Golden Globe Musical or Comedy: a thin field or just a mysterious one?

Last week was a good one for Gold Derby. Not only did Ryan Murphy elevate their brand status by ____ them to death with an Oscar on American Horror Story but their story that David O. Russell's Joy would go Drama at the Golden Globes got a lot of "whoa, really?" press. I'm sure it's true-ish now but people are so exciteable about any "news" that I'm always finding myself in the position of splash of cold water realism. Truth: there are few certainties this early as it's only October and there's lots of wiggle room still for campaigns and precursor ponderings and such. Films are still entering (The Big Short) and exiting (I Saw The Light) the 2015 calendar and some switcheroos of fate/precursors/campaigning happen at all junctures on the way to Oscar: remember when My Big Fat Greek Wedding and Gangs of New York were suddenly Original Screenplays (oy); remember when Oscar decided abruptly that all the precursors were wrong and Kate Winslet was a leading lady in The Reader (they were right of course but it was super gross how all the precursors and media were all "Yay, category fraud!!!"); or when Whiplash was determined to be Adapted too late for its FYCs to urge voters to vote that way.

So let's assume that Joy is out of the Golden Globe Musical or Comedy and let's assume The Martian is in (though obviously things could change on either front). And after shedding whatever tears must be shed that the Coen Bros Hail, Caesar! is not opening in time to own this category, we move on.

Is the field thin or just mysterious to our eyes in October? Let's take a look after the jump...

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NYFF: The wonderful absurdities of "The Lobster"

About five disorienting minutes into The Lobster, all pretense of disorientation for disorientation's sake is stripped flatly away as the headmistress of the hotel (a terrific Olivia Colman) where Colin Farrell's character has found himself lays out the movie's premise. And oh how small the word "premise" seems in relation to what The Lobster has up its sleeve: Singletons will be turned into an animal (meaning a literal non-human creature) if they cannot find a mate in an ordained amount of time! 

It's a moment as surprising as it is funny (her notion of what is and what isn't absurd is the definition of absurd itself). While director Yorgos Lanthimos' previous films Dogtooth and Alps both reveled in their inscrutable rules, forcing the audience to pick up the fragments of what's offered and chase behind the film, trying to cram them together, everybody in The Lobster instead can't stop telling us exactly how this insane world works ("Didn't you read the guidebook?" is asked multiple times), and the more they lay it out the funnier and funnier it all gets.

And The Lobster is a very very funny film, seemingly finding all new ways to be funny that have never been found funny before - I wouldn't want to spoil its dark surprises but let's just say some of its punchlines got several audience members at my screening up on their feet and right out the door with madcap quickness. 

But for all of its laugh-out-loud cynicism about the way our own world works, refracted through the not-so-fun-house mirrors of how its own world works, Lanthimos' film has a heart, maybe black but beating hard, under its strange shape. He manages to make the old-fashioned obstacles of another sad love story hum with newness, scraping the gunk off romance and holding this bright shiny new thing high and proud. It's a marvel, like nothing else, singular from every single stupefying angle.

Alchemy will distribute The Lobster in the US. No date has been announced. For previous posts on the Lobster click here. Follow Jason on Twitter and read his blog MNPP

NYFF: Julianne Moore in "Maggie's Plan"

Manuel here with your weekly reminder that Julianne Moore is an Academy Award Winner.

Rebecca Miller's Maggie's Plan plays like a New York City screwball comedy with a Jane Austen protagonist at its center. If all of those elements feel like they would pull the film in opposite directions, you would be correct. Greta Gerwig is Maggie, a Gerwig-type gal too busy trying to match-make and keep everything within neat little plans to notice what’s right in front of her. Maggie, you see, wants to have a baby by herself, a plan that like many of the ones she cooks up throughout the film, goes awry when she falls for a married man (Ethan Hawke) whose brilliant, ice-cold wife Georgette (a bonkers accented Julianne Moore) is making him horribly miserable. That’s the basic premise. Or, perhaps, “everyone is self-absorbed, impossibly verbose, and in some sort of marital disarray” is just as good a summary for Miller’s film.

Miller, who you may know as “the writer-director of The Private Lives of Pippa Lee” (or even as “Lady Day-Lewis”), has a knack for skewering the pompous urbanity of New Yorkers and much of the comedy in Maggie’s Plan is derived from putting these characters in awkward situations their loquaciousness cannot solve. This is a world where people are “pickle entrepreneurs,” specialize in Ficto-Critical Anthropology, suggest the word like “is a language condom,” and rejoice when they hear Slavoj Žižek will be attending a conference in Canada. Gerwig, Hawke and especially Moore do a great job of walking the thin line between satirizing and humanizing these characters, though Miller’s script sometimes strains for credulity, her characters at once too childish and too self-aware to make many of the choices they make, like write an autobiographical academic book about the affair that destroyed their marriage to a promising anthropologist who’s intent on writing a continuously ballooning mess of a novel.

Thus, while the overall plotting is a bit off (Maggie is compared to Titania, Shakespeare’s meddling fairy Queen, though she’s closer to Austen’s clueless protagonists in the way she approaches relatively simple endeavors with needless complexity), it gives these performers some howlers to milk. Moore in particular finds ways of making lines like “No one upends commodity fetishism like you do!” have you double over in laughter. Part of it is her Danish accent. Part of it is her pineapple-like hairstyle. And part of it is the withering looks she gives as she spouts her dialogue in contempt: “There’s something so pure in you. And stupid” she says to Maggie at one point.

 And so, while there’s plenty to enjoy in Maggie’s Plan, including wonderful bit parts by Maya Rudolph and Bill Hader as Maggie’s bickering married friends, it’s all ultimately a bit too precious. But know this: you haven’t really lived until you’ve seen Julianne Moore faceplant while walking in the snow only to later whimper: “Are we going to die here?!”

 Maggie’s Plan plays NYFF on Sunday October 4th (with Miller, Gerwig, Moore, Hawke, Rudolph, and Travis Fimmel in person) and Monday October 5th (with Miller in person). Sony Pictures Classics will release Maggie's Plan though a date has yet to be determined. 

Best Emmy Night Tweets

Too exhausted from travel for the typical live blog so we'll just share the best tweets from celebrities, friends and awesome people for the night. So refresh on occasion... 

But first of all here's "Taystee" herself Danielle Brooks. TWIRL, GIRL! 

more after the jump

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TV @ The Movies: "Difficult People" and the Golden Globes of Hate

NEW SERIES! Since our eyes always flash and a smile spreads when a movie is referenced on a tv show we're watching, we've decided to make it a habit to share these cross-platform romances with you. Whenever we see one worth discussing, we'll share it.

Have you been watching Hulu's Difficult People? You should be watching Difficult People! Admittedly, it could be a very hard show to fall in love with if you’re not a fan of watching terrible New Yorkers act like exclusionary, entitled gits while spouting cruel insults about celebrities – but hey, that’s one of my favourite genres! What it does mean is references galore, like an audition for a remake of the 1988 body swap comedy Vice Versa in episode two, or a PBS roast in episode three that finds time for jokes about Shining Time Station (“If there’s one thing children love, it’s having Ringo Starr yell at them about trains”) and Maggie Smith’s genitals being named after Mr. Bean.

Julie Klausner and Billy Eichner star as Julie and Billy. They are less successful, but very pseudo-autobiographical versions of themselves - a mildly successful recapper of reality television and a waiter trying to be an actor respectively. They are trying to build a career in comedy while he works for Gabby Sidibe and she deals with her psychiatrist mother (Andrea Martin). Their love of pop culture knows no meta-bounds and they show has already landed in hot water over a joke in episode one about Beyonce that was the target of people who apparently know nothing of irony, criticising the show, the network, Klausner, and executive producer Amy Poehler as “disgusting”.

Sigh, right? [More...]

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