“The thing to remember about the Cannes press, especially the film critics, is that they are global, sophisticated, pretentious and quite often vicious. They love to slam the seats at a press screening, or hiss a movie during the closing credits. That level of rejection did not occur [at Tuesday night’s DaVinci Code press screening]. But there were uncomfortable waves of titters throughout the film tonight, and when the BIG REVEAL comes, there was outright laughter.” — Anne Thompson on her RiskyBiz blog…and I have only this to add: Anne’s descriptions of the visiting Cannes press omits the fact that most of them are quite perceptive, selectively or otherwise. I’ve never known the Cannes gang to dump on a movie for the sheer perverse joy of dumping on a movie. If a movie has anything impassioned or startling or subversive to offer, somebody here will pick up on this and run it up the flagpole. But there’s nothing in The DaVinci Code that raised anyone’s temperature. It has one notable offering — Ian McKellen‘s 15-minute explanation scene (it’s nearly a soliloquy) of the biggest coverup of all time…but that’s it. All to say that the pans that came out of last night’s screening were not a result of temperament or pissy attitudes or predispostions.
This was first posted way back when, but it’s another great trailer re-scramble…very funny.
Hissing Balloon
Ron Howard’s The DaVinci Code, which screened for the press Tuesday night at the Salle Debussy, has its intriguing moments. But it’s a fairly flat sit. A camera crew came up to me after the screening and I said, “It’s not that deep. In fact, it’s not that good. In fact, it’s kind of plodding. In fact…”
I shrugged my shoulders and said it wasn’t painful, because it isn’t. But it sure as hell doesn’t lift off the runway. I didn’t hate it, but I was never that aroused.
Audrey Tatou, Tom Hanks in Ron Howard’s The DaVinci Code
I can see devout Christians seeing it this weekend out of natural curiosity, or maybe to piss themsleves off. I can see it hooking those who aren’t hip to the story. (There must be a few people who don’t know it.)
It has a few chases, a couple of killings, one or two 180 character turns…but it’s Howard’s worst film since Far and Away.
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The story is about a massive coverup, but Columbia Pictures’ decision not to screen it until tonight was a coverup also. A smart one. They knew (even if they don’t admit it) that critics would piss on it and there was nothing to be gained, etc.
The fact that it’s a faithful translation of a pulp best-seller will satisfy many millions, I realize. But it doesn’t doesn’t do what Clint Eastwood’s The Bridges of Madison County did for Robert Waller’s novel, or what Coppola’s The Godfather did for the original Mario Puzo novel.
On the steps of the Salle Debussy after the DaVinci Code screening — Tuesday, 5.16.05, 11:08 pm.
The DaVinci Code is basically a very brainy Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew-styled mystery movie that gradually leads to a debunking of the myth of Jesus Christ’s divinity, and a corresponding salute to the power and spiritual connectedness of women…two in particular.
A critic friend was calling it tedious and boring, but it’s not that bad. It putters along and does the thing that the 50 million people who’ve read Dan Brown’s novel are probably expecting it to do.
For all the controversy and anti-Christian establishment stuff and the discussion of Jesus and Mary Magdeleme’s relationship and their having had a daughter it’s just not that echo-y, and it’s talky as shit for two and a half hours. Sifting through clues, seeing past the obvious…wait, another clue! How could I have missed that?
There’s a pretty good explanation-of-the-biggest-coverup-in-history scene that Ian McKellen (doing his usual rascally eccentric nutter thing) pretty much nails on his own. McKellen! Boss man!
Festival guys putting up DaVinci Code banners in main lobby of Grand Palais — Tuesday, 5.16.06, 3:45 pm.
Tom Hanks does a decent job — he’s a very likable and self-assured actor — and is good at maintaining his dignity and handling some fairly clunky dialogue at times. (Akiva Goldsman has to take some responsibility.) Audrey Tatou handles herself fairly well in the awkwardly-written role of Sophie. Better than I thought she would, I mean.
Paul Bettany as a maniacal, self-flagellating Opus Dei whack job in monk’s robes gets very trying after his first couple of scenes. (It may be those Alaskan husky contact lenses he’s wearing.) Jean Reno plays the world’s most boringly obsessed, one-note Parisian cop.
There’s a big surprise that I won’t divulge, but anyone who doesn’t guess it at least an hour before it comes isn’t paying attention.
I can report that when the big surprise is divulged (by Hanks, in a single line of tepid, on-the-nose dialogue), the smarty-pants audience laughed.
It was the only laughing-at-the-movie moment, but when I heard the chuckles and guffaws, I knew. This movie is going to be toast with discriminating movieogers as the word starts to get out and it moves along into the second and third week. It’s not going to make money hand over fist with urban blues after the initial curiosity surge.
Paul Bettany, Audrey Tatou
We all know DaVinci is going to make a shitload this weekend — $60 million, $70 million. Everyone has decided to see it and that’s that. A lot of people are pretty taken with mysteries and a lot of them are devout Christians. But even the die-hards are going to say to themselves, “Man, this movie is not cooking.”
There was zero applause when it ended, and very few stayed in their seats to watch the credits.
It’s 1:30 a.m. Wednesday and I’m whipped — I have a headache and my vision is hazy-misty from fatigue and my ass hurts from sitting on a too-low, too-hard couch — but I wouldn’t sleep very well if I didn’t tap something out.
The screening ended two and a half hours ago, or about 11 pm. The press rooms are closed at that hour, so I had to scrounge around Old Town for an hour before I found a working wi-fi location. I went to two places that claimed to have good wi-fi but didn’t…pain in the ass.
(a) In front of Cannes’ Majestic Hotel
Three or four weeks after 9/11, Oliver Stone said during a New York Film Festival panel discussion that he’d “like to do a movie on terrorism…it would be like The Battle of Algiers…perhaps it’s an old formula, but if it were done realistically it could be a fascinating procedural.”
“You would see the Arab side,” Stone continued, “and you’d see the American side, and [if it’s done right] people will respond and they will go. I don’t buy this thing that everybody just wants to see Zoolander .” And now, some four years and eight months later, this still from Stone’s forthcoming World Trade Center (Paramount, 8.9) has hit the web and…well, what else is there to think? Obviously Stone still thinks of Ben Stiller‘s fashion-industry parody (which I half-liked as a film and really liked as a script) as an emblem of something puerile.
“The sound of failure is silence,” DreamWorks marketing maven Terry Press tells L.A. Times columnist Patrick Goldstein in one of his best pieces in a long while — a study of what it’s like, psychologically and emotionally, when your movie flops. “When you have a hit, your phone starts ringing at 6:45 a.m. and never stops,” says Press. “In failure, there is a deafening silence. No calls from distribution, no calls from journalists, no calls from the filmmakers. It’s the Hollywood version of bird flu. You feel like everyone is saying, ‘Get my mask out. I don’t want to be near any failure germs.’ Even your own relatives don’t call.”
Another here-comes-The DaVinci Code piece, with another look at how it’s being sold to Christians, hostile and otherwise…researched and written by Peter J. Boyer for The New Yorker.
Yes, yes…no one has seen The DaVinci Code yet and it’s very unusual for Columbia to hide it as they have, but they’ll be showing it here in Cannes about four and a half hours from now and the head-down marketing angle will obviously be moot after that. I’ll try and bang out some kind of a reaction piece as soon as I leave the Palais screening room (I think it’s the Debussy) at 11 pm or thereabouts, but I don’t know how lucid or well-phrased I’ll be at that hour. Sharon Waxman‘s N.Y. Times piece says the first-weekend projections “range from $70 million to over $100 million,” so if it makes $60 or $65 million that will be seen as a shortfall.
Hollywood Elsewhere has arrived in Cannes to the sound of blaring trumpets. It’s bright and sunny, but there’s also a strange hazy quality in the air. That’s how life looks when you’re totally jet-lagged. Pulled into town on a big white bus about five hours ago. I adore my sleeping quarters (i.e, two single beds in a small room that is slightly bigger than a two-man cell at the L.A. County jail), but that’s what you get when you shell out the big bucks.
I picked up my press pass an hour or so ago, and now I’m sitting in front of a wireless flat-screen at the press room at the Palais. Several others are here also. The balcony is shaded this year with six “Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves” white tents, and there are lounge-like seats (blue fabric over padded seating, wood panelling) and tables under them…classy. And there’s Wi-Fi everywhere…great. I have to pick up my tickets for the DaVinci Code soiree tomnorrow night and then decide what to do before the DaVinci Code screening at 8:30 pm. What I need to do between now and then is crash for a couple of hours. I got about two hours of sleep on the plane last night, if that.
My interview piece with Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu, the director of Babel, went up Sunday night and yet it’s been pushed down by other stories and items fairly quickly since then. I just want to make sure it has its day in the sun.
Travelling day today….I leave JFK for Paris at 5:30 pm, arriving in Paris around 6 ayem, and then taking an Easy Jet to Nice a couple of hours later. No more postings between now and sometime around 7 ayem Tuesday morning, New York time. At the earliest, I mean…
Who Dies?
Not to take disaster or ensemble action films too seriously, but there are cultural reasons why certain characters die in films of this sort. There’s a literal pecking order, in fact, and Poseidon — a casualty itself — shows how it works.
The bottom line (and here comes the SPOILER that I warned readers about twice last week) is that two of the four people who die among Poseidon‘s small survivor group — Freddy Rodriguez and Mia Maestro — are Hispanic, and I think their blood is what seals their fate.
Poseidon‘s Freddy Rodriguez, Mia Maestro
I could shilly-shally all over the place about unconscious racism and how Poseidon‘s screenwriter Mark Protosevich and director Wolfgang Petersen are probably more forward-minded than most of us about racial matters, but I still say that Rodriguez and Maestro die in this film not just because they’re not big-enough stars, but also because Hispanics are considered to be culturally expendable.
I forget the name of the black comic (is it Chris Rock?) who does a routine about any time there’s a black guy among a group of kids in a horror film, you can count on his getting killed fairly quickly. This routine always gets a laugh because people know that it’s true, and I think a similar attitude has come through in Poseidon about Latinos.
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Here’s how the disaster-film death system works, more or less…
The highest ranked is the self-sacrificing hero. He is always male, always played by a star, and he always buys it in the third act while trying to save others. Gene Hackman died this way in the original 1972 Poseidon, and a name-value actor dies this way in the present version.
The second death level is shared by two types — the selfish lout and the weak second-banana who can’t hack it.
Mia Maestro
Kevin Dillon is Poseidon‘s resident blowhard, and you can tell he’s a goner from the moment he takes out his hip flask and takes a sip. If Maestro was not Agentinian she would be a good death candidate anyway because she plays the weakling of the group (i.e., unable to handle being in tight places). And yet Carol Lynley played a weakling in the 1972 version and lived.
The third candidates for the Great Beyond, as noted, are culturally expendable non-whites.
Gays used to be considered expendable or disposable — you can feel this attitude in genre movies of the ’60s — but they’ve moved up in the world to the extent that screewriters don’t dare kill them off or make them dislikable or villainous.
Rodriguez’s death inside an elevator shaft is arguably Poseidon ‘s most jarring moment.
His character, a busboy, is shown to be a brave and intelligent man, but then a metal table he’s standing on inside an elevator shaft gives way and he’s forced to cling to the leg of Richard Dreyfuss, a broken-hearted gay industrialist. Dreyfuss, in turn, is being held by star Josh Lucas. Lucas isn’t strong enough to pull Dreyfuss and Rodriguez to safety so he says to Dreyfuss, “Shake him off or you’ll both die!” And Dreyfuss finaly does.
Freddy Rodriguez, Eva Longoria
What if it had been Rodriguez shaking Dreyfuss off? That would have made for an even more startling scene. But Dreyfuss is a better-known actor than Rodriguez at this stage of the game ( Six Feet Under aside), and he probably got paid more, and he’s white…so Rodriguez had to die. But the way he’s gotten rid of is not just sadistic but disrespectful.
I was hoping that one of Poseidon‘s attractive white youths would die — Emmy Rossum, Jacinda Barret, Mike Vogel — or even the token kid, played by Jimmy Bennett. But the Death Rules state that the young must survive in order to go out in the world and procreate and propulgate the species.
A friend sold me on the culturally expendable idea a couple of weeks ago. I was initially skeptical but the more I thought about it the more convinced I became.
I ran it by Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu and he said, “Of course! Of course!” I also ran it by a few Hispanic media types and journalists (American Entertainment Marketing’s Yvette Rodriguez, Jorge Camara of La Opinion, the National Hispanic Media Coalition’s Alex Nogales, Miami Herald film critic Rene Rodriguez) but we missed each other or they didn’t have much to say.
If anyone wants to chime in…
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