Day: January 27, 2006

Here’s the single most disgusting story about the ’06 Sundance Film Festival, written by freelancer Chris Lee and published by the L.A. Times. Why disgusting? Because it’s about a kind of glitzy cancer attached like a boil to the back of a once-great film festival. And because it made me want to throw up. On Lee. Sample graph: “To get to the truth of the underground Sundance economy, an intrepid Times reporter — a nobody among somebodies — boldly attempted to discover how much swag one could collect in six hours spread out over two days. The yield: more than two dozen products and services with a monetary value of $11,326.89. At the conclusion of the experiment, everything was given to charity (or in some cases, eaten or drunk).”

“How did Brokeback Mountain break out? By surgically targeting where the movie would play in its initial release; selling it as a romance for women rather than a controversial gay-bashing tale; and opting out of the culture wars rather than engaging them.” So reads John Lippman’s Wall Street Journal article [free] about the surprising box-office success of this film, which is selling more tickets than Munich by a 3-to-1 margin and, if you ask me, is looking more and more likely to hit or top $100 million. Lippman reports data from Focus Features marketing guy David Brooks to wit: “As the weeks pass, the demographics of the Brokeback audience have shifted. Gays turned out for the first weekend, with 60% of the audience male and 40% female. But in the next three weeks, women responded to marketing and the audience flipped to 60% female and 40% male. Now, as the media attention intensifies in the wake of the film’s wins at the Golden Globes, heterosexual men are going to the film on their own and the women are sliding back down to the mid-50 percentile.”

There’s a Brokeback Mountain Oprah Winfrey show that ran today (Friday, 1.27). Here’s the link.

To all those thoughtful movie-loving righties who wrote in doubting the veracity of the claims in Al Gore’s global-warming movie An Inconvenient Truth, I have this reply: if you don’t want to believe something, you can usually figure some way of doing that under the guise of subjectivism. Where there’s a will, there’s a way…right? The scientific and geological data “isn’t in yet” on global warming and the president of Iran says the holocaust never happened. I think we all understand that righties don’t want to buy into global warming. They want profiteering from any and all sectors of the economy (particularly the oil-based sector) to continue full blast, and they’re pretty dug in as far as waving away the scientific data and the writing on the wall, which has been recognized by scientific authorities and governments the world over. Excluding the Bush-Cheney gang, of course, with their financial ties to the oil industry. And most politicians are convinced they will be voted out if they tell their constituents they’re going to have to modify or reconfigure their lavish lifestyles for the greater ecological good, and a significant portion of the mainstream reporting media continues to muddy the waters as to the facts of the matter. At this stage of the game and knowing what I know (or have no logical reason to disbelieve), the view that global warming is a liberal fiction embraced by Gore and various leftie extremists is simply not reasonable or tenable. The science is in and as far as I can discern, there’s no comprehensive factual basis for arguing that Al Gore’s global-warming slide show or Davis Guggenheim’s film lies or skirt the facts.

Here’s an audio clip of Sundance movie star Al Gore ripping into George Bush on Martin Luther King day over constitutional abuses.

Three Brokeback Mountain items: (a) despite George Bush‘s recent assertion that he hasn’t seen Ang Lee’s film, producer James Schamus said recently that the White House has requested a print and that one was sent over; (b) a guy named Pepe Ruiloba has written and told me after seeing Brokeback Mountain [he] was surprised to discover that the male prostitute that Jack Twist picks up across the boarder is none other than the film’s Mexican cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto, and yet the IMDB doesn’t list Prieto…who knows the truth of this?, and (c) a recent new story said that Brokeback Mountain will be banned from theatres in China in Mongolia.

Steven Soderbergh‘s Che recently filmed some exterior scenes on Mahattan’s Uper East Side, with Benicio del Toro playing the title role. Here’s a photo supplied by Latino Review. I’m assuming this photo is genuine, but you never know.

It’s worth saying again: Lajos Koltai’s Fateless is the first near-great film of 2006. The exquisite widescreen framing, desaturated color and exquisite editing make it, to my eyes, the most visually immaculate Holocaust death-camp drama ever made (am I saying this right?) as well as one of the most realistic seeming and subtly-rendered in terms of story. Based on Imre Kertesz’s mostly true-life account, it’s about a young Jewish boy from Budapest who ends up in a concentration camp during World War II and just barely survives. It lacks the story tension and rooting factor of Polanski’s The Pianist, but situations of hunger, despair and the ashy aura of near-death have never been rendered with such remarkable pictorial finesse. Here’s a phone interview I did with Koltai a week and a half ago.