Day: March 16, 2009

“An ultra-sophisticated love story between two corporate spies with pronounced mutual trust issues, Duplicity is a brainy, non-violent Mr. and Mrs. Smith, the film Intolerable Cruelty wanted to be, a Trouble in Paradise for modern times,” writes Variety‘s Todd McCarthy.

“Smart, droll and dazzling to look at and listen to, writer-director Tony Gilroy‘s effervescent, intricately plotted puzzler proves in every way superior to his 2007 success Michael Clayton. The twisty, time jumping narrative forces viewers to keep on their toes, and it could well be that Duplicity is too smart for its own good as far as the popcorn masses are concerned.

“Still, this is about as good as it gets these days for sharp-minded Hollywood entertainment made for an intelligent audience, and Universal can only hope that Julia Roberts, in an excellent return to leading lady form, still has the B.O. pull to put this one over.”

The Weinstein Company has bought US rights to Sam Taylor Wood‘s Nowhere Boy, the John Lennon teenaged-years biopic that began principal photography on March 8th. (Latin American and German rights were also purchased.) I’ve read Matt Greenhalgh‘s screenplay, and the scruffy British dialogue sounds as true and authentic as it does in Greenhalgh’s script of Control, which, for me, is as good as it gets.

I posted a piece in late January that said “if you take out the born-during-the- German-blitz scene in 1940, the story spans from 1955 to 1960 — years of creative ferment and coming into one’s own.

“19 year-old Aaron Johnson (The Greatest) will obviously play Lennon from age 15 to 20 — not much of a stretch. They’d better get the light reddish brown hair color right. If they screw this up they’re dead.

“The great Kristin Scott Thomas will play Lennon’s Aunt Mimi, which is a larger, more expressive role than the part of Lennon’s mother Julia, who’s being played by Anne Marie Duff. The young Paul McCartney arrives during the last 20-odd pages, and generates, as you might expect, a significant flavor and force. Thomas Sangster (next in Jane Campion‘s Bright Star) will portray Macca.

“The story ends with Lennon and McCartney heading off to play an open-ended gig in Hamburg.”

After decades of absence, a first-rate DVD of Andrzej Wajda‘s Danton (’83) is due from the Criterion Co. on 3.31, or nearly two weeks hence. I’ve seen this superbly composed historical drama only once, and have never forgotten the vivid writing, the bold performances (particularly Gerard Depardieu‘s as Georges Danton) and the mesmerizing recreations of early 1790s Paris.

$35 friggin’ dollars for a standard DVD, even if it does contain two discs with many bells and whistles? It gave me pause, I must admit. But this is an epic film, and the transfer quality is up to the usual Criterion standards. Update: I watched the first 20 minutes last night on my 42″ Plasma and it’s almost Blu-ray quality.

Regarded by some as an allusion to the battle between Polish Solidarity and the doctrinaire Communists (including General Wojciech Jaruzelski) who ran Poland and repressed and penalized Lech Walesa and his cohorts in order to hold onto power, Danton is basically about the clash between two revolutionary leaders, Danton and Maximilien Robespierre (Wojciech Pszoniak), and the many guilllotine deaths that resulted on both sides.

Danton is earthy, ribald, impassioned, and perhaps a wee bit corruptible, but also an advocate of moderation and compassion in the handing of so-called enemies of the revolution . Robespierre is exacting, scrupulous, fastidious and morally demanding in a revolutionary sense, a result of this being that he comes to regard Danton’s moderation as a betrayal of the Revolution, which leads to strenuous efforts to slice off his head.

“Without stretching things too much, Mr. Wajda presents us with a Danton who is the articulate conscience of the Revolution, someone, perhaps, not entirely unlike Lech Walesa, the popular spokesman of Poland’s Solidarity movement,” Vincent Canby wrote in his 9.28.83 N.Y. Times review. “On the other hand, Robespierre is seen as being completely removed from the practical needs and real feelings of the people, a stern father-figure of a dictator, a man who doesn’t hesitate to approve the murder of thousands of people for the fatherland’s ultimate good.

“In an interview in Le Monde, Mr. Wajda denie[d] all associations between 18th-century France and 20th-century Poland, though he does say that Danton represents the West and Robespierre the East.”

What it’s like to have your head chopped off? What would you feel and think? Would there be anxiety and terror or…? I’ve read that the head lives for one to two minutes before expiring so you can presumably see, hear, smell and even taste things before blacking out.

I remember being stoned one night and imagining a conversation between myself and a kind of spectral administrator of in-between states just after my head and body had been separated. “I’ve got a couple of minutes left and I want to be both,” I told the administrator. “I’ve felt the organic totality of my body since birth and don’t want to let that go of that until I’m dead, and I don’t want to lose any kind mental awareness either, much less my sight, smell and hearing in my head.” Sorry, said the administrator — you can’t be both. You’ve been separated and you’re going to have to choose. “All right, all right,” I said. “I’ll be the head.”

Tony Gilroy‘s Duplicity “is a breathlessly enjoyable mind-game, the kind of movie that uses romantic comedy as both leavening and misdirection from its true intent, even as it revels in the heated interaction between its two leads,” critic Marshall Fine posted this morning.

“Built like a devilish puzzle – with emotional variables that alternately underline and undermine the logic of the solution – Duplicity is giddy fun, something that’s been in short supply at the movies. While there have been other jigsaw movies that keep your brain racing as you attempt to connect the disparate pieces, movies that played with time-structure such as Go and 21 Grams, there aren’t many that have the same fizzy titillation that Duplicity does.

“It’s all in the title, isn’t it? Keep it in mind as Gilroy works his cinematic sleight of hand.”

Imagine yourself hanging out in a faintly smelly blue-collar saloon in Austin, Texas (i.e., in a less enlightened section of town), and one of the guys at the bar asks what you thought of Sacha Baron Cohen‘s Bruno, or rather the preview footage you’ve just seen at a South by Southwest event. And you say to him without skipping a beat that it’s “wildly, paralytically funny and brilliantly transgressive.”

The beer boys wouldn’t like that, trust me. If I was a chunky Austin guy who drove a forklift at a soft-drink company and some smartypants in horn-rim glasses said that a movie was “brilliantly transgressive,” right away I would be thinking about hitting him.

The above six-word description came from MSN Movies and AMCtv.com‘s James Rocchi, as passed along by Indiewire‘s Eugene Hernandez. I think all film critics have to keep the shitkicker readers in mind when they write. I’m not saying you can’t write what you want to write or be who you really are, but every so often you have to tone down the NYU Masters in Film Appreciation jargon.

The 7-11 way to say it is that Bruno “pushes the comedy limits in a really clever and wild-ass way. You know, like Borat only more gay this time.”

I’ve written the Twitter tech support guys twice over the past week about my password not being accepted on the iPhone despite changing it on the computer. Nothing back. Dicks.

Another sad aspect of Ron Silver‘s passing, as noted this morning by Hollywood & Fine’s Marshall Fine, is that he would have been a perfect choice to play Bernie Madoff if someone had managed to finance a feature or a made-for-HBO thing. Silver, 62 when he passed, would have been the right age. He could have easily been made up to resemble Madoff, he shares Madoff’s tribal heritage, and, of course, he was a first-rate actor.

Ron Silver (l.), Bernard Madoff (r.)

I think my Madoff Escapes and Cavorts With Hookers Around The World idea would make for a better HBO series than the true-life story of how he became a criminal. The flaunting of a lack of morality or accountability would be the point . Madoff would be the hidden person we’re all ashamed of harboring without ourselves — the irresponsible wastrel and profligate chaser of temporary satisfaction. Talk about your dramatization of a constant existential malady — society demands, the individual shirks and avoids and runs away.

In today’s “First Read” column on msnbc.com, it says that President Obama “has a late-night date with Jay Leno on Thursday when he travels to California. Just asking: when was the last time a sitting president did the Tonight Show?” There’s no mention of the drop-by on the show’s calendar.