The Screengrab : john patrick shanley

Screengrab Predicts the Oscars: Nominations (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 22:45:00 GMT

BEST DIRECTOR

Scott Von Doviak Predicts:

NOMINEES
Danny Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire)
David Fincher (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button)
Ron Howard (Frost/Nixon)
Christopher Nolan (The Dark Knight)
Gus Van Sant (Milk)

David Fincher got respectable with Benjamin Button. Gus Van Sant did the same with Milk. Ron Howard is always an Academy favorite, so he should be there for Frost/Nixon. Danny Boyle put on a show in Slumdog Millionaire. The final slot is up for grabs, but I think Christopher Nolan has the best shot for The Dark Knight.

WINNER
Danny Boyle

Sarah Clyne Sundberg Predicts:

NOMINEES
Danny Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire)
Ron Howard (Frost/Nixon)
Charlie Kaufmann (Synecdoche, NY)
Christopher Nolan (The Dark Knight)
Gus Van Sant (Milk)

Charlie Kaufman will be nominated for Synecdoche, NY because it is a director's movie. However that will feel too forced of a winner, so Gus Van Sant will win for Milk. That is, unless the Academy goes with escapism in these trying times and Christopher Nolan wins for The Dark Knight. If the latter transpires, it will be one of those head-scratching moments when the reel of past winners rolls at future Awards shows. There is no way Danny Boyle will come in from left field and win for Slumdog Millionaire, but the Academy will want to show that they appreciate a good movie, so will nominate him anyway. Ron Howard will be thrown a nomination for engaging the Nixon presidency, a national trauma that we like to think seems timely.

WINNER
Gus Van Sant

Paul Clark Predicts:

NOMINEES
Danny Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire)
David Fincher (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button)
Christopher Nolan (The Dark Knight)
Andrew Stanton (WALL*E)
Gus Van Sant (Milk)

It’s rare for a Best Director shortlist to double the Best Picture nominees five-for-five, and of the Best Picture nominations I’m predicting, Frost/Nixon feels the least like a “director’s movie.” But who takes Ron Howard’s place? If The Wrestler catches on with the voters beyond a couple of acting nominations, Darren Aronofsky might place here -- likewise The Reader’s Stephen Daldry and Happy-Go-Lucky’s Mike Leigh, both two-time directing nominees. As always, one shouldn’t count out Clint Eastwood. But I’m going out on a limb here and predicting WALL*E director Andrew Stanton, as a nomination here would give Academy members a chance to recognize the film outside of its inevitable Best Animated Feature win, thereby making him the first director ever nominated for an animated film. As for the winner, bet on Fincher to win even if the film doesn’t, as the epic scope and classically-inflected style of Button should prove to be right up the voters’ collective alley.

WINNER
David Fincher

Andrew Osborne Predicts:

NOMINEES
Danny Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire)
David Fincher (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button)
Ron Howard (Frost/Nixon)
Christopher Nolan (The Dark Knight)
Gus Van Sant (Milk)

We made our Director predictions before the announcement of the DGA awards, so we’re all flying a little blind in this category. Ron Howard was Opie and Frost/Nixon was good, so he seems like an even-money bet. Christopher Nolan will surely ride The Dark Knight wave, and folks seem enamored of the creepy old man baby (and, I suppose, the swoony, melancholy romance) of Benjamin Button, so I reckon the powers-that-be might finally be ready to forgive David Fincher for Alien³. Whether or not his film receives a Best Picture nod, Danny Boyle will probably get nominated...because if directing means wrangling a zillion elements (including half the population of Mumbai) into a coherent, entertaining auteurial vision, then Boyle certainly directed the shit outta Slumdog Millionaire. And finally, I guess I have to go with Gus Van Sant for Milk, even though it means I just basically wound up parroting all the predictions in Entertainment Weekly. As for the actual winner...hmm. Though I think Dark Knight’s gonna win Best Picture, it’s still basically just an action film (no, really...it’s just an action film, people). Howard, Fincher and Boyle did fine work, but Van Sant has passion on his side and managed to get a labor of love to the finish line (after many failed attempts by previous players) so: him.

WINNER
Gus Van Sant

Leonard Pierce Predicts:

NOMINATIONS

Jonathan Demme (Rachel Getting Married)
Clint Eastwood (Changeling)
Ron Howard (Frost/Nixon)
Sam Mendes (Revolutionary Road)
John Patrick Shanley (Doubt)

Clint’s gonna get nominated for something, and please God don’t let it be for the damn-kids-get-off-my-lawn disaster Gran Torino. Demme gets the ‘year of the comeback’ nomination for Rachel Getting Married, and Shanley will pick up a nom since the Academy has a weakness for directors who aren’t really directors. It’ll come down to a slugfest between Mendes and Howard, who’s finally made a movie worth nominating, and I think, in a year that won’t see any big sweep winners, that Revolutionary Road will get Mr. Kate Winslet the big prize. BIGGEST SCREWJOB: Hollywood isn’t quite ready to welcome back Gus Van Sant, and Benjamin Button is the least David Fincherish movie David Fincher has ever directed, so they’ll get passed over.

WINNER
Sam Mendes

SCREENGRAB CONSENSUS: NOMINEES
DANNY BOYLE, DAVID FINCHER, RON HOWARD, CHRISTOPHER NOLAN, GUS VAN SANT

SCREENGRAB CONSENSUS: WINNER
GUS VAN SANT

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Four & Six

Contributors: Paul Clark, Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Sarah Clyne Sundberg, Scott Von Doviak

Meryl Streep Don't Take Nun of Your Crap in "Doubt"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 18:00:00 GMT

John Patrick Shanley's Doubt is one of the most unusual pieces of Oscar bait laid out before the public this holiday season. Based on Shanley's play of the same name, which is set in a Catholic school in the Bronx in 1964, and which the playwright-filmmaker has managed to transpose to the screen with every bit as much style and as full a grasp of the movie medium as one expects from the director of Joe vs. the Volcano. Superficially, at first glance, it appears to be a simply a filmed version of the play. The text is the blueprint for a naturalistic acting contest in which the four main characters dance around each other, trying to determine what, if anything, Father Flynn did with little Donald Miller in the rectory with the communion wine. However, in an audacious choice, the movie subtly shifts into a science fiction fantasy, about how a stable-seeming institution is driven insane by the presence in it midst of an alien intruder. This major change is entirely the work of one of the principal performers, Meryl Streep, who plays the unforgivingly snoopy old nun who has Father Flynn's backside in her rifle scope, and who makes it clear from her entrance, trailing alongside the benches stuffed with children attending a service and leaving a path of popping eyes and frightened mugging in her wake, that the character is...not of our world. Just as the movie seeks to keep viewers in...doubt!!--as to whether or not Father Flynn has been a dirty, dirty boy, it never spells out just what universe Sister Aloysius Beauvier may have come from, or to what species she might belong. (Her name is a grim indication of the flailing effort she has made at self-invention since coming to live among the humans; presumably, having entered our world from God knows what unguarded cosmic border, she adopted the name of the dead president's widow.)

Is she an extraterrestrial? Or is she a distant cousin of the Wicked Witch of the West, having fled Oz steps ahead of the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman's Republican Guard? While that possibility might be a stretch, Streep's ever increasing resemblance to Margaret Hamilton automatically brings it to mind. It's only a physical resemblance, because Margaret Hamilton was a much subtler performer. But the mysterious dialect that sometimes slips through when Sister Aloysius can't think of a word in what she would call "Earth language" to convey what she means might be Oz-speech, or it could just as easily be something spoken on the Moons of Tralfamadore. In one key scene, Sister Aloysius goes on a desk-raiding expedition while her helpless Earth slave--played by Amy Adams, her fair face a trembling mask of horror--stands by. Pulling a bag out of the desk, Streep cries triumphantly, "Khye! Yandi!" Adams, taking her life in her hands, fearfully points out that the bag only contains cough drops. "Khye! Yandi!..by another name!" Streep retorts. The audience thus learns that in Sister Aloysius's home world, "Khye! Yandi!" is a ritual exclanation made whenever someone detects the presence of something sweet, or what we Earthlings call "candy". The movie, which never shows Sister Aloysius greeting a spaceship to take her home or chugging live frogs or doing whatever it is that those of her kind do to take nourishment, is almost grudging in the slivers of information it offers about Sister Aloysius, so much so that, if you watched it after being up for forty-eight hours straight while messed up on cough syrup and with a hat pulled low over your eyes and listening to the ball game on the radio with headphones, you might just think that it was about the weirdest nun in the world and not fully grasp that there's no way in hell that a serious, trained professional like Streep could have ever intended the good sister to be taken for a member of the human race. The movie's reticence on the point of Streep's inhuman freakishness ultimately makes it a much more disturbing experience than if she has ever actually pulled off a rubber mask to reveal the lizard face beneath.

Having consulted David Thomson, I am forced to conclude that there is no term for a performance that single-handedly upends a movie by completely changing the context of the movie lucky enough to contain it, and any discussion of Christopher Walken's career is surely poorer for that. But Streep's performance in Doubt is not wholly without precedent. Perhaps the most famous example in recent years was Tim Robbins's Night Gallery-style performance in Clint Eastwood's Mystic River. Playing a character who was abducted as a child, Robbins, pop-eyed and trembling throughout, created suspense by transforming the key mystery of the film into just what had been returned to his family in place of the boy who had been taken away. Did the two even share the same body? It might have been less horrifying to speculate that what had grown into Robbins was cobbled together from scratch by his kidnappers before they returned to their mold-encrusted tomb or faraway planet. The movie provided only the most nightmare-inducing, tantalizing hint of what it could be like to live with this thing, in the person of his nerve-racked wife, played by Marcia Gay Hardin, who looked ready to jump out of her skin at the slightest sound and spoke as she supported herself dubbing lines for Tweety Bird. Frustratingly, the film kept waving the mystery of Robbins's zoological classification--was he vampire, zombie, local chief organizer for Nader in 2004--while actually focusing on the far less intriguing question of whether he not he had killed Sean Penn's daughter in the course of his ghoulish nightly rounds. Several years earlier, Eastwood had directed, and starred himself in, White Hunter, Black Heart, playing a role modeled on John Huston. This central piece of casting transformed what should have been a movie about a charming scared monster of a worldy movie director into a movie about the fleeting wish of a guy who became rich and world famous for the casual ease with which he dropped extras into their coffins to appear dashing and debonair, and also to talk as if cacti were blooming in his larynx. He couldn't bring off the former, but the latter as come to him quite naturally in the years since.

William Hurt's ninth-inning appearance in A History of Violence did a nice job of turning a mostly sober-sided movie into The Three Stooges Meet John Gotti. John Turturro's comic relief performance in Transformers, complete with whimsically deployed underwear, occupies its own realm with natural laws all its own. Then there is the matter of late Brando. Actually, many of the movies in which late Brando was permitted to run amok had so little identity without him that it would be silly to make too much of the way that his presence turned, say, The Missouri Breaks into Late Brando Kills Cowboys. Then there's the 1996 version of The Island of Dr. Moreau. Here the chief mischief maker is actually Val Kilmer, playing the dope-addled chief assistant to the title character, played by Brando in the fey, epicene manner that he had deployed more than thirty years earlier in the remake of Mutiny on the Bounty, complete with sorta-English accent. In Moreau, after Brando's character is killed, Kilmer tries to mollify the doctor's murderous, ravening creations by dressing up as the Doc and imitating him over the loudspeaker system. However, Kilmer doesn't imitate Brando's character in the movie but instead does his best after-hours impersonation of the Brando of Stanley Kowalksi, Terry Malloy, etc. What sense the critters onscreen could be expected to make of this we cannot know, but for the people in the theater, it turns the movie into a Val Kilmer production entitled Late Brando, Early Brando, and Whichever Brando Cut Ahead of Me at the Catering Table Can All Kiss My Ass.

For me, the all-time king of these kinds of performances will always be, not Brando or Kilmer or Streep or even Walken, but Wings Hauser, the high-spirite musician and soap opera veteran who menaced half the hookers in L.A. in Vice Squad, turned Richard Pryor onto cocaine in Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling, and abused his position as the police chief of Provincetown more than one might have thought possible in the Norman Mailer-directed spree Tough Guys Don't Dance. Unless handled carefully, say with large animal tranquilizers, Hauser always approaches his roles as if he had been employed to engage in hand-to-hand combat with Godzilla while the people of Tokyo gaze on amazement. His profile in movies has receded in recent years, and the film scene is saner but poorer for that.

The Very Private Public Philip Seymour Hoffman

Phil Nugent — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 17:30:00 GMT

In a long profile published as the cover story of The New York Times Magazine, Lynn Hirschberg nominates Philip Seymour Hoffman as the leading character actor of our day. Lord knows he can't be faulted on effort. At 41, Hoffman still divides his time between stage and screen and can be seen in two big movies released this fall, Synecdoche, NY and Doubt--down one from this time last year, when he could be seen in Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, The Savages, and Charlie Wilson's War. He's also "a very active co-artistic director of the LAByrinth Theater Company, a multicultural collective in New York that specializes in new American plays. LAB mounted five productions last year, thanks in large part to Hoffman’s diligent involvement with every aspect of the process, from fund-raising to directing to acting." Hirschberg caught up with him in London, directing a West End production of a play called Riflemind, which he had previously staged in Australia. "“I don’t get nervous when I’m directing a play," Hoffman told Hirschberg. It’s not like acting. If this fails, I wouldn’t be as upset by it.” Incidentally, Riflemind was written by Andrew Upton, who's Mr. Cate Blanchett, who, like Hoffman, was in the cast of The Talented Mr.Ripley. "“On that movie," Hoffman recalled, "we shot only one or two days a week,” Hoffman recalled. “Much of the time, I was in Rome with Cate and Andrew. I have a hard time having fun, but that was heaven. And I must really like Andrew — my girlfriend, who is in New York, is about to have our third child, and I am here.”

Whatever else he's had going on in his personal or professional life these past twelve months, so far as movies are concerned, for Hoffman 2008 was probably the year of Synecdoche, Charlie Kaufman's dizzyingly ambitious dark comedy about the promise of making sense of life through creativity and the dangers of living in your head. Hardly a universally acclaimed, unblemished success, it's one of the few recent movies that seemed worthy of some of the arguments it inspired. “There were days when I was three different ages,” Hoffman says of the production. “I’d be married, and then two hours later my family would be dead. Charlie seemed to be interested in the idea of life moving faster as you age. And the fear of missed opportunities. In life, do you ever really know if you’re missing an opportunity? No, you really don’t. And you’re never really finished either, unless the finish is dying, and you don’t really want to think about that too much.” “Phil is hard to know,” John Patrick Shanley told Hirschberg. “Phil and his longtime girlfriend, Mimi [O’Donnell], came to a party at my house, and he had on three coats and a hat. I said, ‘Take off one of your coats; it’s hot in here.’ His girlfriend said, ‘He’ll maybe take it off in a half-hour.’ It’s such an obvious metaphor, but Phil has a protective cocoon that he sheds very slowly." Shanley wrote and directed Hoffman's other current movie, Doubt. So it's not as if he isn't an expert on obvious metaphors. “Sometimes," says Hoffman, looking back fondly on the days he spent lounging around the set of Todd Solondz's Happiness, jerking off in his boxer shorts, "acting is a really private thing that you do for the world.”

Trailer Review: Doubt

Paul Clark — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Now that the Toronto Film Festival is over, it’s safe to say that Oscar-bait season has begun in earnest. And make no mistake, John Patrick Shanley’s adaptation of his celebrated stage play Doubt has Oscars in its sights, its acclaimed source material populated with an impressive, Academy-friendly cast (Streep! Hoffman! Adams!). But the film doesn’t look remotely like a slog, at least not judging by this trailer. I’ve been a longtime defender of Shanley’s previous directorial effort, 1990’s Joe Versus the Volcano, a highly original film that finally seems to have found its deserved cult. So I’m glad that Miramax has allowed Shanley to direct this film himself, trusting in his knowledge of the material and its possibilities. I especially like the way the story has been kept in the 1960s, when racism was still prevalent in our society and the sweeping reforms of Vatican II were still recent and controversial. Without these two elements, the story just wouldn't work in the same way, and I can imagine a filmmaker less attuned to the material disastrously making these changes. For a while, I wasn’t sure how Doubt would turn out, but this trailer has gotten me pretty excited.

Oscar's Next Show

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 17:30:00 GMT

Some people just can't get too much of a good thing. With one of the most enriching movie years in history behind us, and one of the most highly anticipated Academy Awards in decades less than a week old, Scott Feinberg's 'And The Winner Is' blog is finally looking ahead to...

...the 2009 Oscars.

That's right, folks: just because none of these movies have been seen yet — just because most of them, indeed, have not even been made yet — doesn't mean the LA Times' irrepressible scamp isn't going to go ahead and handicap them for their chances of taking home Oscar Gold a little over a year from now.

Although Feinberg approaches this ridiculous effort with tongue at least partially in cheek, that doesn't mean he's not somewhat dismayingly comprehensive in his look at whose names might be prominent come Oscar eve '09. Among his choices as early, early, unbelievably early favorites: Benecio del Toro for Best Actor as Che Guevara in Steven Soderbergh's The Argentine; Julianne Moore for Best Actress in Blindness; John Patrick Shanley for the screenplay of Doubt, an adaptation of his own play; Gus Van Sant for directing Sean Penn in Milk, the life story of the assassinated gay rights activist and San Francisco city supervisor; and any number of high-profile performances from Kate Winslet.

Okay, Scott, okay... but can't we elect a President first?

That Guy!: Dan Hedaya

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 16:30:00 GMT

You know, folks, it's really not my intention for this feature to just go through a list of everyone who's ever worked with the Coen Brothers or appeared in Buckaroo Banzai, but that's the way it seems to be shaking down. Some people just share my appreciation of freaky-looking middle-aged guys who behave eccentrically, I suppose. Anyway, Dan Hedaya's first movie role was in Myra Breckenridge, but don't hold that against him: not only did he go one to have a beloved television career, most prominently as the dull-witted Nick Tortelli on Cheers, but he's also appeared in nearly a hundred movies, usually as some variety of dolt or sleazebag. 1999 saw him combine the two, playing doltish sleazebag Richard M. Nixon in Dick and fulfilling a sort of physical destiny: with his weighty jowls, shifty eyes, and perpetual five-o'-clock shadow, he's a near spitting image of the Tricky One. Born to a family of Syrian Jews in Brooklyn, Hedaya taught junior high school science for a number of years before his acting career took off; his shuffling demeanor and absent-minded craziness is certainly reminiscient of more than a few science teachers we can remember from our own school years. Outside of television, the role which Hedaya made the biggest impact was that of Alicia Silverstone's wealthy father in Clueless; he also stole the show in the overblown, overpriced movie version of The Addams Family as Gomez's crooked, shiftless attorney, Tully Alford. Recently, as he closes out his sixties, he's specialized in playing the fathers of characters as eccentric as he is: he was Amy Sedaris' dad in the big-screen adaptation of Strangers with Candy, the patriarch of the Butabi Brothers in the dismal SNL spin-off A Night at the the Roxbury, and the father of the obsessive-compulsive detective played by Tony Shalhoub in Monk. His recent appearance in the controversial TV series The Book of Daniel shows that he won't stop shuffling into strange roles anytime soon.

Where to see Dan Hedaya at his best:

BLOOD SIMPLE (1984)

In their motion picture debut, Joel and Ethan Coen were already showing their deft touch with character actors, casting Dan Hedaya as Julian Marty, the possessive, sleazy strip club owner who stands between John Getz and Frances McDormand. Hedaya gets a rare opportunity to show off his capacity to express rage during his final confontation with Getz, and goes on to become the most persistent murder victim since Paul Meurisse in Diabolique. But all told, it's just one of the earliest examples of his long line of questionable scumbags, a man so dodgy that even ethics-deprived private dick M. Emmet Walsh finds him "disgustin'".

JOE VERSUS THE VOLCANO (1990)

John Patrick Shanley was one of Hollywood's hottest properties, coming off of a big hit with Moonstruck, when he made this rather strange little number, a suicidal romantic comedy starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan looking as uncomfortable as ever. But Dan Hedaya almost single-handedly salvages the movie with a brief but mercilessly hilarious cameo near the start of the film as the hapless, hopeless Hanks' boss. He vanishes from the movie early on and never has much impact on the plot, but he gets some of the greatest comic dialogue of any film of the year: "I know he can get the job. But can he do the job? I'm not arguing that with you!"

MUHOLLAND DRIVE (2001)

We have it on good authority that when David Lynch approached Dan Hedaya about appearing as enigmatic movie producer Vincenzo Castigliane in Mulholland Drive, he asked him: "Dan, we know you can do eccentric. We know you can do sleazy. We know you can even do creepy. But can you do completely bugshit insane?" (He can get the job, but can he do the job?) It turns out he can, and we were all rewarded with another small but scene-stealing performance in this perplexing surrealist masterpiece from a guy who knows good character actors almost as well as the Coens.