Radar Online posted a second Mel Gibson tape about three hours ago. I think the point was made with the first recording, and that this is, like, overkill. Gibson has an ugly mouth, an uncontrollable temper and may be physically violent — we get it already.
But as long as some of us are listening to this horrible-ness, it would at least serve the cause of good storytelling if someone could try to explain what led up to the arguments. The tit-for-tat that resulted in all the hurt and rage, etc. Because this yelling is monotonous and far from Albee. No one is blameless, it takes two to ruin a relationship, etc.
Harvey Pekar, the 70 year-old author of the ground-breaking comic book series “American Splendor” who was portrayed by Paul Giamatti in the much-admired film of the same name, was found dead earlier today in his Cleveland home. He’d been coping with prostate cancer, high blood pressure, asthma and (naturally) depression. Tough deal but he made his mark.
Joyce and Harvey Pekar at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival — taken by myself.
I interviewed Harvey and wife Joyce (who was played by Hope Davis in the film) on the big green lawn of the Grand Hotel at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival. He seemed like one sharp cat — extremely bright, alert, open-pored. He was more like a wolf in a sense, constantly sniffing and detecting whatever faint tremor or aroma might be in the air. He struck me as the opposite of smug.
Directed and written by Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, American Splendor won the Grand Jury prize at the 2003 Sundance Film Festival, and Berman and Pulcini won a ton of Best Screenplay awards. (They were Oscar-nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay but lost out in the ridiculous Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King sweep.) American Splendor won the Best First Film award from the New York Film Critics Circle, and Best Picture awards from the L.A. Film Critics and National Society of Film Critics.
With pretty much everyone resigned to the notion of Roman Polanski being extradited to the U.S. very soon and almost certainly doing time for a few months for having had unlawful sex with a minor 33 years ago, Swiss authorities have manned up and told the Los Angeles district attorney’s office to suck it — no Polish sausage for you to taunt, humiliate and kick around. Too bad, assholes!
For RoPo is a free man this morning. Probably on a train or a plane back to Paris as we speak. Hardcore Polanski coddlers need to gather in bars this evening and raise a few glasses. The Blue Meanies and Twisted Sisters have been cold-cocked, and the whole matter is finally over and done.
The Swiss offered two reasons for their decision. One, they “blamed U.S. authorities for having failed to provide confidential testimony about Polanski’s sentencing procedure in 1977-1978.” And two, they cited “national interests.” What, someone suggested they might face adverse consequences of some sort if they extradited Polanski? This is way too vague.
What a great way to wake up on a Monday morning! The idea of the pitchforkers — the Big Hollywood team especially — being all purple-faced and swearing and punching their refrigerator doors over this matter is almost too delicious to contemplate.
I’m not joyful over the world now being a safer place for foul men who might want to take advantage of children — that’s not what this is about.
This is about the fact — in my head, at least — that the LA District Attorney’s office had totally forgotten about Polanski for the better part of 30 years, and had only engineered Polanski’s arrest Zurich and the Swiss extradition request because they became agitated by Marina Zenovich‘s Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, which reminded that the application of LA justice had been (and might still be) corrupt, political, ego-driven and obstinate in the face of damaging facts.
This is also about the Swiss doing something they’re not exactly known for — i.e., acting like men.
“The 76-year-old French-Polish film director Roman Polanski will not be extradited to the USA,” the ministry said in a statement sometime around noon today. “The freedom-restricting measures against him have been revoked.”
Polanski’s lawyer Herve Temime said the director was still at his Swiss chalet in the resort of Gstaad, where he has been held under house arrest since December.
“Mr. Polanski can now move freely,” Justice Minister Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf declared. “Since 12:30 today he’s a free man.”
From a HuffPost summary: “Approving extradition had seemed the likeliest scenario after Polanski was arrested on Sept. 26 as he arrived in Zurich to receive a lifetime achievement award from a film festival. Polanski had also suffered a series of legal setbacks this year in California courts.
Widmer-Schlumpf said the decision was not meant to excuse Polanski’s crime, saying the issue was “not about deciding whether he is guilty or not guilty.”
It all started with Polanski’s arrest in Zurich on 9.26.09. Here’s the first HE post on the subject — “Cheap Swiss Theatrics.” On 9.28 I ran another posting called “Polanski Wars.”
“Prosecutors ignored Polanski for 30 years because it was a terrible case in which the prosecutor’s office and the sitting judge, in the interest of getting publicity for themselves, had conducted themselves in all variety of dubious ways. But then, last year, a documentary, Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, came out detailing all this dubiousness. So the first motivation for going after Polanski now, as it so often is with prosecutors, is revenge — Polanski and this film makes the DA look bad.
“The second is that the documentary reminded everybody that the LA prosecutor must be turning a blind eye to Polanski, wandering freely in Europe — hence the arrest now is the prosecutor covering his ass.
“The third is — and it’s curiously the success of the documentary that made the LA prosecutor’s office realize the brand name significance of the case — press. The headlines now sweeping the world are the prosecutor’s ultimate benefit. Many careers are suddenly advanced.
“It could tell us quite a lot about the real motivations and real interest in Roman Polanski in the LA prosecutor’s office, about the sudden enthusiasm for Polanski’s capture and the convenient timing of it, if we just got the date and time — Polanski’s lawyers can certainly get this information through discovery requests — when they began to Google him, and when they set up the first alert.
“Among all media whores, there is none so greedy and mendacious as a prosecutor.”
In a brilliant 10.1.09 piece called “The Roman Area,” Phil Nugent wrote the following:
“Polanski may be a sleazeball, but nobody thinks he’s a menace to society — one big difference between then and now is that nobody working for his prosecution can seriously think they’re working to prevent him from doing this again — so the spectacle of his detainment and possible future prosecution can only appeal to that lizard part of the brain that thinks that the justice system has nothing to do with protecting society and everything to do with punishing those we disapprove of.
“This isn’t, or shouldn’t be, about how much of your pity you want to lavish on monsters. It’s about whether, in a country with the largest and most overcrowded prison system in the world, we want to apply any practical considerations at all to who goes and stays into a cell or if we just want to use the system to luxuriate in our capacity for blood lust.”
Apart from its reportedly strong entertainment value, exhibitors are doubly delighted with Phillip Noyce‘s Salt because of its 95-minute running time (plus titles), which obviously allows for more shows per day than the 148-minute Inception. Five or six 11 am-to-midnight shows daily vs. four, not counting midnighters. What’s the shortest action thriller ever released? I’m asking.
The Boston Herald‘s Stephen Schaefer, fresh from this weekend’s Washington, D.C. Salt junket, has called it “the best damn thriller I’ve seen in years. Noyce once again nails the political thriller, mixing high octane action with, as we’ve learned from recent headlines, real-world spy issues. Angelina Jolie stars/scores as CIA operative Evelyn Salt, on the run as an accused sleeper cell Russian agent who attempts to stop an assassination and regain her security clearance. Like Lisbeth Salander, she rates as an irresistible fantastical creation in a realistic milieu.”
Opening opposite Salt and Countdown to Zero on 7.23 is Christian Carlon‘s Farewell, a fact-based espionage drama involving Russian secrets funneled to the French, and set in the early ’80s. There’s an immediate Day of the Jackal/Smiley’s People vibe from the trailer. It played in Telluride last year. An intriguing John Anderson piece in the N.Y. Times got me started.
The costars are Guillaume Canet, Emir Kusturica, Guillaume Canet, Ingeborga Dapknaite, David Soul, Dina Korzun, Phillipe Magnan, Yevgeni Kharlanov, Willem Dafoe and Fred Ward.
Only one screening in Manhattan so far, and another I’ll miss on Wednesday. (I’m trying to snag a screener as we speak.) I’ve never even heard of the distributor, NeoClassics Films, and a well-connected LA friend couldn’t find any screening invites in his inbox.
The beginning of Phillip Seymour Hoffman‘s Jack Goes Boating (Overture, 9.17) “isn’t terribly made or horribly off its game,” I wrote last January. “It establishes an amiable, easy-going tone with dabs of low-key humor, but I really, really didn’t want to hang with Hoffman’s Jack, an oafish Manhattan limousine driver. Jack is pudgy — okay, fat — and rumpled and conversationally slow as molasses. He wears a dim and drowsy expression, and seems borderline stupid and to some degree emotionally shut down.
“‘I don’t like this guy — he’s too doltish,’ I muttered to myself. And the humor, as I heard it, conveyed a kind of low-energy flatness, reflecting the perceptions of people with somewhat diminished capacities.
“And then came a scene between Hoffman and Amy Ryan, portraying a plain girl named Connie whom Jack is interested in, and costars John Ortiz and Daphne Rubin-Vega. It ends with Hoffman telling Ortiz that Ryan wants to go boating sometime, and Hoffman explaining that this might not work because he can’t swim. And then Ortiz mentions that he could teach Hoffman to swim at an indoor pool he’s been to.
“That was it — I wasn’t going to watch Hoffman in bathing trunks. He’s been getting more and more corpulent lately, and it just makes me feel badly for the guy. I want him to be Capote-sized for the rest of his life. I’m sorry. I’m really not trying to be an asshole. It’s quite possible that Jack Goes Boating will be called a decent-enough film by critics and festivalgoers I respect. I just didn’t want to be in that world so I left. I’m sorry.”
Todd McCarthy‘s 7.9 Indiewire column about visiting the just-opened Norman Rockwell exhibit as the Smithsonian Museum with his 12 year-old son Nick didn’t quite ring my bell — sorry. McCarthy attended the 7.2 opening because he’d been hired to write the catalogue notes, and because he’s chummy with Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, who lent their 57 Rockwell originals for the show (which will go until 1.2.11).
But I love the photo of Nick and Spielberg. Nick could almost be a Rockwell kid out of a 1930s painting, and Spielberg (who has stubby-looking fingers) gives off a kindly paternal vibe. I don’t recall Rockwell having ever painted older Jewish guys with beards — he had a very white-picket-fence view of American culture. But squint your eyes and Spielberg could be one of Rockwell’s drug-store managers or small-town rabbis or haberdashers.
I’ve never been a Rockwell fan, and I don’t take kindly to worshippings of the man. He’s as much an illustrator of small-town schmaltz — more Frank Capra than Capra himself — as John Ford was a chronicler of Irish sentimentality among men of action. Rockwell was a talented artist with a lazy, status-quo mind. He’s today considered a sentimental scene-painter of a long-gone, dead-and-buried America that was probably half-phony to begin with. And McCarthy’s story is basically about a couple of lazy, multi-millionaire filmmakers coming to Washington, D.C., to pay tribute to themselves.
Rockwell’s America is “a vision of America that may have had some ties to actual 1950s culture (i.e., when Spielberg and Lucas grew up) but which really came out of the 1920s and ’30s,” I wrote a couple of months ago. “It had actually begun to die in the wake of World War II, primarily from (a) the psychological post-war shocks that brought a certain dark undercurrent to the lives of returned veterans, (b) the corporate tract-home construction and bland suburbanization of Middle America, and (c) the various ’50s be-bop influences (Ginsberg-Kerouac-Cassady-Burroughs, rock ‘n’ roll, Little Richard, Elvis Presley‘s hips) that began to change the way Americans saw themselves and behaved.”
Last night around midnight MCN’s David Polandtweeted that Deadline‘s Nikki Finke had written him the following message: “YOU ARE BEING SUED (INCLUDING FOR YOUR DEFAMATORY TWITTERS) NO MORE DELAYS. THAT’S IT.” More bluster and brimstone, or does she really mean it this time?
We all know about harsh judgments from Rabbi Dave, but if legal action results he’s clearly the Good Guy and Finke is not. The matter will never go to court, but it would be delightful if it did. It would be like the O.J. trial — the whole town would be watching. If I was the right kind of attorney I’d be calling Poland right now and insisting that he allow me to represent him pro bono.
On 6.17 Poland wrote that “it’s only been a couple of weeks since Nikki [Finke] last threatened to sue me, using the full might of Jay Penske‘s attorneys. Unfortunately, what I tweeted about her was factually accurate (as every factual statement that I have ever written about her has been), so her claim was limited to the notion that she is not a public person and therefore I was…well, I don’t even know what legal leg she was pretending to stand on.”
One of his stronger anti-Finke rants ran on 3.23. I wrote a day later that Poland “makes some good points; the writing is very clean and straight because he’s not hemming and hawing in the least. He’s not afraid of being Finke’s enemy, and I admire the ballsiness in that.”
Two nights ago at Houston’s Angelika Film Center, one of the stars of Restrepo — Sgt. Misha Pemble-Belkin — dropped by for a q & a. The following day Culturemap‘s Joe Leydon (who may or may not have conducted the interview with Pemble-Belkin) posted an admiring account of his visit.
Restrepo is a narrowly focused, bravely captured documentary about U.S. troops fighting in Afghanistan’s Korangal Valley from ’07 to ’08. Pemble-Belkin, now stationed at Louisiana’s Fort Polk, was one of those interviewed and befriended by co-directors Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington during their year-long stay.
For my money Leydon’s article seems a little too obliging, primarily because it mentions but doesn’t begin to explore an idea that’s been seeping through here and there, which is that Restrepo is a pro-war, support-the-troops, emotional-propaganda piece wrapped in allegedly neutralist observational verite clothing.
The apparent bottom line is that Junger and Hetherington, like many embedded war journalists before them, “fell in love” with their subjects, and in so doing evolved into supporters of the U.S. Afghanistan campaign. It seems as if they were unable to separate their feelings for the troops and the war that has taken the lives of over 1000 Americans. It’s been reported that Junger has recently been pushing a stay-the-course policy on news talk shows.
Pemble-Belkin obviously knows whereof he speaks and has an absolute right to say what he’s learned and believes about the war in Afghanistan. But reading that he wants to stay in the Army “until we win the war…I don’t want it to go on until my children are old enough to have to go over there” made me furious.
“Win” in Afghanistan? We’re not even stalemating over there. The effort is doomed and we’re on a timetable to evacuate. On top of which the movie doesn’t even explain that U.S. military command pulled out of the Korangal Valley last fall because they could see it was a losing effort.
It is bothersome that Leydon, the good host and gentle inquisitor, doesn’t even tip-toe into this, much less address Pemble-Belkin’s delusion that we might “win” over there. And yet he lets him get away with “politely but firmly” declining to answer “what he calls ‘political questions.'”
Let me explain something. Everything involved in the fighting of a war is political, and all questions about any aspect of that war, including a friendly documentary that presents a highly selective, grunt’s-eye view, are political. And anyone who stands up for the honest but restricted reporting in Restrepo is standing up for its roundabout pro-war stance. So Pemble-Belkin driving from Ft. Polk to Houston on a motorcycle to take part in the Angelika interview, was, in every sense of the term, a political act. Because in so doing he’s taking part in the Restrepo smokescreen, which is the filmmakers trying to pretend that it’s not political by focusing solely on the day-to-day lives of soldiers and saying, “Isn’t it fascinating and touching the way these guys just hang in there and do their job and survive and shit?”
Never trust anyone who says he’d rather not get into political questions. That’s a total chickenshit dodge.
“The kind of frankness that Restrepo is offering is, to put it mildly, selective. For realism’s sake Restrepo chooses to isolate its audience inside the insular operational mentality of the grunts — ‘get it done,’ ‘fill up more sandbags,’ ‘ours not to reason why’ and so on. In so doing it misleads and distorts in a way that any fair-minded person would and should find infuriating. Is there any other way to describe a decision to keep viewers ignorant about any broader considerations — anything factual or looming in a political/tactical/situational sense — that might impact the fate of the subjects, or their mission?
“Imagine a documentary about the day-to-day life of Steve Schmidt, John McCain‘s ’08 presidential campaign manager, that ignores how the campaign is going and instead focuses on Schmidt’s relationship with his family and his dentist and his kids’ homework and his visits to a local cafe and his dealings with the guy who mows the lawn once a week. What would you call that approach? Thorough? Honest?”
I thought it was odd, by the way, that neither Leydon nor his Culturemap editor[s] felt it inecessary to include a photo of Pemble-Belkin. They couldn’t snap a picture and post it? Here’s a link to a photo of Pemble-Belkin as captured in the film.
Last night a friend attended a special American Cinematheque/Aero theatre presentation of two Don Murray films — The Hoodlum Priest (’61) and Bus Stop (’56). Murray, 81, sat for an interview between showings. This reminded me of Fred Zinneman‘s A Hatful of Rain (’57), a black-and-white CinemaScope drama in which Murray plays a heroin addict whose effort to hide this fact from his wife (Eva Marie Saint) convinces her he’s having an affair.
I’ve been a fool for monochrome 2.35 to 1 all my life, and would eventually love to see at least a handsome DVD of this. I love the intensity of the one-sheet — the writhing bodies and the implications of frustration and imprisonment.
If I’m not mistaken, A Hatful of Rain has a reputation of being a little too issue-driven — a little too taken with itself for having the courage to deal with drug addiction, and maybe a bit too emphatic in a straight-arrow, Playhouse 90-ish way.
I don’t know about that. I caught it once on TV in my teens, and recall a jolting, hard-knocks drama with tough, sharply written dialogue (taken from the play by Michael V. Gazzo, who later played Frankie Pantangelli in The Godfather, Part II, and adapted by Gazzo, Alfred Hayes and Carl Foreman) and ace-level acting. Anthony Franciosa, Lloyd Nolan and Henry Silva costarred.
Knowing this about Gazzo gives emphasis to his big scene in The Godather, Part II when he complains to Al Pacino about the Rossotto brothers, his New York crime rivals, being low-lifes who push whores and “junk…dope!” At this instant Gazzo yanks up his sleeve to emphasize disgust.
Foreman’s name didn’t appear on the credits due to his being blacklisted at the time; the WGA restored his name in 1998, 14 years after his death.
It would also be interesting to hear Bernard Herrmann‘s score.
I’m presuming that Summit Entertainment chief Rob Friedman is currently in uh-oh mode about what to do with Jodie Foster‘s The Beaver, the oddball Mel Gibson dramedy that Summit was going to release in the fall. Gibson’s latest public-relations disaster, I suspect, has led Friedman to think about bumping Foster’s film into spring or fall 2011 on the assumption that the blowback to Gibson’s racial rhetoric will be less damaging if they let everything simmer down, etc.
That would be very unwise. Because they’ve got a hot iron in Gibson playing a nutbag, and they should strike while it’s hot. Instead of turning tail, Summit should open The Beaver as soon as possible. In September and October, I’m thinking. Wait any longer and they might “lose the momentum,” as Faye Dunaway explained to Robert Duvall in Network.
Here’s the thinking:
(a) Most people have understood for years that Gibson is one of the craziest and most hyper actors around (a trait that first surfaced in ’87’s Lethal Weapon) and that if anyone was born to play a middle-aged guy who walks around speaking through a beaver hand-puppet, it’s him. He may make the Grand Wizard of the KKK sound like the late James Farmer, but Gibson is the truest living embodiment of Three Stooges insanity living today.
(b) Kyle Killen‘s script of The Beaver was named the hottest Black List script of ’08. And Foster may have translated it into something special. What a waste if this film gets all but dumped by Summit! All that hard work, all that buzz, and that admiration and potential and the whole thing goes south because Gibson was recorded saying horrid things to his ex-girlfriend? That’s ridiculous.
(c) Surely no one at Summit is deluded enough to think that press won’t bring up Gibson’s racist remarks any less persistently if The Beaver opens in April 2011 or August 2011 or September 2012? The wisest thing would be to open it as soon as possible and just blow through that shitstorm and say “fine, whatever, Mel is an actor who acts in the movie, his personal issues are not our concern” and so on. Just man up and do it and no pussyfooting.
(d) Jodie Foster will put the Gibson bugaboos to bed when she does interviews for The Beaver. She’ll keep emphasizing over and over what a natural comedian he is, and how much she respects him as a performer, and how badly she feels about anyone suffering from a temper problem and retrograde attitudes but we all say ugly stuff that we don’t mean in our worst moments, and that a lot of Hollywood types say things to each other in private that they wouldn’t want to hear on the internet, and that perhaps we shouldn’t point fingers too strongly, etc.
(e) Gibson is a repellent figure now, but playing a nutter would be seen as a form of self-portraiture, and that would make The Beaver a hot ticket. As Bill Maher recently said, there’s an audience for what Gibson (or his image) has become — a repellent ayehole who’s articulating the last dying remnants of ugly racial thinking. “Dying” in the big-city regions, I mean, because racial resentments are more alive in flyover states than most Hollywood liberals appear to realize. There are millions of closet racists (right-wing and lefty) who probably relate to Gibson on some buried level and are probably cutting him another break in their heads. Among those who still care, I mean.
(f) There is also a slight sympathetic belief that while Gibson was stupid enough to not only lose his temper with but allow himself to be recorded by a woman he’s in a custody battle with, he was nonetheless sandbagged and sold out. Many feel that even ugly people saying ugly things should be afforded a certain privacy.
If you were Leonardo DiCaprio‘s manager and agent, would you be advising Leo to do that Vikings movie with Gibson or would you advise him to back off for the time being?
