A day or so ago Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson talked about the difference between “artsy” and “art film.” I immediately thought of the last dialogue scene in Stanley Kubrick‘s Lolita when she did. When it was released the term “art movie” had a more or less specific meaning, depending on the mentality and education level of the person you were speaking to. It happens at 2:59 but go back to 2:40 for the full flavor.

My impression from Todd McCarthy‘s review is that Werner Herzog‘s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans isn’t quite declarative enough in its (apparent) attempt to be a loonier-than-life psycho-detective drama. Star Nicolas Cage, he says, “is sometimes so over the top it’s funny, which one can hope was intentional.” And there’s the rub — McCarthy isn’t sure. And yet, he says, if Cage “was looking for a vehicle in which his hyper-emoting would be dramatically justifiable, he found one here.”

Nicolas Cage in Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

And yet, he says, “there’s also a sort of deadpan zaniness, stemming from a steadfast conviction in its own absurdity, that gives the film a strange distinction all its own. Herzog approaches the setting of New Orleans, as well as the depredations of the title character, with a straight face and unblinking lens, the better to catch a glimpse of the links connecting Katrina, the corruption of authority as seen through the outrageous behavior of the lieutenant, and the money, which lands mostly in the wrong places.

“If one watched this movie without knowing the identity of the director, it would admittedly be difficult to give it much credit, since it is so indifferently made, erratically acted and dramatically diffuse. For a considerable stretch, it remains unclear how one is to assess the helmer’s handling of vet TV crime writer William Finkelstein‘s pulpy scenario. The film is offbeat, silly, disarming and loopy all at the same time, and viewers will decide to ride with that or just give up on it, according to mood and disposition.”

I’m getting a feeling that Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans isn’t one for the Eloi. I for one can’t wait to see it in Toronto. I wish I still got high because this definitely seems like thje kind of film that you need to smoke a bowl before seeing.

It’s fully in keeping with my listless viewing habits that I’m only now interested in seeing La Vida Loca, a recent documentary about the Mara gangs in El Salvador, now that the film’s director, Christian Poveda, has been killed. The poor guy was reportedly found Wednesday in Tonacatepeque, a rural region north of San Salvador capital, with more than one bullet in the head.

Can you order La Vida Loca on Amazon? Of course not. And a site that has information about it has some kind of virus on it, according to my computer.

On 4.10.09, a story by L.A. Times Mexico City correspondent Deborah Bonello reported the following:

“La Vida Loca reflects a depressing and hopeless reality. The documentary, by photojournalist and filmmaker Christian Poveda, follows some of the members of ”la dieciocho,” the so-called 18th Street gang in a poor San Salvador neighborhood.

“‘Little One’ is a 19-year-old mother with an enormous ’18,’ reflecting her membership in the 18th Street gang, tattooed on her face. The numbers stretch from above her eyebrows down onto her cheeks.

“‘Moreno’ is a 25-year-old male member of the same gang who works in a local bakery set up by a nonprofit group called Homies Unidos. The bakery eventually folds when its owner is arrested and sentenced to 16 years in jail on homicide charges.

“And ‘Wizard,” another young mother and gang member, who lost her eye in a fight, is followed by Poveda during a long series of medical consultations and operations to fit her with a replacement glass eye. She’s shot and killed before the end of the film.

“Stories like that, punctuated with funerals attended by silent, heavily tattooed male gang members and wailing young wives, mothers and girlfriends, make up the sum of La Vida Loca.

“The nature of their existence meant that Poveda had to spread his camera lens wide in the 16 months he spent shooting the film.

“‘I knew right from the start that I couldn’t film just one character,’ he explains during an interview on a trip to Mexico last month when La Vida Loca was part of the Guadalajara International Film Festival.

“‘Firstly, they get bored after a couple of months and don’t want to be filmed anymore. Or two, they get put in jail, or they get killed.'”

The mind seizes up trying to imagine the mentality of Proveda’s killers. They probably imagined that he was going to rat them out to authorities (or some equally brilliant deduction), or perhaps took offense as some meaningless thing he said or did.

This is my second cinematic exposure (in a sense) to El Salvador gangs, the first being Cary Fukunaga‘s Sin Nombre. The right-wing fantasy in my head right now is an army of 10,000 or so Creasy-like characters (i.e., the CIA guy played by Denzel Washington in Man on Fire) moving in on the gangs and just wiping them out, one by one. Their mothers and girlfriends would be upset, of course, but who else would be?

The hard one is a two-man comedy bit in a sly, low-key vein. Recorded around 1958 or ’59, the humor comes from what used to be a basic fact in the American media landscape of the ’50s and early ’60s, which is that straight-arrow radio and TV guys were totally clueless about subterranean hipster culture. If you’re in the right mood, the bit is hilarious. If you’re not, it plays flat. There’s no guessing the comedian’s name because he disguises his voice.

Easy clip #1 is obviously from a war film. I have a special affection for it because of the way a certain actor says the words “one bullet now.” Easy clip #2 isn’t a guesser but a heavenly piece from West Side Story, which I saw at the Palace four or five weeks ago with an audience of out-of-town tourists, many of whom looked funny or dressed oddly in some way. The only moment that I truly loved was when they played Leonard Bernstein‘s “Scherzo (Vivace leggiero).”

Over and over, MTV’s Josh Horowitz mock-pleads with Jennifer’s Body star Megan Fox to sing “Over The Rainbow.” And all she does is refuse with that reedy little voice and a testy look on her face. “What is this about?…I’m not gonna sing it.” In short, Fox hasn’t much confidence, isn’t into relaxation or chuckling at herself, clearly knows she’s limited and that it’s safer to stick to reading lines in movies, and hasn’t much gumption. I mean, I could do “Over The Rainbow” on MTV.com. I could hit the notes, I mean.

John Hillcoat‘s The Road, which screens today at the Venice Film Festival after months of being kept out of sight by the Weinstein brothers after postponing its release from the end of last year, has been totally dismissed by Variety‘s Todd McCarthy. The opening graph of his review says “this Road leads nowhere” and that “it falls short on every front.”

Viggo Mortensen, Kodi Smit-McPhee in John Hillcoat‘s The Road.

The drama as composed by novelist Cormac McCarthy in his 2006 novel “is one little genre step away from being an outright zombie movie,” McCarthy observes. “[And this is] something that’s much more evident onscreen, with its drooling, crusty-toothed aggressors and live humans with missing limbs; memories of Night of the Living Dead unavoidably advance in all the scenes in which Viggo Mortensen and son Kodi Smit-McPhee take refuge in a house, where they must contend with unfriendly marauders.

“But Hillcoat, who played with heavy violence in The Proposition and made some of it stick, shows no talent for or inclination toward setting up a scene here; any number of sequences in The Road could have been very suspenseful if built up properly, but Hillcoat, working from a script by Joe Penhall, just hopscotches from scene to scene in almost random fashion without any sense of pacing or dramatic modulation.

“Dialogue that should have been directed with an almost Pinteresque sense of timing is delivered without meaningful shadings, principally by two actors who have no chemistry together. Unfortunately, Mortensen lacks the gravitas to carry the picture; suddenly resembling Gabby Hayes with his whiskers and wayward hair, the actor has no bottom to him, and his interactions with Smit-McPhee, whom one can believe as Charlize Theron‘s son but not Mortensen’s, never come alive.

“Tellingly, both thesps are better in their individual scenes with other actors; Mortensen gets into it with Robert Duvall, who plays an old coot met along the road, while Smit-McPhee registers a degree of rapport with Guy Pearce, practically unrecognizable at first as another wanderer. Generally, the boy’s readings are blandly on the nose.

“If you’re going to adapt a book like McCarthy’s bestseller, you’re pretty much obliged to make a terrific film or it’s not worth doing — first because expectations are high, and second, because the picture needs to make it worth people’s while to sit through something so grim.

“Showing clear signs of being test-screened and futzed with to death, the Dimension release may receive a measure of respect in some quarters but is very, very far from the film it should have been, spelling moderate to tepid box-office prospects after big fest preems.”

McCarthy didn’t review The Road out of Venice, but off a showing at LA’s Sunset Screening Room on 8.27.

Yesterday Take Part passed along a report by Ric O’Barry, the haunted star of The Cove, that Taiji officials have at least temporarily decided not to move ahead on the annual dolphin slaughter. O’Barry is in Taiji and wrote on 9.1 that he’s seen no fishing boats, no fishermen, no harpoons…nothing.

Great, but does anyone believe this is really the end of it? Not I. Maybe the bad guys have simply decided to kill the dolphins in some other cove in some other nearby town? And surely the Taiji fishing industry will at least continue to round up dolphins for sale to marine tourist parks? Most people involved in nefarious enterprises (a) are essentially amoral in matters of income and (b) don’t give up their meal tickets this easily.

This reminded me of the situation facing director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu regarding his decision to serve as jury president at the forthcoming Tokyo Film Festival in lieu of the festival’s decision, despite its “green” theme, not to show The Cove. On 8.18 I passed along Peter Howell‘s Toronto Star 8.5 report that the a festival official had told Cove director Louie Psihoyos that Tokyo wasn’t taking The Cove “for political reasons.”

In lieu of O’Barry’s report I’m wondering if anything has shaken loose. Will the Tokyo Film Festival show The Cove after all or…? This is a story that needs an ending.

Last May 21st the Toronto Int’l Film Festival announced a City- to-City Spotlight promotion with Tel Aviv, of all cities. A little more than three months later — i.e., last Friday, 8.27 — Toronto filmmaker John Greyson sent a letter to TIFF honcho Piers Handling announcing his decision to withdraw his short doc, Covered, from the festival in protest over TIFF’s celebration of Tel Aviv ‘s “brand.

Greyson essentially feels that Tel Aviv and the Israeli government have too much blood and militaristic aggression and kad karma on their plate to warrant partnership with a forward-thinking film festival like Toronto’s. And he’s arguing that TIFF’s Tel Aviv promotion flies in the face of an economic boycott against Israel that he and anti-Israel voices would like to see enforced in order to get Israel to be more reasonable and less belligerent in its dealings with the Palestinians.

At the end of his email he wrote, “”Isn’t such an uncritical celebration of Tel Aviv right now akin to celebrating Montgomery buses in 1963, California grapes in 1969, Chilean wines in 1973, Nestles infant formula in 1984, or South African fruit in 1991?

“To my mind, this isn’t the right year to celebrate Brand Israel, or to demonstrate an ostrich-like indifference to the realities (cinematic and otherwise) of the region, or to pointedly ignore the international economic boycott campaign against Israel. Launched by Palestinian NGO’s in 2005, and since joined by thousands inside and outside Israel, the campaign is seen as the last hope for forcing Israel to comply with international law. By ignoring this boycott, TIFF has emphatically taken sides — and in the process, forced every filmmaker and audience member who opposes the occupation to cross a type of picket line.”

Early in the letter Greyson noted that “this past year has seen (a) the devastating Gaza massacre of eight months ago, resulting in over 1000 civilian deaths; (b) the election of a Prime Minister (Benjamin Netanyahu) accused of war crimes; (c) the aggressive extension of illegal Israeli settlements on Palestinian lands; (d) the accelerated destruction of Palestinian homes and orchards; (e) the viral growth of the totalitarian security wall, and (f) the further enshrining of the check-point system.

“Such state policies have led diverse figures such as John Berger, Jimmy Carter, and Bishop Desmond Tutu to characterize this ‘brand’ as apartheid. Your TIFF program book may describe Tel Aviv as a ‘vibrant young city… of beaches, cafes and cultural ferment… that celebrates its diversity,’ but it’s also been called ‘a kind of alter-Gaza, the smiling face of Israeli apartheid‘ (Naomi Klein) and’tthe only city in the west without Arab residents” (Tel Aviv filmmaker Udi Aloni).

“Let’s be clear: my protest isn’t against the films or filmmakers you’ve chosen. I’ve seen brilliant works of Israeli and Palestinian cinema at past TIFFs, and will again in coming years. My protest is against the Spotlight itself, and the smug business-as-usual aura it promotes.”

“What eventually determined my decision to pull out was the subject of Covered itself. It’s a doc about the 2008 Sarajevo Queer Festival, which was cancelled due to brutal anti-gay violence. The film focuses on the bravery of the organizers and their supporters, and equally, on the ostriches, on those who remained silent, who refused to speak out: most notoriously, the Sarajevo International Film Festival and the Canadian Ambassador in Sarajevo.

“To stand in judgment of these ostriches before a TIFF audience, but then say nothing about this Tel Aviv spotlight — finally, I realized that that was a brand I couldn’t stomach.”

Taken earlier today in quiet, under-populated Telluride, Colorado by HE correspondent “buckzollo,” who, among others, will be passing along impressions and whatnot starting Friday. And of course, the 66th Venice Film Festival begins today. Tomorrow John Hillcoat‘s The Road and Todd Solondz‘s Life During Wartime will screen there. And Michael Moore‘s Capitalism: A Love Story will show in Venice on Sunday.

I can remember reading an article in the ’80s that reviled middle-aged European tourists (particularly Germans, as I recall) for walking around Manhattan in the summer months in short-sleeved sports shirts, shorts (and thus exposing their hideous alabaster legs), brown socks and sandals. In my book it’s just as bad to wear black socks and sandals. It may be that the style offender in this shot is wearing black lace-up sneakers, but so what? White legs, black socks…forget it.

And I’m amazed, truly amazed that a guy could go out in public like this. But lots of guys in their mid 40s and younger do go out like this. I’ve seen them in Central Park and downtown and all around, and there’s no stopping it.

Michael Caine will sit for a Toronto Film Festival interview on Sunday, 9.13, at the Isabel Bader theatre to promote his new film, Harry Brown. The interview program is called Mavericks. Caine has worked to some extent in the independent arena, but he’s been known his entire career for a whorish willingness to act in just about anything. He starred in Joseph Sargent‘s Jaws 4: The Revenge and Irwin Allen ‘s The Swarm. I love the guy but has there ever been a less Mavericky actor in film history?