The use of the word “armed” isn’t often a point of argument in movies today. In fact, jousting over rhetorical choices typically isn’t a point of contention in entertainment at all. It is, however, a major focal point in the new Roman Polanski film, “Carnage,” which takes pleasure in the particulars of language and shows what can be done with an engaging script and four strong actors.

The film stars Oscar winners Kate Winslet, Christoph Waltz, and Jodie Foster and co-stars Oscar nominee John C. Reilly. Aside from a brief scene at its beginning and end, a cameo from the director and a few voices heard over the phone, those four constitute the film’s entire cast.

Its story focuses on two sets of parents who come together to discuss a fight between their sons. Reilly and Foster play Michael and Penelope Longstreet, the parents of the victim in the fight, while Waltz and Winslet play Alan and Nancy Cowan, the assailant’s parents. The concept is simple: these four parents spend the film discussing the incident that left the Longstreet’s son with two teeth knocked out of his mouth and several facial abrasions.

What’s interesting about “Carnage” is how that confrontation becomes so meaningless during the course of this film’s short running time -  eighty-nine minutes. The fight between the boys was simply that: a fight between two boys. It was simple and easy to analyze.

The battle between the four adults about the incident and its aftermath is not so easily understood.

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Jodie Foster’s The Beaver was one of the more controversial releases this year, thanks to the latest highly publicized incidents during the production surrounding its lead actor, Mel Gibson.  Once Hollywood’s greatest working leading man, Gibson has descended to a new low in terms of public opinion.  Yet in light of these incidents, he delivers his most personal performance yet in this movie.

Gibson plays Walter Black, a hopelessly depressed man, whose level of self-loathing has forced his wife, Meredith (Jodie Foster), to kick him out of the house.  In a drunken haze, Walter find a beaver hand-puppet in a dumpster and takes it to his hotel.  Walter attempts suicide in a moment of desperation, but is put off by the cockney accented voice of the beaver puppet, which proclaims is out to save his life.  Hiding behind his newfound beaver puppet persona, he returns to life with confidence and swagger, though it causes confusion and frustration to those closest to him.  Meanwhile, Walter’s awkward son, Porter (Anton Yelchin), makes money writing papers for kids a school.  When the silently troubled head cheerleader at his school (Jennifer Lawrence) approaches him to write her graduation speech, he’s forced to face his own family issues while trying to help her tackle her own demons as well.

The Beaver has one of the most bizarre, interesting, and beautiful performances of Mel Gibson’s career.  The vast majority of the film is spent with the actor in beaver-mode, as he skillfully belts out a cockney accent, along with perfect puppeteering to go with it.  One could be forgiven for mistaking Mel’s accent for the voice of Ray Winstone.  Gibson hides behind the puppet in what seems to be a defense mechanism in the movie’s toughest scenes, even when the film delves into truly strange territory, the man sells everything that’s going on with his performance.

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Speaking at a press conference in Cannes for her new film “The Beaver” Jodie Foster said she believed Mel Gibson is ‘probably the most loved actor in Hollywood’.

It’s not often that a popular actor sunk in disgrace and surrounded by media and movie-biz hostility can mount a comeback. Fatty Arbuckle—who was famously railroaded—never managed it; and Jeffrey Jones probably never will. So The Beaver is a triumph for Mel Gibson. Diving down into the alcoholism and manic depression he has implicated in his appalling behavior in recent years, Gibson has resurfaced with one of his most moving performances. This is all the more remarkable because the film’s premise seems so wildly unlikely, if not ludicrous.

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Gibson’s character is Walter Black, the successful—or once-successful—CEO of a New York toy company. Walter is being crushed to the ground by clinical depression and has just about given up hope. He’s tried some desperate therapies—from drum circles to self-flagellation—but now maintains on heavy meds. At work he’s a zombie; his staff is demoralized and profits are down. At home he spends most of his time in bed, smothering his pain in sleep. His loyal wife, Meredith (Jodie Foster), has stuck by him; but while the youngest of their two sons, Henry (Riley Thomas Stewart), still loves his dad, the oldest, teenage Porter (the excellent Anton Yelchin), has turned away in contempt.

Rooting around in some castoff junk one day, Walter finds an old hand puppet, a cute, nubbly beaver. When Meredith finally reaches the end of her marital tether and tells him to move out of the house, Walter takes the beaver with him. Checking into a motel, he gets drunk in his room and suddenly hears a voice: “Oi!” The Cockney accent is familiar, and at first we wonder if Walter has suddenly been joined by Michael Caine. But no—it’s the beaver. “I’m here to save your goddamned life,” says the puppet, no longer quite so cute.

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Something happened in 1991 that my daddy never believed possible: Tommy Lee Jones played a gay man.

And the shrill and very vocal faction of the homosexual community cried foul at not only his portrayal, but of the portrayal of homosexuals in “The Silence of the Lambs.” GLAAD led a protest of “Basic Instinct” before the movie had even wrapped principal photography, and the controversy continued when Tri-Star released the picture during so-called Awards Season in 1992.

The nominees:

“J.F.K.” – Great filmmaking and mythmaking.

“The Silence of the Lambs” – The winner, released all the way back in February of 1991, and a genuine crowd pleaser.

“Beauty and the Beast” – I’m not saying it’s a bad movie, but it’s inclusion smacks of tokenism, as in, “There. We nominated an animated movie. Now leaves us alone.”

“Bugsy” – Another good movie, but I remember thinking, “If this gangster movie wins after ‘Goodfellas’ lost, I’ll threaten a boycott like my gay friends did.”

“The Prince of Tides” – The stink here was that Babs wasn’t nominated for best director. It had to have stung that Ridley Scott was nominated instead for directing “Thelma & Louise,” a wrongly politicized road movie about two women on the run from the law. Babs also missed out on scoring one for women when John Singleton was nominated for “Boyz N The Hood.” The irony, I guess, is that all these years later, both “The Prince of Tides” and “Boyz N The Hood” feel like TV movies.

What should have been nominated:

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Welcome to today’s edition of Hollywood Values:

Mel Gibson goes on a racist tirade and becomes a Hollywood pariah whose career is pretty much over. So over that he’s kicked off of ”Hangover 2″ and HuffPo feels the need to run polls like this.

Fair enough…

Meanwhile, Roman Polanski, a child rapist who fled from justice, is currently in accolade Heaven over a pretty marginal movie and already gearing up for his next one.

And no, we will never stop reminding Hollywood of this. (more…)

Jodie Foster is a two-time Academy Award winner and one of the most respected and well-liked movie stars of our time. She minds her own business, does her job better than most and exhibits nothing but old school class in her personal life. If anyone’s ever had an unkind word to say about her, I haven’t read it and I most certainly haven’t written it. Like many, I was disappointed when she signed on for Roman Polanski’s new film but wasn’t about to judge someone I’ve respected for decades over a single misstep. There’s just too much goodwill there and you can add to that the points she earns for consistency in her willingness to publicly stand by her longtime friend and colleague Mel Gibson, when almost no one else will — including many vigorous and outspoken supporters of a fugitive child-raping director.

The raving left-wingers at Salon, however, have decided that Foster’s loyalty to the embattled Gibson not only warrants criticism (fair enough) but an entire Orwellian “rethink” (their chilling word, not mine) of her as a human being and as an actress. In a piece subtitled, The movie icon continues to go to bat for her embattled friend. Maybe it’s time to rethink the acclaimed actress, Salon writer, Mary Elizabeth Williams, unsheathes the long knives of the New Blacklist:

The time has come to admit it — Jodie Foster is not all that. …

Yet even when she’s not aligning herself with rageaholics and fugitives, Foster’s cinematic track record is something of a head scratcher. Her powerhouse glory days of movies like “The Accused” and “Silence of the Lambs” are now two decades in the past. She did a neat turn in “Inside Man,” but “Flight Plan,” “Panic Room” and “Nim’s Island” doesn’t exactly amount to a stunning body of recent work. (And if you want to blame it on her age, note that Laura Linney, Joan Allen, Hope Davis, Patricia Clarkson, Mary Louise Parker and a slew of other actresses of Foster’s generation seem able to find challenging, award baiting roles in quality films.) Foster can pick and choose. And often, she chooses dreck. …

She’s made a string of forgettable to downright offensive movies. And she thinks Mel Gibson is “incredibly loved.” So why are organizations like Elle handing her accolades? Why are fans, especially women, especially women who fell in love with her sometime around “Bugsy Malone” not coming out and saying, she is no longer our role model?

We shouldn’t be surprised by this. After all, this is the same publication that was so freaked out over “Secretariat” being openly marketed to we churchy types that one of the nicest things they screamed at it was “master race!” (more…)

In the Age of the Hollywood Sucker Punch, betting your time and dollars on movies and TV is more perilous than ever.

As often as not, you can expect to fork over $20-$40 at the theater expecting to laugh, cry, and be entertained. . .

. . . only to find yourself trapped in a widescreen, 3D, surround sound, stadium-seated liberal indoctrination chamber.

With TV, you can dedicate months and years to becoming a dedicated fan of a series. . .

. . . only to suddenly start getting lectured on what creeps you and your family are by dint of your politics/religion/gender/race/fill-in-the-blank.

Closing in on two years patrolling the mean streets, Big Hollywood already has dozens of posts that document these lies, cheap shots, and propaganda in grim detail. Amidst the cultural carnage conservatives step ever more gingerly, sifting through the rubble for scraps worth investing in.

One way most of us navigate this minefield is by discerning which actors — big, well-known, picture-opening actors — are worth trusting on name alone. No one has a perfect record, but the best gain our confidence by routinely choosing projects that hew to some modicum of quality, decency, and fair play. You may not agree with the underlying message or political slant of their movies, but that’s not the point — it’s completely possible for conservatives to love great liberal movies and vice versa. Rather, these actors convince us over the course of their careers that they aren’t likely to sucker punch their fans, or to embarrass their country, profession, or family by allowing politics and prejudices to tarnish their public reputations and filmed entertainments. (more…)

In the kick-off to BH’s “Death of the Movie Star” series, Steven Crowder posited that new media has rendered the Hollywood machine irrelevant. If you have the talent and the drive, you don’t need them. And writing for the UK Telegraph earlier this year, David Gritten has a similar theory in that Hollywood can no longer afford A-list stars (who are also aging and may not appeal to younger audiences) and is relying more heavily on lesser-known names and reality-based entertainment. They both make valid points. However, I think there’s something more to this rapidly spreading phenomenon.

Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire – class and glamour during Hollywood’s heyday

The term “movie star” used to mean a lot to the American public – glitz, glamour, excitement. It embodied an “other worldliness,” if you will, that took hard-working people away from the daily grind and gave them something thrilling and new to take their minds off of their troubles. An afternoon or evening at the movies really meant something then, and the stars who populated the silver screen lived up to the hype – publicly, anyway. This was due to the studio system. During the 1930s and ‘40s:

…the major studios groomed their stable for stardom by picking suitable vehicles that developed their personae—sophisticated comedy for Grant, intense melodrama for Davis, and so on. They also controlled the stars’ publicity, doling out digestible, often-erroneous tidbits on their personal lives for the fan magazines and gossip columns.

Once the studio system was broken, however, we began to see Tinseltown’s residents through a very different lens. Stars began to develop their own careers, making their own decisions and living with the consequences, both good and bad. And the press, which was once held at bay by the studio bigs, had much more access to celebrities. Television talk shows like The Tonight Show and Merv Griffin brought us even closer to our idols. They became…well, more like us, except with oodles more money, fancy cars, designer duds and entrée into exclusive clubs and resorts. (more…)

I was head of the film and broadcast department for a talent agency in the Detroit Metro area. As a casting agent my job was to get the character breakdowns, hold auditions and cast roles for film, TV and radio. My staff and I cast Zebrahead, Hoffa, Renaissance Man to name a few and many award winning commercials. I left the casting biz to coach voice-over artists and produce their CD’s, along with doing free-lance talent coordination for ad-agencies, where I negotiate celebrity talent.

I recently read Apocalypse Near? Liberal Actresses Line Up to Star in ‘Atlas Shrugged’  by Pam Meister and wanted to offer the perspective of someone who has experience in casting. The post told of Julia Roberts and Angelina Jolie having an interest in the role of Dagny Taggert. It was offered up, and several commenter’s mentioned that they feared Julia Roberts might change the script to reflect her liberal viewpoint. I don’t really think that should be a concern because many times certain actors are mentioned only to create buzz for a project, or to get their name out there, or both. I believe such is the case with Julia Roberts in this story. (more…)

Over the weekend, I was pondering why the low budget, standard genre pic The Haunting in Connecticut (Lionsgate) has become a nifty little box office hit. The film added almost $9.5M over the weekend for a new 10-day cume of $37M, and the only conclusion I have been able to reach is that it’s all about the poster.

Creepy, right? I have not seen Haunting and will probably wait for DVD or pay cable, but that is a weird, startling, attention-grabbing image. As a movie junkie, I love good movie art. The best movie posters are evocative. They capture what a movie is all about without giving away the mystery. There are certain movie posters that instantly put me back in that theatre experiencing the film for the very first time. The best movie posters are not just promotional tools. They stand as a work of art on their own. These are my favorites, buit it is by no means a definitive list. Feel free to add your favorites (and subtract any of mine).

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