It’s rainy and coldish and misty in Toronto today. I’ve been pushing it for eight days now (today is the ninth) so I’m in no hurry to get out there. But I should push myself to achieve one final productive day before flying home tomorrow. Options include I Saw The Devil, Mother of Rock, Cirkus Columbia, Little White Lies, Bad Faith, Sensation, etc. Possible re-viewing of Casino Jack, a dinner with Nostalgia for the Light‘s Patricio Guzman, etc.
I don’t mean to sound cavalier about the curious career arc of an excellent actor, and I always flinch when I read “whatever happened to…?” articles because they sound blithe and dismissive. But fuck it — whatever happened to Michael Pitt? An Esquire article about fashion styles seen in HBO’s Boardwalk Empire (which premieres this Sunday) alerted me to Pitt’s steady recurring role as Jimmy Darmody, and my immediate reaction was “whoa…he fell off the radar and I hadn’t even noticed.”
Pitt was all the rage from ’02 to ’05 or thereabouts, starting with his breakout performances in Barbet Schroeder‘s Murder by Numbers (’02) and a year later in Bernardo Bertolucci‘s The Dreamers (probably his most emotionally accessible role). For me he peaked with his Kurt Cobain performance in Gus Van Sant‘s Last Days. My geiger counter says Pitt’s last stand-out performance was in Michael Haneke‘s English-language remake of Funny Games (’07).
Pitt has always projected a kind of studied weirdness — a slightly cold and aloof manner mixed with innocence. It’s the kind of thing that probably worked from him better when he he had that doe-faced thing going in his early 20s, but it may not travel quite as well with age. Pitt will be 30 in April 2011.
Perhaps directors (and casting directors got tired of his alien-from-another-planet schtick. I don’t know. But I do know he always felt to me like the real thing — an actor who really and truly meant it in a James Dean sort of way, right down to the core of his soul. I also know that the train he was on seemed to slow and come to a stop two or three years ago. Tell me why.
If nothing else this recently-released one-sheet for Ed Zwick‘s Love and Other Drugs (20th Century Fox, 11.24) conveys comfort, ease, self-satisfaction. It certainly doesn’t indicate heavy-osity. It seems to be saying, “All that ‘this movie is really exceptional’ and ‘Hathaway kills as a Parkinson’s sufferer’ stuff you were reading about earlier this year? Maybe or maybe not but we’re okay either way, and you should be too.”
Jamie Stuart‘s Filmmaker video interview piece with Never Let Me Go director Mark Romanek is, no offense, more intriguing than Never Let Me Go itself. Sorry, but it got and held me right away, which is pretty much the opposite of what happened when I sat down with Romanek’s feature.
My apologies for not having seen or commented on this apparently un-aired 2008 ad before today. A little broad, a little old-fashioned in a Mel Brooks-y sense, but Eve’s expression at the end is still priceless.
I should have linked two or three days ago to this eloquently written review of The Social Network by In Contention‘s Kris Tapley. It’s one of the most cleanly composed, clearly thought-through pieces I’ve read about this film.
I’ll admit that the physical disparity between Rabbit Hole costars Nicole Kidman and Tammy Blanchard, cast as warring sisters in John Cameron Mitchell‘s well-regarded film, doesn’t seem that acute in these shots, which were taken at a TIFF press conference three days ago. But their differences are accentuated in the film, trust me. And it’s definitely a problem.
If Blanchard doesn’t look “chubby” in her scenes she certainly appears well-fed and is clearly on the road to ampleness once she passes 40. On top of which she’s obviously big-boned and carrying the genes of dark-haired, dark-eyed ancestors. Whereas Kidman’s appearance in Rabbit Hole is her usual-usual — slim-bony, pale skin, ginger-haired, Irish-lassy-by-way-of-Sydney. One look and you’re telling yourself, “No way in hell are they sisters.”
You can tell right away that Tyler Perry is pushing the material too hard. You can tell that right off the bat. Or I can, at least.
The Social Network “takes [Facebook’s] success story and turns it into art,” says Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone, “[in] much the same way Orson Welles took the story of William Randolph Hearst and turned it into Citizen Kane. Was it really Hearst’s story? Not exactly. Is it an American story? Absolutely.
“Sorkin is on fire with this script. There is not a fatty piece presented, not a glossed-over sappy moment. It turns out that his collaboration with Fincher is a match. Fincher’s coldness and Sorkin’s passion are combustible. Both are obsessive compulsive with their projects and have harnessed their collective fervor into a story about a similar obsessive.
“For parts of this thing, you might feel like you can’t breathe. It’s a heavy-metal song. It’s an aria. It’s a two-hour drum solo. And it doesn’t let up.”
David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin “hold up a mirror that says ‘this is who we are in 2010.’ Or maybe this is who we are, period.”
I’ll go Stone one better. The awards-season progress (or failure) of The Social Network is going to be significantly determined by generational favoritism. This is the first big-time award-calibre movie about GenY types, and is brought alive on-screen mostly by GenY actors. There will be many who’ll get that this film represents not just a kind of generational self-portraiture — a very significant one at that — but also forecasts a cultural sea-change in Hollywood. It’s a movie that says “the game belongs to us now.” I haven’t developed (i.e., refined) this thought to its proper distillation, but I know I’m onto something here.
The only people, I suspect, who are not going to get on the Social Network train are the pre-cyber, still-don’t-get-it 60-and-overs. A significant percentage of this group will support The Social Network, of course, because they don’t want to risk being seen as out-of-it (and therefore less employable). The hold-outs, I suspect, will rally round The King’s Speech, which is a fine film for what it is. But it’s not as important as The Social Network.
The Social Network “is possibly one of the most important movies of the decade,” declares PopEater’s Jett Wells in a 9.15 post. “It not only unveils the stage and strings behind the biggest cultural phenomenon since the invention of the internet, but also how one of the most era-defining companies started with backstabbing and betrayal. It’s dark, tragic and unfolds like a classic Greek play jacked on amphetamines and Red Bull.
“After taking in an early preview of David Fincher‘s [film], several scary thoughts come to mind, including: (a) Mark Zuckerberg comes off like an Adderall-fueled sociopath, and (b) Justin Timberlake might actually get an Oscar nomination out of this. JT appears to have finally shaken the awkward pop star-making-movie-cameos phase of his career, and seems poised to become a force to be reckoned with in Hollywood.
“If Timberlake already rubs you the wrong way, then watching him as Napster co-founder Sean Parker should be cathartic. If Jesse Eisenberg (Zuckerberg) is like Anakin Skywalker, a freakishly-talented kid swallowed by ego and obsession for power, then Timberlake is the Emperor, pushing Zuckerberg into full-blown madness. I’m not saying JT is going to win the Best Supporting Actor Oscar, but Network is certainly the biggest turning point in his acting career.
“Then there’s Eisenberg. He always plays socially awkward characters who look like they stayed up all night playing World of Warcraft (The Squid and the Whale, Adventureland, Zombieland), but here, for the first time, he uses his awkwardness in a sinister way to portray Zuckerberg. He’s cold, ruthless and downright scary — don’t cross him unless you want to get the most scathing blog post written about you.”
