“If hard times are here again, maybe it’s time for Hollywood to once again stand up for the downtrodden.” — N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott in a video assessment of John Ford‘s The Grapes of Wrath (1940), one of the older big-studio films that I’ve sworn by all my life.
AICN’s Drew McWeeny recently sat down with Where The Wild Things Are director Spike Jonze. After reading most of the interview I still wasn’t sure what was mandated by Warner Bros. on the re-shoots after a reportedly disastrous December ’07 preview screening. How precisely will the final film differ from the 12.07 version? Spell it out for me like I’m eight years old.
Jonze initially shot the wild things in nine-foot suits with animatronic faces in the jungles of Australia and New Zealand with the idea of pasting on CG-faces in post. Then came the 12.07 screening and hoo-wee.
The movie is “dark, adult and deep — heart-wrenching and scary,” wrote Cinemaniac1979 on AICN. “This isn’t a movie for children — it’s a movie about childhood.”
WTWTA costars Catherine Keener, Forest Whitaker and Australian actor Angus Sampson. It was adapted by Jonze and Dave Eggers.
The current plan is to release it on 10.16.09. The film began shooting in April 2006 at Central City Studios in Melbourne, Australia. The cast includes Catherine Keener, Max Records, James Gandolfini, Angus Sampson, Forest Whitaker, Michelle Williams, Catherine O’Hara, Rachel Rivera, Melissa Davis and Paul Dano. Lauren Ambrose was cast to replace Williams as the voice of one of the monsters.
Producer Gary Goetzman was quoted earlier this year as saying, “We support Spike’s vision…we’re helping him make the vision he wants to make.”
Three new members — Elle magazine’s Karen Durbin, Slate‘s Dana Stevens and Salon‘s Stephanie Zacaharek — have joined the ranks of the New York Film Critics Circle. The group will hold its annual vote on Wednesday, 12.10. The NYFCC awards ceremony will happen at Strata in Manhattan on Monday, 1.5.09.
By a vote of 42 to 13, Senate Democrats have voted to allow the turncoat Sen. Joe Lieberman to retain his chairmanship of the powerful Homeland Security Committee. Of course, if Leiberman had done the same kind of thing to a mafia don that he did to Barack Obama at the Republican National Convention, we all know what would have happened. But then Obama, in forgiving and supporting Lieberman, has observed a legendary mafia rule — “Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.”
Page Six reported today that MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, during a train ride from Philadelphia to Washington, D.C., spoke passionately to a fellow passenger — “an avowed Clinton lover,” as it turns out — “about President-elect Barack Obama possibly picking Hillary Clinton as his secretary of state. And in so doing he blurted out what a lot of Clinton-haters are feeling deep down.
“I don’t understand it,” Matthews said. “Why would he pick her? I thought we were done with the Clintons. She’ll just use it to build her power base. It’s Machiavellian. And then we’ll have Bill Clinton, too. I thought Obama didn’t want drama. He’s already got [chief of staff Rahm] Emanuel and [transition team leader John] Podesta. He’ll have even more drama with her.
“She’s just a soap opera. If he doesn’t pick her, everyone will say she’s been dissed again, [and] we’ll have to live through that again.”
And yet she’s a tough player, she’s brilliant, and she is a camel with a tendency to do that occasional camel thing. And Obama-Lincoln isn’t looking for loyal lie-down types. And it will satisfy those 18 million Hillary supporters in a way that will pay off down the road.
New York’s “Vulture” guys posted a riff yesterday about actors who’ve recently talked about quitting (Joaquin Phoenix, Angelina Jolie) and others who’ve voiced sentiments along these lines. I understand occasional burnout moods, especially if you have the dough with which to experiment and discover new realms, but life is finally not about what makes you “happy.” It’s about fulfilling your potential to the utmost during your brief time on the planet — period.
In the words of Pt. Robert E. Lee Prewitt (i.e., Montgomery Clift) in From Here to Eternity, “A man should be what he can do.” If it makes you happy, great — but you must do that thing, however good or bad or satisfied or mellowed-out it makes you feel.
Vincent Van Gogh lived in a state of relative bummer-hood for much if not most of his life, but what if he’d decided to chuck painting in favor of a job as a waiter or a wheat farmer or sailor — i.e., some vocation that made him feel less agitated? What about Willem Dafoe‘s decision to come off the cross in The Last Temptation of Christ and get married, have children and have a normal-type life, and his horrifying realization at the finale that he’d betrayed his divine purpose on earth? I suffered greatly when I was trying to make it as a journalist in the early days, when I wasn’t very good at it. I wanted to quit, I wanted peace — the weight on my back was crushing, awful. And thank fortune I never gave in.
Screw “happy.” The hell with smelling the roses. (Although a life without occasional intervals of quiet spiritual contemplation would be a barren thing indeed.) The higher calling is all. Indeed, fulfilling that calling makes your whole life a field of roses, in a roundabout hard-road sense.
“The character in the first hour of Benjamin Button was created in post, basically, with Brad inspiring it,” says director Spike Jonze in an interview with AICN’s Drew McWeeny. “[David] Fincher totally invented his own technique, and it’s insane. I’m always a little skeptical whenever you hear there’s a CG character [in a film], but I never even noticed it. It’s just this totally compelling, really charming character, you know, because he’s like a little boy inside an old man’s body, and the performance is amazing.”
Baz Luhrmann‘s long-awaited and over-budget Australia manages, against the odds, to avoid turning into one big sunburnt stereotype about Godzone country,” writes the Times Online‘s Anne Barrowlcough. “Instead, in what turns out to be a multi-layered story, it describes an Australia of the 1940s that is at once compellingly beautiful and breathtakingly cruel.
“Described as a cross between Gone with the Wind and Out of Africa it bears, in fact, little resemblance to either movie – apart from a similarly spectacular landscape as Out of Africa and a plot line that loosely resembles that of Gone with the Wind.
“In this case, Lady Sarah Ashley, a passionless English aristocrat (Nicole Kidman), inherits a vast cattle station in the Northern Territories only to find that the station is the target of a dastardly takeover plot.
“Much against her will, she is forced to enlist the help of a local stockman known only as Drover (Hugh Jackman), to save the station by driving her huge herd of cattle hundreds of miles across the Kuraman desert to Darwin. Which is then bombed by the Japanese.
“In the worst Mills and Boon tradition, Lady Sarah – whose emotions are as frozen as Kidman’s forehead – and the rough neck Drover loathe each other on sight but, as they endure the harsh and rather dusty travails of the cattle drive they quite quickly fall in love. She even teaches him to dance. Under a boab tree.
“But if it sounds shallow and predictable, Australia is, in fact, anything but.
“The cliches are saved by little jokes and asides, as if Luhrmann is saying ‘Yes, I know, but what can you do?’
“But what gives the film its heart is something else entirely. This is also the story of Nullah (Brandon Walters), a mixed race Aboriginal boy left orphaned by the inhumanity of Australian law. The 1940s was the time of the Stolen Generation, when mixed race children were banned from living either with their Aboriginal families or within the white community, but were taken from their homes to be brought up in church missions.
“Nullah’s increasingly frantic attempts to escape from the ‘coppers’ and his symbiotic relationship with his grandfather, the mystical King George, played with awesome power by the renowned Aboriginal dancer and musician David Gulpilil, is treated with a stark honesty and is what actually makes this film truly Australian in both its best and its worst sense.
“Brandon, 13, was discovered by Lurhmann in his local swimming pool in the West Australian town of Broome and he plays Nullah with a combination of mischief and tragedy that may turn him into the real star of the film, despite – or perhaps because of – the fact that he has never acted before.”
Australia “is not without flaws, it’s not the masterpiece that we were hoping for, but I think you could say that it’s a very good film in many ways,” says The Australian‘s David Stratton, who’s obviously writing from a kind of Down Under home-team perspective.
“[But] while it will be very popular with many people I think there’s a slight air of disappointment after it all.
“Like his earlier films Strictly Ballroom, Romeo+Juliet and Moulin Rouge, Australia shows Baz Luhrmann as a very theatrical director. He has a great eye for compositions and the film is beautifully shot by Mandy Walker, but there’s theatricality about the film which is a bit off-putting at the beginning. The early scenes, even the first 20 minutes or so of the film, are handled in a slightly artificial, arch manner which doesn’t sit well with the outback locations and the natural settings of the story.
“It’s all very well to be artificial when you’re dealing with a theatrical concept like Moulin Rouge or even Strictly Ballroom, but it doesn’t really work so well when you’re doing the same sort of thing here, so there’s something that’s just a little bit off key about these scenes. Then once the cattle drive gets under way either you get used to it or that aspect of it is played down because the remainder of the film is much stronger in a rather conventional way.
“I have to say, there are a lot of cliches in the script, a lot of familiar elements from other films of the past — The Wizard of Oz and the song ‘Over the Rainbow’ are heavily referenced — and it’s as though the film is aimed at not so much an Australian audience but an international audience, and especially an American audience.
“I will say that the acting is of a very high level, especially given that some of the actors have been encouraged to perform in this rather stylized, theatrical way. Nicole Kidman does a very good job as she develops from this very stiff, awkward, naive Englishwoman to become a really warm character at the end of the film. And Hugh Jackman has tremendous charisma and charm.
“The supporting cast is particularly good. Jack Thomson as the alcoholic accountant for the property gives a lovely performance, Bryan Brown is a terrific as the cattle baron although his demise is extremely perfunctory, and David Wenham is another terrific villain, very charming and intense.
“In minor roles there are all sorts of interesting people including Ben Mendelssohn, Bill Hunter and Arthur Dignam. And then there’s little 12-year-old Brandon Walters, who plays the Aboriginal boy, who’s really very good indeed.
“Despite its flaws — and it certainly has flaws — I think Australia is an impressive and important film, and if I were to give it a star rating I would give it three and a half out of five.”
Special preview footage from JJ Abrams‘ Star Trek (Paramount, 5.8.09) was shown here tonight for fanboy press and exhibs. We were only shown four scenes, but what we saw was jaunty and full of spirit, handsomely and at times beautifully composed (images of massive, mall-like super-cities rising over the plains of futuristic Iowa were a highlight for me), boasting more than a few loose and nervy performances. My favorite was Zachary Qinto‘s Spock because of his natural Vulcan authority, but I’ve always been a sucker for high intellect.
Here‘s a riff on the showing by AICN’s Louqacious Muse.