Day: August 18, 2005

I don’t understand why the crowd at the Manhattan all-media screening of Judd Apatow’s The 40 Year-Old Virgin (Universal, 8.19) was laughing so much. Because this thing is mostly…you know what I’m going to say, right?…not even vaguely funny. And the first half is damn near agonizing. And it’s one of the ugliest, most flatly lit films (the dp is Jack Green) I’ve seen in a theatre in a long while. Matters improve slightly during the last third when Steve Carrell’s virginal electronic-store worker is allowed to behave in a less broad, less desperate-for-laughs way and comes down to earth and acts like a semi-believable unhappy guy with a slight…er, problem. The very last bit is the funniest bit. And okay, Henry Cabot Beck wasn’t wrong. Catherine Keener is warm and likable as a positive-minded 40ish woman, and in a way that feels for the most part grounded and reflective of someone you might actually meet somewhere other than a film set. But at the same time let’s not get that excited about her performance. I mean, you know… show some restraint already. This is first and foremost an extremely insubstantial film. It doesn’t come close to catching a whiff of the energy or the attitude of The Wedding Crashers so forget it, Apatow…off to the showers!

Time‘s Richard Corliss writes that a generic Ralph Fiennes performance — and particularly the very fine one he gives in The Constant Gardener (Focus Features, 8.31)– “is a miniature device with intricate moving parts. Movie directors often want their actors to ‘go bigger.’ Fiennes goes smaller — and inside. His onscreen speech is a mix of concealments and confidences, of whispers in a cave or under the covers. And he’s not speaking softly just so you will be startled when he explodes.” A striking example is a scene in which Fiennes, playing a British diplomat stationed in Kenya, is told that his wife Tessa (Rachel Weiscz) may have been killed. “As the camera holds on him, searching for a reaction, Fiennes doesn’t conjure up a rage or a gasp. He doesn’t gush a stream of tears or obscenities. He moves hardly at all. Yet alert viewers will see his pale face turn a shade ashen. They will watch his spirit sink as he struggles to retain propriety. Somehow a symphony of grief, suspicion and copelessness plays lightly on his sharp, elegant features.”

I’m finding this obviously way early and somewhat snarky pan of Doug McGrath’s Have You Heard? (Warner Independent, 9.06), written by Leon Neyfakh and appearing in the 8.22 New York Observer, a tiny bit curious, given the positive things I’ve been hearing all along about McGrath’s script….but you never know. Have You Heard? (formerly known as Every Word Is True) is the “other” Truman Capote biopic that Warner Independent is holding back from release until late next year so as not to get into a pissing match with Bennett Miler’s Capote, which Sony Classics is showing in Toronto and then opening on 9.30. Miller’s film starts screening next week for people like me, and I’ve been told by a weekly magazine writer who’s seen it that Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s performance as Capote is definitely award-worthy.

Any e-mails anyone might have sent over the last two or three days of a pressing nature, please re-send them as my inbox has again been erased and I’m starting out clean as of this morning…thanks.