Mike Mills on "Beginners" and Making Stories About Ourselves.

Christopher Plummer and Mike Mills promoting "Beginners"Sometimes the beginning of awards season offers pleasant surprises. Such is the case with Beginners, one of the year's best films, which recently debuted on DVD and is now suddenly on the shortlist of potential Oscar contenders with early and surprisingly robust attention from both the Gotham Awards where it won the top prize and the Independent Spirit Awards (3 nominations including Best Feature). 

I had the opportunity to speak with writer/director Mike Mills recently about Beginners, his second feature. The film famously draws heavily from Mills' own life to depict the relationship between a lonely artist named Oliver (Ewan McGregor) and his gay father Hal (Christopher Plummer) who comes out late in life shortly before succumbing to cancer. Oliver does his own romantic soul searching with an actress named Anna (Melanie Laurent) after his father's death.

The film moved me deeply this past summer and I told Mills as much as we began to talk. I had just rewatched the film on the morning we spoke.

NATHANIEL: It's so fresh in my memory, but how about you? Have you watched the movie recently?

MIKE MILLS: No. You know, most of my friends are filmmakers. A lot of filmmakers I know, we never watch our films after they're done. They're like old lovers or old worlds we were in. Since I premiered it at Toronto in 2010 I haven't watched the whole thing straight through. I watch parts of it and when I do Q&As I end up watching the end a lot or I peek in. Parts of it are tolerable but watching the whole thing is slightly torturous. More than slightly torturous.

Because you've lived with it for so long?

MILLS: Yeah. I've seen it probably a hundred times in making it. It's not the same experience for me, obviously, as it is for the audience. I'm thinking of all the strings behind the puppets. Maybe in a few years. It's strange. It's kind of sad. My wife [Miranda July] doesn't -- I have a lot of director friends and none of us look at our movies. 

Well, Beginners is also so autobiographical. So is it at all harder to watch for that reason, than say your first feature Thumbsucker? 

MILLS: It's not -- well, I don't think so. While it is very autobiographical by the time I've written it, turned it into a story, cast Christopher and all these people, it is a story for me; it's not 1 to 1. For me, I'm the most aware of how much it is not my life. But having said that, I do watch the end a lot. So often, I watch Hal die. I've watched Hal die so many times. The section right after that where it talks about what you do when someone passes away, there are some very real things in there. The daisies at the end -- there's a black and white photo of daisies. That's my mom's photo. That part can really hit me. One, it reminds me of my mom. Two, 'whoa! I put something incredibly intimate and vulnerable in this very public thing.' It almost surprises me every time that it's in there.

"They're just personal photos, they're not art."

I was going to ask. It feels so personal. The very specific can become universal of course. But on the other hand, we are aware that it's based on your life. So...

I'm very happy to remember my dad. It's not like a painful thing. Even his death and even his illness and all of that, we had a lot of great times around that. We had more closeness than we had ever had. So most of the stuff I'm showing you in the film are positive memories, things I enjoy being around. To be honest, most of the stuff with the dad... I pretty much wrote down things my father said to me to the best of my memory. But by the time you've put it in a different place, you've put it into a larger fictional context, and you have Christopher saying it, I really don't go "oh, that's my pop". Do you know what I mean?

But those flowers slap me in the face. They kind of sneak up on my every time.  I worked on the father stuff so much and I got really used to thinking of it as the weird hybrid of personal and story.

[more on his fine screenplay, his art, and working with Oscar-buzzing Christopher Plummer]

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One Hundred Years of Linkitude

24 Frames a glowing profile of Shailene Woodley in The Descendants who is looking more and more like a real Supporting Actress contender. Alexander Payne even compares her to a young Debra Winger. 
Empire fun investigation of the parallels between Joss Whedon's The Avengers and the Whedonverse itself (Buffy and the like)
Animation Magazine digs into the Oscar race for Best Animated Film
NY Post Apparently Terrence Malick is a comedy loving Ben Stiller fan. Who'da thunk it. 
Variety Weird but true. Scarlett Johansson directing a Truman Capote novella 

Rope of Silicon likes the cinematography of We Need To Talk About Kevin, Rampart and Shame... and I come away singing Fiona Apple...

But he's been pretty much yellow
And I've been cryin' blue
But all I can see is
Red, red, red, red, red now
What am I to do

Ugh, I miss Fiona Apple so much some times. What happened to her?

Cinema Blend watch an artist transform Rooney Mara to Lisbeth Salander with one finger on his iPad.
Scene Stealers lists the best Twilight parodies online.
Socialite Life Mila Kunis kept her promise and attended that Marine Corps Ball. Good on her.
Coming Soon more Spider-Man set photos
Gothamist Edward Scissorhands on the F train
Tom Shone turns out not everyone loves Martin Scorsese's Hugo.
Guardian UK readers can see A Separation on DVD/BluRay now. By all means, get to it. I love this quote from the Guardian capsule:

It's not so much world cinema as world class." 

Tom Munro check out his awesome photoshoot of Madonna and Andrea Riseborough for W.E.  

Off Cinema
TV|Line Elisabeth Shue has been put out to pasture in the land of procedural television. Nathaniel wept. 
Salon unveils their People-adjacent list of the year's sexiest men. No movie stars or Bradley Cooper allowed though we're very pleased to see the wonderful director Cary Fukunaga (Jane Eyre) on the list. I was also happy to see Marcus Samuellson, star chef, make the list. He touched our table the very first time we ate at his new restaurant Red Rooster in Harlem. It's delicious and afforable, a combo that you can't beat. Try it if you're ever in NYC. 
Towleroad More divalicious links over there... if you want this link party to keep on rolling...

Yes, No, Maybe So: "Snow White & the Huntsman"

Once upon a time there lived a blogger named Nathaniel R who feared all fairy tale reinventions after the gaudiest of poison apples that was Eyesore in Wonderland left him for dead, comatose. But then on the magical day of November the 10th, this trailer for Snow White & The Huntsmen arrived and woke him with something like true love's kiss.

Or is it another trap? Is this another gaudy brain-dead horror malevolently enchanted with a Prince Charming disguise? Dare Nathaniel dream of a happy ending?

YES

• It's never a bad idea to remind us of Madonna's "Frozen" (♥) and that raven form explosion did the trick for an opening and closing gambit.
• Though the title name checks only Snow White (Kristen Stewart) and The Huntsmen (Chris Hemsworth), the trailer promises that this is totally The Evil Queen Show. And we can live with that since Charlize Theron is delicious.
• "Beauty is my power" ...that creepy yet restrained image of the queen bathed in milk (?) rather than something more cliché like a pool of blood after her opening kill... is so "pop" (think Annie Leibovitz photoshoots) but also has a mysteriously disturbing simplicity. Is the whole movie going to be this visually smart? 
• My god this movie looks so beautiful. Let's see... [IMDb check] ZOMG, it's Greig Fraser on DP duty. No wonder. Remember what he did for Bright Star? He's our new favorite. And... oh... Colleen Atwood on costumes? Really? They look amazing but atypically less than alarmingly busy and fussed over (thank god) than what she concocts lately for Tim Burton.
• Did we mention that we love Charlize Theron?
• Did we mention that we love Charlize best when she embraces her inner outer beauty? When she does she's monstrously good.

No & Maybe So AFTER THE JUMP...

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"Shame" Trailer, Quad, Reviews

We aren't doing a Yes, No, Maybe So on Steve McQueen's Shame since it seems we're constantly talking about it. It's like Shame Central up in here lately what with the partygoing, the quick words, Michael's NYFF review and David's LFF review (later tonight). Maybe I should try and get one of these awesomely funny mirror quads (found on Ultra Culture) to display in my apartment?

image via ultra culture

A movie poster that makes you feel all dirty inside when you look at it? Brilliant!

I am either doing accidental free PR work for Fox Searchlight or my Fassy addiction has really gotten the best of me. Between Fassy and Gosling this year, yeeeeesh. (You'd think they were both actresses or something the way I've been carrying on!)

Oh yes. Here is the trailer. It's a beauty. But the marketing department had a lot to work with given McQueen's and cinematographer Sean Bobbit's gifts with moving (and still) pictures. 

On a scale of 1 to 10", how excited are you to see this?

NYFF: "Martha Marcy May Marlene"

Her name is Martha (Elizabeth Olsen) but we first know her as Marcy when she slips quietly out of a crowded farmhouse where women much like her sleep in huddles, like a happy litter of puppies. Her absence is quickly noted by one of the men on the farm named Watts (Brady Corbett) and Marcy hides in the forest while her once slumbering sisters and their men search for her, continually calling out "Marcy May." Once Marcy has reached a neighboring town, she makes a trembling entirely inarticulate phone call. An unidentified woman answers:

Martha, is that you?" 

Marcy Doesn't Live Here Anymore

We know instinctively that she is, though we know little else in these first few minutes of writer/director Sean Durkin's feature debut Martha Marcy May Marlene. 

The woman on the phone is Martha's estranged sister Lucy (Sarah Paulson) who whisks the young woman away from the mountains to the even more idyllic river side landscape surrounding the far less crowded summer home Lucy shares with her husband Ted (Hugh Dancy). What's comforting to us in their recognizable domesticity, is obviously alien to Martha. The narrative is all friction between the past (Marcy) and present (Martha) and shifts between them sometimes imperceptibly and other times forcefully. The past scenes become in essence an unlocking of the puzzle of Martha's life on the farm with the father/husband figure and shepherd (John Hawkes, Winter's Bone) and his free love flock (to the movie's credit the word "cult" is never uttered). These revelations about Martha's previous life have the pesky tendency to lead the moviegoer to yet more disturbing questions which will probably not have answers.

Patrick sings an entranced Marcy a song he wrote for her.

Martha... possibly hits a few of its scariest notes too obviously, but mostly it's a model of restraint and cool control. That's particularly true of Elizabeth Olsen's interiority as the title character. She's trusting that her blurry contradictory identity -- an uncomfortable mix of rigid thinking, moral confusion, and open physicality -- will be enough to sell this lost woman. The fine ensemble cast is also a boon: Hawkes brings his Winter's Bone friction of menacing stranger and filial protector and Corbett and the other cult members are a believable mix of old phantom selves fading into shadows of Patrick. In the present tense scenes, which could almost read as a satire of stories about obnovious in-laws if it had anything like a sense of humor, Paulson and Dancy sketch in a realistic background marriage that's challenged by the needy relative in the foreground. But it's the writer/director that's the movie's true star. Durkin's screenplay's rich subtext that neither Martha nor Marcy are anything like their own woman, no matter the surroundings, shines. He also makes several smart choices in the filmmaking, often eschewing the comfort of close-ups and traditional scoring, to build a quiet cumulative menace. The cinematography in particular by Jody Lee Lipes is just right with its diffuse earthy warmth as seductive blanketing for a story that's anything but.

Elizabeth Olsen and Sarah Paulson in "Martha Marcy May Marlene""What's in a name?" the doomed Juliet once asked, trying to argue their meaning of Romeo's away. But her efforts were in vain. None of us initially choose the names we're given but as we move through life, plenty of us make small adjustments, concessions, and shifts along the way to shore up our increasing ownership of self.

Before seeing Martha Marcy May Marlene, I liked its "name" a lot. Having now seen the film it's representing, the title vaults over into a thing of pure genius. Film titling is an undersung artform. You could theoretically call this movie about a somewhat nondescript girl haunted by her former life in a cult in New York's Catskills Mountains just about anything. But "Martha Marcy May Marlene" is the perfect, yet far from obvious, choice. It's a riddle, an incantation, a theme. What other name but a series of them could so accurately capture the mystery, simplicity, and loss of self, that's the haunted vacuum center of this stunning debut? A-

Previously on NYFF
The Kid With a Bike races into Kurt's hearts.
George Harrison: Living in the Material World is music to Michael's ears.
A Separation floors Nathaniel. A frontrunner for the Oscar?
The Student makes Nathaniel cram for quizzes that never come.
Carnage raises its voice at Nathaniel but doesn't quite scream.
Miss Bala wins the "must-see crown" from judge Michael.
Tahrir drops Michael right down in the titular Square.
A Dangerous Method excites Kurt... not in that way, perv!
The Loneliest Planet brushes against Nathaniel's skin.
Melancholia shows Michael the end of von Trier's world.