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Oscar never forgets

Going into the Oscars, the cinetrix despaired that she'd never seen fewer of the nominees. Now my line is that I just saw the ones that mattered.

Still, as aging movie brats Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg strong-armed the stage at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion last night, I wondered for a brief moment what in the hell they'd do if someone other than Martin Scorsese won Best Director.

Then I remembered that, Mafia stizz, AMPAS never forgets a favor.

Here's what the littlest Oscar winner told Variety:

His three longtime pals George Lucas, Stephen [sic] Spielberg and Francis Ford Coppola startled him as they came onstage. "It was an extraordinary moment when the three of them came out and gave me a look. Particularly in that 10-12 years from the '70s to the early '80s, we worked together. It was like a private film school. I just went up to San Francisco to see Francis and his new film, at George's new theater. To see them come out and give me a look before they opened the envelope, was a real surprise."

[It probably took you twice as long to read that as it did Scorsese to rattle it off.]

The cinetrix hopes that Mr. Scorsese* had a lovely time last night--the 'Fesser and I threw a smashing bash in his honor--and that having finally nabbed the gold guy, he didn't wake up this morning singing this song .

*Fuck all y'all who call the man "Marty." He's old enough to be your nonno. Respect!

Am I blue?

The cinetrix was paging through a magazine and came across an ad for the dvd release of "the Will Ferrell is a serious actor, forreals," flick Stranger than Fiction.

Is there a special haberdasher for comedic actors? And is this a new thing for Saturday Night Live alums, the ridiculous blue suit? The 'Fesser observed that Murray didn't wear one in The Razor's Edge. Maybe it's like beautiful women playing ugly for Oscars?

Haute vulgarisation

Cinephiliac and the cinetrix were grousing last night over this little item, from Variety:

Howard decodes 'Cache'
Director eyes French film

Ron Howard may unlock an American version of "Cache" for Universal.

Brian Grazer will produce the remake for Imagine, which acquired the rights from Plum Pictures, with Howard looking to direct.

Plum's Celine Rattray will exec produce, along with Randy Simon, and Plum's Galt Niederhoffer and Daniela Taplin Lundberg will co-produce.

Michael Haneke wrote and helmed the French original, which starred Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche as a couple who find increasingly violent videos on their porch. Haneke won the director prize at Cannes for the film in 2005.

Let's help Opie out, cine-cynics! What would you rename Cache? Who would you cast as Georges and Anne? What sort of jobs would they have that would carry the same haute bourgeoisie cachet in the United States that being the host of a chat show ABOUT LITERATURE and working in a publishing house do in France? Where would they live? Will the Majid character become Iraqi? [Oooo, topical!] African American?

And, perhaps most important of all, figure out whether the American equivalent of Haneke's beset intellectuals would even own a VHS player any more. [The cinetrix fears this one could quickly turn into Crash 2, set in a beautiful home in LA--one devoid of books but with its own plush screening room. Perhaps The Anniversary Party crib is available.]

Feel free to add your own questions and answers in the comments. Please try and refrain from spoiling the film's surprises for those who haven't yet seen Haneke's creepy, chilly flick. And if I've just described you, get to it before its gets Grazered.

Lemonade or citric acid?

The cinetrix had a singularly unpleasant and thwartful experience in Terminal B of Logan International Airport on Sunday. How bad? The cinetrix should probably defer to the 'Fesser on this one. An evil gate agent made the cinetrix sob openly and uncontrollably, in public, for several minutes. So, any Pullquote readers who happened to attempt to fly American [you thought I was going to say JetBlue? Maybe Delta?] on Sunday afternoon, that was me.

Once the decision regarding whether I would be present to teach my classes [no] yesterday [not a holiday here] was taken out of our hands, we had dinner with my conveniently proximate brother and sister-in-law and caught Breach.

The cinetrix can't vouch for its quiet power over people who haven't spent part of the day in/near hysterics, but we all liked it and you should go see it. It's February, people. There ain't much else out there.

"Based on the true story" of how F.B.I. agent and uber-traitor Robert Hanssen was finally brought down, Breach is an immensely satisfying little act-off between Chris Cooper and Ryan Phillippe [brunet here to announce his seriousness], punctuated by occasional steely bitch operatics courtesy of Laura Linney. [Gotta say I still think back to her turn as sweet Maryann in Tales of the City in wonderment. She was so innocent then!] The flick also offers Wonderfalls fans a chance to catch up with the amazing Caroline Dhavernas, who plays Phillippe's shut-out wife.

Slowly, ineluctably, director Billy Ray explores how a career bureau man, part patriotic pervert and part conservative Catholic, could sell American secrets to Russia. The Catholic stuff especially made me long for the florid and relatively uncomplicated Catholicism espoused by Italian movie gangsters and there-are-extra-books-in-the-Bible horror plots. But Breach focuses on the how rather than the why of this man's crimes. Given the preordained outcome, it cleverly lets the tedium build until you realize just how a smart bureaucrat might have felt so frustrated and underappreciated that he sought out folks more appreciative of his gifts.

Let It Loose

There once was a boy I knew. A right bastard by most accounts, most of the time. But he loved his Irish mother and he graduated CRLS with Matt Damon. And he always cried to the Stones' track "Let It Loose," from Exile. So he was very much in my thoughts tonight as the cinetrix settled in with my beloved WASPy in-laws to watch the near-sister-in-law's mum's Stones-scored SAG copy of The Depahted.

What tha faaack?

Dude, that shit is wickit retahded.

I mean, sehhhhhriously. Don't get me wrong: Mahky Mahk is faaackin' awesome. But Mahtin Sheen? What tha faaaack? Is he a faaackin Kennedy ah what?

I joke, but only a little bit. The cinetrix was educated in the suburbs of Boston, by nuns, no less, among the very progeny of the OFD crowd of Chowds this flick calls F/family. And I call faaaackin bullshit on The Depahted.

Forget that 90% of the film was actually shot on Marty's home turf, not Southie. And know that I plan on watching it again in more controlled circumstances than those that obtained tonight. I'm still sad that my second-favorite little Sicilian paisan--after my own 90-year-old, Brooklyn-born grandfather--will most likely finally get the Oscar nod for something that's just not his best work.

Ultimately, Scorsese fails to get inside these impenetrable, pig-headed Oirish people the way he did the East New York Eyetalians in Goodfellas--or even the high-brows in The End of Innocence. I had no bettah insight at the end of the film into the pseudo-Whitey Bulgers and their version of omerta than I did at the beginning--because there was no scene akin to Paul Sorvino slicing the garlic oh-so-thin, say, that truly gave the viewer a sense of who these people ahh and what they value. Just a lot of posturing and dropped "r"s and aerial shots of the red line going to Mattapan. Whatevah. Not even the brief, radiant presence of Kevin Faackin Corrigan could make up for my disappointment. The Depahted is less than pissah.

[Can someone please put the cinetrix in the way of a copy of the elusive The Friends of Eddie Coyle before she totally despairs of ever seeing her hometown properly portrayed onscreen?

And somebody needs to lend me Down to the Bone or some of Vera Farmiga's other, better work--double quick fast. I keep hearing she's the freakin' second coming, but here all I kept thinking was, "How nice that Claire Forlani's indie cousin found work. Too bad she got a shitty vocal coach."]

Lines we wish we wrote*

Hats off to the felicitous phrasing of David Edelstein:

"[M]y favorite of all time is The Lady Eve (1941), where Henry Fonda learns that Barbara Stanwyck is a skank, but she tricks him and he falls in love again." [via]

Click through for more V Day viewing suggestions from himself and Lisa Schwarzbaum.

What do you cue/queue up when the lights are low? The 'Fesser's pal Dubarry archly recommended Two for the Road, so feel free to wax as sentimental or cynical as you like in the comments.

*Concept ganked from vintage TMFTML. A nation turns its lonely eyes to you.

Le Fou

It's been one of those days, so the cinetrix is going to place you in Samuel Fuller's capable hands.

[But can she just say how much she is looking forward to watching Weekend with a bunch of unsuspecting undergrads later this week?]

Short shorts

For those times when your attention span lags, a tasting menu of short subjects:

• The Journal of Short Film just released Volume 6 (Winter 2007). Guest editor Sam Green, a noted short film maker, also made the Oscar-nominated feature documentary The Weather Underground. See the complete list of shorts here. [NB: A film that appeared in Volume 4 (Summer 2006)—Borja Cobeaga's Éramos Pocos (One Too Many)—was just nominated for Best Live Action Short Film.]
• The Movies By Women Podcast Channel launches on iTunes, YouTube, and MoviesByWomen.com on February 14. Listen to interviews with director Karen Moncrieff, whose movie The Dead Girl earned her a Best Director nomination for this year's Spirit Awards; Come Early Morning director Joey Lauren Adams and star Ashley Judd; and Air Guitar Nation director Alexandra Lipsitz.
• Tomorrow is the deadline to make your voice heard in the Film Comment Readers' Poll. Complete it online here if you like. Just know that you'll have to hurdle over a buncha of market research queries first. Lie.
• The early deadline to submit short films to Short Circuit is February 15. Works by Southern filmmakers living in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee will serve as the "opening acts" for the filmmakers touring on the 2007-2008 Southern Circuit and be seen by audiences in communities throughout the South.
• It lives! Just yesterday the cinetrix was sporting her Trio tee while stripping wallpaper paste [sexy, no?]. Today Trio poohbah Lauren Zalaznick announced the launch of getTRIO.com, a site with "the same inherent sensibilities as the TRIO television network, a place where we celebrated the high-, worshipped the low-, and always stayed far away from the middle- (brow, that is)."

Also, FOC Mark Olsen talks with Black Snake Moan composer Scott Bowmar in the NYT:

"It was like, O.K., I know two musicians who live in my town and played on some of the coolest film scores of all time. They're also two of the most sampled musicians in rap music, so it just totally made sense."

Kuleshov effect

If you looked in any introductory film text, I'm sure you'd come across an account of Lev Kuleshov's experiment with montage:

Shots of the face of a matinee idol alternated with shots of a plate of soup, a girl, a coffin. The audience believed that the expression on his face was different each time he appeared, depending on whether he was "looking at" the plate of soup, the girl, or the coffin, showing an expression of hunger, desire, or grief, respectively. Actually, the footage of him was identical, and rather expressionless, every time it appeared.

Thus, the combination, not the content, of images is what's important.

Here's how it works in real life if you're the cinetrix. This morning I read that The Butcher Boy finally makes its dvd debut on Tuesday. Huzzah. It was one of the video boy's favorite films, and one I'd missed and despaired of ever seeing. Yet it's also another thing I can't talk about with him--outside of the occasional cameos he makes in my dreams--because he's dead.

And on the facing page? Ken Tucker pens a Valentine's Day appreciation of a mutual favorite, His Girl Friday. Rob loved Rosalind Russell so much that once when he was low I gave him an "autographed" photo of her urging him to keep his chin up.

Hunger, desire, or grief. The Kuleshov effect sounds so simple once it's explained. For me, the layout landed a one-two punch. For the rest of you lucky suckers, though, I've just described pages 64-65 of the latest issue of Entertainment Weekly.

Good times for a change

The cinetrix often blames credits the oeuvre of John Hughes for landing her in Chicago long ago. So you can imagine how tickled she was to stumble across this virtual tour of the Art Institute of Chicago a la Bueller. Now you too can canoodle with your delinquent sweetie in front of Chagall's stained glass to the strains of the Smiths. Ah, adolescent angst, Eighties-stizz.

'Fess up. What movie got under your skin to such a degree that you made a pilgrimage to its real or imagined setting? It's OK--we're all friends here.