My general attitude is that sleep is fine and necessary in its place but don’t overdo it because…you know, stuff to do. The same losers who take extra-long showers tend to sleep longer than go-getters. (My late sister was like this. For her sleeping was the best part of the day.) I prefer sleeping for six hours and at the same time recognize that every three or four weeks the body will put its foot down and demand a nice long eight or even nine hours. Which is why I started late this morning, and that’s okay. I feel really great now.
At the same time I’ve never forgotten a line spoken by Thayer David in the old Journey to the Center of the Earth (’59) in which he described overnight sleeping sessions as “little slices of death.” I’ve always figured it’s better to stay up a little longer and wake up a little earlier because I’ve got a really long sleep coming. Then again I take afternoon cat naps, and I sometimes catch up during boring or awful movies.
If I wasn’t getting invited to free screenings I’d probably pay to see World War Z despite reports about it being a troubled mess. I’d figure a Class-A zombie-plague film with Brad Pitt would be cool for the first two acts at least, and that the third would probably be tolerable even though the guy they hired to fix the third-act problems is the guy who co-wrote effing Prometheus and co-wrote Cowboys and Aliens. Whoa…wait a minute.
Warner Bros. publicity ixnayed my participation in this weekend’s downtown junket for Brian Helgeland‘s 42, probably because of those raised-fist articles. But I did attend a round-table session for Ken Scott‘s Starbuck, also held in that area (i.e, adjacent to L.A. Live) and publicist Fredel Pogodin gave me this 42 hardball which somebody left around. Now I don’t feel so badly. I’ll have to wait until early April to see the film, which opens on 4.12.
My usual reason for walking out on a film is that it’s suffocating me or making me sick or poisoning my soul. I walk out in order to live again. But my reason for bailing on Paul Weitz‘s Admission (Universal, opening today) was a bit different. It’s not a terrible film — it’s a tightly structured, intelligently written comedy about bright adults involved in parenting and academia — but like so many big-studios comedies it’s broad and arch and on-the-nose and exaggerated in ways that become intolerable after a while.
“People definitely think like this,” I was saying to myself. “But they don’t talk like this with each other…and it’s driving me up the wall to sit through this clever, cloying, punch-line dialogue. Will you stop talking like this, Tina Fey and Paul Rudd and Michael Sheen and yaddah-yaddah? Will you please fucking stop?”
And yet the bullshit contrivances are handled in such a way that I was able to stand Admission for a while. For the first 30 or 40 minutes, I mean. Even with occasionally awful scenes like one in which the husband of Fey’s Princeton admissions executive, played by Sheen, confesses that he’s in love with another woman and that the woman is pregnant and that he’s leaving Fey…during a party they’re giving. And then he leaves with the woman while the guests are eating bruschetta in the next room. C’mon! The most thoughtless asshole in the world wouldn’t break the news to his/her partner that way…except in comedies like this one.
Some comedies are so bad that it’s an effort to watch them for more than ten minutes. Admission is not one of these. I wasn’t delighted but I was dealing with it…at first. But comedy is awfully difficult to get right. There’s a certain pitch or tone that “works” (like in David O. Russell‘s Silver Linings Playbook because it feels and sounds natural and believable) and there are others that just don’t. Admission is one of these. I didn’t want to shoot or strangle it or chop it into pieces with a meat cleaver. I just wanted to slip out the door without making any fuss.
Fey and Rudd are…I was going to call them appealing and tolerable for the most part, but they’ve been told to act in a “funny” way and to perform in farcical situations (like sharing tasks during the birthing of a calf) and after a while you have this sensation of the film just sitting there and feeling tiresome. Plus there’s something brittle and ungiving about Fey. She’s limited to a certain territory and I was just wanted to break out and roam free as it were.
Lily Tomlin easily gives the most engaging performance as Fey’s somewhat callous, know-it-all ’60s-generation mom. She’s almost in her own movie.
Good fiction isn’t “fiction,” Mr. Roth is saying. It’s what you’ve been through plus spin. Your embroidered, jazzed-up or otherwise reshuffled history with fresh paint. For whatever reason I’ve never been into that. For me it’s always been tell the story as it happened, and then throw in your hindsight confessions and reactions but never add anything. (Or very little.) What happened is what happened. Leave it there.
For whatever reason the poster for the 2013 Cannes Film Festival throws a spotlight on a thoroughly mediocre 1963 Paul Newman-Joanne Woodward film that no one (and I mean no one) has watched since its initial release. A Paris-set romcom about the fashion industry, A New Kind of Love was a glossy confection that tried (or so I recall) to wear a bit of the French nouvelle vague attitude that had manifested most sublimely three years earlier in Jean Luc Godard‘s Breathless. Meant nothing, was nothing — check the reviews.
Woodward’s hair was blonde in the film (as it was in real life at the time) so who’s the brunette in the poster?
If the festival wanted to honor a Newman-Woodward film with a little French aroma, why not choose a slightly more respectable collaboration like Martin Ritt‘s Paris Blues (’61), which was actually shot in Paris as opposed to the phony-baloney New Kind of Love, which was mainly shot on Paramount sound stages? Or they could have paid tribute to the Oscar-nominated Rachel Rachel (’68), in which Woodward starred and Newman directed.
A New Kind of Love was advertised as having been shot “in blushing color.” It was so smug that the script actually had Newman’s character say to Woodward’s at one point, “I think maybe what we got here is a new kind of love” (or something close to that).
ANKOL was written, directed and produced by Melville Shavelson, the Gary Marshall or Shawn Levy of his time. Shavelson was mostly known for churning out coy, cutely constipated mainstream comedies like Houseboat, It Started in Naples, The Pigeon That Took Rome and Yours, Mine and Ours. (Okay, he also directed The Seven Little Foys, Beau James and Cast A Giant Shadow.)
From the festival’s website: “The poster evokes a luminous and tender image of the modern couple, intertwined in perfect balance at the heart of the dizzying whirlwind that is love. The vision of these two lovers caught in a vertiginous embrace, oblivious of the world around them, invites us to experience cinema with all the passion of an everlasting desire.”
“1963 lay somewhere between Ozzie and Harriet and Janis Joplin and A New Kind of Love was raunchy adult fare for the time…but sanitized. If you can imagine Paul Newman as a rakish cad who writes Beaudelaire verses on the bare bottoms of his nightly conquests and his real-life partner Joanne Woodward as a dikey dress-designer turned tender-hearted and vulnerable real woman posing as a prostitute after praying to St. Catherine, then you have a greater ability to suspend disbelief than I do.” — from an IMDB review.
Movies succeed because they fit into the culture of the moment. Because they express or reflect something recognizably true about the values, customs and traditions that people in a given culture are living by. When David O. Selznick and Alfred Hitchcock made Rebecca in 1940, the naive, submissive attitudes of Joan Fontaine‘s character — literate, daydreamy, intimidated by the swells — struck some kind of chord with romantic-minded women of that era, all of whom had gone through the Depression and many of whom had presumably read Daphne du Maurier ‘s novel.
And by the standards of 1940, Laurence Olivier‘s Maxim de Winter wasn’t as much of an arrogant and insensitive chauvinist as he would seem today to any confident, forward-thinking woman watching the Hitchcock film.
All to say that a remake of Hitchcock’s film (and not an adaptation of DuMaurier’s book) by DreamWorks, director Nikolaj Arcel (A Royal Affair), screenwriter Steven Knight (Eastern Promises) and producers Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner sounds like a dicey idea. Presumably they’re going to make it as a ’30s period film but what woman would be able to relate? Maxim is totally impossible, and that world (Manderley, servants, George Sanders, Mrs. Danvers) existed 70-plus years ago. Our world has no ties or connections to it, or none to speak of.
All you could do to juice up the new version would be to strengthen “Danny’s” lesbian attachment to the dead Rebecca.
The important thing for everyone to remember is to never visualize Rebecca — no actress, no flashbacks, no dialogue. Keep her abstract and ethereal.
For the last two or three years Andrea Riseborough, the 31 year-old lead female in Eran Creevy‘s Welcome to The Punch (IFC Films, 3.27), has been an industry “comer”, which is one level down from industry star and one or two levels down from being a name among ticket buyers. She’s obviously talented and kinda Streepy on a certain level, but the right role — the one that puts her over — hasn’t happened yet. I’d say she has two or three years to find it. Okay, four.
British critics are starting to post reviews of Danny Boyle‘s Trance, which opens in England on Wednesday, 3.27. (The U.S. debut is on Friday, 4.5.) The friendliest response so far is from Indiewire‘s Oliver Lyttleton, who calls it (a) “twisty” and “mind-bending,” (b) a “return to the darker crime fare of Shallow Grave” and (c) “Boyle’s most satisfying and coherent [film] since Trainspotting.”
“In its basic set-up — the battle for loot between a trio of protagonists, not all of whom, or indeed any of whom, are entirely sympathetic — it [has] a playfulness and tricksiness to the material that feels like pure Boyle,” Lyttleton writes. “The vibrant, hyper-kinetic look (once again courtesy of cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle) is a more natural fit here than it was in Slumdog Millionaire or 127 Hours — that so much of the film revolves around the mind, or the tricks it can play, means Boyle’s style feels more earned.
“We heard a few comparisons to Inception knocking around as we left the theater, and they’re not unfair ones, the plot hinging on the unlocking of James McAvoy‘s psyche, and the secrets that it holds within. But if anything, it all feels a little more plausible and authentic than in Nolan’s film; the style might be more jittery, but it seems more fitting to the damaged synapses and dark recesses of its protagonist’s brain.”
I’m not saying the subtitles are incorrect but how did everybody discern what Lindsay Lohan was saying to her attorney during her umpteenth court appearance two days ago? Lip reading? She looks as if she’s probably saying this stuff, okay, but you can only hear the faintest of whispers.
The presumption is that Lohan will be dead by the time she’s 30 or thereabouts. The downside is that she’s only 26 (27 in July) so we may be stuck watching Lilo-in-court TMZ clips for the next three years and perhaps longer.
Slow suicides can take a long time. Usually because the slow suiciders are somewhere between not that dedicated and ambivalent. It took Montgomery Clift ten years from the time of his 5.12.56 auto accident to his drug-related death on 7.22.66 . But then Lohan isn’t behaving and self-destructing like Clift as much as following the standard whoo-hoo-party-on path taken by innumerable rock stars as well as roly-poly wild men like John Belushi and Chris Farley.
Lohan may live into her mid 30s or so, but she surely died a spiritual death after the premiere of Liz and Dick. It would be nice if she at least modestly scores in Paul Schrader‘s The Canyons, but the word on that one, let’s face it, hasn’t been good.
Portions of this new Star Trek Into Darkness trailer have appeared before, and I’m a bit more persuaded that the story is basically about a nihilistic campaign of revenge launched by Benjamin Cumberbatch‘s John Harrison. Who seems, based on these fragments, to be a variation on Javier Bardem‘s Raoul Silva villain in Skyfall — i.e., “You caused me great pain and now you’re going to suffer for that big-time.”
If this is the case (and I’m not saying it is — I’m saying this is a distinct impression given by the trailers) then the real villains, no offense, would be screenwriters Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman and Damon Lindelof.
Anyway, being more than familiar with this kind of plot and looking around for diversion, the only clip that really got me happens at 1:36 and involves Alice Eve — sorry.
Paramount will release Star Trek Into Darkness on 5.17, at which time I’m going to be running around the Cannes Film festival. Hopefully it’ll be viewable before I leave. If not, okay.
All I can recall about Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi‘s Baise-Moi, which opened stateside in the June ’01, is that (a) it was more controversial than good, (b) it was more invested in violent male-hate than anything erotic or half-porny, and (c) it was shot with somewhat primitive video equipment without supplemental lighting and therefore looked extremely crude. I’m only mentioning it because Arrow Video is hyping a new Baise-Moi DVD (out Monday, 3.25) in an unusually honest way.
While some critics thought the low-budget look “added to the film’s uncompromising style, others strongly disagreed with the New York Post [stating] that it ‘looked like hell,'” Arrow’s press statement says. “It is because of the film’s production techniques that Baise-Moiwill never be released on the Bluray format. While some distributors may have looked to cash-in on an ‘improved’ Bluray version, the original digital print of the film is not high quality enough to ever look any better than this DVD version, regardless of the medium it is shown on.”
That statement alone almost makes me want to buy the Baise-Moi DVD. I probably won’t have to as I’ve written the Noble guys and asked for a freebie, but either way this kind of honesty is pretty much unheard of in video marketing circles. I’m also partial to any film released in 1.66.
