list http://www.spout.com/ Recent community activity around Doubt on Spout Copyright 2005-9 Spout, LLC Spout RSS http://www.spout.com/images/SpoutLogoRSS.jpg http://www.spout.com/ 136 30 http://www.spout.com/films/Doubt/328288/default.aspx Title: Doubt
Year: 2008
Director: John Patrick Shanley
Plot: When the principal (Meryl Streep) of a Bronx Catholic High School accuses a popular priest (Philip Seymour Hoffman) of pedophilia, a young nun caught in between the feuding pair become hopelessly swept up in the ensuing controversy. John Patrick Shanley adapts his own play for the screen under the guidance of producer Scott Rudin (The Queen, Notes on a Scandal). ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide
Times Tagged: 49
Number of Lists: 18
Number of blog posts: 12
Number of discussion threads: 3
SpoutRating: 3
]]>Thu, 07 May 2009 22:21:02 GMTDoubt2008John Patrick ShanleyWhen the principal (<a href="http://www.spout.com/players/P____68676/default.aspx" style='text-decoration:underline'>Meryl Streep</a>) of a Bronx Catholic High School accuses a popular priest (<a href="http://www.spout.com/players/P____32716/default.aspx" style='text-decoration:underline'>Philip Seymour Hoffman</a>) of pedophilia, a young nun caught in between the feuding pair become hopelessly swept up in the ensuing controversy. <a href="http://www.spout.com/players/P___110969/default.aspx" style='text-decoration:underline'>John Patrick Shanley</a> adapts his own play for the screen under the guidance of producer <a href="http://www.spout.com/players/P___109231/default.aspx" style='text-decoration:underline'>Scott Rudin</a> (<a href="http://www.spout.com/films/262835/detail.aspx" style='text-decoration:underline'>The Queen</a>, <a href="http://www.spout.com/films/262839/detail.aspx" style='text-decoration:underline'>Notes on a Scandal</a>). ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide49Tag Target (>10)181233http://www.spout.com/ProductImages/s328288.jpghttp://www.spout.com/films/Doubt/328288/default.aspxFilm http://www.spout.com/groups/Disability_On_Film/Re_Best_disabled_character/677/41277/1/ShowPost.aspx Post By: joem18b
Post To: Disability On Film
Post Date: 3/26/2009 6:45:46 PM
Body: If it's ok to be politically incorrect, I'll mention my two favorite disabled characters: God and the devil. Folks are getting so non-religious these days that it's hard for these two to get anything done anymore; they're practically crippled. Doubt is messing things up. God is stuck being George Burns or Morgan Freeman. He can act cool but you can tell he's straining. I mean, Evan Almighty was a boxoffice bomb. And Satan is in the same boat. Stuck as Harvey Keitel with Adam Sandler as his son.
]]>Thu, 26 Mar 2009 22:45:46 GMTjoem18bDisability On Film3/26/2009 6:45:46 PMIf it's ok to be politically incorrect, I'll mention my two favorite disabled characters: God and the devil. Folks are getting so non-religious these days that it's hard for these two to get anything done anymore; they're practically crippled. Doubt is messing things up. God is stuck being George Burns or Morgan Freeman. He can act cool but you can tell he's straining. I mean, Evan Almighty was a boxoffice bomb. And Satan is in the same boat. Stuck as Harvey Keitel with Adam Sandler as his son. http://www.spout.com/blogs/joem18b/archive/2009/2/24/40621.aspx Post By: joem18b
Post To: joem18b Blog
Post Date: 2/24/2009 4:28:50 PM
Body: *** COMPLETE AND THROUGHGOING SPOILERS ***Ordinarily, I wouldn't begin a review with an adverb. Ordinarily, I would watch a movie, share my thoughts, and walk on. In the case of Doubt, however, I missed the movie in the theater and now, weeks later, I'm still waiting for the DVD. The rips I've downloaded from the internets aren't of any use. Why did AXXO pass on Doubt while ripping Drillbit Taylor? It is not given to me to know. [Much later: it's all over the web now.]In the meantime, I read John Patrick Shanley's Miramax screenplay for the film version of Doubt. Having watched a trailer before reading the script, I did have La Streep and PSH acting the roles in my head, but acting them my way, perhaps not theirs. The script seemed a little thin to me, for a play that won the drama Pulitzer and a Tony in 2005.What I know about the drama Pulitzer:1. They can't just give it to Angels in America every year, over and over.2. Seemingly thin scripts can in fact hide greatness, q.v., Our Town.3. Roxanne Pulitzer posed for Playboy; I liked Paloma Picasso better. Such was the cultural training of my youth.7. It took four years for Doubt to catch up with Proof.8. Shaley received the prize but Cherry Jones and Brian O'Byrne knocking heads might have won it for him.5. "Doubt" shares its honor with, among others, "A Streetcar Named Desire," "Death of a Salesman," and "Long Day's Journey Into Night." In the same way, Mike Tyson shares his former title with, among others, Joe Lewis, Rocky Marciano, and Muhammad Ali.4. The prize isn't awarded every year. Looking for a book idea? Write one explaining why the award was withheld in the years 1919, 1942, 1944, 1947, 1951, 1963, 1964, 1966, 1968, 1972, 1974, 1986, 1997, and 2006.** Of course, in my conception, the book would be as catty as possible. Politics, rumors, scandalous rumors, and rumors that are god-damned lies welcomed. The drama-prize candidate is selected each year by a jury of five, one academic and four critics, based upon their reading of the script, or so I have always understood it. The Pulitzer Committee must then approve the jury's choice. In 1963, the Committee declined to approve Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf because of the play's sex and cussing. In 1986, the Committee overruled the jury's choice of the CIVIL warS, which as far as I know has never been performed in full (your homework: find out why). From these two examples, we can infer that the Pulitzer Committee's overrulings are generally wrongheaded. The year after Doubt, no Pulitzer was awarded. Ongoing controversy over these awards led to the creation of The New York Drama Critics' Circle, which, as it happens, also awarded Doubt the prize in 2006, and also did not award an American prize the following year. 2006 is taken by many as a lackluster year, but I've also heard more than one playgoer complain that if it isn't a New York production with Big Names in it, it won't be picked and may not even be considered. 27 plays were considered in '06 and of the three finalists chosen from these, none received a majority of votes from the 17 committee members. So maybe your no-prize book will turn out to be a bust, due to a surfeit of no-prize plays over the years; but don't let mere facts stop you, not in the weedy garden of the arts. The drama jury members who picked Doubt in 2005: Michael Phillips (Chicago Tribune—chair), Fran Dorn (University of Texas—Austin), Robert Hurwitt (San Francisco Chronicle), Charles Isherwood (New York Times), and Wendy Wasserstein (playwright). I wrote Phillips, Dorn, Hurwitt, and Isherwood, asking them an assortment of questions about their choice. (Wasserstein died of cancer in 2006.)Shanley added "a Parable" to the play's title, "Doubt, a Parable," after its introduction. My first thought was that once he had let his play cool a bit after baking, he too felt that it was thin (or short on filling under the crust, to continue the baking metaphor), and everybody knows that a parable can skimp on characterization and plot in the service of loftier goals. Just a thought. A parable is "a brief, succinct story, in prose or verse, that illustrates a moral or religious lesson. It differs from a fable in that fables use animals, plants, inanimate objects, and forces of nature as characters, while parables generally feature human characters." Do we need a parable Pulitzer? Puts me in mind of that famously short-lived category, the haiku Pulitzer. Jonathon Livingston Seagull for fable Pulitzer! 38 weeks on the NTY Best Seller list and still in print! But I digress.What do I mean by "thin"? Print out the script and read the climatic scene, pages 81 to 94. OK, wait. Let me back up and summarize the plot, in case you haven't been out of your cave since the weather turned cold. The Bronx. 1964. Catholic School. Not like Sacred Heart, where my kids went. Old School. The NBs still wear their habits. But Vatican II has happened. Some younger priests are leaning new-school; the school principal, Sister Aloyisius (Aloyisius, the patron saint of students) is old school. Father Flynn is the friendly young chaplain. He is or is not molesting the only African-American (male) student in the school, the population of which is otherwise exclusively Irish/Italian. Come to think of it, though the years have passed, Sacred Heart did recently give the boot to its own chaplain, who looked like the popular graphic version of Jesus Christ and acted a bit too much like him as well.Sister A gets on Father F's case. Shanley: "I was very interested in having a powerful character who was certain she was right chasing down a course of action that was going to do a lot of harm if she was wrong and investigating what it was to live in a world that was a clash between certainty and ambiguity." Sister Aloyisius knows that Father Flynn has abused the boy, though she has no proof. Shanley: "Oh, I do not profess to know the end of the play. The end of the play takes place after the play is over, when you go out and have a drink and you have a fight with your wife about what happened." (Schwarzenegger to his wife in Raw Deal: "You should not drink and bake.") The author has said a lot more than this, in numerous interviews.Shanley has set himself the task here of walking the line between hints of Flynn's guilt and hints of his innocence, so that we the audience might lean one way or the other but cannot ever know the truth, because the truth isn't included in this, Shanley's creation - a creation that he ends with several ambiguous flourishes. Get it? It's a whirligig. It goes round and round and it's fun to watch for a while and then it stops where it started and you go do something else. It's a gizmo. It's a construction, and the key problems in it and Shanley's solutions to those problems are to be found in the pages of the script, and they are mechanical. The Rubik's Cube Pulitzer. I also took strong exception on first reading to pages 65 through 78 - that is, to the scene in which Sister A meets with the boy's mother and in which the mother, hearing that her son is most probably being buggered by his priest, accepts the fact as she keeps her eyes on the prize, a good high school for the boy upon his graduation from St. Nicholas. Shanley the Irishman writes a black family into his play. Limns the family: physically abusive, dangerous father not to be reasoned with or disobeyed; hard-working, saintly but morally primitive mother; bent, wine-drinking son. If Shanley had been black, writing the boy and his mom as Irish, would we then instead have here a drunken, violent, bog-trotting dad; religious, potato-cooking mom with a straw broom in her hand and a sheepy look in her eyes; boy ready to break your knee with a stick? And how does an actress come to deserve an Oscar nomination for 13 pages of work in a film? Parable Oscar. (Well, the part did win Adriane Lenox a Tony.) Reality check: This is it? The best drama 2005 had to offer? Is culture zero-sum? If so, where went the talent that would allow a total equal to that of Tennessee Williams? YouTube?Whoa! Dude! Why the hate? Vitriol! Is it a Hitler speech I'm readin? Are ye turnin on yer own kind then, ladee? Buck up, boyo. Go pull yer Finnegan's Wake back out of the firegrate. Sober up. You're worse than himself this way. Maybe so, but Pineapple Express had nine times the plot that Doubt does.Ye could use a little less Pineapple Express yerself, at that, at that. Write JMJ at the top of every page of this review, with a fountain pen. What said the jury, boyo?Answering my questions about script vs staging, Michael Phillips' response included: "I've happily done jury duty for the Pulitzers four different times, and I must say, it stunned me to realize how the various jurors approached the commitment differently. One made it a point never, ever to read the scripts--for him, if he couldn't see it on stage, in New York, in time for the voting, it wasn't eligible. (Ridiculous. A New Yorker, needless to say.) Others believed differently. And yet the overseers, the members of the Pulitzer board to whom the individual juries report to, are the ones making the final decision, and there's a pretty clear pattern of awards (in two out of three cases) going to plays currently or recently on view in New York. Such was the case with "Doubt." But I have to say, that year, nothing else came close." Unlike me with my script, Charles Isherwood picked up some big ideas in Doubt as he sat in the playgoing audience, ideas conjured into being by the story and its dialog, ideas more profound than most that he had encountered in that theater seat through many a previous year, ideas, Isherwood said, hinted at by that "a Parable" in the title, ideas about taking refuge in certainty when reality is too complicated. Or, as I like to think of it, Bush vs Obama. Isherwood took Sister A's final moment quite seriously. He also detected no irony in the play. From this I deduce that Cherry Jones and Bri­an F. O'Byrne battled to a draw in the performance that he attended.Fran Dorn told me that she went strictly by the script. Some of the other things she said put the idea of writing a book about Pulitzer politics into my head.Robert Hurwitt loved the play in its original staging, but when he saw it again in a larger theater, it lost some of its depth for him. Is this an argument against the script on the page, or for it, or neither? Don't stage a close argument between four individuals on a stage at the 50-yard line of Brillo Coliseum?So I went back and read the play again. 94 pages. 90 minutes on the boards with no intermission. The movie runs 104 minutes. This time I picked up a sweet spirit present in the thing. Nobody gets hurt here. No violence. No evil or despicable characters. What was eating me when I read Doubt the first time? Shanley is writing from the heart. He dedicated the play to the Sisters of Charity and in particular to his first-grade teacher, Sister Margaret McEntee, who was the model for the young nun in the movie and who acted as a consultant on the film. Cinematographer Roger Deakins used the Sisters' school, the College of Mount Saint Vincent, and St. Anthony in the Bronx, to stand in for the play's St. Nicholas. "I've met many nuns as a result of writing this play," says Shanley. "And my first grade teacher, Sister James, who is still alive and still teaching, was my guest for the opening night, and she's just a doll and incredibly intelligent, and one of many invisible women out there living a life of service to others and they deserve to have our acknowledgement and our thanks." Nun love.However, a pure heart in the writer does not guarantee the strength of ten in the script, even if the writer is aiming higher than the construction of a gizmo. Also, let's stamp out the use of "purposefully" to mean "purposely." And, to maintain perspective, let's remember that Shanley in his career also wrote the screenplay for Crichton's Congo. My daughter came back from that one and said only, "Heads roll."The sweetness-of-spirit thing did remind me of Moonstruck (1987), for which Shanley won a screenplay Oscar. I watched Moonstruck again last night and, for me, it holds up, but for the fact that we now know where Cher was heading when she made the movie, her arc over the following 20 years, so that her Oscar performance then loses some of its magic now, even though at the time she really was young, instead of just trying to look that way. Moonstruck. Shanley writing Italian. What is it with this guy? A couple of minor twists in the movie, but again, simple. No irony. Straight down the rails. I'm thinking that with the Oscars and Tony and Pulitzer, Shanley is blessed with the luck of the Irish. Moonstruck's screenplay beat out "Au Revoir les Enfants." Is that luck, or the work of Satan paying for a purchased soul? Perhaps the seeming simplicity of Moonstruck and Doubt is a product or an artifact of that lack of irony in both works, irony often passing for moral depth and complexity these days.Doubt begins with Father Flynn speaking to the congregation: "What do you do when you're not sure? That's the topic of my sermon today. There are those of you in church today who know exactly the crisis of faith I describe. I want to say to you: Doubt can be a bond as powerful and sustaining as certainty. When you are lost, you are not alone." And this applies to the movie how? I don't notice any comity between doubters in the script. Sister A, of course, is not one of the community of doubters, being consistently certain, although she does provide an antithetical doubter's bookend to Father F's opening remarks in the last sentence of the play. Perhaps, as Shanley says somewhere, the principal object of the play is to demonstrate that doubt allows for growth and change while premature certainty leads only to a dead end, with his parable directed not at the church but at those who insist on absolutes in society at large. And this applies to the movie how? What growth and change as a consequence of doubt is he referring to? Ours? Doesn't doubt vis a vis Father F's culpability lead to the possibility not of growth but of continued sodomy? Isn't Shanley's argument in favor of doubt here, against right-wing Bushian certainty, rather like sending Linus over to argue with Rush Limbaugh?. There is a legitimate dialectic at play, traditional Church observance vs Vatican II, but Shanley marries the former to spinsterhood and blind unreasoning faith, and the latter, even more unhappily, to pedophilia and pederasty gone wild. I must have been absent from the rectory the day that that particular memo was delivered.Now hang on. Let's think this through. We don't have our arms around this thing yet. The play was written in 2005. From the comments of others and of Shanley himself, yes, I assume, as many do, that the play is political. In a simple interpretation, Sister A = George Bush and the Right Wing. This does not mean that PSH = the Left Wing. Rather, Father F represents, for example, the Iraq situation - that is, the problem with which certainty is confronted. So that if Sister A turns out to be correct, proof or no proof, the play must tend to validate her position. But Shanley is on record to the contrary, and structures his play so as to maintain an ambiguity in the situation from start to finish, with the denouement functioning as a criticism of Sister A and her certainty. That is, because of Sister A's actions, Father F's innocence or guilt is allowed to continue unresolved. If innocent, he then suffers from the unfair turmoil and suspicion that Sister A has created in his life; if guilty, he remains unchastised for his behavior and free to continue his misdeeds. Had Sister A been in doubt, even a little bit, she would have proceeded differently, more carefully, more politically, perhaps to a place of resolution. Or, more probably, given the mores of that day, her suspicions, delivered up the chain of command, would have been buried. With our present-day knowledge, we know that this did in fact happen over and over again.Since Sister A was not burdened by doubt, however, we don't need to contemplate the historical record. And the play is written to minimize the fact that none of us choose what we know and what we don't know. Knowing is not volitional; we know some things; we don't know other things; it's automatic. Sister A knows this particular thing. In TV and media today, we've been trained to accept the fact that protagonists frequently know things without reason or proof. Characters spring into action even as their sergeant in the precinct or the mayor in his office at City Hall hectors and threatens them. They have precognitive talents, they see the future. "He's lying," they say, and they ain't lying. But Shanley as writer and director can't allow Sister A to prevail in our minds, and neither can the actors, because if so, then the fact that Father F slips away in the end becomes ironic, a miscarriage of justice, an indictment of priests and their sexual predations. And Sister A can easily prevail in this play. If La Streep convinces us, with our viewer's training acting as a handicap in her favor, that she does know what she knows, or if Father F acts his part a little lightly on his feet, or if the boy (the boy in the movie - he isn't seen in the play) appears, well, somewhat used (which we might expect, to justify his mother's acceptance of the situation and fears for his safety at public school or with his father), the goose of the play is cooked. Doubt becomes a simple tale of moral corruption. On the other hand, if La Streep comes across as crazy or embittered and out for blood, the movie might strike us as similar to that scene that has become common in movies: someone, in this case PSH, steps off the curb, usually in the middle of a sentence, and is struck and carried offscreen to the right (or to the left in England) in the blink of a frame by a passing bus or taxi, which in this case would be La Streep.We can think of the core of the play as a balance scale, with Shanley adding a bit of guilt to one pan and then a bit of innocence to the other, then more guilt, then more innocence, keeping the loads equal, with Amy Adams present onscreen to instantiate the instrument in her performance. The strategy has something in common with the avoidance of the "reveal" in a romantic comedy, which if known by the protagonists would settle all issues prematurely. For this reader, Shanley made a major misstep in the script during this doling-out. There is a moment in the climatic argument when Sister A says "I'll hound you" and Father F, rather than defending himself with specifics, plays the "You have no right to exceed your authority" card. To me this jumped off the page at me like a confession of guilt on the priest's part. I'm looking forward to seeing how PSH sells me on that line. Cherry Jones and Brian O'Byrne, and director Doug Hughes, walked the line and managed to leave the issue of guilt in doubt; will La Streep and PSH, directed by Shanly himself, do so as well? Shanley has said that La Streep approached every argument in the movie as if it were a grudge match; La Streep demurs and may bear a grudge against Shanley for saying so. It seems to me that both actors and the director would need to work closely together on a strategy that leaves the audience situated in incertitude when the house lights come up.Now the Doubt trailer has just reappeared on the front page of YouTube. I've watched it again. PSH doing the "You have no right" line is in it; it's obvious, as I mentioned above, that playing Father F as effeminate would be deadly to the balance of the movie, but watching PSH erupt onscreen, doing that anger thing that he does, I realize that there are a lot of other ways to go wrong with this parable, and protesting too much might be one of them. The balance is all in the Sister A/Father F chemistry. For example, every so often, the spouse here gets some notion and confronts me with it and, in the case of my innocence, I defend myself, but often have the feeling that I'm defending myself so badly that an audience would never believe me, much less the spouse; but that might be one clever way to sell Father F's innocence - the weak-and-unable-to-defend-myself ploy. Not PLH in this movie, though, not with his neck veins standing out as he verges on apoplexy. It's some other actor who would work it by holding back the anger.Another word on this doubt thing. In a film review by Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat: "The drama challenges us to take more seriously both the mysteries of the human personality and the uncertainty which lies at the core of our days and doings. Love and doubt converge in the practice of not knowing. And that is the true spiritual path. The world is drenched in mystery and no matter what we do, we can never cut through it all and grab hold of the answer, the one explanation. "X" factors abound, upsetting our rational conclusions. Best to just say "I don't know" and take comfort in the reality that you are not alone." Huh? The issue here is one of potential child abuse. Where does the "practice of not knowing" take us? We can never grab hold of the answer? What if somebody is grabbing hold of something that he oughtn't? How many of us think, or feel, that uncertainty lies at the core of our days and doings? Most of my doings are based on the certainties of heavy traffic at 8 in the morning, movement in my lower regions before lunch, and all local teams missing the playoffs yet again this year. Love and doubt don't converge in the practice of not knowing but in the practice of jealousy, stress, and boredom. On the other hand, asking a priest, at least in the 50s and early 60s, why this and why that got you the response that faith was the answer, faith was required, answers to the questions would not otherwise be forthcoming. Faith was the motive force leading to salvation. Doesn't faith require doubt? Someone somewhere commented that faith and doubt are opposites, but if you know, you don't need faith, do you? I'm asking you, which is why I'm using "you." Asking you rhetorically; no need to write me. What is the opposite of doubt? Not-doubt. Certainty? Can you have faith in your certainty? Can you be certain about a fact but doubt that certainty, if not the fact? Can you feel certain but have no faith in your certainty, so that you believe what God wants you to believe, but without faith? Are questions like these connected to my absence of faith, or my doubt, or my certainty in my non-belief?Sister A has an aphorism for every occasion. One of these that raises questions: “When you take a step to address wrongdoing, you are taking a step away from God, but in his service.” Since Sister A is full of aphorisms, is this just a throwaway line to keep the young Sister in line? Or is Sister A saying that as a warrior for God, it is sometimes necessary to step away from the peace, enlightenment, and forgiveness of the Trinity and take up Satan's weapons, anger and aggression, to put down the evildoers, as a Michael of the Faith? That is, the ends justify the means? Or what?I was listening to Mick LaSalle (S.F. Chronicle's lead reviewer) in a modest podcast rant about the evils of comparing book to movie; he was saying something to the effect that the movie in your head will always be better than the movie on the screen. Comparing the two in a review is a waste of time, though it felt clever to him while he was doing it. So forth. I suddenly wondered if reading a script and then going to its movie might have something in common with comparing book to movie, and I called up to ask him. In retrospect, reading a script is quite different from reading a book that is later made into a movie. I was surprised when LaSalle replied that he could only recall two times when he read a screenplay before seeing the movie. Especially considering that his wife is a playwright, I expected him to be a frequent reader of scripts and screen plays. The two that he named were Ninotchka and Pulp Fiction. He was familiar with Ninotchka simply because it had been written up with a shot-by-shot commentary frequently used in film classes, and when he saw the movie he found himself bemused as the figures onscreen actually moved. He read Pulp Fiction because he was to interview QT before seeing the movie. He knew the cast list but as he watched the movie, he discovered that he had assigned all the actors to the wrong parts as he read the screenplay; plus, scenes in the screenplay that seemed to him integral to the movie were cut in the theatrical release. In sum, nothing here to inform me about Doubt, as I was unlikely to confuse the parts assigned to La Streep and PSH as I read the script.Hmm. I see that Doubt has returned to the metroplex. Must be back for Oscar season. Off I go to watch it! And not to lower the tenor of the discussion, but speaking of nuns and Amy Adams, see page 10 of the script: INT. THE BEDROOM - DAWNSister James has bathed. She’s partially dressed but stillworking on her bonnet. She puts on her rosary.Satan tempts me with expectations even as I head for the cineplex.Note that nobody says "You're off to see Hamlet? Don't bother. You've already ruined it by reading the script. You should have just let the actors bring the pages to life on your blank slate of a brainpan." I'm treating Doubt as if it were a work that is worth something, not as if it were mere entertainment. My regret is that I'll post this before listening to Shanley's own commentary.At this point, imagine Bach's Mass No. 1 in F Major, BWV 233, while you wait. Ba ba dum! Dum deedle doo deedle dum, ba dum! Baaa ba dum!OK, I'm back.What a pleasure to just settle into my seat in an almost-empty brand-new theater and finally watch the damn movie. I enjoyed it from start to finish. Lots to look at and listen to. The movie felt a little earlier than '64 to me, but not by much, and so what? Back in the day, 90% of Catholic school faculty and staff consisted of men and women in the orders; at present, 95% of the staff is lay, which means that they need to be paid. There used to be 12,000 Catholic schools, a large percentage of them catering to lower- and lower-middle-class populations. Now more and more of them are converting to charter, privitizing, going forward with the moral but not the financial support of the Church. Hoffman and Streep and Adams and Davis put on an acting class; let me at that community stage - I want to act! Just in the beginning I noticed that I was focusing a bit on the unlikely babealiciousness of Adams, but my companion murmured to me that there were plenty of cute nuns back then, something that I must have forgotten. Then too, Adams laid on the simpiness pretty thick, but hell, she's a beautiful young woman smothered in a habit; doesn't that automatically signify that she's a raving neurotic? It appears that Adams thought so. Hoffman was born three years after the year in which the play is set. Holy cow, he's forty-one already. Makes a perfect priest. Streep was Streep being Streep and relishing it. Unless I was imagining it when I wrote the fact in my notes, her enjoyment tempered her angst, so I was not surprised when Viola Davis said in her Filmspotting #246 interview how much fun Streep had on set. Streep launched the part playing Sister Mary Stigmata but became increasingly human as the movie wore on. Davis I've seen in 14 movies; she sure got this one right; refer to the interview for her thoughts on preparing for the role. Shanley took a chance writing that scene but it worked for me; the crucial interchange happens fast in an overlapping back and forth between Streep and Davis, emotion dialled up all the way, the scene over too quick for us viewers to start asking questions. I was wondering on the way over to the plex whether Streep and Hoffman are currently so overexposed for me that they wouldn't be able to disappear into their parts no matter what they did. As Streep exchanged her Prada for a dowdy habit and her Cle de Peau Beaute for ELF, could she submerge herself in the part enough to prevent me from watching Streep the actress assaying a new accent, recently arrived from Madison County, say, not some nun I don't know? Well, in the event she remained Streep for me, Streep in person onscreen, apotheosis Streep, but lo also became Sister A as well. No holding back; make em laugh, make em cry, make em shake their heads and come back for more. I've watched so much Hoffman lately, the mind reels. He's a national treasure, or am I just invoking Nicholas Cage when I say that? Watching Hoffman in his Roman collar, I realized that I never quite bought Crosby as Father O'Malley, much as I loved his movies. Shanley's intent, when he set out to write Doubt, was to begin with the Nun and Priest stereotypes and then gradually real the real people beneath. Cherry Jones played sister A as physically weak but spiritually strong. No weakness in the 59-year-old Streep; I kept noticing how strong her wrists looked. Before watching the movie, I had the notion that as a play, Doubt begs for restraint, for cool. So that briefly, in the theater, i wondered what Streep was thinking? Shanley as director wouldn't know any better, but Streep could have grabbed Hoffman by the nape and ordered him to throttle it back and then done the same herself, but no, this Sister A onscreen - who is supposed to be a woman who has spent her life devoted to denial, denial of love, denial of pleasure, denial of coughdrops - show me steel, show me ice, show me the cold vacuum of deep space, not Miss Muffet chewing the carpet. Shanley also takes the tether off Hoffman and we wind up with two overheated actors who know they're delivering Pulitzer lines that, with enough heat, perhaps can be transmuted into Oscar gold (didn't happen). You want certainty? Picture John Wayne as Sister A. Montgomery Clift as Father F - sure he's crazy, tortured, sweating, bug-eyed, but innocent. Or Bing Crosby as Father F. Innocent. Audrey Hepburn or Katherine Hepburn as Sister A, vs der Bingle? How do you pick a winner in an argument between two screen gods?But this movie wasn't about that. This movie was about Shanley's youth, the Bronx, the Sisters and Mothers and Fathers. This was about winter color, grays but somehow still warm with memory, warm wtih nostalgia and love and, by God, entertainment.I also wondered whether opening out the play on the big screen would help it, harm it, or have no effect. Neighborhood, kids, weather, church and school. The play consists of four individuals talking to each other for an hour and a half. In the original production, the sets are small and close. No children are seen, so that there is a certain problem-play, abstract quality to the proceedings. In the film, the protagonists are dropped into a bustling Bronx school full of children. The abuse issue is no longer academic. A specific child's welfare is at issue. The child does some mooning (not that kind) around the priest. This coming-to-life of the situation affects the artificial parableness of the play; without the movie's constant reminder of children qua children, the proceedings onstage were better able to remain an exercise in thought.Anyway, do we the audience know for sure, or think that we know for sure, after watching this film incarnation of Doubt, that Father F is or is not guilty? If so, the dynamics of the play are altered, displaced from the consequences of ambiguity in the face of certainty to questions of moral justice and the consequences of the priest's behavior. The whistle-blower in the case, Sister A, is dismissed from consideration, regardless of the original baselessness of her accusations. When the script presents the wine and locker accusations and the priest's verbal reactions, does Hoffman clothe those reactions in ambiguous anger or innocent surprise or one of a hundred other takes that swing the balance back from guilt? Yes, he does indeed. Clever writing by Shanley. Does the kid have to show gay for his mom's stance to be effective? Well, he doesn't and didn't have to. Was there too much focus on suspect Father F traits like, for example, his thoughts and feelings re long fingernails? So that Doubt morphs into a movie in the genre that includes films like Shadow of a Doubt and The Interview - man seems innocent, isn't? No. Someone complained to me that Father F was made to seem more guilty because when Sister A tells him that she saw him grab William London’s arm, he doesn't defend himself. In the play he explains his action, because the action is never shown, but in the film we see him do it, to check the boy's fingernails, and his silence on the matter later with Sister A seems to me to strengthen him, not weaken him. Shanley knew that the final confrontation between Sister A and Father F was his last chance (almost) to make things come out even. He used 31 camera setups. In the scene, we know that Mrs. Miller has told Sister A that her son is gay, but Father F does not know this. We also know that the boy probably confessed to Father F this fact, but Father F is constrained to keep the fact to himself. Forces swirling. Father F no longer able to step into Sister A's office and sit casually in her chair as if he belonged there, as her natural superior.I heard more than once from others that the movie ended with the issue of guilt/innocence resolved for them. Not for me. For me, Shanley and his cast did not fall off the tightrope. There was smoke, perhaps there was fire, perhaps not. My bet: Father F had misbehaved in the past but not in the current situation. Last word re Sister A's last words: "I have doubts! I have such doubts!" (1) I take this to be Shanley's last-minute buckling to the pressures of public taste in drama in the modern sensibility - that is, the mandatory inclusion of irony as a base element in any concoction, which is what this play is. Or, (2)these last words are an author's last-minute bright idea, a cry to the prize board, pleading for forgiveness for the thinness of the material but asking for the prize anyway. Or, (3) Shanley is telling us here that Sister A has been on a journey throughout this movie, a journey that has taken her from a desert of self-indulgent, selfish abnegation and selflessness of certainty to an uncomfortable paradise of doubt in the closer presence of God. A final message of hope. Shanley's gift to the Sisters of his youth. Or, (4) Sister A has lied, blackmailed, and bullied, and this final wracking doubt is her punishment for her actions. Or, (5) perhaps this is the last bit of weight Shanley drops into the balance on the innocence side, in case you're leaning toward Father F.'s guilt. In any case, Streep has caught some critical flak for not adumbrating this outburst, even in the smallest way. But I think that in fact she did, especially when she agreed with Father F. that she had sinned mightily in the past. That confession entered into the guilt/innocence calculus going forward. For these last words, did Shanley just refuse to put down the pen in time? Did Hannibal Lector apologize for his diet at the fadeout?Am I crazy or is Doubt an old-fashioned feelgood movie?
]]>Tue, 24 Feb 2009 21:28:50 GMTjoem18bjoem18b Blog2/24/2009 4:28:50 PM*** COMPLETE AND THROUGHGOING SPOILERS ***Ordinarily, I wouldn't begin a review with an adverb. Ordinarily, I would watch a movie, share my thoughts, and walk on. In the case of Doubt, however, I missed the movie in the theater and now, weeks later, I'm still waiting for the DVD. The rips I've downloaded from the internets aren't of any use. Why did AXXO pass on Doubt while ripping Drillbit Taylor? It is not given to me to know. [Much later: it's all over the web now.]In the meantime, I read John Patrick Shanley's Miramax screenplay for the film version of Doubt. Having watched a trailer before reading the script, I did have La Streep and PSH acting the roles in my head, but acting them my way, perhaps not theirs. The script seemed a little thin to me, for a play that won the drama Pulitzer and a Tony in 2005.What I know about the drama Pulitzer:1. They can't just give it to Angels in America every year, over and over.2. Seemingly thin scripts can in fact hide greatness, q.v., Our Town.3. Roxanne Pulitzer posed for Playboy; I liked Paloma Picasso better. Such was the cultural training of my youth.7. It took four years for Doubt to catch up with Proof.8. Shaley received the prize but Cherry Jones and Brian O'Byrne knocking heads might have won it for him.5. "Doubt" shares its honor with, among others, "A Streetcar Named Desire," "Death of a Salesman," and "Long Day's Journey Into Night." In the same way, Mike Tyson shares his former title with, among others, Joe Lewis, Rocky Marciano, and Muhammad Ali.4. The prize isn't awarded every year. Looking for a book idea? Write one explaining why the award was withheld in the years 1919, 1942, 1944, 1947, 1951, 1963, 1964, 1966, 1968, 1972, 1974, 1986, 1997, and 2006.** Of course, in my conception, the book would be as catty as possible. Politics, rumors, scandalous rumors, and rumors that are god-damned lies welcomed. The drama-prize candidate is selected each year by a jury of five, one academic and four critics, based upon their reading of the script, or so I have always understood it. The Pulitzer Committee must then approve the jury's choice. In 1963, the Committee declined to approve Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf because of the play's sex and cussing. In 1986, the Committee overruled the jury's choice of the CIVIL warS, which as far as I know has never been performed in full (your homework: find out why). From these two examples, we can infer that the Pulitzer Committee's overrulings are generally wrongheaded. The year after Doubt, no Pulitzer was awarded. Ongoing controversy over these awards led to the creation of The New York Drama Critics' Circle, which, as it happens, also awarded Doubt the prize in 2006, and also did not award an American prize the following year. 2006 is taken by many as a lackluster year, but I've also heard more than one playgoer complain that if it isn't a New York production with Big Names in it, it won't be picked and may not even be considered. 27 plays were considered in '06 and of the three finalists chosen from these, none received a majority of votes from the 17 committee members. So maybe your no-prize book will turn out to be a bust, due to a surfeit of no-prize plays over the years; but don't let mere facts stop you, not in the weedy garden of the arts. The drama jury members who picked Doubt in 2005: Michael Phillips (Chicago Tribune&mdash;chair), Fran Dorn (University of Texas&mdash;Austin), Robert Hurwitt (San Francisco Chronicle), Charles Isherwood (New York Times), and Wendy Wasserstein (playwright). I wrote Phillips, Dorn, Hurwitt, and Isherwood, asking them an assortment of questions about their choice. (Wasserstein died of cancer in 2006.)Shanley added "a Parable" to the play's title, "Doubt, a Parable," after its introduction. My first thought was that once he had let his play cool a bit after baking, he too felt that it was thin (or short on filling under the crust, to continue the baking metaphor), and everybody knows that a parable can skimp on characterization and plot in the service of loftier goals. Just a thought. A parable is "a brief, succinct story, in prose or verse, that illustrates a moral or religious lesson. It differs from a fable in that fables use animals, plants, inanimate objects, and forces of nature as characters, while parables generally feature human characters." Do we need a parable Pulitzer? Puts me in mind of that famously short-lived category, the haiku Pulitzer. Jonathon Livingston Seagull for fable Pulitzer! 38 weeks on the NTY Best Seller list and still in print! But I digress.What do I mean by "thin"? Print out the script and read the climatic scene, pages 81 to 94. OK, wait. Let me back up and summarize the plot, in case you haven't been out of your cave since the weather turned cold. The Bronx. 1964. Catholic School. Not like Sacred Heart, where my kids went. Old School. The NBs still wear their habits. But Vatican II has happened. Some younger priests are leaning new-school; the school principal, Sister Aloyisius (Aloyisius, the patron saint of students) is old school. Father Flynn is the friendly young chaplain. He is or is not molesting the only African-American (male) student in the school, the population of which is otherwise exclusively Irish/Italian. Come to think of it, though the years have passed, Sacred Heart did recently give the boot to its own chaplain, who looked like the popular graphic version of Jesus Christ and acted a bit too much like him as well.Sister A gets on Father F's case. Shanley: "I was very interested in having a powerful character who was certain she was right chasing down a course of action that was going to do a lot of harm if she was wrong and investigating what it was to live in a world that was a clash between certainty and ambiguity." Sister Aloyisius knows that Father Flynn has abused the boy, though she has no proof. Shanley: "Oh, I do not profess to know the end of the play. The end of the play takes place after the play is over, when you go out and have a drink and you have a fight with your wife about what happened." (Schwarzenegger to his wife in Raw Deal: "You should not drink and bake.") The author has said a lot more than this, in numerous interviews.Shanley has set himself the task here of walking the line between hints of Flynn's guilt and hints of his innocence, so that we the audience might lean one way or the other but cannot ever know the truth, because the truth isn't included in this, Shanley's creation - a creation that he ends with several ambiguous flourishes. Get it? It's a whirligig. It goes round and round and it's fun to watch for a while and then it stops where it started and you go do something else. It's a gizmo. It's a construction, and the key problems in it and Shanley's solutions to those problems are to be found in the pages of the script, and they are mechanical. The Rubik's Cube Pulitzer. I also took strong exception on first reading to pages 65 through 78 - that is, to the scene in which Sister A meets with the boy's mother and in which the mother, hearing that her son is most probably being buggered by his priest, accepts the fact as she keeps her eyes on the prize, a good high school for the boy upon his graduation from St. Nicholas. Shanley the Irishman writes a black family into his play. Limns the family: physically abusive, dangerous father not to be reasoned with or disobeyed; hard-working, saintly but morally primitive mother; bent, wine-drinking son. If Shanley had been black, writing the boy and his mom as Irish, would we then instead have here a drunken, violent, bog-trotting dad; religious, potato-cooking mom with a straw broom in her hand and a sheepy look in her eyes; boy ready to break your knee with a stick? And how does an actress come to deserve an Oscar nomination for 13 pages of work in a film? Parable Oscar. (Well, the part did win Adriane Lenox a Tony.) Reality check: This is it? The best drama 2005 had to offer? Is culture zero-sum? If so, where went the talent that would allow a total equal to that of Tennessee Williams? YouTube?Whoa! Dude! Why the hate? Vitriol! Is it a Hitler speech I'm readin? Are ye turnin on yer own kind then, ladee? Buck up, boyo. Go pull yer Finnegan's Wake back out of the firegrate. Sober up. You're worse than himself this way. Maybe so, but Pineapple Express had nine times the plot that Doubt does.Ye could use a little less Pineapple Express yerself, at that, at that. Write JMJ at the top of every page of this review, with a fountain pen. What said the jury, boyo?Answering my questions about script vs staging, Michael Phillips' response included: "I've happily done jury duty for the Pulitzers four different times, and I must say, it stunned me to realize how the various jurors approached the commitment differently. One made it a point never, ever to read the scripts--for him, if he couldn't see it on stage, in New York, in time for the voting, it wasn't eligible. (Ridiculous. A New Yorker, needless to say.) Others believed differently. And yet the overseers, the members of the Pulitzer board to whom the individual juries report to, are the ones making the final decision, and there's a pretty clear pattern of awards (in two out of three cases) going to plays currently or recently on view in New York. Such was the case with "Doubt." But I have to say, that year, nothing else came close." Unlike me with my script, Charles Isherwood picked up some big ideas in Doubt as he sat in the playgoing audience, ideas conjured into being by the story and its dialog, ideas more profound than most that he had encountered in that theater seat through many a previous year, ideas, Isherwood said, hinted at by that "a Parable" in the title, ideas about taking refuge in certainty when reality is too complicated. Or, as I like to think of it, Bush vs Obama. Isherwood took Sister A's final moment quite seriously. He also detected no irony in the play. From this I deduce that Cherry Jones and Bri&shy;an F. O'Byrne battled to a draw in the performance that he attended.Fran Dorn told me that she went strictly by the script. Some of the other things she said put the idea of writing a book about Pulitzer politics into my head.Robert Hurwitt loved the play in its original staging, but when he saw it again in a larger theater, it lost some of its depth for him. Is this an argument against the script on the page, or for it, or neither? Don't stage a close argument between four individuals on a stage at the 50-yard line of Brillo Coliseum?So I went back and read the play again. 94 pages. 90 minutes on the boards with no intermission. The movie runs 104 minutes. This time I picked up a sweet spirit present in the thing. Nobody gets hurt here. No violence. No evil or despicable characters. What was eating me when I read Doubt the first time? Shanley is writing from the heart. He dedicated the play to the Sisters of Charity and in particular to his first-grade teacher, Sister Margaret McEntee, who was the model for the young nun in the movie and who acted as a consultant on the film. Cinematographer Roger Deakins used the Sisters' school, the College of Mount Saint Vincent, and St. Anthony in the Bronx, to stand in for the play's St. Nicholas. "I've met many nuns as a result of writing this play," says Shanley. "And my first grade teacher, Sister James, who is still alive and still teaching, was my guest for the opening night, and she's just a doll and incredibly intelligent, and one of many invisible women out there living a life of service to others and they deserve to have our acknowledgement and our thanks." Nun love.However, a pure heart in the writer does not guarantee the strength of ten in the script, even if the writer is aiming higher than the construction of a gizmo. Also, let's stamp out the use of "purposefully" to mean "purposely." And, to maintain perspective, let's remember that Shanley in his career also wrote the screenplay for Crichton's Congo. My daughter came back from that one and said only, "Heads roll."The sweetness-of-spirit thing did remind me of Moonstruck (1987), for which Shanley won a screenplay Oscar. I watched Moonstruck again last night and, for me, it holds up, but for the fact that we now know where Cher was heading when she made the movie, her arc over the following 20 years, so that her Oscar performance then loses some of its magic now, even though at the time she really was young, instead of just trying to look that way. Moonstruck. Shanley writing Italian. What is it with this guy? A couple of minor twists in the movie, but again, simple. No irony. Straight down the rails. I'm thinking that with the Oscars and Tony and Pulitzer, Shanley is blessed with the luck of the Irish. Moonstruck's screenplay beat out "Au Revoir les Enfants." Is that luck, or the work of Satan paying for a purchased soul? Perhaps the seeming simplicity of Moonstruck and Doubt is a product or an artifact of that lack of irony in both works, irony often passing for moral depth and complexity these days.Doubt begins with Father Flynn speaking to the congregation: "What do you do when you're not sure? That's the topic of my sermon today. There are those of you in church today who know exactly the crisis of faith I describe. I want to say to you: Doubt can be a bond as powerful and sustaining as certainty. When you are lost, you are not alone." And this applies to the movie how? I don't notice any comity between doubters in the script. Sister A, of course, is not one of the community of doubters, being consistently certain, although she does provide an antithetical doubter's bookend to Father F's opening remarks in the last sentence of the play. Perhaps, as Shanley says somewhere, the principal object of the play is to demonstrate that doubt allows for growth and change while premature certainty leads only to a dead end, with his parable directed not at the church but at those who insist on absolutes in society at large. And this applies to the movie how? What growth and change as a consequence of doubt is he referring to? Ours? Doesn't doubt vis a vis Father F's culpability lead to the possibility not of growth but of continued sodomy? Isn't Shanley's argument in favor of doubt here, against right-wing Bushian certainty, rather like sending Linus over to argue with Rush Limbaugh?. There is a legitimate dialectic at play, traditional Church observance vs Vatican II, but Shanley marries the former to spinsterhood and blind unreasoning faith, and the latter, even more unhappily, to pedophilia and pederasty gone wild. I must have been absent from the rectory the day that that particular memo was delivered.Now hang on. Let's think this through. We don't have our arms around this thing yet. The play was written in 2005. From the comments of others and of Shanley himself, yes, I assume, as many do, that the play is political. In a simple interpretation, Sister A = George Bush and the Right Wing. This does not mean that PSH = the Left Wing. Rather, Father F represents, for example, the Iraq situation - that is, the problem with which certainty is confronted. So that if Sister A turns out to be correct, proof or no proof, the play must tend to validate her position. But Shanley is on record to the contrary, and structures his play so as to maintain an ambiguity in the situation from start to finish, with the denouement functioning as a criticism of Sister A and her certainty. That is, because of Sister A's actions, Father F's innocence or guilt is allowed to continue unresolved. If innocent, he then suffers from the unfair turmoil and suspicion that Sister A has created in his life; if guilty, he remains unchastised for his behavior and free to continue his misdeeds. Had Sister A been in doubt, even a little bit, she would have proceeded differently, more carefully, more politically, perhaps to a place of resolution. Or, more probably, given the mores of that day, her suspicions, delivered up the chain of command, would have been buried. With our present-day knowledge, we know that this did in fact happen over and over again.Since Sister A was not burdened by doubt, however, we don't need to contemplate the historical record. And the play is written to minimize the fact that none of us choose what we know and what we don't know. Knowing is not volitional; we know some things; we don't know other things; it's automatic. Sister A knows this particular thing. In TV and media today, we've been trained to accept the fact that protagonists frequently know things without reason or proof. Characters spring into action even as their sergeant in the precinct or the mayor in his office at City Hall hectors and threatens them. They have precognitive talents, they see the future. "He's lying," they say, and they ain't lying. But Shanley as writer and director can't allow Sister A to prevail in our minds, and neither can the actors, because if so, then the fact that Father F slips away in the end becomes ironic, a miscarriage of justice, an indictment of priests and their sexual predations. And Sister A can easily prevail in this play. If La Streep convinces us, with our viewer's training acting as a handicap in her favor, that she does know what she knows, or if Father F acts his part a little lightly on his feet, or if the boy (the boy in the movie - he isn't seen in the play) appears, well, somewhat used (which we might expect, to justify his mother's acceptance of the situation and fears for his safety at public school or with his father), the goose of the play is cooked. Doubt becomes a simple tale of moral corruption. On the other hand, if La Streep comes across as crazy or embittered and out for blood, the movie might strike us as similar to that scene that has become common in movies: someone, in this case PSH, steps off the curb, usually in the middle of a sentence, and is struck and carried offscreen to the right (or to the left in England) in the blink of a frame by a passing bus or taxi, which in this case would be La Streep.We can think of the core of the play as a balance scale, with Shanley adding a bit of guilt to one pan and then a bit of innocence to the other, then more guilt, then more innocence, keeping the loads equal, with Amy Adams present onscreen to instantiate the instrument in her performance. The strategy has something in common with the avoidance of the "reveal" in a romantic comedy, which if known by the protagonists would settle all issues prematurely. For this reader, Shanley made a major misstep in the script during this doling-out. There is a moment in the climatic argument when Sister A says "I'll hound you" and Father F, rather than defending himself with specifics, plays the "You have no right to exceed your authority" card. To me this jumped off the page at me like a confession of guilt on the priest's part. I'm looking forward to seeing how PSH sells me on that line. Cherry Jones and Brian O'Byrne, and director Doug Hughes, walked the line and managed to leave the issue of guilt in doubt; will La Streep and PSH, directed by Shanly himself, do so as well? Shanley has said that La Streep approached every argument in the movie as if it were a grudge match; La Streep demurs and may bear a grudge against Shanley for saying so. It seems to me that both actors and the director would need to work closely together on a strategy that leaves the audience situated in incertitude when the house lights come up.Now the Doubt trailer has just reappeared on the front page of YouTube. I've watched it again. PSH doing the "You have no right" line is in it; it's obvious, as I mentioned above, that playing Father F as effeminate would be deadly to the balance of the movie, but watching PSH erupt onscreen, doing that anger thing that he does, I realize that there are a lot of other ways to go wrong with this parable, and protesting too much might be one of them. The balance is all in the Sister A/Father F chemistry. For example, every so often, the spouse here gets some notion and confronts me with it and, in the case of my innocence, I defend myself, but often have the feeling that I'm defending myself so badly that an audience would never believe me, much less the spouse; but that might be one clever way to sell Father F's innocence - the weak-and-unable-to-defend-myself ploy. Not PLH in this movie, though, not with his neck veins standing out as he verges on apoplexy. It's some other actor who would work it by holding back the anger.Another word on this doubt thing. In a film review by Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat: "The drama challenges us to take more seriously both the mysteries of the human personality and the uncertainty which lies at the core of our days and doings. Love and doubt converge in the practice of not knowing. And that is the true spiritual path. The world is drenched in mystery and no matter what we do, we can never cut through it all and grab hold of the answer, the one explanation. "X" factors abound, upsetting our rational conclusions. Best to just say "I don't know" and take comfort in the reality that you are not alone." Huh? The issue here is one of potential child abuse. Where does the "practice of not knowing" take us? We can never grab hold of the answer? What if somebody is grabbing hold of something that he oughtn't? How many of us think, or feel, that uncertainty lies at the core of our days and doings? Most of my doings are based on the certainties of heavy traffic at 8 in the morning, movement in my lower regions before lunch, and all local teams missing the playoffs yet again this year. Love and doubt don't converge in the practice of not knowing but in the practice of jealousy, stress, and boredom. On the other hand, asking a priest, at least in the 50s and early 60s, why this and why that got you the response that faith was the answer, faith was required, answers to the questions would not otherwise be forthcoming. Faith was the motive force leading to salvation. Doesn't faith require doubt? Someone somewhere commented that faith and doubt are opposites, but if you know, you don't need faith, do you? I'm asking you, which is why I'm using "you." Asking you rhetorically; no need to write me. What is the opposite of doubt? Not-doubt. Certainty? Can you have faith in your certainty? Can you be certain about a fact but doubt that certainty, if not the fact? Can you feel certain but have no faith in your certainty, so that you believe what God wants you to believe, but without faith? Are questions like these connected to my absence of faith, or my doubt, or my certainty in my non-belief?Sister A has an aphorism for every occasion. One of these that raises questions: &ldquo;When you take a step to address wrongdoing, you are taking a step away from God, but in his service.&rdquo; Since Sister A is full of aphorisms, is this just a throwaway line to keep the young Sister in line? Or is Sister A saying that as a warrior for God, it is sometimes necessary to step away from the peace, enlightenment, and forgiveness of the Trinity and take up Satan's weapons, anger and aggression, to put down the evildoers, as a Michael of the Faith? That is, the ends justify the means? Or what?I was listening to Mick LaSalle (S.F. Chronicle's lead reviewer) in a modest podcast rant about the evils of comparing book to movie; he was saying something to the effect that the movie in your head will always be better than the movie on the screen. Comparing the two in a review is a waste of time, though it felt clever to him while he was doing it. So forth. I suddenly wondered if reading a script and then going to its movie might have something in common with comparing book to movie, and I called up to ask him. In retrospect, reading a script is quite different from reading a book that is later made into a movie. I was surprised when LaSalle replied that he could only recall two times when he read a screenplay before seeing the movie. Especially considering that his wife is a playwright, I expected him to be a frequent reader of scripts and screen plays. The two that he named were Ninotchka and Pulp Fiction. He was familiar with Ninotchka simply because it had been written up with a shot-by-shot commentary frequently used in film classes, and when he saw the movie he found himself bemused as the figures onscreen actually moved. He read Pulp Fiction because he was to interview QT before seeing the movie. He knew the cast list but as he watched the movie, he discovered that he had assigned all the actors to the wrong parts as he read the screenplay; plus, scenes in the screenplay that seemed to him integral to the movie were cut in the theatrical release. In sum, nothing here to inform me about Doubt, as I was unlikely to confuse the parts assigned to La Streep and PSH as I read the script.Hmm. I see that Doubt has returned to the metroplex. Must be back for Oscar season. Off I go to watch it! And not to lower the tenor of the discussion, but speaking of nuns and Amy Adams, see page 10 of the script: INT. THE BEDROOM - DAWNSister James has bathed. She&rsquo;s partially dressed but stillworking on her bonnet. She puts on her rosary.Satan tempts me with expectations even as I head for the cineplex.Note that nobody says "You're off to see Hamlet? Don't bother. You've already ruined it by reading the script. You should have just let the actors bring the pages to life on your blank slate of a brainpan." I'm treating Doubt as if it were a work that is worth something, not as if it were mere entertainment. My regret is that I'll post this before listening to Shanley's own commentary.At this point, imagine Bach's Mass No. 1 in F Major, BWV 233, while you wait. Ba ba dum! Dum deedle doo deedle dum, ba dum! Baaa ba dum!OK, I'm back.What a pleasure to just settle into my seat in an almost-empty brand-new theater and finally watch the damn movie. I enjoyed it from start to finish. Lots to look at and listen to. The movie felt a little earlier than '64 to me, but not by much, and so what? Back in the day, 90% of Catholic school faculty and staff consisted of men and women in the orders; at present, 95% of the staff is lay, which means that they need to be paid. There used to be 12,000 Catholic schools, a large percentage of them catering to lower- and lower-middle-class populations. Now more and more of them are converting to charter, privitizing, going forward with the moral but not the financial support of the Church. Hoffman and Streep and Adams and Davis put on an acting class; let me at that community stage - I want to act! Just in the beginning I noticed that I was focusing a bit on the unlikely babealiciousness of Adams, but my companion murmured to me that there were plenty of cute nuns back then, something that I must have forgotten. Then too, Adams laid on the simpiness pretty thick, but hell, she's a beautiful young woman smothered in a habit; doesn't that automatically signify that she's a raving neurotic? It appears that Adams thought so. Hoffman was born three years after the year in which the play is set. Holy cow, he's forty-one already. Makes a perfect priest. Streep was Streep being Streep and relishing it. Unless I was imagining it when I wrote the fact in my notes, her enjoyment tempered her angst, so I was not surprised when Viola Davis said in her Filmspotting #246 interview how much fun Streep had on set. Streep launched the part playing Sister Mary Stigmata but became increasingly human as the movie wore on. Davis I've seen in 14 movies; she sure got this one right; refer to the interview for her thoughts on preparing for the role. Shanley took a chance writing that scene but it worked for me; the crucial interchange happens fast in an overlapping back and forth between Streep and Davis, emotion dialled up all the way, the scene over too quick for us viewers to start asking questions. I was wondering on the way over to the plex whether Streep and Hoffman are currently so overexposed for me that they wouldn't be able to disappear into their parts no matter what they did. As Streep exchanged her Prada for a dowdy habit and her Cle de Peau Beaute for ELF, could she submerge herself in the part enough to prevent me from watching Streep the actress assaying a new accent, recently arrived from Madison County, say, not some nun I don't know? Well, in the event she remained Streep for me, Streep in person onscreen, apotheosis Streep, but lo also became Sister A as well. No holding back; make em laugh, make em cry, make em shake their heads and come back for more. I've watched so much Hoffman lately, the mind reels. He's a national treasure, or am I just invoking Nicholas Cage when I say that? Watching Hoffman in his Roman collar, I realized that I never quite bought Crosby as Father O'Malley, much as I loved his movies. Shanley's intent, when he set out to write Doubt, was to begin with the Nun and Priest stereotypes and then gradually real the real people beneath. Cherry Jones played sister A as physically weak but spiritually strong. No weakness in the 59-year-old Streep; I kept noticing how strong her wrists looked. Before watching the movie, I had the notion that as a play, Doubt begs for restraint, for cool. So that briefly, in the theater, i wondered what Streep was thinking? Shanley as director wouldn't know any better, but Streep could have grabbed Hoffman by the nape and ordered him to throttle it back and then done the same herself, but no, this Sister A onscreen - who is supposed to be a woman who has spent her life devoted to denial, denial of love, denial of pleasure, denial of coughdrops - show me steel, show me ice, show me the cold vacuum of deep space, not Miss Muffet chewing the carpet. Shanley also takes the tether off Hoffman and we wind up with two overheated actors who know they're delivering Pulitzer lines that, with enough heat, perhaps can be transmuted into Oscar gold (didn't happen). You want certainty? Picture John Wayne as Sister A. Montgomery Clift as Father F - sure he's crazy, tortured, sweating, bug-eyed, but innocent. Or Bing Crosby as Father F. Innocent. Audrey Hepburn or Katherine Hepburn as Sister A, vs der Bingle? How do you pick a winner in an argument between two screen gods?But this movie wasn't about that. This movie was about Shanley's youth, the Bronx, the Sisters and Mothers and Fathers. This was about winter color, grays but somehow still warm with memory, warm wtih nostalgia and love and, by God, entertainment.I also wondered whether opening out the play on the big screen would help it, harm it, or have no effect. Neighborhood, kids, weather, church and school. The play consists of four individuals talking to each other for an hour and a half. In the original production, the sets are small and close. No children are seen, so that there is a certain problem-play, abstract quality to the proceedings. In the film, the protagonists are dropped into a bustling Bronx school full of children. The abuse issue is no longer academic. A specific child's welfare is at issue. The child does some mooning (not that kind) around the priest. This coming-to-life of the situation affects the artificial parableness of the play; without the movie's constant reminder of children qua children, the proceedings onstage were better able to remain an exercise in thought.Anyway, do we the audience know for sure, or think that we know for sure, after watching this film incarnation of Doubt, that Father F is or is not guilty? If so, the dynamics of the play are altered, displaced from the consequences of ambiguity in the face of certainty to questions of moral justice and the consequences of the priest's behavior. The whistle-blower in the case, Sister A, is dismissed from consideration, regardless of the original baselessness of her accusations. When the script presents the wine and locker accusations and the priest's verbal reactions, does Hoffman clothe those reactions in ambiguous anger or innocent surprise or one of a hundred other takes that swing the balance back from guilt? Yes, he does indeed. Clever writing by Shanley. Does the kid have to show gay for his mom's stance to be effective? Well, he doesn't and didn't have to. Was there too much focus on suspect Father F traits like, for example, his thoughts and feelings re long fingernails? So that Doubt morphs into a movie in the genre that includes films like Shadow of a Doubt and The Interview - man seems innocent, isn't? No. Someone complained to me that Father F was made to seem more guilty because when Sister A tells him that she saw him grab William London&rsquo;s arm, he doesn't defend himself. In the play he explains his action, because the action is never shown, but in the film we see him do it, to check the boy's fingernails, and his silence on the matter later with Sister A seems to me to strengthen him, not weaken him. Shanley knew that the final confrontation between Sister A and Father F was his last chance (almost) to make things come out even. He used 31 camera setups. In the scene, we know that Mrs. Miller has told Sister A that her son is gay, but Father F does not know this. We also know that the boy probably confessed to Father F this fact, but Father F is constrained to keep the fact to himself. Forces swirling. Father F no longer able to step into Sister A's office and sit casually in her chair as if he belonged there, as her natural superior.I heard more than once from others that the movie ended with the issue of guilt/innocence resolved for them. Not for me. For me, Shanley and his cast did not fall off the tightrope. There was smoke, perhaps there was fire, perhaps not. My bet: Father F had misbehaved in the past but not in the current situation. Last word re Sister A's last words: "I have doubts! I have such doubts!" (1) I take this to be Shanley's last-minute buckling to the pressures of public taste in drama in the modern sensibility - that is, the mandatory inclusion of irony as a base element in any concoction, which is what this play is. Or, (2)these last words are an author's last-minute bright idea, a cry to the prize board, pleading for forgiveness for the thinness of the material but asking for the prize anyway. Or, (3) Shanley is telling us here that Sister A has been on a journey throughout this movie, a journey that has taken her from a desert of self-indulgent, selfish abnegation and selflessness of certainty to an uncomfortable paradise of doubt in the closer presence of God. A final message of hope. Shanley's gift to the Sisters of his youth. Or, (4) Sister A has lied, blackmailed, and bullied, and this final wracking doubt is her punishment for her actions. Or, (5) perhaps this is the last bit of weight Shanley drops into the balance on the innocence side, in case you're leaning toward Father F.'s guilt. In any case, Streep has caught some critical flak for not adumbrating this outburst, even in the smallest way. But I think that in fact she did, especially when she agreed with Father F. that she had sinned mightily in the past. That confession entered into the guilt/innocence calculus going forward. For these last words, did Shanley just refuse to put down the pen in time? Did Hannibal Lector apologize for his diet at the fadeout?Am I crazy or is Doubt an old-fashioned feelgood movie? http://www.spout.com/blogs/scswngr/archive/2009/2/22/40589.aspx Post By: scswngr
Post To: Film Obsessed
Post Date: 2/22/2009 6:39:44 PM
Body: As I scramble to catch the last couple of films that will complete my Oscar Watch List, I am prematurely making my picks for the statuettes tomorrow night. I will save judgement on the Foreign Language and Documentary Short categories, neither of which I have had the opportunity to get into since I live in a town where you can see 4 screens of Rambo, but you're lucky to get to see an independent or foreign film only months after it comes out on DVD at the local film club. That being said, I have also not had the chance to see 3 of the Documentary Features, but am confident in my decision in that category nonetheless. Otherwise, by tomorrow night's Academy Awards ceremony I will have seen every single movie nominated in every other category.So, onto my picks: Screenplay, OriginalShould Win: MilkWill Win: MilkMissing: The WrestlerScreenplay, AdaptedShould Win: Doubt or The ReaderWill Win: Slumdog MillionaireVisual EffectsShould Win: Iron ManWill Win: The Curious Case of Benjamin ButtonMissing: Speed RacerSound MixingShould Win: WALL-EWill Win: The Dark KnightSound EditingShould Win: The Dark KnightWill Win: The Dark KnightShort Film, Live ActionShould Win: Grisen (The Pig)Will Win: Spielzeugland (Toyland)Short Film, AnimatedShould Win: PrestoWill Win: PrestoOriginal SongShould Win: "Jai Ho" from Slumdog MillionaireWill Win: "Jai Ho" from Slumdog MillionaireMissing: "The Wrestler" by Bruce Springsteen from The WrestlerOriginal ScoreShould Win: Slumdog MillionaireWill Win: Slumdog MillionaireMakeupShould Win: Hellboy IIWill Win: The Curious Case of Benjamin ButtonFilm EditingShould Win: Slumdog MillionaireWill Win: Slumdog MillionaireDocumentary FeatureShould Win: Man on WireWill Win: Man on WireCostume DesignShould Win: The DuchessWill Win: The DuchessCinematographyShould Win: The Curious Case of Benjamin ButtonWill Win: Slumdog MillionaireMissing: Brideshead RevisitedArt DirectionShould Win: The Curious Case of Benjamin ButtonWill Win: The Curious Case of Benjamin ButtonAnimated FeatureShould Win: WALL-EWill Win: WALL-EDirectingShould Win: David Fincher for The Curious Case of Benjamin ButtonWill Win: Danny Boyle for Slumdog MillionaireMissing: Darren Aronofsky for The Wrestler Actress, SupportingShould Win: Penelope Cruz in Vicky Cristina BarcelonaWill Win: Viola Davis in DoubtActor, SupportingShould Win: Heath Ledger in The Dark KnightWill Win: Heath Ledger in The Dark KnightActor, LeadingShould Win: Mickey Rourke in The WrestlerWill Win: Sean Penn in MilkMissing: Leonardo Dicaprio in Revolutionary RoadActress, LeadingShould Win: Anne Hathaway in Rachel Getting Married or Meryl Streep in DoubtWill Win: Kate Winslet in The ReaderMissing: Kate Winslet in Revolutionary RoadBest PictureShould Win: MilkWill Win: Slumdog MillionaireMissing: The Wrestler, Doubt, and The Dark Knight
]]>Sun, 22 Feb 2009 23:39:44 GMTscswngrFilm Obsessed2/22/2009 6:39:44 PMAs I scramble to catch the last couple of films that will complete my Oscar Watch List, I am prematurely making my picks for the statuettes tomorrow night. I will save judgement on the Foreign Language and Documentary Short categories, neither of which I have had the opportunity to get into since I live in a town where you can see 4 screens of Rambo, but you're lucky to get to see an independent or foreign film only months after it comes out on DVD at the local film club. That being said, I have also not had the chance to see 3 of the Documentary Features, but am confident in my decision in that category nonetheless. Otherwise, by tomorrow night's Academy Awards ceremony I will have seen every single movie nominated in every other category.So, onto my picks: Screenplay, OriginalShould Win: MilkWill Win: MilkMissing: The WrestlerScreenplay, AdaptedShould Win: Doubt or The ReaderWill Win: Slumdog MillionaireVisual EffectsShould Win: Iron ManWill Win: The Curious Case of Benjamin ButtonMissing: Speed RacerSound MixingShould Win: WALL-EWill Win: The Dark KnightSound EditingShould Win: The Dark KnightWill Win: The Dark KnightShort Film, Live ActionShould Win: Grisen (The Pig)Will Win: Spielzeugland (Toyland)Short Film, AnimatedShould Win: PrestoWill Win: PrestoOriginal SongShould Win: "Jai Ho" from Slumdog MillionaireWill Win: "Jai Ho" from Slumdog MillionaireMissing: "The Wrestler" by Bruce Springsteen from The WrestlerOriginal ScoreShould Win: Slumdog MillionaireWill Win: Slumdog MillionaireMakeupShould Win: Hellboy IIWill Win: The Curious Case of Benjamin ButtonFilm EditingShould Win: Slumdog MillionaireWill Win: Slumdog MillionaireDocumentary FeatureShould Win: Man on WireWill Win: Man on WireCostume DesignShould Win: The DuchessWill Win: The DuchessCinematographyShould Win: The Curious Case of Benjamin ButtonWill Win: Slumdog MillionaireMissing: Brideshead RevisitedArt DirectionShould Win: The Curious Case of Benjamin ButtonWill Win: The Curious Case of Benjamin ButtonAnimated FeatureShould Win: WALL-EWill Win: WALL-EDirectingShould Win: David Fincher for The Curious Case of Benjamin ButtonWill Win: Danny Boyle for Slumdog MillionaireMissing: Darren Aronofsky for The Wrestler Actress, SupportingShould Win: Penelope Cruz in Vicky Cristina BarcelonaWill Win: Viola Davis in DoubtActor, SupportingShould Win: Heath Ledger in The Dark KnightWill Win: Heath Ledger in The Dark KnightActor, LeadingShould Win: Mickey Rourke in The WrestlerWill Win: Sean Penn in MilkMissing: Leonardo Dicaprio in Revolutionary RoadActress, LeadingShould Win: Anne Hathaway in Rachel Getting Married or Meryl Streep in DoubtWill Win: Kate Winslet in The ReaderMissing: Kate Winslet in Revolutionary RoadBest PictureShould Win: MilkWill Win: Slumdog MillionaireMissing: The Wrestler, Doubt, and The Dark Knight http://www.spout.com/blogs/spoutblog/archive/2009/1/30/40091.aspx Post By: SpoutBlog
Post To: SpoutBlog on spout.com
Post Date: 1/30/2009 1:00:46 PM
Body: It was shut out of the Oscar race for Best Documentary Feature, but Blessed is the Match: The Life and Death of Hannah Senesh, now playing in New York City, could easily inspire a Hollywood film about the life of its heroic subject. And that dramatic version could potentially garner multiple Academy Award nominations. It wouldn’t be the first time a figure documented in a nonfiction film was later portrayed in an Oscar-nominated movie. In fact, one of this year’s Best Picture contenders, Milk, is almost like a remake of the 1984 Oscar-winning documentary The Times of Harvey Milk. Actual dramatic remakes of documentaries include Werner Herzogs’ Rescue Dawn, which revisits the subject of his earlier nonfiction film Little Dieter Needs to Fly, Michael Caton-Jones’ Memphis Belle, which fictionalizes the story of William Wyler’s doc The Memphis Belle: A Story of a Flying Fortress, and Martin Bell’s American Heart, which is loosely based on one of the subjects of his Oscar-nominated doc Streetwise. Also, the upcoming HBO dramatic film Grey Gardens was inspired by the Maysles brothers’ doc of the same name, and Hollywood has toyed with or announced remakes of the films The King of Kong, Murderball, Bra Boys and Sherman’s March. To carry on the tradition, we’ve selected nine nonfiction films in addition to Blessed is the Match that would make great dramatic features. Beyond the Call (2006) This little-seen documentary has played at a number of film festivals (I reviewed it at Tribeca) and seems to have been quite popular at each, yet it isn’t likely that it’ll ever come to a theater near you. It may never even be available for your Netflix queue. But you’ve just got to see the work of the three old men who call themselves Knightsbridge, even if it has to be in a fictionalized form. So pray that someone in Hollywood grabs onto their story, which is filled with dangerous humanitarian aid missions and lots of humor. According to the doc’s official synopsis, the film is “an Indiana Jones meets Mother Theresa adventure,” and that’s just the kind of tagline that would suit a summer blockbuster based on this true story. Blessed is the Match: The Life and Death of Hannah Senesh (2008) One of the few Holocaust-related docs to not garner an Academy Award nomination, Roberta Grossman’s film is about Hannah Senesh, a Jewish poet who became part of a dangerous rescue mission to save Hungarian Jews and was eventually caught, tortured and executed by the Nazis. A dramatic film, which would be far more Hollywoodized than the doc’s re-enactment scenes, might be like a cross between Oscar-nominated films Defiance and Sophie Scholl – The Final Days. Brother’s Keeper (1992) Fratricide has made for great stories, from The Bible onward, but mainstream audiences may not run out to see a movie based on Brother’s Keeper, even if it does hold onto the Biblically influenced title. However, while homosexual incest and illiterate old country folk are difficult subjects to sell to moviegoers, murder mysteries will always fascinate people, and anyway the story of the Ward brothers could be more like a male Grey Gardens meets Capote than a dark, depressing drama that would only appeal to Sundance crowds. Changing Our Minds: The Story of Dr. Evelyn Hooker (1992) Now that the life of Harvey Milk has been turned into an Oscar-nominated dramatic feature, Hollywood should take on a biopic about Dr. Evelyn Hooker, whose life and work are depicted in this Oscar-nominated documentary from Richard Schmiechen (who also won an Oscar for producing The Times of Harvey Milk). Hooker’s research in the 1950s led to the discovery that homosexuality is not a disease. And subsequent study and activism resulted in the eventual removal, in 1974, of homosexuality from the American Psychiatric Association’s manual of mental disorders. A remake of Changing Our Minds would be like a cross between Milk and Kinsey. (note: the video above is not from Changing Our Minds, but is the best available alternative I have to present a clip of Hooker). Crazy Love (2007) In the typical Hollywood romance, female audiences see the same old reinforced fantasy about finding a man: while most guys lie, cheat, etc., there are Prince Charmings out there. Well, a dramatized version of Crazy Love might be the perfect romantic comedy for men to drag their girlfriends to. No, not to show them that they’d better not leave or they’ll get acid in the face. Rather, to say, “Look, no matter what I do, at least I’m not the kinda guy who blinds and disfigures the love of his life.” (Or, in other words, a lie to your face is not as bad as lye in your face.) Besides the appeal to boys who will be boys, however, a romantic comedy in which the couple meet, fall in love, are separated when the guy goes to prison for having the girl crippled, are reunited many years later, and eventually marry, is just crazy enough to hit a chord with moviegoers tired of the usual Renee Zellweger/Reese Witherspoon/Drew Barrymore crap. Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father (2008) In her review of this documentary, Karina writes that it “sets up a foundation which it knows it’s going to pull out from under us, and that makes it every bit as emotionally manipulative as a studio film.” Perfect, the film already offers Hollywood a structure for the dramatic version. Other than that, though, the remake would potentially focus on Shirley Turner, who murdered her boyfriend and then gave birth to his child, rather than on the character of Kurt Kuenne, who documents the story in the original. Then again, it could stick with Kuenne, and, though not be as personal as the nonfiction film, might be along the lines of an investigative drama, such as Zodiac. Either way, due to his name appearing in Karina’s review, M. Night Shyamalan has to direct it. Deliver Us from Evil (2006) With Doubt a big success as far as Oscar nominations go (if not as far as box office is concerned), it might be an okay time for Hollywood to make a film that’s more directly focused on the subject of pedophilic priests. It could hardly make less money than Doubt, and if a great actor were to portray Father O’Grady, it could be as popular with the Academy, which already nominated the original film for Best Documentary Feature. Golden Venture (2006) Another little-seen documentary that played Tribeca a few years ago (I reviewed the film then), Golden Venture depicts a failed attempt at an illegal alien smuggling operation and its aftermath. In its first ten minutes, the film offers enough action involving a sea voyage from China to New York City, during which there was mutiny, gang violence and ultimately a Coast Guard rescue, that a dramatic version might not even have time to get to the aftermath part. But as much as turning the doc into an action movie could work, the more interesting stuff relating to immigration and population control should be integrated, too. Like the original film, the dramatized version could separately follow the paths of four characters, each of whom has a different outcome. Tim Robbins, who narrated the doc, could direct it. Street Fight (2005) Newark Mayor Cory Booker’s name has been tossed about on news channels over the past few months due to his similarities with newly elected President Barack Obama. So, considering entertainment magazines predict the new administration will have an effect on pop culture, why not honor that idea by making a dramatic film about Booker’s battle with incumbent Sharpe James for City Hall. It would be a little like Milk, only without the gay rights angle or the tragic ending. And to make it more crowd-pleasing than Marshall Curry’s doc, the new movie wouldn’t end with Booker’s loss in 2002 but would see him all the way to the Mayor’s office in 2006. Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson (2004) Hollywood has never tired of boxing movies and it always loves a good civil rights struggle, so it’s amazing that no studio has tackled an official biopic about Jack Johnson, the first African-American Heavyweight Champion of the World. Sure, there’s The Great White Hope, which is somewhat based on Johnson’s life. And sure, if people want the truth they can check out this doc from Ken Burns (or, if it’s ever released on video, the earlier Oscar-nominated film Jack Johnson). But again, Hollywood never tires of boxing movies, and it always loves a good civil rights struggle, so perhaps it’s just a matter of time before we see this story dramatized for real. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog
]]>Fri, 30 Jan 2009 18:00:46 GMTSpoutBlogSpoutBlog on spout.com1/30/2009 1:00:46 PMIt was shut out of the Oscar race for Best Documentary Feature, but Blessed is the Match: The Life and Death of Hannah Senesh, now playing in New York City, could easily inspire a Hollywood film about the life of its heroic subject. And that dramatic version could potentially garner multiple Academy Award nominations. It wouldn’t be the first time a figure documented in a nonfiction film was later portrayed in an Oscar-nominated movie. In fact, one of this year’s Best Picture contenders, Milk, is almost like a remake of the 1984 Oscar-winning documentary The Times of Harvey Milk. Actual dramatic remakes of documentaries include Werner Herzogs’ Rescue Dawn, which revisits the subject of his earlier nonfiction film Little Dieter Needs to Fly, Michael Caton-Jones’ Memphis Belle, which fictionalizes the story of William Wyler’s doc The Memphis Belle: A Story of a Flying Fortress, and Martin Bell’s American Heart, which is loosely based on one of the subjects of his Oscar-nominated doc Streetwise. Also, the upcoming HBO dramatic film Grey Gardens was inspired by the Maysles brothers’ doc of the same name, and Hollywood has toyed with or announced remakes of the films The King of Kong, Murderball, Bra Boys and Sherman’s March. To carry on the tradition, we’ve selected nine nonfiction films in addition to Blessed is the Match that would make great dramatic features. Beyond the Call (2006) This little-seen documentary has played at a number of film festivals (I reviewed it at Tribeca) and seems to have been quite popular at each, yet it isn’t likely that it’ll ever come to a theater near you. It may never even be available for your Netflix queue. But you’ve just got to see the work of the three old men who call themselves Knightsbridge, even if it has to be in a fictionalized form. So pray that someone in Hollywood grabs onto their story, which is filled with dangerous humanitarian aid missions and lots of humor. According to the doc’s official synopsis, the film is “an Indiana Jones meets Mother Theresa adventure,” and that’s just the kind of tagline that would suit a summer blockbuster based on this true story. Blessed is the Match: The Life and Death of Hannah Senesh (2008) One of the few Holocaust-related docs to not garner an Academy Award nomination, Roberta Grossman’s film is about Hannah Senesh, a Jewish poet who became part of a dangerous rescue mission to save Hungarian Jews and was eventually caught, tortured and executed by the Nazis. A dramatic film, which would be far more Hollywoodized than the doc’s re-enactment scenes, might be like a cross between Oscar-nominated films Defiance and Sophie Scholl – The Final Days. Brother’s Keeper (1992) Fratricide has made for great stories, from The Bible onward, but mainstream audiences may not run out to see a movie based on Brother’s Keeper, even if it does hold onto the Biblically influenced title. However, while homosexual incest and illiterate old country folk are difficult subjects to sell to moviegoers, murder mysteries will always fascinate people, and anyway the story of the Ward brothers could be more like a male Grey Gardens meets Capote than a dark, depressing drama that would only appeal to Sundance crowds. Changing Our Minds: The Story of Dr. Evelyn Hooker (1992) Now that the life of Harvey Milk has been turned into an Oscar-nominated dramatic feature, Hollywood should take on a biopic about Dr. Evelyn Hooker, whose life and work are depicted in this Oscar-nominated documentary from Richard Schmiechen (who also won an Oscar for producing The Times of Harvey Milk). Hooker’s research in the 1950s led to the discovery that homosexuality is not a disease. And subsequent study and activism resulted in the eventual removal, in 1974, of homosexuality from the American Psychiatric Association’s manual of mental disorders. A remake of Changing Our Minds would be like a cross between Milk and Kinsey. (note: the video above is not from Changing Our Minds, but is the best available alternative I have to present a clip of Hooker). Crazy Love (2007) In the typical Hollywood romance, female audiences see the same old reinforced fantasy about finding a man: while most guys lie, cheat, etc., there are Prince Charmings out there. Well, a dramatized version of Crazy Love might be the perfect romantic comedy for men to drag their girlfriends to. No, not to show them that they’d better not leave or they’ll get acid in the face. Rather, to say, “Look, no matter what I do, at least I’m not the kinda guy who blinds and disfigures the love of his life.” (Or, in other words, a lie to your face is not as bad as lye in your face.) Besides the appeal to boys who will be boys, however, a romantic comedy in which the couple meet, fall in love, are separated when the guy goes to prison for having the girl crippled, are reunited many years later, and eventually marry, is just crazy enough to hit a chord with moviegoers tired of the usual Renee Zellweger/Reese Witherspoon/Drew Barrymore crap. Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father (2008) In her review of this documentary, Karina writes that it “sets up a foundation which it knows it’s going to pull out from under us, and that makes it every bit as emotionally manipulative as a studio film.” Perfect, the film already offers Hollywood a structure for the dramatic version. Other than that, though, the remake would potentially focus on Shirley Turner, who murdered her boyfriend and then gave birth to his child, rather than on the character of Kurt Kuenne, who documents the story in the original. Then again, it could stick with Kuenne, and, though not be as personal as the nonfiction film, might be along the lines of an investigative drama, such as Zodiac. Either way, due to his name appearing in Karina’s review, M. Night Shyamalan has to direct it. Deliver Us from Evil (2006) With Doubt a big success as far as Oscar nominations go (if not as far as box office is concerned), it might be an okay time for Hollywood to make a film that’s more directly focused on the subject of pedophilic priests. It could hardly make less money than Doubt, and if a great actor were to portray Father O’Grady, it could be as popular with the Academy, which already nominated the original film for Best Documentary Feature. Golden Venture (2006) Another little-seen documentary that played Tribeca a few years ago (I reviewed the film then), Golden Venture depicts a failed attempt at an illegal alien smuggling operation and its aftermath. In its first ten minutes, the film offers enough action involving a sea voyage from China to New York City, during which there was mutiny, gang violence and ultimately a Coast Guard rescue, that a dramatic version might not even have time to get to the aftermath part. But as much as turning the doc into an action movie could work, the more interesting stuff relating to immigration and population control should be integrated, too. Like the original film, the dramatized version could separately follow the paths of four characters, each of whom has a different outcome. Tim Robbins, who narrated the doc, could direct it. Street Fight (2005) Newark Mayor Cory Booker’s name has been tossed about on news channels over the past few months due to his similarities with newly elected President Barack Obama. So, considering entertainment magazines predict the new administration will have an effect on pop culture, why not honor that idea by making a dramatic film about Booker’s battle with incumbent Sharpe James for City Hall. It would be a little like Milk, only without the gay rights angle or the tragic ending. And to make it more crowd-pleasing than Marshall Curry’s doc, the new movie wouldn’t end with Booker’s loss in 2002 but would see him all the way to the Mayor’s office in 2006. Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson (2004) Hollywood has never tired of boxing movies and it always loves a good civil rights struggle, so it’s amazing that no studio has tackled an official biopic about Jack Johnson, the first African-American Heavyweight Champion of the World. Sure, there’s The Great White Hope, which is somewhat based on Johnson’s life. And sure, if people want the truth they can check out this doc from Ken Burns (or, if it’s ever released on video, the earlier Oscar-nominated film Jack Johnson). But again, Hollywood never tires of boxing movies, and it always loves a good civil rights struggle, so perhaps it’s just a matter of time before we see this story dramatized for real. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog http://www.spout.com/blogs/spoutblog/archive/2009/1/27/39965.aspx Post By: SpoutBlog
Post To: SpoutBlog on spout.com
Post Date: 1/27/2009 1:01:20 PM
Body: In 10 out of 14 years, the winner of the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Leading Role has gone on to win the Academy Award for Best Actress. If this year marks the 11th such congruence, Meryl Streep will take home the Oscar. Yet there is an odd circumstance with the Academy’s nominations that hurts Streep’s chances. Another one of the Academy’s Best Actress contenders also received a SAG Award Sunday night: Kate Winslet, who won the supporting actress trophy for The Reader. At the Oscars, this role has been recognized as a lead performance, one that is likely a favorite to win. Yes, it is a strange situation, one that shocked and confused Oscar prognosticators (especially this writer) on Thursday morning. Winslet’s Reader performance was campaigned as a supporting role, and she was recognized as such by the Golden Globes, the Broadcast Film Critics Association, the Chicago Film Critics Association and of course the Screen Actors Guild. A few organizations did nominate her for a lead award for The Reader, though few people take the Satellites seriously, and the BAFTA Awards are different than most in that they permit Winslet to compete against herself in the same category (she is also nominated for Best Leading Actress for Revolutionary Road). Some now believe the Academy’s deviation will in fact cost Winslet the Oscar she could have won in the supporting field. Either voters will be confused about what film she’s nominated for (unless I’m simply less observant than elderly Academy members, which may indeed be the case), or she will now split the majority vote with Streep and thus allow Anne Hathaway or Melissa Leo to slip ahead (Angelina Jolie is believed to have no shot). Another idea is that voters will dismiss Winslet due to doubts over which category the performance belongs in. But since enough members of the Academy made it a point to nominate her as lead actress in the first place, this is hardly a reasonable theory. Also potentially without merit is the Holocaust factor, which seems to be the most popular argument for why Winslet is now a shoo-in to win the Oscar. This is an old favorite for Oscar oddsmakers, but it may not actually apply here. Still, when The Reader made surprise appearances in the Best Picture and Best Director categories last Thursday, one of the first familiar quotes to show up online was “there’s no business like Shoah business.” Yet the Academy already failed to nominate shortlisted documentary Blessed Is the Match, despite its Holocaust subject matter, and they also ignored related features such as The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, Adam Resurrected, Good and Valkyrie (meanwhile Defiance was only recognized by the music branch). So, certainly the Holocaust fetish thing is not a sure thing. It doesn’t even necessarily carry over to Israeli Oscar nominee Waltz With Bashir, as much as people may try to tie that documentary’s favorable odds to its association with the oft-mocked trend (actually could the doc now suffer with pro-Israel Academy members if it makes them think too much about war crimes committed against Palestinians?). Also, Winslet’s role as a sympathetic concentration camp guard should be as exclusive to the fetish as was (her Reader co-star) Bruno Ganz’s brilliant, Oscar-worthy portrayal of Hitler in Downfall. Even if she has told press that she neither liked nor sympathized with her character. So, then, what are plausible factors in Winslet’s likelihood of winning the Oscar? Well, there is the damage caused by Streep, who has certain advantage in the race for winning the lead SAG Award (which she apparently expected to lose to Winslet), as well as for winning kudos from critic circles, such as the Broadcast Film Critics Association (where she tied with Hathaway). Yet on the other hand, there are all those supporting wins in Winslet and The Reader’s favor, not to mention the triumph she had over Streep at the Golden Globes, even if it was recognition for another performance. There is also the belief that this is simply Winslet’s year to win after losing five previous Oscar races. However, as much as it seems Streep doesn’t need another Academy Award, she has in fact lost her last ten Oscar bids and hasn’t won in more than 25 years. Meanwhile, Winslet has plenty of great years left in her and will surely have more chances in the future. One additional factor could put Winslet’s odds just past Streep’s, and that factor’s name is Harvey Weinstein. Whether the Oscar-hungry exec is simply holding his high ground with the Academy or he’s making a greater push for his company’s film in order to spite Scott Rudin (producer of Streep’s film, Doubt, and a former producer of The Reader) is unclear and beside the point. Many people immediately cursed his name when they saw The Reader make its surprise appearances in the top categories (Nikki Finke believes the film partly prevailed because the Academy wanted to honor Rudin, Winslet and Daldry for having to put up with “that nasty oaf”). Even better than the Harvey factor, though, is the actual quality of Winslet’s work. Sure, worth of talent is all but dead in the modern Hollywood, particularly where the Oscars are concerned, but as a deal breaker in a race between two actresses who are truly brilliant thespians, it could very well be consequential. And between Winslet and Streep, this year the former has the advantage. Streep’s Oscar-nominated role has been viewed by some as overdone, and her other performance in 2008 was in a musical comedy. Winslet, on the other hand, will benefit for giving two Oscar-worthy lead performances, only one of which was nominated. And any voters who initially made the attempt to nominate her for Best Actress for Revolutionary Road may surely choose Winslet with that other unrecognized performance in mind (Anne Thompson agrees she’ll win for both films). With another neck-and-neck race in the Best Actor category and (also thanks to the Academy’s unpredictable deviation from the Winslet campaigns) a lack of a frontrunner in the Best Supporting Actress race, this year’s Oscars are shaping up to be a difficult game to bet on. Knowing that the Academy can be counted on for surprises, it’s possible that Streep will win. Even Hathaway may have a shot (though her time will more likely come from a future supporting role). But if you’re a gambling man who hates to lose, I’d recommend putting your chips on Winslet for Best Actress. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog
]]>Tue, 27 Jan 2009 18:01:20 GMTSpoutBlogSpoutBlog on spout.com1/27/2009 1:01:20 PMIn 10 out of 14 years, the winner of the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Leading Role has gone on to win the Academy Award for Best Actress. If this year marks the 11th such congruence, Meryl Streep will take home the Oscar. Yet there is an odd circumstance with the Academy’s nominations that hurts Streep’s chances. Another one of the Academy’s Best Actress contenders also received a SAG Award Sunday night: Kate Winslet, who won the supporting actress trophy for The Reader. At the Oscars, this role has been recognized as a lead performance, one that is likely a favorite to win. Yes, it is a strange situation, one that shocked and confused Oscar prognosticators (especially this writer) on Thursday morning. Winslet’s Reader performance was campaigned as a supporting role, and she was recognized as such by the Golden Globes, the Broadcast Film Critics Association, the Chicago Film Critics Association and of course the Screen Actors Guild. A few organizations did nominate her for a lead award for The Reader, though few people take the Satellites seriously, and the BAFTA Awards are different than most in that they permit Winslet to compete against herself in the same category (she is also nominated for Best Leading Actress for Revolutionary Road). Some now believe the Academy’s deviation will in fact cost Winslet the Oscar she could have won in the supporting field. Either voters will be confused about what film she’s nominated for (unless I’m simply less observant than elderly Academy members, which may indeed be the case), or she will now split the majority vote with Streep and thus allow Anne Hathaway or Melissa Leo to slip ahead (Angelina Jolie is believed to have no shot). Another idea is that voters will dismiss Winslet due to doubts over which category the performance belongs in. But since enough members of the Academy made it a point to nominate her as lead actress in the first place, this is hardly a reasonable theory. Also potentially without merit is the Holocaust factor, which seems to be the most popular argument for why Winslet is now a shoo-in to win the Oscar. This is an old favorite for Oscar oddsmakers, but it may not actually apply here. Still, when The Reader made surprise appearances in the Best Picture and Best Director categories last Thursday, one of the first familiar quotes to show up online was “there’s no business like Shoah business.” Yet the Academy already failed to nominate shortlisted documentary Blessed Is the Match, despite its Holocaust subject matter, and they also ignored related features such as The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, Adam Resurrected, Good and Valkyrie (meanwhile Defiance was only recognized by the music branch). So, certainly the Holocaust fetish thing is not a sure thing. It doesn’t even necessarily carry over to Israeli Oscar nominee Waltz With Bashir, as much as people may try to tie that documentary’s favorable odds to its association with the oft-mocked trend (actually could the doc now suffer with pro-Israel Academy members if it makes them think too much about war crimes committed against Palestinians?). Also, Winslet’s role as a sympathetic concentration camp guard should be as exclusive to the fetish as was (her Reader co-star) Bruno Ganz’s brilliant, Oscar-worthy portrayal of Hitler in Downfall. Even if she has told press that she neither liked nor sympathized with her character. So, then, what are plausible factors in Winslet’s likelihood of winning the Oscar? Well, there is the damage caused by Streep, who has certain advantage in the race for winning the lead SAG Award (which she apparently expected to lose to Winslet), as well as for winning kudos from critic circles, such as the Broadcast Film Critics Association (where she tied with Hathaway). Yet on the other hand, there are all those supporting wins in Winslet and The Reader’s favor, not to mention the triumph she had over Streep at the Golden Globes, even if it was recognition for another performance. There is also the belief that this is simply Winslet’s year to win after losing five previous Oscar races. However, as much as it seems Streep doesn’t need another Academy Award, she has in fact lost her last ten Oscar bids and hasn’t won in more than 25 years. Meanwhile, Winslet has plenty of great years left in her and will surely have more chances in the future. One additional factor could put Winslet’s odds just past Streep’s, and that factor’s name is Harvey Weinstein. Whether the Oscar-hungry exec is simply holding his high ground with the Academy or he’s making a greater push for his company’s film in order to spite Scott Rudin (producer of Streep’s film, Doubt, and a former producer of The Reader) is unclear and beside the point. Many people immediately cursed his name when they saw The Reader make its surprise appearances in the top categories (Nikki Finke believes the film partly prevailed because the Academy wanted to honor Rudin, Winslet and Daldry for having to put up with “that nasty oaf”). Even better than the Harvey factor, though, is the actual quality of Winslet’s work. Sure, worth of talent is all but dead in the modern Hollywood, particularly where the Oscars are concerned, but as a deal breaker in a race between two actresses who are truly brilliant thespians, it could very well be consequential. And between Winslet and Streep, this year the former has the advantage. Streep’s Oscar-nominated role has been viewed by some as overdone, and her other performance in 2008 was in a musical comedy. Winslet, on the other hand, will benefit for giving two Oscar-worthy lead performances, only one of which was nominated. And any voters who initially made the attempt to nominate her for Best Actress for Revolutionary Road may surely choose Winslet with that other unrecognized performance in mind (Anne Thompson agrees she’ll win for both films). With another neck-and-neck race in the Best Actor category and (also thanks to the Academy’s unpredictable deviation from the Winslet campaigns) a lack of a frontrunner in the Best Supporting Actress race, this year’s Oscars are shaping up to be a difficult game to bet on. Knowing that the Academy can be counted on for surprises, it’s possible that Streep will win. Even Hathaway may have a shot (though her time will more likely come from a future supporting role). But if you’re a gambling man who hates to lose, I’d recommend putting your chips on Winslet for Best Actress. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog http://www.spout.com/blogs/dibot/archive/2009/1/12/39438.aspx Post By: dibot
Post To: dibot Blog
Post Date: 1/12/2009 9:56:13 PM
Body: The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner is another in the filmspotting Angry Young Men marathon. I dug this one more than the others, mostly because I didn't think the main guy, Tom Courtenay ("The Golden Compass"), was mean for no reason. I still did not totally understand his "sticking it to the man." I feel like I would have chosen a different method. But I liked the set-up of the film. Courtenay is in a boy's reformatory and training for the sports program. As he trains, the film flashes back to his life and how he ended up in juvie. I am hoping this marathon will get a bit more uplifting. Please?I just rewatched The Karate Kid, one of my childhood favorites, and it totally holds up. Ralph Macchio ("Beer League") is perfectly earnest as a high schooler moving from New Jersey to California and dealing with bullies who kick his ass with karate. He falls for Elizabeth Shue ("Hamlet 2") and is taken in by Pat Morita ("Act Your Age") who trains him in the right way to to use karate. It's funny. The romance between Shue and Macchio is sweet. And the role Morita plays as father/mentor is inspirational. I still love it.I caught Escape to Witch Mountain on TCM and was quite taken in by the story of two psychic siblings trying to find their real family. The plot follows the kids from an orphanage to the home of a scheming millionaire and then as they escape to the wilderness and are picked up by a grumpy old man. The children are adorable and the things they can do are often entertaining. Although, some of the telekinesis scenes are too long. I guess at the time, the technology was new. Still a good family watch.Doubt is all about watching Meryl Streep ("Mamma Mia!") and Philip Seymour Hoffman ("Synecdoche, New York") go at each other. The other actors are good, but these too heavy weights are mesmerizing. Streep is the principal and head nun of a catholic school in the early 60s. Hoffman is the priest who she suspects of molesting a young boy. I love how the film never confirms anything. You're just left to think about everything. Totally enjoyed it.Once, actually, more than once, when I was very young, my parents foolishly let me watch USA's Saturday Nightmares. And there I saw The Children. Images from the film haunted me throughout my childhood. So, finally seeing it again was a really big deal for me. And, I have to admit, it's just not as scary. But there are some freaky images that, even now, are a bit chilling. The premise has a busload of children passing through a cloud leaked from a nuclear power plant. The children become deadly and anyone they touch suffers from chemical burns. Which is gruesome. And inconvenient when the parents go to hug them. Not a bad movie, but not the scariest movie ever made either.
]]>Tue, 13 Jan 2009 02:56:13 GMTdibotdibot Blog1/12/2009 9:56:13 PMThe Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner is another in the filmspotting Angry Young Men marathon. I dug this one more than the others, mostly because I didn't think the main guy, Tom Courtenay ("The Golden Compass"), was mean for no reason. I still did not totally understand his "sticking it to the man." I feel like I would have chosen a different method. But I liked the set-up of the film. Courtenay is in a boy's reformatory and training for the sports program. As he trains, the film flashes back to his life and how he ended up in juvie. I am hoping this marathon will get a bit more uplifting. Please?I just rewatched The Karate Kid, one of my childhood favorites, and it totally holds up. Ralph Macchio ("Beer League") is perfectly earnest as a high schooler moving from New Jersey to California and dealing with bullies who kick his ass with karate. He falls for Elizabeth Shue ("Hamlet 2") and is taken in by Pat Morita ("Act Your Age") who trains him in the right way to to use karate. It's funny. The romance between Shue and Macchio is sweet. And the role Morita plays as father/mentor is inspirational. I still love it.I caught Escape to Witch Mountain on TCM and was quite taken in by the story of two psychic siblings trying to find their real family. The plot follows the kids from an orphanage to the home of a scheming millionaire and then as they escape to the wilderness and are picked up by a grumpy old man. The children are adorable and the things they can do are often entertaining. Although, some of the telekinesis scenes are too long. I guess at the time, the technology was new. Still a good family watch.Doubt is all about watching Meryl Streep ("Mamma Mia!") and Philip Seymour Hoffman ("Synecdoche, New York") go at each other. The other actors are good, but these too heavy weights are mesmerizing. Streep is the principal and head nun of a catholic school in the early 60s. Hoffman is the priest who she suspects of molesting a young boy. I love how the film never confirms anything. You're just left to think about everything. Totally enjoyed it.Once, actually, more than once, when I was very young, my parents foolishly let me watch USA's Saturday Nightmares. And there I saw The Children. Images from the film haunted me throughout my childhood. So, finally seeing it again was a really big deal for me. And, I have to admit, it's just not as scary. But there are some freaky images that, even now, are a bit chilling. The premise has a busload of children passing through a cloud leaked from a nuclear power plant. The children become deadly and anyone they touch suffers from chemical burns. Which is gruesome. And inconvenient when the parents go to hug them. Not a bad movie, but not the scariest movie ever made either. http://www.spout.com/blogs/spoutblog/archive/2009/1/12/39409.aspx Post By: SpoutBlog
Post To: SpoutBlog on spout.com
Post Date: 1/12/2009 2:01:21 PM
Body: The Golden Globes have been handed out, and the last of Oscar ballots are to be postmarked by today. So, that’s it, the nominations for the 81st Academy Awards are being figured out as we speak, and campaigning is over until the official contenders are announced on January 22. Hopefully a few Academy members took notice of our unlikely last-minute suggestions, but it’s more probable that we’ll be looking at an unsurprising crop of films represented in the major eight categories. As you’ll see after the jump, we predict that two heavily-buzzed supporting performances will be snubbed. Of course you’re likely to disagree with these foreseen omissions. In fact, we welcome all you readers to make your own predictions in the comments section — what you think will be nominated, not what you want nominated. And on Monday, January 19, SpoutBlog will feature a post highlighting the best of these comments and predictions. Best Picture The Dark Knight Slumdog Millionaire Milk The Curious Case of Benjamin Button Frost/Nixon Possible upsets: Doubt; Revolutionary Road; Wall-E Best Director Danny Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire) Gus Van Sant (Milk) Ron Howard (Frost/Nixon) David Fincher (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) Sam Mendes (Revolutionary Road) Possible upsets: Christopher Nolan (The Dark Knight); Jonathan Demme (Rachel Getting Married); Darren Aronofsky (The Wrestler) Best Actress Meryl Streep (Doubt) Anne Hathaway (Rachel Getting Married) Kate Winslet (Revolutionary Road) Cate Blanchett (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) Sally Hawkins (Happy-Go-Lucky) Possible upsets: Kristin Scott Thomas (I’ve Loved You So Long); Angelina Jolie (Changeling); Melissa Leo (Frozen River) Best Actor Sean Penn (Milk) Mickey Rourke (The Wrestler) Clint Eastwood (Gran Torino) Frank Langella (Frost/Nixon) Leonardo DiCaprio (Revolutionary Road) Possible upsets: Brad Pitt (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button); Richard Jenkins (The Visitor) Best Supporting Actress Viola Davis (Doubt) Amy Adams (Doubt) Penelope Cruz (Vicky Cristina Barcelona) Kate Winslet (The Reader) Marisa Tomei (The Wrestler) Possible upsets: Taraji P. Henson (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button); Rosemarie DeWitt (Rachel Getting Married) Best Supporting Actor Heath Ledger (The Dark Knight) Josh Brolin (Milk) Philip Seymour Hoffman (Doubt) Dev Patel (Slumdog Millionaire) Michael Shannon (Revolutionary Road) Possible upsets: Robert Downey Jr. (Tropic Thunder); James Franco (Milk) Best Original Screenplay Dustin Lance Black (Milk) Woody Allen (Vicky Cristina Barcelona) Andrew Stanton & Jim Reardon (Wall-E) Robert Siegel (The Wrestler) Tom McCarthy (The Visitor) Possible upsets: Jenny Lumet (Rachel Getting Married); Joel Coen & Ethan Coen (Burn After Reading) Best Adapted Screenplay Simon Beaufoy (Slumdog Millionaire) Jonathan Nolan & Christopher Nolan (The Dark Knight) Peter Morgan (Frost/Nixon) Eric Roth (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) John Patrick Shanley (Doubt) Possible upsets: David Hare (The Reader); Justin Haythe (Revolutionary Road) Originally posted on:SpoutBlog
]]>Mon, 12 Jan 2009 19:01:21 GMTSpoutBlogSpoutBlog on spout.com1/12/2009 2:01:21 PMThe Golden Globes have been handed out, and the last of Oscar ballots are to be postmarked by today. So, that’s it, the nominations for the 81st Academy Awards are being figured out as we speak, and campaigning is over until the official contenders are announced on January 22. Hopefully a few Academy members took notice of our unlikely last-minute suggestions, but it’s more probable that we’ll be looking at an unsurprising crop of films represented in the major eight categories. As you’ll see after the jump, we predict that two heavily-buzzed supporting performances will be snubbed. Of course you’re likely to disagree with these foreseen omissions. In fact, we welcome all you readers to make your own predictions in the comments section — what you think will be nominated, not what you want nominated. And on Monday, January 19, SpoutBlog will feature a post highlighting the best of these comments and predictions. Best Picture The Dark Knight Slumdog Millionaire Milk The Curious Case of Benjamin Button Frost/Nixon Possible upsets: Doubt; Revolutionary Road; Wall-E Best Director Danny Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire) Gus Van Sant (Milk) Ron Howard (Frost/Nixon) David Fincher (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) Sam Mendes (Revolutionary Road) Possible upsets: Christopher Nolan (The Dark Knight); Jonathan Demme (Rachel Getting Married); Darren Aronofsky (The Wrestler) Best Actress Meryl Streep (Doubt) Anne Hathaway (Rachel Getting Married) Kate Winslet (Revolutionary Road) Cate Blanchett (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) Sally Hawkins (Happy-Go-Lucky) Possible upsets: Kristin Scott Thomas (I’ve Loved You So Long); Angelina Jolie (Changeling); Melissa Leo (Frozen River) Best Actor Sean Penn (Milk) Mickey Rourke (The Wrestler) Clint Eastwood (Gran Torino) Frank Langella (Frost/Nixon) Leonardo DiCaprio (Revolutionary Road) Possible upsets: Brad Pitt (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button); Richard Jenkins (The Visitor) Best Supporting Actress Viola Davis (Doubt) Amy Adams (Doubt) Penelope Cruz (Vicky Cristina Barcelona) Kate Winslet (The Reader) Marisa Tomei (The Wrestler) Possible upsets: Taraji P. Henson (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button); Rosemarie DeWitt (Rachel Getting Married) Best Supporting Actor Heath Ledger (The Dark Knight) Josh Brolin (Milk) Philip Seymour Hoffman (Doubt) Dev Patel (Slumdog Millionaire) Michael Shannon (Revolutionary Road) Possible upsets: Robert Downey Jr. (Tropic Thunder); James Franco (Milk) Best Original Screenplay Dustin Lance Black (Milk) Woody Allen (Vicky Cristina Barcelona) Andrew Stanton & Jim Reardon (Wall-E) Robert Siegel (The Wrestler) Tom McCarthy (The Visitor) Possible upsets: Jenny Lumet (Rachel Getting Married); Joel Coen & Ethan Coen (Burn After Reading) Best Adapted Screenplay Simon Beaufoy (Slumdog Millionaire) Jonathan Nolan & Christopher Nolan (The Dark Knight) Peter Morgan (Frost/Nixon) Eric Roth (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) John Patrick Shanley (Doubt) Possible upsets: David Hare (The Reader); Justin Haythe (Revolutionary Road) Originally posted on:SpoutBlog http://www.spout.com/blogs/spoutblog/archive/2009/1/9/39313.aspx Post By: SpoutBlog
Post To: SpoutBlog on spout.com
Post Date: 1/9/2009 1:00:40 PM
Body: We’re less than two weeks away from receiving this year’s Oscar nominations, and though none of the major categories are completely predictable just yet, each has at least three or four certain favorites. Meanwhile, the final slots for Best Picture, Best Director and the acting and screenwriting categories may be simply a random grab from small handfuls of rotating contenders. As of now, it doesn’t appear we’ll be seeing any huge surprises come the morning of January 22nd, when the Academy announces the nominees. The Dark Knight is sure to become the first comic book film up for Best Picture, and it won’t even be a shocker if animated feature Wall-E is listed alongside it in the same category. But the ballots don’t need to be mailed out until Monday, so I’m taking one last chance to reach out to the procrastinators within the Academy membership. If you still don’t know who and what to write in, and you’re unwilling to go the safe route and nominate the expected bunch of films and talent, then consider some of these underdogs, under-appreciated and pretty much unlikely possibilities: Best Picture: Rachel Getting Married There was a time when Jonathan Demme’s “Altmanesque” family drama was thought a frontrunner for the Academy’s top prize, but now it looks like it may not even garner a much-deserved Original Screenplay nod for Jenny Lumet, let alone Best Picture. Anne Hathaway is still a good bet in the Best Actress category, though she’s perhaps the least worthy element of the film. Demme deserves his first Best Director nomination in 17 years for reinventing and revitalizing his career with such a rich ensemble piece, while editor Tim Squyres needs to be recognized for piecing together the ingredients so perfectly. I could go on and on about more individual achievements that need be honored (I’ve already spotlighted Robyn Hitchcock’s worth), so let’s just sum it all up and say Rachel Getting Married is highly worthy of being nominated for Best Picture. Best Director: Mike Leigh, Happy-Go-Lucky Like Jonathan Demme, Mike Leigh is one of the finest living directors in terms of working with actors. They both constantly get Oscar-worthy (if not Academy-recognized) performances from otherwise serviceable thespians, yet Leigh is typically more regarded for his screenwriting, for which he’s received three Oscar nominations against two directorial nominations. With Happy-Go-Lucky, it’s more his directing skill that shines through, and if the Academy can’t find room to honor either Sally Hawkins or Eddie Marsan (respectively for Best Actress and Best Supporting Actor) they might want to nominate Leigh, since neither would have been so remarkable without his leadership. Best Actress: Michelle Williams, Wendy and Lucy For the minimalist kind of films that Kelly Reichardt makes, most filmmakers would rather go with an unknown lead than with a familiar, gossip magazine-friendly actress, even one as talented as Michelle Williams. Yet the former Oscar nominee disappears into the role of Wendy in Wendy and Lucy, so much that it’s easy to forget that she’s a famous movie star. She seems as fresh and unknown as any actor in a De Sica or, more currently, a Ramin Bahrani film. The Academy will likely overlook Williams this year, not so much because the film was barely distributed, but because she doesn’t give a particularly flashy performance. Plus, although the actress appears relatively unfamiliar on screen, it isn’t the kind of “unrecognizable” transformation that Oscar prefers with beautiful young starlets. Best Supporting Actress: Bette Midler, Then She Found Me If a performance is great and nobody sees it, is it still Oscar-worthy? Of course, but it’s not likely to be nominated. I don’t foresee any Academy members scrambling to rent Helen Hunt’s terrific directorial debut, Then She Found Me, this weekend, which is too bad. Bette was back this past year and just as good as, if not better than, before. She was lively yet somewhat reserved compared to what we expect from her. The two-time Best Actress nominee will hopefully receive her due win one day, probably in the supporting category and as a career-honoring nod, but it may not be as deserving as this. Best Actor: Josh Brolin, W. I’ve already written a whole column about why Brolin should receive a Best Actor nomination for W., so I needn’t devote too much more space here. Apparently he’s gained more heat for his supporting role in Milk, though, and while that should be plenty recognition for him this year, I continue to hope for a double nomination. His two performances this year are equally amazing, and they couldn’t be more different, despite how they may both be deemed villainous roles. Best Supporting Actor: Mark Walton, Bolt Let me first acknowledge that I got this idea from Bolt’s biggest fan, Kristopher Tapley of In Contention, who called Mark Walton’s voice acting, “the closest I’ve ever come to considering a vocal performance Oscar-worthy since Ellen Degeneres in ‘Finding Nemo.’” I don’t necessarily agree with Tapley’s decision to put Bolt at #2 on his Best of 2008 list, but I would love to see a non-actor like Walton be recognized non-traditionally for vocal work, a form of acting that doesn’t garner enough consideration. Who needs big name casting in an animated film when a storyboard artist gives a more hilarious vocal performance than even Jack Black? Best Original Screenplay: Charlie Kaufman, Synecdoche, New York Kaufman may need some fine-tuning in the directorial department (though he did a pretty good job for a first-timer), but his latest screenplay, for Synecdoche, New York, is every bit as brilliant as his three Oscar-nominated scripts (one of which, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, was a winner). There’s not much originality in the attempt to put everything into a screenplay — in fact, it’s a common mistake for narcissistic novices — but Kaufman is quite original for having been the first to be successful at it. Best Adapted Screenplay: James Marsh and Philippe Petit, Man on Wire There is no screenwriter credited for Man on Wire, but there had to have been some sort of adaptation involved, even if it was simply a single-page treatment and some notes about how to turn Petit’s unexceptional (though fairly enjoyable) book To Reach the Clouds into one of the most riveting documentaries of all time. Unfortunately, the lack of credit means that the Academy will certainly overlook this, the greatest cinematic storytelling of the year. And now, some extra-long shots in two of the non-major categories: Best Cinematography: Jeremy Lasky, Martin Rosenberg, Danielle Feinberg, Roger Deakins, Wall-E I almost chose Wall-E, which I don’t think should be given a Best Picture nod, for the Best Director slot, for Andrew Stanton. But if any animation filmmaker is going to break such ground, I’d rather first see Brad Bird recognized in that category. Besides, much of the innovative camera work in Wall-E is courtesy of new concepts in cinematographic technique for animation. Even if the Academy blew our minds and nominated Wall-E for Best Cinematography, Deakins, whom Pixar hired for some uncredited consultation, wouldn’t be named as one of the nominees. But since the guy is so deserving of an Oscar, why not just name him in some additional slots this year (a repeat of his double duty from 2007, he’s expected to receive two nods, for Doubt and Revolutionary Road)? Best Foreign Language Film: Tony Manero Pablo Larrain’s Tony Manero, which is Chile’s official submission to the foreign language category, is currently without a distributor in the U.S. How might that change? An Oscar nomination. Sure, not every Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Language film is guaranteed distribution, but it could help a film as highly praised as this one — recently it placed third on indieWIRE’s Critic’s Poll of the best undistributed films of the year. Currently, it’s a strong contender, though it may be just on the outside of the Academy’s top choices (it’s up against either Sweden’s Everlasting Moments or Germany’s The Baader Meinhof Complex for that last spot). Personally, I haven’t actually seen Tony Manero, but I’d really like to, and that is why I wish for it to be recognized. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog
]]>Fri, 09 Jan 2009 18:00:40 GMTSpoutBlogSpoutBlog on spout.com1/9/2009 1:00:40 PMWe’re less than two weeks away from receiving this year’s Oscar nominations, and though none of the major categories are completely predictable just yet, each has at least three or four certain favorites. Meanwhile, the final slots for Best Picture, Best Director and the acting and screenwriting categories may be simply a random grab from small handfuls of rotating contenders. As of now, it doesn’t appear we’ll be seeing any huge surprises come the morning of January 22nd, when the Academy announces the nominees. The Dark Knight is sure to become the first comic book film up for Best Picture, and it won’t even be a shocker if animated feature Wall-E is listed alongside it in the same category. But the ballots don’t need to be mailed out until Monday, so I’m taking one last chance to reach out to the procrastinators within the Academy membership. If you still don’t know who and what to write in, and you’re unwilling to go the safe route and nominate the expected bunch of films and talent, then consider some of these underdogs, under-appreciated and pretty much unlikely possibilities: Best Picture: Rachel Getting Married There was a time when Jonathan Demme’s “Altmanesque” family drama was thought a frontrunner for the Academy’s top prize, but now it looks like it may not even garner a much-deserved Original Screenplay nod for Jenny Lumet, let alone Best Picture. Anne Hathaway is still a good bet in the Best Actress category, though she’s perhaps the least worthy element of the film. Demme deserves his first Best Director nomination in 17 years for reinventing and revitalizing his career with such a rich ensemble piece, while editor Tim Squyres needs to be recognized for piecing together the ingredients so perfectly. I could go on and on about more individual achievements that need be honored (I’ve already spotlighted Robyn Hitchcock’s worth), so let’s just sum it all up and say Rachel Getting Married is highly worthy of being nominated for Best Picture. Best Director: Mike Leigh, Happy-Go-Lucky Like Jonathan Demme, Mike Leigh is one of the finest living directors in terms of working with actors. They both constantly get Oscar-worthy (if not Academy-recognized) performances from otherwise serviceable thespians, yet Leigh is typically more regarded for his screenwriting, for which he’s received three Oscar nominations against two directorial nominations. With Happy-Go-Lucky, it’s more his directing skill that shines through, and if the Academy can’t find room to honor either Sally Hawkins or Eddie Marsan (respectively for Best Actress and Best Supporting Actor) they might want to nominate Leigh, since neither would have been so remarkable without his leadership. Best Actress: Michelle Williams, Wendy and Lucy For the minimalist kind of films that Kelly Reichardt makes, most filmmakers would rather go with an unknown lead than with a familiar, gossip magazine-friendly actress, even one as talented as Michelle Williams. Yet the former Oscar nominee disappears into the role of Wendy in Wendy and Lucy, so much that it’s easy to forget that she’s a famous movie star. She seems as fresh and unknown as any actor in a De Sica or, more currently, a Ramin Bahrani film. The Academy will likely overlook Williams this year, not so much because the film was barely distributed, but because she doesn’t give a particularly flashy performance. Plus, although the actress appears relatively unfamiliar on screen, it isn’t the kind of “unrecognizable” transformation that Oscar prefers with beautiful young starlets. Best Supporting Actress: Bette Midler, Then She Found Me If a performance is great and nobody sees it, is it still Oscar-worthy? Of course, but it’s not likely to be nominated. I don’t foresee any Academy members scrambling to rent Helen Hunt’s terrific directorial debut, Then She Found Me, this weekend, which is too bad. Bette was back this past year and just as good as, if not better than, before. She was lively yet somewhat reserved compared to what we expect from her. The two-time Best Actress nominee will hopefully receive her due win one day, probably in the supporting category and as a career-honoring nod, but it may not be as deserving as this. Best Actor: Josh Brolin, W. I’ve already written a whole column about why Brolin should receive a Best Actor nomination for W., so I needn’t devote too much more space here. Apparently he’s gained more heat for his supporting role in Milk, though, and while that should be plenty recognition for him this year, I continue to hope for a double nomination. His two performances this year are equally amazing, and they couldn’t be more different, despite how they may both be deemed villainous roles. Best Supporting Actor: Mark Walton, Bolt Let me first acknowledge that I got this idea from Bolt’s biggest fan, Kristopher Tapley of In Contention, who called Mark Walton’s voice acting, “the closest I’ve ever come to considering a vocal performance Oscar-worthy since Ellen Degeneres in ‘Finding Nemo.’” I don’t necessarily agree with Tapley’s decision to put Bolt at #2 on his Best of 2008 list, but I would love to see a non-actor like Walton be recognized non-traditionally for vocal work, a form of acting that doesn’t garner enough consideration. Who needs big name casting in an animated film when a storyboard artist gives a more hilarious vocal performance than even Jack Black? Best Original Screenplay: Charlie Kaufman, Synecdoche, New York Kaufman may need some fine-tuning in the directorial department (though he did a pretty good job for a first-timer), but his latest screenplay, for Synecdoche, New York, is every bit as brilliant as his three Oscar-nominated scripts (one of which, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, was a winner). There’s not much originality in the attempt to put everything into a screenplay — in fact, it’s a common mistake for narcissistic novices — but Kaufman is quite original for having been the first to be successful at it. Best Adapted Screenplay: James Marsh and Philippe Petit, Man on Wire There is no screenwriter credited for Man on Wire, but there had to have been some sort of adaptation involved, even if it was simply a single-page treatment and some notes about how to turn Petit’s unexceptional (though fairly enjoyable) book To Reach the Clouds into one of the most riveting documentaries of all time. Unfortunately, the lack of credit means that the Academy will certainly overlook this, the greatest cinematic storytelling of the year. And now, some extra-long shots in two of the non-major categories: Best Cinematography: Jeremy Lasky, Martin Rosenberg, Danielle Feinberg, Roger Deakins, Wall-E I almost chose Wall-E, which I don’t think should be given a Best Picture nod, for the Best Director slot, for Andrew Stanton. But if any animation filmmaker is going to break such ground, I’d rather first see Brad Bird recognized in that category. Besides, much of the innovative camera work in Wall-E is courtesy of new concepts in cinematographic technique for animation. Even if the Academy blew our minds and nominated Wall-E for Best Cinematography, Deakins, whom Pixar hired for some uncredited consultation, wouldn’t be named as one of the nominees. But since the guy is so deserving of an Oscar, why not just name him in some additional slots this year (a repeat of his double duty from 2007, he’s expected to receive two nods, for Doubt and Revolutionary Road)? Best Foreign Language Film: Tony Manero Pablo Larrain’s Tony Manero, which is Chile’s official submission to the foreign language category, is currently without a distributor in the U.S. How might that change? An Oscar nomination. Sure, not every Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Language film is guaranteed distribution, but it could help a film as highly praised as this one — recently it placed third on indieWIRE’s Critic’s Poll of the best undistributed films of the year. Currently, it’s a strong contender, though it may be just on the outside of the Academy’s top choices (it’s up against either Sweden’s Everlasting Moments or Germany’s The Baader Meinhof Complex for that last spot). Personally, I haven’t actually seen Tony Manero, but I’d really like to, and that is why I wish for it to be recognized. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog http://www.spout.com/blogs/spoutblog/archive/2008/12/15/38418.aspx Post By: SpoutBlog
Post To: SpoutBlog on spout.com
Post Date: 12/15/2008 6:00:57 PM
Body: When the Golden Globe nominations were announced last week, there was one glaring omission from the Best Supporting Actor category: a nod for Milk. Actually, there were four glaring omissions, because Milk still does not have a definite forerunner among its quartet of campaigned-for supporting actors, which includes Josh Brolin, James Franco, Emile Hirsch and Diego Luna. Did the Hollywood Foreign Press Association truly snub the film, as has been suggested, or could the organization simply not decide which actor to nominate? Perhaps the two favorites, Brolin and Franco, cancelled each other out. If so, the Academy needs to ensure that such a thing doesn’t happen with its Oscar nominations. And the best way to do this is to get behind Diego Luna for Best Supporting Actor. This will no doubt seem like a ridiculous suggestion this late in the game, particularly to the critics who fail to appreciate Luna’s performance. His character, Jack Lira, has been labeled underwritten and unnecessary –– neither of which is true –– and “annoying,” which is precisely how the real Lira was thought of anyway. Kirk Honeycutt at The Hollywood Reporter called Luna’s performance “looped,” Wesley Morris of The Boston Globe joked that the actor “appears to have wandered over from some drunken college production of Pedro Almodovar’s Bad Education,” and A.O. Scott at The New York Times wrote that Lira is played “with an operatic verve that stops just short of camp,” which is a little more polite than the multiple reviews that actually straight-up call it camp. Then, there’s Slant critic Ed Gonzalez, who does the most damage, claiming the performance is “embarrassing, miscalculated.” The easiest way to lash back at these criticisms is to accuse most reviewers as being biased against flamboyancy. Sure, Luna’s portrayal of Lira can be viewed as over the top, but that’s not the fault of the actor. And to otherwise negatively respond to the character as “camp” is to display an issue with such insecure personalities as Lira, who projects a boisterous over-identification with the flamboyancy of homosexuality as a sort of masochistic masquerade. The character of Lira is not so much underwritten as unknown and unwelcome, which was basically the reality of his context within Harvey Milk’s campaign. But then to consider the accuracy of Lira’s character and of Luna’s portrayal is to wrongly think that Milk is concrete in capturing the true story. Rather, Milk is more the familiar tale of any martyr who sacrifices his own happiness for the happiness of the masses, who damages his own relationships in order to make possible others’ relationships. For this, Lira is a necessary narrative device, both in terms of contrasting with Franco’s more reserved love-interest character and in terms of contrasting, as the single-save, with the larger civil rights goal at hand. In this role, Luna certainly goes above and beyond the call for serviceability in his portrait of jealous desperation and the politically dismissed individual. Highlighting the critics’ praises for Luna would unfortunately amount to quoting mostly also-ran notices in which he’s included, by name or not, within celebrations of the whole supporting ensemble (including the one supporting actress contender, Alison Pill). Indeed, it is this recognition of the film’s ensemble that has probably allowed for so much of a split among the film’s kudos, and yet it’s one of Milk’s greater assets that there is such equality and consistency with regards to the characters and the acting. Sean Penn may be the obvious lead, and his performance may be spotlighted above the others as a result, but in group scenes Gus Van Sant places the titular character in a fairly even playing field with the rest, enough that Focus Features may just as well have included Joseph Cross, Victor Garber and other unrecognized cast members on its For Your Consideration posters for Milk. In a perfect world they all could be nominated, and honored, as they will be when the film most assuredly wins the Outstanding Performance by a Cast award at the Screen Actors Guild Awards. But the closest thing for the Academy to do in this fashion would be to name all four campaigned-for supporting actors from Milk. Considering a lack of sure things in the category other than Heath Ledger, who is certain to win the award posthumously, there would be little harm in having the other slots filled by Brolin, Franco, Hirsch and Luna. Plus, it would make Oscar history, as it would be the first time the Academy nominated four actors in this category (three films have had three actors nominated: On the Waterfront; The Godfather and The Godfather Part II). Another idea is to simply shrug away the three most celebrated contenders (Brolin, Franco and Hirsch, respectively #2, #6 and #10 on The Envelope’s Supporting Actor Buzzmeter) and pull out the underdog, the non-registering yet still deserving Luna. The other alternative is to continue the divide, which will lead to a category as follows: Ledger (The Dark Knight); Michael Shannon (Revolutionary Road); Philip Seymour Hoffman (Doubt); Robert Downey Jr. (Tropic Thunder); Dev Patel (Slumdog Millionaire). With no love for either Franco, who has been chosen by the Independent Spirit Awards and the Golden Satellite Awards, or Brolin, who has been picked by the National Board of Review and the New York Film Critics. Both actors were actually jointly selected as nominees for the Broadcast Film Critics Association’s awards, but it’s difficult to imagine this compromise happening with the Academy’s voters, who may have a one-or-the-other attitude when considering whose year, Brolin’s or Franco’s, it really was. Both actors equally deserve the recognition for their collective 2008 performances, though that shouldn’t necessarily count towards a nomination for a single role, and both are sure to be cast in more Oscar-worthy parts in the future. Hirsch, likewise, is due for the honor after being ignored last year and will similarly continue to acquire juicy roles in the future. Luna, on the other hand, is less likely to get the kinds of roles that attract Oscar recognition, especially if his negative reviews from Milk follow him in his career. So, in a way, he’s the more deserving supporting actor in the bunch.  Not only did he give as remarkable a performance as his fellow cast members, but also he’s probably the one who’ll most benefit from the honor. And the Oscars needn’t be so much a competition and marking of who is best; it ought to be a general celebration of great talent and also a push for further excellence from such talent. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog
]]>Mon, 15 Dec 2008 23:00:57 GMTSpoutBlogSpoutBlog on spout.com12/15/2008 6:00:57 PMWhen the Golden Globe nominations were announced last week, there was one glaring omission from the Best Supporting Actor category: a nod for Milk. Actually, there were four glaring omissions, because Milk still does not have a definite forerunner among its quartet of campaigned-for supporting actors, which includes Josh Brolin, James Franco, Emile Hirsch and Diego Luna. Did the Hollywood Foreign Press Association truly snub the film, as has been suggested, or could the organization simply not decide which actor to nominate? Perhaps the two favorites, Brolin and Franco, cancelled each other out. If so, the Academy needs to ensure that such a thing doesn’t happen with its Oscar nominations. And the best way to do this is to get behind Diego Luna for Best Supporting Actor. This will no doubt seem like a ridiculous suggestion this late in the game, particularly to the critics who fail to appreciate Luna’s performance. His character, Jack Lira, has been labeled underwritten and unnecessary –– neither of which is true –– and “annoying,” which is precisely how the real Lira was thought of anyway. Kirk Honeycutt at The Hollywood Reporter called Luna’s performance “looped,” Wesley Morris of The Boston Globe joked that the actor “appears to have wandered over from some drunken college production of Pedro Almodovar’s Bad Education,” and A.O. Scott at The New York Times wrote that Lira is played “with an operatic verve that stops just short of camp,” which is a little more polite than the multiple reviews that actually straight-up call it camp. Then, there’s Slant critic Ed Gonzalez, who does the most damage, claiming the performance is “embarrassing, miscalculated.” The easiest way to lash back at these criticisms is to accuse most reviewers as being biased against flamboyancy. Sure, Luna’s portrayal of Lira can be viewed as over the top, but that’s not the fault of the actor. And to otherwise negatively respond to the character as “camp” is to display an issue with such insecure personalities as Lira, who projects a boisterous over-identification with the flamboyancy of homosexuality as a sort of masochistic masquerade. The character of Lira is not so much underwritten as unknown and unwelcome, which was basically the reality of his context within Harvey Milk’s campaign. But then to consider the accuracy of Lira’s character and of Luna’s portrayal is to wrongly think that Milk is concrete in capturing the true story. Rather, Milk is more the familiar tale of any martyr who sacrifices his own happiness for the happiness of the masses, who damages his own relationships in order to make possible others’ relationships. For this, Lira is a necessary narrative device, both in terms of contrasting with Franco’s more reserved love-interest character and in terms of contrasting, as the single-save, with the larger civil rights goal at hand. In this role, Luna certainly goes above and beyond the call for serviceability in his portrait of jealous desperation and the politically dismissed individual. Highlighting the critics’ praises for Luna would unfortunately amount to quoting mostly also-ran notices in which he’s included, by name or not, within celebrations of the whole supporting ensemble (including the one supporting actress contender, Alison Pill). Indeed, it is this recognition of the film’s ensemble that has probably allowed for so much of a split among the film’s kudos, and yet it’s one of Milk’s greater assets that there is such equality and consistency with regards to the characters and the acting. Sean Penn may be the obvious lead, and his performance may be spotlighted above the others as a result, but in group scenes Gus Van Sant places the titular character in a fairly even playing field with the rest, enough that Focus Features may just as well have included Joseph Cross, Victor Garber and other unrecognized cast members on its For Your Consideration posters for Milk. In a perfect world they all could be nominated, and honored, as they will be when the film most assuredly wins the Outstanding Performance by a Cast award at the Screen Actors Guild Awards. But the closest thing for the Academy to do in this fashion would be to name all four campaigned-for supporting actors from Milk. Considering a lack of sure things in the category other than Heath Ledger, who is certain to win the award posthumously, there would be little harm in having the other slots filled by Brolin, Franco, Hirsch and Luna. Plus, it would make Oscar history, as it would be the first time the Academy nominated four actors in this category (three films have had three actors nominated: On the Waterfront; The Godfather and The Godfather Part II). Another idea is to simply shrug away the three most celebrated contenders (Brolin, Franco and Hirsch, respectively #2, #6 and #10 on The Envelope’s Supporting Actor Buzzmeter) and pull out the underdog, the non-registering yet still deserving Luna. The other alternative is to continue the divide, which will lead to a category as follows: Ledger (The Dark Knight); Michael Shannon (Revolutionary Road); Philip Seymour Hoffman (Doubt); Robert Downey Jr. (Tropic Thunder); Dev Patel (Slumdog Millionaire). With no love for either Franco, who has been chosen by the Independent Spirit Awards and the Golden Satellite Awards, or Brolin, who has been picked by the National Board of Review and the New York Film Critics. Both actors were actually jointly selected as nominees for the Broadcast Film Critics Association’s awards, but it’s difficult to imagine this compromise happening with the Academy’s voters, who may have a one-or-the-other attitude when considering whose year, Brolin’s or Franco’s, it really was. Both actors equally deserve the recognition for their collective 2008 performances, though that shouldn’t necessarily count towards a nomination for a single role, and both are sure to be cast in more Oscar-worthy parts in the future. Hirsch, likewise, is due for the honor after being ignored last year and will similarly continue to acquire juicy roles in the future. Luna, on the other hand, is less likely to get the kinds of roles that attract Oscar recognition, especially if his negative reviews from Milk follow him in his career. So, in a way, he’s the more deserving supporting actor in the bunch.  Not only did he give as remarkable a performance as his fellow cast members, but also he’s probably the one who’ll most benefit from the honor. And the Oscars needn’t be so much a competition and marking of who is best; it ought to be a general celebration of great talent and also a push for further excellence from such talent. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog http://www.spout.com/groups/Community_Recommendations/Re_Collaboration_Best_Films_of_2008/643/38152/1/ShowPost.aspx Post By: mercurial
Post To: Community Recommendations
Post Date: 12/9/2008 6:30:49 PM
Body: Liked these (in no particular order): Cloverfield Incredible theatrical experience. Might be hampered watching at home. Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist Cutesy teen flick. Had a great 80's feel to it. Hamlet 2 Perverse and just plain hilarious throughout. Great original music. House Bunny I'm a sucker for Anna Faris and she plays a ditzy Playmate perfectly. The Dark Knight A comic geek's wet dream. My Winnipeg Immensely creative, original film. A flurry of emotions in a bizarre little package. WALL-E Heartbreakingly sentimental love story; action packed galactic adventure. Iron Man Another comic geek's wet dream. And Robert Downey Jr. Nuff said. The Fall Just insanely wondrous film. Deserves the comparisons to The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. Speed Racer Seizure inducing fanboy fun. Savage Grace Frightening 'Based on a True Story' film. Amazing performances. The Strangers Nothing new, but executed perfectly. Dark, abysmal terror. My Blueberry Nights Subtle, nuanced performances and beautiful direction. Packed with emotion. Miss Pettigrew Lives For a Day Carefree, fanciful period flick. Amy Adams and Frances McDormand are a perfect slapstick duo on screen. Jumper Big budget Sci-Fi blockbuster without all the annoying garnishes. Watching the Detectives Made for cinephiles about cinephiles. Hokey fun. Movies that might be on my list that I haven't seen yet: Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead The Curious Case of Benjamin Button The Spirit Doubt The Wrestler The Brothers Bloom Revolutionary Road Repo! The Genetic Opera Humboldt County Just Buried Milk Australia Rachel Getting Married W. Fear(s) of the Dark Synecdoche, New York Zack and Miri Make a Porno Towelhead Vicky Cristina Barcelona The Wackness Brideshead Revisited Glass: A Portrait in Twelve Parts
]]>Tue, 09 Dec 2008 23:30:49 GMTmercurialCommunity Recommendations12/9/2008 6:30:49 PMLiked these (in no particular order): Cloverfield Incredible theatrical experience. Might be hampered watching at home. Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist Cutesy teen flick. Had a great 80's feel to it. Hamlet 2 Perverse and just plain hilarious throughout. Great original music. House Bunny I'm a sucker for Anna Faris and she plays a ditzy Playmate perfectly. The Dark Knight A comic geek's wet dream. My Winnipeg Immensely creative, original film. A flurry of emotions in a bizarre little package. WALL-E Heartbreakingly sentimental love story; action packed galactic adventure. Iron Man Another comic geek's wet dream. And Robert Downey Jr. Nuff said. The Fall Just insanely wondrous film. Deserves the comparisons to The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. Speed Racer Seizure inducing fanboy fun. Savage Grace Frightening 'Based on a True Story' film. Amazing performances. The Strangers Nothing new, but executed perfectly. Dark, abysmal terror. My Blueberry Nights Subtle, nuanced performances and beautiful direction. Packed with emotion. Miss Pettigrew Lives For a Day Carefree, fanciful period flick. Amy Adams and Frances McDormand are a perfect slapstick duo on screen. Jumper Big budget Sci-Fi blockbuster without all the annoying garnishes. Watching the Detectives Made for cinephiles about cinephiles. Hokey fun. Movies that might be on my list that I haven't seen yet: Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead The Curious Case of Benjamin Button The Spirit Doubt The Wrestler The Brothers Bloom Revolutionary Road Repo! The Genetic Opera Humboldt County Just Buried Milk Australia Rachel Getting Married W. Fear(s) of the Dark Synecdoche, New York Zack and Miri Make a Porno Towelhead Vicky Cristina Barcelona The Wackness Brideshead Revisited Glass: A Portrait in Twelve Parts http://www.spout.com/members/0/tags/drama/MemberTagFilms.aspxdrama
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