Thoughts I Had...From Leo On the Set of "The Revenant"

abstew here. We might be in the midst of the current Oscar season, but it's never too early to start thinking about...next year already. Now, I can hear you all saying, "Good god, man! The ceremony is still a month away! Can't we at least hand out the statues for 2014 before thinking of 2015?!" Blame these just released pictures from Entertainment Weekly from the set of current Best Director nominee Alejandro González Iñárritu's next film set to come out on Christmas, The Revenant, because they are already screaming, Oscar! The film is based on the novel by Michael Punke and is a grizzly story of revenge! Leonardo DiCaprio stars as Hugh Glass, a fur trapper in the 1820s Wild West that is left for dead after a bear attack. He miraculously survives but seeks out vengeance on the men that left him for dead. The film is being shot by Oscar-winning Cinematographer (and current nominee for his work in Birdman) Emmanuel Lubezki, who is trying to shoot it all in natural light. How could we not share our thoughts from these first pics?

• Bearded Mountain Man Leo! With Tom Hardy and Domhnall Gleeson co-starring as well, I expect a lot more burly, manly beards in the film. It may have to be retitled Beards: The Movie! And people keep saying the beard trend has reached its peak...
• I hate myself for asking, but is this the film that wins Leo an Oscar? We all know Oscar likes to make men wait, but he turned 40 this past year (that's right, Jack Dawson, is all growed up now) and he's already been nominated 4 times previously in the acting categories. How long will they make him wait? And working with Iñárritu, hot off of Birdman seems promising.
• That coat and hair look pretty gnarly. I guess he doesn't have time for hot shower in his quest. Maybe he wouldn't be so angry if he had time for a nice relaxing bubble bath?
• I'm kinda loving the fact that both Leo and Kate have revenge themed films coming out at Oscar time. Kate has the Australian-set, 1950s fashion revenge The Dressmaker coming out in the Fall. I would love to see the two of them reunited at awards shows again. Never let go!
• So his name is Hugh Glass? Doesn't sound very menacing. I wonder if he's related to George...
• Are we certain this isn't just a still from Cold Mountain?

• After Birdman showed that not all his films have to be so heavy, I'm guessing from the film's plot and those ominous grey clouds that Iñárritu is back to bleak.
• As an actressexual, I have to ask - are there are any women in this at all? Iñárritu has previously directed 4 women to Oscar nominations, hopefully there's a nice female role as well. Like a kindly widow played by Natalie Portman that takes him in and...wait, that's Cold Mountain again.
• It's nice to see that Leo is allowed to work with directors other than Martin Scorsese occasionally.
• Who is that mystery man that Leo and Alejandro are looking at? They both look leery of him. Perhaps there's a bear in the distance and they are not in the mood to deal with their own potential revenge-type, bear related escapade. [Exit, pursued by a bear]
• If anything, those trees are giving me a good feeling that Lubezki is gonna have some gorgeous nature shots in this. He's worked with Terrence Malick many times before, so the man definitely knows his way around a dreamy landscape.

Your turn: what do you think of Leo's rugged new look? Is this a 2015 Oscar contender or do you want to seek revenge against me for even asking?

Best (Male) Directors - The Chart!

I wish I had time to sketch Wes Anderson riding to the Oscars on a bicycle made of antique tuba parts (thanks Tina & Amy) but alas. It's nomination day. No time for goofing around.

Manly men and the men who love them and direct them and vote for them to win miniature idols of gold men.

The Best Director chart is now up with details on the nominees and gives you the opportunity to vote for your favorite (the poll will be up until two days before the Oscars). If you fuse all the Best Directors together this year into one über Frankenstein director you get a 6 foot tall white brown-haired American man with some Norwegian/Mexican blood in him who's rapidly approaching his half century mark and who has made about 7 movies in his career all told. (There's no way to fuse these five men's temperaments and styles though... despite being very similar in age, height, and Oscar favor they have very different aesthetics and concerns as filmmakers)

On the new Nominated Directors chart, you'll aso learn how each man got his nomination*. Besides having penises that is. That goes without saying in this category so we left their penises off the chart.

• How much did Birdman's showbiz navel-gazing help Inarritu?
• Which was more important for Linklater: conception or execution?
• How crucial was that spring release to Budapest's overall success?
• And did Morten Tyldum benefit from Oscar's World War II fetish?

Find out on the chart! (More charts to follow)

* for entertainment purposes only you understand. We can't know what lurks in the hearts and minds of voters but we love pretending to!

Review: Birdman, or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)

An abridged version of this review was originally posted in Nathaniel's weekly column at Towleroad. It is reposted here, with their permission.

 

A card in the bottom right hand of the star's mirror reads:

"A thing is a thing. Not what is said of that thing." 
-Susan Sontag

Which immediately complicates or maybe simplifies celebrity and art, two major themes (among a handful) of Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu's one of a kind new film experience. It's destined for major Oscar nominations and you should see it immediately. The movie has the simple and then complicated title of Birdman, Or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) as befits its duality perfectly. This quote is never addressed in the film but it's always stubbornly lodged there in that mirror, defying or playfully encouraging conversation about what this movie actually is. And what is film criticism or its more popular cousin, after-movie conversation over dinner drinks or online other than conversation that attempts to interpret and define?

Critics are often treated with petulant hostility in movies about show business, as if the filmmakers have an axe to grind and need to do that with grindstone in hand while their critical avatar/puppet hangs there limply, waiting to be struck with the sharpened blade. Birdman is no exception, immediately insulting its formidable theater critic Tabitha (Lindsay Duncan) as having a face that 'looks like she just licked a homeless man's ass,' before she's even spoken a line. But Tabitha is a slippery mark, portrayed as a voice of integrity in one scene and then a vicious unprofessional monster in another. This calls into question the reality of her scenes altogether

... which is not unusual in Birdman.

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Yes No Maybe So: Birdman

How did we end up here? In this dump. You were a movie star, remember?

Surely one of the year's most intriguing features in concept and casting alone, is Alejandro Gonzáles Iñárritu's Birdman. The director collaborating with the great cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki (fresh off his Oscar win for Gravity) trains the movie camera on the best Batman (I'm with Seth Rogen's in Neighbors on this one) as he plays a has-been movie star famous for playing a character named "Birdman". Now he's on stage years later trying to rejuvenate his career.

Concept and casting alone were enough for a "maybe so" tilting yes. And then came advance word from test screenings that the film really delivers across the board in performance so "yes". And then came the teaser which begins with a 41 second continuous shot like its asking me to marry it. So now I'm at 'Yaaaaas! I will. I will. I do!"

Making the traditional Yes No Maybe So a more lopsided formality than is healthy after the jump...

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DiCaprio + Iñárritu = ???

I am not, in any way according to the Internet, a Leonardo DiCaprio fan. Never mind that I saw him first and was proselytizing about his gift for at least ten years after seeing the double whammy of This Boy's Life and What's Eating Gilbert Grape in 1993. Alas, I have no proof of this fact as I was not writing for the internet at the time. But, it is true that I began to sour on him starting with Gangs of New York (2002) the first obvious sign that he was quite fallible indeed and that maybe he needed to be, you know, directed, rather than coddled by the auteurs he blesses with his unusually foolproof bankability. I may be the only person alive who thinks his relationship with Martin Scorsese, The Departed aside, has not been good for developing his once prodigious talent. But at the risk of angering his devout legion again, I feel confident in proposing that he is now in the exact place that his Titanic partner Kate Winslet was in the mid to late Aughts wherein she simply refused to do anything other than try to win statues; prestige piece after prestige piece after prestige piece. Movie stars need more variety than that in their filmography to stay sharp, if you ask me. She won, as many stars of her magnitude did, and so will Leo. And yet, as surely as Kate's fanbase turned on her for "wanting it too badly" and winning for a "lesser" performance, so will they turn on Leo whenever he wins which will undoubtedly be for a lesser performance because that's how 'overdue' Oscars work.

In the meantime he'll just keep trying to win one.

I've been saying for a long time that a light and breezy comedy (something like Catch Me If You Can) would go a long way towards relaxing him on the screen again and revitalizing his heavy and repetitive acting. And maybe it's churlish of me to assume that The Wolf of Wall Street which wasn't quite his best but was certainly his loosest performance since Catch Me... won't be the trigger for the same kind of rejuvenation. But a newly announced project is killing the dream that it might.

Honest question that isn't meant as snark: Is there any director currently working with a heavier hand than Alejandro González Iñárritu? His best film is Powder Keg (2001) and that's precisely because it's so freaking short at 8 minutes that it only has enough time to be sobering and impressive and exciting without overstaying its welcome and smothering the viewer dead in misery as Amores Perros, Babel, Biutiful and 21 Grams did. Otherwise his films are the epitome of the kind of portentously thematic "prestige" mediocrities that are jerry-rigged to be wildly overpraised by virtue of their importance. His next film, which Leo will lead, is The Revenant and it'sbased on Michael Punke's "The Revenant: A Novel of Revenge" which is about a fur-trapping frontiersman left for dead after a bear attack in 19th century Northern America. It's not the bear he wants revenge on but the party that abandoned him.

Maybe DiCaprio's natural tendency toward furrowed brow depression and Iñarritu's natural tendency towards furrowing our brows with depression will cancel each other out and they'll surprise us with a range of feeling in this grisly period drama? One can dream.