Back to Los Angeles and the real world starting today…not a pleasant thought. In fact, I am filled with dread. The best film opening this coming Friday (9/23), hands down, is David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence. There’s also Flightplan, which I haven’t seen. Plus Polanksi’s Oliver Twist, The Prizewinner of Defiance, Ohio (Woody Harrelson’s character seems like such an asswipe in the trailer), and Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride.
The Thing About My Folks, that amusing and surprisingly touching little family film with Paul Reiser and Peter Falk?…the one I first wrote about after seeing it at the Santa Barbara Film Festival last February? It opened limited yesterday (9.16) and…well, do what you think is best. It’s not a Luchino Visconti film but it has a certain caringness about it…paternal love, compassion, recognizable family values. “With movies that are quality-level and playing well, there’s two kinds of buzz — good word-of-mouth and what we call compelling word-of-mouth,” Jeff Dowd said earlier this year. “The Thing About My Folks has compelling word-of-mouth, which you have when the movie is value-based….like The Passion of the Christ. That was a movie that culturally embraced the values of a certain audience. Fahrenheit 9/11 had a value-based appeal, and so did My Big Fat Greek Wedding. People want to see adult films that are positive and empowering and also entertaining, and this is a real family-values film. It’s what people really go through in holding families together…without being ideological or getting into any kind of red-state thing. It’s playing just as strongly in blue states. Throw a dart at a map of the country and it’ll play there.”
Whenever I think back upon the lightning-in-a-bottle period in Bob Dylan’s career, the time (’62 to mid ’66) when he wasn’t just the greatest ’60s generation poet-troubador of all time but someone (or something) who wasn’t just cable-connected to the heart of the early to mid ’60s tumult but in various ways was a kind of Zeus figure, sculpting and cutting through to the bone and voicing the whole evolving drama in head-turning verse…I just crumble inside. More often than not I think of the lyric Dylan wrote for a sad song from “Nashville Skyline” that went, “Once I had mountains in the palm of my hand.” Anyone with their ear to the rails back then could feel the rumble of that possession…the vibration was everywhere. And now, sitting at a dining-room table in a Toronto apartment in September 2005, my weariness amazes me. Martin Scorsese’s 201-minute documentary No Direction Home: Bob Dylan, which showed at the Toronto Film Festival last night, will be available on DVD this coming Tuesday (9.20) and will air on PBS in two segments on 9.26 and 9.27, is a truly magnificent American epic. It’s the best Scorsese film since My Voyage in Italy (’99), although I think it’s a much more emotionally powerful film than that 246-minute doc…or anything else Scorsese has created since Goodfellas. But is it the movie or just me and my investment in the Dylan saga? Scorsese is “in” this film, sure, but it all boils down to found footage and smart editing choices. In a way he lets the story tell itself, but he also frames Dylan’s saga in the same way David Lean configured the life of T.E. Lawrence in Lawrence of Arabia. This analogy originated with screenwriter Larry Gross in a Movie City News posting after he caught No Direction Home at the Telluride Film Festival, and it’s absolutely right-on. This movie is, in a sense, Scorsese’s Lawrence of Arabia, and without losing control of my faculties I have to say that here and there it’s more breathtaking and lump-in-the-throat terrific than Lean’s version. Part One, which lasts two hours, is about becoming…about Dylan’s absorbing all he could and summoning his many strengths, and it ends with his triumphant performance at the 1963 Newport Folk Festival…when Dylan had reached the summit of his powers as the penultimate poet and folk singer of his day. Part Two, which covers ’63 to ’66, is about the complications that came from Dylan’s shifting away from his acoustic roots and embracing his electrified destiny with “Bringing It All Back Home,” “Highway 61 Revisited” and “Blonde on Blonde”…complications and pressures that involved accusations of being a “traitor” to folk music and having to deal with repulsively stupid questions from middle-aged journalists. It all got thicker and gnarlier and finally led to a kind of downfall (his July 1966 motorycle accident, which…who knows?…might have occured for reasons other than mere chance) and a withdrawal from touring that lasted for eight or nine years. “I must have been mad, I never knew what I had”…I can’t nail this film in a Word item, but do not miss it. No Direction Home: Bob Dylan is easily one of the finest and most moving films of the year, and one of the most profound rock docs ever.
I saw Phillis Nagy’s Mrs. Harris, an HBO movie that will air sometime in early ’06, at Roy Thomson Hall last night with two women friends who are…well, agreeably seasoned. The film is a restrained (read: more than a bit dull) account of the downfall of Jean Harris (Annette Bening), the teacher who shot and killed Scarsdale Diet guru Herman Tarnower (Ben Kingsley). The film reminds us that powerful men who are used to getting what they want can be heartless dogs, and that women of taste and refinement sometimes throw caution to the wind in getting involved with guys of this sort, and that sometimes, if you’re really blue and feel pushed to the edge, you can just lose it and want to shoot somebody…yourself, for instance. It’s a huge bummer of a movie, so much so that one of the women I came with left without saying goodbye…she just walked out of the theatre talking on her cell phone, offering nary a word of farewell or even a wave from across the room. Things would have been different if she had come with us to the In Her Shoes screening at Roy Thomson a couple of nights ago, which I invited her to. That movie leaves you in a very nice place.
I’ve seen so many good films at the Toronto Film Festival, I’m feeling a little worn down. This one’s Oscar-worthy, that one’s stellar, this one stirred me to the depths of my soul…gimme a break already. It’s almost like I need to see a few stinkers now (or well-made worthy film that I simply don’t care for…whatever) just to restore my sense of equilibirium. Peter Jackson, I miss you.
Drive a mint-condition Mercedes sedan into the middle of any dirt-poor neighborhood and then park it and leave it there — the next morning it will be completely stripped. Leave a fresh and untouched edition of the Wall Street Journal and the Toronto Globe & Mail on a dining table at the Manulife Center early Friday morning during a visit to the local facilities, and when you return the two papers will either have been fully leafed through or flat-out stolen. Like Alaskan wolves or wild dogs roaming the plains of Africa, movie journalists cruise the Manulife Centre looking for fresh and free newspapers, and when they see a couple of free ones lying there…rowwrrl!
I gave up on doing columns on just Wednesday and Friday during the Toronto Film Festival…or at least, I put up a new lead story a lot more often, whenever something happened or the spirit moved, etc. I kind of liked doing this. Keep adding, keep rolling…keep it fluid and malleable. I’m thinking I should maybe keep on like this.
You didn’t hear it from me, but don’t be too surprised if you read about Miramax president Daniel Battsek acquiring distrib rights to Gavin Hood’s Tsotsi, a flat-out extraordinary South African drama based on a novel by Athol Fugard. I finally saw it yesterday afternoon after being badgered to death by Donna Daniels’ publicity team for the last two or three weeks to do just that. Set in a Johannesburg shantytown, Tsotsi (pronounced “Sawt-see”) is about a bloodless teenage thug (Presley Chweneyagae) who discovers a measure of humanity in himself when he starts to care for an infant who happened to be in the back seat of a car he stole. Unlike Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne’s Palme d’Or-winning L’enfant, which it vaguely resembles, Tsotsi has a potential to snag some decent coin as well as Oscar nominations (Best Foreign-Language Film, Best Actor, etc.), critics awards, Golden Globe awards, etc. How do I know it will sell tickets? Because my kind and compassionate Toronto friend Leora Conway saw Tsotsi at the Wednesday night premiere and went apeshit…she was beaming when she told me about it afterwards, and she said it made her cry at the end. It’s conceivable that a distributor other than Miramax might swoop in and grab Tsotsi, but somebody ought to and get it Oscar-qualified as soon as possible. This is one of those “it” films…I could feel the rooted energy from the get-go…from Hood’s hard-edged direction, the simple and elegant photography (which contrasts with City of God‘s jumpy hand-held visual style) and Chweneyagae’s searing performance as a stone psychopath who sometimes deolves into a terrified three-year-old…it all coagulates into something extra. Two or three weeks ago it won the Edinburgh Film Festival Audience Award and the Michael Powell award for Best British Film, so you have to figure it’s doing a couple of things right.
John Turturro’s Romance & Cigarettes is somewhere between being admirably brave, extremely amusing and horribly embarassing for everyone concerned, including those in the audience. But then you’re always risking pain when you make a musical, and you can’t say that Turturro doesn’t have creative cojones. A story about infidelity, stifled dreams and floundering family values among working-class types in Queens and Brooklyn, Cigarettes is at least something “different.” And it’s extremely comforting that the actors don’t wail and croon on their own…they do it karaoke-style (i.e., on top of established recordings on the soundtrack). They also indulge in some half-assed dancing here and there. Romance & Cigarettes is mostly kind of awful but at other times it verges on the euphoric. There are grace notes aplenty whenever the great Chris Walken is on-screen, although his song-and-dance number isn’t as knock-down cool as his Fat Boy Slim MTV thing. (I have to say that the older he and I get, the creepier the mutual resemblance.) As clumsy, indie-styled, vaguely painful musicals go, this is way, way better than Dan Mirvish’s Open House…but I guess that’s not saying much. James Gandolfini sings entirely on his own for about two or three bars, and I found this truly spellbinding while it lasted. Susan Sarandon delivers a fairly spirited sing-along with Janis Joplin’s “Piece of My Heart,” and Kate Winslet punches it out pretty well here and there. But if comedy is hard, musicals are an absolute bitch…especially when you’re dealing with people who may love music but don’t have the talent to deliver tunes and dance numbers in a truly first-rate way…even with original soundtracks providing accompaniment. This is a partly sincere but largely satirical movie, and it’s obviously been influenced by the karaoke phenomenon (which is based on the sickening notion that we’re all singing stars waiting to happen, or at least unappreciated for our intensly soulful croonings) as well as efforts like Pennies From Heaven. But this is nothing if not a blue-collar musical, and what this movies mainly proves is that working people should stick to what they know.
I have a screening to catch in less than two hours and doing my usual early-morning nutso thing, and Robert Wise has just died at the age of 91. I’m sorry it finally happened, but Wise had a rich life and a distinguished career as a director for about 20 years, from the late ’40s to late ’60s. It was 37 years ago when Wise seemed to surrender the ghost with the arrival of Star!, that godawful Julie Andrews musical debacle that permanently clouded Wise’s reputation as a director who occasionally mattered. Star! made him into a joke. The irony is that two years earlier Wise enjoyed his last creative hurrah with The Sand Pebbles. This 1966 big-studio period drama was widely seen as an allegory about Vietnam and the overall folly of heavily-armed countries look to mold less-strong countries into their own image…a theme that has some resonance today in Iraq. The Sand Pebbles contains Steve McQueen’s best performance ever (not to mention Richard Crenna’s), and it still shatters me each and every time I see it. The first Wise film that really mattered was The Set-up (1949), the real-time boxing noir with Robert Ryan (whose frame was too skinny for a fighter’s). The ones that counted in between this and The Sand Pebbles were The Day The Earth Stood Still, The Desert Rats, Somebody Up There Likes Me, Run Silent, Run Deep, I Want to Live!, Odds Against Tomorrow, West Side Story and The Haunting. This last effort, released in 1961, was a classy horror film that showed nothing except a shot of an expanding wooden door and used only subtle suggestions (sounds, mostly) to convey the presence of ghosts, but it was still extremely creepy. It’s depressing to think about how Wise became known as the stodgy industry guy responsible for The Sound of Music and Star! and Star Trek: The Motion Picture…I prefer to shut these films out. Wise managed one last half-decent film — 1971’s The Andromeda Strain.
We’re supposed to be in a wind-down phase at the Toronto Film Festival, but there are still several…well, a few intriguing films left to see. At the top of the anyone’s list has to be Martin Scorsese’s 201 minute No Direction Home: Bob Dylan, even though it’ll shortly play on PBS, Gavin Hood’s Tsotsi (which a friend saw last night and raved about), Annette Bening and Ben Kingsley in Mrs. Harris, Hermine Huntgeburth’s The White Masai, and my three cleanup viewings — The War Within, The Notorious Bettie Page and Harsh Times.
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