Month: September 2011

So I finally saw Steven Soderbergh‘s Contagion (i.e., in Manhattan the night before last) and re-discovered what I’d known all all along — that popcorn thrillers can be extremely cool and culturally nutritious if they’re (a) smart, (b) clever, (c) believable, (d) stylistically intriguing and (e) packaged with taste and class. Most thrillers fall short to varying degrees; many (especially those starring Jason Statham) are the cinematic equivalent of fast-food or Cinnabons. But not this puppy.

The Soderbergh pedigree alone should tell you that Contagion delivers with quiet pulsing authority and creepy chills. The reviews (mine included) will tell you that also. I can’t say it’s the kind of film that sticks to the ribs exactly because it’s mainly dramatizing standard fears of pandemic viruses and diseases that we carry around in our heads all the time anyway, but it’s done really well…and that’s the whole game. I especially admired Soderbergh’s decision to minimize emotional freakout scenes, which are always tedious when overdone.

My only beef is that I wish it could’ve lasted longer than 105 minutes. I could’ve easily rolled with a 120- or 150-minute version. (Maybe that’ll happen with the DVD/Bluray.) Oh, and I would’ve really liked to have seen it in IMAX. (Warner Bros. publicity didn’t offer that experience.) Maybe I’ll just pay for an IMAX viewing this weekend in Toronto. Why not, right?

Contagion is about a 100% fatal, one-touch virus that starts in Hong Kong and moves around the world in record time. It’s not just the “pathogen” (a term I wasn’t exactly familiar with before this film came out) that destroys so completely, but the panic that kicks in once people sense shortages and class favoritism and a lack of regulatory disclosure.

The strongest and most commanding characters are three women physician/scientists played by Kate Winslet, Jennifer Ehle and Marion Cotillard . After these three performance-wise comes Jude Law as an unscrupulous blogger who exploits the situation, etc. Matt Damon plays a kind of everyman dad who’s naturally immune to the plague. Laurence Fishburne plays a kind of compassionate bureaucratic elitist. Elliott Gould plays a diligent, independent-minded scientist. Bryan Cranston plays a military guy with a hairpiece. Demetri Martin plays a scientist with a 1964 Beatle haircut. Gwynneth Paltrow buys it early on, and then we get to see her scalp opened up and peeled back by autopsy guys. And John Hawkes, who always plays demonic nutters and fiends, surprises by playing a caring, mellow-attitude, non-psychotic dad….nice.

Contagion‘s ultra-believable script is by Scott Z. Burns. The production tab was $60 million or thereabouts. It began shooting almost exactly a year ago and wrapped last January. Soderbergh shot it himself with the Red Epic-X “Tattoo” digital camera. Locations include Switzerland, England, Dubai, San Francisco, Atlanta, Chicago, Hong Kong, Minneapolis, Japan, Brazil, Russia, and Malaysia.

George Clooney‘s The Ides of March (Sony, 10.7) is a smart, taut political thriller — well-acted, gripping (particularly after the shit starts hitting the fan in Act Two) with a chilly, bitter edge. In a term, fully enjoyable. Plus it packs a stiffer, heavier punch than Beau Willimon‘s Farragut North, a 2008 political play that Clooney and Grant Heslov adapted for the screen, and in so doing added a third act involving sexual indiscretion.

Is Ides about us on some level? Does it reflect or shed light upon some universal current that we’ve all come to know and understand? No — it’s a high-end, thoroughly adult popcorn movie, and that’s totally fine. There’s nothing to bitch about or put down here. Well, you can but why? To what end?

The plot is about three shrewd political operatives (played by Ryan Gosling, Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Paul Giamatti) working for a pair of Democratic Presidential candidates during the Ohio primary. One of them is an (relatively) blunt-spoken liberal played by Clooney, called Mike Morris, and the other we never meet up close.

What is Ides basically saying? That big-time politics can be a rough snarly game, and that being dedicated and hard-working doesn’t mean jack — you can still get taken down if you don’t play your cards extra-carefully. And that the game basically stinks.

The piece starts to get interesting when Gosling’s Stephen, a young hotshot aide to Clooney, slipping into a semi-casual affair with Holly Stearns (Evan Rachel Wood ), a 20 year-old who works for the Morris campaign as an intern. And then we learn that someone else has had it off with Holly…all right, I’m not saying any more. But is a little action on the side really shocking in a campaign environment? Or in the world of politics itself? Post-Anthony Weiner what’s so bad about a politician (or his campaign manager or whomever) having an affair or a one-nighter with a more-or-less willing participant? Sounds pretty tame to me.

One of the strongest lines in the film, spoken by Gosling, goes something like “you can go to war or ruin the economy or protect the rich, but you don’t get to fuck the interns.” But don’t you? I mean, isn’t that par for the course? And does anyone really care? I realize, of course, that some people do care, still, but I sure as hell don’t, and no one who’s been around does so, you know, let it go already.

The bottom line is that The Ides of March does the job of a good political thriller — it grabs and rivets and enthralls — and that’s fine with me. And it ought to be fine with everyone else. It’s worth the price of admission.

Passport in hand, I caught a 12:30 pm Porter flight to Toronto and was cabbing toward my rental on Soho street by 2 pm. I picked up my press pass 45 minutes later, and am now sitting next to Joe Leydon in theatre #1 at the Bell Lightbox, waiting for George Clooney‘s The Ides of March at 4 pm.

Bennett Miller‘s Moneyball (Sony, 9.23) is my idea of a triumph. A triumph of surprise and deception, I should add. It’s an emotionally low-key, thinking man’s Field of Dreams — a smart, true-to-life, business-of-baseball movie with a touch of the mystical and the sublime, and propelled along by a highly pleasurable lead performance by Brad Pitt. It’s not just the emotional and spiritual currents that makes it great, but the subtlety of them.

Earlier this year someone called it “the Social Network of baseball movies,” and that’s a close enough description except for the fact that Pitt’s lead performance is highly likable. Moneyball is definitely a nominee for Best Picture, Best Actor (Pitt), Best Director (Miller), Best Adapted Screenplay and so on.

And I don’t want to hear any crap about how it’s not rousing enough or sports-movie-ish enough or emotionally uplifting enough in a Rocky-Warrior sense. Fuck all that. This is a movie about how things work, and what it’s really like to say, “Wait, I’ve got a new idea” and to deal with the entrenched hate that always comes from that.

I’m not into baseball that much but I used to be, and Moneyball re-awakened my affection for the game precisely because it’s a little nerdy — my first text was that “it’s baseball nerd heaven” — and kinda mystical and because it doesn’t traffic in the standard sports-movie inspirational uplift crap…and yet it does do that in a nicely grown-up way.

On a rote level Moneyball is a complex, enjoyably verite, real-life, beautifully directed sports flick about two baseball-underdog iconoclasts (Brad Pitt as the Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane + Jonah Hill as a brilliant, Yale-educated nerd-dweeb that Pitt hires) using a kind of new-math strategy to try and win games. But that’s just the plot-engine aspect, the “hook”…whatever.

What it’s really about is the ecstatic, pure-gravy pleasure of watching a first-rate, award-quality fall movie that’s made for you and me and everyone out there who hated Stupid Crazy Love, plus the holy-shit excitement of a serious, Oscar-level Brad Pitt performance. Seriously. Pitt has never had a better-written part, or such a spirited, multi-layered and vulnerable character to dig into, or given a more primal movie-star performance in his life.

Yep — it’s Pitt vs. Clooney in this year’s Best Actor race. Okay, Pitt vs. Clooney vs. Leonardo DiCaprio as Gay Edgar Hoover.

Moneyball is exactly the kind of sports movie that I’ve recently come to love (i.e., partly a Friday Night Lights-type deal and partly an Undefeated thing but without a do-or-die locker-room speech or a “we’re Number One!” third-act win). It’s mystical, statistical, spooky, emotional and wonderfully original. And wonderfully “pure” in a sense. The complexity mixed with the spirituality and the political reality of things…just brilliant.

Plus it’s elevated all along by killer-level Steve Zallian-meets-Aaron Sorkin dialogue. Did I mention Pitt is great in it?

Put another way, it’s about organizing a baseball team in a different nerdy way (“saber-metrics” and all that) and the political pushback that Pitt and Hill have to deal with from almost everyone, but — this is the exceptional surprise element — it’s also about how the forces and wills of the Gods suddenly step in and make things happen when they feel like it. Angels over the outfield. So call it a nerdy baseball movie mixed with spirituality and politics and adult-level complications…sublime.

Hill is perfect — it’s easily his best performance since Superbad and his first normal-level adult performance. Phillip Seymour Hoffman is tight and testy and spot-on as the Okalnd A’s manager. Arliss Howard delivers a perfect third-act cameo. Robin Wright has exactly one scene as Pitt’s ex-wife (director Spike Jonze plays her boyfriend…hilarious!) Tammy Blanchard is visible as a player’s wife but has no lines. The woman in Pitt/Billy Beane’s life is his daughter (Kerris Dorsey), and she’s all the movie needs.

I’m going to repeat an observation from an HE reader that was initially posted last March:

“Sports films are almost never really ‘about’ sports. They always have a primary, more traditionally cinematic concern on their mind: a relationship on the rocks or a budding romance, the rise of the downtrodden or the triumphant return of the forgotten or discarded. Even the notion of the big game being won is a well-trodden, pedestrian conceit that serves as the usual metaphor for the final challenge a protagonist or team must face.

“Moneyball may well be the first sports film not seen through the prism of a romance a la Bull Durham, a character drama a la The Blind Side, a tragedy a la Brian’s Song, or a comedy a la Major League. Rather, it is the first of its kind: a sports film seen through the prism of sports.”

My heart fluttered when Grace Kelly appeared in this Dior J’adore spot. The appearances of Marlene Dietrich and Marilyn Monroe are pretty cool also. I first wrote about the reanimation of dead actors in a 1991 Empire piece. Back then people thought that the ability to reconstitute and re-use an actor so that he/she could actually “costar” in a feature was maybe 20 or 25 years off. I guess not, but I really want to see this happen someday.

Yesterday TheAtlantic.com’s Kasia Cieplak-Mayr von Baldegg posted a short reel of “process plate” rear-projection footage of downtown Los Angeles, shot sometime around ’48 or ’49, I’m guessing. “If it was ever used, it was seen fuzzy and out of focus,” she wrote. “Today, however, it’s amazing documentation of a lost neighborhood.

“Watch the signs, the spectators and passersby, and the streetscapes, and marvel how historical images can carry evidentiary value that no one ever imagined they would.”

Being at the Telluride Film Festival caused me to miss a 9.3 Maureen Dowd N.Y. Times column that openly asked if President Obama is doomed, primarily due to the wimp factor. In ’09 and ’10 many worried that Obama was becoming Jimmy Carter. I think he’s now surpassed that feeling of late ’70s Carter enervation. There’s just a general sense that Obama can’t man up about anything, particularly regarding the Republicans.

“There’s nothing the Republicans say that [Obama] won’t eagerly meet halfway,” Dowd wrote.

“No. 2 on David Letterman‘s Top Ten List of the president’s plans for Labor Day: ‘Pretty much whatever the Republicans tell him he can do.’

“On MSNBC, the anchors were wistfully listening to old F.D.R. speeches, wishing that this president had some of that fight,” Dowd wrote. “But Obama can’t turn into F.D.R. for the campaign because he aspires to the class that F.D.R. was a traitor to; and he can’t turn into Harry Truman because he lacks the common touch. He has an acquired elitism.

“MSNBC’s Matt Miller offered ‘a public service’ to journalists talking about Obama — a list of synonyms for cave: ‘Buckle, fold, concede, bend, defer, submit, give in, knuckle under, kowtow, surrender, yield, comply, capitulate.’

“The days of spinning illusions in a Greek temple in a football stadium are done. The One is dancing on the edge of one term.”

So this means what? Middle-of-the-roaders are actually going to vote for that maniac Rick Perry? No…that can’t happen. Too much. Which is what might actually save Obama from being voted out of office. Weak and wimpy as he may seem, at least he’s not Perry. The Obama team should put that slogan on a bumper sticker.

When you’ve got the likes of Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham dismissing Sarah Palin‘s credibility as a presidential contender and calling her followers a small, hair-trigger fringe, what is there left for Nick Broomfield‘s You Betcha! doc to say?

Especially with Undefeated, that Palin hagiography doc, having commercially tanked and Palin herself having thoroughly discredited herself since she quit the Alaskan governorship and particularly since her “blood libel” speech in the aftermath of the Gabriele Giffords shooting. What else is there to say?

Sarah Palin: You Betcha!, which premieres this week at the Toronto Film Festival, has a domestic theatrical deal with Freestyle Releasing and a plan to open in New York and L.A. on 9.30.

Earlier today Movieline‘s Julie Miller riffed on the trailer for The Big Year (20th Century Fox, 10.14), a Ben Stiller-produced comedy that looks like a non-cancer-afflicted Bucket List meets “The Great Outdoors meets Planes, Trains & Automobiles meets Jack Black eating pretzels in his underwear,” as Miller noted. The costars are Steve Martin, Jack Black and Owen Wilson.

And yet Howard Franklin‘s script is based on Mark Obmascik‘s “The Big Year: A Tale of Man, Nature and Fowl Obsession” — a book of amusing reportage about three guys who spent all of 1998 watching several hundred species of birds. Okay? Guys spending thousands to watch birds.

The trailer underplays this angle, of course, making the film seem like a collection of the same old sardonic humor moments and comedic pratfalls and misfortunes that always occur when Hollywood stars encounter Mother Nature to any degree.

Declaration of Comedic Principle: it isn’t funny to watch anyone fall off a Joshua Tree-like rock hill. Falling and bruising your bones and muscles and ligaments hurts. Even if you don’t break anything the ache and stiffness stays with you for days.

The point of the tagline “from the director of The Devil Wears Prada and Marley and Me” (i.e., Daniel Frankel) is to make guys like me feel lethargic or depressed or want to drink hemlock, or possibly all three as a package deal.

The poster, however, spells out the bird-watching thing fairly explicity, I think, so Fox can’t be accused of ducking the beak-and-feather aspect entirely.

Keep in mind that Franklin wrote and directed those two culty-quirky Bill Murray comedies that hever quite caught on, Quick Change and Bigger Than Life, and that he adapted a third Murray dud, The Man Who KNew Too Little. Franklin also directed that Joe Pesci “Weegee” movie called The Public Eye. He also wrote Ridley Scott’s Someone to Watch Over Me and The Name of the Rose and Antitrust, which starred Tim Robbins as a Bill Gates-y software billionaire.

Interruptus Schmuptus Update: I’ve gotten new emergency passports in less than a day in Los Angeles and Paris, but New York’s passport bureaucracy is another story. A story you don’t want to hear about. Bottom line is that an L.A. friend is overnighting my passport to NYC and so I’ll be flying to Toronto tomorrow. Porter Air charged me $345 for a new one-way ticket. They would have charged $600-something but they’re offering a special 50% discount sale at the moment. Nice guys!

Newark Airport bulletin: I’ve brilliantly left my passport back in Los Angeles so no flying to Toronto and the Toronto Film Festival until I head back into town and over to the U.S. Consulate at Rockefeller Center and obtain temporary papers. Estimated cost of error (including round-trip NYC-to-Newark cab fare): $250, perhaps more.

Earlier: My Porter Airlines flight to Toronto leaves at noon, and then I’ll have to get situated and pick up the press pass and all that so filings will be few and far between. Attending the Telluride Film Festival definitely put a dent into my Toronto must-see list, and that’s good.

Late last night it was announced that Clint Eastwood‘s J. Edgar will premiere at the AFI Fest 2011 on 11.3. The Hollywod-based fest will run from 11.3 to 11.10. Hence the launch of a possible Best Picture campaign, and a likely Best Actor punch-through for Leonardo DiCaprio as Gay Edgar Hoover. Naomi Watts, Armie Hammer and Judy Dench costar.

Yesterday I was trying to think of a way to re-activate the Eddie Murphy-as-Oscar host conversation, but it would have just been a replay of the 9.4 kick-around so I dropped it. But let’s consider Tom O’Neil‘s assessment. One, Murphy is a humbled, partially unknown 50 year-old whose career “[has] been in decline in recent years.” Two, he’s nonetheless a player and a survivor whose career “may be back on the upswing soon” with the release of Tower Heist and A Thousand Words. And three, he’s funny.

My earlier point was that for Murphy to really be funny in his own skin (or at least the one I got to know with after twice watching him live in the early to mid ’80s), he has to go blue and scatalogical and liberally reference the realm of asses and trim and other primitive urges. And howz he gonna do that on the ABC network? We’d all love to see him go Buckwheat, of course, but that’s too far back in the canon, too yesteryear.