Sir Ian McKellen Charms the Brits. And Other Oscar Stories.

Nathaniel again in my last post directly from LA. I'll have to leave you in the good hands of Team Experience tomorrow as I'm travelling back across the country to home base NYC. This afternoon I had the pleasure of attending a Brit-heavy brunch with various BAFTA & Academy voters to honor Sir Ian McKellen in Mr. Holmes, one of the year's biggest indie hits.

Look at the starry talent that showed up to support him...

Jane Seymour, Sir Ian, Sir Patrick, Kathy Bates, and The Lovely Laura Linney

Did you know that Jane Seymour and Sir Ian McKellen go all the way back to 1980 together, having co-starred in Amadeus (1980) on Broadway? She was wife to Tim Curry's Mozart and McKellen was Salieri (and won the Tony) but none of the stage cast were used in Milos Forman's Oscar-devouring film version in 1984. I was able to say hello to all the actresses. I informed Kathy Bates of her devout fanbase at The Film Experience and she credited American Horror Story for giving her new fans but admitted the bloodiness of the show was a bit much for her (same) and that drinking the fake blood was disgusting. We even talked about her Oscar-winning work in Misery as I shared earlier today on twitter.

I asked Kathy Bates if she'll be seeing MISERY on Broadway. "No. But I sent them flowers from 'your #1 fan.' I know that's corny!."

— Nathaniel Rogers (@nathanielr) November 15, 2015

Longtime readers, particularly "par3182" who named her thus, will be happy to know that "The Lovely Laura Linney" is now aware that at The Film Experiencce we only ever refer to her by that full title and have for years. One may not even say 'Laura Linney' in casual conversation as it must be properly heralded with 'The Lovely'. She beamed with all the apple-cheeked radiance we've all fallen for repeatedly over the years.

McKellen's close friend Sir Patrick Stewart was also on hand. Though McKellen singled several attendees of the party out beautifully as he spoke to the crowd, about his fellow X-Man he joked...

Patrick Stewart and I are practically married at this point. But his wife is here so we won't talk about that."

I personally admitted to Sir Patrick that I keep almost going as him for Halloween. "That is a terrible idea!" he proclaimed, destroying my future dreams of Professor Xavier drag.

As for the man of the hour, Sir Ian McKellen was just as funny, warm, and winkingly arrogant as you could expect. 'I'm very good in the picture!' he agreed without shame with those twinkling eyes while chatting. He was a delight to talk to and especially gracious to fellow actors.

I told the twice Oscar nominated actor that I thought the makeup work to age him up for Mr. Holmes was incredible -- the actor is a spry 76 but he plays Sherlock Holmes as a frail 90something. He agreed and mentioned that "the big hooter" specifically helped him in feeling like someone else. Looking into the mirror after hair and makeup and seeing the character taking shape is a great help. 'Your body starts to join in,' he remarked hunching over to recall the aging affect. When it comes to actors and transformation, he quipped  'I knew what DNA was before the scientists!' 

related: current best actor chart | more on Sir Ian

Links: Adele, Oscar, Regina, Rooney, JLaw and WTF Missy

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The Film Stage a prologue comic for The Hateful Eight written by Quentin Tarantino himself

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Vogue gets a huge juicy house tour and talk with Jennifer Lawrence who is her typical bawdy self. On her current love life...

Cheers to my hymen growing back!” 

Music Video of the Year?
Missy Elliott hasn't released an album in 10 years. 10 YEARS. She proves she's still got it in spades with this track WTF (Where They From).It's got everything:  Hot dancing, inspired hair and makeup, best supporting visual fx, Charlie Kaufman like puppets, and boxes of people wrapped in plastic. I've watched this video a scary amount of times this week. Join me in obsessiveness. 

Oscar Movements
The Oscar charts were updated before yours truly headed to Los Angeles for the AFI, the last festival stop that can significantly change things (the next festivals like Santa Barbara for example are just glorified campaigning & warm up acceptance speeches for actors who are already real contenders). But, in a minor twist, AFI didn't change things - no Selma or American Sniper bows to be seen. There were a few players getting little boosts: Will Smith has an outside shot at Best Actor if they a) don't like their current options and b) Concussion is a big hit at Christmas; The Big Short could be a Globe Comedy contender (given that meager field); and quite a few Foreign Oscar Submissions attracted more devout fans since AFI is the single best festival at which to see them. Why you may ask? Well, it plays a lot of the titles each year and it's also the only big festival that takes place between when the official submission list is announced and when the Academy members start voting towards the finalist list of nine, so it's ideally positioned to make a difference. Mustang (France's submission) won the Audience Award but several other notable contenders, Denmark's A War among them, also had filmmakers and/or actors in town for promotional (hint: Oscar courting) purposes.

And in news that you know warmed Nathaniel's heart, The HFPA has vetoed Category Fraud attempts by Rooney Mara and Alicia Vikander in supporting. They'll have to compete in Lead Actress, Drama where they both 100% belong.  This doesn't necessarily mean anything to the Oscar race where they've been pushed supporting thus far -- Oscar voters have never been required to vote in a specific way for a performance they like (unlike SAG & The Globes where the specific categories are decided for the voters before they nominate) and we've seen in the past that the media and (most shamefully) critics groups generally support / encourage Oscar to accept the fraudulent placement by the studios. But hopefully this is a bellwether for the future. Category Fraud has reached critical mass in the past dozen years and it's time to break it down.

Interview: The Filmmakers of Dominican Republic's Oscar Entry 'Sand Dollars'

Jose  here. In the sensitively told Sand Dollars, we see love become a transaction, as aging tourist Anne (Geraldine Chaplin) buys the affection of local girl Noeli (Yanet Mojica) who indulges the wealthy woman by providing her company and sexual favors. However soon we learn things aren’t as clear as we thought, and we realize there is much more than meets the eye in the relationship between these women. Directed by Laura Amelia Guzmán and Israel Cárdenas, in their third screen collaboration, Sand Dollars explores sexual tourism in an unexpectedly touching way. Rather than being a “social drama” or a morality tale, it’s an acutely observed portrait of people optimizing their best way of survival. For the rich white lady, this comes in the illusion of regained youth, for the young woman it comes through economic benefit, but also in the sense of emotional safety provided by Anne.

Both characters are portrayed beautifully by the lead actresses, Mojica is a force of nature, and Chaplin has truly never been better. Sand Dollars has been selected as the Dominican Republic’s official Oscar submission, and with the film currently being shown in New York cinemas, the filmmakers were kind enough to answer a few questions I sent them via email.  

JOSE: Was it difficult to get funding for a film about an interracial lesbian romance ...?

Click to read more ...

Pilou Asbaek Goes To "A War"

Memorize this face as you'll be seeing a lot of it.

This is Pilou Asbaek, who appears to be the love child of Michael Shannon and Leonardo DiCaprio, but whose acting is surprisingly subtle given that visual prompt. Now picture him shaggier and with a sword as he'll be joining Game of Thrones for Season 6 to play Euron Greyjoy. GoT has become to Scandinavian and Northern European stars what Law & Order once was to NYC stage actors or Harry Potter was to older British thespians; the place they all end up in some capacity large or small! You'll also soon see him as Pontious Pilate in the Ben-Hur remake and then reunited with Scarlett Johansson (he played her cowboy hat wearing boyfriend in the first scenes of Lucy) for Ghost in the Shell  a couple of years from now. In other words, he's suddenly in demand.

But for now he's just a respected Danish actor (a TV star at home, and best known abroad for A Hijacking as well as a brief stint on The Borgias)  making the rounds with his country's Oscar submission A War. It's a real contender for the finalist list and then possibly the big deal Oscar nomination. Asbaek plays a Company Commander in Afghanistan who comes under hot water back home for a questionable decision he makes to save his men while they're under heavy gunfire from the Taliban. Though there are a couple of violent scenes, A War is quieter than its title suggests and more concerned with ethical and psychological fallout from going to war. And its legal consequences, too, as the movie is partially a courtroom drama

At a cocktail reception following the film I was surprised to hear from Pilou that most of the soldiers he shared scenes with were actual soldiers rather than professional actors. I wondered if he felt like a mentor, teaching them how to act with the camera and he humbly suggested that the opposite was true. He couldn't make one false move as an actor since it would read inauthentically while in the company of actual soldiers who were just doing their jobs.

Pilou and his director Tobias Lindholm both referred to the war in Afghanistan as "our Vietnam" in conversation. They drew the comparison because the Danish people never quite understood what they were doing in Afghanistan in the first place -- it's the only war they've ever fought that did not touch their borders. (In the early Aughts, Denmark apparently had a more conservative leader than usual who jumped in with Bush & Blair). A War is vaguely reminiscent of Susanne Bier's great film Brødre (2004, remade in the US as Brothers in 2009), though that one centered on PTSD. Given that the films are more than 10 years apart it's obviously a war that the Danish people are still struggling to make peace with.

Foreign Quickies: Mustang, El Club, Ixcanul

Three quick takes on foreign film competitors from the long list of eligible titles, all screened at AFI.

Mustang (France) Opens November 20th in select cities. Cohen Media Group.
Given that 2015's loudest topic may well be the need for fresh cinematic female voices, the French/Turkish production Mustang deserves $100 million blockbuster status instead of art house ghettoization with a $300,000 gross which is what they're infinitely more likely to get. Director Deniz Gamze Ergüven and screenwriter Alice Winocour, two very talented women, team up to tell the riveting story of five spirited sisters living with their hands-off grandma who keep colliding with the confines, literal and metaphoric, of the patriarchy. An innocent 'schools out for the summer' beach romp prompts the end of their adolescent abandon as their horrified conservative uncle steps in to shape them up, train them to be subservient wives, and marry them off to respectable families. Though the premise is reminiscent of Sofia Coppola's elegiac and dreamy Virgin Suicides, the execution is not. Ergüven and Winocour are more physically grounded and rambunctous in their presentation and there is no distancing conceit of viewing the sisters through the eyes of boys. Mustang has successfully rowdy comedic moments, an earthy non-exploitive sensuality, often clever visual framing, and even a hard-won scrappy optimism to balance out its tough reality checks. In short: it's excellent. Let's hope the Foreign Film Oscar Committee agrees. A- 
(See also: Amir's TIFF Review)

Ixcanul (Guatemala) -Kino Lorber will distribute in the US. Dates TBA
At the well attended premiere of this memorable Guatemalan Oscar submission (their first!), the director brought out, not one of the actresses, but an older woman dressed in South American finery who was some kind of public official/icon (the applause was so loud I missed her title/name). The takeaway of the intro was that Guatemala has a tiny but newly excited film industry and they're extremely proud of this little movie. As well they should be. Ixcanul (or Volcano) looks at a poverty-stricken Kaqchikel family, living next to an active volcano and working on a coffee plantation. The volcano, in addition to being a beautiful and alien visual backdrop for a movie is also a monolithic wall, blocking their view of the rest of the world; Mexico and the United States, to the North, are more myth than reality. The family hopes to marry their sexually curious daughter off to their comparatively rich boss and thereby lift all their futures. Needless to say, things don't go as planned. While the actions of nearly all the characters are often enraging, Ixcanul is never mean spirited, condemning the exploitation of their ignorance rather than the ignorance itself. (One heartbreaking emergy trip to a nearby city shows the family utterly at the mercy of an untrustworthy translator since they don't even speak Spanish in the mountains.) Bustamante's well crafted film is authentically steeped in a nearly alien culture but its humanity is entirely familiar. B

El Club (Chile) - Music Box Films will distribute in the US. Dates TBA
My first encounter with the acclaimed director Pablo Larrain was the violent Tony Manero, a film about a Chilean sociopath obsessed with winning a Saturday Night Fever lookalike contest. It was altogether unsavory and though the director's command was evident I couldn't wait for it to end. The second was the wondrous No, starring Gael García Bernal as an unlikely hero who helps rid his country of their dictator through an unlikely ad campaign. Though not without its necessarily dark moments -- all the Larrain films I've seen take place during the Pinochet era in Chile -- it was an exuberant, moving, and technically amazing film which I was happy to champion; it went on to be nominated for Best Foreign Film at the Oscars. The third encounter is, sadly, more reminiscent of the first in its absolute mandate to rub your face, artfully, in brutal shit.

The film begins deceptively as a mellow observational drama about a strange retirement community in a yellow house by the sea. Shortly, though, the curtain of ambiguity is lifted by an uninvited drunk stranger who stands outside the house spewing a hostel tirade of obscenities. The house, you immediately realize, is a shelter/prison for criminal priests that the Catholic Church is hiding away and the man shouting was one of their victims, repeatedly raped as a young boy. The depressing reveal deepens when you realizes that there are houses like this all over the world. 

Fans of disturbing cinema might admire Larraîn's chutzpah but everyone else should steer clear. Though the film has strong performances, particularly Antonia Zegers as a despicable nun and Marcelo Alonso as a remarkably stone-faced priest sent to assess the inhabitants of the house, it's a tough sit through spiritual rationalization, disturbing psychologies, and actual brutality [SPOILER WARNING] Animals are viciously killed in the film -- albeit just barely off camera -- and I never would have seen it if I had known. [/SPOILER]. Even the resolution, which could be read as spiritually uplifting is ambiguous; it played for me more like a sick pitch-black joke about "penance" and "redemption". (I will be wary of seeing another Larraîn film despite my love for No.) No Rating.