“This is the only time I’ve been consciously trying to capture a sensation, which is that emotion of when you’re a 12-year-old and you fall in love. I remember that being such a powerful feeling, it was almost like going into a fantasy world. It’s stuck with me enough that I think about it still.” — Moonrise Kingdom director-cowriter Wes Anderson speaking to N.Y. Times contributor Dennis Lim in a 5.13 article called “Giving Chase To Young Love on The Run.”
(l. to r.) Bill Murray, Frances McDormand, Edward Norton and Bruce Willis in Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom.
“One of the great things about Wes Anderson’s Rushmore, for me, was that you had teens and tweeners dealing in a calm, matter-of-act way with a sexual affair between a guy in his early ’50s and a teacher in her mid ’30s, and a story that involved obsession, betrayal, jealousy, laissez-faire finance, erotic hunger, cigarette-smoking and revenge.” — from a 1.12 HE riff titled “A Little Romance.”
“I’d really like to see a movie from Wes Anderson about adult characters dealing with adult-type stuff. They can act like adolescents all they want, but enough with the precious adolescents and the stop-motion animals and robots and Dalmatian mice and bright young obsessives with father issues. Please. We need a Wes movie about guys in their late 30s or 40s who don’t come from inherited wealth and have had to scrap to survive and who ride motorcycles and fuck well and have more or less found their place in life.” — from a 3.23.12 HE post called “End of Phase One.”
Moonrise Kingdom will have its first Cannes Film Festival screening less than three days hence. I’m flying down to Nice on Tuesday morning, and will be in my pad by late Tuesday afternoon. No one will be more delighted than myself if Moonrise turns out to be even a little different than what everyone — and I mean everyone — is expecting.
I never pay much attention to Director’s Fortnight or Critics Week selections during the Cannes Film Festival. But this year, as an exercise, I’d really like to catch one film from both programs. But what to choose? I’ve just spent a half-hour or so going over the lists…nothing. So I’m appealing to Guy Lodge or some Guy Lodge-y type acquaintance who can suggest a couple of must-sees that, let’s face it, I’ll most likely hate or be bored by.
Inbox Update: “Iranian filmmaker Massoud Bakhshi’s A Respectable Family will have its world premiere at the Director’s Fortnight on Sunday, May 20.
“Based on Massoud’s own personal experiences growing up in Iran, the film is an unabashed controversial look of contemporary Iran through the eyes of an expat feeling alienated in his own country. Not unlike A Separation, Massoud’s film is a ‘detective story without any detectives’ while focusing on a family drama shaped by a country’s history, politics, religion and ethos.”
Director’s Note: “I belong to the generation that lived through the eight long and deadly years of the Iran-Iraq war. Today this generation represents three quarters of the country. Iran has one of the youngest populations in the world — an educated youth full of curiosity and a desire for life. A youth which dreams of a tolerant Iran open to the rest of the world.
“To me, Iran is impossible to grasp without taking the history of the last 30 years into account. I didn’t make up the story of A Respectable Family. It is a true story — the story of my childhood after the 1979 revolution, my teenage years during the war and of my experience today in Tehran.”
A homework assignment that I’ve been dreading due to sheer laziness has to be done — an appraisal of Tere Tereba‘s “Mickey Cohen: The Life and Crimes of L.A.’s Notorious Mobster,” which has been out since May 1st. It covers Cohen’s entire life (9.4.13 to 7.29.76)…well, from age six on…and offers plenty of shoe-leather detail and minutiae up the wazoo.
Gangster Mickey Cohen, taken sometime in 1953.
The tone of Tereba’s prose is somewhere between excitedly neutral and half-admiring, and that’s a little odd, I must say. But that’s what happens, I suppose, when you write about a famous sociopath. You either get into Cohen’s head and accept that scuzball attitude, or you write disapprovingly like you’re Jack Webb or J. Edgar Hoover. Or you find some kind of objective middle ground,
The research and writing ate ten years of Tereba’s life, and I certainly respect that commitment. Her writing isn’t elegant, but it’s servicable enough. And the story is entertaining (as gangster sagas always are) and timely, of course, with Ruben Fleischer‘s The Gangster Squad, a “get Mickey Cohen” melodrama in the vein of Brian De Palma‘s The Untouchables, opening on 10.19.
One of the similarities is that both films fudge historical fact, or so it would appear in the case of The Gangster Squad.
The real-life Gangster Squad, led by John O’Mara (Josh Brolin in the film) and Sgt. Jerry Wooters (Ryan Gosling) never really got Mickey Cohen any more than the real-life Untouchables got Al Capone. Capone and Coen both did prison terms for income tax evasion, and were therefore “brought down,” so to speak, by federal agents. It may be that the Gangster Squad funnelled information that aided in Cohen’s first income tax conviction (he did two separate prison stretches), but they didn’t nail him in any heavy dramatic way, or not as I understand.
So The Gangster Squad is not a “get Mickey Cohen” movie as much as a “make a lot of noise and look cool and sexy and studly while trying to get Mickey Cohen” movie. Unless Beall’s screenplay makes up a phony ending. I’m basically expecting a general hodgepodge of Untouchables, Public Enemies, L.A. Confidential and Mulholland Falls.
“A movie is always fiction,” Tereba says. “I’ve written a definitive non-fiction book.”
Will Beall‘s Gangster Squad screenplay is based on Paul Leiberman‘s 2008 seven-part L.A. Times series titled “L.A. Noir: Tales From The Gangster Squad.” A book version will appear on 10.2.12, or about two weeks before the film opens.
The climactic finale in Lieberman’s seven-part series is the shooting of Jack “The Enforcer” Whalen at a San Fernando Valley restaurant called Rondelli’s, which happened while Cohen dined nearby with his crew and his bulldog. Whalen isn’t listed as a character in the Gangster Squad‘s IMDB rundown, but this incident is presumably depicted in the film. It’s certain, however, that while Cohen was tried for complicity in Whalen’s killing and O’Mara testified at this trial about Cohen’s guns having been found in a garbage can near the scene, Cohen was never convicted. (Sam LoCigno confessed and wound up going to jail for the shooting.)
Tereba and Liberman’s work will be competing with three other books about Cohen — “Mickey Cohen, In My Own Words: As Told to John Peer Nugent” (1975), “Hollywood’s Celebrity Gangster, The Incredible Life and Times of Mickey Cohen” by Brad Lewis (2009) and “King of the Sunset Strip: Hangin’ with Mickey Cohen and the Hollywood Mob” (2006) by Steve Stevens and Craig Lockwood.
When I spoke with Tereba the first thing I wanted to know was whether she’s read the Gangster Squad script, and if so, what parts are fictional and what parts aren’t?
Her first response to the script question was “I may have [read it],” but then she backed off and said she hadn’t read the script and that she has no idea what the film will contain or omit, and that she’s looking forward to seeing the film with a container of popcorn like everyone else. I find it inconceivable that a person who worked as hard as Tereba did on her book wouldn’t make a point of snagging the Gangster Squad script so she could speak with a degree of authority about the scripted content during interviews. I told her she’d be wise to get hold of a copy and read it so she won’t sound disingenuous the next time somebody like me asks.
“Do you think Warren Beatty and Barry Levinson‘s Bugsy was all fiction?,” I asked. Tereba replied that Benjamin Siegel was sitting on a couch with another guy in his Beverly Hills home when he was shot to death, and that the film left this guy out. She also said that Cohen (played by Harvey Keitel in the film) was “part of the conspiracy” to have Siegel rubbed out.
I can’t keep doing this. I could go on and on and on. I could talk about the women that Cohen allegedly had. Or how Harvey Keitel’s head was half-shaved to mimic Cohen’s appearance in Bugsy, and how Sean Penn, who plays him in The Gangster Squad, has kept his full head of hair…fuck it, I’ll do whatever the fuck I want, like Cohen did.
Tereba isn’t exactly your standard book-author type. She’s been a fashion designer since the late ’60s. She knew and hung with Jim Morrison and his girlfriend Pamela way back when, and was in Paris when he died. (Or had just been there or something.) She had a role in Andy Warhol’s Bad (’77). And she has some kind of honky accent that leads her to pronounce “Cohen” like “Cohn,” as in Harry.
Was Mr. Mickey’s name not spelled C-O-H-E-N, and was it not a two-syllable thing? “It’s just the way I talk,” she answered.
I’ve seen Michael Mann‘s The Last of the Mohicans three times — once during the initial 1992 theatrical release, an expanded edition on a DVD a few years ago and then the definitive director’s cut Bluray in 2010.
The Bluray is the best version by far, but for some reason I’ve never managed to love Mohicans. I’ve always liked, admired and respected it but my heart goes out to Heat, The Insider, Collateral and Thief.
I nonetheless would have attended the special screening of the definitive director’s cut at L.A.’s American Cinematheque on Friday night, if no other reason than to listen to Mann talk about it with L.A. Times guy Geoff Boucher. In Contention‘s Kris Tapley did, however, and has provided a well-written report and an mp3 of the discussion.
“It’s the law and order of nature — as it gives way to the impositions of occupiers — that largely governs the tone and atmosphere of Mohicans,” Tapley writes. “The film is unique in Mann’s canon for its period trappings, but of a piece with his penchant for deep emotional currents that announce themselves only in the nuance of performance.
“Indeed, it is still the film’s sweeping romance, its epic sadness, its viscous sense of honor that resonates emotionally to this day.”
During the post-screening q & a Mann explained the difference between ’92 and the definitive director’s cut.
“I understand story better [now],” Mann told Boucher. “When I was doing the original in 1992, I wanted to jam or insert the audience into the narrative so that things would just happen and you kind of tried to find out where I am in context, kind of inductively. And that wasn’t really serving the story. There’s a hopefully much clearer path in this version. The story is presented in a more deductive way.”
The film was in a sense under-served, Mann feels, by James Fenimore Cooper‘s novel, a piece of arrogant Euro-revisionism which he called “not very good.” He said that the film was “saved” by a diary written by Louise-Antoine Comte de Bougainville “who later goes to Hawaii and discovers Bougainvillea, which we have all over Los Angeles — he wrote a diary of every single day of that whole French and Indian war campaign. And the diary reads — it’s ironic, it’s funny, it’s sarcastic, it’s fantastic. But it literally told us what happened every single day of August 1757.”
Tapley’s best observation: “A simple question [for Mann] yields a bounty of information, as if unlocking the door to a closet packed with ideas waiting to tumble out. He’s meticulous, and it’s not an affectation.”
Best Mann quote: “Daniel Boone could leave a populated area and spend two years in the wilderness, eat three meals a day and live. These were all techniques learned from the American Indians. So the idea was, which I firmly believe, if an actor can actually do the things of the person he’s portraying, he truly becomes that person. You do it, you own it…[and] as a director, that’s what you want. I’m interested in actors and actresses who are for real, who are adventurous, who are very ambitious, who see it as an adventure and are ready to kind of commit, not out of discipline or coercion but out of, ‘Why would you want to do it any other way?’ Who wouldn’t want to do it if you could?'”
Best IMDB Anecdote: “Many long nights were spent filming the siege scenes. Due to the expansive area involved, loudspeakers were installed around the battlefield and fort so directions could be easily given to the hundreds of cast and crew. One night after many long hours, Mann was heard to shout over the speakers, ‘What’s that orange light? Turn out that orange light!’ After a pause another voice (an A.D.?) came over the speakers stating, ‘That’s the sun, Michael.'”
If you want a lustrous representation of Delmer Daves‘ Broken Arrow (1950, the first major post-WWII Western to portray Native Americans sympathetically, you must go to zee French! Their Bluray has been out since mid-April. Costarring James Stewart, Jeff Chandler (who used to wear women’s underwear when he was married to Esther Wlliams), Debra Paget…and with no fascist cropping because it was made in 1950.
Bernardo Bertolucci‘s last film was The Dreamers (’03), and then he suffered a series of back surgeries that led to his being in a wheelchair…at age 72! And then he announced last year that his return film, Io e Te (Me and You), based on Niccolo Ammaniti‘s young-adult book about a 14-year-old boy “who hides from the world in his family’s basement, along with his even more troubled 25-year-old sister,” would be shot in 3D. Then he changed his mind about 3D, calling the idea “vulgarly commercial.”
The only lesson I can derive from Bertolucci’s wheelchair existence is that the older we get, the more spiritual we become. Everything is about the body and the senses and obvious hungers when you’re an infant, and then you start to gradually discover the inwardness and the centered-ness of things, and by the time you’re 20 or 22 or so (if you’re not a total Mitt Romney-like asshole, that is) you know that the spiritual is where it’s at. So if you’ve lost your legs at age 72, you at least have that to fall back on — you don’t need to walk to commune with the sublime and the infinite.
But it still sucks. Walking miles and miles is one of the greatest things you can do with your time when you’re not writing or fucking or eating great food and watching perfectly mastered films on Bluray that haven’t been aspect-ratio raped by Bob Furmanek and the 1.78 or 1.85 fascists.
Io e Te has its press screening at Cannes on Tuesday, 5.22, and its press conference on Wedneday, 5./23.
Out of nowhere I decided last night to rent a DVD of Mike Nichols‘ Heartburn (’86, which I hadn’t seen in a good 20 years. My recollection was that it was smoothly assembled with two super-confident, movie-star performances from Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson, and that it had a flush, slightly smug air about it, and was intermittently entertaining in portions but not that great overall, and was actually flat toward the end.
But I was moved to give it another go. And it was intermittently entertaining once more. I miss this kind of well-funded, well-acted, sophisticated adult dramedy with that Nichols attitude and a fine commercial gloss. I didn’t even mind the Carly Simon songs. And Streep’s portrayal of Rachel Samstadt (i.e., the stand-in for Heartburn screenwriter-novelist Nora Ephron) has many genuine moments, especially of vulnerability.
But the film has a huge roadblock or two (or three). Ephron’s screenplay, based on her mostly autobiographical 1983 novel of the same name, charts the breakdown and dissolution of her marriage to Watergate reporter and novelist Carl Bernstein. Bernstein is called Mark Forman in the film and played by Nicholson, who came aboard at the last minute when Mandy Patinkin, unhappy with his part, left the film early on.
The problem is that Nicholson’s affair with the unseen giraffe lady with the big splayed feet (inspired by Bernstein’s affair with Margaret Jay) happens entirely off-screen and reveals nothing at all about Nicholson’s psychology. All you can sense is that he feels vaguely threatened by fatherhood and responsibility. It just feels bizarre that the affair just happens without the audience being told anything. Nicholson’s Mark is just a selfish shit (which may well have been the case except it takes two to bring a marriage down), and I felt bothered and irritated that I wasn’t getting the whole story.
And their friends (Richard Masur, Jeff Daniels, Stockard Channing, Milos Forman, et. al.) do nothing but sit around at weddings and dinner parties and picnics and share knowing glances and go “Well, yeah…obviously” and “cluck, cluck, cluck.” I began to really hate this bunch. Do they have lives? If so, do they involve disappointments or failures or betrayals that are similar to the ones being endured by Mark and Rachel? I gradually began to dislike this Greek chorus more than Nicholson’s character, in a way. I wanted at least one of them to get killed in a car crash.
“The movie is full of talented people, who are fun to watch, but after a while the scenes that don’t point anywhere begin to add up, and you start asking yourself: ‘What is this movie about?’,” wrote New Yorker critic Pauline Kael. “You are still asking [this] when it’s over, and by then a flatness, a disappointment, is likely to have settled over the fillips you’d enjoyed.
“Although Ephron is a gifted and a witty light essayist, her novel is no more than a variant of a princess fantasy: Rachel, the wife, is blameless; Mark, the husband, is simply a bad egg — an adulterer. And, reading the book, you don’t have to take Rachel the bratty narrator very seriously; her self-pity is so thinly masked by humor and unabashed mean-spiritedness that you feel that the author is exploiting her life — trashing it by presenting it as a juicy, fast-action comic strip about a marriage of celebrities.”
Fans of those extended uncut shots in Let Me In will recognize the hand of dp Greig Fraser in this carefully choreographed action scene (i.e., Slaine and Sam Shepard roughing up Ray Liotta) from Andrew Dominik‘s Killing Them Softly.
Fraser is either currently shooting or recently wrapped shooting on Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal‘s Zero Dark Thirty. He also shot Snow White and the Huntsman…uggh!
The adaptation of George V. Higgins‘ Coogan’s Trade stars Brad Pitt as Jackie Cogan with James Gandolfini, Richard Jenkins, Slaine, Linara Washington, Bella Heathcote (the beauty from Dark Shadows), Shepard, Scott McNairy, Garret Dillahunt and Ben Mendelson.
So where’s the clip of Pitt doing something or other?
Nikki Finke is reporting/opining that Warner Bros’ and Tim Burton’s Dark Shadows is a shortfaller with about $28 million expected by Sunday night. Divide that figure by 3,755 screens and you’ve got an average of $7456 — not terrible but the droll Johnny Depp vampire comedy was predicted to earn a minimum of $35 million, Finke writes, and it should have opened to at least a $40 to $50 million, especially given the $150 to $175 million cost.
All I know is that I felt intrigue and interest all along but almost everyone I’d read or heard from in the weeks before the opening was dumping on it sight unseen. This weekend’s earnings are about those downish feelings and not the reviews. So what happened? My moderately pleased or placated review ran two days ago.
Klaartje Quirijns‘ Anton Corbijn Inside Out, a portrait of the famed photographer and director of Control, The American and the forthcoming A Most Wanted Man, will have two market screenings in Cannes — at the Arcades 1 on Thursday, 5.17, at 3:30 pm, and at the Arcades 2 on Monday, 5.21, at 2 pm.
My 8.31.10 review of The American. The best party of it stole from Richard Eder’s review of Rancho Deluxe, to wit: “The American is handsome, meditative, elegiac and languid. It’s so coolly artful it is barely alive. First-rate ingredients and a finesse in assembling them do not quite make either a movie or a cake. At some point it is necessary to light the oven.”
My second favorite portion of the 8.31.10 review: “There’s a moment at the very end when George Clooney‘s grim, somber-to-a-fault performance — monotonous and guarded to the point of nothingness, shut and bolted down — suddenly opens up. It’s when he asks the local prostitute to leave with him. For the first time in the film, he smiles. He relaxes and basks in the glow of feeling.
“There’s a little patch of woods by a river that Clooney visits three times. Once to test his rifle, once for a picnic and a swim in the river, and then in the final scene. One too many, perhaps. But his final drive to this spot is almost — almost, I say — on the level of Jean Servais‘ final drive back into Paris in Rififi. For the second and final time in the film Clooney shows something other than steel and grimness.
“The American is worth seeing for this scene alone, and for the final shot when a butterfly flutters off and the camera pans up.”
If someone was to tell me I’ll never be able to watch a movie about a fat kid protagonist, I would think “that’s a strange restriction” and “why would anyone care if I see another fat kid movie or not?” But honestly? I wouldn’t be unhappy about it. Sorry but that’s my position. There’s almost no difference between being obese and being a heroin addict. That aside, I support what Matthew Lillard is trying to do. As a gumption-y thing.
