“When Manhattan opened in April 1979, Andrew Sarris began his Village Voice review as though granted a vision: Manhattan had ‘materialized out of the void as the one truly great American film of the ’70s,'” recalls Village Voice critic Jim Hoberman in a 7.10 nod to Woody Allen‘s 1979 classic playing at the Film Forum from 7.13 to 7.19.

“Leaving aside the decade’s avant-garde and documentary productions, this is still a remarkable claim to make of a massively mythologized period. Where was the void? Why did Sarris love Manhattan so? For the first time, Allen’s visual rhetoric was equal to his writing. For the first (and also the last) time, he graced the screen with a fully realized vision. And then, of course, there was the shock of recognition: Manhattan‘s world was a glamorized version of Sarris’s.”
I was living on Sullivan Street and barely eeking out a living as a freelance film writer when Manhattan came out. I knew relatively few people in the film-journalist world, the ones I knew regarded me askance, I was working at restaurants to make ends meet and enjoying damn little comfort. And one of the reasons I loved every minute of Manhattan is that it provided a great fantasy trip into the kind of New York world I wanted to know and live in, but couldn’t afford.
Of course it was a smart Woody Allen uptown dream movie. Of course it bore little relation to the city I was confined to, or to the one that I imagined most New Yorkers knew. I wished time and again that year that I could live in a world that was at least akin to Manhattan‘s — cultured, clever, moneyed and buffed by Gordon Willis in black and white and a 2.35 to 1aspect ratio. The fakery was what everyone found so delightful about the film. Because it was very sharp and sophisticated and nicely burnished.

The L.A. Times reported yesterday that Kerwin Matthews, the good-looking star of The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad and Jack the Giant Killer (and a supporting actor in The Devil at 4 O’Clock and Man on a String, among many other films), passed away “either Wednesday night or Thursday morning” at age 81.

What the Times meant to say is that Matthews died about a week ago. Matthews’ partner Tom Nicoll apparently didn’t get around to telling anyone for a few days. Brian’s Drive-in Theatre reported earlier than Matthews died on July 5th.

In a 7.11 article, Radar‘s Willa Paskin notes that the Robin Williams on view in License to Wed is “a shell of the comedian we once knew,” and re-states that Williams isn’t the “comic genius of his generation” that he was in the ’70s and ’80s. Quite so, and over the last 18 months or so Williams has gone downmarket. But at least he’s not doing sentimental slop or playing twitchy psychos.

After rising to fame as the sitcom alien Mork, Williams “thrilled audiences in the ’80s with spastic, mostly improvisational stand-up routines, culminating in his legendary 1987 performance at New York’s Metropolitan Opera house. But at some critical point Williams crossed over to the dark side.
“We suspect it happened sometime in the mid ’90s, when acclaim for his performance in Aladdin perhaps sent the wrong message and positively reinforced comedic stylings just shy of schizophrenia.” Wait a minute…mid ’90s? Aladdin came out in ’92.
Williams nearly sank himself with sentimental overkill in the mid to late ’90s. Starting with Francis Coppola‘s Jack in ’96, he performed in a series of tender, teary-eyed films — What Dreams May Come, Patch Adams, Bicentennial Man — that made some want to barf and others to reach for the nearest fire extinguisher.
Then Williams did the abrupt 180 into dark parts — One-Hour Photo, Death to Smoochy, Insomnia, The Night Listener.
Then came a brief blessed period in ’05 and ’06 — a funny bit in The Aristocrats and then a starring role in Barry Levinson‘s Man of the Year (’06), which wasn’t miraculous but seemed to some like Williams best part (and performance) since Good Will Hunting.
But right after this Williams shifted over to broad, rube-level comedy with RV, Night at the Museum and License to Wed, and in so doing invited the wrath of Willa Paskin and God knows how many thousands of others.

The trailer for Paul Haggis‘s In The Valley of Elah has been playing in theatres since the opening of A Mighty Heart, but it went up on MSN yesterday, and…that’s all I know for sure. Here’s another link. And another.

The final running time of Sean Penn‘s Into The Wild (Paramount Classics, 9.21) — the story of would-be Alaskan nature dweller Chris McCandless — is two hours and 28 minutes. There’s no such thing as a good movie that runs too long or a bad movie that runs too short, but 148 minutes is…well, attention-getting. Penn is the director, writer and producer. The cast includes Emile Hirsch, Marcia Gay Harden, William Hurt, Hal Holbrook, Catherine Keener, Kristen Stewart and Vince Vaughn.

Is there anyone who feels honestly excited about Kevin Spacey‘s intention to return as Lex Luthor in Bryan Singer‘s Superman: Man of Steel? Variety‘s Anne Thompson reported yesterday that Superman Returns screenwriter Michael Dougherty is writing the screenplay.

N.Y. Times reporter Michael Cieipley is reporting that several Hollywood honchos are calling for the end of the industry’s decades-old system of paying residuals to writers, actors and directors for the re-use of movie and television programs after their initial showings. As Warner Bros. cheif executive Barry Meyer put it, “”There are no ancillary markets any more — it’s all one market. This is the time to do it.”
Cieipley said the suits “stopped short of saying they would demand an immediate end to residual payments in the upcoming, probably difficult negotiations with writers, actors and directors.” (A strike is looming.) “But they were emphatic in calling for the dismantling of a system under which specific payments are made when movies and shows are released on DVD, shown abroad or otherwise resold. Instead, they want to pool such revenue and recover their costs before sharing any of the profit with the talent.”

“When the history of this sun-baked Siberia is written, these shameful words will live in infamy — ‘No chopped chicken livers!’. No garlic pickles. No Lindy’s. No Madison Square Garden. No Yogi Berra. You know what’s wrong with New Mexico, Mr. Wendell? Too much outdoors. Give me those eight spindly trees in front of Rockefeller Center any day. That’s enough ‘outdoors’ for me. No subways smelling sweet and sour. What do you do for noise around here? No beautiful roar of eight million ants — fighting, cursing, loving. No shows, no South Pacific. No chic little dames across a crowded bar. And worst of all, Herbie — no 80th floor to jump from when you feel like it!”

Paul Haggis‘s In The Valley of Elah (Warner Independent, 9.21 or 9.28) is more than just a respectable true-life drama, and a helluva lot more than the sum of its parts. I think it’s close to an epic-level achievement because it’s four well-integrated things at once — a first-rate murder-mystery, a broken-heart movie about parents and children and mistakes, a delivery device for an Oscar-level performance by Tommy Lee Jones, and a tough political statement about how the Iraq War furies are swirling high and blowing west and seeping into our souls.

The best films are always the ones that don’t seem to be doing all that much, but then gradually sneak up on you, laying groundwork and planting seeds and lighting all kinds of fires and feelings. Elah is one of these. It’s a damn-near-perfect film of its kind. There’s one moment at the very end that could have been played down a bit more (i.e., a little less on-the-nose), but others I’ve spoken to don’t agree. I’m trying to think of other potholes but they’re not coming to mind.
Elah isn’t some concoction, some tricks-of-the-trade movie that’s mainly about pushing buttons and playing audiences like an organ. It’s primarily about respecting real-life experience and refining this into art. Haggis’s screenplay is based on a true story that happened in the summer of ’03, and was first reported a year later in a Playboy magazine article by Mark Boal, called “Death and Dishonor.” It came from Boal interviewing Lanny Davis, a former U.S. Army M.P., about the death of his son, who had been reported AWOL following a tour of duty in Baghdad. Haggis bought the rights and created a somewhat fictionalized version, although he stuck to the basic bones.
So let’s not hear any carping about this being another bleeding-heart, anti-Iraq War movie by a Hollywood leftie — it happened. In fact, to hear it from Davis (whom I called the day after I first saw Elah on 6.19), the real story is even darker and more damning.
Elah has been screening for critics over the last two or three weeks, and I know it’s definitely skewing positive, but this is one of those times when I don’t care if everyone understands how good it is or not. All right, I do care because it’s nice to be agreed with and I want to see this film break the Middle-Eastern conflict curse (i.e., the U.S. moviegoer mentality that apparently doesn’t want to know about anything Iraq or Afghanistan-y, an attitude that arguably killed or severely damaged A Mighty Heart at the box office) but I know what this thing is and that’s that.

Forget Crash, or rather forget whatever resentments you might have about Haggis’s film taking the Best Picture Oscar from Brokeback Mountain. And forget the beefs about Haggis writing scripts that are too explicit and surface-y with not enough subtext. Elah, trust me, is a much better, more plain-spoken film than Crash was. It’s about real people, real hurt, real tragedy. My first thought after seeing it was that Warner Independent should show it to all the Crash haters in order to put that dog to bed.
Elah is one of those very rare birds that starts out like a what-happened? procedural you may have seen before, and before you know it it’s doing something extra, and then something else and then another thing altogether. Before you know it Haggis has four or five balls in the air, and when it’s over you’re heading out to your car and going, “Hmmm…yeah…wow.”
I was thinking at first that Elah resembles David Greene‘s Friendly Fire, a 1979 TV movie based on a true story about the parents of a Vietnam veteran cutting through red tape to find out how their son actually died. But before the what- happened-and-whodunit? story even gets going you can feel the undercurrent of grief in Jones, whose character, Hank Deerfield, is based on Lanny Davis.
Jones’ weathered, old-guy face is full of the suppressed shock and grief and guilt that any parent feels when his or her son has gotten into trouble or otherwise done something inexplicable. And his performance, which is all about feelings being kept in check, like it always is with any old-school military guy, just keeps getting sadder and more affecting.

Haggis originally wanted Clint Eastwood to play Deerfield, but it’s a role that has Jones’ history and DNA all over it. He owns characters like Deerfield and that sheriff in The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, and the small-town sheriff he plays in Joel and Ethan Coen‘s No Country for Old Men, which comes out in November. All of them plain-spoken, craggy-faced Texas dudes with turkey necks, paunchy guts and wells of sorrow in their eyes.
The fact that In The Valley of Elah is a gripping investigative procedural is almost the least of its attributes. I felt I was swimming in holy water five minutes into it. Haggis’s early dialogue feels tight and true, and Jones and Sarandon’s acting in the early scenes feels like the playing of two master violinists. (There’s a sad phone call scene between them that choked me up, and Sarandon has a flash- of-rage moment that pierces right through). Add this to Roger Deakins‘ cinema- tography and Jo Francis‘s editing, and any half-aware observer can tell from the get-go that this is very high quality stuff. You just know it. You can feel it happening a hundred different ways.
Red-staters and blue-staters alike are going to get where this film is coming from — they’re going to feel it in their hearts, and make all the connections on their own without going off into specific tirades or defenses.
It’s not so much Haggis-the-Hollywood-liberal as the story itself that’s making the point here, which is that the Iraq War is primarily responsible for the terrible thing that this film turns on. It’s heartening to hear (as Jones’ character says at one point) that David sometimes does win out over Goliath — the title refers to the valley in Israel where their ancient conflict took place — but the Iraq War is a thousand plunderers and a thousand knives. It is obviously laying waste left and right, and will continue to do so for a long time to come, and for what?

(Iraq is going to suffer a blood bath — maybe like Ireland, maybe like Rwanda — and eventually break apart like Yugoslavia and become two or three countries. People have to tend their own nests. There’s no other way. It would be nice if it were otherwise, but the hard rain has only begin to fall over there.)
In some quarters In The Valley of Elah is going to be seen in the same light as Grace is Gone (dad-in-denial John Cusack mourning the death of his wife who was killed in Iraq), although it is much more powerful and assured.
Some might be more muted in their admiration, and they wouldn’t be wrong or right in expressing this, but I think In The Valley of Elah is an unmistakable Best Picture contender. It’s an American tragedy that every last person in this country, from whatever region or persuasion, is going to “get” deep down. Except with aberrations like Chicago, this groundwater quality is usually what gives a Best Picture nominee traction with voters.
I believe that Haggis is now a prime contender for Best Director and for Best Adapted Screenplay. Ditto Deakins for Best Cinematography and Francis for Best Editing. I can see Theron being talked up in the Best Actress category also (her role as a single-mom investigator is much less showy and grandstanding than the blue-collar character she played in North Country), and Sarandon, depending on the competition, could wind up in the Best Supporting Actress category.
Every Elah supporting player delivers a straight-up, no-fuss performance. The best are Jason Patric, James Franco, Josh Brolin, Jonathan Tucker, Frances Fisher, Rick Gonzalez, Barry Corbin, Wayne Duvall, Brent Briscoe, Mehcad Brooks, Brad William Henke and Kathy Lamkin. (Watching it is like a No Country for Old Men old-home week for Jones, Brolin, Corbin and Lamkin.)

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix took in $12 million from last night’s midnight shows, with a average of 5100 a print — a sensational figure.

Here’s the HD teaser-trailer for Roland Emmerich‘s 10,000 B.C. (Warner Bros., 3.7.08), which is about “a young mammoth hunter’s journey through uncharted territory to secure the future of his tribe.” Cliff Curtis, Camilla Belle, Omar Sharif, saber-toothed tigers, woolly mammoths, etc.

The long-awaited, double-disc Criterion DVD of Billy Wilder‘s Ace in the Hole (out on Tuesday, 7.17) arrived this morning. I had to immediately grapple with an instinct to stop work, turn down the lights, lock the door and spend three or four hours watching the feature and the supplementary docs and essays (including a 1980 Wilder doc by Michael Ciment called Portrait of a 60% Perfect Man). But as Richard Nixon once said to H.R. Haldeman, “That would be wrong.”