Blurb Whore Overachiever of the Year

Top Ten List O' the Day: Peter Travers.
I don't know how many of you watch Rachel Maddow on MSNBC but during Herman Cain's brief presidential campaign she began to treat it, hilariously, as a piece of performance art i.e. This just can't be real! I feel much the same way about Rolling Stone's Blurb Whore Legend Peter Travers. I don't mean to fixate on him as much as I do -- every year I marvel for the same reasons --  but I grew up reading and loving his reviews and only later, as I began to read more film criticism did he come to embody the Film Critic as Film Publicist problem. The man can definitely turn a phrase which is why if he wasn't making the presumably big bucks he makes at Rolling Stone, he'd surely be a highly paid ad man.

But this top ten article made me laugh so much. It's performance art. It has to be. He begins with Drive and literally the first words are...

Screw Oscar..."

After which comes a top ten list that includes not one, not two, not three, not four, not five, not six, not seven, not eight but  literally all the contenders you'll see on anybody's Oscar prediction top ten Best Picture charts barring the unscreened 'Extremely Loud'. Which is to say that The Artist, The Descendants, Moneyball, Midnight in Paris, Hugo, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and The Tree of Life... are all accounted for. To make sure he's covered all the Oscar bases there's a three way tie at #10 between War Horse, The Help and Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows Part 2. Seriously. 

I bow down to one of the greatest pieces of year-end list-making performance art that film criticism has ever seen. Peter Travers, you are genius.

Occupy Q&A! Purposefully Bad Acting & Post-Movie Etiquette

Roughly one hundred years ago on November 18th, 2011 I took questions for the next Q&A and after what was meant to be a short diversion answering the oddly abundant small screen questions I am now answering them. I am many things but I am nothing if not punctual. This is Part one of two as there is much to answer. Tomorrow's edition will actually arrive tomorrow night as it's already written. Yay me!

Just to stretch out the variety a bit I asked y'all to refrain from any questions about legendary actresses this time -- my favorite topic and apparently yours since many of you didn't listen ;) -- so  in this week's column, the men get a little time to shine. Let's go!

ANNIE: What was your favorite experience of seeing a movie with an audience, where the audience's reaction actually enhanced your viewing?

I've had many screenings like this that have enhanced my love of the movie we're all watching together. Which is why I believe so emphatically in the sanctity of moviegoing, and why I wish studios and theaters would lower prices before they price themselves out of populist relevance. TV is free and home theaters are getting larger so the movies really need to understand that they can't be making it so difficult for families to hit the multiplex or who will go? Movie attendance is a fraction of what it once was no matter how big the box office numbers seem and that is sad.

Jack and Leo discussing how awesome Barbra Streisand is in "Funny Girl"In terms of special events almost nothing beats Funny Girl's revival at the Ziegfeld several years ago here in NYC. It must have been sold out and that theater is HUGE. I saw at least one semi-famous person in the crowd and everyone was obviously there because they loved the movie. Seeing such a legendary star-making performance super-sized in a historic theater that had actual ties to the movie? Bliss. Nobody was raining on anyone's parades in there. It felt like oxygenated euphoria in that house. Also you know what movie was fun to watch with a typical noisy multiplex crowd just a few blocks from there? The Departed ! I still relish the audience reaction when you-know-who gets shot so mercilessly without fanfare or warning. It was as if there were tiny rugs under every individual theater seat and diabolical trickster Martin Scorsese had yanked them all at once and all OH.HELL.NO broke loose in there; the most fun you'll ever have watching someone get shot in the head!

How's that for a double feature: Funny Girl and The Departed ? Hee.

JOHN-PAUL: With three summer releases still alive in the Best Picture race (The Help, Midnight in Paris, The Tree of Life) and fall Oscar-bait movies seemingly underwhelming left and right (J. Edgar, The Ides of March, Carnage, A Dangerous Method, etc.), do you think the so-called "Oscar season" will become less relevant in the coming years?

I wish I could say "Yes" but this happens on a fairly regular basis and nothing changes. What's more this year has even more "one week qualifiers" than usual (4 or 5 by my count), so the system is definitely not changing for the better. I hate to be a broken record but I firmly believe that AMPAS should change the rules drastically. I don't think a film should be eligible for the Oscars unless it has allowed regular moviegoers to watch it in at least the top six markets. The current system gets called elitist on a regular basis but for stupid reasons ("Hey they didn't vote for that lame-ass blockbuster sequel that audiences flocked to for habitual lemming-like reasons!") and never for the actual elitist problem which is that you can show yourself for seven days in one theater in LA and ignore moviegoers totally and still be eligible for Best Movie prizes. That's all kinds of elitist, suggesting that the only audience a movie need concern itself with is 6000+ voting members of AMPAS. 

Mr. W: Any thoughts on Jean-Jacques Beineix' 'Diva'?

Have you ever seen DIVA (1981)? It's quite a time capsule.

Love it. Saw it three times at least in the 80s on VHS. Unfortunately I remember little about it other than its distinctly 80s new wave aesthetic and the fantastic diversity of the cast (black, asian and white characters on equal footing in the narrative? So rare in the 80s! And even now). I also liked that the story was built around something as mundane but unusual as a bootleg concert of an opera singer who refused to be recorded. No one speaks of "bootlegs" anymore -- they were put out of business by illegal downloads and leaking. 

JOHN T: Which legendary male actor would you like to pull a Christopher Plummer and make a comeback and get his first nomination-must be 65 or older to enter.

[The answer and more questions after the jump including awesome bad acting, Occupy Wall Street and post-movie etiquette.]

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"Speak as you might to a small child or golden retriever"

This past week I've become concerned with the awards prospects of Shame (is Carey Mulligan going to win anything?) and Martha Marcy May Marlene (which I loved) on account of its loss of every breakthrough actress and best first film contests thus far (in the admittedly young awards season.)

I began to wonder if the problem wasn't the constant withholding of the comfort food that is exposition. So I put in my screener to Margin Call, which keeps beating MMMM to prizes and while I enjoyed the film, I was immediately struck at the ginormous difference in verbosity. One movie tells you everything through it's play-like dialogue. The other tells you only so much and nearly always through its visuals.

So I wrote about ambiguity vs. directness in my Oscar column for Fandor.

There's even an infographic! Apparently I believe in both showing AND telling.

Naked Gold Man: Oscar Wears No Watch, But It's All in the Timing

With more and more of the heretofore unseen contenders (Tintin, J Edgar, Young Adult, War Horse, etcetera) beginning to show their goods to tastemakers and balloting voters of various orgs & circles & associations... where to now? Or when to?

Time is a funny thing with Oscar watching. Though the race progresses chronologically in familiar ways each year through its many stages, it's simultaneously a non-linear experience. We're always hopping around in the timeline from the future (What Will Happen on Oscar Nomination Morning? On Oscar Night?) to the past (Statistics, Past Grudges, Happy Memories, The Perennial Subject of "Overdue" and "Momentum" and Over Analysis of Things That Just Happened). Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. The time we're very rarely in is the present. If we're in the present at all (wrist check: it's 2:19 PM on 11|06|11 as I begin writing this) it's to take immediate stock of our surroundings  and then suddenly we're gone again. We've either instantly reduced the present to how we predict it will affect the future... or we've turned it into validation of our past biases or predictions.

A hypothetical example now. J Edgar reactions* range from reverential but not unqualified raves to respectful with a heavy cloud of "meh" to plain old "wow, it's just not any good!" thumbs down. Which means...

J. EDGAR is... [check whichever box applies in your hypothetical future tenses]

⎕ Still in key races. It's a biopic by Eastwood.
⌧  Out of the race but for Best Actor because it's that kind of role and he's that kind of star. 
⎕ Going to bomb with Oscar and the public.  

* no, I don't know why some critics have to obey embargoes and some don't.

That's all hypothetical, understood?!?

ACTOR, ACTRESS, and PICTURE past | present | future after the jump.

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The Unbearable Linkness of Being

The Hollywood Reporter Dianne Wiest to headline The Corrections. I know this will be old news to some but I can't believe I haven't mentioned it. A lead role for Our Miss Wiest, only one of the greatest living actresses in the world.
Tom Shone grades the movies. I love when critics explain their grading systems as it's always such a personal and inexact science. Only six "A+" ever.
Film Studies For Free looks back briefly at Brokeback Mountain, which happens to be one of Mr. Shone's six "A+" films.

Salon offers up a library of film criticism essentials
They Live by Night great piece on the super complicated editing challenges of The Tree of Life.

We had folders for Earth, Sky, Water, Animals, Miscellaneous, and then within those, bins that were more specific."

Guardian on Amélie's (2001) cultural endurance. The whimsical worldwide hit is now ten years old.
Laughing Squid "Teenage Mutant Ninja Noses"
Felix in Hollywood "can someone please explain this picture to me?"Tallulah Bankhead lol.
Awards Daily They aren't reading the Best Picture nominees in alphabetical order this year. Nor will the board show us how many titles will be announced. Suspense! 

Kaufman on the set of Quills (2000) with Kate WinsletFinally, a very happy 75th birthday to the writer/director Philip Kaufman, who people unfortunately rarely talk about these days. Why this is is surely a combo of his infrequency of working (only 12 features in a 47 year career), his lack of masterpieces, and his films being soundly of the adult persuasion in an era when the movies have become increasingly 'you know... for kids.' (I mean, even Scorsese is making family pictures now.)  My favorites from Kaufman's oeuvre are three: The Right Stuff (1983) which was nominated for 8 Oscars though Kaufman was oddly not one of them - they had to make room for Ingmar Bergman in Best Director which we shan't ever complain about but it's strange that the competition that wasn't dropped came mostly from what one might call "actor's films" which are usually the first to go when the lone wolf directorial nod comes-a-calling; The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988, Kaufman's sole nomination - Best Adapted Screenplay); and the NC-17 scandal that was Henry and June (1990). This trinity of "bests" is not-so-coincidentally composed of consecutive projects. When artists are on a roll, they're on a roll. It always seems to come in waves, doesn't it?

He's finally made another movie. His thirteenth film is Hemingway and Gelhorn (2012) which stars Nicole Kidman and Clive Owen. 

Have you seen any Philip Kaufman pictures?