Because I did the right thing and focused on seeing two films I needed to see — The Greatest, which played at the Library at 11:30 this morning, and Humpday, which I saw and quite loved at a Racquet Club screening that began at 2:15 pm — I missed the noon dustup between John “knuckle sandwich” Anderson and Jeff “the Dude” Dowd.
As I’m seeing Shrink at 6:15 pm, I don’t have time to talk to investigate and re-report the episode chapter-and-verse. Here are reports from Variety‘s Anne Thompson, Spoutblog‘s Karina Longworth and MCN’s Kim Voynar.
It’s not permitted to hit someone, but we all know how we sometime get when we’re tired and stressed from over-work. I think it’s very decent of Dowd not to have pressed charges. And of course, it’s very good for Dirt! The Movie, which is what the fisticuffs were more or less about.
I suggested a year or so ago that it might not be a bad idea to have an organized Movie Critics Fight Club, in which anyone who disagrees with the view of a critic would put on a pair of trunks and try to defeat the critic in the ring. Gloves, no bare knuckles. Whoever lost would be wrong and whoever won would be right by the law of divine ordinance. I offered to fight somebody over In The Valley of Elah…well, not really. I said I’d fight a New York critic who hated it, but I wasn’t sincere because I wouldn’t want to bang my hands up and not be able to write. I’m just saying that the concept of fighting for your film-loving (or hating) make sense on a certain level.
For the first time since arriving in Park City last Thursday I got lazy and slept until 7:30 am. So now I’m behind the clock and unable, for now, to post reactions to Dirt! The Movie and Don’t Let Me Drown. I have to hike down to the Library where I’ll be trying hard to bum a ticket to The Greatest (need to catch Carey Mulligan‘s other stand-out performance), and then it’s right over to the Racquet Club and Humpday.
I hate standing around and asking publicists for tickets to anything. All my journalist pals have that super-cool red pass that gets them into anything anywhere, and I’m stuck with a proletariat green pass that requires finagling and begging. Thanks, Sundance press office.
With the cat out of the bag after last night’s screening of The Girlfriend Experience , Some Came Running‘s Glenn Kenny has written about his cameo role as a sleazy website manager. And he confirms that yes, he “did write that nasty voice-over ‘review'” himself, and that “all of the dialogue of the film was in fact improvised.”
Reactions to Kenny’s cameo as well as the film have been generally favorable thus far. The best line has come from Cinematical’s James Rocchi (actually quoting someone else), to wit: that The Girlfriend Experience is “a period piece from October 2008.”
Here are reactions from N.Y. Post critic Lou Lumenick and Spoutblog‘s Karina Longworth. I put mine up last night, of course.
“I’ve seen many presidents come and go, but I’ve never watched a tableau like the one Tuesday, when four million eyes turned heavenward, following the path of George Bush‘s helicopter out of town. Everyone, it seemed, was waving goodbye, with one or two hands, a wave that moved westward down the Mall toward the Lincoln Memorial, and keeping their eyes fixed unwaveringly on that green bird.
“They wanted to make absolutely, positively certain that W. was gone. It was like a physical burden being lifted, like a sigh went up of ‘Thank God. Has Cheney’s wheelchair left the building, too?'” – from Maureen Dowd’s 1.21 N.Y. Times column, called “Exit the Boy King.”
Steven Soderbergh‘s The Girlfriend Experience — a not-half-bad indie-scaled pic about the life of an upscale Manhattan prostitute — had a sneak preview at Park City’s Eccles early this evening. Apart from the usual Soderberghian textures and intrigues, it should be immediately noted that Some Came Running‘s Glenn Kenny plays a sleazy erotic website guy who exploits the main hooker character ( Sasha Grey). He has the funniest lines in the film and, if I’m not mistaken, wrote the smart-ass erotic review that we hear in voiceover.
I was pretty okay with The Girlfriend Experience. It smacks of right-now verite, is smartly written and very well made. (And recently shot also with all kinds of references to the Obama-McCain race and the economic meltdown.) No one would call it the stuff of high Shakespearean drama, but I wasn’t bored for a second. It’s smallish and low-key like Soderbergh’s Bubble but set in Manhattan and focusing on a very pretty upscale prostitute and the various men in her life — boyfriend, journalist, high-rollers looking to buy her favors, Kenny’s character, etc.
I presume that everyone reading this knows that Soderbergh is far too dry, ironic and circumspect to be a provider of hot sex scenes or even mildly suggestive ones (as in, say, Alan Resnais’s Hiroshima Mon Amour). He maintains a cool distance in this regard at all times, which is welcome considering the appearance of Grey’s clients. Some of them, I mean. Two or three inspired a prayer from yours truly: “Please, God, I don’t want to see any middle-aged butt cheeks or bloated stomachs or funny-looking feet.”
Soderbergh frames most of The Girlfriend Experience with static medium and long shots — there are almost no close-ups. He said during the q & a that the photography in Michelangelo Antonioni‘s Red Desert was an influence.
Grey, a real-life porn star, isn’t as much of an actress as she could be. Scene after scene requites her to keep it all locked inside, and she’s good at that. Grey’s live-in boyfriend is played by 30 year-old Chris Santos, who delivers reasonably well in a somewhat layered and mildly challenging role.
I didn’t know what the title meant until I looked at The Girlfriend Experience IMDB page. A trivia notes posting says that “a call girl advertising the provision of a ‘girlfriend experience’ is implying that she provides deep French kissing, ‘full service’ intercourse with protection, and oral sex without protection.”
This reminded me of the services that Ashley Alexandra Dupree allegedly provided (or were sought out by) former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer. I wonder if the Spitzer scandal inspired this film to any extent.
“Coming into Sundance, we had a feeling the coming-of-age dramedy An Education would probably be pretty good,” Defamer‘s Stu Van Airsdale wrote yesterday afternoon. “But as 282 lucky ticketholders at Sunday’s premiere soon discovered, ‘good’ isn’t the half of it.
“An Education all but blew the marquee off the Egyptian Theater, where over 100 latecomers were turned away onto a swarming Main Street before director Lone Scherfig nervously announced not even she had yet seen her film outside the lab. She had nothing to worry about:
“Led by 23-year-old Carey Mulligan in a breakthrough that makes Ellen Page‘s Juno turn look like a Lifetime reject, Scherfig’s ensemble cast wrings a spry, otherworldly beauty from Nick Hornby‘s script and its corrosive glare at early ’60s London. We have no idea if it’s the festival’s best film, as some have said, but if there is a likelier candidate for life beyond Park City — as in awards-season, even canonical immortality — let’s have it.”
Variety‘s Anne Thompson is reporting that Sony Pictures Classics has paid $3 million for Western Hemisphere rights for Lone Scherfig‘s An Education “after a heated bidding war.
“The deal closed Monday night. Fox Searchlight tried to grab the film with an early preemptive bid, but the offer was deemed too low by sellers CAA, Endeavor and Endgame Entertainment, which financed the $12 million ’60s romance with BBC Films.
“Fox Searchlight came back into the negotiation on a second round but was unable to close; also bidding were The Weinstein Co., Focus Features, Lionsgate and Overture. SPC will launch the film in the fall with an eye on an awards campaign.”
Herewith Peter Sciretta‘s 15-word review of The Informers on /film: “Spoiled Rich kids. Drugs. Sex. Amber Heard naked. Aids. Infidelity. Kidnapping. Unconnected. Boring. Uninteresting. Horrible.”
Nicolas Winding Refn‘s Bronson, which I just stumbled out of, is, I must say, audaciously directed. A stark, blunt prison drama (with two brief episodes outside the slammer) that’s more of a performance-art piece than anything else, it’s about an incorrigible, mentally thick, ultra-violent career criminal who lives to strike blows and inflict pain and bang his shaved head against the proverbial wall.
And there’s never any doubt throughout it that Refn is incapable of compromising on any front. This is in-your-face filmmaking, all right. Nor is there any doubt that Tom Hardy‘s performance as the semi-legendary Charlie Bronson, an actual criminal who’s been in British prison for the last 34 years, is quite the madman show.
But just as Bronson is described in the film as “pathetic” and “ridiculous” in his inability to do anything except rage and bellow and beat up on people, so is the film pathetic and ridiculous by way of sheer numbing repetition. The same note is hit over and over and over and over and over and over and over. Until the third act when Bronson develops a facility with the drawing and painting of violent images. The big growth moment happens when he finally decides to paint one of his victims rather than simply assault the shit out of him. Progress! The better angels!
But before this last bit Bronson is, all things considered, a bore. Surely the most boring prison film of all time. Refn’s direction is so fierce and single-minded that he makes you feel like you’re caged in solitary. Hardy’s performance is so repetitive — enraged , pulsing, blazing mad from start to finish — that you begin to wish that Bronson would kill someone, get caught and be sentenced to death because then, at least, there would be a merciful end.
The New York critics who went “apeshit” over this film need therapy. There is really and truly something wrong with anyone who comes out of Bronson with joy in his/her heart and smiling from ear to ear. Refn is certainly one fierce bird of a director, okay. Hardy gives the part everything he has, yes and yes. But the experience of watching the damn thing!
MSNBC runs prison docs in the off-hours, and every so often they profile one of those blood-beast psychopaths who revel in their monstrousness. Any one of these profiles, which I find myself watching from time to time, is more interesting — personal, realistic, disturbing — than Bronson.
The Chief Justice Roberts-President Barack Obama oath of office flubadub transcript.
