Month: August 2012

Cosmopolis director David Cronenberg and star Robert Pattinson rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange this morning. There is meta and meta-meta — this is the latter. Cosmopolis is about an utterly rancid, soul-less and sell-loathing Wall Street guy coming to the end of himself. The metaphor is obvious, and so naturally the NYSE gave Croney and RPatz a big hand.

The Cosmopolis guys can do this stuff all day along and it doesn’t change the fact that the film is airless and suffocating.

“The non-stop chatter in Cosmopolis is so compact and persistent and airless your ears will eventually fall off,” I wrote last May. “With the same determination that Eric Packer — played by Pattinson with his usual glum, shark-eyed passivity — takes himself down, Cosmopolis talks itself to death.

“I was dying for a little silence, a little quiet outside the limo…a sunset, an empty, wind-swept boulevard at pre-dawn, an encounter with a friend or two. Oh, that’s right — Packer hasn’t any.

“Cosmopolis is too familiar, too regimented, too claustropobic, too obvious. Yes, you’re constantly aware of Cronenberg’s fierce behind-the-camera talent, his determination to stay with his apparently quite faithful screenplay of Don DeLillo‘s book and to not cop out by making a film about how Pattinson’s Eric Packer used to be human but is now an alien although there might be a way out. That’s not the Cronenberg way. He gives it to you his way, and you just have to sit there and take it.”

They have a wall phone with a coily cord on the floor of the New York Stock Echange? A wall phone with a cord?

Comedically-inclined talk shows are not a place to get down and share your hurt feelings. But if you’re going to appear on one and you know that subject #1 is not going to be the misbegotten Cosmopolis, you may as well man up and convey something of some interest…some indication of the color of your mood, some pithy banter. So what did Rpatz say to Jon Stewart last night when “the subject” came up? He shrugged and half-smiled and said, “I need to hire a publicist.”

Do you see now why he’s not such a good actor?

If I had been Stewart, I would said the following: “You know, you can’t be too demanding in this world. Nobody’s perfect. Everyone gets corrupted. We all make mistakes. I’m not alluding to anything specific, mind, but one way to look at it is this. If you were to get back together with a certain someone and if there’s, say, a 1 in 100 chance that somewhere down the road you might be the one to make a mistake…a brief dalliance that you half-succumb to and half-resist but it happens anyway, the kind of thing that you’ll remember with great fondness when you’re 87 years old but which you’re sorry for in the immediate aftermath…I haven’t been there but you probably have, right?…and if, let’s say, you get back together with a certain someone and that thing ever happens and you get busted for it, you’ve got this ‘get out of jail’ card that you can pull out of your wallet. Y’know? And she won’t be able to say a damn thing.”

The Jaws Bluray arrived today and I popped it in…well, a couple of hours later. And all I can say is that it looks a bit sharper, cleaner and more vivid than it ever did on a big screen. Back in the ’70s, I mean. For all I know the Jaws DCP will look just as clean and robust if projected on a big screen. Jaws director Steven Spielberg says exactly the same thing on the “restoration of Jaws” piece. Looks better, sounds better. But…

It’s still Jaws. It’s still that mid-level, beach-read, good-enough-but-don’t get-carried-away movie that made all kinds of money, blah blah. I haven’t seen it in five or six years…or is it 10 or 12 years? Anyway I watched about 40 minutes’ worth and it’s fine. It’s clever and crafty and obviously engrossing. But it’s just okay. I can’t for the life of me understand why people hop and down about this thing and go “wow, great film!”

At the very beginning the young blonde girl who’s about to get eaten is running along the beach with a drunk guy following, and rather than act like any normal or semi-normal human being on the planet earth, she takes her clothes off the Spielberg way. She yanks her sweatshirt off and drops it on a grassy sand dune to the right. Then she runs a bit more and pulls one of her sneakers off and throws it to the left. And then the other sneaker. And then her jeans. By the time she’s running into the water she’s scattered her clothes over a 100-foot stretch of beach.

Nobody would do that. They just wouldn’t. In the real world even a drunk girl would drop her clothes in a rough pile of some kind, but not in Spielbergland. Spielberg always finds some way of pulling you out of a film with unnatural human behavior.

I wrote the following last February: “The cheesy Ranker.com has a piece called “The Top 7 Manliest Sword-fights on Film.” Before reading it, I made a bet with myself that they wouldn’t include any of the sword fights in Ridley Scott‘s The Duellist (’77). And they haven’t. Either they’ve never seen it, or they don’t think Scott’s duels are adrenalized enough. In my book The Duellists is on par with Barry Lyndon.” Shout! Factory is releasing a Duellists Bluray on 11.20 — major news.

Earlier today U.S. District Court Judge Dale S. Fischer denied bail to the imprisoned Anthony Pellicano, Hollywood’s hotshot wire-tapper of the ’90s. But the highlights of Frank Swertlow‘s Wrap story (filed at 11:43 am) about the decision focus on the sadly diminished figure of Anita Busch, the former L.A. Times entertainment journalist who was famously intimidated by someone allied with Pellicano when a dead fish and a rose were left on her car windshield along with a note that said “stop.”

A “frail, frightened-looking” Busch delivered an “emotional appeal” at the hearing, Swertlow reports. On top of which she “limped” and “had a wheelchair with her, which she did not use to enter the courtroom.” Busch said her life “has been hell” and her career has been “destroyed” because she “lost sources” over her phone being wiretapped, and she has “lost health.” Swertlow writes that Busch “seemed scared of Pellicano and by the thought of his being released,” calling him “a domestic terrorist” who “has terrorized people for years.”

That may well be the case, but every time I read and think about Busch I feel badly for her, and I shake my head a bit. She’s had a very rough time over the past ten or twelve years, and I’m sorry for her hard luck, physical and otherwise. But the two basic rules about dealing with adversity and tough times are (a) if you’re thrown, dust yourself off and get back on the horse and (b) as hard as things can get someimes, always try to strike a match. Cursing the darkness can get old.

“Our rights come from nature and God, and not from government” — spoken by Republican Vice-Presidential candidate Paul Ryan a day or so ago.

The mind reels. Involuntary gag reflex. The Founding Fathers and the Constitution, Ryan seems to be saying, had relatively little to do with our basic freedoms. But what about those from other cultures and past periods who’ve had to struggle under tyranny? If Ryan is truly a man of God then he surely understands that God rules over all things, and therefore all nations. Which means, according to Ryan’s belief, that God has personally seen to the misery of tens of millions over the millenia, as most people over the last three or four thousand years have suffered under despotic, royal, authoritarian, non-Democratic regimes.

Perhaps Ryan is saying that the hunger to live and breathe and speak freely are inherently bestowed or instilled by a cosmic entity, whether or not these rights are successfully fought for, won and enjoyed. So maybe Ryan isn’t saying that the human rights are God-delivered or assured. Maybe he’s saying that the the freedoms enjoyed by citizens of liberal free societies begin as natural eternal longings, and whether or not they’re able to enjoy them is contingent on the luck of the draw and whether or not they’ve got that fighting spirit. By this understanding, the will to be free isn’t that strong among humans or we’d have seen the emergence of democratic governments a thousand or two thousand years ago instead of two hundred thirty-six years ago.

I don’t think most people are going to go this deep. I think most people are going to read the above statement and think, “What a simplistic-minded Sunday-school asshole.”

Ang Lee‘s Life of Pi (20th Century Fox, 11.21) will be the opening night attraction at the New York Film Festival. Now, I think, there’s a reason to seriously consider shelling out $1500 or so I can stay in Manhattan after Toronto and attend the New York Film Festival press screenings.

Not an easy decision, but I suppose it’s worth it. Sorta kinda. So I can be one of the first movie journalists to watch this kid Pi (played by Suraj Sharma) take a magical 3D sea journey with a Bengal Tiger, an orangutan and a zebra.

Except a little voice is whispering in my ear, “Don’t be a sucker…don’t do it…never trust movies about wide-eyed boys and animals and adventure.”

I don’t know what to do with this seething resentment I’m feeling about Manhattan hotel rates and apartment sublet deals. They used to be steep. Now they’re somewhere between ludicrous and brutal. I’ve come to seriously despise the way all New Yorkers — East Side, West Side, top to bottom, Hoboken to Astoria to Howard Beach — are determined to rape, pillage and gouge all visitors. With random exceptions they’re all pretty much on the same ethical level as Blackbeard or Long John Silver or Bob Diamond of Barclays. But if I want to see Life of Pi seven or eight weeks before it opens, I’ll have to agree to some kind of loathsome economic submission. Terrific.

Posted this morning in the “Don’t Buy The Bullshit” thread, and re-posted here to attract more attention: “I don’t think you guys understand. You might think you’re deeper, smarter, wiser or more perceptive than the New Yorkers who saw the full-length Heaven’s Gate at that disastrous afternoon-and-evening screening at Cinema 1 in November of 1980. But I have to tell you (and maybe you need to sit down first) but you’re not. Or not necesarily, at the very least. By and large you’re roughly on the same level of brain power and sensitivity.

“And I was there, man. I was in that audience, and in all my years of watching films I have never felt such a sucking sensation in a room…a feeling of almost total inertia from the oxygen having been all but vacuumed out by a filmmaker with a ridiculous and over-indulged sense of his own vision and grandeur, and by a resultant approach to filmmaking that felt to me like some kind of pretentious waking nightmare.

“I could feel it in one of the earliest scenes, when John Hurt is addressing his graduating Harvard classmates in a cocky, impudent, self-amused fashion and Joseph Cotten (as a character called “Reverend Doctor”) is shown to be irked and offended by the snide and brazen tone of Hurt’s remarks, and right away I was saying to myself, ‘What is this? I can’t understand half of what Hurt is on about and I don’t give a damn why Cotten is bothered. If this is indicative of what this film will be like for the next three hours then Cimino is fucked and so am I because I have to sit here and watch it.’

“What happened? How could Cimino have made such an oppressive and impenetrable film as this? The basis of the ‘misunderstood masterpiece’ revisionism is basically about the fact that (a) it’s very pretty to look at, very pastoral and majesterial, etc., (b) it offers a severely critical view of the vicious tendencies of gangster capitalism (hence the admiration in certain lefty and left-European circles), and (c) it’s very expansive and meditative and serene in a certain 19th Century fashion. I understand how some could glom onto these three talking points and build that into a revisionist mentality.

“But don’t start up with the ‘oh, what did they know back in 1980?’ crap. They knew. I know. I was there.”

Deadline‘s Michael Fleming is reporting Christoph Waltz — Waltz! — will star in Terry Gilliam‘s The Zero Theorem. Waltz will play “an eccentric, reclusive and angst-plagued computer genius” named Qohen Leth who’s working “on a mysterious project aimed at discovering the purpose of existence — or the lack thereof — once and for all.”

HE memo to Gilliam and Waltz: I figured this out years ago and have explained it once or twice in this column. The purpose of human existence is the same one shared by trees, grass, insects, trout, elephants, cats, dogs, worms, poisonous snakes and armadillos, which is to manifest and re-produce for the elemental purpose of manifesting and re-producing. To be is to be is to be…that’s it! For sentient beings with the ability to read, write and make movies the additional challenge is to devise a philosophy that permits an enthusiastic and whole-hearted continuance of this process without succumbing to depression (see: any Woody Allen film after Bananas) or self-destruction or mindlessness (see: Fight Club).

So now that we know, why would anyone want to spend two hours in the company of a guy who’s trying to figure this out, especially one with a dipshit name like Qohen Leth?

Variety‘s Jeff Sneider joined Sasha Stone and I for a discussion of this and that in an Oscar Poker-ish, grab-bag, drill-down fashion. We talked about right now…howz that? I refuse to describe it any further. Dang-ah-lang-ah-ding, dang-ah-lang-ah-lang-ah-ding. Here’s a stand-alone mp3 link. Note: Link corrected…sorry for earlier error.

Take a gander at this Democracy Corps/Greenberg-Quinlan-Rosner report and tell me the election isn’t all but settled now in Obama’s favor. Note: A little more than 24 years ago my ex-wife Maggie and I (then married) went around West Hollywood and West LA and wild-posted Robbie Conal‘s anti-G.H.W. Bush “It Can’t Happen Here” art sheet.

On 8.30 the Venice Film Festival will honor director-screenwriter-producer Michael Cimino with a Persol Award, and then screen a digitally restored edition of Heaven’s Gate (’80). In a statement, festival director Alberto Barbera called the ceremony “a belated but long overdue acknowledgment of the greatness of a visionary filmmaker” who was “gradually reduced to silence after the box-office flop of a masterpiece to which the film producers contributed with senseless cuts.”

Nope, that’s not accurate. Heaven’s Gate has always been and absolutely always will be a stunningly bad film, very handsomely composed, yes, but flaccid and showoffy but absolutely seething with directorial wanking and certainly without any narrative or thematic substance, at least as I define these. And yet Cimino kept his hand in after Heaven’s Gate and made four subsequent films — Year of the Dragon (’85), The Sicilian (’87), The Desperate Hours (’90) and Sunchaser (’96).

For those who haven’t read Steven Bach‘s “Final Cut: Dreams and Disaster in the Making of Heaven’s Gate” (which was later retitled as “Final Cut: Art, Money and Ego in the Making of Heaven’s Gate“) or seen Michael Epstein‘s 2004 doc based on the book, please take the time. The entire Epstein documentary, lasting 78 minutes, is on YouTube in eight parts.

I hated Heaven’s Gate when I first saw it nearly 32 years ago, and I couldn’t stay with it when I tried it a second time at home about nine years ago. Should I try it a third time when Criterion puts out their Bluray version?

I attended the second critics screening at the Cinema I on November 17th or 18th of 1980, and stood at the bottom of the down escalator as those who’d seen the afternoon show were leaving. I asked everyone I knew what they thought on a scale of 1 to 10. I’ll never forget the deflated, zombie-like expression on the face of journalist Dan Yakir as he muttered “zero.”

Don’t buy the Criterion Bluray (if and when it appears), and don’t buy the bullshit. This whole “Heaven’s Gate is a misunderstood masterpiece” crap was started by F.X. Feeney way back when. I dearly love Feeney, one of the most impassioned and mountain-hearted film essayists around (and also a first-rate screenwriter) but I respectfully dispute this revisionist drool.