In a 5.21 Cannes Journal entry, New York Times critic A.O. Scott wrote that he was “disheartened” by Anne Thompson’s also-recent Hollywood Reporter column which reported/asserted that U.S. moviegoers don’t know and almost certainly won’t care about this year’s big Cannes attractions, much less who their creators are. Her column quoted indie distributors like Warner Independent’s Mark Gill and ThinkFilm’s Mark Urman expressing this realistic (although certainly pessimistic-sounding) view. Scott complained that Thompson’s piece “seemed almost intended to perpetuate the situation it pretends to describe. If you assume that American audiences aren’t interested in certain kinds of movies, and therefore don’t release or write about those kinds of movies, then your assumption will of course appear to be proven right.” The same principle applies to all the whoopin’ and yellin’ over the $300 million-plus earned worldwide thus far by Star Wars: Episode 3 — Revenge of the Sith. If Hollywood-covering editors and journalists were to openly practice advocacy journalism (which of course they don’t — they practice it covertly), they would refuse to report any and all box-office figures for those especially pernicious, grossly disappointing, spiritually polluting movies that come along every so often, like Sith. This is fantasy, of course — you can’t not report about massive box-office earnings anymore than you can omit reporting on huge Asian tsunamis. But one or two local news channels in Los Angeles have talked about refusing to run video coverage of freeway chases and New York Daily News columnist Lloyd Grove has refused to run any more items about Paris Hilton, so there’s some precedent. As God is my witness, showbiz salutations about how the Sith grosses are good and healthy things and that the public has finally and wondrously awakened from its months-long slumber with the release of Sith, blah, blah…these exclamations are feeding the underlying malignancy. To me, these box-office reports seem to almost perpetuate the situation they’re pretending to dispassionately describe. If you assume that American audiences are hugely delighted and/or feel profoundly fulfilled about having seen Revenge of the Sith, and therefore you write about the statistical box-office figures that confirm this assumption, then your assumption will of course appear to be proven right. I have said this over and over in years past, but millions upon millions of easily seducable slackers lining up to see a blockbuster can, depending on the dynamic, mean (and should mean) absolutely nothing in the greater scheme of things. (Which of course if where we should all be living in our heads…in Greater Scheme Land.) What does it mean when a dust storm blows across Kansas and everyone covers their faces and stays inside their home(s)? Is this something to jump up and down about, examine from this and that angle, compare statistically to previous dust storms, and talk about the various ramifications with dust-storm experts like Paul Dergarabedian? People can go to see Sith by the mega-millions and a tip of the hat to those who have shrewdly profited from this, but in a better, smarter and more spiritually focused world, editors and journalists would try to report this dispiriting phenomenon with a bit more perspective…and without quite so much of a “yea, team!” cheerleader tone.
Returned…
…to these shores late Tuesday night, and currently putting finishing touches to Wednesday’s column this morning, i.e., Thursday. Apologies to those who’ve come to expect a stricter adherence to the schedule.
Dead Beach
It’s straight-up noon on Saturday (5.21), and the aura of finality is everywhere. This is one totally flatlined film festival.
For 94% of the visiting journalists, I mean. Make that 96%. The locals are gearing up for the awards ceremony tonight, which I’ve never attended and probably never will attend.
I’m gone early this evening, which is unfortunate because there’s an opportunity to see the movies I missed (most notably the presumed Palme d’Or winner, Michael Haneke’s Cache) at the catch-up screenings on Sunday.
American Pavilion beach, looking westward — 5.21.05, 10:40 am.
But I’ve had it and I don’t care. I mean, I do care but the spirit rebels and suddenly you need to get the hell out of here.
In the unlikely event that Cache (a.k.a., Hidden) doesn’t win tonight, the surprise winner could be Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s L’enfant, about some low-life druggies taking care of a baby. I didn’t see this one either. I know, I know.
My favorites were David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence, Tommy Lee Jones’ The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, Gus Van Sant’s Last Days (because it’s stayed with me…what you feel and think during the watching of a film is only the half of it), Jim Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers (despite slight reservations) and Woody Allen’s Match Point (because of the great ending).
And I liked Brent Hamer’s Factotum, the Charles Bukowski film with Matt Dillon in the lead role.
< ?php include ('/home/hollyw9/public_html/wired'); ?>
And I loved watching East of Eden last night at the Salle Bunuel. It feels a bit too tidy and 1955-ish at times, but James Dean was a prince and a genius, Jo Van Fleet gives one of the scrappiest female performances ever put on the screen, and Julie Harris’s acting in this Elia Kazan film still breaks my heart.
I never got around to writing anything about Amos Gitai’s Free Zone, which I found half-absorbing (it certainly isn’t the bad film that the Hollywood Reporter guy said it was). I loved the driving-through-Israel-and-Jordan footage, and Natalie Portman gives a performance that’s as grounded and filled out as she was in Closer.
No more filing until Monday or maybe even Tuesday. There’s plenty of stuff to get into that’s been piling up over the last eleven or twelve days.
The Why Of It
I saw Wim Wenders’ Don’t Come Knocking on Thursday morning, and I’m sorry to say I was profoundly unmoved.
I’m sorry because I’ll always admire Wenders for his exceptional films (The American Friend is still my all-time favorite, followed by Wings of Desire) and for the auteurist streak that used to be his handle, but this, lamentably, has ebbed and flowed according to the quality of the project in recent years.
Don’t Come Knocking screenwriter-star Sam Shepard (left), director Wim Wenders at Sony Classics press luncheon at Carlton beach cafe — 5.20.05, 2:10 pm.
Wenders and screenwriter-star Sam Shepard last collaborated together on Paris, Texas (’84). That was a fairly strong, deservedly admired film, and I suppose they thought they could make lightning strike twice, or at least create a few meaningful sparks.
“We decided to fuck with it again,” Wenders said earlier today (5.20) during a press luncheon.
Like Jim Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers, Don’t Come Knocking is about a middle-aged guy on a downturn cycle facing up to all the crap in his life by reconnecting with a woman he used to love (or at least have sex with) in his youth, and also looking to find and perhaps get acquainted with a fully-grown son he never knew he had.
Trust me, Jarmusch’s film is a far, far better thing.
Shepard’s Howard Spence is an alcoholic, self-destructive actor who’s on his way down fast. The film begins with Howard hightailing if off the set of his latest film, a western being directed by a journeyman type in his late ’70s, played by George Kennedy.
This put me off right away. Guys who look like George Kennedy direct television shows…maybe. If they used to be feature directors and their rep carries some weight. But mostly they don’t direct anything because the industry discriminates against white-haired guys of this age, so right away I was saying to myself, “Bullshit.”
I also don’t find alcoholics the least bit interesting, especially ones who walk away from paying gigs for no discernible reason other than the fact that the screenwriter has decided the character is a fool who’s going through a midlife crisis.
Howard stays with his mother (Eva Marie Saint) for a while, who sees right through his bullshit boozy behavior but feels no need to call him on it. She provides the inciting incident, 45 minutes into the story, when she tells Howard that he has a son by Doreen (Jessica Lange), his ex-wife (or ex-girlfriend…not that it matters either way).
Howard makes his way up to Butte, Montana, and meets up with Lange, and she points out his son Earl (Gabriel Mann), a local country music performer.
Earl is black-haired and hugely pissed off and averse to emotional exposure of any kind, which means, of course, he doesn’t want to know Howard. He’s one of those guys given to throwing clothes and furniture out of his second-story apartment when emotions come to a boil.
Don’t Come Knocking costar Sarah Polley.
Howard’s mother has a scrapbook full of newspaper clippings about him, and his fame allows him to score with women he’s just met, but Earl, a 30 year-old, doesn’t know who he is. “What is he, an actor?” he says at one point.
The Cannes-based Hollywood Reporter critic wrote that Wenders and Shepard have yielded “a dry, spare, odd and oddly satisfying drama about a modern-day lonesome cowboy, lost in a desert of his own making, who seeks out salvation by seeking out those he left behind.”
Oddly satisfying? The movie is deeply aggravating. I was sitting there trying to decide when to leave. I wanted to see enough so I couldn’t be accused of missing most of it. I knew I was stuck there for a good 90 minutes or so, but I damn sure wasn’t going to sit through all 122 minutes’ worth.
To me, Knocking is not a Wim Wenders film. It doesn’t have his mood or visual signature or stylistic consistency.
It has an unfocused, shuffling-along attitude that feels way, way off. The script is sloppy and raggedy-assed, although there’s a good scene in which Lange tells off Shepard for being an irresponsible screwup.
Sony Classics honchos Michael Barker (l.) and Tom Bernard — 5.20.05, 1:20 pm.
I asked Wenders to respond to a comment about his film written by New York Times critic Manhola Dargis and published today, to wit: “This deeply sincere film takes place in an American West that bears little relation to the real world, perhaps because that isn’t the America with which [Wim] Wenders first fell in love.
“Like other artists and intellectuals from abroad, Mr. Wenders seems to have fallen for an America that mostly exists on Hollywood back lots and in rock ‘n’ roll lyrics, which probably explains why the romance has lasted so long.”
To this Wenders responded, “I have travelled around this country and gotten to know it better than any film critic I’ve ever met. I don’t think [Dargis] has ever been to Butte, Montana.”
I can’t write any more about this, but I had a swell time at the press luncheon and enjoyed speaking to Wenders and Shepard and costars Sarah Polley, Gabriel Mann and Fairuza Balk (who said I had “an interesting face,” which made me feel funny for some reason.)
I’m just sorry I had such a rough time with the film, and I’m hoping Wenders and Shepard do better next time.
Shepard, Wenders — 5.20.05, 2:05 pm.
Don’t Come Knocking costars Tim Roth, Jessica Lange on set.
Exquisitely designed cappuccino cup, sipped from and remarked upon by Wim Wenders and yours truly during Knocking luncheon — 5.20.05, 2:20 pm.
Roger Ebert (third from right, standing) snapping photos before start of Knocking luncheon. Variety critic Todd McCarthy (gesturing, wearing cap) stands to Ebert’s immediate right.
Respecting a Dead Guy
I’ve agreed not to wade into Tommy Lee Jones’ The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada until 10:30 pm Thursday (Cannes time) and it’s only around 7 pm now, so I’ll have to write this a certain way.
I think it’s fair to say what other journos are saying, which is that they’re very admiring, and that some (like the Toronto Sun‘s Bruce Kirkland) are surprised at how smartly composed and compassionate and thematically rich it is.
The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada producer Michael Fitzgerald (left, avec beard), director-producer-star Tommy Lee Jones (center) and Toronto Sun critic-reporter Bruce Kirkland at Thursday’s press gathering at a wonderfully picturesque and soul-soothing villa in the hills above Cannes — 5.19.05, 12:35 pm.
Surprised because you never know what to expect from a first-time-out director **, especially when he’s a famous actor. It could have been indulgent or precious or half-baked.
But then Jones is a very intense, exceptionally bright, very passionate hombre, so his having scored with top-level journos shouldn’t be that surprising. Especially with Jones basing the film on an obviously thoughtful, time-shuffling script by Guillermo Arriaga, who wrote Amores Perros and 21 Grams.
I think it’s also fair to report that I attended an American Pavilion interview late Wednesday afternoon between Jones and Roger Ebert. Ebert made it clear he’d had a positive reaction to the film. He also asked if anyone in the audience had seen it, and when I raised my hand he asked me what I thought and I offered a thumbs-up gesture.
I don’t know if Melquiades Estrada is going to stand up against the supposed Palme D’Or favorites thus far, which are Michael Haneke’s Cache (which I missed last Saturday, and hasn’t, as far as I know, been shown since), David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence and Jim Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers.
It may (I say “may”) be received as more in the realm of being very good or worthy rather than masterful (there’s a prominent critic for a monthly who, according to a Texas-based critic, feels it falls apart during the second half), but I wouldn’t be surprised if the buzz is better than that.
The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada costars Barry Pepper and January Jones at press table, as Pepper reads from a diary-journal he wrote during production. In it he described Tommy Lee Jones as “a Southern badass with a ruthless work ethic and a heart the size of the Copper Canyon.”
The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada is a modern-day tale set in western Texas and northern Chihuahua, Mexico. It deals with a ranch foreman (Jones), a border patrolman (Barry Pepper) and an illegal immigrant named Melquiades Estrada who works for Jones. The second half is a horseback-journey film about redemption and seeing through prejudices and imbedded attitudes.
It’s a film with a great deal of compassion and soul and a generally humanistic view of things. If you want your literary influences, check out Flannery O’Connor’s work and William Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying.”
In the press kit, Arriaga says he wanted “to make a study in social contrast between the land that’s south of the Rio Grande river and the land that’s north of it. About what iron ies, injustices, glory, beauty and redemption you can find in this area that has its own character…something that cannot be imposed, something that has grown and evolved… something that cannot be controlled.”
Just before 11 am today myself and a few other journos (Kirkland, Stephen Schaefer, Desson Thomson, Harlan Jacobson, Shari Roman, etc.) were driven in a minivan from the Gray d’Albion hotel near the Croisette into the hills above Cannes, and eventually (the driver got lost) to a beautiful hilltop villa.
Guillermo Arriaga, hunting buddy of Tommy Lee Jones and screenwriter of The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (as well as 21 Grams and Amores Perros.
The purpose was to allow for a brief schmooze with Jones, Arriaga, Pepper, young co-star January Jones and producer Michael Fitzgerald (whose other ventures include Colour Me Kubrick and Sean Penn’s The Pledge).
Pepper said that Jones “has a very deep passion for strong visual composition and the poetry of words.” He read some passages from his on-set journal, and on one page he described Jones as “a Southern badass with a ruthless work ethic and a heart the size of the Copper Canyon.”
He mentioned two things that Jones told him before shooting a couple of scenes — “Keep it stupid simple” and “don’t do somethin’, just stand there.”
I mentioned to Jones, Arriaga and Fitzgerald that since seeing their film on Wednesday I’ve had trouble remembering the exact title. I like the earnest writerly sound of it — it doesn’t sound like your standard test-marketed title — but there is something about the name “Melquiades Estrada” that won’t stick in my brain, and I’m not trying to sound like a xenophobe when I say that.
Somebody asked Jones and Fitzgerald about the U.S. distribution prospects, and Jones said that “the wheels of commerce are turning as we speak.”
Tommy Lee Jones, Barry Pepper in scene from The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, taken straight from an image in press book (i.e. laid flat on the rug at the American Pavilion, and then cropped and refined).
Jones was asked to articulate the film’s themes, but he’s not what you’d call a press-junket gabber. Aside from calling it “a journey toward redemption,” he said, “You’re invited to read into it anything you deem appropriate…all you want, all you want.”
Pepper said that Jones read aloud from the book of Ecclesiastes during shooting. Jones was later asked why. “Because I like the book,” he replied.
His philosophy of directing actors, he said, is the same attitude he brings to handling a horse, which is “never ask a horse to do what it can’t do.”
Jones was asked what doesn’t work on the setas far as directing is concerned. “Tantrums are not constructive,” he said. “Egotism is not, I think, a good thing.”
He said he’s long wanted to direct a film of Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian,” and was asked a few years ago by then-Sony chief John Calley to write an adaptation of it in script form. He delivered it a year later but “they said it was too violent,” he said.
View of Cannes and the Med from EuropaCorp-rented villa, the site of Thursday’s press junket for The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada.
The session ended after an hour or so, and everyone was driven back to town.
A journalist I spoke to near the front of the Gray d’Albion said I should have snapped a photo of January Jones when she was eating a banana at our press table. He was struck by this act of consumption for obvious reasons.
A wafer-thin and very beautiful brunette woman who does interviews for French TV sat next to me in the van on the way back. She was dressed in a sheer white dress and smelled like jasmine mixed with musk.
I glanced at a printed itinerary she was holding in her hand, and I saw that she had three hair and makeup appointments set for today — one at breakfast, a second just after lunch and a third before going out this evening.
Numbers
There is no more time at all…none…but the caption says it all. I’ll try and amplify tomorrow morning:
Screen International‘s poll of mostly European critics (and no Americans) still had Michael Haneke’s Cache (a.k.a. Hidden) at the top of the list of Palme d’Or contenders as of Wednesday, 5.18, in a graphic published in Thursday’s (5.19) issue. Notice that the Jim Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers is running a very close second. Tommy Lee Jones’ film was shown for the first time late Wednesday morning, and therefore didn’t figure. To what degree do these conclusions reflect the sympathies of the Palme d’Or jurors? I couldn’t say, but they do indicate what a lot of people I’ve spoken to myself are saying. Notice also that Pendre ou Faire L’Amour, which I walked out on, has the lowest ratings of all.
Beached!
I was taking a break yesterday (Thursday, 5.19) on the beach in front of the American Pavilion when I spotted two guys cruising along about 100 years out in the bay in some kind of watercar — an engine-driven car with tires and windshield wipers and everything else that floats and can be driven across the water.
Didn’t I see one of these in a James Bond film back in the early ’90s? Or in some Herbie or Love Bug remake from Disney?
Anyway, the two guys and their watercar started heading for the beach. Paddle, paddle…blub, blub, blub….so far, so good.
Then the tires hit the sand and they started spinning out. The slope of the beach is very gradual and slight, but the car couldn’t get any traction. They kept trying, accelerating, spitting water into the air ….failure.
The various onlookers on the beach began to laugh and joke with each other and point at the beached jalopy. Dumb invention! Back to the drawing board! How very quickly and suddenly the love and support of the public evaporates.
Fact
When I made my first trip to the Cannes Film Festival in ’92, topless women on the beach were a common sight. I used to love to stop for a minute or two and pretend to look at the water and sky and everything else except these women, and there were always several to gaze upon.
But nowadays it’s rare to see a bevy of women lying around topless. I noticed exactly two earlier today, and it’s very sunny and warm out. I think this signifies something. French culture is turning more covered and conservative, apparently…but why? This demands further thought. If anyone has any theories, please send them along.
Rednecks
Crash (Lion’s Gate, 5.6) is worth your attention and respect. It’s one of those films that has the Big Picture on its mind. It isn’t preachy or assaultive (not to my mind anyway), but it damn sure swings for the fences.
Directed and co-written by Paul Haggis (who also adapted Million Dollar Baby), it’s a realistic, nicely sculpted, multi-character thing about racism. L.A. racism, to put a fine point on it, but folks in other regions will relate.
Larenz Tate, Chris “Ludacris” Bridges in Paul Haggis’s Crash.
It’s not a flip or cynical film, but mulling it over made me think of Randy Newman’s “Rednecks”. The chorus of this song and what Crash is saying fit together on a certain level.
Crash is one of those multi-character, criss-crossing fate movies that most of us associate with Robert Altman (Nashville, Short Cuts , Gosford Park) or Alan Rudolph (Choose Me, Welcome to L.A.). But it’s tighter and more disciplined that Altman’s usual stuff.
The closest comparison I can think of is Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia, and I hope I haven’t scared anyone off by saying that.
< ?php include ('/home/hollyw9/public_html/wired'); ?>
Crash is also about rage and mistrust and bad tempers and fatigue, but it plays in a different key. The script, by Haggis and Bobby Moresco, is very intricate and well developed, and eventually (during the last third) it starts to feel like something really sharp and extra.
There are no weak or so-so performances in Crash, and it has some ace-level ones given by Don Cheadle, Thandie Newton, Terrence Howard, Ryan Phillipe (best thing he’s ever done), Larenz Tate, Chris “Ludacris” Bridges, Sandra Bullock and Matt Dillon.
Ryan Phillipe as a conflicted police offer…his career best so far
One of the things I really liked about Haggis and Moresco’s script is that no character is seen as just one color or tendency. People are misread and mistaken for people they’re not all through it, and they all go through these little epihanies.
Matt Dillon’s character, an L.A. patrol cop whose racist attitudes are so belligerent and sulfuric he feels like a throwback to the L.A. Confidential era, is the most offensive, but even he turns out to have traces of heroism and compassion.
Crash is broad-minded enough to even acknowledge that some racial attitudes are semi-justified, or at least understandable.
New Yorker critic David Denby said that Crash “is the first movie I know of to acknowledge not only that the intolerant are also human but, further, that something like white fear of black street crime, or black fear of white cops, isn’t always irrational.”
Here’s an interesting Geoff Pevere interview with Haggis that will bring you up to snuff on the genesis of it.
Thandie Newton, playing the wife of a successful Hollywood director (Terrence Howard) and grappling with rage and humiliation at the hands of a racist cop.
After you’ve seen a movie like Crash you know you’ve seen something. I’ve seen it twice now, and it got me thinking about who I really am, deep down, in terms of racial attitudes.
I’ve never thought of myself as a racist, but I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to being race-conscious. I’m merely saying that I notice stuff — traits, behavior, physical characteristics — that are specific to this or that racial-cultural crew. Is that so terrible? Talk to Paul Theroux about this.
Middle-aged white people from the Midwest, for example, not only look like a very culturally specific bunch but they behave and dress in a very specific oddball way. Their bodies are a bit softer and rounder, they have appalling taste in travel attire, and they always look slightly cowed.
It’s always a fascinating game for me in European airports to try and spot which travelers are French, English, American, German or Italian.
When you’re walking around the Dallas Ft. Worth airport there’s no missing the genetic differences between the natives (who come from Irish and Scottish ancestry) and the folks you’ll see in Los Angeles or San Francisco or Chicago.
And anyone can spot in a second the multi-ethnic stew (old-school Italian, Irish, African-American, Caribbean, Middle Eastern, Russian, Indian, etc.) that is New York City when you’re walking through JFK or La Guardia.
I’m not being completely honest. Between the lines of my airport observations, occasional racist thoughts — call them flashes or spasms — pop through from time to time. I’m ashamed to admit it, but it’s true.
Jeez, I’ve written myself into a box here. I’m just trying to be frank and I’m sounding like Rod Steiger in In The Heat of the Night.
Maybe if I go even deeper I can dig myself out. This is a totally true story that happened to a friend in late ’94. In fact, now that I think about it, it could have been worked into Crash.
It involves alcoholism and reckless behavior, but the guy is over this problem now and I know he’s proud of that.
The guy is coming back from a party and half in the bag. Not blind drunk but definitely impaired. He’s on Sunset near Crescent Heights, and the car in front of him stops dead and he bangs into the car’s rear bumper. Nothing heavy, but there’s been some minor damage and insurance cards need to be exchanged.
Matt Dillon.
Two African American women get out. He says “hey” in a relaxed way, and both parties agree to pull over to the side and sort things out, so the guy gets back in his car and then starts thinking, “Wait a minute.” He’s just been in another alcohol-related car accident (which the cops never heard about, luckily for him) and he doesn’t want to submit another report to the insurance company so soon after the last banger.
Being the mature, level-headed, shake-hands-with-reality type of dude he was at the time, the guy peels out and takes a sharp left and takes off down Sunset. I can lose these guys, he figures. But they peel right out and hit the gas and are right on his ass. He drives faster and faster…no change. He panics and starts to really break the traffic laws but he can’t shake them.
After about five minutes of this, he gives up and pulls over into an empty parking lot, and the women pull up next to him…freaked.
They’re hysterical with rage, outrage, fear and everything else. One of them pulls out her cell and calls the cops. The guy tells them he’s really sorry and doesn’t know why he gave into the idiotic impulse to run away and is trying to calm them down and talk things out, but the women are volcanoes and they want him nailed but good.
A cop car pulls up a few minutes later. The guy is cool with the fuzz, telling them he’s been a jerk and that he apologizes and wants to settle things, and the women are losing it — so angry and hysterical they’re close to crying, saying “he ran off!” and “you’ve got to arrest him!” and so on.
And guess what? The cops side with the guy. Because he’s calm and the woman are so over-the-top emotional and…
They make sure the women and the guy exchange phone numbers and whatnot, and then they tell the women to calm down and chill and they’ll take care of this guy. After the women are gone they tell my friend to lock his car and walk home because they can tell he’s had a few. And then one of them says, “Don’t ever say the L.A. police never cut anyone a break.”
This happened sometime around the O.J. Simpson trial — make of this what you will.
The guy is overwhelmed with affection for these two emissaries of the law. He can’t believe they let him walk. But they did because they didn’t like those two women. My friend rejoices at the racism behind this. He feels scared and shaken up, but strangely filled with hope. He loves L.A.!
We’re rednecks, we’re rednecks. We don’t know our ass from a hole in the ground. We’re rednecks, we’re rednecks. We’re keeping the niggahs down.
Surprise
I went to the House of Wax all-media on Monday night, more or less expecting to hate it. I thought I might get some material for a nice rip piece. But it’s not that bad for a throwaway slasher film. It’s reasonably decent — jolting, suspenseful, inventive.
The producer, Joel Silver, sometimes hires faceless MTV hotshots to direct his second-tier movies, and Jaume Collet-Serra, an MTV guy originally from Barcelona, clearly fits the bill, but he obviously knows what he’s doing and shows some real visual flair in the third act.
Collet-Serra could follow up on this and — who knows? — make himself into the next Antoine Fuqua.
It’s a lot wilder and bloodier than the 1953 House of Wax, a 3-D horror film with Vincent Price and Carolyn Jones. There are two significant links between them — i.e., the existence of a wax museum and a hard-core technique used to create life-like human sculptures.
House of Wax is a hodgepodge of every city slickers-visit-the-hinterlands shocker flick you’ve ever seen, from Psycho to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre to Deliverance to Last House on the Left, with a little taste of Brian DePalma’s Sisters.
Visually, Collet-Saura and Silver have really gone to town with the wax thing. The film is covered with the stuff…sprayed with it.
The guy who pops through is Chad Michael Murray (WB’s One Tree Hill). He plays the bad-ass brother of Elisha Cuthbert’s female lead — a guy who takes no lip and has aggression problems, etc. But it’s very satisfying when these anti-social impulses come into play against the villains of the piece, and you’re left thinking that it’s not so bad to have a bad-ass malcontent around when the going gets rough.
Wolf Creek, an Australian-made horror film I saw at last January’s Sundance Film Festival (and will apparently open later this year via Dimension) is still a better thing. Grittier, tastier, more original.
Chad Michael Murray, Elisha Cuthbert in House of Wax.
I also went to Wax because I wanted to enjoy Paris Hilton being killed. Isn’t that a pretty strong motivation all around? A Warner Bros. publicist was wearing one of those “See Paris Die” T-shirts at the door. And people in the audience did titter a bit when she got it. But not me.
I felt…could it be pity? Compassion? All I know is, she’s not that bad an actress — the word is inoffensive — and I don’t hate her any more. This sounds absurd, I realize, but her acting feels natural and unaffected. She doesn’t force it.
Theoretical question: if you throw a piece of sharp pipe at a person’s head (like a javelin or something), how likely is it that it will go right into their head and come out the other side? I’m not sure this would happen if you threw an arrow-shaped lead pipe at a really rotten, gutted pumpkin.
Complaint: Jared Padalecki, the guy who plays Cuthbert’s boyfriend, is way too big for her. He’s a foot and a half taller. Next to her he looks like a Wookie. [Note: Sorry for getting mis-identifying Padalecki earlier.]
Rising Intrigue
I am a Determined Detractor of George Lucas and the Star Wars prequels. I have said this over and over, but I am a hater because, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far way, I was a lover of The Empire Strikes Back, the best film in the series.
I feel Lucas has shamed the franchise over the last 22 years (since the release of Return of the Jedi) by not even trying to measure up to Empire.
And also because I hated Jake Lloyd in The Phantom Menace. And because those memories of Jar-Jar Binks will never go away. And because I despise Hayden Christensen’s Toronto accent and those awful vowel sounds. I remember an especially irritating delivery of a line (spoken to Natalie Portman) in Attack of the Clones: “I need haahllp!”
Hayden Christensen, Natalie Portman in Star Wars: Episode 3, Revenge of the Sith.
But I have to say (and I feel like a schmuck saying this because you can’t trust trailers) that the trailer or music video or whatever it is makes Star Wars: Episode 3, Revenge of the Sith (20th Century Fox, 5.19) look half decent.
I’m seeing Sith at Manhattan’s Ziegfeld on Thursday night. I have to admit that I’m feeling jazzed about this. Pretty much everyone is.
Sith is George’s last shot at restoring his reputation. If he fails with this final installment, his name as will be marginalized forever as a filmmaker who got it right with THX 1138, American Graffiti and Star Wars…and then went bad and corporate in his imaginings.
But if he succeeds…
Talk
There’s a commentary piece by Wendell Wittler in the current Newsweek listing the most memorable Star Wars moments.
His favorite Star Wars line is Harrison Ford’s “I know” to Carrie Fisher’s “I love you!” in Empire. Mine too.
My second favorite line is Ford saying to Fisher, “You like me because I’m a scoundrel.”
My third favorite line (and I realize this makes no sense at all, and I can’t even think up a good nonsensical reason right now to justify it right now) is also from The Empire Strikes Back and also spoken by Ford. It comes in the opening minutes. Han Solo is pissed at Chewbacca for letting go with one of his wookie laugh-growls at an inappropriate moment and he says…
“Laugh it up, fuzzball.” This is the dumbest thing I’ve ever copped to in this column, but I love this stupid-ass line.
I also love the sound of James Earl Jones’ electronically synthesized voice as he looks down at Solo’s carbon-frozen body and says, “Well, Kalrissian, did he survive?”
And like everyone else in the fanboy universe, I love the beautiful delivery that Jones gives to the immortal line, “No…I am your father.”
See what I mean? Empire lines, all.
Sez Who?
“When Attack of the Clones came out you posted what you thought were obvious spoilers, yet they were still spoilers. Can we have a spoiler warning this time, no matter how trivial, for the Last Lucas-directed Star Wars movie ever…please?
“Hayden’s Toronto accent doesn’t sound any better in the new trailer.
“Take this with a grain of salt, but my talent manager and an old buddy of mine from USC heard from some vp at FOX (my gut says it’s the same guy — my friend and manager don’t know each other) that the movie is terrible.
“The Fox guy also said that the people working on it couldn’t wait for it to be over.
“That said, neither friend buys this after seeing the new trailers.” — Name Withheld for Strategic Reasons
Kingdom‘s Lure
A few days ago a story about alleged right-wing disdain for Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven (20th Century Fox, 5.6) appeared in the London Times. **
The paper’s L.A. correspondent John Harlow reported that “Christian hostility” to the film (the righties don’t like it that some of the Crusaders are portrayed as selfish and “mean-spirited,” and they really don’t like it that Saladin, the Muslim military leader, is portrayed in “chivalrous” terms) may prove “damaging” at the box office.
Orlando Bloom during relatively early scene in Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven.
Harlow wrote that “a spate of hostile reviews are due to appear in the increasingly influential religious press this week [that] will urge America’s 80 million born-again believers to avoid the $130 million film.”
Trust me — the righties are loony. One of the things I admire about Kingdom of Heaven is that it doesn’t draw crude stereotypes and is fairly even-handed in its portrayals of Christians and Muslims. Christian foam-at-the-mouth views about this are agenda-driven and skewed.
< ?php include ('/home/hollyw9/public_html/wired'); ?>
I wonder, in any case, if fans of The Passion of the Christ care all that much about the reputations of Christian Crusaders? As Revolution Pictures exec (and former 20th Century Fox distribution chief) Tom Sherak says, “That [Times] story is interesting but you know something? If people want to go to a movie, they’re going to go to it.”
And yet it’s significant, I feel, that the right-wing Christians vs. Kingdom of Heaven story is being seen as some kind of good thing. Controversy creates curiosity and leads to ticket sales, etc.
Others suspect it may be a case of too little, too late. The fact is that Ridley Scott’s big-budget epic — a beautifully made, epic-styled drama about the Muslim siege of the Christian-defended Jerusalem in the 12th Century — is looking to number-watchers and data crunchers like a passable performer, at best.
Before I get into this, let me say one thing: forget all this crap and just go. If you’re a fan of fine pageant-level filmmaking, Kingdom of Heaven is an essential. What do you care what others think?
That said, I think it’s fair to ask, as other journalists have done, whether Kingdom of Heaven will do better domestically than Hollywood’s last three historical battle epics — Alexander, King Arthur and The Alamo — which all turned out to be duds.
Especially considering that Heaven opens only a week from today (5.6) and research data suggests that average-viewer interest isn’t where it should be.
How many people really know what Kingdom of Heaven is about, given that the basic story comes off as a bit vague in the trailers?
How many people out there give that much of a toss about the Crusades, or have a clue what they were about?
How big of a mainstream draw is the film’s star, Orlando Bloom? He rules with 15 year-old girls but does he mean anything to the 25-and-over crowd?
Is Kingdom going to be a Troy-styled success, with modest returns in the U.S. but double-sized or better grosses overseas?
Bloom and Kingdom costar Eva Green.
Ask around and opinions vary. Some marketing executives are pessimistic or doubtful; others are uncertain or mildly positive.
A senior marketing executive based at a major studio said a couple of days ago that audience interest in Kingdom of Heaven is, according to tracking data, not that great.
“It’s hard to say what [Fox marketing] could be doing differently at this point,” he said. “But if I were handling this film, I would definitely be very nervous at this point. It’s a difficult story line to communicate…the biggest problem they have is communicating that. But it’s not over until it’s over.”
“I don’t have any delusion that this movie is going to be a colossal blockbuster, but you’ve got to watch the numbers every day,” a seasoned box-office analyst said Friday morning. “If the numbers don’t move after this weekend, they’re in trouble. If they do move, they’ll be fine.”
Two days ago an executive from a marketing boutique agency said, “What’s making me happy about Kingdom of Heaven is that it seems to have a solid older audience, which means it’s the kind of film that won’t drop a lot. People are going to go to it over a period of weeks, and interest among the four quadrants — young males and females and older males and older females — is averaging about 39, which is fairly good. So I don’t think you can count ’em out.”
“Right now, this movie is positioned somewhere in between where Gladiator, King Arthur, Troy and The Last Samurai were,” said Sherak. “This movie is really about Ridley Scott. The question is, will it have any heat going into the marketplace next week? It isn’t Gladiator, but right now the numbers are solid.”
A veteran marketing executive disagrees. He says the film “is an ill-conceived project and it stars Orlando who? Think of Master and Commander without Russell Crowe. The title is lousy, the ending doesn’t work, the creative materials don’t tell you anything, they don’t have an advance-review campaign underway, it sounds like a three-snore picture and I’m telling you that the Fox people are worried sick.”
It was suggested during research on this story that I examine “comparables” to get an idea how Kingdom of Heaven is doing compared to the awareness and interest levels in Gladiator, King Arthur, Troy and The Last Samurai one week before their respective openings.
The figures come from a private industry tracking service called Cinesys, which provides its data to clients through National Research Group (NRG).
Based on telephone polling, it measures levels of unaided awareness (i.e., people knowing about a film without being told what its title is), general awareness, definite interest, and whether or not seeing this or that film is a first-choice selection.
As of today (Friday, 4.29), one week before opening, Kingdom of Heaven‘s unaided awareness is at 4%, general awareness is at 65 %, definite interest is at 40 % and 7% of the respondents called it a first-choice selection.
A marketing guy says, “One week from the opening and a 7% first choice for a movie of this cost and stature is toilet time, no matter how you look at it.”
One week before its 7.7.04 opening, King Arthur‘s unaided awareness was 4%, general awareness was at 76%, definite interest was at 48%, and 6% called it a first-choice selection. I don’t have the whole spreadsheet before me, but the IMDB says that King Arthur took in just over $51 million domestic.
The next three films had big stars in the lead role, so take these comparisons with a grain of salt.
One week before its 5.14.04 opening, Troy‘s unaided awareness was 17%, general awareness was 84%, definite interest was at 59%, and 18% called it a first-choice selection. Troy took in $133 million in the U.S., but the foreign totals were at least double that.
One week before its 5.5.00 opening, Gladiator‘s unaided awareness was 6%, general awareness was 75%, definite interest was 44%, and first choice was at 13%. It ended up with about $187 million domestic and a very healthy overseas gross.
One week before its 12.5.03 opening, The Last Samurai‘s unaided awareness levels were at 9%, general awareness was 81%, definite interest levels were at 42%, and first choice was at 6%. It was a groaner, but it wound up making $111 million domestic.
One way to build up interest in a high-profile film is to run advance rave reviews from major critics or get Time or Newsweek to run a feature story a week or two out. This hasn’t happened.
A friend tells me he heard a Kingdom of Heaven radio ad this morning that used a plug from CNN talk-show host Larry King. If that isn’t a sign of trouble, I don’t know what would be.
I disagree with the marketing veteran’s notion that Kingdom of Heaven ‘s ending doesn’t work.
I’ll repeat what I said in my 4.18 column: “Has there ever been a big expensive film about warring armies in which one side didn’t triumph absolutely? In which the loser wasn’t totally beaten down and slaughtered?
“I felt amazed and lifted up when this didn’t manifest…when life and sanity, in effect, is chosen over death and fanaticism.
And I think Orlando Bloom acquits himself in the lead role. Grimy and unshaven, he stands up and shoulders his responsibility like a man.
In the previous piece I called Heaven “a textural masterpiece” and “a big-canvas historical drama that dares to be different. It’s a complex and unusual thing… and what got me is the beauty of the brushstrokes. That and the avoidance of the usual usual.”
I’m seeing it again tonight and I`m looking very much forward to this. I only wish more people felt the same way.
Hold On…
There’s some kind of confusion about whether Focus on the Family film critic Bob Waliszewski is leading some kind of San Juan Hill charge against Kingdom of Heaven. It’s been suggested by Fox publicity sources that John Harlow of the London Times may not have it right, but I’m not sure either way because I can’t reach him.
In any case Fox sent me a statement from Bob Smithouser, editor of a site called Plugged In, which casts doubt upon the Waliszewski angle:
“Due to one journalist’s recent misrepresentation of Bob Waliszewski’s comments regarding the new Ridley Scott film Kingdom of Heaven, some people have been misled to believe that Focus on the Family is rallying forces against the movie. That’s simply not true.”
“Mr. Scott’s film about the Crusades actually deserves credit for carefully avoiding the wholesale vilification of either Christians or Muslims. While people of faith may object to individual moments, statements or characters in Kingdom of Heaven, the movie is not extreme or malicious, and we are content to let it succeed or fail on its own merits.”
This has no bearing on the marketing data aspects of my lead article about Kingdom of Heaven. I could rewrite the damn thing and just cut out the right-wing stuff at the beginning, but it’s easier to do it this way…for now.
Crop Calls
I absolutely swear to God there’s a great-looking Warner Home Video DVD of Elia Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd (1957) hitting stores a week from Tuesday (5.10).
It has terrific monochrome values, I mean…sharp and super-clarified and almost color-like in their fullness.
There’s only one problem: WHV technicians have cropped the image too tightly and presented it in what looks to me like a 1.85 (or 1.78) to 1 aspect ratio, with too many hairdos and foreheads sliced into for no reason.
A Face in the Crowd was photographed by Harry Stradling, who started out in the 1920s, shot A Streetcar Named Desire and ended his career working on a string of ’60s Barbra Streisand movies, including Funny Girl and Hello Dolly.
An early scene from Elia Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd, presented with an overly severe aspect ratio (seemingly 1.85 to 1) on an upcoming (5.10) Warner Home Video DVD. Notice the top of the frame scissoring into Andy Griffith’s pompadour.
Trust me when I say that old-fashioned guys like Stradling never used the top of the frame to crop into people’s heads, unless there was an emotional or compositional point to be made by doing so.
DVDs of almost all non-Scope movies shot in the 1950s and ’60s should
be presented with 1.66 to 1 aspect ratios. I don’t care if the dp on a certain ’50s or ’60s film composed the shots with an expectation that 1.85 aperture plates would be used in theatres (because 1.85 was being used back then) — just use 1.66 and don’t think about it and don’t get creative and just shut up.
That is, except for special-dispensation films like Shane and Dr. Strangelove, which look much better when presented with a full-frame aspect ratio of 1.33 or 1.37 to 1.
MGM/UA Home Video’s DVD of John Frankenheimer’s The Train does it right. There’s a perfect sense of balance and proportion in every shot, and here are no scenes with anyone’s hair or forehead sliced into except when this kind of shot is appropriate and intended.
Socially, culturally, whatever…I think we have an unusual reaction kicking in with the coming of Warner Bros. and Joel Silver’s House of Wax. The big attraction-repulsion element, of course, is Paris Hilton’s costarring role. There are guys on message boards everywhere saying they’ll go to it only if she dies and some saying, “She dies? Thanks for ruining it!” and still others saying they won’t see it at all because she’s in it. Let’s get one thing straight. If you know anything about horror films, you know that lead actresses sometimes die, but suppporting actresses always die, so she’s toast and that’s it. The pleasure element, for me, is (a) how slowly and painfully will she die, (b) how long and how loud will she scream before she croaks, and (c) how naked does she get before it happens? If the answers to these questions are (a) very slowly and very painfully, (b) really loud and long and (c) fairly naked, I’m there. I mean, I’ll definitely go to the all-media.
Kristin Scott-Thomas is telling BBC News that the success of the French-produced Arsene Lupin, which opened in Europe last fall but has apparently found no U.S. distributor, exemplifies a new approach to movies in France. “I think it’s very exciting,” Scott Thomas remarked, “because for a long time in France ‘commercial’ was a dirty word. Now it’s okay to make a lot of money with the films that you’re making.” It’s certainly okay for this 44 year-old French resident, because the producing of more and more empty fantabulous films in France means she gets to earn bigger paychecks. What she doesn’t acknowledge, of course, is that the movie is, to judge by reviews, on the fatuous side. As Boyd van Hoeij of European Films.net politely puts it, Arsene Lupin “is high on atmosphere and production values (the reported budget being 23 million Euros), though it treats the story only as a necessity to bring us from one skirmish to the other, from one lady’s bed to the other and from one flaming explosion to the next.” See what I mean? The cultural-aesthetic cancer that has all but taken over mainstream big-budget filmmaking in Hollywood has spread to France. Break out the Dom Perignon! “Arsene Lupin [can] be an old-fashioned adventure if you are willing to let it be just that,” van Hoeij continues. “The story and its internal logic are not its greatest feats, but indulge in this two-hour fantasy of this rakish burglar in an exquisitely imagined Paris and Normandy and you will come away entertained, amused and delighted.” Adhering to general principle, I am torn between shedding a tear and wanting to throw up.
Sin Peeks Out
I’m moderately cranked about seeing Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City (Dimension, 4.1) tonight, and doing the junket tomorrow on Saturday.
I’ve also been feeling a tiny bit wary, like before any comic-book movie. Does each and every one have to be about breathtaking visual coolness above all? That’s been the basic deal all along…but if this was the core attribute of the original graphic novels, would they have such loyal followings?
I do, however, respect films that have the confidence to stand their ground and be what they are. And according to a certain Midwestern journalist who saw it earlier this week, a fierce emphasis and sureness of purpose comes out of Sin City like sweat.
Mickey Rourke (l.), barely discernible, in Frank Miller and Robert Rodrigeuz’s Sin City.
Obviously, Sin City is going to be all about the sexy graphic aroma…the noir-to-the-max atmosphere…the relentless machismo…the hot slinky babes…those distorted faces all damp and glistening…know-it-all cool oozing off every frame.
The look and mood belong to Miller in terms of primal authorship, but the movie is also about Rodriguez doing the virtuoso hyphenate paw-prints thing…co-director, writer, cinematographer, editor, producer…so there’s a fairly uniform mentality.
< ?php include ('/home/hollyw9/public_html/wired'); ?>
“Sin City looks sensational,” Midwestern guy begins, “duplicating precisely the exaggerated flair of Frank Miller’s panel drawings. This in itself makes it the best big screen comic adaptation since Batman Returns. Hardcore fanboys will be panting for a sequel before the first reel is over.”
He also declares, however, that “anyone unfamiliar with the comic is gonna get the shit shocked out of them.
“Will the film’s relentless nihilism turn off at least as many as it turns on? I knew Rodriquez and Miller were sticking to the [comic book] panels, but never in my sickest dreams did I think bits like a cannibal getting quartered and eaten alive by a dog would survive the translation in all their stomach-churning, grinning-skull ferocity.
“This is one of the most violent flicks in a long time, more savage than Kill Bill or The Passion…way more brutal than anything Rodriguez has ever done (except, maybe, The Faculty), so expect a lot of hysterics from old fogies who don’t know that Frank Miller comics aren’t for kiddies. Or pussies.
“The film intertwines four of Miller’s Sin City arcs into a backtracking loop a la Pulp Fiction, but it serves them up in the style of a straight anthology.
“Besides the recurring characters, what connects Sin City is a grotesque fatalism verging on splatterhouse horror that would make Raymond Chandler bawl like a little girl — violence as a way of life, of recreation, with each inevitable comeuppance more tortuous than the last one.
“This movie doesn’t just celebrate vengeful bloodlust and steamy sex — it wallows in them, gorges on them, and then goes back for seconds.
“Rodriguez, antsy as ever, may seem to string together torture sequences as if violence alone constitutes plot progression, but there is also the grace of Miller’s gutter poetry, offering enough glimmers of humanity to round things out. Okay, so some of it sounds a bit purple at times. Kind of goes with the territory, no?
Rosario Dawson, Clive Owen
“The best segment, and the best ‘Sin City’ comic, centers on beastly manimal Marv (Mickey Rourke, in heavy Dick Tracy make-up) stalking strip clubs, alleys and one seriously creepy country homestead to avenge a murdered whore (Jaime King) who, for one sweaty night, made him feel human.
“Even behind all the granite-faced Thing prostheses, Rourke gnaws on the role, making by far the strongest impression out of the stellar cast.
“Of course, Rourke makes a strong visual impression too — so does Elijah Wood as a pale, mute, choirboy of a serial killer, and Jessica Alba, undulating luscious sweetness as a stripper with a secret. Bruce Willis with a scar on his head is still just Willis playing another cop, without the primitive, stylish pencil slashes Miller used to transcend archetypes.
“There are occasional hollow notes in some of the acting — especially from live wires like Michael Madsen, Benicio Del Toro and Clive Owen — that unfortunately recall Sky Captain sucking the life out of Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow.
There’s also, however, the intrigues of Josh Hartnett, Rosario Dawson, Brittany Murphy…whatever this film may be lacking, grungy-cool, perfectly photographed actors are all over it like a cheap suit.
“As internally-driven movies go, Sin City is probably as good an effort as Rodriguez is capable of, barring some sudden love affair with plot and directing actors and…I don’t know, feelings?
Jessica Alba
“The unrelenting grimness of Sin City doesn’t give Rodriguez much range to work with, but you can imagine Tarantino (whose guest- directed scene stands out for nil) or the young Sam Raimi punching up the black humor, drawing more than just entrails out of the characters.
“Everything Rodriguez has done since picking up an HD-cam looks and feels insular. He has seemed stuck in his head and his Austin home movie factory. His films lost some nerve when he walked out on the verite thrills of El Mariachi‘s streets and into a cubicle.
“And yet here and there, Sin City recaptures some of that living, breathing, thrilling danger. For the first time in a decade, I felt almost as enthusiastic about a Robert Rodriguez movie as the filmmaker obviously does.”
Master Blaster
It was roughly 32 or 33 years ago, in the midst of some digression in a piece about Last Tango in Paris, when Norman Mailer wrote a line that has stayed with me ever since: “the ass wind is our trade wind.”
Mailer wasn’t forecasting any trends (he was speaking about general fascination with celebrities) but he was still prescient. Ass winds are so prevalent these days that no one thinks about them, much less considers that it’s only been over the last ten or fifteen years that ass consciousness has been allowed out of the cellar and given access to the living room.
People have been laughing at fart jokes since the days of Euripides, but posterior attitudes and activities are subjects of somewhat wider usage and discussion these days. Fart jokes, thousands of anal sex websites, Howard Stern’s Fartman, scenes like the bedsheet accident in Trainspotting, Toni Bentley’s “The Surrender,” etc. I don’t know what it all means, but I know there’s an ass thing happening in the culture these days that wasn’t around 20 or 30 years ago.
Johnny Depp
There is no way, I’m telling myself, that some of the anal imagery brought to mind by several big-name comics in Thinkfilm’s The Aristocrats (a doc about the same totally revolting, quite hilarious joke being told over and over again) would have been served up in a regular mainstream movie playing at your local theatre in the `70s or `80s.
Why bring this up? Because I was reminded yesterday that Johnny Depp was quoted twice in the `90s (once by a Vogue magazine interviewer, and then by a book author) as saying he would love to play Joseph Pujol, the greatest ass performer of all time. And I’m sensing…no, I’m certain the time is right for this.
Other actors have expressed the same longing to play Pujol, including Peter Sellers, David Niven and Ron Moody. The only one to have stood up and actually blown wind so far has been British character actor Leonard Rossiter.
But Depp would be perfect. Depp would kill. I can’t be the only one who believes that his starring in a movie about a true-life, Victorian-era superstar ass-blower would be huge.
Pujol, a pretty much forgotten belle √É∆í√Ǭ©poque Parisian entertainer known as “Le Petomane” (which translates into “the Fartiste”), had the ability to suck air into his anus and blow it out in such a way as to simulate on-key musical notes, imitate wildlife and blow out a candle from a foot away.
Joseph Pujol, a.k.a. “le Petomane” or “Fartiste”
Famed for having been a bigger draw than Sarah Bernhardt during his engagements at Moulin Rouge in the 1890s, Pujol was billed as “the Man With the Musical Derriere.”
Jim Dawson, the author of Who Cut the Cheese? — A Cultural History of the Fart (Ten Speed Press), writes that as part of his act, Pujol “would accompany an orchestra, farting well-modulated notes, on key, in the appropriate spots. He could also [make his ass] imitate the human voice, emitting a bass, baritone, tenor and lead parts, as well as the tones of his mother-in-law.
Pujol’s ass could also do “imitations of a little girl, a bride on her wedding night, and a dressmaker tearing two yards of calico.”
In the same book, Dawson apparently quotes Depp as saying, “You have to admire anyone with such great control of his instrument. I’d love to play him. It’s tragic that he left no successors. I’d play him in a minute.”
In a September 1994 Vogue interview, Depp told interviewer James Ryan that Pujol’s act was, to him, deeply impressive. “That’s courage,” Depp said. “A guy who says, ‘Here’s my talent…take it or leave it.’ Blows opera out his butt. That man was a true artist. I mean that.”
The story of Le Petomane has no tragic dips or turns. He got rich from ass-blasting, moved into a chalet with servants and had ten children. He died in 1945 at age 88.
I wish I could find a way to order a DVD of a 1998 documentary about Pujol, directed by Igor Vamos, called Le Petomane: Fin-de-Si√É∆í√Ǭ®cle Fartiste. (It’s mentioned online, but isn’t listed on Amazon or any of the other DVD order sites.)
British character actor Leonard Rossiter
Rossiter (Barry Lyndon, 2001: A Space Odyssey) played Pujol in a 1979 short film called Le Petomane, directed by Ian McNaughton and written by Ray Galton and Alan Simpson.
An online review contends that Rossiter’s portrayal “was nothing short of brilliant. Although he didn’t produce the sound effects himself, his actions and intensity of concentration for each ’emission’ made it hard to remember that he didn’t.”
The same website claims that Sellers and Niven “had expressed great interest in playing Le Petomane. Both had found it hysterically funny and both were advised by their agents against doing it. Because of the nature of the subject it was thought that it would be bad for their image.
“Sellers wanted to do it, but he was advised against it,” according to either Galton or Simpson. (It isn’t clear which one is being quoted.) “They said it would ruin his image. And then it was offered to Ron Moody, who turned it down for the same reason. Leonard saw it and he said, ‘Ooh yes please, I’ll have some of that!'”
No more farting around — the time is nigh for Depp to step up to the plate and do this thing before he gets too old and loses his nerve.
I’m staggered, the more I think about this, that Depp hasn’t sat down with Tim Burton and tried to get a Fartiste film up and rolling. It’s right up their alley.
Depp’s UTA agent, Tracey Jacobs, wouldn’t get on the phone and tell me if any Pujol scripts have ever come in for Depp’s attention. A source who has spoken to Jacobs about this says no screenwriter or producer has ever put a script or money on the table.
The “Fartiste” film I’m imagining would have the chops and focus of another Ed Wood, only much more commercial. Who wouldn’t go to see it? People in their 80s? Depp is the hottest quirky actor of our times, and he’ll always need to do movies like this to balance out crap like Pirates of the Caribbean 2.
Something’s telling me Depp and Burton may want very much to do something a bit more impudent and challenging after the opening of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Warner Bros., 7.15). Those Michael Jackson echoes (or should I say “intimations”?) are creepy.
Buenos Aires
I flew out of Mar del Plata last Sunday around 12:30 and landed at the smaller, slightly east-of-downtown aeropuerto an hour later, and went straight into town to nose around and explore. I had about nine hours before my plane for Los Angeles was due to take off around 10:45 pm.
I left my bags at the Hotel Intercontinental and walked over to the Casa Rosada, the ornate, three-story presidential residence with the famed second-floor balcony that Eva Peron addressed her followers from. (The paint isn’t exactly rose — it’s more like a fleshy off-pink).
I walked around the San Telmo district and visited the open-air flea market. A big crowd was watching a couple dancing the tango. I gave them ten pesos when they passed the hat.
Casa Rosada
Director Fabian Beilinsky (Nine Queens) told me to go to a restaurant in San Telmo specializing in Argentine beef, called La Brigada (Estados Unidos 465). The aroma of perfectly-broiled steaks was transporting. I could tell right away it’s a class joint, although a bit too popular with the local swells. People were milling around outside and some kind of ticketing system was in place that I couldn’t figure out. I eventually gave up.
I then rented a bike and peddled all the way up to Palermo, in the eastern section of town. Palermo is the emerging hip section, like Manhattan’s Soho was in the early to mid ’70s. Buenos Aires is almost completely flat all the way around town, so biking anywhere is no sweat. You just have to be fearless about buses and crazy cab drivers. I figured I travelled about five or six miles, all in.
I ate at a small caf√É∆í√Ǭ©/restaurant on a quiet, tree-lined street in south Palermo, called Viejo Indecente (El Salvador 4960). It has an alternate name of Maldito Salvador, which is what it’s called on the business card and on the website .
There was an attractive woman with Tourette’s Syndrome sitting behind me. She didn’t seem to be swearing as much as shouting. It was kind of a cross between a loud scream and a loud sneeze. (“Aaaggghh“!) I kept asking myself as I ate, “Do I want to move outside or something?”
Buenos Aires is a flat, somewhat hot and sweaty city with superb restaurants and deeply beautiful women, some with bedroom eyes and many with long slender toes. The best part for me was the absurdly low prices. Everything is one-third the cost. It put me in the greatest mood not to have to spend any serious money. I felt like a trust-fund kid.
I drove past the brick-walled cemetery where Eva Peron is buried, and the whole area around it was covered with T-shirted tourists, swarming all over like ants. The nearby restaurants were all cheap fast-food joints (McDonald’s, etc.). The vibe felt lurid and grotesque. I peddled on without stopping.
B.A. is very much the bustling, pulsing place — crowds, music, culture, intensity — but the buses spew out exhaust like there’s no tomorrow, and you’re forced to breathe in the fumes as you’re peddling along, and with all the heat and clamor and the lack of much in the way of old-world architecture I began to conclude that Buenos Aires isn’t as sexy or intriguing as Paris, Rome or Prague. Or Berlin, even.
But at least it’s gritty and alive, and I’m sure it’s a richer thing for X-factor people who live and work there and congregate at the right places.
Hollywood and 9/11
“I was absolutely horrified and fascinated with William Langerweische’s short description of Buzzelli’s story at the end of your Wednesday column. In a way I could imagine myself in this situation, and it felt terrifying. In a weird way it was riveting, of course, but it was perhaps the most gut-wrenching thing I’ve ever read. I had to stop at one point to catch my breath.
“I have no doubt there’s a great story there, but is it a really a movie, with a plot, three acts, etc? I haven’t seen Fearless, only parts of it on TV, but I think I can imagine the structure of it from what I’ve seen.
“With Buzzelli, I believe that as a two-hour movie, we could have a really great part there in the reenactment of his experience, but what about the rest of the movie? I think to show us his reactions prior and after the experience could somehow cheapen it, since it’d be treading into somewhat familiar territory. Besides, what can possibly be said about his experience?
“The really fascinating aspect of the story is what happened during those few hours on 9/11. I can see a wonderful documentary being made about what he went through, maybe in the vein of Touching the Void, but a movie with actors, a script, etc? I really don’t see it.
“Well…. maybe if Terrence Malick directs it? He’s more of a man-nature relation kind of director, and he’d be working in a very urbane setting, so maybe someone else who could give it that Malick humanistic approach? Well, anyway it’d have to be a damn good and special director and script.” — Fabio Augusto, Sao Paulo, Brazil.
“I guess it was inevitable, and I don’t think any tragedy should be so sacrosanct that we tip-toe around it, but does anybody really want to see a 9/11 movie?
“Sure we’ll go, but who wants to sit there and deal with the headache of analyzing the dialogue, the direction, the special effects, the casting, the score, and the overall vibe of a recreation of one of the worst days of all of our lives?
“Seriously, I’m already hearing myself think, `The second act was really intense but I kinda didn’t like Eric Bana’s character and the Hans Zimmer was a little overdone, especially after the first plane hit.’ And I don’t even want to think about Brian Grazer’s The 9/11 Commission Report: The Miniseries on ABC with commercials and pop-ups for Desperate Housewives.
“I’ll admit that some of the art that has come out of the tragedy has amazed me. The HBO documentary about 9/11 is absolutely fantastic, and there’s an amazing show about the Twin Towers (it describes the science behind the structures’ collapse and in which members of the staff, who were interviewed just before 9/11, are labelled `died in the attacks’ or `missing’) and I still get chills when I channel surf into the opening sequence of Spike Lee’s The 25th Hour.
“But, c’mon, do we really need this already? It’ll be forever before we figure out what the whole thing really means. Can’t we take a decade to assimilate the experience and let the whole thing cool, or is five years all we get? ” — Neil Harvey, Roanoke, Virginia.
Wells to Harvey: Five years….all right, maybe six…is all you get.
“Great job on those 9/11 movies. I think Buzzelli’s story is fascinating, and I believe you are right about the dramatic content in comparison of the two different rescues. His is more absorbing, and the other is a little familiar.” — Jim Kiehl
“Whatever 9/11 Hollywood movie gets made, it would be more realistic if they would show the actual horrors of this heinous, cowardly attack by the Islamofacist Al Qaeda bastards who flew those planes into the Twin Towers.
“Probably, sadly, the real 9/11 movie will never be made. After all, there are those in Hollywood who see terrorists are misunderstood freedom fighters with a beef against decadent America, and not as cold blooded killers. ” — Bill Hodges
“Who’s to say which is the “more important story of 9/11, anyway? You? Me? William Langeweische? Anyone. really? I can write this with a certain (very modest) degree of credibility because I happen to be a 9/11 “survivor” myself.
I was working that day on the 5th floor of a five-story building two blocks from the WTC. After the first plane hit, I went with an art director named Raoul up to the roof. There we collected weird stuff that wasn’t on the roof the previous day, when we’d had lunch there. What we found was little metal versions of old Tinkertoy sets, if you remember them. But they were hot to the touch.
“And then, in very close-up straits indeed, we saw the second plane hit. Nose-in and full-on. What I remember most is the sound — an amazingly loud, all-encompassing combination of [unintelligible] and a crunch, as if the very fabric of our existence was caving in. I can still hear that sound.
“I remember how everyone in midtown NYC, once I’d walked up there from downtown and found the bus terminal closed, seemed to be wandering dazedly through the streets. They couldn’t get home and they couldn’t comprehend how horrible things already were, how worse they’d turn out to be. I remember being with thousands of other people looking at a huge TV in Times Square which was showing CBS News, and finally realizing what the famous phrase `the lonely crowd’ really meant.” — Richard Szathmary.
Wells to Szathmary: I didn’t say Buzzelli’s story was “more important” than what happened to Jimeno and McLoughlin. I said their story seems familiar and doesn’t seem to be much more than a standard let’s-dig-these-guys-out rescue tale. I also said it “doesn’t have anything like the surreal, full-throttle, hand-of-God quality of what happened to Buzzelli.”
Translation
“Would it really have hurt you or Jon Doyle, the writer of your DVD column “Discland,” to call Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Eclipse as opposed to L’eclisse ?
“Obviously the Criterion Collection people are spelling it that way, but it just sounds so damned pretentious. Besides, it played in the US as Eclipse, to the best of my memory.” — Richard Szathmary
Wells to Szathmary: I wouldn’t have had a heart attack if Criterion had called it The Eclipse on the DVD. But would you also have them change the title of Antonioni’s L’Avventura and make it The Adventure? That would sound, like, way uncultured.
Alain Delon, Monica Vitti in Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’eclisse.
Blam Blam
It’s unusual for a 44 year-old guy from the fringe indie or straight-to-video world landing a directing gig with a mainstream studio like New Line.
Unusual because of age-ism (i.e., generational tribalism and the belief that new directors have to be in their late 20s or early 30s with two or three MTV music videos to their credit), and because of an unwritten stipulation that if a director hasn’t gotten on-board with a high-profile producer or distributor by age 40, he/she is probably “done” and been relegated to the sidelines.
No, this isn’t Gus Spielberg, Steven’s younger, smarter brother who lives in Arizona — it’s Shoot “Em Up writer-director Michael Davis.
A noteworthy exception is Michael Davis, a Steven Spielberg lookalike whose success story is about one of the longest gestations in Hollywood history.
New Line has just committed to fund production of Davis’s script, a John Woo-type urban actioner called Shoot ‘Em Up, with Davis directing.
New Line president Bob Shaye has made it clear he wants the high-octane action flick rolling by September. He’s also signed Davis to a two-picture option agreement, and I’m told that Davis is now being wooed by agents for representation.
< ?php include ('/home/hollyw9/public_html/wired'); ?>
This is serious pay-dirt for a 1987 USC grad who’s directed a few lower-profile, straight-to-video films (the most admired is Eight Days a Week, winner of the audience award at the 1997 Slamdance Film Festival), and who has also worked as a storyboard artist off and on for roughly fifteen years, never quite putting his mitts on the brass ring.
I’ve read Shoot `Em up and it feels to me like a great New Line genre film in the tradition of The Hidden, the first Rush Hour, Blade and so on. It’s fast, punchy, sardonically funny, and aimed at younger guys and connoisseurs of action choreography-for-its-own-sake.
Journos are always being told that major stars are interested in playing a role in this or that script, but the talk is apparently valid this time. A serious “big name” is eye-balling Shoot `Em Up‘s lead male role, “Mr. Smith,” a terse hard-boiled type with the usual Joffrey Ballet abilities during gun fights.
A stick-figure image from Michael Davis’s 17-minute animatic Shoot ‘Em Up tape that conveys the choreography of the action scenes.
Why would a major star be looking at what sounds on the surface like a rote New Line actioner being made “for a price”? Because Shoot `Em Up ain’t rote.
The crusty, cynical noir-flavored tone is familiar, but the big action scenes have a kicky “haven’t been here before” quality. They take the Hong Kong Woo aesthetic to absurd new heights, but in a way that feels freshly insane, oddly logical and edgy-funny. It’s screwball formula nihilism with a twist.
Woo fans have seen a certain aspect of it before. The central Shoot `Em Up hook — a tough guy loner protecting a new-born baby boy from an army of goons trying to bring his just-begun life to a close — is borrowed from a sequence near the end of Woo’s Hard Boiled (’92).
Apart from the script itself, the element that sold Shoot ‘Em Up more than anything else was Davis’s decision to compose a 17-minute animatics reel, made from roughly 17,000 line drawings, which gives the viewer an idea of how the action scenes will play. (I could describe the action sequences and all, but this would spoil the fun down the road…right?)
I got a look at this tape last weekend and it definitely sells you on Davis as well as the piece itself. You figure any guy who cares this much about explaining how the action stuff will play has his gear wired tight and can be trusted to make it happen on film.
The people who pushed Shoot ‘Em Up into “go” project status are producer Don Murphy (along with his Angry Films team Rick Bennattar and Susan Montford, who will co-produce), New Line creative executive Jeff Katz and vp development Cale Boyter.
Copy insert from Davis’s animatic Shoot ‘Em Up tape.
Murphy had known Davis from USC film school in the late ’80s, and had kept in touch with him over the years. He knew he finally had something to push and maybe sell when Davis showed him the Shoot `Em Up script in the fall of ’03. It was hard and fast and could be made relatively cheaply…but Murphy wasn’t certain he could sell Davis as the director.
Murphy pushed it with New Line execs, although the first exec to make a call on it — senior vp production Stokely Chaffin — didn’t care for the “newborn baby dodging bullets” angle and said no. Murphy persisted and found an ally in Katz, who says he found the script “on the scrap heap…sometimes that’s how you find your little gems.”
Katz sent it along to Boyter, and the two of them eventually took it production chief Tobey Emmerich, who passed it along to Shaye.
Early on Murphy told Davis that “the biggest thing you can give me is some reason why [New Line] would let you direct it.” The animatics tape was the answer. “It said, look, he’s already visualized this thing, and look at how well these sequences play even with stick-figure drawings,” says Murphy. In so doing, Davis “really went the extra mile.”
Murphy knew Davis slightly “when I went to USC grad school in the late ’80s,” he says, “although he was two years ahead of me. He was one of those guys you meet and figure right away when they get out of school they’re going to be the schizzle. His shorts were great and he had an agent when he was still in school. But then we all got out and did what we did, and with Michael it was like…what happened?”
“I made some mistakes,” Davis says. “I was not politically savvy. I was an innocent and had no sense of politics and because I didn’t understand the political landscape in Hollywood, it hurt me. I always thought just sheer talent would be enough. I had an agent in film school. I could have gone with Richard Lovett or Jeremy Zimmer, but I went with a boutique agency instead.
“I also didn’t invest in networking and socializing. I just didn’t follow up on meetings. I guess I’m such a perfectionist….I didn’t want to just call up and be the fuller brush man, and I had too much self-doubt to just put myself out there and call these people.
“Stacy Sher at Jersey tried to help me get my first agent, and she’d take me out to lunch, wondering what I’d be doing. I didn’t keep up with her. I didn’t return the effort she put into me.”
The balancing factor was Davis’ way with a stand-out concept or oddball scene.
For Eight Days a Week he came up with the idea of a young horny protagonist having sex with food (i.e., shtupping a watermelon). If you ask me this bit was ripped off by the makers of American Pie. (How could the Weitz brothers claim otherwise?) Davis says he was “up” for directing that film until a certain Universal executive remembered the studio’s “mandate for hiring 25 year-old directors! I was too old…I was in my 30s!”
(John Hughes, one of Hollywood’s most successful miners of the teen aesthetic, was in his 30s when he made all those ’80s teen comedies. He turned 40 in 1990.)
Davis was a year or two ahead of Murphy at USC, graduating in ’87. He was a bit more contemporary with Jay Roach, Steven Sommers, Michael Lehman, John Turtletaub.
Davis has written 33 screenplays (ten of them produced) and directed five movies based on his scripts, the best of these being Eight Days a Week and 100 Girls, which went to video in the U.S. and “opened on 100 screens in France.” He’s done storyboard work for Pee-wee’s Playhouse and Tremors.
Murphy always “made me feel comfortable,” Davis recalls. “Over the years I’d send him my latest straight-to-video movie, and he always returned my phone calls. His attitude was always, ‘What can I do to help you?'”
It was a seven-month process, he says, before Shoot `Em Up got traction at New Line.
“Most producers shotgun things,” says Davis. “They send a script out, and if it doesn’t get heat they move on. Don is different.
“Jeff Katz liked Shoot ‘Em Up, but it stalled with Stokely. Don being Don, he wouldn’t let them pass on it. Katz loved the material..he was saying he’d never seen an action piece like this before. Then Cale Boyter saw it, got it and pushed it along. Then they all saw the reel.”
Davis “is not a young guy but this movie is happening and the agencies are going crazy for it,” says Katz.
“[Murphy] told me I had to turn myself onto this. So we had a meeting with Davis and he looks like a pudgy Steven Spielberg. He’s this very happy-go-lucky guy, and what he did was map out a very inventive way to sell the gunplay. Shaye saw the tape and said yeah, this is good, get me the script.”
Writer-directors with talent, moxie and opportunistic backgrounds have about ten years to make their mark or establish a serious foothold of some kind after leaving film school. Most get there by their late 20s or early 30s. If they haven’t made it by 40 or thereabouts…toast.
Being a late bloomer myself (I didn’t really get down to journalism until I was 27), it’s nice to know that a slightly older guy has busted through, and for the right reasons.
Oscar Balloon ’05
Here’s the first assembly of ’05 Oscar Balloon picks. The same can be found down in the new mustard-colored Oscar Balloon box at the very bottom of the column.
Anyone with a line on any film or actor or behind-the-camera filmmaker of any stripe that they believe (and I mean on the basis of having read a script or actually having heard or been told something substantive, as opposed to hunches or assumptions) should be included, please forward the info and if it sounds credible, I’ll put it in.
BEST FEATURE: The Producers (Universal); All The King’s Men (Columbia); Untitled Spielberg Munich Olympics Project (Universal), Memoirs of a Geisha (Columbia); The New World (New Line); Jarhead (Universal), Elizabethtown (Paramount); Walk The Line (20th Century Fox); Cinderella Man (Universal); Syriana (Warner Brothers); Oliver Twist (Sony/Columbia).
BEST DIRECTOR: Steven Spielberg (Untitled Munich Olympics Project ); Ron Howard (Cinderella Man); Sam Mendes (Jarhead), James Mangold (Walk The Line), Terrence Malick (The New World); Rob Marshall (Memoirs of a Geisha); Roman Polanski (Oliver Twist).
BEST ACTOR: Matthew Broderick (The Producers); Viggo Mortensen (A History of Violence); Colin Farrell (Ask The Dust; The New World); Joaquin Phoenix (Walk The Line); Jake Gyllenhaal (Jarhead), Russell Crowe (Cinderella Man), Johnny Depp (The Libertine); Sean Penn (All The King’s Men); Eric Bana (Unititled Spielberg Munich Olympics Project).
BEST ACTRESS: Cameron Diaz (In Her Shoes); Gwyneth Paltrow (Proof), Zhang Ziyi (Memoirs of a Geisha); Reese Witherspoon (Walk The Line); Salma Hayek (Ask The Dust).
BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR: Nathan Lane (The Producers); Jamie Foxx (Jarhead), Peter Sarsgaard (Jarhead), Ben Kingsley (Oliver Twist); Paul Giamatti (Cinderella Man); James Gandolfini, Anthony Hopkins, Jude Law (All The King’s Men).
BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Susan Sarandon (Elizabethtown); Hope Davis (Proof, The Weather Man); Toni Collette, Shirley MacLaine (In Her Shoes); Kate Winslet, Patricia Clarkson (All The King’s Men).
BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY: Terrence Malick (The New World); Cameron Crowe (Elizabethtown).
BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY: Mel Brooks and Thomas Meehan(The Producers); Stephen Gaghan(Syriana), Steve Zaillian (All The King’s Men), William Broyles, Jr.(Jarhead), Susannah Grant (In Her Shoes).
Brando Blow-off
“You’re absolutely right about Brando getting short shrift at the Oscars. At least they kept the show reasonably brisk, but a full-up Brando tribute wouldn’t have consumed that much more time.” — Jay Smith
“I felt exactly the same way about Brando — he was robbed. It was insulting and stupid. Anything to do with Brando refusing to take his Oscar in ’73? An oversight? Who is responsible? They had a great opporunity to salute a legend and they lost it. Imagine the quotes they could have got from all the living Oscar-winning actors…De Niro, Pacino, etc. Shameful.” — Dale Launer, director-screenwriter.
“Maybe he wasn’t liked, maybe he didn’t play the game, maybe he took some air of the idea that someone could walk away…but tell me who did more for the performances and the quality of work that the whole night is supposed to be about? Oh right…Johnny Carson.” — Tom Van
Marlon Brando
“You were right on target with your Brando comments. He’s probably the greatest thespian who has ever lived, and he delivered the best acting performance in cinematic history in Last Tango in Paris. I wonder if the oversight had anything to do with his personal troubles in his final years. If so, shame on the Academy.” — Ron Cossey
“Damned right they should have done a special thing for Brando, with Scorsese or somebody putting his complex and contradictory career into perspective. (Forget comedians– why doesn’t Scorsese just host the whole thing with commentary over the clips and footnotes at the bottom of the screen?)
“But Brando isn’t the only one who deserved that kind of separate attention– and I suspect this is the reason they didn’t do it. If they’d done one for him, it would have raised the question of why they didn’t do one for Ronald Reagan.
“By any decent logic, they should have acknowledged that a major place in history — not film history, but history– is held by someone who was once one of theirs. The problem, of course, is that a lot of people in Hollywood hated him as president, and if they were forced to recognize that maybe they were wrong then and that he did play a crucial role in ending a vast and terrible tyranny, they’d have to consider the possibility that they could be wrong about Bush and what’s happening in the middle east right now. And that, of course, won’t do.
“So instead of honoring either Brando or the man who said ‘Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,’ the Academy chickened out by flashing them wordlessly on screen to bookend Fay Wray and Russ Meyer. But after all, how could we expect mere mortals like them to merit the level of loving tribute Hollywood reserved last night only for a true idealist and saint like the gulag-builder Che Guevara? Team America has never seemed more prescient.” — Mike Gebert.
“It’s baffling to me that there was evidently no influential figure to push for a Brando tribute reel.” — Josh Martin.
“It seems clear to me that The Academy didn’t produce any special tribute to Brando because they didn’t feel they owed him anything. I can understand that. After all, he dissed them first. How could they give him special treatment after what he did while reducing other loyal members of the academy to a second each in a montage?
“Separate special memorials eat up too much time anyway. If they were that big a star (like Brando), they had enough press when they actually died. I had my fill of ’50s film clips of Marlon on MSNBC last summer. We didn’t need another review of his career last night. I can understand when they do it for Johnny Carson or Bob Hope because they had a special relationship with the actual Academy Awards TV program.” — P. Mccarthy.
Oscar Fallout
“I wasn’t looking forward to the Oscars this year, and almost didn’t watch for almost the first time I can remember. I’m not a fan of Chris Rock. But I did watch, and I enjoyed it, though it didn’t rank with the more memorable shows. Perhaps the straitjacket of the show actually made Rock funnier to me. You’re right about Johnny Carson, and, yeah, they should give Steve Martin whatever he wants next time.
“The Pepsi Spartacus commercial was such an affront to me that I will go out of my way to avoid Pepsi at all costs until the memory of that ad fades. Ugh. Sean Penn coming to Jude Law’s defense only seemed to play into the perception of him not having much of a sense of humor. Yeah, Clint should have been nominated for his M$B score. And yup, Collateral deserved more than a nod for Best Cinematography.
Clint Eastwood, director-producer of Million Dollar Baby and winner of the Best Director Oscar.
That The Aviator won is almost criminal, because the replication of early two-strip Technicolor processes left me scratching my head wondering if I was seeing a bad reel in the print when I saw the blue peas — and I’m a moviegoer who loved the Technicolor history documentary on the Robin Hood DVD! Who exactly got the homage to early color that they were doing? (I didn’t get it until I looked up the film’s trivia section at IMDB.) That conceit was the worst part of that movie. I had no problems with the CGI effects, and I’m usually pretty hard on that.” — Jay Smith
“The evening ultimately turned into a high mass for Clint Eastwood — the patron saint of on-time and under-budget filmmaking; the Hollywood trooper; the team player; the heartbreak kid; the poster boy for ageism in reverse; the proponent of simple storytelling for simple folk; the guardian against mass market/CGI-driven entertainment; the let’s-not-do-a-first-take,let’s-use-the-rehearsal-footage waste-management pro.
“I know you’re a fan of Million Dollar Baby but when it comes right down to it, the movie is nothing more than an old-fashioned melodrama torn from the pages of Warner Bros.’ own playbook from the 30s and 40s — only then they had actors with the grit and seeming street smarts to bring it all to vivid life: talents like Cagney, Bogart, Garfield, Pat O’Brien and the Dead End Kids. Now we have Clint playing Clint and Morgan Freeman tackling a role no different than all those serial killer movies at which he’s become so expert.” — Steve Chagollan
“Do you think that Collateral might have lost the cinematography Oscar because it was shot digitally? The images of LA at night were stunning, and to shoot so many scenes in the taxi…amazing work. That said, Robert Richardson√ɬØ√Ǭø√ǬΩs Aviator cinematography was worthy of the Oscar. The recreation of the Technicolor processes was amazing and the overall look of the film well worthy of the Award.” — Edward C. Klein, Salem, Oregon.
“I think the funniest moment at the Oscar in the last ten years was the Dave Letterman-hosted 1995 ceremony (a year that honored Forrest Gump and Pulp Fiction in different ways). There was that skit with several top names — Jack Lemmon, Martin Short, Paul Newman, Albert Brooks — acting to a sock monkey. The runner-up would be Billy Crystal’s intro to the 2000 ceremony, complete with Crystal spoofing Spartacus and showing up in drag as Mrs. Robinson.
— Michael Bergeron
“I can’t really stand it that so many people are crying over Eastwood not getting nominated for best score. Guarantee that if Lennie Niehaus wrote the same music note for note, no one would have cared (see Unforgiven). The real tragedy (well, not tragedy….life will go on) is that there were several great scores this year that came up empty in the awards department, while the five Oscar nominees ranged from okay to…okay.
Spartan, The Incredibles, I, Robot (the movie sucked but Beltrami knocked the music out of the park), The Motorcycle Diaries, Friday Night Lights and Kinsey are just a handful of great scores that went mostly unmentioned this year, yet everyone is crying over Eastwood’s ten notes. If he wasn’t going to win for Mystic River, he sure as hell wasn’t going to be recognized for Million Dollar Baby.
“It’s not even that the score was bad — it served its purpose. But there were far, far, far many better ones deserving of recognition, and now their composers have to sit around being told how Eastwood is superior to them too. If Danny Elfman or Carter Burwell haven’t won an Oscar yet, I think Eastwood can stand to miss out a few more times.” — Eddie Goldberger
Pepsi Spartacus
“So you liked Kirk Douglas and the gladiator army selling Pepsi — have you seen the ad with Gene Kelly’s Singing in the Rain remixed to sell VW Golfs? Here’s the link . The spot is pretty seamless, but I can’t help but cringe. I’ve been told that if I were to ever associate msyelf with something similar, I would be killed.
“Similar, but not selling anything, was the video mashup of the Beatles and Jay-Z. Someone took the initiative and blended A Hard Day’s Night footage with Jay-Z clips. Amusing if only to guess which Beatle would be the DJ and which was going to bust a move. [Editor’s Note: There was a link in this letter to the Jay Z video, but it didn’t work. If anyone has found one that works, please send it along.] — Chris Clark
Day and Date
“DVD’s or pay-per-view simultaneous with a theatrical opening sounds like a dream come true to me.
“Theatres won’t die out — they’d just be thinned out. Then maybe
a large percentage of the annoying crowd (families with 30 children in tow, talkers, etc.) would stay home. It’d be cheaper to rent a flick for $12 then it would be to pay admission for every child in your neighborhood. Ticket prices would go up, sure, but then maybe the quality of the experience would too.
“I’ll be honest — it’s getting harder and harder to pay upwards of $10 a person to see a movie maybe three days into the run and already there are a ton of scratches, pops and cigarette burns, not to mention faulty sound equipment. The experience is about as good sometimes for big budget fare in the theatre as it would be in my living room.” — Shawn Robare.
Asian Bootlegs
“Consider two developments regarding bootleg DVDs here in Asia:
“Movies open here on Thursdays…. the co-ordinated global released films actually get shown here one to two days sooner than the USA (by the time difference). The ticket prices vary from $2 to $8 for the equivalent service of a first class international flight (electric reclining seats and waitress service).
“I don’t subscribe to the bootleg industry, but apparently the bootlegs are now ‘off the master’ and nearly as good as the released DVD. Somebody is selling out at the major studios. I saw a snippet of a friend’s Million Dollar Baby copy and it was perfect.” — Paulus.
Crowds in Calcutta waiting for fresh shipments of pirated DVDs. Well, not really.
“You presented some interesting ideas about the future of film distribution. I for one would hate not to be able to see films on a big screen. I don√ɬØ√Ǭø√ǬΩt care how big a screen I have at home — I want the magical experience in a darkened theater.
“One scenario you didn√ɬØ√Ǭø√ǬΩt mention was digital projection. I haven√ɬØ√Ǭø√ǬΩt been able to see a film presented in this format, but from what I√ɬØ√Ǭø√ǬΩve heard it√ɬØ√Ǭø√ǬΩs stunning. If theaters start showing films this way and the films are worthy, just maybe people will start to fill the theaters again.
“Of course it doesn√ɬØ√Ǭø√ǬΩt help that they charge a small fortune to get in the door. My family and I wait until films come to the local Theater Pub where a ticket is $3 and you can enjoy dinner and a beer or glass of wine and see a decent film the way it was meant to be seen. And you don√ɬØ√Ǭø√ǬΩt have to put up with the poorly managed Regal Cinemas where all they want is your hard earned money and could care less if the film is focused or the sound is properly adjusted. And don√ɬØ√Ǭø√ǬΩt get me started on the conditions of the bathrooms!” — Edward C. Klein, Salem, Oregon.
Flipside
“I realize you liked Rock’s Oscar bit when he interviewed patrons at L.A.’s Magic Johnson complex. I’ve read a few other critics (including Tom Shales) who also seemed to like it. But you and Shales and the others may just be deluded honkies.
“Another interpretation of Rock’s interviews is that ‘urban’ audiences may just be completely out of touch with real cinematic quality. Unlettered, culturally limited boobs (as opposed, of course, to the hip, smarty-pants Rock). If a white guy had done those interviews, after all, the bit would have been correctly derided as racist, condescending and patronizing, as someone making fun of the less educated.
Chris Rock.
“But it’s better — okay, at least — if Rock (looking silly indded with earrings in both lobes) does it, right? Are you guys sure of that? And the presence of Albert Brooks is no guarantee either way that the skit was either racist or innocent. It just indicates how clueless Brooks himself may be about stuff like this.
“Good job on the Brando obit, by the way.
“Also, do you really imagine that, say, five years ago when you’re in a Mexican restaurant and there’s a mariachi-type version of this year’s winning song, you’ll truly remember it? I think not. Indeed, I don’t think any of us will remember any of the nominated songs one year from now.” — Richard Szathmary.
We’ll Call You
A couple of months ago I wrote a tough piece about my disappointment with Steven Soderbergh’s output over the last three or four years, and then Soderbergh let me have it at a Sundance party a few weeks later and I heard what he was saying (or feeling), so here’s something olive-branchy:
Unscripted, a half-hour HBO series that Soderbergh and his Section Eight partner George Clooney have exec produced (with Clooney directing now and then), is the best original thing I’ve seen on the tube in a long, long time.
It’s mainly about three hard-luck actors more or less playing themselves (Krista Allen, Bryan Greenberg, Jennifer Hall) and dealing with the usual thespian woes — auditions, rejections, agent relations, more auditions, lost parts, occasional couplings, etc.
It feels honest, economical, “real”…and I say that knowing that it’s pretty easy to fake a reality atmosphere in any guise. It’s a concise and beautifully edited thing, there isn’t a false note in any aspect of it, and it’s pretty close to dazzling. K Street, the last Section Eight HBO show, was good but this is better.
< ?php include ('/home/hollyw9/public_html/wired'); ?>
I’ve only seen two of the ten episodes and there are only two more episodes to go…but there will be re-runs and a DVD box set later this year. It plays Sundays at 10 pm.
The great Frank Langella co-stars as a 60ish acting teacher, Goddard Fulton, who also gets kicked around and his face smudged. Nobody has it easy in this show. Things are tough all over.
“The truth of the matter is [that] less than five percent of [union actors] make all the money,” Clooney says on the show’s website. “And that’s just the people in the union. There are so many actors that get up every morning and — forget getting a job — they try to get an agent. Or an audition. We’re trying to show what it is that we do. It’s completely unlike the way it’s usually portrayed.”
It’s been claimed that the show doesn’t use prepared dialogue, that it’s all improv and things like rehearsals, retakes or reshoots don’t figure. (I can believe this.) The series has allegedly been shot in “real offices” and during “real film productions,” with the actors sometimes crossing paths with “real-life Hollywood stars and directors”…as far as that goes, fine.
Clooney, Soderbergh and Grant Seslov are the executive producers of Unscripted. It’s produced by Michael Hissrich and Joanne Toll; the episodes have been directed by Clooney and co-exec producer Grant Heslov.
Episode #9 of Unscripted preems on Sunday, 2.20, with another airing the following night (i.e., Monday) at 9:30 pm on HBO2 and then Wednesday, 2.23 at 10 pm on regular HBO.
Looksee
Wandering movie journos who haven’t seen Paul Reiser and Raymond DeFelitta’s The Thing About My Folks have a shot at seeing it on Monday, 2.21, at my UCLA Sneak Preview class, which begins at 7pm at the Wadsworth.
RSVP to Sarah Rose Bergman at 310.572.1500 or write jeffdowdassist@aol.com.
If this invite isn’t ringing any bells, I wrote about this amiable little film in my February 8th column . Some distribs think it plays too old, but I’m convinced it’ll play big with the crowd that went to see My Big Fat Greek Wedding. I could be wrong, but I’m not.
Heart on Sleeve
All you have to do is click on this to see where Born Into Brothels is coming from.
It has a video-and-music reel showing Calcutta kids experiencing the joy of taking photos. Acquainting impoverished kids with photography and trying to save them from a squalid life of prostitution (or worse) is what the film’s co-director, Zana Briski, is up to in this unusual documentary. In short, activism rather than the usual impartial neutrality.
In the manner of a wildlife documentarian running out into an African plain to save a zebra from a pursuing lion, Briski (and her filmmaking partner Ross Kaufman — both pictured below) strive to save as many kids as they can from the certain spiritual death that comes to anyone who lives among squalor and prostitutes.
This Oscar-nominated film may have begun as an exploration of children growing up in Calcutta’s whore-house district, but it became a story about trying to get the Indian government and other potential benefactors to sponsor these kids in their education as photographers.
Briski faces tough challenges, not just from the government or the kids’ parents but, believe it or not, from Catholic nuns. In this light, Brothels is an expose of the complacency that keeps unlucky or disadvantaged people where they are, and blocks anything or anyone who might give them hope.
“I just respond to what’s around me, but I wanted to make a good film,” Briski told me a couple of weeks ago. “I didn’t want to be in the film but I became a catalyst.”
The need for education and opportunity among Calcutta’s poor “is enormous…the level of suffering is staggering,” she said. “And we were confronted with it every day. It’s overwhelming for anyone who tries to work in that place. Most of the women are using some form of birth control…and there’s a lot of ignorance. Women don’t know about their bodies.”
Born Into Brothels won the ’04 Sundance Film Festival Audience Award, and is favored (I think) to win the Best Documentary Feature Oscar.
And yet Briski promised the people who helped her make the film (including the ones she interviewed) that she wouldn’t allow it to be shown in India, and she’s managed to prevent that so far. The mothers of the children portrayed in the film don’t want to be “stigmatized,” she says. Not allowing the film to be shown in India or even neighboring Pakistan is “my personal commitment,” says Briski.
When you make a promise you’d better keep it, but Brothels is full of hope and compassion and generosity, and pledging to keep this energy from being absorbed in India seems strange.
Two years ago Briski formed Kids With Cameras, a group that tries to continue the charitable efforts depicted in the film.
Go Ahead…Laugh
Even now, 31 years and five months after its theatrical debut, nobody seems to want to respect or even appreciate The Laughing Policeman. A lot of the reviews of the Fox Home Video DVD that came out two or three weeks ago have either been dismissive or ho-hummy. They should take another look.
I love this film for its gritty milieu and dinghy, matter-of-fact grimness. For me, its sullen attitude is a heavy turn-on. It’s not a great work, but I love that it doesn’t try very hard to “entertain.” It’s a film that says to its audience, “You don’t find what we’re showing you attractive or transporting? Gee, that’s too bad.”
The DVD doesn’t have any extras or voiceovers, but anyone with a taste for hardboiled noir should grab it.
You wouldn’t want to call this a “hard-charging” cop flick — “laid back” would be more like it. And yet by today’s formulaic, semi-anemic standards it’s a genuine pleasure to watch a San Francisco policier that delights in atmosphere to this degree.
It’s not just the cops who seem cynical, miserable, bitter or numb — the innocent bystanders seem this way also. You can almost smell the self-loathing despair, the perspiration, the cigarette smoke and the acidic coffee.
Directed by Stuart Rosenberg and based on a Swedish crime novel, The Laughing Policeman is about an investigation into a mass murder on a San Francisco city bus. Ten or twelve people have been mowed down by some lunatic with a “grease gun,” and the cops don’t have a clue.
A squad of detectives is assigned to the case and Rosenberg acquaints us with some of them (Lou Gossett has the juiciest second-banana role), but the ones we mainly hang with are played by Walter Matthau and Bruce Dern.
Matthau (who was about 53 when it was made) turns in his usual rumpled and grumpy routine, but when Policeman hit screens in September `73 it was seen as a major change of pace. Matthau had been a big comedy guy throughout most of the `60s and early `70s (Plaza Suite, Hello Dolly, et. al.). As a cop lacking in basic people skills, Dern does his usual insinuating obnoxious thing.
One of the big plot points is that Matthau’s partner, a guy named Evans, is among the bus victims. Matthau talks to Evans’ girlfriend (Cathy Lee Crosby), and learns that he was spending his “off” time looking into the murder of a prostitute. He also finds out that Crosby posed for erotic photos, which half-offends him and half turns him on.
This dirty-pictures element has zip to do with finding the killer, but it adds to the general down-at-the-heels sleaziness. It also tells us that Matthau has a thing for Crosby.
A strain of homophobia pops through when Matthau and Dern start to train their sights on a wealthy gay guy as a possible suspect (the term “fruiter” is heard), but this was made only three years after Stonewall so I guess we can cut the filmmakers some slack.
I just love the way Rosenberg and his crew take their time in solving the murder. The movie seems to say, “We’ll get to it, we’ll get to it…in the meantime have a donut and relax and try paying attention to the other stuff.”
Down, Down, Down
“Anyone who doesn’t immediately nominate John Frankenheimer’s Seconds as the most depressing movie ever made — by some distance — is clearly someone who has never seen the film.
“By comparison, Million Dollar Baby is Singin’ in the Rain, Monster is Gigi and Midnight Cowboy is Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. Unlike those films, nobody in Seconds achieves anything resembling a fulfilling relationship, even momentarily. The entire story is dedicated to the proposition that hope is for fools, and that the most we can wish for is an empty illusion.
“Top it all off with James Wong Howe’s askew cinematography, Jerry Goldsmith’s unsettling score, and the heartbreaking sight of Rock Hudson finally giving a brilliant dramatic performance in a film nobody saw — and you have a film that
lingers in the back of your mind for years, like a bad, bad dream you really wish you never had.” — Jack Lechner, Radical Media.
“When I read your downer movie article, the very first things that came to mind were two movies my high school film teacher Jay Kaplan showed back to back in the mid-70’s: The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter and Bang The Drum Slowly.
“Kaplan must have been some kind of masochist to inflict this on a bunch of 17 year-olds, but then again, not many happy endings in that classic era of 70’s films. For a bunch of geeky high school kids, these movies were like a one-two punch of depression. Imagine a bunch of high school seniors just sniffing away in the silence of the dark classroom.
“In the former movie, nobody saw the suicide scene coming, so when you heard Alan Arkin’s gun shots off-screen, the class was totally mortified instantaneously. Then that dissolve to his tombstone… that was killer. The class was a total wreck.
“At least with Bang The Drum Slowly, you found out the deal about halfway (‘My son is dyin’!’), but it was still a head-shaking bummer when good ol’ boy catcher Robert DeNiro did his Brian’s Song exit. My film teacher referred to the hospital parts as the infamous `shit deal scene.'” — Drew Kerr
“David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers is an exquisitely sad film. Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream made me feel like I’d been clocked between the eyes with a 2×4. Mike Nichols’ film Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? still really stings, too. They’re therapeutic, though. True bummers are things like the new Star Wars films and Troy and Bad Boys II — black holes into which enormous amounts of money, talent and creativity disappear.” — Jason Comerford.
“Hurts…hurts so bad! Here are my All-time Downers: Pearl Harbor, Dying Young, St. Elmo’s Fire, Monsoon Wedding, All the Real Girls (I don’t care if you crib from the French or Terrence Malick….learn how to tell a tale), Beaches, Steel Magnolias, Man On Fire, The Perfect Storm.” — George Bolanis
“Most recently, I’ve heard people describe Million Dollar Baby as depressing, to which I say `huh?’ Sad, yes, but depressing? I could watch it over and over.
“For me, a good example of a really depressing movie is House of Sand and Fog. Depressing because, in my opinion, so many relatively intelligent people (like yourself) bought into this pretentious piece of excrement. It was so bad, and so well-liked by critics, that I had to call my entire way of judging films into question.
“Walking out of the theater, I asked my friend (a dim-witted soul but with an oddly good movie bullshit detector), `Was it just me, or was that a piece of shit?’ And he said `Yeah, it was.'” Mark Van Hook, Boston, Mass.
“A triple bill that would have you going for the Prozac: (1) Ironweed — just beats you down…unrelenting on every level. (2) Interiors — not even good drugs help with this one. (3) Kanal — a very difficult and fatalistic vision that grinds a viewer’s sensibilities to a pulp.” — Benjamin Moore
“The Pledge. God almighty, that movie was depressing! Great cast, but oppressive and slow storyline with a downer of an ending.” — Craig Finnerty.
“Here’s your winner, hands down: Gaspar Noe’s Irreversible. Although it aspires to a fleeting moment of hope at the end (beginning), it’s about as dark and bleak a view of humanity as you’ll ever see on celluloid, with nothing remotely redemptive about it.” — Eponymous.
“Recent all-time depress-o-ganza: The Assassination of Richard Nixon. I personally adored the film, and was shocked at the critical indifference it received — it’s the most profound and acute trapped-in-the-mind-of-a-madman head trip since Taxi Driver.
“But when the relentlessness finally abated and the lights went up, I turned to my buddy — who is of the unshakable belief that there are no depressing films, only bad ones — and croaked, `That was pretty goddamn depressing.’ You know what? He agreed — he was shaken. And we talked about the thing for the next couple of hours; neither of us could get it off our minds. If that’s what a genuinely depressing film can do, then I’d argue it’s worth the tough two-hour sit.” — Tim Merrill.
“I’m picky enough to avoid most of the stinkers, but I would have to nominate Purple Rain and Moment by Moment as the two most depressing films I’ve ever seen — not because of their subject matter, but because they were so boring and a waste of my time here on earth.” — Heidi Bortner.
“You clued me into one in a much earlier column — Breaking the Waves. Before Lars von Trier became a total sadist. A movie that was sold as uplifting but was not, in any sense of the word, is Muriel’s Wedding. Though I do admire the hell out of Toni Collette. I saw Blow Up when I was 20, and at that age I thought it was completely depressing. And confusing. Natural Born Killers did not edify me in any way.” — Doug Helmreich
“House of Sand and Fog…bummer! The movie throughout was taxing in its morbidness and depression … but the ending with the (spoiler) son getting killed …now, that’s what I call bleak! For the life of me, I can’t see how anyone can own this film on dvd except for the people who either acted in it or worked behind the scenes (so that they can show their friends … ‘Hey, look, that’s me in the end credits!).” — Ron Koffler
“Dancer in the Dark was, for me, the most depressing movie of all time! A punch in the stomach from beginning to end. I have terrible flashbacks even now while listening to muzak for `My Favorite Things’ at the local supermarket.” — Amy Shemaitis.
“No matter how good it might have been on its merits, Monster was so goddamn depressing that I’d never watch it again. Sure, Charlize Theron is brilliant, but I can’t handle that much despair! I felt the same way about Mystic River, House of Sand and Fog and Leaving Las Vegas. It’s not like I’m some low-brow Neanderthal, either. There’s a good depressing like Million Dollar Baby. The problem is that some films are just so bleak that they don’t make for good re-visiting.
“As for so-bad-it’s-depressing, what about Life or Something Like It? That film was a real kick in the balls. I went to the bathroom three times in 90 minutes just so I could have some relief. Unfortunately, I couldn’t walk out because my wife wanted to stay. — Andrew Hager, Cockeysville, MD.
“My favorite bummers: Five Easy Pieces, The Last Detail, Last Tango in Paris, Boys Don’t Cry, Kids, Million Dollar Baby, Elephant, Raging Bull, Grey Gardens.
“Most of these are obvious choices, but they were the first ones that popped into my head. All of them, for me, have a profound undercurrent of sadness/pain running through. They have moments of naked truth that are electrifying art, almost too stark to embrace: Brando cursing at his dead wife’s corpse, the final shot of Million Dollar Baby, the two sailors walking out of the military prison into the harsh cold morning.” — Mark Smith, PhD
I’ve tried my best to just stay away from ‘depressing’ movies. There are plenty of `sad’ movies I love (Mystic River, On the Beach, The Mission, Fail-Safe come to mind). As for those who think all sad movies are depressing…well, what are you going to do? One friend of mine pretty much hates anything that has a sad ending. (One of his favorite movies is Zorro the Gay Blade, if that gives you any idea). People with tastes like that will always be around and they’re not leaving anytime soon. So why complain?
“I’ve always been interested in watching the Oscars, even though some of their Best Picture choices have been, well, wrong. But that’s all I’m interested in; I couldn’t care less about the other awards. Golden Globes, People’s Choice, MTV, CNN, Newark Critics Circle, whatever, they’re all the same. The Oscars are the big show. Who wants a People’s Choice Award or a Golden Globe?– Aaron Mastriani, El Paso, Texas.
“The recent remake of The Four Feathers is a downer. An expensive adventure movie filled with people who can’t act and all look as if they can’t wait to get back to the hotel pool in Morocco. Kate Hudson’s clearly been watching her mother’s old Laugh-In tapes for the vapid aura, and Heath Ledger’s perfected his pout. But together they have so little idea of how to create romantic tension over issues of moral commitment, and were plainly so badly directed in search of such displays, that the movie just lies there and melts. ” — Richard Szathmary
Nicole vs. Dissers
“Regarding Little Miss Brown-Shirt Nicole: I’ll bet you money that she never even saw the movies she listed as “left-wing” (Frida, Motorcycle Diaries, etc.). Please relate to Nicole that the next time she has left-wing propaganda shoved down her throat, to please do us all a favor and choke to death on it.” — Heidi Bortner.
Nicole to Heidi: “You can rest assured at night that I have seen both Frida and The Motorcycle Diaries . I have also seen Reds, The Cradle Will Rock, Guilty by Suspicion, et. al. What I have yet to see is a serious exploration of the true horror and damage that communism has caused around the world over the past 100 years.
“Most rational people know that Che was not a nice man but when I find my future brother-in-law (a 25 year-old actor…ughhh) to be seeing The Motorcycle Diaries and then claiming that communism has got a bum rap and I’m just brainwashed by the hard right-wing establishment into thinking it’s wrong, I wonder if our institutions of higher learning and our entertainment industry may be sending a skewed message.
“As for your comment that I should choke to death on the left-wing propaganda the next time…well, the tolerance and love you show in that comment makes me realize that my experiences at film school were most likely shared by many more people than myself. What school did you attend by the way?”
“I just want to say that I echo the sentiments by Nicole. Lefties can be some of the most close-minded, uninformed people I’ve come across. It’s definitely on both sides. I totally agree with her assessment of the kind of films we’ve been force-fed over the years. As a filmmaker myself, I hope to change that, at least in a small way.
“The reasons people don’t care about the film industry as much anymore is because there is such an absence of truth. Even when they do try to say something, they wind up saying things that they want to be true, not things that are actually true. But what can you say? It’s a microcosm of the world we live in. The blind leading the blind. Truth will always resonate with people. Until you see more of that on screen, people will continue not to care. ” — Dan Lowman
Nicole to Dan: Seems like you and I had similar film school experiences. I mentioned before that I had a discussion with an older very leftie reporter friend. I find older leftists much more tolerant because they have lived a life and made choices. Younger student activist types not so much. They don’t know why they believe what they believe, only what to believe and feel vindicated because they see their world view so prominently displayed so much through pop culture and the film industry.
“I believe every story has a right to be told but there seems to be a lack of a search for truth in modern day filmmakers. They are more interested in following ideology than showing both sides. I don’t need any more films showing how repressed the 50’s were. Sure films were unrealistic then to some degree in their portrayal of sexuality but are today’s films any different?
“I’ve seen black gangs, white gangs, Asian gangs and Latino gangs in real life but I’ve never seen a multi-racial gang like presented in most Hollywood films. Modern Hollywood film gangs look like a Baskin Robbins store. Is this any different than the Lucille Ball/Desi Arnaz days of each sleeping in different beds? I don’t think so. Different cultures have diferent taboos. Our artistic taboos are just now on the left instead of the right. No religion, no race, no sex inside of marriage unless it is with leather or boredom. This is no more a reflection of our world than that depicted in Pleasantville.
Stuntmen
“I agree about cookie-cutter car chases and fights. I’m a film director — Bang the Drum Slowly, Weeds, Prancer, Let’s Scare Jessica to Death — and have always had great difficulty getting stunt coordinators to do something fresh. In fact I’ve found it almost impossible. I’ve come to feel I’d be better off without them, just stage the stuff as best I could with the actors. But you can’t get proper insurance without them.
“On the other hand, in terms of awards, I think you’re wrong about stunts never adding anything thematic. Think of the fights in The Sopranos, for example, or Olivier’s codger struggle up and down basement stairs with Peck in The Boys From Brazil, or the two brothers on the beach in Big Night. They’re all off the money and awkward. Hard to get stunt coordinators to do that. — John Hancock.
“How could a nod to stuntmen devalue an award show that is already nothing more than a popularity contest? If these awards were still about the value of a performance then Paul Giamatti would have been nominated for lead actor.” — Rob Jeffers .
Heat Letdown
Regarding your deserved rant against the extra ‘scenes’ on the new WHV double-disc Heat, perhaps DVD producers should all go back to Film 101 and remember to differentiate between ‘scenes,’ ‘sequences’ and ‘shots.’
“I too am tired of being promised ‘extras’ only to find the ‘extras’ are just a foot or two of film someone found on the editing room floor.” — Susan Burchfield, Research Director, KTVI FOX 2, St. Louis, MO.
There are at least three ways to have a depressing time at the movies, and one is worth the grief.
You can sit through something shoddy, inept, sub-standard, and do everything you can to flush it out of your system when it’s over. You can also sit through a smooth, studio-funded, well-made enterprise that everyone’s loving and is making money hand over fist, but which you happen to despise with every fibre of your being.
But watching a quality downer can be edifying. (Naturally.) I’m speaking of a movie that’s totally comfortable with the idea of bumming you out, because it’s trying to be thoughtful, profound or in some way affecting. Which saves it from being a bummer.
I’m thinking about this because there’s a film opening fairly soon that belongs in the third category. I saw it a little while ago, and I’m not going to identify it except to say that it was made by good and talented people.
It’s a totally honorable effort, in short, although it doesn’t leave you with much besides a feeling of profound spiritual despair. Everything in this movie is down, down, down. Almost every character hates their life or their job or is overweight or dying…or it’s raining or the skies are overcast, or secondary characters are acting in a randomly cruel and hurtful way.
And yet it feels honest; it captures the way life actually feels at times. I’ve been there on occasion and I didn’t exactly welcome the memory, but I recognized it.
I don’t have any persuasive arguments for anyone with a bleak attitude, but I’ve always gotten a laugh from that Woody Allen/Annie Hall joke about a woman complaining about the terrible food at a restaurant and her friend saying, “I know…and such small portions!”
Life is hard, cruel, oppressive, boring…but it’s all we’ve got to hold onto and it’s better than being dead. The “honorable effort” could use a tiny bit more of this attitude.
Movies that relay or reflect basic truths will never be depressing, but those that tell lies of omission by way of fanciful bullshit always poison the air.
Sadness in good movies is not depressing — it’s just a way of re-experiencing honest hurt. Ordinary People is sad, but if you think it’s depressing as in “lemme outta here” there’s probably something wrong with you.
I’ll give you depressing: living a rich full life (children, compassion, wealth, adventure) and then dying at a ripe old age and coming back (i.e., reincarnated) as a chicken at a Colonel Sanders chicken ranch.
My beef is with movies that impart a distinct feeling of insanity by way of delirium or delusion, or a bizarre obsession. Frank Darabont’s The Green Mile (turn on the current! smell that burning flesh! cuddle that cute mouse!) and The Majestic (rancid small-town “folksiness”) are two such films. Ditto Steven Spielberg’s Always .
Martin Scorsese’s Kundun isn’t exactly a downer. It’s worse than that — it’s paralyzing. And yet Scorsese made one of the greatest spiritual-high movies ever with The Last Temptation of Christ.
On the other hand, Marty sent thousands upon thousands of moviegoers into states of numbing depression when Sharon Stone bent over in order to give Joe Pesci a blowjob in Casino.
Leaving Las Vegas, Mike Figgis’ film about a lush who’s decides to drink himself to death and doesn’t quit until he succeeds, has never been and never will be depressing. (If you’re engaged to someone who thinks it is, tell him or her it’s over — you’ll be divorcing them eventually, so you might as well get it over with.)
And yet the watching of John Huston’s Under the Volcano, about a somewhat older guy (Albert Finney) doing more or less the same thing, is akin to accidentally overdosing on generic cold medication and having to tough it out until the effects wear off.
In her review of Peter Brooks’ King Lear (’71), a profoundly dreary black-and-white thing with Paul Scofield in the title role, Pauline Kael wrote, “I didn’t dislike this film — I hated it.” I was so intrigued by this review that I eventually saw Brooks’ film, and I knew Kael wasn’t talking about what Brooks had done as much as the way his film made her feel deep down.
The Godfather, Part II is a fairly gloomy film but it doesn’t lie. It says that the ties that used to bind families and community together in the old days (the `40s and `50s) have been unraveling for some time. As Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone says to his mother in the second act, “Things are changing.”
The Matrix Revolutions is a profoundly depressing film, especially when all those hundreds of thousands of sentinels start swarming into Zion like wasps. Absolutely relentless and thundering empty-drinking-glass bullshit.
Sitting through Ron Howard’s Backdraft is like injecting an experimental psychotic drug concocted by Dr. Noah Praetorious (the frizzy-haired scientist in The Bride of Frankenstein) straight into your veins.
Most of the movies directed by Sean Penn are pretty damn depressing, but even in this context, The Crossing Guard delivers an exceptionally bleak vibe.
Kevin Bacon’s Loverboy, a well-made drama about an obsessive woman who never lets go of her insanity and is finally destroyed by it, is like being locked in a room with this character, and feels like a Bedlam-type thing.
People who think animal-death movies like Old Yeller, Bambi and The Yearling are depressing are, in the words of Claude Rains’ Captain Renault, “rank sentimentalists.”
The idea that someone saw the spirit of Ernest Hemingway in Chris O’Donnell, and cast him in In Love and War…that’s really bad.
Send in your own all-time depressing films quickly, and I’ll put them up this afternoon. And let’s not have any mentions of gross tear-jerkers like Love Story, Dying Young, etc. Let’s keep things dignified.
Nope
Stunt professionals want the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to start handing out Oscars for Best Stunt Coordinator.
Good movie stunts will always deserve respect, but I’ve never seen a stunt in my life that, by my calculations, has lent thematic depth to the film or added to the emotional impact. Has anyone?
Stunts just aren’t in the same artisan realm as art direction, costume design, music composing or even main-title design. They’re skillful but never artful. They’re just, you know…stunts.
The people who perform them are obviously nervy professionals, but they didn’t go to Pratt or Julliard or NYU or AFI film schools to learn their craft, and I know this sounds snobby but what they bring to a film isn’t all that special or elevated.
Their work isn’t very original, for one thing. I can count on one hand the fist-fight scenes that have seemed exceptionally realistic. (That fight between Mark Wahlberg and Joaquin Phoenix in The Yards was an exception.) To my eyes, movie stunts never seem to involve average, off-balance, physically clumsy people. They’re almost always rotely performed.
And I’m getting really tired of car-chase scenes, even when they push the boundaries like the one staged in Moscow in The Bourne Supremacy. The cars in car-chase scenes always seem like they’re being driven by professional drivers — they always fishtail and spin out in a certain way, like the driver knows exactly what he/she is doing, etc.
Four stunt organizations have gotten together and written a letter to AMPAS, saying that “stunt performers are the only faction of the movie industry that must literally risk their lives for the sake of their art” and that “the talent and expertise that is required of a stunt coordinator to be both creative and safe is enormous and highly deserving of academy recognition.”
Safe, maybe, but forget creative. To me, movie stunts are the antithesis of that. Hollywood’s stunt professionals are good people, but they’re upper-level proles who are just a step or two removed from carpenters and electricians, and including them with the rest of the Oscar contenders would devalue things a bit.
Conservative Diss
“I predict that the upcoming Oscars will be the lowest rated in recent Oscar history. For the first time I will also not be watching.
“As a recent film school graduate who has loved and devoured film history since a child, I can say that I am truly bored with a great majority of the stories being told through the mainstream of the American/Western film industry. Hollywood has been in an overtly left-wing ideological paradigm for well over a generation now and certainly all of my lifetime.
“This is not a question of politics. It is a question of bad story telling. It makes films predictable.
“As someone born in the 70√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s, old-fashioned to me is not a rigid evangelical going to church on Sunday. Old-fashioned to me is wife-swapping, wicca and gay bath houses. Ideologically, for as long as I can remember, and with precious few exceptions priests, evangelicals, businessmen, corporations, conservative politicians, uptight white folk and (insert bad Hollywood stereotype here) are always the villains.
“I did not need Michael Medved to tell me the third-act twist in Million Dollar Baby. I had my suspicions as soon as I saw the religious imagery in the trailer released in November and read web-columns saying how shaken people were from the initial pre-screenings. The day it went into limited release in mid-December, I waited until about 3:30 pm (after the first early matinees), went onto some Eastwood fan chat rooms and had my thoughts confirmed.
“I have admired and championed Clint Eastwood since long before it became hip and fashionable in film circles to do so yet I found the last third of M$B very predictable. It would have been unpredictable had his character not euthanized Hillary. I don√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t for one minute believe that you thought there was a chance the film wouldn√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t end the way it did.
“I saw M$B and The Sea Inside when they were called Brian√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s Song and Whose Life Is It Anyway?. Hearing Julia Roberts in Closer talk about the taste of cum was about as shocking to someone my age as hearing Julia Roberts talk about the taste of cum.
“‘Prestige’ films like Vera Drake, Kinsey, Frida, The Motorcycle Diaries, The Hours, The Dreamers, etc. do not titillate or offend…they bore. They don’t speak to people of a younger generation because we have had their ideology rammed down our throats from birth.
“These films are well-made but indulgent and poorly researched polemics made by people who still pine for an era that no longer exists — the ’60s. The counter culture that lived 30 or 35 years ago and refuses to die bores more in my generation than the media would have you believe. The new generation of film fans are not shocked by Deep Throat. We were weaned on Trey Parker and yawn in the face of it.
“As I said to an older, very left-wing reporter friend of the family after the election who could not understand why I would support GW, I√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢ve never been silenced or censored by an evangelical, but I do have first-hand experience of a raging, foaming at the mouth p.c. university student pointing his finger and saying I am a ‘poor quality human being’ because I ‘dared’ to make a short film with the phrase ‘chick√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s ass’ in it.
“I know first-hand of a film professor who found himself as the subject of a tribunal because he dared — dared! — to show an excerpt of Blue Velvet during a class on voyeurism. The more ‘enlightened progressive’ types decided that he was implicitly endorsing rape.
“Hollywood now forsakes art for ideology and films that truly break new ground artistically (The Passion of the Christ, Fight Club, Hero) are derided or not rewarded because of their ideology.
“It says something about our times and the history of film that we are constantly told how shocking, daring and controversial left-leaning films are/were (Fahrenheit 9/11, Midnight Cowboy, Last Tango in Paris, Last Temptation of Christ), yet by any standard, the most controversial film since 1915√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s Birth of a Nation was made by a conservative Catholic director who made an R-rated film about a man on a cross who died 2000 years ago.
“For a community that says it is so culturally curious about all walks of life, where are the stories depicting the plight of the millions slaughtered under Joseph Stalin?
“For every ten Hollywood love songs to Marxism/communism, where is the director who dares tell the story of those brave students who died in Tianamen Square?
“How about an Oscar-caliber film detailing the slaughter of the three million Polish Catholics killed in the Holocaust?
“For every story about how repressed America was sexually in the ’50s, how about a film detailing the pure intellectual repression caused by leftist speech codes on modern university campuses?
“Can you actually make a case that the creative team of Vera Drake is being nominated over films like Kill Bill Part 2 or Man on Fire because of quality, or is the message of the film what√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s being voted for?
“Can you make the case that in 50 years more film students will be talking about Sideways or The Aviator over The Passion of the Christ? That people such as Stanley Kubrick, Alfred Hitchock, Orson Wells, Akira Kurosawa, Ingmar Bergman, Cary Grant and Stanley Kramer never won a legitimate Oscar does more to invalidate the Oscars than anything anyone can say.
“Most modern Hollywood/Western films don√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t dare me to think — they ask me not to. I suggest that if Hollywood artists want to become relevant again, perhaps they should quit calling everyone who disagrees with them ‘uncurious’ and become a little bit more curious themselves. If they don√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t, they will find more and more Bubbas like myself who care less and less.” — Nicole DuMoulin.
Oscar Expectations
“I’m from one of the dreaded red states — Houston, Texas, to be exact. I’ve seen and loved both Sideways and Million Dollar Baby — especially the former. I suppose I’m an exception to the rule, but you’re probably right that the majority of people who have seen it live up north. That’s too bad because they’re great films.
“I for one am happy with the change in the Oscars, and I’m glad that smaller films that haven’t made $100 million or over have gotten recognition. I just wish Paul Giamatti had been nominated.” — Richard Scandrett.
“Interesting insights on the Oscars and Oscar-nominated grosses in your 2/11 column. I’m a blue-state guy living in a red state (but a weird one with a Democratic Governor and Dem-dominated state assembly who voted overwhelmingly for Bush).
“I finally caught Sideways yesterday in a pretty crowded theatre in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and I was talking with some folks in line and in the theatre beforehand about the Best Picture nominees. I found some other reasons for both the declines in ratings and money among the ‘common man’ types (something that people in NC overwhelmingly believe they are).
“First of all, the biggest movie of the last three years, both in terms of money and Oscar nods was what? That’s right — the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Some people I talked to in the theatre said that since that experience, they haven’t seen any other ‘big’ movies that they were interested in. One guy even said he didn’t even want to give The Aviator a shot, not even on video.
“Similarly, there seems to be sort of a weird backlash against nominated ‘small’ films. People around me in line going to see other stuff said they were disappointed in Lost in Translation, The Hours…one lady even mentioned Gosford Park…other movies that were not blockbusters the last few years but were liked by critics and nominated for Oscars. They didn’t want to see Sideways or Finding Neverland.
“Also, some people just don’t like Clint Eastwood’s movies, and I’m one of them. I hated Unforgiven, tolerated Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and will not watch Mystic River or Million Dollar Baby. Some others in the theatre agreed.
“Anyway, I came out of Sideways very satisfied. It was a great story and well-acted. Other people seemed to enjoy it, too, although I did experience one of the great horrors of being in a movie like that: the couple with the four or five kids clearly not old or smart enough to understand a movie like that who keep getting up to go to the bathroom and get candy every five minutes. At least the parents kept them from talking.” — Marc Allen
Wells to Allen: Those people you were speaking have taken the concept of “unsophisticated” to new lows. People should see what they want to see, but it sounds to me like they’re much more into shutting doors than opening them.
“Don’t you think that the biggest problem with Oscar’s popularity is the fact that there’s an awards show on television at least once a week? It’s ridiculous. There’s the Golden Globes, SAG, some British thing, Blockbuster, MTV, People’s Choice, blah, blah, blah. There’s a complete over-saturation, to the point where these award shows seem to be more about celebrity than they do about films. I used to love the Oscars when I was younger, I never missed a second, but now I’m just burned out on the whole celebrity scene, to the extent that I don’t really want to see any of it. Not even the Academy Awards.
“For me personally, the problem is that the winners of the past two Best Picture awards have really bummed me out. Lord of the Rings: Return of the King over Mystic River for Best Picture? Its wrong to give the Best Picture award for an overall achievement, instead of the year’s best film.
“But that’s not nearly as egregious as Chicago‘s Best Picture win two years ago. I dare someone to explain to me how Chicago, which I couldn’t even sit through, is a better movie than The Pianist. Total crap.
“Every year has its Oscar omissions, but the past two years the Best Picture award should have been named the Picture that Makes People Feel the Best award. If Finding Neverland were to win this year, I don’t think that I could watch another Oscar night. Ever.” — Jeff Horst.
Wells to Horst: Don’t worry about Neverland — it’s in there strictly to round out the pack.
Danced Out
And so begins my eighth and final day in Park City, Utah, and I can’t think of a common thread or theme that fits the experience. The days have burned through like a lit dynamite fuse in a Sam Peckinpah film, only there hasn’t been any kind of explosive finish and I don’t expect there to be. I’m just looking for a clean exit.
All I want to do today is see two or three more films (Hustle & Flow again, just for fun…and then Heights, This Revolution or Ellie Parker), tap out some final thoughts on Thursday morning, and fly home.
(l. to r.) The Ballad of Jack and Rose costars Paul Dano, Camilla Belle and Ryan McDonald at Newmarket’s Chumscrubber party at the Village at the Lift — Tuesday, 1.26.05, 12:05 am.
And then, 18 hours later, around mid-afternoon on Friday, drive up to the Santa Barbara Film Festival and catch the opening-night showing of Melinda and Melinda, the new Woody Allen film.
I’ll guess I’ll be seeing Saturday’s award ceremony on the Sundance Channel like everyone else, and saying to myself, as I do every year, “Darn…I should’ve tried harder to see that one.” Like an atomic clock, like a dependably dull accountant who’s never gone to Italy and never will, I miss several cool films with every new Sundance Film Festival. They’re hot, playing, everyone’s on ’em…I miss ’em.
< ?php include ('/home/hollyw9/public_html/wired'); ?>
Having nothing vital to say, I’ll say this…
* After Monday’s screening of The Squid and the Whale at the Racquet Club, I asked director-writer Noah Baumbach about the similarities between this film and the last three efforts of his colleague Wes Anderson — Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic, which Anderson and Baumbach co-wrote.
All four (a) are about a group of extremely bright and precocious types who are gathered together over family ties, school or work, (b) use lots of dry, deadpan dialogue, (c) use a selfish and immature father figure in his 50s at the axis of things, (d) include people at cross-purposes over sexual intrigues, and (e) use selectively-chosen ’60s and ’70s pop tunes on the soundtrack.
I noted these similarities and asked Baumbach in what ways he and Anderson diverge. He seemed uncomfortable with such comparisons, and said he would in fact “dispute” them.
I mentioned to Baumbach after the q & a that while Wes’s films seem to take place in slightly unreal milieus (a place I’ve called “Andersonville”) and are a bit on the oblique, less-than-fully-revealing side when it comes to emotional matters, The Squid and the Whale, which is a partly autobiographical piece based on the strife between Baumbach’s parents when he was a kid in the mid ’80s, is more plain- spoken and even wounding regarding matters of the heart.
* The hot-ticket ensemble flicks that were at least partly about teen angst — The Chumscrubber, Brick, The Ballad of Jack and Rose, Thumbsucker — all seemed to rank as interesting attempts rather than accomplished successes. None exuded the abundant clarity of purpose or confidence or stylistic brio that wakes you up or turns your head around.
The best liked, for what it was worth, appears to be Thumbsucker. And the least successful, to judge by the technical questions asked at Tuesday night’s post-screening q & a session at the Eccles, was The Chumscrubber. (Technical questions always indicate that people are flummoxed about what a film amounts to, or just flat-out don’t like it.)
* John Maybury’s The Jacket (Warner Independent), which was exec produced by Steven Soderbergh, George Clooney and Peter Guber (whose support is supposed to convey the notion that this is a smart, above-average enterprise, which it is) was the second high-grade horror-thriller I saw in connection with Sundance ’05, the initial entry being Wolf Creek.
This is Adrien Brody’s best film (and includes his best performance) since The Pianist.
If it has a spiritual as well as visual cousin, it’s David Croneneberg’s The Dead Zone — another downbeat drama set in a wintry Vermont about a decent, kind-hearted guy tormented by disturbing visions of the future. The fact that Maybury’s film concludes on a note of caring and compassion (the theme is about the relative shortness and instability of life) only adds to its stature.
* I feel especially badly about not trying harder to see Eugene Jarecki’s Why We Fight, which two or three people have recommended to me; Marcos Siega’s Pretty Persuasion, which I wanted to see because it angered or turned off so many; Steve James’ Reel Paradise (although John Pierson has offered to help get me a screener copy); and Kirby Dick’s Twist of Faith, which was just Oscar-nominated for Best Feature Documentary.
* The most satisfying Sundance films I’ve seen over the last seven days, in this order, are Craig Brewer’s Hustle & Flow, Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man, Greg Mclean’s Wolf Creek, Craig Lucas’ The Dying Gaul, Suzanne Bier’s Brothers and Sebastian Cordero’s Brothers.
Flyer vs. Boxer
Whether or not Million Dollar Baby or The Aviator wins the Best Picture Oscar on February 27th is not, I feel, a vitally important matter.
Nonetheless, Martin Scorsese’s period film was handed 11 Oscar nominations this morning (Tuesday, 1.25), including, naturally, one for Best Picture. This means it will now be the recipient of a psychological bandwagon effect among lazy-minded media types and Academy voters.
Not to be disrespectful, but if that emotionally obtuse, atmospherically un-genuine, overly CG-ed, 1930s dress-up, urine-milk-bottled, Gwen-Stefani-as-Jean-Harlow movie about Howard Hughes wins I will feel very badly.
Not quite as awful as I did when Return of the King and Chicago won, but pretty damn bad.
Any film lover with any kind of fair-minded insight into this competition will most likely feel the same way. An Aviator win will be an occasion for moaning and mourning, except, of course, for interested parties like Gold Derby.com’s Tom O’Neill, a devoted Scorsese ass-muncher since last November.
The Aviator is a “good” film, but nowhere near good enough to be named as the year’s best.
The concept of its alleged superiority is obviously a stretch, but guess what? To a lot of industry watchers who should know better, this doesn’t matter.
“The Oscar’s been going to bigger productions lately, like Chicago, Gladiator and Lord of the Rings,” Entertainment Weekly‘s Dave Karger told a USA Today reporter for a story that went up today. “And no film is bigger than The Aviator.”
Sentiments like these are grotesque…appalling. Karger may be right, but he should be ashamed of himself for airing views of the Oscar race that are short-sighted and wrong and retrograde.
The Aviator has the numbers, a certain admiration and, judging from what I keep hearing, rote Academy support, but Million Dollar Baby has the edge on quality, serious art-film chops, and a straight-to-the-heart component.
Finding Neverland and Ray have never been serious Best Picture contenders, not really, and there are apparently people in the Academy who actually hate Sideways. (I spoke to a former studio bigwig a few weeks ago who used the “h” word, believe it or not, to describe his feelings about it).
The anti-Sideways sentiment is really an anti-Miles sentiment. Some Academy members (i.e., enough to constitute a serious voting block) don’t relate to a lonely pudgy loser who drinks too much wine at the wrong moments, although critics obviously feel differently.
Call it a genetic-aversion factor, but this, in a nutshell, is why Paul Giamatti didn’t get a Best Actor nomination, although he obviously deserves it as much as Jamie Foxx, Clint Eastood or Leonardo DiCaprio…and somewhat more, if you ask me, than Johnny Depp or Don Cheadle.
This, then, is the Best Picture dynamic on the morning of the Oscar nominations, which, obviously, has left me feeling vaguely bummed, cynical and dismissive of mainstream tastes.
We’re looking at a showdown between an eye-filling, reasonably decent film in certain respects vs. a powerful relationship film with a devastating finale that — I’ve been hearing — has prompted some folks of a rightist, traditionalist bent to pull back a bit and look elsewhere.
It’s a choice between an epic-sized, conventionally grandiose period drama about a twitchy oddball Hollywood pioneer…a movie that nobody but nobody feels is any kind of genuinely great film (but which many people in the technical branches feel compelled to vote for because for this or that political reason) vs. a shadowy, relatively quiet father-daughter drama that actually touches the heart and sticks to the ribs.
One of the enduring sentiments out there is that Martin Scorsese deserves his Best Director Oscar because it’s been denied him so long, etc. Scorsese should have won it for Raging Bull 23 years ago, yes, but Oscar handicapper Pete Hammond noted this morning that many great directors (Alfred Hitchcock, et. al.) have been given the Academy cold-shoulder.
“Scorsese is owed an Oscar? Well, get in line,” Hammond said. Using the logic of the Scorsese supporters this year, Hammond asked, “Does this mean that Hitchcock should have won a Best Director Oscar for his work on Family Plot?”
Hammond noted that “if Scorsese loses the DGA Best Director award this Saturday to Eastwood, all bets are off.”
He agreed that “it’s always an uphill climb for a smaller movie like Million Dollar Baby or Sideways to go up against a big juggernaut movie like The Aviator, especially with this morning’s bandwagon effect and all.”
However, he said, there are factors favoring the Eastwood film.
#1: “There has never been a movie about Hollywood that has won the Best Picture Oscar.”
#2: “I was there at the Producers Guild Awards ceremony last weekend when The Aviator won for Best Picture, and the enthusiasm factor was very low…very little applause…the level of enthusiasm isn’t there and yet it’s the kind of movie that people expect should be a Best Picture nominee.
#3: “The fact that Clint got nominated by the actor’s branch for Best Actor this morning is indicative of big support for the film by the actor’s branch, which of course is the largest.
#4: “A lot of The Aviator‘s nominations were technical ones. Baby
doesn’t have costume design, and there’s not much to get into production design-wise when you just have a boxing ring and a gym.”
#5: “People vote for movies they love…that they can get excited about…and the fact is that admiration and enthusiasm levels seem to be much higher for Million Dollar Baby than for The Aviator. People admire The Aviator but they don’t love it.
Hammond says “it’s basically a three-way race between Baby, The Aviator and Sideways. Five nominations for Sideways is a typical slot for that kind of small film…it’s very tough for a dark-horse comedy to pull off a win.”
Special Congrats to…
Catalina Sandino Moreno for nabbing a Best Actress nomination for Maria Full of
Grace. She won’t win (Hilary Swank is a near-lock) but this is a great score for an actress who’s relatively new to this country, and who deserves to be in more films of Maria‘s calibre. She’s been holding off on committing to the next film — here’s hoping the right one comes along soon.
More Visual Push
The Dying Gaul writer-director Craig Lucas in ground-floor atrium of Sundance Film Festival headqarters at one of three Marriott hotels (don’t ask me to give the exact designation) — Monday, 1.24.05, 2:10 pm.
The backside of Baker-Winokur-Ryder publicist Chris Libby (reddish-orange bag slung over left shoulder) as he decides which journalists to hand out complimentary tickets to in parking lot/congregating area of Park City’s Racquet Club — Sunday, 1.23.05, 3:35 pm.
The Squid and the Whale director-writer Noah Baumbach during post-screening q & a at Park City’s Racquet Club after debut showing of his film — 1.24.05, 7:10 pm.
The Strangers With Candy gang on Main Street (l. to r.): co-writer and director Paul Dinello, co-stars & co-writers Amy Sedaris and Stephen Colbert, and some guy who’s probably had something significant to do with the making or selling of the film but I don’t know his name. (Publicist Jeff Hill informed me and I wrote it down, but it disappeared when the computer crashed without warning on Tuesday afternoon, wiping out over three hours of painstaking work in the blink of an eye) — Monday, 1.24.05, 3:35 pm.
Jeff Feuerzeig, director of The Devil and Daniel Johnston, a documentary that David Poland is calling the “masterpiece” of this year’s festival (whoa…be very careful whenever a critic uses the word “masterpiece”) — Monday, 1.24.05, 8:25 am.
Cronicas director of photography Enrique Chediak, star John Leguizamo, director-writer Sebastian Cordero at Palm Pictures’ party at Riverhorse Cafe — Monday, 1.24.05, 10:25 pm.
Legendary, much-admired German helmer Werner Herzog prior to screening of his latest film, Grizzly Man, at Holiday Village Cinemas — Monday, 1.24.05, 8:25 pm.
The Squid and the Whale costars Jeff Daniels and Owen Kline (son of Kevin Kline and Phoebe Cates), director-writer Noah Baumbach (r.) during post-screening q & a — Monday, 1.24.05, 7:05 pm.
Actress Eddie Daniels (Open House, Ken Park) on the Riverhorse dance floor at Cronicas party — Monday, 1.24,05, 11:05 pm.
Blue Tuesday
“I can understand your feelings about a possible win for The Aviator or Marty Scorsese. But I was wondering about your thoughts on the nomination of Finding Neverland and Depp. I know there seems to be positive critical reactions to this movie, but I found its sentimental manipulation to be off-the-charts.
“I found myself returning, over and over, throughout the overlong third act, to the most compelling question presented by the film: is Johnny Depp’s eyeliner permanent, since it seems to be the same stuff he had on in Pirates?
“Contributing to the oppressive schmaltz factor was Winslet, whom I usually love… but watching her torture her kids for two hours by telling them nothing’s wrong with mommy, then coughing up her lungs made me again return to the central enigma of Depp’s perfectly lined eyes.
“As for Giamatti, I had to laugh when I read your comments that Academy members don’t relate to a lonely pudgy loser who drinks too much wine at the wrong moments, although critics obviously feel differently. My first thought was that you might be implying that critics identify with Giamatti because they often include many pudgy, over-imbibing loser types. I have never met a critic (a respected film-focused one, I mean) and since you have, I was wondering if this is so?” — Zoey.
Wells to Zoey: Some critics have that pudgy, mopey, vaguely boozy thing going, but only a few. Some, like myself, have that perfectly toned, gleaming-white-teeth, Hawaiian tan, square-jawed thing, and yeah, I suppose most critics enjoy the occasional glass of vino, and some of them have morose outlooks on life. So yeah, I guess that accounts for some of them liking Giamatti’s Sideways performance.
“It`s too scary to contemplate to see an average piece like The Aviator win for Best Picture. I may not even see the 2.27 Oscar show just for that very fact, and I haven’t missed it since I was a little toddler. I don`t know if it`s because they`ve lost touch with reality but I just don`t get these guys anymore — every year it gets worse and worse.
“The Aviator, a biopic about this man that has neurosis and gets deeper into dementia, was far inferior to the vaguely-similar Nixon or even smaller pictures such as Confessions of a Dangerous Mind and Auto Focus. Scorsese didn’t show us a Howard Hughes we hadn`t seen before in many other flicks — it was all dysfunctional clich√ɬØ√Ǭø√ǬΩs. I still think there`s a great Howard Hughes movie to be done out there, but the once-great Scorsese couldn’t swing it.
“How hard can it be to do a fascinating Howard Hughes film? Everything is there! There’s so much to him that it doesn’t even have to do be cartoonish like Scorsese provided, with a boyish guy with a wimpy voice who seemed to be just getting out of puberty. It’s also ironic that the producer is Mr. Overrated himself, Michael Mann, who did that dreadful other biopic about Muhammad Ali, which was a total bore and didn’t reveal anything new about the man. In both cases there was no joy, which is strange because I’ll bet the real Ali and Hughes had a total blast.
“I haven’t even seen Sideways and Million Dollar Baby since they haven’t come here in this part of the world. And I didn’t feel like going to see Ray. The best I’ve seen this year are Dogville( the first complete Trier film), Fahrenheit 9/11, The Passion of the Christ, A Very Long Engagement and The Bourne Supremacy. These movies made me jump out of my body and realize this is what moviegoing should be.
“And because of that what the Academy has done over the years, promoting frivolous minor movies that may or may not be quality, has been criminal.
“See ya at the red carpet…not!” — S√ɬØ√Ǭø√ǬΩbastien Lecours, Quebec, Ontario.
Rushing It
I haven’t got time to think things through or make what I’m tapping out here sound as good as it ought to, and it pains me to just put stuff up without refinements, but…
The most satisfying Sundance films I’ve seen over the last four days, in this order, are: Craig Brewer’s Hustle & Flow, Greg Mclean’s Wolf Creek (which I wrote about last Friday), and Craig Lucas’ The Dying Gaul (angrier and more bitter than it needs to be, but is nonetheless a fully felt, precisely crafted piece about denial and betrayal, a superb psychological suspense drama and a nicely tuned Hollywood backstabber).
Sculpture of Dying Gaul, created in 230 B.C., residing today in Rome’s Capitoline Museum, and a thematic motif in Craig Lucas’s film of the same name.
The other A-listers are Sebastian Cordero’s Cronicas, John Maybury’s The Jacket, Suzanne Bier’s Brothers, and Peter Raymont’s Shake Hands with the Devil: The Journey of Romeo Dallaire.
Matthew Vaughan’s Layer Cake is an absorbing, carefully measured, constantly crackling British crime film that deliberately eschews the Guy Ritchie-esque razzle dazzle that we’ve all come to expect from movies about the criminal underworld, and offers yet another riveting, multi-layered performance from Daniel Craig.
< ?php include ('/home/hollyw9/public_html/wired'); ?>
Mike Binder’s The Upside of Anger is perhaps a little too on-the-nose at the finish, but it’s honest and human and builds into something tangible, and it contains one of the most likably relaxed and touching Kevin Costner performances ever.
The next big achiever, I’m guessing, with be Arie Posin’s The Chumscrubber, which is screening tomorrow night (i.e., Tuesday) at the Eccles. As I’m leaving Thursday morning I’m already starting to grapple with the likelihood of not being able to see this and that film, given the workload and all.
Yesterday afternoon I caught Mike Mills’ Thumbsucker, and after it was over I can’t say I was doing cartwheels in the Racquet Club parking lot. A moderately resonant drama about teenage uncertainty and suburban angst, it’s one of those films that works on a scene-by-scene basis, but seems to wander and glide along without having a particular goal in mind. There’s no story tension or a discernible arc, but the human-scale observations about this and that (pic is based on Walter Kirn’s novel of the same name) ring true, for the most part…for what it’s worth.
I’m going to just post what I have now and maybe revisit the Intel room at the Yarrow Hotel this afternoon and add or refine or whatever. This is so friggin’ half-assed, I can’t stand it.
Far and Away
For me, so far, Hustle & Flow is still the shit.
Out of twelve or thirteen films I’ve seen here so far, none have delivered a package of this caliber — absolutely note-perfect acting (headlined by Terrence Howard’s already-legendary performance as D-Jay, a flawed, at times brutally insensitive man in a classic do-or-die struggle to make it as a rap artist), formulaic panache, a quality that feels to me like ripe atmospheric truth, exotic charm and sublime emotional satisfaction.
Some are saying Flow is too formulaic, or that it faces an uphill challenge with red-state audiences who may not want to get up close and personal with a film about a drawlin’ Memphis pimp. You know what I’m saying. A certain vaguely racist aversion.
Well, it is formulaic…but in the most intriguing way possible. To say you’ve “seen this kind of film before” means nothing. The question must always be, “How well was it made, and how much did you care?”
A deliberately arty-farty out-of-focus shot taken on set of Hustle & Flow.
At times, Hustle & Flow talks and walks like a ’70s blaxploitation film (that yellow typeface used for the opening main-title sequence is pure Sam Arkoff), but Brewer and Howard and an ace-level supporting cast (Anthony Anderson, Taryn Manning, DJ Qualls, Taraji Hewnson, Ludicris) make it play true and steady and right as rain.
Every frame of this movie says, “You know what we’re doing…this guy wants to climb out of his own hole and maybe we’re gonna show him do that…but we’re gonna do it in a way that feels right to us.” And once D-Jay hooks up with Anderson and Qualls and starts to put together a sound and record a few tracks, Hustle & Flow lifts off the ground and pretty much stays there, suspended.
I find it staggering that seasoned film industry journos would suggest, as they have to me over the last 24 hours or so, that not enough paying customers will want to see this thing. Forget the funky backdrops and gritty-ass particulars — is there anyone out there who can’t relate to a character who feels stuck in a tired groove and wants to do more with his/her life? Is there anything more commonly understood these days?
Whatever you might expect to feel about D-Jay, he is, by the force of Howard’s acting and Brewer’s behind-the-camera input, utterly real and believable, and even with his anger and brutality you can’t help but root for him. And, for that matter, the film.
Meanwhile…
Mike Mills (r.), director-screenwriter of Thumbsucker, fielding questions after Sunday afternoon’s screening at Park City Racquet Club, with costars Lou Pucci (l.) and Tilda Swinton (middle) — 1.23.05, 6:55 pm.
Thumbsucker costar Keanu Reeves (r.) on Racquet Club stage after Sunday’s screening, next to charming actress who plays a very small role — 1.23.05, 6:50 pm.
Can’t Beat It
I feel whipped, anxious and extremely behind schedule this morning.
Okay, I always feel this way…but it’s more pronounced during Sundance. The question each day is, “How many bowling pins will fall to the floor today? How many films I’d like to see or parties I’d like to attend or quickie interviews I’d like to do will I be forced to blow off due to having to feed this bear of a column?”
I started writing this early Monday morning (just before eight), and at one point I thought I had about two hours before having to run off to see the first film of the day — Steve James’ Reel Paradise, a 110-minute doc about indie film maven John Pierson’s experience running a small movie theatre on the island of Fiji.
But I didn’t make the Pierson screening, and now, at 11:25 ayem, I’m trying to finish in time to make the noon screening of Pretty Persuasion at the Eccles. And I’m wondering if I can even make that.
Flow Chart
Sunday’s big news, to recap, was the charged response to Hustle & Flow after a Saturday night screening at the Park City Racquet Club, along with the subsequent announcement, some eight or nine hours after the screening began at 8:30 pm, that the film has been acquired for $9 million by Paramount.
The MTV execs went home around 4 ayem, but the deal closed at roughly 5:30 am this morning, partly as a result of a certain Paramount executive remarking to UTA’s Jeremy Zimmer, “We can’t do this anymore…I have to go to bed.”
No immediate word as to whether Hustle & Flow will be distributed by “big” Paramount or “little” Paramount (i.e., Paramount Classics), but the answer sounds like a no-brainer. Indie-type Sundance movies need the kind of TLC that is generally not dispensed (no offense) by big-studio marketing departments.
The $9 million is part of a $16 million, 3-picture deal that will cover two other films to be produced and directed by Flow producer John Singleton for $3.5 million each.
Part of the Hustle & Flow posse after Saturday night’s screening at the Park City Racquet Club: (l. to r.) Terrence Howard, producer Stephanie Allain, costar Taryn Manning, director-writer Craig Brewer — 1.22.05, 10:45 pm.
The unofficial word is that Hustle & Flow will probably open over the 4th of July weekend, which would be an appropriate date since celebration of this holiday figures into the plot.
Paramount publicist Nancy Kirkpatrick called to say that Paramount’s newly-installed chief Brad Grey, plus Par marketing head Rob Friedman and production president Donald De Line, saw Hustle & Flow in Los Angeles on Saturday night while Viacom co-president and COO Tom Freston was catching it at the same time at the Park City Racquet Club.
I found it interesting that Howard, who was the last Hustle cast member to be called to the stage after Saturday’s screening, seemed more comfortable on the edge of the spotlight than occupying it front-and-center.
There’s no question that his performance as D-Jay, a Memphis pimp in a midlife crisis with musical aspirations, has put him on the map in the exact same way that Morgan Freeman’s performance as a pimp in Street Smart (along with Pauline Kael’s rave in The New Yorker) turned him into “Morgan Freeman.”
Anyway, the JPEGs now and the copy on Monday morning sometime….along with some new photos I’ll probably snap during my Sunday adventures after I finish posting (which always takes longer than expected).
Visual Push
Brothers director and story co-author Suzanne Bier with star Connie Nielsen after Saturday afternoon’s screening at the Egyptian theatre on Main Street — 1.22.05, 2:10 pm.
Hollywood Reporter deputy film editor and columnist Anne Thompson (l.) and film business editor Nicole Sperling (r.) in foyer entrance to a truly deafening party for Layer Cake, held on Park City’s Main Street — Friday, 1.21.05, 10:35 pm.
The Dying Gaul screenwriter and director Craig Lucas (r., on the mike) and (l. to r.) cast members Peter Sarsgaard, Campbell Scott and Patricia Clarkson after late Saturday afternoon screening of the drama, which is Lucas’s filmmaking debut — 1.22.05, 7:15 pm.
Exotic dancer at party for party for Randy Barbato and Fenton Bailey’s Inside Deep Throat, held inside garage space adjacent to Park City Library — Friday, 1.21.05, 11:35 pm.
Relatively small container of pre-popped popcorn selling for $4 dollars at Park City’s Egyptian theatre — taken just before Brothers screening on Saturday, 1.22.05, at 11:55 am.
Hustle & Flow producers Stephanie Allain (middle) and John Singleton (r.) stand with writer-director Craig Brewer after after Saturday night’s screening at the Park City Racquet Club — 1.22.05, 10:50 pm.
The Chumscrubber and Dear Wendy star Jamie Bell (l.) with unidentified (but obviously spirited) woman during latter stages of Inside Deep Throat party — Friday, 1.22.05, 12:25 am.
Layer Cake director Matthew Vaughan seated during interview inside atrium space on first floor of Park City Marriott — Saturday, 1.22.05, 11:05 am..
Congenial and photogenic Dear Wendy director Thomas Vinterberg with an apparently significant other outside Eccles theatre just before screening of his film — Saturday, 1.22.05, 2:45 pm.
Hustle & Flow star Terrence Howard (also in Lackawanna Blues) during post-screening interview before audience at Park City Racquet Club — Saturday, 1.22.05, 11:05 am.
Flora outside Hollywood Elsewhere condo — Thursday, 1.20.05, 11:05 am.
Brothers director Suzanne Bier after Saturday’s showing at the Egyptian theatre, before she introduced Connie Nielsen — 1.22.05, 2:05 pm.
Inside Deep Throat dancers at post-screening party — 1.22.05, 12:05 am.
Erratum
“Just to let you know that Nathan Phillips isn’t the whacko in Wolf
Creek — John Jarrat is. Phillips plays the twentysomething guy. Jarrat’s been on Australian TV for years. Phillips has also been on the tube for a while, but he’s only about 24 or 25.
“And you’re right about the outback police force, by the way. But then any force would have trouble patrolling an area where people own farms that are bigger than some European countries.” — John Truslove, Melbourne, Australia.
Wells to Truslove: Thanks for offering the correction. I’ll fix the error right away.
Stupid Spoiled Whore
“If you have not seen it, hunt down the South Park episode called ‘Stupid Spoiled Whore,’ about Paris Hilton and the utterly ruthless and unforgiving attitudes about her, especially as they seem to be manifesting in force these days. It’s definitely worth 23 minutes of your life.” – Gabriel Neeb.
Frame capture from Paris Hilton sex video.
“I’m 100 percent behind you in protesting the appearance of tabloid trash queen Paris Hilton at Sundance. If someone told her that in order to appear at the parties she would have to watch as many films as she could showing at the festival, I’m sure she would pack up and leave ASAP. And major kudos on the use of the Hilton sex tape screen shot as your stock photo.” — Angry Dick 2.
“I think there√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s more in you yet to write about porn society, as typified by Paris Hilton. I find it interesting that on this you and I agree. Any chance you√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢ll write more about that issue?” — Roy “Griff” Griffis
- All Hail Tom White, Taciturn Hero of “Killers of the Flower Moon”
Roughly two months ago a very early draft of Eric Roth‘s screenplay for Killers of the Flower Moon (dated 2.20.17,...
More » - Dead-End Insanity of “Nomadland”
Frances McDormand‘s Fern was strong but mule-stubborn and at the end of the day self-destructive, and this stunted psychology led...
More » - Mia Farrow’s Best Performances?
Can’t decide which performance is better, although I’ve always leaned toward Tina Vitale, her cynical New Jersey moll behind the...
More »
- Hedren’s 94th
Two days ago (1.19) a Facebook tribute congratulated Tippi Hedren for having reached her 94th year (blow out the candles!)...
More » - Criminal Protagonists
A friend suggested a list of the Ten Best American Crime Flicks of the ‘70s. By which he meant films...
More » - “‘Moby-Dick’ on Horseback”
I’ve never been able to give myself over to Sam Peckinpah’s Major Dundee, a 1965 Civil War–era western, and I’ve...
More »