There were some really good movies this year. Unfortunately, many of them will receive no recognition from the Academy.
As an Academy member, I can’t tell you the movies I nominated for Best Picture. But I can tell you what movies I think should’ve been somewhere on everyone’s ballot. Following – in alphabetical order – are those you really ought to see that you’re not likely to hear Bill Crystal talking about on Oscar night. 1) ANONYMOUS– A movie that wasn’t about a coming apocalypse from director Roland Emmerich (Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow). Who knew he had it in him to make an uber-smart film about Elizabethan theatre and the playwright who gave us 37 of the greatest plays ever written – Edward Devere, the 17th Earl of Oxford. Rhys Ifans is amazing. Vanessa Redgrave is, well, Vanessa Redgrave. It got thrown a Best Costume bone but I put it here among the totally ignored because Ifans, Redgrave and the movie really deserved to be among the year’s bests. Maybe it was the title? 2) CARNAGE – Roman Polanski didn’t have an Edward Albee play to work from but this story of two couples whose lives and relationships are dissected over a red-herring “incident” is a fascinating look at modern parenting, modern marriage & self-righteous deception. Well worth seeing if only for performances by the two female leads, Jodie Foster and Kate Winslet. 3) CORIOLANUS – Shakespeare or Devere, this contemporized version of the Bard’s tale of a warrior without a cause is worth seeing just for the scene where Vanessa Redgrave (her again) shows herself as the ultimate smother mother. Ralph Fiennes knocks it out of the park as both star and director. 4) A DANGEROUS METHOD– David Cronenberg brings a fantastic cast – Fassbinder, Vigo and not-just-a-pretty-face Keira Knightly – to a riveting story about Freud vs Jung: let the grudge match begin. Yes, sexuality is a tough subject (violence, on the other hand.... don’t get me started). This deserved to be a multi-category nominee. 5) THE FIRST GRADER – Never heard of it? That’s ‘cause it deals with Africa. Story about an old man who was tortured in a war no one ever heard of who is determined to learn how to read. No special effects, no stars, no box office appeal whatsoever. Just a beautiful story about triumph of the will. 6) MARGARET – OK, it helps to know what an Upper West/East Side privileged teenage Jewish girl is like. But Anna Paquin and the rest of the cast present a story of moral ambiguity that only someone like Scott Rudin would have the guts and intelligence to produce. Don’t expect to understand it, just appreciate the complexity and depth and brilliant performances by Paquin, Jeannie Berlin and J. Smith-Cameron. 7) RAMPART– Not easy to watch, no likeable characters and not easy to follow. Just Woody Harrelson and director Oren Moverman (The Messenger) re-teaming in a character drama with a James Elroy script. If those elements don’t work for ya, how about Robin Wright as sexy as you’ve ever seen her? Hot doesn’t begin to describe. 8) SENNA– I don’t understand the exclusion of this one from Best Documentary consideration. It wasn’t just a popular documentary, it was a GREAT documentary. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see this as a Best Picture candidate (probably not a nominee but a possible candidate). The story of a matinee idol race car driver has amazing footage and a powerful narrative. 9) IN THE LAND OF BLOOD AND HONEY – I wouldn’t want to watch it twice but watching it once is an experience. Angelina has learned how to make a movie. Prediction: someday she’s gonna put it all together in a Schindler’s List/ Killing Fields kinda film that’s gonna win it all. There were others that got one or two second-tier nominations but should’ve been candidates for more: 1) BEGINNERS – Yes, Chris Plummer was brilliant and deserves the Best Supporting Oscar. But the movie was brilliant. One of my favorites of the year. One of those movies I’ll never get tired of seeing. 2) DRIVE – I wasn’t among those to declare it one of the year’s best but it certainly deserved more than a Best Sound Editing nomination. 3) THE ADVENTURES OF TINTIN – The reason this movie wasn’t considered as good as Rango or Puss in Boots (both of which I liked) is…? I had no history with this character but can’t wait for the next episode. 4) WARRIOR – A sensitive movie about an angry ex-Marine who winds up fighting his brother in a bloody Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) championship? Tom Hardy is especially good as the pissed-off Marine. I love Nick Nolte but there were better Supporting Actor candidates who went unnoticed. 5) RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES – I went in a skeptic and came out a believer. An entertaining out-of-the-box plot, with decent dialogue and a big heart make it more than watchable. Wish there were more indies this watchable. It got a nomination for Best Visual Effects. And the Saddest Non-Nomination of the year goes to: HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS, PART 2 – Which part of THE MOST SUCCESSFUL and respected FRANCHISE IN THE HISTORY OF MOVIES doesn’t the Academy understand? This series of movies will be watched, admired and remembered long after the world has forgotten Hugo & Warhorse (no disrespect – just picking on the two biggest). Sure deserved better than just a Best Makeup, Art Direction and Visual Effects nominations. Share your thoughts if you have a moment between now and February 26.
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‘Tis the season when movie crews clutter the airports.
We’re staying in the U.K., cluttering the highways. My last film ended a month ago, so I’ve been home for awhile. But many of my colleagues have been working on movies that started in the fall and will continue into the new year. They haven’t seen home in months and this is the time they’ve all been looking forward to: Christmas Hiatus. Hiatus, I believe, comes from the Latin, hibernate-at-krismus. It’s like a fat Xmas stocking to working crew. Most of us get our one-line schedules at the beginning of a job and sneak a peek at how long a hiatus we’ll have before even checking our wrap date. Not that any movie schedule is reliable - which means it’s impossible to make plane reservations until you’re well into filming and can get a sense of how slow it might be going. Many a December 21 hiatus has been pushed to December 22 – and airlines don’t care that your movie lost a day to bad weather. It’s custom – if not statutory - to give the crew Christmas Day and New Year’s Day off. It’s customary, however, that crews get a span of days, usually from the first hot toddies on the pre-holiday flight home thru January 1 hangovers on the return. Some friends on the new James Bond film here in London are getting a three-week hiatus. How very Bond. I was appalled when I heard from a friend who is working on a big-ass movie shooting in Michigan, that they’re not getting any hiatus at all. Michigan! That’s in the middle of… Nowhere! Alright, a lot of the secondary crew are probably local but this is a BIG movie for which they brought in a lot key people from L.A. and N.Y. These are now Christmas orphans, stranded in… Michigan! Producers, you make movies about Grinches like you! Do you totally miss their simplistic moral? Everybody wants to be with friends and families at Christmas! Think about Tiny Tim, the prop man’s son, waiting by the window for Dad to come home and lift him up so he can put the replica Texaco star on top of the tree. You bunch of corporate Scrooges!! Then again, with the industry trending towards fewer movies and smaller budgets over the last three years, there are a lot of skilled people out there for whom the hiatus has already been too long. I don’t think the crew on the Michigan movie would trade places. This can be a cruel business – but there are degrees of cruelty: too much work is bad; not enough work is worse. It’s been another tough year for a lot of people. Their hiatus might’ve started in June or July. Or maybe 2009 or 2010 – as total movie production decreased by one-third. There’s a gallows joke going around that if the current trend continues, studios will run out of movies not to make by 2020. Another linguist has traced the word hiatus to the Greek God Hitchcockalus, who envisioned a day when movies might be made without actors. It’s not known whether he foresaw the same thing with crews. The word is also similar to the Aramaic expression for temporarily unemployed. There are probably conjugations that suit different circumstances. Be it etymologically or logistically challenging, long, short or just right, I’d like to wish a Happy Hiatus to you all. Here’s hoping the last year of the Mayan calendar brings as many jobs and as many days of hiatus as you want. Safe travels. In the summer of my 18th year I registered for the military draft, as required. I registered as a Conscientious Objector. Vietnam was the only war I’d known and I’d already spent two years on the front lines of protests against it.
Then in June of 1967, I began reading news reports about the United Arab Republic massing troops for an invasion of Israel. A petition began circulating around my school: Volunteer to Fight for Israel. I didn’t sign it. But I went home and thought about it. One of the first books I remember as a child was a small paperback with a cover illustration of a young boy planting a tree. It was first published in 1949, announcing the glories of the new state of Israel. I still have that book. I grew up believing that the sun shone out of Israel’s ass. It’s existence made me proud: Jews could renew a desert, Jews could fight, Jews could help each other recover from the horrors of the Holocaust. And there was Sandy Koufax – the athlete who gave every Jewish American in the 1960s a reason to be proud of being one of The Chosen. I had no idea if he was a Zionist – Judaism and Zionism were synonymous to me back then – but he was the most dominating pitcher in baseball and he wouldn’t pitch on the High Holy Days. He was my identity. How I prayed Yom Kippur wouldn’t fall on the deciding day of the World Series. So, I went home and thought about the impending destruction of Israel – the motherland for an oppressed, dispossessed people; the nurturing matriarch of a new generation of sabra Jews – who were about to be driven into the sea! I was a pacifist. Committed to non-violence. The next day, Israel made a pre-emptive attack on Egyptian forces in the Sinai and a day later, I signed up to fight, relinquishing my right to Conscientious Objector status – consenting to a suicide pact: I would volunteer to risk my life for Israel and if I survived I would become a potential victim of Vietnam. I was giving up my claim to pacifism because I’d found a war worth fighting. My father – a World War 2 veteran with whom I had bitterly argued over my “duty” to serve my country in Vietnam – put his hand on my shoulder when I told him of my decision and said simply, “I hope you don’t have to go.” I didn’t. It was over in Six Days. Like Koufax blowing through the lineup of the powerful San Francisco Giants, we had not only won, we had dominated. There was Black Power, there was Chicano Power and there was Jewish Power. Felt good to be a powerful minority. All the way Israel-ays! It no longer feels good. I don’t know when it happened. Could it have started as early as 1973? If you recall the Yom Kippur War (known in the Arab World as the Ramadan War), you might remember that Egypt and Syria struck first. Dastardly bastards. You might not remember that after six years, Israel still had control of sovereign Egyptian & Syrian land. Surely the Egyptians and Syrians remembered how Israel had never gotten around to giving back the Palestinian land they took in their war of independence. Maybe – along with their vicious desire to drive Jews into the sea – they also thought they deserved to get back what had been taken from them in a war where they hadn’t made the first strike. But I was still a proud Zionist then. And Israel was again under siege. We all remembered the 1972 massacre at Munich. Now this unprovoked assault on a tiny nation, minding its own business, trying to turn deserts into fertile farmland! Might I have volunteered again had that war been prolonged? I don’t know; the war ended in 19 days, with Israel dominating once again. Push ‘em back, push ‘em back, waaaay back! My team was doing an end-zone dance. I didn’t feel bad about it. Still, the enemy kept coming (“When has there never been an enemy of the Jews?”). In 1976, a plane with 100 Israeli citizens was hijacked at Entebbe, Uganda. I cheered along with everyone else when a heroic raid got them back. Jewish Power. Rah! In 1979, Jimmy Carter negotiated the Camp David Accords and Israel gave back the Sinai, proving they wanted peace. There were still a few loose ends about the Palestinians but, hey, nobody wanted to get into too much unpleasantness and the important thing was we were here to make friends with Egypt. Mazel tov! It was probably the First Intifada that started my questioning of Israel right or wrong. Palestine was a powder keg. I was still an ignorant American Jew. Why did they (Arabs) hate us (Jews)? It was a rhetorical question. The First Intifada, in 1987, allegedly started when an Israeli man was stabbed to death shopping in Gaza. Then an Israeli truck driver ran over four Palestinians in an apparent retaliation. Then a teenage boy was killed by an Israeli soldier during a protest. Provocation was argued by the Israelis. The protests grew and the response of the Israeli Defense Force was short of enlightened: more than 1,000 Palestinian protesters were killed – some armed with rocks or Molotovs but most (the mainstream media failed to report) unarmed. Israel had laid the groundwork for the Intifada five years earlier, surrounding the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon, then sending in their proxies to murder hundreds of men, women and children in their sleep. Israel first denied, then shifted blame, then ultimately tried to rationalize the part they played. At least Catholics might give a mea culpa. Frankly, world, Israel didn’t give a flying donut. Shame on you, my grandmother would’ve said. The Israeli government expressed no shame. A second Intifada shouldn’t have been a big surprise. Over the next decade, the Israelis did a fine job defending themselves from those dedicated to “driving the Jews into the sea.” But by the 1990s, you were finding that phrase used mostly as an excuse for violent overreaction to a threat that history had already downgraded - and as rationalization for the landgrab we’ve come to know as The Settlements. “Never again!” Jews shouted throughout the Israel’s first 50 years. “Enough, already!” Palestinians shouted as first the Labor governments of Yitzak Rabin and Simon Peres, then the rightwing governments of Benjamin Netanyahu and Ariel Sharon confiscated land in the occupied Westbank, Golan Heights, Gaza and East Jerusalem to build permanent, subsidized Jewish housing. The 1993 Oslo Peace Accords was supposed to put an end to this. Since then, the Jewish population of those territories has tripled. The Israeli government put lipstick on a pig (no kosher slur intended) by calling the new settlements “Outposts.” The Second Intifada, depending on whom you believe, was either planned by Yasser Arafat or provoked by Ariel Sharon’s in-your-face election campaign visit to the most holy Muslim site in Jerusalem. “They want to kill us all. They want to drive us into the sea.” And Arafat was still the sleezeball he’d always been. Then he died in 2004. In that same year, Palestinian children were killed at 22 times the rate of Israeli children – yet the deaths of Israeli children were reported on American networks 10 times more frequently (http://www.ifamericaknew.org/media/net-report.html). They want to drive us into the sea. I started to question my unquestioned loyalty to the motherland. Then came the Gaza Strip invasion of December, 2008: 1300-13 – not the score of a lopsided cricket match but the number of Palestinians vs. the number of Israelis killed in that conflict. 1300-13. Go team. The final step in my Zionist deconstruction came when some Jew on television said “Jewish lives are precious” in defending yet another draconian response to a rocket attack or a sniper attack or some other incident of isolated violence by some Islamic extremist Israel had helped create. Isn’t all human life precious? “Enough,” I said, “enough already.” That was when I finally burned my Zionist draft card. It’s fine with me if Israel exists. What’s done is done; I don’t want another war to change the Middle East map. But I won’t be signing up for the next volunteer army to save Israel. Smothering them with American love has not led to a nation of mensches. They’ve gotta learn to play nice with others. Israel to American Jews: “I cook for you, I clean for you, and this is the way you treat your mother?” Let go of the guilt. Mom isn’t perfect. And if you’re a big boy or girl, you’ll admit it. “Lunch” has so many meanings in our business.
“Let’s have lunch,” sometimes means an invitation, sometimes a brush-off. “Let’s do lunch,” often means the speaker is a complete putz. “See ya at lunch,” usually means there’s a meeting. “That’ll be lunch,” means crew break. “What’s for lunch,” is always first on everyone’s mind. “Who do I eat lunch with?” is always second. Lunch is an interesting ritual on a film set. Sometimes the stars will retreat to their trailers where a production assistant brings them lunch; sometimes key department heads will retreat to a room to eat box lunches while watching dailies; sometimes dieting crew members will skip lunch for walks or exercise. But for most of us, lunch is a chance to sit down – after six hours of standing - for a social breaking of bread. Usually very good bread. And often valuable conversation. Lunch is where most of us learn what movies are crewing up, why it took so long to shoot the last scene and who’s been seen doing what with who. Most film crew lunch lines are democratic: he or she who gets there first eats first – and the half-hour or 45 minute break allotted begins with the last man or woman served. Races to lunch are not uncommon. You usually try to sit with your department or someone you know. But like in high school, it’s hard to save seats. And if you arrive too soon before or too much after your mates… You wind up sitting with zombies. OK, I broke for lunch a little early. I was hungry, I couldn’t bear another pass by craft services and I wasn’t needed on set. I couldn’t find the rest of my department – i.e., the stills photographer – to ask if he wanted to break with me, so I headed to the lunch tent alone. Alone. The drivers were almost finished eating; they arrive earlier in the morning and break earlier for lunch. Very few crew were released for lunch yet and I was as content to sit with my Kindle as with anyone present. I’d only just opened Kindle to the last page read when break was officially called and hordes of crew poured into the lunch tent. As tables filled up, mine remained blissfully un-invaded (film crews tend to keep a respectful distance from lunch-time readers thinking it must be part of the person’s job; otherwise who has time for reading?). “Excuse me, you saving these?” The questioner was a man in his mid-thirties, a torn flannel shirt and a hole in his neck, which was clotted in black to match his prominent veins and an inch-thick streak of dried blood that ran from his hairline to the middle of his forehead. I estimated stage 2 decay. He was accompanied by a lovely hospital worker of some sort, missing a piece of her upper right shoulder, uniform splattered in a brownish-red, only recently re-animated judging by her state of decomposition. I pause here to explain this was not my first mutant barbeque. I’ve dined with Ebola victims, an ample number of amputees with bloody stumps, beating victims and worse and a regular diet of aliens and creatures. But these two were really unappetizing. “Help yourself,” I stammered, gesturing at the empty seats around me. No sooner did they sit than two other zombies came to join them. Then a fifth. I was surrounded by very nice people, talented people – these actors were also dancers and acrobats – who just happened to look disgusting. Somehow, returning to my book and trying to ignore them seemed, well… a little rude. It wasn’t like they chose to look this way – though, come to think of it, they probably had to audition. But well… maybe they deserved a little respect after going through four hours of hair, makeup and wardrobe to get a few seconds running past camera. Mostly I think, I just didn’t want them to smell fear and loathing coming from a seasoned professional like myself. So I started talking to one. Her name was Jane. She wasn’t too badly decayed. I tried not to stare at her black lips and discolored teeth between which there appeared to be remnants of… Don’t look there. She was a vegetarian, she laughed. I admitted my relief. She laughed again. She was a dancer from London and had a fourteen-year-old daughter who was a budding hell-raiser. I dropped in my standard pop-psyche line about the child of fourteen-year-old being a four year-old with more power. “God no!” wailed a zombie with purple eye-shadow, a cracked cheek and a bullet hole in his chest seated next to her. “My four-year-old already thinks she’s fourteen!” Laughter all around. Four out of the five of them had kids and as the oldest parent present, I was the go-to guy for advice. Just with boys; no expertise in girls. Of any age. It was a lively conversation. Before we knew it, a p.a. shouted, “we’re back in” and my lunch-mates had to return to being terrifying flesh-eating ghouls. I went to grab a salad for dessert. It was kind of spooky eating alone. The English riots will be over by the time you read this. Some looters will have been arrested and imprisoned; others will be enjoying their new TVs.
Riots and anarchy had to be stopped. Social order had to be restored. Whatever your politics, better to have rule by the Tories than Mad Max. Prime Minister David Cameron returned early from his vacation to take control of the blaming. He pinned the problem squarely on “a sick society” full of irresponsible parents. His opposition blamed it, at least in part, on Cameron’s own “austerity measures” – cutbacks in police funding and on social programs like youth centers. Cameron’s response was to blame the police for not being “robust” enough. But it’s more complicated than any of that. You can’t explain theft that ran from petty to grand, equal numbers of black and white arrests and frightening levels of random violence by blaming it on bad parenting or coddling cops. You can’t explain it by blaming it on any single thing. Or any single group. So, while politicians play the Blame Game – in which participants start out with an ideological rant, then collect data to support an entrenched position based on a previously held bias – why don’t we try a game of Clue. Colonel Mustard, if you will please, tell us the way this works: First pick a Looter: 1. An 11-year-old boy arrested for stealing a trash bin worth 50 pounds. 2. A black unemployed single mother caught on camera examining a purloined pair of sneakers. 3. An 11-year-old foster-home girl who smashed the windows of a clothing shop with rocks. 4. The mother of two who slept through the riots but accepted the gift of a pair of shorts from her roommate. 5. A 16 year old who believed he could bring home a 46” TV on his skateboard without his parents disapproving. 6. A 23-year-old engineering student who was walking back from his girlfriend’s house and took a six-pack of bottled water (worth 3.5 pounds) from a store that was being looted. 7. A 45-year-old banker who drove up housing prices by making bad loans, then sold derivatives made up mostly of the bad loans he’d created. Next, pick a Thug: 1. The driver of the car that ran down three Muslim men trying to protect their business. 2. A guy who helped a mugging victim to his feet in order to give his partner better access to stealing items from the kid’s backpack. 3. The men who beat to death a pensioner who was trying to stop them from setting fire to trash bins. 4. A law student who joined a pack of rioters trying to set fire to a restaurant – with customers cowering inside. 5. A 46-year-old drunk, bearing a resemblance to the star of the British TV series Shameless who tried to gouge out a policeman’s eye. 6. Vigilantes from a rightwing political party who used the riots as an excuse to stir up racial hatred. 7. Rupert Murdoch – whom we could suspect of conjuring all this just to keep himself off British front pages. Next pick a weapon: 1) bricks and rocks 2) police stop and search 3) gasoline and matches 4) jobs and training programs 5) a hard line against looters 6) a sensation-hungry press 7) a good tax attorney and accountant. Next, pick a Villain: 1) Unwed mothers & Absentee fathers 2) “A sick society” 3) The police 4) Profiteering gangs 5) Liberals 6) “austerity measures” 7) Rupert Murdoch (game note: you cannot pick him as both a Thug and a Villain) Finally, match a crime to a punishment: 1. A 14 yr. old girl who stole some clothes. 2. Accepting a pair of shorts from a looter. 3. The theft of billions of pounds. 4. The murder of eight African children. 5. Bribery of police officers and extortion of government officials. 6. Destroying people’s livelihoods. 7. Stealing a six-pack of water bottles. A. Pfizer Pharmaceutical pays $175,000 each to families of four of the eight dead children. No payment to the dozens that were disabled. B. Punishment depends on whether its vandal youth burning businesses or UK corporations sending work to India and China. C. 5 months prison. D. Rupert Murdoch may not get to buy Skye TV. Or he still may. E. Remanded to custody of her parents who were “too busy” to show up at her trial. F. A bailout that enabled banks to make billions more. G. Six months prison. (Answers: 1E, 2C, 3F, 4A, 5D, 6B, 7G) The first player to find a Clue must share it with the Prime Minister - who doesn’t appear to have one. Bonus points if you can predict when this classic game is going to make a comeback in the U.S. destruction of private property. The rich worship it; the poor barely know what it is. The English riots have barely been reported on – let alone explored – by the U.S. press. Don’t think it’s not coming there. But with guns, not bricks. |
Anything and Everything that has Nothing to Do with the MoviesSometimes, we go to a movie to get away from the world and sometimes we go to see what’s going on in the world. This blog will offer comments on the world, the movies and their occasional overlap.
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July 2020
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