The Hot Blog Archive for September, 2012
Wrapping Toronto
People keep asking me if I saw anything game-changing in Toronto.
And I have to say, “No.”
I saw some very good movies. Some of the better stuff I had already seen before the festival.
There were ten films at TIFF that I saw in Cannes. My favorites are Amour, The Hunt, No, and Rust & Bone. Strong, strong pieces that will have a presence in the US.
Harvey Weinstein is out front on The Sapphires, a classic audience film and quite enjoyable. Matteo Garrone’s Reality was, I think, one of the underrated films at Cannes. People were anticipating something more like his first international phenom, Gomorrah and got something quite different. Add to that, Europe’s Big Brother shows have a different place int he culture than ours in the US. I am also a fan of Ulrich Seidl’s demanding Paradise: Love, a movie about middle-aged women in search of something they are missing. A terrific conversation starter if nothing else for some. I am not a fan of Beyond The Hills, Laurence Always, or the pleasant but not so exciting The We & The I.
I saw two other TIFF titles I quite liked in Edinburgh, Scotland; Berberian Sound Studio and Pusher (UK version).
Also, outstanding titles from Sundance were The Sessions (formerly The Surrogate), and West of Memphis.
There are a dozen films that I am really upset about not seeing: The Act of Killing, Argo, The Attack, Cloud Atlas, Dangerous Liasons, The Iceman, Liar’s Autobiography: The Untrue Story Of Monty Python’s Graham Chapman, London – The Modern Babylon, The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, The Place Beyond The Pines, Roman Polanski: Odd Man Out. To The Wonder.
Here, in alphabetical order, are my Top 13 of the 29 films I saw during (or just before) the festival itself…
Anna Karenina – I am not, generally, a Joe Wright fan. I think he’s gotten some nice performances from actors in the past, but has lost me on efforts at big style. Here, it’s big style from start to finish and i bought into it. Not everyone will. But I think there are enough people who will be pleased that it could well find a Best Picture slot at year’s end.
End of Watch – David Ayer’s best work feels a lot like Michael Mann’s work in downtown LA… but with better digital cameras. Strong performances, if a little familiar. But an audience pleaser… for people who don’t mind some blood and dirt and plenty of colorful language.
The Gatekeepers – Important, shocking, and fascinating. Dror Moreh gets the last 30 years of Shin Bet (Israel’s Secret Service) leaders to go on record and talk about the history of Israel and the Palestinians. Inspired by The Fog of War and a worthy follow-up.
Ginger & Rosa – One of those movies that a lot of people seem to hate. They’re wrong. It’s Potter’s most accessible film, a coming-of-age drama set in 60s London. The hjype has been around Elle Fanning, who is great in the film, but her other title-sharing half, Alice Englert, holds her own with style and the supporting cast is truly great, with the most surprising turns coming from Christina Hendricks and a stripped-down Annette Bening. Personally, I would love to see the movie about Bening’s character and her relationship with Oliver Platt and Tim Spall.
Looper – Rian Johnson’s best so far. He makes the complex simple and the simple a pleasure to watch. Of course, Joseph Gordon Levitt and Bruce Willis are not genetic matches… but as a director once told me, “Give me my fucking premise!” This is a wild idea that seems to make sense almost all the time. Solid, enjoyable movie movie.
The Master – I’ve written about this a lot. And there will surely be more. A somewhat inaccessible masterwork.
Mea Maxima Culpa – Alex Gibney is one of the great documentarians of this era. This time, he takes on the Roman Catholic Church, all the way up to The Pope. If Amy Berg’s Deliver Us From Evil and Kirby Dick’s Twist of Faith showed us the experience of this worldwide tragedy on a personal level of the victim and one hands-on victimizer, Gibney goes big picture, really nailing the institution that not only allowed this behavior, but to some degree, protected the abusers with full awareness.
On The Road – I didn’t see the Cannes cut, but I see this version – the release version – as a very youth-friendly, smart, passionate piece of history that is as modern as any rebellious teen/20something. It was expressed to me afterwards that this cut moves much faster than the previous one… and that matched my experience. The experience of being young is what drives the film, not a book or true life. Of course, the work of the actors is heavily influence by real life. Strong turns by the leading cast and a parade of great cameos, especially from Viggo and Amy Adams. And after all these people are talking about Steve Buscemi being perceived differently because of Boardwalk Empire, what until you see him in this…
The Perks of Being A Wallflower – A really good, smart coming-of-age movie. It’s all so familiar, yet all so fresh. Ezra Miller remains The Next Big Thing (who may not want it). Emma Watson continues to come of age before our eyes. I don’t quite get the boy-band stuff around Logan Lerman, but he’s a very solid center in this one. A movie you should see.
Seven Psychopaths – Martin McDonagh has expanded from two psychopaths to seven. Fun! It’s a pastry loaded to the edges with nuts. But a lot of fun. I might have tightened the film up a little bit, if I had my druthers. Leave them wanting more, I say. But there are a lot of weird angles and edges and surprising ideas that you’ll never see coming that make this film a really good time at the theater.
Silver Linings Playbook – David O. Russell returns to Flirting With Disaster territory and brings the stunning Jennifer Lawrence, the career-expanding Bradley Cooper, and the actually-acting Robert DeNiro along for the ride. This is going to be the non-rom-com rom-com of the year. Big audience movie. I give Lawrence a ton of credit on sheer on-screen presence that you never wonder for more than a second about the 15-year age difference. Weird, smart screenplay. I don’t know that it’s really a BP winner… but people are going to go in droves and have a great time.
Stories We Tell – Sarah Polley, one of the most private actresses in North America (directors are often equally press-shy), exposes her family’s romantic history/shenanigans/lies and bends the form known as documentary as well. A fascinating story well told.
What Maisie Knew – Another underdog movie that I really liked. Julianne Moore as the singer-songwriter-narcisist, Steve Coogan as her narcissist/estranged husband and Alexander Skarsgard and Joanna Vanderham as the adults dragged into and out of their wake. (Who is Vanderham? You’ll find out. She’s a keeper.) Of course, Maisie (Onata Aprile) is at the center, a six-year-old with a preternatural calm and something going on behind the eyes. Siegel & McGehee are two of my favorite filmmakers. They just seem to be able to find something in their films more without overselling or trying too hard. They had me interested in these people – any one of which on their own might be seen as a stock character – from start to finish.
And just for completion’s sake, here are the other titles I saw, 18 in all, with a lean positive or negative.
UP
Antiviral
The Bay
Byzantium
Great Expectations
Hotel Transylvania
The Impossible
A Royal Affair
Something In the Air
Sons of the Clouds
Storm Surfers 3D
NOT SO UP
Disconnect
Dredd 3D
Frances Ha
Hyde Park on The Hudson
A Late Quartet
Much Ado About Nothing
The Paperboy
Passion
DP/30: Rust and Bone, actors Marion Cotillard, Matthias Schoenaerts
DP/30 @ TIFF 2012: Silver Linings Playbook, actor Jennifer Lawrence
I seem not to have posted this one to The Hot Blog… odd…
2 Comments »
Friday Estimates by The End of The Klady
So… Should we start by discussing the new movies? Are you worried about the numbers on House At The End OF The Street? They are mediocre at best.
End of Watch? Open Road’s 2nd best launch… a good little movie that is a bit lost in the midst of the post-TIFF, presidential season slot. There’s no way of knowing how the timing will work out in the real world, but the TIFF trip didn’t pay off because there was just too much higher profile content jammed into the first few days up there. It helps to have Liam Neeson telling wolves that he is very good at his job and he’s coming for them.
It will be a matter of debate as to whether Trouble With The Curve was seriously damaged by Trouble With The Chair. Even if people aren’t off of Clint Eastwood right now, they may be saturated… and not about the movie… which would be a marketing problem for anyone. See: Gigli. The reviews for Trouble are pretty good, Amy Adams is supposed to be quite wonderful, and this feels like one of those fall movies that find a loving, growing audience looking for solid, simple, unchallenging entertainment. I personally think that WB was screwed by The Chair more than Romney was… since they actually have something worth selling long-term.
Dredd is one of those classic Lionsgate movies that looks so cool, but pushes away the mass audience. Geek audiences love the Karl Urban of it. Non-geek audiences have to be told, “It’s that guy you never remember seeing before because there were so many gruff accented dudes in the Rings movies who you loved as Doc McCoy in that Star Trek movie with the kids playing a hard-ass jerk who is so hard ass that you’ll love him this time.” But what we got was “DREDD,” which fewer people can identify than even The Spirit ,a movie I quite liked on many levels, but also got caught selling to the .5% who know the name Will Eisner and those who might get sexually aroused by posters of known, oft-unclad actresses in various Bettie Page-era poses. This is a hard-R splat movie with some terrific, non-box office actors leading the way. Honestly, I left the midnight screening at TIFF halfway through because I was tired, had a 9a shoot, and felt like I was watching a more ramped up version of The Raid: Redemption. Maybe it got kinky. This movie needed some kinky. Mad Max had The Wife and then, The Kid. If people knew what Judge Dredd wants, maybe more people would have been in the theater this weekend.
Now… The Master.
Let’s start with last weekend. The problem with hyping up the “biggest opening ever” stuff with 5 theaters really meaning 12 screens is that you have to expand. And then, the jig is up. The actual $61k per-screen from last weekend was pretty terrific. A win. it doesn’t matter that The Perks of Being A Wallflower will outdo it this weekend. Take the win. This weekend, on 782 screens, the per-screen will drop to about $5200 per. That’s also a win. It’s slightly behind the number on the initial 885 screen expansion of There Will Be Blood. But Paramount Vantage, back in 2007, waited to expand until after the film’s Oscar nomination. Master is doing this business with Oscar months away. A win.
The question is, does it look like a loser because of the drop, especially from the hyped-up number?
It is misguided to try to fit The Master into the standard boxes of current cinema. It’s not really any of our business how much money Megan Ellison makes or loses on the film. Bless her heart for wanting to be in business with artists and making their work more likely to get made. Sometimes, she hits a box office winner, like True Grit, and sometimes she will lose money. And Paul Thomas Anderson, much beloved by the cinema-obsessed niche, is not Mr. Box Office. $40.2m is his career-best domestic gross… and that was with his first Best Picture nominee, There Will Be Blood.
I think there is true greatness in The Master, though I do not think it is about to become a mainstream audience favorite. It should be just over $5m after this weekend… and a domestic gross of $25m would be quite a success, in context. I think The Hurt Locker was a lot more of a populist entertainment than this film is, so comparing those grosses is a bit silly. But people need to keep in mind that crunching numbers is not a mechanical event. Perspective counts for a lot… and if it doesn’t, the numbers don’t mean shit.
PS: Nice number for The Perks of Being A Wallflower. That’s a movie that could break out and do $50m with a heavily teen, female audience. We’ll see if it does.
29 Comments »DP/30 @TIFF 2012: Seven Psychopaths, actors Christopher Walken, Sam Rockwell, Woody Harrelson
Dead Guys…. Get Your Dead Guys!!!
Do we really think they’ll be able to resist giving both of these guys Oscar nominations?
November 23
November 16
DP/30 @ TIFF 2012: Silver Linings Playbook, actor Bradley Cooper
DP/30 @ TIFF 2012: On The Road, director Walter Salles, actors Kristen Stewart, Garrett Hedlund
20 Weeks To Oscar: Rush To Poor Judgment?
What is The Academy trying to do by shortening the nomination season by 10 days this year?
When I spoke to Ric Robertson about it late this afternoon, his only real argument for the shift was that by announcing the nominations 2 weeks earlier, it would make it easier for members to see the already nominated films and performances, as there will now be six weeks from nominations to the final voting.
DP: Doesn’t this put an addition emphasis on screeners over screenings?
RR: “There already seems to be a lot of emphasis on screeners.”
DP: Is this move, as some have speculated, a way of reigning in the wild west of Phase One (pre-nominations) last year?
RR: “That was not a part of our consideration.”
DP: So you found a way (electronic voting) to speed up voting, but you’ve made the time to see movies for which to vote weeks shorter.
RR: “Yes.”
DP: The only positive thing I can see in this is that it is a warm-up for moving the actual show much earlier next year.
RR: “Thank you for trying to find one good thing to think about this. I try not to speculate on what may happen in 2014. There has not been any discussion to move the show earlier in 2014. That wasn’t a factor in the decision.”
DP: By announcing this now, The Academy kind of left the studios that scheduled movies in December flat-footed.
RR: “There are only about a dozen movies being released after (Dec 17) and we expect that they will be screened earlier and be available to members.”
RR: “We think it will work.”
I do not. I think it is the dumbing down of The Academy and a continuation of a slow disintegration of standards that is the only thing that keep The Academy Awards from being The People’s Choice Awards.
It may not seem like much, but this is a massive change for the movies and the people who work on them. Essentially, The Academy brain trust has hamstrung the idea of screenings as a primary way of reaching Academy voters for any of the December movies, shifting the emphasis even more intensely onto screeners watched over the holiday break.
Publicists have been SCREAMING for years that a shorter Oscar season means it will be harder to get voters to see movies. So The Academy cooled its heels on that idea. But at the same time, it has shortened the Academy season in the most severe way imaginable. The season, for all but about 18 movies (not counting the docs and shorts) completely ends on January 3.
But January 3 is not really the key date. Go back to December 21, 10 days before the end of the year. That’s when Academy members will start leaving Los Angeles and New York and London in droves for the holidays (Christmas Day is on the following Tuesday.)
But you can go even further back in this bizarro scheduling choice. Academy voting actually begins, ahem, on December 17. And it’s not just ballots going in the mail this year. With new online voting, Academy members can actually register their nominating votes on December 17.
Last year, they mailed ballots out on December 26. This was not intended to induce voting on Dec 27, but to get ballots there by January 1, allowing all the movies that are qualifying to open and for members to use the holiday to catch up on as many movies as possible. This year, you will be able to vote before many of the contending movies are even released.
Now, The Academy is not the biggest offender here. The Screen Actors Guild is CLOSING their voting on Dec 10, the same date that HFPA closes for The Golden Globes. At least HFPA gives you until Dec 5 to show your movie. SAG sends out nominating ballots on November 21. That’s even sillier than the NYFCC idiocy of picking nominees on November 29 last year.
But back to The Academy, which is still the only award that really matters…
What’s the rush?
They’ve cut weeks out of the nominating process and left the old show sitting at the same old dock, at the end of February. There is now a 6-week lag time between nominations and the awards. All the other awards shows that AMPAS seems anxious to get out before will be handing out trophies in full bloom for weeks… and weeks… and weeks… before everyone is supposed to get excited about the same people who have already taken home multiple awards in multiple gowns over a 6-week period finally get The Big One.
And it is more important and it is more exciting… but not only does it remain the very best steak on earth that you’re being asked to consume after eating three pretty good steaks a day for over a month, but by undermining the membership’s ability to watch all the contending films at all, and especially on a theatrical screen, it undermines the entire film industry and the legitimacy of the award itself. It’s not about the movies. It’s about some weird game being played at The Academy to make change after change for no apparent reason with no apparent positive outcome.
Yes, as Ric Robertson and freelance Academy employee Pete Hammond (he writes the Honorary show for them in addition to working for Deadline and other gigs) notes, this does expand the post-nomination viewing period for voters by a couple of weeks. This means, they now can see 8 or 9 BP movies and another 6 or 7 movies with nods in other categories they care about, over a 6-week period. They no longer have to worry about the 30 or 40 other movies that couldn’t find enough eyeballs before Dec 21 and might have been nominated had only enough members had an opportunity to see the work.
Great. More films with big awards marketing budgets and the top consultants and you smaller underdogs can just go screw yourselves now.
This makes me and those like me a lot more powerful. It also makes scumbag bottom-feeders like Carlos de Abreu more powerful because it makes a presence in October infinitely more important. Everyone who separates wheat from chaff, no matter how poorly or with what ulterior motives—or even with the best of skill and motive—is now in an enhanced position.
I wonder whether Pete Hammond, who was one of the great proponents of the nomination of Demián Bichir last year would be bothered if he realized that Demián’s remarkable underdog nomination, driven by his personal charisma and hard work as much as it was by his excellent performance, would be much less likely to happen under this new timetable. Not only does Demián do fewer screenings and meet fewer people, but the crunch for bigger names doing screenings in late November and early December (imagine Brad Pitt’s late push for Moneyball moved up 6 weeks) would make it a lot harder to get voters to show up for Demián’s screenings.
Keep in mind… all those groups that have used The Academy Awards as a springboard to build their own franchises in December and January, with the exception of SAG, are much, much smaller than the near-6000 member Academy. So getting 350 members of BFCA or 85 members of HFPA or 40 critics from one of the critics groups in to see a movie or to watch a screener is quite a different thing than enticing enough of the 5800 or so Academy members to get 600+ votes to get a nomination. Even the SAG Nominating Committee, of about 2200 actors, offers a lesser and more focused challenge.
I thought really hard, looking for a single positive thing about January 3 becoming the end of Oscar voting. I couldn’t think of one. The more I thought, the worse the idea seemed. So then I started calling around… and no one else could come up with a good rationale for the choice by The Academy, much less a positive thing to say about it.
The one thing that people came up with was that The Academy was trying to cut down on the December shenanigans of last year’s Phase One by shortening the window. The rules are much more strict in Phase 2 (post-nominations). But wait… how did we get the shenanigans of last year?
Yes! They were created by The Academy’s new leadership, which opened up the rules and allowed all kinds of member solicitation that had been considered against the rules… until last year. And even when some clearly went beyond last year’s lax rules as they were laid out by the new administration, The Academy chose to look the other way, especially when media outlets were breaking those rules by disguising sponsored marketing events without any screenings by serving a meal at said events.
But recall the top of this piece… The Academy, via Ric Robertson, says this was not an issue. So expect the same shenanigans writ even larger.
Things were a mess last season. And now, this season is on the way to being a bigger mess. And so far, 100% self-inflicted.
The gold standard—a group of industry professionals the vast majority of whom are not in the business of seeing 125+ movies a year—is now voting for the best of the year two weeks before the end of the year. These pros are forced into an even greater reliance on screeners before nominations because they can only see so many movies on the big screen and the opportunity to see films in late December and early January has been compromised severely. And The Academy, which assumes that there won’t be many problems with their membership voting online, is introducing new technology while shortening the window in which it might be used and/or worked around in the case of people having trouble using it. (I guess it’s easier than setting the time on a VCR.)
The personal irony for me is intense. I believe in online voting. I believe firmly that an early Oscar show will improve ratings and status and online voting makes that more possible. But it is hard to imagine a worse way of implementing this new system. It is hard to think of something sadder than The Academy now joining the ranks of awards-givers who have disregarded the calendar for expedience… the mortal enemy of thoughtful consideration.
But mostly, I worry for the movies. Especially the really good movies. The complex movies. The indie movies. The movies that need more than a second to sink in. I love the 10 nominations thing—something else they f-ed up last year for no apparent good reason except being able to say they did—because it celebrates films that are not as easy or obvious or well-funded. Cynics expected big action blockbusters to get nominated. But it was Malick and Winter’s Bone and A Serious Man and great animation like UP that got worldwide recognition.
That is less likely today. And that is sad. And still the big question… WHY?
I appreciate that Ric Robertson represents a big organization and that some people in that organization are afraid to take public responsibility for the choices they push and inflict on the membership and industry. But I cannot agree that giving members six full weeks to see what probably comes down to fewer than 10 films (as they will have seen some of the titles before nominations, obviously) at the cost of opportunity for dozens of titles is a remotely reasonable decision. No. I hope to God he’s lying and that there is some secret endgame. Because if there isn’t…
I don’t want to think any more about it today.
4 Comments »A New Randy Newman Song – “I’m Dreaming”
I’M DREAMING
George Washington was a white man
Adams and Jefferson too
Abe Lincoln was a white man, probably
And William McKinley the whitest of them all
Was shot down by an immigrant in Buffalo
And a star fell out of heaven
I’m dreaming of a white President
Just like the ones we’ve always had
A real live white man
Who knows the score
How to handle money or start a war
Wouldn’t even have to tell me what we were fighting for
He’d be the right man
If he were a
I’m dreaming of a white President
Someone whom we can understand
Someone who knows where we’re coming from
And that the law of the jungle is not the law of this land
In deepest darkest Africa nineteen three
A little boy says, “Daddy, I just discovered relativity.
A big eclipse is coming
And I’ll prove it. Wait and see!”
“You better eclipse yourself outta here, son
And find yourself a tree
There’s a lion in the front yard
And he knows he won’t catch me.”
How many little Albert Einsteins
Cut down in their prime?
How many little Ronald Reagans
Gobbled up before their time?
I don’t believe in evolution
But it does occur to me,
What if little William Howard Taft had to face a lion
Or God forbid, climb a tree?
Where would this country be?
I’m dreaming of a white President
Buh buh buh buh
‘Cause things have never been this bad
So he won’t run the hundred in ten seconds flat
So he won’t have a pretty jump shot
Or be an Olympic acrobat
So he won’t know much about global warming
Is that really where you’re at?
He won’t be the brightest, perhaps
But he’ll be the whitest
And I’ll vote for that
Whiter than this?
Yes
Whiter than this?
Yes
Whiter than this?
Yes
Whiter than this?
Oh yeah
(Note: This song is being released for free download. If you wish to support it with money, Mr. Newman suggests a donation to the United Negro College Fund.)
13 Comments »
