Because a team of airport screeners failed to stop Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab from carrying an explosive substance called PETN (i.e., pentaerythritol) aboard a Detroit-bound airliner, the Transportation Security Administration is determined to make worldwide travellers suffer delays worse than ever before. TSA officials are reactive bureaucratic ninnies whose jobs are not precisely dependent on keeping terrorists off airplanes as much as putting on a show of attempting to do same. It’s all theatre and all tedium. I can honestly say this evening that I fear the TSA more than I do Islamic fundamentalist terrorists.
Last night Nikki Finke posted Bill Mechanic’s keynote speech about the future of indies from yesterday’s Independent Film & Television Production Conference. Mechanic ran Fox from ’94 to ’00, is now an indie producer (Coraline) and owner of Pandemonium LLC. Here’s my favorite portion of the speech:
“It’s disrespectful if not downright dumb to think audiences can’t tell the difference between the original, which occasionally might even have some fresh faces, and the copy, which almost always is populated with retreads. It’s like thinking you can sell yesterday’s news under a different banner.
“The exception to the rule is District 9, which didn’t try to compete with the majors with special effects or stars or plot. Instead of feeling recycled, it was fresh and is now one of the year’s best and most successful pictures. But lot of credit has to go to Peter Jackson since it was undoubtedly his clout that got the film made.
“[Indies] following the lead of the majors presumes that the majors know what they want. It presumes they have a fix on their audiences. I would say that’s anything but true.
“Admissions are down over the past few years and, perhaps most troubling, the audience that Hollywood spends the majority of time focusing on, the under 25’s, are the ones finding other things to do.
“Take a look at this shift over the past decade. While use of the internet and video games have dominated leisure time activities, movie consumption is down or flat over the same period. And, more to the point, you can see that there is a 21% drop in film-going amongst the core target audience and a 24% drop in the next key category, 25-39 year olds.
“And yes, these charts beg another question: if the audiences are shifting, why isn’t the product shifting as well? Name five mainstream films this year that successfully targeted an over-30 year audience.
“In that way, Hollywood in the broadest sense of the word is much like Detroit. It’s a manufacturer’s mentality that reigns, seemingly indifferent to the consumers it serves. Ignore whether the consumer likes our product as long as they buy it. Market it and they will come.
“And don’t worry if they don’t come back. Accept 60% drop-off rates as the norm, saying it’s all about wide openings.
“When was the last time you heard anyone either from a studio or an independent talking about improving their product, of creating positive buzz and expanding the audience?
“Here’s one basic question to ask yourself: If the most popular film in history was Titanic and it did so by weaving together interest in all demographic pockets as well as pulling in non-filmgoers, why in the last 12 years has no one attempted to do the same?
An independent couldn’t and shouldn’t make movies of Titanic’s scale but it should make movies as individualistic and compelling. Certainly there are good examples among some of the smaller independent films — Slumdog Millionaire being an easy choice — that actually do stand out and succeed because of their quality and their uniqueness.
But the independent world [has been] no more concerned with the consumer than the studios. With the influx of hedge fund money, the past decade saw a glutting of product, again most of it with no idea of who it was for or how it could be sold. Whether some of these movies had artistic integrity or not, there is no question there was no audience appeal.
“From the low-water mark of 1990, there has been a 50% increase in the number of pictures and even since 2000, nearly a 25% increase. And most of the influx came from non-majors, rising from 150 in 1990 to 450 in 2008. That, my friends, is insanity.
“Remember that through this entire period, the only growth at the box office has been inflationary, which means more films were fighting for a share of a flat box office. Over approximately this same period, the biggest hits took even a greater share of the box office pie” — i.e., because of an increase in Eloi movie-watching patterns — “meaning the independents, even with a vastly greater number of releases, are taking a dramatically smaller percentage of the available money.”
Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone dislikes Indiewire‘s decision to refer to certain columnists (such as myself and Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson) as “critics” in their Toronto Critics Poll. “I’m not dissing these guys,” Stone writes, “[but] not just anyone can write about movies and be called a ‘critic.'”
I wouldn’t call myself a “critic” either. Certainly not in the Marshall Fine/Dana Stevens/Scott Foundas/Stephen J. Whitty sense of the term. Which can be otherwise defined as seeing every last film that comes along and sitting down like a rank-and-file machinist in Detroit and reviewing every last one (including and especially the awful-awfuls) and always with a five-or-six-paragraph plot synopsis. Which can otherwise be defined as being a good soldier who does the hard and once-necessary task of grappling with all of it, good or bad, rain or shine, sick or healthy. Critics do the job like those pilots in Howard Hawks‘ Only Angels Have Wings flew mail over the Andes.
But critics aren’t truly and finally critics unless they’re stone Catholics about movies, and I have always been that. I’ve been swimming in these waters for 30 years now and I don’t just skim across the surface of the pond when I see and write about a film. True Catholics put on the wetsuit and dive in each and every time. They swim to the bottom and search around and can identify and quantify the various fish and algae down there, not to mention the geological assessments of silt and sand and bedrock.
I do all that and then some. All my life I have felt and communed and wrestled with films as seriously and arduously as Martin Luther did with Catholicism before striking out with the Protestant Reformation. Okay, not every last flick made and distributed on the planet earth but most of the ones worth seeing. Yes, I’ve deliberately chosen not to suffer through each and every film that opens because 60% to 70% of them are soul-sucking torture to sit through, and some of the worst suffering I’ve endured in my life (which has included getting punched and spat upon, being in car and motorcycle accidents, getting arrested and put behind bars, being fired just before Christmas several times, getting divorced and seeing friends and family members die) has been due to bad films.
So I’m selective, yes, and my judgment is far perfect. But even in the murkiest waters I can spot and smell trouble from hundred of yards off, like a shark can pick up distress signals.
Stone is implying that blogger-columnists like myself just kind of bop-bop-bop along like red robins and throw out little zingers — i.e., less than fully considered reactions — after seeing this or that film. Sometimes I do toss out facile-seeming reactions but that’s because I’ve decided that a zinger is quite appropriate and sufficient. We all know what proper film criticism is and no, I don’t follow the form. But a fully considered response to a film doesn’t always have to be expressed in ten to twelve graphs with five or six devoted to some droning boilerplate synopsis.
What matters is whether or not you’re a life-long hairshirt Catholic and whether or not movies get to you in the same way that spiritual satori or lung cancer does. In this respect very few critics out there have anything on yours truly.
Who’s Joe?
Updated: Former Entertainment Weekly writer Chris Willman has written a fascinating account of Wednesday night’s confrontation at Santa Monica’s Aero theatre between Bound for Glory‘s David Carradine, Ronny Cox and Haskell Wexler. I posted a brief description of this yesterday (along with an mp3 file). Willman’s version is better. Note: I’ve just pasted the article below the photo.
(l. to r.) Bound for Glory costar Ronny Cox, moderator Kevin Thomas, star David Carradine
Bound for Hell, or Glory, at the Cinematheque by Chris Willman
Today at 3:35pm
Not since I saw Bill Irwin and Kathleen Turner go at each other in an excellent production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? a couple of years ago have I experienced a night of live theater quite as riveting as the three-way cage match between David Carradine, Haskell Wexler, and the audience the other night following an American Cinematheque screening. I keep alluding to what a nerve-wracking, weird and wonderful night this was, and I’ve gotten asked to go into detail about how the proceedings unfolded, or unraveled. This is going to be way more exhaustive than most of you will want. But for the few who really wanted to hear about the whole thing, by request, here goes…
If there’s anything that doesn’t exactly seem to scream “fireworks!,” it’d be a panel discussion about the 1976 Woody Guthrie biopic Bound for Glory, which at this date probably counts as one of the less remembered works of the late, great Hal Ashby. As much as I love Ashby, I’d never seen it, and I have a hard time forcing myself to watch slow-moving two-and-a-half hour movies unless I’ve committed myself to a seat in front of a big screen. So I just barely dragged myself out of the house for the 30-mile drive to the Aero. I knew there’d be a discussion afterward with Carradine, but my plan was to skip out on it and go from there to a late show of Watchmen in Westwood. (Two two-and-a-half-hour movies in a row, you say? Well, that’s just the kind of tough guy I am.) But, imperfect as Glory is, it does a fantastic job of plunging you into the (previous) Depression, and it’s so utterly and engagingly human that I feel like washing its taste out of my mouth with a comic-book extravaganza would be opening myself up to eternal damnation. So I stay for the discussion, and narrowly avert what might have been one of the great regrets of my life.
I should say that there has already been some weirdness during the screening itself. During a scene where a radio guy reminds Guthrie that he’s not allowed to sing any controversial or topical material on his program, somebody very loudly exclaims, “I hate guys like that!” It gets a big laugh from the audience. But soon the same guy is keeping up with a line of patter, which I can’t make out because he’s on the other side of the auditorium. As you’d expect in a repertory screening, very quickly there are cineastes yelling at the rube to shut the hell up, and some kind of verbal altercation seems to ensue for about a minute. Of course, as soon as the lights come up, Carradine is walking down the aisle with his acoustic guitar, already going off on some kind of rant before he gets to the stage, and everyone realizes he was the one providing live commentary for his movie. (As the late noir character actor Lawrence Tierney once drunkenly did, in this same theater, in a night that is beloved in Cinematheque lore.) At this point I sense people in the audience feeling embarrassed to realize that The Star Of The Show had been shouted down like a common heckler, though some of these sympathies are about to diminish…
The screening is part of a “Kevin Thomas’ Favorite Films” series, hosted by the former (and occasionally still) L.A. Times film critic, who I knew back in my own Times days. I don’t know what Kevin has been like as a moderator on the other nights, but during the ensuing 70 or 75 chaotic minutes, he seems to go into shock and utters all of about 50 words. The first nine of them being: “I understand Ronny Cox is in the audience tonight?” Indeed, Carradine’s costar, Cox, has shown up just to see the film, and, so bidden, walks toward the stage–joining another surprise guest, Haskell Wexler, one of the half-dozen or so most revered living cinematographers, and an Oscar winner for the movie. Carradine and Cox warmly embrace, the former enthusing about how he couldn’t have gotten through without the latter as his partner, and the lovefest begins!
Or the monologue, actually. For the first 20 minutes or so, Carradine does 98% of the talking–hell, maybe 99%–and it’s entertaining as all-get-out, in a had-too-many-highballs-before-dinner kind of way. As the star goes on with his anecdotes, Cox is probably thinking he could have stayed in his original seat, and Wexler keeps slinking further down in his chair, as those of us who know this particular d.p. does not suffer fools gladly wonder what kind of storm clouds might be forming in his head. Wexler, who actually knew Woody Guthrie, does pipe up to say how wonderful a sign of change it was that Pete Seeger and Bruce Springsteen got to sing the full, controversial version of “This Land is Your Land” at the White House recently, which prompts Carradine to sing his own version of the tune, with the aid of some lyrical assists from the crowd. He talks about how Barbara Hershey convinced him to call his agent; about how Richard Dreyfuss was originally cast as Guthrie, but a salary dispute got in the way, and he was able to talk his way into the role by convincing producers that “I AM Woody Guthrie!” He took on this bravado despite the fact that, by his own admission, “the only thing I knew about Woody Guthrie when I was cast was that he wrote ‘Goodnight Irene.'” The punchline to this remark is supposed to be “I was wrong,” but Wexler, thinking Carradine doesn’t realize the mistake, perks up and steps on the actor’s joke, half-disgustedly interrupting, “No, Leadbelly wrote it.” Anyway, so far, so benign.
Then the subject of unions arises… and everything goes gonzo, never to return. Carradine says that these are different times from the 1930s and unions no longer serve the purpose they once did, or words to that effect. Cox, who has barely said a word up until now, starts shaking his head and says, “That doesn’t sound like Woody Guthrie to me!” Carradine starts trying to explain himself, when a woman in the back starts shrieking at him about how nothing about unions’ importance has changed. Carradine starts shouting back, which might’ve been okay if he wasn’t yelling right into the microphone, and it doesn’t sound pretty. The woman doesn’t let up, either, so for about two minutes both of them are going at it at once. She’s the more obnoxious one, but because he’s five times as loud, he’s coming off as the bully. Some audience members are telling Union Lady to shut up while others angrily holler “Let her speak!” A couple guys in my vicinity start shouting “Let’s hear from Haskell Wexler !” About a dozen people get up and walk out in the midst of this–one of them, almost unnoticed, being Cox, who makes the smoothest getaway of all time.
At this point, Carradine reminds me of poor Tucker Carlson, standing in front of that conservative PAC a few weeks ago, realizing that, in defending the New York Times, he has lost the sympathies of his audience to the hecklers, desperately trying to backpedal. A woman in the front row, who we will later learn is Cinematheque publicist Margot Gerber, stands up, turns around, and twice yells that the union shouter should be thrown out. But no, Carradine says, dissent is great. “You’re not one of the people!” shouts the lady. “I am one of the people!” Carradine shouts back, saying that he’s had to cut back on the groceries he buys for his family, and because of SAG’s actions, he can’t get work. “I AM NOT A RICH PERSON!” he growls, seemingly genuinely enraged as well as just loud for the first time. He talks about how it’s a problem when workers in Tennessee making Toyotas make $10 an hour while GM workers in Detroit make $60 an hour–which makes Union Lady even more outraged, naturally. Carradine says that everything we know is out the window in this economy and every aspect of what we’re willing to pay or be paid in our daily lives has to be up for renegotiation. It’s actually a good, lucid point, or would be if he had any control over his tone. Someone yells “Let her have the mike!” So Carradine half-heartedly tosses the mike into the audience–bonking a woman in the front row in the head! Ironically, the woman he bonks is the Cinematheque’s Gerber, who’d just been defending him moments earlier. This may count as some weird karma for her, but fortunately for Carradine, she’s probably the person in the audience least likely to file an assault charge.
The head-strike was an accident, but a groan goes up from the audience, because I think some people think he deliberately intended to lash out at the crowd, as opposed to just having really shitty aim. Suddenly it strikes me that it would only take one more bit of weirdness for things to get completely out of hand. It’s a holy cow, anything could happen right now kind of pregnant moment. Fortunately, there is slightly more confusion than hostility afoot, so no brawl ensues. Union Lady and her entourage finally take their leave, with Carradine shouting after her that he loves her, even though he knows she hates him.
There’s a moment of calm. Since the presumptive moderator is just sitting there, smirking and stunned, an audience member takes it upon himself to shout out a question about the cinematography. Who knew this would be a more dangerous subject than unions? Wexler talks about color desaturation (“You’ll notice the movie gets more colorful when we get to California”) and gives some technical specs. Carradine breaks in and starts talking about crane shots and suitcase cameras. Wexler, visibly irritated, goes back to the specs. And this is the point at which Carradine really kind of goes off the rails, albeit it in a subdued, passive-aggressive kind of way. He uses the line–which he repeats at least two or three more times–about how Wexler “got an Academy Award for ruining my movie.” You can feel the audience sort of collectively holding its breath as Carradine says the film “looks like it was shot through a glass of milk.” When he explains what he wished the look of the film had been, which is grittier, again, it’s a lucid point, but the way he’s making it is either tone-deaf or just evil.
Then he tells the story of how Ashby, the director, hated the look of the film, too, and was insisting on firing Wexler during the making of the film. I’m pretty sure I hear gasps go up at this point. Carradine says he talked Ashby out of firing him, “because if you fire somebody, they just go out in the parking lot and steal your hubcaps.” I’m pretty sure that’s a metaphor, but the audience doesn’t know what to do with this image other than to nervously titter. There will be a lot more of that–oh, yes, there will.
(It’s now, about 20 minutes from the end, that I come out of my own Kevin Thomas-like state of shock and realize that I should have been recording this whole fracas on my iPhone recorder app. So the remainder of these quotes are verbatim…)
Naturally, Wexler is enraged by Carradine’s story. So he retorts: “I didn’t know that I was going to be confronted with a story which I don’t think is necessarily a public story. But since it is public, I have to say something. Hal Ashby sent somebody to fire me, and he said, you’re fired, okay? And then after I heard that and got the message, I went to Hal and I said ‘Hal, just take a minute and STOP SNIFFING THAT STUFF UP YOUR NOSE!’ And if David will tell me there wasn’t heavy duty doping on that film, and that that wasn’t the comradeship he was talking about… When I showed up the next day, I went to work, and I was the UNFIRED director of photography. Now, that’s the goddamned truth!”
Carradine (drolly): “Okay. I don’t think that changes my story at all. Except that Haskell is a little down on people who snort cocaine.” That gets a good, nervous audience laugh. He goes on to tell a story about visiting Ashby’s mammoth trailer, and picking up a copy of the L.A. Times, which he hadn’t seen during many weeks of location shooting . “Underneath it there were about six lines of cocaine. … Hal was looking at me and I said ‘Hal, do you do a lot of this stuff?’ And he said ‘As much as I can get.’ And I said ‘I’ll talk to you later,’ and I left the trailer. Because it’s not my thing. And yes, Hal was a great user of cocaine. It does not change the fact that he was… ” He goes for the superlatives. “Quentin Tarantino doesn’t beat Hal Ashby, and he’s one of my favorite directors. Quentin is incredible. And he’s a big cocaine freak, too!” Okay, you want to talk about nervous laughter… (Just for the record, and to cover my ass. I’m not sure you can tell for 100% certain from the tape whether Carradine says the present-tense “He’s a….” or, possibly, the past-tense “He was a…” But I digress.) Carradine continues: “But Hal was a fucking genius. I don’t like anybody to put him down and say the drugs got in the way or anything else, because they didn’t get in the way. They got in the way of him living longer, but they did not get in the way of his movies. There is not one movie he made that you cannot say it’s one of the best fucking movies that has ever been made…”
He continued: “Hal was a fucking genius.” Okay, we get that part. “And so is this guy! I happen to disagree with the way he felt about Bound for Glory, about the look. And it was beautiful, but it was not what I wanted. I wasn’t the boss, right? … This guy was out there working his fucking ass off, there’s no doubt about it, right? And he wasn’t doing exactly what I would have asked him to do. I would have said, turn up the contrast, show the grit under the fingernails, don’t make any beauty about it, make it fucking ugly. And you know what, if he’d done what I told him to do, he would probably have not gotten his Academy Award, because it wouldn’t have been pretty. So maybe he was right and I was wrong…Somebody will talk to me about Haskell and I’ll say ‘Oh yeah, he’s the guy who got an Academy Award for ruining my picture.’ It’s one of my favorite lines, and it gets a laugh. And then I see the picture and I just forget all that. Because the picture is just so fuckin’ great. That’s the thing that’s amazing to me, is a collaboration between a director and a cameraman and a star who absolutely disagree with each other on almost everything, and yet they make a movie that will be a permanent fucking classic. Is that okay. Haskell?”
Long pause. Wexler: “I just want to say that after Bound for Glory I made three or four pictures with Hal Ashby.”
Carradine: “And I didn’t get to make one!” At last, we all agree, and can laugh together! (Even though Wexler’s not laughing.) Hooray!
The harmony is short-lived. Carradine talks about how the homeless camps they set up for the film were “livable” and attracted people from out of state who actually resided in these tents for a time. Wexler makes faces at the audience, suggesting that everything Carradine is saying is cuckoo. (He also made a coke-snorting motion at one point, though I can’t remember when. It might have been when Carradine said that an entire day’s worth of work was unusable because too much dust in the Dust Bowl scenes made the shots impenetrably murky, which Wexler was not buying at all.) Setting the stage for the next battle, Carradine waxes enthusiastic over the use of a hidden “suitcase camera” that allowed the crew to get great takes of the extras in the camp scenes, unaware that they were being filmed. This is when Wexler really begins to take offense again, thinking that Carradine is trying to give the camera operators credit for his work.
Carradine: “We had this incredible guy… Do you remember the name of the guy that was the handheld camera guy, that used the suitcase camera?”
Wexler (rising to righteous indignation): “Do I remember it? How do you think it got in this film, David? Who do you think planned it? Who did the shots? Look it, David, you fuckin’…”
Carradine: “I’m not talking about credit, I’m just asking for the guy’s name.”
“Wait a second, David…”
“What did I do? I just asked for the guy’s name.”
“Do they know what a director of photography does… ” Wexler goes on to list all the collaborative relationships a cinematographer has with other crew key members. “Hearing David with his explanations about all these cameras and the suitcase camera… Where the hell did you get all this expertise?”
Carradine (drolly): “Uh, I was there. My only question was, what’s the name of that guy who operated the suitcase camera?
“YOU WERE IN THE TRAILER TILL YOU GOT CALLED OUT!”
“Do you know it?”
“I didn’t come here for combat,” Wexler announces, deliberately, “but I also didn’t come out here to be demeaned for what my contribution to that film is.”
“Okay, anyway, since he doesn’t know the name of the guy,” Carradine goes on, getting a dig in, “he had a suitcase that had a camera in it and he could push it and make it go… ” Haskell buries his face in his hands as Carradine goes on a bit more about the glories of the suddenly contentious suitcase camera, which was so brilliantly operated by whatsisname.
Wexler: “I’m gonna give up now. First of all, half the shots in [those scenes] were not from the suitcase…”
Carradine: “Half of ’em!”
Wexler: “David, I don’t know if I can take any more of this bull.”
There is a very pregnant silence. Then Carradine picks up his guitar and starts into a long rendition of Bound for Glory’s title song, urging the audience to join in. There is a bare minimum of singing and clapping, but the audience is a little too stunned, if not alienated, for a “Kumbaya” moment.
Carradine starts packing up his guitar, a process that mysteriously seems to go on for minutes as the actor tries to put a more gracious cap on the evening. “We never agreed, we’re sort of like enemies, but the fact is, I know his fuckin’ talent, and I know his drive and insistence on making the movie the way it was that got him his Academy Award…. I wish that I’d been able to work with you again. The fact that we don’t get along has nothing to do with it, nothing whatsoever. I got along great with your kid! I’m honored to be here. And anybody else that ever wants to do an event for Bound for Glory, I’ll be there.”
And I’m pretty sure Wexler and Cox won’t.
Just in time to send everyone home, Kevin Thomas finds his voice: “I must say, I’ve got some fresh insights into the collaborative effort of filmmaking.” It’s an arch comment, but it has some truth to it. As the audience stands to regain its collective existential bearings, Wexler turns to Carradine and says, “I knew you would not disappoint,” and (incredibly, after the passions that have just transpired) they briefly hug.
Outside on Montana Ave., clusters of attendees form. Metaphorically, or maybe literally, I think we’re all just trying to pat down the hair that’s been standing on end for the last hour. “Between the aggressive panelists and audience and a moderator who wouldn’t stop anything, it was a perfect storm,” announces one guy, gratefully, I think.
One stranger I catch up with on the corner says he found the entire experience to be a deeply uncomfortable immersion in unalloyed anxiety,; his friend counters that it was an exhilarating look past the usual curtain of Hollywood bullshit. Me, I have to go with… both. Either way, I suspect the 40 or 50 of us who stuck it out, like survivors of some massive accident, will be invisibly bonded in forever hereafter experiencing reality through a slightly different, somehow more knowing prism than the untraumatized loved ones to whom we return.
The ruins of Detroit on Time‘s site and also the French reliques site: An HE reader called “x” asks, “Why not have Hollywood film all of its post-apocalyptic movies there? It would make money for Detroit, and it’s got to be even cheaper than filming in Canada. You don’t even have to build the sets before you burn them.”
Clint Eastwood and his latest film Gran Torino are being honored tonight by the Santa Barbara Film Festival. (It’ll be my last SBFF event as I need to return to L.A. tomorrow morning.) It led me, in any case, to some quick surfing and this S. James Snyder Time piece that ran on 1.26. Three days ago!
“At some point this week, Gran Torino will pass the $100 million mark, easily surpassing the box-office receipts brought in by not only some of the Oscar front-runners (Slumdog Millionaire now totals $56 million, Milk $21 million) but also Eastwood’s last Oscar winner, Million Dollar Baby.
“‘It’s an amazing story that no one’s really talking about,’ says Paul Dergarabedian, box-office analyst with Hollywood.com. ‘For a movie starring a 78-year-old to have a $29 million opening weekend in wide release, and in the process to beat out the likes of Anne Hathaway in Bride Wars, I don’t know if I’ve seen that before. It’s a testament to how people still feel about Clint Eastwood.”
“Originally released Dec. 12 in only six theaters and hyped by Warner Bros. as a major-awards contender, the film won Eastwood early recognition by the National Board of Review as Best Actor, but that’s been the exception to the rule. At the glitzy Golden Globes, Gran Torino was mentioned in just one category: original song. When the Oscar nominees were unveiled last week, Gran Torino was shut out of the competition completely.
“It is certainly one of the least likely blockbusters in some time. Starring Eastwood as a crotchety widower living in Detroit’s Highland Park neighborhood — a veteran of the Korean War who eyes his Hmong neighbors suspiciously and launches into racist tirades when provoked — Gran Torino was filmed on location in a mere five weeks on a slim budget of $35 million. The majority of its Hmong characters were played by nonprofessionals. In addressing such tumultuous issues as racial strife, gang warfare and urban blight, it can hardly be categorized as escapist entertainment.
“The film confronts issues that are very timely, from racial violence to economic struggles. It’s a working-class world that we may not see all that often in blockbusters, but it’s something a good many people can relate to,” says Karie Bible, an analyst with Exhibitor Relations.
“Surely Eastwood could not have predicted, when he first set out to make the film, that Detroit’s economic woes would be making national headlines by the time Gran Torino arrived in theaters (his character is a retired Ford assembly-plant worker), nor that the movie would be launching into wide release the same day the U.S. government released the darkest unemployment report in 16 years.
“Audiences, though, have embraced the film’s realism. Bible’s firm projects that the title will soar north of $150 million before it leaves theaters — making Gran Torino the biggest haul ever for an Eastwood film. By then, it may well pass the box-office totals posted last year by such summer tent poles as Mamma Mia!, The Incredible Hulk and Sex and the City.
“‘Slumdog and The Wrestler are these Cinderella stories that have overshadowed Gran Torino, and yet here is another Cinderella story all its own,’ Dergarabedian says. ‘You look at Eastwood, and here he is directing Changeling, which got Angelina Jolie her Oscar nomination, and starring in this blockbuster where he proves again that he’s one of the biggest box-office stars. To become a leading man again at 78, I think it’s a story that’s unparalleled in cinema.’
“Eastwood has been quoted as saying that this could mark his last outing as an actor. If that’s true, he will be going out on top.”
“Over the years, Detroit bosses kept repeating, ‘We have to make the cars people want.’ That’s why they’re in trouble. Their job is to make the cars people don’t know they want but will buy like crazy when they see them. I would have been happy with my Sony Walkman had Apple not invented the iPod. Now I can’t live without my iPod. I didn’t know I wanted it, but Apple did. Same with my Toyota hybrid.” — Thomas L. Friedman in his 12.14 N.Y. Times column.
The N.Y. Times‘ Manohla Dargis and Wall Street Journal‘s “JoMo” Morgenstern are the latest elite-print-critics-who-still-have-a-job to join the Gran Torino horn tootin’ street parade.
“Twice in the last decade, just as the holiday movie season has begun to sag under the weight of its own bloat, full of noise and nonsense signifying nothing, Clint Eastwood has slipped another film into theaters and shown everyone how it’s done,” Dargis starts off. “This year’s model is Gran Torino, a sleek, muscle car of a movie Made in the U.S.A., in that industrial graveyard called Detroit. I’m not sure how he does it, but I don’t want him to stop.
“Not because every film is great — though, damn, many are — but because even the misfires show an urgent engagement with the tougher, messier, bigger questions of American life.
“Few Americans make movies about this country anymore, other than Mr. Eastwood, a man whose vitality as an artist shows no signs of waning, even in a nominally modest effort like Gran Torino.
“Dirty Harry is back, in a way, in [this film], not as a character but as a ghostly presence. He hovers in the film, in its themes and high-caliber imagery, and of course most obviously in Mr. Eastwood’s face.
“It is a monumental face now, so puckered and pleated that it no longer looks merely weathered, as it has for decades, but seems closer to petrified wood. Words like flinty and steely come to mind, adjectives that Mr. Eastwood, in his performance as Walt Kowalski, expressively embodies with his usual lack of fuss and a number of growls.”
Morgenstern begins his review thusly: “No one makes movies like Gran Torino any more, and more’s the pity. This one, with Clint Eastwood as director and star, is concerned with honor and atonement, with rough justice and the family of man. It raises irascibility to the level of folk art, takes unapologetic time-outs for unfashionable moral debates, revives acting conventions that haven’t been in fashion for half a century and keeps you watching every frame as Mr. Eastwood snarls, glowers, mutters, growls and grins his way through the performance of a lifetime.
Gran Torino “is a meditation, as affecting as it is entertaining, on the limits of violence and the power of unchained empathy. It seems to be exactly the movie [Eastwood] wanted to make at this point in his long career. It is defiantly old-fashioned, and occasionally, albeit endearingly, self-indulgent. Most of all it’s heartfelt, and for me the feeling was mutual.”
No offense, but the people who’ve been slamming Gran Torino have their heads up their posterior cavities. Or maybe just broomsticks. They sure don’t seem to understand the legend and the mythology of director-star Clint Eastwood, which is what this film is mainly about (apart from the sections having to do with love, caring, guilt, moral growth and father-son relations). But to watch and fail to get this thing is to admit to a failing — a void — in your own moviegoing heart. Anyone who mocks this film, I mock them back double.
Set in a lower middle-class Detroit neighborhood, Gran Torino is a plain, straight, unpretentious…okay, a tiny bit hokey-here-and-there racial-relations drama by way of an older conservative sensibility — Clint’s, obviously, but also, it seemed to me, John McCain‘s. Get off my lawn, etc. McCain needs to see it and review it for the Huffington Post — seriously. That would be perfect.
It’s an old-fashioned film in that the pacing is gradual and methodical in a good 1962 way, but primarily this is a clean, disciplined, older-guy’s urban western — a kind of growly, sardonic, at times lightly comedic racial-relationship drama. But also a sad and fatalistic Shane movie about a morally compromised guy facing down the baddies at the finale. Light and darkish, brusque and kindly, spitting up blood. Old-guy angst, doubt, warmth, uncertainty, fear-of-death, fear-of-life, family– the whole magillah. What’s to dislike?
Popcorn-wise, this is a doddering Dirty Harry vs. evil-ass gangbangers conflict piece, except it takes its time getting to the Big Showdown parts and there aren’t that many of them to begin with. Like Shane, GT keeps the guns holstered and makes every shot count.
But the confrontation scenes in this vein are awfully damn satisfying because we’re watching the same old Harry, a little weathered but just as fierce as he was nearly 40 years ago, standing up and refusing to take any shit from any cheap-ass punks. But at the same time Walt Kowalski — i.e., Clint’s character — is the kind of guy who’s always letting slight little shafts of light in as he deals with and talks to others. The kind of light, I mean, that comes in odd underhanded ways. Blunt honesty, kindliness, vulnerability, consideration, and tender-gruff father-son conversations, etc. Tough sentiment, but not sentimentality.
Either you get and cherish the Clint thing, or you don’t get and cherish the Clint thing. There’s no third way. Either you understand that he makes films that sound a certain way, share a certain pictorial signature, are cut a certain way and unfold at a certain pace — the same way Unforgiven, Million Dollar Baby, Letters From Iwo Jima, The Bridges of Madison County and all the rest of them played, looked and unfolded — or you don’t understand that.
I understand that. I got it. I admired it. Gran Torino knows itself, is true to itself. And there’s nothing the least bit embarassing or short-fally or Razzie about it. Not in the least. David Poland, hang your head.
Under-30s are advised to stay away. Seriously — you’ll just be wasting your time. Especially younger women. But over 35, over 40 and especially over 50 types are welcome. Guys who’ve been around for the long Clint ride and know what it’s always been about I’ve seen it twice now and GT is about as good as this sort of thing can get. You just have to know what “this sort of thing” really and truly means — the deep-down content and perimeters of it, I mean.
I’ll get into this film again tomorrow, most likely. The other actors, the jokes, the warmth moments — there’s a lot that’s rich and rewarding in this film.
Is Clint’s performance likely to draw a Best Actor nomination? Most likely, yeah. Partly a gold-watch thing, partly for the acting itself. The current inside his acting is quite strong, his whole life running through it. It’ll feel weird if a nomination doesn’t happen — put it that way.
Roger Ebert has posted one of the most persuasive, alarming, and best-written laments about the death of serious print film criticism, and the cancerous spread of trashy celebrity gossip-mongering. It’s Thanksgiving Day, we’ve got the time — here’s the whole article. Read it as the glory that was newsprint Rome burns to the ground.
“A newspaper film critic is like a canary in a coal mine. When one croaks, get the hell out. The lengthening toll of former film critics acts as a poster child for the self-destruction of American newspapers, which once hoped to be more like the New York Times and now yearn to become more like the National Enquirer. We used to be the town crier. Now we are the neighborhood gossip.
“The crowning blow came this week when the once-magisterial Associated Press imposed a 500-word limit on all of its entertainment writers. The 500-word limit applies to reviews, interviews, news stories, trend pieces and “thinkers.” Oh, it can be done. But withSynecdoche, New York?
“Worse, the AP wants its writers on the entertainment beat to focus more on the kind of brief celebrity items its clients apparently hunger for. The AP, long considered obligatory to the task of running a North American newspaper, has been hit with some cancellations lately, and no doubt has been informed what its customers want: Affairs, divorces, addiction, disease, success, failure, death watches, tirades, arrests, hissy fits, scandals, who has been ‘seen with’ somebody, who has been ‘spotted with’ somebody, and ‘top ten’ lists of the above.
“The CelebCult virus is eating our culture alive, and newspapers voluntarily expose themselves to it. It teaches shabby values to young people, festers unwholesome curiosity, violates privacy, and is indifferent to meaningful achievement. [Access Hollywood] has announced it will cover the Obama family as ‘a Hollywood story.’ I want to smash something against a wall.
“In Toots, a new documentary about the legendary Manhattan saloon keeper Toots Shor, there is a shot so startling I had to reverse the DVD to see it again. After dinner, Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe leave the restaurant, give their ticket to a valet, wait on the curb until their car arrives, tip the valet and then Joe opens the car door for Marilyn, walks around, gets in, and drives them away.
“This was in the 1950s. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have not been able to do that once in their adult lifetimes. Celebrities do not use limousines because of vanity. They use them as a protection against cannibalism.
“As the CelebCult triumphs, major newspapers have been firing experienced film critics. They want to devote less of their space to considered prose, and more to ignorant gawking. What they require doesn’t need to be paid for out of their payrolls. Why does the biggest story about Twilight involve its fans? Do we need interviews with 16-year-old girls about Robert Pattinson? When was the last time they read a paper? Isn’t the movie obviously about sexual abstinence and the teen fascination with doomy Goth death-flirtation?
“The age of film critics has come and gone. While the big papers on the coasts always had them (Bosley Crowther at the New York Times, Charles Champlin at the Los Angeles Times), many other major dailies had rotating bylines anybody might be writing under (“Kate Cameron” at the New York Daily News, “Mae Tinay” at the Chicago Tribune — get it?).
“Judith Crist changed everything at the New York Herald-Tribune when she panned Cleopatra (1963) and was banned from 20th Century-Fox screenings. There was a big fuss, and suddenly every paper hungered for a “real” movie critic. The Film Generation was upon us.
“In the coverage of new directors and the rediscovery of classic films, no paper was more influential than the weekly Village Voice, with such as Andrew Sarris and Jonas Mekas. Earlier this year the Voice fired Dennis Lim and Nathan Lee, and recently fired all the local movie critics in its national chain, to be replaced, Variety’s Anne Thompson reported, by syndicating their critics on the two coasts, the Voice’s J. Hoberman and the L.A. Weekly ‘s Scott Foundas. Serious writers, yes, but…
“Meanwhile, the Detroit Free-Press has decided it needs no film critic at all. Michael Wilmington is gone from the Chicago Tribune, Jack Mathews and Jami Bernard from the New York Daily News, Kevin Thomas from the Los Angeles Times — and the internationally-respected film critic of the Chicago Reader, Jonathan Rosenbaum, has retired, accepted a buy-out, will write for his blog, or something. I still see him at all the screenings.
“My shining hero remains Stanley Kauffmann of The New Republic, as incisive and penetrating as ever at 92. I don’t give him points for his age, which anyone can attain simply by living long enough, but for his criticism. Study any review and try to find a wrong or unnecessary word. There is your man for an intelligent 500-word review.
“Why do we need critics? A good friend of mine in a very big city was once told by his editor that the critic should ‘reflect the taste of the readers.’ My friend said, ‘Does that mean the food critic should love McDonald’s?’ The editor: ‘Absolutely.’ I don’t believe readers buy a newspaper to read variations on the Ed McMahon line, ‘You are correct, sir!’ A newspaper film critic should encourage critical thinking, introduce new developments, consider the local scene, look beyond the weekend fanboy specials, be a weatherman on social trends, bring in a larger context, teach, inform, amuse, inspire, be heartened, be outraged.
“The celebrity culture is infantilizing us. We are being trained not to think. It is not about the disappearance of film critics. We are the canaries. It is about the death of an intelligent and curious readership, interested in significant things and able to think critically. It is about the failure of our educational system. It is not about dumbing-down — it is about snuffing out.
“The news is still big. It’s the newspapers that got small.”
Five days ago Mitt Romney wrote a N.Y. Times Op-Ed that made great sense, saying in essence that the Big 3 Detroit car manufacturers have to do a major overhaul (including the removal of General Motors’ Richard Wagoner, Chrysler’s Robert Nardelli and Ford’s Alan Mulally) before the government can begin to think about helping out.
I was amazed to find myself in total agreement with Romney of all people, who had done nothing but anger and irritate me all through the primary campaign season. He basically said the auto industry needs to hire some Steve Jobs-type guys to streamline and revamp, and that means the Big 3 dickwads need to go.
And once it became known that Wagoner, Nardelli and Mulally had flown to Washington, D.C., in three separate corporate jets, I channelled Frank Pentangeli in that Lake Tahoe scene in The Godfather, Part II. “I want those Rosotto brothers dead,” he told Al Pacino‘s Michael Corleone. “No,” snapped Pacino. “Morte,” Pantengeli said again.
A very moving report from N.Y. Times columnist Bob Herbert about reactions among Detroit-residing African Americans to Barack Obama‘s nomination acceptance speech.
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