“You live in a free country, you put up with crud like Hostel Part II,” writes the Chicago Tribune‘s Michael Phillips. “It truly is crud, though. The film is the definition of torture porn, and regarding the Motion Picture Association of America’s business-friendly, brain-free decision to give it an R rating: If this film gets by with an R, then what is left to warrant an NC-17?”

I’ve been wanting to talk to director Zoe Cassevetes since last January, which was when I saw Broken English, her first film. To my surprise I quite liked it, despite it being a kind of romantic comedy, which I tend to hate as a rule. It’s about a 30ish Manhattan hotel worker named Nora (Parker Posey) looking for the right dude and mostly getting hurt, and then finally getting lucky…sort of. The kind of luck that comes with interesting complications.

Broken English director-writer Zoe Cassevetes — Thursday, 6.7.07, 4:25 pm

I did one of those quickie-sit-downs with Cassevetes Thursday afternoon at the Four Seasons hotel. She’s John Cassevetes‘ daughter, all right — whip-smart, unpretentious, compulsively honest. Posey dropped by for a minute or two early on, wearing a killer black blouse. They were both going to attend an invitational screening of Broken English at the Aero in Santa Monica.
I liked Broken English because it’s often funny but also because it doesn’t seem to be trying to be that as much as a natural settling into a sardonic and sometimes bitterly truthful vein. It’s largely about what a slog it is out there for no-longer-young women who haven’t yet found the right match, or at least a relationship offering a possibility of something fairly good happening. It’s not Rules of the Game or A Man and a Woman, but there are very few times when Broken English merely goes for “cute” or “affecting.”
For what it is and as far as it goes, Broken English (Magnolia, 6.22) is unusually bright and observant, and I swear it contains the most affecting and emotionally open performance of Parker Posey‘s 38-year life. She may seem at times to be doing the same sort of Parker-attitude thing here that she’s done in many films before, but this time there’s a bit more sadness, a deeper crack in her voice, a greater willingness to show her buried child.
All along, her performance works hand-in-hand with Cassevetes’ sassy, tip-top script.
The film gets rolling and digs in when Nora meets Julian (Melvil Poupaud), a 30ish Parisian who seems soulful and straight enough. The chemistry seems right, but then he takes off. Should Nora let it go and move on, or fly to Paris and see what happens next?
In the hands of another director and with a lesser actress as Nora, a vehicle like Broken English might’ve been a little tough to get through. I mean, I usually hate stuff like this. But this one touches bottom, and is sharp and deft and even penetrating at times. I just wish that more romantic comedies were on this level. This isn’t to say it’s great or drop-dead profound, but it’s way beyond your typical puerile, over-baked, too-broad romantic comedy
Justin Theroux, playing a generic egoistic actor with a mohawk, is hilarious. He delivers his lines with just the right jaded aroma, never too broad or buffoony. Drea de Mateo, Gena Rowlands and Peter Bogdanovich also give nicely-honed supporting performances.

A fairly nifty trailer for Ridley Scott‘s American Gangster.

Here’s an Iraq flick I’m 95% certain will kick ass: Imperial Life in the Emerald City, with Matt Damon playing a composite character “based on figures in Washington Post journalist Rajiv Chandrasekaran‘s book about chaos in Iraq, under Bourne Supremacy/Bourne Ultimatum/United 93 director Paul Greengrass.

I got into it briefly last August, and now someone else — Slate‘s Kim Masters — has focused on “mom-ager” Dina Lohan, the blonde Medusa behind Lindsay Lohan‘s fixin’-to-die tragedy. Mom, who seems an almost pure manifestation of evil, needs to check into a spiritual-rehab facility while her daughter deals with the substance thing.

Getting this straight: Terry George‘s Reservation Road, an emotionally intense adult drama set in Connecticut that’s based on a respected 1999 novel by John Burnham Schwartz, will open on 11.9.07 via Focus Features. Sam Mendes‘ Revolutionary Road, an emotionally intense adult drama set in Connecticut that’s based on a respected 1961 novel by Richard Yates, will open in December 2008 via DreamWorks.

Joaquin Pheonix, Jennifer Connelly in Reservation Road

George’s film, wrapped, costars Joaquin Phoenix, Mark Ruffalo, Jennifer Connelly and Mira Sorvino. Mendes’ film, now shooting in and around Darien, Connecticut, costars Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet.

“The next time you see a Hostel: Part II poster, perhaps you’ll ponder for a moment why so many of us get a kick out of movies in which kids are gruesomely hacked to death yet so few of us will bother to look at the carnage when it’s real kids in a real war. It must be why they call the movies escapist art. When it comes to real gore, we like to turn away.” — L.A. Times guy Patrick Goldstein in a 6.5 column about Eli Roth‘s Hostel, Part II.

The L.A. County Sheriff’s department’s decision to release Paris Hilton after a lousy three days is a contemptible joke and utterly shameful. She was sent home after midnight with an ankle bracelet, which she’ll wear for 40 days. A Sheriff’s department spokesperson called it a “reassignment” and mentioned that a “medical” issue had been a factor in the decision to send her home. Medical? The message these LACS chumps have sent to the world is that super-rich ho’s with hot-shot attorneys skate, and that the staffers running the show are political bush-leaguers and totally compliant candy-asses.
Hilton, needless, to add, has completey failed the Robert Mitchum test that I spoke of on May 11th. Mitchum did time quietly and without complaint a following a shady marijuana bust in September 1948, and he came out of it smelling like a stand-up guy. Hilton slithered out of her 23-day sentence like a loftier-than-thou, over-pampered, morally bankrupt reptile.
My 5.11 item included this line: “I don’t think for a second that our very own empty-headed, barren-souled heiress has the character to ‘do a Mitchum,’ but the most potentially profound spiritual experience of her so-far-useless life awaits nonetheless.” I was right, actually — getting herself hustled out of jail after three days has been a profound spiritual experience in the most negative way possible. This is it — Hilton is finished. She had a chance to show some balls and fortitude and has showed she has absolutely none. Which famous woman has been more despised? Leni Reifenstahl?

I’m re-pasting these with the assumption that I’m missing at least two or three that should be included (but aren’t). The 23 prestige fall-winter narrative films to watch for are Paul Thomas Anderson‘s There Will Be Blood, Alan Ball‘s Nothing Is Private, Susanne Bier‘s Things We Lost in the Fire, Tim Burton‘s Sweeney Todd, Joel and Ethan Coen‘s No Country for Old Men (seen it…brilliant), David Cronenberg‘s Eastern Promises, Marc Forster‘s The Kite Runner, Sam Mendes‘ Revolutionary Road, Paul Haggis‘s In the Valley of Elah, Gavin Hood‘s Rendition, James Ivory‘s City of Your Final Destination, Shekhar Kapur‘s The Golden Age, Lajos Koltai‘s Evening, Sidney Lumet‘s Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, Mike Newell‘s Love in the Time of Cholera, Mike Nichols‘ Charlie Wilson’s War; Vadim Perelman‘s In Bloom, Robert Redford‘s Lions for Lambs, Ridley Scott‘s American Gangster, Michael Winterbottom‘s A Mighty Heart (seen it…a strong Michael Mann film), and Joe Wright‘s Atonement.

I tried to dig into Canadian author Rebecca Eckler‘s claim, published in MacLeans magazine, that director-writer Judd Apatow used some of the ideas and situations from her book, “Knocked Up: Confessions of a Hip Mother-to-be“, which came out in early ’05, to make his own Knocked Up. What I mean is that I tried to finagle a non-attributable spin from the Apatow/Universal camp, but the rulebook says to keep your yap shut when issues of this sort arise. The similarities are intriguing, but it’s hard to prove this stuff irrefutably.

Late last year director Lars von Trier (The Boss Of It All) spoke of being clinically depressed, but he’s out of it now. He’s confessed to Radar‘s Matt Thompson that “maybe my problem is that I talk too much…I’ve been through three months of depression in the last year, and for some reason everyone seems to think I’m in a straight jacket, which I’m not.”

He explains that The Boss Of It All, which has a very decent 86% positive Rotten Tomatoes rating, is “supposed to be like some of these comedies you make in America: The Shop Around the Corner, Bringing Up Baby, The Odd Couple…all these little talent films. Maybe not so sentimental. Those films were part of my childhood. I was always feeling very secure when I saw them. I was trying to find this mood in Boss of It All.
“It shouldn’t be like Naked Gun, where you’re supposed to laugh all the time. It should only be a little time where you can feel secure.”

Due respect to Matt Damon and his not wanting to be saddled with the Jason Bourne franchise beyond the next and (he says) final entry, The Bourne Ultimatum, but he shouldn’t shut the door too hastily. I’ve loved the last two Bournes (aside from the excessively hyper editing of the Bourne Supremacy action sequences), and I don’t know anyone who doesn’t feel that the Bourne flicks are much more reflective of 21st Century anxieties and vibrations than the Bond films, including the very good Casino Royale. I’d be happy to see at least one or two more Bournes beyond the next one. Besides, Damon has a knack for choosing bombs (I thought he was over after The Legend of Bagger Vance, i.e, “Bag of Gas”) and needs a good commercial franchise to keep things steady.