Nov 19 2009 12:36 PM ET

Oscar buzz for 'Crazy Heart,' or static electricity?

Categories: Commentary, Crazy Heart

An obsessively long article in today’s New York Times chronicles the supposed emergence of Crazy Heart, a low-budget movie starring Jeff Bridges as a washed-up country singer , as a possible Oscar contender. Now, maybe Crazy Heart is great, maybe Jeff Bridges is great (he usually is), and maybe this is one of the best movies of the year. Or maybe not. The thing is, how the heck would you or I know, since none of us has yet seen it? For that matter, how the heck would Oscar voters know, since they haven’t yet seen it either?

With great love and admiration for the brilliant analysis my EW brothers and sisters (led by the erudite Dave Karger–hi Dave!) do in covering the great annual moviepalooza known as the Academy Awards, I’ve got an uncontrollable urge to jump in here and say:   Show me the movie before you tell me the odds! Show me, even though my opinion (either professional or off-duty) doesn’t matter in this race. Show me (and you), even though I know that the winners of those coveted naked-bald-man statues are the result of a process that’s indescribably farklempt (as they say in Hollywood). I don’t know a movie-lover around who really believes that Oscar = Best.  But it would be nice if, in the months and months leading up to the nominations and awards, we could at least believe that Movie = Seen.

And in the meantime, regarding Crazy Heart and its award-worthiness: Sez who?

You know?

Nov 18 2009 03:48 PM ET

'70s behind-the-camera greats: How Laszlo Kovacs and Vilmos Zsigmond put the cinema in cinematography

Last night on PBS, I caught the reverent and fascinating documentary No Subtitles Necessary: László & Vilmos, a look at the art, influence, and longtime brotherly friendship of the two most fabled Hollywood cinematographers of the 1970s, László Kovács and Vilmos Zsigmond. Like anyone else immersed in the classic American movies of that time (and, really, who isn’t?), I knew who these two men were, understood a few things about their art, and had a dim awareness of the fact (coincidence — or something more?) that they were both Hungarian émigrés.

I was amazed, though, at how much I didn’t know, starting with the nearly poetic fact that their baptism in cinematography occurred when the Soviet tanks came rolling through Budapest in 1956. The two, who were then film students, grabbed their cameras, shot the protests and the violent crackdown, and then smuggled the footage out of the country under the noses of Soviet guards. What I love about this story is that it captures how, for Kovács and Zsigmond, photographing movies was, from the start, something raw and essential and existential and real. It was those qualities that they imprinted upon the visual atmosphere of American movies, changing the face of an art form in the process.

The two started out on the grimy indie-exploitation fringes of Hollywood, shooting schlock horror and nudie-cutie films, where they were often billed as “Leslie Kovacs” and “William Zsigmond.” Easy Rider, which really kicked off the revolution in cinematography, was conceived, at least by its backers, as just one more outlaw biker flick. (Read full post)

Advertisement
Nov 18 2009 12:31 AM ET

Helen Mirren, Meryl Streep, cougars, and dames

I had a theory all worked out: The lifestyle of a cougar — you know, an “older” woman (i.e., past 40, or is it 30 and the camera adds 10 years?) who fancies younger men–is a titillating sociological phenomenon made for TV shows, not movies. I mean, I can sort of see the appeal of  Cougar Town on ABC, and I certainly understand the allure of Samantha-the-manhunter on Sex and the City. But I can’t imagine (or maybe don’t want to imagine) Catherine Keener, Frances McDormand, or most any other serious, over-40 screen actress buying into the trend as a career freshener. Cougarhood is a TV-size sociological joke, not a feature-length state of sexual appetite.

Like I said, I had the theory all worked out. But then the other day I read Steven Zeitchik’s solid, all-too-familiar bummer of an article in The Hollywood Reporter about the slim pickings this year for Oscar candidates in the Best Actress category. Did you know, as the author cites, that in the past 20 years, “exactly one fiftysomething woman has taken the prize (Helen Mirren, for The Queen)”? I became so bummed that I lost interest in my Theory of Cougars in Pop Culture….

Instead, I’ll just note that Mirren quite possibly may get a nomination again this year, for her bravura performance as Mrs. Leo Tolstoy in The Last Station. (The movie comes out in a few weeks; that’s her above, looking every inch a Tolstoyan.) There’s a great, maturely sexy scene in which Mrs. T lures her old husband (a fine Christopher Plummer) into bed for a satisfying romp. And Meryl Streep, of course, as Julia Child in Julie & Julia, also loves the sexy time with her old husband (adorable Stanley Tucci) and quite probably will score her 16th nomination for the delicious performance.

No cougars, these foxes. Just great dames.

Photo Credit: Stephan Rabold

Nov 16 2009 07:33 PM ET

Disaster movies: Why we love them (especially in hard times)

At the local megaplex Saturday night, my wife and I were 25 minutes early walking into a theater to see 2012, but the place was already jammed, with scarcely a seat in sight. That’s not your average sold-out show – that’s anticipation. There’s nothing quite like the end of the world to get an audience united and juiced, all worked up. We were able to snag two seats in the fourth row, ordinarily too close for my taste, but in this case the super-close-up vantage worked smashingly well. Gawking up at the screen to watch all that corporate steel and glass buckle and collapse, and the earth itself crack open and erupt into an angry spew of lava, only to get doused in Biblical sci-fi tsunami waves, made for a Complete Eye-Popping Schlock Experience. It almost brought me back to the days of Sensurround, the stunt employed by Universal Studios 35 years ago to sell Earthquake (pictured above). In case you’re not old enough to remember, Sensurround consisted of giant speakers rumbling in ominous woofer frequencies so loud that the whole theater was supposed to shake. Just like in a real earthquake. There are times when, by God, I really do miss the ’70s.

I think I understand why that 2012 crowd was so beyond-punctual, so primed and pumped. Disaster movies, even more than horror films, speak — if not shout, happily — to the child within us. There’s a charmed, wide-eyed, and almost comically irreverent innocence to the way that they can turn an entire audience of sober, responsible, thinking adults into overgrown kids, sitting down to watch civilization get destroyed in much the same way that a 6-year-old lines up his toys to eagerly smash them. On some primal level, this kind of destruction simply has to be staged, so that we can all get a gander of what it might look like. (Read full post)

Nov 14 2009 09:50 AM ET

'The Men Who Stare at Goats' 'Saw Six' 'Gentlemen Broncos.' 'Oh My God!'

My friends and I have been playing the movie-title mash-up game for years. Come join the fun. The rules: Only real titles, past or present. Only clean results. Okay to change punctuation, but nothing else. Dare? Think of it as An Education. Good Night, and Good Luck.

Advertisement
Nov 12 2009 06:29 PM ET

Nicolas Cage: Does he wear his hair, or does it wear him?

nicholas-cage-hair_lI miss the days when actors had bad hair days. When their coifs weren’t so coiffed, when their heads were allowed to look scruffy, greasy, crazy, unkempt. Not Robert Pattinson mousse-mussed, but genuinely dishabille. I miss the days when they could even be — maybe we should whisper this — bald. I admit that I have something of a personal stake in this. I’m a follically challenged male, and perhaps I speak for others who are losing their hair when I say that it wouldn’t be such a terrible thing if we were represented a little more often on screen, and not just by the usual character actors playing dweebish bank tellers and Internet wizards. I do like to think, however, that even if God had graced me with the Jim Morrison-on-Kiehl’s mane of Adrian Grenier, that I’d still want to stand up for a little more healthy hair diversity among contemporary Hollywood leading men. These days, if an actor is losing his hair, he isn’t allowed to show it. He’s got to be plugged, weaved, bobbed, re-strung. In effect, he’s not himself — he’s wearing a permanent costume.

In the new Werner Herzog remake of Bad Lieutenant (it comes out next week — here’s what I wrote about it from the Toronto film festival), Nicolas Cage plays a New Orleans homicide detective who is always high on coke, heroin, OxyContin, or some combination thereof, and Cage, playing this furtive and tormented enforcer/addict, gives the return-to-form performance that a lot of us have been waiting for him to give. The luscious joke of the movie is that Cage, as Lieutenant Terence McDonagh, is wild and operatic and monomaniacally over-the-top, just as he has been so often in his trashy paycheck genre movies. Only now, his beady-eyed gonzo theatrics are part of a deftly controlled character study. McConagh, trapped in the evil pleasure of his addictions, also uses those addictions to be a more sneakily effective cop. He’s like a crackhead undercover agent in hell.

Cage is mesmerizing in Bad Lieutenant, but there’s one aspect of him that hasn’t changed: He still sprouts what I think of as his popcorn-blockbuster hair — that perfectly sculpted widow’s peak of shiny black strands that just about erupts from the front of his head, only to be swept back into a kind of Peter O’Toole-meets-Igor curtain of hair. (Read full post)

Nov 12 2009 06:01 AM ET

'Fantastic Mr. Fox,' fantastic year for animated movies

Owen loves Fantastic Mr. Fox and Disney’s A Christmas Carol, and so do I. And by my count , adding in Coraline, 9, Ponyo, and Up, that makes at least six animated feature films on my short list for best movies of the year.

On a related note, the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences just announced that 20 titles have been submitted  for Oscar consideration this year in the category of Best Animated Feature–guaranteeing that, for only the second time in Oscar history, there will be a full five nominees for the award.

I’m less interested in analyzing the tipping-point reasons why 2009 is a golden year for animation than I am in observing how animation in its many forms–hand-drawn, computer-assisted, stop-motion, motion-capture, 3-D, etc.-frees up inventive filmmakers to create original yet universally accessible stories that defy live-action logic and transcend audience demographics .

All by way of saying that Mr. Fox and his animal kingdom, Mr. Scrooge and his ghosts, and the box-headed old guy who hooks up his house to a bunch of balloons and flies south in Up are some of the most memorable characters of 2009. Which leads me to to a couple of  questions: For fans, what’s your favorite animated movie this year? And for foes, well, what will it take for me to convince you to give the best pictures of 2009 a try?

Nov 10 2009 07:05 PM ET

'Antichrist': Why Lars von Trier's latest fake outrage was made for, and only for, the Cannes film festival

In the world of cinema, there are many precious accolades — an Academy Award, a rating of 100 percent fresh on rottentomatoes.com — but few can match the sexy frisson of that most glittering of distinctions: getting booed at the Cannes film festival. Any old drama can win universal acclaim, especially if it’s set in the back alleys of Romania during the waning days of Communist rule. But to get booed at Cannes…that’s a venerable prize indeed. It signifies that you’ve made something fearless, wrenchingly divisive, ahead-of-the-cutting-edge, maybe even visionary in its disregard for the staid old status quo. It means that you’ve made a movie the bourgeoisie can’t handle. In case you don’t believe me, just check out this image from Lars von Trier’s Antichrist

Antichrist_lHave you recovered from the shock yet? You may think I’m kidding about all this, but there’s a time-honored tradition of movies that get booed at Cannes and then go on to win a reputation as timeless, subversive works. The most famous is probably L’Avventura. In 1960, the crowd on the Riviera didn’t know what to make of Michelangelo Antonioni’s grandly arid and despairing anti-thriller, and so they booed its slowness, its joyless decadence, its mirror held up so pointedly to…well, them. But the film was soon recognized — rightly — as a kind of masterpiece of disaffection, and the memory of those early catcalls only added to its austere luster. Great works, of course, have been hissed and booed throughout history. The most famous example in our time is the first performance of The Rite of Spring in 1913, which caused a riot (though I’ve always found it hard to picture what, exactly, fancy Paris men in top hats and tails engaging in the act of rioting would actually look like). Pauline Kael evoked The Rite of Spring’s premiere when she wrote about the world’s first showing of Last Tango in Paris at the 1972  New York Film Festival — a movie event that provoked, if not boos, then (according to Kael) a hush that was deafening in its lack of enthusiasm. (Read full post)

Advertisement
Nov 9 2009 10:56 PM ET

'2012' spoiler-free: the dog lives!

Categories: 2012, Commentary, dogs

You’ll have my full review of the end-of-the-world disaster pic 2012 in a few days. But I just came home from watching the movie, and I need your help; I’ve witnessed cities crumble, I’ve seen the sea rise up to swallow continents, I’ve watched billions of people lose their lives, accompanied by loud music. Yet the pampered little lap dog carried by one of the score of characters we get to know survives, hooray!

Not that I had any doubts she would. Hell has to freeze over — or at least ancient Mayan predictions of global collapse have to come true — before a movie audience will accept the death of a fictional pet with the same nonchalance we accept the deaths of countless fictional humans. But why should pet death be more shocking or upsetting to moviegoers than people death on screen? I’m as humane and caring a dog-lover as the next girl who watches marathon broadcasts of The Dog Whisperer on Friday nights, yet it rubs my paws the wrong way that moviemakers exult in the many ways they can invent for people to perish, just so long as the pooch prevails. Those producers know that if an animal bit the dust, there’d be an outcry, and editorials, and boycotts, and dogfights among critics….

So here’s where I need your help: Please explain to me the magical superpowers of cinema canines.  And while you’re at it, please tell me whether my theory is right or wrong, that pet death is an audience turn-off, while people death is, you know, what movies are all about.

Nov 6 2009 05:58 PM ET

'A Christmas Carol': Is it coming out too early?

A-Christmas-Carol_lI loved the new Robert Zemeckis/Jim Carrey version of A Christmas Carol — it is toasty, dazzling, touching, and spirited; rousingly old-fashioned and, at the same time, eye-tickingly fresh — yet every time I remind myself that the movie is being released this weekend, I have to do a double take. A big, lavish, holiday-cheer Christmas movie coming out the first week of November? Sorry, but that just seems too early. Memo to Disney: It’s not Christmas yet! I do realize that movie release patterns are forever changing. The summer movie season, which a long time ago used to start in, you know, the summer, then got pegged to Memorial Day, then to the week before Memorial Day, then the week before that, and now it starts somewhere in the middle of April. The goal posts keep getting moved back. But do we really want to start kicking off the Christmas movie season — or, for that matter, the holiday season itself — the weekend after Halloween?

During the holidays, when it comes to pop culture, a lot of us can find ourselves getting wistful over the strangest things. When I was a kid in the ’60s, I always marked the start of the holiday season with the appearance of a television commercial that now holds as much Proustian resonance for me as The Charlie Brown Christmas Special: It was that Norelco “Jingle Bells” spot with Santa zipping down a snowy hill on top of an electric shaver. Christmas movies, for me, provide a similar happy jolt of memory, which is why I can generally recall exactly where I was when I first saw most of them. That’s part of their nostalgic fun. (Read full post)

Advertisement
Powered by WordPress.com VIP