Jeffrey Wells

Out of nowhere I decided last night to rent a DVD of Mike Nichols‘ Heartburn (’86, which I hadn’t seen in a good 20 years. My recollection was that it was smoothly assembled with two super-confident, movie-star performances from Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson, and that it had a flush, slightly smug air about it, and was intermittently entertaining in portions but not that great overall, and was actually flat toward the end.

But I was moved to give it another go. And it was intermittently entertaining once more. I miss this kind of well-funded, well-acted, sophisticated adult dramedy with that Nichols attitude and a fine commercial gloss. I didn’t even mind the Carly Simon songs. And Streep’s portrayal of Rachel Samstadt (i.e., the stand-in for Heartburn screenwriter-novelist Nora Ephron) has many genuine moments, especially of vulnerability.

But the film has a huge roadblock or two (or three). Ephron’s screenplay, based on her mostly autobiographical 1983 novel of the same name, charts the breakdown and dissolution of her marriage to Watergate reporter and novelist Carl Bernstein. Bernstein is called Mark Forman in the film and played by Nicholson, who came aboard at the last minute when Mandy Patinkin, unhappy with his part, left the film early on.

The problem is that Nicholson’s affair with the unseen giraffe lady with the big splayed feet (inspired by Bernstein’s affair with Margaret Jay) happens entirely off-screen and reveals nothing at all about Nicholson’s psychology. All you can sense is that he feels vaguely threatened by fatherhood and responsibility. It just feels bizarre that the affair just happens without the audience being told anything. Nicholson’s Mark is just a selfish shit (which may well have been the case except it takes two to bring a marriage down), and I felt bothered and irritated that I wasn’t getting the whole story.

And their friends (Richard Masur, Jeff Daniels, Stockard Channing, Milos Forman, et. al.) do nothing but sit around at weddings and dinner parties and picnics and share knowing glances and go “Well, yeah…obviously” and “cluck, cluck, cluck.” I began to really hate this bunch. Do they have lives? If so, do they involve disappointments or failures or betrayals that are similar to the ones being endured by Mark and Rachel? I gradually began to dislike this Greek chorus more than Nicholson’s character, in a way. I wanted at least one of them to get killed in a car crash.

“The movie is full of talented people, who are fun to watch, but after a while the scenes that don’t point anywhere begin to add up, and you start asking yourself: ‘What is this movie about?’,” wrote New Yorker critic Pauline Kael. “You are still asking [this] when it’s over, and by then a flatness, a disappointment, is likely to have settled over the fillips you’d enjoyed.

“Although Ephron is a gifted and a witty light essayist, her novel is no more than a variant of a princess fantasy: Rachel, the wife, is blameless; Mark, the husband, is simply a bad egg — an adulterer. And, reading the book, you don’t have to take Rachel the bratty narrator very seriously; her self-pity is so thinly masked by humor and unabashed mean-spiritedness that you feel that the author is exploiting her life — trashing it by presenting it as a juicy, fast-action comic strip about a marriage of celebrities.”

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Fans of those extended uncut shots in Let Me In will recognize the hand of dp Greig Fraser in this carefully choreographed action scene (i.e., Slaine and Sam Shepard roughing up Ray Liotta) from Andrew Dominik‘s Killing Them Softly.

Fraser is either currently shooting or recently wrapped shooting on Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal‘s Zero Dark Thirty. He also shot Snow White and the Huntsman…uggh!

The adaptation of George V. Higgins‘ Coogan’s Trade stars Brad Pitt as Jackie Cogan with James Gandolfini, Richard Jenkins, Slaine, Linara Washington, Bella Heathcote (the beauty from Dark Shadows), Shepard, Scott McNairy, Garret Dillahunt and Ben Mendelson.

So where’s the clip of Pitt doing something or other?

The Weinstein Co. will open Killing Them Softly in the U.S. on 9.21.2012.

Nikki Finke is reporting/opining that Warner Bros’ and Tim Burton’s Dark Shadows is a shortfaller with about $28 million expected by Sunday night. Divide that figure by 3,755 screens and you’ve got an average of $7456 — not terrible but the droll Johnny Depp vampire comedy was predicted to earn a minimum of $35 million, Finke writes, and it should have opened to at least a $40 to $50 million, especially given the $150 to $175 million cost.

All I know is that I felt intrigue and interest all along but almost everyone I’d read or heard from in the weeks before the opening was dumping on it sight unseen. This weekend’s earnings are about those downish feelings and not the reviews. So what happened? My moderately pleased or placated review ran two days ago.

Klaartje Quirijns‘ Anton Corbijn Inside Out, a portrait of the famed photographer and director of Control, The American and the forthcoming A Most Wanted Man, will have two market screenings in Cannes — at the Arcades 1 on Thursday, 5.17, at 3:30 pm, and at the Arcades 2 on Monday, 5.21, at 2 pm.

A Most Wanted Man, based on a 2009 John Le Carre novel, will costar Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Rachel McAdams.

My 8.31.10 review of The American. The best party of it stole from Richard Eder’s review of Rancho Deluxe, to wit: “The American is handsome, meditative, elegiac and languid. It’s so coolly artful it is barely alive. First-rate ingredients and a finesse in assembling them do not quite make either a movie or a cake. At some point it is necessary to light the oven.”

My second favorite portion of the 8.31.10 review: “There’s a moment at the very end when George Clooney‘s grim, somber-to-a-fault performance — monotonous and guarded to the point of nothingness, shut and bolted down — suddenly opens up. It’s when he asks the local prostitute to leave with him. For the first time in the film, he smiles. He relaxes and basks in the glow of feeling.

“There’s a little patch of woods by a river that Clooney visits three times. Once to test his rifle, once for a picnic and a swim in the river, and then in the final scene. One too many, perhaps. But his final drive to this spot is almost — almost, I say — on the level of Jean Servais‘ final drive back into Paris in Rififi. For the second and final time in the film Clooney shows something other than steel and grimness.

“The American is worth seeing for this scene alone, and for the final shot when a butterfly flutters off and the camera pans up.”

If someone was to tell me I’ll never be able to watch a movie about a fat kid protagonist, I would think “that’s a strange restriction” and “why would anyone care if I see another fat kid movie or not?” But honestly? I wouldn’t be unhappy about it. Sorry but that’s my position. There’s almost no difference between being obese and being a heroin addict. That aside, I support what Matthew Lillard is trying to do. As a gumption-y thing.

View from window at Holtzendorfstrasse 19 in Southwest Berlin — Friday, 5.11, 5:55 pm.

Two days ago N.Y. Times “Arts Beat” guy Patrick Healy reported that Tom Hankswill make his Broadway debut next year as Mike McAlary, the Daily News columnist in Nora Ephron‘s Lucky Guy. The Pulitzer Prize-winning tabloid reporter died in 1998 of colon cancer at the age of 41. Says a director-screenwriter friend: “A smart aging star move whose box office clout has been fading. This will help him.”

HE Reader: “I was just wondering if you saw the articles about the Obama fundraiser that George Clooney hosted at his house? And that Robert Downey, Jr. was one of the attendees? Wondering what you think about that since you’ve labeled him a Republican or closet Republican.”

My Reply: “I haven’t labelled anyone as anything. I’ve just pointed out what others have said and what seems fairly evident, given Downey’s own statements.

“All Downey being at the Clooney fundraiser suggests is that he isn’t walking around with a Republican stick up his ass, and is more of a comme ci comme ca type at the end of the day. Downey can be Downey and still be an amiable get-around, schmooze-around, socially ambitious fellow. He’s been a very smart Hollywood player all his life (except during the druggie days) so how could he have a problem with the company of liberals at a very cool party, particularly one attended by Barack Obama? Please.”

I repeat what he told N.Y. Times reporter David Carr in 2009: “I have a really interesting political point of view, and it’s not always something I say too loud at dinner tables here, but you can’t go from a $2,000-a-night suite at La Mirage to a penitentiary and really understand it and come out a liberal. You can’t. I wouldn’t wish that experience on anyone else, but it was very, very, very educational for me and has informed my proclivities and politics ever since.”

And I repeat what a first-rate source whom I’ve known for over 25 years shared last December about Downey:

“His values are pure Republican values. He’s a serious materialist. He loves the great clothes, the beautiful house, the cool cars. He’s a ‘protect the rich’ guy. Why should the rich have to pay for this or that? The people who have it should keep it, and the people who don’t have it shouldn’t complain. And the one he looks up to the most and has been his philosophical guide is Mel Gibson. The Gibson thing is key. Mel Gibson over the years, and who he is and that way of looking at the world.”

“As Roger Friedman reported in 2003, Downey was able to return to movies only after Gibson, who’d been a close friend to Downey since they starred together in Air America (’90), paid Downey’s insurance bond for his appearance in The Singing Detective (’03).

“Downey has looked up to Gibson as an older brother and authority figure and mentor for a long time…Mel said this, Mel said that…all through the ’90s and the aughts. They shared [the late] Ed Limato as an agent. I ask you, how can you be that close to Mel Gibson for 20 years and not share some of his values? Of all the people Downey was close to Mel was by far the most politically inclined and vocal…he was a kind of guru.

“So they’ve been close all through the last 20 years despite Air America having been a failure, both commercially and critically. Usually people sort of run away from people with whom they’ve made a bomb with, but not here.”

Late this morning I spent about 90 minutes touring Studio Babelsberg, the oldest large-scale studio complex in the world which last February celebrated its 100th anniversary. I was hoping to see some remnants of Cloud Atlas (Warner Bros., October), the Wachowskis-meet-Tom Tykwer epic that shot here last year, but alas, all the sets have been struck. But it was great to just roam around and take in all the history and the detail and the endless knick-knacks and eye candy for the soul.

Studio Babelsberg is an all-in-one super-factory for filmmaking — sound stages big, medium and small, a sprawling carpentry shop, a superb prop museum and costume warehouse. You could spend hours and hours inspecting everything.

For a guy like myself, a fan of German cinema since I was a kid, this was like coming home and visiting a grand cathedral at the same instant. Studio Babelsberg is where Fritz Lang‘s Metropolis, Josef Von Sternberg‘s The Blue Angel and Robert Wiene‘s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari were shot. Ditto significant portions of Roman Polanski‘s The Pianist and The Ghost Writer, Quentin Tarantino‘s Inglourious Basterds, the Wachowski’s V for Vendetta, Brian DePalma‘s Passion (i.e., “DePalma Lesbo Action”)and Roland Emmerich‘s Anonymous, among many others.

It’s located in Potsdam, the leafy university town about 35 minutes southwest of Berlin by train. It helped that this was the first really warm and fragrant day since I arrived in Berlin seven days ago.

Many thanks to corporate communications chief Eike Wolf, who gave me the tour and introduced me around. He also invited me to a Studio Babelsberg gathering in Cannes at the Grand Hotel in eight or nine days.

I would have stuck around for lunch but only one guy takes orders at the studio cafeteria — one guy! — and the line is endless, and most of the dishes include piles of french fries.

Update: “It’s great you made a point of going out to Babelsberg,” a critic friend has just written. “I was there in 1990 before the studio had its latest modernization. Just wonder if your guide pointed out that the striking moderne buildings put up in the late ’20s and early ’30s were designed by none other than Albert Speer.”

Babel Marlene

European street set where the Warsaw ghetto portions of The Pianist were shot.

Eike Wolf, head of corporate communication for Studio Babelsberg AF — Friday,

I misheard Eike Wolf when he said that one of Hugh Grant’s roles in Cloud Atlas is that of a “woman” — I thought he said “Roman.”

The train conductor’s uniform worn by Kate Winslet in The Reader.

I was prepared before seeing Tim Burton‘s Dark Shadows this afternoon at Berlin’s Cinestar plex. It has a shitty Rotten Tomatoes grade (51% positive), and the word has been out for a while that it’s spotty at best with a dopey script and not much cohesion. But it looks so rich and sublime, you see. It’s an absolute pleasure to just sit and watch and not listen to or care about.

Burton creates visual art that you can hang on a museum wall, and if you can shut off the usual movie-watching expectations Dark Shadows is a very pleasurable way to spend 113 minutes. Just pretend you’re strolling through a motion-y MOMA exhibit.

I felt underwhelmed but not pissed off. I shrugged, smirked and mostly dug what it was. No anger. Just don’t go expecting anything like Beetlejuice or Ed Wood or Sweeney Todd or Edward Scissorhands — those days are over, I’m afraid. And take comfort, at least, that it’s better than Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Alice in Wonderland.

Forget the underwritten characters, the obligatory fire-and-destruction CG in the third act, the ridiculous introduction of a werewolf manifestation during the last ten minutes and all the other stupid crap. Burton has never been much of a storyteller — we’re all used to his shortcomings in this department. He’s a production designer who feeds off off the feature film racket. And so he’s obliged to hang his darkly creepy visual panache and downbeat attitude humor on the clothesline of at least a semi-rickety plot with semi-fleshed-out characters, etc. He directs films because they give him a bigger audience and a much bigger payday than creating art for galleries or whatever.

I knew early on that Dark Shadows would be a thin sandwich and that I had to settle into it as a visual thing only or leave. And that’s what I did — I stayed and more or less grooved on Johnny Depp‘s lovely black-and-white skin and inky black hair and the lustrous orange in Helena Bonham Carter‘s hair and the delicate, fine-boned beauty in the face of Bella Heathcote and the gray turbulent sea at the foot of a rocky cliff and that standardly gothic home in which the Collins family resides, etc. And Michelle Pfeiffer‘s huge ’70s hair and eyeliner and unpainted toes. I was fine with all of this. I just sat there and sank into it and didn’t nod off, not once.

But God, that third act is awful! “The script is shit and I think even Burton knew it when he was shooting,” I told myself around the 40-minute mark, “and he didn’t mind because he knew guys like me wouldn’t mind either.”