I’m sorry to say this because I’m a Rotten Tomatoes man all the way, but there’s something very wrong somewhere when The 40 Year-Old Virgin is, according to these guys, the best-reviewed film of the year so far with a 90% positive. Can’t they fix these figures or something? Even though Virgin‘s rating has dropped to 89% since this announcement was posted, let’s consider a few things. One, RT’s review poll only considers the wide releases (no platforms, no little indie releases) which means a higher piece-of-shit percentage. Two, The Forty Year-Old Virgin is, at best, a half-tolerable funny-in-spots comedy. (The critics who gave it unqualified raves should be deeply ashamed of themselves.) Three, the fifth most favorably reviewed wide release of the year was Revenge of the Sith so give us all a friggin’ break.
Not Bali Hai
Steve James’ Reel Paradise is lying in wait at your local theatre like a King Cobra. Buy a ticket and watch it and it will bite you and poison to death any Marlon Brando Mutiny on the Bounty South Sea island fantasies you may be nurturing.
Paradise says that watching a good movie can create a kind of paradise in your head, and that turning people on to an exciting or nourishing film can be a wonderful thing. It also says that an alleged tropical getaway like Fiji (and, by extension, other South Sea locations) can be vaguely boring and economically strapped with low-rent thieves ready to sneak in and steal your computer if you’re not careful.
The Pierson family (l. to r.): Georgia, John, Janet, Wyatt in Steve James’ Reel Paradise
And you’d better watch out for your teenaged daughter while you’re there also because life is a struggle and a pain everywhere, and nothing about South Sea life is particularly safe or comforting or tranquil. In short, there are no getaway places. Your life is your life and that’s that.
I don’t know why I used the image of a King Cobra to describe this film. It’s more of a mongoose, really. A thoughtful, life-can-be-gnarly-but-whaddaya-gonna-do? movie made by folks I happen to know and like and respect.
< ?php include ('/home/hollyw9/public_html/wired'); ?>
I guess all I’m really saying is that I don’t think I’ll be visiting Fiji during my next South Seas vacation, but if you’re looking to spend your movie money this weekend on something more layered than Judd Apatow’s The 40 Year-Old Virgin, here’s a way to go.
It’s a doc about what happened three years ago to John Pierson — the former “Split Screen” host, movie-book author (“Spike, Mike, Slackers & Dykes”), producer’s rep and all-around movie community good guy — during a year-long stay in Taveuni, Fiji, where he and his family showed free movies to the locals at a place called the Meridian 180.
Pierson discovered this funky, barn-like theatre on a visit to Tavenui — an agricultural island of about 10,000 residents — in 1999. When the Meridian shut down in ’02 Pierson somehow managed to buy it and then talk his family — wife Janet, 16-year-old daughter Georgia and 13-year-old son Wyatt — into making the trek.
John Pierson addressing crowd at Taveuni’s Meridian cinema prior to another night’s showing.
And then James showed up with his camera in the summer of ’03 to document the final month of their stay. And what he got is that life without cultural resources or the usual modern-age distractions can be a bit flat. Taveuni is a poor island with no public electricity, no high-end restaurants, no video rental stores…Nothingville.
But the film also shows that good movies can have a kind of religious effect upon the locals, and that Pierson became, during his stay, a kind of parish priest.
Gut-level movies — comedies, thrillers — fared the best here. The Fiji folks haven’t had much education and are fairly low-rent in their tastes. They want to laugh or be thrilled or be scared. You get the idea that even if prints of, say, films by Robert Bresson were available to Pierson in Fiji, he wouldn’t have dreamt of showing them.
The obvious association is the scene in Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels when the chain-gang prisoners start laughing uproariously at a Pluto cartoon. A good laugh is all some people have, etc.
The biggest real-life issue in the film is computer robbery and the suspicions that arise about which local might be the culprit. Plus the projectionist Pierson has hired is a real slacker. And there’s also Georgia’s involvement with a local kid whom her parents have reason to disapprove of.
Georgia Pierson (l.) and friend in Reel Paradise.
Put aside the movie-religion aspects and Reel Paradise boils down to a series of lessons about what a real downmarket tobacco-road place Taveuni is, a laid-back culture without much to attract people like myself.
Variety critic Todd McCarthy says Reel Paradise is analogous in some ways to Peter Weir’s The Mosquito Coast. As I watched it I was thinking more about Franklin J. Schaffner’s Papillon.
My mind was also drifting back to that speech that Kirk Douglas gives in Ace in the Hole about the four spindly trees in front of Rockefeller Center providing more than enough in the way of nature’s splendor, etc.
Being There
Almost no one paid to see The Great Raid when it opened last weekend, and most of the critics were bored by it. (It only got a 36% favorable on Rotten Tomatoes.) I wasn’t exactly over-the-moon about it myself, but at no time did it anger or frustrate me, and there’s a kind of distinction in that.
The one aspect that got me 100% was the decision on the part of director John Dahl to make an anachronistic war film. The Great Raid isn’t boring, exactly – it’s just a movie that’s true to the era it’s depicting, and therefore feels out of synch with our times. Which, of course, is partly the point.
The Great Raid is a 98% true World War II story, and not just in factual terms. It’s the story of a raid in early 1945 by a commando team of about 100 soldiers and volunteers, led by some U.S. Army noncoms, upon a Japanese prison camp in the Philippine boonies. It led to the freeing of just over 500 prisoners, soldiers who might have died at the hands of their captors if the raid hadn’t happened.
Benjamin Bratt, James Franco in John Dahl’s The Great Raid.
You can say, “Yeah, and so what?” But this is what the movie’s about, and Dahl has not only paid respect to the story but the era when it happened.
Is The Great Raid the most suspenseful, excitingly paced war film anyone’s ever seen? Obviously not or it wouldn’t have died last weekend. It’s not exactly sluggish but it feels…dutiful. A movie “doing its duty” in trying to recreate a bygone era by adopting an anachronistic style.
And in this sense, Raid‘s stolid qualities — the feeling that it might be your grandfather’s idea of a satisfying World War II film — work in its favor. Not in its commercial favor, obviously, but Dahl did what he did for the right time-machine reasons.
It isn’t just that Dahl has heaped on period realism in terms of dialogue, character shadings and carefully-chosen props and wardrobe (guns, uniforms, women’s hair styles…all highly authentic and just so). It’s also the stolid framing and the unhurried old-fashioned pacing of the thing. It’s Dahl saying to us and himself, “To hell with 21st Century action movie appetites and standards…we are not playing that game.”
The only here-and-now aspect is the faded, sepia-like color…but even the desaturation seems to line up with the old-fogeyness of the thing. It opens the door to an imagining that an original version might have been shot in vivid Technicolor but then faded over the years.
Day-for-night still from The Great Raid, meaning this scene looks a lot duskier in the actual film.
The Great Raid doesn’t feel as if it was shot in ’45 and then put in a storage facility and kept there for 60 years. It would have had to have been filmed in monochrome in a 1.33 to 1 aspect ratio to achieve that illusion. But it does feel like it could have been made in 1955 or thereabouts. If this had actually happened it would have costarred Aldo Ray, Jeff Chandler and George Nader.
As is, the performances (by Benjamin Bratt, James Franco, Joseph Fiennes, Connie Nielsen, Marton Csokas) feel like earnest imitations of the kind of acting that Bill Holden or Jeffrey Hunter or June Allyson used to deliver in boilerplate war flicks of the 1950s.
And I admire the exacting ways that Dahl made it feel so old-fashioned. He knew there would be critics saying “too slow” or whatever, but he was too hard-core to spritz it up (like some period films I’ve seen) and make it feel, say, like a film that was half ’45 and half ’05.
I could go on and on about period films that got the haircuts wrong or had performances or dialogue that felt wrong. It’s not rampant but it happens. Period films are sometimes over-decorated or over-polished. The cars are too new or the actors are too present-day in their speech patterns or accents, or there’s too much CGI (like in Troy).
Marton Csokas in The Great Raid
You can argue that the verisimilitude in The Great Raid doesn’t matter that much because the story plods along and there’s not enough in the way of suspense or story tension, and I wouldn’t argue with you. But I didn’t mind it too much because the period immersion is so complete.
And I just had to slap myself to keep from nodding out. I am boring myself as I finish a piece about a movie that’s a little bit boring for the right creative reasons.
Honest footnote: I have to admit that I was glad when the Japanese soldiers dragged Csokas (the lover in Paramount Classics’ Asylum) and shot him in the head. Csokas speaks with an oddball accent in the film hat includes a bizarre throaty sound he gives to vowels, and so I was glad to rid of him.
By The Way…
Another movie that gets it right in a historical atmosphere sense is George Clooney’s Good Night and Good Luck, which I saw the other night.
It’s not just that the factual newsroom tale, which happened in 1954, has been shot in black and white, but that it feels like one of those live high-quality 1950s television plays, which were routinely seen on Kraft Television Theatre (ABC, 1953-55), Four Star Playhouse (CBS, 1952-56), Ford Theater (NBC, 1952-56) and so on.
David Straitharn in Good Night, and Good Luck
My immediate response was that I really liked and admired the austerity and the realism of Good Night, and Good Luck. It felt like it was happening in the actual 1954…almost. It didn’t feel like ’54 by way of 2005…and I liked that it got right down to the matters at hand and stayed with them.
It really is terrific when you feel a filmmaker striving as hard as Clooney, who costars as well as directs, to give a sense of time and place and also the mentality that informed an era…the way it most likely felt.
I probably won’t get into the merits of Good Night, and Good Luck until it shows at the New York Film Festival in late September (Warner Independent is opening it on October 7), but it’s a thoughtful, respectable film with first-rate acting and an honorable theme and a terrific performance by David Straitharn as legendary newsman Edward R. Murrow.
Honor of Lying
From a celebrity’s perspective, truth-telling is a selective process these days. That’s a way of saying that pretty much every celebrity lies right through his or teeth when it comes to public statements. But it’s okay because they’re well motivated.
They’re lying because they despise the media and feel that dealing with a corrupt and disreputable entity means all bets are off. And I think I understand the ethical system they’re embracing because it was explained in a couple of respected ’60s westerns.
Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch is one of them. I’m thinking of a scene in which William Holden’s Pike Bishop expresses moral support for Robert Ryan’s Deke Thornton because he gave his “word” to a bunch of “damned railroad men,” and Ernest Borgnine’s Dutch Engstrom defiantly argues, “That ain’t what counts! It’s who you give it to.”
Director Sam Peckinpah, star William Holden on the set of The Wild Bunch
Burt Lancaster says the same thing in The Professionals when he discusses flexible ethics with Lee Marvin. When Marvin reminds Lancaster that he’s given his “word” to Ralph Bellamy’s J.W. Grant, a millionaire railroad tycoon, Lancaster replies, “My word to Grant ain’t worth a plug nickel.”
Tom Cruise is J.W. Grant-ing, in effect, when he says he’s in love with Katie Holmes and wants to marry her and so on. He’s saying, “This is what you’re going to get from me and if you don’t think I’m being honest then that’s too fucking bad because my life is my own and you guys don’t rate the real truth because you’re scumbags and you pass along tabloid fairy tales.”
Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie lied and lied and lied and lied (and told their publicists to lie and lie and lie and lie) about their relationship, and they felt just totally fine about it because their word to the tabloid press is commensurate with the degree of respect they have for it.
I don’t really believe this, but I like to tell myself that Bill Clinton lied about his history with Monica Lewinsky because he felt that the news media (and the Republicans pushing things along in the late `90s) had no honor or legitimacy in trying to explore his sex life. Looking right at the TV cameras and saying nothing happened was completely honorable because the news media deserved to be lied to.
I can see this. I can see how people being hammered about personal matters might start thinking this way. But then again…
If you’re willing to lie to someone, you’ve opened the door to dissing them in other ways. Just as Lancaster and Holden and friends were fine with lying to railroad men as well as stealing their money and possibly shooting them during hold-ups, I’ll bet celebrities are thinking about different ways of smacking around tabloid reporters.
That photographer who got shot with a BB pellet while standing outside Britney Spears’ Malibu home…? Just the beginning.
9/11 Movies
“Do we really need dramas about 9/11 so we can exploit the tragedy and suffering and add to the hysteria? It’s bad enough we have a manufactured war. Do we need manufactured crap to incite us further?” — Edward Klein
“I don’t know what bothers me exactly about the 9/11 movies coming out. There were plenty of movies about WWII, and a lot of them made during the war, but those were sort of rah-rah propaganda movies about a war that was absolutely necessary. The Vietnam films seemed hell-bent on showing us the real story behind a war that no one seemed to understand, and many of them revealed the suffering that the troops went through before and after the war.
“But those 9/11 films that are being prepared seem pointless. Why make one? What…there’s no actual footage? People have yet to see what happened? That’s not an argument since it was the single most videotaped event in the history of the world.
“So it must be a desire to reveal what people inside the towers and their families have dealt with during and since that day. No, since there have been countless news reports and documentaries and books and official reports letting us know the horrors of the attack and it aftermath.
“So what could possibly be motivating filmmakers about to start on their 9/11 movies…?
“The whole thing reeks of sickening commercialism. Greedy Hollywood vulture fuckheads who have no shame in exploiting people’s emotions and patriotism for a buck. This is example #5930 of how Hollywood is bereft of ideas. And I love how these guys have somehow talked themselves into thinking that they’re going to be doing some kind of service to mankind.
“It reminds me of the moment at the Oscars when James Cameron, holding his Best Picture award, asked the bejeweled, collagen-injected crowd for a moment of silence in memory of the victims of the Titanic disaster. It was both tasteless and ridiculous, and that event was almost 100 years old at the time. Just imagine how tasteless and ghoulish a 9/11 movie will be a mere five years after the tragedy.” — Mark Smith.
“I don’t see much in a script that attempts to retell an individual story from the events of 9/11. Anyone with a digital cable box can see documentaries from every point of view nightly on cable . HBO had an effective film several years ago that told the story of a boy whose mother was stuck in the towers and died that day.
“Hollywood could use 9/11 in a plot device for a romance — strangers fall in love while searching for a mutual friend who is missing. A sci-fi scenario where a character time travels and ends up in the towers. I think an audience could be accepting of 9/11 in film as long as it is not that literal. Spike Lee used 9/11 as a minor character in 25th Hour. — Ken Ridge, Hazlet, New Jersey.
Grabs
42nd Street between 7th and 8th Avenues — Thursday, 8.19, 10:25 pm.
Bedford Avenue underground — Thursday, 8.19, 7:35 pm.
Not Bali Hai
Steve James’ Reel Paradise is lying in wait at your local theatre like a King Cobra. Buy a ticket and watch it and it will bite you and poison to death any Marlon Brando Mutiny on the Bounty South Sea island fantasies you may be nurturing in your soul.
Paradise says that watching a good movie can create a kind of paradise in your head, and that turning people on to an exciting or nourishing film can be a wonderful thing. It also says that an alleged tropical getaway like Fiji (and, by extension, other South Sea locations) can be vaguely boring and economically strapped with thieves ready to sneak in and steal your computer if you’re not careful.
The Pierson family (l. to r.): Georgia, John, Janet, Wyatt in Steve James’ Reel Paradise
And you’d better watch out for your teenaged daughter while you’re there also because life is a struggle and a pain everywhere, and nothing about South Sea life is particularly safe or comforting or tranquil. In short, there are no getaway places. Your life is your life and that’s that.
I don’t know why I used the image of a King Cobra to describe this film. It’s more of a mongoose, really. A thoughtful life-can-be-gnarly-but-whaddaya-gonna-do? movie made by folks I happen to know and like and respect.
< ?php include ('/home/hollyw9/public_html/wired'); ?>
I guess all I’m really saying is that I don’t think I’ll be visiting Fiji during my next South Seas vacation, but if you’re looking to spend your movie money this weekend on something more substantial and alert than Judd Apatow’s The 40 year-Old Virgin, here’s a good alternative.
It’s a doc about what happened three years ago to John Pierson — the former “Split Screen” host, movie-book author (“Spike, Mike, Slackers & Dykes”), producer’s rep and all-around movie community good guy — during a year-long stay in Taveuni, Fiji, where he and his family showed free movies to the locals at a place called the Meridian 180.
Pierson discovered this funky, barn-like theatre on a visit to Tavenui — an agricultural island of about 10,000 residents — in 1999. When the Meridian shut down in ’02 Pierson somehow managed to buy it and then talk his family — wife Janet, 16-year-old daughter Georgia and 13-year-old son Wyatt — into making the trek.
John Pierson addressing crowd at Taveuni’s Meridian cinema prior to another night’s showing.
And then James showed up with his camera in the summer of ’03 to document the final month of their stay. And what he got is that life without cultural resources or the usual modern-age distractions can be a bit flat. Taveuni is a poor island with no public electricity, no high-end restaurants, no video rental stores…Nothingville.
But the film also shows that good movies can have a kind of religious effect upon the locals, and that Pierson became, during his stay, a kind of parish priest.
Gut-level movies — comedies, thrillers — fared the best here. The Fiji folks haven’t have much education and are fairly low-rent in their tastes. They want to laugh or be thrilled or be scared. You get the idea that even if prints of, say, films by Robert Bresson were available to Pierson in Fiji, he wouldn’t have dreamt of showing them.
The obvious association is the scene in Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels when the chain-gang prisoners start laughing uproariously at a Pluto cartoon. A good laugh is all some people have, etc.
The biggest real-life issue in the film is computer robbery and the suspicions that arise about which local might be the culprit. Plus the projectionist Pierson has hired is a real slacker. And there’s also Georgia’s involvement with a local kid whom her parents have reason to disapprove of.
Georgia Pierson (l.) and friend in Reel Paradise.
Put aside the movie-religion aspects and Reel Paradise boils down to a series of lessons about what a real downmarket tobacco-road place Taveuni is, a laid-back culture without much to attract people like myself.
Variety critic Todd McCarthy says Reel Paradise is analagous in some ways to Peter Weir’s The Mosquito Coast. As I watched it I was thinking more about Franklin J. Schaffner’s Papillon.
My mind was also drifting back to that speech that Kirk Douglas gives in Ace in the Hole about the four spindly trees in front of Rockefeller Center providing more than enough in the way of nature’s splendor, etc.
Being There
Almost no one paid to see The Great Raid when it opened last weekend, and most of the critics were bored by it. (It only got a 36% favorable on Rotten Tomatoes.) I wasn’t exactly over-the-moon about it myself, but at no time did it anger or frustrate me, and there’s a kind of distinction in that.
The one aspect that got me 100% was the decision on the part of director John Dahl to make an anachronistic war film. The Great Raid isn’t boring, exactly – it’s just a movie that’s true to the era its depicting, and therefore feels out of synch with our times. Which, of course, is partly the point.
The Great Raid is a 98% true World War II story, and not just in factual terms. It’s the story of a raid in early 1945 by a commando team of about 100 soldiers and volunteers, led by some U.S. Army noncoms, upon a Japanese prison camp in the Philippine boonies. It led to the freeing of just over 500 prisoners, soldiers who might have died at the hands of their captors if the raid hadn’t happened.
Benjamin Bratt, James Franco in John Dahl’s The Great Raid.
You can say, “Yeah, and so what?” But this is what the movie’s about, and Dahl has not only paid respect to the story but the era when it happened.
Is The Great Raid the most suspenseful, excitingly paced war film you’ev ever seen? No. It’s not exactly sluggish but it feels…dutiful. A movie “doing its duty” in trying to recreate a bygone era by adopting an anachronistic style. And in this sense Raid‘s stolid qualities — the feeling that it might be your grandfather’s idea of a satisfying World War II film — work in its favor.
Not in its commercial favor, obviously, but Dahl did what he did for the right time-machine reasons.
It isn’t just that Dahl has heaped on period realism in terms of dialogue, character shadings and carefully-chosen props and wardrobe (guns, uniforms, women’s hair styles…all highly authentic and just so). It’s also the stolid framing and the unhurried old-fashioned pacing of the thing. It’s Dahl saying to us and himself, “To hell with 21st Century action movie appetites and standards…we are not playing that game.”
The only here-and-now aspect is the faded, sepia-like color…but even the desaturation seems to line up with the old-fogeyness of the thing. It opens the door to an imagining that an original version might have been shot in vivid Technicolor but then faded over the years.
Day-for-night still from The Great Raid,meaning this scene looks a lot duskier in the actual film.
The Great Raid doesn’t feel as if it was shot in ’45 and then put in a storage facility and kept there for 60 years. It would have to have been filmed in monochrome in a 1.33 to 1 aspect ratio to achieve that illusion. But it does feel like it could have been made in 1955 or thereabouts. If this had actually happened it would have costarred Aldo Ray, Jeff Chandler and George Nader.
As is, the performances (by Benjamin Bratt, James Franco, Joseph Fiennes, Connie Nielsen, Marton Csokas) feel like earnest imitations of the kind of acting that Bill Holden or Jeffrey Hunter or June Allyson used to deliver in boilerplate war flicks of the 1950s.
And I admire the exacting ways that Dahl made it feel so old-fashioned. He knew there would be critics saying “too slow” or whatever, but he was too hard-core to spritz it up (like some period films I’ve seen) and make it feel, say, like a film that was half ’45 and half ’05.
I could go on and on about period films that got the haircuts wrong or had performances or dialogue that felt wrong. It’s not rampant but it happens. Period films are sometimes over-d√É∆í√Ǭ©corated or over-polished. The cars are too new or the actors are too present-day in their speech patterns or accents, or there’s too much CGI (like in Troy).
Marton Csokas in The Great Raid
You can argue that the verisimilitude in The Great Raid doesn’t matter that much because the story plods along and there’s not enough in the way of suspense or story tension, and I wouldn’t argue with you. But I didn’t mind it too much because the period immersion is so complete.
And I just had to slap myself to keep from nodding out. I am boring myself as I finish a piece about a movie that’s a little bit boring for the right creative reasons.
Honest footnote: I have to admit that I was glad when the Japanese soldiers dragged Csokas (the lover in Paramount Classics’ Asylum) and shot him in the head. Csokas speaks with an oddball accent in the film hat includes a bizarre throaty sound he gives to vowels, and so I was glad to rid of him.
By The Way…
Another movie that gets it right in a historical atmosphere sense is George Clooney’s Good Night and Good Luck, which I saw the other night.
It’s not just that the factual newsroom tale, which happened in 1954, has been shot in black and white, but that it feels like one of those live high-quality 1950s television plays, which were routinely seen on Kraft Television Theatre (ABC, 1953-55), Four Star Playhouse (CBS, 1952-56), Ford Theater (NBC, 1952-56) and so on.
David Straitharn in Good Night, and Good Luck
My immediate response was that I really liked and admired the austerity and the realism of Good Night, and Good Luck. It felt like it was happening in the actual 1954…almost. It didn’t feel like ’54 by way of 2005…and I liked that it got right down to the matters at hand and stayed with them.
It really is terrific when you feel a filmmaker striving as hard as Clooney, who costars as well as directs, to give a sense of time and place and also the mentality that informed an era…the way it most likely felt.
I probably won’t get into the merits of Good Night, and Good Luck until it shows at the New York Film Festival in late September (Warner Independent is opening it on October 7), but it’s a thoughtful, respectable film with first-rate acting and an honorable theme and a terrific performance by David Straitharn as legendary newsman Edward R. Murrow.
Honor of Lying
From a celebrity’s perspective, truth-telling is a selective process these days. That’s a way of saying that pretty much every celebrity lies right through his or teeth when it comes to public statements. But it’s okay because they’re well motivated.
They’re lying because they despise the media and feel that dealing with a corrupt and disreputable entity means all bets are off. And I think I understand the ethical system they’re embracing because it was explained in a couple of respected ’60s westerns.
Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch is one of them. I’m thinking of a scene in which William Holden’s Pike Bishop expresses moral support for Robert Ryan’s Deke Thornton because he gave his “word” to a bunch of “damned railroad men,” and Ernest Borgnine’s Dutch Engstrom defiantly argues, “That ain’t what counts! It’s who you give it to.”
Director Sam Peckinpah, star William Holden on the set of The Wild Bunch
Burt Lancaster says the same thing in The Professionals when he discusses flexible ethics with Lee Marvin. When Marvin reminds Lancaster that he’s given his “word” to Ralph Bellamy’s J.W. Grant, a millionaire railroad tycoon, Lancaster replies, “My word to Grant ain’t worth a plug nickel.”
Tom Cruise is J.W. Grant-ing, in effect, when he says he’s in love with Katie Holmes and wants to marry her and so on. He’s saying, “This is what you’re going to get from me and if you don’t think I’m being honest then that’s too fucking bad because my life is my own and you guys don’t rate the real truth because you’re scumbags and you pass along tabloid fairy tales.”
Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie lied and lied and lied and lied (and told their publicists to lie and lie and lie and lie) about their relationship, and they felt just totally fine about it because their word to the tabloid press is commensurate with the degree of respect they have for it.
I don’t really believe this, but I like to tell myself that Bill Clinton lied about his history with Monica Lewinsky because he felt that the news media (and the Republicans pushing things along in the late `90s) had no honor or legitimacy in trying to explore his sex life. Looking right at the TV cameras and saying nothing happened was completely honorable because the news media deserved to be lied to.
I can see this. I can see how people being hammered about personal matters might start thinking this way. But then again…
If you’re willing to lie to someone you’ve opened the door to dissing them in other ways. Just as Lancaster and Holden and friends were fine with lying to railroad men as well as stealing their money and possibly shooting them during hold-ups, I’ll bet celebrities are thinking about different ways of smacking around tabloid reporters.
That photographer who got shot with a BB pellet while standing outside Britney Spears’ Malibu home…? Just the beginning.
9/11 Movies
“Do we really need dramas about 9/11 so we can exploit the tragedy and suffering and add to the hysteria? It’s bad enough we have a manufactured war. Do we need manufactured crap to incite us further?” — Edward Klein
“I don’t know what bothers me exactly about the 9/11 movies coming out. There were plenty of movies about WWII, and a lot of them made during the war, but those were sort of rah-rah propaganda movies about a war that was absolutely necessary. The Vietnam films seemed hell-bent on showing us the real story behind a war that no one seemed to understand, and many of them revealed the suffering that the troops went through before and after the war.
“But those 9/11 films that are being prepared seem pointless. Why make one? What…there’s no actual footage? People have yet to see what happened? That’s not an argument since it was the single most videotaped event in the history of the world.
“So it must be a desire to reveal what people inside the towers and their families have dealt with during and since that day. No, since there have been countless news reports and documentaries and books and official reports letting us know the horrors of the attack and it aftermath.
“So what could possibly be motivating filmmakers about to start on their 9/11 movies…?
“The whole thing reeks of sickening commercialism. Greedy Hollywood vulture fuckheads who have no shame in exploiting people’s emotions and patriotism for a buck. This is example #5930 of how Hollywood is bereft of ideas. And I love how these guys have somehow talked themselves into thinking that they’re going to be doing some kind of service to mankind.
“It reminds me of the moment at the Oscars when James Cameron, holding his Best Picture award, asked the bejeweled, collagen-injected crowd for a moment of silence in memory of the victims of the Titanic disaster. It was both tasteless and ridiculous, and that event was almost 100 years old at the time. Just imagine how tasteless and ghoulish a 9/11 movie will be a mere five years after the tragedy.” — Mark Smith.
“I don’t see much in a script that attempts to retell an individual story from the events of 9/11. Anyone with a digital cable box can see documentaries from every point of view nightly on cable . HBO had an effective film several years ago that told the story of a boy whose mother was stuck in the towers and died that day.
“Hollywood could use 9/11 in a plot device for a romance — strangers fall in love while searching for a mutual friend who is missing. A sci-fi scenario where a character time travels and ends up in the towers. I think an audience could be accepting of 9/11 in film as long as it is not that literal. Spike Lee effectively used 9/11 subtly as a minor character in 25th Hour. — Ken Ridge, Hazlet, New Jersey.
Critical Mass
Is there anyone out there looking forward to a slew of 9.11 movies next year?
Okay, maybe “slew” isn’t quite accurate, but there are at least two solid 9/11 features in the pipeline and there’s a third one trying to finalize a script and get rolling, and they’re all funded by major studios. Plus there’s an ABC-TV miniseries and maybe one or two others looking to commemorate (i.e., cash in on) the 5th anniversary of that nightmare, and all but one is slated to open in mid to late ’06.
And if one of these is truly exceptional, people will naturally want to see it. But how much of an appetite is really there for the idea of tripping back to 9.11 time and time again with a bag of popcorn in your lap?
Oliver Stone, Christopher Hitchens, Robert Shaye and others before Alice Tully Hall discussion panel held roughly three weeks after 9/11/01.
Yesterday I asked some friends about the market for these movies and the general mood out there, and their responses are summarized in a story that follows (i.e., the one after the next one). But before you wade into this…
Hasn’t the extensive news and documentary coverage of this nearly four-year-old tragedy already captured the horror and human drama elements pretty thoroughly? What can a movie be expected to bring to the table except to dredge it up all over again with actors and scripted dialogue and CG recreations?
And why are all these 9/11 movies being conceived from the same patriotic and (can I finally say this?) in some ways simple-assed point of view?
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The three tenets of this view are (a) it was an absolutely horrible day, (b) some people responded to the horror with selflessness and amazing heroism, and (c) the Al Qaeda terrorists were motivated solely by the will of Satan, and the U.S. had nothing to do with provoking them in any way, shape or form.
This view is so politically dominant that Oliver Stone, a guy who knows better, not only bailed on trying to make a 9/11 movie that sounds far less rote and much more inquisitive, but agreed to direct what sounds like the biggest mainstream 9.11 sentiment film of them all.
A little over two years ago Stone hired screenwriter John Leone to write a movie about domestic terrorism called Jihad — a thriller that would have depicted the 9/11 horror in the first act but then developed a plot about an attempted nuclear-bombing of Manhattan by a renegade Al Qaeda terrorist.
If there is, as I suspect, limited interest in these films, does this put at least a temporary kibosh on other simmering 9/11 projects? Like, for example, that developing adaptation of 102 Minutes , the best-seller by Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn that focuses on the stories of people who were inside the twin towers that day?
Sony-based producer Mike DeLuca hired Shattered Glass director-writer Billy Ray to turn 102 Minutes into a screenplay last March or thereabouts. DeLuca didn’t comment about Ray’s script, but he wrote this morning and said…
“We don’t consider ourselves in a race, and we strongly feel that we are dealing with an as-yet-untold story about the events of that day in New York, a story that only needs to be told the right way…that to put time pressure on something so delicate and sacred would be a blasphemy, and Sony feels the same way.
“To reduce this subject matter to a race between Hollywood movies is wrong-minded and plain wrong to do. This isn’t some summer nonsense about asteroids coming to earth or the like. This all HAPPENED, and it needs to be treated with RESPECT.
“We’re going to make it when it’s right, and the other films have nothing to do with how and when we arrive at [knowing] when it’s right.”
Okay, sure…but DeLuca and Sony are in a game of providing movies that people will want to pay to see, and when you’re the third theatrical 9/11 movie and with people already writing in the press about matters of taste and how soon is too soon and how much is overkill…
I think there’s only one way DeLuca can win this one, if he winds up making this film, and that’s for the first two films to be generally regarded as pretty good but not great, and for DeLuca’s film to be spellbinding. No matter how you look at it, he’s up against it.
102 Minutes producer Michael Deluca
The two ready-to-go 9/11 features are (a) Oliver Stone and Paramount Pictures’ still-untitled project about the two Port Authority cops who were buried under the rubble of the collapsed World Trade Center towers, and (b) a just-announced feature called Flight 93 for Universal that Paul Greengrass (The Bourne Supremacy, Bloody Sunday) will direct and Working Title’s Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner will produce.
So far Michael Shamberg and Stacy Sher and screenwriter Andrea Berloff are the primary auteurs on the Paramount project. Stone came on as a director-for-hire and is widely presumed to have done so as a career-repair maneuver in the wake of the disastrous reception to Alexander.
Then again, you can bet this film will walk, talk and rumble like any other Oliver Stone film after all is said and done. How can he shoot this thing without delving into the surreal? “Real” was captured by a thousand video cameras that day — a filmmaker worth his salt has no choice but to go someplace else.
The buried-under-rubble project will begin filming in October in New York, and will probably hit screens sometime in late `06.
The Greengrass film is about the hijacked flight that crashed in rural Pennsylvania on 9/11, most likely as a result of passengers overpowering the Al Qaeda hijackers, who intended to slam the jet into a target in Washington, D.C. — either the White House or the Capitol building.
The $15 million film, which will run 90 minutes in “real time” (i.e., the actual time it took the flight to hit Pennsylvania terra firma after takeoff), will begin production on or about October 1st and will wrap before the end of the year. It could be released as early as next summer.
Matt Damon and director Paul Greengrass, apparently (but not necessarily) at the premiere of The Bourne Supremacy, which they both contributed to significantly.
There are three TV projects are in the works, according to Variety, including an ABC miniseries which is starring Harvey Keitel as FBI terrorism expert who was killed in the 9/11 attacks.
And you can bet your bottom dollar than all these projects will wind up saying, in effect, “sad, brave America…a morally decent country attacked by demons..such a godawful day but people were heroes,” etc.
To which anyone would say, yes, yes, it was all that and more, but these impressions have been conveyed over and over in this and that documentary and in tons of books and magazines already.
As one anonymous screenwriter told me on Tuesday, “The 9/11 tragedy has been so overexposed, so written about, so commented upon…but it was five years ago and the national mood has moved so far beyond that.”
In other words, isn’t it time for a bold filmmaker or two to take what happened and move beyond the factual and say something else?
No-Risk Approach
Oliver Stone, one of the few guys out there willing to call a spade a spade, wanted to be that brave filmmaker. Four years ago he had an idea for a drama that would have had 9/11 influences but would have taken things in a more hard-edged, Battle of Algiers-like direction than the rescue movie he’s about to start shooting. But it wasn’t in the cards.
A couple of years ago Stone arranged for a project called Jihad — a thriller about terrorism that used 9/11 merely as a first-act incident — to be written by John Leone (Tough Enough ). Leone is a screenwriter and playwright who’d worked for Stone on a script called Mexico as well one for producer Michael Fitzgerald and Sean Penn.
Leone’s work on Jihad was paid for by Intermedia, the Alexander producers. But then Alexander tanked and Stone’s confidence appeared to weaken. A former associate says, “After Alexander bombed last November, Oliver’s feelings about Jihad were basically, ‘I can’t do this, I’m not going to do this.'”
Stone didn’t return a call I made about this on Tuesday, but on top of his acknowledged suffering about the failure of Alexander he most likely concluded he didn’t have the power to push through a provocative 9/11 film in the wake of the biggest tank of his career, particularly in view of…here I am writing this again…Hollywood’s increasing reluctance to finance films with any kind of pointed political content.
Between other fascinating off-the-cuff thoughts he shared during a panel discussion in Manhattan in early October ’01 about Hollywood practices called “Making Movies That Matter: The Role of Film in the National Debate,” Stone outlined the rough idea for Jihad.
“I’d like to do a movie on terrorism,” Stone said to the packed house. “It would be like The Battle of Algiers in which you’d just go in and show how it works. And it would be a hunt — people looking for them [the terrorists] while they’re about to do this. And perhaps it’s an old formula, but if it were done realistically without the search for the hero, which is often required, if could be a fascinating procedural.
“If it’s well done and real and accurate, you would see the Arab side, you’d see the American side….people will respond and they will go. I don’t buy this thing that everybody just wants to see Zoolander.”
Leone’s script is about “an Al Qaeda guy who is supposed to participate in 9/11 but doesn’t…he misses his assignment and goes on the run. It’s more like a Kubrick comedy about terrorism. It shows exactly how easy it would be to perform a really serious terrorist act…the purpose is to wake people to something out there that’s really dangerous.”
Scene from Gille Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers
Another source familiar with Jihad says it’s about “an Al Qaeda terrorist living in San Diego [and] he’s smuggling a nuclear weapon into the U.S. and planning to blow up New York…it’s a very hard-hitting, very edgy, very political thriller.”
The odd thing is that Stone pretended to be ignorant about this project when I raised my hand and asked about it during a public interview he did with director Rod Lurie at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art last January (or so I recall — it may have been February).
I didn’t know about Leone’s script at the time, but I had heard Stone riff about the Algiers-like thing at the New York discussion and thought it sounded like a cool premise. And Stone said he didn’t remember anything about it and Lurie moved on to the next questioner.
Aristopundits
I asked a bunch of journalist, studio exec, producer and screenwriter pals what kind of interest they sense is out there for a run of 9/11 movies, and whether reliving a real-life nightmare in movie-ish terms is any kind of desirable. And they said…
“Frankly the best 9/11 film to date is The Barbarian Invasions. Why? Because it contained an actual shot from 9/11 — a low-angle, surprisingly close piece of video footage of one of the planes ramming right into one of the towers, quite different from the ones we’re most familiar with.
“The simple fact of the matter is no motion picture recreation can beat 9/11 itself. It’s like preferring ‘Beatlemania’ to the Beatles. Why pay for a recreation after you’ve seen the real thing?
“Of course there’s the option of making Costa-Gavras style drama about the connections between the Bush and Bin Ladin families, but I doubt anyone is interested in that.” — David Ehrenstein, Los Angeles film critic and essayist (L.A. Weekly, et. al.).
“I would say that five years seems to be the threshold for portraying a national tragedy on film. Look to The Deer Hunter, I suppose, or the Manson TV film. The tragedy has to become history in order for it to be exploited. I would say that audiences will allow filmmakers to exploit history, but not tragedy.” — A name-level director-screenwriter who asked for anonymity.
“People don’t want to be toyed with. They don’t want [this tragedy] to be exploited. They don’t want to see Leonardo DiCaprio hanging off the edge of the North Tower.” — Jim Dwyer, New York Times reporter and co-author of 102 Minutes.
“People will pay to see a movie they want to see, regardless of 9/11. Convince them in ads that it is a good movie and you will open. Fail to rise above the `gimmick’ in a way that can be made clear in marketing and people will buy tickets for Fantastic Four II instead. No one NEEDS a 9/11 movie. And any drama in theaters is fortunate to hit the $60 million mark, which has been unfairly held up as a [measure of] failure for Cinderella Man.” — David Poland, Movie City News.
“I think it’ll be like any of the showdowns where people try to produce nearly-identical pictures. Hype will win. The film that has the best hype — looks the best, that has the best pedigree, is sold most confidently by its respective studio — will win. It might coincide with quality and it might not. That’s not really the point.
Producers Michael Shamberg (l.) and Stacy Sher (r.), the duo behind the Oliver Stone buried-under-rubble 9/11 film, flanking Uma Thurman.
“I’m willing to bet that Greengrass and Stone will make very good pictures based on what we know already. Greengrass has proven that he has an eye for this type of material with Bloody Sunday. Shooting that sort of emotionally volatile drama on that airplane… how can that not play well to an audience? He wants to improv, he wants to use a handheld camera… this one sounds like a heck of a movie, no matter what the subject.
“And I think Americans are going to have a powerful emotional response to this in theaters if Greengrass pulls it off. When the Americans rise up and stop the terrorists, you’re going to see people applaud in theaters and yell and get involved.
“Stone’s not making a political picture if he sticks to the script he’s got right now. He’s making a film about ‘the unappreciated heroes,’ which is the exact right move for him to make to help re-establish himself. If he made a kooky conspiracy picture about 9/11, I think the audience would never forgive him. Not yet, anyway.
“It’s way too soon to try and get people angry. Right now, it’s about showing us the faces of the heroes of these tragedies. It’s about trying to make us feel better about the people who were involved.
“I think there’s the chance that audiences will reject the films outright… but I doubt it. If the hype is right, they’ll be there. And that’s what will win this race, and I’m betting on Universal [in this context]. I think they’re better at opening their `big’ pictures that Paramount is, although with things so up in the air at Paramount, it’s hard to tell exactly who will be in charge of selling this one right now.
“It all depends on what they’ve got. If they’ve got a genuinely great angle on the tragedy, something unique and human that they can sell as a visceral event, then I’d say keep going. If it’s just another 9/11 movie, then they need to consider the competition
carefully.” — Drew McWeeny, Aint It Cool News.
“Frankly, I don’t think this is an answerable question. The marketplace decides how much is too much – all else is personal opinion. William Petersen thinks three CSIs is too many but CBS feels otherwise…and so does the viewing public.
“Go back to 1988: Vice Versa bombed, Like Father, Like Son bombed, and then Big opened and became a monster hit. Obviously, #3 wasn’t harmed by the stench of the first two.
“And Deep Impact didn’t hurt Armageddon six weeks later. And the constant stream of lame-brain Ben Stiller comedies hasn’t reached burn-out yet. And so on and so on.
“Thus, each 9/11 film will be judged on its own merits and attended accordingly. If we could predict the future, we wouldn’t be here — we’d be at Hollywood Park. — Major Studio Exec who asked to be nameless.
“I think it is fucking brave to be making these 9/11 movies. And it’s all quality producers making them, which is maybe why they are the top producing guns. Who knows if these movies will do business, but that’s not really the (artistic) point. Remember when no one would make Vietnam movies? Then we got Go Tell the Spartans, Platoon, Deer Hunter and I’m sure others I’m forgetting about that were excellent and provocative.
“Good luck to all of them. I’m proud to know Tim, Eric, Michael and Stacey, and I wish them well. I may not go to the movies as I am still resistant to those images, but I’m sure time will change that.” — Jonathan Dana, producer.
“I’d be very concerned if I had the third of any movie type, be it 9/11 or `a girl and her horse’ or flight thrillers or whatever. I probably wouldn’t make the third movie about this subject, though they all sound cool in their own way.
“Personally, as someone who lost a friend in the WTC, I don’t especially want to spend two hours reliving something that is still more vivid than any movie I’ve ever seen. My guess is the general public is in no rush to see this stuff on screen either. I understand the race between studios in town, but in the big picture (aka ,middle America) I’m not sure the public is clamoring for this stuff at all.
“Also, any 9/11 movie that even has a whiff of liberal bias is going to be torn apart by watchdogs on the right well before it hits theaters. I see a lot of risk in this new subgenre, just on concept alone. Keep in mind [that] most folks go to the movies nowadays to get away from the heavy shit in life. Getting them to shell out $10 bucks to relive the heaviest shit in any of our lifetimes will be tough, in my opinion.” — Another Studio Exec who asked to be nameless.
“As far as I’m concerned, a little goes a long way. To the degree that the unfortunate events of 9/11 have already been exploited to death by the Bush administration, and demeaned beyond belief by print and TV coverage, I don’t look forward to another onslaught.” — Peter Biskind, author, “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls,” “Down and Dirty.”
“Hollywood and indie filmmakers were doing Vietnam movies even when they weren’t overtly or specifically about Vietnam — even when they thought they were avoiding Vietnam, they were somehow acknowledging its effects.
“So far, the most imaginative post-9/11 movies made at the Hollywood level are War Of The Worlds, The Terminal, David Mamet’s Spartan and Zack Snyder’s remake of Dawn of the Dead. None of which is officially ‘about’ 9/11 in any explicit, one-to-one way.
“Which isn’t to say there can’t be any good movies dealing directly and realistically with 9/11, just that sometimes an oblique approach frees a filmmaker’s imagination, freeing him/her to deal with the world in a rawer, more instinctive way, without fear of giving offense.” — Matt Zoller Seitz, critic, New York Press.
Grabs
Picturehouse chief Bob Berney schmoozing it up at a journalist breakfast held at Abbacatto on Tuesday, 8.16. Journalist Sheri Roman is to the left; New York Post critic Lou Lumenick is the guy in the rear with his back turned. (He quickly turned and went over to the serving table for more French toast when he saw me get my camera out.) Berney said that Picturehouse’s The Notorious Bettie Page, directed by Mary Harron and starring Gretchen Mol, will play Toronto
Dick Cavett (r.) being interviewed during appearance at Borders Books at Warner Center on Tuesday evening, 8.16, 6:35 pm, to sign copies of new Shout! Factory DVD “The Dick Cavett Show: Rock Icons.
Michelangelo Antonioni, Jack Nicholson during filming of The Passenger, the 1975 semi-classic that Sony Classics is bringing into theatres prior to a DVD release.
Union Square subway underground, R line downtown — Monday, 8.15, 11:20 pm.
Twin towers of the Time Warner center at Columbus Circle.
There’s always been something really penetrating about this shot, and I’m not just double-entendre-ing. I’m talking about the damp silvery beauty of the tones in this shot…about the indistinct ghostliness of the guy behind the shower curtain and how Janet Leigh seems so vulnerable and yet so exquisite and glistening and shagadelic.
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