I’m not trying to sound like a simpleton, but an association came to mind when I first saw the Na’vi hybrids during the showing of the 24-minute Avatar reel at ComicCon. “I’ve seen those ears before,” I told myself. It finally hit me today what that association is. It came after I saw this just-released photo of Sam Worthington and a submerged Na’Vi hybrid. No biggie. Just sayin’.
Is it fair or achievable (in a legitimate, fair-minded sense) to compare rabid believers among true-believer, herd-mentality fanboys with the right-wing birthers and townhall “death panel” protesters? This idea was thrown into my lap several minutes ago, and so far…well, it’s not coalescing. That’s because there’s nothing that fanboys have said or done in response to, say, District 9 that echoes rightie nutters screaming about socialism poisoning the American tradition and so on. Maybe I’m missing something, but I don’t see it.
I suppose a case can be made by the more-than-500 comments on Rotten Tomatoes that attack N.Y. Press critic Armond White for having written a District 9 pan. And a few aimed at Spoutblog‘s Karina Longworth for doing the same. There is a religious current inside the fanboy mentality — a current that gets really mad if you dump on the faith they’re buying into.
The Toronto Film Festival press office team hasn’t made its final, last-minute calls about who will be getting press badges for the forthcoming festival (9.10 to 9.19). They’re re-reviewing the situation next Monday, a rep says. It nonetheless seems curious, especially considering the rampant implosion of print outlets all over the world, that the TIFF-ers are giving three well-read, thoroughly respectable online voices — Movieline‘s Stu VanAirsdale, Spoutblog‘s Karina Longworth and Cinemablend‘s Katey Rich — the vague idea that they may not make the cut. Or that they might…not sure yet!
On top of which In Contention‘s Kris Tapley, owner and master of one of the key quality-calibrating, awards-chasing sites that shifts into high gear starting with Toronto, has tried to get himself credentialed this year instead of the previously credentialed In Contention correspondent John Foote (Tapley having told Foote he’ll be taking over the beat). Tapley has nonetheless been told by the TIFFers, “Uhm, sorry, but we already have Foote covering for your site.” In response to which Tapley said, “Uhm, no…I’m covering this year for my site, not Foote.” In response to which the TIFFers said, “Uhm, sorry, but we already have Foote covering for your site.”
On top of which the very smart, aggressive, constantly poking-and-hammering film blogger Rodrigo Perez of The Playlist (whom I read daily because he’s always on to something I haven’t heard about) has been officially turned down . This just doesn’t add up. Perez is no fanboy. He’s on the Big Picture 24/7, chasing down scripts, putting his nose into things, assessing the whole equation, etc.
It’s kind of a strange way to treat a crew of respected, trend-spotting, ahead-of-the-curve types. Is the newspaper community not deflating and shrinking? Are the ad dollars that are spent online not starting to overtake print in some markets? It’s a profound changing-of-the-guard situation going on, and festivals, bless ’em, always seem to be slow to wake up to the new-coffee smell.
Whatever the final determination the Toronto Film Festival begins three and half weeks from now and they’re keeping these guys, who need to figure out plane travel and some hotel-room situation as far in advance as possible in order to get good deals, on pins and needles. Longworth, Tapley, Van Airsdale, Rich and Perez are hardly new to the net or the festival circuit. Longworth especially is…Karina Longworth! And Stu is, like, Mr. Shoe Leather. And Tapley is a brand-name guy who collects ad dollars from the biggies every fall and winter.
They’ve all been around, paid their dues, earned their stripes. Tapley does ComicCon and has been to Sundance. Two of them covered Cannes last May. VanAirsdale has been credentialed for Sundance and Cinevegas, and his Moveline colleagues did a bang-up job last month covering ComicCon. Rich covered ComicCon also and has done Showest.
It’s just seems sorta weird and clueless, is all. The Tapley situation especially, which sounds like something out of Kafka.
A TIFF press relations spokesperson told me this morning that (a) “we’ve pulled the files of the people you mentioned [and] we’ll be re-reviewing these files on Monday,” (b) “We get hundreds and hundreds of applications each year and have only a certain amount of passes to give out each year…there are about 1000 revolving/returning press people who come each year and every year we decide on about 200 new people,” and (c) “There are certain outlets we’ve said no to — the ones who focus just on celebrities, for instance — because we want steady persistent festival coverage…it’s not who they are as much as how persistent their coverage will be.”
The German-soldier-clubbing scene that I wrote about yesterday and also two days previously has been given the graphic-novel treatment over at playboy.com. Good work by artist R. M. Guera and fine coloring by Giulia Brusco, but the action and dialogue…well, look it over.
In an 8.13 L.A. Times article, John Horn reported that “because ticket buyers prefer escapist fare these days, [they’ve] been reluctant to swim to The Cove, a documentary on Japanese dolphin-killing that has some of the year’s best reviews. Despite a ton of publicity, The Cove labored after expanding into limited national release last weekend. Roadside Attraction’s Howard Cohen admits that ‘when people hear there is violence against animals, it’s tough for them to think about it…but the concept…is much more off-putting than the experience of watching it.'”
Methinks Cohen and Horn are side-stepping the nub of it. When they say/report that “people” are squeamish about seeing The Cove, what they really mean is that a fair amount of women are pretty much boycotting it. My head and my gut have been telling me for weeks that for every impassioned woman who will attend The Cove because she cares about the plight of dolphins and wants to feel and do something that might help the cause in some way (like my dolphin-loving friend Gini Kopecky), there are nine others who are saying to their girlfriends/dates/ boyfriends/husbands, “No way…can’t watch that…too much.”
Please present any sort of observational evidence that indicates I’m wrong. I haven’t polled a cross-section of a couple of hundred women or hired a research firm to do same. I just know what women are like when it comes to blood. Sorry.
Women call the shots when straight couples go to the movies. Guys can be harassed or cajoled into seeing a flick they wouldn’t otherwise catch on their own, but if a woman doesn’t want to see a particular film…forget it. End of discussion, wasting your breath. Which is why good-movie-seeking, green-minded guys aren’t pushing their girlfriends/ wives to see The Cove with them — they know it’s futile. Which is why The Cove is falling off the radar. Tell me I’m wrong.
I warned/half-predicted this might happen two or three weeks ago but I can’t find the corresponding HE story/item. (I spent ten minutes searching for it under various search criteria…zip.) I know I’ve had at least five or six conversations with women since I wrote this (including two Brazilian women I spoke with during the InFilm tour) and they all said they had strong reservations about seeing The Cove because they don’t want to see Flipper harpooned to death.
Cohen told Horn that Roadside Attractions “will revise the film’s advertising campaign, showcasing more of The Cove‘s critical plaudits than some of its more troubling elements, most of which are confined to the film’s final five minutes.”
Postscript/update: I wrote the following on 7.18 in response to a comment asking why I suspected that women won’t be attending The Cove: “Outside of female artists and female edge-junkies and female adventurers and other self-defined X-factor types, have you ever known a woman who didn’t instinctively flinch and turn her head away from violence, particularly violence visited upon defenseless animals?”
For those who read my “Jew Dogs”/Inglourious Basterds review from two or three days ago, this quote from Quentin Tarantino, given to bfi.org, will strike a familiar chord:
“Now, where I bring in, to me, some resonance to the piece is… Look, I’m not changing what the Basterds are doing at all. But there’s my portrayal of the German sergeant. He’s not a cringing coward. He’s very brave. He’s actually heroic if you consider his point of view on the subject. So I’m not making it easy for you. And I never make it easy in this movie.
“You can enjoy what the Basterds are doing, and I set it up for you to enjoy it. But I don’t make it that easy. The Basterds don’t have any problem killing everybody in that theatre — the wives of the officers, the girlfriends. The Basterds’ view is, fuck those consorting-with-the-enemy bitches. That’s where they’re coming from. Maybe you don’t feel that way. Maybe you have a problem with it. The Basterds feel: Fuck ’em. How you feel about it is how you feel about it. But it is not easy.
“The same thing again with Fredrick Zoller. Under any criteria of heroic action in war, Zoller meets those criteria. If Audie Murphy is a hero, Fredrick Zoller is a hero.”
Don’t believe that “not making it easy” stuff. The movie makes it clear that Tarantino is down with the Basterds and their indiscriminate killings. He’s not trying to make it hard for anyone. It’s served up like fast food. He’s saying “this is cool, this is rad…can you dig it, chickie-poo?”
I was just on the phone with a very polite and gracious twentysomething lady who works for a major film-related organization. And there was a problem. I couldn’t grasp half of what she was saying. This was because (a) she had one of those breathy little mincey peep-peep voices, and (b) she used the cadences and curious tonalities of “mall-speak,” in which simple declarative sentences like “the cat ran up the tree” sound like hesitant questions, as in “like, the cat, uhm…I heard, like, ran up the tree?”
And when she kindly spelled the names of two people I need to call, she couldn’t seem to roll with the practice of pheonetic pronunciation (“e” as in elephant) so it took twice as long to get the spellings sorted out. Again partly due to that little peep-peep mouse voice. “Thanks a lot for your time and your help,” I said as part of my farewell. I meant it. She was nice. But mall-speak drives me nuts.
Movieline‘s Stu VanAirsdale put on his reporter’s hat, got out the notepad, laced up the shoe leather and located the top-secret spot where John Hughes died. It’s at 60 West 55th Street in front of a green-painted wall of some sort. There’s a tiny little candle shrine next to the main door.
“An unexpected element has been added” to “the unvarying male uniform in the precincts of Brooklyn cool,” reports the N.Y. Times Guy Trebay, “and that is a burgeoning potbelly one might term the Ralph Kramden.
“What the trucker cap and wallet chain were to hipsters of a moment ago, the Kramden is to what my colleague Mike Albo refers to as the ‘coolios’ of now. Leading with a belly is a male privilege of long standing, of course, a symbol of prosperity in most cultures and of freedom from anxieties about body image that have plagued women since Eve.
“‘As women have come to outnumber men in the workplace, it becomes more important than ever for guys to armor themselves,’ said David Zinczenko, the editor of Men’s Health, with the ‘complete package of financial and physical,’ to billboard their abilities as survivors of the cultural and economic wilds.”
What?
Lone Scherfig‘s An Education (Sony Classics, 10.9) is going to have clear sailing as far as critics and the Academy and somewhat educated 30-and-overs are concerned. There’s never been any doubt about that. But there will be a connection problem, apparently, with younger twentysomethings, and I’m not just talking about the Eloi.
I’m talking about guys like my son Jett — Jett of all people! a guy who almost always gets it and tunes into a very wise frequency with the right kind of well-read, sensitive-soul attitudes — having problems with the idea of an older guy in his 30s (played by Peter Sarsgaard) taking out a much younger girl of 16 (Carey Mulligan) with her parents’ consent. Nick Hornby ‘s script, set in 1961 England, is based on Lynn Barber‘s true story, and is all laid out with very skillful sophistication, but Jett was going “what?” the whole time.
He explained after the screening that he couldn’t relate to the ethical world of the film. He was appalled, in other words, that no characters went up to Sarsgaard and said, “What are you doing, man? You’re almost 40 and she’s 16!” (The movie wants us to think of Sarsgaard as being roughly 31 or 32, but there are a couple of shots of his creased neck that make him look like he’s pushing 40.)
Jett couldn’t understand, in effect, what it was like for young women in a pre-women’s-liberation, pre-Beatles-era when many if not most women went to college in order to meet the right guy to get married to. An era in which fathers and mothers sent daughters to college expecting this to happen. (Especially fathers like the one Alfred Molina plays in the film, a decent but provincial schlub who’s very, very concerned about the cost of sending his daughter to Oxford.) An era in which some women got married right out of high school, for heaven’s sake.
If a guy in his early to mid 30s was to show serious interest in a 16 year-old today he’d be regarded as something close to a pedophile, and perhaps even arrested and prosecuted for this, but it was a different world back in the early John F. Kennedy era. It was the ’50s, basically. The ’60s didn’t begin in the States until JFK’s murder. They probably began in England with rise of the Beatles, which began to happen in the middle of ’63, which is also when kitchen-sink movies like The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and This Sporting Life began to really sink in and shape the conversation.
And as I said, Sarsgaard’s David is so correct and charming and continental — a likable, sophisticated, free-thinking sort who knows how to handle Mulligan’s parents and would have fit right in as one of Julie Christie‘s jilted boyfriends in John Schlesinger‘s Darling, which came out only four years after the events in An Education. And he’s really not into Mulligan’s character for young-girl sex — he just wants to hide away from being a 30something guy and live in a world of fresh attitude and hip urbanity and all that. He wants to float along.
But Jett couldn’t find his way into it. We argued about this somewhat, and he spat out at one point that “nobody’s going to go see it.” What? All the blood drained from my face. I wasn’t exactly saying to myself “my God, my son is turning into an Eloi” — he’s not — but I realized when he said this that the Eloi are going to blow this film off without a moment’s hesitation.
