Republican presidential candidate John McCain decided on a running mate early Thursday,” the AP’s Liz Sidoti reported a little while ago, “and one top prospect, Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, abruptly canceled numerous public appearances. Without explanation, Pawlenty called off an Associated Press interview at the last minute, as well as other media interviews in Denver, site of the Democratic National Convention. The Arizona senator will appear with his No. 2 at an Ohio rally on Friday.”
The David Fincher tribute aside (which will include a short reel of scenes from The Curious Case of Benjamin Button), does this year’s Telluride Film Festival contain the most underwhelming, least exciting slate of all time? A Telluride fest without at least one oh-wow Oscar derby contender than no one’s yet seen is a stiff, and this one, the 35th, seems to have earned this distinction.
I can feel the flatline mood already and I’m sitting at a desk in West Hollywood, hundreds and hundreds of miles from this beautiful, peak-shrouded hamlet in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains.
What do we have besides the Fincher tribute? Mike Leigh‘s well-made but also (for me and many others) infuriating Happy-Go-Lucky, four well-respected Cannes entries — Bent Hamer‘s O’Horten, Matteo Garrone‘s Gomorrah, Ari Folman‘s Waltz With Bashir and Steve McQueen‘s Hunger — plus Tim Disney‘s American Violet with Alfre Woodard and Paul Schrader‘s Adam Resurrected, which some people are afraid of due to concerns it may play like a cousin of Jerry Lewis‘s The Day The Clown Cried.
Variety‘s Michael Jones has reported that “with limited slots over four days, the fest didn’t invite Jonathan Demme‘s Rachel Getting Married or Clint Eastwood‘s Changeling.” Does that make any sense to anyone? The absence of Demme’s film is a head-scratcher as it would have fit right in with this crowd. (I’ve seen it.) Jones also reports that Sam Mendes‘ Revolutionary Road, John Patrick Shanley‘s Doubt, Gus Van Sant‘s Milk and Oliver Stone‘s W weren’t finished.
“Last year was one of the strongest for American film,” co-director Tom Luddy has told Jones. “But this year I didn’t get any calls from Warner Independent, Picturehouse, Vantage. They’re gone.” Luddy also thinks the writers strike could have played a role in delaying projects.
The sneaks may include Danny Boyle‘s Slumdog Millionaire and Marc Abraham‘s Flash of Genius, which will both play Toronto.
N.Y. Times guy Michael Cieply has written a kind of handicap piece about the various films showing at the Toronto Film Festival — what they’re offering or looking for, their commercial potentials, etc. But Times editors always softball such pieces — they’ll allow implications of what’s doing but no blurting it out. So let’s give Cieply’s article the old shake, rattle and roll.
Warner Bros. is “hoping” that Gavin O’Connor‘s Pride and Glory — a first-rate, fiercely acted drama about a conflicted cop family — “will generate excitement for a much-delayed Oct. 24 release.” Cieply doesn’t mention that less than three weeks ago WB honcho Alan Horn was also hoping to sell Pride and Glory, or was, at least, “open to offers.”
As I wrote yesterday, the people behind Steven Soderbergh‘s two-part Che have until today done an excellent job of convincing Toronto-covering journalists that they’ve all but thrown in the p.r. towel. I learned this morning that Canadian publicists GAT + M.LINK will be handing duties for the film in Toronto, so good for that. Cieply has written that “the producers of Che are finalizing a deal for United States distribution, their spokeswoman said.” Aaah, but this year? And if so, in time for the Oscar derby?
Charlie Kaufman‘s Synecdoche, New York didn’t find a distributor in Cannes because — get real — buyers knew ticket-buyers would run in the opposite direction of a movie whose title they can’t pronounce. At best, it’s an uphill commercial prospect. And yet it’s a high-end, smart-person’s drama that has some truly transcendent aspects (including a great sermon about the spiritual deflation of dealing with the 21st Century human condition).
Neil Burger‘s The Lucky Ones, about a trio of Iraq veterans on a bittersweet cross-country journey, is looking for festival support to build up interest in a 9.26 release by Lionsgate and Roadside Attractions. It’s a fine little road film (decent story, well acted) but even Burger wouldn’t claim that it’s trying to tap into serious groundwater or unleash ultra-passionate or disruptive currents in the American psyche. It’ll gather some positive reviews, but indie flicks of this sort — let’s face it — don’t tend to get a super-size bounce when they show at festivals. But it’s better to play at Toronto than not.
Darren Aronofsky‘s The Wrestler, currently without a distributor, and Jonathan Demme‘s Rachel Getting Married, a Sony Pictures Classics release, are described by Ciepley as “works by directors in peak form.” No comment yet on the Demme, which I’ve seen and agreed to not write about until next week, but I wrote before that I’m not looking forward to looking at Mickey Rourke‘s plastic-surgery-mangled face for 110 minutes or whatever in the Aronofsky.
Cieply notes “the kind of big studio releases — Michael Clayton, Walk the Line, Ray, etc. — that in the past used Toronto to start Oscar campaigns “are “in relatively short supply” this year.
And yet there are two films that “may fit the mold”in this respect, he writes — Marc Abraham‘s Flash of Genius, with Gregg Kinnear as a Tucker-like the inventor of the windshield wiper, and Spike Lee‘s Miracle at St. Anna, about a group of black soldiers in Italy during World War II. No offense, but I’m not detecting any “gotta see this” heat from these two at all. Which doesn’t mean things can’t change next week.
Joel and Ethan Coen‘s Burn After Reading got panned yesterday in Venice and is looking at a murky or at least uncertain Toronto reception as a result. The upside is that it has nowhere to go but up.
I have an issue with Fox Searchlight’s The Secret Life of Bees sight unseen due to the presence of Queen Latifah in a lead role. I made a blanket declaration last year about steering clear of all Queen Latifah movies for life unless something miraculous happens. Of course (and this is what I love about movies), that’s always a possibility..
“The divisions of the major studios who have released ‘art-house-type product’ have poisoned the market by spending so much money to advertise those movies,” indie producer Ira Deutchman has told Cincinatti City Beat‘s Jason Gargano. “It’s become impossible for people with smaller movies to compete, and that’s just thrown the whole market out of whack.
But — get this — the demise of the dependents may be a half-good thing, Deutchman feels.
“One of the things, frankly, that makes me slightly optimistic is that the studios seem to be retrenching a little bit right now. The fact that Picturehouse and Warner Independent have been put out of their misery and the fact that Paramount Vantage has been folded into Paramount, if it reduces the amount of companies that are actually spending that kind of money, it might actually reopen the market a little bit.”
A guy who’s been sub-contracted to finesse issues with Movable Type 4.0 (and with Typekey, blah-blah, whatever) is tied up with other stuff and can’t attend to repairing the problem we’re now experiencing with reader comments until later in the day. Or maybe not until this evening. He might want to catch a movie after work and then pick up some groceries. So whatever I write today, there’s going to be lots of “0 Comments” until the problem is fixed. One question: How did “Richardson” manage to post two replies this morning in response to “Rollover”?
Hollywood Elsewhere has switched servers — happened last night — and of course the usual uh-ohs and “oh, wow…we didn’t think of that” stuff is now being dealt with. Like enabling the new Movable Type 4.0-whatever software to post reader comments. Once again quoting Mickey Rourke‘s felon character in Body Heat as he tells William Hurt not to commit a capital crime: “There are fifty ways you can screw up, counsellor, and if you can think of 35 of them you’re a genius.”
Jay Leno asked John McCain the other night about how many houses he owns, and McCain — boldly, absurdly — went into the prison-cell routine again. Let the word go forth from this time and place to friend and foe alike that McCain’s Hanoi Hilton answers are hereby over, invalid, spent. McCain’s honorable history hasn’t been used up — it’s been vandalized.
Two days ago Times Online guy Matthew Syed posted the most unusual and amusing article I’ve read anywhere about the Beijing Olympics, called “Sex and the Olympic City.” It’s actually a kind of a history piece — an acknowledgement of the “furnace of sexual energy” that Olympic athletes have revelled in for decades, and perhaps (who knows?) centuries.
“Why do sportsmen and women have such explosive libidos?,” he asks. “I am not implying, for one moment, that every athlete in Beijing is at it. Just that 99 per cent of them are.” Would the TV guys ever touch this subject with a 20-foot pole? Would MSNBC’s bubbly right-wing Olympics anchorperson Tamron Hall even joke about it?
“It is worth noting an intriguing dichotomy between the sexes in respect of all this coupling,” Syed writes. “The chaps who win gold medals — even those as geeky as Michael Phelps — are the principal objects of desire for many female athletes. There is something about sporting success that makes a certain type of woman go crazy — smiling, flirting and sometimes even grabbing at the chaps who have done the business in the pool or on the track. An Olympic gold medal is not merely a route to fame and fortune; it is also a surefire ticket to writhe.”
It’s a little bit of a deflater when you go to a film that’s been buzzed up, or which you’ve been buzzing up in your head, and then it turns out to be, like, less than that. I had two such experiences yesterday. What happens is that in order to work through your reactions you wind up calling everyone you know who’s seen them and bat it around. That eats up an hour or two, easy. Especially when you’ve got two films to discuss.
I’ve learned from experience to tap something out right away or you’ll forget where you put the fuel. One easy way to get rolling is to bounce of someone else’s reaction, and one thing I heard this morning is that a certain earlybird fellow suspects that one of the films I saw yesterday may be a “near masterpiece.” Yeegodz.
Early yesterday afternoon I sat down with Jordi Molla, a bearded, blue-eyed, remarkably serene Spanish actor who plays a Bolivian commander in Steven Soderbergh‘s Che. No one in Soderbergh’s four-hour-plus epic has any real “movie moments” — it’s a movie about being there and hanging with Che Guevara during the two most vivid dramatic chapters in his life — but he’s basically a bad guy who has a lot of Guevara’s men shot.
Molla still hasn’t seen Che, and won’t see until it premieres in Spain. Molla was shooting a film in Cannes during the festival and therefore could have seen Che when it showed at the Grand Palais, but the shooting days were long and demanding and he likes to get a good eight hours sleep when he’s working.
There was immediate comfort for me because of Molla’s European attitude — settled, moderate energy, not eager to project positiveness or buoyancy like most actors (but at the same time not sour or downish), okay with the flow of the tide, low-key, que sera sera. Due to his attitude or whatever, the L.A. vibe around us seemed to recede on some level, and I began to feel if I was sitting in an outdoor cafe in downtown Barcelona.
Molla was initially cast by Terence Malick four years ago to be in his Che film, which Malick had been looking to shoot for years although it eventually became Soderbergh’s after Malick fell out. Molla has been in tons of Spanish-produced films (including one for Pedro Almodovar) but his big appearances stateside have been in Blow, The Alamo and Elizabeth: The Golden Age. He’s been in the game since he costarred 16 years ago with Javier Bardem in Jamon Jamon.
I said something about having visited Cadaques, Spain, which isn’t too far from Barcelona, where he first studied acting. I think he said he’d visited there as a youth. If he didn’t say that then whatever, but Cadaques is a great little town either way.
Molla paints well enough to have had his work exhibited at Sotheby’s Gallery, Madrid (’07) and Galeria Carmen de la Guerra in Madrid. Molla has also directed two short films (Walter Peralta and No me importaria irme contigo) and written two books (Las primeras veces and Agua estancada).
So much for my dream that Oliver Stone‘s W, Jim Sheridan‘s Brothers, Gerald McMorrow‘s Franklyn and Beeban Kidron‘s Hippie Hippie Shake might play the 2008 Toronto Film Festival.
None of ’em made this morning’s final list which means the first two weren’t submitted and that issues of one sort or another are afflicting the second two, since both are expected to open in England later this year. I don’t mind saying I’m damn disappointed.
Especially about the W no-show. The 10.17 opening, just over a month after the close of TIFF, would make the festival an ideal launch site by giving the film its first big blast of attention. But it only wrapped in July so this morning’s absence presumably means it’s not quite in “ship-ship-shape!,” as Tony Curtis‘s Jerry once said in Some Like It Hot.
The seven new world premiere galas include Joel and Ethan Coen‘s Burn After Reading (the script tells you it’s a can’t-miss comedy in a dry slapstick vein), Rod Lurie‘s Nothing But The Truth (which I reviewed last night); Gavin O’Connor‘s Pride and Glory, the top-tier crime drama with Ed Norton and Colin Farrell that WB honcho Alan Horn is reportedly willing to dump for the right price; and Neil Burger‘s The Lucky Ones, a stateside Iraq War vet drama costarring Rachel McAdams, Tim Robbins and Michael Pena that Lionsgate has delayed the release of over concerns about the failure of other Iraq War dramas.
Rear-guard galas will include Dean Spanley starring Peter O’Toole; Jodie Markell‘s The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond, from a rediscovered Tennessee Williams screenplay (title sounds way too precious); Caroline Link’s A Year Ago in Winter, Jerry Zaks’ Who Do You Love with Alessandro Nivola; Anne Fontaine‘s La Fille de Monaco, Jean Francois Richet‘s Public Enemy No. 1 with Vincent Cassel as legendary gangster Jacques Mesrine, and Singh Is Kinng, a romantic comedy (forget it!) from director Anees Bazmee.
The Masters program will show Paul Schrader‘s Adam Resurrected, about a charismatic patient in a mental institution for Holocaust survivors with Jeff Goldblum and Willem Dafoe. (Does anyone expect Schrader to even hit a strong double these days? I wish it weren’t true, but with each succeeding effort the Schrader balloon seems to leak more and more air.) The festival will also preem Werner Schroeter‘s Nuit de chien.
What fresh insights, I’m asking myself, can possibly come from Adria Petty‘s Paris, Not France, an “examination of the Paris Hilton phenomenon” that’s “modeled after 1960s pic Darling“? Does the latter statement mean it was shot in black and white? Or that it reveals the presence in Hilton’s life of an older British lover who resembles Dirk Bogarde?
Special Presentations includes the work-in-progress omnibus New York, I Love You, composed of 12 shorts directed by Brett Ratner, Allen Hughes, Shekhar Kapur, Joshua Marston, Mira Nair, Fatih Akin, Scarlett Johansson, Ivan Attal, Natalie Portman, Shunji Iawi, Jiang Wen and Andrei Zvyagintsev.
25 titles were added to the Contemporary World cinema lineup, including Nigel Cole‘s$5 a Day with Christopher Walken, John Stockwell‘s Middle of Nowhere with Susan Sarandon and Anton Yelchin; Ole Christian Madsen‘s Flame & Citron (a sort-of Dogma movie, apparently) and Olivier Assayas‘ L’Heure d’ete.
