Detroit Loves "The Artist", Feels "Shame"

After my chat with Judy Greer I've been feeling homesick for Detroit. Or maybe it's just the ghost of Christmases past floating about though I haven't done a Christmas in Michigan in years. So what a perfect day for the Detroit Film Critics to announce their winners! The Artist is no sweeper but it's proving to be a formidable competitor on the critical map. A nice surprise from Detroit is the solid support afforded Shame which took two of the six acting prizes. 

Picture The Artist
Director Michel Hazanavicius, The Artist
Screenplay Moneyball
Documentary Tabloid

...and the acting prizes
Actress Michelle Williams, My Week With Marilyn
Actor Michael Fassbender, Shame
Supporting Actress Carey Mulligan, Shame
Supporting Actor Christopher Plummer, Beginners
Breakthrough Performances Jessica Chastain
Ensemble Carnage

How amazing is this ad for SHAME from a UK paper I believe?

Since I used to live in the Detroit area, I know how long it can be before Oscar releases show up there so I read this piece from John Serba on the voting with great interest. Here's what he says about Best Actress:

Michelle Williams, My Week With Marilyn. A strong candidate in a weak-ish field. Although now that I've seen “Young Adult,” I'd have voted for Charlize Theron over Williams. So it goes."

I weep for the Michiganders who had a weak Best Actress year! This year is just incredible for Best Actress but, alas, many of the best performances were found in tiny films that maybe never made it to the Detroit Metro area or did not get the attention they deserved if they showed their which was probably for one week in one theater. So it goes, indeed.

The members of this organization, which I'm only listing due to Motown kinship, are as follows: Kirk Baird (The Toledo Blade), Jason Buchanan (allmovie.com), Jim Fordyce (MIentertainment.biz), Adam Graham (The Detroit News), Corey Hall (The Metro Times), Tom Long (The Detroit News), Jeff Meyers (The Metro Times), John Monaghan (The Detroit Free Press), Warren Pierce (WJR Radio), Greg Russell (WMYD-TV), James Sanford (The Kalamazoo Gazette), Tom Santilli (Examiner.com), Debbie Schlussel (Sirius Patriot Channel 144’s Mike Church Show), Perry Seibert (allmovieguide.com), John Serba (The Grand Rapids Press), Lee Thomas (WJBK Fox 2), Mike Tyrkus (Cinemanerdz.com), Kirk Vanderbeek (Real Detroit Weekly), Greg Walton (WIOG/KRSP), and Stephanie Webb (WZZM, ABC 13), Chris Williams (Advisor & Source Newspapers), and Rob Worley (Backlot D.) 

Breakfast With... Holly Golightly

A cup of coffee and a croissant... a classic New York breakfast.

What did you have / What are you having this morning? And which movie was the first one you thought of today?

Parties: Overheard at Guild / Oscar Functions

I thought for fun I'd collect several bits from conversations to share with y'all. A couple of the following bits were said directly to me, some were part of group conversations, some were merely overheard at screenings or events. All are anonymous and shall remain so of course but are fun for awards geeks and movie fanatics to think about. I am not a fiction writer so these are all actual quotes (or paraphrasals, rather, since I don't walk around with a tape recorder.) One thing that's important to remember but easy to forget about the Oscars is that the 6000+ voting members are individuals with individual taste. They are no monolithic unit though the world likes to imagine them sharing one gold plated borg-mind.

While mostly it is fun to talk with voters, one discouraging thing you quickly realize is true that I'd personally always hoped was false is this: many of the voters wait until right about now to start watching the movies. A lot of conversational roads have abrupt dead ends like "I haven't seen that yet but it's on the stack!" In short: they don't go to the movies as often as movie fanatics. Or, as one actress told me recently, "I see a lot of movies but I see them either long before they're in cinemas or long after." It made a lot of sense to me once I stopped to consider the inside mechanics of this Business we call Show. 

On to the (silent) sound bytes on My Week With Marilyn, Moneyball, The Artist, Young Adult and more.

Click to read more ...

Linker by the Dozen

Philadelphia Weekly offers up 6 family films that would draw the ire of the far right in the wake of Fox's ridiculous Muppets bashing.
Coming Soon Another pic of Daniel Day-Lewis from the set of Lincoln, this time with Steven Spielberg
TOH on Matt Damon vs. Tony Gilroy in GQ, hurt feelings around the Bourne franchise.
Guardian David Thomson's ode to Jeremy Renner 

The Cut chooses 11 surprisingly stylish celebrities of 2011
Monkey See 20 Unhappiest People in the Comments Section of Year End Lists. Teehee
Pajiba thinks the teaser poster to Prometheus looks familiar.
Slant Oscar Prospects: Midnight in Paris
Bernardin Could Netflix revive Firefly? It's wishful thinking but thinking wishfully is fun.
Critical Condition "Hush up and watch the Artist" 
Tom Shone why the Globes are better than the Oscars. 

So the HFPA love their stars! What sinful wretches! To survey the history of the Golden Globes is to enter a fragrant Arcadia where all the great Oscar howlers of the last 30 years simply didn't happen. Where E.T. smushes Gandhi, Brokeback Mountain kicks Crash to the curb, and The Social Network roundly thrashes The King's Speech."

@MarkWassmer posted this fine mashup of the latest superhero posters. I haven't posted either previously because their über seriouness drained all joy from my inner child.

I miss superhero pictures that loved color and fun like the original Spider-Man or the original Superman or even X2. Damn you Chris Nolan! ;) I reallydon't want my superheroes looking like they could just meander over to the set of a Clint Eastwood picture and fit right into the I'm A Serious Movie near black and white aesthetics.

Top Ten o' the Day - Dennis Dermody at Paper Mag
Begins by calling The Tree of Life a "psychedelic turd" and moves on to one of the year's most immature and sloppy pictures (Kaboom) so I don't know how seriously to take it but I like the second sentence on Melancholia a lot.

 I feel slightly guilty enjoying the spoils of Von Trier's ongoing depression."

Distant Relatives: The Pawnbroker and A Single Man

Robert here w/ Distant Relatives, exploring the connections between one classic and one contemporary film.

Dead spouses are great dramatic devices. They can give your lead character an extra dose of pain and pathos and add some emotional heft to a bland plot, some sympathy to a distant character, or in the case of a good-old-fashioned revenge movie, incite the action. At its most banal, the dead lover is an obvious cliche. But occasionally it can sweep us up into the protagonist's psyche, force us to ask their same questions about our lives and loves. Those questions, pondered and feared by anyone whose ever been in love: "What if this person died, suddenly, tragically, unexpectedly?" "What if I weren't there to save them, help them, comfort them?" "What if their death were no more to me than a vanishing act. One day here, the next gone... no farewell, no funeral." "What would become of them?" "What would become of me?" These are worst case scenarios to be sure, and we repress the thoughts by telling ourselves that such occurrences are rare (I imagine the exact same thing that anyone whose ever experienced it told themselves too). We watch movies about people who've had such experiences not out of morose voyeurism but out of a desire to understand a state of being that we hope never to be in but realize we easily could.
 
Our two films today follow men who are mourning the death of a companion and who are, to use a cliched phrase, dead inside themselves. The Pawnbroker tells the story of Holocaust survivor Sol Nazerman (Rod Steiger), a man who lost his family and now lives surrounded by the dirt and corruption of New York City. At roughly the same time, on the other end of the continent, George Falconer (Colin Firth) is barely coping with the death of his partner Jim. George, the subject of A Single Man lives among the sunny skies and bright colors of 1960's Los Angeles. The environments of George and Sol, while polar opposites serve the same dramatic purpose, to highlight their state of mind. Sol's is representative. George's is sadly ironic. Added to this is more than a hit of expressionist style, the gritty choppy manic pacing of The Pawnbroker contrasted with the color boosting and desaturated highs and lows of A Single Man.

Both George and Sol have similar supporting characters in their lives. There are two to whom I'd like to draw your attention. They, in turn, represent George and Sol's impossible futures and unattainable pasts. To George, his friend Charlie's (Julianne Moore) propositions of a move back to England and a quaint straight existence are both impossible and offensive. And for Sol, the advances and attempted comforts of a neighborly Social Worker are something he has no intention of dignifying. Both paint pictures of a future that neither man wants to partake in, yet they only serve to emphasize the pain of the present. As for the past, it shows up in the form of two young potential proteges. For George that man is Kenny, a student who is fascinated by him and a bit flirtatious. For Sol it's his shop assistant Jesus, whose desire to learn the business he continually ignores or rebuffs. Both of these young men possess not necessarily much optimism or intelligence but a youthful exuberance, an almost recklessness that neither Sol nor George have present in them anymore. While George engages with Kenny in a way that Sol does not with Jesus, it may be because George has given up on life and planned a suicide while Sol has decided to go on being a living ghost.
 
Ultimately these films don't have any particularly encouraging messages for the man whose loved and lost. George and Sol float through their existence, flashing back to the moments that have defined them, whether they were present or not. Both men are presented opportunities to feel again, and though they resist and resist, they eventually give in tho their humanness in different but equally tragic ways. For Sol it is a new sadness too deep to ignore, for George a fleeting optimism, quickly snuffed out. Both men are outsiders in worlds that should be embracing them and comforting them, but instead are shunning and fearing them. Both men may have to work too hard to heal. But messages about learning to love again and letting people in aren't the point. The point is to get into the minds of these men and understand what makes them work, how their sorrows manifest, how their lives have become irreparably changed. These films give us insights into the inner workings of men on a precipice none of us ever hope to be. Neither film promises much jubilation but both deliver plenty of humanity.

 
Other Cinematic Relatives: Veritgo (1958), Last Tango in Paris (1973), About Schmidt (2002), Up (2009)