I don’t know how many years ago Errol Morris assembled this short, but some of the comments are fairly wonderful. And I love that guy who’s interpreting for Mikhail Gorbachev.

You really have to hand it to Scott Foundas for writing a big L.A. Weekly piece that says Brett Ratner “is a talented filmmaker who deserves to be taken seriously.” If you’re not willing to say the unpopular thing now and then, you’re not worth very much as writer, and for this Foundas has my respect. Even if his proposition — call it a notion — is only half-right.

Brett Ratner

Ratner is a talented filmmaker. Perhaps moderately, perhaps more so. But so far he hasn’t done much with his gifts except make commercial “movies.” And by my standards, he hasn’t put any serious feeling, conviction or high-level craft into any of them. And forget original or innovative. Ratner’s longstanding yen to be a successful, well-paid director and groove with the commercial swing of things gives him a tomcat joie de vivre aura — he’s not Todd Louiso — but his films feel much more like “displays” or “presentations” than anything else.
Ratner is not Karel Reisz, Samuel Fuller or Curtis Hanson. You can’t equate him to middle-range talents who’ve enjoyed admirable flare-up periods like John Frankenheimer or Irvin Kershner. He sure as hell isn’t a stylist like Val Lew- ton. At best he may be Phil Karlson or Mervyn LeRoy. He’s not even Arthur Hiller, who at least made The Americanization of Emily and The Hospital. I’m not one of those who lumps in Ratner with satanic forces like McG, Michael Bay, Stephen Sommers or Roger Kumble, but I do think the best anyone can say about him is that he’s an above-average hack with formidable social skills.
The core of Foundas’ argument is that “it matters to Ratner that his films seem expressive of his personality.” His examples are Money Talks (’97 — Ratner’s first feature), After the Sunset (’04), and “perhaps most of all” the Rush Hour movies.” Ratner, says Foundas, “is there in the preponderance of classic r & b and hip-hop on their soundtracks; in their exuberant celebrations of beautiful women, fast cars and other assorted bling; and in their conscious homages to the movies that made Ratner want to become a director in the first place.”

Scott Foundas

But to me the whole take-Ratner-seriously idea falls apart when you read that the 38 year-old director has told people “that The Family Man is his most personal film.” That’s the film in which Nicolas Cage decides it’s better for his soul, his marriage to Tea Leoni and particularly the welfare of his kid to go back to New Jersey and sell tires rather than live the the uptown life of a well-paid businessman. I always thought that was a cloying and dishonest view of things, and that anyone who would embrace it as something real and profound has a stunted view of human nature as well as bad taste.
I got to know Ratner a few years ago through my friendship with James Toback. Ratner was friendly, gracious and a good fellow when I visited him at his Benedict Canyon home. He picked up the phone after that and all was well.
Then I saw him at Cinevegas in ’02 and happened to ask him at one point why his ex-girlfriend Rebecca Gayheart, whom he had helped with emotional support and legal assistance after her involvement in a terrible accident in ’01 in which a child was killed, wasn’t attending the festival with a short film she’d made (a pretty good one called Me and Daphne) that the festival was showing. Ratner said she couldn’t come because she was visiting family. That was hard to swallow. I felt dissed, in fact, by being fed a half-truth, and I expressed this doubt in a column. The next thing I knew Ratner’s attorney Marty Singer was on my cell phone threatening me.
I took down the sentence about Gayheart’s no-show, but I thought about this later on. Ratner had lied to me, and then he told a pit-bull attorney to get in my face when I wrote that I felt I’d been lied to. I decided from this episode that he’s a snowjobber and a bit of a thug. But a lot of people b.s. a lot of other people in this town, and I decided later on that Ratner was expressing his feelings of loyalty and protectiveness for Gayheart when he had Singer call me. Let bygones be bygones, I figured. But he’s still not that much of a director, and I honestly don’t think he’s on his way up anytime soon.

Stories about the recent suicide deaths of writer Theresa Duncan (Tylenol and alcohol) and then her boyfriend Jeremy Blake (walking into the sea like Sterling Hayden did in The Long Goodbye) are all over the place. L.A. Fishbowl‘s Kate Coe has an L.A. Weekly story in this week’s issue, Chris Lee has an 8.3 story about the tragic duo in the L.A. Times, and Lee says in an online chat with Coe that Vanity Fair, the New Yorker, New York magazine and CNN’s Anderson Cooper are also preparing reports.

the late Theresa Duncan

It therefore felt a bit creepy when by Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone sent me a page of Duncan’s elegant blog (called “The Wit of the Staircase”), dated 2.21.06, that listed “Four Bloggers J’Adore” as follows: “1.Jorn Barger, 2. Lauren Cerand, 3. Jeff Wells, 4. Bad Feminist.” Flattering, okay, but this means there’s something about Hollywood Elsewhere that appeals to the mind of an obviously bright, attractive, 40 year-old woman who decided to off herself. I’m not sure I feel 100% great about this. There’s no romance or transportation in suicide. There is only ink, blackness …plug pulled.
Then Stone wrote once more and pointed out the existence of another guy named “Jeff Wells” whose site is called Rigorous Intuition. So never mind. (Sorry for calling it Rigorous Institution earlier, but a part of me automatically gravitated to that wording. Sound funnier, for one thing.)

In yesterday’s weekend box-office story, Variety‘s Pamela McLintock would only say that Paul Greengrass‘s The Bourne Ultimatum, which is opening today in 3,600 situations, is likely to rack up the best opening of the franchise. No specific projections, but she believes it’ll make more than the $52.5 million earned by The Bourne Supremacy when it opened on 7.23.04. For all I really know Ultimatum may only make a few bucks more than Supremacy, but the awareness and interest levels are truly over the roof, and this tells me it might actually hit $70 million, or at least $65 million and change.

I’m offended by the implications in mainstream reports that Sean Penn is doing a wrong or imprudent thing in visiting Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, and for applauding the leader’s trashing the U.S. waging of the Iraqi War, and for graciously nodding as Chavez calls him “brave” for urging Americans to impeach President Bush. Just as I’m offended by the constant characterizations of Chavez as some kind of wildcard nutbag in the vein of Iran’s holocaust-denying Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

In my book Penn and Chavez are both okay guys with reasonable humanistic attitudes and the courage to speak out against the corporate liars and greed-heads of the world.
I’m not a Chavez scholar or historian, but I’ve frankly been a kind of fan of the guy since seeing Kim Bartley and Donnacha O’Briain‘s The Revolution Will Not Be Televised — a perhaps slanted but still wonderfully rousing documentary about the failed April 2002 right-wing coup against Chavez — at the 2003 Toronto Film Festival. Is Chavez an egotist and a bit of a bully in some respects? Maybe, but politics is a very rough game in Venezuela. I know that he’s always been against the the oil-rich oligarchs in that country and in league with the disenfranchised, and that he’s down on the Bushies and their neocon agenda. In my book that’s a pretty good place to be coming from.
Bartley and O’Briain’s doc basically says that Chavez is supported by the poor and disenfanchised, and is pretty much hated by the moneyed classes. It doesn’t mention anything about his support with the poor drying up because he’s failed to push reforms, so maybe that’s the case now. But the doc persuaded me that the righties tried to blame the leftist Chavez supporters for the shootings that happened before the April ’02 coup attempt, even though right-wing thugs were the clear provocateurs in this situation. The doc contended that the privately run TV companies are total mouthpieces for the oligarchs, and that they didn’t report the truth of what was happening during the counter-coup and in fact spread lies.
Speaking before an auditorium “packed with his red-clad supporters,” Chavez called upon Bush to “withdraw the troops from Iraq…enough already with so much genocide,” according to an AP story by Ian James. “Penn sat near the front, at times applauding and nodding in agreement. He is the latest in a series of celebrities who have visited Caracas, including Danny Glover and Harry Belafonte.”

London reader Pavan Shamdasani is claiming that The Bourne Supremacy: Extended Edition, a Region 2-only release, isn’t extended at all and is “the exact same cut of the previous version,” according to his own calculations. He knows this, he says, because he compared the “Extended Edition” with the previous Region 2 version.
“I find this to be completely unethical on the part of Universal,” Shamdasani writes. “It seems to echo what they did with their release of The Bourne Identity: Explosive Extended Edition, except this time its far worse. Not only did they release a second edition of a DVD a few weeks before its sequel is released in cinemas, they slapped on the words “Extended Edition” so that every fan of the film runs out to buy it, when there is not one extension in the slightest.
“I attempted to contact Universal UK about this, sending them a very impassioned letter but have heard no reply in the past couple of days so I figured I’d spread the news to the fans. The average buyer won’t put in the time and effort to compare the two versions, accepting that there are extensions even if they can’t see them. Here’s a link to the Bourne DVD Amazon page where a couple of reviewers (myself included) have already caught on.”

I think I can honestly say without qualification that I am officially past the point where I can watch another biopic about a charismatic but self-destructive artist (Talk To Me, La Vie en Rose, El Cantante, Walk The Line, Ray, Who is Harry Nilsson and Why Is Everyone Talking About Him?, Great Balls of Fire, Bird, The Doors, A Face in the Crowd) with any kind of receptive, open-pore attitude.

Marc Athony as salsa legend Hector Lavoe in Leon Ichaso’s El Cantante

To judge by these and other biopics (the latest of which is the critically savaged El Cantante) the vast majority of all major pop artists seem to have lived the exact same lives and grappled with the exact same substance-abuse problems, and I’m just sick to death of this same damn story being told over and over.
That doesn’t mean I’m suddenly now open to Disney-produced, G-rated biopics about artists with sunny attitudes with families and friends that love them without exception. I know what artists are like for the most part, and that the better ones are always grappling with doubts and demons of one sort or another. As an HE reader wrote last year in response to my review of the John Scheinfeld‘s Harry Nilsson doc, “The third act of any artist’s life always sucks.” It’s just that I’ve seen too many of these downward-swirl stories, and I can’t watch any more without making cracks at the screen.
Andrew Sarris had a similiar end-of-the-line experience with the films of Jean- Luc Godard, he once told me. It was sometime in the early ’70s, as I recall, when he explained to New York Film Festival director Richard Roud that he was off the Godard boat. We all reach these points, I think. Wait…this is a thread. What genres, stories and filmmakers have you had it up to here with and can no longer tolerate?

It’s sometimes unfair how certain stories or phrases or terms have a way of wrapping themselves around the neck of someone who’s encountered press scrutiny. But fairly or not, newly hired Hollywood Reporter editor Elizabeth Guider is going to have to fend off the word “gizmos” — a term that former colleague Tom Tapp says that she once used to describe “computers and Blackberrys” — for some time to come.
I mean, my God, that’s almost like calling them “contraptions” or “doohickeys“! Guider hasn’t reportedly described persons conversant with the nuts and bolts of cyber journalism as “whippersnappers,” but maybe Tapp was out of the room. It’s hard not to regard anyone’s use of the “g” word as a blade of grass that reflects on an entire universe of comprehensions as well as a regarding askance of the whole technological turnover that journalism is undergoing these days. Forward!

Ingmar Bergman “was not at all what you might expect: the formidable, dark, brooding genius. He was a regular guy. He commiserated with me about low box-office grosses and women and having to put up with studios.
“He confided about his irrational dreams, that he would show up on the set and not know where to put the camera and be completely panic-stricken. He’d have to wake up and tell himself that he is an experienced, respected director and he certainly does know where to put the camera. But that anxiety was with him long after he had created 15, 20 masterpieces. The world saw him as a genius, and he was worrying about the weekend grosses.
“Yet he was plain and colloquial in speech, not full of profound pronunciamentos about life. Sven Nykvist [his cinematographer] told me that when they were doing all those scenes about death and dying, they’d be cracking jokes and gossiping about the actors’ sex lives.” — Woody Allen, who met Bergman once and spoke to him many times after that, speaking to Time‘s Richard Corliss.

Working on a film set is emotionally exhausting because each and every actor and crew person is obliged to be “on” all the time like a vaudeville performer — smiling, spirited, quick with a quip. And you have to keep it going for ten, twelve, fourteen hours a day. All that charming alpha stuff is great, of course, but it has to be real. Undercurrents of fear (i.e., concerns about not getting hired on the next job unless everyone you meet likes you) have a way of taking the bloom off.

A shoot on Melrose and Huntley — 8.2.07, 5:55 pm.

Update: A Magnolia Pictures staffer told me yesterday there was a long-jead journo screening in Manhattan two days ago for Brian De Palma‘s Redacted. That was wrong, I’ve now been told — the screening was “for some festival committees.” I asked to speak directly to Magnolia Pictures chief Eammon Bowles about this but he never returned the call, so I accepted the word of an underling.

Redacted only wrapped about three months ago, but it will play in Toronto in September and open in the fall. A DePalma fan site has quoted a “source” who saw the HD-shot film, and the short verdict is that this “Rashomon-style series of video diaries based on a single incident between American soldiers and Iraqi citizenry” is “very good.”
The video diaries come from several sources, including an American soldier, an Iraqi, and a terrorist website, among others.” The source adds that the film is “intense” and “very affecting,” and that “it feels like the work of a young man.”

Update: Warner Bros. will screen Oliver Hirschbiegel‘s The Invasion (8.17) next Tuesday, which is the only screening I’ve heard of thus far. By any fair-minded standard, this body-snatchers movie with Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig has been playing hide-the-ball. It doesn’t look too bad, to judge by the trailer. “You’ll feel the same the next morning,” “Don’t show emotion,” etc. What do people expect from this thing…innovation? It’s an old shoe with new soles and a spit-shine.

It was reported months ago that The Invasion doesn’t bear the stamp of the German-born Hirschbiegel (Downfall) as much as that of producer Joel Silver and reclusive weirdo directors Larry and Andy Wachowski‘s.
Collider.com‘s Steve Weintraub wrote four months ago that Hirschbiegel’s original cut didn’t go down all that well with Silver and various WB suits (i.e., not enough action beats) so Silver brought in the Wachowskis for a fix job. They reportedly re-wrote 2/3 of it and then got James Teigue, the Wachowski flunky who directed V for Vendetta, to shoot the additional footage.
I haven’t seen the TV trailer, but a friend says it’s all Kidman and no Craig. What, does he have poison ivy? On top of which The Invasion isn’t tracking all that strongly. Tough times and agitated mindsets over at Warner Bros.