Paying attention to things in a way that I’m not, HE correspondent Moises Chiulan has noted Nikki Finke‘s breaking news that Sony has signed Sam Raimi and Tobey Maguire for a 4th and apparently 5th Spider-Man film. Zero excitement on this end…sorry.
Either you get, agree with and derive enormous delight from dry misanthropic humor…or you don’t. Either way, you certainly can’t argue with the fact that while Joel and Ethan Coen have a lot more up their sleeves than just this, when they’re in the mood to dispense their extremely low opinion of human behavior, they are masters of the form. Nobody knows from dry, diseased and delectably deadpan like these guys. It’s in their bones and their blood.
And it’s the genius of Burn After Reading, their latest, to offer another serving in a way that may seem slight or irksome to some, but it is in fact — I mean this — a major satirical meditation about everything that is empty, wanting, sad and hilariously absurd in these united and delusional states of America.
I didn’t laugh all that much, but I loved every minute of this thing. Relished it. I sat there with a bemused smile on my face, chortling every now and then but with all kinds of “yeah, right, exactly, perfect, hah!” stuff happening in my head.
The plot shenanigans are for the popcorn eaters to chew on and the disgruntled critics to bitch about; the meat and marrow of Burn After Reading is contained in the ample and delicious margins. The atmosphere, the asshole-ish line deliveries, the mocking tone, the wacked particulars, and those looks of fear, loneliness, concrete stupidity and desperation.
If you look at it this way, the movie is a feast.
If you’re on the misanthrope boat, this half-espionage, half-comedy of modern fools and manners is about as good as this sort of thing gets. But you have to forget about “laughing.” (Which is overrated anyway, despite what Joel McCrea‘s John L. Sullivan might have thought.) Because this movie is about much more than that.
You can sit there and eat your popcorn and take it as a sardonic goofball spy movie crossed with a comedy of errors that doesn’t add up to much, and that’s fine. But the meanest and cruelest jokes aren’t just the funniest, as Mort Sahl once said — they’re also the most thoughtful.
Burn After Reading is not a movie for the ages, but a modest and dead-perfect geiger-counter reading of what ails those desperate, constantly itchy and perturbed Americans in the comfortable urban areas who can’t help but shoot themselves, attack others, make mad lunges at quick money and temporal erotic satisfaction. Prisoners of their swollen egos and limited intelligence. Strivers who must (they feel) have more, who can’t be satisfied or serene, who eat the right foods, belong to health clubs, drink too much, scheme and claw too much and are natural-born comedians in the eyes of God.
Which is how Burn After Reading starts and ends, by the way — from the point of view of a sad, bemused and occasionally chuckling cosmic super-being who exists somewhere above the earth.
I haven’t even mentioned the cast — George Clooney, John Malkovich, Brad Pitt, Frances McDomand, Richard Jenkins, J.K. Simmons, David Rasche — or the beautiful note-perfect ending. But them’s the breaks when you’re doing four movies a day plus filing and parties and random chit-chats on the street.
Today’s Toronto rundown: Joel and Ethan Coen‘s Burn After Reading at 9 am, which will necessitate blowing off a 9:30 screening of The Secret Life of Bees and a 9:45 screening of Waltz With Bashir (which I missed in Cannes). A writing period from 11 to 12:30 (which will necessitate not seeing Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist) follows, and then comes Ed Harris‘s Appaloosa at 1 pm. (I saw Rachel Getting Married in Los Angeles so missing the 1:45 screening of this Jonathan Demme film is of no concern.)
Then comes a battle between Witch Hunt and O’Horten at 5 and 5:30, respectively. (I’ll be thinking and deciding right up to the showtimes.) The last film of the day is a public showing of Guillermo Arriaga‘s The Burning Plain, which will be followed by a chat with Arriaga and then, most likely, a party or two.
“After many years in the wilderness and being considered MIA professionally, Mickey Rourke, just like the washed-up character he plays, attempts a return to the big show in The Wrestler,” writes Variety‘s Todd McCarthy in a review posted early this evening.
“Not only does he pull it off, but Rourke creates a galvanizing, humorous, deeply moving portrait that instantly takes its place among the great, iconic screen performances. An elemental story simply and brilliantly told, Darren Aronofsky‘s fourth feature is a winner from every possible angle, although it will require deft handling by a smart distributor to overcome public preconceptions about Rourke, the subject matter and the nature of the film.
“Co-produced by Wild Bunch in France, where Rourke has retained his most loyal following through thick and thin, this is nonetheless an American picture through and through, beginning with the way it strongly evokes the gritty working-class atmosphere of numerous ’70s dramas.
“Spare but vital, and with the increasingly arty mannerisms of Aronofsky’s previous work completely stripped away, the film has the clarity and simplicity of a great Hemingway short story — there’s nothing extraneous, the characters must face up to their limited options in life, and the dialogue in Robert Siegel‘s superior script is inflected with the poetry of the everyday.”
I just stumbled out of a screening of Rian Johnson‘s The Brothers Bloom (Summit, 12.19), a sumptuous but impossibly silly and logic-free jape in the vein of…frankly, the movie it most reminded me of was the 1967 Casino Royale, which still reigns as one of the emptiest wank-off movies of the mid to late ’60s.
It’s an elaborate, European-set con-artist movie that imparts none of the fun or the thrill of the game. I didn’t know what was going on half the time, and I stopped caring around the 45-minute mark. Rachel Weisz, as a rich mark named Penelope, is lovely and delightful to hang with — I’ll give her (and the movie) that. But Adrien Brody, as the conscience-wracked half of the Brothers Bloom (sick of being a con-man, wants a real life, etc.), is glum and doleful and enervated, and infuriating for that.
Brody’s character’s last name is Bloom, as is his brother Stephen, who’s played by Mark Ruffalo…and yet Brody is repeatedly addressed as “Bloom” and Ruffalo is called “Stephen.” I fell in hate with the movie over this point alone.
I hated the relentlessly sullen poseur crap delivered by Rinko Kikuchi, who plays an appendage named “Bang Bang.” I wanted to see her knifed or shot or pushed into the ocean. All I could think when I watched Robbie Coltrane, who plays “the curator,” was “my God, the man has to lose some weight!” He’s really gone past the tipping point in terms of excess tonnage.
I lasted a little less than an hour, and I was reeling from the preciousness, the overdone contintental cutesiness, the feeling of being simultaneously mauled, tickled, fucked with and drugged by the impossibly faux-Wes Anderson style of the damn thing.
Rian obviously wants to be Wes, but this movie makes The Life Aquatic look like Yasujiro Ozu‘s Floating Weeds.
Some will say that The Brothers Bloom is lush and stylistically mesmerizing and beautiful to bathe in, in the empty sense of that term. But this is the kind of movie that appeals to 30-something Entertainment Weekly or New York magazine feature writers who have no taste to speak of.
It’s ravishingly composed and oh-so-poised with a sense of old-world European train-car romance (as it once existed 50 or 60 years ago) , and yet so stuck on its cleverness that I wanted to reach out and strangle the movie — pull it right off the screen, leap on top of it like a 350 pound wrestler and choke the life out of the damn thing . I counted at least 22 walkouts before I finally gave up. When I left two volunteers said to me, “Is it over? There are so many people leaving!” We all had a good laugh.
HE reader Chuck W. wrote to say “my daughters have voting age friends. Some of these young men and women admit they find the election interesting, but they aren’t registered. Why not? If they register, they might be subject to jury duty. I hope this is just anecdotal and not a wider trend.”
Let’s review the burgeoning Hurt Locker situation so far. The Toronto Star‘s Peter Howell started the buzz with his 8.31 rave. Then today Variety‘s Nick Vivarelli reported that Kathryn Bigelow‘s bomb squad actioner “gave the Lido a jolt and proposed itself as the Iraq pic that might break through to American auds.”
I also got an e-mail today from cinema2000‘s Nuno Artunes saying that “our correspondent at the Venice Film Festival has just written to say Bigelow’s movie is the best so far at the competition — 5 stars out of five, and he’s not easy to please.”
I’m mentioning all this only to put the Hurt Locker pan from Variety’s sourpuss critic Derek Elley in perspective. Nobody’s “right,” everybody has their persepctive, etc., but how could all these other guys be going “wow” and “whoo-hoo” and then aong comes Elley, less bowled over by the rush of it, and says “war may be hell, but watching war movies can also be hell, especially when they don’t get to the point.”
The best competition movie of the Venice Film Festival so far vs. a hellish unoriginal viewing experience. That’s one hell of a gap. The Hurt Locker will screen for the TIFF press on Tuesday.
This trailer for Gus Van Sant‘s Milk looks awfully good. Just a trailer, but it looks right, feels right, and is very nimbly cut. Sean Penn‘s Harvey Milk performance feels like a knockout. (If only he were taller! Sorry, but it’s hard to dislodge the Times of Harvey Milk footage of the real McCoy, who was something like 6’3″ and had really big feet.) This is definitely the Gus of Good Will Hunting and Drugstore Cowboy…but please, not Finding Forrester!
I was told last night that Fernando Meirelles‘ Blindness, which I didn’t much care for when I saw it at the Cannes Film Festival, has dropped the Danny Glover narration track. That’s a good thing. As I wrote last May, “I was hoping for a film that would rigorously avoid any attempt at pushing metaphor into viewer’s faces. That is precisely what Blindness does by way of [Glover’s] narration voice-over.” I’ll be catching the new version on Saturday night.
There are two kinds of press passes being handed out at the Toronto Film Festival — P for priority and I for insect. Other interpretations: industry, invisible, inscrutable, insignificant, indelible, insubstantial, indomitable, intelligent, insubordinate.
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