wired

“One of the creepier vanities of most political leaders is the private yearning to be tested on a historical scale,” writes David Remnick in this week’s New Yorker, in a piece about Bush’s response to the New Orleans-Katrina disaster. “Bill Clinton used to confide that, no matter what else he did as President, without a major war to fight he could never join the ranks of Lincoln and F.D.R. During the Presidential debates in 2000, George W. Bush informed his opponent, Al Gore, that natural catastrophes are ‘a time to test your mettle.’ Bush had seen his father falter after a hurricane in South Florida. But now he has done far worse. Over five days last week, from the onset of the hurricane on the Gulf Coast on Monday morning to his belated visit to the region on Friday, Bush’s mettle was tested — and he failed in almost every respect.”

I don’t care if Sean Penn’s boat sprang a leak. I respect the way he got out there and gave it up and reached out to people in New Orleans who needed help. What is there not to admire and salute about this? Just wait for some rightie dickhead columnist to try and make fun of this in some way…just wait.

All great persons are like gangsters. All small persons are like prostitutes.

Two favorable (one could even say glowing) Venice Film Festival trade reviews (from Variety‘s Todd McCarthy and the Hollywood Reporter‘s Ray Bennett) of Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain graze on one side of the pasture…fine, good grass, etc. But a “whoa there, cowboy!” review from Movie City News David Poland out of Telluride suggests the possibility of gopher holes, Liberty Valance-type adversaries and unfriendly Comanches whooping and shooting arrows in the weeks and months ahead. I also need to take exception with Bennett’s lead observation, to wit: “Everything you ever imagined about the characters of John Wayne and Montgomery Clift in Red River or Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott in Ride the High Country is revealed candidly in Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain, an epic Western about forbidden love.” Wouldn’t the more appropriate allusion be about Robert Redford and Paul Newman’s relationship in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid? Nobody in their most perverse dreams ever imagined anything remotely askew about the father-son affection between Wayne and Clift in Red River.

I asked a friend visiting the Telluride Film Festival about Poland’s “whoa, cowboy!” reaction and he answered, “I loved Brokeback. I was overcome with so much emotion. It’s ultimately about repressing who you are, and it’s done very honestly. [Variety‘s] Pete Hammond loved it too. It played extremely well, and I’ve spoken with a lot of straight guys here who were shocked how much they liked it.”

In her Venice Film Festival review of Steven Soderbergh’s Bubble (which will soon play at the Toronto Film Festival), Variety‘s Deborah Young says that Ocean’s Eleven and Ocean’s Twelve “must have lit a fire under Soderbergh to direct a film that is, in spirit, far from Hollywood” and so rife with social commentary and “sly humor.” For his story about the lives of three doll factory workers in financially-depressed Ohio, Soderbergh “uses a non-pro cast to deftly sketch the dullness of a mid-American burg, whose sheer normality could set the scene for a Stephen King horror extravaganza [in which] an unmotivated murder, instead of stirring emotions, unveils a frightening moral vacuum. The final shots of smiling, empty-faced dolls — another classic horror image — conjure up nothing so much as a gaping void, a ‘bubble’ far from the real world.” Call me presumptuous or over-eager, but this sounds edgily penetrating in a kind of Shizopolis-meets-sex, lies vein.

I haven’t read anything or spoken to anyone about Laurent Cantet’s Vers le sud, which will show at the Toronto Film Festival. But the following description of it (provided by TIFF director Piers Handling) in Peter Howell’s insider-forecast piece (“The Buzz Stops Here””) in the 9.3 Toronto Star strikes me as odd. “I loved Cantet’s last film, Time-Out,” Handling explains, “and this take on three middle-aged (North American) women in Haiti looking for sex and companionship from the islanders is bound to be smart, intelligent and well-acted.” Hold on…middle-aged North American women looking for sex in with Haitian islanders?

Oh, yeah…Howell contacted me for the same piece, and here’s what I said about three eagerly awaited Toronto Film Festival selections (among many others): (1) Elizabethtown, directed and written by Cameron Crowe: “I’ve read the script so I know what it more or less is, and unless Crowe is suffering from a drug-dependency problem or has somehow lost his ability to direct movies as skilfully as he has before, it’s simply going to be one the festival’s best.’ (2) Bubble, directed by Steven Soderbergh: “Sooner or later Soderbergh is going to pull himself out of his slump, and he’s always better when he’s working small and quirky so maybe this’ll do it for the poor guy. If he flubs it again, the next film will be the Che movie, I guess, with Benicio del Toro.” (3) Romance and Cigarettes, directed by John Turturro: “Anything that risks ridicule gets my vote, and any time you have actors like James Gandolfini, Kate Winslet, Steve Buscemi et al singing or lip-synching or whatever, you’re definitely risking or at least flirting with ridicule.”

In keeping with the theme of the week, and given a certain name at the top of most readers’ hit lists, I give you the uniform of our discontent. A simple shirt with a complex message. Check out the ad on the left under the Discland blurb.

Here’s what Glenn Sumi of Now, the Toronto weekly, is saying about Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain: “This eagerly anticipated film, based on Anne Proulx’s short story, tracks the decades-long love affair between two cowboys. Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) meet and eventually merge while herding sheep on a mountain, and though both get married and live in different states, they occasionally hook up to go ‘fishing,’ although that’s not enough for Jack, the more needy of the two. After all the thinly veiled homo-eroticism in westerns, there’s something cathartic about seeing men go homo on the range, and Ledger and Gyllenhaal give it their best, physically and emotionally. The theme of unfulfilled love never misses, and it’s handled with taste and restraint. But like all of Lee’s films, the pace occasionally lags and the pic could easily be 15 minutes shorter.”

I don’t know why Robert Towne’s Ask the Dust didn’t make the Telluride Film Festival line-up. I know there was a definite interest in showing it there, but I guess it wasn’t quite fine-tuned enough. (Towne told me a few weeks ago he wasn’t sure if it would be done in time.) But the festival is certainly showing Edmond, a David Mamet downer drama abut Bill Macy wandering around a city in a state of suicidal depression; Bennett Miller’s Capote; Liev Schreiber’s Everything is Illuminated, Scott McGehee and David Siegel’s Bee Season; James Mangold’s Walk the Line with Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon; Andy Garcia’s Lost City; Conversations With Other Women; Brokeback Mountain; Be With Me, Hany Abu-Assad’s Paradise Now and several others. They’re also showing a restored print of the 1976 Dino de Laurentiis remake of King Kong…kidding! They’re actually showing the 1933 Merian C. Cooper version, plus a doc about its making.

Late in arriving, but very well said by Elbert Ventura in The Australian: “Although everyone knows what they’re in for — ‘No nudity…no violence…unspeakable obscenity,’ as the tagline states — there is uncertainty about whether we all share the same threshold for outrage. At the outset, the first mentions of taboo sexual acts inspire a smattering of sniggers. As the movie keeps going and the language, impossibly, gets worse, the guffaws become less muted, the atmosphere less tentative. And on it goes, until, eventually, there is a collective mood of giddy surrender, as the Boschian depravities multiply at a rate too fast for sensibilities to be checked and upheld. That feeling of conspiratorial mischief gives The Aristocrats its giddy kick.”