Month: October 2007

Visual economy in a film is always a great thing, but it can be dazzling when used to portray a character’s state of mind and explain why he’s about to embark on a certain course of action. There’s a moment near the beginning of Louis Malle‘s Damage, a masterful drama about an obsessive, self-destructive affair between a British politician (Jeremy Irons) and his son’s fiance (Juliette Binoche), that’s a good example of this.

Irons walks into his tres elegant, two-story home in Hampstead Heath at the end of the day and tells his wife (Miranda Richardson) about a meeting with the Prime Minister. The maid is fixing dinner, he’s feeling smug and successful and all is generally well. He makes himself a drink and strolls into the nearly living room. He take a sip and looks around, and the expression on his face says everything — he feels unfulfilled, unchallenged, unconnected. And Malle doesn’t dwell on Irons’ face. He shows it to us for maybe three seconds, and then fade to black. It tells us all we need to know about why he’s susceptible.

Can anyone think of other films and other moments in which something essential or fundamental about a character is explained in a single brief shot?

“I met this guy named Ding-Dong. He told me the whole earth is goin’ up in flame. Flames will come out of here and there and they’ll just rise up. The mountains are gonna go up in big flames, the water’s gonna rise in flames. There’s gonna be creatures runnin’ every which way, some of them burnt, half of their wings burnin’. People are gonna be screamin’ and hollerin’ for help.

“See, the people that have been good, they’re gonna go to heaven and escape all that fire. But if you’ve been bad, God don’t even hear you. He don’t even hear ya talkin’.”

I honestly don’t believe I’ve heard voice-over dialogue that’s this much fun to read or listen to in…I don’t know how many years. That line about “wings burnin'” is great. When I hear it I don’t think of chickens or turkeys or birds of any kind — I think of the flying monkeys from The Wizard of Oz falling to the ground and leaving wispy little smoke trails.

Ben Affleck‘s thing with Jennifer Lopez “was probably bad for my career,” he admits in a Details interview meant to promote Gone Baby Gone (Miramax, 10.19), a Boston-based thriller cum procedural that Affleck has directed.

“What happens is this sort of bleeds over from the tabloids across your movie work. You go to a movie, you only go once. But the tabloids and internet are everywhere. You can really subsume the public image of somebody. I ended up in an unfortunate-crosshair position where I was in a relationship and (the media) mostly lied and inflated a bunch of salacious stuff for the sake of selling magazines. And I paid a certain price for that.”

I turned positive on Affleck after he discussed the political situation with Hardball‘s Chris Matthews during the ’04 Democratic Convention and held his own very well. He could be a political commentator, a candidate…he’s got it.

“Bennifer” — a derogatory moniker coined by Kevin Smith — is the one everybody went with, but I always preferred “B. Lo.”

I paid money to see Robert Benton‘s Feast of Love last night. It’s a completely decent second-tier relationship drama. That doesn’t mean “second-rate” — it’s just not refined enough to be called top of the line. A little too schematic, not enough of an underflow. Maybe it is second rate, but I half-liked it. I was half into it and sometimes fully engrossed, and also a bit bored from time to time, but it didn’t hurt altogether.

I respected Gregg Kinnear‘s willingness to go into vulnerable places, and the growing intimation that you get from Allison Burke‘s screenplay (based on Charles Baxter‘s book) that the sad/bad stuff might happen at any time. Radha Mitchell delivers as a conflicted real-estate agent who brings fresh misery into Kinnear’s already cloudy life, and hats off to Benton for not shying away from matter-of-fact nudity during the numerous bedroom scenes.

And I really liked Billy Burke‘s acting as Mitchell’s married boyfriend. Burke is mainly a TV actor but he deserves more. He knows how to deliver lines like they’re coming from someone (and some place) genuine, and he has a kind of primal Steve McQueen-ish thing going on.

But I absolutely despised a moment early on when Morgan Freeman‘s charac- ter, a 60ish teacher struggling with the death of his 20-something son from a heroin overdose a year earlier, wakes up in the middle of the night and goes for a stroll. He walks by a vacant baseball field and suddenly sees and hears a softball game in progress — one he’s remembering, presumably. (We all understand scenes like this. Most of us, I mean.) Then all of a sudden it’s daylight and people are everywhere and Kinnear comes up to Freeman and starts chatting.

It’s a beautiful transition at first — Freeman might be remembering a conversation he had with Kinnear, or it might be an imaginary chat that he’s having in his head. It doesn’t matter either way because we’re “there” with Freeman — he inspires trust and comfort no matter who or what he’s playing — and cool with whatever goes down.

But two seconds after Kinnear greets Freeman Benton throws in a title card that says “six months earlier” and the moment is shattered all to hell. Who gives a shit if it’s six months earlier or the next morning or the day before or six months hence? We’ll figure it out as we go along, no? Nope. Some idiot producer (or perhaps some idiots who were asked about this scene following a research screening) confessed to confusion about the dark-to-daylight element (whoa!) and Benton lost his nerve and put in the title card.

Kowtowing to the dumbest people in the audience will always be a mark of mediocrity, and I lost a lot of respect or Benton at this very moment. A stronger director wouldn’t have done this.

Imagine a producer coming up to David Lean during post-production on Lawrence of Arabia and going, “Uhhh, David? I’m not really getting the thing with Peter O’Toole blowing out the match and a split second later we’re watching a sunrise in the desert. He’s standing in Claude Rains‘ office when he blows it out, right? I’m not getting how he’s suddenly hundreds of miles away in a different country… it’s a little disorienting. You need to put in a title card that says, ‘Arabian desert — Three Weeks Later.’ People will be less confused this way.”

Here‘s a well-phrased appreciation from N.Y. Times DVD columnist Dave Kehr of Paramount Home Video’s 50th anniversary DVD of Stanley Donen‘s Funny Face (’57). I’m not sure I would have watched this without Kehr’s recommendation, but now…maybe. “In a version that returns to the original VistaVision negative for an uncommonly crisp and vibrant transfer,” he writes, “Funny Face is a movie that bridges two generations — that of the traditional, studio-bound musical and that of the new, on-location epic.”

Wasn’t On The Town (’49) was the first on-location musical? Shot mostly on sound stages, used a lot of Manhattan location footage.

Whenever I think of something-face in a movie, I think primarily of Cary Grant calling Joan Fontaine “monkey-face” in Suspicion. Then, I suppose, I think of Fred Astaire, Audrey Hepburn and Funny Face. Then Robert DeNiro using the term “fuck-face” in Mean Streets. Then Sex in the City‘s Sara Jessica Parker and that unkind term sometimes applied — “horse-face.” Finally I think of Michael Madsen calling Parole Office Seymour Scagnetti as “ass-head” in Reservoir Dogs. Always the downward spiral…

“I actually think that it’s easier for people who know less about Dylan to go with it, if they’re up for something different. Clearly, that’s the first thing. Whether you know Dylan or not, you have to surrender to the movie to have a good time at all and get anything out of it. If you have a lot of Dylanisms in your head, it’s kind of distracting, because you’re sitting there with a whole second movie going on. You’re annotating it as you go.

“[But] it’s kind of nice to sit back and let it take you. I think people get it: Even if you don’t know which are the true facts and which are the fictional things, and when we’re playing with fact and fiction, from the tone of it, you know that it’s playing around with real life.” — I’m Not There director Todd Haynes speaking to Reeler interview Eric Kohn.

Another industry-watcher — Wall Street Journal contributor Anthony Kaufman — is reporting that the Iraq-Afghanistan movies are either dying (In The Valley of Elah) or underperforming (The Kingdom). If I had the power, I would make every person who voted to continue the Iraq War by voting for Bush’s reelection in ’04 watch every last Iraq War movie there is. I would have them gently brought into theatres and strapped down like Alex in A Clockwork Orange with their eyes kept open with those clamp devices and shown every last one.

Okay, I might let them off the hook with Brian DePalma‘s Redacted, which is a rough sit even for people like myself. But they’d see all the rest. I’d make sure they’re comfortable and serve them good food between screenings and offer free shiatsu neck massages to anyone who wants one, but they would see each and every Iraq War movie, Afghanistan movie and 9/11 movie…anything to do with that general tragedy.

This may sound like a anti-Bush totalitarian fantasy to some, but I think it’s a fair thing to insist upon. If you voted for the war, you should deal with the films about it. (Unless they’re poorly made, in which case you’re excused.) What’s so bad about that?

Eight or nine months ago Michael Sheen told me that a third chapter in the Tony Blair saga — a film about Blair’s relationships with Bill Cinton and George Bush, and particularly about Blair’s misguided alliance with Bush over the mounting of the Iraq War — would one day be written by Peter Morgan (who wrote the first two chapters, The Deal and The Queen), and then be directed by Stephen Frears and star himself as Blair.

Morgan sounded somewhere between iffy and disinterested about it when I asked about the project at last October’s Queen press junket, but he sounded slightly more engaged when I asked it again at a screenwriter’s panel at last February’s Santa Barbara Film Festival. Anyway, Variety’s Adam Dawtrey says Morgan has finally begin to write it. Oddly, Dawtrey doesn’t mention the downfall-of-Blair-over- the-Iraq-War angle. Does that mean he wasn’t told about it, or that Morgan has changed the focus of the script? Or at least, the focus as Sheen described it to me last fall?

This “what do you stand for?” Google/You Tube promotion for Robert Redford‘s Lions for Lambs (MGM, 11.9), which offers a $25,000 cash prize for the best short political video piece submitted, might raise awareness and get the word going. Maybe. What would really help, I suspect, would be for MGM to release stills that show costars Meryl Streep and Tom Cruise doing something besides sitting in that damn Washington, D.C., office with Cruise instructing/lecturing Streep about the hard choices facing America in the fight against terrorism.

For weeks and weeks I’ve been looking at the two of them in trailers and stills, wearing those same outfits and talking, talking, talking to each other — Cruise clenched and focused, Streep doubting and sardonic. Do they do anything else in the film? At all? I’m starting to wonder.

“The lion and the lamb shall lie down together, but the lamb won’t get much sleep.” — a quote attributed to Woody Allen.

Steve Guttenberg is alive and well and 49 and doing (I presume) pretty well, but the fact that he’s cut a deal with Thomas Dunne Books to write a memoir about his early years in Hollywood (the late ’70s to mid ’80s) indicates he’s either got time on his hands or is looking to jump-start things.

It’s generally agreed that Guttenberg’s peak artistic period was between Barry Levinson‘s Diner (’82) and Curtis Hanson‘s The Bedroom Window (’87). His last bona fide hit was Three Men and a Little Lady (’90). I used to hate him before Diner. I remember being elated when his character got killed in Franklin J. Schaffner‘s The Boys From Brazil (’78). I also remember a New York critic writing about his performance in Nancy Walker‘s Can’t Stop The Music (’80) and observing that Guttenberg had “all the charm of a barking dog.”

Ad art for Scott Coffey‘s Ellie Parker (’05) and Michael Haneke‘s Funny Games (due in February ’08).

No biggie, but interesting that the Warner Independent ad art guys chose the same Naomi Watts eye to be running the tears and mascara.

A 9.30 report by Elle‘s Tracey Lomrantz that Robert Rodriguez will be directing real-life squeeze and Planet Terror star Rose McGowan in a remake of Barbarella is at least…what, four months old? But it reminds us that Rodriguez is an old hand at dressing his leading ladies in skimpy outfits and turning them into objects of lascivious attention (as he did with Salma Hayek in Desperado and From Dusk to Dawn). And it seems to once again confirm R.R.’s absolute opposition to making a film of any attempted soul or substance or delicacy for the rest of his life. He’s a thick-fingered genre-wallower.