Month: September 2011

It is significant, I think, that Marshall Fine is a fan of Rod Lurie‘s Straw Dogs. Partly because Fine is an author of “Bloody Sam,” a well-written book about Sam Peckinpah, director of the original 1971 version. And secondly because Fine didn’t like Lurie’s excellent Nothing But The Truth…weird.

James Marsden, Kate Bosworth in Rod Lurie’s Straw Dogs.

Lurie’s Straw Dogs “is a solid, tense drama that packs a wallop and tells its story on Lurie’s own terms,” he writes. “It’s less a remake than a new version of the story, filtered through Lurie’s vision.

“Sam Peckinpah’s 1971 film was a violent hymn to the notion of the territorial imperative: that man is inherently violent and prone to expand his territory at the expense of others, whether he needs to or not. Peckinpah celebrated the animal within, using a mathematician (Dustin Hoffman) to further demonstrate that even the mildest sort harbors a killer within.

“Lurie follows Peckinpah’s story closely, though he’s transferred the setting from rural England to the small-town American South. Yet he has made a film which, while just as violent and tense as Peckinpah’s, seems less Darwinian, if only by degree.

“In Lurie’s version, the couple, David and Amy Sumner (James Marsden and Kate Bosworth), return to her family home on the Gulf Coast in Mississippi after the death of her father. She’s the small-town girl made good, the homecoming queen who ditched the football captain to escape the South and find stardom in Hollywood. David is an amused Ivy Leaguer, a preppie who has made it as a screenwriter, who views this move to the South as though he were a sociologist studying a previously undiscovered tribe.

“The old homestead needs some repairs, so he hires a group of locals, led by Charlie (Alexander Skarsgard), who turns out to be the football star that Amy left behind. When Charlie and his roughneck crew show up, there’s obviously a yawning cultural chasm between them and David, no matter what he tries to do to be accepted.

Except, of course, that he’s always looking down his nose at them, even when he’s trying to be one of the boys. They, in turn, are cagey to the point of being predators; their Southern politesse masks a vicious passive-aggressive quality that is constantly testing the boundaries that David will allow them to cross.

“David sees himself as the civilized man, the guy who is sure that there is a rational, if not intellectual, solution to any problem. When that problem is a dead cat left hanging in their closet, subtlety would seem to go out the window.

“Lurie beautifully sets up the tension between the rednecks’ casual cruelty, David’s determined high-mindedness and Amy’s increasing frustration with David’s passivity. But he also reveals David as a man who can only be pushed so far before he makes his stand.

“And what a stand it is. This is, after all, a movie based on a book called The Siege at Trencher’s Farm and the film’s finale is every bit of that: a bloody battle with improvised weapons and a kill-or be-killed ethos. Lurie lights the fuse that leads to this explosion early on — yet even having David’s current project be a screenplay about the siege of Stalingrad isn’t enough foreshadowing for the brutality of the final confrontation between David, Amy and Charlie’s crew.

“That sequence drew squeals of outrage from sensitive moviegoers when Peckinpah’s film came out. So did a rape scene that implied a certain pleasure on the part of the victim in the original, something Lurie eliminates in this film. There’s none of that macho ‘See? She really wanted it after all’ to the assault when it happens here.

“Lurie’s film is bound to be just as controversial as Sam Peckinpah’s original for its depiction of violence. But Straw Dogs is a smart, provocative — and exceptionally intense and exciting — movie.”

I’ve never wanted to be in the same room as Bucky Larson: Born To Be A Star. I knew that instantly when I saw the ads. I don’t want to smell it, think about it, acknowledge it…nothing. I don’t even want it in the dumpster in my garage. Since opening two days ago it’s become common knowledge that it has a 0% Rotten Tomatoes rating. So there’s been a kind of competition this weekend to top the most withering putdowns filed by critics. if anyone’s seen it, have at it.

I saw Rod Lurie‘s Straw Dogs three months ago, and wrote down some reactions within hours of seeing it. Now that it’s about to open, I can let them out. This new Dogs is flawed here and there, but it’s also the most visceral, straight-from-the-solar-plexus film that Lurie has ever made. And it’s spooky in a couple of ways that Sam Peckinpah, director of the original 1971 version, never divined.

At the very least Lurie’s version is a mature complement to Peckinpah’s. There’s no reason at all to trash it. It may be your cup or not, but it’s an entirely respectable work.

Warning: SPOILERS follow, but not really if you’ve seen the Peckinpah version because Lurie’s follows that film very closely.

Lurie’s is also coming from the head (i.e., reshuffling the cards from a liberal-minded position) and Gordon Williams’ book, and the rape scene has been overly fiddled with, but it’s a serious “growth film” for Rod so hats off.

Here’s exactly what I wrote on June 16th: “In some ways Rod Lurie‘s Straw Dogs is a more complex film that Sam Peckinpah‘s 1971 original, and I was generally pleased with it. But I just couldn’t get the Peckinpah version out of my head. It’s been finessed and finagled and modified in some ways, but it’s basically the same film that Peckinpah made only less…make that not misogynist at all.

“The truth? Rod’s film sometimes — not always but often — made me feel like I did when I was watching Gus Van Sant‘s Psycho.

“I’m sorry but I feel that Peckinpah’s siege is better handled than Rod’s (better cutting, more tension). And the key flashpoint in the siege scene is when the old blowhard drunk struggles with the local constable over a shotgun, which accidentally fires and kills the latter. Lurie decides to play this scene differently, and, in my opinion, not as well.

“Henry Niles, the village idiot, is a problem. I accepted the idea of this character in a small English hamlet in 1971, but not in the American South of 2009. And Lurie didn’t need to have him kill Janice. He just needed to put his hands under her blouse & Woods needed to see that…or see her hand-jobbing or fellating him. That’s all it would take to trigger a huge rage. And then you’d have a truly ironic situation, given the rape of Kate Bosworth by Alexander Skarsgard.

“Marsden is quite good, and is clearly more sympathetic than Hoffman’s David Summer.

“But Rod’s version isn’t as good in the matter of Amy. Sexist pig that he was, Peckinpah had Susan George‘s Amy figured out better than Rod has Kate’s worked out. Bosworth is less of a not-terribly-bright and manipulative tart but there’s something a bit vague & half-and-half about her.

“Who runs barefoot through the woods? That was ridiculous. She’s going to run barefoot over stones and sticks and pine cones and chipmunk shit?

“Amy’s striptease at the window somehow seems more blatant and teasing than Susan George pulling off her sweater. She does a slow unbuttoning thing…blatant. Not real. Too much.

“Skarsgard doesn’t hit her to make her submit during the rape? A rapist would probably do that. Lurie’s version of the rape scene feels like a p.c. intervention. It basically feels abbreviated. It’s been cut too much. And the ass-fucking aspect is completely wimped out on, I feel. This is not a nice story about nice people doing nice things. So why even make this film if your’e going to do it half-assed? Why water it down?

“All in all, Straw Dogs is somewhere between a pretty good film and a very good film, and an ADULT film…a very interesting and very intelligent re-do all in all, but it’s simply not better than Peckinpah’s version — that’s a fact. But on its own terms, it’s a full meal and intelligent and decently calibrated.”

Sony Pictures Classics’ Michael Barker and Tom Bernard hosted their annual TIFF dinner last night in Yorkville. You’d never know it from the lack of a jump-page indication, but I’ve run five photos from last night’s festivities so click on the headline and view the whole thing.

Take Shelter star Michael Shannon, director Jeff Nichols at last night’s Sony Classics’ dinner at Michele’s Brassierie (or whatever it’s now called).

Take Shelter costar Jessica Chastain.

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I’ve been saying to journalist pals that “if you don’t put your foot down and show some discipline in the face of all the Toronto Film Festival temptations” — junket interviews, dinners, parties, panels, lunches, pretty girls — “you can easily fill your days without seeing any films.” And they’ve all agreed to a man/woman…of course, easily!

I have my five or six stories per day quota to fill plus my usual evening social-political shenanigans (i.e., a couple of parties per night or a dinner and a party), and with that daily load I’ve been fitting in only two and 1/2 films per day. I used to be able to fit in at least three.

Earlier today I saw Sarah Polley‘s Take This Waltz (at 9:30 am) and Whit Stillman‘s Damsels in Distress (at 12:30 pm). I then retired to a Starbucks to bang out some stories before catching The Oranges at 4:30 or whenever. But I couldn’t get going right away and piddled around and eventually decided to blow off The Oranges. It’s now 5:05 pm and I have the Albert Nobbs dinner from 6 pm to 8:30 pm. I’ll try to post the Waltz/Damsel reviews later tonight. Maybe. No, definitely…if I’m not too whipped. I can work solid for about 12 hours but then I need to eat, drink and recharge.

I haven’t seen Nick Broomfield‘s Sarah Palin, You Betcha! or Roland Emmerich ‘s Anonymous or Fernando Meirelles‘ 360 or Michael Winterbottom‘s Trishna. Four full viewing days left after tonight, and then back to NYC.

I saw The Raid yesterday afternoon and it was a total bum steer — a murky, grainy, blue-tinted bullshit Asian shoot-em-up macho chopsocky cheese-whiz movie. Me to critic friend: “Why would you, a bright sophisticated film guy, recommend this thing to me? Why?” Critic friend to me: “Because the action is crazy.” I hate hate HATE Asian action films. Whump….hah! Whuh-pah! Whoof-hoof-whunh! Choppy-kick, slap, thunk, chest punch, neck punch, groin punch, finger-snap….whuh! Whah! Hahh!

You don’t beat this festival. It beats you, every time.

Jonathan Levine‘s 50/50 (Summit, 9.30) is an exceptionally honest, no-punches-pulled, very honorably acted adult drama about a young guy (Joseph Gordon Levitt) grappling with The Big C. It’s seasoned with occasional laughs, for sure, but there’s no way this is a light mood comedy, as the 50/50 trailers have implied. And I mean that with the utmost respect.

Based on screenwriter Will Reiser‘s brush with cancer a few years ago, 50/50 is about an

obviously “difficult” subject, markeing-wise. A significant portion of the public (i.e., people over 40 or 45 or 50 who think of films solely as recreational entertainments that are going to make them feel good and giddy in the same way that a Quaalude or a tab of Ecstasy is going to make them feel that way) is going to presume that this will be a downish, difficult or unpleasant thing to sit through and avoid it like the plague.

A bright, fairly-with-it 40ish woman with whom I discussed 50/50 a couple of weeks ago was instantly repelled, I could tell.

The irony is that 50/50 is a straight-dealing, occasionally amusing drama about real human beings dealing with a real-deal issue — the kind of movie that I live for. Cheers to Levine and Reiser for making something very unusual and in fact exceptional. The writing is true and honest and clear. And Levine’s hand is straight and to the point and unfettered and not in the least pretentious. He serves the material well, as any good director should.

Levitt, Seth Rogen, Anna Kendrick, Bryce Dallas Howard, Anjelica Huston, Phillip Baker Hall and Matt Frewer — every last performer (including the guy who plays the doctor who delivers the bad news) delivers like a champ.

This is obviously Joseph Gordon Levitt’s most complete and wholehearted performance since 500 Days of Summer. I’ll never forgive Rogen for The Green Hornet but what a relief to see him in a really good film again. Howard’s unsympathetic character is well written and totally believable — not an admirable person, but that’s what a lot of people are like (i.e., scared of cancer, unable to cope in a supportive way). Kendrick gives her best performance ever, I feel. Huston’s best acting since…what, Prizzi’s Honor? The Grifters? (Her role isn’t big enough to really be compared to her ’80s work, but you know what I mean.)

The ending doesn’t tell you everything’s totally okay again, but it feels positive and right and optimistic, given what’s happened and given that Levitt’s hair has begun to grow back, and that’s how it should be.

The theme, I think, is something along the lines of “when the chips are down, you’ll find out who people really are.” There’s a line is Undefeated, the football doc that I saw a month ago, about how “football doesn’t build character, it reveals character.” That’s clearly what cancer does also, if this film is any kind of honest representation of what the experience is like, and I believe it almost certainly is that.

But is it a kind of “comedy”, as the press notes say and the trailers have more or less suggested? Despite Rogen’s best efforts (and they are considerable and highly appealing) and despite the very welcome humor that pops through when it needs to or ought to if the film is going to be at all natural and real, the answer is an emphatic NO. The answer to the Summit marketers is, due respect, “bless your hearts and souls but take the needle out of your arm.”

All mature art is mixture of drama and comedy. Any film that insists on being a drama-drama or a comedy-comedy doesn’t get this. Life is always a mixture of the two, so naturally 50/50 is flecked or flavored with guy and gallows humor here and there plus one or two anxious-mom jokes and/or chemo jokes and/or jokes about being in denial,etc., but there’s no way in hell anyone could honestly call it a “funny” movie, or a “comedic” or even half-comedic one, really.

The most you could say is that it’s amusingly jaunty at times. It’s good humored and good natured when the material calls for that…when it feels right and true. And any critic who knows quality-level filmmaking when he/she sees it is going to recognize that humor is definitely a part of the package, definitely an element. But the Summit marketers are in a major denial mode if they think they can get away with calling this a kind of comedy. They should put a lid on that here and now…just put it to bed.

Asked by TIFF co-director Cameron Bailey about his tendency to make movies about flawed characters facing tough times, The Descendants director Alexander Payne bristled and snapped, “I don’t mean to pick on you, but what movie doesn’t have characters who are flawed and are facing tough times in their lives? I’m sorry, but I was asked the same question at the press conference this afternoon, and I don’t get it.” — reported last night by TheWrap‘s Steve Pond.

Come to think of it, even if a character isn’t flawed — even if he’s Mr. Perfect — Jesus Christ, for example — all dramas are about struggles, woes and facing tough times. So whaddaya whaddaya, Bailey?

Unlike most I don’t immediately default to Charly when I think of Cliff Robertson, who died yesterday at age 88. I think instead of his performance as Higgins, the cynical CIA official in Three Days of the Condor (’75). Or his hammer-like performance as Joe Cantwell, the sanctimonious, Richard Nixon-esque presidential candidate in The Best Man (’64).

Charly is an agreeable, sweetly touching drama, and Robertson played a mentally challenged man with care and sensitivity. But gentle sentiment never ages well. For me something more interesting came out when Robertson played shits.

Christopher Plummer‘s beguiling performance in Mike Mills‘ Beginners (i.e., a 70ish dad who decides to come out and live his waning years as a gay man) has looked like a strong contender for Best Supporting Actor Oscar all along. But after seeing Plummer charm and electrify and ham it up and speechify in gloriously boozy Shakespearean fashion in Barrymore, which I saw a couple of hours ago at the Bell Lightbox, I’m all but convinced he has the Oscar in the bag.

Christopher Plummer during a post-screening interview with director Atom Egoyan following this afternoon’s screening of Barrymore.

As long as the Academy sees this low-budgeted Canadian film, that is. Once they all see it, the game will be pretty much over. Because Plummer isn’t just portraying the late John Barrymore, and is so doing reanimating all the flamboyance and lamentations and exaltations of a once-great actor’s career in his last year of life, he’s also playing, in a sense, himself. There are, after all, certain parallels.

Add this performance to Beginners plus Plummer’s turn in David Fincher‘s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, and he’s going to be awfully heard to beat.

Barrymore basically captures (and visually enhances to some extent) the stage show that Plummer performed in New York and Stratford in the mid ’90s, and lately performed again in Toronto earlier this year.

Consider this excerpt from Ben Brantley‘s N.Y. Times review of the stage show, called “A Dazzler of a Drink, Full of Gab and Grief“:

“The standup breakdown has become a reigning form in the theater of dead celebrities in recent years. Whether the focus is Truman Capote or Maria Callas, it allows its subjects to spin off witty anecdotes about glamorous lives while occasionally erupting into tormented cries showing the crippled soul beneath the tinsel. It’s like being seated next to a chatty trophy star at a dinner party with conveniently reduced potential for embarrassment.

”Barrymore is definitely part of this somewhat shameless tradition. And the actor in his waning years, a pathological specimen of self-parody, would seem to be an especially shameless subject. But under the assured, appropriately theatrical direction of Gene Saks, Mr. Plummer emerges as far more than the ”clown prince,” as Barrymore here describes himself with sour disgust, of America’s royal family of actors.

“What he achieves instead is the sense of a man whose vertiginous highs and lows were born of the same knot of impulses: a toxic mix of arrogance, insecurity, raw terror, the attention span of a 2-year-old and an insatiable appetite for the pleasures of the flesh. Mr. Luce, to his credit, has not given Barrymore a moment of revelation in which he untangles these elements. And Mr. Plummer seems to live intimately with all of them at once.”

The sidewalk sunlight was hell — I felt like Lawrence of Arabia‘s Gasim baking in the Nefud desert — as I stood for 90 minutes on King Street yesterday. I was a rush line to get into a public screening of Barrymore. I was sweating and melting, and I was beginning to smell like a gym towel on top of that. I will never again suffer like this in order to get into a TIFF public screening.