“You’ve probably heard this from others, but supposedly there just isn’t that much extra footage to add back to that director’s cut of Crash [due April 4th on DVD]. I was at a screening several months back where Paul Haggis and Bobby Moresco spoke for about an hour after it ended. They mentioned the low cost and speed at which they had to shoot it, saying that basically most of what they shot is on the screen and that’s that. Who knows how honest they were being with the Creative Screenwriting crowd, but this may be the answer to your question.” — Josh Roessler.
“Though it needs to be cut drastically, George Gittoes‘ Rampage is a power-packed documentary with lots of potential,” Screen Daily‘s Peter Brunette wrote out of Berlin on 3.7. “Set mostly in one of the worst black ghettoes in Miami, the film, which was shot over the course of several years by the Australian-based Gittoes, is lively, insightful and even shocking. Festival programmers and buyers of docs for television, who may think there’s nothing new to be seen or said about black American ghetto life, should give this film a serious look. Once its two-hour running time is shortened to a punchier and less repetitive 90 minutes, it may even manage to snag theatrical distribution in the US and elsewhere.” Does anyone know of any upcoming U.S. festival screenings?
Haiti, Sex, Death
Before last Sunday night I thought of Haiti as a hopeless Caribbean shithole, one of the worst places to live in the world because the government corruption and the politically-motivated beatings and killings never seem to stop, and because the poverty levels for most of the citizens are beyond belief.
I still see Haiti as an island most foul, but a knockout documentary called Ghosts of Cite Soleil, a kind of Cain-and-Abel story that was filmed just before, during and after the overthrow of Haitian president Jean Bertrand Aristide in March 2004, has added a new dimension.
The real-life 2pac and Lele as they appear in Asger Leth’s Ghosts of Cite Soleil
I now see Haiti as less of a Ground Zero for abstract political terror and more of a place where people on the bottom rung are trying to live and breathe and create their own kind of life-force energy as a way of waving away the constant hoverings of doom.
In short, this excellent 88-minute film, directed by Asger Leth (the son of Danish filmmaker Jorgen Leth), adds recognizable humanity to a culture that has seemed more lacking in hope and human decency than any other on earth. I saw it at the Wilshire Screening Room two and a half days ago, and it’s been a kind of growth experience for me. I feel like I almost “get” Haiti now, and I haven’t stopped telling people about it since.
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Everyone will say that Ghosts is City of God but in ‘real’ verite terms…and it is that, of course. But it’s less about violent street crime than stink-from-the-head Haitian politics, and it explores an unusual romantic triangle between a white French female relief worker namd Lele and two gangster brothers, 2pac and Bily (not “Billy”), and it has a tragic ending that touches you as much as any well-crafted Hollywood tearjerker could…and yet it happened all on its own.
2pac and Bily are in no way the “good guys,” but in a way they are. They wave guns around and talk all the time about defending their territory or making an enemy back off or perhaps having to kill each other, but somehow the film makes them seem like half-sympathetic pawns…somewhat vulnerable sociopaths desperately trying to escape from their cage.
The brothers were leaders of gangs (there were five altogether, all of them known as “the Chimeres”, which is French for “ghosts”) who were being paid big money by the Aristide government to rough up or in some cases eliminate political oppo- nents. Director George Hickenlooper (Factory Girl), who invited me to Sunday’s screening in his capacity as one of the doc’s exec producers, said 2pac and Bily received “hundreds of thousands” of dollars.
When Aristide was finally forced out of office 2pac and Bily were suddenly targets of the new guys in power who wanted to get rid of all remnants of Aristide’s reign, including the “muscle.”
What was special in the making of Ghosts of Cite de Soleil was that Leth had totally open access to both brothers (as well as their government opponents), and also that life played out like a story written by a skilled dramatist.
This is precisely what Ghosts of Cite de Soleil could be the next time — a dramatic movie shot on location in Haiti with actors, a script, grips, electricians, etc.
On Monday I spoke with Cary Woods, the doc’s executive producer, who agreed that Ghosts of Cite Soleil could become a mainstream feature because (and this is primarily me talking) it has all the Shakespearean elements: poverty, political warfare, corruption, the cycle of violence, Cain and Abel, a romantic triangle, and a tragic finale.
And as a scripted feature it could get a bit more into the warring-brothers- sleeping-with-the-same-woman thing, which the doc doesn’t really run with.
Woods told me that a certain big-name actress has expressed interest in playing the Lele character if and when a script is written and a film is up and rolling, and then producer Seth Kanegis called me from somewhere in the Caribbean Tuesday afternoon and said Woods is looking to hire a distinguished, big-name writer to do the screenplay.
This would be a perfect feature for Oliver Stone, Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu, Werner Herzog…any director who could take the grit and social squalor of Haiti’s Cite de Soleil and reenact the story with feeling and realism.
The thing that needs to happen right now is for Ghosts of Cite Soleil to be accep- ted into the Cannes Film Festival’s Director’s Fortnight section so the festival-scout community can see it and talk it up. And then it should go to Toronto Film Festival in September, which would probably lead to some kind of distribution deal.
A film like this can only do what it can do. Film buffs and admirers of hot-button filmmaking and drama-in-the-rough will go for it, but some movigeoers would probably have a bit of difficulty with a film of this sort…a raw-looking, hand-held video piece about killings and squalor and interracial sex.
Ghosts executive producer Cary Woods
The feature that could come from this — that’s the thing. But there are miles to go before that happens…if it happens at all. Life is a gamble and movies are about rolling stones slowly uphill.
I haven’t mentioned the Wylcef Jean hip-hop on the soundtrack (the Haitian-born musician is also one of the film’s exec producers) and 2pac’s seeing himself as a burgeoning hip-hopper and his dream of becoming a musician-star. A Wyclef Jean soundtrack CD of some kind would, I understand, be part of the Ghosts package when and if it opens theatrically. I’m not 100% sure about this, but it would make sense.
King of the Empties
I’m developing an idea that Matthew McConaughey is a kind of anti-Christ. I’m 35% to 40% serious. He may not be the Satanic emissary of our times, but I honestly believe if and when the real devil rises up from those sulfur caverns and begins to walk the earth, he’ll look and behave exactly like McConaughey.
He’s not just the absolute nadir of empty-vessel pretty boy actors. I’m talking about an almost startling inner quality that transcends mere shallowness. It’s there in McConaughey’s eyes…eyes that look out at the wonder and terror of life but do nothing but scan for opportunity…something or someone to hustle or seduce or make a buck off. Eyes that convey a Maynard G. Krebs-like revulsion at the idea that life may finally be about something you can’t touch, taste or own.
Matthew McConaughey and fan
He has the soul of a Texas bartender who dabbles in real estate and has an overly made-up and undereducated girlfriend who drops by at the end of a shift to give him a lift home, except that he tends to ignore her when there’s a good game on and all his empty-ass buddies are there…a bartender who will clean shot glasses for 20 minutes before looking in your direction…a guy with a thin voice and a hey-buddy Texas drawl who sorta kinda needs to be stabbed with a screwdriver.
I’ve known guys like McConaughey all my life, and I feel I’ve come to know them as a predator tribe. Guys with fraternity associations and shark eyes and quarter-inch- deep philosphies that tend to start with barstool homilies like “the world is for the few.”
Because of this I can easily wave away his respectable performances in Dazed and Confused and Reign of Fire and focus on the void. I agree about these standout performances and his being tolerable in one or two other films (U-571, etc.), and because of this I was able to handle his being in movies without cringing for years.
But then came the double-whammy of Two for the Money and Failure to Launch, and now the mere mention of his name…
McConaughey is the emperor of the so-called vapid squad. He can kick Paul Walker’s ass with one hand tied behind his back, in part because Walker is now off the shit list after his sweat-soaked danger-freak performance in Wayne Kramer’s Running Scared. Forget the unfairly maligned Matthew (a.k.a., “Matt”) Davis, who gave a genuine and unforced performance as a decent-guy football player in John Stockwell’s Blue Crush…next to McConaughey he’s almost Brando-level.
With Sarah Jessica Parker in scene from Failure to Launch, which earned $24.6 million this weekend
I forget who the other contenders are but none of them hold a candle to Matt because they haven’t got that deep-down emptiness, which is what it’s all about. Not a matter of craft or affability, but essence.
Here’s some of the reader commentary so far…
“All of McConaughey’s roles fit into one of two categories,” wrote Richard Swank. “He’s either ‘Happy Go Lucky Matt,’ playing a kind of blissed-out stoner that seems to be fairly close to his offscreen persona (Ed TV, Dazed & Confused, Failure to Launch), or he’s ‘Serious Matt,’ where he plays a toned-down version of same who’s a little more intense, but with no more depth ((U-571, A Time to Kill).
“However, there’s one exception that is so out-there that it turns the rule completely on its head: Reign of Fire. Seriously. It may be a goofy sci-fi b-movie about dragons, but McConaughey’s performance in it is so over-the-top, so obviously committed, that it really calls into question whether he has to be the crummy actor he is in everything else.”
McConaughey in Two for the Money
“McConauughey is Pauly Shore with better genes.” — Bill McCuddy, Fox News movie guy.
“McConaughey seems like an affable guy in real life, hosting the college football champion Longhorns and squiring the Ashley Judds around. However, like George Bush, he compensates for depth with a gigantic dose of Texas hubris. But women like him, and that’s the foundation of his popularity. And I agree with you about Don Johnson being just about the most vomitorious actor ever.” — Arizona Joe
“To me, Matthew McConaughey is the acting equivalent of a karaoke machine,” says Toronto Star critic Peter Howell. “The viewer projects into him what they want to get out, and the result is occasionally amusing, yet it always feels false. Remember that his fame started as a total fraud: a Vanity Fair cover when he’d done absolutely nothing to warrant such attention.”
“He’s the Bob Cummings of our age.” — Lewis Beale
Journalist James Sanford interviewed McConaughey during his Sahara tour “and found him to be a genuinely pleasant, dedicated and surprisingly insightful guy. If I had been able to look into the future to see Two for the Money and Failure to Launch at that time I would also have asked him why he has such bad taste in scripts, but what can you do?
“When I was a theater manager in 1994 and we were showing Dazed and Confused, I predicted he was going to become a major star — again and again people came out of that film asking who McConaughey was and what had he done before. He has a kind of effortless, laid-back cool that seems to drive women crazy. He can also be pretty funny (i.e., his crazed performance in Bill Murray’s Larger Than Life or the nutcase he played in the abominable Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre). But finding the right material for him seems to be difficult.
“It might be wiser to find projects for him that could challenge him to develop his dramatic skills. He also needs to work with a diction coach; he is also handicapped somewhat by his strong Texas accent, which makes absolutely no sense when he’s playing someone from Staten Island (How to Lose a Guy…) or Baltimore (Failure to Launch).
“One thing he definitely has going for him is honesty onscreen: For better or for worse, he can’t fake his emotions — as evidenced by his utter lack of chemistry with Sarah Jessica Parker (whom he reportedly did not get along with) in Launch.”
“I basically agree with you about McConaughey, but the guy pretty much gets a free pass from me because of Dazed and Confused . Hell, can you point to one minute in his career when Keanu Reeves was that fun to watch? And they still let him make movies. Maybe McConaughey should have packed it in after Dazed, knowing that he’d peaked and it was all going to be downhill from there.” — Phil Napoli, Clifton, NJ.
Brokeback Mountain not winning the Best Picture Oscar hit the film’s director Ang Lee in a soft spot, and it left some kind of bruise. He said in a TV interview that aired yesterday (Wednesday, 3.8) that promoting the film was “an arduous process” and that losing to Crash was a disappointment-and-a-half. “We’ve won every award since September, but missed out on the last one, the biggest one,” Lee said. But feeling disappointed “is human nature. And it wasn’t for myself. I led a whole team of people.”
Sales of the old Crash DVD (i.e., the one that went on sale last September, and not the “special edition” coming out 4.4) soared after the Paul Haggis film won the Best Picture Oscar Sunday night. In one day (aaah but which day?…Monday, 3.6 or Tuesday, 3.7?) Lionsgate sold 17,500 copies.
Another story about Bob Yari‘s lawsuit over being denied producer credit on Crash, and I’m not precisely understanding how it moves things along to hear Bruce Davis, executive director of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, say that Yari has a tempestuous nature and a Producer’s Guild attorney say more or less the same thing.
I’ve finally heard an explanation as to why Mozart and the Whale costars Josh Hartnett and Radha Mitchell didn’t show up for the Santa Barbara Film Festival screening a month ago. The no-shows, I’ve been told, were basically about giving a fuck-you message to Avi Lerner, the film’s Israeli producer. The principals are angry because Lerner apparently wasn’t happy with a longer and allegedly better cut of Whale and, being the big-cheese producer, had it re-cut it into the shorter version I saw in Santa Barbara. I happened to enjoy and admire what I saw (as did Variety’s Todd McCarthy), but the longer version is said to have been a fuller, worthier film. I called Lerner’s office this afternoon to get his side of it, but neither he nor his assistant were available and no call-backs. My Mozart review called it “a Rain Man-type love story with a jumpy heart…jumpy as in child-like, energetic, anxious. A romanticized, tidied-up version of a complicated real-life love story, Mozart is nervy and provocative in more ways than one. Not calming or swoony like other love stories because the lovers are always in a fairly hyper and unsettled state, which feels a bit challenging, Mozart and the Whale nonetheless seems real and fairly honest and is obviously on a wavelength all its own. At first you’re thinking it needs a regular-guy character (like Tom Cruise‘s selfish prick in Rainman) to provide stability and perspective, but then you get used to the manic energy of it. And then you start enjoying more and more the vigorous cutting and the funky European-style tone (Norway’s Petter Naess directed), and particularly Hartnett and Mitchell’s performances, which feel wired and fresh and unlike anything I’ve ever gotten, tonally, from a love story before. I guess this pogo-stick element isn’t striking a chord with very many others since Mozart and the Whale has been having difficulty finding a distributor.”
I’m told by a trusted source that Lauren Bacall intended to wear her glasses during her appearance on last Sunday’s Oscar show, but at the last minute she didn’t (we can assume why) and this is why she had difficulty reading her copy. Sounds odd (Bacall never heard of contacts or laser eye surgery?) but a well-placed guy tells me that’s how it went down.
The website for Robert Towne‘s Ask the Dust (Paramount Classics, 3.10) nicely captures the film’s 1930s atmosphere and meditative mood. There’s not a great amount of advance heat coming from critics or the distributor, even, about Friday’s opening, but it’s my idea of a movie of genuine substance. Here are some excerpts from a piece I wrote after seeing it last month in Santa Barbara: “Ask the Dust is about how self-acceptance — who you really are, where you come from, what you’re feeling deep down — brings clarity and with that the noblest kind of strength, which is the ability to love. Some who see Ask the Dust may shift around in their seats a bit, but this is a film that knows what it’s doing and gets to where it’s going. It is what it damn well is. It’s meditative and sometimes talky as shit, and it feels visually claustrophobic in the middle section, but this is the kind of life that struggling writer Arturo Bandini (played very well by Colin Farrell) leads in his rented Bunker Hill room so you can’t say it’s not honest. And it pays off at the end, and you can’t say it’s not wonderfully written, and there’s a spiritual element in the water table if you settle down and let it soak in. I was in and out as I watched it, but this is the kind of film that comes together the next morning. You can say “not for me…I want the movie to pay off completely as I’m watching it” and I hear you, but movies that take a few hours to percolate are always the ones that we remember and value more because they hold up over time. Thematically it’s basically the same film as Curtis Hanson‘s 8 Mile, which was about Eminem being unable to rap with confidence or clarity until he stands up and admits he’s just this grungy white kid from a trailer park with a loser alcoholic mom. Dust is about Bandini coming to terms with his roots and how his own rage about suffering ethnic prejudice as a boy leads to treating Salma Hayek‘s Camilla disrespectfully and even cruelly in the same vein, and how accepting this helps him get past the crap and find his voice. Give up the pose and the attitude, admit who and what you really are, and you’ll be able to move on and be a man.
The teaser-trailer for Pixar’s Cars (Disney, 6.9), the latest, certain-to-be-cool animated feature from John Lasseter (Toy Story 2), will be viewable on the Pixar site sometime tomorrow, apparently. (Looks like it’s live now but it isn’t, or wasn’t when I tried it ten minutes ago.) It’s about cars driving themselves around and going through identity crises, etc., but rising to the challenge a big third-act race at the end. (What else, right?) Hotshot race-car Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson) finds himself in a proverbial meditative dead-end in a desert bumblefuck town called Radiator Springs on his way to the big Piston Cup Championship in California. The other characters include a 2002 Porsche called Sally (Bonnie Hunt) and a 1951 Hudson Hornet (Paul Newman). Other voices actors inlcude Tony Shalhoub, Michael Keaton, Cheech Marin and George Carlin.
Sharon Stone has formally confirmed she has a bare-assed scene in Basic Instinct 2. And with that out of the way…
A few Sopranos cast members were asked to spill some plot details about season #6 (which launches on Sunday, 3.12) by a “Page Six” reporter at Tuesday night’s MOMA premiere, but of course they wouldn’t. Nor will I (although I’m trying to figure out some way to write about the four episodes I’ve seen), but here’s a
little tiny taste of some dialogue from episode #4…hilarious. A born- again guy talking to Tony (James Gandolfini) and some friends (among them Michael Imperioli‘s Chris) about being saved, the legend of Charles Colson, dinosaurs and world history. Beautiful stuff.
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