"...Yet “Oblivion” is worth the trip. There are two reasons for this. The first is the cinematography of Claudio Miranda, who won an Oscar for his work on “Life of Pi.” Clearly, he is the man to go to for transcendent physical grace when your metaphysics won’t quite wash. If you like having your breath snatched, wait for the head-on shot of Jack’s swimming pool—a long, transparent tub, slung low beneath the house, and viewed by night so that we can trace the figures frolicking within." — Anthony Lane, The New YorkerIt's right on the edge. It's sci-fi so Kate won't go with me. And there's the plot, by all accounts. And yet those cloudscapes — filmed and then projected onto a wraparound screen behind the actors, the way they used to do rear projection — look gorgeous: "The most beautiful set I've ever been on," said Cruise. I have a weakness for cloud cities, like Swift's Laputa or The Empire Strikes Back's Bespin. They're so golden age, pre-space-flight, back when getting things airborne seemed the big miracle and jet-packs a must. I guess if I can make it through Antonioni's Beyond the Clouds, I can make it through this.
"As for what appears to be Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s Amazon wish list page, it is a weird jumble of self-help books (Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People”), covert-operations-style manuals (“The I.D. Forger: Homemade Birth Certificates and Other Documents Explained”), Chechen history books (“Allah’s Mountains: The Battle for Chechnya, New Edition”), Mafia books (Nicholas Pileggi’s “Wiseguy”) and books about the Roman Empire (“The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”). There is Boethius’s “Consolation of Philosophy” — a staple of college curriculums that addresses ideas of good and evil and free will — and “Snatch,” the “inside story of the making of the smash-hit movie starring Brad Pitt. Did Tamerlan harbor macho dreams of being an action hero, or a Mafia operative? Did he want to read Boethius to grapple with deep existential doubts he was having, or was he assigned it in school? (The books all appear to have been added to the Amazon list in 2006 and 2007.) Did his interest in the Roman Empire have something to do with a conviction that the West was decadent and in decline? For that matter, does this Amazon wish list really belong to him? Or does our fascination with the list simply reflect our own desire to gain insight into his thinking, our hunger for more dots to try to connect?" — MICHIKO KAKUTANI, NYT
From my profile in Vogue:—Mulligan’s workbook for the 2008 Broadway production of The Seagull, in which she played Nina, contains a Chagall landscape, some drawings by her costar Mackenzie Crook, and a copy of the Yeats poem Ephemera, about waning love. She is much moved by such expressions of transitoriness, for reasons she doesn't like to go into but that have something to do, one suspects, with her upbringing in various hotels in Dusseldorf and London, where her father worked as manager; she used to observe guests from under the dining trolley. She compiles these scrapbooks for every role. It is entirely different from the scrapbook she prepared for the 2007 production of the play in London, which contains a letter to Chekhov from actress, press clippings about the working life of Russian women, a note from Mulligan’s director when she got appendicitis (“Recuperate, return”). Why didn’t she use the old scrap-book? “No,” she says. “I would have tried to copy it. I was a few years older and I didn't want to do the same thing over and over.” Mulligan is a creature of the present-tense. “It's the reason for the unpredictability with which she exists in the world, and which she exudes when you’re watching her onscreen,” notes Gyllenhaal. In a film career notably short of the kind of costume dramas with which English actresses usually pad out their résumés, she has instead sought out trans-Atlantic headwinds, appearing in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street 2, Steve McQueen’s Shame, and Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive, bringing her talent for fresh apprehension — for emotions netted on the wing — to roles that feel flush with the present, or else haunted by its passing. She was affecting as one of the doomed youth in Never Let Me Go, while her Daisy is a living, breathing, rebuke to Gatsby’s obsessive exhumation of the past. We hear her before see her in the film, through a diaphanous scrim of white curtains at the Buchanan house, laughter rising up from behind an enormous sofa, as if the very décor were in on some irresistible joke. During filming she and Di Caprio exchanged in-character love notes, after Di Caprio made Mulligan a gift of a protein bar she had coveted. “So he got one for me and wrote me this little note: ‘Darling Daisy…’. and signed Jay. He’d drawn a little Daisy on the front of it….” she recalls.
“You feel like you’re in on some sort of secret with her constantly,” says Tobey Maguire, who plays Nick Carraway, the story’s amenable midwestern narrator. “You’re the one that she’s chosen to be part of a secret club or language. She pulls you in. I remember hearing her voice and I just went: that’s Daisy. It was like the cartoons with the snake charmer, and the eyes start swirling around. She said four words and I was there, I was snake-charmed." It is by her voice, of course, that Daisy is largely characterized in Fitzgerald’s novel — alternately described as “low, thrilling,” possessed of an “exhilarating ripple,” full of “fluctuating, feverish warmth,” and — most famously — “full of money.” Mulligan’s own register is naturally low. Even though her round, dimpled face plays young, her voice — one of those dulcet cut-glass British voices you used to be able to hear on the BBC — brings unexpected notes of sanguinity. "She’s got almost a childlike quality about her physically,” says Luhrmann, “but she has the voice of Rita Hayworth.” It was this paradox that tugged her performance in An Education closer to the zesty self-possession of a young Shirley MacLaine than to the winsomeness of Audrey Hepburn, to whom she was continually compared in that first spring of Hollywood’s infatuation with her, when Harvey Weinstein called her the “Belle” of Sundance and Warren Beatty, finding out she was taking a bus to meetings in LA, offered his services as a chauffeur.
"Most of the moments in the film are interstitial; the story is conjured and suggested rather than shown, and the emotions are evoked and induced rather than performed... Malick constructs the story as the love story, as the story of stories, as a primordial archetype realized in practical and even familiar places, and he films his unnamed characters more or less without dialogue.... Malick avoids many of the ordinary particulars of a couple’s life—why are they together, what drives them apart... Viewers with expectations, or, rather, prejudices regarding what constitutes a movie—regarding scripts, acting, and psychology—are bound to be confounded by “To the Wonder.” Malick has little interest in the psychology of his characters—in fact, it’s hard to call them characters. And the actors who bring them to life have a very difficult job, which they do remarkably... Affleck, a solid and muscular performer, manages to render himself diaphanous" — Richard Brody, The New Yorker
1. Naked (Leigh, 1993)
2. My Beautiful Laundrette (Frears, 1985)
3. Local Hero (Forsyth, 1983)
4. Brazil (Gilliam, 1985)
5. Meantime (Leigh, 1984)
6. Riff-Raff (Loach, 1991)
7. The Ploughman's Lunch (Eyre, 1984)
8. Pink Floyd: The Wall (Parker, 1982)
9. Letter to Brezhnev (Clarke, 1985))
10. Wetherby (Hare, 1985)
Rchives, Rilo Kiley; Bankrupt! Phoenix (April 23); Modern Vampires of the City, Vampire Weekend (May 11); Random Access Memories, Daft Punk (May 17); Trouble Will Find Me, The National (May 20); Untitled, Mariah Carey (May); Anthem, Hanson (June 18th);Untitled, MGMT (June); The Worse Things Get, The Harder I Fight. The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You, Neko Case; Untitled, Goldfrapp; Untitled, Laura Marling; Untitled, Sigur Ros; Untitled, Kylie Minogue
From my Guardian column:—'How fast does a T Rex run? 20 years ago, the technicians at George Lucas’s effects house, Industrial Light and Magic, laboring to finish Jurassic Park in time for its June 11th release date, made a decision whose effects would reverberate for decades to come. “We had a zillion arguments about it,”said animator Steve Williams. Some argued, based on the animals estimated mass, that it ran slower than a jeep, the only problem being that a jeep was precisely what it was required to chase in Spielberg’s film. Others argued that it ran more like a lion: never unless it had to, and if it ran, only for a very short period of time, moving very fast. “Using that logic,” said Williams. “I had to throw physics out the window and create a T Rex that moved at 60mph, even thought its hollow bones would have busted if it ran that fast.”
That decision — cheating mass to achieve the desired velocity — set the pattern for the bendy new laws of physics that were about to unfurl. The eighties had been about nothing if not mass, when roid-head heroes came on like one-man biological armies, wiping out whole buildings, neighbourhoods, villages, with one clench of oily pectoral. “He fills the space, and you have to go with that,” said James Cameron of Arnold Schwarzenegger when casting The Terminator, originally a lithe assassin with a buzz cut, upturned trench-coat, capable of disappearing into a crowd. What he got was 220 pounds of Austrian bodybuilder, who could no more disappear into a crowd than he could perform a pas de deux. As the eighties boomed, so too did the biceps of its movie heroes. ”I always believed the mind is the bestweapon” insisted John Rambo, before strapping some beefy rocket launchers to his forearms, in case his mind wandered.
That all changed in 1993. “Lizard eats Arnie’s lunch,” ran Variety’s headline, after Jurassic Park smushed Arnie’s appropriately titled Last Action Hero at the box office, ushering in a brave new world of computer-generated effects in which the bulk of Arnie, Sly, Bruce and the gang was suddenly a drag — un-aerodynamic. As The New Yorker’s David Denby wrote in his review of X-Men United (2003):—
“Gravity has given up its remorseless pull; one person’s flesh can turn into another’s, or melt, of become waxy, claylike, or metallic; the ground is not so much terra firma as a launching pad for the true cinematic space, the air, where bodies zoom like projectiles and actual projectiles (bullets say) sometimes move slowly enough to be inspected by the naked eye. Roll over Newton, computer imagery has altered the integrity of time and space.”This brave New post-Newtonian universe would belong instead to swift, svelte, low-cal metrosexuals like Keanu Reeves, Matt Damon, Leonardo di Caprio, Joseph Gordon-Leavitt and Andrew Garfield — buff but not ripped, able to cling to a window ledge by their fingertips, or run upside down a corridor, or wrap their tonsils around the gobblydegook of a script like Inception, whose exposition levels alone rendered it a no-fly zone to monosyllabic grunters like Sly and Arnie, whose eloquence at best stretched to a gruff “screw you” as he plunged a power drill into a man’s chest. Jurassic Park put paid to all that — it put machismo on the extinction list.'
Lucas walked into the meeting with an outline of the story, but he wanted to flesh it out with his writer and director. In the transcript, he begins by articulating a recipe for the contemporary blockbuster: the picture will consist of one big set piece after another.
“And each cliffhanger is better than the one before,” Spielberg adds, warming to the idea. “What we’re doing here, really, is designing a ride at Disneyland.”
The hero, Lucas explains, is a globe-trotting archaeologist, “a bounty hunter of antiquities.” He’s a professor, a Ph.D.—“People call him doctor.” But he’s a little “rough and tumble.” As the men hash out the Jones iconography, they refer, incessantly, to other films, invoking Eastwood, Bond, and Mifune. He will dress like Bogart in “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” Lucas says: “the khaki pants…the leather jacket. That sort of felt hat.” Oh, and also? “A bullwhip.” He’ll carry it “rolled up,” Lucas continues. “Like a snake that’s coiled up behind him.”
“I like that,” Spielberg says. “The doctor with the bullwhip.”
After establishing his hero, Lucas proceeds to walk through the film’s plot, beat by beat. There’s the opening sequence in South America, which Lucas describes as “misty and primeval, ‘King Kong’-ish.” (If you want a further sense of what a clever pastiche of earlier films “Raiders” ended up becoming, and haven’t seen this astounding supercut, it is well worth watching.)
Lucas captures the second act of the film pretty aptly:
In the essence it’s just bullshit stuff where he wanders around Cairo trying to uncover the mystery of his puzzle. At the same time, you meet all these interesting characters and every once in a while somebody throws a knife at him, or he beats somebody up, or somebody beats him up. Typical Middle Eastern stuff.
But most importantly, the film had to hurtle at a furious clip. Lucas envisioned the whole story as one elaborate chase: the hero chases Nazis, Nazis chase the hero, and everyone races to find the Ark of the Covenant. They needed a love interest, of course. “She’s sort of a Marlene Dietrich tavern-singer spy,” Lucas suggests, of the character who would become Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen). She works in a bar, he continues. It’s like Rick’s Place, in “Casablanca.”
Kasdan: This is in Cairo?
Lucas: No. This is in Nepal. She’s stuck there.
Kasdan: Who are her customers at this Rick’s Place in Nepal?
The filmmakers want Marion to have a romantic history with the hero. They also want to cast a young actress in her twenties, however. This raises logistical questions. But it’s an easy fix:
Lucas: He could have known this little girl when she was just a kid. Had an affair with her when she was eleven.
Kasdan: And he was forty-two.
Lucas: He hasn’t seen her in twelve years. Now she’s twenty-two. It’s a real strange relationship.
Spielberg: She had better be older.
Over the intervening decades of enormous wealth and success, both Lucas and Spielberg have carefully tended their public images, so there is a voyeuristic thrill to seeing them converse in so unguarded a manner. As the screenwriters Craig Mazin and John August pointed out recently on the Scriptnotes podcast, one delight of reading the transcript is watching Spielberg throw out bad ideas, and then noting how Lucas gently shuts him down. Spielberg, who had sought to direct a Bond movie—and, astonishingly, been rejected—thought that their hero should be an avid gambler. Lucas replied that perhaps they shouldn’t overload him with attributes. (Lucas himself had briefly entertained, then mercifully set aside, the notion that his archaeologist might also be a practitioner of kung fu.) There’s a good reason we seldom get to spy on these conversations: really good spitballing, like improv comedy, requires a high degree of social disinhibition. So the writers’ room, like a therapist’s office, must remain inviolable.
Spielberg fires off ideas with an adolescent’s stamina—and not all of them are bad, either. In fact, among his spontaneous interjections are some of the most iconic episodes in the film. “I have a great idea!” he exclaims. “There is a sixty-five-foot boulder, that’s form-fitted to only roll down the corridor, coming right at him. And it’s a race. He gets to outrun the boulder!”
Lucas eggs him on during these riffs, pushing him to wring the full potential from each sequence. Spielberg conjures a scene in which the hero falls asleep on an airplane, only to wake up and discover that the other passengers have parachuted off, and the plane is in free fall. “He’s trapped in this airplane and it’s going down.”
“Then what happens?” Lucas says. “One sentence further and it’s a great idea.”
Like a number of ideas from the meeting, the flight-from-hell sequence proved too much for “Raiders,” and was incorporated, instead, into “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.” But what is extraordinary, reading the transcript (which runs to nearly a hundred and fifty pages), is how many inspired elements from the film were originally cooked up in these conversations. There is the nefarious monkey in Cairo. (Spielberg: “The monkey should be dressed up as a little Arab.” Lucas: “I like the idea of not only having a turban but also a little backpack.”) There is the clever plot device through which the Gestapo agent Toht burns his hand by grabbing the headpiece of the Staff of Ra, and the scar gives the Nazis a clue to the location of the ark. (Kasdan suggests that a fire might add intensity to the fight in Ravenwood’s bar; the flames heat the medallion—et voilà.) Even the final shot of the film, in which the Ark is filed away in a government warehouse, is settled upon in the meeting. The big winner at the end, Lucas concludes, is “the bureaucracy.”
At one point, hours into the conversation, Kasdan asks, “Do you have a name for this person?”
Lucas: I do.
Spielberg: I hate this, but go ahead.
Lucas: Indiana Smith.
The transcript does not note the sound of crickets, but nor is there any burst of enthusiasm.
Lucas: It has to be unique. It’s a character. Very Americana. Square. He was born in Indiana.
Kasdan: What does she call him, Indy?
Lucas: That’s what I was thinking. Or Jones.
'I’m just about to start my second semester teaching a history of film course at NYU, which means I’ve spent the last few months getting up close and personal with a list of classics — On The Waterfront, Vertigo, The 400 Blows, The Graduate, The Godfather, Raging Bull. I have come out of the experience with three observations to share: 1) The 400 Blows is as close to perfection as anything touched by human hand. 2) James Stewart can’t kiss a woman convincingly. 3) Great films arise when there is a triangulation between director, actor and protagonist — when all three are linked by the same spiritual umbilicus. As first written, Budd Schulberg believed On the Waterfront to be the story of the priest but Kazan knew it to be the younger brother, Terry’s film. In a remarkable letter to Brando which should be read by anyone curious about directing actors, he singled out Terry’s orphan status, and struggle for recognition, explaining, “Marlon this part is much closer to you and to myself, too.” The Greek immigrant who had ostracized himself from the Hollywood community by testifying before HUAC, Kazan saw his own knotted history in the part, and stayed on Brando’s side of the camera during rehearsals. “On the Waterfront was my own story,” he said. “Every day I worked on that film I was telling the world where I stood and my critics to go and fuck themselves.”
This goes beyond merely saying that certain actors become a director’s alter egos. Scorsese worked with De Niro many times but it was only on Taxi Driver and Raging Bull that they seemed to take up residence within the same lost soul, on loan to them from writer Paul Schrader. Two people must tell their most intimate story through third. Mike Nichols struggled for long months to cast Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate, as written a blue-eyed, blonde-haired, southern Californian wasp. For a while, Robert Redford was in the frame. “Are these people having a breakdown?” thought Dustin Hoffman when was approached, “the guys name is Benjamin Braddock. He’s like six feet tall, he’s a track runner.” Nichols told Hoffman, “Maybe he’s Jewish inside.” And of course he was: The Graduate is all about spiritual misplacement, about being a stranger even to your own family, so Hoffman’s feelings of being miscast — which persisted right up to the film’s opening — were crucial. Nichols, the displaced Jewish boy, the lone observer, had finally worked out why the part had been so hard to cast: “without any knowledge of what I was doing, I had found myself in this story”. The list goes on: the Godfather is Coppola’s shadow-King as much as he is Brando’s; One Flew over The Cuckoo’s Nest is Milos Forman’s kiss goodbye to soviet Czechoslovakia as it is Nicholson’s middle-finger salute to Hollywood. It also explains the airlessness that hangs over Citizen Kane, for of course actor, director and part are already united in the singular frame of Orson Welles himself. What was never sundered cannot coalesce." — Intelligent Life
"the book proceeds chronologically through Martin Scorsese’s extraordinarily rich and varied career as a film director. Tom Shone, the British film critic and writer, is currently the film critic for The Economist quarterly magazine Intelligent Life. He was previously the Sunday Times film critic from 1994 to 1999 and has written for Slate, the New Yorker, the New York Times, and the Daily Telegraph. He is the author of Blockbuster: How Hollywood Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Summer, published in 2004. He lives in New York and teaches film history at NYU."Tonight, celebratory meatballs!
“I’m driving one day, the phone rings and it’s Bill Murray, and he says, ‘Ted Melfi, I don’t know who you are, but I love your script.’ He asked me to meet him at LAX and go for a ride as he returned home from a golf tournament. I met him in baggage, we got in a town car. He pulls the script out of an attache case. It’s dog-eared and there are notes all over it. We stop at an In-N-Out Burger, and spent a three-hour drive to I don’t know where discussing the script. He understood everything about the character, and his notes were simple, direct and to the point. He said, this character is who I am at times, and this is how I talk, at times. It was one of those days where you think, if I died tomorrow, it would be okay.” — Ted Melfi, on getting the okay from Bill Murray
"I'd like to thank" — 225
"I love you" — 187
"My wife" — 181
"My mother" – 76
"Wow" – 73
"Cast and crew" – 65
"My father" – 50
“My mom” — 49
"I'd like to thank the academy" – 48
"Harvey Weinstein" – 40
"America" — 40
"Steven Spielberg" — 38
"My husband" — 37
"Thank everybody" — 34
"Thank everyone" — 28
"Fellow nominees" — 26
"My dad" — 24
"My agent" — 24
"My children" — 24
"Meryl" — 19
"Oh my God" — 19
"Thank God" — 17
"England" — 16
"My producer" — 14
"France" — 13
"Gosh" — 12
"My director" — 11
"Martin Scorsese" — 11
"Grandmother" — 9
"Jack Nicholson" – 9
"Oh God" – 6
"I would not be here" — 6
"This is unbelievable" — 5
"Oprah" — 4
"I cant believe it" — 4
"This is incredible" — 4
"I don't know what to say" — 4
"Oh man" — 4
"Thank you, God" — 4
"High school" — 4
"Publicist" – 3
"Go to bed" – 3
"Oh no" — 3
"Good God" — 3
"Whoa" — 3
"Jesus" — 3
"Too many people to thank" — 2
"My Grandfather" — 2
"What the hell" — 2
"Whoo!" — 2
"I had a speech" — 2
"Drama teacher" — 2
"You love me" — 1 (Spacey, 1999)
"Is this really happening?" — 1 (Reznor, 2010)
"Golly" — 1 (Leo, 2010)
"Holy mackerel" — 1 (Streep, 1979)
“I don't believe it” — 1 (Park, 93)
"Lord have Mercy" — 1 (Thornton, 1996)
"I'm not going to thank everybody I've ever met in my entire life" — 1 (McClaine, 83)
"I need a drink" — (Chappel, 94)
"Fucking wonderful" — 1 (Martin, 2011)
"Crap" — 1 (Palance, 91)
"The Academy Awards are known for their bold and unexpected juxtapositions: Burt Lancaster and Ingmar Bergman! Yul Brynner and Francis Truffaut! Sharon Stone and Michaelangelo Antonioni! But nothing quite beats those generated by Michael Haneke’s progress through 2013 awards seasons. For starters, there was Haneke’s appearance at a Hollywood Reporter round-table of Best Screenplay contenders, alongside Mark Boal, John Krasinski and Judd Apatow. The Haneke-Apatow pairing is one serious cinéastes have been awaiting a long time. Finally, the director of The Seventh Continent, about an archetypal middle-class family who have decided, for no apparent, to destroy all their possessions and commit suicide, was in the same room with the director whose most recent film is about an archetypal middle-class family who have decided, for no good reason, to peer up their dad’s butt crack. To say that Haneke brought gravitas to the proceedings is putting it mildly. He had roughly the same effect on the room that black holes are said to have on their surrounding star fields. The first question — would Haneke ever make a film about Hitler? — was met with a swift “no.” The director then proceeded to make mincemeat of Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Downfall (“repulsive and dumb”) before moving onto Schindler’s List. “The idea, the mere idea, of trying to draw and create suspense out of the question whether out of the shower head, gas is going to come or water, that to me is unspeakable,” said Haneke. Not an unfamiliar argument, perhaps, to those familiar with German sociologist Theodor Adorno’s pronouncement that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”, or Haneke’s own diktats on the “totalizing productions” of the “American cinema of distraction,” but still, a little early in the morning for those more used to fielding the question “what will you be wearing?”
Judd Apatow looked as tight-lipped as a kid in front of the head-master who knows beyond all measure of doubt that anything he says will be his Waterloo. The interviewer moved onto John Krasinski.
“John?”
“Yeah — John?” said Apatow, laughing. “When he said the J- part I was so happy it ended with you.”
The lanky, affable Krasinski then spent he better part of a minute untying his tongue on the subject of cinematic manipulation and why it was a Bad Thing, all the while wiggling his feet, as if awaiting rescue from the school bell.
And all for naught. Come the day of the nominations, Apatow and Krasinski didn’t make the cut. Haneke instead found himself nominated alongside none other than Quentin Tarantino, a pairing that but for the resolute atheism of Haneke’s work, is bound to be interpreted as the only proof of the existence of God provided by the 2013 Oscar season thus far. For irony alone, it beats the Haneke-Apatow match-up hands down. It’s like getting Julian Asssange and Dick Cheney to debate state secrecy."
"While I found the depiction of torture to be upsetting–it seemed to me that Bigelow and Mark Boal presented it in a way that leaves it up to the viewer to decide whether or not it was worthwhile or reprehensible..." — Mike Fleming, Deadline HollywoodNotice the baseline assumption behind Flemings comment: the torture worked. Whether it was worthwhile or reprehensible is for us to decide. This is why Boal has done such damage. Because millions now believe that torture produces good information. The baselines of public debate have, for many people, been permanently altered.
From my Guardian column: —
"Best Film / Best Director splits, which use to happen roughly once a decade, have happened four times since 1998. And while Best Actor / Actress used to follow Best Picture the majority of the time, in the last decade only three Best Picture winners — Million Dollar Baby, The Artist, and The King’s Speech — have generated heat for their lead actors. Increasingly, actors win awards for their work in small, low-budget indies in which they gnaw off their left leg. The last film to pull off a sweep of all top five categories — Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Actor, Best Actress — was Silence of the Lambs, over 20 years ago. Increasingly, sweeps are the rarity, not splits. The academy has always liked to “spread the wealth,” but this is something different. It testifies to a much larger fragmentation that has to do with the way business is done in Hollywood. In a nutshell, the global blockbuster economy has scooped out what remained of the American movie business, sending it to the hills, from which it makes the occasional darting foray, under cover of one of the studio’s specialty divisions, or some pocket money from HBO. As Spielberg himself noted in 1997,
"It is getting to the point where only two kinds of movies are being made, the tent-pole summer or the Christmas hits or the sequels, and the audacious Gramercy, Fine Line or Miramax films. It’s kinda like India where there's an upper class and a poverty class and no middle class. Right now we are squeezing the middle class out of Hollywood and only allowing the $70 million plus films or the 10 million minus films."The middle-class he’s talking about is the same vegetable patch in which the Academy used to grew it’s prize pumpkins: — middle-brow, mid-budget, prestige pics like Driving Miss Daisy, Amadeus, and Dances With Wolves, Ghandi, and Out of Africa, which hymned the moral efficacy of a single individual against a backdrop of historical turmoil. It wasn’t quite a genre, but a style of filmmaking — a plush, roseate humanism, with sunsets to match — whose precedents stretched as far back as Lawrence of Arabia and Gone with the Wind. Well, that film is dead, and the Hollywood that made it long since vanished. As one Disney producer recently remarked, "Everything in the middle is toast." Look at the Oscar races of recent years and you’ll see the same pattern of blockbuster versus indie, big-budget versus small: Gladiator vs Traffic, Chicago vs The Pianist, Avatar vs The Hurt Locker, Hugo vs The Artist. The “David vs Goliath” storyline has not become an Oscar season cliche by accident. In this near annual face-off, both nominees have something the other one wants or lacks. Goliath has the technical polish the effects, the box office, the gravitas. David frequently has the acting chops, the human scale, the warmth. Combine them and you’d have quite a picture. Combine them, in fact, and you’d have precisely the kind of Oscar winner your mama used to make, combining epic sweep and intimate detail, and sweeping all the main categories. This year, Lincoln is a close to that endangered species as any. It has received more nominations than any other film (12), has packed a has packed a hefty punch at the box office ($164+ million). It has historical sweep, awards-worthy performances and mahogany-hued gravitas. And yet the very thing that won the critics over — Spielberg’s renunciation of all things Spielbergian — gives it a wobbly front wheel as front-runner. On the other hand, we have a solidly-directed political caper which in another era might have earnt it’s director four stars and a “good job” from the general public, but whose jaunty mix of geopolitics and show-business savvy, together with an underdog status only cemented by Affleck’s director snub, now put it neck-and-neck with Spielberg’s keening thoroughbred."
"... Heartthrob counterbalances juvenility with an aged technique. Immaculate harmonies, taut call-and-responses, and major-key tenderness round out the album. This level of musicianship has been honed for years, from the surprising chord reversals on The Con to the studio flirtations on Sainthood so it’s unfair to call Heartthrob a departure — it’s more like a calculated step forward. And where the synths pause, a piano scale unravels. When Tegan asks “Do you remember?”, a bloom of harmony recalls. “I Was A Fool” takes a long look at failed romance through a dulcet split vocal. It sounds a bit like the Corrs, only it’s magnificent. Heartthrob invokes somber, marble notebook dumps as truthfully as it portrays its lustier foil. “Closer” is, to paraphrase Lena Dunham, a “tits-out” tribute to not getting to know someone. “All I dream of lately is how to get you underneath me,” Tegan sings. The two are more polite than Nine Inch Nails, but not by much. The single is the best pop song of 2013 so far and the credit is largely due to producer Greg Kurstin (Ke$ha, Kelly Clarkson). But “Closer”, and similar songs “I Couldn’t Be Your Friend”, “Drove Me Wild”, pull back on the reigns of contemporary schlock-pop. The vocals don’t compete with a rocket launch or dub-step drop. Instead, Tegan and Sara sound like La Roux crossed with Toni Basil. Genius levels of fun."
— Sarah H Grant, Consequence of Sound
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