Film

Faster Filmmaker Q&A: “Greenberg” Star Greta Gerwig on Nakedness, Noah Baumbach and Movies that Make It Easier to Keep Living

Jonathan Kiefer — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 18:58:04 +0000

In Noah Baumbach’s “Greenberg,” the so-called “first lady of mumblecore,” Greta Gerwig, plays love interest to a guy who’s “trying to do nothing for a while,” played by Ben Stiller. So is that a step up, or what? I talked to Gerwig for half an hour in a hotel room the other day, and neither of us ever said the word “mumblecore.”

I’m sorry I haven’t seen every single one of your films.

Oh, that’s OK. There’s no need to.

But I’ve seen enough to know that Roger Greenberg isn’t the first aimless and shifty guy that a Greta Gerwig character has been involved with.

I think maybe that’s just what’s going on with guys right now. I think what’s interesting is very different women interacting with those kinds of guys. Florence was a particular challenge because instead of layering things on or giving myself things to do, it was more of a process of stripping away. What you’re left with is it’s kind of scary to be doing a scene because you are vulnerable in all ways. And every time I could feel myself wanting to make something more actory, I was like, nope, that’s not Florence. That would be Greta wanting to give a good performance, which is different.

I think I’ve seen you naked more than anybody else I’ve interviewed.

Have you interviewed Kate Winslet?

Touché.

She’s ahead of me. But she’s got a few years on me.

That’s true. So what does all this nakedness mean to you?

It’s always transforming in what it means to me. I think it’s not something I consciously did or didn’t do, but it has been brought to my attention. [Laughs.] And I think that the first time that it ever happened, it was a scene in a shower. You don’t have clothes on in a shower. And also, I guess I fundamentally don’t get what the big deal is in a lot of ways. But if there’s any meaning to it initially, especially in “Hannah Takes the Stairs,” it’s that I have felt like either you’re showing a woman’s body as a sexual object of lust that is presented for your desire, or it is degrading to be naked. But there was nothing in between. There wasn’t just nudity because, listen, you change your clothes and you’re naked. There was something about the lack of that that made me feel like women are either fetishized or degraded or both; they’re not just allowed to live in their bodies. I think it’s hand in hand with not wanting to see people for how they are. We don’t really want to see their bodies either. And I don’t mean to say that as a slight to filmmaking as it stands now. I would feel so much weirder about it if I had worked out really hard and gone on a raw foods diet before I did it, because that defeats the purpose for me. Because then you are showing your body as an object instead of your body as a thing that you live in. I would never do that kind of nudity. But maybe that’s splitting hairs. For me it makes all the difference. And then I think I felt like, “Ah, fuck it — if you do it once, who the fuck cares if you do it again?” At that point being coy about it seems sort of silly. I have said before, though, being naked on screen is very different than doing sex scenes, which are kind of horrible. Not in “Greenberg.” “Greenberg”’s sex scenes were very choreographed and completely safe, which was very nice.

How else is “Greenberg” different from your earlier films?

The scale of it, definitely. I think it’s the biggest challenge and the biggest reward I’ve had as an actress. I think a lot of that has to do with coming to he script as a thing that has already had hours and hours and hours of effort put into it, by Jennifer Jason Leigh and Noah Baumbach. And I think having such a strict script is a big difference. I mean there was no improvisation in the movie. I mean, not a single word was different from how it was written. I’m always so happy when people ask me if I improvised, because that means that we sold it. But Noah writes in such a specific rhythm. He almost writes like a playwright, in terms of the way it needs to sound and read. There’s something about it that it just has this kind of musical quality, and if you miss a word, it sounds weird; it’s like hitting a false note in a song.

Also, he tends to write movie characters who are not nice.

I still feel very protective of Florence and Roger. I still have trouble separating it when people, very well meaningly, say things like, “Boy, he was really mean. I didn’t like him at all!” It’s like, “What, you so fuckin’ perfect?” I feel myself starting to flare a bit. Or if somebody jokingly says, “What a loser, right?!” I think, that’s the kind of thing that makes people like Roger crazy. I mean, it sounds like kooky actor talk, but for me these people became incredibly real. I think I’m interested in flawed characters that are actually flawed. They’re not flawed in a way that makes the picture more beautiful or makes them lovable, but actually just flawed. I think that that’s more true. I know it’s harder from an audience standpoint; it makes characters less palatable in some ways, because it makes them more familiar. And I think I’ve always admired writers who’ve done that. Noah said something in an interview once that I thought was very true. He said sympathetic characters don’t need our sympathy….I mean, like, Nicole Kidman in “Margot at the Wedding”: I love it. I love it. I just thought she was great. But, that being said, I just watched “The Blind Side” on the plane and I cried.

What about actors? Who are your role models?

I think I tend to be attracted not just to actors but to actors in certain films. I really loved Michelle Williams in “Wendy and Lucy.” Just in terms of watching an actor not force anything. But it’s great because she’s in it. And you don’t need anything more than that. You need her to be experiencing these things. And fighting for your life doesn’t always look crazy. Sometimes it is quiet. And I think that that film captures that. I really loved Sally Hawkins in “Happy-Go-Lucky.” That was one of my favorite movies and favorite performances that I can think of in a really long time. She’s so fucking good in it! And that movie to me was so needed. I love going to movies and walking out and thinking, “I don’t know how I would keep living if I didn’t just see that.” And I think that’s why I want to make films and to make art in general. For just doing it all, I really love Emma Thompson. She writes, she acts, she was in comedy troupes, she dated Hugh Laurie and Kenneth Branagh. She’s amazing. There’s something about her that I find immensely appealing as a role model. She doesn’t seem snooty and she doesn’t seem like she panders to anyone.

Why “Greenberg” is No “Annie Hall”

Jonathan Kiefer — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 16:59:44 +0000

It’s not writer-director Noah Baumbach’s fault if his movie “Greenberg,” about a guy named Greenberg, makes me wish for a movie called “Zoidberg,” about the friendless, incompetent, vaguely Yiddish, attention-craving crustacean physician from “Futurama.”

In some ways the characters are similar. “Oh, it’s all so complicated, with the flowers and the romance and the lies upon lies,” Zoidberg once lamented, sounding a note that Greenberg might appreciate. Except that Greenberg, as played by a rebarbative and perpetually nettled Ben Stiller, doesn’t seem very capable of appreciation.

Having flown in from New York to skulk around the Los Angeles home of his well-to-do brother (Chris Messina), who has gone abroad, the fortyish Roger Greenberg promptly embarks on an irresolute affair with his brother’s twenty-something personal assistant (Greta Gerwig), an aspiring singer. There is cautionary talk of him having just gotten out of the hospital after a nervous breakdown, and of her having just gotten out of a relationship. There is awkward sex. There is hesitation, recrimination. They don’t seem to know what they see in each other, or in themselves.

Greenberg keeps touching up his mouth with lip balm, as if to stop himself from saying something awful (it doesn’t work), as if his soul itself were the thing that’s really chapped. He announces that he’s “trying to do nothing for a while,” but still makes time to write cranky letters to corporate and political entities that have offended him, and to brood over his fallow creative ambitions. He used to play music, but now he’s a carpenter. He starts building a doghouse for his brother’s dog, but doesn’t get very far.

Greenberg’s way of caring for others tends to consist of inquiring about their opinions of him, with acrimony aforethought. He reconnects with an old flame (Jennifer Jason Leigh, who conceived the story with Baumbach and is his wife), and can’t seem to stand seeing her settle in to motherhood. He tracks down an old bandmate (Rhys Ifans), as if only to reiterate and defend his own reasons for years ago bailing on their record deal. Eventually he finds himself at a house party, feeling threatened by a gaggle of blithe little scenesters who are half his age, and using their coke to embolden his aggression. At one point, while accompanying a woman on her way to an abortion, the kindest thing he can think to say is, “It’s your day.”

This is a fine and self-inverting turn from Stiller, who for once seems not to crave our attention but instead to be burdened by it, and a self-expanding one from Gerwig, who’s made an onscreen habit of involvement with unpromising guys, and has a generously recessive way of suggesting that this movie may actually be about her. (Read a Gerwig Q&A here.) “Greenberg” has some kinship with “Annie Hall” — neurotic New York Jew, briefly adrift in L.A., reflects on costs of creative life and past romances, hooks up with beguilingly ditzy would-be singer, boils poignantly and humorously with disappointment — but there’s no mistaking Noah Baumbach for Woody Allen.

Baumbach is as perceptive about aimlessness as he is adept at offhandedness. Whether these gifts are ideally complementary may have to remain an open question. I believe we are meant to admire “Greenberg” the movie because it doesn’t take pains to redeem Greenberg the man. There is bravery in Baumbach’s presentation, but also a sort of self-congratulatory understatement. Again, I think of that other willfully and endearingly repulsive figure, Zoidberg, who once said, “OK, so you’re nonchalant. Stop rubbing our noses in it.”

“The End of Poverty?” Review in Brief

Jonathan Kiefer — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 19:47:27 +0000

Presumably a rebuke to the book of the same title, sans question mark, by economist Jeffrey Sachs, filmmaker Philippe Diaz’s radical neo-Marxist screed affirms once again the inherent cinematic dullness of seething liberal guilt. Well, at least its many talking heads — comfortable, variously credentialed pronouncement-makers of the first world and pitiable, variously disenfranchised sufferers in the third — do hail from all over the globe. And at least it goes deeper than the usual our-awful-world doc by surveying five centuries worth of history, albeit to insist that the economic exploitation of underdeveloped nations has been insidiously entrenched via corporatism and colonialism since 1492. It’s dodgy, but determined. The rest, quite blandly academic except when narrated with bloated speechifying smugness by Martin Sheen, is a blizzard of unsourced factoids, with no coherent alternative to the alleged poison of privatization save for some hazy nostalgia about the concept of “the commons.” Probably what’s worst, though, is that the Diaz diatribe ultimately seems so impersonal. At least Sachs’ book, which posited restructuring international aid to abolish such horrific and widespread destitution, was partly a memoir of his own direct experience of doing exactly that.

“Green Zone” Review

Jonathan Kiefer — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 06:31:12 +0000

“Too soon?” we worried when director Paul Greengrass brought out “United 93″ five years after the fact in 2006. Not so, it turned out, but there’s no getting around the less tactful too-lateness of Greengrass’ “Green Zone,” a juddering thriller with Army officer Matt Damon in 2003 Iraq trying to prevent bogus WMD intelligence from escalating a falsely predicated war.

Well, at least the movie preempts a charge of 20-20 hindsight with its own weird sort of willful myopia: the battle-zone tunnel vision compelled by a customary Greengrass rush of relentless adrenalization. After a prologue quite succinctly approximates the duress of shock and awe from Iraqi officials’ perspective, we whip right over to Damon’s chief warrant officer leading his inspection team into casualties and chaos and turning up nothing. He finds himself standing around stupidly in a dank and empty old building, like Geraldo Rivera in Al Capone’s vault. (Yeah, I’ll show you some ancient history.) A sense of futility has stirred in our good chief, and he is becoming annoyed. “This is the third straight time,” he barks. WMD? WTF?

At a briefing, Damon pipes up and inquires as to the source of this so-called intelligence, but gets rebuffed. Then a CIA man with weary eyes (Brendan Gleeson) finds him outside and tells him he’s right to worry. Meanwhile, Greg Kinnear’s Paul Bremer-esque Pentagon suit, quite clearly a weasel descended from a hawk, rushes to dismantle and alienate the otherwise potentially cooperative (if troublesomely Baathist) leadership of the Iraqi army, thereby precluding any hope for law and order. Amy Ryan also appears as an anguished journalist, prodding Kinnear for direct access to his mysterious intel source and starting to panic about getting a runaround. She’s basically Judith Miller of the New York Times, except less stubbornly credulous and (accordingly?) employed by the Wall Street Journal instead. “How does somebody like you write something that’s not true?” Damon eventually asks her, touching a nerve.

Screenwriter Brian Helgeland has a knack for lines like that, which is too bad because it curdles his film into conventional thriller claptrap. So much for the so-called inspiration of Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s nonfiction book “Imperial Life in the Emerald City,” which had a better, bleaker sense of humor about blowing the Green Zone’s poolside-bikinis-and-pizza-deliveries bubble up and away from the ravaged rest of Baghdad. Helgeland generally sticks to telling over showing. “Your government wanted to hear the lie,” says the menacing Baathist general (Igal Naor) who becomes a major plot point. “Whatever you want here, I want more than you want,” says Damon’s friendly Shiite informant (Khalid Abdalla). And so it goes.

That’s the other thing: These aren’t characters; they’re symbols. Damon’s, like Private Ryan all growed up and promoted for moral purity, is so very noble of purpose, so brave and authoritative and committed. We understand his indignation because it’s obvious, but what made him, in the first place, so righteous? Where did this guy come from? Does he have a family or any close friends? (Certainly he has an enemy, in Jason Isaacs as one conveniently villainous Special Forces opponent.) Obviously he never rests, or smiles, or allows himself to register an attractive woman, but does he even eat or go to the bathroom? Even Damon’s Jason Bourne, when pressed centrifugally against the wall of a Greengrass whirligig, made the effort to reflect once in a while. (Which of course, yes, was part of his problem.)

Here, excepting the occasional dignity of mute contrition (one of his specialties), Damon more or less forfeits any subtlety of characterization to the direct projection of star power. His hero is an immovable object, as set in stone as John Wayne, or Gary Cooper, or, hell, even that grunting Vietnam War revisionist Sylvester Stallone.

Ramboesque endorsements tend to tarnish even the leftiest of politics, and so there’s no way around “Green Zone”’s condescending subtext of “I want to make it absolutely clear to all the simpletons who voted against their own best interests just how wrong this war really was.” It’s supposed to be cathartic but just seems like too much when Damon actually shouts, “The reasons we go to war always matter!” Yeah, take that, former “Talk Soup” guy who was in “Little Miss Sunshine” and now stands for glib administrative obfuscation! The act of trumping up is what “Green Zone” claims to abhor, and also all it apparently knows how to do.

“The Ghost Writer” Review

Jonathan Kiefer — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 02:32:45 +0000

It’s so frustrating to know that Roman Polanski makes great movies at least in part because he’s such a creep. But so it goes, and here is “The Ghost Writer”: a classic-seeming new thriller with the recriminative gall also to be an inside joke about how we’ve let the real world turn into something like a Roman Polanski movie.

Ominous intrigue ensues when a nameless young writer (Ewan McGregor) steps in for a mysteriously deceased predecessor to massage the memoirs of an embattled former British Prime Minister (Pierce Brosnan), recently self-exiled to a swanky modernist bunker on a slate-gray island off the Massachusetts coast. Turns out the PM’s grim little hideaway, with its devious-seeming characters lurking around every angular corner, is a sanctuary from a CIA rendition scandal and the long arm of the International Criminal Court. And that, as the ghost writer gradually discovers, is just the first thread of a very tangled web. What twisted fun it’ll be to watch the poor bastard get himself stuck in it.

Although adapted by the director and Robert Harris from Harris’ novel, “The Ghost Writer”’s masterfully proportioned combination of unsettling solemnity and deadpan cheek is pure Polanski. However sick we are of seeing his name in headlines, it’s clear that the movies have missed him. With cinematographer Pawel Edelman supplying a leaden atmosphere of exquisite menace, Polanski doesn’t bother with cheap, expected shock tactics. Instead, and with consistently riveting results, he calmly and intelligently assembles the rather quaintly old-fashioned paranoia of movie-thriller-style conspiracy. And from the elegantly foreboding opening to the harrowing and gleefully mordant final shot, the old son of a bitch never seems to put a foot wrong. His touch is as pearled as ever.

“The Ghost Writer”’s bag of tricks includes knifelike dialogue, succinct characterization, methodical pacing, a twitch-inducing score by Alexandre Desplat, and what surely must be the most improbably, fantastically cinematic use of an in-car computer navigation system in movies to date. And of course it also has a fine group of actors. With this arguable career-best performance, Brosnan stands in not just for Tony Blair (with one dash of Reagan and one of Clinton, too), but also for the notoriously banished filmmaker himself. It’s amazing how much unique vitality he brings to the part of a political proxy, and how keenly he reveals the corrosiveness of public power and charismatic mystique. Meanwhile Olivia Williams, giving everything and nothing away, excels as his tetchy Lady Macbeth-like wife — the fulcrum of the film and its deepest source of mystery. And finally, any lost hope for McGregor’s potential is at last restored by his shrewd but unfussy turn as the appropriately apparitional cipher at this story’s core.

Notwithstanding a few forgivable plausibility problems that are par for such a course, “The Ghost Writer” hums right along with its maker’s surety and muted showmanship. Never mind weak-link Kim Cattrall as the politico’s executive assistant and mistress; relish instead that tantalizingly too-brief moment between McGregor and Eli Wallach as an island old-timer with some useful and unsettling information. Watch in wonder as Tom Wilkinson turns up at exactly the right time to make short, sharp work of his role as a subtly evasive old crony. And trust in the implied promise here that satisfaction — however sinister — will be guaranteed. All it takes is a great director. Even if he is a creep.

“North Face” Review in Brief

Jonathan Kiefer — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 23:38:29 +0000

Benno Fürmann and Florian Lukas play two purportedly good-natured but nonetheless EXTREME!! Bavarian bumpkins who tried on Germany’s behalf to conquer the so-called “murder wall” of Switzerland’s Eiger mountain in 1936. Well, it was either that or cleaning Wehrmacht latrines — and what if one of the climbers had extra moral support from a reluctant party-line photojournalist (Johanna Wokalek) who used to be his girlfriend? Throwing in these complications plus Ulrich Tukur as an allegorically callous newspaper editor, Director Philipp Stölzl and his handful of co-screenwriters seem to confuse and distract themselves, and us, by positing old-school mountaineering as both tragic index of and retrospective rebuke to burgeoning Third Reich nationalism. “Because it’s there” might have sufficed as reason enough, especially with cinematographer Kolja Brandt rendering the it so palpably there. With knuckles alternately white from suspense and black from frostbite, the alpinists get progressively harder to tell apart. But the most compelling character, for all its brutal enormity, always was the mountain.

Oscars 2010: Live-Blogging the Academy Awards

Jonathan Kiefer — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 00:43:45 +0000

That’s right. Because it’s not enough to be staring and shouting at the TV. You need to be staring and shouting at the computer too.

Well, I watched the Oscars and presumed that whatever I’d say about whatever I’d see would be utterly riveting and worthy of publication on these here interwebs. I rigged up the Twitter feed right here so you could follow along.

And in case you missed it, below you will find THE COMPLETE TWEETS, in descending chronological order (and lateral order of profundity). And when I say complete, I mean complete with iffy, inconsistent punctuation and everything!

###

Now it’s over, and still nothing of substance whatsoever to say! Visit oscars.com for full winners list. Good night, folks!

Look at all those people mentioned in the “special material written by” credits.

Bigelow thanks people in uniform everywhere. A nice sentiment, but that also includes Paul Blart: Mall Cop.

Straight to the Best Picture winner: The Hurt Locker.

Best Director: Kathryn Bigelow.

RT @ guardianfilm: Sandra Bullock wins BEST ACTRESS. The first bovine-named performer to win since Morgan Friesian for Driving Miss Daisy

Yep, just one night after winning worst-actress Razzie, it’s Bullock!

Best Actress is Sandra Bullock

My girlfriend’s mom, who is English and knows about these things, points out Carey Mulligan’s resemblance to a young Judi Dench.

The hotness of Helen Mirren: now a disquieting meme. I don’t dispute it, of course, but the old-yet-hot thing seems doubly condescending.

RT @GaryJBusey: I hate watching the Oscars. I’m always scared that I’m going to turn up in the “In Memoriam” segment.

Now for some kissing up to the Best Actress nominees.

Bridges is sweet, exuberant, says “man” a lot, Dude-ishly.

The Best Actor is Jeff Bridges.

Now seems like the time to retweet this: “5.9-magnitude quake shakes Turkey http://bit.ly/9U7Qhn (via @cnni)” via @Alyssa_Milano, oddly.

Best Actor nominees introduced, at length, by people who’ve played with them. Such platitudes!

Best Foreign Language Film: The Secret in Their Eyes, from Argentina

In case you’re keeping score…and, uh, need me to keep score for you…Avatar and Hurt Locker are tied at three.

RT @hodgman Please Steve Martin, if you ARE reading this, please make a sign that says “TEXT THE MAN WITH TWO BRAINS 4414″ and flash it next break.

THE HURT LOCKER takes the editing award too.

Matt Damon, as ever Mr. Integrity, presents the Documentary Feature Oscar, to THE COVE.

Avatar’s Visual Effects Oscar is presented by low-rent bearded hunky dudes Gerard Butler and Bradley Cooper.

Best Original Score: Up

Come on, Desplat, I’m rooting for you!

To be fair, I can’t say I could choreograph a dance to the music of The Hurt Locker either.

No disrespect to James Taylor, but couldn’t they get an actual Beatle to sing “In My Life” for the obits?

For Cinematography, it’s Avatar.

RT @akstanwyck Monique gets standing o backstage. “I am a standup comedian who won an Oscar” she says.

Live-blogging the Oscars commercials: What the hell kind of a name for a birth control pill is YAZ?

Is the mere presence of John Travolta meant to be a cautionary tale for the benefit of Christoph Waltz?

Why is Elizabeth Banks entering to the E.T. theme? Oh, the, uh, sci-tech section…. And suddenly it’s over. Wha?

Sound Mixing: The Hurt Locker

Sound Editing award: The Hurt Locker

With merely a tweet, I’ve already said more than the Steve Martin/Alec Baldwin PARANORMAL ACTIVITY spoof deserves.

Costumes: THE YOUNG VICTORIA

“Jim Cameron: This Oscar sees you….” Acceptance speeches quoting or paraphrasing Cameron’s own dialogue never advised.

RT @robtak: “Featuring Academy Award Winner Mo’Nique” stickers now being added to Soul Plane DVD boxes everywhere.

Art direction Oscar: Avatar.

Not yet sure what I think of Carey Mulligan rocking the Mia-Farrow-circa-pre-rapist-Polanski hairdo.

“tyler perry and oprah winfrey because you touched it…”

Mo’Nique wins.

Of all the Supporting Actresses’ shirts, Vera Farmiga’s shirts have the most sheen.

Steve Martin zinger almost makes up for the cut to Morgan Freeman after a PRECIOUS win.

With a title like “Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire,” it sure worked hard for that adapted screenplay Oscar.

Adapted Screenplay nominees reflect seething class and race conflicts!

At last a toilet-paper commercial. That’s what this telecast has been needing (etc., etc.).

Yeah, OK, but having Jeff Bridges introduce A SERIOUS MAN only reminds me how much better THE BIG LEBOWSKI is.

I just enjoy an award acceptance speech that includes the phrase “We thank Bad Robot.”

The Oscar for makeup goes to: Star Trek.

Ben Stiller in Avatar drag. Cameron approves.

Watch Logorama here.

The New Tenants wins but doesn’t deserve to for live-action short.

Music by Prudence wins doc short award.

Logorama gets animated-short award.

John Lasseter likes short films because they’re short. “Kind of like a jewel-box of storytelling.”

Wow, saying anything meaningful about the Oscars on Twitter is hard. But apparently it’s hard on stage there too.

Parade of aging Hughesies. I’m scared.

Molly Ringwald and Matthew Broderick showing John Hughes some love.

Mark Boal wins his first Oscar for writing “The Hurt Locker.”

RT:@ JasonTrenton Tina Fey & Robert Downey Jr look like Prom Date Swingers on Cocaine

robcorddry: Ryan Reynolds and now Chris Pine? Did I just die and go to Perfect Chin Heaven?

RT @guardianfilm: BEST SONG awarded to Ryan Bingham and T Bone Burnett. First ever award to be won by man named after steak.

Hey, that guy loves his wife more than rainbows. Ok, I hope she knows how much he loves rainbows.

Song: “The Weary Kind” from “Crazy Heart.”

Up scores for Animated Feature. Pete Docter calls his family the greatest adventure.

That alligator just sat on the frog’s face sort of in the way Jennifer Aniston suggested a cold might sit on Gerard Butler’s face.

Hey, it’s Fantastic Mr. Fox! Reminding me that THAT’s what Clooney should have been nominated for.

Ryan Reynolds’ duly earnest intro to The Blind Side calls it “a true story, American as football.” But the iPad commercial moved me more.

Christoph Waltz acceptance speech highlight: “Everybody helped me find a place.”

RT @aoscottnyt: Stanley Tucci: nominated in wrong movie. Should have been for Julie and Julia.

I like the way Penelope Cruz says “Invictooos.”

This one’s for you, Jen: Sandra Bullock’s makeup frightens me.

Cut to a Coen brother after Jew joke. Nice work!

Clooney called on just after the camera showed him not enjoying the hosts’ lame jokes. Nice work.

S. Martin: “Gabourey and I have something in common. In our first movies we were both born a poor black child.” Yes.

Fan dancers fluttering in from the aisles, Martin and Baldwin descending from the rafters, Streep being briefly roasted.

Why, it’s Neil Patrick Harris.

Movie trailers during Oscars telecast commercial breaks: Crappy, disposable-looking movies on purpose, to make the nominees look better?

A brief glimpse of Rachel McAdams reminds me to encourage you all to rent “Slings & Arrows,” the best Canadian TV show ever.

Helen Mirren on Christopher Plummer and their mutual, um, oldness: “He could laugh at my bad back and I could laugh at his bad knees.”

RT @thepretension I love watching this in HD. Maggie Gyllenhaal has smoker’s teeth. Hot.

My girlfriend’s mom on Zac Efron: “He’s a cute little thing, isn’t he?”

Jake Gyllenhaal on Prince of Persia: “I think it’s going to finally do for video game movies what people have always wanted.”

The people of E! just said Meryl Streep never looked better. That’s sweet, but go watch “Manhattan” again.

Gabby Sidibe: “If fashion was porn, this dress is the money shot.”

Clooney: “I even voted for Jeff Bridges.”

Matt Damon on working with rugby players: “Those guys hit you in a way that curdles your cream a little bit.”

RT @slashfilm: Avatar producer Jon Landau’s son (?) caught making faces behind Sandra Bullock on the red carpet

RT @mental_floss: Besides Handing Out Oscars, What Does The Academy Do?

RT @NewYorkTheater : The longest film to win Best Picture: Gone with the Wind (3:54; 1939). The shortest: Marty (1:31; 1955).

RT @hollywoodfest: Today is Peter Sarsgaard’s birthday.

“Alice in Wonderland” Review

Jonathan Kiefer — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 21:49:26 +0000

Let history handle the business of judging director Tim Burton’s Disney take on Lewis Carroll’s fantasy classics against all other film-adaptation attempts — like the first, from 1903; or the one with Gary Cooper and W.C. Fields and Cary Grant from 1933; or Disney’s own fully animated try in 1951. A more pressing question is whether Burton’s film will satisfy fans of his earlier work.

Pink flamingo used as golf club, politely, to hedgehog used as golf ball: “So sorry.”

It’s dispiriting to see Burton the wayward Disney employee dragged back into the fold by the platitudinous force of “Lion King” and “Beauty and the Beast” scribe Linda Woolverton, here apparently a dutiful company woman going through the motions of dramatizing feminist self-empowerment. Indeed, before getting home to tell all those those corseted pop-up-book aristocrats what to do with their arranged marriage, and sailing westward on the winds of Avril Lavigne, this Alice (a canny Mia Wasikowska) first must indulge a formulaic foreordained quest to tame the Bandersnatch, slay the Jabberwock and save the computer-generated day.

OK, but what of Burton the visualist, so encouragingly keen on illustrator John Tenniel’s essential contributions Carroll’s books? “If you go back to Tenniel,” Burton said in one interview, “so much of his work is what stays in your mind about Alice and about Wonderland. Alice and the characters have been done so many times and in so many ways, but Tenniel’s art really lasts there in your memory.”

Absolutely. And yet, as TFT’s own Neal Pollack observed on Twitter during the last blitz of promo posters, “It seems that Tim Burton has turned ‘Alice in Wonderland’ into a story about a 3D gay clown.”

That would be Johnny Depp’s Mad Hatter, the Bozo-haired, chartreuse-eyed oddity seen grinning in the poster but just as often fretting in the movie. (Mad? “All the best people are,” Alice tells him, reiterating some encouraging words imparted by her influential father during a hasty prologue.) There also had been a prevailing hope that Burton’s taste for such inherently gothic somber beauties as Depp and Helena Bonham Carter (the director’s main squeeze) would carry the day. And it should be said that while at times all the CG clutter nearly does Depp in, Burton also has harnessed its unlifelike absurdity to bring out the best of Bonham Carter’s tendency toward weirdly proportioned performances. Hence the hilariously shrill and huffy Red Queen, with a head way too big for her body.

It’s a mystery how these things work, or don’t. In the case of the Red Queen’s henchfreak, Crispin Glover’s Knave of Hearts, the actor’s own weirdness and the movie’s seem to render each other inert. The White Queen, Red’s rival sister, is a fey, pallid Anne Hathaway, unencumbered by computer effects apparently so she may flounder in the community-theater mode of “I don’t really understand my motivation but the director said to do this.”

But at least we have the hookah-puffing caterpillar played by Alan Rickman. And is that really all we need now for a Burton triumph?

Bonus Read: The Many Faces of Alice in Wonderland

“That Evening Sun” Review in Brief

Jonathan Kiefer — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 19:11:40 +0000

As adapted and directed by Scott Teems, William Gay’s short story, “I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down,” feels comfortable on the big screen. There’s not much urgency in the undertaking–it didn’t need to become a film. But Teems’ casual confidence, notwithstanding a few minor missteps, adds up to inherent watchability. He’s obviously learned some lessons from his leading man, the wily old pro Hal Holbrook. And what a pleasure it is to take Holbrook in as an elderly, ornery Tennessee farmer bailing on the nursing home and burrowing back into his homestead, only to find that a young deadbeat (Ray McKinnon) has leased the place from the farmer’s legal-eagle son (Walton Goggins). Adapting this stuff is trickier than it looks, and maybe scenes of an old man delivering rueful monologues to his dog while cleaning a gun are inevitable. And maybe flashbacks to his departed beloved (Holbrook’s real-life wife Dixie Carter) could be fewer in number. But with its atmosphere of soft light and cicadas, its fine supporting performances and effortlessly excellent central one, this is a vintage star vehicle you want to get into and take for a spin.

As We Approach the 2010 Oscars: A Report to My Younger Self

Jonathan Kiefer — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 21:19:38 +0000

Yo, mid-’80s me! Where’s the beef? Greetings from the year 2010.

Don’t worry. I’m not writing to warn you about some relentless cyborg death-drone coming back through time to wreak havoc on your world because the machines have taken over. It’s true that the machines have taken over, but we’re actually pretty cool with it. And we even elected the death-drone as the governor of California.

No, arguably it’s the director of “The Terminator” who’s more out of control these days. I don’t even know how to describe to you what he’s up to now. To put it in language you’ll understand: The problem is that who really wants to have their mind blown by oversized Smurfs? Well, this guy, obviously. A major hoser. It’s been like this since he became the king of the world.

Anyway, the occasion of this year’s Oscars has put me in a reflective mood, and I’ve been thinking about how things have changed since the time when I — when you — were just starting to really get into movies.

I won’t lie to you. There’s been some hardship since then. I can’t go into too much detail because, as you know, no man should know too much about his own destiny. I don’t doubt that right now you’re feeling like you’ll be chubby and lonely and awkward forever. I can tell you that you definitely will be for at least another 25 years. But after that, who knows? Perhaps a future me will send word. Anyway, one thing that’s cool about your 30s is that you’ll be going to the movies all the time, for free.

Now, maybe you think being a dork who goes to the movies too much is no way to become an adult. And maybe you’re right. But then again, it sure worked pretty well for this one guy, now one of the most famous directors in the world, who’s got 8 nominations this year for a film whose title he didn’t even bother to spell correctly.

What I’m saying is dream big, my self, because anything is possible. In fact, all the stuff you’re into right now — cartoons, “Star Trek,” Transformers, hovering motherships, good guys against Nazis, hellacious graphic violence, feel-good football — has become major award-fodder in Hollywood by 2010.

You know it as “the year we make contact,” and I still like the sound of that, even if that movie got a few things wrong. For starters, as one recent documentary makes clear, mankind has a much less pleasant relationship with dolphins than Roy Scheider did back in the “2010″ movie. Oh, but at least that tough older babe who played the Russian space cadet is now playing another Russian space cadet, in a drama about Leo Tolstoy that I’m sure you wouldn’t like.

Yeah, some things haven’t changed. We still have lots of British people — eager schoolgirls, swooning poets, mad bureaucrats, reigning royals and at least one very sad professor — all decked out as usual with fancy clothes and fancy language. And of course we still have musicals, long ethnic jokes and Meryl Streep.

But dude, don’t worry. 2010 is way sci-fi. Big time! And cartoons nowadays are totally tubular. Like, literally. I can’t even explain it. Also, if you’re starting to get sick of Vietnam War movies, cheer up. By now, we’ve got a whole new war! And it’s a doozie!

What else? Well, Dirty Harry is an important director now, and he really wants us all to know he’s not a racist. Which reminds me. I don’t want to freak you out, but I feel obligated to tell you that some of what you’ve been learning from “The Cosby Show” about how black families live in New York City is not entirely accurate. Just try to understand that things are a lot different for the Huxtables in Brooklyn Heights than they are for the Joneses in Harlem.

I tell you, me of 25-some-odd years ago, it’s been a pretty wild ride. Do you remember that guy George in “The Facts of Life”? No, of course you don’t. But he’s a huge movie star now. You probably don’t remember Lou Grant from “Lou Grant” either. Well now he’s a cartoon man who floats away in a balloon house. It’s so crazy. But if somebody had told me when I was you that the guy who directed “Ghostbusters” would one day have a kid who made a movie with that “The Facts of Life” guy and got six nominations for it, well, I don’t know what I’d say. What are you saying right now?

It’s like anything goes here. I mean, if the dude from Knots Landing can co-host the Academy Awards with Steve Martin, well then why shouldn’t Woody from “Cheers” be in the running for an Oscar? After all, he’s been nominated before. Yes, I am serious. And the Starman from “Starman”? Him too. Again. He’s been nominated a bunch of times by now. We think this might be his year. See? Good things do come to those who get old.

OK, man. That’s all for now. I gotta book. Take care of yourself. Maybe try to get out more.

Later days,
You