Danny Boyle‘s 127 Hours, which stars James Franco, tells the true story of Aron Ralston, the mountain climber who amputated half his forearm with a Swiss Army knife in order to free himself after being trapped by a boulder for a full five days in ’03.
The theme of 127 Hours is about courage, “choosing life” — a brave kind of heroism. The first half-hour is reportedly dialogue-free, which sounds intriuging. I believe that the dialogue-free opening of There Will Be Blood lasted appproximately 15 minutes, give or take.
Fox Searchlight will be facing a marketing challenge, to say the least, in persuading Average Joes to want to see this, or to sit through the arm-hacking portion, at least. I’m
not trying to deflate anything or anyone. I’m just honestly asking myself a question that I’m sure others are grappling with as we speak. Who wants to see such a story?
If I was Ralston I wouldn’t walk around with a naked arm stub. I would get myself a cool-looking prosthetic Dr. No arm — black, nimble-fingered, powerful grip, etc. Or a T2 arm.
“‘Tis the thing behind the mask I chiefly hate; the malignant thing that has plagued mankind since time began; the thing that maws and mutilates our race, not killing us outright but letting us live on, with half a heart and half a lung and half an arm.”
The MPAA’s decision to give Amir Bar Lev‘s The Tillman Story an R rating is not cool, but it’s not the end of the world either. Kids under 17 will be technically barred from seeing it, yes, but c’mon, guys — how many teens are ever interested in seeing any documentary about anything, even one as good as this?
The MPAA’s decision is nonetheless grotesque.
The Tillman Story is about an orchestrated governmental obscenity that tried to exploit the memory of former Arizona Cardinals safety and U.S. Army Ranger Pat Tillman, who was killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan in 2004, for political ends. U.S. military and Bush administration officials initially floated a story that claimed Tillman was killed by Taliban troops, and that he died saving his fellow troops. Rah-rah, sis-boom-bah.
“Excessive language” is the MPAA’s reason for the R rating. They’re referring to three uses of the word “fuck.” It apparently matters not to the ratings board that each time the word is spoken with a sense of moral righteousness and/or outrage.
The first timePat Tillman, Sr. quotes a letter he wrote to military investigators who’d bungled their inquiry into his son’s death. He ended it with this line: “In sum, fuck you…and yours.” The second time viewers are told the very last words of Pat Tillman, words he shouted just before being shot by fellow troops: “I’m Pat fucking Tillman!”
The third time Tillman’s younger brother is shown dismissing the notion that his brother is with God. That’s a nice idea, he says during a memorial serivce, but the truth is that “Pat is fucking dead.” Again — the “f” word used to express blunt despairing truth.
As always, context is everything. And sometimes the use of a vulgar word is absolutely the right thing. It’s appalling to consider that the MPAA is apparently too thick or obstinate to understand this.
“Of course there is excessive language,” said Tillman Story producer John Battsek in a statement. “This is a film that follows a truly exemplary family torn apart by the death of their loved one and the barrage of government deceit they encountered in their pursuit of the honest truth. We should be looking at this film as a way to show our younger generation the power of true family values and the sometimes unfortunate failings of our government.”
Bar Lev adds that “the language in this film is not gratuitous. I think this is how many people would react when faced with the unthinkable. Giving this film an R rating prevents young people from seeing this film; the very people who should be exposed to a great American like Pat Tillman.”
“This is one of the most important films I’ve distributed in my career,” says Tillman Story distributor Harvey Weinstein. “I want my teenage daughter and the nation’s young adults to be able to watch Pat’s story. We need to learn from this story and limiting who can see it is not the answer.”
Update: The R rating was yesterday upheld after an appeal.
Two nights ago at Houston’s Angelika Film Center, one of the stars of Restrepo — Sgt. Misha Pemble-Belkin — dropped by for a q & a. The following day Culturemap‘s Joe Leydon (who may or may not have conducted the interview with Pemble-Belkin) posted an admiring account of his visit.
Restrepo is a narrowly focused, bravely captured documentary about U.S. troops fighting in Afghanistan’s Korangal Valley from ’07 to ’08. Pemble-Belkin, now stationed at Louisiana’s Fort Polk, was one of those interviewed and befriended by co-directors Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington during their year-long stay.
For my money Leydon’s article seems a little too obliging, primarily because it mentions but doesn’t begin to explore an idea that’s been seeping through here and there, which is that Restrepo is a pro-war, support-the-troops, emotional-propaganda piece wrapped in allegedly neutralist observational verite clothing.
The apparent bottom line is that Junger and Hetherington, like many embedded war journalists before them, “fell in love” with their subjects, and in so doing evolved into supporters of the U.S. Afghanistan campaign. It seems as if they were unable to separate their feelings for the troops and the war that has taken the lives of over 1000 Americans. It’s been reported that Junger has recently been pushing a stay-the-course policy on news talk shows.
Pemble-Belkin obviously knows whereof he speaks and has an absolute right to say what he’s learned and believes about the war in Afghanistan. But reading that he wants to stay in the Army “until we win the war…I don’t want it to go on until my children are old enough to have to go over there” made me furious.
“Win” in Afghanistan? We’re not even stalemating over there. The effort is doomed and we’re on a timetable to evacuate. On top of which the movie doesn’t even explain that U.S. military command pulled out of the Korangal Valley last fall because they could see it was a losing effort.
It is bothersome that Leydon, the good host and gentle inquisitor, doesn’t even tip-toe into this, much less address Pemble-Belkin’s delusion that we might “win” over there. And yet he lets him get away with “politely but firmly” declining to answer “what he calls ‘political questions.'”
Let me explain something. Everything involved in the fighting of a war is political, and all questions about any aspect of that war, including a friendly documentary that presents a highly selective, grunt’s-eye view, are political. And anyone who stands up for the honest but restricted reporting in Restrepo is standing up for its roundabout pro-war stance. So Pemble-Belkin driving from Ft. Polk to Houston on a motorcycle to take part in the Angelika interview, was, in every sense of the term, a political act. Because in so doing he’s taking part in the Restrepo smokescreen, which is the filmmakers trying to pretend that it’s not political by focusing solely on the day-to-day lives of soldiers and saying, “Isn’t it fascinating and touching the way these guys just hang in there and do their job and survive and shit?”
Never trust anyone who says he’d rather not get into political questions. That’s a total chickenshit dodge.
“The kind of frankness that Restrepo is offering is, to put it mildly, selective. For realism’s sake Restrepo chooses to isolate its audience inside the insular operational mentality of the grunts — ‘get it done,’ ‘fill up more sandbags,’ ‘ours not to reason why’ and so on. In so doing it misleads and distorts in a way that any fair-minded person would and should find infuriating. Is there any other way to describe a decision to keep viewers ignorant about any broader considerations — anything factual or looming in a political/tactical/situational sense — that might impact the fate of the subjects, or their mission?
“Imagine a documentary about the day-to-day life of Steve Schmidt, John McCain‘s ’08 presidential campaign manager, that ignores how the campaign is going and instead focuses on Schmidt’s relationship with his family and his dentist and his kids’ homework and his visits to a local cafe and his dealings with the guy who mows the lawn once a week. What would you call that approach? Thorough? Honest?”
I thought it was odd, by the way, that neither Leydon nor his Culturemap editor[s] felt it inecessary to include a photo of Pemble-Belkin. They couldn’t snap a picture and post it? Here’s a link to a photo of Pemble-Belkin as captured in the film.
I’ve known Phil Spector‘s musical signature all my life — that “wall of sound” thing that gave such ecstatic echo-phonic oomph to all those early to mid ’60s hits (“Be My Baby”, “Walkin In The Rain”, “River Deep, Mountain High”) and Beatle songs he produced a few years later. But I’d never heard Spector speak or gotten to “know” him until I saw Vikram Jayanti‘s The Agony and the Ecstasy of Phil Spector, which will play the Film Forum from 6.30 to 7.13.
And he’s a fascinating man — there’s no getting around that. A brilliant, oddball X-factor “character” of the first order. I’ve known a few guys like Spector. They’re egotists and half-crazy and it’s always about them, but they’re a trip to talk to and share stories with. If you love show business, you can’t help but love how these guys are always sharp as a tack and don’t miss a trick and are always blah-blahing about their genius and their importance. Except Spector’s blah is backed up by truth. He’s a serious maestro who really did shape and inspire rock ‘n’ roll in its infancy, and who touched heaven a few times in the process.
Okay, so he probably shot Lana Clarkson, a 40 year-old, financially struggling actress, on 2.3.03 when she was visiting his home. Or maybe he threatened to shoot her and the gun accidentally went off. Or whatever. And maybe Spector telling a Daily Telegraph reporter two months before the shooting that “he had bipolar disorder and that he considered himself ‘relatively insane‘” was a factor. And maybe he deserves to be in jail for 19 years. The guy is obviously immodest and intemperate with demons galore.
But you can tell from listening to Spector that he’s some kind of bent genius — that he’s brilliant, exceptional, perceptive — and that it’s a monumental tragedy that these qualities co-exist alongside so much weirdness inside the man — all kinds of strutting-egoist behavior and his having threatened women with guns and all of that “leave me alone because I’m very special” hiding-behind-bodyguards crap. Because life is short and the kind of vision and talent that Spector has (or at least had) is incredibly rare and world-class.
That’s why Jayanti’s film is so absorbing, and why the title is exactly right. Why do so many gifted people always seem to be susceptible to baser impulses? Why do they allow bizarre psychological currents to influence their lives? What kind of a malignant asshole waves guns around in the first place? I’ll tell you what kind of guy does that. A guy who never got over hurtful traumatic stuff that happened in his childhood (like his father committing suicide), and who decided early on that he wouldn’t deal with it.
Phil Spector and the Ronettes during a 1963 Gold Star recording session in Los Angeles.
It’s another tragedy that this BBC doc, originally aired in England in 2008, is viewable on YouTube. Perhaps this will affect ticket sales at the Film Forum, or maybe it’s generally understood that you can’t absorb a doc about a music legend unless you see it as a unified big-screen thing with decent sound pumping out of the speakers.
It mainly just needs to be seen, period. Spector’s story encompasses so much and connects to so many musical echos and currents that people (okay, older people) carry around inside, and the way this history keeps colliding with what Spector probably did (despite his earnest claims to Jayanti that he’s innocent) and the Court TV footage and the evidence against him and the thought of a woman’s life being snuffed out…it’s just shattering.
I’m adding Jayanti’s film to my list of the year’s best docs. I’ve seen it twice now and I could probably see it another couple of times. Anyone who cares about ’60s pop music and understands Spector’s importance in the scheme of that decade needs to see this thing. It’s a touchstone trip and an extreme lesson about how good and evil things can exist in people at the same time.
At the same time it’s slightly pathetic that the trailer that the Film Forum site links to is so poorly sized and cropped and has no real focus or intrigue. It doesn’t represent how good the film is. Not even close.
90% of the doc alternates between interviews with the hermetic Spector, taped between his first and second murder trials, and the Court TV footage. But the arguments and testimony are sometimes…okay, often pushed aside on the soundtrack by the hits that Spector produced with the Ronettes, the Righteous Brothers, Ike and Tina Turner, the Crystals, Darlene Love, John Lennon, George Harrison, Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans (that rendition they and Spector recorded of “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah” in ’63). It’s the constant back and forth of beauty and darkness, beauty and rage, beauty and warped emotion — repeated over and over and over.
I never knew that the title of Spector’s “To Know Him Is To Love Him” (which he wrote and performed with the Teddy Bears in ’58) was taken from his father’s gravestone. I’d forgottten that he wrote “Spanish Harlem” — an exceptionally soulful ballad for the 1960 pop market. I never gave much thought to what “Da Doo Ron Ron” meant — I never thought it meant anything in particular — but Spector says it’s a metaphor for slurpy kisses and handjobs and fingerings at the end of a teenage date. Spector also had a good deal to do, he says, with the writing of Lennon’s “Woman Is Nigger of the World.”
There are two curious wrongos. Spector mentions that his father committed suicide when he was “five or six” — he was actually nine when that happened. (How could he not be clear on that?) Spector mentions that line about John Lennon having thanked him for “keeping rock ‘n’ roll alive for the two years when Elvis went into the Army” when in fact Spector’s big period began just after Elvis got out of the Army, starting around ’60 or thereabouts.
Spector mentions that if people like you they don’t say bad things about you, but it’s clear that if he hadn’t been such a hermit and hadn’t acted like a dick for so many years, and if he hadn’t been photographed with that ridiculous finger-in-the-wall-socket electric hairdo, and if he’d just gotten out and charmed people the way he does in the interview footage with Jayanti then…well, who knows? Maybe things might have turned out differently.
As I wrote on May 2nd, Amir Bar Lev‘s The Tillman Story is “far and away one of the finest films I’ve seen this year, and a likely contender for the 2010 Best Feature Documentary Oscar. It has the stuff that engages and holds and sinks in deep.” Which means, as Movieline‘s Stu Van Airsdalepredicted earlier today, that the fiends at Big Hollywood will probably try and trash it in some way.
Sure enough, BH’s John Nolteresponded as follows: “Big Hollywood hasn’t seen The Tillman Story. It wasn’t even high on our radar. But when two of Tinseltown’s top leftist water-carriers” — the L.A. Times‘ Stephen Zeitchik also wrote about it on 6.20 — “carry this much water to assure us there’s nothing political to see here and then assume the highly defensive crouch of challenging us to ‘smear’ it…well, something’s up. And we very much appreciate them letting us know.”
Returning to my 5.2 review: “I felt just as stirred up last night — seething, close to tearful — as I was after my initial Sundance viewing three months ago. Because this is not a film about the Middle East conflict but about a stand-up American family and how they responded (and continue to respond) to an orchestrated governmental obscenity that tried to diminish the memory of a fallen son.
“I’m speaking, of course, of former Arizona Cardinals safety and U.S. Army Ranger Pat Tillman, and particularly his April 2004 friendly-fire death in Afghanistan — a result of his being shot three times in the head by a fellow U.S. soldier. It happened because of the usual idiotic confusion, and some young intemperate guys who wanted to be in a fire fight and acted foolishly in the heat of the moment. Tillman was enraged that his own fellows were shooting at him, of course, and his last words were an attempt to get them to wake up — ‘I’m Pat fucking Tillman!’
“The obscenity was the attempt in ’04 by the U.S. military and Bush administration to make political hay out of Tillman’s death by manufacturing a bullshit scenario that claimed he was killed by Taliban troops and that he died in an effort save his fellow troops.
“Of course, 97% of American moviegoers are going to ignore The Tillman Story when it opens because (a) they’re resolutely opposed to seeing any film that has anything to do with the conflicts in Iraq or Afghanistan and (b) they don’t much like documentaries anyway, and (c) they just want to chill out and be entertained. The fact that The Tillman Story leaves you feeling angry and alive and engaged with the actual world will most likely have no effect on this determination.”
I think I’m done with war documentaries that make a point of not offering any sort of opinion about anything — no history or context, no political point of view, just “this is war, war is hell, taste it.” Well, I’m sick of that shit after seeing Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger‘s Restrepo, a bravely captured, technically first-rate documentary about a year under fire in Afghanistan’s Korangal Valley, a.k.a., “the valley of death.”
There’s no question whatsover that this movie lies through omission about what’s really going on in Afghanistan in the broader, bigger-picture sense. I found myself becoming more and more angry about this after catching Restrepo two nights ago at the Walter Reade theatre, and especially after doing some homework.
Hetherington and Junger spent a little more than a year (May 2007 to July 2008) with several U.S. soldiers in that besieged neck of the woods. They focused mainly on the grunts’ hilltop camp called Restrepo (pronounced res-TREP-o and named for a medic in their unit who’d been killed). The film does a clean and competent job of portraying their endless firefights with Taliban forces and their community dealings with the locals, and it acquaints us with various members of the hilltop platoon — their faces, lives, impressions — in what seems like a frank and forthright manner.
Except the kind of frankness that Restrepo is offering is, to put it mildly, selective. For realism’s sake Restrepo chooses to isolate its audience inside the insular operational mentality of the grunts — “get it done,” “fill up more sandbags,” “ours not to reason why” and so on. In so doing it misleads and distorts in a way that any fair-minded person would and should find infuriating. Is there any other way to describe a decision to keep viewers ignorant about any broader considerations — anything factual or looming in a political/tactical/situational sense — that might impact the fate of the subjects, or their mission?
Imagine a documentary about the day-to-day life of Steve Schmidt, John McCain‘s ’08 presidential campaign manager, that ignores how the campaign is going and instead focuses on Schmidt’s relationship with his family and his dentist and his kids’ homework and his visits to a local cafe and his dealings with the guy who mows the lawn once a week. What would you call that approach? Thorough? Honest?
Rest assured that if I was one of those Korangal troops I would ask a shit-load of questions about the general game plan, as in what the fuck are we doing there and how the hell do we ever get out? But nobody wants to go there, least of all Hetherington and Junger, and so Restrepo is just about cigarettes and weapons and wrestling matches and firefights and sandbags and a cow that got stuck in some barbed wire and had to be killed, and then had to be paid for in order to chill down the locals.
I’m of the view that the Afghanistan War is pure quicksand, and that we can’t help to prevail (i.e., defeat the Taliban or at least reduce them to insignificance) because we’re foreign invaders and sooner or later all invaders are out-lasted by the natives, and that natural organisms will infect and weaken them, and as a result they’ll eventually pack up and go home. Ask H.G. Wells or Ho Chi Minh.
We’re not stopping another 9/11 from happening by fighting there. We’re just fighting a series of skirmishes and offensives that will continue for years to come, perhaps even decades, and which can’t hope to lead to “victory.” It would be great if the Taliban could be finally defeated, sure, but it’s not going to happen and any military or intelligence person who claims otherwise is dreaming. The bottom line is that (a) we can’t win and (b) there’s no way out other than just quitting.
Quitting is un-American, you say? Shameful, unthinkable, cowardly? Well, two months ago U.S. forces up and quit the whole Korangal Valley offensive. That’s right — they shined it. The lives of 42 Americans who died fighting there over the last four years? Water under the bridge, U.S commanders decided. Better to cut bait than waste more lives.
(l.) Sebastian Junger, (r.) Tim Hetherington during filming.
In fact the general thinking (as expressed in this 4.16 N.Y. Times story) is that U.S. troops’ presence in the valley may have actually made matters worse by creating Taliban sympathies among once-neutral Korangalis.” Or so it says in the Times story as well as this Wikipedia summary.
This massive fact has been ignored by Restrepo — they could have easily added a tagline in the closing credits — and was not mentioned by Hetherington during the post-screening q & a.
I asked Hetherington if he could offer his civilian-observer, non-military perspective about whether he could foresee any circumstance that might allow U.S. commanders to decide, as they’ve done in the case of the Korangal Valley, that U.S. efforts to defeat the Taliban simply aren’t working and that it’s time to just pack it in. Hetherington got my drift, but he ignored it and blathered on about how the Afghanistan situation is different from Vietnam in the ’60s.
Hetherington has been a war photographer for years, and guys like him are basically action junkies — let’s face it. He seems almost invested in the Afghanistan conflict, perversely, because it provided him with a year’s worth of adrenaline rushes as well as the opportunity to create a noteworthy film and contribute great pics to Vanity Fair. In any case he’s apparently determined to follow the script set out by The Hurt Locker — i.e., our film isn’t preaching, not taking a stand, just showing how it is for the troops, etc.
(l.) Hetherington, Rachel Reid during Friday night’s q & a at Walter Reade theatre.
“What I’m asking,” I repeated, “is if there’s any way out of this conflict, or are we going to be there…you know, five or ten more years or indefinitely or what?” Rachel Reid, an Afghanistan researcher for Human Rights Watch who was sitting next to Hetherington, said that U.S. allies were getting a little fidgety and that the U.S. economy was impacting the situation and other generic blah-blah stuff.
Restrepo doesn’t tell you what’s going on and Hetherington and Reid weren’t in the mood, so consider the following:
A 12.22.09 CNN story by Peter Bergen reported that “a December 22 briefing, prepared by the top U.S. intelligence official in Afghanistan and obtained by CNN, concludes that the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan is increasingly effective.
“The briefing, which warns that the ‘situation is serious,’ was prepared by Maj. Gen. Michael Flynn last month. His assessment is that the Taliban’s ‘organizational capabilities and operational reach are qualitatively and geographically expanding” and the group is capable of much greater frequency of attacks and varied locations of attacks.
“According to the unclassified briefing, the insurgency can now sustain itself indefinitely because of three factors: (a) The increased availability of bomb-making technology and material; (b) The Taliban’s access to two major funding streams, one from the opium trade and the other from overseas donations from Muslim countries, which reach the Taliban by courier or through a system of informal banks known as ‘hawalas’ that operate across much of the Islamic world; and (c) the Taliban’s continuing ability to recruit foot soldiers based on the perception that they ‘retain the religious high-ground,’ and factors such as poverty and tribal friction.
This morning N.Y. Times columnist Frank Richreminded that Gen. Stanley McChrystal “is calling the much-heralded test case for administration counterinsurgency policy — the de-Talibanization and stabilization of the Marja district — ‘a bleeding ulcer.’ And that, relatively speaking, is the good news from this war.”
“U.S. Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top allied military commander in Afghanistan, sat gazing at maps of Marjah as a Marine battalion commander asked him for more time to oust Taliban fighters from a longtime stronghold in southern Afghanistan’s Helmand province.
“‘You’ve got to be patient,’ Lt. Col. Brian Christmas told McChrystal. ‘We’ve only been here 90 days.’
“‘How many days do you think we have before we run out of support by the international community?’ McChrystal replied.
A charged silence settled in the stuffy, crowded chapel tent at the Marine base in the Marjah district.
“‘I can’t tell you, sir,’ the tall, towheaded, Fort Bragg, N.C., native finally answered.
“‘I’m telling you,’ McChrystal said. ‘We don’t have as many days as we’d like.'”
Two days ago the Hollywood Reporter‘s Eriq Gardner posted a typical alleged-Hollywood-ripoff story — i.e., about a federal appeals panel having ruled that a court should review a years-old claim by two brothers, Aaron and Matthew Benay, that Bedford Falls and Warner Bros. stole their ideas and plot points from a script they’d written (and which their agent verbally pitched in 2000) called The Last Samurai.
The Benays’ idea is summarized in Gardner’s piece as being about an “American Civil War veteran who helps modernize the Japanese Imperial Army and fights against the samurai.”
We’re all grimly aware, of course, that a film using this basic line was released in late 2003, starring and produced by Tom Cruise, written by John Logan and directed by Ed Zwick. Here’s the review I ran after seeing it sometime in mid December of ’03.
For me, there are two issues that pop through.
One is why is this case still kicking around a full decade after the initial pitch made by the Benay’s agent, David Phillips, and six and a half years after the release of The Last Samurai? Why didn’t the system allow for a fair assessment of their claim and a final judgment yea or nay within a year or two of the film’s release? I realize that these cases tend to drag on and on, but this one seems exceptional. Perhaps they can drag it out for another five years or so? The lawyers will be fine either way.
The other issue, of course, is that “[an] American Civil War veteran who helps modernize the Japanese Imperial Army and fights against the samurai” is just the starting seed in the Zwick-Cruise film. The key story element, apparently not written or pitched by the Benay brothers, is the fact that Cruise’s Samurai character, Nathan Algren, is a werewolf.
“I have a theory as to why Tom Cruise’s Nathan Algren character survives the big battle at the conclusion of The Last Samurai,” I wrote. “It makes no sense at all that he would, you see, even under the dubious rules of physics enforced by Hollywood filmmakers. Some explanation is required.
“Cruise’s survival in this scene is more outlandish than Owen Wilson‘s during the finale of Behind Enemy Lines, and that’s saying something.
“I can’t think of any way to be vague about this, so here goes. You’re on horseback and bravely charging the enemy’s front lines, armed only with samurai swords and bows and arrows. And your opponents, unfair as this may sound, are firing straight into your midst with howitzers and Gatling guns.
“What are the chances you’re not going to take a bullet right in your face, or in your chest, and go straight into some ectoplasmic realm? None. A fly who happened to wander into this hot-lead firestorm would get ripped in half.
“I was troubled by Captain Algren’s feat as I left the theatre, but the answer hit me like a slap as I was driving home, and suddenly those wild rumors I was hearing last summer about a discarded Last Samurai sub-plot fell into place.
“Algren, I suddenly realized, doesn’t avoid getting hit by bullets. He probably absorbs several. But he’s a werewolf, and you can only kill a werewolf with a silver bullet, and the soldiers firing the machine guns are unaware of this — nobody knows, not even Goldwyn’s Colonel Bagley — and so the bullets are quite useless.
“I never paid the rumors any mind, but I heard two last summer. One was that a rewrite of the Samurai script by Bean Sweeney had introduced the werewolf angle (something about Algren getting bitten by a half-dead Japanese werewolf during his visit to the samurai village in Act One). The other was that Zwick used Sweeney’s rewrite during shooting, but decided to cut the werewolf sub-plot after test audiences found it absurd.
“Cruise’s survival at the conclusion was locked in, however (a proposed re-shoot wasn’t possible due to a tight post-production schedule), and so Zwick was forced to stay with the existing finale minus the werewolf explanation. The thinking, apparently, was that audiences wouldn’t find it too implausible (the Behind Enemy Lines finale had gone down without a peep during the test-screening process, apparently), and so Zwick and his producers decided to roll the dice.
“Sweeney’s sub-plot was apparently inspired — ‘suggested’ is probably a better word — by Cruise’s lip-synching of Warren Zevon‘s ‘Werewolves of London’ during a scene in Martin Scorsese’s The Color of Money.
“Zwick was said by sources to have encouraged Cruise to wear his hair long and grow a beard prior to shooting Samurai so that his periodic transitions into a wolfish appearance would blend in with the film’s naturalistic scheme. The idea was for Cruise to segue into wolf mode without makeup, a la John Barrymore‘s transformation in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
“You know the drill about rumors in this town, so take all this stuff with a grain of salt. But at least it carries a whiff of credulity.”
Vanity Fair.com‘s Laura Jane Estes has written a summary of David Brinkley‘s VF article (appearing in the July issue) about Sean Penn‘s Haitian humanitarian camp-down. “If it looks as though Sean Penn is just another Hollywood star courting headlines with a camera-ready cause, look again,” Estes begins.
“With a midlife milestone looming (Penn turns 50 in August), his marriage to Robin Wright Penn seemingly finished (‘She is a ghost to me now,’ he observes), and a teenage son, Hopper, having recovered from a life-threatening skateboard accident, the Oscar-winning actor decided to redirect his focus and his priorities.
“Instead of shooting another film or hawking his latest (Fair Game, in which he portrays Ambassador Joseph Wilson, playing opposite Naomi Watts as ‘outed’ C.I.A. agent Valerie Plame), Penn ended up committing himself to the people of Petionville, a once-affluent Haitian suburb where he now runs a camp for 50,000 displaced earthquake survivors.
“As Vanity Fair‘s July issue reveals in detail for the first time, a week after the quake hit last January — killing an estimated quarter of a million people — Penn, a longtime political activist, joined forces with L.A.-based, Sarajevo-born philanthropist Diana Jenkins (creating the humanitarian organization J/P HRO), lined up crisis veteran Alison Thompson to assist in recruiting an A-team of relief volunteers, and flew from his home in Malibu to a ravaged hillside in Port-au-Prince — with a dozen doctors in tow.
“Ever since, Penn, wearing camouflage khakis and carrying a Glock handgun, has been living in a tent not much larger than an army-surplus locker. And this spring the actor and his organization–who toil alongside Haitian colleagues, fellow aid workers, and army rangers — were designated by their fellow NGOs and U.N. officials as the ‘camp manager’ of the Petionville facility.
“Author Douglas Brinkley, the historian, V.F. contributing editor, and a decade-long acquaintance of Penn’s (the pair volunteered in New Orleans in 2005 shortly after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina), traces the humanitarian and personal motivations of the typically press-averse Penn, examining his desire to become an activist in the Phil Ochs mold.”
I watched the just-released Saving Private Ryan Bluray last night, and I must say that the first half of the over-praised D-Day landing sequence gets a little less impressive every time I see it. Some of my beefs about the first few minutes of this sequence are as follows:
There’s a shot of the landing craft in the beginning that allows us to see a vast ocean area behind it, and there’s no armada whatsoever. No ships, no fog, no planes…nothing.
Some troops splash into the surf and are shown sinking twelve or fifteen feet down in an underwater shot. I don’t believe that any landing craft commander would drop troops into water that deep, which is almost tantamount to killing them with the heavy gear on their backs. I also don’t believe that machine-gun bullets can zap guys who are ten or twelve feet below the surface. I’m not a D-Day invasion veteran and I’ve never been in combat, but I think director Steven Spielberg made this stuff up.
I realize, of course, that the sea water in The Cove was totally red after the slaughter of dozens of dolphins, but that was a small body of water undiluted by currents and unchurned by waves. The sea in Saving Private Ryanis affected by these elements, but is nonetheless shown as 100% popsicle red after ten minutes of fighting — as if a ship had poured hundreds of gallons of blood (or vegetable dye) into the water offshore so that Spielberg could make a point about young soldiers bleeding and dying.
There’s no reason for any troops to have survived the first assault wave, given the German machine-gun fire that mowed them down like ducks them the second the landing-craft flaps went down. From what Spielberg shows us, there’s just no way for anyone to have made it onto the beach, much less overrun the concrete bunkers. My understanding is that the first waves at Omaha and Utah beach took absurdly heavy casualties, and that it wasn’t until the fourth or five waves that any kind of serious pushback happened against the Germans.
Tom Hanks, playing an Army Captain, goes into shock at the very beginning as he squats near the water — not ducking or shielding himself, just sitting there with a dumbfounded expression as various men are either blown into pieces or their arms are blown off or whatever. In the real world any Captain who mentally checks out in the heat of battle would have been quickly relieved of duty — the Army can’t afford fog-heads and battle-fatiguers leading its troops.
This is all apart, of course, from Spielberg’s shameless cheat at the beginning tn which the old veteran’s eyes are shown blending into Hanks’ peepers on the landing craft — a move that deludes viewers into thinking they were looking at an elderly Hanks in the opening cemetery sequence. Has there ever been a major director who’s deliberately misinformed his or her audience as baldly as Spielberg does here?
I would have respected Steven Spielberg‘s ambition if he’d decided to remake Robert Bresson‘s Au Hasard Balthazar (1966), a classic Christ parable about the suffering of a donkey as he’s transferred from owner to owner and is mostly treated with cruelty. Spielberg would have added the usual sentimentality, of course, but it would have been ballsy to step onto Bresson’s turf — I for one would have saluted — and it would have played into Spielberg’s strength as a distinctive helmer with keen mise-en-scene instincts.
A scene from the 2009 London stage production of The War Horse.
Instead, Spielberg has decided to direct The War Horse, a film version of a 2009 London play about a poor put-upon horse named Joey as he’s transferred from one owner to another during the time of World War I — from a British farm boy to the British cavalry to the German army and back again.
Nick Stafford‘s play, which is based on a children’s novel by Michael Morpurgo, is closer to Spielberg’s natural wheelhouse. It’s an anti-war piece that has simple strokes, and which was aimed at kids to begin with. Plus it has ample sentimentality — (a) a kind of Lassie Come Home story about a boy and his horse being separated, (b) a scene with German and British soldiers impulsively ceasng hostilities in order to save the wounded Joey’s life, and (c) a finale that some book reviewers have described as contrived and cloying. Plus it will also allow Spielberg to half-riff on Bresson’s film without having to acknowledge this, and to try and out-shoot the trench-warfare scenes in Stanley Kubrick‘s Paths of Glory.
So that’s the deal with The War Horse — a possible lunge at Oscar-level kudos, a Spielbergian hack move, another attempt at mass emotional manipulation, a sprinkling of art-film pretension, and yet a chance for Spielberg to show his stuff as a strongly visual storyteller who doesn’t need the engine of dialogue.
Plus it’s another way for Spielberg to avoid directing the Abraham Lincoln movie, which he’s always been intimidated by regardless. He wouldn’t pull the trigger on this project for years on end, presumably because it didn’t look commercial enough to the studios, and is now cowering even deeper in the closet with Robert Redford‘s The Conspirator having stepped in as a similar-type period drama about Lincoln’s assassination.
When I think of Spielberg these days, I think of a rich bearded toad wearing spectacles and a baseball cap.
Last night I attended a special Tribeca Film Festival screening of Amir Bar-Lev‘s The Tillman Story (Weinstein Co., 8.20) — far and away one of the finest films I’ve seen this year, and a likely contender for the 2010 Best Feature Documentary Oscar. I know it’s early but this movie has the stuff that engages and holds and sinks in deep.
I felt just as stirred up last night — seething, close to tearful — as I was after my initial Sundance viewing three months ago. Because this is not a film about the Middle East conflict but about a stand-up American family and how they responded (and continue to respond) to an orchestrated governmental obscenity that tried to diminish the memory of a fallen son.
I’m speaking, of course, of former Arizona Cardinals safety and U.S. Army Ranger Pat Tillman, and particularly his April 2004 friendly-fire death in Afghanistan — a result of his being shot three times in the head by a fellow U.S. soldier. It happened because of the usual idiotic confusion, and some young intemperate guys who wanted to be in a fire fight and acted foolishly in the heat of the moment. Tillman was enraged that his own fellows were shooting at him, of course, and his last words were an attempt to get them to wake up — “I’m Pat fucking Tillman!”
The obscenity was the attempt in ’04 by the U.S. military and Bush administration to make political hay out of Tillman’s death by manufacturing a bullshit scenario that claimed he was killed by Taliban troops and that he died in an effort save his fellow troops.
Tillman Story producer John Battsek, narrator Josh Brolin following last night’s special screening of The Tillman Story.
Of course, 97% of American moviegoers are going to ignore The Tillman Story when it opens because (a) they’re resolutely opposed to seeing any film that has anything to do with the conflicts in Iraq or Afghanistan and (b) they don’t much like documentaries anyway, and (c) they just want to chill out and be entertained. The fact that The Tillman Story leaves you feeling angry and alive and engaged with the actual world will most likely have no effect on this determination
Producer John Battsek and narrator Josh Brolin did a q & a following the screening, which ended around 11:40 pm. Brolin, a good hombre, mentioned he’ll be doing Cannes promotional duty for five days, partly for Oliver Stone‘s Wall Street 2 and partly for Woody Allen‘s You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger.
Yesterday I visited the midtown Manhattan office of AnyClip, a soon-to-launch movie clip-finding site that locates and plays clips (plus dialogue transcripts plus the usual data) from almost any film ever made in the history of human endeavor using only anecdotal or fragmentary information. It’s the smartest film- or dialogue-finding site I’ve ever surfed in my life, bar none.
The AnyClip team (l. to r. rear): Aaron “Chris” Cohen, Aaron Morris Cohen, Nate Westheimer, Matt Lehrer; (l. to r. front) Aaron Fisher Cohen, Gabi Mereilles.
It’ll be up and rolling on March 15th (i.e., Monday morning), concurrent with a visit by the AnyClip team to South by Southwest this weekend and early next week.
With any luck or pluck AnyClip will soon be a major go-to site for film buffs of any stripe, right up there with IMDB and Amazon and Wikipedia, because it’s propelled by what may be the most brilliantly designed movie-and-dialogue-locating software ever coded or created.
I’m not exaggerating — this site can find any friggin’ movie under the sun using any sort of incomplete or half-assed information. Title, stars, costars, dps, directors, whatever…but most impressively, dialogue fragments. And when it strikes paydirt it brings up corresponding clips and pages of dialogue plus rental/purchase links.
I tried to stump the software several times during my chat with co-founders Aaron Cohen and Nate Westheimer, and I beat it only once when the system couldn’t recognize a line from East of Eden. But that’ll soon be taken care of. I forget how many films they’ve stored and referenced so far, but we’re talking thousands upon thousands. The tech team began with broadly popular titles and movie stars, etc., and are working their way through less well-known, more esoteric fare as we speak.
The technological base of AnyClip is located in Israel, and the whiz-kid software designer is a guy named Maor Gillerman, who wrote this morning in an e-mail that he’s “an avid reader of Hollywood Elsewhere since Mr. Wells’ dissection of the Coen Brothers’ No Country For Old Men two years ago.”
The idea behind AnyClip is to engage casual viewers who are curious about this or that film (or who are looking to investigate a flick they vaguely remember in terms of a line of dialogue or a character or an actor, but can’t recall the title of) and prompt them to go to NetFlix or Amazon and rent/purchase. That or just surf around on this site for hours and waste your entire day.
It’s the same subtle suggestion technique I’ve personally succumbed to dozens of times while browsing at West LA’s DVD/Laser Blazer — i.e., deciding to rent or buy Groundhog Day or Out of the Past on the spur of the moment because it’ll be playing on the store monitors, and watching a certain scene or hearing a piece of dialogue puts me in the mood.
I’m not entirely up to snuff on all the search terms and devices, but I know you can find movies with almost any dialogue ever mouthed by any actor since the days of Lewis Milestone and Howard Hawks. And not just the generic, well-known quotes from famous films (“Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn”) but just about any line at all, or even a fraction of one.
AnyClip.com co-founders Aaron Cohen and Nate Westheimer with a poster composed of AnyClip search terms from The Howards of Virginia….kidding!
I told Westheimer to type in “what can a man do with his clothes off for 20 minutes?” and wham, AnyClip found it in four seconds — i.e., the Chicago hotel-room scene between Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint in North by Northwest. It also found every film in the history of the universe that has used that line, or a portion of it. It covers the entire waterfront with every search.
There’s a minor line that Groucho Marx says to a steward in Night of the Opera — “Hey, turn off the juice before I get electrocuted!” AnyClip found A Night at the Opera like that, and a clip from that particular scene plus other films and scenes that used the words “juice” and “electrocuted” — it’s really amazing.
I could go on and on and on, but that’s the gist of it. Oh, yeah, there’s a Blu-ray searching software that they’ve also come up with in which you can search a Bluray you’re watching using this and that term. I didn’t respond as strongly to this as the dialogue-search thing, but fine, cool, good to go.
And just to reiterate: there are three AnyClip guys named Aaron Cohen — bossman Aaron Morris Cohen plus Aaron “Chris” Cohen and Aaron Fisher Cohen. Here’s a video about the army of Aaron Cohens that inhabit the greater New York City area or the tri-state area or whatever.