One of the things that bothered me about Juan Antonio Bayona‘s The Impossible is that right in the middle of being carried along by tsunami currents and trying to stay afloat and not be gored or gashed, Naomi Watts is shown crying and moaning. Ditto her kids. That is not what people do when they’re struggling to stay alive.
People in serious trouble are like animals — their eyes are wide open, fierce and glaring, and their mind is always focused entirely on what to do and not to do that might avoid or prevent death, and that’s all. The weeping and all that other crap comes later, after it’s over and the person can take a breath. Watt’s moaning and wailing is entirely about “acting” — she and Bayona want the less intelligent people in the audience to understand that things are really tough and scary for her at this moment.
If anything, a person who’s succeeding at staying afloat and not drowning is likely to experience a certain exhilaration. Your’e not going to laugh or go “whoopee!”,” but it would feel awfully damn good to not be overcome by the currents and to keep your nose above water, etc. Remember that Winston Chrurchill quote about how “there is nothing more exhilarating than to be shot at without result”? Same principle.
A lot of people have been giving me goo-goo eyes up here because they think I’m Chris Walken, who costars in Martin McDonagh‘s Seven Psychopaths, a TIFF entry. Two guys have asked me for autographs. Women’s expressions have been like “well, whoa-ho! Wanna talk?” Except I’m younger and a bit smoother looking than Walken. Walken is craggier and saggier looking with significant gray hair. And he has crinkly eye bags and a neck waddle and a pot belly that I don’t have. And I can’t imitate him for shit.
After the Vertigo-screening debacle at last April’s TCM Classic Movies Festival, Universal admitted error and invited me to come see a corrected version when ready. I finally saw it on the lot late last month. Thanks to Universal for this courtesy, but I’m sorry to say that Alfred Hitchcock‘s 1958 classic still doesn’t look right. I’ve heard there’s an issue or two with other titles in Uni’s forthcoming Hitchcock Masterpiece Bluray Collection (9.25), so this seems like the right time to air reactions.
The Vertigo I saw on 8.28 — a DCP that represents the new forthcoming Bluray — is crisp and detailed and certainly more lustrous and colorful than the version shown last April.
But the color has been over-cranked and over-saturated to the extent that it looks like a mistake. It’s incorrect and untrue by way of looking far too intense, and definitely too red, and not just in those intense red wallpaper scenes in Ernie’s.
The woman’s face in the opening credits before the camera goes in on her eye is supposed to be nearly black and white with a just a faint touch of sepia. (The above YouTube clip is a good representation of how it should look.) And they got it wrong again — the tint is definitely too orange.
Jimmy Stewart‘s brown suit is brownish violet or brownish purple (I can’t decide what to call it) throughout the first half or so. But it’s supposed to be plain brown. We all know what brown looks like. Brown is brown. It doesn’t have a violet tint.
Stewart wore pancake make up and eyeliner during filming — all actors did in the ’50s and the general big-studio era — but the over-saturated color scheme makes his face look like a mixture of Monument Valley sand and orange and creme biege makeup base.
And Stewart’s blue suit worn during the San Juan Batista inquest scene is ludicrous. It’s blinding, it’s luminescent — like something out of Tim Burton‘s Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Almost all the men in the inquest scene, in fact, are wearing vivid blue suits. I’ve seen the color done correctly in the 70mm restored version, and they’re all basically wearing black, dark blue and gray suits — NOT crazy electric LSD blue.
Bottom line: it’s still effed up in the sense that the color isn’t accurate or life-like, but it looks better than the disastrous version shown last April. I guess the color will be adjustable, as always, when it comes out on Bluray. But if what I saw on the Universal lot is in fact what the forthcoming Bluray will look like, then the people who mastered the DCP have once again degraded the film. They should have used the 1996 Robert Harris-Jim Katz restored version and just digitized it and cleaned it up.
This is a plain, honest representation of James Stewart’s brown suit in Vertigo. Verily I say unto thee that this color was nowhere to be found in the Vertigo DCP I saw in late August. In this new digital version Stewart wears what must be described as a mauve-brown or violet-brown suit.
Summary: Why did Universal’s Peter Schade and Mike Daruty decide to finalize a DCP of Vertigo that cranks and intensifies the colors to such a strong degree? Why did they sign off on a credit sequence that delivers an orange-tint to the woman’s face instead of the correct black-and-white with just a touch of sepia? Why is Stewart’s brown suit brownish violet or brownish purple? Why are Stewart and those other guys wearing suits during the inquest hearing that are madly, wildly, psychedelically blue?
More to the point, what persuaded Schade and Daruty to believe they could get a better looking, more vivid representation of Vertigo by going back to the negative and ignoring the Robert Harris-Jim Katz restoration of Vertigo, which represented 18 months of painstaking work? They presumably felt they could achieve better results by bypassing the 1996 photo-chemical restoration and re-do it digitally, but it’s abundantly clear that the colors looked right in ’96 but look wrong in the current DCP version.
What’s so red-bandy about this? It’s obviously PG, and it’s still (like the previous trailers) selling something that seems obvious, ham-fisted, shallow and sticommy. ATO is releasing The Oranges stateside on 10.5.
Every year the Toronto Film Festival runs hot and heavy for the first five days with too many high-interest titles playing against each other, forcing guys like myself to choose and miss out. And then the energy starts to drop on Tuesday and by Wednesday things are all but dead. I’ve got two and a half more days of screenings (I leave early Friday afternoon) and there’s almost nothing going on.
I saw Paul Thomas Anderson‘s The Master here — a searing, intense, brilliantly acted film that defies any and all attempts to tally and make clear-cut sense of. I saw Joe Wright‘s Anna Karenina and David O. Russell‘s The Silver Linings Playbook here, and I was 100% delighted. I didn’t have to see Ben Affleck‘s Argo here because I saw it in Telluride — a sharply made, highly satisfying, cranked-up political thriller.
I saw Terrence Malick‘s To The Wonder here two days ago — a whispery, all-but-silent Emmanuel Lubezski art-gallery film that is all but doomed to be shut out by distributors and fated to never be seen by mainstream ticket-buyers. I saw Lana and Andy Wachowki & Tom Tykwer‘s Cloud Atlas yesterday, and I just couldn’t stand it. I saw Juan Antonio Bayona‘s The Impossible here and it breaks my heart to say that while I was technically impressed I was otherwise disappointed.
I didn’t need to see David Ayers‘ End of Watch here because I saw it in Los Angeles — I’ll post a review later today or tomorrow. I saw Derek Cianfrance‘s The Place Beyond The Pines here and called it a problem on numerous levels, and also declared that Eva Mendes and Rose Byrne are “too hot for Schenectady.”
I saw Pablo Larrain‘s No in Cannes and again in Telluride — gripping, inspired, essential. I saw Roger Michell‘s Hyde Park on Hudson in Telluride — meh. I saw Noah Baumbach‘s Frances Ha in Telluride and really loved it all around — Greta Gerwig‘s performance, the screenplay, the supporting performances. (I’ll post a proper review one of these days.) I saw Martin McDonagh‘s Seven Psychopaths here and was let down — it’s nowhere close to the level of In Bruges and far below the level of McDonagh’s A Behanding in Spokane, one of his beter stage plays. I saw Rian Johnson‘s Looper in Los Angeles and didn’t much care for it. And I saw Sally Potter‘s Ginger And Rosa and felt very little enthusiasm.
I saw Ziad Doueiri‘s The Attack in Telluride, and was…well, my response was respectful, for the most part. The day before yesterday I saw Shola Lynch‘s Free Angela And All Political Prisoners and was 90% positive.
Later today I will see Yaron Zilberman‘s The Late Quartet and then James Ponsoldt‘s Smashed.
I’ve seen eight or nine TIFF films that didn’t inspire me to write anything one way or another.
And I’ve missed Toronto screenings of Billy Bob Thornton‘s Jayne Mansfield’s Car, Robert Redford‘s The Company You Keep, Stephen Chobosky‘s The Perks Of Being A Wallflower, Susanne Bier‘s Love is All You Need, Brian De Palma‘s Passion, Peter Webber‘s Emperor, Neil Jordan‘s Byzantium, Dustin Hoffman‘s Quartet, Laurent Cantet‘s Foxfire, Paul Andrew Williams‘ Song for Marion, Spike Lee‘s Bad 25, Francois Ozon‘s In The House, Costa-Gavras‘ Capital, Mike Newell‘s Great Expectations, Sergio Castellitto‘s Twice Born, Mira Nair‘s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Robert Puccini and Shari Spring Berman‘s Imogene, Joss Whedon‘s Much Ado About Nothing, Harmony Korine‘s Spring Breakers (tried to get into p & i screening yesterday and there were no seats), Josh Boone‘s Writers, Chen Kaige‘s Caught In The Web, Marco Bellochhio‘s Dormant Beauty, Joachim Roenning and Espen Sandberg‘s Kon-Tiki, Nick Cassavettes‘ Yellow and Scott McGehee‘s What Maisie Knew.
Some of the films in the preceding paragraph are viewable today and tomorrow, but most are finished and have left town. And that’s mildly infuriating. I’ve been festival humping for 12 days straight (Telluride + Toronto with two-day timeout) but I’ve got plenty of energy and curiosity left, and there’s next to nothing going on. It just feels like “why am I here again?” and “maybe I could just duck out early?”
What a proud moment for Islam this morning with Middle Eastern man-on-the-street Muslims having once again revealed themselves to be absolutist homicidal yahoos. How animal-level dumb do you have to be to look at clips from Sam Bacile‘s grade-Z satire The Innocence of Muslims and say to yourself, “That’s it…Americans must die for this!” And then shell the U.S. Embassy in Benghazi, Libya, and in so doing take the lives of Libyan ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three others?
Bill Maher would say that the lesson, once again, is that all religions attract and energize the cretins of the world — those who have some kind of primal need to process life in good-bad, black-and-white, be-saved-or-be-damned terms.
Low-rent, low-information Christians have shown themselves to be appallingly ignorant in their support or condemnation of this or that film (I’ll never forget arguing with some of them when The Last Temptation of Christ opened in Century City 24 years ago) but have Christians ever killed anyone over a satiric anti-Jesus film? The Muslims who took part in the killing of Stevens and the others were like dogs, like wolves.
It’s been suggested that The Innocence of Muslims “would have hardly have been noticed, some say, had it not been for its promotion by U.S. pastor and bigot Terry Jones, who incited past protests for burning the Koran.
Bacile, a 52-year-old real-estate developer from southern California, has been quoted by the Wall Street Journal as calling Islam “a cancer.” He told the WSJ that he’s the film’s director-writer, and that he had “raised $5 million to make it from about 100 Jewish donors, whom he declined to identify.”
Here’s a just-posted “Judge Mohammed” video put out by the Florida-based Jones:
if foam-at-the-mouth Muslim dumb-asses want to fly over to Florida and Southern California and have it out with foam-at-the-mouth Christian bigots, fine. They deserve each other.
As Sailor Beware opened on February 9, 1952, this photo was almost certainly taken that month. You’d never know it from the billboard, but this Hal Wallis-produced film was shot in black-and-white. James Dean has a walk on-role with a single line of dialogue — “That guy’s a professional!” If memory serves, Nick Tosches‘ “Dino” biography reports that Martin and costar Corinne Calvet didn’t have it off before, during or after principal photography.
Yesterday Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone posted a list of likely or leading Best Actress contenders. She was smart to put Jennifer Lawrence at the top of the list for her spirited Silver Linings Playbook performance. It’s obviously early but in my view the other four are as follows: Keira Knightley for Anna Karenina, Marion Cotillard for Rust & Bone, Greta Gerwig for Frances Ha and maybe Quvenzhane Wallis for Beasts of the Southern Wild…maybe.
Who’s left to be seen and possibly added? I’m asking.
As good as she is, I don’t think Compliance‘s Ann Dowd has much of a shot…sorry. Ditto Amour‘s Emmanuelle Riva, although I could be wrong. (She exudes grace and dignity.) But forget The Impossible‘s Naomi Watts (just a lot of bug-eyed gasping, screaming and hyperventilating) and Hope Springs‘ Meryl Streep (a relatively modest performance). I know nothing about Leslie Mann‘s performance in This Is Forty.
I’ve been writing off and on about the 9/11 story of lucky Port Authority employee Pasquale Buzzelli — i.e., “the 9/11 surfer” — for a good nine or so years. I’ve gotten to know Pasquale and particularly his wife, Louise, over that time. I tried helping them find a co-writer for Pasquale’s book, “We All Fall Down.” He and Louise and I had dinner in Manhattan six years ago — here’s a photo from that night.
“Buzzelli had just passed the 22nd floor when the North Tower gave way. It was 10:28 in the morning, an hour and 42 minutes after the attack. Buzzelli felt the building rumble, and immediately afterward heard a tremendous pounding coming at him from above, as the upper floors pancaked. Buzzelli’s memory of it afterwards was distinct. The pounding was rhythmic, and it intensified fast, as if a monstrous boulder were bounding down the stairwell toward his head.
“He reacted viscerally by diving halfway down a flight of stairs, and curling into a corner of a landing. He knew the building was failing. Buzzelli was a Catholic. He closed his eyes and prayed for his wife and unborn child. He prayed for a quick death.
“Because his eyes were closed, he felt rather than saw the walls crack open around him. For an instant the walls folded onto his head and arms, and he felt pressure, but then the structure disintegrated beneath him, and he thought, ‘I’m going,’ and began to fall. He kept his eyes closed. He felt the weightlessness of acceleration. The sensation reminded him of thrill rides he had enjoyed at Great Adventure, in New Jersey. He did not enjoy it now, but did not actively dislike it either. He did not actively do anything at all.
“He felt the wind on his face, and a sandblasting effect as he tumbled through the clouds of debris. He saw four flashes of light from small blows to the head, and then another really bright flash when he landed. Right after that he opened his eyes, and it was three hours later.
“He sat up. He saw blue sky and a world of shattered steel and concrete. He had landed on a slab like a sacrificial altar, perched high among mountains of ruin.
“There was a drop of fifteen feet to the debris below him. He saw heavy smoke in the air. Above his head rose a lovely skeletal wall, a lacy gothic thing that looked as if it would topple at any moment. He remembered his fall exactly, and assumed therefore that he was dead.
“He waited to see if death would be as it is shown in the movies — if an angel would come by, or if he would float up and see himself from the outside. But then he started to cough and to feel pain in his leg, and he realized that he was alive.”
On a 9/11 PBS documentary, Langeweische said at this point that Buzzelli was “lying on this altar. There’s no one around. It’s utterly silent. There’re no people around, nothing. It’s a wasteland desert in the middle of New York City. The buildings are gone, there’s smoke, and then there’s fire.
“At some point, he was quite certain — to make a long story short — that he was going to die from fire. So certain that he found a piece of jagged metal and was going to cut his wrists, in order not at least to burn to death. And he had gotten to that point when he was rescued.”
I made it through about 70 minutes worth of Andy and Lana Wachowski & Tom Tykwer‘s Cloud Atlas this morning. I’m sorry but for me this time-flipping tale of cosmic reincarnation and celestial cornholing felt and played like an off-and-on cavalcade of story fragments and makeup moments. I’d been told by a critic friend that if you can just get through the first hour it starts to pay off during the second and third hour (it lasts 163 minutes). But I couldn’t do it, man. I want to show respect but I just couldn’t stand it.
That’s not a judgment call, obviously. I’m not someone to listen to as how good or bad this film is, or whether it’s at least worth the price. I’m just syaing I couldn’t take it. It was too patchworky, too much, too scattered and brain-fucky. I sat there wondering if I should leave for a half-hour before I finally did. Give me a reason to stay, give me a reason to stay, etc. I know what it feels like to be engaged by a film that’s on the stick and double-downed and bringing it home, and Cloud Atlas wasn’t doing that, dammit. It really wasn’t.
I just didn’t feel after being up until 1:30 am last night and getting up at 6 am to bang out that To The Wonder review that I wanted to submit to a 163-minute workout. Maybe when it comes out on Bluray and I’m feeling energized and more rested or in a better mood or….who knows? But not today. I just couldn’t stand it.
“Our lives are not our own. We are bound to others, past and present. And by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future”…fine, whatever, go with God.
The Olympian indifference and almost comical current of fuck-you nothingness that runs through Terrence Malick‘s To The Wonder, which I saw last night at the Princess of Wales theatre, carries a certain fascination. I was prepared for it, having heard from Ben Affleck in Telluride that it “makes The Tree of Life look like Transformers” and having read the Venice Film Festival reviews. So it was hardly a shock to encounter a wispy, ethereal thing composed of flaky intimations and whispers and Emmanuel Lubezki‘s wondrous cinematography with maybe 20 or 25 lines of dialogue, if that.
It’s basically The Tree of Life 2: Oklahoma Depression. It’s Malick sitting next to you and gently whispering in your ear, “You wanna leave? Go ahead. Go on, it’s okay, I don’t care…do what you want. But you can also stay.”
And that’s the thing about this film. Malick gives you so little to grapple with (at least in terms of a fleshed-out narrative and that thing we’ve all encountered from time to time called “speech” or “talking” or what-have-you) that it’s pretty much your responsibility to make something out of To The Wonder‘s 112 minutes. It’s all about you taking a journey of your own devising in the same way we all take short little trips with this or that object d’art in a gallery or a museum. The film is mesmerizing to look at but mostly it just lies there. Well, no, it doesn’t “lie there” but it just kind of swirls around and flakes out on its own dime. Run with it or don’t (and 97% of the people out there aren’t going to even watch this thing, much less take the journey) but “it’s up to you,” as the Moody Blues once sang.
To The Wonder doesn’t precisely fart in your face. It leads you rather to wonder what the air might be like if you’ve just cut one in a shopping mall and there’s someone right behind you, downwind. That’s obviously a gross and infantile thing to think about, but To The Wonder frees you to go into such realms if you want. It’s your deal, man. Be an adult or a child or a 12 year-old or a buffalo. Or a mosquito buzzing around a buffalo. Naah, that’s dull. Be a buffalo and sniff the air as Rachel McAdams walks by! You can go anywhere, be anything. Which is liberating in a sense, but if you can’t or won’t take the trip you’ll just get up and leave or take a nap or throw something at the screen. Or get up and leave and head for the nearest mall.
I went with it. I wasn’t bored. Well, at least not for the first hour. I knew what I’d be getting into and I basically roamed around in my head as I was led and lulled along by Lubezki’s images and as I contemplated the narcotized blankness coming out of Affleck’s “Neil” character, who is more or less based on Malick. Or would be based on Malick if Malick had the balls to make a film about himself, which he doesn’t. If Malick had faced himself and made a film about his own solitude and obstinacy and persistence…wow! That would have been something. But Malick is a hider, a coward, a wuss. He used to be the guy who was up to something mystical and probing and mysterious. Now he tosses lettuce leaves in the air and leaves you to put them all into a bowl as you chop the celery and the carrots and the tomatoes and decide upon the dressing.
I came out of it convinced that I will never, ever visit Bartlesville, Oklahoma, where the film was mostly shot.
There’s a kind of mad breakout scene in the second half in which Romina Mondello, “playing” an Italian-born friend of Olga Kurylenko, who “plays” Ben Affleck‘s French wife, says “there’s nothing here!” and you’re sitting there in your slumber and going “no shit?” But it’s not just the place — it’s the emptiness and the nothingness that Affleck and Kurylenko, who have become lovers in her native Paris (just as Malick fell in love with and married Michelle Morette in the mid ’80s), bring to their blah-fart activities in the film — wandering around, making love, playing kid-wrestling games, staring at sunsets, moving this or that piece of furniture from one room to another or lifting it out of a cardboard box, etc. These are people who are investing in their own torpor. People who bring nothing to the table. Deadheads.
Kurylenko and McAdams did a brief q & a after the film, and Kurylenko talked about how her character is supposed to be a little “crazy” — unbalanced, obsessive. Except there’s nothing in the film that persuades you of this, or even hints at it, really. Her character is passionate and emotional and has no real compulsion in life — nothing to do except twirl around, make goo-goo or fuck-you eyes at Affleck, take care of her 12 year-old daughter, sleep, make love, wonder about stuff, prepare meals, wander, daydream.
I raised my hand and asked Kurylenko and McAdams if Malick ever talked about how the film is largely based on his own life and how this was at least a key part of the fabric of it all, and they both kind of looked at each other and then at the floor and more or less said, “Ask Terry…that’s his affair.”
From the TIFF press notes: “As Malick liberates himself more and more from the restrictions of conventional narrative and pursues a more associative approach, he gets closer to eliciting pure, subconscious responses from his viewers. It is gratifying to note that the same man who long ago wrote an uncredited draft of Dirty Harry now finds freedom in the transcendental.”
Shola Lynch‘s Free Angela and All Political Prisoners, an absorbing and well-crafted doc about the intense life of ’60s and ’70s political revolutionary Angela Davis and her 1972 conspiracy-kidnapping-murder trial, had its first press screening today at 2 pm. I attended and was quite taken. But Lynch declines to clearly explain the facts behind the prosecution’s central accusation against Davis, and that’s a huge thing to omit in a film of this sort.
Free Angela is a riveting history lesson and a fascinating time-travel look at the political lunacy of the late ’60s to early ’70s, when thousands of impassioned leftists gradually turned radical and became sincerely convinced that revolutionãry social change was imminent, leading to some of them jumping off a cliff (some rhetorical, some criminal) in order to push things along or throw wood into the fire. And the right did everything in its power to turn this country into a police state in order to repress and suppress the left, especially with the emergence of super-radical street fighters and bank robbers and bomb-makers like the Weathermen.
Much of Free Angela is about that collective madness, but more particularly about Davis’s underground fugitive phase in the wake of being charged with aggravated kidnapping and first-degree murder, and then her capture by the FBI, and then her 1972 trial in San Jose. Davis was prosecuted because four guns bought by Davis were used in an 8.7.70 attempt by Jonathan Jackson, the 17 year-old brother of imprisoned Black Panther George Jackson, to break out three “Soledad brother” defendants out of a Marin County courthouse. Jackson handed guns to three black defendants and took Judge Harold Haley, the prosecutor, and three jurors as hostages. A shoot-out resulted and the judge, one of the jurors, the prosecutor and two of the three black guys (I think) wound up dead.
Jonathan Jackson was Davis’ bodyguard so perhaps he just took the firearms without her knowledge and pulled the whole thing off solo. Okay, maybe. I love Angela Davis and support the various metaphors that she came (and has come) to represent, and I’m totally glad she’s free and speaking and teaching at age 68, but does anyone believe today that Davis was totally unaware of young Jackson’s plan? Especially given the fact that she bought a shotgun three days before the courtoom assault? Read this account by Lawrence V. Cott and tell me she had no clue and was totally blame-free.
Davis was found not guilty of all charges related to the courtroom shoot-out by an all-white San Jose jury in 1972.
The problem with Free Angela is that Lynch doesn’t dig into what actually happened with between Davis, Jackson and the guns. She doesn’t grim up and ask the tough questions. That’s because this is a friendly documentary that was funded by Will Smith and Jay Z, and the agenda and the limits were clear, or so it seems tonight. (I tried to speak to Lynch tonight, but her pubicist put off her chat until tomorrow.)
(l. to r.): Willow Smith, Jaden Smith, producer Sidra Smith, director Shola Lynch, Will Smith, Angela Davis and Jada Pinkett Smith at yesterday’s TIFF premiere screening.
