I had a nice, friendly, off-the-record lunch today with Hurt Locker director Kathryn Bigelow at Extra Virgin on West 4th. She’s in Manhattan for a day or two, and is sitting for a q & a with director-writer Tony Gilroy this evening at the DGA theatre on West 57th. On 11.30 Bigelow will be handed a tribute award at the 19th annual Gotham Independent Film Awards. The org has also nominated Hurt Locker for Best Feature, Best Ensemble Performance and Best Breakthrough Actor (i.e., Jeremy Renner).
The DVD/Bluray comes out January 12th. If Summit is smart they’ll put the film back into NY and LA theatres starting next month.
Anyway after Bigelow left and I was putting my coat on I asked the Extra Virgin waitress if she’d seen The Hurt Locker. “The what?,” she said. “The Hurt Locker. An Iraq movie, bomb-squad defusing.” Her face was a blank. “Is it a documentary?,” she asked. “Nope, feature…a thriller,” I said. “Who’s in it?” she said. “Jeremy Renner, Ralph Fiennes, Anthony Mackie….that’s okay, just wondering,” I said.
Intrigued, I walked into the main room and asked the hostess and (I think) another lady employee who was sitting at the bar if they’d seen it. Same reaction — neither woman had even heard the title.
And we’re not talking about waitresses in some greasy spoon in Pensacola, Florida. New Yorkers are supposed to be moderately hip and aware. It’s one thing for these women not to have seen an Iraq War film, but to draw a total blank at a mention of the title? This obviously says nothing about the quality of the film, and almost everything about the lackluster marketing effort by Summit.
Gamechangers.com’s Mike Bonifer has written a nicely thought-through HE tribute, calling yours truly the October 2009 game-changer of the month. Except his piece was just posted today, 11.12. Why wait 12 days after the end of October to announce this honor? I should either be the November game-changer guy or Bonifer should have run this 30 days ago. Or…whatever, he should have waited until next April.
If you’ve ever played in any kind of half-assed blues band, which I did for a year or so (as a barely competent drummer), you know that the band has to have a half-assed blues band name. The one I played in was called the Sludge Brothers. The thinking was that “sludge” sounded authentic on some level; it also sounded like Flatt and Scruggs. A variation of this same band adopted a different name — Dog Breath — for a special one-night gig. It was stolen from Frank Zappa, of course.
But the band never adopted the greatest blues-band name I ever heard — Blind Pig Sweat. I heard it spoken exactly once in my life by someone other than myself, but I never forgot it. Whatever this quality is, it’s something you want in any name, title, etc.
Today’s (11.12) tracking has Roland Emmerich‘s 2012 with an 87 total awareness, a 49 definite interest and 30 first choice-and-release. That means pretty damn big. Maybe tsunami level. Varietysays that box-office observers are forecasting over $40 million and perhaps higher. I say high 40s at least and perhaps a nudge over $50 million.
Vanity Fair.com‘s Jason Zinoman recently went the distance with Robert McKee‘s screenwriting course. He was”genuinely hoping to learn about screenwriting,” he writes, “but also, as a critic — and a specialist of horror movies — with a professional interest in McKee’s theories about genre and narrative.”
Legendary screenwriting guru Robert McKee
“By the end of the day, I had learned some valuable lessons about show business, the art of persuasion, and the tricky relationship between truth and fiction. I’d also learned that Robert McKee often has no idea what he’s talking about.
“Some people believe that no course can teach you how to write a screenplay, that it just comes out of you, but in my opinion that’s not true. A good teacher can really help writers, and McKee surely has had some success. He’s been criticized for turning the creative process into a series of rules, but this misses the real problem with his course, namely that the rules themselves are often banal and arbitrary. The emperor here is not naked, but he is showing some skin through his loosely tied robe, and when the subject turns to horror, the silky-smooth garment collapses around his ankles.”
You can respond to Fantastic Mr. Fox as an auteurist thing — a dazzling and charming representation of the mind and spirit and stylistic exactitude of director Wes Anderson — and as a movie you pay to see with an $8 tub of popcorn in your lap. I responded to it both ways — in effect with two heads. Which left me feeling great and not-so-great.
I loved and worshipped the auteurist aspect — the luscious autumnal colors, the every-other-frame movement that Anderson and his team used to create Fox’s particular stop-motion look, the “moving” fox hair that resulted from this, the deadpan Anderson humor, Mr. Fox’s courdoroy wardrobe, the tasteful pop-tune soundtrack (Brian Wilson‘s “Heroes and Villains,” “The Ballad of Davy Crockett”) and all the other typical Andersonian goodies. But I was unmoved and even disappointed by the campfire movie aspect.
The fact that 95% or 96% of the paying public will be responding to the latter and not caring all that much about the former (despite the fact that the elites — guys like Kent Jones, Village Voice critic Scott Foundas, New York‘s David Edelstein and New Yorker critic/columnist Richard Brody, among several others — are tickled with delight) may result in a commercial problem for 20th Century Fox, the distributor.
Edelstein calls it “a dandy’s movie,” and that it is. Which, as noted, is what gives my inner movie dweeb such pleasure. I intend to buy, watch and occasionally re-watch the Fantastic Mr. Fox Bluray when it comes out next year. But most American moviegoers are not dandies. They’re slugs and lugs, and I know, trust me, what’s going to happen when they watch it on screens this weekend.
It’ll be the same reaction I was sensing from the swells last month during the London Film Festival premiere in Leicester Square. During the early stages they’re going to go “yeah, yeah, this is glorious, really good, immaculate craft, wonderful colors and details” and so on, but somewhere around the 45- or 60-minute mark they’re going to begin saying to themselves, “Wait a minute, what is this? Nothing’s happening. It’s staying on the same level.”
The bottom-line thematic truth about Fantastic Mr. Fox is that it’s about as deep as a Road Runner cartoon. It’s all about how it looks and sounds and how they made it, and nothing about what it actually is. It’s pure Wes, pure whimsy, pure style, pure technique, pure stone-skimming-across-the pond. I get it and I love it, but my inner meathead was saying “yeah, and so what?”
Based on the Roald Dahl children’s book, Fantastic Mr. Fox is about the troubles and turmoils that befall a sophisticated adult fox (George Clooney‘s Mr. Fox) and his family (Meryl Streep, Jason Schartzman) when he decides that a life as a gentleman newspaper columnist isn’t enough — he must revert to raiding coops and eating chickens.
Mr. Fox and and his opossum friend Kylie (Wally Wolodarsky) decide to raid the farms and warehouses of three ruthless agribusiness types — Boggis, Bunce and Bean (Michael Gambon). The story is basically about Fox and friends enjoying the upper hand against these three, and then Boggis, Bunce and Bean striking back with machine guns and John Deere super-diggers and whatnot, and then the Fox clan figuring some way around their latest maneuver, etc.
Except it’s not “real.” The immutable laws of probability and outcome don’t apply. No foxes get killed despite ridiculous automatic-weapons odds against them. (It’s a little bit like Sylvester Stallone never being winged in Rambo II.) Life can sometimes be brutal in actuality and sometimes very tough decisions have to be made, and sometimes people stumble and fall and die and go to jail, but in Fantastic Mr. Fox life is an ironic bullshit thing…a hip romp…a lightweight goof.
Mr. Fox is chicken-raiding behind the back of Mrs. Fox (Streep) as he’s promised her he won’t attack and slaughter any more, despite the fact that he and Mrs. Fox are shown doing a chicken-raid in the opening scene. Presumably Mr. Fox collects a handsome salary as a newspaper columnist (enough to afford a nice home inside a big tree) and when it comes to vittles he and Mrs. Fox presumably go to a fox supermarket to buy frozen chicken paties. The main point is that hunting is out.
Except none of this is explained or explored, and it struck me as more than a little bit wacko. The common lore of foxes is that of chicken-coop raiders — it’s what they do. (They actually hunt and eat rodents, snakes, you name it. They eat about 2 pounds of food each day.) So what kind of screwy-headed fox wife tells her fox husband that he has to give up chickens, like he’s some kind of alcohol or gambling or oxycontin addict? I don’t get it. In fact, I reject it. It’s just not a very persuasive or compelling story.
I mean, what’s the metaphor here? That it’s cool to be a thief, or that thieves have to be true to their natures? That it’s good to have family and friends to help you steal chickens and apple cider? I didn’t hate the story but what is it? Nothing, really.
In short the Fantastic Mr. Fox style is great to savor in dozens of aesthetic ways, as noted, but in rudimentary terms it’s just a mild-mannered outdoor Anderson picnic. It’s Clooney having fun portraying a canny, urbane, ethically-challenged fox and Schwartzman doing his usual young-neurotic guy, nobody-values-me shtick. And Murray being glib and cool. And Owen Wilson coming in for a brief cameo, and Anderson voicing a weasel, and Willem Dafoe playing a rat.
Compare the whimsy in Fantastic Mr. Fox to the rich thematic delivery in WALL*E or Up or The Incredibles, and you’re talking about a very minor thing. I’m sorry but the Anderson decline continues. I want that old Bottle Rocket/Rushmore current back. And if I can’t have that I want more than just dandified style. I want Wes to remake Jean Luc Godard’s Weekend, or make some kind of 21st Century film noir or….I don’t know but some kind of bold-swan-dive-into-fresh-territory type of film.
Honestly — if Fantastic Mr. Fox wasn’t directed by Anderson and didn’t feature the voices of Clooney, Streep, Schwratzman and Bill Murray (playing a badger), would anyone be paying attention to a film like this at all? I wonder.
And yet I love the way it’s all been done. It’s a huge kick on that level. Really. So if you can watch it from that inner sanctum and stay there and keep yourself from slipping into a sweaty and bothered state after the 45-minute mark (like me), you’ll have a very cool time with it. And you can meet Kent Jones and David Edelstein and Scott Foundas and Richard Brody for drinks afterwards. Cool all around. Movie happiness is where you find it.
A small but bothersome issue in Fantastic Mr. Fox is the refusal of Wes Anderson to give his foxes bent hind legs, like all canines have, even cartoon versions. Anderson’s foxes walk around with straight legs and essentially stand — or more accurately balance themselves — on the pads of their tiny fox feet. Which aren’t large or broad enough to maintain an easy, natural balance, so all the foxes appear to be ballet dancers, in effect — stepping around on their tippy toes. All Wes had to do was give them bent hind legs and I would’ve bought it. I would’ve understood and accepted the balance aspect.
The about-to-open Fantastic Mr. Fox shows that director Wes Anderson (a) remains one of the 21st Century’s most assertive auteurist filmmakers, which is a glorious thing from a certain perspective, and yet (b) at the same time is trapped in this auteurist-mindset mode. A little more than two years ago I wrote a column, inspired by a dream, that suggested how Wes could free himself from the Andersonville gulag. I’m re-running it today as a follow-up to my Fantastic Mr. Fox review:
DVD frame-capture from Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend
Dreams never seem as profound the next morning as they do when they’re running in your sleep, but I had a lulu last night that, if listened to and boldly acted upon, might lead to the resurrection of Wes Anderson‘s career with a single mad sweep of the brush and a sudden screech of tires.
What Anderson needs to do more than anything else right now is to blow up “Andersonville,” that specially styled, ultra-hermetic world that his films and characters reside in. Being Wes, he naturally needs to do it with style. And the best way to do this, I’m convinced, is to make an arty black comedy about the world coming to an end on the rural two-lane blacktops, highways and freeways of America.
Anderson, in short, needs to reimagine and then remake Jean-Luc Godard‘s Weekend.
The original 1967 film, an allegory about the breakdown of civilization illustrated by traffic jams, random violence and bloody car crashes, is regarded by some as Godard’s finest.
I saw shots from Anderson’s Weekend in the dream, and that carefully choreo- graphed, super-manicured visual quality he brings to each and every scene in his films would, I believe, work perfectly with a vision of death, anarchy and twisted metal on the road. The film was fully completed in the dream (I saw it in a small red screening room in Paris, sitting in a large velvet armchair), and it was great viewing.
As I watched Anderson’s camera track along the highway and gaze at the flaming SUVs and scooters and bodies of Bill Murray, Natalie Portman, Anjelica Huston and Jason Schwartzman lying every which way I knew I was seeing a kind of genius. I was awestruck. Only a madman would have made such a film in the wake of The Darjeeling Limited, and I was filled with respect for Anderson’s artistic courage.
I’m not saying Anderson’s Weekend would be commercial or even critically hailed. But after making such a film, Anderson would be free. He would no longer be the guy with the Dalmatian mice and the pet cobras and the velvet curtains and the characters lugging around specially-designed suitcases with all the Kinks and Rolling Stones and Nico songs on the soundtrack.
It is widely agreed by movie cognescenti that Anderson has allowed his films to be consumed by a deadpan mannerist attitude along with a certain style-and-design mania, which Esquire‘s David Walters believes has devolved from a signature into “schtick.” By making movies about “world-weary fellows” with money “who hurl non-sequiturs and charm with endearing peccadilloes and aberrant behavior” in a world-apart realm, he has painted himself into a corner.
Only a radical new turn can free Wes from his effete parlor passions. If not a Weekend remake then something equally nutso. He has to say to his audience (and himself), “To hell with this world I’ve made for myself. I am no longer the maestro of that tweedle-dee symphony. I am a new man on an untravelled path.”
