Day: April 23, 2009

The rationale for doing awful things in order to defeat or weaken your enemy was articulated 44 years ago by Cyril Cusack in The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, to wit: “Our work, as I understand it, is based on a single assumption that the West is never going to be the aggressor. We may do disagreeable things but we’re defensive. Our policies are peaceful. But our methods can’t afford to be less ruthless than those of the opposition…can they?

Cyril Cusack as “Control” in Martin Ritt’s The Spy Who Came In From The Cold.

“You know, I’d say, uhm…since the war, our methods — our techniques, that is — and those of the [opposition] have become very much the same. Yes. I mean, occasionally…we have to do wicked things. Very wicked things indeed. But, uh, you can’t be less wicked than your enemies simply because your government’s policy is benevolent. Can you?”

This, essentially, is the right-wing Fox News view of the torture issue. It sounds moderate and reasonable when expressed by Cusack, but crude and boorish and repellent out of the mouth of Sean Hannity.

A 4.18 German-language Adenblatt article says that Fatih Akin‘s Soul Kitchen isn’t going to Cannes because he didn’t submit it. The German-Turkish director (The Edge of Heaven) simply couldn’t make the Cannes deadline. The piece says that the film, which stars Moritz Bleibtreu, is being cut as we speak and will be ready by June. Same info from this article.

You’d think that L.A. Times film critic Kenneth Turan might be …how to put it?…partial to slipping on the kid gloves in reviewing The Soloist? Since it’s at least partly an L.A. Times milieu story based on a book by a Times colleague, Steve Lopez, about a relationship he had/has with a gifted but schizophrenic street musician? Uhn, nope.

Jamie Foxx,. Robert Downey, Jr. in The Soloist.

“Remember when Lloyd Bentsen told Dan Quayle, ‘I knew Jack Kennedy [and] Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy’?,” Turan begins. “Well, I felt a little that way when it came to reviewing The Soloist

“Despite all I know I should feel, I can’t help being mightily frustrated by [this film]. I can’t help resenting that it suffered the death of a thousand cuts and, more frustrating still, that all this happened in the name of doing good in the world, of making the story’s powerful lessons more palatable to a wider audience.

“But by consistently and relentlessly overplaying everything, by settling for standard easy emotions when singular and heartfelt was called for, by pushing forward when they should have pulled back, director Joe Wright and screenwriter Susannah Grant have made the story mean less, not more. Instead of enhancing The Soloist‘s appeal, they have come close to eliminating it.

“I could back up and write all this in the reviewer’s traditional third person, but that feels disingenuous. After all, I do know Lopez, whose wonderful Los Angeles Times columns and later book about his unlikely friendship with a gifted but deeply troubled street musician started everything. And I work with Lopez at The Times, which, in an unprecedented gesture, offered its newsroom as a set and has in general bound itself to this movie with remarkable fealty.

“More than that, as a Washington Post reporter when All the President’s Men came out, I’ve experienced working at a newspaper when its exploits became movie material. I know what to expect from this kind of wild ride and, just as important, what to disregard.

“So while it was initially jolting to see the tall, laconic Lopez portrayed by Robert Downey Jr. — not the likeliest person to play him — as a short, voluble bundle of energy, I got over it. Did Marlon Brando resemble Napoleon? Did John Wayne look anything like Genghis Khan? Time to move on.

“I also knew we were a long way from the early days of the movie business, when Hollywood ran roughshod over books, ending an early sound version of Moby-Dick, for instance, with Ahab killing the whale and coming home to his girlfriend. Really.

“If The Soloist had been made in those days, Jamie Foxx‘s Nathaniel Anthony Ayers, a gifted musician battling the horrors of paranoid schizophrenia, would have been cured in a trice and ended up playing a gala concert to a Disney Hall standing ovation. So I am nothing if not grateful for the small favors this film provides.

“[And yet] director Wright seems to relish overdoing whatever he can, not surprising for those who remember how he treated the Bennett family in his Pride & Prejudice. So a cellist who tries to help Ayers can’t be just a good person, he has to be clumsily religious. When Ayers gets to hear a concert in Disney Hall, we can’t just experience the moment, we have to watch a psychedelic light show left over from the Jefferson Airplane playing the Fillmore.

“And we can’t simply enjoy this story for what it is, we have to suffer through bogus and unnecessary slapstick moments like Lopez slipping on his own urine during a hospital visit.”

At or near the top of my list for pure enjoyment, pure male-mood adventure, pure turn-off-your-brain animal-criminal swagger. (But without beating up on or shooting anyone.) No American youth comedy has ever even tried to be this anti-social or anarchic. It’s way ruder, nervier and more up-the-social-order than any similar-type American youth comedy you can name. American Pie, hide your head in shame.

“Marvel made a choice, and it was a very, very bad choice. They didn’t keep their word. They didn’t honor my contract. They produced a great bounty with the first one but they put it all in the storehouse and you were not allowed in. They did the same thing with Gwyneth Paltrow, from what I’ve been told. They did it with almost everyone except Robert Downey [Jr.]. One of the things that actors need to learn to do is always stick together, one for all and all for one.” — Former Iron Man costar Terrence Howard speaking to Parade‘s Jeanne Wolf.

Rod Lurie, director-writer of the upcoming Straw Dogs, naturally doesn’t want his film to be compared too precisely to Sam Peckinpah‘s original 1971 version. So he’s cast the very un-Dustin Hoffmanish James Marsden (next in The Box) in the husband role. Hoffman’s character was a dweeby mathmetician but Marsden’s is a big-city writer, as was the original character in the book, The Siege at Trencher’s Farm.

In the view of Vanity Fair.com’s Julian Sancton, the following TFF films are worth catching: Armando Ianucci‘s In The Loop (but then I knew that), Steven Soderbergh‘s The Girlfriend Experience, Leslie Cockburn‘s American Casino, Hirokazu Kore-eda‘s Still Walking, Spike Lee‘s Kobe Doin’ Work, Eric Bana‘s Love The Beast, Alfonso Cuaron‘s Rudy y Cursi, Black Dynamite, Easy Virtue and Pandora’s Box.

“My real problem with Whatever Works was the older-man-younger-woman theme, which has never been one of my favorite Woody motifs, even before it gained a real-life parallel. (Manhattan is a great film, but the Mariel Hemingway relationship is creepy and condescending, and I don’t just say that as a father of an almost-teenage daughter.) Going back to Alvy and Annie, the romances in Allen’s films often have a teacher-pupil quality, too, and in Whatever Works we get that as well as the December-May thing.

“But here, Allen doesn’t even bother to make the relationship between Larry David‘s and Evan Rachel Woods‘s characters credible. Aside from her being hot, the attraction makes no sense: She’s a moron and he’s hateful.” — Vanity Fair critic Bruce Handy in a pro-con debate with Frank DiGiacomo, posted this morning.

Most of us, I suspect, believe that closeted gay politicians who support anti-gay legislation and do nothing to support their own are tragic and despicable figures. And yet I’ve always felt that it’s a basic human and professional right to be closeted if you so choose. However loathsome or pathetic the reason for this or that gay person wanting to live secretly, privacy is privacy. I understand and sympathize with those who’ve sought to “out” these hypocrites, but I would never be party to outing on my own steam.

That said, the headliner in Kirby Dick‘s Outrage, a Tribeca Film Festival doc (showing tomorrow night) that outs closeted D.C. politicians, is certainly Florida governor Charlie Crist. He reportedly supported anti-gay marriage legislation and campaigned in Florida for John McCain last summer and fall (and, if I recall correctly, was floated as a prospective candidate to be McCai’s Vice-Presidential running mate). He’s also on the short list as a prospective 2012 Republican Presidential candidate.

In a 4.22 entry, Wilshire & Washington‘s Ted Johnson reports that Kirby’s doc “recounts a string of stories from Florida’s alternative press, along with anonymous interviews with people who claim to have had conversations with a man who boasted of having sex with Crist.” The Florida governor, he reports, has been “asked about rumors [along these lines and] denied them.”

“The doc sought out Kelly Crosby Heyniger, one of Crist’s girlfriends until the end of 2007, who didn’t appear on camera but gave them a statement about what broke them up: ‘I think I should just keep my mouth shut. Call me in ten years and I will tell you a great story.’

“One of the final scenes of the movie is of Crist’s wedding last July. In a bit of judicious editing, a la Michael Moore, Crist tells a reporter, ‘If your wife can’t help you in a campaign, who can?'”

But we obviously did. Routinely, “legally,” procedurally. Between this Fox News clip and being reportedly mentioned in Kirby Dick‘s Outrage (which will screen at the Tribeca Film Festival tomorrow night), this is definitely Shepard Smith‘s pop-through week.

Garry Shandling‘s Iron Man 2 cameo role (reported here and there earlier this month) is that of “a whiney U.S senator who’s opposed to defense contracting and who’s particularly jealous of Downey’s Tony Stark character, especially his prowess with the ladies,” a guy tells me.

As forecast by Variety‘s Todd McCarthy on 4.16 and in a more general way last February by Screen Daily‘s Mike Goodridge, the official 62nd Cannes Film Festival competition slate includes Quentin Tarantino‘s Inglourious Basterds, Ang Lee‘s Taking Woodstock, Lars von Trier‘s Antichrist, Michael Haneke‘s The White Ribbon and Pedro Almodovar‘s Broken Embraces.

Other competitors officially revealed in Paris this morning were Marco Bellocchio‘s Vincere, Jane Campion‘s Bright Star, Isabel Coixet‘s Map of the Sounds of Tokyo and Ken Loach‘s Looking for Eric.

The festival’s Asian competitors will include Park Chan-wook‘s Thirst, Johnnie To‘s Vengeance, Brillante Mendoza‘s Kinatay and Face, and China’s Lou Ye’s Spring Fever.

French competitors include Alain Resnais‘ Les Herbes folles, Jacques Audiard‘s A Prophet, Xavier Giannoli‘s In the Beginning and Gaspar Noe‘s Enter the Void.

Andrea Arnold‘s Fish Tank and Elia Suleiman‘s The Time That Remains will also compete.

Alejandro Amenabar‘s Agora will screen out-of-competition; ditto Jan Kounen‘s Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky and Terry Gilliam‘s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. Sam Raimi‘s Drag Me to Hell will get a midnight slot.

As previously confirmed, Pete Docter and Bob Peterson‘s Up, the animated 3D pic from Pixar, will start the festival.

The Directors’ Fortnight and Critics’ Week slates will be announced on Friday.

Add-on: For some inexplicable reason a 4.16 summary of Todd McCarthy’s Cannes forecast story wouldn’t click through. I don’t have an explanation but it’s water under the bridge — let it go.