Is Steven Soderbergh‘s Che “an unreleasable dud in its current form? Or is it ‘virile, muscular filmmaking,’ as Peter Bradshaw wrote in The Guardian?

“Guess what: It’s both. Based on trade journal reports and on-screen evidence, Soderbergh’s massive undertaking wasn’t really ready for Cannes. The director barely made the deadline, and you can tell. The result is a shaggy beast — maddening, incomplete, the work of a historical ironist who has no taste or interest in conventional biography.
“Another American competitor, director Clint Eastwood‘s Changeling, is severe ’20s-style pulp [that’s] guided by a fearsomely committed performance by Angelina Jolie. But Che is the more interesting work. It is defiantly non-dramatic as well as a commercial impossibility. And it√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s the most vital work Soderbergh has done in years.” — from a 5.23 Michael Phillips Chicago Tribune piece.

A Fandango survey of 2800 Sex and the City ticket-buyers reports that (a) 94% are women, (b) 67% plan to see it with a group of women; (c) 16% of the female respondents said they are going with a single woman friend; and (d) 6 % said they were going with a man. (I feel sorry for those guys.) It’s expected to do slightly better on its first weekend than The Devil Wears Prada, which did $27.5 million in its opening frame and took in $124.7 by the end of the domestic run. Sex is expected to earn more than $30 million by Sunday night, and possibly exceed $35 million.
I’ll be seeing it for the first time at a noon show in Paris tomorrow, and will file sometime tomorrow afternoon.
No screening invites since the good people at Warner Bros., who apparently ran screenings for this New Line/HBO co-production, have kept me on their don’t-invite-him for several months because, as I explained a while back, I had the temerity to write this ten-month-old piece about an abrasive ad/trailer for No Reservations. Former WB marketing chief Dawn Taubin (a.k.a., “the village idiot”) apparently became offended. The ban officially kicked in three months later (it takes Warner Bros. distribution execs a long while to get around to making decisions), and that was that.
I wouldn’t mind as Warner Bros., like other studios, is basically out of the game of making movies for hip or even halfway-hip adults. It has CG’ed and downmarketed itself into the cultural pig trough. Hey, Jeff Robinov, I have an idea — how about about making Grand Theft Auto 4: The Movie? You could make some money with that and honor the Warner Bros. legacy (which is being honored by You Must Remember This, a Richard Schickel documentary about the good old tyrannical Jack L. Warner days) at the same time.
The ’08 exceptions to not being in the WB groove will be missing out on press screenings of (a) The Dark Knight and (b) Clint Eastwood‘s Gran Torino. And I regret, of course, that the WB advertising that I used to get during Oscar season is now history.

Fox News’ Liz Trotta making her initial Sunday gaffe about certain parties wanting to “knock off Osama…er, Obama…well, both, if they could.” And yesterday’s apology. For those who, like me, have been off in a realm of their own.
How do you say something like this — how does a savvy adult of either gender think something that flippantly toys with the idea of a presidential candidate’s death? — and then dismiss it as merely an aspect of a “very colorful campaign”?

It’s not that this red-band trailer for M. Night Shyamalan‘s The Happening (20th Century Fox, 6.13) has footage that’s especially jolting. But it feels more engrossing (being eerier, grabbier, more fluidly cut) than the teasers and trailers have come before. Here are the Windows, Quicktime and Real Player versions.

If you’re indoors and snug as a bug, there’s something comforting about watching (and feeling) rain blanket a big city — slowing everything down, making life quieter, adding interesting new aromas. Here‘s a quick video I took a couple of hours ago.

I woke up this morning — late, around 9 am — to news of the death of Sydney Pollack. Which we all knew was coming for a long while. The thing about “death’s honesty” (a Bob Dylan coinage from the mid 60s) is that all dread and preparation are forgotten once that solitary walk across the footbridge has been made. Then it all comes washing in. Sydney wasn’t a “friend” but a confidante and supporter, a guy I could always call and, I felt, a warm acquaintance.

As difficult as approaching a threshold always is, once it’s been surmounted there is only peace and tranquility for the traveller. The burden is over, the pain is over. In finality, serenity. And yet it feels…I don’t know, like I’ve lost a favorite uncle or something. I’m feeling that fluttery thing inside.

But if you had told me 18 months ago that Pollack and Anthony Minghella, partners in Mirage Enterprises who worked together on The English Patient, Cold Mountain, The Quiet American and several other quality films…if you had told me then that both of these guys would be lights-out by May 2008, I would’ve said “what…?” Both of them were too active and alive. They had too much talent and know-how, too many miles to go.

People always bring up the Oscar-winning Out of Africa (’85) and Tootsie (’82), the hugely successful comedy with Dustin Hoffman as a straight cross-dressing actor, as Pollack’s finest, best-known films. They’re both solid and accomplished (Tootsie especially), but the Pollack pics that I’ve most enjoyed are the genre thrillers — Three Days of the Condor, particularly, and The Firm — because they exceed their boundaries and then some. They’re about Pollack adding shrewd and surprising things rather than just meeting expectations.

Both have melancholy emotional currents — feelings of loss and regret — and some graceful resignations, courtesy of the wry and understated dialogue by David Rayfiel, Pollack’s pinch-hit rewrite guy for decades. Plus they’re both driven by character as much as plot.

Gene Hackman‘s confession to Jeanne Tripplehorn in The Firm that he plays around “because my wife understands me.” (Too well, he meant.) European Condor assassin Max Von Sydow working with miniature models in his New York hotel room. Condor CIA guy Cliff Robertson asking his superior, played by John Houseman, if he misses the “action” he encountered during the World War II years, and Houseman responding, “No — I miss that kind of clarity.” Both films teem with this kind of stuff.

After these my favorites are (a) Sketches of Frank Gehry (Pollack’s wise, affectionate, layman-level appreciation of our greatest architect), (b) Jeremiah Johnson, (c) the final voice-over moment in Havana, (d) the first half of Random Hearts, (e) all of The Yakuza, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? and Castle Keep, (f) the bomb-on-the-bus scene in The Interpreter and (g) portions of The Way We Were, particularly the final scene.

And, of course, there were Sydney’s first-rate performances — the divorcee in Husbands and Wives, that red-felt pool table scene with Tom Cruise in Eyes Wide Shut, a pair of cynical and corroded seen-it-alls in Changing Lanes and Michael Clayton.

Here’s an mp3 of a chat I did with Pollack about the Gehry doc.

The last contact I had with Pollack was four or five months ago, sometime around Christmas. I e-mailed him and asked if he’d seen 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days. When he said no I asked him if he wanted a DVD to look at and he said sure. A few hours later I drove over to his Pacific Palisades home — a sprawling, well-fortified Cape Cod-like place with tall trees and beautiful grounds — and dropped it off with his wife. I didn’t ask to see him. He was pretty sick at that point.

I first got to know Sydney a little bit in the summer of ’82. He’d heard I was writing a couple of stories about how Tootsie had been a chaotic shoot (which it was) and had cost an astronomical $21 or $22 million — this at a time when a typical mainstream studio film cost $10 to $12 million to make. I hadn’t yet tried to reach him — he’d heard I was calling around and so he called me. He was pissed off but enough of an adult and a strategic player to get right into it and try to spin things his way.

Pollack and Robert Redford during the 1972 Cannes Film Festival.

We became friendly in the mid ’90s when I wrote an L.A. Times Syndicate piece about Rayfiel, whose lamenting and soulful dialgoue had always moved me. Pollack thereafter helped me with an article I did about Mike Arick‘s restoration of They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? I sent him a note when he busted his hip after a bicycle-riding accident. I once gave him a heads-up about the poor quality of a digital master of On The Waterfront that was shown on TCM’s “The Essentials,” which he hosted for a season or two. He talked to me a bit about the making of Eyes Wide Shut, and laughed when I told him the Lars von Trier story about why Harvey Keitel left the film (i.e., the Legend of Mr. White, “an honest misfire,” etc.).

Four years ago Sydney gave me an admiring quote to use when I started Hollywood Elsewhere. He brought me in and showed me a cut of The Interpreter before it had gotten around, and then did a guest appearance up at my UCLA class when I screened it. And we did that phoner about Sketches of Frank Gehry, etc. A steady guy, dependable…about as adult and un-flaky as they come.

He was one of the best DVD voice-over and making-of commentary guys in the business. Sydney was a fretter, a kvetcher. Anxiety-ridden when he was working on something. Always very concerned about fucking up or falling short. Being this kind of person myself, I obviously related.

This quality comes through, in any event, in his commentary tracks — a tone that says, “Look, I don’t know everything but I do know this much, and I’ve been around enough to understand what tends to work and what doesn’t, and I tried to make this particular aspect work. I don’t know if I succeeded or not but people have told me I did so okay, maybe. But what I really love is the process — the shaping and refining — even though it gives me gray hairs. And I believe in having a sense of humor, or at least a sense of irony.”

He was a Paris lover, so we had that in common. He was a pilot (or so I recall him saying), and told me once about flying to Paris once in a private jet of some sort.

Pollack was healthy all his life, I’ve been told by his friends. He ate well, cooked well, didn’t drink much, hadn’t smoked for decades. I don’t know where the cancer came from or why it took him when he had a good 10 or 15 years to go, at the very least. Death knocks on the door when it damn well wants to, whether you’re ready or not.

As Woody Allen said during the just-finished Cannes Film Festival, “We’re hard-wired to resist it. Unfortunately, it doesn’t resist us.”

Heartfelt, pared-down dialogue by David Rayfiel. Superb acting, in particular, by Robert Redford — has he ever shown such feeling in his eyes in any other performance? (Toward the end of this scene, I mean…obviously. The first part is all about set-up.) Marvin Hamlisch‘s score gets what’s going on, but I’ve always felt that its sappiness works against the film’s emotional potential. But it’s one of the most moving man-woman scenes in cinema history, and it’s all the work of Sydney Pollack, who passed yesterday.

5.26.08, 10:05 pm. This seems more like 8:15 or 8:30 pm by U.S. standards, I agree, but the time is right.

There’s no way around saying that Charlie Kaufman, the director-writer of Synecdoche, New York, is a gloom-head. A brilliant and, in his past screenplays, hilarious one (by the standards of dryly perverse humor), but a gloom-head all the same. Who, for now, has put aside his sense of humor. The problem with his film, which I loved in portions, understood the point of and was intrigued and somewhat amused by in the early rounds, is the damn moroseness of it.

And the title is impossible. I would actually say commercially suicidal. I finally learned how to pronounce the damn thing — Syn-ECK-duh-kee — but if the folks who wind up distributing believe that average moviegoers are going to do anything but run in the opposite direction when this puppy opens, they’d best think again. Titles should always convey something that your average dumbass can understand — this one doesn’t. And they sure as shit can’t be tongue-twisters on top of this.

I nonetheless said to myself during the first 50 minutes or so, “This is my kind of deal.” Okay, maybe into the first hour. Smart-guy material, wise and witty, at times almost elevating, at times surreal, performances that strike the chords just so.
But it began to wear me down. I could feel my interest ebbing. This had something (okay, a lot) to do with the archness and obsessiveness of the characters caught up in various fickle head trips and never saying “uncle.” I didn’t hate what was going on — it’s an imaginative Alice in Wonderland-type thing — but I found myself wishing nonetheless that all these dithering neurotics (Caden especially) would get over themselves and…I don’t know, go rob a bank or move to rural China or something. The story tension in Synecdoche, New York is zilch.

And later with the shots of pink urine and bloody stools sitting in the toilet. I don’t care how lame this makes me sound, but I’ll put up with no more than one human waste shot in a film. Here there are three.

Kaufman doesn’t do “comedies,” per se, but he should have (and could have, if he were so inclined) made it all funnier. And a bit shorter. In the realm of, say, 110 minutes rather than the 124-minute version shown in Cannes.

This might sound like a thoughtless suggestion for a film that follows its characters for a good 30 or more years, staying with them into old age and serious decreptitude. I only know that for all the rich ideas and fully worked-out totality of it, for me it started to drag big-time.

Kaufman said at the post-screening press conference that he began writing it in response to feelings of oncoming decay and death. That’s what 49 year-old gloom-heads do, I guess. They’re most likely looking at another 35 to 40 years of life, if not more, but they feel threatened about the depletion of the organism and the curtain coming down.
The shorthand buzz before Friday’s screening was “quality material, tough sit.” I was intrigued and semi-into what it was doing, but I didn’t and couldn’t submit like Kaufman wanted me to. That said, it’s certainly worth a tumble. Only two hours and four minutes of your time, and a promise of at least some satisfaction.

I was especially wowed by a sermon scene that happens sometime in the last third. It’s just some young bearded clerical letting go with the gospel according to Kaufman (we live in a gloomy, fearful universe), but the way it was written and performed made me feel alive and re-engaged.

After the press conference I asked Kaufman and producer Anthony Bregman if I could be sent a copy of this speech to give HE readers a taste of what’s really good and special about the film. Kaufman passed me along to Bregman, who said, “Do you have a card?” No, I’m cardless, I said, but you can easily send me the dialogue through the website. I knew then and there I’d never hear from him. If anyone has a copy of the script, please get in touch.

Caden (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) is a 40ish upstate New York theatre director who’s married to Adele (Catherine Keener), a successful miniaturist painter. They have a very cute little daughter (Sadie Goldstein) named Olive, who doesn’t slightly resemble either of them. Naturally.

As the story begins, Caden is becoming more and more alarmed at signs that serious diseases (or intimations of same) may be shortening his life. His marriage seems like a typical union — relatively stable, shuffling along, both parties depressed, he with a girlfriend (Samantha Morton‘s Hazel) on the side. But Adele can’t hack his gloominess. She flies Olive to a Berlin gallery showing with her friend Maria (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and never returns.

Caden soon after is handed a genius grant, and decides to stage a massive atmospheric theatre piece inside a super-hanger-sized structure that houses a scaled-down replica of Manhattan. The subject is Caden’s own life. He casts actors to play himself and all the people closest to him. So by the halfway mark there’s a duplicate Caden (played by Tommy Noonan), a duplicate Hazel (Emily Morton), a duplicate Lucy (an actress character initially played by Michelle Williams) and so on.

Caden rehearses and rewrites for years on end, but the piece is never performed for the public. They wouldn’t get what’s going on anyway, right? Keep things hermetic. Process is all. But there I was watching it, realizing after a time that there was no escape from the hangar, and wishing more and more that something else would happen. A visitor who isn’t in the play upsetting the apple cart, say. Or a 747 crashing into the hangar and blowing it all to hell.

And yet I was never exactly bored. In a way it’s a riff on Federico Fellini‘s 8 and 1/2. It’s been 45 years since that landmark film. Isn’t it good for our collective moviegoing soul to wade through such films now and then? Then why am I mostly pissing on a film made by a guy whom I’ve enjoyed and admired for many years? Because I’ve always gotten a sardonic kick from Kaufman’s screenplays, and this one took me into the Realm of the Bright but Dispiriting Bummer.

In his Synecdoche, New York review, Cinematical’s James Rocchi wrote that “there are some dreams where we awake perfectly clear as to how the pieces and parts of our nighttime vision matches up to our waking life, and there are other dreams where we simply blink, and dismiss them as nothing but crazy talk; Synecdoche, New York is more like the latter kind of dream, and that hurts the film. Its ideas are so fecund and fertile and promiscuously perverse that we’re often left with a movie too slippery to grasp with the mind and too clever to claim with the heart.”

That says it pretty well, I think.

I asked a few journalists at last Friday’s Sony Pictures Classics luncheon which film they’d rather distribute if they had to choose one or the other — Synecdoche, New York or Steven Soderbergh‘s 260-minute Che. The latter, they all said. That’s saying something.

Steven Soderbergh‘s Che, my choice for the most exciting and far-reaching film of the Cannes Film Festival, didn’t win the Palme d’Or this evening. Lamentable, dispiriting news. Instead the jury gave the coveted top prize to Laurent Cantet‘s justly admired Entre Les Murs. I was wandering around Montmartre when the news broke, and when I heard it I just swore to myself and put it out of my mind and kept waking. I didn’t have my computer with me and I didn’t care.
At least the gifted Benicio del Toro won the Best Actor prize for his portrayal of Che Guevara in the twin Soderbergh films.
Cantet has everyone’s respect, but to me his films have always seemed more quietly admirable than arousing. I’ve never gotten a lightning-bolt charge from anything he’s done. I just feel let down about this, knowing what a Palme d’Or win might have done to at least partly help Che‘s chances in finding the right U.S. distribution deal. I’m obviously thinking politically, and this just doesn’t feel right. Sean Penn and the jury members went with their idea of the best film of the festival, and that’s cool. Entre Les Murs will play at elite art theatres when it opens in the U.S. for two or three or four weeks. Connoisseurs of first-rate French cinema will pay to see it. Terrific.
Congrats to Matteo Garrone‘s Gamorra, which everyone liked for the most part, for winning the Grand Prix. And double congrats to Three Monkeys‘ Nuri Bilge Ceylan for winning the Best Director prize. A Jury Prize went to Paolo Sorrentino‘s Il Divo. Sandra Corveloni won Best Actress for her work in Walter Salles‘ Linha de Passe, and the Best Screenplay award went to Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne‘s Lorna’s Silence. (Sorry, but I don’t agree with that one at all — the Lorna story did not end on a satisfying note.) The Cameras d’Or prize went to Steve McQueen‘s Hunger.
The jury obviously wanted to be magnanimous by giving a little something to everyone. They succeeded.

In an interview with Margy Rochlin in the N.Y. Times, Elizabeth Berkley — now the host of Bravo’s new competition series Step It Up & Dance (Thursdays at 10 pm) — is again given the old Showgirls grilling. Naturally.
Rochlin notes that Berkley “has watched Showgirls go from a movie synonymous with Hollywood tastelessness to what some — most notably the French New Wave filmmaker Jacques Rivette — argue is a misunderstood art film about surviving in a coarse, venal world. ‘For something that was supposed to die on the video shelf, it certainly has had legs,’ Berkley said.”
Rivette’s Showgirls praise, found in this March ’98 Senses of Cinema interview with Jacques Bonnaud, are as follows:
“I prefer Showgirls (1995), one of the great American films of the last few years. It’s Verhoeven’s best American film and his most personal. In Starship Troopers, he uses various effects to help everything go down smoothly, but he’s totally exposed in Showgirls. It’s the American film that’s closest to his Dutch work. It has great sincerity, and the script is very honest, guileless. It’s so obvious that it was written by Verhoeven himself rather than [Joe] Eszterhas, who is nothing. And that actress is amazing!
“Like every Verhoeven film, it’s very unpleasant: it’s about surviving in a world populated by assholes, and that’s his philosophy. Of all the recent American films that were set in Las Vegas, Showgirls was the only one that was real — take my word for it. I who have never set foot in the place!”

Either David O’ Russell‘s currently-rolling Nailed “is horribly cursed, or Capitol Films is completedly busted, or both,” writes Deadline Hollywood Daily‘s Nikki Finke. “I’m told that IATSE today ordered its members off the political comedy because the crew haven’t been paid. There are no plans to resume filming until next Thursday at the earliest. This is the 2nd time IATSE has moved to protect its union members, but only after the Screen Actors Guild first sounded the alarm bell over Capitol Films’ cash crunch and instructed its actors to leave the set earlier this month.”