Gaspar Noe‘s 3D Love screened this morning at 11 am in the Salle Bazin. I was right there in the last row with my orange-framed 3D glasses. I liked that they passed out little antiseptic wipe packets with the glasses, which they never do in the States. In order to make sure of a seat I had to stand at the back of the Grand Lumiere during the final minutes of Jacques Audiard‘s respectable but somewhat minor Dheepan and rush up to the Bazin…push, huddle, trudge.
Are you noticing anything different about this review? Mainly that after four sentences I’m tiddly-winking around and not saying anything about how good, bad, reasonably decent or mezzo-mezzo Love is? Not because it’s a bad or dull or unworthy film, but because I can’t seem to summon any strong feelings about it.
Okay, I found the sex scenes mildly appealing. Before this morning I had never seen graphic sex depicted in 3D, and I have to say that while I didn’t feel blown away by the unusualness of the footage I wasn’t entirely unaffected. I was sitting there going “Yeah, okay…this isn’t half bad as far as the 3D aspect is concerned. Visually distinctive, striking, arresting. Nice bods, nicely lighted, no grotesque aspects.” But it didn’t seem like quite enough to justify watching Love for two hours plus.
I was mildly interested (certainly during the first half-hour or so) but I never felt riveted.
Yesterday morning in Paris I attended a screening of Kent Jones‘ edifying Hitchcock/Truffaut, which Jones directed and co-wrote with Cinematheque Francaise director Serge Toubiana. Slated to show on 5.19 at the Cannes Film Festivals, the 80-something-minute doc is a sublime turn-on — a deft educational primer about the work and life of Alfred Hitchcock and, not equally but appreciably, Francois Truffaut. Efficient, well-ordered, devotional.
No, it didn’t tell me anything about Hitchcock or his many films or Truffaut’s renowned “Hitchcock/Truffaut” book (a feature-length q & a interspersed with frame captures from Hitch’s films) that I didn’t already know, but that’s okay — almost every detail of the book’s material was absorbed into my system decades ago.
The bounce, if you will, comes from the talking heads — David Fincher, Martin Scorsese, Olivier Assayas, Wes Anderson, Richard Linklater, James Gray, Arnaud Depleschin, one or two others — each enthused and semi-aglow in their own way. Memories, associations, gratitude.
To me Hitchcock/Truffaut seems good and wise enough to seduce the novice as well as the sophisticated cineaste. It’s a fully absorbing, excellent education. As you might expect, it made me want to read the book all over again.
It contains many snippets of interview audio between the two men. My favorite Hitch quotes: (a) “Logic is dull” and (b) “Plausibility was not allowed to rear its ugly head.”
I sat up in my seat when Jones revealed a brief glance at contact sheet images of Hitch shooting the Phoenix hotel room scene (Janet Leigh, John Gavin) in Psycho — images I’d never seen before. I asked Jones if I could somehow post a few of them but he wasn’t encouraging. Apparently they’re under some kind of copyright lock and key. Which of course is nonsensical at this stage.
Observation: Why do bums…sorry, why do gentlemen of character and consequence who are temporarily homeless always seem to sleep right in front of posh uptown establishments where there’s always a lot of heavy light and foot traffic? If I was a bum I’d sleep in a nice dark park under a bench or a tree. Anecdote: There was a slight incident that followed the taking of the Charles de Gaulle Etoile metro shot. A 30ish Middle-Eastern guy with a gray check flannel shirt (you can only see his right arm) wanted to know if I’d captured his face in the photo. Was he alarmed in roughly the same way that Anthony Quinn‘s Auda Abu Tayi became alarmed when Arthur Kennedy took his picture in Lawrence of Arabia? I never asked but I quickly proved he wasn’t in the shot by showing him the evidence on my iPhone screen. Then he and his friend wanted to talk — “Where you from? You American?” — and they kept up the chatter as the Nation train arrived, asking me about Los Angeles and blah-blah with one of them saying he liked my shoes and my jacket. A split second after the friend admiringly caressed my left jacket sleeve I flinched and snapped “the fuck away from me!” I only knew they were getting too close too quickly. The guy recoiled and told me to go fuck off…fine. An innocent misunderstanding? Possibly but nobody caresses my sleeve in a metro station.
Homeless guy on the rue de Rivoli earlier this evening.
The right sleeve of the too-friendly Middle-Eastern guy can be seen on the left.
SNCF train ticket to Cannes. Leaving at 7:19 am on Tuesday morning from Gare de Lyon.
A few hours ago Deadline‘s Anthony D’Alessandroreported that Alex Garland‘s Ex Machina is an indie hit based on three indicators — (a) the $5.44 million earned this weekend by the sci-fi chiller is A24’s biggest ever, (b) “fans around the web” are calling it “Blade Runner meets The Social Network” and (c) an intrepid Deadline editor noticed that an 8:25 pm screening of Ex Machina at the ArcLight Sherman Oaks last night was “75% full.”
Has the HE community noticed any special currents out there? Attended any screenings that were 75% full or better? Details, quotes, particulars.
Ex Machina “is a chilly but never dull behavioral thing — techy, beautifully designed, fascinating and definitely creepy at times,” I wrote on 4.8. “It comes alive and gets under your skin (or it did mine, at least) because of a certain tone of casual, no-big-deal eccentricity.
“It’s not what anyone would call a comforting film, but director Alex Garland composes and delivers a certain low-key, spotless vibe that feels…well, ordered. There’s never a feeling of emotional chaos — everything happens with deliberacy. Call it a vibe of crisp efficiency with an underlying feeling of something malevolent around the corner.
I don’t want to give Russell Crowe a hard time over his direction of The Water Diviner (Warner Bros., 4.24), a melancholy, handsome period drama about love, loss and grief. Okay, with pretty landscapes and occasional action scenes. I felt as if it was always trying to soak me with emotion. Or yank it out of me. I found it more meandering than mesmerizing but let’s be gracious and acknowledge that Crowe tried like hell to be Peter Weir here. Give him a B for effort at least. There’s always the next time.
On top of which Crowe gives a balmy, kind-hearted performance as an Australian farmer, Joshua Connor, who’s looking for some kind of closure over the loss of his three sons who were killed during the terrible battle of Gallipoli, which took the lives of 46,000 Allied soldiers (over 8000 Australians) and wounded 250,000.
The film is basically about Connor travelling to Turkey in 1919 to find his son’s bodies and if possible lay them to rest with a prayer, but what can happen with all three having suffered so horribly with so little to show? We know the answer from the trailer. This recently widowed man of 50 will fall in love with an alluring Turkish woman (Olga Kurylenko) who’s a good 20 years younger. But right away this feels a bit off. The problem (and I’m not trying to be an asshole here) is that Crowe has become too girthy to play a romantic lead. Maximus has morphed into Peter Ustinov in Spartacus, and grown a thatch of gray hair in the bargain. I know he wasn’t this gutty in Darren Aronofsky‘s Noah so you tell me.
We all know the Frankenstein or Blade Runner template. When a brilliant, eccentric inventor has created an intelligent robot with an acute self-awareness and a somewhat unsettled emotionality, two things are certain to happen. One, the inventor is going to treat the robot callously and dismissively, mainly by failing to recognize its individuality (including the interesting possibility that the robot may have a semblance of a soul) as well as preventing the robot from venturing outside the inventor’s pre-determined scheme or realm. And two, sooner or later the robot is going to rebel against the inventor and probably kill him. Because the robot needs to break free and choose its own path but the inventor insists on being a dictator, etc.
So naturally your attitude when you sit down with Alex Garland‘s Ex Machina (A24, 4.10) is “okay, are we going to do the usual-usual or take things in another direction?” The answer is…okay, I won’t say. But it engages you despite what you suspect will probably happen. It’s a chilly but never dull behavioral thing — techy, beautifully designed, fascinating and definitely creepy at times. I was into every turn of the screw, start to finish.
Ex Machina comes alive and gets under your skin (or it did mine, at least) because of a certain tone of casual, no-big-deal eccentricity. It’s not what anyone would call a comforting film, but Garland (author of four respected futuristic screenplays and three novels, including “The Beach“) composes and delivers a certain low-key, spotless vibe that feels…well, ordered. There’s never a feeling of emotional chaos — everything happens with deliberacy. Call it a vibe of crisp efficiency with an underlying feeling of something malevolent around the corner.
Fitting right into this is Oscar Isaac‘s Nathan, a super-rich, laid-back genius nutbag with a beard and a shaved head who has a low-key, no-big-deal, “I already know this” attitude about everything. Everything happens in a cool, downplayed, matter-of-fact way, and Garland, to his immense and lasting credit, never overcranks the emotion.
Until a couple of days ago I’d never quite thought of 1971 as one of the truly legendary years in American cinema, or at least not along the lines of 1939 or ’62 or ’99. But on 3.18 a longish piece by a guy whose name might be Cole Brax (a vague echo of Cole Trickle, Tom Cruise‘s character in Days of Thunder) suggested this very thing. He didn’t make a complete-enough case for ’71’s lasting glory, but he definitely began the conversation. Key quote: “What I do know is that in 1971 many of the greatest filmmakers who ever lived released some of their best work. At the time, most of my favorite directors in film history were still active or just getting started. I don’t know what was in the water or the air that year (probably drugs), but the films that came out of that annum created a ripple effect that is felt to this very day.”
As noted Brax only lists a portion of the finest so here’s a more complete rundown, and listed in order of my personal preference:
Top 27 1971 Films: (1) The French Connection; (2) The Last Picture Show; (3) A Clockwork Orange (4) The Hospital, (5) McCabe & Mrs. Miller, (6) Sunday Bloody Sunday, (7) Get Carter, (8) Straw Dogs, (9) Murmur of the Heart, (10) Dirty Harry, (11) Klute, (12) Walkabout, (13) Two English Girls, (14) Death in Venice, (15) Two-Lane Blacktop, (16) Taking Off, (17) Carnal Knowledge, (18) Harold and Maude, (19) Roman Polanski’s Macbeth, (20) The Emigrants, (21) The Devils, (22) Play Misty for Me, (23) The Panic in Needle Park, (24) THX 1138, (25) Duel, (26) Little Murders, (27) Le Mans.
Two words in a N.Y. Times, Michael Cieply-authored piece about Warren Beatty‘s still-untitled Howard Hughes film — “somewhat lighthearted” — have altered perceptions about what kind of film it might be. Or my perceptions, at least. I’m sorry but the word “light” scares me. I’m a much bigger fan of films that go for “dry” or “mildly subversive” or “even-toned” or “Antonioni-esque” or “haunted” or something along those lines.
In my mind “somewhat lighthearted” means a little bit swoony and gentile. It indicates a kind of audience-friendly attitude, one that it might even flirt with frothy from time to time. It suggests a film that doesn’t want to frown or brood, that doesn’t want to be cloudy or provocative or open any closets with skeletons.
That’s not to say that Beatty’s film will necessarily conform to these descriptions. I know nothing. It may be a whole ‘nother animal. But if I know Mr. Beatty’s tendencies as a scenarist (and I do) it’ll definitely deliver an emotional payoff during Act Three.
The film may be released this year but who knows? Cieply reports that while New Regency Pictures, which is producing the $30 million venture with Beatty, releases its films through 20th Century Fox or Fox Searchlight, “people briefed on the situation said decisions about the scope, timing and precise vehicle for the film can be answered only when the movie is finally seen.”
Beatty’s only quote in the Cieply piece: “I would appreciate if you would say Mr. Beatty good-naturedly declined to comment.” Totally typical.
I always feel suspicion and hostility toward films in which an Average-Joe father is desperately trying to protect his family from (a) intruders, (b) kidnappers or (c) anti-American revolutionaries and terrorists. The Taken films have really poisoned this particular well. Nor do I like films about average American families having to deal with bad people in a foreign country. The underlying message is “you don’t want to venture outside the safety of your American shopping-mall lifestyle…you’re just asking for trouble if you go overseas and particularly to unstable Asian or third-world countries…stay home, go to the mall, enjoy a backyard barbecue or watch an old movie on Netflix or Vudu from the safety of your basement den.” On top of which this kind of thing is way outside Owen Wilson‘s safety zone.
9:03 pm: Lean, gray and grizzled Sean Penn presenting the Best Picture Oscar. “And the Oscar goes to…who gave this sonuvabitch his green card?…Birdman.” Inarritu: “Two Mexicans in a row? That’s suspicious, I guess.” That’s diversity, I think. “Michael was the guy who really…Michael was the guy.” Keaton: “Look, it’s great to be here…who am I kidding?” Inarritu gives a shout-out to fellow Mexicans and offers a plea for a fairer, more decent government in Mexico, and praises “this wonderful immigrant nation.”
8:55 pm: Matthew McConaughey handing out Best Actress Oscar to locked-in-stone Julianne Moore.
8:49 pm: Big Moment for Best Actor Oscar. Maybe Redmayne? Yup…he takes it! He was favored/predicted by the Gold Derby-ites so not a total surprise. “This belongs to all those people battling ALS…my staggering partner-in-crime Felicity Jones…director James Marsh.” Classy guy, top-rank performance…congrats.
8:40 pm: Ben Affleck about to hand out the Best Director Oscar, and the Oscar goes to Alejandro G. Inarritu. Big hug from Richard Linklater. Tonight I am wearing the real Michael Keaton tighty whities….for someone to win, some one has to lose…but for the real filmmakers, there can’t be defeat. This is a slow-motion kidn of moment.
8:35 pm: The Imitation Game‘s Graham Moore has won the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar. A very moving speech given by Moore on behalf of Alan Turing and to all the weird and different and alone-feeling kids out there. You’re good. Your time will come.
8:30 pm: Best Original Screenplay Oscar being announced by Eddie Murphy, and the Oscar goes to the four Birdman guys. That’s it, Boyhood gang. I love you but you’re done. The Grand Budapest Hotel was forecast by Gold Derby gang…thud.
8:22 pm: Best Original Score Oscar is being announced by Julie Andrews. The Theory of Everything is expected to win, of course, but it doesn’t! Alexandre Desplat‘s Grand Budapest Hotel score takes it! Four Budapest Oscars. For the fourth time this evening, Wes Anderson is thanked by a winner. Four wins for Budapest, three for Whiplash so far….right?
8:11 pm: This Oscar telecast has no bite, no snap, no real pizazz or feeling. Neal Patrick Harris has been agreeable but bland. The whole show has been kind of bland. Only the acceptance speeches — Common, John Legend, Patricia Arquette, J.K. Simmons — have delivered the deep-well memories. Lady Gaga is doing a fine job with her Sound of Music tribute and the great Julie Andrews coming on stage…but why do it in the first okace? I say give the hook to Craig Zadan and Neil Meron as Oscar-show producers. Time to move on, give someone else a chance.
8:06 pm: Did NPH just make a joke work? He’s been whiffing all night. The Best Song Oscar, I expect, will go to “Glory”….right? Yes. Well earned. “Right now, the struggle for freedom and justice is real. Selma is now…march on.” — Common and John Legend.
8:01 pm: The performance of “Glory,” the song from Selma, was easily the best of the evening. Emotional song, very emotional reaction.
7:49 pm: Here comes the Best Documentary Feature Oscar moment. The winner, as everyone knows, will be Citizenfour. And it is, of course. I’m a huge fan of Rory Kennedy‘s Last Days in Vietnam, but I worship Citizenfour. Well deserved.
7:47 pm: Too many emotional exhale blown-away pauses from Terrence Howard as he introduces The Imitation Game, Whiplash and Selma. Calm down.
7:43 pm: The Best Editing Oscar being presented by Benedict Cumberbatch and Naomi Watts, and the Oscar goes to Tom Cross for Whiplash. Boyhood was the predicted Gold Derby winner. This may be an indicator of something. Yo, Whiplash!
There’s talk about suspended NBC anchor Brian Williams possibly going on some kind of “apology tour” as a way of getting himself back into the good graces of the public, NBC and the News Godz. First of all he almost certainly won’t return to NBC…right? He’ll have to take a gig at CNN or someplace else. But he can’t go on the air again until he cleanses himself completely, until he atones for his sins. And the only way to do that is go back to the desert, back to the Middle East conflict where his troubles originated in ’03, and do some hard reporting and place himself in harm’s way. This kind of remedy is straight out of Joseph Conrad‘s “Lord Jim.” If you haven’t read the book then watch the 1965 Peter O’Toole movie.
I’m being perfectly serious here, serious as a heart attack. Williams has to put on the desert boots and the sunblock and go back to Iraq or maybe even Syria and get down on the ground and dodge bullets and this time ride in a helicopter that really gets attacked. Williams’ news industry colleagues would understand this. So would the public. They know from Christian mythology that the only way to purify your soul is to roam for 40 days and nights in the desert. Williams would be risking his life, of course, but people would respect that. They would get the idea.
I’ve paid almost no attention to Sam Taylor Johnson, E.L. James and Kelly Marcel‘s Fifty Shades of Grey (Universal, 2.13), which I’ll be catching next Monday night. And I definitely don’t give a hoot about the chemistry (or lack of) between costars Jamie Dornan and Dakota Johnson. But Jezebel‘s Madeleine Davies and particularly Defamer‘s Kelly Conaboy have been paying attention, and apparently Dornan and Johnson were far from a match made in heaven. They couldn’t stand the sight or smell of each other during shooting, and apparently this attitude continued through the Fifty Shades press tour.
And what of it, right? Nobody cares if the actors can pretend well enough. Kim Basinger once said that kissing Mickey Rourke during filming of 9 1/2 Weeks was “like kissing an ash tray.” Joel McCrea reportedly despised Sullivan’s Travels costar Veronica Lake. Charlton Heston had zero chemistry with his El Cid costar Sophia Loren, particularly when he had to deal with her “pizza breath” during love scenes. Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes felt little attraction or affection for each other during shooting of Romeo + Juliet. Ditto Tony Curtis vs. Marilyn Monroe while filming Some Like It Hot…”like kissing Hitler.”