Day: October 19, 2007

Charlie Wilson’s War blowback item #1: the more I look at this trailer, the more irksome those clips of Julia Roberts are starting to become. Trailers have the potential of souring viewers on the movies they’re supposed to be selling because they always hammer home the most cloying selling points, but in every clip Roberts is either doing the sly sexy smile with the raised eyebrows or she’s winking. Sorry, but I have a low tolerance for this stuff in movie trailers to begin with.

Plus her accent sounds Southern but not exactly Texan (i.e., she’s playing a real-life conservative Houston socialite named Joanne Herring), and that big blonde hairdo is starting to bother also. I don’t mean to be a pain-in-the-butt nitpicker with nothing better to do than complain, but I’m starting to feel these iffy vibes because of Roberts and (let’s be honest) the trailer itself. More and more I’m hearing and seeing a series of quips and punch lines, but not much of a river or current underneath.

Memo to Universal marketing: get the team to cut a non-cute, non-winking trailer sometime soon that makes Charlie Wilson’s War look like a moderately serious political drama. The more I think about it, the idea that it’s some like of light, sardonic geopolitical romp isn’t going down well. I’m not saying “dreary” is the ticket — just get away from the smirks and the chuckles, and maybe throw in one or two extra clips with Phillip Seymour Hoffman.

Hanks, Roberts and Hoffman on location.

And please, please shitcan the “All Along the Watchtower” and “American Pie” song clips altogether.

Yesterday Benjamin Crossley-Marra announced on the Filmmaker website that a DVD of George Hickenlooper and Fax Bahr‘s Hearts of Darkness, a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at the tortured making of Francis Coppola‘s Apocalypse Now, will finally be released on 11.20.

It bothers me that Crossley-Marra doesn’t mention the disc’s distributor in his story, and that I can’t find any mention of the Hearts DVD on Amazon.com, and that I haven’t heard about this directly from Hickenlooper. I’ll feel a lot more trusting about this announcement when some of these details peek through, or when they don’t.

The Hearts of Darkness DVD will reportedly include a narration track by Francis Coppola and his wife Eleanor. The disc will also feature Eleanor’s Coda: Thirty Years Later, a follow-up documentary on the whole magilla.

I spoke last week to Barbet Schroeder, the esteemed director of Terror’s Advocate, a doc that I wound up respecting more than liking. This led to conflicted feelings and a kind of blogger’s block when it came to posting something about it last week, when the film had its debut.

Terrorist’s Advocate is a portrait of Jacques Verges, a brilliant and vaguely charming French-Vietnamese attorney who’s defended (or been in some kind of collusion with) almost every big-time terrorist, anti-colonialist, revolutionary cowboy and anti-imperialist operative of the last 50 years.

It’s essentially a story of a bright, opinionated, anti-colonialist lawyer who began his professional life with great passion during the Algerian uprising, defending and then winning freedom for a beautiful anti-French terrorist named Djamila Bouhired and later marrying and having two children with her. But he gradually came to love being wanted by as many terrorists and freedom-fighters around the world, however dubious their credentials, as possible.

He came to love the attention — the heat of the action — and this hunger for engagement in and of itself (as well as the spotlight) gradually consumed him.

This, at least, is the impression I got from Schroeder’s film. Not that Verges stopped believing in revolutionary ideals or fighting U.S. imperialism or general oppression, but that he came to care a little more about being Jacques Verges than anything else. It goes that way for a lot of us, I suppose. We start out believing, fighting, trying to be heard or at least see our passion have some impact or result. But we end up owning and occupying a certain turf — a way of living, thinking, being — that becomes, in the end, the ultimate focus.

By the late ’60s Verges had become the terrorist go-to guy for legal defense and consultation. He is still at the top of this pyramid today. (Terror’s Advocate is obviously a kind of advertisement for Verges’ skills as an attorney.) The Baader-Meinhof gang, Carlos the Jackal, Saddam Hussein, allies of Khmer Rouge psychopath Pol Pot, Waddi Haddad, Slobodan Milosevic, former Nazi torturer Klaus Barbie…they all called him, dealt with him, trusted him.

Terrorist’s Advocate is an emotionally dry film — you could call it arid — but it’s not without fascination. For more than two hours Schroeder relates Verges’ history from the mid 1950s to the present, speaking only to Verges and the people who’ve actually dealt with him. There are no outside observers, no judges. Perhaps, for the sake of simple-minded souls like myself, there should have been. After the first hour or so I began to long for something more than Schroeder’s immaculate dispassion.

The movie reminded me that anyone with enough guile and brain cells can be charming. Villains do not scowl or glare or laugh fiendishly like they do in the movies. They smile and chat on the phone and order take-out food on weekends and enjoy taking long walks along country roads as much as anyone else.

I was going to run my mp3 of my chat with Barbet last week, but something held me back. I guess I just didn’t feel enough enthusiasm for the film to get myself up on the diving board so I could do my approach and then bounce off and attempt some kind of jacknife dive into the pool. I knew the fire and the feeling weren’t there.

But I’ve known and admired Barbet Schroeder for 20 years. I worked with him closely for a brief period at Cannon Films, when he was making Barfly and I was writing press kits. He came to a party I threw once, when I was married and living in a home in the Hollywood hills. He’s a fascinating guy, a superb filmmaker, always kind and fair-minded, one of my heroes. So I did my best with Barbet on the phone (he called from from the set of Inju, a thriller he’s currently shooting in Japan) and showed as much interest and enthusiasm as I could.

Terror’s Advocate is a film of great intelligence, but it does gradually lull you into a sort of stupor after a while. Is it possible to feel engaged and nodding off at the same time? Naturally I didn’t have the impertinence to say this to Barbet.

Things We Lost in the Fire has bombed out with slightly less than half the critics — only 65% have thumbs-upped it on Rotten Tomatoes, 58% on Metacritic — but nearly everyone (except for Stephen Holden and maybe one other) has gone into full cartwheel mode over Benicio del Toro‘s performance and, to any fair-minded reader or watcher of the film, made a Best Actor Oscar nom seem mandatory.

The Austin Chronicle‘s Josh Rosenblatt says it best: “If you’re bored some Saturday night, try this game: Close your eyes, spin around three times, and point a finger at Del Toro’s resume. Dollars to doughnuts, you’re going to land on one of the better acting performances of the last 20 years. Basquiat. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Traffic. 21 Grams. Big Top Pee-wee. He can do it all.

“Yet somehow, with Things We Lost in the Fire, he’s managed to top even himself; this most recent performance is right up there with the best screen turns, not just of his generation but of all time: Brando in On the Waterfront. Hopkins in Nixon. Washington in Training Day. Rarefied air.

“In Danish director Susanne Bier‘s excellent new film, Del Toro plays Jerry Sunborne, a fortysomething junkie living in squalor in downtown Seattle who’s forced to re-examine his life after the violent death of his best and only friend, Steven Burke (the perpetually somnolent David Duchovny). Burke’s wife, Audrey (Halle Berry), never trusted Jerry even when her husband was alive, but she decides to call on him after realizing that raising two kids alone in her emotional state may be an impossible task.

“Things We Lost in the Fire is Bier’s first English-language film and her follow-up to the Oscar-nominated After the Wedding, and like that film, it’s an impeccably constructed and perfectly paced drama of domestic and internal volatility.

“In the end, this movie belongs to Del Toro. He imbues Jerry with such life, such ambiguity, such unsentimental complexity and depth that you can’t help but feel you’re watching the most intricately mapped depiction of addiction and strained humanity the film world has ever given us.”

Likewise, The Stranger‘s Andrew Wright states that “you’re mainly going to be watching Del Toro, who somehow slinkys and random-tangents his way into a fully realized being who’s never more soulful than when he’s dealing with the monkey on his back. The film has yet to be made that fully does justice to Del Toro’s alien transmissions, but Bier comes awfully close.”