Day: January 23, 2008

“Everyone knows life is cruel and unfair. But it shouldn’t be this cruel and unfair.” — “Renaissance Blogger” posting on N.Y. Times “City Room” page on the death of Heath Ledger.

But we all suspect that anyone truly committed to life, health and longevity doesn’t end up dead at age 28 with prescription pills found near his naked body. Ledger didn’t die because a tree fell on him. His death, accidental or otherwise, almost certainly came from somewhere in his own head — his back pages, his behavior, his struggles, and perhaps his failure to pay attention to dosage recommendations on prescription bottles.
There’s that strange video clip making the rounds (taken from an I’m Not There interview) in which he says he feels “good about dying” because he’ll live on through his daughter, Matilda. What 28 year-old father with a two year-old daughter and his whole life ahead of him would even consider such a thought?
There’s that Daily News report by Alison Gendar, Edgar Sandoval and Tracy Connor saying that “friends told investigators that Michelle Williams booted Ledger from the Brooklyn home they shared with their 2-year-old daughter, Matilda, because of a drug problem, a police source said.” N.Y. Times “City Room” blogger Sewell Chan, quoting the Daily News story, extends the quote by saying the breakup was “because of a drug problem that only got worse after he left.”
There’s the anonymous quote give to Daily Mail that Ledger “adored his daughter Matilda, and when Michelle called it quits, he missed Matilda so much that he was thrown into a deep, dark depression.”
There’s a suggestion that heavy medicating was part of his life, as indicated by today’s TMZ report that “two of the medications found at Ledger’s apartment were Xanax and Valium, both anti-anxiety drugs. Cops also found Ambien, along with several medications prescribed in Europe.”
Ledger “had a taste for portraying troubled, brooding, self-destructive young men,” N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott wrote in an appreciation piece that went up this morning. “The anguished second-generation prison guard in Monster’s Ball, the heroin addict in Candy, the unhappy film star in I’m Not There, the self-torturing Ennis del Mar in Brokeback Mountain. But the temptation to blend their fates with Ledger’s own should be resisted at all costs. Those roles should be seen less as expressions of some imagined inner torment than as evidence of resourcefulness, creative restlessness and wit.”
My head agrees with Scott about resisting such notions, but my gut isn’t so sure. His death didn’t just happen. It came from within. Genuine accidents in life are few and far between.

“I’m at Sundance right now, and after seven years of covering the festival for various outlets, I’m still taken by surprise whenever I hear the public perception of the Sundance Film Festival, as it’s so alien to the reality of actually being here,” writes San Francisco Chronicle columnist/blogger James Rocchi.
“I asked a friend of mine, as a Rorschach test, to say the first thing she thought of when she heard the words ‘Sundance Film Festival,’ and her reply was as swift as it was blunt: ‘boring and pretentious.’ And yes, when you mention Sundance, most people do think of the sort of high-fiber, hyper-earnest movies that most moviegoers would rather die than see. And there are strong, sincere films up here at Sundance that might lead to that perception — wrenching dramas, hard-to-watch documentaries, and, yes, even earnest failures.
“But really, that perception’s not the total reality. Light movies also play Sundance; funny movies also play Sundance; gripping thrillers also play Sundance. Once made its North American debut up here; so did Napoleon Dynamite. So did 28 Days Later. And so did Narc.”

Only a few hours after the passing of Heath Ledger, an enterprising Best Buy store manager in San Diego’s Mission Valley had this display up. I’ll wager that hundreds of video store managers across the country did the same thing yesterday. Any sightings? There used to be an idea that you should wait a few days after the death of a celebrity to reap the commercial benefits, but no longer. How long did record stores wait to exploit the death of Elvis in ’77? (Thanks to Best Week Ever‘s Michelle Collins.)

Fox Searchlight has paid $5 million for most of the world rights to Clark Gregg‘s Choke, adapted by Gregg from Chuck Palahniuk‘s novel of the same name. Sam Rockwell and Anjelica Huston costar. Coming to theatres in…August? September? Early ’09?

With the death of Heath Ledger, director Terry Gilliam‘s The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus is in a tight spot, to put it mildly. Ledger is/was the star of Gilliam’s fantasy film, which shot exterior scenes in London last month but, according to a Wikipedia summary, has more shooting to do in Vancouver.

Heath Ledger during last month’s London filming of The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus.

Parnassus is set in London, so the Vancouver scenes will presumably be interiors, which usually constitute the bulk of any film unless you’re shooting Lawrence of Arabia. If Ledger’s planned Vancouver interiors aren’t that extensive, maybe Gilliam can fudge some of his unshot scenes with some CG cut and paste work, as Ridley Scott did with the late Oliver Reed‘s footage in Gladiator.
Adam Dawtrey‘s 1.23 Variety piece about this situation says that “blue-screen work [on Parnassus] was due to start in Vancouver next week and continue until early March.” He also wrote that “the producers have yet to issue any statement about how or whether they plan to proceed without Ledger.”
Gilliam is no stranger to massive film-shoot calamity, as anyone who’s seen Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe‘s Lost in La Mancha will tell you. It’s about the awful luck that plagued the shooting of Gilliam’s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, which led to the whole thing being scrubbed.
Of course, The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus was plagued anyway with one of the worst titles in the history of cinema, so Ledger’s death double-fucks it.
Parnassus is operating on a reported budget of $30 million, according to Wikipedia. Production began in December 2007 at London’s Battersea Power Station, Tower Bridge, and St. Paul’s Cathedral.
Gilliam and Adventures of Baron Munchausen collaborator Charles McKeown co-wrote the script for The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. It’s a present-day piece about a thousand-year-old Doctor Parnassus (Christopher Plummer) “leading a traveling theater troupe and offering audience members a chance to go beyond reality through a magical mirror in his possession,” the Wiki summary says.
“Parnassus had been able to guide the imagination of others through a deal with the Devil (Tom Waits), who now comes to collect on the arrangement, targeting the doctor’s daughter (Lily Cole). The troupe, who is joined by a mysterious outsider (Ledger) embark through parallel worlds to rescue the girl.”
Dawtrey’s piece also reports that Ledger had been “working on what would have been his feature directing debut, an adaptation of the Walter Tevis novel ‘The Queen’s Gambit,’ with British writer/producer Allan Scott.
“The leading role of a young female chess prodigy had been offered to Oscar nominee Ellen Page. Ledger, himself a highly rated chess player, was due to play a supporting role.
“In an interview last month, a few days after shooting started on Doctor Parnassus, Gilliam said, ‘Heath is extraordinary. He’s just so good, and he’s going to be a film director. He’s watching everything, and he’s going to be a much better director than I will ever be.'”

The Sundance Film Festival is a 10-day event, but it’s always over as of Wednesday morning, or five and a half days after the opening-night festivities on Thursday night. The voltage turns down, there are fewer people on Main Street, all the presumably hot titles (i.e., name casts, advance-hyped) have been screened. I was going to stay until Friday but with this virus in my system and the general enervation and lack of excitement I’m figuring “screw it.” I’m on the phone to Southwest right now, get myself on a plane tomorrow morning.
Sundance ’08 wasn’t bad but it sure wasn’t great. There was a general feeling of deflation, an almost-but-not-quite vibe. There was no surprise knockout…no Little Miss Sunshine, no Once. Film after film seemed to fall short in this or that way. More than a few were greeted with “respectful but tepid applause,” to quote a college film professor who had just come from The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. Nobody except Variety‘s Bob Koehler came up to me and said, “You have to see this film!” Over and over I heard qualifiers — “not bad,” “I was okay with it,” “Almost worked,” “didn’t blow my socks off,” etc.
I saw five films that I was genuinely aroused and moved by — In Bruges, Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, Patti Smith: Dream of Life, Dog Eat Dog (Perro Come Perro) and The Escapist. Everything else was a half-and-halfer, a “meh” or an outright dud.
I admired the pared-down, Lars von Trier-like atmosphere of Lance Hammer‘s Ballast, which I saw the day before yesterday, but I also found it draggy and almost comatose at times. There were something like 15 movies here that dealt with suicide. I only saw the beginning of American Teen, which Paramount Vantage is apparently buying, but I was instantly bored by its focus on four cliched high-school archetypes.
I missed tons of films. That’s normal, of course. You can’t possibly see everything you want to see. I play it like anyone else, starting out with my own list and ready to shift gears any time I hear about a really special film. But with very few exceptions, all I heard about were films that vaguely disappointed. Or I passed along the bad news myself. Barry Levinson‘s What Just Happened? never connected for me — wasn’t believable, lacked heart, emotionally aloof characters. I was mostly “meh” with Mark Pellington‘s Henry Poole Is Here as it struck me as overly gloomy and enervated. And so on.
I should have seen Choke, Hamlet 2 and Sleepwalking. Getting sick yesterday and being sick today is my best excuse. The virus just took over, although I managed to bang out a few Oscar nomination reactions. I was sleeping on a couch when a friend called in the mid-afternoon about the death of Heath Ledger, so I got up and tapped out an okay-this-happened piece. Then I crashed again.
I have to get out of here. I want only to escape. I just want to leave it all behind and start over in warmer weather.