The Blog

Lawrence Shulruff: A Fast and Furious Look at the Oscars

2012-02-22T23:01:55Z

"Mon dieu!" as Jean Dujardin's character George Valentin might say in the film The Artist if only he could speak. What has happened to the Oscars?

At a time when watching movies has become more and more experiential with 3D glasses, enormous IMAX screen and heart-pounding surround sound systems, the Academy sings paeans to a silent movie? With French actors?

But there's more: With Hollywood executives panicking about dropping movie attendance and the inability to attract younger, hipper viewers, someone needs to ask how the Academy of Motion Pictures selected funnyman Billy Crystal to host the 84th Academy Awards given that few people under the age of 30 have heard of him. What happened? The Lollipop Guild was unavailable?

Can anyone say make-over? It is time to bring style back to the Oscars, and I'm not talking asparagus and hollandaise sauce. Spicing up the broadcast would be a quick fix -- It's time to add some new award categories. So Hollywood, take note. Take a meeting. Take some Tylenol. These recommendations could be the cure for that after-party hangover. Part II.

The Best Sequel: Am I the only one miffed that Fast Five was overlooked -- again? The franchise about street racing has everything you expect in a great movie: clutch actors, clutch plotline, clutch transmissions. (Changing topics for a second, am I also the only who thinks actor Claron Hinds looks like Clutch Cargo?) Did I mention the great chase scenes and the midriff-baring gear heads? Yet the film got blanked by the Academy. Not even an award for best cinematography, whatever that is.

Vin Diesel. Ludacris. The Rock. The film should win an Academy Award for having the actors with the coolest names.

Truth is that sequels are driving the Hollywood engine. Ten of the top 11 grossing films of 2011 were prequels or sequels. Of the past nine years, eight of the top grossing movies were sequels. It just doesn't seem kosher that year after year these cash cows are ignored during the awards season. The Academy seems to think that imitation is the sincerest form of flatulence.

Instead of snubbing this movie-making trend, why not embrace it with its own award category? This will guarantee us a chance to see the same movies we love over and over and over again. (Footnote: Fast and Furious 6 is scheduled for a 2013 release. Plot unknown. Not a big surprise given that I still can't figure out the plots for the first five.)

Best Bat Mitzvah Montage: How is it that this genre of filmmaking had gone completely unrecognized by the Academy Awards? This is especially bizarre when you consider that the production costs for the average bat mitzvah montage exceeds those for most foreign films. And there aren't any subtitles!

Let's also consider that adding such a category would attract a demographic group Hollywood has shamefully ignored over the years -- Jewish teens. In time I expect a spin-off show devoted exclusively to this segment of the industry, and, with a special soundtrack award, there's a logical tie-in with the Grammys. Imagine the scene: Rachel Glickstine's Bubbie is being nominated for best birthday scene which features her racy version of Rihanna's "S&M." The envelope is opened. The winner announced. Rachel jumps from her chair, screaming, "My grammy won a Grammy!" It's an advertiser's dream.

The Salma Hayek Award: Every year the Academy presents a lifetime achievement award to an actor who is wrinkly and grey. Why wait? Why not give the award to someone in her prime while she still looks great in evening wear? I nominate Salma Hayek. And the good news is that it would guarantee she'd be at the show. For 2013 I nominate Penelope Cruz.

Thinking ahead it's not too early to start thinking about next year's host. I'm pushing for Vin Diesel. He's cool. He's hip. He'd look great in a tux, assuming there is one that would fit. All in all, it would be a clutch move.

Dr. Harold Koplewicz: Extremely Loud and the Incredible Courage of Parents

2012-02-22T21:23:52Z

"Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" isn't exactly a favorite to win the Academy Award for Best Picture, but it's my personal favorite for a film that shows not only the courage of children but the courage of parents.

In the movie, based on the Jonathan Safran Foer novel, an 11-year-old boy struggles to come to terms with his father's death on 9/11 by constructing an elaborate quest to find the lock that matches an unmarked key found in his father's closet. It's a childish, magical fantasy -- that there will be a message from father to son in whatever safe deposit or lock box it fits. But he pursues it with the ingenious, literal-minded persistence of a very bright child with Asperger's, which the boy, Oskar, appears to have. Like any good quest, it involves traveling far and wide (all over the five boroughs of New York), meeting many characters, and learning from them. But Oskar also has overwhelming fears not unusual in kids on the spectrum; he's terrified of subways and bridges. The sight of him shaking his tambourine to quiet his fears as marches in what he calls "heavy boots" across the Manhattan Bridge will be moving to anyone who knows kids who are afflicted with intense anxiety.

But the thing in "Extremely Loud" that moved me even more than Oskar's nervous pluck was the portrayal of his parents -- their patient and equally ingenious efforts to understand Oskar's complexities and nurture his talents.

Oskar is not an easy child. In a scene that will be familiar to many parents -- whether your kids are on or off the spectrum -- we see Oskar's father, played by a Tom Hanks, trying unsuccessfully to coax Oskar onto the swings at a playground in Central Park by invoking his own boyhood pleasure in it. In that moment he's every parent who's felt the frustration of having a child who just can't do an ordinary thing all the other kids do, or just doesn't share his parents talents or passions.

But Hanks, and the filmmaker, play the scene marvelously: only a tug at the swing as he takes the boy home betrays the father's disappointment. And we are grateful, because Oskar is nearly as afraid of disappointing his father as he is of getting on that swing.

Hanks, who seems wonderfully tuned in to Oskar's strengths and wonderfully non-judgmental about his weaknesses, devises elaborate scavenger hunts to help his son navigate the city and get better at speaking to strangers. For his mother, getting on Oskar's wavelength seems tougher, and her parallel journey is a good deal of what the movie becomes about. She surprises Oskar, and herself, when she says, "You thought only your father could think like you."

But before we see them coming together there's an exchange that's both painful and wonderful in its honesty. In anger and frustration and loneliness, Oskar blurts out, "I wish it was you." That is, that she had been in the World Trade Center that day and not his father. She says simply, "Me, too." Later, feeling badly about hurting her feelings, he says, "I don't mean that." She says, in an awesomely comforting voice, giving him permission to have his feelings, "Yes, you do. "

A lot of critics disliked this film, called Oskar "obnoxious" or other words to that effect, and complained that they were being manipulated into "feeling sorry" for him. I think this is a misreading of the film: we're not being asked to feel sorry for Oskar or his mother and father. We're seeing the world, and the process of figuring out how to live after terrible loss, through their eyes. What I saw was love and courage and great creativity in the face of adversity -- something to admire, not something to feel sorry about.

Harold S. Koplewicz, M.D., is a leading child and adolescent psychiatrist and the president of the Child Mind Institute. For more about parenting kids with special needs and the courage of children, go to childmind.org, which also offers a wealth of information on childhood psychiatric and learning disorders.

Xaque Gruber: 25 Years After Anna, Sally Kirkland Reflects on the Oscar Race for Best Actress

2012-02-22T20:25:29Z

This year's Academy Awards reunites Meryl Streep (The Iron Lady) with Glenn Close (Albert Nobbs) for the third time in the Best Performance By An Actress in a Leading Role category. The first time they faced off for Oscar was 1988. The prize went to Cher in Moonstruck, but the Golden Globes earlier that year bypassed the superstars (Streep, Close, Barbra Streisand, Faye Dunaway) to honor a lesser known independent film veteran, Sally Kirkland, with Best Drama Actress for Anna. In Kirkland, a star was born -- in her forties. Kirkland's Anna, a faded Czech star stumbling into Manhattan striving for a new beginning, is just as stunning 25 years later.

Appropriately, she also collected one of the first Lead Actress Independent Spirit Awards for the role the L.A. Times called "one of the five best performances by an actress in the 1980s."

Without the machinery of big studio dollars, expensive publicists, or even tapes being sent out to voters (not allowed by the Academy at that time), Kirkland's award show glory was the result of her own tireless campaign launch. With very little capital, Kirkland and friends spread the word, grassroots-style, to garner attention for the little seen indie.

Sally Kirkland Career Film Clips:

Sally Kirkland Sizzle Video from Jill Jucarone on Vimeo.

XG: How did the Anna campaign begin?

SK: When I first read the script by Agnieszka Holland, I thought whoever plays this role has a shot at the Oscar. It was just intuition. In the earlier days when we didn't have any publicity, I called friends including Andy Warhol (Kirkland's first director in 1964's 13 Most Beautiful Women) who put me on his TV show. Joan Rivers did too. At Cannes, I ran into Rex Reed in an elevator and begged him to see it. e did, and he lent me this quote "Sally Kirkland devours Anna like a raw steak and emerges a major star." Then Norman Mailer gave me a quote. We had pooled enough money for a black and white ad trade campaign. Dale Olson, Shirley MacLaine's publicist, encouraged me to go for the L.A. Film Critics Awards. So I wrote them all letters, and said this is a tiny little film but I hope you'll see it, and I ended up tying with Holly Hunter (Broadcast News) for that. Then we screened it for the Hollywood Foreign Press and their response was extraordinary. At the Oscars, there were all these movie stars emerging from their limos, and then there was me. I felt like Cinderella. The greatest part was the feeling to be in the same Oscar category of these women that I was a huge fan of -- Meryl, Glenn, Holly Hunter and Cher, who I used to rollerskate with in the '70s.

ABC Commercial for the 1988 Oscars Best Actress race:

XG: How did actors' respond to your homemade Oscar campaign?

SK: Gena Rowlands said, "I voted for you, Sally, but I have to confess something, I never saw the film, but I wanted you to win so much because of that campaign."

XG: As an Academy voter, give me your thoughts on this year's Best Actress category. Let's start with Rooney Mara in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.

SK: Her physical strength, scene after scene, getting beaten up, the nudity -- very courageous. Meryl Streep in The Iron Lady in a word -- magnificent. In the first five minutes, you see this old woman shopping for groceries. I whispered to the person next to me, "Who is that?" I'm pretty good at knowing actors, and I quite literally had no idea it was Meryl.

XG: Michelle Williams in My Week With Marilyn.

SK: It's not easy to take that on much less capture the essence of this icon. I couldn't believe it was Michelle Williams, this little tiny flower of a woman -- she was wonderful -- vulnerable. And Glenn Close was outstanding. She did Albert Nobbs so well on Broadway and it was a real tribute to her abilities becoming that gentle but strong, androgynous being. Very touching.

XG: Viola Davis in The Help.

SK: She moved me to tears. I had a black nurse growing up, Louise, who taught me about God, and everything. I was closer to her than anyone. To see Viola play this character that, to me, was Louise, was heart breaking. This is one of the strongest years ever for the Best Actress category.

XG: Do you think your 1987 grassroots Oscar campaign could happen in today's world?

SK: Yes, my friend Melissa Leo from Frozen River is a testament to that. If you're in independent films, and worked hard for years, and you don't happen to be part of the mega-billion dollar system, and you've got the chutzpah to stand up and say this is who I am, it takes all the humanity out of Hollywood not to appreciate that.

Sally Kirkland & Polina Porizkova in Anna:

Liz Kozak: A Mom's Oscar Cheat Sheet

2012-02-22T20:02:10Z

When I was pregnant, the single best, most specific piece of advice I received was this:

"Go to the movies a lot now, because once you have a baby, paying a babysitter when you can rent the same thing at home in a few months isn't worth it."

I wish I'd listened.

I wish I could call up every single person who told me, "Sleep while you can!" and inform them that their advice was terrible.

I wish I had used all that nap time to go to the movies, because I miss it a whole lot.

Now the Oscars are almost here, and if you also have a new baby, then you most likely haven't seen any or most of the nominated films, either. Allow me to do my best to break down the Best Picture contenders for you... to the best of my limited ability.

War Horse:
Steven Spielberg made it, right? It must be epic/heartwarming/tragic/expensive. I am wary of horse movies and of horse folk. I really hope that my daughter isn't one of those horse-riding gals like Lindsay on The Bachelor. Now THAT'S something I DO watch!

Hugo:
What kind of a person would leave their kid at home to go see a kids' movie?

The Artist:
The first movie I tell people I would absolutely go see if I could!!! Actually, that's a lie. I did go to the movies once since the baby was born, and I chose The Muppets. So I guess I answered my own question.

Midnight in Paris:
On-Demanded at the highest recommendation of my father-in-law. So charming! So quirky! Actually, all I remember was that Rachel McAdams rocked a lot of shirtdresses, and then I fell asleep. There are now four shirtdresses in my madewell.com shopping cart that I will never buy.

Moneyball:
We rented this one too, and it lost me in the first 10 minutes. There was way more math than in Angels in the Outfield. It does have Brad Pitt, but something happened between Kalifornia and last week. Have you realized he's almost 50? How old does that make you feel? Old enough to be someone's mother! And the kid from Superbad will now instead be referred to forever as "The Oscar nominated kid from Superbad."

Tree of Life:
I do know it also has Brad Pitt. Perhaps with a crew cut. I do not know what it's about. But I bet it would make me cry.

The Help:
Here we go! We're all familiar with this one! If you're reading this column, there is a 70 percent chance that you're in a book club, and if so, there is an 98 percent chance that The Help was one of the books you read. This one was actually designed in a science lab to punch vulnerable moms in the solar plexus. I'm going to search Etsy for a cross stitch that says, "You is smart. You is kind. You is important." to hang in the nursery.

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close:
I don't personally know one single person who's seen this, which makes it my cinematic equivalent of Rizzoli & Isles.

The Descendants:
I heard it's funny, but it's super sad. I guess this movie should be called "The Full Length Mirror in My Hallway," because that's what I feel when I gaze upon myself these days. Who would want to put themselves through that for two sustained hours? Someone who wants to eat Milk Duds in the dark, that's who.

Happy Oscar Weekend!
What films are you rooting for?

Quora: What Do Directors Think When People Make a Torrent for Their Movie?

2012-02-22T18:27:00Z

This question originally appeared on Quora.

Heather Ferreira, film director, 90s H'wood combat vet

As someone directing a feature right now, but who has been forced at certain times to consider downloading music otherwise made distinctly unavailable by the startlingly small cabal of corporations who now own all media in the US, and who dislikes monopolies, I agree with Quora respondent Mr. Lipkowitz. But my feelings are not mixed.

Things are getting better, but I've never been rich. I understood for years what it feels like not to have enough cash in pocket to purchase a listen or a view. I also know what it feels like to contact media companies, beg them to make now-forgotten artist or soundtrack XYZ available for purchase so I and others could spend our money on it, and then be met with either bemused surprise "that we even owned that property" or a stonewalling, bewildering "f--k off." The MPAA and RIAA tell audiences large media companies invite purchases of the movies and songs both organizations claim they are "protecting", and that finding whatever audiences want to buy is easy for the audience. That's not true in all cases.

For instance, I chased a certain 1980s science-fiction movie soundtrack the right way for more than a decade, tracking down and phoning all who had rights to the recording, and begged them all to sell a copy to me. I offered hundreds of dollars for the recording. It originally retailed on vinyl for less than $15.99.

After being ignored for years, talked to rudely by record label and motion picture score licensing executives and their assistants, told "I didn't know we owned that recording..." and directed in circles leading absolutely nowhere, at the end I found a dedicated aficionado who blogs about rare movie soundtracks because they are the passion of his life, and who can tell you every Prokofiev composition John Williams has, er, homaged, because movie music is his life's passion, whose blog serves as a public resource to inform audiences of great movie soundtracks the large corporations are not making them aware of, and to make them available to those who want to learn about and love them -- and the gentleman sent me a copy of my desired soundtrack, which he had, free.

Is what I did wrong? Or is what he did?

After fruitless years of searching and begging the rights owners "the right way"?

Here's how it affects me, directing: If my next film fails to be mediocre enough to satisfy the taste of those delicate little former intern studio execs who sip lattes, name their babies "Brooklyn" and "Max," and take spinning classes at Crunch, and because it is violent it is not made available to mass audiences; and if those audiences however loved it at the tiny festival that ran it; and then can't find a DVD of it because I was too stupid or lazy to make it available -- and then, in frustration at me and the studios they find and download a torrent of it, and love it all over again, does that make those audiences "criminals"?

Come now, folks; come on.

We're all familiar with recent attempts by former Senator Chris Dodd, lobbyists for his Motion Picture Association of America and for the Recording Industry Association of America, and certain not at all well-meaning congressmen, to enact and get passed two terrible ideas, SOPA and PIPA. We've been told these two bills are harmless to the internet, and that their lamblike only intent is to stop piracy, because the movie and music industries are desperately losing blood, and only the MPAA and RIAA exist to heroically save them.

Here's my problem with that.

I am directing a movie. I've written a B movie that got made by an actual studio.
(Cue pimp voice.) "Chris Dodd, where my money at?"

The MPAA has six major studios, such as Warner, Disney and others, listed as "members" of it. But a little research reveals the MPAA started as the MPPDA, or the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America. MGM and two other studios formed the group in 1922. They chose a former Presbyterian minister, Will Hays, as their chairman. Unlike Chris Dodd, who's no prize, Hays was a Republican: in fact for three years he was Republican National Committee chairman. This guy became the head of the MPAA with their blessing. (Indie producers at the time disliked him and the MPAA, and sued them, calling them a "trust" -- which now, like then, they still are.) Hays enacted what we call the Hays Code, which drafted draconian rules censoring what movie directors like me, and some of you out there reading this, could show or say in a movie.

One of the rules the MPAA gave us was we could never show homosexuality in a picture. They called it "the sex perversion." (Google and Wikipedia this for extra credit.)

Another thing our friends the MPAA told us we could not depict were interracial relationships. Their term for this was "miscegenation."

(Visit www.mpaa.org/about/history for a great belly laugh at how frantically today's MPAA tries to spin this era in their history.)

Thus what I see when I examine the MPAA is not a friendly guardian of feature film directors' rights, even at the studio level. Instead, I see a very large lobby that began as a Christian right-wing organization instituted to keep minorities off motion picture screens, promote racism and homophobia, and restrict creative freedom in America. That's how the MPAA began.

Now they are curiously interested in the internet.

This is the moment we would instruct the score composer beside us in the editing room to cue an ominous minor key double whole-note on the contrabasses and cellos.

The Motion Picture Association of America has never written me a paycheck for anything. They're not backing my picture. These are not nice guys. They are not in this business to help filmmakers at all.

They're censors waiting to pounce my film and yours with an NC-17 rating for violence or for showing two consenting adults laughing while enjoying sex (rape, however, is okay), while curiously no one censors the news media for showing my toddler second cousin Josh Powell's house burning down on daytime television with two toddlers just like her inside it, or informing me over breakfast that some Canadian guy sliced off a fellow Greyhound bus passenger's head and began to eat him while other passengers screamed, or showing eight-year-olds Paris Hilton's latest upskirt with very little pixelated out.

Isn't that pauseworthy? If there's no censors for the news, why for dramatic movies and television?

Anyway, I owe the MPAA nothing. They're not my or any other feature director's friends. They are a censoring organization not entirely dissimilar from The Parents Music Resource Center.

Cut, back to one.

Many musicians and singer-songwriters I know here in New York, and knew in Los Angeles, who never received a paycheck from the RIAA, feel the same. Where are the class action lawsuit award paychecks for these musicians from RIAA v. Jammie Thomas-Rasset? If either the MPAA or RIAA made actual financial support efforts towards filmmakers and musicians, e.g. the MPAA earmarking 10-30% of all anti-piracy legal victory awards towards funding independent filmmakers and their projects, or the RIAA making regular and substantial donations from their anti-piracy legal victories to musician-support foundations such as the JFA, or pointing portions of those awards towards funding music education in schools, then I might understand their philosophy. But the fact stands the MPAA and RIAA benefit nobody except their overhead and their attorneys.

There is profit in crusading. That's why there are so many charities. Do you really think Komen gave a real damn about saving women? As someone who has given to charities -- and I am sure you have too -- haven't you at times wondered why we still haven't found that cure, or gotten those children fed, after all this time and exhaustive money, really?

It might be because if these things ever did get truly done, the money to their charities would switch off. Think about it.

Crusading against others "fur die Kinder" has always been profitable. The MPAA and RIAA are using the same gimmick to line their pockets. "It's for the artists!" they claim. That's a very interesting claim.

Not one member of my industry I know has ever received dime one from them. They use us as hostages to strengthen their lobbies, as human shields to promote their fundraising campaigns (aka court cases), and alienate the audience against us with hysterical, hyperbolic legal jihads designed to make them and their professional paid lobbyists richer, but directors, musicians, songwriters, audiences, and American culture all the poorer.

And then they censor us.

What the MAFIAA fails to realize is p2p is not a black and white issue of "piracy is wrong; all of it; and if you didn't pay us, you're a criminal."

Lots of good people have been trying to pay to see lots of good films and hear lots of good music. But when those who moved aggressively to buy "ownership" of film and music are making aggressive efforts clearly designed to suppress public awareness of and access to quality entertainment and instead push, promote and force audiences to the mostly substandard media of this present era, and making few or no efforts to meet audience demand for the "good stuff," what is an audience to do?

If you want audiences to like your product, so make good, original new product, make it affordable in this economy, and turn the volume down on those movie trailers. Seems simple enough to me.

Mr. Lipkowitz is further correct when he says, "On the neutral side, unless the director has equity participation in the film, piracy does not directly impact their paycheck. Their fee is contractual." That's absolutely spot-on.

Piracy does not affect me at all, which is why, for example, Penelope Spheeris' stumble head-first into a hornet's-nest of online infamy and ridicule by openly criticizing something that does not affect her filmmaking future continues to confuse me and make me feel sorry for her. Spheeris apparently wanted notoriety, and believe me, she got it. I disagree with her and am fine with people downloading my films. People have downloaded mpegs of television material I've directed. They later came back and bought DVDs of it because they prefer DVD quality and that "hands to the touch" feeling of actual ownership. Most people do, and the MPAA pretends this isn't true and they don't understand this. If they like it well enough, they'll contact me for the real thing.

Lipkowitz continues, "On the negative side, piracy causes investors and distributors to reduce their revenue projections for future films. This will result in fewer films getting made and reduced budgets for those that do. Fewer films means fewer jobs for all creative and crew. Reduced budgets (among other things) can result in lower fees for key creative." I would amend his otherwise spot-on commentary so that the final sentence reads instead,

"Reduced budgets (among other things) can result in lower fees for key UNION creative."

For independent non-shop filmmakers and key crew, reduced budgets should not impact production quality or quality of life reflected in salaries. What reduced studio budgets adversely impact are studio features made that cost $150MM, the standard A-list movie budget today. One significant reason for these obscene prices is union pressure.

When a picture becomes shop (union), you should multiply your budget by at least three, because in the case of directors, which you asked about, a union director is DGA. All DGA pictures must be "maintenanced": this means only union crew members can work on it. This is when you begin seeing crew end credits such as "assistant standby," and your location fills with people who will not even be moving things or working, but instead standing joking and chewing gum and eating craft services while not actually doing anything, and your budget must pay them all union wages, health and pension. That's bad for the unions and bad for us. It's insulting to unions.

At its worst, the set then becomes an exclusive little "club" of 1 percenters who readily claim they are 99 percenters off set, with a knowing wink to each other, and erect 2-story rubber rats to terrorize films and companies who won't lie down for the beatdown as commanded.

Unions are ripping moviemakers and studios off: not as individuals, mind you, because true union men and women work hard at their craft; but there are many freeloaders who get union cards because of luck or connections, and won't do a damned thing on set, but get paid for it -- and owing to the power of numbers and the threat of what together those numbers can do -- called by one side terrorism and by the other solidarity -- you can't escape being maintenanced, and the moment your film is, its budget inflates to seven, eight or nine figures.

As the individual workers themselves, unions are just awesome and that is all. As collective organizations, they are as nuanced and corrupt as the studios they despise, and absolutely 100 percent as greedy, and possibly more.

Bear in mind also that most A-list celebrities are members of Screen Actors Guild. Their top actors are also members of the 1 percent and make more in 45 days than any teachers in America will make their entire lifetime, and more than the GNP of many small developed countries.

They make $25MM+ per picture because their union, the Screen Actors Guild, is well-financed and extremely corrupt, and what SAG wants, SAG gets. They have rigged the industry so you virtually cannot make an A-list picture without kissing the ring of the capodecina and depositing a third of your little laundromat's income to their Mafia. Lowered movie budgets automatically point a bright Maglite of purity upon this dark, swirling cesspool of corruption.

I welcome reduced budgets for motion pictures. Lower budgets increase the creativity on location. More camaraderie often develops. Stories get smarter; tighter; better. The fat gets trimmed and we're brought down to the lean, the true grit of the story. That's what filmmaking's for. If torrent piracy causes this by forcing budgets to come down and fewer films to be made, then so be it.

If in retrospect we find that piracy is what it took to do that, it was long overdue, the industry was bloated and ill and frankly needed it, and then maybe tough love was the answer and it was worth it to save the movie industry and force a return in it to ingenuity, hard work and creativity.

So this rather long answer, at least from this movie director, is that my response to those who download a torrent of my current film is meh, with an addendum of:

"Thanks. I hope you enjoyed it."
"Please make the effort to track down my studio and contact me. Give me notes on what you liked or didn't about the film, so I can do even better."
"If you really liked it, please consider buying the DVD of it in the future, when your finances permit that you can. I promise to include cool easter eggs and other goodies you couldn't download, and make it worth it."
"Then, because of your support, I can make more of it."

That's all, really. Any further commentary to them would be shrugworthy. They're a potential paying future audience member. The technology has changed. The playing field is different now. We need to adapt to it, not it to us. The above is my adaptation. Thanks for asking me this fascinating question!

More questions on movie-directing:

What are some movies about making/directing movies??

Why would an established writer/director spend energy on a short film instead of developing a feature?

What are some good movie pairings and why?

Mike Ryan: How To Fix The 'John Carter' Marketing Campaign

2012-02-22T17:54:29Z

Disney's John Carter gets released in 16 days. If tracking numbers are to believed, John Carter may be in some serious trouble at the box office. Much of that trouble can be blamed on the bad marketing campaign. As you've probably heard before, hindsight does not require corrective lenses or Lasik surgery, or whatever, but, while sixteen days isn't a ton of time, it just may be enough to salvage opening weekend.

Two points that I should make: (A) Yes, I've seen John Carter, but this piece is not a breakdown of the merits of the film itself (we'll save that for another day) and (B) I do not possess a marketing degree. So, if your response is going to be, "Well, what do you know about marketing?" my answer will be, "Other than getting a B- in Marketing 101 at a Big 12 state school, not a lot." But I do have a general sense of the vibe of what a potential moviegoer is looking for. Based on that, if I were put in charge, here's what I would do. Immediately.

(I'm prefacing all of this with, "If humanly possible with the short amount of time remaining.")

1.) It's too late to change the title back to John Carter of Mars, but in the television spots from here on out, just call it that anyway. Honestly, if I went outside the office and polled 100 people walking down Broadway here in New York City -- well, at least the people who didn't spit on me -- I'd bet good money that a greater number of people are still slightly more familiar with Noah Wyle's John Carter (which he played for 11 seasons on one of the most popular television shows in the country at that time, ER) than they are Taylor Kitsch's John Carter. Most of the movie takes place on Mars -- let people know that.

2.) But, not all of the movie takes place on Mars. The film starts with a pretty interesting sequence about John Carter's military service in the Confederate States of America during the Civil War. Yes, John Carter fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War. I guess Disney doesn't want to promote that its hero fought for the army that was trying to defend, ahem, "states' rights," but, it is interesting, it is gritty, and it brings a deeper level to the background of the character than what most people would expect from the CGI heavy scenes they've seen in the trailers. Plus, these scenes involve the always-great Bryan Cranston as a Union officer. Plaster clips from these scenes during the commercial breaks of Survivor.

3.) That fan made trailer: pay the guy who made this a few thousand dollars for editing Disney's footage together better than Disney did and get it out there. Everywhere.

Good grief, that second John Carter trailer released in November is terrible. I wonder what it was like in the Disney marketing offices on the day that this trailer came out. "So, I have good news and bad news. The good news: people are comparing the new trailer to Star Wars! The bad news: it's Attack of the Clones."

I guess I understand the impulse to show a big battle scene, but, really, these work best when there's a buildup of some kind. To just declare, "behold!," is really no different than walking in on someone playing a video game. The first trailer that debuted way back in July, which alluded, partially, to some of John Carter's back story, is the much better trailer.

4.) This movie needs one last focused media blitz -- and I'm sure that's coming -- but, as alluded to earlier, in the right way with a different strategy. Last week, Disney hosted a three-day John Carter junket in Arizona. If I'm in the Disney marketing department, I guess I'm thinking, Well, if we get all of these journalists in one secluded place for three days, maybe we can influence them into giving us good coverage. This doesn't work for two reasons: (A) It's a lot harder than you think to influence journalists who care about their credibility and (B) even if you do somehow get wall-to-wall positive coverage, this guarantees absolutely nothing. Hey, ask Universal how that all worked out with Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, a film that was universally loved coming out of Comic-Con, but also suffered from poor marketing. As we know, it tanked in its initial release.

5.) Focus on the characters. Look, there are a lot of characters in John Carter. Not that Transformers: Dark of the Moon needed much help, but I did like how they plastered New York City with banners focusing on individual characters. Before I saw the movie, I had a sense of who these people/robots were. And in an action movie that doesn't spend a lot of time explaining itself, it does help. I mean, look at the poster for John Carter, they might as well call the movie Attack of the Shirtless Shadow Man.

Actually, to be honest, I may be more apt to see a movie called Attack of the Shirtless Shadow Man than I would of a movie that's just someone's fairly common name. Taylor Kitsch is a good-looking guy and, as stated, he doesn't wear a shirt for most of the movie. I dunno: promote him! Also: Mark Strong plays a huge role in this movie. Mark Strong is a scary looking guy -- get his image out there, too! Having said that...

6.) Own the fact that the movie is complicated. (And it is complicated.) Maybe start adding voiceovers that ask, "Can you solve the mystery of ... John Carter of Mars?" Or downright challenge people, "Are you brave enough to enter the complex world of ... John Carter of Mars?" Because, when all you know about a film is the big CGI arena battle that you saw in a trailer, it doesn't relay a sense of, "This movie looks complicated, I should pay attention." But, it is: characters come and go with surprisingly little exposition. For better or worse: the film takes you into this world and expects you to be able to keep up. And since that's the case, well, you might as well own it, son.

Mike Ryan is the senior writer for Moviefone. He has written for Wired Magazine, VanityFair.com, GQ.com, New York Magazine and Movieline. He likes Star Wars a lot. You can contact Mike Ryan directly on Twitter

Nico Lang: One for the Controversy: What the Failure of Katherine Heigl's Career Says About Women in Hollywood

2012-02-22T16:09:28Z

Hollywood is not a nice place for actresses, something even a passing glimpse into the career trajectories of Thora Birch, Jessica Alba or Janeane Garofalo will indicate. If you're a woman in Tinseltown, the industry is not a space that's run by you or for you -- and any success you have is seen as ancillary, a tie-over to summer tentpole season. When a movie you're in does well, like Oscar nominees The Help or Bridesmaids, people won't stop talking about what a huge surprise it was, and if your movie tanks, studio heads will threaten not to cast women as leads anymore. Unless you are Meryl Streep, Judi Dench or Helen Mirren -- women known more for being "thespians" than "entertainers" -- this treatment intensifies as you get older. Even one time box-office darlings Julia Roberts and Reese Witherspoon can't open a movie these days; Witherspoon's new film, This Means War, counts her third disappointment in a row, and Roberts' highest-grossing recent film as a lead, Eat Pray Love, failed to come even close to the $100 million success mark -- starkly underperforming especially when considering its star power and mega best-selling source material.

However, some actresses and performers are their own worst enemies, women who use their fame and success to do almost everything in their power to derail their own careers. The best examples of this are Whitney Houston, Lindsay Lohan and Sean Young -- known more for their unreliability, tabloid dramas, drug problems and outlandish public appearances than their talent. Although many of their problems can be blamed on their fraught personal histories, Young and Lohan must, at the end of the day, blame themselves for the mess they made of their enormous potential. With Houston, little more can be said about the incredible tragedy that became her career, a woman who built her acting and singing careers on empowering women of all colors and became a harrowing cautionary tale on the perils of fame and fortune.

This brings us to Katherine Heigl, a woman who went from being the great white hope of women at the box office to not being able to outgross $50 million or even make back her budget. Much has been said, including by me, about how Heigl herself has created the fiasco that has become her career -- her alleged difficult behavior on set, her unpopular public statements about the projects she's involved in, her perceived irritability -- but this has more to do with media gender bias than Heigl herself. For instance, Daniel Craig and Matt Damon have recently taken to making increasingly brash public statements about projects they've worked on, their personal politics and views on modern society -- and no one has criticized them, questioned their box-office viability or used their gender to explain their remarks. Like Sean Penn, they're men in an industry dominated by men -- and unless they're saying something overtly racist, they can say just about whatever they like, and in the case of Charlie Sheen, they might even be applauded for it.

In fact, I would argue that the male-dominated public backlash about Katherine Heigl's statements on Knocked Up -- in which she called the film "a little sexist" -- proved her own point on the film's sexism. I like most of Judd Apatow's films, but I don't think even Apatow would call himself a writer who understands women -- as the women in films like Knocked Up are generally mothering figures or unsympathetic -- brittle, shallow or unstable. If women are seen as being "cool," it's because they're like "one of the guys." In Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Funny People, which were, respectively, produced and directed by Apatow, it's the laid-back, dude-like qualities of the female leads, Mila Kunis and Aubrey Plaza, that attract their male counterparts. When he does create sympathetic women, it's because he's leaving the writing of women up to women, as in the case of Bridesmaids, or because he's writing for a man -- but with boobs.

Although I think that Hollywood needs more tomboys in film -- more women who subvert the gender binary -- that doesn't make what Apatow is specifically doing much better, as his films don't exactly problematize traditional gender roles, nor does it make Heigl wrong for criticizing it.

However, the problem with Heigl herself is that she's good at talking the talk -- speaking out about the inherent sexism in the movie industry -- but terrible stepping out and doing anything about it, and she seems almost willfully against challenging the norms of gender in cinema that she criticizes. In an interview conducted shortly after Knocked Up made her a star, Heigl criticized the fact that every up-and-coming actress is touted to be the "next Julia Roberts" but mentioned, "There's not another woman I look at and think, 'That's it. That's whose career I want to have.'" Similar statements on the subject and her subsequent career choices show Heigl doesn't care about awards; she wants to be a rom-com queen, a genre not exactly known for empowering women. However, what Heigl doesn't get is that rom-com stars like Roberts got to their A-list positions by taking chances within those genres and pushing the boundaries of what women are allowed to be. Although Pretty Woman wasn't doing much for equality, Julia Roberts' best vehicles, My Best Friend's Wedding and Erin Brockovich, show the lead achieving happiness by not ending up with the guy. Roberts finds herself through her career, getting involved with her community, helping others and becoming a better friend to those around her. She does not need to find a man or become more male to be powerful, and in Erin Brockovich, her femininity is the source of her strength.

In the case of Heigl, it's her less-than-progressive scripts that present the problem -- ones that, as a producer, she has a strong hand in picking for herself. Her best post-Grey's Anatomy film, 27 Dresses, was penned by The Devil Wears Prada scribe Aline Brosh McKenna and revels in the exact kind of light-hearted fun that Heigl should be having. 27 Dresses doesn't push boundaries, but it's a great role to showcase her talents, allowing her to be the magnetic mixture of sassy and sweet that made her Grey's character so likeable and relatable; however, vehicles like The Ugly Truth, Killers, New Years' Eve, and One for the Money don't portray her as spunky and fun; they make her, well, ugly.

All of these films have been some of the bigger critical and commercial flops of their respective years, movies that almost everyone stayed away from. Although each is each horrendous in its own special way, One for the Money and The Ugly Truth, in particular, share an interesting vision of a woman's place in the world and means of achieving happiness, an image that -- as someone who cares about sexism in cinema -- Heigl should be trying to subvert. In The Ugly Truth, Heigl's character is a TV morning show producer forced to work, against her will, with a cynical, narcissistic chauvinist, played by Gerard Butler, one that the script calls for her to fall in love with. He's a relationship counselor with unorthodox recommendations, advice that Heigl uses to help her court a man she's interested in. Throughout a makeover process that alters her into a hyper-sexualized fembot, Butler mostly insults and degrades her, telling her that her identity is not what a man wants in a woman and not what her date will desire, and during her date, Butler tells her what to do through a receiver implanted in her ear. Thus, she is not only transformed by the male gaze; she is controlled by it and, eventually, falls in love with it.

Interestingly, what this does is actually uphold the Apatowian view of the world, of women achieving happiness by embracing masculinity, and promotes the very sexism that Heigl made her image in speaking out against. Her newest film, One for the Money, shows her doing more of the exact same thing. Her character -- the luckless, loud-mouthed Stephanie Plum -- finds herself out of her lingerie store job and weasels her way into being a bounty hunter for a bail bond agency. Because her background is in work that is stereotypically female, Plum is initially pathologically unfit for the job; however, she improves in her work by letting her male co-workers show her the ropes, teach her to fire a gun and help her chase down bad guys. As the other women in the film are nagging housewives, airhead secretaries or uncouth prostitutes, the film shows that Plum's femininity is not what empowers her, as femininity is undesirable. Only by embracing hegemonic masculinity can she become whole, and at the end, she winds up with a near-carbon copy of the Gerard Butler's Ugly Truth character.

What's equally interesting about the movie is not how bad it is or how bad Heigl is in it, but how poorly it's doing in the theatres and why. At the end of it's run, One for the Money, based off the popularly beloved Janet Evanovich series and intended to be a franchise for Heigl, will finish with around $25 million in theatres, a sum not much more than the hefty $15 million she earned for the film, one far lower than any of her other major releases. Although the law of diminishing returns affects many name actresses in Hollywood, this one is a more pointed specific backlash against Heigl, her public persona and what her films say about women. As a producer on her own films, Heigl has a great deal of input about what films she makes and what they do for women in Hollywood. Heigl is a terrific actress, when given a role worthy of her and a director who knows how to use her talents. It would be a shame to see her become as "washed up" as industry analysts project her to be, used up and discarded in the way that far too many actresses are, because the ladies of Hollywood and America deserve better. Women, LGBT persons and people of color deserve representation that better speaks to the diversity of their identities, to enjoy a cinema that challenges the limiting ways in which women and minorities are constructed, and in Heigl's case, that change needs to start with her. As an executive, she has the ability to affect change; all she has to do is put her money where her mouth is.

Kevin Sessums: Happy Birthday, Sidney Poitier!

2012-02-22T15:54:40Z

Sidney Poitier turned 85 this past Monday. For those of you who have read my memoir Mississippi Sissy you know he becomes a kind of motif in it, his very name the incantation that our family's maid would say to herself whenever she heard the n-word in her presence, a word she even heard from me the morning after Poitier won the Oscar. He was the first African American to win the award for Best Actor and I asked Matty May, as she was making my bed the next morning before I went to second grade, if she could "believe a n----r won Best Actor." It was a pivotal moment in my life and it is a pivotal scene in the book -- as is my seeing Matty May a few years later as we both picked cotton on my uncle's farm and I overheard her quietly saying his name, "PoitierPoitierPoitier," over and over to calm herself with each boll that she reached for and belligerently wrenched forth to put into her sack.

Indeed, when Oprah Winfrey called me one Sunday to talk about Mississippi Sissy after having read it she told me that she was seeing Mr. Poitier that coming Thursday and was going to take the book with her and read to him the passages she had marked, especially the post-Oscar and cotton field ones. The thought of Oprah reading to Mr. Poitier my words moved me beyond measure -- not just for me, but for sweet dear brave proud Matty May, who changed my life by being a part of it.

I've linked to Mr. Poitier's 1963 Oscar win here in celebration of it as well as the upcoming Oscar ceremony this Sunday. I also recall an Oscar weekend a few years ago when I was out in LA to attend the Vanity Fair Oscar party and a friend's Friday night star-filled shindig at his home and the Saturday afternoon picnic that two other friends gave at their home that was the epitome of low-key easy glamour, many stars lolling about on rugs having been strewn about their Beverly Hills lawn and others sitting at picnic tables. I've seen Oprah a few times at those same parties in the past and at that picnic. When she told me she was going to read to Mr. Poitier from my book I told her about that one picnic afternoon when I spotted him sitting at one of the picnic tables. I gathered up my courage and went and knelt at his side and began to tell him about Matty May and my book and how much he had meant to her. In the middle of my telling him all this, Penny Marshall came up to say hello to him and I rose to leave them but he grabbed my hand and asked me to stay. Penny said her helloes and went to sit with some other friends at a neighboring table.

I continued to kneel by Mr. Poitier's side and he continued to hold my hand. "Please finish telling me all about Matty May," he said softly, her name now coming from him as his had so often come from hers. In that moment I not only felt Matty's presence in my life once more but I felt God's. It truly was a moment of grace to have arrived at that moment from that earlier moment back in Mississippi when as a little southern boy I had broken Matty May's heart with my use of the n-word to describe this dignified man who now held my hand and before whom I was kneeling.

I can still hear her old soft throaty voice now whispering to me even as I type this birthday wish to one of our country's greatest actors: "... PoitierPoitierPoitier... " And I can hear him, too, whisper her name: "... Matty May..."

Check out Kevin's book, Mississippi Sissy, over at Amazon.

Erika Christakis: What Do Women Want: The Cinematic Wasteland of Female Fantasy (Part Two)

2012-02-22T14:00:00Z

When we last saw Bella, in the Twilight series, her single-minded ambition was eternal life with Edward Cullen. Even for young readers, her fixation feels a bit... limiting. I could handle the teen marriage, but why couldn't she just go to Dartmouth, already, and have her hybrid vamp-baby later? Before leaping on the author's religion and her own early marriage as explanations for this low-ball career path, consider how fun it would be to fast-track all the usual stepping-stones to adulthood.

Forget about taking the SATs and going to college. Forget about car payments and health insurance. Forget about finding time for date night or an assisted living facility for your aging parents. You don't even have to plan your own Vogue photo-shoot wedding because your gorgeous vampire sister-in-law happens to be the world's most awesome party planner. Let others do the heavy lifting; in fantasy land, ambition sucks.

Bella's helplessness can be incredibly annoying -- Edward always cooks for her, even though she makes dinner every night for her dad and Edward doesn't even eat human food -- but it's only maddening when viewed in the context of real life. Who doesn't dream of shirking responsibilities and being indulged? In this age of anxiety and the "End of Men," I suspect many teenage girls are drawn to a character like Bella who marries up in such shrewd and spectacular fashion.

The most humorless and tone-deaf criticism of Twilight is the claim that Bella and Edward's relationship echoes patterns of real-life human domestic abuse. Edward is too controlling, Bella too submissive, so it goes. He carries her around a lot -- it just works faster that way. And sometimes he also scales the walls of her house to watch her sleep. I can attest with utter certainty that I'm not 'down' for a man rappelling into a bedroom window to gaze wondrously at my daughter while she sleeps. But the thing is, vampires don't sleep. So Edward is fascinated not only with Bella but with the notion of human sleep. Get it?

Personally, I think even a 12-year-old can grasp that it's okay to enjoy an elaborate kidnapping-cum-sleepover as fantasy even if you would be appalled to find the UPS driver or neighborhood perv sitting in your room in the middle of the night. Edward is just trying to protect Bella from bad vampires who want to kill her! And, anyway, he later apologizes for being a control freak -- unnecessarily, in my view. He was only being gallant, and there are a lot of dragons to slay out there.

Some of us get this. It pains me a bit to say this, but a certain segment of the heterosexual female population occasionally enjoys fantasizing about men who protect them. Sometimes women are even known occasionally to fantasize about men who are both protective and dangerous. A few of the same women who would be absolutely devastated and irreparably harmed by rape have even been known to have an occasional rape fantasy. Breaking news: Those women know the difference. Surely this is more comprehensible than the kind of men who don't know the difference and actually commit rape.

Critics also complain that Bella gives up too much to be with Edward. Her story arc -- protracted virginity, rough sex followed by demon pregnancy, and so on -- suggests the tired cliché that women, not men, suffer for their sexuality. But on the level of pure fantasy, this doesn't quite ring true for a number of reasons. For starters, Edward has to give up a lot to be with Bella, too.

He subsists on an unappetizing "vegetarian" diet of animal blood in order to maintain his tenuous perch on the human ladder. Over time, he manages to tamp down the voracious thirst for Bella's blood that he likens to heroin addiction -- but only after he has lost his love and believed her dead for a time. It's the unbearable pain of being without her that makes him able to manage his animal instincts.

Well, who wouldn't want to believe that love could be so ennobling? That a person would make a sacrifice -- giving up the possibility of, oh, multiple sexual partners, let's say -- in service of a greater love? It's an appealing fantasy, and I'd like to say it's a fantasy shared equally by men and women. But nothing in our culture suggests that is true. All things being equal, women still appear to value sexual fidelity more than men.

Critics are offended by the implied presumption that men are sexual predators, but a lot of teenage girls might argue differently. Sexual assault is committed overwhelmingly by men against young, fertile women (five percent of whom become pregnant from the rape, according to reliable estimates). Yes, it can happen to anyone; but it usually doesn't. Does that make men rapists at heart? Surely not. But you have only to wander the halls of a college dorm on a weekend night to see the ambivalence on young women's faces as they try to navigate the sexual politics of 21st-century hookup culture.

Divorce rates are way down among college-educated couples who delay marriage, and I doubt that more than a minority of 30-year-old women are planning to risk their significant emotional and financial investment in order to synch more than two calendars on Valentine's Day. Put another way: Women don't care for dog-like male behavior any more now than they ever did. There's still something about the baroque awfulness of men's cheating -- the Arnold Schwarzeneggers and Woody Allens and Dominique Strauss-Kahns -- that really makes a girl blanch. It's no wonder that Edward's efforts at self-control are so appealing.

Yes, I know, I've read the news: monogamy is out, "monogamish" in; even '70s-style open marriage, rebranded as "polyamory," is having its moment. It's true that young women are having an awful lot of sex these days, with a lot fewer strings attached, and rates of infidelity are reaching gender parity. But I'd like to know who invented these rules. Let's see some polling numbers on teenage girls who dream in their canopy beds about sharing their prom date in a girl-girl-boy threesome.

In fact, one of the more refreshing aspects of the Twilight story is the complete absence of inter-girl competition for boys' attention. It's Bella's emotional and sexual desires that drive the narrative. For all her blandness, Bella is always the star attraction in this show, and it's fun to watch the guys having at each other to be with her. A lot of ink has been spilled on Bella's sexual innocence; however, like most teenage girls, she's obsessed with losing her virginity and finds time to toy with more than one guy.

The story revolves in part around her attraction to not one, but two, incredibly strong and handsome supernatural males (not to mention the swarm of wimpy human boys she swats away like flies). We are deep into the saga before Bella definitively ditches Jacob, the werewolf runner-up, for her One True Love. I don't think this conflict is meant to be taken terribly seriously, and we're informed, to drive the point home, that Edward would probably win a hypothetical werewolf-vampire showdown, if it came to a duel. But it's certainly exciting to see a fictional girl at the center of an unstable love triangle for a change.

Furthermore, Edward is just as sexually inexperienced as Bella and, frankly, more of a prude. His ideas of courtship are literally Edwardian and he's holding out physically because he wants a marriage license first. "Where I'm from," the 100-year-old vampire explains earnestly, "It's how one says 'I love you.'" "At my age," Bella retorts, "It's how one says, 'I just got knocked up.'"

But after a lot of nagging and tearful fumbling in the four-poster bed he's masochistically bought for her, Edward eventually backs down and tries, rather ineptly, to initiate sex at the very end of Book Three. This development is omitted in the movie version, but Stephenie Meyer throws us a bone, so to speak, lest all this male fussiness begin to veer toward the repellant. Respecting a girl is one thing, apparently; being an idiot is quite another. But by then Bella has safely drunk the abstinence Kool-aid herself and agreed to do things "in the right order."

This all sounds rather grim, but the love story is entirely believable, and nowhere is this more apparent than during the infamous vampire-human wedding night. Hackles were raised over the broken headboard and bruised flesh, but an even more subversive element may be the expression of joy we see in the young couple as they make love for the first time. Can you recall when you saw genuinely romantic laughter during a movie sex scene?

Bella awakens bruised (but unhurt), not because she's been beaten, but because the kinks in what she calls the "tricky" business of interspecies sex haven't quite been worked out. "I think we did amazing," an obviously sated Bella reassures her sheepish husband after he's laid waste to the bedroom in lieu of injuring his wife. In the more effective and tenderhearted film version, we see the headboard splinter as he braces himself mid-PG-13-thrust. We catch a glimpse not only of his impressive, CGI-enhanced, musculature but also of his embarrassed and hesitant face. It's an expression familiar to millions of over-eager young men who are enjoying sex for the first time.

In lesser hands, this scene would have been played for comedy or horror. But the skilled director, Bill Condon, plays it real instead, showing Bella's calm reaction shot as she reassures her new husband that everything is going to be just fine. The largely female audience smiles knowingly. By playing it straight, with wit but not irony, we can fully embrace the fantasy, rather than viewing it from a snarky distance.

This is part two of a three-part series. Read part one here and check back on Friday for part three.

Ellen DeGeneres: Right Here in Black and White

2012-02-22T13:40:21Z

The Oscars are this Sunday, and I have a feeling The Artist is going to do very well. It's nominated for 10 awards, and if I hadn't lost all my money on the Super Bowl, I'd be placing my bets.

It's so original, and that's hard to find in Hollywood these days. Now everything's either a sequel, or based on a book or inspired by actual events. And if it's not, it's probably a sexy vampire movie.

Who would've thought that a black and white movie with no dialogue would be so popular? It's simple and entertaining. We should've been doing this years ago.

I didn't think a silent movie could hold my attention, but it really did. I liked it so much, I started watching some of my favorite TV shows on mute.

One cast member who definitely deserved an award was Uggie. It's too bad he's not eligible for an Oscar because he's a dog. I can't believe how smart he is. He seemed to understand exactly what was going on in every scene. My dog thinks his tail is a squirrel.

Don't miss this movie. Yes, it's silent and in black and white, but it's entertaining, innovative and a great opportunity to practice lip reading. I knew everything the dog was saying.

Cosima Cabrera: Can a Mexican Actor Win An Oscar This Year?

2012-02-22T12:28:34Z

This year two actors from non-English speaking countries, Demián Bichir from Mexico and Jean DuJardin from France, received best actor Oscar nominations. While DuJardin has received a lot of attention, Bichir's uniquely nuanced performance of a father and undocumented gardener in "A Better Life" has not received the attention it deserves. Bichir's Oscar nomination is the first nomination for a Mexican male actor in the lead acting category since Anthony Quinn was nominated for Zorba the Greek in 1964. While Bichir deserves to win, it is unlikely perhaps because Oscar voters are 94% Caucasian and Latinos are less than 2% of the Academy's voting members.

In his portrayal of "A Better Life's" main character, Carlos Galindo, Bichir gives what Rolling Stones Magazine calls "a monumental performance." Other critics have recognized his performance as "pitch perfect." Acknowledgment of Bichir's talent is long overdue. Bechir began his long journey as an actor working in theater with his family in Mexico at the age of three, and by age fourteen he was starring in Mexican television. Although a super-star who has broken box-office records in Mexico, Bichir has not received the same attention in the States. At an Awards season screening for SAG actors, he joked about the countless rejections he faced in the U.S. before getting cast in major roles, which include Fidel Castro in "Che" and the mayor of Tijuana in "Weeds." Bichir attributes stubbornness and perseverance as the reasons for his success. "I'm an Aztec warrior," he joked at a screening for SAG members.

Bichir's performance in "A Better Life" is heart-rending. He delivers one scene in which almost the entire audience I sat with started crying. As if the echoes of sniffles that were heard from every direction were not a strong enough indicator of his moving performance, the two grown men I sat in between both had to wipe tears off of their eyes. Bichir's performance is powerful in its subtlety. In portraying Carlos Galindo, a gardener whose life centers on invisibility, Bichir faces the paradoxical problem of shedding his performance-oriented instincts for a role in which invisibility, not performance, is the only option.

The failure to recognize astounding performances from actors from Spanish speaking countries has happened countless times before. Javier Bardem should have been nominated for Best Actor for 2004's "Mar Adentro" (The Sea Inside), no question. Here's hoping Bichir beats all the odds and actually wins. If anyone deserves an Oscar this year, it is Demián Bichir.

Melissa Fairbanks: An Open Letter to Jean Dujardin

2012-02-22T00:33:46Z

Dear Mr. Dujardin,

I just wish to send you a very short note to say, thank you, for the magnificent film -- The Artist. Not only because it is brilliant on a global scale, but also because for me personally, it was as if there were moments when I thought I saw my grandfather, Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. in front of my very own eyes!

An extraordinary experience, and at times -- completely surreal! I don't know how much of an influence he was for your interpretation of the part -- but it seems to me that you have really embodied his dynamic spirit, his joie de vivre and an aspect of his that I often feel on watching his films where I find myself between tears and laughter.

He understood how to really touch profound feelings and you do the same thing. Unfortunately, he died seven years before I was born, but I always felt an especially deep connection with him -- even more than I felt with my own father.

Now I am quite an old lady, but I sent my children and grandchildren to see your film. They loved it as well, recognizing also a kind of Ogenetic resonance! So, in closing, a big thank you for having touched our hearts in such an important manner. I wish you all the best for your future and thank you for having brought magic -- a magic apparent to all the world -- but for me, something personal and a profoundly touching experience.

Melissa Fairbanks
London, England

Zorianna Kit: Movie Review: The Secret Life of Arrietty

2012-02-22T00:12:54Z

Just as there are those who look forward to every new Pixar animated film, there are also those who cannot wait for the new releases from Japan's Studio Ghibli. Like the Pixar pics, Studio Ghibli's film are also instant classics from My Neighbor Totoro to Spirited Away to Ponyo just to name a few.

Where Pixar is led by John Lassiter's genius, Ghibli has co-founder Hayao Miyazaki to spearhead its vision. One of the best animators of all time, Miyazaki directed the aforementioned films, won an Oscar for Spirited Away and continues to win awards and raves for his other films like Howl's Moving Castle and Princess Mononoke, among others.

Obviously good animators know good animation and it's no secret Lassiter and Miyazaki are friends who admire each others' work. Disney, which distributes Pixar films, also has the rights to all of Ghibli's films. As chief creative officer of both Pixar and Walt Disney Animation, Lassiter has been an executive producer of some of those Ghibli films' U.S. versions, overseeing their English language dubbing and being instrumental in exposing them to a larger audience. (Anyone notice the plush Totoro in Toy Story 3?)

Now comes another Studio Ghibli film released by Disney, and like the previous ones, it deserves your attention as well: The Secret World of Arrietty, based on Mary Norton's children's book series The Borrowers, is about a tiny family who are part of a secret world of four-inch people who live underneath the floorboards of homes, "borrowing" things they need from human "beans" that won't be missed.

The borrowers live carefully, so as to never be seen by humans, but when one particular family's daughter, Arrietty, befriends the new sick human boy who's just arrived to the house, the family feels their lives are now in danger and pack up to move. Unfortunately, the damage to their lives begins before they can leave.

As with all Ghibli films, whether it is tiny people in Arrietty, a goldfish princess in Ponyo, or forest spirits in Totoro, the fantastical living in tandem with normal humans never feels weird or questionable. And though you never know where it's going and how it's going to end up, the ride is always interesting because nothing ever feels contrived or predictable. Rather there is a quiet gentleness and a deep beauty that resonates no matter if you're a child or an adult. It speaks to all without needing to be labeled a particular genre -- other than animation.

And the animation is breathtaking. Not in that computer animated we-see-every-piece of hair-follicle-sway-in-the-wind, but more like a Matisse painting come to life. Miyazaki did not direct this one, but was instrumental in the planning and the writing of the screenplay. He hired first-time filmmaker Hirosama Yonebashi, officially the youngest director in the Ghibli fold, and the result is a stunning world that forces viewers to take the surroundings they often take for granted and see them from an awesomely, overwhelming perspective of a tiny borrower. Electrical outlets become passageways from one side of the wall to another, a teakettle is a boat, a human needle becomes Arrietty's sword and duct tape on the bottom of her father's shoes enables him to climb the side of cabinet.

When Arrietty was released in Japan, it became the country's highest grossing film at the box office that year with 12 million people turning out to see it.

Creating an English dub was challenging because Japanese sounds are longer than American ones and tend to end with an open vowel. That means the animated characters' mouths are usually open at the end of a sentence. Screenwriter Karey Kirkpatrick (The Spiderwick Chronicles) had to write an English screenplay using words that not only fit the mouth movements set forth by the existing animation, but construct sentences to fit the length of the longer Japanese sentences. That must not have been easy, but the final product on screen makes it look like it was never even an issue.

The British version sees Arrietty voiced by Saorise Ronan (The Lovely Bones) with Mark Strong and Olivia Coleman as her parents. The U.S. version utilizes the Disney machine, populating the film with its roster of Disney Channel stars in the kids roles. There is Brigit Mendler (Good Luck Charlie) as Arrietty, David Henrie (The Wizards of Waverly Place) as the human boy she befriends and Moises Arias of Hanna Montana as a young borrower named Spiller. All are to be commended for their work.

Real-life husband and wife Amy Poehler and Will Arnett play Arrietty's parents with Arnett showing a restraint and gravitas not previously heard on screen. Carol Burnett as housekeeper Haru is hilarious in that same way that made her Miss Hannigan character in the 1982 Annie film so delightful and memorable.

The music in the film is sung by French singer/songwriter Cecile Corbel, whose voice is as lush and as beautiful as the scenery she's paired with. It's enough to make anyone rush out and buy the CD soundtrack.

Mark Cosgrove: Julius Caesar, Angelina Jolie and Me - A Week at the Berlinale

2012-02-22T00:00:00Z

If a week is a long time in politics then a week at a film festival is an eternity where you not only travel across time and space but into the minds of a female victim of war, a confused second generation British-Egyptian teenager and a reluctant revolutionary. Taking in five films a day can leave the imagination bewildered and becalmed, ravaged and enlightened. What follows are some of the highlights and observations from one of the world's most expansive and consequential film festivals.

In his introduction to the catalogue, festival director Dieter Kosslick drew attention to the fact that it was one year since the Arab Spring; something that was addressed by a number of films across the programme. He also observed the urgent need to ensure freedom of expression for artists - another theme close to the festival's heart. These two strands found outstanding manifestation in two documentaries: The Reluctant Revolutionary and Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry. This year it felt like truth was much stranger and more emotionally engaging than fiction: documentaries were getting to the heart of the matter more directly than drama.

Sean McAllister's The Reluctant Revolutionary follows Kais, a tourist guide in Yemen, as the revolution unfolds. His work is already perilous and drying up because of the Taliban and when a protest camp sets up in 'Change Square' in Yemen's capital Sana'a, Kais is non-committal partly feeling this is bad for tourism. Over time he begins to get involved and engaged. Film-maker McAllister is either a fool or brave or possibly both because he is obviously the only foreigner around, wondering in a volatile environment with secret police mingling amongst the crowds of protesters. What he captures is extraordinary with access conventional media flinch from. When the state troops shoot into the crowds the camera follows Kais into the makeshift hospitals. The scenes are devastating. But the mood of change and resilience is evident as it is in the charming reluctant revolutionary Kais.

The art of Chinese artist Ai Weiwei is inextricable from his politics and for a Chinese artist, that can be life - or at least liberty - threatening. Ai Weiwei's work is not confrontation for the sake of it but draws attention to the state's wilful dismissal of its own people. This is most apparent in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake where the state never issued the names or numbers of fatalities, many of whom were children because of ill-built schools. Ai Weiwei and colleagues documented and published the names of nearly 5500. Later he would make an installation in the front of an art gallery with 5500 school bags. In this documentary, you get a real sense of the cat and mouse confrontation between artist and state until finally, he is arrested. Released after 81 days, he is fined $2.5m, banned from meeting people and using the internet. It is moving to see ordinary Chinese people leave money at Ai Weiwei's door - the power of the artist evident.

The artist himself could not be at the screening having restricted movements imposed on him, however he managed to arrange for fortune cookies to be handed out to each audience member, which contained a unique message from Ai Weiwei to share. Mine read "You can delete the words but you cannot delete the facts" and was immediately sent into the Twittersphere.

Where fiction really did matter, was somewhat surprisingly in the hands of the glamorous Hollywood star Angelina Jolie. The red carpet razzmatazz was very much in evidence when the "Brangelina" road show hit town to the extent of preventing me from getting into Angelina's own film as she had the paparazzi captivated. However she does not pull her punches in her film In the Land of Blood and Honey, which attempts to depict the horrors, inflicted on women in the 1990s Bosnian war. Whilst it dramatically slides towards melodrama at the end, the first half of the film brings us face to face with the horrific abuses of Muslim women in the conflict.

Similarly, Philippines director Brillante Mendoza's Captive started off with a bang, throwing Isabelle Huppert as well as the audience into the hands of terrorists in a dramatisation of the 2001 incident when Muslim terrorist group Abu Sayyaf took a number people hostage from a Filipino island resort. The first hour is compelling, disorientating filmmaking giving a glimpse into the ordeal. However, the film flags in the second half. I later discovered that the director had intended the film to be three hours. Longer would have actually been better, allowing the film to more fully explore the relationship between captors and captives, the tedium and terror of over a year in captivity.

Documentary and fiction were satisfyingly brought together in the Taviani Brothers' Caesar Must Die, a compelling testament to the transformative power of art that went on to win the top prize at this year's festival. Prisoners in an Italian jail perform Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and through the process realise and understand more about their own condition. One prisoner observes: "ever since I discovered art this cell has truly become a prison." The 80-year-old veterans Taviani Brothers effortlessly merge drama, fiction, documentary and real life. Through immersion in the drama of Shakespeare, the prisoners discover more about themselves and their world. Similarly we, Berlinale festivalgoers, immerse ourselves in films and discover more about our world and ourselves.

Dan Lybarger: Getting His Wings: Oscar Nominee Wim Wenders on Pina

2012-02-21T23:35:36Z

In 1985, German director Wim Wenders was prodded by his girlfriend to watch a performance of choreographer Pina Bausch's eerie Café Müller. As he recalls it now, he dreaded the evening that awaited, not knowing that what he was about to witness would change his movies and his life.

Twenty-seven years later, the 66-year-old Wenders has earned his second Oscar nomination for helming Pina, a 3D documentary tribute to Bausch that features her company Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch performing some of her best known pieces.

While Wenders had become her friend and admirer, Bausch sadly was unable to see the final film or even participate in the shooting because she died unexpectedly in 2009 at the age of 68. Nonetheless, she's helped Wenders, whose other films include classics like The American Friend, Paris, Texas and Wings of Desire, gain some of the best reviews of his career.

Speaking by phone from Los Angeles, Wenders started our conversation, wondering about my Anglicized surname (after hearing it pronounced, he correctly guessed that it was German). When I told him Buena Vista Social Club brought me and my beloved together, he replied, "I take full responsibility."

When it comes to Pina, however, he clearly assigns her the proper credit and acknowledges that she's still with him, like an angel in Wings of Desire.

Despite making so many movies, this is only your second Oscar nomination. Your first was for Buena Vista Social Club. Why do you think you've gotten both of them for your documentaries instead of your fiction films?

(Laughs) That's a great question. I don't know. I really don't know.

Maybe my fiction films have never been really successful in America. I think the most successful of my fictional films was Wings of Desire. Maybe it's because they weren't seen by a huge audience, but Wings of Desire was seen by a lot of people. So I don't know. I just never got up there. I never made either the German entry for Best Foreign Film, or when I shot in English -- I shot a lot of films in English -- I never made it up there.

Actually, I never thought about this. This is a strange question. It's funny, and I'm also a member of the Academy but of the documentary branch. They've embraced me as a documentary filmmaker, which is totally fine with me because as I'm getting older, I'm more and more driven to reality-driven movies. I love documentaries more and more, and as you might have noticed, they take up more and more space in my life.

Didn't it take you about two years to do the actual filming of Pina?

Yes. We started prepping this film and thinking about it, Pina and I, in 2007. We started shooting in the fall of 2009. We edited it for a year and a half. This film took a long time, yes.

Because of the length of time it took you to make Pina, you said that the 3D technology improved as you were making the film. How did it improve?

Oh, man. It improved at lightning speed. When we started shooting, equipment and the 3D rigs were very clumsy and big. The first leg of the shoot was all the stage performances.

We shot for about a month. The cameras were always on a big monster of a dinosaur, a big dinosaur crane called a Techocrane. We had a big, big crane because it was such heavy equipment. And you could only put it on a crane or tracks because you couldn't possibly think of shooting on a Steadicam. That didn't exist yet.

It was all too heavy, and my stereographer (Alain Derobe), he realized how much I wanted to be lighter and move differently. So he developed the very first Steadicam rig for me, and with the second leg of the shoot, not only was the crew much smaller -- we had started with a crew of 50 people. And the camera department alone was five or six. And then in the second leg of the shoot when we shot outdoors, technology had made it possible so that we could shoot out of doors and that we could have a lighter unit. We were down to 20 all of the sudden.

And during the very last part of the shoot, we were five or six people. We were always working with prototypes, but the prototypes had gotten from very, very heavy to very, very light in one year.

Wow.

And, well, again this is two years later. We could shoot it again, very differently today.

What was it about Bausch's choreography that turned you from a skeptic into a fan?

It was the fact that it concerned me.

Dance, I never felt could possibly concern me. I was never really into dance, and I thought it was an aesthetic experience that I had no antennae for. And then when I saw Pina's pieces for the first time, I was just... touched. When I saw the first piece, I found myself crying for 40 minutes. That was as long as it lasted.

And I didn't know what had happened because it hit me like lightning. It was a revelation. It was like I was watching a whole different language that had nothing to do with the dance that I had seen so far with classical ballet or modern dance. This was a very human, very emotional expression that I felt everybody should have access to, especially everybody like me who thought they weren't into dance.

So you've made this film for people, who like you, would have initially been turned off by the subject.

Absolutely. That's my target group right there, people who say, "Oh, dancing, include me out." That's who I really made this film for because Pina really turned me into somebody who's really happy that she opened this whole page in my life. She opened a whole different access to life for me.

How did you decide to approach this film once you no longer had her direct involvement?

Well, we'd been talking about it together for more than 20 years. We had been very much involved with the concept, and Pina had chosen the pieces for the film. And finally, we had found the right technology in 3D. And I was finally ready to do it.

We prepared film together actively for the last two years. And then tragically, just shortly before we were ready to shoot, she passed away. And that was so disappointing for me. If you talk about something for more than 20 years -- and to do it together, and if you really wanted to do this together, and that was the whole purpose of it, it was just unimaginable that Pina would die when she did. And I walked away from the film because I was too disappointed and too shocked.

And there would never bee a movie if it wasn't for the dancers because they didn't walk away. Even the night that Pina died, they went on stage in tears. But they went on stage because they figured that's what Pina would have expected.

And a few weeks later, they decided to continue the company as such without Pina and to fulfill all the obligations for the next three years for tours and performing. So that's why they then, a couple of months later, started to rehearse the pieces that Pina had put on the agenda, so we could film them.

That's when they got back to me and said, "It's a crying shame that we're doing this now, maybe for the very last time, and we remember how much Pina was very much looking forward and how much she was expecting from that new technology and how much you were so excited about shooting her work in 3D. Now, we can still make the film then. Maybe we can't make the film with Pina any more, but maybe can do the film for Pina together."

And it slowly dawned on me that that was very, very important, not just as an homage to Pina, but for these people who stood in front of that loss and didn't know how to deal with it. None of these dancers had been able to say goodbye, and me, too, as a friend. I hadn't been able to say goodbye or thank you to Pina.

So I realized the film needed to be a very different film, but there was a great purpose for it, and that's why we jumped back into it.

One thing that hit me during the testimonials is that these people were incredibly loyal to her, and even the children of the dancers were performing for her. What do you think inspired this loyalty?

Pina loved them very much, and she brought out something in each and every one of them that they all realized they would not have found without Pina. Pina had this uncanny ability to get to the core of a person and to find out the best in somebody. Some of them had done their entire professional life with Pina, up to 30 years or more. Pina was the center of their lives.

Pina's art is very special, and there is no other company that works like this, with her complete integration of everybody. She wasn't imposing her choreographies on anybody. She was developing it with the dancers, with a very unique method.

She'd ask them questions: simple questions, emotional questions, existential questions. And they would answer, but they were not allowed to answer with words. They were only allowed to answer with their bodies, with movement and dance. And Pina would look at their answers and talk about it and ask them to be more precise and be more personal and not with such of a cliché. She was start working on these answers and pushing her dancers to be more and more themselves and more honest, and drop all role playing and really give the most honest answer with their body. And that's how she developed her pieces, and no other choreographer, I think, ever worked like this. So these people are very, very loyal to Pina because they were her orchestra.

A lot of the things you do in Pina seem as if it would be impossible to do on stage, would that be a fair assessment?

Yeah. A lot of all the scenes were shot outdoors. Well, you could dance them on stage, but it would be a very different impression. We shot in traffic, in the city and in the subways, in the industrial wastelands and in nature. That, of course, added a lot to what the dancers showed me about Pina.

But you even have one scene where all the dancers turn from young to old in the blink of an eye. That couldn't be done on stage could it?

Well, that was done on stage.

No kidding?

Because that was a very unique piece in the history of dance that I think had never been done before. This was a piece that Pina called Kontakthof. She first did it in the late 70s with her ensemble. And then in the mid-90s, she did it with the same choreography, the same piece, with an ensemble of senior citizens. And then a few years ago, she did it with teenagers from 14 to 18. The senior citizens as well as the teenagers were dance illiterates, so it was the same piece done with different generations.

I filmed the elderly people as well as the teenagers, as well, of course, as Pina's own ensemble. It was pretty striking to have the same piece in front of you and to be able with one cut go from 16 years to 80 year
s in the same choreography, in the same story and the same piece.

One of my favorite pieces is the one where it looks like the girl is flexing her muscles, but it turns out her "arms" are actually those of her male partner hiding behind her. Was that tough to set up the photography?

Well, it worked on stage, and on film it even worked a little better because on stage people who were sitting on the side would see the trick, whereas on film we could do it more precisely. It was almost more beautiful to shoot it in 3D than to watch it on stage because it could really work perfectly. They were perfectly aligned, and it really felt like she was a very, very strong woman, and all the sudden you saw the trick, and it was very playful.

While you've captured her approach, your own fingerprints are all over it. When I saw the dancers' testimonials, I immediately thought of Wings of Desire where you'd hear a person's thoughts but their faces were immobile. Would that be a fair statement?

Wings of Desire has a very special connection with Pina because when I first encountered Pina in 1985, I saw everything she had ever made, and we got very close. And the next film I made, which was only two years later was Wings of Desire. It is by far the most choreographed film I've made. I don't think I would have had the courage. I don't think I could have made this up film because it was an improvised film, made without a script. I don't think I could have made it without my encounter with Pina. That film was something that really also linked us together.

All photos © 2011 IFC. Used by permission.

Official Trailer for Pina.