If there was any question as to the changing face/function of the studio-dependent art house division, the just-announced 2009 New York Film Festival line-up offers compelling proof that the concept of the indie label-as-Oscar bait factory is losing currency. The last two NYFFs featured the US or North American premieres of studio-division-distributed eventual Oscar nominees The Queen, The Wrestler, Happy-Go-Lucky and I’m Not There (as well as red carpet and/or press conference appearances from the likes of Hollywood movie stars such as Nicole Kidman and Angelina Jolie and American cinema stars such as Wes Anderson and Steven Soderbergh). Though the NYFF 2009 lineup is full of films with US distributors, it’s notably lacking in excuses for Oscar campaigns (with the exception of Lee Daniels’ Push, which is hardly a fresh choice — it’s basically played every major festival in the world since winning Sundance, though it was pulled from what should have been its Film Society debut) and, with the exception of Penelope Cruz in Pedro Almodovar’s Broken Embraces, is virtually star-free. I’m not complaining — the kind of film I’m talking about often ranks amongst NYFF’s biggestdisappointments — but it does seem like a notable swerve away from business as usual. (And will I *ever* see The Road?)
What the NYFF 2009 lineup lacks in Hollywood-friendly star power, it makes up for in auteur weight. The festival will screen newish films (many first screened at Berlin, Cannes, Venice or Toronto) from Lars Von Trier, Pedro Costa, Jacques Rivette, Alain Resnais, Todd Solondz, Claire Denis, Michael Haneke and more. Cannes favorites Vincere and Police Adjective will be there. Catherine Breillait’s Bluebeard and Maren Ade’s Everyone Else, both missing in action since Berlin, will be there, too. But if NYFF is going to function as a near-year-end best of the fests, there are still some titles that seem noticeably omitted — will *you* ever see Dogtooth?
Christina Crawford––adopted daughter of Joan Crawford, and author of Mommie Dearest, the woe-is-me memoir on which the Faye Dunaway camp classic was based––has always had a bizarre/brilliant way of promoting herself. This week, the woman who is only famous for having been adopted by a celebrity is promoting a 30th anniversary edition of her memoir about being adopted by a celebrity by saying that celebrities shouldn’t adopt. From The Guardian:
“I have tremendous concerns about celebrity adoptions by people like Madonna and Angelina Jolie,” she said in an exclusive interview to mark the publication of a 30th anniversary edition of her memoir. “From the adoptee’s point of view, it is vitally important to know who they are, where they came from, or it can have profound medical and psychological effects.”
Crawford alleges that her mother, who was one of the biggest film stars of Hollywood’s Golden Age, adopted her four children for publicity purposes…When asked if today’s celebrities are driven by the same motivation, she replied: “What do you think? Why are they so keen on getting the maximum newspaper and magazine coverage?”
Of course, taking advantage of one’s relationship to a celebrity to attract media attention, and then using that opportunity to rail against how celebrities shouldn’t do things to attract media attention, is completely different. And none of this has anything to do with that new book about Joan Crawford, recently excerpted in Vanity Fair, which basically contends that Mommie Dearest was pure fiction manufactured by Christina in a desperate ploy for attention. Why can’t you give her the respect that she’s entitled to?!?!
You have to wonder how a story like this generates at the Wall Street Journal. Basically, Tom Cruise and Sumner Redstone––the Paramount chief who very noisily severed Cruise’s deal with that studio––had lunch. Cruise wouldn’t comment. Redstone did, rather extensively. So are we to assume that Sumner Redstone got home from lunch and started calling reporters? Because he really thinks it’s in his best interest to go around talking about how he accepted a lunch invitation from the movie star he previously declared to be too insane to work with?
I’m running out the door, but discuss among yourselves.
Scott Kirsner passes along the news that even though the Academy has an official Oscar YouTube channel, they’ve so far failed to use it to showcase clips from last night’s show. Not only that, but they have YouTube hard at work removing clips from the show uploaded by other users––this clip, and this one, and this one were all removed within three hours of their upload.
And not only THAT, but with the exception of a clip from last year’s Jack Black/Will Ferrell/John C. Reilly medley, most of the recently uploaded clips from actual Oscar telecasts date back to the 75th edition of the show––which, of course, took place in 2003. So if you’re just now getting around to blogging about Adrien Brody kissing Halle Berry, you’re in luck! Or, you would be, if the entire channel didn’t disable embeds.
Chris is coming up with a list of things the Academy can do to improve telecast ratings, so check back later this afternoon for that. But this kind of thing has got to be one explanation for last night’s show doing so poorly. The new generation of celebrity porn addicts don’t even know they’re supposed to obsess about the Oscars, because the Perez Hiltons of the world are instead blogging about Jennifer Aniston’s frozen eggs, because at least they have visual aids for that.
The Playlist passes along word that David Bowie has recorded back-up vocals for Anywhere I Lay My Head, Scarlett Johansson’s Tom Waits covers album. The record’s producer, Dave Sitek of TV on the Radio, describes Anywhere as having a “‘cough medicine/TinkerBell’ vibe”––which, funnily enough, seems as good a description as any of Bowie’s performance as Andy Warhol in Julian Schnabel’s Basquiat.
In other indie-cred starlet-turned-pop star news, remember Zooey Deschanel’s album? Justin Wolfe, that smart-star who writes one of the blogs I mentioned in this post about The Hills, wrote an incredible post last week, in which he made the argument that, as “extension of their brand, from image to sound” the She and Him stuff as a Zooey Deschanel product is materially the same as Hills star Heidi Montag’s much-reviled first single. Check it out here.
Young girl with problems writes song about said problems; song becomes major international hit, thus putting girl in situations that feed those same problems; girl hits rock bottom one month before major awards show and a big, public deal is made of getting her help for the problems she said she didn’t need help with in the song; shy and contrite but somehow still aggressive, girl performs the now-mythic song on said awards show; almost immediately thereafter, she is told via television monitor that she’s won a major award for the same song; over the course of a few seconds on live television, she falls apart, asks for help and then miraculously and brilliantly regains her composure––thus essentially reenacting the above cycle in a compressed space; girl is welcomed, problems or not, back into the embrace of semi-polite mainstream culture.
I’ve expressed my doubts about the media event that is Amy Winehouse before. I don’t deny that the girl has been photographed in some bad situations, but the whole crack video to rehab to Grammy triumph trajectory just seems a little contrived, a little too perfect a story of celebrity redemption. But whether her much-documented problems have been exaggerated, or even underplayed, there’s no denying the power of the clip above as an exclamation point on the end of this narrative. Just those few moments where she appears to be taking in the news of her Record of the Year win via the satellite monitor, and her face cracks and her hands grip for something that isn’t there––this is Judy Garland stuff. You can’t make that shit up.
LIBERTAS has an interesting post about how that Will.I.Am “Yes We Can” Obama video––in which celebrities like Scarlett Johansson and Kate Walsh sing over and mug in front of Barack Obama’s New Hampshire primary “concession” speech––is emblematic of a new kind of Hollywood political support. Dirty Harry riffs on a post by Jim Geraghty, who notes that the clip’s “substance-free message of ‘yes we can, unity is good, we have hope and the hopes of children are important’” is unobjectionable “because there’s no ideas in it; it’s entirely emotion.” He goes on to say that aligning oneself with that emotion is less a political action than participation in a “pop-culture phenomnenon.”And because pop culture is something American’s know how to participate in without thinking, by extension Barack Obama becomes the ready-made candidate for those who can’t really handle much more than passive consumption of an image as a stand-in for a feeling.
Dirty Harry actually sees this as a good thing. He likes the idea of ” a quiet advocacy from Hollywood for their guy (or gal)” because it stands in contrast to previous celebrity-led political spectacles, in which stars “have hurt their own careers and the candidate they want elected saying unbelievably stupid things.” But writing about the “Yes I Can’ video at NewTeeVee, Wagner James Au couldn’t disagree more…
On Friday night, Park City endured a brief but hysteria-inducing blackout. The next morning, Joe and Ronnie assess the damage, and ask a zealous festivalgoer the question: “What is it that makes you want to hug a celebrity?”
Previous Sundance video coverage from Joe and Ronnie:
“Julia Attacks!” [The video's actual title is "America's Pissed-off Sweetheart"--Ed.] is a TMZ video in which Julia Roberts chases down and gives a telling off to a paparazzi. Julia — absent from our screens for too long — is completely convincing in this role as an angry mom. The car chase is excellent and the cinematography visceral and immersive. Some moviegoers might be disappointed that this movie is less than a minute long because Julia has her costar turn off the camera before she delivers her speech about children and paparazzi, but most movies are too long anyway.
I love that last last line. Movies are too long, too bloated, too full of filler. If the base motivator to see a Hollywood film is to see a star being a star, then a clip like this reduces it to what’s it’s all about. Julia Roberts asserts her dominance on the celebrity food chain (and thus, in the universe) by convincing a paparazzo to stop plying his trade by turning off his video camera. That she manages to pull it off in twenty seconds of car chase and ten seconds of yelling is all the more impressive.
Actor/game show host/former Nixon speechwriter Ben Stein published a love letter to the soon-to-close Hollywood eatery Morton’s in Sunday’s New York Times. A splooge sample:
My wife and I and all of our friends are devastated. I guess we’ll eat seaweed at Mr Chow. But as far as I know, there now is no Hollywood-center-of-power cafe. Mr Chow would be the closest, especially for the music business. Yet for television and movies, it’s a sad, sad time. For those of us who considered Morton’s as much of a home as our own kitchens, it’s tragic.
Dana Harris had a markedly different take, writing up the closing on Variety’s The Knife blog in May:
But have you been to Mortons lately? I don’t think we’re going to be missing much. Nothing is wrong with the restaurant, but beyond its storied reputation, there isn’t much right. The booths are comfy and the servers are pro, but the menu is as dull and innocuous as its French-vanilla walls.
The two paragraphs above seem to reveal an evolution in the notion of Hollywood public space.
The Golden Globes demonstrated their interest in contemporary World Cinema last year by nominating two Hollywood-produced films in the Best Foreign Language Film category, and ultimately handing the award to Clint Eastwood’s Japanese-language Letters From Iwo Jima. I was one of many who found this worrisome, but at the same time, it didn’t seem like it was totally out of left field. At least they didn’t give it to Apocalypto (nominated in the same category, thus unfortunately giving Mel Gibson a dose of “they only understand my work in Europe” cred).
At The Hollywood Reporter, Steven Zeitchik says the Hollywood Foreign Press Association looks almost certain to repeat the pattern this year. Lust, Caution and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly are just two of several films with Hollywood studio backing, directed by name-brand Indiewood auteurs, in a language other than English and incorporating a mix of foreign talent, that the Globes are expected to deem “too foreign” for their Best Picture category and just right for their Foriegn Language film category. This will, of course, have a ripple effect, pushing deserving non-Hollywood Foreign Language films out of consideration.
Ultimately, the problem stems from the fact that the HFPA’s field of vision is apparently so narrow that they don’t even think there is a problem. And they’re not the only ones.
…that, and other revelations about what celebrities blog about, courtesy of this feature on Gawker. Surprising: 36% of all celebrity blogging is devoted to “shameless self-promotion”; I would have pegged it at 70 or 80 percent. Not so surprising: statistically, blogging celebrities devote exactly as much virtual ink to “indecipherable rants” as “Republicans.” Nice graph, but I have to say, I’m SHOCKED that the Gawk squad let Jeff Bridges’ use of the word “netiquette” slip by un snarked-upon.
UPDATE, 10/18 8AM: Hudgens’ rep told Access Hollywood that her client still has a job; Disney says they’re “still negotiating” with the entire HSM cast.
Because this is a blog generally devoted to movies, and not to the naked exploits of barely-legal, barely-famous starlets, we’ve stayed out of Vanessa Hudgens topless photo non-scandal. But OK! is running a story that I just can’t not comment on, because if nothing else, it seems like a soon-to-be classic example of what old media companies are doing wrong when it comes to the web.
A bit of background for the uninitiated: Hudgens starred in two High School Musical movies for the Disney Channel, along fellow tween heartthrobs Ashley Tisdale and (Hudgens’ real-life boyfriend) Zac Efron. Both movies were such enormous successes on cable, iTunes and DVD that Disney decided to bring the entire cast back for a third film, this time aimed at a theatrical release. Then, in September, relatively tame images of a naked Hudgens, allegedly meant for a boyfriend’s eyes only, were leaked to the internet. Now, OK! is reporting that, over a month after issuing what seemed like a non-judgmental statement in regards to Hudgens’ internet nakedness, “Disney has made up its mind about what to do next and that the 18-year-old actress will not be asked to board the boat for the third HSM film.”
If this is true, then I think Disney is making a big mistake, for three reasons. Details after the jump.
Self-professed “retarded bandwagon-y blogger” Wiley Wiggins has started a micro-blogathon of sorts, dedicated to First Film Crushes. I covered this territory during the Film Characters Who Changed My Life blogathon, but because I too am retarded and bandwagon-y, I’m reposting my answer here:
The afternoon that I watched Ghostbusters for the first time (on VHS, aged six) is my earliest memory of feeling sexual attraction to another human being. Bill Murray was hardly an adonis in 1984 (or ever), and even at six, I think I knew that, but I was drawn to this strange, pock-marked man nonetheless. I even remember the exact moment of the film that did it for me: Ray and Peter have just been kicked out of the University, and they’re standing on the steps to the library, passing back and forth a bottle of booze. Ray is afraid of getting a real job; Peter, rocking back and forth on his heels, tells his partner that they were destined to lose their jobs so that they could start their own paranormal investigation agency. To this day, I’m still attracted to wild-eyed drunks with crackpot schemes, but now I try to pick specimens with better skin.
Unfortunately, that clip is not on YouTube, but the “cats and dogs” speech embedded above is pretty good, too.
Brian Lowry has a favorable review of The SimpsonsMovie: “Put simply, if somebody had to make a Simpsons movie, this is pretty much what it should be — clever, irreverent, satirical and outfitted with a larger-than-22-minutes plot, capable (just barely) of sustaining a narrative roughly four times the length of a standard episode.”
Variety has a loooong consideration of Lindsay Lohan’s future career prospects, as well as an update on the status of Poor Things, the film the rehab rat was scheduled to begin shooting next month alongside Shirley MacLaine. Can Linds make a Robert Downey Jr.-like comeback? The story quotes sales agent Andrew Herwitz, who speculates that Lohan might be able to find redemption in indie film: “She wanted to break free of kid roles, anyway. A lot of indie producers are probably going to be able to cast her in interesting parts because she will actually be reading their scripts. Not a lot of other scripts may be sent to her for a while.”
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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The Golden Globes demonstrated their interest in contemporary World Cinema last year by nominating two Hollywood-produced films in the Best Foreign Language Film category, and ultimately handing the award to Clint Eastwood’s Japanese-language 
