Midlife Surge
Maybe I'm slow, but my awareness levels suddenly shot up the other day about Gong Li, Gong Li, Gong Li...some eighteen years after her film debut, and just over three months shy of her 40th birthday.
This was after hearing she gives the big burn-through performance in Memoirs of a Geisha (Columbia, 12.5). The word, in fact, is that she pretty much steals it from Zhang Ziyi, the star...as far as the "whoa, mama" thing is concerned. I mean, take it with a grain...
A seemingly dated photo of Gong Li, costar of
Memoirs of a Geisha ...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 6:36 PM on Friday, September 30, 2005
In all the
coverage of Sony Pictures refusing to distribute Albert Brooks'
Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:03 PM on Thursday, September 29, 2005
I love this line from a
review of
Capote by
Entertainment Weekly's Owen Gleiberman, in which he examines the final beat in the relationship between Truman Capote and condemned murderer Perry Smith: "[Philip Seymour] Hoffman
makes Capote's dissolution a theatrical miracle of devastation. In his final scene with Perry, he's so conflicted that he does something I've never seen on screen: He cries, honestly, and lies at the same time."
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:27 PM on Thursday, September 29, 2005
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:23 PM on Thursday, September 29, 2005
For a while there, John Stockwell was the director who put soul and character into movies about young people involved in personal struggles and spiritual crises. He did this with
crazy/beautiful, about a smart and responsible-minded East L.A. Hispanic teenager who falls for Kirsten Dunst's alcoholic, self-destructive rich girl from Pacific Palisades, and then with the under-rated
Blue Crush, a beautifully-shot, nicely finessed North Shore surfing movie with Kate Bosworth. But now, suddenly, he's become the go-to guy for exotic outdoor thrillers starring hot-looking 20-somethings. He's directed
Into the Blue...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 1:32 PM on Thursday, September 29, 2005
Oh, and by the way? I had an appointment to meet Scott Caan early last July at a hip hotel on Thompson Street in Soho, the intention being to discuss that above-average film he wrote and directed called Dallas 362...and he disappeared. He wasn't at the hotel, there was no "sorry" message left with the concierge, and no message was left on my cell phone. That makes him a Man of Honor.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 1:25 PM on Thursday, September 29, 2005
Last week's tracking figures for In Her Shoes, before last Saturday's sneak, weren't that hot -- 2% first choice, awareness 55%, and definite interest 23%. (The under-25 female awareness was 66%; over-25 female awareness was 68%.) But the sneak has definitely bumped things up, and today's tracking says first-choice for Shoes is now at 9%, general awareness 66% and definite interest 32%. The second sneak this weekend will bump things up a bit more and so on until the opening on 10.7. For perspective, Flightplan had a definite interest tally of 44% and 14% first-choice the day before it opened.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:57 AM on Thursday, September 29, 2005
Regarding Mr. Lloyd
Norman Lloyd, 90, is in only three scenes in In Her Shoes and is on-screen maybe seven or eight minutes, but his performance is one of the most poignant notes in a film that's got more than a few of them.
It's not one of those burn-through-the-screen performances (along the lines of, say, Beatrice Straight's fight-with-Bill-Holden scene in Network...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 4:30 PM on Wednesday, September 28, 2005
Plays High, Sold Low
In Her Shoes may or may not be appearing to handicappers as an awards-level thing. I don't care to argue this point, but every so often there's a disconnect between my views and those of jaded ivory-tower elites that just staggers me.
On the other hand, if I hadn't yet seen it and had come upon Liz Smith's rave on the film's website, I might have a moment of pause. Smith guarantees "you will laugh and cry in equal measure because this is simply a wonderful film...one of the best in years" -- fine.
(l. to. r.)
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 12:24 PM on Wednesday, September 28, 2005
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:02 AM on Wednesday, September 28, 2005
We all want to be recognized for our own accomplishments, but it still seems...well, funny that the mini-bio for director-writer Rodrigo Garcia in the
Nine Lives press kit doesn't mention that his dad is
novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez("One Hundred Years of Solitude").
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 6:03 PM on Monday, September 26, 2005
My advice is to brush aside David Poland's
dissing/dismissing of Tony Scott's 9.25
N.Y. Times piece about Republican party pro-life talking points in
Just Like Heaven,
The Exorcism of Emily Rose , and even Michael Bay's
The Island. Libertas, the rightie website affiliated with the Liberty Film Festival, discussed the right-to-life issue in
The Island with some enthusiasm last summer, and it seems to me that Scott's observations about
Heaven and
Emily Rose...
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 12:50 PM on Monday, September 26, 2005
It was in the cards for several weeks, and now Miramax president Daniel Battsek has finally
announced his acquisition of Gavin Hood's
Tsotsi, a profoundly gripping drama that I saw and
wrote about during the latter stages of the Toronto Film Festival. More in the vein of Walter Salles'
Central Station than Fernando Meirelles'
City of God,
Tsotsi has the chops to shoot right to the top of the list of Best Foreign-Language Feature hopefuls.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:35 AM on Sunday, September 25, 2005
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:25 AM on Sunday, September 25, 2005
The Great Liberal Hope who might actually pull the trigger some day will be Ben Affleck. Truth, Justice and the American Way will probably result in a career upsurge so it won't happen any time soon, but when Affleck hits his next career pothole (five or ten years from now...who knows?) he might actually start making the moves. If you saw him on the political talk shows during the '04 Democratic Convention in Boston, you know he's got the makings.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:22 AM on Sunday, September 25, 2005
You should have heard the crowd chortle with delight when Bill Hurt went into his irritated-older-brother shpiel in the last act of
A History of Violence at the Grove yesterday afternoon. Hurt had them in the palm of his hand. He got a laugh with almost every line, every facial tic...and it was fantastic to feel a performance work as well as this. Being there put all doubts to rest: Hurt will be one of the Best Supporting Actor nominees when they're announced in January. A performance that rocks as well as this one
can't...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:44 AM on Sunday, September 25, 2005
Stephen Frears'
Mrs. Henderson Presents...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:51 AM on Saturday, September 24, 2005
And yet Curtis Hanson's
In Your Shoes, dismissed by a certain columnist as a good commercial film but not an awards-calibre thing, has an emotional resonance factor (it's not about shoes or bickering sisters but resolving family hurt) that might persuade some in the Academy to think about Oscar-ish distinctions. Maybe I'm alone on this one, but I don't think so. It got to me (and I can be kind of a hard-ass), and I've felt how it plays with a crowd. If any- one catches
In Your Shoes...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:46 AM on Saturday, September 24, 2005
"A masterpiece of indirection and pure visceral thrills, David Cronenberg's latest mindblower,
A History of Violence, is the feel-good, feel-bad movie of the year,"
N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis declared in her
9.23 review...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:56 AM on Saturday, September 24, 2005
A TV comedy show is usually two things -- what the creators intend it to be in their heads as they're fine-tuning the season opener, and what the creators change it into after they've shifted into panic mode after an initial
bad review or two, or when the ratings are much lower than expected. So let's see what happens with Comedy Central's
The Showbiz Show with David Spade from here on...
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:29 AM on Saturday, September 24, 2005
The instant a film is described as a "romantic comedy," it's dead to me. That's why I wouldn't watch
Dirty Love on a plane...even if I was dead-bored. You can always depend on a "romantic comedy" to be arch, off-the-ground and phony as a three-dollar bill. There have been exceptions, yes, but 96% of the time the term means the movie will be farcical and dumb-assed. It will contain nothing angular or vaguely thoughtful, nothing perverse, no laughs... and it will have a juvenile and relentlessly hyper attitude about sex. It means loyal readers of
Star,
In Touch,
People...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:53 AM on Saturday, September 24, 2005
I don't believe in airing dirty laundry if you're profiling someone involved with a new film (actor, director, etc.) for its own sake. However, you should absolutely get into it if it applies to the work. Naturally, being an
L.A. Times piece, you won't find this criteria in Michael Goldman's
interview with Jenny McCarthy about
Dirty Love...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:09 AM on Saturday, September 24, 2005
I love that they're trying to sell the new four-disc
Ben-Hur
DVD to the religious right, offering to Christian retail outlets a "Ben-Hur Bible Study Guide" by the Rev. Robert H. Schuller and his son, the Rev. Robert A. Schuller, the co-chairmen of Crystal Cathedral Ministries. This is just as phony a sales pitch as the original author, General Lew Wallace, calling his book "A Tale of the Christ." As co-screenwriter Gore Vidal explains on the "making of" doc,
Ben-Hur...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 2:32 PM on Friday, September 23, 2005
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 1:57 PM on Friday, September 23, 2005
You're hearing it here again, and I don't know anything except for having read the Jarhead script way back when and knowing how unshakably hard-core the "Troy" character is: Peter Sarsgaard is going to score big with his performance as this guy...the steely- eyed Marine buddy to Jake Gyllenhaal's Anthony Swofford character...the hard guy who never wavers or shudders or loses focus...who always has his shit wrapped tight. I haven't been to an early screening -- this is merely what I got when I met this guy on the page, and I'm just tellin' ya...
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:06 AM on Friday, September 23, 2005
On the other hand, I can understand a reader's reluctance to buy what I'm saying because I also claimed that Cameron Crowe's
Elizabethtown...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:57 AM on Friday, September 23, 2005
What happens when you see Martin Scorsese's
No Direction Home: Bob Dylan...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:25 AM on Friday, September 23, 2005
In a 3.16
lead piece called "9/11 Pitch Meeting," I argued that the story behind the forthcoming Oliver Stone 9/11 movie, about a couple of Port Authority police officers named
Will Jimeno and
John McLoughlin who found themselves buried inside a small pit under 20 feet of rubble after the collapse of the North Tower, and were eventually found and dug out, isn't nearly as intriguing as the story of Port Authority employee
Pasquale Buzzelli...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:55 AM on Friday, September 23, 2005
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:27 AM on Friday, September 23, 2005
If you want a demonstration of how fair and thorough David Poland's Movie City News is in terms of links to showbiz stories on its main page,
click on it right now. (I wrote this Friday morning at 7:19 am.) The link at the top of the page says "
Kilday On The Doc Race for Oscar...But Leaves Out A Lot Of Titles, Including Sony Classics' Sundance Directing Winner
The Devil & Daniel Johnston ...
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:08 AM on Friday, September 23, 2005
A friend who's seen Martin Campbell's The Legend of Zorro (Columbia, 10.28) says it runs something like two hours and fifteen minutes, give or take. If this sequel to Campbell's The Mask of Zorro (1998) is anything like its sire, Legend...
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:50 PM on Thursday, September 22, 2005
The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys, Panic Room, A Very Long Engagement...you can't help wondering why Jodie Foster agreed to star in Flightplan. Two-thirds of it is half decent, but what was the point? I'm told that the script, written by Peter A. Dowling and Billy Ray, has been kicking around for some time and that there was once a third-act resolution that involved terrorists. But the Islamic baddies were thrown out after 9.11 and eventually replaced with....here he comes!...aaahhh!....the former editor of The New Republic!
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:04 PM on Thursday, September 22, 2005
"There's no black and white, left and right to me any more...there's only up or down. And down is very close to the ground, and I'm trying to go up without thinking about anything trivial, such as politics." -- Bob Dylan, as quoted by Martin Scorsese in No Direction Home: Bob Dylan. I want Todd Haynes to succeed with I'm Not There: Suppositions on a Film Concerning Dylan, which is in pre-production, but how can suppositions of any kind compete with majestic echoes?
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 6:10 PM on Thursday, September 22, 2005
Regarding Violence
If you've seen David Cronenberg's A History of Violence, you know it's a philoso- phical double-dealer, and this is what makes it a complex, cut-above film. It's not just saying violence is a kind of terrible virus -- it's also saying it has a way of turning us on.
When Jack (Ashton Holmes), the son of cafe owner Tom Stall (Viggo Mortenson), defuses a potentially violent encounter with a school bully by sarcastically acknow- ledging the other guy's alpha male superiority, etc., you admire Jack for being a hip and clever guy.
...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 6:01 PM on Thursday, September 22, 2005
This Is Bad
I can't overstate what a besotted, drugged-out feeling it is to be back in Los Angeles...to once again stand on the roof of a certain West Hollywood high-rise and smell the faintly noxious air and gaze out at the milky haze and tell myself, "It's okay...despair not."
...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 3:33 PM on Wednesday, September 21, 2005
With Serenity due to open in ten days, I can feel the words taking shape in my head: "Get Joss Whedon." (Yesterday's misspelling was unfortunate, I agree.) Does this mean we should try and "get" Whedon in the sense of trashing his movie, fixing his game, beating him up in an alley, etc.? Not necessarily. Does it mean we should try to really get Whedon in the sense of arriving at a more profound understanding of who this ultra-crafty guy really is and what his wowser films are about deep down? I'm not certain. Thoughts?
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 6:24 PM on Tuesday, September 20, 2005
Writing about
Bubble, a certain columnist has said, "Steven Sodebergh's most recent experiment has journalists with no actual depth of insight who were outraged by previous experiments flip-flopping and somehow embracing this one...and vice versa." That's a direct reference to, among I-don't-know-how- many-others, myself...I'm one of those "with no actual depth of insight." I don't know how to say it in a limited space, but
Bubble is (a) not as whack-cool as Soderbergh's
Schizopolis but (b) it's way,
way cooler than
Full Frontal...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 6:14 PM on Tuesday, September 20, 2005
The
Guardian's John Patterson hates Madonna and Guy Ritchie... whatever...but his 9.17
tear-down piece is wrong about two things: (1) Madonna's palatial home near the Hollywood Reservoir was not in Silver Lake and didn't even border on it -- it was adjacent to Beachwood Canyon and is therefore smack dab in Hollywood; and (2) his observation that Madonna had to be "either terribly thick-skinned or terribly thick-headed" by continuing to make movies "after the quadruple-whammy of
Shanghai Surprise,
Body Of Evidence,
Four Rooms and
Evita" is 75% correct.
Evita...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 4:35 AM on Monday, September 19, 2005
Good God...$50 bucks a year to henceforth access all sections of the N.Y. Times online.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 4:34 AM on Monday, September 19, 2005
Back to Los Angeles and the real world starting today...not a pleasant thought. In fact, I am filled with dread. The best film opening this coming Friday (9/23), hands down, is David Cronenberg's A History of Violence. There's also Flightplan, which I haven't seen. Plus Polanksi's Oliver Twist, The Prizewinner of Defiance, Ohio (Woody Harrelson's character seems like such an asswipe in the trailer), and Tim Burton's Corpse Bride.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 4:27 AM on Monday, September 19, 2005
The Thing About My Folks, that amusing and surprisingly touching little family film with Paul Reiser and Peter Falk?...the one I first wrote about after seeing it at the Santa Barbara Film Festival last February? It opened limited yesterday (9.16) and...well, do what you think is best. It's not a Luchino Visconti film but it has a certain caringness about it...paternal love, compassion, recognizable family values. "With movies that are quality-level and playing well, there's two kinds of buzz -- good word-of-mouth and what we call compelling word-of-mouth," Jeff Dowd said earlier this year. "
The Thing About My Folks...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:38 AM on Saturday, September 17, 2005
Whenever I think back upon the lightning-in-a-bottle period in Bob Dylan's career, the time ('62 to mid '66) when he wasn't just the greatest '60s generation poet-troubador of all time but someone (or some
thing...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 6:45 AM on Saturday, September 17, 2005
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 6:19 AM on Saturday, September 17, 2005
I've seen so many good films at the Toronto Film Festival, I'm feeling a little worn down. This one's Oscar-worthy, that one's stellar, this one stirred me to the depths of my soul...gimme a break already. It's almost like I need to see a few stinkers now (or well-made worthy film that I simply don't care for...whatever) just to restore my sense of equilibirium. Peter Jackson, I miss you.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 6:02 AM on Saturday, September 17, 2005
Drive a mint-condition Mercedes sedan into the middle of any dirt-poor neighborhood and then park it and leave it there -- the next morning it will be completely stripped. Leave a fresh and untouched edition of the
Wall Street Journal and the
Toronto Globe & Mail...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 5:47 AM on Saturday, September 17, 2005
I gave up on doing columns on just Wednesday and Friday during the Toronto Film Festival...or at least, I put up a new lead story a lot more often, whenever something happened or the spirit moved, etc. I kind of liked doing this. Keep adding, keep rolling...keep it fluid and malleable. I'm thinking I should maybe keep on like this.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 5:42 AM on Saturday, September 17, 2005
You didn't hear it from me, but don't be too surprised if you read about Miramax president Daniel Battsek acquiring distrib rights to Gavin Hood's
Tsotsi, a flat-out extraordinary South African drama based on a novel by Athol Fugard. I finally saw it yesterday afternoon after being badgered to death by Donna Daniels' publicity team for the last two or three weeks to do just that. Set in a Johannesburg shantytown,
Tsotsi...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 6:50 AM on Friday, September 16, 2005
Toronto's Eleven
I've only been coming here since '98, but it seemed to me like the best Toronto Film Festival ever. Too many good films, too many I didn't get to see, the energy always there...every day felt like a full deck.
I saw (or re-saw) eleven films here that I know will matter in terms of awards or box-office or causing some kind of a stir over the next thirteen and a half weeks, and that felt fairly bountiful.
Brokeback Mountain costars Heath Ledger, Michelle Williams
...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:57 PM on Thursday, September 15, 2005
John Turturro's
Romance & Cigarettes is somewhere between being admirably brave, extremely amusing and horribly embarassing for everyone concerned, including those in the audience. But then you're always risking pain when you make a musical, and you can't say that Turturro doesn't have creative cojones. A story about infidelity, stifled dreams and floundering family values among working-class types in Queens and Brooklyn,
Cigarettes...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 6:19 AM on Thursday, September 15, 2005
I have a screening to catch in less than two hours and doing my usual early-morning nutso thing, and Robert Wise has just died at the age of 91. I'm sorry it finally happened, but Wise had a rich life and a distinguished career as a director for about 20 years, from the late '40s to late '60s. It was 37 years ago when Wise seemed to surrender the ghost with the arrival of
Star!, that godawful Julie Andrews musical debacle that permanently clouded Wise's reputation as a director who occasionally mattered.
Star!...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 5:26 AM on Thursday, September 15, 2005
We're supposed to be in a wind-down phase at the Toronto Film Festival, but there are still several...well, a few intriguing films left to see. At the top of the anyone's list has to be Martin Scorsese's 201 minute No Direction Home: Bob Dylan, even though it'll shortly play on PBS, Gavin Hood's Tsotsi (which a friend saw last night and raved about), Annette Bening and Ben Kingsley in Mrs. Harris, Hermine Huntgeburth's The White Masai, and my three cleanup viewings -- The War Within, The Notorious Bettie Page and Harsh Times.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 5:01 AM on Thursday, September 15, 2005
David Ayer's
Harsh Times, a violent Los Angeles-based drama starring Christian Bale and Freddy Rodriguez, has been acquired for distribution by Bauer Martinez Distribution, the new theatrical distribution arm of Bauer Martinez Studios. (Apologies for the earlier error naming Lions Gate as the distributor.) It will have one final Toronto Film festival screening on Saturday evening, which I plan to attend. Movie City News is calling it "
Crash for one" while another observer has described it as "a lot like
Training Day...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 4:34 AM on Thursday, September 15, 2005
I can see why Fox Searchlight and Paramount Classics were fighting over the U.S. distribution rights to Jason Reitman's
Thank You For Smoking...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:59 AM on Wednesday, September 14, 2005
I saw Curtis Hanson's
In Her Shoes (20th Century Fox, 10.7) this morning and it got me. It's "commercial," yes, but not in the pat sense of that term -- this is the best classy chick flick since
Terms of Endearment, and they both have award-level Shirley MacLaine performances. Once you get past the first half-hour, which has a rote, almost sitcommy flavor and is all about showing us what an infantile self-destructive screw-up Cameron Diaz's character is (and why her older sister, played by Toni Collete, is perfectly justified in wanting her out of her life),
In Her Shoes...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:28 AM on Wednesday, September 14, 2005
Niki Caro's
North Country is an honestly acted, decently assembled 1989 period drama about a landmark class-action sexual harassment case, but it feels
way familiar and is nowhere near surprising or "whoa" enough to make you tell your friends to stop what they're doing and go see it...although it
is a sturdy, close-to-first-rate effort. It's a little slow at times. For a movie that's about a real-life courtroom case, it feels a bit curious that the
idea...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 5:01 AM on Tuesday, September 13, 2005
Suddenly, starting yesterday (i.e., Monday) morning, all those vaguely bothersome humanoids with industry passes started cramming into the press and industry screenings, and within hours journos were heard bitching to one another about getting shut out of showings of essential-to-see films. I couldn't get into Mary Harron's
The Notorious Bettie Page and then I was shut out of Michael Winterbottom's
Tristram Shandy. And yet this morning I got into the 10 a.m.
Walk the Line...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 4:50 AM on Tuesday, September 13, 2005
It's not that I haven't been seeing films the last couple of days, or thought through my various reactions. I've seen Niki Caro's
North Country, Michael Haneke's
Cache (finally, after missing it in Cannes last May), Liev Schrieber's
Everything is Illluminated, Andrucha Waddington's
The House of Sand, Laurent Cantet's
Heading South...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 4:48 AM on Tuesday, September 13, 2005
Apparently enough people who saw James Mangold's Walk the Line a couple of months ago told Fox publicists that portions of it were too much like Taylor Hackford's Ray (early stuff showing a very young Johnny Cash growing up impoverished with his family in the rural south, and particularly the death of his brother). So a few trims were allegedly made in this section, etc. But the version I saw this morning (i.e., the 10 am screening on Tuesday, 9.13) doesn't seem...
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 4:41 AM on Tuesday, September 13, 2005
Girl Power
It was early Wednesday afternoon, and I was standing in the hallway of the 26th floor of Toronto's Four Season's hotel, waiting for my ten-minute quickie with In Her Shoes director Curtis Hanson.
And then a door opened about three feet away and Shoes costar Shirley Maclaine, who owns each and every scene she appears in, peeked out and said hello.
A Fox publicist sitting to MacLaine's left smiled and nonchalantly said "hey." I forget how Maclaine replied, but I think she was mainly looking to take a breather.
In Her Shoes...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:24 PM on Monday, September 12, 2005
Guess what's surprisingly good? And is easily one of the best edited films I've seen at the Toronto Film festival so far, not to mention one of the most unsettling and a dead-serious spiritual seeker? Abel Ferrara's
Mary, which I saw Sunday night at the Isabel Bader theatre. I didn't have many hopes for this thing because -- frankly? -- I've been wondering about Ferrara lately. How long has it been since he's really hit the mark, which I guess was
Bad Lieutenant...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 4:03 AM on Monday, September 12, 2005
Congratulations to Sony Pictures Classics for acquiring Tommy Lee Jones'
The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada...and I'm sure everyone concerned is breathing a huge sigh of relief. A film as good as this one (which everyone saw in Cannes last May) deserves to be released during Oscar season, but the clock was ticking all summer long and no distribution deal. In her story about the pickup, the
Hollywood Reporter's
Anne Thompson...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 3:47 AM on Monday, September 12, 2005
Cheers to the
Brokeback Mountain team -- director Ang Lee, producer James Schamus and Focus Features -- for having taken the Golden Lion (i.e., the best feature prize) at the just-wrapped Venice Film Festival. A
BBC report claims that George Clooney's
Good Night, and Good Luck "had been the hot favourite among film critics to take the Golden Lion," but at least David Straitharn --
Good Night's Edward R. Murrow -- took the Best Actor prize, and
Good Night...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 6:08 AM on Sunday, September 11, 2005
There's apparently some concern at Sony/Columbia about Rob Marshall's
Memoirs of a Geisha (Columbia, 12.9), a pricey period drama and a presumed Oscar contender (in the costume and production design categories, at least). The story is about how a young girl (Zhang Ziyi) "transcends" her fishing-village roots and becomes one of Japan's most celebrated geishas. Research has apparently indicated that the exotic story elements (the film is set in Japan in the 1930s and '40s) aren't being understood and/or absorbed as clearly as Sony would like, so
Cold Mountain...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 6:06 AM on Sunday, September 11, 2005
Some buyers told me yesterday about a couple of recently-arisen festival favorites. First and foremost is Ward Serrill's
The Heart of the Game, a doc about the development of a naturally talented female basketball player from Seattle over a six-year period. The
festival program...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 5:38 AM on Sunday, September 11, 2005
About halfway through a chat I had last night with documentarian Eugene Jarecki, director of
Why We Fight (and the excellent
The Trial of Henry Kissinger, which I saw here in Toronto in '03), I asked if he's given any thought to shooting a documentary about the ongoing Katrina disaster, which would naturally include the Bush administration's sluggish response to the crisis. He said it would be an absolute natural, but that he's focusing right now on promoting
Why We Fight, etc. And then I went to
Jeannette Walls' column...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 4:48 AM on Sunday, September 11, 2005
Stephen Frears'
Mrs. Henderson Presents...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:53 AM on Friday, September 9, 2005
Danis Tanovic's
L'Enfer, which was press screened Thursday afternoon and which I was fairly pleased with (although it doesn't stand up to Tanovic's
No Man's Land), is getting zapped. A
Variety...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:44 AM on Friday, September 9, 2005
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 4:53 AM on Friday, September 9, 2005
Disney is junket-screening Robert Schwentke's Flightplan (9.23), the Jodi Foster thriller about a mother who can't find her daughter aboard a plane, in Toronto. The talk among festival-attending journos was that it probably was nothing to run over and catch with any particular haste. This is wildly speculative, but one big-name reporter assumes that Disney's decision to have its L.A. all-media screening only two days before the national opening is indicative of quality issues.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 4:46 AM on Friday, September 9, 2005
Daily Mail columnist Baz Bamigboye also had mixed reactions to Cameron Crowe's
Elizabethtown while attending the Venice Film Festival. He also says that the party thrown at that festival for the film was "flat," which has nothing to do with Paramount's decision not to throw any kind of shindig here, and yet the meaning or import of the no-Toronto-party decision has been a matter of discussion among journos. Crowe films are regarded by most journos as semi-events, and the Toronto Film Festival's hosting of Crowe's
Almost Famous...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 4:35 AM on Friday, September 9, 2005
No clear consensus among journos as to which may be the better movie about a Middle Eastern suicide bomber who experiences second thoughts -- Joseph Castelo's
The War Within (Magnolia, 9.30), which is set in Manhattan, spoken in New Yawkese and is about "a Pakistani involved in a planned attack in New York City experiences a crisis of conscience," or Hany Abu-Assad's Assad's
Paradise Now Paradise Now (Warner Independent, 10.28), which is set in Israel, spoken in native tongues and, according to a 9.6 piece in the
New York Times...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 4:11 AM on Friday, September 9, 2005
Master Builder
Sydney Pollack's Sketches of Frank Gehry , which I caught yesterday at a public screening at the historic Elgin theatre, is a stirring, hugely likable portrait of the most daring and innovative architect of our time.
As corny as this sounds, Sketches left me with a more vivid feeling of celebration and with more reasons to feel enthused and excited about life than anything I've seen so far at this festival.
Director Sydney Pollack, architect Frank Gehry at Saturday afternoon's cocktail party for
Sketches of Frank Gehry in downtown Toronto -- 9.10, 6:25 pm.
...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:49 PM on Thursday, September 8, 2005
I don't know why I keep referring to this as a nine-day festival. In its fullest, most alive state, the Toronto Film Festival is intended to last for roughly six and a half days..sorta half-assedly starting today, September 8th, but really starting on the morning of Friday, the 9th, and ending sometime in the middle of Thursday, the 15th. All the hot films and hot parties are front-loaded (i.e., standard procedure for every big-time festival these days), with quasi-leftover clean-up movies like
Mrs. Harris,
The Matador and
Edison...
Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 6:08 AM on Thursday, September 8, 2005
Which relatively unheralded film will be the first surprise must-see... the first stop-what-you're-doing-and-see-this-film no matter what? And which medium-profile release with big names will be the first to bomb out, like The Human Stain did two years ago?
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 5:28 AM on Thursday, September 8, 2005
It's 8:40 ayem in Toronto on the first day of the festival, and a loud rumble was just heard over the city, followed by rain showers. Not a "bad omen" or anything, but I'm thinking twice about catching the 9:30 a.m. screening of The President's Last Bang...because I don't have an umbrella and it's warm and cozy where I'm sitting. And no, I don't anticipate that my Toronto Film Festival "Word" items over the next nine or ten days will be as banal as this one.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 4:41 AM on Thursday, September 8, 2005
Cash It
Walk the Line (20th Century Fox, 11.18), a frank, straight-from the-shoulder biopic about the late Johnny Cash, is making a lot of moves right now. It played Telluride last week and will hit the Toronto Film Festival very soon, so I guess it's time to jump in.
I was cool with it, felt good about it and admired it in most of the ways that usually count. For above all (and because there are many pleasures in the way it unfolds), Walk the Line...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:39 AM on Wednesday, September 7, 2005
Phillip Seymour Hoffman's performance as Truman Capote in Bennett Miller's
Capote "was the talk" of the last week's Telluride Film Festival, the
Hollywood Reporter's Anne Thompson has
written, which has led to presumptions that "an Oscar nomination for Hoffman [is] inevitable." In other words, Thompson and her Rocky Mountain ilk, many or most of whom were "wowed" by the performance, are more or less concurring with
my view in last Wednesday's column that Hoffman "is right at the top of my list right now -- he's the guy to beat in the Best Actor category. Anyone who's seen
CapoteRead More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 4:29 AM on Tuesday, September 6, 2005
There's a view that advance-praising a film or setting up high expectations before it gets seen at a film festival, as I may have done in the case of Cameron Crowe's
Elizabethtown in last Saturday's
Peter Howell/Toronto Star forecast piece, is not necessarily desirable because it sets the movie up for a fall. By this criteria or scenario or what-have-you, someone else coming along and going "nyah, nyah...
Garden State was better," as
Variety's Leslie Felperin has done in her
review...
Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:00 PM on Monday, September 5, 2005
"One of the creepier vanities of most political leaders is the private yearning to be tested on a historical scale," writes David Remnick in this week's
New Yorker...
Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:53 PM on Monday, September 5, 2005
I don't care if Sean Penn's boat
sprang a leak. I respect the way he
got out there and gave it up and reached out to people in New Orleans who needed help. What is there not to admire and salute about this? Just wait for some rightie dickhead columnist to try and make fun of this in some way...just wait.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 4:38 PM on Monday, September 5, 2005
All great persons are like gangsters. All small persons are like prostitutes.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:06 PM on Sunday, September 4, 2005
Two favorable (one could even say glowing) Venice Film Festival trade reviews (from
Variety's
Todd McCarthy and the
Hollywood Reporter's
Ray Bennett) of Ang Lee's
Brokeback Mountain graze on one side of the pasture...fine, good grass, etc. But a "whoa there, cowboy!"
review from
Movie City News...
Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:01 AM on Sunday, September 4, 2005
I asked a friend visiting the Telluride Film Festival about Poland's "whoa, cowboy!" reaction and he answered, "I loved Brokeback. I was overcome with so much emotion. It's ultimately about repressing who you are, and it's done very honestly. [Variety's] Pete Hammond loved it too. It played extremely well, and I've spoken with a lot of straight guys here who were shocked how much they liked it."
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:23 AM on Sunday, September 4, 2005
In her Venice Film Festival
review of Steven Soderbergh's
Bubble (which will soon play at the Toronto Film Festival),
Variety's Deborah Young says that
Ocean's Eleven and
Ocean's Twelve...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:01 AM on Sunday, September 4, 2005
I haven't read anything or spoken to anyone about Laurent Cantet's
Vers le sud, which will show at the Toronto Film Festival. But the following description of it (provided by TIFF director Piers Handling) in Peter Howell's
insider-forecast piece ("The Buzz Stops Here"") in the 9.3
Toronto Star strikes me as odd. "I loved Cantet's last film,
Time-Out," Handling explains, "and this take on three middle-aged (North American) women in Haiti looking for sex and companionship from the islanders is bound to be smart, intelligent and well-acted." Hold on...middle-aged North American women looking for sex in with
Haitian islanders
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 12:17 PM on Saturday, September 3, 2005
Oh, yeah...Howell contacted me for the
same piece, and here's what I said about three eagerly awaited Toronto Film Festival selections (among many others): (1)
Elizabethtown, directed and written by Cameron Crowe: "I've read the script so I know what it more or less is, and unless Crowe is suffering from a drug-dependency problem or has somehow lost his ability to direct movies as skilfully as he has before, it's simply going to be one the festival's best.' (2)
Bubble...
Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 12:01 PM on Saturday, September 3, 2005
In keeping with the theme of the week, and given a certain name at the top of most readers' hit lists, I give you the uniform of our discontent.
A simple shirt with a complex message. Check out the ad on the left under the Discland blurb.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 12:35 PM on Friday, September 2, 2005
Here's what Glenn Sumi of
Now, the Toronto weekly, is saying about Ang Lee's
Brokeback Mountain...
Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:30 AM on Friday, September 2, 2005
Limits of Charm
It's not "nice" to have a Keira Knightley problem. Speaking against a beautiful spirited young woman never wins you any favors. It is seen as impolite and ungentlemanly, and perhaps even uncouth. But I can't suppress it any longer.
She's 20 years old and beautiful and a near-star...her face on the one-sheets, her name in the gossip columns. And she keeps making film after film. Her next outing is Domino (New Line, 10.14), a Tony Scott urban actioner, and then comes Pride and Prejudice (Focus Features, 11.18) and then, early next July, ...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:16 AM on Friday, September 2, 2005
I don't know why Robert Towne's
Ask the Dust didn't make the
Telluride Film Festival line-up. I know there was a definite interest in showing it there, but I guess it wasn't quite fine-tuned enough. (Towne told me a few weeks ago he wasn't sure if it would be done in time.) But the festival is certainly showing
Edmond, a David Mamet downer drama abut Bill Macy wandering around a city in a state of suicidal depression; Bennett Miller's
Capote; Liev Schreiber's
Everything is Illuminated, Scott McGehee and David Siegel's
Bee Season; James Mangold's
Walk the LineRead More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 2:02 PM on Thursday, September 1, 2005
