“This sounds like a weird thing to say, but I remember thinking Robert Redford wasn’t that great an actor, but that he’d had an unbelievable career because he knew how to use himself well. He has incredible taste, a literary development. Is he one of the greatest actors of his generation? No. But he’s certainly one of the greatest filmmakers of his generation. Butch Cassidy, The Sting, The Candidate, Downhill Racer, Ordinary People, The Natural, Out of Africa. He had a great ability to use whatever modicum of talent he had to its absolute uttermost.” — Boyhood‘s Ethan Hawke speaking to Indiewire’s Nigel M. Smith during a just-posted SXSW interview.

Isn’t this what all successful actors do? Or all successful people for that matter? It’s not how gifted or brainy you are as much as how you use what you have. The trick is to find your voice and your style, then work it within the range that you’ve been given or have been able to develop to its utmost, or the realm in which you feel the most planted and comfortable.

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Very few people come off well when they’re being hammered by a contentious interrogator, but the way a person responds to this kind of duress always tells you a little something about them. On one level I feel sorry for Justin Beiber during this hours-long deposition, and on another level he seems like an entitled little dick. The footage also vaguely reminds me of the deposition scenes in The Social Network.

Everyone loves to see bullies slapped down. It’s a perfect, wonderful thing…God smiles and the universe hums with song. On the other hand it’s a tough thing to acknowledge that Peter Weir‘s Witness is on the verge of being 30 years old. (It was shot in the summer of 1984 and released in February 1985…obviously an era in which a February release wasn’t necessarily regarded as a throwaway.) Whatever happened to thematically interesting action films with upscale stars and good scripts? Today Witness would be a Jason Statham film, and nowhere near as good. There’s a region-free Witness Bluray available in France and another coming out in Germany in early April, but a high-def/HDX version (which vary in quality but are often just as robust and detailed as Blurays) is available right now on Vudu so why wait and what’s the point anyway?

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I’m sorry but I feel completely blocked and gunked up and tormented by stomach acid whenever I think about Divergent (Summit/Lionsgate, 3.21), a futuristic sci-fi adventure milkshake that’s trying to ape the success of The Hunger Games and Twilight. I’m throughly sick of dystopian post-apocalyptic anything. I hate the young-adult-fiction poster (i.e., Shailene Woodley and Theo James atop a Chicago skyscraper with dawn breaking over the horizon). And it just smells like another corporate hustle. I’ve been calling it Detergent. Obviously another greedy attempt to launch a youth-market franchise (or at least a trilogy that follows Veronica Roth’s three Divergent novels) so everyone can get rich. Maybe it’s just me but the metaphor within the basic hook, a futuristic society divided into five distinct personality groups, feels a bit underwhelming. I understand how it could resonate with under-30s (in the same way that The Hunger Games obviously has and is) but it looks like fucking torture to sit through.

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Over the last day or so, the strange disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 has evolved from a tragic mystery into something profoundly odd if not creepy. It’s been four days now (the Boeing 777 aircraft took off from Kuala Lumpur last Saturday, heading for Beijing) and nobody has clue #1 what happened except that it disappeared about an hour into the flight. 227 passengers, 12 crew members…engulfed. No clues, no explanations, no bombs, no oil slick…nothing. It seems particularly eerie if you’ve meditated upon two landmark films about inexplicable vanishings — Michelangelo Antonioni‘s L’Avventura (in which a jaded Italian rich girl morphs into thin air on a rocky island off Sicily) and Peter Weir‘s Picnic at Hanging Rock (in which three or four Australian schoolgirls are swallowed by the void during daylight). The essence of the unease that some people are feeling right now, I think, is a hazy notion that there might be some kind of strange dimensional trapdoor or cosmic manhole opening that very randomly erases people and things. Each year and in every corner of the globe there are many, many, many instances of completely unexplained disappearances (I’ve lost hundreds of socks that were seemingly vacuumed up by some kind of space-time continuum wormhole), but never has a massive, electronically connected superjet flown into the void like Rod Serling‘s The Odyssey of Flight 33. Eventually, one presumes, the facts will come out but right now it feels…oddly troubling?

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President Obama‘s bizarre-sounding decision to appear on Zach Galifianakis‘s never-funny Between Two Ferns turned out to be a sage one. The apparent idea was to talk to the target audience (under-40 couch potatoes) about Obamacare, but the surprising offshot, for me anyway, is that this was was the only Between Two Ferns interview that I’ve ever laughed at. Entirely scripted, I presume, but still. From my perspective no “funny guy” on the face of the planet has inspired less in the way or mirth or laughter than Zach Galifianakis, but this was different.

Paramount has flown a group of devoted Darren Aronofsky acolytes (First Showing‘s Alex Billington, Badass Digest‘s Devin Faraci, Slashfilm‘s Peter Sciretta, etc.) down to Mexico City for tonight’s world premiere of Noah. Now, it may be that Noah is a grade-A Aronofsky experience (I’m expecting a good effort, being a longtime Darren fan myself), but if it’s not…well, we’ll see. They’re down there because Paramount figured they’d be reliably supportive and perhaps even good-buzz spreaders, just as Fox Searchlight flew me to Berlin with the knowledge that I’m a Wes Anderson devotee. I’ve been told by a Paramount publicist that the studio won’t be showing Noah for yours truly until the Los Angeles all-media on 3.26 (i.e., two days before it opens commercially) but it’s opening in Mexico on 3.21 so I’ll just drive down to Tijuana and review it from there.

Paramount publicist Tamar Tiefeld and friends-of-Aronofsky Peter Sciretta (far left) and Devin Faraci (far right) visiting Teotihuacan pyramids outside Mexico City a day ago. (Pic from Tamar Tiefeld’s Facebook page.)

Tiefeld and the boys enjoying Mexican grub…drink up, boys! The Margaritas are on Paramount!

Latin American opening dates for Noah

Four months after a Russian-subtitled trailer appeared for Jim Jarmusch‘s Only Lovers Left Alive (Sony Classics, 4.11), an English-language version has finally popped up. This is a very droll, no-laugh-funny vampire movie about middle-aged goth hipster musician types — a nocturnal lifestyle movie that Lou Reed would have loved. (Maybe Jarmusch showed it to him before he died?) After seeing it in Cannes I called it “a perfect William S. Burroughsian hipster mood trip…I sank into it like heroin.” Tilda Swinton, Tom Hiddleston, Mia Wasikowska, John Hurt, Anton Yelchin, Jeffrey Wright.

Roadside Attractions and Black Label Media have acquired U.S. rights to Yann Demange‘s ’71, a Belfast-set period thriller that everyone was talking about during the Berlin Film festival (and which I reviewed on 2.7.14). But Roadside reportedly plans to open it sometime in 2015, presumably because it doesn’t believe it’s strong enough to compete as a summer counter-programmer or award-season contender. Which seems odd as there’s nothing opaque or arty-farty about ’71 — it’s a chase thriller and a suspense film start to finish.

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Alexander Payne and other mature, quality-minded directors will be pleased to hear about a plan by producer Robert Simonds to create a new movie studio dedicated to making $40 million movies with big stars that are aimed at semi-adult audiences — the kind of film that big studios don’t make any more. But Simonds has never been into funding Alexander Payne-type films, and he probably never will be. His new studio will most likely wind up making films with a glossier, more commercial sheen (i.e., Nancy Meyer comedies).

Producer Robert Simonds, Lindsay Lohan in 2005.

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I was thinking this morning about Tad Friend’s just-published New Yorker article about the conflict between Noah director Darren Aronofsky and Paramount Pictures about trying to appeal to the Christian community, and the more I kicked it around the more Paramount’s position (i.e., the one more or less voiced in Friend’s article by Paramount vice-chairman Rob Moore) seemed reasonable to me. If I was running the show, I too would have tried to assemble a pandering, vaguely dipshitty Christian-friendly version of Noah — a version that would have blatantly kowtowed to Christian values. But — this is important — I would only show it in the hinterland territories where most Christians live.

I would give this version of Noah a special rating — C for Christian. I would then open the real Noah — the Aronofsky version, the artistic-integrity cut that was more or less intended all along and is true to itself and doesn’t pander to simpletons — in the cities and their suburbs and other semi-educated areas.

Christians live on their own planet, they want what they want, and they’ll never come down to earth. I don’t see the problem in making and trying to sell them the kind of cereal that they want to eat. And then you could include both versions on the Bluray/DVD.

That, to me, sounds like a sensible business plan for the film’s release, and one that would totally respect Aronofsky’s vision. From Paramount’s perspective, releasing a C-rated version wouldn’t be any kind of dismissal of the Aronofsky cut. It would simply be a practical acknowledgement that Christians want what they want, and that they don’t care about real filmmaking or artistic intent as much as others do. They want and have always insisted upon having a certain kind of spiritual heroin in their lives, and that’s their game — take it or leave it.

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