Month: November 2007

Beowulf producer and co-write Roger Avary, just back from the film’s London premiere and international press junket, called to debate the ongoing Beowulf animation issue as I was editing the Paul Thomas Anderson interview earlier this afternoon.

(l. to r.) Gaim, Beowulf director Bob Zemeckis, Avary

I brought up the fact that basing animated human images upon live-action footage — a Beowulf speed-bump issue for some — is a technique that goes all the way back to Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. As I understand it, Disney animators used a primitive form of rotoscoping to make the body language and some of the features of Snow White, the evil queen and the handsome prince seem more life-like.

I said towards the end of our chat that a critic friend who hasn’t seen Beowulf confided he wasn’t looking forward to the 3D headache syndrome, which Beowulf‘s IMAX 3D process is absolutely free of. Avary agreed that previous 3D films (the 3D Spy Kids, for one) have definitely been a little rough in this respect. I suggested that the Beowulf newspapers ads should promise a relief from this in so many words — “No headaches!”

There Will Be Blood director-writer Paul Thomas Anderson called a couple of hours ago to chat about the film. We spoke for about 25 minutes. I threw out some half-decent questions and did what I could to keep my obsequious impulses in check. Anderson has a shy, circumspect way of putting things. It’s axiomatic that most first-rate directors will shy away from “selling” their film or trying to explain it in any kind of relentless detail. But it was exciting to get a word in and run it all down as much as possible.

Anderson and Blood stars Daniel Day Lewis and Paul Dano will discuss the film and their work following a special WGA theatre screening this evening. A reception will follow.

“The horror that is Paul Thomas Anderson‘s fifth feature, There Will Be Blood, is not simply an amplified feeling of distress but distress itself: a seething perpetual pressure, unremitting, brutal, always on the brink of eruption,” writes House Next Door contributor Ryland Walker Knight (excellent name!).

“Yet the threat (or the promise) of the film’s title is a mere hint of the lurking, bubbling terror within. More pointedly, the title — written in a skuzzy, white, printing press Old English across the width of the film’s opening black screen — is the film’s first trigger pulled to wring its audience anxious and uneasy for a terse, dire, cunning two hours and forty minutes.

“Flipping Punch-Drunk Love on its ear, There Will Be Blood‘s operatic score (composed, by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood, of dissonant string arrangements and odd percussive rhythms aping Kubrick’s favored Penderecki and Ligeti) amplifies the tension of the film not for a flow of delirious hilarity but for a knotting of orchestrated discomfort. This film denies the release laughter allows. This film will beat you down, bury you under its weight. But your beating will be beautiful.

There Will Be Blood “bears Anderson’s signature throughout. There’s the father-son melodrama, the stately and gliding camerawork, the fear of people, and even a few discomfiting wink-jokes at the audience. Most of all, though, there’s Daniel Day-Lewis, covered in crude oil, raising his arms like a conductor to signal the explosion to begin. It’s terrifying, invigorating, phenomenal. I fear I’ve said too much already.”

Knight ran his review after catching last Monday night’s benefit screening of There Will Be Blood at San Francisco’s Castro theatre.

Two days ago at the Denver Film Festival a trade critic called to say he’d been told by a Fox rep he would be physically blocked from a public festival showing of Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium (Fox Walden, 11.16). I ran an item about this late Saturday afternoon I was told this morning by Fox Walden spokesperson Jeffrey Godsick that the incident was some kind of misunderstanding, that an “overzealous” festival rep had conveyed the physical blocking threat (“a weird little thing“) and not a local Fox rep, that the film has in fact been screened for certain critics including Richard Roeper and Michael Wilmington, and that the film was screened for junket press last weekend so no one’s hiding anything.

Denver Film Festival media relations chief Britta Erickson also called to explain that “neither the festival staffers nor Fox reps would have physically blocked any critic from seeing the film” and that Saturday’s festival screening was “a great event for families and children, as it was a benefit for Toys for Tots.”

Godsick said there had been an expectation that trade reviews would be held until the day before the 11.16 opening, and that yesterday’s review by Variety‘s Brian Lowry was posted because Variety took the appearance of Magorium quotes in Sunday newspaper ads as a green light to run their own review.

Lowry called Magorium a “genial and G-rated fantasy from screenwriter/first-time director Zach Helm (Stranger Than Fiction) that sprinkles in charming moments but ultimately doesn’t evoke enough wonderment to overcome its tongue-twisting title and completely win over adults along with kids. Given the dearth of quality family fare, Fox and Walden might drum up nice business, but holiday shoppers at this emporium should be advised that the merchandise is limited in scope and ambition and thus more suited to the specialty realm than franchise-oriented spectacle.”

“Oddly, the same executives who speak with absolute authority about the horrifying injustice of paying residuals [to writers] seem to turn into bewildered children, lost in a fogbound forest and helpless to see even two feet ahead, when they confront the other big issue: income from streaming video, new media, and the Internet.

“Writers, like everybody else with a brain and a computer, have figured out that this is where a large chunk of the future of movie and TV revenue resides, and they want a piece of it. To which the producers have essentially responded: ‘What’s this newfangled interweb you’re talking about? We don’t know how it works! Are you sure there’s a way we can make money from it? What a silly thing to even talk about! What next, flying cars?'” — from Mark Harris‘s latest Entertainment Weekly column, called “Why The Striking Writers Are Right.”

Time magazine is running an article that summarizes the ten best moments from various Coen Bros.films over the last 22 years. It’s a decent appreciation, but as I happened to notice the piece on Sasha Stone‘s Awards Daily earlier today, I couldn’t help but notice Greg Gingold‘s Coen Brothers gag reel video that Stone included as visual filler.

Gingold’s reel is a typically shallow thing — rapid-fire clips aimed at snagging the attention of infants and cultural primitives. The Coens have always had a distinctive visual sense, of course, but to me the words “a Coen Brothers film” has always meant extremely well-crafted dialogue and sardonic hipster humor that’s vaguely misanthropic. They’ve often gone for madcap cleverness, but they’re extremely careful photographer-editors who are just as much about balance and formal framings — a kind of John Ford-Sergei Eisenstein composition sense.

Susan King posted an interesting Envelope piece yesterday (11.10) about the impact of the writer’s strike upon the various awards show, if and when it continues into January and February — the Oscars, Golden Globes, DGA and WGA awards and Film Independent Spirit Awards. The patter on some of these shows is bad enough as it is (the Globes especially) but can you imagine how grotesque these shows will seem without guild writers chipping in at least an occasional decent joke? This more than anything other presentation issue should force a settlement before New Year’s Day or soon after.

“I wear jeans, socks and a shirt — all totally normal,” Tom Cruise has allegedly told the Post-Dispatch. “I get my hair cut on set. I have no iPhone, no mobile, no email address, no watch, no jewelry, no wallet.”

I believe 80% of that statement. The “no wallet” and “no mobile” is bullshit. Everybody carries a driver’s license and a couple of cards around — you have to. (I’ve seen photos of Cruise driving a motorcycle down Robertson Blvd.) And Cruise expects people to believe that if he’s with his daughter and God forbid an emergency were to happen, he’s not going to have a cell in his pocket so he can call an ambulance or the police?

Any guy saying “I carry nothing in my pockets” is actually boasting that he’s got so many security guys and kiss-ass assistants watching his every move that he doesn’t need to do anything except “be.”

Someone take Salt Lake Tribune critic Sean Means aside and quietly explain that Ben Foster is an almost certain no-go for a Best Supporting Actor nomination for his psycho-wacko bad guy in 3:10 to Yuma. There are three reasons why, and if you can’t remember them just have Means read this item.

One, Foster has built his relatively young career out of playing nutters with glaring eyes and arterial neck veins pumping furious red plasma, so it’s not a big deal that he’s done it again in a gunslinger vein.

Two, Foster let his makeup person gunk his face with too much soot and ash for the final shootout scene — he should have said, “C’mon, man…you’re making me look like I’m an actor wearing grungeball makeup just to make the point that I’m the kind of gunslinger who bathes only once a month instead of…you know, a real gunfighter! It’s arch and distracting.”

And three, Javier Bardem‘s No Country for Old Men Anton Chigurh is way scarier and creepier than Foster’s bad guy, and I really can’t imagine people saying, “Well, Foster’s nutter wasn’t as good as Bardem ‘s but he does the boiling-rage, thyroid-condition thing pretty well so what the hell…let’s nominate him.”

Saw this on Kris Tapley‘s Red Carpet District, snickered, wondered what it actually meant, smiled, thought it over, reminded myself that John C. Reilly‘s character didn’t seem all that rude or insolent in the product reel I saw, decided it’s a good sell-job regardless, etc.

In his N.Y. Times profile of Margot at the Wedding director-writer Noah Baumbach, Dennis Lim notes that Baumbach has always “specialized in characters whose verbal acuity outstrips their emotional maturity. In Margot at the Wedding, family members use information as a weapon, disguise cruel judgment as insightful concern and extend or withhold intimacy as part of a power game.

“It’s a family where if you show your belly, people are going to pounce,” Baumbach tells Lim. And, Lim says, no one pounces as often or as recklessly as Nicole Kidman‘s Margot, a seething bundle of anger and self-loathing who swings unpredictably between aggressive and passive-aggressive attacks.

“Margot is me at my worst, probably,” Baumbach says. “I try not to analyze the characters when I’m writing, but I’m very analytical in my life.”

But perhaps too analytical as a dramatist. At least as far as a clan of serious Deliverance-style creeps living next to Margot’s family of malcontents (Kidman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Jack Black, et. al.) is concerned.

Make no mistake — Baumbach has created a family of foul people who treat their kids harshly, slaughter pigs in their front yard, dump garbage on their neighbors’ lawn and demand that a beautiful tree near their property be cut down. Worst of all, they have a teenage son (maybe 14 years old) who attacks Kidman’s young son and by all appearances is a malicious hillbilly monster. There’s no way to avoid despising these people and not wanting the good guys to stick it to them in some way, and yet Baumbach never writes a confrontation or payback scene of any kind. He presents us with malignant fiends and yet he lets them skate. This is deeply unsatisfying.

Imagine The Wizard of Oz in which Margaret Hamilton‘s Wicked Witch of the West (i.e., Miss Gulch) isn’t melted to death when Dorothy douses her with water. And yet this is what Baumbach gives us in Margot at the Wedding.

The Envelope‘s Tom O’Neil is wondering if No Country for Old Men is as much of a lock for Best Picture nominee status as it seems to be this weekend, with the 95% and 94% positive ratings on Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, respectively, and its impressive $41,000 screen average in 289 situations. O’Neil figures it may be a “testosterone rush” critics’ favorite, by which he means…what?…it’s not emotional or “musical” enough, and because some are flummoxed by the ending?

It’s not really a testosterone movie at all, Tom. Testosterone movies can be stupid or smart (The Bourne Ultimatum), but NCFOM has a refinement that sets it apart. It’s a master-class exercise is delivering an art film disguised as a chase thriller. Simians looking for hormonal-surge excitement can do much better elsewhere. It’s very rare for a film to be as calm and unhurried as this one is — that’s the key element, I think. No Country delivers high-level existential dread and Hitchcock-level suspense, but it doesn’t seem the least bit hurried or anxious about whether it’s doing it “right” or if the apes are getting twitchy during the meditative moments.

The more times I watched the finale of No Country for Old Men, the more I see something exquisite and deeply profound. Tommy Lee Jones has been a Greek chorus lawman all through it, observing rather than affecting the course of events, and the whole central theme is about longing for the old days…the days of decency and trust and old-timers doing the right or caring or considerate thing with friends and strangers alike. “The old days were better” is a romantic pipe dream, of course, but that’s the central current in this film. What has happened to this country? What is this malignant scourge as represented by Anton Chigurh?

Jones passing alone the particulars of a dream he had the night before about he and his dad being on horseback in some cold and barren area, and how he always knew his dad would doi what he could to protect and care for him. “And then I woke up.” I love, love, love that the Coens hold on Jones’ face after he says this, and then cut to Tess Harper staring at Jones across the kitchen table, and then back to Jones before cutting to black. Jesus Christ, what a dead-perfect moment that is.

In a way this finale is a kind of spiritual companion to the very last scene in the Oscar-winning To Kill a Mockingbird, particularly Scout’s final line of narration: “He would be in Jem’s room all night, and he would be there when Jem woke up in the morning.”