Bad Thing #1: Early this evening a young Latino couple was looking at the digital lobby board inside Hollywood’s Arclight plex. The guy walked forward, got into line and turned to the girl. “You wanna comedy? Or…what, action? A comedy?” The girl half-shrugged, seemed a bit bored. “I dunno…whatever,” she said. He shrugged also, turned back to the board. Those clayheads, I thought to myself. Forget glancing at Rotten Tomatoes. Forget wanting to see The Immortals or Breaking Dawn. They hadn’t even talked about the kind of film they might want to see. Empty Coke bottles.
Bad Thing #2: I couldn’t resist slipping into theatre #10 to see what was up with the projection of The Descendants. There’s always something a little bit wrong with the light levels or the sound at a commercial plex. (Moneyballlooked like hell when I caught it at Manhattan’s Lincoln Square last September.) Sure enough, the center-channel sound was weak and the dialogue was soft and thin, almost whispery. The Hawaiian music from the right and left channel was louder.
I went out to the lobby and told the manager that I’d seen The Descendants three times before — in Telluride, Toronto and at the Academy theatre on Wilshire — and that the sound was perfect each time. The manager tried the old “tilting the head slightly to the left or right” routine but otherwise he listened and nodded. “And I’m going to tell Fox Searchlight and Alexander Payne about this,” I said. “You have to take responsibility for what you do or don’t do. People aren’t really hearing the film that Payne made.”
I had a brief sitdown last Friday afternoon with A Dangerous Method director David Cronenberg. We had about twelve minutes, if that. Our last interview was, I think, 29 or 30 years ago to talk about Scanners. I still remember the intensity of that discussion and saying to myself as Cronenberg delivered his points, “Whoa, this guy doesn’t fool around…no digressions, no bullshit.” Here‘s the mp3.
There’s always some kind of twisted perversity in Cronenberg’s films. Which is what most of us, I gather, look forward to when a new one is about to be shown. It’s there in A Dangerous Method, for sure, but in a spotty, paint-dabby fashion. Keira Knightley brings it in those shrieking, belt-whipping scenes with Michael Fassbender, but the film, it must be said, is somewhat dryer and more cerebral than anything Cronenberg had made before, and this requires, I feel, an adjustment of expectations.
A Dangerous Method is “well-acted but extremely cool, aloof, studied and intellectually driven to a fare-thee-well,” as I noted in early September. You just have to be ready for that, and saying this is not a criticism. As I wrote on 10.20, “the talkiness plays better the second time. You go in knowing what it is and accepting that, and you settle into Christopher Hampton‘s script like an easy chair.”
My strongest feelings are still about about Knightley’s “highly agitated, face-twitching performance. “It’s fascinating but hard to roll with at times,” I wrote from the Telluride Film Festival, “particularly during the first 20 minutes to half-hour. Cronenberg told her to go for it in terms of facial tics and flaring nostrils and body spasms, etc. She does a jaw-jutting thing that hasn’t been seen since John Barrymore played Dr. Jekyll in the 1920 version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. At the same time Knightley brings a thrilling sexual intensity to the all-too-brief fucking and belt-whipping scenes with Fassbender.
“All in all Knightley is quite a handful — she throws you and pulls you in at the same time. It’s a high-wire, risk-taking thing, and Method really needs to be seen for this alone.”
A guy stood through most of a nearly seven-hour Anchorage-to-Philadelphia flight last July because he couldn’t stand sitting next to a 400-pound sea lion whose massive girth took up half of the standing-guy’s seat. The solution is simple, obvious and considerate to all parties. People who are absurdly obese (and there’s a very simple way of determining who’s excessive in this regard) have to pay for two seats. If they don’t like it, tough.
I don’t know what happened but I thought I’d posted this last night. There are several Drive parodies out there but this might be the cleverest. But only if Albert Brooks thinks so. Albert? You look at the column every so often (or so you indicated when we last spoke) so what’s the verdict? Good, decent, disposable…? At least it has a theme.
I’ve always loathed end-of-the-year holidays because of that awful flatline feeling . Every city becomes a version of San Francisco as seen by Gregory Peck though his submarine periscope in On The Beach. Everyone stops creating and endeavoring and running around and settles into eating and drinking and zoning out in front of LCDs and LEDs. There’s no joy in lying around like lazy seals. I remember feeling this way when I was eight.
But there’s nothing to be done about it. Every time a four-day Thanksgiving is about to begin I say to myself, “Okay, here it comes…the world is going to slip into downshift and nod-off mode, but the holiday is not going to get me. I’m going to live through it and when it’s all over and I’ve capitulated and done the lazy sit-down thing, I’ll never stuff myself with heaping portions of heavy food again. No, nor any of my folk. If I have to lie, steal, cheat or kill…as God is my witness, I’ll never eat anything but fruit again.”
Having sat down only a few days ago with actress Olivia Colman (Tyrannosaur), I was a bit surprised by her heavily altered prosthetic and be-wigged appearance as Carol Thatcher, daughter of former Priem Minister Margaret Thatcher, in Phyllida Lloyd‘s The Iron Lady. A columnist friend didn’t even recognize her, he told me this morning.
(l.) Olivia Colman as Carol Thatcher in The Iron Lady; (r.) Carol Thatcher herself.
Colman during our interview four days ago at L.A.’s Standard Hotel.
There’s nothing quite so depressing and deflating as falling in love with a film that you know is audacious and highly disciplined in the rockin’ high style and art-film achievement realm, and then you see it again with some Joe Schmoe Academy members and they go “ehh, I don’t know, it’s pretty good, not bad,” etc. Your spirit sinks into the swamp as you try to explain what they’ve all-but-completely missed.
(l. to r.) Miss Bala director Gerado Naranjo, Orson Welles, Michelangelo Antonioni.
Outwardly you’re smiling and maintaining your composure but inwardly you’re going “oh, my God” and reminding yourself that you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink it.
I had a moment like this following last night’s special invitational screening of Gerardo Naranjo‘s Miss Bala (20th Century Fox Int’l, 1.20.12), which is not “pretty good” or “meh” or “not bad” but incontestably brilliant. It’s a combination art film-and-violent action thriller that stays within the P.O.V. and the sensibility of a terrified victim (Stephanie Sigman‘s “Laura Guerrero”), and always keeps the violence, ignited by a ruthless Mexican drug-dealing gang, at a certain remove. It tells the story without any flash-bang cutting or jacked-up whirlygig camerawork or any other trick that puts you into the danger.
Unlike 97% of the action films out there, Miss Bala never revels in action adrenaline highs. It never pulls a Tarantino by saying to the audience, “Yes, of course, these are deplorable characters indulging in sadistic violence …but isn’t it fun to follow them around? Wheeee!” That’s one thing that qualifies it as an art film, and why guys like NY Film Festival honcho Scott Foundas have said it’s quite similar to a Michelangelo Antonioni film, or more particularly to The Passenger.
I shared the Antonioni analogy with former producer and “Real Geezers” commentator Marcia Nasatir last night and she emphatically agreed.
Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson, who attended the same screening and after-event, said that Miss Bala is also similar to Matteo Gerrone‘s Gomorrah. But unlike that Italian maifiooso film, Miss Bala has a charismatic and sympathetic lead performer (i.e., Sigman) who’s front and center during the whole ride while Gomorrah is an ensemble piece, and much darker and grimmer and utterly nihilistic.
Some women are having problems with the fact that Sigman’s character is cowed and afraid from the very beginning to the very end. We’ve all been trained to expect a lead character to somehow take charge of the situation and “do something” by the time Act Three rolls around. I mentioned the same thing about Elizabeth Olsen‘s character when I reviewedMartha Marcy May Marlene, to wit: “Once act three began I wanted her to do something, dammit…anything. Woman up!” But Naranjo isn’t just telling Sigman’s character’s story. He’s doing social portraiture by showing what a hell-hole Mexico has become since the drug wars began in ’06. He’s refusing to paste an uplifting ending upon a situation that defies that.
Anyway, I have a solution to try and push Miss Bala into the consciousness of Academy voters. Tell them over and over and over that “it’s an Antonioni film manifested through the skill of a brilliant young Mexican director.”
Most industry professionals and hangers-on will probably “hear” that, I think. Even the dilletantes have some knowledge of Antonioni, who became an art-film legend roughly 51 and a half years ago, starting with the May 1960 Cannes Film Festival debut of L’Avventura. James Toback used to deal with a New York-based distributor, a man he regarded as a thick-fingered vulgarian type, who would refer to the Italian director as “Tonioni.” It obviously meant something, he felt, that even a ruffian like this knew that Antonioni was important. So in most cases, I suspect, the name “Antonioni”, even though he peaked some 40 to 45 years ago, will unlock the door and let some light in.
The reason I included Orson Welles in the above triptych is that he used a similar ruse to unlock the minds of a film crew when he was shooting a film in the ’50s. It was a surreal scene that didn’t make a lot of sense in a certain light, and his dp and lighting guy and production designer and others were saying “what the hell is this scene about?” And Welles (or so the story goes) said to them, “Listen, guys, you have to understand that it’s a dream sequence.” And once they heard those two words they all relaxed and said, “Oh, we get it now!…fine, no worries…why didn’t you just say ‘dream sequence’ before?”
