Month: August 2011

Every now and then an actor delivers a performance that is so odious and unpleasant to settle into that even sophisticated filmgoers find themselves resenting the actor on some level, despite the obvious. If the performance is off-putting enough, it can seriously harm or stall an actor’s career. For me Ezra Miller‘s inhabiting of an evil, acid-spewing fiend in We Need To Talk About Kevin is one of these. I instantly knew while watching Lynne Ramsay‘s film in Cannes that I’d be avoiding seeing this guy in anything else, if at all possible.

Unfair? A bit cruel? Yeah, it is. But that’s what a lacerating performance can sometimes achieve.

What other performances have been so instantly offensive that they all but stopped the career of the actor? All I can think of is Lorraine Braco‘s as a braying biochemist in Medicine Man (1992), which seemed to ruin her feature film work (at last in terms of choice roles) until she bounced back in ’99 with her psychiatrist role in The Sopranos. And, I suppose, Elizabeth Berridge performance as Mozart’s shrewish, low-rent wife in Milos Forman‘s Amadeus (’84). She pretty much went right into ’80s and ’90s TV after that grating turn. She played Annie Oakley in Hidalgo (’04).

It’s been 16 or 17 years since Gabrielle Anwar “disappeared” from features and moved over to television. The last thing she did that really mattered was that tango dance scene with Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman (’92). I’d very nearly forgotten her. Things fall away and you move on. And then wham…her face (perhaps even more stimulating at 41 than in her early 20s) popped up in a trailer for The Family Tree (Tuckman Media, 8.26).

There’s something about faint signs of age settling into the face of a strikingly beautiful woman that gets me. I don’t know why exactly. Even if she has what appear to be trout lips.

The film, an American Beauty-resembling dramedy about a mom with memory loss and a dad with a proverbial wandering eye, is a problem. I haven’t seen it, but the website’s 1996-era design style tells you everything. No, I don’t think Tuckman Media was trying to be hip by intentionally trying to make it look like a Clinton-era website. Anwar’s costars are Dermot Mulroney, Hope Davis, Chi McBride, Vhristina Hendricks, Selma Blair, Keith Carradine, Max Thierot, Rachel Leigh Cook, Jane Seymour and Britt Robertson. The director is Vivi Friedman.

Maybe not a great ending, but one that definitely works because it make a moral point in a tough, unflinching way. Plus that nice little Third Man homage. Start it around the 3:20 mark or thereabouts.

In his N.Y. Times profile of Stephen Lang, John Anderson describes the 50ish actor as having been “scarier than John Dillinger in Public Enemies.” No — Lang was snarlier, but while playing a flinty, straight-up lawman with a sense of honor and dignity about him. Lang was also the co-deliverer (with Marion Cotillard) of that film’s great emotional finale. It’s appalling that I can’t find a decent, unsqueezed clip of this scene.

Avatar‘s Zoe Saldana gets to do the same old avenge-the-death-of-my-parents crap in the vein of a typical Luc Besson, hard-tack, badass-hot-chick La Femme Nikita, blah, blah. And why call it Columbiana? Why do the makers of these films insist on making them all the same way, which is to say in the manner of a Cannon film transposed to the present? Why don’t they try to make it in a Steven Soderbergh mode?

Q: “So how secure do we build this? How many guy wires? Do we make it strong enough to hold up in heavy winds and howling rainstorms, or just strong enough to stand in good weather or what?” A: “Or strong enough to withstand an earthquake, you mean? C’mon, man…we have to stay within our budget. We don’t want to go nuts here. I have mouths to feed. Just build it the usual way.”

Five people died in this calamity. A horrible thing all around. But I have to say that the above video footage reminds me how I always get a huge thrill when dark clouds swirl overhead and the winds pick up like in the parting-the-Red Sea sequence in The Ten Commandments.

Sidenote: Look at the blonde with the swept-back hair and the shoulder-baring black sweater or leotard about the 37 second mark, and how she’s smiling and happy-chatting with her girlfriends. 25 seconds after the collapse.

I’ve misheard song lyrics all my life, and over time those wrong lyrics have sunk into my system and become frozen in amber, and now I can’t hear the correct lyrics to save my life. Most of the mis-heard lyrics were absorbed when I was a kid or a teenager, for the most part. I know it sounds silly but these idiotic re-wordings have stayed in my head.

Example #1: “All Shook Up,” Elvis Presley. All my life I’ve been hearing “I’m itchin’ like a man on a buzzin’ tree” and “mah friends say I’m actin’ wide as a bug.” The correct lyrics are “I’m itching like a man on a fuzzy tree” and “my friends say I’m actin wild as a bug.” Except Presley doesn’t say “wild” in that song. Wild is a two-syllable word that Presley just flat-out doesn’t pronounce — he says “wide.” Yes, an idiotic interpretation. How exactly does a bug act when he’s “wide”? (Or “narrow” for that matter?) But there’s nothing crazy about itching as a result of being in the vicinity of a “buzzing” tree. The tree could be buzzing with mosquitoes or flies or gnats and you could feel itchy from that proximity.

Example #2: “(The Love I Saw In You Was) Just A Mirage,” Smokey Robinson & the Miracles. The song goes “We used to meet in romantic places / You gave the illusion that your love was real / Now all that’s left are lipstick traces / From the kisses you only pretended to feel.” My lifelong problem is that I never heard “are lipstick traces” — I heard “I miss Dick Tracy.” Now listen to these lyrics the Jeffrey Wells way, and you’ll understand why my life has turned out the way it has: “”We used to meet in romantic places / You gave the illusion that your love was real / Now all that’s left I miss Dick Tracy / From the kisses you only pretended to feel.”

Example #3: “Something’s Coming” from West Side Story, written by Stephen Sondheim & sung by Richard Beymer in the 1961 film. The guy who sang on Beymer’s behalf slightly misrepesented the lyrics when he sang “With a click / With a shock / Phone’ll jingle / Door’ll knock / Open the latch!” It’s not my fault but the singer’s that all my life I’ve been hearing “phono jingo / dorro knock!” I know for a fact that almost all singers deliberately de-emphasize the “ell” sound in songs because they’re hard to musically enunciate in a way that sounds “right.”

Before this scene in Paul Schrader‘s American Gigolo (’80), had any film from any country ever shown a guy getting high over the clothes he’d be wearing that day, and experiencing the joy of picking exactly the right shirt, tie and, jacket and shoe combos? Narcissim and shallowness, of course, but this kind of sensual enjoyment is rare in films. It’s appropriate that Richard Gere speaks Italian in this clip since the carefully chosen clothes were mainly from Milan.

Whatever happened to IGN’s Stax Flixburg? Or rather, what happened to his stories? I only know that I used to link to his IGN reports from time time, but that hasn’t happened since July ’07. I just noticed him today on Twitter, etc. It’s funny how you can just sort of slip away and disappear without anyone noticing. That’ll happen to me some day.

I quite like this moody, Antonioni-esque, Guy Peelaert-styled image from Simon Curtis‘ My Week With Marilyn (Weinstein Co., 11.4). But I’m still waiting for a trailer or even an image that will offer a slight taste of Kenneth Branagh‘s performance as Laurence Olivier, which I’ve been told is the film’s highlight.

I ran a piece on 4.14.11 about the decision to remove the words “God of” from Roman Polanski‘s adaptation of Yasmina Reza‘s God of Carnage, and to therefore call it Carnage (Sony Classics, 11.18). I was told by a publicist that day that the decision “was made by the producer Said Ben Said and Polanski.” Most people felt this was an odd call but whatever. The movie’s the thing, right?

My suspicion is that Carnage was adopted because of the U.S market, and particularly a fear that hinterland yahoos might react negatively to the word “God” not being used in a strictly Christian context. Even if this isn’t true the U.S. is still the most religiously primitive, culturally backward, finger-up-its-ass country in the Western hemisphere, hands down.

The French poster for the film has been released, and while the French acknowledge the original title on the the bottom of the poster, they’re sticking to Carnage.

Even in 1984’s Footloose the idea of dancing being banned in a small Midwestern town was ridiculous. Yes, the script came from an actual dancing ban that had been enforced in the town of Elmore City, Oklahoma, and was finally revoked in 1980. But the banning of dancing — not the jitterbug or square-dancing but suggestive pantomining of sexual congress, which is what modern dancing more or less is — is like some ghostly remnant of America’s buried puritan past.

The idea, in short, comes from those small-town preachers and community leaders who were afraid of race music and be-bop Elvis Presley and Little Richard music in the early to mid 1950s.

If it was ludicrous in 1984, some 27 years ago, it’s much, much dopier today. There is no more rural America except in the low-income country backwaters. Everything has been corporatized and Walmart-ized. The internet has opened everything up to every kid in the country. Outside of Mormon, Amish and Hassidic culture there are no more middle-aged farts who look like Dennis Quaid telling high school kids not to grind their hips on a dance floor. The early to mid 1950s, when fear of rock ‘n’ roll was at its height, was 55 to 60 years ago. And that’s over. The small-town elders who inveighed against Presley and who burned Beatles records in 1966 when John Lennon said “we’re more popular than Jesus” are dead and gone, or too old to matter.

Which is why the new Footloose is going to be awful, and why it’s going to take a lot of pain pills to get through Quaid’s performance as John Lithgow. I know, I know…the under-25 target audience won’t care because they’ll just be into the idea of grooving to a new Dirty Dancing before the actual remake comes along.