There is a good reason Hollywood continually makes Animal House wannabes and avoids producing films that actually focus on academia. Kids prefer their college movies to be about the fun stuff. And so a movie like Old School grossed $75 million while another Luke Wilson comedy called Tenure currently lacks a distributor. The latter film may also be hilarious, as a satire of the tenure process, but if it doesn’t concentrate more on beer bongs and naked co-eds, it won’t attract as big an audience. And according to some scholars, it may not even resonate with them, because it couldn’t possibly be what the process is really like. Film blogger and associate professor Chuck Tryon was quoted about the film last year as saying, “my ongoing pursuit of tenure typically involves me sitting in front of my laptop until 1 a.m., I don’t know how interesting that would be to watch.”
And evident by the scathing reviews from Sundance of John Krasinski’s Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, it appears another film about academia has failed to make a strong case for the subject matter. Too bad for the late David Foster Wallace, whose stories were adapted for the film, that Gus Van Sant wasn’t at the helm. A decade ago, in an interview with Van Sant, Wallace pretty much gushed that Good Will Hunting is the most accurate film about academia ever made. Do we agree with him? Let’s just say there’s not a whole lot of competition for such an honor. But in our attempt to recognize the ten best films about academia, Good Will Hunting doesn’t quite make the top spot. …Read more
Move over Milk. I Love You Phillip Morris does the gay rights movement one better, using in-your-face comedy and mainstream casting to defuse whatever anxiety the Heartland might have with guy-guy relationships — the irony being that this outrageous conman comedy from Bad Santa scribes Glenn Ficarra and John Requa was originally supposed to be directed by none other than Gus Van Sant. When Van Sant dropped out, the writers stepped in to shoot their own screenplay, resulting in a first-time film that feels more polished and professional than 90% of the studio comedies in theaters these days.
It helps that Ficarra and Requa went in with a proper script, an ingredient too frequently missing in Judd Apatow and Adam McKay’s improv-happy method, where a cocktail napkin sketch of a plot seems to be all the team needs. No doubt Ficarra and Requa allowed their leads, Jim Carrey and Ewan McGregor, a certain flexibility in interpreting their parts, but it’s refreshing to find a comedy that cuts together, where one scene sets up the next and ideas planted early in the film pay off for bigger laughs later on. The final gag, which shows an unmistakably phallic-shaped cloud, completes a joke set up in first-act flashbacks to Steven Jay Russell’s childhood.
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.
Netflix and Film Independent got a jump on the deluge of independent filmmaking news that will be coming soon via Sundance by announcing a new independent film contest today that will be chaired by Josh Brolin and judged by Brolin, Dan Jinks, Bruce Cohen, and Dustin Lance Black.
Boyle. Fincher. Howard. Nolan. Van Sant. No alarms, no surprises. indieWIRE has the historical analysis that reminds us that last year, the DGA nominated Sean Penn for Into the Wild and the Academy swapped him out for Jason Reitman, but, you know … unless whatshername who was fired from Twilight makes a big surge super quick, it seems unlikely that anyone’s going to get an Oscar nomination this year for nabbing $100 million+ of teenage girl allowance. I’m gonna go out on a limb and say the Best Director Oscar nominations will probably look a lot like this.
Attending the press conference for Gus Van Sant’s biopic Milk, I had a Eureka moment that revealed my own naivety. A woman had asked Van Sant about his creative casting decisions, not just in choosing straights to play all the major gay characters (including a stunning Sean Penn as the gay civil rights leader Harvey Milk), but also in selecting the talented and out Denis O’Hare to embody homophobe extraordinaire John Briggs (the face behind the Proposition 6/Briggs Initiative to kick gay and lesbian teachers out of California’s public schools). I waited anxiously for the director to expound upon what the press notes referred to as “sexual-preference-blind casting,” a subversive twist that relates to Milk’s own modus operandi of rejecting divisiveness regarding sexuality in favor of bringing people together (or as Milk protégé Danny Nicoletta puts it in the notes, “It doesn’t matter what side of the fence you fall on. In fact, just tear the fence down; we all live in the same world.”)
Instead I was taken aback by Van Sant’s candidness. The point wasn’t to use O’Hare in some sort of queer jujitsu to sidestep criticism from the likes of Harvey Fierstein (who’s compared the casting of straights in gay roles to blackface), but simply to get as many homos involved as possible. Thus he wasn’t casting O’Hare so much in a straight role as in a small role. Or as the director so delicately put it, no gay actors have the “box office stature” that was required to get the film made. O’Hare either played straight or he didn’t play at all.
In other words, one of the few industries left in which gay white men (actors) don’t make pay (i.e., wield power) equal to that of their hetero counterparts has churned out a movie about a gay white man who demanded equal rights. Which is ironic enough. And yet even while homo thespians don’t make the serious money in Hollywood some of the biggest box office draws have been allowed to play gay!
Gus Van Sant’s best-known films (which are not the same as his best films) have historically involved a certain grappling with What Hollywood Does. Hollywood saves a poor-but-smart kid from his environment (and himself) with the help of a bearded, platitude-spouting Robin Williams. Hollywood saves a poor-but-smart kid from his environment (and himself) with the help of a bearded, laughable slang-spoutingSean Connery. Hollywood flatters its flavors of the month by shoe-horning them into paint-by-numbers remakes of aged cinematic game changers. Etc. Anyone cognizant of Van Sant’s turn-of-the-century Hollywood period shouldn’t be surprised by his willing ability to play it straight.
To say that Van Sant continues to “play it straight” with Milk isn’t meant as a pun regarding sexuality, exactly, but said pun wouldn’t be entirely off the mark. If his Hollywood trilogy was what Van Sant needed to get from his early meditations on the emotional lives of low-lifes to his much-vaunted Death Trilogy, then that most recent career phase may be what Van Sant needed to work through in order to merge the first two modes of his career. Milk takes the defining moments of a subculture once perceived by the mainstream as deviant, and runs it through the mill of What Hollywood Does, thereby sanitizing its hero for mainstream martyrhood. Van Sant’s laundering of an outsider hero through the very inside mechanism of the Hollywood biopic has been variously described as heroic and distasteful. As of press time, I think it’s somewhere in between.
Irony held center stage at the press conference for Milk, Gus Van Sant’s passionate biopic about the first openly gay man elected to higher office in the United States, that took place at The Regency Hotel in Manhattan a little more than two weeks after the passing of California’s (heavily financed by the Mormon Church) Proposition 8, which defines marriage as between a man and a woman. It was Supervisor Harvey Milk himself who had been instrumental in the defeat of California’s Proposition 6 (a battle featured prominently in the film), which had been openly opposed by everyone from Governor Jerry Brown to Carter and Reagan. The victory over the measure that would have effectively banned homosexual teachers and their allies from the public school system occurred in the same (non-election) year Milk was assassinated along with San Francisco Mayor George Moscone, exactly three decades ago this month. Since those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it, it’s no surprise Harvey Milk is not a household name, not even to the many young actors starring in Milk, who became aware of him only upon receiving the script.
And this is something Van Sant, screenwriter Dustin Lance Black (who grew up gay and Mormon in California, and was the sole Mormon writer/producer on the Mormon-themed Big Love – yes, as I said, irony ruled the day!) and the panel of actors, including Sean Penn (Harvey Milk), James Franco (Milk’s lover Scott), Josh Brolin (assassin Dan White), Alison Pill (campaign manager Anne Kronenberg) and Emile Hirsch (Milk protégé/activist Cleve Jones) have set out to rectify. …Read more
On Monday night, The Hollywood Reporter published a story questioning Focus Features’ marketing plan for Milk, Gus Van Sant’s biopic on the country’s first openly gay elected official who was famously assassinated by a colleague in the late 70s. The story suggested that by “keeping its awards contender out of fall fests and heavily restricting media screenings,” the studio is deliberately trying to avoid any kind of partisan publicity (positive or negative) that could damage the film from reaching a mainstream audience.
Focus chief James Schamus was, apparently, pretty upset by the story, particularly considering that it was timed to hit the web just under 24 hours before Milk’s premiere, a benefit screening at the Castro Theater in San Francisco. He’s written a letter to the editor of THR, which Eugene Hernandez posted on his blog last night before the Milk screening. The gist: Milk wasn’t ready in time for fall festivals, they don’t have enough prints yet to do widespread screening but they will, the entire internet has been going batshit crazy for the trailer (”probably the most inspiring piece of movie marketing about genuine (as well as out) politics ever created”) for over a month, and not only has Focus not avoided political attention but they’ve bought tons of ad space on The Huffington Post and NPR.
If the issue was whether or not Focus is actively trying to create “noise” around Milk, then Schamus’ defense seems solid enough to lead to the conclusion that THR got that part of the story wrong. But the issue might not be the quantity of noise, but the brand of noise.
As you can see above, Floridian turned Brooklynite Holly Herrick knows a thing or two about flowers, but this is just where her expertise begins. The programmer of Sarasota’s quickly emerging film festival has taken up programming duties at the Hamptons Film Festival, which kicks off on Wednesday. We spoke recently about why Agnes Varda’s new film shook her up, the new record from The Walkmen and why she’s looking forward to Examined Life so much. …Read more
I honestly don’t mean to keep devoting time and blogspace to Uwe Boll, but when the guy manages to say something hilarious or interesting every other day, what else am I to do? Write about serious issues like the future of film criticism? Karina’s got that covered quite sufficiently and efficiently, so I might as well stick to the fluff.
Of course, I can still relate the fluff to film theory, as in the case of Boll’s latest peer slamming, located at MTV Movies Blog. After criticizing the uneven work of Tom Tykwer (sorry, Uwe, but Perfumeis a far better film than Run Lola Run), Gus Van Sant and Michael Haneke, he goes off again on his favorite nemesis, Michael Bay:
“Once Upon A Time in America, Dead Man, L’Argent, Ivan the Terrible, Crash—these are some of my favorites in the BFI series of monographs,” Girish writes. “Are there others in the series you particularly like and would recommend?” I read tons of these in grad school; my favorites included Groundhog’s Day, Independence Day, Salmon Rushdie on The Wizard of Oz, and Camille Paglia on The Birds.
Jeff Wells, after trisecting Gus Van Sant’s career, worries which version of the filmmaker showed up to make Milk. “If Van Sant who made Drugstore Cowboy is making Milk, terrific. If a blend of that Van Sant along with the guy who made Elephant is directing Milk, beautiful. But if the Finding Forrester Van Sant is anywhere near the Milk set, watch out.”
On a recent press tour for Smart People, Sarah Jessica Parker was reluctant to speak about the Sex and the City movie at all, but she did try to assuage worries that, content wise, the film is going to be more TBS than HBO. “I don’t think we have any interest in doing some homogenized, conventional version, in order to appeal. We don’t think mass.” Via Michael Musto.
Married Life, Paranoid Park, and Snow Angels: three independently produced American films, all being released this weekend by indie arms of major corporations, and three films that, according to Anthony Kaufman, are surprisingly serious about the “notion that we must come to terms with our complicity in other people’s pain, as well as our own.”
In this piece at Filmcatcher, Kaufman wonders what prompted filmmakers Ira Sachs, Gus Van Sant and David Gordon Green to tackle similar themes in very different ways. “Could it be some long-gestating post-9/11 reflection, or a reaction to the Iraq war and its horrendous collateral damages, from Abu Ghraib and Haditha? Or is it a newfound understanding of globalization, that we are all interconnected and responsible for each other?”
I haven’t seen Snow Angels. I saw Married Life months ago, but I really didn’t care for it and don’t think I could consider it seriously. But Paranoid Park is a really interesting film, one I wish I had time to write more about, but unfortunately haven’t been able to really cover in the madness of True/False and SXSW. It’s definitely a film about the psychology of Getting Away With It, and I can see how it would be tempting to graft political parallels on to that, in that it essentially mines horror from a criminal’s self-interested refusal to take personal responsibility. Still, even if the filmmakers were somehow taping into a zeitgeist, these films are all festival holdovers from 2007, and I’m not sure their simultaneous says anything other than that they’re neither likely Oscar contenders nor summer blockbusters. I’m personally skeptical that three corporate entities would suddenly come to a “newfound understanding” of their complicity in globalization and try to ameliorate their guilt by releasing three adult dramas on the same day.
Speaking of Snow Angels, indieWIRE is sponsoring an Apple Store event tonight in New York, with Angels director Green and co-star Olivia Thirlby (yes, the girl who said “honest to blog” in Juno). More info here.
Steve Rhodes has pictures from the San Francisco set of Milk, Gus Van Sant’s biopic in which Sean Penn plays the openly-gay San Francisco politician Harvey Milk, who was assassinated by a fellow city supervisor who later claimed he had killed whilst in the throes of a sugar rush. Van Sant and crew have apparently dressed a stretch of SF’s Castro district to match its 70s glory. More photos here.
What if this movie were not directed by acclaimed filmmaker Gus Van Sant? What if it had not been honored with a special prize at last year’s Cannes Film Festival? What if it had not been an official selection of the Toronto and New York Film Festivals? What if it wasn’t nominated for three (Independent) Spirit Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Producer? What if Manohla Dargis didn’t consider it, “one of the most moving and delicately felt films of Gus Van Sant’s career”? Would Paranoid Parkstill seem that appealing?
Not to me, but then I’ve seen enough films involving teens covering up an intentional or accidental murder. And that’s despite having enjoyed most of them, including Mean Creek, Bully, George Washington and even (though much, much less so) I Know What You Did Last Summer. Honestly, if this new domestic trailer for Paranoid Park didn’t mention all its prestigious claims, I probably wouldn’t be that compelled to see it. In fact, even if it simply mentioned that it was directed by Van Sant and featured one or more positive review blurbs, that wouldn’t be enough to sell me. Van Sant did direct such lame films as Finding Forresterand Even the Cowgirls Get the Blues, so he’s not a name that is completely synonymous with greatness. And this specific film has received enough negative reviews that critical acclaim is also not constant enough to attract my attention.
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.
filmcouch-114
Boyle. Fincher. Howard. Nolan. Van Sant. No alarms, no surprises. 
On Monday night, 
I honestly don’t mean to keep devoting time and 
“Once Upon A Time in America, Dead Man, L’Argent, Ivan the Terrible, Crash—these are some of my favorites in the BFI series of monographs,” 
Married Life
