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.
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.
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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.
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.
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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 con tend 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 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 th ings suddenly turn alpha and embracing.
I didn’t believe that a woman of Viola’s smarts and accomplishments would freak this he avily 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 dominee- ring 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 nostaligia.
“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.
All Over Now
If you felt at least somewhat satisfied or soothed by the last two dud Star Wars films…
That is, if rock-like dialogue, mummified performances, crazy-beehive CG action scenes and a general skewing to a twelve year-old mentality hasn’t presented too much of a problem, Star Wars: Episode 3 — Revenge of the Sith probably won’t feel like too much of a burn.
For this sixth and final Star Wars feature, franchise creator and originator George Lucas hasn’t come up with any fresh surges or inspirations.
Hayden Christensen, Natalie Portman in Star Wars: Episode 3, Revenge of the Sith.
Here he is taking his Last Big Shot, and he just can’t break through the restraints of his conservative instincts and modest writing-and-directing abilities.
For a lot of people out there, this will be good enough (among them my former boss Kevin Smith, who raved after seeing it last week) and it’s okay with me. You know…whatever.
The fact of what Revenge of the Sith is….the big finale of a six-part sci-fi adventure saga that began 28 years ago…delivering the Big Payoff in fulfilling a tale foretold in The Empire Strikes and Return of the Jedi…depicting at long last the beat-by-beat of Annakin Skywalker’s final descent into the fires of anger and ego, leading to his transformation into the malevolent Darth Vader…can’t help but bring a certain satisfaction.
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And it kind of does. Sort of. But oooh, man…the stuff you have to sit through. Roughly two hours and 15 minutes worth, not counting the end credits.
Which not that many people stayed for, by the way, at Thursday afternoon’s all-media screening at Manhattan’s Zeigfeld Theatre. (Which started 40 minutes late, by the way…incredible.) An awful lot of people got up and bolted as soon as the words “directed by George Lucas” hit the screen.
I wasn’t feeling much of a current in the room, frankly. There were a couple of woo-hoo! moments involving Yoda, and maybe one other. Every now and then an especially awful line was laughed at. The biggest hoot was in response to a line spoken at the very end by poor Jimmy Smits, about how he and his wife have always….whoops, forgot. No spoilers.
The immaculate CG delivers the usual eye-candy splendor, as usual, but c’mon…this is another woefully stiff, broomstick-up-the-butt sci-fi soap opera with the actors clearly suffering from having to mouth George Lucas’s hokey dialogue, and the only relief coming from the frantically busy visuals and the numerous action scenes.
These are more or less the same things that people were complaining about with The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones, right?
Sith is not a flat-out disappointment, but for anyone looking for that Big Uptick, for that sense of profound fulfillment and emotional finality with everything falling into place with and the meaning of it all….jeez, enough with the verbose pussyfooting. As the output of George Lucas goes, this is a somewhat grander, slightly more emotional, probably more necessary-to-see piece of shit.
The trades are already out with their reviews, and I’m presuming the dailies will run early-bird reviews (as they did with Phantom Menace and Clones), and David Poland went up last night with a reaction, so it seems fair to run something now as long as I don’t spoil.
Sith is critic-proof and certain to whup box-office ass, so what difference does it make what anyone says now or next week or the day before it opens (May 19th)?
The problem…the menace…is George Lucas, the big Star Wars Kahuna over the last 30 years who unfortunately insisted writing (with the help of polishers) and directing the three prequels.
It wasn’t his determination to make the Star Wars play like Saturday-matinee serials that messed things up, but his inability to make the dialogue (even with alleged ghost-writer Tom Stoppard doing polishes) feel the least bit alive or angular in any way, or direct his actors in a way that doesn’t feel like showroom furniture arrangement.
Not to mention Lucas’s catastrophic decision to cast Jake Lloyd and Hayden Christensen as the two Annakin Skywalkers.
I’m not even sure the visuals are all that great, really. For all the ambitious design and detail and organic-looking textures, it basically belongs to the video-game world. All the fervor and inspiration that comes from having lots and lots of money to spend on complicated digital effects is relentlessly on view.
Remember those creaky old action sequences in Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back when, say, three or four Empire star-fighters were chasing the Millenium Falcon here and there? Now we have scenes with hundreds of different vessels roaming around and blasting each other willy-nilly.
The idea seems to be that more is more. Over and over we’re shown this and that variation of a galactic traffic jam, and I don’t understand why Lucas and his ILM flunkies think that visual busy-ness and chaos in the skies is so cool.
Star Wars: Episode 3 — Revenge of the Sith is a prisoner- of-war movie. It’s about war (or, according to the narration crawl at the very beginning, “War!”) and the actors are prisoners in it. Jailed by George Lucas’s down-on-your-knees dreadful dialogue, and being well paid for their trouble.
Samuel L. Jackson has spoken in interviews about his character, Mace Windu, meeting his end in this film, so I don’t think this counts as a spoiler. I felt relief for the poor guy when he finally checked out. I thought to myself, “He’s free”…because he looked so miserable when alive.
There are two performances from Ian McDiarmid as Supreme Chancellor Palpatine — one very good, one excessive. He’s much better at being insinuating and diplomatic in the first half…before his character goes through a certain evolution and Lucas tells him to pull out the stops.
Natalie Portman, who seems to be suffering as much as Jackson, has a childbirth scene at the end. (C’mon…everyone knows she’s the mother of Luke and Leia.) I think it’s fair to call this scene the most unrealistic and unconvincing childbirth scene in cinema history.
There’s a scene in which a certain warrior gets his head cut off, but Lucas chickens out and doesn’t show the head rolling across the floor. I understand wanting a PG or PG-13 rating and all, but why write a beheading scene in the first place if you don’t intend to show it?
(On the other hand, Lucas was right not to show a scene in which a bunch of kids get light-sabered to death. This scene has been spoiled all over the place, by the way, so don’t yell at me.)
Just before the climactic battle between the Sith and the Jedi begins at the beginning of Act Three, there’s an order given to the Empire troops by a certain evildoer to commence “attack plan 66” (or something very close to that). I guess Lucas decided to leave off the third “6” because he didn’t want the allusion to seem too obvious.
Don’t get taken in by those clips and stills of a wookie army. Lucas has given Chewbacca the shaft in this film. He and his brethren are barely in it.
Some will be calling this the best of the prequels. Okay, maybe…but that’s not saying much.
There will be others calling this the most emotional of all six films. It is that, I suppose, but I didn’t feel all that much. And it’s not like I can’t feel anything from these films.
I don’t think the light-saber duels mean very much any more. They’re inventively staged here, but they’re just light-saber duels. They’ve burned themselves out.
Just because a franchise continues to sell tickets and merchandise doesn’t mean it’s not over. Just think…no more new Star Wars features from here on, and that’s probably for the best. It’s all going to TV next. Good move.
Stiff
“I think you can’t trust trailers any more. I think we’re all falling prey to the cutting, which can be very manipulative and often extremely false. You may remember that the Phantom Menace trailer made it look like it was on the level of the previous films, possibly even The Empire Strikes Back.
“I think Revenge of the Sith does look better than the last two pieces of shit Lucas put out but there is one warning sign that I picked up on: the dialogue scenes.
“Once again it looks boring and talky. And every line of dialogue is delivered with two people standing side by side. None of the dialogue is taking place during a real scene of any kind. Just two people standing around.
“This is exactly the horrible template Lucas used in the past two films. Some action scenes interspersed with a bunch of boring, lame after-school-special quality dialogue.
“Like you, I’m buying into the marketing and the hype but mostly the hope. I hope to God it doesn’t suck.” — Rich Elvers
Funny
Chicago Tribune writer Mark Caro ran the following interview piece about the link between Ben Affleck, Darth Vader and Revenge of the Sith in May 5. I’m rushing for a train so I can’t take the time to provide a link — I’ll put it in later today.
The article is called “Dark Lords: Anakin, Affleck”:
“For those who griped that the Star Wars movies have been too kiddie, here comes Star Wars: Episode III–Revenge of the Sith.
“The flick will be the first PG-13 movie of the series, and not only features Anakin Skywalker’s bloody mutilation, but also (SPOILER ALERT!) his taking a light saber to the junior Jedis in training. It happens off-camera, though.
“Chatting Wednesday at George Lucas’ scenic Skywalker Ranch north of San Francisco, where the movie was unveiled to journalists the previous night, producer Rick McCallum came up with an interesting analogy for Anakin’s actions.
“Q. Do you think some audiences are going to have a problem with Anakin mowing down a bunch of kids?
“A: He has to kill those kids because that’s the only way he can get that power to be able to eventually work with Palpatine [the dark lord] to figure out a way to save his wife.
“He does it for kind of the right reasons, but if you put it in perspective, I always think of it as like watching Ben Affleck and Matt [Damon]. They wrote this thing [Good Will Hunting], they have this background together, they grew up together, they’re best friends, and they’re two totally different human beings right now. One is laid back, cool, does his work, works as best as he can, tries to be a good actor. The other one has taken the Dark Side, the dark route. It’s just amazing.
“Q: Because Ben Affleck has embraced the whole celebrity aspect?
“A: Yeah, the power thing.
“Q: He hasn’t killed little kids, though.
“A: No, but, can we take this out of [real] Ben? Take the hypothetical Ben in three or four years…career down the slide…and he’s given a choice to be able to resurrect his career, which is probably the most important thing to him, the fame aspect of it. Would he do anything? Who knows?”
Rednecks
Crash (Lion’s Gate, 5.6) is worth your attention and respect. It’s one of those films that has the Big Picture on its mind. It isn’t preachy or assaultive (not to my mind anyway), but it damn sure swings for the fences.
Directed and co-written by Paul Haggis (who also adapted Million Dollar Baby), it’s a realistic, nicely sculpted, multi-character thing about racism. L.A. racism, to put a fine point on it, but folks in other regions will relate.
Larenz Tate, Chris “Ludacris” Bridges in Paul Haggis’s Crash.
It’s not a flip or cynical film, but mulling it over made me think of Randy Newman’s “Rednecks”. The chorus of this song and what Crash is saying fit together on a certain level.
Crash is one of those multi-character, criss-crossing fate movies that most of us associate with Robert Altman (Nashville, Short Cuts , Gosford Park) or Alan Rudolph (Choose Me, Welcome to L.A.). But it’s tighter and more disciplined that Altman’s usual stuff.
The closest comparison I can think of is Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia, and I hope I haven’t scared anyone off by saying that.
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Crash is also about rage and mistrust and bad tempers and fatigue, but it plays in a different key. The script, by Haggis and Bobby Moresco, is very intricate and well developed, and eventually (during the last third) it starts to feel like something really sharp and extra.
There are no weak or so-so performances in Crash, and it has some ace-level ones given by Don Cheadle, Thandie Newton, Terrence Howard, Ryan Phillipe (best thing he’s ever done), Larenz Tate, Chris “Ludacris” Bridges, Sandra Bullock and Matt Dillon.
Ryan Phillipe as a conflicted police offer…his career best so far
One of the things I really liked about Haggis and Moresco’s script is that no character is seen as just one color or tendency. People are misread and mistaken for people they’re not all through it, and they all go through these little epihanies.
Matt Dillon’s character, an L.A. patrol cop whose racist attitudes are so belligerent and sulfuric he feels like a throwback to the L.A. Confidential era, is the most offensive, but even he turns out to have traces of heroism and compassion.
Crash is broad-minded enough to even acknowledge that some racial attitudes are semi-justified, or at least understandable.
New Yorker critic David Denby said that Crash “is the first movie I know of to acknowledge not only that the intolerant are also human but, further, that something like white fear of black street crime, or black fear of white cops, isn’t always irrational.”
Here’s an interesting Geoff Pevere interview with Haggis that will bring you up to snuff on the genesis of it.
Thandie Newton, playing the wife of a successful Hollywood director (Terrence Howard) and grappling with rage and humiliation at the hands of a racist cop.
After you’ve seen a movie like Crash you know you’ve seen something. I’ve seen it twice now, and it got me thinking about who I really am, deep down, in terms of racial attitudes.
I’ve never thought of myself as a racist, but I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to being race-conscious. I’m merely saying that I notice stuff — traits, behavior, physical characteristics — that are specific to this or that racial-cultural crew. Is that so terrible? Talk to Paul Theroux about this.
Middle-aged white people from the Midwest, for example, not only look like a very culturally specific bunch but they behave and dress in a very specific oddball way. Their bodies are a bit softer and rounder, they have appalling taste in travel attire, and they always look slightly cowed.
It’s always a fascinating game for me in European airports to try and spot which travelers are French, English, American, German or Italian.
When you’re walking around the Dallas Ft. Worth airport there’s no missing the genetic differences between the natives (who come from Irish and Scottish ancestry) and the folks you’ll see in Los Angeles or San Francisco or Chicago.
And anyone can spot in a second the multi-ethnic stew (old-school Italian, Irish, African-American, Caribbean, Middle Eastern, Russian, Indian, etc.) that is New York City when you’re walking through JFK or La Guardia.
I’m not being completely honest. Between the lines of my airport observations, occasional racist thoughts — call them flashes or spasms — pop through from time to time. I’m ashamed to admit it, but it’s true.
Jeez, I’ve written myself into a box here. I’m just trying to be frank and I’m sounding like Rod Steiger in In The Heat of the Night.
Maybe if I go even deeper I can dig myself out. This is a totally true story that happened to a friend in late ’94. In fact, now that I think about it, it could have been worked into Crash.
It involves alcoholism and reckless behavior, but the guy is over this problem now and I know he’s proud of that.
The guy is coming back from a party and half in the bag. Not blind drunk but definitely impaired. He’s on Sunset near Crescent Heights, and the car in front of him stops dead and he bangs into the car’s rear bumper. Nothing heavy, but there’s been some minor damage and insurance cards need to be exchanged.
Matt Dillon.
Two African American women get out. He says “hey” in a relaxed way, and both parties agree to pull over to the side and sort things out, so the guy gets back in his car and then starts thinking, “Wait a minute.” He’s just been in another alcohol-related car accident (which the cops never heard about, luckily for him) and he doesn’t want to submit another report to the insurance company so soon after the last banger.
Being the mature, level-headed, shake-hands-with-reality type of dude he was at the time, the guy peels out and takes a sharp left and takes off down Sunset. I can lose these guys, he figures. But they peel right out and hit the gas and are right on his ass. He drives faster and faster…no change. He panics and starts to really break the traffic laws but he can’t shake them.
After about five minutes of this, he gives up and pulls over into an empty parking lot, and the women pull up next to him…freaked.
They’re hysterical with rage, outrage, fear and everything else. One of them pulls out her cell and calls the cops. The guy tells them he’s really sorry and doesn’t know why he gave into the idiotic impulse to run away and is trying to calm them down and talk things out, but the women are volcanoes and they want him nailed but good.
A cop car pulls up a few minutes later. The guy is cool with the fuzz, telling them he’s been a jerk and that he apologizes and wants to settle things, and the women are losing it — so angry and hysterical they’re close to crying, saying “he ran off!” and “you’ve got to arrest him!” and so on.
And guess what? The cops side with the guy. Because he’s calm and the woman are so over-the-top emotional and…
They make sure the women and the guy exchange phone numbers and whatnot, and then they tell the women to calm down and chill and they’ll take care of this guy. After the women are gone they tell my friend to lock his car and walk home because they can tell he’s had a few. And then one of them says, “Don’t ever say the L.A. police never cut anyone a break.”
This happened sometime around the O.J. Simpson trial — make of this what you will.
The guy is overwhelmed with affection for these two emissaries of the law. He can’t believe they let him walk. But they did because they didn’t like those two women. My friend rejoices at the racism behind this. He feels scared and shaken up, but strangely filled with hope. He loves L.A.!
We’re rednecks, we’re rednecks. We don’t know our ass from a hole in the ground. We’re rednecks, we’re rednecks. We’re keeping the niggahs down.
Surprise
I went to the House of Wax all-media on Monday night, more or less expecting to hate it. I thought I might get some material for a nice rip piece. But it’s not that bad for a throwaway slasher film. It’s reasonably decent — jolting, suspenseful, inventive.
The producer, Joel Silver, sometimes hires faceless MTV hotshots to direct his second-tier movies, and Jaume Collet-Serra, an MTV guy originally from Barcelona, clearly fits the bill, but he obviously knows what he’s doing and shows some real visual flair in the third act.
Collet-Serra could follow up on this and — who knows? — make himself into the next Antoine Fuqua.
It’s a lot wilder and bloodier than the 1953 House of Wax, a 3-D horror film with Vincent Price and Carolyn Jones. There are two significant links between them — i.e., the existence of a wax museum and a hard-core technique used to create life-like human sculptures.
House of Wax is a hodgepodge of every city slickers-visit-the-hinterlands shocker flick you’ve ever seen, from Psycho to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre to Deliverance to Last House on the Left, with a little taste of Brian DePalma’s Sisters.
Visually, Collet-Saura and Silver have really gone to town with the wax thing. The film is covered with the stuff…sprayed with it.
The guy who pops through is Chad Michael Murray (WB’s One Tree Hill). He plays the bad-ass brother of Elisha Cuthbert’s female lead — a guy who takes no lip and has aggression problems, etc. But it’s very satisfying when these anti-social impulses come into play against the villains of the piece, and you’re left thinking that it’s not so bad to have a bad-ass malcontent around when the going gets rough.
Wolf Creek, an Australian-made horror film I saw at last January’s Sundance Film Festival (and will apparently open later this year via Dimension) is still a better thing. Grittier, tastier, more original.
Chad Michael Murray, Elisha Cuthbert in House of Wax.
I also went to Wax because I wanted to enjoy Paris Hilton being killed. Isn’t that a pretty strong motivation all around? A Warner Bros. publicist was wearing one of those “See Paris Die” T-shirts at the door. And people in the audience did titter a bit when she got it. But not me.
I felt…could it be pity? Compassion? All I know is, she’s not that bad an actress — the word is inoffensive — and I don’t hate her any more. This sounds absurd, I realize, but her acting feels natural and unaffected. She doesn’t force it.
Theoretical question: if you throw a piece of sharp pipe at a person’s head (like a javelin or something), how likely is it that it will go right into their head and come out the other side? I’m not sure this would happen if you threw an arrow-shaped lead pipe at a really rotten, gutted pumpkin.
Complaint: Jared Padalecki, the guy who plays Cuthbert’s boyfriend, is way too big for her. He’s a foot and a half taller. Next to her he looks like a Wookie. [Note: Sorry for getting mis-identifying Padalecki earlier.]
Rising Intrigue
I am a Determined Detractor of George Lucas and the Star Wars prequels. I have said this over and over, but I am a hater because, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far way, I was a lover of The Empire Strikes Back, the best film in the series.
I feel Lucas has shamed the franchise over the last 22 years (since the release of Return of the Jedi) by not even trying to measure up to Empire.
And also because I hated Jake Lloyd in The Phantom Menace. And because those memories of Jar-Jar Binks will never go away. And because I despise Hayden Christensen’s Toronto accent and those awful vowel sounds. I remember an especially irritating delivery of a line (spoken to Natalie Portman) in Attack of the Clones: “I need haahllp!”
Hayden Christensen, Natalie Portman in Star Wars: Episode 3, Revenge of the Sith.
But I have to say (and I feel like a schmuck saying this because you can’t trust trailers) that the trailer or music video or whatever it is makes Star Wars: Episode 3, Revenge of the Sith (20th Century Fox, 5.19) look half decent.
I’m seeing Sith at Manhattan’s Ziegfeld on Thursday night. I have to admit that I’m feeling jazzed about this. Pretty much everyone is.
Sith is George’s last shot at restoring his reputation. If he fails with this final installment, his name as will be marginalized forever as a filmmaker who got it right with THX 1138, American Graffiti and Star Wars…and then went bad and corporate in his imaginings.
But if he succeeds…
Talk
There’s a commentary piece by Wendell Wittler in the current Newsweek listing the most memorable Star Wars moments.
His favorite Star Wars line is Harrison Ford’s “I know” to Carrie Fisher’s “I love you!” in Empire. Mine too.
My second favorite line is Ford saying to Fisher, “You like me because I’m a scoundrel.”
My third favorite line (and I realize this makes no sense at all, and I can’t even think up a good nonsensical reason right now to justify it right now) is also from The Empire Strikes Back and also spoken by Ford. It comes in the opening minutes. Han Solo is pissed at Chewbacca for letting go with one of his wookie laugh-growls at an inappropriate moment and he says…
“Laugh it up, fuzzball.” This is the dumbest thing I’ve ever copped to in this column, but I love this stupid-ass line.
I also love the sound of James Earl Jones’ electronically synthesized voice as he looks down at Solo’s carbon-frozen body and says, “Well, Kalrissian, did he survive?”
And like everyone else in the fanboy universe, I love the beautiful delivery that Jones gives to the immortal line, “No…I am your father.”
See what I mean? Empire lines, all.
Sez Who?
“When Attack of the Clones came out you posted what you thought were obvious spoilers, yet they were still spoilers. Can we have a spoiler warning this time, no matter how trivial, for the Last Lucas-directed Star Wars movie ever…please?
“Hayden’s Toronto accent doesn’t sound any better in the new trailer.
“Take this with a grain of salt, but my talent manager and an old buddy of mine from USC heard from some vp at FOX (my gut says it’s the same guy — my friend and manager don’t know each other) that the movie is terrible.
“The Fox guy also said that the people working on it couldn’t wait for it to be over.
“That said, neither friend buys this after seeing the new trailers.” — Name Withheld for Strategic Reasons
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