Here’s an Iraq flick I’m 95% certain will kick ass: Imperial Life in the Emerald City, with Matt Damon playing a composite character “based on figures in Washington Post journalist Rajiv Chandrasekaran‘s book about chaos in Iraq, under Bourne Supremacy/Bourne Ultimatum/United 93 director Paul Greengrass.
At what point do moral reactions to torture porn flicks overcome standard dispassionate critique-y assessments (i.e., the “ooh, yeah!” Tarantino aesthetic that generally avoids moral considerations, regarding all manner of depicted behavior solely in terms of high-style visual provocation) and under-30 male moviegoers stand up and shout back at the screen, “This isn’t just vile and degrading on Roth’s part — there’s something seriously wrong with us for watching this crap!”? Or is such a reaction beyond this demographic?
Because of the success of Eli Roth‘s earlier Hostel, movies showing attractive youths being put through through agonizing torture prior to being killed is now considered shruggingly de rigeur, and with the release of Hostel, Part II two days from now, I’m wondering if there’s a line of any kind out there, or whether we’ve passed in a moral-spiritual realm in which lines have basically ceased to exist.
Hostel was about torturing guys, but something darker and more primal is being tapped into, it seems, with Hostel, Part II‘s focus on young female victims. Is there any way to say that these scenes aren’t driven by rage currents dwelling inside Roth and his fans, and is it unfair to call these currents sociopathic on some level? The standard assessment is that some kind of metaphorical sexual release factor has been provided by bloody slasher films all along (which is why they’ve always been big with the young date crowd). I doubt if torture porn flicks would make money if they weren’t sexually arousing on some level, but I shudder when I ask myself why certain guys get stiffies over this stuff.
Young women have been getting killed in horrific and grotesque ways since the beginning of the predator-slasher flicks (starting with John Carpenter‘s Halloween) in the late ’70s, and Roth knows he has to raise the bar or risk being dismissed and waved off by genre aficionados. But what are these films really about? And what do they say about the fans who go to them time and again? I know there are some readers who will think me old-school and fuddy-duddyish for asking this, but is there anything that viewers won’t stand for?
One line that will never be crossed is dog torture. If Roth were to show any howling canine getting hung upside down and slowly cut to death and then disemboweled, his career would come to a screeching halt. I don’t know about cats. I used to know guys in my pre-pubescent youth who would half-chuckle at the idea of swinging a cat around by its tail and slamming it into a wall.
A few days ago Film Ick‘s Brendon Connelly slammed Deadline Hollywood Daily‘s Nikki Finke over Finke’s calling Roth’s Hostel, Part II as “disgusting” without Finke (apparently) having seen it.
And now David Poland has admitted having watched a bootleg DVD of Hostel, Part II, and has recoiled big-time, slamming Roth for his depraved-puppy wallowings and saying he’d avoid shaking his hand should he happen to run into him.
He calls the Heather Matrazzo torture scene (n which she’s “hung upside down, naked, bound and gagged) ” the most disgusting, degrading, misogynistic, soulless shit I have ever seen in a movie that is going to be released widely in this country.”
He describes the scene thusly: “A beautiful European woman comes in, disrobes, lays in [a bathtub below the victim], and starts toying with the screaming Matarazzo with a long-handled sickle. She starts to draw blood and also starts getting off on it. She eventually removes the gag so Matarazzo can beg more pathetically and then cuts her throat, bathing and luxuriating in the blood as it pores over here.
“At that moment, for me, this was no longer just about a stupid, masturbatory, poorly directed shit piece of horror porn. Eli Roth became a little less human to me. He hung an actress, however willing, upside down and naked, gagged and bound, screaming, as nothing but a piece of objectified meat as Roth’s camera moves her breasts in and out of frame like some sort of sick porn tease.
“This is not the first time a director has done something horrible to an actress, but as the scene dragged on, I felt as though I was watching Ms. Matarazzo being raped on a spiritual level. This director did not identify with her as a human in the scene — she is just the target for a bloody gag.
“And then, like the truly sick punk he is, he made a woman do the dirty work in the scene. All said and done, the only person in the film who actually ends up sexually gratified by torture is a woman. There are others who seem to be going there. But this is the one fully executed torture/murder in the film. And just for fun, the woman gets to be naked too.
“I never did respect Roth’s work,” Poland concludes. “Now, if he and I crossed paths, I would refuse to shake his hand. I would extinguish the fire if he was burning, using something quicker than urine, but I’m not sure that I wouldn’t consider it karmic payback for him.”
L.A. Times columnist Patrick Goldstein takes a gander at the script for Peter Jackson‘s The Lovely Bones, and thereafter understands “why the film’s supporters see it as less of a brooding Little Children-style drama and more of a supernatural thriller, packed with creepy chills and a sense of wonder.”
It doesn’t matter. Even if it’s a dark adult drama about a 14-year-old girl who is brutally raped and murdered, which sounds nervy at the very least. If it’s a Peter Jackson film, I know I’m going to suffer one way or another. All of you Jackson haters out there know exactly what I’m talking about. He can’t and won’t go home again and revert into the filmmaker who made Heavenly Creatures. He’s become like Federico Fellini was in the late ’60s and ’70s (i.e., indulgence is everything!), and nothing is going to change that.
Goldstein then reads the untitled Michael Mann-Leonardo DiCaprio Hollywood period thriller that’s been having trouble getting financed, and concludes this is due to (a) it being too costly at a $120 million, plus the concern that Mann almost always goes over-budget, and (b) the film being “full of familiar Hollywood characters who’ve been portrayed endlessly, in altered form, in films over the years…for all its popularity among filmmakers, the inside-Hollywood movie genre has a limited commercial reach.”
As much as I love anything Mann does, I wasn’t all that thrilled when I first read the idea for thisfilm — DiCaprio as a private gumshoe in 1938 who falls in love with an actress he’s hired to watch/protect. Burnished period stuff has a built-in ceidling. But I’d love to see Mann and DiCaprio make theirversion of For Whom The Bell Tolls.
Reader Dennis Costa feels this is “the epitome of the mash-up trailer trend…a downright inspired piece of comedy using Star Wars footage (specifically Vader scenes) with audio clips of other James Earl Jones movies…approaching genius-level…the first three and a half minutes could be the funniest thing I’ve ever seen,” etc. My 1998-level flat screen inside a cafe in Greve (south of Florence about 25 kilometers) doesn’t play video so I’m trusting Costa.
I’m sitting inside the southern branch of the Venetian Navigator (i.e., the one closer to the San Marco district) as I wait the Cannes Film Festival winners to be announced online. And as we were all taught in school, a watched pot never boils. Tell you what….here are two heavyweight video clips of yesterday’s rainstorm. Watch ’em or don’t.
The mark of any exceptional film is the won’t-go-away factor — 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 saw 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.
This plus the ’70s northern-England atmosphere and Martin Ruhe‘s utterly fantastic black-and-white photography combine in a perfect slam-dunk that amounts to perhaps the finest rock-music biopic dramas I’ve ever seen. How many really good ones have there been? My mind is a blank.
Curtis, the movie says, was a mopey epileptic who couldn’t live with the fact that he’d made a mistake in marrying a domestic mouse named Deborah (Samantha Morton), whose book about Curtis, “Touching From A Distance”, was the basis of Matt Greenhalgh‘s screenplay. Curtis especially couldn’t handle the stress and guilt of an ongoing extamarital affair with a Belgian journalist named Annik (Alexandra Maria Lara).
The guy never heard of double-tracking? Of cutting marital ties but at the same time staying close with your ex-wife and supporting the child you’ve had with her? I don’t see the problem, but this plus the epilepsy sent Curtis over the edge and he wound up hanging himself at age 23.
Before last Wednesday, I had listened to Joy Division tracks maybe five or six times. (Not counting what I heard in 24 Hour Party People.) Now I’m suddenly into them, and am definitely planning on buying one or more of their CDs the next time I’m at Amoeba.
Acquiring the North American rights to this quietly jolting biopic may turn out to be the best thing Harvey Weinstein did during his stay in Cannes…unless he paid too much.
The first word that came my way after the Directors’ Fortnight debut screening a week ago Thursday was “routine,” “overhyped,” “fairly conventional,” “too domestic” and so on. The person who passed most of this along to me is an exceptionally alert critic who obviously has a right to his opinions, but he gave me a bum steer, dammit.
Here’s a Control clip that’ll give you a little taste. Here’s another source for the same clip.
Control star Sam Riley (l.), director Anton Corbijn
The stark black-and-white photography is more than merely attractive. It feels like a fit with the somewhat gloomy aesthetic of the punk and post-punk era, and Joy Division’s music in particular. I can’t stop feeling depressed over the fact that we’re all doomed because life is always assaulting us and pulling us down and giving us pain, etc.
Tony Kebbell‘s portrayal of Joy Division manager Rob Gretton — a nervy, mouthy hammerhead sort, is easily the second best performance in the film. He’s also the sole dispenser of comic relief.
I was suspicious of Control early on due to Greenhalgh’s script being based on Curtis’s book (ex-wives and in-laws are generally the least honest and most sentimental sources when it comes to reconstituting an artist’s life and work), but the film doesn’t feel the least bit sanitized or soft-peddled.
I particularly liked that there’s nothing showy about Control — no big emotional blow-ups or Oscar-bait depictions of agonized primal screams. The opposite, really. There’s a great dark moment when Curtis predicts in a quiet, matter-of-fact manner that his young daughter Natalie will probably hate him when she gets older. (Because he barely pays attention to her.) His wife is staggered that he would say this and says he’s delusional. But Curtis knows what he knows and reiterates that “she will…she will.”
Some guys are born poets and songwriters, and some guys should always wear condoms when sleeping with the girl next door.
Bella Tarr‘s very slow-moving The Man From London, a Cannes entry, “epitomized what is known as a ‘festival film,’ i.e., one made for no known audience apart from the already converted disciples of a cult director,” Variety‘s Todd McCarthy has observed. “One version of hell for me would consist of being trapped inside the insular world of this film for eternity.”
I’ve now seen Juan Antonio Bayona‘s The Orphanage twice, which is perhaps an irresponsible thing given all the movies and events to be absorbed at the Cannes Film Festival. But it’s such a deliciously haunting and rousingly effective work that I couldn’t resist. Joel and Ethan Coen‘s No Country for Old Men is the best all-around film I’ve seen here, but The Orphanage is a very close second (with Michael Moore‘s Sicko and Michael Winterbottom‘s A Mighty Heart running third and fourth).
The Orphanage director Juan Antonio Bayona following our chat in the Majestic Hotel lounge — Wednesday, 5.23.07, 12:25 pm
Produced by Guillermo del Toro, The Orphanage is hands down the creepiest sophisticated ghost story/thriller to come along since Alejandro Amenabar‘s The Others, and if you ask me (or anyone else who’s seen it here) it absolutely deserves a ranking alongside other haunted-by-small-children classics as Jack Clayton‘s The Innocents and Nicolas Roeg‘s Don’t Look Now. It also recalls Robert Wise‘s The Haunting, although the ghosts in that 1961 film were all over 21.
Bayona, whom I spoke to a couple of hours ago at the Majestic Hotel, is the newest addition to the current pantheon of Spanish-language directors (most famously repped by Del Toro, Alfonso Cuaron and Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu) who have made — and will hopefully continue to make, if they don’t allow the Hollywood flotsam-jetsam effect to dilute their focus — the most full-spirited and excitingly crafted films of our time. This is all the more wowser knowing that The Orphanage is Bayona’s first feature.
I was told this morning that Bob Berney‘s Picturehouse is planning to open The Orphanage sometime in early ’08. Due respect, but that feels like the wrong call. It should definitely open before the end of the year to qualify in the Best Foreign Language Film category as well as the various critics’ awards. (If I were calling the shots I would open it in late October.) This adult-level, mostly gore-free chiller is so many cuts above the crude horror films of our day (i.e., the Lionsgate torture-porners and slasher films) that their fans may feel moderately ashamed after seeing it. Or at least wised up.
Written by Sergio G. Sanchez, The Orphanage is a close stylistic and thematic cousin of Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth as well as Henry James‘ “The Turning of the Screw.” It’s about nocturnal, other-worldly imaginings taking shape and governing destinies inside the heads of young children — a kind of nightmarish “Peter Pan” tale about (as Variety‘s Justin Chang has observed) “a grown-up Wendy figure grieving her lost boy.”
Laura is a mother in her early ’40s (Belen Rueda, last in The Sea Inside) who is running an orphanage for disabled kids with her husband Carlos (Fernando Caya). She is doing this partly as a way of communing with her childhood since she herself was raised there. But there are residual forces at work in inside the old house, and they have their strongest effect upon Laura and Carlos’ excitable young son, Simon (Roger Princep), who is soon reacting to and then conversing with a small group of young tyke-sized ghosts. We soon learn they’re remnants of kids who suffered a bruising trauma when they were living in the orphanage roughly 30 years earlier.
The film’s two key events are Simon’s sudden disappearance one day, and then Laura’s increasingly manic and desperate attempts to find him (even if that means venturing over to “the other side”) and bring him back. I’m not going to recap any more of the story, but there are at least two heavy-jolt scenes that result — one in the second act, and one in the third. They are worth it, trust me — especially the latter, which gives you the serious chills by panning back and forth between Laura and her five or six visitors during the playing of a childhood game.
What 97% of today’s horror filmmakers don’t get is that it’s not the number of “scares” that matter as much as the effective delivering of seriously creepy mood. Bayona, trust me, knows how to play this game and then some. Cheers also to Oscar Faura for his shadowy widescreen photography, which captures it all just right; ditto the economical work by editor Elena Ruiz, and the very pronounced and melodramatic orchestral score by Fernando Velazquez.
Again, here’s the Bayona interview from earlier this afternoon.
The agreeably shocking thing about Michael Winterbottom‘s A Mighty Heart, which had its first-time-anywhere press screening this morning inside the Grand Palais, is that it’s not a Michael Winterbottom film. Not, I mean to say, a film that has seemingly emerged from the palette and the sensibility of the director of The Road to Guantan- amo, Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, 9 Songs, Code 46 and 24 Hour Party People…all but one of which I had problems with to varying degrees.
Instead, A Mighty Heart is a Michael Mann film — a tight, absorbing, sharply assembled investigative procedural. It summons memories of the pacing, the underplayed performances and the sense of swiss-watch exactitude that have come to be associated with Mann’s films. I can’t recall another film in which a name-brand director has so totally abandoned a signature style (wait…does Winterbottom have one?) and just become, in a sense, “someone else.”
A Mighty Heart is about the kidnapping and murder ofWall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl (Dan Futterman), as experienced by his distraught widow Mariane Pearl (Angelina Jolie). It’s handsomely shot (especially surprising given the generally meh photography in Winterbottom’s previous films), intricate and yet surprisingly easy to keep track of, and very deftly edited.
And in it, Jolie has given a completely satisfying and quite admirable performance which feels to me like the best thing she’s ever done. More mature and less showy than her nutter turn in Girl Interrupted (for which she won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar. The role of Mariane Pearl isn’t exactly a showboat thing (although there’s a very strong grief-venting scene in the third act that everyone will remember). It’s not about histrionics as much as just getting it right and staying with the truth of it — but Jolie’s carefully measured emoting plus her aural and physical resemblances to the Real McCoy make this performance a fairly safe bet for a Best Actress Oscar campaign later this year.
There’s a lot more to discuss here, but I have to get to the longer version of Quentin Tarantino‘s Death Proof, which starts in less than 40 minutes. I’ll try and complete this later tonight, or certainly by tomorrow morning.
Doing time for 45 days is going to be the best thing that ever happened to Paris Hilton. I did a little time in L.A. County in the late ’70s for some unpaid parking tickets, and it sure as hell clears the clutter out of your head and leaves you with something that feels a lot like focus and fortitude. And if there’s anyone on the face of the planet who could use some of this more than Paris Hilton, I’d like to know who that is.
Jail is awful but if you can grim up and face it down, you come out feeling as if you’re a better and a somewhat stronger person. I only did three or four days so I don’t know about hard time. But I know enough about the sound of clanging steel doors to recognize the truth of a line that Dustin Hoffman said in Ulu Grosbard‘s Straight Time: “Outside it’s what you have in your pockets — inside it’s who you are.”
45 days in the pokey won’t be a walk in the park for a ditzoid like Paris Hilton, but if she’s smart she’ll read up about how Robert Mitchum handled his jail sentence in the late ’40s for marijuana possession. He did it quietly and didn’t squawk. He swept the floors, stayed out of trouble, took his medicine and had won everyone’s respect by the time he got out. I don’t think for a second that our very own empty- headed, barren-souled heiress has the character to “do a Mitchum,” but the most potentially profound spiritual experience of her so-far-useless life awaits nonetheless.
And there’s nothing like getting out of jail to make you feel like Jesus’ son. (Or Mary Magdelene‘s daughter.) It reminds you what a wonderful and blessed place the world outside is, and what a sublime thing trip it can be to walk around free and do whatever you want within the usual boundaries, and what a serene thing it is to be smiled at by strangers in stores and restaurants. People you wouldn’t give a second thought to suddenly seem like good samaritans because of some act of casual kindness.
Jail doesn’t just teach you about yourself but about your immediate circle. “If you want to know who your friends are,” Charles Bukowski once wrote, “get yourself a jail sentence.” Or go to a hospital. As foul and bullying as he often is, David Poland nonetheless called and left a get-well message when I had that systemic poisoning episode a few months ago. I’m just saying.
The Hollywood Reporter isn’t what it used to be, but there’s still plenty of interest in the trade paper’s top editorial job,” says a 5.4 Radar item by Jeff Bercovici. “A number of Los Angeles Times staffers are said to have thrown their hats into the ring, perhaps worried about what might become of the Times now that it (and parent Tribune Co.) have been taken over by Sam Zell. (One, staff writer Claudia Eller, says she was contacted by a search firm, not the other way around.) New York Times scribe Sharon Waxman‘s name has also come up.
“Asked whether she was in the running, Waxman says, ‘There’s nothing going on there.’ (Intriguingly, she adds, “If that were true, I don’t think I’d let you break it.”) The job is said to pay around $200,000 a year. ‘If it were not for the money, no serious journalist would take it,’ says one embittered insider. ‘The new owners are only interested in using the paper to help promote their seminars and other profit-making enterprises.'”
The San Francisco Film Festival gave a forum yesterday to theatre director, opera-creator and impresario Peter Sellars to deliver a “State of Cinema” address inside a large theatre at the Kabuki 8 plex. Sellars is a man who lives in his own mystical-energy field and within his own ecclesiastical realm, but who sees and shares everything from within it. It was a stirring, touching, soul-lifting thing to sit in the fourth row and just absorb every brilliant thought, whether you agreed with every last word or not.
Peter Sellars during yesterday afternoon’s speech at the Kabuki 8 — Sunday, 4.29.07, 4:35 pm
I recorded most of what he said, in two sessions. Here’s the second part. The sound is low and it would be best to listen with headphones, but this will give you an idea of what it was like.
What did Sellars say? That deliberately cruel and heartless things are inflicted upon the poor by the well-to-do, and that film is perhaps best considered as an agent of consciousness-raising and social change, and that art’s highest function is to prepare the public for what is possible, even if it may seem impossible at the time.
Sellars is professor of World Arts and Culture at U.C.L.A., where he teaches “Art as Social Action” and “Art as Moral Action.” Yesterday’s talk was an extension or expression of these themes.
At one point in discussing some institutional cruelty Sellars began to weep, and although I wasn’t feeling the moral outrage as acutely as he was I was moved by that fact that he was feeling it and then some — his emotionalism is one serious torch. Immense artistic accomplishments, worldwide respect, orange shirt, blue beads, spikey hair, Harvard education…the man is a trip.
Sellars talked a lot about the last year of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and what he was really consumed with as his life drew to a close, and that this was far more fascinating than the “frat-boy ” shenanigans that Milos Forman and Anthony Shaffer’s Amadeus depicted.
Again, here’s a 22-minute portion of what he said.
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