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.”