For whatever reason, the Swedes have decided against calling Jodie Foster‘s Manhattan-vigilante pic The Brave One. Not that I’m a fan of The Stranger Inside, but I’ve never quite figured out what the American title actually means. It doesn’t really work as a literal notion (Foster’s character is “brave” because she works through her fiance’s death and personal trauma by drilling some bad guys?) or an ironic one.
Anyone who says Todd Haynes‘ I’m Not There (Weinstein Co., 11.21) isn’t an essential film to see — not just for the portions that “deliver” but the ones that are radiantly, eye-poppingly alive — is operating without the DNA of a true movie lover…it’s that simple. This is a great poetry-weave film, a reanimation of ’60s spiritual-cultural energy like no feature I can recall, and a magnificent head-tease that is always arresting, even during the fumble portions.
Cate Blanchett in I’m Not There
It’s not all-the-way fantastic (20% or 30% drags and meanders and sometimes confounds), but I’m saying for sure that you can’t not see it. You can blow it off when it opens theatrically and wait for the DVD, sure, but this will probably incur the suspicion of trusted friends and colleagues. Honestly, do you want that?
I knew Haynes had taken a huge bite going in with this ultra-ambitious patchwork exploration of Bob Dylan‘s life and legend (spanning from the late ’50s to late ’60s), in which he uses six different actors (Cate Blanchett, Christian Bale, Carl Franklin, Richard Gere, Heath Ledger and Ben Whishaw) along with numerous styles and palettes to convey various aspects of this unique life and legend.
What I didn’t anticipate was his impressive use of montage that ties together the various strands and makes a kind of harmony out of what could have been serious chaos. Nor did I expect the magnificent detail in each frame, the always-brisk pacing and the sheer “fun” aspect.
An example of the latter is a Dylan-frolics-with-the-Beatles-in-”64 moment that’s absolutely hilarious in a kind of of Jacques Tati-meets-Charlie Chaplin-meets A Hard Day’s Night sense.
Did I mention this is Haynes’ absolute best film? That he’s pulled off one of the most exciting growth-surge displays of any directorial career, ever?
I’d heard from a friend at Telluride that I’m Not There is “an inside joke for Dylanologists” and okay, yeah, it is that…but for anyone open to full-crank cinematic stimulation it’s one of the most inventive and dazzling head-trip films I’ve ever seen. I went into it this afternoon with some trepidation, and then realized within minutes it would be much, much better than anticipated. It doesn’t really have much of a “thread” (by the classic definition of that term) and it loses tension from time to time, but when it’s “on” and rolling full steam it’s a wild-ass thing to behold.
On top of which it has to be seen for Blanchett’s knockout performance (captured entirely in black and white) as the Highway 61 Revisited/Blonde on Blonde Dylan. Forget Cate’s game performance in the catastrophic Elizabeth: The Golden Age and absolutely count on the fact that she’ll be nominated for Best Supporting Actress in the Haynes pic. Dylan fans are going to be blown away, but I can see others digging it as one of the best woman-playing-a man tour de forces ever put to film.
On one level her inhabiting of the ’65-to-’66 Dylan doesn’t feel entirely sincere — it’s a piece of performance art that feels a wee bit put-onny — but another level it’s psychologically “real” and shattering. For me Blanchett delivers as much of a knockout punch as Marion Cotillard‘s Edith Piaf does in La Vie en Rose or Jamie Foxx did in Ray, and perhaps even more so.
I’m speaking about much more than a physical capturing — the frizzy big hair, black shades, tight pants, Beatle boots and whatnot — or Blanchett’s spot-on imitation of his mumbly voice and guarded manner. I’m talking mainly about a convincing communion with that Dylan-esque otherness…that sense of odd, connected whimsy and all-knowing, tapped-in power that indicated all kinds of fascinating currents in the actual guy.
Yes, the Gere-in-the-country portion (a chapter evoking the reclusive John Wesley Harding/New Morning era) slows things down a bit, but even this section has its odd carnival-like charms. I’ll admit I was feeling a wee bit anxious and impatient, but Haynes saves it somewhat by cutting back to the Blanchett, Ledger, Bale and Whishaw portions now and then and thereby creating a welcome whatever-ness that at least staves off boredom.
Will those who’ve never listened to a Dylan album or seen Martin Scorsese‘s masterful No Direction Home be able to get into this film? Probably not, but the Dylan-deprived aren’t going to see it in the first place so the question is moot.
I felt alive and tingly as I walked down Bloor Street after seeing this film early this afternoon. I was saying to myself “this is what it feels like to feel charged up by a movie, by transcendent thought, by ravishing lyrics…by the whole magilla.”
I saw Sean Penn‘s Into The Wild at a special early screening on the Paramount lot several weeks ago, and came away impressed and stirred up. This is an essential “trip” movie — you can’t be any kind of film lover and wait for the DVD — as well as an experience that’s certain to provoke primal passions and arguments. And in terms of focus, passion and visual splendor, it’s easily Sean Penn‘s best-directed film — evidence of serious artistic growth on his part.
It also contains the best performance Emile Hirsch (Alpha Dog, The Girl Next Door) has ever given, even though, truth be told, he’s not the most charismatic of actors. There’s something vaguely feral and muskratty (and even, at times, other-planet-y) about Hirsch. And yet this quality works for Wild and Hirsch’s strange, quiet performance as a misanthropic loner, especially as he seems to uncover every last shade and mood of misanthropic loner-ism there is.
Everyone presumably knows that Penn’s film is the story of Chris McCandless, the idealistic/disaffected son of privelege who died of starvation in 1992 while trying to be Jeremiah Johnson in the Alaskan wilderness, and that it’s based upon a respected and popular book by Jon Krakauer that covered McCandless’s life and death.
The fact that Into The Wild is a very fully felt spiritual journey stems from Penn obviously being a major believer in the McCandless legend. It’s also a wide-open atmosphere movie about the wonders of nature’s grand cathedral, and this seems especially welcome in this day and age when 99% of the population lives inside artificial environments.
But when you boil the spiritual and visual snow out of it, Wild is about a very self-absorbed, somewhat arrogant, not-exactly-genius-level guy who could have found his way out of the Alaskan wilderness area he died in if he’d thought to buy a decent map. I read an opinion piece by an Alaska forest ranger that clarified my suspicions.
McCandless’s dream — to live a primal life free of meaningless, spirit-draining crap — is something we can all relate to or at least understand, but I’m not sure that Penn’s mostly sympathetic portrait of McCandless (although Into The Wild doesn’t shove anything down yoru throat — it lets you come to your own conclusions) is the entire truth of the matter. I don’t think McCandless took nature quite seriously enough (if he hadn’t found that abandoned school bus he probably would have been dead a lot sooner), and that he wound up paying the price.
I respect that Penn has made a longish film — it’s something like 2 hours and 25 minutes — and that he gives it a kind of drifting, wandering feeling, like you’re wandering through the Louvre only more so. This was the right way to go for a film with this subject and story. And the ending definitely works — you can actually feel a sense of release in the death of a twenty-something guy, which is quite a feat when you think about it. And I agree with everyone else about Hal Holbrook giving an award-quality performance as a kindly old guy whom McCandless/Hirsch meets toward the end of the film.
I’ve other questions and comments, but I have to jam. To be continued….
Slate‘s Kim Masters has reported about friction between Russell Crowe and Lionsgate marketers over the release date of 3:10 to Yuma, as well as delays that may have affected the slant and tone of the aarly one-sheets.
Crowe wanted Yuma delayed until ’08, she reports, because he wanted the fall season free and clear for the opening of American Gangster, which opens on 11.2. (Masters is hearing Universal will fund a Best Supporting Actor campaign for Crowe’s performance in that film). But Lionsgate decided to bring out Yuma on 9.7 (two days hence) in order to beat another big western, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, to the punch.
But “once Lionsgate moved the date, everything had to be done in a hurry,” Masters writes. “Crowe was given an unusually small selection of photos to approve for the poster and rejected all of them.” (One of Masters’ sources says “he thought they made him look fat.” Has anyone taken a gander at those recent videos of Crowe doing Yuma interviews? He’s really packed it on.). “But those on his side say the studio didn’t offer enough choices and Crowe was merely exercising a routine movie-star prerogative. Finally, an acceptable option was proffered.”
Could this be the reason why Lionsgate went with those leather-coated-dandy one-sheets early on?
“But Mangold [and his team] apparently were fuming that Lionsgate left them out of the loop on various decisions,” Masters writes. (What decisions? The gay campaign?) “‘They’ve had a big-studio experience with Walk the Line — they know what it means to be included in the process,’ says a source inside the situation. ‘And Lionsgate isn’t used to dealing with filmmakers like that.’
Lionsgate, says this person, “is very comfortable drawing young men to Eli Roth movies, but not with bringing along a more mature movie like 3:10 to Yuma. Ortenberg counters that the 3:10 to Yuma campaign ‘will go down as one of the best of the year.'”
Andy Warhol once said “there’s nothing more middle-class than being afraid to look middle-class.” By the same token, in the realm of film columnists and critics there’s…now I can’t figure the analogy. I’m trying to say that if you’re afraid to sound downmarket and/or gut-level in your opinions, you’re lacking a certain degree of integrity.
Not that anyone is obliged to sound like Oscar Madison or Rufus T. Firefly or Roger Avary after three cans of beer in discussing new films, but most of us have these guys (or aspects of them) living inside us. And yet most high-end critics accept or at least recognize that they’re all obliged to express themselves in a manner that will be deemed “aesthetically correct” by their peers.
The secret to good writing is having the brass to begin a sentence with only a half-formed notion — and certainly without knowing exactly — what you’re about to put into words, but pushing ahead and writing it down anyway, knowing or at least trusting it’ll come out right in the end.
I was going to ignore David Poland‘s vitriolic slam of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford out of concern that a tit-for-tat would convey an impression of too much respect, but I’ve been urged to take a poke anyway.
“Like” it or not, Andrew Dominik‘s deeply atmospheric moralistic western about the last days of Jesse James (Brad Pitt) and the tragedy of “groupie” Robert Ford (Casey Affleck) is a time-machine passage to the way life in rural and urban Missouri (and to a lesser extent New York and Colorado) quite possibly felt, tasted, smelled and sounded like some 135 years ago. It feels utterly real, convincing, lived-in…and at the same time is a chocolate sundae of awesome style and immaculate flavor.
And yet Poland has called it “the most pretentious studio release in a decade.” I don’t know where derision of this sort comes from in people. Films of this calibre and pedigree sometimes strike people as poised and overbearing. I remember talking to a bartender at the Spring Street Bar & Grill 29 years ago about how he’d dismissed Days of Heaven as masturbatory, self-important shite. I developed an instant dislike for the guy at that moment, but I also felt twinges of pity. He didn’t have it in him to get it, is all. If you reach high and achieve big, somebody is going to come along and slap you with the “p” word and there’s nothing to be done about it.
Poland accuses Dominik of having ripped off Terrence Malick, Robert Altman‘s McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Michael Cimino‘s Heaven’s Gate, Sam Peckinpah‘s Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid and so on. The natural process of every artist is to take, assimilate and make anew. Dominik’s film certainly has the echoes of ’70s cinema all through it, but anyone who looks at Jesse James without understanding that he’s delivered a very particular feast of his own — similar, yes, but a long way from being shamelessly borrowed — and then calls it “obnoxious” and “taste-free” is coming from a numb and enervated place.
I can only throw up my hands at the taste buds of someone who would use these terms to take down one of the most potent dream trips ever released by a major studio (dreamy in a gently musty, burnished, lace-curtain-y sort of way) while having previously creamed over The Proposition, a movie that was so caked in pretentious grit (with each and every actor covered in makeup-van “chicken grease”) that I went home and took two showers after seeing it.
Poland says he feels “bad” for everyone involved including Brad Pitt for having “[worked] his ass off to create an elusive but distinct character.” And yet Pitt truly succeeds — his Jesse James is probably his best performance ever. Empathy is misplaced and unnecessary. Graciously, Poland allows that the supporting cast is “excellent” — true. And that Patricia Norris‘s production design is “first class” — check. And that Roger Deakins‘ cinematography is “stunning” because “you will likely never see light coming from the inside of every character in a movie’s eyeballs like this again.” All true, and let it go at that.
Poland also correctly understands that Warner Bros. reported attempt to cut this 160 minute film down to 110 or 120 minutes was doomed from the start because it’s been shot in a way that necessitates the spending of some time — it’s a movie that has sunk itself right into the pace of life in the 1870s, and any attempt to cut into this would ruin its integrity. I felt the 160-minute length in my butt somewhat, but I never once resented the scope and ambition of this film, and would never in a million years call it an “abusive…self-indulgent mess.”
The Assassination of Jesse James is a curiously sad and haunting slow-train ride that definitely goes to a place that feels whole and complete and resolved. In a way it’s like a theme-park movie, albeit one of the most historically precise and devoted ever made. It isn’t a faux ’70s art film but the real thing, released some 25 or 30 years after the that wondrously fertile decade began to wind down and a bringer of much-needed deliverance. I can’t wait to see it again.
In yesterday’s (8.31) L.A. Times, there were two wise and well-phrased thoughts — one about cutting, another about scoring — from What Just Happened? director Barry Levinson, as told to critic Michael Sragow.
Quote #1: “In my mind, I have a scheme about how a scene is supposed to work and what’s needed in each scene. But then you hope that a scene doesn’t suddenly come apart in the editing room so that you’re fighting for its life. Sometimes the scene in front of it is affecting it in some way. And there are all these little surprises that come about. Sometimes you find holding back on some moment makes it all the stronger. It’s extraordinary how much impact a particular cut from one shot to another can have. The mathematics of, ‘We need to extend this shot for six more frames,’ and suddenly with those six frames I feel something there, that moment, and that’s all there is — it’s just extraordinary.”
Quote #2: “Music has a huge effect. You have to find the voice of the music. You don’t want to push the movie emotionally. You have to allow it to breathe on its own.”
What Just Happened?, an inside-Hollywood drama based on Art Linson‘s sardonic roman a clef that was partly about the difficult making of The Edge, the trying-really-hard-not-to-get eaten-by-an-Alaskan-grizzly-bear movie with Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin that came out ten years ago.
Levinson shot it a few months ago after toning up the the script. I’ve read the untrammelled Linson version. It’s not The Cherry Orchard but it’s a knowing, real-feeling piece about a barely-holding-it-together producer, in the way that Robert Redford and Michael Ritchie‘s The Candidate was a clever take on early ’70s politics. It will open sometime in ’08.
A slimmed-down, stunningly youth-ified Robert DeNiro (he was looking like a turn-of-the-century Russian wheat farmer for a while there — here he looks like he did in Midnight Run) plays the Linson character. Bruce Willis and Sean Penn play themselves; the costars include Stanley Tucci, John Turturro, Kristen Stewart, Robin Wright Penn and Catherine Keener.
There’s an 8.26 David Halbfinger N.Y. Times piece that searches for meaning in two noteworthy rage-and-revenge movies — Neil Jordan‘s The Brave One (Warner Bros., 9.14) and James Wan‘s Death Sentence (Fox Atomic, 8.31) with Jodie Foster and Kevin Bacon, respectively — as well as the less prominent Descent, which starred Rosario Dawson, and a British revenge movie called Outlaw, which starred Sean Bean.
The piece asks whether audiences today might be ready for a new wave of cathartic, rough justice at the movies. Halbfinger quotes original “Death Wish” author Brian Garfield as saying that “people are just sort of simmering with the kind of anger that they can’t really define, and this kind of movie gives them some kind of release.” But this anger seems incompletely defined by Halbfinger also.
Street crime, after all, is not the nationwide virus or pestilence it once seemed to be. New York City is thought to be a much safer place it was in the early ’70s, when Garfield wrote the book, or when the Michael Winner-Charles Bronson film of Death Wish came out in ’74.
I think these films are about getting revenge upon a general “themn” — an unruly, assaultive, disenfranchised element that would puncture our indoor-shopping-mall complacency and invade our air-conditioned membranes inside our SUVs. This includes not just criminals but the whole Middle Eastern crew..anyone lobbing grenades in our direction. In this sense the best post-9.11 revenge movie of them all has been Tony Scott‘s Man on Fire — a movie that Bush and Cheney probably loved, and which I genuinely respected as one of the best right-wing propaganda films ever made.
It’s too early to get into James Mangold‘s 3:10 to Yuma (Lionsgate, 9.7) which has a lot of good things going for it and will probably, I’m guessing, be widely liked, but if this film was an interactive video game with plastic pistols, I would have spent my whole time firing at Ben Foster‘s nutball bad guy. I wanted him dead — morte — as soon as he came on-screen. I almost mean Foster himself rather than the villain he plays.
Okay, that’s putting a bit harshly. Foster is “good” as Russell Crowe‘s loyal lieutenant — intense, commanding, colorful — but I hated his performance as much as his $850 Nudies-on-Lankershim leather jacket and all the Hollywood gunk he has caked all over his face at the end. I despised Foster’s performance even more than Joseph Gordon Levitt‘s in The Lookout, and that’s saying something.
Warning: a spoiler than means absolutely nothing follows two graphs from now.
Foster is totally actor-ish and post-modern diseased in ths film. He’s delivering one of those performances that say “look at me, Hollywood — I bring a charismatic evil-ness and a 21st Century loony-tunes intensity to my parts every time.” That is, unless he’s playing Angel in the X-Men movies or doing a quality TV thing in Six Feet Under, in which case he may be into something else. But that won’t happen for a while because Foster has become Hollywood’s go-to guy for parts Michael Madsen was playing ten years ago.
To deliver a classic lunatic performance you have to out-nutbag previous movie wackos, and one way to do this (ask the ghosts of John Ford or Budd Boet- ticher or Howard Hawks for advice) is to burn a guy alive inside a flaming stagecoach. And Foster manages this feat (the performance, not the burning) with just two expressions — his frozen-eyed Alpha Dog wacko look, and a slightly calmer version of same in which he seems to be thinking about turning wacko in about two or three minutes.
An awful lot of people get drilled in 3:10 to Yuma. I’ll bet more people die in this film than all the guys killed in all the dime western novels ever written by Elmore Leonard, Louis L’Amour and Zane Grey combined, and frankly I got a little tired of this after a while. But I kept wishing that Mangold would kill Foster’s psycho. Kill him for those ice-blue eyes, for that hat he wears, for those buttons on the back of his leather coat. Mangold is good at killing other guys you want to see die, but he lets Foster skate and that’s too bad.
If I saw Foster on a Los Angeles street I would smile and shake hands and act like a gentleman, but I’d give him a covert dirty look when his back is turned.
Anton Corbijn‘s Control (Weinstein Co., 10.10), the sad but visually arresting story of doomed Joy Division singer Ian Curtis, is less than eight weeks from opening in this country, and there’s still no full-on website to support it. Whassup with that? This is one of the best films of the year so far, and the cost of creating a tight, attractive, professional-level website with all the right bells and whistles is relatively small. If you know how to work it, that is.
Sam Riley in Anton Corbijn’s Control.
All the Weinstein Co. has put up is a single information page with a synopsis, a photo of star Sam Riley (who gives one of the year’s most arresting lead performances, no question) and a little blah-dee-blah about Curtis and Joy Division and yaddah-yaddah.
The Weinstein site doesn’t even feature a link up to this new Control trailer, which is now sitting on a My Space page.
“The mark of any exceptional film is the won’t-go-away factor,” I wrote just after seeing it last May at the Cannes Film Festival. “A film that doesn’t just linger in your head but seems to throb and dance around inside it, gaining a little more every time you re-reflect. This is very much the case with Anton Corbijn‘s Control, the black-and-white biopic of doomed Joy Division singer Ian Curtis.
“I finally saw Control at a market screening last Wednesday night (5.23) at the Star cineplex, and it’s definitely one of the four or five best flicks I’ve seen at Cannes — a quiet, somber, immensely authentic-seeming portrayal of a gloomy poet-performer whom I didn’t personally relate to at all, but whose story I found affecting anyway.
“Corbijn, a music-video guy, was obviously the maestro, but a significant reason why so much of Control works is newcomer Sam Riley, who portrays Curtis as a guy who was unable to throw off that melancholy weight-of-the-world consciousness that heavy-cat artists always seem to be grappling with. There is no such thing as a gifted writer/painter/poet/sculptor/filmmaker who laughs for the sake of laughing and does a lot of shoulder-shrugging. Everything is personal, and everything hurts deep down. And Riley makes you feel what it’s like to be a guy who just can’t snap out of it.”
Again, check out the new trailer. It’s the best one I’ve seen so far, and I’ve been looking at Control-related stuff all summer.
Billy Wilder‘s Ace in the Hole, a very cynical 1951 drama about a hard-bitten reporter (Kirk Douglas) exploiting the life-and-death situation of a trapped miner, came out on a long-awaited Criterion DVD on July 17th, and then 20 days later — last Monday, 8.6 — a cave-in trapped six miners inside a Utah mine, and within hours the media descended and began delivering the same kind of ticking-clock, hand-of-fate reports that Douglas and a horde of newsmen filed in the Wilder film…odd.
Kirk Douglas in Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole, shot taken near mining disaster situation in Huntington, Utah.
One thing reporters have learned since the 1920s (when the original trapped-miner incident that inspired the Wilder film occured) is to show heart and empathy, and there’s certainly been plenty of that coming out of Utah over the last five days.
Sadly, the real-life survival situation is starting to show similarities between the fate of the single trapped miner in Ace in the Hole as well as those radio reports about a little girl trapped in a hole in Woody Allen‘s Radio Days. “A tiny microphone lowered deep into the earth early Friday picked up no evidence that six coal miners are alive four days after they were caught in a cave-in,” a N.Y. Times story reported an hour or so ago. And while “an air sample indicated enough oxygen to breathe was present in the chamber where the miners are believed to be trapped, it also did not pick up carbon dioxide, the gas exhaled when people breathe.”
N.Y. Times writer Michael Cieply sits down at Swingers with Superbad co-writers Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, and he doesn’t even ask why those two cop characters (played by Rogen, Bill Hader) are so anarchic and off-the-reservation absurd (particularly during the second half) compared to the hilariously ground-level genuine-ness you get from the characters played by Jonah Hill, Michael Cera and Christopher Mintz-Plasse.
Judd Apatow, Seth Rogen
I wasn’t expecting Cieply to try and nail Rogen and Goldberg for this, of course, but he doesn’t even friggin’ bring it up. C’mon, man…inquiring minds want to know.
This video clip of Rogen and Superbad producer Judd Apatow talking things over is much more engaging. They discuss a presumably forthcoming N.Y. Times magazine piece that’s been written about them, and whether it makes any sense for a reporter to spend months and months falling them around in order to write it.
I also love the part when Rogen asks what the N.Y. Times magazine is, and then how he follows this with “none of my friends read it” and “I don’t know what it is…I mean, what is it, part of the newspaper on different paper or something?” Apatow gently breaks the news that it’s inside the Sunday paper and that it’s printed on shinier paper, and Rogen goes, “Oh…okay.”
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