Gossip Central

Drive My Car: An Oscar Game Changer from Japan

Life moves slowly. Loss. Grief. So much happens in Drive My Car, Japan’s entry for the Best International Film Academy Award, it is amazing that the movie is only two and a half hours long. That it has been named Best Film by the venerable NY and LA Film Critics can make you think, Parasite all over again, but that Best Picture Oscar winner from Korea is action-packed, a satiric bloody nightmare romp, while the longeuers of Drive My Car drive home deeper, more difficult truths, and how we process them. An acclaimed theater director (Hidetoshi Nishijima) loses his beautiful wife. Two years into his grief, he takes a job directing Uncle Vanya in Hiroshima. A young woman (Toko Miura) from a remote mountain town Hokkaido, dour, her face expressing oceans of sadness, chauffeurs him around in his red Saab. Producing Chekhov in Japan may represent one aspect of multi-culturalism, but the players speak many languages, including sign. And perhaps most poignantly, it takes more than translation to make inner lives connect.

Pedro Almodovar’s Parallel Mothers Closes The New York Film Festival: Penelope Cruz is Spain’s Sophia Loren

Pedro Almodovar’s Parallel Mothers Closes The New York Film Festival: Penelope Cruz is Spain’s Sophia Loren loves women. He also loves actors. He could not have been more passionate introducing the stars of his new movie, Parallel Mothers, closing night of the New York Film Festival: Penelope Cruz and Milena Smit. Beautiful women, one older, the other younger, they play women who bond in a maternity ward, each birthing a daughter, and if you know this Spanish auteur’s oeuvre, the event occasions the usual high stakes emotional melodrama for which he famously directs the women to pull back the tears.

For this film, he folds their stories into a historical memory, a time when Fascists came door to door in the Spanish countryside arresting men, shooting them, their fates tied together with barbed wire in mass graves. Having been told of this horrific event by her grandmother, Cruz’s Janis (named for Janis Joplin) seeks to unearth this site in her village so that the men—fathers, brothers, uncles-- can be properly mourned and remembered.

Oscar Women: What They Wore

One could suspect from the way the Oscars were put together at LA’s Union Station, this was an unusual year. How do you dress for well, the imperative to simply show up? Some women took the Hollywood glam route: Amanda Seyfried’s red ball gown seemed from every camera angle to fill the room. Ditto for Angela Bassett’s pouf shoulders. Cleavage and bare midriffs were a thing. And others rocked in covered up understatement: Olivia Coleman in demure Dior, Glenn Close dazzled in Armani Prive, even when she was wiggling her butt. The Nomadland women from multi-awarded Chloe Zhao to Frances McDormand whose wolf howl was the most musical note of the evening wore dour. Even the real-life nomads, like Swankie, so endearing and colorful in this desert toned movie, made up and coiffed, looked more dressed up.

But, had she attended, what would Ann Roth have said or worn collecting her Oscar for costume design? A second-time winner at 89, like Anthony Hopkins at 83, she sat this one out. In 2012, Roth was honored for her work at the Hamptons International Film Festival. Here’s what I learned about her illustrious decades-long career:

Midnight Cowboy in 1969: How to Win an Oscar Without a Campaign

This week, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures sent out a Timeline featuring many “firsts:” among them citing Midnight Cowboy (1969), the first X-rated film to win Best Picture. With Glenn Frankel’s new book, Shooting Midnight Cowboy: Art, Sex, Loneliness, Liberation, and the Making of a Dark Classic, much has been written clarifying that X-rating: “Few had high expectations that an X-rated movie about an aspiring male prostitute made in New York . . . would do well in the Hollywood-centric Oscars.”

But a more unusual circumstance for the film’s Oscar success was that it won with almost no campaign to shepherd it along with Academy voters—certainly, as Frankel notes, it had “no money for the lavish events that Universal and 20^th Century Fox” hosted for Anne of a Thousand Days and Hello Dolly, the kind of thing that in recent years Peggy Siegal did so well, hired by the studios to host luncheons that featured filmmakers and actors in high-minded conversation about making art. Instead, the Midnight Cowboy producers made sepia-toned stills, using different ones for each ad. Frankel quotes Gabe Sumner at United Artists, “It was a terrific movie. We didn’t need anyone to stand up and give a speech. We knew what we had.”

The Man Who Sold his Skin: Skin in the Oscar Game

          
“You want my soul?”

            “I want your back.”

Provocative and transactional, the dialogue illustrates the film, The Man Who Sold his Skin’s pact with the Devil. From Tunisia, the film frames director Kaouther Ben Hania’s central conceit for the state of Syrian refugees, and is nominated for this year’s Best International Feature Academy Award.

The devil in question is Jeffrey Godefroy (Koen De Bouw), artist supreme, who needs a man’s back to create his latest work of art. Already a highly marketable name, Godefroy (free of God?) and his assistant Soraya, a blond Monica Bellucci, make an offer to Sam Ali (Yahya Mahayni) from Raqqa who fights for freedom, and wants only to be with Abeer (Dea Liane), the girl of his dreams, now married to a diplomat and living in Brussels. Godefroy makes him an offer he cannot refuse, involving his back, and his presence as an art installation. His journey to Abeer takes more than a passport.

Oscars 2020: Parasite Upset

Okay, we did see it coming. Parasite certainly made a big impression. A stylish hoot, the feature was the edgiest, artiest of the lot. Director Bong Joon Ho needed a drink after his writing win; maybe he thought his run would end after that, but the academy shed its love for him over top honors. Much like our current political scene, where the line-up of democrats does not seem to yield any one clear candidate, the Oscars, with 1917 looking like a Best Picture winner, had stellar contenders. The mood had shifted over the course of the award season. I, for one, wished more love could have been shared with The Irishman, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, or Little Women, that Parasite would beat Pain and Glory for Best International Film, and that would be that. Still, in the end, the Oscars 2020 show proved to be more entertaining than expected. As the dear departed two-time nominee Sylvia Miles used to say every year, the voting algorithm for Academy Awards is reliably unpredictable. Expect an upset.

Martin Scorsese’s Rat Pack

Whatever else happens, no matter what other Oscar nominations The Irishman garners, Best Picture is guaranteed. The New York Film Critics Circle and National Board of Review, to name two groups, have already augured its success. But of course, winning is anyone’s guess. After decades of movies, Martin Scorsese seems to take the award season in stride, flanked by his posse including Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci, as he was this week at Tao for the NYFCC. Picking up an award at Tao this week, jet lagged following the Golden Globes on the other coast, he spoke about another of his pack, Harvey Keitel, wanting to jump ship at that event. “We were sinking,” he confessed defeat. Harvey switched tables for Tarantino’s.

But there Marty was front and center at Tao, with everyone paying homage to the master as they took the stage.

Cats: The World Premiere: T. S. Eliot, Can You Hear Jennifer Hudson?

The latest entry into the Oscar race is Cats, a feature adaptation of the now iconic Andrew Lloyd Weber musical based on T. S. Eliot. I must mention “The Wasteland” poet because at no time during the state of the art premiere this week at Alice Tully Hall did anyone acknowledge this bona fide cred. Well, the musical is what its audience calls for: spectacularly beautiful to look at, with exceptional voices rendering the musical’s songs --or song. As one wag put it, I have never seen a whole feature devoted to one tune. That song, “Memories,” sticks in the craw, grating in its familiarity and cliché, but Jennifer Hudson as the ousted Grizabella, manages to give it new oomph. It soars.

Remembering D. A. Pennebaker: Through a Beat Lens

Back in 2002, the one and only time I attended the Cannes Film Festival, I was at dinner with D. A. Pennebaker, his wife and film partner Chris Hegedus, and my friend Roger Friedman who had made a film with the documentary team called Only the Strong Survive, an important historical exploration of R&B and soul music that was premiering at the festival. I was attending as a journalist, but Pennebaker knew I was a scholar of the beat generation literati, and as he did with every subject you
could mention, he had a story to tell.

On this occasion, he recounted his having talked to Kerouac about doing a film of On the Road, that is, Kerouac asked him to do it, just as he imagined Marlon Brando starring. Penny, as he is known, was going to start the film with the character of Dean, the legendary “son of a Denver wino” stealing cars, maneuvering them around a parking lot. It was Penny who gave me a new window into the subject I thought, after having written several books on Kerouac, I knew very well: how the newly created highway system in America promoted the fantasy of fast car escapes from the restrictions of society: Huck Finn’s raft supplanted by the automobile. The film never left their machinations.

Rendez-Vous with French Cinema Opens with Pierre Salvadori’s The Trouble with You

The annual fete de films, Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, a collaboration between Unifrance and the Film Society of Lincoln Center, opened this week with a comedy, The Trouble with You. Director Pierre Salvadori introduced the film noting that most filmmakers in France are French New Wave influenced, but he is more inspired by Hollywood. “It’s more about my love of stories, of fiction, of Ernst Lubitsch and Billy Wilder,” he explained. “My film is funny and sad. Feel free to laugh and cry.”

And so when the Trouble with You opens with a violent police action, the movie seems a startling homage, until the realization hits: a police procedural is appropriated for farce as only the French can do. Salvadori brought with him his leading man, Pio Marmai, with whom he has worked in the past. In fact, the last time he came to New York to promote a Salvadori film, he—in a drunken state— got a tattoo, the word for fighter misspelled.