David Carr, the N.Y. Times Carpetbagger guy, tried to dimiss Walk the Line as a Best Picture contender this morning. Or has this Johnny Cash biopic in fact lost serious steam? That would be news to me, but maybe I’m not talking to the right people. Carr back- handed Jim Mangold’s film with stealth and without seeming too aggressive. He merely said it “has faded from memory, perhaps because it was not that memorable of a film.” Maybe…but it’s the only the Best Picture contender on the short list that’s certain to top $100 million, and isn’t there some kind of interest in having at least one Best Picture contender be a popular hit?
I finally saw Debra Granik‘s Down to the Bone last night and got the wisdom of what almost every deep-focus movie journalist and critic has been saying since it (barely) opened in New York and Los Angeles nearly six weeks ago, which is that it’s grimly real but has something that doesn’t let up. This is a profoundly honed and life-like low-budgeter about a mom with two kids coping with drug addiction, and Vera Farmiga, who plays this withered young woman like she’s not playing her at all, is the absolute shit.
Vera Farmiga, Hugh Dillon after last night’s screening of Down to the Bone at Laemmle’s Music Hall — 1.12.06, 9:50 pm.
Farmiga doesn’t perform — she becomes and burns through. She has the saddest eyes and the posture of a Siberian salt-mine worker, and she makes you feel the empty-soul fatigue of working a job at a supermarket check-out counter while nur- sing a serious cocaine habit and…Christ, stealing birthday money from her son in order to score, and then getting fired after she cleans up because the coke made her work faster.
This is Anna Magnani in Open City reborn and time-tripped into something worse than mere poverty.
I’ve been told Down to the Bone is the main reason Farmiga landed major roles in Anthony Minghella‘s upcoming Breaking and Entering and Martin Scorsese‘s The Departed…you can see why in a heartbeat.
Newsweek‘s David Ansen called Farmiga’s Down to the Bone performance a “revelation” and listed her performance among the best of the year, and of course the L.A. Film Critics voted her their ’05 Best Actress award. It was these responses that stirred me from slumber and led to last night’s wake-up.
I am so late-to-the-party on this one I don’t want to talk about it. But I am and I’m sorry, and I wish I’d been able to say this before: this is a moderately weak year for female performances, and there’s no question that Farmiga’s performance in this bleak but mesmerizing film is absolutely gold standard.
Farmiga with Jasper Daniels (playing her older son) in Debra Granik’s Down to the Bone
If we lived in a world that singled out the real jewels in the rough and paid less attention to industry hype and herd-mentality thinking, Vera Farmiga would right now be breathing down Reese Witherspoon‘s neck.
But of course we don’t and she’s not, and Farmiga, giving it one last shot and laying it on the line, personally arranged for last night’s Down to the Bone screening at Laemmle’s Music Hall (and for guys like me to be invited)…and good for her. And cheers to Adrien Brody, an old friend of Farmiga’s (they co-starred in an ’02 film called Dummy) who dropped by to lend support.
My apologies to publicist Steven Zeller, who tried to get me to see Down to the Bone early last fall. And a respectful tip of the hat to Farmiga’s ICM agent Chris Matthews, who also dropped by to show support and cheer things along.
And hold on…who’s this Hugh Dillon guy? He gives an assured, quietly sexy performance as Farmiga’s drug-counsellor boyfriend who holds her hand and caresses her cheek as they both spiral downward in the third act. Damned if he isn’t another reason for me to feel like a dilletante columnist.
Adrien Brody, Farmiga, Dillon — Thursday, 1.12.06, 9:52 pm.
Dillon is one of those steady souls who comes into a scene and looks the lead actress right in the eye in an easy, friendly way and says it plain and true (like he does in his first scene with Farmiga) and right away you’re saying to yourself, “This guy’s cool…I trust him.”
Dillon should be happening. He should be the star of a TV cop show… something. He’s got that pale-faced Irish hard-guy thing…he should have been cast as a cop or a wise guy in The Departed.
Don’t mention my having missed Down to the Bone at Sundance ’04 — I’m having enough trouble coping as it is. Just take my word and rent it when it comes out on DVD, which will probably happen over the next four to six months.
I told Dillon after the screening that the movie has a unique tension that comes from pulling you in opposite directions. You want his and Vera’s characters to straighten up and fly right and your heart sinks when they fall off the wagon, but at the same time the bleakness of their lives and surroundings seems so futile and spiritually draining that you can understand the appeal of an occasional snort.
Ve detta Days
If one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter (depending on one’s political perspective), the notion of a “good terrorist” should be an exploitable subject for a Hollywood film…no? In any case it’s now the basis of a very smart big-bolt action drama, and from the makers of The Matrix yet — the brilliant, very crafty, vaguely oddball Wachowski Brothers.
V for Vendetta (Warner Bros., 3.17), which I saw Wednesday afternoon, is a genuinely rousing and serious-minded thriller that’s fairly throbbing with political metaphor. Anyone over the age of 10 or 11 will be able to connect the dots. And it’s probably safe to assume that V will anger a few rightie jerkwads, but that’s fine — March can be a boring month and the arguments will be fun.
V for Vendetta is Fight Club-plus…it’s Fight Club strapped to a missile…or should I say a fertilizer bomb?
Based on Alan Moore’s early ’80s graphic novel and set in a fascist England in the near-future, it’s about revenge and revolution from the point of view of an anti-fascist rabble-rouser provocateur named “V” (voice-acted by Hugo Weaving, whom we never meet in the flesh). And about a growing relationship between V and Evey Hammond (Natalie Portman), whose parents were crushed for anti-fascist activi- ties and, like Neo at the beginning of The Matrix, is looking to add something vital to her life.
She certainly acccomplishes that before the film is over…along with thousands of others in London who join in overwhelming the police in front of Parliament…each one, like the hero all through the film, wearing a grotesque Guy Fawkes mask… bonding fast against tyranny.
Okay, so it has a pie-in-the-sky, fairy-tale ending. I think that’s allowable in some cases.
Most readers probably know that Fawkes was one of a group of Roman Catholic conspirators who attempted to blow up London’s Parliament building (or perhaps just the House of Lords) in 1605, but didn’t quite succeed. He and his co-conspi- rators were caught and was executed for treason. The anniversay of Fawkes’ failed attempt (which happened on November 5th) is celebrated as Guy Fawkes Day.
V for Vendetta is a futuristic myth, a fable…designed at every stage to entertain but quite obviously aimed at our world and time…portraying what happens when people get scared about potential enemies and give a pass to rightwing brown- shirts who run roughshod over basic freedoms. If you don’t see the parallels to the political tendencies and tensions of 2006 then I don’t know what.
What this is, curiously, is a heavily-budgeted, Joel Silver-produced actioner that works as a kind of companion piece to Eugene Jarecki’s Why We Fight. Jarecki’s film is pure exposition, of course, but it paints a riveting portrait of some crafty politicos who did what they could to exploit citizens’ fears after 9/11 in order to expand and strengthen their power base…and that’s exactly what the bad guys have been up to in Vendetta.
So the film is nervy as hell and will most likely enrage people like Ann Coulter, Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, who will probably say it endorses terrorism or some such hooey. It doesn’t, of course…I mean, not actually…but watch the righties go to town.
Vendetta may not have the stylistic visual pizazz of the Matrix films, and in fact feels a tiny bit flat-footed during the first 15 minutes or so, but this concern quickly falls away because once the film gets rolling it becomes more and more pointed and complex by the minute.
In my book V is one of the most politically audacious mainstream Hollywood films ever made because it really lays it on the line — there are dark echoes of 9.11 and 21st Century neocon power dreams and hard-right fanatacism all through it, and yes…the good guy does blow up a building or two.
Natalie Portman, Hugo Weaving in V for Vendetta
And yet — trust me — this is a film that says and stands for all the right things. Which is why it’s going to get attacked.
Look at all the inflammables…a terrorist hero, a sub-plot about a deeply-in-love lesbian couple (this plus those hot lezzie scenes in Bound tells you the boys definitely have a thing for girl-on-girl action), plus a huge fertilizer bomb under Parliament and that ’03 sex-change operation…forget it, the right’s going to have a field day.
The bottom line is that V isn’t some simple-minded action flick trying to glorify the struggle of a lone terrorist against a repressive right-wing regime. It’s using a story that follows the contours of an action-thriller to push an allegory about some very real and threatening tendencies in our society today.
James McTeigue “directed” V, but it was basically a Wachowski show and there’s no point in getting picky about this. But it’s probably fair to credit McTiegue for the fact that the actors are excellent from to bottom — Weaving, Portman, Stephen Rea, John Hurt, Stephen Fry, Sinead Cusack, et. al.
I assume Warner Brothers marketing will be handing out Guy Fawkes masks at press and promotional screenings between now and March 17. How could they not be? Can I have mine early so I can be the first one on the block?
In any case, the Wachowskis are back after a two-year hiatus, and bully for that.
For most of us, the legend of Larry and Andy began nine years and three months ago with the release of Bound, a brilliantly designed indoor crime drama. Their rep was double-certified and cast in industrial steel with the release of The Matrix in March 1999, and it grew from there. For the next four years the Wachowskis were as mythical gods.
But the aura started to fade with the May 2003 release of The Matrix Reloaded, which disappointed just about everyone on the planet except for David Poland, and then came the Really Big Crash of The Matrix Revolutions in November of ’03, and everyone was saying “what happened?” The Wachowskis had let everyone down and all of that geek goodwill pretty much imploded.
The boys seemed to disappear for all of ’04 and early ’05. Then they began work on Vendetta last summer in London and here they are again with a film that some are going to call a work of genius, or at least a piece of revolutionary cinema.
Everybody loves a good comeback. Will V for Vendetta make big money or just good money? No telling…let’s see what happens.
Niagara Falls
Here’s an Abbott and Costello time-out. I’m figuring some of you need a break from terrorism, and I’m also presuming there are lots of under-30 readers who’ve never heard it. It’s an old burlesque classic that all the comics used to do. The Three Stooges did a version of it in a short called “Gents Without Cents.” Abbott and Costello did a “Pokomoko” version in a feature called Lost in a Harem , and then a “Niagara Falls” version with Sid Fields on their 1950s TV series.
Harsh Respect
As long as we’re looking ahead here, I saw David Ayer’s Harsh Times on Monday night, and it left me (or I left it) a little more than pleasantly surprised.
This is a totally respectable hardcase urban drama — perhaps not a date movie (unless you have an X-factor girlfriend or wife who thinks like Manohla Dargis), but it’s quality stuff all the way and rates as a very respectable calling-card film for Ayer, who’s best known for having written Training Day.
It’s not coming out for another three months (Bauer Martinez is planning a smallish mid-April release) but the word on Harsh Times out of the Toronto Film Festival was iffy, and it’s not that. I wouldn’t call it transcendent or drop-your-socks amaz- ing, but it’s pretty damn sturdy and rooted, and extremely well acted by leads Christian Bale and Freddy Rodriguez.
Christian Bale in David Ayer’s Harsh Times
Written about ten years ago and clearly cut from the same cloth as Training Day (which Ayer reportedly wrote two or three years after this),
It’s not what anyone would call a pleasant sit, but it has an honest street feeling and is certainly not the kind of film that uses lurid exaggeration for cheap effect.
It’s about a Gulf War veteran who’s obviously a hair-trigger nutjob (Bale), and how he gradually falls apart and detonates over the span of two or three (four or five?) days after failing to land a job as an L.A. policeman force hangin’ and cruising around East Los Angeles with his immature, irresponsible homie (Rodriguez).
The story’s about Bale’s character almost finding a career niche for himself with the Feds after losing out on a job with the L.A. police department, and almost nabbing a chance at happiness with his Mexican girlfriend…and about Rodriguez trying to shuck his drinking inclinations and get a job and fly right so he can hang on to his wife-girlfriend (Eva Langoria) and then…kablooey.
The way you’ve been prepped for a film always affects the way you see that film, especially if you’ve been told “watch out, rough going, my friend walked out,” etc. If the film turns out to be not be quite as gnarly or difficult to sit through as you heard it would be, you tend to come out with a favorable impression.
Rodriguez, Longoria and Harsh Times director David Ayer during last September’s Toronto Film Festival.
And if the film accomplishes some worthy things that you weren’t told about in the first place, then you’re really on the boat and flashing all kinds of positive things.
This is what happened to me three nights ago at Raleigh Studios. I went there to see Michael Winterbottom’s Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, but when I arrived I learned that Harsh Times was playing next door. Before Shandy began I spoke to a big-name critic who said he’d seen Harsh Times in Toronto and found it overly harsh, and that New York Post critic Lou Lumenick had walked out after ten minutes.
That did it — I was sold. The lights went down and I was quickly bored by Shandy (sorry) so I got up, walked ten steps and slipped into Harsh Times room, and was soon glad I did.
Grabs
Sunset Boulevard near Horn — Tuesday, 1.10.06, 9:30 pm
On bike path in Santa Monica — Sunday, 1.8.06, 2:10 pm
Billboard on Laurel Canyon Blvd. just south of 134 on-ramp. Snapped on Tuesday, 1.10.06, 9:50 am.
Reasons to Believe
I spoke last Sunday to director Eugene Jarecki for “Elsewhere Live” about his superb documenary Why We Fight. The Sony Classics release is opening on 1.20 and spreading out from there.
A recording of our chat is uploadable in the Elsewhere Live archive, and here’s a stand-alone version.
If you want some prep before listening, here’s a re-print of a piece I wrote about Why We Fight during the Toronto Film Festival:
A thought hit me when I was writing my column from Toronto on the evening of 9.11.01, but I didn’t have the brass to write it down.
Former U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower delivering his farewell speech on 1.17.61.
It was my suspicion that no one in the news media in the coming weeks or months would ever be permitted to explore (or even discuss on a talk show like, say, Chris Matthews’ “Hardball”) what might have motivated the 9.11 attackers to do what they did.
It seemed fairly obvious that the news media were already locked into characterizing the Al Qeada plotters as nothing more or less than harbingers of pure evil, and that allowing for the possibility that United States foreign policy might have had something to do with their anger would simply never be acknowledged.
Eugene Jarecki’s Why We Fight isn’t the first doc to explore why so many people around the world hate our guts, but it’s one of the most precise and persuasive.
This is a cleanly composed, very perceptive explanation of how the American military-industrial complex basically runs everything and everyone, from the U.S. President to the U.S. Congress to the slant of our foreign policy.
The news-clip centerpiece, as you might imagine, is former president Dwight D. Eisenhower’s farewell address warning about the influence of the burgeoning military-industrial complex. Jarecki then goes on to show exactly how prophetic Ike was.
Why We Fight director Eugene Jarecki during q & a following TIFF screening at Toronto’s Cumberland plex — 9.15, 5:50 pm.
This will seem like boilerpate stuff to some, but Jarecki and his sources explain how and why the U.S. decided at the end of World War II to become a permanent roving super-power with the technological ability (if not necessarily the political will) to strike any adversary in any country at any time.
The film’s title is borrowed from a jingoistic Frank Capra doc made during World War II that explained the necessity of defeating Japan and Nazi Germany.
The movie says that for roughly the last 60 years, the U.S. has been led by a basic need for constant military adventurism for the sake of domestic corporate profits, which are then spread around to political supporters in government.
Fight shows how there are four branches of Eisenhower’s complex today — the military, the weapons-making industry, the U.S. Congress and conservative think tanks — and how they all feed into each other.
Gore Vidal is one of Fight‘s talking heads, supplying his view at one point that “we live in the United States of Amnesia.”
But Jarecki is smart enough to stay away from staunch liberals for the most part, speaking mostly to establishment or conservative types such as Sen. John McCain, high-level CIA veteran Chalmers Johnson, William Kristol, Richard Perle, former Lt. Gen. Karen Kwiatkowski and former president Eisenhower’s granddaughter Susan and son John.
Jarecki also talks to the wonderfully candid and articulate Charles Lewis of the Center for Public Integrity, who was more or less the star of Orwell Rolls in His Grave.
Why We Fight is also effective when it talks to average-Joe types. The standout in this realm is an ex-cop named Wilton Sekzer, whose son was killed on 9.11 and who came to embrace a very cynical attitude about the foreign policy aims of the Bush administration, not to mention its general lack of candor about same.
Jarecki also interviews a fresh Army recruit named William Solomon, and to a couple of military pilots who dropped the first bombs in the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
On top of everything else, Jarecki is an excellent cinematographer and editor. The movie is persuasive in part because it’s been shot and cut with eye-pleasing expertise.
Legend has it there’s a significant clue at the very end of Michael Haneke’s Cache (Sony Pictures Classics, 1.11.06)…some kind of visual tipoff about who’s behind the stealth videotaping of Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche’s home, lives, histories, etc. Esquire film writer Mike D’Angelo mentions the clue in a current piece. The clue has something to do with the son of a certain ill-fated Algerian character seen talking to a guy named Pierrot (Lester Makedonsky). Or maybe something to do with a black car driving by three times, or a blue station wagon…I’m a little hazy on the details. Anyone who’s seen Cache (also known as Hidden) knows the motive for the tapings has something to do with shameful French treatment of Algerians in the early ’60s. Cache star Daniel Autiel allegedly told a gathering at the London Film Festival several weeks ago that he’d seen the film three times and didn’t know where the tapes had come from either and neither to his knowledge did Haneke. This film isn’t a whodunit anyway. I don’t know what to call it but it’s way too smart to be concerned with matters of culpability. It’s more into arty obfuscation.
Reader Tom Van watched the Brokeback Mountain discussion on Fox News’ “The O’Reilly Factor” last night and didn’t think it amounted to much. “The main push of this piece was Bill’s assertion that the left-wing media constantly pushes films on people that support the liberal political agenda, and in the case of Brokeback the gay movement and gay marriage,” Van reports. “O’Reilly said that a paper like the New York Times does it all the time through ‘stealth’ methods and yet the at same time he said it’s constantly ‘in your face.’ Conservative film critic Michael Medved agreed, of course, and said that Narnia made more in a weekend than Brokeback will make overall. (He must understand the concept of per-screen averages, so I don’t get it.) He followed that gem up with ‘Why isnt’ the New York Times pushing family films like that?’ Fascinating stuff. He also mentioned Brokeback is destroying the legacy of John Wayne. Uhhm….okay. Critic Jeanne Most tried to bring up the box-office discrepancy and inject the notion that Brokeback Mountain is first and foremost a quality film, but she didn’t have the chutzpah to compete against Medved and O’Reilly. It was a pretty silly piece and nothing surprising but as always, good for a few laughs.”
The Hollywood Reporter‘s Anne Thompson paints an intriguing portrait of the tangled situation at Sony at the end of a year that reeked of under-performing films (Zathura, The Legend of Zorro, Stealth) on top of the sad failure of Rent, a movie that works beautifully but not enough people wanted to see. Sony is now bracing itself for the arrival of two December releases with difficulties — Rob Marshall’s Memoirs of a Geisha, which is all but dead in the Oscar competition, and Dean Parisot’s Fun with Dick and Jane, which I’m hearing “doesn’t work.” (I don’t think this is a secret, is it? It doesn’t mean, of course, that Dick and Jane won’t make money.) There’s also the unfortunate postponement of All The King’s Men into late ’06, which carried the obvious implication when the delay was announced that this period drama (which earlier this year had been presumed to be a potential Oscar contender) had problems. Thompson seems to making the point that one reason things aren’t panning out is that Columbia’s vice chairman and production chief Amy Pascal doesn’t have an entirely free creative hand due to having to share things, so to speak, with Sony Pictures Entertainment chairman Michael Lynton…not to mention Sony’s constant problems with not being able to market its films with any particular pizazz. “The way they do things at Sony is very unwieldy,” a studio veteran comments. “Pascal is a very nice lady and very hard working, but the decisions she’s made on films plus the marketing of them have made things difficult for her. Because in the final analysis, the marketing people control your destiny.”
Willie’s Out
You can bid a sad Oscar farewell to Sean Penn, Willie Stark, Patty Clarkson, Mike Medavoy and director-writer Steven Zallian…at least as far as the ’05 race is concerned.
All The King’s Men, a southern political melodrama about the corruption of a home-grown politician in the mode of Louisiana Senator Huey P. Long, has been pulled from its 12.16 release date, which has been scheduled for several months now.
Sean Penn in Steven Zallian’s All The King’s Men
ATKM will probably open in late ’06, according to Medavoy, the film’s producer and head of the Sony-based Pheonix Pictures.
Medavoy told me Thursday afternoon that “we’re just not ready” to release All The King’s Men by 12.16.
“And although I’m personally not happy that we didn’t make it, I know enough about this business to say thank you to the studio for having the guts to [make this decision].”
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One obvious result is that the Best Picture Oscar race is suddenly a tad less challenging for contenders like Brokeback Mountain, Capote, Munich, Walk the Line, Jarhead, Good Night, and Good Luck and The New World.
The assumption was that ATKM might be an Oscar contender on several fronts, especially since the 1949 screen adaptation of Robert Penn Warren’s novel, which was directed by Robert Rossen, won a Best Picture Oscar and two acting Oscars (for costars Broderick Crawford and Mercedes McCambridge).
The story’s about an idealistic southern politician who starts off as a sincere man-of-the-people type, but gradually becomes corrupted by the system as he becomes more and more powerful.
“The few people who’ve seen the movie are over the moon about it…there’s no question this film would have gotten several Oscar nominations,” said Medavoy. “But we have another four weeks to go with the editing, we haven’t even heard the music, we didn’t have the TV spots ready…we would have had to rush everything.”
In other words, said Medavoy, the version of the All The King’s Men that he, Zallian and Columbia would have had to put into theatres to meet the 12.16 release date might not be “the best movie that we know how to put out there, one that I’ll be proud and you’d be proud of… we’re just not ready.”
All The King’s Men finished shooting last April — five months ago — and has been editing ever since. Steven Spielberg’s Munich, another presumed Oscar contender, began filming early last July and will be in theatres by 12.25.
The average guy might compare the two and ask if Spielberg can finish a film in six months, start to finish, why can’t Zallian get his done satisfactorily in double that time, since principal photography on All The King’s Men started in early December of ’04?
Jude Law, Kate Winslet, Mark Ruffalo
Medavoy’s answer is that Warren’s novel “is a very complicated story. You’ve read the novel, you know what I mean. And we didn’t want to send out a wet print. Spielberg can send out a wet print. We can’t afford to do that.
“The current plan is to wait until the fall,” said Medavoy. “Maybe we’ll have a Cannes plan or a New York plan…we’ll see how it all develops.”
Zallian previously directed two pretty good films — A Civil Action and Searching for Bobby Fischer, and won a best Adapatred Screenplay Oscar for his work on Schindler’s List.
All The King’s Men also stars Kate Winslet, Mark Ruffalo Anthony Hopkins, James Gandolfini and Kathy Baker.
Grab Ass
Looking south on 7th Avenue from 57th Street — Friday, 10.21.05, 1:10 pm.
Fierce People director Griffin Dunne in Almond room of Four Seasons hotel — Friday, 10.21.05, 12:15 pm. (Note to the gang at Michelle Robertson publicity: thanks, really, for calling and politely reminding me about Thursday’s interview — very thorough and much appreciated.)
Hany Abu-Assad, director and co-writer of Warner Independent’s Paradise Now, at Thursday’s press junket at Century City’s Hyatt-whatever hotel (i.e., the terra cotta-colored one).
57th Street and 7th Avenue, looking east — Friday, 10.21.05, 1:07 pm.
Buffet for journalists at Paradise Now junket, courtesy of Hyatt and Warner Independent.
Waiting for the fabled A train at Howard Beach station, Brooklyn, not far from JFK — Friday, 10.21.05, 6:05 am.
Brief Encounter
Quality over quantity…right? Longer usually ain’t better and less is usually more. Except when it comes to performances.
The only exception I can think of was Beatrice Straight taking a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for a single deeply-felt scene in Sidney Lumet’s Network. But if Straight had given that killer performance in an anthology film, she’d have been passed over.
Jason Isaacs, Robin Wright Penn in Rodrigo Garcia’s Nine Lives
The rule seems to be that a performance isn’t award-worthy unless it takes the viewer on at least a 70 or 80-minute journey.
But rules are made to be broken, and Robin Wright Penn’s performance in Rodrigo Garcia’s Nine Lives (Magnolia) — nine short films about women in some kind of emotional transition or meltdown — is enough to make anyone step back and go “wait a minute.”
Penn’s performance comes in the second segment, called “Diana.” She plays the title character — a very pregnant married woman who runs into an old flame named Damian (Isaacs) in a Bel Air market…a man she deeply loved and had the major hots for, and who obviously hurt her very badly.
They spot each other and start talking, and things rekindle in a matter of minutes …or is it seconds? By the time this 11-minute sequence ends, Penn is a mess…crying, anxious…looking for her ex-lover in a darkened parking lot to no avail. And you’re right with her, feeling it.
All the sequences in Nine Lives are shot in a single unbroken take, and the camera is right on top of Penn for every second of “Diana.” And she shows a fuller, more flickery sense of pushed-down hurt and passion than anything I’ve felt from any other female performance, leading or supporting, this year.
Robin Wright Penn prior to Sundance ’05 premiere for Rodrigo Garcia’s Nine Lives
The fact that she gets to the places she gets to with such delicacy and depth of feeling, and in such a short time…
As good as Isaacs is also (he supplies exactly the right portions of confidence, charm and implied unruliness), you can’t help but study Penn for every facial spasm, every crack of a half-smile, every surge of hesitant feeling.
She’s so good I went back last weekend and paid to see Nine Lives, and nobody freeloads like me when it comes to movies and DVDs.
Most of the major critics have singled out this segment and/or Penn’s performance as the best in the film.
Entertainment Weekly‘s Lisa Schwarzbaum called “Diana” “my favorite among the nonet of 10-minute scenes of women in crisis that make up [this] deeply satisfying feminine maypole dance.
“The air between [Diana and Damian] is electric with unresolved feelings, and the woman truly doesn’t know which way to turn: She tries this aisle and that to find her emotional way, while the camera follows her agitated indecision in one unbroken take.”
Nine Lives director Rodrigo Garcia
“Erotic sparks fly [in this sequence],” said N.Y. Times critic Stephen Holden, “as [Diana’ is gripped by the familiar, scary feeling of disappearing in [Damian’s] presence.”
Variety‘s Scott Foundas has called “Diana” “the pic’s most haunting sequence,” and the L.A. Daily News critic Glenn Whipp called it “the best of the lot.”
“The mundane conversation mingling with obvious chemistry, bitter confrontation and, finally, abject sadness (we get the feeling Damian has really hurt her) is so beautifully handled by Wright-Penn that even the sound of her shopping cart speeding and slowing down matches her staggered feelings,” wrote Reel.com’s Kim Morgan.
L.A. Times critic Kevin Thomas called “Diana” “an especially fine example of Garcia’s masterly control in developing a scene to its fullest,” adding that Wright Penn “beautifully reveals Diana’s increasing inner turmoil along with her determination not to lose her self-control.”
It was Damian’s “inability to commit [that] ended their relationship a decade earlier,” he observed. “Even though Damian has married, as has Diana, he instantly realizes he has never stopped loving her, and in his regret, selfishly resolves to force her to acknowledge that she feels the same way about him.
Jason Isaacs at Sundance ’05 premiere
“He starts out in a low enough key that Diana, though thrown by running into him, is finding the chance meeting pleasant enough until he starts bearing down on her,” Thomas explained. “Diana therefore finds herself in a very public place having to confront an unexpected and painful truth and then rise above it, holding on to her dignity and determination all the same.”
Wait a minute….Damian doesn’t really bear down on Diana. He comes over and says he “can’t stop thinking about her,” etc., which I guess is kind of over- bearing, but she’s obviously torn up about seeing him without any prompting (searching for him as she walks down the aisles with her basket, etc.) that he hardly seems like an invader.
Will anything happen for Penn with the critics groups or the Academy? Doesn’t matter on one level because great work is its own reward, but she’s less than a year from being 40 and we all know what that means for actresses. She could do with a pat on the back and some extra attention for being as good as she is.
Arclight Double
Fierce People director Griffin Dunne, costars Anton Yelchin (center) and Donald Sutherland (r.) at Arclight theatre prior to Hollywood Film Festival showing — Wednesday, 10.18, 7:55 pm. Lions Gate will release Fierce People in April ’06.
Movie City News editor David Poland chatting with North Country director Niki Caro, star Charlize Theron following screening at Arclight — Wednesday, 10.18, 10:10 pm. Nice interview, but the sound system was all screwed up. The Fierce People q & a could be heard on speakers in the North Country venue, and vice versa. And the cordless mikes kept cutting out.
Steal This Tune
“Jeff, you deserve all props from Ann Hornaday (& Poland!), but you’re wrong about Harrison’s heist of ‘She’s So Fine.’ In fact, he heisted a heist, as you’ll read in Marc Shapiro’s Harrison bio Behind Sad Eyes.
“The info’s from Delaney Bramlett, who says it all happened on the Delaney and Bonnie and Friends tour:
“‘George came over to me and said, ‘You write a lot of gospel songs. I’d like to know what inspires you to do that,” Bramlett begins. ‘I told him, ‘I get things from the Bible, from what a preacher may say, or just the feelings I felt toward God.’ He said, ‘Well, can you give me a for instance? How would you start?’
Allegedly snapped on George Harison’s birthday…which might explain why he seems to be the recipient of more-than-the-usual attention here.
“‘So I grabbed my guitar and started playing the Chiffon’s melody from ‘He’s So Fine’ and then sang the words, ‘My sweet Lord/ Oh, my Lord, Oh, my Lord/ I just wanna be with you….’ George said okay. Then I said, ‘Then you praise the Lord in your own way.’
“Rita [Coolidge] and Bonnie were there and so I told them when we got to this one part to sing, ‘Hallalujah.’ They did. George said okay.”
“[After it came out as the top hit on George’s All Things Must Pass album], ‘I called up George and told him that I didn’t mean for him to use the melody of ‘He’s So Fine.’ He said, ‘Well, it’s not exactly,’ and it really wasn’t. He did put some curves in there but he did get sued.”
“Delaney became even more upset when he went out and bought the record and discvoered that only George was credited with writing the song.
“‘When I saw I wasn’t credited, I called George and said, ‘George, I didn’t see my name on the song.’ He promised me it would be on the next printing of the record, but I was never given credit on that song…even though he did admit that the song, to a large extent, was mine, and I never saw any money from it.”
Delaney Bramlett
“Delaney was upset but refused to pursue his legitimate complaint in the courts. His feeling was that he would not give up his friendship with George for a song. Unfortunately, George did not feel the same way.”
“On the same tour, George also stole his pants. ‘One night George got really crazy drunk and tore off the green velvet pants I was wearing and I ended up running down the street naked, chasing after the tour bus.'” — Tim Appelo, esteemed film critic for Seattle Weekly
Wells to Appelo: I obviously stand corrected. Harrison may have been the most spiritually pure (or at least ardent) Beatle, but he wasn’t the most exacting guy in the world when it came to ethics.
Spoil
“Having seen Steve Martin’s The Pink Panther about six months back, I do agree that it’s a lot more fun than it has any right being, but you totally blew one of the best gags in the film by mentioning the Clive Owen thing.
“Granted it’s now lost some of its foresight now that Daniel Craig’s been cast as Bond, but it’s such an awesome nod to film fans and it really comes out of nowhere. There’s a reason IMDB made a point of not mentioning it: it’s supposed to be a surprise. You really should do your readership a solid and take the mention down. They’ll thank you come February (or whenever the film finally gets released).” — Andrew Dignan, Sherman Oaks, CA.
Wells to Dignan: It’s meaningless and at most an asterisk thing now with Craig’s casting…an anecdotal drop in the bucket. Nobody cares, it’s all swirling down the toilet, and you and I and our friends and our pets will all be dead in 70 or 80 years, if not sooner.
Again
Having just seen Mrs. Henderson Presents (Weinstein Co., 12.9) a second time, I’m still 90% convinced Dame Judi Dench will snag a Best Actress Oscar nomination.
She plays the title character, a 70ish widow who buys a London theatre in the late 1930s and, with the help of a feisty 50ish theatre manager (Bob Hoskins), eventually puts on a nude revue…and does so with her usual aplomb.
Dench may not be quite the slam-dunk that Philip Seymour Hoffman is in the Best Actor category, but she’s probably “in”…assuming there are no surprises in the wings (which an Oscar-handicapper should never do) and depending, obviously, on the breaks.
Jason Isaacs, Robin Wright Penn in Rodrigo Garcia’s Nine Lives
Her competitors are Reese Witherspoon (Walk the Line), Maria Bello (A History of Violence), Toni Collette (no full-length performance has out-shone hers in In Her Shoes, but the flat box-office revenues for this 20th Century Fox release will probably lessen the attention), Charlize Theron (North Country), Sara Jessica Parker (The Family Stone), and — if you ask me — Robin Wright Penn.
Who am I missing? Karen Fried, who’s repping that trans-gender drama Transamerica (which I haven;t seen), swears that Felicity Huffman’s performance is good enough to contend, and says “many press people” feel the same way.
It’s not just that Dench is spirited and funny-sad, but she has a pitch-perfect way of delivering zap lines with just the right tone of upper-class indifference. With a less-skilled actress at the helm this could seem offensive, depending on the direction…and yet the joke is always on Dench.
Plus she gradually starts to soften and sadden her Mrs. Henderson (a 70ish widow who buys a London theatre and eventually puts on a nude revue) at the halfway point, and generally makes her into a woman of considerable heart and soul.
Listen Up
Here’s a recording of a special introduction to the just-out “collector’s edition” DVD of Joel and Ethan Coen’s The Big Lebowski. I just popped it in last night, not expecting anything special, and I had one of those “what the fuck is this?” reactions.
It’s billed on the package as an “Exclusive Introduction featuring Mortimer Young, a practitioner of ‘non-uptight’ film preservation.”
This dry and perverse intro is hilariously delivered by an actor who’s really good at sounding like a vageuly pompous know-it-all. His name escapes me, but he’s in his late 60s or early 70s and has been in, I think, a Coen brothers film or two
The copy was obviously written by Joel and Ethan. The riff about “the catastophic period of synergy” (onwership of Universal by Vivendi, Seagrams, etc.) is hilarious.
Everybody knows producer’s rep Jeff Dowd was the quasi-inspiration for Jeff Bridges’ Jeff Lebowski character, but no one has ever said this: Jeff Dowd is nothing like Jeff Lebowski except for the girth. Dowd is quick, shrewd, on top of it. Was into White Russians in the ’70s or ’80s but not now. Not much of a bowler.
“Brown” Booty
“I imagine that the money hairs on the back of Ridley Scott’s neck may be going `Whoo, whoo, whoo’ about directing an Encyclopedia Brown movie, but I have to say ‘What the fuck?’
“Donald Sobol’s books were the shit in the `80s the same way R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps were the shit for kids in the 90s and Harry Potter is now and will soon be replaced by the next volume of books with strikes a chord with the upcoming generation of pre-pubescents with stories of kids as the main characters.
“But even back then, misguided third-grader that I was, I couldn’t imagine there being an `Encyclopedia Brown’ movie.
“Nothing about it is cinematic. Something happens — usually something that stumps little Leroy’s dad, the chief of police — and Encyclopedia snoops around a bit, and Sally follows him around and gets into fisticuffs with anyone who’ll start something. A little more investigating and lightbulb goes off. Then you go to the back of the book and see the solution to the mystery. It has less of a story than a single episode of `Scooby Doo.’
“Who wants to watch an entire movie of vignettes like that? What’s Scott going to do with that? You can create kinetic shots by adjusting the shutter speed on gladiator fights before the emperors and the bloody battles in Somalia, but a pre-teen solving a mystery? And this is from one of the little tykes who blindly made Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles the highest-grossing movie in 1990.
“I even vaguely remember my third-grade teacher bringing in a videocassette of an episode of the show based on the books and my class didn’t even like it. I can smell `80s revivalism from the other side of the country on this one, trying to bring in the dollar of twenty-somethings with a title from their youth just to get a few quick bucks.
“Just like that Dukes of Hazzard abomination from this summer and the soon-to-be abomination that will be Michael Bay’s Transformers movie (which future existence still gives me nightmares like no scary movie could), it seems like a way to milk empty nostalgia from the unsuspecting public.
“And with things the way they are in a overly-p.c. landscape, what kind of kid’s movie will have a guy named Bugs Meaney, who wants to beat of a girl? If you ask me, Sobol should be satisfied that his books made it into one of the greatest movies of the `90s, Pulp Fiction. A deleted scene, okay, but still better than the prospect of a Ridley “Brown” picture.” — Jay from the state of Georgia.
“That Encyclopedia Brown thing, if not nauseating, is annoying as hell. Okay, maybe it’s nauseating, too. Since when has Ridley Scott given a shit about kids’ movies? And isn’t Narnia enough of an exploiation of the Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings reps?
Ridley Scott
“We must count our blessings, regardless of these developments. Remember that if even if the worst comes to pass, at least Ridley’s brother Tony will not have directed this new film. The cruel taint on Scott Free Productions is Tony’s vile hand; he who committed such crimes as Spy Game and True Romance. All right, I guess The Fan was okay.
“But I’m a jerk for saying such things. I never directed a movie, so what right do I have to blast Tony Scott? Man. (And good Christ, I am STILL so disturbingly correct somehow… funny, that.)” — Steve Clark
Grabs
Entrance to 20th Century Fox studios — Tuesday, 10.18, 4:25 pm.
Meandering around West Hollywood’s Farmer’s Market — Saturday, 10.15, 4:50 pm
Ditto
West Hollywood = the quickening of the pulse.
Chicken Little promo package filled with a handful of chicken feathers that half-spill out and half float-out the minute you open it…sent late last week by Disney publicity.
Lobby of Laemmle’s Sunset 5 — Sunday, 10.16, 7:20 pm. As a result of taking this photo, I was (a) asked to produce my ticket stub by a suspicious usher, (b) interrogated by the manager and the assistant manager about why I was taking a photo of the lobby, (c) asked to show the camera so they could make sure it wasn’t a video camera.
What does the fruit section of Whole Foods on Third and Fairfax have to do with anything…?
Rear of vehicle parked on San Vicente Blvd. outside West Hollywood post office — Tuesday, 10.17, 3:25 pm.
I know…so what?
That photo of a South Pacific island that Jamie Foxx’s cab driver in Collateral kept on his sun visor so he could take a brief vacation when he needed to? Same difference. Atop a hillside in Tuscany, taken in June 2003.
The Family Stone (20th Century Fox, 11.4.05) looks like a hit because it has something for lightweight Sex and the City fans (you know…the ones who say they’ve enjoyed this or that film because it’s “fun”) as well as those looking for a quality deal with a little heart and gravitas. Sarah Jessica Parker is the nominal star of The Family Stone, although it’s primarily an ensemble dramedy with great performances all around, plus top-grade writing and directing from the unknown but obviously talented Thomas Bezucha.
The Family Stone crew (l. to r.): Craig T. Nelson (on rug) Elizabeth Reaser, Savannah Stehlin, (seated) Diane Keaton, (on rug) Rachel McAdams, Paul Schneider (standing) Sarah Jessica Parker, Dermot Mulroney, Luke Wilson, (seated) Brian J. White, (on rug) Tyrone Giordano, (standing) Claire Danes, no comment.
The producer is Michael London, who also delivered Sideways. These two plus House of Sand and Fog and Thirteen, all made over the last two and a half years, have cemented London’s rep as one of the few guys who make classy personal films that bridge the line between big-studio polish and indie attitude.
Set in snowy New England (although exteriors were shot in Madison, New Jersey), The Family Stone is a home-for-the-holidays family pic with smarts and feeling and humor that’s simultaneously sensitive, abrasive and “real.” Tight, sharply written, enjoyably acted. I’ve seen it twice so far and I’m looking forward to more viewings.
People have asked me if The Family Stone is mainly a comedy or one of those heartfelt things. I tell them it’s kinda both. It’s not serious-serious, but there’s an emotional sincerity and a moment or two (or three) that gets you deep down. The main residue at the end is one of caring and closeness.
Question is, if you’re 20th Century Fox, who do you sell it to…the Parker fans (i.e., younger women) or people with the ability to savor more than just lively performances and clever dialogue and casseroles spilled on the kitchen floor?
The teaser one-sheet (which came out only two or three weeks ago) and the trailer provide an obvious answer — Fox is going for the Sex and the City crowd. That upraised wedding finger is catchy…it promises a comedy with attitude…and the trailer is selling an idea that Parker is the star of The Family Stone…which isn’t quite the case.
Danes, Mulroney, Keaton, Nelson.
She plays a provocateur who stirs things up among a large, earthy and liberal new-age New England family. This is a dynamic that vaguely resembles Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman’s The Man Who Came to Dinner, although the film itself is closer in spirit to George Cukor’s Holiday.
The Stone family is a brood of grown-up kids (Luke Wilson, Rachel McAdams, Dermot Mulroney, Tyrone Giordano, Elizabeth Reaser) and their late-50ish parents (Diane Keaton, Craig T. Nelson). Parker is Mulroney’s bring-home girlfriend whom everyone hates because “she doesn’t trust or know herself,” as Nelson’s character observes early on. She’s uptight, anal, buttoned-down and trying way too hard.
Thrown by the death-ray looks and other signs of disapproval, Parker pressures her sister (Claire Danes) to drop by to provide emotional support, and this in turn lays the stage for all kinds of upheavals, including two relationship re-alignments and a romantic rekindling.
Thing is, if I didn’t know anything and was just checking out the one-sheet and trailer like anyone else, I would probably be going “naaah…too sitcommy…a girl comedy.” And that’s not what this film is. I’m not the target audience, but if I was Joe Shmoe and I knew how this film actually plays, I’d have a different attitude.
Three weeks before the new opening date (i.e., an 800-screen platform release on 11.4 followed by a wide break on 11.11), Fox seems to be re-thinking the pitch. A new poster has apparently been designed and is on its way out (Fox wouldn’t let me see it or display it for this article), but frankly…?
Changing the one-sheet campaign might broaden the audience a bit (and I hope it does), but big-studio marketers aren’t supposed to shuffle the deck this close to the release date. Not according to the rule book, anyway. Teaser one-sheets are supposed to be in lobbies three or four months before release, but the “real” poster should be out and displayed a couple of months before…six weeks anyway.
After last weekend’s disappointing opening of In Her Shoes I’m suppressing a concern. I’m worried that Fox might blow it again with another quality piece that it doesn’t quite know how to sell. And in this case, an emotionally intimate film that would be a Fox Searchlight release in a more perfect world.
I don’t expect this to happen, mind…and maybe the Sarah Jessica wedding-finger campaign is the way to go after all, but I’m feeling a tiny bit nervous.
Next month, remember, comes a whole ‘nother challenge for Fox with James Mangold’s Walk the Line, which is likely to be seen as a white Ray. It’s been made with great craft and has a pair of Oscar-level performances (Joaqin Pheonix, Reese Witherspoon), yes, but country music ain’t soul music….and those toe-tapping Ray Charles songs helped put Ray over.
Sarah Jessica Parker
Line will be a natural with the critics and the Academy, but selling it to the public is going to take some doing…let’s face it.
The Family Stone might turn out okay. I know that if a seemingly shallow person likes a film, that’s usually a good sign it’ll be a hit. I know this actress who knows this woman, see, and she went to The Family Stone last weekend and said it was “fun.”
Convincing a woman who enjoys escapist movies that a movie with real emotional substance is “fun.”…that’s like hitting the daily double. There are a lot more people out there who think like this than there are people like me. Girls who don’t wanna pickle, just wanna laugh …you’ve got them, you’re just about there.
I always use my sons as box-office barometers. Jett, 17, says he hasn’t seen the one-sheet and only caught the end of the trailer…no firm impressions. But he said “yeah, cool” when I told him it wasn’t a Sara Jessica Parker movie but more of a mixed bag with funny and sad stuff mixed in. Dylan, 15, says he doesn’t care and isn’t going.
I took an attorney friend to see it last weekend in Pasadena, and he liked it…who wouldn’t? But on the way out he said my liking it as much as I do is proof that I’ve become “a rank sentimentalist.”
Everyone says Keaton will be a Best Supporting Actress nomineee and yeah, maybe…but Parker is the one who tears it up and takes the big character journey. Nelson and McAdams are right-on, and Wilson has a fine time with the best role he’s had since Bottle Rocket.
The Family Stone director Thomas Bezucha (l.), producer Michael London
The original title of Bezucha’s script, which kicked around for years and almost got made by indie-level producers twice before the present version came together late last year, was Fucking Hating Her and then Hating Her.
Wilson’s role of Ben Stone was reportedly going to be played in ’03 or ’04 by Billy Crudup, Steve Zahan and/or Aaron Eckhart…but I’m going by internet heresay.
Among the actors who were allegedly cast before and then left behind were Selma Blair (in the Claire Danes role of “Julie”), Bridget Moynahan (replaced by Parker); Blythe Danner (the Keaton role ), Donald Sutherland (replaced by Nelson), Maura Tierney (replaced by Reaser) and Johnny Knoxville (replaced by Mulroney…thank God!).
The only thing I don’t like about The Family Stone is the bubbly holiday music, composed by Michael Giacchino, heard over the opening credits. It says to the audience, “Boy, do we have a cute and cuddly movie for you!”
I hate it when musical scores try and establish an emotional mood before the film starts. (Unless it’s a melodrama or a cop film, in which case it’s fine…as long as the music isn’t “cute.”) We’ll get it soon enough, okay? Chill.
The Tighten-Up
With 18 minutes cut from the Toronto Film Festival version, Cameron Crowe’s Elizabethtown (Paramount, 10.14) is less of a chore to sit through…especially during the first half. It was hard to remember what was taken out, which means Crowe made a thousand tiny cuts rather than chop this or that scene. Crowe went back to the Avid after his latest film ran into bad buzz at both the Venice and Toronto film festivals in September.
Kirsten Dunst, Orlando Bloom in Cameron Crowe’s Elizabethtown
But there’s still that tone of dry farce and sentimental whimsy that never quite connects. You can feel it trying to win you over, and the more you’re aware of the effort the more you pull back.
And a second viewing has forced a realization that costars Orlando Bloom and Kirsten Dunst don’t feel that rooted to their characters or the film…or to anything else. They never seem to disappear into the story or the bedrock reality of it — all they seem to be doing is trying to make their line-readings sound spunky.
And a lot of those first-hour speed bumps are still there.
In the wake of his cloud-walking shoe flopping with the public and being returned to the factory, Bloom still says “I’m okay, I’m okay” to everyone. This makes you say to yourself, “This movie‘s not okay.”
It still doesn’t add up that a multi-millionaire shoe magnate (Alec Baldwin) would blow almost a billion dollars on Bloom’s Spasmodica. (Regional test marketing …hello?). I might have bought this if the losses were more in the range of $50 or $75 million or something, but $900 million is just dopey.
Orlando Bloom
Bloom’s co-workers still stare at him as he goes to meet Baldwin for the first stage of tongue-torturing and eventual termination. I said before (and everyone knows) that company employees never stare at a colleague who’s about to get whacked…they steal glances and then look away.
I know…Bloom’s character is imagining that everyone is looking at him, just like he imagines everyone in Elizabethtown is waving and offering directions when he first arrives.
Bloom still puts together that ridiculous suicide device (big carving knife duck-taped to a workout contraption) that he intends to use on himself. Stabbing yourself to death is…how to best say it?…a very whimsical way to go.
It still doesn’t add up that Bloom’s mom and sister (Susan Sarandon, Judy Greer) are averse to letting their dead ex-spouse/father’s body be buried in Elizabethtown. The guy moved there, lived there…why not let well enough alone instead of trying to bring the body back to Portland for cremation?
It’s still ridiculous that Bloom would be the only passenger on an overnight flight from Portland to Louisville (i.e., “Loo-ah-vuhl”), and on a 747 yet. (Since when are those behemoths used for 2,000-mile cross-country hops between mid-sized cities?)
And that bit with the funny-looking, pot-bellied guy who’s about to get married going into an obviously insincere crying jag when Bloom tells him his father has died…this is a terrible moment. Fake, awkward, horribly acted…you just want it to end.
The only significant cut I noticed is that dispute between Bloom and his Kentucky in-laws about whether his father will wear a blue or a brown suit in the coffin.
I guess I’m saying that if all these pain-in-the-ass things are still in the film, then maybe it hasn’t been improved all that much. But it has been…I think, to some extent.
Elizabethtown starts to get better with the all-night cell chat sequence between Bloom and Dunst…except for the re-charging problem. Six or seven hours of straight cell-calling and only Bloom re-charges. It’s a very small matter, but why doesn’t Dunst plug in also?
As I wrote in Toronto, the last third is actually pretty good. And the final road-trip sequence delivers the basic theme (what is it we get from life that it joyful and nurturing…what makes us want to hang on with our last dying breaths?) rather touchingly.
Bloom, Susan Sarandon, Judy Greer
It’s a better-crafted, obviously more ambitious film than Zach Braff’s Garden State, which everyone has been comparing it to for ages. The thing is this: even though Braff seems to have less on his mind he also has less to prove, making Garden State easier to sit through, even though it’s only a so-so film.
But of course, Elizabethtown has a great pop-song soundtrack …but that’s a given with any Crowe film.
I’m deeply indebted to Crowe for at least re-acquainting me with Tom Petty’s “Learning to Fly”, a song that I haven’t listened to since the Clinton era. It’s off Petty’s “Into the Great Wide Open” album, which came out in ’91.
I’m almost tempted to say buy the CD soundtrack and wait for the DVD, but the last third really is pretty good. And I’ve heard from some people who’ve liked the whole thing.
Other Trims
“It seemed to me that, aside from the argument scene between Bloom and the blowhard funeral home guy, most of the cutting done on Elizabethtown has been done in the last third.
“Sarandon’s speech at the memorial service seemed slightly shorter (and choppier) — do you think Jane Fonda has had a single moment of regret over not playing that role? — but Crowe left in the overwrought punchline. (The audience I saw it with chuckled when they first figured out what she was talking about, but they were silent by the time she started shouting out the specifics).
“I was surprised that Crowe kept the outlandish ‘Freebird’ scene, in which the audience keeps applauding and sitting in their seats as a flaming sculpture zooms around over their heads — absurd. The silly post-memorial service episode with the infuriated Chuck and Cindy is gone, and good riddance, so Crowe also had to snip the scene between Bloom and the desk clerk, who realizes the charges for his stay are going to be about $50,000, which was also ridiculous. (In these days of cutting every corner in the business world, there is no way a corporate credit card would still be valid after an employee left the company anyhow).
Sarandon, Greerm, Bloom
“I was also glad to see that the little deus ex machina postscript with the whistling shoes was dropped; even the generally friendly audience I saw it with at the gala screening in Toronto didn’t seem to buy that.
“But all the trims did absolutely nothing to improve the film itself, which still has major plot holes and miscast leads. What caused the shoes to be such a huge failure in the first place? And, yes, any product that was supposedly that “eagerly anticipated” would have been through quite a bit of research and testing during its eight-year development period.
“You’re also right about Dunst and Bloom. She strains to capture the airy-fairy quality that came so naturally to Kate Hudson in Almost Famous — it must be miserable for an actress to stuck with a role in which you do nothing except smile, turn your head and say things that make you sound like the secret love child of Rod McKuen and Tori Amos — and he seems painfully over-rehearsed. Everyone of his reactions seemed pre-processed and carefully planned out, which is certain death in comedy. The shots of him laughing to himself and crying in the car were utterly unconvincing, even though
“I liked most of the road trip itself. Bloom is easy to look at and a pleasant enough personality, but he cannot carry a film, something that has now been proven at least twice now in the past six months. Elizabethtown cried out for John Cusack, but actors like that aren’t easy to find.” — James Sanford
Futility
What happened with In Her Shoes last weekend? What does it mean for a movie this good and effective to earn a moderately cruddy $10 million dollars?
I realize the game isn’t over and word-of-mouth could it keep going, etc., but Shoes probably won’t even make $50 million, and I know it does the thing that big-studio “heart” movies are supposed to do, and I really don’t get it.
Al Pacino’s bullshit gambling film, Two for the Money, made $10 million last weekend also…good heavens. The theory going around last weekend was that young simians who don’t read reviews saw those Money trailers and felt the energy and said, “Hey…!”
Toni Collette, director Curtis Hanson and Cameron Diaz during filming of In Her Shoes
What happened to the supposed big-time drawing power of Cameron Diaz, who collects a $15 (or is it $20?) million fee on the strength of her hold over younger women? If she can’t push a well-reviewed quality film into the mid teens on the opening weekend, what does that say?
In Her Shoes has grabbed every audience I’ve seen it with (caught up, perfectly still, no coughing or bathroom breaks) and over 70% of the critics went for it. A director friend (you know him) called me after catching it last Saturday and said he did the whole laughing-and-crying thing. He said it was so good he wished he’d written and directed it himself.
I know the Fox people have been wondering for some time about how to sell it to the under-25’s who don’t want to know from reviews and refuse to respond to anything except trailers and ads.
I think I can deal with this situation best by running this letter from Roderick Durham in Tallahassee, Florida. It’s about the vibe during a 2:10 pm showing of In Her Shoes last Sunday:
“The show almost sold out, and get this — at least half of the audience was men. Mostly with wives, girlfriends, etc. but guys all the same.
“There are times when you are in a movie, and the silence is because what you are seeing on screen is mesmerizing or so intense that you can’t look away, nor can you move. Nobody wants to look away or miss anything. The Wedding Crashers was like that. War Of The Worlds was like that.
“Then there are movies like In Her Shoes. No doubt every man in the joint had to piss like a racehorse at one time…but Jeff…not ONE man left. Some women left to use the bathroom and come back, but none of us did.
“Know why? Great storytelling and great acting make it so you can’t leave. That’s what this was. In the confines of the genre…well, it’s like you said…if it is a ‘chick flick’ then it is one of the better ones EVER made…because it transcends that genre.
“These actors, Curtis Hanson, Susannah Grant…great storytellers. And great EDITING…not a wasted scene, wasted performance. Every character was three-dimensional, to me…and though the women rule, Mark Feurerstein, Richard Burgi, the great Norman Lloyd (long shot, but you are right about his performance NEEDING to be nominated), Jerry Adler…all lovely work.
“The scene stealer that is Francine Beers brings the movie much joy…but the top three actresses give it the soul, you know?
In Her Shoes costar Shirley MacLaine
“Shirley MacLaine — this might be my favorite performance of hers…even more than Terms of Endearment or (my favorite) The Apartment. So nuanced and just right on the money was her work here (loved the scene with she and Diaz at the table talking about Diaz’s new career as a shopper for the elderly).
“And Toni Collette…please. She gives too real and honest a performance not to be noticed. For me, so far this year of what I have seen, she gives the superior performance of the year. Hard to pull off what she does here. So good.
“Diaz will be overlooked, which is shameful since she proves herself an actress again here. The scene at the MTV audition…the great fight scene with she and Collette, and almost every scene in Florida…good for her.
“This is a lot, but when you see a successful commercial film…when a movie does what it is supposed to do, and even a bit more…well, one will go on about it. Thanks for the heads-up on this one. Any man who seriously can’t appreciate this movie has issues.”
Agreement
“So true about what Rod Durham says about In Her Shoes. I saw it last Friday after work and felt totally compelled by it… didn’t want to miss anything! This is the difference between a Curtis Hanson making this kind of film and a hack doing so.
“Shirley MacLaine has a moment when Jerry Adler steals a kiss from her. Her surprised reaction is worth an Oscar nod alone. Priceless!
“I did feel the last act dropped the ball a little, but not enough. A very good movie, which I’ve recommended. Weirdly enough, I raved about it to my sister, who told me she was turned off by the TV campaign. Despite my rave, she didn’t want to go. Interesting…” — Dixon Steele
Midlife Surge
Maybe I’m slow, but my awareness levels suddenly shot up the other day about Gong Li, Gong Li, Gong Li…some eighteen years after her film debut, and just over three months shy of her 40th birthday.
This was after hearing she gives the big burn-through performance in Memoirs of a Geisha (Columbia, 12.5). The word, in fact, is that she pretty much steals it from Zhang Ziyi, the star…as far as the “whoa, mama” thing is concerned. I mean, take it with a grain…
A seemingly dated photo of Gong Li, costar of Memoirs of a Geisha
Remember she was also great in Wong Kar Wai’s 2046 as well as in that short Wong directed for the anthology film Eros called “The Hand,” which I thought was the best of the three.
And that she’s playing the third-lead role of “Isabella” in Michael Mann’s Miami Vice (Universal, 7.28) right after Crockett (Colin Farell) and Tubbs (Jamie Foxx). Going by the script I have, Isabella is a financial-strategic sharpie (i.e., “I run the numbers”) involved in the high-end drug business.
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This locks it in on these shores. If Michael Mann thinks you’re cool and desirable, you’re cool and desirable.
And then comes…wait a minute, a young Hannibal Lecter movie called Behind the Mask, directed by Peter Webber (The Girl with a Pearl Earing)? That sounds like a mistake, no? This is Dino de Laurentiis going to the well for more cannibal bucks ….the fiend.
I first laid eyes on Gong Li in the late 80s when I caught her lead performance in a video of Red Sorghum, which I remember as being a good film that I wished would be over sooner.
I never saw The Story of Qiu Ju (’92), for which she was named Best Actress at the 49th Venice Film Festival, but everyone saw Farewell My Concubine (’92), for which she won an acting award from the New York Film Critics. She was 27 when that happened.
Then I kind of went to sleep on her until last year when everything started surging again.
An actor’s career karma can be very touch and go. You can be cold or warm or treading water and then wham, the bells go off and everyone wants you.
When I ran that item about Gong Li’s alleged stand-out performance work in Mem- oirs of a Gesiha, Vinod Narayanan wrote in and said…
“This was always going to happen. Not that Zhang Ziyi is a bad actress or anything, but Gong Li is something else.
“Check out the early Zhang Yimou flicks from Red Sorghum through Raise the Red Lantern up until To Live and Shanghai Triad. Or, if you can find it, the uncut version of Chen Kaige’s Temptress Moon.
“She’s a terrific actress and easy on the eyes. Very easy.”
Fail Safe
Big wipe-outs are what gifted risk-takers do on occasion. Any talented director can drop the ball, blow it…step on a land mine.
Is this something to be ashamed of? That’s probably putting it too strongly. Some- thing to duck, I suppose…as long as you don’t take it to extremes. Like tucking yourself into a fetal-ball position and refusing to get up, dust yourself off and get back on the horse.
Keep plugging, keep becoming. Sounds trite, doesn’t it?
Into the Blue
There is so much failure going on right now that it’s a little bit scary. The big fall and holiday movies are getting seen and picked off, one after another, and a lot of them made by veterans who are supposed to know what they’re doing.
Of course, nobody knows anything. They might have a knack, but they never have the key. Creation is always about starting from scratch, and anyone who says they haven’t second-guessed themselves and had Garden-of-Gethsamane mom- ents is lying.
I heard from a guy today about The Producers…I’ve been hearing from others about Memoirs of a Geisha. The crack of rifle fire in the distance, muffled by trees.
Next week I’m expecting to see the re-edited (i.e., shorter) version of Cameron Crowe’s Elizabethtown, but nothing will undo the trauma I went through when I saw the Toronto Film Festival version.
It was like being with Willem Dafoe’s Sgt. Elias in an early scene from Oliver Stone’s Platoon, and watching him fall into a pit filled with razor-sharp bamboo sticks.
Poor John Stockwell. Today can only be regarded as a day of mourning with the nationwide opening of Into the Blue, a film that shows that one of the best young genre directors of the 21st Century — a guy who stood tall with crazy/beautiful and Blue Crush — can be diverted from the path.
Johnathan Rhys-Myers, Woody Allen during filming of Match Point
Stockwell is in some Brazilian rain forest right now, making another hotbod-youths- in-peril movie called Turistas. Will he bounce back some day with something a bit more believable? Life is pain and choices and struggle…but I’d like to think so.
As far as I’m concerned, Steven Soderbergh’s Bubble, a very precise heart-of- proletariat-darkness drama, is reason to pop open the champagne and breathe easy for a change.
Soderbergh was falling off the horse repeatedly with Full Frontal, Solaris and the two Ocean’s movies…but he hunkered down and stayed with the process and that constant-state- of-becoming trip that all artists need to be into, and now he’s back.
How did William Friedkin manage to un-learn how to be the power-drive director he was when he made The French Connection, The Exorcist, Sorcerer, The Brinks Job and To Live and Die in L.A.?
I love the metaphor of an old dog trying out a new spin and making it work with a skeptical audience…like Woody Allen has done with his new film, Match Point. I love that Allen never quits.
Elizabethtown
For years I didn’t know what to say to Francis Coppola when I would see him at parties because all I had in my head was, “Are you gonna make another film or what? Why are you putzing around with the wine business? You’re a lion and you’ve been sitting under a tree and licking that thorn in your paw for the last seven or eight years.”
Now, finally, he’s making a new film — Youth Without Youth, a period drama with Tim Roth, Alexandra Maria Lara and Bruno Ganz. Coppola’s script, about the travials of a fugitive in Europe before World War II, is based on a book by Roman- ian author Mircea Eliade. It’ll begin shooting in Bucharest early this month, accor- ding to Variety.
I saw a movie a while back that was directed by a smart talented guy, someone who’s probably going to be around for the next three or four decades. It’s not a “bad” film — the guy has a voice and knows from brushstrokes and has the chops to make the various elements fuse together and all — and it’s got some scenes that touch bottom and are well charged.
But I really didn’t like the main character, and I was honest with the director about my feelings, and he took it like a grown-up and didn’t say I was wrong but said others have felt differently, and that he’s certainly proud of it.
He also said that once a director starts trying to hold onto a groove and/or repeat a past success he’s doomed…and he’s right.
Mr. Lloyd
“Thanks for your piece on Norman Lloyd. As an actor myself, I found his ‘just say the words’ advice as succinct and perfect an acting class one could hope for. It really is that simple, although making it come alive is the difficult part…something Lloyd has been doing his entire career. We should all be lucky and be like him when we get to be 91.” — Edward C. Klein
Shoes
“I interviewed almost the whole In Her Shoes team — Cameron Diaz, Toni Collette, Shirley MacLaine, Susannah Grant and Curtis Hanson — during the Toronto junket, and they all spoke with a bit of exasperation about the perceived difficulties of marketing the film.
“Every one of them was adamant about was that the press not call it a ‘chick flick.’
“Grant was particularly funny in addressing the topic: ‘No one asks Michael Bay how it feels to make a dick flick,’ she noted. MacLaine asked, ‘Who is the target audience for this movie? Families — but it’s not Disney.’ She said they’re trying to get the message across that it’s a story about a dysfunctional family overcoming their problems and learning to put the past in its place.
Cameron Diaz, Shirley MacLaine in In Her Shoes
“When Hanson was asked about the ‘chick flick’ label, he sighed. ‘I’ve been down that road,’ he said. ‘I didn’t want 8 Mile labeled a hip-hop movie because while that appeals to a certain segment of the audience, there’s a whole other world of potential audience that it’s a turn-off to. I wanted that movie to be broader than that.
‘But at a certain point, it’s like a wave coming in and you’re trying to stop it…but there’s also a compliment that comes with it, when you meet someone who says, ‘I hated hip-hop and I hated Eminem, and I went to see that movie and I was surprised.’ With this picture, time and again, people keep saying, `Maybe I wasn’t that interested and I thought it was a `chick flick,’ but I really connected with it.’
‘So if the story ends up being, ‘It looks like a chick-flick but’… and the ‘but’ leads to something interesting, then I accept it. I’m not going to keep beating my head against the wall.”
‘Even Diaz claimed to be embarrassed by the teaser poster that only shows her. She said her reaction when she first saw it was a baffled “What the f— is that?” — James Sanford
“Just wanted to say I’m anticipating In Her Shoes big-time thanks to your recent articles about it.
(l. to. r.) Variety screening series host Pete Hammond, In Her Shoes star Toni Collette, and director Curtis Hanson during post-screenign q & a at Hollywood’s Arclight — Monday, 9.26, 9:50 pm.
“I have always been into movies that kind of abuse you, unhealthy as that sounds. My favorite films are tearjerkers, war films that make you feel like crap, and horror movies that scare the shit out of you. All things that play on negative emotions.
“I look forward to Curtis Hanson movies. I liked L.A. Confidential a lot, and Wonder Boys further proved that he had something going on (though I didn’t really get it… it seemed like something was there…maybe I’m dumb). 8 Mile was so-so but hey, if Curtis Hanson has made a tearjerker that works, I’ll be the first in line.
“Any movie that makes you confront negative emotions in a powerful way is da bomb.” — Steve Clark
Wells to Clark: Wonder Boys was at least partially about the place you’re in when you’re ripped on really good weed. If you’ve never turned on, the movie wouldn’t work as well for you.
Clark to Wells: That might explain it.
Hey…
“Could you please stop listing Soderbergh’s Solaris in his row of ‘failures’? I get the other titles you mention (even though I sorta enjoyed most of those as well), but I consider his Solaris to be a brilliant film, and I know I’m not alone.
“It’s your opinion, of course, but are you just putting it in there because it failed commercialy? It is certainly an artistic triumph, as far as I’m concerned.” — Reint Scholvinck, who didn’t say what city or country he’s from although he seems to be from Norway or Sweden or one of those places in which people’s last names end with “vinck.”
Wells to Scholvinck: Solaris struck some people as some kind of profound or moving thing, yes. It was spooky — it had an undercurrent. It was made by and for people of some intelligence. But while it mostly took place on a space station it was not really about matters of space travel or exploration or, even in a nominal sense, anything technical or celestial. It was about loss and dark fantasy and then death.
George Clooney dies at the end, willfully as I recall it, crashing into terra firma with the space station because his beautiful wife (Natascha McElhone) is really and truly dead. Why? What did this achieve in terms of resolving the story or fulfilling themes? It would have been a bit more interesting to me if Clooney’s character had stayed on earth and coped with McElhone’s ghost in his own home.
Solaris was a lot of very fancy footwork and indications of heavy-osity. But it was obvious to anyone that it was, at heart, an expensive, generally nebulous art film about a dead wife that didn’t add up to a whole lot. That’s why it didn’t make any money. People have lowball tastes, yes, but they aren’t stupid. They took a look and said to themselves, “What the fuck is this?”
I’m not into suicide, personally. If my beautiful wife is dead, she’s dead, and my being dead won’t bring me any closer to her.
Death isn’t a membrane that you pass through, and on the other side is some romantic playground in which you can frolic and make love and walk your dog. Death is death…lights out, power off, adios. At best you’re off to your next life as a baby without any memory of your past lives, or you’re an invisible cosmic emissary soaring through the universe. Whatever…no Natascha.
Ivory Tower vs. 7-11
“Every time you talk about your disconnect with the jaded ivory-tower
elites who fail to get In Her Shoes, or how deeply you’re in touch with your blue-collar Jersey roots and how the mainstream avoidance of Hustle & Flow means that your working-man peers let that movie down, I swear to you that I plotz, and I’m not even Jewish.
“I get that critics are supposed to treat their opinions as gospel, the absolute inviolable revealed truth that brooks no other interpretation. Even if a critic doesn’t necessarily believe that about his opinions, that’s the rhetorical stance from which he is expected to issue his writing, without a lot of hedging.
“But you seem to believe it…to actually believe it-believe it. I could cherry pick ten selections of your work and show them to ten people and ask, ‘Is this guy in the ivory tower or not?’ and they would all say yes, but then some writers don’t like In Her Shoes as much as you and suddenly you’re a class warrior.
“The truth of it is — and I hate to break this to you — that you are not the standard-bearer of perfectly refined taste, the dweller at the crossroads of piffle and pretension with no personal idiosyncrasies to deter you from determining which movies deserve sellout crowds. Deviance from your picks and pans does not signal the demolition of popular culture on the one hand, or the stultification of the Film Comment crowd on the other.
“As a device to get me to value your opinion a bit more, this whole last-honest-man shtick just doesn’t work. Perhaps I should append ‘for me’ to that, but I think I might have actually stumbled upon some inviolable revealed truth.” — Sean Weitner
Wells to Weitner: Before I discovered — accepted — my blue-collar, man-of-the- people thing, I was in constant torment as a writer. Now that I’ve embraced who I am, it’s still hard…but it’s nowhere near as difficult to bang out the column, so I must be on to something.
I know “good” when I see it or feel it, even if I don’t like it, and that quality-meter I have inside me comes in part from being attuned to ivory-tower pretensions and affected intellectual posturings, etc. and trying to stay clear of that.
I always imagine myself standing in a parking lot outside a 7-11, and that’s how I find the words and the attitude. I may be some kind of elitist…I mean, you can throw that at me, but anyone who tries to appreciate the best in film art is going to resent lowbrow philistine tastes in movies.
The bottom line is that I know who I am and where I come from — the towns of Westfield, New Jersey, and Wilton, Connecticut — and being in touch with that middle-class, 7-11, never-finished-college way of looking at things is my biggest strength as a writer. I mean, along with my tenacity.
There is a tendency among learned know-it-alls to recoil from heart movies. I do it all the time — I hate icky emotionalism — but in the final analysis the critical divide between cheap and/or coyly manipulative heart movies and ones that really touch bottom and address commmon issues in an adult way is craft. Craft and honest emotion is there in In Her Shoes. There’s no question about that.
There are such things as emotional pores, and you and I know that ivory-tower elites tend to maintain a state of guardedness and wariness with such films, because if they appear overly susceptible to emotional films they are dead meat as far as their peers are concerned. Elites don’t tear up in movies like regular people do, and they don’t laugh as loudly, and so on.
You will not find a single ivory-tower elite these days who will speak favorably of Titanic. They’ve all been told to deride it and every last one of them does…but the fact is that the final 15 minutes of that film gets people where they live, and the elites can foxtrot and sidestep all they want but that movie wouldn’t have scored those hundreds of millions if it hadn’t delivered a very strong emotional current.
Elites always pooh-pooh emotion. I know this is because I’m one of them. I know exactly where they live.
Weitner to Wells: I’m not saying you’re full of shit, and I’m certainly not doubting the quality of In Her Shoes — after Wonder Boys, I would be happy to watch anything Curtis Hanson wanted to put onscreen, because I think he really has that studio artisan knack.
“And, like you, I’ve had to defend Titanic from hecklers in the intervening years. So I know very much where you’re coming from.
“Where I’m still stuck is this idea of objectively identifiable craft-cum-worthiness, and a monolithic body of tower dwellers who reject worthy movies for being emotional. I think the matter is more, as you say, that you, and I, and everyone out there that writes about movies, has a touch of the ivory tower in them that flares up when our personal taste runs contrary to popular opinion, expressed in the box-office or elsewhere.
“Of all the professionals I read, and all of the pro-ams with whom I associate, and even the few film academics under whom I’ve studied, all of them go to movies for the emotion.
“Sure, we can find some Andrew Sarris or Jonathan Rosenbaum reviews to build a case that they’re out of touch, but your persistent appeals to some nebulous elite that’s out there and against whom you defend quality movies — or when the proles let you down by not taking a chance and exposing themselves to the paragons of craft you’ve uncovered — doesn’t prima facie make your opinion any more valuable or valid, and in some ways it detracts from it.
“When there are specific pieces of wrongheaded criticism that you want to bring up and pick apart — that’s entirely appropriate and can be terrifically illuminating. Sometimes a stated viewpoint needs challenging. But attributing opinions to some Village Voice boogeyman, as opposed to some actual writer with whom you want to tangle, doesn’t do anything to bolster your argument.”
Wells to Weitner: Point not entirely accepted, but taken.
Caan Wrath
True Patriot: Maybe because I just watched this week’s My Name is Earl (should I point out that I did this from a copy a downloaded using BitTorrent, which will kill Tivo in a few years?)…
Wells: How is downloading from BitTorrent going to kill Tivo? Explain…I’m really curious.
True Patriot: But when I got to the inevitable ‘How I Was Mistreated This Week’ section of your Wired blog (Scott Cann standing you up in Soho)….
Wells: The Scott Caan thing was triggered by seeing him in Into the Blue. I don’t run how-I-was-mistreated stories with any regularity. I don’t run them irregularly.
Scott Caan
True Patriot: I had to wonder if you have considered that perhaps these things happen because of karma?
Wells: Have you considered that Scott Caan, being the big swinging dick and all, may have succumbed to thoughtlessness?
True Patriot: Ever stopped to consider that one man’s “telling it like it is” is another’s rude, pretentious egotist?
Wells: Yeah, I realize that. And if you don’t like the way I tell it, you can do whatever.
True Patriot: That maybe these little shocks-to-the-system are karmic paybacks?
Wells: I didn’t want to get into this as heavily as I am now, but Scott Caan not showing for an appointment is one thing. Not leaving a note to explain or calling after-the-fact to apologize is another. All I said in the item was, this is what Scott Caan, man among men, didn’t do. What’s your problem?
True Patriot: I’m just saying….
Grabs
Limits of Charm
It’s not “nice” to have a Keira Knightley problem. Speaking against a beautiful spirited young woman never wins you any favors. It is seen as impolite and ungentlemanly, and perhaps even uncouth. But I can’t suppress it any longer.
She’s 20 years old and beautiful and a near-star…her face on the one-sheets, her name in the gossip columns. And she keeps making film after film. Her next outing is Domino (New Line, 10.14), a Tony Scott urban actioner, and then comes Pride and Prejudice (Focus Features, 11.18) and then, early next July, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest.
Keira Knightley
And I swear to God she doesn’t have it. I don’t mean sex appeal or vivaciousness or any of that natural-aura stuff. I mean she doesn’t have “it.” And it’s not for lack of experience. She’s been acting since she was five or six, or for the last 14 or 15 years.
Everything she’s in, in every role she played except one, I’ve never believed her. Certainly not for the last couple of years, since she became a big name. I went with her performance in Bend It Like Beckham (which seemed natural and unforced), but everything since has felt arch, postured, projected.
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There’s an unfussed-with, straight-from-the-heart vibe you can sense when an actor or actress is in the zone, and Knightley doesn’t seem to know the first thing about this.
It was her performance in The Jacket that woke me. There was a scene in which her character got extremely angry and defensive when Adrien Brody tried to explain his relationship to her, and I remember being pulled out of the film by Knightley’s overplaying…the way her eyes glared and went nutso and she opened her mouth and trembled with what was supposed to be rage or fear.
I saw her play Julie Christie’s Lara role in a 2002 TV miniseries of Dr. Zhivago …about ten or fifteen minutes worth, I should say…and found it draining. Christie put soul and sensuality and a certain disciplined cultivation into her performance in David Lean’s 1965 version. Knightley’s performance wasn’t in the same galaxy.
As Guinevere in King Arthur
She’s felt the same way to me in Love Actually (I didn’t feel a hint of genuine emotion from her in that abominable film) and King Arthur (nothing but nothing happened between her and Clive Owen) and Pirates of the Caribbean, etc.
Now it’s gotten to the point of my going “uh, oh” when I hear she’s in something.
I’ve seen Knightley in Pride and Prejudice (Focus Features, 11.18) and I’ve told a publicist I won’t get into it until it plays at the Toronto Film Festival. But I think at this point she needs to be drop-dead exceptional in Domino (New Line, 10.14).
She’s got to be good enough in it so people like me don’t just say, “Oh, she’s better in this one.” She’s got to be good enough so that she doesn’t get in the way of whatever the movie is trying to do. She’s got to just be and then flow with it.
People are delighted with Knightley…that young, beautiful, Audrey Hepburn-ish quality, and the way she seems to add fizz to any movie she’s in. (“Seems” being a relative term.) And I know all the guys crave her and dream about her. Last year London’s Tatler called her the most desirable single woman in the England.
But there’s nothing about her that sticks or sinks in. Whatever it is that Rachel McAdams possesses and dispenses, Knightley has not.
All she has is her youth, her sexual spirited-ness (that playful, slightly taunting thing she does with her eyes whenever a male costar is sniffing around), and her good looks…but there’s even something a tad off in that department.
I do know that when Knightley smiles something odd happens. I don’t know if “smile” is really the right word. Her eyes compress into feral little slits and little bags bunch up above and below, and it looks a bit scary. And then her mouth opens and her almost-fearsome teeth are exposed (she could play a vampire at a drop of a hat) and there’s a slight glint of madness in all of this as her head tilts back and she lets go with a throaty “hah-hah-hah!”
Granted, a certain exuberant joie de vivre gushes out, but just as some people are said to have intoxicating smiles, can’t the opposite be true as well?
I was at a party last January for Inside Deep Throat at the Sundance Film Festival, and I was talking to Donnie Darko director Richard Kelly, and Knightley — her hair cropped like it is in Domino — was there. She and Kelly had been together on the Domino set (he wrote the excellent script) and they had a brief chat at the party, and when they finished Kelly told me Knightley made him weak in the knees in a very special way.
That’s probably what most guys want from actresses, to feel aroused and desiring. There’s nothing wrong with that, and we might as well let it go at that.
As Robert Mitchum’s character said in Out of the Past, “I can let it all go.”
With Adrien Brody on the set of The Jacket
Yer Blues
I never liked John Landis’ The Blues Brothers (1980). I’ve always found it obnoxious, egoistic, forced, unfunny. I had always heard it was a big cocaine movie, and I always believed that story because the film has a cranked-up quality.
I was a pretty big fan of John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd’s before it came out. I remember going to see them perform a Jake and Elwood blues concert at Carnegie Hall in ’80 or thereabouts, and having a pretty good time. But I cooled down on these guys big-time after The Blues Brothers.
I remember having a breakfast interview with Landis at a New York hotel with a Universal publicist sharing the table. It was 1982 and we were talking about An American Werewolf in London, which I liked. And I remember Landis wolfing down his soft-boiled eggs and toast and home fries and slurping his coffee as I poked around with my chickenshit questions (i.e., ones that didn’t try to challenge or probe as much as kiss ass).
Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi in late ’70s Blues Brothers mode.
And then, out of nowhere, an unfortunate but honest question came out. I asked Landis about the discrepancy between the “enormity” of The Blues Brothers — the massive over-whacked scale of the thing, like those ridiculous car chases through Chicago with fifty or six cop cars after Jake and Ellwood’s — and the “humble origins” of the Chicago blues.
“That movie was not about the humble origins of the Chicago blues,” Landis retorted. “It was a musical comedy in the style and attitude of ‘Saturday Night Live’…”
But it was about Chicago blues music, I said, and the music came from black guys who’d moved up from the south and lived on the South Side, taking from the ache and the rough-and-tumble of life and turning it into blues numbers, and the movie was funny and all” — I was lying when I said this — “but it just didn’t seem…”
“It wasn’t a documentary!” Landis repeated. He was getting pissed, and the Universal guy was looking concerned and gesturing with his hand, telling me to let it go. So I turned the subject back to American Werewolf and the mood was cool again.
In any case, I was a bit startled to read some very kind and admiring comments about the new Blues Brothers DVD the other day from Dave Kehr, the New York Times DVD guy.
The Blues Brothers “may have arrived near the end of one tradition” — i.e., the old-school movie musical — “but it helped to found another: the ‘Saturday Night Live’ spin-off.
“Giving a feature-length depth and interest to characters conceived for (and through) sketch comedy is no easy proposition, as the many disastrous SNL vehicles over the years have copiously demonstrated.
“But Jake and Elwood have a staying power unusual for the form, perhaps because Mr. Aykroyd (who wrote the script with Mr. Landis) draws so affectionately and authoritatively on the blues tradition that stands behind them.”
This is precisely what the film doesn’t do. It gives, as Kehr notes, “slam-bang [musical] production numbers” to James Brown, Cab Calloway, Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin, but there’s never a feeling that the film is really “with” them.
The Blues Brothers was a jape, a flamboyant showboat and a kind of musical put-on. It was Landis, Belushi and Aykroyd leading a splashy Hollywood parade that was mainly about money and enormity and drugs and bloat.
Whackings
I asked a tongue-in-cheek question in Wednesday’s column: “If Hollywood was run like the mythological mafia and you, the reader, were the boss of all the families with absolute control, who in the Hollywood filmmaking game would you decide to whack for the good of the industry?”
And here’s what came in…a torrent. I think it’s safe to say there’s a lot of anger out there. It’s also apparent that the most famously loathed Hollywood figures (Michael Bay, George Lucas, Brett Ratner, Jan de Bont, Cuba Gooding, et. al.) of recent years are still tops of the pops.
Here and there I’ve inserted in a Wells exception at the end of whatever statement I think is unfair or incorrect.
“Oh good God, where do you begin with this list? So many awful, worthless, snot-nosed filmmakers and actors, so little time. But here are a few….
“Martin Lawrence. Crimes: Every single starring movie this big zit has ever appeared in should be stomped out. To call Lawrence an actor or a comedian is an offense to anyone who ever took the profession seriously. Without question the single unfunniest person to ever sully a movie screen.
“Adam Sandler — Crimes: Big Daddy, Billy Madison, Little Nicky, Mr. Deeds, helping give Rob Schneider work, etc, etc, etc. Nowhere near as awful as Lawrence, and PT Anderson managed to make Punch Drunk Love work nicely, but I’d sacrifice that swell little movie if every other lazy piece of crap Sandler has made, or nursed along, would disappear with it.
“Rob Schneider — So obvious it needs no explanation.
“Rob Reiner — Crimes: Everything he directed after A Few Good Men. Reiner is a tragedy — a director who started out very impressively (This is Spinal Tap, Misery) and seemed infallible until he flipped over and decided to suck at everything.
“Rob Cohen — Crimes: direction of Dragonheart, The Fast and Furious, XXX, Stealth. Whacking not necessary. Will probably commit suicide in wake of Stealth. It’s a bad time to be named Rob.
[Wells exception: Rob Cohen has his issues, as we all do, but The Fast and the Furious is a great B movie in the Sam Arkoff tradition, and, I think, his best film ever.]
“Michael Bay — Too easy! Let him live so we can continue to revel in telling him how much he sucks.
“George Lucas — WAY too easy!
“Chris Columbus — Crimes: Home Alone 2, his Harry Potter movies, Bicentennial Man, etc.
“Cuba Gooding, Jr. — Crimes: Snow Dogs, Chill Factor, Rat Race, Instinct…worst post-Oscar career ever. Two final words: Boat Trip. Probably begging Jamie Foxx for a job as we speak.” — Erik Ainsworth
Brett Ratner
“I think a lot of the people who’d be whacked would be the backroom players, by which I mean the ones who seem to inhibit creative people by trying to make the movies more of a product and business and less of an art form.
“It goes from the ridiculous (Jon Peters and his quest to make Batman more merchandisable than God, Tom Rothman and his hiring Brett Ratner to direct X3 as a big FU to Bryan Singer) to the not-so-ridiculous (Walter Parkes for emasculating Cameron Crowe’s Untitled, every development exec who has given Terry Gilliam and Martin Scorsese hell for anything, etc.)…but either way these guys all need to go on a ride to the New Jersey Meadowlands.
“I think, and not to sound like a geek, that the above phenomenon happens most with geeky movies, so things like The Watchmen (which I’ve never read, but the idea of Paul Greengrass doing a comic book/superhero movie gets me jazzed), Gilliam’s Good Omens, Quixote, etc., tend to get scrapped because of this focus on merchandising and tie-ins and all of the stuff that has nothing to do with filmmaking, but everything to do with product.
“Not to say this isn’t a business — it is, and companies are investing hundreds of millions of dollars in making movies, and need to show returns to keep making movies — but when it’s entirely about product, the real reason why you’re in the movie-making business kind of flies out the window…I don’t know if there’s a slump or not, but as someone said, the easiest way to bring crowds into the movie theatres is just to make better movies. People who don’t get that don’t deserve to work in Hollywood.
“And the senior executive at Warner Bros. who made the call to hire Chris Columbus to direct the first two Harry Potter films…unless this person was also behind hiring of Alfonso Cuaron….whack!
“I’m torn on the Weinsteins, because they did screw with Scorsese on Gangs of New York, Gilliam on The Brothers Grimm, and they spiked Spike Lee’s version of Rent. (Which led to Chris Columbus directing it!) But they’ve also being pushing the envelope for 20 years trying to get films that no one else makes made. For that, I’d spare them.” – Sridhar Prasad.
“Is whacking the way to go? Are we past the point of reprogramming? Locking up Michael Bay, McG, etc. in your prison and then forcing them to watch good movies 16 hours a day, until they can’t comprehend the shit they made before? It might be kinda fun to see how long it would take to break them.” — James Watson, Tallahassee, FL.
“At the very top of my hit list would be Tom Cruise. His recent actions and public behavior sets a bad example for the organization as a whole. He needs to be reprimanded and made an example of in the most obvious way possible.
“Taking out Cruise would be a very Fredo-esque hit, and one that could set in motion the downfall of the family if not handled properly. Regardless, I can’t think of a stronger way to send a message to any who would follow in his footsteps. Though he is at the top of the list, he is by no means to be the first to be dealt with, rather the last. It makes the job that much more poignant.
“The second one to be iced would be Brett Ratner. Making horribly bad big-budget cinema is okay, but a minimum standard must be set. Here is that bar.
“Rounding out the list to make a solid three would be Ben Affleck. I like Ben, so he wouldn’t actually be a full-on hit. Just a warning, broken legs or a trashed mansion….something like that. You got one more chance kid, better make it work.
Tom Cruise
“So there you have it, in this order: Affleck (a warning), Rattner (a message) and Cruise (an example).” — Gabriel Groves
“Okay, first off, this wouldn’t be a one-shot deal. This would be about sending a message. Those who survived would have to live in fear of me. So here goes…
“Steven Spielberg. I worship this guy at the altar, but if he were to get clipped, imagine the fear this would instill in Michael Bay and Rob Cohen, wondering what in God’s name might happen to them, etc. They wouldn’t be able to sleep.
“Mark Wahlberg. His last bit of Boogie Nights goodwill went away with `I got the rock now.’
“Larry or Andy Wachowski. I’d make Keanu pick which one survives, Sophie’s-Choice style. Somebody has to pay for the total Matrix collapse of ’03, and you can only blame Joel Silver to a certain extent.
“And finally, ironically, compassionately…Francis Ford Coppola. To put the poor man out of his misery.” — John Sheridan
“For the good of Hollywood and the moviegoing public, I propose that first in line to be whacked (metaphorically, of course) should be either John Carpenter or John Landis. Preferably both.
“Don’t get me wrong, they’ve both contributed just fine in the past. Halloween, The Thing, The Blues Brothers, An American Werewolf in London..but that was then, this is now. The creative well’s dried up, they’re going through the motions and when a studio somehow forgets what dross Ghosts Of Mars or Beverly Hills Cop III really were, millions of dollars get wasted on their next cinematic atrocity. Money that could have been spent on up-and-coming talent.
“They’re like pet dogs. Years ago, they were bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, full of energy and good fun to be with. Now you’ve got to spend your time around their embarrassingly insipid shit. It’s better for you…better for the dogs…that they get put down.” — Phil Guest, Bournemouth, UK.
Marlon Brando as Vito Corleone in The Godfather.
“Michael Bay. Car chase. Slow-motion shooting. Then blow him up. Let him sleep with the birds.” — Chris Andrien
“Hit #1: Brett Ratner and fast, before he can do any more damage to X3.
“Hit #2: Everyone at Dark Castle Entertainment except Robert Zemeckis, although I still might kneecap him for producing Gothika.
“Hit #3: George Lucas, for perverting everything good about Star Wars for more money than anyone could ever spend in a lifetime.
“Hit #4: Uwe Boll, who somehow got $60 million for something called Dungeon Siege, and without the help of anyone at Dark Castle. It’s insulting to guys in angora sweaters everywhere to call this guy our generation’s Ed Wood.
“Hit #5: Jan De Bont, and here’s why: Speed 2, The Haunting, Tomb Raider 2 and The Haunting. Men of good conscience need to do whatever’s necessary to keep that man from getting behind a camera again, and he’s already prepping a movie about a giant Megalodon shark. Put Luca Brasi on this one.” — Man with No Name
“If I were the Hollywood Don, I would just start killing all the big names who’ve failed in egregious ways to live up to the promise of their earlier careers….in order to scare all the young guys. The following filmmakers would need to die:
“1. Ben Stiller. The man has to go for the sake of his comedies. He’s been making the same movie with the same character for too many years.
“2. Steven Spielberg or George Lucas. Major complacency from two guys that have defined the whole blockbuster system is too much. If I’m the big boss, they get put in a room together and whoever walks out still has a job.
“3. Oh, and while I’m at it? No rappers in movies. The few good actor rappers, like Mos Def, will just have to be cut for the general good…sorry.
“4. Same thing as #3 for pop stars.
“5. Same thing as #2 and #3 for models and any cast member of SNL. Stick to short skits and assume that your brilliant idea won’t translate into a 100-minute feature film.
Ben Stiller
“6. Quentin Tarantino. His movies are not good enough to come out once every five years or whatever.
“7. Wes Craven. Red Eye shows he still has it, but someone must take the blame for the rush of crappy horror films, especially the recent onslaught of PG-13 shitbombs. I’d blame him since Scream really got the ball rolling. I think the money it made convinced too many smaller studios to come out with similar splatter flicks and forced the big companies to cash in with all the horror fluff we see today.
“8. No more sports movies or movies based on extreme sports. Miracle and The Rookie were decent, but you also have ones like Torque , The Bad News Bears, Motorcross, The Fast and the Furious, etc. etc.
“9. Tim Burton. Too many movies nowadays think quirky characters or inventive set design equals good.
“10. Eddie Murphy. I’d make him an example of talented people who must stay in the genre that made them famous. His death would serve as a warning to Chris Rock, Dave Chappelle, and others.
“The following who would get a sound beating and be threatened with worse:
“1. Robert DeNiro. He had a free pass from me until about five years ago. I’ll let Meet the Parents/Focker thing go, but him being in every other “thriller” that comes out has to stop. Have your career go out with a bang.
“2. Ben Affleck. I’m convinced he can act, so perhaps scaring him to death will inspire some better performances and/or script selections.
“3. Brad Pitt. Same thing as Affleck. More films like Fight Club and 12 Monkeys and less Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Troy, etc….or else!
4. Anyone thinking of a sequel or making a movie that may require a sequel. All must be approved.” — Jason Tanner
“To do any good with an epidemic as large as the creative-deprivation tank known as Hollywood, you’d need something larger than Corleone ordering a hit — something along the lines of Stalin ordering a purge is what’s needed. The film business is one asylum that needs to be run by the inmates. To `what do you call 500 lawyers at the bottom of the ocean?’ I would add bean-counters and development executives.” — David Ludwig
“If you were looking for a power play you might seriously have to consider a big player like George Lucas. Put a stop to the man who felt that CGI was more important than story. The film industry might just be the better for it.
“Angelina Jolie. All of the Hollywood wives would rejoice. She won’t be done until somebody stops her.
“Michael Bay. Enough is enough.” — James Kent
“You don’t have to whack Tim Burton and Kenneth Branagh, but you might want to break their thumbs for squandering real ability on masturbatory, self-indulgent junk. I would do a quick knee-capping on George Lucas” — Griff Griffis
“Don’t take this personally, but as the Don I would whack all the critics and sites that spend an inordinate amount of time dissecting and criticizing every movie several months before it comes out.
“I’m speaking specifically of sites like Ain’t It Cool News. Much like Fox News has the effect of feeding and reinforcing the viewpoints of the converted that follow it, AICN uses its clout to try to mold films into the vision of the guys that run the site. This predigesting is another thing contributing to the demise of movies.
“I’ve read good reviews on AICN, but most of the time, AICN’s pieces start something like, `I truly hope this movie is good, but the signing of so-and-so as director/star etc. really has me worried.’ From that point on, the movie doesn’t have a chance.
“Or, alternatively, ‘The news out of the latest Spielberg/Lucas/Jackson flick has my geek heart aflutter.’ The result of these posts is that, no matter how big a piece of shit the movie eventually turns out to be, Knowles and his crew will support it with their last breaths.
The widely despised McG, captured, one presumes, on the set of one of the Charlie’s Angels films.
“This stuff creates a bizarre pack mentality and buzz which pigeonholes a movie long before it has a chance to stand or fall on its own merits. I single out AICN because it’s the site I’m most familiar with, but they’re not the only offenders. It’s a shame that some movies can barely get a fair shake any more, simply because they had the misfortune of using a non-genre director, while others get accolades simply because some faded fanboy god is in the director’s chair.
“Luca, Luca…my very good friend.” — Rich Swank, Orlando.
“Michael Bay and Jerry Bruckheimer — kings of the big, dumb, stupid movies that have ripped the heart out of filmmaking. Soul-less, plot-less, script-less, their movies are all about blowing things up, and VERY loud soundtracks. They’re obscenities. Tie them to cement shoes, and dump ’em both in the Pacific. The film world will be lots better off without ’em. “– Lewis Beale
“If I were going to execute people, I’d start with Keanu Reeves. His movies qualify as crimes against humanity. In fact, just about everyone associated with Point Break would get at least a near fatal beating. Also, McG’s body would mysteriously turn up at the bottom of a mine shaft.
[Wells exception: Keanu has been pretty good in more than a few films. He was perfect in The Matrix and in the Bill and Ted movies and in River’s Edge. And what’s so terrible about Point Break?]
“I’d give the horse in the bed treatment to Tom Hanks to warn him to never make another movie like The Terminal again; in fact, never do any kind of movie that requires an accent again. I’d also take a hammer to Spielberg’s hands until he recut War of the Worlds so that the son dies. ” — Brad Sims
“The #1 person on my hit list would have to be Joel Schumacher. Next would be George Lucas. Before the most recent Star Wars trilogy I would have simply had my goons dangle him out of a window until he agreed to hire a writer to redo the crap Lucas calls dialogue just so I wouldn’t have to stick my fingers in my ears and hum loudly in the theater during the love scenes.
“I’m not a big Star Wars fan and haven’t been since I turned 15 or 16 but most of my friends are and they don’t appreciate that loud humming let alone the sound of me shifting uncomfortably in my seat after/during every bad line.” — Jon Scott
John Landis
“If I were the absolute Don Corleone of Hollywood, these are people who would need to go…
“Peter Jackson and New Line, and Mr. and Mrs. Wachowski. You must pay for your sins, and those sins include forcing people to pay to see more than one movie to get closure. No matter how you dress it up, you still have to tell a story.
“Anyone who is so unoriginal that they have to produce remakes of old movies that don’t need to be remade and shouldn’t be remade, especially by decent filmmakers trying to cash a check.
“Anyone making a film for the express purpose of depressing you into winning an Oscar because their film is important. Hello, Mr. Minghella? This is your mountain. Sure is cold now, isn’t it?
“Actors so determined not to be typecast that they will sign on to any piece of crap just to break the mold, and refusing to listen to that little voice in their head that says that it just isn’t right. With that goes the managers and agents and entourage feeding these actors the ego boosting b.s. at the expense of all of us.
“Filmmakers not named Wes Anderson playing madlibs cinema. Anderson perfected the genre with The Royal Tenenbaums, but now you have so many people trying to do it. Garden State had the same problems (Portman in a helmet, Gulf War cards, etc.? )” — Evan Boucher.
Shoes Again
“I saw Curtis Hanson’s In Her Shoes at an early press screening a few weeks ago, and your source is right on the money. It’s a terrific film that is destined to go over very well with audiences, if Fox can bring them in.
“Another critic said, ‘Women will love it because of the relationship between the sisters and guys will love it because Cameron spends a lot of her time in her underwear or in a skimpy bikini.’ But it’s more than that. It’s witty, credible and exceptionally well-played by everyone, including MacLaine, who comes into the picture halfway through and becomes kind of the touchstone for the second half of the story.
Cameron Diaz as she appears in Curtin Hanson’s In Her Shoes (20th Century Fox, 10.7)
“I also appreciated how the screenplay doesn’t throw in a last-minute tragedy to get the tears flowing. The tensions and the happier moments between the sisters felt genuine because Diaz and Collette get ample time to really establish the personalities of these women.
“Collette is an overachieving lawyer who thrives in the workplace and doesn’t really know how to function outside of it. She operates almost entirely on brain power, but she doesn’t have much time for compassion or even relaxation. Diaz plays a troubled, dyslexic cutie with unrealistic expectations from life.
“In one of the film’s most painful scenes, she skips out on a job interview her sister set up for her to zoom up to New York for an audition to be an MTV host. She’s bubbly enough, but she can’t follow the teleprompter.
“Ashamed of her lack of education, she forces herself to play the ditzy good-time gal who can always get free drinks, even though she’s becoming aware of the fact she can’t get away with that forever.
“Collette tells her something that’s cruel but true, along the lines of `young, promiscuous women are considered fun, but middle-aged promiscuous women are just pathetic.’ (I cringed, because I’ve actually said that same thing to someone I know who was on a similar course.)
“MacLaine’s character is outwardly strong, but a bit lonely, the kind of person who takes care of everyone else so well in order to avoid considering her own needs. Her scenes with Diaz (who initially sees MacLaine as someone she can sponge off of, but quickly figures out that’s not going to be the case) are just terrific.
“I give a lot of credit to Hanson, who took what could have been chick-flick soap opera and turned it into a movie that’s going to connect with a whole lot of people, like As Good As It Gets, which it often reminded me of.
“If I can squeeze it into my schedule, I would happily see it again in Toronto. One thing to note: The print we saw (about 90 % complete) ran about 125 minutes and the Toronto Film Festival page lists it as being 130 minutes, so unless they beefed it up at the last minute it’s not quite as long as you were told.” — James Sanford
Reading Blood
“It’s good you’re going to grab Truman Capote’s ‘In Cold Blood’ for another read. It’s been one of those for me that, about once a year, it’ll be a rainy Sunday or something, nothing else to do, and I’ll say, ‘Think I’ll read ‘In Cold Blood’ again,” and then spend the better part of the day with it.
“I know there’d been a lot of random murder-robberies before the Clutter killings, but this one, and what Capote did with it, I think ended a lot of our innocence. I went to college in Kansas and saw the movie in Wichita when it hit, about a decade or so after the murders, surrounded by those infinite plains and very interested Kansans.
“I had a similar, more pointed experience a few years later in Wichita Falls, Texas, viewing the premiere of The Last Picture Show, which was shot in black-and-white the year before in the area, surrounded then by local extras in the film, the small group of movie aficionados in the town, and more of those infinite plains.) — Joe Hanrahan.
Keira
“I think Keira Knightley is easily the most over-rated actress that my country has ever produced. Every film she’s in she always has her mouth slightly open, giving the impression that she’s a zombie. (She has the acting talents of one) I saw her in that Dr. Zhivago drama, and she looked like a lost child in it, drawing me out of the story. (I haven’t seen the David Lean version).
“You are spot on saying that she hasn’t got ‘it’ like, say, Natalie Portman. I realize she’s only 20, but at the moment she has a lot of catching up to do to get anywhere near our best actress working at the moment, Kate Winslet.” — Ben Colegate, London, England.
Keira Knightley and Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean.
“Oh my God, it is so refreshing to see your comments about Keira Knightley! I’ve been wondering what is wrong with me, because in every film I’ve seen her in (except maybe Bend it Like Beckham) I’ve failed to see what the hype is all about.
“She definitely does not have ‘it.’ I don’t think she’s a good actress at all, and, in fact, her looks bug me to no end as well. It’s that pouty mouth, I guess, it has one expression…pouty. She is actually the main reason I have no desire to see Pride and Prejudice, and at this point I’m real ‘iffy’ on whether or not to see Domino. I’ll wait until I read more reviews and hear from friends.
“Your comparison to Rachel McAdams is a good one. In my mind, however, perhaps because her looks are similar, every time I see Keira I think about Natalie Portman. Natalie is also young, also has been acting for a long time. But Natalie definitely has ‘it.’ I think she has talent in spades, has been getting better and better and will be seeing lots of critical acclaim and award attention in the future. I don’t see that for Keira.
“Thanks for making me feel I’m not alone.” — Cindy Wick
Grabs
Pub in Yorkville area of Toronto, about five blocks from where I’m staying.
On St. George, just north of Bloor.
My last Manhattan shot of the summer — bootleg DVDs laid out on the cement floor of the Union Square L line.
It doesn’t aspire to high art or try for the sort of emotional engagement that makes you choke up, but Lexi Alexander‘s Green Street Hooligans (Odd Lot, 9.9) is nonetheless a very intense emotional hybrid thing, which is to say a sports movie and a bloody gang-violence movie mashed into one.
The lads doing what they know, love and do best in Lexi Alexander’s Green Street Hooligans (Odd Lot, 9.9)
I don’t know how well this mostly London-based film is going to do in the States given the exotic milieu and the thuggish attitudes (i.e., the world of boozed-up, ultra-violent British soccer fans), but it’s vibrant and original enough to warrant being seen and grappled with. It sure as shit is an experience and an education.
And it’s absolutely a career springboard for British actor Charlie Hunnam, who steals the show with a second-banana performance as a violent, in some ways immature, soccer fan who is nonetheless man enough to bring a sense of balance and compassion to an otherwise loutish lifestyle.
Hunnam starred in Nicholas Nickleby, and was in Cold Mountain, a Katie Holmes thriller called Abandon and the British TV series Queer as Folk, but who noticed? Now this 25 year-old has punched through.
The superficial tag is to call him a younger Brad Pitt with a Brit accent. What matters is that he conveys an inner groundedness and conviction on top of a sense of basic decency that you find yourself recognizing and responding to right away.
Hunnam is not just the star of Green Street Hooligans — he’s a star waiting to happen. Maybe. If he’s lucky and has the right agent and can do an American accent. (There seems to be some question whether or not he appears in Robert Towne’s Ask the Dust, which will debut at the Tellruide Film Festival in a few days). Whatever happens, he’s got it inside.
Charlie Hunnam
Green Street Hooligans is a story about a young American (Elijah Wood) on a visit to London who gets caught up in the violent world of English soccer fandom by joining a “firm,” which is a term for a gang that asserts and defends the honor of a given soccer team by parading around after soccer matches and confronting other firms and kicking their ribs in, or vice versa.
It sounds repulsive and cro-Magnon on one level, but European guys take soccer (which, of course, they call football) very seriously. And a lot of British working- class dudes are extremely furious about…well, I don’t know what precisely but apparently a lack of opportunity within a still-fairly-restrictive social caste system and having to make do with certain economic terms. I’ve been to London a few times and have felt this. The social-rage levels over there are much more intense among the disenfranchised than they are here.
And there are elements that go with being a firm member…tribal love, loyalty, security…that you’re not ever going to find vegging out in front of a computer or a TV, so there’s something to be said for it.
If you’re at all receptive to the values I’m speaking of and you can roll with fairly realistic depictions of street violence, Green Street Hooligans is affecting in a hormonal, territorial way. If it doesn’t exactly speak to Americans where they live in terms of being avid sports fans, it certainly is different and bracing and a movie to kick around and talk about and send your friends to.
Unless, that is, you happen to be one of those absent-sports-gene types who just doesn’t feel it or get it, in which case it may seem too exotic and what-the-hell?
The U.S. release one-sheet (l.) and the British release version (r.)
I’m kind of in this camp (my favorite spectator sports are tennis and baseball), but I get what the film is putting across and I respect the effort and the craft that Alexander and co-screenwriters Dougie Brimson and Josh Shelov have put into making this world come alive.
The German-born Alexander, a late twentysomething who grew up with football fandom and knows this universe fairly well, has made a name for herself with Hooligans and has already gotten a gig out of it — a thriller for Disney called Labor Day.
When you`re watching Hooligans…I’m sorry, Green Street Hooligans …you have to keep telling yourself, “A young woman directed this, a young woman directed this.” But then Alexander is a former World Kickboxing champion who used to scrap with a Mannheim, Germany, firm for three years, so…
Green Street Hooligans won both the grand jury prize and the audience award for best feature at the South by Southwest festival last March, which should indicate something.
(It used the original British title of Hooligans at that Austin venue, and I can’t quite understand why the distributor, Odd Lot Releasing, feels that adding the words Green Street makes the film more appealing to U.S. audiences.)
Wood’s character, a Harvard journalism major named Matt Buckner, is the audience’s tour guide into this bizarre world of Brit football fanaticism. He gets into it by getting kicked out of Harvard only three weeks or so before graduation when his snotty fortunate-son roommate arranges for him to take the rap for cocaine found in their dorm suite.
(This isn’t a very convincing beginning. In Josh Shelov’s original script Matt gets the boot after he and some classmates are accused of having cheated on an exam, and he is specifically ousted because his friends don’t stand up for him — an issue of loyalty that is dealt with later in the film.)
Matt flies from Logan to London to visit his sister Shannon (Claire Forlani), who’s married to a steady-seeming guy with a vaguely pissy attitude named Steve (Marc Warren). But Matt has arrived on a day when Steve is taking Shannon to see Chicago in the West End, so he’s temporarily placed in the care of Steve’s wild-assed brother, Pete (Hunnam).
Suspicious of this wimpy-looking yank, Pete reluctantly takes Matt to his local pub to meet his crew, who are called the GSE — i.e., Green Street Elite, a two-fisted firm devoted to the West Ham soccer…I mean football team.
Matt is regarded with some distance but then wins the respect of the firm when the GSE gets into a street fight with another firm and he throws himself into battle with real ferocity.
I had trouble with watching this at first, with Wood being so small and sensitive-seeming with those big watery eyes of his. But then I understand and sympathize with his having wanted to de-wimpicize and add some machismo to his persona after playing Frodo in the Rings films. (Has there ever been a more dewy-eyed, super-weenyish lead character in a major franchise?)
Trouble arises when a GSE member named Bovver (Leo Gregory) uncovers evidence that suggests (without actually proving) that Matt may be an undercover journalist secretly writing a story about the firm. This leads to all kinds of betrayals and soul-searchings and double-backs, and eventually the GSE gang going up against an especially hated firm whose leader has been nursing a particular rage against Pete’s family for years.
Hunnam again…seemingly two or three years ago.
It’s not hard to step back in the middle of all this and ask yourself, “Why don’t these guys just chill and pull back from this stupid-ass gang attitude that necessitates getting into fights all the time?” It seems so primitive and stupid and unenlightened, etc. I understood the meaning of it and felt it to a certain extent, but it wasn’t exactly coursing through my veins.
Then I read Lexi Alexander’s explanation for the behavior of these guys (who are legion over Europe), and I started to feel it a bit more. As I mentioned earlier, she was part of a firm in Mannheim, Germany, for three years (accepted by the males because of her black belt kick-boxing abilities) and knows the turf.
“Reliable. Protective. Loyal. Consistent. That’s what I remember most about the firm…which was more than you could say about any of our parents,” she writes. “The firm was our family. What we missed at home, we found in each other..in our firm. The riots were about proving our love, because obviously a bunch of guys don’t walk around telling each other, ‘I love you, man.’
“Standing next to your friend when you’re facing thirty guys who want to punch your face in — that’s love.
“Coming back for somebody who fell or was left behind, despite the fact that you’re most likely going to get your ass kicked — that’s love.
“Watching your mates out of the corner of your eye in a fight, and making sure you come to [their] rescue when needed — that’s love.
“Getting arrested and not remembering anyone’s name when the cops question you — that’s love.”
The message of this film, she says, is never abandon a friend when the chips are down.
Green Street Hooligans director Lexi Alexander, star Elijah Wood at Austin’s Draft House after South by Southwest screening last March.
“When your friend is sick, don’t run. When your friend has a crisis, don’t run. When your friend is going through a streak of bad luck, don’t run. When your friend is being treated unjustly, stand behind him/her, or better yet, stand in front. And when you become successful, don’t leave your friends behind.”
That gets me. I know that if I had a dollar for every fair-weather friend I’ve ever had, I could buy a new 100 gig computer. I know I could certainly use a friend or two with a “firm” attitude. Couldn’t we all?
On the other hand, I haven’t punched or even shoved anyone since I was in the seventh grade. And I need my fingers to be agile and unswollen because I have to type all the time. And British blokes can afford to lose a couple of teeth now and then because they have a good national health care system to turn to — I don’t.
There’s a 1988 Gary Oldman film called The Firm (dir: Alan Clarke) that covers the same territory. Here’s the Amazon page for a buyable Alan Clarke DVD package that includes The Firm. I hear it’s strong and worth seeing. Anyone…?
Toronto Feed
“I read your mention about showing caution when it comes to Michael Caton Jones and particularly his Shooting Dogs, which will show at the Toronto Film Festival.
“Well, I saw it in Cannes and it’s very good — a decent, solid drama about the Rwanda massacre of ’94. It’s a fuck-Schindler-Benigni kind of film. No heroes, no innocent little girls, no redemption. And the carnage is great.
“I’ve read ‘A Time for Machetes,’ the Jean Hatzfeld book about the massive killings, and MCJ was pretty precise about a lots of things.
Hugh Dancy, John Hurt in Michael Caton Jones’ Shooting Dogs.
“Otherwise…
“Cronenberg’s History of Violence, as you know, is splendid. This thing grows in your brain (nyuk-nyuk) many days after the screening. I loved it. You have to see it again.
“Free Zone: Crap. Arghh. A cheater. Kiarostami without the ideas, Panahi without the balls. Step aside, you don’t need this.
“Cache: Amazing. Dry, cool, disturbing. Did you saw Haneke’s Code Unknown, which was one of the major influences on the 21 Grams narrative? This thing has the same eerie feeling. It’s funny, it works like a twin film with the Cronenberg piece. Besides, Auteuil and Binoche are the best married couple I ever seen in the screen in years. They just nail the atmosphere of ten-years-of-marriage in a way that Kidman-Cruise-Kubrick never did.
“L’ Enfant: It’s not as good as Rosetta, but…hmmm, I don’t remember anything good as Rosetta, so…nut it’s very good, it’s worth a look and the only problem is the age of the principal actor. I will leave you to discover on your own what I mean by this.” — Daniel Villalobos, Santiago, Chile.
Just Six
“Dunno if you get the Encore cable channels but Stuart Samuels’ Midnight Movies doc, which is playing Toronto, has been airing there all month.
“It’s an interesting movie that I caught late one night, and while I had hoped it would cover a broad spectrum of films it actually focuses on just six films — El Topo, Night of the Living Dead, Eraserhead, Pink Flamingos, The Harder They Come and The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
“While it’s something I enjoyed watching on TV, and I like five of the six movies, I would’ve felt a little let down if I’d seen it in a theater. It’s not bad, it just didn’t tell me much that I didn’t already know. Still, I always enjoy John Waters interviews and this one has plenty.” — Neil Harvey.
Grabs
Thursday, 8.25, 7:50 pm.
Fifth Avenue strollers from various walks of American life and of different faiths and political persuasions contemplating the notion of being gay and up for action — Friday, 8.26, 4:20 pm. I took a series of these photos, and for nearly 30 seconds an older woman and her daughter — tourists, I was fairly certain — who happened to be approaching stood to the side and waited for me to finish. It didn’t occur to them that someone shooting a street scene might be cool with a woman or two walking in front of the camera just as he/she snaps a photo. It could make for a more interesting shot…who knows? But this didn’t occur to them, and so they stood there for almost 30 seconds waiting for me to finish. That’s mainstream America for you. Very polite.
Sixth Avenue and 47th Street, or something like that — 8.25, 5:45 pm.
While speed-marching over to Dolby Screening Room (1350 Ave. of Americas) to see Lord of War — 8.25, 5:42 pm.
Iraqi War 101
“I believe you’re familiar with our Iraq doc Gunner Palace. Last week I devoured your column about the upcoming slate of 9/11 and terror films. It was a needed piece. For me especially, as the theme of reality vs. fiction has been at the top of my mind lately.
“Last May I was invited to a DGA panel discussion where they screened parts of Gunner Palace ‘against’ Iraq-themed episodes of ER and JAG as well as the pilot for Bochco’s Over There. Without going into critic mode, I must say it was surreal to sit in a theater watching fictional scenes from a reality that I was preparing to return to in ten days.
“In the last six months, GP has become something of an Iraq War 101 for creative execs. As you must know, there are at least 10 Iraq projects floating around and development people are looking for interesting takes on Iraq, so every so often we get a call.
“In the beginning I was resistant to the whole idea of fiction — that is, until I had the experience of trying to market a distinct reality to a tabloid nation. We’ve had a fantastic run with GP –I’ve only been home six weeks since January — and the film has been held up as emblematic, but we’ve also been keenly aware of both an audience disconnect and war fatigue.
“However, at the same time, I’ve sensed that the disconnect comes largely from an emotional inability to relate to the subject, a faraway reality, and I’ve perceived a certain hunger to understand the war beyond the rants of pundits.
“Your 9/11 piece raised interesting questions. In regards to this ongoing war, I’ve asked myself, when is soon too soon? Perhaps now is the time — and the public doesn’t need a decade for collective memory to simmer — rather, perhaps there is an urgency to get it right, to tell it like it is.
“I found this Roger Ebert quote the other day:
“‘Whether we are for the war or against it, we all know it is a terribly complicated struggle. There is a desperate need in this country for a film that will depict the war in honest terms.”
“I have not been one for emotional button-pushing, especially about a war that has become all too personal to me, however, as flawed as fiction often is, it has the ability to evoke very real emotions. The Deer Hunter comes to mind. Inaccurate? Without a doubt — down to the last detail — but it captured the emotional essence of an experience. From another war, another time, came The Battle of Algiers — fiction, yes, but a fiction so steeped in reality that it was banned in France. Something to aspire to…no?
“So I surrender to fiction and the urge to at least get it right, to answer Ebert’s call to arms, remembering what a 19 year-old soldier had to say about his experience in GP: ‘For y’all this is just a show, but we live in this movie.” — Mike Tucker
Out There
“Those Walk the Line wildpostings are all over San Francisco too. I saw them the other day and thought, isn’t that opening like months from now? I really like the look of it, and the heavy use of graphics over photos. Seems unorthodox for a biopic.” — Tom Kelly, San Francisco, CA.
Grabs 2
You don’t have to put a caption under every damn photo.
The lobby of the famous Brill building on Broadway and 48th (or is it 49th?) I took this last night around 7:35 pm, just after slipping out of a preview screening of Pride and Prejudice upstairs. A romantic breakup scene in Alexander MacKendrick’s Sweet Smell of Success was filmed right here roughly 48 years ago. Susie Hunsecker (Susan Harrison), terrified sister of ruthless columnist J.J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster), has just called it quits with jazz musician Steve Dallas (Martin Milner). Dallas and his manager Frank D’Angelo (Sam Levene) walk down the hallway and out of the building as a glum-faced Susie leans against the wall near the elevators. As they’re standing outside on Broadway, Milner says to Levene, “Look inside and tell me if she’s still standing there.” Levene looks. “She’s still standing there,” he says.
This newspaper ad on behalf of Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man is apparently aimed at the March of the Penguins crowd. You almost want to pet this guy. Timothy Treadwell, the “star” of Grizzly Man did, in fact, pet a few until one day…
A block or two west of CBGB’s — Sunday, 8.21, 4:40 pm.
Thursday, 8.25, 5:55 pm.
Change of Season
The winding down of the ’05 summer is fortunate in two respects: it’s getting a tiny bit cooler in the city (there was a transcendent breeze travelling southward down Broadway Monday night around 9:30 pm), and it gives me something to write about during a flat week.
It felt to me like an above-average summer. At the end of each year I always come up with a list of 40 or 45 films that were good, very good or excellent, and here we had a summer providing about 21 first-raters, or just over five per month. (I’m going by the perimeters of May 1st through August 30th.) Not bad for a season that’s thought to be mainly about flotsam and popcorn and yeehaw.
Ralph Fiennes in Fernando Mierelles’ The Constant Gardener (Focus Features, 8.31)
I’ve written enough about the good ones in past columns, so I’m going to have more to say about the problems and irritants. But starting at the top…
GOOD AS IT GOT (in the following order): Hustle & Flow, The Constant Gardener, Cinderella Man, Last Days, Crash, The Beautiful Country, Grizzly Man, Wedding Crashers, Batman Begins, Mad Hot Ballroom, The Beat That My Heart Skipped, The Aristocrats, Broken Flowers, Kingdom of Heaven, The White Diamond, Layer Cake, Cronicas, My Summer of Love, This Divided State, Tell Them Who You Are, War of the Worlds.
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That was the good news, although I’m presuming very few even had the option of seeing The White Diamond, a Werner Herzog doc I wrote about in the June 8 column, or Mark Wexler’s Tell Them Who You Are, a feisty portrait of the director’s relationship with his overbearing dad, the award-winning cinematographer Haskell Wexler.
The lesser films were tedious, grueling or worse. I am one who feels especially dispirited by cheesily commercial films made by directors and writers whom I know are capable of delivering much smarter and craftier stuff, and…well, I guess I should leave Judd Apatow and The 40 Year-Old Virgin alone. (I’ve been warned by readers.)
But this isn’t an obsession thing of mine. It’s a sum-up piece and Virgin has made a big splash, but it’s really not fit to lick the boots of The Wedding Crashers and deserves to be called the SUMMER’S MOST OVER-PRAISED SO-SO COMEDY.
Russell Crowe, Renee Zellwegger in Ron Howard’s Cinderella Man
Just gonna zotz out the rest…
PUTRID, REPUGNANT, MALIGNANT…NOT TO MENTION ONE OF THE MOST BREATHTAKING CAPITULATIONS & SELL-OUTS IN HOLLYWOOD HISTORY BY A TALENTED DIRECTOR WHO KNEW BETTER: Doug Liman’s Mr. and Mrs. Smith, which way too many people gave a pass to with the rationale that it was harmless fluff.
MOST ATTENTION-GETTING WIPEOUT & ACROSS-THE-BOARD CAREER DAMAGER: The Island. The bitch-slapping of Michael Bay may not have been such a bad thing for the guy. The only way Bay is going to do better work (and I know he’s capable of it) is to be woken up from the narcotized pipe dream of being Michael Bay (muscle cars, bimbo girlfriends, parking in handicapped spaces, etc.), and it’s a safe bet that the staggering failure of The Island has made him reconsider his whole program. Producer Walter Parks got slapped around also when he said insufficient star wattage on the part of Island costar Scarlett Johansson was one of the reasons the film tanked; the take-no-guff Johansson fired right back and set him straight.
MOST LOATHSOME BIG-STUDIO RELEASES AFTER PREVIOUS TWO: The Dukes of Hazzard, Star Wars, Episode 3: Revenge of the Sith, Bewitched.
The Beat That My Heart Skipped
SEX SCENES SO BORING AND UNAPPETIZING THAT THOUSANDS OF COUPLES MIGHT HAVE BEEN PERSUADED TO PUT ASIDE SEXUAL ACTIVITY FOR A BRIEF PERIOD: Michael Winterbottom’s 9 Songs.
NOTEWORTHY ON-SCREEN IMPROV: After Kieran O’Brien playfully blindfolds Margo Stilley in 9 Songs, she says, “I can’t see!”
A MOVIE THAT PERSUADED ME TO THINK NEGATIVELY ABOUT A BIRD SPECIES THAT I’VE HAD NOTHING AGAINST MY ENTIRE LIFE: March of the Penguins. You can sing the praises of this doc all you want, but those Emperor penguins spend way too much time trudging across Antarctic wastelands and sitting on unhatched eggs during blizzards. The success of this film was mainly driven by women and old people. Tell me one regular guy you know who went to this thing on his own (or with his regular-guy friends) and came back going, “Amazing!” I don’t want to see any animals suffer, but it would have enlivened things if a few more penguins had been eaten by predators.
AS A LIVE-ACTION DIRECTOR, IT’S TIME TO FACE THE FACT THAT TIM BURTON MAY BE OVER: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
NOT ENOUGH: Monster-in-Law, The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till, Bad News Bears, Dark Water, Asylum, The Chumscrubber, Lila Says , Rize.
Christian Bale in Chris Nolan’s Batman Begins
FLATLINERS: The Longest Yard, Madagascar, Kings and Queen, Lords of Dogtown, Must Love Dogs , Fantastic Four, Stealth, The Brothers Grimm, Heights.
WANTED TO SEE ‘EM, MISSED THE SCREENINGS, COULDN’T SEE FORKING OVER TEN BUCKS, ETC.: Howl’s Moving Castle, High Tension, The Devil’s Rejects, November, Mysterious Skin, Murderball, The Edukators .
WOULDN’T SEE ‘EM AT THE POINT OF A KNIFE: The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants, The Honeymooners, Herbie: Fully Loaded .
NOT HALF BAD: Yes, Red Eye, Four Brothers, Reel Paradise, House of Wax, Dominion: Prequel to The Exorcist, The Great Raid, The Last Mogul , Me and You and Everyone We Know, George A. Romero’s Land of the Dead.
BIGGEST ACTOR BREAKTHROUGHS: Rachel McAdams (The Wedding Crashers, Red Eye), who could wind up doing it all. Terrence Howard (Hustle & Flow, Crash), who deserves a Best Actor nomination hands-down for his Memphis pimp. Vince Vaughn (Wedding Crashers…can’t wait for his tortured deejay movie for director David O. Russell). And Amy Adams (Junebug), although she needs to move beyond that sweet and trusting magnolia-blossom thing.
LEAST INTRIGUING NEW ACTOR (and a possible speed-bump for Clint Eastwood’s Flags of our Fathers): Jesse Bradford , the costar of Heights who, in that film, wore a fixed expression that said, “I’m not really getting what’s going on…I’m not sure what to say or do…maybe if I just stand here long enough looking like a stubble-faced bowling pin with legs, events will sort themselves out.”
Jesse Bradford at Sundance Film Festival, looking a lot less clueless and confused than he does in Heights…so maybe it’s not a terminal problem.
SUMMER’S BIGGEST STOCK-DROPPERS: Tom Cruise and Will Ferrell. Will Cruise ever get back the lustre he had in the wake of Jerry Maguire, or are emperors forever disempowered once the public has seen them without their aura of mystery and velvet robes? When Ferrell came out of the shadows of that bungalow to talk with Owen Wilson in that third-act scene in Wedding Crashers, you could almost hear the film’s energy collapse and an instant consensus form in the audience that he didn’t belong and was way overdoing it. Plus he was ickily unfunny in Bewitched . This sounds incredible for a guy who’s only been a marquee draw since Old School, but he may already be heading downhill.
COLD-SHOULDERED, UNDER-ATTENDED, INSUFFICIENTLY LOVED: Cinderella Man, Kingdom of Heaven, Tell Them Who You Are, My Date With Drew.
Toronto Jam
This year’s Toronto Film Festival (Sept. 8th through 17th) is a big problem in the best way imaginable: there are too many good films to see in only nine days. I gripe about this every time the schedule is announced, but this year is really a bitch.
I’ve come up with 69 films I’d like to see (or in some cases, see again). If I run around like an animal and the screening times mesh perfectly with my column-writing schedule (which never happens) and I don’t get shut out of any films (which happens a lot at this festival), I’ll be able to catch four per day or 36 films.
That means I’m going to have to forget about seeing 33 films that I’d definitely see under free-and-clear circumstances. This means I have to start crossing a lot of ’em off…a tough but necessary task.
Imagine a filmmaker having just finished a film into which he/she has invested every last drop of blood, sweat and tears, only to read some journalist talking about taking a few whiffs and calibrating the angle of the dangle and going, “Naah, I don’t think I’ll see that one.”
I’d like to hear anything from anyone out there because these lists are always changing, but at first glance here’s what’s doing. The films I’d like to see but have doubts about are italicized; keepers (i.e., films most likely to connect with paying audiences because they look commercial or will prove aesthetically exceptional) are boldfaced.
WORLD CINEMA (4): River Queen, director: Vincent Ward. (financing problems, Samantha Morton problems…a sturm und drang movie); Shooting Dogs, director: Michael Caton-Jones (always approach an MCJ film with caution); Le Temps qui reste, director: Francois Ozon (haven’t heard anything to quicken my pulse); Tsotsi, director: Gavin Hood (Athol Fugard source material…being schmoozed into seeing this by Donna Daniels and Emily Lowe.) Keeper total: 0.
Jason Statham in Guy Ritchie’s Revolver
DIALOGUES: TALKING WITH PICTURES (4): Midnight Movies: From the Margin to the Mainstream, director: Stuart Samuels (talked to Samuels in Cannes even though I hadn’t see it…love the subject but I may miss it again); My Dad Is 100 Years Old, director: Guy Maddin (maybe, but The Saddest Music in the World didn’t do it for me); Open City, director: Roberto Rossellini (never seen a decent print, I’d love to see it with a hip crowd, and I’ll probably blow it off); William Eggleston in the Real World director: Michael Almereyda (not feeling it). Keeper total: 0.
DISCOVERY (1): Stoned, director: Stephen Woolley (missed the market screenings in Cannes…I was told it wasn’t so hot…I’d like see it anyway because it’s about the death of Brian Jones). Keeper total: 0.
The White Masai
MASTERS (11): Breakfast on Pluto, director: Neil Jordan (seeing it here Friday); Brokeback Mountain, director: Ang Lee (will someone please arrange an impromptu screening of Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey’s Lonesome Cowboys during the festival?); Bubble, director: Steven Soderbergh (for the last few years Soderbergh has been like Mickey Mantle during one of his slumps…the fans in the stands going, “Hit one out of the park, Mick!” with their fingers crossed); Cache, director: Michael Haneke (missed it in Cannes where it almost won the Palme d’Or…have to see it); L’ Enfant, directors: Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Luc Dardenne (the Palme d’Or winner at last May’s Cannes Film Festival); Free Zone, director: Amos Gitai (saw it in Cannes, wouldn’t mind catching it again… fascinating road movie that takes you through Israel and Jordan…fine Natalie Portman performance…satisfying in a minor key); Iberia, director: Carlos Saura (waiting to hear something); No Direction Home: Bob Dylan, director: Martin Scorsese (how can I miss this?…then again, one wonders what fresh new aspect of Dylan-the-sourpuss can Scorsese be expected to uncover?); Tideland , director: Terry Gilliam (there’s no missing a Gilliam); The Best of Our Times, director: Hsiao-hsien Hou (maybe); and Takeshis, Takeshi Kitano‘s latest about a celebrity confronting a double. Keeper total: 7.
Cameron Diaz in an alleged still from Curtis Hanson’s In her Shoes
MIDNIGHT MADNESS (2): The Great Yokai War, director: Takashi Miike (maybe); Sarah Silverman: Jesus is Magic, director: Liam Lynch (liked her in The Aristocrats…she played the nagging-bitch girlfriend in School of Rock). Keeper total: 0.
REAL TO REEL (6): a/k/a Tommy Chong, director: Josh Gilbert (definite interest so far); A Conversation with Basquiat, director: Tamra Davis (ditto); The Devil and Daniel Johnston, director: Jeff Feuerzig (heard good things when it played Sundance); Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man, director: Lian Lunson (gotta catch this one); Twelve Disciples of Nelson Mandela, director: Thomas Allen Harris (definitely intrigued); and Why We Fight, director: Eugene Jarecki. Keeper total: 3.
Dame Judi Dench in Stephen Frears’ Mrs. Henderson Presents
SPECIAL PRESENTATIONS (18): Art Project: Ghosts of Woodrow, director: Graeme Patterson (waiting to hear something); Bee Season, director: Scott McGehee, David Siegel (Tom Luddy having chosen it to play Telluride Film Festival ought to mean something); Capote, director: Bennett Miller (seeing it in NYC this week); Dave Chappelle’s Block Party, director: Michel Gondry (Chappelle’s flake-out/disappearing act a while back…does that make this film more or less intriguing?); Everything Is Illuminated, director: Liev Schreiber (might see it here); The Notorious Bettie Page, director: Mary Harron (essential for the period trimmings and sexy-photo stuff alone…Harron did an excellent job with American Psycho); Oliver Twist, director: Roman Polanski (can’t blow off Polanski, although I suspect he probably shot his last meaningful wad with The Pianist); Romance & Cigarettes, director: John Turturro (can’t bypass a singing James Gandolfini); Shopgirl, director: Anand Tucker (I’m hearing not great but fairly decent); Sketches of Frank Gehry, director: Sydney Pollack (gotta show respect to Pollack and Gehry); Slow Burn, director: Wayne Beach (waiting); Thank You For Smoking, director: Jason Reitman (sounds a bit obvious, but maybe): Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride, directors: Mike Johnson, Tim Burton (Burton is better with puppets than people, but it looks like The Nightmare before Xmas again); Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, director: Michael Winterbottom (9 Songs didn’t do anything for Winterbottom’s rep, but this is supposed to be fairly good); Trust the Man, director: Bart Freundlich (always approach a Freundlich film with caution); Vers le Sud, director: Laurent Cantet (waiting to hear something); Wah-Wah, director: Richard E. Grant (ditto), The World’s Fastest Indian, director: Roger Donaldson (good buzz from Oz exhbitors about this one during their recent Australian Gold Coast convention, but Donaldson being from New Zealand suggests it should probably be taken with a grain). Keeper total: 10.
Charlize Theron in Niki Caro’s North Country
VIACOM GALAS (15): Dreamer: Inspired by a True Story, dierctor: John Gatins (any movie with the word “dreamer”…holding off for now); Edison, director: David J. Burke (waiting to hear something); Elizabethtown, director: Cameron Crowe (essential); L’ Enfer, director: Danis Tanovic (don’t know anything); A History of Violence, director: David Cronenberg (missed about 20 minutes worth in Cannes when I nodded off…want to see it again anyway); In Her Shoes, director: Curtis Hanson (exhib calls it an above-average chick flick and a little on the “commercial” side…Hanson-as-director means this has to be seen, but a serious film maven must always approach any film starring Cameron Diaz with a certain caution); The Matador, director: Richard Shepard (Sundance buzz was fairly good but nothing spectacular); Mrs. Harris, director: Phyllis Nagy (Bening and Kingsley…essential viewing for these two alone); Mrs. Henderson Presents, director: Stephen Frears (there’s no blowing off a Frears film); The Myth, director: Stanley Tong (skeptical); North Country, director: Niki Caro (return of Whale Rider director is an exciting prospect, but true-life story about a sexually harassed mine-worker sounds like a snooze, even with Charlize Theron in the role); Pride and Prejudice, director: Joe Wright (seeing it in NYC this week); Proof, director: John Madden (seen it, wrote about it); Revolver, director: Guy Ritchie (guarded optimism…post-Swept Away Ritchie requires extreme caution); The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, director: Tommy Lee Jones (fell for it in Cannes, looking to see it again); Walk the Line, director: James Mangold (saw it a few weeks ago, looking to go again just for the enjoyment); Water, director: Deepa Mehta (heard nothing); The White Masai, director: Hermine Huntgeburth (based on autobiographical book by Corinne Hofmann about a European white woman who falls head over heels for a Masai tribesman, blows off her boyfriend, uproots her life, etc.) Keeper total: 9.
Actual Bettie Page (i.e., receiving discipline) and not Gretchen Mol portraying the famous ’50s pin-up girl in Mary Harron’s The Notorious Bettie Page
VISIONS (6): 50 Ways of Saying Fabulous, director: Stewart Main (no hints); L’ Annulaire, director: Diane Bertrand (ditto); Brothers of the Head, directors: Keith Fulton, Louis Pepe (return of the Lost in La Mancha guys); Mary, director: Abel Ferrara (respect must be paid to Abel Ferrara, despite all the crap); The Piano-tuner of Earthquakes, directors: Timothy Quay, Stephen Quay (no hints); Wassup Rockers, director: Larry Clark (no clues). Keeper total: 2.
Add ’em up and at this early stage we’re looking at a grand keeper total of 31. Truth be told, I rarely seem to get to more than 25 or so films during a typical festival, although I’d love to crack 30 this time.
Grabs
Through windows of Dean & Deluca, SE corner of Broadway and Prince — Sunday, 8.21, 8:20 pm.
Only in New York City do you get this kind of stark aesthetic juxtaposition…one of the most beautiful dining-room decoration stores on the planet on the inside, and all kinds of heavy scaffolding and splattered paint and cheap-ass graffiti on the mailboxes outside.
Martin Scorsese, Matt Damon on set of the upcoming The Departed
James Mangold’s Walk the Line won’t be out until 11.18, but the 20th Century Fox marketing team is plugging it like a sonuvabitch. The Johnny Cash biopic has tribute pieces running in this week’s Time and Newsweek (particularly about Joaquin Pheonix and Reese Witherspoon’s performances) and now Fox has wild-posting all over Manhattan construction sites…which is fairly unusual for a film that won’t be opening for another three months.
Journos and industry types know Eamonn Bowles as the president of Magnolia Pictures, but he’s also the head of a kick-butt Iggy Pop-ish bar band called The Martinets. I saw them play last night at the Knitting Factory Tap Bar on Leonard Street (between B’way and Church), and was blown away — they’re really fast, tight and rock-sharp. The sound is raw and catchy and they all play like pros. Bowles sings like a mad banshee and plays electric guitar like a ringin’ a bell. It’s not just the usual bar-band “noise” but crafty, well-shaped material with intellectually pointed lyrics. I asked Bowles if Mark Cuban, the part-owner of Magnolia and a guy who reportedly gets around, has dropped by to catch the act. Bowles said nope.
All the milk that’s about to go bad and turn into cottage cheese, they send it to grocery stores in my Brooklyn neighborhood. I bought this last Sunday. The guarantee said it would be good until 8.25, and the next day all these gross little white globs poured out while I was trying to put milk in my coffee.
Playground at Spring and Mulberry — Sunday, 8.21, 5:45 pm.
Rice to Riches, located on Spring near Mulberry, is a stand-alone store that sells flavored rice puddings. Fantastic tasting, very filling, etc.
Facing south on La Guardia (I think…memory’s a bit hazy) — Sunday, 8.21, 7:15 pm.
Not Bali Hai
Steve James’ Reel Paradise is lying in wait at your local theatre like a King Cobra. Buy a ticket and watch it and it will bite you and poison to death any Marlon Brando Mutiny on the Bounty South Sea island fantasies you may be nurturing.
Paradise says that watching a good movie can create a kind of paradise in your head, and that turning people on to an exciting or nourishing film can be a wonderful thing. It also says that an alleged tropical getaway like Fiji (and, by extension, other South Sea locations) can be vaguely boring and economically strapped with low-rent thieves ready to sneak in and steal your computer if you’re not careful.
The Pierson family (l. to r.): Georgia, John, Janet, Wyatt in Steve James’ Reel Paradise
And you’d better watch out for your teenaged daughter while you’re there also because life is a struggle and a pain everywhere, and nothing about South Sea life is particularly safe or comforting or tranquil. In short, there are no getaway places. Your life is your life and that’s that.
I don’t know why I used the image of a King Cobra to describe this film. It’s more of a mongoose, really. A thoughtful, life-can-be-gnarly-but-whaddaya-gonna-do? movie made by folks I happen to know and like and respect.
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I guess all I’m really saying is that I don’t think I’ll be visiting Fiji during my next South Seas vacation, but if you’re looking to spend your movie money this weekend on something more layered than Judd Apatow’s The 40 Year-Old Virgin, here’s a way to go.
It’s a doc about what happened three years ago to John Pierson — the former “Split Screen” host, movie-book author (“Spike, Mike, Slackers & Dykes”), producer’s rep and all-around movie community good guy — during a year-long stay in Taveuni, Fiji, where he and his family showed free movies to the locals at a place called the Meridian 180.
Pierson discovered this funky, barn-like theatre on a visit to Tavenui — an agricultural island of about 10,000 residents — in 1999. When the Meridian shut down in ’02 Pierson somehow managed to buy it and then talk his family — wife Janet, 16-year-old daughter Georgia and 13-year-old son Wyatt — into making the trek.
John Pierson addressing crowd at Taveuni’s Meridian cinema prior to another night’s showing.
And then James showed up with his camera in the summer of ’03 to document the final month of their stay. And what he got is that life without cultural resources or the usual modern-age distractions can be a bit flat. Taveuni is a poor island with no public electricity, no high-end restaurants, no video rental stores…Nothingville.
But the film also shows that good movies can have a kind of religious effect upon the locals, and that Pierson became, during his stay, a kind of parish priest.
Gut-level movies — comedies, thrillers — fared the best here. The Fiji folks haven’t had much education and are fairly low-rent in their tastes. They want to laugh or be thrilled or be scared. You get the idea that even if prints of, say, films by Robert Bresson were available to Pierson in Fiji, he wouldn’t have dreamt of showing them.
The obvious association is the scene in Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels when the chain-gang prisoners start laughing uproariously at a Pluto cartoon. A good laugh is all some people have, etc.
The biggest real-life issue in the film is computer robbery and the suspicions that arise about which local might be the culprit. Plus the projectionist Pierson has hired is a real slacker. And there’s also Georgia’s involvement with a local kid whom her parents have reason to disapprove of.
Georgia Pierson (l.) and friend in Reel Paradise.
Put aside the movie-religion aspects and Reel Paradise boils down to a series of lessons about what a real downmarket tobacco-road place Taveuni is, a laid-back culture without much to attract people like myself.
Variety critic Todd McCarthy says Reel Paradise is analogous in some ways to Peter Weir’s The Mosquito Coast. As I watched it I was thinking more about Franklin J. Schaffner’s Papillon.
My mind was also drifting back to that speech that Kirk Douglas gives in Ace in the Hole about the four spindly trees in front of Rockefeller Center providing more than enough in the way of nature’s splendor, etc.
Being There
Almost no one paid to see The Great Raid when it opened last weekend, and most of the critics were bored by it. (It only got a 36% favorable on Rotten Tomatoes.) I wasn’t exactly over-the-moon about it myself, but at no time did it anger or frustrate me, and there’s a kind of distinction in that.
The one aspect that got me 100% was the decision on the part of director John Dahl to make an anachronistic war film. The Great Raid isn’t boring, exactly – it’s just a movie that’s true to the era it’s depicting, and therefore feels out of synch with our times. Which, of course, is partly the point.
The Great Raid is a 98% true World War II story, and not just in factual terms. It’s the story of a raid in early 1945 by a commando team of about 100 soldiers and volunteers, led by some U.S. Army noncoms, upon a Japanese prison camp in the Philippine boonies. It led to the freeing of just over 500 prisoners, soldiers who might have died at the hands of their captors if the raid hadn’t happened.
Benjamin Bratt, James Franco in John Dahl’s The Great Raid.
You can say, “Yeah, and so what?” But this is what the movie’s about, and Dahl has not only paid respect to the story but the era when it happened.
Is The Great Raid the most suspenseful, excitingly paced war film anyone’s ever seen? Obviously not or it wouldn’t have died last weekend. It’s not exactly sluggish but it feels…dutiful. A movie “doing its duty” in trying to recreate a bygone era by adopting an anachronistic style.
And in this sense, Raid‘s stolid qualities — the feeling that it might be your grandfather’s idea of a satisfying World War II film — work in its favor. Not in its commercial favor, obviously, but Dahl did what he did for the right time-machine reasons.
It isn’t just that Dahl has heaped on period realism in terms of dialogue, character shadings and carefully-chosen props and wardrobe (guns, uniforms, women’s hair styles…all highly authentic and just so). It’s also the stolid framing and the unhurried old-fashioned pacing of the thing. It’s Dahl saying to us and himself, “To hell with 21st Century action movie appetites and standards…we are not playing that game.”
The only here-and-now aspect is the faded, sepia-like color…but even the desaturation seems to line up with the old-fogeyness of the thing. It opens the door to an imagining that an original version might have been shot in vivid Technicolor but then faded over the years.
Day-for-night still from The Great Raid, meaning this scene looks a lot duskier in the actual film.
The Great Raid doesn’t feel as if it was shot in ’45 and then put in a storage facility and kept there for 60 years. It would have had to have been filmed in monochrome in a 1.33 to 1 aspect ratio to achieve that illusion. But it does feel like it could have been made in 1955 or thereabouts. If this had actually happened it would have costarred Aldo Ray, Jeff Chandler and George Nader.
As is, the performances (by Benjamin Bratt, James Franco, Joseph Fiennes, Connie Nielsen, Marton Csokas) feel like earnest imitations of the kind of acting that Bill Holden or Jeffrey Hunter or June Allyson used to deliver in boilerplate war flicks of the 1950s.
And I admire the exacting ways that Dahl made it feel so old-fashioned. He knew there would be critics saying “too slow” or whatever, but he was too hard-core to spritz it up (like some period films I’ve seen) and make it feel, say, like a film that was half ’45 and half ’05.
I could go on and on about period films that got the haircuts wrong or had performances or dialogue that felt wrong. It’s not rampant but it happens. Period films are sometimes over-decorated or over-polished. The cars are too new or the actors are too present-day in their speech patterns or accents, or there’s too much CGI (like in Troy).
Marton Csokas in The Great Raid
You can argue that the verisimilitude in The Great Raid doesn’t matter that much because the story plods along and there’s not enough in the way of suspense or story tension, and I wouldn’t argue with you. But I didn’t mind it too much because the period immersion is so complete.
And I just had to slap myself to keep from nodding out. I am boring myself as I finish a piece about a movie that’s a little bit boring for the right creative reasons.
Honest footnote: I have to admit that I was glad when the Japanese soldiers dragged Csokas (the lover in Paramount Classics’ Asylum) and shot him in the head. Csokas speaks with an oddball accent in the film hat includes a bizarre throaty sound he gives to vowels, and so I was glad to rid of him.
By The Way…
Another movie that gets it right in a historical atmosphere sense is George Clooney’s Good Night and Good Luck, which I saw the other night.
It’s not just that the factual newsroom tale, which happened in 1954, has been shot in black and white, but that it feels like one of those live high-quality 1950s television plays, which were routinely seen on Kraft Television Theatre (ABC, 1953-55), Four Star Playhouse (CBS, 1952-56), Ford Theater (NBC, 1952-56) and so on.
David Straitharn in Good Night, and Good Luck
My immediate response was that I really liked and admired the austerity and the realism of Good Night, and Good Luck. It felt like it was happening in the actual 1954…almost. It didn’t feel like ’54 by way of 2005…and I liked that it got right down to the matters at hand and stayed with them.
It really is terrific when you feel a filmmaker striving as hard as Clooney, who costars as well as directs, to give a sense of time and place and also the mentality that informed an era…the way it most likely felt.
I probably won’t get into the merits of Good Night, and Good Luck until it shows at the New York Film Festival in late September (Warner Independent is opening it on October 7), but it’s a thoughtful, respectable film with first-rate acting and an honorable theme and a terrific performance by David Straitharn as legendary newsman Edward R. Murrow.
Honor of Lying
From a celebrity’s perspective, truth-telling is a selective process these days. That’s a way of saying that pretty much every celebrity lies right through his or teeth when it comes to public statements. But it’s okay because they’re well motivated.
They’re lying because they despise the media and feel that dealing with a corrupt and disreputable entity means all bets are off. And I think I understand the ethical system they’re embracing because it was explained in a couple of respected ’60s westerns.
Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch is one of them. I’m thinking of a scene in which William Holden’s Pike Bishop expresses moral support for Robert Ryan’s Deke Thornton because he gave his “word” to a bunch of “damned railroad men,” and Ernest Borgnine’s Dutch Engstrom defiantly argues, “That ain’t what counts! It’s who you give it to.”
Director Sam Peckinpah, star William Holden on the set of The Wild Bunch
Burt Lancaster says the same thing in The Professionals when he discusses flexible ethics with Lee Marvin. When Marvin reminds Lancaster that he’s given his “word” to Ralph Bellamy’s J.W. Grant, a millionaire railroad tycoon, Lancaster replies, “My word to Grant ain’t worth a plug nickel.”
Tom Cruise is J.W. Grant-ing, in effect, when he says he’s in love with Katie Holmes and wants to marry her and so on. He’s saying, “This is what you’re going to get from me and if you don’t think I’m being honest then that’s too fucking bad because my life is my own and you guys don’t rate the real truth because you’re scumbags and you pass along tabloid fairy tales.”
Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie lied and lied and lied and lied (and told their publicists to lie and lie and lie and lie) about their relationship, and they felt just totally fine about it because their word to the tabloid press is commensurate with the degree of respect they have for it.
I don’t really believe this, but I like to tell myself that Bill Clinton lied about his history with Monica Lewinsky because he felt that the news media (and the Republicans pushing things along in the late `90s) had no honor or legitimacy in trying to explore his sex life. Looking right at the TV cameras and saying nothing happened was completely honorable because the news media deserved to be lied to.
I can see this. I can see how people being hammered about personal matters might start thinking this way. But then again…
If you’re willing to lie to someone, you’ve opened the door to dissing them in other ways. Just as Lancaster and Holden and friends were fine with lying to railroad men as well as stealing their money and possibly shooting them during hold-ups, I’ll bet celebrities are thinking about different ways of smacking around tabloid reporters.
That photographer who got shot with a BB pellet while standing outside Britney Spears’ Malibu home…? Just the beginning.
9/11 Movies
“Do we really need dramas about 9/11 so we can exploit the tragedy and suffering and add to the hysteria? It’s bad enough we have a manufactured war. Do we need manufactured crap to incite us further?” — Edward Klein
“I don’t know what bothers me exactly about the 9/11 movies coming out. There were plenty of movies about WWII, and a lot of them made during the war, but those were sort of rah-rah propaganda movies about a war that was absolutely necessary. The Vietnam films seemed hell-bent on showing us the real story behind a war that no one seemed to understand, and many of them revealed the suffering that the troops went through before and after the war.
“But those 9/11 films that are being prepared seem pointless. Why make one? What…there’s no actual footage? People have yet to see what happened? That’s not an argument since it was the single most videotaped event in the history of the world.
“So it must be a desire to reveal what people inside the towers and their families have dealt with during and since that day. No, since there have been countless news reports and documentaries and books and official reports letting us know the horrors of the attack and it aftermath.
“So what could possibly be motivating filmmakers about to start on their 9/11 movies…?
“The whole thing reeks of sickening commercialism. Greedy Hollywood vulture fuckheads who have no shame in exploiting people’s emotions and patriotism for a buck. This is example #5930 of how Hollywood is bereft of ideas. And I love how these guys have somehow talked themselves into thinking that they’re going to be doing some kind of service to mankind.
“It reminds me of the moment at the Oscars when James Cameron, holding his Best Picture award, asked the bejeweled, collagen-injected crowd for a moment of silence in memory of the victims of the Titanic disaster. It was both tasteless and ridiculous, and that event was almost 100 years old at the time. Just imagine how tasteless and ghoulish a 9/11 movie will be a mere five years after the tragedy.” — Mark Smith.
“I don’t see much in a script that attempts to retell an individual story from the events of 9/11. Anyone with a digital cable box can see documentaries from every point of view nightly on cable . HBO had an effective film several years ago that told the story of a boy whose mother was stuck in the towers and died that day.
“Hollywood could use 9/11 in a plot device for a romance — strangers fall in love while searching for a mutual friend who is missing. A sci-fi scenario where a character time travels and ends up in the towers. I think an audience could be accepting of 9/11 in film as long as it is not that literal. Spike Lee used 9/11 as a minor character in 25th Hour. — Ken Ridge, Hazlet, New Jersey.
Grabs
42nd Street between 7th and 8th Avenues — Thursday, 8.19, 10:25 pm.
Bedford Avenue underground — Thursday, 8.19, 7:35 pm.
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