If I were given to cynicism I would say it’s far more usual than unusual these days for big-studio marketing departments to distort, misrepresent and otherwise lie about what an upcoming movie is like, or is even about. If you wanted to really get cynical you could say it’s not movie quality (and I don’t mean esoteric Jim Hoberman-type quality, but quality your mother would recognize if she could be dragged out of her house and down to a multiplex) …it’s not quality that determines success these days, but to what degree big-studio marketers are going to fuck things up for you. That’s the determining factor…will marketing execs re-imagine and re-edit what your film is to a mild degree (like Fox has with those Sarah Jessica Parker-obsessed trailers for The Family Stone), or will they misrepresent your film all to hell in order to sell it to The Stupids and get the big opening weekend numbers no matter what? The result of which is that long-term nurturing and appreciation of your film is pretty much left to chance.

Let’s take the kids to Chicken Little. Supposed to be kinda crappy …screw it…take ’em anyway. Give Disney the $30 million weekend it doesn’t deserve. I read Jarhead blows also…let’s go see it! Way of showing support for the troops in Iraq…sorta kinda. Boring movie…nudging $30 million by Sunday! Seen Saw II yet? Blood, dismemberment, piece-of-shit…I’m there! The Legend of Zorro movie is cruddy also…let’s pay $20 plus parking, popcorn and drinks to see it and help encourage lazy Hollywood producers to make more like it! As long as I don’t have to sit through a good film, I don’t care.

The only thing I’ve heard about Steven Gaghan’s Syriana (Warner Bros., 11.23 limited) that’s sunk in to any degree is that it’s “very political.” In other words, the person who conveyed this view feels it doesn’t deliver as well in emotional, beating-heart terms. Ignore it…blue-state-persuasion people really want this movie to work. The excellent trailer suggests that the aim of Syriana (a really annoying title) is to be a Traffic-type exploration of the who-what-why behind 9/11..a probing of the politics of Big Oil, Middle Eastern subcurrents, radical Islamic rage and alienation…the whole magillah. One of those tapestries with several different characters and storylines in which “everything is connected.” Gaghan’s Oscar-winning Traffic screenplay showed him to be a superb converter-transposer of gritty real-world mucky-muck into highly absorbing movie material (okay, with Steven Soderbegh’s modest assistance), and the first film he directed, 2002’s Abandon with Katie Holmes, was certainly tolerable…stylistically assured, engaging here and there. The first Syriana press screening happens on 11.9 or thereabouts, and I’m psyched. But why am I getting this feeling of hesitancy from Warner Bros. publicity? Are they feeling antsy about the political content and feel it might be safer on some level to sit on the film until a couple of weeks before the 11.23 limited opening…or are they exuding this dithering vibe for some other reason? Pic opens wide on 12.3.

Hypothesis: Comedy Central or HBO or Showtime runs a series called “The Avengers,” about a squad of vigilantes, their activities funded by some secretive billionaire, who go out and find tech- support staffers who pick up the phone for various manufacturers of computer-related products like IPAQ handhelds and Norton Antivirus…both the out-sourcing morons in India and their U.S. counterparts…and then take them to remote warehouses, tie them down and coolly and methodically torture them in ways that would appall the Marquis de Sade, gradually inducing in each victim a ghastly, horrible, beyond-painful death. I’m just saying in a very calm and loving and Christian way I would not only watch this series, but I would send in regular cash donations to the producers.

Brokeback Mountain (Focus Features, 12.9) is about a coupla cowpokes in love with each other, but it’s not a “gay” film…not even vaguely. It’s a epic modern western with a tragic twist. It’s about lamenting, about fearfulness, about being stuck.

So what about Rachel Weicz deserving a Best Suppporting Actress nom for her work in The Constant Gardener? Right up there with In Her Shoes‘ Shirley MacLaine, Match Point‘s Scarlett Johannson, The Family Stone‘s Diane Keaton, Junebug‘s Amy Adams, et. al. And who except a total Producers water-carrier would seriously put forward Uma Thurman’s performance as any kind of competitor? Playing a dumb-blonde sex poodle in a broad, brassy comedy-musical…? C’mon!

Gold Derby’s Tom O’Neill, writing on the L.A.Times-owned site “The Envelope,” is projecting Peter Jackson’s King Kong as a credible Oscar nominee for Best Picture because director-writer Peter Jackson has taken three hours to “flesh out the love story between Naomi Watts and Adrien Brody” and “expand the psychological complexity of the movie’s lead characters, thus giving them more substance, while also fleshing out the plot so it can better explore the theme of commercial man exploiting innocent beast.” Uh-huh…and the 100-minute 1933 original didn’t address this theme sufficiently?

It’s not just me any more. New York Press critic Armond White has stood up and strongly praised Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat, which recently came out on a Fox Home Video DVD. Lifeboat shows Hitchcock using “suspense tactics to reveal spiritual and philosophical mystery, [and] thus achieves profundity akin to The Birds. Hitchcock’s famous toying with psychological dread [in this film] has a complexity that also speaks to the present political moment. Contemporary critics feel no relation to John Steinbeck’s story, to judge by the DVD’s recent reviews; they simply dismiss it as WWII sentimentality. [But] Lifeboat deals with moral and sexual compulsion no less effectively than Vertigo. Hitchcock looks deeply into the circumstances of human crisis and creates in your mind (before your eyes) the essence of their terror, passion, vitality and horror. The reason Godard called Hitchcock ‘the greatest poet among us’ was to point out this gift for imagining the depth of human experience in the most deceptively simple, ‘popular’ ways. Between silent Griffith and Spielberg/DePalma, Hitchcock stands as the finest exemplar of genre filmmaking. But actually, his best films transcend genre and become strangely poetic visions”.

An interesting coincidence that the three biggest take-down movies of the holiday season — The Producers, King Kong and Munich — are all Universal releases. Did I just say that? I just know that prior to every holiday season a journo consensus forms about which of the big hoo-hahs are cruisin’ for a bruisin’ in the biggest, most self-aggrandizing way…movies coming in with such high expectations that’s probably a good idea to smack them down on general principle. I don’t want to hate anything or anyone, but if I had to predict which of the Big Three will give forward-thinking moviegoers the most difficulty, I would have to presume The Producers, closely followed by King Kong. I’ll be surprised if Munich is a problem on its own terms, but the teaser trailer (see item below) suggest that expectations are way overblown.

Has the big emotional fight scene between Anthony Rapp’s Mark and Adam Pascal’s Roger, one of the big emotional highlights of the Rent stage show, been cut from the Chris Columbus film? Rent has begun screening and there are issues…people having trouble with this and that…the staging of certain numbers, the infamous Columbus sugar-touch. Wait, there are good things. Rosario Dawson handles the singing and dancing pretty well. Pascal holds his own. Some of it works. Is it commonly known that Sarah Silverman has a brief, comedic, non-singing role? She told me so yesterday during our Boston interview. Her character is called Alexi Bright.

Saturday morning and the Munich trailer…er, teaser…is up. No surprises, no oddities…precisely the focus and tone anyone who’s been following this project might expect. Impressions can be misleading, but the teaser is telling us that Munich will totally adhere to the mode of a typical hard-wired procedural about some Israelis agents killing Palestinians and then feeling guilty about it. A hard-wired procedural directed by a relentlessly praised, obeisance-before-power, affluent-bubble-dwelling, 58 year-old director named Steven Spielberg. A teaser is obviously its own thing, and usually bears a catch-as-catch-can relationship to the film it’s selling…at best. But even with this acknowledgment, I’m starting to feel what this film (probably) is…I can feel the radio-antennae vibrations from the raised hairs on the back of my neck. The fact that the teaser starts off front-and-center with clips from Jim McKay’s “Wide World of Sports” coverage of the Munich tragedy speaks volumes about the apparent sensibility behind the film. (McKay’s Munich coverage is legendary, and therefore the most generic, least-imaginative, what-else-is-new? way to pass along what happened there.) I’m telling you…I’m telling Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea….that while Munich may turn out to be good or thrilling or rich in morality, the whole “wait for Munich….this is the big one…Oscar, Oscar!” drumbeat is based on little more than a generic kneejerk Spielberg kowtow. (There is also, to some extent, the Jewish-entertainment- journalists-who-want-to-see-Israel-kick-ass factor.) Watch the teaser and explain to me how it makes Munich look even a little bit challenging or startling..a bringer-of-the-next-thing aesthetic. It looks like a guilty license-to-kill so-whatter. A decent man with a family (Eric Bana in a ’70s haircut with sideburns) accepts the charge of Israel’s Mossad (his “M” is played by Geoffrey Rush) to lead a team of four (including a guy played by Daniel “007” Craig) to assassinate the Palestinian perpetrators of the 1972 Munich Olympic massacre of Israeli athletes. Ohhh, we have to do this for justice’s sake but I feel a little bit bad. Ohhh, mistakes are being made and innocent people are being killed along with the terrorists. Ohhh no…was that a little girl’s voice? Ohhh, I hope my daughter still loves me after the mission is accomplished. Am I a good man or a bad man? Honey, did you leave some pasta in the refrigerator that I can put into the microwave when I come home at 3:30 ayem? Ohhh, what a holiday muddle.

Has It Down

Today (Friday, 10.4) is Peter Sarsgaard Meditation Day, if you want to think like that. You know…thoughts of who he is and how sharp his mind is, what he’s got stewing inside, what that easy smile and those hooded eyes really indicate deep down, where’s he’s heading.
Sarsgaard, 34, has two new movies opening today — Jarhead, a Waiting-for-Godot- ish Gulf War drama in which he plays Troy, the hardest and truest Marine of them all…an intense embodiment of the modern deballed warrior…and The Dying Gaul, in which he plays a gay screenwriter involved in a sexual-ethical muddle with a big-studio executive (Campbell Scott) who wants to make a movie of his script, and the executive’s curiously frustrated wife (Patricia Clarkson).

Peter Sarsgaard

Both of Sarsgaard’s characters are given to internal suffering, which he conveys with his usual particularity. A lot of actors are good at subtle conveyences, but Sarsgaard is always fascinating when most of the energy is being pushed down and there’s relatively little to do. He doesn’t ever seem to say, “Look at me”…but you can’t help doing that.
He can also be riveting when asked to go in the opposite direction. There’s a start- ling, almost-on-the-cusp-of-being-too-much sexual scene in Gaul that proves this and then some. It’s “honest” in a way that almost no other actor I can think of would be willing to touch.
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I wouldn’t call either performance career-altering, but they’re a reminder of what everyone has come to realize about Sarsgaard over the least couple of years, which is that he’s an exceptional violin player, and that one day the right music and the right conductor are going to come along and…wham, out of the park.
Being an obsessive type, I keep wondering when Sarsgaard is going to play another quietly heroic, morally grounded role…a guy who knows much more than he’s saying, whose intelligence you can sense right away…another sympathetic, Chuck Lane-in-Shattered Glass type…a struggling 30ish guy with brains and integrity…maybe given to a little anxiety at times, maybe a sharp glance or two, but a guy you want on your team.

Campbell Scott, Patricia Clarkson, Sarsgaard in Craig Lucas’s The Dying Gaul

Like any artist with any kind of bravery, Sarsgaard doesn’t believe in repeating himself. He’s into discovery and twisting the dials in such a way that the audience is prodded into new territory, and would almost certainly find some way of saying “uhm, I don’t think so” if a producer were to take him to dinner and say, “I want you to do that again.”
But Sarsgaard is that guy…I think. That guy and then some. And he’s a lot more intriguing in person than what he is (or has been given to do) in his new films, not because the movies are shitty but because real-life conversation can sometimes turn your mind around in ways that performances can only poke at.
Sarsgaard “has become this year’s go-to guy by holding his feelings in check,” the Newark Star Ledger‘s Stephen Witty wrote today. “What exactly is going on behind those sleepy eyes? Sly and knowing, Sarsgaard’s characters always seem to be privy to some secret information…something always feels closeted.”
“As Robert convulses with wrenching emotional seizures, Mr. Sarsgaard gives the riskiest screen performance of his career,” wrote New York Times critic Stephen Holden. “Save perhaps for Sean Penn’s outbursts in Dead Man Walking and Mystic River, no actor in a recent American film has delivered as explosive a depiction of a man emotionally blasted apart.”
And yet Sarsgaard’s essence as a performer, I think, is about strength. He’s the guy who gets everything, who sees through every last dodge. That’s what those hooded eyes say to me…not malevolence, not some prickly loser attitude, but supreme perceptional confidence. In a friendly, non-arrogant way.

Sarsgaard, Maggie Gyllenhaal

It’s right there in that settled gaze and slight smile. I know, he’s saying. You know …we both do. You want me to tell you? I can but…we don’t need to play games, do we?
I met Sarsgaard late Wednesday afternoon near his place in the West Village, adjacent to Hudson Square.
My moody little fucking IPAQ 3115 didn’t feel like recording, but I remembered a few things without notes. Here’s a random sampling of topics explored at a little Italian place on the corner of Jane and West 4th Street.
He’s taller than he seems to be on-screen, and a bit fuller of face (especially with the beard) than he was in Shattered Glass. It may be an act (and wouldn’t that fit the whole picture if is is?), but his manner is about as easy and gracious as it gets.
Sarsgaard took some time off about doing four ’05 films in a row — The Skeleton Key, Flightplan (in which he played the villain), The Dying Gaul and Jarhead. He’s only just starting to read scripts again.
He can wait for the right ones to come along. He doesn’t spend his money (he drives a ’91 or ’92 car) and is under no financial pressure to do anything.

He’d like to play likable, sure, but he doesn’t get sent the pick-of-the-litter scripts (i.e., the ones that go to Tom Cruise, Bard Pitt, et. al.) and he often winds up getting offered this or that outsider-malcontent type. He’s pretty clear about which films are right for him and which aren’t, he says.
He’s loosely collaborating with Dying Gaul director-writer Craig Lucas on a new film project, although his input has been mostly in the vein of saying “this works” or “that doesn’t seem right” with Lucas doing the heavy lifting.
There’s a lot of concentration that goes into doing press junkets, he feels. He suggested to Jarhead costar Jake Gyllenhaal that he check out Albert and David Maysles’ Meet Marlon Brando (’66), a 28-minute doc about Brando doing press interviews for Code Name: Morituri in ’65,and never really getting into the promo- tional frame of mind, talking about this or that…an excellent behavioral guide for any actor looking to keep his/her dignity during a press junket.
His girlfriend Maggie Gyllenhaal is just starting work on Oliver Stone’s 9/11 movie, and Peter doesn’t claim to know too much about the when, where and how…not his deal.
After finishing shooting on The Dying Gaul, Peter and Maggie took a trip to Sicily but at one point decided to divert to Rome to visit the statue of the Dying Gaul (also known as the Dying Galatian or Dying Gladiator) in the Capitoline Museum. They stayed at Rome’s Hotel de Russie.

Dying Gaul statue at Rome’s Capitoline Museum.

A thought hit me during our chat that Sarsgaard (especially with his beard and all) would look right as an 1860s cabinet officer and Union military guy in Steven Spielberg’s Abraham Lincoln movie, which is supposedly going to begin filming in March ’06 with Liam Neeson in the lead.
We parted company around 6 pm, partly because Sarsgaard had to make it up to the Beacon Theatre to see Rufus Wainwright perform. He’s also a fan of a Rasta- farian group called Midnite (apparently they only perform in the wee hours). He later suggested my checking out two of their tunes on I-Tunes — “Propaganda” and “Mamma Africa.”
Check out this IMDB chat board showing that Sarsgaard has some revved-up female fans, with some singing his praises as a “soft” non-sculpted hottie.
Regular reader Dixon Steele wrote in this afternoon after reading an earlier, choppier version of this piece and said, “Peter Saarsgard is a very talented actor, always interesting…and I don’t think I’ve ever seen him in a total clunker.
“But on top of that, he gets to sleep with Maggie Gyllenhaal every night! Damn!! For that alone he gets our respect (and envy!). Maybe it’s the Double-A thing in their names.”
Acknowledgment: Special thanks to our friends at DigitalHit.com for allowing me to use the Sarsgaard photo at the top of the page.

Still from Albert Maysles’ 1966 documentary Meet Marlon Brando

Boston Grabs

Sarah Silverman during 20-minute q & a at Boston’s Seaport Hotel — Friday, 11.4.05, 12:40 pm.

On the way to the Silverman interview from Coolidge Corner on Beacon Street — 11.4.05, 12:05 pm.

On Chinatown bus to Boston, about 40 miles out — Thursday, 11.3.05, 4:10 pm.

On Green Line back to Brookline after Silverman interview — 11.4.05, 1:15 pm.

Jett Wells — Thursday, 11.3.05, 8:05 pm.

Coolidge Corner, looking southwest — 11.4.05, 11:58 am.

This is what I mean by widescreen TV idiocy, and I see it everywhere. Batman Begins, a 2.35 to 1 scope film, is stupidly misconfigured on this 16 x 9 screen — vertically, nonsensically compressed. The morons who set up hardware displays in electronics stores are always doing stuff like this, and when you mention it to them they always go “huh?”

Sarah Silverman — 11.4.05, 12:50 pm