A very nicely rendered trailer for Clint Eastwood‘s Flags of Our Fathers (Dreamamount, 10.20). There’s some kind of deal in place by which www.miltary.com is the only website currently showing it….cool.

The Venice Film Festival jury has given the Golden Lion to Jia Zhangke‘s Still Life — hah! — and not Stephen Frears ‘ The Queen or Emilio Estevez‘s Bobby . The latter two were named as the most likely Golden Lion winners in a recent Reuters story by Mike Collett-White and Silvia Aloisi…wrong! The Silver Lion for Best Director went to director Alain Resnais for Private Fears in Public Places , and a Silver Lion Revelation trophy went to Emanuele Crialese for Nuovomondo — Golden Door.

I read an earlybird “review” two or three months ago that said Ridley Scott‘s A Good Year (20th Century Fox, 11.10) was a little too mild and unassertive for its own good. The writer was somewhat persuasive because ever since I’ve been referring to this film in my column jottings as “Ridley Lite.”
Well, back up on that. A Good Year, which had its first press screening this morning at 9 ayem, is a lightweight film, all right, and, okay, more than a little formulaic from the get-go…but it goes down so easily and smartly, and after the first 35 or 40 minutes or so the mood of it begins to sink in like expensive French skin cream, and the result is a kind of airy, nectary enchantment that is relatively rare in mainstream cinema these days.
And I swear on my kids that Russell Crowe, the fuming, flying-phone-man of legend, is 50% of the cause of all this sweet, mellow charm. The other 50% contributor is Scott, of course. And let’s give some credit, also, to the late Harry Nilsson, whose songs turn up on the soundtrack three times. (“Gotta Get Up”, one my favorites, is one of them.)
And let’s offer a toast, also, to the cinematography, the French sun, the vineyards, the aroma, the taste of it, the beautiful women…the whole succulent package. This, to me, is first-class escapism.
The Good Year press conference is about to begin (I’m typing this from the press room at teh Sutton Place hotel) so I’ll continue this piece later on this afternoon ….probably.

Peter O’Toole‘s performance as an aging, spirited, rogue-ishly randy actor in Roger Michell‘s Venus (Miramax, 12.15) hasn’t been overhyped — I saw the film late yesterday afternoon and it’s certainly one of his very best. But it has been, I think, under-described. It’s a performance of profound tenderness and vulnerabilty …artful frailty, if you will.

O’Toole is 74 and is playing a man in his early to mid ’80s, and bravely, it seemed to me. He makes you chuckle at times, and of course is charming to the last, but it’s not an audience-pleasing “performance” as much as a piece of naked exposure about what it is to be at death’s door and stll wanting to be alive in every way you can.
It’s a beautiful job, and it makes me all the more sad that O’Toole won’t be coming to Toronto after all. It was announced yesterday that he’s too sick to travel from Britain. Something about “intestinal problems, which he’s had before,” according an a story in Tom O’Neill‘s column.

Emilio Estevez‘s Bobby “is bound to get mixed reactions from critics, especially those not attuned to the times and attitudes it depicts,” says a voice from Los Angeles. “Estevez is aping Grand Hotel and every other multi-story ensemble pic right up to last year’s Crash. Taken as a whole it’s admirable and, I feel, necessary.” I get what he’s saying. The under-40s who aren’t especially liberal or political-minded aren’t likely to respond like boomers who were “there” in one way or another.

James Bond is dead, poor Daniel Craig is the first mate on a sinking ship, Bourne is the new Bond, etc. But people keep sending me the brand-new Bond/Casino Royale trailer and I have to admit…fuck that, I don’t have to admit anything. But it’s well cut and gives you a good jolt. I’ve just been disliking 007 producers Michael Wilson and Barbara Broccoli more than usual because they persuaded director Roger Michell to bail on the next one.

I somehow missed this two-day-old Radar Online poll about who’s Hollywood’s biggest hack (answer: Brett Ratner), most wanted actor (answer: Brad Pitt), most dysfunctional director (answer: Michael Mann) and so on. The reporter (whom I assume is Marcus Baram, whom I’ve known since his days working for George Rush at the N.Y. Daily News) talked to roughly 50 “power brokers”.

Hollywood Reporter columnist Anne Thompson on the three amigos — directors Guillermo del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth) Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu (Babel) and Alfonso Cuaron (Children of Men) — who huddle, collaborate, advise each other on creative matters, and generally watch each other’s back.

Lacking The Rhyme

As a would-be Oscar contender, Stranger Than Fiction (Columbia, 11.10) is dead. This fact was made resoundingly clear after today’s (9.8) press screening at the Toronto Film Festival. You and your friends can still pay to see it when it opens two months from now and chuckle and eat popcorn and discuss it afterwards… knock yourselves out. But forget the derby.

Maggie Gyllenhaal, Will Ferrell in in Marc Forster’s Stranger Than Fiction

The only reason anyone had reason to presume Fiction might be award-quality is that it’s a big-studio November release with quality-level people behind it (director Marc Forster, producer Lindsay Doran, screenwriter Zack Helm, costars Will Ferrell, Emma Thompson, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Dustin Hoffman, Queen Latifah), and a pseudo-trippy storyline in the vein of Charlie Kaufman‘s Adap- tation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind .
But it’s a half-assed little failure — a middle-range mindfuck movie that isn’t that clever or funny or up to something that holds metaphorical water. That’s because the “imaginative” metaphysical scheme behind it doesn’t really add up or pan out. I almost hated it. In some ways I do hate it.
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I can’t explain what’s wrong with Stranger Than Fiction without discussing plot particulars so if you’re averse to spoilers, read no further.
It’s about a lonely, overly regulated IRS agent named Harold Crick…stop right there. Right away you can smell the whimsical tone. Giving a joyless, constipated character the last name of “Crick” is like calling a cowboy character “Dusty Rhodes” or a backwoods yokel “Clem Kadiddlehopper.” Having him portrayed by Ferrell is…well, not a bad idea. In theory. Ferrell is more restrained and character- contained here than in any film he’s ever been in, and I remember saying to myself early on, “Good for him, he’s subliminating his schtick.”
But fifteen minutes with Harold Crick was enough to make me nostalgic for Talladega Nights, and that’s bad. All Ferrell has to play here is confusion and timidity and befuddlement, and anhour’s exposure to these states of mind make you feel down and dreary.

Harold’s problem is that he’s begun to hear his life being narrated by a woman with a British accent. Literally, like a DVD narration track. And it’s driving him nuts. We gradually learn that the voice belongs to a chain-smoking writer named Kay Eiffel (Emma Thompson), who is having lots of trouble finishing her latest book, which is largely about an IRS agent named Harold Crick. Yup…same.
Anyway, Kay is planning to kill Harold off and doesn’t quite know how. (She’s murdered several of her characters, we’re told.) And Harold, once he gets wind of this, seeks her out and pleads with her not to kill him because for the first time in his life he’s starting to feel love and joy, having fallen for a cookie lady (Gyllenhaal) whose tax returns he’s auditing, and because he’s just begun to learn to play guitar.
An interesting idea…at first. Anyone who’s written fiction knows that sometimes the characters tell you what they want to do. You may have had a plan for this or that to happen to them, but every so often characters talk back and say, “Hold up, man…this is my life, okay? And this is what I want to do.”
Except — and this is the Big Problem — the movie never makes it clear that Harold Crick is or isn’t living inside Kay Eiffel’s head. It never makes a case for the fact that he’s existing in some imaginary realm Kay is creating as she moves along with her book, or, assuming he’s real, how and why Kay’s imaginings have any power over him.

The bottom line (I think ) is that Harold is as real as you or me or Piers Handling or Paris Hilton…or so it seemed to me. And yet Harold believes he’s a character in Kay’s book and he’s afraid that Kay will have him killed, etc. On top of which Kay is unaware that Harold is a real-life physical creature who is being guided and provoked by her words.
Desperate, Harold turns to help from a quirky English professor, Dr. Jules Hilbert (Dustin Hoffman), who listens with interest but also a kind of strange indifference to his tale. Very strange. Hilbert tells Howard at one point that if Kay has decided he has to die, he may as well accept it because the manner and circumstance of his death that she’s dreamt up will somehow be more enobling than an average death. Or some such hooey.
On top of which there’s Queen Latifah as some kind of soother-smooth talker type who’s been ordered by Eiffel’s publisher to help her circumnavigate the writer’s block. Can anyone imagine an ordeal more terrible than having to deal with Queen Latifah more or less moving into your home or workspace and sitting on you (all 250 pounds of her) until you start writing again?
I know this sounds like a tiresome, half-baked, full-of-holes story idea, and it may feel tedious just reading about it in this space, but seeing the film is much, much worse….trust me. Stranger Than Fiction is one of those movies that makes you shift around in your seat and squeeze the armrest of your chair and whimper and grit your teeth. After an hour or so it makes you feel like your head is going to explode.

Dustin Hoffman, Will Ferrell

Zac Helm’s script was widely admired before this film was made, and I still can’t figure why that was. I tried to read it twice and couldn’t get through it. The damn thing doesn’t echo because the system of the story hasn’t been thought out or explained in a way that really “works”. It’s stuck on its own deadpan cuteness and quirkiness and other-ness. Talk about flames licking your feet.
I’m not saying Fiction won’t have its fans here and there, but it’s finished as far as any kind of derby points are concerned because there will be enough detractors like myself throwing its value into question. Average Joes, trust me, are going to go “later” and shine it after the first showings on Friday night.

Triumph of Others

That Telluride Film Festival hype about Florian Henckel- Donnersmarck‘s The Lives of Others (Sony Classics, 2.07) was based on serious substance. This is one of the most penetrating German-made “heart” films I’ve ever seen — the love story at the center of it is tender and impassioned and ripely erotic — and yet it’s also a very chilling and gripping drama about political terror.

Martina Gedek, Sebastian Koch in The Lives of Others

And yet it’s very much of an interior thing — emotional at every turn and at times quite sad. Gray and dispiriting at other times, but with a touching “up” element at the end.
The Lives of Others is a political thriller with compassion — a movie about spying and paranoia and the worst aspects of Socialist bloc rigidity and bureacratic thug- gery, 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 need not rule.
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It’s about the turning of a bad guy — a Stasi secret policeman (Ulrich Muhe) who is 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 (Martina Gedek) for the sake of career advancement gradually weakens and erodes, and then flips over into something else entirely.
Call it a fable or (if you’re German) unrealistic in an historical political sense, but I bought it and so did everyone else at last night’s packed screening at the Elgin. The crowd stood up at the end of the 9 pm show — clapping, cheering, woo-wooing. Muhe and Henckel-Donnersmarck, the 33 year-old director-writer, left their seats and went up on stage and took bows — several bows. They waved and smiled as the cheers kept coming, and then they turned to each other and hugged. Quite a moment.

Ulrich Muhe and Floridan Henckel-Donnersmarck taking bows on the stage of Toronto’s Elgin theatre last night around 11:15 pm.

The Lives of Others a one-week qualifying run in New York and Los Angeles, and then open it in February to coincide with the Oscar nominations. It’s all but guaranteed to be nominated as one of the five Best Foreign Films. It 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.
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 (Tukur), to dig up anything negative he can on a famous playwright named Georg Dreyman (och) and his actress wife Christa-Maria Sieland (Gedeck, best known for her starring role in Mostly Martha).

Ulrich Muhe in The Lives of Others

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.
I have to get downtown and hit the Varsity plex, but I’ll be speaking with Muhe and Henckel-Donnersmarck at their hotel tomorrow afternoon. Not counting Pedro Almodovar’s ,em>Volver< .em>, which I saw yeserday for the second time yesterday for reasons of pure pleasure, this is the first super-fine film I’ve seen at the Toronto Film Festival so far.
Later today is Venus and then Candy and then a Michael Moore thing at the Elgin, and finally a Volver party starting around 10:30 or 11 pm.