Only two weeks and two days before the Toronto Film Festival begins on Thursday, 9.10 (which requires flying there and getting all set up on Wednesday, 9.9). New York-based producers and distributors know what goes, but I’m reminding everyone anyway that people like me tend to see maybe 25 films during the festival and that I now have about 33 films on my list not counting the two or three unexpected “finds” that you always hear about and want to squeeze in during any festival. So please get in touch if there’s anything to be seen here in Manhattan between now and Tuesday, 9.8. I won’t post until the festival begins but I really need to see as much as possible before it starts.
My 8.14 tally came to 34. I added Catherine Corsini‘s Partir but scratched Jan Kounen‘s Coco Before Chanel (saw the trailer…yeesh) and Carlos Saura‘s I, Don Giovanni, leaving a total of 33. So I’m most likely going to miss at least eight of these and possibly more…who knows how it’s going to go?
Here’s my two cents about Roger Friedman‘s 8.21 piece assessing the leading Best Actress contenders of the moment. Right now it’s a two-actress race — Carey Mulligan in An Education vs. Meryl Streep in Julie & Julia (with possible fortification coming from her It’s Complicated performance.). Obviously there are four months to go and anything can happen, but right now the Oscar is Mulligan’s to lose because of (a) the old “Streep nominated again?” factor and (b) Mullligan’s performance is delightful/exciting while Streep’s is merely expert.
Mulligan might very well not win because Oscar tradition has generally been about ingenues being nominated but not winning because they have to pay their dues and all that jazz. It would actually be cooler for Mulligan to just have fun with the nomination dance and boost An Education in the bargain, etc.
Abbie Cornish might manage a Best Actress nomination in for her performance in Bright Star, although she’s looking like a bit of a weak sister at this stage. (The movie’s real star is Jane Campion.) Nobody knows anything about Rachel Weisz in The Lovely Bones so just shut up and wait. Forget Penelope Cruz in Broken Embraces (although I think she’s wonderful in this film) because the reaction to Pedro Almodovar‘s latest has been tepid since Cannes. Forget Zooey Deschanel in 500 Days of Summer…just forget it. (You can’t be nominated for playing a whimsical, self-absorbed ditzoid.) And forget Gwynneth Paltrow in Two Lovers….not happening!
Friedman, by the way, says that Mulligan is the breakout star among his list of nominees and then adds, “Remember, you heard it here first.” That’s funny. I seem to recall some other guy jumping up and down about her last January and predicting that An Education “will definitely be in contention at the end of the year” in some capacity.
“The debate over the public option has been depressing in its inanity,” writesN.Y. TimesPaul Krugman in today’s (8.24) edition. “Opponents of the option — not just Republicans, but Democrats like Senator Kent Conrad and Senator Ben Nelson — have offered no coherent arguments against it. Mr. Nelson has warned ominously that if the option were available, Americans would choose it over private insurance — which he treats as a self-evidently bad thing, rather than as what should happen if the government plan was, in fact, better than what private insurers offer.
“But it’s much the same on other fronts. Efforts to strengthen bank regulation appear to be losing steam, as opponents of reform declare that more regulation would lead to less financial innovation — this just months after the wonders of innovation brought our financial system to the edge of collapse, a collapse that was averted only with huge infusions of taxpayer funds.
“So why won’t these zombie ideas die?
“Part of the answer is that there’s a lot of money behind them. ‘It is difficult to get a man to understand something,’ said Upton Sinclair, ‘when his salary’ — or, I would add, his campaign contribution fund — ‘depends upon his not understanding it.’ Vast amounts of insurance industry money have been flowing to obstructionist Democrats like Mr. Nelson and Senator Max Baucus, whose Gang of Six negotiations have been a crucial roadblock to legislation.
“But some of the blame also must rest with President Obama, who famously praised Ronald Reagan during the Democratic primary, and hasn’t used the bully pulpit to confront government-is-bad fundamentalism. That’s ironic, in a way, since a large part of what made Reagan so effective, for better or for worse, was the fact that he sought to change America’s thinking as well as its tax code.
“How will this all work out? I don’t know. But it’s hard to avoid the sense that a crucial opportunity is being missed, that we’re at what should be a turning point but are failing to make the turn.”
“If you are splashing around with a bunch of guys who are 93 percent white, an average of 45.62 years old and look as if they’ve done this before, you must be swimming in the studio directors’ pool,” wroteMichael Cieply in yesterday’s (8.23) N.Y. Times.
“Such is the profile of studio filmmakers, based on a survey of those who directed the 85 or so live action movies that have been released, or will be, in 2009 by the six biggest film companies — Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, 20th Century Fox, Universal Pictures, Walt Disney Studios and Warner Brothers.
Cieply’s tally “does not count animated films, which are born by a different, more collaborative process, or the independent-style movies released by specialty divisions like Fox Searchlight Pictures or Focus Features.
“Rather, it is a scan of what is on the big studio schedules: comedies like The Hangover from Todd Phillips and I Love You, Man from John Hamburg; action films like Fast & Furious from Justin Lin and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen from Michael Bay; and the increasingly rare drama, like Shutter Island, which was on tap for October from Martin Scorsese (but has just been moved into 2010).
“What the count shows is that Hollywood directors are pretty much what they have always been: a small brotherhood of highly skilled craftsmen — more than 90 percent this year are men — who could hit or miss with any given film, but who tend to have solid experience. This year’s directors appear to have made 6.1 movies, on average — and probably have more in common with one another than with the increasingly diverse population around them.
“There’s no single process or pattern for deciding who will direct any given picture. The choices are born of an often awkward consensus among executives and producers, with plenty of lobbying from agents and occasional input from the movie’s stars. A filmmaker might write an attractive script and then insist on directing it as a condition of sale, or could simply be hired based on a great track record.
“Though Hollywood’s power structure remains heavily white, it has opened the ranks to far more women in recent years. But that shift does not yet appear to have changed the makeup of the studio directing pool.”
The moral basis in Inglourious Basterds for the Basterds’ delicious slaughter of German troops is that said troops were serving an evil criminal regime and therefore THEY, the troops, were evil and criminal as well as viciously anti-Semitic, so snuff ’em out like rats. Shoot ’em, club ’em, exterminate ’em.
IGB is basically a table-turning game in which Tarantino decided to have fun by letting Germans suffer en masse the way Jews suffered en masse at the hands of the SS and other Nazi command types who carried out the Holocaust.
It is still shocking news to some ostrich-heads out there that Americans were the bad guys in the Vietnam War (i.e., a great industrial nation coming down full-force upon a peasant society and calling out the furies), and that by this token the troops who served this policy were bad guys as well, or even, if you want to really fulminate and get angry about it, just as bad as average German grunts were “bad” for serving their side during WWII.
Grunts are grunts. They don’t formulate policy. They sign up and go through basic training and shoot the enemy and try to survive so they can come back to their families. But by the standards of some, U.S. grunts were okay and just trying to get through the Vietnam War — regular guys, one of us, etc. — but German grunts were evil and deserved to be slaughtered with baseball bats. What myopic idiocy!
IGB is playing a facile, cheap and repugnant game. Two vicious wrongs really don’t make a right, guys. And by relishing the idea of slaughtering average-Joe Germans — by revelling in their elimination like cheering baseball fans in the bleachers — Tarantino degrades the morality of Jewish survivors…indeed, the moral residue of the entire horrific Holocaust experience.
And form-wise, Inglourious Basterds is taken up by at least three if not four long scenes in which a suspicious German goes on at length about how a certain neutral or Allied-friendly Frenchman or French-woman or Brit seems to be not telling the truth and “can you explain why?” and “may I have another glass of your delicious milk?” and lah lah lah lah. The applicable terms are “repetitive” and “boring.”
I know exactly what I’m talking about. I know exactly what Inglorious Basterds is. It is third-rate, scraping-the-bottom-of-the-barrel Tarantino. And just because the HE hoi polloi are calling it cool and telling their friends to go see it doesn’t invalidate my view. I haven’t been a movie maniac all my life and a regular column writer since 1994 for nothing. I know what goes. I mean, I know.
So all you IGB hooligans can just retire to a pub somewhere and arrogantly chortle about how popular the film is all on your own. Have a good time, enjoy yourselves, etc. Due respect but I don’t agree with you, and if you want to know the truth I don’t truly respect your cinematic value system either. I mean, I do in a sense — no one is “right” and everybody has their opinion — but I think it’s pretty obvious what it’s all about.
And that goes for you too, Glenn Kenny! IGB is smug, low-grade, wafer-thin cinematic shite. It’s popular because it allows the pseudo-hip to fancy themselves as genuinely hip by winking at them over and over and saying, “Get it guys? It’s just a movie. We’re just havin’ fun with the WWII mythology! Yeaaahhh!”
Note: I just tapped out the above diatribe in the HE reader comments section, and figured it would get more play if I posted it as a front-page rant.
An HE reader who’s friendly with an LA movie buddy of mine wrote the following over the weekend: “My Dad and I saw Inglourious Basterds, which we loved. I’m so mad at the critics for thinking the movie is too violent or cruel, or Wells’ whole diatribe about the Basterds behaving no better than the Nazis they’re after. It’s a movie! Let’s have fun! If we can’t laugh at Nazis, what can we laugh at?.”
Wells response: It’s a movie! Have fun with the fake Nazis! Club their heads in for refusing to betray their friends….hoo-hoo!
Except I’m just wondering what this guy and his dad will think of Tarantino’s rumored sequel, Inglourious Vietnamese Basterds. D’ju read about it? It’s about an elite team of ornery North Vietnamese hillbilly badasses sent into South Vietnam in early ’68 to kill a whole bunch of no-good Americans and deliver some payback for torchin’ all those villages and slaughterin’ non-combatants who won’t give up the Vietcong.
The rockin’ first-act highlight comes when head Basterd Lambo Nguyen tells Sgt. Ernest Taylor of Middletown, Connecticut, that unless he provides information about a nearby company of American soldiers that the craziest Basterd of all, Wham-bam Phan, will beat his skull into mush with a baseball bat. Alas, the stubborn Taylor refuses to betray his buddies, and when Wham-Bam Phan lets him have it….whoa! Very cool! Blood and brain matter mixed with the jungle grass, and covered with insects in minutes!
The thumbnail plot for Jerry Bruckheimer‘s Pirates of the Caribbean 4, a connected friend confides, is a search by Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) and other parties for the fountain of youth. This is the same MacGuffin plot that George Lucas was supposedly considering for an Indy sequel. There will also be some kdin of Captain Nemo-type villain utilizing new-style technology. Sounds like they’re invoking the “steampunk” style we’ve seen gain more and more of a foothold in genre conventions, including Comic Con.
Doug Pray‘s Art and Copy opened two days ago in Manhattan. At last January’s Sundance Film Festival I said it had “turned out to be a little thin. It’s basically a chapter-by-chapter history of the most legendary ad campaigns of the last 45 or 50 years, each chapter with a corresponding flattery profile of the advertising exec (or execs) who dreamt each one up.
“But there’s no arching theme to it, no undercurrent, no inquiring line of thought. Pray doesn’t begin to think about the odious implications of modern advertising (as Adam Curtis did in The Century of the Self). Nor does he think to draw parallels between certain legendary ad copy lines and the contours and tendencies of the culture from which they sprung.
“In 1961 a copywriter in the employ of Foote, Cone & Belding named Shirley Polykoff came up with the line: ‘If I’ve only one life, let me live it as a blonde!’ The basic attitude of having ‘only one life,’ said Wolfe, contradicted a general belief among families and nations that had existed for centuries, which you could sum up as a belief in ‘serial immortality.’
“Boiled down, serial immortality means that we’re all part of a familial stream — our lives being a completion or fulfillment of our parents’ lives and our children’s lives completing and fulfilling our own, and everyone understanding that we’re part of the same genetic river of existence and spirit.
“Polykoff’s copy line, which was written for Clairol hair coloring, basically said ‘the hell with that — it’s just me, it’s just my life and my goals, and I’m going to satisfy myself!’ By the time the early ’70s rolled around the culture had begun to believe in the ‘me first’ philosophy en masse.
“I just wish Pray had decided to dig into this and other correlations between advertising and cultural values.”
The big challenge with Laura Gabbert and Justin Schein‘s No Impact Man (Oscilloscope, 9.11, NY and LA) is not to fight it. You need to let it in and let it swim around and settle in of its own accord. Or not. But you have to at least give it a chance. Because if you do…well, no guarantees. But you may find yourself looking at your habits in a slightly more earth-friendly manner, and how can that not be a good thing?
I hated the idea of watching this damn thing. It was showing last Thursday night at a press screening on Hudson Street, and I was going “oh, crap.” What could be drearier, I muttered, than observing a year-long experiment by blogger Colin Beavan and his wife, Business Week staffer Michele Conlin, and their daughter to live for a year in their ninth-floor West Village apartment without contributing in any significant way to the pollution, global warming and general ruination of the planet?
Okay, nice idea but c’mon…don’t make me watch this. I get it but I don’t feel like going there. Really.
We can all reduce our carbon footprints if we choose, and there are obviously healthier ways of living than others. I’ll bet I contribute a lot less garbage to the world than tens of millions of bison-sized fast-food eaters and constant fossil-fuel burners out there. I could probably do better, okay, but the idea of living in such a monk-purist way that I’d have no impact whatsoever? C’mon…that’s excessive. That’s tedious. Get outta here. Or as one guy angrily tells Colin in an email, “I can’t wait to wipe my ass with the pages of your book.”
Oh, right…forgot about the book. It’s called “No Impact Man: The Adventures of a Guilty Liberal Who Attempts to Save The Planet and the Discoveries He Makes About Himself and Our Way of Life in the Process.” (They handed out free copies at the screening.) And Colin’s No Impact Man blog is…well, here.
But what happens is that the film starts, the experiment begins and gradually the denial thing doesn’t seem so bad. Or at least it begins to seem tolerable. Colin and Michele get used to this and that deprivation, and so do we in a sense. They stop using their refrigerator. They give up electricity at the six-month point. They wash their clothes by stomping around barefoot in a bathtub filled with their dirties and I-forgot-what-kind-of-cleanser. They stop using toilet paper. (How does that work?) They ride their bikes around and start losing weight due to not eating take-out. They do without air-conditioning in the summer. (Good God!)
“No Impact Man” author Colin Beaven (r.) and wife Michele Conlin (l.), who are the “stars” (along with their daughter Isabella) of Laura Gabbert and Justin Schein’s doc. Taken Thursday, 8.20 at 9:35 pm.
Colin’s basic point seems to be “if my wife and daughter and I could live this purely and monastically for an entire year and have a good happy life in the bargain, can’t you guys change your lives at least somewhat in order to save the planet?”
Is No Impact Man entertaining? Well, Michele is kind of fun to hang with (or at least a bit more fun than the pleasantly candid but glumly earnest Colin) but I can’t say the film actually “entertains.” Does it deliver emotional touchstone moments like a good Michael Moore doc? Uhn…not really. Is it tight and true in that it gets down to business and doesn’t meander and holds its focus? Yeah, for the most part, but at the same time it feels a tiny bit draggy in the final third. It runs 90 minutes. I wouldn’t have minded 75 or 80.
But overall it’s coming from a good and intelligent place and I’m glad I saw it. Really. It got me thinking about my bad habits and how I might erase or correct some of them.
Will the popcorn-munching, KFC-eating 20something Eloi ever pay No Impact Man the slightest heed? Yes — if their children show it to them on their deathbeds 50 or 60 years from now, and I mean if the kids strap them to their beds. inject them with some kind of wake-up drug and make them wear Clockwork Orange eyelid-clamps.
I asked Michele during the after-party how she and Colin and their daughter managed to avoid using toilet paper for a year. Michele went “no!” and kind of half-chuckled when I asked if they used some kind of re-usable cloth rag, but she never said what the actual trick was. (Some kind of sponge in a water pot, is my guess.) A disgusting topic, sure, but the movie is about alternatives, right?
The screening was attended by 85% women. Singles, couples, groups of three, etc. There were two or three boyfriends and a couple of stag guys but Jett and I were the only men who attended together. Why was that? Something to do with nest-tending instincts morphing into earth-tending meditations? That was my theory, at least. The bottom line? At the end of the day No Impact Man will probably settle into the public consciousness as a chick flick.
I don’t know exactly what happened or why, but Inglourious Basterds ending up with $37.6 million domestic (obviously no sharp Saturday fall-off occured) and $65.1 million worldwide is a very good score for the Weinstein Co.
I frankly expected a steep Saturday fall-off based on disappointed word-of-mouth, but that didn’t happen. Against all logic and all good taste, a lot of people seemed to like IGB and have been telling their friends. The rumble is simple and clear. The Weinsteins have won themselves a breather! But only a breather. Deliverance and salvation has to happen steadily over the next few months. (And Nine has to pretty much knock it out of the park.) But remember that the Weinsteins are splitting the domestic IGB revenue with Universal.
Remember also that it cost $70 million to make (it ideally should have been made for $15 or $20 million tops with everyone taking back-end profit-shares) and that selling it cost $35 to $40 million. And that an ideal scenario is for a film to triple its opening weekend haul, so if it triples $65 million worldwide….well, I really doubt that will happen. But if it does it will bring in close to $200 million worldwide plus video and video games and whatever else.
So it’s not looking too bad, and a pretty good thing for the Weinsteins.
If anyone has seen the teaser playing this weekend for Chris Nolan‘s Inception (which I’ve been too lazy or too cheap to pay to see in theatres), perhaps they can add to the following description offered by two Playlist correspondents a day or so ago? The film is shooting as we speak, having only begun principal photography on 7.13.09, so it’s unusual, by my sights, for a teaser to already be playing in theatres.
“[It] starts with an affected WB logo, then goes to footage of a spinning dreidel” — who knows what a dreidel is? I didn’t until two minutes ago. “Then it shows a closeup of Leonardo DiCaprio (who looks way cooler than he does in Shutter Island…more like Ethan Hawke in Gattacca) and has words, ‘from Christopher Nolan, director of The Dark Knight.’
“It then cuts to footage above a city (very Dark Knight, Michael Mann-esque) and then says something about the biggest battle taking place in the mind. Then comes the money shot of the trailer, with DiCaprio fighting another guy in a hallway and they’re flying all over the place as if gravity keeps changing directions on them (very Matrixy but looks quite good — surprised to see an FX shot completed).
“The soundtrack is really great (Hans Zimmer again), with major bass booming at a very pulsated rate. Then the title comes up and Summer 2010.”
Inception is understood to be “a contemporary sci-fi actioner set within the architecture of the mind.” DiCaprio stars as Cobb, a CEO of some big company. Marion Cotillard plays Leo’s wife. Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays an associate of some kind. Ken Watanabe plays a villain named Saito, who blackmails the CEO. Michael Caine, Tom Hardy and Cillian Murphy costar.
I need to ask a rhetorical question. If you had a fairly tall and strapping lead actor in your film like Leonardo DiCaprio, would you have any concerns about casting the winky-dinky-sized Ellen Page in a costarring role? I’m just struck every time I see her in a movie still alongside this or that actor how she looks like she’s maybe 9 or 10 years old, if that.
Ellen Page (l.) and Leonardo DiCaprio (r.) in a still from Chris Nolan’s Inception.
Just look at the above shot of her walking in front of DiCaprio. I’m sorry to sound like a size-ist asshole but are you going to tell me the discrepancy isn’t striking? His head is at least 50% larger than hers. Look at them! He could pick her up and carry her under his arm like one of those stuffed Jack Skellington dolls. Page is a very fine actress — nobody’s talking about her emoting here — but she’s obviously in the same size realm as the superb Peter Dinklage (who easily gave the best performance in Sidney Lumet‘s Find Me Guilty), Billy Barty, Mickey Rooney and Danny DeVito.
Now that I think of it Page isn’t really analagous to Dinklage. I think of Dinklage as an adult actor of impressive range who happens to be of a very short stature. In the same sense Page, as sharp and powerful as her performances tend to be, doesn’t seem to exude any kind of natural adultness or been-around-the-block femininity. She looks to me like someone’s growth-stunted kid. Like I said in an ’07 riff about Juno , the idea of Page having had sex with some guy like Michael Cera (who’s fairly tall and lanky) and then gotten pregnant seems perverse. She’s too little for that.
Yes, she was great nonetheless in Juno. And I’ll buy her as a spunky roller derby player in Whip It and probably in anything else. She’s really got it within. I guess all I’m really saying is that she looks odd standing next to tall guys. Veronica Lake had the same problem opposite Joel McCrea in Sullivan’s Travels. I guess because it’s a little unusual in real life to see basketball players going out with pixie-sized women. I know it happens from time to time, but it looks really odd when it does.
Joel McCrea, Veronica Lake in Sullivan’s Travels
I’m basically saying Page would be ideally cast opposite Al Pacino or Michael J. Fox or DeVito or anyone in that realm, but not opposite Ryan Reynolds or Jeff Goldblum or Richard Kiel or anyone extra-tall. Well, you could cast her opposite Reynolds but guys like me would say stuff if you did. She would have been perfect alongside Alan Ladd in This Gun for Hire or opposite Humphrey Bogart in anything.
I realize that saying anything about a person’s size is seen in p.c. circles as almost the same thing as remarking about their skin color or ethnic heritage or whatever, but disproportionate sizes in actors in the same scene have a way of standing out in an odd sort of way, and I don’t think I’m being a jerk for pointing this out.
