Day: September 4, 2015

This afternoon’s Telluride Film Festival showing of Davis Guggenheim‘s He Named Me Malala (Fox Searchlight, 10.2) was very warmly received. The people on my gondola coming down from the Chuck Jones Cinema were beaming, almost swooning. They were reacting, trust me, more to the subject matter than the film itself. Which feels and plays like a lesson, a sermon, an 80-something minute educational piece that…you know, we all need to see and contemplate and so on.  It’s a good-for-you spinach movie, as I supposed it would be yesterday.

Malala Yousafzai, the star and subject of Davis Guggenheim/s He Named Me Malala, vis Skype feed during a post-screening discussion.

One can’t help but feel touched and inspired by the saga of teenaged Pakistani education activist (and current resident of Birmingham, England) Malala Yousafzai, and particularly how she managed to not only survive being shot in the head three years ago (when she was 15) by a Taliban fanatic, but how she recovered and continued to campaign for female education in Pakistan and other Muslim countries, and how she won the Nobel Peace Prize late last year. The more this film is seen worldwide (particularly in Middle-Eastern territories where the suppression of women is appalling), the better.

But Guggenheim’s film is just okay. If you wanted to be a sorehead you could say it almost flirts with mediocrity. But I don’t want to say that because I don’t want to discourage anyone from seeing it. He Named Me Malala stands for the right things, shows the right things, says the right things and uses watercolor-like animation to convey portions of Malala’s life…all to the good. But it never seems to find any kind of levitational groove or strategy that would result in a 2 + 2 = 5 equation.

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I’ve been debating whether or not to reveal an embarassing thing that happened in the late ’80s, and I realized this morning that I need to just flush it out. Always a good thing to expose disturbing, uncomfortable memories. So here goes.

I took part in a paintball game when I was working at Cannon Films in the summer of ’87. I had suggested some bold, George S. Patton-type strategies to my fellow warriors, but when you actually get out there with your paintball gun in that sticky and sweltering Los Angeles heat and you’re dealing with dust and sweat and the sobering fact that you’re not exactly Steve McQueen in Hell Is For Heroes, things are a little different. The Cannon team lost that day, and I was one of the reasons.

I’m just going to spit this out. We were losing and I was in a bad position, surrounded by the opposing team and anxious and furious that we were getting clobbered, and in my haste and rage I saw someone appear in the corner of my left eye and I whipped around and fired. I shot one of our own guys. Actually it was a woman. I got her in the arm…thwack! She let go with a loud and angry “aah!” She was expressing two things: (1) “That hurts!” and (2) “You just shot someone on your team…asshole!”

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Those gray skies and cool temps had me worried, but I attended the Telluride Film Festival picnic all the same, leaving on the bus at 9:45 am and arriving at 10:10 am. Five minutes later it began to sprinkle.  I got my umbrella out as I waited in line for food.  I started to feel chillier and chillier.  And then flat-out cold.  “God, this is fucking miserable,” I said to a couple of pals.  Then some kind of cooking gas ignited and a sizable surge of flame appeared next to a serving table.  Two fast-acting chefs snuffed it out but I wondered if this was an omen of some kind.  I was Nicholas Hoult in Mad Max: Fury Road:  “What a damp and uncomfortable day!”  I decided to get on a shuttle bus back to town. along with THR’s Scott Feinberg and Stephen  Galloway.  This was my first gloomy Telluride picnic — the weather had always been sunny and delightful in years past.

At 8:15 am, it’s a bit damp and chilly outside my Telluride condo. The lineup for the patron’s brunch starts an hour from now, and I’m thinking about how it’ll feel as I stand around on damp grass and getting my shoes wet and wondering what the fuck. If it ain’t sunny and warm, I’d rather park it indoors. And I’m not the only one who feels a little let down that Davis Guggenheim‘s He Named Me Malala (Fox Searchlight, 10.2) will be the “secret” 2:30 pm screening at the Chuck Jones Cinema.

I’m in no way dismissing this doc about teenaged Pakistani activist Malala Yousafzai‘s campaign for female education. I’m sure it’ll be stirring stuff. But I want to start this festival off with something ripe and sexy. I want to see Spotlight or Black Mass or Steve Jobs today at 2:30 pm, and not some nutritious spinach documentary about the tyrannical nature of Islam when it comes to women’s rights. And no one is happy about the overlapping scheduling of today’s films, which forces either-or choices or prods you into seeing something of a more offbeat or mercurial nature.

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“His hair is Harlow gold, his brows odd surprise, his face looks icy cold, he’s got Whitey Bulger’s eyes.” — Venice Film Festival tweet from Playlist critic Jessica Kiang.

Following the 7.30 appearance of the most recent Black Mass trailer I wrote that “the assumption, of course, is that Johnny ‘Alaskan husky eyes’ Depp will slam it out of park as Whitey Bulger.” And the early Venice Film Festival reviews suggest that Depp’s performance as the notorious, now-incarcerated Boston crime lord is quite the thing. The Hollywood Reporter‘s Todd McCarthy writes that “long-time Depp fans who might have lately given up hope of his doing something interesting anytime soon will especially appreciate his dive into the deep end here.” But in the view of Indiewire‘s Jessica Kiang, the performance is hindered by excessive makeup.

“This is certainly the most interesting thing [Depp has] done in ages, and he never feels less than committed — and no doubt there will be those who’ll champion it as such,” she writes. “But…Depp is encased in a helmet of make-up and prosthetics [that] make him look by turns ghostly, corpse-like, lizardy and sometimes like a literal incarnation of the devil. It makes him fascinating to look at, but maybe for the wrong reasons — ones that have nothing to do with the quality of his performance or the menace and charisma he exudes, and more to do with trying to locate the single element that almost but doesn’t quite gel.

“Is it the too-light contacts with their unchanging beady pupils? Is it his odd, never totally convincing hairline? Is it the fact that his forehead seems peculiarly immobile? This feels like a rare case where a live action performance falls into what animators call the ‘uncanny valley‘ — the narrow but unbridgeable gap that exists between something realistic and something real.”

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