Every so often I have the feeling that money is just pouring out of me. Everything I do and everywhere I turn I’m bleeding 20s, 50s and 100s. Hundreds, thousands. Sooner or later this awful feeling attains critical mass and I have to stomp on the brakes and shut down because I just need the hemorrhaging to stop. Need a tourniquet, getting short of breath.
My 21-inch suitcase is looking a little ragged so I was looking at new ones yesterday in the Swiss Army store in the Beverly Center. I liked a modest one that went for $260-something but with the tax it was just about $300, and something in me said “no! no!” and I thanked the sales guy and left. This morning at LAX I bought a New Yorker and a N.Y. Times and a Tic-Tac and some gum and it cost $15 bucks…what?
I can’t go back to LA so I want to retreat to some podunk town and stay in a rented room and eat apples and take long walks and just not spend anything…Jesus.
In tribute to the late Erland Josephson, the great Swedish actor who worked with Ingmar Bergman (Hour of the Wolf. The Passion of Anna, Cries and Whispers, Scenes from a Marriage, Fanny and Alexander) and Andrei Tarkovsky (Nostalghia) before passing yesterday at age 88, I’m re-running a 2007 article about a Manhattan encounter I had with Josephson and some other Swedish actors (Harriet Andersson in particular) about 30 years ago:
Erland Josephson — 6.15.23 to to 2.25.12
“The closest contact I ever had with Ingmar Bergman, so to speak, was a night in 1981 or ’82 when I talked for a long while with Harriet Andersson, who had a relationship with Bergman in the ’50s and starred in various Bergman films of that general period (including Summer With Monika, Sawdust and Tinsel, Through a Glass Darkly) and later costarred in Fanny and Alexander.
“There was actually a little more than talking going on. There was enough of an attraction that after 90 minutes or so Andersson suggested that we could perhaps leave the party (some invitational soiree on behalf of Swedish filmmakers that was happening in some cavernous space in Soho or Tribeca) and head uptown and…who knew?
“I knew one thing: an attractive middle-aged woman (she was nudging 50 but looked a good ten or twelve years younger) who had once been entwined with the great Ingmar Bergman was now somewhat interested in me. I was certainly flattered. If you believe that lovers pass along certain particles and auras to each other and that these are somehow absorbed and become part of who and what they are for the rest of their lives, I was thinking that on some ethereal level I might absorb a little residual Ingmar.
“But instead of grabbing a cab, Andersson arranged for us to ride uptown in a limo with a group of her Swedish film industry friends, including actor Erland Josephson, who had starred in several Bergman films himself including Hour of the Wolf, The Touch, Cries and Whispers and Scenes from a Marriage. There were five or six of us crammed into the back seat, and it was only a matter of ten or twelve seconds before they all realized what was going on and starting making joke after joke. In Swedish, of course, but translations were unnecessary.
“The mockery and the giggling and the howling went for two or three minutes, but to me it felt like a non-stop barrage. I tried to smile and be a good sport at first, but after a minute or so my eyes froze over. I distinctly remember Josephson being the worst of them. He was slightly in his cups and looking at me with a certain fiendish glee as he let go with one derisive snort after another. The import, more or less, was ‘Hah!…you worthless nobody!…you think you are good enough to lie down with Harriet?…think again!’
“By the time we were let off at Andersson’s hotel at 59th Street and 7th Avenue, I was on the verge of vomiting. It was all I could do to say ‘very nice meeting you’ to Andersson before turning and walking off. She’d been howling along with the rest of them, after all. Nice.”
In short, Josephson was a major talent and legendary actor who, like many people who live on the creative edge, was capable of brutal judgment and, if he’d had a few, casual cruelty. I’ve never forgotten that night so off you go, Erland…off you go, escorted by an army of dark horned angels, ya prick ya. The next time an older woman friend hooks up with an attractive young guy and wants to take him home, I’ll remember to be nice and friendly if we share a cab uptown.
Josephson was director of the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm from 1966 to 1975. He also directed a 1980 film called Marmalade Revolution.
Countless War Horse reviews have described the drenched-in-orange sunset finale (i.e., when Joey returns to the Dorset farm) as a near-copy of the famous red-sunset scene in Gone With The Wind when Rhett tells Scarlett he’s leaving to join the Confederate army. But the more likely inspiration comes from a romantic scene in Stanley Kubrick‘s (and dp Russell Metty‘s) Spartacus.
In the view of Michael Morpurgo, author of the ’80s War Horse children’s novel, Steven Spielberg‘s War Horse delivers “a wonderfully paced story.” He admits to N.Y. Times “Carpetbagger” Melena Ryzik that “it’s quite slow to begin with, and I’m sure it will be criticized for that. But it should be, because you have to establish the relationship between the boy and the horse, the boy and the landscape.
“And then you find, rather like the walk of a horse, the story begins to trot. And it trots when the horse joins the army and goes off to war, and then when the action starts, it begins to canter, and then you have the terrible gallop at the end.”
Honestly? That sounds pretty good. But then Morpurgo is only talking about structure and narrative pacing.
This New York Observer-captured clip of an Occupy Wall Street protestor making mince meat of a Fox News stooge never aired. The guy is easily as sharp and well-spoken and spot-on with his arguments as Cenk Uygur, if not more so. He should be on Young Turks or MSNBC or Current TV. And that Civil War-era Union army cap is a nice touch.
Sanjeewa Pushpakumara‘s Flying Fish, a Sri Lankan civil war drama, has been praised by Indiewire contributor Meredith Brody for having “striking and assured compositions” with “astonishing saturated colors” and “more beautiful shots, I think, than in The Tree of Life.”
Brody caught Flying Fish at the 2011 Seattle Film Festival. It’s also been seen at the Rotterdam Film Festival, and is reportedly slated to play at the Museum of Modern Art’s Contemporary Asian Film series (July 7th through 13th) as well as the forthcoming 47th Chicago International Film Festival next October.
So why isn’t Flying Fish playing at the about-to-begin LA FilmFest? It sounds as if Pushpakumara’s film is at least worth seeing. Did LAFF programmers drop the ball?
Prior to the recent Seattle showing Pushpakumara “giggles through a somewhat off-putting introduction that prophesies numerous walkouts,” Brody writes, “since he did not make an enjoyable movie. It sounds like he’s daring us to endure it. Imagine my surprise when I do.
“The acting is rudimentary in three entwined stories of shocking sex and shocking violence set against the…endless Sri Lankan civil war.”
“This daring, exciting story from northern Sri Lanka convincingly captures the madness in a land where the psychology of war is omnipresent. Three parallel stories deal with the attempts of ordinary village people to lead a normal life in abnormal circumstances.
“Through three parallel stories this daring debut deals with economic and even greater spiritual decay as the result of a civil war lasting more than two decades.
“A beautiful village girl falls in love with a soldier. Her father, 45-year-old Muthubanda, is against this. When his daughter falls pregnant, Muthubanda is harassed and humiliated by soldiers. He commits suicide and the girl flees the village. Her guilt and rage push her to do the least expected.
“A middle-aged widow takes care of her eight children in a village filled with tension between the army and the Tamil Tigers. She has an affair with a local and her son comes to know about it. His frustration drives him to something that will change all his siblings overnight.
“A thirteen-year-old Tamil girl lives in a village where the battle between the Tamil Tigers and the army is extremely intensive. Tamil forces are conducting active war propaganda in local schools. One night, they break into the girl’s house and demand a huge ransom for her. She chooses to escape.”
Last Wednesday I did a phoner with Paramount’s Ron Smith, the restoration guy who quarterbacked the work on the Ten Commandments Bluray. (And on the theatrical version.) A ten-minute portion of our chat is on the video. The film is best appreciated as “a Cecil B. DeMille proscenium arch experience,” as I put it. It’s immaculate old-world fakery, shot almost entirely on a sound stage. The 44 days spent shooting location footage in Egypt mean nothing to me. The Exodus scene could have been shot in the Mojave desert.
“Digital processes have made it cheaper and easier to assemble such multitudes in films like Gladiator and 300, but pixels are pixels, no matter how artfully deployed. Only DeMille and his army of assistants could have captured the spectacle of The Ten Commandments, a human spectacle, with weight, warmth and life.” — from Dave Kehr‘s 4.1 N.Y. Times appreciation.
Now that I’ve seen Denis Villeneuve‘s Incendies (NY/LA, 4.22), I know that the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar race is probably down to a choice between Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu‘s Biutiful and Susanne Bier‘s A Better World. Because as compelling and anchored and finely chiselled as Incendies is, it’s such an ugly and searing portrait of tribal rage, ignorance, cruelty and sadism that it’s finally one of those widely admired films that you’ll never want to see a second time, or even think about once it’s over.
Most critics have called Biutiful a tough thing to sit through, and it is that in some ways. But Incendies is such a grim march and so committed to the probing of an oppressive and penetrating vision of downer-hood that it would easily whip Inarritu’s ass in a one-on-one gloom match.
The story (based on Wajdi Mouawad‘s play of the same title) is clearly a reflection of the Lebanon horrors (Israeli army plus Christian militia vs. Lebanese PLO and non-combatants) of the ’70s and early ’80s. Aaah, to be immersed in primitive Arab-Lebanese-Christian rage on all sides — idiotic tribal traditions, threats of honor killings, sniper shootings, rural women shunning wronged women, torture, prison rape, machine-gun slaughter, burnt bodies, more torture, prolonged imprisonment…good stuff!
You’re sitting there going “boy, this sure is a good film…I wonder how much longer until it’s over?” I went out to the lobby around the 90-minute mark and asked the guy. He called the projectionist and got off the phone and gave me a look and told me to grim up and hang in there — I had another 35 to 40 minutes to go. Eff me. I really hate it when films thrust me into backward patriarchal societies and then block off all escape routes. What a completely nowhere fundamentalist culture we’re stuck with in this film, a world defined by rock and scrub brush and dust and hills and chained to such ongoing hate.
And to be doubly stuck in a lonnnng quest-for-the-ancestral-truth movie in which clue after clue is sought and uncovered, blah blah. Clue, hint, clue, hint…are we getting closer to finding out what really happened? No? It has to get there eventually, right?
Incendies is about a youngish Canadian brother and a sister whose Lebanese mother has recently died, and who are more less forcibly engaged in a search for their missing father and missing brother. And for all of it to end with a Chinatown-ish resolution that gives new meaning to the term “all in the family”? Which doesn’t really illuminate anything in a real-world sort of way? I don’t know, bro. A very “good” film but if I never see Incendies again it’ll be too soon. And I’ve seen Biutiful three times.
I’m getting quite tired of reading dismissive remarks about The Social Network along the lines of a comment posted today by an HE reader called dayXexists. “I found very little emotional resonance in The Social Network,” he wrote, “[because] it’s just about some college kid who is an asshole and screws over his best friend.
“That’s why I’m so baffled about all the fanboys throwing such a big stink over TSN supposedly being so superior to TKS. I don’t think either come anywhere near Black Swan, The Fighter or even 127 Hours.”
I have no beef with anyone preferring these three films to TSN or TKS, but there’s a 10.9.10 Maureen Dowd column that requires a fresh review. It reminded me that The Social Network is afflicted with the same story virus that compromises Das Rheingold, that semi-boring hack opera by the overbearing Richard Wagner.
“They had me at the mesmerizing first scene, when the repulsive nerd is mocked by a comely, slender young lady he’s trying to woo,” Dowd began. “Bitter about women, he returns to his dark lair in a crimson fury of revenge.
Das Rheingold “unfolds with mythic sweep, telling the most compelling story of all, the one I cover every day in politics: What happens when the powerless become powerful and the powerful become powerless?
“This is a drama about quarrels over riches, social hierarchy, envy, theft and the consequence of deceit — a world upended where the vassals suddenly become lords and the lords suddenly lose their magic.
“The beauty who rejects the gnome at the start is furious when he turns around and betrays her, humiliating her before the world. And the giant brothers looming over the action justifiably feel they’ve provided the keys to the castle and want their reward. One is more trusting than the other, but both go berserk, feeling they’ve been swindled after entering into a legitimate business compact.
“The antisocial nerd, surrounded by his army of slaving minions, has been holed up making something so revolutionary and magical that it turns him into a force that could conquer the world.
“The towering brothers battle to get what they claim is their fair share of the glittering wealth that flows from the obsessive gnome’s genius designs.
“The gnome, remarkably, invents a way to hurl yourself through space and meet up with somebody at the other end.”
The themes in The Social Network, in short, are “strikingly similar” to those in Das Rheingold. The timeless echoes in Wagner’s opera, “based on the medieval German epic poem Das Nibelungenlied, which some experts say helped inspire J. R. R. Tolkien‘s The Lord of the Rings, underscore how little human drama changes through the ages.
“We are always fighting about social status, identity, money, power, turf, control, lust and love. We are always trying to get even, get more and climb higher. And we are always trying to cross the bridge to Valhalla.”
Four days ago Fair Game director Doug Limanresponded to a falsehood-filled attack on his film’s credibility by former N.Y. Times reporter and alleged neocon mouthpiece Judith Miller, which appeared in the Wall Street Journal on 12.9. Liman also alludes to a 12.3 Washington Post editorial, also penned with a dimissive and inaccurate neocon conviction, that attacked his film.
I should have posted this earlier — sorry. Read Liman’s piece on the Columbia Journalism Review website or, if you prefer, here. I’ve pasted the whole thing because it’s important, and because the people who’ve been attacking this film are, I believe, agenda-driven liars. William Burroughs said it decades ago: “Some people are shits.”
Editor’s note: Last Thursday, Judith Miller penned a column for The Wall Street Journal in which she accused the new film Fair Game of pushing “untruths” in its telling of the outing of former CIA agent Valerie Plame.
Miller described the film, which focuses on the relationship of Plame and husband Joe Wilson, as “brilliantly acted,” but a “gross distortion of a complicated political saga.” She challenges seven of what she calls the film’s “untruths”; among them, claims that Plame played a “key role” in the CIA’s counterproliferation division, charged with gathering evidence on Iraq’s WMD programs, and that Plame was involved in missions to provide safe havens to Iraqi scientists. Miller also takes issue with a subplot in the film in which Plame, played by Naomi Watts, recruits an Iraqi-American woman to visit her scientist brother in Iraq, where is working on the country’s WMD program. CJR approached Fair Game director Doug Liman (Swingers, Mr and Mrs Smith, The Bourne Identity) for comment. He wrote back with this response to Miller’s piece:
Judith Miller demonstrated in her recent WSJ story about my film, Fair Game, the same cavalier attitude towards the facts that led to her departure from The New York Times in disgrace. And we should never forget that Scooter Libby outed Valerie Plame to Miller in June 2003 — more than two weeks before Richard Armitage outed Plame to Novak. Somehow Miller neglected to mention that in her op-ed piece.
But she also forgot about that before — in her early grand jury testimony — until she was forced to come clean about it in a subsequent grand jury appearance and under oath at Libby’s trial. Miller’s belated testimony helped convict her “source” Libby, but not until she did everything she could, as a forceful proponent of the war in Iraq, to avoid telling the truth to the American public.
And so here we go again.
Judith Miller writes that her supposed anonymous sources told her that Valerie Plame did not play a “key role” in the CIA’s effort to penetrate Iraq’s presumed WMD program. In truth, Valerie Plame was head of operations for the CIA’s Joint Task Force on Iraq (JTFI). My sources: former Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet and U.S. attorney Pat Fitzgerald.
Valerie’s specific actions as head of operations for the JTFI were and still are classified. Valerie Plame, a loyal intelligence officer from a military family, has always honored and continues to honor the secrecy agreement she signed when she joined the Agency more than twenty-five years ago. As filmmakers, we did the best job we could to piece together her activities in covert CIA operations specializing in nuclear counter-proliferation. This is not easy, especially since Valerie was a NOC, a form of deep cover operative with no official ties to the U.S. government. To be drawn into debating what this deep cover operative may or may not have done is to miss the big picture — this was no “glorified secretary” who was outed by the White House. Far from it.
Special Counsel Fitzgerald submitted a memorandum to the district court in the Libby trial spelling out in detail Valerie’s undercover role overseas, covert status, and senior positions at the CIA leading counter-proliferation teams and searching for WMD in Iraq. It is disgraceful that Miller and others like her continue to demean Valerie and the dedicated women and men who serve our country as operations officers and risk their lives to keep armchair warriors like Miller safe from harm.
Regarding the Iraqi scientists that are the focus of a sub-plot in Fair Game, Judith Miller seems to blur the line between opinions and indisputable fact. This much we know to be fact: the CIA made a criminal referral because of Plame’s outing. I doubt that the CIA and its director George Tenet — someone who bent over backwards to protect the Bush Administration — would have allowed that to occur if the consequences to national security weren’t serious and the damage to intelligence operations severe.
Obviously WMDs remain a sore subject for Miller, who wrote many erroneous stories that badly misled the American public about their existence in Iraq in 2003. Fair Game doesn’t much focus on the WMDs, except to recount an episode showing the dangers of politicized intelligence, which is now common wisdom on both sides of the political aisle. Indeed, Fair Game doesn’t even state an opinion about the war itself, however disastrous its consequences are in hindsight. Rather, Fair Game is about the president of the United States lying to the American people, and what happened to the people who challenged him. The wagons were circled around the president of the United States on the trust issue.
And while Judith Miller seems to downplay whether there was a conspiracy in the White House to out Valerie Plame, the published explanation for her hasty and forced exit from The New York Times refers to the unfortunate role she played as “one of the reporters on the receiving end of the anti-Wilson whisper campaign.” As a key witness, Miller didn’t attend every day of the Scooter Libby trial the way my screenwriters did. Remember that this was not some witch-hunt: the special prosecutor Pat Fitzgerald is universally respected and was a Republican U.S. Attorney appointed by President Bush. And the jury was unanimous in its conviction of Scooter Libby on all five counts with which he was charged.
As for Miller’s rehash of old arguments about Armitage, here again she’s got it wrong. Armitage was not an innocent Boy Scout, as wrongly portrayed by Miller and The Washington Post editors in their recent editorial. Armitage twice attempted to out Plame as a CIA officer, first to Bob Woodward (just about the most famous reporter in Washington), then, when unsuccessful with that, to Bob Novak, the syndicated self-proclaimed “Prince of Darkness.” Armitage famously confessed his “foolishness,” but that isn’t an explanation. Once may be careless, but twice is not careless, it’s either intentionally foolish, on purpose, or worse.
The truth is that Armitage is no peacenik and probably never was, no matter what Miller wishes were true to cover her tracks. Anyone looking at a timeline of who did what and when can see that Armitage tried to be an “army of one” by blurting out about Plame to two different high profile inside-the-Beltway reporters. But the trail of how Armitage came to know about Joe Wilson and his wife — a covert CIA NOC — appears to lead straight back to Libby.
Libby met with Armitage in June 2003, shortly after confirming that Joe Wilson was the unnamed ambassador sent to Niger by the CIA to find out about the now infamous “yellowcake” uranium claim. A few days later, Armitage first told Bob Woodward about Wilson and his wife, but Woodward kept silent. So Armitage’s first effort to out Plame failed. But weeks before Armitage got his second chance to out Plame, Libby had already outed Plame to Miller at the end of June 2003. Then Libby outed Plame to Miller again in early July 2003, right before Armitage blabbed to Novak about Plame and her husband, Joe Wilson.
In case Armitage’s second attempt failed, Libby knew that Miller was standing by. With Miller as a backup and Karl Rove standing by to confirm Armitage, Novak outed Plame as a CIA operative wife of Joe Wilson. Miller says nothing about her role in this affair in her op-ed piece. The Republican controlled Justice Department in fact found that Libby and Rove personally outed Valerie Plame to multiple members of the news media, including Robert Novak, Judith Miller, Matt Cooper, Walter Pincus, and Bob Woodward. Plame was going to be outed even if Armitage didn’t succeed with Novak.
So although neither Miller nor Armitage are in the film Fair Game, both of them were involved in the whole sorry episode up to their eyeballs. Actually, I would have loved to have included Richard Armitage, Dick Cheney and others in Fair Game, had Scooter Libby not obstructed the investigation, for which a unanimous jury convicted him on five serious counts with jail sentences.
So was there a conspiracy in the White House to punish Joe Wilson for speaking out? The film leaves that up to the viewer to decide. Pat Fitzgerald did say “there’s a cloud over the Vice-President, a cloud over the White House.” People can go see Fair Game this holiday and decide for themselves who was naughty and who was nice.
Note: My apologies to HE commenters, but I was obliged to delete and repost this story, which originally ran Saturday morning, due to a ridiculous server clock/time stamp issue created by the geniuses at Softlayer/Orbit the Planet, which is HE’s internet service provider for the time being. As a result (and I really couldn’t help this) all of yesterday’s comments were wiped out.
Rod Lurie‘s Straw Dogs — a movie that Screen Gems likes so much that it won’t release it until September 2011 — has gotten a boost from an Ain’t It Cool contributor called “Le Stephanois,” who caught Lurie’s melodrama at a recent Syracuse University screening. I’m impressed by this because (a) Mr. Rififi writes well and (b) claims to prefer Lurie’s remake to Sam Peckinpah‘s 1971 original.
Straw Dogs local bad guys (l. to r.) Billy Lush, Drew Powell, Rhys Coiro and Alexander Skarsgard
“It’s hard for me to recall a remake that has drawn as much ire as [Lurie’s] Straw Dogs, which seemingly everyone (at least everyone on the IMDb message boards) has lambasted and written off entirely,” he begins. “They refuse to believe that it could be good in its own right, that Lurie could have actually made a decent film. After seeing it, I can confidently say that anyone who might have harbored some prejudice towards the film should, quite simply, be ashamed.
“Neither I nor Rod Lurie need tell you that he is not trying to best Peckinpah, though it appears the naysayers demand some sort of explanation as to why it’s being remade.
That’s easy. Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs is arguably the best example of the late director’s misogynist ideology (this coming from a major fan of his work). Lurie, whose works are often defined by strong female protagonists, set out to reverse the original’s misogynist implications.
“David and Amy Sumner (James Marsden, Kate Bosworth) are certainly recognizable as reincarnations of Peckinpah’s David and Amy, though their ideals are altogether different. Lurie puts different human beings in situations close to what Peckinpah devised, and he does so brilliantly.
“The plot of Lurie’s Straw Dogs — David and Amy Sumner seek solace in Amy’s hometown so that David can write in peace, only to be brutally antagonized by the locals — hews close to the original, save for some slight alterations. David is a screenwriter and not a mathematician, and the setting is the fictional town of Blackwater, Mississippi, and not rural England. The townies’ new identities then correlate.
“One of the most admirable qualities of Lurie’s film is its slow-burning tension. This is not an obnoxiously chaotic exercise in extreme violence, but a classically photographed, deliberately paced and thought-provoking thriller — a rarity in today’s mainstream cinema.
“Just because it is not relentlessly violent does not mean it is in any way Straw Dogs Lite. Indeed, it is just as brutal and arguably as discomforting as the original, a major triumph considering Lurie’s ideological framework is nowhere near as controversial as Peckinpah’s misogynist mindset.
Straw Dogs costars Kate Bosworth, James Marsden.
“The siege at the end of the film is extraordinarily riveting, the ending itself a revelation of sorts. And none of it is cheap or self-indulgent; the violence is beautifully choreographed, achieving a rhythmic intensity that is well-nigh overwhelming. It is during the siege that Marsden makes a quantum leap as a performer, projecting an eerie confidence that lends an extra degree of weight to the film’s haunting conclusion.
“The utilization of the film’s setting is similarly outstanding, as the bloodthirsty nature of a familiar southern football town mirrors the air of violence that persists throughout the picture. The meaning of the title is clearer (it’s almost as if the title didn’t necessarily suit Peckinpah’s film, considering how well Lurie articulates its meaning), and the town’s having an identity imbues the film with a unique atmospheric tension.
“Lurie masterfully cultivates that tension so as to constantly remind the audience that they are in the presence of men who are predisposed to committing acts of violence with a primal mentality, having been conditioned to beat the hell out of anyone that crosses them, be it on the field or in a more domestic arena.
“The acting is uniformly terrific, and Alexander Skarsgard might just be the best thing about the movie. In a subtle tour de force, Skarsgard is utterly mesmeric; you cannot take your eyes off him for one moment, and you even root for him and relate to him in the oddest scenarios. As a former high school standout whose knee — and scholarship — lasted just three semesters at the University of Tennessee, Skarsgard is much more relatable and dynamic than the Charlie (Del Henney) in Peckinpah’s film.
“There is much to be said for Marsden and Bosworth too, both of whom give the finest performance of their careers thus far. Marsden tackles the Dustin Hoffman role with uncommon poise, unintimidated by the stature of the man whose part he inherited. Bosworth gives a mature, nuanced and at times disquieting turn, revealing a side of herself that should lead to plenty more roles in high-pedigree dramas and thrillers.
“Lurie’s film is not perfect, though it should obliterate the low expectations placed upon it by a small army of Peckinpah fans. They’re certainly entitled to their opinion, but they would be wise to reserve their judgment until the picture is released next year.”
In a recent HE piece called called “Little Doggies” I expressed frustration with Screen Gems’ decision to delay the release of Lurie’s film.
“The initial plan was to open it in spring 2011, but last March it was bumped to September 2011,” I wrote, “which seemed to me like a candy-ass move. Distributors always delay when they’re scared. They tend to put off releasing so-called intimidating films on their slate the same way financially-troubled folk will sometimes put off paying the mortgage.
“Straw Dogs is a smart but violent film with a rape scene, sure, but why bite into a sandwich if you don’t intend to chew and swallow?
“The general rule of thumb is that if your film isn’t released within a year or so after the end of principal photography, you’ve got some kind of worries going on. Inviting press down to the Straw Dogs shoot last fall and then announcing it won’t open until…oh, who knows but maybe Spring 2011 or September 2011 is like purchasing a Variety trade ad saying, ‘Okay, we’re a little scared — we admit it. We picked up the sandwich, we bit into it and…uhm, we’re not quite sure how to play it.’
I wrote that I’d been told “there’s nothing wrong with the film.” HitFix’s Drew McWeeny seized on this and asked if I’d written it because Lurie is a friend. “Because any other time people delay films, it’s the movie’s fault,” he said. “But in this case, you’re predisposed to believe the filmmaker, so in this case, it’s those gutless distributors.
“For what it’s worth, I have spoken to several people who have seen the film, and there wasn’t much good they had to say about it. They ranged from fans of the original to people who didn’t realize it was a remake, and not one of them seemed enthused or engaged by it. And, no, it wasn’t because they were ‘scared’ of it, either.”
I don’t know who Le Stephanois is, and I suppose I have to consider that he may be a Lurie ally of some kind, but if he’s not and just some guy who saw the film at Syracuse, then what McWeeny has been told about the film is at the very least questionable.
Four days before I posted that Dutch film critic’s review of Anton Corbijn‘s The American, Big Hollywood‘s Kurt SchlichterreviewedRowan Joffe‘s screenplay, and I have to say it’s moderately amusing. Even though Schlichter is one of “them,” he can be funny. Except he needs to spell arrivederci correctly next time.
“We never find out much about [George Clooney‘s] back-story, which is okay because we really don’t care,” he says toward the end. “His tattoo reveals that he’s ex-Special Forces, because, as we know, all Green Berets leave the Army to join that giant high-priced international hit man industry we somehow never hear about in real-life. If in reality half as many people were employed as high-priced professional assassins as Hollywood movies depict, the unemployment rate would only be 9% and the Obama administration would point to it as evidence the stimulus is working.
“The script is technically proficient and evocative, meaning that I could clearly and fully visualize all of the tired, hackneyed cliches. On the plus side, other than the ‘you Americans don’t know how to live life’ crap, it’s not political. It’ll be equally dull for adherents of every political stripe.
“And there’s another upside – there’s a hot Italian girl character in it and in pretty much every scene she’s taking off her clothes. I don’t mean just once or twice — I mean this gal makes Lindsay Lohan look like a particularly repressed Amish chick during Sunday school. So Clooney gets to pick up a big paycheck for hanging out in the Italian countryside surrounded by hot naked girls (yeah, there’s more than one), so I can see what was in The American for him. Unfortunately, I still can’t see what’s supposed to be in it for the rest of us.
One plus for the film, Schlicter says, will be the talented Corbijn, last seen directing the very cool Joy Division movie Control. And yet “terrifyingly, a true story about a Goth band and its lead singer’s eventual suicide has more laughs than this script does, which is to say at least one.”
It’s now 12:45 pm. The American will screen in Manhattan a little more than six hours from now.
Update: Who was I to talk about Schichter misspelling arrivederci when I couldn’t spell his last name correctly? Apologies.