So the New York Film Festival‘s crack team (Scott Foundas, Rose Kuo, Todd McCarthy, etc.) has landedRoman Polanski‘s Carnage for their opening-night attraction. Meaning there will be no Carnage at the Toronto Film Festival due to NYFF exclusivity terms, although it’ll have its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival in early September.
Carnage costars Cristoph Waltz, Kate Winslet, John C. Reilly and Jodie Foster with director Roman Polanski.
I’m going to need to catch the NYFF press screening of Carnage post-Toronto, which will be sometime between 9.18 and 9.25…right? Or do I have wait until 9.27 or 9.28? I’d like to know.
My other question (which NYFF and Focus Features staffers have so far declined to answer) is whether or not Tomas Alfredson‘s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, which will also preem at Venice, will be confirmed as a Toronto Film Festival attraction or as another NYFF booking down the road? It doesn’t figure that Venice has TTSS booked but not Toronto unless the NYFF has locked it down. Well…?
“All strong directors are sons of bitches,” John Ford allegedly said to screenwriter Nunnally Johnson sometime in the late ’40s or early ’50s. His point was that Johnson, in Ford’s view, was too much of a nice, thoughtful, fair-minded guy to cut it as a director. Directors basically can’t be mellow or gentle or accommodating. They need to be tough, pugnacious and manipulative mo’fos in order to get what they want. And if they’re too deferential, they won’t last.
(l.) Wes Anderson; (r.) John Ford.
I was reminded yesterday what a tough mo’fo Wes Anderson is when I asked him via email if he had a comment about Polly Platt‘s death, and he said “I don’t wish to share anything at this time.” What he actually meant, I suspect, is that he was temporarily refusing to disengage from the ultra-intense concentration he’s devoting to the making of Moonrise Kingdom, and that he just can’t and won’t disengage to compose a short paragraph about the woman who all-but-singlehandedly brought him into Hollywood’s top-tier realm.
That’s not conventional selfishness or thoughtlessness, but hard-core battlefield thinking. All movies are wars — enemies all around, one skirmish after another, betrayal lurking, bullets whizzing — and Wes was basically saying, “Polly and I know what our relationship was about and what she did for me, and I just don’t feel the need to jump through your quote hoop at this exact moment. I’ll say something about Polly at a time of my own choosing. But that was then and right now I’m leading the Third Army across France and into Germany so if you’ll excuse me…”
This reminded me of another “don’t mess with Wes” moment when I obtained entry into the Royal Tenenbaums Manhattan after-party in September 2001, and an enraged Wes came over and laid into me something fierce for (a) being at the party when he didn’t want me there because (b) I’d written a half-and-half review of Tenenbaums that leaned negative, and which came out a day or two earlier than other N.Y. Film Festival reviews. We talked the next morning in a calmer way, but I’d learned what a scrappy, in-your-face guy he could be when angry or under pressure. No pushover.
All good directors (Mann, Stone, Tarantino, Cameron, Kurosawa, Nichols, Kubrick) are know to have operated like this in their prime. They don’t sashay their way through the making of a film — they stress and scheme and argue and finagle to get whatever they want any way they can. Making a movie with them is an organized, guns-blazing, duck-and-weave enterprise that requires hard work, and is no day at the beach. All smart directors go out of their way not to be mean or manipulative, of course, being political animals and all. But deep down they have to be that snarly John Ford guy, or the system will eat them up.
There are always welcome exceptions to any rule, but the general rule is that there’s a linkage between directors getting older and becoming nicer, mellower people and their films starting to go down in quality.
The question is not which good directors have SOB undercurrents (answer: all of them) but which directors have a reputation for perhaps being too mellow and easygoing and accommodating, and are therefore probably doomed to be weeded out of the business sooner or later?
A thoroughly adolescent, borderline-retarded thought flashed through my head a while ago, to wit: I’d be far more interested in seeing Guillermo Del Toro‘s Pacific Rim if it was re-titled Pacific Rim Job. A joke for sixth-graders, okay, but I felt an agreeable surge when it hit me. Yes! Better title! But why?
In fact my reasons for entertaining this dopey-sounding thought are entirely reasonable.
One, a consensus is building in the blogosphere that Joe Cornish‘s Attack The Block has exposed the utter worthlessness of spending mountains of money on CG monsters by reminding us that it’s the victims of the monsters (their lives, issues, thematic currents, fears) are what matter most, and in fact are the only things that matter.
Two, the ludicrous CG alien craft in the trailer for Peter Berg‘s Battleship made me sick, and convinced me all the more that Cornish’s film is a breath of fresh air and may in fact represent a kind of nouvelle vague in monster films. It certainly revives a George Romero-ish feeling and reiterates what’s best in this genre.
And three, Guillermo del Toro declared during last weekend’s ComicCon that he feels duty-bound “to film the finest fucking monsters ever committed to the screen, and the greatest fucking robots.” The instant I heard that I said to myself, “Who cares? Monsters are over. They’ve been over-created! And your duty, Guillermo, is to engage and move your audience like you did in Pan’s Labrynth, Chronos and The Devil’s Backbone…okay?”
Which is why if given a choice between Pacific Rim and Pacific Rim Job, I would definitely prefer the latter.
I’m guessing that Crazy, Stupid, Love and Cowboys & Aliens will sell the most tickets this weekend, but the two best openers — easily, hands down — are from County Galway, Ireland and the Morden neighborhood in southern London. I’m speaking of John Michael McDonagh‘s The Guard, which I’ve praised two or three times in recent weeks, and Joe Cornish‘s Attack The Block (Screen Gems), which I finally saw this evening.
Attack The Block obviously cost a small fraction of the $100 million that Cowboys & Aliens spent on itself, and yes, the furry ape-aliens with green phosphorescent teeth are flagrantly unbelievable if not borderline comical. But they’re still scarier and snarlier and a lot more fun to to shoot and stab and run away from than the dipshit hard-drive aliens in Cowboys & Aliens, which are direct descendants of the Alien and Super 8 monsters, and boring for that.
The point is that Attack The Block is a smarter, more character-flavored, more tightly constructed entertainment than Cowboys, and I don’t mean solely in terms of tension and thrills. Block is also about something — i.e., community values and urban-jungle teens learning to take responsibility and fly straight and become men — while Cowboys is…what? About kissing the behinds of ComicCon fanboys and their low, sloppy taste in comic-book movies? About wanting to make money?
Cornish seems to be emphasizing the metaphor with his use of cartoony growling furries. He’s almost saying “forget the realism factor…these monsters are obviously bullshit and you and I know it, so let’s forget about our technical efforts and concentrate on what the threat of these monsters mean to the characters.” None of us believe in movie monsters. Not really. But there’s something curiously liberating about beasts that are excessively unbelievable. After watching Attack The Block this evening I was telling myself I don’t want to see another super-expensive CG monster ever again.
I’ll lengthen this review when I wake up tomorrow. I’m whipped.
It’s fairly common knowledge that the key movers and shakers in turning Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson‘s Bottle Rocket (’96) into a “go” feature were the late Polly Platt, producer-screenwriter L.M. Kit Carson and concert promoter and Woodstock ’69 maestro Michael Lang. In the wake of Platt’s death, I thought I’d re-tell the story one more time for the record. I discussed it with Carson today, and heard from Anderson online. Lang didn’t get back.
(l. to r.) The late Polly Platt, Wes Anderson, L.M. Kit Carson, Michael Lang.
Bottle Rocket was green-lighted because Carson slipped the 13-minute black-and-white Bottle Rocket short — directed by Anderson, co-written by Wes and Owen and exec produced by Carson and Lang — to Platt in early ’94. The short had just played at Sundance, and Platt was involved in cutting the doomed musical I’ll Do Anything with director James L. Brooks.
Carson had seen a few minutes of rough footage that Anderson had shot, and convinced Lang to invest $7500 to pay for the short’s production costs.
“Polly was the person who persuaded Jim Brooks to watch the Bottle Rocket short during lunch break,” says Carson. “They were in the editing room on I’ll Do Anything, and she stuck the tape into a VHS player and and made him watch it. When it ended Brooks looked up and said, ‘What’s anybody waiting for? Make a deal. This is a go picture.’ No-shit-thanks, Polly Platt, for this movie.”
Here’s part 1 and part 2 of the original Bottle Rocket short.
“Wes and Owen had showed me some rough footage,” Carson recalls. ” It wasn’t even a cut-together film. I got Michael Lang to write a check for $7500, and we took that and re-shot the short.” Current Sundance honcho John Cooper was a programmer at the time, and he told Carson’s partner Cynthia Hargrave that the short “‘has to be 13 minutes and no longer” so that’s the length they cut it to.
After the Sundance showing Carson sent the tape to Platt at the recommendation of producer Barbara Boyle, who’s now a senior professor/chair/something-or-other with UCLA’s film program.
Bottle Rocket being greenlighted by Brooks and Columbia “was a major moment….a comet coming out of the universe and hitting Wes Anderson on his left shoulder,” says Carson. And yet despite this history relations cooled between Anderson and Carson during shooting, and pretty much ceased after the film was released. Vague vibes, no reciprocity or keeping in touch over future projects.
“My favorite moment with Wes — relatively recently, I mean — was around the time of the release of The Darjeeling Limited,” Carson relates. “I was on the phone with Roman Coppola, and he said, ‘Someone wants to talk to you.’ And Wes got on the line and said, ‘Roman says I should say thank you.'”
I wrote Anderson about this anecdote and he wrote back as follows: “I don’t recall the conversation Kit refers to but I was very happy to see him in LA during that time and [I] still miss him.” Anderson, currently shooting Moonrise Kingdom in New England, said he’d rather not be quoted about Platt’s passing. “Some people have been asking me for comments but really don’t wish to share anything for now,” he said.
This could be semi-passable. Or good, even. My insect antennae are sensing Eddie Murphy‘s funniest performance since Bowfinger, or at least the potential of that. Maybe. It’s also nice to see that Gabby Sidibe has scored a post-Precious gig.
Dan McCarthy‘s abstract, sepia-toned one-sheet for Paddy Considine‘s Tyrannosaur (Strand Releasing, November) tells you it’s some kind of austere art film. It’s obviously striking but it conveys nothing of the tone of compassion and forgiveness that slips into the narrative during Act 2 and especially Act 3. The suggestion is mainly that someone or something ferocious will bite someone’s head off. And that’s only about a quarter…okay, a third of the whole pie.
Meanwhile Strand continues to not post a YouTube trailer, despite assurances passed along to this columnist on 6.15 (or about five weeks ago) that a trailer was “being finalized.” The film opens in the UK and Ireland in mid-October. Ten or eleven weeks from the UK opening and there’s no trailer? Who opens a film this way?
Facing north from the 8th floor of the Beverly Wilshire hotel — Thursday, 7.28, 9:55 am.
The Beverly Wilshire hotel in 1958, or around the time that Michael Corleone was dealing with Hyman Roth and his “Sicilian messenger boy” Johnny Ola and Fredo’s betrayal and the Kefauver Senate hearings on organized crime, etc.
Ward Bond to John Wayne in Rio Bravo: “That’s all you got?”
Intuitive currents made it clear a long time ago that I’ll probably be getting my hate-on for Gary Ross‘s The Hunger Games (Lionsgate, 3.23). This will obviously change if it’s any good, but somehow and some way I just “know” this film is trouble. A primitive, walloping Rollerball-meets-Girlfight youth-market flick — that’s what I’m seeing in my thought dreams. Ross (Pleasantville, Seabiscuit) could make it come out right…maybe. But any movie based on a book classified as “young adult science fiction” — that in itself is a stopper.
I also suspect that any movie that gets an early Entertainment Weekly cover is probably indicative of something that’ll be pandering to the not-so-bright. Plus I have issues with any book author named “Suzanne.” Yes, I know — I have to read the damn book and shut up until I do.
The Ides of March is an adaptation of Farragut North, a good play about political operatives that I saw performed a couple of years ago at the Geffen with Chris Pine and Chris Noth. Ryan Gosling and Phillip Seymour Hoffman play these parts, respectively, in the film. George Clooney‘s presidential candidate was created for the film.
Are there any official 2011 Venice Film Festival titles that weren’t covered in Nick Vivarelli’s 7.25 Variety piece? Just asking. The Ides Of March, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Wuthering Heights, Texas Killing Fields, A Dangerous Method, Abel Ferrara’s 4:44 Last Day On Earth, Killer Joe, The Exchange, Shame, Carnage, Dark Horse, etc.
