Holy moley — Nikki Finke is reporting that action director John McTiernan (The Hunt for Red October, Die Hard, Last Action Hero, The Thomas Crown Affair) is going to the slammer for four months for lying to a federal agent over an aspect of the Anthony Pellicano wiretapping prosecution. The fib was that “he had no knowledge of alleged wiretapping” involving Pellicano, Finke reports. The rap carried a maximum penalty of five years.
Israeli film columnist Yair Raveh usually writes me directly about stuff, but this time he spoke to Nikki Finke about the Best Foreign Language Fiilm Oscar qualification issue that may be affecting Eran Kolirin‘s The Band’s Visit. But I did some calling around and found out a couple of things.
The Band’s Visit
The plot of the Israeli-French production deals with an Egyptian brass band visiting Israel for a performance, only to become stranded there…fish out of water. The issue is whether the dialogue in the Sony Classics release (which won’t open commercially until February ’08) is primarily Arabic and Hebrew (i.e. more than 50%) or, as “rivals” are contending (according to Finke), primarily English. If it’s the former it’ll qualify as a possible Oscar contender, and if it’s the latter it won’t.
Raveh told Finke the film’s dialogue is less than 50% English. A publicist who’s seen the film (and who isn’t working for Sony Classics) says that the characters speak Arabic and Hebrew, and sometimes resort to English when the need to communicate is urgent, but that the language thing “never seemed like an issue” — i.e., that it seemed to her a foreign-language film for the most part.
The publicist said that the Motion Picture Academy makes the calls about language content, and that “they tend to be lenient” on such matters.
Torene Svitl, the Motion Picture Academy’s foreign film liason/adminstrator, says she’s “been in contact with the Israeli people [on this] and we’ll be getting into it” sometime after October 1st. The foreign-film screenings always start in October so a decision will probably come down sooner rather than later.
“As someone who’s been following Israeli cinema for the past 15 years,” Raveh told Finke, “I’ve yet to see a local film getting such glowing international reviews.” If it makes the grade as an Oscar finalist, The Band’s Visit will be the first Israeli film to be so honored since Beyond the Walls (’84). Six Israeli films have been Oscar nominated, but none have won.
Going by data compiled by market research group E-Poll on the country’s leading pundits, Forbes staffer Tom Van Riper has listed the top dogs — Roger Ebert, Bill Maher, Bill O’Reilly, Al Franken, etc. Leonard Maltin was ranked seventh. This is obviously based on visibility through television. Has anyone ever done a pundit/columnist popularity poll restricted to movie opinion? When I think of my favorite opinion-givers it’s not how important they are or how much they’ve influenced my thinking (whatever that means), but how much I enjoy reading or hearing them.
The lamenting in Joel and Ethan Coen‘s No Country for Old Men — those perfect, world-weary ruminations spoken by Tommy Lee Jones‘ lawman character about dissipation and ghosts and the fate that you can’t see coming, much less stop — are what the film (slavishly faithful to Cormac McCarthy‘s novel) is all about. It’s the damn raison d’etre. Take it or leave it but the tune is the tune.
Joel and Ethan Coen
The Coens ladle it out in even portions all through. It’s stated plain as day in Jones’ opening narration, in those chats he has with those two old coots (played by Barry Corbin and Rodger Boyce), and in that last description of a dream he’s had about his long-gone father. You can whinny and rear up and say “hold up there, that’s not the resolution I’m looking for” but hell, that’s just spittin’ in the wind.
In his New York magazine essay on the Coens and Old Men, critic David Edelstein says what I’m sure 95% of the paying moviegoers will be muttering about as they exit the theatre. I’m no one to talk — I complain about films not doing what I want them to do all the time — but it’s a little dispiriting to read an exceptionally smart and perceptive guy siding with the brutes on this one.
“In the film,” he writes, “you wait to see the sheriff, the venerable rock of decency, confront the newfangled evil in a showdown as cathartic as Carl Franklin‘s B-movie classic One False Move. But the Coens are true to their source, if not their strengths. I’m told that McCarthy liked the last part of the picture best, and he would.”
The final No Country scene is what I like best also. What Jones says (and the way he looks as he says it, and that five or six-second delay before the cut to black) sums it all up and takes it home. The question should be “does No Country for Old Men stick to its guns and achieve its goals in a way that works according to its own motto and terms?” Damn straight it does. That’s why it’s a great film — the finest the Coens have ever made. The probability of some people saying “what the hell?” at the end is, for me, in a roundabout way, one reason why it sits tall in the saddle.
In the third graph of a 9.19 Newsweek story by Karen Springen about Mary Todd Lincoln, it is offhandedly stated that Sally Field will play the emotionally troubled wife of Liam Neeson‘s Abraham Lincoln in Steven Spielberg‘s forthcoming Lincoln biopic. This is a done deal, or is this being floated to see what the reaction might be? I’m asking in part because the IMDB is reporting that Marcia Gay Harden has the role, and because she’d nail Mrs. Lincoln cold.
Sally Field, Mary Todd Lincoln, Marcia Gay Harden
I’ve no doubt that Field can turn on the juice and make this work to some degree, but it might be a stretch. I’ve had this image all my life of Mary Todd Lincoln being a scrapper with a cast-iron backbone, and there’s something about Field’s squeeky heartland voice and fretful manner that seems to channel victims and underdogs (Norma Rae, Places in the Heart). Harden has been superb time and again with that heart-of-darkness battle-axe thing (Pollock, Mystic River, The Dead Girl). And she resembles Mrs. Lincoln a bit more (or certainly could be made to resemble her). This would make her a perfect match alongside Neeson, who’s obviously a close biological cousin of the nation’s 16th president.
Due respect but isn’t Spielberg obliged to at least listen to public opinion on this matter? It’s his movie but the legend of Abraham Lincoln belongs to all of us. David O’Selznick understood this concept when he was casting Gone With the Wind. Not that he would have cast Fred MacMurray as Rhett Butler if the public had called for this (which they didn’t — everybody knew it had to be Clark Gable), but he knew the public was heavily invested in Margaret Mitchell‘s novel and at least made a show of listening to their casting preferences.
Curiously, almost bizarrely, Darjeeling Limited director Wes Anderson has given his critics all the ammo they need and then some by freely discussing his whimsical, mercurial, Wes-world lifestyle (thus spurring thoughts about how this may have affected the style and content of his films) in a New York interview by David Amsden called “The Life Obsessive.”
Anderson, says Amsden, is “someone who has constructed a life almost preposterously conducive to the pursuit of fantastical whims. [And yet] one gets the impression that even Anderson, these days, can find living in Wes’s world a bit claustrophobic.
At one point Amsden mentions a recent Atlantic Monthly essay by Michael Hirschorn which “argued that, as a culture, we are ‘drowning in quirk,’ an aesthetic he defines as the ’embrace of the odd against the blandly mainstream.’ Citing Anderson’s movies as a prime example, Hirschorn claims that the problem with quirk is that it ‘can quickly go from an effective narrative tool to an end in itself.’
“You need only watch a few frames of one of his movies to spot it as an Anderson production,” Amsden goes on to say. “Though he is originally from Texas, there is something distinctively European in his obsession with aesthetics: a belief that the way something looks is what dictates how it will make you feel. His impeccably composed wide-angle shots have the feeling of a childhood fantasy: wistful, more than a bit ridiculous, with a darkness creeping in at the edges.
“Pepper in some resurrected classic-rock songs; deadpan dialogue; themes of failure, nostalgia, and fractured families; and the result, at its best, is a world unto itself.”
I’m not heartened by Amsden’s observations at all. Anderson is obviously one of the most distinctive signature filmmakers working today, and he used to be one of our finest. He can solve his problem by simply crawling out of his own rarifed ass and exposing himself to some form of raw, unruly, Hemingway-esque experience — a life without stuffed African animals or spur-of-the-moment train trips to Rome or specially tailored seersucker suits.
Career-saving suggestions for Anderson to consider: (a) do a T.E. Lawrence and join the Army or Marines as a raw recruit with a fake name, and serve in Iraq for a year; (b) get a job in Iraq as an ambulance driver, and have an affair with a nurse if he gets sent to the hospital if and when he gets maimed by an I.E. D.; (c) do a T.E. Lawrence and take a low-level job in some blue-collar industry in Missouri or Mississippi for a year, again under a fake name; (d) do a John Pierson and run a repertory movie theatre in some far-off territory for a year — soak up the exotic atmosphere, get to know the locals, etc.
Wes Anderson‘s Hotel Chevalier, that 13-minute short currently being shown prior to The Darjeeling Limited at film festival and critics’ screenings, will have its world public premiere next Tuesday (10.2.07) at Apple stores in L.A., New York, Chicago and San Francisco. It will also be a free download on iTunes the following day (Wednesday, 10.3). It will also, as previously announced, be included on the Darjeeling DVD.
It’s basically a piece about Jason Schartzman‘s Darjeeling character (one of the three emotionally congealed brothers who train across India in the feature) being visited at an amber-lit Paris hotel by his not-quite-ex-girlfriend, played by Natalie Portman. You can feel that all kinds of dark stuff has happened between them. They’re not a couple any more, but they have sex anyway. Naturally, given the agenda, Portman gets naked. (Interestingly, Schwartzman doesn’t.) Then they stand together on the carved-stone balcony and gaze at the storied surroundings, and the early-evening nightlife below.
L.A. Times writer Chris Lee reports today that “if Anderson has his way, Hotel Chevalier will be added to theatrical showings of the feature after it has run for a few weeks. ‘We were unsure how this needed to be presented,” he tells Lee. ‘We felt they should be connected and [we] searched for how to do that. In the end, I liked the idea that one person could see it in one way, and another could see it in totally another way.'”
I love the brassy-gutsy David Shire music that accompanies the opening credits of The Taking of Pelham 123 (1974) — here’s the clip. And now Entertainment Weekly says there’s a Tony Scott remake coming with Denzel Washington as Walter Matthau…”gesundheit.” Do you think Scott will use that bit with the Japanese businessmen being given a tour of New York’s MTA central control and have Denzel, presuming (as Matthau presumed) they don’t speak English, refer to them as “monkeys”?
As I wrote yesterday, the two best tunes in Wes Anderson‘s The Darjeeling Limited (Fox Searchlight, 9.29) and arguably the most flat-out enjoyable aspects of the film itself are Peter Sarstedt‘s “Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)” and Joe Dassin‘s “Les Champs-Elysees.” The Dassin song is a sentimental French cornball thing, but the Darjeeling usage has made it cool. Here‘s the least offensive YouTube video I could find.
Asked if he would defend Adolf Hitler in a theoretical court of law, Jacques Verges — the French ally and defender of numerous leftie extremists and terrorists over the last four decades — says, “I would even defend Bush. As long as he pleads guilty.” A trailer for Barbet Schroeder‘s Terror’s Advocate (Magnolia, 10.12) is up exclusively on Coming Soon. The doc is a primer on the history of world terrorism from the ’60s until today, as told through the experience of Verges.
A reiteration for ESPN fans: To be a hard-core sports buff you need to be inherently conservative on some deep-down level. By this I mean naturally deferential to “order.” Sport happens in a definable, quantifiable world of rules and referees and umpires and end zones and teams guided by coaches and managers. But there’s an unruly world of lonely individualism out there (and “in” there), and it’s a lot wilder and weirder and scarier than anything encountered on a soccer, football or baseball field. Just ask Albert Einstein.
Sport-watching and following (betting, handicapping) is a place that fans tend to live inside of. It’s a kind of haven or cathedral…a floating monastery. My experience is that sport fans are obviously literate but aren’t…how to say it?…burningly passionate about communing with worlds that exist outside their safety zone. Walk into any sports bar in the country and you can feel that sports-fan vibe — friendly and alert, amiable and ordered, but less learned, studied and complex than the one you get when you walk into the Harvard Club on West 44th.
Everybody laughed at that line in Repo Man about “the more you drive the less intelligent you are” but similar analogies tend to be frowned upon.
It’s been nearly three months since I saw Peter Berg‘s The Kingdom (Universal, 9.28), and some of the details have faded. But I remember the fundamentals. It’s basically C.S.I Riyadh with a slowish first two acts and then a wowser third-act shootout — a team of FBI guys and a few Saudi cops blowing away several terrorists (a couple of dozen, at least) who were behind the bombing of an American compound and the deaths of several Americans early on. Crazy-ass towelheads…get ’em!
It’s good material in a keep-it-simple, shoot-the-bad-guys way. Which is what audiences want, right? Millions have made a point of avoiding dramas that have taken earnest, realistic approaches to the Middle Eastern conflict (A Mighty Heart, In The Valley of Elah), and are likely to continue doing so. Leave us alone! Not entertaining! Too gloomy!
Well, they can rest easy this time. The Kingdom is mindful of present-day political currents as well as the history of the region, but the story is relatively straightfor- ward, uncomplicated and non-lamenting. No guilt trips, no left-wing directors or screenwriters telling auds what a tragedy the Iraq War has been for everyone… none of that messy stuff.
The problem is that most of The Kingdom is about how bogged down everything gets when this FBI team, based in Washington, D.C. and led by Jamie Foxx with backup from Chris Cooper, Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman, tries to go Riyahd in the first place to investigate the blast.
Roadblock this, impediment that…it just goes on and on. It’s a hassle getting diplomatic permission to fly over there. And then it’s a political Gordian knot trying to circumvent the Saudi Arabian authorities, led by Col. Faris Al Ghazi (Ashraf Barhom), who initially keep the team from gathering fresh, first-hand evidence.
In short, you have to slog through the first and second acts to get to the rousing third. The finale is worth it, and the depiction of the bombing at the very beginning is well -handled. You just have to grapple with the slow stuff for 60 or 70 minutes. The film lasts 110 minutes, the opening credits and the explosive opener eat up 10 or 15 minutes and the big finale (hot and heavy shootout on a highway, big shoot- out in an apartment complex) goes on for maybe 15 or 20 minutes…maybe a bit longer.
I don’t want to put The Kingdom down too strongly. Berg’s Friday Night Lights was a better film, but you can’t say the newbie isn’t a decent time-passer. And if you can get into the adrenalized excitement of blowing away wild-eyed, wack-job terrorists in the same way it’s fun to shoot at empty beer cans in your back yard with a pellet gun, so much the better.
I don’t know why Garner is on the team in the first place. Aren’t Middle Easterners basically patriarchal and sexist? Why would an FBI team want to complicate matters by bringing in a woman on top of everything else? She spends an awful lot of energy, in any case, showing womanly emotion whenever anyone gets hurt or any time things get hairy. Who needs a partner on the team whose eyes are always getting moist? Whatever happened to the spirit of Sigourney Weaver in Aliens? Suck it in, get hard, kill the enemy…end of story.
And I don’t know why Jeremy Piven plays the American ambassador to Riyadh — he’s basically giving us a diplomatic Ari Gold with gray hair.
Foxx delivers an okay phone-in hard-guy performance. Cooper does his usual crusty contentious moves. Barhom handles himself well. Let’s just not get carried away here. The Kingdom‘s all right, but you need to try and keep things in proportion when you’re putting your thoughts to print.
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