taste in either camp.

10:35 am Update: Rachel Getting Married screenwriter Jenny Lumet has taken the Best Screenplay award, and Slumdog Mllionaire‘s dp Anthony Dod Mantle has won for Best Cinematography.

Incidentally, in 1956 the New York Film Critics Circle gave its Best Picture prize to….wait for it….Around the World in Eighty Days. It was bad enough that the Academy gave this nothing film its Best Picture Oscar, but the NYFCC? A major historical embrassment.

And in 1938 the NYFCC gave its Best Picture award to King Vidor‘s The Citadel. Until this moment I’d never even heard of this film, much less seen it on DVD. Robert Donat, Rosalind Russell, Ralph Richardson, Rex Harrison, etc..

Just a reminder that Cristian Mungiu‘s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days came out on DVD last Tuesday, and that those who missed it in theatres…you know the rest. Set the time aside, make some popcorn or order in some pita and hummus, open a bottle of white wine, sit down with a significant other and pop it in. It’s a landmark film, an unmissable classic.

Lance Hammer‘s austere, somber, incontestably over-praised Ballast has snagged four nominations for the upcoming Gotham Independent Film Awards, which will be held 12.2 at Cipriani Wall Street. The snooty elites have embraced this low-key atmospheric mood piece since it played at Sundance ’08. I saw it there (i.e., at the Eccles) and went “uh-huh…okay…fine.”

Cipriani Wall Street

I’m not saying Ballast doesn’t deliver a nicely immersive sense of reality, or that it doesn’t deliver credible, first-rate art-film chops. I’m saying I don’t get the critics who’ve wet themselves after seeing it. Ballast never really got hold of me. It’s like a cross between an early Lars von Trier film and a Cristian Mungiu Romanian film (and that’s a good thing to see from an American filmmaker) but without the gathering intrigue. I kept saying to myself, “This is it? This is what Robert Koehler is doing cartwheels over?” As Armond White wrote, “It’s simply another calling-card movie establishing the director’s credentials.”
Here are the nominee GIF Award nominees and my pick about who (or what) should win:
BEST FEATURE: Ballast, Frozen River, Synecdoche, New York, The Visitor, The Wrestler. Suggested HE Winner: Tom McCarthy‘s The Visitor. Runner-up: The Wrestler.
BEST DOCUMENTARY: Chris & Don: A Love Story; Encounters at the End of the World, Man on Wire, Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, Trouble the Water. Suggested HE winner: James Marsh‘s Man on Wire. Runner-up: Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired. Special HE Standout That Wasn’t Nominated But Should Have Been: Patti Smith: Dream of Life.

BEST ENSEMBLE PERFORMANCE: Ballast — Micheal J. Smith, Sr., JimMyron Ross, Tarra Riggs, Johnny McPhail; Rachel Getting Married — Anne Hathaway, Rosemarie DeWitt, Bill Irwin, Tunde Adebimpe, Mather Zickel, Anna Deavere Smith, Anisa George, Debra Winger ; Synecdoche, New York — Philip Seymour Hoffman, Samantha Morton, Michelle Williams, Catherine Keener, Emily Watson, Dianne Wiest, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Hope Davis, Tom Noonan; Vicky Cristina Barcelona — Scarlett Johansson, Rebecca Hall, Javier Bardem, Penelope Cruz; The Visitor — Richard Jenkins, Hiam Abbas, Haaz Sleiman, Danai Gurira. Suggested HE winner: If it’s finally a question of which ensemble cast seems the most grounded and penetrating without conspicuously “acting,” the winner has to to be The Visitor team. Runners-up: the Rachel Getting Married crew minus Tunde Adebimpe, who basically just stands around and smiles and good-vibes everyone.
BREAKTHROUGH DIRECTOR: Antonio Campos, Afterschool; Dennis Dortch, A Good Day to Be Black & Sexy, Lance Hammer, Ballast; Barry Jenkins, Medicine for Melancholy; Alex Rivera , Sleep Dealer. Suggested HE winner: What the hell, give it to Hammer. Runner-up: Alex Rivera.
BREAKTHROUGH ACTOR: Pedro Castaneda in August Evening; Rosemarie DeWitt in Rachel Getting Married; Rebecca Hall in Vicky Cristina Barcelona; Melissa Leo in Frozen River; Alejandro Polanco in Chop Shop; Micheal J. Smith, Sr. in Ballast. Suggested HE winner: Rosemarie DeWitt. (I love Melissa Leo’s work in Frozen River, but how is she a breakthrough type? She’s been around the track a few times.) Runner-up: Alex Rivera.
BEST FILM NOT PLAYING AT A THEATER NEAR YOU: Afterschool, Antonio Campos, director; Meadowlark, Taylor Greeson, producer/director; The New Year Parade, Tom Quinn, director; Sita Sings the Blues, Nina Paley, producer/director; Wellness, Jake Mahaffy. Suggested HE winner: No opinion.

The moral undercurrent in Nuri Bilge Ceylan‘s Three Monkeys — a quietly devastating Turkish family drama about guilt, adultery and lots of Biblical thunderclaps — is in every frame. It’s about people doing wrong things, one leading to another in a terrible chain, and trying to face or at least deal with the consequences but more often trying to lie and deny their way out of them. Good luck with that.

Hatice Aslan, Yavuz Bingol in Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Three Monkeys.

I was hooked from the get-go — gripped, fascinated. I was in a fairly excited state because I knew — I absolutely knew — I was seeing the first major film of the festival. Three Monkeys is about focus and clarity in every sense of those terms, but it was mainly, for me, about stunning performances — minimalist acting that never pushes and begins and ends in the eyes who are quietly hurting every step of the way.
It’s a very dark and austere film that unfolds at a purposeful but meditative (which absolutely doesn’t mean “slow”) pace, taking its time and saying to the audience, “Don’t worry, this is going somewhere…we’re not jerking around so pay attention to the steps.”
A 50ish politician named Servet (Ercan Kesal), fighting off sleep as he drives on a narrow country road, hits a man and kills him. Freaked, he drives off without calling anyone. The next day he convinces the quiet-mannered Eyup (Yavuz Bingol), his longtime driver who’s abut the same age, to confess to the crime and do the jail term, promising to give him a lot of money in addition to paying his salary to his wife Hacer (Hatice Aslan), and son Ismail (Ahmet Rifat Sungar) while he’s in stir.

Except Servet soon takes advantage of Eyup’s absence of having it off with Hacer in a what-the-fuck recreational sense. (He’s a politician, after all.) The plot thickens when Ismail, a morose downhead to begin with, learns of the affair and starts twitching with anger and grief and guilt, not knowing what to do or say. Then Eyup gets out of jail and immediately starts to sense the after-vibe. Then we realize that Hacer hasn’t indulged with the boss out of lust or boredom or to keep him sweet but because she’s obsessively in love with the creep. (Good God.) Then matters get even worse.
Every step of the way you’re reading the characters, absorbing what they’re feeling or looking for, guessing what they might do, feeling their vulnerability, pulling for them, wanting to see it all come out right or at least end in a way that won’t result in more pain or ruination.
Ceylan and his cinematographer Gokhan Tiryaki are into filling their frames with muted but luscious browns, grays, blacks (lots of black) and faded greens. The visuals are such a bath that Three Monkeys almost deserves a standing ovation for this alone. But it’s the unstinting sense of engagement with the moral cost of what’s being done and lied about and covered up that matters. It’s heavy material, all right, but it’s not a reach to call it the stuff of classic tragedy. The script (by Ceylan, Ebru Ceylan and Ercan Kesal) is right up Will Shakespeare’s alley.

Nuri Bilge Ceylan

And ohhh, that thunder! Four or five times it growls and rumbles like God’s angry symphony. Lightning, too, at the very end.
I think Three Monkeys is fundamentally a political film because it’s telling an eternal political truth, which is that people with money and power rarely pay for their wrong-doings — they simply arrange for someone down the food chain to take the rap. And then sometimes they fuck the rap-taker’s wife for good measure.
The (mostly) static camera work and powerful quietude of Three Monkeys reminded me every so often of Cristian Mungiu‘s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, which played here last year and won the Palme D’Or.
I’m not sure if Three Monkeys is a masterpiece — I’m still sifting it through — but I knew all along I was watching an exceptional, very powerful, high-end thing. It’s the kind of film that plays like gangbusters inside the Grand Palais but will barely be seen in commercial cinemas, and may even irritate the ADD crowd. It’s not going to do much business in the States, I’m guessing — some critics, I’m told, were saying they bored with it as they talked things through at the bottom of the steps outside the Salle Debussy — but it looks to me like a sure contender for the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme D’Or.

You absolutely have to put Hatice Aslan at the very top of the list of Best Actress winners here. I don’t care what comes along between now and Friday the 23rd — her performance is knockout stuff. Ditto Yavuz Bingol for Best Actor. I read somewhere that Ceylan, in the tradition of Robert Bresson, doesn’t use professional actors; I read somewhere else that he uses friends who are actors– just not famous ones. I’m sure someone will point out what an ignoramus I am for not knowing this stuff chapter and verse.
It’s obviously early to be talking Palme D’Or winners, but when a film has the Unmistakable Right Stuff, you know it right away. Moral fortitude, razor-sharp vision and stylistic sure-footedness of this calibre are impossible to ignore.
Originally a photographer, Ceylan seems to me like the Satyajit Ray of Turkey. His hallmarks, to quote from a recent Turkish Daily News article, are “a strong minimalist shooting style, themes of alienation and” — I didn’t know this until recently — “strong autobiographical elements.” The piece adds that Ceylan’s cinema “is not for those who view cinema as a form of entertainment, but for festival-followers who revere art-house filmmaking.”

Except — hello? – great art-house movies are something very close to entertainment. They take you out of yourself and into a realm that adds to your empathy and understanding of life’s infinite sadness. They turn you on with their mesmerizing style and condensed capturings of instantly recognizable human folly. When films of this sort really deliver they satisfy in ways that stay with you for decades. They add meat to your bones.

As the uproar over the exclusion of Cristian Mungiu‘s 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days from the foreign-language “short list” continues to smolder, a thought comes to mind. Instead of ignoring the oversight and stressing the awards and lavish praise that this film has gathered since last May, what if IFC Films, the film’s distributor, were to make the Academy committee’s diss the focus of a new campaign?
What if IFC Films sought out the hundreds of “name”-level industry people who are mortified at what happened and asked them to sign their names to a petition that would run in consumer press and online ads, pleading with the public to see the film regardless and that doing so would be about more than just “buying a ticket” and “seeing a film”?
Or forget the public — what about a trade ad in Variety in which the film’s admirers say en masse that they’re disgusted by the Academy committee’s decision, and this incident makes clear that changes in the selection process are desperately needed?
People who care about these matters should stand up and respond as a community. You can’t just shrug and be cynical. You have to say “this can’t happen again…for the good of the industry and its reputation, we have to do something.”

“Tuesday, January 15, 2008 — a date that shall live in Academy Awards infamy,” writes L.A. Weekly critic Scott Foundas in a piece titled “How Do You Say ‘Oscar Scandal’ in Romanian?” He’s referring to the shafting earlier today of Cristian Mungiu‘s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days by the Academy’s foreign-language committee.

“I’ve had better days,” producer and Foreign Language nominating committee chairman Mark Johnson told Foundas late this afternoon. Referring to a recently instituted two-phase nominating process, Johnson said, “I thought we had made big strides last year, but apparently not big enough.”
When Foundas asked if “further retooling (including the possible involvement of more active Academy members earlier in the nominating process) may lie in the future” — code for 86ing the geriatric fuddy-duds whose aesthetic taste buds have obviously become a problem — Johnson was unambiguous. “That’s what has to be done, because in my mind it can’t continue like this. I don’t believe these choices reflect the Academy at large.”

One of the biggest outrages in the history of the Academy’s foreign film committee — a scandal fed by deficient taste and myopic, mule-like obstinacy — has just happened with the release of the nine-film short list that doesn’t include Cristian Mungiu‘s widely hailed 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days. The people who pushed for this decision need to be identified and, with all charity and compassion, expelled from this group for life. What will it take? Torches and pitchforks at the corner of Wilshire and La Peer at 8 pm this evening?

4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days star Anamaria Marinca

The foreign-committee nominators were in no way obliged to salute this landmark film as their absolute favorite, but to not even put it on the short list (much less include it among the five nominees, from which the winner of the Best Foreign Language Feature Oscar would be chosen) is intolerable and inexcusable. This is truly a Day of Infamy. I’m not trying to be Franklin D. Roosevelt here, but these people have embarassed themselves and the Academy and reflected on the industry as a whole…it’s laughable.
A “name” player associated with the foreign branch shared the following a few minutes ago: “I’m embarassed. I think it’s humiliating and unfair, and I’m shocked…shocked at this omission.”
Among other prizes, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days won the ’07 European Film Awards’ Best Picture prize, the ’07 Cannes Palme d’Or, and it was named Best Foreign Film by the National Society of Film Critics, the Chicago Film Critics Association and the Toronto Film Critics Association. It also won the Bronze Horse For Best Film and Best Actress from the Stockholm Film Festival 2007.
The films chosen for the nine-film short list are the following: The Counterfeiters, The Year My Parents Went on Vacation, Days of Darkness, Beaufort,, The Unknown, Mongol, Katyn, 12 and The Trap. Yes, that’s right — Persepolis, the French entry, also got the boot, and so did Juan Antonio Bayona‘s absolutely brilliant The Orphanage.

Laura Vasilu, Vlad Ivanov

Somewhere between 300 and 400 people voted for the nine films. Exaggerating only slightly, a veteran marketer described the foreign film branch this morning as “all retired, their median age is 75, a lot of them are on walkers and they have very conservative tastes.”

Cheers to the National Society of Film Critics for denying their Best Supporting Actress award to Gone Baby Gone‘s Amy Ryan, and instead handing it over to I’m Not There‘s Cate Blanchett. Somebody bucked the tide! Admire that backbone. On top of which Blanchett deserves.

There Will Be Blood took the Best Picture award, and Paul Thomas Anderson was named Best Drector. Blood‘s Daniel Day-Lewis was named Best Actor, Away From Her‘s Julie Christie was named Best Actress, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford‘s Casey Affleck was named Best Supporting Actor, and Blood‘s Robert Elswit was named Best Cinematographer.
Cristian Mungiu‘s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days was named Best Foreign-Language Film of 2007, and Charles Ferguson‘s No End In Sight was named Best Non-Fiction Film (i.e., Best Documentary).
Here’s a backstage report on the NSFC voting from The Envelope‘s Tom O’Neil.

Cristian Mungiu‘s 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days “manages to deal with abortion without advocating any stance other than compassion,” writes Times Online critic Kevin Maher. “It illustrates what happens when a woman’s right to choose her biological destiny is removed, and yet it also shows a picture of abortion that would please the most adamant pro-lifer.”

And yet, as I wrote last summer, the likelihood of any American right-to-lifers seeing this movie is next to nil. Their commitment to stopping abortion is sincere, but it pales next to their xenophobia. I suspect that most conservative Americans would rather jump into a raging volcano than see 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days.
The right-to-choose and pro-life viewpoints in Mungiu’s film “cancel each other out, leaving a moving portrait of two lonely women who bond in an unforgiving regime,” Maher writes.
“It’s very difficult to explain why the film moves so many people,’ says Mungiu, who shot the movie in 2006 for 600,000 euros. ‘But I honestly believe that it has a soul. As soon as we finished editing it we knew that we had something strong, emotional and balanced. It is a film that speaks about something important without ever being preachy.”

The L.A. Film Critics stood tall in the mud and adopted their usual contrarian, damn-the-torpedos stance in giving their Best Picture award today to Paul Thomas Anderson‘s There Will Be Blood — a brilliant, lacerating, suffer-no-softies art film that you need to see twice to get the full benefit of. But yay for LAFCA — it was a good thing to do for a movie that a lot of mainstream industry types may flinch at when they see it. (Which is why they’ll need to see it twice — the second time’s the charm!)

No Country for Old Men wasn’t the runner-up (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly took that honor) and that’s fine…but again, no love for poor Atonement, by any standard a non-competitor or perhaps even a weak-kneed underdog at this stage.

Variety‘s Anne Thompson wrote earlier today that LAFCA did this in response to the National Board of Review having given their Best Picture award to No Country for Old Men, not because of my Groucho Marx theory but “to seek another consensus winner…that could use their support.”

LAFCA also gave their Best Director award to Paul Thomas Anderson (the runner-up was Diving Bell and the Butterfly helmer Julian Schnabel).

The group’s Best Actor award went to Blood‘s Daniel Day-Lewis. LAFCA’s runner-up Best Actor was Starting Out in the Evening‘s Frank Langella, who won the Best Actor prize from the Boston film critics earlier today.

LAFCA’s Best Actress award went to Marion Cotillard for La Vie en Rose — no surprise there. Anamaria Marinca, the scrappy, blonde-haired star of 4 Months, 3 Months and 2 Days, was the runner-up. Marinca’s costar Vlad Ivanov, who plays the hard-eyed Mr. Bebe in Cristian Mungiu‘s film, won LAFCA’s Best Supporting Actor award with Into The Wild‘s Hal Holbrook taking the runner-up slot.

4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days costar Vlad Ivanov (r.), winner of LAFCA’s Best Supporting Actor award

Gone Baby Gone‘s Amy Ryan took the Best Supporting Actress award, zotzing I’m Not There‘s Cate Blanchett for the second time today. I suspect this probably happened because LAFCA and the Boston critics both figured Blanchett was the runaway front-runner and they wanted to give Ryan a helping hand.

LAFCA’s Best Screenplay award wet to Tamara Jenkins for The Savages.

The Best Animation award was split between Persepolis and Ratatouille.

LAFCA’s Best Foreign Language Film award, no surprise, went to 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. (How dug in are the AMPAS foreign-branch members who didn’t care for Mungiu’s film? Their will and credibility is being tested by all the awards it’s been getting lately. Will they stick to their guns and, as feared, refuse to even nominate it as one of the five, or will they cave like the consensus shape-shifters they are deep down? Either way they’re scum.)

The Best Documentary/Non-fiction Film award went to No End in Sight witn runner-up status gogng to Sicko. The Best Music award wad given to Once‘s Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova. The Best Cinematography award went to Janusz Kaminski, for The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. The Best Career Achievement went to Before The Devil KNows You’re Dead director Sidney Lumet.

47 elite critics have selected their five best films of ’07 for the latest edition of Sight & Sound, and of these Cristian Mungiu‘s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is the top of the heap. Among the runners-up: David Lynch‘s Inland Empire, David Fincher‘s Zodiac, Todd Haynes‘ I’m Not There, Carlos Reygadas‘ Silent Light, Andrew Dominik‘s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Joel and Ethan Coen‘s No Country for Old Men and David Cronenberg‘s Eastern Promises.

Israeli film blogger Yair Raveh, writing on his recently launched English-language version of Cinemascope, shares my concern about the Oscar chances of Cristian Mungiu‘s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. Raveh isn’t just dubious about this winner of the European Film Award for Best Feature and Best Director (plus the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or last May) not taking the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. He doesn’t even think it’ll be nominated.

“I predict it will not be one of the five nominated Foreign Language films,” Raveh states. “Not because of the abortion theme, but because [Mungiu’s] filmmaking style is all but indigestible to American viewers.” Academy fuddy-duds, he means.

Raveh says a nomination won’t happen for the same reasons that films by Dardenne brothers or Bruno Dumont have never been nominated. 4 Months is “stark, naturalistic, mirthless and devoid of music. It looks like a documentary or perhaps an improvised piece, and it’s easy to miss the stand-out filmic achievements Mungiu has brilliantly pulled off, starting with the movie’s ironic self-referential title.”