Boiled down, the theme of Peter Keough‘s “The Medium is the Movie,” a 3.5 Boston Phoenix piece that I stopped reading two thirds of the way through because I didn’t feel a sense of gathering force, is that “reality and truth are fluid, and are dictated by whoever is behind the camera.”
I think we all know that. A more interesting idea, to me, is how the constant streams of fluid media are taking over everything…how fewer and fewer of us seem to live or think or create in organic, three-dimensional, tactile ways or realms.
Cowie also quotes a 1964 Marshall McLuhan line, submitted in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, that ‘we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time…we approach the final phase of the extensions of man — the technological simulation of consciousness.’
This “might have sounded a little over the top” 44 years ago, Cowie states, but “not so much now.”
10,000 B.C. was projected to earn $32 million yesterday morning, but yesterday’s ticket-sale surge has resulted in a slight adjustment — it’s now expected to earn $35.3 million. The completely repulsive College Road Trip is looking at $13.8 million by tonight as opposed to yesterday’s forecast of $12.5 million. The Bank Job has notched up also — projected to earn a weekend tally of $4,980,000 yesterday, it’s now looking at $5.5 million. (But it should have done better, being far and away the best-quality film to have opened two days ago.)
HE correspondent Moises Chiullan is raving about David Modigliani‘s Crawford, which screened last night at Austin’s South by Southwest. It’s “about much more than the major change felt initially in this small Texas town when George W. Bush first moved there in 2000 a few months before the election,” he writes, “and it’s more than you get out of a trailer or a quote from a friend. In fact, the municipality of Crawford, Texas itself is a lot more than it may seem like at first.
“This movie is more than a chronicle of events and humorous anecdotes, or an examination of what directionsmall-town America went in during these last eight long Bush years. This is a movie about the future, and the film’s relevance is even greater considering the pivotal role of the recent Texas primary and the still-uncertain picture regarding the Democratic nominee.
“The intellectual elite (high-thread-counters, in Hollywood Elsewhere parlance) may have it stuck in their heads that small towns across the country are full of ignorant, tobacco-chewing pro-Bush morons, a complacent idiocracy. Many saw the 2004 election map as straight up red and blue thanks to the arcane effect of the Electoral College on our voting system. But Modigliani’s Crawford presents it as definitely a purple town, and make the case that we’d all be surprised how often this is true in what are considered ‘rural’ communities.
“The Crawford locals portrayed in the film include a woman who owns a Bush merchandise shop and a Baptist preacher who prays for the day Bush will visit his church, expected types you’d see in ‘Bush Country.’ They also count among them anti-war activists who founded a Peace House and kids who completely defy the stereotype of their small town by not ‘chewing grass and wearing boots.’
“There are good ol’ boys who as ‘good ole’ as they come but don’t fall in line with the crap others buy on Fox News each night. They know Bush only gets outside with a chainsaw to get at some cedar trees when there are cameras on him and they wish he’d pick up more of his trash.
“A more important examination is the town’s rise and fall, evinced in the 74 minutes that the film runs.
“The beginning of the Bush years in Crawford begins a local economic boom. Every storefront on the main street is rented, and the town’s former glory many recall comes back. As the years wear on, we approach the point where the country began to implode, and once it does, it’s kind of surprising how bad things turn out until you remind yourself that George W. Bush invaded Crawford before Afghanistan or Iraq.
“For me, the most pivotal story and relationship present in the film is shared by Misti Turbeville (a progressive, liberal history teacher), and a young man who became one of her pupils during those years named Tom Warlick. Tom went from believing everything he was told to searching out his own truth and standing up for it.
“Tom goes through years of being picked on and emotionally crucified just for having his beliefs. One day he went to school wearing a homemade t-shirt that read ‘America, Your Hands Are Bloody’ listing the military casualties of most of the U.S.’s major wars. I grew up in north Texas. I didn’t make one of those shirts, but I know what just having that opinion is like, and it isn’t pleasant.
“In the film, Warlick leads what I consider to be the epitome of the young ‘examined life’: the kid who does like Walk Whitman urged and tore the pages out of the book of life that offended logic, reason, and decency and blazed his own path. Teachers like Mrs. Turbeville are the reason guys like him make it through the bullying and the intimidation.
“During a post-screening q & a, Misti remarked she thought Crawford ‘has matured like the nation has matured,’ which I took to mean that whether or not everyone is more open to the idea of thinking about and doing things differently, they know it’s time for the new direction toward progress that Tom represents.
“I’ll say that you should take care reading other reviews that may ruin seeing the movie yourself. This is a movie that should not be spoiled for anyone.”
Being a cinematic plebeian at heart, I’m more impressed with the Contempt photo-wall below than I am with Terrence Rafferty‘s 3.9 N.Y. Times piece about this classic Jean Luc Godard film being revived at the Film Forum (3.14 to 3.27). I’ve read the piece twice and I can’t find that one clean sentence that just lays bare the essence. You know. So the dumb guys can figure it out.
I’ve had this idea for years that Contempt (’63) was about the rancid nature of the film business and at least partially (subliminally) about Godard’s contempt for producer Joseph E. Levine. Rafferty says it’s about “the relation of man to nature.”
Sen. Hillary Clinton got her backside whipped by Sen. Barack Obama in the Wyoming Democratic caucuses today, taking only 41% of the votes to Obama’s 58%.
Larry W. Smith/European Pressphoto Agency shot stolen from N.Y. Times website
This doesn’t really count, of course, because it wasn’t a people’s primary in which lunchbucket types could have just hopped into their gas guzzlers and driven down to the polling place to vote for the woman who’s tough, has a lifetime of experience to draw upon, knows how to answer that phone at 3 am and can be fully trusted to carry the torch for traditional Reagan Democrat values.
The Wyoming caucuses favor the educated priveleged elite who support Obama and know how to organize so forget it. They don’t matter, nobody cares, not that many delegates were involved, and everyone expected it. Go, monster!
Update: A Clinton aide has been quoted by the Times Online as putting down Obama’s victories “in ’boutique’ caucus states rather than the hardscrabble terrain of the rustbelt, saying, ‘Obama has won the small caucus states with the latte-sipping crowd. They don’t need a president, they need a feeling.'”
Vincent Gallo has the lead part in Francis Coppola‘s upcoming Argentine drama Tetro, but less than a month ago it was Matt Dillon‘s role. What happened?
Gallo will play the title character, “a brother in a family torn apart by rivalries and betrayal.” (Good God.) Javier Bardem will play an Argentine literary critic, Alden Ehrenreich will play Gallo’s younger brother, and Maribel Verdu plays Tetro’s longtime love interest.
I’m sorry, but something snapped inside after I saw Youth Without Youth. Before that experience the name Francis Coppola had, in my yearning moviegoer heart, a certain electricity, a creative vibe, a positiveness. That’s gone now. The man who directed the Godfather films, The Conversation, Apocalypse Now, One From The Heart and The Rain People, I fear, is no longer with us. I would love to be proven wrong.
Tetro, budgeted at less than $15 million, starts shooting on 3.31 in location in Buenos Aires. A 2009 release “with an as-yet-undetermined distributor” is planned.
“Rebooting the Batman franchise may be behind him, but Dark Knight director Chris Nolan still has to improve upon it,” writes N.Y. Times reporter David Halbfinger in tomorrow’s paper. “Sequels are always trickier. And now he must also navigate the aftermath of the Jan. 22 death of Heath Ledger.”
Nolan says he “felt a “massive sense of responsibility” to do right by Ledger’s “terrifying, amazing” performance as the Joker. “It’s stunning, it’s iconic,” he says. “It’s going to just blow people away.”
Halbfinger notes that “news that the prescription drugs that killed [Ledger] included sleep aids — along with narcotics — prompted internet chatter about whether his intense performance as the Joker, styled after Malcolm McDowell‘s in A Clockwork Orange, had been a factor in his demise.
While Ledger once called his Dark Knight experience “the most fun I’ve ever had, or probably ever will have, playing a character,” his fatigue was “obvious” to costar Michael Caine, Halbfinge reports. “He was exhausted, I mean he was really tired,” Caines says. “I remember saying to him, ‘I’m too old to have the bloody energy to play that part.’ And I thought to myself, I didn’t have the energy when I was his age.'”
That sounds like disingenuous movie-set talk. Caine wasn’t a sickly youth. When you’re in your 20s you can do just about anything and then go out drinking with your friends. Anyone in their 20s who moans about being tired and drained from work all the time is lacking youth’s natural constitution.
Dark Knight cinematographer Wally Pfister adds that Ledger seemed “like he was busting blood vessels in his head…it was like a seance, where the medium takes on another person and then is so completely drained.” What is this? What’s being said here? It’s called acting, giving yourself over to the role, submitting to the spirit, etc. Why are these people characterizing Ledger’s efforts as analogous to being flogged and nailed to a cross?
Variety‘s Joe Leydon likes Robert Luketic‘s 21…great. But after his slightly-too-affectionate Semi-Pro review that ran on 2.28, I don’t know. I’m still smarting from that. I feel a little more comfortable with reviewers who err on the side of hostility, or at least snideness.
“A flashy fictionalization of an extraordinary true-life story about college kids who counted cards to win big in Las Vegas, [it’s] is a better-than-even-money bet to be an important player in the spring B.O. tournament,” Leydon says. “Pic shrewdly shuffles together attractive young leads (Jim Sturgess, Kate Bosworth, Aaron Yoo, Liza Lapira, etc.), cagey screen vets (Kevin Spacey, Lawrence Fishburne) and a fantasy-fulfillment scenario in a slickly polished package that should appeal to anyone who’s ever dreamed of beating the odds.
“Only the lack of some truly megawatt star power might hold the Sony release back from a massive, rather than just lucrative, payday,” Leydon writes.
Clinton-McCain, clear choices, two lifetimes of experience. No containing the repulsion…sorry.
“A contender for the Democratic nomination, praising the Republican nominee as preferable to her Democratic rival,” Yale lit professor David Bromwich has written, “was a rash act and probably unprecedented. Joe Lieberman did something like it, but only after he declared himself an ‘independent.’
“In the same session with reporters, Senator Clinton glowed at the thought of herself and John McCain together. ‘Both of us will be on that stage having crossed that threshold,’ she said. And again: ‘I think you’ll be able to imagine many things Senator McCain will be able to say. He’s never been president, but he will put forth his lifetime of experience. I will put forth my lifetime of experience. Senator Obama will put forth a speech made in 2002.’
“As other observers have noted, this is the kind of thing you say if you are John McCain’s running mate, not what you say if you mean to campaign fiercely against him. It was a remarkably destructive statement — a defection from party loyalty, and a subversion of the principle that is supposed to underlie such loyalty.”
10,000 B.C. did $12.5 million yesterday and will wind up with close to $32 million by Sunday night. (It may do slightly better than this, but the word-of-mouth is far short of ecstatic.) Martin Lawrence‘s College Road Trip, a piece of shit according to Rotten Tomatoes, will do about $12.5 million and $4000 a print.
The almost completely dreadful Vantage Point actually came in third and will do about $7.6 million for the weekend. What kind of idiot would pay to see this a film of this calibre on its third weekend? Wlll Ferrell‘s Semi-Pro has dropped 51% for a likely weekend haul of $5.9 million….off to the showers! The Spiderwick Chronicles…$4,990,000.
Roger Donaldson‘s The Bank Job — easily the weekend’s best opener — will come in sixth with $4,980,000 at $3100 a print, which isn’t very good. What’s wrong with people out there? They’d rather pay to see crap than a solid, well-crafted heist film? Is it the rote-sounding title? Is it because the Jason Statham fans, as I hypothesized the other day, prefer to see dumber, more intense action films in which the violence is more pronounced and the pace is more accelerated? The Bank Job, after all, is a kind of ’70s film.
Trailers always distort to this or that degree and sometimes even unwittingly undermine the feature they’re trying to sell, but a voice is telling me that this trailer for Jon Avnet‘s Righteous Kill (Overture, 9.12) is doing a straightforward job of telling us what this cop thriller basically is. It could be an okay sit but you can also tell right off the bat that it sure ain’t Heat. The adjectives that come to mind are “second-tier,” “crude,” “flip” and “paycheck job for Robert De Niro and Al Pacino.”
I decided it was a piece of cheese right at the beginning when a judge says “order! order!” in a courtroom. That’s a dog-eared cliche that you might hear on a Saturday Night Live sketch….maybe, in an ironic sense. No real-life judge would ever use the term “order!” for the simple reason that only actors playing judges in second- rate movies say this.
The main thing I got from the trailer is that Pacino, 67, looks younger (thinner, tighter face, cooler-looking hair) than De Niro, 63.
The plot is about ethical conflicts among two veteran detectives who half-agree with the motives of a vigilante killer who’s offing bad guys. Not original enough….sorry.
It’s very, very hard to make a film work to any degree, but Avnet, no offense, simply lacks that grade-A pedigree element. His two best films, Fried Green Tomatoes and The War, came out 17 and 14 years ago, respectively. Up Close and Personal (’96) was a disappointment given the Jessica Savitch material he had to work with. Red Corner (’97) wasn’t bad (production designer Richard Sylbert did a fine job of recreating Beijing in Los Angeles) but it was also the last feature Avnet directed in a decade. His most recent effort, 88 minutes, is being released on 4.18 from TriStar.
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