In Contention

Category: Daily

  • Sean Penn might be the greatest living actor

    After writing my piece on the recent Best Actor winners and non-winners I was rather shocked at the number of comments on Sean Penn’s astounding performance in “Mystic River,” a performance I believe to rank with the best of Brando, Duvall, Nicholson and De Niro.

    I love debate, I love to talk film, and best of all I love debating the merit of performance as I studied method acting in the hopes of becoming an actor before I fell in love with film criticism.

    For the record, I was terrible, but remained fascinated by those who could do it, and Mr. Penn might just be the very best at what he does. Far too often his off-screen antics have over-shadowed his brilliant work as an actor, and while he has mellowed in his later years, he is still every bit as surly and rebellious as he ever was, though as a father and husband perhaps he understands the need for boundaries these days. I had the pleasure of interviewing Penn at the Toronto International Film Festival a few years back, and always believe that there should be no trace of the characters he portrays in his films for him to be judged a great actor. There were none. The person sitting across from me, relaxing when he seemed to know I was here to discuss acting as an art and craft, was not anyone I had seen on film, nor the hot-tempered photography beater of his youth.

    We all became aware of Penn in “Taps” back in the early 80s, but it was his hysterical turn in “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” that made him a star. I find it difficult sometimes to connect the actor who portrayed the doomed killer in “Dead Man Walking” and the deeply distrubed man in “The Assassination of Richard Nixon” to the actor who portrayed the goofy, sunny, surf-loving Jeff Spicoli. Pauline Kael said Penn had the sort of talent that bites you on the nose and she was not off the mark at all.

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  • Batman vs. Iron Man

    httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlLeCu63HCA

  • That leaked Two Face photo…

    Jeff Wells is running it over at his site. So is AICN. Since I saw at least two take-down orders out there on the net, I refrained from running the pic. But Jeff says he ran it by publicists at Warner Bros. and no one got back to him, so taht was reason enough for him.

    Anyway — while it’s there — what do you think? Personally, if it’s indeed real, I think it’s perfect. Especially knowing what it might look like on film with Wally Pfister playing with the shadows. And it’s downright terrifying.

  • Kidman takes on Dusty: could Oscar beckon?

    Unwritten rule of Oscar strategy #476: playing a troubled popular music icon will probably net you at least a nomination. Just ask Marion Cotillard, Reese Witherspoon, Joaquin Phoenix, Jamie Foxx, Angela Bassett, Laurence Fishburne, Jessica Lange, Sissy Spacek, Gary Busey, Diana Ross, Susan Hayward… the list goes on.

    It’s not hard to figure out why. Academy voters have long had a bias towards biopics, somehow believing that interpreting a real-life figure, whose physicality, voice and mannerisms are already established, is more of a challenge than creating a fictitious character from scratch. Playing a real-life entertainer only ups the ante, allowing the actor to build multiple performance personae within the character, as well to show off any singing/dancing/playing skills we didn’t know they possessed. (Singing being optional, of course, as Cotillard and Foxx can attest.) Throw in the mental breakdowns and substance abuse problems that generally go with the territory, and you have Academy Award bait of the highest order.

    So the news that Nicole Kidman, arguably the foremost leading lady of her generation, is set to produce and play in a biopic of the late Dusty Springfield, inarguably the greatest white soul singer of all time, can’t fail to prompt early Oscar speculation.

    Even laying aside Springfield’s astonishing musical legacy for a moment, the woman is a fascinating character: born and raised in London, she overcame crippling self-confidence issues to top the U.S. charts in the 1960s, confusing the barriers between what was perceived as “white” and “black” music. As her hold on the charts loosened, however, she descended into a reclusive lifestyle of alcoholism, drug abuse and self-harm, all the while conflicted between her emerging bisexuality and her Catholic faith. Finally clean, she made something of a comeback in the late 80s, before being diagnosed with breast cancer, finally losing the battle in 1999. All this, and with a British accent to boot. Like I said, baity stuff.

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  • Best actor contenders join an eclectic list of recent winners

    Sean Penn, Benicio Del Toro and Frank Langella seem to be the names bandied about for Oscar consideration this year, which would place them in some impressive company of nominees and winners these last 20 years. Of course, that said, there have also been some bizarre choices for the Best Actor award, which has often left me shaking my head in disgust and wondering what these voters were actually seeing.

    Since 1988, there have been 10 winners that perhaps should not have been, the award arguably deserved by another of the nominees, or worse, an actor not nominated! Consider Dustin Hoffman in “Rain Man,” a widely acclaimed performance that asked that he not connect with anyone in the film, never make eye contact, rock back and forth and speak in a nasally voice.

    Stop what you are doing right now and try what he did in the film, and trust me it is very easy to do. Now do you deserve an Oscar for doing what Hoffman did in that film? The real perfortmance in “Rain Man” was that of Tom Cruise, who we watched evolve over the course of the film, and of course the best performance of that year was Gene Hackman as the tough investigator in “Mississippi Burning.” Hackman was nominated, but he stood no chance in the wake of the juggernaut of support for Hoffman, who in fact should have won years before for his miraculous work in “Tootsie!”

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  • What next?

    As you can see in the polls archive, it looks like readers aren’t too receptive to the notion that Baz Luhrmann’s “Australia” will be a major awards contender as it sits atop the hep with four or five other “frontrunners” early in the season. Joe Wright’s “The Soloist” wasn’t far behind. We’ll see if you guys were on the money in a matter of months, but for now, we’ve got a new query for you all.

    Now that the summer movie season has exploded onto the scene in the form of last week’s “Iron Man,” what are you most excited about on the horizon? Well, speak up!

    (I went with the nine most likely choices and an “other” option as well. If you’re more psyched for something else, come back here and let us know!)

  • About The Joker, or Heath Ledger, remembered

    In a post earlier today, Kris linked to the new trailer for “The Dark Knight” starring Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Michael Caine . . .I could continue. It’s an exceptional cast complete with some of the finest actors from different demographics, Maggie Gyllenhaal, especially, as a needed upgrade from Katie Holmes.

    This trailer gives us an added (and for me, a needed) glimpse into The Joker, played by the late Heath Ledger. This performance, characterized by Michael Caine as “the most murderous psychopath you’ve ever seen on screen,” is, arguably, the most anticipated of the year.

    You expected me to write summer, didn’t you, what with all those new and different performances being released: Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones; Will Smith as an invincible man; Brendan Fraser as Rick O’Connell; Seth Rogen as a stoner; Adam Sandler as a cross between Little Nicky and Bobby Boucher . . .

    I don’t mean to diminish these performances (or those I didn’t mention: Ed Norton as The Incredible Hulk and Emile Hirsch in “Speed Racer”), but they simply don’t inspire me the way Ledger’s performance does. Is that because he’s dead? In part, I’m sure. But friends of mine will attest that I suggested to anyone that would listen that Ledger’s performance would be memorable. Oscar-worthy was used several times, I recall.

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  • ‘Dark Knight,’ YouTubed

    You know…just to round out a few days of Bat-talk:

    httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKSUCoN7Ioo

  • Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes!

    Lots of revamping and updating going down on the Oscarweb lately.

    I noticed Sasha Stone is pointing out that old Oscar fan site standby, The Oscar Igloo, has recently changed faces to Awards Circuit (did the Academy give them shit over the Oscar moniker, too?). Now it seems David Poland’s long-in-the-making transformation of The Hot Button into a blog has come to pass.

    I like this change, personally. Poland is a go-to writer for opinion — if anything — during the awards season months, and his work has always been far too scattered between The Hot Blog, The Hot Button and Movie City News. It seems he’s finally consolidating (like the airlines!), and that’s a good thing, if you ask me.

  • Clint Eastwood — anything he does grabs Oscar’s attention

    Let me begin with something very personal, something I prefer not to do in this column. Movies have not mattered much this past week, as my wife of 18 years, the love of my life was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor. This Thursday we journey to Sunnybrook Hospital in Toronto to allow the finest surgeons in the country to go in and take the tumor out, with the hope she does not have to have chemotherapy or radiation. There is a chance I could lose her, and that I couldn’t bear. The past few days have been a blur, and yet it is her who urged me back to the computer, with a gentle, “You can’t let the movie writing stop because of this…please…write…” God I love that girl. She is at this moment snoozing behind me as I write this.

    Later this year we will see the release of “Changeling,” the latest from Clint Eastwood who over the last 16 years has become one of the finest directors working in movies. Now seriously, had anyone ever told me in the 70s that one day I would be celebrating the works of Eastwood the director by writing a book about him and his work, I would have laughed in their face at the thought.

    Dirty Harry, the man who acted with apes, becoming a world class director? Yet here we are in 2008 and Eastwood has won two Academy Awards for Best Director, twice been honored by the Directors Guild of America, and won countless critics prizes for his work. Revered by actors, beloved by the studios for whom he works, and respected by his colleagues, he has quietly risen to the very peak of the directing world, sitting alongside Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese. His films have the lean feel and look of the best work of John Huston and Howard Hawks to whom story was paramount.

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  • Bringing the truths of Skid Row to the masses

    The LA Times’ Steve Lopez is enjoying plenty of publicity this month for his latest book release, “The Soloist: A Lost Dream, an Unlikely Friendship and the Redemptive Power of Music.” The book was drawn from a series of articles Lopez published three years ago in his “Points West” column in the Times about a Juliard-trained, homeless musician: Nathaniel Ayers.

    The story was cleverly recounted with amusing detail by Lopez at a book reading in Pasadena last month, which was when I first discovered that the film adaptation (releasing later this year and starring Jamie Foxx and Robert Downey Jr.) might actually do some good in forwarding the issue of mental disorder in the U.S., a stigmatized subject that deserves more focus.

    Lopez and “The Soloist” are featured on newsstands this week as Dana Goodyear writes the story and the issue up as a “Letter from Los Angeles” in the pages of The New Yorker. And I’m happy to see that the film may actually take these issues seriously, rather than setting them aside in favor of what would obviously be a heart-warming story.

    Here’s a look at the abstract (I wish the full article was online, but it’s the May 5 issue for those interested):

    Since the nineteen-eighties, L.A. has been known as the country’s homeless capital. Skid Row, a fifty-block area covering less than a square mile between the L.A. River and the office towers of downtown, has the city’s highest concentration of homeless people. A January, 2007, street count showed that there were just over five thousand homeless people living in the area, thirty-three hundred of them in shelters and nearly eighteen hundred on the street. Many suffer from mental illnesses, drug addiction, or both. Thousands are in recovery.

    Joe Wright, the British director of the new Ayers film, decided to take the job on one condition: that the film be made with real people from Skid Row…Open casting calls for extras in the movie were held on San Julian Street, and hundreds of people turned up. Two miles east of the real San Julian Street, a set was built. The Skid Row cast members were asked to play recognizable street types. Some days there were four hundred extras on the set, the vast majority of them from Skid Row.

    “The humanness of the story has given people a rooting interest in Nathaniel’s life, and to that extent it has destigmatized homelessness,” Lopez said. “But Nathaniel pays a heavier price. He has to deal with the attention.”

  • Eckhart on Dent

    My guy identifies with everybody in the movie…Really, all of it is more than an adventure tale, it’s somewhat of a mirror of our times. It deals with some fundamental questions of what’s going on in society. To me, this film is about how Batman feels about justice, how he takes care of the city, how he feels about the Joker when he meets him and sees what he is capable of doing. How he feels when Harvey Two-Face takes matters into his own hands. It’s not simple, and it gets ugly. I think people will be surprised.

    From this weekend’s profile in the LA Times.

  • Uh…is it a cleansing by fire for Dent rather than acid?

    A second look at “Iron Man” with the masses (indeed, the MASSES) last night afforded a look at the new trailer for “The Dark Knight” on the big screen, rather than dealing with that clumsy cell phone video that’s out there.

    Two things hit me when I was watching this:

    1) Wally Pfister is all but guaranteed a second nomination for his work on the series. The opening hero shot, dizzyingly high above and looking down a Chicago skyscraper, has to be the coolest shot in the genre.

    2) I think the brothers Nolan may have taken some liberties with the Two-Face origin.

    The information has always been scattered out there that, in David Goyer and Christopher Nolan’s vision of a trilogy, the Joker would be the one responsible for the mangling of Harvey Dent’s face and, therefore, the impetus for the creation of Two-Face. (Aaron Eckhart plays Dent in the film. He was profiled in the LA Times this weekend).

    I don’t know if this has panned out, but if it has, I am still not 100% comfortable with it. In the comics, of course, Dent is scarred when a mob boss tosses a vial of acid his way, most interestingly laid out by writer Jeph Loeb and artist Tim Sale in “The Long Halloween.” In that story, the boss is Sal Maroni (portrayed by Eric Roberts in “The Dark Knight,” by the way).

    No, I’m not beholden to comic-to-screen loyalty every step of the way. “Batman Begins” was, after all, a brilliant mish-mash of a couple of comic sources, and we already know that Nolan and company are taking the mash-up approach to “The Dark Knight,” using a little of Batman #1, a little of “The Long Halloween,” this and that, this and that. Fair enough. But I’ve never been fully comfortable with one of the rogues gallery providing the genesis for another.

    Watching the new trailer again last night, I noticed a brief shot of what looked to be Harvey held down, the left side of his face pressed against a floor covered in gasoline. It was quick, but I think I know what I saw.

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  • Opening day = $32.5 million

    You always expect the first summer blockbuster to do well but still…Yowsers. The sky is really the limit for this one now, especially with the great reviews. I have to say I’m really happy for Downey and “Iron Man” in general at this point. This is the start of an amazing year for him — a year he’s had coming for a long time.

    How far do people think this one can go? What does it tell us is in store for the next blockbusters on the way?

  • Artist on Artist: John Cusack and Diablo Cody

    Just ran across this over at The Movie Blog. The latest installment of MySpace’s “Artist on Artist” series features a conversation between John Cusack and Diablo Cody.

    Cody talks a little about her upcoming horror film “Jennifer’s Body,” which is in the midst of filming right now up north. Cusack feigns interest while clearly trying to figure out how he might get her back to his crib. (Kidding, of course…kinda.)

    Check it out:

  • What did you think of ‘Iron Man?’

    Now that the first summer blockbuster has landed, tell us what you thought.

  • Official poster for ‘Hamlet 2’

    This was a big hit at Sundance and something tells me with the right finesse, Focus Features could spin some awards potential out of the film. But admittedly I haven’t seen it yet. Here’s the trailer. And the new poster:

  • Chiwetel Ejiofor: an actor to watch

    As both Kris and I have suggested, this is likely to be the year of Robert Downey Jr. I’m pleased to see that he’s getting rave reviews for his work in “Iron Man,” and I’m glad to know that it isn’t a mess the way many comic book adaptations become (“Hulk” and “Batman & Robin,” certainly).

    But since we’re on the topic of new actors (or, in Mr. Downey’s case, veteran actors re-made) taking the scene, I wanted to draw attention to Chiwetel Ejiofor, who stars in the lead role of David Mamet’s new film “Redbelt.”

    Ejiofor easily makes my list of the finest actors working today. Recently, he starred in Alfonso Cuaron’s marvelous “Children of Men,” alongside Denzel Washington in Ridley Scott’s “American Gangster” and opposite Don Cheadle in “Talk to Me.” I thought his role in HBO’s under-appreciated drama “Tsunami: The Aftermath” was extraordinary.

    In “Redbelt,” Ejiofor plays the role of Mike Terry, a Brazilian Jiu Jitsu instructor who runs a struggling academy in Los Angeles. Michael Rechtshaffen of Hollywood Reporter describes Ejiofor as the “heart and soul of the film.” Today, Ejiofor appeared on NPR’s “Fresh Air” with Terry Gross.

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