Day: January 25, 2008

Here’s a re-run of a piece I did a little more than two years ago about Heath Ledger‘s visit to the 2006 Santa Barbara Film Festival, and a q & a he did at the Lobero Theatre with Pete Hammond. The article was called “Measure of Ledger.” I was reading it earlier today and was struck by the second paragraph. The last line in particular:

Heath Ledger — Wednesday, 2.8.06, 8:32 pm.

Heath Ledger submitted to a friendly dog-and-pony show at the Santa Barbara Film Festival last night. It was a nice evening — pleasant, heartening — and Heath seems like a right guy, but I don’t know what to say about him that doesn’t sound cliched or repetitive or flat.
He’ll be around for a long time, I think. That seems like a fairly safe bet. He’s 26 now — he’ll probably still be acting 40 or even 50 years from now, and in quality vehicles, given his standards and talent. I’ll be dead (probably) and he’ll still be acting. Nice thought.
I’ve never written a damn word about Ledger’s performance as “Skip” in The Lords of Dogtown because I never gave a shit about watching it (due to laziness…I had nothing against the film), but after watching him in a clip or two last night I now want to see it whole.
I think Ledger may be a bit like Laurence Olivier and Alec Guiness, which is that without a role to play (or a fake nose or an exotic accent to hide behind) he congeals and stammers on a bit and isn’t quite up to the charm levels of Jay Leno or Conan O’Brien or Jimmy Kimmel in front of a crowd.
Ledger is a gently spoken sort with what feels like a fairly strict sense of integrity. It’s no secret that he has one of those serious light-up-the-room smiles. Being Australian and somewhat expressive and non-taciturn, his voice isn’t the least bit Ennis del Mar-ish, but it does have a deepish timbre and a kind of rolling tonality.

Heath Ledger, Pete Hammond on stage of Santa Barbara’s Lobero Theatre — Wednesday, 2.8.06, 8:25 pm.

He’s a gifted, probably genius-level actor who right now seems to be about sixteen times more into spending time with his infant daughter than making new movies and pocketing huge paychecks, and is actually planning on not working at all for roughly a year. (He said something about living in Amsterdam when we spoke at the Focus Features after-party following the Golden Globes.)
I liked it that there was a loose tab or some kind of mini-tongue sticking out of the heel of his lace-up shoes, and I was staring at this thing for a while and thinking, “Yeah, funky- ass shoes…but I guess that’s Ledger and his I’m-not-your-father’s- idea-of-an-uptown-actor attitude.
He was pretty good at fidgeting around in his seat last night as he spoke to Hammond about this and that. He sat on his hands for a bit. His legs were kind of tucked under the chair, a bit like a British school kid doing detention. He said that auditions have always been awkward because he doesn’t like the feeling of being examined and judged.
Here’s that Manohla Dargis riff about Ledger’s Brokeback Mountain performance that I ran in WIRED last week: “I’ve almost always liked Ledger, but I didn’t think he had anything going on as an actor until Monster’s Ball. But while he was amazing for the ten seconds he was in that film, I wasn’t prepared for Brokeback, where he creates a world of pain with a tight mouth and a body so terribly self- contained it’s a wonder he can wrap his arms around another person.
“But here’s the thing,” she concluded, “and this is the part that’s hard to explain — I don’t just admire the performance on the level of craft, I am also deeply moved by it, just as I am by the film.”
SBFF director Roger Durling said the following at the end of the evening: “Movies reflect who we are, and in going to the movies we identify with the heroes and protagonists. When I saw Brokeback Mountain and Heath Ledger’s performance, I felt as if somebody had punched the wind out of me.
“It took me a while to understand that never before I had seen a character in a major Hollywood film that portrayed all the loneliness, self-loathing, the need to be loved and give love back that a gay man like me goes through, and I felt a personal form of catharsis watching Heath’s performance. He was kicking a door open that had been long shut, and for that I’m very grateful.”

Tomorrow’s “It Starts With the Script” screenwriters’ panel at the Santa Barbara Film Festival, a two-hour event set to begin Saturday at 11 am at the Lobero Theatre, has been cancelled because everyone except three writers (two of the loyalists being Enchanted‘s Bill Kelly and The Great Debater‘s Robert Eisele) called up and went “waaah, I’m sick” or “waaah, I’m afraid to drive up to Santa Barbara in the rain.”
The significant cop-outers were Diablo Cody (Juno), Glenn Gers (Fracture, Mad Money) and Nancy Oliver (Lars and the Real Girl). Their reasons, I’m told, were (a) they were suffering from the flu and/or (b) were afraid to drive up to Santa Barbara in the rain (although this second excuse may possibly apply to only one writer). I’m no one to talk, having been felled by a 24-hour virus in Park City only three days ago, but is a flu really raging around Los Angeles now? I’m asking.
Let’s face it — if Diablo Cody hadn’t bailed they would have gone ahead with the panel anyway because she’s a big name and sassy-ascerbic and the writer of a huge hit film, etc. So let’s call a spade a spade and say that Cody’s cop-out sent the whole thing down the tubes. The audience would have been plenty satisfied if they could seen and listened to her alone.
I’m not saying Cody wasn’t sick, but this is the second high-profile media appearance thing she hasn’t appeared at. Remember that ridiculous no-show at the Critic’s Choice Award because she didn’t find out it was happening early enough due to strike issues and couldn’t get home in time to dress and then the dog ate her car keys?

In order to boost her chances of winning the Best Actress Oscar for her much-admired performance as a victim of Alzheimer’s disease, Away From Her star Julie Christie has, somewhat reluctantly, agreed to submit to a gala tribute by the Santa Barbara Film Festival this evening. It starts three and a half hours from now.

An old-school actress who’s not at all comfortable with Oscar campaigning, Christie is said to be reluctant, antsy, intimidated. Her Lionsgate publicists (she has no personal p.r. rep) had to twist her arm to get her to come to Santa Barbara and are said to be nervous themselves. Festival staffers are trying to be their usual cool-as-a-cucumber selves, but the anxiety virus affecting the Christie contingent has spilled over so everyone’s on pins and needles. Even I’m nervous just writing about this. Do I even want to attend this? I guess I do.
It’s perfectly allowable for Christie to be skittish as she wants. The irony, of course, she’s the odds-on favorite to win the SAG award this weekend as well as the Best Actress Oscar. One reason, as The Envelope‘s Tom O’Neil reported a few days ago, that Lionsgate sent out DVD screeners of Away from Her to the full SAG membership — 100,000 voters — and Fox Searchlight did not do same for Juno. Picturehouse sent 2100 screeners to the SAG nominating committee but not, I’ve been told, the general membership.
Another possible factor favoring Christie is Anglo-xenophobia, which, in this instance, is the SAG/AMPAS version of the Bradley effect. Just as a percentage of voters who said they were for Obama did a racial fold in the voting booth and went for Clinton instead, perhaps SAG and AMPAS members voted for Christie because (a) she’s more akin to their culture, being British and English-speaking, and (b) also something of a Hollywood legend and a rep of the hallowed Hollywood glory days of the ’60s and ’70s, and against La Vie en Rose‘s Marion Cotillard because she lacks these factors and because…I don’t want to say it, but never underestimate the prevalence of small-minded tribal thinking when it comes to such matters.

The Daily Mail‘s Paul Scott has written a standard Daniel Day Lewis hit-job piece. I’m not disputing the accuracy of this or that, but if I wanted to I could write a similar piece on almost any actor or non-actor you could name, and I could make that person seem just as weird and fickle. It’s not hard, believe me. You just need the will and the attitude and the rest falls into place.

“Some critics just seem to want to hate the films. If I came in with that attitude I would slit my wrists. Also I am keenly aware when reviewing a film of trying to relate its plusses and minuses to the audience I am writing for.

“I may see some virtue in some 17th century costume drama but I am not so sure the average [young-male] reader would. I will point that out. I don’t sit there and say, ‘Well I didn’t like it so it must be bad.’ I try to see what the film is trying to accomplish on its own terms and judge it on that level. I don’t try to judge every movie against Citizen Kane.” — Pete Hammond in a “Meet a Critic” interview with Rotten Tomatoes’ Jen Yamato.
Wells revision/coloration of Hammond quote: “80 to 85% of any creative endeavor with the potential to transcend entertainment and become art is second-tier, mediocre or out and out crap — that’s universal law. Ask Dorothy Parker, ask Edmund Wilson, ask Otis Ferguson. Some critics seem determined to find ways around this rule. I can see giving credit to this or that aspect of a film even if the rest of it stinks, but you can’t sidestep the basic way of things. It’s mostly junk and filler — only 10% or 15% of the movies out there are worth your time.
“I float between being a show-no-mercy type of guy and a rank sentimentalist who bends over for the right film becuase it ‘got’ me. I know you need a sense of history, perspective…you have to know from your Budd Boetticher and William Wellman films. You have to memorize dialogue from ’40s film noir films and be able to repeat these lines drunk at parties. Yet I’m keenly aware when reviewing a film that I shouldn’t be judging it from a place that’s too deeply imbedded in my own posterior cavity.
“My big breakthrough in finding a voice was to merge all I know and care about as far as movies are concerned with the personality and attitude of the middle-class New Jersey guy I used to be before I worked my way into the New York-Los Angeles film-journalist culture. Then again, if I run across a film or a performer that I feel is concurrently appealing and appalling, like Nikki Blonsky, I will point that out. I know what I’m talking about and I know myself, so while I may not say ‘Well I didn’t like it so it must be bad,’ I know when a film is a genuine affront to the Movie Gods and that it doesn’t matter at all if such a film is a hit or not. I am a fan of certain directors, writers and producers whom I know are trying like hell to do the right thing, but if a film blows chunks then dammit, you have to say that.
“That said, I would like to think I have the character to say, as the great Stuart Byron did many years ago, that a film like Mark Lester‘s Truck Stop Women is a more vital and essential film experience than Costa Gavras‘ State of Siege. I don’t try to judge every movie against Citizen Kane either.”

Responding to a question from Harry Knowles about whether he’s looking to shoot a horror film as his next project, Paul Thomas Anderson said “this is news to me. I thought I just made a horror film…”

“I hope you don’t mind if I speak about this. I feel very unsettled at the moment. I suppose it’s because I only just saw the news about Heath Ledger‘s death. It seems somehow strange to be talking about anything else. Not that there’s anything to say really except to express one’s regret and to say from the bottom of one’s heart to his family and to this friends that I’m sorry for their troubles.

“I didn’t know him. I have an impression, a strong impression, I would have liked him very much as a man. I’d already marvelled at his work and had looked so much forward to see the work he would do in the future.” — Daniel Day Lewis speaking to Oprah Winfrey during a taping last Tuesday afternoon.
To my knowledge, Lewis has never really acted in his own very gentle and softly seductive speaking voice. Not a trace of Daniel Plainview or Bill the Butcher in the man — the opposite characteristics, if anything. There’s something faintly George Harrison-y in his tones and inflections.

In his latest non-fiction comic-strip interview, Mike Russell speaks with Persepolis creator Marjane Satrapi.