Yesterday Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone posted a list of likely or leading Best Actress contenders. She was smart to put Jennifer Lawrence at the top of the list for her spirited Silver Linings Playbook performance. It’s obviously early but in my view the other four are as follows: Keira Knightley for Anna Karenina, Marion Cotillard for Rust & Bone, Greta Gerwig for Frances Ha and maybe Quvenzhane Wallis for Beasts of the Southern Wild…maybe.
Who’s left to be seen and possibly added? I’m asking.
As good as she is, I don’t think Compliance‘s Ann Dowd has much of a shot…sorry. Ditto Amour‘s Emmanuelle Riva, although I could be wrong. (She exudes grace and dignity.) But forget The Impossible‘s Naomi Watts (just a lot of bug-eyed gasping, screaming and hyperventilating) and Hope Springs‘ Meryl Streep (a relatively modest performance). I know nothing about Leslie Mann‘s performance in This Is Forty.
I’ve been writing off and on about the 9/11 story of lucky Port Authority employee Pasquale Buzzelli — i.e., “the 9/11 surfer” — for a good nine or so years. I’ve gotten to know Pasquale and particularly his wife, Louise, over that time. I tried helping them find a co-writer for Pasquale’s book, “We All Fall Down.” He and Louise and I had dinner in Manhattan six years ago — here’s a photo from that night.
“Buzzelli had just passed the 22nd floor when the North Tower gave way. It was 10:28 in the morning, an hour and 42 minutes after the attack. Buzzelli felt the building rumble, and immediately afterward heard a tremendous pounding coming at him from above, as the upper floors pancaked. Buzzelli’s memory of it afterwards was distinct. The pounding was rhythmic, and it intensified fast, as if a monstrous boulder were bounding down the stairwell toward his head.
“He reacted viscerally by diving halfway down a flight of stairs, and curling into a corner of a landing. He knew the building was failing. Buzzelli was a Catholic. He closed his eyes and prayed for his wife and unborn child. He prayed for a quick death.
“Because his eyes were closed, he felt rather than saw the walls crack open around him. For an instant the walls folded onto his head and arms, and he felt pressure, but then the structure disintegrated beneath him, and he thought, ‘I’m going,’ and began to fall. He kept his eyes closed. He felt the weightlessness of acceleration. The sensation reminded him of thrill rides he had enjoyed at Great Adventure, in New Jersey. He did not enjoy it now, but did not actively dislike it either. He did not actively do anything at all.
“He felt the wind on his face, and a sandblasting effect as he tumbled through the clouds of debris. He saw four flashes of light from small blows to the head, and then another really bright flash when he landed. Right after that he opened his eyes, and it was three hours later.
“He sat up. He saw blue sky and a world of shattered steel and concrete. He had landed on a slab like a sacrificial altar, perched high among mountains of ruin.
“There was a drop of fifteen feet to the debris below him. He saw heavy smoke in the air. Above his head rose a lovely skeletal wall, a lacy gothic thing that looked as if it would topple at any moment. He remembered his fall exactly, and assumed therefore that he was dead.
“He waited to see if death would be as it is shown in the movies — if an angel would come by, or if he would float up and see himself from the outside. But then he started to cough and to feel pain in his leg, and he realized that he was alive.”
On a 9/11 PBS documentary, Langeweische said at this point that Buzzelli was “lying on this altar. There’s no one around. It’s utterly silent. There’re no people around, nothing. It’s a wasteland desert in the middle of New York City. The buildings are gone, there’s smoke, and then there’s fire.
“At some point, he was quite certain — to make a long story short — that he was going to die from fire. So certain that he found a piece of jagged metal and was going to cut his wrists, in order not at least to burn to death. And he had gotten to that point when he was rescued.”
I made it through about 70 minutes worth of Andy and Lana Wachowski & Tom Tykwer‘s Cloud Atlas this morning. I’m sorry but for me this time-flipping tale of cosmic reincarnation and celestial cornholing felt and played like an off-and-on cavalcade of story fragments and makeup moments. I’d been told by a critic friend that if you can just get through the first hour it starts to pay off during the second and third hour (it lasts 163 minutes). But I couldn’t do it, man. I want to show respect but I just couldn’t stand it.
That’s not a judgment call, obviously. I’m not someone to listen to as how good or bad this film is, or whether it’s at least worth the price. I’m just syaing I couldn’t take it. It was too patchworky, too much, too scattered and brain-fucky. I sat there wondering if I should leave for a half-hour before I finally did. Give me a reason to stay, give me a reason to stay, etc. I know what it feels like to be engaged by a film that’s on the stick and double-downed and bringing it home, and Cloud Atlas wasn’t doing that, dammit. It really wasn’t.
I just didn’t feel after being up until 1:30 am last night and getting up at 6 am to bang out that To The Wonder review that I wanted to submit to a 163-minute workout. Maybe when it comes out on Bluray and I’m feeling energized and more rested or in a better mood or….who knows? But not today. I just couldn’t stand it.
“Our lives are not our own. We are bound to others, past and present. And by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future”…fine, whatever, go with God.
The Olympian indifference and almost comical current of fuck-you nothingness that runs through Terrence Malick‘s To The Wonder, which I saw last night at the Princess of Wales theatre, carries a certain fascination. I was prepared for it, having heard from Ben Affleck in Telluride that it “makes The Tree of Life look like Transformers” and having read the Venice Film Festival reviews. So it was hardly a shock to encounter a wispy, ethereal thing composed of flaky intimations and whispers and Emmanuel Lubezki‘s wondrous cinematography with maybe 20 or 25 lines of dialogue, if that.
It’s basically The Tree of Life 2: Oklahoma Depression. It’s Malick sitting next to you and gently whispering in your ear, “You wanna leave? Go ahead. Go on, it’s okay, I don’t care…do what you want. But you can also stay.”
And that’s the thing about this film. Malick gives you so little to grapple with (at least in terms of a fleshed-out narrative and that thing we’ve all encountered from time to time called “speech” or “talking” or what-have-you) that it’s pretty much your responsibility to make something out of To The Wonder‘s 112 minutes. It’s all about you taking a journey of your own devising in the same way we all take short little trips with this or that object d’art in a gallery or a museum. The film is mesmerizing to look at but mostly it just lies there. Well, no, it doesn’t “lie there” but it just kind of swirls around and flakes out on its own dime. Run with it or don’t (and 97% of the people out there aren’t going to even watch this thing, much less take the journey) but “it’s up to you,” as the Moody Blues once sang.
To The Wonder doesn’t precisely fart in your face. It leads you rather to wonder what the air might be like if you’ve just cut one in a shopping mall and there’s someone right behind you, downwind. That’s obviously a gross and infantile thing to think about, but To The Wonder frees you to go into such realms if you want. It’s your deal, man. Be an adult or a child or a 12 year-old or a buffalo. Or a mosquito buzzing around a buffalo. Naah, that’s dull. Be a buffalo and sniff the air as Rachel McAdams walks by! You can go anywhere, be anything. Which is liberating in a sense, but if you can’t or won’t take the trip you’ll just get up and leave or take a nap or throw something at the screen. Or get up and leave and head for the nearest mall.
I went with it. I wasn’t bored. Well, at least not for the first hour. I knew what I’d be getting into and I basically roamed around in my head as I was led and lulled along by Lubezki’s images and as I contemplated the narcotized blankness coming out of Affleck’s “Neil” character, who is more or less based on Malick. Or would be based on Malick if Malick had the balls to make a film about himself, which he doesn’t. If Malick had faced himself and made a film about his own solitude and obstinacy and persistence…wow! That would have been something. But Malick is a hider, a coward, a wuss. He used to be the guy who was up to something mystical and probing and mysterious. Now he tosses lettuce leaves in the air and leaves you to put them all into a bowl as you chop the celery and the carrots and the tomatoes and decide upon the dressing.
I came out of it convinced that I will never, ever visit Bartlesville, Oklahoma, where the film was mostly shot.
There’s a kind of mad breakout scene in the second half in which Romina Mondello, “playing” an Italian-born friend of Olga Kurylenko, who “plays” Ben Affleck‘s French wife, says “there’s nothing here!” and you’re sitting there in your slumber and going “no shit?” But it’s not just the place — it’s the emptiness and the nothingness that Affleck and Kurylenko, who have become lovers in her native Paris (just as Malick fell in love with and married Michelle Morette in the mid ’80s), bring to their blah-fart activities in the film — wandering around, making love, playing kid-wrestling games, staring at sunsets, moving this or that piece of furniture from one room to another or lifting it out of a cardboard box, etc. These are people who are investing in their own torpor. People who bring nothing to the table. Deadheads.
Kurylenko and McAdams did a brief q & a after the film, and Kurylenko talked about how her character is supposed to be a little “crazy” — unbalanced, obsessive. Except there’s nothing in the film that persuades you of this, or even hints at it, really. Her character is passionate and emotional and has no real compulsion in life — nothing to do except twirl around, make goo-goo or fuck-you eyes at Affleck, take care of her 12 year-old daughter, sleep, make love, wonder about stuff, prepare meals, wander, daydream.
I raised my hand and asked Kurylenko and McAdams if Malick ever talked about how the film is largely based on his own life and how this was at least a key part of the fabric of it all, and they both kind of looked at each other and then at the floor and more or less said, “Ask Terry…that’s his affair.”
From the TIFF press notes: “As Malick liberates himself more and more from the restrictions of conventional narrative and pursues a more associative approach, he gets closer to eliciting pure, subconscious responses from his viewers. It is gratifying to note that the same man who long ago wrote an uncredited draft of Dirty Harry now finds freedom in the transcendental.”
Shola Lynch‘s Free Angela and All Political Prisoners, an absorbing and well-crafted doc about the intense life of ’60s and ’70s political revolutionary Angela Davis and her 1972 conspiracy-kidnapping-murder trial, had its first press screening today at 2 pm. I attended and was quite taken. But Lynch declines to clearly explain the facts behind the prosecution’s central accusation against Davis, and that’s a huge thing to omit in a film of this sort.
Free Angela is a riveting history lesson and a fascinating time-travel look at the political lunacy of the late ’60s to early ’70s, when thousands of impassioned leftists gradually turned radical and became sincerely convinced that revolutionãry social change was imminent, leading to some of them jumping off a cliff (some rhetorical, some criminal) in order to push things along or throw wood into the fire. And the right did everything in its power to turn this country into a police state in order to repress and suppress the left, especially with the emergence of super-radical street fighters and bank robbers and bomb-makers like the Weathermen.
Much of Free Angela is about that collective madness, but more particularly about Davis’s underground fugitive phase in the wake of being charged with aggravated kidnapping and first-degree murder, and then her capture by the FBI, and then her 1972 trial in San Jose. Davis was prosecuted because four guns bought by Davis were used in an 8.7.70 attempt by Jonathan Jackson, the 17 year-old brother of imprisoned Black Panther George Jackson, to break out three “Soledad brother” defendants out of a Marin County courthouse. Jackson handed guns to three black defendants and took Judge Harold Haley, the prosecutor, and three jurors as hostages. A shoot-out resulted and the judge, one of the jurors, the prosecutor and two of the three black guys (I think) wound up dead.
Jonathan Jackson was Davis’ bodyguard so perhaps he just took the firearms without her knowledge and pulled the whole thing off solo. Okay, maybe. I love Angela Davis and support the various metaphors that she came (and has come) to represent, and I’m totally glad she’s free and speaking and teaching at age 68, but does anyone believe today that Davis was totally unaware of young Jackson’s plan? Especially given the fact that she bought a shotgun three days before the courtoom assault? Read this account by Lawrence V. Cott and tell me she had no clue and was totally blame-free.
Davis was found not guilty of all charges related to the courtroom shoot-out by an all-white San Jose jury in 1972.
The problem with Free Angela is that Lynch doesn’t dig into what actually happened with between Davis, Jackson and the guns. She doesn’t grim up and ask the tough questions. That’s because this is a friendly documentary that was funded by Will Smith and Jay Z, and the agenda and the limits were clear, or so it seems tonight. (I tried to speak to Lynch tonight, but her pubicist put off her chat until tomorrow.)
(l. to r.): Willow Smith, Jaden Smith, producer Sidra Smith, director Shola Lynch, Will Smith, Angela Davis and Jada Pinkett Smith at yesterday’s TIFF premiere screening.
This looks and sounds half-decent. TIFF logline: “A powerhouse cast — Christopher Walken, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener and Mark Ivanir — brings vivid life to Yaron Zilberman‘s engrossing drama about an illustrious string quartet, whose 25th anniversary precipitates a tempestuous release of repressed feelings, long-held resentments and painful betrayals.” It screened today at 6 pm; the next TIFF showing is Wednesday, 9.12, at 5 pm.
Is this supposed to be Daniel Day Lewis Abraham Lincoln voice? Please, God…no! After the rich booming voices of Daniel Plainview and Bill the Butcher this is nothing — it sounds like a twangy Matthew Modine. No snap, no intrigue, not at all like Raymond Massey‘s (which Lincoln’s son Robert Todd Lincoln allegedly said was very much like his father’s). None of that piping high-pitched quality, no log-cabin Illinois flavor.
If this is how Lewis is going to sound, I’m appalled. I’m almost ready to say “forget it.” Update: It’s been asserted that the voice belong to some black actor named David Oyelowo. If so, relief!
I never wrote in my Place Beyond The Pines review that people who live in Schenedtady are flat-out “unattractive,” as the Times Union‘s Kristi Barlettewrote this morning. I said costars Eva Mendes and Rose Byrne are “too hot to live in Schenectady” — a key difference..
Boiled down, I said what any cab driver or club owner in any city will tell you — i.e., pick-of-the-litter types of either gender rarely choose to live in towns like Schenectady.
“Beauty almost always migrates to the big cities where power and the security lie, and in my experience the women who reside in blue-collar hell holes like Schenectady are far less attractive as a rule,” I wrote. Not unattractive per se, but not double grade-A either. “There’s a certain genetic look to the men and women of Upper New York State,” I wrote, “and they aren’t the kind of people who pose for magazine covers or star in reality shows.” And this is pretty much true — face it, rurals.
I brought two Macbook Pros with me to Toronto, and one of them has recently developed a charming habit of completely freezing at random — no keystrokes, no remedies, no saving your work…nothing. You have to power off with the button and then start all over again. Wonderful…I love it when this happens! What an emotion, what a feeling!
About a half hour ago I was in the middle of writing a riff on The Impossible (I always compose on Movable Type, which only auto-saves when it’s in the mood) and then… KLONNNG! YOU’RE DEAD! I couldn’t save anything so I did a visual capture with my iPhone camera — here it is. I have to start the day so this is the best I can do…eff it. I’ll transcribe and/or rewrite and format it properly later. What a grind, what stress, what frenzy!
Note: At the end of the first paragraoh I meant to say “…not only unmoving but uninvolving.”
I’ve always kind of vaguely hated the way Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan refuse to hit the same notes or at least try to adhere to a common melody in their Nashville Skyline duet of “Girl From The North Country.” The arrogance of these guys thinking, “Aaah, we’re good…whatever notes we hit and however we wind up phrasin’ is fine…it’s all good because we’re feelin’ it and sittin’ here together, all cool and settled and strummin’ on our guitars all humble-like.”
And they couldn’t occasionally hit the same note or share the same phrasing?
Despite all this I bought this song today because it’s become the new ear bug and I need to get rid of it. David O. Russell uses it in a quiet one-on-one scene in The Silver Linings Playbook, and I haven’t been able to shake this tune since the night before last.
Today is about Stuart Blumberg‘s Thanks For Sharing at 11 am, Billy Bob Thornton‘s Jayne Mansfield’s Car at 2 pm or thereabouts, and then, may the saints protect & God help us all, Terrence Malick‘s To The Wonder at 7 pm at the Princess of Wales.
I could see The Iceman at an 11:15 press & industry screening but I don’t wanna see it, see? Or as Humphrey Bogart used to say during his 1930s bad-guy phase, “See, mug?”
I’ve been trying to write stuff since 7:30 this morning but I had to walk four blocks this morning to a 24-hour market to buy garbage bags, and before the first screening I have to hit a nearby print and copy shop and print, sign and fax an insert order that can’t effing wait.
I feel like that Claude Rains line in Lawrence of Arabia: “On the whole I wish I’d stayed in Tunbridge Wells.” The reason I feel this way is mainly because of the Malick. The Malick plus having to file all the damn time on top of the movies I want to see always being scheduled in conflict with each other. Eff me. On top of which the place I’m staying in is starting to feel like a real pig sty, which is why I needed to to buy the garbage bags.
