Day: September 6, 2007

My second viewing this evening of Anton Corbijn‘s Control (Weinstein Co., 10.10) resulted in even greater elation than I got from last May’s Cannes screening.

What I failed to say adequately in my previous raves is how wonderfully still and centered and untricky it is, and yet how sublimely satisfying it looks (with widescreen black-and-white photography so good it looks like monochromatic ice cream) and how authentic it all feels.

This, you’re left thinking (and even more so than Michael Winterbottom‘s 24 Hour Party People, which went for a slightly absurdist tone there and there), is how the souls of young despairing people in ’70s England truly resonated and registered, and more particularly how the Manchester scene really was or at least seemed to those who were there. (As Corbijn briefly was.)

The only thing about the film that doesn’t exactly turn me on is the gloomy story line. But I believed every line of it, every shot, every performance…all of it. It’s an absolute classic of its kind, and Sam Riley, who plays doomed Joy Division Ian Curtis, is — agree or not, believe it or not — an absolute candidate for Best Actor. Emphatically. No question. He’s dead perfect. (And I don’t mean that as a pun.)

Fox 411‘s Roger Friedman is reporting that Larry-into-Lana Wachowski sex-change story isn’t true. Stories about Larry having made the choice to reassign gender started four years ago without any disputation until now. “Disappointed?,” Friedman asks. “I know. I am too.”

You can’t say that a one-sheet using the suggestion of an old, dog-eared Bible to spread awareness of an allegedly violent period film about the oil business that’s based on an anti-capitalism book isn’t, at the very least, striking. It’s saying, obviously, that Paul Thomas Anderson‘s There Will be Blood (Paramount Vantage, 12.26) will address bedrock moral issues. Of course, all that blackness suggests somberness, bitterness and severity as well. But this is just a teaser poster (surfacing over three and a half months from release). Other themes and designs will surely follow.

Only fifteen minutes before the 5:30 pm press screening of Anton Corbijn‘s Control (which I’m seeing again for the sheer selfish enjoyment of it). I’ve just come out of Ang Lee‘s Lust, Caution, which started at 2:05 and ran 160 minutes, and my basic feeling (and the general consensus I’ve picked up in three or four conversations so far, two of them in the Cineplex Odeon men’s room) is that Derek Elley‘s Variety pan out of the Venice Film Festival was harsh and unwarranted.

Lust, Caution is what it is — a well-assembled, carefully honed period piece that tells a very twisted love story with some excellent (as in arousing, emotionally defining, envelope-pushing) sex scenes. I was irked at first with the pace but then I began to go with the graduality. The ending pays off, although there was laughter in the house right after a climactic bit of action. (I don’t know how to interpret the guffaws exactly, but third-act laughter in the third act of a heavy drama isn’t a desired reaction.) I wasn’t wowed down to my toes, but Lust, Caution has integrity and conviction, and I respected Lee’s decision to tell the story in the way that he did.

It is axiomatic that one must must approach all Canadian-produced films chosen to open the Toronto Film Festival with extreme caution. Jeremy Podeswa‘s Fugitive Pieces, which I just walked out of, conveys this tendency in spades. I was out the door after 30 minutes, but I was looking at my watch after the first 15 minutes. I don’t care if it kicks in at the one-hour mark or whatever — I won’t sit through films like this.

Expelled for the duration of the festival, and perhaps beyond. We will have no more to do with thee..be gone! Snapped in a Cineplex Odeon hallway after excusing myself from Jeremy Podeswa‘s Fugitive Pieces — Thursday, 9.6.07, 9:35 am

I guess this means I’m dead meat as far as the film’s producer, Robert Lantos, is concerned. If I run into him at at a party I’ll say I’m somebody else.

Pieces is a doleful past-and-present drama about a 40ish Holocaust survivor (Stephen Dillane) who finds it difficult coping with the present with so many World War II ghosts swirling around in his head. I can’t personally cope with Dillane — he kills each and every film and play that he’s in with his withered, crinkly-faced dweeby-ness. And I didn’t believe for a second that a 51 year-old pill like Dillane would entice a 28 year-old blonde hottie (Rosamund Pike, last in Fracture) to hop into bed with him and then propose marriage in fairly short order.

I’m going to catch the last half-hour of Juan Antonio Bayona‘s The Orphanage. Saw it twice in Cannes, and that wasn’t quite enough.

Proving once again that any youngish woman can get into hot-bod shape after having a kid if she sets her mind to it, Maggie Gyllenhaal is the new visual spokesperson for a just-launched promotional campaign Agent Provocateur, the London-based lingerie firm. It’s a semi-legit item (MCN is running it), but the things this column will do to attract readers. The first TIFF press screening starts 85 minutes from now…

Maggie Gyllenhaal