Month: June 2006

Stanley Nelson‘s Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple may seem like a provocative L.A. Film Festival film to catch this evening. (It’s at the Majestic Crest at 7:15 pm, and tomorrow night at 9:30 pm at the Laemmle Sunset 5.) But having seen this well-meaning doc at the Seattle Film Festival, I can tell you it pulls too many punches.

A story of a warped predatory looney who persuaded over 900 people to kill themselves with cyanide Kool-Aid should not be afraid to look at the horror straight in the face. Jim Jones began as an inspired preacher but ended his days as a diseased psychotic. One of his last acts as a bringer of God’s message was to persuade his followers to murder their children. The people who followed Jones’ orders were obviously insane also at that particular moment, and yet Nelson’s film refuses to get angry about any of this. It’s way too moderate.
It tells Jones’ story, all right. It’s well-written (by Marcia Smith), well researched, professionally edited and it uses first-rate footage. But the talking heads are all relatives, parents and former wives-and-husbands of those who died in Jonestown, and Nelson’s big error is trying to show too much respect for the living and the dead. He wants them to have a measure of dignity, and so he goes easy on the followers and what they did, and in so doing winds up going half-easy on Jones.
Tonally, emotionally, Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple could almost be a documentary about a dramatic soccer championship match in which the favored home team lost. It was a shame that Jones was so charismatic and imbued and yet so terribly screwed up, the doc seems to say. And how very unfortunate that all those lost people followed him to the jungles of Guyana and wound up offing themselves. A very tragic story, but….well, shit happens.
The point seems to be the victims deserve our respect and sympathy, and I say the hell with that.
The Jonestown tragedy was essentially a San Francisco story, as the Peoples Temple had been based in San Francisco from 1974 until the move to Guyana. The suicides happened only about nine days after the shootings of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and supervisor Harvey Milk by ex-supervisor Dan White, and there’s just no comparing the neutered impact of Nelson’s doc and Rob Epstein‘s masterful The Times of Harvey Milk (1984), one of the most impassioned and heartbreaking docs ever made about a tragic, untimely death.
What happened in Jonestown was NC-17, but Nelson’s doc is strictly PG-13. There’s no anger or fire in it…no ghastly details, none of the horror, not enough particulars about Jones’ sleazy seducer tendencies, etc. That 1980 Powers Boothe TV movie about Jones (Guayana Tragedy: The Story of Jim Jones) had a lot more intrigue in this regard.

Is the Tomkat structure cracking at the foundations? Roger Friedman has a story about how the bidding for photos of Suri Cruise didn’t go anywhere with the celebrity magazines (i.e., the pics didn’t attract a high-enough bid, or “not more than $3 million”). If this is more or less true, it’s interesting as a kind of roadside zeitgeist indicator. “If you think you’re still the Tom Cruise of the mid-to-late ’80s and ’90s”….”with your power and money and popularity all at peak levels”…”ask not for whom the bell tolls”…”it tolls for thee”…”Burma Shave.”

Amber Tamblyn was awfully good in Hilary Brougher‘s Stephanie Daley, an unsettling but definitely-better-than-decent melodrama that played at last January’s Sundance Film Festival. Nobody expects that (or Tamblyn’s performance in it) will attract anything like the press interest in her starring role in Takashi Shimizu‘s forthcoming The Grudge 2, but according to the IMDB Daley doesn’t even have a distributor lined up. So it’s going to…what?…turn up some day on DVD and that’s all? Small indie-type dramas with provocative subjects used to get at least some attention. Now, it seems, they’re not even managing that.

I’m not understanding Kevin Spacey‘s declaration that he based his Lex Luthor portrayal in Superman Returns on convicted Enron ogre Kenneth Lay. Read any of Lay’s statements during the Enron trial or watch him in Alex Gibney’s Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and it’s all who-me? and equivocations and various modes of shoulder-shrugging. There’s no rage in the man…nothing but a calculated front. Spacey’s Luthor is nothing at all like Lay. If you ask me, he seems to have based his performance on John McEnroe.

“For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.” — T.S. Eliot

It appears that Superman Returns is being marketed to Christians after all. Here’s a Bryan Singer interview in today’s Christianity Today, written by Mark Moring. Singer’s money quote: “I think that [Superman as a Christ figure] is kind of a natural evolution, because he began as kind of a Moses figure, of the child sent by the parents down the river to fulfill a destiny. Superman’s a savior. And even more so in my film, because he’s gone for a period of time, and then he returns. For me to say that those messianic images don’t exist in the movie would be absurd.” I’ve been told by a “fundie” reader that another Singer interview/profile will post tomorrow on Crosswalk.com.

I talked to a critic friend yesterday who said he had a great time with the new Pirates, although he admitted it’s a bit of slog during the first act or hour (whichever comes first). And now here’s David Poland saying that “like Superman Returns, Pirates 2 is too long by about 30 minutes, and the script tends to bog down every time the story gets a bit complex for its own good….it gets too confusing.” On top of which critic #1 said it’s an adventure fantasy “on steroids.” I know what “steroids” means and it doesn’t mean seductive or enticing. It means bigger, louder, crankier…a heavy boot. (Poland says one of the film’s charms is about Johnny Depp “pushing the envelope a little further.”) Anyone who felt un-levitated by the original Pirates should probably keep this Poland passage in mind: “Pirates 2 will never be as fresh” as the original…”that first film was expected to be a complete disaster in the mold of Kangaroo Jack and Treasure Planet…and then it turned out not only to be good, but a wonderful film .” Amazing…a movie that had me loudly exhaling, shifting positions in my seat, leaning forward with my hands covering my face, and escaping out to the lobby three times — one bathroom break, one soda refill, and one just to get the hell out of the theatre for a couple of minutes — was a “wonderful” film. Poland and I live on the same planet but the Pirates disconnect couldn’t be more profound. “Like the best of Spielberg (which this is one small step behind), [Pirates 2] really speaks to children of all ages,” Poland continues. “If your inner child died in a mine shaft disaster a few years back, you are part of the small group that won’t enjoy this movie.” Could that last statement possibly be amended to, “If you’re one of those who was theoretically into and wanted very much to drink the Verbinski-Bruckheimer Kool-Aid but found yourself involuntarily choking and gagging, you may find yourselves deja-viewing”? I love Poland’s admission that Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio‘s script “has none of the suspense of The Empire Strikes Back…the difference between this film and, say, Star Wars, is that there is not the big picture driving the emotional weight of the middle movie. The world is not about to fall to the evil empire. The lives and happiness of our heroes is really what drives these films and it isn’t as powerful.” And yet Pirates 2 “sends you out of the theater smiling, laughing, and applauding.” Everyone I’ve spoken to has said more or less the same thing and you can’t fight City Hall, I guess. But in the rascally spirit of Jack Sparrow…

Warner Bros. marketers have been too classy (or clueless) to try and sell Bryan Singer‘s Superman Reborns to Christian righties as a kind of Jesus-metaphor movie, the way Disney sold Narnia, etc. But maybe they should have? When those righties come out for a movie, they come out in force.

The marketing execs of Fox Home Video are just as determined to sell Sidney Lumet‘s Find Me Guilty as a dopey-ass lightweight mob comedy as its theatrical distributor, Yari Film Group Releasing, was during its brief theatrical release last March. These guys won’t quit until everyone in DVD-ville is convinced this film is a second-tier wash and probably not worth the rental fee. It is worth it…trust me.

Broadly played at times but meticulous and flavorful and dramatically solid, Guilty is Lumet’s best film since Q & A and before that, Prince of the City. It’s extremely well acted (Vin Diesel, Peter Dinklage, Ron Silver, Annabella Sciorra, Alex Rocco …everyone shines), beautifully shot and edited, and reeking of New York-New Jersey goombah-and-cop culture like many of Lumet’s better films.
I wrote last February that “it’s a tight, no-nonsense court drama that’s not about legal maneuvers or discovering evidence or doing right by the system and justice being served, but mob family values. In a stuffed-manicotti way, Find Me Guilty is as much of a values-based entertainment as The Passion of the Christ, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, The Thing About My Folks and Madea’s Family Reunion. I’m serious.
These values can be summed up by the words ‘don’t rat’, ‘don’t roll‘ and ‘family is everything’. I’m no goombah but I sympathize with these sentiments, so I guess that’s part of the territory.” Here’s the whole piece.

Another global warming story from the L.A. Times, and scarier than the last one. Would the Times have run these stories on the front page at this particular juncture even if An Inconvenient Truth weren’t in theatres? You tell me.

To judge by news of her casting in Woody Allen ‘s next film (which will costar Colin Farrell and Ewan McGregor), British actress Haley Atwell is doing fairly well. But Google her and you get this, and put her name on the IMDB and all you get are some TV credits, her height (5 foot, 6 1/2 inches) and a statement that she went to England’s Guildhall School from ’02 to ’05.

Reading about someone’s obsessive dislike of a film they haven’t seen is pretty damn tedious, I realize, but pieces about Johnny Depp plugging Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest are much, much worse. Depp is mugging and prancing around in tall boots and a loose-flowing shirt and a three-cornered hat so he can get paid….end of story. If I could wave a magic wand that would make all the arts editors at all the big syndicates and big-city newspapers totally ignore this film, I would do so. Beware the commercial gleam in the eyes of Gore Verbinski and Jerry Bruckheimer because they are seducers, not lovers. They are not interested in the state of your soul or the beating of your heart after you’ve seen their two-hour, 30-minute “entertainment” — they’ll scamper out the rear exit door before the opening credit sequence is finished, laughing like hell. Beware Pirates screenwriters Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio…beware their machinations. (They wrote both Zorro movies…they wrote the “story” of Godzilla…they’re bad people.) Beware Keira Knightley in all her manifestations, but especially in 18th Century gowns and hair extensions. I for one intend to arise early on July 7th and hike into the mountains and find an isolated spot and beat myself with birch branches like Max von Sydow in The Virgin Spring.