Day: September 6, 2012

Joe Wright‘s Anna Karenina (Focus Features, 11.16.12) will have its detractors (in my screening today five or six people were actually chuckling at it during a high-emotion scene in the late second act) but for me it’s a serious, drop-your-socks knockout — the first truly breathtaking high-style film of the year, a non-musical successor to Moulin Rouge and a disciple of the great ’70s films of Ken Russell (and by that I mean pre-Mahler Russell, which means The Music Lovers and Women In Love) as well as Powell-Pressburger’s The Red Shoes.

You either go with the proscenium-arch grandiosity of a film like Anna Karenina or you don’t (and I was just talking in the Bell Lightbox lobby with a critic who didn’t care for it) but if you ask me it has all the essential ingredients of a bold-as-brass Best Picture contender — an excitingly original approach, cliff-leaping audacity, complex choreography, the balls to go classic and crazy at the same time, a wild mixture of theatricality and romantic realism, a superbly tight and expressive script by Tom Stoppard and wowser operatic acting with a special hat-tip to Keira Knightley as Anna — a Best Actress performance if I’ve ever seen one.

The brazen idea behind Wright’s film is that he’s presenting a completely theatrical environment, and therefore defined by and subject to the terms of live theatre. The film literally takes place in a 19th Century theatre with the orchestra seats removed, and yet it’s a special kind of theatre that dissolves and opens up from time to time — regularly, literally — and thus allowing Wright and his players to run out or zoom into a semi-naturalistic world. But one is mostly aware that we’re watching a play that is choreographed like a musical or a ballet with broad but delicious acting and some magnificent dance sequences and killer production design and break-open walls and actors sometimes freezing in their tracks and becoming tableau.

I can imagine some people saying “whoa…this is too much” but like I said, either you understand the concept and accept it…or you don’t. I loved every minute of it except for a portion in the third act when it seems to run out of gas. But it revs up again at the finale.

I’m being kicked out of the Bell Lightbox press lounge as we speak so I guess I’ll have to add to this later on this evening, but I couldn’t feel more excited and elevated.

Those snide bitches who chuckled during this afternoon’s screening needed to be hauled out by the collar and slapped around. If they had been watching Wright’s film as a literal theatrical presentation (and it could be presented that way with modifications), they wouldn’t have dared to laugh at any projection of tragic intensity. No one who understands and respects theatre would do that.

I didn’t mean to suggest that Anna Karenina is as good or almost as good as Moulin Rouge but without the music — it’s a much tonier and classier production than Baz Luhrman‘s film, in my view, although it’s coming from the same general ballpark. And of course it’s a much darker thing than Moulin Rouge, given the Leo Tolstoy source material.

I hate having to stop writing but I’m really being kicked out of here…eff me.

I saw Rian Johnson‘s Looper (Sony, 9.28) in Los Angeles a week or so ago, and as it screened this morning in Toronto it’s okay to post my thumbnail response, which I originally tapped out on an iPhone while sitting in traffic on Venice Boulevard:

Looper is a highly imaginative sci-fi action thriller in the Phillip K. Dick mode that’s a little too enamored of its originality and imagination, I feel — certainly more than it is enamored of being propulsive or thrilling. I realize that Johnson reads this column from time to time and that he’ll be pissed when he realizes I feel more in the way of muted respect than genuine admiration, but them’s the breaks.

The biggest disappointment, for me, is that the great haunting concept of an older guy (Bruce Willis) being able to give counsel to his younger, stupider, less wise self (Joseph Gordon Levitt) has been almost completely ignored, and that’s really a shame.

And Levitt’s made-up, CG-fortified Willis face is weirdly unformed and gets in the way of any potential investment. We all know what Willis looked like when he was costarring in Moonlighting and their faces, his and Levitt’s, just don’t match or seem even vaguely from the same family or country, even. The effect doesn’t work. Johnson should have cast Willis in both roles and CG’ed and de-aged him for his younger-self scenes.

Boil Looper down and it’s just another violent whammy-chart actioner, albeit with a novel time-travel premise. The whammy chart thing is oppressive. It really feels as if someone shoots something or someone every seven or eight minutes, and that this is happening because the software insists.

“Too many gunshots” is a malady…hell, a form of cancer afflicting modern action films. It’s also a bellwether. The more gunshots, the worse a movie tends to be. And fewer gunshots almost always tends to mean quality. Examples: The Limey, Shane.

The effing Wiki plot gives you a headache: “In a futuristic gangland in the year 2044, a 25-year-old killer named Joseph Simmons (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) works for a mafia company in Kansas City as a ‘looper.’ Loopers kill and dispose of agents sent by their employers from corporate headquarters in Shanghai from the year 2074″…what? “Loopers are foot soldiers, paid on the terms that all targets must never escape. When Simmons recognizes his target as a future version of himself (Bruce Willis), his older self escapes after incapacitating him. The resulting failure of his job causes his employers to come after him, forcing him to fight for his life as he hunts his younger self.

Tweeted by Johnson an hour ago: “I am the opposite of pissed. This is the perfect Jeff Wells reaction, and when I see you I am going to kiss you on the mouth.”

For me, the first day of the 2012 Toronto Film Festival isn’t much to write home about because I’ve seen so many films having their first press & industry screenings today. The only major pop-outs are Joe Wright‘s Anna Karenina at 3 pm and a 3D screening of the digitally restored and cleavered (i.e., whacked down to 1.85 to 1) Dial M for Murder, which shows this evening at 9:15 pm. And I’ve got a couple of parties starting around 10 or 11 pm, but those aren’t as much fun without the drinking.

The films I’d normally be seeing with great excitement I’ve already seen, and the ones playing today that I haven’t seen I don’t want to see. And if I don’t want to see something, you can’t stop me. (Yes, that’s a Samuel Goldwynism.)

I saw Jacques Audiard‘s Rust and Bone (8:45 this morning) in Cannes — here‘s what I wrote. I also saw Abbas Kiarostami‘s brilliant Like Someone in Love (12:34 pn today) there and posted this. (This film is so mesmerizing that I’m thinking of seeing it again for the sheer pleasure factor.) I’ve seen Amy Berg‘s West of Memphis twice (at last January’s Sundance Film Festival as well as the Santa Barbara Film Festival) and praised it up and down. I saw Michael Haneke’s Amour (3:45 pm today) in Cannes and posted this. And I saw and was quite elevated in Cannes by Walter Salles On The Road (1:45 pm).

Filing from the Venice Film Festival, Variety‘s Leslie Felperin isn’t exactly doing cartwheels for Robert Redford‘s The Company You Keep, but she’s in a respectful and approving frame of mind. Calling it an “unabashedly heartfelt but competent tribute to 1960s idealism [in which] nostalgia is generally the order of the day,” pic is “not entirely filtered through rose-colored granny glasses.”

“Screenwriter Lem Dobbs, adapting Neil Gordon’s novel, has something of track record with this sort of material, having written Steven Soderbergh‘s The Limey (1999), another tale about ’60s survivors haunted by its thesps’ own filmographies. Like that film, all plot roads lead to a young woman whose honor must be defended, in this case Brit Marling‘s smart love-interest law student, who upstages Shia LaBeouf.

The Company You Keep “is nowhere near as formally audacious as Soderbergh’s film, but in its stolid, old-fashioned way, it satisfies an appetite, especially among mature auds, for dialogue- and character-driven drama that gets into issues without getting too bogged down in verbiage.

“There is something undeniably compelling, perhaps even romantic, about America’s ’60s radicals and the compromises they did or didn’t make, a subject underexplored in Hollywood cinema apart from honorable exceptions like Sidney Lumet‘s Running on Empty (1988) and a few others. The French, meanwhile, have almost completely monopolized radical chic nostalgia, as seen in this pic’s Venice-fest competish rival, Olivier Assayas‘ Something in the Air.

Keep‘s “colorful, almost-wastefully impressive cast limns a sociologically convincing rogue’s gallery of reformed revolutionaries — some turned organic farmer, like the one played by Stephen Root (refreshingly cast against usual nerdy type); or university professor (Richard Jenkins) or Nick Nolte‘s small businessman, a cleaned-up acid casualty. The last, a brief but memorable turn, harks pleasingly back to Nolte’s blasted ‘Nam vet in Who’ll Stop the Rain.”

The star of Nick Cassavetes‘ Yellow is wife/co-writer Heather Wahlquist, playing “a pill-popping school teacher and mother of four who finds herself losing her mind while trying to depict her real life from her altered states of consciousness.” The TIFF attraction costars Sienna Miller, Melanie Griffith, Gena Rowlands, Lucy Punch, David Morse and Ray Liotta.

From HE reader Jakob Aljaz: “I’ve read Jeff’s ‘Too Damn Many‘ article on Hollywood Elsewhere (8.16.12), which listed around 40 films he’d like to catch in Toronto. But in the last few days there have been major raves (Variety, etc.) for two fims that Jeff didn’t include: Tobias Lindholm‘s Danish thriller A Hijacking and Peter Strickland‘s Berberian Sound Studio. Also of interest is the philosophical documentary The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (a must for any leftie).”