I’m at a late-afternoon launch party for the TCM Classic Film Festival at the Hollywood Roosevelt hotel, and it’s a very pleasant affair. Nice band, tasty hors d’oeuvres, etc. But you don’t want too many security goons hanging around. The degree of goon security at an event reflects management’s view of human nature. Too many goons indicates a high level of trepidation, if not alarm. Then again you don’t want to be too cavalier. It’s a fine line.
I love the fact that only minutes after the Total Recall trailer appeared this afternoon on Apple.com, some guy uploaded it to YouTube and wham…Sony’s online attorneys ran in like linebackers and blocked it. Bullies. Jerks.
The 1080 version really dazzles, obviously, but I’m also feeling a little bit of that Len Wiseman B-movie cheapness. He’s the Underworld guy — never forget that. Colin Farrell in a hot-stud, high-anxiety lead role again after being a character actor for the last four or five years. Kate Beckinsale obviously has the Sharon Stone part. It looks kinda skin deep. Possibly less substantial than Minority Report. Pure popcorn. There are indications.
Total Recall opens on 8.3.
Blue collar clock-puncher Douglas Quaid (Farrell), married to hot wife (Beckinsale), takes memory vacation. But things turn suddenly weird and violent, and he’s soon on the run from the fuzz and Chancellor Cohaagen (Bryan Cranston), he hooks up with a hot rebel lady (Jessica Biel) and the head of underground resistance (Bill Nighy), blah dee blah.
Cranston is in every other film these days. He’s everywhere. Cranston, Cranston, Cranston, Cranston, Cranston, Cranston….”you love me in Breaking Bad and Drive…hire me for your film!”
The screenplay is by Kurt Wimmer and Mark Bomback, based on a story by Ronald Shusett, Dan O’Bannon and Jon Povill. The producers are Neal H. Moritz — cause for concern? — and Toby Jaffe.
Paramount obviously doesn’t need to expend much energy to raise awareness about the forthcoming Titanic 3D (4.4). Diehards who saw and worshipped James Cameron‘s 1997 blockbuster 15 years ago will cough up for a somewhat darker stereoscopic version no matter what. There is, however, a second target audience — i.e., the wait-and-see crowd who aren’t sure how good the 3D conversion will be, and are waiting for buzz.
Well, guess what? They aren’t going to hear any buzz until the night before Titanic 3D opens (i.e., Tuesday, April 3rd) because Paramount apparently won’t be screening it anywhere for anyone — not for press, not for fans — for the next 33 or 34 days.
Or so it appears. Maybe they’re planing some private industry screenings I haven’t heard about. I’ve written Paramount to make sure that the 4.3 preview really will be the only peek-out between now and then, and to convey my surprise that they would go dark for this long a period.
A neutral observer would say that Paramount miscalculated by inviting Roger Ebert and David Poland to special Valentine’s Day screenings of Titanic 3D on Tuesday, 2.14, because Ebert and Poland both panned the 3D presentation, more or less. It appears that Paramount doesn’t want to attract any more “too dark and filtered” responses so they’ve parked the car and turned off the engine.
The Ebert-Poland reactions haven’t stopped writers like Cinema Blend‘s Kelly West from expressing optimism (“I’m hoping that the film will prove to be a fine example of how a movie can benefit from a 3D make-over,” she wrote earlier today), but Paramount has apparently decided they can only devalue the brand by sneaking Titanic 3D any further so that’s all she wrote for the month of March.
I’ve always liked Titanic, and I definitely love the last 25 to 30 minutes. I’ve said that for years. So it’s been my interest all along to savor Titanic 3D under the finest theatrical projection standards possible. The piece I posted yesterday suggested that a darker filtered image with a foot lambert range of roughly 4 or less is what the general public is going to see. I’d love to see something brighter and more satisfying than what Ebert and Poland said they saw, and maybe that’ll be the case when I see it on 4.3. Here’s hoping.
I spoke earlier today to Boston Light and Sound’s Chapin Cutler, who said he had no knowledge or insights about Titanic 3D‘s presentation. He did, however, repeat the basics: “3D in general is dark. The common specs are real dark and it is not uncommon for 3D to be run at 3 to 4 foot lamberts. Although there are [ways] to raise the illumination levels in cinemas, that is really hard on big screens given the 10 to 15% efficiency of 3D systems.”
Either way I would love to be able to see Titanic 3D under optimum conditions. Meaning that I’d love to be able to see it under better conditions than the general public will be paying to see. Is there going to be a screening at some high-end post-production facility between now and the 4.4. opening? A screening room that offers optimum conditions, I mean? Has any thought been given to the Panavision 3D option, an integrated image-enhancement system that works with all maor 3D projectors except Sony’s?
Yesterday’s article passed along a testimonial from respected projection consultant James Bond that Panavision 3D would enhance the presentation of Titanic 3D. (I don’t personally know that it would enhance the film’s appearance — I’ve just been told that.) Tomorrow afternoon I’ll be attending a demonstration of Panavision 3D at Panavision’s Woodland Hills headquarters.
Update: N.Y. Post critic Lou Lumenick also saw Titanic 3D on 2.14, and posted a rave. He also tweeted the following in response to this piece: (a) “I saw Titanic 3-D on 2/14 at the AMC Loews 34th St. and it looks great, works wonderfully”; (b) “It wasn’t at all like Transformers 3, [in which] some of the daytime scenes looked like they were filmed at night”; (c) “I’ve been enormously critical of 3D, especially lousy post-conversions. But based on this, I’d like to see a 3D Wizard of Oz“; (d) “Based on the wild anticipation at the 2.14 screening, I’m not sure Paramount really needs to screen this for critics at all.”
All of this sounds great, but what, one wonders, were Roger Ebert and David Poland on about when they complained? Were they both unlucky in that the 3D projection they saw in Chicago and Burbank, respectively, wasn’t as good as what Lumenick saw in NYC? Weird.
Friend: The WGA Awards are happening now. Maybe we should wait for that to be over before we do the other thing.
Hollywood Elsewhere: Okay whatever…but at this stage of the game with everyone really tired of the award season and The Artist having it all locked anyway, who gives that much of a shit, really?
Friend: Well, The Descendants has been picking up steam, which you should probably write about. It won the Eddie award last night, beating Hugo, and it won the USC Scripter award the other night, beating Moneyball. If it wins the WGA this afternoon that’ll be a three-for-three for The Descendants, and that shows some real heft…a bit. If there were two more weeks it could gain on The Artist, based on the momentum here.
Hollywood Elsewhere: Yeah, but it doesn’t have two more weeks. I wish it did and I wish an upset was in the cards. I wish Demian Bichir would win. I wish rain was beer. I wish we all had wings. But we don’t.
Hollywood Reporter columnist Scott Feinberg sent along this reponse: “Forget The Descendants. The one that’s really gaining on The Artist is The Help. The latter has what the former lacks: gravitas, social relevance, an ‘important’ message. A surprisingly high number of Academy members have told me that it’s their pick. If it wins, though, it would mean that we need to throw out all the history/stat books, because the last time a film won without a directing nom was 22 years ago (Driving Miss Daisy), without a screenwriting nom was 14 years ago (Titanic), and without a film editing nom was 31 years ago (Ordinary People). The last time one won without all three, as would be the case with The Help, was 79 years ago (Grand Hotel). In other words…at the end of the day it will still be The Artist.”
Why are the Academy’s Oscar nominees and winners criticized so frequently for being traditionally staid and “safe”? Why has the general Academy mentality proven so averse or oblivious to the contours and leanings of the present? We all know the answer. It’s because the Academy is made up of mostly older white guys who aren’t paying close attention, largely because they don’t choose to because they’re looking to maintain their relationships with other older white guys, and who are always looking for a job so why shake things up or otherwise rock the boat?
But all along I’ve been buying the line that the Academy is expanding its roster and getting younger and more inclusive. More members in their 30s and 40s, right? Jonah Hill, Tina Fey, David Gordon Green, Kristen Wiig, Judd Apatow, Seth Rogen, etc.? Well, that’s mostly Academy spin, it turns out.
Because a just-published L.A.Times survey (2.19) led by John Horn, Nicole Sperling and Doug Smith reports that Oscar voters are nearly 94% Caucasian and 77% male, have a median age of 62.
And — here’s the kicker — “people younger than 50 constitute just 14% of the membership.”
“The Times found that some of the academy’s 15 branches are almost exclusively white and male. Caucasians currently make up 90% or more of every academy branch except actors, whose roster is 88% white. The academy’s executive branch is 98% white, as is its writers branch. Blacks are about 2% of the academy, and Latinos are less than 2%.”
Your typical Academy member, in short — the person whose whims are constantly being studied and divined by Sasha Stone, Scott Feinberg, “Safe Dave” Karger, Tom O’Neil, Kris Tapley, Stu Van Airsdale and Pete Hammond — is a graying (or dyed-haired) guy with a paunch and a neck waddle and liver spots on his hands who doesn’t work out as much as he used to, and who listened to Frankie Avalon and the Turtles and Paul Revere and the Raiders in high school, and who tends to watch comfort movies when he’s home instead of Academy screeners, and who sometimes nods out at screenings.
“Men compose more than 90% of five branches, including cinematography and visual effects,” the report says. “Of the academy’s 43-member board of governors, six are women; public relations executive Cheryl Boone Isaacs is the sole person of color.
“The full roster of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences has never been published. Times reporters confirmed the identities of more than 5,100 Oscar voters — more than 89% of all active voting members.
“‘We absolutely recognize that we need to do a better job,’ said writer-director Phil Alden Robinson, a longtime academy governor. But “we start off with one hand tied behind our back…if the industry as a whole is not doing a great job in opening up its ranks, it’s very hard for us to diversify our membership.”
Frank Pierson, a former academy president who won an Oscar for original screenplay for Dog Day Afternoon in 1976, said merit is the primary criterion for membership.
“I don’t see any reason why the academy should represent the entire American population. That’s what the People’s Choice Awards are for. We represent the professional filmmakers, and if that doesn’t reflect the general population, so be it.”
“Some academy members, though, believe the organization should do more to reflect the demographics of the nation. Denzel Washington, who won the lead actor award for 2001’s Training Day,” said the academy needs to ‘open it up’ and ‘balance’ its membership.
“‘If the country is 12% black, make the academy 12% black,’ Washington said. ‘If the nation is 15% Hispanic, make the academy 15% Hispanic. Why not?'”
I don’t quite buy Washington’s calculus. I think you have to demographically survey the ranks of filmmakers in the indie community and all over and determine what percentage in this group — people who are actually trying to get features or shorts made by hook or crook — are black and Latino and whatnot, and then you need to adjust the Academy’s membership accordingly.
You can’t go by the general population. There are millions upon millions of lazy, fast-food-eating couch potatoes of every ethnic stripe out there, and you can’t expect their ranks to be reflected in an organization made up of determined achievers.
Every new movie generation delivers its own attitude and aesthetic. I was reminded of this when I first saw Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson ‘s black-and-white Bottle Rocket short in ’94. And I was reminded again today when I caught Andrew Edison and Luke Loftin‘s BINDLESTIFFS early this afternoon at Slamdance. They’re only 20 and 21, respectively, but they’re probably a two-headed version of the new Todd Phillips, or maybe they’re a new hybrid of Wes Anderson mixed with John Waters or something like that. I haven’t quite figured it out.
(l. to r.) Andrew Edison, John Karna, Luke Loftin following’s today’s BUNDLESTIFFS screening.
Set in Houston, BINDLESTIFFS is raw and outrageous at times, but often quite funny in a scattershot deadpan fashion. It’s fast and brazen and lewd, and as hip in its own curious way as Tiny Furniture but way, way crazier and goofier and (this being a testosterone comedy) driven by erections. It has a certain manic energy that I haven’t gotten from any Sundance film this year, and it revels in absurdist raunch.
It looks and sounds ragged (like it was shot on a family home-video camera in the late ’90s) but it could play right now in theatres and make a decent pile of change. I didn’t laugh out loud all that much, but then I’m more of a heh-heh type of guy. I was comforted by the fact that Edison-Loftin know from farce, and that their film is smart, nervy and extreme.
I was especially impressed by the fact that BINDLESTIFFS was blocked out action-wise but entirely and hilariously improvised in terms of dialogue. These guys are really good at keeping the ball in the air and batting it around.
It starts out in a semi-farcical, rat-a-tat vein that reminded me of the Bottle Rocket short, principally due to the three leads — Loftin, Edison and John Karna — playfully bouncing off each other’s personalities and proclaiming their allegiance to J.D. Salinger‘s The Catcher in the Rye, which their high-school has just banned from the curriculum. But when they all get suspended for an idiotic non-reason things suddenly shift into Road Trip-without-a-car meets Better Off Dead meets Pink Flamingoes or…whatever, you figure it out.
The only difficult aspect is the film’s callous attitude about a mangy homeless woman who is photographed without a face as a kind of “thing”, and treated by two of the three leads as a sub-life form, a dog. It’s not funny to me when you completely remove a person’s dignity, even that of a filthy, gray-haired skank. But many in the audience today were laughing.
The only issue is that an R rating will be impossible, and trying to cut BINDLESTIFFS down in order to get an R would defeat its whole purpose. It’s not in the comic realm of Superbad (guys like Jonah Hill come along very rarely), but it does have its own personality and ‘tude and way of delivering a joke.
Two or three or four films from now Edison-Loftin could deliver the next $100 million comedy…maybe. It’s hard to predict who’s really got it or not, but these guys definitely understand themselves and have come up with a kind of humor that feels and plays a little differently than what I’ve been suffering through in the plexes over the last two or three or four years.
I decided to see 45 minutes’ worth of SuperClasico at the Palm Springs High School, and then walk to the Camelot plex across the street to catch an 8 pm showing Turn Me On, Dammit! (I’ll see the remainder of SuperClasico today at 3 pm.) And I have to say, regretfully, that Turn Me On, Dammit! is slow-moving and interminable — one of the dullest sex comedy-teenage ennui films I’ve ever seen in my life. And I can’t say I was levitated by SuperClasico either, although it started to improve just as I was leaving.
A nice but dull Reid Rosefelt-approved shot of Helene Bergsholm, star of Turn Me On, Dammit!
Directed and co-written by Jannicke Systad Jacobsen, Turn Me On is a woman’s sexual awakening “comedy,” if you want to call it that. But it’s really about a teenaged girl’s sexual fantasies that don’t lead to anything except more fantasies. It’s also about dullness and torpor and being imprisoned in a small Norweigan hamlet in which nothing happens. Okay, smallish things happen (i.e., modest personal awakenings) but you know what I mean.
It has a running time of only 76 minutes, but it feels like 176 minutes.
Turn Me On, Dammit! reminded me somewhat of Lena Dunham‘s Tiny Furniture. In my 12.27.10 review I called Furniture “realistic and character-rich and low-key ‘cool’ [with] an honestly dreary vibe…not a lot happens, and the film takes its time about it. It has integrity, but it really could be titled A Life in Hell.” This is pretty much what Turn Me On is. Jacobsen wants you to experience the suffocating boredom as you sit in your seat, and that definitely happens, let me tell you.
It’s also fair to say that her film exudes the antithesis of the lively, wiggy vibe of a 1930s screwball comedy. The best way to see it would be to take two Percocets an hour before it starts, and then just sit there with your eyelids half-closed as it plays, sinking into your seat and going “aaaggghhhhhh.”
Helene Bergsholm plays Alma, a pretty 15 or 16 year-old who lives with her single mom and masturbates a lot and has phone sex and would like to have it off with Artur (Beate Stofring), a young candy-ass with a handsome face but no balls, no pizazz, no lust for anything. During a party Alma and Artur are chatting outside, and then one of two things happen: he either takes out his angry schlonghauffer and pokes her in the thigh with it, or she imagines the same.
Salacious (but thematically accurate and reflective) shot of Bergsholm in Turn Me On, Dammit!, sent out by European distributors…tasteless dickwads! How dare they send out a publicity still that suggets and evokes the compulsions and longings of the lead character! Don’t they have any decency? Any manners? Reid…you get what I’m saying. Can you give these animals a stern talking-to?
She tells her girlfriends about this, and Artur denies it and for some idiotic reason all the kids in her small town (the film was shot in Hjelmeland, Norway) decide she’s a pathetic loser and she becomes persona non grata — i.e., “Dick Alma.”
The movie sits there, I sat there, the audience of mostly 60 and 70somethings sat there, and we all wound down like a vinyl album playing on a vintage turntable in Frank Sinatra‘s home that has been just been unplugged….”whurrrrruuhhhrrrrmmm.”
I’ll write something about Superclasico when I see Part 2 later this afternoon.
On the afternoon of Friday, 12.2 — hours after seeing The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo at Sony — I posted a Best Actress evaluation piece that began with my enthusiastic response to Rooney Mara‘s performance as Lisbeth Salander. She was so fierce and penetrating, I figured, that she had to be a late-inning Best Actress contender. In my own book that’s still true, but things have changed over the last 11 days, and now…who knows?
Mara Rooney in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.
The tight embargo enforcement and the general feeling that Sony doesn’t see Dragon Tattoo as an award-calibre film has created a feeling that the air is seeping out of the Tattoo tires, awards-wise, including Mara’s own.
It just goes to show how quickly things change in this racket. The wind shifts direction, the temperature cools down, the current loses strength. Anyway, here’s how I saw it way back when:
“I don’t think I’m breaking the embargo to say that Rooney Mara is fierce and touching and diamond-hard in David Fincher‘s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. Yes, her Lisbeth Salander character is familiar due to Noomi Rapace having played her three times in the three original Girl flicks but Mara gives a richer, fuller performance, I feel. Her manner is curt and chilly but her eyes are swimming with feeling. She’s a heartbreaker, and she’s tough and resourceful — the rock upon which the film rests.
“In a phrase, I think it’s highly likely that Mara will land a Best Actress nomination”…Update: Nope — not likely at all. A slender chance, at best.
“By my sights, the locks are Meryl Streep (The Iron Lady), Michelle Williams (My Week With Marilyn) and Viola Davis (The Help). The top actresses fighting it out for the other two slots are Glenn Close (Albert Nobbs), Charlize Theron (Young Adult) and Tilda Swinton (We Need To Talk About Kevin). And possibly Mara, which would make four.
“Close is seen as a weak sister in some circles because her performance is so restrained and still and minmal. On the other hand her presumed Best Actress nomination has long been seen as a career tribute (i.e., the last 30 years) plus Close has been glad-handing a lot of people at a lot of events on both coasts. Theron is seen as vulnerable because her Young Adult character, Mavis Gary, is acutely dislikable; others feel that she gives an exceptionally ballsy and blazing performance because of the dislikable-ness. Tilda Swinton‘s We Need To Talk About Kevin performance is a little odd and “who knows?” She plays a writer who gives birth to an evil demon who needs to be thrown off a pier in a burlap bag filled with rocks at an early age. I don’t see it.
“And yet many feel that Theron and Swinton give livelier, more vivid and graspable performances than Close does, despite Close having the sweep of history and present-day politics behind her.
“Close has been on thin ice since the start of the week,” says In Contention‘s Kris Tapley. “I think it’s a strong performance so I wouldn’t treat it as if it ‘has to go.’ And the category itself is fraught with great performances in mediocre films (though I think Young Adult is a great film, and the exception). So the film itself doesn’t really hold her down. The problem — as far as standing out this time of year is concerned — is that Close’s is an internalized portrayal. And you have to have a ‘show them’ component to register for a large group of people like the Academy.
“That qualification out of the way, yes, Close is in a precarious spot. The thing Theron could have against her, as you intimate, is how unlikable her character is. Viola Davis, Meryl Streep and Michelle Williams seem assured. And it’s not just Mara looking for room. Indeed, Tilda Swinton hasn’t gone away. But I don’t see anyone outside of those seven cracking in.”
“Hollywood Reporter columnist Scott Feinberg disagrees. He thinks that Martha Marcy May Marlene‘s Elizabeth Olsen and Like Crazy‘s Felicity Jones have contention heat. That’s not very likely, I feel. Feinberg knows that Academy voters tend to let one ingenue in among a typical Best Actress assortment, and that they’re not likely to let in three.”
Right now I think it’s Streep, Davis, Williams, Theron and either Swinton or Mara…but more likely Swinton. Close is weakening, I feel.
Yesterday afternoon NY Post film critic/blogger Lou Lumenick explained how the New York Film Critics Circle balloting (and its “arcane weighted system”) actually went down. And guess what? Melancholia was dead even with The Artist, the Best Picture winner, in the first round, and its director, Lars Von Trier, was just a notch behind Artist helmer Michel Haznavicius in the initial Best Director balloting,
“The Artist was tied with Melancholia (27 points each) for Best Picture,” Lumenick reports, “followed by Hugo with 16 points. The Artist finally won on the third ballot with 44 points.
Lumenick’s favorite film of the year, The Descendants, “never managed to amass more than 17 points in any round.” And what about Moneyball?
I would have agreed with the NYFCC if Melancholia had won — it’s a moody in-and-outer with a highly charged opening and finale — but I would have at least respected it. I was speaking last night with a few L.A. columnists/bloggers at an after-event for Valerie Donzelli‘s War Is Declared, and I didn’t hear anyone say that giving the Best Picture prize to The Artist was absolutely justified and right-on. Most seemed surprised and dismayed. I was appalled.
The Best Director balloting also required three rounds to determine a winner. The Artist‘s Haznavicius “finally won with 47 points to 39 for Hugo‘s Martin Scorsese and 35 for Von Trier. “In the first round, it was Haznavicius, 24; Von Trier, 22 and The Tree of Life‘s Terrence Malick 21,” Lumenick writes. “And in the second ballot, a single point separated Haznavicius (33), Scorsese (32) and Von Trier (31).
“Meryl Streep wired the field on the first and only Best Actress ballot with 38 points to 24 for Michelle Williams (My Week With Marilyn) and 23 for Kirsten Dunst (Melancholia).
On the initial Best Actor ballot Moneyball‘s Brad Pitt had 24 points, The Artist‘s Jean Dujardin 23 and Shame/Dangerous Method‘s Michael Fassbender 18. But
Pitt surged in the second ballot (42 points), handily dispatching Fassbender (27) and Dujardin (26).
Drive‘s Albert Brooks “won on the second ballot with 43 points to 36 for Beginners‘ Christopher Plummer and 18 for A Dangerous Method‘s Viggo Mortensen….what? Mortensen was fine as Sigmund Freud but he mainly just sat there with a lit cigar and a stern expression and went “hmmm…I see.”
Take Shelter/Tree of Life/The Help‘s Jessica Chastain “had to go three rounds before her 33 points topped the 27 for Shame‘s Carey Mulligan and 26 for Coriolanus‘s Vanessa Redgrave.”
Steven Spielberg‘s War Horse was indeed “out of the bag” as of 4 pm earlier today, as Deadline‘s Pete Hammond noted at 3:43 pm Pacific. Press/guild screenings were held in LA and New York around the same time today (1 pm on this coast) and lots more are happening tomorrow, Saturday and Sunday (including some public sneaks).
Which means, as I understand it, that it’s now permissible to write about it but not to formally review it. Got it.
Hammond’s headline asked if Spielberg “Can Win Another Oscar?” Yeah, he could. Definitely. Not for this film but he could down the road. Never underestimate the future of an obviously talented director. Spielberg could wake up some day next week or next year and turn his career around like that.
Hammond is more politically correct than yours truly so allow me to stay within the boundaries of the piece he posted earlier today. Hammond talks, I comment….good enough? A robust chit-chat between friends.
Hammond: “What Spielberg has wrought is a stunning looking and highly emotional epic that is Hollywood moviemaking at its best, and seems likely to be the filmmaker’s most Academy-friendly work since his Oscar winners, Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan.”
Wells comment: Let me put it this way. I sat next to a significant headliner in the Oscar-blogging community during today’s War Horse screening, and after it ended (roughly around 3:25 pm) we both said, almost in unison, “Hammond is crazy…there’s no way this thing wins the Best Picture Oscar.” Okay? No offense. Due respect. Just our opinion. We could be wrong.
Hammond: “Is War Horse old-fashioned? You bet, but in this fast-moving techno culture that may be a welcome thing. Even though some of the Academy’s more recent Best Picture choices, notably No Country For Old Men, Slumdog Millionaire and The Hurt Locker among others, indicate a different sensibility than the kind of once-traditional ‘bigger’, more craft-laden film the Academy once favored, and a category into which War Horse definitely falls.”
Wells comment: As I tweeted late this afternoon, War Horse is a time-capsule movie. Every luscious, immaculate, John Williams-scored frame says ‘this is how Oscar-bait films used to be made…if the director was hungry and utterly calculating.’ It’s analogous, I feel, to Hitchcock’s Topaz. The handprint and the auteurist chops are unmistakable but they have a crusty yesteryear feel. Out of the past.
Hammond: “Spielberg is known to be a great admirer of David Lean, and with its sweeping vistas, deliberate pacing and epic story of one horse’s remarkable journey through the front lines of World War I, the film could almost be a tribute to the great director of such classics as Lawrence of Arabia and The Bridge on the River Kwai.”
Wells comment: War Horse contains unmistakable tributes to Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia and Stanley Kubrick‘s Paths of Glory. War Horse‘s best scene is a British attack upon German lines across a blown-apart, puddle-strewn No Man’s Land — very similar to (and in some ways an improvement upon) Kubrick’s classic tracking shot of French troops attacking German positions in Glory. Spielberg also includes an “attack on Aqaba” sequence with sword-bearing, horse-riding British troops attacking Germans and overturning tents and steaming pots of whatever and killing guys with blade-swipes, just like Lawrence‘s original. Spielberg even features a British noncom named Higgins, an apparent nod to the Corporal Higgins in Lawrence who refuses a cigarette to Daoud and Farraj.
Hammond: “There should be some kind of separate Academy Award for the horses [as] they are surprisingly expressive.”
Wells comment: This is true. The horse (or horses) who play Joey are very actorish. And the black horses who play Charcoal, Joey’s best four-legged friend, are no slouch either. I would go so far as to say the horses are almost hams in this thing.
Hammond: “War Horse is probably too emotional and traditional to earn much love on the hardcore, unsentimental critics awards circuit, but I imagine it will fare very well at the CCMA’s , Golden Globes and Oscars.”
Wells tweets w/edits: “Tonally, emotionally and spiritually, War Horse is Darby O’Gill and the Little People goes to war with a horse. And I’m saying this as a fan of Darby O’Gill and the Little People — within its own realm and delivery system it’s a decent, cheerful, sometimes spooky little Disney flick. In any event, welcome to Spielbergland. It’s like no other place in the world. If you can push aside the carnage-of-war stuff, War Horse is essentially a nice Disney family movie. But the concept of restraint is out the window. The King’s Speech is a b&w Michael Haneke film compared to War Horse.”
Hammond: “The King’s Speech triumph last year over the more trendy critics choice of The Social Network might indicate there is still room for less edgy, more ‘traditional’ films in the heart of the Academy voter. We’ll have to wait to see, but the sheer scope of War Horse certainly gives it its own niche against smaller favored Best Pic hopefuls (seen so far) like The Descendants, The Artist, Midnight In Paris and Moneyball.”
Wells comment: War Horse is wonderful, beautiful and very touching…if you’re Joe Popcorn from Sandusky, Ohio or Altoona, Pennsylvania. Or if you feel a nostalgic affinity for “less edgy, more traditional” films and can just roll with what War Horse is serving. I think it’s so shameless it’s almost a hoot, but that’s me. It’s all of a piece and very exacting and lovely and handsomely shot and full of highly expressive emotional performances, but my God! Spielberg!
I had a brief sitdown last Friday afternoon with A Dangerous Method director David Cronenberg. We had about twelve minutes, if that. Our last interview was, I think, 29 or 30 years ago to talk about Scanners. I still remember the intensity of that discussion and saying to myself as Cronenberg delivered his points, “Whoa, this guy doesn’t fool around…no digressions, no bullshit.” Here‘s the mp3.
A Dangerous Method opens tomorrow (Wednesday, 11.23).
There’s always some kind of twisted perversity in Cronenberg’s films. Which is what most of us, I gather, look forward to when a new one is about to be shown. It’s there in A Dangerous Method, for sure, but in a spotty, paint-dabby fashion. Keira Knightley brings it in those shrieking, belt-whipping scenes with Michael Fassbender, but the film, it must be said, is somewhat dryer and more cerebral than anything Cronenberg had made before, and this requires, I feel, an adjustment of expectations.
A Dangerous Method is “well-acted but extremely cool, aloof, studied and intellectually driven to a fare-thee-well,” as I noted in early September. You just have to be ready for that, and saying this is not a criticism. As I wrote on 10.20, “the talkiness plays better the second time. You go in knowing what it is and accepting that, and you settle into Christopher Hampton‘s script like an easy chair.”
My strongest feelings are still about about Knightley’s “highly agitated, face-twitching performance. “It’s fascinating but hard to roll with at times,” I wrote from the Telluride Film Festival, “particularly during the first 20 minutes to half-hour. Cronenberg told her to go for it in terms of facial tics and flaring nostrils and body spasms, etc. She does a jaw-jutting thing that hasn’t been seen since John Barrymore played Dr. Jekyll in the 1920 version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. At the same time Knightley brings a thrilling sexual intensity to the all-too-brief fucking and belt-whipping scenes with Fassbender.
“All in all Knightley is quite a handful — she throws you and pulls you in at the same time. It’s a high-wire, risk-taking thing, and Method really needs to be seen for this alone.”
Christopher Plummer‘s beguiling performance in Mike Mills‘ Beginners (i.e., a 70ish dad who decides to come out and live his waning years as a gay man) has looked like a strong contender for Best Supporting Actor Oscar all along. But after seeing Plummer charm and electrify and ham it up and speechify in gloriously boozy Shakespearean fashion in Barrymore, which I saw a couple of hours ago at the Bell Lightbox, I’m all but convinced he has the Oscar in the bag.
Christopher Plummer during a post-screening interview with director Atom Egoyan following this afternoon’s screening of Barrymore.
As long as the Academy sees this low-budgeted Canadian film, that is. Once they all see it, the game will be pretty much over. Because Plummer isn’t just portraying the late John Barrymore, and is so doing reanimating all the flamboyance and lamentations and exaltations of a once-great actor’s career in his last year of life, he’s also playing, in a sense, himself. There are, after all, certain parallels.
Add this performance to Beginners plus Plummer’s turn in David Fincher‘s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, and he’s going to be awfully heard to beat.
Barrymore basically captures (and visually enhances to some extent) the stage show that Plummer performed in New York and Stratford in the mid ’90s, and lately performed again in Toronto earlier this year.
Consider this excerpt from Ben Brantley‘s N.Y. Times review of the stage show, called “A Dazzler of a Drink, Full of Gab and Grief“:
“The standup breakdown has become a reigning form in the theater of dead celebrities in recent years. Whether the focus is Truman Capote or Maria Callas, it allows its subjects to spin off witty anecdotes about glamorous lives while occasionally erupting into tormented cries showing the crippled soul beneath the tinsel. It’s like being seated next to a chatty trophy star at a dinner party with conveniently reduced potential for embarrassment.
”Barrymore is definitely part of this somewhat shameless tradition. And the actor in his waning years, a pathological specimen of self-parody, would seem to be an especially shameless subject. But under the assured, appropriately theatrical direction of Gene Saks, Mr. Plummer emerges as far more than the ”clown prince,” as Barrymore here describes himself with sour disgust, of America’s royal family of actors.
“What he achieves instead is the sense of a man whose vertiginous highs and lows were born of the same knot of impulses: a toxic mix of arrogance, insecurity, raw terror, the attention span of a 2-year-old and an insatiable appetite for the pleasures of the flesh. Mr. Luce, to his credit, has not given Barrymore a moment of revelation in which he untangles these elements. And Mr. Plummer seems to live intimately with all of them at once.”
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