Daily

Thank the Lord and praise Allah — I’ve booked myself a flight that leaves Tuesday morning. This is the beat that my heart skipped. The last time I was this desperate to escape a city was when I was in Fez with the kids in May 2009.

Wifi has been spotty since I’ve arrived at the Palace Es Saadi — weak, passable, fast, weak again — but this morning it’s been all but nonexistent. The concierge says it’s the city’s fault (“It’s bad on the weekend”) and the tech guy…let’s not go there. It’s tedious to read about this, but there’s really no point in being here with this level of service. I won’t be able to record Oscar Poker today because of this. The Moroccan atmosphere only goes so far.

On top of which access to talent isn’t as informal as I thought it would be. Press people have it pretty easy in Cannes, Toronto and Sundance in this respect, but they’re kind of relegated to the sidelines here. I suspect that talent isn’t that much into giving interviews; they’re here to kick back and sample the North African vibe, and I don’t blame them. (I’ve had opportunities to chat with Charlotte Rampling and Alan Parker, and I have a John Malkovich round-table at 5:30 pm.) And there’s not that much to discuss anyway.

Like dozens of other peripheral big-city festivals around the world that aren’t really in the swing of it, the Marrakech Film Festival is — understandably — basically about itself. It’s about the rich swells attending black-tie events and the festival nurturing good relations with filmmakers and promoting tourism. And the events and venues are located all over town, and at considerable distances from each other, so you’re either a slave to taxis or you have to take a map and an iPhone and try to find them on your scooter. A lot of stopping and getting honked at, let me tell you.

I’m filing this from the Palais de Congres press room, where everything is wired just fine. Yes, I could scooter down here every morning and post new stories and photos, but if I did something else would go wrong. So far it’s been one ordeal after another with short little breaks of enjoyment.

You have to hand it to the Criterion Co. for creating DVD/Bluray jacket art that persuades (or at least suggests) that films regarded as nothing short of appalling if not calamitous during their initial release might not be all that bad. Perhaps the time has finally come to re-assess and recognize that Michael Lehman‘s Hudson Hawk…kidding! The art is from a site called Fake Criterions. Thanks to “Mr. F.” for passing it along.)

The narration in this just-released trailer for Jodie Foster‘s The Beaver is deadly. The dopey-ironic copy and the narrator’s Jack-and-Jill tone is aimed at idiots. But Mel Gibson‘s hand-puppet voice is brilliant. It’s basically the voice of Ray Winstone. In interviews next year I’d like to hear Gibson doing Winstone at the beginning of Sexy Beast: “Oh yeah. Bloody hell. I’m sweatin’ here. Bakin’, boilin’, roastin’…”

USA Today guy Anthony Breznican announced a few hours ago that he’s becoming a film writer for Entertainment Weekly. So he was pretty much the movie guy at USA Today (along with Suzie Woz), and now he’ll be one of the guys at EW. Meaning, obviously, that he decided there was more of a future with the latter. Except EW is kind of like SS Brittanic (as in Richard Lester‘s Juggernaut) these days…no?

Having now seen this booteg webcam version of the trailer for Terrence Malick ‘s The Tree of Life, I think I can answer Stephen Zeitchik‘s question about “what the to-do is about.” It’s basically saying that the cosmic light of the altogether is right out there and right within us, but the rough and tumble of survival (along with some brutal parenting at the hands of a guy like Brad Pitt‘s character) keeps us in a morose and damaged place. And what a sadness that is.

This is a very touching and trippy trailer, for what it is. It got to me. And I’m glad there are no dinosaurs. I still say that only problem with this film is that flat-footed title, which has always grated.

Kids who grew up in the ’50s and ’60s under the tough, gruff and goading fathers like Pitt’s character suffered significantly, and in many cases passed it along with interest. Dysfunction breeds dysfunction. Hurt people hurt people. Pitt’s character’s generational view was primarily shaped by the Great Depression and World War II, which told them that awful things happen to people who aren’t strong and resourceful and prepared, and awful things can still happen to good people due to bad luck and happenstance.

Tonya Harding?

I’ve been feeling a little Barry Lyndon-ed out. I’ve seen it too many times. I’ll be taking home the Bluray when it appears sometime next year, of course, but I’ve been wondering how much I can really get into it. Even the greatest films have a saturation point. But I’ve been watching a French-language version over the last hour or so, and somehow it’s come alive again. Removing the dialogue prods the viewer into focusing on that which was always the strongest suit to begin with.

Every so often a Manohla Dargis review feels as ravishing or transporting as the film she’s making out with. I have my reactions to Black Swan fairly well sorted, but her impressions turned on a current I hadn’t fully felt or relished, or whatever the right term is. She made me want to see it a fourth time.

Black Swan “surprises despite its lusty or rather sluttish predilection for cliches,” she says at the halfway point. “[These] include the requisitely demanding impresario (Vincent Cassel makes a model cock of the walk) and Nina’s ballerina rival, Lily (Mila Kunis, as a succulent, borderline rancid peach). But, oh, what Mr. Aronofsky does with those cliches, which he embraces, exploits and, by a squeak, finally transcends.

“Such is his faith in his ability to surmount the obvious (and the lethally blunt) that he turns Nina’s mother, Erica (a terrific Barbara Hershey), into a smother-mother who out-crazies Faye Dunaway‘s Joan Crawford in the mommy dearest department. You don’t know whether to laugh or shriek (both are reasonable responses), and it is this uncertainty and at times delicious unease that proves to be Mr. Aronofsky’s sweet spot.

“It’s easy to read Black Swan as a gloss on the artistic pursuit of the ideal. But take another look, and you see that Mr. Aronofsky is simultaneously telling that story straight, playing with the suffering-artist stereotype and having his nasty way with Nina, burdening her with trippy psychodrama and letting her run wild in a sexcapade that will soon be in heavy rotation on the Web.

“The screenplay, by Mark Heyman, Andres Heinz and John McLaughlin, invites pop-psychological interpretations about women who self-mutilate while striving for their perfect selves, a description that seems to fit Nina. But such a reading only flattens a film that from scene to scene is deadly serious, downright goofy and by turns shocking, funny and touching.”

It’s been made clear that Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck‘s The Tourist (Sony, 12.10) is a straight diversionary entertainment. And yet expectations certainly kicked up a notch when it was announced last August it would open in December rather than a previously slotted opening in early 2011, and it was hard to dismiss the idea that the hand of von Donnersmarck, director of The Lives of Others, might yield something extra.

The Johnny Depp-Angleina Jolie film was junketed a day or two ago in Paris, but I’ve read nothing about it, not even a tweet. And it won’t screen domestically until Wednesday, 12.8, or two days before it opens. If it was good enough to be rescued from a late winter or spring 2011 debut, why isn’t it good enough for someone to say at least something in the wake of the Paris junket screenings? How could a director as assured and impassioned as von Donnersmarck fail to deliver at least a moderately passable thriller?

“I loved Florian’s first film and he was a jolly chap when I spoke with him [for an inteview],” a friend wrote yesterday, “but this kind of late reveal doesn’t bode well.

Have I missed something?

A little more than two years ago I read that Johnny Depp would play Tonto in a Jerry Bruckheimer-produced feature of The Lone Ranger. I was hoping this ghastly idea would kind of go away, but it hasn’t — it’s going to start shooting later this year under director Gore Verbinski.

All I wanted to do in my Marrakech depression (whipped, spotty wifi, not dressed nicely enough for the swells) was walk around. I made my way up to Place de la Liberte and rented a red scooter with two mirrors ($50 U.S. per day) with a plan to pick it up tomorrow morning. Then I walked a mile or less up to Djemaa el Fnaa Square, the sprawling marketplace-slash-tourist magnet. Hundreds were staring at two massive video screens showing the opening-night festivities for the Marrakech Film Festival, so in a sense I was “there” after all.

Read more