Day: April 4, 2008

Yesterday a Variety story painted another portrait of 20-somethings who don’t want to know from film critics. Except this time it was columnist Anne Thompson, and she was basing her reading on first-hand experience as a part-time USC instructor. She described her film criticism students as “film-obsessed and hardly representative of their non-cinephile peers” but says they “can’t name a working critic other than Roger Ebert, and that’s thanks to his TV fame.

“They scan Rolling Stone or Entertainment Weekly, but they don’t know critics Peter Travers or Owen Gleiberman. They check out film rankings at Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic and dip into some reviews, but they haven’t found a particular film critic they trust to steer them straight.
“These young film lovers are just as likely to look up old (yes, even b & w) movies for their Netflix queue as new ones. On the Internet, the long tail prevails.” She mentions pajiba.com called Trading Places an “under-appreciated gem”…what? A pretty good studio comedy, okay, but a gem?
“They admire the auteurs Wes Anderson and the Coen brothers, can parse Hitchcock’s Psycho with the best of them, and have studied Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard. But they don’t read newspapers, and never will. Many of them don’t even frequent like-minded blogs that share their cinephilia.”
Really? I’ll be a guest at Charles Fleming‘s USC class on April 7th (along with James Rocchi). Before setting a date Fleming told me I’d “been asked for, by name, by the students.” He was applying the usual flattery, of course, but even if you cut the b.s. down by 50% what he said sounded moderately encouraging: “I ask the students every year, on the first night, where they get their entertainment reporting, and whom they admire,” he wrote. “Your name came up several times. There was delighted surprise when I said that I knew you and that you’d often come down to talk to my students.”
And yet a voice tells me that what Thompson is reporting is closer to the truth. “Students — and today’s youth auds in general — more often get their movie info straight from the studio marketing departments,” she writes. “These kids go to YouTube, Yahoo Movies and Apple to find trailers. As they surf the Web, bits of movie flotsam and visuals planted by the studios on MSN Movies or IGN or JoBlo eventually cross their eyeballs. But they also listen to their friends more than any authority figures, and distrust obvious studio hype.”
20 year-old USC film criticism student hitting on brunette classmate: “So do you like any, like, old black-and-white 1930s or 1940s films? Any comedies or…?”
Brunette: “Oh, totally. Well, you know…some. But it’s like, I mean, like….depending? I mean, I like, of all people, I really like…uhm, Jean Arthur? Because she’s, like, so, I don’t know, her personality is, like…kinda crazy but…you know, spirited? I saw this movie about guys flying airplanes in a jungle somewhere. I think it was, like, somewhere in South America? Venezuela or Columbia and she’s this singer who comes on a boat and meets these guys in a bar who fly the planes? They, like, deliver the mail and they’re, like, hitting on her, and then…wait a minute, what happens? Um, one of the guys gets into a plane and crashes it and Cary Grant — Cary Grant, oh…my….God! And he was, like, I read somewhere, gay? — anyway he gets, like, mad at her because the guy who crashed the plane wanted to get back to the bar so he could buy her another drink..?”
Thompson explains that “these kids’ boomer parents, average age 55 to 65, are the ones who still read movie critics and follow their guidance when there’s something for them to see.”

A just-posted teaser trailer for Fernando Meirelles‘ Blindness (Miramax, 9.19), which may screen next month at Cannes (according to one trade magazine report), appeared a few minutes ago.

Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo

Based on the Jose Saramago novel with a screenplay by Don McKellar, the futuristic drama costars Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, Alice Braga, Danny Glover and Gael García Bernal. Meirelles is of course known for having directed City of God and The Constant Gardener.
“When a sudden plague of blindness devastates a city, a small group of the afflicted band together to triumphantly overcome the horrific conditions of their imposed quarantine,” the company synopsis reads.

I’ve heard some credible-sounding information from a couple of solid guys about The Argentine and Guerilla, Steven Soderbergh‘s Cannes-bound Che Guevara films. And the situation, they’re telling me, is more or less as follows:

(1) The second of the two films, Guerilla, which deals with Guevara’s failed attempt to incite a revolution in Boliva in 1967, is pretty much done, largely, I gather, because principal photography was completed on this one before it was on The Argentine, which is about the triumphant Cuban revolution from ’56 to late ’58. (I’ve written the films’ producer Laura Bickford to clarify this and other matters.)
(2) Right now, I’m hearing, Soderbergh is jacked and sweating bullets in a Manhattan editing facility getting The Argentine into showable shape in time for Cannes. One guy says he’s been told by a Warner Bros. source that Soderbergh is determined to get the film[s] done in time for Cannes. Another guy told me he’s heard the chances of The Argentine being “ready-ready” are “less than 50%.” And yet Soderbergh, he adds, repeating what the Warner Bros. guy passed along, is said to be confident he can have The Argentine in some kind of decent shape by the mid-April deadline, or roughly ten days from now. Of course, he could always screen The Argentine as a not-quite-completed work in progress a la Apocalypse Now.
(3) It’s been deemed crucial in the view of various players, including Wild Bunch topper Vincent Maraval, the film’s Paris-based financier who’ll be selling the distribution rights to an as-yet-uncommitted U.S. distributor, that The Argentine and Guerilla should be shown in Cannes as a single unit consisting of two parts. Soderbergh has said he’d wants the films to come out in tandem or something close to the same time (i.e., maybe a couple of weeks or a month apart).

(4) It’s also very important to get The Argentine done for Cannes because it’s the more “up”-ish of the two…more exciting, more rousing. It’s about struggle and success. Well written as it is, Guerilla is pretty much about struggle and failure. Peter Buchman‘s Argentine script seemed complete on its own terms, but Guerilla, I thought, needed the Argentine counterweight.
(5) A potential buyer confides that “it’s a tough deal…looks like a tough deal. Two Spanish-language films, no dubbed English versions, gritty subject matter, possible rancor in some sectors of the U.S. — the right-wing Cubans in Miami, say — when the two films open.” The upside, he adds, is you have a likely Best Actor contender in Benicio del Toro‘s performance, and possibly other award-level attributes, including, obviously, the two pictures themselves for Best Picture.
“”All you have to do is sell it to all those kids who’ve hung that Che poster on their college bedroom wall,” he said.
Variety‘s John Hopewell reported from the Berlin Film Festival two months ago that Wild Bunch’s hottest draw — very possibly the most talked-about film at this year’s Berlin festival — was Soderbergh’s two-pic Che, an action bio of large artistic ambition. Screened in Soderbergh’s presence, 10 minutes of excerpts, mainly of first-part Argentine, had buyers talking bullishly about a work with the makings of a modern classic.

“Three U.S. buyers are circling Che, said Berlin reports. The number is most probably significantly higher than that, though Wild Bunch’s Vincent Maraval said [that] Wild Bunch was in no hurry to close a U.S. deal.”
The grapevine says the most likely U.S. buyer at this stage is Warner Independent. And no, Focus Features is not involved at this stage. A rumor got started along these lines a year or so ago, but I’ve been told Focus is not connected.
Hey, how about showing the two films as a gargantuan Lawrence of Arabia-styled two-parter with an intermission, running at least three or three and a half hours?

I remember reading about a comic bit performed by George Bush at the ’04 or ’05 Gridiron Club dinner about looking around for WMD’s that didn’t exist, like he was looking for a lost wallet. The fantasy rationale Bush had used for starting the Iraq War and causing the deaths of thousands of Iraqis and U.S. troops and bringing untold pain into the lives of millions had devolved into joke material. By admitting he’d been full of it he won people over…hilarious.

In the same vein Hillary Clinton tried joking her way out of telling that whopper about dodging bullets in Bosnia on Jay Leno last night. Is that how it works now? Sell a lie as fact and get nailed for it, but all you need to do to turn it around and improve your public standing is deliver a “funny” mea culpa in the right forum? Does this mean Iran’s President Ahmedinjad could theoretically go on Late Night with David Letterman one day and make a joke about having been a former Holocaust denier? Why not, given the system we clearly have in place?

As I said in my initial review of Shine a Light, which opens today (and, to repeat once again, must be seen in the IMAX format), it’s hard to get into the big standards that “Shattered,” “Start Me Up,” “Honky Tonk Women,” “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” etc. The highlights of Martin Scorsese‘s concert film are the less well-known, mid-rangers like “Tumblin’ Dice,” “Live With Me,” “As Tears Go By,” “Champagne and Reefer,” “Faraway Eyes” and “She Was Hot.” If there are You Tube/Shine a Light videos of these performances, it’s news to me.

The Harry Ransom Center, an arts and culture study and archive branch of the University of Texas at Austin, has put up over 50 videos of “Mike Wallace Show” interviews from 1957, plus a selection of audio-only revisitings and transcripts. What a weird, constricted, almost repulsively narrow-minded world it seems to have been back then. Or at least, as far as what’s implied by Wallace’s questions and the answers he gets.

Wallace smokes constantly during the interviews and hustles Phillip Morris cigarettes like there’s a stern-faced Phillip Morris account executive standing just out of camera range. Where would Wallace have been financially back then without cigarette advertisements? He also sold Parliament cigarettes like there was no tomorrow.
The only half-agreeable clip I took the time to watch is of Wallace asking Kirk Douglas, who was then filming The Vikings, about hiring former Nazis and Communists. Douglas, obviously feeling a bit threatened but standing up nonetheless, basically replies that he doesn’t believe in persecuting people for past alliances, mistakes and/or errors of judgment. Good answer. Douglas and director Otto Preminger brought the curtain down on the black list three years later by openly working with screenwriter Dalton Trumbo.
Wallace later asks whether European or American women makes the best wives. These two politely joshing males could be talking about cars or haberdasheries or washing machines.
We’re all products and members of our immediate environment, but the people in these videos seem to be living in a kind of gulag — the Leavenworth State Prison and Siberan salt mines of 1957-style propriety and conformity. The implications of a guarded, button-down, autocratic world in these videos are positively stifling. And to think that I wasted over 45 minutes watching the damn things.
When I think of 1957 I think of the vitality and reach and yearnings of Elvis Presley, Paths of Glory, the original Broadway production of West Side Story, the debut of “American Bandstand,” Chuck Berry, Eugene O’Neill‘s A Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Fats Domino, Jack Kerouac, Jerry Lee Lewis, Night of the Demon with Dana Andrews, Mickey Mantle, Moose Skowron, the Dodgers leaving Brooklyn, Bob Dylan at age 16, Sayonara, The Tin Star, the original 3:10 to Yuma, the death of Humphrey Bogart, A Face in the Crowd, The Bridge on the River Kwai, A Hatful of Rain, Ben Gazzara in The Strange One, Little Richard, Twelve Angry Men, etc.
There are faint echoes of these events, artists, athletes and creations in the Wallace videos, I suppose, but the world that’s mainly conveyed is one of arch attitudes and forced viewpoints, and above all a cautious, corporate mentality filled with people who weren’t really on to what was starting to happen back then, and certainly not about where things would be in a few short years.
Thanks to HE reader Mike Gaertner for passing these time-wasters along. “Another notable moment,” he writes, “is when Wallace attempts to make Tony Perkins the poster boy of the beat generation (???). Perkins seems very uncomfortable when Wallace asks to him discuss On the Road and jazz music (Tony apparently haing ben a fan of both). You can almost sense Perkins hoping a studio publicist would swoop in from the side to save him from having to reveal his bizarre side-life to middle America.”