“I’ve seen 10 Sundance films in the last two days,” an exhibitor friend confides, “and the the highlight so far, unquetionably, has been Steve Buscemi’s Lonesome Jim, which is one of the most beautiful odes to a pathetic human life ever put to screen. It’s a breakthrough vehicle for star Casey Affleck.
“The only thing the film has against it is a horribly cheap look as a result of being shot on shit-level video. It might have been the projection at the press screening but given that most things in there have been projected digitally, I somehow doubt it. Try and check it out (although, thinking about it further, you might really hate it).”
“I thought Marcos Siega’s Pretty Persuasion was PRETTY FUCKING HIDEOUS. Trying so hard to be another Election/Heathers/To Die For — truly awful characters and a terrible, try-too-hard script. Performances were actually okay but it’s not going to take.” Wells reaction: Seeing it Monday, but heard from one journo friend that it’s “awful,” and another that it’s “okay” but not quite good enough and a little too familiar. It’s fairly raunchy in terms of dialogue and sexual stuff. Visiting costar James Woods was telling friends at a Main Street party on Friday night that “I don’t know how we’re going to get a rating.”
“Rian Johnson’s Brick is worth seeing, if only to lock in the director as definitely a talent to watch. The idea (high school noir, Sam Spade in high school) is quite brilliant, although it outstays its welcome. I have a feeling the film could grow into a little sleeper in the Donnie Darko fashion — there’s a lot to admire and enjoy.” Wells reaction: Bullshit — it’s a clever little film, and accurately reflects the way 16 and 17 year-olds see their world, which is to say totally separate from adults and utterly caught up in their narrow social spectrum, but it’s too smug for its own good.
“Scott Coffey’s Elllie Parker is awful and indulgent — I left after an hour. Wells reaction: Haven’t sen it yet, but the general reaction has been that it’s little bit like episodic TV and not good enough, although star Naomi Watts is said to be excellent. (She always is.)
“Dear`Wendy is pretty interesting until the last half hour when it goes off
the rails. Lars von Trier (who wrote the screenplay, and you can so totally tell) isn’t going to win any more friends in America. I feel like he was nutting out a lot of the ideas he went on to explore in Manderlay. Wells reaction : I felt this wasn’t working from the get-go, and I left after an hour or so. I’ll have more to say in Monday’s column.
“I heard good things about Murderball — seeing it later in the week. The two documentaries I saw tonight, Protocls of Zion and Ring of Fire were both, in their own ways, quite excellent.
“Logger heads is minor — it went on forever and has a very confusing time structure. I’m guessing it will probably go straight to the Sundance Channel and/or play at gay film festivals.”
Sick at Sundance
I started to fall ill Wednesday evening — coughing, congestion — and I felt sicker all day Thursday. I did a lot of sleeping, drank a lot of water. And on top of this, I discovered Wednesday night that the phone in the condo I’m staying in has been shut off, so there’s been no internet (and the phone won’t be turned back on until Friday morning…great).
But at least I managed to drop by the Sundance Film Festival headquarters Thursday morning to pick up my press pass, along with three ‘loaner’ tapes of Sundance flicks. I went back to the condo (right behind the Radisson Hotel) and watched them between naps. One sucked, but two were quite good.
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Greg Mclean’s Wolf Creek, which has been picked up by Dimension, is dark as shit, but it’s a knockout. It’s going to be a sizable hit when it opens this summer, and for good reason. It’s well made, genuinely scary and very believable.
Shown as part of the just-begun World Dramatic Competition, it will have its first festival showing on Monday evening, and will also screen Tuesday and Wednesday. If you’re in town, don’t miss it.
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The theme of this way-above-average horror flick is basically ‘watch yourself when you go on a trip to an outlying area, because it’s entirely possible that you might run into a degenerate homicidal wack-jobber.’ Especially in the Aussie wasteland, where there doesn’t seem to be any kind of civilized anything, much less a visible police force.
The Wolf Creek rundown is that three late-twentysomethings from Sydney (Nathan Phillips, Cassandra Magrath, Kestie Morassi) run into one of these hayseed nutbags during a camping trip to the outback.
The fiend (deliriously well played by John Jarrat) is a good-natured yokel type with a vaguely charming, wholly diseased personality. The more ghastly his actions, the more he chuckles. He’s like the
bad-seed cousin of Crocodile Dundee who’s gone crazy from loneliness and who probably smells like a dog and farts 24/7.
One of Jarrat’s better lines, spoken during an extremely dark moment, is straight from the first Dundee film.
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His coming is expertly foreshadowed by Mclean when the two-girls-and-a-guy meet up with another outback psycho at a roadside rest stop. You can feel the awful stuff approaching from this scene on.
Scene for scene, there’s very little that feels formulaic in Wolf Creek (apart from the boiler-plate borrowings from Deliverance, The Last House on the Left and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre).
There are always those in any audience who say they can predict what will happen, or who always claim after-the-fact that they saw it coming. Trust me, there’s no predicting where this film is going. I was genuinely shocked at two third-act plot turns.
Nothing that happens seems conventionally movie-ish, which is partly due to the fact that Mclean based his screenplay on a true story.
My only beef is that it’s hard to understand a lot of the dialogue during the first half. Those ‘strine accents can be mothers. When Miramax puts the DVD out, they should include optional subtitles.
Peter Raymont’s Shake Hands with the Devil: The Journey of Romeo Dallaire is a documentary companion piece to Terry George’s Hotel Rwanda…or vice versa.
I liked and was moved by Hotel Rwanda, but the doc is sadder, deeper, more affecting. Raymond is a bit more of a visual poet than George. He pays attention to Rwanda’s natural beauty, for one thing, and I don’t mean just the landscapes but the feeling in the eyes of the natives. There’s a quietly focused tone in Shake Hands with the Devil that somehow conveys a fuller absorption of the overall.
Dallaire is a former U.N. peacekeeping commander who went through all kinds of hell and torment during the 1994 Rwandan massacre (he was played, so to speak, by Nick Nolte in Rwanda) as he tried — without much effect — to maintain order and do something to contain the slaughter.
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Dallaire feels guilty about this failure, but he was under-funded and under-supported by the U.N., and he doesn’t seem to be a guy who has ever dodged a tough situation. Decency and compassion seem like natural components in his DNA.
The doc was shot last year when Dallaire revisited Rwanda for a ten-year memorial anniversary of the horror. Raymont explains the background of the Hutu-vs.-Tutsi hatred, somewhat. But he never just says (as I feel he should have) that the Tutsis were, for the most part, better educated, jacket-and-tie types with ties to the Belgian colonialists, and that the Hutu killers were basically disenfranchised yahoo rednecks.
Bill Clinton is ridiculed for having said during a visit to Rwanda (i.e., years after the killings) that he didn’t fully grasp the degree of the savagery that was happening during April and May of ’94. An outspoken talking-head authority says in no uncertain terms this is total bunk.
There are supposed to be a couple of decent sex scenes in Hal Hartley’s The Girl from Monday, and this, frankly, is why I wanted to see it. I respect Hartley but his films have always bored me, and this one is true to form. No, it’s worse.
The story is some kind of futuristic political thing, and there’s no energy or tension to any of it. Or rather, the portions of the film that I saw. I was feverish, remember, and I was sitting in a big fat leather easy chair. I just wanted to see the actresses take their clothes off, but I nodded off a couple of times and missed the good stuff.
Early Talk
I heard two tips at a Wednesday evening dinner party in Deer Valley. Take ’em with a grain.
One, forget Kevin Bacon’s Loverboy, a drama about twisted motherhood that will show at the Eccles on Monday evening and at the Library on Tuesday afternoon. I√ɬØ√Ǭø√ǬΩm sorry to pass this along, but a guy who saw it earlier this week told me it’s too gloomy and sluggish.
This was a sales guy talking, however, so maybe David Edelstein, Charles Taylor or Armond White will like it.
And two, I was told I should catch David LaChappelle’s Rize, which is said to be crappy on a story level but apparently has some heat as a dance film…you know, on an anthropologically vital, life-in-the-here-and-now vein.
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It’s basically about ‘krumping,’ a South Central dance phenomenon that involves super- quick body gyrations, and various dancers competing with each other, etc.
Shot on a Sony High-def camera, LaChapelle�s 84-minute feature is based upon his 24- minute documentary short, Krumped, which showed at Slamdance two or three years ago.
The idea is that kids of a wayward, egoistic persuasion are more into krumping than gang-banging. Krumping is their voice, their expression…whatever, dawg.
An acquisitions guy who claimed to be on vaguely familiar terms with L.A. clubbing said that Rize (which is pronounced ‘rise’) has an aliveness that will work with younger African-American audiences, but his colleagues didn’t agree with him so that was that.
I was telling people at the party that Craig Brewer’s Hustle and Flow, one of the festival’s most hotly anticipated films (said to feature a lead breakout performance by Terrence Howard), kept blurring in my mind with Rattle and Hum , the Phil Joanu U2 concert film, and Shake, Rattle and Roll.
I suppose the blur will go away when I see Hustle at a Saturday afternoon press screening and it takes root on its own terms, but until then…
Snaps
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View of Deer Valley from swanky Solamere Drive chalet being rented by Paramount Classics co-president Ruth Vitale. I love that digital cameras can capture this much light and detail after dark. If I were to manipulate further I could probably whiten the snow a bit more.
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Second-floor living room — Thursday, 1.20.05, 1:27 pm.
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View from rear porch of condo — Thursday, 1.20.05, 1:30 pm.
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An unruly desk indicates a creative mind — Thursday, 1.20.05, 1:33 pm.
Protest Paris!
An e-mailed press release announced earlier this week that the dreaded Paris Hilton is supposed to attend tonight’s party for Rize at the Gateway Center (at 136 Heber), which starts around 9:30 or 10 pm.
I sent the following e-mail off to a couple of people who are repping the party:
“If it’s okay with you guys, I am going to try and organize a mass boycott of the Rize premiere party, preceded by a march down Main Street (complete with chants, torches and picket signs), all to protest the appearance of Paris Hilton at the Sundance Film Festival.
“Lloyd Grove at the New York Daily News started something, I think, when he promised a few weeks ago that he would no longer write about Paris. I believe her to be this year’s symbol of everything rancid, glossy, overblown and spiritually screwed-up about the Sundance Film Festival…or what it’s become, rather.
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“Will Paris in fact be at this party? If so, could you ask her to autograph my picket sign? And why haven’t I been invited to the party instead of being sent this entirely demeaning invitation to ‘cover’ the party?√ɬØ√Ǭø√ǬΩ
One of the publicists responded by saying, “I am sure Paris would sign it if you agreed to run a photo of her doing it.”
I am half serious about protesting her presumed appearance. A lot of people out there despise what she seems to be, and certainly what she represents. Do a Google search of �protest Paris Hilton� and you�ll see what I mean.
I guess there’s no point in this anti-Paris venting. We should just be good sheep and lie down and continue to take pictures of the rich and powerful and watch them on tabloid TV. Wherever they go, whatever they are.
In any case, the aesthetic problem presented by the appearance of leeches and ding-a-lings at the festival has been geographically solved.
It’s been clear for the last two or three years that there are two Sundance festivals. The one about movies and people who matter happens at the Marriott, the Eccles, the Library, the Yarrow, the Holiday Village and the Racquet Club. And the one that’s about parties, corporate piggybackers and GenX binge-drinkers happens on Park City’s Main Street.
Other expected “guests” at tonight’s Rize party include Pamela Anderson, Snoop Dogg, Steven Dorff, Erika Christiansen and Busy Philipps.
Where is Al Qeada when you really need them?
Maneuvers
You’d think that a rented Park City condo would have a working phone, at the very least for local (internet service provider, medical emergency) calls. You’d think that between the owner and the renter, somebody would ask about this or explain or something. Think again.
When I called Thursday morning about needing to get the condo phone turned back on, the people at Qwest said they’d have to wait three business days to activate the line. That meant Monday afternoon at the earliest, or possibly Tuesday morning.
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The only way they could do it sooner, they said, would be if they were faxed a letter from a doctor saying it’s essential that I have a phone. I was feeling shitty anyway so I went down to the Park City Family Medical Clinic and saw a doctor (a nice woman named Eileen Price-Burke), and she agreed to write the letter to Qwest.
But I had to pay her fee of $115 plus $20 for a bottle of codeine cough syrup and $20 for an inhaler. The Qwest account cost $45 to get things rolling so the entire cost to get the phone turned on was about $200…not counting the stress.
The Qwest installation guy didn’t get here first thing Friday morning, like the dispatcher promised. He didn’t even show up in the ayem. Thanks, guys.
Nick and Neville
I’ve had this unformed thought about Nick Lachey for a long time, and it finally hit me last weekend: he’s Neville Brand.
A World War II hero with thick features, a gravelly voice and a street attitude, Brand mostly played heavies. One of his first decent roles was in Stalag 17 (�53), and he played Al Capone in the TV series The Untouchables.
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Lachey (pronounced “lashay”) is Jessica Simpson’s vaguely doltish husband who hangs around the house, bitches about day-to-day stuff and tries to get his music career rolling on Newlyweds , their MTV “reality” show.
Anyway, they’re more or less the same guy…right?
Check out the shot of Neville in a cowboy hat — that was taken in the late ’50s or early ’60s, when he was in his 40s. By the time Lachey is 40-plus he√ɬØ√Ǭø√ǬΩll also have that portly, beefed-up, potato-head look.
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Lachey should start playing bad guys. Right now he’s just a house-husband. In the next Newlyweds season Nick will reportedly “build a studio in his home, sign with Jive Records and works with his label to get his CD in stores,” etc. But all he’s seemed to do on the show so far is walk around in T-shirts and baggy shorts and sometimes help the delivery guys install a new refrigerator.
Note to readers: I’m totally aware of how shitty it looks for the Neville Brand and Nick Lachey photos to be differently sized.
Bad Press Computers
The flat-screen computers in the press room at the Sundance Marriott are unfriendly to journalists.
That’s because the person who set them up made sure that users can’t access the hard drive, which is what you need to do if you’re going to transmit text or JPEG’s off one of those portable USB drive doo-dads. The Marriott computers only let you surf the internet, meaning they’re almost totally worthless from a working point of view.
Thank fortune that the Intel people have a free business center (or press room) on the 2nd floor off the Yarrow hotel, with six or seven connected laptops and nothing preventing you from doing your job. They also have a wireless thing going so you can bring your laptop in and get online as long as you have a wireless card. This is Intel’s second year at the festival.
Parting Shot
This was taken from the back balcony of the condo around 10 ayem on Friday morning. Tourists take balloon rides all day long, apparently. This would probably be a very cool thing to do if you�re dressed for it.
Son of Enchilada
I guess ’05 isn’t going to be such a bad year after all.
I asked readers to suggest upcoming film titles to complement Wednesday’s piece about the year’s most promising features (“Whole ’05 Enchilada”), and I was reminded of a few good ones. The overall list of probable good’s to very good’s is now up to 23, and the list of maybe’s and wait-and-see’s is up to 10, for a grand total of 33.
I’ve broken the whole list down into three seasonal sections in an article that follows this one.
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I’ve added six films to the ’05 first-rate list (The Fountain, In Her Shoes, Lords of Dogtown, A Scanner Darkly, Shopgirl, Syriana) and seven to the second-tier.
Darren Aronofsky√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s The Fountain (Warner Bros., mid tolate √¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢05) A searching sci-fi thriller about a search for immortality via a mystical “tree of life” in Central America. Situation is explored in three different centuries, √¢‚Ǩ≈ìthe ultimate lesson being that death, as part of the process of rebirth, is to be embraced, not feared.√¢‚Ǩ¬ù (Those aren√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t my words.) Directed and written by Aronofsky. Cast : Hugh Jackman, Rachel Weisz, Ellen Burstyn, Sean Gullette, Sean Patrick Thomas, Donna Murphy.
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Curtis Hanson’s In Her Shoes (20th Century Fox, fall ’05) Said to be a “comedy drama,” directed by Hanson and written by Susannah Grant (Erin Brockovich), but it sure sounds like a chick flick to me. (Hanson- level, I mean.) Two motherless sisters (Cameron Diaz, Toni Collette) with a history of conflict stop speaking to each other when the more carefree and irresponsible one seduces the other’s boyfriend, but they eventually reconcile with the help of a grandmother Shirley Maclaine) they never knew they had. Cast: Diaz, Collette, Maclaine, Mark Fuerstein, Eric Balfour, Francine Beers.
Catherine Hardwicke’s Lords of Dogtown (Columbia, 6.10) A big studio’s token stab at street cred. Stacey Peralta wrote the script for this dramatization of his award-winning doc Dogtown and Z Boys, which told the story of the birth and growth of skateboarding, largely in southern California. Cast: Emiel Hirsch, Victor Rasuk, Heath Ledger, Nikki Reed, Rebecca de Mornay, Johnny Knoxville.
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Richard Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly (Warner Independent, 9.16) Another Waking Life-type animated thing from Richard Linklater, but this time with a futuristic sci-fi thriller plot. Based on a Philip K. Dick short story about an undercover cop (Keanu Reeves) who gets addicted to a split personality-inducing drug called Substance D. This leads to Reeve√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s good side sets up a sting operation with his superiors to catch his drug-dealer dark side. Cast : Reeves, Robert Downey Jr., Woody Harrelson, Wynona Ryder.
Steve Martin and Anand Ticker√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s Shopgirl (Touchstone, fall √¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢05) Based on Martin’s best-selling “Shopgirl,” about a fifty-something guy (Martin) falling in love with 20-something Mirabelle (Claire Danes), and the various turns and difficulties of the relationship that follows. Eventually, of course, a younger suitor (Jason Schwartzman) winnows his way into the picture. Cast: Martin, Danes, Schwartzman, Sam Bottoms, Frances Conroy, Bridgette Wilson-Sampras.
Stephen Gaghan√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s Syriana (Warner Bros, 7.29) A first-person account of the CIA’s false confidence concerning the future of Middle East after the end of the Cold War, based on Robert Baer√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s book See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA’s War on Terrorism, with George Clooney as Baer. Screenplay by Gaghan. Cast: Clooney, Chris Cooper, Matt Damon, Michelle Monaghan, David Clennon, Gina Gershon.
And seven possible’s, maybe’s, wait-and-see’s….
Oliver Assayas’ Clean (Palm Pictures, 9.05) Woman struggling to survive after her boyfriend dies from drug overdose, eventually hooks up with his dad. Didn’t hear much about this during Cannes ‘04. Cast: Maggie Cheung, Don McKellar, Nick Nolte, Beatrice Dalle.
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Steven Soderbergh, Michelangelo Antonioni and Wong Kar Wai’s Eros (Warner Independent, 4.8.05) Three-part anthology pic about love, lust, longing. Wong’s is about a high-end prostitute having it off with her tailor, Soderbergh’s is about ad exec Robert Downey exploring an erotic dream with psychiatrist Alan Arkin, and Antonioni’s is about a ménage-a-trois between a couple and a young woman on the coast of Tuscany. (Soderbergh stepped into project when pedro Almodovar dropped out.)
Liev Schreiber’s Everything Is Illuminated (Warner Independent, 8.12.05) I am struggling to suppress my negatives feelings about star Elijah Wood, whose moist-eyed Frodo performance in the Rings will live in infamy for decades. He plays a Jewish kid who goes to the Ukraine to find the woman who saved his granddad from the Nazis during WWII. √¢‚Ǩ≈ìNot your standard Holocaust tale,√¢‚Ǩ¬ù a reader informs, √¢‚Ǩ≈ìbut a complex story-within-a-story type deal, and I wonder if a first-time director like Liev Schreiber can pull it off.”
David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence (New Line, fall ’05) Said to be a thriller, but you never know with Cronenberg. Viggo Mortensen is a small-town family guy dealing with something really bad and having to consequently save his family from peril, blah, blah. Cast Ed Harris, Maria Bello, William Hurt, Ashton Holmes.
Atom Egoyan’s Where the Truth Lies (Thinkfilm, fall √¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢05) Based on Rupert Holme’s novel about the breakup of a 50’s comedy team (sort of Martin and Lewis-y, I gather) after a girl is found dead in their hotel room. A young female journalist goes after the truth, even though both comedians were off the hook with alibis. Cast: Kevin Bacon, Colin Firth, Alison Lohman. (The only problem is that while I√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢ll buy Alison Lohman as Nick Cage√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s pretend daughter in Matchstick Men, I can√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t buy her as a journalist — she looks and behaves too much like an actress. Her eyes are too dewy, too open to emotion. Female journalists I√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢ve known all have faces that say √¢‚Ǩ≈ìenough with the mushy stuff√¢‚Ǩ¬ù and √¢‚Ǩ≈ìlet√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s get down to it.√¢‚Ǩ¬ù)
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Out of dark curiosity if nothing else, I was going to put Rob Reiner’s Rumor Has It (Warner Bros., 4.15) down as a “maybe,” but despite the intriguing cast and all (Jennifer Aniston, Mark Ruffalo, Shirley MacLaine, Kevin Costner) this project has a bad-vibe, damaged-goods feeling. This is due to the guillotining of one-time director Ted Griffin early in the shoot (an act aided and abetted by producer Steven Soderbergh, Griffin’s former friend and supporter who turned against him or at least didn’t protect him when push came to shove) over issues of slowness and alleged bickering between Griffin and the stars.
Griffin√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s replacement by Rob Reiner, who brought in his own writers to tweak the script and in so doing imposing what I expect will be a mainstream-meathead imprint upon Griffin’s original script, added insult to injury.
All Together Now
I think I’ll start a Good Vibrations box at the bottom of the column with the following titles, and then start to put together a separate Oscar Balloon ’05 box as it all starts to coagulate. Which means, of course, that some titles will be added and some will be dropped, etc.
Like I said in Wednesday’s piece, with a few exceptions I’m ignoring all the broad, big-budget, mass-appeal studio films on the assumption that they’ll offend or disappoint in one way or another.
BEST OF JANUARY TO APRIL: Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato’s Inside Deep Throat (Universal, 2.11); Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker’s Gunner Palace (Palm Pictures, 3.4); Mike Binder’s The Upside of Anger (New Line, 3.11); Woody Allen’s Melinda and Melinda (Fox Searchlight, 3.18); Jonathan Nossiter’s Mondovino (Thinkfilm, 3.23); Gore Verbinski’s The Weather Man (Paramount, 4.1). Sydney Pollack’s The Interpreter (Universal, 4.22); Paul Haggis’s Crash (Lions Gate, 4.29). MAYBE√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢S: Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s Sin City (Dimension, 4.1); Steven Soderbergh, Michelangelo Antonioni and Wong Kar Wai√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s Eros (Warner Independent, 4.8.05). (10)
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BEST OF MAY TO AUGUST: Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven (20th Century Fox, 5.6); Ron Howard’s Cinderella Man (Universal, 6.3.05); Catherine Hardwicke√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s Lords of Dogtown (Columbia, 6.10); Cameron Crowe’s Elizabethtown (Paramount, 7.29); Stephen Gaghan√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s Syriana (Warner Bros, 7.29); Tony Scott’s Domino (New Line, August); Darren Aronofsky√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s The Fountain (Warner Bros., mid to late √¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢05). MAYBE√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢S: Doug Liman’s Mr. and Mrs. Smith (20th Century Fox, 6.10); John Stockwell√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s Into the Blue (MGM, 7.15); Liev Schreiber’s Everything Is Illuminated (Warner Independent, 8.12.05) (10)
BEST OF SEPTEMBER TO DECEMBER: Richard Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly (Warner Independent, 9.16); Terry Zwigoff’s Art School Confidential (UA, mid-fall); Robert Towne’s Ask the Dust (Paramount Classics, mid to late fall); Curtis Hanson√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s In Her Shoes (20th Century Fox, fall √¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢05); Steve Martin and Anand Ticker√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s Shopgirl (Touchstone, fall √¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢05) ; Sam Mendes’ Jarhead (DreamWorks, 11.11); Terrence Malick’s The New World (New Line, 11.9); Steven Zallian’s All The King’s Men (Columbia, November-December). MAYBE√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢S: Oliver Assayas√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢ Clean (Palm Pictures, 9.05); Bennett Miller’s Capote (United Artists, fall); David Cronenberg√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s A History of Violence (New Line, fall √¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢05) ; Atom Egoyan’s Where the Truth Lies (Thinkfilm, fall √¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢05); Terry Gilliam’s The Brothers Grimm (Miramax, 11.23). (13)
Man Near London
I was looking yesterday at the VHS trailer for Ron Howard√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s Cinderella Man (Universal, 6.3) and agreeing with the general consensus that it looks solid — well-acted, well-organized — and enjoying the vague sepia-tone shadings in the color photography, when this letter from a London reader I√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢ve heard from before, Poly Giannaba, came through.
Now, she could be a studio “plant” (it happens) but it would be awfully tricky and rather elaborate of some Universal/Imagine guy to try and send along a rave from way over there. Plus a planted review would probably be more explicit that what Poly has provided in terms of plot and scene descriptions.
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√¢‚Ǩ≈ìI just saw Cinderella Man in a test screening a couple of weeks ago, and in my opinion the online trailer doesn’t do it justice. The trailer looks a bit soft, and the film feels leaner and more confident, and is very involving.
√¢‚Ǩ≈ìIt’s hard to tell with these things but I think that all three actors (Russell Crowe, Renee Zellweger, Paul Giamatti) will get Oscar nominations. It has gorgeous photography and almost a kind of documentary feel in places. The boxing action is exciting and brutal, but also emotionally relevant to the story.
√¢‚Ǩ≈ìThe film literally starts with a punch near the end of the 1920s, when Jim Braddock’s (Crowe) star is ascending. And so the scene is set, both in the ring and in his domestic life. Things are looking very good and then there is a very nice, simple and effective transition to a few years later, when things are totally different.√¢‚Ǩ¬ù
Poly doesn’t spill, but any Braddock website will tell you he lost a fifteen-round decision to Tommy Loughran in 1929, and that the combination of this and the 1929 stock market crash made things tough for Braddock and his family over the next two or three years.
√¢‚Ǩ≈ìThat first scene, when we first see the change of fortune, is a different kind of punch, all the more upsetting because there is a sense of normality about it. The whole film is like that — neither the direction nor the acting tries to emphasize that what we√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢re seeing is extraordinary or appalling. Things speak for themselves.
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√¢‚Ǩ≈ìThe first part of the film is mostly about Braddock√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s day-to-day struggle and keeping his head above water. My stomach felt cold, like lead — it really hits you. That first part might need some trimming — not to lose any one scene but to make it all play tighter.
√¢‚Ǩ≈ìWhen Braddock starts to win, it’s still about the day-to-day struggle. At no point does he want to win in order to celebrate himself. It’s still about keeping the family together and the children fed and warm. It’s great seeing a film hero who isn’t self involved.
√¢‚Ǩ≈ìThen the interest shifts a bit, and you want to know why Braddock keeps fighting when the consequences are potentially devastating. Max Baer, his final opponent, had killed two men in the ring. When Braddock articulates the reasons for wanting to fight, it’s a great moment, both simple and powerful.
√¢‚Ǩ≈ìThe final fight is long and brutal. I heard some people say that it’s too long but I didn’t think so. That’s the whole point — the beating isn’t over quickly and you have to feel it. The result of the fight is almost irrelevant, but it’s not flashy and it feels very good. Ron Howard doesn’t overstay the moment and the final sequence of brief scenes, each one freezing to create a photograph, is aesthetically fantastic and genuinely sweet.
“The version we saw was 2 hours and 20 minutes, with no credits. It seemed to me like 90 minutes.
√¢‚Ǩ≈ìThe boxing scenes are thrilling — directed, played and edited to perfection. I can’t remember boxing in any other film being both so physical and so integral to the emotional life of what it’s about.
“The film has a great sense of time and place, which has, in part, something to do with the color. Thinking back, I remember it as black and white.
√¢‚Ǩ≈ìCrowe plays Braddock like the everyday man, very quiet but direct. Very few actors can inhabit characters with such inner conviction. I don√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t always like Zellweger, but she√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s very earthy here, doesn’t try too hard and looks great as a brunette.
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√¢‚Ǩ≈ìIt’s great to see Giamatti with a really good role in a mainstream film. The part is big, he doesn’t play a loser and his relationship with Braddock is at least as vital as Zellweger’s. He has great chemistry with Crowe. His explosiveness works great with Crowe’s stillness — kind of a yin-yang thing.
“The test screening was at Kingston upon Thames, a little town outside London, on 12.16.
“The company that organized it was First Movies (www.firstmovies.com). I was surprised that they had a test screening in the U.K. but I wasn’t going to complain.
√¢‚Ǩ≈ìThe cinema was full, about 300 people. Very diverse crowd. The fact that several rows were filled with teenagers didn’t make me happy before the film started, as I didn’t think they would sit still for the whole film. I was wrong — they seemed as involved as everyone else.
√¢‚Ǩ≈ìI wasn’t part of the discussion group but all the people around me seemed to enjoy the film immensely. All the boxes I saw checked were √¢‚ǨÀúvery good√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢ and √¢‚ǨÀúexcellent.√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢ I can√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t wait to see it again.√¢‚Ǩ¬ù
I like the name Poly, which alludes in a left-field way to “poly-sci.”
Lamented Non-Merger
There are two Truman Capote movies coming — one from Warner Independent called Every Word is True that√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s just starting to shoot, and another from United Artists called Capote that√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢ll be out sometime in the fall.
The big draw of Bennett Miller’s Capote is Phillip Seymour Hoffman. You just know that performance will cook. Miller’s last film was the totally delightful Speed Levitch doc The Cruise. Capote’s script, based on Gerald Clarke’s “Capote,” was written by actor Dan Futterman, who’s a friend of Miller’s from high school.
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Every Word is True, which will have to race to be in theatres by year’s end, is being directed by Douglas McGrath, whose script is based upon George Plimpton’s bio “Truman Capote.” McGrath’s best-known credit is his co-authoring of Woody Allen’s Bullets Over Broadway. Toby Jones plays Capote, with support from Alan Cummings, Anjelica Huston and Sandra Bullock.
Capote has been dead since 1984. Clarke and Plimpton’s books came out in ’88 and ’97-‘98. Why is there a horse race between two filmed biopics now? Why do these same-subject duels always happen?
Or why didn’t the warring Capote teams simply merge assets? Jean Francois Allaire, who knows from good writing (as we’ve corresponded about this and that screenplay for years), has read McGrath’s and Futterman’s scripts, and has this to say:
√¢‚Ǩ≈ìCapote has a really good cast but the screenplay isn’t great. Every Word is True√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s screenplay is far superior. It’s a shame they couldn’t combine the projects together, as in taking Capote√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s A-List cast and folding it into Every Word is True.√¢‚Ǩ¬ù
Narration Beef
One of Netflix critic James Rocchi’s slams against Million Dollar Baby is that it leans on Morgan Freeman’s narration, which he says is usually a sign of weakness. In response to this, a guy who forgot to put his name at the bottom of his e-mail wrote me and said….
√¢‚Ǩ≈ìThe only thing more tired than narration is movie critics complaining about narration. It’s a shame Billy Wilder (Sunset Boulevard, Double Indemnity ), Joseph L. Mankiewicz (All About Eve), Terrence Malick (Badlands), Francis Ford Coppola (Apocalypse Now) and Alexander Payne (Election) didn’t trust their audiences. They might’ve made decent movies.√¢‚Ǩ¬ù
Bum Tsunami Pics
I just got back in this evening and everyone has written to tell me the tsunami pics I ran earlier today weren’t taken during the recent Asian tsunami, but happened some two years ago. Checking with www.snopes.com before putting them up would have been easy enough. And a decent money shot of the tsunami still hasn’t surfaced.
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Why Wait?
Million Dollar Baby is easily one of the finest films of the year and the most likely winner of the ’04 Best Picture Oscar. Why then have Warner Bros. execs been keeping it hidden from most of the nation since it opened limited two weeks and two days ago?
Some people I’ve spoken to say they’re playing it smart, but I don’t know.
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So far Baby has been showing in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco and Toronto only…and in precious few theatres at that. I’ve been telling friends around the country since I first saw it in late November that it’s the one to see, the emotional grabber with the art-film pedigree, etc.
But they can’t see it because they live in one of the hundreds of cities where it’s not playing — Danbury, Boston, Houston, Birmingham, Louisville, et. al.
The reason is that Warner Bros. marketing execs don’t really believe it will travel all that well with regular ticket buyers who’ve been prompted by the usual marketing efforts, so they’re waiting for the Academy nominations on 1.25 to nudge them into a state of receptivity.
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Moviegoers probably will be more interested in lining up after the expected happens, which would be nominations in most of the major categories– Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor (Clint Eastwood), Best Actress (Hillary Swank), Best Adapted Screenplay (Paul Haggis), Best Cinematography (Tom Stern), Best Musical Score (Eastwood) and so on.
But you’d think during a period when audiences flock to the plexes hoping to see a big year-end winner and, in one or two cases, dip into that communal emotional bath that goes with it, Warner Bros., having something fairly “big” and special on their hands, would want to supply this.
Eastwood’s boxing film is a critics darling, obviously, but it also seems to work with average audiences. (I’ve seen it with two paying audiences.) It has an unpretentious, un-fussed-with quality and appears to touch people where they live. Women especially.
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I’ve seen it separately with two 40ish women who aren’t exactly jaded cinephiles, and they were both obviously moved by the film, especially by the father-daughter relationship thing between Eastwood and Swank.
On the other hand…
“Right now the awareness of the film is dicey,” says Movie City News columnist and box-office reporter Len Klady. “I have to assume that people probably like the picture so far, but they’re also probably a little uncomfortable about it.”
Klady then went on to mention a certain third-act plot element which this story won’t get into. But he also speculated that among those who haven’t seen Baby , they’ve at least come to know Eastwood over time and know his films don’t usually peddle escapism and tend to lean towards darker material, and some might say to themselves, `Let’s see something lighter….for now.”
This may account for the fact that Baby has so far been playing well but not spectacularly in New York, Los Angeles, et. al.
“There’s something that just comes out of the pavement,” says Klady. “Intuitive feelings that come out of the atmosphere, like microbes…very quickly the country knows what a film is.”
There is nothing unwelcome or sluggishly downer-esque about Million Dollar Baby . What it is, inescapably, is a film that knows itself and leaves you with something fully realized and affecting. The only thing tempering the Baby business so far, I’m assuming, is that same old reliable American aversion to any movie that doesn’t appear to be upbeat escapism. People will always go first for the fizzy high.
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And so as the Xmas holidays approached, WB execs probably figured Baby wouldn’t do all that well against esteemed, high-quality competitors like Meet the Fockers, Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, In Good Company, Phantom of the Opera, etc.
And they sensed on some pavement level that audiences probably wouldn’t, in the last analysis, embrace Million Dollar Baby like the critics have, and the third- act wallop wouldn’t be quite enough to sell it, and they just didn’t want to risk it.
So they hedged and said, “Screw it…let’s wait for word to build, for knowledge about the critics awards to get around, for the Oscar nominations.” Why bet on viewer awareness and risk getting kicked around?
A week from today (9.7) Warner Bros. will finally be expanding Million Dollar Baby into some other cities and territories…modestly. I don’t know where exactly (WB distrib execs were holidaying and not picking up the phone), but some people in other areas of the country will get to see it.
The bigger breaks, I gather, will be on 1.21 and 1.28, just before and just after the Oscar noms are announced.
Say What You Want
Million Dollar Baby is the third best film of ’04 according to the Movie City News chart of film critics choices, and it’s been tagged as the year’s finest by New York Times critic A.O. Scott, and third-best by Times critic Manohla Dargis.
But hold on…it’s also been called the second worst film of the year by James Rocchi, the resident film critic for Netflix .
It takes all sorts, variety is the spice of life, that’s what makes a ball game, etc. But we’re in a dead news cycle, I need to fill space and this is a mildly intriguing sidelight.
Rocchi’s Ten Worst Movies of the Year list had been finished as of December 16th, at which point he reported, “Dang! Just when you post the 10 Worst Films of the Year, they pull you back in. Clint Eastwood’s latest — Million Dollar Baby — is now in serious contention to take the crown of thorns from Alexander.”
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As it turned out, this didn’t quite happen. I think Rocchi should have gone for it. Then he would have really made history.
A member of the Broadcast Film Critics Association and the Online Film Critics, Rocchi also called The Hunting of the President, in my opinion a clearly assembled, seemingly thorough examination of the commonly acknowledged right-wing attack-dog efforts to get President Clinton during the ’90s, the 7th worst film of ’04.
Rocchi doesn’t lack for readers or listeners. His site bio reads, “In addition to providing movie reviews and recommendations for more than 2 million Netflix members, James has been a special guest on CNBC, CNN Headline News, MSNBC Scarborough Country and is a movie reviewer in 20 to 30 regional TV morning programs in top markets across the nation.”
Let’s see…hated The Hunting of the President, supplied guest commentary on the conservative-leaning Scarborough Country. Wait a minute, let’s not jump to conclusions.
Anybody can love or hate anything they want. I despised the Lord of the Rings movies and I’m in the extreme minority on that score, but I never called them the worst of anything. Peter Jackson, the trilogy’s auteur-creator, is a smart, impassioned and exacting filmmaker, and I really liked Heavenly Creatures. (That said, let me say again: beware of King Kong!)
Rocchi is fully entitled to hate the way the direction a film takes in its third act, or just despise things about a film that he considers manipulative or old-hat. I’m assuming, naturally, that he almost called Million Dollar Baby the worst film of ’04 because it got to him on a very primal level. It’s a startling call, but hey, James…knock yourself out.
Crumbling Plaster
My 15 year-old son Dylan is hanging with me over the holidays, and while I’ve been writing my columns he’s been spending a lot of time on the couch playing Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, the latest in a series of Grand Theft Auto video games that first hit the market in `98 or ’99.
The San Andreas upgrade was released in October for use with PlayStation 2 game consoles. The players of the game control the actions of a deranged homicidal hip-hop asshole who runs around blasting the bejeezus out of anybody and anything, while enjoying protection (supplied by the game’s programmers) from being seriously harmed by enemies.
Since Dylan got the game a couple of months ago, he estimates that he’s “killed” about 5000 people, and that includes a lot of cops and regular-Joe bystanders. I’ve seen him run his victims down with cars he’s been driving, or machine-gun them to death, blow them up, beat them to death with clubs…any which way. And they’re always left lying in a pool of blood.
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The game isn’t about achieving a goal or defeating your bad-ass enemies. A review I found of GTA: SA says that players “go on a series of missions to take back the streets.” Bullshit — it’s about running around and wasting anyone you feel like wasting.
A reviewer with Video Game Radio wrote that “most gamers will tell you that video games merely allow them to live out fantasies in the safety of their own homes. Whatever your opinion is on video-game violence, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is by far the most controversial video game on the market today.”
The main-character asshole — described by the creators as a 1990s California gang member who found out that his neighborhood had been taken over by another gang when he got out, blah, blah — can instantly change weapons. The game also allows him to fly planes (my favorite aspect).
Spray paint cans can be used to deface buildings or cover up graffiti left by rival gang within the “story,” but Dylan hasn’t once resorted to this. He’s my son and spray-painting isn’t part of his history…the guy’s got standards.
I understand what these games are about and I can feel their juice and why everyone likes playing them, but at the same time how can anyone take part in simulated murder hundreds or thousands of times — day after day, week after week — and not have their sensibilities affected on some level?
I’m not trying to get all fuddy-duddy and imply that Dylan or any similar Grand Theft Auto fan (teenaged, well-educated, middle-class, productive parents) is more susceptible to violent impulses in real life as a result of playing this game. Maybe he is, but I don’t think so.
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But I think less intelligent kids without less-than-cultivated social habits or who’ve suffered from low-rent upbringings might be a bit more prone to sociopathic behavior due to this influence. Just a little bit, I’m saying.
The Entertainment Software Rating Board has given San Andreas an “M” (for mature) tag, recommending it for users aged 17 and older. The rating was given for “blood and gore, intense violence, strong language, strong sexual content and use of drugs,” according to the board’s website.
The ESRB “M” rating for the previous Grand Theft Auto game, called Vice City, was described as having only “violence” (the “intense” adjective wasn’t used) and didn’t mention “use of drugs.” Obviously the creators, Rock Star Games, are upping the ante.
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is morally repulsive but undeniably cool from the POV of a player looking for fast, anything-goes action and steadily improving graphics. The question is how its popularity (and that of hundreds of similar games) may be affecting the moviegoing appetites of its fans, at least as far as their attention spans are concerned, or their ability to feel revulsion towards violence, which in real life is a deeply ugly thing in all its forms.
Finally
A much longer version of Michael Mann’s Heat is finally coming to DVD, although not in a unified form.
Warner Home Video’s two-disc Heat “special edition,” out on 2.22.05, will have 11 additional scenes that weren’t included in Mann’s 172-minute theatrical cut that came out in 1995. A WHV publicist tells me the extra footage amounts to 100 minutes, give or take, “which would total 272 minutes” — four hours and 32 minutes — “including the feature itself.”
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This means that the alleged 257-minute running time of this DVD, posted last week by two websites — www.dvd.town.com and www.amazon.com — is incorrect.
When you press “play feature” on the new DVD, the 1995 theatrical version is what you’ll see. But if you’ve got video editing software and you’re clever and industrious, you’ll be able to construct a four-hour, 32-minute version for your own amusement.
DVD Town says that NBC aired a re-cut 188-minute Heat. (DVD Town’s exact wording calls it an “original pre-aired NBC version.”)
I don’t know if this is true, but if it happened it means Mann was obviously willing to re-cut his film to meet a commercial requirement. Why, then, didn’t he re-cut Heat and make it into a 272-minute extravaganza for the DVD? Obviously because he feels the 172 minute theatrical cut is the best, but deranged people like me would love to wallow in a much longer cut for the hell of it.
Disc #1 of the new version will offer the original film plus Mann’s optional commentary.
Disc #2 will offer five making-of documentaries:
(1) “Return to the Scene of the Crime,” with location manager Janice Polley and associate producer Gusmano Cesaretti visiting the real life L.A. locations used in the film;
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(2) “Pacino and De Niro: The Conversation,” in which Mann and others recall the shooting of the showdown scene between Robert De Niro’s Neal McCauley and Al Pacino’s Vincent Hanna at Kate Mantellini’s, a restaurant in Beverly Hills;
(3) “The Making of Heat: True Crime,” with Mann and Chuck Adamson, the film’s technical advisor who was also the real life inspiration for Hanna, discussing the Chicago crime scene and the events surrounding the real McCauley (whom Adamson took down in the late `60s) that inspired the film;
(4) “The Making of Heat: Crime Stories,” with Mann and others reviewing the 20-year origin of the script, the film’s genesis, and the complexity of the characters portrayed on screen; and…
(5) “The Making of Heat: Into the Fire,” with Mann and his cast and crew discussing training for their roles, filming in LA, shooting the climatic downtown heist, and the film’s post production.
Heaven Disputes
“However you feel about US involvement right now in Iraq, the Crusades are far more complicated than you make them out to be. And not terribly analogous to today’s perilous reality.
“For example, the population of what was known as the `Holy Land’ during the 11th and 12th centuries was, at least until jihad did its nasty work, mainly Christian. (But then so many liberals seem to forget the plight of Christian Arabs, both in the past and now.)
“Although from about the 9th century on there were Arab tribes in the area of Jerusalem, to which they’d wandered from the Arabian peninsula in search of better living conditions, they in no way constituted an ethnic majority when Godfroi de Bouillon and his companions recaptured Jerusalem from its Muslim occupiers in 1099.
“The final spur to the decision in the West to launch the Crusades, incidentally, was the Byzantine defeat at the (not terribly well-known) battle of Manzikert in 1076, although it took some five years for news of this battle to reach Rome and another ten or so for its import to really sink in, which thus opened up the Holy Land to Muslim hegemony. And to oppression, I’ll add.
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“Despite what many liberals also seem to believe, the period of Muslim rule immediately before the Crusaders landed in the Holy Land was a cruel one for Christians and Jews alike. Have you never heard the terms `dhimmi’ and `dhimmitude,’ which refer both to non-Muslims in a Muslim land and to the Koranically dictated way to treat them, including extra taxation?
“At least get hold of Richard Fletcher’s `Moorish Spain’ (it’s a short book) and read it for the way Christians were treated under that supposedly mild group of invaders; Fletcher himself admits he wrote it to dispel the myths concerning how non-Muslims fared during medieval times under Muslim rule.
“Also, too, Saladin happens to have been a Kurd. Thus a member of, today, an oppressed minority, one in fact oppressed by its fellow Muslims. Got that? There is an irony there that is biting, and I wonder if Scott will even mention it in his upcoming movie.
“One of the best books out there on the complicated issue of what the Crusaders were actually like is Zoe Oldenbourg’s `The Crusades.’ I think that if you even only page idly through it, you’ll learn that the image of them as racist butchers has little to do with reality. Perhaps, too, you’ll no longer quite see Saladin as the absolute paragon of chivalry that many writers still portray him to be. I don’t know if Scott will similarly have done his homework, but you still can.
“Something else that might even amuse you is that the bulk of Crusaders were, in fact, French (although it wasn’t referred to as `France’ at that time in the sense it is today). There is a train of thought among historians that holds that France from 1940 on owes its destiny to the simple truth that for the preceding 600 years the country had been bled white by a succession of (in general) losing wars, with WWI thus only constituting the final such catastrophe.
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“This way of thinking holds that since, say, 1100, it’s just been one long slide downwards for France, culminating in the truly rapid and shameful way the better-armed and more numerous French forces were defeated by the German Army in 1940. At the same time, of course, perhaps because so many of them `stayed home’ during the 12th century, England rose as a world power and, for about a hundred years, even occupied large chunks of France.
“Really, Jeffrey, you’re a fine film critic in my opinion, and you’re especially great at the visceral reaction stuff, but you’d be even better if your writing indicated some familiarity with history.” — Richard Szathmary
Wells to Szathmary: “The general theme of European Anglos (French, British) invading the Middle East and trying to restore Christian culture and Christian dominance in the Holy Land (whatever the history of Christian vs. Muslim clashes back then) carries inescapable parallels for Anglo-American forces today trying to implement/impose a Western-style democracy in Iraq in the wake of a takeover, etc.
“In a basic sense, I mean….without getting into all the jejune, finger-up-the-rectum historical mucky-muck.
“Your knowledge of Crusades history is more vast and scholarly than mine, but c’mon…. the basic bones of the two situations are obviously similar enough for a casual viewer of Kingdom of Heaven to say, “Aha, yes…of course. There are echoes in this situation.”
“You seem to be saying not only that the leaders of Muslim culture back then were discriminatory and ugly towards their lessers, but that there’s something inherently brutal and oppressive about Muslim culture that refuses to tolerate the culture of anyone or anything that isn’t Muslim. They’re purist fuckheads, in other words, just like the Jihadists are today…completely dedicated to the conquering and wiping out of impure non-Muslims around them. In a phrase, Natural Born Tyrants.
“So why don’t we just launch a U.S. Crusade today and just wipe ’em all out….every last one of them….man, woman and child? Okay, I’m kidding…but given your belief that Muslims and their brethren are really venal and bad news down to the bone, what’s the remedy?”
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Szathmary back to Wells: I think you could have a fine, Oxford Union-style debate on the topic of `Resolved: That Islam Is Incompatible With Democracy.’ Just as there was a fine symposium on whether or no Islam is compatible with feminism this very morning at www.frontpagemagazine.com.
“As to what the answer would then be, I honestly don’t know. But the truth also is, neither of us can truly name a country with an Islamic majority that also is constituted as a democracy. Nor can either of us locate one in the past. That does not mean I’m espousing a white man’s burden” theory of history, either. Nobody (well, not too many of us, certainly not me) wants to wipe out all these radical Islamist motherfuckers (see, now you’ve got me lapsing into profanity!), but it’d be nice in your work, which I generally admire a great deal, to see some occasional acknowledgement that many of those motherfuckers do in fact want to wipe us out. Completely. Along with the Jews, of course.
“Forget al-Jazeera television. Look up some stuff about the al-Manar network some time if you want a real eye opener.
“And I’m sorry — well, no, I’m not really sorry, it’s just a figure of speech — but I think you have a greater responsibility to the yahoos out there, just as many of whom now seem to be disgruntled Democratic voters as Republicans (from which, even I’ll admit, the ranks are usually filled), to be more sensitive to history. More attentive to accuracy. This in turn might even contribute to some eventual good coming out of this debate down the line.
“Yes, it’s fun to go with your gut, and I admire that in your criticism, but temper it just a bit sometimes with a nod to fact.”
Pranksters
There’s an article on the legacy of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters in the 12.31 issue of the L.A. Weekly.
One piece of slightly-dated news in the piece, written by by Michael Hoinski, is that Kesey’s son, Zane, has assembled a 55-minute documentary about the adventures of the Pranksters on their 1964 cross-country tour on their day-glo bus. The doc, available on www.key-z.com, is purchasable for $25. (Actually, there’s a couple of other videos about the tour, plus one or two others about Kesey.)
Coincidentally, a reader (as well as HE’s volunteer editor) Mark Griffey wrote me the following just three days ago:
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“Being interested in the film, I found a website called http://www.key-z.com/video. html that seems to be run by Ken Kesey’s son, Zane. Before he died in 2001, Kesey finally finished the Merry Prankster movie (45 hours of footage were shot). Given Kesey’s legacy and all, I was surprised to find that the guys who run the site won’t sell it to video stores. The only way to get it is to buy it from them on VHS for $25. Where’s the brotherly love?
“On top of this, the guys who run the site are currently bidding on the one copy that is up on Ebay. They don’t want anyone to get it unless they buy it from them! It’s crazy. Because to me, this doc seems to be a very important artifact.
“Kesey, Cassady and the Pranksters single-handedly started the entire psychedelic-hippie craze way back in 1964, long before Sgt. Pepper and all that shit. It’s like having a video of Newton getting hit in the head with the apple.
“Of course, the video is purportedly out-of-focus and a big mess, although I haven’t even seen it, but I just think it’s all very interesting. The Pranksters thought the movie would change the world, and now that it’s finally being released 40 years later, it’s practically a secret” — Mark Griffey.
Wells to Griffey: You’d think Zane would at least make a DVD version. You know, like…join the ’90s?
If The Shoe Fits
The plot of Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven (20th Century Fox, 5.6) is on the complex side, but if you let yourself think plain like Tom Joad and avoid getting smeared with your own intellectual whipped cream, it all boils down nicely.
Aside from the upscale distinction of being a Ridley Scott film in the big-canvas Gladiator mode, Heaven is a 12th Century armies-on-horseback movie about Eastern vs. Western forces. You know…one of those Muslim vs. Christian, olive-skinned natives vs. white-guy invader type deals, taking place during the Crusades and set in war-torn Jerusalem.
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Orlando Bloom in Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven.
It’s also one of those pageant-type flicks about a really cute brave guy (Orlando Bloom, as a French blacksmith who eventually comes to be called Balian of Ibelin), and how he falls in love with a foxy, well-born hottie (Sibylla, the princess of Jerusalem, played by Eva Green) and then gets to be El Cid-like when push comes to shove.
Or something along these lines. I’m fairly sure Bloom whups ass. You have to figure after he played a girlyman Paris in Troy his agent wouldn’t let him go there a second time.
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Balian of Ibelin was a Crusader knight who led the defense of Jerusalem in 1187. His formidable opponent was a Muslim leader named Saladin, who defeated him. With this element Kingdom sounds a bit like a 12th Century Black Hawk Down, about white guys in armor and shields getting their butts kicked by the Muslims in their tunics and turbans and curved swords.
I’m not a scholar on the Crusades and I haven’t read William Monahan’s Kingdom of Heaven script, but c’mon….how can anyone not see cultural parallels between Scott’s tale and the fighting going on now between U.S. forces and native guerillas in Iraq? You’d have to be suffering from enzyme blockage to say they aren’t there.
The Christian Crusaders were arrogant in presuming to claim and run the Holy Land in the first place, and the Saracens were in a more spiritually justified place in their battle against these Bible-reading, pale-faced invaders.
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Can anyone think of another occupying Anglo force that went into a Middle Eastern country for bogus reasons and is probably fated to leave with its tail between its legs?
New York Times reporter Sharon Waxman explored this issue in a story that ran on 8.12.04.
“With bloody images of Muslims and Westerners battling in Iraq and elsewhere on the nightfly news, it may seem like odd timing to unveil a big-budget Hollywood epic about the ferocious fighting between Christians and Muslims over Jerusalem in the Crusade of the 12th Century,” Waxman’s story began.
“While the studio has tried to emphasize the romance and thrilling action, some religious scholars and interfaith activists…have questioned the wisdom of a big Hollywood movie about an ancient religious conflict when many people believe that those conflicts have been reignited in a modern context.”
I got into a dopey argument the other day with a guy who says it’s journalistically sloppy to point to Kingdom‘s present-day allusions. I found it staggering that he would even argue this point.
If a history professor were to show his class a movie about the Crusades (Christians vs. Muslims in the Holy Land) and ask his students to point out current echoes in a term paper, I said, he would be right to flunk any student who doesn’t at the very least mention Bush-Rummy-Iraq.
The guy replied that Kingdom was developed before Bush was elected and was greenlit before the U.S. went into Iraq. The Crusades, therefore, have nothing to do with Iraq, he said…unless, of course, the person making this connection is a fringe whack-jobber.
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You’re tap dancing too much on this thing, I replied. Your thinking is too pretzel-like. You have to boil it down to basics. Anglo army occupying Middle Eastern territory, shouldn’t be there, natives hate them, etc.
9/11 was three years and three months ago, the invasion of Iraq happened in March ’03, and principal photography on Kingdom of Heaven began in Morocco last January. And in the minds of Scott and his creative team, the U.S. vs. Iraqi insurgent situation didn’t weave its way into the film on this or that level?
This is certainly an allowable interpretation, I argued, given the basic bones.
That said, I can’t wait for Kingdom of Heaven, which looks great in the trailer and cost around $130 million. After Bloom and Green, the costars are Liam Neeson, Jeremy Irons, David Thewlis and Chassan Massoud as Saladin.
There isn’t much happening right now on Kingdom of Heaven‘s official site , but it’s a start.
Miscalculation
The Napoleon Dynamite DVD story is a great success with a blemish. This is because the people at Fox Home Video blew it when they ordered their initial run.
Roughly 1.4 million units were sold when the disc hit stores on 12.21, but the suits didn’t order enough of them to be pressed because the available Dynamite‘s sold out right away (in West Coast urban areas, at least) and as of Monday, 12.26, copies were still scarce.
The clerks at Laser Blazer in West L.A. are telling me people keep coming in and asking for Napoleon and they keep answering, “Sorry, man…sold out. Nope, not even a rental.” A Seattle-based guy named Aaron Stewart (one of HE’s newly engaged Discland contributors) told me yesterday that the same thing is happening up there.
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Figuring an average price of $20 per DVD, Dynamite retail sales totals come to about $28 million, which is more than half of the film’s $44 million domestic earnings.
Fox spokesman Steven Feldstein was quoted as saying that when the first shipment came close to selling out, Fox ordered a motherload of new Napoleon‘s from their plant in Huntsville, Alabama, but the trucks attempting to deliver the discs got stuck in a Kentucky snowstorm. I don’t know…does this sound to anyone else like “the dog ate my homework”?
Sooner or later the trucks will make it through and the stores will have enough copies, but the Fox Video guys could have posted some kind of astronomical sales figure in the trades if they’d been more accurate in gauging public interest.
Plugging Away
If you’re looking for the key provocateurs in the sacking of Vincent Ward from the historical drama River Queen, you wouldn’t be far off if you settled on two people.
One is Richard Soames of Film Finances, River Queen‘s guarantor. He’s the guy who actually lowered the boom on the film’s director last October, and not the producers, Silver Screen Films and The Films Consortium, who were surprised at the canning and immediately tried to get Ward his job back. They eventually succeeded.
The other is costar Samantha Morton, who has been described by a source close to the production as a bit of a harridan whose hair-pulling episodes have not been limited to her behavior on River Queen.
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River Queen costar Samantha Morton.
Morton clashed with Ward about this and that — rather bitterly, I’m told — during the first half of the filming. This rancor, compounded by Ward’s perfectionism and lousy weather during much of the New Zealand-based shoot, led to an atmosphere of delay and disharmony that caught Soames’ attention and led to his action.
Ward didn’t stay fired for long. He was actually re-hired in late November despite an announcement earlier this week that he’s just returned to the payroll.
Ward declined to speak about the situation, but a source close to the shoot chimed in.
Ward is now in London trying to finish the editing before the end of March. It’s that or Ward and his producers will face some kind of stiff financial penalty, as English tax laws allowed for the majority of the financing.
The expectation is that the historical war drama, set during the New Zealand Maori Wars of the 1860s and about the efforts of an Irish mother (Morton) trying to find her kidnapped child with the help of a soldier (Kiefer Sutherland), will be shown at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival.
Given the title it’s a reasonable assumption that (a) Morton and Sutherland do some of their searching while traveling on a river boat, and (b) that some kind of bond develops between them, although hopefully of a different cast than the romance that occurs between Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn in John Huston’s The African Queen.
River Queen is known to have been a labor of love for Ward (Map Of The Human Heart, The Navigator, Vigil). He co-wrote the script with Toa Fraser, and has tried to put together production funding for quite a spell.
Ward’s axe-ing happened in October, three weeks after Morton came back to the set after being felled by influenza.
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My production source says Ward was replaced as director following a continual series of “incidents” with Morton, who had already caused the production to close down once due to her illness.
Soames stepped in to get control of things, but right away colleagues and friends of Ward’s pointed out that the project would be worthless without Ward’s input and guiding hand, and the only way for anyone to recoup was for him to be restored as director.
River Queen was directed for the final three weeks of shooting by the director of photography, Alun Bollinger (Heavenly Creatures), with day-to-day guidance from Ward by phone and email.
“One thing for certain is that the film did not go any smoother after Ward left,” the source confides, “nor did it progress any faster. The number of shots per day stayed the same, and Morton’s various illnesses and troubles continued.”
Good News
In the wake of my 12.17 praising of Adam Curtis’ brilliant BBC2 documentary called The Power of Nightmares, I’m happy to report it will screen in either late January or early February as a special presentation of the Santa Barbara Film Festival, which kicks off on 1.28.05.
SBFF director Roger Durling was shown a copy of the doc by Telluride Film Festival director Tom Luddy after my piece came out, and Curtis was contacted and agreed to provide a screenable copy of the film. No word as to whether Curtis will attend the festival, but he should. The San Francisco Film Festival is also reportedly mulling over a showing of Nightmares.
Author (The Whole Equation) and essayist David Thomson wrote the following about Nightmares on 12.26 for his column in the London Independent:
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Nightmares producer-writer Adam Curtis (l.); a non-related plaque outside a BBC office.
“I share the sentiments behind Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, but I cannot look at or listen to Moore without smelling the demagogue. Which leads me to this point: the most arresting thing I saw in 2004 (in a poor-quality duplicated tape) was Adam Curtis’s three-part TV documentary series, The Power of Nightmares.
“The program may be prompting soul-searching within the BBC as to the function and role of that diminishing institution, but it will likely never find a large public in the U.S., because no one will be brave enough to air so lucid, caustic and comic an account of the sham of Islamic terror.
“Now, in America, as you have heard, the ordinary television watcher often has hundreds of channels to choose from. But the four networks will not touch The Power of Nightmares, because of the subsequent charge of being anti-Bush. Public television (PBS), the nearest equivalent to the BBC, will almost certainly decline because of the fear of putting their funding in jeopardy.”
“That leaves HBO, for several years now the most enterprising movie/TV studio in the world. But even there, I’m not sure that anyone has the stomach for this superb, Swiftian satire or the absolute insolence with which Curtis delivers his message.”
Dicey Intrigue
If you find these photos interesting or alluring, there’s something wrong with you.
There’s only one way to process the horror of over 114,000 people drowning from that big tsunami three or four days ago, and that’s with muted sadness and a slight shaking of the head, like you’re sitting in a church pew at a funeral for a friend.
You can’t express any kind of fascination in how the Indian Ocean tsunami might have looked or sounded because if you do you’re a pig and a creep and you have no heart.
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I didn’t die from the big tsunami because I was in Los Angeles when it happened, and I don’t have any personal connections with any of the sufferers. I’m appalled by the death and the hurt and my heart goes out, but I’m curious, dammit.
I’ve never seen a real tsunami. The only kind I’ve ever seen has been Jim Cameron’s mile-high tsunami in The Abyss and that other stupid CG tsunami in Deep Impact (you know…the one that instantly flattened Maximillian Schell and Tea Leoni…which I’m thinking of watching again, in all candor, in the wake of Leoni’s performance in Spanglish).
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On 12.27 there was an AP story about how news agency representatives are hunting for video of this event.
“There will still be, I think, the definitive shot, the wall of water,” Sandy MacIntyre, director of news for Associated Press Television News in London, said Monday.
APTN was said to be “competing fiercely” with Reuters to try and snag some good tsunami video footage. APTN producers were reportedly sent to six airports in Europe and Asia on Monday to ask tourists if they had captured the scene on their home video cameras, MacIntyre said.
Who knows how to process or make sense of over 114,000 people dying in the space of five or ten minutes?
I used to have nightmares about big waves when I was a kid. I would be on a beach and a tidal wave would be getting bigger and bigger and I’d try to run and my feet would be like anvils and I could barely take a step. And the approaching monster would get louder and louder.
Convert
“I’ve been reading your column for years and I must say that although I disagree with your politics and some of your film choices I admire the fact that you will push a film to the forefront for the attention it deserves. Sideways has been garnering a great deal of attention now and you were one of the first, if not the first to call it.
“You’ve also been pushing Million Dollar Baby, and you even ran a blip about it last summer, as I recall. I must admit I was not really interested in seeing this film, but then I kept reading your column concerning this picture and I finally went to the Grove Theatre and plucked down my ten bucks for a late morning viewing.
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“This film is one of the most powerful things I have ever seen put to celluloid. It’s a little predictable at times and uses some cliches, but it’s the way the story is told and the confidence in the way the narrative is handled that makes it great. This film deserves the good attention that it is receiving. Those naysayers that could be disciples of Kael need to let their opinion be known as well, even though they’re way off.
“Ever since I left the theatre I’ve been imploring various people to take in a viewing of this film and calling up relatives to tell them to be the first in line when it goes nationwide. It is a shame that Warner Brothers has not been pushing this gem and I thank you for bringing this film to my attention. I plan on viewing it again with friends when the holiday cycle calms down.
“Also you need to give Collateral a look on DVD. It has a great commentary by Michael Mann that has not been advertised and it would be a shame not to give it a listen. This guy is a genius and his films should be studied more. Bring on the new special edition Heat DVD!” — James Wallace
Paulettes
“Philip Kaufman, Fred Schepisi, Walter Hill, Brian De Palma and Robert Benton. What do these guys have in common? Nothing…except that you’ll probably find each film made by these guys have gotten a thumbs-up or something close to it from the Paulettes.
“Michael Sragow would fit nicely onto that little list that includes Charles Taylor, David Edelstein and Armond White.
“I think this has to with the fact that the French and Dave Kehr and some other guys who followed the Andrew Sarris auteurist school of thought picked up on Eastwood first, thereby making him persona non grata with the Paulettes since anything the French and Sarris (especially Sarris) gave the okay to was bound to stink according to the Kael gospel.
“Among the Paulettes there was some sort of party-line that had to be toed when it came to certain film makers. Thumbs up for the above worthies and thumbs down for Eastwood, Hitchcock, John Ford, Howard Hawks, Orson Welles, etc. They were young and easily led, I guess. And here you were thinking that film criticism was mostly about the movie!
“I think that the only Paulette to have escaped out of that cultish orbit has been Roger Ebert, and more power to him for that.” — Vinod Narayanan
Armond!
“A few years back I spent some time talking about movies with Armond White and the more we spoke, the more I began to suspect his entire approach to movie, and in fact to reality.
“He kept going on about Spinal Tap and how real metal fans were offended by the film, and that Spinal Tap was a fictious band. And even when I pointed out that the guys in the movie played their own instruments, wrote the songs and even toured without a film crew, he refused to admit that at their core, Spinal Tap was as real of a band as any other ’80s metal band.
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“Their songs ‘Big Bottom,’ ‘Hell Hole’ and ‘Sex Farm’ go up their with anything Ratt ever released. Sure they made up their background, but what band doesn’t fake their story? What makes Spinal Tap less real than Led Zeppelin’s ‘Song Remains the Same’? I just gave up on Armond at that point.
“And you’re right about HBO being the place to make a drama. Have you seen The Wire? Best 12-hour movie of the year.” — Joe Corey
“Armond White plays it safe and says that he likes both Kael and Sarris although that’s a bit like saying that you like the Republicans and the Democrats. He gave a thumbs up to Bloodwork and a thumbs down to both Mystic River and Million Dollar Baby and he thinks that Tomcats and Bubble Boy are masterpieces. Nuff said.
“Look, anyone who froths at the mouth in sheer untrammelled glee at the sight of a Brian De Palma film should probably not be throwing any stones ‘cuz that’s a big-ass glass house they’re livin’ in.” — V.N.
Hold Up
“Is the Napoleon Dynamite DVD shortage really as bad as you say in today’s column? I was just at the Best Buy in West Los Angeles, and there were at least 30 copies just sitting there waiting to be purchased.” — Grady Styles.
Wells to Styles: Great. The truck drivers must have finally gotten their act together. That or the people who frequent Laser Blazer and that video store in Seattle have hipper tastes than your typical Best Buy customers and therefore bought up all the available copies quicker.
Big-studio publicist to Wells: Interesting. I tried to buy Napoleon Dynamite at Borders across from the Arclight last night and they were sold out. But I found a bunch of ’em at Virgin.
Hacked Again
For the second time during the Xmas holiday, Hollywood Elsewhere has been hacked. But it’ll all be back to normal within hours, maybe only two or three.
For the record, this is being written at 3:06 pm Pacific, on Tuesday, 12.28.04.
The most recent Hollywood Elsewhere column (the one that went up on Friday, 12.24) will be restored and back up by 4 or 5 pm Pacific. The rest of the site, including the proper ads (the currently viewable ads are from our server’s last fully-backed up version of the site, dated December 3rd), will be up and rolling in their proper and timely configuration by the end of the day.
I apologize to all concerned for not being fast or vigilant enough to stay ahead of the hackers or, in this instance, the Fanty worm. For what it’s worth, this latest hacking has happened today on hundreds of other sites. I will be doing everything I can do (and spending everything I can) to keep this from happening again.
I think it’s only fair to lay part of the blame for this latest disruption on the lack of vigilance of the folks at Interland, our Atlanta-based server. They failed to install a protective (or preventive) software called php5 in the wake of the last hacking, which was the weekend before last. If they had things might not have turned out so badly today.
33 and 1/3
It√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s too much of a task to forecast √¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢05 altogether, so let√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s just concentrate on the first third. I’m guessing I’m not the only one who’s giving in to kick-back holiday feelings right about now.
Movie quality tends to slack off (okay, plummet) between January and April, but I’m spotting at least seven films during this period that appear to be worth the price, and two that might qualify as half-decent throwaway’s.
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Upside of Anger writer-director Mike Binder guiding costars Kevin Costner (l.) and Erika Christensen and Keri Russell (r.) during filming.
All but two will open in March or April, so grim up for a dud January and a fairly tepid February. In the order of scheduled openings…
Inside Deep Throat (directors: Fenton Bailey, Randy Barbato — producer: Brian Grazer), Universal, 2.11. Serious minded, fully considered documentary about the social impact and cultural legacy of Deep Throat, the 1972 porn film that ranks as the most profitable feature of all time. Hard-luck star Linda Lovelace was grossly under-compensated, and the mafia wound up taking almost all the serious profit. Talking heads include Erica Jong, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, John Waters, Harry Reems, etc. World premiere-ing at ’05 Sundance Film Festival.
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The Upside of Anger (director-writer: Mike Binder), New Line, 3.11. Terms of Endearment with four daughters and without the cancer. Feisty, middle-aged mom (Joan Allen), randy suitor (Kevin Costner), and four Wolfmeyers — Andy (Erika Christensen), Lavender (Evan Rachel Wood), Emily (Keri Russell) and Hadley (Alicia Witt). Great performances, should have been released last fall, will probably put Binder (now finishing Man About Town with Ben Affleck) on the map. Rated R for language, sexual situations, brief comic violence and some drug use.
Melinda and Melinda (director-writer: Woody Allen) Fox Searchlight, 3.18. Acclaimed by Screen International as Woody√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s best in a long while. A discussion between playwrights about the nature of comedy and drama leads to the story of a woman named Melinda (Radha Mitchell, said to be terrific), and a look at her life as a piece of tragedy and comedy. Has already played in Spain, will have played everywhere in Europe by the time it opens here. As a character in the movie puts it, a certain character is “despondent, desperate, suicidal…all the comic elements are in place.” Co-starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Johnny Lee Miller, Josh Brolin, Will Ferrell, Wallace Shawn, Amanda Peet.
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Nicole Kidman in Sydney Pollack’s The Interpreter
The Weather Man (dir: Gore Verbinski) Paramount, 4.1. Not about a radical planting bombs in the early √¢‚ǨÀú70s, and at least partially about the stand-out toupee worn in this film by star Nicolas Cage. Gore Verbinski√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s direction of The Ring) has given him newfound respect. Word around the campfire is that this one√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s okay…maybe better than okay. Cage is a Chicago weatherman named Dave Spritz with an extremely chaotic personal life. I don√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t know what this involves precisely, but the writer is Steve Conrad (Wrestling Ernest Hemingway) and the costars are Michael Caine and Hope Davis.
Sin City (directors: Frank Miller, Robert Rodriguez) Dimension, 4.1. Any genre movie shot in black-and-white gets my vote sight unseen, and I love the straight-from-a-comic-book visual style of this thing, and the Dick Tracy-like prosthetics worn by some of the actors (Mickey Rourke, Benicio del Toro). Based on three stories taken from Miller√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s graphic novels, the likely emphasis will be on “look” over story and character, but disappointments of this sort are par for the course with comic-book adaptations. Lots of violence, pretty girls, partial nudity, etc. Briefly appearing costars include Bruce Willis, Clive Owen, Brittany Murphy and Rosario Dawson. Pic won√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t be press-screened until mid-March (Rodriguez likes to tweak until the very last minute) so who knows? GenX comic-book freaks will lap this one up.
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Hope Davis, Nicolas Cage in Gore Verbinski’s The Weather Man
The Interpreter (dir: Sydney Pollack) Universal, 4.22: A smart, politically sophisticated thriller set within the United Nations community, with a exotic-accented Nicole Kidman and a straight-ahead Sean Penn in the leads. Pollack at the helm means this one will be intelligently assembled and that the characters will have (I√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢m assuming) unusual angular aspects, if his past work (like his last New York-based thriller, Three Days of the Condor) is any indication. Universal bumping this from February to mid-April prodded mild concern, but I’m now told this happened only because Kidman will be working in Australia on Jocelyn Moorhouse’s Eucalyptus through the end of March, and wouldn’t have been around to promote a February Interpreter opening.
Crash (dir: Paul Haggis), Lions Gate, 4.29. Screened at Toronto Film Festival, bought by Lions Gate, and kept under a cloak of secrecy since. Not to be confused with David Cronenberg’s Crash, it’s about a group of L.A.-ers united by their involvement in a multi-car pileup. Matt Dillon, Sandra Bullock, Don Cheadle, Brendan Fraser, Jennifer Esposito, Thandie Newton, William Fichtner, Ryan Phillipe, Larenz Tate and Keith David costar. Written and directed by Paul Haggis, the Canadian-born screenwriter of Million Dollar Baby.
And the possibly passable duo…
Be Cool (dir: Gary Gray) MGM, 3.4. Chili Palmer (John Travolta) shows some low-life L.A. types how to do that preternaturally calm Zen street-guy thing…again. Elmore Leonard, the Michigan-based author of Get Shorty (the basis of the 1995 Barry Sonenfeld film with Travolta, Gene Hackman, Ren Russo) and his hard-bound follow-up Be Cool, tells me Gray√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s film is playing well with audiences, so we√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢ll see. The trailer makes it look as if Gray pushed the slapstick humor stuff a little too hard. The best Leonard adaptations have been about character and criminal mood, not hah-hah pratfalls. But trailers can be deceptive, so let’s hold our water. One promising sidelight: Travolta re-united with his old Pulp Fiction dance partner Uma Thurman. Costarring Vince Vaughan, Harvey Keitel, the Rock, Danny DeVito. I just don√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t trust Gray — how can anyone after A Man Apart?
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Assault on Precinct 13 (director: Jean-Francois Richet), Rogue Pictures, 1.19. A remake of John Carpenter√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s admired 1976 noir shoot-em-up, itself an homage to Howard Hawks√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢ Rio Bravo, has to retain some of the genetic inheritance…right? Plus it has a first-rate cast — Ethan Hawke, Laurence Fishburne, Maria Bello, John Leguizamo, Drea de Mateo, Gabriel Byrne, Brian Dennehy, Ja Rule. Carpenter√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s original was set in a South Central L.A. police station, but the synopsis for the new one says it takes place √¢‚Ǩ≈ìduring a snowy New Year’s Eve,√¢‚Ǩ¬ù so I guess that deep-sixes L.A. Screenplay by the not-related to-James-Monaco James DeMonaco.
I was going to run a spring-summer piece, but the summer slate depressed me. It√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s looking even more formulaic and lowbrow than usual. Keep your head down, hold your nose and hope for the best. And may God protect us from Peter Jackson√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s on-the-nose instincts in his direction of King Kong…whoops, unnecessarily negative!
New Chat Room
Hollywood Elsewhere has a brand-new live chat room going. It can be reached through a link on the Poet’s Corner page. There’s something wrong with my Java or whatever because every time I go the chat room my browser freezes up and crashes. HE’s Ohio-based consultant and column editor Brian Walker says it’s working fine and I’m the problem. If anyone else has any complaints, send ’em in.
Reminder
I ran this a couple of weeks ago in the WIRED column, but just to be extra-clear everyone should know that the currently-playing War of the Worlds teaser is, from a strict visual-content perspective, almost entirely b.s.
I’m speaking of two elements: (a) those middle-American families standing in their nightgowns and bathrobes on a small-town neighborhood street at night, looking with concern at those flashing sky lights in the clouds on the far horizon, and (b) those shots of various European capitals.
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An insider has told me that the middle-American milieu stuff is horseshit because they’re not in the movie and don’t really represent the film at all. Ditto those images of Paris and London and whatnot, since the film never strays from the limited viewpoint of Tom Cruise’s lead character, a New Jersey longshoreman who just happens to be the grandson of Marlon Brando’s Terry Malloy. (Kidding!)
As reported in a New York Times story about the Worlds shoot in Bayonne, New Jersey, director Steven Spielberg has gone to great lengths to avoid suburban settings. The action takes place largely in Cruise’s blue-collar neighborhood — rusted, down-at-the-heels — and, in certain portions, out in the Jersey countryside.
Thirteen
“I’ve seen the upcoming remake of Assault on Precinct 13, and it blows.
“Unlike Carpenter’s original — a spare, stripped-down ‘B’ pic which understood its iconic origins — the new one is just a bunch of action set pieces strung together, none of them particularly memorable.
“Filled with cliched characters — the oversexed secretary (Drea de Matteo), the guilt-ridden cop who feels he’s responsible for a partner’s death (Ethan Hawke), the geezer cop due for retirement (Brian Dennehy, totally slumming) — the film also features Laurence Fishburne as a kingpin drug dealer, but he’s still doing his stentorian Morpheus thing!
“For this they got some French director I’ve never heard of?
“If I were Carpenter, I’d be really, really pissed at the rape of what is, I think, one of the best ‘B’ films ever made.” — Unsung (in this instance) New York journalist
Wes’s Shortfall
“The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou didn’t look like a masterpiece in the trailer. It didn’t look like director Wes Anderson was trying to perfect the same old riff. It looked like Wes was changing the format and the ground rules. It appeared to be an adventure movie with explosions, stop-film animation, and like it was taking its cues from Spielberg and Fellini. None of the above can be said about his previous films.
“I hoped there would be Wes touches. He has a personality and a voice, and it seemed as if he was trying to hit a new register with this one. It might be a little off key, I thought, as I’d only heard a touch, but it sounded like a new melody.
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“And then I saw it, and now I largely agree with what you’ve said. It felt like Wes was trying to break out of his past, but he failed. But if this turns out to be his worst movie, then he’ll have a great run. Then again, Bill Murray said on Letterman that he had to see it three times to really get it. That’s asking a lot of people, but I’ll check it out again and maybe I’ll change my mind.” — Christopher Lee.
Wells to Lee: Aquatic is the same old Tenenbaums melody with modifications. Wes has a voice — that’s what makes him good, makes him Wes — but the boat and Italy and the deep blue sea don’t interfere with the increasingly detail-minded Wes aesthetic. It’s the same basic thing, only less charming and less emotionally involving.
The Other Shoe
“Million Dollar Baby is a powerful and rewarding film, and superior to Mystic River, but I√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢m starting to roll my eyes at all the critics fawning over Eastwood√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s bare bones, not-one-superfluous-frame method of storytelling.
“Did every little scene and fragment of dialogue — from Frankie√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s Gaelic to the number of Scrap√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s fights, to pie at Ira√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s diner — require greater significance on the other end? When it√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s so stripped down, I felt myself waiting for payoffs.
“One of the last great character-study movies, The Insider, could have easily been trimmed down 50 minutes. The scenes in that movie that don√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t necessarily drive home the plot, but they still add to the richness and complexity of the overall.
“And am I the only one wishing that Jim Brown had played Scrap? I suppose you can never go wrong with Freeman, though I never saw him as a boxer, and I wasn√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t buying it when he won his last fight.” — Mark Frenden
Coyle
“I ended up watching my VHS copy of The Friends of Eddie Coyle the other day. It’s such an amazing gem and deserves a great DVD. But Paramount’s DVD division has a few putzes on the payroll. They couldn’t even produce great extras for the Saturday Night Fever DVD. And promoting it? Beyond their skills. It’s a shame that Warners didn’t release Coyle.” — Joe Corey.
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Game Over
The ’04 Oscar Best Picture race is all over but the shouting and the ad buys. Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby (Warner Bros., 12.15) is it, and that’s that.
I’m saying this with a twinge of regret since it affects the chances of my personal Best Picture favorite, Alexander Payne’s Sideways. I wish it were otherwise.
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The only thing that can stop Million Dollar Baby at this stage is some kind of backlash about the elements that don’t quite work — the retarded kid in the gym, the roteness of Hilary Swank’s first-round knockouts, etc. But I don’t think these things are stoppers.
Emanuel Levy can beat the Aviator drum for Martin Scorsese’s work on The Aviator until he’s blue in the face (“Will Scorsese win the Oscar at his fifth nomination? And how high will The Aviator fly with the Academy voters?”) and it won’t matter. I’ve worshipped Scorsese for decades, and I’m sorry to slap down the hoo-hah, but a reality check is required at this stage.
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The Aviator (Miramax, 12.17 limited) will grab six or seven Oscar noms but mostly, I’m guessing, for below-the-line tech stuff.
But maybe not. Scorsese could luck out with a Best Director nomination, but this will be mainly seen as a tribute to his rep. Leonardo DiCaprio might also snag a Best Actor nomination for his Howard Hughes performance because he’s one of the fiercest, go-for-broke actors of our times, and thereby manages to overcome a gut feeling I couldn’t ignore in the opening reels that he’s just not the right guy physically.
And it’s possible that the film might land a Best Picture nomination, but as God is my witness The Aviator isn’t close to being satisfying or elevating enough, and all this Oscar talk is just wishful thinking.
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From where I sit today Million Dollar Baby is probably going to take the bulk of the Best Picture honors…from most of the critics’ groups (an L.A. critic tells me he’s “getting the vibe that Million Dollar Baby may be becoming a strong consensus pick, passing aside The Aviator , which perhaps can’t gather a consensus”), probably from the Hollywood Foreign Press (i.e., the givers of the Golden Globes), and almost certainly from the Academy.
I’ll be a confirmed Sideways man to the bitter end, but Payne’s wonderfully finessed film just doesn’t have the heat that Baby does right now. His work is a tiny bit better than Eastwood’s, I feel. It has a livelier assortment of moods and shadings, and is more emotionally supple, agile and surprising — but it doesn’t have Baby‘s arthouse austerity, and it’s not as strong emotionally.
Just to round things out and maintain a sense of artificial suspense (in the same way that Chris Matthews and the MSNBC news team kept saying “maybe” about Kerry’s election-night chances long after it was clear he was finished), you’ll be hearing about Ray, Finding Neverland, Kinsey, Maria Full of Grace, The Incredibles and so on, but it’s pretty much over and settled.
Aviator Slaps
I didn’t believe for a split second that I was getting a look at anything close to the actual life and times of Howard Hughes when I saw The Aviator. Most of it felt like play-acting, dysfunctional weirdness, time-travel disorientation and phony-baloney CGI.
DiCaprio looks like a 17 year-old kid doing his best at pretending, but once you get past this he’s great. (Does that make sense?) Otherwise, The Aviator is an OCD freak show that drags in the middle, feels somewhat overlong and at the same time strangely choppy and over-accelerated in the beginning, and, some brilliant sequences aside (like the plane crash in Beverly Hills), is a very bumpy ride.
You sit there and you just don’t give a damn about Howard Hughes, and all through it you’re saying, please God…please make this movie about something besides not enough green peas on a plate, urine-filled milk bottles and lint on the lapels.
I’m referring (again) to the relentless attention paid by Scorsese to Hughes’ obsessive compulsive disorder mishegoss. Portions exploring this aspect of his psychology seem to take up nearly half the running time.
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Very little about The Aviator seems to be tethered to anything except the front-and-center obviousness of it. The fact that it’s a big pricey period thing shot by Marty Scorsese never leaves your head. I don’t know if it’s the lighting or the cinematography or what, but visually it feels phony and swaggered-up and pushed too hard. (Unlike, for instance, the evocative historical aroma one gets from Jean Pierre Jeunet’s A Very Long Engagement.)
In all sorts of little needling ways, The Aviator never stops offending. Some of the CG-amped flying sequences, for me, are only a step or two away from video-game verisimilitude. I hated that Scorsese picked Gwen Stefani to inhabit Jean Harlow, and I hated those inane lines she says into the mike during the Hell’s Angels premiere scene. (She sounds like some checkout girl at Target.) And I despised Rufus Wainwright’s preening theatrical gestures as he sang on the bandstand in that early party scene at the Coconut Grove. I started to turn off to the film right there and then. I’m just being honest.
New York Press critic Matt Zoller Seitz summed up a perception problem — an unwillingess to roll with Scorsese’s big-canvas, post-Goodfellas phase — with an e-mailed comment on Tuesday, ironically prior to seeing The Aviator that evening.
He said he was “looking forward to it but also dreading it, to be honest. I love Scorsese and think he has gotten a bit of a bum rap in certain quarters recently, because he has evolved from a micro filmmaker specializing in subjective, emotional stories to a macro filmmaker who is concerned with the mechanics of particular societies, and critics have been somewhat unwilling to adapt to this evolution.”
Some took exception yesterday to my anti-Aviator comments in the WIRED column a couple of days ago and sent me some toughly worded e-mails. A couple of them sounded like Peter Jackson fans from last year, saying “you think you know everything but you don’t, asshole!” and so on.
So I asked some journos to see if they’ve gotten the same noise. I told them I was getting a street-thug attitude from Aviator admirers. I said it felt like I’m a struggling tavern owner in 1931 and Jimmy Cagney is striding into my place, grabbing me by the collar and slapping me silly and threatening worse if I don’t buy his brand of bootleg beer.
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A trade-paper critic said I had brought the Cagney aggression upon myself “because your comments on the film have been — now let’s be honest — particularly hostile. Perhaps the hostility engendered a hostile response. I do particularly enjoy films that divide the room, though I’m not sure if the division is equal here. It seems that the Aviator supporters outnumber its detractors.”
No argument there. The Rotten Tomatoes rundown shows that reviews are running about 90% positive.
The rest of the comments ignored my Cagney riff and just dealt with the film.
L.A. Daily News critic Glenn Whipp said he had “had no idea The Aviator had ardent supporters, [as] everyone I know is mixed about the thing. The Hells Angels stuff is fine, damn entertaining even, but finding the drama in [Hughes] being afraid to touch a doorknob seems elusive.
“Gangs of New York was much more entertaining,” he continued. “And there’s no performance here on the level of Daniel Day Lewis going apeshit in Gangs….unless you count Cate Blanchett’s butchering of [Katharine] Hepburn’s accent.
“Tell those hard-asses to stuff a bar of hypoallergenic soap where the sun don’t shine,” Whipp concluded, “and catch Million Dollar Baby. That will put The Aviator‘s ‘greatness’ into proper context.”
Along with his post-Goodfellas directions, said Seitz, Scorsese “has run into the realities of Hollywood filmmaking — i.e., he’s somehow able to get the massive funding required for peculiar big projects like Bringing Out the Dead, Gangs of New York and The Aviator , but to get that funding, he has to accept severe studio interference, unwelcome notes and marketing input, and the presence of problematic stars like Nicolas Cage, Leonardo DiCaprio and Cameron Diaz, whose names guarantee studio support but who frankly aren’t always strong enough to pull off the very specific emotional effects his recent movies require.”
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Oregonian critic Shawn Levy said, “Not to come off sounding like a thumb-breaker or anything, but I thought The Aviator was a really wonderful picture, easily Scorsese’s best since Goodfellas and lots of fun all the way through. Couldn’t believe it was 160 minutes when it was over. I’m virtually certain that it’s gonna win major gold in February. We can still be chums, of course. I just won’t let you hold the remote when we’re channel-surfing.”
Christopher Kelly of the Fort Worth-Star Telegram recently wrote a piece on how Sideways‘s Oscar chances are, in his view, looking much better since he saw The Aviator. He called himself “an Aviator shrugger, not a basher.”
Philip Wuntch of the Dallas Morning News said, “Sorry, Jeffrey, but I really liked The Aviator.”
New York-based journalist Lewis Beale said he hasn’t spoken to enough people about this, but confides he sat next to a big-name critic at the screening he attended, and “this guy said afterwards in an e-mail exchange that (a) the flying effects didn’t work [and] just called attention to themselves, (b) Leo is okay but this critic always relates to him as a little kid playing dress-up, (c) the OCD stuff was way over the top, (d) the film rates 2 and 1/2 stars, and (e) Cate Blanchett’s Kate Hepburn is the best thing in the film.”
But the critic “also felt the pressure was on to give Marty his Oscar for this one. Which, needless to say, he does not agree with.”
One final Seitz thought, rendered post-screening: “In marked contrast to other big Scorsese productions like Goodfellas, Casino and The Age of Innocence, The Aviator is not about a crafty player or alienated pariah pretending to be an insider. It’s about an outsider who truly, deeply, sincerely wants to be an insider. It’s about a visionary who wishes to belong to a club that would not have someone like him as a member. Which I suppose makes it a Groucho Marx joke stretched out to three hours.”
Perfect
I really need to pay tribute to the brilliant new Aviator one-sheet that popped through a week or two ago. It captures the Hughes essence in a stunningly attractive way that the film never manages. It portrays him as a kind of fearless alien, not quite of this world and with powers beyond the norm, and at the same time blinkered and keeping the world from penetrating his inner sanctum.
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I guess I’ll find out later today who the artist was, whether he/she is with an outside agency or working for Miramax’s in-house marketing department. If the film had delivered more of what this poster conveys and less of what I’ve been ranting about today, it might have amounted to a different equation. Not a portrait of a nutbag Hughes, but a man whose inner turbine was so relentless and who was possessed of such unique vision and fierce reach that he was not quite of this earth.
Court
Today’s column was 95% finished as of late Tuesday evening, and I’ve got a fantastic excuse for not getting it up until Wednesday afternoon. I sat in courtroom #602 at Beverly Hills Superior Court all this morning waiting for a small-claims issue to be resolved, and it was all for naught because I didn’t have that pink form that proves the defendant (I’m the plaintiff) had been served.
Defending Soderbergh
“I’d hate to read what you’d be writing about Soderbergh if he was actually making bad movies. As it is, at least from my perspective, he seems to be making films that are either safe and entertaining, or risky and flawed.
“Oceans 11 was mild but fun enough. Given the huge cast and complicated story it could’ve been a smug fiasco but it was entertaining and, despite its strangely off-key trailers, I’m expecting the same from Ocean’s 12. Would you call Eastwood a Warner Bros. go-along boy? He alternates serious fare with popcorn flicks for them, too.
“Solaris wasn’t effective but it stuck with me and, for a film I’d rate at about a 5 or 6 out of 10, it’s still something I find myself turning over in my head from time to time. Full Frontal was a wank — Schizopolis Lite — but I’d rather see something that took a chance and failed than played it safe.
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“And you didn’t mention the aborted HBO series K Street, which was another one of those A-for-effort endeavors. It didn’t quite work but if it had found a stronger groove, it would’ve been great. Even at its worst it still felt like an R-rated TV show directed by an at-his-prime Alan Pakula. Soderbergh tried to base a series on the big political events of the week, using real political figures, real events, D.C. locations; he shot-edited-directed the whole thing himself on a week-to-week basis. Sounds like more work than is healthy. I was almost relieved for him when the series upchucked its own intestines.
“Anyway, my point is he’s out there trying and for the past four years, he’s unfortunately been getting his ass kicked. Given his level of self-deprecation and candor in interviews (see any post Underneath remarks or post Oscar remarks for that matter) I’m sure he’ll admit at some point if your reading on him was accurate or not.
“I personally have more ire for directors who don’t seem to be doing anything at all. Where’s Paul Thomas Anderson? I love him but it’s been two years since Punch Drunk Love and we’ve yet to even hear an announcement about an upcoming project. Can I borrow his clout if he’s not going to use it? What’s taking John Cameron Mitchell so long to follow up Hedwig? Yeah, he’s doing the sex flick but where’s it at? David O. Russell hit a cult homer with Huckabees, but it came five years after Three Kings.
“Understand, I mention these guys because I love and respect the hell out of them but I’d hate to see anybody I like fall prey to the Tarantino syndrome. Therein lies stagnation, I think, and a failure of nerve and instinct. ” — Neil Harvey
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“What’s with your bizarre psychoanalysis of directors lately? Okay, Wes Anderson and Steven Soderbergh aren’t making films that precisely match your sensibilities anymore but that doesn’t mean they’ve gone crazy and sold out. As far as I can tell, The Life Aquatic looks very much like something the Anderson we all know and love would make. If it’s too weird for popular tastes, good for him. I’d be happy if he made something with an even more unusual rhythm than his other films. Nobody bashes Kubrick for his cold, precise attention to detail. Why bash Anderson? Is it because he doesn’t return your calls anymore? I thought you were above that kind of thing.
“As for Soderbergh, he definitely hasn’t been asleep for four years. As anyone who’s seen the complete K Street will tell you, it’s one hell of a five-hour movie. Also, you’re in a minority when it comes to Solaris. Yes, it was rejected by the mainstream, 1+1 = 2 film industry crowd but most serious students of film that I know felt this was one of Soderbergh’s best films to date.
“Full Frontal was a flawed but worthwhile experiment and definitely not the work of a sell-out. And don’t forget the countless interesting films that Soderbergh has supported as a producer over the last four years (Insomnia, Far From Heaven, Naqoyqatsi, A Scanner Darkly).
“The one area where I turn against Soderbergh is in the Oceans department but…wait a second, didn’t you write a favorable review of Ocean’s 11 in 2001? I remember being excited to see it, based on your review, then being terribly disappointed with the actual film. Now, in order to justify your out-there Soderbergh thesis, you’re pretending you hated it all along. Also to Soderbergh’s credit, don’t forget that several risky projects were green-lit as a result of his involvement in Ocean’s 12. (Soderbergh’s Insider-like whistle-blower project, The Informant, is one.)
“I don’t know why you expect these filmmakers to keep repeating themselves. You can go back and watch The Limey or Rushmore any time. Even if they’re not going in the direction you want them to go, give them some credit. They’re intelligent, film-loving auteurs who put a lot of care into their work and you can’t say that about very many filmmakers these days. ” — Jonathan Doyle, Montreal, Quebec.
Wells to Doyle: Here’s a portion of what I wrote in my early December ’01 piece about Ocean’s 11:
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“A little less than two years ago, I reviewed an early draft of Ted Griffin’s script of Ocean’s 11. I said it plays ‘a lot like The Sting‘ but that it ‘lacks the wit and character that made that 1973 film so richly entertaining. The Sting devoted its first 20 to 25 minutes to setting up the job (i.e., providing motivation, ability), and the rest of its running time to playing it out, with no consequences at the finale other than success. That’s pretty much what Ocean’s 11 does.’
“I was wrong. Ocean’s 11 doesn’t do what The Sting does. It doesn’t do what The Hot Rock — another minor but hugely enjoyable early ’70s heist film — does either. And it’s not Rififi or Topkapi or the original Ocean’s 11. It’s not anything, really. It’s a shell of a heist film covered in a yellowish haze. (You’ll know what I mean after seeing it.) One slick move after another, adding up to nothing and leaving you with less than you came in with. That’s Vegas for you.”
Does this excerpt strike you as a rave?
“Good lord! I’m hoping that your Soderbergh rant (and, come to think of it, your son’s QT-inspired pass on tipping) was nothing more than an attempt to prod readers.
“Sure, I’d like another Limey or Out of Sight or sex, lies & videotape. Shit, I’d make do with Kafka. But why all the hostility towards Ocean’s 11 and Ocean’s 12? The former was fun and clever. Not nearly as fun or clever as Out of Sight, but not worthy of that kind of bile. Have you watched it since? I was very surprised to find that I enjoyed it more the second time around. I liked the smug little asides between the actors. They were having a good time, and, against all my instincts, I felt like I was in on the joke with them. The movie is ridiculous, but it’s not stupid.
“When he was super-hot, I considered Soderbergh to be the only American filmmaker who mattered. Maybe he’s not working at that level right now, but give him a break. Say what you will about Full Frontal and Solaris, but they felt like home to me. They reminded me of my favorite `70s films — they had a presence. You could wrap them around you like a blanket. They have a voice that I enjoy hearing.
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“Soderbergh was going at a breakneck pace from `98 on — 7 films in 5 years. Who came close to that output with half the results?
“I refuse to begrudge Soderbergh for making a big Hollywood movie. Because even if it is a big Hollywood entertainment, it’s not Coppola making The Cotton Club or Dracula or Jack. O12 is a silly thing made with some friends. No more complicated or important than that. And I feel like SS knows that. Make it good, don’t insult anyone, no huge effects, just a nice little caper built on snarky dialogue and silly situations. I’ll take that over Beyond the Sunset any day.” — Sean Cameron
“There aren’t many directors who haven’t hit this kind of snag. Remember that the same man who directed The Maltese Falcon, The African Queen and The Asphalt Jungle also directed Annie, Reflections in a Golden Eye and Victory. And yet he came back from the ashes periodically to bestow upon us The Man Who Would Be King, Fat City and Prizzi’s Honor. Roman Polanski drudged through Pirates, Frantic and The Ninth Gate before he knocked everybody off their asses with The Pianist.” — Christopher Hyatt.
Underground Man
Remember when the prospect of a new, soon-to-open Steven Soderbergh film would bump up your pulse rate a bit?
It came out of that electric surge he had between ’98 and ’00, that dam burst of creative energy manifested in Out of Sight, The Limey, Erin Brockovich and Traffic. The 38 year-old Soderbergh won a Best Director Oscar for Traffic in March ’01, and I remember watching from some crowded Oscar party and loudly whoo-whooing when this happened. Great achievement, glorious night.
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It was precisely four years ago when I first saw the superb Traffic, and I remember purring in my screening room seat and giving silent thanks to God or fate or whatever for putting Steven Soderbergh films in my life.
But in the four years since the dream has turned into cottage cheese. Green cottage cheese, okay, because a lot of money has been (and will be) made, but the upshot is that nobody in my rarified circle cares very much any more. It used to be, “Wow…Soderbergh.” Now it’s like, “Okay, here he comes again…another in-and-out so-whatter.”
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I don’t know who Steven Soderbergh is anymore, but the guy who made The Limey has, by all appearances, lumbered off into a very deep bear cave and curled up for a snooze. We all need to do this at times and maybe he’s recharging, but for four years?
When I think of Soderbergh these days I think of this in-house Warner Bros. go-along guy. He’s not the GenX Mr. Cool with the horn-rim glasses any more. He’s the guy who makes big expensive fuck-all movies like the two Ocean flicks, or the pretentious guy who made Solaris, or, depending on who you talk to, the axe man who didn’t stand by or protect former pally and close colleague Ted Griffin (his Ocean’s 11 screenwriter) when push came to shove on the filming of the film now called Rumor Has It.
I’ve been thinking recently that Soderbergh may have evolved into a 21st Century version of director Stuart Rosenberg (Cool Hand Luke, Brubaker, The Pope of Greenwich Village, Pocket Money). Rosenberg made some decent films, so it’s not an insult to invoke this comparison. But it is disappointing that the Soderbergh of ’98 to ’00 has folded up shop.
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He sure as hell isn’t carrying on the tradition of Richard Lester anymore…not with Ocean’s Bullshit 11 to his credit and the firing of Griffin on his conscience, and the visually swampy, what-the-fucky Full Frontal to answer for, on top of the crib-death failure of Solaris and now the likelihood of another big-budget jape…or is romp the more accurate term?…with Ocean’s Who-Gives-a-Crap? 12.
I don’t mean to sound like a rank sourpuss. I like japes, romps, caper movies …whatever. As long as they’re clever and winning and well-acted. Peter Yates’ The Hot Rock (’71) is a example of a great jape movie. I love it — I’ve seen it maybe eight times. If Ocean’s 12 (which I won’t see until early next week) has the same kind of vibe and agility, cool. Soderbergh will still be the Hollow Man, but at least I won’t feel burned.
I realize it may all turn around when he does his Che Guevara movie with Benicio del Toro. Maybe that will be the Big Turnaround and after it’s made Soderbergh will start admitting in interviews what a fallow period ’01 to ’04 was, etc. Let’s hope so.
Soderbergh’s malaise is clearly tracable to his production company deal with Warner Bros. Maybe he wanted to live on his partner George Clooney’s level and maybe he wanted a better class of girlfriend, so (in all likelihood) he went for the dough. Maybe there’s some kind of vague Samson-and-Delilah thing going on and Soderbergh’s wife, Jules Asner, is somehow sapping his essence or messing with the purity of his genius-geek boy-nerd sensibility.
Maybe he needs to just renounce everything and start wearing sandals and sarapes and go to Guatemela and live in a cave and find his soul again. I don’t know. Thoughts?
Feel His Pain
I’ve only read portions of David Thomson’s The Whole Equation (Knopf, now in stores), but it’s obviously another brilliant work by a man I believe to be our greatest film essayist and critic. Thomson’s books are always sublime. And like all the others, this one is written in a clean and graceful prose style that’s not too academic or snooty, and is always serving up thoughts, insights and asides of a wholly fascinating nature.
The Whole Equation is a detailed, penetrating, here-and-there history of the psychology of American filmmaking over the last 100 years.
The title comes from a line of dialogue taken from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon, a novel about the Hollywood career of MGM producer Irving Thalberg. I don’t know the speaker, but a guy is saying Hollywood “can be understood, but only dimly and in flashes. Not half a dozen men have ever been able to keep the whole equation of pictures in their heads.”
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Thomson is one of those guys. His book juggles and eyeballs and sorts through the whole shmear. It focuses in on the core elements, and then puts them all into a pan and turns on the heat and sprinkles on seasoning, and then lays it out on the table.
I love that it’s not written in some sequential history-book way, and it has all kinds of great anecdotal data. I love reading what stars got paid for this or that role. I wonder how Humphrey Bogart spent the $35,000 and change he made for starring in Casablanca. Marlon Brando earned $125,000 for acting in the great On the Waterfront, but $5 million for his stupid 10-minute cameo in Christopher Columbus: The Discovery . I eat this shit up.
My favorite parts are those that explain the personalities and manic compulsions of Hollywood craziest (as in crazy-beautiful) — folks like Robert Towne, Louis B. Mayer, Eric von Stroheim, Nicole Kidman, David O. Selznick, Steven Spielberg, and Joe Gillis.
Especially Joe Gillis — the famously embittered screenwriter played by William Holden in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard. As this haunting 1950 classic starts up, Gillis, who’s marginally talented but probably isn’t good enough all the way around the track, is in a pickle. He’s broke, can’t get a job and is about to have his car repossessed. He winds up working for a has-been movie queen named Norma Desmond on a rewrite job, and then becomes her gigolo lover, and winds up floating in her swimming pool with two slugs in his back. Or is it three?
Equation offers a very amusing riff about what the terms of Joe’s humiliation would be today. If, that is, he had been born around the time of Sunset Boulevard‘s release. Here’s how most of it reads:
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“It is 2000 or so, and Joe is a modest success in Hollywood. He has some good credits, and he gets new assignments. He is, of course, a member of the Writers Guild, and as such — so long as he keeps working — he enjoys the Guild health plan (it covers dental), the pension scheme (Joe is in his fifties), and death benefits. And because of the Guild’s steady pressure to raise the respectability of the writer, and because of Joe’s agent’s endeavors, he can get $350,000 for a script. In return, he owes the Guild $100 a year plus 1.5 percent of his gross earnings.
“Now let’s do a little gentle math on Joe. He has a house in Santa Monica, one he bought seven years ago (at the time of his second marriage). He got it for $850,000 then, and with refinancing his monthly mortgage payment is $5000 (though he now owes $970,000 on the house). Thanks to Jarvis-Gann (Proposition 13 it was called), Joe pays only about $8500 a year in property taxes. But the state has suffered in other ways because of Proposition 13: it has lost the quality public schools it once had.
“This hits Joe quite sharply. He had a first wife and a divorce, and although California is a no-fault state, the judge nailed him. He plays alimony of $5000 a month. He has a nineteen year-old at Dartmouth (that’s $40,000 a year if you count plane tickets) and a fifteen year-old in a private high school ($25,000). Then he has a six year-old boy by the second marriage ($15,000 a year at a Montessori school).
“Joe also likes to keep a small office in Venice; he works better there, and he has learned that a man deserves a private life. The office and his secretary (just three days a week) run him $25,000.
“Are you counting? The annual total so far is $313,850.
“I forgot to mention the therapy; not for Joe (he bears up), but the two older kids go once a week and that is $14,000 a year. Now his second wife is saying it’s unfair that the six-year-old doesn’t go, too.
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“So far the expenses are $327,000, against income this year of $350,000. Joe is lucky. He has work and a nice house and three kids who are all sound of body if inert in the mind. He has a little left over for a vacation. But the second wife (she is a lot younger than he is) wants to open a dance studio that could be very capital-greedy in its first few years. And Joe really needs a new car. Living in Santa Monica, his drives to the studios are rough and getting rougher. His Volvo is creaking. He has his eye on something just a bit spiffier.
“Look, he’s in trouble, which is why he is considering this second job, a moonlighting polish called Bases Loaded about a girls’ softball team. It doesn’t really need writing, so much as catching the way teenagers talk in the mall. And Joe has traded on having teenagers — he talks to them incessantly; it troubles them, but he has the latest slang. It’ snto going to be anything Joe will be proud of, but he needs the second check. It’s that or some TV stuff.
“Anyone living in Hollywood will have detected an extra irony in the equation of Joe’s economy. If he does better, his fiscal parameters will expand to keep him pinched. His house, on Montana, is rather shabby. To mix usefully with the A-list people, he needs to live in Beverly Hills. That is not going to happen at under $2.5 million. In turn that would push his mortgage payments to $120,000 a year. To say nothing of staff — he’s going to need a housekeeper, a gardener, and catering services from time to time.
Thomson runs another tabulation of Joe’s income and expenses, noting that he makes about $1 million but has to spend $1 million to keep his life rolling, which, as his accountant points out, leaves the accountant unpaid.
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“Joe lives in another trap. At his standard of living, he cannot yield to even his own great ideas, supposing he has them. Suppose he thinks of a lovely, simple story; the whole arc of it comes to him as he knots his tie. But it’s a small film, a little gem. How small? Well, it could happen — Joe knows a start-up company that would fund it (at a modest level). Joe could write it and direct it (the thing he’s always dreamed about), for $200,000 — two thirds of that deferred. Here it is — the apple of his eye.
“But he can’t do it. He can’t afford to step down. He needs projects of a certain size. Maybe his wife or a child (I ilke that better) taunts him: “You’re only doing it for the money, Dad!” He protests. He argues. He turns angry. He is a writer, isn’t he?
“But when he sleeps, he has a dream in which God (or is it his agent?) comes to him — they are sitting up on Mulholland, surveying the city on a warm night – and says: “Here’s the deal. You can make the film you want, the film of your best moments – for nothing. Or, we’ll never make another film you touch, but we’ll give you $2 million a year.”
Intrigue
“Find out the movies a man saw between the age of ten and fifteen…which ones he liked, disliked…and you would have a pretty good idea of what sort of mind and temperament he has.” — Gore Vidal, Paris Review interview, 1974, as excerpted in David Thomson’s The Whole Equation.
Overheard
“I liked it, it’s well done but I wasn’t crazy about it. I didn’t believe he’d stay with that neurotic wife. I could be in the minority…I didn’t hate it… but the ending is the ending and that’s what you go out with. It’s no home run ending. There’s no reason to stay with her. She had an affair, which she admits to him. There’s a line that she had an affair, she says yes, I slept with him. I don’t get it. It doesn’t ring true for me. [The director] shot all kinds of different endings, but he just didn’t know what to do at the end, and the ending he chose is flat. And yet overall the whole picture is very well done.”
Prick Up Your Ears
Nancy Porter of Sierra Madre (east of Pasadena), California, was first to identify last Wednesday’s dialogue clips.
Clip #1 is Laurence Olivier using metaphor in an attempt to seduce his servant, played by Tony Curtis, in Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus; Clip #2 is George C. Scott’s doctor in Arthur Hiller’s The Hospital, describing the emotional shambles of his life, and Clip #3 is Barnard Hughes from the same film, explaining all about “death by irony”; and Clip #4 is an Tilda Swinton and.
Today’s Clip #1 is an exploration of the implications of silence, and Clip #2 is a response to a particular conclusion about this. Clip #3 is from a conversation on a beach in Mexico; and Clip #4 is a “eureka!” scene from the annals of advertising.
I’ll post the winner on Wednesday, 12.8.
Air Hugs
“If memory serves, you’re the writer who gave a close reading to that photo of Leslee Dart with Nicole Kidman that ran in the N.Y. Times. In any case, if you’re interested in further study of Hollywood publicist body language, check out the photo that runs with the Kingsley-Dart story in the current (12/6) New York magazine.
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“In this one, Dart has her arm around Harvey Weinstein, and she’s doing the exact same thing to Harvey that Nicole did to her — she’s got her arm around him, but only her thumb is touching him. And not even that, because her thumb is only barely touching his should and is resting on its side The rest of her fingers are awkwardly poised above his shoulder, hovering in mid-air.
“Maybe these days, Harvey is even more of an untouchable than she is. Or maybe both Leslee and Nicole are covertly flashing some sort of gang sign.” — Walter van Tilburg Clark
Makeover
It may be total bullshit, but if there’s any truth to the 007 franchise-destroyers Michael Wilson and Barbara Broccoli giving serious thought to hiring Colin Salmon as the new James Bond, it would be the absolute coolest move of their mediocre lives.
Britain’s Sun newspaper is basing a speculative story that Salmon might be the guy on ]nothing but the fact that Salmon signed an autograph for a young fan by wrting, “To Sebastian, have a wonderful life!! Colin Salmon 007”, on a photograph of himself in Alien Vs Predator.
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Salmon played the British intelligence officer Charles Robinson opposite Pierce Brosnan in the last three Bond flicks.
“The casting of Salmon would certainly bring a new twist to Ian Fleming’s creation — after a Scot, an Australian, an Englishman, a Welshman and an Irishman, Salmon would be the first black Bond,” the Sun story wrote.
Filming on the untitled Bond 21 is set for sometime in 2006.
Bitch Slap
“Well, Mr. Wells, you dodged a bullet. As an enlightened female whose ears start shooting steam every time some male tries to tell me how women and their domestic tyranny are the cause of all of man’s collective sufferings, I was prepared to bawl you out as soon as you started in on your `drop that bitch’ rant.
“But you surprised me (okay, I admit it, I shouldn’t have prejudged you), and by the time I realized what you were getting around to I figured that you were just stating a fact that’s true for a lot of guys (though this truth may be their own fault, and have nothing to do with their wives) and not going for the cheap misogynist insult.
“And I could go into a whole tirade about how too many men do end up leaving their wives in the lurch to pursue fantasy women in spite of the fact that said wives have botoxed and belly-crunched themselves half-to-death in the hopes of preventing exactly that occurrence, but that would be going for the cheap misandrist insult, and you don’t deserve that (at least not today.)
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“Instead, I’d like to mention that it’s not only men who are leading the lives of quiet desperation that you describe. Women go to the movies for fantasy, too. When you go to a romantic comedy, plenty of the women in the audience are married, and they’ve come there to drool over Colin Firth and Hugh Grant even while trying to avoid the unpleasant mental comparison with their own balding, beer-bellied, football-watching husbands.
“And why do you think Erin Brockovich was such a big hit? The (straight) women in the audience weren’t there to stare at Julia Roberts’s breasts, but because they loved the idea of a sassy southern woman with three children sticking it to an evil utility company while hooking a sexy/dangerous biker guy to stay home with the kids so she can go out and kick corporate ass. This is the stuff female dreams are made of, and if
“Spanglish draws in a huge female audience, I can tell you it won’t be because the women in the theatre really like Tea Leoni’s self-loathing harpie (if that’s what she is), but because they’re turned on by the idea of an honest, patient husband who takes his wedding vows seriously and heroically resists the (understandable) urge to leave his wife for the sweet, young, non-English-speaking-and-therefore-emotionally-low-maintenance household help. Because that kind of guy is, in too many cases, just a fantasy.
“But here’s my last point (and the only one you’re probably even remotely interested in): Buck up! I went into As Good As It Gets with a similar attitude: why would I want to watch Jack Nicholson get paid to act like an ass for two hours? But I was won over, because the movie transcended the lame marketing slogan that read “Brace yourself for Melvin,” and became a story about people who seemed real to me and whose lives I was invested in without necessarily wanting to be best friends with any of them.
“If Brooks does what he’s capable of doing (and do we have any reason to believe he won’t?), then Spanglish will follow suit, and that gag-inducing ‘every family has a hero’ tag line will have nothing to do with the reality of the film, which won’t pander and won’t make anyone into a stock whipping-boy or harridan and won’t leave all the straight males in the audience feeling emasculated and depressed. Here’s hoping.” — Ashley Reed, Atlanta, GA.
“Regarding your item about whether or not the premise of Spanglish will appeal to most men, I have one comment. Bitter much?
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“This is just speculation, of course, because I haven’t seen it either, but maybe Brooks and company aren’t concerned with bringing men another fantasy piece about how wives are evil shrews and pretty new acquaintances are hot. Maybe they’re offering women a portrait of a man who loves his children.
“Or maybe the film isn’t meant to appeal to any particular subgroup of human beings at all. Maybe they’re simply offering a quality script based on real human emotions portrayed by solid performances, a talented director, and (with any luck) Sandler’s follow-up to the potential he showed us in Punch Drunk Love.
“Again, I don’t know if any of this is right, and admittedly it could very well be overly optimistic and a bit naive. But, I haven’t seen it yet and neither have you. Just curious why you’re so quick to damn the concept before you’ve seen how it’s handled.” — Sarah Lenzini, “a non-toxic wife in training,” St. Louis, MO
Rahoi vs. Zelter
“Jon Rahoi sounded a little naive in his article when he suggested that it was just limited economic growth which kept the mainland Chinese from seeing Hollywood films.
“Let’s not forget that the source of that limited growth comes from the Chinese living under a totalitarian communist country, in which wages for actual effort are artificially deflated to subsistence levels, rather than the actual value of their contributions.
“Not to mention the authorities in question have the power to review each and every single film, and either ban them or demand they be edited to conform with their politically-correct policies. So even if the people want the real thing, they have to settle for bootlegs, because the party decides what’s appropriate for them to consume.” — Daniel Zelter
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Rahoi responds: Sorry to burst your bubble, but China is Communist in name only these days. Your summary of Chinese life is in fact pure fantasy to me, cribbed from whatever textbook you used in tenth-grade Sociology.
“While the culture you described might have been the case two decades ago, China today is a much different place. The ‘totalitarian communist country’ you mentioned is, in reality, a thriving economic juggernaut, with private ownership of land and businesses. In this, the southern part, I can watch uncensored Hong Kong broadcasts as easily as state news, check U.S. websites, and write about China unchecked from my apartment.
“You’re right that the government still keeps a lid on the media, but it’s blown way out of proportion when mentioned in the states. The truth is, there just isn’t much of a film-distribution infrastructure yet, and absolutely no market for most crappy American movies. Just because Red Corner didn’t open here doesn’t mean it’s Soviet Russia — the movie just sucked.
“Your wages for actual effort are artificially deflated to subsistence levels’ statement is laughable. Wages here, while low, are determined by market forces alone. The Chinese government is far more laissez-faire than our own, and the next ten years will bear that out. Don’t come crying to me when the Chinese guy who takes your job buys your house and rents it out to you at a profit.”
Neverland
“Jeff, you don’t get Neverland. I think everyone who reads your column understands that. But you spend most of your late column praising the National Board of Review’s choice of Michael Mann as director, but their choice is, of course, horribly compromised. If only they hadn’t chosen Neverland as Best Picture!
“Jeff, you just don’t get it. You don’t have the receptors, you’re too narcissistic, you’re too antsy, you’re worried about what’s young, hip, and really edgy. Okay, we get it . You don’t think Neverland is any good….for you. And if not you, then who?
“But just acknowledge that maybe there are certain cinematic mysteries that are beyond your grasp and let it go. And quit calling older people blue hairs, you fucker. Perhaps if you quit yammering so damn much, and paid a little bit of attention to what other loved and why, you could learn something new. Or not.” — Kathleen Denning .
Flyboys
Universal Home Video isn’t making a huge effort to inform you about this…they care but not all that deeply, I mean…but there’s a very decent-looking looking DVD of Howard Hughes’ Hells Angels (or so I’m told) hitting video stores on 12.7.
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I would have gotten into it a bit more, but the publicists at UHV don’t consider me a prime word-spreader about DVD’s, and I was frankly too crazed to get around to asking them for a copy, which is always an effort.
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is having a screening of Hells Angels on Friday, 12.10, at 7:30. This, one could argue, would be the preferable way to see a classic film — biggish screen, appreciative crowd, etc. I just hope the sound is loud enough.
Sticks and Stones
There’s a scene in Lawrence of Arabia that comes just after General Allenby (Jack Hawkins) tells his artillery officers to bomb the hell out of the Turks. “Pound them, Charlie…pound them,” he says.
Cut to Lawrence (Peter O’Toole) and Ali (Omar Sharif) riding their camels at the head of the Arab army at night, looking at the flashes of artillery fire on the horizon and listening to the distant thunder. “God help them,” says Ali. “They’re Turks,” says an unconcerned Lawrence. “God help them,” Ali repeats.
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It’s 11:55 pm on Tuesday night, Oliver Stone’s Alexander opens tomorrow, and the Rotten Tomatoes artillery is raining death upon it. When a movie gets hammered this hard, my tough-guy thing goes out the window and I start feeling all soft and mushy. “Poor Oliver,” I hear myself saying. “He tried so hard, wanted so much to make this film great.” Forget it, most of my colleagues are saying. He’s fried, he’s over, the movie’s a mess. “He tried so hard,” I repeat.
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All right, Alexander is a mess. There’s no way around that. You don’t need to hear any details from this corner. Go to Rotten Tomatoes…it’s amazing. The page is soaked in green. 37 pans out of 43 reviews.
“It’s one of the greatest adventure tales of all time,” Stone told the Toronto Sun ‘s Bruce Kirkland the other day. “It’s equal to Sinbad or any of them. You would have to say that this guy outdid Achilles, he outdid Jason, he outdid Dionysus. He’s a god! And the guy did it in his lifetime. It’s a great story.”
But it’s not a great story. That’s the odd thing about it. It’s a military saga writ large, a fascinating ancient myth, a tale of great hunger and ambition and mother-loathing and competing with dad…but a great story it’s not. Not the one that Stone tells, at least. But I still worship Rosario Dawson’s breasts.
I have this half-formed idea kicking around in my head about the fact that Stone started thinking about making a movie about Alexander the Great 30 years ago, and then spent major portions of the past 15 years working to bring his story to the screen.
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Maybe sometimes when a film stews inside a filmmaker for too long, it becomes too big like some swollen oversized fetus, and gets all caught up in itself with the umbelical cord wrapped around its neck, and a successful delivery is impossible. This happened also with Toys, Barry Levinson’s long-delayed dream movie.
And yet Clint Eastwood’s years-long effort to make Unforgiven turned out splendidly. But then Clint didn’t write it or work it through in his head (that was David Webb Peoples’ job), so maybe that’s a different deal.
I wrote a big report on Alexander the Great for my Ancient and Medieval History class when I was twelve or thirteen. I really wanted this movie to work. I’m not happy that it doesn’t.
I was even mildly disappointed by the big battle scene between Alexander’s troops and the much larger forces of the Persian king Darius. I was expecting a battle pumped up with adrenaline and ecstasy and all kinds of Oliver craziness, but Stone doesn’t handle it that much better than Robert Rossen did in the 1956 Richard Burton version. And Rossen shot his version without title cards.
I was also surprised to learn that the Persian king’s name, according to Stone’s film, is pronounced Dar-EYE-us. Wow, I’ve been saying it wrong my whole life.
Palookaville
The single overriding concern henceforth for any journo writing about Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby (Warner Bros., 12.17, limited), even cryptically, is to not spill the plot. That means don’t even hint at it…right?
I went into Monday night’s screening expecting some kind of Clint riff on Girlfight, and it is that for the first 100 minutes or so….but then it turns and does something else and it’s like “whoa, daddy…oh, man” time. It hits you like a freight train and leaves you saddened and bent over and coping with the backwash.
Before seeing it the night before last I didn’t know anything about the source material — “Rope Burns: Stories From the Corner”, a short-story collection by the late fight manager and cutman Jerry Boyd, who wrote under the pen name of F.X. Toole — and not one iota of buzz had gotten through. It’s a great thing to see a good movie cold.
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Okay, I’m warming it up a little for the readership, but I’m holding my water. I don’t trust critics to keep their hint-hint instincts at bay, so play it safe and put on your blinders and don’t read any reviews on opening day. See it first, I mean.
Repeating my WIRED praise, Baby is a major art film. It is in the same realm of accomplishment and penetration as Clint’s Unforgiven, and may be his best film ever. In the view of at least one major critic who attended Monday’s screening, it emphatically is that.
It follows that it’s an Oscar contender on several fronts — Best Picture, Best Director (Eastwood), Best Actor (Eastwood), Best Actress (Hilary Swank). I’m not alone on this — the four or five serious journos I’ve spoken to who’ve seen it are all seriously impressed. Nobody’s hedging.
All right, one former critic I spoke to was shaking his head, but mainly because he wanted to see something else.
My kids, I fear, are going to be reluctant to see it, much less embrace it. It’s as far away from an MTV heebie-jeebie movie as you can get. Eastwood may be the only major director left in this industry who paces his films without regard to velocity for its own sake…..who just lets his stories unfold according to their own speed. Baby takes its time but it gets where it’s going.
The widescreen cinematography by Tom Stern (Mystic River, Blood Work) is straight and unpretentious, but I love the more-than-occasional detours it takes into darkness and shadows. It felt to me like the return of Gordon Willis or Gregg Toland in their respective heydays.
All the hoo-hah means that Swank is once again up against Annette Bening — they faced each other before in the ’99 race when Swank’s Boys Don’t Cry performance beat out Bening’s in American Beauty.
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What’s partly amazing about Million Dollar Baby is how quickly it was thrown together.
I’m told it went into production only last August 1 and wrapped in late October, or something close to that. The script by Paul Taggis (who also wrote and directed Crash, one of the hits of last September’s Toronto Film Festival…which Lions Gate is opening next year) was, I’m told, put into production only a couple of months after Eastwood first read it. Eastwood said okay, hired his cast, called up his crew people and said “let’s go, we’re doing this”…wham.
Here’s a letter from a guy named Kyle Long. He says he’s a legit screenwriter (sold a spec, gotten two jobs since) and not a Warner Bros. plant. I think I believe him:
“I saw this film last night at the DGA. Wow…what a movie! Thanks to the fact that the idiots at WB have yet to produce one trailer or commercial, I wasn’t that excited going in — I just thought it was some chick boxing flick, and who could get excited about that?
“But in my humble opinion, what I saw rivals Sideways as the best movie of the year.
“Without ruining it for you (if you haven’t seen it already), Million Dollar Baby is really two movies in one. The first is an excellent take on a kind of boxing movie that we’ve seen before. It’s funny and inspiring and it just works. The second movie (basically the third act) completely caught me by surprise and moved me to tears on several occasions.
“Based on what I’ve seen so far, it gets nominated in every major category and may be my favorite right now for Best Picture. Paul Haggis is a lock for best adapted screenplay. Eastwood (in his best performance…well, maybe ever) gets a nod, as does Hillary Swank and Morgan Freeman (is there another actor on the planet who delivers voice-over lines better?).
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“Eastwood has hit his stride at 74…unbelievable.
“I really can’t believe how poorly a job Warner Bros. has done marketing this flick. I mean, I live in LA, work in the biz and I barely knew about it. Not only will this flick be a critical fave, but it could be a major hit as well (it will play everywhere). Meanwhile, the suits have decided to blow their wad on Alexander, which makes no sense at all.
“This biz can suck the creativity right out of you sometimes and if nothing else, movies like Million Dollar Baby and Sideways recharge me and remind me why I wanted to write movies in the first place. Just a great, great flick.”
I included Long’s rant about Warner Bros. publicity only to debunk this impression. The Burbank crew only just saw Baby a little while ago because Eastwood played it that way. True to form, the guy’s been holding his cards to his chest. Clint runs his own show on his own clock, and won’t be muscled into anything he doesn’t feel like doing.
So lay off WB marketing — they’re just playing cards they’ve been dealt.
Talking Funny
If there’s a choice, movie stars should steer clear of exotic accents unless they can do them perfectly. Sometimes it’s not even a good idea if they can.
For the most part U.S. audiences don’t want their name actors to try and be Laurence Olivier. Stars become stars partly because people like their unchallenging steadiness.
Exceptions crop up every now and then. Owen Wilson is a star because he’s Owen Wilson in everything he does — same delivery, same intelligent-stoner phrasing, no variations. And yet he manages a surprisingly good Kentucky accent in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. I’m impressed.
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Renee Zellweger didn’t have a choice with Bridget Jones Diary: The Edge of Reason (Miramax, now dying in theatres everywhere). Bridget is a London working girl and that’s that. Zellweger went with what I remember was a passable English accent in the original Bridget Jones Diary three years ago, but some feel she fudges it in the sequel, and she’s taking a shellacking for this.
A less confident director than Mike Nichols might have asked Julia Roberts to go with a British accent for her performance as Anna, a divorced London-based photographer, in Closer (Columbia, 12.3). But he didn’t, wisely, and it’s fine.
You might think for a minute or two as this London-based drama begins, “Hey, she’s not sounding British”…and then you’ll forget about it. Roberts probably would have blown it if she’d tried. She’s not Cate Winslet.
Ancient-era period dramas can get away with any kind of accent as long as it’s uniform. I have no problem with Colin Farrell and his Macedonian officers speaking in Irish accents in Oliver Stone’s Alexander.
Same deal with Jesus Christ, John the Baptist and the twelve disciples sounding like New York-area goombahs in Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ — a uniform system. It’s also acceptable that Kirk Douglas and his slave army lieutenants in Spartacus use regular-guy American accents and their Roman opponents talk in British or cultivated mid-Atlantic accents.
As long as everyone sticks to the scheme…
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Angelina Jolie’s Russian accent (Time critic Richard Corliss describes it as “crypto-Carpathian”) obviously goes against the system in Alexander. The idea, apparently, is to convey that she’s a Medusa snake woman who has no allegiances or agenda other than her own, but it threw me anyway. The campiness seemed overbaked.
Actors shouldn’t do medieval English history dramas without sounding vaguely like like they belong in the milieu, but half-assed attempts are worse than none at all.
Kevin Costner could have easily gotten away playing himself in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, but he went with a mid-Atlantic accent instead and seemed off-center all through the film. His Boston accent in Thirteen Days made me want to hit him, and I still flinch at the memory of his Jim Garrison Nyawlins-speak in JFK.
Clark Gable played Rhett Butler accent-free in Gone With the Wind, and it was one of his smartest moves ever. He would have sounded grotesque with an attempted Charleston drawl.
Even character actors need to watch their step with this stuff. Every time I watch Shane Elisha Cook, Jr.’s Alabama accent (“Ain’t no one runnin’ me off maaah cleem!”) makes me wince.
Blowing Town
This column is shutting down until Monday. I’ll be doing the Thanksgiving thing in Connecticut with my parents. I may tap out a WIRED item or two if boredom creeps in but don’t hold your breath.
Two Strangelove‘s
I said this in a short piece a few weeks ago but it’s gift-buying time so here goes again for good measure. Dr. Strangelove fanatics should think twice before buying Columbia Tristar Home Video’s 40th anniversary two-disc special edition, which hit stores three weeks ago.
The extras are great (four doc featurettes plus a quickie interview with former Defense Secretary Robert MacNamara, who never gets around to actually mentioning the film) but the presentation of the film isn’t right.
The problem is the decision by CTHV to present Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 black comedy in a matted 1.85-like format, with black bars on the top and bottom of the image.
In accordance with Kubrick’s wishes, it should be framed instead in a 1.33 to 1 aspect ratio with an occasional shifting to a rough 1.66 to 1. This is what you get on the still-purchasable CTHV Strangelove DVD that came out in February ’01. That’s why it’s the better buy, even if it doesn’t have as many extras as the new version.
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On top of which I did a comparison of the ’04 and the ’01 versions on my TV set, and I swear the ’04 didn’t look as bright or sharp as the earlier version…even though it makes no sense that CHTV would degrade the quality.
Kubrick wasn’t into having his films shown in 1.85 matted formats. He was a full-frame type of guy, and you may have noticed that the full-frame images in his films really are full frame — not just 1.85 images with sides chopped off.
In any event, the framing on the ’01 DVD is quite beautiful, I feel, because of all the extra space in each shot. I don’t know why I just used the word “extra” because it looks just right — exquisitely framed and airy, and no boom mikes popping in.
The irony is that the Amazon.com description of the transfer of the 40th anniversary DVD explains exactly how it should look but doesn’t — or didn’t, to be precise, on the screener I was sent by CHTV a few weeks ago.
The Amazon copy reads, “Because this movie was originally shot using various aspect ratios, the proportions of the screen image will change periodically throughout the movie. This transfer (with its changing aspect ratio) was approved by director Stanley Kubrick himself.”
If anyone has a purchased copy of the 40th anniversary Strangelove that conforms to this standard (which would mean I was sent a screener that hadn’t been formatted correctly by accident), please write in and say so.
Prick Up Your Ears
Vikram Weet of Los Angeles was first to identify last Friday’s dialogue clips.
The “lesson in civics” in Clip #1 is spoken by Otto Kruger in Fred Zinneman’s High Noon; the lawman he’s speaking to is Gary Cooper. The interrogator in Clip #2 is Peter Sarsgaard in a third-act scene from Shattered Glass; the irritating little twinkle-toes with the nasal Toronto accent is Hayden Christensen; the dialogue in Clip #3 and Clip #4 is spoken by Gene Hackman and Jeanne Tripplehorn in Sydney Pollack’s The Firm.
Today’s clips are it for a week because there won’t be a new column on Friday, 11.26. Clip #1 is an actor of international renown using metaphor to lay some moves upon a young man he happens to fancy for the moment; Clip #2 and Clip #3 are two longish confessionals, one spoken by a despairing middle-aged character (and played by a certain Oscar-winning actor) and the other by a renowned Broadway character actor; and Clip #4 is an interrogation scene between a somewhat older woman and a teenage male.
Send in your answers before the holiday starts. I’ll post the winner on Wednesday, 12.1.
More Alexander
“I went to a recent screening of Alexander feeling reasonably sure that it would be superior to Troy, which it somewhat resembled. On the way out, however, I wasn’t at all sure that that’s the case.
“What was Oliver Stone thinking? Angelina Jolie as Colin Farrell’s mother? A mother who ages at least 20 years over the course of the story — which is set in a time when the average life expectancy was, what, maybe 35? — without so much as gaining a wrinkle or a gray hair?
“And all of Alexander’s men speaking in Irish accents? I would never have guessed Macedonia was a stone’s throw from Dublin.
“How about all the pointless flirting with that dancer who looked like he was auditioning for a remake of The Crying Game, or the irritating will-they-or-won’t-they? scenes with Farrell and Jared Leto?
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“And what about those dozens of endless, stilted speeches that seemed to stop the film dead every time it needed a strong shot of adrenalin instead?
“And once again, Stone proves that in his world women exist only to be painted in the most vicious and unflattering colors. There are only two major female roles in the film: a demented, snake-charming man-eater of a mom, and an ill-tempered hottie whose few lines are dripping with venom.
“A few of the battle sequences were impressive (and most of the others were ruined by the shaky cinematography, which made the scenes in the Indian jungle stuff seem like Alexander and company had strolled into Jurassic Park by mistake) and the sets looked great…
“But what a horrible waste of Farrell: an inventive, charismatic actor is reduced to little more than a wide-eyed, slack-jawed mannequin, crowned with an amateurish dye job that reminded me of the girls in my junior high who tried to emulate Farrah Fawcett and failed miserably.
“The critics I saw it with were silently respectful for the first hour, but they eventually lost control and began giggling (and at times groaning) at the folly of it all. When Alexander gazed into the bowl of wine and saw the image of his mom as Medusa just about everyone in the room was roaring.
“Warners must be thanking Zeus that they’ve got Ocean’s Twelve and Phantom of the Opera to replace this one on first-run screens within the next few weeks. It’s gonna bomb but good.” — James, Portage, Minnesota.
Wes Speaks
To me, Wes Anderson was always this very smart, ultra-particular, vaguely dweeby guy who happened to be this great filmmaker. Then he evolved into this Manhattan clothes horse with his suits cut a tiny bit shorter and tighter than the norm. And now he’s got shoulder-length hair and a copy line next to his portrait on last week’s cover of Paper that says, “Wes Anderson makes us wet.”
He’s definitely morphed into this other person, and I guess all I’m saying is that it’s interesting when people you’ve known from an earlier stage in life spread out and adopt dramatic flourishes and all. It’s fascinating. In any case, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou is a seafaring adventure thing and kind of splashed all over with salt water…I guess that’s what the copywriter meant, in part.
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Anderson and Zissou costars Owen Wilson and Jeff Goldblum did a q & a on Monday night after a Variety series screening at Hollywood’s Arclight theatre. I would have made it but I was off seeing Million Dollar Baby. Moderator Pete Hammond told me all about it the next day.
“[Wes] was very good, very upbeat, but there wasn’t anything that he really said that he hasn’t said before. I opened it by reading an interview he did three years ago when Tenenbaums came out, about what he wanted to do next. He said, ‘I want to do something with big sets and but at the same time smaller and more emotional with a doumentary feel,’ and that’s exactly what he did with Aquatic.
“I asked him this time what he’s going to do next, and he said, ‘I don’t know….I think I’m gonna do something in India.”
Oh, no…he’s thinking about doing a Bollywood film? Or some kind of deadpan comedy about some New York advertising guy who burns out and goes to an ashram in northern India and meets up with the corrupt and bisexual son of Mararishi Mahesh Yogi? The mere thought of Owen Wilson sitting in the lotus position gives me the willies.
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Obsessions
It’s said to be a problem when gifted filmmakers (and only the gifted fall prey to this) get caught up in the jib-jab of their brushstrokes and lose sight of the painting.
You know what I mean…movies that always seem to be emphasizing how hip and clever the director is, or how vast and ambitious his/her efforts were. There are more of these films in mainstream theatres toward the end of the year, naturally.
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I love brushstrokes for their own sake. I can be half-sold on an entire film if there’s an exceptional contribution or two (photography, music, a performance). I’m not saying that excessive brushstroking isn’t distracting. I’m saying I find it easy to segregate my enjoyment of particular elements that work, even if the overall fails.
I just saw a movie that I can’t talk about yet, but I loved the main title sequence plus the dialogue in an epilogue scene at the very end. I will always feel warmly about this film for these two ingredients, regardless of any followup judgements I may render.
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The reigning example of this syndrome, according to what nearly everyone is saying, is Robert Zemeckis’ The Polar Express (Warner Bros., playing everywhere). The rap is that this $165 million feel-good Christmas movie has invested more heavily in digital performance-capture technology than in the story-telling, character-building aspects, let alone the imaginative fun so abundant in The Incredibles.
It’s being said in some quarters that Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (Disney, 12.25) is caught up in cleverness and style issues here and there. To what degree I can’t say, but a Wes Anderson film without style issues wouldn’t be a Wes Anderson film. I totally worshipped those live, non-digital, opening-curtain shots he used to begin each chapter of Rushmore.
Jean Pierre Jeunet’s A Very Long Engagement has a fair amount of stylistic archness, but so did Amelie and Delicatessen. A friend who thinks it’s a great banquet of a movie wrote a day or two ago asking why there isn’t more buzz about it. “[Jeunet’s] direction is stylish and exquisite, the production design is A-plus…is it because it’s French?” A certain know-it-all says the lack of excitement is over brushstroke issues.
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There’s a certain self-referencing cleverness all through I Heart Huckabees, but like all credentialed art it’s steady and consistent, like the frenzied brushstrokes of Vincent Van Gogh. It’s all of a piece and I don’t care if it’s only made $10 million so far. This is one of those films that gets better and better the more you think about it, and one that absolutely improves if you see it a second time.
But the clever-dick aspects in Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind have always bothered me. I actually started to hate it because of this, despite my admiration for Charlie Kaufman’s script. It underlined my belief that when it comes to filming a Kaufman, Spike Jonze = good and Michel Gondry = less so.
Any other films that have bothered anyone for these reasons?
All Alone
I usually send these queries out by e-mail, but I’ll just plop this in. I was talking to a critic friend last night about the number of times he’s championed films that almost everyone else has hated. He had a fairly long list to recite from.
I don’t think a critic is worth much unless he/she experiences at least an occasional stand-alone episode. TV critics almost never do, and guys like Armand White and Jonathan Rosenbaum have these episodes every other week.
I remember admiring the crap out of Eric Blakeney’s Gun Shy, an early 2000 release with Liam Neeson, Oliver Platt and Sandra Bullock (and which Bullock helped to produce). Almost no one except New York Times critic Elvis Mitchell agreed.
It’s hard to get critics to admit to these episodes, but I’ll bet there are plenty of great stories to be told about what it felt like to stand all alone in the cold stiff wind with everyone (including your editor) looking at you like something’s gone seriously wrong because you stood up and led the charge for the “wrong” film.
If anyone wants to send in a recollection…
Down to This
There’s all this stuff happening in the Best Picture race suddenly. This film ascending, that film dropping out. And now our friend David Poland at Movie City News is saying “the only movie that can keep The Phantom of The Opera from winning Best Picture is The Aviator.”
No comment as I haven’t seen either film, but good God. Bush wins the election and now this. I’m just not a fan of any “lush, glitzy, over-the-top, overwrought” musical, which is how a friend has described Phantom. Is my friend the bringer of the last and final word on this Joel Schumacher film? No, and I could wind up liking it. It’s possible…but I don’t especially want to.
I keep hitting on this same point, which is that bigger and more grandiose and more thundering films are…aaah, forget it.
There’s no point. No point saying Sideways has it all because people keep saying nope, it’s not enough. It’s not enough to be insightful, adult, touching, funny, heartbreaking, emotional, soulful…and to be about average people living recognizable lives. No, cries the mob…we need more.
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Poland emphasized in his Phantom prediction that this “is not about what I like.” For what it’s worth, he agrees with me about Sideways.
Best Picture Oscars are about emotion. The ones that deliver an emotional sandwich you can sink your teeth into and get a little choked up over or, failing that, say something simple but profound about life, something we all recognize as perceptive and truthful — these are the ones that tend to win it.
Why, then, did the awful Chicago win it two years ago? What did that film actually say? That we’re all users, abusers and bamboozlers, and that’s what makes the world go’ round?
American Beauty was the last people-sized movie to win the Best Picture oscar, but it was serene at the finish and said something bedrocky about our day-to-day, which is that we don’t pay enough attention to the beauty around us.
Sideways doesn’t quite choke you up, but it comes close when Paul Giamatti listens to Virginia Madsen’s voice message near the finish. And the knock on her door that directly follows says volumes about the life force, positivism, hope, love and refusing to fold up your tent.
Of course, it’s only a small masterpiece. Nothing to put your chips on. Broad and breathless is always better.
Prick Up Your Ears
Paul Matwychuck of Edmonton, Alberta, was the first to correctly identify all three of Wednesday’s (11.10) sound clips.
Clip #1 is Ben Kinsley hammering at Ray Winstone in Jonathan Glazer’s Sexy Beast; (b) Clip #2 is Terrence Stamp speaking to John Hurt in Stephen Frears’ The Hit ; and (c) Clip #3 is the brilliant Oskar Werner presenting his case to an East German tribunal in The Spy Who Came in From The Cold.
Today’s Clip #1 is from an urban cop film (obviously); (b) Clip #2 has some ambient noise effects, but the dialogue is detectable; and (c) Clip #3 — my favorite — is from a film based on a play, if that’s any help.
I’ll post the winner in the column in next Wednesday’s column.
Radiant
The color and detail in the new Gone With the Wind DVD box set that hit stores last Tuesday is mouth-watering. It’s the ripest and most sharply focused version I’ve ever seen. It probably looks better than the version GWTW‘s producer David O. Selznick and director Victor Fleming knew. I’m not exaggerating.
Even the hardcore restoration master Robert Harris (Lawrence of Arabia, Vertigo, Spartacus), who’s always very tough when I ask him to size up this or that digital makeover, says this new Gone With the Wind is “perfect…absolutely perfect…the most beautiful rendition I’ve ever seen.”
I don’t have the time or space to get into the others merits of this four-disc set, released by Warner Home Video, but they’re plentiful, trust me.
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The idea-guy behind this GWTW‘s new look is a Warner Bros. technology executive named Chris Cookson. Three years ago he came up with an idea called edge detection, which involved digitally scanning the three different film strips that Gone With the Wind‘s Technicolor cameras used to capture the red, blue and yellow elements in each scene. But there was always a very slight fuzzy element in prints if the three strips were not perfectly aligned.
“The realization was that if we could just get these things to align [more precisely], we’d find detail and information that’s always been there but never visible,” Cookson says on a disc #3 documentary called “Restoring a Classic.”
The people who wound up writing the software for this process, which is known as Ultra-Resolution, were image scientists Sharon and Karen Perlmutter of America Online. Warner Bros. Senior Systems Engineer Paul Klamer put the team together and made sure everyone was on the same page.
What they did with Gone With the Wind, says Klamer, “is like taking the walnut oil off the Rembrandt paintings.”
“Not only is it aligned at least as good as the film was when it was originally released,” says Warner Bros. senior vp of production technology Rob Hummel, “[but] we believe we’ve probably achieved a level of alignment and registration that probably has never seen before.
“The result is actually beyond what we had hoped to see,” says Cookson. “A degree of detail that we didn’t even know to expect.”
Kool Aid
I’m running this excerpt from Manohla Dargis’s review of The Polar Express in the New York Times because I couldn’t agree more with what she says about the influence of George Lucas and other powerful tech-head types, and because she says it well.
“Directed by Robert Zemeckis, who wrote the film with William Broyles Jr., The Polar Express is a grave and disappointing failure, as much of imagination as of technology. Turning a book that takes a few minutes to read into a feature-length film presented a significant hurdle that the filmmakers were not able to clear.
“Animation is engaged in a debate that pits traditional and computer-assisted animation against computer-generated animation. The idea that anyone loves Finding Nemo because it was made wholly on a computer is absurd, but behind this debate lies a larger dispute not only about animation, but film’s relationship to the world as well.
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“On one side of the divide are Pixar visionaries like [The Incredibles director] Brad Bird and the Finding Nemo co-director Andrew Stanton, who either know they can’t recreate real life or are uninterested in such mimicry, and so just do what animators have always done: they imaginatively interpret the world.
“On the other side of the divide are filmmakers like George Lucas who seem intent on dispensing with messy annoyances like human actors even while they meticulously create a vacuum-sealed simulacrum of the world.
“It’s worth noting that two important contributors to The Polar Express Doug Chiang, one of the production designers, and Ken Ralston, the film’s senior visual effects supervisor, worked for years at Mr. Lucas’s aptly named company, Industrial Light and Magic. There’s no way of knowing whether they drank the company Kool-Aid.
“Still, from the looks of The Polar Express it’s clear that, together with Mr. Zemeckis, this talented gang has on some fundamental level lost touch with the human aspect of film. Certainly they aren’t alone in the race to build marvelous new worlds from digital artifacts.
“But there’s something depressing and perhaps instructive about how in the attempt to create a new, never-before-seen tale about the wonderment of imagination these filmmakers have collectively lost sight of their own.”
Thunder of Hoofbeats
“Glad to see you mention The Rapture. I saw it when it was first released at an early screening in Atlanta that included an invitation-only audience of local churchgoers. Mimi Rogers and Michael Tolkin were there to take questions from the audience at the end of the movie.
“In the South, of course, the Rapture is just a given. It’s not uncommon to see cars with bumper stickers that read `In case of rapture, this car will be unoccupied.’ When I was in Junior High, the big book that everyone was reading was a tome about the rapture by Ernest Angsley (you remember him, he’s the televangelist/faith healer Robin Williams used to parody — “Say Baaa–by! Be HEALED!”).
“Almost everyone in the audience spoke of enjoying the movie and its “message” (presumably the depiction of the rapture) but complained of the excessive nudity during the opening sequences. No one spoke of the decision of Mimi Rogers’ character to kill her daughter and finally reject God’s salvation. Michael Tolkin tried to get people to talk about religion, but that sort of thing just isn’t done down here.” — Reed Barker, Peachtree City, Georgia.
“That’s a pretty cheap shot to take at Christians in your little piece about The Rapture. I’m sorry that your guy didn’t win the election, but let it go. Before you start saying that you’re afraid of Christians, you’d better do some serious reading. I certainly missed the Bible passage that states “shoot your child to send them to Heaven.”
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“The Rapture is a movie, just like The Omen or The Exorcist. Are these films thrilling and entertaining? Sure. Do these films represent Christian doctrine? Absolutely not. Honestly, I feel sorry for you if you would let one film “push you into permanent atheism.” It one thing to say “I read the Bible and just don’t buy it”, but its another to say “I saw this movie, made by a guy who might have his own agenda, and now I know that Christians are all creepy.” That’s really objective.” — Jeff Horst.
Wells to Horst: I can’t think of the last time I’ve gotten to know anyone who answered to being a Christian. I guess it’s the circles I’ve travelled in over the last 20-plus years. But I’ve known a few, and I think they’re nice enough but also a bit creepy. And 90% of them seem to be righties. Every time I meet them, I think of that Dustin Hoffman line in Straw Dogs: “There’s has never been a kingdom given to so much blood as that of Christ.”
I reject with every gram of brain matter and every fibre of my being the notion that our time on earth is all about what happens to our souls after we pass on, and Michael Tolkin’s film just seemed to solidify these feelings, or ratchet them up a notch. The basic tenets of Christianity are a blessing to anyone who understands them and takes them into his or her heart, but I despise how Christianity has somehow become culturally aligned in this country with bedrock conservativism.
I just hate their uptightness and rigidity and aura of fearfulness…and that repugnant smugness they all seem to have about being plugged into and receving the world of our Lord Jesus, and always delivered with those gleaming eyes and awful toothy smiles. If I were a Roman Emperor and this was, say, 200 A.D., I’m not sure I would overturn the practice of throwing them to the lions in the Colisseum.”
Horst back to Wells: I understand the type of Christian that you’re talking about. If those are the people that you are citing, then you need to say that. Just saying `born-again Christians’ is painting with a really wide brush, and encompasses a lot of those people who really do try to live by those basic tenets that you referred to in your reply. It’s an important distinction.
“I hope its clear that I’m not saying that you have to believe in anything. That’s where well intentioned people usually go wrong. Everyone needs to believe in what they feel is right, as long as it doesn’t harm others. That’s supposed to be the whole point of this country that we are fortunate enough to live in.”
Originality
“In anticipation of their 2004 recaps, entertainment blurb writers everywhere are trying to suitably illustrate the sludge that Tom Hanks√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢ star has slammed into — the worst Coen Brothers movie ever, one of Spielberg√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s poorest conceptions, and now maybe the all-time epic Christmas dud (with apologies to Ben Affleck). Please, blurb writers — try and come up with something better than √¢‚Ǩ≈ìHanks Express Derailed: 3 Audience Killers leaves fan base looking Terminal.” — Mark Frenden
Late Again
Apologies to all in confessing that Friday’s column won’t be up until 3 or 4 pm Pacific. Hooray for The Incredibles, a possible new potency acquired by Fahrenheit 9/11, first peeks at Alexander this weekend, new dialogue audio clips, etc.
After the Fall
I was goaded early this morning by a conservative woman friend. (Yes, there are righties in Beverly Hills — they just don’t announce themselves). I had initially provoked her in an e-mail yesterday, telling her to grim up for a Kerry win. Now she was calling back to gloat over the Bush win, which she said was driven by moral reasons on the part of right-thinking Americans.
This beautiful fascist blonde was puffed up like a toad about a near-surreal state of affairs. The Reds so despise the perceived elitism and morally jaded attitudes of the Blues, she was more or less saying, that they’ll cut off their nose to spite their face.
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“One of the Republican Party’s major successes over the last few decades has been to persuade many of the working poor to vote for tax breaks for billionaires,” Nicholas Kristof says in a New York Times column published this morning.
The final outcome of the election was uncertain as Kristof wrote the piece, but “John Kerry’s supporters should be feeling wretched about the millions of farmers, factory workers and waitresses who ended up voting — utterly against their own interests — for Republican candidates,” Kristof added.
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The Red’s went for Bush for “moral reasons”? Am we all co-starring in a Twilight Zone episode? Is that Rod Serling standing off to the side of the sound stage, being cryptic and grinning and smoking an unfiltered cigarette?
Who were the pollsters talking to? And what about those exit polls we were all told about yesterday showing Kerry taking the election?
In his concession speech a minute or two ago (it’s now 11:19 am), Kerry just said, “America only moves forward.” I know he doesn’t believe that the election results has supported this statement. Tens of millions in this country, I’m sure, feel that the opposite has just kicked in.
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I get it on one level. To be elected President these days you have to have at least a touch of that Andy-of-Mayberry quality, and Kerry was badly cast. Too tall, too rich, too much of an Easterner. He didn’t energize the youth vote. He turned out to be a taller Michael Dukakis. If Bill Clinton had been allowed to run, he would have won hands down.
I’m trying to keep myself from throwing up as I write this. I don’t want to succumb to negativity, but I despise Bubba Nation and the thinking that led to what happened last night. And yet I know that hate is futile and will get me nowhere, and that it’s time to turn the page.
“If people want to vote against their own best interests, it’s gonna come back and bite them in the ass,” a journalist friend, Lewis Beale, wrote me this morning. He said that while researching a just-published George Romero story in Toronto, “Every Canadian I spoke to thought a Dubya victory would prove that America was absolutely psychotic. Time Canada published a poll in which 56% of Canadians said the word would be `worse off’ if Bush won.”
If there’s any reason to think otherwise, I’d sure like to hear it. My spirits need a lift, as there’s obviously no comfort to be gotten from Ilsa of Beverly Hills.
Bunker Blues
Speaking of facism, Adolf Hitler is back. The Austrian corporal may not mean very much in terms of significant box-office, but he obviously still has the power to greenlight movies. Thematically he is still the gift that keeps on giving.
There was that four-hour CBS biopic, The Rise of Evil, that aired last year, plus that ’03 documentary called Blind Spot: Hitler’s Secretary. There was also Menno Meyjes’ Max (’02), a low-budgeter about a young and unsettled Hitler in old Vienna.
And now comes Downfall, a smart, vividly rendered, highly convincing ensemble drama — funded, filmed and performed by Germans — about the last few days of the Hitler regime, focusing yet again on spiritual and cultural collapse as the last of the loyal huddle in an underground bunker in Berlin.
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This is nothing new for anyone with any mileage. There’s already been two respected, reasonably accomplished Hitler-in-the-bunker dramas — Hitler: The Last Ten Days (’73) with Alec Guiness in the lead role, and The Bunker (’81), a TV pic with Anthony Hopkins as Adolf.
But it’s been 20 years plus since the Hopkins film (which I never saw), and a couple of generations have grown up since. And Downfall has a certain cultural authority due to the fact it’s the the first German-funded film to tackle the subject head-on since G.W. Pabst’s Der letzte Akt (1956), which nobody has heard of, much less seen.
But what kind of currents can A. Hitler be expected to stir among U.S. audiences? And especially within the Academy?
This is obviously one question facing Downfall‘s producer and screenwriter Bernd Eichinger, who’s also the head of the Los Angeles-based Constantin Film.
Using the perspective of Junge, the young woman who worked for Hitler from ’42 until the end and whose recollections were the entire focus of the Blind Spot doc, is one thing that sets Downfall apart. (An excerpt from the respected ’03 documentary is used at the end of Downfall.)
Directed with workmanlike efficiency by Oliver Hirschbiegel, Downfall is based on “Inside Hitler’s Bunker: The Last Days of the Third Reich,” a book by Joachim Fest, and the memoir “Until the Final Hour: Hitler’s Last Secretary” by Traudl Junge (the Blind Spot subject) and Melissa Mueller.
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The result is an exceptional historical piece. It’s all about detail, detail and more detail — not so much a Hitler character study as a Guernica-sized, pointillist portrait of the last remnants of Nazi culture collapsing into itself.
Plus it has an extremely feisty and snarly (if not entirely unfamiliar) Hitler portrayal by Bruno Ganz, along with a supporting cast that delivers one memorable drill-bit moment after another.
I don’t know where to start in praising them all, but the stand-outs include Alexandra Maria Lara (as Traudl Junge), Corinna Harfouch (as Maga Goebbels, the wife of the famed Nazi propaganda minister), Ulrich Matthes (as Goebbels), Thomas Kretchmann (as a morally dissolute soldier), Heino Ferch (as Albert Speer), Juliane Koehler (as Eva Braun), Michael Mendl (as a tough German general), Goetz Otto (as Hitler’s personal adjutant) and Donevan Gunia (as a Hitler youth dodging Russian bullets).
Downfall was favorably reviewed several weeks ago out of the Toronto Film Festival. Variety’s Derek Elley called it “classy upscale fare” and “a cumulatively powerful Goetterdammerung.” And it has done well commercially since opening in Germany, Austria and German-speaking Switzerland in mid September.
And yet Downfall appears to have a problem in Los Angeles. There doesn’t seem to be enough of a receptive mood among the early-viewing industry crowd, which will have something to say about whether Downfall has any kind of shot at being nominated for a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar.
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Downfall hasn’t yet found a U.S. distributor, which surely says something about the mood out there.
On Tuesday I wrote that Eichinger hadn’t hired a savvy, plugged-in public relations veteran (someone like Fredel Pogodin or Nancy Willen, say) to rep Downfall with the Academy’s foreign branch and, less importantly, the Hollywood Foreign Press, which hands out the Golden Globe Awards. But today (Thursday, 11.4) I was told by publicist Anna Gross that Karen Fried (formerly of Rogers and Cowan, the Angelotti Company) is being brought in to handle this.
And there’s an idea out there — pretty much groundless, if you ask me — that the film portrays Hitler with too much sympathy.
Derek Elley said that Downfall “will undoubtedly raise discussion in some quarters for its coolly objective, humanistic approach.” I echoed this view myself in my 10.22 column. I had been told that the film depicts Hitler in a way “that may seem overly sympathetic (i.e., too vulnerably human) to industry mainstreamers, which, if true, means it’s toast.”
I’ve seen Downfall and it isn’t toast. It deserves respect and allegiance. And it doesn’t soft-pedal the venality of Adolf Hitler in the slightest.
Gnomish and bent-over, Ganz’s Hitler is a raging misanthrope who sometimes screams about being betrayed or poorly served, is sometimes in denial about his troops’ ability to resist advancing Russian troops, and sometimes wants to pull the proverbial temple down on his (and everyone else’s) head.
Most of the story is about the last ten days of Hitler’s life, from his 56th birthday on 4.20.45 to his suicide on 4.30.45. But a lot of fascinating stuff happens all through the film that doesn’t concern Hitler, and there’s almost an entire act lasting about 40 minutes that unfolds after he and Eva Braun are gone.
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There’s a devastating sequence in which Goebbels’ wife Magda poisons their six children before she and her husband commit suicide by pistol.
You’re led to assume that Lara’s Traudl Junge will be a key character, since the film begins with her being landing the Hitler secretary job in 1942. And the film does stay in touch with her, but it pays attention to so many other characters as well.
I don’t know what else to add, except to reiterate that Downfall is in no way a Hitler-coddling thing, or even a slightly oblique one.
Okay, there’s one device in this movie that tries to vaguely humanize the guy. It shows us that Hitler loved his dog, a German Shepherd named Blondi. And yet just before he kills himself Hitler gives orders for Blondi to be given poison, and we see this happen and we hear the poor dog cry out just as the poison is being put in her mouth. So the hint of that regular-guy, dog-loving thing is pretty much cancelled out.
Prick Up Your Ears
Here are three dialogue clips. Listen to `em all and try to identify, but you can’t just say the movie title – you have to identify the actors too. They’re all fairly easy, if you’re any kind of movie buff.
Clip #1 is, I think, fairly legendary and rooted in the lore of yesteryear nocturnal Manhattan, Clip #2 is pretty hard to miss if you’re a fan of intelligent thrillers, and Clip #3 should also be easy to spot (and I’m not gonna say why).
Harder and harder clips will follow in the weeks to come. Send in your answers quickly and include a JPEG photo, and I’ll post the winner in the column as soon as he/she is known.
Election
I’m being told that I was too harsh last night in condemning the 18 to 29 year olds for their weak turnout, which, according to MSNBC, amounted to the same percentage of youths who voted in 2000. But the fact is that voting levels yesterday were higher across the board, including the 18 to 29 group, so it was all proportional.
So okay, I over-reacted. But obviously the youth vote still wasn’t high enough. They could have changed things and they didn’t, and the slackers know who they are.
“Before you deride an entire age group as `scumbags,’ you may want to look at your statistics. Even though the 18-29 voting group represented 17% of the electorate, as it did in 2000, the fact is that many, many many more voters in that age group came out to vote this time, but so did older voters so the percentages did not change. It also appears that the voters in the 18-29 age range voted much more convincingly Democratic than they did in 2000.
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“Apparently the large numbers of older voters who came out in 2004 but not 2000 were able to offset those Democratic votes. You may want to point your ire at these older voters, but that would not fit in with your pattern of deluded but cranky nostalgia for the survivors of the 60s and 70s.” — Marc Reiner, New York, N.Y.
Wells to Reiner: I don’t have any particular nostalgia for the `60s and `70s, although I’m a huge fans of ’70s movies. Especially ’70s crime movies. Which reminds me: Charley Varrick is showing this Saturday at the American Cinematheque.
“Okay, yes — fuck Red America and its President. But take it easy on the kids. 17% is a decent turnout from any 10-year demographic slice. And if the percentages held from 2000 it means 20% more of them did get out.
“If you’re looking for a goat this morning I’ll offer Bin Laden. That egomaniac’s sudden appearance on Friday spooked the sheep enough to carry the day for Bush.
“But it’s a hard morning. I’ve never been more proud to be an Illinoisan; I wish I could say the same about being an American.” — Joe Greenia, Chicago.
“One reason why that youth vote number is so low (at least for the lower half of the demographic) is that most people of that age are out at college. Often, that means they are a good distance from their polling place and don’t go to the polls. If they vote, it is via absentee ballot, which that poll wouldn’t account for. Neither me, nor my wife voted in ’92, when we were in college.
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“Stronger arguments can be made that Kerry failed because just saying that you are not Bush isn’t good enough for a lot of people. Also, having a personality of a stump doesn’t help. Whether we like it or not, how personable a candidate is is more important than how intelligent he is.” — Jason Birzer.
“The under-29 crowd voted in the same numbers as it did before. However, since more people voted in this election than in the last election that statistic represents a larger number of people. So there were in fact more under 29’s who voted this time than last time, just not enough to insure a Kerry victory. It might be a good thing that a lot of them didn’t show up, since not all young people are Democrats.
“Still, if you want to be pissed at someone, be mad at the kids at Ohio State University. If they had all gone and voted in Ohio rather than sending in absentee ballots in their home states, the state might have swung blue.” — Bradley G. Sims.
“I would save my venom for people like Michael Moore. Fahrenheit 9/11 cost….what? About as much as an average episode of Friends? It made over $100 million in the theaters and became the biggest selling DVD of 2004. And yet Moore continually refused to let it get a free showing prior to the election. He would only permit pay-per-view or pay webcasts. It shows where his priorities truly lie.
“However, I doubt if Moore is doing an Oskar Schindler right now, agonizing over what more he could have done to change he election. Now he gets four more years of profitable bitching.” — Rich Swank.
“I wrote to you last week in a very optimistic way about the youth vote, but clearly my fellow young Americans fucked me. We did show up in record numbers (seeing as how the voter turnout was extraordinary and my demographic maintained the same % of voters as we did in 2000), but it wasn’t enough. If only a dense atmosphere of apathy didn’t surround the beautiful havens of passionate and informed democracy, like my university.
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“As for myself I was there at the Connecticut polls at 5:45 AM with Kerry propaganda to represent my age group, but apparently I didn’t represent them accurately. Thanks for your clear perspective on the whole thing and I can’t wait to commiserate or celebrate with you in ’08. Until then let’s hope the movies are good.” — David Ehrlich, Columbia University, New York, N.Y.
“I woke up very early this morning with a sense of hope. I hoped that maybe, just maybe, there was a silent coup just waiting to bre and boil over. But as I sit awake at 3:10 AM CST, I’m left wondering, what happened?
“How is it that Bush stands such a great chance of winning? How is it that this man that really does represent so many bad causes has such a strong base of support? How is it that a country that makes Fahrenheit 9/11 the highest-grossing documentary of all time, something that really does show that there is a strong part of the country dissatisfied with our current leadership, let the film’s subject stick around?
“How is that possible? How did this happen? And wwho knows what will come next? Where will we send our war on terror next? How many more will die in Iraq? How many Americans will suffer at home through Bush economic policies, education policies, and civil rights violations? Four more years. How anyone could be so irresponsible to not vote is beyond me.
“I will wake up in roughly five hours to attend classes for the day. The world I wake up in will remain unchanged. And I will feel sick to my stomach. To Bush supporters, congrats. I applaud your passion and your desire to see this man remain in office. You have your beliefs and you stuck by them all the way to the end. To Kerry supporters, we tried. To the undecided that chose not to vote, thanks.
“I’m angry. I’m opinionated. I’m trying to remain calm. But if the young voters didn’t quite show up in the droves that people expected them to, I wonder how they will feel if the draft is reinstated. I’m just wondering what the hell happened.” — Andy, Vermillion, South Dakota.
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“Come on Jeff — split the country? Is it really that bad? Do you really feel so harmed and disillusioned and assaulted by this regime that you feel the country should be split in two? This is just getting ridiculous.
“I know people care for what they believe in, but the madness that has taken place over this past election cannot go much further. I am probably considered the enemy by you. I am in that 18-29 group that didn’t vote but would have voted for Bush. Its not that I really like Bush — it√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s that it√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s a choice between what I felt was the lesser of two evils. I find that Kerry seemed to be a weak person with follower qualities written all over him. The democrats shot themselves in the foot with having someone as mediocre as Kerry as their choice.
“My generation will not be remembered as the Generation of Shame because we chose not to vote in this, anyone closely related to your thoughts should be. I just find it to be a horrible travesty to consider splitting the country over this, or that this election needs to be as divisive for the general public as it is shown to be by people of your stripe. I have many friends who are hard-line blue like you, and guess what, we are still friends. We may have differences but we stick through them. You need to learn that this is not the end of the world.” — David Harper.
√¢‚Ǩ≈ìIn regards to your comments that all 29-and-unders are a Generation of Shame and that it is their fault for yesterday’s election, go fuck yourself. Last election it was all Nader’s fault, and now it is young people√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s. Maybe Democrats should think about creating a stronger, clearer message, and stop looking for scapegoats when they lose elections. Your comments reek of sore losing. By the way, these comments are coming from a Shame Generation 22 year old Kerry Voter.√¢‚Ǩ¬ù — Dan Morfesis.
“If you ask me, the American people let us down. The whole world, I mean. We were
expecting a change. Americans should be aware that their Presidential election affects every other country, and they should be able to see beyond their fears. They should carry the title of ‘strongest nation in the world’ with more dignity. Instead of starting wars all over the world to help us all to be ‘free,’ they could simply avoid wars…or better yet, avoid the President who seems so eager to start them. That would be much more helpful.” — Alexandro Aldrete, Monterrey, Mexico.
Roar of Greasepaint
I predicted this a few weeks ago, and now it’s coming to pass: Joel Schumacher’s The Phantom of the Opera (Warner Bros., 12.22) is making its way, buzz-wise, into the Best Picture Oscar race.
This lavishly produced (I’m told) musical, which almost no one has seen but is based, as everyone knows, on the popular Andrew Lloyd Webber stage musical, has become a big Best Picture “maybe” largely due to a story written by New York Times reporter Sharon Waxman that ran yesterday (10.28).
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“You know it’s going to be a strange year for the Oscars when November is just around the corner and the talk in Hollywood is about The Phantom of the Opera,” her story began.
Schumacher, Waxman continued, “is not exactly an Oscar habitu√ɬ©, never having been nominated before. But the need for buzz, any kind of buzz, is very real, and a sure sign of Oscar desperation.”
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I haven’t seen Phantom either, but knowing Schumacher’s work as I believe I do, and having spoken to a bright fellow who has in fact seen Phantom, it sounds to me like the sort of Best Picture nominee that the squares and the blue-hairs will rally ’round, like they did last year for Chicago.
I’m inclined to believe this (although, to repeat, I know absolutely nothing first-hand) because my source has told me that Phantom, although well performed, richly assembled and probably very commercial, is glitzy and overwrought. He also doubts it’ll become a critical darling “and you need critics in an Oscar race.”
Oscar talk is building nonetheless, one gathers, because red-state moviegoing tastes are as much in evidence in Beverly Hills as they are in Mobile or Duluth, and we all know (or at least suspect) that folks who think red tend to applaud emotionally grandiose “art.”
For Academy members of this persuasion, an emotional plunging-over-the-waterfall experience — i.e., one that’s not necessarily abundant in terms of delicacy or succinctness or representations of plain-truth reality, but is lathered in faux-emotional foam — is what Oscar-bequeathing is all about.
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Here’s what my guy says, precisely:
“I think [Waxman’s] out of her mind,” he began. “This is a big, over-the-top, glitzy Joel Schumacher special. It’s a theatrical construct that Joel has chosen not to turn it into something realistic, but into a visually lush, overwrought Hollywood musical.
“It’s just a question of taste…of being over the top and a little campy…a little bit of the Batman syndrome…it’s a little `much.'”
“It’s very commercial, actually. It’s a very commercial movie. I just don’t see it as an Oscar film because the critics are going to be hard on it. I could be wrong. [A friend] saw it with me, and we both didn’t think it was going to be an Oscar film. One of the problems is Gerard Butler, who plays the Phantom, but Emmy Rossum and Miranda Richardson are very good.
“I could be wrong about the Oscar chances. It could be a Chicago thing all over again, with people of discriminating taste saying no but Academy members loving it anyway – it’s a gorgeous film to look at, it’s absolutely stunning, and Academy members tend to love that and tend to fall all over themselves in admiring the craft of it.”
Set in 19th Century Paris, the story concerns an obsessive mask-wearing hideaway named Erik (Gerard Butler), and his growing impassioned love for a pretty young opera singer named Christine (Emmy Rossum).
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“Everyone knows this, but thematically, of course, it’s a beauty and the beast tale,” the guy continues. ” It says we should get beyond the superficial appearance of things, and Butler plays one of those damaged outsiders. You’re supposed to see the beauty of his soul, and there’s a musical connection, an artistic connection, between [he and Rossum], and there’s this great realm that the two of them inhabit in Paris.”
Most of the Phantom action takes place at the Paris Opera house (the old one at Place de L`Opera, not the relatively soulless one at Place Bastille). The film was shot at England’s Pinewood Studios and in London.
I’m not saying Joel Schumacher hasn’t sometimes risen to the occasion. His best films — Falling Down, The Client, Tigerland — show he’s capable of this. I really loved one of his earliest films, D.C. Cab. It’s got a great spirit, and Gary Busey gave one of his career-best performances in it.
But the idea of the director of A Time to Kill, Flatliners, Dying Young, Batman Returns, Batman and Robin, Flawless and Veronica Guerin having supposedly found something new and vital within himself and directed a film that genuinely warrants Best Picture consideration…I don’t know. That’s a tough one to process.
More Balkanizing
Here’s how the rest of yesterday’s Sharon Waxman piece breaks down in terms of red state vs. blue state movies. I may have hit on a new permutation here. Movies and politics have been bleeding into each other for a long time, so it’s not surprising to hear handicappers using similar terminology.
Bottom line: the Academy is made up almost entirely of blue staters who tend to lean red when handing out Best Picture Oscars.
Red being, of course, indicative of common emotional themes that Average Joe’s with pot bellies and baseball caps can easily understand and relate to and digest, and blue referring to stories and emotional matters reflecting the lives of folks with better educations, tonier lifestyles and cultivated lefty attitudes.
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There’s nothing new or trail-blazing in the observation that a lot of the Best Picture Oscar winners — Titanic, Braveheart, etc. — have been red. I guess I’m also saying that a blue movie, no matter how good it is, will always have an uphill fight.
The Phantom of the Opera is almost surely a red-state movie — allegedly broad, lavish, grandiose emotions worn on its sleeve, etc.
Alexander Payne’s Sideways, which Waxman acknowledged as a critical favorite (read: not necessarily Oscar-worthy), is without question the most deserving Best Picture candidate so far. It’s a soulful, mature, quietly emotional film about love and pain and the whole damn thing, etc. It’s got it all (including some great laughs), and the Hollywood mainstreamers Waxman spoke to for her piece are going, “Eh.” Why? Because it’s blue.
Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator is about a blue-state kind of guy (the hard-driving, OCD-ish Howard Hughes) and directed by a hard-core blue-stater (Martin Scorsese), but it supposedly has an escapist entertaining mood, which is kind of a red-state concept (keep your head down, live in your own self-created zone, go into denial and be “happy,” etc.). So it’s kind of a red-blue mix.
Oliver Stone’s Alexander is basically about redeeming courage and life being for the stout-of-heart few, but it’s also selling itself as a bloody action thing, so that makes it mainly a red-state package.
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Walter Salles The Motorcycle Diaries (viva Che!) is, of course, a total blue-stater. Ditto Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s A Very Long Engagement (soldiers ducking out of battle, searching for a lover), Pedro Almod√ɬ≥var’s Bad Education (same-sex soap opera) and Alejandro Amen√ɬ°bar’s The Sea Inside (assisted suicide).
Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby, a surrogate father-daughter relationship piece about a lady boxer, seems to have a populist red-state mentality, for the most part. Sports movies in and of themselves tend to be red, and don’t forget that Eastwood’s a longtime rightie.
Fahrenheit 9/11 — obviously blue through and through. Finding Neverland is blue. Richard Linklater’s Before Sunset is blue. The sexually frank Kinsey is totally, obviously blue. Maria Full of Grace, blue. Mike Nichols Closer and James L. Brooks Spanglish, both blue.
The rousing, relatively uncomplicated, all-American Ray is red. The small town, football-worshipping Friday Night Lights is obviously red. The Passion of the Christ, drenched in the sticky stuff, is clearly the reddest of the bunch.
Let It Go
A couple of weeks ago I was talking about throwing sound clips into the column on a semi-regular basis, and of course I haven’t done it since. So here’s a supplement to the defunct What’s That Line? page, which I jettisoned a month or so ago. Just listen to this guy and tell me what movie it’s from. I made it deliberately easy, so no complaints about this. Harder ones are soon to come.
Root of It
Apologies to David O. Russell and the Independent Film Channel for not putting this article about Soldiers’ Pay up until now. I tried last Friday but the clock and the schedule said no.
Soldiers’ Pay is a 35-minute documentary that was shot by Russell, Tricia Regan and Juan Carlos Zaldivar last summer, and then edited by Russell. Essentially about a strange discomforting episode experienced by certain G.I.’s in Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein, it’s set to air three times on IFC on Monday, 11.1, as part of an Election Eve marathon.
The doc tells a real-life story that echoes the story of Russell’s Three Kings, which was about three Gulf War soldiers trying to make off with gold bullion worth many millions. The Soldiers’ Pay version is about the actual finding of hundreds of millions in cash while G.I.s searched homes of this or that Hussein Baghdad loyalist.
The temptation was severe and some soldiers pocketed whatever loot they could. Some of them were found out and paid the price. By telling their story Russell is trying to shed light on the various corruptions going on over there, and the matter of who’s making out and who isn’t. He calls their story a “holographic paradigm…it’s a part representing the whole.”
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The intention was to “just let these guys tell their story,” Russell said in a phoner last Friday morning.
The doc asks “whether we went there to defend the oil, and says if we treat this arena as a supermarket for our own oil needs, then this [mentality] trickles down.”
Russell, Regan and Zaldivar didn’t just interview veteran noncoms, but native Iraqis, journos like the New York Observer‘s Nicholas von Hoffman, politicos (Republican Rep. David Dryer), psychologists, and Major General J. Michael Myatt, a Gulf War veteran who delivers the film’s saddest and most emotional moment.
Russell said he hoped the doc “might make a difference before the election.” The plan was for the doc to be included on a new DVD of Russell’s Three Kings , but Warner Bros. marketing execs kibboshed this when the doc’s pronounced political import was highlighted in a Sharon Waxman New York Times article that ran last August.
Soldier’s Pay will be distributed on DVD by Cinema Libre, the distribution arm of leftie documentarian Robert Greenwald. Russell said he didn’t know precisely when the DVD will come out, but I would imagine sometime fairly soon. The three 11.1.04 IFC airings will happen at 9:35 pm, 12 midnight and 2:15 am EST, or 6:35 pm, 9 pm and 11:15 pm Pacific.
Good Guy
I’m late on this, but like everyone else I’m very sorry about the passing of Golden Apple Comics owner Bill Liebowitz, a good hombre who died suddenly last Wednesday, 10.27.
Bill wasn’t a friend, but he sometimes helped me with an occasional story and was always ready to help with anything. He was gracious, accommodating and spirited as hell. There was no missing his quickness and aliveness, or the size of his heart.
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Liebowitz’s Melrose Avenue Golden Apple store (the other one is in Northridge) is one of the greatest retail-level pop culture meccas ever created. Crammed with comic books, action figures and all kinds of movie-related products and promos, it will remain a tribute to the guy who put it all together.
Liebowitz said on his website that his goal was “to develop Golden Apple as the world’s greatest comic book store… and more. We are constantly changing and experimenting with new ideas, and we don’t intend to stop. We’re very proud of what we’ve achieved, and where we are today.”
My sympathies to his wife Sharon and the rest of the Golden Apple crew.
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