wired

I decided last week that no matter how celebrated or shot at Leonardo DiCaprio‘s Blood Diamond performance turns out to be, he’s still a dead-serious, kick-the-door-down Best Actor contender for his work in The Departed…no question. His undercover state cop is so fierce and frazzled and emotionally strung out that it just clobbers any resistance you might have to the notion of an award-worthy performance coming out of a straight-ahead crime film.

Forget whatever depth or resonance his character appears to have upon the pages of William Monahan ‘s script. DiCaprio adds layer upon layer of frazzled, hard-pavement emotionalism — uncertainty, anxiety, despair, loneliness…a haunted, kicking-around, terrified mutt-dog quality. He’s a guy who can’t be comforted or loved — one of the most permanently-alone characters I’ve ever considered in my life as an incorrigible movie hound. Like I wrote in my first reac- tion piece, it’s the best performance he’s given since Gilbert Grape . And that’s not saying enough.
I slipped into a 7:40 pm Departed showing at the Grove last Sunday. The sign above the ticket-selling kiosk said the sucker was sold out, but there were some seats in the front (there always are), and you could just feel the full-tank-of-gas feeling in the room as the end credits unspooled. And two days later along came this Scott Bowles USA Today story remindng everyone that The Departed is continuing to kick box-office ass (taking the #2 slot and beating Flags of Our Fathers last weekend) and rack up cred as a Best Picture contender.
When the idea of it being being Best Picture material was first being being floated, I said it was like The French Connection , which didn’t have anything profoundly thematic either but was celebrated for its raw, gritty-ass, only-in-New-York abrasions. The Departed doesn’t deal the same kind of cards, but is being celebrated for its tight and tasty Scorsese-ness, the ferocious story energy, the killer acting and cutting. But the award-worthy precedent-paradigm is The French Connection nonetheless, and I don’t think I have to argue this point any more — it’s obviously taken off on its own.

I had a moment’s hesitation this morning in trying to remember that smart Noah Baumbach film that the likable Jessie Eisenberg costarred in. The whale, the shark, the squid, the porpoise, the flounder. It’s not Mozart and the Whale, I told myself — that’s the Josh Hartnett/Radha Mitchell movie about lovers with Asperger’s Syndrome. It’s The Shark and…it wouldn’t come but I knew it was about two aquatic life forms, and one of them was definitely a whale.

It came to me 10 or 12 seconds later, but in the meantime I was reminded that Mozart and the Whale will be out on DVD on December 12th via Sony Home Video. I wrote a half-rave about it eight or nine months ago after catching it at the Santa Barbara Film Festival.
I found out later there was an even better version, or at least one that Hartnett and Mitchell preferred, but it was scuttled when the film’s executive produer Avi Lerner had it re-edited, which is why Hartnett refused to support the film when it played in Santa Barbara.
The version I saw “is a Rain Man-type love story with a jumpy heart, ” I commented. “Jumpy as in child-like, energetic, anxious. A romanticized, tidied-up version of a complicated real-life love story, it’s about a youngish couple with autism, or more particularly Asperger’s Syndrome. And this, viewing-wise, is nervy and provocative in more ways than one.
“It’s not calming or swoony like other love stories because the lovers are always in a fairly hyper and unsettled state, which feels a bit challenging, but it seems real and fairly honest and is obviously on a wavelength all its own. At first you’re thinking it needs a regular-guy character (like Tom Cruise’s selfish prick in Rain Man) to provide stability and perspective, but then you get used to the manic energy of it.
“And then you start enjoying more and more the vigorous cutting and the funky European-style tone (Norway’s Petter Naess directed), and particularly Hartnett and Mitchell’s performances, which feel wired and fresh and unlike anything I’ve ever gotten, tonally, from a love story before.
“For what it’s worth, a woman [following the SBIFF screening] said she has an autistic child stood up and that Hartnett’s performance is authentic and spot-on. And people from Europe who are claiming to be autistic (or are close to autistic people) who’ve seen the DVD are saying the same thing in online chat rooms.
“Written by Rain Man screenwriter Ron Bass, Mozart and the Whale is nothing if not alive to the moment. It’s a little twee at times and vigorously paced, but it’s not a comedy, despite what you might have read elsewhere. Call it amped or cranked up but it feels more original than not.
“It’s a spirited tale about two childlike souls, Donald and Isabelle, dealing with the peaks and valleys of a turbulent love affair, but also trying to seriously build a life together.
“Donald (Hartnett) is a kindly eager-beaver who keeps birds in his stinky cluttered apartment and, like Dustin Hoffman’s Raymond, has a genius-like ability with numbers. He works as a taxi driver but is also an organizer of an autistic support group. He copes well but doesn’t adapt well to change. Isabelle (Mitchell) is also austistic but bohemian. Her life-coping skills are more refined than Donald’s and she’s more goal-oriented, but in a way she’s more manic and volatile, and she has a way of setting Donald off…and vice versa.
“Austistic boy meets autistic girl, they fall in love, they break up, they get together again, they break up again and get back together again and finally get married. A familiar-sounding plot, perhaps, but with odd angles and tender weirdnesses.”

Clearly, poor Michael J. Fox appears heavily afflicted by the ravages of Parkinson’s disease in this political ad that has recently gotten a lot of press. Rush Limbaugh‘s saying that Fox, whose body jerks back and forth as he speaks, “either didn’t take his medication or was acting,” was asinine (although he later apologized for accusing Fox of overdoing it).
About two weeks ago I ran a Fox item and a link to a YouTube video of Fox talking, and it’s also quite obvious what Parkinson’s is doing to him but he’s not jerking back and forth in this one.
I don’t know what this disease is like or whether your spasms are different each day or what, but it’s obviously a ghastly thing to live with. The fundamentalist ignorance and arrogance of President Bush and the religious right’s opposition to federal funding for embryonic stem cell research is rancid and despicable. Anything that might lead to medical developments that could alleviate the plight of Parkinson’s sufferers should obviously be funded up the wazoo.

There’s this dark comedy called Spring Break in Bosnia now being filmed in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and it’s about an actual attempt once made by journalists to find and capture real-life Serbian war criminal and former head of state Radovan Karadzic. In the script he gets nabbed, but in real life he’s still free. And Senad Pecanin, the editor of a weekly Muslim-read magazine called Dani, is telling New York Times reporter Nicholas Wood that “it’s kind of farcical to have this when Karadzic is still at large. For me it’s a Hollywood invasion of tragic reality.”

And yet the filmmakers — director Richard Shepard (The Matador) and actors Richard Gere, Terrence Howard, Diane Kruger and Jesse Eisenberg (The Squid and the Whale), among others — are saying “they hope the movie, due out next year, will shame the international community into making Karadzic’s arrest a higher priority [than it has been before], so that he will finally go on trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity.”
Karadzic is thought to be responsible for a significant portion of war-crimes killings that happened during the ethnic Serb-Bosnian war of ’92 to ’95, during which roughly 100,000 people, most of them Bosnian Muslims, are estimated to have been killed. His policies in office led to the expulsion of all non-Serbs from half of Bosnia, and to the three-year siege of Sarajevo, in which up to 10,000 people bought it. United Nations prosecutors have also accused Karadzic of planning the massacre of nearly 8,000 Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica in 1995.

The following excerpt from Larry Grobel‘s “Al Pacino: Conversations with Lawrence Grobel” (Simon Spotlight Entertain- ment, $25.00) endeared me to the actor known as Al Pacino almost as much as his better performances: “His three-room apartment” — which Pacino was living in around 1979 — “consisted of a small kitchen with worn appliances, a bedroom dominated by an unmade bed, a bathroom with the toilet constantly running, and a living room that was furnished like a set for a way-off-Broad- way production about some down-and-out city dweller. I knew poor people who lived in more luxury than that.”

I don’t know when Paramount intends to start showing David Fincher‘s Zodiac (1.17.07), especially given their apparent determination to not release it platform-style in late ’06, but I’ve been told it’ll be totally finished and screenable as of 11.10. The person who told me this expects Zodiac to begin showing the following week; let’s see what develops.

All the purchase of ThinkFilm by Capitol Films means is that L.A. entrepreneurs David Bergstein and Ron Tudor have now expanded their way into the U.S. indie film distribution scene, having already established themselves in England by owning the U.K.-based Capitol Films. (Oddly, Capitol has Bordertown, that crackling Jennifer Lopez drama about the unsolved Juarez murders that no one will pick up, on its website — kind of an industry advertisement that says “we pick up shit nobody else wants!”) The upshot is that ThinkFilm (which will hang onto its name and retain all of its staffers) will now have more money to be more competitive with. Capitol also holds rights to the recently-wrapped Sidney Lumet drama Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, which has no U.S. distributor.

I tried to think of something interesting to say about TomKat planning to finally get married in Italy on Saturday, 11.18, but all I could come up with was the idea of being inside their heads for five or six hours via one of those Being John Malkovich mud-tunnel transporting devices, or even being in both their heads simultaneously (weird thought), but it got too strange.
The intrigue is much higher regarding Cruise’s interest in making an indie “political drama” called Lions for Lambs, which reportedly deals with a platoon of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan, presumably post-9/11. The script is by Matthew Carnahan (State of Play), and Variety’s Michael Fleming says Robert Redford is said to be “likely” to direct as well as play a role. If anyone has a copy….

The more you hear about a film that presents a humanistic portrait of an afflicted people and their oppressors, and the more you hear about a director’s humane, liberal views about the social particulars behind the film or that were used as a kind of socio-textural backdrop during its making, the more curious…okay, suspicious you are about how the movie plays by regular-guy, hang-the-politics standards.

Blood Diamond director Ed Zwick isn’t exactly the Stanley Kramer of his time but he sounds like Kramer, a ’50s and ’60s Hollywood liberal who made socially- minded films with liberal philosophies, in this phone interview with Nikki Finke, and the more I read it, the more I smelled liberal smoke.
Zwick was looking to quash a negative rumor that he and the film’s big-name stars — Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Connelly, Djimon Hounsou — promised to supply prosthetic limbs for some teenaged orphans and child amputees from South Africa’s South Zulu Nataal and Mozambique’s Maputo, where the film was shot, and then reneged and took off back to the States. “This is a very cynical and appalling tack to take and in the worst taste, especially given what we all tried to do while we were there.” Zwick said in a phoner from London. “What I do think is this is the work of someone who clearly bears the film ill will.”
The long and the short is that Zwick, DiCaprio, Connelly, Hounsou, other cast and crew members plus “producers like Paula Weinstein” coughed up some change (i.e., presumably several grand each) that went into a fund, and then Warner Bros. matched. it The “Blood Diamond Fund” came to somewhere between $200,000 and $500,000, Finke reports.
It was just a drop in the bucket but a humane thing to do all around, etc., even if, when you get right down to it, prosthetic limbs haven’t in fact been purchased with the donated funds.
The money went to a lot of needy causes, but the people charged with assessing needs and where to invest the money haven’t yet specificaly bought any prosthetic limbs. “The fund has gotten to a number of things on the list,” Zwick tells Finke, “but there’s more to go. And in the list of things to do, prosthetics are part of that list.”
Bottom line: Zwick, Hounsou, DiCaprio, Connnelly, Weinstein, et. al. are good people who did the right thing, but be wary of Blood Diamond because of the above-mentoned equation. I’ve heard from a guy who’s seen it. He didn’t call it problematic in any kind of pronounced way — he mainly said not bad, pretty good, etc. — but he did say it was very Zwick-y.

Go to the site for Paul Feig‘s Unaccompanied Minors (Warner Bros., 12.8) and right away you’re thinking 180s, escape routes, avoidance patterns. The cast list tells me they’ve got Brett Kelly (Bad Santa) costarring as Beef Welllington, in the part of the morbidly obese kid, which every comedy seems to have these days. Morbidly obese people used to be oddities — in today’s culture young kids who are probably fated to die of a heart attack by the time they reach 50 are totally commonplace.
To me fatties have always been kind of chuckly, but there’s something deeply unfunny about Jabbas. For centuries corpulence has been regarded as a sign of jolliness, indulgence, mischievousness or a little sadness, which makes it natural and easy to laugh at fat guys (John Candy, John Belushi, etc.). But morbidly obsese types are generally seen (whether people want to admit it or not) as people with a major problem — undisciplined lardbuckets, avatars of sloth. I’ve noticed, by the way, that Ethan Suplee is no longer m.o. but merely fat. Good work, dude… keep it up. Word is he got a staple job.

I thought I had linked to Nathaniel R.‘s comprehensive rundown of all the Best Foreign Language feature submissions on Film Experience. Well, I have now. ’06 will be a bitch as far as playing favorites since the three top foreign-language contenders — Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck‘s The Lives of Others (Sony Pictures Classic, 2.9.07), Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth (Picturehouse, 12.29 — submitted by Mexico, shot in Spain) and Pedro Almodovar’s Volver (Sony Pictues Classics, 11.3) — are equally major, exceptional, transporting. I worship each one and there’s no choosing — all three should take home the prize.