Awaiting the Oscars

The movies don’t thrill, 

but inclusion and diversity might

     The Oscars are around the corner and there probably won’t be a lot of surprises with the winners.  However, there should be some verbal fireworks from Chris Rock.  I hope so because there isn’t much diversity in movies or television except for white, able-bodied straight boys.  The recent Annenberg study confirms what we know:  Hollywood executives make obscenely expensive B-movies for boys (and the girls who want to date or stay married to them) to see and preferably more than once.  

Sidney Poitier's 1964 Oscar Win

     Historically, blacks have always led the charge for equality, followed by women, other ethnicities, LGBTQ, and the disabled.  When was the last time a disabled character was in a movie or TV show?  Although TV has done and does a better job of including female characters, the recent increase of action professionals’ shows (cops, hospitals, firefighters) and superhero shows and decline of family oriented dramas (except on Freeform, which was ABC Family) and both daytime and nighttime soap operas has resulted in more tokenism and greater inequality.

     So, Hollywood trots out its “Art” from late September to mid-December and has to rely heavily on the Independent studios, some of which are boutiques of the majors and that actually care about entertainment and edification.  The take-away from the Annenberg study is that a female director or series creator will result in more diversity in front of the camera.  Spike Lee thinks that more diversity in executives would lead to more diverse projects getting the green light.  I think black, Latino, and female stars need to singly or collectively become moguls.  It’s how Féla, On Your Feet, and Selma were recently produced.

     Rock will address this in some way, though he was almost as awkward in 2005 as David Letterman was in 1994 so here’s hoping the script is better this time.  The problem is that outside of the diversity issue, there isn’t much that will surprise.  However, in 2009, the Oscars changed up Best Movie from five nominees to up to ten. Couldn’t the acting nominees be variable based upon number of votes?

Saoirse Ronan in Brooklyn

Movie:  We loved Brooklyn, a wonderful romance, and The Martian, which was the smartest, most spectacular comedy of the year.  Neither has a chance because neither is nominated for Director.  The Revenant will win because it’s won all over.  Will we see it?  I don’t know.  Brenda described it in enthralling detail to me, but she thought it was violent and a bunch of hairy bears (animal and human) dragging through the mud for two and a half hours could be more of a slog than I can take.

Our take:  Couldn’t Steve Jobs have been nominated?  Couldn’t Straight Outta Compton have been nominated?

Director:  Alejandro Iñárritu for The Revenant is a lock because the movie and director are generally conjoined categories.

Leonardo DiCaprio in The Revenant

Actor:  Leonardo DiCaprio for The Revenant because he’s won everywhere else, this is his SIXTH nomination, and he’s made billions for Hollywood and, oh yes, he’s incredibly talented.

Our take:  We thought Michael Fassbender was pretty great as Steve Jobs.  Couldn’t Michael B. Jordan have been nominated for Creed?  Stallone and DeNiro were nominated for boxing roles.

Actress:  Brie Larson has won everything so far for Room, a movie we want to see, and she’ll take this too, though we loved Saoirse Ronan in Brooklyn.

Our take:  Couldn’t Lily Tomlin have been recognized for Grandma?

Best Supporting Actor:  Sylvester Stallone in what will be a touching moment.

Our take:  A strange group this year because I thought Billy Crudup gave the best supporting performance in Spotlight and why couldn’t Idris Elba have been nominated for Beasts of No Nation?  I haven’t seen the movie, but he’s sensational in the clips and that’s all most viewers will see on the Oscars anyway.

Jennifer Jason Leigh
in The Hateful Eight

Best Supporting Actress:  A competitive category because female actors find more secondary than leading parts thanks to the overriding sexism of the movie industry.  It would be a lovely moment to see the great Jennifer Jason Leigh win on her first nomination for The Hateful Eight!  I can think of a number of times when she could/should have been nominated and she’s taken more risks than almost any other actress of her generation.  However, the movie didn’t take off in the way Tarantino’s most recent ones have.  Rachel McAdams is a joy in anything, but I think her nomination for Spotlight is about recognizing the ensemble, rather than her specific work.  However, Kate Winslet gives a quietly devastating turn in Steve Jobs, pulls off the tricky accent, and is practically unrecognizable.  She’ll win.

The tragic (and I use that term correctly) Amy and the simultaneously joyful and heartbreaking Inside Out were the best movies I saw this year so I hope they win their respective categories – documentary feature and animated feature.  

The Martian

I’d like to see The Martian win in its technical categories since hundreds (thousands?) worked on the movie and its production design is sumptuous.  Brooklyn should have been nominated and won for costumes.  Since it wasn’t, I don’t care.  Carol had the artiest – not necessarily the best – cinematography so it will probably win.  

For many people, the Grammys and the Oscars have become fashion shows.  Many do not see the movies that are nominated so they are more interested in the clothes. However, how many tube dresses are really that fascinating?

Anne Hathaway and James Franco at the 2011 Oscars

Is Mark Ruffalo the heir apparent to Gene Hackman? –PART II

Recent viewings:  Night Moves

     A week or two ago, we watched Arthur Penn’s Night Moves (1975), a neo-noir private eye thriller that’s become a cult movie.  It’s understated and oozes with the betrayals of Watergate, starting with a former D-lister starlet hiring a retired football player to find her runaway teenage daughter and ending with the image of a motorboat going around in circles and a hero who may have passed out or been mortally wounded.  However, it’s on a small scale; there isn’t the baroque corruption hidden by the vast ambition at work in Chinatown (1974) or the classic misperception and sardonic turnaround ending of The Conversation (1974) that also stars Hackman in a completely different performance as a small, damaged man in a big, regular guy body.

     Hackman gives a fully fleshed out performance in Night Moves as someone who’s been around the block a few times and takes himself seriously, although no one else shows him the same respect.  He’s in over his head, but doesn’t understand it until it’s too late.  He thinks of himself as ‘a white knight’ out to save others and the title actually refers to the moves a knight makes in chess, as well as what goes on after dark.  There’s a squirming moment, which put me in mind of Ruffalo, when he wonders whether he should take advantage of Jennifer Warren’s damaged character.  As H.L. Mencken said, “Never sleep with a woman whose problems are worse than your own,” and Hackman’s character looks like he remembers that phrase while making that decision.

Jennifer Warren and Gene Hackman

     To digress yet again, what didn’t happen for Jennifer Warren?  In her screen roles, she was intelligent without having to be eccentric or daffy, attractive without having to be pretty, and sensual without having to be sexy; she was a real American woman, but that seems to be too much for either directors, producers, or executives so she didn’t get a chance at leads; instead, she turned to producing.  Joanna Cassidy found herself in a similar boat about a decade later, but turned to TV for some sharp, wild, but smaller parts.  She was, however, a great professional ‘80s heroine in Under Fire (1983), co-starring with Hackman. The list could go on, though a number of top actresses – Laurie Metcalf, Allison Janney, and now Viola Davis – have gone from the theatre straight to television with movies on the side instead of as the main dish.  The result is that television has ascended and film has descended.  They’re all just movies and many of them are no more than jumped-up, third-rate, whorish comic books.

Melanie Griffith in Night Moves

     Another era change has to be Melanie Griffith’s role as the young jailbait runaway.  She plays a couple of suggestive nude scenes that probably would be cut today.  On the other hand, her death would be much bloodier nowadays and lingered over.  Hackman’s character behaves responsibly because he possessed an avuncular quality, especially in parts where he was co-starring in or supporting a female star vehicle (Lucky Lady, All Night Long, Postcards from the Edge).

The French Connection

     He’s best known for The French Connection I and II (1971, 1975), but he could be hilarious, especially his blind hermit in Young Frankenstein (1974), a western hero in Bite the Bullet (1975) or western villain in Unforgiven (1992), and he could do war movies, thrillers, suspense, and even cartoons, though he defined Lex Luthor in the first Superman series.  I wish he’d had the chance to play Robin Williams’ role in The Birdcage (1996), rather than the more one-note senator stooge.  He could have passed easily as straight and then still provided a sense of kink.

     Part of Hackman’s maturity as a performer and understated, but extraordinary range, was nourished by years of being turned down for parts.  He seemed on the verge when he was cast as Mr. Robinson in The Graduate (1967), but as Mark Harris recounted in Pictures at a Revolution (2008), he knew he’d be fired.  There was an unstated physical reason, I believe.  Watching a bear maul a chipmunk is not funny, but watching a squirrel wrestling with a chipmunk is very funny, which is why Murray Hamilton made sense visually with Dustin Hoffman.  It wouldn’t have been believable to consider Hackman existing with Mrs. Robinson in such a sorry marital state.

The Royal Tenenbaums

     Hackman’s last great role was as the eponymous patriarch of Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), which is probably as close as we’re ever going to get to the essence of J.D. Salinger making it to the screen.  His vigorous, wild, brilliant character provides the soul to the movie and deserved far greater attention than it received.  I know some reviewers look at Owen Wilson as Hackman’s heir apparent, perhaps because of their noses that both display a somewhat phallic quality, but Wilson, while a gifted writer and a happily relaxing presence, doesn’t display the performing tension of a strong actor.  Maybe Hackman could be persuaded to come out of retirement for a one-off movie with Ruffalo.  That would be worth seeing.

Is Mark Ruffalo the heir apparent to Gene Hackman? –PART I

Recent viewings:  

Foxcatcher and The Normal Heart

Mark Ruffalo

     A few weeks ago, we saw Foxcatcher, written by E. Max Frye and Dan Futterman and directed by Bennett Miller right after The Normal Heart, directed by Ryan Murphy, written by Larry Kramer from his 1985 play.  (It took Julia Roberts’ participation to realize The Normal Heart; even Barbra Streisand couldn’t make it happen back in the ‘80s).  Mark Ruffalo displayed powerful range in both roles:  a top wrestling coach, who happens to be a decent family guy in over his head with a billionaire psychopath, and a gay civil rights and AIDS activist, who becomes more prominent and controversial than he’d ever wanted.

You Can Count on Me

     I’ve liked seeing Ruffalo ever since You Can Count on Me (2000), where his insouciant portrayal of a likeable drifter earned him comparisons to a young Brando.  I could see it in terms of looks and his vulnerability, but he didn’t possess Brando’s power or the sense, as Ellen Barkin once put it, that ‘he had secrets’ that she wanted to know.  XX/XY (2002), although little seen, takes a look at a ménage a trois, in which the male is the emotionally weakest character.  We Don’t Live Here Anymore (2004), based on two André Dubus stories, examined two adulterous academic couples; it was the apotheosis of a serious American independent movie with excellent actors stuck in something that thought it was serious, but was actually dreary.

Zodiac

     Where his persona (and career) took off for me was his performance as Detective Dave Toschi, the primary investigator, in David Fincher’s Zodiac (2007), which was one of the most ignored excellent movies of the past decade.  With a great cast (Jake Gyllenhaal, Robert Downey Jr., Anthony Edwards, and Chloë Sevigny, among others) and extraordinary production design that re-creates San Francisco in the 1969 – 1980 era, it goes so far as to unmask the identity of the Zodiac serial killer.  He was funny, foot loose, and sexy as the sperm donor out of his depth when he meets his adolescent children and their lesbian mothers in The Kids Are All Right (2010).  

Begin Again

     However, 2014 was his year with Begin Again, Foxcatcher, and The Normal Heart by playing three vastly different roles.  He was up for the Oscar for Foxcatcher, a movie that could have been released in the ‘70s with its presentation of complex characters and the revelation of the establishment’s sinister entitlement.  That type of movie only seems to receive major studio distribution nowadays if it’s about historical events, rather than fictional ones (Argo, Zero Dark Thirty and the earlier Miller/Frye/Futterman productions Capote or Moneyball).  Steve Carell went the whole way as the creepy, psychotic John du Pont, but it was Ruffalo and Channing Tatum that provided the soul to the proceedings as the Olympic wrestling Schultz brothers.   

Channing Tatum

     To digress for a moment, what about Channing Tatum and when will he get taken seriously?  He’s a wonderful dancer (I thought that watching him on the bus in Step Up  as we rode to Canada in 2006) and he has a wicked sense of humor, but he raised the stakes in Foxcatcher and was criminally overlooked.  He remade himself physically for the part and expressed such a depth of rage that I would have thought he’d be a lock for award nominations, but no.  We haven’t had a smart, funny hunk who can move for a long time:  Burt Reynolds facetiously trashed his career, Sidney Poitier was stuck being a credit to his race/nation/the whole world, which killed his humor – the same thing happened to Barbra Streisand after she and everyone else decided she had to be important – so we have to go back to Burt Lancaster to see his actual forebear.  Tatum can already produce a movie.  If he sets up a production company, goes after great material, and works with European as well as American directors, then he could be the next Burt Lancaster.  And Lancaster never coasted, never called it in, and was still funny and could still move until a stroke ended his career in his late seventies.

Foxcatcher

     So back to Ruffalo and the two moments where he displayed greatness recently.  About halfway into Foxcatcher, Neil said, “I don’t see where this was so good,” and then the scene comes where Ruffalo’s character is pushed into saying something he doesn’t believe and there’s a horrible, squirming moment in which his eyes don’t lie and his fate is sealed.  After that look, we didn’t talk back at the screen anymore, which is really saying something.  The other moment was in The Normal Heart where Ruffalo as Larry Kramer’s stand-in is getting ready for a date.  He’s been pretty low-key and might even pass for straight, but he’s nervous and running out of time and his wrists turn loose and he slightly flounces and we know this date is important to his very essence.  It’s a scene that many gay men can identify with because of those hands and, even more tellingly, he doesn’t use that gesture again.

Ruth Rendell 1930 - 2015

Farewell to a Great

Ruth Rendell

     Ruth Rendell, whom we’ve featured in the past, died Saturday after suffering a stroke in January.  She was extraordinarily prolific, publishing over 60 books in fifty years under both her name and her pseudonym Barbara Vine, and

Mad Men: 6 more episodes and already it’s “Uh-oh”

We hope its best days aren’t behind a TV classic

     Yes, we’ve praised Mad Men up one season and generally up even more the next.  I wasn’t certain about season 6 since it got off to a rocky start until “The Crash” episode.  The second half of the last season just started and a tiny wretched crack of the English language showed up and in an episode written by no less than series creator Matthew Weiner.  One of Peggy’s

Award Shows Round Up

Snow between the Grammys 

and the Oscars (with our predictions)

30s Hollywood Glamour

Bette Midler's
45 rpm Hat at the
1975 Grammys
with Stevie Wonder

     What to do on a snowy day?  How about write up the biggie award shows?  The Grammys were set up to get people to buy LPs (yes, it was that long ago) and the Oscars were set up so that Hollywood moguls could try to class up a glamorous factory system (yes, it was even longer ago).

Rosanne Cash, the Big Americana Winner

     The Grammys are now about promoting current and upcoming A-list tours because it’s the only way to guarantee a big income, thanks to downloading. The show is about who wins the night, i.e. the performer who makes the biggest

Saturday Night Live at 40

It just keeps going, but maybe 

a new battery should be ordered

     OMG, I thought dinosaurs no longer walked the Earth, but boy was I wrong because they stumbled along in Studio 8H in 30 Rock.  Snooty Steve Martin (I think he really is that way and not just putting it on), squeaky Paul McCartney, the fossil Jack Nicholson, and the indefatigable and misguided Lorne Michaels led the way for a reunion of what started as a

Is the Movie Musical Back?

Annie and Into the Woods

are the tent poles for this Holiday Season

     TV ads have trumpeted Annie and Into the Woods and it’s a watershed moment when two big musicals are opening this close together.  The movie musical was declared dead back in the early ‘70s when a number of the monstrously expensive stage generated properties failed to perform and broke the 

Opening Scene of The Sound of Music

old time studios.  The three that work are The Sound of Music (1965) because of Julie Andrews, West Side Story (1961) because of the dancing and arguably the greatest Broadway

Cheech Marin, Chicanitas, and UW

The Latino/Hispanic tradition celebrated in Laramie

Cheech Marin

    The University of Wyoming Art Museum displayed Chicanitas:  Small Paintings from the Cheech Marin Collection (size doesn’t matter) this past fall.  Marin, famously half of Cheech and Chong, has pursued his passion for art after touring Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum and viewing Rembrandt’s monumental The Night Watch, then seeing Vermeer’s work

Personality Chef Carla Hall

Toot. Toot! Honk. Honk! Ah-Ooh-Ga!

Dexter Enjoys Carla's Reading

      That was Carla's call out from her first book Cooking with Love: Comfort That Hugs You.  It's what she says when she wants to give herself a pat on the back.  At the recent book signing at Joseph-Beth Booksellers for her second book, Carla's Comfort Foods: Favorite Dishes from Around the World, her fans were ready to give her plenty of pats and

Reconsidering The New Hollywood, Part II

The Stunt Man

      . . . if only László Kovács had shot The Stunt Man, which is bathed in that butterscotch lighting redolent of prestige (i.e. Emmy contender) TV movies of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s.  (1980’s Those Lips, Those Eyes had the same awful lighting).  

     The Stunt Man has a script by Richard Rush and Lawrence B. Marcus from Paul Brodeur’s novel that probably reads beautifully.  It’s a variation on

Reconsidering The New Hollywood, Part I

Shampoo

     The R rated movie introduced the adult, intelligent “New Hollywood” of the ‘60s and ‘70s that was subsumed by blockbusters and was reasserted by the independents of the ‘90s.  TCM recently showed Shampoo (1975) and The Stunt Man (shot in 1979, but allowed to escape in 1980 and Part II for this article), which represent that initial period, were

New York in the ‘70s: Will Hermes, Martin Gottfried, & Sam Wasson

During an economic free fall, the city 
crumbled, but the performing arts electrified

     When Howard Cosell said, during the 1977 World Series, “The Bronx is burning,” it really was.  Fires in the Bronx and bombings in Manhattan were commonplace in the ‘70s, an era that Will Hermes resurrects with extraordinary detail and an encyclopedic knowledge of the music scenes in Love Goes to Buildings on Fire:  Five Years in New York that Changed Music Forever (2011).  Hermes is a senior critic for Rolling Stone, but he writes in the exciting, all-encompassing style of

Some Recent Milestones

Talent exploding through a multitude 
of works = Genius in retrospect

   Two milestones this week were reminders of watershed eras in American and world popular – Shirley Temple Black’s death and the 50th anniversary of the Beatles first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show.  

Shirley Temple

   Shirley Temple was the most famous American child at the age of six, driven by a stage mother desperate that her little girl would be a movie star.  There were a number of women with this psychological need in that generation, the most

Another Beatle Anniversary

February 9, 2014 marks 50 years 

since their American debut

Meeting Ed Sullivan

      The Ed Sullivan Show was America's guide to pop culture for three decades.  If one appeared on his weekly Sunday night program, then there was cause for one to be noticed.  If that included a telegram prior to your performance from Elvis and his manager, Col. Tom Parker, then there was definitely going to some conversation on Monday morning at the office and school.  After weeks of anticipation, The Beatles would make their first of 3 consecutive appearances as they criss-crossed 22,621 miles across North America on their first tour here. That was all in a little over a month that sold 453,950 tickets.  For a front-row seat the cost was $4.

      The No. 1 song on Billboard's chart the week of February 1, 1964 was "I Want to Hold Your Hand".  For their first live performance in America, they chose to perform "All My Loving" to screaming female teenagers in the Ed Sullivan theater and across the country for those poised in front of their black & white TV sets.  For the three performances, they received a whopping $10,000.   It all became a life-changing time in our history that if one was lucky enough to experience first-hand, one can never forgot it.

The Super Bowl Concerts

Renée Fleming flawless, Queen Latifah sweet, 
Bruno Mars deserved the spotlight

Renée Fleming

     Yes, we knew Renée Fleming was a great choice to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” when it was first announced.  She delivered like the pro and leading American opera soprano that she is.  We laud her for repeating ‘the brave’ and hitting that high note from ‘free’ for a second time.  The NFL should ask her

Oscar nominations for 2013 movies

The snubs intrigue more

     Do there have to be nine movies up for Best Picture?  It means that each movie was nominated as the best of the year by at least 5% of the voters.  If all of the Academy members voted, then at least 300 selected Philomena.  It’s a good two-hander (Judi Dench and Steve Coogan) with an excellent

The Christmas Candy Cane

An amazing journey 

from Cologne, Germany to Wooster, Ohio

Cologne Cathedral Christmas Market

      I never thought of the candy cane as having a Christian origin–no more than Rudolph or Frosty.  But, the truth may be that it all came about at the Cologne Cathedral as early as 1670.  That's when the choirmaster became frustrated with all

Christmas is Coming – Will It Ever Stop for Thanksgiving?

     When we lived in Panama, José Feliciano’s “Feliz Navidad” started playing on local and Armed Forces radio stations the week of Halloween and my family was so sick of

Our Fascination with The Kennedys

50 years since Camelot

The Official Presidential Portrait
by Aaron Shikler

      For anyone living 50 years ago, I think most of us would agree that November 22, 1963 changed the world we lived in.  So much has been written that I would be self-asserting to