John Hamburg‘s I Love You, Man “cranks out the kind of lowball humor that makes you gag on your own laughs,” writesVariety‘s Todd McCarthy. “Ever alert for opportunities to drop dirty bombs — and compelled to repeat every below-the-belt joke at least one time too many — pic never surmounts a deeply lame central premise that makes most of the action seem fraudulent and thoroughly unnecessary.
I Love You Man‘s Jason Segel, Paul Rudd
“[It] is propelled by the perplexing notion that a young man isn’t properly prepared for marriage or life in general unless he has a best male friend and, in the bargain, a guy who merits being his best man at the nuptials. It’s a rare film that features an operating principle less compelling or credible than this, although the script by John Hamburg and Larry Levin makes use of it to put Peter Klaven (Paul Rudd) into a succession of awkward and embarrassing encounters that can easily be — and are — misconstrued in aspiringly comic ways.
“But the notion of sending him on ‘man-dates’ in search of a best friend proves preposterously contrived, as if such a confidential and symbiotic relationship could be formed anywhere near as quickly as falling in love, or certainly lust. Add the fact that Peter’s fiancee becomes completely and understandably alienated by the process and the annoyance level hits the red zone. All the picture lacks is a nudgy mother constantly asking, ‘So when are you going to get a best friend already?'”
Everyone expected Watchmen to experience a steep revenue drop (40% or 50%) on its second weekend. Hardcore geeks contributed $55 million and change last weekend, but the mainstream crowd wasn’t expected to follow suit. But a drop of 71%, as reported by Big Hollywood’s Steve Mason, is devastating. And a 73% drop, as reported by Deadline Hollywood Daily‘s Nikki Finke, is obviously worse news.
The weekend’s #1 film is Disney’s family-friendly Race To With Mountain, which will probably earn $24 million and change.
“In the last couple of years the industrious Joe Swanberg has managed to turn himself into an identifiable independent name despite having evinced little initial filmmaking talent,” N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis has written. “Things look better, however, in his latest effort, Alexander the Last, a 72-minute (including credits) series of loosely connected scenes.
“For starters, he finally has a real actress to look at and undress, the charming, vibrantly alive Jess Weixler, who plays Alex, a rather less appealing actress struggling with the divide between life and art. As important, Alexander comes with an imprimatur of legitimacy because the filmmaker Noah Baumbach (Margot at the Wedding) has signed on as a producer. It’s hard to imagine Mr. Baumbach putting his name to anything without some creative input.
“The story in Alexander emerges elliptically after Alex’s musician husband, Elliot (Justin Rice), heads out for a spell. She soon lands a part in a theater production (the movie was shot in Brooklyn), playing the romantic foil to a vague young man, Jamie (the equally hazy Barlow Jacobs), for whom she develops…well, a vague interest.
“The two advance and parry on and increasingly off the stage, even as Alex’s sister, Hellen (Amy Seimetz), moves in on Jamie. Inhibitions and clothes are shed amid awkward silences, lurching conversations and tentative gestures as the focus shifts between life and the theater, and the two realms become more and more blurred, at least for Alex.
“The only thing truly in focus here is Ms. Weixler’s performance.”
I’ve been waiting to see Gerald Peary and Amy Geller‘s For The Love of Movies: A History of American Film Criticism for a long time. It’s been in the works for years. So many, in fact, that one of the talking heads appears as a young, lean-faced guy with a shock of dark hair (in footage that was shot around 2000) and as an older, fuller-faced guy with less hair. Happens to all of us, but this may be a first. Same interview subject, two biological incarnations.
Anyway, For The Love of Movies — directed and written by Peary, produced by Geller — is finally here and it does the job nicely. Which is to say intelligently, competently, lovingly and, after a fashion, comprehensively. Meaning that it tells the story as thoroughly as the budget and running time have allowed. For those who don’t know much about the lore of the realm, it’s nutritious food and then some.
It’s a hell of a subject — a chronicle of magnificent obsessions and magnificent dreams, and a rise-and-fall story covering scores of critics, the entirety of the Hollywood film culture from the ’20s to the present, and hundreds if not thousands of movies.
Ideally (and this is no slag on Peary or Geller) For The Love of Movies should have been a well-funded, six-part American Experience series on PBS, shot on 35mm by Emmanuel Lubezski, and including a vast smorgasbord of film clips donated by their copyright owners as a gesture of thankfulness. (Today’s production and marketing community may resent critics, but they owe them big-time.)
But Peary and Geller’s low-budget, hand-to-mouth approach will do for now. I’m very glad it was made, glad that I saw it. I hope others follow suit when it has its big debut on Monday, 3.16, at South by Southwest, and more particularly at the Alamo Ritz at 8 pm. And then on Wednesday, 3.18 at the same venue. And again on Saturday, 3.21, at the Alamo Lamar 3 at 4 pm.
Gerald Peary (l.) and Amy Geller (r.) with unknown female.
You can’t watch this film and not acknowledge that Peary and Geller are fully up to the task of providing a clean and cogent history lesson. Could they have made a snarkier, trippier excursion piece? A more poetic and probing cultural epic or tone poem…whatever? Yeah, probably, but they were budgetarily constrained and wanted to reach the not-very-hip (or moderately hip) crowd.
So they’ve thrown together an easy-to-digest, chapter-by-chapter saga of the last 90 years of American film criticism, starting in the mid-to-late teens with the emergence of Frank E. Wood, the first “cricket” to earn his stripes by investing a modicum of personal passion and a writerly point-of-view, and hiking all the way through Vachel Lindsay, Robert Sherwood, the great seminal trio of Otis Ferguson, James Agee and Manny Farber, the 20-year reign of Bosley Crowther, the fall of Crowther over his Bonnie and Clyde review, the influence of Cahiers du Cinema and the auteur theory, the resultant reign of Andrew Sarris and The American Cinema, the huge influence of Pauline Kael and the writings of Stanley Kaufman, Vincent Canby, Richard Corliss, Richard Schickel, Molly Haskell, Roger Ebert, Stuart Klawans, etc.
This feels like Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Stop the Fire.” I’m hearing a film-critic spoof version of the lyrics. Come to think, a mock music-video interlude would have been a great thing for Perry and Geller to run with — seriously.
Gleiberman, Hoberman, Harlan tell-it Jacobson.
John Powers, Elvis Mitchell, Leonard Maltin, mumblecore.
Titanic, Janet Maslin, Wesley Morris, David Sterritt.
Ain’t-It-Cool, Rex Reed, Nesselson and junket whores.
Lisa Schwarzbaum, Orson Kane, Indies in the ’90s.
Wilmington, Weinberg, Siskel and Szymanski.
Ruby Rich, Kenny T., tits and zits, Anthology Film Archives.
I’ve lost the rhythm, can’t get it right, haven’t the time. Anyone?
For whatever reason Perry and Geller don’t mention the great French critic Andre Bazin. (Or at least not that I remember. He’s not listed in this cast roster.) Nor do they mention John Simon, whom I always regarded as a brilliant (if occasionally cruel) critic and one of the major go-to guys of the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s. Or Todd McCarthy, Dwight McDonald, Bertrand Tavernier, Andy Klein, Armond White, Ty Burr, Glenn Kenny, Anthony Lane, Scott Foundas, etc.
There are a lot of holes and gaps — let’s face it. The doc only runs 80 minutes. A longer length (115 or 120 minutes, say) would have obviously allowed for a more comprehensive summary.
For those who know a lot about the American film-critic monastery, For the Love of Movies is a tidy and agreeable canoe ride down memory creek. With a tinge of melancholy, I should add, although this comes more from my own feelings.
Peary and Geller, to put a point on it, have chosen not to emphasize the dominant reality facing established film critics in the 21st Century — i.e., the extinction of the monk-like film critic cabal as it was known and defined from the late 1930s and ’40s to the beginning of this century, and the drop-by-drop decline and diminishment of the power and prestige of the traditional film critic. Which is due, obviously, to the winding down of the Gutenberg era, blah blah. With some critics and columnists adapting to the new technological climate (ahem) and some not so much.
Peary and Geller acknowledge that it’s currently a sink-or-swim, do-or-die reality out there. They begin by saying that “film criticism is a profession under siege” and that “according to Variety 28 film critics have lost their jobs in the last several years.” That, of course, is dated information and isn’t the half of it. Sean P. Means‘ disappearing film critic list is currently at 49. MCN’s Last Film Critics in America list has the names of 121 who are still collecting a check.
Clearly we’re looking at the end of the road here, certainly for the elite culture portrayed in the film.
The prime kiss-of-death factor is a diminished interest among today’s tweeting, texting, 24/7 digital-feed generation in being passive recipients of the views of learned, brahmin-like, know-it-all film critics dispensing ivory-tower insights. Economic issues aside, the firing of film critics is rooted in today’s common-currency belief that everyone and anyone with a computer or hand-held device knows as much as those snooty-ass critics do. Or certainly that their opinion is just as valid, and that they prefer a more democratic, interactive bloggy-blog conversation as the dominant mode of dissection and discussion.
In short, there’s a whole current of lament than runs underneath this story that probably should have been explored with more frankness and feeling.
For The Love of Movies is narrated by Patricia Clarkson. I don’t want to be a crank, but I would have preferred to hear a raspy, whiskey-tinged male voice tell the tale. The voice of someone who sounds like he might have personally lived through some of the history. Michael Wilmington would have worked in this respect.
Speaking last night at the School of Visual Arts, Tyson director James Toback told a story about Focus Features’ chief James Schamus. He was the first Hollywood hotshot to be offered the film at Cannes, but he passed. Flash forward a few months when Toback’s agent calls Toback with the news that Schamus had told a mutual friend that he not only loved Tyson, but said it was by far the best thing he’d seen at Cannes.
Toback called Schamus right away. “From what I’m told you were at a Tyson screening in Cannes, and you passed,” he said. “But now I’m hearing you loved it. Somebody’s clearly lying.”
Schamus: “I passed on the movie and I loved it”
Toback: “Why?”
Schamus: “The movie’s brilliant, but it doesn’t fit what we do. We’ve never released a documentary at Focus. So there’s that plus I’m a financier — I’m not an acquisitions guy.”
I spoke with Alexander The Last director Joe Swanberg a day or so ago. It had to be a phoner because he lives in Chicago. The chat lasted 18 minutes. He agreed that he’s less a story-driven director than a framer and coaxer of emotions, personalities, situations, moods. Either films of this type get you or they don’t. I made it clear last Tuesday I’m a sucker.
Joe Swanberg during filming of Alexander the Last
Alexander the Last will be available on IFC Movies on Demand, concurrent with its screening at South by Southwest. Operators that carry IFC Movies On Demand are (a) Bright House, (b) CableVision or Ch. 508, (c) Charter (Ch. 1 /Movies On Demand/IFC In Theaters), (d) Comcast (Ch. 1 /Movies On Demand/IFC In Theaters), (e) Cox (Ch. 1 /Movies On Demand/IFC In Theaters), (f) Insight (Ch. 1 /Movies On Demand/IFC In Theaters), and (g) Time Warner (Movies On Demand/IFC In Theaters). Here‘s an IFC brochure detailing other IFC on-demand titles, etc.
Conservative-minded actor Gary Sinise had made a support-the-troops Iraq War doc called Brothers at War. Who’s seen it? Is there an on-demand plan of some kind in the works? A filmmaker friend says Sinise’s film has “been suspiciously absent from festivals and just started a small run starting in military communities.”
Why not air Brothers at War on HBO, which has attracted huge numbers by playing the red-state card with recent airings of Ross Katz ‘s Taking Chance? As I’ve noted once or twice before, Taking Chance‘s success is due to the way it massages feelings of heartland pride and patriotism, sadness over the death of too-young American soldiers, and a certain kind of sentimentality that associates itself with feelings of allegiance for the waging of the Iraq War.
In any event, Brothers at War and Taking Chance are discussed in this 3.13 Washington Times article by Sonny Bunch. The piece also quotes the Taking Chance argument that N.Y. PostKyle Smith and I got into about two weeks ago.
Hey, whatever happened to Pat Dollard‘s Young Americans, which deals with his embed experiences with Iraq combat troops? He shot it…what, four years ago? Five? I have a feeling he’ll never finish this thing. I’d be sorry not to see it. I respect what Dollard did in going over there, etc.
The guy who lives upstairs is so fat that you can’t just hear the stairs and floor beams buckling and groaning under his weight — you can feel the whole building doing this. It’s very unsettling. Imagine a Vietnamese water buffalo walking around on its hind legs, and sensing the tonnage as it trudges up and down a sagging staircase.
Truth be told, the building I’m staying in (which is probably 60 or 70 years old) was built from second-rate materials. It’s not the age of it. I’ve stayed in apartment buildings in Paris and Rome that are 150 or 200 years old, if not older, and their winding, steel-fortified staircases are as solid as trees.
“Once he had Mad Money‘s Jim Cramer at his desk, Jon Stewart showed…embarrassing clips from a 2006 interview with the website [Cramer] founded, TheStreet.com, in which he too candidly explained how hedge fund market manipulation really works.When Cramer explained, ‘There is market for it and you give it to them,’ Stewart stared at him in disbelief, exclaiming. ‘There’s a market for cocaine and hookers!'” — from Alessandra Stanley‘s 3.13 N.Y. Times story about the 3.12 Daily Show interrogation.
“I know Jim Cramer a little,” Andrew Sullivan wrote this morning. “The reason he crumbled last night, I think, is because deep down, he knows Stewart’s right. He isn’t that television clown all the way down. And deeper down, he knows it’s not all a game — now that they’ve run off with grandpa’s retirement money.
“It’s not enough any more, guys, to make fantastic errors and then to carry on authoritatively as if nothing just happened. You will be called on it. In some ways, the blogosphere is to MSM punditry what Stewart is to Cramer: an insistent and vulgar demand for some responsibility, some moral and ethical accountabilty for previous decisions and pronouncements.
“I watched last night’s Daily Show with growing shock last night. Did you expect that? I expected a jolly and ultimately congenial discussion, after some banter. What Cramer walked into was an ambush of anger. He crumbled from the beginning. From then on, with the almost cruel broadcasting of his earlier glorifying of financial high-jinks, you almost had to look away. This was, in my view, a real cultural moment. It was a storming of the Bastille.”
Yesterday the New Yorker‘s Richard Brodylamented the recent departure of Film Society of Lincoln Center’s film programmer Kent Jones while offering a possible reason for his having resigned (i.e., left for reasons not of his own making).
(l.) Recently departed Lincoln Center film programmer and Film Comment contributor Kent Jones; (r.) FSLC exec director Mara Manus.
“I haven’t heard from [Jones] recently and don’t know the specifics of the situation, his departure is emblematic of a greater problem at the Film Society,” Brody wrote.
“In December, the Film Society presented ‘Spanish Cinema Now,’ which was ‘presented in collaboration with the Instituto de la Cinematografia y de las Artes Audiovisuales (ICAA) of the Spanish Ministry of Culture and the Instituto Cervantes of New York.’
“A similar program, ‘Open Roads: New Italian Cinema,’ was co-organized along with a host of organizations last June, including the ‘Ministero per i Beni e le Attivita Culturali (Direzione Generale per il Cinema).’
“And the week of Slovenian cinema last July was ‘presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center in collaboration with and with major support from the Slovenian Film Fund.’
“Many of the films shown in these series are far from the best of world cinema,” Brody noted, adding that “these series seem to serve mainly the interests of the governments or national film agencies in question, whether to promote the country for tourism or to promote the movies for possible export.
“It is unimaginable that the New York Philharmonic would take money from, say, Spain’s or Slovenia’s Ministry of Culture in exchange for programming a series of works by composers from that country, or that the Metropolitan Opera or the Great Performers series would accept payment for featuring a particular country’s soprano or pianist.
“But Lincoln Center allows — perhaps even expects — the Film Society to dilute its curated programming with arrantly sponsored screenings of some inferior movies. As long as that happens, the Film Society will remain a hit-or-miss venue, its programming unreliable and its brand name less than sterling among New York’s cinephiles.
“I don’t know whether Kent Jones’s departure is in any way connected with such programming. I do know that his departure, combined with the frequency of such programming, is an ominous trend.”
Postscript: Jones wrote me from Vienna last night to insist that he resigned and wasn’t “whacked.” I corrected my 3.12 story yesterday afternoon, but wrote back the following: “No offense, Kent, but nobody believes you just ‘resigned.’ They’re presuming, as I do, that work conditions under FSLC exec director Mara Manus led to a level of discomfort and dissatisfaction that you didn’t want to live with. Whether you initiated things by saying ‘I’m leaving’ or Manus initiated things by enforcing workplace policies that led to your departure is a minor distinction.”