Everyone understands, of course, that Marc Forster‘s film having had its third act re-written and re-shot matters not to 97% of the audience out there. So it’s not the calamity-waiting-to-happen that some think it is. Most of of the paying public hasn’t read about it and doesn’t want to know. They’re committed to being as ignorant and/or ineducable (in a pre-release sense) as they feel like being, and that’s how the big studios like it. I suppose in my own way I’m guilty of the same. But not really.
What do I really know? Maybe the third act really works now.
I’ve long felt that Terence Fisher‘s Horror of Dracula (’58) is scarier, grabbier and definitely sexier than Tod Browning‘s Dracula (’31). And that Christopher Lee‘s bloodsucking count is far spookier than Bela Lugosi‘s. The original British title was just plain Dracula — it was re=titled Horror of Dracula for the American release. The U.K. Bluray, in any event, is at the top of my list.
Surely some regulars have seen Shane Carruth‘s Upstream Color by now. If you’re among them please share impressions. Here’s yesterday’s re-posting of my Sundance reaction. And here’s Carruth’s explanation of what the film is basically about, as posted by Filmmaker magazine’s Scott Macaulay:
Upstream Color costar Amy Seimetz.
“What I wanted to do was have a story where I break some people apart and make them have to figure it out all over again — what it is that they are, how they see themselves and how they behave. They’re going to wake up — whatever ‘wake up’ means — in a ruin of some kind, and they’re going to have to understand or explain to themselves what happened to them. That was sort of the kernel of it.
“I wanted to explore the concept of trying to recognize that you’re in a narrative, one that you may have made up yourself, or one that was [impressed] on you from an outside force. Thematically, this is everything in the film for me.
“And then you have a potential romance in the midst of it all, and I found that incredibly compelling. I think I had The Hustler on repeat last year for months. That’s where it comes from, the romantic possibility that exists when everything has been stripped away. I don’t know a better premise for a love story that that.
“And then, I needed this mythical cycle to be happening around them. They’re not aware of it, because if they are, then that changes everything. Then they know that their story is affected by it. I wanted these mythical elements to be there, but that [the two central characters] not touch them. Once I knew that, then it’s like you get to play with these things.
“You’ve got a Thief, you’ve got a Sampler and you’ve got the Orchid Mother and Daughter as the three points of this continuing cycle’s triangle. The Thief is clearly a pretty negative force, for the most part. The Orchid Mother and Daughter don’t know what they’re doing. They’re just cogs in the machine. They’re completely benign. And then, you’ve got The Sampler, who is a complete unknown hanging in the middle, this character we can read into. Is he just observing, or is he gaining something from his observance? Is he saving people from this worm that is constricting and controlling them? Or, is he just using this device to grow his own fishbowl full of emotional experiences?
“I’m trying here not to talk about God; it’s like, that is what we’re talking about. There is an offscreen force that we attribute things to that we can’t explain. Anyways, that’s way too many words, but that’s where that story came from.”
Sometimes writing this column is a huge blast, and sometimes it’s drudgery. Sometimes the back-and-forth gets really funny or passionate and sometimes angry, but it’s always an adventure. I always try to cut the fat out and get down to the nub of things as a rule. I can be mouthy and egoistic at times, but you know what I never do, ever? I never go after another columnist or critic or reporter and say, “God, that person is a waste of skin” or “Jesus, what a slimy disreputable jerkwad” or words to that effect.
Unless they go after me first, of course. Then all bets are off. But I never take the first shot because I don’t believe in hating on fellow journos unless, you know, they’re lying or being slanderous or are dealing heroin or molesting minors.
But I get hated on all the time. Every day of the week and twice on Sundays. Haters on comment threads are part of the rough and tumble — you have to roll with that — but what kind of a journalist/columnist/critic likes to shove a sword between the ribs of somebody who works on the same side of the fence? Life is hard enough, guys. I mean, seriously…how do you grow your uglies into a permanent tumor? I read one of their comments and I ask myself, “Oh, so I’m really bad, huh? Okay. So am I supposed to…what, stick my head in an oven? Throw myself on the steps of the nearest church and beg for forgiveness?” And then you have to stifle an urge to write them back and say something even snarlier.
Yesterday I posted a little note called “Little Marty Nudge” in which I asked the great and powerful Martin Scorsese to try and give a little thought to the Shane aspect-ratio scandal, which I wrote him about a week ago. It was just a thought so I posted it…big deal. And in response Newark Star Ledger critic Stephen Whitty tweeted the following: “Is there anything more sadly self-aggrandizing than ‘An Open Letter To’ someone who’d never take your call?”
The fuck? I’ve never been dumb enough to call Scorsese for that reason, but after I’ve received no response to a note I wrote a week earlier I don’t see what harm a little nudge-note amounts to. The shape of a Bluray-ed Shane is an important issue that I’m sure Scorsese has a strong conviction about so what’s the problem? Is Scorsese too important to be addressed in this manner? Does he poop Tiffany cufflinks? Is he given to secrecy and subterfuge and would therefore be grossly offended by an open letter?
I can tell you that if Whitty ever writes something that I don’t agree with, I will never tweet that he has disgusted or appalled me. Not my style.
An hour or two earlier JHoffman6 tweeted that “I can’t deny that I’m a little impressed Woody Allen weighed in on wellshwood’s windmill tilting.” In response to which Kris Tapley tweeted, “Yeah, but if he knew what we know…” What kind of a shitheel do you have to be to throw little dingleberries like that? “Yeah, we know better about what a problematic ayehole wellshwood is,” blah blah. Allow me to respond by saying that Tapley is a cranky, judgmental sourpuss who’s always looking to piss on something I’ve written or throw some kind of “nyah-nyah” or whatever. That is the kind of sour and diseased attitude I never fire at other journalists…unless provoked.
All I know is that there are some journalists who seem to live in order to condemn others in their field. It gets them off on some level. These are people who have Alien acid blood running in their veins. And I really get sick of this from time to time.
None of the 2013 Cannes Film Festival prediction pieces have even toyed with the possibility of James Toback and Alec Baldwin‘s Seduced and Abandoned, a documentary about the film business and financing in particular, being one of the attractions. Shot during last year’s festival and featuring encounters with numerous industry hotshots, the now-completed film sounds to me like a semi-likely inclusion. Perhaps in some kind out-of-competition slot or under Director’s Fortnight or Un Certain Regard.
James Toback, Alec Baldwin.
“The movie business is the worst girlfriend in the world,” Baldwin said in Simon Dang‘s 5.31.12 Indiewire article about the film. “You go back again and again and again. You go back with another chance to do something that you want to do in moviemaking or moviegoing. You are seduced and abandoned over and over again.”
I’ve been hearing this and that person say “I obviously don’t know anything but this is starting to feel like a bit of a weak festival.” The only way to shake that feeling would be to bring in a major fall awards contender, and that would be Alexander Payne‘s Nebraska…right? Remember that No Country For Old Men vibe when Joel and Ethan Coen‘s film debuted at Cannes six years ago? That “whoa, stand back” feeling? That’s what we need to lift things up this year.
Steven Soderbergh‘s Behind the Candelabra is said to be likely. Ditto Sofia Coppola‘s The Bling Ring and Asghar Farhadi‘s The Past.
I wouldn’t mind catching JC Chandor‘s All is Lost, the Robert Redford survivalist drama. Oliver Hirschbiegel‘s Diana would be welcome. Ditto Jonathan Glazer‘s Under the Skin, Guillaume Canet‘s Blood Ties and Jim Jarmusch‘s Only Lovers Left Alive.
I was really hoping for Alfonso Cuaron‘s 3D Gravity but that won’t be completed until sometime this summer, I’m told by a top-dog source. Yes, even though it test-screened early last November at the Sherman Oaks Arclight.
I would be down with Ryan Coogler‘s Fruitvale (which I still haven’t seen), Spike Jonze‘s Her, James Gray‘s Lowlife, Luc Besson‘s Malavita and/or Roman Polanski‘s Venus in Fur.
My “Dream Cannes” picks include Paul Greengrass‘s Captain Phillips (wny not?), Steve McQueen‘s 12 Years A Slave, Jason Reitman‘s Labor Day (which was test screened two or three months ago), and Spike Lee‘s Oldboy.
Nobody in the U.S. press pack will express great enthusiasm much about Baz Luhrman‘s The Great Gatsby as it will have opened commercially in th U.S. five days earlier. The period drama will open the festival.
The 2013 Cannes film festival runs from 5.15 through 5.26.
Everybody’s been playing this Roger Ebert clip, which was taped at the Park City Library following a 2002 Sundance Film Festival screening of Justin Lin‘s Better Luck Tomorrow. But it reminded me how Lin copped out on Tomorrow‘s ending after his film got picked up by Paramount. In so doing Lin conveyed to the suits that he was basically looking to play ball and make commercial films. And that’s what he wound up doing.
After the Paramount acquisition Lin got pressured about the original ending (in which the lead guy, played by Parry Shen, gets away with murder and isn’t all that bothered about it) being amoral. So Lin changed it so that the film implied at the very end that Shen would probably get caught for his crime.
In addition to catching a Tribeca Film Festival short called Rider and the Storm and that American Masters Mel Brooks doc I have three recently-arrived scripts to read this weekend: Billy Ray‘s Maersk Alabama, based on “A Captain’s Duty” by Richard Phillips and otherwise known as the basis of Paul Greengrass‘s Captain Phillips; George Clooney and Grant Heslov‘s The Monuments Men, which runs 145 pages so expect a longish running time; and Tom Shepherd‘s Hey, Stella!, an HBO-ish period piece about how the very young Marlon Brando landed the stage role of Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire.
Robert Redford‘s The Company You Keep (Sony Classics, opening today) has a lousy 55% Rotten Tomatoes score, but it isn’t too bad. Really. It’s relatively decent, semi-tolerable, good enough, etc. Is it sleepy? A little bit, yeah. Is it overly mellow and modulated? Yeah. Is it relatively well-plotted and engrossing as far as it goes? Yes, more or less. Will 22 year-olds like it? Nope.
I’m giving it a 7.5 out of 10. Okay, a 7.7.
Believe me, if this thing was any kind of burn I would say so. It underwhelmed me somewhat but it never pissed me off. If I had paid to see it I…I’m not sure how I would have felt but I’d probably be okay with it. Shrugging-your-shoulders okay, I mean. No harm, no foul.
I mean, you know going in that Redford, due respect, peaked as a director 19 years ago with Quiz Show and 12 years ago as an actor in Spy Game. You knew he’d really lost it after seeing Lions for Lambs…forget it. So you go in hoping that The Company You Keep will be at least good enough to not annoy or alienate and you’re more or less placated when it meets that test.
Honestly? Most of the time I was thinking about the plastic surgery that 75 year-old Redford has had — subtle, selective, nothing too drastic — along with costar Julie Christie. Forgive me but I think this somehow undercuts their attempts at portraying former ’60s Weathermen-type radicals. Not that I mind these two looking a bit less saggy than their years would indicate, but looking at their slightly altered appearance takes away from the authenticity one associates with the life and values of an ex-hardcore radical. I’m sorry but they look like movie stars who have enough money to do a little something about being in their 70s.
The trick with plastic surgery is to have just enough done so it doesn’t look like anything. Honestly? I think Christie went a little too far but Redford got it more or less right, although you can still tell.
Has Susan Sarandon, who plays a Bernadine Dohrn-like ex-fugitive who is busted early on, had any touch-ups? If she has they’re not noticable, but she looks pretty good so you have to kinda wonder.
Those in The Company You Keep who haven’t had plastic surgery: Shia LaBeouf, Jackie Evancho (who plays Redford’s 11-year-old daughter), Brendan Gleeson (real and genuine and honestly himself), Brit Marling, Anna Kendrick, Terrence Howard (who bellows like an authoritarian hard-ass throughout the whole film — a huge pain-in-the-ass), Richard Jenkins, Nick Nolte (who looks like he’s been drinking beer and eating french fries), Sam Elliott, Stephen Root, Stanley Tucci and Chris Cooper.
I won’t be around for the upcoming Rolling Stones concert at the Staples Center (no announced date but probably around 5.1), but if you want to stand in the “tongue pit” in Oakland’s Oracle arena it’ll set you back $1500 bills. The pit will be filled with bald or white-haired guys in T-shirts with their 39 year-old girlfriends (total cost for getting laid that night: $3 grand.). They should sell some cheap tickets on a lottery basis for younger fans.
DATE: 4.5.13
FROM: Jeffrey Wells, HE
TO: Martin Scorsese c/o Margaret Bodde, Thelma Schoonmaker
RE: Shane aspect ratio controversy
Just following up, Marty, on my Shane letter addressed to you 7 days ago. I also wrote Woody Allen about this matter, and he replied yesterday as follows: http://www.hollywood-elsewhere.com/2013/04/woody-allen-on-shane-debacle/. If you can spare the time a reply would be greatly appreciated. — Jeffrey Wells, Hollywood Elsewhere
Here’s a little taste of Robert Trachtenberg‘s Mel Brooks: Make A Noise, which will premiere on Monday, 5.20. It’s a little riff about The Critic, the 1963 Oscar-winning short that Brooks voiced. I’ll be watching the show this weekend.
“Shane Carruth‘s Upstream Color is the only Sundance film I’ve seen so far that totally jettisons narrative in favor of an impressionist, oddly spooky, catch-as-catch-can paint-splatter whatever experience. It’s very cool and commanding and climatorial. I became an instant fan. You’re free to piece together all the fragments and good luck with that, but Upstream Color has something to do with 21st Century anxiety, malevolent micro-manipulation, love, bodily invasions, Ridley Scott-like worms and definitely pigs. Lots and lots of little pigs.
“You don’t want to hear what I think it all amounts to. Whatever I might write would just get in the way or feel like a mosquito. It’s entirely between you and Upstream Color.
“Director-writer-producer Carruth is self-distributingUpstream Color on April 5th. HE readers are advised to grapple with the experience. All serious cineastes, I mean. I honestly don’t think you’ll be able to call yourself a man if you don’t.
“It’s certainly worth catching for Amy Seimetz‘s mesmerizing lead performance. And Carruth’s costarring one, come to think. They play lovers (named Chris and Jeff) who may have been invaded/afflicted by the same quietly malevolent, William S. Burroughs-ian bad guys, and Carruth is cool — a fascinating actor in that he doesn’t seem to “act” much but is indisputably interesting. His intense eyes especially.
“But Semetz (an indie actress-director who strongly resembles early Juliette Binoche) is the shit. She’s the primary victim, the person who struggles with weird micro-aggression and malevolence that makes no real “sense,” who tries to hold on, who bears the burden and somehow muddles through. Seimetz has been around for years, but this is the first time I’ve sat up and said ‘wow.'”
Portion of Dargis review: “For all of Mr. Carruth’s cosmic reaching and despite the jigsaw montage, Upstream Colorisn’t an arduous head-scratcher if you don’t worry about what it means and just go with the trippy flow. (Mr. Carruth helped cut and shoot the movie, and wrote its mood-setting score.)
“It is, instead, a sometimes seductive, sometimes tiresome melange of ideas that are by turns obvious, hermetic, touching and sweetly dopey. Much of it involves an emotionally fraught romance that Amy Seimetz’s Kris strikes up with Mr. Carruth’s Jeff, a relationship that dovetails with a freaky tale of dead pigs, blue orchids, those mind-altering worms and another mystery man, Sampler (Andrew Sensenig), whose mailbox bears the words ‘Quinoa Valley.’
“You may laugh, but if that’s an intentional joke, Mr. Carruth isn’t saying. He’s a man of few words and less exposition, and Upstream Color doesn’t come across as satirical even if it edges close to absurdity. Sampler is similarly taciturn and is mostly seen walking about recording sounds, like the papery rustle of dry leaves and the happy gurgle of streams. He also tends to his swine and conducts a shivery, creepy deworming procedure with Kris and a pig.
“At times, he walks among people as undetected as the soulful angels in Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire. In one scene, he drifts among his adorable herd of little porkers Christ-like, the fingers of one hand trailing through the air as the camera closely follows, a shot and a gesture that strongly evoke Mr. Malick’s work.
Mr. Malick’s imprint on Mr. Carruth, however deliberate, runs deep. It’s evident in Mr. Carruth’s emphasis on the natural world; his use of ‘Walden’; the hushed voices and many images, including some time-lapse photography of a dead pig decaying underwater, which registers as the catastrophic inverse of the time-lapse sequence of a seed sprouting underground in Days of Heaven. (Mr. Carruth’s movie at times feels like days of hell.)
“Mr. Malick’s influence also extends to shots of Kris and Jeff walking, whispering and touching that are not moored in a specific time but could be from the past, present or future. In these Malick Moments, time becomes as circular as the rising and setting of the sun. ‘Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in,’ Thoreau wrote in ‘Walden.'”
