Month: February 2009

I had a brief chat yesterday with the great Steve Coogan to talk about his upcoming gig as emcee of the 24th annual Spirit Awards, which will happen per custom under a massive white tent on the beach in Santa Monica on Saturday, 2.21 — one day before the Oscars.

Coogan has been in Los Angeles since 2.10 and is currently working away with some joke-writer friends, refining and fortifying “the act” as it were.

A gifted comedy actor and the current carrier of the Peter Sellers tradition, Coogan delivers a sort of broad quality — a bit giddy and freaky — in his film roles but comes off a lot dryer and more witty-urbane in conversation. Here’s an mp3 link to our little ping-pong match.

“Peter Sellers became ‘Peter Sellers’ because of Stanley Kubrick,” I said at one point. “I think Kubrick understood Sellers better than anyone else, and gave him his greatest roles. And I’m wondering, given the Sellers comparisons, who your Stanley Kubrick is? Or who, given your druthers, would you choose to fill that role?”

“I’m still waiting for my Stanley Kubrick, ” Coogan answered. “I guess Michael Winterbottom, who’s channelled some very inventive currents into our collaborations…he might be a partner of that sort.” But not quite, he meant. “If you can announce I’m looking for my Stanley Kubrick to realize my Peter Sellers potential, please do.”

I said I thought perhaps Armando Ianucci, who directed Coogan in a brief scene in In The Loop, might be the guy. “He may well be,” Coogan replied. “In The Loop has his exactitude written all over it. He’s great….he never says ‘that’ll do.’ He’s quite purist in that way. I’m more populist than he is, but when we work together a nice sort of blend happens. I’ll be sure and mention the Kubrick analogy when I next see him.”

Speaking of funny, nobody’s more hilarious than N.Y. Times Oscar blogger David Carr (a.a.a, “the Bagger”) when he gets a good grump on. From a posting earlier today:

“This is the Bagger’s fourth season at Kudo Camp and he has never seen such a lack of oxygen. The lack of a best-picture throwdown, combined with a class of nominees that don’t have huge traction at the box office, means that we are spending a fair amount of time talking to ourselves. While doing man on the street interviews in Times Square earlier this week, the Bagger discovered that many people thought they might have already taken place.

“Sasha Stone, a bit of den mother in the Ninny Kingdom, lavishes praise on all five films this year, but then finishes with this: ‘The five Best Pictures this year, admittedly, are nothing to write home about, meaning, none of them will really set the world on fire in ten year’s time.’

“Gee. Kind of interrupts the seance about excellence a bit.

“The Biggest Movie Event of the Year, so far, seems like a little bit of a non-event. C’mon people, careers are at stake, there is studio loot on the line, bloggers are getting tired of capping on each other for attention. It’s time to snap to and start paying attention or we just might have to…um, oh, never mind.”

A couple of days ago I picked up a copy of Graydon Carter ‘s Vanity Fair’s Tales of Hollywood: Rebels, Reds, and Graduates and the Wild Stories Behind the Making of 13 Iconic Films (Penguin), an anthology deal that came out two months ago. It includes Sam Kashner‘s account of the making of Sweet Smell of Success, which first appeared in an April 2000 issue. And when I got to page 87, I nearly collapsed.

The above excerpt makes it unnecessary to summarize or describe except to say that the anecdote came from the late Ernest Lehman, who shared screenplay credit with Clifford Odets.

This is not an endorsement of Burt Lancaster‘s indicated behavior or attitudes about women. The guy was obviously a bit of a pig in this regard. But there’s something hilarious about a man of great force and accomplishment — an actor-producer with a rep that everyone respects and admires — sounding like an asinine 15 year-old, an unregenerate lout. I can imagine him beaming as he said this, the same way he turned it on time and again for the cameras. I suppose that the humor comes from being reminded that actors really are children deep down.

According to a press release from Warner Home Video, a “director’s cut” of Hal Ashby‘s all-but-forgotten Lookin’ To Get Out (’82) will be available in England from Warner Home Video on 5.26.09. Presumably it’ll also be available stateside, but who knows when? In any case, friend-of-HE Jon Voight was a prime mover behind the release.

A ramshackle, loose-shoe hustling-and-gambling comedy starring Voight, Burt Young and Ann Marget, Lookin’ to Get Out was shot in ’80 but held up for two years. It cost $17 million to make and was a spectacular wipeout when it finally opened, grossing a total of $832,238 in the U.S. (per the IMDB).

It’s the only film to costar Voight, his then-wife Marcheline Bertrand (who died in late ’07 and has a walk-on part in the film) and 5 year-old Angelina Jolie, who made her screen debut here as “Tosh.”

In the WHV release Voight, who co-wrote the script with Ashby and someone named “Al Schwartz” (a nom de plume?), explains the backstory: “For various reasons, the film we released didn’t really represent Hal’s best work. I knew every version of the script and every cut, so I was understandably excited, but I also didn’t want to be disappointed. But when I saw it, I knew instantly it had Hal’s touch. The way he took all the elements and made it his own, it was almost like we were working together again. Because when Hal cut his films himself, it was magic.”

Here’s a link to Vincent Canby‘s 10.8.82 review in the N.Y. Times, and an excerpt: “As the film progresses, a terrible sort of chill sets in. One begins to grow uneasy in the realization that all of these frantic turns by Mr. Voight, Mr. Young and the others are going nowhere. It has the look of improvisation that won’t quit. There’s a lot of energy being demonstrated on the screen but, being without focus, it seems merely flatulent. It’s also exhausting.”

This doesn’t stop me. My faith in and admiration for Ashby requires a looksee. The original running time was 105 minutes. The WHV release doesn’t give a running time for the director’s cut but, as Voight indicates, perhaps the upcoming version is more about re-ordering and re-shaping rather than new footage.

Lookin’ To Get Out is being released as part of a package called Directors’ Showcase: Take Four. Three other wipe-outs (i.e., critically derided, box-office tanks) are included along along with David Cronenberg‘s M. Butterfly.

The biggest calamity title is a new director’s cut of Hugh Hudson ‘s Revolution with Al Pacino — easily one of the biggest bombs of Pacino’s career. Also included are John Boorman‘s Beyond Rangoon (which features Patricia Arquette giving one of the least convincing performances as a doctor in motion-picture history), and Michelangelo Antonioni‘s Zabriskie Point — an interesting and rather spooky oddball film set in the late ’60s, but one of the master’s lesser works.

As long as WB is putting out ’80s movies that tanked or suffered critical slings and arrows, why aren’t they releasing a DVD of the original “flashback” cut of the late James Bridges‘ Mike’s Murder, which was a rock-solid film to begin with? Jack Larson, Bridges’ longtime partner, has made it clear that all the materials exist to make that possible.

HE reader Marc Edward Heuck suggests that a Take Five edition of this series could feature Mike’s Murder alongside Claude Lelouch‘s Les Miserables, James Toback‘s Love and Money, Bill Gunn‘s Stop, and Richard Rush‘s Freebie and the Bean. Hey, why not?

Magnolia is opening James Gray‘s Two Lovers, which screened nine months ago in Cannes, tomorrow in theatres and on VOD on 2.16. Here again is my Cannes review, which is fairly well written and comprehensive if I do say so myself:

Joaquin Phoenix, Vinessa Shaw in James Gray’s Two Lovers.

Two Lovers is attractively composed and persuasively acted but, for me, a slightly too earnest and on-the-nose drama about romantic indecision. But it’s not half bad — a little Marty-ish at times, maybe a bit too emphatic here and there, but nonetheless concise, reasonably well-ordered and, for the most part, emotionally restrained and therefore believable.

Unlike Gray’s The Yards and We Own The Night, there’s no criminal behavior in Two Lovers, and the absence of this — no resorting to gunplay, car chases or fist fights — has naturally led Gray in a gentler, quieter direction. It’s mainly a mild-mannered borough family film, and fairly decent in that regard. I’m not a lockstep Gray fan — I was mostly okay with The Yards but disliked We Own The Night. But for what it’s worth, I think Lovers is his best yet.

Leonard (Joaquin Phoenix) is a lonely, less-than-worldly, recently suicide-prone guy, reeling from a busted relationship and living with his parents (Moni Moshonov, Isabella Rossellini) and working for his dad’s dry-cleaning store. The movie kicks in when he finds himself torn between Sandra (Vinessa Shaw), a sweet, wrinkle-free Brooklyn girl who wants to get married and do the usual-usual, and Michelle (Gwynneth Paltrow), a scattered, impulsive blonde who lives in Phoenix’s parents’ apartment building and is obviously “trouble” from the get-go.

Guess which one Leonard has the major hots for? Naturally.

Elias Koteas, Gwynneth Paltrow and Pheonix.

Leonard’s passion for Michelle is partly due to her being hot shiksa material, but also because she’s very much the big-city girl. His sincere but less passionate feelings for Sandra are precisely about her being a home-and-hearth type — stable, loyal and not exciting enough. As Leonard is also a fairly decent photographer, he understandably sees Michelle as spiritually linked to the big “out there” where his talent may some day be recognized — a place where people may see more value in his work than his family and neighborhood friends, who look at his stuff and say “yeah, pretty good” and then ask him to photograph weddings.

I was disappointed that Gray didn’t touch on a general rule-of-thumb when it comes to nice girls vs. crazy girls. As Woody Allen and other men of the world will tell you, the crazy ones are better in bed. This isn’t an absolute fact, thank fortune, but my experience on the planet has taught me it’s more true than not. I regard this as one of the great unfair conditions about life. It is certainly something Gray should have gotten into, and the fact that he doesn’t even flirt with this is, for me, strike #1.

Strike #2 is the casting of Shaw as Sandra. She’s too Fairfield County pretty, poised and delicate to be a borough girl. There are exceptions galore in real life, of course, but men and women from Brooklyn and Queens (i.e., those born and raised) tend to exude a slight coarseness. A coarseness that’s often vibrant and agreeable (I know New Yorkers and it’s not a cliche), but is also saddled, I feel, with a lack of interest in other realms. A wanting for worldly finesse. An Adrianna-from- The Sopranos quality. Not to mention that happily hunkered- down attitude about being “borough” — a life of eating pizza, not quite dressing the right way and failing to learn to speak French or play piano. Not to mention the distinctive ethnic features and honky accents. (I’ve known exactly one woman in my life who was raised in Brooklyn but doesn’t look it or talk it.)

James Gray

Shaw, simply, looks and talks like a girl from Greenwich or Westport or the Hamptons or Pacific Palisades. I’m a huge fan of this actress (as HE readers well know), but she’s too finishing-school to be believed here. Plus Gray and co-writer Ric Menello haven’t given Sandra enough in the way of distinctive ticks or weirdnesses. (Which everyone has.) They’ve settled for making her warm, generous, full of support and understanding. In short, a fantasy.

That said, I admired Pheonix’s performance — his best since Walk The Line, I feel. He convinced me that Leonard is just hermetic and naive enough to fall for a girl like Paltrow’s Michelle and not realize what he’s getting into. I think it’s fair to say that he’s starting to look vaguely 40ish — jowly, slightly chunky, filled-in. This is fine from an acting perspective, but a little curious given that he’s only 33.

2.12 Update: Pheonix is 34 now and look at him — a jowly, slightly chunky, bearded member of the rapping Taliban.

I was in a so-whatty frame of mind when I read earlier today about Tom Cruise and Denzel Washington reportedly being close to signing for The Matarese Circle, an updating of a respected 1983 Robert Ludlum thriller under director David Cronenberg. It would be the second high-velocity, internationally-flavored vehicle for Cruise on top of The Tourist, a remake of the French-produced Anthony Zimmer (’05) which Variety says will be his next project.

What’s in this for Cronenberg besides a fat paycheck? The man has always made films that have had some kind of extra thematic layer or undercurrent, or at least an application of kink. Read the synopses of the original ’83 Ludlum novel. Unless rewriters Michael Brandt and Derek Haas are radically departing from the book, there doesn’t seem to be anything in it other than straight plot. Is Cronenberg looking to be the next Paul Greengrass or ’90s-era Phillip Noyce? If so, that’s a switch.

It’s a good idea to beware, by the way, of anyone who had anything above-the-liney to do with Wanted, and in my book that means beware of Brandt and Haas. I realize that the ludicrousness of that Angelina Jolie thriller was partly due to the graphic-novel origins as well as the direction of that three-toed Russian sloth Timur Bekmambetov, who made this Universal release into one of the dumbest, most over-cranked action films of all time. But Brandt-Haas also wrote 3:10 to Yuma as well as 2 Fast 2 Furious. Make that caveat emptor plus.

“I am a sucker for redemption stories, so I would have to say Mickey Rourke [for Best Actor]. I thought it was a vulnerable, stripped-down, raw and brave performance by somebody who has climbed his way out of what seems like a bottomless pit. It was an excellent performance. It really reminded me of all the things that I loved about Mickey Rourke in the early years, and part of that is just kind of a fearlessness to expose himself to whatever it takes to get the performance across.” — L.A. Times critic Betsy Sharkey in a 2.11 L.A. Times q & a conducted by Patrick Goldstein and also including Kenneth Turan, titled “Film experts reconsider the Oscar nominees.”

A little sloppy for my tastes, two fart noises too many, and obviously about eight or nine months late. But decent. Thanks to Jack Morrissey, Peter Sciretta, Topless Robot, etc. The original posting was six days ago!

Real Geezers Marcia Nasatir and Lorenzo Semple, Jr. both respected but didn’t quite buy The Reader. (And they both think that Ralph Fiennes‘ first name is pronounced like Alf Landon‘s.) In as far as they probably represent the thinking of over-70 Academy voters to some extent, the combination of this and Ron Rosenbaum‘s Slate hit piece the other day suggests that the Slumdog Millionaire team needn’t worry too much.