Movie Nation

And “Martha Marcy May Marlene” and “Identity” and so many other films. He’s been around for years and years, and every now and then I’m flipping the dial and there he is in another film that I hadn’t realized he was in. “Winter’s Bone” changed his profile and MADE us notice.

The roles that made John Hawkes famous — in “Winter’s Bone,” and “Martha Marcy May Marlene” — had the rawboned Minnesotan showing off a frightening and fierce charisma. He was playing men you just knew were capable of violence.

So he wasn’t on director Ben Lewin’s short list for “The Sessions,” a biographical tale of a sympathetic, quirky quadriplegic poet and journalist who wrote about losing his virginity at 36, by hiring a sexual surrogate. But casting director Ronnie Yeskel insisted that Lewin take a look.

“I saw this creepy old guy who scares the wits out of you and thought, ‘What IS she thinking?'” Lewin recalls. “When I met him, it was quite clear, he isn’t creepy. In many ways, he’s much more like the real Mark O’Brien — witty, warm. You get past ‘Winter’s Bone,’ and his whole body of work makes you appreciate just what a chameleon he really is.”

Hawkes, whose career as a character actor only picked up as he hit 50 (he’s 53, now), connected with O’Brien, a San Francisco polio survivor who longed to find physical and emotional love “before my expiration date,” as he puts it in the film. And Lewin, a polio survivor himself, gambled on that connection.

“He’s a guy who lives in his head a lot of the time,” Hawkes says. “Actors do that, too. Creative people spend a lot of time ruminating. We’re a thoughtful, analytical bunch.”

Director and star wanted to avoid, as Lewin put it, “any ‘Cripple of the Week’ touches in the story.” Hawkes would read O’Brien’s writings to get “inside his head,” and Lewin would make sure that the man’s sense of humor — something the writer-director shares — shone through.

“John took getting this fellow right personally,” Lewin marvels “It went far beyond professionalism.”

The story of “The Sessions” is set in 1980s San Francisco. O’Brien writes poetry and essays and journalistic pieces for local publications. He does this from his bed, or the gurney he has to be pushed about in. Each night, he sleeps in an iron lung, which keeps him breathing. His heart and his body are telling him that he wants more out of life. He wants to experience love. After getting the go-ahead from his hipster-priest (William H. Macy), O’Brien contacts a sexual surrogate (Oscar winner Helen Hunt) who counsels and instructs him in all matters sexual.

It’s a film of clinical, awkward, romantic and quite frank sex scenes.

“You can’t get embarrassed,” Hawkes says. “A good story makes you forget about how raw the situation is.”

Lewin’s way of making his actors feel comfortable with those scenes was to make them uncomfortable. He kept them apart and didn’t let them rehearse the physical stuff.

“They didn’t know each other,” Lewin (“Paperback Romance”) says “They’d never worked together. And there was a kind of natural anxiety that both of them had about what this was going to be like. That mirrored the reality of the situation. So I kept them apart to take advantage of that electricity. That first scene, where she had to undress him, was tempting to rehearse. But it was so much more effective when she showed up without having any real idea of how it would be done.”

The result is one of the year’s most critically-acclaimed films, with Hawkes praised for his “full-bodied vocal and emotional characterization” of a character with a “frail corporal presence.” (The Hollywood Reporter).

Hollywood is sending Hawkes plenty of studio picture feelers these days. But even though he’ll never get rich working on the indie side of things, that’s where he likes it. “I’m paid with experiences, with the friendships I make.

The greatest pleasure of this job is learning about things you didn’t know much about, whether it’s longline fishing (“The Perfect Storm”), running a hardware store in the gold rush (“Deadwood”), scalping tickets at Wrigley Field (“Hardball”) or learning to play the drums (“A Slipping Down Life”). 

“And working this way, every role is one you just HAVE to do, because every film that’s hard to find financing for, becomes your dream dream role.”

After “Contraband,” a break-out hit of last January, the first month of the year seems to belong to Mark Wahlberg.

He is to January what Will Smith was to July 4, back in the 90s and early 2000s.

Wahlberg has “Broken City,” in which he’s a cop blackmailed into helping a creepy mayor (Russell Crowe) hunt down his wife’s paramour, opening next week.

And “Pain & Gain,” a buddy action comedy in April.

Got questions to ask Wahlberg? Always looking for fresh angles. Comment below.

These are always worth a chuckle, some years more than others.

Will the Golden Raspberry go to “Battleship” or to “Madea’s Witless Protection?”

Such a list of infamy — so many bad movies. Some (“Breaking Dawn Part 2”) not quite deserving of this scorn, but whatever.

“Atlas Shrugged: Part II” earned notice (worst director, John Putch). And a theater-chain financed fiasco, “Oogiloves.”

The Razzies are handed out Feb. 23.

Full list of nomination? Read on…

Continue reading →

All the pre-Oscar awards hubbub is pointing toward these self-evident truths.

“Lincoln” is in. So is “Zero Dark Thirty.” And “Les Miserables.” Probably “Life of Pi.” Possibly “Django Unchained.”

“The Silver Linings Playbook”? Also possible. “Argo”? Love that Ben. Probable.

The DGA nominations cast a further cloud over the controversial hit “Django Unchained.” “Zero Dark Thirty” seems to be weathering its blowback well enough.

“Beasts of the Southern Wild”? A long shot.

Veteran Oscar watcher Steve Pond figures it’s an eight picture field.

But he’s leaving out such potential worthies as “Skyfall,” “Flight,” “Amour,” and “The Impossible” (another long shot). With Oscar promising to celebrate James Bond, does that impact whether the best Bond in decades will earn a best picture nod?

What else will earn consideration? What could possibly surprise us on January 10, when Emma Stone and Oscar host Seth “Ted” McFarlane tell us the Oscar field?

MIAMI BEACH — In the half dozen years that he’s been a movie star, Channing Tatum could be excused for skipping the exercise of reading his reviews.

He’s been in some big hits — “G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra,” “Step Up,” but the good notices have been few and far between. “Tatum makes what use he can of his two expressions,” critic Derek Malcolm might crack about Tatum’s turn in “Dear John.” Or The New York Times might call his work as a guilt-stricken cop in “The Son of No One” “one of the year’s most wooden, expressionless star turns.”

The ex-model, onetime stripper seemed written off as just another big screen six-pack, a guy famous for turning up shirtless in almost everything he did.

But 2012 has changed all that. At 32, Tatum is on a roll, with commercial hits (“The Vow” and “21 Jump Street”), the attention of a name director (Steven Soderbergh) and critical acclaim for a newly discovered gift for comedy.

“It’s the ‘10,000 hour rule,'” he says. “It takes that many hours to master something. I don’t know if I’ll ever master it, because every role is a totally new experience. But you can understand the process more. And for me, in acting, times on sets, I’m closing in on 10,000 hours. I’m just starting to understand the whole thing.”

The cherry on the top of this year’s coming out party for Tatum is “Magic Mike,” a dramatic comedy that Soderbergh and screenwriter Reid Carolin built around Tatum’s first job in show business — taking it all off for screaming female fans at a Miami strip club.

“This has almost nothing to do with my experience in that world,” he says. “It’s a movie. It’s fictitious. I only danced for about eight months. But the stuff that happened was so crazy and outrageous that you couldn’t put it into a movie without somebody going, ‘You’re making that up just to sell tickets.’

“I was 18 at the time. I was living in Florida. I dropped out of college where I had played football. And I have a sister. That much of the film is true. But I never OD’d or any of that other stuff.”

In the film, Tatum plays the star stripper of an all male dance revue who takes an 18 year old (played by Alex Pettyfer) under his wing, courting the younger guy’s sister (Cody Horn) as he does.

“The first half of ‘Magic Mike’ really captures my experience of what exposure to this world was like,” Tatum says. “Soderbergh told me, ‘I can’t believe an 18 year old kid went into this world, where the other guys were grown men — guys who had been doing this dancing for years.’ This kid doesn’t know what he’s getting into. I didn’t. “

Tatum had been talking up a movie on this subject for a few years, before his rising star power and the attention of Soderbergh made that dream a reality.

“The one thing I really wanted the movie to capture was the wildness of it all,” he says. “We know what the female stripping world is like, thanks to a lot of movies. But men go to see a strip show for different reasons than women. Men go for a carnal experience. Visual sexual stimulation.

“I think women just go to laugh, and embarrass the friend sitting next to them. Laughing at their friend’s red-face as she’s getting grinded on. That’s been my experience, anyway. They’re not there to get turned on.”

The secret to taking it all off, in public? It’s not just about the workout, about the dance moves (Tatum was an accomplished dancer, even at 18).

“Committing is the key,” he says. “It’s like acting, in a way. You’ve got to sell it.

My thing was the dancing part of it. I didn’t like taking off my clothes. I wasn’t very big, not some big muscle-bound meathead who could flash the muscles and everything. I could dance. So I got the younger girls.”

For the film, which was shot and set in Tampa, Tatm became the on-set truth-detector. He was the guy who had lived this life.

“There wasn’t a power point presentation that he gave or anything,” says co-star Joe Manganiello of TV’s “True Blood.” “But his experiences were in the script. He was open and frank about his past, with us. He says he did do this and there’s no shame to it. That was all the rest of us needed.”

And preparation? There was the gym time, of course. And rehearsing with a choreographer. And for some, getting used to appearing in the buff.

“I didn’t think I could get more naked in a movie,” Tatum laughs. “They proved me wrong!

“But it was more fun, this time. Stripping was my first performance. My first time up on stage. And it’s very funny that it’s come around to this, me stripping again, performing that way again, in a movie.”

The British comic book “Judge Dredd” made its debut in the mid-1970s, a helmeted lawman who was judge, jury and executioner in a nearly lawless anarchy of the future. Coming out in the recession-wracked ’70s, when civil unrest were common in the U.K., U.S., and other corners of the West, one might see it as a celebration of a kind of Dirty Harry justice — simple, bloody solutions to socio-criminal ills.

Or maybe it was “a satirical response to Thatcherism,” says actor Karl Urban, who stars as the Judge in a new 3D movie, “Dredd 3D.” Margaret Thatcher wasn’t Prime Minister of Britain until 1979, but she was a well-known figure in mid-70s Britain, already the head of the Conservative Party there.

And what about Dredd today?

“Dredd is perfectly placed in our times,” says Urban, best-known for playing Dr. McCoy in the new big screen “Star Trek” franchise. “Our film is the perfect representation of the character that [author] John Wagner created back in ’75. In our movie, I see Dredd as a response to social unrest that’s errupted globally, and to society’s response to that unrest. Dredd is set in a world where the justice system has been given absolute power, the power to summarily execute a perp on the spot.

“Since the creation of Dredd, one can argue that there’s been a continual escalation of Big Brother, watching over all of us, a steady erosion of civil rights. Unfortunately, incidents like 9/11 have given us laws like The Patriot Act, a necessity for this day and age.

Thematically, Dredd was ahead of his time.”

The 40 year-old New Zealander endured months in a gym and weeks in a South African boot camp to get in shape to play the Judge.Afer all, Sylvester Stallone was the character’s previous big screen alter ego. The bigger challenge, Urban says, was acting behind a helmet and mask.

“It’s a challenge to communicate with the audience without the use of my eyes,” he says. “I had to use every other tool I have available to me. Obviously, the voice takes on heightened significance. As does the physicality, the wear the character carries himself. It was important to me to know what humanized Dredd. He’s just a man. He’s not a robot, not a super hero. He has no special powers. Just gadgets. It was important to me to know where his sense of humor lay, what angers him, what amuses him and what he does when he’s tired, or when he’s pumped up.”

The film is earning early praise from comic book fan websites and even the trade publication Variety noted that it “reinstates the somber brutality missing from the U.K. comicbook icon’s previous screen outing.” Urban hopes “we’ve made an instant cult classic. But let’s be honest, movies like this that open in September don’t do nearly the box office that summer films do. So while I would be delighted to play the character again, if it’s just a one-off experience, I’m still proud of it.”

Besides, Urban already has two franchises — maybe three — that he has obligations in. He returns as “Bones” McCoy in the next “Star Trek” film , “Star Trek into Darkness” in 2013. He’s a part of the Vin Diesel “Chronicles of Riddick” series. He may even reprise his secret agent role in the sequel to “RED,” the Bruce Willis/Helen Mirren action comedy. But it’s McCoy where his long-term plans lay, a character he lobbied hard for the chance to play, and a role he relishes.

“Think about it,” he says. “They’re action films, with heroes. And McCoy isn’t really heroic. He’s got this comic humanity that makes him stand out in that universe. Who wouldn’t love playing that?”