bits

From HitFix

Roundup: Soderbergh's plea for 'bananas' McConaughey, and other campaign oddities

Also: Critics split on 'Les Mis,' and stage elite pick their film directors of 2012

By Guy Lodge Friday, Dec 7, 2012 7:57 AM

Today's most enjoyable Oscar-related feature comes from Steve Pond, who has rounded up a selection of the more notable and/or quirky campaign maneuvers from the season thus far, from curious merchandise (a "Lincoln" cookbook, haggis crisps for "Brave") to an Academy rule violation by shortlisted doc "The Invisible War." My favorite, though, is a typewritten letter to BFCA voters from the campaign-averse Steven Soderbergh on behalf of Matthew McConaughey: "I'm breaking my longstanding embargo regarding pleas for recognition... we found [his performance] to be completely bananas in the best sense of the word. As he says in the film, 'The moon is just a chip shot away!'" Now one for for Channing Tatum, please. [The Wrap]

David Hudson rounds up early reviews of "Les Misérables." Not all critics are hearing the people sing. [Keyframe Daily]

Craig Kennedy interviews "Les Mis" star Eddie Redmayne, who has, for many, emerged as one of the film's unexpected standouts. [Awards Daily]

Scenes from the waterborne Paris premiere of "Life of Pi." The French, as with so much in life, just do it with a little more class. [Entertainment Weekly]

An excellent feature on the creation of the alternately jangly  and ecstatic score for "Beasts of the Southern Wild." This is one Oscar nomination that needs to happen. [Creators Project]

I'm loving Variety's awards coverage this year. This feature on top Broadway directors saluting their favorite film counterparts in 2012 (including Mike Nichols on David Chase, and Matthew Warchus on Rian Johnson) is a great idea. [Variety]

Prompted by Greig Fraser's win for the very contemporary "Zero Dark Thirty" at the NYFCC Awards, Jose Solis wonders why the cinematography Oscar so heavily favors period and fantasy films. [The Film Experience]

Ben Affleck and screenwriter Chris Terrio talk about how they balanced a range of genre rhythms, from bouncy satire to white-knuckle thriller, in "Argo." [LA Times]

"I turned that setting off on my TV." Andrew O'Hehir discusses the potentially alienating effect of the 48fps frame rate in "The Hobbit," and how it could affect Peter Jackson's legacy from here on out. [Salon]

Bret Easton Ellis thinks Kathryn Bigelow is overrated because she's a beautiful woman. (Best response I read on Twitter: "So why is Bret Easton Ellis overrated, then?") [The Carpetbagger]

From NYTimes

Hollywood’s Year of Heroine Worship

By A. O. SCOTT

Published: December 6, 2012

Tierney Gearon for The New York Times

Quvenzhané Wallis of “Beasts of the Southern Wild.” More Photos »

Ordinarily, the unemployment of a film critic would be the very definition of a dog-bites-man story, but the circumstances that separated Michael Calleri from his job at The Niagara Falls Reporter, a small weekly newspaper in upstate New York, were sufficiently peculiar — and also sufficiently resonant — to go a bit viral, stirring up a minor storm on the Internet and attracting the attention of a network morning-news show. This was a man-bites-man story that also turned out to be a man-freaks-out-about-women story. In a long narrative uploaded in November by Roger Ebert on The Chicago Sun-Times’s Web site, Calleri quoted an e-mail from his boss, Frank Parlato (curiously unnamed in the article), who had recently taken over as editor and publisher of The Reporter. Parlato was not, to put it mildly, a fan of Calleri’s movie reviews, but his real problem was with the movies themselves.

“I don’t want to publish reviews of films where women are alpha and men are beta,” he wrote. “Where women are heroes and villains and men are just lesser versions or shadows of females.”

The specific movie that set the editor off was “Snow White and the Huntsman,” a retelling of the Grimm fairy tale starring Kristen Stewart and Charlize Theron as the disinherited princess and her vengeful stepmother. The picture’s apparent reversal of gender norms — this Snow White wears armor, wields a sword and leads an army into battle — struck Parlato (who does not seem to have seen it) as emblematic of “a Hollywood agenda of glorifying degenerate power women and promoting as natural the weakling, hyena-like men, cum eunuchs.”

A Hollywood agenda of glorifying powerful women — now that is news! Granting that Parlato’s rant seemed to emanate from the same zone of the culture-war id that undid a few Republican Senate candidacies this year, you might still be inclined to wonder if, in sensing a shift in the portrayal of women, he was onto something — or for that matter to hope that he might have been. After all, the contrary complaint — that Hollywood is a swamp of testosterone, turning out entertainment that marginalizes or condescends to women when it does not ignore them entirely — has been around much longer, and has, to say the least, a much stronger grounding in reality. Have things really changed that much?

There is a smattering of evidence to support the impression that they have, because 2012 was, all in all, a pretty good year for movies and also a pretty good year for female heroism. In addition to “Snow White and the Huntsman,” there was “Brave,” whose flame-haired heroine, Merida, combined Disney-princess pluck with Pixar’s visual ingenuity; “The Hunger Games,” which drew on young-adult literature to find, in the resourceful person of Katniss Everdeen (played by Jennifer Lawrence), a new archetype of survivalist girl power; and perhaps best of all, “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” in which a scrappy child of the Louisiana bayou named Hushpuppy (the amazing Quvenzhané Wallis) faced down hurricanes, monsters and the power of the state. And we should not forget the culmination of the “Twilight” saga, speaking of Kristen Stewart, whose Bella Swan, grown from a sulky, indecisive teenager into a fiercely protective vampire mother, fought alongside her in-laws against the supernatural forces of evil. Forget about Team Jacob and Team Edward: it was Team Renesmee that triumphed in the end.

Of course it would be silly to proclaim, on the basis of a handful of movies, that some kind of grand role reversal has taken place, that cultural power has shifted toward women, or even that 2012 is yet another “year of the woman,” a wishful phrase that surfaces periodically in movies as it does in politics. When the box-office records are tallied, “The Avengers,” a superhero frat party with Scarlett Johansson upholding the “yeah, but it’s not all guys” clause, will most likely be at the top, flanked by Spider-Man, the Dark Knight, James Bond, Liam Neeson and other familiar franchise dudes. At the Oscars, the academy can be expected to continue its tradition of equating gravitas with masculinity. We are likely to see a lot of “Flight,” “Lincoln,” “Argo” and perhaps “The Master” (all fine movies, by the way), though such manly titles might be balanced, or even upstaged, by Kathryn Bigelow and “Zero Dark Thirty,” starring Jessica Chastain as a C.I.A. officer involved in the hunt for Osama bin Laden.

In hindsight, the first decade of the 21st century can be viewed as a singularly male-dominated era in American cinema. In nearly every sector — summer blockbusters, indie dramas, awards-trolling prestige pictures, naughty comedies — stories of men and boys hogged the screens, even as a handful of women found their way into the Hollywood boys’ club of studio executives, A-list producers and big-name directors. Hermione Granger was a wonderful smart-girl role model (and nerd-boy crush object), but it was Harry Potter whose name was on the eight-movie billion-dollar fantasy juggernaut and whose epic coming of age ruled the multiplexes from 2001 to 2011. Keeping him company in the kingdom of the tent poles were Spider-Man, Iron Man, Batman, the X-Men and a lot of other men.

Hollywood used to take pride in its “woman’s pictures,” a category that embraced many of the immortal romances and melodramas of the studio era and that made actresses like Bette Davis, Joan Crawford and Ingrid Bergman into powerful industry players as well as adored stars. The modern analog is the “chick flick,” a demeaning name applied mostly to cynical and threadbare rom-coms trotted out with dreary regularity every spring. Movie comedy, once a lively, if tilted, battlefield of the sexes, regressed into an aggressive puerility that was the flip side of macho superhero self-pity. The big joke, repeated endlessly (and sometimes wittily) in Adam Sandler vehicles, school-of-Apatow farces­ and up-from-mumblecore slackfests is that guys can reject all the traditional trappings of maturity — jobs, manners, hygiene — and that girls will sleep with them anyway. And the girls in these movies are not called on to do much else, except be mommies, nice or mean, symbolic or actual. They can serve as the object of or the audience for the guys’ jokes but rarely the agents of humor in their own right.

The prevalence of this kind of comedy contributed to the rise of the canard — “meme” is too dignified a word — that women are not as funny as men. This notion became, in effect, a self-fulfilling prophecy. It consigned brilliant, frequently sexy screen comediennes of the past (like Katharine Hepburn, Claudette Colbert, Judy Holliday, Doris Day, Marilyn Monroe, to name just a few) to the footnotes of film history and made “Bridesmaids” feel like a groundbreaking event in the annals of pop culture.

Which, in a way, it was. Partly because it introduced many of us to the unhinged, protean comic gifts of Rebel Wilson, and partly because it made you wonder what had taken so long, given that Maya Rudolph and Kristen Wiig and Melissa McCarthy did not all of a sudden become funny in 2011. And you may also have found yourself wondering why it took the wizards of Pixar 17 years and more than a dozen features to arrive at its first female protagonist, or wishing that Katniss Everdeen had been around when you (or your sisters, or your daughters) were young.

The rush to celebrate movies about women has a way of feeling both belated and disproportionate. Pieces of entertainment become public causes and punditical talking points, burdened with absurdly heavy expectations and outsize significance. It should not, after all, be a big deal that movies like “Bridesmaids” or “The Hunger Games” exist, perhaps because it should have been a bigger deal when such movies didn’t. In 1985, the comic-strip artist and memoirist Alison Bechdel first formulated what has since become known as the Bechdel test, which assesses movies according to a three-step formula. To pass the test, a film “1. has to have at least two [named] women in it 2. Who talk to each other 3. About something besides a man.” It is a stunningly simple criterion, and stunning how few movies manage to fulfill it. (Though a visit to bechdeltest.com suggests that things have been improving recently.)

Well, yeah, but wait, hang on. . . . The stated desire for more, better or different kinds of movie representation, like other forms of feminist advocacy, is often met with defensiveness, or heard as special pleading. Girls like action movies, too, so what’s the problem? Women talk about men all the time, don’t they? Lighten up! I promise I will, but not before noting a deep and ancient bias that underlies the way we talk about movies, and what we see in them — namely the assumption that stories about men are large, important and universal, while stories about women are particular, local and trivial.

This is not a prejudice limited to movies, of course. Nor, however, is it a primal fact of human nature, encoded by genes and ratified by custom. The Great Tradition of the 19th-century English novel — so designated by the mighty critic F. R. Leavis, hardly an apologist for feminism — moved through Jane Austen and George Eliot on the way to Henry James and Joseph Conrad and has at its center the implicit assumption that women’s lives and fates are not only interesting but also emblematic, vessels of meaning and mirrors of history. The Dead White Male canon bustles with lively ladies — Emma Bovary, Hester Prynne and, of course, Anna Karenina, who reappeared on-screen this year in the lithe and energetic person of Keira Knightley.

Part of what makes these women and their fictional sisters so fascinating is that they live their lives and exercise their wills in highly constrained circumstances. In a novel by James or Austen, the question of who a woman will be is always bound up with the questions of whom she will marry and whether, in the cases of the great adulterous heroines listed above, she will be faithful to him. These questions are hardly obsolete, but they seem increasingly narrow when measured against the social realities of the time. In Joe Wright’s version of “Anna Karenina,” the heroine is a wild bird in a gilded, highly stylized cage, a modern spirit imprisoned by archaic custom. Her entire world conspires to flunk the Bechdel test. She vacillates between the cold, righteous Alexis Karenin and the shallow Count Vronsky, and neither man seems adequate to the force of her passion, which is finally less erotic than existential.

Love remains part of the great drama (and also the comedy) of existence, and it is not as if the great romantic and melodramatic woman’s-picture themes — maternal devotion, sexual longing, enduring commitment — will ever fade away. Naomi Watts in “The Impossible” is surely the mother of the year, a lioness fighting to restore her family in the wake of catastrophe. All of those themes are breathtakingly present in what might be the single finest film of the year, Michael Haneke’s “Amour,” which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in May. Emmanuelle Riva plays Anne, who is a wife, a mother, a musician and a teacher and whose decline and death, in the company of her faithful husband, Georges, constitute as intensely particular and as grandly universal a story as you could want. Anne is completely (and painfully) human. She is more than the sum of her domestic, artistic and professional roles, even though she bears the traces, in her extraordinary face, of the various roles she has performed.

It is a fact beyond dispute that the roles available to women in what movie-lovers nervously call the real world have expanded significantly in the last half-century, a fact at once celebrated and lamented in backward-looking pop-cultural phenomena like “Mad Men.” But the things that women do — the people they insist on being — remain endlessly controversial. It takes very little for individual tastes and decisions to become urgent matters of public debate. It takes, basically, a magazine cover article. Women are breast-feeding their babies, pushing their children to practice violin, reading “50 Shades of Grey” on the subway, juggling career and child care, marrying late or not at all, falling behind or taking over the world. Stop the presses!

The problem is not that these issues are not important but rather that they are presented with a sensationalism that tends to undermine their ongoing and complicated significance. The behavior of a woman who appears on the public stage can be counted on to provoke a contentious referendum on the state of women in general. Is this good for women? Is she doing it wrong? This happened, in the last 12 months, to Sandra Fluke and Paula Broadwell, to Rihanna and Ann Romney, and, closer to the matter at hand, to Lena Dunham.

You did not really think I would get through a whole essay on gender and popular culture without mentioning her, did you? But the reception of “Girls,” even more than the show itself — which is, to keep things in perspective, a clever half-hour sitcom about a bunch of recent college graduates — is an interesting sign of our confused times. Dunham was mocked for her body, sneered at for her supposed nepotism, scolded for her inadequate commitment to diversity and lectured about the inappropriate things her alter ego, Hannah Horvath, does in bed. That much of the criticism came from Dunham’s peers is both evidence of a robust feminist discourse in the cultural blogosphere and a legacy of the under- and misrepresentation I have been talking about. Dunham was not quite allowed just to explore her own ideas and experiences. She was expected to get it right, to represent, to set an example and blaze a path.

All of which she did, but not quite in the ways that immediately grabbed attention. “Girls” is not primarily about kinky sex, dull boyfriends and creepy older guys who suddenly turn into marriage material (or not). Its real subject is the fraught, funny relationship, in Hannah’s life, between ambition and friendship.

That is also, by the way, the subject of “Bridesmaids” and, even more so, of “Pitch Perfect,” one of the unheralded hits of this year and yet another platform for the fearless and hilarious Rebel Wilson. There are boys in the movie, but the romantic prospects of the heroine, Becca (Anna Kendrick), are even less relevant to the story than those of Katniss Everdeen. The real arc of “Pitch Perfect” is Becca’s growth as a singer and a functional member of a fractious all-girl a cappella group. The movie is, literally and symbolically, about a young woman finding her voice.

As is Sally Potter’s “Ginger and Rosa,” an uncommonly sensitive early-’60s coming-of-age story anchored by Elle Fanning’s subtle and heartbreaking performance. Her character, Ginger, is the child of Bohemian British parents who longs, above all, to be taken seriously, to grow from a precocious schoolgirl into a grown-up poet.

My point is not to hold any of these characters and films up as positive images. Nor is the purpose of this year’s photography portfolio to advance an agenda, score an ideological point or address a historic imbalance. It is, instead, to acknowledge the range and depth of 13 remarkable and very different actresses, and also to convey, through the suggestive medium of pictures and words, an array of intriguing, troubling, inspiring and contradictory possibilities. A partial list of the roles the women in these pages have played this year would include a slave, a sex therapist, a trainer of killer whales, a randy Texas dowager, a 19th-century factory worker driven to prostitution and the two most compelling and morally complicated characters in the semicompelling, morally simplistic “Dark Knight Rising.” And also, of course, Katniss and Hushpuppy, authentic superheroes with the power to turn the world upside down.

A. O. Scott is a chief film critic at The New York Times and a frequent contributor to the magazine.