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 of single-mom-and-coal-miner Charlize Theron suing the mining company she’s been woriking for doesn’t come up until the movie has been running for a good hour and 20 minutes. And then the courtroom stuff happens during the last 15 or 20 minutes. It’s fine and moving here and there, but we’ve all seen this kind of thing before and I can’t imagine anyone getting that cranked about it. Sexual harassment is a detestable thing, but it’s been a hot-button issue in our culture for…what?…25 or 30 years now? Yes, Theron could wind up as a Best Actress Oscar contender for her performance, but the film’s been-there, done-that quality will not work in her favor. Frances McDormand gets to play a victim of Lou Gehrig’s Disease….whoo-hoo! Lou Gehrig’s Disease! Emotional-impact-opportunity! Her character is dying but she still has the moxie to say “fuck you” to a corporate lawyer through a voice-box speaker and musters the courage to stand up for her friend, etc. But with all my complaining out of the way, it would be inaccurate and unfair not to say that the final courtroom scene does work…it put a modest lump in my throat. North Country may do fairly well with ticket-buyers, but it’s not a major-event film like Caro’s Whale Rider and that’s the truth.

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 press screening without any difficulty. Peter Howell told me that local Fox publicists had a well-attended press screening a couple of weeks ago, so maybe that was why. Variety‘s Joe Leydon says the Bettie Page jam-up happened simply because everyone wanted to see Gretchen Mol looking stylishly naked in that really dirty 1950s way.

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, et. al. There have been two or three others, but none have so moved me to my core that it has felt mandatory that I file an immediate review. That’s been my policy for the last couple of days…fuck it. But I guess I’d better put something down about something sometime today, even if I’m not turned on about it.

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 any different than the one I saw in Manhattan in mid-July, so I don’t know what’s up here. More later…