Month: July 2010

Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu‘s Biutiful still hasn’t landed as distribution deal two months after its Cannes Film Festival debut. The reason, I gather, is that distributors fear that it’s too much of a downer (scruffy Barcelona, a gloomy-eyed protagonist, ghosts, cancer, mental illness), especially with a significant percentage of Cannes critics (like EW‘s Owen Gleiberman) having put it down.

A lot of people (myself included) thought Biutiful was the shit — one of the finest 2010 films thus far. And you’d think that Javier Bardem having won the Best Actor prize at Cannes would have spurred some kind of deal by now. But the Eloi mentality has spread like a virus (a San Francisco friend told me last night she isn’t interested in seeing anything that isn’t “pure entertainment”), and any film that doesn’t deliver some kind of cinematic quaalude high (laughs, emotion, visual wows) is in a fix right now.

Perhaps distributors are squeamish about the cost of U.S. rights plus funding a Best Actor campaign for Bardem. But mainly, I suspect, the prospect of the Gleiberman gang delivering a barrage of deft knife jabs when Biutiful opens stateside has given them the willies. It’s been said that film critics have no power anymore. Well, they do.

Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone wrote one of the most eloquent Biutiful raves during Cannes. Here it is.

I called it “a sad and deeply touching hard-knocks, lower-depths drama in the tradition (or along the lines, even) of Roberto Rosselini‘s Open City or Vittorio DeSica‘s The Bicycle Thief. How’s that for high praise out of the gate ?

“Set among the poor and deprived in Barcelona, it’s about love and caring and continuity and carrying on among those who have it toughest, and dealing with guilt and tradition and the approaching of death and all the rest of the stuff that we all carry on our backs.

“Every actor is exactly right and spot-on in this film, but Javier Bardem gives a truly stellar performance in the title role of an illegal migrant labor and street-vendor manager-facilitator.

“[The film] starts out brilliantly, and then slips into a longish character-introducing, character-building, filling-in-the-details phase that goes on for a 90 minutes or so, and then — bit by bit, and then in increasing increments — it starts to emotionally kick in. And that’s when I knew it was delivering something special.”

Six-plus years ago screenwriter William Goldman (Marathon Man, All The President’s Men, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid), explained what a “drop out ” moment is — i.e., when something happens that just makes you give up interest and faith in a film. He cited a bit in Sofia Coppola‘s Lost in Translation.

He observed that as the film begins, Bill Murray‘s character “has just been in a movie where there is a fabulous vehicle chase, buses destroyed, explosions and, we find out, he did his own driving.” Murray, in short, “is playing a famous action star.

“Look, I started following him over a quarter-century ago, on Saturday Night Live Live and in the movies, from Meatballs on, and maybe in real life he can kick the crap out of Harrison Ford and maybe stripped he has pecs that make Arnold Schwarzenegger look flat-chested — but I do not believe this, not for a New York minute.

“Murray is a comedy star. He’s goofy and he fumbles, and the minute you try and shove this other persona at me, make me think he is the toughest guy on the planet, sorry, I do not go there.

“And I stopped, from this moment on, believing in this flick. And when belief goes, caring is right behind.”

Movies are rife with “no sale” moments these days, but I’m presuming there are standouts among the readership. I’d pop in a few myself but I have to get to the airport.

I’m not trying to sound like an asshole but I don’t like Keir Gilchrist, the kid playing the kid. He’s too dweeby looking, too deadpanny, like a young Jack Webb or something. Sorry, but seeing or not seeing a movie comes from snap judgments like this one. It’s Kind of a Funny Story (Focus Features, 9.24) is from director-writers Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck (Half Nelson). .

In the space of 24 hours Inception has been fired upon by five name-brand critics — New York‘s David Edelstein (revealed yesterday) plus Indiewire‘s Todd McCarthy, N.Y. Press critic Armond White, the Village Voice‘s Nick Pinkerton and the N.Y. Observer‘s Rex Reed.

Are you man enough for Inception? Or are you a punk who runs for cover when challenged or threatened? It’s early Tuesday evening at the Lincoln Square plex, and the lights go down and I’m telling myself, “Okay, just remember…this is primarily about Leonardo DiCaprio‘s family issues (a bit like what his character was dealing with in Shutter Island, only in a trippier and more GQ vein), and that Marion Cotillard‘s ‘Mal’ is the monkey wrench, and there are three dream states (deep, deeper and deepest), and bathroom breaks are out of the question.

But soon my mind is bouncing around inside a huge padded dryer set to “air only” and then plunging off a cliff and dropping down an elevator shaft and being whipped around every which way, filled with everything in Chris Nolan ‘s head as well as my own, and the fusing of all this feels a little cranked and crazy.

I’d seen Salt a few hours before and had gone through the basic sifting and processing of that, and here I was in a kind of visual wind tunnel with my cheeks inflating and my hair getting flattened and my finding it hard to have and to hold and…whatever, keep it tidy. Yes, Inception is a cold, cerebral grand-design thing. Yes, I agree that it’s more Michael Mann than Stanley Kubrick (which somebody, I forget who, wrote a day or two ago). And yes, it’s hard not to feel awed.

And yet the damn sound at the Lincoln Square is pissing me off hugely because the dialogue isn’t that crisp or clear — not the way it’ll sound when I’ll watch this film on Bluray five or six months hence — and so I’m cupping my ears half the time despite being only about six or seven rows from the screen. Is it because I’m sitting too close? Are the consonants flying over my head? I can’t understand most of Ken Watanabe‘s dialogue to save my life, and yet every word Michael Caine is speaking comes through clear as a preacher’s sermon.

If only I was sitting ten rows back with Kathryn Bigelow, who’s about to start shooting that HBO/John Logan pilot and is sitting in the reserved section with two pallies.

I’m reminding myself to say at some point that Inception is always intriguing, and often (particularly during the last 40-plus minutes) exhilarating. Do I really mean infuriating? No, I mean exhilarating. I think. Highly engaging, thrilling, confusing…oh, I see, I’ve got it. I’m okay now. Wait…I just missed that. What’d she say? Doesn’t matter. The main plot points are coming fast and furious and being assembled with due haste, but it’s not easy. I’m glad I “studied” beforehand.

If Inception is a masterpiece, and 65% or 70% of me thinks it probably is that, it’s one for the record books because every so often it makes you want to shoot yourself in the head. Not to commit suicide but, like DiCaprio’s con artist/thieves/dreamers do when they want out of dead-end situation, to wake up and take yourself out of the tumbling landslide narrative and take a two-minute break so you can suss it out.

Have you got your rifle set to stun? Wait…is that Devin Faraci on a ski slope, wearing a white parka and giving me the finger? Or Drew McWeeny? No, it’s Dileep Rao. Either way, don’t shoot! Calm down, stay focused…but how does this happen when you’re tumbling over and under like the passengers in a large white van that’s gone off the road and is somersaulting down a hillside, and in a slowed-down time realm yet? Until everything shifts and you’re in one of three (or is it finally four?) dream states.

Should I wait for the “kick” that’ll release me upward, or do I try and make one happen on my own? Oh, that’s right — I’m not in control here. Nolan is. And he’s too caught up in his own razmatzz to care about one guy in the sixth row at a press screening.

So you have to quantify, calibrate, find order, sort through. You’re throttled on one level but not quite keeping up with this thing the way you feel you should, and at the same time a voice is saying “this way madness lies” while another is saying “just hold on!” And then the big mind-heist sequence finally begins around the 100-minute mark, and it gets wilder and fruit-loopier by the minute and you finally start to feel what it’s all about. It’s not about sorting stuff through and making linear sense of it all (although you can if you want). It’s about surrendering. You can’t logically process your way into satori. You have to let it all in.

And once I did I began to laugh. I laughed when Marion Cotillard, dressed in one of those white Devin Faraci parkas, descended in slow-mo into the scene of much snow-covered chaos, determined to screw things up even further. I laughed when the guys in the van hit the water (after plunging off a bridge and falling for about 15 minutes) and Ken Watanabe made a face that seemed to say, “Jesus Christ, I’m fucking underwater and I don’t know what to do…maybe if I just look like I’m passing out? Or that I’m stressed and anxious to breathe? No, that’s too obvious.”

Have I made Inception sound too complicated? I don’t actually think it is that, not now anyway, but I know how I felt last night. I really couldn’t hear between a third and half of the damn dialogue and so I was putting it together as best I could based on the sentences I could understand and the reviews I’d read. And DiCaprio and Ellen Page do sort through the basics fairly thoroughly in Act One, explaining the whole stealing-of-secrets concept and the meaning of inception (i.e., the inserting of an idea in the mind of a mark).

Even if it’s too complicated for you, it’s the right kind of complicated. Sometimes a good grapple leaves you feeling stronger, more awake, more alive. This is one of those times.

And all hail Joseph Gordon Levitt‘s performance, by the way. He feels like the most commanding and sharply focused, the guy to watch after Leo, who does his usual hard-core suffering thing. Ellen Page, Tom Hardy, Watanabe, Cillian Murphy, Tom Berenger, Cotillard, Pete Postlethwaite, Caine, Lukas Haas — everyone ups their game and delivers like a champ. But it’s not an actor’s movie. They’re all just figurines in the landscape.

I’m man enough for Inception, yes. I’m seeing it again in IMAX (and hopefully with much better sound!) at the Sony Metreon in San Francisco this weekend. There are tons of reviews out there now, and if you want to read a careful sorting-through of what the plot strands actually amount to, you know where to go. Suffice to say it’s about DiCaprio trying to get free of some bad business in his head, and about that tiny little spinning dreidle and those ticking clocks and safes and crashing waves and…whatever, Nolan going all Nolan on us.

As Jett and I were riding down the escalator following the screening, I said something about not fully understanding how Cotillard’s character got so caught up with advanced dream surfing in the first place since she was never working as a team member in one of DiCaprio’ss mind capers, so how exactly did she get exposed to all this? Because she was his wife and not part of the “business,” etc. And four younger women standing right in front of us on the escalator heard me and immediately turned around and said “Yes! Yes! Us too…yeah! What was that?”

Does Warner Bros. have any idea how cold the Eloi are going to be on this film after the first weekend? A lot of them are cold on it now because it isn’t a sequel or a TV show or some brand that’s been hammered in from some other promotional effort of the past. Inception‘s first-weekend estimate is said to be in the vicinity of $40 or $50 million. The chilliness of Inception will do it in with the hoi polloi, but If I could wave a magic wand I would command every Average Joe out there to sit through this film and grapple with it as best he/she can.

Everyone with half a brain is going to see Inception over the next couple of weeks, and for all my struggling I can’t wait to go again. It’s a pain-in-the-ass landmark film — a cinematic stretching and weight-lifting exercise that makes you feel strong and brave at the end of the day. It is time and money well spent, and Warner Bros. deserves a salute, I feel, for funding it. (Although we all realize they won’t have touched it if Nolan hadn’t first given them The Dark Knight.) I think it’s a safe bet to be nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best Editing, Best Musical Score, etc. It made me feel as if my mind was being pulled like turkish taffy, but it’s a very good thing to live in a world in which highly intelligent $160 million mindfuck movies are still being made.

“Considering how many inaccurate media claims have been made regarding myself and the potential series Tilda for HBO, I wish to set the record straight,” Nikki Finke wrote earlier today. “I had no prior knowledge that this show was being created or put into development. I have never written about the show. I have never encouraged Deadline.com journalists to write about the show. I had no prior agreement with HBO or anyone regarding the show. I had no creative or consulting involvement with the show.

“So why am I making my first and last statement about Tilda today?

“Only because there is an agreement now in place among myself, Deadline’s parent company MMC, and Watski productions (which is producing the Tilda pilot) negotiated solely on my behalf by attorney Tal Vigderson. I still have no creative or consulting involvement with the show nor wanted any. I still won’t write about the show. And Deadline.com journalists can still write whatever they want about the show.

“As for all of you who’ve asked for a quote from me about Tilda, here it is: ‘It should have been called Toldja!‘”

Hey, that’s not original! Hollywood Reporter columnist Matthew Belloni said this on 4.21.10.

“I was suffering from the very beginning of Todd Solondz‘s Life During Wartime (IFC Films, 7.23),” I wrote during last year’s Toronto Film Festival, “and there was very little respite until I bolted, which was about 65 minutes in. I’d been seething, scowling, muttering, looking at my watch and asking myself, ‘Should I do the full suffer and stick it out until the end, or can I escape after an hour or so?’

“I left because I’ve never related to Solondz’s more-or-less constant theme — the inner monster in us all will always crawl out and can probably never be restrained — and I find it incredibly boring to sit through another icky-pervy exploration of same.

“I left because I’m just about burned out on the plight of a suffering male child molester as a topic of dramatic interest or intrigue. I think male child molesters should have their sexual organs chopped off with a dull axe. Other scenarios hold little interest.

“I left because I didn’t believe anything I was hearing — to my ear Solondz’s dialogue is always unnatural and rhetorical — and I didn’t believe any of the actors. To me they were just speaking the dialogue and trying like hell to make it all play realistically, but the odds were too great against them. Solondzworld is a place of constant guilt and venom and nightmares. Do the merciful thing — get out your father’s AK-47 and shoot yourself in the mouth. It’s easier and less complicated that way.

“I left because bitter middle-aged women who wear bad wigs (like Charlotte Rampling‘s character) don’t come over to a man’s table (i.e., one occupied by costar Ciarin Hinds) and start conversing with an unmistakable implication that some sort of erotic coupling is on her mind. It doesn’t happen that way, and it never will happen that way.

“And it doesn’t matter if Solondz agrees and wanted this scene to be seen as some kind of arch exercise. The point is that no one can relax and listen and settle in when a scene is bullshit.

“I left because the tall and large-boned Allison Janey could never be a sister to the tiny pipsqueak British actress Shirley Henderson — not in a million fucking years.

“I left because mothers never discuss erotic awakenings with their tweener-aged sons, and because it’s not funny when Solondz tries to make such scene into a form of dry ‘what if?’ comedy. Heh-heh, not really, fuck off.”

“Just a month ago the tech market was gripped by iPhone 4 fever,” writes cbsnews.com’s Charles Cooper, “[but] the conversation has shifted and some public relations executives say that a recall is likely, if not inevitable.”

The tipping point is Consumer Reports having recently said no dice after testing the iPhone 4 and determining that the antenna problems aren’t caused by software issues and that it’s basically a hardware design issue.

“What are the odds that Apple would feel enough pressure to order a recall? Place your bets. Apple continues to sell huge volumes of iPhone 4s, [but] this is the sort of perception problem that can quickly root itself with the wider public.

“This is no longer an arcane debate confined to the tech community. When the antenna complaints first surfaced, that may have initially been the case. Now Consumer Reports has become involved and the controversy has gone mainstream. ‘If geeks are the canary in the coal mine,’ writes CNET’s Molly Wood, ‘Apple would do well to start counting carcasses. And as Consumer Reports goes, so goes much of America.”

The rain currently drenching Manhattan is a metaphor for the wet-blanket wrath of David Edelstein and the other Inception naysayers to come. The first euphoric wave is over, and now it’s time for those who were kept out of the early screenings to beat the shit out of this film…if, that is, it seems like the right and fair thing to do.

This is all speculative horseshit, of course, but going au contraire seems like the only independent way to go now. Unless, of course, Inception is actually as backflip good as the first-wavers claimed, in which case that should be repeated loud and clear.

I only know that until today the critical reaction had been one big gushathon. Now Edelstein has tossed a stink bomb and changed the mood of the room. When charged to destroy the army of Spartacus, Marcus Glabrus stood in front of the Senate and said, “The garrison of Rome stands ready.” I too am ready to do what’s right and necessary, and if that means taking shots at Inception then so be it. And if doing what’s right and necessary requires dropping to my knees and kissing Inception‘s ass, then so be that. But no obligations, all bets off. Edelstein’s review has sprung a leak in the psychological dike. The men and women going to tonight’s Manhattan screening are free souls now. Nobody owes anything to anyone.

Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson has diagnosed Edelstein’s pan and decided it’s a reflexive Kubrick-hating Pauline Kael thing. “[Edelstein] seems to have taken exception to those of us who suggested that the movie is Kubrickian,” she writes. “Interestingly, Edelstein is a card-carrying protege of Pauline Kael (i.e., a “Paulette”), who never liked Kubrick. In fact, she panned 2001: A Space Odyssey in Harper’s in 1969, called it an ‘erector-set approach to movie-making.’ And Edelstein also didn’t care for The Dark Knight, calling it ‘noisy, jumbled, and sadistic.'”

A screening of Salt happens this morning, and then the big all-media screening of Inception this evening for all us low-priority caboose types. The seven-hour break will be split between Starbucks filing time and stuff to take care of before tomorrow’s flight to California.

Oh, and Starbucks wifi blows now. It was fast and smooth when I was paying for it, but it’s been free since July 1st and that means everybody’s using it, which means it’s slower than molasses and barely worth the effort. It’s like municipal wifi in Cleveland. Whatever’s free to the public is usually a wash. Quality comes with a price.