I’ve read this Sharon Waxman story about Walk the Line star Joaquin Pheonix visiting Folsom Prison and singing songs and meeting inmates and basically…well, promoting the movie. And yet Waxman’s story says the visit began “with an invitation from a religious outreach group called the Prison Fellowship, whose leaders felt that Walk the Line might inspire inmates with its story of redemption.” Whatever…
The Envelope‘s Steve Pond is reporting that Daily Show host Jon Stewart has been hired to host the Oscar Awards telecast, which will air two months from now. Pond says the official announce- ment is expected Thursday morning. I still say a Luke Wilson- Vince Vaughn pairing would be a cooler thing, but Stewart…I don’t know. I suspect he won’t quite be as intoxicating as Steve Martin was, and I fear he might be another David Letterman. I’ve got a bit of a funny feeling about this, but I think I’ll start watching The Daily Show again.
It’s not a rumor and there’s absolutely no question about it: Ridley Scott‘s 190-minute “extended cut” version of Kingdom of Heaven is a considerably better film than the 145-minute theatrical version that opened last May (and which came out on DVD on 10.11). I saw it yesterday afternoon at the seedy-but-functioning Laemmle Fairfax in West Hollywood. The projection and sound were fine, but why is a must-see, calling-all-cars revival like this playing in a theatrical equivalent of a doghouse?
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Outside the Laemmle Fairfax — Tuesday, 1.2.06, 7:05 pm.
Stand-up critics ought to review this version for history’s sake, for the sake of salu- ting top-grade filmmaking…whatever. An obviously improved version of what was a respected film to begin with, and from a major director…attention should be paid. When a film this admirable is deliberately gutted by a major studio, critics have an obligation to assess what was what.
Scott has made it clear this is the preferred version. But it shouldn’t just play to an audience of five or six people (like it did at yesterday afternoon’s 3:45 pm show) in a sub-run theatre and be forgotten.
Every good movie has a prime “fighting weight.” 190 minutes is what Kingdom of Heaven should have been all along, and seeing it at this length proves it.
One presumes the 190-minute version will come out on DVD down the road, but who knows? It’s not that Fox publicists won’t answer any questions. They just don’t know anything (they say), and Kingdom of Heaven is obviously not a priority at this stage, etc.
Last May’s Kingdom was a painterly, politically nutritious meal that felt more than a touch truncated and a bit shy of playing like a true epic-type thing. The longer cut makes it into a fuller, tastier, more banquet-y type deal…sweepier and more sumptuous and better told.
The extra 45 minutes or so adds a good deal more in terms of story and character to an extremely moral (I would call it ethically enlightened), highly perceptive, anti- Christian-right epic.
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Orlando Bloom as Balian in Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven
Pretty much every character (except for Ghassan Massoud’s Saladin character, who still generates as much panache and admiration as Orlando Bloom’s Balian) seems more interesting and filled out. And it reveals a significant new character (the blonde-haired son of Eva Green) and a sub-plot about his fate that the shorter version had completely eliminated.
As exacting and stirring as it is in many respects, the improved Kingdom is still, for me, more of a 90% rather than a 100% thing. There’s still something slightly opaque about it. But the longer version is certainly a finer and more substantial film. And this fact makes Fox’s decision to release its shorter, runtier kid brother seem more than a little distasteful.
Only an idiot could have watched both versions last spring (or late winter…whenever it was that Fox and Scott sorted things through) and not realized that the 190-minute version was the distinctly better film.
Obviously the 145-minute version was released to make room for more shows per day, although the movie was a disappointment anyway. It would up making about $200 million worldwide, which, for a movie that cost $130 million to shoot, wasn’t enough.
The decision to put out the shorter Kingdom of Heaven was a shameful dereliction of duty in terms of…okay, an admittedly sentimental responsibility that nonethe- less ought to be embraced by all distributors and filmmakers, which is to put the best films they can make before the public.
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Tuesday, 1.2.06, 7:06 pm.
In deliberately releasing a not-as-good version in order to increase the chances of making more money during the first 14 days of release, Fox did the “right thing” from the point-of-view of the stockholders, but they betrayed the ticket-buying public…they really did.
Fox and Scott (who didn’t squawk at all about the shorter version being released, and who therefore bears some responsibility) were following a familiar pattern.
DreamWorks pulled the same crap when they released the not-as-good version of Almost Famous instead of the obviously better Unititled that came out on DVD later on. Warner Bros. and the Ladd Company did it also in the early ’80s with a truncated version of Once Upon a Time in America. It’s happened with some other worthy films.
What hasn’t changed about Kingdom of Heaven? All the stuff that was good to begin with.
It’s a big-canvas historical drama that dares to be different by being complex and unusual, and altogether a textural masterpiece.
Has there ever been a big expensive film about warring armies in which one side didn’t triumph absolutely? In which the loser wasn’t totally beaten down and slaughtered? I felt amazed and lifted up when this didn’t manifest…when life and sanity, in effect, is chosen over death and fanaticism.
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Bloom, Eva Green
The 12th Century milieu feels entirely authentic, the big siege-of-Jerusalem battle scene totally aces Peter Jackson‘s similar third-act sequence in Return of the King, there are fine supporting performances throughout (especially from Jeremy Irons and a masked Edward Norton), and William Monahan‘s script, praise Allah, avoids a lot of black-and-white, good-and-evil stereotypes.
New York Times reporter Sharon Waxman wrote a piece last weekend about how the financial failure of Kingdom of Heaven and Elizabethtown (along with the under- whelming U.S. response to Troy) has cast a dark shadow on Orlando Bloom’s career.
All that went out the window when I watched him again yesterday. Bloom may have missed the boat in Cameron Crowe’s film, but he’s got heft and range and really knows how to play a stalwart hero.
The words I wrote last May still apply: “Bloom is bearded, grimy, quiet and steady throughout Kingdom of Heaven. He is manly, in short, and does that classic Jimmy Cagney thing — planting his feet, looking the other guy in the eye and telling the truth. Does he channel Laurence Olivier? No, but Bloom has definitely held his ground here.”
I suppose that the political attitude of this film — respectful and even admiring of the Muslims, contemptuous of the arrogant Christian attitudes that led to war — is partly what I love about Kingdom of Heaven.
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The lobby of the Laemmle Fairfax — Tuesday, 1.2.06, 3:35 pm. Kingdom of Heaven is playing in theatre #2.
It’s obviously an impassioned f.u. to the Bush administration’s rationale for being in Iraq. It addresses the fundamental folly of being an occupier, and in fact offers an honorable solution for those who find themselves in this situation.
Depth of Feeling
In real life Roberta Maxwell, the gifted New York actress who’s quietly riveting as Jake Gyllenhaal’s bereaved mom during a four- or five-minute scene near the finale of Brokeback Mountain, barely resembles her emotionally bruised, hardscrabble character.
Her face is pale and plain and vaguely trembling in Ang Lee’s film, and with short, sort-of-mousey red hair. Very much a cowering but compassionate farmer’s wife from Wyoming. But the woman who opened her apartment door at 6 pm on New Year’s Eve was a pert and sophisticated New Yorker in glasses, her blondish-gray hair cut even shorter and her eyes the opposite of morose.
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Roberta Maxwell during the second-to-last scene in Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain
Imagine that! An actress who can not only manipulate her appearance but do a little internal tossing of the emotional salad.
Maxwell isn’t the only Brokeback Mountain actress who supplies a strong dose of hurt — there’s also the excellent Kate Mara and Linda Cardellini as Heath Ledger’s daughter and jilted girlfriend, respectively, on top of Michelle Williams and Anne Hathaway’s lead performances as unhappy wives — but Maxwell makes her mark in what is arguably the film’s penultimate scene.
It’s obvious that Maxwell’s mom and her scowling homophobic husband (played by the great Peter McRobbie) know what kind of relationship Ledger’s Ennis del Mar had with their son Jack, but her grief-ridden face is full of acceptance and compas- sion when del Mar pays a visit. And all of this hemmed in by fear of her husband’s rattlesnake temperament.
It’s the quiet but devastating interplay between Maxwell, McRobbie and Ledger that increases the film’s sadness to peak strength and sets up the film’s final hit, which comes when Mara tells Ledger she’s getting married to an oil-field worker named Kurt, and then leaves him alone in his trailer with Jack’s shirt hanging in the closet.
In fact, the more you watch Maxwell’s scene (I have a DVD screener of the film), the more clear it becomes that her underperforming of this exquisitely shot denouement is the emotional springboard of that last ten- or twelve-minute section. She’s got the whole film in her eyes.
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Snapped about six hours before midnight in Maxwell’s Manhattan apartment — 12.31.05, 6:15 pm
And she had only a few hours to make it work.
Maxwell shot her footage in July 2004, not on a set but inside the rundown farm- house seen in the film, which is located about an hour outside Calgary, Alberta, which was a cheaper place to shoot than Wyoming, where most of the film’s story unfolds.
“When I arrived at the set, people were getting ready to leave,” she recalls. “It was the very end of the shoot.”
Jack’s mom is “a lifelong Pentecostal Christian,” says Maxwell. “And in this last scene we see this tension and fear about what she knows her husband feels about this relationship, and about great cruelty and suffering she has endured herself, but she shows compassion to Ennis because she can see Jack was obviously very much loved.”
Maxwell suspects that Brokeback Mountain‘s casting director Avy Kaufman arranged a meeting with director Ang Lee a few months earlier because she had played the mother of Sean Penn’s condemned prisoner in Dead Man Walking (’95) and “so I have a history of sad mothers.”
She sensed during her sit-down with Lee that “we had connected on a level that would make me a very strong competitor [for the part].”
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Maxwell, Len Cariou and director Ethan McSweeny during a promotional stint on behalf of a relatively recent Pace University production of “The Persians.”
Brokeback Mountain had been showing to industry and festival audiences since early September, but Maxwell didn’t see it until it opened commercially on December 9th.
“I was really shocked by the scene, by our scene,” she recalls. “The starkness of it…the simplicity. And how [Lee] shot it, like when I put my hand on Heath’s shoul- der. I grabbed my friend sitting next to me. It was so strange, this old hand…I said to myself, is that mine?”
Maxwell began as a child actor in the ’50s, and has done lots of New York theatre, television, TV movies and features.
Her Dead Man Walking performance was, if you ask me, the big standout before Brokeback Mountain. She played the judge in Jonathan Demme’s Philadelphia (i.e., the one administering when Tom Hanks collapsed in court). And she had the lead female role in the 1975 debut stage production of Peter Shaffer’s Equus with costars Anthony Hopkins and Peter Firth. (That’s right…the naked-in-the-stables role.)
Maxwell was told in early October that her performance was special by none other than Annie Proulx, the author of the “Brokeback Mountain” short story that Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana’s screenplay is so closely based upon. The advance review came in the form of a letter, and it brought Maxwell to tears.
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Sometime around ’76 or ’77
It reads: “Dear Roberta Maxwell — Just the right touch…the almost-crushed wife of a martinette who under his very nose and in only a few lines about cake and coffee, gets across the message that she knew and understood what Jack meant to Ennis. I don’t know how you did it in so small a compass. With much apprecia- tion, Annie Proulx.”
Maxwell read this to me aloud near the end of our talk. Here’s a recording of about half of it.
She asked last night how I think Brokeback Mountain will do at the Oscars, and when I repeated the conventional wisdom that it’s the Best Picture front-runner, she feigned surprise. I would play it that way if I were her.
Maxwell told the Toronto Star‘s Martin Knelman that she’ll be visiting Los Angeles soon “so I can enjoy the fun of Brokeback being touted for the Oscars. It’s such a special time and such a special film. Why not enjoy it while it lasts?”
If it were my call (and I can’t imagine Focus Features not feeling the same way), Maxwell will wind up sitting next to her costars and Lee and the film’s producer James Schamus and all the others at the Oscar Awards. If there’s anyone apart from the core players who deserves such an honor, it’s Maxwell.
I mean, c’mon, she’s the ninth-inning pinch hitter…the windup, the pitch…thwack!
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The hard-working professionals in charge of manning the defenses at Lunar Pages are fending off a hostile DDoS attack…screaming savages outside the gates of the fort…woo-woo-woo!…flaming arrows!…Ward Bond taking one in the chest…and that’s why I haven’t put very much up this morning.
The Writers Guild of America has given one of its five best Original Screenplay Award nominations to Judd Apatow and Steve Carell‘s The 40 year-Old Virgin….what? In the process they’ve blown off Craig Brewer’s Hustle & Flow, Woody Allen’s Match Point and Guillermo Ariagga’s superb The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. Does Judd Apatow host a WGA poker game or something? Is there some kind of “aww, Judd has worked so hard and he’s a nice guy and needs a pat on the back” sentiment out there? The 40 Year-Old Virgin is, at best, an above-average relationship comedy during its second half, but during the oafish first half it’s not even close to award-worthy. This is bar none one of the most moronic, jaw-dropping calls the WGA has ever made. Congrats, meanwhile, to the other four nominees for Best Original Screenplay — Cinderella Man‘s Cliff Hollingsworth and Akiva Goldsman, Crash‘s Paul Haggis & Bobby Moresco, Good Night, And Good Luck‘s George Clooney and Grant Heslov and The Squid and the Whale‘s Noah Baumbach.
I sort of expected this, but Radar magazine has folded. Kurt Andersen’s withering review of the fledgling publication in a 6.6.05 issue of New York magazine sounded the death knell. It read, in part, that “Radar seeks to be one of those ‘rare titles’ that ‘define a cultural moment by getting there first.’ But if that’s the goal, shouldn’t it be more original?”
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The Seattle Weekly‘s Sheila Benson and Chuck Wilson have agreed with me (and quite a few others, I suspect) about Roberta Maxwell having given a brief but stirring performance as Jake Gyllenhaal’s mom in Brokeback Mountain . They’ve got her at at the top of their list of the year’s finest blink-and-they’re-gone performances (“The Two-Minute Oscars”). And right on for including Walk the Line‘s Dallas Roberts for his acting as record producer Sam Phillips, the guy who says “sorry” when he hears a few bars of Johnny Cash’s rendition of a gospel tune but then goads him into playing ‘Folsom Prison Blues”…and a star is born.
If anyone’s stuck for Sundance lodgings, I think I’ve got some- thing that sounds good. Semi-spacious, not too expensive. Write me and we’ll talk it over. Available for the entire span of the fes- tival…near Prospector Square. Respond hastily.
As I understand it (i.e., as the newspaper ads proclaim), the initial 149-minute version of Terrence Malick’s The New World is going to “close” late tonight — Tuesday, January 3rd — and a new shorter version is going to re-open on Friday, 1.20.06. So today is the last chance for anyone to see the longer, more meditative version of this half-awesome, half-not-so-awesome film. For all we know the 149-minute version will never again see the light of day. You never know…will the eccentric Malick forbid New World Home Video from releasing it? It’s looking to me like more and more of a big do-or-die day…and just hours to go! The shorter New World will run about 132 minutes (a New Line spokesperson says it’s been cut by “about 16 or 17 minutes”). It will be press-screened a week or so before the 1.20 re-opening.
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So why was Ridley Scott’s “extended cut” of Kingdom of Heaven not sent out on DVD to Academy members or selected press? It’s only showing at the Laemmle Fairfax…which isn’t a very good theatre, by the way. It should have been booked into a better house in Westwood somewhere. If you’re going to promote a big-budgeted film for year-end Academy Awards consideration (which is what showing the “extended cut” is apparently about), why do it in such a half-assed way?
Here’s an L.A. Times public-opinion piece piece by John Horn and Scott Collins (“Moviegoers Speak Up”) about what average folks feel about the moviegoing experience. It feel lazy, this thing. It adds nothing to what everyone’s been hearing and repeating for a long time. Oh, and I have no respect for anyone who says they’re “not bothered” by theatrical TV commercials. I’m speaking of one Frank Delgado, 41, who spoke for his wife Patty, 42, and children Emily, 7, and Ryan, 11. Delgado was interviewed at the Edwards Westpark 8 in Irvine…baaahh.
I always thought once you get a bit older and know who and what you are, watching a sensitively-made movie about a non-hetero romance is no big deal. So what’s with Larry David‘s New York Times piece about how he can’t quite roll with the idea of seeing Brokeback Mountain? I think it’s supposed to be a satire about homophobia (right…?) but it also strikes me as a somewhat honest confessional. Larry David never inhabits another persona — he’s always himself. “I just know if I saw [Brokeback Mountain], the voice inside my head that delights in torturing me would have a field day,” he write. “‘You like those cowboys, don’t you? They’re kind of cute. Go ahead, admit it, they’re cute. You can’t fool me, gay man. Go ahead, stop fighting it. You’re gay! You’re gay!”
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