Month: October 2014

I hereby apologize for being a bit late to a 5 pm interview yesterday with Pasolini director-writer Abel Ferrara and star Willem Dafoe. (I mostly blame the C train.) I was there for three reasons. I’ve admired both of these guys for exactly 33 years (Ferrara since 1981’s Ms. 45, Dafoe since Kathryn Bigelow‘s The Loveless). I was sufficiently impressed by Pasolini to warrant further inquiry. And I’ve been a lifelong worshipper of Pier Paolo Pasolini himself, or since I caught The Gospel According to St. Matthew on the tube with my parents way back when.

Abel Ferrara, Willem Dafoe — Friday, 10.3, 5:35 pm.

Our chat happened inside a small windowless room inside the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center on West 65th Street. Ferrara and Dafoe are amiable, easy-going guys who’ve spent their life scaling mountains and who know just about everyone and everything. Fascinating, occasionally flinty…nothing but the truth. They both live in Rome and, of course, previously collaborated on Ferrara’s Go-Go Tales (’07).

Read more

The sometimes wonderful Richard Brody has joined the ranks of those who understand that Gone Girl is about much, much more than a friggin’ airport-thriller plot. And is much more than just a film about the Five D’s — despisings, deceit, disgust, deception and disappearance. I tried explaining to a friend earlier today that Fincher’s film is not really about the tale. It’s about the broader (and yet highly particular) strokes. The tale is just the clothes line. It’s the socio-cultural stuff…the rotting-yuppie-hell-vile-media wash that Fincher hangs on it — that’s what the movie really is. Brody also floats a Stanley Kubrick analogy. Yes, I realize that Fincher-Kubrick comparisons have already been kicked around on this site but you need to be patient as these arguments tend to pop up when they pop up.

Read more

Gone Girl‘s Ben Affleck, Bill Maher, N.Y. Times columnist Nicholas Kristol, Michael Steele and author Sam Harris, a critic of severe Islamic repression and brutality, engaged in a spirited discussion on Friday night’s Real Time with Bill Maher. Watch Affleck’s body posture and particularly his hands — he’s very unhappy with what Harris and Maher are saying and is marshalling all his strength to keep himself in check. It should be noted that on three previous Real Time visits Affleck expressed frustration about Muslims and Arabs being unfairly characterized and/or painted with too broad a brush — on 10.18.12, 10.23.08 and 5.27.07.

Yes, it’s a bit early for East Coast theatregoers to have caught a commercial screening and walked around and collected their thoughts (it’s 2:20 pm) but as the day wears on…

Read this Cara Buckley N.Y. Times story about a fight that Ben Affleck had with David Fincher during the shooting of Gone Girl and ask yourself the following: if you were Fincher, how resolute would you be about Affleck wearing or not wearing a Yankees cap? I wouldn’t have cared. I would have actually had Affleck wear a St. Louis Cardinals cap, his character being from Missouri and all. I would never have agreed with the Boston-born Affleck wearing a Red Sox cap as that would have seemed too in-jokey, but I would have never said “you have to wear a Yankees cap!” That’s a bit nutty, but then again that’s what makes Fincher a world-class director…right?

Last night a friend slipped me a copy of Kino’s new True Confessions Bluray, which streets next Tuesday. I haven’t seen Ulu Grosbard‘s period noir since ’81, but in my mind it feels like burnished brass. Robert De Niro, Robert Duvall, Charles Durning, Kenneth MacMillan, Burgess Meredith, etc. And it has a serene ending that you don’t expect from a film preoccupied with the stink of corruption and the Black Dahlia murder case, etc. Produced by Chartoff-Winkler; screenplay by John Gregory Dunne (who used to pick up the phone when I would call in the ’90s) and Joan Didion, based on Dunne’s novel.

Abel Ferrara‘s Pasolini, screening this evening at the New York Film Festival, is about the last day or so in the life of the noted visionary Italian filmmaker — a brilliant writer and impassioned artist, upscale and refined, incredibly hard-working, the maker of one of the most rancid and perverse films of all time…and a guy with a thing for low-class, curly-haired boys. And an inclination on some level to flirt with danger. Ferrara is obviously in awe of Pasolini’s artistic bravery (or obstinacy) and has captured some of his visions and dreams by depicting portions of Pasolini’s “Petrolio,” a meandering unfinished book he was writing, and has depicted his violent death with a certain raw power but…how to best say this?…I was faintly bored by some of it. Not dead bored — it’s an intelligent, earnestly felt film about an interesting man — but my fingers were tapping on the tabletop. Too many shots are murky or underlit…not Gordon Willis dark but “you can’t see shit” dark. Willem Dafoe‘s performance as Pasolini is arresting — he obviously looks the part, and for whatever reason I didn’t mind that he and almost everyone else speaks English the entire time. I actually loved Ferrara’s capturing of three scenes from Porno-Teo-Kolossal, a film Pasolini intended to make as a follow-up to Salo, The 120 Days of Sodom. But it’s finally a mercurial film aimed at Pasolini devotees. I agree with Variety‘s Peter Debruge that “it’s not fair to require audiences to know Pasolini’s ‘Petrolio'” — if you haven’t done your homework some portions of Ferrara’s film will throw you blind. But it’s lively and unfamiliar and anything but sedate. It’s not so bad to be faintly bored; it also means that you’re somewhat engaged. I’m glad that I saw it. It has portions that work. My vistas have been somewhat broadened. Note: I’m sitting down with Ferrara and Dafoe later this afternoon.

Virtually none of the right’s dire predictions about Obamacare have come true, and the program is more or less a success. And now we have reports that U.S. employers added 248,000 jobs last month, in a burst of hiring that drove down the unemployment rate to 5.9 percent, the lowest since July 2008.” And gas prices are down to $3.33 a gallon — the lowest for the month of September since 2010. What will be the likely midterm election response be from hinterland voters? Throw the bums out!

Vice‘s Keegan Hamilton is reporting that North Korea’s Supreme Dictator Kim Jong-un, 31, has either been removed from power or has at least been seriously challenged by the country’s Organization and Guidance Department (OGD), “a powerful group of officials that have allegedly stopped taking orders from the dictator and have effectively taken control of the country.” Kim “has been absent from public view for nearly a month and was last seen walking with a pronounced limp during a July ceremony commemorating the death of his grandfather, Kim Il-sung,” he explains. “The South Korean news agency Yonhap cited anonymous sources saying that Kim, a heavy smoker who has become markedly plump since assuming the role of dictator, is ‘suffering from gout, along with hyperuricemia, hyperlipidemia, obesity, diabetes and high blood pressure.'” If Hamilton’s report is echoed elsewhere and picks up steam, Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg‘s The Interview (Sony, 12.25), a comedy about two lightweight TV news guys (Rogen, James Franco) goaded by the CIA into assassinating Kim Jong-un, won’t have as much relevancy. How can Rogen-Goldberg not be at the very least concerned if not worried?

Read more

Excuse me for not jumping on this trailer when it popped three hours ago — I was walking around the West Village on this, one of the most perfect warm fall nights ever. Watch it with the sound on and then off. This is great stuff. I’m sensing an Eastwood surge.

Deadline‘s Anita Busch and Mike Fleming have tapped out a piece about Midnight Rider director Randall Miller trying to get back to work. He’s been quietly assembling a similar-type film called Slick Rock Trail. The Deadline guys are calling it a drama about “a washed up, hopeless long-haired old rocker with addiction problems who shaves his head and drives to Utah in an effort to tie up loose ends in his personal life before he dies” but “in the process ends up helping out a fledgling blues band called The Drainpipes.” Which sounds to me like Tender Mercies — a forgiveness and redemption story. Obviously Miller wants to move on and maybe earn some degree of forgiveness in his own life. The Busch/Fleming implication is that Miller shouldn’t be doing anything except throwing himself on the church steps, submitting to lashings, eating bitter herbs and living a life of penance. I don’t have Busch’s email but I just wrote Fleming the following: “Mike, Miller’s carelessness cost the life of a crew person — a huge, horrible mistake — but does that mean he has to stop all work and put on monk’s robes and go into a fetal-tuck position and drown himself?”