I think Marc Forster‘s Stranger Than Fiction (Columbia, 11.10), which preemed at the Toronto Film Festival over the weekend, is maddening in its lack of clarity — its inability to make simple unified sense of all the strands.
But there’s no one correct way of seeing it. Emmanuel Levy is calling it “a moral fable, a wake-up call for all [who] would like to change our story. The movie touches on a universal fantasy , the notion that we have inner voices in our heads that tell us what to do and how to be.”
What Will Ferrell‘s Harold Crick character “discovers in the midst of the film’s incredible events is how to escape all that and really begin to enjoy his existence. All of the characters, including Harold’s wristwatch, end up doing little but significant things to help save one another, underlying the theme that the people and things we take most for granted are often the ones that make life worth living and actually keep us alive.”

9.11.01 happened five years ago today…take a moment. It seems like a soft day at the Toronto Film Festival, which means there’s a bit more time to stay with www.cnn.com and watch CNN’s streaming replay of its 9.11.01 coverage — precisely as it unfolded, minute-by-minute — from 8:30 am to midnight.

The first words that came out my mouth this afternoon as I watched the closing credits of Todd Field‘s Little Children were “very interesting.” It’s a wee bit cold and a little bit strange, but it’s also a very poised (i.e., stylized but not overly so), carefully composed art film — and as such it has my complete respect.
That sounds like I’m holding back, doesn’t it? I’m not trying to. I just don’t know how else to put it.
It’s less naturalistically moving than Fields’ In The Bedroom, but then it’s a step up from that film — Fields isn’t trying for similar moods and tones. It’s certainly one of the most impressive suburban malaise films I’ve ever seen, in part because the feelings of dread are constant and unnerving. Every step of the way you’re thinking, “Something really bad might happen here.”
This is not a film looking to warm anyone’s heart — that’s for sure. And yet it brings compassion and insight and exquisite humor to its story, which is based on a novel by Tom Perrotta (who also wrote Election), who co-scripted with Fields. It’s a story about characters and situations that I partly recognize and certainly believe in, with almost every one seriously handicapped in one way or another.
Little Children may be better than I’m able to give it credit for right now, three hours after seeing it at the Varsity. I know I haven’t seen anything like it in a long, long while. It’s immensely satisfying and pleasurable to watch a film as ambitious and precise and high-strung as this, and yet it’s not a soother. This said, I’m not sure if it’s an Oscar derby movie or not. I can see how some might find it too queer for their tastes, and I can see some being excited — turned on — by its apart-ness.
This is a film about emotionally arrested adults — 30- and 40-somethings who desperately need to live in their own private dreamspaces, and hang the consequences.
I really loved the perfectly phrased narration (read by Will Lyman), which reminds me somewhat of the dry, sardonic narration in Stanley Kubrick‘s Barry Lyndon. The turn-off element, I suspect, will be the sex-offender character (played by Jackie Earle Haley). He’s a sad, self-torturing, pathetic, very real person — a character I’m not likely to forget. Kudos to Earle for bringing something (don’t know what exactly) really fascinating to it.
Kate Winslet‘s performance, it seems to me, is a near-lock for a Best Actress nom, and I was totally knocked out by how good Patrick Wilson is — it’s the best thing he’s ever done so far, and I’m including his superb acting in in Mike Nichols‘ Angels Over America. Jennifer Connelly also, I feel, outdoes herself here.
If nothing else, this is a fascinating things-are-fucked-up-in-surburbia movie. Everyone needs to see it and chew it over. I plan on seeing it at least another couple of times.

Will Mel Gibson‘s Apocalypto really arrive on Dec. 8?” asks N.Y. Times columnist Caryn James. “As recently as last week Touchstone, the Disney division releasing it, insisted it would. That√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s about all the studio will say about a movie that must have become an albatross, because the crucial question is: How can this film be marketed? Mr. Gibson√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s name and ability to chat up Apocalypto was its only real selling point. Now he trails apologies and questions about bigotry wherever he goes, which will make it pretty hard to stay on message about old Jaguar Paw. ”

I wish I’d been awake all through last night’s All The King’s Men screening (which started at 10:35 pm). If I’d seen it all, I could maybe have written a pan as smart and frank as David Poland has written here.

This is a generic point, but you can’t write a pan of a film you’ve only seen 60% of, or even 90% of. But I’ve always maintained it’s permissible to say, “I blew this film off after 20 minutes and here’s what led to me to this.” That said (and this is also an old riff), if a film isn’t working I’m fairly sure of this ten minutes in. After fifteen minutes I know it absolutely. After 20 minutes I’m leaning forward and cupping my face in my hands. After a half hour my knees are bouncing up and down. After 40 minutes I’m looking at my watch and calculating how much longer I can stand. And anybody who says they don’t experience similar things while watching an incontestably bad film is being dishonest.

Didn’t mean to sound dismissive yesterday about Ben Affleck winning the Best Actor trophy at the Venice Film Festival. He does a solid job at getting into the frustration, rage and sadness of George Reeves . Reeves became world-famous as a result of his starring in the Superman TV series in the ’50s, and then hopelessly despondent about same — he became so strongly identified with Superman that he couldn’t land any other roles.
I wish that the film, which I respected and half-liked, would have had more Affleck and less of Adrien Brody , frankly. The latter plays a shamus hired by Reeves’ mother to learn whether or not her son’s shooting death was a murder made to look like a suicide. Brody’s gumshoe is not the sharpest tool in the shed; he’s vaguely motivated and a bit of a loser. The decision by director Allan Coulter to focus on his flopping around as much as it does is what makes Hollywoodland frustrating to sit through.

Gabriel Range‘s Death of a President, which screens tonight in Toronto, “does not take the assassination of [George] Bush as the premise for entertainment,” the 32 year-old director tells Toronto Star critic Peter Howell. “It’s the starting point for what I hope are some quite serious reflections on these extraordinary times we live in.” Here’s the piece, which apparently is the first significant interview that Range has given about the film.

In another N.Y. Times Sunday piece, James Ulmer tells the tale of David Geffen ‘s long-standing reluctance to have Dreamgirls made into a feature, and how director Bill Condon and producer Larry Mark managed to change his mind. Other stories are passed along in the piece, but this is the most interesting.

N.Y. Times staffer David Halbfinger profiles All The Kings’ Men director-writer Steve Zallian, apparently without his having seen the finished film. He writes that ATKM “is already being talked about as an Oscar contender,” but he qualifies this by mentioning that Robert Rossen‘s original 1949 version, starring Broderick Crawford, won the Best Picture Oscar “and no remake has ever matched that feat, Academy researchers say.”

Steve Zallian, Sean Penn

This seems to me like a typical N.Y. Times evasion. Halbfinger has surely dug around and been told what many, many people are saying about this film, which is that it’s problematic on various levels (sluggish, creaky, talky) and will almost certainly encounter limited enthusiasm from the public, but he chooses instead to mention a statistic that implies that Oscar glory may be elusive.
There were expectations that Zaillian’s film would open at the end of ’05, but “when test screenings revealed that audiences were confused about the basic relationships among the main characters, Columbia Pictures agreed to delay the opening, and Mr. Zaillian went back to work.” Eight months later Zallian “has emerged from almost a year of near-solitary confinement in an editing room to pronounce All the King’s Men a finished product. His producers are hoping it will prove his masterpiece.”
All the King’s Men stars Sean Penn, Kate Winslet, James Gandolfini, Patricia Clarkson, Mark Ruffalo and Anthony Hopkins. It’ll open nationwide on 9.22 following some special screenings in New Orleans.
I tried to see it at 5:30 pm yesterday afternoon at the Varsity, but I lost heart when an announcement was made that there were almost no seats available (I was standing near the end of a long line) so I went to three parties in succession and came back for the 10:30 pm screening. Unfortunately, the champagne at the parties on top of the usual late-night fatigue factor messed with my concentration.
I definitely saw portions of ATKM — somewhere between half and three-fifths, I’d say. I know that the parts I was awake for (and I was very alert and attuned during my waking moments) felt enervated and boring. I know that the photography has a kind of drained sepia quality, and that a lot of the scenes are shrouded in dark- ness and flavored with lots and lots of southern-fried, neo-Faulknerian dialogue.
Clarkson has at least one great line: “The world is full of sluts on skates.”
I’ll have to take another shot at seeing ATKM when I get back Los Angeles, I guess. Or on DVD four or five months from now.