wired

Clint Eastwood‘s Flags of Our Fathers (Dreamamount, 10.20), the WWII epic about Iwo Jima and the p.r. effort to celebrate the men who raised the flag atop Mt. Surabachi, began screening for selected journalists this week in New York, according to a 9.21 N.Y. Times piece by David Halbfinger.
He calls it “a big, booming spectacle that sprawls across oceans and generations,” with “much of [it] following the flag raisers as they crisscross the country in the spring and summer of 1945 pitching war bonds for a government in desperate financial straits. It is neither a pure war movie nor, given its sweeping and harrowing combat sequences, merely a wartime drama. It examines the power of a single image to affect not only public opinion but also the outcome of a war.
“Above all it is a study of the callous ways in which heroes are created for public consumption, used and discarded, all with the news media’s willing cooperation. And it is imbued with enough of a critique of American politicians and military brass to invite suspicions that Hollywood is appropriating the iconography of World War II to score contemporary political points.
“Yet just when it verges on indicting the people responsible for exploiting the troops, the movie comes round to their point of view.”
This last bit reads like a critique, no? Is Halbfinger saying Eastwood cops out or pulls his punches on some level? Left Coast critics and journos wll begin to see Flags sometime next week.

Sofia Coppola‘s Marie Antoinette is a well made, relentlessly shallow film about an 18th Century Paris Hilton (Kirsten Dunst) living inside a whimsical fantasy membrane in and around the grounds of the Palace of Versailles in the years leading up to the French revolution. Camille Paglia is a brilliant writer, a social seer and a fearless pretense-puncturer, and she’s written a piece about…well, not Coppola’s film but how Marie-Antoinette is back in vogue. I was hoping she’d seen the film and might have hated it….pity. It is not enough to merely hate Marie-Antoinette. One needs to organize against it, storm its gates, demand that certain parties lose their heads.

ESPN’s “Page 2” writer Sam Alipour follows Rescue Dawn producer and Clippers All-Star hotshot Elton Brand around Toronto as he went to the premiere and the after-party and whatnot. If there’s a serious money quote in this piece, I haven’t found it yet. Maybe I need to read it again .

Black Film.com’s Wilson Morales has transcribed what reads like a portion of last weekend’s Departed press conference. Matt Damon, Martin Scorsese, Leonardo DiCaprio, producer Graham King, Vera Farmiga and screenwriter William Monahan sat and suffered through a series of brain-novacaine press-junket questions.

A publicist I spoke to during a lunch earlier this afternoon told me that 80% of the “people” (journalists, I presume) she’s spoken to about Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu‘s Babel have been iffy about it — too long, too much like the previous Innaritu films, etc. But there’s no basis for anyone to “meh” this film, I argued. It’s too well crafted, too full of feeling and echoes about parenting and children. Later I talked with an industry guy who’s spoken at length with Samuel L. Jackson, who saw Babel as a judge at the Cannes Film Festival, and the guy said Jackson felt that Babel is “Crash Benetton” — i.e., a European version of Paul Haggis‘s Best Picture winner. Dammit…that’s a ridiculous point of view. Babel may be in the same solar system as Crash, but it’s certainly not on the same planet. What the hell’s going on there?

FILMdetail’s Ambrose Herron on yet another anti-blogger screed written by a print journalist (the Guardian’s Rachel Cooke). Cooke’s piece was posted roughly three weeks ago (9.3) — why does it take people like Herron and Anne Thompson so long to respond to these things? Why am I posting this item myself? I don’t really give a shit about any of this. That’s not true — I do give a shit about some of it.

Suber Lesson #4: “In many of the most memorable stories, th central character is torn between desire and duty, between what the self seeks and society demands. The inner voice whispers, ‘I want…’ but the outer voice responds, with an echo-chamber resonance, ‘You must…’ The duty of the hero is not merely to stand up; he must stand for something. It’s not something he desires; it’s something he’s got to do.”
For some reason I’ve never forgotten this line from a David Mamet script for a 1987 “Hill Street Blues” epsode that he did a one-shot thing for: “I went to sleep dreaming life is beauty; I awoke the next morning knowing life is duty.”

Sven Nykvist, the cinematographer who shot Ingmar Bergman‘s best films with some of the most exquisite black-and-white compositions in film history, has died. I admired his color photography on Woody Allen’s Another Woman and especially Crimes and Misdemeanors, but deep down he will always be the silver-monochrome painter who shot Bergman’s The Virgin Spring, The Silence, Persona, Winter Light and Through a Glass Darkly. I met him on the set of King of the Gypsies in Manhattan back in ’78 or thereabouts. Sven was only 83 years old. He lived his last days in a Stockholm nursing home where he was being treated for(this is awful) a form of dementia called aphasia, according to Carl-Gustaf Nykvist, his son.

Germany has chosen Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck‘s The Lives of Others as its offical entry for the 2007 Best Foreign Film Oscar…what a shocker. The 1980s-era drama won seven Lola awards (i.e., the German Oscars), it was the toast of Telluride and Toronto and it’s looking to everyone like a very strong contender. What was Germany going to do? Was there a choice?

Suber Lesson #3: “Like religion, people to go movies not to see the world as it really is , but to see a world that compensates for the one they know.”

A film will almost certainly be made out of “Hannibal Rising” (Delacourte Press), Thomas Harris‘s new Hannibal Lecter book that’s due on 12.5, but Anthony Hopkins can forget it. It’s strictly a young Hannibal thing that covers ages 6 through 20. Meaning two or three actors, right?

“Close readers of Mr. Harris√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s previous novels, which also include ‘The Silence of the Lambs’ and ‘Red Dragon,’ may recall that Dr. Lecter saw his entire family killed during World War II in Eastern Europe,” Motoko Rich recalls in this New York Times story. “The new novel will shed more light on the circumstances of those deaths, with a focus on Dr. Lecter’s memories of his younger sister, Mischa.”