In Contention

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  • The Bagger finds the meaning

    There are few journalists with as sharp an understanding of the tunnel vision that affects award-season coverage as David Carr.  So it’s with a guard of irony that, in yesterday’s ruminative NYT piece, he describes this year’s race as “somehow less frivolous than it has (been) in recent years.”

    While he acknowledges the comparative slightness of the Oscars against such events as Obama’s inauguration and the global financial crisis, he feels that the awards, and more particularly, the films being awarded, have a clearer collective sense of purpose — and resonance — this year:

    Consumers who are motivated by the laurels heaped on these films to plunk down increasingly scarce disposable income will leave the movie house with the message that circumstance is just that, and no match for the indomitability of human will. The films are built on individual successes — kids from the slums who better themselves, a television celebrity who finds his inner newsman, a newborn who overcomes old age and the midlife closeted man who steps into the light — that accrue to the greater good. That message, that darkness can be overcome by individuals working for the common good, is not so distant from the current collective impulse.

    I think it’s an intelligent point, but a flawed one. Carr may refer to this year’s nominees as “the filmed stories that have captured the public’s attention,” but the fact is that, in at least two cases, they haven’t. Carr already marks “The Reader,” the gloomiest and lowest-grossing of the Best Picture nominees, as an exception to his argument, but “Frost/Nixon” hasn’t fared much better commercially. In his recent chat with Charlie Rose, David Denby astutely pointed out that Ron Howard’s film rather overstates the relevance of an event that amounts to little more than an interesting historical footnote — and its $12 million gross so far suggests the public agrees.

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  • SANTA BARBARA: Clint Eastwood hailed as a Modern Master

    Clint EastwoodSo Clint Eastwood arrived in town tonight without all the pizazz you might have expected, as I reported from this evening’s Arlington Theatre event.  But inside the place was bananas.  Every single seat in the theater was filled, many of the locals vocalizing their shock on the way down the aisles.  “I’ve never seen it this packed before,” many of them said as they found a place to settle in and behold the career the festival was honoring.

    Moderator Leonard Maltin seemed to bite off a little bit more than he could chew.  Seriously, an hour and a half in and we were just getting to 1971.  I figured the 1980s would be a blur and indeed they were — Who wants to remember “Heartbreak Ridge” and “Firefox?” — but I would have liked some discussion on “Bird,” maybe, or “Pale Rider.”  But Maltin warned at the top that if he didn’t get to your favorite film, please understand.  We’re talking about six decades here.

    Early in the discussion Maltin spent a lot of time picking Eastwood’s brain on his early career — a contract player at Universal, roaming around the lot soaking up what information he could, getting the gig on television’s “Rawhide” and, of course, Sergio Leone’s spaghetti Westerns that didn’t find release in the states until rights were cleared up regarding Akira Kurosawa’s “Yojimbo.”  On the whole it was one of those kiss, kiss sessions, but the crowd was pumped.

    Every film that might be mentioned briefly in passing seemed to find this pocket of applause or that.  The “Dirty Harry” stuff was an obvious favorite (of course we were treated to the infamous “I gots ta know” sequence), but “Gran Torino” really brought the house down, especially the old guy vs. the homies scene that might have been Eastwood’s Oscar clip had the performance been nominated a week ago.

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  • Reasons Clint Eastwood is cool, #246

    He drives himself to his own tribute, eschews the big to do of a red carpet arrival, hops the metal barricade and slides into the fray minutes before anyone notices. Classic Eastwood.

  • What, no one wants to circulate this story, too?

    Slumdog MillionaireEveryone was so quick to pounce on the “Slumdog Millionaire” smear pieces of the week, yet this Sandy Cohen AP piece as been sitting there, waiting for similar obsessive circulation for 31 whole minutes.

    Here’s a taste:

    The makers of “Slumdog Millionaire” have done more for the film’s child stars than their parents ever could, the father of one young actress said.

    Rafiq Qureshi, whose 7-year-old daughter, Rubina, appears in the film, said that the filmmakers enrolled his daughter in school and “are taking complete care of my child.”

    “Whatever a parent could have done, they have done much more than that,” he said during an interview with AP Television in Mumbai, India on Wednesday.

    The rest here. Let’s move on, shall we? Whoever did the whispering, it was a valiant effort.

  • Is ‘Slumdog’ score too pop?

    Thanks to Nat Rogers at The Film Experience for pointing out a really worthwhile article in the Wall Street Journal, in which music critic Jim Fusilli takes a close look at this year’s nominees for Best Original Score. It’s not a category which tends to inspire much intelligent coverage in mainstream outlets, so it’s great to see someone giving the race the attention it deserves.

    Fusilli starts by commending the Academy for dodging the iffy qualification issues that have plagued previous races — principally the weirdly flexible criteria that allowed “Babel” in, but not “There Will Be Blood” — though I would still venture that “The Dark Knight”‘s initial disqualification scuppered its chances in the category. In any case, this year’s five nominated scores are all clearly original works, and Fusilli is generally impressed by the calibre of the competition. He is, however, not entirely convinced by frontrunner A.R. Rahman’s work on “Slumdog Millionaire”:

    This year, voters will have to decide whether to recognize music that’s most memorable as catchy pop or symphonic music that illuminates story and character. Mr. Rahman’s ebullient work for “Slumdog Millionaire,” a film about a poor boy who may win a fortune on a game show, is likely the early favorite — last week, I stopped in a theater in Boston to see it again and members of the audience cheered when his name appeared in the end credits. That may not be what a film-score composer is looking for. As Mr. Elfman told me last week, “If I’m going for any reaction, the best I could possibly hope for is that they see my name and go, ‘Oh really?’ Writing a score that gets people to jump out of the chairs is a whole other ballgame.”

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  • Interviews with this year’s Oscar nominees at In Contention

    Mickey Rourke (Best Actor, “The Wrestler”)
    Michael Shannon     (Best Supporting Actor, “Revolutionary Road”)
    Amy Adams     (Best Supporting Actress, “Doubt”)
    Marisa Tomei (Best Supporting Actress, “The Wrestler”)
    Danny Boyle (Best Director, “Slumdog Millionaire”) (also here)
    James Marsh (director, “Man on Wire”)
    Kristi Zea, Albert Wolsky (Best Art Direction, Best Costume Design, “Revolutionary Road”)
    Chris Menges (Best Cinematography, “The Reader”)

  • Brit critics follow the script

    It seems we really have reached consensus here. The Richard Attenborough Film Awards, a relatively new set of awards voted on by regional UK critics, haved chimed in with nearly everyone else, handing their Film of the Year and Director of the Year honours to Danny Boyle’s “Slumdog Millionaire.”

    They stuck with the well-awarded in the acting categories too, crowning Mickey Rourke and Kate Winslet (for “The Reader”) as Actor and Actress of the Year, respectively, while Dev Patel took the Breakthrough Star award.

    Meanwhile, I’m pleased to see Screenwriter of the Year went to Martin McDonagh for “In Bruges.” That might have been a less expected choice a month ago, before the nearly year-old release achieved a remarkable awards-season turnaround in the last few weeks.

    Four People’s Choice awards were spread between “The Dark Knight,” “Mamma Mia!” and “Slumdog,” completing a very British-leaning set of winners — hardly surprising, given that last year, the Attenboroughs were all about “Atonement.” I expect the BAFTA winners list will look somewhat similar.

    List of winners after the cut.

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  • 1/29 Oscarweb Round-up

    Joaquin Phoenix• Looks like Mickey Rourke isn’t going to get into the ring after all. [Associated Press]

    • Perhaps in response to snarky items like this? [Vulture]

    • Kim Voynar deconstructs the Oscar nominations a week later. [Movie City News]

    • In case it wasn’t obvious from the start, Joaquin Phoenix has been punkin’ y’all. [Entertainment Weekly]

    • Anne Thompson wonders if “Milk” is coming up on the outside.  I’ve heard some people here in Santa Barbara call it the #2 film in the mix, which it certainly might be.  Very interesting… [Thompson on Hollywood]

    • An opportune time for a story like this.  (If we really, REALLY want to get all conspiracy theorist about it, The Times is the Telegraph’s conservative competition.  And who owns The Times?) [Daily Telegraph]

    • Rather than post the emailed producers’ statement myself, I’ll just point you to Sasha Stone’s post with the full release. [Awards Daily]

    • Following that awesome Newsweek actors round table, Patrick Goldstein worships at the altar of Frank Langella (who, I just discovered today, is friggin’ 71 — now THAT’s aging well). [The Big Pucture]

  • SANTA BARBARA: Virtuosos on the march

    Richard JenkinsUnfortunately, “Happy-Go-Lucky” star couldn’t make it to tonight’s presentation of the Virtuoso Awards at the Lobero Theatre due to surgery recovery, but Viola Davis, Richard Jenkins, Rosemarie DeWitt, Melissa Leo and Michael Shannon were on hand to talk their roles in five of the most critically acclaimed films of the year.  James Cromwell did the honor of presentation.

    It’s a shame DeWitt was the only one on stage lacking (criminally) an Oscar nomination, but moderator Roger Durling kept the conversation away from awards as much as he could.

    A considerably amount of the discussion was spent on the nature of these actors’ careers, floating between the big screen, television and theater with a particular ease.  Many of the Virtuosos swept the comment aside with the usual “we go where the work takes us” rhetoric, which is fine, but Davis made a compelling comment regarding the state of the profession.

    “When you think about actors, you think about Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie,” she said.  “But most of them look just like us here on stage.”  The indication, of course, is the middle class actor and how often he or she isn’t given the proper credit, be it on television, on stage or, certainly, on the screen.

    “Please, go to New York,” DeWitt said.  “See a play.  Some of the greatest actors in the world are working on stage,” but their names aren’t well-known.  It’s an interesting topic with the SAG dispute of late, which finds middle class actors at the forefront of a fight for credit.  Durling, of course, didn’t pursue that line of questioning.

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  • ‘Two Lovers’

    This US trailer for James Gray’s wispy throwback romance has been knocking around for a little while, but it only came to my attention now. It’s a minor-key work that admittedly isn’t flattered by the rather prosaic trailer, though it’s been lauded (like all Gray’s films) in France, and I was rather charmed by it at the London Film Festival back in October.

    Whether this really will be the last we see of Phoenix on screen is still open to question, but it’s a vivid, award-level turn that galvanises the otherwise slight enterprise; Gwyneth Paltrow, meanwhile, contributes her most engaging work in a decade. Look out for it.

  • Class act

    Jeff Wells has captured some of last night’s Kristin Scott Thomas Q&A at the Santa Barbara festival, and it’s well worth a look — as I found when I interviewed her back in December, she’s immensely forthright, considered and witty in her discussion of her craft. Truly one of the best in the game.

    Wells also offers some tidbits from an informal chat he enjoyed with Scott Thomas afterwards, the most intriguing of which is that “plans are afoot to shoot a film version of ‘The Seagull’ with the same Broadway cast.”

    If you caught the Royal Court revival of Chekhov’s play in either of its London or New York incarnations, chances are you’re as excited by that news as I am. If you didn’t, you should be excited anyway.

    Scott Thomas’ interpretation of Arkadina was possibly the greatest stage performance I have ever seen, and the prospect of it being immortalised on film, with the likes of Carey Mulligan (who killed as Nina in the same production) and Peter Sarsgaard strutting their stuff too, is tantalising indeed. (The production I saw had Chiwetel Ejiofor in place of Sarsgaard — hardly a bad tradeoff.)

    If it gets done, and done right, on screen, Scott Thomas could just nab the second Oscar nomination that so unfairly eluded her this year for her staggering work in “I’ve Loved You So Long.” Here’s hoping. Check out the interview here.

  • The Bagger gets it

    As if we needed any more reasons to love David Carr, he has come out in full support of Matteo Garrone’s superb “Gomorrah,” citing its Oscar snub as “criminal”:

    (The Bagger) can’t get the movie out of his mind. There is a kind of moral certainty to the film – deeply corrupt, remarkably brutal – that makes everything make sense within the four corners of the movie. It’s full of likable, familiar types, but they just happen to have the habit of blowing people’s brains out. What does it say about culture when primordial evil expresses itself in a kid who might live right down the block?

    Indeed. The Academy may believe that this masterpiece doesn’t ‘deliver’ as effectively as, say, the thoroughly average “The Baader Meinhof Complex,” but he (and we) ain’t fooled. The film opens Stateside next month; don’t let the lack of a puny Oscar nod stop you from seeing it.

  • Did Harvey Weinstein cost Kate the Oscar?

    Harvey WeinsteinFor all his marketing and campaigning genius, Harvey Weinstein’s tactics have become — well, have been — a bit thuggish. In Peter Biskind’s extraordinary book “Down and Dirty Pictures,” a stunning look at the independent film world in the late 1980s and all through the 1990s, we are made privy to many of Harvey’s tantrums, eyewitness accounts of his bullying behavior, and crazy belief that because he is rich, he can do whatever he wants.  He can always buy his way out.

    Is there anyone left out there who truly believes that “Shakespeare in Love,” a lovely film, was actually better than “Saving Private Ryan?” Somehow Weinstein convinced the Academy it was, so the best directed, best edited, best shot and best sounding film, lost to a beautifully written work that will be forgotten in time, if it has not been forgotten already.

    Weinstein is a genius at getting his films Academy Award nominations, and some have said he will promise the artists as much when he buys the film or agrees to finance the work. He took Billy Bob Thornton from relative obscurity to an Oscar win for writing “Sling Blade.”  Who did Thornton defeat that year?  No less than the great Arthur Miller for “The Crucible!”

    I had hoped that when Disney dismissed Weinstein and brother Bob from Miramax (a company they founded) that perhaps he had learned something. It seems The Weinstein Company will continue the legacy of Miramax during the Oscar season, however.

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  • “Alan Parker had a boner…”

    Sorry — just now getting this up on the site.  Brilliant stuff:

    More here.

  • Elevating Ebert

    Roger Ebert has yet to weigh in with his formal Oscar predictions, but for now, he’s trying something a little different — selecting winners purely on the basis of “elevation,” which is to say the nominees that have had the most profound emotional impact on him. (He offers an in-depth explanation of this rationale here.)

    He has run through three categories so far, and using his criteria, I am hard-pressed to disagree with any of them. Melissa Leo — whose performance is, I think, in a different league to those of her fellow nominees — is Ebert’s personal favourite in the Best Actress category; he aptly describes her work as “close to the bone, closer to the soul.”

    Meanwhile, he celebrates “Milk” in the Best Picture category, with Gus Van Sant skilful use of existing footage of the candlelit Castro Street parade in Harvey Milk’s honour the clear emotional tipping point for him. I must concur here, even if “Milk” as a whole isn’t my favourite of the nominees. (I can’t say I was as moved by “Slumdog Millionaire” as I was grandly entertained.)

    However, I particularly love Ebert’s verdict in the Best Actor race, as he offers a point-on appreciation of what makes Mickey Rourke’s performance such a singular achievement:

    (“The Wrestler”) is his comeback on his own terms, as a full-force, heedless, passionate physical actor, with strong undercurrents of tenderness, loneliness, and need. He did a lot of his own wrestling in the film, including a scene where he deliberately cuts himself, and he was painfully honest in the scenes with women. What you see is a man with what he knows is the role of his lifetime, and willing (I am convinced) to die for it.

    Bingo. I’ve been struggling for a while to put my finger on exactly why I am that much more affected by Rourke’s performance than I am by Sean Penn’s impeccable inhabitation of Harvey Milk, but Ebert nails it. There is so much visibly at stake in the former; it’s about as autobiographical as an ostensibly fictitious performance can be.

  • 1/28 Oscarweb Round-up

    Kate Winslet at the 66th Annual Golden Globe Awards• Trying to get in on more of that tech action, Elizabeth Snead talks to “Benjamin Button” costumer Jacqueline West. [The Envelope]

    • “Push” and “Cove” top the critics’ picks for the best of Sundance. [indieWIRE]

    • Despite a nation-wide ban on Israeli products, two brave souls screen “Waltz with Bashir” in Beirut. [The Guardian]

    • The Stanley Kubrick Holocaust film (and shining new ingenue) that almost was. [The Independent]

    • Giving Kate Winslet shit across the pond for forgetting Angelina Jolie’s name at the Globes. [Daily Telegraph]

    • The top 10 most bewildering Best Picture nominees. [Rope of Silicon]

  • John Updike (1932-2009)

    This may be a film site, but I cannot let the passing of John Updike go without comment. While he contributed little directly to the artform — and the two feature-length attempts at bringing his work to the screen were, to say the least, regrettable — but it’s impossible to underestimate his level of influence across media.

    He may not have been the very first writer to appreciate suburban America for the seethingly dramatic storytelling space that it is, to investigate its paradoxical balance of suffocating community spirit and equally oppressive loneliness, but he became indisputably its most precise and prolific chronicler — while in his “Rabbit” quartet, he created arguably the most complete, searching study of shifting American social mores in the last half-century. Contemporary writers such as Tom Perrotta and Jonathan Franzen are as indebted to his legacy as filmmakers like Todd Solondz or Alexander Payne.

    We all have our heroes, and Updike is mine. In a way, it’s pointless writing obituaries for figures like him — though the Guardian takes an excellent stab — because his own work speaks more eloquently for itself than anyone else can. Indeed, it was Updike himself who, in the foreword to his essential 2003 “Early Stories” compilation (buy it if you don’t yet have it), best described his achievement as a writer:

    After I gave up cigarettes, I smoked nickel cigarillos to allay my nervousness at the majesty of my calling and the intricacy of my craft; the empty boxes, with their comforting image of another writer, Robert Burns, piled up. Not only were the boxes useful for storing little things like foreign coins and cufflinks, but the caustic aura of cigars discouraged visitors. I felt that I was packaging something as delicately pervasive as smoke, one box after another, in that room, where my only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me — to give the mundane its beautiful due.

  • SANTA BARBARA: ‘Fallujah’ soars, Thomas Vanguarded

    The Road to FallujahSomething of a slow day today at the festival — well, I purposely put the breaks on in favor of some quality time with you guys throughout the day and to put my feet up for a spell at the ole’ homestead.

    Anyway, I was really taken with Mark Manning’s “The Road to Fallujah,” an Iraq war documentary that played at Sundance last week and had its California debut this evening at the Arlington Theatre.  There was a nice turn-out, largely because Manning is a local (the first Santa Barbaran, in fact, to bring a film to Park City and then back the hometown fest).  But what I expected to be a derivative analysis of “what we did wrong” slowly revaled itself as perhaps one of the very best docs on the conflict we’ve seen yet.

    A former oil platform worker who up and decided one day to take a documentary course and shoot over to the middle of hell and find out what was going on, Manning only commits one sin that tends to irk me in non-fiction filmmaking: he put himself in the film.  If this is done to dramatically impacting effect (like in, say, “Dear Zachary”), it’s generally forgiveable at the start.  But it actually didn’t get to me as the film went on because the portrait Manning paints is immediate, penetrating and emotional.

    In essence, the film is a “what do the Iraqi people do now?” think-piece, littered with depictions of collateral damage and, of course, an extended look at the build-up to the Battle for Fallujah, the horrors of war during it, and the repercussions both Iraq and the U.S. are left with as a result.  Manning makes great use of his string of talking head experts, grabbing the key lines at the right times.  It’s amazing all this came from a night class education.

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