I tried to think of something interesting to say about TomKat planning to finally get married in Italy on Saturday, 11.18, but all I could come up with was the idea of being inside their heads for five or six hours via one of those Being John Malkovich mud-tunnel transporting devices, or even being in both their heads simultaneously (weird thought), but it got too strange.
The intrigue is much higher regarding Cruise’s interest in making an indie “political drama” called Lions for Lambs, which reportedly deals with a platoon of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan, presumably post-9/11. The script is by Matthew Carnahan (State of Play), and Variety’s Michael Fleming says Robert Redford is said to be “likely” to direct as well as play a role. If anyone has a copy….
Borat boys outside Mann’s Chinese at last night’s Borat premiere — Monday, 10.23.06, 7:50 pm.
It was great to finally see Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (20th Century Fox, 11.3), even if it was on a very gracious, Russian-potato-line, second-class invitee basis.
Invited guests to last night’s premiere were made to wait in a totally non-moving line on Hollywood Blvd. last night for a very long while, and while it was hardly painful or humiliating — it was a nothing, a shrug-off — this sort of thing never happens at a premiere. The usual drill at any premiere is to walk up to will-call, get your ticket and go inside and grab a bag of popcorn. Nobody could figure out the delay but the general sentiment was one of vague irritation and “why?” And then we were kept waiting another half hour or so once we were in the theatre and seated.
Borat is fall-on-the-floor funny. Hilarious, outrageous, brilliant, diseased. It’s true about it being a slash-and-burn satire of American yahoo-ism. If red-staters are good sports they’ll laugh along with everyone else, but some devotees of the Pentecostal faith are probably going to have concerns. The mock anti-semitism is inspirational; I loved the throwing of dollar bills at the Jews disguised as cock- roaches. And the naked wresting scene is without question the single most appalling thing I’ve seen in a film in years. Make that decades. And thass okay! I like it!
Borat star-producer-writer Sacha Baron Cohen spent an hour (longer?) talking to electronic press people on the red carpet. Journalists like myself and the Holly- wood Reporter‘s Borys Kit and N.Y. Times reporter Sharon Waxman didn’t get to attend the premiere showing at the big Chinese theatre — we were shunted off to an upstairs theatre at Mann’s Chinese 6.
Variety reported that the plan was for Cohen “to be ushered into his preem by a phalanx of Kazakh locals bearing fruits and wonders of the country. Plans were for ‘Borat’ to be carried, bridelike, to the podium by an oversized woman. There, he would address the throng of press and fans and respond to a recent invitation to visit Kazakhstan, which has tried to disown Borat almost from the moment he claimed it as his country of origin.”
San Francisco Int’l Airport, 10.16.06, 10:10 pm ; Hangar restaurant inside the Redmond, Oregon airport, about 25 minutes north of Bend — Monday, 10.16.06, 5:45 pm; departing for San Francisco from Redmond.
Just a couple of guys sitting in a restaurant, talking it out. It’s not just the acting in this scene (and the fact that the actors are so legendary-iconic), but the writing. The dialogue is straight, clean…entirely about fundamentals.
It wasn’t quite the same during a sit-down with the creator of this scene, Michael Mann, a couple of weeks ago at his office in West Los Angeles. The idea was to talk about the new Taschen book about Mann and his career — a luscious visual smorgasbord (the photos are choice in a very special off-center way) coupled with insightful, exceptionally well-sculpted analysis by F.X. Feeney . It turned out to be more of a casual chit-chat, although a fascinating one. 40, 45 minutes…the minutes just flew.
Mann just wanted to relax and talk, which meant no recording or taking pictures …cool. I didn’t take many notes as we went along; I asked about everything; there was no vein to it.
So to get myself rolling on a piece, I wrote Feeney and suggested we do an online q & a like we did before about his Roman Polanski book. So I wrote some ques- tions and he sent back the answers last night. But before I run it, consider this graph from Feeney’s first chapter:
“Over the course of the eight feature films he has directed since 1971, Michael Mann has shown himself, time and again, to be a rigorous, honest dramatist, a maker of solid worlds. So much so that in America, at least, he tends to be underrated. The most respectful of his critics define him (a bit too simply) as a realist. Certainly, Mann seeks authenticity above all…but perhaps the most accurate word for him is ‘ synthesist ‘…[an artist who] immerses himself thor- oughly, breaking the truth of a given topic down to its working parts, throwing away whatever rings false.”
I don’t just love Michael Mann’s films — I want to live in them. I want the clarity, the decisiveness, the certainty, the edge, the coolness…all of that stuff. A lot of people feel this way. Guys, mostly, but whatever. Here’s the back-and-forth…
JW: I notice Mann is actually listed as a co-author on the Taschen website.
FXF: That’s true, and fair to say. The book has three authors: I wrote the text; Paul Duncan (who also edits the entire filmmaker series for Taschen) chose the photos and directed the layouts; and Michael Mann was not only the book’s subject, he took an extremely active role in its production — providing Paul in-depth access to his archives, inviting me to witness him at work, indeed making time to sit with me for hours of in-depth interviews.
JW: How did you get that kind of cooperation from Mann? I remember you mentioning when we spoke at CineVegas that there had been a previous attempt at a Mann/Taschen book, which you were not part of.
FXF: I even mention it in the first chapter of the book, by way of dramatizing the high-pressure challenges in store for any critic who takes on a creative individual as exacting and enigmatic as Michael Mann. Beyond that, it’s not worth mentioning: Read the book! I have a strong take on Mann, which Taschen was willing to support. I had just completed the Polanski book in April 2004 when the Mann assignment came back into the open. Paul Duncan and I enjoy a good working relationship; I dove in. We were realistic and flexible. We figured that if my essay got rejected by Mann, then to hell with it…so much for a Taschen-Mann book.
But as it turned out, Mann was engaged by what I wrote. “Engaged” as opposed to flattered — near as I can tell, he’s immune to flattery; what he seems to crave instead is experience and information — and once engaged, he opened his doors to me. I spent much of the summer of Collateral (2004) in intensive conversation with him. My essay posed explicit and implicit questions he would either knock down or answer. As I hope is plain in the finished book, if there was a disagreement, we each stood our respective grounds — Michael getting the last word in most cases. I was more interested in what he had to say.
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JW: What were the so called “high pressure challenges for any critic” who takes on Mann?
FXF: Only one — but an important one. Too many well-meaning critics and fans describe Mann as “a subverter of genres,” as a kind of movie buff hell-bent on reinvigorating the crime film. In his own view, he is anything but. “Genre” is a word for which he has no personal use.
JW: If Mann doesn’t “subvert genres,” then why are Thief, Heat, Collateral and Miami Vice all superior examples of “the crime movie”?
FXF: Because Mann sees them as pictures drawn from life. As I say, he’s interested in first-hand experience. He comes out of a tough neighborhood in Chicago, has gotten to know cops and criminals, and is himself by nature what I call “a stealth non-conformist.” By that I mean, Mann has a very self-directed, fundamentally rebellious nature, yet paradoxically he is skilled at blending in. Small wonder his heroes and villains alike so often live under-cover; Mann respects that what is least dispensible about a person’s character is that which thrives in private — in secret, even.
When other directors of his generation (Francis Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas) were establishing their flamboyant personal styles and vivid reputations through their great films of the 1970s, Mann was playing it close to the vest, working in television, a place few self-respecting auteurs would deign to spend time in those wasteland days, developing his craft as a writer-director, above all mastering the business as a producer.
By the time he made his debut feature Thief (1981), he was already full grown as an artist — and Thief is one deeply realized work, down to its tiniest fibers. Somebody once asked Mann how he exerted such control over a film’s final cut so early in his career, and he replied: “Because I cut the checks.” Amen. Or, as Crockett marvels of an adversary, early in the new Miami Vice film: “Those are skill sets.”
JW: What would you say is the personal trait that stands out above all others with Mann?
FXF: His mantra is “get it right.” By that he means, get your facts right, insure that your aesthetic decisions in making a movie follow what is actual and logical in the world at large. Mann has a strong sensual streak — music is clearly a deep (if not his deepest) source of inspiration — and a high susceptibility to visual beauty, yet he never lets his appetites for these get the upper hand. Everything in his work is subordinated to concrete use, either in terms of what interests the characters, or those dynamics which reveal the deeper character of the world to the onlooker.
Here’s one vivid example from my encounters with him. He was leafing through my Polanski book — attentive, silent, un-judging — but when he closed it, asked me one question: “What did Polanski’s father do for a living?” Damn. I had to admit, I didn’t know — Mann had stumped the band on his first try. Yet this is such a simple question, and an important one, if you think about it — “how the world works” is best revealed by the specific work people do — and I had forgotten to ask it.
JW: What did Polanski’s father do for a living?
FXF: Polanski’s father was an artist in Paris, and when he returned to Krakow in the late 1930s, it was to take an office job at a factory owned by relatives. (Thanks for asking, Michael!)
JW: Like all big-name directors, Mann has a coterie of journalist and film-critic loyalists who think he’s one of the greatest and stand up for him time and again. I am one of these, frankly. I’ve sensed for a long time now — unquestionably since Heat — a profound respect for the guy, and a kind of corresponding allegiance.
FXF: My sense is that Mann characteristically makes movies that are critic-proof — he thinks and works everything through to such a degree that few can ever seriously quarrel with his intentions or his technique. Back in the 1980s a few reviewers tried to wisecrack him into a corner over the success of Miami Vice on TV, belittling him “a glossy stylist,” and so on. I was guilty of this myself, if memory serves — but over time, the films have held up so solidly to repeated viewing that we cutups in the peanut gallery have been obliged to acknowledge, at last and belatedly, that yes, here is a giant, ingenious body of work in progress.
JW: What was the turning point for you?
FXF: The Insider (1999). Of course, I’d admired Manhunter, Last of the Mohicans and Heat as individual films — but it was watching Mann penetrate the contemporary world of corporate authority, in which matters of life and death are decided over desks and behind closed doors, that the living totality and cumulative value of his filmography became unmistakable, and a source of abiding amazement. Others felt the same way, I know.
Since that time, Mann’s only difficulties with critics have arisen out of certain specific expectations that sometimes get raised, extraneous to the intrinsic quality of the films themselves.
For example, Ali (2001) — if you grew up feeling emotionally involved with the real Muhammed Ali, or were enchanted as most critics were by the late `90s documentary about him called When We Were Kings, then accepting Will Smith in the role, or revisiting scenes from the life of Malcolm X so vividly covered in Spike Lee’s Malcolm X, became a bit of a stumbling block — at least on a first viewing. (Also, the film opened two months after 9/11, when both the viewing public and the very practice of moviegoing were heavily depressed.) See Ali now on DVD, and its overriding virtues quietly but forcefully assert themselves — Will Smith’s performance being one of them; I think it’s the best thing he has ever done.
What’s more, you have a portrait of America in the 1960s and `70s that for my money is unsurpassed in terms of its authentic detail and atmosphere. Mann intelligently, skillfully reveals Ali as a leader on a par with Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Patrice Lamumba — a lesser filmmaker would have been content to celebrate his greatness as a boxer.
JW: How did Mann’s manner with you evolve as you got to know him?
FXF: No change. Steady, steady, steady. He knows who he is. Over time, anyone who works with him is privileged to glimpse a person of deep emotional sensitivity and compassionate awareness within the tough-guy fortress-of-solitude that is his workaday persona — he would not be able to create characters so deeply if this quality were not there — but at the same time, he is completely unsentimental. When he expresses a feeling, you trust it, even if it stings. There’s nothing willed or manipulative — no bullshit — about what he’s telling you.
JW: What do you think of The Keep…honestly? That film, to me, is the runt of the litter…almost the bizarre aberration that doesn’t belong in the family.
FXF: You ought to see it again, Jeff — as with all of Mann, it only gets better. Yet of all his films, The Keep is the only one where you sense Mann himself was unresolved about how to dramatize certain things. As I say in the book, he hadn’t yet found a way to use the audience’s imagination as an ally when dealing with monstrous evil — ergo, he shows “the monster.”
It’s interesting that one film later, in Manhunter, he successfully trusts that the Unseen is even more terrifying than what we do see. Hence, Mann removed the dragon tattoo that he originally intended to be an outward expression of torment on the skin of the serial killer, Francis Dollarhyde. “It would trivialize his struggle,” he told actor Tom Noonan. So we are forced to imagine the monstrosity inside Dollarhyde, and there it is. But The Keep is an honorable effort to achieve the same illumination.
JW: Is Mann his own singular invention, or does he stem from a tradition of distinctive realist directors?
FXF: He loves all the hardworking explorers — Kubrick, Pabst, George Stevens — but he is his own man, as an artist. Life influences him far more than other artists.
JW: The film that turned Mann on the most when he was young — the one that made him decide to be a filmmaker, was G.W. Pabst‘s Joyless Street. Which I’ve never seen. Have you?
FXF: No. And I guess this is like not knowing what Roman Polanski’s father did for a living. You’ve stumped the band, Jeff! But I’ve seen enough of Pabst’s other work (Pandora’s Box; Diary of a Lost Giorl; Threepenny Opera) to feel a lucid sense of what so excited Mann about Joyless Street at age 21 that he decided on the spot to become a filmmaker — Pabst is one who never imposes himself visibly on the story he is telling. He instead yields great power out of the characters, and his own observation of life.
JW: When Pacino asks DeNiro in Heat if he ever wanted “a regular-type life,” De Niro doesn’t say (as you relate in the book), “What is that, barbecues?” He says, “The fuck is that… barbecues and ball games?” And Pacino, almost smiling, waits a beat and a half and goes, “Yeah.”
FXF: I wasn’t quoting the line in its entirety; I was synopsizing, touching on specifics to make a larger point — and I only had 25,000 words. There are never enough!
JW: What film do you consider to be his best, and why? If you can’t name just one, try to at least give me a tie between two films.
FXF: My favorite is Last of the Mohicans — a stunning evocation of early America. Everything that is greatest about Mann — his sense of history, his love of women, his sensitivity to the intricacies of motive (even Magua the terrifying renegade has reasons for being so brutal; white men killed his wife and children); Mann’s total commitment to getting everything right, down to the least corset and chord of music. And then — selfishly — I love that period of American history. There simply haven’t been enough films about it.
The legendary Clint Eastwood answered questions this morning about Flags of Our Fathers (Dreamamount, 10.20). Tall and trim, a model of silver-fox urbanity, he strode in and sat at a table in front of 60 or 70 seated entertainment journalists inside a small “ballroom” inside the Four Seasons hotel, and talked straight and plain about his World War II drama for just over 47 minutes.
The guy looked only slightly (or do I mean vaguely?) bowed by his 76 years. Tanned face, tight features, perfectly cut grayish-white hair, and wearing a beautifully tailored gray suit and light blue shirt with a tie with some kind of conservative dazzle pattern.
Before listening to this recording of the q & a, you should recall a few things.
Flags is Eastwood’s sad and elegaic drama that’s partly about the Marines who fought and died during the battle of Iwo Jima in early ’45, but is mostly about three veterans of that battle who raised the American flag on a pole atop Mt. Surabachi during the fighting, resulting in a photo that was sent around the world and came to symbolize the valor and sacrifice of U.S. forces.
These three men — — John Bradley (Ryan Phillipe), Ira Hayes (Adam Beach) and Rene Gagnon (Jesse Bradford) — were sent home to take bows and raise funds and build morale on a big public relations tour arranged by the military. Flags partly deals with the conflicted and/or buried feelings that arose from this effort, and from the conflict between two worlds — the godawful battle-of-Iwo-Jima world where everything was ferocious and pure and absolute, and the confusing, lost-in-the- shuffle world of back home, where almost everything felt off and incomplete.
This isn’t a review or reaction of any kind — that won’t happen for another several days. But I can at least say that Flags is a mature and very soulful meditation piece with its head and heart in the right humanistic place, and that a couple of hot-shot critic friends are feeling a good amount of respect and admiration for it.
It was also obvious that the room this morning was full of respect for Eastwood and his storied career as a director, with the critical highpoints (prior to Flags of Our Fathers) being Bridges of Madison County and the Oscar-winning Unforgiven and Million Dollar Baby.
Now that you know the basics, listen away.
I wangled a last-minute entry into a big hoo-hah for Warren Beatty‘s Reds (’81) at the Directors Guild of America theatre last night. It was a four-part affair — a buffet reception at 6 pm, screening at 7 pm, coffee, fruit and brownies in the lobby during intermission, and then a q & a with Beatty and interviewer Bennett Miller (the esteemed Capote director) sometime around 10:40 pm.
Capote director Bennett Miller and Reds director-producer-star Warren Beatty during Saturday night’s q & a following a screening of Reds at the DGA on Saturday, 9.30.06.
This and Wednesday’s special screening at the New York Film Festival is part of a promotion for the Paramount Home Video double-disc DVD that “streets” on 10.17. The longish, Oscar-winning epic will also open theatrically for a week in New York and Washington, D.C. on 10.6, and in L.A. (at the Arclight) on 10.13.
I hadn’t seen Reds in over 20 years (I haven’t watched the versions on VHS and laser disc due to gross over-scanning), and I was stirred and turned on all over again — it’s a very smart, wonderfully adult historical epic that delivers at a consistently intimate-intellectual level. I was also startled at how incredibly young everyone (Beatty, Diane Keaton, Jack Nicholson, Edward Herrman) looked back then.
At the same time I was wondering if today’s under-30 viewers will care very much about a film as rich and densely political as this one. The dual servings of a troubled-relationship movie (i.e., the ups and downs between Beatty’s free-thinking John Reed and Keaton’s Louise Bryant) and a very nicely layered portrait of old-school lefty idealism may seem a bit…I don’t know, musty.
And I wondered, also, if the early ’90s collapse of Russian communism, which Reed cared about and worked for with such feeling in the late teens and early 1920s, has enhanced the film by making it seem more like a tribute to lost-cause Quixotic dreams, or diminished it because it Bolshevism (which the film portrays as being a brutal and failed system almost from the get-go) came to naught at the end?
I’d forgotten what a deeply annoying piece of work Keaton’s Bryant is — insecure, snappy, under-talented, ready to argue at the drop of a hat. She has an affair with Nicholson’s Eugene O’Neill and that’s…well, emotional indiscretions will happen every so often, but she walks out and all-but-terminates their relationship when Reed acknowledges he’s had a dalliance or two on the side and what-of-it?
Miller and Beatty had only met once before, but they seemed relaxed with each other. I liked Beatty’s observation that directing a movie was a bit like vomiting. “When things build up inside you eventually start to feel like vomiting,” he said. “You don’t want to vomit, but when you finally do you feel much better.” And I enjoyed a later moment when Beatty said to Miller, “You’ve acted, right?” and Miller, “What the fuck are you talking about? I haven’t acted since high school.” And also when Miller said, “You began filming the ‘Witnesses’ in the ’70s,” and Beatty replied, “The 1870s.”
Beatty mentioned during the q & a that his 12 year-old son Ben said earlier in the evening that he thought Reds was too long.
I spoke to Beatty this morning and asked him how Reed might have evolved in his thinking if he hadn’t died at such a young age, and what would he have said about the ultimate fate of Russian communism?
“I feel he wouldn’t have moved to the right [if he’d lived],” said Beatty. “And uhm…it’s very interesting. How some people moved from the far left to the far right, like Max Eastman. And you know, what happened to people during the Stalinist purges moved a lot of people to the right…and then there were a lot of people who didn’t. I believe Reed would have…well, of course, I don’t know…but I believe he would have remained true to that which he thought was workable. I also think he saw the upcoming problems with Communist dictatorship.”
Beatty said that he’d “he’d never taken DVDs seriously until now. I thought it was retrograde. I thought the picture is what it is and why excessively look back? I don’t feel that anymore because I think the nature of distribution has had a deleterious effect on certain content.
“This film, which cost $32 million to make…this film, Dr. Zhivago and Lawrence of Arabia wouldn’t and couldn’t be made in today’s environment — they wouldn’t be financed. Can you imagine anyone today putting $150 million or $200 million dollars into a story of a very strange Englishman who goes to Arabia, behaves peculiarly and dies on a motorcyle…and played by an unknown?
“DVD releases and the obviously long shelf life that comes with the DVD market are the replacement for the long theatrical life that films used to have in theatres, plus it saves the audience from having to experience the mall experience, which is largely a hormonal matter these days. The home screens are getting bigger” — Beatty has a high-def system in his home — “and the multiplexes are…well, the large theatres at the Arclight are more of an exception than the rule.”
Reds will be at the Arclight on October 13th, as well as at the City Cinemas Village East in Manhattan and the E Street Cinema in Washington, D.C., on October 6th.
“I’ve never before studied the [DVD] situation, ” said Beatty, “but with theatrical you sometimes have your film opening against four or five movies on the same dates. There are 117 other DVD titles coming out on October 17th.” Before he said that I had guessed there were probably 20 other recongizable titles coming out that day.
I don’t think anyone gives a damn about the other 100.
Reds is unusual in that it will be issued in three formats on 10.17 — on regular DVD and on both Blu Ray and HD-DVD high-def.
“I’ve finally seen Tom Tykwer‘s Perfume in a plex in my home town of Augsburg, Germany , and I’m even more convinced that it will go the route of The Name of the Rose, which was a blockbuster in Europe ($120 million) while earning a miniscule $7 million in the U.S.,” says a former exhibitor who runs a site about box-office in Germany and elsewhere.
“Just keep in mind that Perfume has so far grossed $31.8 million in five European markets in just 11 days.
“Even though it feels a bit lengthy in parts, the movie never feels like its actual length of 150 minutes , give or take.
“If Dreamamount decides to push an Academy campaign, the camera work, art design, costumes and the score are definitely Oscar-nomination material. And Dustin Hoffman is wonderful as Guiseppe Baldini, and the unknown Ben Whishaw a pleasant surprise. (Only Alan Rickman suffers due to his role not being meaty enough.)
“But I wonder if the flagrant nudity and very sensual tone [in the film] and an unforgettable opening scene that led to a local woman fainting in a nearby theatre — a scene depicting Whishaw’s birth in a filthy Parisian fish market full of fish innards and other disgusting stuff (you can almost smell the bad air) — will result in resistance among U.S. moviegoers.
“Not to mention the strange ending, which is based more or less on the novel. I’m just wondering if the mainstream American audience will rather feel confused than satisfied
“I’m also wondering if the U.S. one-sheet is in synch with American tastes. It (rightfully) hints at nudity and I do not recall that many U.S. one-sheets do this, probably for good reason. For Americans the movie is artsy with nudity for sure, for European tastes it√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s a mixture of artsy and mainstream — the nudity doesn√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢t matter at all.”
“The humiliating box office returns for All the King’s Men may have trickled in over the weekend (a pathetic $3.8 million), but the death knell sounded almost a year ago and unintentionally came out of its producers’ mouths. When Sony Pictures announced, just two months before the film’s planned Christmastime release, that its opening would be pushed into the next year, the official reason was that more time was needed to complete the editing and score.
“But the unmistakable message sent to savvy audiences (that means everyone now) was: This movie is in trouble,” begins a 9.26 Caryn James piece in the New York Times.
“The studio ignored one of the harshest realities of movie marketing today: It’s almost impossible to recover from bad buzz. Studios wield their marketing campaigns as they always have, priming audiences to expect the best. But with the media following every twist of a movie’s progress, viewers head to theaters loaded with behind-the-scenes information. A current television spot for the Ashton Kutcher-Kevin Costner action film, The Guardian (opening Friday), actually flaunts its preview audience test scores, calling it ‘one of the best-playing and highest-scoring movies in the history of Touchstone Pictures.'”
“Even insidery advertising campaigns, though, can’t change the fact that blogs, television infotainment and mainstream entertainment reporting can amount to an anti-marketing campaign, priming audiences for the worst.”
And I love this graph….
“Desperately trying to spin viewers with higher expectations, All the King’s Men set itself up for failure because it is impossible to forget a year’s worth of factoids. When Sean Penn first appears on screen in the film, as the self-described hick and soon-to-be-political-savant Willie Stark, his short-sided period haircut may jog your memory: that’s the funny haircut he had at the Oscars two years ago.”
In an upcoming (10.2.06) Al Pacino interview on James Lipton‘s “Inside The Actor’s Studio” series on Bravo, the 66 year-old actor tells a simulated rear-entry Oscar statuette story.
It happened right after he’d won his Best Actor Oscar for Scent of a Woman. I get in the elevator and I’m going down with a lot of people,” Pacino tells Lipton. “And I had my Oscar [and] a very well known actress is in front of me and she starts to squirm. And I realized the head of my Oscar was touching her behind. I leaned over and said, ‘Oh pardon me, that wasn’t me — it was my Oscar.'”
This reminds me of a comment that Pulp Fiction writer Roger Avary said in front of a packed crowd at the Independent Spirit Awards ceremony in Santa Monica in February ’95. Holding up a Spirit Award trophy, which is basically a Valkyrie with a pair of jagged angel wings sticking out of her back, Avary said that having anal sex with an Oscar Award (or at least with the bald guy’s head) was doable, but it was obviously out of the question with a Spirit Award.
Queer Lady
Stephen Frears‘ The Queen (Miramax, 9.30) will open the New York Film Festival this Friday (9.29), but it’s also been shown at the Venice Film Festival. It would have been okay to write about it after that festival debut, but I’ve been holding back. I’ve decided to let go today because a guy called me a candy-ass the other night for doing so.
I don’t want to put The Queen down — it’s intelligent and restrained, and Helen Mirren gives us a fascinating Queen Elizabeth II — but there’s not a whole lot to it, really. It’s a tidy, occasionally intriguing drama about the push-and-tug between the Queen and Prime Minster Tony Blair (Michael Sheen ) in the wake of the death of Princess Diana in September 1997.
And all we’re left with at the finale is what we knew going in — that the Royals, seen by the British press as cold and unfeeling about the Diana tragedy, were reluctantly obliged to make a show of sharing in the nationwide grief. The movie simply shows us the day-by-day, inch-by-inch process by which this happened.
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After days of frosty disdain and indifference behind the gates of Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle, and yet with Blair delicately but persistently trying to awake the Royals and, as he allegedly expressed it himself, “save these people from themselves”, the emotional urgency of the situation gradually penetrated, and Queen Elizabeth responded with a couple of photo ops and a well-written but somewhat curt TV address.
I was unable to detect any current in this film that lifts it above the realm of a muted inside-the-palace parlor piece. Jolting, searing cinema it’s not. It feels a bit too much like its subject, almost as if the film was co-directed by Queen Elizabeth herself, and it feels a bit too miserly with historical details. And yet it unfolds in a tight, well-ordered, agreeably perfunctory way.
It modestly satisfies, in other words. I didn’t feel burned, just under-nourished, and I’ll be surprised if very many people come out of it with any major beefs.
Mirren seems to “get” Queen Elizabeth in a mildly intimate, as-deep-as-it-goes way. She’s very skilled at conveying that overly hemmed-in, elite-British mindset. But you’re still left with an impression at the end that this woman and her husband, Prince Phillip (James Cromwell) and the Queen Mother (Sylvia Sydney ) are very odd ducks — chilly elitist relics, totally cut off from the hurly burly, existing (“living” seems too intense and palpable a term) in a membrane of protocol.
The Windsor-Mountbattens are as close to the embodiment of “bloodless” as anyone could possibly imagine. By the standards most of us live by today, by the notion that you have to open up and give a little and show a little heart in life’s affairs, they’re all but mummified.
The Queen is not, to me, as satisfying in a passionate, striking and emotionally pronounced way as Mirren’s other Queen Elizabeth performance in that HBO film with Jeremy Irons (which she won an Emmy for). Her performance for Frears is necessarily restrained, dry and reserved, as befits the subject. Which makes for a bit of a problem.
Mirren’s Queen Elizabeth obviously isn’t the gusto type — everyone will get this, of course — but that still leaves us with a character who’s at once interesting and yet a kind of walking mannequin.
The story I would have liked to see would have had a little “live Diana” — maybe some flashbacks with an actress portraying her (Diana never appears in the film, and is only verbally referred to), with a fuller, tastier reenactment of her final night on the earth with Dodi al Fayed — and with sharper exchanges between the Queen and her son about the whole messy thing with Diana and Camilla Parker Bowles, and more telling details about the curiousness and remoteness of the life of the Windsor-Mountbattens.
Just as these people are museum pieces, so is the film to some extent. The fact is that it doesn’t have a lot of “English” — no real visual pizazz or seasoning. With such a bloodless lead character and such an understated story, you’d think Frears would have used some high style to compensate.
I would have preferred more of an exploration of the emotional unruliness and the deterioration of courtly dignity that Diana brought to the Buckingham Palace soap opera. And the appalling lack of good judgment in hooking up with a scumbag like Dodi Al Fayed.
The film reminds us that Queen Elizabeth harbored negative feelings towards Diana, and thought that she had done immense damage to the monarchy. I think she was more correct than incorrect, I feel, in her disdain for Diana’s lack of taste and judgment. And yet the film doesn’t fill us in at all about what happened with Diana, or why — no dirt. It is assumed that we’re fully up to snuff on her romantic dalliances and can render our own judgments. I think that’s a bit of a cop-out.
(I was asked to write a long file about Dodi al Fayed when I was working at People in ’97. After making calls and taking notes for three or four hours, I knew he was basically trash — a spoiled son of a rich man, a guy who didn’t pay his gardener bills. And yet Diana chose him to be her boyfriend. That told me a lot about her, sad to say. The truth is that she was not an especially bright woman.)
Frears seems to have shot what was on the page, it seems, and worked on getting the performances right, but he didn’t seem to have the budget or the time to be expressionistic in an angular, big-screen sense. The Queen feels television-y. This isn’t The Hit, Bloody Kids, The Grifters or High Fidelity. It’s not even up to the level of Mrs. Henderson Presents. It’s more in the realm of Prick Up Your Ears or The Snapper, that British-Irish TV film he did about the young girl having a baby.
Frears is a seasoned pro, but at what point does the fine art of shorthand, less-is- more storytelling — the notion that it’s always better to show a bit less than what viewers might want to see — become dramatically stultifying? The Queen skirts the edge of this.
The most emotionally moving moment is when a big antlered stag stops and peers at Queen Elizabeth as she’s waiting to be picked up after her jeep stalls in the middle of a river in Scotland. It’s the only time she really lets it out during the whole film. I felt much more from the Queen’s relationship with this animal than in her relationship with Blair or her son or her husband or her aide or her mother. Really.
Underneath the story of Blair managing to goad Queen Elizabeth into showing a bit of her emotional self (or at least pretending to do that), The Queen seems like a quietly persuasive argument for the abolishment of the Royals, which is why, I’m guessing, it’s struck some chords with the British. But I wonder how average Americans will respond, or if they’ll respond at all.
The question is, what is it that we, the audience, derive from learning that once, and only once, a famous woman of state who seems to be the most emotionally remote and rigidly-mannered public figure on the face of the globe let down her guard a wee bit and showed a bit of humanity and softened her rectitude… but only after days and days of people and newspaper headlines saying, “What is wrong with this woman? Where is her heart?”
Keeping it all inside with a stiff upper lip is not a recipe for emotional health. Most of us know that…except for Queen Elizabeth, it seems. Maybe she’s learned at the end of this drama that it’s better to let the heart show a bit more…fine. Good for her if she came to this place. But I wasn’t entirely sure at the end of the film that she had.
In her final scene with Blair, she seems to be mostly shaking her head a bit quizzically and saying “I don’t know what happened, frankly.” It confused her, threw her off balance. What, then, does Queen Elizabeth’s momentary softening have to do with the price of rice in our own lives? Not very much, if you ask me.
Incidentally: Frears uses some footage to suggest a brief coverage of the Paris car accident that took the life of Princess Diana and Dodi al Fayed, but no one “plays” these two. (Not in the print I saw, at least.) And yet below is a photo of Frears directing a couple sitting in the back seat on a black car — a couple that looks very much like Diana and Dodi — the blonde hairdo looks exactly like hers, and the guy seems to be of Middle Eastern descent. It suggests that Diana and Dodi were in fact cast, portrayed and filmed, and then Frears cut the footage.
Hollywood Reporter columnist Anne Thompson has penned a column about Zach Helm‘s fabled Stranger Than Fiction script, which “five studios, 37 directors and scores of movie stars threw themselves at.” I knew all about that excitement when it was happening. Everyone was creaming over that script except I couldn’t get past page 20 when I tried to read it (twice), and then I saw the finished film in Toronto and I went, “What the fuck was that about?”
Ostensibly, Fiction is about a problem afflicting IRS agent Harold Crick (Will Ferrell), which is that he’s begun to hear his life being narrated by a woman with a British accent. We gradually learn that the voice belongs to a chain-smoking writer named Kay Eiffel (Emma Thompson), who’s having lots of trouble finishing her latest book, which is largely about an IRS agent named Harold Crick. Kay is planning to kill Harold off and doesn’t quite know how. And Harold, once he gets wind of this, seeks her out and pleads with her not to kill him.
Fiction‘s problem is that it never figures out if Crick is or isn’t living inside Kay Eiffel’s head. It never makes a case for the fact that he’s existing in some imaginary realm Kay is creating as she moves along with her book, or, assuming he’s real, how and why Kay’s imaginings have any power over him.
Anyway, Thompson builds her column around conversations she had Stranger Than Fiction director Marc Forster and producer Lindsay Doran, and it reads well in that skillful, well-structured way that Thompson’s columns always read. But then you get to paragraph #13 and it’s like….my goodness! Doran and Forster actually admit to and discuss the film’s fatal flaw.
“One thing they never figured out,” writes Thompson, was”how to explain the logic of exactly how this particularly strange movie fiction works. ‘It was an ongoing conversation,’ says Doran, who sounds amazed that audiences are buying the film at all. ‘We never explain it. I kept saying to Zach, if nothing else we need a scene where somebody says, how could this be happening?’
“Forster shot one such scene, but after preview screenings he cut it. Is he a character out of a book or is he real?’ Forster asks. ‘I see him as real, an everyday man who suddenly has a narrator pop into his life. Some parts of his life are part of the book and some aren’t. Not everything has to be perfectly explained: that’s the freedom and beauty of art and fiction. For me, the title says it all — ‘Stranger Than Fiction.’ ”
Horseshit. Either you work a story out or you don’t. The central riddle in Fiction‘s story has been left open-ended and unresolved, and that’s a shame because I would’ve bought the film if Helm, Forster and Doran had just established and set the rules for Ferrell’s Crick being a character living in Thompson’s imaginary universe…or not. And if they’d gotten rid of Queen Latifah entirely. I hated every moment that Queen Latifah occupies in this film.
Woody Allen‘s story for The Purple Rose of Cairo was a lot crazier and more off-the-charts than Fiction‘s (it’s about a good-looking actor leaving a film playing on a screen in a small town and having a relationship with a female fan in the audience) but he worked out a system and stuck to it. It’s not that hard. You just have to buckle down and figure it out, and then make the crazy figured-out stuff seem inevitable, brisk and entertaining. Hello?
“…then I realized, Gawd laeft this playce a lawwng time ago“…that’s Leonardo DiCaprio ‘s final line in the trailer for Ed Zwick’s Blood Diamond (Warner Bros., 12.15). This is being positioned by Warner Bros. as an Oscar-worthy movie, but The Last Samurai taught everyone that you have to be careful with Zwick. He can be tasteful and restrained at times, but also ham-fisted — for my money his emotional points have too often been underlined with a black felt-tip marker.
But the trailer tells me that DiCaprio — one of the three leads in Diamond, along with Djimon Honsou and Jennifer Connelly — is a strongly positioned Best Actor candidate. We all know that the Academy always responds to actors playing (a) handicapped characters, (b) characters with exotic accents (i.e., the Meryl Streep syndrome), and (c) characters that have required the actor to put on weight, wear a fake nose or teeth, or otherwise make him/her look less attractive than normal. DiCaprio’s South African accent in the trailer (which sounds pretty good to me — can any South African readers tell us if it sounds right to them?) indicates he’s definitely lived up to the Streep syndrome.
This means he’s on the brink of entry into the Best Actor finals if….if (and I can’t underestimate the importance of this qualification) Zwick’s film isn’t too Samurai– like. If Diamond turns out to be as compelling as it could be (it’s apparently an action-fortified moral tale about greed and redemption, set against the backdrop of the Sierra Leone civil war of the 1990s with DiCaprio playing a guilt-wracked South African mercenary), the combined heft of Leo’s morally-flawed-guy-who- becomes-a-man-of-honor plus his hard-punch performance as a mole inside a criminal gang in Martin Scorsese‘s The Departed could put him near the top of the heap and right up against Peter O’Toole (Venus), Forest Whitaker (The Last King of Scotland) and Derek Luke (Catch a Fire) and…who else?
I know, I know…Will Smith in The Pursuit of Happyness, right? But think about it — doesn’t Smith need to be bitch-slapped and kept down for playing the role of the rich, over-pampered movie-star smoothie and starring in Wild Wild West , Independence Day, Shark Tale and other such shite? Smith is a natural-born charmer with a gleaming smile who’s really good when he’s talking with Access Hollywood reps on the red carpet, and now that he’s shifting into major heart-tug mode in Happyness (and opposite his own son yet) we’re supposed to just topple …is that it?
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