An AICN poster named Dave Feldman has posted a very positive reaction to an early screening of Sam Mendes‘ Revolutionary Road in White Plains, New York, and that’s fine. But the guy doesn’t know how to spell “bawling” — in his mind it’s “balling” — and this, I feel, opens up a whole universe of caution and interpretation about the world of Mr. Feldman. If you don’t know how to spell “bawling,” what else don’t you know? What other aspects of the human condition have you misread or missed out on?
“The movie’s a killer,” he begins. “Clear the decks — this is a great ride.” Well and good, but then Feldman feels obliged to describe costar Kate Winslet as Mendes’ “beautiful wife” and again you go “what?” I don’t trust anyone who introduces any artist as someone’s beautiful wife or handsome husband. Artists stand on their own or they’re nothing, and information about who they’re married to or living with is a waste of breath in a review, so obviously one needs to say “watch it!” when reading anyone who brings this up.
Winslet plays “an idealistic wife in 1950s Connecticut who realizes that her dreams and freedom have withered away,” he writes, “[so] she persuades her husband, the debonair Leonardo DiCaprio, to rediscover the thing that made their marriage vital.” Winslet, he believes, has “never been better.” Okay, fine.
“I won’t give away too much, but let’s just say that DiCaprio goes along for the ride for a bit, but soon reality sets in and they’ve got to make some life-altering changes. Let’s just say not only was DiCaprio’s character balling [sic] by the end, but most of the audience was too.”
“The performances are absolutely stunning, he explains, “true powerhouse roles like we haven’t since in a lonnng time. I bet comparisons to Cat on a Hot Tin Roof are inevitable, and dare I say that DiCaprio and Winslet outshine Taylor and Newman.” Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman‘s performance, he means, in a not-very-good adaptation of a so-so play. The guy is referencing a 50 year-old movie that feels classic to some because of the current Broadway stage revival? Puzzling.
This, I say, is the third and final nail in the coffin. “Balling” plus “Mendes’ beautiful wife’ plus Cat on a Hot Tin Roof…over and out.
Another AICN guy who called himself “Jay Diggler” (meaning…what, that he fancies himself a ladies’ man because his member is almost as large as Dirk Diggler’s?) liked it also — a little bit less than Feldman, but he’s a more explicit writer and seems more thoughtful and circumspect.
The film “clocked in at about 2 and 1/2 hours but it never felt that long,” he writes. “It starts off with the end of a play that April is starring in and shows Frank’s disappointing face. Turns out this play is in a local high school and April [we learn] never became the actress she really wanted to be. This scene culminates in an intense screaming match between the two and Frank punching the car followed by the credits or Revolutionary Road.
“This sets the mood for how this movie is going to be. April is a failed actress/depressed housewife and Frank is a failure working at a crappy job he hates [because he feels he’s] becoming his dad.
“DiCaprio and Winslet give Oscar worthy perfomances throughout the film. Their fights are intense; one in particular gave me the chills. You can see the anguish behind April’s eyes as she goes on each day, hiding the fact that she’s miserable. When April comes up with the idea to move to France and start over, you can see happiness reenter both of their lives and you really hope that everything works out for them. Those who’ve read the book know that this is only wishful thinking . For those that haven’,I don’t want to spoil the results.” You don’t?
Diggler believes that Mendes “really blew” the ending, though. “They could’ve had a perfect ending that left you feeling for the characters but they tacked on some scenes at the end that were unnecessary and they failed to give you any time to process what happened to the characters. [This is] a missed opportunity that I hope is corrected in the final cut. I made sure to detail my problems with the ending in the sheet that they passed around to everyone.
“Overall though I really enjoyed the film, the acting kept the movie afloat and I’m sure we’ll see a couple names from this movie [among] the Oscar nominations. For Sam Mendes [this is] not as good as American Beauty but still a great job.”

You sure feel it the next morning, you bet. Stiff and aches galore. Swollen left hip with scab. Aching left rib area, hurts when I breathe in deeply. Left elbow slightly swollen, slightly painful. Swollen knob, scab on my left knee. In short, the usual stuff when you’ve suffered minor impact trauma (i.e., the kind you don’t need to go to the hospital for). I’ll be in decent shape by next weekend. Okay, maybe more like seven days but certainly by the time I leave for Toronto on 9.3.

Yesterday afternoon Politico party girl reporter Anne Schroeder Mullins noted that “when Barack Obama and Joe Biden made their big appearance Saturday, Biden walked out to Bruce Springsteen‘s The Rising. It seems that will — or already has — become the new Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow. And it strikes the right working-class notes.”
For me there’s only one Rising/Springsteen song, only one anthem that seems to really know something true and fundamental about the American working-class, or at least about the soul and melancholia it seemed to have for that brief period after 9.11 — Nothing Man. No campaign would have the character to use it as a theme song, but it’s such a beauty, such a keeper.

After tapping out a link to last night’s discord-in-Denver story by Politico‘s John F. Harris and Mike Allen, two HE talk-backers gave me pause — “hepwa” and “dinther” by name — and then two e-mails came in with a counter-balance effect.
One, from HE contributor Moises Chiullan, reminded me that “Politico and other outlets have to create stories and will selectively show Clinton-Obama acrimony and separatism when, according to Clinton supporters I know who are in Denver, there is a lot less PUMA-style division at work.”
The other came from MSNBC’s First Read, to wit: “With so many of Hillary Clinton‘s most ardent supporters in Denver, is the political press corps here in danger of over-hyping Obama’s problem with Hillary backers? Yes, our most recent NBC/WSJ poll showed that Obama has yet to win some of them over, and that (in part) explains why he hasn’t pulled away from McCain. But a brand-new Washington Post/ABC poll also had Obama getting more Clinton support than he’s ever received since she dropped out of the race back in June.
“No doubt Obama still has some work to do, and he has two-plus months — including this convention — to make the sale. But the point we’re trying to make is that perhaps the Democratic Party is more unified than PUMA-on-the-street interviews might suggest.
“Indeed, today’s New York Times/CBS poll of Dem convention delegates probably has it right: 60% of Hillary’s delegates enthusiastically support Obama, 31% support him with reservations or because he’s the nominee, and 5% don’t support him at all. But the Clinton folks will have an impact on the media narrative this week. In fact, they already they have — see Ed Rendell at the media confab yesterday and today’s Politico piece by Harris and Allen.”

The Clintons are acting like their old fiendish selves again. Damn those two to hell, and I don’t really mean “their people” — I mean them. If Democratic politics was the mafia, Obama operatives would be drawing straws as to who gets to work things out with the hit man.

Rope of Silicon‘s Brad Brevet calls this international trailer for Steven Soderbergh‘s Che: El Argentino a “high quality” thing…really? It looks muddy to me. It doesn’t even look decent. What’s the deal with the materials on this film, Wild Bunch? Trying to shave costs?Please take notice of the train-going-off-the-track shot. It’s a quick one, but it’s not CGI — it’s a real, full-sized train really going off the rails. I asked Soderbergh at the Che press conference in Cannes if this is the first train-wipeout shot using verite footage since John Frankenheimer‘s The Train (’64). Whatever the truth, he didn’t want to get into it. He went “no, no, no, no…I don’t know.”

The Toronto Film Festival starts a week from Thursday — 11 days from now. This morning I took my first stab at coming up with a short list. 40 films, I mean, which I’d like to see and write about these over a nine-day period. But I’ll probably only see two thirds. The truth is that I usually see about 25 TIFF films over nine days, 30 if I really push it.
I probably won’t be re-viewing anything I’ve already seen here (or intend to see here before 9.2), or anything I saw last May in Cannes — Nuri Bilge Ceylan‘s Three Monkeys, Rod Lurie‘s Nothing But The Truth, Bill Maher and Larry Charles‘ Religulous, Jonathan Demme‘s Rachel Getting Married, Mike Leigh‘s Happy Go Lucky, Gavin O’Connor‘s Pride and Glory, etc. And I’ve obviously marked off dozens of films that just don’t seem or sound good enough.
In no particular order, my priorities are as follows: (1) Neil Burger‘s Lucky Ones, (2) Joel and Ethan Coen‘s Burn After Reading, (3) Daniel Burman‘s Empty Nest, (4) David Koepp‘s Ghost Town, (4) Ed Harris ‘s Appaloosa, (5) Guillermo Arriaga‘s The Burning Plain, (6) Steven Soderbergh‘s Che (yes, again — in part because it’s 14 or 15 minutes shorter than the Cannes version), (7) Stephan Elliott‘s Easy Virtue, (8) Barbet Schroeder‘s Inju, (9) Spike Lee‘s Miracle at St. Anna, and (10) Guy Ritchie‘s Rocknrolla.
And then comes (11) Darren Aronofsky‘s Wrestler, (12) Kevin Smith‘s Zack and Miri Make a Porno, (13) Kari Skogland‘s Fifty Dead Men Walking, (14) Michael McGowan‘s One Week, (15) Richard Eyre‘s The Other Man, (16) Jean-Francois Richet‘s Public Enemy Number One, (17) Gina Prince-Bythewood‘s Secret Life of Bees, (18) Ari Folman‘s Waltz With Bashir, (19) Phillipe Claudet‘s I’ve Loved You So Long, and (20) Laurent Cantet‘s Entre Les Murs.
The next ten are (21) Rian Johnson‘s Brothers Bloom, (22) Matteo Garrone‘s Gomorra, (23) James Stern and Adam Del Deo‘s Every Little Step, (24) Kathryn Bigelow‘s Hurt Locker, (25) Bruno Barreto‘s Last Stop 174, (26) Stephen Belber‘s Management, (27) Richard Linklater‘s Me and Orson Welles, (28) Peter Sollett‘s Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, (29) Danny Boyle‘s Slumdog Millionaire, and (30) Matt Tyrnauer‘s Valentino.
The final group is made up of (31) Max Farberbock‘s Woman in Berlin, (32) Jerzy Skolimowski‘s Four Nights with Anna (which I missed in Cannes), (33) Olivier Assayas‘ Heure de Ete, (34) Nigel Cole‘s $5 A Day, (35) Anthony Fabian‘s Skin, (36) Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige‘s I Want To See, (37) Scott McHehee and David Siegel‘s Uncertainty, (38) Cyrus Nowratesh‘s Stoning of Soraya M., (39) Brian Goodman‘s What Doesn’t Kill You and (40) Kevin Rafferty‘s Harvard Beats Yale….even if it played at Manhattan’s Film Forum last fall.
Anything I should add or subtract or make extra sure that I see? Open to all suggestions, warnings, kills.

Four days old, pre-Biden decision, still nutritious: “I lke Obama better because he’s younger, cooler, smarter. The Democrats never do anything bold once they get the nomination. I’m still for Obama, but I have to tell you — he’s trying my patience. I thought he was going to be different. He didn’t have that ‘I’m going to blow it’ look on his face. But he’s doing the same thing as Kerry and Gore…to be sort of the lighter version of the Republican candidate.”

This segment is good also.

I’ll never forget standing on West 45th Street in January 1983 and eyeballing the almost side-by-side marquees for the Booth and the Plymouth (now the Gerald Schoenfeld theatre), and laughing quietly to myself about C.P. Taylor‘s Good being at the Booth and David Hare‘s Plenty playing at the Plymouth. And you know what? There are no online photos of this, probably the dopiest Broadway marquee juxtaposition in history.

In any event, Plenty re-appeared three years later as a Meryl Streep movie directed by Fred Schepisi. (My favorite line: “He proposed to me in a moment of weakness. Mine, I mean.”) And yet it’s taken Good 25 years to be made into a film.
The Good movie, directed by the Brazilian-born Vicente Amorim (who’s rumored to be loosely related to Duchess director Saul Dibb), will show at the Toronto Film Festival. Viggo Mortensen plays Halder alongside Jason Isaacs, Mark Strong, Steven Mackintosh and Gemma Jones in the flick.
Written in ’81, Good is regarded as Taylor‘s most successful play. It’s about Halder, a thoughtful German professor whose wimpishness and gradual corruption leads to his involvement with National Socialsm in the 1930s. The point of the play is that Halder sees himself as a reasonable good guy even as he succumbs more and more to the swatztika. Are there are parallels in the current American political arena? Naaah.

I was kind of reminiscing just now about a visit to the northern Italian set of Renny Harlin and Sylvester Stallone‘s Cliffhanger, for a N.Y. Times profile called “Can Stallone Get A Grip?”. I’d just come from the 1992 Cannes Film Festival. The crew was shooting at a very high elevation location in the scenic Dolomite mountains, which surround Cortina d’Ampezzo, a serene little skiing village that hosted the 1956 Winter Olympics and was also visited by For Your Eyes Only, the Roger Moore 007 film that came out in ’81.

On or about 5.20.92 in the Italian Dolomites, about 90 minutes north of Venice — a little below 30 degrees, elevation of 11,000 feet, maybe a bit less.

I’ve scanned the 8.23.92 Times article that resulted from the Cliffhanger visit —page #1, page #2.

I visited Cortina again about eight years ago, and was very dismayed to learn the town had gone to to hell due to its popularity with the wrong kind of American tourists — i.e., bearish middle-aged couples from Texas and Kansas and Oklahoma who spoke too loudly in mixed company, wore repulsively-designed ski sweaters and seemed to enjoy dancing to awful-sounding Euro disco in the hotel lounges. I was sitting in a bar listening to this 60-ish bearded guy with a Houston accent talking about how “we really loved goin’ to the Loove…the wife went back on her own the second day, all by her lonesome.” That’s it, I said to myself — I’m never coming back here.

An hour ago I taxied over to the shop of a freelance mechanic named Dennis to pick up my motorcycle, which had suffered minor damage (shattered plexiglass, smashed turn signal) after a small parking-space accident happened a few days ago. Within seconds of leaving his place (about a block east of Fairfax) I could feel something wrong. The bike had no power due to some kind brake-lock problem with the front tire, which kept me from getting up to any speed. Imagine driving a car with your foot tromped on the brake and the emergency brake on — it was like that.

Corner of Fairfax and Melrose, looking west.

I called Dennis as I was putting some air in the front tire (at a gas station at the corner of Fairfax and Melrose) and said, “Something’s really wrong, man…the brake is locking the front wheel or something.” He told me to bring it right back, so I pulled into Fairfax traffic heading north, but the bike would barely move. And then like a shot and right in the midst of a cluster of cars, the front wheel totally froze and the BMW and I both crashed onto the pavement, the bike sitting on my left leg and pinning me to the ground for a few seconds. No real damage to speak of — a bloody left elbow and a scraped left knee plus my nice black dress pants torn in two places.
The cars behind me stopped in time, thank God (nobody was going too fast), and two guys got out and helped me pick the sucker up. I feel fine — just bruised and cut. A slight ache in my rib cage on my left side, but nothing much. The body goes into mild shock when you have a sudden trauma like this, so I’ll probably feel some more minor bruise pain and muscle ache when everything settles down. This only happened 40 minutes ago. Dennis couldn’t figure what had happened, but he obviously screwed up big-time while doing the body work. He had planned to drive out to Lancaster to visit his wife in a rehab facility, so I told him to stay with that plan and we’ll talk tomorrow. His friend (i.e., his wife’s brother) drove me home.
I feel fine about being a motorcycle guy because I didn’t get hit by anyone or make any mistakes — the damn thing just froze up on me.