I was whipped when I last saw The Kids Are All Right, or half of it, at last January’s Sundance Film Festival. It struck me as good enough — believably written, unaffected acting — but not levitational. I was in and out, waiting, checking my watch. I decided to duck out and catch another film I had to see.
I saw Kids again last night at the Clearview Cinemas, and this time to the finish. It went down pretty well! Not a great film but a much better one than I recall. (Being well rested makes a difference.) I don’t think it’s the Second Coming, but I’m giving it a B-plus for shaping and selling the story of a gay couple — played by Annette Bening and Julianne Moore — confronted with history and infidelity in a smart, likably middle-class way. With an honest third-act emotional payoff. It’s modest but genuine. I have no beef with it.
Bening has a Best Actress nomination in the bag, I think. Best Performance of a Neurotic, Controlling, Affluent, Red-Wine-Sipping Physician Lesbian by a straight actress in a long time. And Mia whatsername-with-the-nearly-unspellable-and-unpronouncable-Polish-name…okay, Wasikowska…is an exceptional off-pretty actress with a better role than she had in HBO’s In Treatment and a much better one than she had in Tim Burton‘s 3D borefest. And Mark Ruffalo is true and settled as “the sperm donor” — an engaging, easygoing L.A. resturateur who can’t keep it in his pants.
The Kids Are All Right is Lisa Cholodenko‘s best film ever, I feel. She’s a good filmmaker but she’s only hit line drives and doubles until now; this is her first triple.
I was a bit confused about Magnolia opening Leon Gast‘s Smash His Cameratheatrically on 7.30 despite the doc having preemed on HBO roughly seven weeks ago (on 6.7.10) and still being available via HBO On Demand. (I reviewed it favorably just prior to this debut.) The solution, according to a publicist, is that “the film is scheduled to stop airing on HBO and will no longer be available on HBO On Demand next week.”
Why not, right? It’s an amusing, above-average film, and well worth a theatrical looksee. Not everyone has HBO or has the time to watch everything on it.
Why would any semi-healthy person want to watch a brand-new, grosser-than-the-original I Spit On Your Grave? What kind of animal wants to watch cartoony yee-haw woman-haters humiliate an actress and then watch her get some payback by going all medieval Antichrist on their asses? Who’s the audience? Under-20 lowlife males and who else?
Scurvy violent scumbags in violent movies are always, always played by actors with no talent or crude chops. And if they have anything good to show they aren’t allowed to make use of it. Jeff Goldblum played one of Hope Lange‘s rapists in Death Wish, and he was nothing but a faceless fiend with a shaved head.
Radar Online posted a second Mel Gibson tape about three hours ago. I think the point was made with the first recording, and that this is, like, overkill. Gibson has an ugly mouth, an uncontrollable temper and may be physically violent — we get it already.
But as long as some of us are listening to this horrible-ness, it would at least serve the cause of good storytelling if someone could try to explain what led up to the arguments. The tit-for-tat that resulted in all the hurt and rage, etc. Because this yelling is monotonous and far from Albee. No one is blameless, it takes two to ruin a relationship, etc.
Harvey Pekar, the 70 year-old author of the ground-breaking comic book series “American Splendor” who was portrayed by Paul Giamatti in the much-admired film of the same name, was found dead earlier today in his Cleveland home. He’d been coping with prostate cancer, high blood pressure, asthma and (naturally) depression. Tough deal but he made his mark.
Joyce and Harvey Pekar at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival — taken by myself.
I interviewed Harvey and wife Joyce (who was played by Hope Davis in the film) on the big green lawn of the Grand Hotel at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival. He seemed like one sharp cat — extremely bright, alert, open-pored. He was more like a wolf in a sense, constantly sniffing and detecting whatever faint tremor or aroma might be in the air. He struck me as the opposite of smug.
Directed and written by Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, American Splendor won the Grand Jury prize at the 2003 Sundance Film Festival, and Berman and Pulcini won a ton of Best Screenplay awards. (They were Oscar-nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay but lost out in the ridiculous Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King sweep.) American Splendor won the Best First Film award from the New York Film Critics Circle, and Best Picture awards from the L.A. Film Critics and National Society of Film Critics.
With pretty much everyone resigned to the notion of Roman Polanski being extradited to the U.S. very soon and almost certainly doing time for a few months for having had unlawful sex with a minor 33 years ago, Swiss authorities have manned up and told the Los Angeles district attorney’s office to suck it — no Polish sausage for you to taunt, humiliate and kick around. Too bad, assholes!
For RoPo is a free man this morning. Probably on a train or a plane back to Paris as we speak. Hardcore Polanski coddlers need to gather in bars this evening and raise a few glasses. The Blue Meanies and Twisted Sisters have been cold-cocked, and the whole matter is finally over and done.
The Swiss offered two reasons for their decision. One, they “blamed U.S. authorities for having failed to provide confidential testimony about Polanski’s sentencing procedure in 1977-1978.” And two, they cited “national interests.” What, someone suggested they might face adverse consequences of some sort if they extradited Polanski? This is way too vague.
What a great way to wake up on a Monday morning! The idea of the pitchforkers — the Big Hollywood team especially — being all purple-faced and swearing and punching their refrigerator doors over this matter is almost too delicious to contemplate.
I’m not joyful over the world now being a safer place for foul men who might want to take advantage of children — that’s not what this is about.
This is about the fact — in my head, at least — that the LA District Attorney’s office had totally forgotten about Polanski for the better part of 30 years, and had only engineered Polanski’s arrest Zurich and the Swiss extradition request because they became agitated by Marina Zenovich‘s Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, which reminded that the application of LA justice had been (and might still be) corrupt, political, ego-driven and obstinate in the face of damaging facts.
This is also about the Swiss doing something they’re not exactly known for — i.e., acting like men.
“The 76-year-old French-Polish film director Roman Polanski will not be extradited to the USA,” the ministry said in a statement sometime around noon today. “The freedom-restricting measures against him have been revoked.”
Polanski’s lawyer Herve Temime said the director was still at his Swiss chalet in the resort of Gstaad, where he has been held under house arrest since December.
“Mr. Polanski can now move freely,” Justice Minister Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf declared. “Since 12:30 today he’s a free man.”
From a HuffPost summary: “Approving extradition had seemed the likeliest scenario after Polanski was arrested on Sept. 26 as he arrived in Zurich to receive a lifetime achievement award from a film festival. Polanski had also suffered a series of legal setbacks this year in California courts.
Widmer-Schlumpf said the decision was not meant to excuse Polanski’s crime, saying the issue was “not about deciding whether he is guilty or not guilty.”
It all started with Polanski’s arrest in Zurich on 9.26.09. Here’s the first HE post on the subject — “Cheap Swiss Theatrics.” On 9.28 I ran another posting called “Polanski Wars.”
“Prosecutors ignored Polanski for 30 years because it was a terrible case in which the prosecutor’s office and the sitting judge, in the interest of getting publicity for themselves, had conducted themselves in all variety of dubious ways. But then, last year, a documentary, Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, came out detailing all this dubiousness. So the first motivation for going after Polanski now, as it so often is with prosecutors, is revenge — Polanski and this film makes the DA look bad.
“The second is that the documentary reminded everybody that the LA prosecutor must be turning a blind eye to Polanski, wandering freely in Europe — hence the arrest now is the prosecutor covering his ass.
“The third is — and it’s curiously the success of the documentary that made the LA prosecutor’s office realize the brand name significance of the case — press. The headlines now sweeping the world are the prosecutor’s ultimate benefit. Many careers are suddenly advanced.
“It could tell us quite a lot about the real motivations and real interest in Roman Polanski in the LA prosecutor’s office, about the sudden enthusiasm for Polanski’s capture and the convenient timing of it, if we just got the date and time — Polanski’s lawyers can certainly get this information through discovery requests — when they began to Google him, and when they set up the first alert.
“Among all media whores, there is none so greedy and mendacious as a prosecutor.”
In a brilliant 10.1.09 piece called “The Roman Area,” Phil Nugent wrote the following:
“Polanski may be a sleazeball, but nobody thinks he’s a menace to society — one big difference between then and now is that nobody working for his prosecution can seriously think they’re working to prevent him from doing this again — so the spectacle of his detainment and possible future prosecution can only appeal to that lizard part of the brain that thinks that the justice system has nothing to do with protecting society and everything to do with punishing those we disapprove of.
“This isn’t, or shouldn’t be, about how much of your pity you want to lavish on monsters. It’s about whether, in a country with the largest and most overcrowded prison system in the world, we want to apply any practical considerations at all to who goes and stays into a cell or if we just want to use the system to luxuriate in our capacity for blood lust.”
