A good friend who goes to a lot of parties and film festivals often talks about how delightful it is to run into people who are “so nice.” Meaning that they’re friendly, gracious, funny, witty, open-hearted. It’s the easiest thing in the world, of course, to turn on your nice lights at a social gathering. The worst psychopath in the world can put on a “nice” face anywhere, any time. About as meaningful as a snow cone.
What impresses me is whether a person exudes a straight, no b.s. vibe, and looks you in the eye when they shake hands and seems to know one or two things. And if they have that steady Zen thing going on. And, once you know them a bit, if they’re reliable and trustworthy. And if they’re “nice” to waiters and shuttle drivers and phone company employees. (Unless, you know, the waiters and/or phone company employees are stupid or something.) “Nice” and $1.75 will get you a bus ticket.
There’s a little bit of Strangers on a Train thread in the plot for this, the latest Nicolas Cage potboiler. Guy Pearce isn’t exactly Bruno Antony with a shaved head, but he’s talking the same basic concept of murder-swapping. If only they’d stuck with the original title — The Hungry Rabbit Jumps.
Yesterday’s Oscar Poker was recorded a few hours after yesterday’s Oscar nomination announcements. Just myself and Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone. Here’s a stand-alone mp3 link.
Julie Delpy, director-star of 2 Days in New York, at the film’s after-party. Costar Chris Rock made it known he didn’t want his picture taken at the party…cool.
Filmmakers Morgan Spurlock and Jessica Yu at a Zoom party for a special press preview for the Short Films, Big Ideas initiative, which were presented the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. The five films by Jessica Yu, Phil Cox, David W. Leitner, Jeremiah Zagar and Jessica Edwards & Gary Hustwit had their world premiere on Tuesday, 1.24, at 12pm EST on www.vimeo.com/focusforwardfilms.
Set in the early ’90s, James Marsh‘s Shadow Dancer is a low-key LeCarre-esque thriller about a young IRA-allied mother (Andrea Riseborough) who’s nabbed by a British MI5 officer (Clive Owen) and told she’ll go to prison and lose her relationship with her young son unless she turns snitch and rats out her own. She reluctantly agrees, and you know (or can certainly guess) what probably happens from this point on.
Andrea Riseborough in James Marsh’s Shadow Dancer.
But you can’t know until you see it, of course, and I’m telling you the ending delivers jolts and eerie turns that I didn’t see coming.
Marsh (best known for the docs Project NIM and Man on Wire) plays everything down and subtle and subdued — the acting, the lighting, the colors. The grayish mood of Shadow Dancer recalls, welcomely, the BBC adaptations of John Le Carre‘s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Smiley’s People.
My only problem was that I missed at least 30% or 40% of the dialogue due to those damn impenetrable Irish accents. I understood Owen and his MI5 colleagues pretty well, but it was touch and go with Riseborough and her IRA brethren. I was able to catch an Irish word or two or a phrase now and then, but I was mostly in the dark. This has happened many, many times before (particularly with Paul Greengrass‘s Bloody Sunday). Films with significant Irish dialogue need to be subtitled — period.
I can’t wait to see Shadow Dancer again on Bluray, when the subtitles will presumably be added, at least as an option.
The passionately praised Beasts of the Southern Wild, which I finally saw last night at Park City’s MARC, is everything its admirers have said it is. It’s a poetic, organic, at times ecstatic capturing of a hallucinatory Louisiana neverland called the Bathtub, down in the delta lowlands and swarming with all manner of life and aromas, and a community of scrappy, hand-to-mouth fringe-dwellers, hunters, jungle-tribe survivors, animal-eaters and relentless alcohol-guzzlers who live there.
It’s something to sink into and take a bath in on any number of dream-like, atmospheric levels, and a film you can smell and taste and feel like few others I can think of.
Directed and co-written by Benh Zeitlin, Beasts is much more of a naturalistic object d’art than a narrative-driven drama, at least as most of us define that term. The emphasis is on sensual naturalism-wallowing — lush, grassy, muddy, oozy, leafy, stinky, primeval, non-hygenic, slithery, watery, ants up your ass — with a few story shards linked together like paper clips.
The narrative, as such, focuses on six-year-old Hushpuppy (Quvenzhane Wallis) and her father Wink (Dwight Henry) and a third-act search for Hushpuppy’s mother.
Wallis is a hugely appealing young actress — beautiful, spirited, wide-eyed — and she pretty much carries the human-soul portions of the film. But Henry’s dad, who cares for Hushpuppy in his own callous and bullying way, is a brute and a drunk and mostly a drag to be around, and after the fifth or sixth scene in which he’s raging and yelling and guzzling booze, there’s a voice inside that starts saying “I don’t know how much more of this asshole I can take.”
Here comes the part of the review that the keepers of the precious Sundance flame are going to dislike. If you apply the classic Jim Hoberman “brief vacations” concept of a great film not only being a kind of “sacred text” but constituting a realm that a viewer would be happy to literally take up residence within, Beasts of the Southern Wild does not, for me, pass the test.
I’m sorry but after a while it began to feel too oozy and filthy and slimey and boozy. I don’t like hanging with people who drink all the time — alcoholism is boredom incarnate — and I don’t like walking around in oil-like, knee-deep mud and feeling bugs and snakes on my body as I sleep and running across the occasional alligator who’s looking to bite my leg off. I come from the suburbs of New Jersey, and I like taking hot showers and sipping wine in streetside cafes and sleeping on clean sheets and watching Blurays with my cats. And I hate snakes.
I not only didn’t want to live in the world of Beasts of the Southern Wild — a part of me wanted to escape after an hour or so. I wanted to walk or hitchhike to New Orleans, and catch a plane to Orlando and stay for a few days with Steve and Jackie Siegel, the stars of The Queen of Versailles. All right, scratch that…too extreme. But it made me think about clean roadside motels and rental cars and hot baths and power toothbrushes and all the comforts of home.
In short, I aesthetically respect and admire Beasts of the Southern Wild, but watching it almost turned me into a Republican. Until I left the theatre and went down to John Sloss‘s Cinetic Media party at Bing and I talked to some friends and started to feel like myself again.