30 Seconds To Link

Time Warner Do you want to be an indie film icon? Time Warner is hosting a short film competition on their YouTube channel. The prize is a trip to Sundance and presumably the festivities there.
Spangle the slippery slope of the new MPAA ratings. Yes, they're now warning you if a movie shows male nudity. Female nudity is the regular kind, see. No funny stuff!
Self Styled Siren great rangey entertaining review of the Romanian drama Tuesday After Christmas. Though I have to disagree on one major point: I thought the oaf at center was hot in the ways one can be if one happens to be oafish...
/Film Daniel Craig on the set of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

TCM Fredric March is the star of the month. Yay. Make sure to watch The Best Years of Our Lives... since we just discussed it (in case you haven't). I'm DVRing One Foot in Heaven tonight because it's never been able for home viewing.
Mind of a Suspicious Kind on Canadian Oscar submission Incendies
This Recording Molly Lambert wrote a zingy personal runaway train piece on Aaron Sorkin. Loved it but for that "artistic meritocracy" detour sent me spinning. I don't believe in any true meritocracy anywhere. I think believing it it only leads to unhappiness. Success is always about a combo of things including luck, getting to the right places first, knowing the right people, looking the right way, saying the right thing at the exact right time, being in the right mood at the right times, noticing opportunities when they whiz by,  and then... then and only then (and maybe even further down the list) merit. Sorry! There's just too many wildly successful people / things that are indifferently executed, lazily created, or unspecial to believe in merit. Personal button: Pushed! Beep Beep. But Molly is astute...

The internet has taught me that people are radically transparent even when they try not to be. It is a way to channel your id directly, sometimes dangerously, and everyone's id is going "I'M THE BEST LOOK AT ME I'M THE BEST" and then also simultaneously "OH GOD FUCK I AM THE WORST" as an extension of the same thing. Namely that people are fucking fragile, even the accomplished ones.

Dead on. Which is why I try to be transparent. Iwish I was more successful! I'mthebestlookat-ohfuckI....

Antagony & Ecstasy "Beating a Dead Horse" I almost don't want to see Secretariat now. I've been enjoying the merciless reviews too much. The movie might spoil the reviews!
Coming Soon Eric Stoltz as Marty McFly in Back to the Future. What could have been as DVD extras. (Though I'm surprised that contractually, studios can do this?)
MTV Rhys Ifans will play Spider-Man's villain. No word on which villain but if they're going with the canonic Gwen Stacy story it'd be The Green Goblin again.
OUT Cheyenne Jackson's career continues to blossom on television. I'm so embarrassed that the movies are still so hung up about out actors but TV is getting over it already. Oh, movies. Catch up!NY Times Courtroom sketch of Woody Allen & Mia Farrow circa 1993. Ohhhhh...


Refinery and Boy Culture have new Terry Richardson shots of Jared Leto. And speaking of...
Cineboobs Katey drew our attention yesterday to this incredible Jared Leto transformation.



Wow.

Familiar Faces. The David Fincher Hierarchy

By now you've undoubtedly confirmed for yourself that Brad Pitt is not in David Fincher's The Social Network... Unless you count that "Tyler Durden" Facebook profile on a computer screen in Jesse Eisenberg's room (blink and you'll miss it but I did catch it the second time through).

A Fincher sandwich. Brangelina brung the bread.

If you foolishly expected Brad to pop up for a cameo, you're forgiven on account of your totally understandable great love of David Fincher movies, in which Brad often stars (Se7en, Fight Club, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button). They're friends in real life and only one year apart in age. But for now, no new movie collaborations are on the docket. 

<--- Fincher winning an MTV Award for Se7en (1995). It wasn't the first time MTV honored him but more on that later.

Beyond the obvious and uncurious case of Brad Pitt, does the popular director even favor repeat actors?  He's not visibly a creature of habit like Woody Allen, previously featured in this new series, but he does reuse actors, like favorite daubs of paint on his auteurial palette. Let's investigate!

The David Fincher Acting Hierarchy
(Quantitatively Speaking)

4 Films.
There's a three way tie for the top honor, each beating Brad Pitt by one film, albeit with much smaller roles than Brad's movie star status would allow.

• Richmond Arquette. Yes, that's the least famous member of the Arquette clan (brother to Alexis, David, Rosanna & Patricia). Fincher always gives him tiny roles but some are key: he makes the dread box delivery at the end of Se7en, makes the first two kills in Zodiac and also appears in Fight Club and Benjamin Button.
• Bob Stephenson, who you might reconize as a series regular from TV's Jericho or The Forgotten, is part of the SWAT team in Se7en, a security officer in Fight Club and a killer in both The Game and Zodiac.
• Christopher John Fields stretches the furthest back with the director, all the way to Fincher's debut feature Alien³ (1992) where he played "Rains" one of the first victims of the acid-blooded beastie. Poor guy. He also appears in The Game as Detective Boyle, Fight Club's dry cleaning man and he's a copy editor in Zodiac.

3 Films.
A man that needs no introduction.

• Brad Pitt delivered his two best performances,  Se7en (1995) and Fight Club (1999), under the director's guidance. Their third union for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008), though a substantial hit, didn't deliver in the same way. It's one of Pitt's duller performances, Oscar nomination be damned, and entire scenes are stolen from him by the make up f/x and the supporting actors.

2 Films.
The Fincher filmography is, we hope, just barely starting its second act. He's currently making his 9th feature (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) and several people have now appeared in two. It's possible some of the smaller character actors will show up in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo but we won't know they're there till the credits confirm their existence. We'll take the two-fers in semi-random order...

• Holt McCallany is the tattooed prisoner who tries to rape Ripley in Alien³ (clearly he had never seen Alien or Aliens) and he's also one of Tyler Durden's disciples/bruisers in Fight Club.
• Jared Leto Remember that Fight Club line "I felt like destroying something beautiful?" used in connection with the destruction of Jared Leto's dreamy face? Leto and Fincher both obviously took that to heart in subsequent projects, too like Panic Room. (What a strange career Leto has had since the teen heartthrob days.) And think of the visual beating Brad Pitt takes in every Fincher film! Fincher definitely wants to destroy his beauty.
  
• Elias Koteas is one of dozens of cops caught up in the Zodiac case and he's also in Button.
• Rooney Mara is onscreen now in The Social Network and so good in it, too. Like "Mark Zuckerberg" we'll be refreshing our screens until she returns in Fincher's version of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

• Paul Schulze, is probably best known as Nurse Jackie's pharmacist / lover. He appears in both Panic Room and Zodiac (with hair!)
• Charles S Dutton is the prison colony's spiritual leader in Alien³ and a cop in Se7en
• Andrew Kevin Walker is the screenwriter of Se7en but he also acts in the film (he plays "Sloth" ... shudder one of the dead bodies). He's also in Panic Room as "Sleepy Neighbor". Hee.
• Michael Massee who'd you recognize as a regular on one season of television's 24 or FlashForward appears in The Game as an EMT and in the massage parlor in Se7en. I think he's also in Madonna's "Bad Girl" video, directed by Fincher but I'm not positive on this. (But that'd make him a 2+)
• John Getz is Zuckerberg's lawyer in The Social Network and Templeton Peck in Zodiac. Poor man is always shot sitting behind a desk. Does he have legs?
• John Casini is one of the cops in Se7en and a "man in airport" in The Game.

1(+) Film

• James Rebhorn appears in The Game but he's also in the Madonna video "Bad Girl". Just think. If his date with Madonna had gone well, maybe she wouldn't have gone home with that serial killer!? Fincher sure loves the serial killer trope. And "Bad Girl" sure is an interesting piece in understanding David Fincher; the "angel of death" is visualized as a film director.
• Trevor Wright appears in The Social Network but when he was a little kid he appeared in the Fincher directed Paula Abdul video "Forever Your Girl".

1 Film. Hundreds of people share this distinction but the two actresses we'd really like to see David Fincher reteam with are Helena Bonham-Carter who was so against-type revelatory in Fight Club and Nicole Kidman who was supposed to get locked up in that Panic Room but ended up just being a disembodied voice on a phone in the same film.

To come full circle from his music video days, wouldn't it be fun to see three actors Fincher used there in one of his feature films? Why not cast Christopher Walken (Madonna's "Bad Girl"), Elijah Wood (Paula Abdul's "Forever Your Girl" when he was only 8!) or the egregiously underused Lesley Ann Warren (Aerosmith's "Janie's Got a Gun") in a future movie?

Finally... 
We must dedicate this list to the woman who introduced us to one of our favorite directors. David Fincher famously built his visual rep on a series of gargantuan Madonna music videos (Fincher won an MTV Video Award for "Express Yourself" though the big M did not) before escaping to feature films.

 Most people went to see Alien³ because it was the third in a franchise. I went to see it because I wanted to see if the man behind the frankly incredible images in Express Yourself, Oh Father, Vogue and Bad Girl had a feature career in him. He clearly did though most critics and audiences were not impressed. That movie needs a critical reevaluation because it was plain as day even then that he was already a cinematic wizard. My suspicion is that the shockingly nasty and merciless tone threw people off and he lost them in the opening shots by killing off Newt. It was always going to be roughly received, no matter how well made, coming after James Cameron's untoppable Aliens (only among the greatest action films ever made) but the tonal shift further chilled that inevitably cool response.

The second woman we reluctantly must dedicate this to is Paula Abdul since she's also a 4 time Fincher graduate. His videos for her aren't as good but he didn't have as much to work with, you know?

This series is about director's actor preferences but we'd like to note that Fincher, like most great auteurs reuses behind the scenes personell as well. Frequent collaborators include composer Howard Shore (3 films), editors James Haygood (3 films) and Angus Wall (4 films), cinematographer Jeff Cronenwerth (4 films), and production designer Donald Graham Burt (the past 4 films).

If you enjoyed this article, pass it on to your [ahem] Social Networks. Wink! Nudge!
*
*

further reading? SEE THE NEW BLOG
also... "Hit Me With Your Best Shot" on Se7en
and Oscar discussions regarding The Social Network

*
*

Hit Me: "Requiem for a Dream" (10th Anniversary!)

In the "Hit Me With Your Best Shot" series we choose our favorite images from motion pictures. Next Wednesday we're looking at Fellini's La Dolce Vita (1960) in glorious black & white. Today's topic is Darren Aronofsky's haunting addiction drama... in full color.

"If this is red, I wanna know what's orange?"

Requiem for a Dream (2000)

10th Anniversary Appreciation

Requiem for a Dream warns us continually about the addictive power of drugs, dreams, and dieting... but who will warn us about the addictive properties of Requiem for a Dream? The movie is, in its own teeth-grinding way, as hard to kick as Sara Goldfarb's (Ellen Burstyn) diet pills or the harder stuff her only son Harry (Jared Leto) ingests. But I realized something during my umpteenth view that I haven't quite processed before. I rarely watch the whole movie. When the characters get high in Requiem there's often a long slow fade to white to end the scene. My fade to white is the centerpiece monologue, one of the most brilliantly shot and performed monologues ever. After it, I can't take anymore.

Ellen Burstyn is such a quivering ball of despair, held together by willfully hand-stitched delusion... "I like thinking about the red dress... and the television." Jared Leto's aftershock moment in the cab afterwards, from weeping baby to instantly stoned man, is a pitch-perfect exit scene. Aside from two brilliant performances, the cinematography by Matthew Libatique is masterful. The whites are always too white in Requiem; it's not just dope that's making them snowblind. It's a harsh world out there. Also note the sickly green light of the interior Goldfarb apartment. The outside world will swallow you up but you're no safer inside.

But for "Best Shot" let us applaud the split screen. Darren Aronofsky isn't the only contemporary filmmaker who uses the split screen but the practicioners are few. It's a surprisingly versatile technique which can reference additional artforms, show narrative parallels, provide style/eye candy, offer character P.O.V. or heighten the tension of some impending moment both images foretell. In this film, Aronofsky is mostly using it for P.O.V. purposes (Sara staring at the fridge) or as a visual metaphor for disconnectedness.

In one of the best scenes, Harry and Marion (Jared Leto and Jennfier Connelly, both giving the finest performances of their careers) do pillow talk. The images and the the dialogue convey both eroticism and emotional intimacy but the slightly out of sync eyelines and timing (note that the images aren't completely in sync since hands reach faces before arms move and the like) convey that something is broken. Their love may well be real but they're so far removed from their own realities that the connection is inherently false.

Harry: Hey, you know something? I always thought you were the most beautiful girl I ever seen.

Marion: Really?

Harry: Ever since I first saw you.

Marion: That's nice Harry. Makes me feel really good. You know other people have told me that before and it was meaningless.

Harry: Why is -- You thought they were pulling your leg?
Marion: No, no, not like that. I mean... I don't know or even care if they were. From them it was just meaningless, you know? You say it and I hear it. I really hear it.

Harry: You know somebody like you could really make things all right for me.

Marion: You think?

Heartbreaking.

And one more. In a moment of true inspiration shortly afterwards, Aronofsky reminds us of this same self-medicated disconnection in what looks like a split screen but isn't.

Sara has just begun to grind her teeth and retreats to the bathroom mirror to investigate this new development. The diet drugs have kicked in and after a closeup of her shifting jaw, this image. She's not losing weight. She's losing her self.

*

*

"Be Excited. Be Be Excited"
Best Shot Participants

• Nick's Flick Picks   .....purple in the morning
• Brown Okinawa Assault ...blue in the afternoon
• Movies Kick Ass ........orange in the evening
• Stale Popcorn  ...and green at night.
• My New Plaid Pants  ... purple in the morning
  (it's a ritual, see? Just keep repeating it.)
  

 Previously on "Hit Me With Your Best Shot"

• Angels in America (2003)
• X-Men (2000)
• Showgirls (1995)
• Bring It On (2000)
• Black Narcissus (1946)
• A Face in the Crowd (1957)
• Pandora's Box (1929)
• Se7en (1995) 

Related Reading

• Top 15 Movies of the Aughts
• Desperately Apeing Jennifer Connelly
• Top 10 Characters of the Aughts