David Friend to Jeffrey Wells: “Earlier this week I received a legal notice from the studio that owns most of Ingmar Bergman‘s films, trying to halt a YouTube series I’m doing on his career called Breaking Down Bergman.
“A little background on myself — I’m a reporter by day for The Canadian Press news wire and a longtime movie fanatic. I recently launched this Bergman series with a friend. We intend to watch all of Bergman’s directorial efforts in chronological order, and discuss each one in a 10-minute video using our opinions, comments and brief clips from the movie to illustrate our points. The intention is to encourage others to delve into Bergman, especially younger viewers who might know him by name but haven’t seen his movies.
“There is no profit involved — we’re doing it because we love film.
“However, Svensk Filmindustri, the copyright owner of his films in Sweden doesn’t want us using any footage AT ALL ,and after a recent conversation threatened me with legal action if I don’t stop the series. As far as I can tell, they are completely disregarding fair use laws. We’re not putting Bergman’s films online and we are actually providing promotion for this studio. So, it seems to me it is a service to the community and thus qualifies as fair use.
“Because we don’t profit from this, we also don’t have the money to hire lawyers, so we’re weighing the decision of whether to take down all of these videos and abandon a project we intended to spend the next two years on, or stick it out and see if they launch a lawsuit. I haven’t received any official legal statement from the studio lawyers at this point, but I don’t think they necessarily have to do that. Of course, these big guys at Svensk have a lot of money to challenge us and could probably hurt us financially even if they launch a lawsuit that they don’t win.
“I think it’s hugely important for us to continue engaging in a dialogue about Bergman’s films, and potentially about any other director’s films in a future series. We’re not officially movie critics. We’re just Average Joes talking about movies, and this seems like a dangerous precedent they’re putting forth.”
I’ll telling you right now that Woody Harrelson‘s performance as McCain campaign manager Steve Schmidt in Jay Roach‘s Game Change (HBO, March 2012) is going to be very good, and maybe great. Between this and Rampart, Woody’s on a roll.
In a recently-published Elle interview, We Bought A Zoo star Matt Damon says that “a one-term president with some balls who actually got stuff done would have been, in the long run of this country, much better” than what we got with Barack Obama.
“If the Democrats think that they didn’t have a mandate…people are literally without any focus or leadership, just wandering out into the streets to yell right now because they are so pissed off,” Damon explains. “Imagine if they had a leader. I’ve talked to a lot of people who worked for Obama at the grassroots level. One of them said to me, ‘Never again…I will never be fooled again by a politician.”
I finally got a chance last night to watch that DVD I was handed of Kenneth Lonergan‘s Margaret, and I now completely understand and agree with the rave notices it’s been getting. New Yorkers are urged to see it at the Cinema Village, where it’ll be as of Friday, 12.23.
It’s a bit lumpy and awkward here and there (although not as much as I’d been led to believe) and perhaps a wee bit too long, but Margaret — shot in ’05 and stuck in some kind of post-production indecision and lawsuit hell for five years after that — is smart and brave and ambitious, and made of the passionate stuff that matters.
It’s a Manhattan-set moral tale, occuring a year or so after 9/11, about a curious, somewhat bullheaded, occasionally agitated teen named Lisa Cohen (a fierce and emotionally brazen Anna Paquin), and the different ways her life is stirred and churned up as a result of her having been at least partly responsible for a fatal bus accident.
It’s clearly the fault of the bus driver (Mark Ruffalo), but Lisa, not wanting to destroy the driver’s ability to care for his family, lies to the cops about the circumstances, telling them that the victim (Allison Janey) crossed against a red light. But then she has an attack of conscience and hooks up with Janey’s best friend (Jeannie Berlin, giving a tangy, abrasive performance) about a possible civil lawsuit against the MTA. This leads to scenes with investigators and lawyers with a side benefit of three standout supporting performances from Stephen Adly Guirgis, Michael Ealy and Jonathan Hadary. Subplots involving sex and boyfriends and teachers and a mother conflict are threaded in and result in a kind of catch-as-catch-can tapestry deal.
Lisa’s actress mother is played by J. Smith-Cameron, and her boyfriend, a well-mannered European with an anti-Semitic undercurrent, is portrayed by Jean Reno.
Good and believable supporting performances also come from Matt Damon, Rosemarie DeWitt, Lonergan himself (as Lisa’s dad), Matthew Broderick and Kieran Culkin.
Is each and every Margaret moment successful? No, but most of them are. On top of which I’d much rather watch a hit-and-misser with some truly alive portions and maybe two or three so-so moments than a polished but consistently mediocre middlebrow thing.
Fox Searchlight opened and closed Margaret last September, and then along came efforts a month ago (prinicipally Jaime Christley‘s Margaret peitition) to persuade FS to re-issue it or at least provide screeners. And now, to repeat, the comes a new booking at Manhattan’s Cinema Village on Friday, 12.23.
Shame on those Rotten Tomatoes critics who called it a “mess” and a “sophomore slump” film, etc. Agreed, it doesn’t move along at a crisp pace with the usual smooth assurance, etc. But it’s so smart and searching and penetrating in so many ways great and small that the stylistic, cosmetic stuff shouldn’t matter. Would these same critics have dismissed On The Waterfront if it was too long and had been clumsily edited with one or two needless subplots, even with the classic stuff intact? If a film has really good material then it has really good material, and a good critic should always point that out, even if there are structural issues here and there.
The only thing that doesn’t quite work in the beginning is the fact that Ruffalo’s bus driver is wearing a cowboy hat (which no real-life MTA operator would ever be caught dead with on the job) as well as the cutting of the accident scene. There’s also a sex-with-Damon scene followed by Paquin going up to Damon and a woman colleague and saying she’s getting an abortion. Lonergan could have lost those two scenes with no harm to the film or Pacquin’s performance or anything.
The Margaret title alludes to a young woman described in a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem called “Spring and Fall: To a Young Child.” The poem, which is about facing up to the inevitable losses and ruinations of life, is read aloud during Lisa’s drama (or English literature) class by Broderick’s teacher character.
“Everyone is really enjoying Sherlock Holmes: A Game Of Shadows. The feedback I’ve been getting is super positive. That’s why I started doing this to begin with. I’d so much rather be doing this than some little indie movie that everyone says is fantastic and it kinda sucks, and it’s boring.” — Robert Downey, Jr., speaking for a Holmes EPK video posted by the Guardian.
The first two thirds of Cameron Crowe‘s We Bought A Zoo (20th Century Fox, 12.23) tries too hard to be endearing, or so it seemed to me. For 80 minutes or so it’s a not too bad family-type movie that works here and there. In and out, at times okay and other times oddly artificial. And then it kicks into gear during the last third and delivers some genuinely affecting sink-in moments and a truly excellent finale.
Matt Damon is better-than-decent in the lead role of Benjamin Mee, a nice guy who for complex emotional reasons decides to buy a zoo in the Thousand Oaks area. Scarlett Johansson is believably forceful as the head zoo keeper (or whatever the correct title is), and Thomas Haden Church is under-utilized as Damon’s advice-giving older brother.
The stand-out performance comes from 14 year-old Colin Ford, I feel. There’s also a surprisingly inconsequential, poorly written one given by Elle Fanning, who by the way wears too much eye makeup.
The first two thirds are better at delivering family-friendly studio schmaltz than War Horse, but that’s not saying much. It suffers from on-the-nose dialogue and a bad case of the cutes, which is what happens when Crowe’s magical realism vibe doesn’t quite lift off the ground because the exact right notes haven’t been found or hit.
The movie never really transforms into a suspension-of-disbelief thing. You’re constantly aware that you’re sitting in a theatre seat watching actors speak that tangy, semi-natural-sounding, spiritually upbeat Crowe dialogue and listening to the usual nifty Crowe-selected rock tunes (“Cinnamon Girl”, “Bucket of Rain”, etc.).
Matt Damon, imprisoned Bengal tiger in We Bought A Zoo.
But the last third kicks in with better-than-decent emotional conflict and payoff scenes, and the heart element finally settles in from time to time, and there’s a great diatribe against the use of the word “whatever” and an exceptional father-son argument scene and nice use of refrain (“Why not?”). Endings are half the game, and by that rule or standard We Bought A Zoo saves itself.
It won’t kill you to see it, and you might like the first two-thirds more than I did. Whatever.
Johansson gets to do a lot of arguing and shouting in this thing, and at some point I began saying to myself, “Jesus, I wouldn’t ever want to be in an argument with her…she’s really angry and adamant and unyielding.” And I began to think that I might be sensing, maybe, how her marriage to Ryan Reynolds came apart.
Crowe’s marriage fell apart in 2008 and his career hit a land mine in 2005 with Elizabethtown and then stalled again with mysterious shutdown of Deep Tiki in late ’08/early ’09, so Zoo is actually his story on one level or another, I suspect.
But my basic feeling about We Bought A Zoo is similar to a line that former Secretary of State James Baker once said about a senior Iraqi official during the 1991 Gulf War: “A good diplomat with a bad brief.”
Damon, Johansson, Cameron Crowe during filming of We Bought A Zoo
We Bought A Zoo is harmlessly decent family pap, but it rests upon a fundamentally rancid notion that zoos are cool. Zoos are emphatically not cool. I’ve been to zoos three or four times in my life and I like checking out the giraffes and lions and orangutans as much as the next guy, but they’re built on the conceit that animals living sullen and diminished lives inside cages are entertaining, and that looking at these creatures from the safe side of a cage and chuckling at their behavior and smelling their scent somehow enhances our lives by connecting us (or our kids) to nature. Which is, of course, horseshit.
Outside of the makers of this film and zoo owners and clueless lower-middle-class Walmart types, I don’t think there are any intelligent and compassionate people on the planet who believe zoos are a good idea. At best they’re an unfortunate idea. A message during the end credits informs that Mee’s zoo in England (i.e., Dartmoor Zoological Park) is a highly respected one, but it’s still a zoo.
Last month’s exotic animal slaughter in Ohio reminded a lot of us that it’s fundamentally wrong to keep exotic animals in cages to satisfy some bizarre emotional longing to bond with them, which, outside of respectably maintained zoos, is some kind of low-rent, Middle-American scumbag thing. Remember how Tony Montana kept a Bengal tiger chained up on the grounds of his mansion?
Zoos are prisons, and it’s dead wrong to sentence animals to life terms in them, however spacious and well-maintained their cages or how loving and caring and compassionate their keepers may be. Zoo animals don’t live in “enclosures,” as zoo-keepers prefer to call them these days. They live in effing jail cells just like Jimmy Cagney and George Raft did in Each Dawn I Die, or Elvis Presley in Jailhouse Rock.
Crowe is renowned for using great rock-music tracks in his film, but I doubt if he ever considered using Presley’s “I Want To Be Free” for We Bought A Zoo. I thought of it last night when I was driving home from the screening, I can tell you.
“Yet here comes Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson, bound and determined to transform the mildly humorous adventures of an intrepid boy reporter into a big-budget computer-animated hit,” writesMarshall Fine. “Unfortunately, they find themselves trapped on the Road to Hell, paving furiously.
“Perhaps Spielberg and Jackson (who produced) simply made The Adventures of Tintin (Paramount, 12.21) to amuse themselves. So, hopefully, at least two people will come out entertained.”
From my 11.11 review: “If you have a place in your moviegoing heart for an empty synthetic entertainment that will delight your inner nine-year-old, Steven Spielberg’s Tintin will rush in and twinkle your toes.
“All I know is that I never, ever want to sit through Tintin again. Because, as I said last night, it is popcorn punishment. I felt like I was being whoopee-cushioned and thrill-ridden to death, or like a virus was being injected into my system. Such amazing filmmaking — all about light and colorful characters and swirling camera movement and high adrenaline and technology — and it was making me sick.”
14 months ago the New Zealand Herald reported via news.com.au that Peter Jackson‘s The Hobbit — a two-part prequel to The Lord of the Rings trilogy that began filming last March — “is expected to cost $500 million (US) and has already racked up legal fees believed to exceed $100 million.
“The most expensive movie to date was Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, which cost $300 million (US),” the story continued. “The soaring Hobbit costs are mostly due to settlements with rights holders, whose wrangles with Warner Bros/New Line Cinema could have delayed shooting for another decade.
Pic will star Martin Freeman as Bilbo Baggins, Richard Armitage as Thorin Oakenshield and Benedict Cumberbatch as Smaug. Several actors from Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings film trilogy will reprise their roles, including Ian McKellen, Andy Serkis, Hugo Weaving, Cate Blanchett, Christopher Lee, Ian Holm, Elijah Wood and Orlando Bloom.
“Following a dumb brute on its arduous journey from master to master (most of whom perish), War Horse has an unavoidable similarity to Robert Bresson‘s sublime Au hasard Balthazar,” writesVillage Voice critic Jim Hoberman in a 12.21 posting. “Indeed, the sequence in which Joey — like Bresson’s donkey — is adopted by a willful, unlovable French peasant girl suggests the parallel might have occurred to Spielberg.
“The difference is not solely a matter of Bresson’s ascetic restraint and Steven Spielberg‘s shameless schmaltz, or Bresson’s tragic sense of life and Spielberg’s unswerving belief in the happy ending. Suffering witness to all manner of enigmatic human behavior, Balthazar is pure existence; Joey is an abstraction. Had Spielberg elected to show war (or life) from Joey’s perspective rather than use the horse as the war’s protagonist, the movie could have been truly terrifying.”
In a 10.18 HE posting called “Joey vs. Balthazar,” I wrote the following: “In Bressonworld, casual cruelty and inhumanity are visited upon a saintly little donkey. In Spielbergland, bombs explode at night, pretty photography commences, John Williams‘ music swells, and everyone falls in love with Joey-the-adorable-horse.
“It was my hope that Spielberg, needing to replace the wondrous effect of the pretend horses in the stage show, would shoot War Horse as a total horse-POV thing, allowing us to see our carnage and compassion anew through the eyes of an innocent. Dashed!”
MTV.com’s Josh Horowitz has posted an above average q & a with Girl With The Dragon Tattoo helmer David Fincher. Here’s the audio, and here’s the text version. Fincher obviously has a cough, and to judge by the sound of it I wouldn’t want to be in his vicinity without gloves and a surgical mask.
In my initial review of Mission: Impossible 4 — Ghost Protocol I should have given it points for being very well cut, engineered and choreographed. It’s a shallow and steroid, but nicely mechanized. It’s shrewd, tight and hard. But another thought hit me as I watched it for the second time last night at the Zeigfeld. It’s a kind of sequel to T2: Judgment Day.
The action stunts in that landmark 1991 thriller were extreme and out there, but this was logically allowed by the fact that Arnold Schwarzenegger‘s Terminator and Robert Patrick‘s T-1000 were cyborgs with super-powers and the ability to absorb all kinds of blows and body trauma.
And now, 20 years later, here we are with Tom Cruise, the star of M:I4, performing many similar stunts. He gets hit by cars, runs after moving cars, crawls up the side of a glass Dubai skyscraper with only one grip-glove, drives a car that drops 35 or 40 feet and crashes into a steel platform, etc. Okay, he limps a little bit toward the end but otherwise Cruise’s Ethan Hunt is much more cyborg than human.
The makers of M:I4 — Cruise, director Brad Bird, producer JJ Abrams — are anything but stupid. They know how dopey it is to show Cruise doing all this stuff, and they know that most audiences will roll with it. But the bottom line is that they probably felt they had no choice but to go full cyborg, and not just with Hunt’s stunts but those performed by costars Jeremy Renner, Paula Patton, Michael Nyqvist and Josh Holloway.
That’s because today’s big-scale action films are so stuck in the box, and so beholden to absurdist, gravity-defying dynamics, that super-flex action heroes are often obliged to perform stuff that only Schwarzenegger and Patrick were allowed to do in James Cameron‘s T2, but which no humans could have done because it would have been, like, ridiculous. Because Cameron is a realist. He shows us wild stuff, but he believes in logic and “rules.”
Director Andrew Jarecki, producer JJ Abrams during last night’s MOMA after-party.
But it ain’t ridiculous any more because the bar has been raised and there’s nowhere for action-movie directors, writers and producers to go except to keep upping the voltage and making action films nuttier and more cartoony.
This is why I said three days ago that there’s only one kind of thriller that can work these days — i.e., the human-scale, back-to-basics-and-believability model found in Steven Soderbergh‘s Haywire and Nicholas Winding Refn‘s Drive. I love thrills and action and dangerous situations, but it’s so much better when you can truly believe (or at least mostly believe) what you’re seeing on a screen.
Brad Pitt‘s Moneyball performance isn’t just a lock for a Best Actor Oscar nomination but a likely winner, I believe. The reason is Pitt’s other big 2011 performance — an unhappy, frustrated, dictatorial suburban dad in Terrence Malick ‘s The Tree of Life. It’s been touted by many (including Grantland‘s Mark Harris in a well-hidden 12.20 post) as the better of the two, and yet Pitt’s awards heat is all about Moneyball. Bottom line: No other potential Best Actor nominee has a similar two-for-one equation going on
“Given a role with such wrenching father-son dynamics, it must have been tremendously tempting to play only the red-meat stuff [in The Tree of Life] — the explosions, the clenched need for control, the abusiveness, the small tyrannies,” Harris writes. “Pitt does all that impeccably, but he never forgets that the inadequate father he’s playing is also a man who cares for his children, who teaches them things, who can’t bear not to be a good provider. Pitt doesn’t soft-pedal the character’s potential for cruelty, but he lives so deep inside the role that even when he’s behaving monstrously, he lets you see the self-loathing, the sense that he’s nursing a wound that will never heal.
“Nobody in the supporting-actor category did more nuanced, layered, complicated work this year. But instead of being at the center of the discussion, his performance is on the fringes, because the system has decided that Pitt will be ‘taken care of’ with a Best Actor nomination for Moneyball. He deserves that nomination. He deserves this one even more.”
Update: A cople of hours ago a friend wrote that “George Clooney, of course, has two films too including Ides of March so Pitt isn’t the only one with two perfs in the Best Actor ring, and Clooney has an advantage having written produced , directed and costarring in his. You might want to make note before your commenters do.” I replied that he was right, of course, “but Clooney’s Ides performance is nowhere close to Pitt’s Tree of Life performance in terms of layered gravitas and praise for same…not even close. It’s a fine Clooney performance, but nothing to drop your pants and go crazy for.”
