The following films are set for the 2006 Sundance Film Festival, which will run from Thursday, 1.19.06 through Sunday, 1.29.06: (1) Steven Shainberg’s Fur, the Diane Arbus biopic with Nicole Kidman and Robert Downey, Jr., from Picturehouse; (2) Brian DePalma’s The Black Dahlia, a period crime thriller with Josh Hartnett, Scarlett Johanson, Hilary Swank, Aaron Eckhardt; (3) Joby Harold’s Awake, a Weinstein Company thriller with Hayden Christensen, Sigourney Weaver, Jessica Alban; (4) Fabiane Bielinsky’s The Aura, an Argentine film about a taxidermist involved in criminal intrigue; (5) Terry Zwigoff’s Art School Confidential, a sardonic comedy about a young guy (Max Minghella) who enrolls in art school for curious fame-related reasons, with John Malkovich, Anjelica Huston, Jim Broadbent; (6) 0430, a totally non-verbal Singapore-produced film from director-writer Royston Tan, about a friendship between an 11 year-old boy and a man in his 30s; (7) Todd Yellin’s Brother’s Shadow, a Brooklyn-set drama about a black-sheep type (Scott Cohen) trying to step into the shoes of his deceased older sibling; (8) Neil Armfield’s Candy, a Down Under relationship drama with Heath Ledger, Abbie Cornish and Geoffrey Rush; (9) Nanda Anan’s City of Sand and Stone, an adventure piece about an American woman (Kelli Garner) unravelling some sort of mystery in India, with Justin Theroux and Frank Langella; (10) Fast Track, a Weinstein Co. comedy from director Jesse Peretz, with Jason Bateman, Amanda Peet, Paul Rudd and Mia Farrow; (11) Michael Lehmann’s Flakes, a quirky-behavior comedy with Aaron Stanford and Zooey Deschanel; (12) Nicole Holofcener’s Friends With Money, a relationship drama with Jennifer Aniston, Frances McDormand, Scott Caan; (13) Dito Montiel’s A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, a New York-based drama with Chazz Palmintieri, Rosario Dawon, Robert Downey, Jr., and produced by Downey and Trudie Styler (i.e., Mrs. Sting); (14) Julian Goldberger’s The Hawk is Dying, a Florida-set drama with Paul Giamatti and Michael Pitt; (15) Klimt, about the last years of Austrian artist Gustav Klimt, with John Malkovich, Stephen Dillane and Saphron Burrows; (16) Lee Yoon-Ki’s Love Talk, a Korean-American drama set in Los Angeles; (17) Kevin Smith’s The Passion of the Clerks, with Brian O’Halloran, Jason Mewes, Jeff Anderson and Smith; (18) John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus about several New Yorkers “exploring” each other during a power outage; (19) Bruce Leddy’s Shut Up and Sing, a meditative comedy about an a capella singing group having a reunion; (20) Robert Benigni’s The Tiger and the Snow, about a love-struck Italian poet immersed in the American invasion of Iraq; (21) Carlos Borado’s What God Knows, a Brazilian drama with Diego Luna and Alicia Braga; and (22) Hilary Brougher’s Stephanie Daley, a drama about infanticide with Tilda Swinton and Amber Tamblyn. These 22 films are, of course, just the tip of the iceberg.
I’ve been asked to refrain from running my review of Stephen Gaghan’s Syriana (Warner Bros., 12.3) until 11.23, but Rolling Stone critic Peter Travers is running his because…he’s Peter Travers! We all know he gets quoted too often, and that he’s creamed over far too many mediocre films, but I agree with Travers all the way this time. “Written and directed in a fever of risk-taking provocation, [Syriana] takes off with the lightning speed of a thriller, the gonzo force of frontline journalism and the emotional wallop of a drama that puts a human face on shocking statistics,” he proclaims. “No dry civics lesson, this fighting-mad film isn’t just hot, it’s incendiary…and no one gets off the hook. You see Syriana with the exhilarating feeling that a movie can make a difference. The first surprise is George Clooney. Bearded and bloated from the thirty-five pounds he packed on to play CIA opreative Fred Barnes, he gives us a ground soldier who’s been used and used up by the CIA’s war on Middle East terrorism. Here is a man, struggling to put his son through college, who can order the assassination of Prince Nasir (the superb Alexander Siddig) for favoring China over the U.S. in an oil deal (‘Hit him with a truck going fifty miles per hour’), stand up to fingernail-yanking torture from former operatives and still be amazed when the Firm plays him for a patsy. This is the best acting Clooney has ever done — he’s hypnotic, haunting and quietly devastating. [And] Gaghan is in top form, mixing potent writing with images that tear at the heart, such as the sight at the madrassa of a Pakistani migrant worker (Mazhar Munir) — both he and his father are laid off by Connex after Nasir’s deal with the Chinese — being indoctrinated into Islamic fundamentalism. Syriana is a tough nut that demands attention, refuses to ingratiate and keeps throwing curves…it’s the kind of give-’em-hell filmmaking that Hollywood left for dead, the kind that matters.”
The recently-issued Paramount Home Video DVD of the 1953 War of the Worlds, one of the most beautifully photographed Technicolor movies ever made, looks absolutely breathtaking. This sci-fi classic provides one of the lushest color-baths in Hollywood history and has always looked sumptuous…now it’s heavenly.
But there’s an unfortunate side effect to this clarity. The new DVD (released on 11.1) pretty much ruins the suspension-of-disbelief element because of the way- too-visible wires holding up the Martian spaceships. You can see them repeatedly during scenes of the initial assault against the military…a thicket of blue-tinted wires holding up each one.
You can see the wires in this photo (taken off my own TV) but if you have any kind of recently-manufactured big-ass flat screen, they look much more vivid than indicated here
And there’s no believing it. The wires are much too vivid. Clayton Forrester (Gene Barry) is explaining to General Mann (Les Tremayne) how the Martians keep their bright green ships aloft, that they’re using “some form of electro magnetic force” and “balancing the two poles” and so on, and it’s absurd. The illusion is shot.
The obvious solution is for Paramount Home Video to digitally erase the wires. It would make perfect symmetrical sense. Just as digital technology has made this 1953 film look sharper than ever before, it follows that digital technology needs to recreate the original illusion. The wires weren’t that visible 52 years ago, and they weren’t as visible in Paramount Home Video’s 1999 DVD.
I can’t believe there are people who feel that wire-erasing would be a violation of the original film and are actually arguing against a fix-up, but they’re out there.
One of those naysayers is the highly respected and very bright Glenn Erickson (a.k.a., “DVD Savant”). I’m stunned that a smart guy like Erickson could be so dead friggin’ blind.
“Many scenes [in War of the Worlds] that appeared blurry or poorly composited [before] are now crystal clear,” Erickson said in a review posted 13 days ago. “This means that the forest of fine wires supporting the fighting machines is now more visible than ever, so we can’t have everything.
“There was no CG wire removal in 1953,” he writes, “and it would be detrimental revisionism to change the picture now. Today’s enlightened filmmakers like George Lucas would never do such a thing! So be an adult and learn to live with it.”
Uh-huh. Suppose George Pal and Bryon Haskin couldn’t do anything to hide the wires in their film, and 1953 audiences could therefore see them as clearly as DVD watchers can now? Would Pal and Baskin have just shrugged and told Paramount and the exhibitors, “Sorry, guys… learn to live with it…it’s the best we can do”?
Obviously the new DVD is the provider of “detrimental revisionism” — it’s showing an image that wasn’t meant to be seen.
Obviously, clearly…hello?…erasing the wires will enable audiences of today to suspend their disblief with the same ease that audiences did 52 years ago. You can’t muddy up the image so they can’t be seen, so it’s the only thing to do.
I’m going to be charitable and consider the possibility that Erickson may be over- worked and wasn’t thinking all that clearly when he wrote what he wrote. All is forgiven if he recants.
John Lowry, the head of Lowry Digital who’s done some great clean-up and/or digital restoration work on loads of classic films, was the one hired by Paramount Home Video to clean up War of the Worlds .
Ann Robinson, Gene Barry in War of the Worlds
“Our job is always to serve the wishes of the client…we do what the client says …and we didn’t have orders to clean up the wires,” he says. “Plus we were working on a very tight budget.”
Lowry faced a similar issue when he was doing the digital remastering ofAlfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest. “We were working onthe scene when the crop duster plane crashes into the gas truck,” he recalls, “and there were 25 or 30 frames of that particular shot in which you could see three wires holding up the rather large model of the airplane.
“And I said to myself, my God, too obvious…it spoils the illusion. And I asked myself, what would Hitchcock do? I knew what he would do. Take the wires out of there. So I did, and the Warner Bros. people approved.
“But ever since then we’ve been very attuned to original artistic intent. And with today’s technology, anything that interferes with the story-telling process or which degrades that process, is dead wrong.
“We got rid of the wires on the Mary Poppins DVD, for the Disney people. We asked and they said ‘get rid of them’ but they had the money to do it.
“When we were working on the snake-pit scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark you could see all kinds of reflections in the glass separating Ford from the snakes, and there was a very conscious decision made by Spielberg to take the reflections out.”
I called and e-mailed a few other guys who should have opinions about this story — restoration master Robert Harris, director and War of the Worlds fan Joe Dante (who riffs about the film on one of the DVD’s two audio tracks), and film restoration artist Mike Arick.
I’ll probably add to this story on Monday if any of these guys reply.
Grabs
George Clooney, New York Times editor-writer Lynn Hirschberg during a discussion at theatre #10 in Hollywood’s Arclight theatre complex — Saturday, 11.12.05, 4:35 pm. One piece of news that emerged is that Clooney is looking to direct a film currently being written by Joel and Ethan Coen called Suburbacon. Another is that he’ll direct but won’t act in the upcoming televised re-do of Network. He said it took him only about a month to gain 35 pounds for his role in Syriana. I told him I’d been told prior to seeing it by a critic friend that “Fat Clooney is one of the best [performances] that you’ll see this year”…and he was right.
Sunset Blvd. near Cole, looking east — Saturday, 11.12.05, 2:10 pm.
Pico Blvd. and La Brea Avenue, looking south — Saturday, 11.12.05, 6:40 pm.
In front of Arclight Dome theatre — Saturday, 11.12, 2:05 pm
Looking down on the Arclight lobby — Saturday, 11.12, 3:25 pm
Bring It On
Shoot any kind of outdoor footage of the Middle East (especially in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, et. al.) and you get the same flat terrain…aflame, parched, bleachy…which makes for a kind of atmospheric monotony.
But movies shot there (or which happen there) don’t have to be dull. The Middle East is the dramatic boiling pot of our times. It’s just a matter of going there and absorbing the particulars and pruning them down into something fitting and well- sprung.
U.S. soldier involved in fighting in Falujah in ’04
I’ve recently seen a no-pulse, no-conflict, Waiting-for-Godot Middle East film (Sam Mendes’ Jarhead) and a complex, multi-layered, altogether fascinating one about the pernicious social and political political effects of big oil (Stephen Gaghan’s Syriana)…and leapin’ lizards, talk about a night-and-day response.
I’ll be waiting until 11.23 before running a Syriana review, but it’s obviously a far better film.
Jarhead was so bad and so nothing that it would feel almost refreshing to see a real Middle East war movie — a half-real, half- fictional narrative about the current conflict in Iraq, say. And why not? It’s time.
Hollywood didn’t feel safe about making Vietnam movies until 1978, and the first major Gulf War movie — David O. Russell’s Three Kings — didn’t happen until ’99, or about eight years after the fact. But the concepts of lag-time and the usual “gee, can we get into this?” no longer apply.
The reality of instant digital commnunications means that dramas (or black come- dies) about current military conflicts need to be shot and rescrambled with some urgency. Waiting around won’t do. Immediacy may not be the whole game, but it matters as much as anything else.
Syriana, which Gaghan researched in the Middle East for a full year, is a geo-political spellbinder that doesn’t feel the least bit dated. The story could have happened last summer, or even a year or two from now.
Matt Damon (center) in Stephen Gaghan’s Syriana (Warner Bros, 11.23)
Steven Bochco’s Over There, the first dramatic TV series about an ongoing war, much less one about U.S. troops in Iraq, had its debut on FX last summer. And Hany Abu-Assad’s Paradise Now, a respected film about a couple of would-be Palestinian martyrs, has a ripped-from-right-now quality.
Why not an Iraq War feature right now? Write it, shoot it…sort it out as you go along.
A writer-director of some vision and gumption needs to visit Iraq, get imbedded with the grunts like Gunner Palace‘s Michael Tucker did, soak it up, write it down, find the funding and make a feature film about what’s eally happening in that hell-hole.
Shoot the atmospheric stuff right there, maybe bring some of the cast over…risk it, dodge the bullets, burrow in. And then wrap it, cut it and open it quickly.
If Oliver Stone was the Oliver Stone of the mid to late ’80s, he’d be the guy to do this.
If Italian actor-filmmaker Roberto Benigni (who won a Best Actor and Best Foreign Film Oscar for Life Is Beautiful) can make an Iraqi War film, why can’t Americans?
Benigni just opened a comedy set against the backdrop of the Iraq conflict, althou- gh it was shot in Tunisia. An admired film (if not quite the anti-American rant some of his Italian fans had expected), The Tiger and the Snow opened on 10.14 in Italy and will debut in France in mid-December and probably open here during the first six months of ’06.
Syriana uncertainty: George Clooney’s CIA agent between a rock and hard place
A U.S.-produced drama about the current conflict obviously wouldn’t have to be shot in the streets of Baghdad or Fallujah.
A satisfying film for me would probably have to be something like Syriana or Traffic — a multi-character, five or six-plot-thread piece. I’m not going to try and dream up a story here and now, but it would either need to be a Costa Gavras-type condem- nation piece, or one that shows balanced compassion for U.S. troops as well as Iraqi locals.
Has anyone out there written a script or heard of a good one making the rounds? Is there a military veteran, freelance journalist and/or contract engineer who’s been to Iraq within the last couple of years who’s published stories or recollections on a site that could be made into a good script?
If there’s anything really good that’s been put into script form, or if anyone’s heard of something exceptional making the rounds, please advise.
Aniston Martin
Derailed has been handed a Rotten Tomatoes death sentence — only 19% of the critics approve. But it’s only somewhat bad because of certain hard-to-swallow developments that I won’t divulge. And it’s been well directed by Mikael Halfstrom, and by that I mean it feels solid, assured, nicely shot and well-cut.
Thrillers of this sort often get trashed by critics but supported by paying audiences. An agent told me this morning that Derailed, which opened today, has been doing well in New York theatres.
Like Fatal Attraction and Unfaithful, Derailed is a cautionary thriller about what happens when you cheat on your spouse.
Jennifer Aniston in Mikael Halfstrom’s Derailed
Clive Owen plays a Chicago advertising guy who succumbs to temptation after meeting Jennifer Aniston, a blue-chip financial consultant, on a commuter train. But then they get robbed and assaulted by Vincent Cassel in a seedy hotel room before they get down to it…
I’m not going any further, but Cassel basically becomes Bruno Antony to Owen’s Guy Haines (the two leads in Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train), and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t caught up in all the lever-pulling. It’s far from first-rate, but it’s reasonably decent.
The biggest problem is one that nobody seems to have written about so far, which is the casting of Jennifer Aniston as an adulterer who… well, as a woman who can’t be trusted.
As far as I’m concerned, the believabilty of Aniston as a conniving adultress is about the same as a hypothetical casting of Dean Martin as one of Christ’s disciples in George Stevens’ The Greatest Story Ever Told.
Aniston was a TV actress who deserved a fair shake when she played a cheating housewife in The Good Girl, but she’s since become a tabloid superstar — she’s known worldwide as the nice, emotionally temperate actresss who had her heart broken by Brad Pitt.
Dean Martin
Whatever the real truth and whomever she may actually be, Aniston is the good wife who got fucked over. It’s hard, but the public persona of some actors and actresses is so deeply imbedded that they can’t be absorbed into in certain roles..period.
Frank Sinatra as a priest in The Miracle of the Bells…get outta town.
Or John Wayne as Genghis Khan or, much worse, as a Roman Centurion standing at the foot of the cross while Jesus is dying in The Greatest Story Ever Told and saying, “This was truly the son of God.”
There must be dozens of other head-slappers. Send ’em in, please.
Ten Years and Two Weeks
I’m a Terrence Malick fanatic from way back, and it’s the nostalgia factor more than anything else that has me especially excited about seeing The New World (New Line, 12.25), which Malick wrote and directed.
I’m also one of the only journalists to have any kind of conversation with Malick since he went into his Thomas Pynchon withdrawal about 17 years ago (right after the release of Days of Heaven) and became this gentle phantom-like figure whom journalists couldn’t get to under any circumstance.
In this context speaking to Malick on the phone– which I managed to do on Octo- ber 25, 1995, around 11:35 am — was like snapping a photo of Bigfoot. It was a half-pleasant, half-awkward, quite meaningless conversation, but at least he picked up the phone.
Terrence Malick during filming of The Thin Red Line
Malick had been staying with producer Mike Medavoy, who wound up producing The Thin Red Line, but Medavoy was leaving for Shanghai and Malick would be staying elsewhere, so I called to get a forwarding number.
A cleaning woman answered and said Medavoy was out, but that Malick was nearby. She asked me to hold…
Malick: Hi.
Me: Hi, Terry. This is Jeffrey Wells speaking…
Malick: Hi.
Me: And uhh…I was just talking to Mike last night and he said, uh, you might be leaving today and I wanted to see if I could speak with you about an article I’m researching. It’s for Los Angeles magazine and my editor…he worked on that piece about ten years ago with David Handleman for California magazine. It was called “Absence of Malick.”
Malick: Yeah.
Me: I don’t know if…did you happen to read it?
Malick: No, I…I…uhnn…
Me: Anyway, I’m doing this piece and trying to sort things through here. About what’s going on with…well, to start with, The Thin Red Line and that rumored BAM stage production of “Sansho the Bailiff” and…I’ve wanted to speak with you about it, and now that I’m speaking with you I feel…well, I feel nervous.
Locust arrival scene in Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven
Malick: Don’t be, Jeffrey. It’s not that. I just don’t feel comfortable talking about it yet.
Me: About Red Line, you mean?
Malick: Yeah and…it’s something that has no date, really. It may happen some- time in the indefinite future.
Me: The indefinite future? Uh-huh. So there’s no approximate, long-range plan at all? It’s not even on a low flame?
Malick: I…I’m…uhmm.
Me: I was only thinking, you know…heh-heh… ‘indefinite future.’ You could say the same thing about the sun collapsing and the end of the solar system, heh-heh.
Malick: Uhhmm…
Me: I’m only mentioning this because…well, you may have seen that item in Pre- miere that you said you had this reading of the script with Costner and Lucas Haas and Ethan Hawke.
Malick: We did it just to get a sense of how it flowed.
Me: How did it flow?
Malick: I just don’t feel comfortable talking about it. I appreciate your interest but…
Malick in 1979
Malick: Mike says you’re on the second or third draft, something…it’s a work that’s been through some development and progression, and…
Malick: I….
Malick: I dont want to grill you, Terry. Mike explained the rules and said that grilling you…’that’s the one thing we don’t do’…and I understand that. I had a hope, though, of just discussing movies in general…ones you’ve seen and been impressed by in recent years.
Malick: Well, I appreciate your interest. I guess I do feel uncomfortable talking right now.
Me: I’m just one of…who knows, hundreds of film journalists around the country who regard you as one of the best ever and have watched your films over and over.
Malick: You’re very kind, Jeffrey. I appreciate it and I feel it and it comes to me as very encouraging. But I feel uncomfortable talking about it. I spoke to my brother Chris and he said that you’re just trying to help. And of course I know you’re just trying to do your job.
Me: I was actually just reading about a new laser disc of Days of Heaven that’s coming out, and it’s really something I’m looking forward to because I’ve never seen a print of that film that equalled the first viewing at the Cinema 1 in New York when they showed a 70mm print with six-channel sound, and having a…are you a laser-disc aficionado?
Malick: I’m, uh…not..uh…
Me: Are you…you don’t watch TV? Videos? Do you ever catch movies on tape?
Malick: I’d be happy to talk to you at some later point, Jeffrey.
Me: I know. I understand know what the rules are.
Malick: And someone actually is here, Jeffrey, and I do have to keep an appointment. I would love to, later on…we could talk.
Me: I’ll look forward to it. I understand you’re in town for a few more days.
Malick: Yes, but I really do have to go now.
Me: Because if you have a moment later on, I’d like to run some basic points by you and just go over them one by one, for accuracy’s sake.
Me: I can’t really talk about this. I know what you’re trying to do and it’s not…if you’d try to understand. Chris told me you’d written and that you were trying to help.
Me: Well, I hope you have a good stay. I look forward to chatting again on a more…uhm, relaxed basis.
Malick: Okay, thank you.
Bring It On
Shoot any kind of outdoor footage of the Middle East (especially in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, et. al.) and you get the same flat terrain…aflame, parched, bleachy…which makes for a kind of atmospheric monotony.
But movies shot there (or which happen there) don’t have to be dull. The Middle East is the dramatic boiling pot of our times. It’s just a matter of going there and absorbing the particulars and pruning them down into something fitting and well- sprung.
U.S. soldier involved in fighting in Falujah in ’04
I’ve recently seen a no-pulse, no-conflict, Waiting-for-Godot Middle East film (Sam Mendes’ Jarhead) and a complex, multi-layered, altogether fascinating one about the pernicious social and political political effects of big oil (Stephen Gaghan’s Syriana)…and leapin’ lizards, talk about a night-and-day response.
I’ll be waiting until 11.23 before running a Syriana review, but it’s obviously a far better film.
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Jarhead was so bad and so nothing that it would feel almost refreshing to see a real Middle East war movie — a half-real, half- fictional narrative about the current conflict in Iraq, say. And why not? It’s time.
Hollywood didn’t feel safe about making Vietnam movies until 1978, and the first major Gulf War movie — David O. Russell’s Three Kings — didn’t happen until ’99, or about eight years after the fact. But the concepts of lag-time and the usual “gee, can we get into this?” no longer apply.
The reality of instant digital commnunications means that dramas (or black come- dies) about current military conflicts need to be shot and rescrambled with some urgency. Waiting around won’t do. Immediacy may not be the whole game, but it matters as much as anything else.
Syriana, which Gaghan researched in the Middle East for a full year, is a geo-political spellbinder that doesn’t feel the least bit dated. The story could have happened last summer, or even a year or two from now.
Matt Damon (center) in Stephen Gaghan’s Syriana (Warner Bros, 11.23)
Steven Bochco’s Over There, the first dramatic TV series about an ongoing war, much less one about U.S. troops in Iraq, had its debut on FX last summer. And Hany Abu-Assad’s Paradise Now, a respected film about a couple of would-be Palestinian martyrs, has a ripped-from-right-now quality.
Why not an Iraq War feature right now? Write it, shoot it…sort it out as you go along.
A writer-director of some vision and gumption needs to visit Iraq, get imbedded with the grunts like Gunner Palace‘s Michael Tucker did, soak it up, write it down, find the funding and make a feature film about what’s eally happening in that hell-hole.
Shoot the atmospheric stuff right there, maybe bring some of the cast over…risk it, dodge the bullets, burrow in. And then wrap it, cut it and open it quickly.
If Oliver Stone was the Oliver Stone of the mid to late ’80s, he’d be the guy to do this.
If Italian actor-filmmaker Roberto Benigni (who won a Best Actor and Best Foreign Film Oscar for Life Is Beautiful) can make an Iraqi War film, why can’t Americans?
Benigni just opened a comedy set against the backdrop of the Iraq conflict, althou- gh it was shot in Tunisia. An admired film (if not quite the anti-American rant some of his Italian fans had expected), The Tiger and the Snow opened on 10.14 in Italy and will debut in France in mid-December and probably open here during the first six months of ’06.
Syriana uncertainty: George Clooney’s CIA agent between a rock and hard place
A U.S.-produced drama about the current conflict obviously wouldn’t have to be shot in the streets of Baghdad or Fallujah.
A satisfying film for me would probably have to be something like Syriana or Traffic — a multi-character, five or six-plot-thread piece. I’m not going to try and dream up a story here and now, but it would either need to be a Costa Gavras-type condem- nation piece, or one that shows balanced compassion for U.S. troops as well as Iraqi locals.
Has anyone out there written a script or heard of a good one making the rounds? Is there a military veteran, freelance journalist and/or contract engineer who’s been to Iraq within the last couple of years who’s published stories or recollections on a site that could be made into a good script?
If there’s anything really good that’s been put into script form, or if anyone’s heard of something exceptional making the rounds, please advise.
Aniston Martin
Derailed has been handed a Rotten Tomatoes death sentence — only 19% of the critics approve. But it’s only somewhat bad because of certain hard-to-swallow developments that I won’t divulge. And it’s been well directed by Mikael Halfstrom, and by that I mean it feels solid, assured, nicely shot and well-cut.
Thrillers of this sort often get trashed by critics but supported by paying audiences. An agent told me this morning that Derailed, which opened today, has been doing well in New York theatres.
Like Fatal Attraction and Unfaithful, Derailed is a cautionary thriller about what happens when you cheat on your spouse.
Jennifer Aniston in Mikael Halfstrom’s Derailed
Clive Owen plays a Chicago advertising guy who succumbs to temptation after meeting Jennifer Aniston, a blue-chip financial consultant, on a commuter train. But then they get robbed and assaulted by Vincent Cassel in a seedy hotel room before they get down to it…
I’m not going any further, but Cassel basically becomes Bruno Antony to Owen’s Guy Haines (the two leads in Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train), and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t caught up in all the lever-pulling. It’s far from first-rate, but it’s reasonably decent.
The biggest problem is one that nobody seems to have written about so far, which is the casting of Jennifer Aniston as an adulterer who… well, as a woman who can’t be trusted.
As far as I’m concerned, the believabilty of Aniston as a conniving adultress is about the same as a hypothetical casting of Dean Martin as one of Christ’s disciples in George Stevens’ The Greatest Story Ever Told.
Aniston was a TV actress who deserved a fair shake when she played a cheating housewife in The Good Girl, but she’s since become a tabloid superstar — she’s known worldwide as the nice, emotionally temperate actresss who had her heart broken by Brad Pitt.
Dean Martin
Whatever the real truth and whomever she may actually be, Aniston is the good wife who got fucked over. It’s hard, but the public persona of some actors and actresses is so deeply imbedded that they can’t be absorbed into in certain roles..period.
Frank Sinatra as a priest in The Miracle of the Bells…get outta town.
Or John Wayne as Genghis Khan or, much worse, as a Roman Centurion standing at the foot of the cross while Jesus is dying in The Greatest Story Ever Told and saying, “This was truly the son of God.”
There must be dozens of other head-slappers. Send ’em in, please.
Ten Years and Two Weeks
I’m a Terrence Malick fanatic from way back, and it’s the nostalgia factor more than anything else that has me especially excited about seeing The New World (New Line, 12.25), which Malick wrote and directed.
I’m also one of the only journalists to have any kind of conversation with Malick since he went into his Thomas Pynchon withdrawal about 17 years ago (right after the release of Days of Heaven) and became this gentle phantom-like figure whom journalists couldn’t get to under any circumstance.
In this context speaking to Malick on the phone– which I managed to do on Octo- ber 25, 1995, around 11:35 am — was like snapping a photo of Bigfoot. It was a half-pleasant, half-awkward, quite meaningless conversation, but at least he picked up the phone.
Terrence Malick during filming of The Thin Red Line
Malick had been staying with producer Mike Medavoy, who wound up producing The Thin Red Line, but Medavoy was leaving for Shanghai and Malick would be staying elsewhere, so I called to get a forwarding number.
A cleaning woman answered and said Medavoy was out, but that Malick was nearby. She asked me to hold…
Malick: Hi.
Me: Hi, Terry. This is Jeffrey Wells speaking…
Malick: Hi.
Me: And uhh…I was just talking to Mike last night and he said, uh, you might be leaving today and I wanted to see if I could speak with you about an article I’m researching. It’s for Los Angeles magazine and my editor…he worked on that piece about ten years ago with David Handleman for California magazine. It was called “Absence of Malick.”
Malick: Yeah.
Me: I don’t know if…did you happen to read it?
Malick: No, I…I…uhnn…
Me: Anyway, I’m doing this piece and trying to sort things through here. About what’s going on with…well, to start with, The Thin Red Line and that rumored BAM stage production of “Sansho the Bailiff” and…I’ve wanted to speak with you about it, and now that I’m speaking with you I feel…well, I feel nervous.
Locust arrival scene in Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven
Malick: Don’t be, Jeffrey. It’s not that. I just don’t feel comfortable talking about it yet.
Me: About Red Line, you mean?
Malick: Yeah and…it’s something that has no date, really. It may happen some- time in the indefinite future.
Me: The indefinite future? Uh-huh. So there’s no approximate, long-range plan at all? It’s not even on a low flame?
Malick: I…I’m…uhmm.
Me: I was only thinking, you know…heh-heh… ‘indefinite future.’ You could say the same thing about the sun collapsing and the end of the solar system, heh-heh.
Malick: Uhhmm…
Me: I’m only mentioning this because…well, you may have seen that item in Pre- miere that you said you had this reading of the script with Costner and Lucas Haas and Ethan Hawke.
Malick: We did it just to get a sense of how it flowed.
Me: How did it flow?
Malick: I just don’t feel comfortable talking about it. I appreciate your interest but…
Malick in 1979
Malick: Mike says you’re on the second or third draft, something…it’s a work that’s been through some development and progression, and…
Malick: I….
Malick: I dont want to grill you, Terry. Mike explained the rules and said that grilling you…’that’s the one thing we don’t do’…and I understand that. I had a hope, though, of just discussing movies in general…ones you’ve seen and been impressed by in recent years.
Malick: Well, I appreciate your interest. I guess I do feel uncomfortable talking right now.
Me: I’m just one of…who knows, hundreds of film journalists around the country who regard you as one of the best ever and have watched your films over and over.
Malick: You’re very kind, Jeffrey. I appreciate it and I feel it and it comes to me as very encouraging. But I feel uncomfortable talking about it. I spoke to my brother Chris and he said that you’re just trying to help. And of course I know you’re just trying to do your job.
Me: I was actually just reading about a new laser disc of Days of Heaven that’s coming out, and it’s really something I’m looking forward to because I’ve never seen a print of that film that equalled the first viewing at the Cinema 1 in New York when they showed a 70mm print with six-channel sound, and having a…are you a laser-disc aficionado?
Malick: I’m, uh…not..uh…
Me: Are you…you don’t watch TV? Videos? Do you ever catch movies on tape?
Malick: I’d be happy to talk to you at some later point, Jeffrey.
Me: I know. I understand know what the rules are.
Malick: And someone actually is here, Jeffrey, and I do have to keep an appointment. I would love to, later on…we could talk.
Me: I’ll look forward to it. I understand you’re in town for a few more days.
Malick: Yes, but I really do have to go now.
Me: Because if you have a moment later on, I’d like to run some basic points by you and just go over them one by one, for accuracy’s sake.
Me: I can’t really talk about this. I know what you’re trying to do and it’s not…if you’d try to understand. Chris told me you’d written and that you were trying to help.
Me: Well, I hope you have a good stay. I look forward to chatting again on a more…uhm, relaxed basis.
Malick: Okay, thank you.
Rent Renewal
The advance word on Rent (Columbia, 11.23) for the last few months has been that it’s going to feel slightly dated (being a late ’80s piece about some young AIDS-af- flicted Manhattanites), and Chris Columbus, not the grittiest and most naturalistic of directors, will gloss it up too much, so watch out.
The buzz was wrong. Say it again: the buzz was wrong.
Rosario Dawson, Adam Pascal during “Light My Candle” number in Chris Columbus’s film of Jonathan Larson’s Rent (Columbia, 11.23)
Call me emotionally impressionable, call me unsophisticated, call me a sap…but I saw Rent last night in Santa Monica, and in its vibrant, open-hearted, selling-the- hell-out-of-each-and-every-song-and-dance-number way, it’s a knockout and an ass-whooper and damn near glorious at times.
I didn’t just like it…I felt dazzled, amped, alpha-vibed. I got into each and every song, every character and conflict…I settled back and went with it. People were applauding after almost every song, and the film really does give you a “whoa… this is special” feeling.
Somewhere up there (out there, in there…whatever), Jonathan Larson, the guy who created the play but died in January 1996, just before the stage show opened, is breathing easy.
Columbus went with almost the entire original cast, and they’re all spot-on. A cer- tain theatricality is inevitable when actors are breaking into song, but everyone plays it down and naturalistic; they don’t project in a playing-to-the-balcony way that throws you out of the piece.
Adam Pascal’s Roger and Anthony Rapp’s Mark are note-perfect. Rosario Daw- son’s singing is surprisingly assured and satisfying, in addition to her usual first- rate emoting. Wilson Jermaine Heredia, Jesse L. Martin, Idina Menzel, Tracie Thoms, Taye Diggs…everyone gets a gold star.
Rent is a slicker, punchier, more revved-up movie musical than Milos Forman’s Hair, which had some of the same elements (kids in New York, in and out of love, looming tragedy). But it’s not that different from the Forman film; it has a similar elan.
I kept saying to myself last night, “What’s wrong with this film?….where’s the mis- calculation? Where’s the gross Chris Columbus saccharine overkill?”…and it just didn’t happen to any bothersome degree.
It may not be hip enough for some of my nyah-nyah, know-it-all critic friends. It may not be Alphabet City enough. It may be, for them, too far removed from the vitality of the original off-Broadway, pre-Broadway show…too much of a Holly- wood-style take on something that may have been a bit sweet or cloying, but which worked because of the Lower East Side funkitude balance-out factor.
Critics said the same thing about Robert Wise’s West Side Story. That overly Oscar-awarded film brought an overly sanitized, sound-stagey quality to the material, wich furthered the loss of the immediacy and excitement of the original B’way play. The dissers of Wise’s film were right. It was too 1961 mainstream.
But Columbus is not Robert Wise. He lived in Manhattan way back when and knew the Lower East Side, he knows the stage show backwards and forwards, he’s pruned it down a bit and has made a film that’s a lot tighter and brighter and a cleaner “sell.”
I saw Rent in ’96 with Jett, who was then about eight, and I remember enjoying the energy and a lot of the songs and feeling a general respect for it…but I wasn’t floored. For me, the film is a better ride.
I don’t want to compare apples and oranges, and I understand that Rent-heads might not agree that it’s “better,” but the film is a cleaner, more easily processed thing, and it delivers a fuller, riper feeling.
The “La Boheme” number
There’s really a lot to be said for being able to hear each and every song lyric. (I digested them only occasionally when I saw the stage version.) And being able to hear each and every voice in the chorus of “Seasons of Love” (and every song after that) provides an amazing high.
Has Columbus made a kicky and colorful c’mon-kids-let’s-put-on-a-show musical? Yeah, kind of…but what’s wrong with that? And what other way could Columbus have gone? Play down the energy, go grimmer, shoot in on Super 16mm, channel Darren Aronofsky or Larry Clark?
Rent is a big-studio movie musical. As I understand it, the idea is to turn people on, attract the fans of the stage show, sell tickets, etc.
It’s not Open City or Paisan or Rocco and his Brothers. It’s a revamp of Puccini’s “La Boheme” with all those primary emotions, catchy thrash-guitar songs, drama- tic condensings, lovers loving and losing each other, tomorrow belongs to no one so go for it today, etc.
And it’s Rent, after all…butter wouldn’t melt in its mouth.
I’m sorry to differ with the nyah-nyahs, but Columbus has taken these ingredients and made it all sound quadruple-fantastic (be absolutely certain you see Rent in a theatre with a great sound system) and punched it up and brought out the bells and whistles and made a movie musical that really delivers.
Rent creator Jonathan Larson, composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim sometime around ’94 or ’95.
You’ll be more likely to feel this way if you’re a not-very-hip type like myself, or if you’re in the same kind of head-space as those 425 satisfied folks who saw it with me at the Aero theatre. And if you’re in the opposite camp…it’s your call.
Rent is set in 1989 — the stage show was written between 1988 and ’90. The show is basically about the effect that being close to death has upon your basic life atti- tudes. We all know the riff about “the clarity of mind experienced by a man stand- ing on the gallows is wonderful,” etc. That’s all that’s being said here, and that’s obviously a theme that will never lose relevance.
The young-gay-guys-and-urban-drug-users-dropping-like-flies-from-AIDS element isn’t the same today as it was in the early days of the first Bush administration , obviously (and thank fortune)…but this doesn’t date the film — it just places it in a certain cultural context, and that’s nothing to get over.
I know it when something is working. Call it subjective, but I felt it last night and it wasn’t just me.
A guy who loved the off-Broadway stage version said he’s heard it doesn’t work because the actors seem too old. “They’re all supposed to be in their early 20s …the actors all look like they’re 28 or 30,” he told me this morning. That’s bull- shit…they’re young-enough looking. It’s a non-issue.
There are three love relationships in Rent, and only one of them (Adam and Rosa- rio’s) is hetero. We’re really in a gay-friendly season these days, and there’s no watching Rent and missing the notion that we’re all God’s children. The Mel Gibson contingent can go stuff it.
The energy and punch of this show are there all the way through, and the emotion- al specifics of each and every character and situation are clearer and more vivid than they appeared to me when I saw the stage show…whoops, repeating myself.
There will be more to say about Rent in a week or two. Those crab-heads really need to be slapped around.
Columbus did a post-screening q & a with Variety‘s Ian Mohr, and here’s how it sounded. It’s a big fat (probably slow-loading) sound file, but it’s worth a listen.
You’ll hear me ask a couple of questions — one about an angry duet number between Pascal and Rapp that was cut, and another about the “dated” issue, which Columbus answers pretty well.
Debate
“I saw Rent yesterday, and I thought it absolutely blew chunks. I haven’t seen the stage play and knew nothing from the music. Went in with a totally open mind, but…
“The score is awful. Mediocre rock songs with banal lyrics — every single one of them seemingly introduced by the same string of piano chords. And they all sound alike except for the first number, which is the only memorable piece in the entire production. Just dreadful.
“Some of the production numbers — particularly ‘La Vie Boheme’ — are too loud, too crowded, too all-over-the-place. It also seems to me that Larson was incapable of writing a song that didn’t involve a multi-part chorus. Again, just dreadful.
Adam Pascal, Rosario Dawson in Chris Columbus’s film of Jonathan Larson’s Rent (Columbia, 11.23)
“And what’s with that performance piece that Idina Menzel performs? The one involving cows and metaphors about developers, and…sheesh! My brain hurts just thinking about it.
“I will say I didn’t have a problem with the age of the actors, although let’s admit that one or two look way too old for the roles.
“The book sucks also. Cardboard characters, one-dimensional situations, cliches all over the place. But I’ll be honest: you can say the same about a lot of musical theater.
“Thing is, I can understand why twentysomethings will probably dig this. But watching it, I felt how they must feel watching Hair . What the…?” — Lewis Beale
Wells to Beale: Whatever, but answer me this….
The movie is a shorter version of the play with some trims, and it allows you to hear each and every lyric, and it lets you sink into the characters a bit more.
The play has been running at the Nederlander since ’96. That means that it’s been striking chords with audiences on a fairly profound level.
So if the score is so awful and the production numbers are so shitty (and I really don’t know how you could feel this way), how do you explain the play’s popularity? It must be doing something right.
And if the movie is the play only clearer and more condensed (which it is), how can it be totally chunk-blowing, as you say it is?
Beale back to Wells: As I said, I can understand why twentysomethings respond to it. The whole camaraderie thing, the trying-to-find-your-place-in-the-universe thing, rebelliousness, love, etc.
“And let’s not get into the whole art vs. commerce thing. Plenty of plays, movies and CDs are aesthetic crap, but speak to audiences for whatever reason. ‘Phantom of the Opera’ is still on Broadway. ‘Mama Mia’ is a huge hit. Does anyone think these productions are grand artistic statements?”
Empty Vessel
“I’m no Keira Knightley fan but let’s be honest. The only thing that Rachel McAdams has over her is that she has made a film with not only Owen Wilson but Luke wilson too (!) and Keira hasn’t. That connection alone seems to be enough for you to give someone a free pass, or in McAdams’ case a promotion to ‘greatest thing since…’
“Maybe Holden sees something in Knightley that you don’t. It’s a little tiresome hearing you go on and on about someone or something as if it’s the greatest thing in cinema and then as soon as another passionate opinion is expressed that you don’t agree with you resort to describing it as ‘jizzing.'” — Tom Van
Keira Knightley
Wells to Van: Cream over? Wet himself? Experience critical arousal? McAdams’ Luke-and-Owen connection is impressive, yes, but take away Knightley’s looks and transitional aura and she’s treading water, at best. It would be polite for me to say otherwise, but it’s not valid for Stephen Holden to “see something in Knightley that I don’t” because there’s nothing there….end of discussion.
“I agree with your assessment of Keira Knightley. I think there is appeal there and after seeing her on The Daily Show this week, I think I understand what it is.
“She’s a great first date. You see her in little bites — in the trailer for Pirates, for instance — and she’s exciting and great. She made a great best friend in Bend It Like Beckham . Seeing her in a single movie can be okay, but she doesn’t hold interest through to the next morning. I mean, what would you talk about over breakfast?” — Reed Barker, Senoia, Georgia.
9/11 Songs
“The only 9/11-related song I can think of is Richard Thompson’s ‘Outside of the Inside,’ which is actually a commentary on the fundamentalist attitudes that lead people to extremist actions.
“I don’t know if you’re familiar with Thompson’s work, the song is on ‘The Old Kit Bag,’ his excellent record from 2003. He also scored Herzog’s Grizzly Man. His web site is http://www.richardthompson-music.com/default.asp.” — Scott Bishop
“There’s an Amy Rigby song called ‘Don’t Ever Change’ where the first verse (in my mind, at least) is about being in a small town right after 9/11. You can listen to it here: http://www.amyrigby.com/wheelslyrics.html” — Kristie Coulter
“If you missed ‘Where Were You (When The World Stopped Turning)’ by Alan Jackson, which is utterly unlike Springsteen’s business-as-usual lugubriousness, then you really have to stay in more and watch CMT.” — Richard Szathmary
Will you listen to New York Times critic Stephen Holden jizz all over Keira Knightley and her intoxicating aura in Pride and Prejudice (which is quite tedious, by the way)? Knightley “is, in a word, a knockout,” he enthuses. “When this 20-year-old star is on the screen, which is much of the time, you can barely take your eyes off her…her radiance so suffuses the film that it’s foolish to imagine [her character] would be anyone’s second choice.” This is dereliction of duty. There should be more to a captivating actress than looks and radiance. She needs to have it inside…deep down… and Knightley, as I wrote in early September, “doesn’t. I don’t mean sex appeal or vivaciousness or any of that natural-aura stuff. I mean she doesn’t have ‘it.’ People are delighted with Knightley…that young, beautiful, Audrey Hepburn-ish quality, and the way she seems to add fizz to any movie she’s in. But there’s nothing about her that sticks or sinks in. Whatever it is that Rachel McAdams possesses and dispenses, Knightley has not.”
The cathartic effect of war films and what they get into vs. don’t get into — particularly in the recent Jarhead, Gunner Palace and Syriana — will be the topic at the annual “Times Talks” on Saturday, 11.12. It’s happening inside theatre #10 at Hollywood’s Arclight cinema. Kicking things off at 11:30 will be critics A.O. Scott and Manohla Dargis riffing on war films past and present, followed by a 2 pm panel discussion between Times editor Gerald Marzorati and directors Eugene Jarecki (Why We Fight), Michael Tucker (Gunner Palace), Garrett Scott (Operation Dreamland) and Stephen Marshall (Battleground). The finale will be a discussion between Lynn Hirschberg and George Clooney, primarily talking about Syriana. For information and availability, visit www.AFI.com/afifest or call 866.234.3378.
Rent Renewal
The advance word on Rent (Columbia, 11.23) for the last few months has been that it’s going to feel slightly dated (being a late ’80s piece about some young AIDS-af- flicted Manhattanites), and Chris Columbus, not the grittiest and most naturalistic of directors, will gloss it up too much, so watch out.
The buzz was wrong. Say it again: the buzz was wrong.
Rosario Dawson, Adam Pascal during “Light My Candle” number in Chris Columbus’s film of Jonathan Larson’s Rent (Columbia, 11.23)
Call me emotionally impressionable, call me unsophisticated, call me a sap…but I saw Rent last night in Santa Monica, and in its vibrant, open-hearted, selling-the- hell-out-of-each-and-every-song-and-dance-number way, it’s a knockout and an ass-whooper and damn near glorious at times.
I didn’t just like it…I felt dazzled, amped, alpha-vibed. I got into each and every song, every character and conflict…I settled back and went with it. People were applauding after almost every song, and the film really does give you a “whoa… this is special” feeling.
Somewhere up there (out there, in there…whatever), Jonathan Larson, the guy who created the play but died in January 1996, just before the stage show opened, is breathing easy.
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Columbus went with almost the entire original cast, and they’re all spot-on. A cer- tain theatricality is inevitable when actors are breaking into song, but everyone plays it down and naturalistic; they don’t project in a playing-to-the-balcony way that throws you out of the piece.
Adam Pascal’s Roger and Anthony Rapp’s Mark are note-perfect. Rosario Daw- son’s singing is surprisingly assured and satisfying, in addition to her usual first- rate emoting. Wilson Jermaine Heredia, Jesse L. Martin, Idina Menzel, Tracie Thoms, Taye Diggs…everyone gets a gold star.
Rent is a slicker, punchier, more revved-up movie musical than Milos Forman’s Hair, which had some of the same elements (kids in New York, in and out of love, looming tragedy). But it’s not that different from the Forman film; it has a similar elan.
I kept saying to myself last night, “What’s wrong with this film?….where’s the mis- calculation? Where’s the gross Chris Columbus saccharine overkill?”…and it just didn’t happen to any bothersome degree.
It may not be hip enough for some of my nyah-nyah, know-it-all critic friends. It may not be Alphabet City enough. It may be, for them, too far removed from the vitality of the original off-Broadway, pre-Broadway show…too much of a Holly- wood-style take on something that may have been a bit sweet or cloying, but which worked because of the Lower East Side funkitude balance-out factor.
Critics said the same thing about Robert Wise’s West Side Story. That overly Oscar-awarded film brought an overly sanitized, sound-stagey quality to the material, wich furthered the loss of the immediacy and excitement of the original B’way play. The dissers of Wise’s film were right. It was too 1961 mainstream.
But Columbus is not Robert Wise. He lived in Manhattan way back when and knew the Lower East Side, he knows the stage show backwards and forwards, he’s pruned it down a bit and has made a film that’s a lot tighter and brighter and a cleaner “sell.”
I saw Rent in ’96 with Jett, who was then about eight, and I remember enjoying the energy and a lot of the songs and feeling a general respect for it…but I wasn’t floored. For me, the film is a better ride.
I don’t want to compare apples and oranges, and I understand that Rent-heads might not agree that it’s “better,” but the film is a cleaner, more easily processed thing, and it delivers a fuller, riper feeling.
The “La Boheme” number
There’s really a lot to be said for being able to hear each and every song lyric. (I digested them only occasionally when I saw the stage version.) And being able to hear each and every voice in the chorus of “Seasons of Love” (and every song after that) provides an amazing high.
Has Columbus made a kicky and colorful c’mon-kids-let’s-put-on-a-show musical? Yeah, kind of…but what’s wrong with that? And what other way could Columbus have gone? Play down the energy, go grimmer, shoot in on Super 16mm, channel Darren Aronofsky or Larry Clark?
Rent is a big-studio movie musical. As I understand it, the idea is to turn people on, attract the fans of the stage show, sell tickets, etc.
It’s not Open City or Paisan or Rocco and his Brothers. It’s a revamp of Puccini’s “La Boheme” with all those primary emotions, catchy thrash-guitar songs, drama- tic condensings, lovers loving and losing each other, tomorrow belongs to no one so go for it today, etc.
And it’s Rent, after all…butter wouldn’t melt in its mouth.
I’m sorry to differ with the nyah-nyahs, but Columbus has taken these ingredients and made it all sound quadruple-fantastic (be absolutely certain you see Rent in a theatre with a great sound system) and punched it up and brought out the bells and whistles and made a movie musical that really delivers.
Rent creator Jonathan Larson, composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim sometime around ’94 or ’95.
You’ll be more likely to feel this way if you’re a not-very-hip type like myself, or if you’re in the same kind of head-space as those 425 satisfied folks who saw it with me at the Aero theatre. And if you’re in the opposite camp…it’s your call.
Rent is set in 1989 — the stage show was written between 1988 and ’90. The show is basically about the effect that being close to death has upon your basic life atti- tudes. We all know the riff about “the clarity of mind experienced by a man stand- ing on the gallows is wonderful,” etc. That’s all that’s being said here, and that’s obviously a theme that will never lose relevance.
The young-gay-guys-and-urban-drug-users-dropping-like-flies-from-AIDS element isn’t the same today as it was in the early days of the first Bush administration , obviously (and thank fortune)…but this doesn’t date the film — it just places it in a certain cultural context, and that’s nothing to get over.
I know it when something is working. Call it subjective, but I felt it last night and it wasn’t just me.
A guy who loved the off-Broadway stage version said he’s heard it doesn’t work because the actors seem too old. “They’re all supposed to be in their early 20s …the actors all look like they’re 28 or 30,” he told me this morning. That’s bull- shit…they’re young-enough looking. It’s a non-issue.
There are three love relationships in Rent, and only one of them (Adam and Rosa- rio’s) is hetero. We’re really in a gay-friendly season these days, and there’s no watching Rent and missing the notion that we’re all God’s children. The Mel Gibson contingent can go stuff it.
The energy and punch of this show are there all the way through, and the emotion- al specifics of each and every character and situation are clearer and more vivid than they appeared to me when I saw the stage show…whoops, repeating myself.
There will be more to say about Rent in a week or two. Those crab-heads really need to be slapped around.
Columbus did a post-screening q & a with Variety‘s Ian Mohr, and here’s how it sounded. It’s a big fat (probably slow-loading) sound file, but it’s worth a listen.
You’ll hear me ask a couple of questions — one about an angry duet number between Pascal and Rapp that was cut, and another about the “dated” issue, which Columbus answers pretty well.
Silverman Live
I hate the way I sometimes tend to digress during inteviews (i.e., talking about myself rather than the subject). I feel like I’m being fairly precise and down to it when the interview is happening, but I always think otherwise when I listen to the recording because I sound like like a self-obsessed putz.
Times photo of Sarah Silverman, taken at a party last Monday night in Manhattan for her film Jesus Is Magic
That said, if you’re not too sound-filed out by the recording of the Chris Columbus q & a, here’s a recording of my time spent with Sarah Silverman in Boston last Friday afternoon.
The latest Silverman interview, written by New York Times correspondent Marcelle Clements, which went up today, is another good profile, aspiring to the level of the 10.26 New Yorker piece but shorter.
Modern Marketing
You’ll experience a fairly strong disconnect if you (a) read Peter Biskind’s interview with Woody Allen in the December Vanity Fair, and then (b) examine DreamWorks’ newspaper ad in last Sunday’s New York Times on behalf of Allen’s Match Point (opening 12.25, limited).
It’s not like you need a magnifying glass to see Allen’s name, which is right under Penelope Wilton’s, but you do have to kind of lean in and squint. The typeface is obviously less vivid than the one used for the actors’ names.
I can imagine the marketing execs’ memo to the art guys: “Okay, his name has to be in the credits above the title but let’s do what we can to obscure this. Okay? No casual reader of the ad is supposed to see his name. Just so we’re clear on that.”
The reason is that the name “Woody Allen” is a big negative with the under-30s. I don’t want to give this attitude any more respect or attention than I have to, but that’s the equation…”Woody Allen = stay away.”
Match Point may have an effect upon this attitude, but you can’t predict. I just know that under-30 movie tastes are really fascinating at times.
Girl Can’t Help It
There’s no question about Sarah Silverman being some kind of avatar of a new, out-there comic dispensation. She’s had a handle on it for a while…ten years or so, she told me last Friday…but most of us, I’m presuming, are just starting to tune in.
There’s something about that dry, super-perverse delivery of hers…the dingle-dan- gle rhythm of her schpiel…it’s just perfect. I could listen to that reedy chatty voice for hours. And those oh-and-by-the-way-I-was-licking-jelly-off-my-boyfriend’s-penis jokes…not sexy but so sublime.
Comic Sarah Silverman
I go to a comedy club maybe once every couple of years so I obviously don’t have the perspective, but Silverman seems possessed by and onto something extra.
There’s something Lenny Bruce-ian about her. She’s not really jazzy or free assoc- iative and she doesn’t do political humor (not my by my definition of it), but there’s an element of provocation, a kind of maybe-you’re-getting-this-and-maybe-you’re- not-but-maybe-you-should.
It’s all pretty much there in Silverman’s Jesus is Magic (Roadside Attractions, 11.11), a kind of get-acquainted performance film that includes a sassy little musical intro and an occasional staged, out-of-the-theatre short.
Don’t take this the wrong way, but I didn’t laugh that much during Jesus is Magic. Silverman is obviously funny-nervy, but I was too into watching her perform. And for some of us, mind-game humor is more heh-heh than hah-hah.
An online commentator wrote, “Instead of laughing at the content [of her jokes], you laugh at the attitudes she portrays and worry if you should find them funny. You either miss the irony of her comedy or you have to appreciate her genius as an actor, writer, comic, and social critic.”
The heart of Jesus is Magic (a dig at Christian mythology… what will the Mel Gib- son wackos say?) is Sarah doing her sly and very dry little-girl-telling-an-outrage- ously-provocative-joke routine.
Sitting in a dull corporate boardroom on the 16th floor or Boston’s Seaport Hotel — Friday, 11.4.05, 12:35 pm.
There are two sides to her stage manner — Silverman seemingly amused by the discomfort created by her choke-on-it riffs (i.e., a marketing proposal that would exploit the fact that American Airlines was the first to slam into the World Trade Center) and oblivious to her words in a very bright, manipulative-Jewish-girl-who- knows-how-to-push-her-father’s-buttons way.
Listen to these clips. Click on “Nanna.” Consider the way Silverman says. “I’m sorry… alleged Holocaust.” She almost mutters it, like she’s talking under her breath. Which is why it’s funny (to me). If she’d turned up the delivery just a bit, or pushed it in some other direction…
Listen to “St. Christopher Medal” and the kind of dreamy way she says, “I wear this St. Christopher medal sometimes because — I’m Jewish, but my boyfriend is Catholic — it was cute the way he gave it to me. He said if it doesn’t burn through my skin it will protect me.”
Silverman isn’t vulgar or “blue” or gripped by some fiendish rage. She’s sweet, friendly, prim, well-behaved. No element of madness… obviously disciplined…hip and shrewd, but concerned with basic Jewish-girl issues (love, family, being thin) deep down.
Of course, doing interviews with journalists involves a kind of performance.
An excellent profile of Silverman ran in The New Yorker a couple of weeks ago. Written by a poet named Dana Goodyear, it’s called “Quiet Depravity: The Dem- ure Outrages of a Standup Comic”.
“Silverman is thirty-four and coltish,” she writes early on, “with shiny black hair and a china-doll complexion. Her arms are long and her center of gravity is low: she is five feet seven, and moves like a vervet monkey.”
As lame as this sounds, Silverman’s black hair is mesmerizing. I was thinking all through the film how it’s a world unto itself…as black and freshly-shampooed-per- fect as Snow White’s.
“Onstage, she is beguilingly calm,” Goodyear observes. “She speaks clearly and decorously. The persona she has crafted is strangely Pollyanna-ish and utterly absorbed in her own point of view. She presents herself as approachable though deranged, a sort of twisted Gracie Allen, and she never breaks character.
“[Silverman] talks about herself so ingenuously that you can’t tell if she is the most vulnerable woman in the world or the most psychotically well defended. She cross- es boundaries that it would not occur to most people even to have. The more inno- cent and oblivious her delivery, the more outrageous her commentary becomes.”
Hence my interest, fascination, attraction…
A smart guy wrote me after reading in the column that I spoke to her last Friday, and asked about her in-person allure. I replied that “she’s really sweet and earnest in a girly, sitting-around-in-her-sweatpants way…like a lot of smart Jewish girls I’ve known. Endearing, straight-from-the-shoulder, confessional.
Silverman, boyfriend-comedian Jimmy Kimmel
“Okay, she seemed a tad hotter in the concert film than in person, but workout clothes have a way of toning things down. Plus she’s very fair-skinned and freck- ly…but also impish-pretty with lots of sparkle. I liked her right away.
“I loved that she’s not nuts (most comedians seem to live in dark, despairing pla- ces) and that she’s totally into discussing other actors or comedians or movies and doesn’t try to steer things back in her direction, like many actors and actresses do during interviews.”
I asked Silverman at what point did she realize she’d finally refined and gotten hold of her unique comedic voice and attitude. “Sometime around 24, 25,” she replied. Which meant around ’94 or ’95.
At one point she sat side-saddle on the half-sofa, tucking her feet off to the side, up against the arm rest…the exact same position she was sitting in during her reasonably funny Aristocrats interview.
Her boyfriend is comedian Jimmy Kimmel, the amiable, barrel-chested late-night ABC talk-show guy. I told Silverman I like his humor but I can’t stand the elephant- collar shirts he wears. It’s an under-40 GenX guy thing…the influence of the mythic Italian shirt designers of the ’80s never got through. The loyal Silverman told me she had no idea what I was on about when I tried to explain.
Silverman’s next performance is in Rent (Columbia). A guy she ran into recently told her she’s the funniest thing in the film. (Is that a distinction worth noting? It’s a film about kids dealing with AIDS in Manhattan’s Lower East Side in the early ’90s.)
Silverman has a meatier part is Todd Phillips’ School for Scoundrels, a comedy that will costar Billy Bob Thornton, Jon Heder and Michael Clarke Duncan.
I mentioned to Silverman that there’s a 1959 British comedy with the same name. She said she didn’t think so and suugested I might be thinking of School for Scandal. I didn’t push it, but Scoundrels did come out in ’59, and costarred Terry Thomas and Alastair Sim.
I really think it’s important to see Jesus is Magic and know who Silverman is and what she’s on about. She’s an echo chamber of sorts…tethered to certain aspects of our general cultural malaise in the same way that currents running beneath the culture of the mid ’50s are discernible when you look at blurry kinescopes of Sid Ceasar and Imogene Coca.
Tempest Approaching?
“If you’re looking for an angle on The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, you might enjoy this one:
“The promotion and release of the film is going to bring about a red-blue religious wackos vs. the rest of us dust-up. It has the potential to be a moderately big deal, and thus far almost no one in the entertainment press is covering it.
“The series of fairy tales this Narniais based on are generally seen as an old-fashioned Christian parable, i.e., the New Testament rewritten with talking animals and magic standing in for disciples and theology, plus a big talking lion standing in for Jesus.
“The problem is that these days, it’s viewed — incorrectly, I might add — as a kid- targeted endorsement of Passion-style fundamentalism by a lot of the fringe- wacko hardliners, which is a shame and a joke as the theology expressed by the story is exactly the sort of kinder, gentler, more intellectual-and-philosophical brand of Christian thought that the Passion posse so despises.
“These fringe-wacko hardliners are already raring, ready and organized to try and piggyback their agenda onto this film, and Disney has gone so far as to hire special faith-oriented marketing firms to help them assuage concerns that they might ‘secularize’ the material.
“Plus some of the more faith-oriented fans are gearing up to mount what would have to be called a boxoffice holy war between this flick and the Harry Potter franchise, which they view as Narnia‘s pagan upstart enemy.
“Here’s the best part: The fan base will also be at war within itself, as there are basically two camps of heavy-duty Narnia devotees…an even split between those who appreciate it simply as a series of beloved children’s literature and those who want it viewed only as a kind of 700 Club recruiting pamphlet.
“The blood between these two camps is so bad it makes the Original Series/Next Gen split in Star Trek fandom look like a mild family quarrel, and if the Narnia movie makes any kind of notable mainstream splash in theaters it’s gonna be open war right out in the cultural square.
“Mark my words, this is going to be an interesting release no matter how good the flick turns out.” — MSTMario2@aol.com
Wells to Mario: I have to hunker down and do some studying about this. I don’t know anything…zilch.
Grabs
Boston statehouse — Friday, 11.4.05, 8:25 pm.
Sign in front of 2038 pairs of boots arranged in military formation on the Boston Common — Friday, 11.04, 8;40 pm.
Sign placed opposite the Boston Common display of U.S. military boots.
Waiting for the Red Line subway on way back from Long Beach airport — Sunday, 11.6.05, 9:40 pm.
Hollywood Boulevard near corner of Highland — Sunday, 11.6.05, 9:55 pm.
Mannequin inside Boston’s Prudential Center/Copley Square mall — Saturday, 11.5.05, 7:05 pm.
Jarhead Muddle
“I went to dinner and a movie with some friends Saturday night. The local theater didn’t have Capote so we were stuck with a choice between Shopgirl and Jarhead, and we decided on the latter.
“My expectations were low enough that I wasn’t disappointed when it was over; I was more disappointed going in then coming out. But two things struck me upon exiting the theatre.
“First, there are too many kids who treat the experience of watching a war film like it’s “so soooo coool” and “awesome” and exchanging quotes from Full Metal Jacket. Perhaps they would like to experience the ‘pink mist’ as well. At a risk of getting all Howard Beale on you, we are in a war now and kids are getting blown up almost everyday, there’s nothing cool about it, right? We’re in a war now. The audience seemed detached from this.
Jarhead costars Jake Gyllenhaal, Peter Sarsgaard
“Secondly, Jarhead seemed to play mostly as a deadpan postmodern black comedy. I laughed more than anyting else. Another measure was that during pivotal scenes there was a smacking irony, a harsh truth that you would have to either laugh through or become the Troy character.
“When Swoff and Troy are robbed of their kill at the end, it felt to me like dark comedy. The sexual angst was mostly played for yuks even though underneath the ramifications are ugly. Lines like “shooting my gun in celebration being the only time I fired it the entire war” or “that’s Vietnam music, we don’t even get our own music” are what stick in my mind, and they taste of dark humor.
“But I can’t tell if this was the intention of Sam Mendes. Was he boldly and delicately making a black comedy and not telling the execs, or is he just tone deaf? Am I the only one or did you notice this too?” — George Bolanis , Pittsburgh, PA.
Girth
“I dunno…somehow ‘The Fat Clooney’ sounds like the sequel to The Big Lebowski — Mike Mayo
Wells to Mayo: Exactly. Immediate coolness. My want-to-see on Syriana shot up ten-fold after hearing it.
Lifeboat
“Liked that WIRED bit about Hitchcock’s Lifeboat, a film I’ve loved for years. Hitch often gets dismissed as a serious filmmaker because his movies are fun to watch and were, in many cases, clearly commercial.
“It’s become fashionable for guys like Tarantino to bash on Psycho), but Hitchcock had an artistry to his filmmaking and a depth of understanding of the human condition that many of today’s so-called auteurs lack, in my opinion.
“I just saw Rebecca for the first time and was blown away. Even if Selznick did come along and put his own music in, etc., it’s still a visionary work by a filmmaker at the top of his game.” — Michael Goedecke
Choices
“I was reading your most recent comments on why some films that give off what I’d guess you’d call an emotionally burnished quality don’t seem to connect with the audiences in the way that some of us might expect. There’s no single thing that explains this, but I can think of a few.
“First is the inevitable focus on box office, which is one of the few, hard indicators of the ‘success’ of a film, but given the changing nature of entertainment options and methods of consumption, I don’t believe it’s the only, or in some cases, even the primary factor.
“There are many films that I’d like to see in the theater, but if I miss that two- or three-week window when they’re in wide release — either because I was busy or just not in the right frame of mind — than I’ll opt to buy the DVD. I’ve got a decent home theater set-up, and frankly I don’t think my experience watching, say, Hustle & Flow at home is going to be qualitatively different than seeing it in the theater.
Naomi Wattts in King Kong
“I also think you make an unfair distinction between those who might go to see Saw II and those who might prefer to see The Constant Gardener. At least among my particular group of friends, those are overlapping audiences, and going to catch one movie on opening weekend means we’re unlikely to see the other.
“It’s not a sign of lack of interest, but a matter of mood and social dynamics. And frankly, DVDs provide a safety net because there will always be a DVD, and then I can choose where, how, and with whom I want to watch the movie on my own timetable.
“Lastly, whenever anyone points to the disappointing response to Cinderella Man I just have to shake my heard. I can’t pretend to know what was in the hearts and minds of everyone who chose not to see the film, but I know that for me it was contempt borne of familiarity.
“I mean, I’ve seen this story. So. Many. Times. I know every single emotional beat that will be hit, every single turn of the plot screw, the entire shape of the dramatic arc.
Ralph Fiennes in The Constant Gardener
“And it’s simply not interesting, no matter who wrote, directed, or acted in it, unless they can give me something new, deeper, surprising. And the trailer did a great job of telling me that there was absolutely nothing like that in the film. It’s Oscar Model #21A, and frankly it just bores me, and seems to bore most other people I know.
“I also agree with the disinterest in King Kong, mainly because I’m uninterested in the original and all succeeding versions. It’s a personal thing, but I really hate the ‘misunderstood hero as antagonist.’ I’ll still probably go see it with a crowd, but not out of any passion for the material.” — Chris Todd
Widescreen Idiocy
“I saw that photo you ran of the widescreen TV with the extra-wide widescreen image of Batman Begins, and perhaps you’re the idiot here. A 2.35:1 film will still have black bars on a 16:9 TV. 16:9 is 1.78:1, and not 2.35:1.” — Grady Stiles
Wells to Stiles: I know exactly what I’m talking about. Black bars are fine…the point is that the anamorphic 2.35 image in that photo has been squeezed down to what looks like a 3 to 1 or 3.5 to 1 image. It’s a widescreen image for morons who don’t know aspect ratios from their anus. I know aspect ratios dead to rights….go to American Widescreen Museum (http://www.widescreenmuseum.com/) and poke around and learn a thing or two. It’s all there. A very smart and knowledgable site.
Has It Down
Today (Friday, 10.4) is Peter Sarsgaard Meditation Day, if you want to think like that. You know…thoughts of who he is and how sharp his mind is, what he’s got stewing inside, what that easy smile and those hooded eyes really indicate deep down, where’s he’s heading.
Sarsgaard, 34, has two new movies opening today — Jarhead, a Waiting-for-Godot- ish Gulf War drama in which he plays Troy, the hardest and truest Marine of them all…an intense embodiment of the modern deballed warrior…and The Dying Gaul, in which he plays a gay screenwriter involved in a sexual-ethical muddle with a big-studio executive (Campbell Scott) who wants to make a movie of his script, and the executive’s curiously frustrated wife (Patricia Clarkson).
Peter Sarsgaard
Both of Sarsgaard’s characters are given to internal suffering, which he conveys with his usual particularity. A lot of actors are good at subtle conveyences, but Sarsgaard is always fascinating when most of the energy is being pushed down and there’s relatively little to do. He doesn’t ever seem to say, “Look at me”…but you can’t help doing that.
He can also be riveting when asked to go in the opposite direction. There’s a start- ling, almost-on-the-cusp-of-being-too-much sexual scene in Gaul that proves this and then some. It’s “honest” in a way that almost no other actor I can think of would be willing to touch.
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I wouldn’t call either performance career-altering, but they’re a reminder of what everyone has come to realize about Sarsgaard over the least couple of years, which is that he’s an exceptional violin player, and that one day the right music and the right conductor are going to come along and…wham, out of the park.
Being an obsessive type, I keep wondering when Sarsgaard is going to play another quietly heroic, morally grounded role…a guy who knows much more than he’s saying, whose intelligence you can sense right away…another sympathetic, Chuck Lane-in-Shattered Glass type…a struggling 30ish guy with brains and integrity…maybe given to a little anxiety at times, maybe a sharp glance or two, but a guy you want on your team.
Campbell Scott, Patricia Clarkson, Sarsgaard in Craig Lucas’s The Dying Gaul
Like any artist with any kind of bravery, Sarsgaard doesn’t believe in repeating himself. He’s into discovery and twisting the dials in such a way that the audience is prodded into new territory, and would almost certainly find some way of saying “uhm, I don’t think so” if a producer were to take him to dinner and say, “I want you to do that again.”
But Sarsgaard is that guy…I think. That guy and then some. And he’s a lot more intriguing in person than what he is (or has been given to do) in his new films, not because the movies are shitty but because real-life conversation can sometimes turn your mind around in ways that performances can only poke at.
Sarsgaard “has become this year’s go-to guy by holding his feelings in check,” the Newark Star Ledger‘s Stephen Witty wrote today. “What exactly is going on behind those sleepy eyes? Sly and knowing, Sarsgaard’s characters always seem to be privy to some secret information…something always feels closeted.”
“As Robert convulses with wrenching emotional seizures, Mr. Sarsgaard gives the riskiest screen performance of his career,” wrote New York Times critic Stephen Holden. “Save perhaps for Sean Penn’s outbursts in Dead Man Walking and Mystic River, no actor in a recent American film has delivered as explosive a depiction of a man emotionally blasted apart.”
And yet Sarsgaard’s essence as a performer, I think, is about strength. He’s the guy who gets everything, who sees through every last dodge. That’s what those hooded eyes say to me…not malevolence, not some prickly loser attitude, but supreme perceptional confidence. In a friendly, non-arrogant way.
Sarsgaard, Maggie Gyllenhaal
It’s right there in that settled gaze and slight smile. I know, he’s saying. You know …we both do. You want me to tell you? I can but…we don’t need to play games, do we?
I met Sarsgaard late Wednesday afternoon near his place in the West Village, adjacent to Hudson Square.
My moody little fucking IPAQ 3115 didn’t feel like recording, but I remembered a few things without notes. Here’s a random sampling of topics explored at a little Italian place on the corner of Jane and West 4th Street.
He’s taller than he seems to be on-screen, and a bit fuller of face (especially with the beard) than he was in Shattered Glass. It may be an act (and wouldn’t that fit the whole picture if is is?), but his manner is about as easy and gracious as it gets.
Sarsgaard took some time off about doing four ’05 films in a row — The Skeleton Key, Flightplan (in which he played the villain), The Dying Gaul and Jarhead. He’s only just starting to read scripts again.
He can wait for the right ones to come along. He doesn’t spend his money (he drives a ’91 or ’92 car) and is under no financial pressure to do anything.
He’d like to play likable, sure, but he doesn’t get sent the pick-of-the-litter scripts (i.e., the ones that go to Tom Cruise, Bard Pitt, et. al.) and he often winds up getting offered this or that outsider-malcontent type. He’s pretty clear about which films are right for him and which aren’t, he says.
He’s loosely collaborating with Dying Gaul director-writer Craig Lucas on a new film project, although his input has been mostly in the vein of saying “this works” or “that doesn’t seem right” with Lucas doing the heavy lifting.
There’s a lot of concentration that goes into doing press junkets, he feels. He suggested to Jarhead costar Jake Gyllenhaal that he check out Albert and David Maysles’ Meet Marlon Brando (’66), a 28-minute doc about Brando doing press interviews for Code Name: Morituri in ’65,and never really getting into the promo- tional frame of mind, talking about this or that…an excellent behavioral guide for any actor looking to keep his/her dignity during a press junket.
His girlfriend Maggie Gyllenhaal is just starting work on Oliver Stone’s 9/11 movie, and Peter doesn’t claim to know too much about the when, where and how…not his deal.
After finishing shooting on The Dying Gaul, Peter and Maggie took a trip to Sicily but at one point decided to divert to Rome to visit the statue of the Dying Gaul (also known as the Dying Galatian or Dying Gladiator) in the Capitoline Museum. They stayed at Rome’s Hotel de Russie.
Dying Gaul statue at Rome’s Capitoline Museum.
A thought hit me during our chat that Sarsgaard (especially with his beard and all) would look right as an 1860s cabinet officer and Union military guy in Steven Spielberg’s Abraham Lincoln movie, which is supposedly going to begin filming in March ’06 with Liam Neeson in the lead.
We parted company around 6 pm, partly because Sarsgaard had to make it up to the Beacon Theatre to see Rufus Wainwright perform. He’s also a fan of a Rasta- farian group called Midnite (apparently they only perform in the wee hours). He later suggested my checking out two of their tunes on I-Tunes — “Propaganda” and “Mamma Africa.”
Check out this IMDB chat board showing that Sarsgaard has some revved-up female fans, with some singing his praises as a “soft” non-sculpted hottie.
Regular reader Dixon Steele wrote in this afternoon after reading an earlier, choppier version of this piece and said, “Peter Saarsgard is a very talented actor, always interesting…and I don’t think I’ve ever seen him in a total clunker.
“But on top of that, he gets to sleep with Maggie Gyllenhaal every night! Damn!! For that alone he gets our respect (and envy!). Maybe it’s the Double-A thing in their names.”
Acknowledgment: Special thanks to our friends at DigitalHit.com for allowing me to use the Sarsgaard photo at the top of the page.
Still from Albert Maysles’ 1966 documentary Meet Marlon Brando
Boston Grabs
Sarah Silverman during 20-minute q & a at Boston’s Seaport Hotel — Friday, 11.4.05, 12:40 pm.
On the way to the Silverman interview from Coolidge Corner on Beacon Street — 11.4.05, 12:05 pm.
On Chinatown bus to Boston, about 40 miles out — Thursday, 11.3.05, 4:10 pm.
On Green Line back to Brookline after Silverman interview — 11.4.05, 1:15 pm.
Jett Wells — Thursday, 11.3.05, 8:05 pm.
Coolidge Corner, looking southwest — 11.4.05, 11:58 am.
This is what I mean by widescreen TV idiocy, and I see it everywhere. Batman Begins, a 2.35 to 1 scope film, is stupidly misconfigured on this 16 x 9 screen — vertically, nonsensically compressed. The morons who set up hardware displays in electronics stores are always doing stuff like this, and when you mention it to them they always go “huh?”
Sarah Silverman — 11.4.05, 12:50 pm
Nothing There
If I wanted to just blurt it out and cut to the chase, I could say that Jarhead (Univ- ersal, 11.4) is nothing. But it’s not entirely nothing — it’s the fall’s first major what- the-hell-were-they-thinking? movie, and that ain’t hay. Trust me, it’s going to send tens of thousands of viewers out of theatres and into the street next weekend (it’s tracking…it’ll open) asking themselves this very question.
Oo-rahh…
Based on Anthony Swofford’s first-person account of his experience as a Marine during the 1991 Gulf War, Jarhead was probably pitched to Universal execs as the first GenX war movie…the Nirvana generation’s answer to Full Metal Jacket.
Swofford (Jake Gyllenhaal) arrives at U.S. airbase in Saudi Arabia, ready to whoop ass.
It was probably also sold it as a kind of GenX woe-is-us movie…as a Douglas Coupland-referenced metaphor about feelings of impotence and powerlessness… about Gulf War grunts feeling robbed of immediacy and ground-floor opportunity during their Big Combat Moment.
Or maybe they (Mendes or producers Lucy Fisher or Doug Wick, or all three) sim- ply told Universal they would deliver an honest definitive portrait of what a letdown the Gulf War was for the combatants and how it felt to be bored out of your ass in the desert, and Universal execs listened, looked at each other and said in unison, “Cool, that’ll sell tickets.”
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Universal bought the pitch, but Jarhead isn’t a movie. It’s about waiting in your seat for the movie to begin, and then waiting and waiting and eventually saying to yourself, “Oh, shit.” It doesn’t dig in or get down or manage to be any more than what Three Kings was during its first 15 minutes.
My respect for David O. Russell, the director and writer of Three Kings, is very much renewed. Great filmmaker!
Swofford’s book was fairly absorbing (I read about half of it), but the material that would make for a moderately absorbing movie simply isn’t there.
Jarhead is a series of scenes showing Marines being trained to be killers state- side, and then flying to Saudi Arabia in ’91 and waiting to go to battle against Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard troops, and then never quite seeing battle.
And to give things a generically haunting vibe it tells us (by way of narration by Jake Gyllenhaaal, who plays Swofford, or “Swoff”) that a grunt can never forget that rockin’ feeling of having his finger on a trigger. To which you will say…to which your friends will say…to which anyone with a mind will say…”So what?”
Gylennhaal, costar Peter Sarsgaard (r.) in Sam Mendes’ Jarhead
If Jarhead wasn’t a Sam Mendes movie, and wasn’t a big-studio early November release (and hence a presumed Oscar contender on some level)…if it had opened in, say, March or August without a lot of hoopla…it might have been seen for what it is — a nicely textured, maddeningly empty film about grunts coping with boredom, loneliness and disappointment — without people resenting what it isn’t.
It’s not terrible. It’s well made, well acted, convincing, etc. But $1.75 and a movie like Jarhead will get you a bus ticket.
And I’m not going to be sucked into saying what some critics are probably thinking right now, which is, “Whoa…ballsy! A hall-of-mirrors film about nothing happening that actually becomes what it’s about!”
Watch out for any critic who tries this one out on you, because that critic will be totally full of shit.
I was in my local Montrose Avenue grocery store after Monday night’s screening and the counter guy — Hispanic, early 40s, unmarried – asked me about it after spotting the program notes in my hand. “A Gulf war movie…been wanting to see this,” he said. I said, “Well, I don’t know…it’s fairly well made but no fighting.” And he said, “No fighting?”
Not even the genius of Universal marketing honcho Marc Schmuger can save this film.
It’s kind of Full Metal Jacket-y at times, but it mainly resembles that film’s floun- dering middle section. That means no character intrigue or simmering conflict (like Vincent D’Onofrio’s Pvt. Gomer Pyle being slowly tortured into animal madness by F.Lee Ermey’s drill sergeant), and no third-act battle-scene climax or a very young dying enemy soldier lying on the ground and whispering “Shoot me…shoot me!”… and no final ironic statement that comes close to Stanley Kubrick’s grunts singing the Mickey Mouse Club song with the hell-fires of Hue in the background.
It has one big scene toward the end that isn’t really a big scene…it’s kind of a final “sorry, son but this war won’t be happening for you” scene. You start to feel something when it happens but then it’s over and it’s back to the same old blah.
And there’s one really good line that Gyellenhaal says about not wanting to hear Vietnam music (i.e., a cut by The Doors) in the middle of an early `90s desert war.
So Kubrick wins and Mendes loses. (He never had a chance, really.) The British -born director, a good guy, started things off with a bang with American Beauty six years ago, and managed a stirring followup with Road to Perdition, but he didn’t have Connie Hall to punch things up this time and the material was too unfocused and insubstantial…and he failed. Jarhead is the suck.
No Oscar nominations for anyone except cinematographer Roger Deakins. No acting awards or nominations for Jake Gyllenhaal, although he’s pretty good (as far as it goes). No Best Supporting Actor nom for the great Peter Sarsgaard because the script doesn’t let him do or say anything except for a single emotional crackup scene near the end (and it’s nowhere near enough).
Universal will get its first weekend gross and then the word will get out and it’ll be down-the-toilet time.
Okay, it’s well-crafted. Yes, it has a certain high-visual distinction (occasional sur- real or dream-like flourishes) and (I keep mentioning this but there’s nothing else to mention) a streak of apparent honesty in its depiction of what boredom it can be to park your eager-beaver Marine ass in the Arabian desert for months and months, etc.
But the script never grabs hold of anything in the characters and tries to make something happen. Nothing means nothing. “Swoff” is nervous about what his girlfriend may be up to with some guy she says she’s met…who cares? Sars- gaard’s Troy is wired tight and born-to-fight…and that’s it. Jamie Foxx is a sergeant who loves the Corps and doesn’t shrink from handing out discipline…nothing. Chris Cooper gives two pep-rally speeches…showboating.
Marine Sergeant Jamie Foxx (l.) and the guys
There’s no narrative through-line to hitch your wagon to…no sense of gathering force or anything of interest approaching…nothing emotional. A lot of presumed disloyal girlfriend stuff, a little homoeroticism here and there…but it’s all Waiting for Godot-ish. The actors have zip to work with. They do moderately well with what they’ve been given, but moderately well doesn’t cut it during Oscar season.
Deakins’ photography is fine…okay, better than fine…and the CG of the burning oil wells in the third act is my favorite kind of CG, which it to say pretty much invisi- ble.
But a supposed war movie about not fighting a war — about the boring nothing bullshit stuff that happens when soldiers who’ve been trained to kill are just hanging around in the desert with their dicks in their hands…I’m really amazed. Jarhead‘s audacity would be startling if it didn’t feel so inert.
Mondo Kongo
Anyone who’s seen the Lord of the Rings trilogy (or, more to the point, has sat through the extended versions on DVD) knows Peter Jackson has never been into brevity. He couldn’t operate farther from a less-is-more aesthetic if he tried.
Eye-filling visuals, teary emotionalism, portentousness, sets and costumes that are just so, probing closeups, dialogue scenes that go on longer and are more exacting than necessary…Jackson loves to heap it on.
It should therefore come as no surprise that King Kong, his latest film which Universal will open theatrically on 12.14 (or six and a half weeks from today), is going to run three hours, according to a 10.27 story by New York Times reporter Sharon Waxman.
The obvious implication is that Jackson’s Kong is going to be a lot more about Jackson — his brushstrokes, I mean, and the absolute power and perogative he has to throw as much paint at the canvas as he deems fit — than anything else.
It also seems that Jackson’s indulgent streak has most likely overwhelmed any chance of audiences getting to savor a straight, clean re-telling of a classic tale about a dishy blonde and a big heartsick ape.
Take a look at the Kong stills and it’s obvious the film is going to look awesome. They’re clearly mouth-watering. But that aside, all bets are off.
I know how some of you are reading this. I have a case against Jackson and have hated everything he’s done since Heavenly Creatures, blah blah, so anything I say in advance about King Kong is a broken-record “here we go again” deal.
This poster is an unoffical fanboy thing, but thanks anyway to Jeremy Huggins for fixing the spelling of Adrien Brody’s name.
But ask yourselves this: has there ever been a remake of any kind — play, film, televised — that has been judged to be superior because it went on longer and used more words, sets, costumes and tubes of paint than the original leaner version?
I’m not saying this hasn’t ever happened (and I will honestly love it if Jackson outdoes the original in any way…really), but I’m having trouble thinking of an example.
The whole idea in Jackson making this film, according to his own proclamations when he began work on it a couple of years ago, was to pay some kind of tribute to Merian C. Cooper’s 1933 original film. Not in a Gus Van Sant/Psycho way, but to essentially re-do a classic movie…to re-experience and re-deliver to modern audiences what he loved about Kong when he first saw it as a kid on TV.
The project, which has swollen in cost to $207 million dollars, has apparently evolved into something more obsessive than personal.
The 1933 Kong runs 100 minutes, and Jackson is pretty much using the same story and situations, or so I’ve understood all along. So what could the extra 80 minutes be about? Only a few people know, but I’m fairly certain they’re about one thing and one thing only: Jackson’s power to make this film any way he damn well pleases, and about nobody at Universal being able to say boo.
In other words, the extra 80 minutes are about the auteurist “wheee!” factor…the same carte blanche E-ticket that has allowed all powerful directors at the apex of their careers to go for broke.
Given his huge success with the Rings trilogy, Jackson is certainly in no position, contractually or psychologically, to alter his modus operandi. And he’s in no way obliged to listen to anyone else’s opinions, be they practical brass-tacks sugges- tions or what-have-you.
“The film is substantially longer than Universal had anticipated and presents dual obstacles,” Waxman writes. “The extra length has helped increase the budget by a third…while requiring the studio, owned by General Electric, to reach for the kind of long-term audience interest that made hits out of three-hour movies like Titanic and the films in Mr. Jackson’s Rings trilogy.
“Hollywood blockbusters have increasingly relied on big releases that bring in as much as half of their ticket sales on the first weekend. But long films receive far fewer showings per day, and the most successful ones, like Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) by Mr. Jackson, which took in $315 million at the domestic box office for New Line Cinema, have remained in theaters for well over half a year.”
Asked about the length of King Kong, Universal executives told Waxman they saw it “as an advantage in an era when jaded moviegoers are hungering for something extraordinary.
“‘This is a three-hour feast of an event,’ said Marc Shmuger, vice chairman of Universal Pictures. ‘I’ve never come close to seeing an artist working at this level.'”
Waxman notes that “few elements of the film have been seen by the larger public, and even Universal executives saw a finished version of King Kong’s face — with its expressive eyes, broadly fierce nose and mane of computer-generated hair — only in recent days.”
“Expressive eyes”? Is that Waxman talking or something she was told by some other Universal exec? No telling yet, but a Golum-ish, Andy Serkis-ized Kong will be a very tough row to hoe.
“Exhibitors have long complained that very long films make it harder to draw audiences, though in this difficult year at the box office, they have complained louder about not having enough good films to show,” Waxman writes.
No one will be happier than myself if Kong kicks ass. And yet the indications are what they are. Snaggle tooth, Jack Black doing a half-comical spin on Carl Den- ham, three-hour running time, 11th-hour firing of composer Howard Shore, etc.
Talk me out of this. Tell me how I’m reading this the wrong way…I mean, without resorting to the usual you-can’t-see-straight-when-it-comes-to-Peter-Jackson argument.
Implied
That European poster for Steven Spielberg’s Munich (Universal, 12.23) confirms what I wrote about this film last March, which is that it’s not going to be about killing the Palestinian perpetrators of the 1972 Munich Olympic Games massacre as much as the feelings of guilt and futility that are the inevitable dividend of any such act.
Munich, which will star Eric Bana and Daniel Craig, is about a revenge operation planned and executed by Mossad, or Israel’s CIA. And, I gather, the moral and ethical mucky-muck that resulted. The script is by New York playwright Tony Kushner (Angels in America).
The guy in the poster is sitting in a hotel room and holding a piece and obviously experiencing a moment of spiritual doubt of some kind. He’s not wondering what TV show to watch.
European one-sheet for Steven Spielberg’s Munich
Munich will be Spielberg’s second major-league feature having to do with lethal aggression against Jews, the first being Schindler’s List, and he knows this latest effort will be compared to his 1993 Oscar winner, so he’s got to…you know…make it complex, high-minded, morally probing.
The theme, I’m guessing, will be something along the lines of “if we all keep taking an eye for an eye, pretty soon the world will be blind.” This line comes from a 1986 TV movie called Sword of Gabriel, which was based on the same true-life story the Spielberg-Kushner film is apparently about.
Two athletes were killed during a hostage-taking and stand-off situation with German authorities at Munich’s Olympic village. Nine more were killed by a grenade blast at Munich’s Furstenfeldbruck airport when authorities tried to shoot it out with the terrorists.
I haven’t read Kushner’s script, but one of the film’s vantage points is that of “Committee X,” a high-ranking group of Israeli officials, chaired by Israeli premiere Golda Meir and Defense Minister Mosha Dayan, and the assassination campaign they ordered Mossad to carry out — to murder every strategist and supporter known to have in some way supported Black September’s Munich operation.
A member of Black September standing on balcony of Israeli athletes’ condo in Munich’s Olympic Village during September 1972 hostage stand-off.
The operation was known in some circles as Operation Wrath of God.
The idea behind the campaign, which was known as the kidon (Hebrew for bayonet) and run by senior Mossad agent Mike Harrari, was to strike terror in the hearts and minds of the plotters. It was primarily for the sake of revenge, I’m sure, but also to try and psychologically deter similar operations.
Mossad started with a list of 11 names, but the people they wound up killing numbered 18, by one count.
Harrari’s plan was to be absolutely precise and avoid collateral damage, and yet people who had nothing to do with the Munich killings — a Moroccan waiter, a Russian KGB agent, an Arab-looking bodyguard in Gibraltar, three Arab-looking guys who made the mistake of pulling out guns during a raid in Switzerland — died at the hands of the kidon killers. Seven in all.
Snob Aesthetics
My favorite flip-through book last summer was David Kamp and Steven Daly’s “The Rock Snob’s Dictionary” (Broadway Books), an incisive and tidy sum-up guide about the who, what and wherefores of elitist rock-music savoring.
And now I’m into “The Film Snob’s Dictionary,” which I scored an advance copy of last week. It’s less of an education than “Rock Snobs” — I’m obviously much more familiar with the turf — but I’m having just as good a time with the knowingness and wit and concise prose style.
“The Film Snob’s Dictionary” won’t be out until February ’06 (to tie in with seasonal Oscar frenzy), but I don’t think I’m blurbing it too early. You’ll be reading advance items and friendly mentions come November-December, and…I don’t know…time seems to whiz by faster and faster these days…torrents of information surging at hurricane-speed.
The authors are the Manhattan-based Kamp, a longtime Vanity Fair writer and sometime contributor to GQ, and another New York journo named Lawrence Levi, who first met Kamp when they worked together at Spy in…I think it was the late ’80s or early ’90s, when Graydon Carter was the editor.
Snobs are always hovering around any field of creative endeavor, and most of them are usually fringe wannabe types (i.e., producers, financial patrons, hangers-on) covering some insecurity.
Film Snobs are mostly fringe types also, but a certain number can be found among journalists and critics. Naturally, I exclude myself. I have this delusional idea that I’m an anti-snob, man-of-the-people type. The truth is that I know my stuff and feel no empathy for lowbrow ignorance, and I always go into fits when people refuse to support a film I know is intelligent, well-honed and suffused with honest emotion.
So maybe I’m a bit snobby, although for the sake of balance I try to ground myself in my middle-class, rubbing-shoulders-with-prole-types background. And I think Bollywood films are for the birds.
And yet I couldn’t help laughing when I read this line from the opening graph of “An Introductory Note by the Authors”:
“The Film Snob fairly revels, in fact, in the notion that The Public Is Stupid and Ineducable, which is what sets him apart from the more benevolent Film Buff — the effervescent, Scorsese-style enthusiast who delights in introducing novitiates to The Bicycle Thief and Powell-Pressburger films.”
I know film-snob attitudes quite well, or at least what it is to feel grossly insecure about not knowing enough about movies and therefore lacking the chops to qualify as a snob.
I felt this way when I first came to New York in the late ’70s to try and make it as a film journalist. I was acutely aware that I didn’t have the seasoning and the film knowledge to even stand in the same vicinity as the big New York guns of the time (Pauline Kael, Andrew Sarris, Stuart Byron, etc.), and it caused me no shortage of anguish.
This was compounded by the fact that writing articles at the time was doubly difficult because I couldn’t relax and just write what I knew and felt on my own terms.
Pauline Kael
I finally got past all this, partly out of a realization that certain elite critics lived on the planet Neptune. I came to realize that although they knew what they knew and had a brilliant way of saying it, their views weren’t any better than mine…although my respect for the elites and worshipping their prose all those years (as well as boning up on venerated critics like Andre Bazin, Otis Ferguson, Manny Farber, Dwight McDonald, James Agee, et. al.) had a cumulative effect.
I wrote last summer that I especially enjoyed “The Rock Snob’s Dictionary” because “it’s so exquisitely written. Every sentence is a Hope diamond, chiseled and honed and phrased to perfection with just the right seasoning of know-it-all attitude…aimed, naturally, at the snobs who initially created it.” The same goes with the new volume. It’s an immaculate, whip-smart read.
One difference is that “The Film Snob’s Dictionary” runs 114 pages, or 36 pages shorter than “The Rock Snob’s Dictionary.” I would have preferred a few more snob obsessions being thrown in (film snobbery encompasses a vast universe and at least 85 years of film history) …but since it’s aimed at people who don’t know this world at all, I guess the idea was to avoid getting too anal-particular.
Another difference is that knowing the film world as I do, a lot of what’s in the book is back-of-the-hand familiar. But I’m sure rock aficionados felt the same way last summer.
New York Press critic Armond White
The intro piece is pretty good…
“The Film Snob’s stance is one of proprietary knowingness — the pleasure he takes in movies derives not only from the sensory experience of watching them, but also from knowing more about them than you do, and from zealously guarding this knowledge from the cheesy, Julia Roberts-loving masses, who have no right whatsoever to be fluent in the works of Samuel (White Dog) Fuller and Andrei (the original Solaris) Tarkovsky.”
The graph about the public being Stupid and Ineducable follows, and then…
“The Film Snob’s Dictionary seeks to redress the knowledge gap between Snobs and non-Snobs, so that normal, nonsociopathic, movie-loving people may (a) become privy to some of the good stuff that Film Snobs zealously hoard for themselves; and (b) avoid or approach cautiously the vast quantities of iffy or downright crappy material that Snobs embrace in the name of Snobbery.
“This second service is especially valuable, because the Film Snob’s taste is willfully perverse, glorifying drecky Hong Kong martial-arts flicks and such misunderstood works of genius as Mike Judge’s Office Space and Michael Mann’s Heat for no rational reason whatsoever.”
(I read the preceding graph Sunday night to L.A. City Beat film critic Andy Klein, who isn’t a snob but surely knows his stuff as well as Jim Hoberman or Armond White. Klein laughed and said, “Obviously they’re trying to get a rise out of critics,” etc. He also declared that Heat, Office Space and, one inferred, a selection of his favorite Hong Kong chop-socky flicks “are all great.”)
“The authors of this book, in compiling its entries, have sought to strike the right balance between intellectual curiosity and Snob madness, so that the reader will feel less intimidated about renting a genuinely entertaining film such as Fritz Lang’s M just because it is ‘German Expressionist,’ but liberated from the burden of ever having to watch a Peter Greenaway film.”
The intro also says that “readers knowledgable about film will notice the conspicuous absence from The Film Snob’s Dictionary, apart from passing references, of such titans of foreign cinema as Federico Fellini (8 1/2), Ingmar Bergman (The Seventh Seal), Akira Kurosawa (The Seven Samurai), and Satyajit Ray (the “Apu” trilogy).
“The Film Snob may indeed know a fair amount about these filmmakers (Fellini in particular, given that his movies’ soundtracks were often composed by Snob cause celebre Nino Rota), but he generally scoffs at them, deeming them to be mere name-drops for bourgeois losers wishing to seem cultured. Watching a Bergman film is so PBS tote-bag, so Mom-and-Dad-on-a-date-in-college, so baguettes-and- Chardonnay.
“The Snob prides himself on his populist, un-arty taste, favoring, for example, the soapy, over-emotive schlock of India’s Bombay-based `Bollywood’ film industry over the artful, nuanced films of the Calcutta-born Ray, and the Spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Leone and Corbucci over anything Fellini ever made. It’s a reverse Snobbery more powerful than the Snobbery it’s rebelling against.”
New York Observer critic Andrew Sarris
There are something like 250 capsule mentions. As noted earlier, there could probably be another 100 or so more if Kamp and Levi wanted to bulk up. Some of these have appeared in two past issues of Vanity Fair, and there’s a site that quoted a few of them in ’04, so it doesn’t seem like much of a spoiler to excerpt a few more.
The eight entries I’m running deal solely with critics and film magazines/sites. If it were my book I would have mentioned other Neptuners (B. Ruby Rich, Jim Hoberman, Ray Pride, Armond White, Robert Koehler, Emanuel Levy) — each of whom, it could be argued, are fascinating in their authority-exuding quirkiness.
There’s certainly no slight in saying these people should have been included. Film Snobbery is an excusable neurotic outgrowth of being an extra-passionate Film Buff, and every Neptuner I’ve mentioned in this graph is a fine writer and respected scholar, so let’s not have any arched backs.
Anyway…
Farber, Manny: Beloved alter kocker film critic emeritus, now working as a a painter in Southern California. Preceding his friend Pauline Kael by more than a decade as a nonconformist thinker about movies, Farber got his start writing reviews for The New Republic in the 1940s and proved as comfortable decon- structing Tex Avery cartoons and Don Siegel genre exercises as he was evaluating the French New Wave and Rainer Werner Fassbinder — in effect, inventing the prevailing critic vogue for high thought on low entertainment. A big influence of Snob-revered Jonathan Rosenbaum, Farber, more than Kael or Andrew Sarris, is the name to drop for instant Crit Snob credibility.
Retired film critic Manny Farber
Film Comment. Smug, aggressively elitist bimonthly magazine published by the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Where Snobs go to read (or write) dithery articles about Bollywood and despairing critiques of popular cinema.
Film Threat. Surprisingly buoyant, unsmug Web ‘zine devoed to independent film. Where Snobs go to read fulsome appreciations of Sam Raimi and interviews with such Queens of the B’s as Debbie Rochon and Tina Krause.
Katz, Ephraim. Industrious Israeli-born film nerd who, in the 1970s, single- handedly undertook the task of compiling an encyclopedia of film. Published in 1979, after years of work, Katz’s The Film Encyclopedia quickly established itself as the definitive film reference for both Snobs who need to know what a “friction head” is (it’s a kind of tripod head that ensures smooth camera movement) and laypersons who can’t keep Linda Darnell straight from Joan Blondell. Katz died in 1992, and successive, expanded editions of the Film Encyclopedia have been produced by his proteges, though hard-core Snobs take issue with some of the cuts that were made from Katz’s original, and keep the ’79 edition around.
Kael, Pauline. Revered film critic (1919-2001) whose work, most of which appeared in The New Yorker, stood out for its bracing, provocative prose and its author’s loony, nonsensical taste; no one was smarter and more cogent about Cary Grant’s career and Steve Spielberg’s early films, yet no one was more reckless in overpraising grim 1970s murk and unbearably blowsy female performances (e.g., Elizabeth Taylor in X, Y & Zee; Karen Black in Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean; Bette Midler in Big Business). A tiny woman, Kael nevertheless inspired fear in her legions of movie-critic acolytes (known as “Paulettes”), full-grown men and women who tremulously sought her unforthcoming approval and pilgrimaged to her home in the Berkshires in the vain hope of being anointed her heir apparent.
Snob-favored New York Times critic Dave Kehr, flanked by two Russians with four-syllable last names
Kehr, Dave. Third- or possibly fourth-string New York Times movie critic. Though often relegated to reviewing DVD releases, he is preferred by Snobs over A.O. Scott, Manohla Dargis and Stephen Holden.
Rosenbaum, Jonathan. Industrious but mirthless film critic for the Chicago Reader; one of the few important film writers of the post-Kael era. Given to chiding fellow Snobs about their ignorance of the Iranian New Wave.
Sarris, Andrew. Brooklyn-born film critic and theorist known for popularizing the Auteur Theory, and for arousing the ire of Pauline Kael with his totemic 1968 book The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929 — 1968, in which he categorized directors by preference, prompting Kael to deride him, to his face, as a “list queen.” His gentlemanly, hypeless prose has remained consistent since 1960, when he began writing for the Village Voice. Married to the fellow film-critster Molly Haskell, Sarris now plies his trade for the New York Observer and as a trainee Snob-admired lecturer at Columbia University.
Reminder to Kamp and Levi: Montgomery Clift got drunk and slammed his car into that telephone pole in May, 1956. And the cool thing about Todd A-O in the 1950s wasn’t just the 70mm format — it was mainly the 30-frame-per-second rate of photography and projection (even though it was viewable in the big-city roadshow engagements of only two films — Oklahoma! and Around the World in 80 Days).
“The Film Snob’s Dictonary” is an essential, highly educational read for non- snobs, and snobs will have to buy a copy just to keep it on their bookshelves… something to leaf through and reflect upon as a kind of cautionary text.
Montgomery Clift
Grabs
Lounge area on main floor of Algonquin Hotel — Monday, 10.24.05, 10:30 pm.
Tuesday, 10.25, 10:25 pm.
2004 Village Voice cover…never saw it before this week
Marilyn Monroe photo shoot, sometime around ’59 or ’60. (I think.)
Mondo Kongo
Anyone who’s seen the Lord of the Rings trilogy (or, more to the point, has sat through the extended versions on DVD) knows Peter Jackson has never been into brevity. He couldn’t operate farther from a less-is-more aesthetic if he tried.
Eye-filling visuals, teary emotionalism, portentousness, sets and costumes that are just so, probing closeups, dialogue scenes that go on longer and are more exacting than necessary…Jackson loves to heap on the syrup.
It should therefore come as no surprise that King Kong, his latest film which Universal will open theatrically on 12.14 (or six and a half weeks from today), is going to run three hours, according to a 10.27 story by New York Times reporter Sharon Waxman.
The obvious implication is that Jackson’s Kong is going to be a lot more about Jackson — his brushstrokes, I mean, and the absolute power and perogative he has to throw as much paint at the canvas as he deems fit — than anything else.
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It also seems that Jackson’s indulgent streak has most likely overwhelmed any chance of audiences getting to savor a straight, clean re-telling of a classic tale about a dishy blonde and a big heartsick ape.
Take a look at the Kong stills and it’s obvious the film is going to look awesome. They’re clearly mouth-watering. But that aside, all bets are off.
I know how some of you are reading this. I have a case against Jackson and have hated everything he’s done since Heavenly Creatures, blah blah, so anything I say in advance about King Kong is a broken-record “here we go again” deal.
Note to eagle-eyed proofreaders: the misspelling of Adrien Brody’s name above is not my doing and I can’t figure how to Photoshop in a correction.
But ask yourselves this: has there ever been a remake of any kind — play, film, televised — that has been judged to be superior because it went on longer and used more words, sets, costumes and tubes of paint than the original leaner version?
I’m not saying this hasn’t ever happened (and I will honestly love it if Jackson outdoes the original in any way…really), but I’m having trouble thinking of an example.
The whole idea in Jackson making this film, according to his own proclamations when he began work on it a couple of years ago, was to pay some kind of tribute to Merian C. Cooper’s 1933 original film. Not in a Gus Van Sant/Psycho way, but to essentially re-do a classic movie…to re-experience and re-deliver to modern audiences what he loved about Kong when he first saw it as a kid on TV.
The project, which has swollen in cost to $207 million dollars, has apparently evolved into something more obsessive than personal.
The 1933 Kong runs 100 minutes, and Jackson is pretty much using the same story and situations, or so I’ve understood all along. So what could the extra 80 minutes be about? Only a few people know, but I’m fairly certain they’re about one thing and one thing only: Jackson’s power to make this film any way he damn well pleases, and about nobody at Universal being able to say boo.
In other words, the extra 80 minutes are about the auteurist “wheee!” factor…the same carte blanche E-ticket that has allowed all powerful directors at the apex of their careers to go for broke.
Given his huge success with the Rings trilogy, Jackson is certainly in no position, contractually or psychologically, to alter his modus operandi. And he’s in no way obliged to listen to anyone else’s opinions, be they practical brass-tacks sugges- tions or what-have-you.
“The film is substantially longer than Universal had anticipated and presents dual obstacles,” Waxman writes. “The extra length has helped increase the budget by a third…while requiring the studio, owned by General Electric, to reach for the kind of long-term audience interest that made hits out of three-hour movies like Titanic and the films in Mr. Jackson’s Rings trilogy.
“Hollywood blockbusters have increasingly relied on big releases that bring in as much as half of their ticket sales on the first weekend. But long films receive far fewer showings per day, and the most successful ones, like Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) by Mr. Jackson, which took in $315 million at the domestic box office for New Line Cinema, have remained in theaters for well over half a year.”
Asked about the length of King Kong, Universal executives told Waxman they saw it “as an advantage in an era when jaded moviegoers are hungering for something extraordinary.
“‘This is a three-hour feast of an event,’ said Marc Shmuger, vice chairman of Universal Pictures. ‘I’ve never come close to seeing an artist working at this level.'”
Waxman notes that “few elements of the film have been seen by the larger public, and even Universal executives saw a finished version of King Kong’s face — with its expressive eyes, broadly fierce nose and mane of computer-generated hair — only in recent days.”
“Expressive eyes”? Is that Waxman talking or something she was told by some other Universal exec? No telling yet, but a Golum-ish, Andy Serkis-ized Kong will be a very tough row to hoe.
“Exhibitors have long complained that very long films make it harder to draw audiences, though in this difficult year at the box office, they have complained louder about not having enough good films to show,” Waxman writes.
No one will be happier than myself if Kong kicks ass. And yet the indications are what they are. Snaggle tooth, Jack Black doing a half-comical spin on Carl Den- ham, three-hour running time, 11th-hour firing of composer Howard Shore, etc.
Talk me out of this. Tell me how I’m reading this the wrong way…I mean, without resorting to the usual you-can’t-see-straight-when-it-comes-to-Peter-Jackson argument.
Implied
That European poster for Steven Spielberg’s Munich (Universal, 12.23) confirms what I wrote about this film last March, which is that it’s not going to be about killing the Palestinian perpetrators of the 1972 Munich Olympic Games massacre as much as the feelings of guilt and futility that are the inevitable dividend of any such act.
Munich, which will star Eric Bana and Daniel Craig, is about a revenge operation planned and executed by Mossad, or Israel’s CIA. And, I gather, the moral and ethical mucky-muck that resulted. The script is by New York playwright Tony Kushner (Angels in America).
The guy in the poster is sitting in a hotel room and holding a piece and obviously experiencing a moment of spiritual doubt of some kind. He’s not wondering what TV show to watch.
European one-sheet for Steven Spielberg’s Munich
Munich will be Spielberg’s second major-league feature having to do with lethal aggression against Jews, the first being Schindler’s List, and he knows this latest effort will be compared to his 1993 Oscar winner, so he’s got to…you know…make it complex, high-minded, morally probing.
The theme, I’m guessing, will be something along the lines of “if we all keep taking an eye for an eye, pretty soon the world will be blind.” This line comes from a 1986 TV movie called Sword of Gabriel, which was based on the same true-life story the Spielberg-Kushner film is apparently about.
Two athletes were killed during a hostage-taking and stand-off situation with German authorities at Munich’s Olympic village. Nine more were killed by a grenade blast at Munich’s Furstenfeldbruck airport when authorities tried to shoot it out with the terrorists.
I haven’t read Kushner’s script, but one of the film’s vantage points is that of “Committee X,” a high-ranking group of Israeli officials, chaired by Israeli premiere Golda Meir and Defense Minister Mosha Dayan, and the assassination campaign they ordered Mossad to carry out — to murder every strategist and supporter known to have in some way supported Black September’s Munich operation.
A member of Black September standing on balcony of Israeli athletes’ condo in Munich’s Olympic Village during September 1972 hostage stand-off.
The operation was known in some circles as Operation Wrath of God.
The idea behind the campaign, which was known as the kidon (Hebrew for bayonet) and run by senior Mossad agent Mike Harrari, was to strike terror in the hearts and minds of the plotters. It was primarily for the sake of revenge, I’m sure, but also to try and psychologically deter similar operations.
Mossad started with a list of 11 names, but the people they wound up killing numbered 18, by one count.
Harrari’s plan was to be absolutely precise and avoid collateral damage, and yet people who had nothing to do with the Munich killings — a Moroccan waiter, a Russian KGB agent, an Arab-looking bodyguard in Gibraltar, three Arab-looking guys who made the mistake of pulling out guns during a raid in Switzerland — died at the hands of the kidon killers. Seven in all.
Snob Aesthetics
My favorite flip-through book last summer was David Kamp and Steven Daly’s “The Rock Snob’s Dictionary” (Broadway Books), an incisive and tidy sum-up guide about the who, what and wherefores of elitist rock-music savoring.
And now I’m into “The Film Snob’s Dictionary,” which I scored an advance copy of last week. It’s less of an education than “Rock Snobs” — I’m obviously much more familiar with the turf — but I’m having just as good a time with the knowingness and wit and concise prose style.
“The Film Snob’s Dictionary” won’t be out until February ’06 (to tie in with seasonal Oscar frenzy), but I don’t think I’m blurbing it too early. You’ll be reading advance items and friendly mentions come November-December, and…I don’t know…time seems to whiz by faster and faster these days…torrents of information surging at hurricane-speed.
The authors are the Manhattan-based Kamp, a longtime Vanity Fair writer and sometime contributor to GQ, and another New York journo named Lawrence Levi, who first met Kamp when they worked together at Spy in…I think it was the late ’80s or early ’90s, when Graydon Carter was the editor.
Snobs are always hovering around any field of creative endeavor, and most of them are usually fringe wannabe types (i.e., producers, financial patrons, hangers-on) covering some insecurity.
Film Snobs are mostly fringe types also, but a certain number can be found among journalists and critics. Naturally, I exclude myself. I have this delusional idea that I’m an anti-snob, man-of-the-people type. The truth is that I know my stuff and feel no empathy for lowbrow ignorance, and I always go into fits when people refuse to support a film I know is intelligent, well-honed and suffused with honest emotion.
So maybe I’m a bit snobby, although for the sake of balance I try to ground myself in my middle-class, rubbing-shoulders-with-prole-types background. And I think Bollywood films are for the birds.
And yet I couldn’t help laughing when I read this line from the opening graph of “An Introductory Note by the Authors”:
“The Film Snob fairly revels, in fact, in the notion that The Public Is Stupid and Ineducable, which is what sets him apart from the more benevolent Film Buff — the effervescent, Scorsese-style enthusiast who delights in introducing novitiates to The Bicycle Thief and Powell-Pressburger films.”
I know film-snob attitudes quite well, or at least what it is to feel grossly insecure about not knowing enough about movies and therefore lacking the chops to qualify as a snob.
I felt this way when I first came to New York in the late ’70s to try and make it as a film journalist. I was acutely aware that I didn’t have the seasoning and the film knowledge to even stand in the same vicinity as the big New York guns of the time (Pauline Kael, Andrew Sarris, Stuart Byron, etc.), and it caused me no shortage of anguish.
This was compounded by the fact that writing articles at the time was doubly difficult because I couldn’t relax and just write what I knew and felt on my own terms.
Pauline Kael
I finally got past all this, partly out of a realization that certain elite critics lived on the planet Neptune. I came to realize that although they knew what they knew and had a brilliant way of saying it, their views weren’t any better than mine…although my respect for the elites and worshipping their prose all those years (as well as boning up on venerated critics like Andre Bazin, Otis Ferguson, Manny Farber, Dwight McDonald, James Agee, et. al.) had a cumulative effect.
I wrote last summer that I especially enjoyed “The Rock Snob’s Dictionary” because “it’s so exquisitely written. Every sentence is a Hope diamond, chiseled and honed and phrased to perfection with just the right seasoning of know-it-all attitude…aimed, naturally, at the snobs who initially created it.” The same goes with the new volume. It’s an immaculate, whip-smart read.
One difference is that “The Film Snob’s Dictionary” runs 114 pages, or 36 pages shorter than “The Rock Snob’s Dictionary.” I would have preferred a few more snob obsessions being thrown in (film snobbery encompasses a vast universe and at least 85 years of film history) …but since it’s aimed at people who don’t know this world at all, I guess the idea was to avoid getting too anal-particular.
Another difference is that knowing the film world as I do, a lot of what’s in the book is back-of-the-hand familiar. But I’m sure rock aficionados felt the same way last summer.
New York Press critic Armond White
The intro piece is pretty good…
“The Film Snob’s stance is one of proprietary knowingness — the pleasure he takes in movies derives not only from the sensory experience of watching them, but also from knowing more about them than you do, and from zealously guarding this knowledge from the cheesy, Julia Roberts-loving masses, who have no right whatsoever to be fluent in the works of Samuel (White Dog) Fuller and Andrei (the original Solaris) Tarkovsky.”
The graph about the public being Stupid and Ineducable follows, and then…
“The Film Snob’s Dictionary seeks to redress the knowledge gap between Snobs and non-Snobs, so that normal, nonsociopathic, movie-loving people may (a) become privy to some of the good stuff that Film Snobs zealously hoard for themselves; and (b) avoid or approach cautiously the vast quantities of iffy or downright crappy material that Snobs embrace in the name of Snobbery.
“This second service is especially valuable, because the Film Snob’s taste is willfully perverse, glorifying drecky Hong Kong martial-arts flicks and such misunderstood works of genius as Mike Judge’s Office Space and Michael Mann’s Heat for no rational reason whatsoever.”
(I read the preceding graph Sunday night to L.A. City Beat film critic Andy Klein, who isn’t a snob but surely knows his stuff as well as Jim Hoberman or Armond White. Klein laughed and said, “Obviously they’re trying to get a rise out of critics,” etc. He also declared that Heat, Office Space and, one inferred, a selection of his favorite Hong Kong chop-socky flicks “are all great.”)
“The authors of this book, in compiling its entries, have sought to strike the right balance between intellectual curiosity and Snob madness, so that the reader will feel less intimidated about renting a genuinely entertaining film such as Fritz Lang’s M just because it is ‘German Expressionist,’ but liberated from the burden of ever having to watch a Peter Greenaway film.”
The intro also says that “readers knowledgable about film will notice the conspicuous absence from The Film Snob’s Dictionary, apart from passing references, of such titans of foreign cinema as Federico Fellini (8 1/2), Ingmar Bergman (The Seventh Seal), Akira Kurosawa (The Seven Samurai), and Satyajit Ray (the “Apu” trilogy).
“The Film Snob may indeed know a fair amount about these filmmakers (Fellini in particular, given that his movies’ soundtracks were often composed by Snob cause celebre Nino Rota), but he generally scoffs at them, deeming them to be mere name-drops for bourgeois losers wishing to seem cultured. Watching a Bergman film is so PBS tote-bag, so Mom-and-Dad-on-a-date-in-college, so baguettes-and- Chardonnay.
“The Snob prides himself on his populist, un-arty taste, favoring, for example, the soapy, over-emotive schlock of India’s Bombay-based `Bollywood’ film industry over the artful, nuanced films of the Calcutta-born Ray, and the Spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Leone and Corbucci over anything Fellini ever made. It’s a reverse Snobbery more powerful than the Snobbery it’s rebelling against.”
New York Observer critic Andrew Sarris
There are something like 250 capsule mentions. As noted earlier, there could probably be another 100 or so more if Kamp and Levi wanted to bulk up. Some of these have appeared in two past issues of Vanity Fair, and there’s a site that quoted a few of them in ’04, so it doesn’t seem like much of a spoiler to excerpt a few more.
The eight entries I’m running deal solely with critics and film magazines/sites. If it were my book I would have mentioned other Neptuners (B. Ruby Rich, Jim Hoberman, Ray Pride, Armond White, Robert Koehler, Emanuel Levy) — each of whom, it could be argued, are fascinating in their authority-exuding quirkiness.
There’s certainly no slight in saying these people should have been included. Film Snobbery is an excusable neurotic outgrowth of being an extra-passionate Film Buff, and every Neptuner I’ve mentioned in this graph is a fine writer and respected scholar, so let’s not have any arched backs.
Anyway…
Farber, Manny: Beloved alter kocker film critic emeritus, now working as a a painter in Southern California. Preceding his friend Pauline Kael by more than a decade as a nonconformist thinker about movies, Farber got his start writing reviews for The New Republic in the 1940s and proved as comfortable decon- structing Tex Avery cartoons and Don Siegel genre exercises as he was evaluating the French New Wave and Rainer Werner Fassbinder — in effect, inventing the prevailing critic vogue for high thought on low entertainment. A big influence of Snob-revered Jonathan Rosenbaum, Farber, more than Kael or Andrew Sarris, is the name to drop for instant Crit Snob credibility.
Retired film critic Manny Farber
Film Comment. Smug, aggressively elitist bimonthly magazine published by the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Where Snobs go to read (or write) dithery articles about Bollywood and despairing critiques of popular cinema.
Film Threat. Surprisingly buoyant, unsmug Web ‘zine devoed to independent film. Where Snobs go to read fulsome appreciations of Sam Raimi and interviews with such Queens of the B’s as Debbie Rochon and Tina Krause.
Katz, Ephraim. Industrious Israeli-born film nerd who, in the 1970s, single- handedly undertook the task of compiling an encyclopedia of film. Published in 1979, after years of work, Katz’s The Film Encyclopedia quickly established itself as the definitive film reference for both Snobs who need to know what a “friction head” is (it’s a kind of tripod head that ensures smooth camera movement) and laypersons who can’t keep Linda Darnell straight from Joan Blondell. Katz died in 1992, and successive, expanded editions of the Film Encyclopedia have been produced by his proteges, though hard-core Snobs take issue with some of the cuts that were made from Katz’s original, and keep the ’79 edition around.
Kael, Pauline. Revered film critic (1919-2001) whose work, most of which appeared in The New Yorker, stood out for its bracing, provocative prose and its author’s loony, nonsensical taste; no one was smarter and more cogent about Cary Grant’s career and Steve Spielberg’s early films, yet no one was more reckless in overpraising grim 1970s murk and unbearably blowsy female performances (e.g., Elizabeth Taylor in X, Y & Zee; Karen Black in Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean; Bette Midler in Big Business). A tiny woman, Kael nevertheless inspired fear in her legions of movie-critic acolytes (known as “Paulettes”), full-grown men and women who tremulously sought her unforthcoming approval and pilgrimaged to her home in the Berkshires in the vain hope of being anointed her heir apparent.
Kehr, Dave. Third- or possibly fourth-string New York Times movie critic. Though often relegated to reviewing DVD releases, he is preferred by Snobs over A.O. Scott, Manohla Dargis and Stephen Holden.
Rosenbaum, Jonathan. Industrious but mirthless film critic for the Chicago Reader; one of the few important film writers of the post-Kael era. Given to chiding fellow Snobs about their ignorance of the Iranian New Wave.
Sarris, Andrew. Brooklyn-born film critic and theorist known for popularizing the Auteur Theory, and for arousing the ire of Pauline Kael with his totemic 1968 book The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929 — 1968, in which he categorized directors by preference, prompting Kael to deride him, to his face, as a “list queen.” His gentlemanly, hypeless prose has remained consistent since 1960, when he began writing for the Village Voice. Married to the fellow film-critster Molly Haskell, Sarris now plies his trade for the New York Observer and as a trainee Snob-admired lecturer at Columbia University.
Reminder to Kamp and Levi: Montgomery Clift got drunk and slammed his car into that telephone pole in May, 1956. And the cool thing about Todd A-O in the 1950s wasn’t just the 70mm format — it was mainly the 30-frame-per-second rate of photography and projection (even though it was viewable in the big-city roadshow engagements of only two films — Oklahoma! and Around the World in 80 Days).
“The Film Snob’s Dictonary” is an essential, highly educational read for non- snobs, and snobs will have to buy a copy just to keep it on their bookshelves… something to leaf through and reflect upon as a kind of cautionary text.
Montgomery Clift
Grabs
Lounge area on main floor of Algonquin Hotel — Monday, 10.24.05, 10:30 pm.
Tuesday, 10.25, 10:25 pm.
Marilyn Monroe photo shoot, sometime around ’59 or ’60. (I think.)
Snob Aesthetics
My favorite flip-through book last summer was David Kamp and Steven Daly’s “The Rock Snob’s Dictionary” (Broadway Books), an incisive and tidy sum-up guide about the who, what and wherefores of elitist rock-music savoring.
And now I’m into “The Film Snob’s Dictionary,” which I scored an advance copy of last week. It’s less of an education than “Rock Snobs” — I’m obviously much more familiar with the turf — but I’m having just as good a time with the knowingness and wit and concise prose style.
“The Film Snob’s Dictionary” won’t be out until February ’06 (to tie in with seasonal Oscar frenzy), but I don’t think I’m blurbing it too early. You’ll be reading advance items and friendly mentions come November-December, and…I don’t know…time seems to whiz by faster and faster these days…torrents of information surging at hurricane-speed.
The authors are the Manhattan-based Kamp, a longtime Vanity Fair writer and sometime contributor to GQ, and another New York journo named Lawrence Levi, who first met Kamp when they worked together at Spy in…I think it was the late ’80s or early ’90s, when Graydon Carter was the editor.
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Snobs are always hovering around any field of creative endeavor, and most of them are usually fringe wannabe types (i.e., producers, financial patrons, hangers-on) covering some insecurity.
Film Snobs are mostly fringe types also, but a certain number can be found among journalists and critics. Naturally, I exclude myself. I have this delusional idea that I’m an anti-snob, man-of-the-people type. The truth is that I know my stuff and feel no empathy for lowbrow ignorance, and I always go into fits when people refuse to support a film I know is intelligent, well-honed and suffused with honest emotion.
So maybe I’m a bit snobby, although for the sake of balance I try to ground myself in my middle-class, rubbing-shoulders-with-prole-types background. And I think Bollywood films are for the birds.
And yet I couldn’t help laughing when I read this line from the opening graph of “An Introductory Note by the Authors”:
“The Film Snob fairly revels, in fact, in the notion that The Public Is Stupid and Ineducable, which is what sets him apart from the more benevolent Film Buff — the effervescent, Scorsese-style enthusiast who delights in introducing novitiates to The Bicycle Thief and Powell-Pressburger films.”
I know film-snob attitudes quite well, or at least what it is to feel grossly insecure about not knowing enough about movies and therefore lacking the chops to qualify as a snob.
I felt this way when I first came to New York in the late ’70s to try and make it as a film journalist. I was acutely aware that I didn’t have the seasoning and the film knowledge to even stand in the same vicinity as the big New York guns of the time (Pauline Kael, Andrew Sarris, Stuart Byron, etc.), and it caused me no shortage of anguish.
This was compounded by the fact that writing articles at the time was doubly difficult because I couldn’t relax and just write what I knew and felt on my own terms.
Pauline Kael
I finally got past all this, partly out of a realization that certain elite critics lived on the planet Neptune. I came to realize that although they knew what they knew and had a brilliant way of saying it, their views weren’t any better than mine…although my respect for the elites and worshipping their prose all those years (as well as boning up on venerated critics like Andre Bazin, Otis Ferguson, Manny Farber, Dwight McDonald, James Agee, et. al.) had a cumulative effect.
I wrote last summer that I especially enjoyed “The Rock Snob’s Dictionary” because “it’s so exquisitely written. Every sentence is a Hope diamond, chiseled and honed and phrased to perfection with just the right seasoning of know-it-all attitude…aimed, naturally, at the snobs who initially created it.” The same goes with the new volume. It’s an immaculate, whip-smart read.
One difference is that “The Film Snob’s Dictionary” runs 114 pages, or 36 pages shorter than “The Rock Snob’s Dictionary.” I would have preferred a few more snob obsessions being thrown in (film snobbery encompasses a vast universe and at least 85 years of film history) …but since it’s aimed at people who don’t know this world at all, I guess the idea was to avoid getting too anal-particular.
Another difference is that knowing the film world as I do, a lot of what’s in the book is back-of-the-hand familiar. But I’m sure rock aficionados felt the same way last summer.
New York Press critic Armond White
The intro piece is pretty good…
“The Film Snob’s stance is one of proprietary knowingness — the pleasure he takes in movies derives not only from the sensory experience of watching them, but also from knowing more about them than you do, and from zealously guarding this knowledge from the cheesy, Julia Roberts-loving masses, who have no right whatsoever to be fluent in the works of Samuel (White Dog) Fuller and Andrei (the original Solaris) Tarkovsky.”
The graph about the public being Stupid and Ineducable follows, and then…
“The Film Snob’s Dictionary seeks to redress the knowledge gap between Snobs and non-Snobs, so that normal, nonsociopathic, movie-loving people may (a) become privy to some of the good stuff that Film Snobs zealously hoard for themselves; and (b) avoid or approach cautiously the vast quantities of iffy or downright crappy material that Snobs embrace in the name of Snobbery.
“This second service is especially valuable, because the Film Snob’s taste is willfully perverse, glorifying drecky Hong Kong martial-arts flicks and such misunderstood works of genius as Mike Judge’s Office Space and Michael Mann’s Heat for no rational reason whatsoever.”
(I read the preceding graph Sunday night to L.A. City Beat film critic Andy Klein, who isn’t a snob but surely knows his stuff as well as Jim Hoberman or Armond White. Klein laughed and said, “Obviously they’re trying to get a rise out of critics,” etc. He also declared that Heat, Office Space and, one inferred, a selection of his favorite Hong Kong chop-socky flicks “are all great.”)
“The authors of this book, in compiling its entries, have sought to strike the right balance between intellectual curiosity and Snob madness, so that the reader will feel less intimidated about renting a genuinely entertaining film such as Fritz Lang’s M just because it is ‘German Expressionist,’ but liberated from the burden of ever having to watch a Peter Greenaway film.”
The intro also says that “readers knowledgable about film will notice the conspicuous absence from The Film Snob’s Dictionary, apart from passing references, of such titans of foreign cinema as Federico Fellini (8 1/2), Ingmar Bergman (The Seventh Seal), Akira Kurosawa (The Seven Samurai), and Satyajit Ray (the “Apu” trilogy).
“The Film Snob may indeed know a fair amount about these filmmakers (Fellini in particular, given that his movies’ soundtracks were often composed by Snob cause celebre Nino Rota), but he generally scoffs at them, deeming them to be mere name-drops for bourgeois losers wishing to seem cultured. Watching a Bergman film is so PBS tote-bag, so Mom-and-Dad-on-a-date-in-college, so baguettes-and- Chardonnay.
“The Snob prides himself on his populist, un-arty taste, favoring, for example, the soapy, over-emotive schlock of India’s Bombay-based `Bollywood’ film industry over the artful, nuanced films of the Calcutta-born Ray, and the Spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Leone and Corbucci over anything Fellini ever made. It’s a reverse Snobbery more powerful than the Snobbery it’s rebelling against.”
New York Observer critic Andrew Sarris
There are something like 250 capsule mentions. As noted earlier, there could probably be another 100 or so more if Kamp and Levi wanted to bulk up. Some of these have appeared in two past issues of Vanity Fair, and there’s a site that quoted a few of them in ’04, so it doesn’t seem like much of a spoiler to excerpt a few more.
The eight entries I’m running deal solely with critics and film magazines/sites. If it were my book I would have mentioned other Neptuners (B. Ruby Rich, Jim Hoberman, Ray Pride, Armond White, Robert Koehler, Emanuel Levy) — each of whom, it could be argued, are fascinating in their authority-exuding quirkiness.
There’s certainly no slight in saying these people should have been included. Film Snobbery is an excusable neurotic outgrowth of being an extra-passionate Film Buff, and every Neptuner I’ve mentioned in this graph is a fine writer and respected scholar, so let’s not have any arched backs.
Anyway…
Farber, Manny: Beloved alter kocker film critic emeritus, now working as a a painter in Southern California. Preceding his friend Pauline Kael by more than a decade as a nonconformist thinker about movies, Farber got his start writing reviews for The New Republic in the 1940s and proved as comfortable decon- structing Tex Avery cartoons and Don Siegel genre exercises as he was evaluating the French New Wave and Rainer Werner Fassbinder — in effect, inventing the prevailing critic vogue for high thought on low entertainment. A big influence of Snob-revered Jonathan Rosenbaum, Farber, more than Kael or Andrew Sarris, is the name to drop for instant Crit Snob credibility.
Retired film critic Manny Farber
Film Comment. Smug, aggressively elitist bimonthly magazine published by the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Where Snobs go to read (or write) dithery articles about Bollywood and despairing critiques of popular cinema.
Film Threat. Surprisingly buoyant, unsmug Web ‘zine devoed to independent film. Where Snobs go to read fulsome appreciations of Sam Raimi and interviews with such Queens of the B’s as Debbie Rochon and Tina Krause.
Katz, Ephraim. Industrious Israeli-born film nerd who, in the 1970s, single- handedly undertook the task of compiling an encyclopedia of film. Published in 1979, after years of work, Katz’s The Film Encyclopedia quickly established itself as the definitive film reference for both Snobs who need to know what a “friction head” is (it’s a kind of tripod head that ensures smooth camera movement) and laypersons who can’t keep Linda Darnell straight from Joan Blondell. Katz died in 1992, and successive, expanded editions of the Film Encyclopedia have been produced by his proteges, though hard-core Snobs take issue with some of the cuts that were made from Katz’s original, and keep the ’79 edition around.
Kael, Pauline. Revered film critic (1919-2001) whose work, most of which appeared in The New Yorker, stood out for its bracing, provocative prose and its author’s loony, nonsensical taste; no one was smarter and more cogent about Cary Grant’s career and Steve Spielberg’s early films, yet no one was more reckless in overpraising grim 1970s murk and unbearably blowsy female performances (e.g., Elizabeth Taylor in X, Y & Zee; Karen Black in Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean; Bette Midler in Big Business). A tiny woman, Kael nevertheless inspired fear in her legions of movie-critic acolytes (known as “Paulettes”), full-grown men and women who tremulously sought her unforthcoming approval and pilgrimaged to her home in the Berkshires in the vain hope of being anointed her heir apparent.
Kehr, Dave. Third- or possibly fourth-string New York Times movie critic. Though often relegated to reviewing DVD releases, he is preferred by Snobs over A.O. Scott, Manohla Dargis and Stephen Holden.
Rosenbaum, Jonathan. Industrious but mirthless film critic for the Chicago Reader; one of the few important film writers of the post-Kael era. Given to chiding fellow Snobs about their ignorance of the Iranian New Wave.
Sarris, Andrew. Brooklyn-born film critic and theorist known for popularizing the Auteur Theory, and for arousing the ire of Pauline Kael with his totemic 1968 book The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929 — 1968, in which he categorized directors by preference, prompting Kael to deride him, to his face, as a “list queen.” His gentlemanly, hypeless prose has remained consistent since 1960, when he began writing for the Village Voice. Married to the fellow film-critster Molly Haskell, Sarris now plies his trade for the New York Observer and as a trainee Snob-admired lecturer at Columbia University.
Reminder to Kamp and Levi: Montgomery Clift got drunk and slammed his car into that telephone pole in May, 1956. And the cool thing about Todd A-O in the 1950s wasn’t just the 70mm format — it was mainly the 30-frame-per-second rate of photography and projection (even though it was viewable in the big-city roadshow engagements of only two films — Oklahoma! and Around the World in 80 Days).
“The Film Snob’s Dictonary” is an essential, highly educational read for non- snobs, and snobs will have to buy a copy just to keep it on their bookshelves… something to leaf through and reflect upon as a kind of cautionary text.
Montgomery Clift
Grabs
Lounge area on main floor of Algonquin Hotel — Monday, 10.24.05, 10:30 pm.
Looking south on 7th Avenue from 57th Street — Friday, 10.21.05, 1:10 pm.
57th Street and 7th Avenue, looking east — Friday, 10.21.05, 1:07 pm.
Marilyn Monroe photo shoot, sometime around ’59 or ’60. (I think.)
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