Month: May 2011

In his review of Curtis Hanson‘s Too Big To Fail (HBO, debuting on Monday, 5.23), Media Life’s Tom Conroy notes the “paradox of [how] good historical dramas can be engrossing and suspenseful even when we already know that, for example, Apollo 13 is going to land safely and Mark Zuckerberg is going to wind up running Facebook.

The docudrama “tells a story that might seem unfilmable — the near collapse of the American economy in 2008,” he writes. “[But] the cast of well-known and, more importantly, skilled actors, though somewhat distracting, helps to make the movie both graspable and gripping.”

For me Paul Giamatti playing Ben Bernanke is a closer in and of itself. Not to mention William Hurt as Hank Paulson and Billy Crudup as Timothy Geithner.

Has it really been 20 years since Michael Tolkin‘s The Rapture? It’s some kind of thinking-man’s horror flick (despite the Wiki page calling it “a psychological-religious drama”), and one of the most chilling and profoundly creepy films ever. I think of it now as a marvellous bitchslap directed at Godfreaks and the religious right. Bill Maher should have somehow referenced it in Religulous.

The Rapture weirded me out on a level that I didn’t fully comprehend at first. So much so that I’ve only watched it twice. It’s not what you’d call a “pleasant” film, but it sinks in and spreads a strange malevolent vibe — a feeling of profound unease, disquiet — into your system.

Mimi Rogers hit her absolute career peak playing a telemarketing swinger-turned-convert who (a) sends her daughter to God with a bullet in the head and then (b) tells God to shove it when He/She is levitating Rogers up to Heaven during the finale.

David Duchovny and Will Patton costarred. I was so taken by Patrick Bauchau‘s performance as a libertine that I sought him out at a party sometime in the late ’90s and wound up interviewing him at his Hollywood home.

It’s only fitting that this minor masterpiece be mentioned in lieu of today’s rapture event, which I presume will be happening sometime during daylight hours in the States. The whackers will naturally want to experience it fully awake; I should think God would be all-too-willing to oblige.

I didn’t mention this in Thursday’s Driver review, but I felt that Bryan Cranston‘s supporting performance as Ryan Gosling‘s mentor-employer is one of the few things in that film that doesn’t quite work. His character basically runs at the mouth in the manner of a meth freak (ironic in lieu of Breaking Bad). The first thing that comes to mind when he starts motor-mouthing is “shut up already.” On top of which Cranston manages to sound like a British or Irish actor trying to do an American accent…queer.

A year ago Constantin Film AG had the YouTube Hitler parodies removed from YouTube. Some believed it was just as well, that the string had played out. I more or less felt the same, I suppose, and wasn’t even going to watch this. And then I did. When they’re good, the Hitler YouTubes are one of the few things that can make LQTM types like myself laugh out loud.

I know. How can I compose that protest petition draft and then laugh at something that perpetuates a stupid media meme that was misrepresentational in the first place? I guess it’s the LexG-in-Hitler-guise patter. I’m sorry but it’s funny.

I claim crashing and flopping rights after ten days of the Cannes Film Festival. Baked, etc. Australian journalist Sam Cleveland, whom I’ve written and linked to a few times but have never met, has invited me to a party tomorrow night in southwestern

Paris. And then there’s the Stanley Kubrick exhibit at the Cinematheque Francais (51 rue Bercy). And whatever else.

I’m scratching my head about Colin Farrell, who became reborn when he curtailed the boozing and began providing rich, indie-level character perfs (Cassandra’s Dream, In Bruges, Pride and Glory, Crazy Heart, The Way Back), playing a vampire in a remake of a 1985 Tom Holland film. I don’t know Craig Gillespie, director of the new version. Anton Yelchin and Christopher Mintz-Plasse costar.

Not to mention playing one of three Horrilble Bosses (7.8). I guess this goes with being a character actor. I guess it’s called expanding your range and upping your employability, etc. At least Farrell hasn’t signed for a costarring rile in Jerry Bruckheimer‘s The Lone Ranger.

Those Cannes tweets about Paolo Sorrentino‘s This Must Be The Place, the Sean Penn/aging goth-rocker/Nazi-hunting drama, are fairly negative. Now I see why my efforts to catch a possible early screening on the rue d’Antibes (which sometimes occur for buyers) didn’t even get a reply.

“I thin they’re keeping it under wraps,” a buyer speculated two or three days ago. “Under

wraps?,” I replied. “Then why screen it at Cannes at all?”

It’s now 12:25 pm. I’m standing in front of my Paris pad at 11 rue Victor Cousin, waiting for Cedric-the-landlord who said he’d meet me at 11:30 am. I don’t like this. (Who would?) My mood is growing darker by the minute. Then again it’s a nice day and I have my health, etc.

After double-checking the SNCF train schedule pamphlet and then going the extra mile by revisiting the Cannes gare yesterday and re-confirming with an information-booth person, I had every reason to believe that I’d be able to take a 5:40 am train from Cannes to Nice. But of course, I couldn’t and didn’t. Because this particular train doesn’t run on Fridays, I was told this morning. Thanks, SNCF staffers! So I had to take a cab to Nice Airport, and it set me back 80 euros.

Nice Airport departure lounge — Friday, 5.20, 7:05 am.

Final Cannes snap — Thursday, 5.19, 8:55 pm.

Nichoias Winding Refn‘s Drive, which finished showing about 45 minutes ago, is the violent, Steve McQueen-ish, fast-car crime movie that guys like myself have been waiting for…almost. It’s a genre flick and hardly high art, and the truth is that some of the elements are under-cooked. But the things it does right are wonderful, really wonderful. For me anyway.

It’s Bullitt in the clothes of a curiously motivated stunt-car driver (a very stoic and charismatic Ryan Gosling) who moonlights as a freelance getaway guy. And yes, it has that stripped-down ’70s atmosphere in spades. And it delivers three killer performances from Gosling, Carey Mulligan and — big jolt — a darkly cynical and altogether splendid Albert Books (!), and a very fine one from Ron Perlman. It holds back, invests in silences, lets the ingredients percolate and build and then wham! And then it chills for a bit. And then wham! again. And then more quiet, waiting, looks, intimations.

It’s the kind of high-end genre flick that “they” stopped making a long time ago when “they” decided that the Fast and Furious movies were better investments. Jerks.

If I was Justin Lin, the director of Fast Five and two other Fast & Furious films, I would put on a fishing hat and a fake beard and hide out in the desert until things blow over. Lin churns out bonehead CG car fantasies that are impossible to even half-believe in. Deliberately. Lin pushes his absurdities in your face and says, “Cool, huh?” But Nicholas Winding Refn is a director, a real director, and one measure of this is that he makes you believe that much of what’s in Drive is fairly plausible. By today’s standards that’s almost a Godsend.

Parts of Drive are so carefully and cautiously dead-on and still and quiet, and are so thrillingly well-directed (or should I say well-engineered?) that I was grinning ear to ear. Smart talk, lean talk, oddly cool music, menacing aromas, superb car-chases…all to the good. And with all manner of knife-stabbings and hammers and severed arteries and head-stompings…a bit too much of this, actually, but we’ll let that slide for now.

And the early scenes between the barely verbal Gosling and Mulligan, who constitute the film’s romantic coupling, have the kind of poignant, eye-contact undercurrents that would do any straightforward guy-girl romance proud.

Why, then, does this roaring, speeding, fish-tailing, back-to-basics car movie that puts Fast Five to shame not feel entirely whole? Why does it feel like it belongs in the good company of Michael Mann‘s legendary Thief (’81), a film about a lone-wolf felon whom Gosling’s character somewhat resembles, but isn’t quite as good?

Answer: Hossein Amini‘s script makes Gosling’s driver into too much of an enigma. He doesn’t have a backstory and you don’t know what he really wants or needs. And you’re not told why he’s so efficient at fists and stabbings and gunplay. He’s just “the Zen guy” who walks slowly and waits and sizes things up before making a move. That’s okay on a certain level but I wanted more.

Anyway, I have to get up in five hours so that’s all she wrote, but there’s enough in this film to make a lot of people very happy. My only other complaint is that there’s a little too much blood, but…right, I said I was going to let that one go. For now. I’ll get into it a bit more tomorrow.

From David Poland‘s HotBlog, posted earlier today: “I have to say, it makes me kind of sick to my stomach to think that Lars von Trier, stumbling over his own ideas about being Jewish and German, basically saying stuff that has been said by high school upperclassmen and college freshmen for decades, and having it all reduced down to ‘I Heart Hitler!,’ leading to Cannes’ board meeting and saying that the filmmaker is now ‘persona non grata.’

“Seriously?

“As inarticulate as his comments and the tortured path they rambled down were, he never said anything more generous to Hilter than, ‘I think I understand the man.’ And he ‘liked” Albert Speer, which American TV networks have done, via mini-series, in the past.

“The word ‘Nazi’ was used, in the context of the press conference segment I posted last night, by von Trier as a provocative shorthand about himself. And then it snowballed into snippets that could be taken out of context. But what i heard was that he was thinking about the German mindset and the Jewish mindset and how he is caught between the two, part of the two, and understands both…even Hitler.

“Of course, von Trier was marginalized by much of the American critical community in years past as ‘anti-American,’ making it hard for some of his work to get distribution here. And there was the stupid – really stupid – claim that Anti-Christ was torture porn of some kind. This was about as accurate as saying that paintings of Christ on the cross are torture porn.

“What really disturbs me is that this is not Fox Fucking News, where anti-intellectual hysteria is a way of life (as they support everyone who would drain every last dollar out of the pockets of anyone earning less than $200k a year). This is a FILM FESTIVAL. We are film critics.

“And the media is completely complicit as we incite the rage by making headlines referring to a ‘meltdown’ or blasting ‘I am a Nazi’ all over the place, when it could not be more clearer than von Trier was NOT endorsing the mass murder of Jews or any race. And if you were to kick every filmmaker at Cannes who thinks ‘Israel is a pain in the ass’ out of the festival, it would be a quiet place indeed.

“Is von Trier an ass at times? Absolutely. Aggressive provocateur? Absolutely.

“But he is one of the few high profile filmmakers who pushes audiences to Think. You can hate what he makes, but you can’t deny that he is skilled and alive with ideas. Who will stand for this in a homogenized, instant-news-cycle culture if Film Critics and Festivals will not?”

Posted earlier today by Slant‘s Ari Arikan…enjoy.

I’ve only just gotten around to watching this Tintin teaser, which appeared yesterday. It isn’t much — teasers never are.. I could share my opinion but I have to bolt now for a screening. If anyone has a view — an honest, non-invested view — I’d love to hear it.