Manohla Dargis‘s N.Y. Times review of Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days is one of the best she’s ever written. I haven’t been this gob-smacked by Dargis since she wrote three and half years ago about Michael Mann‘s Collateral:

4 Months director Cristian Mungiu, star Anamaria Marinca.

“In 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, a ferocious, unsentimental, often brilliantly directed film about a young woman who helps a friend secure an abortion, the camera doesn’t follow the action, it expresses consciousness itself. This consciousness — alert to the world and insistently alive — is embodied by a young university student who, one wintry day in the late 1980s, helps her roommate with an abortion in Ceausescu’s Romania when such procedures were illegal, not uncommon and too often fatal. It’s a pitiless, violent story that in its telling becomes a haunting and haunted intellectual and aesthetic achievement.
“You may already have heard something about 4 Months, which was awarded the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival last year, only to be shut out from Academy Award consideration a few weeks ago by the philistines who select the foreign-language nominees. The Oscars are absurd, yet they can help a microscopically budgeted foreign-language film find a supportive audience. And “4 Months” deserves to be seen by the largest audience possible, partly because it offers a welcome alternative to the coy, trivializing attitude toward abortion now in vogue in American fiction films, but largely because it marks the emergence of an important new talent in the Romanian writer and director Cristian Mungiu.
“In interviews, Mr. Mungiu has resisted some of the metaphoric readings of his film (say, as an attack on the Ceausescu regime) and resisted making overt declarations on abortion. I’ve read more than once that the film is not about abortion (or even an abortion) but, rather, totalitarianism, a take that brings to mind Susan Sontag‘s observation that ‘interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.’ This isn’t to say that 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days isn’t also about human will and the struggle for freedom in the face of state oppression, only to suggest that such readings can be limited and limiting. Mr. Mungiu never forgets the palpably real women at the center of his film, and one of its great virtues is that neither do you.”

Cody: “In my opinion? The best thing you can do is to find a person who loves you for exactly who you are. Good mood, bad mood, ugly, pretty, handsome, what-have-you…the right person will still think that the sun shines out your ass. That’s the kind of person that’s worth sticking with.”
Wells: “You want it straight, Juno, or fluffy? Let’s try straight. The very best thing you can do is to find a person who loves you for exactly who you are. Good mood, bad mood, ugly, pretty, handsome, what-have-you…the right person will still think the sun shines out your ass. That’s the kind of person that’s worth sticking with. And the odds of finding that person…? Heh-heh…yeah…well.”

“Everyone knows life is cruel and unfair. But it shouldn’t be this cruel and unfair.” — “Renaissance Blogger” posting on N.Y. Times “City Room” page on the death of Heath Ledger.

But we all suspect that anyone truly committed to life, health and longevity doesn’t end up dead at age 28 with prescription pills found near his naked body. Ledger didn’t die because a tree fell on him. His death, accidental or otherwise, almost certainly came from somewhere in his own head — his back pages, his behavior, his struggles, and perhaps his failure to pay attention to dosage recommendations on prescription bottles.
There’s that strange video clip making the rounds (taken from an I’m Not There interview) in which he says he feels “good about dying” because he’ll live on through his daughter, Matilda. What 28 year-old father with a two year-old daughter and his whole life ahead of him would even consider such a thought?
There’s that Daily News report by Alison Gendar, Edgar Sandoval and Tracy Connor saying that “friends told investigators that Michelle Williams booted Ledger from the Brooklyn home they shared with their 2-year-old daughter, Matilda, because of a drug problem, a police source said.” N.Y. Times “City Room” blogger Sewell Chan, quoting the Daily News story, extends the quote by saying the breakup was “because of a drug problem that only got worse after he left.”
There’s the anonymous quote give to Daily Mail that Ledger “adored his daughter Matilda, and when Michelle called it quits, he missed Matilda so much that he was thrown into a deep, dark depression.”
There’s a suggestion that heavy medicating was part of his life, as indicated by today’s TMZ report that “two of the medications found at Ledger’s apartment were Xanax and Valium, both anti-anxiety drugs. Cops also found Ambien, along with several medications prescribed in Europe.”
Ledger “had a taste for portraying troubled, brooding, self-destructive young men,” N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott wrote in an appreciation piece that went up this morning. “The anguished second-generation prison guard in Monster’s Ball, the heroin addict in Candy, the unhappy film star in I’m Not There, the self-torturing Ennis del Mar in Brokeback Mountain. But the temptation to blend their fates with Ledger’s own should be resisted at all costs. Those roles should be seen less as expressions of some imagined inner torment than as evidence of resourcefulness, creative restlessness and wit.”
My head agrees with Scott about resisting such notions, but my gut isn’t so sure. His death didn’t just happen. It came from within. Genuine accidents in life are few and far between.

“I’m at Sundance right now, and after seven years of covering the festival for various outlets, I’m still taken by surprise whenever I hear the public perception of the Sundance Film Festival, as it’s so alien to the reality of actually being here,” writes San Francisco Chronicle columnist/blogger James Rocchi.
“I asked a friend of mine, as a Rorschach test, to say the first thing she thought of when she heard the words ‘Sundance Film Festival,’ and her reply was as swift as it was blunt: ‘boring and pretentious.’ And yes, when you mention Sundance, most people do think of the sort of high-fiber, hyper-earnest movies that most moviegoers would rather die than see. And there are strong, sincere films up here at Sundance that might lead to that perception — wrenching dramas, hard-to-watch documentaries, and, yes, even earnest failures.
“But really, that perception’s not the total reality. Light movies also play Sundance; funny movies also play Sundance; gripping thrillers also play Sundance. Once made its North American debut up here; so did Napoleon Dynamite. So did 28 Days Later. And so did Narc.”

Only a few hours after the passing of Heath Ledger, an enterprising Best Buy store manager in San Diego’s Mission Valley had this display up. I’ll wager that hundreds of video store managers across the country did the same thing yesterday. Any sightings? There used to be an idea that you should wait a few days after the death of a celebrity to reap the commercial benefits, but no longer. How long did record stores wait to exploit the death of Elvis in ’77? (Thanks to Best Week Ever‘s Michelle Collins.)

Fox Searchlight has paid $5 million for most of the world rights to Clark Gregg‘s Choke, adapted by Gregg from Chuck Palahniuk‘s novel of the same name. Sam Rockwell and Anjelica Huston costar. Coming to theatres in…August? September? Early ’09?

With the death of Heath Ledger, director Terry Gilliam‘s The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus is in a tight spot, to put it mildly. Ledger is/was the star of Gilliam’s fantasy film, which shot exterior scenes in London last month but, according to a Wikipedia summary, has more shooting to do in Vancouver.

Heath Ledger during last month’s London filming of The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus.

Parnassus is set in London, so the Vancouver scenes will presumably be interiors, which usually constitute the bulk of any film unless you’re shooting Lawrence of Arabia. If Ledger’s planned Vancouver interiors aren’t that extensive, maybe Gilliam can fudge some of his unshot scenes with some CG cut and paste work, as Ridley Scott did with the late Oliver Reed‘s footage in Gladiator.
Adam Dawtrey‘s 1.23 Variety piece about this situation says that “blue-screen work [on Parnassus] was due to start in Vancouver next week and continue until early March.” He also wrote that “the producers have yet to issue any statement about how or whether they plan to proceed without Ledger.”
Gilliam is no stranger to massive film-shoot calamity, as anyone who’s seen Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe‘s Lost in La Mancha will tell you. It’s about the awful luck that plagued the shooting of Gilliam’s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, which led to the whole thing being scrubbed.
Of course, The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus was plagued anyway with one of the worst titles in the history of cinema, so Ledger’s death double-fucks it.
Parnassus is operating on a reported budget of $30 million, according to Wikipedia. Production began in December 2007 at London’s Battersea Power Station, Tower Bridge, and St. Paul’s Cathedral.
Gilliam and Adventures of Baron Munchausen collaborator Charles McKeown co-wrote the script for The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. It’s a present-day piece about a thousand-year-old Doctor Parnassus (Christopher Plummer) “leading a traveling theater troupe and offering audience members a chance to go beyond reality through a magical mirror in his possession,” the Wiki summary says.
“Parnassus had been able to guide the imagination of others through a deal with the Devil (Tom Waits), who now comes to collect on the arrangement, targeting the doctor’s daughter (Lily Cole). The troupe, who is joined by a mysterious outsider (Ledger) embark through parallel worlds to rescue the girl.”
Dawtrey’s piece also reports that Ledger had been “working on what would have been his feature directing debut, an adaptation of the Walter Tevis novel ‘The Queen’s Gambit,’ with British writer/producer Allan Scott.
“The leading role of a young female chess prodigy had been offered to Oscar nominee Ellen Page. Ledger, himself a highly rated chess player, was due to play a supporting role.
“In an interview last month, a few days after shooting started on Doctor Parnassus, Gilliam said, ‘Heath is extraordinary. He’s just so good, and he’s going to be a film director. He’s watching everything, and he’s going to be a much better director than I will ever be.'”

The Sundance Film Festival is a 10-day event, but it’s always over as of Wednesday morning, or five and a half days after the opening-night festivities on Thursday night. The voltage turns down, there are fewer people on Main Street, all the presumably hot titles (i.e., name casts, advance-hyped) have been screened. I was going to stay until Friday but with this virus in my system and the general enervation and lack of excitement I’m figuring “screw it.” I’m on the phone to Southwest right now, get myself on a plane tomorrow morning.
Sundance ’08 wasn’t bad but it sure wasn’t great. There was a general feeling of deflation, an almost-but-not-quite vibe. There was no surprise knockout…no Little Miss Sunshine, no Once. Film after film seemed to fall short in this or that way. More than a few were greeted with “respectful but tepid applause,” to quote a college film professor who had just come from The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. Nobody except Variety‘s Bob Koehler came up to me and said, “You have to see this film!” Over and over I heard qualifiers — “not bad,” “I was okay with it,” “Almost worked,” “didn’t blow my socks off,” etc.
I saw five films that I was genuinely aroused and moved by — In Bruges, Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, Patti Smith: Dream of Life, Dog Eat Dog (Perro Come Perro) and The Escapist. Everything else was a half-and-halfer, a “meh” or an outright dud.
I admired the pared-down, Lars von Trier-like atmosphere of Lance Hammer‘s Ballast, which I saw the day before yesterday, but I also found it draggy and almost comatose at times. There were something like 15 movies here that dealt with suicide. I only saw the beginning of American Teen, which Paramount Vantage is apparently buying, but I was instantly bored by its focus on four cliched high-school archetypes.
I missed tons of films. That’s normal, of course. You can’t possibly see everything you want to see. I play it like anyone else, starting out with my own list and ready to shift gears any time I hear about a really special film. But with very few exceptions, all I heard about were films that vaguely disappointed. Or I passed along the bad news myself. Barry Levinson‘s What Just Happened? never connected for me — wasn’t believable, lacked heart, emotionally aloof characters. I was mostly “meh” with Mark Pellington‘s Henry Poole Is Here as it struck me as overly gloomy and enervated. And so on.
I should have seen Choke, Hamlet 2 and Sleepwalking. Getting sick yesterday and being sick today is my best excuse. The virus just took over, although I managed to bang out a few Oscar nomination reactions. I was sleeping on a couch when a friend called in the mid-afternoon about the death of Heath Ledger, so I got up and tapped out an okay-this-happened piece. Then I crashed again.
I have to get out of here. I want only to escape. I just want to leave it all behind and start over in warmer weather.

The life and career of Heath Ledger, a deeply talented guy who sometimes played romantic heroes and at other times quirky loner roles that worked against his dashing good looks, is over. The brooding 28 year-old was found dead in a Manhattan Broome Street apartment earlier this afternoon.

A CNN report says “a possible drug overdose was suspected” but a city desk N.Y. Times story says “signs pointed to a suicide.”

This is not a cause for weeping as much as a cause for anger and indignation. Brilliant, Heath! I knew him to say hello to, having bonded slightly during the 2005 Toronto Film Festival showings of Brokeback Mountain. He never gave me a guarded response to questions, was always cool about encounters. He liked to scrunch his face up instead of smile when I took his picture. He was shy, private, “moody.” Maybe he should have allowed less of those feelings in because this is totally friggin’ ridiculous. Heath Ledger dead?

A long lifetime of great performances lay ahead for Ledger. He could have easily kept working into old age as he never gave a damn about playing hunks — and now his life is over, his daughter (whom he had with ex-wife Michelle Williams) is father-less, and Warner Bros. is looking at some kind of uncertain future for The Dark Knight, which Ledger plays “The Joker” alongside costars Christian Bale and Michael Caine.

We all know what Warner Bros., the distributor of Chris Nolan‘s second Batman film, is going to say about this this tragic news. They’ll say the same thing that Warner Bros. said about James Dean‘s death when he was killed in a car crash in September 1955 with two movies yet to open — Rebel Without a Cause and Giant. They’ll say “this is a very sad time for all of us, and not a time for discuss grosses.”

But you know and I know that the WB hardballers are asking themselves right now, “Will this adversely impact the Dark Knight box-office or will it enhance it, or will it have no impact?” The latter, I would think.

The Times story says that Ledger “was found dead this afternoon in an apartment in Manhattan, according to the New York City police. Signs pointed to a suicide, police sources said. Mr. Ledger was 28.

“At 3:31 p.m., a masseuse arrived at Apartment 5A in the building, at 421 Broome Street in SoHo, for an appointment with Mr. Ledger, the police said. The masseuse was let in to the home by a housekeeper, who then knocked on the door of the bedroom Mr. Ledger was in. When no one answered, the housekeeper and the masseuse opened the bedroom and found Mr. Ledger naked and unconscious on a bed, with pills scattered around his body. They shook him, but he did not respond. They immediately called the authorities.”
“The police said they did not suspect foul play.”

Ledger was nominated for an Academy Award in early ’06 for his performance as a closeted sheepherder in Ang Lee‘s Brokeback Mountain.

Here’s an updated 6 pm version of the N.Y. Times story.

I have a virus-fever in my system and it aches, it’s exhausting and it’s slowing me down with the postings. An hour ago I leaned over on the bench at the Star Hotel breakfast table and went to sleep. So we’re lookiing at a Sundance shut-down today and perhaps also tomorrow. Staying indoors, drinking liquids, sleeping (if I can). I’ll try and get into more stuff when I wake up.

Listen to this Patti Smith stage rant called “Declaration”, which is heard in Patti Smith: Dream of Life. Her monumental rage and phrasings are electric, breathtaking…especially during the last half. Smith told me she re-records and re-posts it on her website every year.