Julianne Moore and Patricia Arquette — Why We’re Rooting for them on Oscar Night

Posted on February 18, 2015 at 11:02 pm

No one is smarter about actors and Oscars than Susan Wloszczyna, and I was honored to be included in her latest Big O piece about front-runners Julianne Moore and Patricia Arquette, and why wins for the two of them will be especially satisfying.

But what will make a triumph for Moore even more satisfying is that the 54-year-old actress, who has been nominated four times before with no Oscar to show for her efforts (and probably should have had a fifth nod for 2010’s “The Kids Are All Right”), is considered long overdue. She hasn’t even been in the race since 2002.

Meanwhile, 46-year-old Arquette — a member of a high-profile acting clan who made her film debut in 1987’s “A Nightmare on Elm Street 3” — has never gotten the recognition she deserves for her standout roles in such films as 1993’s “True Romance,” 1994’s “Ed Wood,” and 1996’s “Flirting With Disaster.” She has been better served as the star of the TV series “Medium,” which aired for seven seasons starting in 2005 and won her an Emmy.

As for Arquette’s role in “Boyhood,” in which she plays a devoted mother determined to better her position in life, it is essentially a lead and probably the most substantial showcase for her talent that she has ever had. That alone practically assures that she will not go away empty handed.

Fingers crossed for both of them Sunday night.

Bad Movies Inspire Great Critics: Mortdecai

Posted on January 24, 2015 at 3:35 pm

Johnny Depp’s “Mortdecai” is sure of a place of dishonor on the end of the year worst lists. Business Insider and Huffington Post have some choice quotes from some of the movie’s best bad reviews, and I’ve found some good ones, too, including:

David Edelstein, New York Magazine

Having combed Roget’s Thesaurus in vain for a suitable adjective to describe the Johnny Depp comedy Mortdecai, I’m forced to say it’s just … bad…Depp is very, very bad. Watching his first scene, a bad echo of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, I thought he’d finally moved from emulating late (insane) Brando to late, slumming Peter Sellers and would spend the rest of movie swapping out wigs and accents. It quickly became clear that his bad, gap-toothed Terry-Thomas imitation (with extra eyebrow action) would be all she wrote. The badness settled over the audience like nuclear ash.

Rafer Guzman, Newsday

Depp’s grating, bug-eyed performance in this strenuously unfunny film may go down as a kind of psychotic break in his overacting career.

Robbie Collin, Daily Telegraph

It’s hard to think of a way in which the experience of watching the new Johnny Depp film could be any worse, unless you returned home afterwards to discover that Depp himself had popped round while you were out and set fire to your house. This is comfortably the actor’s worst film since Alice in Wonderland, and even dedicated fans will find their hearts shrivelling up like week-old party balloons at its all-pervading air of clenched desperation.

Steven Holden, The New York Times

hat a frantically dull spectacle this vanity project is.

Guy Lodge, Variety

onger on frippery than quippery: There’s a fatal shortage of zingers to supplement its exhausting zaniness.

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Critics

Critic Critiques — Has the Internet Been Good or Bad for Movie Criticism?

Posted on January 14, 2015 at 3:46 pm

Until a few years ago, the movie critics you read were determined by geography. There were a few critics in national publications, like Pauline Kael in the New Yorker and the critics for Time and Newsweek. If you lived in Chicago, you got to read Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel, but if you did not, you read the critic in your local paper. The internet made it possible to read any critic you liked. And it made it possible for anyone to be a critic. I started putting my movie reviews online in 1995 and did not start getting paid for it until five years later.

This democratization of movie criticism has been both good and bad. The worst part has been the result of overall budget-slashing at news organizations across the board. Film critics are among the first to go. A documentary called “For the Love of Movies” was a sad elegy to the era of the professional movie critic.

Director David Cronenberg is especially critical of aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. He said

Even now if you go to Rotten Tomatoes, you have critics and then you have ‘Top Critics’, and what that really means is that there are legitimate critics who have actually paid their dues and worked hard and are in a legitimate website connected perhaps with a newspaper or perhaps not. Then there are all these other people who just say they’re critics and you read their writing and they can’t write, or they can write and their writing reveals that they’re quite stupid and ignorant. … Some voices have emerged that are actually quite good who never would have emerged before, so that’s the upside of that. But I think it means that it’s diluted the effective critics.

It is clear to me that the best part of this access to technology by both critics and filmgoers (and thus the dissolving of the distinction between them) has been the range of new voices. My friend Sonny Bunch wrote for the Washington Post:

there is some use in examining the way that the movies themselves help us order our existence. The movie screen may not be a mirror for society. But it can be a roadmap for understanding and navigating it. And the non-expert may sometimes, even often, be better equipped to help us travel that path than the expert.

Susan Wloszczyna on Producer Gail Anne Hurd

Posted on January 4, 2015 at 8:00 am

Susan Wloszczyna’s terrific series on women filmmakers for the Alliance of Women Film Journalists continues with a profile of Gail Anne Hurd, producer of films like “The Terminator,” “Aliens,” and television like “The Walking Dead.” Hurd has appeared on some of the most memorable Comic-Con panels I have attended, and I loved her stories about working for Roger Corman, where everyone on the staff was expected to pitch in on every task at hand, especially the interns.

Susan concludes:

If any woman producer in Hollywood deserves to be saluted for her perseverance, continued success and ability to be relevant in an ever-changing world of entertainment, it is Hurd.

Much like the female action figures in her films that remain the standard for big-screen female warriors – namely, Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Conner in the first two Terminator movies and Sigourney Weaver’s galactic bad-ass Ripley in Aliens — she is tough enough to survive the occasional bump in the road such as the critically slammed The Hulk from 2003 and Aeon Flux, a failed try to turn Charlize Theron into an action hero in a dystopian universe that came and went in 2005.

That Hurd has proven to be equally successful and influential in a different medium with The Walking Dead — based on a comic-book series — demonstrates that she still has a knack for being ahead of the curve in popular entertainment. The longtime zombie flick fan, she described to Rolling Stone why the hugely popular series stands out from other tales of the wandering undead: “The title doesn’t refer to the walkers. It refers to the survivors. That’s the key to the whole show right there.”

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Behind the Scenes Critics

How True Should a “Based on a True Story” Movie Be?

Posted on January 2, 2015 at 8:10 pm

What does “based on a true story” really mean? The Washington Post had a front-page story titled, “‘Selma’ sets off a controversy amid Oscar buzz,” describing the objections by Lyndon Johnson administration insiders to the way he was portrayed. They say it was his idea to go to Selma, that he supported Dr. King’s efforts, and that he had nothing to do with the FBI’s surveillance and J. Edgar Hoover’s sending tapes of King’s supposed affairs to Mrs. King.

Historian Michael Bechloss has posted this handwritten note made by King for his conversation with LBJ:

Martin Luther King handwritten note on keeping “national attention focused on Selma”: #KingCenter pic.twitter.com/VjQ9gBgzh0

— Michael Beschloss (@BeschlossDC) January 4, 2015

Vox’s Matthew Yglisias has responded to the criticisms from those who object to the portrayal of LBJ’s views and actions.

And now my friend Jen Yamoto is summarizing objections to “Selma” and to other “based on a true story” films “Foxcatcher,” “The Imitation Game,” “Unbroken,” and “Big Eyes.” Some of these are the concerns of those trying to make sure that those who take their “history” from Oscar-worthy feature films at least begin to question the capacity of any dramatic work to be accurate in conveying historical events. But some are just sniping by competitors in the Oscar race.

As Jen writes:

Oscar voting opened Monday, and like clockwork, the haters have come calling. As Deadline’s Pete Hammond wrote on Monday, ’tis the season for controversy over fact-based awards contenders: Now, Bennett Miller’s real-life Olympian tragedy Foxcatcher and Tim Burton’s art exposé Big Eyeshave joined MLK Jr. drama Selma, the Alan Turing biopic The Imitation Game and Angelina Jolie’s Unbroken in ducking for cover over accuracy issues in mixing fact-based stories with narrative structure.

Even the most scrupulous accuracy will still reflect choices of perspective, tone, and emphasis. The best we can hope from any work of art is that it is the beginning, not the end, of an inquiry into the subject.

The Guardian takes on the portrayal of Alan Turing in “The Imitation Game.”

Movie critic Ann Hornaday has an excellent piece on this subject in the Washington Post. She wisely concludes:

if the Gotcha Game is here to stay, we can at least agree on some new rules. And we can begin by adjusting our own attitudes toward fact-based films and their inevitable nit-pickers. Rather than the dualistic one’s-right-one’s-wrong model, it behooves audiences to cultivate a third eye — a new, more sophisticated way of appreciating both the art and the reality that inspires it.