And the Dennis Hopper tributes just keep on coming, the most recent from N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis. Except the opening graph says that Hopper has “acted for Quentin Tarantino.” Well, sorta kinda. Hopper costarred as “Eddie Scratch Zero” in Larry Bishop‘s Hell Ride (’08), an apparent stab at an “ironic” wink-wink ’70s biker exploitation pic a la Death Proof that Tarantino exec produced. Mainly a straight-to-DVDer following a limited theatrical debut in August ’08.
There’s an almost startling intrigue — an odd vibrancy — to the non-concert footage of Jim Morrison in Tom DeCillo‘s When You’re Strange . Nobody has seen this footage, which is basically of Morrison driving and walking in the Southern California desert in a kind of dramatic or “acted” context. For this alone the doc is worth seeing.
Former Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek (and producer of the doc) tells Movieline’s Stu VanAirsdale that “we’ve had the footage in storage, in one of those temperature-controlled storage vaults in Hollywood like you should do with all your film and all your tapes. It was there. It had been sitting there waiting to go to work — in cold storage. The footage said, ‘Any time you want to use us, we’re in shape here. We just need some processing.’ We had everything archived and just went to work on it.'”
I paid a visit to Morrison’s grave at Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris about 22 years ago. This was when a marble bust of Morrison was still on top of the gravestone. Everything was covered in spray paint and graffiti. Empty bottles of alcohol, cigarette packs, butts and roaches littered the ground directly in front of it.

I enjoyed and admired Angela Ismailos‘ Great Directors when I saw it at last year’s Cannes Film Festival. A concise and well-shot personal tribute doc about Bernardo Bertolucci, Agnes Varda, Stephen Frears, Todd Haynes, David Lynch, Catherine Breillat, Richard Linklater, Ken Loach and John Sayles, it’s clearly an intelligent and nourishing tutorial — a Socratic inquiry about what matters and what doesn’t when it comes to making lasting films.

I said in my initial write-up that it’s “also about Ismailos’ golden blonde hair — a steady presence from start to finish.”
And yet, smart and agreeably illuminating as it is, I couldn’t at the same time honestly call Great Directors absolutely essential viewing. It’s not what I would call an especially novel or unusual doc, and the bottom line is that there’s no burning reason for it being a film except that Ismailos got to the filmmakers and put it together. Which is fine.
During last May’s showing I kept asking myself “who exactly is Ismailos, who funded the doc, how did she come to know these filmmakers and persuade them to sit down?,” etc.
Five years ago artnet.com described her as an “author and socialite.” I’ve also found a couple of shots of her at some lah-lah lawn parties in the Hamptons. That’s obviously not a crime, but at the same time…why her? And why me, for that matter? Why, I mean, am I writing about her film? Obviously because I was invited to see it, and because I liked it, and because I was invited to the after-party on a yacht in the Cannes marina (which I couldn’t attend). I guess I’m feeling a certain class-based resentment on some level. I’d like to think I do more than eat grass when it’s put before me, but the more I thought about it, the more this film made me feel…I don’t know exactly. I realize I’m not quite getting the thought out.
No disrespect intended, but I would be more interested in a doc about major directors by LexG than Ismailos. I just get the feeling that she socialized and blue-chipped her way into this project while LexG, suffering as he does on a nightly basis in the San Fernando Valley, has more of a blood-sweat-and-tears investment in transcendent films — he needs them like Gasim in Lawrence of Arabia needs water as he treks across the Nefud desert. Mailos, obviously bright and educated, could be the sensitive and concerned wife (or daughter) of a British officer based in Cairo who wants to make a film about the Arab uprising. Which is fine and good, admirable even, except for a certain vitality or hunger or need that only guys like Gasim have. That’s fair to say, I think.
Great Directors had its official premiere at the Venice Film Festival last September, and six months later Mark Urman‘s Paladin Films picked it up for distribution. It will open limited on 7.2.10.
Here’s a May 2009 flipcam interview with Ismailos by Anne Thompson, who was with Variety at the time:
I’m a late convert to Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work (IFC Films, 6.11), having missed it at Sundance and only just seen it a couple of days ago. I had relegated Rivers in recent years to an “uh-huh, whatever” status, partly because of her irksome red-carpet chatter and partly because of her 21st Century facial work, which suggests she may have been hurt in a terrible car crash (worse than Montgomery Clift) but was lucky enough to find a gifted plastic surgeon who was able to make her look as normal as possible.
Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg’s documentary, which will play at the Tribeca Film Festival, has wiped that image away. It shows us what a “never say die” trooper Rivers is — 76 and combat-ready and slowing down for nothing. I now think of her as a highly admirable paragon of toughness and tenacity. Plus the doc deepens and saddens our understanding of who Rivers is, was and continues to be. Plus it has some excellent jokes (including one about anal sex that I laughed out loud at, and I’m basically a heh-heh type).
What a fighter she is…God! Frank and blunt, nothing off the table, takes no guff, lets hecklers have it in the neck, never stops performing, tough as nails.
One thing Stern and Sundberg don’t get into is the condition of Rivers’ personal life. I know she’s straight, so does she has a boyfriend of any kind? Even a platonic one? If they mentioned this aspect I missed it. I realize Rivers is too egoistically driven and too much of a busy-busy-bee to even think about making room in her life for any normally-proportioned relationship, but everyone needs a little TLC from time to time. Someone to be tender with, go out to dinner with, take walks with, etc.
Early last week New York weather, after a brief flirtation with spring jacket weather, was suddenly cold again. Then last weekend the warmth returned, and then yesterday it was suddenly summer in July. Ask anyone who’s lived here — New York heat waves don’t fool around. So I spent some time this morning installing the two air conditioners, and properly air-trapping the window sills with duct tape and asking the construction guys downstairs to cut a short piece of lumber to use as a window jam. So that’s what I was doing. And very soon I’ll be leaving for the Kick-Ass junket, which starts at 2 pm.

With next month’s Cannes Film Festival popping up in discussions, I’m reminded of the three pronunciations. Some say “Cahn” as in Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan, which is how you’re supposed to pronounce Caen, the medieval city two hours northwest of Paris. And some say Cannes properly, which is hard to phonetically describe except that you need to emphasize the “n” sound more than than the vowel, and that the vowel is more “an” than “anne.”
And then there’s the oafish American way of saying it, which is “can” as in tin can or Peter Pan. Remember Julia Roberts‘ flat rural twang-dang pronunciation of “Paayyhnn” in Steven Spielberg‘s godawful Hook? Like that.
“The public have always, and in every age, been badly brought up. They are continually asking Art to be popular, to please their want of taste, to flatter their absurd vanity, to tell them what they have been told before, to show them what they ought to be tired of seeing, to amuse them when they feel heavy after eating too much, and to distract their thoughts when they are wearied of their own stupidity.” — Oscar Wilde, quoted in Ronald Bergan‘s 4.7 Guardian piece about the death of old-guard film criticism.
There are basically two kinds of moviegoers. The first will go to Noah Baumbach‘s Greenberg, not like it, get up after 45 minutes in and say to the manager “I want my money back!” This same kind of person will go to Shawn Levy‘s Date Night, laugh and stomp and go “hee-hee-hee” and “yeahhh!”

Date Night director Shawn Levy, star Steve Carell.
The second kind will go to Date Night and experience a slightly different reaction. He/she will quickly realize he/she is stuck watching another mildly tolerable high-concept comedy with soul-numbing car chases and gun-wielding baddie-waddies, and try to cheer him/herself by cherry-picking the few bits and lines that are semi-funny by saying “hey, that wasn’t bad…that was a decent improv…if only Tina Fey and Steve Carell could costar in a film with decent material.” And then walk out of the screening room relieved but vaguely depressed.
The first kind represents, I’d say, between 85% and 90% of moviegoers. The second kind obviously represents persons like myself.
I don’t know which group Variety‘s Lael Lowenstein belongs to, but her having recently called Date Night “an uncommonly engaging date movie with action, edge and genuine chemistry between its leads…a home run” calls her judgment and taste buds into question. In a perfect world there would be a special District Attorney with the power to indict certain critics for writing outrageously incorrect (i.e., overly fawning or overly dismissive) reviews. If I was Mr. D.A. you can bet Lowenstein would be hauled before a grand jury.
Date Night, yes, has its moments. Left to their own improvisational devices, Fey and Farrell are obviously bright and inventive and even “funny” here and there. It’s not a “terrible” film, but I just sat there like a lump of mashed potatoes this morning — patient, immobile, looking at my watch every so often, half-frowning, waiting for it to be over. It carries the Shawn Levy virus, you see, and if you’ve seen the Night at the Museum flicks, Just Married, Cheaper by the Dozen and The Pink Panther you know what that means, and more particularly how it feels to submit to it.
Don’t let Levy’s smiling face in the above photo fool you. He’s obviously doing very well in life, but serious movie hounds despise him. He must realize by now that he’s trapped in a wonderfully affluent studio-funded hell of his own making. He’ll never make anything as good as Little Miss Sunshine or Flirting With Disaster. If Levy was to get hold of the “cheaters” and put them on in front of his bathroom mirror, look out.
And yet Levy deserves credit for at least keeping Date Night down to 88 minutes.
The goal here could/should have been to make another After Hours, the dryly subversive Martin Scorsese comedy with a similar premise, but that wouldn’t have been as Eloi-friendly as Date Night, which will do pretty well commercially, I expect.
I loathe movies with pistol-packing, slickly-dressed, slightly fungusy-looking bad guys who do three things and three things only — threaten-and-glare, shoot at the good guys, and chase them in cars. The Date Night offenders in this regard are Jimmi Simpson (who played one of the vicitms in Zodiac) and Common, a rapper-shmapper.

“The Cheaters” was the title of a 1960 episode from Thriller, the hour-long, Boris Karloff-hosted series that tried to feed off the success of The Twilight Zone. It was about a pair of glasses that allows the wearer to see the ugly truth about others, and what he/she really looks like a la Dorian Gray. The story was by Robert Bloch, the original author of Psycho. The director was John Brahm. The actor in the clip is the late Harry Townes.
I have to catch a 10 am Date Night screening. No more filings until early afternoon, and only briefly at that with another screening at 6 pm.
I’ve finally seen Maren Ade‘s Everyone Else (Cinema Guild, 4.9), and can confirm reports about it being a very well acted, intelligently focused, moderately uncomfortable relationship film. It’s about a somewhat youngish couple (Birgit Minichmayr, Lars Eidinger) going through contractions during a vacation in Sardinia. The seriously talented Ade has said she “wanted to make a film about all the details of a relationship, all the things you can’t really explain to someone…a film about the secret world you have together with someone in a relationship [by] being as specific as possible.”
After seeing Everyone Else at the New York Film Festival, critic Philippe Garnier wrote that Ade’s effort does “for the 21st-century couple what Roman Polanski‘s Knife in the Water or Michelangelo Antonioni‘s L’Avventura were doing in the ’60s.” That’s arguably or at least half-true, which is why I’m favorably disposed for the most part. It’s a movie that dog-paddles, but in thoroughly adult and curiously subtle ways.
The wrinkle is that Knife in the Water‘s Jolanta Umecka and L’Avventura‘s Monica Vitti or Lea Massari were glamorously, broodingly attractive while Minichmayr (sorry but you have to be straight about such matters) is not.
You could call Minichmayr “striking” if you want to be gracious, but two minutes with her and you’re thinking “later on the rock ‘n’ roll.” On top of which her character is almost constantly anxious and/or agitated. So right away I was asking myself why Eidinger, a tall and handsome fellow with soft eyes and a smallish bald spot, would even be with someone like Minichmayr in the first place. It doesn’t feel right — we all decide within minutes whether or not a couple we’ve just met fits together or not — so the whole film feels off in this respect.


