Oscar Noms

13.4%
Daniel Craig, 'Defiance'

11.2%
Benicio Del Toro, 'Che'

34.1%
Richard Jenkins, 'The Visitor'

4.3%
Ben Kingsley, 'Elegy'

37.1%
Mickey Rourke, 'The Wrestler'


Current state of play for Oscar 'Best Actor' Public Poll for LA Times.

Go vote here

OldBoy - The Octopus Eating Scene

With the news that Steven Spielberg is to remake the South Korean psychodrama, everyone is wondering whether that movie's most famous scene is about to be reproduced. Would Will Smith ever chow down on a slippery, live cephalopod?

Ah yes. The Octopus. The scene 'has become an iconic image in the minds of many Asian cinema fans,' according to Variety. It's one of the very few shots that didn't feature in the original Japanese Manga on which the film is based. When I called him up to talk about it, Park Chan-Wook revealed the lengths his actor had to go to in the search for the prefect take.

The scene unfolds as follows.

Choi's character has fought his way out of an inexplicable incarceration after fifteen grueling years of mind-games and private torment. He is now at large in the city, in front of a sushi bar where he receives a wallet of money and a mobile phone from a passer-by. He enters the bar, and sits on one of the red-upholstered bar-stools. He's wearing sinister, comedy sunglasses. 'I want to eat something alive', he intones dully to the pretty woman serving as a sushi chef.

He's given a whole octopus on a green plate. The phone rings, and it's a phone call from his tormentor. After hanging up he rips off the head of the octopus and chews on the tentacles, which sucker and writhe around his face and even creep into his nostrils. He faints face-down onto the sushi counter as the tentacles still wriggle from his lips.

'I want to say straight away that most people in Korea don't normally eat octopus of that size,' he tells me. 'But it's true we do eat it when it's still alive'. Park wanted to show the 'hatred' Choi's character felt after that mocking phone-call from his invisible tormentor, but also his desire to 'touch' after not touching a living thing for fifteen years.

'We filmed past midnight in a real Pusan restaurant called Gozen,' says Park. Pusan is a massive harbour overlooking the Sea of Japan. It's famous for its seafood, as well as its film festival.

'The props department had ordered a total of seven octopi from the fish market, via the restaurant's established contacts, and they were kept in the fish-tanks until we needed them' It was only on the seventh take that they got the final shot they wanted 'with the tentacles really moving around in a good way'.

It turns out that each retake was torture for Choi Min-shik. Despite his formidable action presence, he'ss a committed Buddhist. 'Before every take we had to do a prayer to apologize to the octopus for killing it,' recalls Park of that evening.

'It was very hard for him to kill something like that, let alone seven creatures in a row. It took him a long time to recover'.

Joaquin Phoenix Quits Movies to Focus on Music.

It's official.

Phoenix's publicist, Susan Patricola, has confirmed his earlier comments to TV's "Extra": The upcoming Two Lovers will be his last performance on film.

"He has said that Two Lovers is his last. But this is not strange. Joaquin has been directing music videos and been involved in music for the last number of years," she says.

Phoenix first talked about his decision to "Extra" this week while attending a fundraiser in San Francisco, abruptly ending the interview after the reporter wondered whether he was joking.

The 34-year-old star received Oscar nominations for his roles in Gladiator and Walk the Line. He learned to play guitar on the latter.

Phoenix co-stars with Gwyneth Paltrow in the romantic drama slated for release Feb. 13.

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GONZO: THE LIFE AND WORK OF DR. HUNTER S. THOMPSON [The Review]

When Hunter S Thompson shot himself in 2005, America lost a distinctive voice. Best know as a substance-abusing anarchic sonafabitch in pursuit of the American Dream in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, where he was dubiously channeled by Johnny Depp, a long-standing friend, Hunter’s reputation as a pioneering skeptical journalist, star reporter of Rolling Stone, inventor of the Gonzo style, had long since drifted into obscurity.

One of the good things about this documentary by Oscar-winning film-maker Alex Gibney is how it restores Dr Gonzo to some semblance of seriousness. He was very much more than the Ralph Steadman caricature, a sort of drug-addled holy fool. At one point in the 1970’s, at the peak of his powers, Thompson was a formidable influence on the political landscape of America.

A mixture of talking heads, home videos, TV clips, film clips, recycled documentaries all pulled together with a Johnny Depp narration (sadly only ever reading from the books and never commenting on his own experiences with the man), the talking heads in particular are impressive. It’s a slight surprise when you see Republican Pat Buchanan speaking some warmly about him, and the former president Jimmy Carter not quite bringing himself to admit that it was Hunter’s early unequivocal support for him, when he was just a not very famous governor of Georgia, that later helped him clinch the 1977 election.

This is a feelgood documentary which avoids the darker part of Thompson’s psyche. It skimps on the details of his suicide. It says nothing about his early years. No doubt through issues of space it neglects a good deal of his writing, and skimps the quarrels with his friends. So you get many sequences from an interview with Jann Wenner, co-founder and publisher of Rolling Stone, climaxing as he rubs a tear from his eye, but you hear nothing of his fall-outs with Thompson after 1975. Perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that a New York media mogul should be treated with kid gloves; Graydon Carter is the producer here, after all.

History may well show that Thompson’s most important work was his Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trial ’72, in which he fearlessly exposed both the Washington political establishment and the journalistic cabal that supports it. Gonzo is especially good on this, while at the same time never quite getting to the heart of what Thompson believed politically; the overweening sense is that he simply hated being lied to, and whoever was in the establishment would have received his ire.

There have been several documentaries about Thompson, one of them even cannibalized here, but this is far and away the best of them. That said, those seeking a serious analysis of Thompson’s work will not find it in Gonzo. But what it lacks in seriousness it more than makes up with an enthusiastic, appealing bundle aimed at a younger generation. He may have spent his life attacking the American Dream, but in many ways, and here’s the irony, he actually lived it.

‘Politics is the art of controlling your environment’, he once wrote. He made an art out of politics, and his life became a work of art.


**** out of five


Gonzo receives its UK release on 19th December 2008

Taxi Driver: Story of the Scene

'You talkin' to me? You talkin' to me? You talkin' to me? Then who the hell else are you talkin' to? You talkin' to me? Well I'm the only one here. Who do you think you're talking to? Oh yeah? Huh? Ok.’

Travis Bickle is practising with his guns in front of a mirror in one of the most-quoted scenes in modern cinema. The film is Taxi Driver. The actor is Robert De Niro. One of the last scenes to be shot, the dialogue is improvised by De Niro who borrowed the ‘signature line from a stand-up comic’ according to Amy Taubin in the BFI Film Classics guide for the movie.

The exact identity of this comedian, curiously, remains unrecorded. Scorsese’s follow-up film was to be King of Comedy – his exorcism of the information that John Hinckley had become obsessed with Taxi Driver prior to his assassination attempt on Ronald Regan. Scriptwriter Paul Schrader had in fact used the case of Arthur Bremer – who had tried to assassinate presidential candidate George Wallace – as a template for the Travis Bickle character.

Paul Schrader, who had only seen his first film at the age of seventeen, was an ex critic turned top-dollar screenwriter. He was a protégé of Brian de Palma, for whom he had written the semi-autobiographical Taxi Driver (drawing in fact on his LA experience of a nervous breakdown). With De Palma’s blessing (and some nice percentage points) Scorsese took over the script with De Niro in the lead. Despite De Niro’s recent Godfather II Oscar win the Hollywood establishment made clear its antipathy for the film at an early stage – the budget was hard to raise at a paltry $1.3 million.

The film’s story is simple enough. It’s a mood piece, a love-hate letter to New York in the era of 1970’s urban decay and chequered cabs. De Niro plays the alienated Vietnam vet Travis Bickle (his name a homage to Malcolm McDowell’s character in If…) who drives a taxi for a living; enraged by the spectacle of Jodie Foster as an underage child prostitute, he decides to arm himself with a small arsenal of handguns and ride to her rescue. In the famous mirror scene here he is, stripped to the waist, practising his moves. The mixture of jump-cuts, reverse angles and 180-degree swish pans make it hard to differentiate the man from his mirror image.

Accorsing to Scorsese, Bickle’s fluid moves are inspired by the filching scenes in Bresson’s Pickpocket. And the reason Bickle keeps repeating the line ‘are you talkin’ to me’? If the camera had panned down you would have seen Scorsese himself lying on the floor, mere inches from the actor, wearing headphones, mouthing to De Niro ‘say it again’ out of earshot – worried that the street-noise from bustling New York was ruining the take.

Tarantino Update

The final casting pieces of Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds have fallen into place.

Maggie Cheung has been cast as Madame Mimieux, the French matriarch of the Cinematheque that takes in the protagonist Shosanna (Melanie Laurent) when she is homeless and being sought by the Nazis.

Previously French icon Isabelle Huppert had been attached to the role. But she reacted badly when news leaked out that she had been 'fired' from the role because of diva-ish behaviour. In fact, she had simply not turned up to a reading because no deal had been struck and no dotted line had been signed.

Finally, Samuel L. Jackson will be the omniscient narrator.

Peter Sarsgaard: The Warm Up

How does actor Peter Sarsgaard prepare for his Broadway performances in Chekhov's The Seagull?

Topless, he plays table tennis in his New York apartment, sweating against a gadget that bounces the balls back at him

"It's my pre-show warm up," he says. "I'm in there frequently playing ping pong against a robot, topless and wearing shorts."