Day: September 13, 2011

I so love Neil Young‘s voice and phrasings and those great ballsy rocker chords and deeply stirring chord changes that I was willing to sit through Jonathan Demme‘s Neil Young Life. Even though it’s a fairly undisciplined, loose-shoe doc made up of (a) Young singing several of his songs in a May 2011 Toronto concert at Massey Hall and (b) footage of Young cruising through northern Ontario in a 50 year-old gas guzzler.

It’s a nice way to kill time, but 20 or 25 people bailed during the first 45 minutes, and then I bailed to write this.

The most visually distinctive thing about the doc is the way Demme stays super close on Young’s face, pushing his unshaven-old-bulldog features into our consciousness. I was sitting there muttering, “Do you have to keep showing me Neil Young’s white-whiskered waddle?” The truth is that Young, now 66, looks like Orson Welles‘ Quinlan in Touch of Evil. Then again Welles was only 42 when he made that classic noir in 1957 or early ’58.

John Calley, one of the most sophisticated and filmmaker-friendly studio chiefs of all time whose golden years were at Warner Bros. from 1968 to 1981 (and then later at Sony from 1996 to 2003), has left the earth. He was 81 years old, or close to that. I love the fact that when Calley was handed the Academy’s Thalberg award in 2009, he voiced an uncommonly frank remark about the life of a studio executive: “You’re very unhappy for a long period of time. And you don’t experience joy. At the end you experience relief, if you’re lucky.”

My first screening yesterday was Marc Forster‘s Machine Gun Preacher. It’s a unexceptional boilerplate thing about a criminally-inclined druggie (Gerard Butler) who finds Jesus and then goes off to the Sudan to build houses and wipe out the evil warlords, etc. It’s not a dreadful film but one completely untouched by any kind of vision or inspiration. “What’s happened to Marc Forster?,” I asked a couple of friends yesterday. “He used to be the artful Monster’s Ball guy, and now he’s made a so-so film in the style of an anonymous hack.”

Then came William Friedkin‘s Killer Joe, which is based on a Tracy Letts play. It’s technically adept and Matthew McConaughey is okay as a chillly psychopath type, but it’s primarily about a demimonde of intellectually challenged low-lifes ( Emile Hirsch, Thomas Haden Church, Gina Gershon, Juno Temple). After 40 minutes or so I was asking myself, “Why am I watching a movie about low-rent trailer-trash scuzballs nosing around like pigs in the gutter?” A friend says that Letts’ stagey dialogue is part of the problem, and that so far his films (this and Friedkin’s Bug) haven’t been satisfactorily translated to film.

Then I caught a 2 pm showing of Juan Carlos Fresnadillo‘s Intruders, which is basically another spooky-monster-in-a-child’s-bedroom movie in the tradition of Guillermo del Toro‘s Pan’s Labrynth. I felt I was seeing nothing original wbatsover. I’ve been feeling more and more fatigued and irritated by CG monsters who make that same deep digital-gurgly sound. Please…stop it!

Ralph Fiennes‘ Coriolanus was the last film of the day, and the only one with intelligent, commendable high-end chops. And yes, Vanessa Redgrave is a Best Supporting Actress contender, no question. Fiennes is a fine performer and a first-rate director who can handle action scenes with the best of them. Cheers to costars Gerard Butler, Brian Cox, Jessica Chastain, James Nesbitt and Paul Jesson.

One problem: I was able to understand maybe 20% of the dialogue. Maybe it was the sound system or the echoes in the Elgin theatre but at most I was able to decipher an occasional phrase or word or what-have-you. I’ve absorbed and enjoyed Shakespeare all my life, on stage and in films, and we all know that Shakespeare takes a little while to get used to and “hear.” But I couldn’t find the groove last night. And I’m in the older and educated Shakespeare movie demographic.

Think about the millions of under-40s moviegoers who wouldn’t watch this film with a gun at their head. How will they react, if they somehow find themselves watching it in a theatre? Solution: American colloquial subtitles that would offer Tobacco Road rephrasings of Shakespeare’s dialogue. I know — a dreadful idea. A metaphor for the end of civilization, etc. But we’re living in a debased and under-educated culture, and we might as well deal with it as practically we can.

I still haven’t reviewed Gerardo Naranjo‘s Miss Bala, but I tweeted twice about it two or three days ago. Tweet #1: “If Michelangelo Antonioni had made a movie about a Mexican beauty queen grappling with drug gangsters, the result might have been Miss Bala.” Tweet #2: “Naranjo has totally ignored the chaotic action aesthetic of Michael Bay & his acolytes, and delivered an action thriller with a truly elegant visual style. Long shots and almost no cut-cut-cut-cuting.”

I met with Naranjo late yesterday morning. Mostly I just flattered him and the film. I also met Stephanie Sigman, the star of the film, and took a couple of side-by-side shots of the two of them.

Naranjo is a bright, good-humored fellow who knows how to handle action and danger in a much, much more involving fashion that 90% of the bullshit scattershot action directors out there. Those guys know nothing, and Naranjo, I feel, is a master. “Bala” is the Mexican term for bullet, by the way. Miss Bala will open limited in mid October through Fox International and the marketing efforts of David Dinerstein.

Miss Bala director Gerardo Naranjo, star Stephanie Sigman at Hotel Intercontinental on Front Street — Monday, 9.12, 11:05 am.

I arrived a bit late at yesterday’s GE/Cinelan press breakfast, but the gist of the announcement was that GE and Cinelan are partnering on a new series of three-minute nonfiction shorts about innovation in various fields. It’s called the Focus Forward documentary project, and there’s an exclusive deal for Vimeo to present the results. Participating filmmakers include Morgan Spurlock, Liz Garbus, Joe Berlinger, Alex Gibney, Steve James, Barbara Kopple and Jessica Yu.