Do you literally have to live in the U.S. to knock its values or criticize its culture or politics? David Cronenberg, a Canadian whose recently-screened A History of Violence addresses America’s shoot-em-up, fistifcuff tendencies, is quoted thusly by L.A. Times critic Kenneth Turan: “Does a fish know about water? Living in a tributary, not the ocean, [Marshall] McLuhan had a different perspective. The insights he had into America would not be possible to anyone living in America. Stepping away has a lot to do with it.”
A lot of press people in Cannes have been doing their usual ranting against Lars von Trier for making another film critical of the U.S. (i.e., Manderlay) without having ever visited American shores. Certainly one needs to absorb a country’s culture first-hand to get a thorough understanding of what it’s about…but it also seems absurd to insist that a visitation has to happen before one can render a strong opinion about a country’s history with a film like…well, Manderlay. As von Trier told the Hollywood Reporter‘s Anne Thompson, “America dominates world culture” and “is a big part of our lives in my country. 60% of the main words in all the experiences of my life are American…I am an American, but I can’t go there to vote [and] I can’t change anything. That’s why I make films about America.”
“The general opinion of Revenge of the Sith seems to be that it marks a distinct improvement on the last two episodes, The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones. True, but only in the same way that dying from natural causes is preferable to crucifixion.” This from Anthony Lane’s pan in the current issue of The New Yorker. Hail to this fellow…his review is hilarious.
Eight Days In
It’s late Wednesday morning, 5.18, and this signifies, among other things, that the Cannes Film Festival started a week ago and there’s another couple of days to go before everyone collapses into a heap.
This morning’s competition film, Peindre out Faire L’Amour (To Paint or Make Love), did nothing for me or to me. It’s another one of those leisurely paced, mezzo-mezzo domestic French dramas about middle-class, middle-aged people, and I’m sorry but I couldn’t abide it.
I know it sounds lazy and arrogant to dismiss a film like this without giving it its proper due, but I’m just being honest. I have enjoyed films of this type before and I hope to again, but not this morning, Monique.
I took this out-of-focus shot around 8 pm yesterday evening (5.17) aboard a large yacht that Stella Artois beer and the Hollywood Reporter were throwing a party on. (The invite came via courtesy of Gregg Kilday.) Notice the heaving seas — it looks like a rescue scene from Richard Lester’s Juggernaut. And the seas really were heaving and rocking the boat and pitching everything and everyone around, and it was magnificent to be on this little red craft and feel all this natural turbulent energy.
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I’m seeing the rugged outdoor drama that Tommy Lee Jones has directed and starred in, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, at a private screening at noon, but I’ve agreed not to write about it until Thursday, so I don’t know what to do for today’s column.
I hate writing a daily column, but I love nailing it and doing it well when my energy’s up and the synapses are firing away like the spark plugs inside the humming engine of Jimmy Stewart’s The Spirit of St.Louis over the icy north Atlantic at 5 ayem.
People seemed to be getting irritable yesterday, which I attribute to the fact that people always get irritable after going 18 hour days for seven says straight.
If you’re looking for something fresh, please scroll down and check out my new “head” shot. I’ll try and post something intriguing later today.
Mostly
I respected and mostly liked Jim Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers, but I didn’t find it entirely sublime. It felt a bit sketchy and under-fueled and sketchy at times, but that’s Jarmusch for you — a real less-is-more kind of guy. He likes his characters and scenes fairly cut and dried without any of that emotional backstory stuff.
This isn’t to say Broken Flowers doesn’t penetrate. It’s a dryly intriguing comedy, at first, that slowly darkens into a sobering adult drama. The ending isn’t “happy” or tied up in a red bow, but on Jarmusch’s own terms it has integrity, and in fact “works.”
Broken Flowers star Bill Murray, costar Tilda Swinton and (half cropped) director-writer Jim Jarmusch.
The story’s about a middle-aged lonely guy (Bill Murray) flying around the country and trying to figure out which old girlfriend has written him a note telling him he has a 19 year-old son.
All we’re told about Murray’s character, who’s called Don Johnston, is that he’s financially comfortable and emotionally remote. In the film’s early scenes one could call him emotionally shut down — too much so, I felt.
We’re all used to Murray’s half-comic underplaying (which was never better than in Wes Anderson’s Rushmore) but this works best, I feel, alongside higher-energy characters or situations. For the first 25 to 30 minutes, Jarmusch and Murray are almost too synched up for their own good.
The story begins with Johnston getting dumped by his latest girlfriend (Julie Delpy) over emotional remoteness issues, including Johnston’s aversion to having family. Then comes the letter, partly written with a typewriter, and on pink paper inside a pink envelope. The import is that the alleged 19 year-old son may be looking for Johnston.
There’s a hangup, though: the girlfriend doesn’t identify herself. Johnston shows the letter to his next-door neighbor Winston (Jeffrey Wright), a guy with five kids and three jobs who fancies himself as a kind of internet sleuth. Winston asks Johnston to write down a list of ex-flames who might be the mystery letter-writer.
Murray comes up with the names of four women, and Winston finds their addresses and whatnot online. He urges Johnston to visit each and try to learn what he can.
Broken Flowers stars Murray and Swinton, director-writer Jim Jarmusch.
Winston twice tells Johnston that his romantic history qualifies him as some kind of former Casanova. Of course, having had four ex-lovers during the mid ’80s is not especially hound-like. The Great Nookie Shutdown of the mid to late ’80s (caused by fear of AIDS) hadn’t quite kicked in in the early years of the Reagan administration, and single heteros were almost as frisky as they were in the ’70s.
The ex-girlfriends are played by Sharon Stone, Jessica Lange, Frances Conroy (from HBO’s Six Feet Under) and a just-about-unrecognizable Tilda Swinton, covered in a black wig and heavy eye mascara.
The film picks up steam once Murray/Johnston goes on the road and pays a visit to each ex, always offering a bouquet of flowers but saying and asking very little. For some reason, Johnston never puts his cards on the table and just says, “Did you write me a letter on pink paper that said I have a 19 year-old son?” Instead, he hints and tippy-toes around and asks if they own a typewriter.
What’s so bad about posing a straight question? A middle-aged man asking an ex-girlfriend whether he might have a son he never knew about…what’s so gauche or off-putting about that?
Jim Jarmusch — Monday, 5.16.05, 7:55 pm.
Of course, all the tip-toeing around makes the encounter scenes (and the film itself) about undercurrent — the things people think and do not say.
What’s interesting and finally quite satisfying about Broken Flowers is how Jarmusch doesn’t feel obliged to answer each and every last question, either on the part of Johnston or the audience.
Flowers has, of course, Jarmusch’s signature elements (minimalism, understatement, observings of cultural minutae), and a somewhat taciturn, occasionally hilarious lead performance by Murray.
One of the funnier things Murray does is a carrot-eating scene at the home of Conroy and her real-estate-mogul husband. I’m not going to describe it. I couldn’t.
Wright is fine and believable, although he doesn’t have that much of a part. The standout among the four exes is Swinton, and she has maybe eight or nine lines, if that. Stone, Lange and Conroy are intriguing in their respective turns.
Murray was asked at the press conference about his minimalist acting style, and he said “it comes from deterioration of ability. As time moves on I find I have less and less to give.”
Boiled down, his role in Broken Flowers is about how “I get beaten up by all these women,” he said. “It was a far more precarious thing than I expected it to be. Always being off-balance and feeling unsettled.”
A journalist told Murray he was very scared as a kid when he saw all the spooks and monsters in Ghostbusters. “You’re safe now,” Murray replied. “We took care of all that.”
Another guy asked Murray an extremely arcane, hard-to-follow question, and Murray replied, “Are you the same guy who asked me outside a few minutes ago to take on the Argentinean Senate? I mean, why not? I’m looking for work.”
Murray said at another point that “doing that back-story stuff sometimes takes you out of the moment [when you’re doing a scene].”
Jarmusch said he’s “not interested in back-story…my style is looking at details and nuances. My religion is that of the imagination.”
Plantation Blues
Manderlay didn’t do it for me, and I’m speaking as a totally ardent fan of von Trier’s Dogville , Dancer in the Dark and Breaking the Waves, as well as a general fool for his bad-boy provocateur routine.
It’s a relentlessly talky, intelligent and provocative film that addresses…well, American racism, certainly, but more generally a do-gooder tendency by American governments to try and shape other societies so they more resemble our own (Iraq, Vietnam, etc.). And it indulges in the usual proddings and agitations that are par for this Danish filmmaker.
Willem Dafoe and Bryce Dallas Howard in opening scene from Lars von Trier’s Manderlay.
I don’t know when it’ll open in the States, but I’m presuming Manderlay wi ll piss off African-Americans when it opens there for saying, in part, that they are playing (or have played) a willing part in their economic subjugation by whites.
The second installment in von Trier’s America, Manderlay is a continuation of the adventures of Grace, the gangster’s daughter played by Nicole Kidman in Do gville, the trilogy’s 2003 kickoff, and by Bryce Dallas Howard in the new film.
Both films are stagey and pedantically inclined, and shot on what is probably the same massive sound stage with imaginary props and sets. (The third installment will presumably follow suit.)
Manderlay‘s problem is that it’s too similar to Dogville…and not similar enough.
Despite its slow pace and very gradual plot development, Dogville had a surprise character revelation (i.e., that Kidman is the daughter of gangster James Caan, and not his girlfriend, as the film allows us to assume at first) and a shockingly violent finale that expressed von Trier’s negative feelings about what he sees as American tendencies to exploit the less fortunate.
The perfect-bound, pocket book-sized press notes for Lars von Trier’s Manderlay.
Manderlay is supposed to walk, talk and feel like a Dogville companion. It is broken up by titled chapters, John Hurt again provides the dry and pungent narration, and the closing credit sequence is nearly identical with the same David Bowie song (“Young Americans”) played over a series of stills that il laminate the uglier aspects of America’s history – in this instance, the treatment of African-Americans over the last century or so.
But there’s no big jolt or surprise at the finale — you can pretty much tell what’s coming from the get-go – and it so closely recalls Dogville‘s aching-butt aspects that watching it feels like a chore.
Set in the early 1930s, some days or weeks after Dogville ended, Grace and her father (Willem Dafoe, taking over for James Caan) and his gang of thugs pull up out side the gates of an Alabama plantation called Manderlay.
To her shock, the na√É∆í√ǬØve and willful Grace quickly learns that slavery is still in place here — the black workers lorded over by a white family (which is headed by Lauren Bacall). She quickly decides to use her dad’s power to take over the plantation and institute democracy and free choice and self-sufficiency.
But the process of teaching is kind of fraught with contradictions. Grace needs to order and organize and put structure into place, and the black men and women of Manderlay resist or elude her plans in different ways, and old habits revive themselves and Grace gradually ends up becoming a tyrant — just like the slave-running family she replaced.
Manderlay‘s sound-stage set.
She develops the hots for a laborer named Timothy (Issach de Bankole) whom she first saw tied to a post and about to be whipped. She and Timothy eventually submit to their mutual libidinal urges, but he is tied up again by the end of the film and this time Grace is doing the whipping.
She also executes an older woman named Wilma (Mona Hammond) who, it is charged, was responsible for the starvation death of a child.
The bottom line is that Manderlay isn’t punchy or startling enough to justify the two hour and 19 minute running time.
Violence
I meant to write longer about David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence, which I caught Sunday night and liked quite a lot, but I have to postpone writing about it again and it’s two days later.
Viggo Mortensen stars as Tom Stall, a man who leads a relatively quiet, small-town life with his wife (Maria Bello) and two kids.
The truth starts to come out when Mortensen defends a waitress about to be attacked from a pair of thugs, dispatching them with speed and savage efficiency. This act makes him into a news media hero, which brings him nationwide attention.
Viggo Mortenson in David Cronenberg’s smartly assembled, suprisingly amusing A History of Violence.
Then it turns out he’s a guy with a criminal past who’s adopted a fake name, and then some of the gangster types he ran with — dark-suited baddies from Philadelphia, including a pair of creepy nogoodniks played by Ed Harris and William Hurt — start showing up and saying, “Heyyyy…”
I was especially turned around by the dark humor aspects. A lot of people get bloodied and shot and killed in this film, but it’s a very funny thing at times, and I wasn’t the only one feeling this way.
There was a French guy in the audience at the Salle de Bussy’s 7:30 pm showing who yelled at the audience while the film was running, saying,in effect, “Stop laughing…this isn’t funny!”
Randoms
Cannes beach in front of Noga Hilton beach annex — Monday, 5.16.05, 7:40 pm.
Enterprising journalist holding an obviously first-rate prosthetic severed head. Head was found sitting on a mantle at a party thrown by and for socially ambitious under-25 Brits on the evening of Tuesday, 5.17, at a faux-castle residence in the eastern section of Old Town.
Carlton Hotel billboard for Cameron Crowe’s Elizabethtown.
Audience at Salle de Bussy on Sunday evening, just before the lights went down and David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence began — Sunday, 5.15.05, 7:25 pm.
My work station (i.e., lower right, newspaper on keyborad) at the American Pavillion — Monday, 5.16.05, 1:55 pm.
View of rainstorm from American Pavillion — Monday, 5.16.05, 2:40 pm.
London filmmaker Natalie Turner (Sfumato), Channel 4 journalist-critic Annette Dasey at Sunday night’s Star Wars party — 5.16.05, 12:20 am.
Fireworks over baie de Cannes — Sunday, 5.15.05, 11:40 pm.
Death Stars
George Lucas and his digital galactic posse arrived in Cannes Sunday
(5.15), and attracted, to no one’s surprise, more attention than any other film or team of filmmakers who’ve dropped by thus far.
Which is symmetrically appropriate, I suppose, since we all realize that Stars Wars: Episode 3 — Revenge of the Sith will most likely attract more ticket buyers than probably all the other films showing here (including the market offerings) combined.
Star Wars: Episode 3 – Revenge of the Sith director-writer George Lucas and costar Natalie Portman during Sunday afternoon’s Cannes Film Festival press conference, which I would have attended if I didn’t have better things to do — 5.15.05, 1:10 pm.
There’s no percentage in being a sorehead and teeing off on George and his unstoppably mediocre film all over again, so let’s just zip it.
The Sith press conference, which just ended about 20 minutes ago (i.e., at 2 pm), was a two-toned affair — the occasional (make that very occasional) journalist asking a somewhat pointed question and Lucas not really answering them, and the other journos asking puffball questions.
Big surprise, right? The world wants to love this film, publishers and editors who employ Cannes-covering journalists know this and just want the standard oooh-ahhh coverage, and who gives a hoot anyway?
Movie City News and Film Stew contributor Sperling Reich asked Lucas why he had made it more difficult for websites and bloggers in recent years to cover Star Wars-related news by not affording them the same access given to print publications. Lucas ignored the question and spoke about his love for the free exchange of information that the internet provides, etc. And Reich didn’t follow up.
I was standing by a big window overlooking the path that Team Lucas (Hayden Christensen, Rick McCallum, Portman, Samuel L. Jackson, etc.) were about to walk by, and I was going to snap a photo when one of the Wi-Fi Cafe volunteers (i.e., French girls in their early 20s dressed in white T-shirts and white ass-hugging pants) said no pictures, per order of some festival bigwig.
I put my camera away but donnez-moi un fucking break.
The 20th Century Fox publicity people gave me tickets to the Sunday night after-party, which is classy of them given my general animus, etc.
Saturday Afternoon
Bob Berney, head of the newly formed Picturehouse, the newly-formed HB0 and New Line-backed indie distribution company, and wife Jeanne Berney (who’s on a temporary hiatus from publicity chores) at beachside party celebrating the company’s launch — Saturday, 5.14, 5:35 pm
Chicago Tribune reporter Jackie Fitzgerald (far left), film critic Michael Wilmington and Where the Truth Lies director Atom Egoyan (right) at Picturehouse launch party — Saturday, 5.14.05, 6:20 pm.
Last Days star Michael Pitt (l.), Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore at Picturehouse party — Saturday, 5.14.05, 6:47pm.
.
During Variety-sponsored panel discussion among American directors: (l. to r.) Brent Hamer (Factotum), Kyle Henry (Room), David Jacobson (Down in the Valley), host Roger Ebert, Miranda July (Me and You and Everyone We Know), Lodge Kerrigan (Keane) and Stuart Sammuels (Midnight Movies: From the Margin to the Mainstream).
Room director Kyle Henry (sideburns, facial blemish, second from left); panel host Roger Ebert slightly behind and to the right — Saturday, 5.14.05, 4:05 pm.
No Worries
I saw about an hour’s worth of Joyeux Noel at the Salle Bazin earlier today. That’s right — it wasn’t good enough to see through to the end.
It’s a French-produced period drama about the World War I Christmas truce of 1914, written and directed by Christian Clarion. It suffers from a too-modest budget, simplistic writing, the worst dubbing of an actor and actress pretending to be opera singers I’ve ever seen in my life, and a generally sentimental and ham-fisted tone that will almost certainly not play with audiences in the States, if any US distributor is reckless enough to pick it up.
As regular readers know, I ran a piece a few months ago about two other films being planned about this exact same subject.
Vadim Perlman (House of Sand and Fog) is (or was) planning a film called Truce, working from a script by Stuart Beattie. Paul Weitz and his brother Chris have been talking about making a film called Silent Night…exact same deal.
What I’m saying, obviously, is that Perlman and Weitz have only each other to fear…if their respective projects are still on the rails and moving ahead, I mean (which I’m not sure about at this stage)
While Tapping…
…out a lead piece about Jim Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers, which everyone saw at this morning’s 8:30 am press screening (and which will have its black-tie premiere tonight), I may as well put up these photos from the post-screening press conference, which ended a bit after 12 noon.
I respected and mostly liked Broken Flowers, bit I didn’t find it entirely sublime. It felt a bit under-fueled and sketchy at times, but that’s Jarmusch for you…he likes his characters…his movies, I mean…cut and dried without any of that emotional backstory stuff.
Broken Flowers star Bill Murray, costar Tilda Swinton and (half cropped) director-writer Jim Jarmusch.
Broken Flowers is actually fairly penetrating. It’s a dryly intriguing comedy about a middle-aged lonely guy (Bill Murray) flying around the country and trying to figure out which old girlfriend has written him a note telling him he has a 19 year-old son.
Mostly it’s about loneliness and regret and missed opportunities, and is one of those films that gets better the more you mull it over. I saw it about four hours ago and it’s growing on me already. I liked that it doesn’t fill in all the blanks or neatly tie things up at the finish.
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It has, of course, Jarmusch’s signature elements (minimalism, understatement, observings of cultural minutae), and a somewhat taciturn, occasionally hilarious lead performance by Bill Murray.
Anyway, I’ll expand on this in a little, and in the meantime here are some more press conference photos, plus a shot of Jarmsuch taken yesterday (Monday, 5.16) at a Fortissimo Films party at the Noga Hilton beach annex:
Broken Flowers stars Murray and Swinton, director-writer Jim Jarmusch.
Jim Jarmusch — Monday, 5.16.05, 7:55 pm.
Plantation Blues
Manderlay didn’t do it for me, and I’m speaking as a totally ardent fan of von Trier’s Dogville , Dancer in the Dark and Breaking the Waves, as well as a general fool for his bad-boy provocateur routine.
It’s a relentlessly talky, intelligent and provocative film that addresses..,well, American racism, certainly, but more generally a do-gooder tendency by American governments to try and shape other societies so they more resemble our own (Iraq, Vietnam, etc.). And it indulges in the usual proddings and agitations that are par for this Danish filmmaker.
Willem Dafoe and Bryce Dallas Howard in opening scene from Lars von Trier’s Manderlay.
I don’t know when it’ll open in the States, but I’m presuming Manderlay wi ll piss off African-Americans when it opens there for saying, in part, that they are playing (or have played) a willing part in their economic subjugation by whites.
The second installment in von Trier’s America, Manderlay is a continuation of the adventures of Grace, the gangster’s daughter played by Nicole Kidman in Do gville, the trilogy’s 2003 kickoff, and by Bryce Dallas Howard in the new film.
Both films are stagey and pedantically inclined, and shot on what is probably the same massive sound stage with imaginary props and sets. (The third installment will presumably follow suit.)
Manderlay‘s problem is that it’s too similar to Dogville…and not similar enough.
Despite its slow pace and very gradual plot development, Dogville had a surprise character revelation (i.e., that Kidman is the daughter of gangster James Caan, and not his girlfriend, as the film allows us to assume at first) and a shockingly violent finale that expressed von Trier’s negative feelings about what he sees as American tendencies to exploit the less fortunate.
The perfect-bound, pocket book-sized press notes for Lars von Trier’s Manderlay.
Manderlay is supposed to walk, talk and feel like a Dogville companion. It is broken up by titled chapters, John Hurt again provides the dry and pungent narration, and the closing credit sequence is nearly identical with the same David Bowie song (“Young Americans”) played over a series of stills that il laminate the uglier aspects of America’s history – in this instance, the treatment of African-Americans over the last century or so.
But there’s no big jolt or surprise at the finale — you can pretty much tell what’s coming from the get-go – and it so closely recalls Dogville‘s aching-butt aspects that watching it feels like a chore.
Set in the early 1930s, some days or weeks after Dogville ended, Grace and her father (Willem Dafoe, taking over for James Caan) and his gang of thugs pull up out side the gates of an Alabama plantation called Manderlay.
To her shock, the na√É∆í√ǬØve and willful Grace quickly learns that slavery is still in place here — the black workers lorded over by a white family (which is headed by Lauren Bacall). She quickly decides to use her dad’s power to take over the plantation and institute democracy and free choice and self-sufficiency.
But the process of teaching is kind of fraught with contradictions. Grace needs to order and organize and put structure into place, and the black men and women of Manderlay resist or elude her plans in different ways, and old habits revive themselves and Grace gradually ends up becoming a tyrant — just like the slave-running family she replaced.
Manderlay‘s sound-stage set.
She develops the hots for a laborer named Timothy (Issach de Bankole) whom she first saw tied to a post and about to be whipped. She and Timothy eventually submit to their mutual libidinal urges, but he is tied up again by the end of the film and this time Grace is doing the whipping.
She also executes an older woman named Wilma (Mona Hammond) who, it is charged, was responsible for the starvation death of a child.
The bottom line is that Manderlay isn’t punchy or startling enough to justify the two hour and 19 minute running time.
Until Tomorrow…
I have to quit now, but here are some photos I took last night and today. I’m seeing Jim Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers, starring Bill Murray, tomorrow morning.
I meant to write about David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence, which I caught Sunday night and liked quite a lot, but I’ll have to get into it tomorrow also.
Viggo Mortenson in David Cronenberg’s smartly assembled, suprisingly amusing A History of Violence.
Viggo Mortensen stars as Tom Stall, a man who leads a quiet, small-town life with his wife (Maria Bello) and two kids. Then it turns out he’s a guy with a criminal past who’s adopted a fake name, and then some of the gangster types he ran with — dark-suited baddies from Philadelphia, including characters played by Ed Harris and William Hurt — start showing up and saying, “Heyyyy…”
I was especially turned around by the dark humor aspects. A lot of people get bloodied and shot and killed in this film, but it’s a very funny thing at times, and I wasn’t the only one feeling this way.
There was a French guy in the audience at the Salle de Bussy’s 7:30 pm showing who yelled at the audience while the film was running, saying,in effect, “Stop laughing…this isn’t funny!”
Randoms
Carlton Hotel billboard for Cameron Crowe’s Elizabethtown.
Audience at Salle de Bussy on Sunday evening, just before the lights went down and David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence began — Sunday, 5.15.05, 7:25 pm.
My work station (i.e., lower right, newspaper on keyborad) at the American Pavillion — Monday, 5.16.05, 1:55 pm.
View of rainstorm from American Pavillion — Monday, 5.16.05, 2:40 pm.
London filmmaker Natalie Turner (Sfumato), Channel 4 journalist-critic Annette Dasey at Sunday night’s Star Wars party — 5.16.05, 12:20 am.
Fireworks over baie de Cannes — Sunday, 5.15.05, 11:40 pm.
Death Stars
George Lucas and his digital galactic posse arrived in Cannes Sunday
(5.15), and attracted, to no one’s surprise, more attention than any other film or team of filmmakers who’ve dropped by thus far.
Which is symmetrically appropriate, I suppose, since we all realize that Stars Wars: Episode 3 — Revenge of the Sith will most likely attract more ticket buyers than probably all the other films showing here (including the market offerings) combined.
Star Wars: Episode 3 – Revenge of the Sith director-writer George Lucas and costar Natalie Portman during Sunday afternoon’s Cannes Film Festival press conference, which I would have attended if I didn’t have better things to do — 5.15.05, 1:10 pm.
There’s no percentage in being a sorehead and teeing off on George and his unstoppably mediocre film all over again, so let’s just zip it.
The Sith press conference, which just ended about 20 minutes ago (i.e., at 2 pm), was a two-toned affair — the occasional (make that very occasional) journalist asking a somewhat pointed question and Lucas not really answering them, and the other journos asking puffball questions.
Big surprise, right? The world wants to love this film, publishers and editors who employ Cannes-covering journalists know this and just want the standard oooh-ahhh coverage, and who gives a hoot anyway?
Movie City News and Film Stew contributor Sperling Reich asked Lucas why he had made it more difficult for websites and bloggers in recent years to cover Star Wars-related news by not affording them the same access given to print publications. Lucas ignored the question and spoke about his love for the free exchange of information that the internet provides, etc. And Reich didn’t follow up.
I was standing by a big window overlooking the path that Team Lucas (Hayden Christensen, Rick McCallum, Portman, Samuel L. Jackson, etc.) were about to walk by, and I was going to snap a photo when one of the Wi-Fi Cafe volunteers (i.e., French girls in their early 20s dressed in white T-shirts and white ass-hugging pants) said no pictures, per order of some festival bigwig.
I put my camera away but donnez-moi un fucking break.
The 20th Century Fox publicity people gave me tickets to the Sunday night after-party, which is classy of them given my general animus, etc.
Saturday Afternoon
Bob Berney, head of the newly formed Picturehouse, the newly-formed HB0 and New Line-backed indie distribution company, and wife Jeanne Berney (who’s on a temporary hiatus from publicity chores) at beachside party celebrating the company’s launch — Saturday, 5.14, 5:35 pm
Chicago Tribune reporter Jackie Fitzgerald (far left), film critic Michael Wilmington and Where the Truth Lies director Atom Egoyan (right) at Picturehouse launch party — Saturday, 5.14.05, 6:20 pm.
Last Days star Michael Pitt (l.), Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore at Picturehouse party — Saturday, 5.14.05, 6:47pm.
.
During Variety-sponsored panel discussion among American directors: (l. to r.) Brent Hamer (Factotum), Kyle Henry (Room), David Jacobson (Down in the Valley), host Roger Ebert, Miranda July (Me and You and Everyone We Know), Lodge Kerrigan (Keane) and Stuart Sammuels (Midnight Movies: From the Margin to the Mainstream).
Room director Kyle Henry (sideburns, facial blemish, second from left); panel host Roger Ebert slightly behind and to the right — Saturday, 5.14.05, 4:05 pm.
No Worries
I saw about an hour’s worth of Joyeux Noel at the Salle Bazin earlier today. That’s right — it wasn’t good enough to see through to the end.
It’s a French-produced period drama about the World War I Christmas truce of 1914, written and directed by Christian Clarion. It suffers from a too-modest budget, simplistic writing, the worst dubbing of an actor and actress pretending to be opera singers I’ve ever seen in my life, and a generally sentimental and ham-fisted tone that will almost certainly not play with audiences in the States, if any US distributor is reckless enough to pick it up.
As regular readers know, I ran a piece a few months ago about two other films being planned about this exact same subject.
Vadim Perlman (House of Sand and Fog) is (or was) planning a film called Truce, working from a script by Stuart Beattie. Paul Weitz and his brother Chris have been talking about making a film called Silent Night…exact same deal.
What I’m saying, obviously, is that Perlman and Weitz have only each other to fear…if their respective projects are still on the rails and moving ahead, I mean (which I’m not sure about at this stage).
Plantation Blues
Manderlay didn’t do it for me, and I’m speaking as a totally ardent fan of von Trier’s Dogville, Dancer in the Dark and Breaking the Waves, as well as being a general fool for his bad-boy provocateur routine.
This is a relentlessly talky, intelligent and provocative film that addresses…well, American racism, certainly, but more generally a do-gooder tendency by American governments to try and shape other societies so they more resemble our own (Iraq, Vietnam, etc.).
And it indulges in the usual proddings and agitations that are par for this Danish filmmaker. But not enough to satisfy.
Willem Dafoe and Bryce Dallas Howard in opening scene from Lars von Trier’s Manderlay.
I don’t know when it’ll open in the States, but I’m presuming Manderlay will piss off African-Americans when it opens there for saying, in part, that they are playing (or have played) a willing part in their economic subjugation by whites.
The second installment in von Trier’s America, Manderlay is a continuation of the adventures of Grace, the gangster’s daughter played by Nicole Kidman in Dogville, the trilogy’s 2003 kickoff, and by Bryce Dallas Howard in the new film.
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Both films are stagey and pedantically inclined, and shot on what is probably the same massive sound stage with imaginary props and sets. (The third installment will presumably follow suit.)
Manderlay‘s problem is that it’s too similar to Dogville…and not similar enough.
Despite its slow pace and very gradual plot development, Dogville had a surprise character revelation (i.e., that Kidman is the daughter of gangster James Caan, and not his girlfriend, as the film allows us to assume at first) and a shockingly violent finale that expressed von Trier’s negative feelings about what he sees as American tendencies to exploit the less fortunate.
The perfect-bound, pocket book-sized press notes for Lars von Trier’s Manderlay.
Manderlay is supposed to walk, talk and feel like a Dogville companion. It is broken up by titled chapters, John Hurt again provides the dry and pungent narration, and the closing credit sequence is nearly identical with the same David Bowie song (“Young Americans”) played over a series of stills that illuminate the uglier aspects of America’s history — in this instance, the treatment of African-Americans over the last century or so.
But there’s no big jolt or surprise at the finale — you can pretty much tell what’s coming from the get-go — and it so closely recalls Dogville‘s aching-butt aspects that watching it feels like a chore.
Set in the early 1930s, some days or weeks after Dogville ended, Grace and her father (Willem Dafoe, taking over for James Caan) and his gang of gun-toting thugs pull up outside the gates of an Alabama plantation called Manderlay.
To her shock, the na√É∆í√ǬØve and willful Grace quickly learns that slavery is still in place here — the black workers lorded over by a white family (headed by a frail old woman played by Lauren Bacall). She decides to use her dad’s power to take over the plantation and institute democracy and free choice and self-sufficiency.
But the process of teaching is fraught with contradictions. Grace needs to order and organize and put structure into place, and the black men and women of Manderlay resist or elude her plans in different ways, and old habits revive themselves and Grace gradually ends up becoming a tyrant — just like the slave-running family she replaced.
Manderlay‘s sound-stage set.
She develops the hots for a laborer named Timothy (Issach de Bankole) whom she first saw tied to a post and about to be whipped. She and Timothy eventually submit to their mutual libidinal urges, but he is tied up again by the end of the film and this time Grace is doing the whipping.
She also executes an older woman named Wilma (Mona Hammond) who, it is charged, was responsible for the starvation death of a child.
The bottom line is that Manderlay isn’t punchy or startling enough to justify the two hour and 19 minute running time.
Until Tomorrow…
I have to quit now, but here are some photos I took last night and today. I’m seeing Jim Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers, starring Bill Murray, tomorrow morning.
I meant to write about David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence, which I caught Sunday night and liked quite a lot, but I’ll have to get into it tomorrow also.
Viggo Mortenson in David Cronenberg’s smartly assembled, surprisingly amusing A History of Violence.
Viggo Mortensen stars as Tom Stall, a man who leads a quiet, small-town life with his wife (Maria Bello) and two kids.
Then it turns out he’s a guy with a criminal past who’s adopted a fake name, and then some of the gangster types he ran with — dark-suited baddies from Philadelphia, including characters played by Ed Harris and William Hurt — start showing up and saying, “Heyyyy…”
I was especially turned around by the dark humor aspects. A lot of people get bloodied and shot and killed in this film, but it’s a very funny thing at times, and I wasn’t the only one feeling this way.
There was a French guy in the audience at the Salle de Bussy’s 7:30 pm showing who yelled at the audience while the film was running, saying,in effect, “Stop laughing…this isn’t funny!”
Randoms
Carlton Hotel billboard for Cameron Crowe’s Elizabethtown.
Audience at Salle de Bussy on Sunday evening, just before the lights went down and David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence began — Sunday, 5.15.05, 7:25 pm.
My work station (i.e., lower right, newspaper on keyboard) at the American Pavilion — Monday, 5.16.05, 1:55 pm.
View of rainstorm from American Pavilion — Monday, 5.16.05, 2:40 pm.
London filmmaker Natalie Turner (Sfumato), Channel 4 journalist-critic Annette Dasey at Sunday night’s Star Wars party — 5.16.05, 12:20 am.
Fireworks over baie de Cannes — Sunday, 5.15.05, 11:40 pm.
Death Stars
George Lucas and his digital galactic posse arrived in Cannes Sunday
(5.15), and attracted, to no one’s surprise, more attention than any other film or team of filmmakers who’ve dropped by thus far.
Which is symmetrically appropriate, I suppose, since we all realize that Stars Wars: Episode 3 — Revenge of the Sith will most likely attract more ticket buyers than probably all the other films showing here (including the market offerings) combined.
Star Wars: Episode 3 – Revenge of the Sith director-writer George Lucas and costar Natalie Portman during Sunday afternoon’s Cannes Film Festival press conference, which I would have attended if I didn’t have better things to do — 5.15.05, 1:10 pm.
There’s no percentage in being a sorehead and teeing off on George and his unstoppably mediocre film all over again, so let’s just zip it.
The Sith press conference, which just ended about 20 minutes ago (i.e., at 2 pm), was a two-toned affair — the occasional (make that very occasional) journalist asking a somewhat pointed question and Lucas not really answering them, and the other journos asking puffball questions.
Big surprise, right? The world wants to love this film, publishers and editors who employ Cannes-covering journalists know this and just want the standard oooh-ahhh coverage, and who gives a hoot anyway?
Movie City News and Film Stew contributor Sperling Reich asked Lucas why he had made it more difficult for websites and bloggers in recent years to cover Star Wars-related news by not affording them the same access given to print publications. Lucas ignored the question and spoke about his love for the free exchange of information that the internet provides, etc. And Reich didn’t follow up.
I was standing by a big window overlooking the path that Team Lucas (Hayden Christensen, Rick McCallum, Portman, Samuel L. Jackson, etc.) were about to walk by, and I was going to snap a photo when one of the Wi-Fi Cafe volunteers (i.e., French girls in their early 20s dressed in white T-shirts and white ass-hugging pants) said no pictures, per order of some festival bigwig.
I put my camera away but donnez-moi un fucking break.
The 20th Century Fox publicity people gave me tickets to the Sunday night after-party, which is classy of them given my general animus, etc.
Saturday Afternoon
Bob Berney, head of the newly formed Picturehouse, the newly-formed HB0 and New Line-backed indie distribution company, and wife Jeanne Berney (who’s on a temporary hiatus from publicity chores) at beachside party celebrating the company’s launch — Saturday, 5.14, 5:35 pm
Chicago Tribune reporter Jackie Fitzgerald (far left), film critic Michael Wilmington and Where the Truth Lies director Atom Egoyan (right) at Picturehouse launch party — Saturday, 5.14.05, 6:20 pm.
Last Days star Michael Pitt (l.), Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore at Picturehouse party — Saturday, 5.14.05, 6:47pm.
.
During Variety-sponsored panel discussion among American directors: (l. to r.) Brent Hamer (Factotum), Kyle Henry (Room), David Jacobson (Down in the Valley), host Roger Ebert, Miranda July (Me and You and Everyone We Know), Lodge Kerrigan (Keane) and Stuart Sammuels (Midnight Movies: From the Margin to the Mainstream).
Room director Kyle Henry (sideburns, facial blemish, second from left); panel host Roger Ebert slightly behind and to the right — Saturday, 5.14.05, 4:05 pm.
No Worries
I saw about an hour’s worth of Joyeux Noel at the Salle Bazin earlier today. That’s right — it wasn’t good enough to see through to the end.
It’s a French-produced period drama about the World War I Christmas truce of 1914, written and directed by Christian Clarion. It suffers from a too-modest budget, simplistic writing, the worst dubbing of an actor and actress pretending to be opera singers I’ve ever seen in my life, and a generally sentimental and ham-fisted tone that will almost certainly not play with audiences in the States, if any US distributor is reckless enough to pick it up.
As regular readers know, I ran a piece a few months ago about two other films being planned about this exact same subject.
Vadim Perlman (House of Sand and Fog) is (or was) planning a film called Truce, working from a script by Stuart Beattie. Paul Weitz and his brother Chris have been talking about making a film called Silent Night…exact same deal.
What I’m saying, obviously, is that Perlman and Weitz have only each other to fear…if their respective projects are still on the rails and moving ahead, I mean (which I’m not sure about at this stage).
The Power of Nightmares director Adam Curtis told me last night (Saturday, 5.14) that Sony Pictures Classics has submitted a bid for U.S. theatrical distribution of his controversial documentary. Sony Classics’ Tom Bernard confirmed his company’s interest this afternoon (“We want it!”) at the American Pavillion. Nightmares points out philosphical parallels between Al Qeada and the American neocons and contends that U.S. government fears about a coordinated, single-minded Al Qeada organization are pretty much a myth. The two-hour, 35-minute doc would probably never be shown on U.S. television, and I’ve long presumed, given the ultra-British tone and slant of Curtis’ work, that U.S. theatrical distribution is out of the question. Congrats to Sony Classics for having the cojones to step up and exhibit a truly superb, tough-minded political film.
Those who’ve seen a five-minute DVD reel of David Lynch’s next film, called Inland Empire and starring Laura Dern, Jeremy Irons, Justin Theroux and Harry Dean Stanton, are describing it as a surreal oddball thing involving people in rabbit costumes (or wearing rabbit heads). “It’s great in a typical dark-weird Lynchian way,” said one distributor at Saturday’s Picturehouse party. “It feels like a cross between Lost Highway and Mulholland Falls,” said another. Side note: Mulholland Drive costar Laura Harring told me during an interview a year or so ago that she had acted in a short for Lynch (in ’03 or perhaps a bit earlier) that involved dressing up in a rabbit costume.
Picturehouse, that new HBO/New Line Cinema joint venture being headed by former Newmarket marketing-acquisitions hotshot Bob Berney, has, I feel, acted wisely in acquiring Paul Reiser’s The Thing About My Folks. I wrote about this amiable, family-values dramedy after seeing it at the Santa Barbara Film Festival in early February. The company has also acquired distrib rights to Steven Shainberg’s Fur, a Diane Arbus biopic starring Nicoel Kidman and Robert Downey, Jr.
That story that Reuters’ Mike Collett-White ran two days ago about the Star Wars legacy (“Was Star Wars Good or Bad for Cinema?”) has stayed with me. Particularly Paul Schrader’s quote that the series “ate the heart and soul of Hollywood,” and Peter Biskind’s that the rudimnetary good-against-evil storyline of all the Star Wars films “has become a simplistic prototype for today’s blockbuster. Unfortunately, we will be living in the shadow of Star Wars for a long time.”
Death Stars
George Lucas and his digital galactic posse arrived in Cannes today (Sunday, 5.15), and attracted, to no one’s surprise, more attention than any other film or team of filmmakers who’ve dropped by thus far.
Which is symmetrically appropriate, I suppose, since we all realize that Stars Wars: Episode 3 — Revenge of the Sith will most likely attract more ticket buyers than probably all the other films showing here (including the market offerings) combined.
Star Wars: Episode 3 – Revenge of the Sith director-writer George Lucas and costar Natalie Portman during Sunday afternoon’s Cannes Film Festival press conference, which I would have attended if I didn’t have better things to do — 5.15.05, 1:10 pm.
There’s no percentage in being a sorehead and teeing off on George and his unstoppably mediocre film all over again, so let’s just zip it.
The Sith press conference, which just ended about 20 minutes ago (i.e., at 2 pm), was a two-toned affair — the occasional (make that very occasional) journalist asking a somewhat pointed question and Lucas not really answering them, and the other journos asking puffball questions.
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Big surprise, right? The world wants to love this film, publishers and editors who employ Cannes-covering journalists know this and just want the standard oooh-ahhh coverage, and who gives a hoot anyway?
Movie City News and Film Stew contributor Sperling Reich asked Lucas why he had made it more difficult for websites and bloggers in recent years to cover Star Wars-related news by not affording them the same access given to print publications. Lucas ignored the question and spoke about his love for the free exchange of information that the internet provides, etc. And Reich didn’t follow up.
I was standing by a big window overlooking the path that Team Lucas (Hayden Christensen, Rick McCallum, Portman, Samuel L. Jackson, etc.) were about to walk by, and I was going to snap a photo when one of the Wi-Fi Cafe volunteers (i.e., French girls in their early 20s dressed in white T-shirts and white ass-hugging pants) said no pictures, per order of some festival bigwig.
I put my camera away but donnez-moi un fucking break.
I was under the mistaken impression earlier this afternoon that the Sith after-party would be held late tonight aboard the Queen Mary II. I was wrong — it’s being held at a place called La Baoli. Lucas is being given an award aboard the Queen Mary sometime later this afternoon or early this evening.
I can see the Queen Mary right now from my vantage point at the American Pavilion, moored out in the baie de Cannes about a quarter-mile from the beach. I’m told it’s the world’s largest ocean liner.
The 20th Century Fox publicity people have graciously given me tickets to the party, which is classy of them given my general animus, etc.
Saturday Afternoon
Bob Berney, head of the newly formed Picturehouse, the newly-formed HB0 and New Line-backed indie distribution company, and wife Jeanne Berney (who’s on a temporary hiatus from publicity chores) at beachside party celebrating the company’s launch — Saturday, 5.14, 5:35 pm
Chicago Tribune reporter Jackie Fitzgerald (far left), film critic Michael Wilmington and Where the Truth Lies director Atom Egoyan (right) at Picturehouse launch party — Saturday, 5.14.05, 6:20 pm.
Last Days star Michael Pitt (l.), Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore at Picturehouse party — Saturday, 5.14.05, 6:47pm.
.
During Variety-sponsored panel discussion among American directors: (l. to r.) Brent Hamer (Factotum), Kyle Henry (Room), David Jacobson (Down in the Valley), host Roger Ebert, Miranda July (Me and You and Everyone We Know), Lodge Kerrigan (Keane) and Stuart Sammuels (Midnight Movies: From the Margin to the Mainstream).
Room director Kyle Henry (sideburns, facial blemish, second from left); panel host Roger Ebert slightly behind and to the right — Saturday, 5.14.05, 4:05 pm.
No Worries
I saw about an hour’s worth of Joyeux Noel at the Salle Bazin earlier today. That’s right — it wasn’t good enough to see through to the end.
It’s a French-produced period drama about the World War I Christmas truce of 1914, written and directed by Christian Clarion. It suffers from a too-modest budget, simplistic writing, the worst dubbing of an actor and actress pretending to be opera singers I’ve ever seen in my life, and a generally sentimental and ham-fisted tone that will almost certainly not play with audiences in the States, if any US distributor is reckless enough to pick it up.
As regular readers know, I ran a piece a few months ago about two other films being planned about this exact same subject.
Vadim Perlman (House of Sand and Fog) is (or was) planning a film called Truce, working from a script by Stuart Beattie. Paul Weitz and his brother Chris have been talking about making a film called Silent Night…exact same deal.
What I’m saying, obviously, is that Perlman and Weitz have only each other to fear…if their respective projects are still on the rails and moving ahead, I mean (which I’m not sure about at this stage).
Downturn
It’s Friday afternoon — day #3 of the Cannes Film Festival — and I’ve decided to file from the American Pavilion because the wi-fi hardly ever crashes here (unlike the flaky Wi-Fi Cafe inside the Grand Palais).
And I’ve seen three high-profile features since running my semi-rave of Woody Allen’s Match Point on Thursday, which took me hours to get right. I haven’t been to a single party or gone out to dinner or kicked back at all.
Looking west from beach adjacent to American Pavilion — Friday, 5.13.05, 1:45 pm.
And I’m having a much better time sitting in this crowded and clattery beachside cafe and trying to write something intelligent about Gus Van Sant’s Last Days, Atom Egoyan’s Where The Truth Lies and Shane Black’s Kiss Kiss Bang Bang than I did watching these films.
That’s because they suffer from the same problem. All three are very well made with a solid grasp about what kind of movie experience they are and how to deliver their particular stuff, but they’re all about stories and characters you don’t care very much about. Nice chops, but the emotional content is zilch.
Last Days is the most respectable because it’s the least formulaic and the most out-there. Unlike the other two, it feels like it was made in the 21st Century. Ten or fifty years from now people will watch it and say, “Weird movie…what was that? But you know something? It’s got something.”
Where the Truth Lies is another one of those investigation procedurals about a pain-in-the-ass journalist (Allison Lohman, last in Matchstick Men) digging up the ugly facts about a long-buried crime — in this instance, the death of a seemingly innocent young woman.
Kevin Bacon, Rachel Blanchard, Colin Firth in one of the booty scenes in Where the Truth Lies.
The apparent guilty parties, one is led to presume throughout the film, are a couple of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis-styled comics named Lanny Morris (Kevin Bacon) and Vince Collins (Colin Firth), who were hot in the 1950s. That is, before the woman died and their act broke up. Both had airtight alibis and were never charged with anything but Lohman is sure something happened, etc.
We all know how these things go. Tangy dialogue, snappy performances, lots of period flavor, gathering clues, some red herrings…and it all comes out in the wash. In the final moments, I mean. And when it does, it’s a big “eh.”
Actually, it’s kind of a hoot because it uses one of the biggest four-word cliches associated with the whodunit genre. (If anyone wants to know what these words are, ask and I’ll answer back.)
Bacon and Firth are quite good in the `50s portions, partly because they’ve taken the time to work out a convincing — i.e., fairly funny — stage act. They’ve really got that Martin-and-Lewis patter and energy down cold. It would have been more engaging if Egoyan, whose script is based on a novel of the same name by Rupert Holmes, had just made something about the wild and woolly adventures (booze, broads, relationships with gangsters, etc.) of these two during their peak years.
Robert Downey and Val Kilmer in Shane Black’s Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang
I didn’t buy Lohman as a journalist/novelist. She talks the talk but she never seems like anything other than a pint-sized actress (she’s about five feet tall…I know because I stood next to her at a screening last year) playing a role. She convinced me like Patricia Arquette convinced me she was a doctor in Beyond Rangoon.
On top of which Lohman’s character has a night of hot sex with Morris and is manipulated into having lesbian sex by Collins after she pops a couple of Quaalude-like pills. Pulitzer-level stuff.
Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang is Shane Black doing the same-old same-old, only this time he’s directing on top of writing. It’s fast and funny and cynically entertaining in a what-else-is-new? vein. I didn’t hate it, I half-liked it, but I wasn’t floored. Everyone’s been saying the same thing since this morning’s screening — “It’s all right,” “pretty good,” etc.
It has lots of clever dialogue and smart-assed attitude and several hairpin turns, and a pair of high-energy performances from Robert Downey and Val Kilmer (playing, respectively, a not-very-bright thief pretending to be an actor and a wily gay private detective), and what felt to me like a breakout performance from Michelle Monaghan (next in Mr. and Mrs. Smith and Syriana ).
Michael Pitt during the Last Days press conference, as rendered on a monitor outside the press conference room inside the Grand Palais — Friday, 5.13.05, 12:45 pm
Last Days is a fictional account of the last hours in the life of Kurt Cobain, the Nirvana pop star who took himself out with a shotgun blast in ’94.
That’s right…hours, not days. The use of “days” in a title implies at least three 24-hour cycles, if you ask me, and it didn’t seem to me as if what happens in the film takes place over more than two days. It could be occurring in a single day…not that this matters very much.
It stars Michael Pitt (The Dreamers) as a Cobain-like figure called Blake, and for what it’s worth Pitt is very heavily into his character’s pain. He convinced me he’s really going through the same crap that Cobain was reportedly caught up in just before the end.
Like Van Sant’s Gerry and Elephant, Days is the last part of a trilogy (or so I’ve read) that uses a heavily deconstructed narrative. That’s a high-falutin’ way of saying there’s nothing routinely composed about it. There’s no scripted dialogue or story tension or close-ups or multi-angled editing. You know…none of that phony, tricked-up stuff.
Remember those long unbroken shots of kids walking through school hallways in Elephant? Same deal here, except this time the subjects are spaced-out, inarticulate heroin users hanging out inside an unheated home and doing stoned musician-type stuff…talking about music, cooking up macaroni-and-cheese in the grungy kitchen, having sex, listening to the Velvet Underground in their living room, etc.
It’s mostly about Blake, of course, who plays a tune at one point and is shown taking an overnight hike through the woods early on. Mostly, however, he avoids the phone and runs away whenever someone knocks on a door and spends a lot of time sitting around like a zombie and nodding out.
Cobain had a heroin problem near the end of his life and Blake is obviously using big-time in the film, but Van Sant chooses not to show him hitting up. A journalist friend is telling me there’s a brief view of track marks on Blake’s arm, but I missed this if it’s there. I think it’s dishonest not to show Blake doing the deed. It’s a little like making a film about a man dying of cancer in a hospital but not showing any scenes with doctors or nurses or chemotherapy.
Remember that rumor about Keanu Reeves and River Phoenix getting into heroin when they acted in Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho, and Reeves coping with a lingering usage problem when he was acting in Francis Coppola’s Dracula? I don’t know anything at all, but an agent friend who claimed to be in a position to know told me it wasn’t a rumor. Or at least, not entirely.
The most alive scene in Last Days happens when one of Blake’s bandmates plays the Velvet Underground’s “Venus in Furs,” from their 1967 banana album. You know…that plodding, screechy, strangely hypnotic cut in which Lou Reed sings “I am tired, I am weary, I could sleep for a thousand years”? And uses the word “severin” over and over? (I never knew what that word meant.)
Looking east from beach adjacent to American Pavilion — Friday, 5.13.05, 1:48 pm.
What I mean is that I was hugely grateful when this cut was played because something, at last, was happening of a focused nature.
If you ask me that banana album, which also has the famous Reed song “Heroin,” is filled with junkie music. Likewise, Last Days really gets the heroin-user mentality. (It’ll probably be a big hit with addicts when it comes out on DVD.) I knew some guys who were into smack when I was in my early 20s, and the way they sat around and talked and basically did very little…that’s this movie, all right.
Random Shots
Saturday, 5.14.05, 10:20 am.
Sunday, 5.14.05, 10:05 am.
It rained for an hour or so on Saturday, sometime between noon and 1 pm. The air felt much cooler right after and a strong breeze was coming off the bay as I described this from my American Pavilion table. I missed the pleasure of watching the downpour due to being at a screening of Brent Hamer’s Factotum, a bittersweet lower-depths comedy-drama based on a Charles Bukowski novel. Following in the footsteps on Ben Gazzara and Mickey Rourke, Matt Dillon gives one of the most confident and centered performances of his career as the famously besotted writer-poet. I snapped this shot of the rear Palais area on 5.14 at 1:20 pm, right after the screening and before plugging in and setting up.
Sunday, 5.15.05, 10:05 am.
Sunday, 5.14.05, 3:20 pm.
TV Antennas
“I’m a Brit and a big fan of your site, and I just thought I’d let you know that despite your doubts about Londoners using some rooftop TV antennas in Woody Allen’s Match Point, modern-day Londoners do indeed still use them. Although satellite and cable TV are big business now, a lot of people still have only five terrestrial channels (because, really, how many crap reality shows do you need?).
“So Woody’s got that right, even if he’s got all the actors speaking like they’ve got sticks up their arses. (I’m guessing from the cast list that he hasn’t quite played up London’s multiculturalism either, has he?)” — Richard Eaton
Match and Set
I’m going to crawl out on a bit of a creaky limb and just say it: Woody Allen’s Match Point is his darkest and strongest film — certainly his most moralistically bitter and ironic — since 1989’s Crimes and Misdemeanors.
I’m not saying it’s as good as Crimes and Misdemeanors, but this mixed-bag drama — somewhat stiff and artificial here and there, and at the same time scalpel-like in its social observations — deals the same kind of cards and has its footing in more or less the same philosophical realm, and it has a finale that absolutely kills.
Match Point costar Emily Mortimer, writer-director Woody Allen, and costar Scarlett Johansson at this morning’s press conference inside the Grand Palais — Thursday, 5.12.05, 11:05 am.
I’m speaking of one the neatest twist endings I’ve ever seen in a film involving a murder and police inquiries and all that. It’s so clever and surprising that several people in the audience were clapping. I spoke to Roger Ebert about this in the press conference room right after the screening and he said Cannes audiences often clap for this and that, so maybe this isn’t a big deal. But it got me, I can tell you.
What’s special about it is that the nature of the twist ties in with what Match Point is basically saying, which is that life has no moral discipline or scheme, and that much of what happens to us is about sheer dumb luck.
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Set in present-day England (mostly London) and funded by BBC Films, Match Point is a jaded moral tale by way of A Place in the Sun and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment.”
It’s about a young teacher of tennis skills (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) who relationships his way into an upper-crust English family by way of one of his male students, a cheerful smoothie named Tom Hewett (Matthew Goode). He is soon romancing and then marrying Tom’s sister Chloe (Emily Mortimer), but almost-as-quickly becomes involved with Tom’s fianc√É∆í√Ǭ©, a struggling American actress named Nola Rice (Scarlett Johansson).
The story essentially turns on the matter of Nola becoming pregnant and insisting that Rhys-Meyer’s character, who’s called Chris Wilton, leave his wife for her, and how Chris deals with the pressure of this.
Mortimer, Allen, Johansson and Jonathan Rhys-Meyers facing the cameras before the start of this morning’s press conference — Thursday, 5.12.05, 11:02 am.
Rhys-Meyers handles his part skillfully and with exactly the right balance between terrible, gut-wrenching guilt and the suggestion of a sociopathic undercurrent. But it’s Johansson, far and away, who gives the finest performance. She seems in possession of a fierce, almost Brando-esque naturalism here. She grabs Allen’s dialogue by the shirt collar and slaps it around.
Why a creaky limb? Because Match Point plays a bit awkwardly from time to time. The dialogue feels a bit pat and coy and even a touch antiquated (are there any present-day Londoners who rely on rooftop TV antennas for their tellies?), and certain aspects of the plot feel contrived.
It’s not a totally artificial piece, but it’s certainly mannered and tidied up. It doesn’t feel taken from life as much as concocted and then imposed.
I don’t know how much of an “uh-oh” this will turn out to be. Maybe it won’t be one. Ebert said he feels it’s Allen’s best film in years. A Los Angeles-based journalist friend, however, just told me a little while ago she didn’t care for it at all.
There’s no question that Allen’s writing isn’t as sharp as he used to be, and that his films since the mid ’90s have been feeling more and more mannered and sealed-off and…oh, let’s just say it and be done with it. The term is old-fogeyish.
Journalist pour into the Grand Palais this morning prior to this morning’s screening of Match Point — Thursday,5.12.05, 8:05 am.
It’s become tiresome to me, to name one example, that Allen’s stories and characters are almost always planted in a world of affluence and cultivation and luxurious distractions.
It wasn’t always this way. The worlds of Annie Hall and Manhattan are Allen-esque, but they also reflect to some extent the pulse and character of urban life as it was in the late ’70s. By the same token, it’s pretty hard to argue that Match Point, Melinda and Melinda and Anything Else are any kind of representations of life as it is lived and grappled with by GenX and GenY types in the 21st Century.
To be perfectly frank, Allen’s fatigued manner at the press conference (due to jet lag, I presume), his occasionally meandering reactions to questions and his being so hard of hearing that he asked moderator Heni Behar to repeat each question to him….all this suggested he’s not the on-top-of-it guy he used to be.
On the other hand, he got a huge laugh when he pretended not to know who Michael Bay was. His exact line was “Michael who?”
I asked him to riff about similarities between Match Point and Crimes and Misdemeanors, and he said he didn’t see them as similar at all. “But I may not be right,” he added, “and what you are seeing, and what others may be seeing, may be valid.”
Photographers in front of the dais before the start of this morning’s Match Point press conference.
I loved Allen’s reason for making a new movie each year. He said making a new film (a process that takes a full year, all in) is a magnificent distraction that keeps him from lethargy and feeling depressed and other dark tendencies, which would swallow him up, he believes, if he didn’t have this to distract him.
I’ve said this over and over, but generally speaking a Woody Allen film with some problems here and there is usually much better than a typical Hollywood thing. And Match Point makes a very sharp and coordinated philosophical point, and it ties it all together with great cleverness at the finish, so…
The odd thing is that it doesn’t have a U.S. distributor….yet. The IMDB says the foreign openings will happen in the fall.
Kate Winslet was originally cast in Johansson’s role, but she bailed for some undisclosed reason. Allen disclosed that he’ll be shooting another film in England this summer — a comedy — and that Johansson will again be starring. Allen will also play a role in it, he said.
Cote d’Azurred
Here we are again, Cannes-ing around and dropping pounds from all the walking up and down the Croisette with my black computer bag around my shoulder and saying “hey” to all the (mostly) smiling journalists and publicists who say “hey!” or “hello, Jeffrey!”…the usual traipsing-around bon ami stuff.
The festival’s lineup looks pretty good this year. I don’t even know where to begin, but there’s James Marsh’s The King, David Cronenberg’s The History of Violence, Johnnie To’s Election, Woody Allen’s Match Point , Lars von Trier’sManderlay, Martha Fiennes’ Chromophobia and Carlos Reygadas’ Battle in Heaven.
Facing le plage and all that, sometime in the late afternoon on Tuesday, 5.10.05.
Plus Jim Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers, a special screening of Adam Curtis’ The Power of Nightmares, Wim Wenders’ Don’t Come Knocking , Gus Van Sant’s Last Days, Atom Egoyan’s Where the Truth Lies…and I’m only scratching the surface here. Plus whatever discoveries happen to pop up.
I’m hearing intriguing things about Shane Black’s Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, which press-screens on Friday at 1 pm. I’ll probably post a review a few hours later…that is, unless the wait for a computer in the press room is impossible, and/or if the Wi-Fi in the wireless cafe isn’t screwing up again.
KKBB stars Robert Downey and Val Kilmer, and is said to be about the intrigues of a thief on the run auditioning for a part in a detective film.
Black’s hard-hitting action screenplays (Lethal Weapon, The Long Kiss Goodnight) had him on top in the late ’80s to mid ’90s, but then he seemed to go into an eclipse. No matter — everyone loves a comeback.
The first significant thing I did after arriving at the Cannes Film Festival was to blow off Lemming, the opening-night film by Dominik Moll. (The press screening, I mean, which showed this morning at 10:30.)
Not very thorough or engaging of me, obviously, but I had the usual logistical crap to contend with (behind on today’s column, wi-fi connection problems in the press room) and I don’t trust opening-night films anyway. They always seem to be a bit off and under-nourished in some way.
This was my half-assed rationale, in any event. For what it’s worth, I was assured by a Canadian journalist who sat down near me in the press room after the film broke that missing it wasn’t a tragedy.
I felt badly anyway because it meant missing Charlotte Rampling as one of the leads, and because I was moderately intrigued with Moll’s last film ( With a Friend Like Harry , a.k.a., Harry Is Here to Help), a dry, perverse thriller about a manipulative creep who throws a married couple’s life into chaos.
I might have gone anyway if it hadn’t been for the official program describing it as being about “the bursting of irrationality into a hitherto orderly life.”
Toronto critic Bruce Kirkland (far left), Sperling Reich and two guys whose names I’ve forgotten (plus some bearded guy I’ve never met…and I don’t want to) at La Pizza, a very nifty restaurant near the harbor — Tuesday, 5.10.05, 10:35 pm.
And if that damn wi-fi hadn’t given me so much trouble. One of the tech guys said there were too many computers using it and the system couldn’t handle it. They made a hurried call early this afternoon for an upgrade.
Apparently the 20th Century Fox people are throwing some kind of floating bash late Saturday night for Star Wars: Episode 3 — Revenge of the Sith, which will screen at the Grand Palais that night.
If so, that’s (probably) one event I won’t be going to, given my recent postings about this last and final episode. I guess I can always try and wangle an invite regardless.
Tomorrow morning’s big screening is Allen’s Match Point. It’s a tragedy, and Allen’s first film shot on foreign shores (i.e., England). It stars Scarlet Johansson, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, Emily Mortimer, Brian Cox and Penelope Wilton.
Set among the upper-class (Woody never does down and dirty), it’s “about a young man’s rise in society and the terrible consequences of his ambition,” the program says. “The protagonist is torn between two women and finding no way out, resorts to extreme action.”
It’s 8 pm — time to speed-walk down to the press room again and have another go at throwing this thing together. If those wi-fi gremlins act up again…
Bitchery
I saw Monster-in-Law for the second time last week (in Manhattan, at a large theatre near Lincoln Center) because I wanted to see it with a crowd.
I knew it wasn’t all that laugh-out-loud funny; all it is, at most, is amusing. But it scored with the New Yorkers. The room wasn’t rocking exactly, but I didn’t get an after-vibe that anyone felt burned, and there were a fair number of journos there.
I’m saying this because there seems to be a disconnect between front-line critics and average Joe’s, based on some of the pans I’ve read so far. Maybe I’m getting soft but I gave it a pass. It’s aimed at women and relatively square ones at that, but it’s spritzy and determined and reasonably well arranged, like a nice vase of flowers.
To say I wasn’t doubled over in pain sounds like a knock, but guys like me aren’t supposed to get high off films like this.
It has Jane Fonda, at least, and it’s nice to say that after a 14-year absence (her last role was in 1991’s Stanley and Iris) she hasn’t lost any of that verve and pizazz. She’s a gusto machine in this thing, and her comic timing and willingness to not only act but, at times, look totally unhinged gives Monster-in-Law the kind of crazy energy that farces need to stay afloat.
I know, I know…afloat isn’t the same thing as tearing across the bay with an outboard motor.
Why isn’t it better? It’s not real. It never quite touches the bottom of the pool. It’s all about bitchery and cat-fighting and smoldering rage, and a lot of half-baked characters banging into each other and doing and saying things that I wouldn’t dream of saying or doing if I were them. I called it spritzy but a better description is high-strung, and that can feel tiresome after a while. In all candor, I didn’t believe any part of it…not really.
What’s good about Monster-in-Law then (besides Fonda’s performance)?
The what-the-hell attitude. It doesn’t care that it’s second-tier. It plows ahead regardless and scores in a spirited way from time to time, and never quite deflates. And then it ends with a great Stevie Wonder song, “For Once In My Life,” which doesn’t precisely fit or feed off what’s happened in the film, but it put me in a good mood and what’s the difference anyway?
Fonda is Viola Fields, a rich, high-powered TV talk-show host who’s just been canned for being too old (her producers are after a younger demographic), and is feeling semi-hysterical and off-balance.
Viola is the kind of driven personality who needs a big project or challenge in her life to feel whole, and so she decides, with nothing else on the horizon, to derail the engagement of her beloved twentysomething doctor son Kevin (Michael Vartan) to a sweet and considerate young woman (Jennifer Lopez) whom Fonda doesn’t feel is good enough for him because she works as a temp and a dog-walker and nightclub waitress.
That’s the whole film, basically — Fonda trying to screw things up for these two, and her assistant (Wanda Sykes) clucking and shaking her head but pretty much standing aside and taking the path of least resistance. And then Lopez fights back and gives Fonda a taste of her own maliciousness, and finally Fonda comes to her senses and backs off and things suddenly turn alpha and embracing.
I didn’t believe that a woman of Viola’s smarts and accomplishments would freak this heavily just because her son decides to marry beneath his station. Her neurosis feels like a slapstick construction. In any case, she wouldn’t be this blatant about it. She’s a professional politican, after all.
I didn’t buy anything about the doctor at all. It’s conceivable that a guy with a domineering mom might be attracted to a woman on the opposite end of the spectrum, but J.Lo `s character isn’t that much of a pushover. She’s a level-headed, stand-her-ground type.
Of course, young doctors rarely marry women who don’t have some kind of pedigree, but we’ll let that one slide. What I really couldn’t swallow was how Vartan keeps telling Lopez that his mom is stable and considerate and thinks Lopez is terrific, all indications to the contrary. He’s supposed to be exceptionally bright and mature, but the film keeps making him into one of the dumbest Dr. Kildare’s in history.
And that he would have been in a previous relationship with Fiona (Monet Mazur), a scheming, icy-hearted blonde and a totally empty glass…a non-character thrown in just to spoil things, and to make J. Lo look good.
Everyone has too much money in this thing. I hate movies in which everyone has everything they need and they never sweat a mortgage payment.
I didn’t believe J. Lo could afford the apartment she lives in — way too big and well decorated and nicely furnished for a struggling 20-something. Dr. Vartan is presumed to have a healthy income and all, but the king-sized, two-floor bungalow he lives in is far too pricey-looking. It’s the kind of thing a well-to-do guy in his 40s or a hip-hop mogul could afford, but not some guy only a few years out of medical school.
So go to Monster-in-Law if you’re looking for a nice layback deal that will irritate you if and when you give it any serious thought…so don’t.
Sith Stuff
“I’m a long-time reader of your column (since Mr. Showbiz days!) and a film critic (for a Montreal alt-weekly) myself, and an indie filmmaker. I read your piece on “Revenge of the Sith” yesterday and I wanted to share my reactions to it, as I felt very much the same way you did.
“What I basically told my friends was `don’t expect any miracles.’ Most of my pals — all in their late 20s or thereabouts and thus very much of the Star Wars generation — felt the way I did about the first two prequels, which is that they were complete pieces of shit, through and through…almost bafflingly bad.
“And yet…and yet we were all kinda sucked in by the Sith trailer, which, having seen the actual movie, I can say is probably the best piece of filmmaking to come out of the whole prequel fiasco.
“That’s one good trailer: light-saber battles, Wookies, lava, Darth Vader, that music. But the movie itself, while probably the best of the three (and what’s that saying?) suffers from basically the same problems as the other two. I found it impossible to invest myself at all in what was happening onscreen. I just don’t care about these characters.
“As the movie progressed and we got closer to the stuff I was invested in, at least once (Luke and Leia, Vader, all that stuff), I found myself slightly, very slightly more drawn in. But too little, too late. Which is what I’d say about Revenge of the Sith in its entirety, actually.
“I found myself a little sad and contemplative after the screening. I couldn’t help but thinking how much better the prequels would’ve been if Lucas had started the series with Anakin around the same age as Luke was in the first Star Wars, If Anakin’s character arc had mirrored Luke’s over the series — with the exception that Anakin makes the wrong choice at the crucial moment — think of how much more resonance the series would have had! The tragic parallels!
“Oh well, it’s all over now, and for the best, I suppose. Lucas has chosen to make the films feel trivial, not resonant, and that’s his choice. Incidentally–when I first saw the SW series I was just a kid, but I felt that Vader and the emperor were scary bad guys –real avatars of EVIL. In the prequels, they seem less like terrifying monsters and more like, well, dicks.
“Anyway, thanks for the fine article.” — Name withheld upon request.
“Thanks for the review on Sith. Yours is the last I’m reading until actually seeing the movie and I kinda figured you wouldn’t like it.
“Like you (and like everybody, really), I think The Empire Strikes Back was the be-all, end-all to this series and I think it is Lucas’ cold dissociation with human beings and real life that has caused the prequels to be closer to fetish objects than actual, you know, movies.
“And believe me, I buy his `galaxy far, far away’ hokum hook, line and sinker, but I totally appreciate and value your point of view. I have come to accept my own mental blocks (or maybe, mental deficiencies) for loving this series of movies. It’s hard not to be
enamoured with this stuff if you saw it when you were five years old. Ah, the power of nostalgia.
“Lucas may have left the building, but I still think he has it in him to make one great movie before he dies … he just needs to suck it up and hire an actual writer and maybe needs someone like Scott Rudin to push him around as a producer.” — Joey Santos
“Your review of Revenge of the Sith was one of the worst, most unprofessional reviews of a movie I’ve read in a long while.
“It’s obvious you have some sort of agenda because half the review you rake Lucas over the proverbial coals. You don’t really offer any critique of the movie other than the stock critiques that everyone likes to spout like mentioning the bad acting and over-reliance on CGI.
“It’s also obvious that I’m a fan of these and I can take a negative review but only one that actually critiques the film.
“Why even mention the Kevin Smith review? Do you have some lingering issues with your former employee or something? The showing was 40 minutes late and people got up when the credits started rolling? Who cares? What does that have to do with the movie?
“There was no buzz or `current’ in the room? Again, who cares?
“So congratulations — you’ve written a totally asinine negative review of Revenge of the Sith, and you’ve subverted pop culture with your superior film intellect. Unreal.” — Tom
Wells to Tom: Sorry, man, but I didn’t want to be too specific. I didn’t want to give anything away in any detail. I felt it was a little early to do that.
“Thanks so much for cutting through all the bullshit hype with your Star Wars: Episode III review. (I started to worry about you when you said how jazzed you were to be seeing it. All of the mainstream critics who’ve reviewed it have essentially been telling the fanboys what they’ve wanted to hear, that it’s the Star Wars movie they’ve been waiting for, blah blah blah.
“I never believed it for a second, and I’m not even as big a hater as you. I actually — gulp — liked Return of the Jedi (the most-watched movie of my childhood, without a doubt), and I even found things about Episode I to enjoy. But Episode II was the jumping-off point for me – a boring, turgid piece of crap that had me realizing that the prequel trilogy was an irrevocable failure.
“Sith could be the greatest thing ever to happen to Star Wars, and it still wouldn’t redeem the trilogy as a whole.
“So naturally, I’ve been rolling my eyes ever since I saw the trailers and heard people saying that this was going to be the one (when are people going to realize that trailers don’t indicate a film’s quality, only the editing skills of the marketing team?). I knew that once you’d finally seen the film, you’d be a voice of reason amidst the marketing crap. Thanks for keeping it real.” — Mark Van Hook, Boston, Mass.
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