More discussion of ZERO DARK THIRTY as Oscar campaigning reaches climax.

Entirety of Tom Shone's recent THESE VIOLENT DELIGHTS blog post:

"While I found the depiction of torture to be upsetting–it seemed to me that Bigelow and Mark Boal presented it in a way that leaves it up to the viewer to decide whether or not it was worthwhile or reprehensible..." — Mike Fleming, Deadline Hollywood

Notice the baseline assumption behind Flemings comment: the torture worked. Whether it was worthwhile or reprehensible is for us to decide. This is why Boal has done such damage. Because millions now believe that torture produces good information. The baselines of public debate have, for many people, been permanently altered. 

 

Entirety of Jeffrey Wells' recent HOLLYWOOD ELSEWHERE blog post--titled "It Can't Happen Here...Or Can It?":

It's absurd, I realize, to speculate or fantasize about the absolute finest film of 2012 actually winning the Best Picture Oscar...ridiculous! The best films don't win the Oscar, dummy -- the most popular ones do. And yet Zero Dark Thirty is turning into a highly popular film with $75 million tallied + 9/11 families expressing their support + Leon Panetta giving it a thumbs-up + Martin Sheen going "homina-homina-homina...I've changed my mind!" + the Stalinist haters having been marginalized by common sense and routed by public scorn. Tables turnin', cut down to size, how ya like me now?

 

My take: I'm going with Tom Shones.  The Mike Fleming quote is inadvertently spot-on regarding ZERO DARK THIRTY's explicit desire to put torture/rendition into an apolitical vacuum.

 

I wonder if Mr. Boal/Ms. Bigelow were influenced not only by their CIA sources but also Sony exec Amy Pascal in proceeding with this "for us to decide" approach--to make it "acceptable" for a mainstream audience.

[Remembering the sexual politics of Sony's remake of THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, where Rooney Mara was on top of Daniel Craig until Craig flipped Mara over to assert the dominant male/female sex position--a marked difference from the original Swedish film version.]

 

And, though I read Wells' blog, it's rather silly/unbecoming of him to persist in the claim that people unswayed by ZERO DARK THIRTY's filmmaking/screenwriting are merely "Stalinist haters."

 

When stand-up comedy becomes Theatre of Casual Cruelty.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNOwXkGyXPQ

There's a story behind the not-that-funny stand-up comedy video I've posted here.

Two decades ago this summer, I worked on a film called JIMMY HOLLYWOOD as a stand-in for Joe Pesci.  Carlos Kotkin, in his pre-comedy days, was a production assistant on the film; part of his duties involved being an assistant to the female lead, Victoria Abril.

I remember Carlos as being deadpan and with a bit of a sardonic edge.  He worked hard and made it through the film shoot (which, from my point of view, was uberstressful).

On one hand, I'm glad that Carlos has a show business career (in addition to doing stand-up, he has a book titled PLEASE GOD LET IT BE HERPES, for which the following is a promotional video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFUP_hGyHfo), but it seems like he's content with doing lowest-common-denominator comedy where you make people laugh in a lazy, uncreative way by merely feeding the audience's prejudices about homeless street people and dating disasters (whiff of misogyny here) back to them.

But he's making a living--even if it's derived from figurative urination on misfortune, dysfunction and poverty for audiences his age and younger.

And I'm hoping to never be part of his audience and/or be a subject of one of his routines.

Filmmaker Steven Soderbergh offers employment advice.

Excerpted from a long NEW YORK magazine interview with soon-to-retire-from-moviemaking director/producer Steven Soderbergh (his film SIDE EFFECTS opens February 8th).

This quote (highlighted by me) was preceded by the interviewer's query as to how Soderbergh was able to get a variety of films (in different genres) greenlighted by the studio system.

On the few occasions where I’ve talked to film students, one of the things I stress, in addition to learning your craft, is how you behave as a person. For the most part, our lives are about telling stories. So I ask them, “What are the stories you want people to tell about you?” Because at a certain point, your ability to get a job could turn on the stories people tell about you.  The reason [then–Universal Pictures chief] Casey Silver put me up for [1998’s] Out of Sight after I’d had five flops in a row was because he liked me personally. He also knew I was a responsible filmmaker, and if I got that job, the next time he’d see me was when we screened the movie. If I’m an asshole, then I don’t get that job. Character counts. That’s a long way of saying, “If you can be known as someone who can attract talent, that’s a big plus.”

Link to the full interview: http://www.vulture.com/2013/01/steven-soderbergh-in-conversation.html

JJ Abrams adds STAR WARS to his resume.

Commenter "jchrisfg" from the HOLLYWOOD ELSEWHERE site has this observation to make re the Disney announcement of STAR WARS franchise caretaker earlier today:
 Abrams is in the circumstances a safe, generic and conservative move for the franchise. However flawed Lucas' prequel trilogy is, it has seeds of great movies in them, and some fantastic mythical images and visions that unfortunately don't work in narrative forms as-is.

Abrams' film will probably have better beats for general audiences, but apart from some character names, it will have nothing to do with the original franchise and I'm afraid it will just be a generic, forgettable science-fiction film of the 2010's.

Adding my opinion to the above: Abrams is 1 for 1 for film franchise revitalization.  The last two MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE films were good, but STAR TREK basically flipped  a bird in the direction of Gene Roddenberry's gravesite--proving to be the kind of generic, forgettable film the HE commenter referred to above.

A further heresy: Abrams' SUPER 8--paying homage to Steven Spielberg and, arguably, Joe Dante, is superior to the STAR TREK reboot .  Awaiting brickbats for this  decidedly non-fanboy opinion.

THE NEW YORKER's Emily Nussbaum on the artistic implosion of HOMELAND.

Excerpted from Emily Nussbaum's "On Television" article TRIGGER-HAPPY in the January 21, 2013 issue of THE NEW YORKER (much of the article is about the FX series JUSTIFIED):
"As I watched "Justified"'s narrative expand and contract, it was hard not to think of Showtime's espionage thriller "Homeland," which just ended a disastrous second season.  The show's original twelve episodes were a mini-masterpiece, a propulsive scenario paired with a reasonably thoughtful exploration of U.S. policy on torture and drones.  The second season began well, but it imploded into schlock--the creators had fallen in love with the chemistry between their stars [Claire Danes as CIA agent Carrie and Damian Lewis as U.S. soldier-turned-terrorist-turned-double-agent Brody].  When a bomb went off in the finale, it killed every corrupt or shady character, a convenient metaphor for the show's problems: it had been purged of complexity, a side effect of success.  The surviving ensemble--Carrie and Brody, Brody's family, Mike, Saul, and Quinn--were now cursed with, at worst, the flaws of the antihero: brilliant but unstable, willing to break rules in the name of justice.  That's not an original story, let alone an interesting way to examine foreign policy."

Feedback for opinionating on Jessica Chastain on ZERO DARK THIRTY.

Yesterday, I reposted comments I posted to the HOLLYWOOD ELSEWHERE site about ZERO DARK THIRTY and Jessica Chastain's lead performance as Maya.  Chastain's been a good actress elsewhere, but not in ZDT, where her performance has been overrated.

HE commenter Thunder Redux wrote:
TVMCCA is right on the money regarding Chastain. I think she was grossly miscast in this film. No idea how she got a best actress nom for this performance.

Commenter bobbyperu took strong exception:

Congratulations to TVM and Thunder for the Seriously Out of My Fucking Head But Let Me Just Be Contrarian award of the day. You guys are total fucking douches -- Chastain, as everyone knows by now (at least those with taste, frame of reference and knowledge of technique/sense of actresses currently working in America), is about the only versatile American thirty-something actress working right now. Without cataloging her dozen, diametrically opposed performances in the last year (different voices, bodies and masquerades, all of them) suffice to say that you two are clueless dicks.

But good to know that virtually no one agrees with you, based in her tally of awards this season from both press and industry.

ZERO DARK THIRTY is a low point in Kathryn Bigelow's career.

Reposting a comment I just left on the HOLLYWOOD ELSEWHERE site:
Have finally seen ZDT. Another film glorifying whatever-it-takes vigilantism--and it's stretching far too much to attach moral complexity to the job-fatigue burnout exhibited by Clarke and Chastain's characters. Earlier Bigelow films like BLUE STEEL and K-19: THE WIDOWMAKER surpass ZDT in character depth and examining the limits of bordering-on-fascist absolutism.
And Jennifer Ehle blows Jessica Chastain off the screen in ZDT. The limits of Chastain's talent and overhype have been decisively exposed.

Adding to the above: ZDT built up a lot of manufactured controversy from comments about whether torture brought about the eventual discovery and execution of bin Laden (the old Dick Cheney "torture works" argument) instead of the "why are we sinking to this level of depravity" moral inquiry sparked by the Abu Ghraib naked detainee photos. 

Victor Infante explains how the artistic selection process can sometimes be arbitrary and subjective in a good way.

From Victor Infante's eulogy blog entry for the late Jack McCarthy, a poet whose undeniable talent and grace Victor and I can both agree on.  The selected passage is interesting for its insight into how unconventional poets can sometimes be blessed with academia approval.  NEC refers to New England College, where Jack sometimes taught.

It was after his first reading at NEC -- to a packed house, I might add -- that I had one of my favorite conversations about Jack and his work, with poet and NEC professor Carol Frost. Carol is always an outspoken sort, and when we encountered him in the hall afterward, she was clearly wrestling with Jack's poetry.

I confided that Jack does a lot of things in his writing that normally drive me crazy, but when he does them, they all work. That's what makes him such an amazing artist. This answer seemed to satisfy Carol, but it also crystallized a lot for me, too. A lot of people treat poetry like it's a math problem, an equation to be solved. Jack put the lie to that in poem after poem. The "rules," such as they are, are there to help the writer coax nuance, meaning and emotion out of the poem. They're not an end unto themselves. And Jack could use any of the tools in the poet's toolbox with skill and precision -- his smaller lyrics, the ones that rarely made it to slams, are gorgeous -- but he always knew he didn't have to use any artifice if he didn't need to. Jack could just craft a story, and it would inevitably be a poem, would always be something a bit more than a jumble of sentences and sentiment. Because Jack was a real artist, and any arbitrary rules only applied when he found them convenient.