I’m sitting here stranded in Tokyo and doing my best to deny it. And I’m really hating the puerile Japanese daytime TV programming that I’m watching. This culture is drunk on helium emotions and attitudes. They’re like six year olds. But all the way from Tokyo I can almost smell what will happen Monday morning when the New York Film Critics Circle vote for Best Picture, and I haven’t even seen Zero Dark Thirty so what do I know? But I think they’ll go for it nonetheless.
I think the NYFCC’ers will want to go hard and real as a swing away from the intense emotionality of Les Miserables, and the consensus is that Zero Dark Thirty is sharp and hard and austere. It also contains an allegedly stirring lead performance by Jessica Chastain, who may even beat out Silver Linings‘ Jennifer Lawrence…maybe. I suspect the NYFCC’ers have gotten over their first encounters with Lincoln by now, and they know what it really is and that giving it Best Picture trophy will land with a thud across the land. I’m also presuming that Silver Linings haters (David Denby and Rex Reed possibly leading the charge) are going to do everything they can to block a majority for David O. Russell‘s film. And I can’t imagine there being enough of a head of steam to put Life of Pi over. And The Master has gone down to the sea in ships.
But the biggest surge of feeling, to repeat, will be about the NYFCC wanting to give a big “eff you” to the Manhattan theatre-queen contingent that will be pushing Les Miserables.
I think they’ll give their Best Foreign Film award to Amour or Holy Motors or….No?
It’s now 9:15 am Tokyo time on Friday (or 4:15 pm LA time on Thursday), and the sooner I’m out of here the better. My Narita-to-LAX flight leaves at 5:10 pm (or 12:10 am LA time on Friday). The flight arrives at 9:50 am or nine and a half hours after departing. That’s funny as last week’s LAX-to-Honolulu flight was six hours and Honolulu-to-Tokyo was eight hours so I thought Tokyo-to-LA might be 12 hours or thereabouts. I hate being stuck in a fuselage for lengthy periods but I guess nine and a half hours isn’t so awful.
I go right to a Richard GereArmitage lunch at 12:30 pm on Friday, and then back for a nap and then off to a 6 pm screening of The Hobbit in 48 fps on the Warner lot. (For me 48 fps isThe Hobbit as I’m not invested in Tolkien realms in the slightest.) And then I’m doing Zero Dark Thirty screenings on Saturday and Sunday (I’m afraid that I might be so jet-lagged that I’ll miss something the first time plus I suspect that Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal‘s film warrants two viewings anyway).
There’s also a Sunday screening of The Guilt Trip, the Seth Rogen-vs.-Barbra Streisand road comedy that opens on 12.25. And the first Les Miserables screening I can get to happens on Wednesday at 12.5, but on the other hand I’m told that a Les Miz screener will arrive today. I think it’ll be better to wait to see it in a theatre.
This Hollywood Reporter Directors’ Roundtable is worth an hour of your time. Talk to certain pulse-takers and they’ll tell you Tom Hooper and Les Miserables are about to experience a turn in the road. David O. Russell is kicking it now like never before. Nobody knows what’s coming from Quentin Tarantino‘s Django Unchained, but I can guess. Ang Lee has the “job very well done but no Oscar take-home” vote. Ben Affleck wants to rally back to where he and Argo were six weeks ago. Gus Van Sant‘s Promised Land…no comment until I see it.
The people who write the embed codes for Brightcove are truly incompetent because their codes always cause problems when I paste them down.
Andrew Dominik‘s Killing Them Softly is opening Friday (11.30) with an 87% Rotten Tomatoes rating. All Boston-area crime flicks based on George V. Higgins source material are worth the price, but this one is noteworthy for a rightwing political theme that says Obama’s hope-and-change stump speech of the ’08 campaign was bullshit. Here’s my 5.22.12 Cannes Film Festival review:
“Surprisingly, Andrew Dominik‘s Killing Them Softly isn’t your father’s tough-talkin’ George V. Higgins gritty crime pic. Well, it is but it persistently and rather curiously pushes concurrent political commentary about the ’08 financial collapse, Obama, hope, cynicism, ruthlessness and American greed.
“Indiewire‘s Eric Kohnwrote that Softly, like Dominik’s five-year-old The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford, is a “tone poem that uses narrative to prop up various attitudes and moods,” but this time with a greater emphasis on the polemic. Well put.
“The plot is basically about Brad Pitt‘s Jackie Cogan, a hard-as-nails hitman, being hired to rub out a few guys involved in the robbing of a Boston poker game, as well as an unlucky rackets guy (Ray Liotta) who didn’t really do anything but tough shit — he’s on the list regardless. And yet the first 25% to 30% of the film is Pitt-less, focusing on the perps and their grubby, slip-shod realm.
“Cogan, a down-to-business, cut-the-shit assassin, is about doing the job, period. Rationality, efficiency, no personal issues or baggage — an exemplar, in a sense, of ‘clean living,’ which is what Dominik, during the just-finished press conference and somewhat flippantly, said the film is partly espousing.
“Above all Cogan is no believer in community and equality and Barack Obama’s high-falutin’ talk about sharing and ‘we’re all in this together.’
“Killing Them Softly, then, is a fairly novel thing — an ‘Obama’s rhetoric is full of shit’ crime movie. Okay, not Obama’s per se, but his inspirational come-together theme of the ’08 campaign (a clip from his acceptance speech in Chicago is used at the beginning and end) or the generic uplift rhetoric of ‘America the beautiful.’ Pull the wool off, take the needle out, wake up to what America is.
“So this isn’t The Friends of Eddie Coyle but a Metaphor Movie. The political newscast and Obama-speech clips are interwoven a bit more persistently than is necessary. But the ending of Killing Me Softly, no question, hits it right slam on the head. I chuckled. I left the theatre with a grin.
“Most of Softly, like any good crime pic, is about character, dialogue, minutae, this and that manner of slimeball scumbag, rain, sweat, smack, bottles of beer, guns and old cars (i.e., ratty old buckets, classic muscle cars, ’80s gas guzzlers). Nobody in Killing Me Softly ever heard of a Prius.
“Pitt delivers a solid, snarly performance as the bearded, leather-jacketed Cogan. But running a close second is Scoot McNairy as a scuzzy thief who’s out of his depth. He does more than just scuzz around and suck in cigarette smoke. He exudes fear and anguish along the usual cocky irreverence required of any bottom-tier criminal. He should and will be seen again, and often.
“Other stand-out performances come from Richard Jenkins, Vincent Curatola and the Australian Ben Mendelsohn, acting with his native accent, as the sweatiest and gunkiest no-account junkie west of the Pecos. James Gandolfini doesn’t quite register as a gone-to-seed hitman…sorry.
“Given a choice between an unfettered, down-to-basics George V. Higgins crime drama and what Softly‘s double-track variation is, I’m mostly pleased with the latter. We all know the about the lure of rugged, tangy, straight-punch crime films, which much of Softly is. We’ve been there many, many times. So why not a crime film that goes for something else on top of the usual-usual? Ladies and gents, it’s okay with me.”
Last night the Film Society of Lincoln Center, Film Comment Selects and Scott Foundas hosted “An Evening With Christopher Nolan.” Which was basically an award-season promotion for Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises under the guise of a career-review conversation. HE’s Manhattan correspondent Clayton Loulan attended and took snaps and recorded the conversation. Problematically, I would add, as you can barely hear what’s being said without headphones.
Scott Foundas, Chris Nolan following last night’s FSLC discussion.
I can’t write an authoritative stinging indictment of Tokyo because I’ve only experienced a bit of it. I’ve only been here eight hours and I haven’t wandered outside of the Shibuya and Shinjuku districts. But I’m hugely unimpressed so far. I shouldn’t even be saying this but Tokyo strikes me as corporate and arid and car-friendly and full of delights for rich people. It’s a bigger, chillier, smoggier Houston with sushi and noodles and taller buildings and more stylishly dressed women. It’s titanic and rich and sprawling and so what?
It was all but burned to the ground in 1945 thanks to Curtis LeMay so the buildings are all less than 50 or 60 years old, and it just doesn’t have any character or flavor or aroma to speak of. Certainly not the kind that reaches out and pulls you in. I’m sure my opinion would be a bit more favorable if I had the time to really get into it but this is what I feel right now.
All I could think as I wandered around was “why did I come here again?”
And it’s not much of a walking city either — you have to constantly walk up and down stone staircases to cross streets. And what is there to look at anyway beside restaurant signs and the women? Big buildings are a deadly bore. And the air is light brown — I went to the top floor of the TMG building and you can see a dense layer of smog hanging over the whole town (like the air in LA in the ’70s), and there are so many people walking around with those white surgical masks that I feel I’m part of an epidemic in Steven Soderbergh‘s Contagion.
People of serious character and accomplishment love Tokyo so I should probably hold my tongue, but this place feels like downtown LA or Detroit or Honolulu or….I haven’t been to soulless Sao Paulo but I’ve heard it has a similar vibe. I’m not going to get all bent out of shape about this, but honestly? I almost hate it here. There’s nothing architecturally alluring or unique and the girls are prettier in Vietnam, and they all have smaller, shapelier, more perfectly pedicured feet than the women here. I’m sorry but that’s what I’ve observed.
Too many people have told me the food in Tokyo is terrific so there’s no disputing that aspect. (I’ll be going to Ichiban, the Lost in Translation sushi bar, in a couple of hours). But I wonder if it can beat the drop-dead scrumptious food I’ve eaten in Hanoi over the last three or four days.
I’m not sure I’ll ever return here. In fact I know I won’t. Give me Paris or Berlin or Rome or Havana or London — any town with a personality and the right kind of seductive flair. A town that has something you immediately want more of, and that puts you in the right kind of mood. Tokyo is my idea of a town you really don’t need to visit. Life is short. You can have it.
The one thing that really impressed me? Some of the Tokyo taxis have an automatic rear-door opening-and-closing mechanism so when the driver pulls over to let a fare in…pop! The door swings open and then closes at the push of a button.
Here’s what a filmmaker friend recently advised: “In Tokyo go to Nakano Broadway, the largest toy-collectible mall in the world. It will give you an insight into Japanese culture being a mixture of extreme depth and extreme youthful enthusiasm for characters and toys. Go to YoYoGi Park in Shibuya. Great stores around it and an amazing shrine at its center. Go to Akihabara and geek out on the electronics and walk around Ginza for a day or two. Go to the palace and walk the gardens — even in winter they are amazing. I also recommend you make an appointment to visit the Ghibli museum. Go to the big department stores in Ikebukuro.”
I am completely and fully prepared to ignore everything my friend recommended for the rest of my days on this planet and into the next life. And when I say “prepared” I mean I am absolutely at peace with this notion.
I’m staying on the 6th floor with a nice view of the park across the street.
There are a lot of squat toilets in Tokyo, which is why they have this sign explaining to the sophistos that you’re not supposed to squat with the regular sit-down model.
With my flight to Tokyo leaving at midnight, HE’s gracious host Nguyen Mai invited me to a farewell lunch today at Le Tonkin, an elegant, French colonial-style gourmet restaurant in Hanoi’s French quarter. Joining us were actor Chi Bao, music composer & producer Nguyen Quoc Trung, pop singer Thanh Lam and her son Dang Quang, and Mai’s business partners (in Vidotour and other enterprises) Pham Tuan Phuong and Nguyen Thuy Quynh.
Vidotour and VidoMedia CEO Nguyen Mai — Wednesday, 11.28, 12:50 pm.
Yesterday afternoon I saw Nguyen Huu Muoi‘s Scent of Burning Grass, a highly emotional antiwar film that is Vietnam’s official 2012 submission for the Best Foreign Language Feature Oscar. It’s basically a Vietnamese All Quiet on the Western Front about four North Vietnamese lads suffering the horrors of the Quang Tri battle of 1972, which was almost entirely a North Vietnamese vs. South Vietnamese face-off. It may be based on the personal experience of screenwriter Nhuan Cam Hoang, although this is just a guess.
I was affected by the depictions of suffering because I’ve never seen a Vietnamese-perspective drama about the Vietnam War, and because it reminded me once again (as if I needed reminding) that all combatants in conflicts such as these experience acute hell in more ways than I’d care to imagine. So despite the film’s problems, I was moved. There I was in a small theatre filled with Vietnamese, the only Anglo, watching a story about their pains and losses as it were, or rather the pains and losses of their fathers and grandfathers. I was inescapably affected.
But Scent of Burning Grass does, due respect, have problems. Or one problem, I should say. I’m speaking of an insufficient level of exceptional talent and refined professionalism, or at least the kind of exceptional talent and refined professionalism that would warrant even-handed comparison to the work of All Quiet‘s Lewis Milestone or, say, Paths of Glory‘s Stanley Kubrick or any number of respected wartime dramas.
The fim’s low budget creates technical believability issues that are irksome but not fatal. What is fatal, in my humble view, is that each and every actor has been told to over-act — to make feelings so explicit and upfront that one can’t help but feel annoyed.
And the digital projection at the theatre was appalling at times. Hardware commands would appear and light from the booth flooded the screen and compromised the image. Small-point-size English subtitles had been pasted into the margins of previous existing French subtitles that were slightly larger and yellow-tinted. This was tolerable except every so often the English subtitles would disappear for two or three or four minutes at a time.
A production guy whom I’ve been speaking to at Hanoi Film Festival parties told me that Scent of Burning Grass is, in his view, a “commemorative film” commissioned by and/or pushed along by the government rather than one that came out of Vietnam’s artistic community as it were. He was saying that there isn’t a sufficiently concentrated community of film artists in Vietnam, from which a process of honing and refinement and self-criticism naturally results.
And yet despite all this, I felt Scent of Burning Grass. And I’m glad I saw it.
Watch both Love Is All You Need trailers and tell me the German-dubbed version isn’t preferable. The half-English, half-Danish version, as Rope of Silicon‘s Brad Brevetwrote, has Pierce Brosnan “playing an Englishman living in Denmark running around speaking English while everyone else is speaking Danish and they clearly understand him and he understands them, so why aren’t they all speaking the same language?”
