In Contention

Tag: The Insider

  • ‘Beginners’: Plummer’s late Oscar vehicle?

    We may be almost halfway through the 2011 release schedule, and as usual, there’s been little in the theaters to trouble the Oscar-minded obsessives among us. That’s not to say the last six months have wanted for deserving work — in a perfect world, one where all good films are created equal, “Certified Copy” star Juliette Binoche would be tough to beat for Best Actress, while “Meek’s Cutoff” would be a slam-dunk Best Picture nominee, but we hardly need to go into the dully pragmatic reasons why those are mere pipe dreams.

    Only two immediate post-Cannes releases, “The Tree of Life” and “Midnight in Paris,” have prompted some awards discussion with their critical provocation and surprising box office, respectively — but beyond a near-certain cinematography nod for the former and a possible writing nod for the latter, further prospects depend largely on the performance of autumn’s big-name prestige draws, as well as a few hot festival purchases from Cannes, Sundance and even Berlin.

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  • Christopher Plummer talks Tolstoy, “S&M” and his under-the-radar film career at AFI Fest

    Christopher Plummer was feted at AFI Fest Tuesday evening and I popped in for the brief toast before heading over to an unrelated Gala screening.  LA Weekly’s Scott Foundas was the moderator for an all-too-brief back and forth with the actor, who comes off as someone with whom you’d like to have a drink or 10.

    Some of the discussion was dedicated to Plummer’s memoir, “In Spite of Myself,” and a little bit of “The Last Station” thrown in here and there as well.

    I grabbed a couple of quick videos of the event. iPhone vids, mind you, so no 1080p detail going on here, but decent audio. Here’s Plummer discussing his work developing and performing the “character” of Mike Wallace in Michael Mann’s “The Insider,” which leads to discussion of his role in Michael Hoffman’s Tolstoy biopic, which will likely land the actor his first ever Oscar nomination, for Best Supporting Actor.

    Two more quick vids after the jump.

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  • 9/22 Oscarweb Round-up

    Jane Campion• Peter Bart takes note of two of the season’s leading ladies of the Oscar circuit, unlikely rivals Jane campion and Kathryn Bigelow. [BF Deal Memo]

    • Eugene Hernandez on the Oscar marathon. [indieWIRE]

    • Bilge Ibiri compares “The Insider” to “The Informant!” [Future of Classic]

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  • R.I.P. Don Hewitt

    CBS is reporting that “60 Minutes” creator and cornerstone of CBS News Don Hewitt has died after being diagnosed with a small, contained tumor earlier in the year.  He was 86.  The news comes one month and two days after Hewitt’s long-time colleague, Walter Cronkite, passed away at 92.

    Hewitt spear-headed the most successful television news show of all time in “60 Minutes,” and has been portrayed in film by Grant Heslov (George Clooney’s “Good Night, and Good Luck.”) and Philip Baker Hall (Michael Mann’s “The Insider.”)  Hewitt came under fire, as dramatized by Mann’s film, when he caved into corporate interests by refusing to air a segment in which former tobacco executive Jeffrey Wigand blew the whistle on malfeasance practices at the Brown & Williamson tobacco company.  But that, however damaging, is certainly not his legacy.

    Hewitt was one of the titans who ushered in an age of televised news content, but his passing, along with Cronkite’s, continues to sound the bell of a forgotten or, at least, diminished period of high respect for the profession.

  • Zen pulp

    I should really let Matt Zoller Seitz’s words speak for themselves in his ongoing five-part series of video essays concerning director Michael Mann at the Museum of the Moving Image, (“Zen Pulp: The World of Michael Mann”), but I’m a sucker for this stuff.

    Part one (posted July 1), which you can check out below, concerns Mann’s early years, moving from TV’s “Miami Vice” backwards five years to his first directorial effort, TV movie “The Jericho Mile” (a movie I REALLY need to see, already). Then it’s back to “Vice” for some aesthetic analysis.

    “The advertising part of Mann’s sensibility is encoded in the show’s brooding slickness,” Seitz says, “its fascination with clothes, cars, boats, buildings, and bodies as objects worth contemplating apart from their narrative function.” There’s plenty of talk about Mann’s penchant for authenticating the world on screen and the heavy body count and aesthetic violence in the ground-breaking series.  Then it’s a fast-forward 22 years to talk about the 2006 feature film starring Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx.  Check it out:

    (Keep reading to check out parts two and three.)

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  • THE LISTS: Top 10 performances from Michael Mann films

    Russell Crowe in The InsiderWith the forthcoming release of Michael Mann’s “Public Enemies” (review) dominating — quite impressively, I might add — the publicity circuit this week, all eyes are on Johnny Depp.  An Ulmer Scale X factor for this character study posing as a summer blockbuster, Depp’s performance is sure to draw champions and detractors alike for its delicate, internalized particulars.  But of one thing we can be certain: the work is of a piece with Mann’s typically detailed approach to character.

    Mann’s collaborative process with his actors typically involves something called “character acquisition,” a tightly-conceived regimen, of sorts, that gives his films’ characters the authentic touch that makes his work so novel.  Many times these details won’t even be discussed in the overall narrative, but their background impact on the performer is unmistakable.  Take, for instance, the photos of the childhood home of Tom Cruise’s hitman Vincent in “Collateral” that Mann brought to the actor’s attention, merely by way of more fully developing the character’s clearly complicated formidable years.

    The result of this hard work has been a slew of captivating, at times career-best performances from some of the most accomplished actors working today.  A Michael Mann production represents the opportunity to go deeper with a performance and perhaps even learn more about the craft.  Will Smith has frequently discussed his collaboration with Mann as the most rewarding experience of his professional life.  And, as Javier Bardem once told me, “When Michael Mann invites you to his party, you don’t turn him down.”

    So with that, a collective representing the best performances to come from Mann’s 10 feature films to date seemed the best way into this week’s installment of The Lists.  It’s a very personal list, of course, as yours would be.  There are three performances from one film, none from two, and a pair of unconventional supporting turns to shake things up.  After going back through the director’s work last week in preparation for the list, even I was surprised my #1 choice was left standing, but regardless of order, see this as a way to compliment a true actor’s director.

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  • THE LISTS: Top 10 films of 1999

    (from left) Joe Pantoliano, Laurence Fishburne, Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss in The MatrixRemember that Entertainment Weekly cover from November of 1999?  The headline boldly proclaimed: “The year that changed movies.”  Indeed, it has become nearly a cliche to harp on and on about those 12 months of solid product as a time not equaled since the glory year that was, 1939, but to many, the truth was the truth.  1999 was the best year for films in a long, long time.

    And it wasn’t a microscopic view of “quality” either.  A broad net was cast, from genre successes aplenty to art house sensations, both finding equal play in the film awards circuit that year.  And so it is that hammering out a list of the 10 best constitutes to be a pastime of sorts for the movie lover, especially those like me who were experiencing an awakening of sorts around that time.

    1999 was my first year of film school — the dark ages, as I like to call them (because I’ve come to know film school as a fool’s errand of sorts, an education not easily passed from one person to the next but better learned through trial and tribulation).  But I was still an eager, unjaded soul and took a trip to the local theater one day with a troupe of friends for our own double feature: Sam Mendes’s “American Beauty” and David O. Russell’s “Three Kings.”  It was our first real understanding of the year that had been unfolding right before our eyes.

    “American Beauty” has, of course, aged quite poorly, though Russell’s Iraq war film remains a staple of sorts, a unique blip in a consistently uneven genre.  This was already the year that had seen the release of the first “Star Wars” installment in over 20 years (however disappointing), the last great exhibit from the portfolio of the cinema’s greatest artist (Stanley Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut”) and a science fiction masterpiece that owed as much to William Gibson as anything else (at least those ideas were making it to the screen).

    Moreover, this was a cinematic year that would see releases from more top-tier directors than any other year: Kubrick, Scorsese, Lucas, Lynch, Allen, Fincher, Burton, Leigh, Minghella, Anderson, Almodóvar, Mann, Lee, Stone, Jordan, Sayles, Soderbergh, Forman, Burton, Pollack, Darabont and Howard, while simultaneously launching the exciting careers of untold newbies.  The range of quality, as expected, was certainly wide, but that all of these guys were in neck deep in their work during the same stretch of time had plenty to do with the perception of 1999, then and now.

    So with that, I felt that this week’s top 10 list (a Tuesday regularity now, if you haven’t been keeping score) would address 1999, the year that was.  Here are my picks:

    (from left) Mark Wahlberg, George Clooney and Ice Cube in Three Kings10. “Three Kings” (David O. Russell)
    David O. Russell is a visionary of sorts, but he seems to always be right at the surface, just about to break through with an unyielding brilliance, never fully harnessing the wicked talent he clearly has.  But for a brief moment in the fall of 1999, he discovered an outlet in this Iraq War dramedy that became more famous for its off-screen drama than what unfolded on-screen.  Pity, because I would rank “Three Kings” in a list of the 10 greatest war films ever made without flinching.  George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg, Spike Jonze and Ice Cube headlined a sprawling cast that probably deserved some ensemble attention.

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  • Who joins the great Best Picture snubs this year?

    It happens every year, a great film, in some cases destined to be remembered more than the eventual Oscar winner is snubbed for a Best Picture nod, or gets nominated and loses to an inferior film that happened to capture the public’s attention at that particular point in history.

    Some of the greatest films of all time lost the top award, “Citizen Kane” among them, arguably the greatest of all time (though I disagree). “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre”, easily John Huston’s best work, joins the list, as does “The Searchers,” which is in my opinion the finest western ever made and contains the greatest John Wayne performance of all time.

    Remember “Rocky” winning over “All the President’s Men,” “Network” and “Taxi Driver?” Or “Kramer vs. Kramer” over “Apocalypse Now?” In the last twenty years, Oscar has pulled some howlers, some choices that left me nearly putting my foot through the television upon the announcement. The first time I remember being really, truly angry at a lame decision was in 1981 when “Chariots of Fire” bested Warren Beatty’s “Reds,” which I believe to be among the best films of the 80s.

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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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