Here’s a site that lets you futz around with music and images from Darren Aronofsky‘s The Fountain…okay. Obviously a kind of promotional “Hail Mary” pass but fine. Clearly, curiously, not enough people are getting into this film. It has only a 50% positive Rotten Tomatoes rating. I told Aronofsky when I saw it late last summer than anyone who’s taken LSD or mescaline should definitely be receptive to it. Not to be overly simplistic, but could some of the difficulty come down to the fact that not enough people out there are sufficiently “experienced”? (Well….I am.) Those on the fence may want to at least consider Devin Faraci‘s CHUD rave.

Running a link to material as dusty and creaky as this is pretty close to unpardonable, but this YouTube video of Sacha Baron Cohen‘s visit to the Jon Stewart show is truly fascinating. Cohen’s natural British accent is mesmerizing…in a very relaxed and affable way. He’s witty as shit. On top of which (and for some reason I find this extra-surprising) his hair is thinning. For me, it revives the whole Borat thing because now there’s an engaging real-life guy behind the mask. (The James Lipton story is hilarious, by the way.) Cohen needs to try a different Borat p.r. mode and do some follow-up interviews as himself. It adds to the intrigue. Everyone’s sick of his in-character routine — time to shift gears.

The coming weekend looks like another Borat crowning, although I don’t yet have an exact screen count tally. The other significant trackers are Casino Royale (85, 39. 10), Deja Vu (78, 31, 7), Stranger Than Fiction (68, 37. 7) and Bobby (60, 37, 3). For numerous reasons, the excellent Babel (52, 25, 5) is in the same awareness-and-definite interest ballpark as Ridley Scott’s A Good Year (51,18, 4).

All I was trying to do was get to Josh Horowitz‘s story about Judd Apatow declaring that Borat should be an Oscar Best Picture contender, but the MTV.com’s site is way too layered and complicated and show-offy. Way too much stuff that needs to load before getting to the story. Wells to MTV.com webmaster(s) — please let guys like me access Horowitz’s material without trying to saturate my head with all of your empty-ass, sub-literate “whoa, dude” audio-visual bullshit .

The best Borat news of the week — banned in Russia. “The film contains material that some viewers may consider offensive to certain nationalities and religions,” Federal Agency for Culture and Cinematography minister Yury Vasyuchkov has explained to local press.
Variety‘s Moscow correspondent Tom Birchenough has reported that the ban “is likely the first time that a non-pornographic movie has been banned [in Russia]…plenty of hard-core porn movies succeed in being licensed by the agency.”
Local distributor Gemini had intended to give Borat “a medium-range release” starting on 11.30. Gemini spokesperson Alexander Kovalenko told Birchenough he was still considering whether to [try and] release the film. The story said that distributors “have the option to appeal the licensing decision √ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Ǩ¬ù though it would likely prove a fruitless task [in this instance].”

Condolences to the friends and family of Ed Bradley, the legendary, steady-eyed 60 Minutes correspondent who died, according to Variety, sometime earlier today at age 65. He was felled by lukemia, which he’d been reportedly coping with for some time. The Variety obit says Bradley won 19 Emmys during his career at CBS, which began in 1971 when he joined as a stringer in the Paris bureau…[he] was transferred to Saigon the year after and was wounded covering the war in Cambodia.” It also says that “after the semi-retirement of Mike Wallace in 2005, Bradley became the longest-serving full-time 60 Minutes correspondent (he started in 1980) and was the first to introduce himself after the ticking stopwatch, an honor known as the first ‘I’m.'” A long time ago a friend regaled me with details about a hot affair he’d had with the late Jessica Savitch sometime in the ’70s. For some reason I always saw Bradley as an exceptional news guy after hearing this — a man with a certain spiritual specialness who had the taste buds of a good hound.

I wasn’t invited to Wednesday night’s Westwood screening of Casino Royale (a kind of punishment, I presume, for having dissed Sony’s magnetic fall trio — Marie Antoinette, Stranger Than Fiction, Running With Scissors — with too much vigor) but Variety‘s Todd McCarthy attended, and he obviously sped home and speed-wrote his rave review and had it posted hours later.

And he’s made two encouraging proclamations — Daniel Craig is the studliest, most Ian Fleming-esque Bond since Sean Connery, and that the film’s low-tech, somewhat underproduced quality is very agreeable thing. For 007 purists, at least.
“Casino Royale is the first Bond in a while that’s not over-produced and is all the better for it [with] the fabled series” having been “invigorated by going back to basics,” McCarthy declares. “It’s comparatively low-tech, with the intense fights mostly conducted up close and personally, the killings accomplished by hand or gun, and without an invisible car in evidence.”
Moreoever, “there can be little argument that Craig comes closer to Ian Fleming’s original conception of this exceptionally long-lived male fantasy figure than anyone since early Connery. Casino Royale sees Bond himself recharged with fresh toughness and arrogance, along with balancing hints of sadism and humanity.
Bond, he writes, “is more of a lone wolf” this time out. “Craig’s upper-body hunkiness and mildly squashed facial features giving him the air of a boxer; 007’s got a frequently remarked upon ego, which can cause him to recklessly overreach and botch things, and the limited witticisms function naturally within the characters’ interchanges.
The notorious gonad-squeezing, scrotum-tugging scene is a stand-out, apparently. “Constrained nude to a bottomed-out chair, Bond is tortured as Mads Mikkelsen‘s Le Chiffre repeatedly launches a hard-tipped rope upon his nemesis’ most sensitive area, and Craig once and for all claims the character as his own by virtue of the supremely cocky defiance with which he taunts Le Chiffre even in vulnerable extremis.”
On top of which the dialogue, says Mccarthy, “requires Bond to acknowledge his mistakes and reflect on the soul-killing nature of his job, [and therefore delivers a] self-searching [that’s] unimaginable in the more fanciful Bond universes inhabited by Pierce Brosnan and Roger Moore.”

Reconsidering Lives

I spoke early Wednesday evening with Florian Henckel- Donnersmarck, the 33 year-old director of the gripping, pulverizing German-language thriller The Lives of Others (Sony Pictures Classics), which is all but a dead lock for a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar nomination.

Florian Henckel-Donnersmarck at the Beverly Wilshire hotel — Wednesday, 11.8.06, 6:05 pm.

A huge favorite at the Telluride Film festival and the biggest hit of the Toronto Film festival after Borat, The Lives of Others won’t open in a conventional commercial sense until 2.9.07. L.A. audiences will get an early peek in December, however, when it opens here for a one-week qualifying run. The idea is to qualify it for nom- inations in other categories, as Pedro Almodovar‘s Talk to Her and Roberto Begnini‘s Life is Beautiful managed a few years ago.
The Lives of Others is one of the most penetrating German-made “heart” films I’ve ever seen — the love story is tender and impassioned and ripely erotic — but it’s also a riveting drama about political terror.
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I always tell people Lives has four selling points: (a) it’s a first-rate political thriller and a well-sculptured drama, (b) the story isn’t predictable, and it delivers strong arresting emotion at pretty much every turn, (c) it’s sexy as all get out (largely due to costar Martina Gedek, best known on these shores for her Mostly Martha role) and (d) it runs 2 hours and 17 minutes with credits, and yet it feels like maybe 100, 110 minutes at the most.
It’s a gray and dispiriting film now and then, but with a touching “up” element at the finale. It’s a political thriller with real compassion — a movie about spying and paranoia and the worst aspects of Socialist bloc rigidity and bureacratic thuggery, and yet one that delivers a metaphor that says even the worst of us can move towards openness and a lessening of hate and suspicion. Ugliness needn’t rule.

Sebastian Koch, Martina Gedek

It’s about the turning of a bad guy — a Stasi secret policeman (Ulrich Muhe) who’s first seen as a bloodless and fiendish bureaucrat, but whose determination to spy upon and mangle the lives of a playwright (Sebastian Koch) and his actress wife (Gedek) for the sake of career advancement gradually weakens and erodes, and then flips over into something else entirely.
“It’s so easy to make a cynical film,” Henckel-Donnersmarck said early in our chat. “To write or play an unlikable part is easier still. But to write or play someone postive…a positive character…is much harder. Any kind of film with a message of hope, to convey that emotion…to deliver that is a real challenge.
“A film that empowers you is very important to me. Even if it’s painting a positive image just be painting a shadow. if ‘what’s next’ question dies in a viewer’s head …that makes a film drag. People always have to be asking “what’s next?”..you have to keep people awake in that respect, and that means you always have to keep surprising them.”
Set in Berlin, the story mostly takes place in 1984 and ’85, although it jumps to ’89 (the year the Berlin Wall came down) and then to ’91 and ’93. During the 50-year history of the German Democratic Republic (’49 to ’89), the thugs who held the reins of power kept the citizenry in line through a network of secret police called the “Stasi”, an army of 200,000 bureaucrats and informers whose goal was “to know everything.”

Captain Gerd Wiesler (Muhe) is a highly placed Stasi officer who is prodded by a superior, Lieutenant Colonel Anton Grubitz (Ulrich Tukur), to dig up anything negative he can on a famous playwright named Georg Dreyman (Koch) and his actress wife, Christa-Maria Sieland (Gedeck).
At first the suspicions are baseless — Freyman is a dedicated socialist who believes in the GDR. But his loyalties evolve when he discovers that his wife has been pressured into a sexual relationship with a government bigwig, and especially after a theatrical director pal commits suicide due to despondency over his being blacklisted and prevented from working. Eventually Wiesler, who has had their apartment thoroughly bugged, has evidence that Wiesler is working to undermine the state.
And yet his immersion in the lives of this playwright and his actress wife leads, ironically, to a gradual bonding process — a feeling of identification and sympathy for the couple as human beings, artists…people he’d like to know and perhaps share passions with, despite his constricted personality and shadowy Stasi ways. He knows he’s not in their league and probably not worthy of their friendship, but he feels what he feels regardless.
Others won 7 Lola Awards (Germany’s equivalent of the Oscar) — for Best Film, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Actor (Muhe), Best Supporting Actor (Ulrich Tukur) and Best Production Design.

Ulrich Muhe in The Lives of Others

Here’s the shorter first portion of our conversation and the longer second portion. It includes questions and comments from producer and longtime friend Victoria Wisdom, who’d met Henckel-Donnersmarck the night before.
Florian is definitely the tallest first-rate director I’ve ever spoken to — he’s 6’9″. He said he’s looking to direct a U.S.-funded film next, although he’s a ways from deciding what that will be. He’ll be in Los Angeles for the next few days. He said something about returning for the one-week December opening and then again in January to promote the early February opening.

Agents are beefing to L.A. Times reporter John Horn about not being allowed to vote in the Oscar competition. Agents are not all Ari Gold types. They do a lot of creative facilitating, of course, and that’s definitely an important part of the process. But there’s been continued stiff resistance to allowing them access to the ballot box. Right now the academy’s position is that “membership is extended to people who make the art,” says an Academy spokesperson, “[but] not people who provide services, however valuable, to the people who make the art.”

Revised due to reader input: The only somewhat younger, new-to-the-game persons in Mark Olsen‘s L.A. Times/The Envelope piece who have any hope of generating any kind of Oscar heat is Dreamgirls supporting actress hopeful Jennifer Hudson and The Queen‘s Michael Sheen, a best supporting actor contender. That’s it…the list goes no further.

N.Y. Times guy David Carr (a.k.a. “the Bagger”) listens to director-screenwriter Billy Ray (Shattered Glass) expound during an American Film Market panel. in Santa Monica. “It’s difficult out there, but it always has been,” Ray comments. “If your goal is to write or direct for a living and make a contribution to the culture, you are choosing something tough. If I could be happy doing something else, I would.”
I presume Ray isn’t delighted with the status of 102 Minutes, a script adaptation of Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn‘s 9/11 book that Ray wrote for Mike DeLuca ‘s Sony-based production company. I was told today that it’s an “active project” (i.e., a studio term that doesn’t mean anything) under the aegis of Alissa Phillips, but the truth is that it’s taken forever to get rolling. I read it last year. It’s a tough thing to weave together several stories and several characters who, in this case, happened to be working inside the WTC towers that day, so I can’t really call it a home run. But it’s reasonably well done…
At one point in the AFM panel discussion, Carr writes, Ray recounted how he had been asked by a producer to do a script based on Doom: “I said, `What’s the story?,’ and he said, ‘What’s the difference?'” That‘s the AFM in the nutshell.

Say what you will about Emilio Estevez‘s Bobby (Weinstein Co., 11.17), but it seems to have tapped into something fairly strong with the over-50 set. Or it did last night, anyway, when it screened at Pete Hammond‘s KCET class out at the TV Academy in North Hollywood. It was election night, of course, and perhaps people were reflecting back on those old Bobby Kennedy highs. Or maybe the movie just got to them. The crowd, in any event, really responded when the lights came up and Hammond introduced Estevez.

“It was the longest and strongest applause I’ve ever seen happen at this class,” Hammond told me earlier today. “When people greet a guest the applause usually goes 30, 40 seconds…usually less than a minute. This went on and on and on, and then everyone started to stand up. Very unusual. These are all upscale movielovers. I asked how many had voted and they all raised their hands.”
I never know to what extent a reaction like this is may be about things other than the film iself, but I remember what an exceptionally positive reaction Crash got when I showed it an older, well-heeled crowd at the UCLA Sneak Previews in the spring of ’05, and we all know where that one led. And we all know that a typical Academy member tends to fit the same profile — 50-plus, liberal, etc. So maybe this means something. Or not.