Here’s a very fine beat-by-beat description of “Diana,” that short-film sequence in Rodrigo Garcia’s Nine Lives that I got all jazzed about in one of my October columns…the one that happens in the supermarket between Robin Wright Penn and Jason Isaacs. The description (accompanied in Sunday’s edition by similar riffs by A.O. Scott and Manohla Dargis) is by the New York Times‘ Stephen Holden. I’m guessing that 97% of the people reading this never saw Nine Lives. Well, it’ll be out on DVD on 2.14.06…just four weeks from now.
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.
Christian Bale in David Ayer’s Harsh Times
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.
Cheaters
There are three serious things wrong with Warner Home Video’s new double-disc “special edition” DVD of The Wild Bunch (on sale Tuesday, 1.10).
The wrongos may not seem like a big deal to some of you, but in my book they constitute a serious cheat on the part of Warner Home Video, enough for me to recommend that loyal Peckinpah fans should steer clear.
Straight-off-the-screen image from Warner Home Video’s “director’s cut” DVD of The Wild Bunch, released in 1997.
From WHV’s new double-disc Bunch that comes out Tuesday, 1.10 — notice the subdued sandy tones and Ben Johnson’s broader features
The things wrong are (a) the not-quite-right color, (b) the slightly distorted (i.e., anamorphically wider than it should be) image, and (c) Warner Bros.’ totally fraudulent promise on the jacket of “Never Before-Seen Additional Scenes.”
The color on the double-disc Bunch (on sale Tuesday, 1.10) feels like an arty-farty atmospheric touch compared to the color on the older single-disc “director’s cut” DVD that came out in May 1997.
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Compare the unmanipulated snaps (above) of the same first-act image on both discs. The color on the double-disc version is clearly desaturated — it has a sandy, brownish, faintly monochromatic hue — compared to the more naturally buoyant color on the ’97 disc.
I didn’t notice the slight anamorphic distortion when I first watched the double-disc version, but compare these two shots again — taken from exactly the same angle and position in front of my TV. Ben Johnson’s face and neck are obviously bulkier in the double-disc “Bunch” image than on the ’97 version.
I don’t know why the WHV guy who did the mastering would produce a Bunch with slightly squatter, heavier characters, but why should anyone bother with it? The differences are obvious, and my Canon digital camera doesn’t shoot what isn’t there.
I shouldn’t have to point out the difference between “Never-Before-Seen Additional Scenes” and “Never-Before-Seen Outtakes“.” The former is promised on the back of the jacket of the double-disc version, and the latter is promised on the main menu of the second disc.
And it’s all outtakes. Some raggedy Wild Bunch footage is all…fragments and odd angles of scenes we’ve all seen before.
That said, there are some good things in the double-disc package.
There’s an excellent documentary about The Wild Bunch‘s legendary director- writer, called “Sam Peckinpah’s West: Legacy of a Hollywod Renegade.” There’s an emotional excerpt from a forthcoming Nick Redman documentary called “A SIMPLE ADVENTURE STORY: Sam Peckinpah, Mexico and The Wild Bunch. And there’s no harm in having the very fine “The Wild Bunch: An Album in Montage”, a 1996 Oscar nominee that first appeared on the ’97 disc, repeated.
But damn it…why did they mess with the integrity of the film? And what’s with the phony claim on the package? The main reason I bought this thing was because I wanted to see the “additional scenes.” This is flim-flammery, plain and simple.
Object d’Art
Billboard on Laurel Canyon Blvd. just south of 134 on-ramp. Snapped on Tuesday, 1.10.06, 9:50 am.
Crash Man
The biggest awards-surge story last week undoubtably belonged to Crash and its director-writer Paul Haggis. The film became one of the biggest all-time indie grossers earlier this year (topping out at $55 million) and now, four months after its DVD release, it’s catching new heat.
Oscar-level expectations for this indie-type ensemble drama about L.A. racism seemed to be very slightly down over the last month or two. But then Hollywood’s four big guilds announced nominations on Wednesday and Thursday and bam, bam, bam, bam…Haggis and Crash were back on the horse and clear contenders for a Best Picture Oscar.
Crash director and cowriter Paul Haggis
Haggis was nominated for the Directors’ Guild of America’s Best Director award, Haggis and co-writer Bobby Moresco were nominated for a Best Original Screen- play by the Writers Guild, the Producers Guild nominated Crash as one of five possible recipients of its Daryl F. Zanuck award and the Screen Actors Guild nominated the Crash cast for an ensemble acting award along with costar Don Cheadle for Best Supporting Actor. That’s a strong consensus.
So I called about speaking to Haggis on Thursday morning and we were chatting two or three hours later. The live broadcast was a bit of a cock-up because of two or three glitches in the sound quality (won’t happen again…I’ve figured out the problem) but I’ve cleaned up most of the choking sounds.
Here’s our 17-minute conversation, which went pretty well and covered Haggis’ script for Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers and Haggis’ next film, a father- and-son film about the Iraqi War tentatively called Death and Dishonor, which Haggis is hoping to get Eastwood to star in.
Old Splendor
“My wife and I went to yesterday’s (Sunday, 1.8) 5 pm screening of Brokeback Mountain at the Tampa Theatre, and we were shocked to find lines around the block. In fact, there were two huge lines — one of ticketholders wrapped around the theater and another waiting to buy tickets.
“Many of us were worried it would sell out; however, we were all able to get in. There was also another huge line waiting to get into the 8 pm showing as we walked out.
“Brokeback was only playing on only one screen in our county (Hillsborough) with even the Sunrise, the one so-called independent theater in our area, not showing it. (They wanted to show it, but the distributor refused.) Thank God for the Tampa Theatre!
A portion of a reportedly very long line to see the 5 pm showing of Brokeback Mountain at the historic Tampa theatre.
“The picture I sent you doesn’t convey how long the lines were, but I’ve never run into this in all the times I’ve gone to see a movie at the Tampa. I’ve always just walked up to the box office…no biggie. The lines reminded me of going to the opening of a Star Wars film and we went on a Sunday!” — Brian Bouton,
Wells footnote: I’ve never been to the Tampa theatre but it’s obviously an archi- tectural treasure. Check out the photos of the lobby and auditorium on the thea- tre’s website…awesome.
The Tampa originally opened nearly 80 years ago, on 10.15.26. The architectural style is called Florida Mediterranean. It cost $1.2 million to build, and was restored in the late ’80s at a cost of $2 million. The very first attraction was The Ace of Cads with Adolph Menjou.
Brokeback Lockouts
Brokeback Mountain did more good business last weekend, but it also ran into conflicts with the moral guardians in Rubeland.
Ang Lee’s film was abruptly pulled on Friday, 1.7, from the Megaplex 17 at Jordan Commons in Salt Lake City, Utah. The decision was reportedly made late Thurs- day, 1.5, although the word didn’t get out until Friday.
The reason appeared to be moral indignation, either on the part of the theatre’s Mormon owner, Larry Miller, or…let’s be imaginative …on the part of local rightie bigwigs who put political pressure on Miller.
Regal Cinemas also pulled it in Poulsbo, Washington, according to reports in the Kitsap Sun and on 365gay.com.
Larry Miller
Regal Cinemas reportedly took the film off the bill on Thursday after it had heavily marketed the movie in the local media. Regal has said that the decision was simply an error and isn’t about censorship, but there’s been some skepticism about this.
“The Regal multiplex movie theater ran ads for Brokeback Mountain in Thursday’s edition of the local Kitsap Sun newspaper and was promoting pre-sale tickets at the theater,” 365gay reports. “But posters at the theater disappeared on late Thursday, and further ads in the paper were cancelled.”
The Salt Lake City situation centers around Miller, known to be an auto dealer, entrepreneur and Utah Jazz owner. He has been described in a news story by Sean Means as “the Louis B. Mayer of Mormon Cinema.”
If Brokeback‘s opening-day business in Salt Lake City was in any way similar to how it was described by readers in St. Louis and Portland, it was probably pretty good. I’ve been told that shows were sold out in advance in SLC, but I don’t know.
Here’s an oddly written local report that ran Friday about Miller’s pulling the Ang Lee film from his theatre.
There’s an IMDB posting claiming that when Miller was asked for comment during a news segment on Fox News 13. He said he wasn’t up for comment or criticism, but added that “immorality is immorality, any way you look at it.”
Reader Mandy Bartels said that “what surprises and disappoints me is that the theater bought the film in good faith, promoted it and sold tickets to eager patrons. Then along comes the owner who pulls it when the queues were already forming to watch it. And then gives a totally lame reason as to why it was pulled.
“This sounds like the 1950s, not the 21st century. It underlines why Brokeback Mountain is so relevant today, despite people thinking we live in a more tolerant society. It seems we haven’t moved on from when the film was set in the 1960s.”
I’ll be nosing around for more reports about this. I suppose I’ll try to call Miller myself this weekend. If anyone was at Miller’s theatre on Friday and can fill in any details, please write in.
Brokeback Mountain added 215 theatres for this weekend and did $1.7 million Friday night. It’s expected to earn about $5.7 for the weekend, and by the end of this weekend the film will have made $22 million.
The cultural impact is obviously spreading, but the initial brushfire has cooled down a bit. It’s doing extremely well in some areas but only fair in others. The per-screen is still strong, but it’s more like $12,000 a print than $24,000 or thereabouts.
Smoke
Flashback
I wrote an item yesterday about the why the reign of New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther, the most powerful film critic in the country from the late 1940s to early ’60s, came to an end in the late ’60s.
It’s common knowledge why — more and more of his reviews showed he was get- ting older and more and more out of it, and that the culture was passing him by.
The fatal blow was Crowther’s April 1967 pan of Arthur Penn and Warren Beatty’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967), a certified 20th Century classic and still great today. Crowther called it “a cheap piece of bald-faced slapstick comedy that treats the hideous depredations of [the lead characters] as though they were as full of fun and frolic as the jazz-age cutups in Thoroughly Modern Millie.”
Faye Dunaway, Denver Pyle in Bonnie and Clyde
I like this passage even better: “Such ridiculous, camp-tinctured travesties of the kind of people these desperados were and of the way people lived in the dusty Southwest back in those barren years might be passed off as candidly commercial movie comedy, nothing more, if the film weren’t reddened with blotches of violence of the most grisly sort.”
I mentioned the Crowther review because I thought Today critic Gene Shalit demonstrated the same kind of disconnect with his recent review of Brokeback Mountain.
It’s fascinating, really fascinating, to read Crowther’s piece alongside Pauline Kael’s 7000-word defense of Bonnie and Clyde in the New Yorker, which appeared seven months after the film’s initial release, and to marvel at how one very smart and learned person can totally miss a good film and how another can absolutely get it and then some.
Seriously…read the Crowther and then the Kael. And try to remember the last time that a seriously prominent and brainy critic splattered egg over his face the way Crowther did.
Respect This Movie
It’s not a rumor and there’s absolutely no question about it: Ridley Scott’s 190- minute “extended cut” version of Kingdom of Heaven is a considerably better film than the 145-minute theatrical version that opened last May (and which came out on DVD on 10.11).
I saw it yesterday afternoon at the seedy-but-functioning Laemmle Fairfax in West Hollywood. The projection and sound were fine, but why is a must-see, calling-all- cars revival like this playing in a theatrical equivalent of a doghouse?
Outside the Laemmle Fairfax — Tuesday, 1.2.06, 7:05 pm.
Stand-up critics ought to review this version for history’s sake, for the sake of salu- ting top-grade filmmaking…whatever. An obviously improved version of what was a respected film to begin with, and from a major director…attention should be paid. When a film this admirable is deliberately gutted by a major studio, critics have an obligation to assess what was what.
Fox has booked this new Kingdom into the Laemmle Fairfax, I presume, as some kind of gesture of respect to Scott, who has made it clear this is the preferred ver- sion. But it shouldn’t just play to an audience of five or six people (like it did at yes- terday afternoon’s 3:45 pm show) in a sub-run theatre and be forgotten.
Every good movie has a prime “fighting weight.” 190 minutes is what Kingdom of Heaven should have been all along, and seeing it at this length proves it.
One presumes the 190-minute version will come out on DVD down the road, but who knows? It’s not that Fox publicists won’t answer any questions. They just don’t know anything (they say), and Kingdom of Heaven is obviously not a priority at this stage, etc.
Last May’s Kingdom was a painterly, politically nutritious meal that felt more than a touch truncated and a bit shy of playing like a true epic-type thing. The longer cut makes it into a fuller, tastier, more banquet-y type deal…sweepier and more sumptuous and better told.
The extra 35 minutes or so adds a good deal more in terms of story and character to an extremely moral (I would call it ethically enlightened), highly perceptive, anti- Christian-right epic.
Orlando Bloom as Balian in Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven
Pretty much every character (except for Ghassan Massoud’s Saladin character, who still generates as much panache and admiration as Orlando Bloom’s Balian) seems more interesting and filled out. And it reveals a significant new character (the blonde-haired son of Eva Green) and a sub-plot about his fate that the shorter version had completely eliminated.
As exacting and stirring as it is in many respects, the improved Kingdom is still, for me, more of a 90% rather than a 100% thing. There’s still something slightly opaque about it. But the longer version is certainly a finer and more substantial film. And this fact makes Fox’s decision to release its shorter, runtier kid brother seem more than a little distasteful.
Only an idiot could have watched both versions last spring (or late winter…when- ever it was that Fox and Scott sorted things through) and not realized that the 190-minute version was the distinctly better film.
Obviously the 145-minute version was released to make room for more shows per day, which theoretically allowed for more money to be made during the first two weeks of play. (The movie was a disappointment anyway. It would up making about $200 million worldwide, which, for a movie that cost $130 million to shoot, wasn’t enough.)
The decision to put out the shorter Kingdom of Heaven was a shameful dereliction of duty in terms of…okay, an admittedly sentimental responsibility that nonethe- less ought to be embraced by all distributors and filmmakers, which is to put the best films they can make before the public.
Tuesday, 1.2.06, 7:06 pm.
In deliberately releasing a not-as-good version in order to increase the chances of making more money during the first 14 days of release, Fox did the “right thing” from the point-of-view of the stockholders, but they betrayed the ticket-buying public…they really did.
Fox and Scott (who didn’t squawk at all about the shorter version being released, and who therefore bears some responsibility) were following a familiar pattern.
DreamWorks pulled the same crap when they released the not-as-good version of Almost Famous instead of the obviously better Unititled that came out on DVD later on. Warner Bros. and the Ladd Company did it also in the early ’80s with a truncated version of Once Upon a Time in America. It’s happened with some other worthy films.
What hasn’t changed about Kingdom of Heaven? All the stuff that was good to begin with.
It’s a big-canvas historical drama that dares to be different by being complex and unusual, and altogether a textural masterpiece.
Has there ever been a big expensive film about warring armies in which one side didn’t triumph absolutely? In which the loser wasn’t totally beaten down and slaughtered? I felt amazed and lifted up when this didn’t manifest…when life and sanity, in effect, is chosen over death and fanaticism.
Bloom, Eva Green
The 12th Century milieu feels entirely authentic, the big siege-of-Jerusalem battle scene totally aces Peter Jackson’s similar third-act sequence in Return of the King, there are fine supporting performances throughout (especially from Jeremy Irons and a masked Edward Norton), and William Monahan’s script, praise Allah, avoids a lot of black-and-white, good-and-evil stereotypes.
New York Times reporter Sharon Waxman wrote a piece last weekend about how the financial failure of Kingdom of Heaven and Elizabethtown (along with the under- whelming U.S. response to Troy) has cast a dark shadow on Orlando Bloom’s career.
All that went out the window when I watched him again yesterday. Bloom may have missed the boat in Cameron Crowe’s film, but he’s got heft and range and really knows how to play a stalwart hero.
The words I wrote last May still apply: “Bloom is bearded, grimy, quiet and steady throughout Kingdom of Heaven. He is manly, in short, and does that classic Jim- my Cagney thing — planting his feet, looking the other guy in the eye and telling the truth. Does he channel Laurence Olivier? No, but Bloom has definitely held his ground here.”
I suppose that the political attitude of this film — respectful and even admiring of the Muslims, contemptuous of the arrogant Christian attitudes that led to war — is partly what I love about Kingdom of Heaven.
The lobby of the Laemmle Fairfax — Tuesday, 1.2.06, 3:35 pm. Kingdom of Heaven is playing in theatre #2.
It’s obviously an impassioned f.u. to the Bush administration’s rationale for being in Iraq. It addresses the fundamental folly of being an occupier, and in fact offers an honorable solution for those who find themselves in this situation.
Fox has acted honorably by letting viewers see the extended version of this film, but it should also do the following:
(a) Don’t just keep Kingdom of Heaven at the Laemmle Fairfax so other critics can come see it (the film is apparently scheduled to play there only until the night of Thursday, January 5th), but schedule a critics’ screening on the lot;
(b) Arange for a similar critics screening in New York City as well as open it at a decent Gotham theatre, and…
(c) Release the “extended” version on DVD before too long.
That Darn Apatow
“Kudos for your stand against the Writers Guild giving a ridiculous nomination to the writers of The 40 Year-old Virgin, Judd Apatow and Steve Carell, for Best Original Screenplay
“As a huge fan of Apatow, I went into the film with high hopes to see something with the charm and freshness of Freaks and Geeks or Undeclared. Instead I sat in disbelief, covering my eyes in embarrassment and cringing when the first 45 minutes consisted of long stretches of badly timed and stilted gags and undercooked characters.
“Honestly, were we to buy that someone like Andy gave up on losing his virginity at some point? Who actually gives up and means it? There’s a difference between giving up on actively pursuing sex and giving up the possibility of sex altogether, and I don’t see someone like Andy, obviously caring and well-adjusted enough to function in a working relationship, doing the latter.
Not that funny, not clever…it hurts when you pull chest hair! Hah-hah!
“Carell seems to play the character this way, and he and Catherine Keener have a kind of touching, warm chemistry together, so what’s with the wafer-thin explana- tion for his virginity that reduces him to a punch-line…someone who had a montage of bad sex and therefore gave up on sex? What gives?
“How does a screenplay sell its characters short and draw them in only the broadest strokes — we are to believe, from the more overwhelmingly supportive critics, that because every character is sweet, the characterization is solid — and get these kinds of accolades for its sensitivity and insight?
“Seemingly tiny but significant character blips like that do not a great screenplay make. Unbelievable.” — Angelo Muredda
“I think I can help shed some light on your question concerning the WGA nom- ination for The 40 Year Old Virgin screenplay.
“It is not, as you put it, ‘bar none one of the most moronic, jaw-dropping calls the WGA has ever made,’ but a recognition of comedy as a genre worthy for awards consideration. Why does something have to be serious in order to be taken seriously? Isn’t the effort to make a film successful, entertaining and funny just as hard as creating one that is successful, entertaining and dramatic?
“I applaud the WGA for getting it right. Last year they nominated the equally worthy Mean Girls, which Tina Fey adapted from a non-fiction self-help book with enormous skill. In fact, if you look at the history of WGA nominations you’ll find that they usually choose more interesting and off-beat choices than the Academy does.
Also not funny or clever…ride shotgun and let the drunk girl drive! Huh?
“You want to talk about the year Steve Martin’s Roxanne actually WON against David Mamet’s The Untouchables and Gustav Hasford, Stanley Kubrick and Michael Herr’s Full Metal Jacket? The Academy didn’t even nominate Martin.
“Whether or not you personally thought 40 Year Old Virgin was funny or not is beside the point. There’s a high level of talent at work in a film that comes off as successfully as Virgin. Perhaps making everything look so easy is precisely why comedies are so often overlooked at awards time.
“Surely you’d agree that a nomination for a comedy like this is more appropriate than those side-splitters Pride and Prejudice and The Squid and the Whale which were chosen over Virgin for recent Golden Globe nominations as Best Motion Picture Comedy.
I, for one, am tired of comedy as being the bastard stepchild of the end of the year awards. And I don’t think I’m alone out there.” — Ron Fassler
That “uppity nigger” line from a draft of Stephen Gaghan’s Syriana script was revealed on Boing-Boing earlier today (12.28), and then a link appeared on Defamer. Tim Blake Nelson doesn’t blurt this term out to Jeffrey Wright in the film (certain people probably would’ve freaked) but I’m sorry Gaghan didn’t just let it rip anyway. The rumpus would have been fun.
Terrence Malick’s The New World (New Line, 12.25) is almost in theatres but enveloped in a deafening silence. I mean, except for the put-down quotes in the Rotten Tomatoes selection of reviews. Salon‘s Stephanie Zacaharek says Malick “may not care much for people, but he never met a tree he didn’t like.” (Somebody previously said this when The Thin Red Line came out, only they used “leaf” instead of “tree.”) She calls it “so much atmospheric tootle…his idea of using actors in a movie is straight out of ‘Where’s Waldo?'” The L.A. Weekly‘s Scott Foundas calls it “suffocating…a movie less interested in expanding the boundaries of narrative cinema than in forsaking them.” The hands-down funniest blurb is from Mike Clark’s USA Today review: “That sound you’re about to hear is the cracking of spines as Terrence Malick enthusiasts like me bend over backward trying to cut The New World a break.” Second prize goes to e-Film Critic’s Eric Childress: “Between the Smith-wanna-poke-a-hontas relationship, the seditious behavior back in Jamestown and the fear of the naturals that their kindness may be turned against them, a story as vast of The New World should serve as more than just a footnote in American history and a stain on the art of storytelling for all eternity.” And yet draggy-final-third and all, it’s still worth seeing…as I tried to explain in my own review: “[During] those first two thirds, The New World is a truly rare animal and movie like no other…a feast of intuitive wow-level naturalism that feels as fresh and vitally alive as newly-sprouted flora.”
Carmike Cinemas Inc. has pledged to install 2300 digital projection systems in its 37-state theatre chain by October 2007….good. Carmike is the first U.S. exhibitor to step up to the plate, dig deep and start rolling with this. The investment will cost them about $150 million. There are currently only about 100 screens in the entire country capable of showing digitally-projected movies. There are roughly 36,000 movie screens in the U.S., so this is only a small first step.
I know we’re all taking off for the holidays, but the failure of major entertainment reporters to step up and face the reality of the Great Middle-American Ho-Humming of King Kong is amazing. This is a hugely surprising story and….zzzzz. Joseph Jones , a reader, says he “saw King Kong last night at an AMC multiplex here in Tampa. We arrived an hour prior to the show, expecting a line (I remember arriving an hour before a showing of Jurassic Park back in 1993 — and still ending up near the back of the line and in dreadful off-to-the-side seats) but we were the first ones there. We were let into the theater a half-hour before the show, and, by this time, there were maybe 10 people. By the time the show started, there were plenty of empty seats…still. I can’t say I share your enthusiasm for the film — I found that first hour pretty much intolerable, the second hour ok, and the third hour fantastic. Yet, by that time, I was grateful for this bombastic flick to finally end. Audience reaction seemed good but not great. I overheard the group behind me saying that they’d enjoyed other films this year more (Batman Begins was mentioned as a preferred film). My companion commented that while there was some truly amazing stuff in the film, there was also a lot of bad stuff in the film. I imagine word-of-mouth is going to be mixed.”
A Birmingham guy named Chance Shirley (great name!)
says he and the missus “went down to the local multiplex last night for a 7:40 Family Stone screening. After hearing your concerns that Fox had dropped the ball marketing-wise, I was surprised that we had trouble finding a seat — the place was packed. It wasn’t long before a theater manager stepped in to let us know Stone would be playing on an additional screen. Both screening rooms were pretty full after all was said and done, and the film seemed to go over well with the audience. We don’t live in the most metropolitan of areas — I’d imagine the movie will play even better in the bigger cities. Thanks for the heads-up — my wife and I both enjoyed it.”
Del Mar Nation
Brokeback Mountain is starting to spread out (it went into 69 theatres on Friday), and that means that sooner or later those gay cowboy jokes on “Late Night with David Letterman” and in Aaron McGruder’s “Boondocks” comic strip will be coming to an end.
The more people see Brokeback, the greater the likelihood that a certain percen- tage will start to understand that gay cowboys and high-altitude pokin’ in the pup tent ain’t the point. It’s a way into the film’s real subject, which is the terrible price of letting a good thing go.
Jake Gyllenhaal, Heath Ledger in Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain
I mean the tragedy of a person feeling love or passion for something (a relationship, a career ambition, a creative dream) and not doing anything about it. If this movie sinks in like it’s meant to, it’ll hit you on the way home that turning away from a good and spiritually nourishing pursuit in whatever form is the saddest ride in the world.
The most tragic of Brokeback‘s frustrated cowboy lovers is Heath Ledger’s Ennis del Mar because he’s the most heavily invested in denial and pushin’ it all down. I’ve known a lot of people in a lot of cities and towns, and there are tens of thousands of Ennis del Mars out there…guys holdin’ down jobs, mindin’ the kids, pluggin’ along and not diggin’ into that special place.
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And doin’ some heavy deep-down witherin’. Everyone has a secret unfulfilled dream but how many step up and try to really grab it? Damn few.
I would submit, in fact, that Ennis del Mar-ism is the hurtin’-est American tragedy of all. As spiritual killers go, it’s worse than poverty or bad luck or divorce or depression or whatever substance addiction you can name.
Getting stuck in one of these issues needn’t be more than a temporary sidetrack thing…waist-deep quicksand…but failing to embrace that One Big Thing in your life is terrible permanent rain.
I’ve been there myself. I was almost Ennis del Mar before I got going in journalism in the late ’70s. Every now and then I feel like him in an emotional sense… shut down, doin’ the work, keepin’ it together so I can wake up the next day and do the same thing.
I’ve known lots of late-30ish and 40ish guys in smallish towns in Connecticut, Massachucetts, New Jersey and northern California who fit the Ennis mode more fully than myself….way.
A guy I know says he doesn’t relate to del Mar-ism because he doesn’t feel put-upon by life. He futher believes that most of the Academy members are the same.
To get into the Motion Picture Academy you have to be a go-getter, and these people won’t relate to the sadness of a uneducated loser who lacks the gumption to stand up and try to cure what’s ailing him. I don’t think Academy people are anywhere near that shallow, but he could be right.
It might also be that straight American males everywhere along with their wives will blow off Brokeback Mountain and never even consider that it’s much more about them more than a couple of cowpoke queers. It would be a shame if that happened, but it might.
I’d like to hear some thoughts about this, and if any good ones come in I promise to actually run them.
Slash Girls
“Just a comment about straight men and their wives not going to Brokeback Mountain. Jeffrey, their wives will be going with the other wives. The straight husbands can stay home, hon.
“I’m constantly amazed by the perception of many men, straight and gay, that women ‘won’t be attracted to guy/guy action.’ Do these guys ever get out and ask women about this? Roger Ebert said it the other night on some show, and Roeper agreed. Women just ‘don’t get off on guys kissing.’
“Well, hello…wrong. So so wrong. We just love it. Can’t get enough. Not all of us to be sure, but sufficient numbers for there to be thousands of websites dedicated to the phenomen called ‘slash.’ Mostly derived from television shows and films, but many other fan fics and genuine gay romances.
Heath Ledger, director Ang Lee during Brokeback Mountain shoot
“This is our movie…the slash movie we women have been waiting for forever. We own this film just as much as the gay guys, which makes for some fascinating territorial stakeouts and debates at times on the boards. But we generally enjoy the debates cuz we’re all really on the same side here.
“And we’re gonna be there in droves. Some of us will see it 10 or 20 times. It’s hot. That idiot publicist who said Jake Gyllenhaal’s career would be down the tubes because his teen fanbase would disown him should get a new job. His fanbase will multiply tenfold among women with this film.
“Women write about guy/guy action, guy/guy romance, and they buy gay porn and go to gay movies. And most of the women are straight, married (happily) and thirty to seventy.
“Do you know? Have you heard about this? If so, perhaps you might include it in a later column to just enlighten those poor guys who don’t know what their women are secretly fantasizing about.
“I’m from Australia by the way and will see Brokeback Mountain in a month with some girlfriends. My husband won’t go near it.” — Mandy Bartels, Melbourne.
“Later” Factor
“I still think the main reason behind Kong‘s good-but-not- great opening is the running time. And it’s not just because it has fewer shows per day.
“Of all the big critics, I think Richard Roeper is the first one I’ve heard to finally get it. Going to the movies is becoming an ordeal. Rude crowds, too many ads, ticket and concession prices through the roof, etc. Now tack on the fact that Kong is over three hours.
“What normal person (i.e. non-movie critic) can take that much time off on a weeknight, or during a busy holiday weekend? Throw in the walk from the parking lot (which in the big entertainment complexes like Universal can take 15 minutes) and the ads/trailers and you’re literally killing half a day.
“I know the Harry Potter and Rings flicks ran long, but they had a built-in audience that came aboard before the ‘big chill.’ Any new movie running more than 2 1/2 hours had better be pretty damn special. And the must-see factor for Kong, at least around here, just isn’t there.
“It’s basically seen as a bunch of critical darlings and B-list stars in a remake of a movie everyone has seen featuring a lot of been-there-done-that Lost World special effects. Of course, we know it rises above that level, but it’s going to be a chore to get people out to realize it.
“Kong will make back its money, but only after everyone buys it on DVD to play on the home theater system they got for Christmas. Then folks can play it at their leisure, maybe an hour at a time, where they can fast-forward through the ads and not have to listen to someone chatting on her cell phone.” — Rich Swank
Kong vs. Females
“A reader suggested that King Kong‘s less-than-stellar business so far is due in part to ‘average female moviegoers being too shallow to be brought into the theater without a pretty face.’
“I think that statement is a little shallow. I probably won’t see Kong this weekend for a bunch of reasons, none of which has to do with pretty or unpretty faces.
“One, I’ve already seen this movie. I know, I know…it’s been reconfigured masterfully for a new age and audience. But what made that first movie so cool was that first shock when the soon-to-be-sacrificed Faye realizes exactly what she is being sacrificed to. When Kong turns the corner and comes into view…wow! And Kong climbing up the tallest building in the world to make his last stand? Also very cool. But alas, in 2005…been there, done that.
“Two, I’ve seen enough in the way of dinosaur chases and predatory behavior in Jurassic Park and its lame sequels to last a lifetime. And throwing Kong in as an adversary will not, I think, make them more interesting (a view that seems to be shared by a good number of critics who point out that the CG fights in this new film go on way too long).
“Three, and the biggest reason: I just don’t like non-verbal romances regardless of what the faces of the leads look like. Give me that artful banter back and forth between the leads in a romantic comecy or the heartfelt linguistic nuances of separation and loss in a weeper. Soulful glances can only go so far and this ape has never been much for conversation.
“Intelligent, heartfelt conversation between two people gets me every time. (You know, like that terrific conversation on wine and grape- growing in Sideways between Madsen and Giamatti, that guy who pulled in the female contingent with his pretty face.)” — Zoey
…And This Brooks Guy
“I went to see King Kong this afternoon and I have to say that for me this movie just did not work. I enjoyed the Lord of the Rings films, although I’m not a huge fan, and was looking forward to Kong but this thing is at least 45 minutes too long. The beginning dragged on forever. I think that is what is going to hurt the film the most.
“By the time you get to the island you just don’t care that much. The effects for the most part are great, Kong was especially well done, but a little restraint would have made this a much better film.
“Why do directors, once they have some success, think that every scene and every shot is pure gold? I have the same complaint about Spielberg. He needs someone to trim his movies down a bit. They’re always about 20 minutes longer than necessary.
“I actually watched the original Kong a few weeks ago on Turner Classic Movies, and in some ways I prefer the original. They knew what type of movie they were making. They didn’t inflate it to something it’s not.
“The thing I resented most about Jackson’s remake what that he tried so hard to make you cry. I took my wife, who cries at the drop of hat for any movie, and she didn’t shed a tear.
“I could feel the audience growing restless as the picture went on. If you go to enough movies you can tell when people are not getting into a film. I don’t think it’s going to get the repeat business Universal hopes that it will. By the end I was sitting waiting for Kong to die just so I could out of the theater.” — Steven Brooks
World Class
Much of Terrence Malick’s The New World (New Line, 12.25) is masterful, and I’m not just blah-blahing. It’s sensually mesmerizing and caressed with my idea of real genius. It is also, commercially speaking, a kind of kamikaze film, in part because of a certain call made by Malick regarding the love-story plotline.
Ten days away from its Christmas Day opening and if I know anything, The New World is fixin’ to die. Plus there’s no critics-group awards to sustain interest among the cinefiles or any hope of above-the-line Oscar nominations in January. But forget all of this because The New World should absolutely be seen.
Colin Farrell in Terence Malick’s in The New World
It’s the kind of half-great movie that is more than worth the ride because of it has so many wondrous elements. The photography and textures and aromas are nearly all, and for a while they’re nearly enough. The New World may leave you feeling betrayed, but you won’t feel undernourished.
Endings are everything, and the final third of this film (lasting roughly 40 minutes) doesn’t make it at all. Because Malick, gifted but mule stubborn, is off in his own realm, and the task of supplying a story that you and your friends might want to see isn’t worth his heavy-cat consideration.
The New World‘s drawn-out, epilogue-like final act is, in fact, an example of abrupt story betrayal and audience abandonment. It should be picked over in filmmaking classes at USC and NYU in years to come as a lesson in what a director looking to survive in the world of commercial filmmaking should never ever do.
A few weeks ago The New World producer Sarah Green told the New York Times that “first and foremost we’ve created a love story.” This is unmistakably true for the first 100 or so minutes, and in a near-revolutionary sense.
The legendary, historically fanciful saga of British explorer John Smith (Colin Farrell) and the teenaged Pocahantas (Q’orianka Kilcher) in early 1660s Virginia feels vitally alive and re-imagined as a kind of naturalist culture-clash love story… largely non-verbal, visually haunting…primal atmosphere seeping out of every frame.
Colin Farrell, Q’oiriana Kilcher
Green also told the Times, “We’re definitely not doing a historical piece. We try to set it properly…we try to give that background and that feeling, but we focus on the love story.” As far as the last act is concerned, that’s a distortion.
The Farrell-Kilcher love story is totally abandoned (and in a very brusque and alienating way at that) and the film pretty much sticks to the historically accepted story of Pocahantas’ life for the last third — marriage to a wealthy English tobacco grower named John Rolfe (Christian Bale), bearing a child, travelling to England to meet the King and Queen, and an early death.
The failure of The New World ending is entirely due to the fact that this final section plays like a postscript. But for those first two thirds, The New World is a truly rare animal and movie like no other…a feast of intuitive wow-level naturalism that feels as fresh and vitally alive as newly-sprouted flora.
This is the forest primeval, all right…the native Americans (“naturals”) and English settlers eyeballing each other amid the mumuring pines and hemlocks, and then prodding, spearing, shooting and finally accepting each other in a step-by-step evolving cultural passion play.
I’ve respected Terrence Malick as a genius all of my filmgoing life. I knew that before but I was reminded once again when I sat down with this film in late November. And I’m truly glad to live in a world that gives up a Malick film every five or six years.
But he’s so imbedded in his own head that he can’t deliver a halfway satisfying commercial movie. I don’t mean formulaic. I mean a film that simply satisfies like his two best films, Badlands and Days of Heaven, did 32 and 27 years ago, respectively.
I was going to say Malick is a “compositional” genius rather than an overall genius, but I have to repeat that the first 100 minutes of The New World were, for me, truly exquisite. Exquisite in the way that profound visual art always is.
The film is heart-stoppingly beautiful at times. The acting is all about eyes and faces and initmations…hardly anyone says anything, and most of the dialogue arrives in the form of internal narration.
The only person who speaks from the diaphragm in complete sentences with any clarity is costar Christopher Plummer. Everyone else and every plot turn is conveyed in mutters, whispers and meditative voice-overs. You get what’s happening bit by bit but Malick refuses to spell anything out in Hollywood connect-the-dots terms.
The feeling of primal aliveness in this film is a real pore-opener. Call it an aura of naturalism — a feeling that you’re really and truly there with the moisture and the mud on your feet…the grime and hard work and smell of the leaves and the soil….the worshipping of nature’s magnificence and terror. It really and truly is Virginia in the 1600s coming off the screen and sinking into your eco-system.
Q’orianka Kilcher
There’s a truly wondrous sequence about Farrell having been accepted into Pocahantas’s tribe and taking part in their rituals. And there’s a truly amazing battle scene in which you don’t see the big picture, but how it is to be right in the middle of it. Extraordinary isn’t the word.
There’s no Hollywood crap in any of it. This is a kind of filmmaking you’re just not going to get from anyone in the mainstream realm. I wasn’t just impressed with the first 100 minutes or so. I was close to levitating at times.
James Horner’s fugue-like music is startling — a kind of a droning thing with one or two notes played continuously, like some kind of foghorn symphony.
Emmanuel Lubezki’s cinematography, Jack Fisk’s art direction, the set decoration by Jim Erickson (those ships!) and costumes by Jacqueline West, and the sometimes mind-spinning editing by Richard Chew, Hank Corwin, Sara Klein and Mark Yoshikawa…what a magnificent thing to sink into.
And then about 100 minutes in, Malick drops the bomb, pulls the rug out and leaves you emotionally stranded without a love story to hang onto. But before I explain…
Spoiler Alert!
Farrell’s Smith decides that he and Kilcher are doomed because their cultures are so at odds and her association with him will only cause her harm. So he does the hard thing and blows her off.
Love stories, of course, are about overcoming odds,but there’s no such effort here, much less an effort on Malick’s part to clearly explain Smith’s thinking. The way it plays is that Farrell does a cold and shitty thing by abandoning Kilcher for the sake of career opportunism, since he’s been offered an assignment to explore the northeast territories.
And Farrell doesn’t even break the news to her straight, like a man of some marginal tenderness or compassion (which is how he’s been portrayed up to this point) might do. He doesn’t even say, “Sorry, gotta move on”…which would have been bad enough. Farrell just bails, but before doing so gets Noah Taylor (the Shine and Almost Famous guy) to tell her after a couple of months that he’s drowned.
I liked Farrell up to that point and really invested in the thing he and Kilcher had together, but blowing her off like that and skipping out the back door is unconscionable. I turned on him and the movie at that point. I said to myself, “Did that just happen?”
So Malick carefully builds the love story, weaving it into the whole, and then he pulls the rug out and shifts gears in order to tell the historically true tale about Pocahantas marrying and having the kid and going to England and all.
This is a shitty development to throw into a movie that gives every indication (on top of Sarah Green’s earnest statements to the New York Times) it’s primarily about the Colin-and-Q’orianka love story…which the poster in the lobby obviously declares.
Am I saying I want to see the animated Disney Pocahantas all over again but with Malick-y textures and mood and photography and real actors? No. I want a third option of some kind.
I wanted a little Days of Heaven thrown in, perhaps. When Christian Bale came along, I said to myself (and another person who was at the screening told me they had the same reaction), “Oh, I get it…Bale is Sam Shepard in Days of Heaven. And Farrell is going to come back and somehow redeem himself in her eyes and Bale or Farrell will have a showdown and maybe one of them will die.”
But that’s not it. And how could Farrell redeem himself anyway? A tough thing, given what he’s done to Kilcher, particularly the way he’s done it.
I felt profoundly invested in Farrell and Kilcher, dammit, and since part of me is a 17 year-old girl munching popcorn, it felt seriously, criminally wrong to throw their love story out like the garbage.
Malick does a wonderful job of making me care about these two because he does it so unusually and with such feeling, not just in the two of them but their merging within his nature suite….and then he simply stops caring about them.
Blanche Dubois said it: deliberate cruelty is not forgivable. And Farrell breaking that poor teenage girl’s heart is that.
If you were sitting around a campfire and somebody told you the story of The New World, you’d probably say, “That’s a love story? It’s not even a good story. It starts one way and then goes another way and doesn’t pay off.”
Which is kind of what someone in the lobby after the screening that I attended: “Yeah….what was that?”
An industry friend says it’s the kind of film in which “you come out humming the sets.” His first reaction last night was, “Malick doesn’t know how to tell a story. He’s totally stuck on himself and he’s living in his own realm.”
I said to a friend right after seeing it, “This is the kind of movie made by a guy who’s spent way too much time in his his oak-panelled library, reading books and smoking a pipe and looking out upon the grounds at sunset.”
That friend told me I’m missing the point and the film is actually about assimilation. Okay, I can see that. And I can just imagine the over-25s, couples and upscales coming out of the theatre and saying, “That was one great movie about cultural assimilation!”
So Terrence Malick is a genius, but a genius who needs a like-minded but tough and practical producer who can stand up to him and talk back when it’s appropriate and call his creative bluff when push comes to shove…and he didn’t have that here.
Read again the story about how Bert and Harold Schneider made him trim Days of Heaven from a three-hour or two-and-a-half-hour cut to 97 minutes, which is how long that beautiful film lasts.
Even Mike Medavoy, who’s known Malick for decades, couldn’t wrestle Terry to the ground and make him trim The Thin Red Line into a tighter, less meditative thing. (The script was much leaner thanj the film…the emphasis that the film had on alligators, leaves and trees and all that meditative “who are we and why do we create such havoc in our lives?” narration crap wasn’t there…I read it and I know.)
And if Medavoy couldn’t get to Malick, you know Sarah Green couldn’t. It’s pretty clear that The New World wasn’t made with any ideas of regular-Joe audiences finding their way into it. It’s about Malick’s vision and nothing much beyond that. That’s the wonder and frustration of it.
Best and Worst of `05
I can’t do a Ten Best of ’05 of list — the number has to be fourteen. And I had to include 28 films on the “Pretty Damn Good” roster, and I had to make a special mention of Terrence Malick’s stunningly see-worthy shortfaller, The New World.
That’s a total of 43 very good-to-sublime films released this year, or a little less than one every nine days. Not a bad tally, and arguably one of the more distin- guished in recent years, and with the makings of a rip-snortin’ Oscar fight in January and February.
Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal in Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain
Just do the fast-rewind for a second…the finely-tuned austerity of A History of Violence and Match Point, the note-perfect Capote, the spookiness of Cache, the sad and tremulous Brokeback Mountain, the familial warmth of films like Hustle & Flow, In Her Shoes and The Family Stone, the Van Santian purity of Last Days, the bleached-bleary paranoia of Syriana, the Lawrence of Arabia-like sweep of Bob Dylan: No Direction Home…and that’s just scratching it.
I’ve kept the docs separate except for Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man, which gets spookier and spookier the more I watch it and fully deserves its own space, and Martin Scorsese’s masterful Bob Dylan: No Direction Home. Some films (like Cameron Crowe’s Elizabethtown ) were special cases and required a stand-alone mention. And of course, nearly all the super-stinkos were expensive big- studio releases.
I’ve only listed 102 films so I’ve obviously left a lot out. There are plenty I still haven’t seen. And some just don’t matter. I couldn’t think of a single thing to say, good or bad, about Thomas Vinterberg’s Dear Wendy or John Stockwell’s Into the Blue, for example.
The listings in each category are in order of personal preference. Suggestions about films I’ve omitted and should have added to this or that category are welcome. I’m sure there are several.
Creme de la Creme: Brokeback Mountain, Capote, The Constant Gardener, A History of Violence, Hustle & Flow, In Her Shoes, Match Point, The Family Stone, Crash, Cinderella Man, The Beautiful Country, Last Days, Grizzly Man, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (14).
Early scene in Thomas Bezucha’s The Family Stone
70% Masterful…Merging of Lovers From Different Cultures in the Midst of a Splendorous Natural Symphony…But Goes off The Rails, Drop-Kicks the Mood and Leaves You Stranded at the 110-Minute Mark : The New World (1)
Pretty Damn Good: Good Night and Good Luck, The Wedding Crashers, Syriana, The Aristocrats, Batman Begins, Broken Flowers, Bob Dylan: No Direction Home, Cache (Hidden), The Interpreter (for the bomb-on-the-bus scene alone), King Kong (if you can excuse the first 70 minutes), Nine Lives (for Robin Wright Penn alone), Cronicas, The Beat That My Heart Skipped, The Squid and the Whale (Noah Baumbach has an assured place at the table), The Upside of Anger (for Kevin Costner’s performance) , The Thing About My Folks (for Peter Falk’s performance), Mrs. Henderson Presents, Kung Fu Hustle, Kingdom of Heaven, Rent, Broken Flowers, Brothers (for Connie Nielsen’s performance and the austere and upfront tone of Suzanne Bier’s direction), The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, War of the Worlds, Casanova, My Date With Drew (a good-humored rendering of a metaphor about youthful pluck and persistence and team spirit), My Summer of Love, Paradise Now. (26)
Not Half Bad: The Producers, The Dying Gaul, The World’s Fastest Indian, Four Brothers, Layer Cake, The Great Raid, Reel Paradise, Green Street Hooligans, Everything is Illuminated, Proof, Dreamer: Inspired by a True Story, Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride, Dominion: Prequel to The Exorcist (13)
Hayden Christensen’s tormented Annakin Skywalker
Unquestionable Failure That Nonetheless Half-Saves Itself as It Comes to a Close: Elizabethtown (1)
Biggest Bummer (and splattered milkshakes don’t matter): The Weather Man (1)
Solid First Stab by Talented Director: Scott Caan’s Dallas 362 . (1)
Grudging Approval (i.e., respect for an obviously first-rate film that I didn’t partic- ularly enjoy watching all that much): Wong Kar Wai’s 2046 (1)
Blaaah: Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, North Country, Shopgirl, Jarhead, The Libertine (5)
Tediously Acceptable: The 40 Year-Old Virgin (Catherine Keener’s fine perform- ance helped); March of the Penguins. (2)
Crap Marginally Redeemed By…: Sin City (heavenly Nevada silver-mine black- and-white photography); House of Wax (Paris Hilton’s death and some fairly inventive pizazz shown by director Jaume Collet-Serra. (2)
Cavalcade of Crap…Moneyed, Honeyed, Sullied…an Affront to The Once Semi-Respectable Tradition of Mainstream Hollywood Filmmaking: The Dukes of Hazzard, The Island, Bewitched, Rumor Has it, Deuce Bigalow: Euro- pean Gigolo, Must Love Dogs, Memoirs of a Geisha, Domino, The Legend of Zorro, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Constantine, Aeon Flux, Fantastic Four, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous . (15)
Owen Wilson, Vince Vaughn in The Wedding Crashers
Final Enduring Proof of George Lucas’s Mediocre Soul : Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith (1)
Best Docs (after Grizzly Man and Bob Dylan: No Directon Home): Why We Fight, Gunner Palace, Mondovino, Favela Rising, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, Mad Hot Ballroom, Tell Them Who You Are, One Bright Shining Moment: The Forgotten Summer of George McGovern (for the tribute factor alone…McGovern is such a respectable man), Rize, The Last Mogul, Murderball, Occupation: Dreamland (12)
Never Saw’ Em: Ballet Russes (apologies to the hard-working Mickey Cottrell and the all-around good guy producer Jonathan Dana, who repped it), The Ice Harvest, Oliver Twist, Little Manhattan, Transamerica, The Prizewinner of Defiance, Ohio, Forty Shades of Blue, Get Rich or Die Tryin’, You and Me and Everyone We Know (9)
Favorite DVDs of the Year: Two Criterion special editions — Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’eclisse and Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar.
Worst DVD of the Year: Fox Home Video’s two-disc Oklahoma! because of the appallingly bad mastering of the Todd AO verison of the film, which looks worse than any version of this film ever put out, including the VHS versions in the ’80s. I said before that the executive who approved this should be fired. I was wrong to say this. He should be hung by his thumbs.
Jon Cusack, Diane Lane in Must Love Dogs
Thick as Thieves
Once again reactions to Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man have people shaking their heads and asking “what the hell?” And once again there’s reason to ask why the members of the Motion Picture Academy’s Documentary Executive Committee continue to hold to a tendency to make total boob-level decisions.
Knowledgable people everywhere were appalled when Herzog’s brilliant examina- tion of the life of Timothy Treadwell, a self-promoting grizzly bear obsessive who wound up getting eaten by one, didn’t make the committee’s short list of doc fin- alists, which was announced on 11.15.05.
The late Timothy Treadwell as presented in Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man
And now the committee’s oversight is being examined once again in the wake of Grizzly Man having been named the year’s best feature-length documentary by four respected critics groups — the New York Film Critics Circle, the Los Angel- es Film Critics, the New York Online Film Critics and the San Francisco Film Critics — over the last four days.
The doc committee, chaired this year by Freda Mock, of course isn’t obliged to agree with film critics groups in its choice of the year’s finest. But with four different groups of obviously passionate film lovers picking Grizzly Man, wouldn’t you think the AMPAS committee would have at least included it on the preliminary list of finalists?
Obviously there’s a major disconnect going on here.
I called around about this and all I hear are the usual throwaway comments. A publicist who asked for anonymity said the documentary committee is “a curious bunch.” A nameless documentary filmmaker I spoke to said, “You never know about these people.”
It’s been suggested here and there that Grizzly Man didn’t rate in the committee’s eyes because it’s composed of mostly found video footage — i.e., Treadwell’s — or because Herzog edited the film for a relatively short period of time. Whatever.
I called an Academy spokesperson this afternoon for some sort of explanation or comment about this disparity of opinion. She declined.
Lion’s Gate Home Entertainment will be releasing a DVD of Grizzly Man on DVD on Tuesday, 12.26.
Words for Kevin
I’m not sure if people are getting how reborn Kevin Costner is these days. I don’t know him and I’m not claiming any special insight, but over the last two or three years Costner seems to have remade himself into this quietly self-amused older guy who just ambles along and instinctually gets everything and could almost be Bruno Ganz in Wings of Desire.
People who try really hard to please are exhausting. (Case in point: Sarah Jessica Parker’s bitch from Bedford in The Family Stone.) Costner is pleasing these days because he doesn’t seem to trying at all, and because not trying is a very clever play.
Kevin Costner in The Upside of Anger
I’m not talking about Open Range (2003), which was his first big career-turnaround film. I’m talking about how Costner seemed to become this other guy when he put on the jacket of a supporting actor in Mike Binder’s The Upside of Anger, and the way he’s done it again in Rob Reiner’s Rumor Has It (Warner Bros., 12.25).
Rumor is what it is, but at least Costner makes his scenes play pretty well on their own. The ability to make tepid dialogue sound fairly good is something to respect, I think. This is partly due to the fact that there’s no middle-aged actor around these days who seems quite as settled into himself.
I remember reading in some weekly mag puff piece about 15 years ago that Cost- ner doesn’t work out, and thinking this was kind of a funny attitude. Now I get it. Costner is Mr. Anglo-Dangle Bojangles…the laid-back guy in loose shoes who can charm without trying but just as easily let the whole thing go if the vibe’s not right.
There’s just something zen about him now, and he couldn’t have gotten to this place if he hadn’t been Mr. Big Swinging Dick with his Oscar and the failures of Waterworld, Wyatt Earp and The Postman. He had to go down and come back from that.
In a semi-fair world, Costner would be getting talked up as a Best Supporting Actor for his Anger schmanger…like he is right here and now.
Good move by the Los Angeles Film critics Association in giving the great Terrence Howard its “New Generation” award because ’05 was such a great breakout year for the guy (Hustle & Flow, Crash, Get Rich or Die Tryin’). Then again, the fact that Howard has been kicking around for quite a while makes the notion of him being a “New Generation” anything sound like a stretch. And LAFCA’s decision overlooks the very noteworthy fact that 2005 was Rachel McAdams‘ breakout year as much as anyone else’s. She stepped right up last summer and became the new Julia Roberts…signed, sealed, done deal. No, a better Julia Roberts!
Here we were beating a dead horse, but in the case of Memoirs of a Geisha (Columbia, opening today) it seems fair to note in the wake of the overwhelmingly negative reviews that the chances of this production-designed-and-costumed-to-death period chick flick rating as a Best Picture contender are close to virtually nil. Salon ‘s Stephanie Zacaharek, expressing the general consensus, says that Geisha has “no life, no juice. Instead of tempting you into submission, it merely drugs you.” Academy members can put it up for this or that tech award, but with Geisha getting slammed by the vast majority of big-gun critics (including the New York Times‘ Manohla Dargis, the L.A. Times‘ Carina Chocano and the Wall Street Journal‘s Joe Morgenstern) and racking up a sad 31% Rotten Tomatoes rating, anyone looking to seriously push it for Best Picture is going to look like some kind of clueless clod. Even Zhang Ziyi’s performance won’t have much heat either after today. “Ms. Zhang…shows none of the heartache and steel of her astonishing performance in Wong Kar-wai’s 2046,” Dargis observes. “When her character crumbles with desire in that film, Ms. Zhang’s face seems to break into pieces — you can scarcely believe she could put it whole again. Here [in Geisha], you can hardly believe it’s the same actress.”
Munich Shortfall
I’m not trying to be a hard-ass for the sake of being a hard-ass, but I can’t get on the Oscar boat for Steven Spielberg’s Munich (Universal, 12.23).
It’s a pretty good movie, but the Best Picture hoo-hah seems a tiny bit forced given what this film truly is in the light of day. If you ask me those prognosticators who’ve already said “this is it!” are conning themselves.
One of the Black September hostage-takers during the actual 1972 Munich Olympic Games standoff
Directed by Spielberg and written (for the most part) by Tony Kushner and Eric Roth, Munich is a longish (160 minutes), thoughtful drama about Israel’s revenge campaign against the perpetrators of the 1972 Munich Olympic Games killings of Israeli atheletes. It’s strong, meaningful and well-intended…but I don’t get all the jumping up and down.
I’m talking about the proclamations about it being the new Best Picture front-run- ner. It’s in the running, I guess, but it sure as shit is no shoo-in.
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I spoke last night to a guy who’ll be voting this Saturday with the L.A. Film Critics, and we had both just seen Munich and were talking about the Best Picture Oscar contest, and he said, “I don’t know if [Munich] will even get nominated.”
He may have been overly dismissive, okay, but any seasoned film guy making such a statement should give you a hint about what’s going on here.
I felt the euphoric current at the DGA theatre last year after seeing Million Dollar Baby — I was levitating — but nothing like this kicked in last night inside theatre #5 at the AMC Century City.
Munich wants first and foremost to say something earnest about the legacy of political killing. It’s a movie that doesn’t quite cry out for peace, but is clearly asking for it. It connects here and there in short bursts, but it mainly achieves a general mezzo-mezzo effect of “okay, good point, we get it.”
Which is why I don’t get the effusive praise from Time‘s Richard Schickel and Fox 411’s Roger Friedman and what I presume will be an oncoming tide of kiss-assers …the Spielberg kowtow brigade looking to show obeisance before power.
David Poland was more measured in his “Hot Button” reaction on Monday night, but he still believes from a hard-nosed realpolitik standpoint that Munich is the presumptive Best Picture winner, and that’s just wrong. Perhaps not inaccurate, but dead fucking “wrong” because Best Picture Oscars shouldn’t go to good movies that say the right thing, etc. but don’t inspire major passion.
Really exceptional movies always get people deep down in one way or another. They provoke, excite…make you choke up. They almost always deliver some kind of intrigue that usually builds and gains upon reflection. But I was not so moved last night.
I didn’t conduct a poll in theatre #5 but I could “feel the room” as the film unspooled and I’d be surprised if Munich aroused any go-for-broke fervor. But I’ll bet every last critic who saw it last night, if you were to pop the question, would say it’s a “good film” or “very strong” or “important.”
Steven Spielberg conferring with Eric Bana (shades) during last summer’s shooting of Munich
And it is that. Munich is a smart and stirring ride. It’s still with me this morning, still pinging around in my rib cage…and yes, I respect where it’s coming from and how Spielberg has organized the journey, for the most part.
And yes, of course, I agree with and support what Munich is saying about the rotten karma that comes out of any act of murder.
Munich is saying that however well justified or rationalized those revenge killings may have been, the air was still befouled and the spiritual effects upon three of the Mossad team — sensitive Israeli assassins played by Eric Bana, Mathieu Kosso- vitz and Ciaran Hinds — were disturbing and unsettling.
(Honestly? I felt almost relieved that two other guys on the team — Daniel Craig’s character and some older guy — don’t seem to pay the price as much. I don’t know why exactly, but I was vaguely comforted by these two being hardcore enough to just do the friggin’ job sans guilt trips.)
As a man with two sons, as a film critic, as a movie fiend…I side with any movie that says “killing is bad” or “killing others…even those who may deserve to die …will let loose a virus in your soul.”
But Munich rarely rises above the level of being dutiful, thoughtful and morally correct. All it is, really, is a sprawling here-and-there procedural with a gathering sense of moral disquiet. That’s a fine and respectable thing, but it doesn’t exactly set off tremors or firecrackers.
Eric Bana, Geoffrey Rush
Michael Lonsdale (whose performance as the investigator in Fred Zinneman’s The Day of the Jackal is one of my all-time favorites) is the best element in Munich. I also quite enjoyed the performance by Mathieu Almaric (last seen in Kings and Queen) as Lonsdale’s churlish son.
There is hoopla over Munich because it’s on the cover of this week’s Time and because the Best Picture situation is very much in flux and everyone’s looking for another Million Dollar Baby to sweep them off their feet.
I can sense a psychological eagerness to consider an end-of-the-year Spielberg movie about the ethical costs and karma of revenge…about the quandaries facing Jews and anti-Zionists in the Middle East as their conflict persists. Journos are primed because it’s that time of year and this is Spielberg-getting-all-morally- earnest-in-December and because everyone’s been saying “Munich is coming, Munich is coming” since last spring.
And everyone wants to savor Spielberg’s second big-statement movie about what good people have done when Jews have been killed because they’re Jews…killed by haters, racists, Nazis, anti-Zionists.
Oskar Schindler did what he did in Schindler’s List and became known to the audi- ence (as he had to his biographers) as a good, compassionate, peculiar, complex man. And the Mossad team led by Eric Bana are reasonably decent guys who go out and do what they do, and the virus of murder and retribution gets into their hearts and systems and they begin to pay the price.
And poor Eric Bana’s character gets the worst of it because he finds it hard to concentrate on making love to his lusciously sexy wife in their Brooklyn apartment because he can’t get those images and sounds of the massacre at the Munich airport in ’72 out of his head…images and sounds he absorbed from TV coverage because he wasn’t there.
I’m not trying to be a smart-ass, but this bizarre sex scene reminded me a tiny bit of Woody Allen’s Alvy Singer not making love to Carol Kane in Annie Hall because he can’t stop talking about the Kennedy assassination and the Warren Report.
Is Munich profound? Is there anything earth-shaking here? In what way does this film step out and grab you by the shirt collar and say, “Wake up!” In what way does it rock anyone’s world in terms of technique, even?
Okay, it feels in some ways like a ’70s film…but that’s not making me shudder or leap out of my seat as I acknowledge this.
The most riveting portions, as you might expect, are about how the killings of the members and supporters of the Munich operation (the core group was known as “Black September”) are carried out, and what goes wrong. The strongest happen early on — a killing in Rome and then another in Paris, which involves a family man and his daughter.
There’s a particularly effective portion involving a pretty woman at a London hotel who gets briefly involved with Bana and Hinds, and a killing results, and then another killing. I don’t want to spoil but the whole cause-and-effect sequence is both sad and shocking.
Tony Kushner’s script gives each Doubting Thomas character a speech just as he starts crumbling, or just before fate is about to take a hand. There’s a certain wordy literalness going on here that isn’t quite as effective as Spielberg and Kushner would like it to be.
Munich ends in New York City with a long shot of a certain downtown landmark. A friend feels this shot was overdoing things a bit, but at least Spielberg doesn’t go in for a closeup, and the CG image is quite realisitic and haunting.
I have gotten to the point where Janusz Kaminski’s cinematography is starting to blatantly turn me off. He has become the one dp whose work really and truly irri- tates me.
Every film Kaminski has shot for Spielberg — War of the Worlds, The Terminal, Catch Me If You Can, Minority Report, A.I., Saving Private Ryan, Amistad and now Munich — has looked more or less the same to me, regardless of the theme or mood. I’m referring to the Kaminski palette of slightly desaturated color, a slightly misty soft-focus look, starchy white light flooding through windows during daytime scenes, a lack of sharpness, and a bizarre fondness for grain.
I think that calling this film Munich was a little bit of a chickenshit move. It should have simply been called Vengeance . I realize that the “Vengeance” book it’s partly based upon has blemishes against it, but vengeance is what this movie is primarily about, and Spielberg should have just copped to that.
Next Year’s Balloon
Here are some initial calls about next year’s Ocar contenders. I’d like to hear from anyone who’s read the scripts or can pass along versions of the scripts to yours truly…whatever. I just think it’s time to start looking ahead and planning ahead, etc.
Thanks to Canadian correspondent and rabid script-hound Jean-Francois Allaire for starting me on this jag…
Best Picture: The Departed (Warner Brothers); Babel (Paramount); The Good Shepherd (Universal Pictures); Southland Tales (Universal); Marie Antoinette (Columbia Pictures); The Pursuit of Happyness (Columbia Pictures); Breaking and Entering (The Weinstein Co.); All The King’s Men (Columbia Pictures); A Good Year (20th Century Fox); Stranger Than Fiction (Columbia).
Martin Scorsese, Matt Damon on the set of The Departed
Best Director: Steve Zaillan (All The King’s Men); Anthony Minghella (Breaking and Entering); Martin Scorsese (The Departed); Steven Soderbergh (The Good German); Ridley Scott (A Good Year); Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (Babel); Marc Forster (Stranger Than Fiction); Richard Kelly (Southland Tales).
Best Actor: Will Smith (The Pursuit of Happyness); Matt Damon (The Good Shepherd); Jude Law (Breaking and Entering); Sean Penn (All The King’s Men); Brad Pitt (Babel).
Best Actress: Cate Blanchett (The Good German or Babel ); Maggie Gyllenhaal (Stranger Than Fiction)….need more!
Best Supporrting Actor: Jack Nicholson (The Departed); Hugh Grant (American Dreamz); Gael Garcia Bernal (Babel); Albert Finney (A Good Year); Jamie Foxx (Dreamgirls)
Best Supporting Actress: Zip…anyone?
Best Original Screenplay: Richard Kelly (Southland Tales); Paul Weitz (American Dreamz); Eric Roth (The Good Shepherd); Anthony Minghella (Breaking and Entering).
Best Adapted Screenplay : Sofia Coppola (Marie Antoinette).
Rundown
The first high-profile award announcements will come this Saturday afternoon from the Los Angeles Film Critics, with the final calls starting to leak out sometime around 1 pm or 2 pm.
The National Board of Review — that odd-smelling, Manhattan-based, awards- dispensing group made up of mostly weirdos and wackos (with the noteworthy exception of respected Columbia film professor and scholar Annette Insdorf) would have been first — i.e., today — but the group has delayed their announcements until next Monday, 12.12, due to some omissions on their initially mailed-out ballot.
On the same day the New York Film Critics Circle will announce their picks (expected a final decision around 1 pm Eastern), and since the NYFCC is roughly eight or nine times more respected than the National Board of Review (or is that eighty or ninety times?), the likelihood is that reporters and Oscar assesors will pay even less attention to the NBR winners than usual.
The very next day (Tuesday, 12.13) the Golden Globe nominations will be announced. These noms will be a very big moment for Diane Keaton and The Family Stone…I hope, I hope. And let’s hope that Terrence Howard (Hustle & Flow), bless him, hangs in there as a Best Actor in a Drama nominee.
I don’t have the dates for all the other critics groups but many of them will start to weigh in next week also, or very soon after. Critics groups from Boston, San Francisco, Chicago, Miami, San Diego, Seattle, etc.
Then it’s Christmas and New Year’s and the annual depression and suicide surge that happens ever year, and then…well, here’s the schedule:
* Writers Guild of America and Producers Guild nominations: Wednesday, 1.4.06
* Screen Actors Guild and Directors Guild nominations: Thursday, 1.5.06.
* BFCA Awards: Monday, 1.9.06
* Golden Globe Awards: Monday, 1.16.06
* Directors Guild Awards: Saturday, 1.28.06
* Screen Actors Guild awards: Sunday, 1.29.06
* Academy Award nominations: Tuesday, 1.31.06
* Writers Guild Awards: Saturday, 2.4.06
* BAFTA Awards: Sunday, 2.19.06
* Independent Spirit Awards: Saturday, 3.4.06
* Academy Awards telecast: Sunday, 3.5.06
* Rest Period: March through late June-slash-early July ’06
* Campaigning Strategizing for 2006 Awards (i.e., 2007 Academy Awards) commences and long-term expectations begin to come into focus: Early to Mid-July 2006.
Rumble in the Jungle
I saw King Kong for the second time Monday morning (12.5), and I feel the same way I did after my first viewing Sunday night. About 110 minutes of this three-hour film (i.e., the last two-thirds) are rock ‘n’ roll and worth double the ticket price. And the finale is genuinely touching.
After Sunday night’s screening at the Academy theatre I called the better parts of this monkey movie “damned exciting in an emotional, giddily absurd, logic-free adrenalized way.”
And then I offered a limited apology to its creator, Peter Jackson. “You aren’t that bad, bro,” I said. “You got a few things right this time. The movie is going to lift audiences out of their seats. And I need to say ‘I’m sorry’ for bashing you so much because you’ve almost whacked the ball out of the park this time.”
Almost, I say.
King Kong is too lumpy and draggy during the first hour or so to be called exquisite or masterful, but there’s no denying that it wails from the 70-minute mark until the big weepy finale at the three-hour mark. Monkey die, everybody cry.
The emotional support comes from the current between Kong and Naomi Watts, who is pretty much the soul of the film. I was concerned that the tender eye-rap- port between them would be too much, but it isn’t. It’s relatively restrained and subtle and full of feeling.
And Andy Serkis’ Kong performance doesn’t play like any kind of “Gollum Kong” (which I fretted about a year and a half ago in this space), and in fact he creates something surprisingly life-like, or do I mean ape-like?
The good ship Kong starts out with a spirited montage (scored with a classic Al Jolson tune called “I’m Sittin’ On Top of the World”) that shows what Depression- era 1933 New York City probably looked and felt like on the streets. The recrea- tions of this bygone Manhattan are awesome, immaculate…CGI illusion at its most profound.
So the first ten or so minutes are fine, but then things start to get lunky and pokey and meandering, and the dialogue becomes increasingly stiff and speechy, and before you know it Kong is close to crashing on the rocks and suffering a gash in the hull.
It’s very touch-and-go from roughly the 10 to the 65- or 70-minute mark. I was shifting in my seat and going “uh-oh.” But things take off once Kong snatches Watts, and the energy stays high and mighty from there to the finale.
You can break Kong down into three sections…
(a) The draggy 70-minute first act, which is all New York set-up, character exposi- tion, the long sea voyage to Skull Island, tedious philosophizing and no action to speak of;
(b) the breathtaking, nearly 70-minute Skull Island rumble-in-the-jungle section, including the breathtaking dino-run sequence (an absolute instant classic that’s likely to drive most of the repeat business in and of itself), Kong vs. the T-Rex trio, and the icky spider-and-insect pit sequence;
(c) the 42 or 43-minute New York finale with Kong on-stage, breaking the chrome- steel chains and escaping, trashing Manhattan, finding Watts, and facing planes and fate atop the Empire State building.
If I were a 14 year-old kid talking to friends about all of us seeing Kong a second or third time, I would suggest that everyone try to slip into the theatre after the first hour because who wants to sit through all that talky crap again?
Kong isn’t better than Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures because it’s almost entirely about enthusiasm and has almost nothing to do with restraint (bad word!), but it’s still the most thoroughly pulse-pumping, rousingly kick-ass film Jackson’s ever delivered, and respect needs to be paid.
And I mean especially by someone who’s been bashing the pud out of Jackson for the last four years or so, calling him an indulgent (and overly indulged), excessive, paint-splattering “wheeeeee!” director all this time.
Make no mistake — Kong shows Jackson is still all of these things. But Kong is a movie with a big heart and a stupidly exuberant joie de cinema coarsing through its veins…during the second and third acts, I mean.
And even though Jackson has gone way beyond the point where he’s able to show minimal respect for physics and could-this-happen? issues of logic and probability …a point from which he’ll never return…he manages such amazing visual feats and surges once the film takes off that all objections are moot. Even if some of the action scenes are cartoonishly wham-bam and ridiculous.
Life-size Kong model currently sitting in Manthatan’s Times Square
I’ll get into this a bit more later in the week, but I felt I had to cop to the fact that Jackson has hit one deep into center-left field.
Jack Black’s Carl Denham isn’t at all bad (he’s mouthy and slimy, but he doesn’t reach for outright comedy), Adrien Brody inhabits the playwright-hero to sensitive perfection, and Kong’s snaggle tooth is glimpsed only a few times and a non-issue.
Sometime next week I’m going to run a list of things in King Kong that make little or no sense (and it’s a long list), but right now it’s simply time to acknowledge that the parts of the film that get your blood racing and your emotions worked up work really well.
[Incidentally: I wrote last night that King Kong starts with an overture taken from Max Steiner’s original score for the 1933 film. However, I learned today [Monday] that Steiner’s overture was played before the presentation of Jackson’s film as a mood-setter by the people in the projection department at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences theatre, so it isn’t attached to the film and won’t be heard by regular audiences. That’s a shame.]
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