The New Bond flick is looking like a wipeout before it gets rolling. Despite filming having begun on the Daniel Craig-starring, Paul Haggis-authored Casino Royale in Prague a few days ago, the producers still haven’t signed anyone to play the Icily Sophisticated, Cold-Hearted Villain in Perfect Physical Shape as well the Tough, Spirited, Independent-Minded, Fated-to-Sexually- Submit Bond Girl. “They’re talking to three to four [women] right now,” Haggis recently told a reporter. “Every week I read there’s a new Bond girl, and I call them and they say, no, you idiot.” Let’s just spit it out so we don’t have to step over the elephant: they can’t get a Bond girl because the agents for the hottest actresses are telling their clients not to do it because they don’t think Craig has the right kind of studly savoir faire and that the series may well be on its last legs, and also because no one wants to work with those Irving Thalberg-level Bond producers Michael Wilson and Barbara Broccoli. Rachel McAdams would be great to cast, but the only reason she’d accept would be a need for a whopping down payment on an expensive new home. An insider has confided that “the casting of the villain is much further along than that of the female star.”
I’m thinking of a film about two men in love with each other, but one of them loving a bit less. Their lusts and longings are entirely about women and children are sired, but nothing approaches their feelings for each other. They’re constantly pried apart by social-political concerns and they never quite mesh, but the man who loves a bit more can never quit his feelings. He doesn’t know how, and he hurts badly as a result.
And then one of them is killed by a group of violent men who despise what their victim stands for, and finally the longish movie (lasting over two hours) ends with the survivor lamenting his dear friend’s passing and talking quietly to his ghost.
Peter O’Toole, Richard Burton in publicity still for Peter Glenville’s Becket
The men with unquenchable feelings for each other are played by movie stars in their prime, the movie is funded by a major studio, and come January it is honored with a slew of high-prestige Oscar nominations — Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, and so on. Everybody admires or at least respects it, and the reviews are almost 100% ecstatic.
The movie, of course, is Peter Glenville’s Becket, which came out just shy of 42 years ago. But the element of men in love with each other (in a not-quite-sexual way) was no less pronounced or emotionally intense than the love affair in Brokeback Mountain, except for Becket‘s lack of depicted physical intimacy.
And yet it’s a film in which the lead actors share a bed in the first act, with one of them confiding to the other a few pages earlier that “I can’t bear to think of you in pain.” They argue fiercely during a third-act scene about rejected feelings of love between them, and a disapproving female accuses one of having “an obsession” for the other that is “unhealthy and unnatural.”
In fact, it’s more than a little bit astounding that a movie as “gay” as Becket was released five years before the Stonewall riot and the beginning of the gay rights movement, and that it was made by the stodgy-at-the-time Paramount Pictures, and was performed by two of the era’s most respected actors (Peter O’Toole and Richard Burton), and was patronized by straightlaced audiences who had probably never considered the idea of emotional dignity between homosexual men.
In short, there are a lot of striking similarities between Becket and Brokeback Mountain. So many, in fact, that the stage has been pretty much set by James Schamus and Ang Lee’s western for Becket to enjoy a whole new level of interest on DVD.
But years after plans were first made by MPI Home Video to bring out a loaded Becket disc, complete with a making-of documentary and a commentary track by Peter O’Toole, the chances of it coming out any time soon seem…well, a bit up in the air.
MPI Home Video marketing executive Greg Newman says the DVD will be out “this year,” but his reluctance to speculate about whether he’s speaking of the spring, summer, fall or winter indicates that MPI’s plans are perhaps less than rock-solid. Newman’s vagueness suggests that the Becket DVD, whenever it finally peeks through, may strike when the iron is cold.
Unless, of course, it happens to be released at the same time that Brokeback Mountain comes out on DVD, which will probably be in the late spring or early summer.
I know that no video company would be forecasting an ’06 release of a major title in late January without having formulated some kind of ballpark or target release-date in their heads.
And I can’t imagine Peter O’Toole not having questions about the Becket DVD also, some two years and four months after taping his supplemental interview footage and voice-over commentary for MPI in London, in the fall of ’03.
Becket has been out of circulation for several years due to a rights-and-revenue issue and the family of Jean Anouilh, the French author of the original stage play of “Becket” that Glenville’s film was based upon. Plus the 40 year-old film elements had deteriorated. But a 35mm version was restored about three years ago by the Academy Film Archive, with support from the Film Foundation.
Around the same time (i.e., the summer/fall of ’03), MPI, which has owned the video rights for a long while, began making plans for a DVD release of the film. The revenue issue with the Anouilh family has finally been resolved, I was told by an MPI spokesperson on Monday, but there’s still a measure of uncertainty about anyone seeing a DVD of Becket with a firm date in mind.
I think it’s fair to say that the Illinois-based MPI Home Video is known for being a small-time, not-quite-in-the-hip-groove-of-things outfit, and it seems a shame that a film as good and valuable as Becket should be land-locked with a company of this calibre. Becket is clearly the kind of highly-valued classic that should be released by a toney video company like Criterion or Acorn Media.
I saw Becket on a big screen in the summer of ’04 and again at a UCLA class that I moderated last spring, and it holds up very nicely. Burton is masterful as Thomas Becket, but O’Toole’s performance as King Henry II is one of the most exciting ever seen in a mainstream movie. O’Toole takes your breath away half the time, and the other half he makes you grin with delight.
Nominated for 12 Oscars (but winning only one for Best Adapted Screenplay), Becket isn’t just a touching story about unrequited love but one that manages to dramatize in a recognizable way what it is to experience profound spiritual growth.
It’s a conventional costume drama in some respects, yes, but it’s one of the smartest and most engrossing features ever made in this vein. Directed by Glenville from a screenplay by Edward Anhalt (who adapted Jean Anouilh’s play), photographed by the great Geoffrey Unsworth and edited by Anne V. Coates, Becket feels slightly hemmed in by the conventions of prestige-level filmmaking as they existed in the mid ’60s, but the delivery and the talent levels are tip-top.
MPI has owned the film for several years but contributed nothing to the Academy’s restoration costs (about $125,000, give or take), which were covered by the Film Foundation. The restoration work was handled by Mike Pogorzelski, who provided the print of Becket that was shown at UCLA last March.
Newman told me almost two years ago that MPI got O’Toole to record a commentary track in London in the fall of ’03. The 71 year-old actor talked all through the 2 hour and 29 minute film, Newman said.
“We’re still doing quite a lot of the technical work for the DVD and everything else,” Newman told me in the summer of ’04, “and we’re going to have a hell of an extras package, and these releases take time. I hope that it will come out next year.”
Newman was referring to a 2005 release, which never happened.
“Remember, we’re coming right on the heels of this restoration thing,” Newman said. “It was only finished recently.” When he said this, the restored Becket had been screened in London seven months earlier.
The crux of the restoration was about the original stereo mix of Becket being digitally reconstituted. “That’s what the restoration was mainly about,” I was told in the summer of ’04.
“MPI never invested in the film,” says restoration specialist Robert Harris, who wanted to restore Becket a decade ago. “If the Academy hadn’t done it, those audio tracks would have been trashed. The Academy is an angel here.”
Harris told me that MPI “should pay the Academy back out of their first earnings, because without the Academy’s efforts they wouldn’t have a film to release.”
Nommie Nommie
A hearty yee-haw for the eight nominations that went to Brokeback Mountain this morning. This pretty much certifies that Ang Lee’s film has the Best Picture Oscar in the bag. Someone tell me how this won’t happen.
And a big college yell for Best Picture nominees Capote (as well as Best Actor contender Philip Seymour Hoffman, Best Director hopeful Bennett Miller and Best Adapted Screenplay nominee Dan Futterman), Paul Haggis and Bobby Moresco’s Crash, and George Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck.
The Best Picture nominees: Brokeback Mountain,
And a confused head-shake over Munich taking the fifth Best Picture nomination.
I understand the reasoning, I think. Why shouldn’t a movie that appalled a significant portion of film cognoscenti the world over with that ludicrous cross-cutting between Eric Bana schtupping his on-screen wife and a reenactment of the 1972 shoot-out between Black September kidnappers and German police at Munich’s Furstenfeldbruck air base…a film such as this is surely a finer and more worthy achievement than The Constant Gardener, Walk the Line or Match Point.
Three and a half hours ago (around 7 am) I received an e-mail that said “Steven Spielberg says fuck you,” and I guess I deserved that.
But let’s be clear: my comment to Newsday‘s Jon Anderson in late December was that Munich was “dead, dead…deader than dead” as a Best Picture winner. (And that’s still the case today, as everyone well knows.) I asked Anderson to please get this right because I knew that the Academy psychology might give up a Best Picture nomination, despite all the minuses.
Munich helmer Steven Spielberg wouldn’t have been nominated for Best Director without the ingrained Spielberg kowtow sensibility out there. No friggin’ way would Roger Donaldson have been nominated if he’d directed the same Munich now playing in theatres.
Avner (Eric Bana) and Munich-massacre-montage fuck partner watch initial tube coverage of 1972 Munich Olympic Games hostage standoff
But let’s ease up and acknowedge that NBC/Univeral publicists and, yes, Munich water-carrier David Poland managed to sell it for all it was worth…they and other Munich team members pulled it off against great odds. They helped to save Munich from total humiliation. Now go away and don’t come back until the DVD comes out.
The Oscar show ratings on March 5th will be fairly low because the viewing audience for the five Best Picture nominees isn’t that high (so far), but what could the academy have done? Nominate King Kong or Fun With Dick and Jane for Best Picture? It’s going to be a gnarly three or four weeks for ABC’s ad sales team.
A big hand to the Academy for giving George Lucas what-for by not nominating Revenge of the Sith for a special-effects award. It took them a while to stand up and grow a pair, but they finally delivered a referendum on the soullessness of the Star Wars prequels.
And another cheer for their refusal to nominate the thoroughly rancid Sin City in this category, although it should be once again acknowledged that the black-and- white photography in this otherwise pukey film was to-die-for.
Congratulations to the great Terrence Howard for nabbing a Best Actor nomination for his superb performance in Craig Brewer’s Hustle & Flow. It wasn’t that long ago when handicappers were saying he might not have the juice to go all the way (especially after he got re-categorized by the Golden Globes). A proud moment for a good man.
Mixed congratulations, at best, to North Country‘s Frances McDormand….the truly great Frances McDormand…for her Best Supporting Actress nomination. No self- respecting actor wants accolades for playing a blue-collar laborer dying from Lou Gehrig’s disease and saying “fuck you” out of a voice box.
McDormand was nominated because some not-very-hip Academy people decided to think sappy. It’s wrong, wrong, wrong that In Her Shoes costar Shirley MacLaine and The Family Stone‘s Diane Keaton were blown off in this category.
Down the list and firing at will…
It doesn’t seem right that both Walk the Line honcho James Mangold and The Constant Gardener helmer Fernando Meirelles weren’t included among the five Best Director nominees. I understand why History of Violence helmer David Cronenberg didn’t have the votes, but he’s still a world-class artist whose films will play to film lovers 100 years from now.
Best Supporting Actor nominee Jake Gyllenhaal, Best Actor nominee Heath Ledger
Walk the Line‘s Reese Witherspoon will win for Best Actress, but I wish her competition was stronger, and I’m lamenting again that Toni Collette didn’t get her due by receiving a Best Actress nom for In Her Shoes…a performance that was absolutely in the same league as Witherspoon’s, if not above and beyond.
Keira Knightley’s Best Actress nomination for her work in Pride & Prejudice is bizarre, I think. Weird. I saw that film again on an Academy screener earlier this month, and if she weren’t young and beautiful…aaahh, forget it.
Paul Giamatti will probably win the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his Cinderella Man trainer, but hooray for Crash costar Matt Dillon nabbing a nomination in this category. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer, harder-working guy…and for playing a cop with pretty ugly stuff inside.
And cheers to the great William Hurt for winning a nomination for his hilarious, jaw-dropping History of Violence performance.
Cheers to Junebug‘s Amy Adams for taking a Best Supporting Actress nom, even though The Constant Gardener‘s Rachel Weisz is the almost-certain winner.
Best Actor nominee Philip Seymour Hoffman, Best Supporting Actress nominee Catherine Keener
Congrats to Match Point director-writer Woody Allen for his Best Original Screen- play nomination. I thought this might not happen after the Writers Guild blew him off.
The Best Foreign Language Film showdown is between Hany Abu-Assad’s Paradise Now and Gavin Hood’s Tsotsi, but I’m half- presuming that concerns about the recent election of Hamas to run the Palestinian state will adversely affect support for Abu-Assad’s film. Everything cross-pollinates.
March Of The Penguins has long been the presumed favorite in the Best Documentary Feature race, but maybe the start of the Enron trial in Houston will assist its closest competitor, Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room.
And shame once again upon Freida Mock and her documentary nomination committee for failing to even short-list Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man, by far the most critically honored and awarded doc of the year.
Nothing else has me revved right now. I’ll put more stuff in as the day progresses, and I’ll put the final nominations into a final Oscar box later this morning.
Oh, and Hollywood Elsewhere didn’t arise at 5 ayem this morning to tap this piece out because waking at 6 ayem was rigorous enough.
Expanded Balloon
Oscar Balloon ’06 is finally up and running, and the more input and attention the better. Movies that look like they might rate because they’re been (or are being) directed and written by proven top-tier talents…that’s all this is now.
Best Picture: Flags of Our Fathers (DreamWorks); The Departed (Warner Brothers); Babel (Paramount); The Good Shepherd (Universal Pictures); The Good German (Steven Soderbergh); Che (Focus Features); Southland Tales (Universal); Marie Antoinette (Columbia Pictures); The Pursuit of Happyness (Columbia Pictures); Breaking and Entering (The Weinstein Co.); Infamous (Warner Independent); All The King’s Men (Columbia Pictures); A Good Year (20th Century Fox); Stranger Than Fiction (Columbia); I’m Not There: Suppositions on a Film Concerning Dylan (Cinetic Media); Dreamgirls (DreamWorks/Paramount); Running With Scissors (Columbia); World Trade Center (Universal); The Prestige (Touchstone); The Children of Men (Universal); Zodiac (Paramount).
Matt Damon, Martin Scorsese during filming of The Departed
Best Director: Clint Eastwood (Flags of Our Fathers); Anthony Minghella (Breaking and Entering); Martin Scorsese (The Departed); Steven Soderbergh (The Good German, Che); Ridley Scott (A Good Year); Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (Babel); Marc Forster (Stranger Than Fiction); Richard Kelly (Southland Tales); Steve Zaillan (All The King’s Men); Bill Condon (Dreamgirls); Doug McGrath (Infamous); Ryan Murphy (Running With Scissors); Oliver Stone (World Trade Center); Chris Nolan (The Prestige); Alfono Cuaron (The Children of Men).; Todd Haynes (I’m Not There: Suppositions on a Film Concerning Dylan); David Fincher (Zodiac).
Best Actor: Will Smith (The Pursuit of Happyness); Matt Damon (The Good Shepherd); Jude Law (Breaking and Entering); Sean Penn (All The King’s Men); Brad Pitt (Babel).
Best Actress: Anette Bening (Running with Scissors); Nicole Kidman (Fur); Cate Blanchett (The Good German or Babel); Maggie Gyllenhaal (Stranger Than Fiction).
Best Supporting Actor: Jack Nicholson (The Departed); Hugh Grant (American Dreamz); Gael Garcia Bernal (Babel); Albert Finney (A Good Year ); Jamie Foxx (Dreamgirls), Javier Bardem (Che).
Ryan Phillipe (l.) and costars in Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers
Best Supporting Actress: Kate Winslet (All The King’s Men), Sandra Bullock (Infamous)
Best Original Screenplay: Richard Kelly (Southland Tales); Paul Weitz (American Dreamz); Eric Roth (The Good Shepherd); Anthony Minghella (Breaking and Entering).
Best Adapted Screenplay: Sofia Coppola (Marie Antoinette).
Best Feature Documentary: God Grew Tired of Us ((Christopher Dillon Quinn, Tom Walker); Sicko (Michael Moore).
Sure To Be Remembered: Snakes on a Plane (New Line Cinema — director: David Ellis — CAST: Samuel L. Jackson, Nathan Phillips, Benjamin McKenzie).
Grabs
In motion on the Santa Monica Pier merry-go-round — Sunday, 1.29.06, 4:10 pm.
Billboard over Book Soup on Sunset Strip — Saturday, 1.28.06, 9:55 pm.
Posted at pizza joint on Abbot Kinney Blvd. in Venice — Sunday, 1.29.06, 5:15 pm.
Sunday, 1.29.06, 4:12 pm.
Sunday, 1.29.06, 6:45 pm.
Quince…what?
Day after day and hour after hour during the Sundance Film Festival I asked every journalist, distributor and agent I ran into what they’d seen and liked (or half-liked). I must have asked this question 60 or 70 times over the eight days I was up there…
And nobody mentioned Quinceanera, a small-scale drama about sexual tensions vs. Hispanic community values in L.A.’s Echo Park. It was like it didn’t exist…one of those strugglers that sometimes get lost in the shuffle.
I can guess but I don’t precisely know who these guys are, but they’re Quinceanera costars. Possibly Jesse Garcia and Emily Rios.
And yet Wash Westmoreland and Richard Glatzer’s film not only won the Dramatic Grand Jury Prize last night but the Dramatic Audience Award, which hasn’t occured at a Sundance Film Festival since Tony Bui’s Three Seasons took the same two prizes in 1999.
I guess I should spend more time talking to non-pro types and not just my know- it-all friends. It’s probably also fair to say that the other dramatic competition entries — Stay, Sherrybaby, Somebodies, Wristcutters, Stephanie Daley, The Hawk is Dying, Right at Your Door, etc. — all had some kind of drawback or dislike element. (I had no beef with Daley at all — it’s a very respectable and well-made trauma drama.)
That rumor about Bob Berney’s Picturehouse having bought Quinceanera for distribution isn’t true, by the way. Berney told me this morning it’s “a good rumor” but an inaccurate one. He agreed that the buzz about Quinceanera wasn’t very strong during the festival, but said it was apparently a “local” favorite (i.e., among people in the ticket lines).
Since almost no one in journo circles saw it, I suggested an idea this morning to Quinceanera producer Anne Clements, whom I reached via cell phone: offer it for a showing at the Santa Barbara Film Festival (which kicks off on Thursday, 2.2). Festival director Roger Durling told me he might be able to find a loose slot in his schedule if the film were to be made available.
Wash Westmoreland, Richard Glatzer, who co-directed and co-wrote Qinceanera, during the ’06 Sundance Film Festival. (Pic stolen from Indiewire site.)
There was another double winner last night when Christopher Quinn’s God Grew Tired of Us won both the Grand Jury Documentary Prize as well as the Audience Doc Award — another festival first.
The World Cinema Jury Prize for Best Documentary went to Juan Carlos Rulfo’s In The Pit, which Variety‘s Robert Koehler went on about and told me to see. It explores the day-to-day lives of guys building an upper deck to Mexico City’s Periferico freeway.
The World Cinema Dramatic Jury Prize went to Gela Babluani’s 13 Tzameti. The World Cinema Audience Documentary Award was given to Tim Dirdamal’s De Nadie, about a female Central American immigrant making her way from souterhn Mexico into the U.S. And the World Cinema Audience Dramatic Award was given to Toa Fraser’s No. 2.
Here’s the official announcement.
“How did Brokeback Mountain break out? By surgically targeting where the movie would play in its initial release; selling it as a romance for women rather than a controversial gay-bashing tale; and opting out of the culture wars rather than engaging them.” So reads John Lippman’s Wall Street Journal article [free] about the surprising box-office success of this film, which is selling more tickets than Munich by a 3-to-1 margin and, if you ask me, is looking more and more likely to hit or top $100 million. Lippman reports data from Focus Features marketing guy David Brooks to wit: “As the weeks pass, the demographics of the Brokeback audience have shifted. Gays turned out for the first weekend, with 60% of the audience male and 40% female. But in the next three weeks, women responded to marketing and the audience flipped to 60% female and 40% male. Now, as the media attention intensifies in the wake of the film’s wins at the Golden Globes, heterosexual men are going to the film on their own and the women are sliding back down to the mid-50 percentile.”
Docs Own It
So far the most affecting highs of Sundance 2006 are not coming from the features but the documentaries. No narrative except Little Miss Sunshine has generated any kind of noticable wattage, but everywhere you turn people are talking up the docs.
Yesterday afternoon I saw Freida Mock’s conventional but nonetheless moving and impassioned Wrestling with Angels, a study of the great playwright Tony Kushner. Here, at last, was a film of serious substance and palpable emotion…something that woke me up…a movie about caring and striving and laying it on the line.
An acquisitions guy who’s been vigorously making the rounds told me last night that Christopher Quinn’s God Grew Tired of Us, a study of young Sudanese refugees, is an Oscar-level achievement. (I’ll be seeing it this morning, and — not that this matters — there’s a reception for Quinn from 8 to 10 pm tonight.)
I detected heartfelt enthusiasm last night in response to yesterday’s 3 pm Eccles screening of Stewart Copeland’s Everyone Stares, which is said to provide epic coverage of the career of the Police in the late ’70s and ’80s. I won’t see it until 11:30 pm tonight at Prospector Square but I’m sensing the alignment of coming pleasure.
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Ditto Jonathan Demme’s Neil Young: Heart of Gold, which screens tonight at the Eccles at 9:30 and tomorrow (Tuesday) at the Library. How can this not be a fine deep-drill meditation about an indusputably great songwriter and performer, no matter how Demme decides to play it? The elements seems unquenchable.
Haskell Wexler’s Who Needs Sleep, which is showing right now at the Holiday Cinemas (and which I’m obviously not seeing because I’m writing this) did well at the Library on Saturday evening. Okay, I didn’t poll the audience but I’ve spoken to two journos who saw it, and they were well satisfied.
Thin, Lauren Greenfield’s doc about eating disorders, is reputedly exceptional… although I still have yet to see it.
Neil Young
There was ample respect and satisfaction shown for Lian Lunson’s Leonard Cohen I’m Your Man when it played the Toronto Film Festival last September, and the response has been the same in Park City. (And there’s no colon after “Cohen”… this is how the title reads.) The IMDB says Lionsgate will be releasing it in May.
The selling point of Nathaniel Hornblower’s Awesome: I Fuckin’ Shot That!, which ThinkFilm will release in late March, is in the concept. It’s a Beastie Boys concert doc shot by 50 fans who were handed video cameras and urged to shoot away. The word on it has been strong since before the festival began.
Not to mention Patricia Foulkrod’s Ground Truth: After the Killing Ends, Steve Bognar and Julia Reichert’s A Lion in the House, Malcolm Ingram’s Small-Town Gay Bar…obviously I’m just laundry listing and you can call it hot air, but docs are where the current is.
To Live By
I can’t provide a clip from Freida Lee Mock’s Tony Kushner doc, Wrestling with Angels, but I’ve found a sampling of the exceptional joie de vivre that this gifted writer seems to exude every time he steps in front of a mike.
It’s a portion of a Class Day address that Kushner delivered a delivered to grad- uating Columbia University students in June 2004. Read it, or watch the video.
Think not of the content as words meant to inspire students, but all of us. Each morning of each day begins the remainder of our lives.
Tony Kushner
“This is the Columbia dialectic, the New York City dialectic, all this spectacular symmetry, all this Euclidean geometry…all this rational griddage is a lattice entwined with floribund, uncontrolled and uncontrollable vines, shoots, roots, fruits, leaves, bees, busily cross-pollinating.
“This box, this machine, this is a crystal incubatory whence comes the fluid, the protean, the revolutionary, the non-mechanical, the non-commodified, the non-fetishized, the human. The air this morning is electric. You have fed, you have sated, you’re ready…and every step you take from this point on counts.
“This is your Code Orange: Life and its terrors, terrible and splendid, awaits. I know I speak for Jon, Warren and Justice Ruth — seek the truth; when you find it, speak the truth; interrogate mercilessly the truth you’ve found; and act, act, act.
“The world is hungry for you, the world has waited for you, the world has a place for you. Take it. Mazel tov. Change the world.”
Holding Pattern
Saturday’s snowfalls (there were at least two) in Park City seemed far more nourishing and stimulating than any of the four films I saw: Laurie Collyer’s Sherrybaby, Julian Goldberger’s The Hawk is Dying, Patrick Stettner’s The Night Listener and Mia Goldman’s Open Window.
If there’s a general impression so far, it’s that festivalgoers are underwhelmed so far (apart from Little Miss Sunshine). It’s fun going from screening to screening and trucking around and running into friends, but none of the films have struck anyone as genuinely powerful or heavy-duty.
Apart from the four I sat through, nothing happened yesterday except for people talking about the $10 million Fox Searchlight purchase of Little Miss Sunshine, a couple of pleasant-vibe parties, a lot of time spent in impossibly congested traffic jams, especially on the main road in downtown Park City, which is a ridiculous alcoholic zoo.
Little Miss Sunshine costar Alan Arkin grilled by a blonde at party thrown for Sunshine and Sherrybaby by Big Beach at VW Lounge — Saturday, 4:45 pm
I’ve heard good things about Lauren Greenfield’s Thin, which shows tonight (1.22) at the Holiday Village cinemas. (My only concern is an enthusiastic review that David Poland wrote about this film last night. Beware: underneath every Poland rave is a potential for another Devil and Daniel Johnston meltdown.)
I’ve also heard stuff about the Tony Kushner doc Wrestling with Angels, which I’m going to try to see today at 5:30 pm.
As I was leaving the Eccles just after Saturday’s 6 pm Night Listener screening I mentioned to a journo pal that watching it felt like being in a kind of prison…a windowless isolation cell in Iraq during the Hussein regime. It’s a movie for dead people — the whole thing is entombed. Almost every shot is enveloped in shadows and blackness, and your kindly torturer is a bearded and extremely old and withered-looking Robin Williams.
Written by Amistead Maupin, Terry Anderson and Stettner, The Night Listener is based on a mostly true story (or so I heard). It’s about a radio talk-show host who becomes intrigued by a young sickly kid (Rory Culkin) he’s spoken to on the phone but has never seen, and about his search for the boy and some very curious encounters with a blind woman who seems to be his mom (Tonni Collette).
During yesterday afternoon’s snowfall — Saturday, 3:15 pm
What happens is so dreary and stifling I don’t want to recount it, but this is one of those films that makes you repeat that Victoria Wisdom line about “Sundance spelled backwards spells depression.”
It’s startling to consider that the producers of this film thought that filmgoers might actually be persuaded to pay money to see this thing. You program Sundance for “diversity,” and you get stuff like this. This is a real John Cooper film.
Sherrybaby — a melancholy, downward-spiral drama about an ex-drug addict (Maggie Gyllenhaal) just out of prison who’s too weak, selfish and lacking in resolve to make any serious changes in her life — felt like the most straightforward and heartfelt of the four.
But as pics about suburban mothers with drug problems go, Down to the Bone (which I wrote about two weeks ago) isn’t as much of a downer because its main character, played by Vera Farmiga, is smarter and more self-aware than Gyllen- haal’s, and she seems more guilty and self-critical about her problem so you’re able to half-root for her recovery.
During q & a following yesterday morning’s screening of Sherrybaby at Racquet Club, costars Maggie Gyllenhaal, 8 year-old Ryan Simpkins, Bridget Barkan
Gyllenhaal’s Sherry, based upon a troubled woman from Collyer’s past, is somewhat sympathetic. She has a good heart and loves her toddler daughter (who’s been raised by her brother and his wife when she went into prison for theft) and has been deeply hurt by sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of her father (Sam Bottoms). But some people are just born to screw up and fall down, and Sherry is one of these sad sacks and that’s that.
Recovering addicts need discipline, maturity and hard introspection to stay out of trouble, and a lot of them just don’t have the stuff to pull through, and so they wind up wasting their lives and subjecting their friends and families to all their crap for decades. Thank fortune some of them break out of the cycle and climb out of the pit, but most of them don’t.
That said, Gyllenhaal is quite invested and believable (her not being very likable is a choice that Collyer made), and the young girl who plays her daughter — 8 year- old Ryan Simpkins — is flat-out superb.
Snapped on the way to screening of The Night Listener — Saturday, 1.21, 5:25 pm.
I haven’t seen his mermaid-in-the-swimming-pool movie, but The Hawk is Dying won’t hurt Paul Giamatti’s career. We all have to work and pay the bills, and some- times we work with friends for the wrong reasons, and moviegoers understand this, I think.
I started thinking about catching a snooze very soon after this film began. I’ve become disciplined enough at sleeping during films that I can make myself wake up every ten minutes just to keep up with the plot. So I can honestly saw that I saw maybe half of it, and that the portions I saw left me totally cold.
Set in the south, The Hawk is Dying is about an owner of an auto upholstery shop named George who lives with his grotesquely fat sister and her mentaly challenged son Fred (Michael Pitt). George is into training falcons, and the footage of him capturing and training a red-tailed falcon is…well, interesting. But I was glad for the nap time.
Open Window star Robin Tunney, Kinky Boots star Chiwetel Ejiofor (his close friends call him “Chewy”) prior to midnight showing of Open Window
When I was watching I didn’t give care at all about paying sufficient attention in order to understand or give a shit about the hawk-capturing metaphor. Movies with overt metaphors get be very old very quickly.
Any movie that makes a Paul Giamatti performance seem dull or running on empty is definitely doing something wrong, and Michael Pitt really needs to play an aver- age guy soon. Someone who smiles and wears clean clothes and brushes his teeth and talks in complete sentences. Pitt always plays barely articulate zone cases, and I’m starting to wonder if he can do anything else.
Open Window is a dull, decently made drama about a youngish Los Angeles couple coping with the trauma of the wife (Robin Tunney) having been raped in their home while the husband, a UCLA professor (Joel Edgerton), is away.
Sherrybaby director Laurie Collyer at Saturday’s Big Beach party at VW Lounge — 4:40 pm.
It’s a problem movie because it’s only about dealing with a problem and nothing much else. A bad thing happens, good people struggle with after-effects of the bad thing, recovery is slow and difficult, and so on. There’s a startling Repulsion-like moment about halfway through, but nothing else got me.
The problem with midnight screenings is that they always start at 12:30 am after the talent introductions and the short and the initial start-up delays, so you wind up gettign to sleep at 3 ayem and then the next day is late-starting and a whole late- rising, late-to-bed cycle begins.
It’s now 1:25 pm. I’m just finishing and haven’t showered so I’ll be missing the 3 pm Eccles screening of Stewart Copeland’s Everyone Stares, his doc about touring with the Police. That settles it — no more midnight screenings.
Saturday Grabs
Cinetic Media’s John Sloss, Little Miss Sunshine director Valerie Fairs at Big Beach party — Saturday, 4:45 pm.
Ulrich Thomsen, star of Christopher Boe’s Allegro and Anders Thomas Jensen’s Adam’s Apples.
The traffic gets worse every year. From the Library up to Main Street is a total parking lot. I jumped off the bus and got into town much faster by walking.
Sunshine Sublime
The first big of the ’06 Sundance Film Festival ignited last night in front of a huge, seriously delighted crowd at the Eccles theatre, and you can bet one of the big indie-level distribs will have cinched a deal to release it before the sun comes up Saturday morning.
I’m speaking of Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris’ Little Miss Sunshine …and all lovers of good, smart mainstream comedies with heart should have been there. For me, watching films like this with a live-wire crowd is what Sundance highs are all about.
This isn’t exactly a movie that re-invents the wheel. It’s just a smart family comedy-slash-road movie, but the last film that got so much good humor out of such dark subject matter was maybe David O. Russell’s Flirting with Disaster, although Sunshine is a bit more of a wholesome, straight-up thing.
Following the 6pm Friday night screening of Little Miss Sunshine (l. to r.): Toni Collette, screenwriter Michael Arndt (partially hidden), co-helmers Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton.
This is a film about hostility, feelings of futility, middle-aged career collapse, a troubled marriage, a fiercely alienated son, a dad who’s a bit of an asshole, a sudden family death, a failed suicide…and it’s often very funny and quite warm and so cleverly calculated and well-blended that it doesn’t feel like anyone calculated anything.
Sundance director Geoff Gilmore has written that Little Miss Sunshine possesses a kind of “Capra-esque lunacy.” For me the word Capra (as in Frank) means cornball emotion and cloying stabs at manipulation…and Sunshine feels, to me, more natural (and naturally effective) than any Capra film I’ve ever seen.
And damned if Steve Carell isn’t eight times sadder and gloomier in this thing than he was in the early portions of The 40 Year-Old Virgin, and if he isn’t much funnier and more winning here than he was in that hit film from last summer. It’s his best performance ever.
Virgin director-writer Judd Apatow has been writing comedy for 15 years or so, and when he sees Little Miss Sunshine he’s going to wish he could write something as good as what Michael Arndt has done, and direct a comedy of this type with the naturalistic panache shown by co-directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris.
The crowd on its feet after the lights came up.
Toni Collette, Steve Carell, Michael Arndt
Sunshine is basically about family ties holding strong under ghastly and horrific circumstances.
It’s two days or so in the life of the can’t-catch-a-break Hoover clan — the vaguely dipshitty motivational speaker Richard (Gregg Kinnear), his sorely frustrated wife Sheryl (Toni Collette), Sheryl’s crushed, post-suicidal brother (Carell), a curmud- geonly, drug-taking grandpa (Alan Arkin), the silent, sulking Dwayne (Paul Dano), and 7 year-old cutie-pie Olive (Abigail Breslin).
The action is about going on a car trip from hell to take Olive to a Little Miss Sunshine beauty pageant in Redondo Beach…and wouldn’t you just know the pageant itself would also be a nightmare? But this family has an improvised cure for that.
It’s not just that this all feels unexpectedly funny, but fresh and unforced. It’s not quite as refined or soulful as Alexander Payne’s Sideways, but dammit…Little Miss Sunshine has to be a hit…it can’t not be. Now watch paying audiences shrug their shoulders and go “eh” when it opens later this year.
The crowd waiting outside (in what felt like 20 degree weather) before the ushers finally let everyone into the 6 pm show..
Little Miss Sunshine got a standing ovation when it ended around 8 pm or there- abouts. And now it’s 3:55 ayem Utah time and I’m sitting in the lobby of the Park City Marriott because the QWest DSL that was supposed to be working in the condo wasn’t working, and fuck me.
Cinetic Media’s John Sloss is probably still finalizing the distrib deal for Little Miss Sunshine as I write this. Indiewire reported early this morning that “biz activity kicked into high gear with immediate offers rumored to be in the millions of dollars. Negotiations were continuing at 1:30 a.m. early Saturday morning. An overnight deal was possible, but an insider added, “I think it will be a long night.”
It took Faris and Dayton about five years to get this film made. Why I can’t imag- ine, but this anecdote in itself reminds me how blind and clueless mainstream Hollywood can often be. What if Faris and Dayton had given up? How many people with scripts as good as this one have grown weary and thrown in the towel after getting turned down for the 27th time?
Longtime Sundancer Cherry Kutac (left) and sister prior to start of 2nd Friday night show, Lucky Number Slevin.
Cold Mountain
For the first time since the ’93 Sundance Film Festival, I haven’t gotten a jump on things by arriving early in Park City — Wednesday night, say, or early Thursday afternoon — and filing the usual hot story about the food I’ve bought at Albertson’s and the people I’ve run into in the aisles.
I won’t even be picking up my press pass until late Friday afternoon, which means I’ll be missing the 1:30 pm press screening of The World According to Sesame Street, which I’m hearing is time very well spent. But the value of pre-festival Los Angeles phone-chat info is dropping sharply as we speak so forget it.
Park City’s Main Street during the waning hours of the ’05 festival, snapped from the roof of the Treasure Mountain Inn.
I can’t wait for the first left-field oddball movie to pop through. By “left field” I mean the sort of life-altering, visions-of-Johanna indie-cred film that very bright critics like Manohla Dargis or David Poland tend to have kittens over, and that not-quite-as- bright people like myself tend to have difficulty with. It’ll happen, trust me.
“There’s nothing like seeing a good film with a totally hip audience at Sundance,” people always say. And yes, the festival is worth it for those wondrous communal highs. But not every movie that slays in Park City does the same in Framingham or Paramus. And it’s not the film’s fault. I don’t want to sound like a snob, but some audiences just aren’t hip or perceptive enough to get it and that’s the truth.
If a movie is playing at the Eccles, the Raquet Club or the Library over the first three or four days, it’s probably pretty good or at least penetrating or half-clever on some level. And if it’s been scheduled from Tuesday, 1.24, through the end of the festival, be careful. (Except for Alpha Dog — see following story.)
I’m presuming that Stephanie Daley, Hilary Brougher’s drama about a young woman (Amber Tamblyn) who may have killed her child, will be one of the first announced pick-ups, but to judge from the film’s Equus-summoning quote that appears in the program notes — “This case is not about facts…it’s about what we believe” — the hoi polloi appeal may be limited.
At Thursday’s Sundance 2006 press conference (l. to r.): festival director Geoff Gilmore, founder & honcho Robert Redford, Friends with Money director-screenwriter Nicole Holofcener
I gather (i.e., have been told more than once) that Little Miss Sunshine, a Capra- esque dysfunctional-family heart movie from co-directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, will also be one of the early pick-ups. (Smells to me like a Fox Searchlight thing.)
Written by Michael Arndt (who lived in my humble West Hollywood abode last summer while I crashed in his spartan Brooklyn apartment), it stars Toni Collette, Gregg Kinear, Steve Carell, Paul Dano, Alan Arkin, Abigail Breslin. (First screen- ing: Eccles at 6 pm Friday. 2nd screening: Library at 8:30 am, Saturday, 1.21.)
Other likely pick-ups appear to be Julia Goldberger’s The Hawk is Dying with Paul Giamatti and Michelle Williams; The Darwin Awards with Joseph Fiennes and Win- ona Ryder; The Night Listener, a drama with Robin Williams, Toni Collette and Sandra Oh; and The Illusionist with Edward Norton, Paul Giamatti and Jessica Biel.
Wait a minute…The Darwin Awards?
Other intrigues include Michael Gondry’s The Science of Sleep, about a guy (Gael Garcia Bernal) falling for his neighbor; Chris Gorak’s Right at Your Door, a post- 9/11 nightmare piece about a terrorist “dirty bomb” detonating in Los Angeles; and Jason Reitman’s Thank you for Smoking, a comedy about a jaded tobacco lobbyist (Aaron Eckkhardt) which everyone saw and liked in Toronto four months ago.
Some people are cranked about seeing Terry Zwigoff’s Art School Confidential, which I saw and didn’t think much of…sorry.
Prada Lala
The Devil Wears Prada (20th Century Fox, 6.30.06) is a Manhattan fast-lane chick flick about the soul-corrupting rigors of working for an Anna Wintour-like Boss from Hell.
Let’s face it — Meryl Streep is going to wail as Miranda Priestley, editor-in-chief of the Glamour-ish Runway magazine. We all love it when gifted actresses play successful hyper neurotics. Faye Dunaway was never so perfect as she was in Network.
Anne Hathaway (Jake Gyllenhaal’s wife in Brokeback Mountain) plays Andy, the college journalism major hired to be Streep’s junior assistant as the film begins. Stanley Tucci, Rent‘s Tracie Thoms, Simon Baker and Emily Blint costar.
Meryl Streep a Miranda Priestly in David Frankel’s The Devil Wears Prada
I’ve read the script and enjoyed it for what it is, but I’d like to see a Hollywood confection some day that doesn’t trot out the same old bromide that demanding, high-paying, high-pressure jobs are bad for your relationship with your sweet laid-back boyfriend (played here by Adrian Grenier) and bad for your soul, etc.
Peter Hedges (About a Boy) has top-of-the-page screenplay credit on my draft, which is dared March 14, 2005.
The revisions are by three smarty-pants writers supplying the uptown polish and bitchy banter (Howard Michael Gould, Paul Rudnick and Don Roos).
The most recent polish when this draft was copied was by Aline Brosh McKenna (Laws of Attraction), whom the producers brought in to punch up Hathaway’s part and soften up the emotional tone of the film (i.e., make it more appealing to under-30 women) by heightening the vulnerability stuff.
Dog Has Its Day
Of the dozens of definite-interest films playing at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival (which I haven’t even begun to try and summarize), Nick Cassevetes’ Alpha Dog has easily gotten the most press…and yet it’s showing at the very end of the fes- tival (Friday, 1.27 at the Eccles, and Saturday, 1.28, at Prospector Square) when most of the hot-and-happening crowd will be gone.
I have it on very good authority that it’s worth sticking around for. Alpha Dog isn’t a great film but it’s quite provocative and even agitating (in a good way). It’s certainly thought-provoking, and it boasts more than a few live-wire performances, including a serious stand-out one by Justin Timberlake.
Shawn Hatosy, Emile Hirsch, Harry Dean Stanton, Bruce Willis, Olivia Wilde and Justin Timberlake in Alpha Dog.
Directed and written by Cassevetes, Alpha Dog is more than a cautionary tale about amoral kids gone wild. It’s a condemnation of liberal anything-goes values, of absentee parents, of a society lacking in moral fibre. In short, it’s a film that social conservatives will point to and say, “See? This is what we’re trying to prevent.” And it’ll be hard to argue with them.
The impression is that Dog has fashioned its own particular vibe and attitude, but it will certainly be seen as following in the tradition of Tim Hunter’s River’s Edge, Jack Aaron Estes’ Mean Creek and Larry Clark’s Bully.
The film also stars Shawn Hatosy, Harry Dean Stanton, a bewigged Bruce Willis, Olivia Wilde, Sharon Stone, Dominique Swain and Ben Foster (another provider of an exceptional performance).
Based on a true story that happened about six years ago, Dog is about a 20 year-old known as Jesse James Hollywood (called Johnny Truelove in the movie, and portrayed by Lords of Dogtown‘s Emile Hirsch), a pot dealer from a well-to-do San Fernando Valley suburb who obviously saw himself as a minor-league Tony Montana.
This plus the general lower-end-of-the-gene-pool idiocy that is not unknown to suburban youth culture led to Jimmy making a fatal error: he and some pals kidnapped the 15 year-old younger brother of a guy who owed him $1200 as a way of applying pressure, and when he later realized he and his cronies would be looking at big-time jail terms he told a flunkie to kill the boy (Nicholas Markowitz in actuality– called Zack Mazursky in the film and played by Anton Yelchin) to keep him from testifying.
Justin Timberlake
When the boy’s body was found Jimmy eventually left the country and, with his father’s help, wound up living incognito in Brazil. But last March he was punched by Interpol agents and brought back to the U.S. to face murder charges.
The reason Alpha Dog has been getting a lot of press (in a David Halbfinger story that ran today in the New York Times and one that Lou Lumenick ran in the on 1.13) is because Cassavetes and the film’s distributor, New Line Cinema, are caught up in a legal tangle over a threatened injunction that could conceivably prevent Alpha Dog from being released on 2.24.06, as New Line is planning.
The beef is from Hollywood’s attorney James Blatt, who’s saying that prosecuting attorney Rod Zonen was guilty of misconduct by providing inside information about the murder case to Cassevetes during the film’s preparation phase. Blatt’s argu- ment is that the release of this information in a dramatic fashion in Alpha Dog will prejudice matters against his client.
Cassevetes was subpoenaed by Blatt last summer as part of an attempt to have Zonen removed from the case for giving Cassavetes access to nonpublic records. The ploy failed. Two months ago a judge ordered Cassavetes’s researcher, Michael Mehas, who is writing a book about the case, to turn over notes and tapes from his interviews to the defense. Blatt is now threatening to seek an injunction against the release of Alpha Dog.
I suspect Blatt is mainly grandstanding and that Alpha Dog will probably open as planned, but ahead-of-the-curve types will probably want to see it at Sundance just to play it safe.
Emile Hisch
Sundance honcho Geoff Gilmore declares in the program notes that Cassavetes’ film “captures the driving energy and sordid anomie of contemporary youth culture,” adding that it end “in a tragedy that would be shocking if we weren’t so aware of the kind of world we live in, a place with kids who live without mores, parents who don’t have a clue, and ongoing conflict between the lingering inno- cence of youth and moral disintegration and dissolution.”
Being a father of a 17 and a 16 year-old, this Cassevetes quote in the Times piece about absentee-parenting struck home:
“I’m guilty of it — of being too busy with your everyday life to properly spend enough time with your children to figure out what’s going on with them.
“You can check in, and you say, ‘Are you all right?’ But it’s not like being on a farm or spending a lot of time in the house. We all live really global, Internetty lives. Kids have more power than they did before. They have cars, they can get around, they have dough, and there’s always some person that’s got something going on that can get everybody killed.”
Vintage Art
For the first time since the ’93 Sundance Film Festival, I haven’t gotten a jump on things by arriving early in Park City — Wednesday night, say, or early Thursday afternoon — and filing the usual hot story about the food I’ve bought at Albertson’s and the people I’ve run into in the aisles.
I won’t even be picking up my press pass until late Friday afternoon, which means I’ll be missing the 1:30 pm press screening of The World According to Sesame Street, which I’m hearing is time very well spent. But the value of pre-festival Los Angeles phone-chat info is dropping sharply as we speak so forget it.
Park City’s Main Street during the waning hours of the ’05 festival, snapped from the roof of the Treasure Mountain Inn.
I can’t wait for the first left-field oddball movie to pop through. By “left field” I mean the sort of life-altering, visions-of-Johanna indie-cred film that very bright critics like Manohla Dargis or David Poland tend to have kittens over, and that not-quite-as- bright people like myself tend to have difficulty with. It’ll happen, trust me.
“There’s nothing like seeing a good film with a totally hip audience at Sundance,” people always say. And yes, the festival is worth it for those wondrous communal highs. But not every movie that slays in Park City does the same in Framingham or Paramus. And it’s not the film’s fault. I don’t want to sound like a snob, but some audiences just aren’t hip or perceptive enough to get it and that’s the truth.
< ?php include ('/home/hollyw9/public_html/wired'); ?>
If a movie is playing at the Eccles, the Raquet Club or the Library over the first three or four days, it’s probably pretty good or at least penetrating or half-clever on some level. And if it’s been scheduled from Tuesday, 1.24, through the end of the festival, be careful. (Except for Alpha Dog — see following story.)
I’m presuming that Stephanie Daley, Hilary Brougher’s drama about a young woman (Amber Tamblyn) who may have killed her child, will be one of the first announced pick-ups, but to judge from the film’s Equus-summoning quote that appears in the program notes — “This case is not about facts…it’s about what we believe” — the hoi polloi appeal may be limited.
At Thursday’s Sundance 2006 press conference (l. to r.): festival director Geoff Gilmore, founder & honcho Robert Redford, Friends with Money director-screenwriter Nicole Holofcener
I gather (i.e., have been told more than once) that Little Miss Sunshine, a Capra- esque dysfunctional-family heart movie from co-directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, will also be one of the early pick-ups. (Smells to me like a Fox Searchlight thing.)
Written by Michael Arndt (who lived in my humble West Hollywood abode last summer while I crashed in his spartan Brooklyn apartment), it stars Toni Collette, Gregg Kinear, Steve Carell, Paul Dano, Alan Arkin, Abigail Breslin. (First screen- ing: Eccles at 6 pm Friday. 2nd screening: Library at 8:30 am, Saturday, 1.21.)
Other likely pick-ups appear to be Julia Goldberger’s The Hawk is Dying with Paul Giamatti and Michelle Williams; The Darwin Awards with Joseph Fiennes and Win- ona Ryder; The Night Listener, a drama with Robin Williams, Toni Collette and Sandra Oh; and The Illusionist with Edward Norton, Paul Giamatti and Jessica Biel.
Wait a minute…The Darwin Awards?
Other intrigues include Michael Gondry’s The Science of Sleep, about a guy (Gael Garcia Bernal) falling for his neighbor; Chris Gorak’s Right at Your Door, a post- 9/11 nightmare piece about a terrorist “dirty bomb” detonating in Los Angeles; and Jason Reitman’s Thank you for Smoking, a comedy about a jaded tobacco lobby- ist (Aaron Eckkhardt) which everyone saw and liked in Toronto four months ago.
Some people are cranked about seeing Terry Zwigoff’s Art School Confidential, which I saw and didn’t think much of…sorry.
Prada Lala
The Devil Wears Prada (20th Century Fox, 6.30.06) is a Manhattan fast-lane chick flick about the soul-corrupting rigors of working for an Anna Wintour-like Boss from Hell.
Let’s face it — Meryl Streep is going to wail as Miranda Priestley, editor-in-chief of the Glamour-ish Runway magazine. We all love it when gifted actresses play successful hyper neurotics. Faye Dunaway was never so perfect as she was in Network.
Anne Hathaway (Jake Gyllenhaal’s wife in Brokeback Mountain) plays Andy, the college journalism major hired to be Streep’s junior assistant as the film begins. Stanley Tucci, Rent‘s Tracie Thoms, Simon Baker and Emily Blint costar.
Meryl Streep a Miranda Priestly in David Frankel’s The Devil Wears Prada
I’ve read the script and enjoyed it for what it is, but I’d like to see a Hollywood confection some day that doesn’t trot out the same old bromide that demanding, high-paying, high-pressure jobs are bad for your relationship with your sweet laid-back boyfriend (played here by Adrian Grenier) and bad for your soul, etc.
Peter Hedges (About a Boy) has top-of-the-page screenplay credit on my draft, which is dared March 14, 2005.
The revisions are by three smarty-pants writers supplying the uptown polish and bitchy banter (Howard Michael Gould, Paul Rudnick and Don Roos).
The most recent polish when this draft was copied was by Aline Brosh McKenna (Laws of Attraction), whom the producers brought in to punch up Hathaway’s part and soften up the emotional tone of the film (i.e., make it more appealing to under-30 women) by heightening the vulnerability stuff.
Dog Has Its Day
Of the dozens of definite-interest films playing at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival (which I haven’t even begun to try and summarize), Nick Cassevetes’ Alpha Dog has easily gotten the most press…and yet it’s showing at the very end of the fes- tival (Friday, 1.27 at the Eccles, and Saturday, 1.28, at Prospector Square) when most of the hot-and-happening crowd will be gone.
I have it on very good authority that it’s worth sticking around for. Alpha Dog isn’t a great film but it’s quite provocative and even agitating (in a good way). It’s certainly thought-provoking, and it boasts more than a few live-wire performances, including a serious stand-out one by Justin Timberlake.
Shawn Hatosy, Emile Hirsch, Harry Dean Stanton, Bruce Willis, Olivia Wilde and Justin Timberlake in Alpha Dog.
Directed and written by Cassevetes, Alpha Dog is more than a cautionary tale about amoral kids gone wild. It’s a condemnation of liberal anything-goes values, of absentee parents, of a society lacking in moral fibre. In short, it’s a film that social conservatives will point to and say, “See? This is what we’re trying to prevent.” And it’ll be hard to argue with them.
The impression is that Dog has fashioned its own particular vibe and attitude, but it will certainly be seen as following in the tradition of Tim Hunter’s River’s Edge, Jack Aaron Estes’ Mean Creek and Larry Clark’s Bully.
The film also stars Shawn Hatosy, Harry Dean Stanton, a bewigged Bruce Willis, Olivia Wilde, Sharon Stone, Dominique Swain and Ben Foster (another provider of an exceptional performance).
Based on a true story that happened about six years ago, Dog is about a 20 year-old known as Jesse James Hollywood (called Johnny Truelove in the movie, and portrayed by Lords of Dogtown‘s Emile Hirsch), a pot dealer from a well-to-do San Fernando Valley suburb who obviously saw himself as a minor-league Tony Montana.
This plus the general lower-end-of-the-gene-pool idiocy that is not unknown to suburban youth culture led to Jimmy making a fatal error: he and some pals kidnapped the 15 year-old younger brother of a guy who owed him $1200 as a way of applying pressure, and when he later realized he and his cronies would be looking at big-time jail terms he told a flunkie to kill the boy (Nicholas Markowitz in actuality– called Zack Mazursky in the film and played by Anton Yelchin) to keep him from testifying.
Justin Timberlake
When the boy’s body was found Jimmy eventually left the country and, with his father’s help, wound up living incognito in Brazil. But last March he was punched by Interpol agents and brought back to the U.S. to face murder charges.
The reason Alpha Dog has been getting a lot of press (in a David Halbfinger story that ran today in the New York Times and one that Lou Lumenick ran in the on 1.13) is because Cassavetes and the film’s distributor, New Line Cinema, are caught up in a legal tangle over a threatened injunction that could conceivably prevent Alpha Dog from being released on 2.24.06, as New Line is planning.
The beef is from Hollywood’s attorney James Blatt, who’s saying that prosecuting attorney Rod Zonen was guilty of misconduct by providing inside information about the murder case to Cassevetes during the film’s preparation phase. Blatt’s argu- ment is that the release of this information in a dramatic fashion in Alpha Dog will prejudice matters against his client.
Cassevetes was subpoenaed by Blatt last summer as part of an attempt to have Zonen removed from the case for giving Cassavetes access to nonpublic records. The ploy failed. Two months ago a judge ordered Cassavetes’s researcher, Michael Mehas, who is writing a book about the case, to turn over notes and tapes from his interviews to the defense. Blatt is now threatening to seek an injunction against the release of Alpha Dog.
I suspect Blatt is mainly grandstanding and that Alpha Dog will probably open as planned, but ahead-of-the-curve types will probably want to see it at Sundance just to play it safe.
Emile Hisch
Sundance honcho Geoff Gilmore declares in the program notes that Cassavetes’ film “captures the driving energy and sordid anomie of contemporary youth culture,” adding that it end “in a tragedy that would be shocking if we weren’t so aware of the kind of world we live in, a place with kids who live without mores, parents who don’t have a clue, and ongoing conflict between the lingering inno- cence of youth and moral disintegration and dissolution.”
Being a father of a 17 and a 16 year-old, this Cassevetes quote in the Times piece about absentee-parenting struck home:
“I’m guilty of it — of being too busy with your everyday life to properly spend enough time with your children to figure out what’s going on with them.
“You can check in, and you say, ‘Are you all right?’ But it’s not like being on a farm or spending a lot of time in the house. We all live really global, Internetty lives. Kids have more power than they did before. They have cars, they can get around, they have dough, and there’s always some person that’s got something going on that can get everybody killed.”
Vintage Art
Dog Has Its Day
Of the dozens of definite-interest films playing at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival (which I haven’t even begun to try and summarize), Nick Cassevetes’ Alpha Dog has easily gotten the most press…and yet it’s showing at the very end of the fes- tival (Friday, 1.27 at the Eccles, and Saturday, 1.28, at Prospector Square) when most of the hot-and-happening crowd will be gone.
I have it on very good authority that it’s worth sticking around for. Alpha Dog isn’t a great film but it’s quite provocative and even agitating (in a good way). It’s certainly thought-provoking, and it boasts more than a few live-wire performances, including a serious stand-out one by Justin Timberlake.
Shawn Hatosy, Emile Hirsch, Harry Dean Stanton, Bruce Willis, Olivia Wilde and Justin Timberlake in Alpha Dog.
Directed and written by Cassevetes, Alpha Dog is more than a cautionary tale about amoral kids gone wild. It’s a condemnation of liberal anything-goes values, of absentee parents, of a society lacking in moral fibre. In short, it’s a film that social conservatives will point to and say, “See? This is what we’re trying to prevent.” And it’ll be hard to argue with them.
The impression is that Dog has fashioned its own particular vibe and attitude, but it will certainly be seen as following in the tradition of Tim Hunter’s River’s Edge, Jack Aaron Estes’ Mean Creek and Larry Clark’s Bully.
< ?php include ('/home/hollyw9/public_html/wired'); ?>
The film also stars Shawn Hatosy, Harry Dean Stanton, a bewigged Bruce Willis, Olivia Wilde, Sharon Stone, Dominique Swain and Ben Foster (another provider of an exceptional performance).
Based on a true story that happened about six years ago, Dog is about a 20 year-old known as Jesse James Hollywood (called Johnny Truelove in the movie, and portrayed by Lords of Dogtown‘s Emile Hirsch), a pot dealer from a well-to-do San Fernando Valley suburb who obviously saw himself as a minor-league Tony Montana.
This plus the general lower-end-of-the-gene-pool idiocy that is not unknown to suburban youth culture led to Jimmy making a fatal error: he and some pals kidnapped the 15 year-old younger brother of a guy who owed him $1200 as a way of applying pressure, and when he later realized he and his cronies would be looking at big-time jail terms he told a flunkie to kill the boy (Nicholas Markowitz in actuality– called Zack Mazursky in the film and played by Anton Yelchin) to keep him from testifying.
Justin Timberlake
When the boy’s body was found Jimmy eventually left the country and, with his father’s help, wound up living incognito in Brazil. But last March he was punched by Interpol agents and brought back to the U.S. to face murder charges.
The reason Alpha Dog has been getting a lot of press (in a David Halbfinger story that ran today in the New York Times and one that Lou Lumenick ran in the on 1.13) is because Cassavetes and the film’s distributor, New Line Cinema, are caught up in a legal tangle over a threatened injunction that could conceivably prevent Alpha Dog from being released on 2.24.06, as New Line is planning.
The beef is from Hollywood’s attorney James Blatt, who’s saying that prosecuting attorney Rod Zonen was guilty of misconduct by providing inside information about the murder case to Cassevetes during the film’s preparation phase. Blatt’s argu- ment is that the release of this information in a dramatic fashion in Alpha Dog will prejudice matters against his client.
Cassevetes was subpoenaed by Blatt last summer as part of an attempt to have Zonen removed from the case for giving Cassavetes access to nonpublic records. The ploy failed. Two months ago a judge ordered Cassavetes’s researcher, Michael Mehas, who is writing a book about the case, to turn over notes and tapes from his interviews to the defense. Blatt is now threatening to seek an injunction against the release of Alpha Dog.
I suspect Blatt is mainly grandstanding and that Alpha Dog will probably open as planned, but ahead-of-the-curve types will probably want to see it at Sundance just to play it safe.
Emile Hisch
Sundance honcho Geoff Gilmore declares in the program notes that Cassavetes’ film “captures the driving energy and sordid anomie of contemporary youth culture,” adding that it end “in a tragedy that would be shocking if we weren’t so aware of the kind of world we live in, a place with kids who live without mores, parents who don’t have a clue, and ongoing conflict between the lingering inno- cence of youth and moral disintegration and dissolution.”
Being a father of a 17 and a 16 year-old, this Cassevetes quote in the Times piece about absentee-parenting struck home:
“I’m guilty of it — of being too busy with your everyday life to properly spend enough time with your children to figure out what’s going on with them.
“You can check in, and you say, ‘Are you all right?’ But it’s not like being on a farm or spending a lot of time in the house. We all live really global, Internetty lives. Kids have more power than they did before. They have cars, they can get around, they have dough, and there’s always some person that’s got something going on that can get everybody killed.”
Vintage Art
Globe Finals
There were no big surprises at the Golden Globes last night, and the big after-party on the roof of the Beverly Hilton…I’m not too sure I can do this right now. It’s 12:25 a.m. and I’m whipped, partly because I couldn’t muster the discipline to leave the after-party sooner but I had a good time so the hell with it.
I ran into and had brief chit-chats with Heath Ledger, Rachel Weisz, Walk the Line director-co-writer James Mangold and producer Cathy Konrad, Ang Lee, New York Times “Carpetbagger” blogger David Carr, Brokeback Mountain producer James Schamus and…
Heath Ledger, Michelle Williams at Focus Features/Universal/NBC post-Golden Globes party — Monday, 1.16.06, 8:15 pm.
I don’t know why I’m dropping names like this. I mean, it’s pathetic. I suppose there’s something a bit more vital about roaming around and chatting people up and taking snaps than sitting around and nibbling food and watching a TV screen, but…
Walk the Line is looking heavily fortified for the Oscars with three Globes in a knapsack — Best Picture (Musical/Comedy), Best Actor in a Musical/Comedy (Joaquin Phoenix) and Best Actress in a Musical/Comedy (Reese Witherspoon) …plus the domestic box-office is set to pass the $100 million mark this weekend.
And if Brokeback Mountain was looking like a hot Oscar contender before, it’s looking even stronger now with four Golden Globe wins — Best Picture, Best Director (Ang Lee), Best Adapted Screenplay (Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana) and Best Song.
I never even knew there was a Brokeback Mountain song until last night. It’s called “A Love That Will Never Grow Old” (music by Gustavo Santaolalla, lyrics by B. Taupin, sung by Emmylou Harris), and is heard playing rather faintly on the radio when Jack (Jake Gyllenhaal) is driving in his pickup after after visiting Ennis in Wyoming just after the divorce. (Because it’s barely in the film, I’m told it’s ineligible for an Oscar nomination.)
Hooray for Capote‘s Philip Seymour Hoffman winning the Best Actor (Drama) award (although I’m still hoping for a tie between Hoffman and Heath Ledger on Oscar night), and George Clooney nabbing the Best Supporting Actor trophy for his work in Syriana.
Walk the Line director and cowriter James Mangold, producer Cathy Konrad — Monday, 1.16.06, 9:10 pm.
Brokeback Mountain director Ang Lee — Monday, 1.16.06, 9:20 pm.
V for Vendetta star Natalie Portman (foreground), Brokeback Mountain producer James Schamus (far left) — 1.16.06, 9:10 pm.
It was a pleasant evening all around. Maybe a little too pleasant? I have this memory of the Globes being a little looser and more raucous than the Oscars, but the only one indulging in oh-my-God behavior was E! red-carpet guy Isaac Mizrahi with his boob-cupping routines.
At the podium it was all small stuff…Sandra Oh, winner of the Best Supporting TV Actress award for Grey’s Anatomy, having trouble making it up to the stage, George Clooney telling that Jack Abramoff jack-off joke, and Dennis Quaid saying something about the import of Brokeback Mountain rhyming with “chick flick.” I think he meant “dick flick”…witty!
Drew Barrymore and Mariah Carey got the biggest “whoa” responses from the crowd at the Weinstein Co. viewing party at Trader Vic’s — Barrymore because of her green see-through dress and Carey because she’s moving closer and closer to Aretha Franklin dimensions.
And we have to wait until March 5th for the Oscars? Seven weeks minus two days?
Brokeback Mountain producer James Schamus, Universal Pictures honcho Ron Meyer — Monday, 1.16.06, 8:55 pm.
The Constant Gardener costar and Best Supporting Actress Golden Globe winner Rachel Weisz (who’s about five months pregnant) — 1.16.06, 8:20 pm.
There were plenty of GG nominations but no awards for Good Night, and Good Luck, Match Point, Crash and Mrs. Henderson Presents. Does this indicate anything? Naah. Well, maybe.
After making the rounds at the Focus Features party on the roof for maybe 40 or 50 minutes, I thought it might be time to head over to the 20th Century Fox/Walk the Line party, but as I made my way out the door I realized the Fox party guests — Line‘s director-co-writer Jim Mangold and producer Kathy Konrad, Fox Newscorp chief Rupert Murdoch, et. al. — had bailed and decided to join the Universal throng.
I’m just sorry I didn’t run into Capote‘s director Bennett Miller and screenwriter Dan Futterman, who were saluted by Hoffman during his Golden Globe acceptance speech and described as sitting “waay back in the corner.” Capote has brought in roughly $12.5 million domestically so far — I trust Hoffman’s win and the coming nominations will boost business considerably.
Winners — Best Picture (Drama): Brokeback Mountain. Best Director: Ang Lee, Brokeback Mountain. Best Actor, Drama: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Capote . Best Picture, Musical/Comedy: Walk the Line. Best Actor, Musical/Comedy: Joaquin Phoenix, Walk the Line. Best Actress, Musical/Comedy: Reese Witherspoon, Walk the Line.
More Winners — Best Actress, Drama: Felicity Huffman, Transamerica. Best Screenplay: Brokeback Mountain (Larry McMurty, Diana Ossana). Best Original Score: John Williams, Memoirs Of A Geisha. Best Foreign Language Film: Paradise Now.
Memoirs of a Geisha star Ziyi Zhang.
Amber Tamblyn, star of Stephanie Daley, a 2006 Sundance Film Festival Dramatic Competition selection that’s showing next weekend. Amber and I shared a table at the Weinstein Co. viewing party at Trader Vic’s, adjacent to the Beverly Hilton.
N.Y. Times “Carpetbagger” Oscar blogger David Carr
Steve Carell, winner of Best Actor (Musical/Comedy) in a TV series in The Office, and Geisha star Ziyi Zhang.
Bed of roses inside seating arangement at Focus Features after-party.
I think I get the meaning of this. I mean, I think it was meant to be received as (a) a friendly wink or (b) a form of social criticism of some kind in a Diane Arbus vein. Either way it’s cool.
London Daily Mail columnist Baz Bamigboye, Fox 411 columnist Roger Friedman.
Crash Bash
Lionsgate threw a big crowded pre-Golden Globes party at Morton’s last night (Saturday, 1.14). Some Crash stars (Matt Dillon, Terrence Howard, director-writer Paul Haggis, screenwriter Bobby Moresco) attended along with several journalists, Lions Gate brass (Jon Feltheimer, Tom Ortenberg) and staffers, and a lot of corporate promotional partners milling about with their wives and girlfriends.
Crash star and Golden Glove nominee Matt Dillon, manager-producer Victoria Wisdom at Lions Gate soiree at Morton’s — Saturday, 1.14.06, 9:25 pm.
Crash star Terrence Howard, Lion’s Gate CEO Jon Feltheimer
The party was about celebrating the work of Haggis and Moresco, whose Crash screenplay is GG-nominated, as well as Dillon, who’s been nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Golden Globe, plus the very hot Howard (distinguished in ’05 not just for his Crash performance but his superb rendering of a Memphis pimp going through a midlife crisis in Hustle & Flow).
But it was mainly about turning up the Crash flame in hopes of attracting a bit more Academy enthusiasm and maybe locking down a Best Picture Oscar nomination, plus (one would hope) noms for Haggis, Moresco, Dillon, et. al.
The vibe was friendly, amiable…an aura of flush satisfaction and anticipation and Pinot Grigio frivolity…dampened only slightly by a fire marshall blocking the door at one point and stranding a few latecomers on the sidewalk.
The Envelope “Styles & Scenes” correspondent Elizabeth Snead, Slate Kausfiles columnist Mickey Kaus, Arianna Huffington of the Huffington Post.
Crash director and co-screenwriter Paul Haggis, co-screenwriter Bobby Moresco — Saturday, 1.14.06, 9:10 pm.
I wanted to run over and catch a Writers Guild interview between Brokeback Moun- tain screenwriters Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana and Oscar gadfly/film critic Pete Hammond, but I flaked.
And so concludes the least substantial Hollywood Elsewhere piece I’ve ever written…but I had fun and I don’t care. Working 15-hour days seven days a week requires an occasional kick-back or you’ll go catatonic.
Down To It
I finally saw Debra Granik’s Down to the Bone last night and got the wisdom of what almost every deep-focus movie journalist and critic has been saying since it (barely) opened in New York and Los Angeles nearly six weeks ago, which is that it’s grimly real but has something that doesn’t let up.
This is a profoundly honed and life-like low-budgeter about a mom with two kids coping with drug addiction, and Vera Farmiga, who plays this withered young woman like she’s not playing her at all, is the absolute shit.
Vera Farmiga, Hugh Dillon after last night’s screening of Down to the Bone at Laemmle’s Music Hall — 1.12.06, 9:50 pm.
Farmiga doesn’t perform — she becomes and burns through. She has the saddest eyes and the posture of a Siberian salt-mine worker, and she makes you feel the empty-soul fatigue of working a job at a supermarket check-out counter while nur- sing a serious cocaine habit and…Christ, stealing birthday money from her son in order to score, and then getting fired after she cleans up because the coke made her work faster.
This is Anna Magnani in Open City reborn and time-tripped into something worse than mere poverty.
I’ve been told Down to the Bone is the main reason Farmiga landed major roles in Anthony Minghella’s upcoming Breaking and Entering and Martin Scorsese’s The Departed…you can see why in a heartbeat.
Newsweek‘s David Ansen called Farmiga’s Down to the Bone performance a “reve- lation” and listed her performance among the best of the year, and of course the L.A. Film Critics voted her their ’05 Best Actress award. It was these responses that stirred me from slumber and led to last night’s wake-up.
I am so late-to-the-party on this one I don’t want to talk about it. But I am and I’m sorry, and I wish I’d been able to say this before: this is a moderately weak year for female performances, and there’s no question that Farmiga’s performance in this bleak but mesmerizing film is absolutely gold standard.
Farmiga with Jasper Daniels (playing her older son) in Debra Granik’s Down to the Bone
If we lived in a world that singled out the real jewels in the rough and paid less attention to industry hype and herd-mentality thinking, Vera Farmiga would right now be breathing down Reese Witherspoon’s neck.
But of course we don’t and she’s not, and Farmiga, giving it one last shot and laying it on the line, personally arranged for last night’s Down to the Bone screen- ing at Laemmle’s Music Hall (and for guys like me to be invited)…and good for her. And cheers to Adrien Brody, an old friend of Farmiga’s (they co-starred in an ’02 film called Dummy) who dropped by to lend support.
My apologies to publicist Steven Zeller, who tried to get me to see Down to the Bone early last fall. And a respectful tip of the hat to Farmiga’s ICM agent Chris Matthews, who also dropped by to show support and cheer things along.
And hold on…who’s this Hugh Dillon guy? He gives an assured, quietly sexy performance as Farmiga’s drug-counsellor boyfriend who holds her hand and caresses her cheek as they both spiral downward in the third act. Damned if he isn’t another reason for me to feel like a dilletante columnist.
Adrien Brody, Farmiga, Dillon — Thursday, 1.12.06, 9:52 pm.
Dillon is one of those steady souls who comes into a scene and looks the lead actress right in the eye in an easy, friendly way and says it plain and true (like he does in his first scene with Farmiga) and right away you’re saying to yourself, “This guy’s cool…I trust him.”
Dillon should be happening. He should be the star of a TV cop show… something. He’s got that pale-faced Irish hard-guy thing…he should have been cast as a cop or a wise guy in The Departed.
Don’t mention my having missed Down to the Bone at Sundance ’04 — I’m having enough trouble coping as it is. Just take my word and rent it when it comes out on DVD, which will probably happen over the next four to six months.
I told Dillon after the screening that the movie has a unique tension that comes from pulling you in opposite directions. You want his and Vera’s characters to straighten up and fly right and your heart sinks when they fall off the wagon, but at the same time the bleakness of their lives and surroundings seems so futile and spiritually draining that you can understand the appeal of an occasional snort.
“Brokeback Mountain opened in Portland, Maine, today,” writes resident Chris Gray. “I got out of work at 9 pm in hopes of making a 9:40 pm show just five minutes away, and there was a line around the block. Sold out, as was the show before that. A friend called me from inside the theater before it began and said he feels like part of a big cultural sensation. Granted, this is a much more bohemian town than most, but we’re hardly motivated enough to sell out a movie theater with such exclamation. I’m ready to bargain that I won’t be able to see Brokeback Mountain if I try until the last showing Sunday night.”
These stories about Brokeback Mountain getting suddenly pulled from theatres [see below] in both Salt Lake City and Pulsbo, Washington, are terrific. I love it when the red brigades get all morally adamant and dig in their heels…it’s good drama. Ang Lee’s film moved into 215 new theatres yesterday (Friday, 1.6). If there are any new incidents happening anywhere else in the country, please advise.
Whoa…wait a minute. Hollywood Reporter columnist Anne Thompson has written in her Risky Business column that “right now, Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain and George Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck are leading the Oscar pack.” In other words, Clooney’s film has the second-highest Best Picture heat factor after Lee’s. I’m not saying she’s wrong and I realize that Clooney & Co. have done a brilliant job of promoting their drama about journalistic ethics and personal courage, but if GNAGL has in fact surged as high as Thompson claims, people — Academy members — are losing sight of the overall. They like it because they fondly remember the ’50s and Edward R. Murrow and the values he stood and fought for, etc., but c’mon: GNAGL is a well crafted, very respected film for what it is within its modest perimeters. It’s basically a solid black-and-white, better-than-mezzo-mezzo drama that was cleverly shot like a Playhouse 90 live broadcast from the 1950s. A very sturdy thing, okay, but how can anyone call it a gusher? For a movie to win a Best Picture Oscar it has to least try to say something profound about the the ground we all stand on and the air we all breathe. (I mean, unless it’s a revolting aber- ration like Chicago.) GNAGL is a passion piece about a very rock-steady good guy who said and did the right things, but it’s very particular and historical and doesn’t strike any universal chords or illuminate anything about life on the street…not the one I live on, at least. It’s about life inside a very elite Manhattan bunker some 60 years ago, which was under very peculiar and particular pressures at the time. I’m not saying it won’t be nominated for Best Picture, and I guess it doesn’t matter if journos proclaim this or that film as the second-hottest contender because there’s only one Best Picture winner at the end…but how Good Night, and Good Luck went from being a respected and competitive Best Picture contender to being first runner-up beneath Brokeback Mountain is a bit of a shocker. I would go so far as to say this has been my biggest what-the-fuck? moment of the day so far.
It’s not a rumor and there’s absolutely no question about it: Ridley Scott‘s 190-minute “extended cut” version of Kingdom of Heaven is a considerably better film than the 145-minute theatrical version that opened last May (and which came out on DVD on 10.11). I saw it yesterday afternoon at the seedy-but-functioning Laemmle Fairfax in West Hollywood. The projection and sound were fine, but why is a must-see, calling-all-cars revival like this playing in a theatrical equivalent of a doghouse?
Outside the Laemmle Fairfax — Tuesday, 1.2.06, 7:05 pm.
Stand-up critics ought to review this version for history’s sake, for the sake of salu- ting top-grade filmmaking…whatever. An obviously improved version of what was a respected film to begin with, and from a major director…attention should be paid. When a film this admirable is deliberately gutted by a major studio, critics have an obligation to assess what was what.
Scott has made it clear this is the preferred version. But it shouldn’t just play to an audience of five or six people (like it did at yesterday afternoon’s 3:45 pm show) in a sub-run theatre and be forgotten.
Every good movie has a prime “fighting weight.” 190 minutes is what Kingdom of Heaven should have been all along, and seeing it at this length proves it.
One presumes the 190-minute version will come out on DVD down the road, but who knows? It’s not that Fox publicists won’t answer any questions. They just don’t know anything (they say), and Kingdom of Heaven is obviously not a priority at this stage, etc.
Last May’s Kingdom was a painterly, politically nutritious meal that felt more than a touch truncated and a bit shy of playing like a true epic-type thing. The longer cut makes it into a fuller, tastier, more banquet-y type deal…sweepier and more sumptuous and better told.
The extra 45 minutes or so adds a good deal more in terms of story and character to an extremely moral (I would call it ethically enlightened), highly perceptive, anti- Christian-right epic.
Orlando Bloom as Balian in Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven
Pretty much every character (except for Ghassan Massoud’s Saladin character, who still generates as much panache and admiration as Orlando Bloom’s Balian) seems more interesting and filled out. And it reveals a significant new character (the blonde-haired son of Eva Green) and a sub-plot about his fate that the shorter version had completely eliminated.
As exacting and stirring as it is in many respects, the improved Kingdom is still, for me, more of a 90% rather than a 100% thing. There’s still something slightly opaque about it. But the longer version is certainly a finer and more substantial film. And this fact makes Fox’s decision to release its shorter, runtier kid brother seem more than a little distasteful.
Only an idiot could have watched both versions last spring (or late winter…whenever it was that Fox and Scott sorted things through) and not realized that the 190-minute version was the distinctly better film.
Obviously the 145-minute version was released to make room for more shows per day, although the movie was a disappointment anyway. It would up making about $200 million worldwide, which, for a movie that cost $130 million to shoot, wasn’t enough.
The decision to put out the shorter Kingdom of Heaven was a shameful dereliction of duty in terms of…okay, an admittedly sentimental responsibility that nonethe- less ought to be embraced by all distributors and filmmakers, which is to put the best films they can make before the public.
Tuesday, 1.2.06, 7:06 pm.
In deliberately releasing a not-as-good version in order to increase the chances of making more money during the first 14 days of release, Fox did the “right thing” from the point-of-view of the stockholders, but they betrayed the ticket-buying public…they really did.
Fox and Scott (who didn’t squawk at all about the shorter version being released, and who therefore bears some responsibility) were following a familiar pattern.
DreamWorks pulled the same crap when they released the not-as-good version of Almost Famous instead of the obviously better Unititled that came out on DVD later on. Warner Bros. and the Ladd Company did it also in the early ’80s with a truncated version of Once Upon a Time in America. It’s happened with some other worthy films.
What hasn’t changed about Kingdom of Heaven? All the stuff that was good to begin with.
It’s a big-canvas historical drama that dares to be different by being complex and unusual, and altogether a textural masterpiece.
Has there ever been a big expensive film about warring armies in which one side didn’t triumph absolutely? In which the loser wasn’t totally beaten down and slaughtered? I felt amazed and lifted up when this didn’t manifest…when life and sanity, in effect, is chosen over death and fanaticism.
Bloom, Eva Green
The 12th Century milieu feels entirely authentic, the big siege-of-Jerusalem battle scene totally aces Peter Jackson‘s similar third-act sequence in Return of the King, there are fine supporting performances throughout (especially from Jeremy Irons and a masked Edward Norton), and William Monahan‘s script, praise Allah, avoids a lot of black-and-white, good-and-evil stereotypes.
New York Times reporter Sharon Waxman wrote a piece last weekend about how the financial failure of Kingdom of Heaven and Elizabethtown (along with the under- whelming U.S. response to Troy) has cast a dark shadow on Orlando Bloom’s career.
All that went out the window when I watched him again yesterday. Bloom may have missed the boat in Cameron Crowe’s film, but he’s got heft and range and really knows how to play a stalwart hero.
The words I wrote last May still apply: “Bloom is bearded, grimy, quiet and steady throughout Kingdom of Heaven. He is manly, in short, and does that classic Jimmy Cagney thing — planting his feet, looking the other guy in the eye and telling the truth. Does he channel Laurence Olivier? No, but Bloom has definitely held his ground here.”
I suppose that the political attitude of this film — respectful and even admiring of the Muslims, contemptuous of the arrogant Christian attitudes that led to war — is partly what I love about Kingdom of Heaven.
The lobby of the Laemmle Fairfax — Tuesday, 1.2.06, 3:35 pm. Kingdom of Heaven is playing in theatre #2.
It’s obviously an impassioned f.u. to the Bush administration’s rationale for being in Iraq. It addresses the fundamental folly of being an occupier, and in fact offers an honorable solution for those who find themselves in this situation.
Depth of Feeling
In real life Roberta Maxwell, the gifted New York actress who’s quietly riveting as Jake Gyllenhaal’s bereaved mom during a four- or five-minute scene near the finale of Brokeback Mountain, barely resembles her emotionally bruised, hardscrabble character.
Her face is pale and plain and vaguely trembling in Ang Lee’s film, and with short, sort-of-mousey red hair. Very much a cowering but compassionate farmer’s wife from Wyoming. But the woman who opened her apartment door at 6 pm on New Year’s Eve was a pert and sophisticated New Yorker in glasses, her blondish-gray hair cut even shorter and her eyes the opposite of morose.
Roberta Maxwell during the second-to-last scene in Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain
Imagine that! An actress who can not only manipulate her appearance but do a little internal tossing of the emotional salad.
Maxwell isn’t the only Brokeback Mountain actress who supplies a strong dose of hurt — there’s also the excellent Kate Mara and Linda Cardellini as Heath Ledger’s daughter and jilted girlfriend, respectively, on top of Michelle Williams and Anne Hathaway’s lead performances as unhappy wives — but Maxwell makes her mark in what is arguably the film’s penultimate scene.
It’s obvious that Maxwell’s mom and her scowling homophobic husband (played by the great Peter McRobbie) know what kind of relationship Ledger’s Ennis del Mar had with their son Jack, but her grief-ridden face is full of acceptance and compas- sion when del Mar pays a visit. And all of this hemmed in by fear of her husband’s rattlesnake temperament.
It’s the quiet but devastating interplay between Maxwell, McRobbie and Ledger that increases the film’s sadness to peak strength and sets up the film’s final hit, which comes when Mara tells Ledger she’s getting married to an oil-field worker named Kurt, and then leaves him alone in his trailer with Jack’s shirt hanging in the closet.
In fact, the more you watch Maxwell’s scene (I have a DVD screener of the film), the more clear it becomes that her underperforming of this exquisitely shot denouement is the emotional springboard of that last ten- or twelve-minute section. She’s got the whole film in her eyes.
Snapped about six hours before midnight in Maxwell’s Manhattan apartment — 12.31.05, 6:15 pm
And she had only a few hours to make it work.
Maxwell shot her footage in July 2004, not on a set but inside the rundown farm- house seen in the film, which is located about an hour outside Calgary, Alberta, which was a cheaper place to shoot than Wyoming, where most of the film’s story unfolds.
“When I arrived at the set, people were getting ready to leave,” she recalls. “It was the very end of the shoot.”
Jack’s mom is “a lifelong Pentecostal Christian,” says Maxwell. “And in this last scene we see this tension and fear about what she knows her husband feels about this relationship, and about great cruelty and suffering she has endured herself, but she shows compassion to Ennis because she can see Jack was obviously very much loved.”
Maxwell suspects that Brokeback Mountain‘s casting director Avy Kaufman arranged a meeting with director Ang Lee a few months earlier because she had played the mother of Sean Penn’s condemned prisoner in Dead Man Walking (’95) and “so I have a history of sad mothers.”
She sensed during her sit-down with Lee that “we had connected on a level that would make me a very strong competitor [for the part].”
Maxwell, Len Cariou and director Ethan McSweeny during a promotional stint on behalf of a relatively recent Pace University production of “The Persians.”
Brokeback Mountain had been showing to industry and festival audiences since early September, but Maxwell didn’t see it until it opened commercially on December 9th.
“I was really shocked by the scene, by our scene,” she recalls. “The starkness of it…the simplicity. And how [Lee] shot it, like when I put my hand on Heath’s shoul- der. I grabbed my friend sitting next to me. It was so strange, this old hand…I said to myself, is that mine?”
Maxwell began as a child actor in the ’50s, and has done lots of New York theatre, television, TV movies and features.
Her Dead Man Walking performance was, if you ask me, the big standout before Brokeback Mountain. She played the judge in Jonathan Demme’s Philadelphia (i.e., the one administering when Tom Hanks collapsed in court). And she had the lead female role in the 1975 debut stage production of Peter Shaffer’s Equus with costars Anthony Hopkins and Peter Firth. (That’s right…the naked-in-the-stables role.)
Maxwell was told in early October that her performance was special by none other than Annie Proulx, the author of the “Brokeback Mountain” short story that Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana’s screenplay is so closely based upon. The advance review came in the form of a letter, and it brought Maxwell to tears.
Sometime around ’76 or ’77
It reads: “Dear Roberta Maxwell — Just the right touch…the almost-crushed wife of a martinette who under his very nose and in only a few lines about cake and coffee, gets across the message that she knew and understood what Jack meant to Ennis. I don’t know how you did it in so small a compass. With much apprecia- tion, Annie Proulx.”
Maxwell read this to me aloud near the end of our talk. Here’s a recording of about half of it.
She asked last night how I think Brokeback Mountain will do at the Oscars, and when I repeated the conventional wisdom that it’s the Best Picture front-runner, she feigned surprise. I would play it that way if I were her.
Maxwell told the Toronto Star‘s Martin Knelman that she’ll be visiting Los Angeles soon “so I can enjoy the fun of Brokeback being touted for the Oscars. It’s such a special time and such a special film. Why not enjoy it while it lasts?”
If it were my call (and I can’t imagine Focus Features not feeling the same way), Maxwell will wind up sitting next to her costars and Lee and the film’s producer James Schamus and all the others at the Oscar Awards. If there’s anyone apart from the core players who deserves such an honor, it’s Maxwell.
I mean, c’mon, she’s the ninth-inning pinch hitter…the windup, the pitch…thwack!
I always thought once you get a bit older and know who and what you are, watching a sensitively-made movie about a non-hetero romance is no big deal. So what’s with Larry David‘s New York Times piece about how he can’t quite roll with the idea of seeing Brokeback Mountain? I think it’s supposed to be a satire about homophobia (right…?) but it also strikes me as a somewhat honest confessional. Larry David never inhabits another persona — he’s always himself. “I just know if I saw [Brokeback Mountain], the voice inside my head that delights in torturing me would have a field day,” he write. “‘You like those cowboys, don’t you? They’re kind of cute. Go ahead, admit it, they’re cute. You can’t fool me, gay man. Go ahead, stop fighting it. You’re gay! You’re gay!”
Depth of Feeling
In real life Roberta Maxwell, the gifted New York actress who’s quietly riveting as Jake Gyllenhaal’s bereaved mom during a four- or five-minute scene near the finale of Brokeback Mountain, barely resembles her emotionally bruised, hardscrabble character.
Her face is pale and plain and vaguely trembling in Ang Lee’s film, and with short, sort-of-mousey red hair. Very much a cowering but compassionate farmer’s wife from Wyoming. But the woman who opened her apartment door at 6 pm on New Year’s Eve was a pert and sophisticated New Yorker in glasses, her blondish-gray hair cut even shorter and her eyes the opposite of morose.
Roberta Maxwell during the second-to-last scene in Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain
Imagine that! An actress who can not only manipulate her appearance but do a little internal tossing of the emotional salad.
Maxwell isn’t the only Brokeback Mountain actress who supplies a strong dose of hurt — there’s also the excellent Kate Mara and Linda Cardellini as Heath Ledger’s daughter and jilted girlfriend, respectively, on top of Michelle Williams and Anne Hathaway’s lead performances as unhappy wives — but Maxwell makes her mark in what is arguably the film’s penultimate scene.
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It’s obvious that Maxwell’s mom and her scowling homophobic husband (played by the great Peter McRobbie) know what kind of relationship Ledger’s Ennis del Mar had with their son Jack, but her grief-ridden face is full of acceptance and compas- sion when del Mar pays a visit. And all of this hemmed in by fear of her husband’s rattlesnake temperament.
It’s the quiet but devastating interplay between Maxwell, McRobbie and Ledger that increases the film’s sadness to peak strength and sets up the film’s final hit, which comes when Mara tells Ledger she’s getting married to an oil-field worker named Kurt, and then leaves him alone in his trailer with Jack’s shirt hanging in the closet.
In fact, the more you watch Maxwell’s scene (I have a DVD screener of the film), the more clear it becomes that her underperforming of this exquisitely shot den- ouement is the emotional springboard of that last ten- or twelve-minute section. She’s got the whole film in her eyes.
Snapped about six hours before midnight in Maxwell’s Manhattan apartment — 12.31.05, 6:15 pm
And she had only a few hours to make it work.
Maxwell shot her footage in July 2004, not on a set but inside the rundown farm- house seen in the film, which is located about an hour outside Calgary, Alberta, which was a cheaper place to shoot than Wyoming, where most of the film’s story unfolds.
“When I arrived at the set, people were getting ready to leave,” she recalls. “It was the very end of the shoot.”
Jack’s mom is “a lifelong Pentecostal Christian,” says Maxwell. “And in this last scene we see this tension and fear about what she knows her husband feels about this relationship, and about great cruelty and suffering she has endured herself, but she shows compassion to Ennis because she can see Jack was obviously very much loved.”
Maxwell suspects that Brokeback Mountain‘s casting director Avy Kaufman arranged a meeting with director Ang Lee a few months earlier because she had played the mother of Sean Penn’s condemned prisoner in Dead Man Walking (’95) and “so I have a history of sad mothers.”
She sensed during her sit-down with Lee that “we had connected on a level that would make me a very strong competitor [for the part].”
Maxwell, Len Cariou and director Ethan McSweeny during a promotional stint on behalf of a relatively recent Pace University production of “The Persians.”
Brokeback Mountain had been showing to industry and festival audiences since early September, but Maxwell didn’t see it until it opened commercially on December 9th.
“I was really shocked by the scene, by our scene,” she recalls. “The starkness of it…the simplicity. And how [Lee] shot it, like when I put my hand on Heath’s shoul- der. I grabbed my friend sitting next to me. It was so strange, this old hand…I said to myself, is that mine?”
Maxwell began as a child actor in the ’50s, and has done lots of New York theatre, television, TV movies and features.
Her Dead Man Walking performance was, if you ask me, the big standout before Brokeback Mountain. She played the judge in Jonathan Demme’s Philadelphia (i.e., the one administering when Tom Hanks collapsed in court). And she had the lead female role in the 1975 debut stage production of Peter Shaffer’s Equus with costars Anthony Hopkins and Peter Firth. (That’s right…the naked-in-the-stables role.)
Maxwell was told in early October that her performance was special by none other than Annie Proulx, the author of the “Brokeback Mountain” short story that Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana’s screenplay is so closely based upon. The advance review came in the form of a letter, and it brought Maxwell to tears.
Sometime around ’76 or ’77
It reads: “Dear Roberta Maxwell — Just the right touch…the almost-crushed wife of a martinette who under his very nose and in only a few lines about cake and coffee, gets across the message that she knew and understood what Jack meant to Ennis. I don’t know how you did it in so small a compass. With much apprecia- tion, Annie Proulx.”
Maxwell read this to me aloud near the end of our talk. Here’s a recording of about half of it.
She asked last night how I think Brokeback Mountain will do at the Oscars, and when I repeated the conventional wisdom that it’s the Best Picture front-runner, she feigned surprise. I would play it that way if I were her.
Maxwell told the Toronto Star‘s Martin Knelman that she’ll be visiting Los Angeles soon “so I can enjoy the fun of Brokeback being touted for the Oscars. It’s such a special time and such a special film. Why not enjoy it while it lasts?”
If it were my call (and I can’t imagine Focus Features not feeling the same way), Maxwell will wind up sitting next to her costars and Lee and the film’s producer James Schamus and all the others at the Oscar Awards. If there’s anyone apart from the core players who deserves such an honor, it’s Maxwell.
I mean, c’mon, she’s the ninth-inning pinch hitter…the windup, the pitch…thwack!
Snowstorm Grabs
(l. to r.) Subway tracks leading from Marcy Street into Manhattan during height of yesterday afternoon’s very slushy snow storm — 12.31.05, 3:05 pm
Budget-level Chinese restaurant in Chinatown, near corner of Mott and Bayard.
There’s a character in Woody Allen’s What’s Up, Tiger Lily called Wing Fat, played by Susumu Kurobe…and the name was meant as an ethnic goof
Oh-Six Starters
There are four January releases that definitely cut the mustard in my pantry, and two or three with one or two problems but are recommended regardless. So things are starting off reasonably well. For a month known for so-so product, I mean.
The absolute must-see’s are Lajos Koltai’s Fateless (Thinkfilm, 1.6), Eugene Jarecki’s Why We Fight (Sony Pictures Classics, 1.20), Steven Soderbergh’s Bubble (Magnolia, 1.27) and Michael Winterbottom’s Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story (Picturehouse, 1.27).
From Lajos Koltai’s Fateless (and not what it seems to be)
The not-bad-with-reservations in order of preference are Ol Parker’s Imagine Me and You (Fox Searchlight, 1.27), Albert Brooks’ Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World (Warner Bros., 1.20) and Lars von Trier’s Manderlay (IFC Films, 1.27).
I’ve seen some others and can riff a bit about them, but aside from these six or seven we all know what January is about. That is, if you aren’t priveleged or con- nected enough to go to Sundance and you pay to see new movies in your local plex. It’s about feeling vaguely burned.
Or it’s about catching up with Xmas films and watching more DVDs than usual or maybe picking up a book…but the mood that settles over a multiplex in January is rarely expectant, much less electric.
Here’s what I know, have heard or am deducing thus far…
January 6: Fateless is the first near-great film of 2006. The exquisite widescreen framing, desaturated color and exquisite editing make it, to my eyes, the most visually immaculate Holocaust death-camp drama ever made (does that sound right?) as well as one of the most realistic seeming and subtly-rendered in terms of story.
Based on Imre Kertesz’s mostly true-life account, it’s about a young Jewish boy from Budapest who ends up in a concentration camp during World War II and just barely survives. It lacks the story tension and rooting factor of Polanski’s The Pianist, but situations of hunger, despair and the ashy aura of near-death have never been rendered with such remarkable pictorial finesse.
Otherwise, I’ve been told by a young guy I completely trust that Grandma’s Boy is absolutely atrocious. I don’t know about BloodRayne except for the hot babe in the poster. I’ve seen the Hostel trailer and that’s as far as I go. Not a very brave or engaging attitude, I’ll admit. (I generally loathe horror films even though I rather liked Wolf Creek, which so many other critics were deeply offended by.)
January 13: The only one I’ve seen is Laurence Dunmore’s The Libertine (Weinstein Co.) and the less said about it, the better. Johnny Depp is utterly dislikable as a smart but self-destructive Old World asshole named John Wilmot, the second Earl of Rochester. Muddy, desaturated color…gobs of period detail without no discernible spark of life…an almost completely detestable film.
The trailer for Kevin Reynolds’ Tristan & Isolde (20th Century Fox)…oh, no….oh, no….Rufus Sewell is in it. I’m sorry but that tears it. And please…not another swords-and-horses romantic triangle King Arthur– slash-First Knight-type thing. How can studio executives greenlight this stuff and still look at themselves in the mirror?
James Franco (Tristan) is a very fine and charismatic actor who can’t seem to catch a wave, much less a break. (He’s also in Justin Lin’s Annapolis, opening on 1.27.) Sophia Myles, whom I liked in Art School Confidential, is a very intelligent, seemingly passionate actress with a very chubby moon face. Curvy, not-slim actresses are becoming more and more common these days, but there haven’t been any high-wattage moon-faced actresses since the days of Theda Bara.
Misty Wilkins, hot-stuff star of Steven Soderbergh’s Bubble
And zipposky on April’s Shower, Glory Road, Hoodwinked, Last Holiday, On The Outs.
January 20: Eugene Jarecki’s Why We Fight is not just the best film being released on this date but sure to be listed among the year’s (and probably the decade’s) finest also. A brilliantly told history of America’s military industrial complex and war machine. And very well made…well paced…totally blue-chip all the way. John McCain, Gore Vidal, William Kristol, Chalmers Johnson and Richard Perle are among the talking heads.
There are good things — more than a few good things — in Albert Brooks’ Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World (Warner Bros.). It’s dry and disciplined and somewhat amusing here and there, but it has an older guy’s energy levels and — frankly? — not that great a story.
You’d think a movie about what makes Muslims laugh would at least take a stab at answering this question. And it would have worked better if Brooks (playing himself) had somehow managed to visit the real Muslim world (Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, et. al.) instead of India, where most of this film takes place.
India is not where the terrorists are. Call for tech support and a very polite idiot who knows absolutely nothing about how to help you with your problem…that‘s India.
Albert Brooks (l.) in Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World
You know that Underworld: Evolution (Screen Gems), the Underword sequel, is solely about trying to grab a portion of the $100 million earned by the original. With Kate Beckinsdale and Scott Speedman reprising their roles, what are the odds of this being any more that the usual breathy-moldy-sexy CGI vampire-werewolf crap?
The trailer certainly gives every indication it’s a straight programmer and strictly a paycheck movie for the talent. If it rises even a tiny bit above the level of pure bilge I will buy a red rubber enema bag and do the appropriate thing.
Nothing about End of the Spear, Pizza, The Real Dirt on Farmer John.
January 27: Bubble is a minimalist murder tale from Steven Soderbergh, shot on video with non-pro actors. It’s a very clean, creepy and absorbing piece. It’s modest but damn fine within its perimeter. I consider Bubble Soderbergh’s return to form — the first high-grade wow thing he’s done since Traffic.
I wrote during the Toronto Film Festival that “as far as I’m concerned Bubble, a heart-of-proletariat-darkness drama, is reason to pop open the champagne and breathe easy. Soderbergh was falling off the horse repeatedly with Full Frontal, Solaris and the two Ocean‘s movies…but he hunkered down and stayed with the process and that constant-state-of-becoming trip that all artists need to be into, and now he’s back.”
Oh Parker’s Imagine Me and You, which I saw at Toronto, is one of those rotely British romantic confections, although nowhere near as sickening as Love Actually and for the most part a reasonably decent and even (at times) touching thing.
It’s about a woman (Piper Parabo) who falls in love with another woman (Lena Headley) on her wedding day…which leaves her husband Heck (Matthew Goode) confused and out in the cold. It’s formulaic and tidy, although at times I could feel the capability on Parker’s part (if not the willingness) to make a complex adult relationship drama along the lines of John Schlesinger’s Sunday Bloody Sunday.
I didn’t hear a single unkind word about Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story during the Toronto Film Festival, so even though I didn’t see it myself it seems like a reasonably safe call to put it on the recommend list.
It’s basically the bone-dry British funnyman Steve Coogan starring in some kind of smart-ass variation of Karel Reisz’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1982). It’s a film about the making of an historical film — an adaptation of Laurence Stern’s “The Life and Opinions of Tristram Sahndy, Gentlemen” — while at the same time a look at the historical characters as well as the actors portraying them.
Willem Dafoe, Bryce Dallas Howard in Lars von Trier’s Manderlay
After seeing Lars von Trier’s Manderlay in Cannes last May I wrote that “it didn’t do it for me, and I’m speaking as a totally ardent fan of von Trier’s Dogville, Dancer in the Dark and Breaking the Waves, as well as being a general fool for his bad-boy provocations.
“It’s a relentlessly talky, intelligent and provocative film that addresses…well, American racism, certainly, but more generally a do-gooder tendency by American governments to try and shape other societies so they more resemble our own (Iraq, Vietnam, etc.). And it indulges in the usual proddings and agitations that are par for this Danish filmmaker.
“The second installment in von Trier’s America trilogy, Manderlay is a continuation of the adventures of Grace, the gangster’s daughter played by Nicole Kidman in Dogville, the trilogy’s 2003 kickoff, and by Bryce Dallas Howard in the new film.
Sophia Miles, James Franco in Kevin Reynolds’ Tristan and Isolde
“Both films are stagey and pedantically inclined, and shot on what is probably the same massive sound stage with imaginary props and sets. (The third installment will presumably follow suit.)
“Manderlay is too similar to Dogville and not similar enough. Despite its slow pace and too-gradual plot development, Dogville had a surprise revelation (Kidman is the daughter of gangster James Caan, and not his girlfriend, as the film allows us to assume at first) and a shockingly violent finale that expressed von Trier’s negative feelings about what he sees as American tendencies to exploit the less fortunate.
“Like Dogville it’s broken up by titled chapters, John Hurt again provides the dry and pungent narration, and the closing credit sequence is nearly identical with the same David Bowie song (‘Young Americans’) played over a series of stills that illuminate the uglier aspects of America’s history — in this instance the treatment of African-Americans over the last century or so.
“But there’s no big jolt or surprise at the finale — you can pretty much tell what’s coming from the get-go — and it so closely recalls Dogville‘s aching-butt aspects that watching it feels like a chore.
Eugene Jarecki discussing Why We Fight at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival
Otherwise…
Annapolis isn’t a precise revisiting of An Officer and a Gentleman but it’s obviously on similar turf with the element of boxing thrown in. Annapolis, boxing…Annapolis, boxing. Better Luck Tomorrow helmer Justin Lin is the director, and I should just keep my mouth shut until I see it.
Big Momma’s House 2 can have coitus with itself. Breaking News looks to me like a standard-issue Hong Kong cop thriller, and I’m not vigorous enough to try and figure the real truth of it. Mirage, Nanny McPhee and the IMAX film Roving Mars haven’t yet come into focus.
You don’t have confuse Tristram Shandy with Tristan and Isolde — “Tristram” has two r’s and the movie is fairly jaunty and flip, and the other one is bold-faced sincere.
Grabs
(l. to r.) Occasional Hollywood Elsewhere columnist Dylan Wells, Becca Payne and producer-screenwriter L.M. Kit Carson at Columbia student bar at Broadway and 113th Street — Tuesday, 12.27, 10:15 pm
On IRT Lexington uptown — Saturday, 12.24, 3:10 pm.
Troubador in waiting area for Union Square L line to Brooklyn — Monday, 12.26, 11:25 pm.
$30 jar of ginger orange foam scrub, purchased at Sabon on Spring Street on Sunday, 12.25, 8:40 pm.
Mott Street in Little Italy — Thursday, 12.29, 8:20 pm.
Canal Street near Manhattan Bridge — Thursday, 12.29, 7:15 pm.
Grand Central Station — Tuesday, 12.27, 4:25 pm.
On L train heading to Brooklyn — Tuesday, 1.27, 11:45 pm
What would Nic Cage (or a character played by him), Joan of Arc and Oliver Reed’s “Father Grandier” character in The Devils have in common? Something, I think…unless Neil Labute has decided to re-shuffle the story of The Wicker Man.
Thurday, 12.29, 8:15 pm.
Herzog vs. Huffman
“Thanks for celebrating Werner Herzog, the most amazing director working today. However…
“While I don’t disagree with you and Time‘s Richard Corliss for celebrating his little seen recent, wonderful documentary The White Diamond, I wonder if you were aware just how contrived the film is.
“Recently Herzog was in Seattle for a short festival of some of his recent films and in the q & a session afterwards he explained that pretty much everything said in the interview sessions in the film (particularly from the talkative local man who owned the rooster) was completely scripted.
“Herzog said it in way that made it seem like he would be stunned if anyone could possibly think it was done any other way. He described in detail how he wrote complete speeches for the folks and how they would struggle to deliver them (the speeches are basically based on his conversations with the interviewees and Herzog’s own thoughts).
“If anything, knowing that this is how Herzog constructs his documentaries makes me like them even more. All documentaries are a succession of lies that form a particular person’s greater truth. I am just surprised that Herzog seemed to assume that everyone else was in on the secret.” — Richard Huffman, Seattle, WA.
Werner Herzog replies: “Jeffrey — [Huffman’s] questions about The White Diamond are too simplified. Why would I who postulates a cinema where you can trust your eyes again (Fitzcarraldo) ‘concoct’ elements of his ‘documentaries’?
“My inventions and stylizations aim to penetrate into a deeper truth, whereas Reality TV only pretends to depict the ‘real’ but captures just facts, and not truth.
“I have to be more precise to distinguish between two major issues:
“1. Whenever it comes to visual material, I want audiences to trust their eyes again, like the ship over a mountain (Fitzcarraldo). When I use a digital effect, like at the end of Invincible where the strongman’s kid brother flies away across the ocean: it is so obvious, and so stylized, and embedded in the dialogue that it is no contradiction to what I like to achieve.
“I welcome the recreation of dinosaurs on the screen.
“Equally: everything which constitutes the hardcore identity of a protagonist in my “documentaries” I would not touch (Littlre Dieter Needs to Fly, Grizzlly Man, Wings of Hope, etc.). However, I do invent Dieter’s dreams, and I do stage elements of his character (otherwise not visible), like Dieter opening and closing the door of his home. This is the ecstatic truth of his existence.
“2. Whatever I can do to get beyond the mere facts…to get deeper into a story of a ‘documentary’…to grasp a truth in its ecstatic state, I will do. The story of Graham Dorrington remains untouched, the catastrophy which befell Dieter Plage, the cinematographer, during his maiden flight on board Dorrington’s airship, happened as narrated, yet: I liked a seemingly unimportant side figure, Mark Anthony Jhap so much that I manoeuvred him more and more into the center – or rather epicenter – of the film. The leading character shifts from Dorrington to Mark Anthony, and at the end to Mark Anthony’s splendid rooster.
“The scene where Mark Anthony leads the camera during his foraging trip to the waterfall, watching it through one single drop of water, is completely scripted, and staged, and rehearsed. From off camera I am asking the most insipid New Age question: ‘Mark Anthony, do you see a whole universe in one single drop of water’, and Mark Anthony turns around with a slight smirk on his face, and responds: ‘I cannot hear what you say for the thunder that you are.’ I believe I shot the scene 5 or 6 times until I got the right, almost imperceptible smirk.
“Mark Anthony’s sentence appears verbatim in a previous film,
“What you and your audience also should be aware of is the fact that the drop of water was not water, but glycerin which has better properties for filming. Klaus Scheurich, a very accomplished wildlife cinematographer, shot this drop of ‘water’ with the inverted waterfall caught in it, and this — at first sight — looked like kitsch, but I got hooked to the image, and I was convinced that this waterdrop embedded in an environment of sheer fantasy would assume a different, a higher, an ecstatic quality.
“I think that this delicate line between reality, and fact, and truth needs to be more clearly defined. My Minnesota Declaration (you’ll find it on my website) does this. But what has to be made more clear is: with the onslaught of virtual realities WE HAVE TO RE-DEFINE REALITY: beyond Cinema Verite, beyond the documen- taries we usually see on TV, beyond the terrain which is not solid any longer, as if we were treading on thin ice.” – Werner Herzog
You can always tell how a film is doing (or how much confidence it has among exhibitors) by the size of the theatres it’s playing in. I was in Loew’s Lincoln Square last night, located in Manhattan’s heavily Jewish Upper West Side, and Munich was playing in one of biggest auditoriums and to a heavily packed house . I went inside and watched for a bit — large, crisply projected widescreen image, and the sound was strong and sharply defined. But Woody Allen’s Match Point, which was having its opening day, was showing in one of the two smallest, turdiest little theatres in the plex. And the sound was murky, muffled…like it was coming out of a tag sale boom box. A DreamWorks rep should have have been there to see the most enthusiastically reviewed Woody Allen film of the last 10 years being crapped on. The house was packed, but exhibs don’t trust Allen’s drawing power — his films have been fizzling for a long time. And by the way: King Kong was playing in the plex’s other matchbox-sized theatre. This movie is in a limping-along mode and exhibs know it.
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