• Larry Rohter talks “Outside the Law” with director Rachid Bouchareb, who calls the film “a historical continuation” of 2007’s “Days of Glory” and mentions a third part is in the cards. [The Carpetbagger]
• The biggest lies of this year’s Oscar contenders. [The Race]
• As “The King’s Speech” dusts off its mantle, this taxing conversation keeps getting play. [Entertainment Weekly]
–MEMO–
TO: Members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences
FROM: Kristopher Tapley
RE: The ballot you recently received
Ladies and gentleman,
As you sit to ponder the year’s best in your various fields of professional expertise, you might find yourself strong-armed into the consensus view 2008’s film product has been whittled down to over the last 30 days. You might even find yourself at a loss, cramming as much as you can after a year of constantly working with nary a moment to spare a trip to the cinema. Such last minute jitters can yield an unconsidered and, certainly, lackadaisical approach to your annual responsibilities as AMPAS members. But I implore you to take your time with this, be measured, and above all, take pen to paper with a level of seriousness.
While I would never presume to tell you how to go about filling in your respective ballots, I hope you don’t find it too bold of me to offer a few closing words of encouragement and suggestion as we close the book on 2008. The glut of film awards season fades into a numbing hum you’d perhaps rather ignore until the holidays have run their course, so come back to these words at a later date if you must. They merely represent the humble opinion of one passionate film lover who believes in the potential of your organization and the ideals it stands for.
Fox Searchlight Pictures will be screening its awards season favorite “The Wrestler” in tandem with two classics of American cinema next week: Elia Kazan’s “On the Waterfront” and Martin Scorsese’s “Raging Bull.” The event, to be held at the Aero Theater in Santa Monica, has been dubbed: “Contenders: A Look at Film Heavyweights.”
Each film, with their esteemed blue collar performances from Marlon Brando and Robert De Niro respectively, has popped up in Q&A sessions during screenings for Aronofsky’s film, a Searchlight spokesman said. The screenings will take place on Monday, December 8 and Tuesday, December 9.
“I look at those films and I stand in awe of them,” Aronofsky told me yesterday. “You can’t take your eyes off them. They are mentor films to ‘The Wrestler’ in a way” and they contain “untouchable, iconic performances.”
Aronofsky says both “On the Waterfront” and “Raging Bull” have always been an inspiration. He studied both in film school, in fact. But beyond that, it is hardly surprising that parallels might be drawn between these two classics and Aronofsky’s film; actor Mickey Rourke’s performance has been singled out as an “amazing tour-de-force” by the Los Angeles Times’ Patrick Goldstein. Variety’s Todd McCarthy, meanwhile, wrote that Rourke’s work “instantly takes its place among the great, iconic screen performances.” And so it will again next week.
“My favorite part of the process is working with the actors,” Aronofsky said. “It reminds me that the only true time we get to be artists is between ‘action’ and ‘cut.’ And every day, Mickey gave me a new gift. Watching him work is amazing and the honesty he brought is reminiscent of those films, I think.”
The first double-bill will start at 6:30 p.m. Monday evening with “On the Waterfront.” “The Wrestler” will follow at 8:00 p.m. Tuesday, Aronofsky’s film will show at 6:00 p.m. and “Raging Bull” will close the evening, and the two-day event, at 8:00 p.m.
It’s no real secret that the Academy is partial to the biopic. Big or small, intimate or epic, celebratory or critical, they never seem to tire of the allure of actors channelling real-life figures, past and present. Lately, in the performance categories in particular, biopics have been the surest route to voters’ hearts, with seven of the last nine Best Actress winners falling under the category, and Daniel Day-Lewis having just broken a three-year run of biopic winners in Best Actor.
The genre is no less prominent this year, with titles like “Milk,” “Frost/Nixon,” “Che” and “W.” all garnering varying degrees of awards buzz, for their star turns in particular. Meanwhile, from the arthouse, European titles like “Hunger” and “Il Divo” are significantly challenging the formal boundaries of the biopic, proving that the genre has far more adventurous terrain to cover than the solid, occasionally stodgy awards catnip the Academy frequently chooses to laud.
Back in August, I wrote a post about how I was wearying of Oscar’s devotion to the genre; in turn, after my unenthusiastic “Frost/Nixon” review, a friend said to me, “Well, you do hate biopics.” I really don’t. But I am a little bored of the more linear, prosaic examples of the genre that reduce the narrative to CliffsNotes highlights in order to showcase a performance. (Step forward, “Ray” and friends.)
Real life offers an infinite number of structural and cinematic possibilities, and it is the films that best take advantage of this fact that this week’s list is designed to celebrate. The ten films here take a wide range of approaches in portraying an equally diverse array of lives, but for me, they all pass the principal test of the great biopic: defamiliarizing the familiar. By creating living, breathing characters out of figures best known from history books and pop culture annals, they make real life as revelatory and surprising as fiction.
It’s interesting to note how few of the films I’ve chosen qualify as the Oscar-bait that biopics are widely perceived to be — we have four Best Picture nominees here, and only one winner. It was by no means a deliberate or elitist move on my part, but the fact remains that a lot of the most interesting and audacious work within the genre doesn’t get the recognition it deserves.
The biopic is clearly maturing — as I was drawing up the shortlist for this piece, I was surprised by how recent many of my inclusions were, but it’s clear that filmmakers are getting more adventurous with time. For example, in the 1950s, a film like “La Vie en Rose” would have been made as a stolid music weeper in the “I’ll Cry Tomorrow” mold — today it comes in a considerably more fractured form, structurally and stylistically. It’s just one of several recent films, from “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” to “Marie-Antoinette,” to show that the biopic need never be safe cinematic territory. The following ten films prove that.
10. “American Splendor” (Robert Pulcini and Shari Springer Berman, 2003)
An ingeniously intertextual account of the life and work of comic book author Harvey Pekar, “American Splendor” goes against the grain of nearly every other biopic of a creative being by revelling in its subject’s ordinariness. Riffing off Pekar’s own autobiographical comics, Pulcini and Berman brought their keen documentarist’s eye to Pekar’s unremarkable world of beige offices and supermarket checkouts, making as much dramatically of the absences in his life as his achievements. Anchored by a quicksilver performance from Paul Giamatti, this achieves the rare biopic feat of matching its subject’s individualism.
Alfred Hitchcock, Charlie Chaplin, Howard Hawks, Stanley Kubrick, Preston Sturges, Ernest Lubitsch, Hal Ashby, Alan J. Pakula, Sidney Lumet, Spike Lee, Paul Thomas Anderson.
Collectively they represent some of the greatest directors in the history of the cinema, and together they share one rather unbelievable fact…not one of them is a Academy Award winner for Best Director.
Each has the distinction of nominee, of course. But to think that filmmakers such as James Cameron (The King of the World, remember?), Richard Attenborough, Ron Howard, Sir Carol Reed (for “Oliver,” man?), John G. Avilden, Michael Cimino, Robert Benton, Robert Redford, Robert Wise (for “The Sound of Music??”) and George Roy Hill, to name a few, have Oscars on their mantles and the giants above do not is simply insane to me.
Ten awards for Best Picture were handed out throughout the 1980s, one of the worst decades for film in history, and I’d wager that only “Platoon,” the Oscar winning giant of 1986, can lay claim to being a great film.
Oh, that is not to say there were not great films made in the 80s; there were indeed, but nobody went to see them, despite rave reviews. Many of the decade’s very best films were released and abandoned, to be re-discovered on video, at that time a very new addition to the film industry.
“Raging Bull” ended up being the finest film of the decade, hell one of the five greatest films of all time, yet Oscar did not see it that way. Somehow, Martin Scorsese’s masterpiece lost the Oscar for Best Picture and the New York Film Critics Circle award for Best Film to Robert Redford and “Ordinary People” — a well crafted film, but hardly the raw and angry work of the former.
That same year would see the releases of “The Empire Strikes Back” — a superior film to the first “Star Wars” installment, yet snubbed for a nomination for Best Picture — and Richard Rush’s “The Stunt Man,” which might have been a strong choice for a nomination as well.