The Screengrab : american gangster

DVD Digest for October 14, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 14:00:00 GMT

This week brings plenty of thrills on Blu-Ray and some interesting arthouse releases coming to DVD. Oh, and some guy with a whip.

Conundrum of the Week: Terrence Malick’s The New World is one of my favorite movies of all time. So why am I not more excited about this week’s release of the “Extended Cut” of the film? You’d think that I would welcome the opportunity to see even more of the film, to luxuriate in its irresistible Malick-ness. Yet I find myself torn. On the one hand, I’m encouraged by the fact that Malick re-cut the film himself, which leads me to believe that maybe he just needed more time to get his vision fine-tuned to his exact specifications (I still yearn, in vain I fear, for his 6-hour cut of The Thin Red Line). But it was the theatrical cut that I fell in love with in the first place. So why can’t the boys at Warner just do what Universal did last week and release all three existing cuts of The New World in one handy box set? Now, there would be an occasion worth celebrating. I know, I know- I’m thinking about it too much. But that’s what they pay me for, after all…

Also notable this week is MGM’s Alfred Hitchcock Premiere Collection, which contains eight Hitchcock titles from their library and features many new commentary tracks and archival material including Hitchcock being interviewed by Peter Bogdanovich and Francois Truffaut. The big titles in the set are Rebecca, Spellbound, and Notorious, each of which went out of print on Criterion DVD a few years ago, and which are now available separately as well as in the set. Other titles in the set are The Paradine Case, Sabotage, Young and Innocent, Lifeboat, and The Lodger. Other classics coming to DVD include: a new release of Robert Altman’s Short Cuts (Criterion), Kon Ichikawa’s An Actor’s Revenge (Koch), Capricorn One (Lionsgate), and the 15th Anniversary of Chaplin (Lionsgate), which features what’s still Robert Downey Jr.’s sole Oscar nomination to date.

The week’s biggest recent release on DVD is, of course, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (Paramount, also Blu-Ray), a movie which I enjoyed but which disappointed a number of fans including Trey Parker and Matt Stone. But if you’re one of the Indy naysayers, check out one or more of this week’s crop of new indies: Errol Morris’ Standard Operating Procedure (Sony, also Blu-Ray), the Genghis Kahn origin story Mongol (Warner, also Blu-Ray), the Cannes-anointed The Edge of Heaven (Strand Releasing), and this year’s Golden Bear-winner at Berlin, Elite Squad (Genius Productions). Or if you’ve got a little too much cash jangling around in your pockets, you can always either buy The Pirates Who Don’t Do Anything: A VeggieTales Movie (Universal) or drive by your local Best Buy and throw $20 out of your car window, both of which produce about the same effect.

This week’s TV on DVD releases include: CSI Season 8 (Paramount), Back to You Season 1 (Universal), Nash Bridges Season 1 (Paramount), and The Unit Season 3 (Fox).

Finally, this week’s releases are a fairly action-packed bunch, including thrills of all sorts. For true-crime thrills, try Eastern Promises (Universal), American Gangster (Universal), or Casino (Universal). If you’ve got a taste for blood, give Interview With the Vampire (Warner) a spin. For adventure and romance, there’s always the double feature of Romancing the Stone (Fox) and Jewel of the Nile (Fox). If you like your action spiced liberally with cyberpunk, you probably don’t need me to tell you about this week’s release of The Ultimate Matrix Collection (Warner). For some Halloween chills, check out Poltergeist (Warner). And if you don’t really care for good movies, Constantine (Warner) should satisfy your movie-watching urges just fine.

Screengrab Bets the Oscars: Phil's Picks

Phil Nugent — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Let's make sure we're on the same page on this: if you bet money, household chores, or bragging rights on anything you're about to read in this post, you are out of your mind, and while I pity you, I will not admit in a court of law to ever having met you. I got off the Oscar train when I was eight years old and Sissy Spacek didn't win for Carrie; to have continued our relationship beyond that point would have been madness, madness! I claim no inside knowledge or deep understanding of how they decide these things, and the only thing I could tell you about the winners of recent years is that Jennifer Hudson won last year for Dreamgirls. (How do I know this? I was talking to someone on the phone when it was announced, and the woman I was talking to happened to have her TV set on. When Hudson's name was called out, the woman screamed. It turned out that it was a joyous scream, but until she calmed down enough to tell me what the hell was going on, my best guess was that she had just noticed that her couch was on fire.) Anyway, the only thing more completely charmless than the Oscars may be the ugly spectacle of a writer bragging about how little he cares about what he's paid to weigh in on, so now that we've just established that my opinion in this area counts for about as much as hair styling tips from Paul Wolfowitz, here goes:

BEST SCREENPLAY:

Diablo Cody takes Best Original for Juno because the voters have actually heard her name — it's not like, having come across it once, you can get it out of your head without laser surgery — and Paul Thomas Anderson takes it for Best Adaptation for There Will Be Blood, because that's what you get when you make a great movie but you aren't going to get Best Picture and the Best Director prize already taken.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS:

Apparently this is going to go to Cate Blanchett for I'm Not There, partly because Blanchett is also nominated for a Best Actress award that she is not getting to get and nominating her twice in one year without giving her anything would just seem silly. A good and sound bit of reasoning, and so I will of course reject it. And not only because I don't get the universally accepted logic by which this is agreed to be a "supporting" performance. Who the hell is she supposed to be supporting? The term ought to mean something other than "Big name actor in a role that is frequently off-screen." She's definitely the unquestioned star of her section of the movie, and while I didn't put a stop watch on it, I'll bet that she has as much screen time as any of the other Dylans. And if it turns out that Richard Gere, say, has a little more actual screen time, I'm not sure that the editor did him a favor by it. Until persuaded otherwise, I shall remain convinced that Blanchett's placement in this category is part of some conspiracy to screw over Amy Ryan, who wouldn't win anyway, because you only win an Oscar for playing a character as skanky as her Gone Baby Gone character if the Academy has already seen you in a bunch of glamour-puss roles and so knew for sure that you were acting. It's a moot point anyway, because I boldly predict that the winner will be Ruby Dee, because she has had a long and distinguished career, because she is 83 years old, because her late husband, Ossie Davis, is much missed, and because even though she didn't have much of a role in American Gangster, she did get to slap Denzel Washington, and he needed slapping.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR:

Hal Holbrook has had a long and distinguished career and is now the same age as Ruby Dee, so if she doesn't win in her category, his chances automatically go up by 50%. But I really don't see it happening. Philip Seymour Hoffman gives the best performance in this category — he's a stone hoot in Charlie Wilson's War, which marks a rare example of an actor giving the Academy three different performances to select for nomination and the Academy choosing the right one. I'd think he had a real chance if it weren't for the fact that he already won not too long ago for Best Actor for Capote, which makes Javier Bardem the needier candidate. Bardem's trigger-happy, unstoppable psycho in a much-discussed hairstyle gave audiences all the fun of watching a Batman villain ply his trade, but it's in an officially certified, critically approved serious film with a literary pedigree, and for this he will be the recipient of much gratitude from voters whose wives dragged them to Atonement. He's already won more than a few awards for this performance, and he'll be throwing one more on the pile.

BEST ACTRESS:

Julie Christie in a lock. Next?

BEST ACTOR:

The conventional wisdom seems to be that this one belongs to Daniel Day-Lewis for There Will Be Blood. I think that George Clooney has a shot for Michael Clayton, which is the kind of hard-hitting, tough-minded, yet still glamorous-looking movie that Hollywood wishes and expects America to take to its bosom. (Clooney looks worn-down and dissipated in it, and a gorgeous-looking man looking as much like hell as he can is the most glamorous thing in the world.) Some would argue that Clooney himself gave the award to Day-Lewis at a recent Newsweek-sponsored gathering where he serenaded his shy British colleague by saying that all actors "bow low to this motherfucker." Indeed, the whole of the media has been going wild these last couple of months about Day-Lewis's position as the great screen actor of our time. I do not disagree. But I happen to be one of those suspicious types who, when I hear conservative pundits on Fox News go on and on about how fearsome a candidate Barack Obama would be against a Republican challenger in November, and how they think that any Republican would just chew Hillary Clinton up and spit her out, I can't help thinking, Okay, would they say that out loud if they really believed it? Hasn't anyone ever heard the one about wanting to be thrown in the brier patch? So, on this baseless idiot notion, I have just decided the media have been building Day-Lewis up in preparation for the shocking upset to come when Clooney takes the prize. Remember, you read it here first! Unless I'm wrong, in which case you can just forget that I said anything.

BEST DIRECTOR:

The Coens, for No Country for Old Men, in a bigger lock than Julie Christie.

BEST PICTURE:

The big pictures here are obviously No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood, and I think they're going to cancel each other out. Both are impressive, violent movies that actually alienate as many potential voters as they attract. For the same reasons that I think George Clooney is an attractive candidate for Best Actor, his movie, Michael Clayton, has the smell of a loser to it. So the contrarian, can't-we-all-just-get-alone vote will go to putting either Juno or Atonement over the top. After it won at the Golden Globes, I thought that Atonement, with its period romance and literary prestige, was a shoo-in, but since then I have shifted over to favoring Juno, partly because I got bored with my previous position, partly because Juno is this year's Little Miss Sunshine, and Little Miss Sunshine lost last year. That means that the partisans of indie-flavored whimsy will be harder-driving this year. Also, it came out later in the year than Little Miss Sunshine, and is lucky in its timing: I calculate that the backlash against the backlash against Juno is now on a rising wave and will crest in time for the awards Sunday. It will flatten out the next morning and the papers will be full of "What were we thinking" pieces for the next two weeks.

DVD Digest for February 19, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 15:00:00 GMT

New this week: another Jean-Luc Godard film goes Criterion, and plenty of Oscar-bait (successful and not-so-successful) premieres on DVD.

DVD of the Week: The latest Godard classic to get the deluxe Criterion treatment, Pierrot le Fou is quite possibly the lightest and least didactic of the master's Golden Age output. The film lacks the poetry of earlier films like My Life to Live and Band of Outsiders, as well as the revolutionary fervor of Week End and La Chinoise. In many ways, Pierrot feels like the closest Godard came to making a lark, complete with impromptu musical numbers, gorgeous Cinemascope photography, and Anna Karina at her loveliest. But despite the deliberately minor feel of the film, it's a seminal work, both for the filmmaker and for the period. The two-disc Criterion edition of the film also includes: a new interview with Karina; archival interviews with Godard, Karina, and Jean-Paul Belmondo; the video A "Pierrot" Primer, directed by Godard associate Jean-Pierre Gorin; and a documentary about Godard's personal and professional relationship with Karina.

Also on the Criterion front this week is Alex Cox's Walker, a notorious flop in its day that has become a cult favorite in the intervening years. I haven't had the chance to watch the film yet, so I'll direct you to an appreciation of it by former ScreenGrab editor, and unabashed Walker fan, Bilge Ebiri.

Other new releases on DVD:
American Gangster (Universal, also HD-DVD)
In the Valley of Elah (Warner, also Blu-Ray)
Lust, Caution (Universal)
Margot at the Wedding (Paramount)
Michael Clayton (Warner, also Blu-Ray)
Rendition (New Line)

The new Criterions aside, it's looking like a lean week for classics coming to DVD, although I would be remiss if I didn't mention Sony's Blu-Ray-only release of Tom Tykwer's propulsive arthouse hit Run Lola Run. In addition, Sony is releasing a 1992 documentary about old-school criminals like Lucky Luciano and Bugsy Siegel entitled... The American Gangster. I can't imagine why they'd wait until this week to release it.
Finally, new TV on DVD: Universal's Coach: Season 3; Fox's Newhart: The Complete First Season (note: this is the one where he runs the inn, not the one where he's a shrink); and, as promised, the much-anticipated Walker, Texas Ranger: The Complete Fourth Season. I can't imagine there'll be much overlap between people renting this and those renting the Alex Cox Walker, but you never know.

Screen Actors' Guild Awards

Phil Nugent — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 15:00:00 GMT

The fourteenth annual Screen Actors Guild Awards were handed out Sunday night, in a brisk televised program that the striking Screen Writers' Guild gave its blessing to. This year's awards got perhaps a bit more attention than usual in this season, when the writers' strike turned the Golden Globes into a glorified press conference and threatens to do we know not what to the Academy Awards show. Dignified yet friendly, the evening struck a nice balance between this year's gutted-out version of the Golden Globes and the bedazzled vulgarity of the traditional Oscar blow-out, which helped to compensate for the fact that the list of chosen winners didn't have a lot of surprises. Among the movie nominees, There Will Be Blood's Daniel Day-Lewis took the Best Actor prize, which he dedicated to the late Heath Ledger. Julie Christie (Away from Her won for Best Actress, while awards for Best Supporting performance went to Javier Bardem (for No Country for Old Men) and Ruby Dee (for American Gangster). The SAG Awards also set aside awards for Best Cast Ensemble and Best Stunt Ensemble: these went to the fine actors who appeared together in No Country for Old Men and those motherfucking lunatics who risked life and limb while giving the finger to gravity itself in The Bourne Ultimatum, respectively. In the television category, the most notable awards were those slathered on the cast of The Sopranos, in its last year: the show won for Best Actor (James Gandalfini), Best Actress (Edie Falco), and Best Dramatic Cast Ensemble. The cast of The Office won for Best Cast in a comedy, but the awards for Best Actor and Actress in a comedy went to Alec Baldwin and Tina Fey, both of 30 Rock. Fey got off perhaps the most gracious one-liner of the evening when she credited Baldwin with her win, saying that if you spend enough time watching "Fred Astaire dance with a hatrack; after a while, you’re, like, ‘That hatrack is pretty good too.’ ”

American Lawsuit

Phil Nugent — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Ridley Scott's American Gangster, ostensibly based on the real story of the '70s drug dealer Frank Lucas, ends with Lucas (Denzel Washington) basically joining forces with Richie Roberts (Russell Crowe), the detective who's nailed him, by agreeing to testify against their shared enemies, the crooked lawmen who shake down crooks and sneer at clean cops. The movie wraps up its story with a series of titles that state that "three-quarters of the drug enforcement agents assigned to New York" wound up being convicted thanks to Lucas' testimony. The DEA and its agents are pissed off about this, and they're not settling for barging into Scott's home and shooting his dog; a bunch of former feds have filed a class-action defamation lawsuit against the movie. The suit charges that "the defamation involved the defendant NBC Universal, through its Universal Studios, falsely communicating, in writing, to millions of people in a motion picture called American Gangster that three-quarters of New York City's DEA, from approximately 1973 through approximately 1985, were convicted criminals."

Dominic Amoroso, a former federal prosecutor who tried Lucas and is now representing the agents in their claim, says that, with regard to the titles suggested that Lucas' testimony brought down crooked feds, "No such thing ever occurred. Not a single agent of New York City's DEA, or any other law enforcement officer, was convicted of anything based upon the so-called 'collaboration' of Lucas and Roberts. Nor was a single agent of New York City's DEA or officer of the NYPD convicted in any case or investigation involving Frank Lucas whether based upon a collaboration of Lucas and Roberts or any other resource." NBC Universal earlier blew off the agents' demand for a retraction and an apology by issuing a statement that read in part, "The film in no way charges or even insinuates wrongdoing on the part of the federal Drug Enforcement Administration. " Assuming that someone at Universal has actually seen the movie, this would seem to apply that the studio heads and its lawyers do not regard graft, theft, and violent shakedowns as "wrongdoing", which, depending on how long they've been working in Hollywood, might not be implausible.

Academy Awards Also-Rans

Phil Nugent — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Now that the Academy Award nominations have been announced, we can all buckle up and wait to find out who the lucky non-winners are. Don't get us wrong: an Oscar win has a lot to recommend it. It bestows upon the recipient not just bragging rights but a new, higher pay ceiling and, if he doesn't screw it up the way Kevin Spacey did, a privileged glow and a long-term shot at juicier roles. But as anyone who's spent ten minutes reading about Cary Grant or Alfred Hitchcock knows, there's nothing that sets a major Hollywood figure apart like never having won an Oscar — that is, a real Oscar, and none of that special lifetime career achievement bullshit. Then, every time someone writes a profile of you, they can set aside a moment to tear their hair out over the fact that you never got the big prize — and everyone, including the people who'd never given it a second's thought before, will automatically do you the honor of agreeing that, yes, it is a shocking thing now that you mention it. In recent years, the sudden realization that Paul Newman and Martin Scorsese, to name two examples, had never won Oscars set off palpitations in the entertainment media, and cries went out urging the Academy to do the right thing, to make sure that they did not go to their graves un-Oscared, even if it meant honoring, by association, such lesser works as The Color of Money and The Departed. It's hard not to feel that, by finally joining what sometimes seems to be the majority, these men lost a little something that had previously set them apart from the likes of Red Buttons, Cliff Robertson, Roberto Begnini. One would think that Scorsese, with his ravenous enthusiasm for obscure and neglected filmmakers whose posthumous reputations glow with the luster one associates with misunderstood genius, would get this as much as anyone, but the lure of the little gold statuette is a powerful one. Let's take a moment to honor some of the people who will have to content themselves with asking Marty how it feels to hold one.

BEST ACTOR: Except for Johnny Depp and Viggo Mortensen, all the nominees here are already lost souls, with Oscars already stashed in the broom closet. Still, George Clooney and Tommy Lee Jones have only won for Best Supporting Actor in the past, so I'm sure it would feel a little special if they were able to corral one for being top banana. (Jones's nomination is also notable for being the only direct evidence included in the list of nominations that there was something this past year called "movies about the Iraq war.") Notable among the missing: Mark Ruffalo and Robert Downey, Jr. of Zodiac, two very fine performances that could just as easily have been shoehorned into the Supporting Actor category, but which had the misfortune to have been included in a movie that really took it on the chin for having been released early in the year. (The Academy has traditionally favored movies that were released late in the year and so were fresh in the minds of voters, a tradition that the development of home video has done surprisingly little to reverse.) The Academy did reach back to movies released in the first half of 2007 in order to bestow a Best Actress nomination on Julie Christie for her work in Away from Her, but Gordon Pinsent, who had to carry that picture, and whose performance was equally fine, was slighted, which may have something to do with the fact that no Academy voters have fond memories of having used a picture of him torn from the pages of Vogue to help them get through puberty thirty years ago. Similarly, Will Smith's performance in I Am Legend, a movie that he was obliged to keep alive single-handedly for long stretches, was in its way every bit as impressive a feat of movie-star acting as Clooney's glamorously world-weary turn in Michael Clayton, but he was in a movie about fighting rabid vampires, whereas Clooney was in one about reaching deep down into the pit of one's soul and learning to say no to the forces of evil, represented by a bunch of lawyers who could easily be taken for rabid vampires if you squint.

BEST ACTRESS: It's really no surprise that one of the most remarkable performances seen this year, that of Molly Shannon in Year of the Dog, isn't here: the movie was, again, released a very long time ago, it wasn't a hit, and in the ranks of people remembered for having been on Saturday Night Live, Shannon is probably closer to Chris Farley's side of the scale than Bill Murray's in the public mind. That could change if she gives many more performances like this one, but God knows where she's going to find the roles. It's a bit more surprising that Angelina Jolie's A Mighty Heart has sunk without a trace; it's not the best performance of the year, nor is it Jolie's best performance, but in a year that, as usual, was not overflowing with instances of women being given the chance to strut their stuff in big, juicy parts, you might think that Jolie's lending whatever muscle she has a movie star to telling the story of Daniel Pearl's widow would get her a token nod. Maybe all the factors that it had going against it — released in the summer, box-office failure, heavy subject matter, plus the mixed feelings that so many people seem to have about Jolie (is she a star, or a tabloid freak?) created a kind of perfect storm. Ashley Judd's wild-eyed, insane sexy mama in the off-Broadway sort-of-horror picture Bug was something to see. I don't know if the studio even bothered to send out screener copies to Academy voters, though if they were on the fence about it, I'd have chipped in for the cost of the postage, just so I could fantasize about how many of them would end up calling in priests to exorcise their DVD players.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR: Chris Cooper punted two good shots the Academy's way, first with his creepy performance as treasonous spook Robert Hanssen in Breach, then with an excellent demonstration of the character actor functioning as secret star in the big action flick The Kingdom, but the Academy passed on both. Steve Zahn was amazing and heartbreaking as a doomed P.O.W. in Werner Herzog's Rescue Dawn; he didn't get nominated either, but just last week he was amazing again, effortlessly channeling Robert Duvall as the young Gus McCrae in the Lonesome Dove prequel, so maybe the Emmys will make it up to him later. Jeff Daniels' straight-talking blind man in The Lookout deserved more attention than it got, and Clarence Williams III made a solid meal of about two (uncredited) scenes as Bumpy Johnson in American Gangster. (Ruby Dee did get nominated for Best Supporting Actress for playing Denzel Washington's mother in that movie. Her performance isn't nearly as rich as Williams', but she's certainly due for a little attention, and maybe the Academy figured, regarding her and Williams, that it was either one or the other.) The funny thing is that the category is padded out with people — Casey Affleck, Javier Bardem — who got enough screen time in their movies to qualify as lead actors. Bardem's Supporting Actor status feels like it's rigged to make it easier for him to claim the award, though I'd look for a late surge to form behind Hal Holbrook after people realize that he's not only nominated but actually still alive and capable of being cheered by a win.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS: I don't get the universal consensus that Cate Blanchett was a supporting actress in I'm Not There. I guess that, again, it comes down to amount of screen time, but nobody else in that movie had any more screen time than she did; certainly nobody else put theirs to as good a use. I probably wouldn't mind so much except that, by shoving her into this category for her phenomenal performance, it feels as if the Academy is shafting Amy Ryan, nominated for a hair-raisingly skanky performance as a bad mother for the ages in Gone Baby Gone, and Tilda Swinton, whose completely reprehensible and yet completely understandable corporate villain gave Michael Clayton a surprising amount of its soul. A little tinkering might have left room for Marisa Tomei, who in Before the Devil Knows You're Dead made Philip Seymour Hoffman's faithless wife convincingly empty and slow-witted and shallow in her dissatisfaction with her existence, yet still made her seem very much worth screwing up your life over. This would have also been the place to honor little Nina Kervel-Bey, who made one of the year's most remarkable debuts in the French film Blame It on Fidel. She's actually the star of the movie, but from Tatum O'Neal to Abigail Breslin, the Academy has traditionally shoved little girls into the Best Supporting Actress category, as if "supporting" were synonymous with "short." Appearances to the contrary, Ellen Page turns twenty-one next month, so her nomination in the Best Actress category (for Juno) does not break this trend. It would have been nice, though, if Page's co-star Jennifer Garner could have been sandwiched in here. In The Kingdom, Garner is still trying to prove herself as an action heroine, with mixed results, but she gave the performance of her career so far in Juno — a carefully nuanced performance and a brave one, one that depended for its (and the movie's) full effectiveness on the actress's willingness to slowly open up to the audience and reveal what's on the inside of a woman who has the shell of a frosty yuppie robot.

BEST DIRECTOR: The fun in this category has usually been in thinking about how it feels to be the one director who wasn't nominated even though his movie was nominated as Best Picture. However he may laugh it off in public, you know that the message he thinks he's getting is, "And last but not least, nominated for Best Picture in spite of having been directed by..." This year it is the director of Atonement, the esteemed young filmmaker what's-his-name, who has to wonder if everybody thinks the actors built the sets while he was in the bathroom and came up with their blocking while he was at lunch. Suffice to say that Julian Schnabel, the director of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, fills out the category just fine, though it might be even finer if, say, Jason Reitman had somehow been overlooked in favor of Zodiac's David Fincher. Another surprisingly plausible contender might have been Ben Affleck, who sure did a hell of a lot better job behind the camera on Gone Baby Gone than he's ever done in front of it. Affleck may not have the face of a director — that's a compliment, Ben — but I'm in favor of anything that encourages him to stay back there.

Paul Clark Predicts the Oscar Nominees

Paul Clark — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 19:00:00 GMT

"Nobody knows anything." Screenwriter William Goldman immortalized that phrase a few decades ago, and it's as true this Oscar season as it's always been. Perhaps even more so — not only are many Oscar races still wide-open, but the status of the ceremony itself is up in the air. But for now the show is still happening, which means the nominations are set to be announced tomorrow morning. Here are my hasty, shot-in-the-dark predictions in the top six categories:

Best Picture:
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Into the Wild
Juno
Michael Clayton
No Country for Old Men

I think we can all agree that No Country is in, right? Beyond that, it's something of a crap shoot. Michael Clayton is the kind of classy star vehicle the Academy usually responds to, and audience favorite Juno has become too big a word of mouth phenomenon to ignore. At one point, Atonement was looking like a front-runner for the win, but its Oscar buzz has subsided. On the other side of the coin, There Will Be Blood may be too bleak for the voters to embrace — it would have a better chance were it the year's undisputed critical champ, but with No Country in the mix, PTA's masterpiece could be shut out here. Instead, I'm predicting The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, an acclaimed true-life story that's only gaining momentum, and Into the Wild, the year's most Oscar-baity film directed by a respected actor, which is something that tends to go over well with the actor-filled Academy membership.

Best Actor:
George Clooney, Michael Clayton
Daniel Day-Lewis, There Will Be Blood
Johnny Depp, Sweeney Todd
Emile Hirsch, Into the Wild
Viggo Mortensen, Eastern Promises

Even if the Academy decides to overlook There Will Be Blood, they won't be able to deny the awesomeness of Day-Lewis' blazing performance as Plainview. Likewise, Clooney and Depp have recently become Academy favorites, and I dare say that had Sweeney Todd done more business Depp would've been the one to beat here. Hirsch is a bit iffier here given his age, but he carries Into the Wild on his capable shoulders, and if the film gets nominated I'm guessing he will be too. With the recent groundswell for The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, I think Matthieu Amalric should be seen as a contender here, although not nearly as much as if he was an American star. Instead, I'm going with Mortensen — Eastern Promises didn't exactly set the world on fire, but his performance was the highlight, and I think voters will take the opportunity to honor him not only for this role but also for his overlooked turns in A History of Violence and the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Best Actress:
Amy Adams, Enchanted
Julie Christie, Away From Her
Marion Cotillard, La Vie en Rose
Angelina Jolie, A Mighty Heart
Ellen Page, Juno

Throughout this awards season, three names kept popping up in this rare — Christie, Cotillard, and Page. So it's pretty safe to assume they'll make it in. That leaves us two spots in a relatively weak year for buzzed-about performances (sadly, Black Book's Carice Van Houten has no traction whatsoever). With very little competition, Jolie should make the cut — the film didn't make much of a dent, but her stardom has kept her in the race. The final spot is anyone's guess. High-profile star turns (Jodie Foster in The Brave One, Cate Blanchett in Elizabeth: The Golden Age) have flopped at the box office, while respected performers in independent films (notably Laura Linney in The Savages) have been lost in the year-end shuffle. That leaves Amy Adams in Enchanted, a star-making performance by a previous nominee in a hit movie that's still fresh in people's minds.

Best Director:
Paul Thomas Anderson, There Will Be Blood
Joel and Ethan Coen, No Country for Old Men
Tony Gilroy, Michael Clayton
Sean Penn, Into the Wild
Julian Schnabel, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

At this point, Best Director is the Coens' to lose. Even if someone else takes home Best Picture, I think it's still their year in this category. I also think the Directors Branch will be impressed by Sean Penn's metamorphosis into serious filmmaker, as well as Schnabel's unconventional, inspired filmmaking choices in Diving Bell. For this year's semi-obligatory non-Best Picture-nominated director, I'm predicting Anderson, a respected maverick whose filmmaking chops in There Will Be Blood are undeniable even if the film itself is too much for some audiences. Of the two remaining Best Picture nominees, I think Gilroy has the edge over Juno's Jason Reitman for two reasons: (1) crowd-pleasing comedies tend to get shut out of this category, and (2) Gilroy is a veteran screenwriter makes an impressive directorial debut. But don't be surprised if another "lone director" — say, Sidney Lumet for Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, or Tim Burton for Sweeney Todd — gets the nod instead.

Best Supporting Actor:
Javier Bardem, No Country for Old Men
Philip Seymour Hoffman, Charlie Wilson's War
Hal Holbrook, Into the Wild
Tommy Lee Jones, No Country for Old Men
Tom Wilkinson, Michael Clayton

In a year without Bardem, this race might have come down to Grand Old Actor Holbrook vs. veteran character actor Wilkinson. But Bardem casts a long shadow over this category, with Chigurh the creepiest villain in an Oscar-feted film since Hannibal Lecter. Charlie Wilson's War wasn't the Oscar juggernaut that it was predicted to be, but I still think Hoffman's scene-stealing turn will make it in. I think this year's biggest surprise will be the absence of Casey Affleck's performance in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Affleck's the only serious competition Bardem has had among the precursor awards, but Jesse James was a box-office flop and Affleck's performance could give voters the willies. Max Von Sydow's affecting turn in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly might have had a chance here — as a means of honoring one of the world's most esteemed actors and, by extension, his recently-departed longtime collaborator Ingmar Bergman — except that he might not have enough screentime to be a contender. Instead, I'm giving the edge to Jones, an Academy favorite who came roaring back this year to give two acclaimed performances after a decade's worth of commercial crap.

Best Supporting Actress:
Cate Blanchett, I'm Not There
Catherine Keener, Into the Wild
Kelly MacDonald, No Country for Old Men
Amy Ryan, Gone Baby Gone
Tilda Swinton, Michael Clayton

Once again, three names keep popping up in this category: Blanchett, Ryan, and Swinton. I think they'll all get nominated, though who will win remains to be seen (early shot-in-the-dark prediction: a Swinton upset). The other two spots are less certain. But consider that, more than any other category, the Best Supporting Actress nominees are largely composed of performers who starred opposite other Oscar nominees. In this respect, I think contenders such as Ruby Dee in American Gangster, Marisa Tomei in Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, and especially Saoirse Ronan in Atonement, are at a disadvantage here. Instead, I'm predicting the fourth spot to go to Catherine Keener, getting her third nomination in this category for her moving turn in Into the Wild. The final slot comes down to Jennifer Garner in Juno and Kelly MacDonald in No Country for Old Men. Despite Garner's greater name recognition, I'm giving the edge to MacDonald, both for No Country's frontrunner status and for playing one of Oscar's favorite characters, the supportive, long-suffering wife. But honestly, it could go either way.

Watch for the Oscar nominations tomorrow, January 22. And remember, nobody knows anything.

Inspired by a True Story, and Improved On

Phil Nugent — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Ann Hornaday measures the differing approaches to factual accuracy in recent movies claiming to be "based on a true story", an old-fashioned turn of phrase that has of late been retrofitted to read "inspired by true events", or even, in the case of I'm Not There, "Inspired by the music & many lives of Bob Dylan." Historical inaccuracy in historical movies is nothing new--Cecil D. DeMille told a few stretchers in his time--and it's not always reprehensible. Hornaday writes that "Accuracy is the great bugaboo of biopics and historical dramas, whose standards of success lie in how well they tell a story, not how closely they adhere to the facts. Filmmakers should excise, compress and invent -- in other words, lie -- only when they have to, and only to support, rather than weaken, the story's factual, historical framework." Still, some of the decisions filmmakers make can leave you guessing; what notion of larger truth did Ridley Scott think he was serving with American Gangster, when he chose to alter the private life and personal style of the drug dealer Frank Lucas to make him seem classier and more admirable, while at the same time cooking up a phony, messy back story for the cop who arrested Lucas to turn him into a dysfunctional slob? Whatever their motives, filmmakers as a rule seem to have no problem heeding the words of Kasi Lemmons, whose recent Talk to Me was criticized by survivors of its real-life hero, Petey Green, and who had a ready answer as to why she hadn't sought them out or read Green's autobiography: "I thought I might get distracted with too much reality."

Making Movies, Singing Songs, and Tanking 'Round the World

Phil Nugent — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 20:00:00 GMT

Forbes magazine has crunched the numbers and concluded that the most overpaid star in Hollywood — literally, in terms of how much she’s paid as it compares to how much good her presence onscreen seems to do her movies at the box office—-is Nicole Kidman. What’s that, you say? The talented and discerning star of Cold Mountain, The Human Stain, Eyes Wide Shut, Bewitched, The Interpreter, Fur, The Invasion, Birth, The Stepford Wives, overpaid? David Thomson can’t imagine how anyone could entertain such a churlish notion, but apparently if you run the numbers by someone who can count, it turns out that Big Red’s movies have been earning the studios a return of about eight bucks for every dollar she’s been getting paid--and Kidman got paid fifteen million dollars for her most recent release, The Golden Compass, a fantastically expensive movie intended to serve as the platform for a franchise, though it's proven such a disappointment that it may be lucky to inspire a direct-to-video sequel. She does show a better return than her countryman Russell Crowe, who earned the studios five dollars for every dollar he was paid on such ironically titled duds as Cinderella Man and A Good Year. But Crowe, who maintains a less slavish work schedule than Kidman, has lashed himself to fewer anchors in the last few years, and his current hit, American Gangster, is doing so well, even before the home-video revenues have started rolling in, that much will be forgiven. The usual response to this kind of talk from a star's camp is that a star can only do so much with the material he or she has to work with, and anyway, do you think that a movie like Fur would have done kickass business if it hadn't had Kidman's frosty mug on the poster? In the meantime, as Forbes notes, the golden boy of the moment in Hollywood is Judd Apatow, who’s been behind two modestly budgeted major hits (Knocked Up and Superbad) that didn’t have any stars at all and may have a third before the year is over if Walk Hard with John C. Reilly opens big. Of course, one reason that Apatow’s starless pictures make so much money, even after being subjected to the surreal rigors of Hollywood accounting, is that his budgets aren’t inflated from having to pay one actor fifteen to twenty million dollars right off the bat.

When Good Directors Go Bad: 1492: Conquest of Paradise (1992, Ridley Scott)

Peter Smith — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 18:00:00 GMT

The setup: To celebrate the 500th anniversary of Columbus' discovery of the New World, Paramount Pictures needed a filmmaker who could be counted upon to create a handsome and commercial film about the great man and his momentous voyage. Who better than Ridley Scott, a dependable stylist best known for Alien and Blade Runner, and whose faltering career had been revived the prior year with the critical and audience favorite Thelma and Louise?

What went wrong: Scott, for all his directing skill, has always been a journeyman, making films from material originated by others. Because of this, the screenplays are usually the keys to his films' success. While no one would deny that Columbus' story lends itself well to cinema, the 1492 script (credited to Roselyne Bosch) simply isn't very good, and Scott was unfortunately unable to cover that up with style.

One problem was the film's conception of Columbus himself. The real-life Columbus was a forward-thinking man, but he was also highly ambitious, and the film glosses over this aspect of his personality. Instead of a portrait of a man driven by his nature to seek greatness, 1492 gives us Columbus, the passionate idealist, selflessly dreaming of the future. The film's star, Gerard Depardieu, could have given us a fierce, larger-than-life Columbus, but he's largely called upon to play twinkly-eyed in the early scenes and disillusioned in the later ones.

Additionally, even with a two-and-a-half-hour running time, 1492 feels rushed. One never really feels the strain of the long ocean voyages — after the first one, Scott does away with them altogether. Likewise, character development is largely dictated through tonsorial choices — whereas Columbus shares the shaggy look of the men he commands, the bad guys invariably sport eccentric, intricate beards and hairdos. The most surprising thing about the violent, sneeringly-entitled nobleman Moxica (played by Michael Wincott) is that he doesn't have a mustache to twirl along with his Slayer-worthy flowing black hair. And Sigourney Weaver, playing Queen Isabella, has so little to work with that she mostly looks lost.

Finally, a lot of the film is hard to take seriously. Consider the scene in which a fist fight breaks out in a monastery; or the hurricane sequence, during which Columbus' native translator runs away after admonishing him, "You never learned my language;" or practically every scene involving Moxica or the sinister judge Bobadilla (Mark Margolis). 1492 tried to be the definitive Columbus movie, but the best it could manage was to be the best Columbus movie of 1992, and since the competition was Christopher Columbus: The Discovery, that's nothing to write home about.

The fallout: 1492: Conquest of Paradise failed with critics and bombed at the box office, and Scott floundered for the rest of the decade before he came roaring back with 2000's Best Picture Oscar-winner Gladiator. His most recent film, American Gangster, is currently in theatres.

— Paul Clark

American Gangster vs. Mr. Untouchable

Peter Smith — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 19:00:00 GMT

A few weeks ago, we reported here on the ongoing rivalry between Nicky Barnes and Frank Lucas, who were both drug dealers in the New York of the 1970s. Both men were eventually arrested and imprisoned, after which both turned snitch, ratted out their former associates, and are both now "retired" and back out in the world. This is of interest to us mainly because both men are also the subjects of movies — the high-profile Ridley Scott epic American Gangster and the documentary Mr. Untouchable — that opened within a week of each other. As part of the publicity for each movie, both men have been granting interviews in which they've talked about the bad old days and also jockeyed for position as the real ultimate big-city badass of their era. But of course, given the Screen Grab's recognized and unquestioned authority on movies and everything else fly, they have both secretly been sitting on the edge of their seats, nervously waiting to hear what we think. First, just to state the obvious and get it out of the way: both men are sociopathic predators and dishonored tattletales, who should in no way be mistaken for glamorous figures or role models. But a job's a job. There can be only one.

THE MOVIE: American Gangster, directed by Ridley Scott; written by Steve Zaillian

OUR HERO: Frank Lucas, as played by Denzel Washington, is a smooth, well-dressed powder keg of an urban entrepreneur, more Fortune 500 than Detroit 9000. The only time he casts off his smart suits is to attend the Ali-Frazier fight in a white Super Fly ensemble that sits on him about as comfortably as tight jeans and a wifebeater might have on Cary Grant. (The movie stresses that this was his wife's idea; after the clown clothes earn Frank some unwanted attention, he goes right home and literally throws them in the fireplace.) Though Washington gets to have a few violent tantrums — and, in a moment of purely calculated coldness, lays claim to supremacy on his turf by casually shooting a rival in the head in front of about a hundred witnesses — the performance has none of the scary volatility of his bad cop in Training Day. The movie seems to want you to like him, and to make sure the mainstream audience likes him, it defines his ambitions in terms of upper-middle class acquisition: a beautiful wife and home, a nice place for his momma (Ruby Dee), a low profile.

HIS BETE NOIRE: Nicky Barnes is played here by Cuba Gooding, Jr., which is kind of a slap in the face right there. Actually, as is often the case, Gooding's acting is much better than his track record at selecting his roles. He's brooding and charismatic, albeit in a ridiculous, coked-up way. He goes in for the Super Fly flashiness that Frank rejects. At one point, he's seen at a party proudly handing out copies of The New York Times Magazine with his picture on the cover — a nod to an actual incident that insiders will recognize as having marked the beginning of the end for Barnes. It was after seeing Barnes's posed picture on the cover, alongside the legend "Mr. Untouchable", that President Carter got on the phone to the Justice Department and ordered them to make Barnes priority number one.

THE MILIEU: Production-designed to death but with little sense of breathable air, American Gangster recalls the Elvis Mitchell line about applying grit with an aerosol can. The most disappointing thing about it is that the fine supporting cast is largely wasted; there's really nobody in the movie but Washington as Lucas and Russell Crowe as Richie Roberts, the New Jersey police detective on his trail. Scott inflates their starry icons until they blot out the sun, as well as the supporting actors.

THE END: No spoiler warning here; the fact that Lucas (like Barnes) was busted and turned state's witness has been widely reported in the publicity surrounding the movie. What counts is how the moviemakers treat this less-than-heroic aspect of their story. It must be said that they wimp out. In real life, not only did Lucas sing for a reduced sentence, but the actual Richie Roberts retired from the force to become a defense attorney and accepted a fat fee from Lucas to represent him at trial. The way the movie presents it, the drug dealer and the good cop join forces because they recognize a common enemy: the bad cops who have been making Roberts's life miserable while shaking down Lucas. The movie comes dangerously close to presenting Lucas as just a successful businessman who made himself rich the only way white society would allow him to do it, and whose testimony against others wipes the slate clean.

THE MOVIE: Mr. Untouchable, directed by Marc Levin

OUR HERO: Nicky Barnes, who details his life while protectively photographed in shadows. Much of the time, we only see his bony, expressive hands working as he tells his tale and offers his justifications for what he's done. He lived big, and now it's over, but no matter what he says, he leaves you with the feeling that he thinks it was worth it. He offers a compelling picture of a megalomaniacal sociopath who's outlived the good times.

HIS BETE NOIRE: Whereas American Gangster treats Nicky Barnes as a fact of life in Frank Lucas's world, someone who may be treated dismissively but cannot be ignored, Lucas is only mentioned glancingly in Mr. Untouchable, Barnes speaks of him with the contempt one usually reserves for something unpleasant that's gotten stuck to one's shoe, and mocks the idea that Frank would ever have done anything so disrespectful as to have put out a contract on him, as Lucas has claimed. Also, a single photograph of Lucas is briefly shown. He's wearing the same stupid-looking coat and hat that Denzel wears on fight night, and to say that he at least looks at home in that getup is to acknowledge that he doesn't look very Denzelesque.

THE MILIEU: Since Mr. Untouchable is a documentary about people who weren't often recording their illegal activities with camcorders, much of the period atmosphere must be laid in with old news footage and photos and such, but it does have what American Gangster sorely needs, and what every good crime picture thrives on: a teeming and colorful supporting cast. That includes not just Barnes's former colleagues (one of whom is named Frank James) and his ex-wife, Thelma Grant, whose picture ought to be in the dictionary next to the entry on "gangsta love", but such characters as Bob Geronimo, who walked into the offices of the DEA to volunteer his services as an undercover informant and bring Barnes's and his whole organization down after one of Barnes's lieutenants, seriously underestimating the man's ability to hold a grudge, stole his car. (Geronimo's code name on the operation was "Barbarino", as in John Travolta's character on Welcome Back, Kotter. This information is supplied by a fed who adds that he was never clear on why somebody whose real name was "Geronimo" needed a code name.) Incidentally, Geronimo and others who worked to bring Barnes down agreed to be filmed in full light, which makes or a sly, unspoken comment on Barnes's preferring to linger in shadows. The filmmakers also interviewed Barnes' lawyer, David Breitbart, who supplies his version of the New York Times Magazine cover picture story: he had advised Barnes not to co-operate with the paper and told the photographers to stay the hell away from his client until A. M. Rosenthal himself called up and informed him that unless Barnes agreed to come in to pose, they'd use the mug shot he had taken after he was arrested for murder, a photo that was taken after he was roused from bed in the middle of the night "and it looks like he ate the victim's eyeballs."

THE END: The movie doesn't try to sell Barnes's decision to testify against others as a heroic crime-busting operation, but it makes it seem something other than cowardly by stressing that it was, in fact, an act of revenge: rightly or wrongly, Barnes felt that those still on the outside (including his wife) were screwing him over and wanted payback. He broke his whole operation himself just to show how bad he was. The movie also differs from American Gangster by balancing his say with the testimony of those he turned on.

THE VERDICT: It seems clear that of the two gentlemen in question, Nicky Barnes is the more deserving of the title Mr. Ultimate Seventies Badass Heroin Dealer Turned Squealer. His mother must be so proud.

— Phil Nugent

Britain's First Black Movie Star

Peter Smith — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 17:00:00 GMT

It seems incredible that such a figure would emerge as late as 2007, but that’s what the U.K. press is calling Chiwetel Ejiofor. As if apologizing for their role in the whole mess, the Telegraph feels obligated to explain why, though the actor has had hit after hit in Britain, they still feel it necessary to tell readers how his name is pronounced. In the piece, Ejiofor — currently starring Stateside in American Gangster — comes across as a thoughtful, cautious, quietly compelling man whose dedication to Method (though he never calls it that) extends to deciding how high a character would wear his shirt buttoned. He discusses the tragic loss of his father at a young age, his bewilderment at being dubbed a movie star, and how he happened to become an actor — "I don’t actually know how to do anything else," he admits. — Leonard Pierce

Jay-Z At The Movies

Peter Smith — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 21:00:00 GMT

In his music, Jay-Z has always quoted and referenced his favorite gangster movies, from Scarface and Carlito's Way to the 1992 banger's character drama South Central. His new album, American Gangster, was "inspired" by the new movie of the same name; it mixes Jay-Z's raps and samples from the picture to tell the story of Frank Lucas, the old-school high roller played by Denzel Washington. It's not the first time that Jay-Z has experimented with music as movies, and vice versa; as Kelefa Sanneh writes, "in the late 1990s Jay-Z did American Gangster in reverse when he used a handful of his tracks as the basis for Streets Is Watching, a mini-feature. (It’s essentially a hip-hop musical starring Jay-Z, and it proves that hearing him rap about murder is much more fun than watching him pretend to commit it.)" The new project also gives him a chance — sometimes wittily, sometimes maybe not so much — to point up some of the contradictions and ironies implicit in hip-hop attitudes regarding self-styled Super Flys like Lucas. At one point, Jay-Z likens himself to Lucas in terms of utter coolness but feels compelled to add, "Like Frank Lucas is cool, but I ain’t tryna snitch." Does this mean that he forgives Lucas for having made his money off the drug addicts of Harlem, but not for having turned state's witness? — Phil Nugent

Today in the Nerve Film Lounge/From the Nerve Film Issue

Peter Smith — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 16:00:00 GMT

In the Film Lounge:

American Gangster: "It's not just that other movies and TV shows have been here. It's that they've done it better."

Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten: Review coming soon.

Help!: "It's the weakest Beatles movie, but that's not to deny its pleasures."

And from the Nerve Film Issue:

The Manhood Behind the Mustache: Ada Calhoun interviews Rob Perri, the director of a gonzo "documentary" about Mets legend Keith Hernandez.

To Sleep With Anger: Bilge Ebiri traces the long, strange career of Kenneth Anger.

Character Types: Nicole Ankowski figures out which Drew Barrymore or John Cusack archetype you're dating.

We're All Replicants Here: I finally get to wax rhapsodic about Blade Runner.

— Peter Smith

American Gangsters' Reunion

Peter Smith — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 18:00:00 GMT

Movie screens are about to be awash in black crime lords from the 1970s, what with the imminent release of Ridley Scott's American Gangster, starring Denzel Washington as Frank Lucas, and Mark Levin's documentary Mr. Untouchable, about Leroy "Nicky" Barnes. Lucas and Barnes were high-rollers and business competitors thirty years ago; now both are retired and living in the witness protection program, having turned for the government when their backs were against the wall. In Barnes's case, he can boast of having been broken under direct orders from the president of the United States; Jimmy Carter reportedly turned the dogs on him after reading a 1977 New York Times Magazine article on the drug kingpin's "untouchable" status and deciding, that ain't right.

This week in the Los Angeles Times, Robert W. Welkos catches up with with the seventy-four-year-old Barnes and finds that he's interested in maintaining his legacy; he's upset about the high-profile movie starring Denzel Washington as his old rival. "Hollywood is so full of baloney," he told Mark Levin. "They got it all upside down. [Lucas] and his 'countryboys,' they didn't run New York, I did." Levin was able to use that to convince Barnes to cooperate and be interviewed for his movie. But Levin says that when Barnes and Levin hooked up recently to discuss the good old days, "Their conversation, if I could characterize it a little, was like a reunion of fraternity brothers." (They also bonded over presidential politics. Rudy Giuliani will be delighted to hear that both men are ready to give him their endorsement.) Less eager to let bygones be bygones and shoot the shit are the old cronies whom Barnes ratted out as part of his deal with the Feds. Many of these guys had already filmed interviews with Levin before he managed to rack down Barnes; how did they react to the news that he would be sharing the screen with them? "There were some heated discussions," is how Levin describes it. — Phil Nugent