John Leonard on Books We Love

Posted on November 7, 2008 at 7:46 am

A beautiful tribute to book, television, and movie critic John Leonard in Salon has this lovely quote from him about the books he loved:
My whole life I have been waving the names of writers. From these writers, for almost 50 years, I have received narrative, witness, companionship, sanctuary, shock, and steely strangeness; good advice, bad news, deep chords, hurtful discrepancy, and amazing grace…The books we love, love us back. In gratitude, we should promise not to cheat on them — not to pretend we’re better than they are; not to use them as target practice, agitprop, trampolines, photo ops or stalking horses; not to sell out scruple to that scratch-and-sniff infotainment racket in which we posture in front of experience instead of engaging it, and fidget in our cynical opportunism for an angle, a spin, or a take, instead of consulting compass points of principle, and strike attitudes like matches, to admire our wiseguy profiles in the mirrors of the slicks. We are reading for our lives, not performing like seals for some fresh fish.

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David Thomson’s top 1000 Films

Posted on November 5, 2008 at 8:00 am

David Thomson is one writer whose appraisals are as riveting and entertaining as the films and performances he describes. His The New Biographical Dictionary of Film is one of the dozen or so indispensable reference works every film fan needs.

His latest book is “Have You Seen . . . ?”: A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films. He does not waste time trying to be too specific or consistent about his guidelines (okay, so “Monty Python” and “The Sopranos” are television programs, not movies, they’re still must watching) and thank goodness he does not try to rank anything. That does not mean you won’t find something to argue with. But it does mean that the arguments it sparks will be a lot of fun. Critics are cranky. But crankiness can be a lot of fun. Whether he included or dissed your favorites, it cannot be denied that every movie on his list is worth seeing and every entry in this book is worth reading.

Welcome to the Back Porch!

Posted on November 3, 2008 at 8:53 am

Many thanks to Mitchell Keller and his syndicated Back Porch show, featuring “real country music,” for inviting me to be their movie critic. I’ll be on every week talking about the new releases at the theater and on DVD. Thanks for adding me to the website and the show!

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Is Hollywood Taking the Oscars Back from the Indies?

Posted on October 28, 2008 at 6:00 pm

For the past few years, independent films have out-performed Hollywood studio productions when it comes to awards like the Oscars so consistently that the studios made very little effort to campaign on behalf of big-budget films. But the New York Times reports that the studios are getting ready to promote some of their blockbuster releases for awards this year.
In theory, any film released this year is eligible for awards, but as a practical matter only the films supported by their studios will get the critical mass of support necessary for a nomination. Each fall, very expensive campaigns — special screenings, distribution of DVDs, some promotional swag, ads in trade publications “for your consideration” — determine which films are prominent in the voters’ minds when it comes time to cast their ballots.
After years of giving plenty of running room to independent film companies or studio art house divisions that set the pace with critic-friendly but limited-audience films like last year’s “No Country for Old Men” and “There Will Be Blood,” this year the major studios are pushing some of their biggest crowd-pleasers into the thick of the awards race.

Their approaching multimillion-dollar campaigns come at a time when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, whose 6,000-plus members award the Oscars, is planning to give its annual show a more commercially popular flavor. In part the academy’s producers will do that by including glimpses of the year’s box office favorites , whether or not they are nominated for prizes….
Shrinkage in the small-film business has left more room for big studios to play the Oscar game. Awaiting awards pushes are films like Universal’s “Frost/Nixon,” directed by Ron Howard; Paramount’s “Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” a David Fincher film starring Brad Pitt; and 20th Century Fox’s “Australia,” a Baz Luhrmann epic starring Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman.
The Times says there could be campaigns for such commercial hits as Wall?E and Iron Man. While this could be more about attracting viewers to the Oscar broadcast as it is about the quality of the film candidates for awards, I like the idea of recognizing that just because a movie makes a lot of money does not mean it is without artistic merit. A large part of what made Iron Man successful was the artistry of Robert Downey, Jr., Gwenyth Paltrow, and director Jon Favreau. And what made Wall?E so successful was the way its stories and characters touched the hearts of the audience, thanks to its writers and artists. I like seeing independent films get nominated for awards because it brings them a larger audience. But I’m glad to see blockbusters getting studio support for awards because it reminds us why they are so important to us.

Thoughts on ‘W’ as Movie, History, and Politics

Posted on October 18, 2008 at 2:20 pm

Movie review from Dana Stevens of Slate:
Neither satire nor biopic, the film is a kind of secular pageant, enacting with dogged literality the well-known stations of the cross of Bush’s life: the 40th-birthday hangover-turned-religious-conversion! The near-asphyxiation by pretzel! Mission accomplished! “Is our children learning?” The moments scroll up the screen like the song titles on one of those greatest-hits collections advertised on TV. The movie is done in the broad strokes and primary colors that are Stone’s trademark–lest you’ve forgotten JFK, this is not a filmmaker of nuance–but the net effect is both satisfying and strangely cathartic to watch.
My enjoyment of this film hovered perilously close to camp at times. Stone’s musical choices lay it on particularly thick: He accompanies a party scene during Bush’s drinking years with the Freddy Fender song “Wasted Days and Wasted Nights” and scores the fall of Baghdad to the marchlike rhythm of “The Yellow Rose of Texas.” But if Stone’s portrait of George Bush is laid on with a trowel, maybe it’s because God seems to have engineered the real Bush’s life with a similarly crude sense of irony. W. is a case of biographer and subject being perfectly matched: You really don’t want a Bush biopic directed by Jean-Luc Godard (though Robert Altman could have done something interesting with it if he were still around). Like Tina Fey’s Sarah Palin, Stone’s George Bush gets his best lines straight from the source. This movie was scripted by screenwriter Stanley Weiser (Wall Street) but was ghostwritten by history itself.
Slate political columnist Timothy Noah talks about what they left out:
W. is the rare Oliver Stone film that had to tone down the historical record because the truth was too lurid. How the hell do you tell the uncensored story of a guy like George W. Bush? No one would believe it.
Stevens and Noah have a great conversation about the movie on the weekly “spoiler special,” which can be accessed via iTunes.

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