Eight months after debuting at Sundance ’06 and being pretty much praised to the heavens, Christopher Quinn and Tommy Walker‘s God Grew Tired Of Us has finally landed a distribution deal.
National Geographic Films, which “co-presented” March of the Penguins, is pooling forces with Newmarket Films on a plan to open it “early next year”, according to this story by Variety‘s Nicole LaPorte.
NGF “is providing funds to complete the film,” she reports. (What does that mean? Pay off the catering bill? It looked completed to me when I saw it eight months ago.) Nicole Kidman is narrating the doc. Brad Pitt exec produced; Catherine Keener and Dermot Mulroney co-produced.
“We’re a big media company with a lot of different moving parts,” NGF president Adam Leipzig told LaPorte.
Leipzig and his homies saw God at Sundance also (probably the same screening I attended). “We were blown away,” he tells LePorte. “We walked out of the theater and found the agents at CAA who were representing the movie, and said, ‘We have to be involved in this movie.’ It was one of those responses that was instantaneous and completely clear to us.”
And yet it took eight months to put a deal together. Lots of deal points to smooth out, right? Everybody’s gotta get their cut, lotsa lawyers involved. Anyway, fast work!
Will the film at least open sufficiently for it to compete for the Best Doc Oscar? It should.
God Grew Tired of Us tells the story of three young Sudanese guys — John, Daniel, and Panther — all of them refugees from their country’s ongoing, utterly devastating civil war, and members of a massive army known as the “lost boys of Sudan”. The film is about their escape to America to start new lives only to encounter profound longings for home and family, and no small measure of guilt.
The HE piece I wrote about the film last January is called “Lonely Deliverance” — you’ll have to scroll down some.
Triumph of Others
That Telluride Film Festival hype about Florian Henckel- Donnersmarck‘s The Lives of Others (Sony Classics, 2.07) was based on serious substance. This is one of the most penetrating German-made “heart” films I’ve ever seen — the love story at the center of it is tender and impassioned and ripely erotic — and yet it’s also a very chilling and gripping drama about political terror.
Martina Gedek, Sebastian Koch in The Lives of Others
And yet it’s very much of an interior thing — emotional at every turn and at times quite sad. Gray and dispiriting at other times, but with a touching “up” element at the end.
The Lives of Others is a political thriller with compassion — a movie about spying and paranoia and the worst aspects of Socialist bloc rigidity and bureacratic thug- gery, and yet one that delivers a metaphor that says even the worst of us can move towards openness and a lessening of hate and suspicion. Ugliness need not rule.
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It’s about the turning of a bad guy — a Stasi secret policeman (Ulrich Muhe) who is first seen as a bloodless and fiendish bureaucrat, but whose determination to spy upon and mangle the lives of a playwright (Sebastian Koch) and his actress wife (Martina Gedek) for the sake of career advancement gradually weakens and erodes, and then flips over into something else entirely.
Call it a fable or (if you’re German) unrealistic in an historical political sense, but I bought it and so did everyone else at last night’s packed screening at the Elgin. The crowd stood up at the end of the 9 pm show — clapping, cheering, woo-wooing. Muhe and Henckel-Donnersmarck, the 33 year-old director-writer, left their seats and went up on stage and took bows — several bows. They waved and smiled as the cheers kept coming, and then they turned to each other and hugged. Quite a moment.
Ulrich Muhe and Floridan Henckel-Donnersmarck taking bows on the stage of Toronto’s Elgin theatre last night around 11:15 pm.
The Lives of Others a one-week qualifying run in New York and Los Angeles, and then open it in February to coincide with the Oscar nominations. It’s all but guaranteed to be nominated as one of the five Best Foreign Films. It won 7 Lola Awards (Germany’s equivalent of the Oscar) — for Best Film, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Actor (Muhe), Best Supporting Actor (Ulrich Tukur) and Best Production Design.
Set in Berlin, the story mostly takes place in 1984 and ’85, although it jumps to ’89 (the year the Berlin Wall came down) and then to ’91 and ’93. During the 50-year history of the German Democratic Republic (’49 to ’89), the thugs who held the reins of power kept the citizenry in line through a network of secret police called the “Stasi”, an army of 200,000 bureaucrats and informers whose goal was “to know everything.”
Captain Gerd Wiesler (Muhe) is a highly placed Stasi officer who is prodded by a superior, Lieutenant Colonel Anton Grubitz (Tukur), to dig up anything negative he can on a famous playwright named Georg Dreyman (och) and his actress wife Christa-Maria Sieland (Gedeck, best known for her starring role in Mostly Martha).
Ulrich Muhe in The Lives of Others
At first the suspicions are baseless — Freyman is a dedicated socialist who believes in the GDR. But his loyalties evolve when he discovers that his wife has been pressured into a sexual relationship with a government bigwig, and especially after a theatrical director pal commits suicide due to despondency over his being blacklisted and prevented from working. Eventually Wiesler, who has had their apartment thoroughly bugged, has evidence that Wiesler is working to undermine the state.
And yet his immersion in the lives of this playwright and his actress wife leads, ironically, to a gradual bonding process — a feeling of identification and sympathy for the couple as human beings, artists…people he’d like to know and perhaps share passions with, despite his constricted personality and shadowy Stasi ways. He knows he’s not in their league and probably not worthy of their friendship, but he feels what he feels regardless.
I have to get downtown and hit the Varsity plex, but I’ll be speaking with Muhe and Henckel-Donnersmarck at their hotel tomorrow afternoon. Not counting Pedro Almodovar’s ,em>Volver< .em>, which I saw yeserday for the second time yesterday for reasons of pure pleasure, this is the first super-fine film I’ve seen at the Toronto Film Festival so far.
Later today is Venus and then Candy and then a Michael Moore thing at the Elgin, and finally a Volver party starting around 10:30 or 11 pm.
Triumph of Others
That Telluride Film Festival hype about Florian Henckel-Donnersmarck‘s The Lives of Others (Sony Classics, 2.07) was based on serious substance. This is one of the most penetrating “heart” German films I’ve ever seen — the love story that beats at the center of it is tender and impassioned and ripely erotic — and yet this is also a very chilling and gripping film about political terror.
And yet it’s very much of an interior thing — quite emotional, and at times quite sad. But with a deeply touching “up” element at the finale.
The Lives of Others is a political thriller with compassion — a movie about spying and paranoia and the worst aspects of Socialist bloc rigidity and bureacratic thuggery, and yet one that delivers a metaphor that says even the worst of us can move towards openness and a lessening of hate. Ugliness needn’t rule.
It’s about the turning of a bad guy — a Stasi secret policeman (Ulrich Muhe) who is first seen as a bloodless and fiendish bureaucrat, but whose determination to spy upon and mangle the lives of a playwright (Sebastian Koch) and his actress wife (Martina Gedek) for the sake of career advancement gradually weakens and erodes, and then flips over into something else entirely.
Call it a fable or unrealistic in an East German political sense, but I bought it and so did everyone else at last night’s screening at the Elgin. The crowd stood up at the end of the 9 pm show — clapping, cheering, woo-wooing. Muhe and Henckel-Donnersmarck, the 33 year-old director-writer, left their seats and went up on stage and took bows — several bows. They waved and smiled as the cheers kept coming, and then they turned to each other and hugged. Quite a moment.
Sony Classics is going to open Others in February to coincide with the Oscar nominations. It’s guaranteed to be nominated as one of the five Best Foreign Films. It won 7 Lola Awards (Germany’s equivalent of the Oscar) — for Best Film, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Actor (Muhe), Best Supporting Actor (Ulrich Tukur) and Best Production Design.
Set in Berlin, the story mostly takes place in 1984 and ’85, although it jumps to ’89 (the year the Berlin Wall came down) and then to ’91 and ’93. During the 50-year history of the German Democratic Republic (’49 to ’89), the thugs who held the reins of power kept the citizenry in line through a network of secret police called the “Stasi”, an army of 200,000 bureaucrats and informers whose goal was “to know everything.”
Captain Gerd Wiesler (Muhe) is a highly placed Stasi officer who is prodded by a superior, Lieutenant Colonel Anton Grubitz (Tukur), to dig up anything negative he can on a famous playwright named Georg Dreyman (Koch) and his actress wife Christa-Maria Sieland (Gedeck, best known for her starring role in Mostly Martha).
At first the suspicions are baseless — Freyman is a dedicated socialist who believes in the GDR. But his loyalties evolve when he discovers that his wife has been pressured into a sexual relationship with a government bigwig, and especially after a theatrical director pal commits suicide due to despondency over his being blacklisted and prevented from working. Eventually Wiesler, who has had their apartment thoroughly bugged, has evidence that Wiesler is working to undermine the state.
And yet his immersion in the lives of this playwright and his actress wife leads, ironically, to a gradual bonding process — a feeling of identification and sympathy for the couple as human beings, artists…people he’d like to know and share passions with, despite his constricted personality and shadowy ways.
I have to get downtown and hit the Varsity plex, but I’ll be speaking with Muhe and Henckel-Donnersmarck at their hotel tomorrow afternoon, but this is the first absolutely top-drawer film I’ve seen at the Toronto Film Festival so far.
Later today is Venus and then Candy, and then a Michael Moore thing at the Elgin, and then a Volver party starting around 10:30 or 11 pm.
Nothin’s Jumpin’
I sat through one entire film — John Waters and Jeff Garlin‘s This Filthy World, a concert performance doc about Waters doing his act — and portions of three other films during my first six hours of the Toronto Film Festival, and none of them delivered much of a bolt or a jolt.
So things are off to an inauspicious start, but at least there’s that hot German film, The Lives of Others, that everyone was raving about at the close of last weekend’s Telluride Film Festival, showing at 9 pm this evening at the Elgin.
The three so-sos that I saw after the Waters-Garlin doc were Murali K. Thalluri‘s 2:37, Susanne Bier‘s After The Wedding and Rachid Bouchareb‘s Indigenes (i.e., Days of Glory)
For years the rap on Waters has been that he’s much better commentator-comedian than filmmaker. He’s a brilliant idea-and-insight man, but his movies, despite their irreverence and nerve, always feel a bit drab and one-dimensional. The big payoff of This Filthy World is that it’s nothing but Waters the gabbermouth, and that, for me, makes it funnier than A Dirty Shame or Serial Mom or Hairspray or even
TIFF programmer Noah Cowan‘s production notes are a hoot. “While This Filthy World might be described as an autobiographical stand-up comedy set by John Waters,” he begins, “its real purpose is to document a sardonic lesson in cinema’s decline and fall .” This falls under the heading of pretentious b.s. Well, not entirely, but what person writing or talking about film in any capacity isn’t discussing, in one way or the other, the cinema’s decline and fall, or at least the fact that 85% of the output sucks?
Water is just riffing here like I’ve seen him riff 17 or 18 times — amusingly, wittily — and he’s great at this. But let’s not try and pass him off as the new Voltaire.
Garlin (I Want Someone To Eat Cheese With) pretty much just shoots Waters from a centered mid-audience p.o.v. and that’s that. He keeps the camera in focus and doesn’t get too tricky and barely cuts between Waters and the audience too much. Cowan calls it “an uncluttered approach” — this guy’s a card.
2:37 is a kind of guessing-game movie about a suicide that happens in an Adelaide high school at 2:37 pm. Thalluri, who’s only 21 or thereabouts but directs like a much older pro, acquaints us with five or six (seven?) characters who may turn out to be the kid who’s killed himself. We’re supposed to care about this. I didn’t.
Every high-school kid suffers. A lot of them cope with profound depression of one kind of another — I sure did — but the ones who seriously entertain thoughts of suicide need to get over themselves and that’s that. I never even flirted with the idea, and nobody was sadder, angrier or felt more unloved and repressed and furious at everything than I was at age 15 or 16.
Life can be cold and brutal in high school, yes, but the idea of teenagers suffering profound soul-crushing angst is an overindulged mythology. Kids need to grim up and cut back on the substances and deal with it like Steve McQueen would have.
The influence you can’t ignore throughout 2:37 is Gus Van Sant‘s Elephant, which was also about a sudden tragedy in a high school with various characters either affected by it or contributing to it in some way. I much prefer the constant steadicam tracking and overall stylistic detachment of Van Sant’s film to Thalluri’s. I left 2:37 after a half-hour or so. An Australian exhibitor agreed with me later on that it’s very derivative and that my instinct to bail was entirely correct.
The emotional exposures and raw, dogma-ish acting and shooting styles and in Open Hearts and Brothers made me a huge fan of Bier. But I started to feel distanced from After the Wedding within a half-hour or so, and I bolted after about 45 or 50 minutes. It seemed to me that Anders Thomas Jensen‘s story — about some big primal changes happening to a wealthy Danish family — was forced and labored. It’s very well acted but too much of it feels contrived and histrionic.
The three principal performers — Mads Mikkelsen (who starred in Open Hearts), Sidse Babett Knudsen and Rolf Lassgard — are in excellent form throughout. I need to confess that there’s something about the haunted intensity in Mikkelsen’s high-cheekboned face that’s starting to bother me. Not a fair thing to lay on an actor’s natural mechanism, but there it is.
I guess I just felt that the main story points — it’s about a guy who runs an Indian orphanage finding out that he’s the father of a grown Danish daughter just as her stepfather, a bilionaire, is coping with a fatal disease and needs someone to step and take over, so to speak — were clumsily introduced and over-emphasized. Like Bier was so into achieving emotional fireworks that she allowed her zeal to get the best of her.
Indigenes, a World War II story about four North African guys who enlist in the French army but wind up dealing with a good amoutn of racial discrimination, is well-made and handomsely shot with some ultra-realistic battle scenes. But it’a rote and unexceptional piece, and is not that much different, believe it ot not, from Mark Robson‘s Home of the Brave, a 1949 film which dealt with racial discrimin- ation among U.S. troops during the same war.
It’s not a “bad” film — you get to know the characters, it moves along, it’s saying the right things about who we are and the necessity for dignity in every human life — but it feels too been-there, done-that.
It took them several years, but Warner Home Video is finally about to release a big swanky DVD of the 1962 Marlon Brando version of Mutiny on the Bounty. The film has been re-mastered from the original 65mm elements and will be presented in the original 2.76 to 1 Ultra-Panavision aspect ratio. This version hasn’t been seen by anyone since Bounty‘s big-city, reserved-seat showings some 44 years ago.
It’ll be part of a spiffy new Marlon Brando Collection box set hitting stores on 11.7.06. The set will also include a purist remastering of John Huston‘s Reflections in a Golden Eye (’67) that will recreate the golden pinkish hues that this disturbing film was presented with during its initial run. It’ll also include a remastered version of Joseph L. Mankiewicz‘s Julius Caesar (’53), which I wrote an item about just a few days ago.
(l. to r.) Trevor Howard, Marlon Brando, Richard Harris and Percy Herbert in Lewis Milestone’s Mutiny on the Bounty
The lesser titles in the set are Teahouse of the August Moon (’56), which features Brando’s strange performance as a cheerful Taiwanese translator named Sakini, and John Avildsen’s The Formula (’80), in which a fat, white-haired Brando plays a no-good oil company mogul.
Say what you will about the ’62 Bounty‘s problems — historical inaccuracies and inventions, Brando’s affected performance as Fletcher Christian, the floundering final act. The fact remains that this viscerally enjoyable, critically-dissed costumer is one of the the most handsome, lavishly-produced and beautifully scored films made during Hollywood’s fabled 70mm era, which lasted from the mid ’50s to the late ’60s.
Roger Donaldson‘s The Bounty (’84) is probably a better Bounty flick (certainly in terms of presenting the historical facts), but the ’62 version has more big-buck, oom-pah swagger. The sets seem flusher and more carefully varnished and arranged, Robert Surtees‘ widescreen photography is more vivid and precisely lit and generally more eye-filling than Arthur Ibbetson‘s for The Bounty, and Bronislau Kaper‘s orchestral score is more deep-down stirring than the quieter ’84 score by Vangelis.
The Brando Bounty is a dated film in some ways (okay, a lot of ways), but it has a flamboyant “look at all the money we’re spending” quality that’s half-overbaked and half-absorbing. It’s pushing a kind of toney, big-studio vulgarity that insists upon your attention.
There’s a way to half-excuse Bounty for doing this. It was made, after all, at a time when self-important bigness was regarded as a kind of aesthetic attribute unto itself, with large casts, extended running times, dynamic musical scores (overtures, entr’actes, exit music) and intermissions all par for the course. And there’s no denying that a lot of skilled craftsmanship and precision went into this manifestation.
The act that ignites the mutiny scene as Brando’s Fletcher Christian tries to give fresh H20 to a thirsty seaman, and Howard’s Cpt. Bligh expresses his opposition.
Bounty definitely has first-rate dialogue and editing, and three or four scenes that absolutely get the pulse going (leaving Portsmouth, rounding Cape Horn, the mutiny, the burning ship). And I happen to like and respect Brando’s performance — it gets darker and sadder as the film goes along — and you can’t say Trevor Howard‘s Captain Bligh doesn’t crack like a bullwhip. (I read a review that said his emoting was made from “wire and scrap iron”, and that Brando’s came from “tinsel and cold cream”.) And Richard Harris and Hugh Griffith are fairly right-on. And everybody likes the topless Tahitian girls.
You could argue that this Bounty is only nominally about what happened in 1789 aboard a British cargo ship in the South Seas. And you could also say that its prime fascination comes from a portrait of colliding egos and mentalities — a couple of big-dick producers (Aaron Rosenberg was one), several screenwriters, at least two directors (Lewis Milestone, Carol Reed) and one full-of-himself movie star (Brando) — trying to serve the Bounty tale in ’60, ’61 and ’62, and throwing all kinds of money and time and conflicting ideas at it, and half-failing and half-succeeding.
Seen in this context, I think it’s a trip.
I frankly expected WHV to go with a 2.55 to 1 aspect ratio. 2.76 to 1 is fairly radical. It means you’ll be looking at thicker-than-normal black bars above and below the image. (If you want an example, check out the most recent DVD of Ben-Hur.) This means you’d better watch it on a fairly large screen.
Here’s are four samples from Kaper’s score — the overture, an unused overture, a romantic idyll piece on Tahiti and a replay of the main theme.
The Bounty DVD is a two-disc affair, but apparently it won’t offer a “making of” documentary. (The doc on the second disc is called “After the Cameras Stopped Rolling: The Journey of the Bounty”, which obviously isn’t about what happened before and during the rolling of the cameras.) That’s a shame because Bounty‘s production history is one of the most tortured in Hollywood history, marked as it was by constant tempest (Reed was let go, Milestone quit), cost overruns and Brando’s brash big-star behavior. It was almost as costly and disastrous as the shooting of Cleopatra, which opened seven months after Bounty.
(Fox Home Video’s two-disc Cleopatra DVD has a doc that covers the making-of story in fascinating detail, and is actually much more engrossing and entertaining than the film.)
The DVD will also include a prologue and epilogue that was attached to the film for showings on TV in the late ’60s and/or ’70s, but never seen theatrically.
John Huston’s visual scheme for Reflections in a Golden Eye was created with cinematographer Oswald Morris, with whom he created the steely monochrome-ish color for Moby Dick and the rose-tinted, Toulouse Lautrec-ish color for Moulin Rouge.
It used a look of desaturated color with an emphasis on gold and pink. It was supposed to make you feel the perversity and the creepiness that permeates this adaptation of Carson McCullers’ novel, which is about a gay, heavily repressed Army Major (Brando) who ignores his hot-to-trot wife (Elizabeth Taylor) but has a thing for a hunky young private (Robert Forster).
The color succeeded in complementing the vaguely icky mood. Too well, I mean. Viewers complained that it made them feel queasy, and so the color reverted to conventional tones later in the run. The “normal” color also turned up on the VHS version that was sold way back when. WHV’s DVD of the gold-and-pink version will be the first time anyone has seen it in nearly 40 years.
The black-and-white Mutiny stills were sent to me by Roy Frumkes, a friend of restoration guru Robert Harris.
Brando posing with Mutiny crew and costars aboard newly constructed Bounty ship during filming
Tarita Teriipia, Brando shooting love scene. Tarita later had two children with Brando, including a troubled daughter, Cheyenne, who committed suicide in 1995.
Deep Polanski
Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been reading “Roman Polanski” (Taschen), an eye-filling and genuinely inspiring review of one of the greatest living filmmakers of our time. It runs 192 pages, and I wouldn’t have minded an extra 100 pages or so. I have no problem with calling it the most insightful, alluring and fetchingly phrased book about Polanski ever.
The photos, selected by editor Paul Duncan, are exceptional but F.X. Feeney’s smoothly written 30,000-word essay is the soul of it. The book is a peach and a picnic for lovers of “Repulsion”, “Knife in the Water”, “Rosemary’s Baby”, “China- town”, “The Pianist”, “Macbeth”. It even made me want to return to “Frantic”, which I bought into because I found it impossible to believe that Harrison Ford would marry Betty Buckley.
Roman Polanski (l.) and Jack Nicholson during the making of Chinatown (1974)
One look at “Repulsion”, which I first saw in my early 20s, and it was clear Polanski knew how to sock it to you but good. That rotting rabbit on the plate, the bleeding cuticle of that old woman in the beauty salon, the man briefly reflected in the closet-door mirror, that loudly ticking clock, the cracking walls — Polanski was a guy who knew from nightmares and had a knack for conveying creepiness and perversity in a way that anyone could feel.
The idea you always get from any Polanksi film is that life is not to be trusted, unsafe…teeming with predators. Feeney’s copy notes that “the ghostly truth [behind his films] is that Polanski was orphaned by the Nazis and wandered Poland alone from ages 9 to 13. In each of his films, the omniscient viewpoint feels ‘childlike’ in the least innocent sense: we listen and watch…wary of what’s been hidden or is being planned in secret,…one’s survival (even within the playful confines of a fantasy) depends on not missing so much as one detail.”
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I’ve been talking to F.X. about doing an interview about the Polanski book since mid June. Last week I hit upon the idea of simply writing out a few e-mailed questions and having F.X. write back. His replies came in yesterday and here they are:
HE: How long did it take you to research, write, and then re-write everything? How many words? When did you do the work?
Feeney: I worked from October 2003, to early May 2004. Mind you, I had been researching it since the late `60s and early `70s, when I was in my late teens. Polanski was a very early hero of mine. I have always felt at home in his films. There was never any need to ‘interpret’ his movies, as with other greats.
“The only way I could make sense of 2001: A Space Odyssey when I first saw it was to try and understand the ‘meaning’ of the monolith. Polanski was immediately involving, by contrast. If you’ve ever felt scared while you’re alone in a house, Repulsion and Rosemary’s Baby make instant sense. Any kid, any grownup, can watch and be perversely tickled by firsthand knowledge of what those poor heroines are feeling.
“My hands-on research began as I tramped around Poland in late November and early December of 2003. I visited the house where Polanski lived in Krakow, prior to the Nazi invasion. A local guide — a wonderful character who calls himself ‘Bob of Bobtours dot com’ — drove me to Wysoka, in the Tatras mountains south of Krakow, where Polanski hid out after escaping the ghetto at age 9.
“A 90 year-old camp survivor living up in those hills remembered the family Polanski boarded with, and directed us precisely to the spot where their hut once stood. (‘Three bus stops past the church, to where a long road curves up to the right.’) A photo I took of that place is in the book — along with another I took of the ‘half lion, half dragon’ Polanski remembers over the door to the house where he spent his few happy times as a kid.
“The following week I went to CAMERIMAGE, a magnificent, intimate, world-class film festival devoted to honoring cinematographers, and held each year in Lodz, Poland. Polanski attended the film school at Lodz — pronounced ‘Woodge,’ and fondly nicknamed “Hollywoodge” by partisans of the festival.
Catherine Denueve in Repulsion (1965)
“There, in addition to hobnobbing with David Lynch, Peter Weir, James Ivory, Christopher Doyle and an army of great cameramen and young filmmakers, I ran into a wealth of Polanski’s old schoolmates, and was even given a tour of the film school, which is still thriving. “Polanski always sat there, on the seventh step,” the rector told me as we climbed the wide staircase to the screening room, where the students used to hang out and socialize by the hour.
HE: How did you speak with Polanski? (Over the phone, I presume.) How many conversations? How long did the interview process take?
Feeney: “There were no conversations with Polanski. When I first reached out to him, through a mutual friend — film director Hubert Cornfield, now deceased — Polanski’s response was courteous but absolute: ‘I hope never to be interviewed, ever again.’
“Truth is, Polanski has dealt with everything in print over the past 40 years, be it the Nazis’ murder of his mother, the Manson gang’s massacre of Sharon Tate and his unborn son, even the incident of ‘unlawful sex with a minor’ (which is the actual wording of the crime for which he pled guilty — not statutory rape), and the question of whether or not he’s coming back to America — he’s dealt with all of it, exhaustively, in print and on TV, again and again.
“A fellow Polanski scholar, Paul Cronin — editor of ‘Roman Polanski: Interviews’ — shared an indispensible bulk from his archive. But above all there is Polanski’s own 1984 autobiography, which is blisteringly honest. I decided to fuse these countless fragments into a coherent mosaic while focusing primarily on the films.
Polanski’s wife and actress Emmanuelle Seigner with Polanski two or three years ago
“Polanski did cooperate very generously in terms of providing access to the rare graphic images at his office that my editor Paul Duncan gathered for his superb layouts. Polanski never intervened, though he did review the text for factual inaccuracies. In my original draft I had written that Wysoka is 35 kilometers south of Krakow — he changed that to 40. He adjusted one or two other things of that nature. Otherwise, his stance was a respectful ‘no comment,’ good or bad.”
HE: What film is he proudest of at this stage? My guess is The Pianist, but maybe it’s Knife in the Water or Cul de Sac.
Feeney: “Cul de Sac is his favorite, of record — everything that is most pure and original in himself is in that film, although it was hell to make. (Uncooperative weather, bedbugs at night, moody actors.) His two favorite working experiences were Chinatown and The Pianist — in each case, he enjoyed the unwavering support of his backers, cast and crew.”
HE: What is your favorite Polanski film personally? Which of his films do you think is the greatest? And why?
Feeney: “This is like asking me my favorite Beatles song. (Actually, that would be ‘You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away’ — but do we have to sacrifice all the rest?)
John Huston, Jack Nicholson in Chinatown
HE: Will Polanski ever return to this country?
Feeney: “The great misconception I try to correct in the book is the question of why he’s in exile. Several times, lately, in a number of venues, I’ve come across erroneous newspaper accounts which say ‘Polanski fled the US to escape arrest.’ No — he pleaded guilty, took full responsibility, even did prison time and stood ready to pay a hefty fine. Unfortunately Judge Laurence J. Rittenband reacted badly to the overheated media coverage. The day after Polanski was released from Chino [state prison], Rittenband reneged on the careful deal worked out with the prosecutors and arbitrarily threatened Polanski with further and unlimited jail-time. The judge’s freakout became contageous and Polanski boarded the next jet out of Dodge. (See pages 109 and 111 of my book.)
“As for his present exile, and his chances of returning: Remember The Exterminating Angel, the Bunuel classic in which dozens of wealthy people are trapped at a party for 40 days and 40 nights (eventually resorting to cannibalism), all because nobody wants to be thought rude by being the first to leave? That’s Polanski’s position. He pleaded guilty, he did time, he made amends — through civil courts, he settled with the young woman in the late 1980s / early 1990s. The way is technically clear to an amnesty, but nobody in power wants to be the first one to let him off the hook.
HE: My favorite Polanski scenes are in Repulsion. The loud ticking clock as Catherine Deneueve lies in bed, terrified that an intruder will come into her bedroom, etc. And the arms and hands shooting out from the walls and grabbing her. What are your favorites?
Feeney: “I’m with you in loving Repulsion, through and through. As for Cul de Sac, I would call your attention to a few things — particularly the long magical interlude on the beach at daybreak, all done in one breathtakingly sustained complex master shot. There, Donald Pleasance, Lionel Stander and Francois Dorleac — Catherine Deneueve’s elder sister, dead in a car crash later in 1966 — get along peaceably for a change. It’s subtle, but the rest of the movie’s emotional power is energized by this little truce.
Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby
“In Chinatown, pick any scene. My favorites tend to involve John Huston — but as Robert Towne points out, check out and savor any scene in where the characters (and ourselves) are obliged to wait. Take the moment when Jake is rudely forced to wait all day in a Water & Power honcho’s outer office. He persists in waiting — to the great irritation of the secretary. The same goes, more famously, for the little showdown through gritted teeth with the clerk at the hall of records. Who among contemporary directors would have the bold audience sense to try such scenes, much less pull them off? Paul Thomas Anderson comes to mind, but otherwise? Almost no one.
“Polanski’s last five films are all great, in my opinion. Bitter Moon (1992) is a sexy wonder, Death and the Maiden (1995) a magnificent thematic follow-up to Chinatown particularly as articulated by Noah Cross (Huston) to Jake Gittes, when he says: “Most people never have to face the fact that, under the right circumstances, they’re capable of anything.” Ben Kingsley, Sigourney Weaver and Stuart Wilson give three exceptional performances that demonstrate precisely that horrible truth. The Ninth Gate (1999) is a hoot.
“The Pianist (2002) and Oliver Twist (2005) constitute twin valedictories — the former recreates the historic reality of Polanski’s childhood with a vital fidelity, and the latter catches the inner reality of his childhood — at large in a hostile universe, but protected by an indestructible optimism.”
Wells addendum: I have one beef with the book, which is the cover photo — a shot of a tearful, devastated Adrien Brody in The Pianist walking down a littered street. This is not Polanski to me — a man full of grief and pain. Polanski, to me, is the crafty jackal, the brilliant manipulator, the pervy purveyor of the sinister. Polanski is not about boo-hoo but heh-heh. He’s the scared little boy who probably once said to himself, “I’ll escape the clutches of those Nazi bastards, and then I’ll come back when I’m older and make brilliant films and scare the shit out of their sons and daughters and then make them feel ashamed of their parents…hah!”
** Feeney is also the author of Taschen’s forthcoming Michael Mann book, due on 9.5.06.
The thoughtless vulgarian in me would get a kick out of playing this Taxi Driver video game…I’m half-serious. It was designed by Papaya Studios, and was supposed to be distributed by Majescoe Entertainment.
The idea is, of course, grotesque, and yet there’s something about the perversity of a video game allowing the player to become Robert De Niro‘s Travis Bickle, everyone’s favorite nutbag taxi driver, and get that Mohawk haircut and put on that Army surplus jacket and that sliding-gun arm device and go hunt down Harvey Keitel ‘s Lower East Side pimp and who knows how many others? Maybe Peter Boyle‘s burly cab driver or Charles-Pallantine-for-President staffers Albert Brooks and Cybil Shepherd or maybe Pallantine himself…it’s totally diseased beyond measure.
The Taxi Driver game was announced last year, but I became interested again when I read this 7.6 Guardian interview with Paul Schrader, screenwriter of the original 1976 Taxi Driver , which Martin Scorsese directed. It said that Schrader and Scorsese, appalled at the idea of the game, tried to have it stopped only to learn that they’d signed away the power to do anything about it in their original contracts.
Majescoe was supposed to issue the Taxi Driver game earlier this year, and (I’m obviously not plugged into the video-game world) yet I couldn’t find any reviews or even a release date. I called Majescoe this morning and was told they had severed their deal with Papaya. The numbers I called after this — Papaya’s Irvine office #, plus several for reporters and reviewers who write for video mags — didn’t lead anywhere because everyone’s at the VSDA Convention in Las Vegas. If anyone knows why Majescoe backed out, please inform.
Sunshine Is It
Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris’ Little Miss Sunshine (Fox Searchlight, 7.26) is, at the very least, this year’s Sideways — a non-formulaic character-driven comedy created by people of similar attitude and talent and emotional complexity levels, with laughs are just as rich and uproarious and particular.
There are two big differences: (1) Sunshine is a family comedy — a real family comedy about real people, as opposed to a piece of shite like Cheaper by the Dozen — and not about screwed-up middle-aged guys, and (2) it may make a lot more money than Sideways.
(l. to r.) Gregg Kinnear, Steve Carell, Paul Dano, Toni Collette and Abigail Breslin in Little Miss Sunshine (Fox Searchlight, 7.26)
Or so it would seem to judge by what happened last night, when the L.A. Film Festival ended with a Sunshine screening at the Wadsworth. The place shook like the Eccles theatre did last January before a hopped-up crowd at the start of the Sundance Film Festival. I’m talking guffaws, laughs, horse laughs and one signi- ficant “awww.” Plus heavy cheering and clapping and woo-woo’s as it ended.
The amazing thing for me is that Sunshine goes into some very dark places at times, and yet it has the balls and the spirit to bounce right out of those places and make you laugh five or ten minutes later, like nothing happened.
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Watch both cuts of the trailer — the one on the Sunshine website and the one currently parked on Rotten Tomatoes — and you’ll have some idea of what I’m talking about.
It played just as well last night with me also — no diminishment at all. I can see catching it at least another couple of times and then owning the DVD.
I don’t know how big or how wide, but Sunshine is definitely a hit waiting to happen. It looks to me like a winner with all four quadrants. It may be a bit soft with young males at first, possibly, but that shouldn’t last.
The only people who may not warm to this acidly funny and touching family comedy as much, possibly, are the hideous fastidious mothers out there who delight in transforming their daughters into Jon Benet Ramsey clones so they can win at junior-miss beauty pageants.
After you see Sunshine you’ll know what I’m talking about. These women — the whole junior-miss beauty pagent culture, in fact — should be quietly rounded up and put on Army transport jets and flown to rural China and put to work on farming communes.
It’s also starting to hit me that Sunshine has a real shot at picking up some critics awards and Oscar nominations — Dayton and Faris for directing, Steve Carell and especially Paul Dano for Best Supporting Actor (the latter’s performance is especially good because two-thirds of it is done non-verbally, and yet he hits it out of the park with every facial muscle inflection and eye-roll), Michael Arndt for Best Screenplay, and so on.
I just re-read my morning-after review of Sunshine that ran six months ago, so here it is again (most of it) and screw the quote marks:
Little Miss Sunshine doesn’t exactly re-invent the wheel. It’s just a smart family comedy-slash-road movie, but the last film that got so much good humor out of such dark subject matter was maybe David O. Russell’s Flirting with Disaster, although Sunshine is a bit more of a wholesome, straight-up thing.
This is a film about hostility, feelings of futility, middle-aged career collapse, a troubled marriage, a fiercely alienated son, a dad who’s a bit of an asshole, a sudden family death, a failed suicide…and it’s often very funny and quite warm and so cleverly calculated and well-blended that it doesn’t feel like anyone calculated anything.
Sundance director Geoff Gilmore wrote last January that Little Miss Sunshine possesses a kind of “Capra-esque lunacy.” For me the word Capra (as in Frank) means cornball emotion and cloying stabs at manipulation…and Sunshine feels, to me, more natural (and naturally effective) than any Capra film I’ve ever seen.
And damned if Steve Carell isn’t eight times sadder and gloomier in this thing than he was in the early portions of The 40 Year-Old Virgin, and if he isn’t much funnier and more winning here than he was in that hit film from last summer. It’s his best performance ever, no question.
Virgin director-writer Judd Apatow has been writing comedy for 15 years or so, and when he sees Little Miss Sunshine he’s going to wish he could write something as good as what Michael Arndt has done, and direct a comedy of this type with this kind of naturalistic panache.
(l. to r.) Alan Arkin (as the family’s heroin-snorting grandpa), Carrel, Dano, Breslin, Collette, Kinnear
Sunshine is basically about family ties holding strong under ghastly and horrific circumstances.
It’s two days or so in the life of the can’t-catch-a-break Hoover clan — the vaguely dipshitty motivational speaker Richard (Gregg Kinnear), his sorely frustrated wife Sheryl (Toni Collette), Sheryl’s crushed, post-suicidal brother (Carell), a curmud- geonly, drug-taking grandpa (Alan Arkin), the silent, sulking Dwayne (Paul Dano), and 7 year-old cutie-pie Olive (Abigail Breslin).
The action is about going on a car trip from hell to take Olive to a Little Miss Sun- shine beauty pageant in Redondo Beach…and wouldn’t you just know the pageant itself would also be a nightmare? But this family has an improvised cure for that.
It’s not just that this all feels unexpectedly funny, but fresh and unforced. So much so that it’s easy to ignore a couple of scenes that don’t entirely work. It’s not quite as refined or soulful as Alexander Payne’s Sideways, but Sunshine has to be a hit — it can’t not be.
War is Cruel
I finally caught up this morning with Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross’s The Road to Guantanmo (Roadside, 6.23). I realize that I’m expected to jump up and down like many critics did when this half-doc, half-recreated drama had its debut last February at the Berlin Film Festival, but I don’t quite feel it…sorry.
I never felt less than absorbed by Guantanamo. I respected and believed what I was seeing…but I didn’t feel all that heavily caught up in it for reasons I’ll soon explain.
Rizwan Ahmed, Farhad Harun and Afran Usman, although not necessarily in left-to-right order. (If anyone can help…)
Guantanamo is an anti-American political horror film. It’s a true story of three young British Muslims who made an ill-advised visit to Afghanistan after celebrating a wedding in neighboring Pakistan in October 2001. The upshot was that they were rounded up as suspected Al Queada collaborators and later flown to the U.S military base in Guantanamo, Cuba, and then detained for over two years.
I don’t mean to say that the film has an anti-American attitude — the facts about what happened to these guys are damning in and of themselves.
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It’s a sad portrait of what undoubtedly happened to many innocent Muslims unlucky enough to get caught up in America’s Mideast assault on all suspected 9/11 collaborators and/or supporters, in the weeks that followed the World Trade Center attacks.
The stories of Shafiq Rasul, Ruhel Ahmed and Asif Iqral (who recount their saga in talking-head footage while being portrayed in the dramatic sections by Rizwan Ahmed, Farhad Harun and Afran Usman) are shocking, pathetic, appalling. Their brutal treatment at the hands of American troops and various U.S. intelligence officers smells like stupidity, ignorance and racism every step of the way.
The heart of the film is the depiction of their abusive treatment at Guantanamo’s Camp X-Ray and Camp Delta. Geneva Convention be damned — America was enraged and hell-bent on vengeance after 9/11, and these poor guys caught the brunt of it.
But I have to say I felt a certain distance from their story, despite the repellent nature of their treatment and the deplorable behavior of their captors, because their decision to travel to Afghanistan in the first weeks after 9/11 was awfully reckless.
The real guys say to the camera that no one expected American troops to come thundering into Afghanistan so they were caught unawares…to which one can only say, “Come again?” The entire world knew that US forces were going to hit Afghanistan in a search for Osama bin Laden. Anyone watching CNN knew that Afghanistan was definitely not a smart place to be back then, especially if you were a Muslim from England.
Nonetheless, with all manner of military Armageddon being predicted to slam into Afghanistan by CNN’s Wolf Blitzer and every other media guy in the U.S. and Britain, these three dudes decided to visit that beleagured country because it seemed like a good idea at the time.
A little perspective, if I may: Berlin women were raped by Russian soldiers. Those conquered by Roman troops in the ancient days were humiliated and slaughtered by God-knows-how-many-thousands? Innocent people have been getting victimized, bludgeoned and chewed up by wars for thousands of years. The conquering army marches in, looking to punish and subjugate (or interrogate), and those too weak or old or dumb to get out of their way catch hell.
So Lord knows it’s a horrid world when warriors pick up the sword, but only a careless person walks into a potentially lethal situation without fully considering the consequences.
I’m not saying that the “Tipton 3” (the victims were all from the British town of Tipton) were stupid, but they sure didn’t think things through.
In fact, given the worked-up state that Americans were known to be in after 9/11 and the virtual certainty that bombs would soon be falling upon Taliban forces and suspected Al Queada sympathizers in that region, why didn’t the Pakistani woman that the British-residing groom (a guy named Monir, who later disappeared) intended to marry come to England instead, so both parties would be out of the danger zone?
The first half-hour of Guantanamo, which quickly intros the trio and begins the renactment of their story, immediately pulls you in. Their initial visit, fleeing the bombs, seeing dead victims being buried…all of it feels authentic and then some.
The pace slows, naturally, after their capture by British troops in Afghanistan, their being handed over to the U.S. military and taken first to Kandahar Air Base (where the beatings and interrogations start) and then flown to Guantanamo in January 2002.
The poor guys are kept inside chain-linked cells that are always lit and resemble dog kennels. No sleep, constant inspections, berated and brutalized…all depicted with terrible realism.
They’re interrograted by careless intelligence officers who claim to have video footage of them attending an Osama bin Laden speech, which of course the three guys deny.
And they’re beaten up and shat upon in all kinds of grotesque ways. The most Orwellian torture they’re put through involves being tied up and forced to absorb super-loud heavy metal music with incessant strobe lights flashing.
Their innocence is eventually discovered in 2004 and they’re slowly, gradually freed. Winterbottom and Whitecross remind us, however, that 500 or so prisoners are still sweating it out in Guantanamo.
But my basic problem remains: I didn’t identify with the Tipton 3 because if I were Muslim, I certainly wouldn’t have travelled to the Middle East for a wedding in the immediate wake of 9/11. I mean, who would? Think about it.
The Spirit of Radio
Robert Altman’s A Prairie Home Companion (Picturehouse, 6.9), based on Garrison Keillor’s radio show with a script by Keillor, is a backstage look at the goings-on during the final broadcast of America’s most celebrated radio show.
The film played Friday night (3.10) at the kickoff of South by Southwest in Austin, and Moises Chiullan, author of HE’s “Arthouse Cowboy” column, was in the audience with his video camera. And he’s sent along some thoughts. Which I’ve refined and reshuffled to some extent.
Prairie Home Companion‘s Lindsay Lohan, Meryl Streep, Robert Altman and Woody Harrelson…not at South by Southwest but last month’s Berlin Film Festival
Altman always lets his actors cut loose according to their own whims and improvs, and the word from February’s Berlin Film Festival, where A Prairie Home Companion had its world premiere, is that the cast — Kevin Kline, John C. Reilly, Meryl Streep, Lily Tomlin, Tommy Lee Jones, Woody Harrelson, Garrison Keillor, Lindsay Lohan, Virginia Madsen — has a good time with it.
I’ll get right to Moises in a second, but first a question that’s been bothering me. Why is it for the last several years that the PHC show and Keillor’s name, even, seem to constantly be about finality, signing off, winding down, bidding farewell? What’s wrong with keeping on and putting more wood on the fire? Is this some kind of death trip?
The flm’s highlights, Chiullan says, “include the radiant singing voice of Meryl Streep, the sharp and acerbic one-liners, and the recalling of the golden age of radio throughout the script.”
The narrative “is part radio show, part real, and the structure is unconventional, to say the least. But the combination works.
“The radio setting and the overlapping, Mamet-esque rambling from various characters immediately brought to mind a Mamet play called The Water Engine. That play began as a radio drama and shifted back and forth from the studio to a conventional stage play in much the same way that Keillor’s characters like Guy Noir (Kevin Kline) and the Dangerous Woman (Virginia Madsen) interweave into the lives of these ‘real’ people performing in a fictionalized version of A Prairie Home Companion.
“Altman’s film is conscious of the fact that radio variety programs have been out of style for decades, as this one always has been, but that’s not all of the point here. The film is basically saying that the passion and humor that used to be is not so out-of-touch as some of us might think.
“One of the first striking things about A Prairie Home Companion is the new, animated, and really snazzy Picturehouse logo.
“The film opens in Mickey’s Dining Car, with voice-over narration by Kline’s Guy Noir. Being a longtime listener of the radio show, I was impressed how undistracting it was having another voice saying the lines usually spoken by Keillor.
“John C. Reilly and Woody Harrelson bounce off one another so well it’s remarkable no one has used them together previously. Their song about bad jokes absolutely kills. There were moments of suspension and then uproarious laughter related to duct tape, Descartes, and Texans who ‘talk funny and whose eyes don’t focus.’
Meryl Streep, Lindsay Lohan
“And Streep lights up the whole room. She’s so ‘on’ and ‘in’…and continues to surprise me every time. There isn’t a moment in the film in which I remotely doubted any of her motivation or found her over-the-top.
“Streep and Lily Tomlin are just as well-matched as Harrelson and Reilly. Their interplay and overlap will be the subject of many rewatchings, since there was no way to absorb it all last night through the laughter.
“Maya Rudolph plays the Stage Manager from Noises Off!-type part well, the sensible link in a chain of chaos, and Tommy Lee Jones provides a wonderfully contrasting role compared to that of his recent turn as Pete in The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada.
“Even Lindsay Lohan shows some decent chops as Streep’s dismissive and withdrawn poet-daughter, Lola.
“So much of the film is symbolic and semiotic in its delivery, and it hits the right notes the whole way through, crackling with electric bits of wit and passion throughout.
South by Southwest director Matt Dentler doing the introductions at Friday night’s event (3.10.06)
“Screenwriter Ken LaZebnik was at last night’s screening, and I wish I could have shook his hand or bought him a beer or six. Few films talk about mortality as much as Prairie Home does and end up reaffirming your desire to get up the next day and change the world somehow rather than consider giving up.”
The video footage is of South by Southwest honcho Matt Dentler introducing Reilly and LaZebnik and bringing them to the stage.
The Less Bondy…
…Daniel Craig turns out to be in Casino Royale (Columbia, 11.17), the better for the franchise and movie culture. Okay? It’s an excellent thing that the fans of the old smoothie-type Bond — tuxedos, constant cocksman, shaken-not-stirred — are giving it to Craig for stepping into his shoes. In a way, their scorn is a badge of honor.
Advocates of sticking with old-school models just because they’re old-school models are never worth anyone’s time. They’re like the old-school Communists who tried to unseat Boris Yeltsin….like the people who said no to Elliot Gould’s Philip Marlowe in The Long Goodbye and that only a dick in the Humphrey Bogart mode would do.
Read Ian Fleming’s “Casino Royale” and Craig will pop into your mind. And good for Paul Haggis and Martin Campbell for keeping that ballsy torture scene (no pun intended).
Daniel Craig in a new still from /Casino Royale
Out with the old and in with the new blood, and good for Craig not being quite six feet tall and having blond hair, ice-blue eyes and a boxer’s nose.
I still haven’t thrown out my suggestion for getting rid of 007 producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael Wilson by kidnapping them, flying them to Thailand and keeping them in a deluxe-accomodation prison there for the next 20 years. That aside, Casino Royale has my vote just for the sake of agitating any and all fans of Diamonds are Forever and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.
But the webmaster at Sony should junk that ancient Dr. No “James Bond theme” music that plays when you click on the Casino Royale site. Talk about sending the absolute worst message imaginable.
Marquee Value
It costs time and money, I’m sure, but how technically difficult can it be to show decent, convincing footage of what Times Square looked like in 1955? Whatever it required, it was too much for director Mary Harron when she was assembling The Notorious Bettie Page (Picturehouse, 4.14).
This is one of those technical-obsession pieces that I write every so often, and it shouldn’t be taken as an early volley against Harron’s film. I’m just one of those guys who can’t help cringing when directors of period films get Manhattan movie- theatre marquees wrong. This is Harron’s small but significant botch in the opening seconds of her ’50s-era biopic.
This famous shot of James Dean in Times Square in 1954 uses roughly the same vantage point as the footage used by director Mary Harron in the opening seconds of The Notorious Bettie Page
She starts with black-and-white newsreel footage of Times Square from a high-up perspective with titles proclaiming “New York City, 1955.” Then a second, lower- angled shot of Times Square from an approximate vantage point of 44th Street, looking north on Broadway. And on the left side we can see the marquee of the legendary Astor threatre, which has the names “Cary Grant,” “Myrna Loy” and “Melvyn Douglas” brightly displayed.
Of course, there’s only one film in which these three actors appeared together — Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, which was reviewed by New York Times critic Bosley Crowther on March 26, 1948. In its heyday the Astor was very strictly a first-run venue, which means, obviously, that Harron’s footage was shot in ’48. And that means she has to go stand in the corner and face the wall.
If I hadn’t brought this up maybe 25 or 30 people in the face of the earth might have spotted this mistake — I realize that. This is the sort of nitpicky issue that flabby- bellied movie buffs with no lives get incensed over. (Although I’d like it understood I’m not coping with either one of these traits.)
Thing is, I respected Harron’s last film, American Psycho, in part for how well she captured those late-1980s details, like hot shots talking in expensive restaurants on U.S. Army walkie-talkie four-pound cell phones.
Famous idiot photo titled “Times Square 1942,” with contradictory evidence screaming at you from three theatre marquees.
I was therefore amazed that Harron had managed to duplicate one of the most famous photo-caption blunders in world photographic history. I’m speaking of that stupid photo you can find online by Googling “New York 1942” and then “images.” You know…the one that clearly shows two 1949 films playing side by side — Carol Reed’s The Third Man and William Wellman’s Battleground — at the Astor and the Victoria theatres?
If Harron had wanted to get her footage right, all she needed to do was hire some NYU CG geek to paste fake marquee letters on the Astor marquee spelling out any 1955 release — The Rose Tattoo, East of Eden…whatever. (I could let Harron slide if the substitute film didn’t actually show at the Astor — there’s a limit to this kind of obsessiveness.)
This would have been a simple cut-and-paste job by today’s standards. Harron’s Astor marquee Blandings footage lasts maybe two or three seconds, not long enough for the eye to notice any technically crude touches. It would have been so simple for some kid to come in and fix it with the most rudimentary software on an Apple laptop.
If it’s any comfort to Harron, Billy Crystal made the same error in his HBO Roger Maris-and-Mickey Mantle film 61. He used a snippet of color footage of Times Square with the wrong film, Mutiny on the Bounty, playing at Leow’s State in the summer of 1961, even though this MGM Marlon Brando film opened in November 1962.
East side of Times Square between 46th and 47th Street in 1962
On the other hand, Mike Nichols got it just right in a scene he shot for Carnal Knowledge (1971) showing Jack Nicholson and Ann Margret in the back of a cab moving through Manhattan. Nichols used rear-projection color footage through the cab’s rear window that caught a glimpse of The Four Horseman of the Apocalypse playing at Leow’s State.
An inauspicious peek at a marquee touting this lousy Glenn Ford film, reviewed by Crowther in March 1962, told film buffs exactly when Nicholson and Ann-Marget’s budding romance was happening, and because it didn’t argue with any title cards (which Nichols didn’t use anyway) the shot was perfectly fine.
Brubaker Tribute
Over 450 Brokeback Mountain loyalists under the leadership of the “Ultimate Brokeback Forum” are incensed over last Sunday’s Best Picture defeat, and have managed to fund an ad in Daily Variety that will drive their point home.
Peter Greyson, who has chaired the campaign at the Dave Cullen site, says that over $17,500 dollars has been raised from around the world, and that the full-page ad [see below] will run in Friday’s issue of Daily Variety.
“The circulation people there tell us the issue is already sold out because the demand is so very high,” Greyson just told me (5:21 pm Eastern). “We just hope the people at Focus and all those involved with the film will see our tribute to them. It has been an all-volunteer effort involving over 200 volunteers.”
A friend from the N.Y. Daily News has sent me the page with all the information, links, visuals, comment. The ringleaders besides Greyson and author/journalist Dave Cullen are John Wells and Linda Andrews.
Their ad will basically be an emotional salute to Ang Lee’s film in the manner of the final moments in Stuart Rosenberg’s Brubaker (1980).
I’m speaking of the finale when prison convicts start slowly clapping in tribute to Robert Redford’s character, who’s been fired as warden for being too much of a political troublemaker. You may have failed in a political way, the cons are saying, but you’re made of the right stuff and we respect what you did.
Gardener in Nairobi
“More than six months after its U.S. release (and two days before Rachel Weisz took home an Oscar), The Constant Gardener finally opened in Kenya, the country which provided the majority of its locations.
“The Fernando Meirelles film opened to almost no public fanfare, and is now showing on exactly one screen in exactly one theater (alongside Zathura and Derailed), in a Nairobi suburb mostly populated by foreign diplomats and UN workers. It’s unlikely that more than a handful of Kenyans will ever see this movie on the big screen, though it has long been available on pirated DVD from the hawkers downtown.
Rachel Weisz, Ralph Fiennes in fernando Meirelles’ The Constant Gardener
“In late February I was invited to a benefit showing of Gardener with the proceeds going to the Constant Gardener Charity, an organization established by the producers of the film to provide assistance in the form of schools, water tanks and other necessities to impoverished residents of Kibera, the sprawling slum located near the heart of both the city and the film. The main draw of this screening was the presence of Constant Gardener actor Pete Postlethwaite and producer Simon Channing.
“The screening and the reception afterwards were sponsored by the British High Commission, which seems a bit surreal given that the film is a stinging critique of British diplomacy, and one in which the British Foreign Ministry (particularly the BHC in Nairobi) is depicted as aiding and abetting evil. It’s a little like the U.S. Embassy sponsoring a showing of Fahrenheit 9/11.
“I wasn’t at this screening but I would have loved to ask British High Commissioner Adam Wood aif his bosses in London were anything like Bill Nighy’s character.
“I sponsored my own showing of the Gardener DVD at my house last January, with the aid of a borrowed LCD projector. The reviews from my guests, all diplomats and aid workers living in Nairobi, were mixed tending to negative.
Somewhere in this photo is the marquee of the former Cameo Cinema in downtown Nairobi
“The aid workers found the Weisz character profoundly annoying and embarrassingly naive, and the diplomats were unable to swallow the love story. I enjoyed the top-shelf acting talent and the visuals, but having read the book I was disappointed to see that hundreds of pages of plot had been excised, including much of the intrigue involving Big Pharma.
“I guess this is understandable given that Mereilles was trying to avoid a three hour-plus running time, but I thought that this removed much of the book’s suspense and jittery paranoia. Mereilles turned a page-turning global-conspiracy potboiler into an often plodding, reflective character study, perhaps on purpose. And this is coming from someone who was head-over-heels over City of God.
“My other problem with the film is that it falls too easily into the old Hollywood paradigms about Africa. As with movies like Cry Freedom or Out of Africa, the African experience is only palatable to Western audiences if filtered through a well-meaning white protagonist. Actual Africans are relegated to supporting roles with few lines, and are not allowed more than two dimensions: they must play one of four acceptable roles: the desperate victim, the noble martyr, the loyal servant or the corrupt official.
“In The Constant Gardener, which has no major African characters, the only African who really registered with me was the great Kenyan actor Sidede Onyulo (also terrific in Nowhere in Africa), who plays the jaded UN pilot and is gone from the story all too quickly.
“The only Western-produced movies I’ve seen recently in which fully-drawn, articulate, complex African characters are put at the center of their own stories are Dirty Pretty Things and Hotel Rwanda. (Okay, so Don Cheadle’s not exactly African and Chiwetel Ejiofor was born in London.)
“Hope all is well stateside. I’m still in shock over the Crash win. That film was shown on another one of our LCD projector movie-nights showings, and my wife and I couldn’t stand the thing. Much unintentional laughter was had at the expense of that movie’s clumsy dialogue and poorly-drawn characters. Maybe you have to be an Angeleno to appreciate it.” — Peter McKenzie, Nairobi, Kenya.
Different Enough?
There’s a slightly longer “Director’s Cut” DVD of Paul Haggis’s Oscar-winning Crash hitting stores on April 4th. It’s just about three minutes longer than the 112-minute version that played in theatres. Extra dabs, clips and brushstrokes “integrated,” as a Lionsgate spokesperson put it this morning.
The two-disc package will have several deleted scenes and the usual featurettes, etc., but it’s too bad the slightly altered film on the DVD won’t be a little more so. A good 15 or 20 minutes longer, say, or maybe even a Wyatt Earp-sized three-hour cut. All those racist Los Angelenos, all those story strands…why not?
Terrence Howard
Or maybe a shorter, tighter version in the vein of Terrence Malick’s re-released version of The New World, maybe with substituted footage or all the same scenes but more streamlined. There’s no such thing as a film that can’t be just a wee bit improved with the right trims or reshufflings. I could go back to just about any article I’ve ever written and improve it with a few edits…easy.
I called Paul Haggis (through his publicist) to discuss the content of the extra stuff, but no callback. So I tried Bobby Moresco, who shared the Best Original Screen- play Oscar with Haggis two nights ago, and he didn’t get back either. I’m getting a distinct feeling that the 115-minute Crash doesn’t mean much in their world right now.
I get it…I do. Lionsgate suddenly has a Best Picture winner with brand-new earning potental so they’re trying to milk it every which way…fine. And I’m always up for a good milking if the package is right.
But if I’m a food critic and a chef says he’s got a whole new menu he’d like me to try, and it turns out the only thing different is that all the dishes have an extra spoonful of steamed carrots, I’m going to feel disappointed.
A special director’s cut of a well-liked movie means a rethink or a recall of some kind. It’s about having another go. My expectation when this happens is a juicier steak or extra mashed potatoes with gravy…something with calories.
The final cover will obviously tout the Best Picture Oscar triumph — this one was roughed out a few weeks ago
I’m sure the extras on the double-disc Crash will be fine, but the film is the matter at hand.
Sidenote: In looking into this story I noticed that three credible sources — Variety, N.Y. Times and DVD Empire — give three different lengths of the original Crash.
Variety‘s Toronto Film Festival review (September 2004) said Haggis’s film ran 112 minutes, A.O. Scott’s 5.6.05 Times review said it runs 107 minutes, and DVD Empire claims a running time of 122 minutes.
Somebody at DVD Empire probably just hit a “2” key when he was aiming for the “1” but that N.Y. Times estimate is…well, odd.
Happiness
I finally saw Debra Granik‘s Down to the Bone last night and got the wisdom of what almost every deep-focus movie journalist and critic has been saying since it (barely) opened in New York and Los Angeles nearly six weeks ago, which is that it’s grimly real but has something that doesn’t let up. This is a profoundly honed and life-like low-budgeter about a mom with two kids coping with drug addiction, and Vera Farmiga, who plays this withered young woman like she’s not playing her at all, is the absolute shit.
Vera Farmiga, Hugh Dillon after last night’s screening of Down to the Bone at Laemmle’s Music Hall — 1.12.06, 9:50 pm.
Farmiga doesn’t perform — she becomes and burns through. She has the saddest eyes and the posture of a Siberian salt-mine worker, and she makes you feel the empty-soul fatigue of working a job at a supermarket check-out counter while nur- sing a serious cocaine habit and…Christ, stealing birthday money from her son in order to score, and then getting fired after she cleans up because the coke made her work faster.
This is Anna Magnani in Open City reborn and time-tripped into something worse than mere poverty.
I’ve been told Down to the Bone is the main reason Farmiga landed major roles in Anthony Minghella‘s upcoming Breaking and Entering and Martin Scorsese‘s The Departed…you can see why in a heartbeat.
Newsweek‘s David Ansen called Farmiga’s Down to the Bone performance a “revelation” and listed her performance among the best of the year, and of course the L.A. Film Critics voted her their ’05 Best Actress award. It was these responses that stirred me from slumber and led to last night’s wake-up.
I am so late-to-the-party on this one I don’t want to talk about it. But I am and I’m sorry, and I wish I’d been able to say this before: this is a moderately weak year for female performances, and there’s no question that Farmiga’s performance in this bleak but mesmerizing film is absolutely gold standard.
Farmiga with Jasper Daniels (playing her older son) in Debra Granik’s Down to the Bone
If we lived in a world that singled out the real jewels in the rough and paid less attention to industry hype and herd-mentality thinking, Vera Farmiga would right now be breathing down Reese Witherspoon‘s neck.
But of course we don’t and she’s not, and Farmiga, giving it one last shot and laying it on the line, personally arranged for last night’s Down to the Bone screening at Laemmle’s Music Hall (and for guys like me to be invited)…and good for her. And cheers to Adrien Brody, an old friend of Farmiga’s (they co-starred in an ’02 film called Dummy) who dropped by to lend support.
My apologies to publicist Steven Zeller, who tried to get me to see Down to the Bone early last fall. And a respectful tip of the hat to Farmiga’s ICM agent Chris Matthews, who also dropped by to show support and cheer things along.
And hold on…who’s this Hugh Dillon guy? He gives an assured, quietly sexy performance as Farmiga’s drug-counsellor boyfriend who holds her hand and caresses her cheek as they both spiral downward in the third act. Damned if he isn’t another reason for me to feel like a dilletante columnist.
Adrien Brody, Farmiga, Dillon — Thursday, 1.12.06, 9:52 pm.
Dillon is one of those steady souls who comes into a scene and looks the lead actress right in the eye in an easy, friendly way and says it plain and true (like he does in his first scene with Farmiga) and right away you’re saying to yourself, “This guy’s cool…I trust him.”
Dillon should be happening. He should be the star of a TV cop show… something. He’s got that pale-faced Irish hard-guy thing…he should have been cast as a cop or a wise guy in The Departed.
Don’t mention my having missed Down to the Bone at Sundance ’04 — I’m having enough trouble coping as it is. Just take my word and rent it when it comes out on DVD, which will probably happen over the next four to six months.
I told Dillon after the screening that the movie has a unique tension that comes from pulling you in opposite directions. You want his and Vera’s characters to straighten up and fly right and your heart sinks when they fall off the wagon, but at the same time the bleakness of their lives and surroundings seems so futile and spiritually draining that you can understand the appeal of an occasional snort.
Ve detta Days
If one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter (depending on one’s political perspective), the notion of a “good terrorist” should be an exploitable subject for a Hollywood film…no? In any case it’s now the basis of a very smart big-bolt action drama, and from the makers of The Matrix yet — the brilliant, very crafty, vaguely oddball Wachowski Brothers.
V for Vendetta (Warner Bros., 3.17), which I saw Wednesday afternoon, is a genuinely rousing and serious-minded thriller that’s fairly throbbing with political metaphor. Anyone over the age of 10 or 11 will be able to connect the dots. And it’s probably safe to assume that V will anger a few rightie jerkwads, but that’s fine — March can be a boring month and the arguments will be fun.
V for Vendetta is Fight Club-plus…it’s Fight Club strapped to a missile…or should I say a fertilizer bomb?
Based on Alan Moore’s early ’80s graphic novel and set in a fascist England in the near-future, it’s about revenge and revolution from the point of view of an anti-fascist rabble-rouser provocateur named “V” (voice-acted by Hugo Weaving, whom we never meet in the flesh). And about a growing relationship between V and Evey Hammond (Natalie Portman), whose parents were crushed for anti-fascist activi- ties and, like Neo at the beginning of The Matrix, is looking to add something vital to her life.
She certainly acccomplishes that before the film is over…along with thousands of others in London who join in overwhelming the police in front of Parliament…each one, like the hero all through the film, wearing a grotesque Guy Fawkes mask… bonding fast against tyranny.
Okay, so it has a pie-in-the-sky, fairy-tale ending. I think that’s allowable in some cases.
Most readers probably know that Fawkes was one of a group of Roman Catholic conspirators who attempted to blow up London’s Parliament building (or perhaps just the House of Lords) in 1605, but didn’t quite succeed. He and his co-conspi- rators were caught and was executed for treason. The anniversay of Fawkes’ failed attempt (which happened on November 5th) is celebrated as Guy Fawkes Day.
V for Vendetta is a futuristic myth, a fable…designed at every stage to entertain but quite obviously aimed at our world and time…portraying what happens when people get scared about potential enemies and give a pass to rightwing brown- shirts who run roughshod over basic freedoms. If you don’t see the parallels to the political tendencies and tensions of 2006 then I don’t know what.
What this is, curiously, is a heavily-budgeted, Joel Silver-produced actioner that works as a kind of companion piece to Eugene Jarecki’s Why We Fight. Jarecki’s film is pure exposition, of course, but it paints a riveting portrait of some crafty politicos who did what they could to exploit citizens’ fears after 9/11 in order to expand and strengthen their power base…and that’s exactly what the bad guys have been up to in Vendetta.
So the film is nervy as hell and will most likely enrage people like Ann Coulter, Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, who will probably say it endorses terrorism or some such hooey. It doesn’t, of course…I mean, not actually…but watch the righties go to town.
Vendetta may not have the stylistic visual pizazz of the Matrix films, and in fact feels a tiny bit flat-footed during the first 15 minutes or so, but this concern quickly falls away because once the film gets rolling it becomes more and more pointed and complex by the minute.
In my book V is one of the most politically audacious mainstream Hollywood films ever made because it really lays it on the line — there are dark echoes of 9.11 and 21st Century neocon power dreams and hard-right fanatacism all through it, and yes…the good guy does blow up a building or two.
Natalie Portman, Hugo Weaving in V for Vendetta
And yet — trust me — this is a film that says and stands for all the right things. Which is why it’s going to get attacked.
Look at all the inflammables…a terrorist hero, a sub-plot about a deeply-in-love lesbian couple (this plus those hot lezzie scenes in Bound tells you the boys definitely have a thing for girl-on-girl action), plus a huge fertilizer bomb under Parliament and that ’03 sex-change operation…forget it, the right’s going to have a field day.
The bottom line is that V isn’t some simple-minded action flick trying to glorify the struggle of a lone terrorist against a repressive right-wing regime. It’s using a story that follows the contours of an action-thriller to push an allegory about some very real and threatening tendencies in our society today.
James McTeigue “directed” V, but it was basically a Wachowski show and there’s no point in getting picky about this. But it’s probably fair to credit McTiegue for the fact that the actors are excellent from to bottom — Weaving, Portman, Stephen Rea, John Hurt, Stephen Fry, Sinead Cusack, et. al.
I assume Warner Brothers marketing will be handing out Guy Fawkes masks at press and promotional screenings between now and March 17. How could they not be? Can I have mine early so I can be the first one on the block?
In any case, the Wachowskis are back after a two-year hiatus, and bully for that.
For most of us, the legend of Larry and Andy began nine years and three months ago with the release of Bound, a brilliantly designed indoor crime drama. Their rep was double-certified and cast in industrial steel with the release of The Matrix in March 1999, and it grew from there. For the next four years the Wachowskis were as mythical gods.
But the aura started to fade with the May 2003 release of The Matrix Reloaded, which disappointed just about everyone on the planet except for David Poland, and then came the Really Big Crash of The Matrix Revolutions in November of ’03, and everyone was saying “what happened?” The Wachowskis had let everyone down and all of that geek goodwill pretty much imploded.
The boys seemed to disappear for all of ’04 and early ’05. Then they began work on Vendetta last summer in London and here they are again with a film that some are going to call a work of genius, or at least a piece of revolutionary cinema.
Everybody loves a good comeback. Will V for Vendetta make big money or just good money? No telling…let’s see what happens.
Niagara Falls
Here’s an Abbott and Costello time-out. I’m figuring some of you need a break from terrorism, and I’m also presuming there are lots of under-30 readers who’ve never heard it. It’s an old burlesque classic that all the comics used to do. The Three Stooges did a version of it in a short called “Gents Without Cents.” Abbott and Costello did a “Pokomoko” version in a feature called Lost in a Harem , and then a “Niagara Falls” version with Sid Fields on their 1950s TV series.
Harsh Respect
As long as we’re looking ahead here, I saw David Ayer’s Harsh Times on Monday night, and it left me (or I left it) a little more than pleasantly surprised.
This is a totally respectable hardcase urban drama — perhaps not a date movie (unless you have an X-factor girlfriend or wife who thinks like Manohla Dargis), but it’s quality stuff all the way and rates as a very respectable calling-card film for Ayer, who’s best known for having written Training Day.
It’s not coming out for another three months (Bauer Martinez is planning a smallish mid-April release) but the word on Harsh Times out of the Toronto Film Festival was iffy, and it’s not that. I wouldn’t call it transcendent or drop-your-socks amaz- ing, but it’s pretty damn sturdy and rooted, and extremely well acted by leads Christian Bale and Freddy Rodriguez.
Written about ten years ago and clearly cut from the same cloth as Training Day (which Ayer reportedly wrote two or three years after this),
It’s not what anyone would call a pleasant sit, but it has an honest street feeling and is certainly not the kind of film that uses lurid exaggeration for cheap effect.
It’s about a Gulf War veteran who’s obviously a hair-trigger nutjob (Bale), and how he gradually falls apart and detonates over the span of two or three (four or five?) days after failing to land a job as an L.A. policeman force hangin’ and cruising around East Los Angeles with his immature, irresponsible homie (Rodriguez).
The story’s about Bale’s character almost finding a career niche for himself with the Feds after losing out on a job with the L.A. police department, and almost nabbing a chance at happiness with his Mexican girlfriend…and about Rodriguez trying to shuck his drinking inclinations and get a job and fly right so he can hang on to his wife-girlfriend (Eva Langoria) and then…kablooey.
The way you’ve been prepped for a film always affects the way you see that film, especially if you’ve been told “watch out, rough going, my friend walked out,” etc. If the film turns out to be not be quite as gnarly or difficult to sit through as you heard it would be, you tend to come out with a favorable impression.
Rodriguez, Longoria and Harsh Times director David Ayer during last September’s Toronto Film Festival.
And if the film accomplishes some worthy things that you weren’t told about in the first place, then you’re really on the boat and flashing all kinds of positive things.
This is what happened to me three nights ago at Raleigh Studios. I went there to see Michael Winterbottom’s Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, but when I arrived I learned that Harsh Times was playing next door. Before Shandy began I spoke to a big-name critic who said he’d seen Harsh Times in Toronto and found it overly harsh, and that New York Post critic Lou Lumenick had walked out after ten minutes.
That did it — I was sold. The lights went down and I was quickly bored by Shandy (sorry) so I got up, walked ten steps and slipped into Harsh Times room, and was soon glad I did.
Grabs
Sunset Boulevard near Horn — Tuesday, 1.10.06, 9:30 pm
On bike path in Santa Monica — Sunday, 1.8.06, 2:10 pm
Billboard on Laurel Canyon Blvd. just south of 134 on-ramp. Snapped on Tuesday, 1.10.06, 9:50 am.
Reasons to Believe
I spoke last Sunday to director Eugene Jarecki for “Elsewhere Live” about his superb documenary Why We Fight. The Sony Classics release is opening on 1.20 and spreading out from there.
A recording of our chat is uploadable in the Elsewhere Live archive, and here’s a stand-alone version.
If you want some prep before listening, here’s a re-print of a piece I wrote about Why We Fight during the Toronto Film Festival:
A thought hit me when I was writing my column from Toronto on the evening of 9.11.01, but I didn’t have the brass to write it down.
Former U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower delivering his farewell speech on 1.17.61.
It was my suspicion that no one in the news media in the coming weeks or months would ever be permitted to explore (or even discuss on a talk show like, say, Chris Matthews’ “Hardball”) what might have motivated the 9.11 attackers to do what they did.
It seemed fairly obvious that the news media were already locked into characterizing the Al Qeada plotters as nothing more or less than harbingers of pure evil, and that allowing for the possibility that United States foreign policy might have had something to do with their anger would simply never be acknowledged.
Eugene Jarecki’s Why We Fight isn’t the first doc to explore why so many people around the world hate our guts, but it’s one of the most precise and persuasive.
This is a cleanly composed, very perceptive explanation of how the American military-industrial complex basically runs everything and everyone, from the U.S. President to the U.S. Congress to the slant of our foreign policy.
The news-clip centerpiece, as you might imagine, is former president Dwight D. Eisenhower’s farewell address warning about the influence of the burgeoning military-industrial complex. Jarecki then goes on to show exactly how prophetic Ike was.
Why We Fight director Eugene Jarecki during q & a following TIFF screening at Toronto’s Cumberland plex — 9.15, 5:50 pm.
This will seem like boilerpate stuff to some, but Jarecki and his sources explain how and why the U.S. decided at the end of World War II to become a permanent roving super-power with the technological ability (if not necessarily the political will) to strike any adversary in any country at any time.
The film’s title is borrowed from a jingoistic Frank Capra doc made during World War II that explained the necessity of defeating Japan and Nazi Germany.
The movie says that for roughly the last 60 years, the U.S. has been led by a basic need for constant military adventurism for the sake of domestic corporate profits, which are then spread around to political supporters in government.
Fight shows how there are four branches of Eisenhower’s complex today — the military, the weapons-making industry, the U.S. Congress and conservative think tanks — and how they all feed into each other.
Gore Vidal is one of Fight‘s talking heads, supplying his view at one point that “we live in the United States of Amnesia.”
But Jarecki is smart enough to stay away from staunch liberals for the most part, speaking mostly to establishment or conservative types such as Sen. John McCain, high-level CIA veteran Chalmers Johnson, William Kristol, Richard Perle, former Lt. Gen. Karen Kwiatkowski and former president Eisenhower’s granddaughter Susan and son John.
Jarecki also talks to the wonderfully candid and articulate Charles Lewis of the Center for Public Integrity, who was more or less the star of Orwell Rolls in His Grave.
Why We Fight is also effective when it talks to average-Joe types. The standout in this realm is an ex-cop named Wilton Sekzer, whose son was killed on 9.11 and who came to embrace a very cynical attitude about the foreign policy aims of the Bush administration, not to mention its general lack of candor about same.
Jarecki also interviews a fresh Army recruit named William Solomon, and to a couple of military pilots who dropped the first bombs in the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
On top of everything else, Jarecki is an excellent cinematographer and editor. The movie is persuasive in part because it’s been shot and cut with eye-pleasing expertise.
An impassioned, extremely well-made film with a sincere emotional current (i.e., one that actually makes you feel something with an application of professional finesse rather than hokey button-pushing) opens after being acclaimed by critics or film festival audiences or both…and what happens?
The public doesn’t respond with much enthusiasm. The movie opens in third or fourth or fifth place, or it opens okay but not as strongly as it should have, and then it’s dead by the second or third weekend, if not sooner.
Terrence Howard, Taraji P. Henson in Craig Brewer’s Hustle & Flow
And then journos start thinking twice about putting this or that insufficiently-loved film on their best-of-the-year lists because they don’t want their editors to think they’re out of touch or living in their own realm.
All because the marketing wasn’t handled in exactly the right way…or the market- ing was fairly on the money and the paying public still didn’t care that much and went to see…whatever….Saw II, Flightplan, The Legend of Zorro, Wallace and Gromit, The 40 Year-Old Virgin, etc.
I’m not talking about a disconnect between effete critics loving the latest downer- head, hard-to-stay-with, impossible-to-really-like art film, and audiences doing their usual avoidance-rejection of anything that doesn’t deliver a rousing visual punch, or that isn’t arresting on some primitive horrific-comedic level.
I’m talking about fairly high-grade, non-elitist, feel-good movies getting the cold shoulder, or at least they’re not getting the love they deserve. Why? I could theorize but I’d wind up sounding like a misanthrope.
I don’t have a long list of examples, but 2005 has availed itself of a few modest calamities in this vein.
The two most obvious are Craig Brewer‘s Hustle & Flow ($22 million so far), a movie with some euphoric musical-high scenes and a fully-earned righteous-uplift finale, and Curtis Hanson’s In Her Shoes, a movie with a $70 or $80 million quality aura that’s taken in only $30 million so far. I’ve written enough about this film, but it qualifies.
Beautiful Country director Hans Petter Moland, Damien Nguyen during filming
I don’t care if anyone agrees with me, but Hans Petter Moland’s The Beautiful Country delivered in the general realm I’m describing — it’s a heart movie with a carefully rendered tone — and it was all but ignored.
I’m a bit worried that Thomas Bezucha‘s The Family Stone, a smart, sophisticated family-friendly comedy, might underperform or fail to reach an appropriate-sized audience…partly because it’s opening relatively late in the holidays (12.16) and will lose a bit of its appeal after January 1, 2006. And partly because rural-sector audiences might say, ‘Is this dopey enough? Are these people like the people in my family or…?’
I’m afraid Fox marketing might have erred in abandoning the original early Novem- ber release, and that audiences might be smelling this indecision and starting to go ‘hmmm.’
I’ve mentioned this before, but I’m wondering more and more how much ticket- buying support Ang Lee‘s Brokeback Mountain — easily one of the most emotionally affecting mainstream films I’ve seen this year — will be getting. I’m not predicting anything, but if it gets cold-shouldered…maybe I shouldn’t bring this up.
Quality movies obviously do well (or fairly well) from time to time, or at least man- age to avoid box-office humiliations. The $28 million earned so far by A History of Violence isn’t bad, given what it is. The Constant Gardener‘s nearly $33 million domestic gross is a moderately satisfying thing…depending on your attitude. Intriguing cultivated-audience films all seem to top out in the high 20s or low 30s.
We all know about disparate movie appetites making a world. There are Saw II fans vs. fools for Capote. It’s not a crime to like primitive boilerplate films which (here comes a troublesome statement) are primarily made for people who lead straight-from-the-shoulder, not-deeply-examined, Carl’s-Jr.-salad-bar lives, and there are films for those with somewhat more developed interiors…folks who’ve gone to college, grown up a bit, read a few books.
Heath Ledger, Michelle Williams in Brokeback Mountain
What staggers me is when the instinctuals, who obviously comprise the majority, blow off films that are relative no-brainers and are also emotionally shrewd and affecting.
I’ve always presumed people of all stripes and persuasions go to movies mainly to feel something profound…to connect with this or that lump-in-the-throat emotion that they’re not experiencing all that much in their day-to-day lives…but maybe not.
I know that Dylan, my extremely bright (i.e., smarter than me) 15 year-old son, doesn’t care at all for lump-in-the-throat movies. He’s partial to intensely visual movies, naturally, and stays away from anything that smells square or schmaltzy.
Shruggers
Movie reviews always seems to lean in the direction of “thumbs up” or “thumbs down.” But what about those relatively engaging, not-that-bad ‘tweeners?
I’ve seen a lot of films that I can’t really rave about, but I’ve had a moderately okay time with. Didn’t hate ’em, didn’t love ’em…they left me not hungry, not angry…and maybe a little more than half satisfied.
I’ve always thought Ebert and Roeper should add a “thumbs sideways” rating. Thumbs sideways would mean “wait for the DVD,” I know…and if I were paying to see movies, that’s how I’d process this reaction.
But thumbs sideways is better than thumbs down, and any honest critic will tell you that many, many films (roughly 15% or 20%) are not profound works of art or deliriously entertaining, but a long way from being pieces of shit.
Recent shruggers include North Country, Lord of War, Junebug, The War Within, Dreamer: Based on a True Story, Proof, Thumbsucker, Everything is Illiminated, New York Doll, The Libertine, Ellie Parker, The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till, 2046 and Kings and Queen.
They’re not bad, they don’t stink, I didn’t hate them and I didn’t walk out in a bad mood. What do you want from a film…perfection and purity?
Tuesday Grabs
Dying Gaul costars Patricia Clarkson, Peter Sarsgaard at Kanvas (9th Avenue and 23rd Steet), site of the post-premiere party — Tuesday, 11.3.05, 10:15 pm.
Billboard at corner of 42nd and 7th Ave. — Tuesday, 11.3.05, 10:40 pm.
Wednesday, 11.4.05, 7:05 am.
Approaching Times Square from 40th Street — Tuesday, 11.3.05, 10:40 pm.
Cop cars assembled to handle some sort of security issue regarding New York City visit of Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles…I think.
Peeking at Diane Sawyer through the big window outside Good Morning America studios at B’way and 44th — Wednesday, 11.4.05, 6:55 am.
Spiritual Sell
Gotta love that Bob Berney marketing audacity. Lay it on the line, sell the movie you have and damn the torpedoes.
I’m referring to Berney’s decision to call a certain heart-warming, Israeli-produced film, which his company, Picturehouse Films, picked up for U.S. distribution a few months ago…a movie that, let’s be honest, very few people other than Orthodox Jews in New York and Florida will want to see no matter what it’s called…a movie that Berney, in his admirably mule-stubborn way, has decided to sell with its orig- inal title, which is…ready?…Ushpizin.
Shuli Rand, star and screenwriter of Ushpizin, enduring a moment of anti-rapture
I would have called it Holy Guests or Bad Company or something like that. Partly because the movie’s about a Jewish Orthodox couple playing host to a couple of ne’er-do-wells during a holiday, but mainly because these titles are more…goy- friendly?
But then I’m not Bob Berney. I’m just this guy typing away inside a modest Brooklyn apartment while Berney sits in regal poobah splendor inside his $17 million Park Avenue triplex, tabulating profits from his offshore investments and making and breaking careers with a slight raising or lowering of his eyebrows…a much-feared and much-envied “big op” renowned for great wisdom and shrewd business judgment.
Okay, I’m kidding about the triplex and the eyebrows and the offshore investments, but Berney is a smart distributor so maybe he made the right call.
Let’s start with the Ushpizin basics, beginning with the correct pronunciation, which is oosh-peh-zeen.
Directed by Giddi Dar and written by the film’s star, Shuli Rand, Ushizpizin is about a poor Orthodox Jew named Moshe who lives in Jerusalem with his wife Malli and is trying to live by the spirit of the festival of Sukkot…I’m sorry, is this sounding too exotic already?
Moshe’s a nice pudgy middle-aged guy with a long squiggly beard, but he and his chubby wife Malli have no kids and he’s feeling a little bit blue about this and other matters.
And then these two jerky oddballs show up — Eliyahu, an old pal of Moishe’s from his pre-Orthodox, running-around days, and a pal called Yossef. They’re prison convicts on the run from the law, which eventually becomes known by Moshe and Malli, and from this complications ensue.
As with all spiritual fables, the visit by this unruly pair turns out to be a kind of blessing in disguise.
There’s a totally valid analogy between Ushpizin and David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence. You could also say it parallels Michael Mann’s Collateral, which is also about redemption arriving in the form of criminal behavior.
L.A. Daily News critic Bob Strauss, who doesn’t roll over for just anything, has called Ushpizin “one of the best character-based comedies of the year.”
Ushpizin has already played successfully in Israel for about a year. It just opened limited on Friday, 10.28, and is expanding on 11.4 to Philadelphia, Boston, Los Angeles and (I think I have this right) Florida. Basically anywhere there’s a heavy Jewish Orthodox population,okay?
Dar said that even in Israel he was told by distributors to change the title because “a lot of [Israelis] don’t know what it means.” (It means “guests” or “holy guests.”) But when he spoke to Berney about selling the film in the U.S., Berney said “let’s trust in God and keep it…let audiences break their teeth.”
Berney decided to stick with Ushpizin precisely “because it’s exotic. I just thought it made more sense to go with the original Hebrew name.”
Berney acknowledges that the interest in “small outside of New York City, but inside New York City it’s huge. We’re going to take it slowly, obviously playing to the core audience first….evangelicals, other faiths…it’s a film, after all, about belief and a test of faith. And there’s also the arthouse crowd.”
Berney and his wife Jeannie went to a screening of Ushpizin last week at a Brooklyn neighborhood called Borough Park.
“It’s a Hassidic, ultra-Orthodox neighborhood near Coney Island, and it’s really it’s own world. A very concentrated, ultra-Orthodox Hassidic community. It was at a high school auditorium and there were hundreds of people and many of them were coming up to me and telling me they were really pleased…it was mainly a 35 or 40 year-old crowd.”
Gadar agrees that the word “exotic” applies to the title of Ushpizin as well as the film itself, “but the interesting part is that when you cross the line and look at the world from Moshe and Malli’s point of view…you end up finding they’re very much like you.
Official Ushpizin T-shirt, available through official website.
Gadar says he’s “not religious at all” but says, “I think what this movie offers is that it’s a completely authentic movie about faith…teling a story which all faiths and cultures can identify with.”
When Ushpizin played in Isarel last year “everybody …secular, liberals, left- wing…saw it.” America is the first country outside of Israel to have theatrical playdates,he tells me.
“I showed the film to some Muslim people, but I don’t think Muslim countires will allow it to be played in their territories. I would like to show it in Iran…but it’s not that simple to put an Israeli film in Ian or even Egypt. It’s very hard. But the best thing about this movie is that it overcomes politics.”
And the best thing for Berney and Picturehouse Films, obviously, would be for Ushpizin to catch on with the goyim.
Honestly? I might not have gone to see this film if I hadn’t been given a screener. The title seems to be a statement that it isn’t for someone like me. But having seen it, I can say that it’s a film I respect for its heart and spiritual values, and that I feel a certain allegiance because of this.
Jarhead Support
“I haven’t seen Jarhead, but I read Anthony Swofford’s book while on my year-long tour in Iraq last year. And now that I’ve just read your commentary on the film, it appears that the filmmakers have actually tried to make a film that is honest about modern war, if not battle.
“I don’t yet know if that’s necessarily a problem, but an issue that I have with most war movies (now that I’m a ‘war’ veteran), is that they aren’t war films. Battles are exciting but war is boring. You also have to realize that except for the first wave of fighting in Faluha, there haven’t been pitched conflicts during the Iraqi occupation.
Jarhead costars Jake Gyllenhaal, Peter Sarsgaard
“Even those soldiers unlucky enough to have been under direct fire will tell you that 99% of their time is spent being bored out of their minds. So if you want to tap into the reality of a soldier (most of whom are not traditional triggermen, but support soldiers) you have to address the boredom and personal demons that soldiers focus on in the absence of anything to do. I mean, I too went batty about a girl back home.
“I was trained for three years and then I spent 10 months with a higher headquarters staff, where I stared at a computer screen for 12 hours a night, 7 nights a week, so I can really relate to the frustration that comes with not doing the job that you volunteered for and trained to do. It makes that time feel like it’s been stolen from you.
“I guess my point is that what Jarhead is about is what those who experience it feel about the boredom factor that is part of the totality of fighting a war. Non-veterans, it seems, don’t want to tap into that truth, and seem to prefer ideas of being entertained by their concepts of what war (or war movies) ought to be like.” — Andre Rember, formerly a Captain in the U.S. Army Artillery.
“I haven’t seen Jarhead, but your piece said there’s no story or plot and that’s upsetting (a little), but the waiting and many of your other descriptions sound exactly what life is like in the military.
“What your wrote actually makes it more intriguing to me now. How you described the movie is our reality. That is exactly what it is like. Train, train train…get ready, get ready…wait…okay, something happened so you’re not going now. (A constant emotion and adrenaline roller-coaster)
“That is enlisted life. I am wrapping up my fifth year in the military and although I haven’t been to the desert, your descriptions are dead on as to what it is like most of the time.
“Does that make Jarhead a good movie? Maybe not, especially for those outside of the military. But at least it sounds real. It could do well with military, depending on ‘if they get it.’ (Most of my military counterparts are more interested in Saw II) Many could come out saying, ‘Yep that is what it’s like.’ And tell their friends. But that won’t create a huge box office or push any awards.” — A senior Airman who asked for anonymity
“I disagree that Jarhead fails ‘to stir any primal chords about anything …to make anyone feel anything about what happened 14 years ag,’ as you said. It must be that I served my time in the Army and had those same feelings of anticipation, anxiety, fear, and regret.
“And I really didn’t see those things in Gunner Palace (which isn’t to say I didn’t like it and it didn’t hit close to home). Hell, Nick Moncrief (the Sgt. who raps in that movie) was in my Basic Training platoon at Ft Sill. To this day I have several family and friends over there and it’s a damn crime.
“That said, Jarhead does something that no other war’ film has done — it paints the portrait of what it is to be a soldier in a way that spooked me.
“When Peter Sarsgaard’s character announces to his buddies after seeing a newscast that ‘we are going to war,’ almost made me throw up with memories of the morning of Sept 11th and when the same reaction happened from my line NCO.
“Everything that follows is a pitch-perfect portrayal of the hurry-up-and-wait mentality of the U.S. armed forces. Jarhead is what it is to be a modern soldier. What you infer is that all of the little things about Jodie and other common military horror stories, is they are simply cliches. Well, they are real — this is what happens. Every soldier knows them and every soldier has expierenced them or knows someone who has.
“As far as the message of the film is concerned, Mendes & Co. simply were showing how dissapointing the whole ordeal was. Every thing from the tagline to the looks on the Marine’s faces when the Vietnam Vet enters their bus…it was all a disappointment.
“That scene is another (of many) that hit home way to well. As soon as an older vet finds out that I served in the Army, they immediately become freindly with me and share all of their sad tales of war and hardship, and just like the Marines on that bus all you can do is stare, because the life of a soldier is merely a disappointment, and not honorable…because what is honor in a pointless war?
“Because this movie spooked me, I think it is the best film of the year so far. For me.” — Michael Walsh, www.blackcarmediaworks.com
Meetings in Paris
“I was in Paris last week and saw Woody Allen’s Match Point on the day it opened (on a Wednesday), and I was astounded by how much I enjoyed it.
“Some of this reaction, I suppose, is about having having had low expectations despite yourself and other journalists running raves after seeing it last May at the Cannes Film Festival.
“Is it just me or shouldn’t Dreamworks be making some noise right now about how good it is? Maybe some whispers about Allen’s screenplay, at least?
Match Point star Scarlett Johansson.
“Maybe I’m delusional but I really quite enjoyed it. I re-watched Crimes and Misde- meanors when I got home and, all right, maybe Match Point isn’t quite up to that standard, but it just might be enough to renew some interest in Allen’s films after his last five abysmal outings.
“Speaking of Paris, I also ran into Wes Anderson there a few days ago. He was sitting with a woman at a sidewalk table in front of a small cafe on Blvd St. Ger- main between Rue De Seine and Rue Danton. And I was walking along with my friend Michael.
“Unnhh…Mr. Anderson.”
“Yes.”
“I thought it was you. I’m sorry to interrupt, but my friend and I were just discuss- ing you and your films about a block away and how you were living in Paris. Then I saw you and had to say something.”
“No problem,” he said. “What’s your name?”
“I’m Grant. This is Michael.”
“Hey, Michael…I’m Wes. This is Deborah.” And we all shook hands.
Sitting on Wes’s table was a large script that had drawings in red marker along the margins, with a small notebook on top of it.
Grant Peterson (l.) and Paris resident Wes Anderson on the occasion of a chance meeting on Blvd. St. Germain — Wednesday, 10.26, 3:45 pm
“About two weeks ago I read that Noah Baumbach mentioned you were living in Paris,” I said to him, “and I’m only here for the day before I head back to the States and I was thinking it would be really awesome to run into to you…and then it happens!”
He asked if I’d seen Noah’s film, The Squid and the Whale.
“No, I haven’t. Unfortunately it’s not out in Portland where I live. I think it’s opening this week.”
Then I asked Wes if Michael could take our picture together.
“Not a problem,” he said. He stood up and gestured for us to move over to an empty space next to the cafe. Wes put his arm around me and I smiled. We shook hands again and I thanked him profusely. He said it was no trouble.” — Grant Peterson
Mondo Kongo
“When I saw Heavenly Creatures six or seven years ago it not only became my favourite Peter Jackson movie, but led to increased interest in the then-upcoming Lord of the Rings trilogy that he would be directing.
“Heavenly Creatures is still my favourite Peter Jackson movie, mainly because it’s my only favourite Peter Jackson movie. I really became pissed off with the LOTR films as they contained leading characters I hated (fucking Hobbits), multiple endings (especially Return of the King) and a director obviously going up his own rear.
“With all the internet correspondents writing about the Rings films like they were the second coming and that we have to see them, etc. I really did not like this overwhelming favouritism as I found it really hard to judge the films on their own merits, which I managed to do when I got them on DVD. I certainly didn’t like them as much as AICN fellowship had implored me to do.
“When I heard that King Kong is going to be three hours long, all interest in this film died on the spot. You know at least an hour is going to be useless filler. What audiences want, which has been lacking from a lot of blockbusters this year, is an element that keeps them glued to the screen. Maybe King Kong will be a masterpiece…who knows?
“I’llstart taking Jackson seriously when he makes a low-budget indie film without all his usual toys. A low-budget indie film, say, about a disintegrating family, written by Harold Pinter, But right now I seriously doubt a director who is a) so obviously full of himself, and b) is being told he’s the greatest thing since sliced bread. He’s like the film world’s equivalent of Bono.” — Ben Colegate, London
“Your observation about Jackson being at a place professionally where he can throw money (and extra scenes and CG and effects) at his film just because he can is very true. But I think you missed the main point, blinded are you are by reflexive Jackson-loathing.
“The point is more about Jackson having lost his way artistically. The textbook example is John Landis. After the success of Animal House and the Blues Brothers (blecch), he makes his horror-comedy An American WereWolf in London. Funny bits, decent cast (go Griffin Dunne!)…but it was fat and digressive with pointless (for me) spooky dream sequences involving Nazi pig monsters and too many squibs and too much blood.
“It seems that when the artists are starting out and have less money, they have to be more creative, and are forced to generate more innovate material. Once they’re established…well, money can’t buy love, but it can buy a lot of CG. Many artists fall prey to the temptation to take those kinds of shortcuts, not just Jackson or Cameron.
“The question is, can Jackson rise above his demonstrated tendencies to self-indulge? I guess we’ll have a clue about this soon enough.” — Roy “Griff” Griffis
Sunday Evening
Schiller’s Liquor Bar on Rivington, a couple blocks north of Delancey on Manhattan’s Lower East Side — Sunday, 10.30.05, 8:50 pm.
Ditto, exterior — 9:15 pm
Fuck Yoga, an attitude T-shirt boutique on Ludlow Street — Sunday, 10.30.05, 8:20 pm
Pseudo-hip discount Manhattan hotel…”only” $169 per night.
Walking back to good old ratty Brooklyn across Williamsburg bridge — Sunday, 10.30.05, 10:05 pm
Schiller’s again
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