The one disconnect I’ve had with director-writer Paul Haggis (In The Valley of Elah, Crash, Million Dollar Baby) all these years was his being a member of the Church of Scientology. I presume I don’t have to explain the odious aspects of such a relationship. But being a major fan of Elah and the MDB script I didn’t want to contemplate it or go there, so I just pushed it aside.
Paul Haggis (l.); Church of Scientology lieutenant Tommy Davis
Now Hollywood Reporter columnist Roger Freidman has reported that Haggis has walked away from the Church of Scientology over two ethical issues — i.e., the church’s support of Proposition 8 (a.k.a. “Proposition Hate,” the California initiative banning gay marriage) and an order from the Scientology high command that Haggis’s wife Deborah Rennard had to sever all ties with her parents “because they’d violated some code of the sect,” Friedman explains.
Friedman has posted a letter Haggis wrote to Scientology “celebrity wrangler” Tommy Davis (i.e., the son of Scientologist Anne Archer), and is claiming that “the veracity of the letter has been confirmed by a friend of Haggis.”
I’ve read the letter twice and in my book Haggis is now a man of great courage and high honor. It takes balls to stand up to those vindictive mafiosos, those brain police, as they’re infamous for getting in your face and crawling up your ass. To go by Haggis’s letter, Davis sounds like a spineless hypocrite.
Haggis is currently filming The Next Three Days, a remake of Fred Cavaye‘s Pour Elle, about a professor (Russell Crowe) struggling to free his wrongfully imprisoned wife (Elizabeth Banks) from jail. Liam Neeson costars.
Late Sunday afternoon I attended a Word Theatre poetry reading called ‘Tongues on Fire” in West Hollywood. The big draw was actress-poet Amber Tamblyn reading from her latest volume, Bang Ditto. The passages she read were mostly about relationship rage (“I would sleep with your friends if you had any”) and were delivered with a certain arch-deadpan tonality, like pithy fire-drill alarms.
Russ Tamblyn, Amber Tamblyn following Sunday evening’s Word Theatre presentation of
‘Tongues on Fire: An Evening with California’s Finest Poets” at Restaurant3 in West Hollywood — Sunday, 10,.25, 6:25 pm.
Tamblyn’s writing is fierce, brilliantly honed and sometimes razor-hilarious. She also sang two duets with her mom, Bonnie Murray.
My admiration for Tamblyn began with her lead performance in Stephanie Daley, which I first saw at Sundance ’06. (Distribution mucky-muck delayed its release until April ’07.) I called her performance “awfully damn good…conveying a haunted, gloom-ridden, terrified emotional state, and she’s immensely watchable, attractively so, every second she’s on-screen.”
Amber has been seriously invested in poetry since 2005 or thereabouts. Her first poetry book, Free Stallion (Simon & Schuster), came out that year. She exec produces an annual L.A. poetry event, “The Drums Inside Your Chest“, and is the co-founder of Write Now Poetry Society. She’s hooked up these days with comedian David Cross. She currently lives in Brooklyn’s DUMBO district.
Amber’s actor-manager dad Russ Tamblyn (who’s partnered with Joan Hyler these days) was in the audience. Post-performance we briefly spoke about Robert Wise‘s The Haunting (’61), a landmark horror film in which Russ co-starred. An English home known for being actually haunted was used for exteriors, he said, with interiors filmed at Elstree Studios. We talked about that killer climactic scene in which a large wooden door bends and contorts from the pressure of ghosts, and what it might have actually been made of.
Amber Tamblyn, Bonnie Murray during yesterday’s Word Theatre performance at West Hollywood’s Restaurant3. The show was produced by Cedering Fox.
In a profile of The Box director Richard Kelly, N.Y. Times contributor Ari Karpelwrites that his “trippy films” — Donnie Darko, Southland Tales — “have made people assume he’s like Edward Scissorhands living up in some weird castle.” Says Kelly: “That’s certainly not who I am.”
“In person Mr. Kelly comes across like a former fraternity guy, his torn jeans and gelled hair complementing a T-shirt that reveals an obsessive weightlifter. ‘My dream is to be able to have thought-recognition software that, as I’m exercising, will just write the script,’ he said.
“His Twitter feed (with more than 5,000 followers) has revealed his love of University of Southern California football, beer pong and the Coen brothers’ movie A Serious Man. (‘Oy vey! This goy is beyond smitten!’ he tweeted.)
“Everyone interviewed for this article mentioned the dissonance within Mr. Kelly. ‘A contradiction would imply something that would be understood,” Jake Gyllenhaal said, ‘two things that would be a yin and a yang. He’s not that.’ Mr. Gyllenhaal then took a moment to formulate an accurate description. ‘I sometimes feel like he’s out of the mind of John Hughes. He’s like the missing character in ‘The Breakfast Club.'”
I intend to buy the Public Enemies Blu-ray when it comes out on 12.8. I love the film itself and the high-def digital photography is sure to look killer-diller. But it would look even better if director Michael Mann decided to create the Blu-ray from the original digital images for the transfer (i.e., the pure video version) instead of the digital-converted-to-film version that played in theatres.
Mann’s idea in shooting digitally, as I understand it, was to provide a certain aliveness and immediacy that would sharply differ from traditional photography used in other 1930s-era features (like Bonnie and Clyde or Thieves Like Us) and take you into that period without the filter. So why not? Universal Home Video could issue a pure-video alternative version vs. a traditional thearical version. I know, I know…too much of an investment for a film that didn’t do well enough theatrically to begin with.
David Carr‘s decision to retire from his N.Y. Times Oscar-beat “Carpetbagger” column, announced on 10.21, threw me somewhat. I’m sure his replacement, Melena Ryzik, will perform brilliantly once the change-over happens on 12.1, but I like Carr and his writing alot and didn’t want to see him go.
(l.) David Carr; (r.) Melena Ryzik.
I finally got around to saying this in a note sent this morning. “So David, your strategy is to lower your profile,” I said, “and not continue to do the one thing that aside from your book has put you on the map as a personality/celebrity/character of considerable acclaim? Why? This whole thing floors me. What ‘s the real thinking behind this?”
Carr replied an hour or so later: “If you read the news, I think you know the media story has hit a critical inflection point. Carpetbagger may be that ‘one thing’ in the hothouse of Hollywood, but we all contain multitudes and I think that working as a media columnist and blogger for a national newspaper is a pretty big deal.
“I made the hand-off this year, which I always thought would happen at some point, because now would not be a good time to have my attention divided. I am moving toward the story that matters most to me and my employer accommodated with enabling a very graceful handoff to Melena. I made my desires known and we all agreed that she was the natural, easy choice.
“Melena is the Carpetbagger in blog and in video, and she will be smashing — mark my word. And Paula Schwartz will be the Baguette, as she has always been, working to help cover what ia a very big waterfront. She knows the territory, works the carpet and the phone like nobody’s business, and will be invaluable to Melena and the blog.
“As you may also have noticed, I have not lost my interest in popular culture. Last Sunday, I did Amelia and the new record from The Swell Season. I have two other movie stories in the works and will be reading the Bagger like everyone else. But most of my reporting will be spent on the media story, new and old, digital and not, and all of my blogging will be going into Media Decoder, which is a very big deal to us at a critical time on a story where we think we have a significant competitive advantage.
“I love movies, I love the Oscars, I love all my fake movie-star friends, and I really enjoy the people on the beat, especially my fellow bloggers. But spending the next five months trying to decipher the new math of 10 nominations, which I think is a fascinating story, would pull me out of the narrative on media matters at the precise time I should be paying the most attention. That story is happening right now at a velocity that will put us all to the test.
“I might write something here and there about the Oscars in the paper and am angling to attend the Oscars because I’ve never been other than the press room, but I’m on media, 24-7. All good things must end, even if you and others think its silly to walk away.
To which I replied: “Of course you’re on it. Of course you haven’t lost your interest in popular culture. And of course your filings rule. I was just lamenting your having forfeited the Carpetbagger handle. It’s really a thing of honor and lustre in my book, and it’s taken years to build it up to that level. And it was just a little bit of a ‘whoa…he’s throwing that hard-won identity away?’
“We all contain multitudes, I suppose (some perhaps more than others), and there’s no disputing that your Media Decoder stuff and general reporting has always been and always will be first-rate, but I’ll miss you in the Carpetbagger context. You lent a touch of class, erudition, seasoned judgment, distinction, etc.”
Carr then reminded “it was Michael Cieply who came up with the Carbetbagger handle, so it’s not like I own the concept. As Jack Nicholson would say, I just showed up and worked the uniform.”
I was genuinely startled this morning by the use of periods at the end of “the internet is under new management” and “yours.” Ad agencies these days are infamous for ignoring correct punctuation. I grind my teeth every time I see an ad sentence with a missing comma, dash or semi-colon, or one with poor construction. I took this shot because of this disregard; because it’s become so utterly routine.
Ebert’s review isn’t all that ardent. It’s really more of a mixed reaction that includes some bending over backwards in order to dispense generosity and graciousness. But there’s one thing he says about Billy Wilder‘s The Spirit of St.Louis — a much better film about a legendary flyer — that bothers the hell out of me. Actually two things.
“I’m not suggesting that [director] Mira Nair and her writers, Ronald Bass and Anna Hamilton Phelan, should have invented anything for Amelia,” he begins. “It is right that they resisted any temptation. It’s just that there’s a certain lack of drama in a generally happy life.” In other words, they probably should have invented something to make Amelia Earhart‘s story more interesting. They should have said “the hell with the facts” and lied about her life.
“[But] at least by treating her big flights as chapters in a longer life, they sidestepped the dilemma that defeated Billy Wilder when he starred Jimmy Stewart in The Spirit of St. Louis,” Ebert continues. “Lindbergh’s life offered such promising details as a 1930s decoration by the Nazis and the kidnapping of his baby, but Wilder focused on the long flight itself, during which the most exciting event is the appearance of a fly in the cockpit.”
That’s actually bullshit because the scheme of Wilder’s film uses the flight as a through-line while telling Lindbergh’s back-story in numerous flashbacks. For my money these scenes break up the flight’s monotony and keep the film going in a dutiful, somewhat stodgy, mildly engaging way.
And as I wrote a little over three years ago, Wilder and Spiritweren’t defeated because The Spirit of St. Louis “pays off emotionally at the very end. In a blatantly dishonest way, okay, but effectively. And I’ve always found this fascinating.
“It’s mainly because of Wilder’s storytelling discipline — he was always one to plant seeds and make them pay off much later in a film — and also, partly, due to Franz Waxman‘s majestic music. I only know that I hate it when smart critics diss a film that’s at least partly successful.
“Just before the exhausted Stewart is about to land his plane at Le Bourget field in Paris, he starts to lose it — he starts freaking and whimpering over a simple, sudden inability to focus on the basics of landing a plane.
“The movie has briefly acknowledged about an hour earlier that Lindbergh was an atheist who believed only in his own aeronautical skills and in the engineering of planes. But just as Stewart is melting down above Le Bourget he thinks back to a flying prayer that a priest once passed on, and he says aloud, ‘Oh, God, help me.’ And of course he lands safely.
“And I swear to God it seems like the right thing to say at that moment — for Stewart/Lindbergh, for the audience, for the film. And I’m saying this as a half-atheist myself. (I found satori when I was 20 — I held universes in the palm of my hand — but mystical flotation fades over time.) It was shameless of Wilder and coscreenwriters Charles Lederer and Wendell Mayes to have pulled such a cheap trick (pandering to conventional religious sentiment, etc.), but it’s amazing when bullshit works despite it obviously being bullshit.
“Jean Luc Godard had a somewhat similar reaction when he said he was seized with affection for John Wayne‘s Ethan Edwards at the finale of The Searchers when he picks up Natalie Wood and says, ‘Let’s go home, Debbie.’ That’s a dishonest moment also. Ethan is a racist sonuvabitch, and there’s no way he’s doing to do a last-minute 180. But the moment works anyway.
“I’ve always felt that any movie that puts at least one lump in your throat is not impersonal. If the filmmakers are talented and clever enough to “get” you, they’re always coming some emotional place themselves. You can’t be totally cynical and touch people. You have to mean it on some level. And that means getting down to the ‘personal.'”
It follows that neither can you be overly cautious and carefully measured and slavishly devoted to historical fact, as Nair’s film is for the most part, and expect to touch people either. Amelia is a bland and bloodless travelogue through Earhart’s life while The Spirit of St. Louis was and is a much better film because it sells an emotional package (while hiding numerous lies and historical omissions) with impressive skill .
For that matter Flight for Freedom, that heavily fictionalized 1943 film about Earhart with Rosalind Russell and Fred MacMurray, worked better also, albeit on its own terms. It’s a dismissable film in many respects, but at least it understands itself and knows how to sell the schmaltz in a way to that is more engrossing than what Amelia tries to do. Russell lying to MacMurray at the end, telling him everything he wants to hear, knowing full well she’ll be making the flight on her own, etc. It’s dream-factory crap but if half-works. Whereas Amelia doesn’t work at all.
Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone has suggested five rules to follow if you’re trying to launch a grassroots/word-of-mouth Oscar nomination talking campaign. So I’ve come up with a few arguments, counter-suggestions and “oh, yeah?”s.
Stone Rule #1: “Never strong-arm people into voting for someone or something. People hate to be told what to do in general. No one wants to be thought of as stupid or out of touch.”
Wells response: Yeah, except the majority of people out there are out of touch (or at least not as in touch as they should be). It’s also a pretty safe bet that the main reason they’re out of touch is that they live with certain levels of timidity and hesitancy. They tend to like the same things over and over in films and they don’t particularly like to be challenged or provoked. It’s also a fairly safe bet that deep down they know this about themselves. In short, most film industry people are walking around with the mentality of sophisticated, self-aware sheep. There’s only way to respond to this, which is to treat them the way a shepherd treats his flock. Use your shepherd’s staff and goad them along. Do it politely or sternly, but tell them what to do. Because deep down they want to be led. It’s easier to follow a strong leader than make semi-nervy, semi-bold decisions on your lonesome.
Stone Rule #2: “Make them think it’s their idea. Present all of the reasons a film or person is worthy without ever falling into the trap of saying ‘nominate them now because they deserve it!'”
Wells response: I agree with this, but how provincial and donkey-stupid do you have to be to dig in your heels and decide to not see or admire a film or not vote for one of the people who helped make it, because you resent the manner of a person (or persons) telling you how great or at least worthwhile it is? When someone urgently tells me I need to put a film or filmmaker into the Oscar Balloon I never reject them out of hand. I always reconsider my thinking and/or my original reactions to the film in question.
Stone Rule #3: “Reverse psychology – it works quite well. The old ‘this is the best film of the year but no way will the Academy nominate it…it’s the best film to come along in ten years but it’s too small, too dark, the genre isn’t right…no way will the Academy go for it.’ That works ten times better than ‘of course they’ll nominate it…there is no way they can’t nominate it.'”
Wells response: Of course — very wise thinking. But if the Academy doesn’t nominate The Hurt Locker for Best Picture there’ll be blood on the floor. Sometimes reverse psychology isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Because sometimes the wrong film or filmmaker wins no matter what psychological strategy is in play. People like what they like while realizing deep down that they’re a little bit lazy and Zelig-ish in their thinking. They secretly want to be led, driven, pushed, admonished, browbeaten. (See Stone Rule #1.)
I read that 10.20 Playlist review of Anthony Peckham‘s Invictus script, sure. Key quote: “We get into a rhythm with Morgan Freeman‘s Mandela, but as the story expands to encompass the rugby storyline, Matt Damon‘s Francois Pienaar character and the country at large, we lose rhythm and end up flopping about in the middle of the familiar sea of cinderella-sports-story cliches.” It mainly inspired me to read the damn thing myself. In fact, no…I only have an ’08 draft. If anyone has a more recent version, please send along and I’ll have at it.
I wrote the following on 9.19.09: “Shot over a two-day period last March, Collapse is basically a Spalding Gray-like soliloquy piece in which Michael Ruppert, a former LA police officer turned independent reporter, author and truth teller, explains in a blunt spoken, highly detailed and extremely persuasive way that our economic and energy-using infrastructure is on the verge of worldwide collapse.
“There’s too much debt, too much greed, not enough oil and it’s all going to start falling apart — in fits and starts, bit by bit and then more and more, and then eventually…well, look out. A vast and terrible turnover that will devastate and destruct is just around the corner. Ten years, twenty years…forget it. I listened and listened to what Ruppert said, and “a hard rain’s gonna fall” ain’t the half of it. A survivable scenario, but a very different and much tougher world awaits.
“Before I saw Collapse I would have readily agreed with the view that things are very, very bad in terms of the world’s economic and energy scenarios. After seeing Collapse I’m 95% convinced that we’re on the brink of Armageddon — that we’re truly and royally fucked. Get hold of as many organic vegetable seeds as you can and start growing your own food. Hey, Viggo…nice shopping cart!
“The 5% of me that isn’t fully convinced has concerns about Ruppert’s personality and temperament, which seem a little bit wiggy at times. He’s been called a 9/11 Truther and, according to a CBC News summary, ‘claims to have met one of JFK’s shooters.’ He seems stable and knowledgable enough and is obviously quite bright, but he chain smokes, is having trouble paying his rent, and is clearly emotionally distraught over the data he’s gathered and the information he’s sharing. Collapse gets into his head and soul the way Erroll Morris‘s The Fog of War burrowed into Robert McNamara.
“Isn’t it in the nature of most whole-equation alarmists to be alone and uninvested in establishment currencies and memberships with a tendency to shout from streetcorners, publish nickel-and-dime newsletters or expound in low-budget documentaries such as Collapse?
“There were three basic kinds of group mentalities aboard the Titanic, Ruppert remarks, once the crew understood the extent of the iceberg damage. The first was the reaction of sheep — ‘We don’t know what to do, we’re scared, we’re cold, and all we want to do is huddle together.’ The second was ‘yes, this is serious, we get it — and what can we do to build lifeboats?’ And the third was ‘you’re crazy, this ship can’t sink, the people who are saying this are pathetic alarmists, and we’re just going to sit at the bar and enjoy the pleasures of decades-old bourbon.'”
Collapse will simultaneously debut on video and theatrical debut November 6th. Vitagraph will handle the film’s theatrical release, while FilmBuff will launch the film simultaneously on video-on-demand. The 11.6 Manhattan debut will be at the Angelika Theater;Collapse will premiere that day on FilmBuff. It will open at Landmark theaters in San Francisco, Berkeley and San Diego on 12.4.
In tribute to tonight’s BAM screening of John Ford‘s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (as part of the New York Film Critics Circle 1962 series), the New Yorker‘s Richard Brody has assembled a video piece and written a few words, among them a declaration that it’s “both the most romantic of Westerns and the greatest American political movie.
“The Western is intrinsically the most political movie genre, because, like Plato’s ‘Republic,; it is concerned with the founding of cities, and because it depicts the various abstract functions of government as direct, physical actions. It’s also an inherently romantic genre, because of its connection with the nation’s founding mythology. (One of the strengths of Ford’s movie is its depiction of the actual grassroots practical politicking in the Western territories.)
“The movie’s most famous line, of course, is that of a newspaperman: ‘This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.’ Ford prints it — and prints the facts behind it — and makes a movie about the moral burden of a life lived in the name of a myth and the ethical implications of direct action. Implicitly, the subject of the film is also that of a nation founded in this way. In his next Western, Cheyenne Autumn, from 1964, Ford takes on another overlooked Western reality: that of the Native Americans and their relations with the United States government.
“But the movie is also romantic in another, intimate way — it’s a great love story and a painful triangle, involving the tenderfoot lawyer (James Stewart), his gunslinger friend (John Wayne), and the woman they both love (Vera Miles). The tale’s epic span — it’s framed as a flashback to distant youth — stretches that love story over a vast arc of experience and renders it immeasurably poignant.
“As it draws to a close, there’s hardly a dry eye in the house — at least, in our house.”
I wrote about 15 months ago that I didn’t like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance “as much as I should because of the TV sound stage vibe, the hamminess of the acting, the fact that John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart are at least 15 years too old for their parts, etc.”
John Wayne, James Stewart
I also wrote the following in July 2007: “You can talk about this film for hours and never run out of new things to discover or re-review. I’ve seen Liberty Valance many, many times on the tube, and I absolutely love the transfer on the most recent DVD. It’s basically an old man’s movie — an elegy for bygone times and regrettably false legends. There’s also no denying it’s one of Ford’s very best — his saddest and most personal film ever, and worthy of the highest respect.
“But the older I’ve gotten (and I’ve said this before), the more trouble I’ve had with Ford’s sentimental cornball streak. His affection for actorly colorfulness among his supporting players seems to get worse every time I re-watch one of his films. Andy Devine‘s performance in Liberty Valance as a cowardly, squealy-voiced sheriff is, for me, 90% torture . (His one good scene is in the very beginning when he takes Vera Miles out to visit Wayne’s burned-down ranch.) Edmond O’Brien‘s alcoholic newspaper editor is a problem performance also. The movie is littered with them.
“As Newsweek critic Malcom Jones observed in March 2006, Ford’s movies “are a little antique, a little prim.”
“The irony, of course, is that despite the irritating aspects, The Man Who Shot LIberty Valance becomes a greater and greater film with each re-viewing. Some- thing majestic and touching and compassionate seems to come out in greater and greater relief. Genius-level films always gain over the years, but to my surprise I was almost moved to tears last night — and this stagey monochrome oater has never quite melted me before. Go figure.”
