Foxcatcher Luncheon, Bright Sun, Croisette Stroll, etc.
Sony Classics hosted an elegant press luncheon today (12:30 to 2 pm) for Bennett Miller‘s well-received Foxcatcher at the Carlton Beach restaurant. It got started a little late and a lot of us had to leave around 1:30 pm for the Salle Debussy Lost River screening so there wasn’t much time to really chat with the principals. I spoke with Bennett a little bit; ditto producer Jon Kilik. I didn’t even say hi to costars Steve Carell and Channing Tatum. Thanks to SPC’s Tom Bernard and Michael Barker and their p.r. reps. I wish I could have hung around longer.
During today’s Foxcatcher press luncheon at Carlton beach (l. to r.): Deadline‘s Pete Hammond, Daily Mail‘s Baz Bamigboye (standing), director Bennett Miller, Hollywood Reporter critic Todd McCarthy.
Foxcatcher star Channing Tatum at today’s Foxcatcher luncheon.
Overgrown Urban Blight Meets Nutso Beasts of the Northern Wild
It turns out that Ryan Gosling‘s Lost River, which ended about 50 minutes ago, is much, much better than I expected — a wide-angle-lensed, visually inventive decrepit dream-fantasia that’s obviously been influenced by Behn Zeitlin‘s Beasts of the Southern Wild as well as David Lynch, Terrence Malick (murmuring voice-overs mixed with impressionistic visuals), John Carpenter‘s Escape From New York and you-tell-me-what-else. The film may not be 100% successful but at least Gosling errs on the side of wild-ass imagination. Some journos hated it (“show-offy,” “pretentious”) and there was a definite mixture of boos and cheers when the closing credits began to roll, but I know a formidable envelope-pusher when I see it. Director-writer-producer Gosling and dp Benoit Debie have really come up with a ruined realm of their own — part Tobacco Road, part urban wasteland, part psychedelia — and a lot of it is very cool to gaze upon and…I don’t know, get lost in. Oh, the meditative muck and sprawl of it all!
Lost River star Iain De Caestecker.
Ryan Gosling during last summer’s filming of Lost River.
Set in some kind of verdant, overgrown, foreclosed-upon urban shithole pockmarked with abandoned homes and rundown buildings (and shot near Detroit), Lost is really out there and a lot of it (okay, most of it) is driven by what could politely be called dream logic. That’s a nice way of saying some of it doesn’t make a lot of basic sense. There are mentions of a collapsed economy and a woman having taken out a home loan that she shouldn’t have so it’s obviously a post-2008 realm. There are predatory creeps roaming around like the feral bad guys in Robocop, and there are little pockets of normality and decency and respect for life and property. There are things that happen every so often without apparent motivation but with films like this you have to roll with the imaginative flow.
Door To Door
Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne‘s Two Days, One Night, which screened early this morning at the Cannes Film Festival, is exactly what I expected — a low-key, no-frills, ploddingly earnest drama about factory workers being asked to make a choice between humanity and expediency after a co-worker (Marion Cotillard) has been told she’s being laid off. It’s a decently made but far-from-inspired film, roughly on the level of the Dardennes’ The Kid With The Bike. Yup, that’s right — the Corleone brothers of the Croisette have hit another line-drive single or ground-rule double. Now watch everybody cream over it.
Trust me — if this film had been made by a no-name journeyman from England or Germany or Russia, it would barely be noticed much less honored with a Cannes competition slot. But it’s that Dardennes legend, you see. That stamp means everything.
Indulgent Fantasy Twaddle?
Now I don’t even have to see Ryan Gosling’s Lost River. The trailer makes it quite clear that this reputed “fantasy thriller” suffers from the good old “trying too hard” impulse that many first-time-filmmakers succumb to. It may be somewhat influenced by Rubber‘s Quentin Dupieux, but it’s probably going to suck eggs. I’m obliged to see it, of course (Tuesday afternoon, 2 pm, Salle Debussy) but I have a pretty good idea what this is going to be. We all do. Iain de Caestacker plays the sensitive-faced son of Christina Hendricks. The “look at my muscles!” guy is Matt Smith. Also featuring Eva Mendes, Saoirse Ronan, Ben Mendelsohn and Barbara Steele.
Agonizing Bunuel Ordeal, or The Sweatbox
Earlier this evening I stood uncomfortably rock-still for a good 30 minutes outside the Salle Bunuel for a 7:30 pm screening of Pablo Fendrik‘s El Ardor, which, by the way, is slow and uninteresting. We had to wait a good 15 or 20 minutes longer than we should have because a screening of Steve James‘ Life Itself, the excellent Roger Ebert doc, ran late. And then instead of the crowd exiting when the doc was over, James and Chaz Ebert (i.e., Roger’s widow) apparently decided to have a nice leisurely q & a inside while a couple of hundred people outside melted and suffered. The air began to lose sufficient oxygen, the body heat was oppressive, and the crowd was getting angry and unruly. “That’s Cannes,” a British journalist told me. “That’s how they do things here. Get used to it.”
Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell
Last night TheWrap‘s Steve Pond posted a piece titled “Cannes At The Halfway Point: Where’s The Excitement?” Well, I’ll tell you, Steve. Cannes excitement has definitely been sparked by two films thus far — Damian Szifon‘s Wild Tales and David Cronenberg‘s Map to the Stars. Sharon Waxman, Pond’s boss, filed almost the exact same story during last year’s Cannes festival…”nothing’s really happened yet, where’s the pizazz?,” etc.
Free Enterprise
Yesterday the N.Y. Post‘s Susan Edelman revealed a list of tacky knick-knacks being sold at the new 9/11 Museum Gift Shop. Included are (a) FDNY, NYPD and Port Authority Police T-shirts and caps, (b) earrings molded from leaves and blossoms of downtown trees, (c) cop and firefighter charms by Pandora and other jewelers; and (d) “United We Stand” blankets. Not to mention 9/11 bracelets, bowls, buttons, mugs, mousepads, magnets, key chains, flags, pins, stuffed animals, toy firetrucks, cellphone cases, tote bags, books and DVDs. “Even FDNY vests for dogs come in all sizes,” Edelman reports. Why don’t they sell photos of dead jumpers while they’re at it? What gets me is that visiting adults have to pay $24 to even get into the store. What’s the difference, I’m wondering, between this and similar items (tasteful scale models of prisoner barracks, little Nazi ashtrays, little toy Doberman Pinschers) being sold in a gift shop at the Dachau and Auschwitz museums?
Foxcatcher Chatter & Confession
Here are three mp3s from this morning’s Foxcatcher press conference, which was attended by (left to right in pic below) Mark Ruffalo, Channing Tatum, director Bennett Miller, Steve Carell, producer Megan Ellison. Here’s the entire press conference, start to finish. At one point Chaz Ebert asked Miller about having gotten exceptional performances not just from his Foxcatcher cast but particularly from the late Phillip Seymour Hoffman, whom Miller directed in Capote — here’s his halting emotional response. A little later on Miller explained that you can capture a world or a situation with a telescope or a microscope, and that Foxcatcher uses the latter approach.
(l. to r.) Ruffalo, Miller, Carell, Tatum.
Bleak, Brooding Foxcatcher
Speaking as a devoted admirer of Bennett Miller‘s Capote and Moneyball, it gives me no pleasure to admit that I feel a tad less enthusiastic about Foxcatcher, which screened this morning at the Cannes Film Festival. There’s no doubt that Foxcatcher is very strong and precise and clean, especially as crime dramas tend to go. And I respect the fact that it contains undercurrents that stay with you, and I certainly respect and admire what Miller has done here with his deft and subtle hand. But the obviously intelligent Foxcatcher is a relentlessly bleak trip that, accomplished as it is, isn’t especially likable or enjoyable. Okay, I “liked” it or…you know, I didn’t “dislike” it because it’s so well-made and refined, etc. But it’s basically a grim study of a dark tale about victims and affluent malevolence and corrupting wealth, and about fate surrounding the characters like tentacles and sucking them down the drain.
No savvy players, no smart detectives, no wise guys, no sex, no heroes, no winners, no zingy dialogue…its a down concerto from start to finish.
Please don’t get me wrong — this is a carefully honed, highly disciplined smart-guy melodrama. I admire the shit out of it, and I will never speak ill of it. But it’s still a downbeat thing about the pursuit of Olympic wrestling glory by a couple of weird obsessives — the late multimillionaire and convicted murderer John DuPont (Steve Carell), and real-life, grim-faced 1984 Olympic wrestling champion Mark Schultz (Channing Tatum) — and Mark’s kind-hearted, steady, positive-minded older brother Dave Schultz (Mark Ruffalo), a married ex-wrestler and coach who got caught in the middle when DuPont shot him to death in 1996. The film is about creepy currents and unstated agendas that lead to perplexing tragedy, and it all happens in gloomy rural Pennsylvania — an atmosphere that has always seemed to have a narcotic-like effect upon my system or mood or whatever. I only know that whenever I’m in rural Pennsylvania I want to escape.
Gordon Willis Looks Down Upon The Landscape
The obviously legendary, hugely influential, always blunt-spoken Gordon Willis has died. The man was and always will be a collossus among cinematographers, right up there with Gregg Toland, Conrad Hall, the Sunrise guys (Karl Struss, Charles Rosher) and all the others profiled in Todd McCarthy‘s Visions of Light. I have to catch an 8:30 am Foxcatcher screening in 40 minutes so I’ll just use a quote from Time Out‘s Steven Garrett, to wit: “More than any other director of photography, Willis defined the cinematic look of the 1970s: sophisticated compositions in which bolts of light and black put the decade’s moral ambiguities into stark relief.”