In the past month, the cinetrix has seen We Own the Night, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, and American Gangster. All three stories hinge, to some extent, on the violent collision of family ties and old-skool drugs and take place in either the not-quite-now or the way-back-when. What this means is that audiences can count on the obligatory "roomful of naked women cutting up coke" scenes [or, in the case of Dead, the gay hustler swanning around in a silk robe after helping Philip Seymour Hoffman shoot up].
These prestige pictures can get away with what would otherwise be decried as gratuitous nudity because, in addition to titties, they also feature masterful performances so deliberately "understated" that the actors' very restraint becomes distracting. The leads' subtle portrayals of "real" people announce, "Oh, we could gnaw at the scenery, people, but we're gonna go for the twitching jaw muscle instead--because we're just that good." These self-consciously nuanced turns have become so endemic of late that Gangster's final reel showdown/throwdown between Oscar winners Washington and Crowe actually comes as a relief. Russell smolders through his carapace of crappy clothes and corpulence; Denzel flashes his bright smile as he throws back his head for that signature laugh. They're both so delighted with how they've tamped down their respective star personas for more than two whole hours that the audience half expects them to make out.
That the performances in these flicks are aimed straight at Oscar should come as a surprise to no one. And then there are turns like that of Ellen Page in heavily promoted "dark horse" Juno [which I haven't seen, although I've read about it ad nauseam at this point]. Yes, it's a complete different type of acting in a wholly other kind of [Oscar-bait] flick, but I mention it mostly because someone over at the House Next Door recently referred to this season's backlash baby as a "Facebook film." It's not, of course, but the cinetrix was taken by the neologism nonetheless.
What would an actual Facebook film look like? Here's one idea. Most award-angling movies, if they deal with drugs at all [and they frequently do], are still fighting the last Just Say No war. Yes, I know, cocaine never really goes out of style, but face it: a true Facebook film would also have to be an Adderall film. Yet I suspect that any movie based on the premise that college students, no matter how nubile and horny, would take drugs to study will prove so incomprehensible and unsexy to most Hollywood types that it'll take ages for a true Facebook film to emerge.
[Now, Facebook novels, on the other hand, are probably already circulating as ARCs, given New York publishing types' alleged fondness for Adderall and the ongoing colonization of vast swaths of said social networking site by ink-stained wretches old enough to know better.]
