MALIBU AWARDS WATCH: Malibu Surfside News Goes to the Movies

BY JEREMY WALKER

It’s the time of year when our neighbors who work in “the industry” start talking passionately of movies and awards, and not just those Oscars. Rank and file members of the various guilds representing actors, directors, writers, producers and cinematographers are currently catching up with, previewing, and will soon be voting on the best movies of the year. With all the biztalk sure to be spinning at Malibu holiday parties, The News assigned an Awards Watch roundup for which our reporter has already logged over 24 hours in darkened screening rooms.
His report:

FEEL-GREAT MOVIES THAT ARE TOO EASY TO MISS—The less you know about “Happy-Go-Lucky” and “Slumdog Millionaire” going in, the better, but do make the effort to seek them out while they hang on to their big screens around town. Both films are, in distinct ways, handsomely directed by Brits (Mike Leigh and Danny Boyle) working at the top of their respective games, realizing characters that are astonishingly, achingly human.
With “Happy-Go-Lucky,” Leigh gambles everything on the actress playing his title character and we all win big. Sally Hawkins is the personification of ebullience, an empathetic, hyper-social, boundaryless London schoolteacher with whom you cannot help fall in love—think about watching Julie Walters in “Educating Rita” and toss in an irrepressible giggle.
The ensemble of “Slumdog Millionaire” is also uniformly excellent, but the film will make real stars of cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle and editor Chris Dickens, whose feverish, intensely colorful portrait of Mumbai is our most immediate cultural touchstone to a city just beginning its own post-cataclysmic recovery.
’70s SHOWS— Both Ron Howard’s “Frost/ Nixon” and Gus Van Sant’s “Milk” are trips back to ’70s California, with each filmmaker shooting in the actual locations where history was made.
Howard calls wandering the grounds of La Casa Pacifica, Nixon’s “Western White House” in San Clemente, “chilling… knowing that Nixon, Brezhnev, Kissinger—so many significant people from that era—had decided the course of history here. I definitely think it brought something to our actors’ performances to be working there.” And what performances, Frank Langella has already won a Tony Award for his work when “Frost/Nixon” was a stage play by Peter Morgan (“The Queen”).
For “Milk,” Van Sant took over the streets and landmarks of San Francisco to bring the story to life. See www.Filminfocus. com, Focus Features’ “interactive community,” which is currently featuring Jenni Olson’s nifty short film “575 Castro St.” about the scenes shot at Harvey Milk’s actual camera store.
ROADSHOW—Steven Soderbergh’s epic “Che” opens this Friday for a weeklong qualifying run at the Landmark on Pico, significant for the fact that Soderbergh’s “Traffic” won four Oscars in 2001, including a Best Supporting Actor statue for Benicio Del Toro, who stars here in the title role of revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevarra. The weeklong run is significant also because Soderbergh’s movie is actually two movies, each just over two hours long and presented with an intermission and a collectible program book. A rare chance to see a massive work the way its master filmmaker intended
WHY THESE ACTORS SHOULD BE CONSIDERED FOR BEST SUPPORTING—James Franco in “Milk” because he was also great in “Pineapple Express” and if he can love Sean Penn and Seth Rogen then the Academy should love him…Viola Davis in “Doubt” because at a post-screening Q&A at the Academy last month, Davis called her co-star, with whom she was seated on stage, “Meryl Freakin’ Streep” and because her two scenes opposite Streep in the film are so good they will make you gasp… Eddie Marsan in “Happy-Go-Lucky” because he’s scary as bloody hell… “Taraji P. Henson in “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” because she moved gracefully from singing the Oscar-winning “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp” in “Hustle & Flow” to playing Brad Pitt’s savior and saintly mother as he ages backwards in a very, very, big movie… Heath Ledger in “The Dark Knight” because his performance would have made a blockbuster out of this most important political art film of the year even if he hadn’t died.