Month: July 2010

If you’re like me you love filmmaking style as an end in itself. I’ll always admire Michelangelo Antonioni‘s L’Avventura for that jaded ennui thing, but I adore the shooting and cutting. The brushstrokes are so clean and confident and assured, the kind that only a master scenarist can apply. Phillip Noyce, the director of Salt, has never lived (or sought to live) in Antonioni’s realm, but he’s just as good at dispensing high-powered, studio-funded action flicks (along with quieter, smaller-scaled films like The Quiet American and Rabbit-Proof Fence) as Antonioni was in fashioning his kind of experience.

Know-how and finesse come in many guises, elegant caviar is elegant caviar, and bullshit always walks or takes the bus. Wanted, the last Angelina Jolie actioner, blew chunks from the get-go, but it really seems bad when compared to Salt. The Russian animal who directed it, Timur Bekmambetov, isn’t fit to shine Noyce’s boots.

Salt is one extremely well made, doo-wacky spy movie. The plot will make your head spin (unless you see it a second time, in which case it all starts to make some kind of sense), but it delivers constant tension and thrills by way of highly refined skill. It’s like a cartoon drawn by Renoir or Matisse or De Kooning. Every second of this 95-minute vroomathon feels like you’re sitting shotgun in a brand-new, high-powered BMW, straight out of the showroom. Each and every element, beginning with Jolie’s fierce, burn-through performance, has that exciting new-car smell.

The plot is a bit too complex for my taste, obsessed with hiding the ball in a somewhat cynical and robotic fashion, but it’s still the work of the very best people — the best M.I. team imaginable for this kind of venture — and that makes it a pleasure.

I’d like to congratulate James Newton Howard for creating one of the coolest-sounding action scores I’ve heard in….well, I think I can say years. And I love the moment when Jolie flips her shoes off and goes barefoot in preparation for heavy action. When’s the last time a star did this same exact thing? Tom Laughlin in Billy Jack?

Now, you can turn around and say, “Okay, fine, but how good are the internals? What is this film really about, how original is it, and how long does it stay with you after you’ve left the theatre? Does it hang in your head like Inception or is it gone the second you’re out the door?” My answer to all these questions is “you’re on your own, pally, but this is one well-made film.”

I have to say I like the first act, when Salt/Jolie, a CIA agent, is shown being freed from a North Korean prison – rough stuff, red swollen eye — and then flash-forwarding two years to her workaday gig in Washington, D.C. as…whatever, a CIA operative in a suit. This act contains Jolie’s first runaway, duck-and-hide scenes, and for my money the best of them. During this portion Jolie is an exceptional operative with a heart and a smile and a certain normality. This contrasts with the New York-based second act, when she morphs into full cyborg mode. The third act returns her to D.C. and the White House.

I admired the support provided by Liev Schrieber (although his face is getting chubby) and Chiwetel Ejiofor — a.k.a. “Chewy.”

“The Russians” aren’t the bad guys. As I mentioned in an earlier post, they’re basically sentimental Commies — nostalgic psycho assassins living in the Jimmy Carter past and trying to perpetuate the glory of belligerent pre-Gorbachev Russia. Out of their gourd, off the reservation.

I was thrown, I have to say, by the sudden intrusion of nuclear launch codes. Which I’m not going to explain except to say this happens in the basement of the White House. The last time a U.S. President made tough choices in this milieu was…was it Fail Safe with Henry Fonda as the President? Or Charles Durning in Twilight’s Last Gleaming? A guy named Hunt Block has the role this time.

Honestly? Truth really be told? I’m a bit of an old-fashioned guy pining for the Phillip Noyce of the early to mid ’90s, when he made the very movie-ish but smart and mostly-buyable Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger. Sorry but I liked those two a bit more. For all its highly intelligent, grade-A action chops, Salt is aimed at the high-velocity, video-game ADD crowd. Either I’m getting old or action films are getting too corporate. Because Salt feels more like a madhouse Adderal speed ride than a nutritious adult movie with vegetables and emotion and an idea or two thrown in. Although I love the way the flashbacks are cut in. And the CG, which is sparingly used, is excellent when it turns up.

I especially loved an overhead shot of Jolie climbing alongside the ledge of the apartment building. But I don’t agree (and I’m not going to explain milieu or plot particulars) with having Angie leap from one structural elevator beam to another. Why couldn’t she just climb down?

Is this Angie’s Bourne? I guess so, yeah. Except I believed that Matt Damon ‘s character could actually do most of the stuff he did in his films. I bought into the Angie-as-cyborg-spy fantasy, but I didn’t believe she could actually beat up or subdue or otherwise overpower several guys bigger than herself. I bought maybe a third of the things she does in Salt. Which is why I loved the first act, when all she mainly does is run and climb and use her ingenuity. I just wish it had stayed on this level.

I’m most impressed by violent scenes when things are scaled down to some kind of recognizable organic level. I love fight scenes like Sean Connery vs. Robert Shaw in that train compartment in From Russia With Love.

Noyce ends Salt on a kind of open-ended, running-through-the-woods note. Because it pretty much just stops. The sequel, a critic friend said after the first viewing, will almost certainly be called Salt 2.

I don’t want to end this on a pissy note. I’ve seen Salt twice and have been fine with it as one of those “take it or leave it but it is what it is” type of experiences both times. If X-treme espionage on steroids does it for you, fine. And if not then you’ll have the pleasures of craft to fall back on.

Noyce is as good at action as Tony Scott only with more discipline, easily as good as Paul “shaky-cam” Greengrass , and much better at action than Chris Nolan. Salt feels like a 37 year-old directed it. Although credit should also go, I’m told, to stunt coordinator Simon Crane and editor John Gilroy.

Phillip Noyce‘s Salt was premiere-d and after-partied last night at Grauman’s diminished Chinese (i.e., no more balcony) and then at the ballroom atop the Kodak theatre. The red motif (lighting, drapes, wall coverings) was chosen because the baddie Russians in the film are sentimental Commies at heart — psycho assassins who live to perpetuate the glory of belligerent pre-Gorbachev Russia. It was glorious to just stand in the middle of it all and just drink in the redness. Along with the champagne, of course.

Monday, 7.19, 9:40 pm.

I missed Mr. Noyce and only saw Angie and Brad from a distance (swamped by admirers, posing for photos, seemingly loving the attention). I chatted with Angie last summer on the set but I can’t be part of a big throng going “ooh! ooh!” Brad has his Moneyball/Billy Bean hairstyle going. (Bennett Miller’s film began shooting last week.)

I spoke briefly with Noyce’s publicist Mickey Cottrell, who’s also repping Stones in Exile director Stephen Kijak. I took a shot of them but the focus failed.

I also spoke with Florian von Henckel Donnersmarck, director of The Tourist, which also stars Jolie along with Johnny Depp. Florian was hanging with his agent, UTA’s Jeremy Zimmer. The Tourist, which Florian is currently cutting, will come out either in December or next summer, they said. Sony/Columbia is distributing.

7.19, 10:25 pm.

What a wonderful thing it is to sip your morning coffee while listening to the thundering sound of two helicopters hovering over West Hollywood, 800 or 1000 feet up, about a quarter of a mile to the northeast. It’s like that scene in Costa Gavras‘ Missing (’82) when John Shea and Melanie Mayron wake up in Vina del Mar on the day of the coup against Salvador Allende, and helicopters are hovering just outside their hotel-room window.

I begin each and every day by manually banning spammers, and then manually deleting their posts. Every damn day. The column is a 24/7 party/debating society/primal-scream therapy session, but the locks are open and Taiwanese and Eastern European riff-raff drop by every night, and every morning I have to kick them out, clean up their mess, tidy up. Eating up 45, 60, 90 minutes every morning.

Four pics from my last full day in San Francisco — Saturday, 7,17 — which included a hike in the Mt. Tamalpais/Muir Woods vicinity. City weather was windy and borderline chilly at times; Marin County was somewhat warmer but nothing to write home about. They barely have summers up there.

Saturday, 7.17, 3:40 pm.

Saturday, 7.17 — neighborhood Italian joint near corner of Hayes and Gough.

7.17, 3:25 pm.

I had dinner in San Francisco with an ex-girlfriend who’s into astrology, and she told me that some astrological guru she knows is predicting that the second Big Recession will kick in on August 8th. I didn’t say anything to the ex, but a part of me froze when I heard this. I shared my fears with a friend over dinner last night, and he said he doesn’t see it happening.

The Sunday afternoon poolside scene at the Hollywood Roosevelt, where I did an interview yesterday afternoon with Salt director Phillip Noyce, is pure Roman decadence. It’s Caligula meets New Babe City with lotsa drinks, string bikinis, body oils, etc. Not that many WASPS, though, and some of the guys looked a little dorky. (Like that shirtless guy talking to the hottie at the beginning of the video.) But it was quite a thing to see. You couldn’t help but chortle.

If you’ve seen The Kids Are All Right, you need to read this ugly Andrea Peyser piece which appeared in the N.Y. Post‘s online edition on 7.15. She basically feels that Mark Ruffalo‘s “sperm donor” character, who’s a little on the impulsive and immature side, deserves more respect and understanding than director-writer Lisa Cholodenko shows him over the course of the film. And that the film itself is basically Hollywood lefty gay propaganda that won’t play in the heartland.

Peyser seems down with Ruffalo’s character because he’s straight, and she appears to dislike or at least disapprove of the gay-mom characters, played by Annette Bening and Julianne Moore , because gay people shouldn’t be raising and screwing up their kids (i.e., influencing their attitudes about gay people). Nice.

Peyser feels it’s an insult to Ruffalo’s biological sovereignty for him to be referred to as the “sperm donor” instead of biological father. I can see her point, but biological co-authorship matters only if the father (or the mother) lives up to the demands of parenthood in a steady, compassionate, straight-arrow way. I would have personally liked the movie a bit more if Ruffalo hadn’t been tossed onto the compost heap at the end, but guys are dogs, let’s face it, and this seemed like a half-reasonable way to go.

Peyser is clearly irked that Cholodenko favors the domestic gay relationship over Moore briefly knocking boots with Ruffalo’s resturateur. Which is basically true, Cholodenko being gay herself and all that entails. (Would Peyser knock a film from a straight male director that doesn’t seem to treat a gay or bisexual character with full respect and fairness? Kinda doubt it.) But Chololdenko is also a good director doing the best work of her career thus far. For dramatic and/or moralistic purposes (or both), Cholodenko is supporting a committed parenting relationship over an impulsive affair — what’s so twisted about that?

What matters is that Cholodenko sells us on the compassion, foibles, vulnerabilities and all-around normalcy of Bening-Moore. They’re a caring, quirky, struggling couple trying to do the right thing by their kids. I see what Peyser’s beef is — she wants a restoration of a primarily straight culture in which gay people live in the recesses and don’t raise kids. She’s entitled to feel this way, of course. If she wants to argue against treating everyone fairly or decently regardless of sexual orientation, let her. But what a pathetic way to look at things.

If I had two kids that I couldn’t raise for whatever reason (illness, jail, impending death by gangsters) and I had to choose between their being adopted by a decent gay couple like Bening-Moore or a bigot like Peyser, I’d definitely go with the dykes.

I’ve never seen Chris Nolan‘s Following, which came out 12 years ago. It played a few festivals (Toronto, Palm Springs) but not Sundance, and I’m still too lazy to pick up the DVD, which came out in late ’01. IFC Films is guessing lot of folks who’ve seen Inception are just as lazy, and might be in the mood to check out this 16mm monochrome mood flick, shot in London. They’re re-releasing it on demand for three months via various cable providers.

“A struggling, unemployed young writer takes to following strangers around the streets of London, ostensibly to find inspiration for his new novel.

“Initially, he sets strict rules for himself regarding whom he should follow and for how long, but soon discards them as he focuses on a well-groomed man in a dark suit. The man in the suit, having noticed he is being followed, quickly confronts the young man and introduces himself as ‘Cobb‘.

“Cobb reveals that he is a serial burglar and invites the young man to accompany him on various burglaries. The material gains from these crimes seem to be of secondary importance to Cobb, who takes pleasure in rifling through the personal items in his targets’ flats. He explains that his true passion is using the shock of robbery and violation of property to make his victims re-examine their lives. He sums up his attitude thus: ‘You take it away, and show them what they had.'”

We all know about the theology of grain monks (i.e., an old film should never be refined beyond what audiences saw when it played the local Bijou), but do they have allies in the TV-transfer realm? I’m asking because it seems a bit curious (and at the same time very cool) that a forthcoming Bluray of the first Twilight Zone season (’59 to ’60) will look better than what Rod Serling was able to see in his private screening room, and far better than what Average Joes saw on their Sylvania or RCA Victor sets.

“All new 1080p high-definition transfers have been created from the original camera negatives,” the promotional copy states, “as well as uncompressed PCM audio, remastered from the original magnetic soundtracks,” resulting in 36 episodes (contained on five discs) “presented in pristine high definition for the first time ever!”

If you were a TV-transfer monk, wouldn’t you find this a betrayal of the Twilight Zone‘s original visual aesthetic? Imagine if the Image Entertainment people behind this Twilight Zone Bluray were to stage a coup at Criterion. Imagine the monk horror when they suggest at the first post-coup meeting that Stagecoach could be cleaned up a bit. “No!” the monks would shriek. “Leave those scratches alone! And don’t mess with the grain…please! Show some respect! John Ford wanted this film to look a little bit shitty and dog-eared. And it’s our responsibility to maintain this look into perpetuity!”

The Twilight Zone Bluray will be out on 9.14, and will set you back about $75 bills.

A financial-sector guy who always sends me reactions to HE stories rather than post a public comment says he’s totally smitten by Inception. “I saw it yesterday and the only knock I can come up with on it is that it might be too good,” he writes.

“I was telling some co-workers that this guy might be the answer to every gripe people have about Hollywood these days. ‘There are no original stories,’ ‘Too much CGI,’ ‘Sick of 3D,’ ‘Everything is dumbed down,’ etc. Nolan is making high-level high stakes popcorn movies that deliver on almost every angle and in the face of a degree of difficulty that no one else has to face. We are witnessing the natural progression of genius and we have no idea what his ceiling is.

“The only question that exists for Nolan now is not ‘can he’ but ‘for how long can he do it?’ Obviously that remains to be seen, but right now at this moment, he’s the best screenwriter and director on the planet — due respect to Ridley, Almodovar, Coens or any other name you want to throw out there. No one else can pull of something this good of this scale twice in a row. We should remember this time when a real genius is at his absolute best and the future looks brighter still. It’s a good time to be into stuff like this.”

If by clapping three times I could eradicate all forthcoming comic-book movies (and thereby impose a permanent frown on the faces of Devin Faraci, Drew McWeeny and the rest of the die-hard Comic-Con crowd), I would clap three times. Same difference if I could magically eliminate the notion of a superhero from the minds of all men, women and children on the planet earth, you bet.

For comic-book movies are surely the scourge of the film industry — agents of infantilism and same-itude, a pox upon the art and intrigue of storytelling, a tumor inside the ribcage of our movie-making culture.

The good news about comic-book movies is that they occasionally fail (Jonah Hex) or fall short (Kick-Ass), proving if nothing else that this mostly deplorable genre is not infallible. The bad or dispiriting news is that this may not be giving Hollywood execs sufficient pause, as the continued and growing success of San Diego Comic-Con (which kicks off Thursday) seems to suggest.

“I’m not quite sure how we reached a point where Comic-Con became the engine that drives Hollywood but that is absolutely the case,” laments critic Marshall Fine.

“A steady diet of comic-book and zombie and other fantasy movies is like a steady diet of Big Macs for the mind and soul. Unfortunately, no one will ever make the Super-Size Me revealing the brain-deadening effects that overconsumption of these films is having. Yet it’s out there, slowly stripping audiences of their ability to focus on anything that doesn’t distract them with big flashes and booms and super-powers and the like. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, in which feeding this particular beast allows it ultimately to consume all our brains, and take over the culture.

“Ah, Comic-Con: the tail that wags the entertainment dog. Would that we were able to brutally crop that particular tail. Instead, it’s being celebrated on the cover of Entertainment Weekly, as though it isn’t yet another harbinger of what is destroying movies that make you think and feel something other than the brief endorphin rush of cheap thrills.”

Calling Morgan Spurlock! There really is a documentary in this — an exploration of how comic-book movies transformed from a live-wire Hollywood phenomenon into something approaching a cultural pestilence.