Month: December 2009

Bilge Ebiri has hit on something fairly big in an amctv.com article — Up In The Air is Intolerable Cruelty and vice versa, He mentions five big similarities in the piece (with spoilers!); this evening he passed along a few more by e-mail.

1. Our Cynical Hero, George Clooney

Up in the Air: Termination counselor Ryan Bingham travels the country firing people on behalf of other companies. He’s at the top of his field, and he’s best-known for a motivational speech he gives to various business groups about shedding all the material and emotional baggage in their figurative “backpacks.”

Intolerable Cruelty: Miles Massey is a divorce attorney who spends all his time coldly dividing (or seizing) marital estates. He’s at the top of his field, and he’s famous for “The Massey Prenup,” an iron-clad prenuptial agreement that protects wealthy spouses from losing their assets due to divorce.

2. …Who Meets His Match

Up in the Air: Alex (Vera Farmiga) seems to know as much about travel, frequent flier mile programs, and rental cars as Ryan does. But they’re both lonely, and they find themselves falling for each other in a more profound way.

Intolerable Cruelty: Manipulative, ice-cold lawyer Marylin Rexroth (Catherine Zeta-Jones) is initially on the other side of a divorce case involving one of Miles’s clients. But they’re both lonely, and they find themselves falling for each other in a more profound way.

3. …Who Isn’t What She Seems to Be

Up in the Air: It turns out that Alex isn’t exactly the single road warrior she made Ryan think she was. Instead, she’s happily married, with kids — as Ryan discovers when, in a burst of romantic inspiration, he drops everything and surprises her at her house in Chicago.

Intolerable Cruelty: It turns out that Marylin has been conning Miles all along, and is just after his money — as he discovers when, in a burst of romantic inspiration, he drops everything and marries her.

4. The Revelatory Convention Speech

Up in the Air: Ryan finally gets the chance to give his “What’s in Your Backpack” speech at the very prestigious Goldquest Convention. But after taking the stage, he realizes that he loves Alex and no longer believes his own cynical spiel.

Intolerable Cruelty: Miles has to keynote the annual convention of the National Organization of Marital Attorneys Nationwide. But after taking the stage, he realizes he loves Marylin and no longer believes his own cynical spiel.

5. A Last-Minute Reprieve!

Up in the Air: Ryan is about to be grounded for good thanks to a newfangled virtual firing system…but then someone they fired earlier commits suicide. Faster than you can say “deus ex maquina,” the new system is scrapped, and Ryan goes back up in the air.

Intolerable Cruelty: Miles is about to lose everything he’s got after Marylin decides to divorce him. But then Miles’s former client and Marylin’s ex-husband has a sudden heart attack, she comes into a ton of money, and Miles gets the upper hand in their divorce proceedings.

Extras: (a) Loaded exchanges with airplane crews (the stewardess saying “you’re gonna win” to Clooney and later saying “you didn’t win” to CZJ; the conversation with Sam Elliott-as-god in UITA); (b) The

craven boss who likes to quote statistics; (c) The earnest travel companion (Clooney’s fellow lawyer in Intolerable Cruelty is less severe than Anna Kendrick in UITA but they’re both essentially earnest professionals who have bought into their companies’ official lines of bullshit).

“Several knowledgable executives” have told The Wrap‘s Sharon Waxman that director Roland Emmerich, that secret comedian, will pocked $100 million from his 2012 deal — i.e., $20 million vs. 20% of the gross. Emmerich’s faux-slapstick disaster film will eventually take in $700 million worldwide so Roland is beaming, sitting pretty, a pig in shit.

Last night I met the great Vlad Ivanov, the Romanian actor who was named 2007’s Best Supporting Actor by the Los Angeles Film Critics Association for his abortionist performance in Cristian Mungiu‘s Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days. Ivanov was at the Tribeca Cinemas for a Romanian Film Festival screening of Corneliu Porumboiu‘s Police, Adjective, and an after-party.

Vlad Ivanov at the Tribeca Cinemas’ downstairs lounge — Sunday, 12.6, 9:55 pm.

Ivanov plays a small but pivotal role as a police captain in a dreary Romanian town (i.e., Vasilu) in which busting and punishing three young pot smokers consumes an enormous amount of police department strategizing and man-hours. It’s a fascinating non-thriller — a kind of slow-mo, at times dryly amusing police procedural — that’s essentially a lament about bureaucratic inhumanity and a lack of cultural flexibility in today’s Romania, which is still following the psychology of the Ceausescu era.

I admired and respected Police Adjective enormously. The prolonged static shots — a staple of Romanian cinema — are, as always, fascinating. And the recurrent theme of the particularities of language being perverted and mis-used makes it one of the more thoughtful and ethically grounded films I’ve seen this year. At the same time I can’t say I felt knocked flat by it. A film about the banality and inanity of the Romanian bureaucracy seems…well, less riveting than I wanted or expected it to be, in the end. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, Sigmund Freud once said, and sometimes a slow-paced film is just a slow-paced film.

But at the same time it’s more than that. This is a hard one to figure but impossible to dismiss. Not that I (or any reasonably intelligent film fan) would want to. Respect must be paid. Police, Adjective has a certain integrity and a trust in the audience detecting and responding to the political undercurrent that is quite profound, the more I think about it. It has my vote as far that goes. Then again, I took a six-minute bathroom break and didn’t feel I’d missed anything important.

On the currently available French Antichrist DVD/Bluray, there’s a featurette about what happened when the film was shown at the Cannes Film Festival last May. This same doc is on the British version (due 1.11.10) and will presumably be included in the U.S. version. In any event I can’t imagine it being any better than this YouTube version.

The doc includes , of course, that wonderfully confrontational press conference question by Daily Mail columnist Baz Bamigboye that essentially said “why in the name of all that is sacred and holy did you make this rancid revolting film?”

I still think that IFC dropped the ball when they failed to convince a toy manufacturer to bring out a limited edition animatronic fox that raises its head and says when you raise the tail, “Why, Baz Bamigboye, did you put such an assaultive question to the glorious Lars Von Trier?” As well as “chaos reigns!” and whatever other statements they might want to throw in.

There are few things more excruciating than to listen to well-paid filmmakers talking about how truly delighted they are to be working on this exciting and wonderful new film, etc. I want to reach for my samurai sword. It’s comforting, of course, to be once again reminded that the Harry Potter franchise will soon be over and done with. I got off the boat years ago (i.e., after the Alfonso Cuaron one), but I’m actually thinking about seeing the Deathly Hallows finale. The final one, I mean.

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“Hollywood has this idea about what’s commercial [but] they don’t really know what’s commercial. What’s commercial is what people want to see. It’s that simple, and sometimes they want to slow down and experience something. It isn’t always dack-dack-dack, boom-boom-boom rocketing along. This is what Hollywood has convinced itself that people want to see.

“There are scenes in Avatar that accelerate and intensify things in this fashion, but there are other moments that slow down and see the wonder of this world. There’s this motif in the film of seeing…perceiving through the eyes of another person. Coming in one door and coming out another door — the door of perception.

“[The film] is a political comment on all human history, and the basic pattern of people laying waste to a primitive territory to get what they need. I didn’t want to explain what unobtainium actually is or does. It’s whatever gets people out of their cities and go to other countries and take stuff that doesn’t belong to them.

“The story of the 21st Century is going to be about the depletion of resources. And the wars of the 21st Century are going to be about ‘we need your stuff, and we’re going to justify going in and getting it.’ We’ve already seen that happen over the last decade.

“Technology is a part of us, who we are…we absorb the technology that interests us. How is it primarily used today? Social networking, howya doin’?, monkey chatter. I’ve never seen technology as something outside of the human experience.

“Every film is individual and unique. I believe today that we fulfilled the goals that we set out to do [with Avatar]. Now, we’ve yet to see whether it’s something people actually want to see. I’m happy to be done. I’ll be even happier if people like the movie.”

Pretty much everything on Pandora, the tropical-rain-forest moon in James Cameron‘s Avatar, is either “inspiring and dangerous,” to listen to Sigourney Weaver‘s narration in this travelogue piece. But it seems a little too crammed with scary predators. And too effin’ noisy. To me anyway.

Outside of the Na’vi, those glowing dandelion fuzzies and the six-legged direhorses, Pandora seems to be all about hexapods, flying banshee dino-birds, viper wolves, those dino-hammerhead guys, the especially dreaded thanator, etc. What about the grazing animals — the Pandoran equivalent of elephants, giraffes, wildebeests, zebras, etc.? What about the Pandoran monkeys and benign birds and silent slitherers and small burrowing mole-type animals?

And why do the Pandoran predators have to howl and growl and roar all the time? I’ve almost gotten to the point of muttering “will you shut up?” as I watch those trailer clips of Sam Worthington‘s Na’vi being chased through the jungle as his pursuers yowl and bellow and shriek. Predators — hello? — are silent when hunting because growling eats up oxygen and wind power. They primarily growl when they’re defending their turf or trying to scare off other predators from taking their food.

Think about how much scarier it would be if the Pandoran monsters were silent as they chase Worthington around. A very cool thing. But no — the CG culture (those highly paid guys sitting around their flatscreens and doing exactly what the other highly paid guys on the last super-CG epic have done) has decided that all scary creatures must bark and howl at all times because the fanboy multitudes have been trained to expect this going back to King Kong and would be thrown for a loop if they didn’t. “Hey…I want my digital lion roar!” Make no mistake — the FX community is defined by institutional follow-the-leader instincts first and genuine creativity second.

Pandora, says Weaver, is “a dreamlike landscape reminiscent of a Magritte painting.” (It’s called “Castle in the Pyrenees.”)

“Vast magnetic fields…unobtainium….bio-luminescent…Greek mythology…the Pandoran ecology works and communicates like a nervous system, suggesting that amid the savage and fierce creatures…this strange bewitching polace might hgld hope for ourselves, our planet and the fturue of all living things.”

I was slapped around two or three days ago for putting on my realist hat and predicting that The Blind Side would be a Best Picture nominee. This weekend’s box-office tallies have made it clear that this Christian catnip football saga is going to easily top $200 million, and this clearly makes The Blind Side an ideal recipient of a gimme nom — a “people” movie that the expanded Best Picture nomination slate was clearly created for.

“I saw on YouTube the video comparing [Delgo and Avatar] side by side. I thought, wow, there are a couple of moments that are pretty compelling. Do I think there is much of a comparison? Clearly there is. [But] I think the comparison was too literalized. You can take a bunch of stuff and spin it to whatever you want.” — Avatar creature designer Neville Page speaking to L.A. Times guy Gerrick Kennedy.

A woman I was talking to at a party last night became very aroused when I told her I’d be speaking this morning with A Single Man star Colin Firth. “Oh, God…I could be your assistant and just sit there and watch!,” she said. “This would be a very big deal for her!,” her husband chimed in with a smirk. “That classiness, that sense of reserve!,” she went on. “It’s what every woman wants.”

It’s also what everyone else has been savoring since Firth broke through roughly 15 years ago. And now there’s widespread agreement that he delivers the finest variation of this very particular aura or attitude in Tom Ford‘s A Single Man.

One of my better questions began with a paraphrasing of John Ford‘s quote about how directors make the same film over and over. Do actors do the same thing more or less? Firth didn’t disagree. His achievement in A Single Man is that he’s playing the deepest and most intriguing aspect of this patented thing, and that this is mainly why people are calling him the front-runner in the Best Actor race — i.e., because the role of George has found him in exactly at the right place and time, and vice versa.

The lighting in the Carlyle bar was very Vittorio Storaro-like this morning. I imagine it’s this way no matter what time of day. The dark amber tones reminded me of of the apartment-scene lighting in a couple of scenes in Last Tango in Paris. Alas, the Canon Elph didn’t quite capture what was there. And yet a photo I took before Firth walked in (see above) comes pretty close.