Everybody’s been playing this Roger Ebert clip, which was taped at the Park City Library following a 2002 Sundance Film Festival screening of Justin Lin‘s Better Luck Tomorrow. But it reminded me how Lin copped out on Tomorrow‘s ending after his film got picked up by Paramount. In so doing Lin conveyed to the suits that he was basically looking to play ball and make commercial films. And that’s what he wound up doing.
After the Paramount acquisition Lin got pressured about the original ending (in which the lead guy, played by Parry Shen, gets away with murder and isn’t all that bothered about it) being amoral. So Lin changed it so that the film implied at the very end that Shen would probably get caught for his crime.
In addition to catching a Tribeca Film Festival short called Rider and the Storm and that American Masters Mel Brooks doc I have three recently-arrived scripts to read this weekend: Billy Ray‘s Maersk Alabama, based on “A Captain’s Duty” by Richard Phillips and otherwise known as the basis of Paul Greengrass‘s Captain Phillips; George Clooney and Grant Heslov‘s The Monuments Men, which runs 145 pages so expect a longish running time; and Tom Shepherd‘s Hey, Stella!, an HBO-ish period piece about how the very young Marlon Brando landed the stage role of Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire.
Robert Redford‘s The Company You Keep (Sony Classics, opening today) has a lousy 55% Rotten Tomatoes score, but it isn’t too bad. Really. It’s relatively decent, semi-tolerable, good enough, etc. Is it sleepy? A little bit, yeah. Is it overly mellow and modulated? Yeah. Is it relatively well-plotted and engrossing as far as it goes? Yes, more or less. Will 22 year-olds like it? Nope.
I’m giving it a 7.5 out of 10. Okay, a 7.7.
Believe me, if this thing was any kind of burn I would say so. It underwhelmed me somewhat but it never pissed me off. If I had paid to see it I…I’m not sure how I would have felt but I’d probably be okay with it. Shrugging-your-shoulders okay, I mean. No harm, no foul.
I mean, you know going in that Redford, due respect, peaked as a director 19 years ago with Quiz Show and 12 years ago as an actor in Spy Game. You knew he’d really lost it after seeing Lions for Lambs…forget it. So you go in hoping that The Company You Keep will be at least good enough to not annoy or alienate and you’re more or less placated when it meets that test.
Honestly? Most of the time I was thinking about the plastic surgery that 75 year-old Redford has had — subtle, selective, nothing too drastic — along with costar Julie Christie. Forgive me but I think this somehow undercuts their attempts at portraying former ’60s Weathermen-type radicals. Not that I mind these two looking a bit less saggy than their years would indicate, but looking at their slightly altered appearance takes away from the authenticity one associates with the life and values of an ex-hardcore radical. I’m sorry but they look like movie stars who have enough money to do a little something about being in their 70s.
The trick with plastic surgery is to have just enough done so it doesn’t look like anything. Honestly? I think Christie went a little too far but Redford got it more or less right, although you can still tell.
Has Susan Sarandon, who plays a Bernadine Dohrn-like ex-fugitive who is busted early on, had any touch-ups? If she has they’re not noticable, but she looks pretty good so you have to kinda wonder.
Those in The Company You Keep who haven’t had plastic surgery: Shia LaBeouf, Jackie Evancho (who plays Redford’s 11-year-old daughter), Brendan Gleeson (real and genuine and honestly himself), Brit Marling, Anna Kendrick, Terrence Howard (who bellows like an authoritarian hard-ass throughout the whole film — a huge pain-in-the-ass), Richard Jenkins, Nick Nolte (who looks like he’s been drinking beer and eating french fries), Sam Elliott, Stephen Root, Stanley Tucci and Chris Cooper.
I won’t be around for the upcoming Rolling Stones concert at the Staples Center (no announced date but probably around 5.1), but if you want to stand in the “tongue pit” in Oakland’s Oracle arena it’ll set you back $1500 bills. The pit will be filled with bald or white-haired guys in T-shirts with their 39 year-old girlfriends (total cost for getting laid that night: $3 grand.). They should sell some cheap tickets on a lottery basis for younger fans.
DATE: 4.5.13
FROM: Jeffrey Wells, HE
TO: Martin Scorsese c/o Margaret Bodde, Thelma Schoonmaker
RE: Shane aspect ratio controversy
Just following up, Marty, on my Shane letter addressed to you 7 days ago. I also wrote Woody Allen about this matter, and he replied yesterday as follows: http://www.hollywood-elsewhere.com/2013/04/woody-allen-on-shane-debacle/. If you can spare the time a reply would be greatly appreciated. — Jeffrey Wells, Hollywood Elsewhere
Here’s a little taste of Robert Trachtenberg‘s Mel Brooks: Make A Noise, which will premiere on Monday, 5.20. It’s a little riff about The Critic, the 1963 Oscar-winning short that Brooks voiced. I’ll be watching the show this weekend.
“Shane Carruth‘s Upstream Color is the only Sundance film I’ve seen so far that totally jettisons narrative in favor of an impressionist, oddly spooky, catch-as-catch-can paint-splatter whatever experience. It’s very cool and commanding and climatorial. I became an instant fan. You’re free to piece together all the fragments and good luck with that, but Upstream Color has something to do with 21st Century anxiety, malevolent micro-manipulation, love, bodily invasions, Ridley Scott-like worms and definitely pigs. Lots and lots of little pigs.
“You don’t want to hear what I think it all amounts to. Whatever I might write would just get in the way or feel like a mosquito. It’s entirely between you and Upstream Color.
“Director-writer-producer Carruth is self-distributingUpstream Color on April 5th. HE readers are advised to grapple with the experience. All serious cineastes, I mean. I honestly don’t think you’ll be able to call yourself a man if you don’t.
“It’s certainly worth catching for Amy Seimetz‘s mesmerizing lead performance. And Carruth’s costarring one, come to think. They play lovers (named Chris and Jeff) who may have been invaded/afflicted by the same quietly malevolent, William S. Burroughs-ian bad guys, and Carruth is cool — a fascinating actor in that he doesn’t seem to “act” much but is indisputably interesting. His intense eyes especially.
“But Semetz (an indie actress-director who strongly resembles early Juliette Binoche) is the shit. She’s the primary victim, the person who struggles with weird micro-aggression and malevolence that makes no real “sense,” who tries to hold on, who bears the burden and somehow muddles through. Seimetz has been around for years, but this is the first time I’ve sat up and said ‘wow.'”
Portion of Dargis review: “For all of Mr. Carruth’s cosmic reaching and despite the jigsaw montage, Upstream Colorisn’t an arduous head-scratcher if you don’t worry about what it means and just go with the trippy flow. (Mr. Carruth helped cut and shoot the movie, and wrote its mood-setting score.)
“It is, instead, a sometimes seductive, sometimes tiresome melange of ideas that are by turns obvious, hermetic, touching and sweetly dopey. Much of it involves an emotionally fraught romance that Amy Seimetz’s Kris strikes up with Mr. Carruth’s Jeff, a relationship that dovetails with a freaky tale of dead pigs, blue orchids, those mind-altering worms and another mystery man, Sampler (Andrew Sensenig), whose mailbox bears the words ‘Quinoa Valley.’
“You may laugh, but if that’s an intentional joke, Mr. Carruth isn’t saying. He’s a man of few words and less exposition, and Upstream Color doesn’t come across as satirical even if it edges close to absurdity. Sampler is similarly taciturn and is mostly seen walking about recording sounds, like the papery rustle of dry leaves and the happy gurgle of streams. He also tends to his swine and conducts a shivery, creepy deworming procedure with Kris and a pig.
“At times, he walks among people as undetected as the soulful angels in Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire. In one scene, he drifts among his adorable herd of little porkers Christ-like, the fingers of one hand trailing through the air as the camera closely follows, a shot and a gesture that strongly evoke Mr. Malick’s work.
Mr. Malick’s imprint on Mr. Carruth, however deliberate, runs deep. It’s evident in Mr. Carruth’s emphasis on the natural world; his use of ‘Walden’; the hushed voices and many images, including some time-lapse photography of a dead pig decaying underwater, which registers as the catastrophic inverse of the time-lapse sequence of a seed sprouting underground in Days of Heaven. (Mr. Carruth’s movie at times feels like days of hell.)
“Mr. Malick’s influence also extends to shots of Kris and Jeff walking, whispering and touching that are not moored in a specific time but could be from the past, present or future. In these Malick Moments, time becomes as circular as the rising and setting of the sun. ‘Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in,’ Thoreau wrote in ‘Walden.'”
Here I am paying oblique tribute to Malala Yousufzai, who was shot in the head and neck by a Taliban psycho last year for advocating female education in Pakistan. I’m posting this because Angelina Jolie gave a speech about Malala earlier today at the Women in the World Summit in Manhattan. I happened to run across the video as I was surfing around in search of Roger Ebert material.
Congrats to David & Goliath, the ad agency that created this spot. It’s probably the most blissed-out, magical-feeling advertisement for a government-sponsored con aimed at society’s losers ever made. Kudos to D&G’s chief creative offier David Angelo, exec creative director Colin Jeffery, ssociate creative director Jason Rappaport and art director Todd Rone Parker.
How many decades have directors of horror films been using scratchy, high-pitched howls to make sure that audiences understand that something horribly scary is happening? I guess it began with Bernard Herrmann‘s screechy violins on the Psycho soundtrack. I only know that you can’t watch a horror film or a trailer for one without hearing that shrieking laryngitis banshee wail — the universal sound for all ghosts, demons, banshees and monsters. I’d really love to be spared every so often.
I’m thinking of hiking up to the San Francisco Film Festival on Saturday, 4.27 to hear Steven Soderbergh deliver a “state of the cinema” speech as well as an explanation of his reasons for taking a taking a little time out, a.k.a., a “Frank Sinatra retirement.” No more gratis hotel bookings so we’re talking round-trip air fare plus two nights at some flophouse or b & b plus the usual expenses or roughly $700 bills just to hear Soderbergh give a speech.
I’ll also be doing the 16th annual Sonoma International Film Festival from roughly Thursday, 4.11 through Sunday, 4.14. I’ve been there before and its a nice, agreeable, intelligently programmed affair. When I was drinking it meant something to be staying in the middle of wine country; now not so much. But I get to park it here so it’s all good.
