“The story of this election…is demographics,” MSNBC’s Chuck Todd said a little while ago. “The Republican Party has not kept up with the changing face of America. That explains what’s going on in Florida. That explains what’s going on in Colorado. That explains, frankly, what’s going on in Virginia and North Carolina. The Obama campaign was right. They built a campaign for 21st century America. The Republican Party has some serious soul-searching to do when you look at these numbers…they are getting clobbered among non-white voters.”
I identified no one in my description of last night’s sputtering rage parking-lot argument about The Silver Linings Playbook, but Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neil has copped to being one of my opponents by posting an explanation and a response. Good on Tom for his manly candor. Here’s a portion of his article and a closing response from me:
The Silver Linings Playbook is “one of those awkward love stories about two social misfits who find salvation in each other’s arms. Arguably, you could say that Silver Linings is thus in the tradition of Slumdog Millionaire or, even better, Annie Hall (both have comedic qualities), but Oscar voters aren’t often smitten with love stories in this race, especially comedic ones. Usually, they believe Best Picture = Big Serious Picture.
“However, the most important quality a winner must have is The Rooting Factor and The Silver Linings Playbook has more passionate fans than the Philadelphia Eagles on David O. Russell‘s silver screen. We saw evidence of that earlier this month during its screenings to critics and industry chiefs at the Toronto International Film Festival, and in a parking garage last night after a screening in Beverly Hills. That’s where Jeff Wells had a pop-eyed meltdown when some of us mentioned the film’s predictable plotting (it’s obvious as hell how the film’s big dance competition will end — and, for that matter, how the love story will play out too).
“But such criticism is quibbling. Overall, The Silver Linings Playbook is extremely well made, deeply felt. It delivers. Of course, it will be nominated for Best Picture, director, screenplay. Twenty of the 23 Oscarologists polled by Gold Derby say Jennifer Lawrence will win Best Actress. With 17 to 10 odds, she’s a virtual shoo-in. Robert De Niro is in second place to win Best Supporting Actor, (6 to 1 odds).
“What was behind Jeff Wells’ meltdown last night in that parking garage? Why does he adore this film so much? I have a cynical answer that will probably get Jeff mad again, but I think it’s pertinent to this film’s place in this Oscar derby. The Silver Linings Playbook is the ultimate masturbatory fantasy of mature str8 guys. They feel like they can have a failed marriage or two behind them, they can even be a bit loopy in the head and cast off by the world, but, hey, somewhere, on some back suburban street, there’s a hot chick chasing him relentlessly, begging for sex.
“Now consider all of the loopy str8 geezers who dominate the membership of the motion picture academy. Hmmm…maybe The Silver Linings Playbook really is out front…and unbeatable?”
Wells to O’Neil: I honestly felt no horndog feelings for Jennifer Lawrence in this thing. But I felt enormous liking for her character’s cut-through the bullshit, straight-talking manner. She is dead solid real and steady and uncompromised every second she’s on-screen. So for me it wasn’t some fuck-fantasy thing — it’s the “I would love to meet a girl who loves me, sure, but I’d really love to connect with a woman who knows what she wants and doesn’t play games or beat around the bush and calls people on their bullshit” fantasy. Big difference.
Anybody who gives any shit to Trouble With The Curve (Warner Bros., 9.21) is a sourpuss who needs to hit the showers. This is not a great Eastwood film, but it’s an entirely decent second-tier thing that completely pays off during the last 15 minutes. Who else is making old-fashioned, tripod-mounted, one-scene-follows-another movies with plain-spoken characters that are actually about stuff that counts? This film is a classic 1957 Chevy with a well-tuned engine and brand-new radials and no GPS and an AM radio with no auxiliary plug-in — take it or leave it.
If the name “Sandy Koufax” doesn’t mean anything to you, you’re going to have trouble with Trouble With The Curve, okay? Just being straight with you.
You can’t put down Eastwood movies (even if this one has been directed, very smoothly and confidently and almost certainly with Clint overseeing, by Robert Lorenz) for their relaxed Eastwoodish pacing and right-over-the-plate writing and their emphasis on values. That’s what they do, man. It’s a brand, a consistency.
Trouble With The Curve is a baseball movie that totally sides with the savvy scouts and their gut instincts and derides the computer stats analysts — it’s anti-Moneyball in spades. And it’s a fairy tale, of course — I didn’t believe any of it in a real-world sense except for the parts that show Clint’s character getting stiffer and crankier and a little less able to fend for himself, but I went with it because it’s Clint’s World and because the ending works with a great final line. As I was walking out I was even starting to forgive Clint for being a Romney supporter. Well, not really “forgive” — I was trying to figure out ways to overlook it.
Clint gets to do his snarly older-guy thing as Atlanta Braves baseball scout Gus Lobel. Gus is starting to be regarded by the front-office guys as too old and bent-over for the game (i.e., refuses to work with a computer) . Plus he needs to forget about driving because his eyes are failing. Pete (John Goodman) does what he can to protect Gus from soulless GenX operator Tom Silver (Mathew Lillard) but Gus’s forthcoming trip to scout hitters and pitchers in North Carolina is basically “move it or lose it.” Pete persuades Gus’s attorney daughter Mickey (Amy Adams) to tag along to make sure he’s okay. In N.C. they hook up with Johnny (Justin Timberlake), a former pitcher whom Gus supported and encouraged and now a scout for another team. And yaddah yaddah.
I have to admit I was a little concerned for the first two thirds or so. Trouble ambles along in a relaxed and steady fashion but it’s almost entirely about character and old age closing in and Gus’s relationship with Mickey and Mickey’s gradual romantic thing with Johnny. All well and good, I was telling myself, but where’s the actual story? Nothing’s really happening. And then something happens at the end and it all kicks into place.
In Contention‘s Kris Tapley was right the other day when he said this is Amy Adams’ film. It is. Her Mickey performance is straight and settled down, never actor-ish, in the zone and just right. Between this and her Master performance she has to be the front-runner for Best Supporting Actress.
“Trouble With the Curve is either an off-speed pitch that just catches the edge of the strike zone or a bloop single lofted into right field. The runner is safe. The movie is too. Crack open a peanut and flag down the beer guy.” — from A.O. Scott‘s 9.20 N.Y. Times review.
One of the Toronto Film Festival movies I saw and said nothing about because I was bored and unmoved was Dante Ariola‘s Arthur Newman, which I keep misremembering the title of. What comes to mind are Alfred Newman, the composer, or Alfred E. Newman of MAD magazine.
Anyway, it costars the usually interesting or at least charismatic Colin Firth as the titular character, a very dull guy who decides to disappear from his own life and become a sort of imaginary golf pro, and Emily Blunt as a morose, leather-jacketed vagrant-knockabout. Together they narcotize and deflate and make a very dull film. I knew I wouldn’t last the duration, but I was hanging in there and hoping for the best when something happened that severed me from Arthur Newman and actually led to a walkout. It was a very minor thing, but it just hit me the wrong way and that was that.
There’s a scene in which Firth’s Arthur is urging Blunt’s Mike to get on a bus to Durham, North Carolina (she’s from there or something). But she doesn’t want to go, she says, because “I don’t like Durham.” But she doesn’t say that — she says “I don’t like Derm.” And the instant she said “Derm” I shook off the boredom and wondered why she’d say that because I was now mildly pissed off.
How do most people pronounce “Durham”? I asked a girl who worked at a Toronto cafe how she would prounounce it and she said “DurHAM?” An English literature professor visiting from Oxford or Cambridge might say “Dourhahm.” I pronounce “Durham” as a two-syllable thing with a muffled “uhr” that sounds like “Duhrrum.” But Derm (as in “perm” spelled with a p or Bruce Dern spelled with an m) is dead wrong. Nobody says it that way, and if they do they’re mistsken.
I guess Blunt got screwed up because she’s British and somebody told her it’s pronounced “Derm” and she didn’t know any better, and the director was no help because he’s Italian. I only know that “derm” was a deal-breaker, and that I can’t get the sound of Blunt saying “I don’t like derrrmm!” out of my head.
I’m adding Marina Zenovich‘s Roman Polanski: Odd Man Out to my list of Toronto Film Festival essentials. To go by Thom Powers‘ description on the TIFF website, Zenovich’s film — the second Polanski doc unveiled this year (the first being Laurent Bouzereau and Andrew Braunsberg’s Roman Polanski: A Film Memoir) and a kind of sequel to Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired — is at least partly about guilt.
“What happens when an award-winning documentary intended to highlight a legal injustice comes back to haunt its maker?,” Powers writes. “In 2008, director Marina Zenovich’s Emmy Award-winning film Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired brought a radical new understanding to the circumstances surrounding Roman Polanski’s 1977 statutory rape case. Interviewing key participants from both the prosecution and the defense, Zenovich detailed how Polanski couldn’t get a fair trial, prompting him to flee the United States. Even Polanski’s victim, Samantha Geimer, said he was treated unjustly and deserved to have the case dismissed. But these views didn’t stop others from vilifying Polanski. The film’s notoriety seemed to make him even more ‘wanted and desired’ by the authorities.
“When Polanski was arrested in Switzerland in 2009 and threatened with extradition to the United States, Zenovich felt she was partly to blame. Her new film, Roman Polanski: Odd Man Out, revisits this endlessly controversial case from several new angles. What possessed the Swiss government to arrest Polanski? For years, he had vacationed in Switzerland and even bought a home there. Was the Swiss government trying to distract attention from an American investigation into its banks? Was the Los Angeles District Attorney grandstanding for his own political ambitions? How far had Zenovich’s own work as a filmmaker unwittingly contributed to Polanski’s arrest?
“Zenovich applies her insider’s knowledge and dogged research to the process of investigating what took place in Switzerland. (The subtitle Odd Man Out refers to the 1947 fugitive drama that Polanski has cited as a favorite.) Whether or not you’ve seen her previous film, this work stands on its own as a shrewd commentary on the collision of life and cinematic art. When it comes to Polanski’s case, opinions have always been more prevalent than facts. An esteemed journalist is caught in an unguarded moment saying, ‘Just take him out and shoot him.’ But Zenovich unearths fresh perspectives and new questions. The film leads us to think about broader questions of legal manipulation, media distortion, and power politics. No matter how much you think you understand this case, you have a lot to learn.”
I wrote the following to Polanski this morning: “Roman — I’ve been friendly with Marina Zenovich for many years, and I intend to see her documentary, Roman Polanski: Odd Man Out, at the Toronto Film Festival. I just heard from her via email (she’s in France now) but forgot to ask her if you and she have corresponded to any degree over the last few years. Have you ever had any contact with Marina? Did you speak with her while she made this film, or while she was cutting it? Have you seen her Odd Man Out doc? By the way, have you seen the British Network Bluray of Carol Reed’s Odd Man Out? Quite beautiful.”
For a comedy to be funny, it has to reflect real recognizable life. There has to be at least an attempt to represent the world as most of us perceive it, and the behavior of humans as most of us understand that. Most of us know that if you pick up a bucket filled with horse urine and dog feces and throw it in the face of a Catholic priest, he will not smile and say, “Aahh, thanks…I needed that!” If you make a comedy in which this happens, people are going to wonder why and go “wuh-wuh-wuh.”
Jay Roach‘s The Campaign (Warner Bros., 8.10) has a tough row to hoe. It has to jump on a trampoline and leap madly beyond the typical lying, insincerity and general horseshit that constitutes a political campaign these days, and make it “funny” in a clowning, lampoonish, rube-level way. But in so doing Roach and his screenwriters, Chris Henchy and Shawn Harwell, apparently said to themselves “Okay, we have to create a comedic political realm that only slightly resembles the one outside the multiplex — vaguely, superficially, faintly — but also one in which characters throw 550 or 600 paper cups of horse urine and dog feces into each other’s faces and have them go ‘aaah, thanks…I needed that!'”
That’s why The Campaign is not funny. Because it aims low, by which I mean it’s aimed at idiots or rather a simple boob’s understanding of the world of politics. I sat there like a granite tombstone, staring at the screen, waiting for it to be over and wiping off drops of horse urine as they came flying off the screen.
The Campaign is about a North Carolina Congressional race between Will Ferrell’s Cam Brady, a randy Blue Dog Democrat asshole, and Zach Galifianakis‘s Marty Huggins, a nerd-dweeb type with a terrible moustache. At the halfway point Brady decides he wants to humiliate Huggins, and so he goes over to his house and puts the moves on Marty’s shrewish little Munchkin wife (Sarah Baker). And because Marty hasn’t been paying attention to their marriage in the heat of the campaign, she succumbs to Cam’s overtures. In front of his recording iPhone camera. And she takes it up the ass.
This scene isn’t the least bit funny because not even a donkey or a sheep would do that. They would have more sense. A sheep would realize that Cam’s attentions are politically motivated, and she would say no. But Marty’s little wife doesn’t, and we’re supposed to laugh. I didn’t. I couldn’t. It was impossible. Most of the film’s jokes are on this level.
The terms “musician” or “composer” tend to summon images of a slightly rumpled creative type — the kind of man or woman who stays up late and leads a distracted, impulsive life and lives on egg salad sandwiches and doesn’t dress all that carefully. But Marvin Hamlisch, the famed tunesmith who suddenly died yesterday at age 68, always looked and dressed like an owner of a midtown Manhattan jewelry shop or the head of a savings and loan.
The late Marvin Hamlisch — 1944 to 2012.
Hamlisch was a fast talker and a witty, amusing guy, but he couldn’t have looked more stodgy and straight-laced. He didn’t just wear three-piece suits all the time — he looked like he might have been born in one. He also seemed to have the body of a banker, like a guy who didn’t work out much and who liked his evening meals and apertifs. I’m not judging — just sharing what I saw and perceived.
There’s nothing wrong in and of itself with being a square or looking like one, but what impulse led a genuinely gifted guy like Hamlisch, who lived for music and melody and the radiant joy of that, to want to appear to the world like the director of the mortgage department for a Midwestern bank or a well-heeled New York accountant or an executive in the pharmaceutical industry?
Hamlisch was part of that Tin Pan Alley-influenced clique of motion picture composer-musicians like Burt Bacharach, Carole Bayer Sager (whom Hamlisch was hooked up with romantically for a time) and Marilyn and Alan Bergman.
Hamlisch was best known for his scores for A Chorus Line and The Way We Were and The Sting, of course. And for the “Nobody Does It Better” song from The Spy Who Loved Me. (I always loved the chord changes that play when Carly Simon sings “is keepin’ all my secrets safe tonight.”) Hamlisch also did the scores for Ordinary People (although that film is known for Pachelbel’s “Canon in Plain D“), Sophie’s Choice, The Swimmer, Three Men And A Baby, Take The Money And Run, Bananas, Save The Tiger and Steven Soderbergh‘s The Informant!. Halmisch had also done work on Soderbergh’s currently-lensing Behind The Candelabra but I don’t how you score a film before you see it.
It was around 4:30 am and I couldn’t sleep, so I checked the email and found the following from “bobfilm”: “FYI The Master sneaked at the Aero tonight in 70mm after screening of The Shining. Big surprise for the audience.” The fuck? No, really — it apparently happened. I realized that when In Contention‘s Kris Tapley, stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis blues again, posted the same story around 1:58 am Pacific.
So who was there? Or who knows someone who was? What did they think? How did “the room” seem to react? Forget The Shining — what’s with “the silence”? How can any conscientious film lover have seen it and then gone to sleep and not posted anything anywhere? Not even a tweet?
At first I was suspicious, wasn’t sure. The Aero site definitely has The Shining on their schedule for last night. Then I checked Twitter…nothing. And then Cigs and Red Vines, the semi-sanctioned Paul Thomas Anderson site, but they had totally dropped the ball by posting nothing except some post about PTA wanting to show The Master in 70mm around the country. Then I saw the Tapley post, and it partly reads as follows:
“A source at the event tells me that, prior to the screening, personnel announced that there would be a ‘secret screening‘ following the event and that anyone who’d like to stay was more than welcome. When the lights came up after the closing credits of Kubrick’s icy horror staple, attendees were told the secret film was Anderson’s much anticipated opus (which will screen at the Toronto, Venice and maybe Telluride and Fantastic Fest film festivals next month).
“The film is being shown in 70mm, the director’s preferred format of exhibition for The Master and one that has reportedly caused issues in lining up both commercial and festival exhibition. Anderson [was] in attendance along with wife Maya Rudolph.
“Gotta love the guy. He doesn’t go the traditional route. Popping the film on unsuspecting cinema lovers (who else would be at a Cinematheque screening of The Shining?) is pure PTA.
“So here’s to you lucky folks seated in the Aero right now soaking up the latest from one of the best working filmmakers today. It makes me feel even worse that I’m way over here in some Holiday Inn north of Mobile, Alabama.”
Tapley allegedly left for Manhattan a day ago and…why he would me in effing Mobile of all places is beyond me. But that’s what he wrote. Very weird. Update: He’s taking the red-state route to North Carolina, etc. See KT’s comment below.
The Master opens on September 14 after showings in at the Venice and Toronto film festivals, and maybe FantasticFest. I’m sensing that it will also play Telluride based on a source that hinted as much, but it’s mainly a vague notion.
Network’s Odd Man Out Bluray “is quite impressive. Contrast levels are well balanced and stable, most close-ups convey very pleasing depth [and] the noirish dark sequences with the long shadows boast excellent clarity. The best news is that there are no traces of excessive de-noising. All in all, Network’s restoration has produced some marvelous results, and I must speculate that this is indeed the very best Carol Reed‘s film has ever looked.” — from Dr. Svet Atanasov‘s 6.29 review.
From Cinema Blend‘s Katey Rich: “You can probably tell by now that Magic Mike isn’t exactly the glitter-caked bachelorette party romp promised in the trailers, or at least not entirely. But what’s probably most impressive about the work Steven Soderbergh does, directing from Reid Carolin‘s script, is that it’s got the glitz and the heavy character study, without sacrificing either.
“Shot by Soderbergh through a dingy yellow filter that makes everything feel like it’s been left in the sun too long, Magic Mike is about dreams that curdle and get deferred, about how you need more money than what’s stuffed in a G-string to make it in this world, but how those $1 bills can make it easier to wait — for a little while, at least. It’s also about Channing Tatum being a crazy good dancer, about how fun it would be to party all day on a sandbar, and how a male stripper really can make a woman’s night with a good lap dance. These things might be mutually exclusive in the hands of another director, or disastrous when combined, but as usual, Soderbergh makes it look easy.”
Steven Soderbergh‘s Magic Mike (Warner Bros., 6.29) is one of those summer films that comes along once in a blue moon — a fun romp filled with yoks and swagger and whoo-hoo, but also sharp, wise and shrewdly observed, and flush with indie cred. And quite funny for the first two-thirds. If this thing isn’t a fairly big hit in the States there’s going to be a lot of complaining on this site. I’m sick to death of people paying to see only the big crap movies while occasionally blowing off the really fine smaller ones.
Every frame in Magic Mike tells you someone super-smart and focused is running the operation, and Soderbergh (serving again as his own dp under the name Peter Andrews) lays on the atmosphere by using a faintly reddish sepia color scheme with a vaguely hung-over aura — his way of saying “Look, this is me, okay? Nothing too bright or luscious or HBO-attractive. We’re kickin’ it, obviously, but digging into character.”
Trailers always lie but the Magic Mike trailers are really lying. They’re selling only the cheap stuff. This thing is way better than what you might expect.
As Mike, a Tampa-residing, cock-rocking male stripper facing his 30s and the pressure to build his life (he dreams of being a high-end furniture designer) into something with a semblance of a future, Channing Tatum scores big-time with his first genuinely decent role and performance — I was completely in his corner all the way, admiring his skill and ease with a role that touches all the right bases. And 22 year-old newcomer Alex Pettyfer hits a ground-rule double as Adam, a.k.a. “The Kid” — a proverbial good-looking innocent whose arc acquaints us with the male-stripping realm and all the behavioral pitfalls.
Matthew McConaughey, whose career has really turned around over the last couple of years, hits a solid triple as Dallas, the owner-manager of the strip club Xquisite, nailing every line and delivering the requisite hoots and cock-of-the-walk sleaze. And Cody Horn, as Adam’s skeptical older sister, hits nothing but true notes in a role that’s basically about slowly shaking her head and nagging a bit, a character who’s always saying “Okay, guys, you’re making money and a lot of whoopee but when are you gonna get real?” But she’s not tedious — she’s honest and steady and investable at every turn.
Alex Pettyfer, Channing Tatum in Magic Mike.
The very first scene shows a strutting, bare-chested, leather-pants McConaughey delivering a show intro to a roomful of cheering, half-bombed women, and you’re thinking right away, “Okay, this feels standard — a typical way to start a movie about male strippers.” And then boom — Soderbergh cuts to black and then to a groggy Tatum waking up in bed after a threesome with an occasional hook-up (Olivia Munn) and a sleeping nude girl whose name neither of them can recall. And right away you’re thinking, “Wow, this is good…the dialogue (by first-time scripter Reid Carolin, who’s also Tatum’s producing partner) is canny and astute and cuts to the quick, and the acting feels natural and unforced.”
And you just relax. You know you’re in good hands. God, what a relief!
All it takes is one standout like Magic Mike to wash away the crud and part the clouds and make everything feel right again. Is it a great movie? No, but there’s very little in it — almost nothing — that doesn’t feel right. Okay, the last third feels a bit predictable and the final scene doesn’t quite deliver one of those final closure notes that we all talk about months or years later, but it’s good enough. More than good. Anyone who says this film doesn’t cut it needs to hit refresh and watch it again, and anyone who says it flat-out blows is a moron, and if he/she wants to make anything out of that I’ll see them outside after the film.
Yes, I intend to see Magic Mike at least another couple of times. It works the way all good movies do. It turns you on with smarts and honesty and sophistication, and sends you out on a high.
Tatum, Cody Horn, Olivia Munn.
“Ladies are gonna love Magic Mike,” enthuses Variety‘s Peter Debruge. “A lively male-stripper meller inspired by Channing Tatum‘s late-teen, pre-screen stint as an exotic dancer, it supplies more low-calorie fun than any Steven Soderbergh movie since Ocean’s Eleven. This breezy offering ought to be subtitled ‘How Steven Got His Groove Back,’ as its typically high-minded director drops pretentions like tear-away pants.
“Meanwhile, enlisting a squad of Hollywood hunks to strip down to their thongs alongside him, Tatum (backed by producing partner Reid Carolin) drains the shame from a profession that gets no respect, serving up a guiltless girls’ night out likely to rank among the summer’s word-of-mouth sensations.
“Soderbergh is in excellent form here, putting aside the ambitious experimentation that threw a wet blanket on such ostensibly sexy projects as Full Frontal and The Girlfriend Experience, while re-embracing the shooting techniques missing from Contagion and Haywire. (Once again, he serves as his own d.p., under the pseudonym Peter Andrews.) Tatum reportedly first approached Nicolas Winding Refn about making Magic Mike, but here he has the benefit of not only Soderbergh’s commercial savvy, but also the good-humored generosity and keen anthropological interest the helmer brings to every project.
“No moment captures that sensibility better than an oblique glimpse of backstage ‘fluffing’ — sure to rank among the year’s most amusing shots.”
Magic Mike opens on Friday, 6.29.
Channing Tatum, Alex Pettyfer.
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