I had to make a couple of minor changes in the three contributor-funded Hollywood Elsewhere press screenings of Tyrannosaur, but they’re now set in cement. Screening #1 will happen at the Aidikoff Screening Room on Thursday, 10.27, at 3:30 pm. Screening #2 occurs at the Ocean Avenue Screening Room on Monday, 10.31, at 7:30 pm. And Screening #3 will happen at the Sunset Screening Room on the Strip on Wednesday, 11.2 at 4 pm.
Earlier today Strand Releasing’s Jenna Martin sent out her own emailed invitation to all Los Angeles press. Please RSVP to strand@strandreleasing.com. Friends of HE who didn’t receive Jenna’s invite or who contributed to the screening fund and would like to attend can rsvp to me via Hollywood Elsewhere.
I know I’ve posted this clip before, but it’s the only atmospherically intriguing, emotionally affecting moment in Lewis MIlestone‘s otherwise humdrum Ocean’s 11. And this fact raises a question. What other films are mostly unremarkable except for their finales? Mostly offbeat or mediocre affairs that somehow pulled it all together and brought it home with just the right ending?
The only other scene that works in this over-rated caper flick is when Richard Conte has his heart attack on the Vegas Strip and goes down saying “never the luck! never the luck!”
Remember — we’re looking only for movies that mostly blew chunks except for their last few minutes. They can’t otherwise be half good or somewhat passable. Their endings have to be the only truly decent thing about them.
The Ocean’s 11 finale is shot in front of the old Sands, which was destroyed in ’96 and was located in what is now the front approach area of the Venetian.
Set within the Serb-Bosnian conflict and particularly in a Serb-run concentration camp, Angelina Jolie‘s In the Land of Blood and Honey (Film District, 12.16) is a riff on the Romeo and Juliet/West Side Story disparate-lovers theme. A Bosnian woman (Zana Marjanovic) submits to the tender passions of her Serbian captor (Goran Kostic), but the soup is spoiled when Kostic’s father (Rade Serbedzija, constantly cast as a crude, low-minded brute) plants seeds of doubt.
“U.S. Rep. Eric Cantor, the Republican majority leader in the U.S. House, canceled his scheduled speech at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business because if was going to be open to the first 300 people who showed up. Given that hundreds of Occupy Philadelphia protesters were planning to march from City Hall to the campus to protest the speech, that could have been lively audience.” — from Chris Brennan’s report in recent 10.21 posting in the Philadephia Daily News.
The two best films opening this weekend are Sean Durkin‘s Martha Marcy May Marlene and J.C. Chandor‘s Margin Call. The mob will be pouring into Paranormal Activity 3, of course. But Margin Call is the movie of the moment if the Occupy movement means anything to you.
It’s basically a 24-hour pressure-cooker piece about top analysts and brass at a Lehman Brothers-like outfit getting wind of the impending 2008 financial collapse, and about the various players deciding whether to make a clean breast of it, or sell off assets while the rest of the world is still in the dark.
Here’s what I wrote after seeing it at last January’s Sundance Film Festival: “Margin Call is a moderately engaging Wall Street drama — I’m giving it a 7.5 — that uses reasonably well-sketched characters in a brokerage firm to dramatize the 2008 meltdown. It’s a decently made film with one especially riveting boardroom scene, but without much snap or tension overall, and it radiates a fair amount of gloom.
“It provides solid, workmanlike performances from Kevin Spacey, Paul Bettany, Zachary Quinto, Demi Moore and Stanley Tucci. Jeremy Irons is the standout as the ruthless top dog.”
Yes, I called it “moderately engaging.” But the Occupy movement has given this above-average drama an extra dimension. So much so that I’m thinking of paying to see it this weekend. Paying!
If I was in Libya right now, I would assemble a mob to hunt down the guy who shot this video. “Severe punishment to all atrocious cell-phone video shooters!” would be our war cry. Once we capture him and have him down on his knees, men in the crowd will shout, “Don’t kill him! Don’t kill him! He has no talent but we need him alive!” And the shooter will likely say, “What do you want? Don’t kill me, my sons.” (Video on jump.)
I’ll be attending the Savannah Film Festival the weekend after next, from 10.28 through 10.31. It’s been ten years since I last attended. I was brought down by NY publicist and Savannah native Bobby Zarem, who introduced me that year to Jane Fonda and Stanley Donen . The lures this time around are Ellen Barkin and Another Happy Day, and the company of Alec Baldwin, James Toback and Ray Liotta. And the ghosts, of course. Savannah is filled with them.
Two thoughts after seeing David Cronenberg‘s A Dangerous Method for the second time last night. Keira Knightley is still the spark of the film — things would be too dry and measured without her jaw-jutting intensity. And the talkiness plays better the second time. You go in knowing what it is and accepting that, and you settle into Christopher Hampton‘s script like an easy chair. Here‘s my original review.
Following last night’s Academy screening of David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method (l. to r.): Sony Pictures Classics co-honcho Michael Barker, Cronenberg, producer Jeremy Thomas, SPC co-honcho Tom Bernard.
A Better Life director Chris Weitz, wife Mercedes Martinez.
Laura d Holesch, director Phillip Noyce at the Dangerous Method party.
Zhang Yimou‘s The Flowers of War (formerly Nanjing Heroes) is about the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, at the time of the Second Sino-Japanese War. Christian Bale plays real-life missionary John Magee, an American priest who helps a number of Chinese as they struggle to survive the violent invasion of the city by Japanese troops.
Set to open in China on 12.16.11, pic has been selected as the Chinese entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 84th Academy Awards.
Between his wonderfully exacting and deeply felt turn as Edward de Vere in Roland Emmerich‘s Anonymous and his immersive, authentic performance as a somewhat burnt-out musician in Noah Baumbach‘s Greenberg, I’m ready to offer an apology to Rhys Ifans for trashing him ten years ago…despite the fact that I was on the money when I did.
Here’s how I put it in a 2001 Reel.com column called “Stop Rhys Ifans,” which was mainly written in response to his performance in Roger Michell‘s Enduring Love:
“I want to put this carefully so as not to be misinterpreted. I’m trying to formulate what I consider to be a modest and temperate industry initiative. The unmalicious goal is the total termination of acting jobs given to Rhys Ifans, the downmarket, stubble-faced tall guy with dirty-blonde 1971 hippy hair who, in his movie roles, is often given to beatific expressions and saying lines in such a way as to produce vague mystifications.
“It’s just that Ifans, a 36 year-old, six-foot-two Welshman, has been cast as more or less the same guy in film after film, and the cumulative effect has finally reached repulsion levels. Whatever the character, whatever the story or film title…Human Nature, Danny Deckchair, portions of Vanity Fair, Roger Michell‘s Enduring Love…Ifans lumbers up to the plate and goes into his gangly, grungy, S.P.C.A. mode.
“Did Ifans’ performances in The Shipping News, Once Upon a Time in the Midlands and Hotel deliver the same? Memory isn’t serving; I may have erased the hard drive out of some insuppressable instinct.
“In Enduring Love, which I saw Thursday night, Ifans plays what struck me as hands-down the most profoundly icky and repulsive stalker character in the history of film.
“I didn’t want to see Ifans killed in some quick tidy way; I wanted to see a little torture thrown in first. The story, set in England and based on the Ian McEwan novel, is about the after-effects of a bizarre falling death upon two men (Ifans being one) who happen to witness it. It seemed only natural that Ifans character should be dealt with similarly. A plunge off a nice tall building, say. For symmetry’s sake.
“Lamentably, Michell is too original a director to go for such a stock indulgence. This is a strong disciplined film with nothing so mundane as mere audience satisfaction on its agenda. It doesn’t compromise or indulge in half-measures. I know I sound muddled, but in its own way Enduring Love is a very commanding work.
“But I really, really don’t want to see Ifans playing a downmarket, stubble-faced tall guy with dirty-blonde 1971 hippy hair ever again. I don’t know anything or presume anything. As ship’s engineer Steve McQueen said to the first mate in The Sand Pebbles (and yes, I’ve referenced this line before), “I’m just tellin’ ya.”
“I’m not trying to be cruel or cause pain. If I know this industry, Ifans will continue to work for years to come. (He’s apparently now making, or about to make, a new movie with Human Nature director Michel Gondry.) Casting directors generally have minds of their own and couldn’t give two shits.”
My ultimate point is that Ifans has grown into a much more accomplished actor than he was ten years ago, and has lucked into better roles.
I went into Roland Emmerich‘s Anonymous (Sony, 10.28) with a chip on my shoulder. I’ve been suffering for 15 years from Emmerich’s end-of-the-world monster-disaster films (Independence Day, Godzilla, The Patriot, The Day After Tomorrow, 2012), and if there was any way I could mess with Anonymous, I was ready and loaded for bear.
Why the hell was this Destroyer of Worlds making a film about Edward de Vere (who some believe to be the actual author of the plays attributed to William Shakespeare) anyway? You can’t make films for cretins and then just turn around and go for the swells.
And then I saw it and was myself turned around. Anonymous is Emmerich’s best film by a mile. It’s his only good film, really. It’s a fairly complicated, time-shifting Elizabethan period thing, and yet brilliantly written by John Orloff, impeccably visualized with the finest historical CG I’ve ever seen, and acted superbly up and down, first and foremost by Rys Ifans as the aforementioned de Vere.
It’s enjoyably smart but not overly dense or stuffy. It challenges but isn’t difficult to follow, and it basically just does it right.
Orloff’s screenplay isn’t just a debunking of the legend of William Shakespeare. It’s also, simply, a yarn well told. I was interested and engaged in every turn of the tale. [That’s Orloff in the above video clip, talking with KCET Screening Series host Pete Hammond the night before last at the Aero.]
Also top notch are Vanessa Redgrave as Queen Elizabeth, Joel Richardson as young Queen Elizabeth, David Thewlis as the malevolent William Cecil and Edward Hogg as his venal, hunchbacked son. Less engaging as Sebastian Armesto as Ben Jonson and Rafe Spall as the loutish and thoroughly asshole-ian William Shakespeare, a fellow who “never wrote a word” of decent prose, according to the Oxfordian theory.
Many who know something about William Shakespeare and Elizabethan-era history will despise Anonymous, of course. Holger Schott Syme, an English and Drama professor at University of Toronto Mississauga, wrote last month than Emmerich’s film is “stupid…a pompous, ignorant, ill-informed, and clumsy film. Worst, it’s a film that thinks it has an important story to tell. It doesn’t.”
There’s certainly no argument that on a level of pure craft, Anonymous is highly admirable.
If we’re talking nominations I’d definitely suggest Ifans for Best Supporting Actor, Orloff for his original screenplay, Anna Foerster‘s cinematogprahy, Sebastian T. Krawinkel for the production design, Simon-Julien Boucherie for the set decoration and Lisy Christl for the costume design.
I still don’t understand why Emmerich spent so many years shoveling expensive CGI crap into the laps of Joe and Jane Popcorn, making hundreds of millions for himself, and then suddenly turned a corner in his mid 50s and decided to go all classic-y and thoughtful and historical and whatnot. There’s something not right about this. Emmerich did nothing but degrade and befoul the House of the Movie Godz for years. He was doing the work of the devil, in a sense, and you don’t just get to throw that karma off and say, “Okay, I’m into something else now.” I respect him enormously for his latest effort, but I still don’t trust him.
