A full review of the film will follow later today, but Will Ferrell’s Semi-Pro is certainly blazing more new paths with its ancillary marketing schemes. First there’s Ferrell’s in-character, costarring role with Heidi Klum in the recent, annual Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition (below).
Then, in moderate rotation, and I guess greatly defraying the cost of ad buys, are a series of television commercials for Old Spice deodorant in which Ferrell — again in character, as affably idiotic owner-coach-player hoops maven Jackie Moon — ad-libs about sweat, exercise and “herniated colons,” and how Old Spice is the all-important cure-all. They’re funny (despite my girlfriend’s insistence to the contrary) and in keeping with the arbitrary tone of the movie, though still a little bit diminishing. It smacks of all the cross-promotional stuff done for Talladega Nights, though a bit less artfully integrated, since part of the “joke” there was in spoofing the commercialization of racing, and its many sponsors.
So how did it escape my attention for so long that a fourth entry in Universal’s Fast and the Furious franchise has officially been given the greenlight? Rumor has it that Vin Diesel, who has Babylon A.D. on tap and may or may not get that long-rumored, dream-project Hannibal flick off the ground (I’ll believe it when I don’t see it in theaters), will come crawling back to the series that first made him a household name, reuniting with Paul Walker. (Shirts will be optional, I feel certain.) Third flick director Justin Lin is also tentatively slated to return, along with Jordana Brewster, while 2004 Miss Israel Gal Gadot will apparently slot in nicely as the requisite bikini-chick eye-candy, according to FilmStew and others. No word yet on Bow Wow, alas, but knowing Universal I’m sure there already exists a treatment for a proposed spin-off featuring his Tokyo Drift character.
I’m trying to figure out why I should care, and am even posting on this… oh yeah, maybe because Babylon A.D. was originally supposed to release this weekend, and has now been pushed to August 29. That’s what sparked all this. Sigh…
The latest from the Democratic campaign trail? She’s playing a dangerous game, Hillary Clinton, but damned if she isn’t doing it with some intelligence. After playing almost exclusively nice with Barack Obama in person at the last Democratic debate — saying how “honored” she was to be sharing the stage with him — Clinton then immediately turned around and ripped into the Illinois senator on Saturday, crying “for shame!” over a piece of direct-mail correspondence from his campaign that questioned her health care plan.
OK, well played — Clinton gets that she’ll have to slug it out in the trenches if she wants to ignite a comeback, battling over issues and using contrast to decry contrasts drawn with her. Well… maybe not. In a Rhode Island campaign appearance Sunday afternoon, she mocked Obama’s hopeful rhetoric, declaring it not the answer in fighting entrenched interests. “I could stand up here and say, ‘Let’s just get everybody together, let’s get unified, the sky will open, the light will come down, celestial choirs will be singing, and everyone will know we should do the right thing and the world will be perfect,'” Clinton said, as people cheered and laughed. Again: bad idea, this mocking of hope and optimism, especially for a candidate whose husband ran as “a man from Hope.” I don’t doubt that Clinton has a perfectly serviceable sense of humor, but it’s been evidenced repeatedly that she’s demonstrably awful with a jab. Repeated use of this technique will unleash a world of hurt and spurned “third-way” voters, even if she were to rally and win the Democratic nomination.
The Sherman-esque march of No Country for Old Men over There Will Be Blood was tipped with Javier Bardem’s Best Supporting Actor win and the Coen brothers’ victory for Best Adapted Screenplay, but there were plenty of other emotional and/or surprising moments at this year’s Oscar ceremony, well moderated by Jon Stewart. The latter category includes Diablo Cody’s Best Original Screenplay win for Juno and Tilda Swinton’s Best Supporting Actress win for Michael Clayton, while the former includes Cody’s teary speech (ended with parachute-ripcord abruptness), a sincerely overwhelmed Marion Cotillard’s acceptance of the Best Actress statuette for La Vie en Rose, and Freeheld co-directors Cynthia Wade and Vanessa Roth’s acceptance of the Oscar for Best Documentary Short Subject. The classiest/best feel-good moment of the night, though, hands down, has to be the smart audible call to let Markéta Irglova, a Best Original Song co-winner for the wonderful Once, come back out for her own words of acceptance. It was a nice gesture, and one returned with a moving and well-articulated speech of appreciation.
It’s not a super-big deal, but to my mind the Oscar victory of Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room director Alex Gibney’s Taxi to the Dark Side for Best Documentary over Charles Ferguson’s slightly favored No End in Sight does indeed signal that there’s an agitated liberal voting bloc in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Who knows the exact size — Taxi to the Dark Side is a fine film, it must be said, with its own merits — but the personal is the political is the personal all over again. The former film focuses on an innocent Afghan taxi driver who died after being imprisoned and tortured in Iraq; the latter movie, which assays with surgical precision the post-war bungling in the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq, drew some criticism from the far left for not being an explicit enough critique of the Bush doctrine that led us to war in the first place.
Casting an eye away from the big screen, I’d hate to be the one to break this to the Clintons, but — barring some sort of top-shelf political faux pas, nay, utter flame-out, or the sudden disclosure that Barack Obamasecretly funded Michael Vick’s dogfighting ring — Hillary’s campaign for the Democratic nomination for the presidency is all over but the shouting. Like a “Choose-Your-Own-Adventure” novel of yesteryear, she can pick the gracefulness and specifics of her exit, but it’s no longer a “numbers game” in which she holds any sort of advantage.
Obama’s string of 10 straight primary and caucus wins, and the average, crushing margin of the victories (an astonishing 33 percent), means that Clinton would have to notch 60-plus percent of the vote in delegate-rich Texas, Pennsylvania and Ohio — unreasonable gets, to say the least. This virtually guarantees that Obama will hold a significant lead in pledged delegates, states won and total votes (of which he’s picked up one million more than Clinton since Super Tuesday) upon the completion of the main primary cycle.
Of course no politician of substance gets to where they are by just packing it in. But Clinton no longer has any semblance of an effective message to match her iron will. Initially missing the boat on the electorate’s hunger for change is one thing, but the Clinton campaign is now pursuing an equally tone deaf strategy in trying to reverse Obama’s momentum and “drive up his negatives,” in inside-the-Beltway parlance. Since her experiential trump card isn’t working, she’s taken to (understandably) ignoring voting outcomes and (less understandably) treating hope as a piñata in her recent stump speeches.
“When I think about what we’re really comparing in this election, you
know, we can’t just have speeches, we need to have solutions for America,” Clinton said in one speech in Ohio. “It is time to get real — to get real about how we actually win this
election and get real about the challenges facing America,” she said in another speech. “It’s time
that we moved from good words to good works, from sound bites to sound
solutions. Americans have a choice to make in this
election, and that choice matters. It’s about picking a president who
relies not just on words, but on work, on hard work, to get America working again for all of our people. We
need to make a choice between speeches and solutions.”
Parsing and attempting to highlight this distinction is something that requires a deft touch — a pinch of good-natured wheedling and a very conciliatory tone. Needless to say, these are not traits that Clinton possesses in abundance. Ergo, this tack, and the repeated use of the phrase “Get real” (10 times in one speech yesterday) is like dumping gasoline on a fire. It’s an argument that doesn’t really hold sway with undecided independents, and it does nothing except piss off and further agitate many of those leaning toward Obama — Democrats, so-called “Obamacans” or otherwise unaffiliated voters — because you’re essentially calling them stupid, questioning the value and judgment of their feelings. And that’s a problem, because a feeling is much stronger than a thought.
Smarter-than-her-years Sarah Polley certainly doesn’t need my help securing work, but John Horn’s recent feature piece, from February 17’s Los Angeles Times, proves that the actress turned director, Oscar nominated for her adapted screenplay for Away From Her, gets it, and is no one-flick fluke behind the camera.
In discussing her preparation for the movie, Polley makes remarks that are illustrative of why (really smart, attentive) actors often make good
directors, for many of the same reasons that catchers make decent
managers in baseball. “I’ve spent a lifetime working with disorganized first-time filmmakers
who don’t get the support of their crew because they feel they are
wasting their time,” says Polley in the interview. “And I knew how badly I needed their
support. You know as an actor so acutely what destroys morale, what
creates complaints, and that can be good and bad, because when you’re
directing you can become hyper-aware of that. I think that what
a lot of first-time filmmakers don’t realize is that they are the least
experienced person on that set. Everybody else has been doing their job
for years, so the whole act of playing the filmmaker, playing the
person in command, is a charade. So the best you can do is work your ass off and admit what you don’t know, and ask for help when you need
it.” Succinctly put, and spot on.
A full review will soon follow, but this weekend’s heavily hyped Vantage Point is basically something like 1996’s Executive Decision — a malarkey genre picture masquerading as something slightly more “topical” and nuanced. Imagine my bemused surprise, then, when I found that that film’s director, Stuart Baird, actually served as the editor on Vantage Point. Unfortunately, this flick doesn’t really even have the purebred, ridiculous popcorn enjoyment of Executive Decision. Dennis Quaid tries quite hard, and a no-doubt-well-paid Forest Whitaker, William Hurt, Matthew Fox and Sigourney Weaver (in a very small role) are tossed in to try to give the appearance of something smarter and classier than what we really have. The deal-breaker is the script, which isn’t much more than thumbnail-deep, and has an ending with a ludicrous grasp at mock-chilling, conspiratorial hoo-ha.
So Lindsay Lohan has bared all for New York Magazine and photographer Bert Stern, who snapped the last pictures of Marilyn Monroe, six weeks before she was found dead. To that end, the shots — taken February 5, at the Hotel Bel-Air — are a recreation of those photographs, with Lohan posing with little to nothing, save see-through fabrics and strings of diamonds, like the photographs below.
In the interview accompanying the spread, penned by Amanda Fortini, Lohan dismisses talk that the pictures are part of a gambit to restore any shine to her big screen career, after last year’s lackluster grosses of Georgia Rule and I Know Who Killed Me, and a couple well-publicized run-ins with the law and stints in rehab. Rather, the actress offered a more straightforward explanation: “I didn’t have to
put much thought into it. I mean, Bert Stern? Doing a Marilyn shoot?
When is that ever going to come up? It’s really an honor,” she says.
In laying out some of the particulars of the air-quote closed-set shoot, Fortini delivers a compelling thumbnail sketch of the “celebrity industrial complex,” but also raises questions about who is giving Lohan advice, if anyone. Part of her rationalization, given the next day by phone (“Here is a woman who is giving herself to the public,” says Lohan about the Monroe photos, “she’s
saying, ‘Look, you’ve taken a lot from me, so why don’t I give it to
you myself?’ She’s taking control back”) doesn’t really pass the smell test, particularly when Lohan has to battle newly forged ridden-hard-and-put-away-wet tabloid problems largely of her own creation. It’s great for the hornball set, naturally, these pictures, but what does it accomplish, other than remind folks, “Oh yeah, I guess we haven’t really heard anything about Lohan the past eight or nine weeks?” Does it help make her one iota more bankable, or land a film of gimme-put substance, either commercially or artistically? No, it doesn’t; it merely reinforces the notion that she’s only suitable for wild-child and/or other dinged, reckless parts.
Stating the obvious, the United States is clearly unhappy with the
state of its union. An unpopular war of seemingly ill-conceived choice
grinds on, deflecting resources and attention away from that other war
we started, in Afghanistan, to try to ferret out the people actually
responsible for the events of September 11. Privacy concerns, as well
as lingering questions of endorsed torture and basic governmental
competence take turns owning the headlines alongside economic and
environmental anxiety, while the race for the White House, and who will
replace President George W. Bush, seemingly intensifies with every
passing day.
America is paying attention again, and talking. We’re poised on the
precipice of a historic election, no matter the eventual course
selected. So perhaps it’s not ultimately quite as surprising as it is
at first blush that a seemingly throwaway February romantic comedy like Definitely, Maybe could potentially end up as a talking point on MSNBC.
Starring Ryan Reynolds, Elizabeth Banks, Isla Fisher and Rachel Weisz (along with an unbilled Kevin Kline), the movie tells the story of a young father who shares with his daughter (Abigail Breslin) the story of the three great romances of his life, leaving her to guess which one is her mother. Reynolds is Will Hayes, a Manhattan advertising executive go-getter who’s on the eve of his divorce finally becoming official. To satiate his daughter Maya’s inquisitive mind, he finds himself recounting his more idealistic youth as a campaign scrub during then-candidate Bill Clinton’s campaign for the presidency. Temporarily leaving behind his college sweetheart Emily (Banks), it’s then that Will meets copy girl April (Fisher), a spunky and apolitical Nirvana fan who’s treading water, occupationally speaking. He also meets Summer (Weisz), a brilliant writer who challenges his mind, as well as his preconceptions. Each woman intrigues and completes Will in some way, and as Will tells Maya the story, she flashes back and forth on who she believes is her mother… and who might eventually be right for her dad.
It doesn’t hurt that Definitely, Maybe has the extremely personable Reynolds as its anchor, and the film also makes the most of Fisher’s charms. It’s easily her best performance since Wedding Crashers. Anyone who’s a big city singleton or knows some of the same gets these characters pretty quickly; they’re witty and energetic, wry and intelligent. In an era when most studio scripts settle for merely “good enough,” this one, from writer-director Adam Brooks (who also penned Practical Magic, Wimbledon and Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason) has an extra bit of shine and polish.
Mostly, though, the rich background detail in Definitely, Maybe — conspicuously absent in its marketing — is a large part of what most heartily recommends the movie. It’s not just empty or incidental set dressing; as the film charts Will’s personal struggles with love, fidelity, duty and connection, it parallels his professional life in politics, as well as some of the travails of then-President Clinton. After the bloom of his relationship with Emily fades, Will goes on to work on the gubernatorial campaign of a tough-on-crime Democrat felled by favor-brokering. Later, when the Monica Lewinsky affair unfolds during Clinton’s second term, Will finds himself alone, downhearted and disillusioned. While his diehard Democratic friends and colleagues steadfastly defend Clinton (“I’d vote for him again if I could,” says one), Will recognizes the disappointment of what might have been. After witnessing Clinton’s famous deposition, and parsing of the English language (“It depends on what your definition of the word ‘is’ is…”), a disgusted Will spits to his friends, “What happens if next time they give him a hard word — like truth?”
Definitely, Maybe isn’t an overtly political film by any stretch of the imagination or generous definition. It’s a well-shaded romantic comedy with a bit of heartstring tugging built in, courtesy of the flashback conceit and character of Maya. Still, in an election cycle when the question of political dynasty and the Bush-Clinton double-helix that the national political scene has been in the grip of for the past two-plus decades (a Bush or Clinton on one of the national tickets every presidential election since 1980) has been thus far deftly suppressed by the campaign of Senator Hillary Clinton, the film cuts to the heart of this potential for dysfunction in a rather breathtaking way. The specifics of writer-director Brooks’ political leanings (the film gets in a shot against the current President Bush, too, showing footage of him awkwardly campaigning for his father in 1992), or those of the characters, is essentially irrelevant, because the movie isn’t advocating anything specific. By trading in metaphor and parallel structure, though, Definitely, Maybe makes a compelling allegorical statement about just how stuck in a rut we collectively feel our nation is; it’s ingrained in even the most fleeting entertainment, and that’s everything. For the full original review, from FilmStew, click here.
Telly Davidson has up an interesting postmortem of the recently wrapped NATPE Convention over on FilmStew, and if you want to buy his book, by golly, you can do that too. I’m sure he wouldn’t mind.
Dining last night with some friends, including one in the know, there was some information gleaned about The Wolf Man, the Andrew Kevin Walker-scripted project, starring Benicio Del Toro, Anthony Hopkins and Emily Blunt, from which director Mark Romanek walked away. While he indeed quit over budget concerns and considerations (he refused to commit to a production kitty that had already ballooned from $100 million to around $120 million-plus), Romanek was also on the verge of being fired before he chose to walk. Universal called in the director over the weekend several weeks back, in a last-ditch, ass-covering effort to get him to toe the line; by quitting, he voided his contract, and made things a lot easier.
Jurassic Park III and October Sky helmer Joe Johnston has already officially been tapped as The Wolf Man‘s new director, as announced by Variety last week, but this after both Brett Ratner (who of course jumped into the driver’s seat on X-Men: The Last Stand when Bryan Singer abandoned the franchise he originated to take the reigns on Superman Returns) and Frank Darabont (who most recently directed The Mist, an adaptation of Stephen King’s source text of the same name) were each given hearty consideration. One of those names is entirely expected, one decidedly less so, in my opinion…
The so-called first 10 minutes of All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, starring Amber Heard (below), is now online, courtesy of Yahoo’s UK site (it’s actually more like eight-and-a-half minutes, for the record), and the good advance buzz on the movie looks more and more justified. There’s a long, complicated and typically Weinstein-ian history to this film and its several delays, but things are now pointed in the right direction, insofar as The Weinstein Company has divested themselves of domestic releasing responsibilities — probably a good thing for all parties involved, given the shoddy treatment it would have received in the wake of “creative differences” squabbles, allegedly over gore, other trims and running time.
Given what’s on display, I think the Weinsteins may have been freaked out by how nice-looking a product they had on their hands. The film’s trailer proper is a thing of slow-building and highly evocative stalking terror — several wide shots conjure up recollections of genre touchstones like I Spit on Your Grave and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, both the original and Marcus Nispel’s gorgeously shot re-imagining. And beyond the nicely restrained, impressionistic introductions, the film’s opening party scene — in which a bullied kid seemingly stuck in “friendship alley” uses his wits to coerce a jockish romantic rival for Mandy’s affections into taking a stupid risk — is its own nicely orchestrated chamber piece about teen egos and competitiveness. Most striking, though, is the self-conscious underwear posing by the bullied best friend, prior to a poolside sequence.
Not to gloss over debut screenwriter Jacob Forman’s contributions, but one can tell that music video director Jonathan Levine — who just had his second feature effort, The Wackness, premiere at this year’s Sundance Film Festival — worked this thing out in his head. If the
rest of the movie is this well ordered and smart, no matter the familiarity of the plot trappings, I’ll be mightily impressed. Regardless, the trailer and this advance look has definitely aroused my interest. Mandy Lane opens next month in the United Kingdom, and is set for a March Stateside bow, from upstart Senator Entertainment.
It’s a happy 29th birthday to ex-Bond babe Rosamund Pike, who continues to score work despite reminding every guy who’s being intellectually honest of the girl who wouldn’t give them the time of day (or evening) in high school.
When it comes to actresses, some eyebrows work better than others, but Pike’s, in the photo above, is like a scythe, for Chrissakes, and it sets in stone the tone for every thing else about her countenance. It’s a hard-knock life, however arguably hot, for actresses with this little palpable sympathy and smoothed, “sisterly” edges, or at least the ability to feign such. Pike just doesn’t give off any sort of vibe that makes women identify with her.
So far she’s been well served by most of her choices. Pike’s seemingly natural coolness fit nicely in the legal thriller Fracture, where she played a steely corporate lawyer opposite Ryan Gosling’s slick professional climber, and hey, I even thought she was great in Doom… seriously. But there’s a precariously short shelf life for moon-faced, English-speaking foreign beauties. Audiences tend to regard them as interchangeable. After all, look what happened to Sarah Wynter. Wait a second… who?
Just a couple days ago, flipping past E!’s unabashedly
whorish entertainment news show on television, I came across a quick-hit report
— designed to serve as a teaser lead-in, so that Ryan Seacrest could peddle
footage of the erstwhile pop princess’ latest shopping excursion, or whatever —
in which the Associated Press essentially confirmed that they’d already worked
up the bulk of their obituary on Britney Spears, saying something to the effect
of, “We of course wish Britney nothing but the best in these difficult times,
but we have to be prepared.”
I was pretty bowled over at the time (why would E! fish for
this rather callous and insignificant nugget, and why would the AP even confirm
it?), but this bit was among the first thoughts that came surging into my mind
when hearing about Heath Ledger’s tragic death in New York on Tuesday.
The difference between this misfortune with Ledger and something
like the recent passing of fellow actor Brad Renfro (apart from their
respective profiles) is a matter chiefly of expectation — reflected and
refracted in peculiar ways, both privately and publicly. Almost everyone I came
across and talked with about the event on Tuesday, or read a blurbed reaction
from, expressed considerable surprise in addition to the more standard sympathetic
compassion. I know I did: “What?,”
I asked, upon first hearing the news.
It’s always such a big jolt when a death like this doesn’t
match the air-quote public persona of the star. True tragedy, and certainly
fatal accidents (which this event is leaning more and more in the direction
of), don’t happen to people like this; money and fame protects them, right? It
gives them all sorts of buyout clauses and extra chances?The truth is, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes there is a
plane crash, or an automobile accident. Sometimes there is an accidental
overdose of prescription medications. Sometimes there is an undetected heart
condition, or cancer. And that gives us mental pause, because celebrities are America’s
own royalty.
It’s not merely grappling with a cultural loss that feeds
shock and astonishment; we expect and accept, often with a shrug, the deaths of
high-profile actors, directors, musicians and the like. They wash over us,
however lionized they are (even I couldn’t tell you with any degree of
confidence about the death dates of artists whose work I tremendously respect),
until retrospective reminders at the Academy Awards or some other televised
event remind us. We presume, too, the deaths of certain performers given to histories
of excess (John Belushi, Anna Nicole Smith, Chris Farley, the aforementioned Renfro) long before
their actual passing. Ergo, I guess, the locked-and-loaded obituary for Spears,
and no doubt Lindsay Lohan. But when it happens to celebrities seemingly out of the
blue, like John Ritter or Aaliyah, or now Ledger, we don’t know what to do.
Conspiracies or other outlandish theories crop up; rumors run rampant.
So, in the hours following the Ledger story breaking, and
into the next day, cable news channels — because simple expressions of
disbelief can only fill so much airtime — still struggled to make the death fit
into their preformed narrative templates about “Hollywood
lifestyle.” Rich evidence of this abounds, whether in the mis-reportage about
the apartment in which Ledger was found being Mary-Kate Olsen’s (ooh, link him
to another celebrity), the $20 bill “folded in a suspicious manner” (now
confirmed as free from any drug residue, an ordinary Andrew Jackson), or awards
prognosticator and professional opinion slinger Tom O’Neil waxing enthusiastically
and imaginatively on CNN as to the encoded meaning of Ledger’s personal hygiene
during an interview from several months prior.
As the surprise and sadness from his death fades, the
challenges facing two projects still in production in which Ledger appears — July’s The Dark Knight,
from Warner Bros., and director Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus — will of course come
into starker relief, and keep news of his death in the public realm.
Gilliam in particular has a heartrending history of
unusually rough financing and production problems, so much so that it’s even
been lampooned by The Onion. A half-decade ago, his attempt to film The Man Who
Killed Don Quixote was beset by bombing at a nearby NATO range,
once-in-a-generation flash floods and the herniated disc of his lead actor,
resulting in 2002’s Lost in La
Mancha, a documentary of darkly comedic devolution.
For Warner Bros., the stakes are even bigger. The follow-up
to their hugely successful and critically embraced franchise reboot, Batman Begins, The Dark Knight is a tent-pole
summer release for the studio, and Ledger’s dark, seemingly twisted take on the
homicidal Joker was at the forefront of their marketing campaign, which will
almost surely now see an overhaul.
Still, whatever is done, Ledger’s death — its suddenness and
seeming inexplicability — will almost certainly continue to shade and color
perceptions of these projects, even after the unfathomable particulars are
scientifically explained. As of now, pending final a toxicology report, only six
types of prescription medications — including an antihistamine, and pills to
treat both anxiety and insomnia, which Ledger had previously said he started
suffering during production of The Dark Knight — were found with Ledger upon his death. For a
country so preoccupied, in aspirant-protective fashion, with its celebrities,
that’s cold comfort, and an unsatisfactory answer. For the full, original op-ed feature piece, from FilmStew, click here.
In the wake of Heath Ledger’s untimely passing, it’s worth noting Michael Caine’s effusive praise of his performance as the Joker in this summer’s forthcoming The Dark Knight. It takes a lot to knock a seasoned professional like Caine off of his game, so it definitely means something when he says he forgot all his lines upon first contact with Ledger’s turn.
So the Oscar nominations are in, and Juno is undeniably one of the big winners, its hearty commercial embrace having pushed the movie over the hill. I pointed out yesterday that Fox Searchlight is operating on a different plane when it comes to turning out the vote for its movies, and alongside the aforementioned surprise little hit of the final quarter of 2007 ($85 million and counting), further evidence arrives in the form of Tamara Jenkins’ The Savages, which, despite not (yet) having connected at the box office (it’s made only $3.6 million in a month and a half of release), garnered an expected Best Original Screenplay nomination, but also a Best Actress nod for Laura Linney, probably coming at the expense of Angelina Jolie and A Mighty Heart.
Writer-director Tony Gilroy’s end-around on studio financing worked out well, with Michael Clayton racking up nods for George Clooney’s lead performance, Tilda Swinton and Tom Wilkinson’s supporting turns, Best Original Screenplay and, somewhat surprisingly, Best Director, in Gilroy’s debut. Joe Wright’s Atonement, meanwhile, used its “BAFTA bounce” to secure Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Supporting Actress (Saoirse Ronan) and Best Film nominations, despite neither of its leads (James McAvoy or Keira Knightley) being selected for the final winnowing.
Finally, with eight nominations — tied for the most, with Joel and Ethan Coen’s No Country for Old Men — critics can for the moment stop bellyaching about Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood being a snubbed masterpiece. They’ll get a chance to continue if the film is shut out in top categories, but for now, it’s a “made film,” a legit contender with the other big boys and probably an early front-runner, alongside the aforementioned Coen brothers flick and Michael Clayton. Oh, one other thing… what happened to the brilliant prognostications of The Envelope’s human noisemaker, Tom O’Neil, who I thought called for a Sweeney Todd sweep long ago?
It’s a happy birthday to erstwhile Clueless BFF Stacey Dash, who is somehow 42 years old today, a fact that I cannot really fathom, especially when I look at the below picture from her August 2006 Playboy spread. Still, it’s the green eyes that really do it for me. No, seriously…
It’s been a while since I’ve seen Dash in something; I know that the Clueless television series was decent work for her, but I always felt it stole her away from Maura Tierney-type roles — hot, no-nonsense professional women parts with comedic and/or exasperated inflections. Maybe that was Clueless, though, and the ceiling for her. Regardless, I do look forward to seeing Dash in the long-delayed I Could Never Be Your Woman, opposite Michelle Pfeiffer and Paul Rudd… if that ever sees the light of day. Honestly, it’s been scheduled so many times now, I can’t remember if it got bumped to 2008 again or just given the two-city (dis)courtesy release, and is now in line for a DVD release.
It’s rather baffling to me, 20th Century Fox’s decision to move 27 Dresses, Katherine Heigl’s Knocked Up follow-up, off of its original release date of January 11, and directly into competition this weekend with Overture Films’ Mad Money, a movie starring Queen Latifah, Diane Keaton and Katie Holmes, and arguably pitched at somewhat the same demographic — 18-to-34-year-old women and their white-collar set mothers and older sisters. Probably because I can’t really get into the thrill of parsing advance tracking data, I still can’t decide whether or not that’s a sign of confidence or futile, hands-thrown-to-the-heavens sacrifice.
I hadn’t posted this earlier due to some photo glitches with the old blogcast software recently, but I presented the Best Supporting Actress Award to Amy Ryan this past weekend at the annual Los Angeles Film Critics Association awards dinner. Well, to her friend and fellow actor Tate Donovan, actually (below). Ryan couldn’t attend, and not just because she heard I was “grabby.” (Donovan doesn’t mind, he gives as good as he gets.) No, Ryan was in Spain filming Imperial Life in the Emerald City, Paul Greengrass‘ follow-up to The Bourne Ultimatum, opposite costars Matt Damon and Greg Kinnear.
There was a little speech, which I did not deliver in song, alas, but the text of my introductory essay, from the awards booklet, reads as follows:
“It’s been a breakthrough and haphazardly maternal sort of year on the big screen for Tony-nominated stage actress Amy Ryan, with a slate of film roles in which she memorably portrays caregivers both attentive and criminally negligent. In Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, Ryan costars as Ethan Hawke’s ex-wife Martha, working hard to raise her daughter with in arrears financial support from her ex-husband. In Gone Baby Gone, she plays Dorchester single mother Helene McCready, a white-trash junkie who endangers her 4-year-old first by taking her on a drug run and then, when she goes missing, by withholding key, germane details which may aid the police in her recovery.
In real life, Martha (as well as many others, rightly) would be appalled by Helene’s actions. Yet Ryan’s searing performance neither panders nor tips over into gaudy caricature. However bawdy the character, she plays Helene chiefly with an unapologetic self-involvement — the unblinking, under-educated victim of her own shattered childhood, who now knows no choices other than poor, self-indulgent or some combination thereof — and in doing so shines a light on the cyclical distress of America’s underclass, heartbreakingly chalking an evidentiary mark for the latter grouping in the age-old nature-nurture debate.”
It’s a happy birthday to Jim Carrey, who turns 46 today, and probably celebrates with some yoga and a romp with Jenny McCarthy in a kiddie pool or something. He might also catch 45 seconds of Son of the Mask on cable, smile bemusedly to himself, and deeply exhale. At the very least, looking forward, he’ll likely have a better Valentine’s Day than he has in years past.
Carrey has been in relative hibernation since The Number 23, but I hold nothing but anticipation for where the true sunset stage of this guy’s career. Whatever you think of his rubber-faced tent-pole comedies (hit-and-miss, in my book, though slightly more of the former), Carrey has at least shown a desire to mix it up, making bold choices that sometimes totally work (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), sometimes kind of work (The Truman Show) and sometimes don’t really at all work (The Majestic). While audiences have thus far been resistant to Carrey in darker and/or melancholic roles, I think he will still continue to occasionally venture out on thinner limbs than most of his actor brethren, and thus serve another generation of writer-directors quite well.
More will post later today, as well as a full, legit review, but it’s worth mentioning that Cloverfield‘s run time, end credits inclusive, is 84 minutes, and that sort of streamlining really helps in the selling of the movie as a “found artifact.”
It’s awful news for a friend of mine, yesterday’s announcement that 11-year-old Little Miss Sunshine star Abigail Breslin will be named the Showest “Female Star of Tomorrow” at the closing night ceremony of the Las Vegas industry professional event, held March 10-13.
“Since making her big screen debut at the tender age of five, Abigail Breslin has impressed critics and movie fans across the world with her versatile, enchanting and charismatic performances,” said Mitch Neuhauser, co-managing director of the event. “From her breakout role in Signs to her astounding performance in Little Miss Sunshine, Abigail has shown Hollywood that she is a force to be reckoned with, for many years to come.”
The commercial breakthrough of those two, above-mentioned films notwithstanding, it seems an unusual choice in some regards, as Breslin, who next appears in Nim’s Island, hasn’t been a recognized top-liner for very long. I wonder what older brother Spencer thinks of this? Well… both he and Dakota Fanning, actually. She may be sticking needles in an Abigail voodoo doll tonight.
Gazing past the silver screen and into the real world, The Atlantic has up a fascinating piece by Marc Ambinder in which he assays the behind-the-scenes run-up and laid track of the presidential campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, as well as some of their strategies and inner workings even now. It’s the rich detail of involving novels, stuff you could never really cram into a film about politics, no matter how exacting and “inside-the-Beltway.”
The article offers up a story of dueling war rooms, shrewd fund-raising battles and surprising allies (for one, the Hillary camp’s
back-channel alliance with Matt Drudge, who helped break the Monica Lewinsky story,
and rode it with an unrivaled fervor), but also very much more than that. It’s an allegorical story of plotting, entitlement, and not seeing the forest through the trees.
Clearly, Obama’s populist candidacy has threatened to upend the Clintons’ painstakingly constructed political applecart, as well as the way politicians have traditionally pursued
the presidency — through years of careful preparation and positioning. “I think there’s no doubt that it would be easier for a lot of people in
Washington if I had decided that I was going to take a pass and wait my
appropriate turn,” says Obama in the piece. “[That] might be, from their perspective, 10 years from
now — or at least once the Clintons had exhausted all possibilities of
running any further.”
The above accompanying photo, from John Gress of Reuters, actually sums it up nicely — the Clintons’ simultaneous disdain for and disbelief at Obama’s meteoric rise. (In the preparatory months leading up to Hillary’s campaign launch, they were focused on sharpening their talons to fend off the more obvious challenge by John Edwards.) Part of the grand strategy for Hillary Clinton’s run at the White House
was to build a movement around her gender and the possibility of
electing the first female president. Mark Penn, the Clinton campaign’s visionary pollster,
believed that presenting Clinton’s candidacy as a historic occasion
would re-inspire voters badly disillusioned after eight years of George
W. Bush. But Obama — the first nationally viable African-American candidate, and one possessing the charisma to enthuse potential voters about rising to make history, however implicitly — assumed the
symbolic role that Clinton’s team had in mind for her. For the full read, click here.
After much haggling and horse-trading in an attempt to salvage some of the celebratory PR value of the when-worlds-collide event,Variety is reporting that the Golden Globe ceremony for next Sunday, January 13, is no more. The Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s 65th annual awards show has been downscaled from a gala dinner ceremony and live
telecast to an hour-long news conference at the Beverly Hilton. Huzzah!
This outcome shouldn’t be that shocking — this is one of the few opportunities the writers have to actually evidence that they collectively have a pair. Back-channel attempts were made to reach an accord that would allow the event to proceed in some fashion without the oh-so-distasteful pictures (and, more importantly, lack of stars) that picketing outside would produce, but now that the studio after-parties have started being canceled, one by one, it’s all over but the hand-wringing and recrimination.
The real question, moving forward, is how this will affect the box office fortunes of movies like Atonement, which led the honored films with seven nominations — including best acting honors for Keira Knightley and James McAvoy — or, for that matter, writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson’s California oil-boom epic There Will Be Blood, which many mainstream audiences still haven’t yet glimpsed. (Hey, not to mention special events like the Globe spin-off screening series at the Aero and Egyptian theaters, for which Marc Forster had already bowed out, given that he’s lensing the 22nd Bond picture.) It’s too bad that caterers will take a seasonal hit — I feel bad for them, at least.
