The second half of Che, also known as Guerilla, just got out about a half-hour ago, and equally delighted although it’s a different kind of film — tighter, darker (naturally, given the story). But I’ve been arguing with some colleagues who don’t like either film at all, or don’t think it’s commercial. Glenn Kenny and Kim Voynar feel as I do, but Anne Thompson is on the other side of the Grand Canyon. Peter Howell is in the enemy camp also.

I know I predicted this based on a reading of Peter Buchman‘s script, but the first half of Steven Soderbergh‘s 268-minute Che Guevara epic is, for me, incandescent — a piece of full-on, you-are-there realism about the making of the Cuban revolution that I found utterly believable. Not just “take it to the bank” gripping, but levitational — for someone like myself it’s a kind of perfect dream movie. It’s also politically vibrant and searing — tells the “Che truth,” doesn’t mince words, doesn’t give you any “movie moments” (and God bless it for that).
It’s what I’d hoped for all along and more. The tale is the tale, and it’s told straight and true. Benicio del Toro‘s Guevara portrayal is, as expected, a flat-immersion that can’t be called a “performance” as much as…I don’t know, some kind of knock-down, ass-kick reviving of the dead. Being, not “acting.” I loved the lack of sentimentality in this thing, the electric sense that Soderbergh is providing a real semblance of what these two experiences — the successful Cuban revolution of ’57 and ’58, and the failed attempt to do the same in Boliva in ’67 — were actually like.
Oh, God…the second half is starting right now. The aspect ratio on the second film is 1.85 to 1, but the first film was in Scope 2.35 to 1.

The moral undercurrent in Nuri Bilge Ceylan‘s Three Monkeys — a quietly devastating Turkish family drama about guilt, adultery and lots of Biblical thunderclaps — is in every frame. It’s about people doing wrong things, one leading to another in a terrible chain, and trying to face or at least deal with the consequences but more often trying to lie and deny their way out of them. Good luck with that.

Hatice Aslan, Yavuz Bingol in Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Three Monkeys.

I was hooked from the get-go — gripped, fascinated. I was in a fairly excited state because I knew — I absolutely knew — I was seeing the first major film of the festival. Three Monkeys is about focus and clarity in every sense of those terms, but it was mainly, for me, about stunning performances — minimalist acting that never pushes and begins and ends in the eyes who are quietly hurting every step of the way.
It’s a very dark and austere film that unfolds at a purposeful but meditative (which absolutely doesn’t mean “slow”) pace, taking its time and saying to the audience, “Don’t worry, this is going somewhere…we’re not jerking around so pay attention to the steps.”
A 50ish politician named Servet (Ercan Kesal), fighting off sleep as he drives on a narrow country road, hits a man and kills him. Freaked, he drives off without calling anyone. The next day he convinces the quiet-mannered Eyup (Yavuz Bingol), his longtime driver who’s abut the same age, to confess to the crime and do the jail term, promising to give him a lot of money in addition to paying his salary to his wife Hacer (Hatice Aslan), and son Ismail (Ahmet Rifat Sungar) while he’s in stir.

Except Servet soon takes advantage of Eyup’s absence of having it off with Hacer in a what-the-fuck recreational sense. (He’s a politician, after all.) The plot thickens when Ismail, a morose downhead to begin with, learns of the affair and starts twitching with anger and grief and guilt, not knowing what to do or say. Then Eyup gets out of jail and immediately starts to sense the after-vibe. Then we realize that Hacer hasn’t indulged with the boss out of lust or boredom or to keep him sweet but because she’s obsessively in love with the creep. (Good God.) Then matters get even worse.
Every step of the way you’re reading the characters, absorbing what they’re feeling or looking for, guessing what they might do, feeling their vulnerability, pulling for them, wanting to see it all come out right or at least end in a way that won’t result in more pain or ruination.
Ceylan and his cinematographer Gokhan Tiryaki are into filling their frames with muted but luscious browns, grays, blacks (lots of black) and faded greens. The visuals are such a bath that Three Monkeys almost deserves a standing ovation for this alone. But it’s the unstinting sense of engagement with the moral cost of what’s being done and lied about and covered up that matters. It’s heavy material, all right, but it’s not a reach to call it the stuff of classic tragedy. The script (by Ceylan, Ebru Ceylan and Ercan Kesal) is right up Will Shakespeare’s alley.

Nuri Bilge Ceylan

And ohhh, that thunder! Four or five times it growls and rumbles like God’s angry symphony. Lightning, too, at the very end.
I think Three Monkeys is fundamentally a political film because it’s telling an eternal political truth, which is that people with money and power rarely pay for their wrong-doings — they simply arrange for someone down the food chain to take the rap. And then sometimes they fuck the rap-taker’s wife for good measure.
The (mostly) static camera work and powerful quietude of Three Monkeys reminded me every so often of Cristian Mungiu‘s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, which played here last year and won the Palme D’Or.
I’m not sure if Three Monkeys is a masterpiece — I’m still sifting it through — but I knew all along I was watching an exceptional, very powerful, high-end thing. It’s the kind of film that plays like gangbusters inside the Grand Palais but will barely be seen in commercial cinemas, and may even irritate the ADD crowd. It’s not going to do much business in the States, I’m guessing — some critics, I’m told, were saying they bored with it as they talked things through at the bottom of the steps outside the Salle Debussy — but it looks to me like a sure contender for the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme D’Or.

You absolutely have to put Hatice Aslan at the very top of the list of Best Actress winners here. I don’t care what comes along between now and Friday the 23rd — her performance is knockout stuff. Ditto Yavuz Bingol for Best Actor. I read somewhere that Ceylan, in the tradition of Robert Bresson, doesn’t use professional actors; I read somewhere else that he uses friends who are actors– just not famous ones. I’m sure someone will point out what an ignoramus I am for not knowing this stuff chapter and verse.
It’s obviously early to be talking Palme D’Or winners, but when a film has the Unmistakable Right Stuff, you know it right away. Moral fortitude, razor-sharp vision and stylistic sure-footedness of this calibre are impossible to ignore.
Originally a photographer, Ceylan seems to me like the Satyajit Ray of Turkey. His hallmarks, to quote from a recent Turkish Daily News article, are “a strong minimalist shooting style, themes of alienation and” — I didn’t know this until recently — “strong autobiographical elements.” The piece adds that Ceylan’s cinema “is not for those who view cinema as a form of entertainment, but for festival-followers who revere art-house filmmaking.”

Except — hello? – great art-house movies are something very close to entertainment. They take you out of yourself and into a realm that adds to your empathy and understanding of life’s infinite sadness. They turn you on with their mesmerizing style and condensed capturings of instantly recognizable human folly. When films of this sort really deliver they satisfy in ways that stay with you for decades. They add meat to your bones.

The concerns about wind and rain delaying the flight didn’t pan out. Air France #39 is pulling away from Dulles gate #42 as we speak. We be cool. Two wailing babies in my section. Isn’t it fair to put crying babies and their parents in the luggage area below the seats? I’m speaking as a father of two boys. I’ve been there. I used to be mortified when my kids disturbed others.

The Troma guys are claiming that weekend ticket sales for Poultrygeist, Night of The Chicken Dead tallied $12,000 for a single-screen showing at Manhattan’s Village East Theater. This is the highest per-screen haul of any film playing anywhere this weekend, they say. A press release says that Poultrygeist was called “a masterpiece!” by an Ain√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢t It Cool poster, and that CHUD’s Jason Pollock has called it “the best film Troma’s ever produced, without a doubt.√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√Ǭù
I’m mentioning this because the Troma people have never made anything I’ve wanted to see — ever — and in part because I wrote a treatment and half of a script in the mid ’80s called Killer Chickens. The word “half” in the last sentence is one reason why I’m a columnist and not a screenwriter.

We’ve all felt that peculiar irritation that kicks in when news of yet another “special collector’s edition” DVD of a classic film (single or double-disc…same difference) is announced. I say to myself “no, I won’t fall for it…screw those greedy DVD distributors trying to milk me for the second or third or fourth time.” Then I read that the new release will provide a “restored” and presumably improved transfer, and I’m hooked. Even if the transfer on a DVD of the film that I own looks perfectly fine. Because I’m a sucker for any upgrade.

Especially, I should add, if the film is in black and white. I’m a total fool for that luscious silvery sheen. My biggest orgasm in this regard is that Columbia/TriStar Home Video release of Anatomy of a Murder, which came out eight years ago.
Lionsgate’s new two-disc DVD release of High Noon has “what appears to be a reliable report, though unconfirmed, that it will include a new transfer of the film, restored by Paramount,” according to a posting on the Amazon page by DVD aficionado “Sanpete.” He writes that “lack of agreement between Paramount and Lionsgate prevented the earlier release of a restored transfer,” adding that “the current and older DVDs are only of average video and audio quality.”
I haven’t verified the new transfer assertion, but knowing deep down that I’ll probably spring for this disc when it comes out on 6.10 is a real bee in my bonnet. To my fairly sophisticated eyes, there’s nothing the least bit problematic about the version that I presently own, a “collector’s edition” mastered by Republic Home Video and issued in ’02. But I know myself and what’ll happen when I see this on the shelf. I’m a junkie without brakes or discipline.

Taking advantage of last weekend’s first-anywhere screenings of Sex and the City (New Line/HBO, 5.30) for junket press here in Manhattan, N.Y. Daily News feature writer Colin Bertram blew off the embargo and ran a spoiler-free valentine review in today’s edition.

I talked this morning to a journalist who saw it here also, and if you merge his reactions with Bertram’s I’m getting the sense that it’s not too bad. Lacking the constitution of a stand-alone movie, perhaps, but enjoyable enough on its own terms.
The dividing line (no surprise) is that fans of the HBO series are liking it more than non-fans. A quick read-through of Bertram’s piece tells you he’s definitely among the former. But if you read it twice and pick it apart line by line, he really doesn’t say very much.
He concedes that the film suffers from “initial awkwardness” but this “quickly disappears” as director-writer Michael Patrick King and his leading ladies — Sara Jessica Parker‘s Carrie Bradshaw, Kim Cattrall‘s Samantha Jones, Cynthia Nixon‘s Miranda Hobbes and Kristin Davis‘s Charlotte York Goldenblatt — “hit their stiletto-shod strides.”
“The four women turn in sensitive, solid performances,” he writes, although Parker and Nixon “shine particularly bright.” Shouldn’t that be “brightly”?
The real joy of SATC: The Movie “lies in the return of all those things that mass television syndication has stripped from the series in the intervening years,” Bertram declares. “The ‘Oh, my God, they did not just do that!’ moments, the nudity, the swearing, the unabashed love of human frailty and downright wackiness. Snappy, verbal sparring punctuates the laughs and more than a few shed-a-tear moments.”

My source’s comments were put more plainly. “No one dies…that rumor about Mr. Big or someone else dying in it is bunk,” he says. The movie “is basically the same as the show. It’s like four episodes squished into one thing. It kind of works if you liked the show, but I was never a real fan of it.” Women journalists at the junket “liked it,” he allows, “and…you know, people who like the show are pretty okay with the movie.”
I asked if there was any thematic deepening or movie-ish story tension or a sense of completeness — anything that makes it feel less like a continuation of the series and more like a sturdy enterprise with its own bones. My friend hesitated. “Uhmm…I don’t know,” he finally said. “It’s very up and down. It doesn’t really resolve things [in the way that strong films do]. There’s lots of funny material. It basically undoes a lot of stuff, and then puts it all back together. Clearly they had a lot of ideas and [the film shows] they could have gone back and done another season of the show.”
What about nudity? “There’s lots of that, but not from Sara Jessica Parker. Kim Cattrall and Cynthia Nixon do most of the nudity. Nixon has a Lust Caution moment.”
Fox 411’s Roger Freidman saw the film the night before last, and says in today’s column that “it’s going to be a very, very big hit. Women wept, cheered. It’s the Neiman Marcus catalog on steroids.”
“Is it really possible to revisit the past?,” Bertram begins, paraphrasing the movie’s voice-over. “And will old friends and situations still be as dear to our hearts? Thankfully, the answer to that Carrie-esque musing when applied to the big-screen version of Sex and the City is a resounding yes.”
In short, the Sex characters and that robust top-of-the-world vibe they carry around is still warming Bertram’s heart. Great…but what does that mean for the rest of us? What could it mean? The answer is provided between the lines, but the general drift I’m getting is that the film not particularly painful for non-invested types.

Iron Man did $37.9 million yesterday, and is on track to finish Sunday night with $93.9 million. (This presumably includes Thursday night’s business.) Made of Honor is projecting $15.5 million for the weekend, and Baby Mama will come in third with $10.3 million — off 41%, a not-great-but-decent hold. Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo will be fourth with $6.4 million. And Forgetting Sarah Marshall with come in fifth with $6.2 million.

Forbidden Kingdom will make almost $4 million. Nim’s Island will be seventh with $2.7 million. Prom Night will finish with $2.4 million, 21 will make $2 million even. 88 Minutes, the Al Pacino embarassment, will make $1.7 million, but it’ll also have a cume of $15.4 million by Sunday night. There are many superior indie films out there that would be delighted to make one third of that amount, all in.

I don’t know what this is about or what the shot is, but Ted Kotcheff‘s First Blood (’82) is going to have a special nationwide one-time-showing at dozens of first-rate theatres on Wednesday, May 15th. Following the film, the alternate “Rambo dies” ending will be shown plus an “exclusive, never-before-seen interview with Sylvester Stallone on First Blood, the new film and the iconic Rambo series,” etc.

In other words, people are being asked to pay theatre-ticket prices to see a great movie plus some extras that they can see just as easily on the First Blood special edition DVD. I personally love the idea of re-watching the best Rambo film ever in a tip-top theatre with a good crowd, but at the same time I’m scratching my head. I’m fanatical enough to pop for a ticket but who else will? Under 25s who saw the last Rambo (the one that came out last January) who’ve never seen the first one and can’t be bothered to rent it…right? Who else?

The totally expected deal for Guillermo del Toro to direct The Hobbit in two parts has been signed, sealed and delivered. It’ll be a New Line-MGM joint production that will eat up four years of Del Toro’s life. Obviously a good gig, obviously an excellent choice, and congratulations to a beautiful human being on a very fine score.

But if you ask me there’s a downside to this deal. It means that Del Toro, a truly gifted director with the power to be a 21st Century Luis Bunuel or better, won’t be making any adult-market, real-world-grappling, artistic-growth movies in the vein of Pan’s Labyrinth and The Devil’s Backbone for a long, lonnng time. He’ll be Hobbit-ing until at least 2012 and probably into 2013.
Del Toro’s will be moving to New Zealand for the next four years to work with Peter Jackson — arrghhh! — and his Wingnut and WETA production teams. The two films will be directed back to back, with the sequel which will deal with the 60-year period between The Hobbit and The Fellowship of the Ring, the first of the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

The marketing team for Speed Racer (Warner Bros. 5.9) is facing an ironic challenge. It’s basically “a kid’s movie,” as a critic friend recently confided, but the tracking, according to Fantasy Moguls’ Steve Mason, says the biggest interest levels so far are with the over-25 crowd who grew up on the animated versions in various media.

There is therefore “every reason for Warner Bros to be concerned” about the Wachowski Brothers latest, Mason writes. Total awareness is at 77%, but un-aided awareness is sitting at a mere 5% and definite interest is only at 29% — certainly an issue of concern. As Mason points out, even 20th Century Fox’s What Happens in Vegas, another 5.9 opener that feels to me like a whatever thing, is doing better on this score.
Kids never show up on tracking very strongly, of course, but Speed Racer is a very costly event picture that’s kicking off the summer season. It needs to generate a lot more interest among younger males over the next two weeks or the crestfall factor will be huge.
I for one am fascinated by the visual textures in this thing and therefore consider it a must-see, but I don’t count very much in the big scheme. The target audience is going to pay to see this thing or not based on the ads and trailers alone…or not.

The closer Barack Obama gets to the Democratic nomination, the uglier this thing is getting in racial terms. That Republican-funded North Carolina TV attack ad I saw today that tried to “Willie Horton” Obama was nothing sort of breathtaking. When was the last time in which the racial-attitude cards from the hunkered-down regions were laid more plainly on the kitchen table? The early to mid ’60s? As one MSNBC commentator said today, there are people out there who “made up their minds about [voting for an African-American candidate] back in 1957.”

Illustration by Tom Tomorrow

Is there any way to interpret Hillary Clinton‘s strategy but to say she’s clearly playing this situation (along with her ace-in-the-hole gender loyalty card) for all it’s worth? At the end of the day the ugly-duck reality is that Obama, who has to despise his opponent with every fibre of his being, may have no choice but to offer Clinton the Vice-Presidential spot. You don’t have to like or even respect someone to cut a deal with them. But would she take it?