I concur 100% with Toronto Star critic Peter Howell when he says that “just one person saves Smart People from being completely wretched, [and] it’s the presence of Thomas Haden Church.”

The problem, unfortunately, is that Haden Church wears a truly wretched moustache in Noam Murro‘s film, and it wrestles with his performance. He’s still the film’s most winning actor (slightly more engaging than Ellen Page, and much more so than the growly and curmudgeonly Dennis Quaid), but every time you look at him your eyes go right to his upper lip and it’s like…why?
This led me to lament almost all moustaches everywhere. I realize that some actors look better with them. Or they did in the good old days. Clark Gable, Ronald Colman, William Daniels in The Graduate, John Hillerman in Chinatown, etc. Robert Redford’s ‘stache in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid looked terrific. But almost everyone who doesn’t have the kind of face that really and truly needs the augmentation of upper-lip hair looks awful when they grow one. I mean terrible and sometimes even comically miscalculated at times. The word doofusy comes to mind.
Black guys, for whatever reason, almost always look good with moustaches. Who can imagine Billy Dee Williams without one? Except for Denzel Washington — they don’t work for him at all.

Slashfilm’s Peter Sciretta has posted a piece about an alleged San Francisco backlash to the Forgetting Sarah Marshall slogan campaign. If any San Francisco HE readers notice any of these satirical knockoffs that Sciretta is referring to, please snap a photo and send it along.

Sciretta begins by explaining that he recently wrote “about Universal’s genius viral marketing campaign for the upcoming Judd Apatow-produced comedy Forgetting Sarah Marshall, which had taken over San Francisco. Signs on buses, bus shelters and billboards with cryptic messages that read ‘I hate You Sarah Marshall’, “My Mom Always Hated You Sarah Marshall’ and ‘You Do Look Fat in Those Jeans, Sarah Marshall’, lead those who notice to ihatesarahmarshall.com.
“It’s actually a very cool campaign, maybe too good. There are so many of these advertisements around San Francisco that a backlash has begun. Last week flyers that look like the Sarah Marshall advertisements have started appearing on trees around the city reading ‘I’m So Over You, Tree’. Another person snapped the photo below of a tree-attached flyer which reads ‘You Do Look Fat in those jeans, tree”.
Forgetting Sarah Marshall, which I found personally painful to sit through (in part because of the film having forced me to contemplate certain aspects of Jason Segel‘s anatomy), opens on 4.18.

Lacking The Rhyme

As a would-be Oscar contender, Stranger Than Fiction (Columbia, 11.10) is dead. This fact was made resoundingly clear after today’s (9.8) press screening at the Toronto Film Festival. You and your friends can still pay to see it when it opens two months from now and chuckle and eat popcorn and discuss it afterwards… knock yourselves out. But forget the derby.

Maggie Gyllenhaal, Will Ferrell in in Marc Forster’s Stranger Than Fiction

The only reason anyone had reason to presume Fiction might be award-quality is that it’s a big-studio November release with quality-level people behind it (director Marc Forster, producer Lindsay Doran, screenwriter Zack Helm, costars Will Ferrell, Emma Thompson, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Dustin Hoffman, Queen Latifah), and a pseudo-trippy storyline in the vein of Charlie Kaufman‘s Adap- tation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind .
But it’s a half-assed little failure — a middle-range mindfuck movie that isn’t that clever or funny or up to something that holds metaphorical water. That’s because the “imaginative” metaphysical scheme behind it doesn’t really add up or pan out. I almost hated it. In some ways I do hate it.
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I can’t explain what’s wrong with Stranger Than Fiction without discussing plot particulars so if you’re averse to spoilers, read no further.
It’s about a lonely, overly regulated IRS agent named Harold Crick…stop right there. Right away you can smell the whimsical tone. Giving a joyless, constipated character the last name of “Crick” is like calling a cowboy character “Dusty Rhodes” or a backwoods yokel “Clem Kadiddlehopper.” Having him portrayed by Ferrell is…well, not a bad idea. In theory. Ferrell is more restrained and character- contained here than in any film he’s ever been in, and I remember saying to myself early on, “Good for him, he’s subliminating his schtick.”
But fifteen minutes with Harold Crick was enough to make me nostalgic for Talladega Nights, and that’s bad. All Ferrell has to play here is confusion and timidity and befuddlement, and anhour’s exposure to these states of mind make you feel down and dreary.

Harold’s problem is that he’s begun to hear his life being narrated by a woman with a British accent. Literally, like a DVD narration track. And it’s driving him nuts. We gradually learn that the voice belongs to a chain-smoking writer named Kay Eiffel (Emma Thompson), who is having lots of trouble finishing her latest book, which is largely about an IRS agent named Harold Crick. Yup…same.
Anyway, Kay is planning to kill Harold off and doesn’t quite know how. (She’s murdered several of her characters, we’re told.) And Harold, once he gets wind of this, seeks her out and pleads with her not to kill him because for the first time in his life he’s starting to feel love and joy, having fallen for a cookie lady (Gyllenhaal) whose tax returns he’s auditing, and because he’s just begun to learn to play guitar.
An interesting idea…at first. Anyone who’s written fiction knows that sometimes the characters tell you what they want to do. You may have had a plan for this or that to happen to them, but every so often characters talk back and say, “Hold up, man…this is my life, okay? And this is what I want to do.”
Except — and this is the Big Problem — the movie never makes it clear that Harold Crick is or isn’t living inside Kay Eiffel’s head. It never makes a case for the fact that he’s existing in some imaginary realm Kay is creating as she moves along with her book, or, assuming he’s real, how and why Kay’s imaginings have any power over him.

The bottom line (I think ) is that Harold is as real as you or me or Piers Handling or Paris Hilton…or so it seemed to me. And yet Harold believes he’s a character in Kay’s book and he’s afraid that Kay will have him killed, etc. On top of which Kay is unaware that Harold is a real-life physical creature who is being guided and provoked by her words.
Desperate, Harold turns to help from a quirky English professor, Dr. Jules Hilbert (Dustin Hoffman), who listens with interest but also a kind of strange indifference to his tale. Very strange. Hilbert tells Howard at one point that if Kay has decided he has to die, he may as well accept it because the manner and circumstance of his death that she’s dreamt up will somehow be more enobling than an average death. Or some such hooey.
On top of which there’s Queen Latifah as some kind of soother-smooth talker type who’s been ordered by Eiffel’s publisher to help her circumnavigate the writer’s block. Can anyone imagine an ordeal more terrible than having to deal with Queen Latifah more or less moving into your home or workspace and sitting on you (all 250 pounds of her) until you start writing again?
I know this sounds like a tiresome, half-baked, full-of-holes story idea, and it may feel tedious just reading about it in this space, but seeing the film is much, much worse….trust me. Stranger Than Fiction is one of those movies that makes you shift around in your seat and squeeze the armrest of your chair and whimper and grit your teeth. After an hour or so it makes you feel like your head is going to explode.

Dustin Hoffman, Will Ferrell

Zac Helm’s script was widely admired before this film was made, and I still can’t figure why that was. I tried to read it twice and couldn’t get through it. The damn thing doesn’t echo because the system of the story hasn’t been thought out or explained in a way that really “works”. It’s stuck on its own deadpan cuteness and quirkiness and other-ness. Talk about flames licking your feet.
I’m not saying Fiction won’t have its fans here and there, but it’s finished as far as any kind of derby points are concerned because there will be enough detractors like myself throwing its value into question. Average Joes, trust me, are going to go “later” and shine it after the first showings on Friday night.

Triumph of Others

That Telluride Film Festival hype about Florian Henckel- Donnersmarck‘s The Lives of Others (Sony Classics, 2.07) was based on serious substance. This is one of the most penetrating German-made “heart” films I’ve ever seen — the love story at the center of it is tender and impassioned and ripely erotic — and yet it’s also a very chilling and gripping drama about political terror.

Martina Gedek, Sebastian Koch in The Lives of Others

And yet it’s very much of an interior thing — emotional at every turn and at times quite sad. Gray and dispiriting at other times, but with a touching “up” element at the end.
The Lives of Others is a political thriller with compassion — a movie about spying and paranoia and the worst aspects of Socialist bloc rigidity and bureacratic thug- gery, and yet one that delivers a metaphor that says even the worst of us can move towards openness and a lessening of hate and suspicion. Ugliness need not rule.
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It’s about the turning of a bad guy — a Stasi secret policeman (Ulrich Muhe) who is first seen as a bloodless and fiendish bureaucrat, but whose determination to spy upon and mangle the lives of a playwright (Sebastian Koch) and his actress wife (Martina Gedek) for the sake of career advancement gradually weakens and erodes, and then flips over into something else entirely.
Call it a fable or (if you’re German) unrealistic in an historical political sense, but I bought it and so did everyone else at last night’s packed screening at the Elgin. The crowd stood up at the end of the 9 pm show — clapping, cheering, woo-wooing. Muhe and Henckel-Donnersmarck, the 33 year-old director-writer, left their seats and went up on stage and took bows — several bows. They waved and smiled as the cheers kept coming, and then they turned to each other and hugged. Quite a moment.

Ulrich Muhe and Floridan Henckel-Donnersmarck taking bows on the stage of Toronto’s Elgin theatre last night around 11:15 pm.

The Lives of Others a one-week qualifying run in New York and Los Angeles, and then open it in February to coincide with the Oscar nominations. It’s all but guaranteed to be nominated as one of the five Best Foreign Films. It won 7 Lola Awards (Germany’s equivalent of the Oscar) — for Best Film, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Actor (Muhe), Best Supporting Actor (Ulrich Tukur) and Best Production Design.
Set in Berlin, the story mostly takes place in 1984 and ’85, although it jumps to ’89 (the year the Berlin Wall came down) and then to ’91 and ’93. During the 50-year history of the German Democratic Republic (’49 to ’89), the thugs who held the reins of power kept the citizenry in line through a network of secret police called the “Stasi”, an army of 200,000 bureaucrats and informers whose goal was “to know everything.”
Captain Gerd Wiesler (Muhe) is a highly placed Stasi officer who is prodded by a superior, Lieutenant Colonel Anton Grubitz (Tukur), to dig up anything negative he can on a famous playwright named Georg Dreyman (och) and his actress wife Christa-Maria Sieland (Gedeck, best known for her starring role in Mostly Martha).

Ulrich Muhe in The Lives of Others

At first the suspicions are baseless — Freyman is a dedicated socialist who believes in the GDR. But his loyalties evolve when he discovers that his wife has been pressured into a sexual relationship with a government bigwig, and especially after a theatrical director pal commits suicide due to despondency over his being blacklisted and prevented from working. Eventually Wiesler, who has had their apartment thoroughly bugged, has evidence that Wiesler is working to undermine the state.
And yet his immersion in the lives of this playwright and his actress wife leads, ironically, to a gradual bonding process — a feeling of identification and sympathy for the couple as human beings, artists…people he’d like to know and perhaps share passions with, despite his constricted personality and shadowy Stasi ways. He knows he’s not in their league and probably not worthy of their friendship, but he feels what he feels regardless.
I have to get downtown and hit the Varsity plex, but I’ll be speaking with Muhe and Henckel-Donnersmarck at their hotel tomorrow afternoon. Not counting Pedro Almodovar’s ,em>Volver< .em>, which I saw yeserday for the second time yesterday for reasons of pure pleasure, this is the first super-fine film I’ve seen at the Toronto Film Festival so far.
Later today is Venus and then Candy and then a Michael Moore thing at the Elgin, and finally a Volver party starting around 10:30 or 11 pm.

You’re Fired, Tom!

Paramount Pictures has shown Tom Cruise the door, and it’s top executive has explained why in a blunt and unflattering way. “Lo, how the mighty have fallen” is one way of reacting to this, but the real question is why has Viacom chairman Sumner Redstone spoken so curtly and dismissively of a once all-powerful superstar?

The Wall Street Journal has a story up about Paramount severing ties with Cruise/Wagner Prods., and it’s a whopper. The money quote is Redstone explanation for why Paramount is ending its 14-year relationship with Cruise’s film production company, to wit: because the actor’s “offscreen behavior” which “was unacceptable to the company.”
It’s astonishing that Redstone would say this because it wasn’t really necessary to spell things out. The usual Hollywood routine in explaining a parting of the ways (creative or otherwise) is to use polite respectful terms, which Redstone obviously decided against. He’s clearly disdainful of Cruise’s eccentric Scientology-driven antics and has made a very public show of flipping him the bird.
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Why didn’t Redstone just say “we wish Cruise and Paula Wagner well” and let it go at that?” What could have brought this on? “It seems as if Redstone is acting on a belief that Cruise has become box-office poison, or is starting to become that,” an insider with ties to Paramount said this afternoon.
Cruise’s partner Paula Wagner told Variety earlier today that Redstone’s comments about Cruise were “outrageous and disrespectful.” Wagner also asserted that CAA, which reps Cruise, terminated discussions with Paramount earlier in the week. The studio had had been offering a sharply reduced annual funding commitment for C/W Prods., down from $10 million to something like 20% of that, according to an earlier report.
It was also annouced that Cruise and Wagner have raised $100 million from two hedge funds and are striking out as indies while looking for a housekeeping deal at another studio. “‘This is a dream of Tom and mine,’ Wagner told the Wall Street Journal.
Still, could anyone have imagined even two or three years ago that Cruise would be in effect be pushed off the Paramount lot? It’s one thing for Paramount to cut C/W’s annual deal down from $10 million to $2 million, but for its chairman to effectively say “you’re fired’ is a mind-blower.
Between Mel Gibson’s anti-Semitic wipeout of a few weeks ago and Cruise being booted off a big-studio lot due to “unacceptable behavior”, we’re once again reminded that studio chiefs are being less and less accomodating to big-star salaries.
And also that big-star meltdowns are becoming more and more common these days. The difference this time is that a major corporate figure has given this bizarre syndrome as a reason for ending a deal. This is significant. And it seems fair to re-acknowledge that Andrew Breitbart and Mark Ebner‘s “Hollywood Interrupted” called this syndrome a long ways back.
Free Katie. Free Suri.

Laughed Some, Seen Worse

The consensus is already getting around: Snakes on a Plane is sorta kinda tolerably entertaining. As in sometimes hilarious, amusingly cheesy here and there, never out-of-this-world brilliant, fitfully amusing…a guiltless B movie all the way.

Rachel Blanchard in David Ellis’s Snakes on a Plane (New Line, 8.18)

Make that a B-minus. Watching cheeseball thrillers can make you feel like you’ve got a virus of some kind, and this one definitely put something in my blood. But it has maybe seven or eight good laughs (okay, nine or ten), and a good ending with Keenan Thompson (the cool fat-ass in the orange shirt) delivering some funny lines. And I loved it when Gerard Plunkett, playing a snarly-ass middle-aged businessman…I’d rather not spoil. But Plunkett does two things that are quite funny.
It’s significant that Snakes didn’t irritate me all that much. It’s also significant, however, that watching it felt so uneventful that I couldn’t make myself write a review last night after I got home around midnight. It’s hard to get it up when all you have to say is “I wasn’t in pain.”
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I was shaking my head at times at the some of the over-acting and tepid dialogue. The first 15 or 20 minutes (i.e., set-up sections shot on one of the Hawaiian islands) is on the level of, say, a Charlie’s Angels episode from the early ’80s, and that’s pretty damn awful. Byron Lawson’s performance as Eddie Kim, the criminal who arranges for a big crate of poisonous snakes to be unleased on a Honolulu-to LAX jet, is the worst element by far.
The damn thing is overlit for the first 25 to 30 minutes, in the manner of big-studio movies of the mid to late ’60s. Director David Ellis knows, I’m sure, that when planes take off the really bright lights in the cabin (i.e, the ones that are turned on when a plane lands) are never used, and also that most of us know that. But he flood-lights the hell out of these scenes anyway, and this just takes you right out of it.

Samuel L. Jackson, Flex Alexander

But Snakes never turns bad-bad. It’s lazy, goofy and often sloppy. Ellis isn’t a terribly clever action director — not in my book. But he’s not incompetent and the film isn’t horribly crafted. It’s just not very hip.
I just wish Ellis had gone more nutso. I wish that someone had gotten sucked out of the window as the plane is approaching the coast of Los Angeles and that the camera had stayed with this person as he/she splashes into the Pacific…and lives. I was hoping one of the really big snakes would eat the baby. I wanted to see one of the big snakes act like a phallus and sexually invade one of the terrified females. (Elsa Pataky, I was hoping.) Well, why not? This movie isn’t about logic or sensitivity — it’s about pushing the bounds and making the fans howl. As long as we’re talking about snakes-as-penises, why not have one of the fat black guys get anally penetrated by a python?
Most of the snakes are CGI-ed or substandard animatronic. I didn’t believe anyone was being threatened, not for a second. It’s about cartoon snakes on a plane. And stupid sound effects with the snakes hissing and growling and whatnot. A lot of this film is really quite lame.

Elsa Pataky

I would have had a better time if Ellis and New Line has done a shot-for-shot remake of Tobe Hooper and Piers Haggard’s Venom. Seriously — that’s a pretty good deadly-snake exploitation flick. It’s just about a single black mamba and when one of those babies bite you, forget it.
There is one totally brilliant moment when Flex Alexander is chatting up Rachel Blanchard and he’s interrupted by the sound of a guy sitting nearby blowing snot out of his nose. Flex and Rachel look at this guy and we see him wiping his pants with his snot in order to get it off his hands. I usually despise gross-out humor but the absolute lunacy of this bit is inspired. Why show a passenger doing a point- lessly gross thing? The fact that Ellis does it anyway is a stroke of mad genius. He should be proud of this bit…seriously.
Samuel L. Jackson is pretty good, not great — but the moment when he yells out the big line (“I’ve had it with these mothahfuckin’ snakes,” etc.) is very neat. Todd Louiso is a very subtle and gifted actor who’s under-utilized here. (Naturally.) David Koechner and Bobby Canavale…forget it. They’re fine but in a film like this all performances are a losing battle.

Keenan Thompson

I hope Elsa Pataky lands more roles in U.S. films. She’s hot and fetching and I liked her in that Maxim spread. Her eyes say dirty things.
The flatness of much of this film is conveyed in the opening titles. First of all, it’s a mark of mediocrity when a film begins with a helicopter shot of a big scenic locale. It’s the director saying to the audience, “All right, relax…I have no imagination and you’re not the brightest bulbs on the planet for paying $10 bucks to see this thing, but that aside, here’s the scenic area where our story begins.”
Sure enough, Snakes starts with a lame helicopter shot. Sun, surf…breaking waves! Then we see a title card that says “SNAKES” (beat, beat) and then comes the addition of “ON A PLANE” — and as soon I saw this, I knew what I was in for. This, sadly, is the predominant Ellis touch rather than some guy wiping snot on his jeans.

O’Toole Scores Again?

As everyone presumably knows, Miramax has swapped the release dates of Stephen Frears‘ The Queen, a drama about Queen Elizabeth (Helen Mirren) grappling with the death of Lady Diana, and Roger Michell’s Venus, based on a script by Hanif Kureishi about septugenarian sex, romance and parenting. Queen was advanced up to 10.6, and Venus was pushed back to 12.15. The motive was to put Venus into a better position for an Oscar campaign, but not necessarily for the film itself.
The main beneficiary of the Venus campaign is going to be Peter O’Toole, who reportedly plays the lead role — a randy, very straight 70ish actor named Maurice — with exceptional gusto, tenderness and O’Toolean panache.

Peter O’Toole in two cruddy-looking stills from Roger Michell’s Venus (Miramax, 12.15)

However good O’Toole turns out to be, there’s a great comeback story to be told if and when he goes on the promotion trail.
A story about a great and colorful actor, 73, being back in the saddle with a good role after years of wandering in the desert. About his flamboyant past as one of the big-time acting kings of the early to mid ’60s (Lawrence of Arabia, Becket), and as one of the great party animals of that era. About going flat in the ’70s and then briefly resurging in the early ’80s with plum roles in Richard Rush’s The Stunt Man and Richard Benjamin’s My Favorite Year…before going flat again. About the legend who came close to refusing an honorary gold-watch award from the Academy’ in 2003 because he didn’t want to be thought of as over-the-hill, and then got lucky right after this and nabbed a juicy part and hit a home run with it.
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Or so I’ve heard and read. You never know and you can’t trust anyone.
A certain Dart Group publicist in the employ of Miramax has been pushing O’Toole’s Venus work, yes, but I came across some pretty encouraging stuff on my own last May from some IMDB posters who claimed they’d seen Venus at a Convent Garden screening in very late April and then at a Manhattan screening three or four days later.
These postings inspired me to call Charles McDonald of the London p.r. firm McDonald + Rutter just before leaving for Cannes. I was hoping to get information about any Cannes market screenings of Venus, but McDonald said he didn’t know of any.

O’Toole in Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy

There are no prints of Venus in the States, I’m told, so maybe Michell and Kureishi have been adding or refining. It would be great to catch it in Toronto, but who knows?
The Venus log line reads, “Life for a pair of veteran actors gets turned upside down after they meet a brash teenaged girl.” Leslie Phillips, Jodie Whittaker (the young and the brash), Vanessa Redgrave and Richard Griffiths costar. The word on the film last spring is that it was good or pretty good (as in “good beginning and middle, so-so ending”). But the word on O’Toole was something else.
After seeing Venus at the Convent Garden showing, a Scottish-sounding guy named Phil Concannon wrote on 4.29 that “the real attraction [of the film] is the chance to see Peter O’Toole in a leading role once again, and he is very good indeed. He’s funny and touching, and occasionally uncomfortably lecherous, and it’s terrific to see him getting a role he can really sink his teeth into. There’s one scene in which O’Toole recites Shakespeare’s ‘Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?’, and his sheer charisma, along with that great voice, makes the scene breathtaking.”
You know what would help the O’Toole campaign, assuming he’s as good in Venus as everyone says? If that low-life, ass-dragging video company MPI Home Video would finally get it together and put out that restored Becket DVD they’ve been holding onto and embarassing themselves by not releasing for the last couple of years.

O’Toole in the opening moments of Peter Glenville’s Becket

If this Becket DVD were to hit the market in the mid-fall, say, people would obviously be reminded what a great performance O’Toole gave as Henry II (he should have won the 1964 Best Actor Oscar but Rex Harrison took it for My Fair Lady), and the general awareness about O’Toole having been a world-class actor for the last 45 years would be that much higher.
O’Toole’s Becket performance “is one of the most exciting ever seen in a main- stream movie,” I wrote early this year. “O’Toole takes your breath away half the time, and the other half he makes you grin with delight.”
O’Toole recorded a narration track for MPI in the fall of ’03 that lasts throughout the 149-minute film, and, according to MPI Home Video’s Gregg Newman, is quite entertaining to listen to. If I were a Miramax marketing exec I would contact MPI and ask them what the hold-up is and, you know, can Miramax help in some way?
Becket addendum: I didn’t even call the MPI Home Video people Wednesday about the Becket DVD situation. MPI reps have flown their colors with baldly disengenuous statements about their release plans for this DVD in the past, always saying they intend to have it out “later this year” or “soon” and never living up to these pledges. That said, an MPI spokesperson named Christie Hester ( I spoke to her during the writing of one of my previous Becket DVD articles) posted a message on an IMDB board on 5.30.06 that said “MPI Home Video intends to release Becket on DVD during the first quarter of 2007.”
Obviously, any prepared statement about a forthcoming company initiative that contains the word “intends” is not to be trusted. Hester was obviously qualifying in case things don’t pan out. (Trust me, Warner Home Video has never announced it “intends” to release anything — their p.r. releases always say flatly and unambiguously that WHV will release this or that title on this or that date, and no monkeying around .) Then again Hester’s “first quarter of 2007” is a more date-specific pledge than anything ever stated by any MPI Home Video exec about their Becket plans, so maybe the DVD will come out sometime before 12.31.07. Maybe.

9/11 Comfort Blanket

Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center (Paramount, 8.9) is a well made, emotionally satisfying rescue movie. It happens to be about a couple of Port Authority cops (played by Nicolas Cage and Michael Pena) who got buried in the rubble of 9/11, but it could be about any two family men who nearly buy it while doing a tough job on a bad day.
It’s pretty much as screenwiter Andrea Berloff described it three or four months ago — a boy-down-the-well movie only darker and with blood and bruises and crushed bones, and times two. Not the most striking or labrynthian or emotionally complex film you’ve ever seen, but a good one.

Nicolas Cage as John McLoughlin in Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center

It’s spookier and less talky and certainly more traumatic than Ron Howard’s Apollo 13, but it’s basically the same thing. Brave guys get caught in it, seem fucked, are fucked, families think they’re fucked, a nervy guy with smarts and ingenuity is determined to save them, he finds a way, brave guys aren’t fucked after all and they’re home free and out. Otherwise there are loads of differences between Stone’s and Howard’s film, and one that stands out in particular: Apollo 13 has a more interesting story and a much stronger second act.
World Trade Center is about two guys trapped in a dark hole full of rocks and dirt and twisted metal, and the audience definitely shares their plight in the middle section. A feeling of being enveloped by despair and then hopelessness, a sensation of oxygen depletion, of being trapped with life slipping away. If this weren’t a grim-up-and-pay-attention 9/11 movie and was just an original script, agency readers would be writing the same thing all over town: “Great beginning, good ending…and a second act that literally lies there.”
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Stone has directed World Trade Center like a champ and made it into something sharper and more shaded than what it probably was on the page. It could have been television — the bones are straight out of a made-for-TV movie manual — but it’s not. Nor is it the Second Coming. But because of the 9/11 baggage factor it’s being called a knockout and a cathartic wowser by both Time and Newsweek this week. And it’s not. Or at least, it didn’t feel that way to me.
By my standards World Trade Center is a solid 7.8. Not quite an 8, but absolutely nothing for anyone on the team not to be proud of, or at least very content with. I have no significant beefs with this film. I’d be surprised if anyone does. It’s not the kind of movie that will tick anyone off. It’s too decent and restrained and respectful and sharply rendered. But in a ground-rule-double sort of way.

Oliver Stone on Playa del Rey set of World Trade Center

It’s very well acted up and down (Nicolas Cage, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Stephen Dorff are the best of a uniformly pro-level cast). The sense of 9/11 realism is bracing all the way through, and the visual effects are top-notch, by which I mean nearly invisible. (There’s an overhead shot of the smoldering World Trade Center site on Tuesday, 9.12, that’s one of the best non-fake-looking CG shots I’ve ever seen.) I really have to hand it again to Stone for doing an excellent job of “getting out of the way” and just directing it like a no-nonsense pro — as if the spirit of Anthony Mann swirled up from the grave and took over.
I think it’s fine that the patriotic right-wing community has been shown World Trade Center in advance screenings and that they’re digging it and all. I can see why. It has no politics, no Hollywood leftie attitude — it’s just a straight drama about a lot of good people pulling together to save a couple of guys from the jaws of death. A movie about caring, family, duty, perseverance.
Everybody knows Cage plays Port Authority cop John McLoughlin and Pena plays Will Jimeno, right? Two real-life guys who had to go through dozens of operations to recover from their 9/11 injuries, and who’ve been helping to promote the film that last several weeks.
The Newsweek story, written by critic David Ansen, says that World Trade Center “celebrates the ties that bind us, the bonds that keep us going, the goodness that stands as a rebuke to the horror of that day. Perhaps, in the future, the times will call for more challenging, or polemical, or subversive visions. Right now, it feels like the 9/11 movie we need.”
Not very challenging or polemical, and yet Newsweek has World Trade Center on the cover. It sounds like the editors might have been the ones doing cartwheels in the lobby rather than Ansen. Boil the snow out and all he’s saying is that WTC is classy emotional therapy.

Michael Shannon as Dave Karnes

I have one very small quibble with World Trade Center and two mid-sized ones. A tinkling of piano keys at the wrong moment near the beginning, and two small but significant omissions in the portrayal of Dave Karnes, the ex-Marine who drove in from Connecticut on the afternoon of 9/11 and made it through the police barriers and onto the WTC site by dinner hour.
It was Karnes (portrayed by Michael Shannon) who discovered McLoughlin and Jimeno and brought the rescue teams to their aid. Everybody had quit looking that night for fear of other buildings collapsing. If Karnes hadn’t put on his Marine uniform and gotten himself a Marine haircut at a Stamford barbershop and driven down to Manhattan and all, it’s quite possible McLoughlin and Jimeno might not have survived. Shannon portrays him as a bit of a religious weirdo, a bit of a nut. But a good kind of nut in a situation like 9/11 — a guy who laser-beams right into what needs to be done, and then does it.
Curiously, Stone decided to omit a character detail that I find really interesting. Karnes drove into Manhattan in a recently purchased Porsche 911 convertible, and at times, according to a 9.02 Slate story by Rebeca Liss, at speeds of 120 mph.
That’s a fascinating trait for a 9/11 savior — tear-assing down the Connecticut Turn- plike and the Henry Hudson Parkway in a muscle car with the top down, and stop- ping at a McDonald’s along the way.
Why didn’t Stone show this? My theory is that he wanted Karnes to appear selfless and monk-like — a slightly bent military saint. And I think he knew this impression wouldn’t fly with audiences if he had Karnes driving a Porsche 911 because a lot of people think that guys who drive Porsches are dickheads. But I had read about Karnes and his Porsche two or three years ago and was waiting for that shot. I felt that Stone sold Karnes and his audience short by trying to simplify him into a ex-Marine who resembled Karnes in a lot of ways but not entirely.

There’s another thing that happened between Karnes and the men he saved that Stone chose not to dramatize. It would have been touching. Liss describes it thusly:
“Karnes left the site that night when Jimeno was rescued and went with him to the hospital. While doctors treated the injured cop, Karnes grabbed a few hours sleep on an empty bed in the hospital psychiatric ward. While he slept, the hospital cleaned and pressed his uniform.”
The little thing I didn’t like is a bit at the very beginning when Cage is dressing and getting ready to drive to work from his home in New Jersey. The movie has been running for maybe four or five minutes as he walks down a hallway and opens a door and looks into the bedrooms of his sleeping children. And Stone ruins the moment by putting a “sensitive” little piano riff on the soundtrack. Sensitive as in “awww, he loves his children” and “boy, the quiet little moments in life are what make it all worth it, you know?”
Without the tinkling piano it would have been a nice honest little moment — with the tinkling piano it’s Hollywood bullshit. It’s okay to use tinkling piano riffs to emphasize emotion but only after the film has been running for 15 or 20 minutes, by which time you’ve built up your characters and plot elements a little bit.
There’s a perfect little piano tinkle when Gloria Stuart’s “old Rose” first looks at Jack Dawson’s old drawing of her naked younger self in Titanic, but because we’ve gotten to know a bit about her character and who she is, and because we don’t exactly know what the piano tinkle means…but we can tell it means something. And so it gets us on some level.

Michael Pena as Jim Jimeno

I seem to have lost my World Trade Center thread here….
At least I haven’t oversold the thing. If you go and feel this afterwards, blame Ansen and Time‘s Richard Schickel.
Addendum: I happened to meet Mcloughlin’s real-life son on the Paramount lot after seeing World Trade Center a couple of weeks ago. He was with a couple of friends in a small white car. We shook hands and talked about the film a bit. I asked if his dad has been in touch with Karnes since 9.11 and I think he said “once.” I asked why Cage portrayed his dad as walking in an awkward stumpy fashion at the end of the film, and he said it’s because the bones in his dad’s feet were totally crushed and aren’t flexible and that he basically “walks around like Frankenstein.”

San Diego Hoo-Hah

I was so backlogged by Friday midnight that I decided not to return to Comic-Con today (i.e., Saturday, 7.22). No offense but I was fairly okay with that. I heard a little voice late last night that said “fug it.” It’s a cool thing to be a Comic-Conner but after wandering around the San Diego Convention Center and sitting for several hours inside the cavernous Hall H, you start to feel like a stooge sitting there with 5000 others, watching show after show on the big screens and absorbing the big-studio sell-jobs.
In any case Friday’s action — a special screening of Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain, the raucous Snakes on a Plane presentation, the colleague buzz that followed the promo for Alfonso Cuaron’s Children of Men — was enough to fill the tank.

Fountain director Darren Aronofsky (l.), composer Clint Mansell (r.) at small party following Friday night’s Fountain screening

The Snakes presentation was a lot of fun for everyone, but for me it was also a bit of a downer — a final official confirmation that Snakes on a Plane isn’t going to be anything like Tremors (i.e., a smart, crafty comic thriller), and possibly more like a cheeseball B-movie with special effects out of the mid ’90s, and enhanced by the reverse Midas touch of a go-along, second-tier director.
Aronofsky’s The Fountain (Warner Bros., 10.13), which I saw with about 20 other journalists last night in a plex on 5th Street, is the most beautiful and best-cafted cosmic head-trip movie since I don’t know what. 2001: A Space Odyssey? Fight Club? The first half of Altered States ? (I was never a big fan of Bertolucci’s Little Buddha. Was anyone?)
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And for a movie with Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz playing three characters each in three different eras (the 1500s, the present and the 24th Century), it’s remarkably easy to sort through and make sense of. You have to let it seep into you like any great book or perfectly brewed cup of tea, and you have to seep yourself into it also, but it’s an extraordinary place to go to and then return from….like a planet unto itself.
It’s one of those films that takes a little seasoning to appreciate. Mature educated types will like it more than typical 20-something hormonals, women probably more than guys who watch football and smoke cigars and drive SUVs, etc.
I’m presuming that anyone who’s ever tripped on anything will definitely respond to The Fountain. (Most columnist-critics are afraid to admit they’re “experienced”, but a lot of people of character and conviction dropped in the old days). This means, I guess, that at least part of the marketing effort will have to be directed at boomers who’ve been around that particular block.

Samuel L. Jackson during yesterday’s Snakes on a Plane presentation at Hall H

But a good nutritious film is a good nutritious film, and The Fountain is tight and rich and well-crafted enough that it will play just as well ten or fifty years from now.
I guess you could call it an odyssey. It’s about parallels, echoes and refrains between Jackman and Weisz’s three characters over a thousand-year time-span. The three settings are 16th century Spain, here-and-now America and somewhere in the nether cosmic regions some 500 years from now. It’s a movie about healing, loving…trying to break through.
The Fountain will play at both the Venice and Toronto Film Festivals in early September. I’ll get into it more sometime around then.
I don’t know where I was when the presentation for Children of Men (Universal, 9.26) happened, but one look at the trailer tells you it’s a gripping futuristic thriller and a class act that steers clear of generic Comic-Con elements — i.e., mythical terrain, geek wonder, visually driven, monsters and mutants, etc.
On top of which it’s got Cuaron (Y Tu Mama Tambien, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban) co-writing a script with Timothy Sexton (Live from Baghdad) and with Clive Owen, Julianna Moore and a hippie-haired, pot-smoking Michael Caine costarring. You can feel the focus and and smell the pedigree.

Clive Owen, Julianne Moore in Children of Men

Set in Britain a few decades hence, it’s about mankind facing extinction and anarchy because of an infertility defect that has spread across the globe. Cuaron was quoted as calling it “the anti-Blade Runner.” I’m guessing that Children will be shown at the Toronto Film Festival and that screenings starting next month in Los Angeles are also likely. The great Guillermo Del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth) Interviewed Cuaron during the presentation.
I don’t know how I managed to avoid thinking about Child of Men until yesterday, but I’m all over it now.
The Warner Bros. presentation include a briefing onThe Reaping, which looks like The Birds by way of The Swarm except it’s about locusts and (I presume) frogs and other Biblical plagues visited upon a small southern town. The director is Stephen Hopkins, a moderately talented, very friendly Britisher (The Life and Death of Peter Sellers) whose involvement in a film of this sort means….competency.
Problem is, I’m having trouble remembering the title. The Reaping, The Gleaming, The Shining, The Reaming, The House-Cleaning…hard to hang onto.
Next on the bill was Superman Returns director Bryan Singer, who told the crowd he intends to shoot a Supie sequel for 2009, and that he hopes to “go all Wrath of Khan on it.” After a while Singer brought on Richard Donner, director of the original ’78 Superman with Chris Reeve. Donner was there to plug a new Superman II DVD. He showed a cool Superman-deceives-Lois scene from that film that was never used in the film. The disc will also include footage of Reeve doing screen tests.

Hilary Swank, AnnaSophia Robb in The Reaping

The best thing shown the whole day was Singer’s Superman Returns blooper reel. It’s hilarious. He only cut it together a day earlier, I was told. Singer should definitely put this on the DVD.
The second funniest thing happened when Singer was asked about the selling if Superman Returns. “I can’t talk about the marketing,” he almost whispered…but it was clear he wasn’t delighted with what happened. His hints, implications and half-utterances on this subject were priceless.
I can’t talk about 20th Century Fox’s Eragon because it struck me as another mythical CG battle flick in the crusty mold of Joseph Campbell, Lord of the Rings, Dragonslayer and Star Wars. Same deal with Pathfinder. Reno 911….low-rent but a lot of people will have fun with it. Borat ….same.
A unseen sequence from Peter Jackson’s King Kong Deluxe Extended DVD was shown on the big screens. It’s a re-do of the scene from the ’33 original with crew making their way across a swamp on a raft. It was “fun” to watch and yet it was typical Jackson crap — vigorous and inventive, overwrought, show-offy. The guys are attacked by a huge eel-like monster with big yellow teeth, and Jackson has his creature swim all kinds of wow stunts like he’s a dolphin at Sea World.

Richard Donner, Bryan Singer

Neil Labute talked about The Wicker Man (Warner Bros., 9.1) a bit, and then showed a scene from the opening of the film. Nic Cage is a motorcycle cop pulling over a young mother because her daughter has thrown a doll out in the road. The scene starts to get creepy, and then creeper still…and then shocking, and then demonic. It left me with a feeling that The Wicker Man is going to be a very scary film. Labute is one of the brightest directors around, but I wouldn’t call him warm and fuzzy. And you need a little touch of steel in your soul, I think, to push the right buttons and do the job on people.
Comic-Con is the ultimate cinegeek get-together. I love being surrounded by thousands and thousands of mellow eccentrics. Spiritually-speaking, the vibe is very cool…serene, even. But nobody looks like they work out much or eat a lot of healthy food. There were always a good amount of smokers outside. Four or five people suggested to me that Comic-Con was about movies and mythology but also drinking. Lots of that.
San Diego’s Gaslamp district has the usual-usual tourist stuff (cool restaurants, lotsa bars, pretty women), but I wish have liked to visit here during Wyatt Earp’s day. Which was one reason it feels better to just chill and work on the column today in air-conditioned comfort. I’m sitting in a guest cabin this afternoon in Escondido (about 30 miles north of San Diego), and it’s the Nefud desert out there.

Family Argument

A couple weeks from now, I’m guessing, we’re going to start seeing pieces about how Steve Carell is messing with his funnyman handle by playing a suicidal gay gloomhead in Little Miss Sunshine (Fox Searchlight, 7.26).
The lead graph of these pieces will be a rhetorical question — will those who loved Carell’s broadly funny shtick in The 40 Year-Old Virgin (and who can’t wait to see him in Get Smart) go for the mixed-bag, funny-dark humor in his latest film?

Steve Carell doing the old leaping-from-the-van action in Little Miss Sunshine

I’ve said a couple of times before that Carell’s performance in Little Miss Sunshine is his best ever. He’s ten times funnier in this than he was in Virgin. Funnier because he’s playing an ascerbic, very bright Marcel Proust scholar — one who feels quite real and fleshed-out. The laughs may be fewer in Sunshine, but when they happen they seem richer and more invested in something tangible.
Not that this will stop square-peg journalists and their editors from running “Carell is stepping out of the box” pieces. They know, after all, that a lot of people out there like their movie comedians to be funny in a broad and familiar way. These are the good folks who just say no when comedy stars turn up in quirky dark-current laughers, as Jim Carrey found out when he made The Cable Guy.
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It may be that even Christina Applegate, Carell’s Anchorman costar, is feeling a bit alienated by Little Miss Sunshine‘s in-and-out tonality. She addressed the crowd before it played last Sunday night at the LA Film Festival closer, and all she did was snip, snip, snip about how unusual it was and that it goes into dark places, blah, blah.
And then I spoke to a critic friend the next day and he was saying, “I dunno… Carell does a lot of moping in this thing…it may not go over.”
This was after he read my rave review, which I put up the following day (7.3). He also said, “I guess we saw different movies.”

I responded by saying, “You are once again holding down the fort on a small island with three cocoanut trees for sustenance, and a few kindred souls for company.”
And he said, “Well, I’m not sure what that means. Are you presuming that I think that anything that’s popular is bad, or that I like movies that only a `few kindred souls’ like and dislike all else, or that any movie that isn’t popular is bad?
“How do you know that Sunshine will be a hit? Have you done a measurement? I have absolutely no idea how many folks will like Sunshine, and neither does any- one else.
“What I mean is, you need to consider the possibility that it might tank when it opens.”
And I replied, “What this means is that when a film like Sunshine has actual recognizable humanity and doesn’t act like The 40 Year-Old Virgin but gets laughs and at the same time has the character and cojones to rapel down into the caves of darkness only to climb back out and be hah-hah funny again…that’s really unusual.
“You can’t just sit there and go ‘Gee, I don’t know….it didn’t work for me and people in general may hate it.’

As if this needs to be pointed out, a scene from The 40 Year-Old Virgin

“The basic theme of Little Miss Sunshine is that as fucked and miserable as families may feel in each other’s company, they’ll stand up and support each other when dealing with the outside world. That’s a basic truism — families all over the world are like this — and don’t take this the wrong way but you have to be made of silicon chips not to recgognize that.”
I had written earlier that “people went apeshit for Little Miss Sunshine at Sundance last January, and again last Sunday night.”
And this guy replied, “‘Apeshit’ is a wildly exaggerated term. I’ve seen ‘apeshit’ only a few times recently — maybe Me and You and Everyone We Know at Park City’s Raquet Club, and portions of the Palais audience for Babel or Volver. I shouldn’t have to tell you that the Sunshine audiences in Park City or at the Wadsworth last Sunday in no way provide sober gauges for how it’ll be received by real audiences.
“Do you really think that an auditorium full of people from Fox Searchlight, big Fox, and the Los Angeles Film Festival is going to be less than abuzz over that movie?” this guy continued. “I had the distinct impression that there were ‘laughers’ (those nefarious paid folks strategically placed near press during early screenings) seated behind us, and I recognized one outside after the screening.

“Fox Searchlight has has paid good money for bad before — this would hardly be the first time that’s happened, particularly a deal done at Sundance. It may, on the other hand, also do well on its investment. I don’t know, and neither do you and neither do they.”
And then I replied, “You’re speaking as if movies are dice and they may tumble around and come up seven, or they may come up snake-eyes.
“If people don’t like something when it plays in Wichita, then what can you or me or Fox Searchlight do about it? Nothing. But this film is not a pair of dice on a Vegas craps table. It’s a movie with a pulse — a kind of organism with a certain astuteness, a certain alchemy, and a very particular comic tone. (Why am I pointing this out to you? Why don’t you see this?)
“This movie is funny and yet full of raw family material. I’ve got kids, and some- times they do scream and rant and say how much they despise their parents. Seven year-old girls at the dinner table would want to know why their uncle tried to commit suicide, and a lot of them would find it fairly silly that he did so because a love affair with a student fell apart. And every other family has crusty old curmud- geons who tell their sons to fuck themselves and that they can say anything they want.

“And there are hospital bureaucrats who are unfeeling monsters. And there are wicked Orange County witches who live in that horrid Jon Benet Ramsay world. And there are positive-attitude assholes who constantly spout about always winning but who tend to exemplify the other side of the coin. Family members do fight all the time, and wives do attack their husbands as soon as they lose a source of income.
“A lot of it is horrible…despair, gloom, helplessness…and yet it all can turn on a dime and be funny the next minute. It’s a matter of the filmmakers recognizing life as it often feels and behaves and then putting it all together in a darkly ironic, half-comedic, very lifelike form.”
Then the guy said his wife didn’t much care for Sunshine, and that worried me.
“If you don’t like something or don’t think it will go with the general public…well, I can deal with that. But your wife scares me. Your wife and Applegate…a couple of wild cards.”