There’s a good South Park show on Comedy Central on Wednesday night…good, I’m told, because it’ll rip into Scientology, Tom Cruise, etc.

Every DVD-covering journalist in North America must be pushing Warner Home for a review copy of the
special edition two-disc DVD of King Kong, due out 11.22, because WHV is telling me “nope” and they usually say “sure, no problem.” If anyone has an advance “screener” lying around…

An informative, nicely written piece by Time‘s Josh Tyrangiel about Stephen Gaghan’s researching of Syriana (Warner Bros., 11.23). And a good New York Times piece by Stephen Farber about the current popularity of multi-narrative Syriana-type films.

Beware of two highly touted, nicely production-designed, supposedly audience-friendly movies that have been frequently mentioned as Best Picture contenders. You may go to them when they open and like them, etc., and that’ll be fine…but everything I’ve heard so far tells me these two are going to get slammed by a majority of the critics. Both are broadly-based and aimed at the shmoes, and at least one of these will probably do very well with audiences, based on NRG test scores. But every now and then you see some- thing you’ve heard will be quite the thing because a couple of prominent journos like it, and then you see it and it’s like, “What? There’s nothing there…pretty pictures do not make a film.”

The Big Question in Anne Thompson’s “Risky Business” piece about Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain isn’t really answered, so let’s boil some of the snow out. The question is, will the quietly homopho- bic Bubbas out there go for Brokeback Mountain the way they might if they weren’t vaguely weirded out about gay people? And if they don’t, what will this do to the film’s chances of winning the Best Picture Oscar? Thompson quotes Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation spokesperson Damon Romine saying that Brokeback Mountain “is the first film I’ve seen about two men in love, [that’s been] told in a way that straight people can relate to. People don’t have to be gay to understand loss and longing and unrequited love. This is…a film that has tremendous potential to reach and transform mainstream audiences.” Thompson also alludes to “Gallup polls” having stated that “Americans [are] growing increasingly tolerant of homosexuals, but movie audiences have never been confronted with a gay western.” I’m really starting to worry that “gay western” and “gay cowboy movie” is going to stick to Brokeback and hurt it. What Thompson is inferring in her piece is that it’ll be one thing for critics and uptown audiences to support brokeback Mountain, but if the dollars aren’t earned in the theatres across the nation — if Brokeback doesn’t make, let’s say, a good $40 or $50 million — the Academy will fold and vote for another film. I think we live in a moderately homophobic (and racist) culture for the most part, and that what people say to Gallup pollsters and what they really think deep down are two different things. The battle for Brokeback Mountain is just starting and it’s going to be a brawl. It’ll be nominated for Best Picture, certainly…especially given all the supposed Oscar contenders that are falling by the wayside, one after another. But if that goldurned “gay cowboy” expression doesn’t get shut down and kicked out of the room paying movie- goers are going to start turning off before they’ve even seen it, and that won’t be good. Brokeback Mountain is not a gay western and it’s not a gay movie…it really isn’t.

Did I read or just hear a line allegedly said by a gay jounalist- critic to a friend, which is that Brokeback Mountain is “our Gone With the Wind“? B. Ruby Rich wrote something along those lines a couple of months ago, but Anne Thompson says that a Toronto journalist said it specifically. Who was it?

The recently-issued Paramount Home Video DVD of the 1953 War of the Worlds, one of the most beautifully photographed Technicolor movies ever made, looks absolutely breathtaking. This sci-fi classic provides one of the lushest color-baths in Hollywood history and has always looked sumptuous…now it’s heavenly.
But there’s an unfortunate side effect to this clarity. The new DVD (released on 11.1) pretty much ruins the suspension-of-disbelief element because of the way- too-visible wires holding up the Martian spaceships. You can see them repeatedly during scenes of the initial assault against the military…a thicket of blue-tinted wires holding up each one.

You can see the wires in this photo (taken off my own TV) but if you have any kind of recently-manufactured big-ass flat screen, they look much more vivid than indicated here

And there’s no believing it. The wires are much too vivid. Clayton Forrester (Gene Barry) is explaining to General Mann (Les Tremayne) how the Martians keep their bright green ships aloft, that they’re using “some form of electro magnetic force” and “balancing the two poles” and so on, and it’s absurd. The illusion is shot.
The obvious solution is for Paramount Home Video to digitally erase the wires. It would make perfect symmetrical sense. Just as digital technology has made this 1953 film look sharper than ever before, it follows that digital technology needs to recreate the original illusion. The wires weren’t that visible 52 years ago, and they weren’t as visible in Paramount Home Video’s 1999 DVD.
I can’t believe there are people who feel that wire-erasing would be a violation of the original film and are actually arguing against a fix-up, but they’re out there.
One of those naysayers is the highly respected and very bright Glenn Erickson (a.k.a., “DVD Savant”). I’m stunned that a smart guy like Erickson could be so dead friggin’ blind.
“Many scenes [in War of the Worlds] that appeared blurry or poorly composited [before] are now crystal clear,” Erickson said in a review posted 13 days ago. “This means that the forest of fine wires supporting the fighting machines is now more visible than ever, so we can’t have everything.
“There was no CG wire removal in 1953,” he writes, “and it would be detrimental revisionism to change the picture now. Today’s enlightened filmmakers like George Lucas would never do such a thing! So be an adult and learn to live with it.”

Uh-huh. Suppose George Pal and Bryon Haskin couldn’t do anything to hide the wires in their film, and 1953 audiences could therefore see them as clearly as DVD watchers can now? Would Pal and Baskin have just shrugged and told Paramount and the exhibitors, “Sorry, guys… learn to live with it…it’s the best we can do”?
Obviously the new DVD is the provider of “detrimental revisionism” — it’s showing an image that wasn’t meant to be seen.
Obviously, clearly…hello?…erasing the wires will enable audiences of today to suspend their disblief with the same ease that audiences did 52 years ago. You can’t muddy up the image so they can’t be seen, so it’s the only thing to do.
I’m going to be charitable and consider the possibility that Erickson may be over- worked and wasn’t thinking all that clearly when he wrote what he wrote. All is forgiven if he recants.
John Lowry, the head of Lowry Digital who’s done some great clean-up and/or digital restoration work on loads of classic films, was the one hired by Paramount Home Video to clean up War of the Worlds .

Ann Robinson, Gene Barry in War of the Worlds

“Our job is always to serve the wishes of the client…we do what the client says …and we didn’t have orders to clean up the wires,” he says. “Plus we were working on a very tight budget.”
Lowry faced a similar issue when he was doing the digital remastering ofAlfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest. “We were working onthe scene when the crop duster plane crashes into the gas truck,” he recalls, “and there were 25 or 30 frames of that particular shot in which you could see three wires holding up the rather large model of the airplane.
“And I said to myself, my God, too obvious…it spoils the illusion. And I asked myself, what would Hitchcock do? I knew what he would do. Take the wires out of there. So I did, and the Warner Bros. people approved.
“But ever since then we’ve been very attuned to original artistic intent. And with today’s technology, anything that interferes with the story-telling process or which degrades that process, is dead wrong.
“We got rid of the wires on the Mary Poppins DVD, for the Disney people. We asked and they said ‘get rid of them’ but they had the money to do it.

“When we were working on the snake-pit scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark you could see all kinds of reflections in the glass separating Ford from the snakes, and there was a very conscious decision made by Spielberg to take the reflections out.”
I called and e-mailed a few other guys who should have opinions about this story — restoration master Robert Harris, director and War of the Worlds fan Joe Dante (who riffs about the film on one of the DVD’s two audio tracks), and film restoration artist Mike Arick.
I’ll probably add to this story on Monday if any of these guys reply.

Grabs

George Clooney, New York Times editor-writer Lynn Hirschberg during a discussion at theatre #10 in Hollywood’s Arclight theatre complex — Saturday, 11.12.05, 4:35 pm. One piece of news that emerged is that Clooney is looking to direct a film currently being written by Joel and Ethan Coen called Suburbacon. Another is that he’ll direct but won’t act in the upcoming televised re-do of Network. He said it took him only about a month to gain 35 pounds for his role in Syriana. I told him I’d been told prior to seeing it by a critic friend that “Fat Clooney is one of the best [performances] that you’ll see this year”…and he was right.

Sunset Blvd. near Cole, looking east — Saturday, 11.12.05, 2:10 pm.

Pico Blvd. and La Brea Avenue, looking south — Saturday, 11.12.05, 6:40 pm.

In front of Arclight Dome theatre — Saturday, 11.12, 2:05 pm

Looking down on the Arclight lobby — Saturday, 11.12, 3:25 pm

Bring It On

Shoot any kind of outdoor footage of the Middle East (especially in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, et. al.) and you get the same flat terrain…aflame, parched, bleachy…which makes for a kind of atmospheric monotony.
But movies shot there (or which happen there) don’t have to be dull. The Middle East is the dramatic boiling pot of our times. It’s just a matter of going there and absorbing the particulars and pruning them down into something fitting and well- sprung.

U.S. soldier involved in fighting in Falujah in ’04

I’ve recently seen a no-pulse, no-conflict, Waiting-for-Godot Middle East film (Sam Mendes’ Jarhead) and a complex, multi-layered, altogether fascinating one about the pernicious social and political political effects of big oil (Stephen Gaghan’s Syriana)…and leapin’ lizards, talk about a night-and-day response.
I’ll be waiting until 11.23 before running a Syriana review, but it’s obviously a far better film.
Jarhead was so bad and so nothing that it would feel almost refreshing to see a real Middle East war movie — a half-real, half- fictional narrative about the current conflict in Iraq, say. And why not? It’s time.
Hollywood didn’t feel safe about making Vietnam movies until 1978, and the first major Gulf War movie — David O. Russell’s Three Kings — didn’t happen until ’99, or about eight years after the fact. But the concepts of lag-time and the usual “gee, can we get into this?” no longer apply.
The reality of instant digital commnunications means that dramas (or black come- dies) about current military conflicts need to be shot and rescrambled with some urgency. Waiting around won’t do. Immediacy may not be the whole game, but it matters as much as anything else.
Syriana, which Gaghan researched in the Middle East for a full year, is a geo-political spellbinder that doesn’t feel the least bit dated. The story could have happened last summer, or even a year or two from now.

Matt Damon (center) in Stephen Gaghan’s Syriana (Warner Bros, 11.23)

Steven Bochco’s Over There, the first dramatic TV series about an ongoing war, much less one about U.S. troops in Iraq, had its debut on FX last summer. And Hany Abu-Assad’s Paradise Now, a respected film about a couple of would-be Palestinian martyrs, has a ripped-from-right-now quality.
Why not an Iraq War feature right now? Write it, shoot it…sort it out as you go along.
A writer-director of some vision and gumption needs to visit Iraq, get imbedded with the grunts like Gunner Palace‘s Michael Tucker did, soak it up, write it down, find the funding and make a feature film about what’s eally happening in that hell-hole.
Shoot the atmospheric stuff right there, maybe bring some of the cast over…risk it, dodge the bullets, burrow in. And then wrap it, cut it and open it quickly.
If Oliver Stone was the Oliver Stone of the mid to late ’80s, he’d be the guy to do this.
If Italian actor-filmmaker Roberto Benigni (who won a Best Actor and Best Foreign Film Oscar for Life Is Beautiful) can make an Iraqi War film, why can’t Americans?
Benigni just opened a comedy set against the backdrop of the Iraq conflict, althou- gh it was shot in Tunisia. An admired film (if not quite the anti-American rant some of his Italian fans had expected), The Tiger and the Snow opened on 10.14 in Italy and will debut in France in mid-December and probably open here during the first six months of ’06.

Syriana uncertainty: George Clooney’s CIA agent between a rock and hard place

A U.S.-produced drama about the current conflict obviously wouldn’t have to be shot in the streets of Baghdad or Fallujah.
A satisfying film for me would probably have to be something like Syriana or Traffic — a multi-character, five or six-plot-thread piece. I’m not going to try and dream up a story here and now, but it would either need to be a Costa Gavras-type condem- nation piece, or one that shows balanced compassion for U.S. troops as well as Iraqi locals.
Has anyone out there written a script or heard of a good one making the rounds? Is there a military veteran, freelance journalist and/or contract engineer who’s been to Iraq within the last couple of years who’s published stories or recollections on a site that could be made into a good script?
If there’s anything really good that’s been put into script form, or if anyone’s heard of something exceptional making the rounds, please advise.

Aniston Martin

Derailed has been handed a Rotten Tomatoes death sentence — only 19% of the critics approve. But it’s only somewhat bad because of certain hard-to-swallow developments that I won’t divulge. And it’s been well directed by Mikael Halfstrom, and by that I mean it feels solid, assured, nicely shot and well-cut.
Thrillers of this sort often get trashed by critics but supported by paying audiences. An agent told me this morning that Derailed, which opened today, has been doing well in New York theatres.
Like Fatal Attraction and Unfaithful, Derailed is a cautionary thriller about what happens when you cheat on your spouse.

Jennifer Aniston in Mikael Halfstrom’s Derailed

Clive Owen plays a Chicago advertising guy who succumbs to temptation after meeting Jennifer Aniston, a blue-chip financial consultant, on a commuter train. But then they get robbed and assaulted by Vincent Cassel in a seedy hotel room before they get down to it…
I’m not going any further, but Cassel basically becomes Bruno Antony to Owen’s Guy Haines (the two leads in Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train), and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t caught up in all the lever-pulling. It’s far from first-rate, but it’s reasonably decent.
The biggest problem is one that nobody seems to have written about so far, which is the casting of Jennifer Aniston as an adulterer who… well, as a woman who can’t be trusted.
As far as I’m concerned, the believabilty of Aniston as a conniving adultress is about the same as a hypothetical casting of Dean Martin as one of Christ’s disciples in George Stevens’ The Greatest Story Ever Told.
Aniston was a TV actress who deserved a fair shake when she played a cheating housewife in The Good Girl, but she’s since become a tabloid superstar — she’s known worldwide as the nice, emotionally temperate actresss who had her heart broken by Brad Pitt.

Dean Martin

Whatever the real truth and whomever she may actually be, Aniston is the good wife who got fucked over. It’s hard, but the public persona of some actors and actresses is so deeply imbedded that they can’t be absorbed into in certain roles..period.
Frank Sinatra as a priest in The Miracle of the Bells…get outta town.
Or John Wayne as Genghis Khan or, much worse, as a Roman Centurion standing at the foot of the cross while Jesus is dying in The Greatest Story Ever Told and saying, “This was truly the son of God.”
There must be dozens of other head-slappers. Send ’em in, please.

Ten Years and Two Weeks

I’m a Terrence Malick fanatic from way back, and it’s the nostalgia factor more than anything else that has me especially excited about seeing The New World (New Line, 12.25), which Malick wrote and directed.
I’m also one of the only journalists to have any kind of conversation with Malick since he went into his Thomas Pynchon withdrawal about 17 years ago (right after the release of Days of Heaven) and became this gentle phantom-like figure whom journalists couldn’t get to under any circumstance.
In this context speaking to Malick on the phone– which I managed to do on Octo- ber 25, 1995, around 11:35 am — was like snapping a photo of Bigfoot. It was a half-pleasant, half-awkward, quite meaningless conversation, but at least he picked up the phone.

Terrence Malick during filming of The Thin Red Line

Malick had been staying with producer Mike Medavoy, who wound up producing The Thin Red Line, but Medavoy was leaving for Shanghai and Malick would be staying elsewhere, so I called to get a forwarding number.
A cleaning woman answered and said Medavoy was out, but that Malick was nearby. She asked me to hold…
Malick: Hi.
Me: Hi, Terry. This is Jeffrey Wells speaking…
Malick: Hi.
Me: And uhh…I was just talking to Mike last night and he said, uh, you might be leaving today and I wanted to see if I could speak with you about an article I’m researching. It’s for Los Angeles magazine and my editor…he worked on that piece about ten years ago with David Handleman for California magazine. It was called “Absence of Malick.”
Malick: Yeah.
Me: I don’t know if…did you happen to read it?
Malick: No, I…I…uhnn…
Me: Anyway, I’m doing this piece and trying to sort things through here. About what’s going on with…well, to start with, The Thin Red Line and that rumored BAM stage production of “Sansho the Bailiff” and…I’ve wanted to speak with you about it, and now that I’m speaking with you I feel…well, I feel nervous.

Locust arrival scene in Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven

Malick: Don’t be, Jeffrey. It’s not that. I just don’t feel comfortable talking about it yet.
Me: About Red Line, you mean?
Malick: Yeah and…it’s something that has no date, really. It may happen some- time in the indefinite future.
Me: The indefinite future? Uh-huh. So there’s no approximate, long-range plan at all? It’s not even on a low flame?
Malick: I…I’m…uhmm.
Me: I was only thinking, you know…heh-heh… ‘indefinite future.’ You could say the same thing about the sun collapsing and the end of the solar system, heh-heh.
Malick: Uhhmm…
Me: I’m only mentioning this because…well, you may have seen that item in Pre- miere that you said you had this reading of the script with Costner and Lucas Haas and Ethan Hawke.
Malick: We did it just to get a sense of how it flowed.
Me: How did it flow?
Malick: I just don’t feel comfortable talking about it. I appreciate your interest but…

Malick in 1979

Malick: Mike says you’re on the second or third draft, something…it’s a work that’s been through some development and progression, and…
Malick: I….
Malick: I dont want to grill you, Terry. Mike explained the rules and said that grilling you…’that’s the one thing we don’t do’…and I understand that. I had a hope, though, of just discussing movies in general…ones you’ve seen and been impressed by in recent years.
Malick: Well, I appreciate your interest. I guess I do feel uncomfortable talking right now.
Me: I’m just one of…who knows, hundreds of film journalists around the country who regard you as one of the best ever and have watched your films over and over.
Malick: You’re very kind, Jeffrey. I appreciate it and I feel it and it comes to me as very encouraging. But I feel uncomfortable talking about it. I spoke to my brother Chris and he said that you’re just trying to help. And of course I know you’re just trying to do your job.
Me: I was actually just reading about a new laser disc of Days of Heaven that’s coming out, and it’s really something I’m looking forward to because I’ve never seen a print of that film that equalled the first viewing at the Cinema 1 in New York when they showed a 70mm print with six-channel sound, and having a…are you a laser-disc aficionado?
Malick: I’m, uh…not..uh…
Me: Are you…you don’t watch TV? Videos? Do you ever catch movies on tape?
Malick: I’d be happy to talk to you at some later point, Jeffrey.

Me: I know. I understand know what the rules are.
Malick: And someone actually is here, Jeffrey, and I do have to keep an appointment. I would love to, later on…we could talk.
Me: I’ll look forward to it. I understand you’re in town for a few more days.
Malick: Yes, but I really do have to go now.
Me: Because if you have a moment later on, I’d like to run some basic points by you and just go over them one by one, for accuracy’s sake.
Me: I can’t really talk about this. I know what you’re trying to do and it’s not…if you’d try to understand. Chris told me you’d written and that you were trying to help.
Me: Well, I hope you have a good stay. I look forward to chatting again on a more…uhm, relaxed basis.
Malick: Okay, thank you.

Bring It On

Shoot any kind of outdoor footage of the Middle East (especially in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, et. al.) and you get the same flat terrain…aflame, parched, bleachy…which makes for a kind of atmospheric monotony.
But movies shot there (or which happen there) don’t have to be dull. The Middle East is the dramatic boiling pot of our times. It’s just a matter of going there and absorbing the particulars and pruning them down into something fitting and well- sprung.

U.S. soldier involved in fighting in Falujah in ’04

I’ve recently seen a no-pulse, no-conflict, Waiting-for-Godot Middle East film (Sam Mendes’ Jarhead) and a complex, multi-layered, altogether fascinating one about the pernicious social and political political effects of big oil (Stephen Gaghan’s Syriana)…and leapin’ lizards, talk about a night-and-day response.
I’ll be waiting until 11.23 before running a Syriana review, but it’s obviously a far better film.
< ?php include ('/home/hollyw9/public_html/wired'); ?>
Jarhead was so bad and so nothing that it would feel almost refreshing to see a real Middle East war movie — a half-real, half- fictional narrative about the current conflict in Iraq, say. And why not? It’s time.
Hollywood didn’t feel safe about making Vietnam movies until 1978, and the first major Gulf War movie — David O. Russell’s Three Kings — didn’t happen until ’99, or about eight years after the fact. But the concepts of lag-time and the usual “gee, can we get into this?” no longer apply.
The reality of instant digital commnunications means that dramas (or black come- dies) about current military conflicts need to be shot and rescrambled with some urgency. Waiting around won’t do. Immediacy may not be the whole game, but it matters as much as anything else.
Syriana, which Gaghan researched in the Middle East for a full year, is a geo-political spellbinder that doesn’t feel the least bit dated. The story could have happened last summer, or even a year or two from now.

Matt Damon (center) in Stephen Gaghan’s Syriana (Warner Bros, 11.23)

Steven Bochco’s Over There, the first dramatic TV series about an ongoing war, much less one about U.S. troops in Iraq, had its debut on FX last summer. And Hany Abu-Assad’s Paradise Now, a respected film about a couple of would-be Palestinian martyrs, has a ripped-from-right-now quality.
Why not an Iraq War feature right now? Write it, shoot it…sort it out as you go along.
A writer-director of some vision and gumption needs to visit Iraq, get imbedded with the grunts like Gunner Palace‘s Michael Tucker did, soak it up, write it down, find the funding and make a feature film about what’s eally happening in that hell-hole.
Shoot the atmospheric stuff right there, maybe bring some of the cast over…risk it, dodge the bullets, burrow in. And then wrap it, cut it and open it quickly.
If Oliver Stone was the Oliver Stone of the mid to late ’80s, he’d be the guy to do this.
If Italian actor-filmmaker Roberto Benigni (who won a Best Actor and Best Foreign Film Oscar for Life Is Beautiful) can make an Iraqi War film, why can’t Americans?
Benigni just opened a comedy set against the backdrop of the Iraq conflict, althou- gh it was shot in Tunisia. An admired film (if not quite the anti-American rant some of his Italian fans had expected), The Tiger and the Snow opened on 10.14 in Italy and will debut in France in mid-December and probably open here during the first six months of ’06.

Syriana uncertainty: George Clooney’s CIA agent between a rock and hard place

A U.S.-produced drama about the current conflict obviously wouldn’t have to be shot in the streets of Baghdad or Fallujah.
A satisfying film for me would probably have to be something like Syriana or Traffic — a multi-character, five or six-plot-thread piece. I’m not going to try and dream up a story here and now, but it would either need to be a Costa Gavras-type condem- nation piece, or one that shows balanced compassion for U.S. troops as well as Iraqi locals.
Has anyone out there written a script or heard of a good one making the rounds? Is there a military veteran, freelance journalist and/or contract engineer who’s been to Iraq within the last couple of years who’s published stories or recollections on a site that could be made into a good script?
If there’s anything really good that’s been put into script form, or if anyone’s heard of something exceptional making the rounds, please advise.

Aniston Martin

Derailed has been handed a Rotten Tomatoes death sentence — only 19% of the critics approve. But it’s only somewhat bad because of certain hard-to-swallow developments that I won’t divulge. And it’s been well directed by Mikael Halfstrom, and by that I mean it feels solid, assured, nicely shot and well-cut.
Thrillers of this sort often get trashed by critics but supported by paying audiences. An agent told me this morning that Derailed, which opened today, has been doing well in New York theatres.
Like Fatal Attraction and Unfaithful, Derailed is a cautionary thriller about what happens when you cheat on your spouse.

Jennifer Aniston in Mikael Halfstrom’s Derailed

Clive Owen plays a Chicago advertising guy who succumbs to temptation after meeting Jennifer Aniston, a blue-chip financial consultant, on a commuter train. But then they get robbed and assaulted by Vincent Cassel in a seedy hotel room before they get down to it…
I’m not going any further, but Cassel basically becomes Bruno Antony to Owen’s Guy Haines (the two leads in Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train), and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t caught up in all the lever-pulling. It’s far from first-rate, but it’s reasonably decent.
The biggest problem is one that nobody seems to have written about so far, which is the casting of Jennifer Aniston as an adulterer who… well, as a woman who can’t be trusted.
As far as I’m concerned, the believabilty of Aniston as a conniving adultress is about the same as a hypothetical casting of Dean Martin as one of Christ’s disciples in George Stevens’ The Greatest Story Ever Told.
Aniston was a TV actress who deserved a fair shake when she played a cheating housewife in The Good Girl, but she’s since become a tabloid superstar — she’s known worldwide as the nice, emotionally temperate actresss who had her heart broken by Brad Pitt.

Dean Martin

Whatever the real truth and whomever she may actually be, Aniston is the good wife who got fucked over. It’s hard, but the public persona of some actors and actresses is so deeply imbedded that they can’t be absorbed into in certain roles..period.
Frank Sinatra as a priest in The Miracle of the Bells…get outta town.
Or John Wayne as Genghis Khan or, much worse, as a Roman Centurion standing at the foot of the cross while Jesus is dying in The Greatest Story Ever Told and saying, “This was truly the son of God.”
There must be dozens of other head-slappers. Send ’em in, please.

Ten Years and Two Weeks

I’m a Terrence Malick fanatic from way back, and it’s the nostalgia factor more than anything else that has me especially excited about seeing The New World (New Line, 12.25), which Malick wrote and directed.
I’m also one of the only journalists to have any kind of conversation with Malick since he went into his Thomas Pynchon withdrawal about 17 years ago (right after the release of Days of Heaven) and became this gentle phantom-like figure whom journalists couldn’t get to under any circumstance.
In this context speaking to Malick on the phone– which I managed to do on Octo- ber 25, 1995, around 11:35 am — was like snapping a photo of Bigfoot. It was a half-pleasant, half-awkward, quite meaningless conversation, but at least he picked up the phone.

Terrence Malick during filming of The Thin Red Line

Malick had been staying with producer Mike Medavoy, who wound up producing The Thin Red Line, but Medavoy was leaving for Shanghai and Malick would be staying elsewhere, so I called to get a forwarding number.
A cleaning woman answered and said Medavoy was out, but that Malick was nearby. She asked me to hold…
Malick: Hi.
Me: Hi, Terry. This is Jeffrey Wells speaking…
Malick: Hi.
Me: And uhh…I was just talking to Mike last night and he said, uh, you might be leaving today and I wanted to see if I could speak with you about an article I’m researching. It’s for Los Angeles magazine and my editor…he worked on that piece about ten years ago with David Handleman for California magazine. It was called “Absence of Malick.”
Malick: Yeah.
Me: I don’t know if…did you happen to read it?
Malick: No, I…I…uhnn…
Me: Anyway, I’m doing this piece and trying to sort things through here. About what’s going on with…well, to start with, The Thin Red Line and that rumored BAM stage production of “Sansho the Bailiff” and…I’ve wanted to speak with you about it, and now that I’m speaking with you I feel…well, I feel nervous.

Locust arrival scene in Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven

Malick: Don’t be, Jeffrey. It’s not that. I just don’t feel comfortable talking about it yet.
Me: About Red Line, you mean?
Malick: Yeah and…it’s something that has no date, really. It may happen some- time in the indefinite future.
Me: The indefinite future? Uh-huh. So there’s no approximate, long-range plan at all? It’s not even on a low flame?
Malick: I…I’m…uhmm.
Me: I was only thinking, you know…heh-heh… ‘indefinite future.’ You could say the same thing about the sun collapsing and the end of the solar system, heh-heh.
Malick: Uhhmm…
Me: I’m only mentioning this because…well, you may have seen that item in Pre- miere that you said you had this reading of the script with Costner and Lucas Haas and Ethan Hawke.
Malick: We did it just to get a sense of how it flowed.
Me: How did it flow?
Malick: I just don’t feel comfortable talking about it. I appreciate your interest but…

Malick in 1979

Malick: Mike says you’re on the second or third draft, something…it’s a work that’s been through some development and progression, and…
Malick: I….
Malick: I dont want to grill you, Terry. Mike explained the rules and said that grilling you…’that’s the one thing we don’t do’…and I understand that. I had a hope, though, of just discussing movies in general…ones you’ve seen and been impressed by in recent years.
Malick: Well, I appreciate your interest. I guess I do feel uncomfortable talking right now.
Me: I’m just one of…who knows, hundreds of film journalists around the country who regard you as one of the best ever and have watched your films over and over.
Malick: You’re very kind, Jeffrey. I appreciate it and I feel it and it comes to me as very encouraging. But I feel uncomfortable talking about it. I spoke to my brother Chris and he said that you’re just trying to help. And of course I know you’re just trying to do your job.
Me: I was actually just reading about a new laser disc of Days of Heaven that’s coming out, and it’s really something I’m looking forward to because I’ve never seen a print of that film that equalled the first viewing at the Cinema 1 in New York when they showed a 70mm print with six-channel sound, and having a…are you a laser-disc aficionado?
Malick: I’m, uh…not..uh…
Me: Are you…you don’t watch TV? Videos? Do you ever catch movies on tape?
Malick: I’d be happy to talk to you at some later point, Jeffrey.

Me: I know. I understand know what the rules are.
Malick: And someone actually is here, Jeffrey, and I do have to keep an appointment. I would love to, later on…we could talk.
Me: I’ll look forward to it. I understand you’re in town for a few more days.
Malick: Yes, but I really do have to go now.
Me: Because if you have a moment later on, I’d like to run some basic points by you and just go over them one by one, for accuracy’s sake.
Me: I can’t really talk about this. I know what you’re trying to do and it’s not…if you’d try to understand. Chris told me you’d written and that you were trying to help.
Me: Well, I hope you have a good stay. I look forward to chatting again on a more…uhm, relaxed basis.
Malick: Okay, thank you.

Rent Renewal

The advance word on Rent (Columbia, 11.23) for the last few months has been that it’s going to feel slightly dated (being a late ’80s piece about some young AIDS-af- flicted Manhattanites), and Chris Columbus, not the grittiest and most naturalistic of directors, will gloss it up too much, so watch out.
The buzz was wrong. Say it again: the buzz was wrong.

Rosario Dawson, Adam Pascal during “Light My Candle” number in Chris Columbus’s film of Jonathan Larson’s Rent (Columbia, 11.23)

Call me emotionally impressionable, call me unsophisticated, call me a sap…but I saw Rent last night in Santa Monica, and in its vibrant, open-hearted, selling-the- hell-out-of-each-and-every-song-and-dance-number way, it’s a knockout and an ass-whooper and damn near glorious at times.
I didn’t just like it…I felt dazzled, amped, alpha-vibed. I got into each and every song, every character and conflict…I settled back and went with it. People were applauding after almost every song, and the film really does give you a “whoa… this is special” feeling.
Somewhere up there (out there, in there…whatever), Jonathan Larson, the guy who created the play but died in January 1996, just before the stage show opened, is breathing easy.
Columbus went with almost the entire original cast, and they’re all spot-on. A cer- tain theatricality is inevitable when actors are breaking into song, but everyone plays it down and naturalistic; they don’t project in a playing-to-the-balcony way that throws you out of the piece.
Adam Pascal’s Roger and Anthony Rapp’s Mark are note-perfect. Rosario Daw- son’s singing is surprisingly assured and satisfying, in addition to her usual first- rate emoting. Wilson Jermaine Heredia, Jesse L. Martin, Idina Menzel, Tracie Thoms, Taye Diggs…everyone gets a gold star.
Rent is a slicker, punchier, more revved-up movie musical than Milos Forman’s Hair, which had some of the same elements (kids in New York, in and out of love, looming tragedy). But it’s not that different from the Forman film; it has a similar elan.

I kept saying to myself last night, “What’s wrong with this film?….where’s the mis- calculation? Where’s the gross Chris Columbus saccharine overkill?”…and it just didn’t happen to any bothersome degree.
It may not be hip enough for some of my nyah-nyah, know-it-all critic friends. It may not be Alphabet City enough. It may be, for them, too far removed from the vitality of the original off-Broadway, pre-Broadway show…too much of a Holly- wood-style take on something that may have been a bit sweet or cloying, but which worked because of the Lower East Side funkitude balance-out factor.
Critics said the same thing about Robert Wise’s West Side Story. That overly Oscar-awarded film brought an overly sanitized, sound-stagey quality to the material, wich furthered the loss of the immediacy and excitement of the original B’way play. The dissers of Wise’s film were right. It was too 1961 mainstream.
But Columbus is not Robert Wise. He lived in Manhattan way back when and knew the Lower East Side, he knows the stage show backwards and forwards, he’s pruned it down a bit and has made a film that’s a lot tighter and brighter and a cleaner “sell.”
I saw Rent in ’96 with Jett, who was then about eight, and I remember enjoying the energy and a lot of the songs and feeling a general respect for it…but I wasn’t floored. For me, the film is a better ride.
I don’t want to compare apples and oranges, and I understand that Rent-heads might not agree that it’s “better,” but the film is a cleaner, more easily processed thing, and it delivers a fuller, riper feeling.

The “La Boheme” number

There’s really a lot to be said for being able to hear each and every song lyric. (I digested them only occasionally when I saw the stage version.) And being able to hear each and every voice in the chorus of “Seasons of Love” (and every song after that) provides an amazing high.
Has Columbus made a kicky and colorful c’mon-kids-let’s-put-on-a-show musical? Yeah, kind of…but what’s wrong with that? And what other way could Columbus have gone? Play down the energy, go grimmer, shoot in on Super 16mm, channel Darren Aronofsky or Larry Clark?
Rent is a big-studio movie musical. As I understand it, the idea is to turn people on, attract the fans of the stage show, sell tickets, etc.
It’s not Open City or Paisan or Rocco and his Brothers. It’s a revamp of Puccini’s “La Boheme” with all those primary emotions, catchy thrash-guitar songs, drama- tic condensings, lovers loving and losing each other, tomorrow belongs to no one so go for it today, etc.
And it’s Rent, after all…butter wouldn’t melt in its mouth.
I’m sorry to differ with the nyah-nyahs, but Columbus has taken these ingredients and made it all sound quadruple-fantastic (be absolutely certain you see Rent in a theatre with a great sound system) and punched it up and brought out the bells and whistles and made a movie musical that really delivers.

Rent creator Jonathan Larson, composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim sometime around ’94 or ’95.

You’ll be more likely to feel this way if you’re a not-very-hip type like myself, or if you’re in the same kind of head-space as those 425 satisfied folks who saw it with me at the Aero theatre. And if you’re in the opposite camp…it’s your call.
Rent is set in 1989 — the stage show was written between 1988 and ’90. The show is basically about the effect that being close to death has upon your basic life atti- tudes. We all know the riff about “the clarity of mind experienced by a man stand- ing on the gallows is wonderful,” etc. That’s all that’s being said here, and that’s obviously a theme that will never lose relevance.
The young-gay-guys-and-urban-drug-users-dropping-like-flies-from-AIDS element isn’t the same today as it was in the early days of the first Bush administration , obviously (and thank fortune)…but this doesn’t date the film — it just places it in a certain cultural context, and that’s nothing to get over.
I know it when something is working. Call it subjective, but I felt it last night and it wasn’t just me.
A guy who loved the off-Broadway stage version said he’s heard it doesn’t work because the actors seem too old. “They’re all supposed to be in their early 20s …the actors all look like they’re 28 or 30,” he told me this morning. That’s bull- shit…they’re young-enough looking. It’s a non-issue.

There are three love relationships in Rent, and only one of them (Adam and Rosa- rio’s) is hetero. We’re really in a gay-friendly season these days, and there’s no watching Rent and missing the notion that we’re all God’s children. The Mel Gibson contingent can go stuff it.
The energy and punch of this show are there all the way through, and the emotion- al specifics of each and every character and situation are clearer and more vivid than they appeared to me when I saw the stage show…whoops, repeating myself.
There will be more to say about Rent in a week or two. Those crab-heads really need to be slapped around.
Columbus did a post-screening q & a with Variety‘s Ian Mohr, and here’s how it sounded. It’s a big fat (probably slow-loading) sound file, but it’s worth a listen.
You’ll hear me ask a couple of questions — one about an angry duet number between Pascal and Rapp that was cut, and another about the “dated” issue, which Columbus answers pretty well.

Debate

“I saw Rent yesterday, and I thought it absolutely blew chunks. I haven’t seen the stage play and knew nothing from the music. Went in with a totally open mind, but…
“The score is awful. Mediocre rock songs with banal lyrics — every single one of them seemingly introduced by the same string of piano chords. And they all sound alike except for the first number, which is the only memorable piece in the entire production. Just dreadful.
“Some of the production numbers — particularly ‘La Vie Boheme’ — are too loud, too crowded, too all-over-the-place. It also seems to me that Larson was incapable of writing a song that didn’t involve a multi-part chorus. Again, just dreadful.

Adam Pascal, Rosario Dawson in Chris Columbus’s film of Jonathan Larson’s Rent (Columbia, 11.23)

“And what’s with that performance piece that Idina Menzel performs? The one involving cows and metaphors about developers, and…sheesh! My brain hurts just thinking about it.
“I will say I didn’t have a problem with the age of the actors, although let’s admit that one or two look way too old for the roles.
“The book sucks also. Cardboard characters, one-dimensional situations, cliches all over the place. But I’ll be honest: you can say the same about a lot of musical theater.
“Thing is, I can understand why twentysomethings will probably dig this. But watching it, I felt how they must feel watching Hair . What the…?” — Lewis Beale
Wells to Beale: Whatever, but answer me this….
The movie is a shorter version of the play with some trims, and it allows you to hear each and every lyric, and it lets you sink into the characters a bit more.
The play has been running at the Nederlander since ’96. That means that it’s been striking chords with audiences on a fairly profound level.

So if the score is so awful and the production numbers are so shitty (and I really don’t know how you could feel this way), how do you explain the play’s popularity? It must be doing something right.
And if the movie is the play only clearer and more condensed (which it is), how can it be totally chunk-blowing, as you say it is?
Beale back to Wells: As I said, I can understand why twentysomethings respond to it. The whole camaraderie thing, the trying-to-find-your-place-in-the-universe thing, rebelliousness, love, etc.
“And let’s not get into the whole art vs. commerce thing. Plenty of plays, movies and CDs are aesthetic crap, but speak to audiences for whatever reason. ‘Phantom of the Opera’ is still on Broadway. ‘Mama Mia’ is a huge hit. Does anyone think these productions are grand artistic statements?”

Empty Vessel

“I’m no Keira Knightley fan but let’s be honest. The only thing that Rachel McAdams has over her is that she has made a film with not only Owen Wilson but Luke wilson too (!) and Keira hasn’t. That connection alone seems to be enough for you to give someone a free pass, or in McAdams’ case a promotion to ‘greatest thing since…’
“Maybe Holden sees something in Knightley that you don’t. It’s a little tiresome hearing you go on and on about someone or something as if it’s the greatest thing in cinema and then as soon as another passionate opinion is expressed that you don’t agree with you resort to describing it as ‘jizzing.'” — Tom Van

Keira Knightley

Wells to Van: Cream over? Wet himself? Experience critical arousal? McAdams’ Luke-and-Owen connection is impressive, yes, but take away Knightley’s looks and transitional aura and she’s treading water, at best. It would be polite for me to say otherwise, but it’s not valid for Stephen Holden to “see something in Knightley that I don’t” because there’s nothing there….end of discussion.
“I agree with your assessment of Keira Knightley. I think there is appeal there and after seeing her on The Daily Show this week, I think I understand what it is.
“She’s a great first date. You see her in little bites — in the trailer for Pirates, for instance — and she’s exciting and great. She made a great best friend in Bend It Like Beckham . Seeing her in a single movie can be okay, but she doesn’t hold interest through to the next morning. I mean, what would you talk about over breakfast?” — Reed Barker, Senoia, Georgia.

9/11 Songs

“The only 9/11-related song I can think of is Richard Thompson’s ‘Outside of the Inside,’ which is actually a commentary on the fundamentalist attitudes that lead people to extremist actions.
“I don’t know if you’re familiar with Thompson’s work, the song is on ‘The Old Kit Bag,’ his excellent record from 2003. He also scored Herzog’s Grizzly Man. His web site is http://www.richardthompson-music.com/default.asp.” — Scott Bishop

“There’s an Amy Rigby song called ‘Don’t Ever Change’ where the first verse (in my mind, at least) is about being in a small town right after 9/11. You can listen to it here: http://www.amyrigby.com/wheelslyrics.html” — Kristie Coulter
“If you missed ‘Where Were You (When The World Stopped Turning)’ by Alan Jackson, which is utterly unlike Springsteen’s business-as-usual lugubriousness, then you really have to stay in more and watch CMT.” — Richard Szathmary

Will you listen to New York Times critic Stephen Holden jizz all over Keira Knightley and her intoxicating aura in Pride and Prejudice (which is quite tedious, by the way)? Knightley “is, in a word, a knockout,” he enthuses. “When this 20-year-old star is on the screen, which is much of the time, you can barely take your eyes off her…her radiance so suffuses the film that it’s foolish to imagine [her character] would be anyone’s second choice.” This is dereliction of duty. There should be more to a captivating actress than looks and radiance. She needs to have it inside…deep down… and Knightley, as I wrote in early September, “doesn’t. I don’t mean sex appeal or vivaciousness or any of that natural-aura stuff. I mean she doesn’t have ‘it.’ People are delighted with Knightley…that young, beautiful, Audrey Hepburn-ish quality, and the way she seems to add fizz to any movie she’s in. But there’s nothing about her that sticks or sinks in. Whatever it is that Rachel McAdams possesses and dispenses, Knightley has not.”

The cathartic effect of war films and what they get into vs. don’t get into — particularly in the recent Jarhead, Gunner Palace and Syriana — will be the topic at the annual “Times Talks” on Saturday, 11.12. It’s happening inside theatre #10 at Hollywood’s Arclight cinema. Kicking things off at 11:30 will be critics A.O. Scott and Manohla Dargis riffing on war films past and present, followed by a 2 pm panel discussion between Times editor Gerald Marzorati and directors Eugene Jarecki (Why We Fight), Michael Tucker (Gunner Palace), Garrett Scott (Operation Dreamland) and Stephen Marshall (Battleground). The finale will be a discussion between Lynn Hirschberg and George Clooney, primarily talking about Syriana. For information and availability, visit www.AFI.com/afifest or call 866.234.3378.

All the big year-end films but three are either currently screening or will start to screen in a week or so. Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, The White Countess, Casanova, The Producers (starting on or about 11.18), Syriana, Memoirs of a Geisha, Narnia, Match Point, et. al. The last to be considered will be Terrence Malick’s The New World (there’s an Academy screening set for 11.26), Peter Jackson’s King Kong and Steven Spielberg’s Munich (both in very early December). It’s flurry time, screening-conflict time, dog-and-pony-show time.

Exactly how weak is the Best Picture contender list? A lot of films so far have fallen by the wayside, and more will follow suit before long. The only dug-in finalists by my barometer are Capote and Brokeback Mountain. (Haven’t yet seen the apparently well-regarded Memoirs of a Geisha.) The highly-rated possibles are Walk The Line, The Constant Gardener, Syriana, The New World and Crash. Tea-leaf readings are telling me Munich will fall short, but that and $1.75 will get you a bus ticket. The reality that nobody seems to want to face up to is that Cinderella Man, easily one of the year’s best, ought to be a finalist. I’ve always felt that the quality of a film ought to be a factor…naive as that may sound.