• Reed Johnson sits down with “Invictus” director Clint Eastwood and star Morgan Freeman. [Los Angeles Times]
• Eric D. Snider digs into the different perspectives on what makes a decade’s end. [Eric D. Snider]
• Noah Forrest stumps for some low-lying contenders that need the help. [Movie City News]
• Pete Hammond reports on a last minute surge to get “Iron Cross,” Roy Scheider’s final film, into Oscar contention. [Notes on a Season]
• Gregory Ellwood takes note of the season’s box office champs so far: “Inglourious Basterds” and “Up.” [Awards Campaign]
• Geoff Boucher talks to “Avatar” composer James Horner. [Hero Complex]
After some initial resistance, I’m getting chattier on Twitter lately. Yesterday, in a “best of 2000s” frame of mind, an enjoyable back-and-forth with some of you started after I idly asked which actor or actress has had the greatest decade on film.
The suggestions came in thick and fast, some mathematically going by awards stats, others opting for more abstract criteria. Some names came up with particular frequency: it’s hard to argue with the choice of Kate Winslet, though with the peerless exception of “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” I wish she had more stone-cold masterworks under her belt.
Johnny Depp was a popular choice, as was Sean Penn. I liked many more outré suggestions, including a shout-out for Patricia Clarkson, though will admit to scratching my head over two people’s advocation of Clint Eastwood. (If we’re counting people who only appeared four films this decade, I’ll stick with Daniel Day-Lewis.)
But I was pleasantly surprised by the number of people who plumped for the same name I’d consider for the honor: Nicole Kidman. The actress has been at the receiving end of a lot of media snark lately, be it in a professional or personal capacity, but clearly she still commands respect for her adventurous script choices and rarefied taste in auteurs.
There’s really no arguing the fact that South Africa’s victory in the 1995 Rugby World Cup was an inspirational moment of collaborative triumph for a country healing the wounds of the past. The occasion was an against-all-odds statement of progress and togetherness. It announced to the world that a nation had chosen to look to the future, not to the past. And the echoes undeniably reverberate in the crossroads the United States finds itself in this very day.
These themes are apparent in Clint Eastwood’s “Invictus,” but they do not have the elevating quality that might have rendered them truly affecting. A flat narrative and tedious structure ironically hold the audience at arm’s length from a story of inclusion and camaraderie. A confused central relationship is done no favors by a lack of true conflict and dramatic tension (the latter due largely to swift third act resolution). The film simply chugs along at a capable but unremarkable pace, and given the subject matter, it’s staggering how arbitrary the proceedings ultimately feel.
This might be seen as par for the course when it comes to Eastwood. He is an unfussy director concerned with streamlined, no-frills visual story telling, and at times, refreshingly so. But “Invictus” doesn’t feel like the work of a man invigorated by his focused process. It almost feels like the work of an exhausted artist, letting any number of elements slide on the way to completing a toothless, benign depiction of a momentous occasion.
Apparently unfazed by embargos, Newsweek’s David Ansen has posted a short, mixed-to-positive review of “Invictus,” the meat of which is here:
Invictus is not a biopic; nor does it take us deep inside any of its characters—Eastwood views Mandela from a respectful middle distance. It’s about strategic inspiration. We witness a politician at the top of his game: Freeman’s wily Mandela is a master of charm and soft-spoken gravitas. Anthony Peckham’s sturdy, functional screenplay, based on John Carlin’s book Playing the Enemy, can be a bit on the nose (and the message songs Eastwood adds are overkill). Yet the lapses fade in the face of such a soul-stirring story—one that would be hard to believe if it were fiction. The wonder of Invictus is that it actually went down this way.
So far, the early word I’ve sourced on this one is all over the place. I’m still struggling to get excited. Are you?
• Michael Cieply writes up “Crazy Heart” from the angle that Paramount has “embarrassed” itself for passing on the film once upon a time, but apparently that early cut was “unwatchable,” so, you know, cut some slack. [New York Times]
• Clint Eastwood — set to grace one of five GQ covers next month — says the country is in a morbid mood. [CNN]
• The Gurus o’ Gold weigh in on the directors and animated features. [Movie City News]
In January 2005, exactly one week after I left my birth town of Johannesburg to study film in the brighter lights of London, Darrell James Roodt’s earnest AIDS drama “Yesterday” became South Africa’s first Oscar nominee in the Best Foreign Language Film category.
Only a month later, the rather better “uCarmen eKhayelitsha” took the Golden Bear at the Berlin fest; again, the country’s first production to take top honors at one of the major festivals. And only a year later, Gavid Hood’s “Tsotsi” went one better than “Yesterday” by taking the Oscar.
By this time, I was beginning to wonder if the movie gods were sending me a sign that I’d picked the wrong country: South Africa’s film industry seemed poised for a crossover explosion. That didn’t quite happen. Hampered by the usual financial constraints of a third-world industry, the country went back to its steady output of provincial lowbrow comedies and not-quite-there dramas, few of them seen beyond its own borders.
Almost five years later, however, something interesting is starting to bubble there again — but this time, it’s not South Africa’s own industry making waves as much as an international cinematic preoccupation with the country and its stories.
Apple has exclusively debuted the first trailer for Clint Eastwood’s “Invictus,” and when you get around the initial akward shock of Morgan Freeman’s accent, work around the oddly structured but still somehow streamlined nature of the trailer, read the writing on the wall, etc., I think it becomes clear pretty quick what we all, rightly or wrongly, have assumed sight-unseen since day one: this looks like a bona fide Oscar contender.
I’ve been wondering aloud lately whether the film’s message of healing a nation’s wounds after extended political turmoil might not be more resonant now than we might think. The story delicately reflects the zeitgeist in some way. It looks to be one of the more traditional entries of the lot, which could make it a safe haven of sorts for the Academy.
And in any case, it certainly looks to pack an emotional wallop. Tough to argue with that stuff convincingly, but then again, maybe the “Gran Torino” snub meant more than we thought. Maybe Clint is becoming old hat. I doubt it, though.
Anyway, head on over to Apple and see the trailer for yourself, or check out the embed after the jump.
• Pete Hammond follows up on the Academy’s foreign screenings, plus more. [Notes on a Season]
• Like me, Steven Zeitchik senses a little “Slumdog” in “Precious.” [Risky Business]
• David Poland catches some intriguing similarities between the recently released “Invictus” and a number of other posters from Eastwood flicks. [The Hot Blog]
Based on some of the comments I received last week regarding my article on great acting, I took the suggestion of a young lady and am kicking off a series of articles, one per week, that will explore the best performances ofeach year, beginning today with 1995. So let’s go back and work our way towards 2008 and discover the great film performances we know about, and maybe a few we do not.
The Academy did a pretty fine job in 1995 when it came to the acting nominees. Sure there was some shock when John Travolta was snubbed for his superb work in “Get Shorty,” and those hoping for a three-peat with Tom Hanks missed it when the actor was not nominated for his solid work in “Apollo 13.” I personally would like to have seen Clint Eastwood nominated for his wonderful work in “The Bridges of Madison County,” but there are just five slots open, and so many fine pieces of acting.
One could also argue for Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt, both excellent in David Fincher’s “Seven,” or Bruce Willis, who was nobly brilliant in “Twelve Monkeys,” and perhaps even Jack Nicholson in “The Crossing Guard.”
Nobody could argue with Nicolas Cage in “Leaving Las Vegas,” Sean Penn in “Dead Man Walking” or Anthony Hopkins for “Nixon” as Best Actor nominees. And frankly I believe Penn gave the best performance of the year, one for the ages in fact. However, Richard Dreyfuss in “Mr. Holland’s Opus?” Seriously? I love Dreyfuss and I think he’s even been short-changed in the past, but come one. He does fine work and it’s not his fault the script asks him to be mushy and sentimental, but I have struggled with his nomination over Hanks, Travolta and Eastwood for many years.
What constitutes a great performance? What makes it something that puts it head and shoulders above the rest? What does an artist do to go to that level of art and achieve something that is both extraordinary and rare?
Does the Academy, or rather the branch that nominates the actors, look as closely at performance as critics do? Is a performance considered great because it is an Oscar-winning piece of acting or nominated for one of the acting prizes?
An actor reads a script and likes both the character he or she is being offered and the story on the page. The actor accepts, and begins (we hope) work on the character. A year or so later, after shooting and cutting the film, on the screen in front of us the actor’s work will be seen and judged, commented on, praised, perhaps showered with accolades or negative comments, perhaps winning an Oscar or a Razzie, maybe becoming discussed for years to come, or forgotten moments after seeing it.
I doubt, seriously, that an actor accepts a role with any of that in mind. Perhaps I am overly idealistic, but I hope actors accept roles because they are trying (always) to evolve as an artist, to discover something different in their acting and themselves, and to do something they have never done before. Of the many actors I have interviewed over the years, most of them take a role based on something that speaks to them in the screenplay.
Meryl Streep once told that me she seeks something that “touches my soul” while Robert Duvall looks for a character that is “real, something that will challenge me, but he has to be real.” Tom Cruise said he “likes to try different things each time out, and hopes he does the part justice”, while Hilary Swank looks “for something that speaks to me, as though the character were whispering to me.”
• Nathaniel Rogers and Katey Rich offer an early rundown of the best of 2009 thus far. [The Film Experience]
• Breaking down the world premieres at the Edinburgh Film Festival, which yours truly will be covering. [Screen International]
• Shia LaBeouf calls the “Transformers” sequel “literally the biggest movie ever made.” What a shame I won’t see it. [Daily Telegraph]
• Tim Burton gets a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. Freaky sketches included. [New York Times]
• Anne Thompson asks why nobody will fund movies for mature audiences, gets Clint Eastwood’s thoughts on the matter. [Thompson on Hollywood]
• Patrick Goldstein on the return (kinda) of Alexander Payne. [The Big Picture]
• Random list of the day: 10 movies that didn’t need girls. (Sorry, but “Wedding Crashers” totally needed Rachel McAdams. Most movies do.) [Cinema Blend]
• Okay, another list, but I really like this one: the 10 greatest multiple-role performances in history. (Yes, #1 is exactly what you think it is, and rightly so.) [Vulture]
• Something belated for the “Bolt” fans: a video interview with Rhino the hamster. [The Guardian]
• Not exactly new, and not exactly movie-related, but have you heard Scarlett Johansson’s duet with Pete Yorn yet? I dig it. [The Break Up Album]
There are few things as antithetical to great drama as an unmitigated hero, a character rendered almost inhuman by unfailing nobleness and valor. In fiction and non-fiction alike, we are inevitably more compelled by the flawed and conflicted of our kind – whether in lurid warts-and-all celebrity biographies or more subtly probing character studies. In film, true-life heroes often make for worthily sanitized Oscar bait (from “Gandhi” to “Milk”), but they rarely provoke great art.
Few figures bear out this truth as handily as Nelson Mandela – a man who is surely the greatest political hero of our time, but who has nonetheless inspired a number of crashingly dull books and films. It’s not that the man wants for character or complexity: Mandela’s deserved (if artfully self-engineered) modern sainthood belies his early days as a fierce firebrand, but few biographies (and to date, no biopic) have bridged that gap, or made much of an attempt to study the man beneath the myth.
So it comes as no surprise that John Carlin’s “Playing the Enemy,” which forms the inspiration for Clint Eastwood’s recently-titled film “Invictus,” does little to change this, casting the first black president of South Africa less as a freestanding character than as a perma-haloed symbol of democratic benevolence. Of course, in this instance, Carlin’s intent was not to write another Mandela biography – just as it should be stressed that Eastwood’s film isn’t really a Mandela biopic.
In narrowing his focus to South Africa’s monumental victory in the 1995 Rugby World Cup, the currency of which extended beyond simple sporting patriotism to a kind of symbolic consolidation of the country’s international post-apartheid rehabilitation, Carlin’s aim is precisely to dehumanise Mandela to an extent. At the book’s core is the somewhat tenuous thesis that Mandela almost single-handedly enabled this against-the-odds triumph via an elaborately strategized charm offensive – though Carlin pays sporadic attention to Mandela the man, his chief interest lies in the mid-1990s invention of Mandela the brand, and the influence it could wield.
To the best of my knowledge, this is the first time we’ve seen Morgan Freeman on the set of Clint Eastood’s “Invictus.” Everything has been Matt Damon in rugby garb so far.
Slipped my mind to do this on Friday, but better late…
• We broke the news that Clint Eastwood’s upcoming Mandela film finally has a title: “Invictus.” (And if you’re wondering what it means, we explain that too.)
• And with that, much “Invictus” talk ensued, as we learned that Eastwood directed the film at Morgan Freeman’s request, and that it’s going up against “The Lovely Bones” in December.
• Speaking of “The Lovely Bones,” this week’s edition of Page to Screen put Alice Sebold’s bestselling novel under scrutiny.
• Our slightly disappointing (to some, at least) poll of cinema’s most influential films entered its final stage.
• With the news of a “Total Recall” remake the final straw, we got on Hollywood’s case for being so apparently allergic to original material.
• This week’s list counted down the all-time greatest champs in the Best Foreign Language Film category. (Hint: The just-released “Departures” ain’t on it.)
• We considered the wealth of female filmmakers in the mix for awards consideration this year.
• A bit of respect for the great Elia Kazan.
• “Up” stormed the box office, as we all knew it would.
• Finally, in sadder, and much less expected, news, we said goodbye to actor David Carradine.
Toward the top of this John Powers profile of Morgan Freeman (published in part online and appearing in full in the June issue of Vogue), the actor drops an interesting bit of information I wasn’t aware of until now. Most people were (as always) quick to call Clint Eastwood an Oscar hound for his choice of material this time around. Obviously a film featuring a revered individual such as Nelson Mandela and covering the historic events of John Carlin’s book “Playing the Enemy” sets off the Oscar bait alarm, but it appears Eastwood didn’t exactly go searching for his next big awards season get:
Effortlessly dapper in a black jacket and a white polo shirt at breakfast in Beverly Hills, [Freeman] says that at this point in his storied career, “there aren’t many challenges in making movies.” Luckily, he’s about to embark on one of them—going to South Africa to produce and star in a big-budget Hollywood film about Nelson Mandela. “If you are playing a living figure who’s revered by the world, you’ve got yourself a major, major undertaking. You’ve got to do this without embarrassing yourself, your audience, and especially Madiba [Mandela’s nickname]. Knowing that, you can be entirely too self-conscious. There are pitfalls, but I am going to be working with Clint.”
He’s referring, of course, to his good friend Clint Eastwood, who’s directing the film at Freeman’s request. “Morgan is just right for the role,” says the man who helmed Freeman’s Oscar-winning turn in Million Dollar Baby. “His stature in the acting world is like Mandela’s in his world.” (Eastwood’s confidence turns out to be well-founded. “Things are going fantastic here,” Freeman later tells me by phone from Johannesburg. “Everything has just fallen into place. The thing that’s surprised me is how easy it’s been to adapt to being Mandela.”)
Also, I have to say, “Invictus” is growing on me. Even though it’s totally wrong for the scope of the film and isn’t commercially appealing, I think it’s a very attractive title. Strong. Confident. I dig it.
It’ll be Clint Eastwood in one corner, Peter Jackson in the other for round two this Oscar season.
Tuesday we broke the news that Clint Eastwood’s untitled Nelson Mandela/1995 World Cup film would be titled “Invictus.” Now comes word form Variety that the film will be released December 11, the same day as Jackson’s “The Lovely Bones” (featured this week in Guy’s Page to Screen column).
“Invictus” follows Mandela’s attempt to use the 1995 Rugby World Cup to heal his nation following his release from prison, the fall of apartheid and his election as president of South Africa…
Eastwood drew the title of the film from a short poem often recited by Mandela. “Invictus,” penned by William Ernest Henley, speaks to the will to survive in the face of adversity.
“Invictus” isn’t the first picture to claim Dec. 11. Also opening that weekend is Peter Jackson’s “The Lovely Bones,” from Paramount and DreamWorks.
The Dec. 11 release puts “Invictus” and “Lovely Bones” in the heart of awards season.
Also note the utter lack of sourcing our story from two days ago. Nothing new there, but you roll with the punches in this racket.
