Earlier this week, Funny or Die tried to answer the question I hoped would never get asked this Oscar season: Who had it worse, slaves or poor, single mothers driven into prostitution? In a clever four-minute video, Samuel L. Jackson (Team Slaves) and Anne Hathaway (Team PSMDIP) campaigned for their respective sides in a “sad-off.” It’s a brilliant bit of movie promotion, with the actors selling their sad, sad movies ( Les Misérables and Django Unchained , respectively) through comedy. “My movie is literally called ‘The Miserable,’” throws down Hathaway. “Women get beaten in my movie,” boasts Jackson. “Same thing happens in mine,” Hathaway counters. “Guy gets his head blown off.” “Same.” “There’s a man ripped apart by dogs in my movie.” When Hathaway stays quiet, Jackson cackles in triumph. The two Oscar nominees eventually get into the yuletide spirit by cheerfully agreeing, “Nothing says Christmas like slaves and whores.” That’s cute and all, but it also smartly points out the paradox of the holiday movie season, that magical time of the year when, between maxing out our credit cards and stuffing our faces like it’s the Mayan apocalypse, we dutifully assign ourselves to watch “serious movies” about “important issues.” There seem to be way more of those this year, from the slavery-themed Django , the plebe-supporting Les Miz , the torture-approving Zero Dark Thirty , the dementia-sympathizing Amour , the insanity-forgiving Silver Linings Playbook , the FEMA-condemning Beasts of the Southern Wild , and the disability-sex-championing The Sessions . Looking at this group of politically weighty films, Salon film critic Andrew O’Hehir stated last week that he’s looking forward to a “meaty” 2013 Oscars because of the “ideological throwdown” promised by the likely award nominees, especially after the win of last year’s lightweight The Artist . It’s of course great that so many special-interest groups will have their issues heard throughout Oscar season. But given the fractured, us-versus-them nature of America today, it’s hard not to feel pessimistic that the run-up to the Academy Awards will turn out to be one interminable lose-lose game of Who Suffered Most? There’s certainly precedent for this. Back in 2005, the Best Picture race rapidly narrowed down to Crash and Brokeback Mountain . In a particularly ugly turn, the media narrative twisted the Oscars into a contest between racism and homophobia, as if declaring racism to be the greater injustice eased the pain felt by bullied gay teens. When Brokeback lost, some commentators exacerbated the situation by blaming the outcome on the homophobia of Academy voters, who are still mostly old, white men . (For the record, they probably just have really bad taste.) That’s why the best part of Hathaway and Jackson’s video is its preemptive mockery of the tendency to hierarchize different kinds of oppression. In a bit that recalls the 2008 Democratic primary race between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, the sad-off briefly veers into black man vs. woman territory. “You try being a black man in the South in the 1800s. I bet you couldn’t handle being a black in the South right now ,” taunts Jackson. “When there’s a French whore in the White House, then we can talk,” Hathaway challenges. “You say that like there’s never been a French whore in the White House,” says Jackson in the best line of the video. Let’s hope that’s the last round of sad-off we have to play this holiday season, because justice and equality doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game. Inkoo Kang is a film critic and investigative journalist in Boston. She has been published in Salon, Indiewire, Boxoffice, Yahoo! Movies, Pop Matters, Screen Junkies, and MuckRock. Her great dream in life is to direct a remake of All About Eve with an all-dog cast.” Follow Inkoo Kang on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.
Music not only serves as the subject but informs the very fabric of Not Fade Away , David Chase’s savvy ’60s-set feature film debut. Aided immeasurably by his keen ear for dialogue, Chase filters a suddenly tumultuous, transformative decade through the restrictive prism of conservative suburbia in this story of a New Jersey boy’s coming of age, as political instability, class awareness and rock ‘n’ roll break in waves over the still-inchoate consciousness of several friends trying to form a band. Though starless, save for James Gandolfini’s knockout supporting perf, this dynamic pic should resonate with auds countrywide upon its Dec. 21 release. Not Fade Away injects the past with the nervous energy and exciting uncertainty of the present, devoid of nostalgia or biopic baggage, and infused with all the wicked wit that characterized Chase’s The Sopranos and his bygone standout episodes of The Rockford Files. The move from TV to a theatrical canvas is mirrored in the picture’s very conception, presenting the New Jersey microcosm as no longer a self-contained unit. Still, the film rarely leaves its setting, where Doug (John Magaro) lives with his looming, disapproving father (Gandolfini), his quasi-hysterical mother (Molly Price), and his little sister (Meg Guzulescu), who supplies voiceover narration and performs a wonderful curtain-dropper to boot. Macrocosm first meets microcosm when Doug returns to Jersey from college sporting longer hair, Cuban heels and anti-war indignation, quitting his studies to devote himself to the rock band he started in high school. Chase’s writing shines in this intricate relationship between world events and their impact on the everyday: Drawing from his own, decidedly more lackluster experience as a band drummer, the writer-helmer surrounds Doug with friends whose talents are not necessarily congruent with their ambitions and whose class differences manifest themselves erratically. Thus, after lead singer/guitarist Gene (Jack Huston) temporarily knocks himself out by swallowing a lit joint, Doug takes over as vocalist, wowing the local crowd with his rendition of “Time Is On My Side,” a glamorous position he soon assumes permanently, to Gene’s ongoing resentment. Meanwhile, well-off Wells (Will Brill) wrestles with the philosophical implications of imminent fame, always worrying they’ll “lose the mystique” they’ve built up with their barely existent fanbase. The group covers the Rolling Stones , the Kinks and Bo Diddley with varying degrees of fidelity, but Not Fade Away pointedly refuses to follow either a difficult-road-to-success or downward-spiral-to-failure scenario. Instead, the music feeds off surrounding chaos, anchoring Doug’s existence and coloring snapshots of various stages of his youth. His questioning whether to go for a more melodic or bluesier vocalization while listening to Leadbelly equates to his deciding on different attitudes toward life. Even movies and TV shows are defined through their music: The Twilight Zone announcing its presence to the protag through its signature theme, while Blow-Up confounds him with its silence. Doug’s evolving relationship with wealthier girlfriend Grace (Bella Heathcote) forms the film’s other throughline and, like his interaction with certain band brothers, brings up issues of economic disparity. But Chase excels at diverting attention from the obvious and foregrounding the particular, as in how Doug’s cramped kitchen contrasts with Grace’s Toulouse Lautrec-wallpapered rec room, where his band plays parties. And when Doug is shown digging ditches at Grace’s country club, the scene’s focus stays completely on Doug’s failed attempt to musically bond with Lander (Isiah Whitlock Jr.), a conservative black co-worker who only likes church music. The young thesps play their characters, interestingly, as socially inept, with varying levels of self-assertion and intellectual pretension. Magaro’s Doug, maturing in fits and starts, contrasts strikingly with Gandolfini’s brilliant turn as a father undergoing a late-blooming epiphany. Chase often matches and sometimes even betters Cameron Crowe or Floyd Mutrux in granting present-tense immediacy to the rock ‘n’ roll on the soundtrack, never smothering it with hindsight. In this endeavor, he was undoubtedly greatly assisted by exec producer/music supervisor Steven Van Zandt. Follow Movieline on Twitter.
In Monogamy , Chris Messina plays Theo, a burnt out wedding photographer who starts a side job that involves photographing clients in a more natural, unaware surrounding. When one of his clients with the provocative handle “Subgirl” (Meital Dohan) shows up for her session and puts on quite a show, it leads Theo down a road of obsession that puts a strain on his current engagement to Nat (Rashida Jones). Movieline sat down with Messina to discuss the dark twists of Monogamy , an audition outburst that led to him being banned for life from the future work of The Sopranos ‘ David Chase, and why it was unfair that Devil got caught up in the stink left over from M. Night Shyamalan’s The Last Airbender .
In Monogamy , Chris Messina plays Theo, a burnt out wedding photographer who starts a side job that involves photographing clients in a more natural, unaware surrounding. When one of his clients with the provocative handle “Subgirl” (Meital Dohan) shows up for her session and puts on quite a show, it leads Theo down a road of obsession that puts a strain on his current engagement to Nat (Rashida Jones). Movieline sat down with Messina to discuss the dark twists of Monogamy , an audition outburst that let to him being banned for life from the future work of The Sopranos ‘ David Chase, and why it was unfair that Devil got caught up in the stink left over from M. Night Shyamalan’s The Last Airbender .
Also in this Tuesday edition of The Broadsheet: Oscar nominee James Franco may play a pornographer… Sundance’s first bomb arrives… Those Matrix sequels are not on the way… and more ahead.
Many of you might not realize this, but Lost ends this Sunday night. ABC should really be publicizing this more, right? Kidding! The two-and-a-half hour series finale is basically being positioned as the geek Super Bowl: ABC is starting coverage at 7 p.m. and will keep fans tuned in until 1 a.m., when the special Lost edition of Jimmy Kimmel Live — with cast members and three alternate endings — wraps up. Two people who won’t be appearing with Kimmel, though, are Lost executive producers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse. Like David Chase — The Patron Saint of Finales — the men will go into a self-imposed radio silence following the last frame of Lost as a way to let their work speak for itself. Oh, and also because they have no one left to talk to.
Breaking Sports Video
