Nikki Finke has reported that among the 11.10 openers, Marc Forster‘s Stranger Than Fiction is tracking much better than Ridley Scott‘s A Good Year. Ironic given the unmistakable fact that Year is a somewhat better film — not a great one, but certainly better written, better assembled, and more in touch with itself and how to best say what it’s saying.
Year isn’t a comedy, like I said a few days ago, but a light mood piece about nurturing those things in one’s life that need nurturing. One of those tonic-for- the-soul movies about slipping out the back door and being a little bit happy at times, it left yours truly in a pleasant, sitting-outdoors-as-the-summer-sun-sets, enjoying-a-good-glass-of-wine frame of mind.
Fiction has some amusing moments but it isn’t “funny”, trust me — although the folks out there who buy books because of their covers are thinking it must be at least clever because it stars funny-guy Will Ferrell. When I saw it in Toronto I called it a middle-range mindfuck movie that isn’t especially clever or funny or up to anything that holds metaphorical water. That’s because the “imaginative” meta- physical scheme behind it doesn’t really add up or pan out. I almost hated it. In some ways I do hate it. It’s a half-assed little failure.
But Ferrell is biggger than Good Year star Russell Crowe, and Ferrell never threw a phone at anyone so there it is.
Cohen Cagri
This has been kicking around for some time, but just for the HE record and in case somebody hasn’t read this on Defamer or elsewhere, there are indicators that strongly suggest Sacha Baron Cohen‘s Borat character is based on a real-life Turkish guy named Mahir Cagri, whose doofus-level web page attracted internet notoriety six or seven years ago.
Make your own assessment, but Cagri’s Wikipedia page says that “chief similarities between Mahir and Borat include facial hair and taste in formal wear. Borat also shouted out Mahir’s catchphrase ‘I like sex‘ to the crowd at the MTV Europe Music Awards in Lisbon and at a Savannah Sand Gnats baseball game. In Borat, Cohen not only quotes ‘I like sex’ and ‘You can stay my home’ in the introductory scenes, but poses during a game of ping-pong in revealing red shorts, referencing two of Mahir’s famous shots.
It’s been claimed, however, that the Borat character “has been in development since 1995, four years before Mahir’s page was online. Cohen has allegedly said it was based on a Russian doctor.”
Earlier “Diamond” date
Warner Bros. has decided to open Ed Zwick‘s Blood Diamond a week earlier — 12.8 instead of 12.15. Fine, whatever, no biggie. WB domestic distribution chief Dan Fellman apparently told somebody that the film has been generating good buzz and the studio wants to give Academy and guild members more time to see it before the Oscar game heats up too much. Except the good buzz thing is a fantasy — the buzz is good about Leonardo DiCaprio, yes, but iffy about the film. The Zwick factor (heavy-handed brush strokes, a tendency to emotionally over- bake, not a single machine-gun bullet hitting Tom Cruise in that final battle scene in The Last Samurai, etc.) leaves the prognosticators no choice.
Denzel, Ridley, Russell
Check out Denzel Washington‘s ‘fro in Ridley Scott‘s American Gangster. The photo is illustrating John Leland‘s N.Y. Times piece about the filming of Scott’s period (’70s to ’90s) crime pic, which costars Russell Crowe. Universal will open the film in November 2007.
Snap Judgment
Snap Judgment
Just as Burt Lancaster‘s Ernst Janning character finally spills his true thoughts at the end of Judgment at Nuremberg, it is time after days of sober reflection to speak of the Borat playdate scale-back that was confirmed by 20th Century Fox last Wednesday. Instead of opening Sacha Baron Cohen‘s rollicking comedy on the previously decided-upon 2000 screens on 11.3, Fox will now start with an 800-screen debut and then bump the run up to 2,200 screens the following weekend (i.e., 11.10).
My basic feeling is that Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan is one of the most live-wire concoctions to come along in years — as much of an essential American comedy as Preston Sturges‘ Sullivan’s Travels — and an absolute must-see for anyone with a pulse. But it’s not especially embracable or familiar-feeling, truth be told. It’s clever, witty, often hilarious in a dumb-ass way…but sometimes it’s more astonishing than anything else.
I was a bit more amazed by Borat than in love with it, although I’m recommending it to everyone I see. You can’t not see it any more than a half-aware moviegoer could avoid seeing Dr. Strangelove when it came out in early ’64. To not see Borat is to say to yourself or your friends on some level, “I am dead…I am out of the ’06 loop.”
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The truth, I believe, is that red-state types (I’m sorry for ignoring the recently evolved p.c. decision that there’s no such thing as a red-state mentality…sorry, A.O. Scott!) may not find it as outrageous-funny as blue-state urbans. It’s a silly-goofy comedy, but Borat is fundamentally a satire about rural American values. It’s absurdist but snide. If nothing else, the Pentacostal conversion scene alone (which is more of a mind-blower than hah-hah “funny”) makes this fairly obvious.
Fox’s cutback happened, obviously, because the Borat awareness among regular Joe Schmoes wasn’t where it needed to be to support a big 2000-screen debut. I wrote about the sluggish tracking situation ten days ago (on 10.19). That 10.25 L.A. Times story by Josh Friedman and Lorenza Munoz said that a National Research Group tracking survey issued last Monday “showed that 27% of respondents were aware of Borat, well behind two competitors” — Disney’s The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause and DreamWorks’ Flushed Away” — opening the same weekend.
Sacha Baron Cohen
This may seem like an extreme analogy to some, but the answer to Borat‘s apparent low awareness, I believe, lies in Ernst Janning’s statement about the proverbial claim that average Germans didn’t know what the National Socialist government was up to in the 1930s and early ’40s. “Maybe we didn’t know the details,” he declares, “but if we didn’t know, it was because we didn’t want to know!” Same thing here, I believe, and the root factor, as in Nazi Germany, is about tribal persuasions and inclinations and snap judgments.
I’m not saying average Americans are Nazis, for heaven’s sake…calm down. I’m saying they make gut-level decisions about movies they want to see based on deep-down primal factors. Like you or me, like anyone.
Average Joes (and I mean the generally overweight slow-on-the-pickup types…the “late adopters”) are aware of Borat, all right — how could they have missed the hoopla out of Cannes and Toronto, the internet buzz, that recent Entertainment Weekly cover? But somewhere deep down they’ve considered Cohen’s appearance — rug-trader moustache, Middle-Eastern ethnicity, extremely geeky — along with the arch, deliberately “impersonal”, somewat anti-emotional attitude of an outsider-hipster who’s aiming his jokes at those hip enough to get where he’s coming from, and they’re saying to themselves, “This guy’s not me, and he’s not trying to talk to me — he wants me to get into him.”
In other words they’re taking one look, they’re sizing him up…and they “don’t want to know.” Instinctually. That’s what’s going on with Joe Sixpack, with older rurals, with lazy boomers, with the hundreds of thousands of shallow young girls who laugh too loudly when they sit together at Starbucks. The only people who are naturally into him are educated (or at least curious), ahead-of-the-curve (or abreast-of-the-curve) urbans. That’s where the 27% awareness is from.
Of course, all the resistors have to do is see the damn movie and everything will change. They’ll mostly laugh in an “oh my God!” sort of way, and they’ll tell their friends and Borat will be on its way to wherever, on its own speed. That’ll probably start to happen when the 800-theatre break happens next Friday. I know it’ll do well in most cities, but one should never underestimate red America’s xenophobia — the deep-seated unwillingness to consider an exotic attitude or mentality. They like what they like if the movie/record/TV show reaches out and talks to them, and if it doesn’t….later, dude.
In short, Borat is largely a satire of American rubes, and the commercial reception that awaits should, I feel, be read as a referendum on the American character circa 2006.
United 93 vs. WTC
Despite recent vigorous efforts by Paramount and Universal to promote World Trade Center and United 93, respectively, as Best Picture contenders, “an Oscar consultant not connected to either film” said to Hollywood Wiretap‘s Pete Hammond a few days ago that “this expensive grab for renewed attention by both films will result in a wash as neither is likely to get into the Best Picture circle.” Maybe not — I don’t entirely agree with whoever said this — but if sheer moviemaking craft mattered to anyone (and I don’t mean the application of nuts- and-bolts know-how but the knack of knowing how to make a picture work in just the right way so what it’s saying comes through without obstruction), United 93 would, no question, be a slam-dunk contender. The reason it’s not being talked up much is because a lot of people out there refused to go see it. I almost used the word “babies” but I thought better of it.
Michael Sheen
I sat down with Michael Sheen, a.k.a. Prime Minster Tony Blair in The Queen, for a quick lunch on Friday afternoon. I’ll be writing something about it tomorrow or Monday, as the recording of our chat was mostly ruined by clattering dishes and the loud, insistent voices of three or four women sitting two tables away. I don’t know if they were drinking wine or not, but they sounded like they were. At least they didn’t shriek with laughter. Not too much, I mean.
I can at least say two things about Sheen, who’s a very easy bloke to talk to. He seems more and more favored to emerge as one of the five Best Supporting Actor contenders for his performance in Stephen Frears‘ film. (And I’m not just saying that.) And perhaps even more importantly, the odds are very likely that he’ll portray David Frost in Ron Howard‘s feature version of the hit London play “Frost/Nixon”, to which Sheen will be returning fairly shortly, and in which he’ll continue to costar in (along with Frank Langella, I think) when it opens in New York City next March.
Negative publicity
“The TV networks don’t want you to see ads for the Dixie Chicks documentary Shut Up and Sing. The movie theater chains don’t want you to see the fictionalized polemic Death of a President. The president of Kazakhstan doesn’t want you to see Borat. Just ask the people promoting the movies. Hollywood appears to have hit upon a fail-safe strategy for getting attention for just about any kind of film: get someone, anyone, to try to suppress it, and then rush to the news media with breathless warnings about the First Amendment coming under attack.” — from David Halbfinger‘s 10.27 piece in the N.Y. Times.
James on DiCaprio
“In a film with a wealth of strong actors — including Jack Nicholson as the crime boss and Matt Damon as a policeman in his pocket — there is scarcely a weak link (well, a couple of over-the-top Nicholson moments). But no one is better in The Departed than Leonardo DiCaprio,” writes N.Y. Times columnist Caryn James in Sunday’s edition. “His role is central, and the film would collapse without him.
“His character, Billy Costigan, is a smart guy who has to infiltrate a crime ring and act a little less smart in his undercover guise. He erupts in sudden violence, and his cropped hair minimizes DiCaprio’s movie-star glamour. But the performance goes deeper than those external clues. He shows in his eyes the undercover agent’s fear and revulsion, a fear he has to reveal to the camera yet conceal from the mobsters in the room. We see the difference between that fear and the confusion he sometimes displays in his role as the mob’s newest member, full of braggadocio. And we see how he is torn by stress almost, but not quite, to the breaking point.
DiCaprio has “mastered an art that looks simple on screen but is immensely sophisticated: he is often best when playing devious characters who are themselves playing roles, letting us see the layers behind the facade of the con man or the undercover cop. The Departed is his most substantial take on that kind of slippery character.”
Cocaine Cowboys
Billy Corben‘s Cocaine Cowboys (Magnolia) is fast and whiplashy — a 118-minute roller-coaster ride through the world of big-time Miami cocaine dealing 20, 25, 30 years ago…whew! I liked it start to finish and so did a lot of others (it’s running 82% on Rotten Tomatoes), but no review I’ve read so far has mentioned two very obvious points, so allow me.
(l. to r.) Jorge “Rivi” Ayala, Mickey Munday, former cocaine dealer Jon Roberts
(1) If you’re any kind of fan of Brian De Palma‘s Scarface (’83), an operatic chronicle of the rise and fall of Al Pacino‘s Cuban-born, Miami-residing cocaine gangster Tony Montana, you have no choice but to see Corben’s film because it gives you what the actual Scarface world was really like: manic, blood-soaked and ferocious beyond any concept of restraint. In fact, Corben’s film shows what a tea-and-crumpets party Scarface‘s story was, relatively-speaking, in terms of the mayhem. The real deal was insane, relentless…too much to pack into a single drama because viewers would either get bored or turned off by all the blood, or they simply wouldn’t believe it.
(2) No Hollywood-movie assassin has ever resembled Jorge “Rivi” Ayala, the top-dog hit man who worked for the most cranked-up cocaine boss of them all — Columbian Godmother Griselda Blanco (a woman who also ignored the rule of “don’t get high on your own supply”). Hollywood hit men always exude some form of malice or cold-bloodedness or sadism or twitchiness…something actor-ish, in other words. Rivi, on the other hand, is smooth-spoken, affable and fairly charming. He could be a Porsche salesman at a big South Beach dealership, or a city coun- cilman. I’ve never knowingly spoken to an assassin in my life, but I’ve somehow always known that the hit-men portrayals I’ve seen in various action movies weren’t right. Rivi is the proof.
Two other thoughts were circlulating as I watched Cocaine Cowboys: what’s so bad about delivering a harmful drug to willing consumers of same, and why don’t gang- sters ever wise up and sock some of their money away in a Swiss bank account while the getting is good?
One of the film’s more appealling talking heads is a former transporter named Mickey Munday — strictly a guy who would fly to Columbia to pick up a shipment and fly it back to Florida. Munday “sees the whole period as a great adventure,” Corben told me. “He regrets the prison time, but he feels no more complicit in the drug trade than Fed Ex is for the industries they’re shipping for. His attitude is, ‘I picked up a product and I didn’t sell anything.’ He enjoyed the chal- lenge and the adventure of it.”
We all know our society condones the taking of certain drugs that lead to self- destruction and the harming of innocents (family members, drivers on the road, people breathing in second-hand smoke) and yet condemns the taking of other substances and hands out long prison sentences to people who provide same. As long as they don’t drive or get near me, people should be entitled to drink, snort or smoke whatever poison they choose. I agree with Munday — there was nothing all that “wrong”, if you judge by a societal curve, about a pilot doing what he did.
Talk to anyone who knows anything about the life of a criminal, and they’ll all tell you bad guys don’t last any more than five to ten years, tops. Every last one gets killed or nailed by the law. The big cocaine-trade earners of the late ’70s and early ’80s brought in tens of millions. You’d think at least one or two of them would have put a few million into a numbered bank account somewhere so they could go off and live nicely once it’s all over. I asked Corben if any of his talking head survivors had thought this far ahead, and he said none had — or at least, none have copped to it.
The Cocaine Cowboys website has it all — names, chronologies, mini-bios, criminal records, etc. Very nicely designed.
“Bounty” DVD arrives
I received Warner Home Video’s five-disc Marlon Brando Collection yesterday (it’ll be in stores on 11.7), and spent most of last night watching Mutiny on the Bounty, Julius Caesar, Reflections in a Golden Eye, Teahouse of the August Moon and The Formula. The first three, actually; I can’t stand the latter two (can anyone?), especially Teahouse.
While Mutiny doesn’t play quite as rousingly as I remembered — I’d forgotten how foppy and buffoonish Brando’s Fletcher Christian character is, and how frequently his contentious relationship with Trevor Howard‘s Captain Bligh is played for easy laughs during the first 100 minutes — the extremely wide 2.76 to 1 Ultra Panavision image, shot by Robert Surtees and derived from the original 70mm elements, is really quite beautiful, and the colors are full and luscious.
But the image is so wide (and so narrow in terms of height) that one really needs an extra-large screen to fully appreciate it. It seems too compact on my 36″ Sony flat screen. What I need to do is find someone with a high-def DVD player and a 60″ plasma screen and get myself invited to a viewing party when they purchase a high-def DVD version of this new Bounty. I’ll bring along some Chinese takeout and a bottle of wine.
My difficulties with the jokey humor aside, I have to acknowledge this scene between Howard and Brando, and pay my respects to the way Brando pauses ever so slightly before and after he says the word “fight”. It’s the film’s wittiest moment — the only line that made me laugh out loud.
The decision not to offer a “making of” documentary definitely lessens the interest in this particular DVD. (The main doc on the second disc is called “After the Cam- eras Stopped Rolling: The Journey of the Bounty” — a dull tale about the making of the ship.) It’s a real shame that WHV went the cheapie route in view of the fact that Mutiny on the Bounty‘s production history was one of the most expensive and out-of-control in Hollywood history, and therefore worth recounting for history, like any calamitous event.
Production was marked by constant tempest (Sir Carol Reed, the first director, was let go, and his successor, Lewis Milestone, quit), cost over- runs and Brando’s egoistic big-star behavior. It was almost as prolonged and costly as the shooting of Cleopatra, which opened seven months after Bounty.
Fox Home Video included an ambitious making-of-Cleopatra doc along with their Cleopatra disc three or four years ago, and it’s a far more engaging thing to watch than the film itself. Too bad WHV didn’t follow suit. Laurent Bouzereau or someone on his level could’ve really gone to town with it.
Baldwin’s “Webster” is Back
This isn’t news to readers of IMDB postings, but one of the all-time saddest orphans of Movies-in-Limbo Land — The Devil and Daniel Webster, which Alec Baldwin directed and costarred Anthony Hopkins, himself and Jennifer Love Hewitt — will be released in ’07 by The Yari Group, or roughly six years after this modern-day (hah!) rehash of Stephen Vincent Benet‘s story and Archibald Macleish‘s play finished lensing.
Look at the stills of Baldwin as he appeared while directing the film and compare them to how he looks today — he was a kid! Hopkins hadn’t made Hannibal, Red Dragon or The Human Stain when TDADW was shot, and Hewitt’s feature film career hadn’t yet gone into the crapper. It’s a pre-9/11 nostalgia movie. Here’s a YouTube trailer.
Yari apparently intends to release the film with Alan Smithee as the credited director, since Baldwin renounced it eons ago because his edit of the film was taken away and recut, apparently because the original jerkwater producers felt it wasn’t funny or commercial enough. Baldwin reportedly wanted a dramatic ensemble piece while the editors changed the tone and pacing and tried to hawk it as a comedy.
The original producers also apparently got into dutch for reporting fraudulent financial information to the IRS and therefater went bankrupt. The film had it’s premier in Florida in April 2004 at the World Cinema Naples Film Festival. A Beverly Hills company called My Own Worst Enemy Productions has apparently bought the rights (the movie is on their website — company rep Michael Golland didn’t call me back), and in turn has apparently pacted with Yari to get it into theatres.
The plot’s about an unsuccessful writer (Baldwin) selling his soul to the devil (Hewitt) in exchange for fame and fortune. When his success isn’t everything he thought it would be he attempts to wiggle out of the deal, which leads to Daniel Webster (Hopkins) to defend him in a kind of cosmic court setting.
How bad is The Devil and Daniel Webster? It may actually be watchable. An IMDB poster has written there were three versions of this film. He saw the original and says it “left a lot to be desired.” But there were two more versions, one after Baldwin abandoned ship and the last one just before it was sold to Yari. The guy says “that the final cut, a half-hour shorter that the previous ones, is by far the best!” So it may be passable, but never trust anyone who uses exclamation points to convey enthusiasm about anything.
Webster was screened at the 2003 Cannes Film Market, and, acccording to the IMDB, opened commercially in Russia on 8.7.03.
But if you go by the general rule that the more producers a film has the worse it is, then Webster is a super-stinker. There are 17 producers of varying importance and credibility listed on the IMDB: Alec Baldwin, Tony Cataldo, Terry Chase Chenowith, Jonathan Cornick, Katie Daily, Craig Darian, Randall Emmett, George Furla, Carol Gillson, David Glasser, Michael Z. Gordon, Michael S. Grayson, Brian R. Keathley, Dessie Markovsky, Adam M. Stone, Scott G. Stone (are they brothers?), Jeff G. Waxman (i.e., line producer) and Jason Zelin.