Well, things are winding up as we get closer to Oscar season. Films like Foxcatcher, Imitation Game, andThe Theory of Everything (all strong contenders for the Best Actor awards) are on the horizon, so let’s kick this column off by examining what’s essentially the only lock in the category, a career-ecompassing piece of brilliance from Michael Keaton. From an Oscar hopeful we take a look at an Oscar winner hoping to sustain their charmingly brief narrative in feature length, NBC’s newest attempt to capture a cultural zeitgeist, a short documentary that attempts to paint the term “gentrification” in a positive light, and we mourn the terrible loss of an under appreciated legend.
Movies: Michael Keaton delivers a transcendent performance in this Oscar worthy trip down the rabbit hole as Regan Thomson, former star of the Birdman superhero franchise, tries to launch a Broadway production of Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Hiring his recovering addict daughter (Emma Stone) to handle gopher tasks to try and keep her on the right track as his own life spirals out of control, Keaton begins to halucinate, convinced his psychic powers have injured his castmate, forcing them to recast a prime role with Edward Norton’s Mike Shiner, a pompous stage actor (reportedly based on Phillip Seymour Hoffman) whose erratic behavior and backstage antics cause even more stress for Thompson and his stage manager Jake (Zach Galifinakis). Each performer within this inventive piece of cinema deserves Oscar recognition, as does its stellar cinematography (much like Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope, the film flows as one singular shot, and its a marvel to behold). It captures the spirit of live theatre with a maddening authenticity, which both draws in those who understands the allure of “the boards” and very likely will alienate those who don’t. Its a strange, divisive film, but its one hell of a ride to take, so those willing to try something new would do well to give the film a chance.
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Two years ago, the 85th Academy Awards presented the Oscar for Best Live Action Short to writer/director Shawn Christensen’s Brooklyn-set drama Curfew (though many felt it should have gone to the German steampunk flick Dood Van Een Schaduw instead). The film was charming and hip diversion about a hopeless man and his inspiring niece, and evidently the success of the short brought Christensen to the conclusion he could “Sling Blade” his successful short into an equally successful feature. However, the endearing nature of the story’s brevity apparently doesn’t translate to a 90 minute run time, taking on a tone of morose and cloying sentimentality and cliches, as Before I Disappear stumbles into cinemas. Skip the full film, and instead seek out the short, and indeed, you’ll see both why people fell so in love with the original, and why it couldn’t work in a feature length format.
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TV: It was late in the season to launch a new drama, but after one episode, its not hard to see why NBC pushed State of Affairs to such a late in the game release. Simply put: the show so tonally inconsistent, narratively over-complicated and stylistically bland. The only thing that comes out clear is the echo of some NBC exec 3 years ago saying “Get us a Homeland!” before that show itself imploded. Here we’re treated to an insufferable Katherine Heigel as CIA operative/Carrie Mathison knock off as she talks to a therapist, has supposedly funny banter with her co-workers and has casual sex (you know, because she’s messed up. Cause when Barney Stinson does it, its because he’s happy, but women, naturally never wanting sex, would only do so if she’s suffering on the inside) because her boyfriend died in Iraq, which she saw because they were on a mission together because that’s…how it works apparently? From the introductory flashbacks of tedium, the pilot drags on insufferably until the show collapses into its own self-importance and implodes like the failed knock-off it is, hopefully to be axed before the season ends, sparing us worse version of an already awful show.
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News: Born Mikhail Igor Peschkowsky in Berlin on November 6th, 1931, a young boy came to America with dreams to entertain. In time, he would help found the Second City in Chicago with Elaine May, whom he met at the University of Chicago. Together, he and May would record a comedy album which won them a Grammy in 1962 for Best Comedy Album, beating out the revered Jonathan Winters. From there, he would take to directing for the stage, winning two Tony Awards for direction (1964’s Barefoot in the Park and 1965’sLuv and The Odd Couple) before being invited to direct the cinematic adaptation of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. And while that film would show the promise of a burgeoning young director, his next would be his masterwork. Though he’d go on to make beloved films like Working Girl, The Birdcage and Silkwood, in only his second time behind the camera, he’d redefine cinema with the landmark, groundbreaking masterpieceThe Graduate, which came to define a decade, a point in human life, and for some the art form of cinema itself. That film would earn him an Oscar, a BAFTA and a Golden Globe. Though the film would lose Best Picture that year, and he never again took the Oscar stage, he took to so many more, winning 3 Drama Desk awards, 4 Emmys, 2 of which were for the HBO adaptation of Tony Kushner’s moving Angels in America, a Film Society of Lincoln Center Gala tribute in 1999, A Kennedy Center Honors in 2003, an American Film Institute Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010, and another 6 Tony Awards, his final being in 2012 for an astoundingly haunting revival of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman starring Phillip Seymour Hoffman in his final stage role.
He would marry Patricia Scott in 1957, but they would divorce in 1960. Three years later he would try again with Margo Callas in a marriage that would survive eleven years and see the birth of his daughter Daisy. After another failed marriage which produced his children Max and Jenny, he would finally settle down with news anchor Diane Sawyer in 1988. Finally, in his apartment in Manhattan on November 19th, 2014, he would suffer a heart attack and die, and be mourned the world over by lovers of every medium his brilliant mind ever touched. Mourned, not as Mikhail Igor Peschkowsky, the little boy from Berlin, but as Mike Nichols, the man for whom “jack of all trades” is an unfit title, as it implies he is also a “master of none”, a fact every glittering trophy that likely adorned the mantle of that Manhattan apartment rightfully defied. Soon, the lights of Broadway shall dim in his honor, and no matter how brightly they shine again a moment later, those sacred stages, much like the silver screen, will forever feel a little dimmer now. Here’s to you, Mr. Nichols. Here’s to you.
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Short Film: Gentrification (Without The Negative) in Columbus, OH is the kind of film its tough to form an objective opinion on beyond “There’s nothing there”. The film has so little substance beyond talking heads explaining the basic idea of “moving into an abandoned neighborhood” that its bereft of any depth, and indeed any true purpose beyond the surface. Of course, that surface itself can be pretty grating as, without any real story to tell that couldn’t be told in one sentence of a news article, we the viewer endure several artists going on and on about the important thing they’re doing because look how cool and innovative they are, etc. Perhaps some viewers can find the short inspiring, but not nearly as much as the speakers within the short wish you to find it, leaving most of us clicking to another browser window amidst what unfortunately feels like douchey, middle-class self-aggrandizing suburbanites.
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