The cathartic effect of war films and what they get into vs. don’t get into — particularly in the recent Jarhead, Gunner Palace and Syriana — will be the topic at the annual “Times Talks” on Saturday, 11.12. It’s happening inside theatre #10 at Hollywood’s Arclight cinema. Kicking things off at 11:30 will be critics A.O. Scott and Manohla Dargis riffing on war films past and present, followed by a 2 pm panel discussion between Times editor Gerald Marzorati and directors Eugene Jarecki (Why We Fight), Michael Tucker (Gunner Palace), Garrett Scott (Operation Dreamland) and Stephen Marshall (Battleground). The finale will be a discussion between Lynn Hirschberg and George Clooney, primarily talking about Syriana. For information and availability, visit www.AFI.com/afifest or call 866.234.3378.
Rent Renewal
The advance word on Rent (Columbia, 11.23) for the last few months has been that it’s going to feel slightly dated (being a late ’80s piece about some young AIDS-af- flicted Manhattanites), and Chris Columbus, not the grittiest and most naturalistic of directors, will gloss it up too much, so watch out.
The buzz was wrong. Say it again: the buzz was wrong.
Rosario Dawson, Adam Pascal during “Light My Candle” number in Chris Columbus’s film of Jonathan Larson’s Rent (Columbia, 11.23)
Call me emotionally impressionable, call me unsophisticated, call me a sap…but I saw Rent last night in Santa Monica, and in its vibrant, open-hearted, selling-the- hell-out-of-each-and-every-song-and-dance-number way, it’s a knockout and an ass-whooper and damn near glorious at times.
I didn’t just like it…I felt dazzled, amped, alpha-vibed. I got into each and every song, every character and conflict…I settled back and went with it. People were applauding after almost every song, and the film really does give you a “whoa… this is special” feeling.
Somewhere up there (out there, in there…whatever), Jonathan Larson, the guy who created the play but died in January 1996, just before the stage show opened, is breathing easy.
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Columbus went with almost the entire original cast, and they’re all spot-on. A cer- tain theatricality is inevitable when actors are breaking into song, but everyone plays it down and naturalistic; they don’t project in a playing-to-the-balcony way that throws you out of the piece.
Adam Pascal’s Roger and Anthony Rapp’s Mark are note-perfect. Rosario Daw- son’s singing is surprisingly assured and satisfying, in addition to her usual first- rate emoting. Wilson Jermaine Heredia, Jesse L. Martin, Idina Menzel, Tracie Thoms, Taye Diggs…everyone gets a gold star.
Rent is a slicker, punchier, more revved-up movie musical than Milos Forman’s Hair, which had some of the same elements (kids in New York, in and out of love, looming tragedy). But it’s not that different from the Forman film; it has a similar elan.
I kept saying to myself last night, “What’s wrong with this film?….where’s the mis- calculation? Where’s the gross Chris Columbus saccharine overkill?”…and it just didn’t happen to any bothersome degree.
It may not be hip enough for some of my nyah-nyah, know-it-all critic friends. It may not be Alphabet City enough. It may be, for them, too far removed from the vitality of the original off-Broadway, pre-Broadway show…too much of a Holly- wood-style take on something that may have been a bit sweet or cloying, but which worked because of the Lower East Side funkitude balance-out factor.
Critics said the same thing about Robert Wise’s West Side Story. That overly Oscar-awarded film brought an overly sanitized, sound-stagey quality to the material, wich furthered the loss of the immediacy and excitement of the original B’way play. The dissers of Wise’s film were right. It was too 1961 mainstream.
But Columbus is not Robert Wise. He lived in Manhattan way back when and knew the Lower East Side, he knows the stage show backwards and forwards, he’s pruned it down a bit and has made a film that’s a lot tighter and brighter and a cleaner “sell.”
I saw Rent in ’96 with Jett, who was then about eight, and I remember enjoying the energy and a lot of the songs and feeling a general respect for it…but I wasn’t floored. For me, the film is a better ride.
I don’t want to compare apples and oranges, and I understand that Rent-heads might not agree that it’s “better,” but the film is a cleaner, more easily processed thing, and it delivers a fuller, riper feeling.
The “La Boheme” number
There’s really a lot to be said for being able to hear each and every song lyric. (I digested them only occasionally when I saw the stage version.) And being able to hear each and every voice in the chorus of “Seasons of Love” (and every song after that) provides an amazing high.
Has Columbus made a kicky and colorful c’mon-kids-let’s-put-on-a-show musical? Yeah, kind of…but what’s wrong with that? And what other way could Columbus have gone? Play down the energy, go grimmer, shoot in on Super 16mm, channel Darren Aronofsky or Larry Clark?
Rent is a big-studio movie musical. As I understand it, the idea is to turn people on, attract the fans of the stage show, sell tickets, etc.
It’s not Open City or Paisan or Rocco and his Brothers. It’s a revamp of Puccini’s “La Boheme” with all those primary emotions, catchy thrash-guitar songs, drama- tic condensings, lovers loving and losing each other, tomorrow belongs to no one so go for it today, etc.
And it’s Rent, after all…butter wouldn’t melt in its mouth.
I’m sorry to differ with the nyah-nyahs, but Columbus has taken these ingredients and made it all sound quadruple-fantastic (be absolutely certain you see Rent in a theatre with a great sound system) and punched it up and brought out the bells and whistles and made a movie musical that really delivers.
Rent creator Jonathan Larson, composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim sometime around ’94 or ’95.
You’ll be more likely to feel this way if you’re a not-very-hip type like myself, or if you’re in the same kind of head-space as those 425 satisfied folks who saw it with me at the Aero theatre. And if you’re in the opposite camp…it’s your call.
Rent is set in 1989 — the stage show was written between 1988 and ’90. The show is basically about the effect that being close to death has upon your basic life atti- tudes. We all know the riff about “the clarity of mind experienced by a man stand- ing on the gallows is wonderful,” etc. That’s all that’s being said here, and that’s obviously a theme that will never lose relevance.
The young-gay-guys-and-urban-drug-users-dropping-like-flies-from-AIDS element isn’t the same today as it was in the early days of the first Bush administration , obviously (and thank fortune)…but this doesn’t date the film — it just places it in a certain cultural context, and that’s nothing to get over.
I know it when something is working. Call it subjective, but I felt it last night and it wasn’t just me.
A guy who loved the off-Broadway stage version said he’s heard it doesn’t work because the actors seem too old. “They’re all supposed to be in their early 20s …the actors all look like they’re 28 or 30,” he told me this morning. That’s bull- shit…they’re young-enough looking. It’s a non-issue.
There are three love relationships in Rent, and only one of them (Adam and Rosa- rio’s) is hetero. We’re really in a gay-friendly season these days, and there’s no watching Rent and missing the notion that we’re all God’s children. The Mel Gibson contingent can go stuff it.
The energy and punch of this show are there all the way through, and the emotion- al specifics of each and every character and situation are clearer and more vivid than they appeared to me when I saw the stage show…whoops, repeating myself.
There will be more to say about Rent in a week or two. Those crab-heads really need to be slapped around.
Columbus did a post-screening q & a with Variety‘s Ian Mohr, and here’s how it sounded. It’s a big fat (probably slow-loading) sound file, but it’s worth a listen.
You’ll hear me ask a couple of questions — one about an angry duet number between Pascal and Rapp that was cut, and another about the “dated” issue, which Columbus answers pretty well.
Silverman Live
I hate the way I sometimes tend to digress during inteviews (i.e., talking about myself rather than the subject). I feel like I’m being fairly precise and down to it when the interview is happening, but I always think otherwise when I listen to the recording because I sound like like a self-obsessed putz.
Times photo of Sarah Silverman, taken at a party last Monday night in Manhattan for her film Jesus Is Magic
That said, if you’re not too sound-filed out by the recording of the Chris Columbus q & a, here’s a recording of my time spent with Sarah Silverman in Boston last Friday afternoon.
The latest Silverman interview, written by New York Times correspondent Marcelle Clements, which went up today, is another good profile, aspiring to the level of the 10.26 New Yorker piece but shorter.
Modern Marketing
You’ll experience a fairly strong disconnect if you (a) read Peter Biskind’s interview with Woody Allen in the December Vanity Fair, and then (b) examine DreamWorks’ newspaper ad in last Sunday’s New York Times on behalf of Allen’s Match Point (opening 12.25, limited).
It’s not like you need a magnifying glass to see Allen’s name, which is right under Penelope Wilton’s, but you do have to kind of lean in and squint. The typeface is obviously less vivid than the one used for the actors’ names.
I can imagine the marketing execs’ memo to the art guys: “Okay, his name has to be in the credits above the title but let’s do what we can to obscure this. Okay? No casual reader of the ad is supposed to see his name. Just so we’re clear on that.”
The reason is that the name “Woody Allen” is a big negative with the under-30s. I don’t want to give this attitude any more respect or attention than I have to, but that’s the equation…”Woody Allen = stay away.”
Match Point may have an effect upon this attitude, but you can’t predict. I just know that under-30 movie tastes are really fascinating at times.
Girl Can’t Help It
There’s no question about Sarah Silverman being some kind of avatar of a new, out-there comic dispensation. She’s had a handle on it for a while…ten years or so, she told me last Friday…but most of us, I’m presuming, are just starting to tune in.
There’s something about that dry, super-perverse delivery of hers…the dingle-dan- gle rhythm of her schpiel…it’s just perfect. I could listen to that reedy chatty voice for hours. And those oh-and-by-the-way-I-was-licking-jelly-off-my-boyfriend’s-penis jokes…not sexy but so sublime.
Comic Sarah Silverman
I go to a comedy club maybe once every couple of years so I obviously don’t have the perspective, but Silverman seems possessed by and onto something extra.
There’s something Lenny Bruce-ian about her. She’s not really jazzy or free assoc- iative and she doesn’t do political humor (not my by my definition of it), but there’s an element of provocation, a kind of maybe-you’re-getting-this-and-maybe-you’re- not-but-maybe-you-should.
It’s all pretty much there in Silverman’s Jesus is Magic (Roadside Attractions, 11.11), a kind of get-acquainted performance film that includes a sassy little musical intro and an occasional staged, out-of-the-theatre short.
Don’t take this the wrong way, but I didn’t laugh that much during Jesus is Magic. Silverman is obviously funny-nervy, but I was too into watching her perform. And for some of us, mind-game humor is more heh-heh than hah-hah.
An online commentator wrote, “Instead of laughing at the content [of her jokes], you laugh at the attitudes she portrays and worry if you should find them funny. You either miss the irony of her comedy or you have to appreciate her genius as an actor, writer, comic, and social critic.”
The heart of Jesus is Magic (a dig at Christian mythology… what will the Mel Gib- son wackos say?) is Sarah doing her sly and very dry little-girl-telling-an-outrage- ously-provocative-joke routine.
Sitting in a dull corporate boardroom on the 16th floor or Boston’s Seaport Hotel — Friday, 11.4.05, 12:35 pm.
There are two sides to her stage manner — Silverman seemingly amused by the discomfort created by her choke-on-it riffs (i.e., a marketing proposal that would exploit the fact that American Airlines was the first to slam into the World Trade Center) and oblivious to her words in a very bright, manipulative-Jewish-girl-who- knows-how-to-push-her-father’s-buttons way.
Listen to these clips. Click on “Nanna.” Consider the way Silverman says. “I’m sorry… alleged Holocaust.” She almost mutters it, like she’s talking under her breath. Which is why it’s funny (to me). If she’d turned up the delivery just a bit, or pushed it in some other direction…
Listen to “St. Christopher Medal” and the kind of dreamy way she says, “I wear this St. Christopher medal sometimes because — I’m Jewish, but my boyfriend is Catholic — it was cute the way he gave it to me. He said if it doesn’t burn through my skin it will protect me.”
Silverman isn’t vulgar or “blue” or gripped by some fiendish rage. She’s sweet, friendly, prim, well-behaved. No element of madness… obviously disciplined…hip and shrewd, but concerned with basic Jewish-girl issues (love, family, being thin) deep down.
Of course, doing interviews with journalists involves a kind of performance.
An excellent profile of Silverman ran in The New Yorker a couple of weeks ago. Written by a poet named Dana Goodyear, it’s called “Quiet Depravity: The Dem- ure Outrages of a Standup Comic”.
“Silverman is thirty-four and coltish,” she writes early on, “with shiny black hair and a china-doll complexion. Her arms are long and her center of gravity is low: she is five feet seven, and moves like a vervet monkey.”
As lame as this sounds, Silverman’s black hair is mesmerizing. I was thinking all through the film how it’s a world unto itself…as black and freshly-shampooed-per- fect as Snow White’s.
“Onstage, she is beguilingly calm,” Goodyear observes. “She speaks clearly and decorously. The persona she has crafted is strangely Pollyanna-ish and utterly absorbed in her own point of view. She presents herself as approachable though deranged, a sort of twisted Gracie Allen, and she never breaks character.
“[Silverman] talks about herself so ingenuously that you can’t tell if she is the most vulnerable woman in the world or the most psychotically well defended. She cross- es boundaries that it would not occur to most people even to have. The more inno- cent and oblivious her delivery, the more outrageous her commentary becomes.”
Hence my interest, fascination, attraction…
A smart guy wrote me after reading in the column that I spoke to her last Friday, and asked about her in-person allure. I replied that “she’s really sweet and earnest in a girly, sitting-around-in-her-sweatpants way…like a lot of smart Jewish girls I’ve known. Endearing, straight-from-the-shoulder, confessional.
Silverman, boyfriend-comedian Jimmy Kimmel
“Okay, she seemed a tad hotter in the concert film than in person, but workout clothes have a way of toning things down. Plus she’s very fair-skinned and freck- ly…but also impish-pretty with lots of sparkle. I liked her right away.
“I loved that she’s not nuts (most comedians seem to live in dark, despairing pla- ces) and that she’s totally into discussing other actors or comedians or movies and doesn’t try to steer things back in her direction, like many actors and actresses do during interviews.”
I asked Silverman at what point did she realize she’d finally refined and gotten hold of her unique comedic voice and attitude. “Sometime around 24, 25,” she replied. Which meant around ’94 or ’95.
At one point she sat side-saddle on the half-sofa, tucking her feet off to the side, up against the arm rest…the exact same position she was sitting in during her reasonably funny Aristocrats interview.
Her boyfriend is comedian Jimmy Kimmel, the amiable, barrel-chested late-night ABC talk-show guy. I told Silverman I like his humor but I can’t stand the elephant- collar shirts he wears. It’s an under-40 GenX guy thing…the influence of the mythic Italian shirt designers of the ’80s never got through. The loyal Silverman told me she had no idea what I was on about when I tried to explain.
Silverman’s next performance is in Rent (Columbia). A guy she ran into recently told her she’s the funniest thing in the film. (Is that a distinction worth noting? It’s a film about kids dealing with AIDS in Manhattan’s Lower East Side in the early ’90s.)
Silverman has a meatier part is Todd Phillips’ School for Scoundrels, a comedy that will costar Billy Bob Thornton, Jon Heder and Michael Clarke Duncan.
I mentioned to Silverman that there’s a 1959 British comedy with the same name. She said she didn’t think so and suugested I might be thinking of School for Scandal. I didn’t push it, but Scoundrels did come out in ’59, and costarred Terry Thomas and Alastair Sim.
I really think it’s important to see Jesus is Magic and know who Silverman is and what she’s on about. She’s an echo chamber of sorts…tethered to certain aspects of our general cultural malaise in the same way that currents running beneath the culture of the mid ’50s are discernible when you look at blurry kinescopes of Sid Ceasar and Imogene Coca.
Tempest Approaching?
“If you’re looking for an angle on The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, you might enjoy this one:
“The promotion and release of the film is going to bring about a red-blue religious wackos vs. the rest of us dust-up. It has the potential to be a moderately big deal, and thus far almost no one in the entertainment press is covering it.
“The series of fairy tales this Narniais based on are generally seen as an old-fashioned Christian parable, i.e., the New Testament rewritten with talking animals and magic standing in for disciples and theology, plus a big talking lion standing in for Jesus.
“The problem is that these days, it’s viewed — incorrectly, I might add — as a kid- targeted endorsement of Passion-style fundamentalism by a lot of the fringe- wacko hardliners, which is a shame and a joke as the theology expressed by the story is exactly the sort of kinder, gentler, more intellectual-and-philosophical brand of Christian thought that the Passion posse so despises.
“These fringe-wacko hardliners are already raring, ready and organized to try and piggyback their agenda onto this film, and Disney has gone so far as to hire special faith-oriented marketing firms to help them assuage concerns that they might ‘secularize’ the material.
“Plus some of the more faith-oriented fans are gearing up to mount what would have to be called a boxoffice holy war between this flick and the Harry Potter franchise, which they view as Narnia‘s pagan upstart enemy.
“Here’s the best part: The fan base will also be at war within itself, as there are basically two camps of heavy-duty Narnia devotees…an even split between those who appreciate it simply as a series of beloved children’s literature and those who want it viewed only as a kind of 700 Club recruiting pamphlet.
“The blood between these two camps is so bad it makes the Original Series/Next Gen split in Star Trek fandom look like a mild family quarrel, and if the Narnia movie makes any kind of notable mainstream splash in theaters it’s gonna be open war right out in the cultural square.
“Mark my words, this is going to be an interesting release no matter how good the flick turns out.” — MSTMario2@aol.com
Wells to Mario: I have to hunker down and do some studying about this. I don’t know anything…zilch.
Grabs
Boston statehouse — Friday, 11.4.05, 8:25 pm.
Sign in front of 2038 pairs of boots arranged in military formation on the Boston Common — Friday, 11.04, 8;40 pm.
Sign placed opposite the Boston Common display of U.S. military boots.
Waiting for the Red Line subway on way back from Long Beach airport — Sunday, 11.6.05, 9:40 pm.
Hollywood Boulevard near corner of Highland — Sunday, 11.6.05, 9:55 pm.
Mannequin inside Boston’s Prudential Center/Copley Square mall — Saturday, 11.5.05, 7:05 pm.
Jarhead Muddle
“I went to dinner and a movie with some friends Saturday night. The local theater didn’t have Capote so we were stuck with a choice between Shopgirl and Jarhead, and we decided on the latter.
“My expectations were low enough that I wasn’t disappointed when it was over; I was more disappointed going in then coming out. But two things struck me upon exiting the theatre.
“First, there are too many kids who treat the experience of watching a war film like it’s “so soooo coool” and “awesome” and exchanging quotes from Full Metal Jacket. Perhaps they would like to experience the ‘pink mist’ as well. At a risk of getting all Howard Beale on you, we are in a war now and kids are getting blown up almost everyday, there’s nothing cool about it, right? We’re in a war now. The audience seemed detached from this.
Jarhead costars Jake Gyllenhaal, Peter Sarsgaard
“Secondly, Jarhead seemed to play mostly as a deadpan postmodern black comedy. I laughed more than anyting else. Another measure was that during pivotal scenes there was a smacking irony, a harsh truth that you would have to either laugh through or become the Troy character.
“When Swoff and Troy are robbed of their kill at the end, it felt to me like dark comedy. The sexual angst was mostly played for yuks even though underneath the ramifications are ugly. Lines like “shooting my gun in celebration being the only time I fired it the entire war” or “that’s Vietnam music, we don’t even get our own music” are what stick in my mind, and they taste of dark humor.
“But I can’t tell if this was the intention of Sam Mendes. Was he boldly and delicately making a black comedy and not telling the execs, or is he just tone deaf? Am I the only one or did you notice this too?” — George Bolanis , Pittsburgh, PA.
Girth
“I dunno…somehow ‘The Fat Clooney’ sounds like the sequel to The Big Lebowski — Mike Mayo
Wells to Mayo: Exactly. Immediate coolness. My want-to-see on Syriana shot up ten-fold after hearing it.
Lifeboat
“Liked that WIRED bit about Hitchcock’s Lifeboat, a film I’ve loved for years. Hitch often gets dismissed as a serious filmmaker because his movies are fun to watch and were, in many cases, clearly commercial.
“It’s become fashionable for guys like Tarantino to bash on Psycho), but Hitchcock had an artistry to his filmmaking and a depth of understanding of the human condition that many of today’s so-called auteurs lack, in my opinion.
“I just saw Rebecca for the first time and was blown away. Even if Selznick did come along and put his own music in, etc., it’s still a visionary work by a filmmaker at the top of his game.” — Michael Goedecke
Choices
“I was reading your most recent comments on why some films that give off what I’d guess you’d call an emotionally burnished quality don’t seem to connect with the audiences in the way that some of us might expect. There’s no single thing that explains this, but I can think of a few.
“First is the inevitable focus on box office, which is one of the few, hard indicators of the ‘success’ of a film, but given the changing nature of entertainment options and methods of consumption, I don’t believe it’s the only, or in some cases, even the primary factor.
“There are many films that I’d like to see in the theater, but if I miss that two- or three-week window when they’re in wide release — either because I was busy or just not in the right frame of mind — than I’ll opt to buy the DVD. I’ve got a decent home theater set-up, and frankly I don’t think my experience watching, say, Hustle & Flow at home is going to be qualitatively different than seeing it in the theater.
Naomi Wattts in King Kong
“I also think you make an unfair distinction between those who might go to see Saw II and those who might prefer to see The Constant Gardener. At least among my particular group of friends, those are overlapping audiences, and going to catch one movie on opening weekend means we’re unlikely to see the other.
“It’s not a sign of lack of interest, but a matter of mood and social dynamics. And frankly, DVDs provide a safety net because there will always be a DVD, and then I can choose where, how, and with whom I want to watch the movie on my own timetable.
“Lastly, whenever anyone points to the disappointing response to Cinderella Man I just have to shake my heard. I can’t pretend to know what was in the hearts and minds of everyone who chose not to see the film, but I know that for me it was contempt borne of familiarity.
“I mean, I’ve seen this story. So. Many. Times. I know every single emotional beat that will be hit, every single turn of the plot screw, the entire shape of the dramatic arc.
Ralph Fiennes in The Constant Gardener
“And it’s simply not interesting, no matter who wrote, directed, or acted in it, unless they can give me something new, deeper, surprising. And the trailer did a great job of telling me that there was absolutely nothing like that in the film. It’s Oscar Model #21A, and frankly it just bores me, and seems to bore most other people I know.
“I also agree with the disinterest in King Kong, mainly because I’m uninterested in the original and all succeeding versions. It’s a personal thing, but I really hate the ‘misunderstood hero as antagonist.’ I’ll still probably go see it with a crowd, but not out of any passion for the material.” — Chris Todd
Widescreen Idiocy
“I saw that photo you ran of the widescreen TV with the extra-wide widescreen image of Batman Begins, and perhaps you’re the idiot here. A 2.35:1 film will still have black bars on a 16:9 TV. 16:9 is 1.78:1, and not 2.35:1.” — Grady Stiles
Wells to Stiles: I know exactly what I’m talking about. Black bars are fine…the point is that the anamorphic 2.35 image in that photo has been squeezed down to what looks like a 3 to 1 or 3.5 to 1 image. It’s a widescreen image for morons who don’t know aspect ratios from their anus. I know aspect ratios dead to rights….go to American Widescreen Museum (http://www.widescreenmuseum.com/) and poke around and learn a thing or two. It’s all there. A very smart and knowledgable site.
Girl Can’t Help It
There’s no question about Sarah Silverman being some kind of avatar of a new, out-there comic dispensation. She’s had a handle on it for a while…ten years or so, she told me last Friday…but most of us, I’m presuming, are just starting to tune in.
There’s something about that dry, super-perverse delivery of hers…the dingle-dan- gle rhythm of her schpiel…it’s just perfect. I could listen to that reedy chatty voice for hours. And those oh-and-by-the-way-I-was-licking-jelly-off-my-boyfriend’s-penis jokes…not sexy but so sublime.
Comic Sarah Silverman
I go to a comedy club maybe once every couple of years so I obviously don’t have the perspective, but Silverman seems possessed by and onto something extra.
There’s something Lenny Bruce-ian about her. She’s not really jazzy or free assoc- iative and she doesn’t do political humor (not my by my definition of it), but there’s an element of provocation, a kind of maybe-you’re-getting-this-and-maybe-you’re- not-but-maybe-you-should.
It’s all pretty much there in Silverman’s Jesus is Magic (Roadside Attractions, 11.11), a kind of get-acquainted performance film that includes a sassy little musical intro and an occasional staged, out-of-the-theatre short.
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Don’t take this the wrong way, but I didn’t laugh that much during Jesus is Magic. Silverman is obviously funny-nervy, but I was too into watching her perform. And for some of us, mind-game humor is more heh-heh than hah-hah.
An online commentator wrote, “Instead of laughing at the content [of her jokes], you laugh at the attitudes she portrays and worry if you should find them funny. You either miss the irony of her comedy or you have to appreciate her genius as an actor, writer, comic, and social critic.”
The heart of Jesus is Magic (a dig at Christian mythology… what will the Mel Gib- son wackos say?) is Sarah doing her sly and very dry little-girl-telling-an-outrage- ously-provocative-joke routine.
Sitting in a dull corporate boardroom on the 16th floor or Boston’s Seaport Hotel — Friday, 11.4.05, 12:35 pm.
There are two sides to her stage manner — Silverman seemingly amused by the discomfort created by her choke-on-it riffs (i.e., a marketing proposal that would exploit the fact that American Airlines was the first to slam into the World Trade Center) and oblivious to her words in a very bright, manipulative-Jewish-girl-who- knows-how-to-push-her-father’s-buttons way.
Listen to these clips. Click on “Nanna.” Consider the way Silverman says. “I’m sorry… alleged Holocaust.” She almost mutters it, like she’s talking under her breath. Which is why it’s funny (to me). If she’d turned up the delivery just a bit, or pushed it in some other direction…
Listen to “St. Christopher Medal” and the kind of dreamy way she says, “I wear this St. Christopher medal sometimes because — I’m Jewish, but my boyfriend is Catholic — it was cute the way he gave it to me. He said if it doesn’t burn through my skin it will protect me.”
Silverman isn’t vulgar or “blue” or gripped by some fiendish rage. She’s sweet, friendly, prim, well-behaved. No element of madness… obviously disciplined…hip and shrewd, but concerned with basic Jewish-girl issues (love, family, being thin) deep down.
Of course, doing interviews with journalists involves a kind of performance.
An excellent profile of Silverman ran in The New Yorker a couple of weeks ago. Written by a poet named Dana Goodyear, it’s called “Quiet Depravity: The Dem- ure Outrages of a Standup Comic”.
“Silverman is thirty-four and coltish,” she writes early on, “with shiny black hair and a china-doll complexion. Her arms are long and her center of gravity is low: she is five feet seven, and moves like a vervet monkey.”
As lame as this sounds, Silverman’s black hair is mesmerizing. I was thinking all through the film how it’s a world unto itself…as black and freshly-shampooed-per- fect as Snow White’s.
“Onstage, she is beguilingly calm,” Goodyear observes. “She speaks clearly and decorously. The persona she has crafted is strangely Pollyanna-ish and utterly absorbed in her own point of view. She presents herself as approachable though deranged, a sort of twisted Gracie Allen, and she never breaks character.
“[Silverman] talks about herself so ingenuously that you can’t tell if she is the most vulnerable woman in the world or the most psychotically well defended. She cross- es boundaries that it would not occur to most people even to have. The more inno- cent and oblivious her delivery, the more outrageous her commentary becomes.”
Hence my interest, fascination, attraction…
A smart guy wrote me after reading in the column that I spoke to her last Friday, and asked about her in-person allure. I replied that “she’s really sweet and earnest in a girly, sitting-around-in-her-sweatpants way…like a lot of smart Jewish girls I’ve known. Endearing, straight-from-the-shoulder, confessional.
Silverman, boyfriend-comedian Jimmy Kimmel
“Okay, she seemed a tad hotter in the concert film than in person, but workout clothes have a way of toning things down. Plus she’s very fair-skinned and freck- ly…but also impish-pretty with lots of sparkle. I liked her right away.
“I loved that she’s not nuts (most comedians seem to live in dark, despairing pla- ces) and that she’s totally into discussing other actors or comedians or movies and doesn’t try to steer things back in her direction, like many actors and actresses do during interviews.”
I asked Silverman at what point did she realize she’d finally refined and gotten hold of her unique comedic voice and attitude. “Sometime around 24, 25,” she replied. Which meant around ’94 or ’95.
At one point she sat side-saddle on the half-sofa, tucking her feet off to the side, up against the arm rest…the exact same position she was sitting in during her reasonably funny Aristocrats interview.
Her boyfriend is comedian Jimmy Kimmel, the amiable, barrel-chested late-night ABC talk-show guy. I told Silverman I like his humor but I can’t stand the elephant- collar shirts he wears. It’s an under-40 GenX guy thing…the influence of the mythic Italian shirt designers of the ’80s never got through. The loyal Silverman told me she had no idea what I was on about when I tried to explain.
Silverman’s next performance is in Rent (Columbia). A guy she ran into recently told her she’s the funniest thing in the film. (Is that a distinction worth noting? It’s a film about kids dealing with AIDS in Manhattan’s Lower East Side in the early ’90s.)
Silverman has a meatier part is Todd Phillips’ School for Scoundrels, a comedy that will costar Billy Bob Thornton, Jon Heder and Michael Clarke Duncan.
I mentioned to Silverman that there’s a 1959 British comedy with the same name. She said she didn’t think so and suugested I might be thinking of School for Scandal. I didn’t push it, but Scoundrels did come out in ’59, and costarred Terry Thomas and Alastair Sim.
I really think it’s important to see Jesus is Magic and know who Silverman is and what she’s on about. She’s an echo chamber of sorts…tethered to certain aspects of our general cultural malaise in the same way that currents running beneath the culture of the mid ’50s are discernible when you look at blurry kinescopes of Sid Ceasar and Imogene Coca.
Tempest Approaching?
“If you’re looking for an angle on The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, you might enjoy this one:
“The promotion and release of the film is going to bring about a red-blue religious wackos vs. the rest of us dust-up. It has the potential to be a moderately big deal, and thus far almost no one in the entertainment press is covering it.
“The series of fairy tales this Narniais based on are generally seen as an old-fashioned Christian parable, i.e., the New Testament rewritten with talking animals and magic standing in for disciples and theology, plus a big talking lion standing in for Jesus.
“The problem is that these days, it’s viewed — incorrectly, I might add — as a kid- targeted endorsement of Passion-style fundamentalism by a lot of the fringe- wacko hardliners, which is a shame and a joke as the theology expressed by the story is exactly the sort of kinder, gentler, more intellectual-and-philosophical brand of Christian thought that the Passion posse so despises.
“These fringe-wacko hardliners are already raring, ready and organized to try and piggyback their agenda onto this film, and Disney has gone so far as to hire special faith-oriented marketing firms to help them assuage concerns that they might ‘secularize’ the material.
“Plus some of the more faith-oriented fans are gearing up to mount what would have to be called a boxoffice holy war between this flick and the Harry Potter franchise, which they view as Narnia‘s pagan upstart enemy.
“Here’s the best part: The fan base will also be at war within itself, as there are basically two camps of heavy-duty Narnia devotees…an even split between those who appreciate it simply as a series of beloved children’s literature and those who want it viewed only as a kind of 700 Club recruiting pamphlet.
“The blood between these two camps is so bad it makes the Original Series/Next Gen split in Star Trek fandom look like a mild family quarrel, and if the Narnia movie makes any kind of notable mainstream splash in theaters it’s gonna be open war right out in the cultural square.
“Mark my words, this is going to be an interesting release no matter how good the flick turns out.” — MSTMario2@aol.com
Wells to Mario: I have to hunker down and do some studying about this. I don’t know anything…zilch.
Grabs
Boston statehouse — Friday, 11.4.05, 8:25 pm.
Sign in front of 2038 pairs of boots arranged in military formation on the Boston Common — Friday, 11.04, 8;40 pm.
Sign placed opposite the Boston Common display of U.S. military boots.
Waiting for the Red Line subway on way back from Long Beach airport — Sunday, 11.6.05, 9:40 pm.
Hollywood Boulevard near corner of Highland — Sunday, 11.6.05, 9:55 pm.
Mannequin inside Boston’s Prudential Center/Copley Square mall — Saturday, 11.5.05, 7:05 pm.
Jarhead Muddle
“I went to dinner and a movie with some friends Saturday night. The local theater didn’t have Capote so we were stuck with a choice between Shopgirl and Jarhead, and we decided on the latter.
“My expectations were low enough that I wasn’t disappointed when it was over; I was more disappointed going in then coming out. But two things struck me upon exiting the theatre.
“First, there are too many kids who treat the experience of watching a war film like it’s “so soooo coool” and “awesome” and exchanging quotes from Full Metal Jacket. Perhaps they would like to experience the ‘pink mist’ as well. At a risk of getting all Howard Beale on you, we are in a war now and kids are getting blown up almost everyday, there’s nothing cool about it, right? We’re in a war now. The audience seemed detached from this.
Jarhead costars Jake Gyllenhaal, Peter Sarsgaard
“Secondly, Jarhead seemed to play mostly as a deadpan postmodern black comedy. I laughed more than anyting else. Another measure was that during pivotal scenes there was a smacking irony, a harsh truth that you would have to either laugh through or become the Troy character.
“When Swoff and Troy are robbed of their kill at the end, it felt to me like dark comedy. The sexual angst was mostly played for yuks even though underneath the ramifications are ugly. Lines like “shooting my gun in celebration being the only time I fired it the entire war” or “that’s Vietnam music, we don’t even get our own music” are what stick in my mind, and they taste of dark humor.
“But I can’t tell if this was the intention of Sam Mendes. Was he boldly and delicately making a black comedy and not telling the execs, or is he just tone deaf? Am I the only one or did you notice this too?” — George Bolanis , Pittsburgh, PA.
Girth
“I dunno…somehow ‘The Fat Clooney’ sounds like the sequel to The Big Lebowski — Mike Mayo
Wells to Mayo: Exactly. Immediate coolness. My want-to-see on Syriana shot up ten-fold after hearing it.
Lifeboat
“Liked that WIRED bit about Hitchcock’s Lifeboat, a film I’ve loved for years. Hitch often gets dismissed as a serious filmmaker because his movies are fun to watch and were, in many cases, clearly commercial.
“It’s become fashionable for guys like Tarantino to bash on Psycho), but Hitchcock had an artistry to his filmmaking and a depth of understanding of the human condition that many of today’s so-called auteurs lack, in my opinion.
“I just saw Rebecca for the first time and was blown away. Even if Selznick did come along and put his own music in, etc., it’s still a visionary work by a filmmaker at the top of his game.” — Michael Goedecke
Choices
“I was reading your most recent comments on why some films that give off what I’d guess you’d call an emotionally burnished quality don’t seem to connect with the audiences in the way that some of us might expect. There’s no single thing that explains this, but I can think of a few.
“First is the inevitable focus on box office, which is one of the few, hard indicators of the ‘success’ of a film, but given the changing nature of entertainment options and methods of consumption, I don’t believe it’s the only, or in some cases, even the primary factor.
“There are many films that I’d like to see in the theater, but if I miss that two- or three-week window when they’re in wide release — either because I was busy or just not in the right frame of mind — than I’ll opt to buy the DVD. I’ve got a decent home theater set-up, and frankly I don’t think my experience watching, say, Hustle & Flow at home is going to be qualitatively different than seeing it in the theater.
Naomi Wattts in King Kong
“I also think you make an unfair distinction between those who might go to see Saw II and those who might prefer to see The Constant Gardener. At least among my particular group of friends, those are overlapping audiences, and going to catch one movie on opening weekend means we’re unlikely to see the other.
“It’s not a sign of lack of interest, but a matter of mood and social dynamics. And frankly, DVDs provide a safety net because there will always be a DVD, and then I can choose where, how, and with whom I want to watch the movie on my own timetable.
“Lastly, whenever anyone points to the disappointing response to Cinderella Man I just have to shake my heard. I can’t pretend to know what was in the hearts and minds of everyone who chose not to see the film, but I know that for me it was contempt borne of familiarity.
“I mean, I’ve seen this story. So. Many. Times. I know every single emotional beat that will be hit, every single turn of the plot screw, the entire shape of the dramatic arc.
Ralph Fiennes in The Constant Gardener
“And it’s simply not interesting, no matter who wrote, directed, or acted in it, unless they can give me something new, deeper, surprising. And the trailer did a great job of telling me that there was absolutely nothing like that in the film. It’s Oscar Model #21A, and frankly it just bores me, and seems to bore most other people I know.
“I also agree with the disinterest in King Kong, mainly because I’m uninterested in the original and all succeeding versions. It’s a personal thing, but I really hate the ‘misunderstood hero as antagonist.’ I’ll still probably go see it with a crowd, but not out of any passion for the material.” — Chris Todd
Widescreen Idiocy
“I saw that photo you ran of the widescreen TV with the extra-wide widescreen image of Batman Begins, and perhaps you’re the idiot here. A 2.35:1 film will still have black bars on a 16:9 TV. 16:9 is 1.78:1, and not 2.35:1.” — Grady Stiles
Wells to Stiles: I know exactly what I’m talking about. Black bars are fine…the point is that the anamorphic 2.35 image in that photo has been squeezed down to what looks like a 3 to 1 or 3.5 to 1 image. It’s a widescreen image for morons who don’t know aspect ratios from their anus. I know aspect ratios dead to rights….go to American Widescreen Museum (http://www.widescreenmuseum.com/) and poke around and learn a thing or two. It’s all there. A very smart and knowledgable site.
Has It Down
Today (Friday, 10.4) is Peter Sarsgaard Meditation Day, if you want to think like that. You know…thoughts of who he is and how sharp his mind is, what he’s got stewing inside, what that easy smile and those hooded eyes really indicate deep down, where’s he’s heading.
Sarsgaard, 34, has two new movies opening today — Jarhead, a Waiting-for-Godot- ish Gulf War drama in which he plays Troy, the hardest and truest Marine of them all…an intense embodiment of the modern deballed warrior…and The Dying Gaul, in which he plays a gay screenwriter involved in a sexual-ethical muddle with a big-studio executive (Campbell Scott) who wants to make a movie of his script, and the executive’s curiously frustrated wife (Patricia Clarkson).
Peter Sarsgaard
Both of Sarsgaard’s characters are given to internal suffering, which he conveys with his usual particularity. A lot of actors are good at subtle conveyences, but Sarsgaard is always fascinating when most of the energy is being pushed down and there’s relatively little to do. He doesn’t ever seem to say, “Look at me”…but you can’t help doing that.
He can also be riveting when asked to go in the opposite direction. There’s a start- ling, almost-on-the-cusp-of-being-too-much sexual scene in Gaul that proves this and then some. It’s “honest” in a way that almost no other actor I can think of would be willing to touch.
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I wouldn’t call either performance career-altering, but they’re a reminder of what everyone has come to realize about Sarsgaard over the least couple of years, which is that he’s an exceptional violin player, and that one day the right music and the right conductor are going to come along and…wham, out of the park.
Being an obsessive type, I keep wondering when Sarsgaard is going to play another quietly heroic, morally grounded role…a guy who knows much more than he’s saying, whose intelligence you can sense right away…another sympathetic, Chuck Lane-in-Shattered Glass type…a struggling 30ish guy with brains and integrity…maybe given to a little anxiety at times, maybe a sharp glance or two, but a guy you want on your team.
Campbell Scott, Patricia Clarkson, Sarsgaard in Craig Lucas’s The Dying Gaul
Like any artist with any kind of bravery, Sarsgaard doesn’t believe in repeating himself. He’s into discovery and twisting the dials in such a way that the audience is prodded into new territory, and would almost certainly find some way of saying “uhm, I don’t think so” if a producer were to take him to dinner and say, “I want you to do that again.”
But Sarsgaard is that guy…I think. That guy and then some. And he’s a lot more intriguing in person than what he is (or has been given to do) in his new films, not because the movies are shitty but because real-life conversation can sometimes turn your mind around in ways that performances can only poke at.
Sarsgaard “has become this year’s go-to guy by holding his feelings in check,” the Newark Star Ledger‘s Stephen Witty wrote today. “What exactly is going on behind those sleepy eyes? Sly and knowing, Sarsgaard’s characters always seem to be privy to some secret information…something always feels closeted.”
“As Robert convulses with wrenching emotional seizures, Mr. Sarsgaard gives the riskiest screen performance of his career,” wrote New York Times critic Stephen Holden. “Save perhaps for Sean Penn’s outbursts in Dead Man Walking and Mystic River, no actor in a recent American film has delivered as explosive a depiction of a man emotionally blasted apart.”
And yet Sarsgaard’s essence as a performer, I think, is about strength. He’s the guy who gets everything, who sees through every last dodge. That’s what those hooded eyes say to me…not malevolence, not some prickly loser attitude, but supreme perceptional confidence. In a friendly, non-arrogant way.
Sarsgaard, Maggie Gyllenhaal
It’s right there in that settled gaze and slight smile. I know, he’s saying. You know …we both do. You want me to tell you? I can but…we don’t need to play games, do we?
I met Sarsgaard late Wednesday afternoon near his place in the West Village, adjacent to Hudson Square.
My moody little fucking IPAQ 3115 didn’t feel like recording, but I remembered a few things without notes. Here’s a random sampling of topics explored at a little Italian place on the corner of Jane and West 4th Street.
He’s taller than he seems to be on-screen, and a bit fuller of face (especially with the beard) than he was in Shattered Glass. It may be an act (and wouldn’t that fit the whole picture if is is?), but his manner is about as easy and gracious as it gets.
Sarsgaard took some time off about doing four ’05 films in a row — The Skeleton Key, Flightplan (in which he played the villain), The Dying Gaul and Jarhead. He’s only just starting to read scripts again.
He can wait for the right ones to come along. He doesn’t spend his money (he drives a ’91 or ’92 car) and is under no financial pressure to do anything.
He’d like to play likable, sure, but he doesn’t get sent the pick-of-the-litter scripts (i.e., the ones that go to Tom Cruise, Bard Pitt, et. al.) and he often winds up getting offered this or that outsider-malcontent type. He’s pretty clear about which films are right for him and which aren’t, he says.
He’s loosely collaborating with Dying Gaul director-writer Craig Lucas on a new film project, although his input has been mostly in the vein of saying “this works” or “that doesn’t seem right” with Lucas doing the heavy lifting.
There’s a lot of concentration that goes into doing press junkets, he feels. He suggested to Jarhead costar Jake Gyllenhaal that he check out Albert and David Maysles’ Meet Marlon Brando (’66), a 28-minute doc about Brando doing press interviews for Code Name: Morituri in ’65,and never really getting into the promo- tional frame of mind, talking about this or that…an excellent behavioral guide for any actor looking to keep his/her dignity during a press junket.
His girlfriend Maggie Gyllenhaal is just starting work on Oliver Stone’s 9/11 movie, and Peter doesn’t claim to know too much about the when, where and how…not his deal.
After finishing shooting on The Dying Gaul, Peter and Maggie took a trip to Sicily but at one point decided to divert to Rome to visit the statue of the Dying Gaul (also known as the Dying Galatian or Dying Gladiator) in the Capitoline Museum. They stayed at Rome’s Hotel de Russie.
Dying Gaul statue at Rome’s Capitoline Museum.
A thought hit me during our chat that Sarsgaard (especially with his beard and all) would look right as an 1860s cabinet officer and Union military guy in Steven Spielberg’s Abraham Lincoln movie, which is supposedly going to begin filming in March ’06 with Liam Neeson in the lead.
We parted company around 6 pm, partly because Sarsgaard had to make it up to the Beacon Theatre to see Rufus Wainwright perform. He’s also a fan of a Rasta- farian group called Midnite (apparently they only perform in the wee hours). He later suggested my checking out two of their tunes on I-Tunes — “Propaganda” and “Mamma Africa.”
Check out this IMDB chat board showing that Sarsgaard has some revved-up female fans, with some singing his praises as a “soft” non-sculpted hottie.
Regular reader Dixon Steele wrote in this afternoon after reading an earlier, choppier version of this piece and said, “Peter Saarsgard is a very talented actor, always interesting…and I don’t think I’ve ever seen him in a total clunker.
“But on top of that, he gets to sleep with Maggie Gyllenhaal every night! Damn!! For that alone he gets our respect (and envy!). Maybe it’s the Double-A thing in their names.”
Acknowledgment: Special thanks to our friends at DigitalHit.com for allowing me to use the Sarsgaard photo at the top of the page.
Still from Albert Maysles’ 1966 documentary Meet Marlon Brando
Boston Grabs
Sarah Silverman during 20-minute q & a at Boston’s Seaport Hotel — Friday, 11.4.05, 12:40 pm.
On the way to the Silverman interview from Coolidge Corner on Beacon Street — 11.4.05, 12:05 pm.
On Chinatown bus to Boston, about 40 miles out — Thursday, 11.3.05, 4:10 pm.
On Green Line back to Brookline after Silverman interview — 11.4.05, 1:15 pm.
Jett Wells — Thursday, 11.3.05, 8:05 pm.
Coolidge Corner, looking southwest — 11.4.05, 11:58 am.
This is what I mean by widescreen TV idiocy, and I see it everywhere. Batman Begins, a 2.35 to 1 scope film, is stupidly misconfigured on this 16 x 9 screen — vertically, nonsensically compressed. The morons who set up hardware displays in electronics stores are always doing stuff like this, and when you mention it to them they always go “huh?”
Sarah Silverman — 11.4.05, 12:50 pm
An impassioned, extremely well-made film with a sincere emotional current (i.e., one that actually makes you feel something with an application of professional finesse rather than hokey button-pushing) opens after being acclaimed by critics or film festival audiences or both…and what happens?
The public doesn’t respond with much enthusiasm. The movie opens in third or fourth or fifth place, or it opens okay but not as strongly as it should have, and then it’s dead by the second or third weekend, if not sooner.
Terrence Howard, Taraji P. Henson in Craig Brewer’s Hustle & Flow
And then journos start thinking twice about putting this or that insufficiently-loved film on their best-of-the-year lists because they don’t want their editors to think they’re out of touch or living in their own realm.
All because the marketing wasn’t handled in exactly the right way…or the market- ing was fairly on the money and the paying public still didn’t care that much and went to see…whatever….Saw II, Flightplan, The Legend of Zorro, Wallace and Gromit, The 40 Year-Old Virgin, etc.
I’m not talking about a disconnect between effete critics loving the latest downer- head, hard-to-stay-with, impossible-to-really-like art film, and audiences doing their usual avoidance-rejection of anything that doesn’t deliver a rousing visual punch, or that isn’t arresting on some primitive horrific-comedic level.
I’m talking about fairly high-grade, non-elitist, feel-good movies getting the cold shoulder, or at least they’re not getting the love they deserve. Why? I could theorize but I’d wind up sounding like a misanthrope.
I don’t have a long list of examples, but 2005 has availed itself of a few modest calamities in this vein.
The two most obvious are Craig Brewer‘s Hustle & Flow ($22 million so far), a movie with some euphoric musical-high scenes and a fully-earned righteous-uplift finale, and Curtis Hanson’s In Her Shoes, a movie with a $70 or $80 million quality aura that’s taken in only $30 million so far. I’ve written enough about this film, but it qualifies.
Beautiful Country director Hans Petter Moland, Damien Nguyen during filming
I don’t care if anyone agrees with me, but Hans Petter Moland’s The Beautiful Country delivered in the general realm I’m describing — it’s a heart movie with a carefully rendered tone — and it was all but ignored.
I’m a bit worried that Thomas Bezucha‘s The Family Stone, a smart, sophisticated family-friendly comedy, might underperform or fail to reach an appropriate-sized audience…partly because it’s opening relatively late in the holidays (12.16) and will lose a bit of its appeal after January 1, 2006. And partly because rural-sector audiences might say, ‘Is this dopey enough? Are these people like the people in my family or…?’
I’m afraid Fox marketing might have erred in abandoning the original early Novem- ber release, and that audiences might be smelling this indecision and starting to go ‘hmmm.’
I’ve mentioned this before, but I’m wondering more and more how much ticket- buying support Ang Lee‘s Brokeback Mountain — easily one of the most emotionally affecting mainstream films I’ve seen this year — will be getting. I’m not predicting anything, but if it gets cold-shouldered…maybe I shouldn’t bring this up.
Quality movies obviously do well (or fairly well) from time to time, or at least man- age to avoid box-office humiliations. The $28 million earned so far by A History of Violence isn’t bad, given what it is. The Constant Gardener‘s nearly $33 million domestic gross is a moderately satisfying thing…depending on your attitude. Intriguing cultivated-audience films all seem to top out in the high 20s or low 30s.
We all know about disparate movie appetites making a world. There are Saw II fans vs. fools for Capote. It’s not a crime to like primitive boilerplate films which (here comes a troublesome statement) are primarily made for people who lead straight-from-the-shoulder, not-deeply-examined, Carl’s-Jr.-salad-bar lives, and there are films for those with somewhat more developed interiors…folks who’ve gone to college, grown up a bit, read a few books.
Heath Ledger, Michelle Williams in Brokeback Mountain
What staggers me is when the instinctuals, who obviously comprise the majority, blow off films that are relative no-brainers and are also emotionally shrewd and affecting.
I’ve always presumed people of all stripes and persuasions go to movies mainly to feel something profound…to connect with this or that lump-in-the-throat emotion that they’re not experiencing all that much in their day-to-day lives…but maybe not.
I know that Dylan, my extremely bright (i.e., smarter than me) 15 year-old son, doesn’t care at all for lump-in-the-throat movies. He’s partial to intensely visual movies, naturally, and stays away from anything that smells square or schmaltzy.
Shruggers
Movie reviews always seems to lean in the direction of “thumbs up” or “thumbs down.” But what about those relatively engaging, not-that-bad ‘tweeners?
I’ve seen a lot of films that I can’t really rave about, but I’ve had a moderately okay time with. Didn’t hate ’em, didn’t love ’em…they left me not hungry, not angry…and maybe a little more than half satisfied.
I’ve always thought Ebert and Roeper should add a “thumbs sideways” rating. Thumbs sideways would mean “wait for the DVD,” I know…and if I were paying to see movies, that’s how I’d process this reaction.
But thumbs sideways is better than thumbs down, and any honest critic will tell you that many, many films (roughly 15% or 20%) are not profound works of art or deliriously entertaining, but a long way from being pieces of shit.
Recent shruggers include North Country, Lord of War, Junebug, The War Within, Dreamer: Based on a True Story, Proof, Thumbsucker, Everything is Illiminated, New York Doll, The Libertine, Ellie Parker, The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till, 2046 and Kings and Queen.
They’re not bad, they don’t stink, I didn’t hate them and I didn’t walk out in a bad mood. What do you want from a film…perfection and purity?
Tuesday Grabs
Dying Gaul costars Patricia Clarkson, Peter Sarsgaard at Kanvas (9th Avenue and 23rd Steet), site of the post-premiere party — Tuesday, 11.3.05, 10:15 pm.
Billboard at corner of 42nd and 7th Ave. — Tuesday, 11.3.05, 10:40 pm.
Wednesday, 11.4.05, 7:05 am.
Approaching Times Square from 40th Street — Tuesday, 11.3.05, 10:40 pm.
Cop cars assembled to handle some sort of security issue regarding New York City visit of Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles…I think.
Peeking at Diane Sawyer through the big window outside Good Morning America studios at B’way and 44th — Wednesday, 11.4.05, 6:55 am.
Spiritual Sell
Gotta love that Bob Berney marketing audacity. Lay it on the line, sell the movie you have and damn the torpedoes.
I’m referring to Berney’s decision to call a certain heart-warming, Israeli-produced film, which his company, Picturehouse Films, picked up for U.S. distribution a few months ago…a movie that, let’s be honest, very few people other than Orthodox Jews in New York and Florida will want to see no matter what it’s called…a movie that Berney, in his admirably mule-stubborn way, has decided to sell with its orig- inal title, which is…ready?…Ushpizin.
Shuli Rand, star and screenwriter of Ushpizin, enduring a moment of anti-rapture
I would have called it Holy Guests or Bad Company or something like that. Partly because the movie’s about a Jewish Orthodox couple playing host to a couple of ne’er-do-wells during a holiday, but mainly because these titles are more…goy- friendly?
But then I’m not Bob Berney. I’m just this guy typing away inside a modest Brooklyn apartment while Berney sits in regal poobah splendor inside his $17 million Park Avenue triplex, tabulating profits from his offshore investments and making and breaking careers with a slight raising or lowering of his eyebrows…a much-feared and much-envied “big op” renowned for great wisdom and shrewd business judgment.
Okay, I’m kidding about the triplex and the eyebrows and the offshore investments, but Berney is a smart distributor so maybe he made the right call.
Let’s start with the Ushpizin basics, beginning with the correct pronunciation, which is oosh-peh-zeen.
Directed by Giddi Dar and written by the film’s star, Shuli Rand, Ushizpizin is about a poor Orthodox Jew named Moshe who lives in Jerusalem with his wife Malli and is trying to live by the spirit of the festival of Sukkot…I’m sorry, is this sounding too exotic already?
Moshe’s a nice pudgy middle-aged guy with a long squiggly beard, but he and his chubby wife Malli have no kids and he’s feeling a little bit blue about this and other matters.
And then these two jerky oddballs show up — Eliyahu, an old pal of Moishe’s from his pre-Orthodox, running-around days, and a pal called Yossef. They’re prison convicts on the run from the law, which eventually becomes known by Moshe and Malli, and from this complications ensue.
As with all spiritual fables, the visit by this unruly pair turns out to be a kind of blessing in disguise.
There’s a totally valid analogy between Ushpizin and David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence. You could also say it parallels Michael Mann’s Collateral, which is also about redemption arriving in the form of criminal behavior.
L.A. Daily News critic Bob Strauss, who doesn’t roll over for just anything, has called Ushpizin “one of the best character-based comedies of the year.”
Ushpizin has already played successfully in Israel for about a year. It just opened limited on Friday, 10.28, and is expanding on 11.4 to Philadelphia, Boston, Los Angeles and (I think I have this right) Florida. Basically anywhere there’s a heavy Jewish Orthodox population,okay?
Dar said that even in Israel he was told by distributors to change the title because “a lot of [Israelis] don’t know what it means.” (It means “guests” or “holy guests.”) But when he spoke to Berney about selling the film in the U.S., Berney said “let’s trust in God and keep it…let audiences break their teeth.”
Berney decided to stick with Ushpizin precisely “because it’s exotic. I just thought it made more sense to go with the original Hebrew name.”
Berney acknowledges that the interest in “small outside of New York City, but inside New York City it’s huge. We’re going to take it slowly, obviously playing to the core audience first….evangelicals, other faiths…it’s a film, after all, about belief and a test of faith. And there’s also the arthouse crowd.”
Berney and his wife Jeannie went to a screening of Ushpizin last week at a Brooklyn neighborhood called Borough Park.
“It’s a Hassidic, ultra-Orthodox neighborhood near Coney Island, and it’s really it’s own world. A very concentrated, ultra-Orthodox Hassidic community. It was at a high school auditorium and there were hundreds of people and many of them were coming up to me and telling me they were really pleased…it was mainly a 35 or 40 year-old crowd.”
Gadar agrees that the word “exotic” applies to the title of Ushpizin as well as the film itself, “but the interesting part is that when you cross the line and look at the world from Moshe and Malli’s point of view…you end up finding they’re very much like you.
Official Ushpizin T-shirt, available through official website.
Gadar says he’s “not religious at all” but says, “I think what this movie offers is that it’s a completely authentic movie about faith…teling a story which all faiths and cultures can identify with.”
When Ushpizin played in Isarel last year “everybody …secular, liberals, left- wing…saw it.” America is the first country outside of Israel to have theatrical playdates,he tells me.
“I showed the film to some Muslim people, but I don’t think Muslim countires will allow it to be played in their territories. I would like to show it in Iran…but it’s not that simple to put an Israeli film in Ian or even Egypt. It’s very hard. But the best thing about this movie is that it overcomes politics.”
And the best thing for Berney and Picturehouse Films, obviously, would be for Ushpizin to catch on with the goyim.
Honestly? I might not have gone to see this film if I hadn’t been given a screener. The title seems to be a statement that it isn’t for someone like me. But having seen it, I can say that it’s a film I respect for its heart and spiritual values, and that I feel a certain allegiance because of this.
Jarhead Support
“I haven’t seen Jarhead, but I read Anthony Swofford’s book while on my year-long tour in Iraq last year. And now that I’ve just read your commentary on the film, it appears that the filmmakers have actually tried to make a film that is honest about modern war, if not battle.
“I don’t yet know if that’s necessarily a problem, but an issue that I have with most war movies (now that I’m a ‘war’ veteran), is that they aren’t war films. Battles are exciting but war is boring. You also have to realize that except for the first wave of fighting in Faluha, there haven’t been pitched conflicts during the Iraqi occupation.
Jarhead costars Jake Gyllenhaal, Peter Sarsgaard
“Even those soldiers unlucky enough to have been under direct fire will tell you that 99% of their time is spent being bored out of their minds. So if you want to tap into the reality of a soldier (most of whom are not traditional triggermen, but support soldiers) you have to address the boredom and personal demons that soldiers focus on in the absence of anything to do. I mean, I too went batty about a girl back home.
“I was trained for three years and then I spent 10 months with a higher headquarters staff, where I stared at a computer screen for 12 hours a night, 7 nights a week, so I can really relate to the frustration that comes with not doing the job that you volunteered for and trained to do. It makes that time feel like it’s been stolen from you.
“I guess my point is that what Jarhead is about is what those who experience it feel about the boredom factor that is part of the totality of fighting a war. Non-veterans, it seems, don’t want to tap into that truth, and seem to prefer ideas of being entertained by their concepts of what war (or war movies) ought to be like.” — Andre Rember, formerly a Captain in the U.S. Army Artillery.
“I haven’t seen Jarhead, but your piece said there’s no story or plot and that’s upsetting (a little), but the waiting and many of your other descriptions sound exactly what life is like in the military.
“What your wrote actually makes it more intriguing to me now. How you described the movie is our reality. That is exactly what it is like. Train, train train…get ready, get ready…wait…okay, something happened so you’re not going now. (A constant emotion and adrenaline roller-coaster)
“That is enlisted life. I am wrapping up my fifth year in the military and although I haven’t been to the desert, your descriptions are dead on as to what it is like most of the time.
“Does that make Jarhead a good movie? Maybe not, especially for those outside of the military. But at least it sounds real. It could do well with military, depending on ‘if they get it.’ (Most of my military counterparts are more interested in Saw II) Many could come out saying, ‘Yep that is what it’s like.’ And tell their friends. But that won’t create a huge box office or push any awards.” — A senior Airman who asked for anonymity
“I disagree that Jarhead fails ‘to stir any primal chords about anything …to make anyone feel anything about what happened 14 years ag,’ as you said. It must be that I served my time in the Army and had those same feelings of anticipation, anxiety, fear, and regret.
“And I really didn’t see those things in Gunner Palace (which isn’t to say I didn’t like it and it didn’t hit close to home). Hell, Nick Moncrief (the Sgt. who raps in that movie) was in my Basic Training platoon at Ft Sill. To this day I have several family and friends over there and it’s a damn crime.
“That said, Jarhead does something that no other war’ film has done — it paints the portrait of what it is to be a soldier in a way that spooked me.
“When Peter Sarsgaard’s character announces to his buddies after seeing a newscast that ‘we are going to war,’ almost made me throw up with memories of the morning of Sept 11th and when the same reaction happened from my line NCO.
“Everything that follows is a pitch-perfect portrayal of the hurry-up-and-wait mentality of the U.S. armed forces. Jarhead is what it is to be a modern soldier. What you infer is that all of the little things about Jodie and other common military horror stories, is they are simply cliches. Well, they are real — this is what happens. Every soldier knows them and every soldier has expierenced them or knows someone who has.
“As far as the message of the film is concerned, Mendes & Co. simply were showing how dissapointing the whole ordeal was. Every thing from the tagline to the looks on the Marine’s faces when the Vietnam Vet enters their bus…it was all a disappointment.
“That scene is another (of many) that hit home way to well. As soon as an older vet finds out that I served in the Army, they immediately become freindly with me and share all of their sad tales of war and hardship, and just like the Marines on that bus all you can do is stare, because the life of a soldier is merely a disappointment, and not honorable…because what is honor in a pointless war?
“Because this movie spooked me, I think it is the best film of the year so far. For me.” — Michael Walsh, www.blackcarmediaworks.com
Meetings in Paris
“I was in Paris last week and saw Woody Allen’s Match Point on the day it opened (on a Wednesday), and I was astounded by how much I enjoyed it.
“Some of this reaction, I suppose, is about having having had low expectations despite yourself and other journalists running raves after seeing it last May at the Cannes Film Festival.
“Is it just me or shouldn’t Dreamworks be making some noise right now about how good it is? Maybe some whispers about Allen’s screenplay, at least?
Match Point star Scarlett Johansson.
“Maybe I’m delusional but I really quite enjoyed it. I re-watched Crimes and Misde- meanors when I got home and, all right, maybe Match Point isn’t quite up to that standard, but it just might be enough to renew some interest in Allen’s films after his last five abysmal outings.
“Speaking of Paris, I also ran into Wes Anderson there a few days ago. He was sitting with a woman at a sidewalk table in front of a small cafe on Blvd St. Ger- main between Rue De Seine and Rue Danton. And I was walking along with my friend Michael.
“Unnhh…Mr. Anderson.”
“Yes.”
“I thought it was you. I’m sorry to interrupt, but my friend and I were just discuss- ing you and your films about a block away and how you were living in Paris. Then I saw you and had to say something.”
“No problem,” he said. “What’s your name?”
“I’m Grant. This is Michael.”
“Hey, Michael…I’m Wes. This is Deborah.” And we all shook hands.
Sitting on Wes’s table was a large script that had drawings in red marker along the margins, with a small notebook on top of it.
Grant Peterson (l.) and Paris resident Wes Anderson on the occasion of a chance meeting on Blvd. St. Germain — Wednesday, 10.26, 3:45 pm
“About two weeks ago I read that Noah Baumbach mentioned you were living in Paris,” I said to him, “and I’m only here for the day before I head back to the States and I was thinking it would be really awesome to run into to you…and then it happens!”
He asked if I’d seen Noah’s film, The Squid and the Whale.
“No, I haven’t. Unfortunately it’s not out in Portland where I live. I think it’s opening this week.”
Then I asked Wes if Michael could take our picture together.
“Not a problem,” he said. He stood up and gestured for us to move over to an empty space next to the cafe. Wes put his arm around me and I smiled. We shook hands again and I thanked him profusely. He said it was no trouble.” — Grant Peterson
Mondo Kongo
“When I saw Heavenly Creatures six or seven years ago it not only became my favourite Peter Jackson movie, but led to increased interest in the then-upcoming Lord of the Rings trilogy that he would be directing.
“Heavenly Creatures is still my favourite Peter Jackson movie, mainly because it’s my only favourite Peter Jackson movie. I really became pissed off with the LOTR films as they contained leading characters I hated (fucking Hobbits), multiple endings (especially Return of the King) and a director obviously going up his own rear.
“With all the internet correspondents writing about the Rings films like they were the second coming and that we have to see them, etc. I really did not like this overwhelming favouritism as I found it really hard to judge the films on their own merits, which I managed to do when I got them on DVD. I certainly didn’t like them as much as AICN fellowship had implored me to do.
“When I heard that King Kong is going to be three hours long, all interest in this film died on the spot. You know at least an hour is going to be useless filler. What audiences want, which has been lacking from a lot of blockbusters this year, is an element that keeps them glued to the screen. Maybe King Kong will be a masterpiece…who knows?
“I’llstart taking Jackson seriously when he makes a low-budget indie film without all his usual toys. A low-budget indie film, say, about a disintegrating family, written by Harold Pinter, But right now I seriously doubt a director who is a) so obviously full of himself, and b) is being told he’s the greatest thing since sliced bread. He’s like the film world’s equivalent of Bono.” — Ben Colegate, London
“Your observation about Jackson being at a place professionally where he can throw money (and extra scenes and CG and effects) at his film just because he can is very true. But I think you missed the main point, blinded are you are by reflexive Jackson-loathing.
“The point is more about Jackson having lost his way artistically. The textbook example is John Landis. After the success of Animal House and the Blues Brothers (blecch), he makes his horror-comedy An American WereWolf in London. Funny bits, decent cast (go Griffin Dunne!)…but it was fat and digressive with pointless (for me) spooky dream sequences involving Nazi pig monsters and too many squibs and too much blood.
“It seems that when the artists are starting out and have less money, they have to be more creative, and are forced to generate more innovate material. Once they’re established…well, money can’t buy love, but it can buy a lot of CG. Many artists fall prey to the temptation to take those kinds of shortcuts, not just Jackson or Cameron.
“The question is, can Jackson rise above his demonstrated tendencies to self-indulge? I guess we’ll have a clue about this soon enough.” — Roy “Griff” Griffis
Sunday Evening
Schiller’s Liquor Bar on Rivington, a couple blocks north of Delancey on Manhattan’s Lower East Side — Sunday, 10.30.05, 8:50 pm.
Ditto, exterior — 9:15 pm
Pseudo-hip discount Manhattan hotel…”only” $169 per night.
Walking back to good old ratty Brooklyn across Williamsburg bridge — Sunday, 10.30.05, 10:05 pm
Schiller’s again
Spiritual Sell
Gotta love that Bob Berney marketing audacity. Lay it on the line, sell the movie you have and damn the torpedoes.
I’m referring to Berney’s decision to call a certain heart-warming, Israeli-produced film, which his company, Picturehouse Films, picked up for U.S. distribution a few months ago…a movie that, let’s be honest, very few people other than Orthodox Jews in New York and Florida will want to see no matter what it’s called…a movie that Berney, in his admirably mule-stubborn way, has decided to sell with its orig- inal title, which is…ready?…Ushpizin.
Shuli Rand, star and screenwriter of Ushpizin, enduring a moment of anti-rapture
I would have called it Holy Guests or Bad Company or something like that. Partly because the movie’s about a Jewish Orthodox couple playing host to a couple of ne’er-do-wells during a holiday, but mainly because these titles are more…goy- friendly?
But then I’m not Bob Berney. I’m just this guy typing away inside a modest Brooklyn apartment while Berney sits in regal poobah splendor inside his $17 million Park Avenue triplex, tabulating profits from his offshore investments and making and breaking careers with a slight raising or lowering of his eyebrows…a much-feared and much-envied “big op” renowned for great wisdom and shrewd business judgment.
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Okay, I’m kidding about the triplex and the eyebrows and the offshore investments, but Berney is a smart distributor so maybe he made the right call.
Let’s start with the Ushpizin basics, beginning with the correct pronunciation, which is oosh-peh-zeen.
Directed by Giddi Dar and written by the film’s star, Shuli Rand, Ushizpizin is about a poor Orthodox Jew named Moshe who lives in Jerusalem with his wife Malli and is trying to live by the spirit of the festival of Sukkot…I’m sorry, is this sounding too exotic already?
Moshe’s a nice pudgy middle-aged guy with a long squiggly beard, but he and his chubby wife Malli have no kids and he’s feeling a little bit blue about this and other matters.
And then these two jerky oddballs show up — Eliyahu, an old pal of Moishe’s from his pre-Orthodox, running-around days, and a pal called Yossef. They’re prison convicts on the run from the law, which eventually becomes known by Moshe and Malli, and from this complications ensue.
As with all spiritual fables, the visit by this unruly pair turns out to be a kind of blessing in disguise.
There’s a totally valid analogy between Ushpizin and David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence. You could also say it parallels Michael Mann’s Collateral, which is also about redemption arriving in the form of criminal behavior.
L.A. Daily News critic Bob Strauss, who doesn’t roll over for just anything, has called Ushpizin “one of the best character-based comedies of the year.”
Ushpizin has already played successfully in Israel for about a year. It just opened limited on Friday, 10.28, and is expanding on 11.4 to Philadelphia, Boston, Los Angeles and (I think I have this right) Florida. Basically anywhere there’s a heavy Jewish Orthodox population,okay?
Dar said that even in Israel he was told by distributors to change the title because “a lot of [Israelis] don’t know what it means.” (It means “guests” or “holy guests.”) But when he spoke to Berney about selling the film in the U.S., Berney said “let’s trust in God and keep it…let audiences break their teeth.”
Berney decided to stick with Ushpizin precisely “because it’s exotic. I just thought it made more sense to go with the original Hebrew name.”
Berney acknowledges that the interest in “small outside of New York City, but inside New York City it’s huge. We’re going to take it slowly, obviously playing to the core audience first….evangelicals, other faiths…it’s a film, after all, about belief and a test of faith. And there’s also the arthouse crowd.”
Berney and his wife Jeannie went to a screening of Ushpizin last week at a Brooklyn neighborhood called Borough Park.
“It’s a Hassidic, ultra-Orthodox neighborhood near Coney Island, and it’s really it’s own world. A very concentrated, ultra-Orthodox Hassidic community. It was at a high school auditorium and there were hundreds of people and many of them were coming up to me and telling me they were really pleased…it was mainly a 35 or 40 year-old crowd.”
Gadar agrees that the word “exotic” applies to the title of Ushpizin as well as the film itself, “but the interesting part is that when you cross the line and look at the world from Moshe and Malli’s point of view…you end up finding they’re very much like you.
Official Ushpizin T-shirt, available through official website.
Gadar says he’s “not religious at all” but says, “I think what this movie offers is that it’s a completely authentic movie about faith…teling a story which all faiths and cultures can identify with.”
When Ushpizin played in Isarel last year “everybody …secular, liberals, left- wing…saw it.” America is the first country outside of Israel to have theatrical playdates,he tells me.
“I showed the film to some Muslim people, but I don’t think Muslim countires will allow it to be played in their territories. I would like to show it in Iran…but it’s not that simple to put an Israeli film in Ian or even Egypt. It’s very hard. But the best thing about this movie is that it overcomes politics.”
And the best thing for Berney and Picturehouse Films, obviously, would be for Ushpizin to catch on with the goyim.
Honestly? I might not have gone to see this film if I hadn’t been given a screener. The title seems to be a statement that it isn’t for someone like me. But having seen it, I can say that it’s a film I respect for its heart and spiritual values, and that I feel a certain allegiance because of this.
Sunday Evening
Schiller’s Liquor Bar on Rivington, a couple blocks north of Delancey on Manhattan’s Lower East Side — Sunday, 10.30.05, 8:50 pm.
Ditto, exterior — 9:15 pm
Pseudo-hip discount Manhattan hotel…”only” $169 per night.
Walking back to good old ratty Brooklyn across Williamsburg bridge — Sunday, 10.30.05, 10:05 pm
Schiller’s again
Nothing There
If I wanted to just blurt it out and cut to the chase, I could say that Jarhead (Univ- ersal, 11.4) is nothing. But it’s not entirely nothing — it’s the fall’s first major what- the-hell-were-they-thinking? movie, and that ain’t hay. Trust me, it’s going to send tens of thousands of viewers out of theatres and into the street next weekend (it’s tracking…it’ll open) asking themselves this very question.
Oo-rahh…
Based on Anthony Swofford’s first-person account of his experience as a Marine during the 1991 Gulf War, Jarhead was probably pitched to Universal execs as the first GenX war movie…the Nirvana generation’s answer to Full Metal Jacket.
Swofford (Jake Gyllenhaal) arrives at U.S. airbase in Saudi Arabia, ready to whoop ass.
It was probably also sold it as a kind of GenX woe-is-us movie…as a Douglas Coupland-referenced metaphor about feelings of impotence and powerlessness… about Gulf War grunts feeling robbed of immediacy and ground-floor opportunity during their Big Combat Moment.
Or maybe they (Mendes or producers Lucy Fisher or Doug Wick, or all three) sim- ply told Universal they would deliver an honest definitive portrait of what a letdown the Gulf War was for the combatants and how it felt to be bored out of your ass in the desert, and Universal execs listened, looked at each other and said in unison, “Cool, that’ll sell tickets.”
Universal bought the pitch, but Jarhead isn’t a movie. It’s about waiting in your seat for the movie to begin, and then waiting and waiting and eventually saying to yourself, “Oh, shit.” It doesn’t dig in or get down or manage to be any more than what Three Kings was during its first 15 minutes.
My respect for David O. Russell, the director and writer of Three Kings, is very much renewed. Great filmmaker!
Swofford’s book was fairly absorbing (I read about half of it), but the material that would make for a moderately absorbing movie simply isn’t there.
Jarhead is a series of scenes showing Marines being trained to be killers state- side, and then flying to Saudi Arabia in ’91 and waiting to go to battle against Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard troops, and then never quite seeing battle.
And to give things a generically haunting vibe it tells us (by way of narration by Jake Gyllenhaaal, who plays Swofford, or “Swoff”) that a grunt can never forget that rockin’ feeling of having his finger on a trigger. To which you will say…to which your friends will say…to which anyone with a mind will say…”So what?”
Gylennhaal, costar Peter Sarsgaard (r.) in Sam Mendes’ Jarhead
If Jarhead wasn’t a Sam Mendes movie, and wasn’t a big-studio early November release (and hence a presumed Oscar contender on some level)…if it had opened in, say, March or August without a lot of hoopla…it might have been seen for what it is — a nicely textured, maddeningly empty film about grunts coping with boredom, loneliness and disappointment — without people resenting what it isn’t.
It’s not terrible. It’s well made, well acted, convincing, etc. But $1.75 and a movie like Jarhead will get you a bus ticket.
And I’m not going to be sucked into saying what some critics are probably thinking right now, which is, “Whoa…ballsy! A hall-of-mirrors film about nothing happening that actually becomes what it’s about!”
Watch out for any critic who tries this one out on you, because that critic will be totally full of shit.
I was in my local Montrose Avenue grocery store after Monday night’s screening and the counter guy — Hispanic, early 40s, unmarried – asked me about it after spotting the program notes in my hand. “A Gulf war movie…been wanting to see this,” he said. I said, “Well, I don’t know…it’s fairly well made but no fighting.” And he said, “No fighting?”
Not even the genius of Universal marketing honcho Marc Schmuger can save this film.
It’s kind of Full Metal Jacket-y at times, but it mainly resembles that film’s floun- dering middle section. That means no character intrigue or simmering conflict (like Vincent D’Onofrio’s Pvt. Gomer Pyle being slowly tortured into animal madness by F.Lee Ermey’s drill sergeant), and no third-act battle-scene climax or a very young dying enemy soldier lying on the ground and whispering “Shoot me…shoot me!”… and no final ironic statement that comes close to Stanley Kubrick’s grunts singing the Mickey Mouse Club song with the hell-fires of Hue in the background.
It has one big scene toward the end that isn’t really a big scene…it’s kind of a final “sorry, son but this war won’t be happening for you” scene. You start to feel something when it happens but then it’s over and it’s back to the same old blah.
And there’s one really good line that Gyellenhaal says about not wanting to hear Vietnam music (i.e., a cut by The Doors) in the middle of an early `90s desert war.
So Kubrick wins and Mendes loses. (He never had a chance, really.) The British -born director, a good guy, started things off with a bang with American Beauty six years ago, and managed a stirring followup with Road to Perdition, but he didn’t have Connie Hall to punch things up this time and the material was too unfocused and insubstantial…and he failed. Jarhead is the suck.
No Oscar nominations for anyone except cinematographer Roger Deakins. No acting awards or nominations for Jake Gyllenhaal, although he’s pretty good (as far as it goes). No Best Supporting Actor nom for the great Peter Sarsgaard because the script doesn’t let him do or say anything except for a single emotional crackup scene near the end (and it’s nowhere near enough).
Universal will get its first weekend gross and then the word will get out and it’ll be down-the-toilet time.
Okay, it’s well-crafted. Yes, it has a certain high-visual distinction (occasional sur- real or dream-like flourishes) and (I keep mentioning this but there’s nothing else to mention) a streak of apparent honesty in its depiction of what boredom it can be to park your eager-beaver Marine ass in the Arabian desert for months and months, etc.
But the script never grabs hold of anything in the characters and tries to make something happen. Nothing means nothing. “Swoff” is nervous about what his girlfriend may be up to with some guy she says she’s met…who cares? Sars- gaard’s Troy is wired tight and born-to-fight…and that’s it. Jamie Foxx is a sergeant who loves the Corps and doesn’t shrink from handing out discipline…nothing. Chris Cooper gives two pep-rally speeches…showboating.
Marine Sergeant Jamie Foxx (l.) and the guys
There’s no narrative through-line to hitch your wagon to…no sense of gathering force or anything of interest approaching…nothing emotional. A lot of presumed disloyal girlfriend stuff, a little homoeroticism here and there…but it’s all Waiting for Godot-ish. The actors have zip to work with. They do moderately well with what they’ve been given, but moderately well doesn’t cut it during Oscar season.
Deakins’ photography is fine…okay, better than fine…and the CG of the burning oil wells in the third act is my favorite kind of CG, which it to say pretty much invisi- ble.
But a supposed war movie about not fighting a war — about the boring nothing bullshit stuff that happens when soldiers who’ve been trained to kill are just hanging around in the desert with their dicks in their hands…I’m really amazed. Jarhead‘s audacity would be startling if it didn’t feel so inert.
Mondo Kongo
Anyone who’s seen the Lord of the Rings trilogy (or, more to the point, has sat through the extended versions on DVD) knows Peter Jackson has never been into brevity. He couldn’t operate farther from a less-is-more aesthetic if he tried.
Eye-filling visuals, teary emotionalism, portentousness, sets and costumes that are just so, probing closeups, dialogue scenes that go on longer and are more exacting than necessary…Jackson loves to heap it on.
It should therefore come as no surprise that King Kong, his latest film which Universal will open theatrically on 12.14 (or six and a half weeks from today), is going to run three hours, according to a 10.27 story by New York Times reporter Sharon Waxman.
The obvious implication is that Jackson’s Kong is going to be a lot more about Jackson — his brushstrokes, I mean, and the absolute power and perogative he has to throw as much paint at the canvas as he deems fit — than anything else.
It also seems that Jackson’s indulgent streak has most likely overwhelmed any chance of audiences getting to savor a straight, clean re-telling of a classic tale about a dishy blonde and a big heartsick ape.
Take a look at the Kong stills and it’s obvious the film is going to look awesome. They’re clearly mouth-watering. But that aside, all bets are off.
I know how some of you are reading this. I have a case against Jackson and have hated everything he’s done since Heavenly Creatures, blah blah, so anything I say in advance about King Kong is a broken-record “here we go again” deal.
This poster is an unoffical fanboy thing, but thanks anyway to Jeremy Huggins for fixing the spelling of Adrien Brody’s name.
But ask yourselves this: has there ever been a remake of any kind — play, film, televised — that has been judged to be superior because it went on longer and used more words, sets, costumes and tubes of paint than the original leaner version?
I’m not saying this hasn’t ever happened (and I will honestly love it if Jackson outdoes the original in any way…really), but I’m having trouble thinking of an example.
The whole idea in Jackson making this film, according to his own proclamations when he began work on it a couple of years ago, was to pay some kind of tribute to Merian C. Cooper’s 1933 original film. Not in a Gus Van Sant/Psycho way, but to essentially re-do a classic movie…to re-experience and re-deliver to modern audiences what he loved about Kong when he first saw it as a kid on TV.
The project, which has swollen in cost to $207 million dollars, has apparently evolved into something more obsessive than personal.
The 1933 Kong runs 100 minutes, and Jackson is pretty much using the same story and situations, or so I’ve understood all along. So what could the extra 80 minutes be about? Only a few people know, but I’m fairly certain they’re about one thing and one thing only: Jackson’s power to make this film any way he damn well pleases, and about nobody at Universal being able to say boo.
In other words, the extra 80 minutes are about the auteurist “wheee!” factor…the same carte blanche E-ticket that has allowed all powerful directors at the apex of their careers to go for broke.
Given his huge success with the Rings trilogy, Jackson is certainly in no position, contractually or psychologically, to alter his modus operandi. And he’s in no way obliged to listen to anyone else’s opinions, be they practical brass-tacks sugges- tions or what-have-you.
“The film is substantially longer than Universal had anticipated and presents dual obstacles,” Waxman writes. “The extra length has helped increase the budget by a third…while requiring the studio, owned by General Electric, to reach for the kind of long-term audience interest that made hits out of three-hour movies like Titanic and the films in Mr. Jackson’s Rings trilogy.
“Hollywood blockbusters have increasingly relied on big releases that bring in as much as half of their ticket sales on the first weekend. But long films receive far fewer showings per day, and the most successful ones, like Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) by Mr. Jackson, which took in $315 million at the domestic box office for New Line Cinema, have remained in theaters for well over half a year.”
Asked about the length of King Kong, Universal executives told Waxman they saw it “as an advantage in an era when jaded moviegoers are hungering for something extraordinary.
“‘This is a three-hour feast of an event,’ said Marc Shmuger, vice chairman of Universal Pictures. ‘I’ve never come close to seeing an artist working at this level.'”
Waxman notes that “few elements of the film have been seen by the larger public, and even Universal executives saw a finished version of King Kong’s face — with its expressive eyes, broadly fierce nose and mane of computer-generated hair — only in recent days.”
“Expressive eyes”? Is that Waxman talking or something she was told by some other Universal exec? No telling yet, but a Golum-ish, Andy Serkis-ized Kong will be a very tough row to hoe.
“Exhibitors have long complained that very long films make it harder to draw audiences, though in this difficult year at the box office, they have complained louder about not having enough good films to show,” Waxman writes.
No one will be happier than myself if Kong kicks ass. And yet the indications are what they are. Snaggle tooth, Jack Black doing a half-comical spin on Carl Den- ham, three-hour running time, 11th-hour firing of composer Howard Shore, etc.
Talk me out of this. Tell me how I’m reading this the wrong way…I mean, without resorting to the usual you-can’t-see-straight-when-it-comes-to-Peter-Jackson argument.
Grabs
Lounge area on main floor of Algonquin Hotel — Monday, 10.24.05, 10:30 pm.
Tuesday, 10.25, 10:25 pm.
2004 Village Voice cover…never saw it before this week
Marilyn Monroe photo shoot, sometime around ’59 or ’60. (I think.)
Midlife Surge
Maybe I’m slow, but my awareness levels suddenly shot up the other day about Gong Li, Gong Li, Gong Li…some eighteen years after her film debut, and just over three months shy of her 40th birthday.
This was after hearing she gives the big burn-through performance in Memoirs of a Geisha (Columbia, 12.5). The word, in fact, is that she pretty much steals it from Zhang Ziyi, the star…as far as the “whoa, mama” thing is concerned. I mean, take it with a grain…
A seemingly dated photo of Gong Li, costar of Memoirs of a Geisha
Remember she was also great in Wong Kar Wai’s 2046 as well as in that short Wong directed for the anthology film Eros called “The Hand,” which I thought was the best of the three.
And that she’s playing the third-lead role of “Isabella” in Michael Mann’s Miami Vice (Universal, 7.28) right after Crockett (Colin Farell) and Tubbs (Jamie Foxx). Going by the script I have, Isabella is a financial-strategic sharpie (i.e., “I run the numbers”) involved in the high-end drug business.
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This locks it in on these shores. If Michael Mann thinks you’re cool and desirable, you’re cool and desirable.
And then comes…wait a minute, a young Hannibal Lecter movie called Behind the Mask, directed by Peter Webber (The Girl with a Pearl Earing)? That sounds like a mistake, no? This is Dino de Laurentiis going to the well for more cannibal bucks ….the fiend.
I first laid eyes on Gong Li in the late 80s when I caught her lead performance in a video of Red Sorghum, which I remember as being a good film that I wished would be over sooner.
I never saw The Story of Qiu Ju (’92), for which she was named Best Actress at the 49th Venice Film Festival, but everyone saw Farewell My Concubine (’92), for which she won an acting award from the New York Film Critics. She was 27 when that happened.
Then I kind of went to sleep on her until last year when everything started surging again.
An actor’s career karma can be very touch and go. You can be cold or warm or treading water and then wham, the bells go off and everyone wants you.
When I ran that item about Gong Li’s alleged stand-out performance work in Mem- oirs of a Gesiha, Vinod Narayanan wrote in and said…
“This was always going to happen. Not that Zhang Ziyi is a bad actress or anything, but Gong Li is something else.
“Check out the early Zhang Yimou flicks from Red Sorghum through Raise the Red Lantern up until To Live and Shanghai Triad. Or, if you can find it, the uncut version of Chen Kaige’s Temptress Moon.
“She’s a terrific actress and easy on the eyes. Very easy.”
Fail Safe
Big wipe-outs are what gifted risk-takers do on occasion. Any talented director can drop the ball, blow it…step on a land mine.
Is this something to be ashamed of? That’s probably putting it too strongly. Some- thing to duck, I suppose…as long as you don’t take it to extremes. Like tucking yourself into a fetal-ball position and refusing to get up, dust yourself off and get back on the horse.
Keep plugging, keep becoming. Sounds trite, doesn’t it?
Into the Blue
There is so much failure going on right now that it’s a little bit scary. The big fall and holiday movies are getting seen and picked off, one after another, and a lot of them made by veterans who are supposed to know what they’re doing.
Of course, nobody knows anything. They might have a knack, but they never have the key. Creation is always about starting from scratch, and anyone who says they haven’t second-guessed themselves and had Garden-of-Gethsamane mom- ents is lying.
I heard from a guy today about The Producers…I’ve been hearing from others about Memoirs of a Geisha. The crack of rifle fire in the distance, muffled by trees.
Next week I’m expecting to see the re-edited (i.e., shorter) version of Cameron Crowe’s Elizabethtown, but nothing will undo the trauma I went through when I saw the Toronto Film Festival version.
It was like being with Willem Dafoe’s Sgt. Elias in an early scene from Oliver Stone’s Platoon, and watching him fall into a pit filled with razor-sharp bamboo sticks.
Poor John Stockwell. Today can only be regarded as a day of mourning with the nationwide opening of Into the Blue, a film that shows that one of the best young genre directors of the 21st Century — a guy who stood tall with crazy/beautiful and Blue Crush — can be diverted from the path.
Johnathan Rhys-Myers, Woody Allen during filming of Match Point
Stockwell is in some Brazilian rain forest right now, making another hotbod-youths- in-peril movie called Turistas. Will he bounce back some day with something a bit more believable? Life is pain and choices and struggle…but I’d like to think so.
As far as I’m concerned, Steven Soderbergh’s Bubble, a very precise heart-of- proletariat-darkness drama, is reason to pop open the champagne and breathe easy for a change.
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.
How did William Friedkin manage to un-learn how to be the power-drive director he was when he made The French Connection, The Exorcist, Sorcerer, The Brinks Job and To Live and Die in L.A.?
I love the metaphor of an old dog trying out a new spin and making it work with a skeptical audience…like Woody Allen has done with his new film, Match Point. I love that Allen never quits.
Elizabethtown
For years I didn’t know what to say to Francis Coppola when I would see him at parties because all I had in my head was, “Are you gonna make another film or what? Why are you putzing around with the wine business? You’re a lion and you’ve been sitting under a tree and licking that thorn in your paw for the last seven or eight years.”
Now, finally, he’s making a new film — Youth Without Youth, a period drama with Tim Roth, Alexandra Maria Lara and Bruno Ganz. Coppola’s script, about the travials of a fugitive in Europe before World War II, is based on a book by Roman- ian author Mircea Eliade. It’ll begin shooting in Bucharest early this month, accor- ding to Variety.
I saw a movie a while back that was directed by a smart talented guy, someone who’s probably going to be around for the next three or four decades. It’s not a “bad” film — the guy has a voice and knows from brushstrokes and has the chops to make the various elements fuse together and all — and it’s got some scenes that touch bottom and are well charged.
But I really didn’t like the main character, and I was honest with the director about my feelings, and he took it like a grown-up and didn’t say I was wrong but said others have felt differently, and that he’s certainly proud of it.
He also said that once a director starts trying to hold onto a groove and/or repeat a past success he’s doomed…and he’s right.
Mr. Lloyd
“Thanks for your piece on Norman Lloyd. As an actor myself, I found his ‘just say the words’ advice as succinct and perfect an acting class one could hope for. It really is that simple, although making it come alive is the difficult part…something Lloyd has been doing his entire career. We should all be lucky and be like him when we get to be 91.” — Edward C. Klein
Shoes
“I interviewed almost the whole In Her Shoes team — Cameron Diaz, Toni Collette, Shirley MacLaine, Susannah Grant and Curtis Hanson — during the Toronto junket, and they all spoke with a bit of exasperation about the perceived difficulties of marketing the film.
“Every one of them was adamant about was that the press not call it a ‘chick flick.’
“Grant was particularly funny in addressing the topic: ‘No one asks Michael Bay how it feels to make a dick flick,’ she noted. MacLaine asked, ‘Who is the target audience for this movie? Families — but it’s not Disney.’ She said they’re trying to get the message across that it’s a story about a dysfunctional family overcoming their problems and learning to put the past in its place.
Cameron Diaz, Shirley MacLaine in In Her Shoes
“When Hanson was asked about the ‘chick flick’ label, he sighed. ‘I’ve been down that road,’ he said. ‘I didn’t want 8 Mile labeled a hip-hop movie because while that appeals to a certain segment of the audience, there’s a whole other world of potential audience that it’s a turn-off to. I wanted that movie to be broader than that.
‘But at a certain point, it’s like a wave coming in and you’re trying to stop it…but there’s also a compliment that comes with it, when you meet someone who says, ‘I hated hip-hop and I hated Eminem, and I went to see that movie and I was surprised.’ With this picture, time and again, people keep saying, `Maybe I wasn’t that interested and I thought it was a `chick flick,’ but I really connected with it.’
‘So if the story ends up being, ‘It looks like a chick-flick but’… and the ‘but’ leads to something interesting, then I accept it. I’m not going to keep beating my head against the wall.”
‘Even Diaz claimed to be embarrassed by the teaser poster that only shows her. She said her reaction when she first saw it was a baffled “What the f— is that?” — James Sanford
“Just wanted to say I’m anticipating In Her Shoes big-time thanks to your recent articles about it.
(l. to. r.) Variety screening series host Pete Hammond, In Her Shoes star Toni Collette, and director Curtis Hanson during post-screenign q & a at Hollywood’s Arclight — Monday, 9.26, 9:50 pm.
“I have always been into movies that kind of abuse you, unhealthy as that sounds. My favorite films are tearjerkers, war films that make you feel like crap, and horror movies that scare the shit out of you. All things that play on negative emotions.
“I look forward to Curtis Hanson movies. I liked L.A. Confidential a lot, and Wonder Boys further proved that he had something going on (though I didn’t really get it… it seemed like something was there…maybe I’m dumb). 8 Mile was so-so but hey, if Curtis Hanson has made a tearjerker that works, I’ll be the first in line.
“Any movie that makes you confront negative emotions in a powerful way is da bomb.” — Steve Clark
Wells to Clark: Wonder Boys was at least partially about the place you’re in when you’re ripped on really good weed. If you’ve never turned on, the movie wouldn’t work as well for you.
Clark to Wells: That might explain it.
Hey…
“Could you please stop listing Soderbergh’s Solaris in his row of ‘failures’? I get the other titles you mention (even though I sorta enjoyed most of those as well), but I consider his Solaris to be a brilliant film, and I know I’m not alone.
“It’s your opinion, of course, but are you just putting it in there because it failed commercialy? It is certainly an artistic triumph, as far as I’m concerned.” — Reint Scholvinck, who didn’t say what city or country he’s from although he seems to be from Norway or Sweden or one of those places in which people’s last names end with “vinck.”
Wells to Scholvinck: Solaris struck some people as some kind of profound or moving thing, yes. It was spooky — it had an undercurrent. It was made by and for people of some intelligence. But while it mostly took place on a space station it was not really about matters of space travel or exploration or, even in a nominal sense, anything technical or celestial. It was about loss and dark fantasy and then death.
George Clooney dies at the end, willfully as I recall it, crashing into terra firma with the space station because his beautiful wife (Natascha McElhone) is really and truly dead. Why? What did this achieve in terms of resolving the story or fulfilling themes? It would have been a bit more interesting to me if Clooney’s character had stayed on earth and coped with McElhone’s ghost in his own home.
Solaris was a lot of very fancy footwork and indications of heavy-osity. But it was obvious to anyone that it was, at heart, an expensive, generally nebulous art film about a dead wife that didn’t add up to a whole lot. That’s why it didn’t make any money. People have lowball tastes, yes, but they aren’t stupid. They took a look and said to themselves, “What the fuck is this?”
I’m not into suicide, personally. If my beautiful wife is dead, she’s dead, and my being dead won’t bring me any closer to her.
Death isn’t a membrane that you pass through, and on the other side is some romantic playground in which you can frolic and make love and walk your dog. Death is death…lights out, power off, adios. At best you’re off to your next life as a baby without any memory of your past lives, or you’re an invisible cosmic emissary soaring through the universe. Whatever…no Natascha.
Ivory Tower vs. 7-11
“Every time you talk about your disconnect with the jaded ivory-tower
elites who fail to get In Her Shoes, or how deeply you’re in touch with your blue-collar Jersey roots and how the mainstream avoidance of Hustle & Flow means that your working-man peers let that movie down, I swear to you that I plotz, and I’m not even Jewish.
“I get that critics are supposed to treat their opinions as gospel, the absolute inviolable revealed truth that brooks no other interpretation. Even if a critic doesn’t necessarily believe that about his opinions, that’s the rhetorical stance from which he is expected to issue his writing, without a lot of hedging.
“But you seem to believe it…to actually believe it-believe it. I could cherry pick ten selections of your work and show them to ten people and ask, ‘Is this guy in the ivory tower or not?’ and they would all say yes, but then some writers don’t like In Her Shoes as much as you and suddenly you’re a class warrior.
“The truth of it is — and I hate to break this to you — that you are not the standard-bearer of perfectly refined taste, the dweller at the crossroads of piffle and pretension with no personal idiosyncrasies to deter you from determining which movies deserve sellout crowds. Deviance from your picks and pans does not signal the demolition of popular culture on the one hand, or the stultification of the Film Comment crowd on the other.
“As a device to get me to value your opinion a bit more, this whole last-honest-man shtick just doesn’t work. Perhaps I should append ‘for me’ to that, but I think I might have actually stumbled upon some inviolable revealed truth.” — Sean Weitner
Wells to Weitner: Before I discovered — accepted — my blue-collar, man-of-the- people thing, I was in constant torment as a writer. Now that I’ve embraced who I am, it’s still hard…but it’s nowhere near as difficult to bang out the column, so I must be on to something.
I know “good” when I see it or feel it, even if I don’t like it, and that quality-meter I have inside me comes in part from being attuned to ivory-tower pretensions and affected intellectual posturings, etc. and trying to stay clear of that.
I always imagine myself standing in a parking lot outside a 7-11, and that’s how I find the words and the attitude. I may be some kind of elitist…I mean, you can throw that at me, but anyone who tries to appreciate the best in film art is going to resent lowbrow philistine tastes in movies.
The bottom line is that I know who I am and where I come from — the towns of Westfield, New Jersey, and Wilton, Connecticut — and being in touch with that middle-class, 7-11, never-finished-college way of looking at things is my biggest strength as a writer. I mean, along with my tenacity.
There is a tendency among learned know-it-alls to recoil from heart movies. I do it all the time — I hate icky emotionalism — but in the final analysis the critical divide between cheap and/or coyly manipulative heart movies and ones that really touch bottom and address commmon issues in an adult way is craft. Craft and honest emotion is there in In Her Shoes. There’s no question about that.
There are such things as emotional pores, and you and I know that ivory-tower elites tend to maintain a state of guardedness and wariness with such films, because if they appear overly susceptible to emotional films they are dead meat as far as their peers are concerned. Elites don’t tear up in movies like regular people do, and they don’t laugh as loudly, and so on.
You will not find a single ivory-tower elite these days who will speak favorably of Titanic. They’ve all been told to deride it and every last one of them does…but the fact is that the final 15 minutes of that film gets people where they live, and the elites can foxtrot and sidestep all they want but that movie wouldn’t have scored those hundreds of millions if it hadn’t delivered a very strong emotional current.
Elites always pooh-pooh emotion. I know this is because I’m one of them. I know exactly where they live.
Weitner to Wells: I’m not saying you’re full of shit, and I’m certainly not doubting the quality of In Her Shoes — after Wonder Boys, I would be happy to watch anything Curtis Hanson wanted to put onscreen, because I think he really has that studio artisan knack.
“And, like you, I’ve had to defend Titanic from hecklers in the intervening years. So I know very much where you’re coming from.
“Where I’m still stuck is this idea of objectively identifiable craft-cum-worthiness, and a monolithic body of tower dwellers who reject worthy movies for being emotional. I think the matter is more, as you say, that you, and I, and everyone out there that writes about movies, has a touch of the ivory tower in them that flares up when our personal taste runs contrary to popular opinion, expressed in the box-office or elsewhere.
“Of all the professionals I read, and all of the pro-ams with whom I associate, and even the few film academics under whom I’ve studied, all of them go to movies for the emotion.
“Sure, we can find some Andrew Sarris or Jonathan Rosenbaum reviews to build a case that they’re out of touch, but your persistent appeals to some nebulous elite that’s out there and against whom you defend quality movies — or when the proles let you down by not taking a chance and exposing themselves to the paragons of craft you’ve uncovered — doesn’t prima facie make your opinion any more valuable or valid, and in some ways it detracts from it.
“When there are specific pieces of wrongheaded criticism that you want to bring up and pick apart — that’s entirely appropriate and can be terrifically illuminating. Sometimes a stated viewpoint needs challenging. But attributing opinions to some Village Voice boogeyman, as opposed to some actual writer with whom you want to tangle, doesn’t do anything to bolster your argument.”
Wells to Weitner: Point not entirely accepted, but taken.
Caan Wrath
True Patriot: Maybe because I just watched this week’s My Name is Earl (should I point out that I did this from a copy a downloaded using BitTorrent, which will kill Tivo in a few years?)…
Wells: How is downloading from BitTorrent going to kill Tivo? Explain…I’m really curious.
True Patriot: But when I got to the inevitable ‘How I Was Mistreated This Week’ section of your Wired blog (Scott Cann standing you up in Soho)….
Wells: The Scott Caan thing was triggered by seeing him in Into the Blue. I don’t run how-I-was-mistreated stories with any regularity. I don’t run them irregularly.
Scott Caan
True Patriot: I had to wonder if you have considered that perhaps these things happen because of karma?
Wells: Have you considered that Scott Caan, being the big swinging dick and all, may have succumbed to thoughtlessness?
True Patriot: Ever stopped to consider that one man’s “telling it like it is” is another’s rude, pretentious egotist?
Wells: Yeah, I realize that. And if you don’t like the way I tell it, you can do whatever.
True Patriot: That maybe these little shocks-to-the-system are karmic paybacks?
Wells: I didn’t want to get into this as heavily as I am now, but Scott Caan not showing for an appointment is one thing. Not leaving a note to explain or calling after-the-fact to apologize is another. All I said in the item was, this is what Scott Caan, man among men, didn’t do. What’s your problem?
True Patriot: I’m just saying….
Grabs
Toronto’s Eleven
I’ve only been coming here since ’98, but it seemed to me like the best Toronto Film Festival ever. Too many good films, too many I didn’t get to see, the energy always there…every day felt like a full deck.
I saw (or re-saw) eleven films here that I know will matter in terms of awards or box-office or causing some kind of a stir over the next thirteen and a half weeks, and that felt fairly bountiful.
Brokeback Mountain costars Heath Ledger, Michelle Williams
I’m just sorry that the festival fathers didn’t re-show some of the favorites this past weekend (like they used to) so I could’ve seen some of the films that I couldn’t get to for whatever reason. Now I won’t get to see Bettie Page until next year…not good.
The goodies, in order of admiration…
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1. Brokeback Mountain: I didn’t expect to be as moved as I was. Not a “gay cowboy” movie, but a film about the costs of love denied and lost. My idea of a profoundly sad film, and obviously a love story of a strikingly original cast… certainly in terms of multiplex movies. Oscar potential: A probable Best Picture candidate (if it doesn’t tank financially). Ditto Ang Lee for Best Director. Heath Ledger, who gives the best performance of his career here, will almost certainly snag a Best Actor nom. Commercial prospects: No telling, although I’d like to say quality sells itself and let it go at that. I know this movie is a kind of break- through, and therefore a marketing challenge as far as the cultural foot-draggers are concerned.
2. No Direction Home: Bob Dylan: An electrifying music-history saga, a powerful American epic and Martin Scorsese’s finest film since My Voyage in Italy. Oscar prospects: It’s not going out theatrically so Oscar doesn’t figure. Commercial potential: The numbers for the doc’s PBS airing on 9.26 and 9.27 should be huge; ditto the sales and rental for the DVD (in stores on Tuesday, 9.20).
The Tsotsi gang
3. Capote: Searing, fascinating drama about a writer who pours his heart out and uses every ploy in the book to produce a groundbreaking novel, but loses his soul in the process. So deft and mature it’s almost like Louis Malle directed it. Oscar prospects: Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s performance as Truman Capote is an absolute lock for a Best Actor nomination, and I really think the film is good enough to be in the running for a Best Picture nomination. Clifton Collins, Jr. deserves a nom for Best Supporting Actor, Bennett Miller for Best Director, and Dan Futterman for Best Adapted Screenplay. Commercial potential: Everyone who’s ever heard the name “Truman Capote” is going to want to see Hoffman. One of those films that every semi-educated soul over the age of 25 or 26 is going to have to see…right?
4. Tsotsi: Emotionally pungent drama about the spiritual awakening of a socio- pathic teenage killer after he finds an infant boy in the back seat of a car he’s stolen. Winner of Toronto Film Festival’s audience award. Oscar prospects: A shoo-in for Best Foreign Language Film (it’s spoken in “Tsotsi-taal,” a mixture of several tongues), but obviously only if it gets picked up right away and pushed into theatres before 12.31. Commercial potential: A toughie…will depend very much on word-of-mouth, reviews, how good the marketing campaign is, etc.
5. A History of Violence: David Cronenberg’s strongest and most commercial film since The Fly. Oscar prospects: Limited, although William Hurt could push through with a Best Supporting Actor nomination. Commerical potential: On the modest side.
Walk the Line director James Mangold (l.), star Joaquin Pheonix
6. In Her Shoes: Best upscale chick flick since Terms of Endearment. Oscar prospects: Forget what Manohla Dargis or Stephanie Zacharek may or may not say about it — the fact that it emotionally connects means Shoes could go all the way and land noms for Best Picture, Best Director (Curtis Hanson), Best Screen- play, Best Actress (Toni Collette), etc. An assured Best Supporting Actress nom for Shirley MacLaine. Commercial potential: Very big, although Fox is going to have to work hard at first to sell it to the women who don’t read reviews, or who move their lips when they do.
7. Walk the Line: Admirably pared-down, ultra-believable Johnny Cash biopic…rooted and steady on its feet. Oscar prospects: Guaranteed Best Actor and Best Actress noms for Joaquin Pheonix and Reese Witherspoon; possible Best Picture and Best Director (James Mangold). Commercial potential: I don’t think it’s going to do what Ray did, but reasonably spirited business seems likely.
8. Thank You for Smoking: Sharp, clever, quippy…lacking in emotional gravitas. Oscar prospects: Not that kind of thing. Commercial potential: Good to pretty good.
9. Mrs. Henderson Presents: Not a massive home run but a very brisk serving of rudely effete British humor in a perky period vein. A lively near-perfect film for the over-30 (or do I really mean over-40?) crowd. Oscar prospects: A better-than- decent chance of Dame Judy Dench landing a Best Actress nomination…if the Weinstein Co. campaigns hard and smart for it. Commercial potential: Rather good.
Why We Fight director Eugene Jarecki during q & a at Cumberland plex during Toronto Film Festival
10. Sketches of Frank Gehry: Sydney Pollack’s doc is a highly intelligent look at an exceptional man, and a profound contact high. Oscar prospects: There’s no theatrical distribution deal, and even if it lands one it may be too late (or so I understand) due to Academy rule about August deadline. Commercial potential: The only viewing opportunity for sure right now is a PBS “American Masters” airing in the fall of ’06.
11. Why We Fight: Eugene Jarecki’s doc about the carrot-and-stick relationship between American interventionism over the decades and the military-industrial complex is utterly fascinating, well-sculpted, and stirring. Oscar prospects: Good potential to figure among the Best Feature Doc nominees. Commercial potential : Good.
As for the rest…
The Modest but Very Welcome Return of Steven Soderbergh: Bubble
Good, Fairly Good, Decent: Mary (dir: Abel Ferrara), Cache (dir: Michael Haneke), Tristram Shandy (dir: Michael Winterbottom…although I’m leaning on the word of trusted sources, as I was shut out of the press screening last Monday), Everything is Illuminated (dir: Liev Schreiber), Imagine Me and You (dir: Ol Parker), L’enfer (dir: Davis Tanovic), Vers le Sud (dir: Laurent Cantet).
Shortfalls: North Country, Stoned, John & Jane, Romance & Cigarettes, Lie With Me.
Capote costars Catherine Keener, Phillip Seymour Hoffman
Near-wipeout: Elizabethtown…but an obit would be premature at this stage, as a re-edit is in the works.
Wipeouts: Tideland, Revolver, Wassup Rockers, The Cabin Movie, Mrs. Harris.
If only the music grabbd me…: The Devil and Daniel Johnston.
Gloob gloob: Shopgirl, The President’s Last Bang, The White Masai, Mistress of Spices, Sorry Haters.
Martyr-Ball: The War Within, Paradise Now
Missed ‘Em: Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man, Iberia, Tristram Shandy, The Matador, Edison, Jesus is Magic, The World’s Fastest Indian, The Proposition, The Notorious Bettie Page, Wah-Wah, Tim Burton’s The Corpse Bride (didn’t care that much about seeing this one), Oliver Twist, Bee Season.
Bad Guy and a Baby
Gavin Hood’s Tsotsi has become the big stand-out at the end of the Toronto Film Festival.
It was first shown on Wednesday night, right opposite the In Her Shoes viewing at Roy Thomson Hall, and by this time many of the top-tier journalists had left town, so there haven’t been a lot of insiders hopping up and down about it. And yet today — Saturday, 9.17 — it won the Toronto Film Festival People’s Choice award.
Tsotsi star Presley Chweneyagae (l.) and the film’s director-writer Gavin Hood outside Toronto’s Sutton Place hotel — Friday, 9.16, 8:55 am.
I also know Tsotsi has aroused the persistent passions of at least one would-be distributor. And that it touched enough people at the recently-wrapped Edinburgh Film Festival to win the Audience Award, along with the Michael Powell award for Best New British Feature.
Even the notoriously hard-nosed critic Len Klady told me early this afternoon, “I hear it’s very good.”
As I waited to see it Thursday afternoon I thought I might be in for another hyper- cut City of God crime-in-the-slums movie, but it was something quite different.
Set in a rancid Johannesburg shantytown, Tsotsi (pronounced “Sawt-see”) is about an ice-cold teenage thug (Presley Chweneyagae) who discovers a small spring of compassion in himself when he starts to care for an infant boy who happens to be in the back seat of a car he’s stolen.
What is this film doing exactly? It’s reminding audiences in a believably non-sappy way there are sparks of kindness in even the worst of us. It’s a rather Christian- minded movie, in a sense.
It may sound sentimental and manipulative, but it’s not. But neither is it sadistic or repellent in some flashy, gun-fetish way. It’s real and unblinking, but it also lets you feel what’s happening. But not too much…just enough.
Tsotsi star Presley Chweneyagae
Emotions suppressed but leaking out anyway…the emotion you’d rather not feel but which won’t leave you the fuck alone…the emotions that you stopped letting in when you were eight or nine but have always been there…conveying these in a film is always a stronger, more poignant thing than having some emotionally healthy actor or actress cry their eyes out or hug everyone to death…please.
I said this in a Wired item posted on Friday morning, and here it is again: unlike Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne’s Palme d’Or-winning L’enfant, which it vaguely resembles, Tsotsi has a potential to snag some decent coin as well as Oscar nominations (Best Foreign-Language Film, Best Actor, etc.), critics awards, Golden Globe awards, etc.
How do I know Tsotsi will sell tickets? Because my good and kindly Toronto friend Leora Conway, who know what she knows but isn’t tremendously knowledgeable or sophisticated about movies, went apeshit after seeing Tsotsi at the Wednesday night premiere…she was beaming when she told me about it afterwards, and said it made her cry at the end.
Bad guys and wailing babies…it’s bound to be the very next phase. Tsotsi, L’enfant and Michael Davis’s Shoot ‘Em Up, the comically violent Don Murphy-New Line movie with Clive Owen as a gun-toting Man of Few Words protecting a baby who’s only a day or two old. Any others?
Wait a minute…I see a TV series in this. A wise-cracking yuppie assassin (think John Cusack) whose girlfriend dies just after giving birth..this hard-assed guy has to juggle diapers and nanny-care while taking care of business. And he’s got a nosey female neighbor who’s secretly hot for him.
Tsotsi costar Terry Pheto as Miriam, a single mom who establishes a bond with Chweneyagae’s street thug.
I had breakfast early this morning with Hood, Tsotsi‘s director and writer (the film is based on a novel by South African playwright Athol Fugard), and Presley Chweneyagae, who plays the title role, at the Sutton Place hotel, and we batted it around some.
Hood said he’s always been “terrified” of sentimentality and “being mushy” in movies, and says that his mantra during shooting was that “there’s always got to be more going on within a character than what he lets out.”
Hood said he wanted to use formal compositions and a slower editing style than the one popularized by City of God “because I didn’t want to seem like I was saying ‘me too’…I didn’t want to come in second.”
Hood says he feels more of an affinity with the shooting style of director Walter Salles (The Motorcycle Diaries) and particularly Sales’ Central Station than he does with City of God director Fernando Meirelles.
The language that Chweneyagae and his costars speak is known as “Tsotsi-taal” (the first word meaning “thug” and the second meaning “language”). It’s a mixture of several tongues including English, Afrikaans, Zulu, Xhosa, Sothu and Tswana.
To qualify for Academy consideration, Tsotsi is opening in South Africa today for one week.
Tsotsi gang (l. to r.): Aap (Kenneth Nkosi), Tsotsi (Presley Chweneyagae), a failed teacher (Mothusi Magano) and Butcher (Zenzo Ngqobe)
Hood showed the finished film to Fugard, 87, at his San Diego home just before the Toronto Film Festival began. Fugard was delighted and wrote that Tsotsi “is everything in my wildest dreams that I hoped it would be…it is far and away the best film that has been made of something I have written [and] it will rank as one of the best films ever to come out of South Africa.
This is one of those “it” films. I could feel the rooted energy from the get-go…from Hood’s hard-edged direction, the elegant photography and Chweneyagae’s mesmerizing performance as an ice-cold psychopath who now and then devolves into a terrified three-year-old. It all coagulates into something steady and whole.
If I know anything about this business, somebody is going to pick this film up fairly soon. But they’ll need to move quickly once they do, so hubba-hubba and chop- chop.
Reasons to Believe
A thought hit me when I was writing my column from Toronto on the evening of 9.11.01, but I didn’t have the brass to write it down.
It was my suspicion that no one in the news media in the coming weeks or months would ever be permitted to explore (or even discuss on a talk show like, say, Chris Matthews’ “Hardball”) what might have motivated the 9.11 attackers to do what they did.
It seemed fairly obvious that the news media were already locked into characterizing the Al Qeada plotters as nothing more or less than harbingers of pure evil, and that allowing for the possibility that United States foreign policy might have had something to do with their anger would simply never be acknowledged.
Not from Eugene Jarecki’s Why We Fight, although it could have been used if Jarecki had so chosen.
Eugene Jarecki’s Why We Fight, which I finally saw Thursday afternoon at Toronto’s Cumberland cineplex, isn’t the first doc to explore why so many people around the world hate our guts, but it’s one of the most precise and persuasive.
This is a cleanly composed, very perceptive explanation of how the American military-industrial complex basically runs everything and everyone, from the U.S. President to the U.S. Congress to the slant of our foreign policy.
Sony Pictures Classics will be releasing Jarecki’s doc in January 2006. It’s already been qualified, I’ve been told, to compete for the best feature-length documentary Oscar.
The news-clip centerpiece, as you might imagine, is former president Dwight D. Eisenhower’s farewell address warning about the influence of the burgeoning military-industrial complex. Jarecki then goes on to show exactly how prophetic Ike was.
This will seem like boilerpate stuff to some, but Jarecki and his sources explain how and why the U.S. decided at the end of World War II to become a permanent roving super-power with the technological ability (if not necessarily the political will) to strike any adversary in any country at any time.
Why We Fight director Eugene Jarecki during q & a following Thursday afternoon’s screening at the Cumberland plex — 9.15, 5:50 pm.
The film’s title is borrowed from a jingoistic Frank Capra doc made during World War II that explained the necessity of defeating Japan and Nazi Germany.
The movie says that for roughly the last 60 years, the U.S. has been led by a basic need for constant military adventurism for the sake of domestic corporate profits, which are then spread around to political supporters in government.
Fight shows how there are four branches of Eisenhower’s complex today — the military, the weapons-making industry, the U.S. Congress and conservative think tanks — and how they all feed into each other.
Gore Vidal is one of Fight‘s talking heads, supplying his view at one point that “we live in the United States of Amnesia.”
But Jarecki is smart enough to stay away from staunch liberals for the most part, speaking mostly to establishment or conservative types such as Sen. John McCain, high-level CIA veteran Chalmers Johnson, William Kristol, Richard Perle, former Lt. Gen. Karen Kwiatkowski and former president Eisenhower’s granddaughter Susan and son John.
Jarecki also talks to the wonderfully candid and articulate Charles Lewis of the Center for Public Integrity, who was more or less the star of Orwell Rolls in His Grave.
Former U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower delivering his farewell speech on 1.17.61.
Why We Fight is also effective when it talks to average-Joe types. The standout in this realm is an ex-cop named Wilton Sekzer, whose son was killed on 9.11 and who came to embrace a very cynical attitude about the foreign policy aims of the Bush administration, not to mention its general lack of candor about same.
Jarecki also interviews a fresh Army recruit named William Solomon, and to a couple of military pilots who dropped the first bombs in the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
On top of everything else, Jarecki is an excellent cinematographer and editor. The movie is persuasive in part because it’s been shot and cut with eye-pleasing expertise.
Eugene is the brother of Capturing the Freidmans director Andrew Jarecki, as well as the half-brother of Nic Jarecki, who made the excellent James Toback doc The Outsider. Having hung with all three, I can say with some authority they’re a clan worthy of Eugene O’Neill.
Lonesome Town
The energy is down all over the Toronto Film Festival. You can feel it on the street, at the Varsity, in the hotels…it’s over except for locals and stragglers like myself and a few clean-up screenings to get to, like tomorrow’s (9.16) showing of Martin Scorsese’s No Direction Home: Bob Dylan.
Girl Power
It was early Wednesday afternoon, and I was standing in the hallway of the 26th floor of Toronto’s Four Season’s hotel, waiting for my ten-minute quickie with In Her Shoes director Curtis Hanson.
And then a door opened about three feet away and Shoes costar Shirley Maclaine, who owns each and every scene she appears in, peeked out and said hello.
A Fox publicist sitting to MacLaine’s left smiled and nonchalantly said “hey.” I forget how Maclaine replied, but I think she was mainly looking to take a breather.
In Her Shoes star Toni Collette, snapped at Wednesday night’s post-gala party, has shed the weight she gained for the film and is now quite obviously not a brunette, as she is in the film. Director Curtis Hanson, Shirley MacLaine, Cameron Diaz and a bunch of journos (Peter Rainer among them), publicists and agents were also huddling in the VIP area.
The Fox publicist smiled and said, “Shirley, this is Jeffrey Wells, a journalist, and he really likes the film.”
“A man who likes the film…good,” said MacLaine.
The publicist turned slightly in my direction and said, “Tell Shirley what you told me.”
I looked at MacLaine and said, “I think it’s the best chick flick to come along since Terms of Endearment.”
And I know how phony that sounds. People are always tossing around suck-uppy comments at press junkets, but I really haven’t responded this strongly to a film that’s mainly about older and younger women in the same family grappling with heavy emotional life issues since that 1983 James L. Brooks film.
Really…I haven’t. And if I have I can’t think what other film I might be forgetting about.
“That’s good but it’s not a chick flick,” Maclaine said right away. “It’s really about family. Nice meeting you…bye.” And then she closed the door.
In Her Shoes director Curtis Hanson during my ten-minute interview with him at Toronto’s Four Seasons hotel — Wednesday, 9.14, 1:12 pm.
“She’s a bit of a character,” the publicist said. I was thinking to myself, didn’t MacLaine just make a point about a man liking this thing?
Trust me — In Her Shoes is a chick flick. It just happens to be a very good one, and when a particular type of movie is really exceptional that usually means it’s digging deeper and operating with more skill and finesse than other chick flicks that have gone before. And that means it has become more of a plain old good movie than just a chick flick…even though it started out that way.
It was finally time for my ten-minute Curtis Hanson interview. I’ll get into this sometime over the next two or three days, but Curtis was his usual robust and articulate self and I wished we could’ve had…oh, maybe two or three minutes more? Should I shoot the moon and wish for an extra five?
When I was told I would only have ten minutes with Hanson, I coughed and shifted my weight and leaned forward and said, “Ten minutes?” I felt insulted. Why not eight minutes? Why not two? The haiku interview!
I wrote a blurb-sized review of In Her Shoes yesterday for the Wired box. I’ll try and write more this weekend…maybe.
Line Walker
Walk The Line holds up and then some. I liked and respected it after seeing it the first time (i.e., last July), but didn’t quite love it. I saw it again Tuesday morning and while I’m still not 100% wowed by the love story element, I have an even greater respect for how lean and down-to-it and well-assembled this film is.
I’ll say it again for the sake of emphasis: this movie, very neatly, is analogous to a Johnny Cash song — solid and straight, no b.s. or flaky embroidery. And it’s very conceivable it could punch through as a Best Picture nominee because of these attributes alone.
Walk the Line director and co-writer James Mangold (l.) with star Joaquin Phoenix at 20th Century Fox’s post-screening party for Walk the Line — Tuesday, 9.13, 10:10 pm.
Oh, and that item I ran about director James Mangold having allegedly trimmed a bit out of the opening scenes of Walk the Line so it would lessen resemblances to Ray? Bogus. Mangold is telling journalists that the film has been locked for the last four months, and the version I saw this morning in Toronto was precisely the same one I saw in Manhattan, so sorry for briefly muddying the waters.
After seeing four movies today — Walk the Line, the very authentic and unsettling Paradise Now, John & Jane (see review below) and Larry Clark’s lazy, totally masturbatory Wassup Rockers — I strolled over to the Walk the Line party at the Chanel store on the north side of Bloor between Bay and Avenue Road.
The small VIP room was upstairs and very poorly ventilated. No sooner did the Fox publicists wave me into this inner sanctum when Joaquin Phoenix and a friend of his both lit up cigarettes, and you could really smell it.
Daily Mail columnist Baz Bamigboye and I spoke with Phoenix for a few minutes. He’s a nice guy, cool dude. I loved hearing that he hasn’t seen Walk the Line yet, either in a screening room or with an audience, and he has no plans to see it in the foreseeable future. He laughed when he said this, and his laugh has a very slight tone of perversity.
Jane Seymor and husband James Keach, producer and ground-floor instigator of Walk the Line at same after-party — Tuesday, 9.13, 9:55 pm.
I complimented Phoenix on his ultra-realistic fight scene with Mark Wahlberg in The Yards, which is one of the all-time greats. I was surprised to hear that he and Wahlberg didn’t have a stunt guy advising them, but worked out the rollin’ and tumblin’ on their own. They wore knee pads and just told each other, “Okay, I’m gonna hit you and you’re gonna fall down the stairs and then…”, etc.
Mangold, dressed in a tweed jacket and just as warm as I was, was friendly and gracious. I asked him about the film’s best scene, which he wrote, in which Sun records owner Sam Phillips tells Cash and his band during an audition that he doesn’t believe Cash’s signing of a gospel tune, and that he needs to sing some- thing tough and real, etc. Mangold agreed it’s one of the film’s best, and he toasted actor Dallas Roberts, who plays Phillips, for making the scene play as well as it does.
I also spoke to producer James Keach, who knew Cash for several years and tried, with Cash’s approval, to launch his own Cash biopic for a long while before he tied in to the Fox/Mangold/Phoenix project.
Keach and I talked about Cash’s first wife, Vivian, and how the way she’s written and the actress who plays her, Ginnifer Goodwin, makes her seem like the world’s biggest complainer and worst marital partner…a total drag.
What did they get married for? I asked Mangold. Was it sex or…? Mangold said Cash once told him he got married to Vivian because he considered her a dead ringer for Pier Angeli, who was (allegedly) the great love of James Dean’s life.
