Day: August 6, 2010

This will sound shallow, but I feel oddly gratified that Paul Giamatti is wearing a wig in Barney’s Version, a Canadian comedy set to debut at the Venice Film Festival. I wanted his thinning hair to stop at Sideways levels, and of course it hasn’t. The film seems lively enough and Dustin Hoffman has some funny lines. I know that the 1997 Mordecai Richler novel that the film is based upon involves three wives and the arrival of one Al Z. Heimer.

Here’s another really shallow thought: I’m cool with whatever Giamatti has a mind to do because he’s a superb actor, but what I’d really, really like is to see him do is play Miles again in another Alexander Payne film. I’m serious. Sideways 2: The Continuing Adventures of Miles Raymond. Some new locale, new challenges, something. I just love Miles’ moroseness, that tortured look, his fundamental decency, etc.

I’m pretty sure this Kevin Pollak bit — i.e., Albert Brooks telling the Aristocrats joke — wasn’t in The Aristocrats. Pollak is amazing. The voice isn’t exactly like Brooks’ but the vowels and inflections are just right. “Whatever, I’m fine..I’ll be in therapy. This is what we do…Helen, you couldn’t be more fired than you are now…I’d kill your family if I knew them…I got nothin’, I’m spent.”

Somebody in Criterion’s editorial department has published a q & a with producer Curtis Tsui, the subject being Tsui’s recent work on Criterion’s upcoming Paths of Glory Bluray. The project led Tsui to visit the rural English home of the late Stanley Kubrick, the film’s director. Tsui is “annoyingly coy” (his own words) when asked to physically describe the house and grounds, but by mentioning an annual three-day arts festival thrown on the estate by Kubrick’s widow Christiane, he provides the geographical location.

I’ve known for decades that Kubrick’s home was near the town of St. Albans, about 22 miles north of London. The website for the Childwickbury Arts Festival provides a map with an icon pinpointing the approximate spot. But when you paste the address — Childwickbury House, St. Albans, Hertfordshire, AL3 6JX, England — into Google Maps, you get a slightly different location to the south.

Tsui mentions a video clip of a November 1957 interview between Mike Wallace and Paths of Glory producer-star Kirk Douglas that he wanted to include on the disc. He couldn’t manage this (“the piece was impossible to land,” he says) but there’s a link to a University of Texas at Austin website that hosts the video. Tsui calls the interview kind of “mind-blowing,” explaining that “the types of questions that Wallace tosses out would catch almost anyone off guard and would never be allowed by a protective publicist today, and it’s really pretty stunning to see Douglas thinking on his feet and parrying those blows like a total pro.”

If you want mind-blowing, consider this quote from Wallace’s introduction: “Just the day before our interview, Mr. Douglas had completed shooting on The Vikings for which he had grown his hair long and he hadn’t yet had the chance to see his barber.” In other words Wallace is not only mindful of the regimented, bordering-on-military approach to men’s hair styles in 1957, but feels a need to actually prepare the audience for the shock of seeing Douglas’s coif, which is maybe a tiny bit longer and fuller than an average haircut worn by a typical Man in a Gray Flannel Suit. Lockstep conformity was the rule among urban male professionals of the ’50s, but Wallace’s remark borders on the absurd.

The other half-comical aspect is a pitch for Phillip Morris cigarettes that Wallace delivers before doing the Douglas interview:

You could call George Gallo‘s Middle Men a kind of crime comedy except it isn’t funny — Giovanni Ribisi‘s hyper performance kills any instinct you might have to laugh at anything in this film — so I don’t know what to call it. I know that after it was over it felt sublime not to be in the presence of actors shouting and sweating and doing lines and smoking and screaming at each other and waving guns around. God!

Middle Men is kinda like Goodfellas but with the emphasis lever turned all the way up, and despite agreeable performances from Luke Wilson, James Caan and Kevin Pollak, this is the central problem. It’s too cranked up. Which, in my book, means it’s all about the less well-known cast members (i.e., everyone who isn’t Wilson, Caan and Pollak) “acting” instead of being. Which gives you a headache after a while.

In all walks of life people of any intelligence usually dial themselves down. Whatever people are feeling or seeking or angry about or whatever, they’ll always turn their 9 or 10 feelings down to 4 or 5 or 6 at the highest. The only people who don’t understand that calm or restrained behavior will always work better than fierce emotionalism are idiots or druggies or people with thyroid issues, and who wants to spend 110 minutes with that kind?

What’s interesting, of course, is that while real-life people usually dial it down, the facts about who and what they are eventually leak out in little ways, and that’s what gives you the willies — those “tells,” those unintentional secretions of truth.

This sort of thing is a lot more subtle, of course, than some hyper, bearded, drugged-out, cigarette-smoking monkey screaming and spraying saliva as he pokes the hero in the chest and blows smoke in his face and whatnot. But in the eyes of under-talented filmmakers, this kind of thing is more appealing from a cinematic standpoint than the dialed-down behavior I’ve just described. There’s a place for shouting and screaming, but if you do it too much the audience will shut down. And that’s what happens when you’re watching Middle Men. You start saying “lemme outta here.”

It’s mainly Ribisi’s fault. Giovanni effin’ Ribisi. He’s so over-the-top in this thing that I don’t think I want to see him in any kind of film for the next four or five years. Really. I’m going to start make a list of all the films he’s and start figuring out excuses for not seeing them.

(l. to r.) Middle Man costar Kelsey Grammer, director and co-wrter George Gallo, producer Christopher Mallick.

Ribisi’s performance is mainly Gallo’s fault, of course. It’s the job of a director to rein the actors in and guide them toward that sweet spot, and Gallo, clearly, hasn’t a clue about how much is enough or too much. I have to figure that Gallo, a somewhat older guy, didn’t want Middle Men to look like it was directed by some decrepit, over-the-hill dude who doesn’t understand the pace of 21st Century cinema and how to reach the ADD crowd by always keeping things cranked, so he decided to turn it on and turn it up and pile on the narration, etc. Some critic said the only thing Middle Men doesn’t have in this respect are pop-up ads.

Look at the above photo of Gallo (center) and Middle Men producer Christopher Mallick, whose actual history with an internet porn-billing service in the ’90s is the basis of the story. Do they not look like waste management guys from North Jersey? They could be sitting around Satriale’s and talking about loan-sharking with Paulie Walnuts. More to the point, they could be associates of Christopher Moltisanti during the making of Cleaver. One look and you know they’re not X-factor types on the level of Martin Scorsese and Paul Schrader. Fuhgedaboutit.

Will Tony Scott‘s Unstoppable turn out better than The Taking of Pelham 123? It looks kick-ass to me, and hail to those that know how to really and truly deliver on these terms. As long as the reason(s) for the train being unstoppable seem logical and reasonable, all will be well. It’ll be total ice cream. You know Scott can do this kind of thing blindfolded with one hand tied.

Last fall I wrote that Pelham 123 should be considered as a Best Picture candidate. And it should have been. So maybe people will consider Unstoppable a bit more seriously in this light. 2010 is looking like a shitty year as we speak so who knows? Shouldn’t there be at least one high-end popcorn movie to round things out?

Will Unstoppable land with a thud? Will it be come to be regarded as the best train movie since Andrei Konchalovsky‘s Runaway Train or Buster Keaton‘s The General or — the all-time greatest — John Frankenheimer‘s The Train, which used real trains and not a single frame of CGI? Or will it be thrown out with the trash?

When the words gets out that you’re toast and it’s just a matter of time, some people have a tendency to step back a few paces, or turn away and cut off contact. I’d like to think that I’m not one of them, but I’ve seen these responses time and again. One thing’s for sure: Christopher Hitchens is evading nothing in terms of analysis. He’s dealing with it like a man.

When my sister was on her way out with cancer, days or hours from liftoff, my brother (who’s now dead himself) told me he hadn’t visited her in the hospital because “I don’t want to sit in a room and watch her die.” You effing asshole, I thought to myself. It’s not about you, it’s about her.

Death is like walking across a rickety wooden bridge across a huge and deep chasm. It’s not the other side of the chasm that scares you, but grabbing hold of the railing and stepping out and making your way across. People about to do this want people with them, I think. It comforts them that they have people supporting them and telling them in a roundabout way that it’s okay to cross, and that it’s safe and pleasant on the other side.