Everything took longer than expected yesterday. My SLC-to-LAX Southwest flight left a half-hour late, and then we ignored the usual eastern landing approach and flew out over the Pacific three or four miles before banking hard right and finally landing from the west. (This almost never happens.) And then 25 or 30 people were waiting for a cab. And traffic was snarly. And then I realized I had the wrong set of keys and couldn’t get into my pad. At least no one Road Warrior-ed me on my way up to Santa Barbara.
I finally saw Randy Moore‘s Escape From Tomorrow late yesterday afternoon. Set entirely in Disneyland and shot in black-and-white, it’s basically a riff on The Shining with a vein of social criticism about pudgy, desperate, flabby-brained Americans indulging themselves with sugar, booze and fantasy while corporations control and exploit them like cattle. Is this not the central middle-class affliction of the 21st Century?
The Shining parallels: (1) Weak, economically strapped dad has (or has had) an alcohol problem; (2) Dad and family submit to extended stay within a large, imposing, surreal realm (hotel/theme park) with gradually revealed ghosts and sexually tempting witches preying on dad, exploiting his barely suppressed lusts; (3) for spooky reasons two young girls openly invite a major character to come and play; (4) Dad succumbs to drink, is wounded and bloodied, goes loony and staggers around until the hotel/theme park finally eats him up and takes his soul.
Escape is definitely an interesting sit. It’s brave, absorbing, original as far as it goes, subversive, occasionally funny, and it has a thematic point. I was never bored and was/am glad I saw it. I hope that it finds some way to be seen by Joe Popcorn. I’m presuming that Disney attorneys will do what they can to block it.
Few things make me more irate than driving-and-talking scenes in which the driver primarily looks at the person riding shotgun (usually a woman) and only glances at the road sporadically. Five or six seconds of eye-contact for every one or two seconds of road-watching. That’s exactly the opposite of what real driving is like, even in the case of reckless drunks. I never, ever look at a passenger except when we’re at a stop light or stalled in traffic.
Shailene Woodley, Miles Teller in James Ponsoldt’s The Spectacular Now
And yet directors are constantly telling actors during driving scenes that they can eyeball the passenger all they want. I flinch and seethe when this happens. I twitch. “Asshole!Watch the road!”
Most actors don’t care about driving realism. The car they’re acting in is usually being towed by the camera-and-lighting car so what do they care? They just want as much eye-contact as possible with the person riding shotgun so they can show the audience how personable and sensitive they are. And 90% of the time the director indulges them when he/she should be saying, “Do you drive like this in real life? Glancing at the road in one- and two-second bursts while staring soulfully at your passenger?”
I’m mentioning this tendency because director James Ponsoldt and actor Miles Teller have taken the ignore-the-road aesthetic to a whole new level in a scene in The Spectacular Now, a decent Sundance flick about a teenage drunk that I saw two or three days ago.
Teller, a 25 year-old playing an 18 year-old, is driving down a suburban road when a car with a couple of girls pulls up on his left side and starts cruising at the same speed. Both parties roll down their windows and start chatting, and Ponsoldt and Teller blow Hollywood’s “four or five seconds of eye-contact for every one or two seconds of road-watching” rule out of the water. Teller — this guy is bold as brass — just fucking stares at the women in the car and ignores the road altogether…nine, ten, twelve seconds! Go for it, Miles!
Two little kids could have run out in front of Teller’s car and he would have flattened them like a flesh pancake. An elderly man who’s fallen out of his wheelchair could be crawling across the road and Teller would have come along and turned him into a pile of blood, broken bones, brain matter and hamburger.
I mentioned this to Ponsoldt yesterday when I ran into him at the Prospector, and he laughed in his usual charming way and said I need to ask Teller about this. Ask Teller?
It’s time for directors like Ponsoldt to man up and admit that they’re consciously trying to defy the reality of the road when they shoot driving-and-talking scenes, and once they’ve done that they need to man up and push it farther. One of these days a truly bold and visionary Kubrick-like director is going to tell his behind-the-wheel actor to ignore the road altogether when he/she is driving. Don’t glance at the road every five or six seconds or, in the case of guys like Teller, every ten or twelve seconds. What road? Make your own world, man!
(l. to r.) Escape From Tomorrow costar Roy Abramsohn, director-writer Randy Moore, costar Elena Schuber, composer Abel Korzeniowski following Thursday’s 5:30 pm screening at Park City Library.
Park City’s Chateau Apres — Thursday, 1.24, 7:25 pm.
The Upstream Color one-sheet (director-writer-star Shane Carruth and costar Amy Seimetz sharing tub) is the most striking and novel piece of film art I’ve seen during the 2013 Sundance Film Festival.
JJ Abrams will direct the seventh Star Wars movie, it was reported today. There will be pressure, obviously, for Abrams to ensure that his film blends with the previous six. Is there any chance he’ll tell those episodes to go eff themselves and make his very own Star Wars flick? I suspect Abrams wants to. It shouldn’t matter what George Lucas wants because he’s taken the cash and is out of it, but if Lucas holds any sway at all (and I’m sure he does in a Obi-Wan Godfatherly way) the 7th will walk and talk and race around like all the others. Resist this impulse, Mr. Abrams. Please.
About an hour ago I briefly sat down with Upstream Color director-writer-producer-star Shane Carruth inside the Prospector Cinema’s “green room.” He even allowed me to take a couple of snaps. He wrote yesterday to suggest a meeting. Carruth says he’s “been a lurker for a while” on Hollywood Elsewhere, which is flattering.
Upstream Color director-writer-producer-star Shane Carruth — Thursday, 1.24, 2:35 pm in room adjacent to Park City’s Prospector Cinema.
Carruth may or may not evolve into the new Terrence Malick in terms of journalist-dodging reclusiveness, but there’s definitely a certain tension between his having acted in Upstream Color and his previous film, Primer, and the vague dread he feels about being invaded or probed. He’d like to just make films and drop them into the marketplace, he said, without any of the hoo-hah. That’s unrealistic, but Carruth seems like a nice enough guy. Friendly, patient, respectful, impish smile.
And I admire his decision to self-distribute Color — theatrically in April, VOD/digital in May. I offered to run ads gratis if I have any space to spare.
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He also told me he had a chance to meet Malick in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, during shooting of what was then being called The Burial but eventually become To The Wonder. Malick’s soft manner belies, etc
Jessica Winter‘s profile of Zero Dark Thirty director Kathryn Bigelow and the torture-related controversy that KB and producer-screenwriter Mark Boal‘s film has sparked is essential reading. Will it help to wake Academy members up and remind them — shake them into recognizing — that ZD30 is by far the year’s finest? Time offers an analysis of the Oscar situation.
This is going to sound a bit odd, but it suddenly hit me yesterday that just about every lead actor in every Sundance film I’ve seen over the last seven days has smallish, rounded girly-shoulders. Broad male shoulders are analagous to large female breasts, and you can call me a closet case but I like broad shoulders on male actors. Most of us do, I suspect. I know that I’m starting to almost hate little nancyboy ones, probably because I feel like I’ve been deluged by these since arriving in Park City.
People will think you an ape if you complain about the lack of big boobs in Sundance films but you can gripe about this, I’m presuming. Narrow, rounded girly shoulders are a metaphor for a lack of balls and slacker-tude and impotence. and big broad shoulders are metaphors for strength and confidence, like strong jaw lines and deep gravelly voices.
Seriously — name one male star or costar of one Sundance ’13 film with broad shoulders who isn’t The East‘s Alexander Skarsgaard.
Prince Avalanche‘s Paul Rudd has small rounded shoulders. Before Midnight‘s Ethan Hawke has small rounded shoudlers. Ain’t Them Bodies Saints costar Casey Affleck has small rounded shoulders. The only actors with half-decent-looking shoulders so far are Skarsgard and (and I’m not talking wide as much as semi-wide in a chiselled sort of way) Upstream Color‘s Shane Carruth. The late Tim Hetherington, “star” of Which Way Is The Front Line From Here?, had broad shoulders but docs don’t count.
Cary Grant had broad shoulders. Ben Affleck has broad shoulders. Hell, I’ve got broad shoulders. SLP‘s Bradley Cooper has broad shoulders. Where am I going with this? I don’t know but it bothers me slightly. I’m the only guy who shares observations like this but many physical traits are digested as metaphors, and this has a bearing on films people want to see and don’t want to see. At the very least this smallish-shoulders thing suggests that indie-ish, Sundance-destined films don’t tend to attract alpha-male types, or they aren’t written for same.
I watched the doc during last night’s hibernation withdrawal. It’s well made, tight, solid. I respected the blend of discipline and candor and sadness. I was especially touched by the playing of “Danny Boy” over the end credits.
Hetherington was a good guy who lived fully and laughed a lot, but he was a war-adrenalin junkie and we all know the name of that tune. We’ve all contemplated that famous Winston Churchillquote about how “there is nothing so exhilarating as to be shot at without consequence.” The doc tells us that Hetherington was getting over this addiction and was starting to look at another way of living and working, but he had a hard time saying no in a final, absolute sense.
I still have an issue with the lack-of-contextual-candor aspect of Restrepo, which I explained in a 1.20.10 article called “Afghanistan Bananistan.”
“There’s no question whatsover that this movie lies through omission about what’s really going on in Afghanistan in the broader, bigger-picture sense,” I wrote. “I found myself becoming more and more angry about this after catching Restrepo two nights ago at the Walter Reade theatre, and especially after doing some homework.
“Hetherington and Junger spent a little more than a year (May 2007 to July 2008) with several U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan’s Korangal Valley, a.k.a., ‘the valley of death.’ They focused mainly on the grunts’ hilltop camp called Restrepo (pronounced res-TREP-o and named for a medic in their unit who’d been killed). The film does a clean and competent job of portraying their endless firefights with Taliban forces and their community dealings with the locals, and it acquaints us with various members of the hilltop platoon — their faces, lives, impressions — in what seems like a frank and forthright manner.
“Except the kind of frankness that Restrepo is offering is, to put it mildly, selective. For realism’s sake Restrepo chooses to isolate its audience inside the insular operational mentality of the grunts — ‘get it done,’ ‘fill up more sandbags,’ ‘ours not to reason why’ and so on. In so doing it misleads and distorts in a way that any fair-minded person would and should find infuriating. Is there any other way to describe a decision to keep viewers ignorant about any broader considerations — anything factual or looming in a political/tactical/situational sense — that might impact the fate of the subjects, or their mission?
“Hetherington has been a war photographer for years, and guys like him are basically action junkies — let’s face it. He seems almost invested in the Afghanistan conflict, perversely, because it provided him with a year’s worth of adrenaline rushes as well as the opportunity to create a noteworthy film and contribute great pics to Vanity Fair. In any case he’s apparently determined to follow the script set out by The Hurt Locker — i.e., our film isn’t preaching, not taking a stand, just showing how it is for the troops, etc.”
15 months later Hetherington was killed. I’m very sorry, but he knew what he was doing. Condolences once again to his family, friends and colleagues.
The best part of this 1.8.13 Honest Trailer happens at 1:33: “A movie so complex it requires intense concentration every moment which is really difficult when this guy” — Ken Watanabe — “goes over important plot points with a heavy [Asian] accent.” As I wrote on 11.27.10, “My Inception history has been primarily defined by my relationship with Ken Watanabe’s dialogue. I could barely hear what he was saying during viewing #1, [but] I could comprehend 70% to 80% of his dialogue during [a subsequent] IMAX screening.”
