Month: August 2011

Magnolia is releasing Anne Sewitsky‘s Happy Happy in New York and Los Angeles on 9.16, and it’s now starting to be shown to journalists. But there’s no subtitled trailer to be found on YouTube, the film isn’t listed on ComingSoon.net, and it can’t be found on Wikipedia. So here’s the 2010 Norweigan trailer. It’s pretty easy to tell what the film’s about, and the tone of it.

Happy Happy is a sexual comedy of sorts, but not in the American sense. It’s a frank, plain-spoken, curiously skewed film. It’s “funny” but not silly or scatterbrained. It is not devoid of drama. It contains real people and hard confrontations, etc. It should be remembered that it won the Narrative World Cinema Jury Award at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival.

I saw and quite enjoyed Happy Happy at Sundance 2011. It’s not fluffy but it’s not too heavy either. It’s about a mad intoxicating affair (is there any other kind?) between a lovely, optimistic-minded housewife (Agnes Kittelsen) and a recently arrived married neighbor (Henrik Rafaelsen). There’s a certain humorous emphasis in the film, it must be said, on oral sex. A somewhat brazen emphasis, I should add. There’s no seeing this film and not remembering this aspect.

The affair is eventually found out, of course, as all affairs are. Particularly those taking place in a small town. The trick for any infidel is to be as covert and CIA-like as possible. I know — I was the other man in an extra-marital affair that lasted more than two and a half years. It was painful and glorious while it lasted. No regrets at all. The heart wants and needs what it wants and needs.

“Kittelsen’s performance is the linchpin of the film — her open, emotive face reveals as much about her thoughts as her poor impulse control,” wrote The Hollywood Reporter‘s Justin Lowe. “Whether cavorting with her new lover or probing her husband to share his emotions, her expressive performance easily draws the audience in.

“Sewitsky directs the performances and camera with confidence and flair, although the succession of Christmastime interiors is rather repetitive, in contrast to the exterior scenes, which breathe fresh dynamism into the pacing.”

Joachim Rafaelsen plays Kittelsen’s taciturn husband; Maibritt Saerens plays Rafaelsen’s attorney wife.

Happy Happy director Anne Sewitsky (l.), star Agnes Kittelsen (r.) at a January 2011 Park City party for Norweigan entries.

I’ve seen this film so many times I can say almost all the dialogue in synch with the actors, Rocky Horror-style. But nobody is more queer for high-end black-and-white Blurays than myself, and so I have no choice. None whatsover. I won’t even bitch if it’s grainy, which it probably will be to some extent. It’s the old thready textures of the 1950s clothing that I’m looking forward to. That and being able to study the sweat beads and beard follicles of the twelve-man cast.

Two days after the Depardieu plane-urination incident, a Bluray of the original “pee on the rug” movie is in video stores and purchasable on Amazon. Excellent timing. My copy is being messengered over as we speak. Word is that the bowling-alley scenes have that extra-shimmering Bluray pop-through quality, and that the rest of of the film…let’s wait.

Reports indicate that the suicide of Russell Armstrong was prompted by terrible financial despair. He apparently spent himself into debt in order to keep his Real Housewives of Beverly Hills wife Taylor Armstrong in clover (or the appearance of same), and eventually found himself in neck-deep quicksand and more or less said to himself, “I can’t stand this any more….I’m outta here.”

This sadly exposes the kind of pathetic relationships that are rife in this community — the wife is a total money-and-attention whore and the guy, usually older and not her physical-attraction equal, understands that the only way to keep her is to shower her with this and that luxury. There’s a rumor about a book that was going to float rumors about the guy being bi or whatever. He should have just gone gay and walked away and rented a nice little West Hollywood condo and chilled out. Life is very short. You have to choose happiness, but the “happy” you choose has to be grounded in something more nourishing than just having a lot of dough and thereby satisfying the shallow whims of a vacuous nobody.

Yesterday CNN’s Anderson Cooper got the giggles at the end of a segment about the Gerard Depardieu peeing-on-a-plane incident. It starts around the 2:40 mark. It’s funny and infectious but (a) the reason Cooper is laughing this hard is not really about Depardieu but something cathartic that only Cooper understands, (b) his laughter has this fluttery falsetto (amost eunuch-y) sound, and (c) the last syllable of Depardieu’s name is pronounced “dyeuh,” not “doo.”

Cooper’s breakdown reminded me, of course, of a similar scene in Michael Ritchie ‘s The Candididate (’72). I prefer Redford’s laugh to Cooper’s — no offense.

Truly primal laughter is never about any one event or mishap or whatever. It’s usually about the release of tension and frustration, and it’s completely unsuppressable if you feel you’re exposing some careless, thoughtless or callous part of yourself by laughing. I once wrote about a tree-surgeon boss I didn’t like and how he broke down in tears after a gas cap popped off a huge chain saw he had lifted above his head, and gas splashed all over his chest and stomach and lower flank. He was so angry and frustrated that he openly wept — literally going “whoa-hoo-hoo!” — and I started giggling at the whole spectacle. I had to suppress it, of course, or he would have killed me. But I couldn’t stop.

The mileage estimate websites claim that the drive from Albuquerque to Telluride is 207 miles. Yeah…as the crow flies. But if you’re driving it’s more like 310 or 320 miles. The more scenic eastern route (Albuqerque, Santa Fe, Chama, Durango, Dolores, Telluride) is 309 miles; the western route (Albuquerque, Gallup, Dolores, Telluride) is 320, but the roads are a bit flatter and faster.

Scenic route (heading to Telluride Film Festival, beginning on 8.31): Albuquerque to Santa Fe: 54 miles. Santa Fe to Chama: 92 miles. TOTAL: 146 miles (or 2 1/2 hrs.). Chama to Durango, CO: 76 miles. Durango to Dolores: 37 miles. Dolores to Telluride: 50 miles

TOTAL: 163 miles (or 3.5 hours). Grand Total: 309 miles = 6 hours.

GOING THERE: Lap #1 — Wednesday, 8.31, starting at 6 pm. Albuquerque to Santa Fe = 54 miles, or maybe 60 minutes. Take 25 east from ALB to Santa Fe. Go NORTH on 84 to Chama. Lap #2: Santa Fe to Chama = 92 miles, or maybe 90 minutes. North on 84, then take 17 north to Chama.

Lap #3 — Thursday, 9.1, starting at 9 am: Chama to Durango, CO = 76 miles or about 75 to 90 minutes. West on 84/64, then due north on 84 to Pagosa Springs, CO, then West on 160 to Durango (47 miles from Pagosa Springs). Lap #4: Durango to Dolores = 37 miles. West on 160 to Mancos (about 24 miles), then NORTH on 184 to Dolores (about 15 miles from Mancos). Then NE on 145. Lap #5: Dolores to Telluride, or 50 miles. NE on 145, maybe an hour.

RETURNING: Lap #1 — Monday, 9.1., starting around noon: Telluride to Dolores, or 50 miles. SW on 145, maybe an hour. Lap #2: Dolores to Gallup, or about 129 miles or two hours. Due south on 491. Lap #3: Gallup to Albuquerque, or about 140 miles east on Interstate 40. Or roughly another two hours. TOTAL: 320 miles, or about 5 hours. Averaging 70 mph would make it a four and 1/2 hour trip…we’ll see.

I was half-watching a DVD last week of Alan Parker‘s Evita (1996), and it looks like hell on a 50-inch screen. For its upcoming 15th anniversary, Hollywood’s best all-singing musical opera (yes, better than Sweeney Todd) needs to be Bluray-ed. For me Darius Khondji‘s widescreen cinematography is compositional heaven — each and every frame has an exquisite painterly balance, and is lighted to perfection. And Gerry Hambling‘s lively cutting is a perfect compliment to the musical rhythms and rhymes.

And it’s a very fine film for what it is, and the music is entirely catchy and hummable and pizazzy. The kids and I used to sing the songs together when they were seven and eight. “So what happens now? / where am I going to? / you’ll get by, you always have before.”

I don’t think I’m the only one who feels that Evita may be Alan Parker ‘s best film ever.

No, Madonna’s performance isn’t triple or even double grade-A because she’s not a gifted actress, no argument, acknowledged, but it’s certainly the best thing she’s ever done or will do acting-wise, and I truly respect her work here because Parker got her to do nothing except sing (and I think she fully honors Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber‘s score) and emphasize feelings and needs with her face and body and wear great clothes and look dazzling and forceful. She’s playing a grasping, conniving operator, but yet there’s something common and shared in her eyes and voice. She gives it hell and brings it home.

Antonio Banderas and Jonathan Pryce are exactly right in their phrasings and flavorings and emotings. Honestly? I can’t think of another American-made film in which I’ve enjoyed either actor more. Banderas was better in his early Almodovar turns in the late ’80s, but that’s another realm.

Evita is probably my all-time favorite Hollywood musical — yes, more so that Singin’ in the Rain or Cabaret or you-name-it. It just gets the snap and brio and excitement of being a unified opera that sings and breathes with one voice, one truly Latin spirit. And it’s just too beautiful-looking not to upgrade it to Bluray. Okay, I’ve said it.

“I want to be a part of BA, Buenos Aires, Big Apple…”

As might be expected from a 8.19 release that was press-screened for people in my short-lead realm for the very first time yesterday morning (i.e., three days before opening), Lone Scherfig‘s One Day (Focus Features) is getting badly beaten up over at Rotten Tomatoes (27% positive) and somewhat less so at Metacritic (47%).

The writing has been on the wall for several months. In a 5.30 posting called “Oy! Dumb Girls!,” I wrote that “‘destined to be together but indecisive and unable to pull the trigger for 20 years’ is not my idea of an engrossing concept. It’s my idea, actually, of a repellent one. The narration in trailer #2 (‘…but life got in the way’) is very cliched, and the British narrator’s speaking style has that same ‘talking down to idiots’ tone that the last trailer had.”

How could the gifted and respected director fo An Education and Italian for Beginners have made a film like this?

I missed yesterday morning’s screening, but will catch it tomorrow, courtesy of Ginsberg-Libby and Focus Features.

This group shot from Bruce Beresford‘s Love, Peace and Misunderstanding, a family relationship drama in which Jane Fonda plays an ex-hippie grandma, is presumably meant to resemble the cover of Crosby Stills & Nash’s first album, or at least the yellowish eggshell paint on the clapboard exterior of the home plus the light green windowsill trim.

Set to play at the Toronto Film Festival, Love and Misunderstanding sounds like like a right-down-the-middle, straight-across-the-plate family confection in a Golden Pond-ish vein. Neurotic attorney (Catherine Keener) brings her teenage kids (one of them played by Elizabeth Olsen) to visit her estranged and eccentric mom (Fonda) and yaddah-yaddah. Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Nat Wolff, Marissa O’Donnell, Chace Crawford, Kyle MacLachlan and Rosanna Arquette costar. It’s slated to open later this year.

Two days ago I asked about when Juan Antonio Bayona‘s The Impossible might be released. Sometime next year, yes, but spring, summer or fall? This morning Bayona responded: “I can only say that we’re on schedule and working really hard on the editing and visual effects. We didn’t wrap last fall, as you metioned in the article. We finished in February and did three weeks of technical shooting (scale models and water) in June. The film will be completed early 2012, but there’s still no release date from Summit.” It’s my understanding that Bayona will screen a rough cut for friend and Orphanage producer Guillermo del Toro sometime next month.

Last Saturday morning I reported that (a) a March 2009 draft of Terry Rossio and Ted Elliott‘s The Lone Ranger script was about Native American mysticism and a werewolf predator that tore men into pieces, and that (b) the CG needed for the werewolf stuff was at least one of the reasons for the film’s $250 million budget, which Disney execs felt was excessive and led them to shut the movie down.

Now The Hollywood Reporter‘s Kim Masters is reporting that the spirits-and- werewolf stuff has been “jettisoned” and that “sources who have read recent drafts” say they contain “three massive action set pieces involving trains remain, including one described as the biggest train sequence in film history.”

Okay, fine — werewolves out, trains in. Does anyone have a draft with these three train sequences? Not that it matters much now. Honestly? If I was Jerry Bruckheimer and Gore Verbinksi, I would’ve kept the werewolves and put them on the train (make them into the owners or engineers or whatever) and called the movie The Lone Ranger Meets The Werewolf Train.

Yesterday’s rug-peeing incident involving Gerard Depardieu whizzing on the floor of a Paris-to-Dublin CityJet was completely avoidable. And almost predictable. Flight attendants, security guards and other uniformed functionaries who try and tell movie stars what to do and what not to do will always lose. The same lesson has been taught a million times and they won’t listen. Don’t fuck with the Godz because the Godz have been taught that they can always sidestep rules if they need or want to. That’s the way the world works…hello? If a swaggering, big-bellied, larger-than-life French actor and winemaker needs to slip into the can for a quick one, let him! So stupid.