I’m so delighted with the new Criterion Repulsion Bluray (out 7.28) that I’ve played it twice start to finish, and I only opened the package last night. I didn’t sit there like a bowling pin and literally watch it twice. I watched it once and I ran it a second time as a kind of white-noise sideshow in the corner of my eye, tuning in and out and half-listening as I worked on the column.
It doesn’t seem to have been de-granularized in the slightest and I still love it. Just goes to show that people like me are fine with a natural grain look as long as it’s been done right. For all I know the grain has been toned down, but it looks amazingly sweet. It’s there but it’s fine. The monochrome tones are pleasingly vivid and soothing, and the sharpness of the picture is just right in an unforced and untweaked way.
The Ugly Truth (Sony, 7.24) is about a shrill and tightly-wrapped morning TV producer (Katherine Heigl) who decides to take guidance lessons from a sexist cock-of-the-walk talk-show guy (Gerard Butler) about how to land a prospective new boyfriend. Which gradually leads, of course, to Hiegl falling for Butler and vice versa and the other guy getting the blowoff. It was all there in the trailer.
I like Butler but he didn’t have a chance with this steaming pile of uptown fantasy chick-romance horseshit. The crude craft and lack of finesse make it a stunningly plastic, relentlessly boorish thing to sit through. It doesn’t wear its loathsomeness with pride as much as…I don’t know, cluelessness. It is arch, syrupy, cliche-ridden and girlish in the worst sense of that term. The whorish plotting and half-formed, rough-draft dialogue are just awful.
The Ugly Truth doesn’t even try to work with recognizable human behavior or tendencies or whatever. There seems to be a determination on the part of director Robert Luketic and the screenwriters (Nicole Eastman, Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith) to studiously avoid any depictions of human behavior that might remotely resemble what passes for believable behavior among real people dealing with real situations.
The problem is that there’s a whole generation of filmmakers out there who believe that once a film is “just a comedy” that this amounts to a license to show people cavorting several miles outside the boundaries of realism and credibility and recognizable human genetics because…it’s a comedy! And it’s cancer. It’s pure cancer afflicting and tumorizing a once-respectable form. Billy Wilder, Ernst Lubitsch, Leo McCarey and David O. Russell would be bent over and vomiting on the floor after watching this thing.
Comedies are nothing unless they’ve been imagined and written like Hamlet — they have to be about serious hurt, real fears, genuine anxiety — and then lifted and contorted and pratfalled into humor with agility and spirit and split-second timing.
The Ugly Truth is just repellent sitcom crap aimed at younger women unencumbered by taste buds or judgment of any kind, and who are therefore easy lays. I understand “crazy” and I get “everyone is on drugs”…but you first have to realistically invest in and make people believe in the reality of what’s being said, done, decided upon and so on. Luketic and his screenwriting trio have totally ignored this responsibility.
If there was a court system within Hollywood that addressed exceptional creative crimes the whole Ugly Truth gang — Luketic, Eastman, Lutz, Smith plus producers Steven Reuther, Kimberly di Bonaventura, Deborah Jelin Newmyer, Tom Rosenberg and Gary Lucchesi plus executive producers Andre Lamal, Eric Reid, Katherine Heigl, Nancy Heigl, Karen McCullah Lutz, Kirsten Smith and Ryan Kavanaugh — would be wearing orange jumpsuits and handcuffs and standing before the judge. If it were my call they’d all get time. Okay, suspended sentences with community service.
Heigl hasn’t done herself any favors with her performance. She plays it pinched and highly strung and neurotically unappealing for the most part. You could put a nickel between her butt cheeks and it would never drop to the floor. She touches emotional bottom towards the end — I’ll give her that.
Butler has a kind of crude mannishness that comes across decently here and there, but his loutish American accent — the same one Mel Gibson began using in the mid ’80s with lines like “gimme a hot dawwg with rehhlish!” — sounds forced and ungenuine. He needs to stop trying to be American and speak in his own native Scottish accent, which is quite appealing.
Every bullshit cliche in the big-studio, high-adventure, CG-crapola pantheon, packed into one self-regarding, thoroughly self-amused franchise. It’s Indiana Zorro 007 Jones in 19th Century London, for God’s sake. It gave me instant cardiac arrythmia. I feel as if I’ve already sat through two screenings, been to the junket and watched it on a coast-to-coast flight. It’ll probably do extremely well with the chumps. I’m betting right now that the pre-disposed Drew McWeeny will cream all over it.
With Universal’s Despicable Me (7.9.10), Hollywood has produced another mainstream animated feature with another morbidly obese boy in a prominent role. (Or in the trailer, at least.) This follows the precedent begun by Up‘s “Russell” character, a morbidly obese young boy scout voiced by Jordan Nagai
Meaning that once again Hollywood is presenting obesity as a normal and accepted adolescent condition, certainly as far as American culture is concerned. Let’s imagine that instead of one out of three American kids being obese or overweight they were instead hardcore heroin users. If this was the case would a mainstream animated feature show a typical American family kid stumbling around and getting off and scratching his face and eating candy bars? I doubt it.
Fox Searchlight will distribute Scott Cooper‘s Crazy Heart, per a press release received an hour ago. Adapted from Thomas Cobb‘s 1989 book, the downbeat drama (country music, alcoholism, parenting, looking for closure) costars Jeff Bridges, Colin Farrell, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Robert Duvall.
The film was produced by Cooper, Judy Cairo, Rob Carliner and Robert Duvall. The film has an original soundtrack by T-Bone Burnett.
Here’s a Library Journal summary of Cobb’s book, which may or may not have been strictly followed by Cooper’s script:
“Singer and guitarist Bad Blake (Bridges) was once a first-rate country-and-western star, but now he’s 57, an alcoholic, a failure at four marriages, and playing in third-rate clubs. The biggest gig he can get is opening for Tommy Sweet (Farrell), the kid Bad got started and whose career has now eclipsed Bad’s.
“Bad meets Jean Craddock (Gyllenhaal) when she comes to interview him and they fall in love. Her little boy, Buddy, inspires Bad to search for his own long-lost son, but there’s no happy ending there. And when Bad, hungry for a drink, loses Jean’s son, things take a downturn, despite Bad’s fling with AA. This first novel has the authentic patter and ambience of those seedy one-night-stands, but the plot is thin and the ending is very downbeat.”
Compare this to the Fox Searchlight press release synopsis: “An aging country music legend wrestling with his loss of fame at the hands of younger protégé. Struggling to make ends meet playing one small gig to the next in the twilight of his career, he finds unlikely inspiration in a small town reporter (Gyllenhaal) and her young son.”
“How did you get stahted with this stawrey?,” a junket journalist asked Thirst director Park Chan-Wook early this afternoon. “What was the creativity in makin’ this film?”
A few seconds later this same journalist asked me not to take photos of Park because she was sitting right next to him and didn’t want her face in the picture. I took a few shots at the get-go because I didn’t want the usual posed-smiling shots. I never thought about including any face-shots of any journalists sitting nearby, but being asked by this woman not to do this tempted me to think otherwise.
I always have these feelings when I attend junket round-tables. I half-pay attention to what the talent is saying about him/herself and the film he/she is promoting while bracing myself for the awful junket questions that are sometimes asked.
Based on Emile Zola‘s Therese Raquin, Thirst is a grotesque morality with some extremely hot love scenes. The lovers are a Catholic priest (Song Kang ho) and a repressed housewife (Kim Ok bin). The priest is tortured by his vampirism; the housewife feels liberated by it. I loved the sensual abandon that came out of Kim’s performance, but felt a little dragged down by Song’s moral writhing.
Just as Stanley Kubrick was slavishly devoted to the ethos and plot points of Arthur SchnitzlerTraumnovelle, Park Chan-Wook is devoted to the moralistic fatalism and plot points of Emile Zola‘s Therese Racquin — at least as far as the priest character is concerned.
Except no one today believes that people suffer absolute damnation and death for their sins. People who’ve done something “bad” or criminal rarely pay the price. If they pay the price they get past it and move on. They atone and compartmentalize and reinvent themselves and write a book or star in a reality show or become born-again Christians in prison. There’s a world of difference between the emotionally propelled vampires in Twilight and the guilty priest vampire in Thirst.
I don’t have to explain any particular stinking reasons about why I posted this. Okay, here’s one. It’s interesting in hindsight how this one scene created a vivid (one could say racial) stereotype — the scheming predatory sociopath with the wild eyes and evil grin. The Treasure of Sierra Madre was released 61 years ago, and this type of villain — i.e., so deeply in love with his evil nature that he can’t help flaunting it — is still with us. “I don’t care if you think I’m a bad guy. Because I am a bad guy — I admit it. And I love it\ besides.”
I’ve seen Cold Souls. It’s intriguing and mildly amusing at times, but for a comedy in which a New York actor literally plays himself (in this instance Paul Giamatti) it’s no Being John Malkovich either. My usual reaction to seeing a comedy that doesn’t entirely work is to complain that they should’ve toned down the schtick. But Cold Souls could’ve used a bit more schtick. Odd — I never thought I’d hear myself say that.
I’m saying there’s something a bit too dry and studied about it. The director/writer, Sophie Barthes, isn’t into fooling around for its own sake, but this is exactly what Cold Souls needs. It need a little Buck Henry or Sarah Silverman or David O. Russell attitude. But it’s not half bad.
My only other thought is that Giamatti needs to (a) stop losing hair follicles and (b) get back to his Sideways weight. He needs to be Miles again — seriously. He needs to make time stand still. He needs to dip himself into amber and just be that guy for the next 50 or 60 years.
HE reader James Kent was at the Harkins Tempe Marketplace cinema in Tempe, Arizona last weekend, and observed the following: “My wife and I walked passed the theater entrance to Bruno and noticed hey had a big sign posted in front that absolutely no one under the age of 18 would be permitted without parent or legal guardian. They even posted an usher to check IDs at the door. There was also a big sign up at the main ticket counter. Now, just two doors down there were no such signs in front of the R-rated The Hangover or three doors down at Public Enemies. Homophobia in this super-conservative state is clearly alive and well.” Not to mention Navan, Ireland.
“I don’t know how much you follow the Emmys,” writes HE reader Matthew Morettini, “but something noteworthy came out of last week’s nominations. Entourage‘s Jeremy Piven, winner of three Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series awards for three years straight (’06 through ’08), wasn’t even nominated. And there are six nominees! My guess? His fellow actors were appalled by his walking thermometer Speed-the-Plow shenanigans and decided to send him a message about professionalism. David Mamet couldn’t have written it better.”
It takes a special improvisational Thelonious Monk-like approach to running a website business to forget to renew your domain name. Everything’s jake now but my aversion to Sir Thomas More-like regularity made for a truly delightful morning.
And now I’m running to a Thirst junket that I’ll probablly be a few minutes late for. All kinds of to-do’s are piling up as I speak. No further filing until mid-afternoon. A screening of The Ugly Truth happens early this evening.
