For decades the Detroit auto industry was notorious for lagging behind on gas efficiency while mainlining profits from gas-guzzling SUVs. Three or four years ago Chrysler shut down the Delaware plant that made their hefty=sized Dodge Durango and Chrysler Aspen SUVs so they’ve presumably gotten into the swing of things. But it’s flat-out dishonest if not rancid for Bob “paycheck” Dylan to praise Detroit as an exemplar of “the finest” innovation and craftsmanship. “Is there anything more America than America?” he said at the beginning of Superbowl ad. How about selling out? Several native industries arguably exemplify the best aspects of American tradition and character. Detroit may be gradually changing its approach, but it’s known worldwide for having been myopic, arrogant and greedy for a long stretch of time. Why didn’t Dylan make an ad for Fender guitars? The Chrysler ad gave me the same sinking feeling I felt in ’79 when Dylan announced he was a born-again Christian. “Bob Dylan just negated 50 years of sticking it to the man in about 90 seconds,” some guy tweeted. Dylan stopped sticking it to the man in 1964.
I recognize that Denis Villeneuve‘s Prisoners has won the devotion of the elites. I recognize that the damp, sprawling Fincher-like aspects of the damn thing are very appealing to a certain breed of critic. But for me and others in my aesthetic realm it feels more like a dense slog than anything else, and I think it might be nice at this juncture to gather all the complaints (like the 153-minute length and that “what?” ending) under one umbrella and kick the can around. All I know is that I began looking at my watch around the one-hour mark. All through Prisoners I felt weary and chilly and fatigued. “If this is such a good film — and it is — why do I feel like a prisoner myself?,” I muttered at one point.
Time‘s Richard Corliss acknowledges that while Prisoners “has more pedigree than a Westminster dog-show winner, it’s just not very good. In fact, it’s worse than not-very-good — it’s could’ve-been-really-good-and-isn’t.”
I was thinking this morning about the influence of the late Elmore Leonard, particularly the way the late crime novelist would occasionally put the article or main object at the end of a sentence. Which seemed odd to English composition teachers and…well, to me also, at first, but then I got used to it. And then it seemed a little odd when dialogue didn’t do that.
I’m mentioning this because it was almost exactly a year ago (i.e., at the 2012 Toronto Film Festival) when I noticed an Elmore sentence in Silver Linings Playbook.
Neurotic dad Robert De Niro is pleading with local cop Dash Mihok to not escort manic-eccentric Chris Tucker “back to Baltimore” until the Eagles game is over. “What’s the problem?,” De Niro says, clutching his green Eagles handkerchief. “He’s not goin’ anywhere. Just let him finish the game, that’s all. The handkerchief is working. We’re killing the Seahawks, twenty-seven-ten. What’s the matter with you? Let him stay, please!” And Mihok says, “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, ‘the handkerchief’. And I’m glad that the Seahawks are losing and we’re winning, but I gotta take Danny McDaniels back to Baltimore, alright? He can contest his case from Baltimore.”
I believe that without Elmore Leonard, Mihok would have used a more conventional sentence structure and said “I don’t know what your handkerchief has to do with it” or “What do you mean ‘handkerchief?'” or something along those lines. Screenwriter David O. Russell would not have put the article at the end — “I don’t know what you’re talking about, ‘the handkerchief.'” Just saying.
The responses to this riff, I realize, will have nothing to do with Leonard and everything to do with how much this or that pisshead hates Silver Linings Playbook. But that rant is history now. It was a peculiar thing to feel or say in the first place. SLP was and is brilliant. It resonated all over the place with sophistos and Average Joes alike, and it made $132 million theatrically — fuck-you money as far as the naysayers are concerned. It should have won the Best Picture Oscar, and it would have if hadn’t been for the votes taken away by the respectable but tedious Lincoln.
Legendary crime novelist Elmore Leonard, who wrote thousands upon thousands of the most beautifully shaped sentences and digressive dialogue riffs I’ve ever read in my life and who incidentally influenced the living shit out of me, has ascended and is now hanging out with Dennis Farina. A stroke took him down. He was 87. A Detroit guy through and through. Well, a Bloomfield Hills guy. **
Leonard wrote and wrote and wrote for…what, sixty-five years straight? He never stopped working and enjoyed a brilliant hot streak during the ’80s and ’90s. And he boiled the bullshit out of his prose each and every time he put pen to paper. And he was nice enough to talk with me on the phone a few times during my reporting days with Entertainment Weekly and People and the L.A. Times Syndicate. He didn’t even hiccup when I called him “Dutch” a couple of times.
My Paris plane touched down last night at JFK at 7:30 pm. Taxied forever on the tarmac. The passport line took a good 35 to 40 minutes because there weren’t enough passport guys at the desks. At 9:15 pm I was waiting for the slow-as-molasses A train at Howard Beach. I finally arrived at Hanover Square, my area of residence for the next couple of weeks, around 10 pm. The neighborhood, south of Wall Street and a block away from the East River, is a bit on the chilly, corporate side. Not exactly saturated with historical aroma. It could be a corporate high-rise region of Cleveland, Detroit, Hong Kong or Boston’s North End. It had a certain charm back in the days of Martin Scorsese‘s Gangs of New York, but then you had to deal with guys sinking meat cleavers into each other’s heads so it all balances out.
“Male charm is all but absent from the screen because it’s all but absent from our lives,” writes Benjamin Schwartz in a 5.22 Atlantic piece that I missed until now due to Cannes and whatnot. Most men hold charm in vague suspicion: few cultivate it; still fewer respond to it; hardly any know whether they have it; and almost none can even identify it. (The damn URL embed capability isn’t working so here it is: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/06/when-men-lost-their-charm/309303/.)
There’s been a vague, half-accurate assumption for some years now that the choices made by the Broadcast Film Critics Association’s Critics Choice Awards are somehow reflective or at least similar to those made or shared by the Academy. I realize this is a “nobody knows anything” kind of year and anyone and/or anything can win, but there has been a sense of a formidable Lincoln headwind, as evidenced by yesterday morning’s 12 Oscar nominations…right? But at most I’m feeling a mild breeze.
My question is this: Are there any tea-leaf indications in the BFCA having yesterday given its Best Picture award to Argo and its Best Director trophy to Ben Affleck instead of Lincoln and/or Steven Spielberg? Obviously without the BFCA knowing (having voted on 1.7) that Affleck would be Best Director-snubbed. Was this just…what, a curious call? Or does it suggest that Lincoln doesn’t have the heat that some people think/hope it has?
I know people think I’m just out to trash Lincoln any way I can, but surely this is a legitimate question. If Kris Tapley or Pete Hammond or Anne Thompson were to ask this it would seem fair to most HE readers, I think. But they probably won’t ask it as they don’t want to be seen as Lincoln bashers or agenda-driven.
So what if anything did yesterday’s Argo wins mean? I’m really not concluding anything. Okay, I kind of am but in a Solomon-like, non-predatory way.
Pete Hammond replies: “This race is all over the map. The BFCA has a pretty good track record — not great but good — as far as reflecting Academy tastes and choices. But I didn’t really expect Lincoln to win there. The 12 Lincoln nominations mean broad-based support but Life of Pi got 11 without any acting shots. Lincoln strikes me as an Academy consensus movie, and maybe [the 12 nominations] are indicative of what the Academy thinks. But there are so many factors in play now. Affleck’s Academy snub might make Argo stronger, and he could win the DGA. The Producer’s Guild Awards (1.26) is the one to watch as far as where this race is going.”
Sasha Stone replies: “The Critics Choice voters aren’t even critics. Many of them are awards bloggers like yourself. They try to match Oscar every year because that is their claim to fame and how they get all the screeners every year. So their ballots were turned in before Oscar nominations, and at that time everyone in the film blogger community was thinking Argo would take the Oscar, and [so] Argo took the BFCA. Normally, Zero Dark Thirty would have taken it but that has the stink of controversy now so critics have jumped the ship.
“Most of the time the films with the most nominations at the BFCAs don’t win Best Picture there. So that part of it isn’t surprising. Lincoln has not won any major critics award. It may finish out the season not having won anything but the only votes that count or matter are the industry votes — the Producers, Directors, Writers, Editors Guilds — and NOT THE CRITICS. And it could turn out that voters don’t ‘like’ it enough. In any capacity, at any awards show and it will end the race with a screenplay win and nothing more. A joke but I’ve become used to how it all goes down by now, although you never really get used to it. The trick is not minding.”
Kris Tapley replies: “Argo and Zero Dark Thirty were tied for critics Best Picture prizes this year. I thought Lincoln might win last night because BFCA likes to predict in some sense, but fact is, critics have by and large gone with Argo and Zero Dark Thirty, so it was probably between the two of them. And Argo won, now having pulled ahead with critics awards:
ARGO (10)
Broadcast Film Critics Association
Southeastern Film Critics Association
St. Louis Gateway Film Critics Association
San Diego Film Critics Society
Florida Film Critics Circle
Oklahoma Film Critics Circle
Nevada Film Critics Society
Houston Film Critics Society
Online Film Critics Society
Denver Film Critics Society
ZERO DARK THIRTY (9)
New York Film Critics Circle
Boston Society of Film Critics
Chicago Film Critics Association
New York Film Critics Online
Washington D.C. Area Film Critics Association
Boston Online Film Critics Association
Utah Film Critics Association
Black Film Critics Circle
Vancouver Film Critics Circle
(Also NBR, but those aren’t critics.)
LINCOLN (3)
Dallas-Ft. Worth Film Critics Association
Iowa Film Critics Association
North Texas Film Critics Association
THE MASTER (3)
San Francisco Film Critics Circle
Toronto Film Critics Association
Kansas City Film Critics Circle
AMOUR (2)
Los Angeles Film Critics Association
National Society of Film Critics
SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK (2)
International Press Academy
Detroit Film Critics Society
LIFE OF PI (1)
Las Vegas Film Critics Society
MOONRISE KINGDOM (1)
Central Ohio Film Critics Association
SAFETY NOT GUARANTEED (1)
Indiana Film Critics (1).”
Earlier today the Detroit Film Critics Society gave five big ones to Silver Linings Playbook. Best Film award, Best Director award to SLP‘s David O. Russell, Best Actress award to SLP‘s Jennifer Lawrence, Best Supporting Actor award to SLP‘s Robert De Niro and Best Screenplay award to Russell.
Is Glenn Kenny the man of vision and principle who can straighten out these Detroit guys? Who’s better suited?
The DFCS’s Best Actor award went to Lincoln‘s Daniel Day Lewis, Best Supporting Actress to Les Miz‘s Anne Hathaway, Best Ensemble to Lincoln, Breakthrough award to Ruby Sparks‘ Zoe Kazan and Best Doc award to Jiro: Dreams fo Sushi.
I can’t write an authoritative stinging indictment of Tokyo because I’ve only experienced a bit of it. I’ve only been here eight hours and I haven’t wandered outside of the Shibuya and Shinjuku districts. But I’m hugely unimpressed so far. I shouldn’t even be saying this but Tokyo strikes me as corporate and arid and car-friendly and full of delights for rich people. It’s a bigger, chillier, smoggier Houston with sushi and noodles and taller buildings and more stylishly dressed women. It’s titanic and rich and sprawling and so what?
It was all but burned to the ground in 1945 thanks to Curtis LeMay so the buildings are all less than 50 or 60 years old, and it just doesn’t have any character or flavor or aroma to speak of. Certainly not the kind that reaches out and pulls you in. I’m sure my opinion would be a bit more favorable if I had the time to really get into it but this is what I feel right now.
All I could think as I wandered around was “why did I come here again?”
And it’s not much of a walking city either — you have to constantly walk up and down stone staircases to cross streets. And what is there to look at anyway beside restaurant signs and the women? Big buildings are a deadly bore. And the air is light brown — I went to the top floor of the TMG building and you can see a dense layer of smog hanging over the whole town (like the air in LA in the ’70s), and there are so many people walking around with those white surgical masks that I feel I’m part of an epidemic in Steven Soderbergh‘s Contagion.
People of serious character and accomplishment love Tokyo so I should probably hold my tongue, but this place feels like downtown LA or Detroit or Honolulu or….I haven’t been to soulless Sao Paulo but I’ve heard it has a similar vibe. I’m not going to get all bent out of shape about this, but honestly? I almost hate it here. There’s nothing architecturally alluring or unique and the girls are prettier in Vietnam, and they all have smaller, shapelier, more perfectly pedicured feet than the women here. I’m sorry but that’s what I’ve observed.
Too many people have told me the food in Tokyo is terrific so there’s no disputing that aspect. (I’ll be going to Ichiban, the Lost in Translation sushi bar, in a couple of hours). But I wonder if it can beat the drop-dead scrumptious food I’ve eaten in Hanoi over the last three or four days.
I’m not sure I’ll ever return here. In fact I know I won’t. Give me Paris or Berlin or Rome or Havana or London — any town with a personality and the right kind of seductive flair. A town that has something you immediately want more of, and that puts you in the right kind of mood. Tokyo is my idea of a town you really don’t need to visit. Life is short. You can have it.
The one thing that really impressed me? Some of the Tokyo taxis have an automatic rear-door opening-and-closing mechanism so when the driver pulls over to let a fare in…pop! The door swings open and then closes at the push of a button.
Here’s what a filmmaker friend recently advised: “In Tokyo go to Nakano Broadway, the largest toy-collectible mall in the world. It will give you an insight into Japanese culture being a mixture of extreme depth and extreme youthful enthusiasm for characters and toys. Go to YoYoGi Park in Shibuya. Great stores around it and an amazing shrine at its center. Go to Akihabara and geek out on the electronics and walk around Ginza for a day or two. Go to the palace and walk the gardens — even in winter they are amazing. I also recommend you make an appointment to visit the Ghibli museum. Go to the big department stores in Ikebukuro.”
I am completely and fully prepared to ignore everything my friend recommended for the rest of my days on this planet and into the next life. And when I say “prepared” I mean I am absolutely at peace with this notion.
I’m staying on the 6th floor with a nice view of the park across the street.
There are a lot of squat toilets in Tokyo, which is why they have this sign explaining to the sophistos that you’re not supposed to squat with the regular sit-down model.
At first it seemed as if the ranks of Silver Linings haters were extremely marginal if not microscopic, like the carriers of an extremely rare disease. But others have pushed through (notably and bizarrely New Yorker critic David Denby, whose brief pan of David O. Russell‘s film is roughly similar to Bosley Crowther‘s dismissal of Dr. Strangelove), and with, it has to be acknowledged, remarkable levels of battery acid.
One in ten reviewers, I’d say, are in the hater camp. Their stuff reads like Sean Hannity rants on Fox News. Never have so few worked so hard and whipped themselves into such a strange lather about such an expertly assembled, deceptively good-timey, emotionally grounded, once-in-a-blue-moon payoff film.
The haters know SLP is nudging a 90% Rotten Tomatoes approval and is made of the stuff that works with people who are open to its manic charms and currents so they’re focusing on trying to wound its award potential. Their need to take this extraordinary effort down is, I feel, far more pathological than my mostly respectful and fair-minded remarks about Steven Spielberg‘s Lincoln.
I’ve recognized all along that Silver Linings Playbook winning the Best Picture Oscar is unlikely given the general prejudice against comedies or spirited dramedies (regardless of whatever emotional truths, heart, edge and wit they may deliver), but the sentiments of the anonymous secreter known as Oscar Tipster…words fail. Guys like this are actually walking around.
Some are having problems with the treatment of mental illness or the hyper personality of Bradley Cooper‘s Pat Solitano during the first half. Cole Smithey called it “a Hollywood romantic comedy made to mask the horrific downside of mental illness while still giving the audience a little sense of superiority as they walk out of the cinema.” Russell has a son with Asperger’s Syndrome. Think about that for five or six seconds.
But primarily the haters seem locked into the idea, to paraphrase Rotten Tomatoes fan reviewer Nate Zoebl, that enjoyment and creative accomplishment are, in fact, opposing forces and that being a rousing, crowd-pleasing sort of movie is, in fact, a yoke that weighs down its artistic integrity. Tell that to The Lady Eve, The Awful Truth, Bringing Up Baby, My Man Godfrey and Some Like It Hot.
The key thing, of course, is that Silver Linings Playbook is offering a lot more than just feelgood vibes, and if that’s all you’re getting from it, God fucking help you and any kids you might have. Repeating from 11.16: “The real lame-itude is dismissing or marginalizing a film because it’s buoyant and screwball-intense and furiously spirited and is all about want and need and dealing with recognizable demons, and is therefore not the equal of more steadily (or more slowly) paced solemn-attitude Best Picture contenders that are about real pain, real loss and are therefore truly serious.”
Denby actually called SLP “pretty much a miscalculation from beginning to end…it just feels worked up — an exercise in which actors can blow off steam.”
I don’t believe that many more people are on my side of the fence — I know it. I know that guys like =Detroit News critic Tom Long, who writes plainly and frankly, know whereof they speak. But what a gulf between the camps.
“It’s your boy-meets-girl formula at heart,” Zoebl wrote on 11.21, “but the execution is so extremely sure-footed, so exceptionally handled, that the movie leaves you buzzy and beaming. Once it ended, I wanted to run around, shouting from the rooftops for people to run out and see this movie. I freely admit that Silver Linings Playbook is a masterful movie that knows what it takes to get an audience cheering, and I was thrilled to be part of that cheering throng. Here is a movie that just makes you feel good. I was so happy after my screening that it felt like a high I didn’t want to come down from.”
I could be a cheap smartass and say that Alex Karras, 77, has been traded to that Great Football Team In The Sky, but that would be a shallow and cavalier way of saying he passed this morning from kidney failure at his Los Angeles home. I’m sorry but we all have to go sometime. Karras was by all accounts a likable and compassionate fellow. Condolences to friends, family and colleagues.
Karras’s first push was on the football field with the Detroit Lions from ’58 to ’70, and then as a successful actor from ’68 on. His first Hollywood score was playing himself in the film version of Paper Lion (’68), based on the George Plympton novel. He best-known portrayal was as the hulking Mongo in Mel Brooks‘ Blazing Saddles but he also delivered a very respectable performance as a football coach in Against All Odds.
When I heard the news this morning his Against All Odds emoting was the first thing I thought of, if you wanna know.
I always presumed that Brooks called Karras’s character Mongo instead of Mongol as a capitulation to p.c. massagings of the early ’70s. The reference was obviously to “Mongolian idiot,” the catch-all term for victims of Downs Syndrome in the old insensitive days.
“Telegram for Mongo!” Or was it “Candygram for Mongo!” One of these.
What’s this Argo obsession that Sasha Stone, Kris Tapley, Roger Ebert are putting out? Drop to your knees in worship? What film can steal its Best Picture thunder? Will you guys please take it easy? Argo is a very fine thing — a well-crafted, highly satisfying caper film with a certain patriotic resonance that basically says “job well done, guys…you should be proud.” But the hosannahs are a bit much.
Argo is proof that director-star Ben Affleck has clearly, seriously upped his game. He really is the new Sydney Pollack, and I say that as someone who knew, enjoyed, occasionally chatted with and deeply respected the director of Three Days of the Condor, Tootsie, The Yakuza, Out of Africa, The Firm, The Way We Were, etc.
But Argo is basically a movie designed to enthrall, charm, amuse, thrill, move and excite. It’s a comfort-blanket movie that basically says “this was the problem, and this is how it was solved…and the guys who made it happen deserve our applause and respect…no?” Yes, they do. But above all Argo aims to please. It skillfully creates suspense elements that probably weren’t that evident when the story actually went down. And it throws in two or three divorced-father-hangs-with-young-son scenes, and some CIA razmatazz and a few ’80s Hollywood cheeseball jokes and basically lathers it all on.
We all liked it in Telluride, but audiences in Scranton, Detroit, Ft. Lauderdale, Bakersfield, Terre Haute and Hartford will really love it.
I keep thinking about that jacked-up suspense finale that “works” but doesn’t feel genuine. You know it doesn’t. That last nail-biting bit with the police cars hot-dogging the departing jet on the Tehran airport runway? Standard Hollywood bullshit.
If I was a high-school teacher and Argo was a term paper, I would give it an 87 or 88. Okay, an 89. It’s obviously good, but it’s not constructed of the kind of material that ages well. It is not a film that exudes paralyzing greatness. Like many highly regarded Hollywood films, it adheres to familiar classic centrist entertainment values…and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s very pleasing thing, but it’s a fucking caper film. Boil it down and it’s Ocean’s 11 set in Washington, D.C., L.A. and Tehran of 1978 and ’89 without the money or the flip glamorous vibe or the Clooney-Pitt-Damon-Cheadle combustion.
Just get a grip, is all I’m saying. Tone it down.
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