Salon.com > True Grit

The Oscars’ black hole of boredom

Mon, 28 Feb 2011 16:01:00 +0000

Oscar has fallen, and he can't get up. Now, if you get that reference, you're probably: A) too old to belong to the demographic that was supposedly being hunted by the producers of Sunday night's dreary and confused telecast, and B) too young to have written most of the shtick. Presented with one of the most varied and interesting lists of nominated films in recent memory -- many of which had actually been seen by large numbers of paying humans -- the academy managed to screw up its messaging totally and create a soul-sucking black hole of boredom.

One way of explaining what happened last night is that the Oscar producers tried to tack young and hip, just as academy voters tried to tack mass and mainstream, correcting for several years of more audacious indie-style winners like "The Hurt Locker," "Slumdog Millionaire" and "No Country for Old Men." The result was a great big middle-of-the-road splat, presided over by a monumentally uncomfortable pair of stars, the miffed-looking James Franco and the perky-like-a-little-coffeepot Anne Hathaway.

Salon’s favorite red carpet moments at the Oscars

Mon, 28 Feb 2011 12:29:00 +0000

On a famous night for fashion, , with commentary found by combing Twitter.

Winners and losers of today’s Oscar noms

Tue, 25 Jan 2011 17:20:00 +0000

If the Kabuki theater of the 2011 Oscar race is to yield any major surprises -- let alone any of the half-baked sociological talking points so beloved by the media -- that wasn't evident in Tuesday morning's nominations for the 83rd Academy Awards. In fact, if there's anything strange about this year's Oscars, it's how predictable they appear.

Conventional wisdom has held for months that "The King's Speech" and "The Social Network," a pair of handsome and talky comedy-drama blends with biographical and historical roots, were the best-picture front-runners, and so it appears. (Furthermore, the latter will win, and I don't care how much tea-leaf reading to the contrary you hear in coming weeks.) Best actress is perceived as a race between Annette Bening's lesbian mom in "The Kids Are All Right" and Natalie Portman's demented ballerina in "Black Swan," and best actor as a race between Colin Firth, for his richly sympathetic portrayal of the stuttering King George VI in "The King's Speech," and, well, nobody in particular. Done and done.

“True Grit”: A ferocious heroine in a classic western

Wed, 22 Dec 2010 02:01:00 +0000

Some people are expressing amazement that Joel and Ethan Coen would set out to make a classic western in the first place, and then that they'd accomplish it. All I can say is that those folks haven't been paying attention. In a recent New York Times article, David Carr described the Coens' richly entertaining new "True Grit" -- which they insist is an adaptation of Charles Portis' novel, not a remake of the 1969 John Wayne film -- as a surprising, family-friendly departure from the brothers' "dark comedies and twisted genre spoofs" and their "murderers' row of cinematic sociopaths." What that means in English, I think, is that the level of violence and cussing in "True Grit" is a lot lower than in "Blood Simple" or "No Country for Old Men," the Coens' previous excursions into the American West.

“True Grit”: How does the original stack up?

Mon, 20 Dec 2010 20:01:00 +0000

Despite the Coen brothers' claim that they have only vague memories of the 1969 version of "True Grit," there isn't a scene in the trailer for their upcoming remake that doesn't conjure its counterpart from the initial film. The plucky Mattie Ross still plummets into that snake pit, although Hailee Steinfeld (born in 1996) is a much younger Mattie in today's version than Kim Darby, who was a 22-year-old mother when the original was made. That iconic scene of the one-eyed reprobate Marshall Rooster Cogburn riding into a line of bandits with guns blazing is also structurally unchanged. The most noticeable difference between old and new takes is that Jeff Bridges' duded-up 21st century Cogburn opts for two pistols instead of John Wayne's odd pairing of a revolver in one hand and Winchester in the other. The clip where Cogburn is grilled by a haughty defense attorney shows an even stronger resemblance between the two films. Both the Duke and the Dude say, "shot or killed" with a similar cadence.

Early Oscar odds: “Inception” vs. “Social Network”

Thu, 21 Oct 2010 11:01:00 +0000

Question: Is it too unbearably early to begin thinking about the annual winter circus that is Oscar season? Answer: Never! Or at least not after the Gotham Independent Film Awards nominations, the unofficial starting gun of award-mania, have gotten us started.

Let me save your comment-typin' fingers a workout and stipulate the following: No, the Oscars are no indication of quality, historically speaking; yes, the best films of the year (whether by my standards or yours) are often overlooked; and yes, covering movies by focusing overmuch on the Oscar race resembles the horse-race coverage of American politics and signifies the downfall of journalism in particular and civilization in general. But you want to know about it anyway, so let's move on. (Check out my Movie List for an utterly subjective and totally non-market-driven ranking of the year's best and worst movies.)

Screened out

Mon, 18 Oct 1999 16:00:00 +0000

Four wonderful novels and one whole career obscured by film adaptations, good, bad and indifferent.

True Grit by Charles Portis

The difference between the novel and the film is that the novel, which like Mark Twain's "Huckleberry Finn" and Thomas Berger's "Little Big Man" perfectly captures the naive elegance of the American voice, is about the inner life of the narrator, a 14-year-old girl. The film is, of course, about John Wayne, who in portraying Rooster Cogburn turned his screen image gently on its ear, and won an Oscar. That was nice, but the book should be better remembered.

Endless Love by Scott Spencer

Behind that titter-provoking Brooke Shields movie is one of the best candidates for Great American Novel
-- "The Great Gatsby" meets Terrence Malick's "Badlands,"
a story of teenage romantic obsession told in a voice
as rich, intelligent and full of emotional nuance as the
best of Philip Roth or Richard Yates.