Lacking The Rhyme

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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”

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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.

Adams on “Catch a Fire”

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It’s hard to find the link, but Toronto Globe & Mail critic James Adams has called Philip Noyce‘s Catch a Fire “a nail biter…a fast paced, compulsively watchable political thriller about what happens when a previously apolitical working man (Derek Luke) decides to join the armed struggle against an oppressive govt, in this case Sout Sfrica’s now defunct apartheid regime.
“Tim Robbins deftly plays a fiendishly clever Boer security agent trying to hold back the growing power of the ANC, but the real stars here are Luke as Patrick, the politicized refinery worker, and Bonnie Henna as the wife whose jealousy has consequences far beyond hearth and home. Based on a true story and shot on location, Noyce’s film is like The Battle of Algiers, unsparing in its portrayal of the many prices everyone pays when the ‘old is dying and the new cannot yet be born’.”

Triumph of “Others”

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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 “heart” German films I’ve ever seen — the love story that beats at the center of it is tender and impassioned and ripely erotic — and yet this is also a very chilling and gripping film about political terror.
And yet it’s very much of an interior thing — quite emotional, and at times quite sad. But with a deeply touching “up” element at the finale.
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 thuggery, and yet one that delivers a metaphor that says even the worst of us can move towards openness and a lessening of hate. Ugliness needn’t rule.
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 unrealistic in an East German political sense, but I bought it and so did everyone else at last night’s 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.
Sony Classics is going to open Others in February to coincide with the Oscar nominations. It’s 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 (Koch) and his actress wife Christa-Maria Sieland (Gedeck, best known for her starring role in Mostly Martha).
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 share passions with, despite his constricted personality and shadowy ways.
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, but this is the first absolutely top-drawer 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 then a Volver party starting around 10:30 or 11 pm.

VIP screening policy

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For years I’ve been going up to the TIFF volunteers working the VIP rooms (i.e., small 20-seat theatres) at the Varsity plex and asking what’s showing and may I slip in?, etc. But this year they’ve gone all CIA on me, claiming they don’t know what’s showing and suggesting that I speak to the publicist attached to whatever film is showing…except they won’t tell me what’s slated for later in the day. I’m wondering if this new restrictiveness has anything to do witjh a new TIFF program of buyers-only screenings, which the Hollywood Reporter‘s Gregg Goldstein explained yesterday.

McCarthy on “Venus”

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Variety critic Todd McCarthy‘s glowing review of Roger Michell‘s Venus, posted yesterday from Telluride, Telluride….Telluride! Peter O’Toole, all but locked for a Best Actor nomination, “reigns [with] his first meaty leading film role in perhaps two decades, and the still charismatic and silver-tongued star scores a bull’s-eye.” McCarthy describes this “small-scaled, throughly British entertainment” as “genuinely funny, randy and moving by turns and breezily enjoyable throughout.” The Miramax release has its first press screening today at the Varsity at 4:15 pm. I’ll try and post a reaction sometime this evening…maybe.

“Bobby” disser

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I ran into a Bobby disser yesterday afternoon at the “indie” publicist hotel, the Intercontinental. To be specific, he shrugged his shoulders, shook his head and kind of grimaced after mentioning that he’d seen it. The best thing about it, he said with some enthusiasm, is the archival footage of Robert F. Kennedy. The worst thing, he claimed, is Ashton Kutcher‘s performance as a late ’60s hippy-dippy type.

Borat breakdown

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Instead of going to that disastrous Borat midnight screening at the Ryerson last night…oh, that’s right, I haven’t mentioned this yet. Only 20 minutes worth of the film was shown before the friggin’ projector broke down. Sacha Baron Cohen, Michael Moore and director Larry Charles entertained the rowdy (as in hugely pissed off) crowd and promises were mde about the show starting any minute now, etc., but they finally had to cancel the whole show and re-schedule for midnight makeup tonight at the Elgin.
Variety‘s Stephen Zeitchik, David Poland and Justine Elias have provided colorful reportings on the particulars.
There’s a Borat press screening in a couple of hours (12:45 pm) inside a puny little 82-seat theatre at the Varsity plex…brilliant. If the festival had its act together, they’d arrange for a bigger last-minute daytime venue. (Thre’s also a 1:15 pm Saturday screening at the Paramount.)
I started this item by saying instead of going to the damn Borat screening (which I knew wouldn’t get out until 2:15 or 2:30 ayem, and then I’d get to bed at 3:30 ayem), I went to an after-party at Lobby, a narrow, darkly lit club on Bloor Street, for Ken Loach’s The Wind That Shakes the Barley. It was awful, noisy, repulsive. Wall-to-wall 20- and 30-something nocturnal party types with much-too-loud music and steely-eyed goons at the doorway keeping invited guests from coming in…a festival pigfuck extraordinaire.
I went to a little joint two or three doors down and ran into MPRM’s Jennifer Lopez and Wendy Martino. We shared stories and traded news and generally had a nice wind-down for an hour or so.

FIC, “So Goes The Nation”

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IFC Films has picked up …So Goes the Nation, a doc by James Stern and Adam Del Deo about the key battleground state of Ohio during the ’04 Presidential campaign. Any examination of Ohio ’04, of course, means an examination of the long-standing charge that George Bush‘s stooges stole the election by suppressing liberal democratic voters through various underhanded means. This story has been reported and explored quite a lot over the last couple of years, and the response from the right has consistently been “get over it.” …So Goes The Nation is being touted as an even-handed look at what happened, but “even handed” is a code term that sometimes means “bending over backwards to accomodate the bad guys’ point of view.” (Sorry to be judgmental and all, but if you conspire to steal an election, that kinda makes you a “bad guy.” ) A release says that tthe doc “looks at the election and the voting public through lenses large and small, and in doing so, examines both the U.S. voting process and the American national psyche.” The public Toronto Film Festival screenings aren’t until Thursday, 9.14, and Friday, 9.15.

Nothin’s Jumpin’

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Nothin’s Jumpin’

I sat through one entire film — John Waters and Jeff Garlin‘s This Filthy World, a concert performance doc about Waters doing his act — and portions of three other films during my first six hours of the Toronto Film Festival, and none of them delivered much of a bolt or a jolt.
So things are off to an inauspicious start, but at least there’s that hot German film, The Lives of Others, that everyone was raving about at the close of last weekend’s Telluride Film Festival, showing at 9 pm this evening at the Elgin.
The three so-sos that I saw after the Waters-Garlin doc were Murali K. Thalluri‘s 2:37, Susanne Bier‘s After The Wedding and Rachid Bouchareb‘s Indigenes (i.e., Days of Glory)
For years the rap on Waters has been that he’s much better commentator-comedian than filmmaker. He’s a brilliant idea-and-insight man, but his movies, despite their irreverence and nerve, always feel a bit drab and one-dimensional. The big payoff of This Filthy World is that it’s nothing but Waters the gabbermouth, and that, for me, makes it funnier than A Dirty Shame or Serial Mom or Hairspray or even Pink Flamingoes.
TIFF programmer Noah Cowan‘s production notes are a hoot. “While This Filthy World might be described as an autobiographical stand-up comedy set by John Waters,” he begins, “its real purpose is to document a sardonic lesson in cinema’s decline and fall .” This falls under the heading of pretentious b.s. Well, not entirely, but what person writing or talking about film in any capacity isn’t discussing, in one way or the other, the cinema’s decline and fall, or at least the fact that 85% of the output sucks?
Water is just riffing here like I’ve seen him riff 17 or 18 times — amusingly, wittily — and he’s great at this. But let’s not try and pass him off as the new Voltaire.
Garlin (I Want Someone To Eat Cheese With) pretty much just shoots Waters from a centered mid-audience p.o.v. and that’s that. He keeps the camera in focus and doesn’t get too tricky and barely cuts between Waters and the audience too much. Cowan calls it “an uncluttered approach” — this guy’s a card.
2:37 is a kind of guessing-game movie about a suicide that happens in an Adelaide high school at 2:37 pm. Thalluri, who’s only 21 or thereabouts but directs like a much older pro, acquaints us with five or six (seven?) characters who may turn out to be the kid who’s killed himself. We’re supposed to care about this. I didn’t.
Every high-school kid suffers. A lot of them cope with profound depression of one kind of another — I sure did — but the ones who seriously entertain thoughts of suicide need to get over themselves and that’s that. I never even flirted with the idea, and nobody was sadder, angrier or felt more unloved and repressed and furious at everything than I was at age 15 or 16.
Life can be cold and brutal in high school, yes, but the idea of teenagers suffering profound soul-crushing angst is an overindulged mythology. Kids need to grim up and cut back on the substances and deal with it like Steve McQueen would have.
The influence you can’t ignore throughout 2:37 is Gus Van Sant‘s Elephant, which was also about a sudden tragedy in a high school with various characters either affected by it or contributing to it in some way. I much prefer the constant steadicam tracking and overall stylistic detachment of Van Sant’s film to Thalluri’s. I left 2:37 after a half-hour or so. An Australian exhibitor agreed with me later on that it’s very derivative and that my instinct to bail was entirely correct.
The emotional exposures and raw, dogma-ish acting and shooting styles and in Open Hearts and Brothers made me a huge fan of Bier. But I started to feel distanced from After the Wedding within a half-hour or so, and I bolted after about 45 or 50 minutes. It seemed to me that Anders Thomas Jensen‘s story — about some big primal changes happening to a wealthy Danish family — was forced and labored. It’s very well acted but too much of it feels contrived and histrionic.
The three principal performers — Mads Mikkelsen (who starred in Open Hearts), Sidse Babett Knudsen and Rolf Lassgard — are in excellent form throughout. I need to confess that there’s something about the haunted intensity in Mikkelsen’s high-cheekboned face that’s starting to bother me. Not a fair thing to lay on an actor’s natural mechanism, but there it is.
I guess I just felt that the main story points — it’s about a guy who runs an Indian orphanage finding out that he’s the father of a grown Danish daughter just as her stepfather, a bilionaire, is coping with a fatal disease and needs someone to step and take over, so to speak — were clumsily introduced and over-emphasized. Like Bier was so into achieving emotional fireworks that she allowed her zeal to get the best of her.
Indigenes, a World War II story about four North African guys who enlist in the French army but wind up dealing with a good amoutn of racial discrimination, is well-made and handomsely shot with some ultra-realistic battle scenes. But it’a rote and unexceptional piece, and is not that much different, believe it ot not, from Mark Robson‘s Home of the Brave, a 1949 film which dealt with racial discrimin- ation among U.S. troops during the same war.
It’s not a “bad” film — you get to know the characters, it moves along, it’s saying the right things about who we are and the necessity for dignity in every human life — but it feels too been-there, done-that.

“King’s” Talk

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A journo pal has seen Steve Zallian‘s All The King’s Men (Columbia, 9.22), which shows at the Toronto Film Festival in two or three days. He says it has problems but also merit here and there, and that it’s not a washout or a train wreck. He insists that Sean Penn gives a strong, formidable performance as Willie Stark — Oscar-level, he claims — but that Jude Law‘s Southern accent doesn’t cut it at all, and that this naturally impacts his performance. (Speaking about Law prompted him to make a face.) And just to clarify, it’s Mark Ruffalo who plays the part that Shepard Strudwick played (blam!) in the 1949 film.