The Cannes Film Festival has added Ken Loach‘s Route Irish, a romantic triangle drama set in Liverpool and Iraq, to the competition slate. Written by Paul Laverty, it’s about two ex-soldiers in love with the same lady. Pic includes “a number of action sequences employing stunts and pyrotechnics — a rare terrain for the British helmer,” says Variety. Chris Menges is the dp. Boning scenes will most likely be subtle or bypassed entirely, given the usual wont of older directors.
I’ve just been invited to see Craig McCall‘s Cameraman: The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff, on Sunday, 5.16 at 7:45pm — six days hence — at the Salle Bunuel.
My favorite Cardiff-shot films (in this order): John Huston‘s The African Queen, Richard Fleischer‘s The Vikings, John Irvin‘s The Dogs of War, and King Vidor‘s War and Peace. Oh, and I’ve always had a liking for the look of Girl on a Motorcycle, that late ’60s soft-porny leather-zipper thing with Alaine Delon and Marianne Faithful.
Cameraman screened at the BFI in London last week. It was hosted by the indefatigable Martin Scorsese who described the late director as “one of the last pioneers of filmmaking and one of the first artists who gave us color…he was able to create images of heart-stopping beauty and dynamism…once seen, his images are never forgotten, [and] will never fade.”
Didn’t play this trailer until yesterday. Apparently decent, mildly appealing, amusing attitude, etc. Supernatural revenge saga by way of Pale Rider and High Plains Drifter. But what’s with the the gopher hole in the right cheek? If I’d produced, I would have said “look, I get it, maimed by a branding iron…but I don’t want the star of my movie walking around with a grotesque hole in his cheek. Eastwood would have never gone for that in his day. It would scare away the ladies.”
President Obama will certainly nominate Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court, according to an MSNBC news story written by Pete Williams that posted an hour ago.
“They stand so low / you got to pick ’em up just to say hello.” — Randy Newman.
Here‘s what I wrote on April 10th: “President Barack Obama‘s likely nominee to replace retiring Chief Associate Justice John Paul Stevens is said to be solicitor general (and former Harvard Law School dean) Elena Kagan.
“The general understanding is that she’s (a) quite brilliant, (b) ideologically centrist if not conservative (Salon‘s Glenn Greenwald wrote yesterday that “replacing Stevens with Kagan would shift the Supreme Court substantially to the right on a litany of key issues”), and (c) openly gay.
“If Kagan is in fact nominated Team Obama will be viewed as having gone the cautious if not vaguely chickenshit route, considering that Kagan’s conservative leanings will make it hard for Republicans to sqawk all that loudly and will deprive them of an election-year issue. Unless, of course, they want to play the anti-gay bigot card.”
Or the anti-overweight card, which Republicans would never exploit given that a sizable percentage of their supporters are fast-food eatin’ plus-size types.
Instead of waiting for Wednesday’s Cannes showing, several critics jumped the gun on Robin Hood today. First came Empire, and then Variety and The Hollywood Reporter stepped in with a little wham-bam, and then came Indiewire‘s Todd McCarthy. And some of them have grumbled a bit, and nobody is quite doing cartwheels in the lobby.
I’m thinking I may as well throw my own two cents in. I mean, the fences are down and this movie needs a friend.
Hasn’t the general Average Joe anticipatory reaction been “what…another Robin Hood? Already? How long ago was the Costner version?” The answer is almost 20 years ago, but I for one am somewhere between fairly and moderately pleased that Ridley Scott’s version doesn’t do the usual usual. It’s an origin story than ends when the other Robin Hood films have begun, and for my meager money it moves along well enough on this particular course. It’s an honorable stab at doing a very familiar thing a bit differently, and since when has that been a crime?
The script is intelligible and intelligent, every frame has been handsomely shot, the production design is first-rate and the cast does its job like the somewhat older pros that most of them are. There are no major under-30 actors in this film except one (i.e., Lea Seydoux as Isabella of Angoulemea) and only a handful of actors iseem to be in their early 30s. Russell Crowe, slimmer than recently but not quite down to his Gladiator weight, has sprigs of gray in his beard, and Cate Blanchett — playing the previously married and widowed Lady Marian — is no spring chicken herself.
No portions of Scott’s film are acutely painful, and almost all of it is, I feel, good enough and often of a very high order (like the French naval invasion sequence). This is a nice “old pro” movie. You’re always aware that you’re in the hands of someone who knows exactly what he’s doing.
Will the Eloi flock to it? Everyone knows the answer to that question, I think. But the Tea Baggers might tell their friends about it because Robin Hood is, philosophically and politically, against tax-and-spend governments and very much with Average Joes. Except Robin Hood’s allies and supporters take care of their teeth and aren’t portrayed as racists so the analogy doesn’t go all the way.
McCarthy calls it “a conjectural origins story about the career birth of England’s legendary people’s outlaw” and says it’s “neither as good as the director’s personal best period epic, Gladiator nor a match for Hollywood’s most memorable previous accounts of the beneficent bandit of Sherwood Forest” but “is, however, superior to the Kevin Costner entry two decades back.
“Earthy, rugged and earnestly advanced in quasi-plausible historical terms, this grandly produced picture can be regarded as something of a tangential sequel to Scott’s ambitious Kingdom of Heaven, with Richard the Lionheart as the connective thread.
“[And yet] what we’re left with is a fashionably gritty period drama, conceived by intelligent minds and handsomely decked out, but featuring no beating heart or compelling raison d’etre.”
The talk already is that the American Pavillion is going to be known as year as Shit Year Central with a Cam Archer interview (shared with Myth of the American Sleepover‘s David Robert Mitchell…go, Adam Kersh!) on Saturday the 15th and a Shit Year “Industry in Focus” panel the following day with Archer, costars Ellen Barkin and Luke Grimes, and producers Jay Van Hoy and Lars Knudsen. Get your Shit Year right here!
Seriously, where’s the usual smattering of name-level guests? Apart from Barkin, I mean? Who did the bookings?
I noted last week that I found Robert Downey, Jr.’s appearance in Iron Man 2 irksome. All that base and mascara and tanning spray, and that prissy Van Dyke beard. Today I finally put my finger on it — he has a bit of that Cesare Danova-in-Cleopatra thing going on. That’s the only notable Van Dyke beard performance I could think of, but there must be others. I only know (or feel, at least) that in Downey’s careful clippings and waxy skin something icky this way comes.
(l. to r.) Robert Downey in Iron Man 2; Cesare Danova in Cleopatra; Leonard Frey in The Boys in the Band.
The fact that Iron Man 2 made $133.6 million this weekend is marketing, of course, but there’s no reasonable explanation for it having earned an “A” with CinemaScore. Not in my head at least. Sooner or later, I also feel, Downey will have to deliver a real performance in a good film and get away from this tentpole franchise crap that has recently consumed his energies. If I could will it with a wave I would have him play “Harold” in William Friedkin‘s The Boys in the Band — the role that Leonard Frey did so well with 40 years ago.
“What I am, Michael, is a 32 year-old, ugly, pock-marked Jew fairy, and if it takes me a little while to pull myself together, and if I smoke a little grass before I get up the nerve to show my face to the world, it’s nobody’s god damned business but my own. And how are you this evening?”
Isn’t a movie that fans the flames of the old “William Shakespeare didn’t really write all those plays” controversy a kind of literary birther flick, in a sense? Roland Emmerich‘s currently rolling Anonymous, which alleges that Edward De Vere (Rhys Ifans) was the actual author, strikes me as such.
Team Anonymous on the muddy Elizabethan set: (l. to r.) Mark Rylance, screenwriter John Orlov, Vanessa Redgrave, Roland Emmerich, Joely Richardson, Rafe Spall, David Thewlis, Rhys Ifans.
Pic is nonethless being called a “political thriller.” A friend who’s read John Orloff‘s screenplay says “this is the best screenplay I have read in ten years. It is clean and frightening and elegant — a kind of All The President’s Men set during the time of William Shakespeare. It’s a mind bender and very convincing. If it was not Emmerich but, say, Michael Mann or Ridley Scott directing we would already be engraving the Oscar — it’s that good. Luckily, Roland has brilliant actors pretty perfectly cast.”
What a curious side trip for Emmerich, given his usual wont.
The costars include Rafe Spall (Shakespeare), Vanessa Redgrave (Queen Elizabeth), Joely Richardson (Young Elizabeth), David Thewlis (William Cecil), Xavier Samuel (Southampton) and Mark Rylance (Gloucester, a Globe actor).
A 5.8 clip of Seymour Hersh speaking on 4.24 at the Global Investigative Journalism Conference in Geneva about how Barack Obama is being “dominated by the military” on “Iran, Afghan and Pakistan,” is “following the policies of Bush and Cheney almost to a fare-thee-well,” and is “in real trouble.”
I’ll put up with chilly, buffeting Santa Ana winds for a day — but not two. Blowing my hair all to hell, putting scarves and sweaters and winter coats back into use. Eff you, Mother Nature. It’s early May, summer beckons and it’s like Montana in early March.
The image on the left — i.e, a red-haired Monica Vitti mildly intrigued by the idea of physical congress with a certain someone as she pauses at a bedroom door — is what comes to mind when I think of Michelangelo Antonioni‘s Red Desert (’64). The cover of the upcoming Criterion Bluray, by contrast, is the monk version of same. Monks are averse to sex; they wear brown robes and sandals, pray a lot and tend to the goats in the barn. They respect Vitti, of course, but they also fear her.
(l.) the 2008 British Red Desert Bluray vs. (r.) the forthcoming Criterion Bluray version, out on 6.22.
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