Hell House

Anyone who tells you Ryan Murphy‘s Running with Scissors is funny — as in a film that makes you laugh, which is an activity regarded in most cultures as something positive and good for the soul — has a very, very twisted idea of what “funny” is. On the other hand, certain aspects of blue-state culture are turning more and more perverse as things move along and — who knows? — maybe the people who will laugh at or with this film will outnumber people like myself.

But I respect Running With Scissors, which is based on Augusten Burroughs‘ popular 2002 autobiography, for its unmitigated, unapologetic torture-chamber vibe. A film as difficult to sit through as this one is nothing if not bold. And there are some — New York Observer critic Andrew Sarris and Village Voice critic Rob Nelson — who think it’s quite funny so there’s no accounting for anything or anyone.
Urban culture has afforded a certain designation of respect for films like this. Scissors is basically an extreme permutation of grand guignol gay camp, and as such belongs in a tradition of archly mannered, darkly funny shockers like Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? and Mommie Dearest and that line of country. Diseased behavior, ultra-corroded personalities, hair-pulling, etc.
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Other reviewers have mentioned the drawings of Edward Gorey and Charles Adams as stylistic influences. I think Scissors is actually more of a cross between early John Waters and The Hills Have Eyes, only with an effete surburban milieu and self-destructive nutso behavior substituting for a trailer-trash backdrop and killings and mutilations.
You have to at least give Murphy some kind of cojones award for adapting a book as gnarly as Burroughs’ and being relatively forthright in translating it. Burroughs’ writing style is clean and well-ordered, but his life story is all about suffocation, madness, imprisonment, torture, abuse…c’mon.

And so viewers are put on a ride with young Augusten (Joseph Cross) suffering under an obsessively egoistic mom (Annette Bening) and alcoholic dad (Alec Baldwin) and then getting through their divorce, and eventually being sent to live with her oddball therapist, Dr. Finch (Brian Cox) and his emotionally curdled family — wife Agnes (Jill Clayburgh), daughters Natalie (Evan Rachel Wood) and Hope (Gwynneth Paltrow) — and an unshaven 30ish wackjob (Joseph Fiennes) with whom he has his first same-sex affair.
Murphy doesn’t shrink from the psychological boils and emotional leprosy that seep out of every character, every page. (I’ve read portions of the book since seeing the film.) He lets you have it with both barrels. And I respect the ballsiness of doing that and then turning around and saying, “Okay, now pay ten bucks to see this.” He walks the walk and does the thing. And if I were a fan of this kind of dark and diseased film, I could imagine being satisfied with it.
The only time I looked at the ceiling and counted to ten was during a toilet-bowl contemplation scene. Dr. Finch is convinced that the shape and/or flotation qual- ities of…I’m not going to describe this any further. Go to the movie and absorb it directly. I won’t be a go-between.
Will Bening be Oscar nominated for Best Actress? She certainly gives the part (and the audience) hell. Like Murphy, she doesn’t shrink from the material. But to what end? Oscar-nominated perfs tend to give pleasure on some level — recog- nizing some aspect of a friend or a parent or a mate in a performance, deriving some insight into why people act they way they do…something. Bening’s performance is totally blazing and balls-out, but it’s not the sort of thing that usually inspires affection or allegiance.

The actors are all pretty vivid and, in a sense, uniform. Clayburgh is just as memorable as Bening, but my God, the poor woman. I liked Cross the most because he’s the only sane and half-reasonable one. Oh, and I liked Baldwin’s character after he gets sober. Does this constitute a spoiler?
You could call Scissors a cautionary tale of sorts. You could say Murphy and Burroughs are saying if any aspects of our own lives resemble the madhouse depictions in the film, then we might want to take stock and make some changes, etc. But you could say that about The Sorrow and the Pity…about anything.
Running with Scissors is not funny, not entertaining, not touching…but I can honestly call it staggering. And never boring.
If you’re twisted enough, you might have a ball with it…great. But if you are a relatively healthy, untwisted sort, watching this movie is an exercise in claus- trophobic agony. But in a ballsy, non-trashy way. It’s like someone coming along and stabbing you in one of your nostrils with an electric toothbrush and then hitting the “on” button. Remember rolfing? Therapists sticking their fingers up their patients’ nose and patients feeling better for it? That’s kind of the idea here.

All Squonked Out

Life is hard all over, day after day, but every time I visit a film festival I’m reminded how especially hard it seems for documentary filmmakers. How so many of them go into deep debt to get their films made, and how most find that it takes three or four or five years to finish. And if they don’t manage to win awards at film festivals it’s that much harder to land a DVD distribution deal because awards are regarded as selling points.

There’s the personal satisfaction of making a film you’re happy wth, of course, plus the calling-card benefit that always helps when you’re starting your next film and looking to get the best people and/or cut the best deals. There’s the general heartwarm that comes from hearing positive reactions when your film plays before festival audiences (who tend to be generous) and all that, but for every Werner Herzog, Ken Burns or Michael Moore there are hundreds if not thousands of doc makers who reap almost no reward for their efforts, and who wouldn’t be able to stay in the game without superhuman tenacity.
Case in point: Peggy Sutton, a Manhattan-based script supervisor, and director of SQUONKumentary, a culture-clash doc about a group of Pittsburgh musicians who encounter some rough and tumble as they prepare their musical revue for a Broad- way venue. It’s an engaging, well-made piece — quirky, spirited — and I presume it’s been shown here and there since its completion sometime in late ’05. But I was nursing a feeling yesterday that Sutton might exemplify the thankless plight of the documentary filmmaker a bit more than others.
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I spoke to Sutton last night about what she went through to get it made, but it was a bit noisy and everyone was drinking. I called with more questions this morning, twice, but she didn’t call back. (Probably thought I was trying to hit on her.) She’s probably shown SQUONKumentary at this and that festival, but all I know for sure besides the fact that it played here yesterday morning is what the IMDB says, which is that it showed it at the AFM (American Film Market) in September ’05.
The Bend Film Festival showing happened Friday at 11 a.m. at the Regal Old Mill, in the southern part of town. A more opportune venue would have been the Tower theatre on Wall Street, and a better time would have been in the late afternoon or evening. Obviously the festival wouldn’t be showing SQUONKumentary if they weren’t fans, but they seem to be slightly bigger fans of the some of the other films.

I shouldn’t be saying anything before tonight’s awards ceremony, but I can repeat that the jurors for the Bend Film Festival awards (myself among them) met yesterday and that SQUONKumentary, naturally, was one of the docs we talked overand weighed. I can’t say anything more except the obvious, which is that the competition at any well-regarded festival (and Bend definitely qualifies) is always tough.
And I was thinking as I spoke to Sutton last night…it’s hard to say it just so, especially under constrictions. But I came away from the jury deliberations with a keener appreciation for what filmmakers go through.
The performers — SQUONKers — in Sutton’s film are formally known as the Squonk Opera company, from Pittsburgh.
Sutton got to know them when she was hired to film two performances during Squonk Opera’s seven-week engagement on Broadway in 2000. They want clips to use for TV reviews and for distribution to European theatre producers.
“I was struck by them as people and as artists,” Sutton told a Pittsburgh Tribune writer in November 2005. “Theirs is not a conventional show. There’s no narrative. It doesn’t have a book or an overarching story. They think of themselves as a band first, with six members. There are visual elements and audience participation in their shows.”
Sutton’s performance footage became the core of her documentary film.
“I started editing in January 2005, which shows you how long the evolution was. I’ve been told the average time for a documentary is five years. You’re condensing lives into a three-act struggle.”
Sutton told me last night that it cost about $100,000 (I think); the IMDB says it cost about $150,000. “Are you in debt,” I asked her. “No,” she said. Obviously there’s a story there, but like I said…

SQUONKumentary shot in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Pittsburgh. The idea of beginning work on a project in 2000 and not finishing it for another four or five years sounds like a mind-blower to me. How does filmmaker “keep it up” all those years? I would think you’d get sick of the subject after a couple of years, or certainly by the third year. But four or five? Gimme a break.
Sutton’s income as a script supervisor has given her a relatively comfortable life. She’s worked on mostly indie-level films — Tape, Pollock, Election, Lawn Dogs, Songcatcher, Chasing Amy — as well as Stuart Little 2, Ash Wednesday and Men in Black 2.

Just a couple of guys sitting in a restaurant, talking it out. It’s not just the acting in this scene (and the fact that the actors are so legendary-iconic), but the writing. The dialogue is straight, clean…entirely about fundamentals.

It wasn’t quite the same during a sit-down with the creator of this scene, Michael Mann, a couple of weeks ago at his office in West Los Angeles. The idea was to talk about the new Taschen book about Mann and his career — a luscious visual smorgasbord (the photos are choice in a very special off-center way) coupled with insightful, exceptionally well-sculpted analysis by F.X. Feeney . It turned out to be more of a casual chit-chat, although a fascinating one. 40, 45 minutes…the minutes just flew.

Mann just wanted to relax and talk, which meant no recording or taking pictures …cool. I didn’t take many notes as we went along; I asked about everything; there was no vein to it.

So to get myself rolling on a piece, I wrote Feeney and suggested we do an online q & a like we did before about his Roman Polanski book. So I wrote some ques- tions and he sent back the answers last night. But before I run it, consider this graph from Feeney’s first chapter:

“Over the course of the eight feature films he has directed since 1971, Michael Mann has shown himself, time and again, to be a rigorous, honest dramatist, a maker of solid worlds. So much so that in America, at least, he tends to be underrated. The most respectful of his critics define him (a bit too simply) as a realist. Certainly, Mann seeks authenticity above all…but perhaps the most accurate word for him is ‘ synthesist ‘…[an artist who] immerses himself thor- oughly, breaking the truth of a given topic down to its working parts, throwing away whatever rings false.”

I don’t just love Michael Mann’s films — I want to live in them. I want the clarity, the decisiveness, the certainty, the edge, the coolness…all of that stuff. A lot of people feel this way. Guys, mostly, but whatever. Here’s the back-and-forth…

JW: I notice Mann is actually listed as a co-author on the Taschen website.
FXF: That’s true, and fair to say. The book has three authors: I wrote the text; Paul Duncan (who also edits the entire filmmaker series for Taschen) chose the photos and directed the layouts; and Michael Mann was not only the book’s subject, he took an extremely active role in its production — providing Paul in-depth access to his archives, inviting me to witness him at work, indeed making time to sit with me for hours of in-depth interviews.
JW: How did you get that kind of cooperation from Mann? I remember you mentioning when we spoke at CineVegas that there had been a previous attempt at a Mann/Taschen book, which you were not part of.

FXF: I even mention it in the first chapter of the book, by way of dramatizing the high-pressure challenges in store for any critic who takes on a creative individual as exacting and enigmatic as Michael Mann. Beyond that, it’s not worth mentioning: Read the book! I have a strong take on Mann, which Taschen was willing to support. I had just completed the Polanski book in April 2004 when the Mann assignment came back into the open. Paul Duncan and I enjoy a good working relationship; I dove in. We were realistic and flexible. We figured that if my essay got rejected by Mann, then to hell with it…so much for a Taschen-Mann book.

But as it turned out, Mann was engaged by what I wrote. “Engaged” as opposed to flattered — near as I can tell, he’s immune to flattery; what he seems to crave instead is experience and information — and once engaged, he opened his doors to me. I spent much of the summer of Collateral (2004) in intensive conversation with him. My essay posed explicit and implicit questions he would either knock down or answer. As I hope is plain in the finished book, if there was a disagreement, we each stood our respective grounds — Michael getting the last word in most cases. I was more interested in what he had to say.
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JW: What were the so called “high pressure challenges for any critic” who takes on Mann?
FXF: Only one — but an important one. Too many well-meaning critics and fans describe Mann as “a subverter of genres,” as a kind of movie buff hell-bent on reinvigorating the crime film. In his own view, he is anything but. “Genre” is a word for which he has no personal use.

JW: If Mann doesn’t “subvert genres,” then why are Thief, Heat, Collateral and Miami Vice all superior examples of “the crime movie”?

FXF: Because Mann sees them as pictures drawn from life. As I say, he’s interested in first-hand experience. He comes out of a tough neighborhood in Chicago, has gotten to know cops and criminals, and is himself by nature what I call “a stealth non-conformist.” By that I mean, Mann has a very self-directed, fundamentally rebellious nature, yet paradoxically he is skilled at blending in. Small wonder his heroes and villains alike so often live under-cover; Mann respects that what is least dispensible about a person’s character is that which thrives in private — in secret, even.

When other directors of his generation (Francis Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas) were establishing their flamboyant personal styles and vivid reputations through their great films of the 1970s, Mann was playing it close to the vest, working in television, a place few self-respecting auteurs would deign to spend time in those wasteland days, developing his craft as a writer-director, above all mastering the business as a producer.

By the time he made his debut feature Thief (1981), he was already full grown as an artist — and Thief is one deeply realized work, down to its tiniest fibers. Somebody once asked Mann how he exerted such control over a film’s final cut so early in his career, and he replied: “Because I cut the checks.” Amen. Or, as Crockett marvels of an adversary, early in the new Miami Vice film: “Those are skill sets.”

JW: What would you say is the personal trait that stands out above all others with Mann?

FXF: His mantra is “get it right.” By that he means, get your facts right, insure that your aesthetic decisions in making a movie follow what is actual and logical in the world at large. Mann has a strong sensual streak — music is clearly a deep (if not his deepest) source of inspiration — and a high susceptibility to visual beauty, yet he never lets his appetites for these get the upper hand. Everything in his work is subordinated to concrete use, either in terms of what interests the characters, or those dynamics which reveal the deeper character of the world to the onlooker.

Here’s one vivid example from my encounters with him. He was leafing through my Polanski book — attentive, silent, un-judging — but when he closed it, asked me one question: “What did Polanski’s father do for a living?” Damn. I had to admit, I didn’t know — Mann had stumped the band on his first try. Yet this is such a simple question, and an important one, if you think about it — “how the world works” is best revealed by the specific work people do — and I had forgotten to ask it.

JW: What did Polanski’s father do for a living?

FXF: Polanski’s father was an artist in Paris, and when he returned to Krakow in the late 1930s, it was to take an office job at a factory owned by relatives. (Thanks for asking, Michael!)

JW: Like all big-name directors, Mann has a coterie of journalist and film-critic loyalists who think he’s one of the greatest and stand up for him time and again. I am one of these, frankly. I’ve sensed for a long time now — unquestionably since Heat — a profound respect for the guy, and a kind of corresponding allegiance.

FXF: My sense is that Mann characteristically makes movies that are critic-proof — he thinks and works everything through to such a degree that few can ever seriously quarrel with his intentions or his technique. Back in the 1980s a few reviewers tried to wisecrack him into a corner over the success of Miami Vice on TV, belittling him “a glossy stylist,” and so on. I was guilty of this myself, if memory serves — but over time, the films have held up so solidly to repeated viewing that we cutups in the peanut gallery have been obliged to acknowledge, at last and belatedly, that yes, here is a giant, ingenious body of work in progress.

JW: What was the turning point for you?

FXF: The Insider (1999). Of course, I’d admired Manhunter, Last of the Mohicans and Heat as individual films — but it was watching Mann penetrate the contemporary world of corporate authority, in which matters of life and death are decided over desks and behind closed doors, that the living totality and cumulative value of his filmography became unmistakable, and a source of abiding amazement. Others felt the same way, I know.

Since that time, Mann’s only difficulties with critics have arisen out of certain specific expectations that sometimes get raised, extraneous to the intrinsic quality of the films themselves.
For example, Ali (2001) — if you grew up feeling emotionally involved with the real Muhammed Ali, or were enchanted as most critics were by the late `90s documentary about him called When We Were Kings, then accepting Will Smith in the role, or revisiting scenes from the life of Malcolm X so vividly covered in Spike Lee’s Malcolm X, became a bit of a stumbling block — at least on a first viewing. (Also, the film opened two months after 9/11, when both the viewing public and the very practice of moviegoing were heavily depressed.) See Ali now on DVD, and its overriding virtues quietly but forcefully assert themselves — Will Smith’s performance being one of them; I think it’s the best thing he has ever done.

What’s more, you have a portrait of America in the 1960s and `70s that for my money is unsurpassed in terms of its authentic detail and atmosphere. Mann intelligently, skillfully reveals Ali as a leader on a par with Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Patrice Lamumba — a lesser filmmaker would have been content to celebrate his greatness as a boxer.

JW: How did Mann’s manner with you evolve as you got to know him?

FXF: No change. Steady, steady, steady. He knows who he is. Over time, anyone who works with him is privileged to glimpse a person of deep emotional sensitivity and compassionate awareness within the tough-guy fortress-of-solitude that is his workaday persona — he would not be able to create characters so deeply if this quality were not there — but at the same time, he is completely unsentimental. When he expresses a feeling, you trust it, even if it stings. There’s nothing willed or manipulative — no bullshit — about what he’s telling you.
JW: What do you think of The Keep…honestly? That film, to me, is the runt of the litter…almost the bizarre aberration that doesn’t belong in the family.
FXF: You ought to see it again, Jeff — as with all of Mann, it only gets better. Yet of all his films, The Keep is the only one where you sense Mann himself was unresolved about how to dramatize certain things. As I say in the book, he hadn’t yet found a way to use the audience’s imagination as an ally when dealing with monstrous evil — ergo, he shows “the monster.”

It’s interesting that one film later, in Manhunter, he successfully trusts that the Unseen is even more terrifying than what we do see. Hence, Mann removed the dragon tattoo that he originally intended to be an outward expression of torment on the skin of the serial killer, Francis Dollarhyde. “It would trivialize his struggle,” he told actor Tom Noonan. So we are forced to imagine the monstrosity inside Dollarhyde, and there it is. But The Keep is an honorable effort to achieve the same illumination.

JW: Is Mann his own singular invention, or does he stem from a tradition of distinctive realist directors?

FXF: He loves all the hardworking explorers — Kubrick, Pabst, George Stevens — but he is his own man, as an artist. Life influences him far more than other artists.
JW: The film that turned Mann on the most when he was young — the one that made him decide to be a filmmaker, was G.W. Pabst‘s Joyless Street. Which I’ve never seen. Have you?

FXF: No. And I guess this is like not knowing what Roman Polanski’s father did for a living. You’ve stumped the band, Jeff! But I’ve seen enough of Pabst’s other work (Pandora’s Box; Diary of a Lost Giorl; Threepenny Opera) to feel a lucid sense of what so excited Mann about Joyless Street at age 21 that he decided on the spot to become a filmmaker — Pabst is one who never imposes himself visibly on the story he is telling. He instead yields great power out of the characters, and his own observation of life.

JW: When Pacino asks DeNiro in Heat if he ever wanted “a regular-type life,” De Niro doesn’t say (as you relate in the book), “What is that, barbecues?” He says, “The fuck is that… barbecues and ball games?” And Pacino, almost smiling, waits a beat and a half and goes, “Yeah.”

FXF: I wasn’t quoting the line in its entirety; I was synopsizing, touching on specifics to make a larger point — and I only had 25,000 words. There are never enough!
JW: What film do you consider to be his best, and why? If you can’t name just one, try to at least give me a tie between two films.

FXF: My favorite is Last of the Mohicans — a stunning evocation of early America. Everything that is greatest about Mann — his sense of history, his love of women, his sensitivity to the intricacies of motive (even Magua the terrifying renegade has reasons for being so brutal; white men killed his wife and children); Mann’s total commitment to getting everything right, down to the least corset and chord of music. And then — selfishly — I love that period of American history. There simply haven’t been enough films about it.

Bring On Letters!

A couple of hours after Clint Eastwood‘s press conference last Saturday, I wrote that his latest film, Flags of Our Fathers (Dreamamount, 10.20), is a mature and very soulful meditation piece with its head and heart in the right humanistic place. It definitely is that…but I’m afraid this isn’t enough.

It’s not what it’s saying but how it says it that creates the problem for Flags of Our Fathers. It’s a fairly decent film and not a tank, but it’s not that satisfying because of a lack of strong story and strong characters, and because Paul Haggis‘s script is too diffuse and back-and-forthy.
Last April I wrote that Haggis’s script “is a sad, compassionate, sometimes horri- fically violent piece that’s essentially plotless and impressionistic and assembled like a kind of time-tripping poem — a script made from slices of memory and pieces of bodies and heartfelt hugs and salutes from family members and politicians back home, and delivered with a lot of back-and-forth cutting.
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“So it’s basically a montage thing that’s obviously more of an art film than a campfire tale, and that means that the sector that says ‘give us a good story and enough with the arty pretensions’ is going to be thinking ‘hmmmm’ as they leave the screening room.”
That seems to be what’s happening now among some who’ve seen Flags. But not among everyone. Three major voices — Emanuel Levy‘s and two guys who have yet to post their reviews — are fans, but I know of at least one major critic back east who’s feeling disappointed so let’s see how it all shakes out.
Some day down the line someone on YouTube is going to re-cut Flags of Our Fathers, take out the footage of Doc Bradley‘s grown son interviewing his dad’s war buddies in their 80s and all the narration, and then blend it with Letters From Iwo Jima, Eastwood’s forthcoming Japanese version of the same battle, into some- thing more linear and, I’m betting, truly hard and ferocious — a film that cuts back and forth between foes, revealing both sides and both cultures…and just lets the raw truth of that battle speak for itself.

Flags has many admirable things in it, but it doesn’t really make it as a unified entity. Leaving aside the son writing the book, it tells two not-very-strong stories — one about how the battle of Iwo Jima went for Doc Bradley (Ryan Phillipe) and his Marine buddies, and another about a fund-raising that tour that Bradley, Ira Hayes (Adam Beach) and Rene Gagnon (Jesse Bradford) were taken on after they and three others helped raise the U.S. flag atop Iwo Jima’s Mt. Surabachi — especially after a photo of this historic moment was published around the world.
The fighting scenes, no question, are more involving than the fund-raising tour scenes, and I know that the blending of these doesn’t build or gather much force as the film moves along. Eastwood’s unadorned style — his plainness and lack of pretension, just shoot it and move on — doesn’t work for him as well this time. Maybe if the story was more linear. Hard to say, easy to take shots.
I do know that the preparation-for-battle scenes feel bland and perfunctory, and so are the p.r.-tour-in America scenes. The battle scenes are the only real rock ‘n’ roll, but even these aren’t what anyone would necessarily call staggering. They’re very strong and intense, but they’re not legendary or mind-blowing because, frankly, they don’t put anything really new on the table. The ghost of Steven Spielberg‘s Saving Private Ryan haunts this film like Jacob Marley.

It seemed to me that the same points — all the top military p.r. guys care about are speeches and ceremonies and raising money, they don’t get what it was like over there, war is horrific — are made over and over. And except for the last five or ten minutes, which are okay but no great shakes, it stays on this same level all the way through. The narration (some of it read by Harve Presnell, who plays one of the elderly vets) that read nicely on the page — it was succinct and yet natural sounding — seems unnecessary and on-the-nose in the film. The movie isn’t saying “make of this what you will” — it’s spelling everything out.
Beach’s Hayes character is the only character with any poignance. He has a big weeping scene in a hotel room that feels more to me like a good try than a profound emotional touchstone. I felt Hayes’ pain, but I began to wonder after a while if he wasn’t just a weak sister who didn’t have a strong family upbringing and simply had a natural susceptibility (as some men do) for alcohol. It was distasteful and offensive and a dishonoring of the dead for the U.S. to launch that p.r. tour and take part in all that p.r. crap, yes, but was it really all that horrible? Bradley and Gagnon didn’t like it either, but they struggled through.
I think deep down that something told Clint he didn’t have as good a film as he thought he had in Flags of Our Fathers, and that’s where the idea of Red Sun, Black Sand — the film now called Letters From Iwo Jima — came from. Somewhere down in the core of his creative heart be knew he hadn’t quite captured the mother- lode with Flags, and a notion came to mind that there might be something better — something exotic and nervier, perhaps more poignant — in the story of the defending Japanese soldiers. These were young men who knew they probably wouldn’t leave that island alive, who had families waiting back home, who were just as terrified as the American soldiers, etc,

The Japanese movie is going to save the situation or not. It would be better, Oscar- wise, for it to be released this year instead of just Flags of Our Fathers on 10.20. It may or may not be the movie that turns the situation around, but I know this: Flags of Our Fathers doesn’t have a powerful right hook and doesn’t even box all that well, and even with the aura of this being Clint’s latest and all, I’m not sure its even going to wind up as a Best Picture nominee.
If it ends up with a nod, fine…but I really don’t think a Best Picture trophy is in the cards. Clint has proved over and over he’s a sublime filmmaker, but now and then even the best pitchers miss the strike zone.
There are obviously a lot of people in this town who reflexively half-bow their heads when Eastwood’s name comes up. I didn’t use to be one of these stone worship- pers, but I joined their ranks after Bridges of Madison County, I became a choirboy after Unforgiven, and I became a deacon after Million Dollar Baby. But Clint is not God, and not every single thing he touches turns to gold. Due respect, but this time I’m outside the church.
So let’s hear it from the other team. This year, I mean. Because right now the only thing that will save matters is a Hail Mary pass.

Queer Lady

Stephen Frears‘ The Queen (Miramax, 9.30) will open the New York Film Festival this Friday (9.29), but it’s also been shown at the Venice Film Festival. It would have been okay to write about it after that festival debut, but I’ve been holding back. I’ve decided to let go today because a guy called me a candy-ass the other night for doing so.

I don’t want to put The Queen down — it’s intelligent and restrained, and Helen Mirren gives us a fascinating Queen Elizabeth II — but there’s not a whole lot to it, really. It’s a tidy, occasionally intriguing drama about the push-and-tug between the Queen and Prime Minster Tony Blair (Michael Sheen ) in the wake of the death of Princess Diana in September 1997.
And all we’re left with at the finale is what we knew going in — that the Royals, seen by the British press as cold and unfeeling about the Diana tragedy, were reluctantly obliged to make a show of sharing in the nationwide grief. The movie simply shows us the day-by-day, inch-by-inch process by which this happened.
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After days of frosty disdain and indifference behind the gates of Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle, and yet with Blair delicately but persistently trying to awake the Royals and, as he allegedly expressed it himself, “save these people from themselves”, the emotional urgency of the situation gradually penetrated, and Queen Elizabeth responded with a couple of photo ops and a well-written but somewhat curt TV address.
I was unable to detect any current in this film that lifts it above the realm of a muted inside-the-palace parlor piece. Jolting, searing cinema it’s not. It feels a bit too much like its subject, almost as if the film was co-directed by Queen Elizabeth herself, and it feels a bit too miserly with historical details. And yet it unfolds in a tight, well-ordered, agreeably perfunctory way.
It modestly satisfies, in other words. I didn’t feel burned, just under-nourished, and I’ll be surprised if very many people come out of it with any major beefs.

Mirren seems to “get” Queen Elizabeth in a mildly intimate, as-deep-as-it-goes way. She’s very skilled at conveying that overly hemmed-in, elite-British mindset. But you’re still left with an impression at the end that this woman and her husband, Prince Phillip (James Cromwell) and the Queen Mother (Sylvia Sydney ) are very odd ducks — chilly elitist relics, totally cut off from the hurly burly, existing (“living” seems too intense and palpable a term) in a membrane of protocol.
The Windsor-Mountbattens are as close to the embodiment of “bloodless” as anyone could possibly imagine. By the standards most of us live by today, by the notion that you have to open up and give a little and show a little heart in life’s affairs, they’re all but mummified.
The Queen is not, to me, as satisfying in a passionate, striking and emotionally pronounced way as Mirren’s other Queen Elizabeth performance in that HBO film with Jeremy Irons (which she won an Emmy for). Her performance for Frears is necessarily restrained, dry and reserved, as befits the subject. Which makes for a bit of a problem.
Mirren’s Queen Elizabeth obviously isn’t the gusto type — everyone will get this, of course — but that still leaves us with a character who’s at once interesting and yet a kind of walking mannequin.
The story I would have liked to see would have had a little “live Diana” — maybe some flashbacks with an actress portraying her (Diana never appears in the film, and is only verbally referred to), with a fuller, tastier reenactment of her final night on the earth with Dodi al Fayed — and with sharper exchanges between the Queen and her son about the whole messy thing with Diana and Camilla Parker Bowles, and more telling details about the curiousness and remoteness of the life of the Windsor-Mountbattens.

Just as these people are museum pieces, so is the film to some extent. The fact is that it doesn’t have a lot of “English” — no real visual pizazz or seasoning. With such a bloodless lead character and such an understated story, you’d think Frears would have used some high style to compensate.
I would have preferred more of an exploration of the emotional unruliness and the deterioration of courtly dignity that Diana brought to the Buckingham Palace soap opera. And the appalling lack of good judgment in hooking up with a scumbag like Dodi Al Fayed.
The film reminds us that Queen Elizabeth harbored negative feelings towards Diana, and thought that she had done immense damage to the monarchy. I think she was more correct than incorrect, I feel, in her disdain for Diana’s lack of taste and judgment. And yet the film doesn’t fill us in at all about what happened with Diana, or why — no dirt. It is assumed that we’re fully up to snuff on her romantic dalliances and can render our own judgments. I think that’s a bit of a cop-out.
(I was asked to write a long file about Dodi al Fayed when I was working at People in ’97. After making calls and taking notes for three or four hours, I knew he was basically trash — a spoiled son of a rich man, a guy who didn’t pay his gardener bills. And yet Diana chose him to be her boyfriend. That told me a lot about her, sad to say. The truth is that she was not an especially bright woman.)

Frears seems to have shot what was on the page, it seems, and worked on getting the performances right, but he didn’t seem to have the budget or the time to be expressionistic in an angular, big-screen sense. The Queen feels television-y. This isn’t The Hit, Bloody Kids, The Grifters or High Fidelity. It’s not even up to the level of Mrs. Henderson Presents. It’s more in the realm of Prick Up Your Ears or The Snapper, that British-Irish TV film he did about the young girl having a baby.
Frears is a seasoned pro, but at what point does the fine art of shorthand, less-is- more storytelling — the notion that it’s always better to show a bit less than what viewers might want to see — become dramatically stultifying? The Queen skirts the edge of this.
The most emotionally moving moment is when a big antlered stag stops and peers at Queen Elizabeth as she’s waiting to be picked up after her jeep stalls in the middle of a river in Scotland. It’s the only time she really lets it out during the whole film. I felt much more from the Queen’s relationship with this animal than in her relationship with Blair or her son or her husband or her aide or her mother. Really.
Underneath the story of Blair managing to goad Queen Elizabeth into showing a bit of her emotional self (or at least pretending to do that), The Queen seems like a quietly persuasive argument for the abolishment of the Royals, which is why, I’m guessing, it’s struck some chords with the British. But I wonder how average Americans will respond, or if they’ll respond at all.

The question is, what is it that we, the audience, derive from learning that once, and only once, a famous woman of state who seems to be the most emotionally remote and rigidly-mannered public figure on the face of the globe let down her guard a wee bit and showed a bit of humanity and softened her rectitude… but only after days and days of people and newspaper headlines saying, “What is wrong with this woman? Where is her heart?”
Keeping it all inside with a stiff upper lip is not a recipe for emotional health. Most of us know that…except for Queen Elizabeth, it seems. Maybe she’s learned at the end of this drama that it’s better to let the heart show a bit more…fine. Good for her if she came to this place. But I wasn’t entirely sure at the end of the film that she had.
In her final scene with Blair, she seems to be mostly shaking her head a bit quizzically and saying “I don’t know what happened, frankly.” It confused her, threw her off balance. What, then, does Queen Elizabeth’s momentary softening have to do with the price of rice in our own lives? Not very much, if you ask me.
Incidentally: Frears uses some footage to suggest a brief coverage of the Paris car accident that took the life of Princess Diana and Dodi al Fayed, but no one “plays” these two. (Not in the print I saw, at least.) And yet below is a photo of Frears directing a couple sitting in the back seat on a black car — a couple that looks very much like Diana and Dodi — the blonde hairdo looks exactly like hers, and the guy seems to be of Middle Eastern descent. It suggests that Diana and Dodi were in fact cast, portrayed and filmed, and then Frears cut the footage.

Scorsese Wired

At long last and after weeks of conflicting buzz-hype, Warner Bros. finally had a screening last night of Martin Scorsese‘s The Departed (10.6), and what great Scorsese stuff it has. And what a relief! The fabled director of Mean Streets, Taxi Driver and Goodfellas is back on the contempo urban turf where he once belonged. Here, at long last, is a return to an old-school, brass-knuckles crime flick with piss and vinegar and style to burn. It may not be profound or symphonic, but it’s cause for real cheering.

Every piston in this film is well-oiled and chugs like a champ. The result is a package that’s violent as hell and smartly written (hats off to William Monahan‘s script, which is much more clearly written and easier to follow than Siu Fai Mak‘s 2002 Hong Kong thriller, which I got totally confused by when I saw it in Toronto four or five years ago), and is heavily pumped and beautifully scored (the sound- track is a well-chosen cavalcade of ’60s and ’70s tracks) and superbly acted by a live-wire, blue-chip cast.
And I mean especially by Leonardo DiCaprio, who hasn’t been this good since What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?. (I was going to say Titanic, but his work in that James Cameron film is so divorced from what he’s up to in The Departed that they shouldn’t be mentioned in the same breath.) I don’t want to get hung up on just DiCaprio here — this is a film that works because all the elements groove together just so, and Leo is only one of several — but it’s great to report that after two middling efforts (Gangs of New York and The Aviator) he and Scorsese have finally generated real electricity.
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The Departed doesn’t exactly throb with thematic weight. It’s just a feisty, crackling crime film — a double-switch, triple fake-out dazzler about lies and cover-ups and new lies to take the place of old lies, and about the psychic toll of being a two-faced informer and living in a whirlpool of anxiety and dread. And it’s DiCaprio, more than costars Matt Damon, Jack Nicholson, Alec Baldwin or Mark Wahlberg or anyone else, who exudes the vibe of a hunted, haunted animal — a guy so furious and frazzled and inwardly clenched that he can barely breathe.
Don’t even talk about Leo’s Amsterdam Vallon in Gangs of New York or Howard Hughes in The Aviator or Frank Abagnale in Catch Me If You Can . In fact, some- body ask those guys to please leave the room and wait for us in the car. We’ll be out later.

I’m not sure that what DiCaprio does in this film amounts to much in terms of reflecting or expressing some great current in the human condition — he’s just part of a very tricky and feisty concoction here — but in the annals of crime-movie performances he knocks it out of the park. And I hear he’s knocks it hard and fierce in Ed Zwick‘s Blood Diamond also, so maybe he’ll wind up in the derby.
There’s no question — none whatsoever — about The Departed being Scorsese’s best film since Goodfellas. Is it as good as Goodfellas? Well, no…but who cares? It’s tight and trim and exciting at every turn. It may not “say” or mean a whole lot, but at least it’s Scorsese back in the groove.
It’s going to make a fair amount of money. The strongest demos, obviously, are going to be older and younger males, and there may be some who will feel that the ending is a little too bitter and apocalyptic (think Taxi Driver squared), but the word-of-mouth will trump this. I stil don’t get why Warner Bros. publicity decided to hide this film from the Toronto crowd — it would have been the toast of the festival and then some — and or least let some of us see it along with the junketeers who caught it during the festival, but whatever.
The energy, punch and Boston street funk in The Departed is so “on” and plugged in that Scorsese’s last sixteen years of creative striving falls into sharper relief after seeing it. Since the unqualified triumph of Goodfellas in 1990 the poor guy has been a good shepherd wandering in a desert — grasping, floundering, trying like hell to make a great film about something other than wise guys jousting and finagling on streetcorners.

Obviously Scorsese has done moderately well with other types of films but contemporary urban crime is his home ground. I’m sorry to be blunt about this, but the difference in focus and pizazz between The Departed and Gangs of New York, The Aviator , the cufflinks movie with Daniel Day Lewis and Kundun is just too glaring not to remark upon.
In the final analysis The Departed is just a brutally tough popcorn movie, but even as such it’s way more effective than Bringing Out The Dead, and it’s a much more riveting entertainment that Cape Fear or The Color of Money, even. It’s not a realstic film — Monaghan’s dialogue is stylized and snappy in a David Mamet-on-steroids way — and everyone is acting with some kind of Boston accent, but it’s all of a piece. And when something is this assured and well-fused, a lack of depth and thematic resonance doesn’t feel like a big hassle.
The Departed may just be a portrait of Marty pulling out the stops and resorting to every trick in the book to make this crime story “play” in a way that will make guys like me respond — it may have been made from a place of total cynicism and I don’t care. All I know is that the sputtering engine is back in tune again, and that it’s a joyous thing to be enveloped by a fast and flavorful Scorsese film that’s loaded with Boston “English” and plotted tight as a drum.

I guess I have to recite a plot summary of some kind. The story is basically about two moles — a “bad guy” (Damon) infiltrating the ranks of the Massachucetts State Police, and a “good guy” (DiCaprio) infiltrating Nicholson’s South Boston crime gang. Two rats, two wolves in sheep’s clothing…and sooner or later it’ll all come out in the wash. The key man in the middle is the burly and boodthirsty Nicholson, who obviously knows about Damon but doesn’t know about DiCaprio. Two guys with the “Staties” — Wahlberg and Martin Sheen — know about DiCaprio but are clueless about Damon. Vera Farmiga is a sketchily-drawn psychologist who has affairs with both Damon and DiCaprio.
How good is Nicholson? Great in terms of his usual presence and assurance, but it’s basically Jack playing off his legend rather than inhabiting a sadistic monster created by Monaghan (and allegedly based on a real-life Boston crime figure.) He basically tries a lot of stuff, and some of it connects and some of it is funny but it’s basically “okay, good old Jack, we love him…next.”
Every actor kicks ass in this thing — there are no “meh” peformances. Farmiga, Wahlberg, Alec Baldwin, Sheen, Ray Winstone and Kevin Corrigan are all great. I got a feeling from the print I saw last night that a lot of saucy stuff was left on the cutting-room floor so here’s hoping for a heavily loaded DVD in early ’07.
I’ve run out of things to say and I have to get to a luncheon, but what a great thrill it is to see a real Scorsese film again. He’s a great jazzman and impresario who knows the urban goombah thing up and down. He’s obviously been trying to duck this syncrhonicity for years, but he can’t. Marty may feel a wee bit unhappy about this on some level, but his fan base won’t be. Nobody will, really.

Cheatin’ Hearts

Two movies about issues of trust, truth-telling and fidelity between loving couples played during the Toronto Film Festival, and the lessons of both — Tony Goldwyn’s The Last Kiss (which opened Friday) and Bob Goldwaith’s Sleeping Dogs Lie (Samuel Goldwyn, 9.29) — are pretty much the same but told from different gender perspectives.

They both say don’t lie to your partner about anything — lies are poison– but at the same time don’t tell them the absolute 100% truth, which can be worse than lying.
The Last Kiss is about 30 year-old architect Zach Braff freaking about girlfriend Jacinda Barrett suddenly being pregnant and deciding to go on a hot date with a pretty college sophomore he meets at a party (Rachel Bilson), and the very same night getting busted by Barrett when one of his good buddies fails to lie for him. Braff begs for forgiveness, telling Barrett that nothing happened (which is true) but she makes him leave their home anyway. Naturally, he goes right over to Bilson’s place and plays hide the python.
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The next day Barrett has begun to relent and is thinking about taking him back, but Braff has been given fatally bad advice by her dad (Tom Wilkinson), to wit: “Unless you’re completely honest with her, you’ll lose her.” So a little later on when Barrett says to Braff, “You really didn’t sleep with her?”, he spills the beans….and their relationship is all but toast. Hello? Total candor can be ruinous.
Sleeping Dogs Lie, directed and written by Goldwaith, is about another relationship ruptured by truth. Sweet, emotionally adjusted Amy (Melinda Page Hamilton) is persuaded by her nice-guy finance John (Bryce Johnson) to share every last little truth about her past. Encouraged, once again, by an idiotic parent (her mother) as well as a friend at work, both of whom urge complete honesty, she tells John her kinkiest sexual secret, which is that she once gave her dog a blowjob.

Does John take it like a man? Of course not. He freaks. He’s repelled. Lesson repeated: there are some things you should never share. Whole hog truth-telling is a recipe for disaster.
Obviously The Last Kiss has more to say about guys lying or not lying to their wives or girlfriends, and Sleeping Dogs Lie addresses just how honest women should be with their boyfriends or husbands.
From a guy’s POV, one of the worst things you can do to a girlfriend is to say, “I fucked somebody else.” Or to let her find this out if you did. Knowledge of infidelity hurts like a sword-stabbing. It breaks the other person’s heart and pretty much destroys whatever trust you had with them before. It’s a terrible thing to do to anyone you care for and respect.
I’m basically saying that the important thing is to never let your partner feel the pain of knowing what you’ve done if you’ve done it. If, I say. The important thing for a cheater (a one-timer or a serial) is to be an astonishingly good liar, and that means covering your tracks like a CIA agent in East Germany in the early ’60s, and making absolutely dead sure that she never finds out, even accidentally.

Cheating is obviously not a good thing for any relationship, but if you ever wade into those waters do so with the utmost caution and take it very, very seriously. That’s all I’m saying.
People are going to do what they’re going to do. Nobody’s perfect. Fidelity is the best policy but how many of us can say we’ve never sniffed around and maybe let something happen once or twice? Down cycles and odd episodes and tomcat compulsions come and go. I’m not advocating cheating, but if it happens — if — go there with the utmost consideration for your partner’s feelings, which means you need to keep them totally, totally in the dark.
Guys always tell their girlfriends or wives that their past relationships with other guys means nothing. They’re lying. They do mean something, and they will judge the shit out of you if you tell them too much. There is nothing to be gained by spilling every last detail about an ex-boyfriend, or boyfriends. You can only lose by doing so.

Everyone loves or at least greatly respects Tombstone, the 1993 cult western with Kurt Russell, Val Kilmer, Bill Paxton and Sam Elliott. And many of the more ardent fans have probably watched the Disney Home Video Director’s Cut DVD, which came out in January ’02. Now it turns out there’s an ironic element contained on that nearly five-year-old disc — ironic bordering on comedic, I’d say — by way of the commentary track by director George V. Cosmatos, who died in April 2005.

The Cosmatos rap will seem like a mild hoot to anyone reading this recent piece by Henry Cabot Beck in the October edition of True West magazine. That’s because it reveals/contends/proposes that the guy who ghost-directed Tombstone, who deserves the lion’s share of the credit for this much-loved western, and who certainly should have recorded the DVD commentary nearly five years ago is none other than Kurt Russell.
Cosmatos, no offense, was never anything but an amiable hack — a guy who did the shots, got the lighting right, etc. This is more or less acknowledged in the article by Russell, who swore to Cosmatos he would never tell the truth about their deal behind the making of Tombstone while he was alive.
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Boiled down, Russell tells Beck that (a) it was he, Russell, who went out and raised the production dough through biking pal Andy Vajna, (b) that after Tombstone‘s original director Kevin Jarre was canned Russell decided to “ghost” direct Tombstone by hiring Cosmatos to shoot it like he was told to and nothing beyond that.
It also explains (c) how Kevin Costner, who was working with Larry Kasdan on Wyatt Earp at the time, pulled strings all over town to keep Tombstone from getting a distribution deal with anyone with Disney, (d) how Vajna wanted Richard Gere to play moustachioed lawman Wyatt Earp and (e) how Jarre wanted Willem Dafoe to play Doc Holliday but was forced to accept Val Kilmer in the role — which turned out to be a good thing because Kilmer was exceptional.

Beck got the goods from Russell while speaking with him at a Beverly Hills Poseidon junket four or five months ago.
“I mentioned to him that I write for True West and suggested we talk about Tombstone sometime,” Beck relates, “and then Russell went straight into it, pulling the lid off the can of worms and giving me an extra 20 interview minutes of unheard skinny — how he put the project together, how he ghost-directed the picture, Costner’s involvement, Jarre’s firing, casting issues…really loaded with good material.
Beck thereafter sent two messages to Russell through CAA agent Rick Nicita “thanking [Russell], letting him know I intended using the stuff, and requesting follow-ups, but when I heard nothing back I ran with what I had, especially since none of it was off the record and because the 125th anniversary of the Gunfight at The OK Corral is coming at the end of October and all the scholars and academics and buffs are converging in Tombstone and this was hot poop.
“When CAA finally noticed I was running a story, they called Russell, literally one week before the True West issue hit the stands (8.28 or 8.29) and the next thing I knew I had Russell calling me from the set of Quentin Tarantino‘s “Death Proof” short (which is part of Grind House) in Austin. He wasn’t all that happy, although he did admit he would have likely done the same thing in my shoes. I had some copies sent and called his hotel but I’ve heard nothing — I’m guessing he’s steamed for several reasons.

“There are two stories here — the story of Tombstone, and the story of the story. Things I think are most fun are Russell admitting he directed the picture but promising he’d keep mum for Cosmatos, Costner’s hardball, and the Gere/Dafoe casting business.
“Pity, really, that Russell was kept in the dark and then got pissed, because I really wanted to follow up, and I still think there’s a book here.”

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 “heart” German films I’ve ever seen — the love story that beats at the center of it is tender and impassioned and ripely erotic — and yet this is also a very chilling and gripping film about political terror.
And yet it’s very much of an interior thing — quite emotional, and at times quite sad. But with a deeply touching “up” element at the finale.
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 thuggery, and yet one that delivers a metaphor that says even the worst of us can move towards openness and a lessening of hate. Ugliness needn’t rule.
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 unrealistic in an East German political sense, but I bought it and so did everyone else at last night’s 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.
Sony Classics is going to open Others in February to coincide with the Oscar nominations. It’s 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 (Koch) and his actress wife Christa-Maria Sieland (Gedeck, best known for her starring role in Mostly Martha).
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 share passions with, despite his constricted personality and shadowy ways.
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, but this is the first absolutely top-drawer 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 then a Volver party starting around 10:30 or 11 pm.

Nothin’s Jumpin’

I sat through one entire film — John Waters and Jeff Garlin‘s This Filthy World, a concert performance doc about Waters doing his act — and portions of three other films during my first six hours of the Toronto Film Festival, and none of them delivered much of a bolt or a jolt.
So things are off to an inauspicious start, but at least there’s that hot German film, The Lives of Others, that everyone was raving about at the close of last weekend’s Telluride Film Festival, showing at 9 pm this evening at the Elgin.
The three so-sos that I saw after the Waters-Garlin doc were Murali K. Thalluri‘s 2:37, Susanne Bier‘s After The Wedding and Rachid Bouchareb‘s Indigenes (i.e., Days of Glory)
For years the rap on Waters has been that he’s much better commentator-comedian than filmmaker. He’s a brilliant idea-and-insight man, but his movies, despite their irreverence and nerve, always feel a bit drab and one-dimensional. The big payoff of This Filthy World is that it’s nothing but Waters the gabbermouth, and that, for me, makes it funnier than A Dirty Shame or Serial Mom or Hairspray or even Pink Flamingoes.
TIFF programmer Noah Cowan‘s production notes are a hoot. “While This Filthy World might be described as an autobiographical stand-up comedy set by John Waters,” he begins, “its real purpose is to document a sardonic lesson in cinema’s decline and fall .” This falls under the heading of pretentious b.s. Well, not entirely, but what person writing or talking about film in any capacity isn’t discussing, in one way or the other, the cinema’s decline and fall, or at least the fact that 85% of the output sucks?
Water is just riffing here like I’ve seen him riff 17 or 18 times — amusingly, wittily — and he’s great at this. But let’s not try and pass him off as the new Voltaire.
Garlin (I Want Someone To Eat Cheese With) pretty much just shoots Waters from a centered mid-audience p.o.v. and that’s that. He keeps the camera in focus and doesn’t get too tricky and barely cuts between Waters and the audience too much. Cowan calls it “an uncluttered approach” — this guy’s a card.
2:37 is a kind of guessing-game movie about a suicide that happens in an Adelaide high school at 2:37 pm. Thalluri, who’s only 21 or thereabouts but directs like a much older pro, acquaints us with five or six (seven?) characters who may turn out to be the kid who’s killed himself. We’re supposed to care about this. I didn’t.
Every high-school kid suffers. A lot of them cope with profound depression of one kind of another — I sure did — but the ones who seriously entertain thoughts of suicide need to get over themselves and that’s that. I never even flirted with the idea, and nobody was sadder, angrier or felt more unloved and repressed and furious at everything than I was at age 15 or 16.
Life can be cold and brutal in high school, yes, but the idea of teenagers suffering profound soul-crushing angst is an overindulged mythology. Kids need to grim up and cut back on the substances and deal with it like Steve McQueen would have.
The influence you can’t ignore throughout 2:37 is Gus Van Sant‘s Elephant, which was also about a sudden tragedy in a high school with various characters either affected by it or contributing to it in some way. I much prefer the constant steadicam tracking and overall stylistic detachment of Van Sant’s film to Thalluri’s. I left 2:37 after a half-hour or so. An Australian exhibitor agreed with me later on that it’s very derivative and that my instinct to bail was entirely correct.
The emotional exposures and raw, dogma-ish acting and shooting styles and in Open Hearts and Brothers made me a huge fan of Bier. But I started to feel distanced from After the Wedding within a half-hour or so, and I bolted after about 45 or 50 minutes. It seemed to me that Anders Thomas Jensen‘s story — about some big primal changes happening to a wealthy Danish family — was forced and labored. It’s very well acted but too much of it feels contrived and histrionic.
The three principal performers — Mads Mikkelsen (who starred in Open Hearts), Sidse Babett Knudsen and Rolf Lassgard — are in excellent form throughout. I need to confess that there’s something about the haunted intensity in Mikkelsen’s high-cheekboned face that’s starting to bother me. Not a fair thing to lay on an actor’s natural mechanism, but there it is.
I guess I just felt that the main story points — it’s about a guy who runs an Indian orphanage finding out that he’s the father of a grown Danish daughter just as her stepfather, a bilionaire, is coping with a fatal disease and needs someone to step and take over, so to speak — were clumsily introduced and over-emphasized. Like Bier was so into achieving emotional fireworks that she allowed her zeal to get the best of her.
Indigenes, a World War II story about four North African guys who enlist in the French army but wind up dealing with a good amoutn of racial discrimination, is well-made and handomsely shot with some ultra-realistic battle scenes. But it’a rote and unexceptional piece, and is not that much different, believe it ot not, from Mark Robson‘s Home of the Brave, a 1949 film which dealt with racial discrimin- ation among U.S. troops during the same war.
It’s not a “bad” film — you get to know the characters, it moves along, it’s saying the right things about who we are and the necessity for dignity in every human life — but it feels too been-there, done-that.

Boring Saint

Variety‘s Phil Gallo starts out telling it straight and true about David Leaf and John Scheinfeld‘s The U.S. vs. John Lennon (Lionsgate, 9.15) in his Venice Film Festival review, but then he begins to equivocate and cottonball. As does the film itself.

Here are my three main arguments with the documentary, which Lionsgate will release on 9.15 after showings at the Telluride and Toronto film festivals, along with Gallo’s review:
(a) The doc does “persuasively chronicle an artist sticking to his guns through activism” as the U.S. government conspired to kick Lennon out of this country in the early ’70s as a way of getting back at him for using his celebrity to stir up sentiments against the U.S. military’s fighting of the Vietnam War. And Gallo is dead right in saying that “by getting Ono to cooperate and open the vaults, the storyline follows the Ono-approved bio that posits Lennon as saint, excising his dark periods and their years apart, which could have enhanced the portrait.”
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The Lennon portrayed in this film is indeed scrubbed clean and phony as a three-dollar bill, and there’s no doubt in my mind that Leaf decided on this portrait — Lennon as a kind-of St. Francis of the anti-war movement, a guy who did nothing but good things and spoke only of love and peace and stopping the killing — under the influence of his and Scheinfeld’s alliance with Lennon’s widow.
I call it the “Curse of Ono” — the more control she seems to have over any portrait of the late ex-Beatle, the more sugar-coated it turns out.
Like anyone else, Lennon was a mixed bag — part genius, part beautiful guy, part angry guy, part saint, part asshole, part man-of-courage, part prima donna, part gifted troubadour, part abusive drunk (during his 1974 “lost weekend” phase), part mystical seeker. But you only get the positive stuff from Leaf-Scheinfeld-Ono. And after an hour or so of the vigilant, heroic, positive-minded Lennon, you want to barf.

It’s almost like listening to a speech by Big Brother: “John Lennnon was God’s gift…better than most of us…learn from his story…praise the good things he did for this country…follow in his footsteps!”
There’s nothing more boring and infuriating, even, than a doc determined to sweeten and sanitize the truth. Anyone who knows anything about the real John Lennon, warts and all, will be shifting in their seat and going slowly mad.
(b) 40 Lennon songs — 37 from his solo career — “are used pointedly [and] out of chronological order and tied to the visuals thematically,” Gallo notes with some approval. He’s wrong to wink at this. The out-of-chronology thing is bad, but what really hurts are the painfully on-the-nose cues that intro the playing of each tune. Thematic links between what we’re seeing or hearing about Lennon on-screen and the songs that pop up a few seconds later are almost enough to turn a longtime Lennon fan off his music for life.
The idea in stuffing so many songs onto the soundtrack, of course, is to market a new double-album, which, of course, Ono and VH1 (which partly financed the pic) will profit from. I appreciate that there are many tens of thousands of GenXers, twenty-somethings and teenagers who barely know Lennon’s stuff and will be turned on to his music by this film, and that’s fine…but if you already know the songs and the drill, it’s truly awful to hear them re-played alongside a series of dreadfully clunky biographical observations.

(c) The film completely ignores the biggest irony that naturally goes with any look at Lennon’s life as an engaged, socially involved artist and agitator, and so does Gallo. I’m speaking of the apparent reason Lennon was killed by Mark David Chapman on 12.8.80, which had to do with Chapman, a psychotic nerd and homicidal asshole, deciding that Lennon had to pay the price for withdrawing from being the courageous and nervy “John Lennon” of legend and turning into a house-husband, abandoning his musical career, ceasing his political activism, etc.
In short, Leaf and Scheinfeld’s movie celebrates what a brave and commendable guy Lennon was when he got into a standoff with the government, but doesn’t even acknowledge that his abrupt withdrawal from this activity, from occupying his persona as Lennon-the-bold-and-outspoken, is what ended his life. They could have spoken to some friend or biographer who could have at least mentioned this (without giving Chapman’s motive any respect, I mean)…but the irony never surfaces. It isn’t even breathed upon.

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Year’s Best Trailer

Stop what you’re doing and click on this trailer for Todd Field‘s Little Children (New Line, 10.6). It’s probably the best trailer for a dramatic film I’ve seen this year, no shit. It really grabs you, and it’s almost all about the sound. No music, almost no talk, no story. All you hear is a wonderfully haunting, far-off train horn in the distance. And the whole piece just seeps right into your soul the second you start watching it.

The trailer tells you right off that Little Children is a smart, A-level drama about suburban infidelity with a kind of John Cheever-ish guilt-trip atmosphere. It tells you it’s about Kate Winslet and her little red-headed daughter (who actually looks like her…amazing), and an extra-marital affair she has with Patrick Wilson, and how Jennifer Connelly, playing Wilson’s wife, fits into the general discomfort.
Fields’ script is based on Tom Perrotta‘s novel of the same name, and there’s more to the story than an extra-marital affair, but for the purposes of the trailer and the “sell,” it works beautifully. And with the train-horn effect and all (I used to listen to that lonely sound every night when I was a kid living in a sedate New Jersey suburb called Westfield), it feels exciting. As in original, grabby, exciting.
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The idea for the trailer came from Field in a meeting in…actually, there’s some debate about that. Two sources say that the first creative sitdown happened in very late 2005, and another says it happened in March or early April of 2006. That’s a huge discrepancy, but whatever.
The main thing is that Field said early on that he didn’t want the Little Children trailer to have music, dialogue or story. The guy he told this to was Mark Woollen, 35 year-old owner of the Santa Monica-based Mark Woollen & Associates, an agency known for creating smart atypical trailers for hip movies like About Schmidt, Adaptation, I Heart Huckabees and The Royal Tenenbaums.
The other agency guy in the room during that first meeting was Woollen’s top editor, Chad Misner. The third principal party was New Line executive vp creative advertising Laura Carrillo, who had brought Wollen and Misner in.
“The train horn came from something that Chad found,” says Woollen. “And we had a piece cut together by January ’06, which was pretty mich the version you’re seeing now.” Another source says Woollen’s train-horn trailer was delivered closer to early April 2006. (Are these discrepancies amazing or what?)
“So we showed it to Todd and he was very turned on,” Woollen says. The other source says Woollen’s first cut wasn’t quite as train-horn pure as the final version. Field and Little Children editor Leo Trombetta actually cut together a trailer of their own around this time, and I’m told that a fair portion of the elements in their version made it to the finish line.

“And then we spent several months revising,” says Woollen. [The New Line people] wanted to see how it would play with music, which we worked on in June. The final version was locked only just recently.”
As it turned out, the final version does have a few quiet lines if dialogue, but they’re spoken in almost a whispering way. I especially like Kate Winslet’s line about how almost everyone she knows has “a hunger for alternatives and a refusal to accept a life of unhappiness.”
From Carillo’s point of view the trailer was basically a Field-and-Woollen show. “Mark really wrapped his brain around this [piece],” she says. “He began as a trailer editor and has grown this company on his own. He likes to be away from the whole Hollywood thing but tends to be a very collaborative partner with filmmakers.
“I also know that early on, Todd brought up the metaphor of trains connecting all these towns in America. I wrote this down as a note. As you’ll see in the movie., there are trains and train sounds in it. Todd shot lots and lots of trains, although a lot fewer made it into the final cut.”
The operative phrase here is a famous one: success has many fathers and failure is an orphan.

Woollen started his company in ’01. He’s been cutting trailers since he was 18. The first trailer he did that he was really proud of , he says, was one for Schindler’s List.
Mark Woollen and Associates also did the trailers for Crash, Brick, Syriana, March of the Penguins and Hard Candy.
Note: This piece was slightly re-written between the time it was posted early Friday evening and Saturday morning at 9:40 am, some 15 hours later.