Memory Lane

April has barely begun and the media drumbeat over the year’s two big 9/11 films, both produced with the upcoming five-year anniversary in mind, is already pretty loud.
Press screenings for United 93 are beginning this week, stories attempting to gauge the public’s interest in seeing this and other 9/11 presentations are running (the Wall Street Journal and Newsweek ran theirs on 4.7 and 4.10, respectively), and we’ll be hearing more and more about Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center next month when a 20-minute reel from the 8.11 Paramount release is shown at the Cannes Film Festival.

Nicolas Cage as Sgt. John McLouglin in Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center (Paramount, 8.11)

The 9/11 anniversary isn’t for another five months, of course, but I’ve been thinking about another startling event that happened in Manhattan nearly five years ago — a panel discussion on Saturday, October 6, 2001, at Alice Tully Hall called “Making Movies That Matter: The Role of Film in the National Debate.”
I reported on this right after it happened and I’ve mentioned it since (most recently in a WIRED item around noon on Sunday, 4.9), so why dredge it up for the third or fourth time? Because what panelist Oliver Stone said that day is, to me, still bang -on-the-head thrilling, and I’ve been wondering what’s changed in the four and a half years since…if anything?
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It’s Sunday, it’s sunny outside, birds are chirping and I’m just going to run this piece again. (Most of it.) It’s a portrait of what’s been happening in this town for a long time, but the precision and candor in Stone’s rant still resonates.
Stone tried to describe the mindset and inclinations of corporate-run Hollywood as he saw it back then. Has the situation abated, remained the same, gotten worse or what? Read this through and think about it. I’m asking.
I’m repeating what I said in the WIRED item, but this sure was a long time ago, especially considering the apparent repositioning that has happened inside Stone himself, who was obviously more than a bit of a firebrand on 10.6.01 and now look at him, the director of a 9/11 pic about a couple of Port Authority guys who got buried under the fallen towers…a film that’s starting to sound, frankly, like it may be a head-in-the-sand emotional comfort blanket disguised as a rescue thriller.

Before the ’01 debate: Lumumba director Raoul Peck, essayist Bell Hicks, director Oliver Stone, New Line Cinema honcho Robert Shaye, political writer Christopher Hitchens, former Universal Pictures chairman Tom Pollock, indie producer Christine Vachon (Boys Don’t Cry, Storytelling), former Universal Pictuers chairman Tom Pollock (almost completely hidden), and HBO executive Colin Callender.

I’m not saying World Trade Center won’t be a well-crafted or emotionally affecting drama. (Alexander aside, Stone is still a top-notch filmmaker). And who knows? Maybe it will contain echos and undercurrents that will add dimension to what screenwriter Andrea Berloff believes it is (“a boy-down-a-well saga’). But read the following and tell me Stone hasn’t trimmed his sails just a tad.
“Say what you will about Oliver Stone’s political views, but he’s a master at whipping up a crowd,” I began. “This was plainly evident during a panel discussion he participated in last Saturday at New York’s Alice Tully Hall called ‘Making Movies That Matter: The Role of Film in the National Debate.’
“The same brio that has enlivened many of Stone’s politically driven films, including JFK, Born on the Fourth of July, Platoon, and Nixon, was in full force during the sometimes brawl-like, HBO-sponsored discussion.
“Stone’s chief nemesis during the discussion — which also included some volleys from from political writer Christopher Hitchens, former Universal Pictures chairman Tom Pollock, indie producer Christine Vachon (Boys Don’t Cry, Storytelling), Lumumba director Raoul Peck, and political essayist Bell Hooks — was New Line Cinema chairman and CEO Robert Shaye.
“It fell to Shaye to articulate the status-quo views of corporate Hollywood, which elicited not only the wrath of Oliver but occasional groans from the audience. Much of what Shaye said was fair and sensible, but it was no match for the sweep of Stone’s oratory, which occasionally vaulted past the concerns of the entertainment industry to include speculation on the whys and wherefores of the 9/11 disaster.

“The central issue was whether Hollywood’s increasing reluctance to finance films with a strong political undercurrent (particularly in the wake of the World Trade Center attack) was being caused by a corporate-driven aversion to anything that isn’t essentially banal or superficial, as Stone asserted, or whether the main impediment to the funding of risky and/or controversial films is ‘the tyranny of talent,’ as Shaye put it, referring to astronomical fees demanded by actors and certain high-profile directors.
“Stone launched into one of his hardest-hitting points by recalling the relatively modest financing that gave birth to Born on the Fourth of July, his Oscar-winning 1989 drama about Vietnam veteran Ron Kovic that starred Tom Cruise.
“‘We struggled to make it,’ said Stone. ‘We had fights. The picture cost $16 million, and then it went to $17 or $18 million, and we fought for that extra two million like crazy.
“‘But this was 1989 — and there’s been no significant inflation in the United States since then,’ he continued. ‘Why, in 2001, does a picture that was done very tightly in 1989…[would] that picture today cost $60 to $80 million? With the marketing costs added in, which are inflated, putting it into the $90s…advertising and television…we’re talking a $100 to $135 million event.
“‘This would no longer be a movie, but an event. And someone like Tom Pollock would say…’Born on the Fourth of July? I’m not going to make that for $130 million!’ Because [this kind of film] can’t work any more in a system that has gone bananas .’

Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall

“Stone was greeted by a passionate, sustained round of applause. Who doesn’t feel that films like Born on the Fourth of July, for which Stone won a Best Director Oscar and Cruise was nominated as Best Actor, are in woefully short supply these days?
“‘And this ties in to the Arab situation,’ Stone went on. ‘Why have we gone, in a non-inflationary era, to a [place] where our corporations have become huge over the last 10, 12 years? We’ve let them go. There’s been no trust-buster around. Teddy Roosevelt is long dead. And these media corporations have conglomerated themselves into six principal fiefdoms run by barons…they’re bigger than barons. They’re kings.’
“Stone was referring to Sumner Redstone who runs Viacom, which owns Paramount; Barry Meyer of Time-Warner, which owns Warner Bros. and New Line Cinema; Rupert Murdoch of Fox Newscorp., which runs 20th Century Fox; Mel Harris of Sony Pictures; Michael Eisner, the chairman/CEO of the Walt Disney Company; and Jean-Marie Messier of Vivendi, which owns Universal Pictures.”
[Note: Today’s media barons are Viacom’s Redstone, Newscorp’s Murdoch, Richard D. Parsons of Time-Warner, Sony Corp.’s chairman and CEO Howard Stringer, Disney CEO Bob Iger and Jeffrey R. Immelt, CEO of General Electric, which owns NBC Universal.]
“And these six companies decide,” said Stone. “Rupert Murdoch says ‘I would not make JFK,’ or Mike Eisner says ‘I would not do a film on Martin Luther King, Oliver, [because] there’s gonna be rioting at the gates of Disneyland’…you know, this is bullshit!”

“Gales of applause greeted this one, with some scattered yelps and cries of ‘right on!’
“‘These six people have control of the world and that’s what the new world order is,’ he explained. ‘Six men are deciding what you’re seeing in film, and they own all the small companies…it’s hard to find one that’s not owned by one of these huge companies buying new companies, so it’s a dilemma. There’s a control of culture, ideas, everything.
“Now, within reason, they let [filmmakers] do certain things, and that is far better obviously than, say, the Arabs where they don’t let you do anything, and I agree it’s relative. But we are in a dilemma. We have too much order.”
“‘And I think the revolt on September 11 was about order,’ Stone went on. “It was about fuck you, fuck your order…it was an eruption of rage about this. And is it time perhaps to reconsider the world order? Is it time to wonder why the banks have joined the movie companies and all the corporations, and where this is all going?”
“Hitchens, who writes for The Nation and Vanity Fair , bridled at the use of the term ‘revolt’ and said the September 11 massacre ‘was not a revolt. It was a state-supported mass murder using civilians as missiles. It was an attack on civil society and civilization.’ This drew vigorous applause, albeit slightly more subdued.
“Shaye said, ‘I disagree with Oliver about this. I think he’s talking about an era and the studio system of 30 years ago. I will tell you, and Tom Pollock will back me up on this, that this is a tyranny of talent right now, and I don’t know what Oliver gets for directing a film, but I know what a lot of other people get, and it’s way too much. I do know that the last guys to get paid, believe it or not, are the studios that put up the money, and…’

Robert Shaye (r.), co-chairman and co-CEO of New Line Cinema (pictured with Michael Lynne (l.)

“At this last remark, Stone shuddered and flopped back in his chair and looked up at the ceiling as if to say, ‘Did he just say that? I give up!’ Torrents of laughter. The hall was jumping.
“‘And if there’s a tyranny, it’s a tyranny of talent,’ Shaye concluded, drawing muted sneers and guffaws.
“Pollock, who was running Universal’s movie division when Born on the Fourth of July got made, said the go-ahead happened ‘because Oliver Stone was willing to make it for no money, and Tom Cruise was willing to make it for no money. The film was successful, they made a lot of money, and so did Universal, but it would not have been made had they not done that.
“‘Controversial films can still get made,’ said Pollock, ‘but films cost what they cost because most of the people who make them want to get paid as much as they can. They want control, but there is still that trade-off of money for control. We are in an oligarchy now where the large companies control what we see…yes, Rupert Murdoch has a political agenda, but by and large Rupert Murdoch is only interested in money.
“‘The problem with the six guys running the six companies is, they want to take no risks at all,’ he concluded. ‘They want movies that entertain only, if they can be marketed. There was little room before September 11 to make political movies inside the system. There’s less room now. It isn’t that it’s not going to happen. But it is going to be harder. And to that extent, Oliver is right.’
“Shaye said that New Line Cinema ‘started out in my apartment on 14th Street. We made our way in the world. We started out with Sympathy for the Devil. Talk about political…give me a break. And you know why it made money? Because the Rolling Stones were in it, not because Jean-Luc Godard had anything particularly profound to tell the world.’ Random hoots and snorts greeted this one.

“‘It’s a little disenchanting,’ Shaye continued. ‘The truth of the matter now is, right now, that with high-definition and video and stuff like that you can make a good movie for not very much money. The great thing about the entertainment business and the movie business is that when a movie’s good, you attract people. People talk about it, the whole word-of-mouth thing…the quality of a movie is a self-fulfilling mechanism.”
“Stone jumped back in. ‘Thirty years ago, Bob said before. That’s when he got started. It was all…it was another world. [But] nobody here has answered that question why, between ’89 and 2001, everything has become so uniform…what’s basically happened in the last 10 years is that the studios have bought television stations. And why?’
“Referring to the so-called ‘syn-fin’ legislation passed under the Clinton administration a couple of years ago that allowed studios to own more TV stations, Stone asked, ‘Why did that telecommunications bill get passed at midnight? It was basically a division of the world by a few media moguls and it was a giveaway and it was done at midnight and it’s a disgusting thing. To own TV stations is the basis upon which movie companies today have to exist. And that’s changed everything. There are only so many television stations. Each one has their big build-up and that’s their base of operation.
“‘And Bob [Shaye] knows it because he sold his little movie company to Warner Bros. for more money than I could ever dream of making,” Stone continued. He acknowledged that certain high-profile directors, such as himself, are well paid for helming big-studio films. But the majors these days “don’t need a top director, they feel. Just make the movie. Because for them it’s all about marketing and about subject. That’s what they think.
“‘So there’s no ‘left’ point of view. It’s not financially interesting for them to make a movie with a director who costs more money…they’d rather go with a marginal director. It’s all about product…movie product…and it’s all about this new world order.

“‘And the Arabs have a point. Whether it’s right or wrong, there’s an objection to the way the world is going. There’s a lot of hate and revolt in that state. It may continue and although the shoe may drop on the other foot the next time, the point is they’re objecting to something. And I say that we’re not dealing with that objection on this stage today. There was a breakdown in the ’90s, in the system, the world system, the world banking system…it’s the new world order, and it’s about order and control, but this control comes with a cost.
“‘One of the most banal ways for censorship to operate in America,’ Stone continued, ‘is to drive out thought by explosions of People magazines and celebrity culture and…our culture is focused on Sarah Jessica Parker and kind-of inane, superficial stuff…it just becomes the noise, the white noise of our society.”
“Turning to Pollock, Stone said, ‘I don’t want to pick on you, Tom, but you’re ignoring the banks, you’re ignoring television, you’re ignoring the size of this thing, and you’re saying this thing is okay because that’s the way of the world because capitalism will go that way.
“‘The so-called ways of capitalism are not inevitable,’ Stone exclaimed. ‘It’s changed historically. Teddy Roosevelt changed the direction of it. Franklin Roosevelt changed the direction of it. Everybody in Hollywood says, ‘Well, what can I do about it?” These six companies have taken over just like the oil companies, and it’s wrong, wrong, wrong because they’re subverting political will.'”

Ales & Stouts

Obsession

The last truly exceptional hunt-for-a-serial-killer movie was David Fincher’s Se7en. And the next one, I’m fairly convinced, is going to be Fincher’s Zodiac (Paramount, 11.10).
I’m basing this on a recent read of James Vanderbilt’s script, which runs 150-plus pages. This persuades me that what I heard last week is true: Zodiac is going to be a three-hour movie, or close to it.

Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo in David Fincher’s Zodiac (Paramount, 11.10)

Scripts never really tell you that much, but reading Zodiac planted an idea that Fincher is again pushing the thriller boundary. Not just in the tradition of Se7en but also Alan Parker’s Angel Heart, another chasing-a-monster film that ended with something pretty startling.
Zodiac is based on two best-sellers by Robert Graysmith, “Zodiac” and “Zodiac Unmasked: The Identity of America’s Most Elusive Serial Killer Revealed“, which are first-hand accounts about the hunt for the Zodiac killer who terrified the San Francisco area in 1968 and ’69.
The chief Zodiac hunters in Fincher’s film (as they were in actual life) are Gray- smith, a San Francisco Chronicle cartoonist at the time (Jake Gyllenhaal), and a blunt-spoken, never-say-die San Francisco detective named Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo).
Toschi is understood to have been the real-life model that Steve McQueen based his tough-nut San Francisco detective on in the 1968 Peter Yates film Bullitt.
And of course, the Zodiac killer was the model for Andy Robinson’s psycho killer in Dirty Harry , the 1971 Don Siegel-Clint Eastwood classic…right down to the Zodiac claim about wanting to kill a busload of school children.

Zodiac is partly about the thrill and fascination of the hunt (the scores of hints and clues that pile up are more and more fascinating as the story moves along), and partly about how the complex, seemingly never-ending nature of the case makes Graysmith and Toschi start to go a bit nuts.
Is there such a thing as being too determined to stop evil? At what point do you ease up and say, “I’ve done all I can.” Is it always essential to finish what you’ve started? Should never-say-die always be the motto, even at great personal cost?
Zodiac isn’t just about sleuthing. Deep down I think it’s a metaphor piece about obsessions wherever you find them, and how the never-quit theme applies to heavily-driven creative types (novelists, painters, architects, musicians) as much as cops or cartoonists or stamp collectors or baseball-card traders.
Zodiac and Se7en have at least a couple of things in common: both are heavily focused on the bottled-up emotions and personal frustrations of their two main protagonists, and both films end on a note in which the “crime doesn’t pay” motto doesn’t exactly ring out from the belltower.

Zodiac director David Fincher during filming; laughing Gyllenhaal in b.g.

Let’s just say it: these are two catch-the-bad-guy movies in which the good guys try like hell, but they can’t quite manage to be McQueen or Eastwood in the end.
Partly because the up-and-down life of a cop generally isn’t that heroic or simple. And because Fincher would probably have trouble staying awake if somebody forced him to direct a Bullitt or a Dirty Harry.
Fincher and screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker ended Se7en with a mind-blowing twist in which the killer won and the good guys lost, and in such a way that the final fate of the killer didn’t matter as much as the fact that his vision (which had a certain moral foundation) ended up being fulfilled.
The more I think about Se7en, the more certain I am that it was and is a truly brilliant cop thriller. Not just in the way the story was put together and paid off, but because it echoed a certain clouds-are-forming, it’s-all-starting-to-rot-from-within attitude…a kind of geiger-counter reading of the despair in the air in 1994 and ’95, when Se7en was made and released.

I attended a Writers Guild event last night that celebrated the 101 Greatest Screenplays ever written, and bless their hearts but the WGA voters were blind as bats for not including Se7en.
I’m not going to spill the Zodiac finale in any detail, but anyone who’s read even a little bit about the the hunt for the Zodiac killer knows the culprit was never charged or convicted, although his more ardent pursuers were convinced that he was a pudgy alcoholic and an ex-school teacher named Arthur Leigh Allen, who died in 1992.
The script uses a substitute name instead of Allen’s. It wouldn’t be that big of a deal to mention it, but I’m trying to go lightly here.
Graysmith is the best part Gyllenhaal has ever had, and I’m including Jack Twist in this equation. If he does it right he’ll generate a lot of heat for himself, and I can’t see how he wouldn’t.
Graysmith is a very strongly written guy with a lot of struggle and frustration inside, and the pressure on him just builds and builds. The coup de grace comes at the end when Graysmith delivers a spellbinding 12-page oratory that ties up all the loose ends. (I was reminded of Simon Oakland’s this-is-what-actually-happened speech at the end of Psycho.)

Downey, Gyllenhaal

Robert Downey, Jr. has several good scenes as a Chronicle reporter named Avery. It seems at first as if he’ll be a prominent costar along with Gyllenhaal and Ruffalo, but nope. Anthony Edwards, as Toschi’s partner, has a smaller role than Downey.
Dermot Mulroney, Chloe Sevigny, Ione Skye, Donal Logue and Brian Cox have supporting roles. The IMDB says Cox plays famed San Francisco attorney Melvin Belli, but my script doesn’t even have Belli in it.

Sidney Lumet‘s Find Me Guilty (Freestyle, 3.17) isn’t just about the rebirth of Lumet’s career (at age 82!) and that of his star, Vin Diesel. It’s also a kind of Damon Runyon-esque joyride — an ethnic-Italian, New York-attitude sociopath movie for those who wink at the bad guys and chuckle when they manage to maneuver their way around the law.

Maybe I’m jaded or I’ve just been Godfather-ed and Soprano-ed into submission, but I bought into most of it and felt pretty much delighted with the care that went into the making of it, and the final ambiguity of it. I was also a bit troubled by it. And yet fascinated.

Vin Diesel as Jackie DiNorscio in Sidney Lumet’s Find Me Guilty (Freestyle, 3.17)

Guilty is unquestionably a marvel of old-fashioned (i.e., ’80s-style) craftsmanship — Lumet’s superb direction, T.J. Mancini and Robert McCrea’s’s finely structured screenplay and skillfully pared-down dialogue, and Diesel’s inescapably charming, sincerely felt performance that puts him back on the road map. (Really — all those mixed memories of XXX and The Pacifier are out the window.)

Plus there’s Peter Dinklage and Annabella Sciorra’s superb acting. I genuinely feel that Dinklage, playing a shrewd mob defense attorney with a gift for persuasive oratory, is the first serious contender for Best Supporting Actor for the ’07 Oscar Awards (or at least the ’07 Indie Spirits). And Sciorra almost does here what Robin Wright Penn did last year in Nine Lives, and that’s really saying something.

But there’s some mucky-muck going on. Shot in late ’04, Find Me Guilty has had distribution troubles (it was shopped around and nobody bit) and is being sold the wrong way — the trailer tries to tell you it’s a jaunty mob-guy comedy, a kind of farce, and the music toward the end of the film tries to convey this also, and this feels like a sell-out to the moron trade.
Is everyone listening? Ignore the advertising. The advertising is dishonest.

It’s not without its amusements and gag lines from time to time, but Find Me Guilty is a fairly serious, rooted-in-reality court procedural about wise-guy morality, or the urban mythology about same.

It’s clearly Lumet’s best film since Q & A (1990), and before that Prince of the City (1981). It’s a tight, no-nonsense court drama that’s not about legal maneuvers or discovering evidence or doing right by the system and justice being served, but mob family values.

In a stuffed-manicotti way, Find Me Guilty is as much of a values-based entertain- ment as The Passion of the Christ, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, The Thing About My Folks and Madea’s Family Reunion. I’m serious.

There’s more time spent in a courtoom in this thing than in Lumet’s The Verdict, and for good reason: Find Me Guilty is about the longest-lasting federal criminal prosecution in history. From March ’87 to August ’88, 20 members of the New Jersey-based Lucchese crime family, each represented by his own lawyer, were brought to trial in Newark, New Jersey, on some 76 charges (dope smuggling, gambling, squeezing small businesses…the usual mob stuff).

The feds felt they had an air-tight case, but when the verdict came down…well, let’s not say. But I’ll tell you right now that some people are going to have a problem with this film because of the ending, and especially the tone of it.

Peter Dinklage

The Hollywood Reporter‘s Kirk Honeycutt has already voiced this reservation in his review from last month’s Berlin Film Festival. The community values espoused (or at least given a fair examination) by this film are, from a strictly law-abiding perspective, totally goombah and wholly corrupt. And yet what’s being said here is not without a certain resonance, a certain sincerity of feeling.

These values can be summed up by the words “don’t rat,” “don’t roll” and “family is everything.” I’m no goombah but I sympathize with these sentiments, so I guess that’s part of the territory.
I’m talking about the values of a group of bad guys (i.e., men who live outside the law and occasionally enforce their ethical standards by whacking each other) who ostensibly care for and someitmes “take care of” each other, and about one particular bad guy — Diesel’s Jackie DiNorscio — who stood up for certain things over the course of this trial …loyalty, friendship, togetherness…even if the reality of Italian crime ethics, going by everything I’ve heard, is that everyone rats out everyone else sooner or later and a lot of these guys are just full-out sociopaths, or are viewed this way by the majority. And yet Guilty isn’t an invented story.

This, for me, makes it absolutely fascinating because Lumet, Mancini, McCrea and Diesel are making a moral statement that they obviously have some kind of respect for, and in a serious way. Diesel does his courtroom buffoon routine for entertainment value at regular intervals, but otherwise Find Me Guilty is a fairly sober piece that asks you to grapple with who and what DiNorscio is, and what he’s really saying.

Sidney Lumet, Vin Diesel

The story points and much of the dialogue in Find Me Guilty are taken from court records and based on hard facts, so there’s obviously a kind of imbedded truth in what we’re seeing, but let’s face it — if you were to show this film to Tony Soprano’s crew they would eat it up like baked ziti.

But show this film to a group of straight-arrow law officials from outside of the New Jersey-New York corridor who haven’t seen other ethnically-correct mob movies, and some of them will undoubtedly say, “What the hell is this? Has Hollywood gone totally corrupt?” And yet it happened.

What’s really striking is that Find Me Guilty is pretty much the precise moral opposite of Lumet’s Prince of the City (1981), which is about the emotional agony that a corrupt cop puts himself through when he decides to tell the absolute truth and rat out his equally corrupt cop friends, and ends up despised and lonely and broken.

Find Me Guilty is about a wise guy who refuses to rat out his wise-guy friends, even when most of them shun him and treat him like a leper because of his court behavior, but who nonetheless holds to his own moral ethical course. I’m not going to spill the ending but this is not a movie that ends with the clanking of prison-cell doors a la Goodfellas.

Has there ever been a major-league filmmaker besides Lumet who has made two films about the same culture — the New York-area criminal underworld — with both (a) based on a completely true story about courts and prosecutors and defendants, (b) both grappling with almost the exact same moral-ethical issue, and yet (c) coming to almost the exact opposite conclusions about ratting out your friends?

There are no almost double features these days except at L.A.s Beverly Cinema and New York’s Cinema Village, but Find Me Guilty needs to be paired next year on a double bill with Prince of the City. And when that happens I’m going.

The more I think about this film, which at times feels like a close cousin of William Friedkin’s The Brinks Job, at other times like an earnestly intended moral fable, at at still other times like Prince of the City‘s sociopathic, wise-assed younger brother with a fuck-you-John-Law attitude….the more morally curious and unto-its-own- realm it seems.

I think this is why the distribution community passed — they don’t know what to make of it, and are a little afraid of how the average moviegoer (i.e., those over-30s who will be persuaded to give an old-fashioned Lumet film a shot in the first place) might react.

A dish of cheese ravioli

The hard truth is that Find Me Guilty will most likely tank on its first weekend, but it shouldn’t. It’s a quality thing all the way, it isn’t the least bit boring and is easily among the best of the year so far (alongside Why We Fight, Fateless, Totsi, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada and Neil Young: Heart of Gold).

There’s no denying that from a craft perspective Find Me Guilty is simply one of the Lumet’s best ever. Mancini and McCrea’s dialogue is sharp, honed, and perfectly seasoned. And his slightly fake-looking rug aside, Diesel is amazing. At times he seems to be just joshing around and more into charming the audience (along with the on-screen jury) that rendering a character, but it gradually seeps in that he’s really playing Jackie DiNorscio and capturing what made him tick and who he really was.

And the supporting actors…fuhgedaboutit. Dinklage (that very cool short guy from The Station Agent) delivers a pitch-perfect performance — an utterly believable incarnation of a fully-rounded hardball lawyer. Sciorra has only one scene with Diesel, in a tiny prison holding room, but the husband-and-wife vibe is dead-on with the old resentments and sexual current getting stronger and stronger — it’s a near-classic scene.

Also excellent are Ron Silver as the presiding judge, Alex Rocco as the viper-like head of the crime family being prosecuted, and Linus Roache as the steely-eyed, go-for-broke prosecutor.
There are fifteen or twenty other actors who are just as good — this film has been perfectly cast in the legendary Lumet-New York street guy tradition by Ellen Chenoweth and Susie Farris. Cheers also for the cinematography by Ron Fortunato, which is beautifully framed and lit all through.

Find Me Guilty is not as good or as interesting as Lumet’s two greatest New York dramas — Dog Day Afternoon and Serpico — because it feels a little too smug at times, a little too invested in trying to charm/amuse the audience with a yea-team finale (using swing music and that Louis Prima tune at the end really undercuts it…a Big Mistake), but it’s certainly in the same moral ballpark, delivers the same high-quality acting and has the same kind of precise and disciplined filmmaking chops that made Prince of the City a great New York drama.

I went in to last night’s screening expecting to see a movie with at least a few problems (given what I’ve heard about the distribution siutation), and I came out almost totally delighted.

Part of the satisfaction of this film is seeing that Lumet still has it together like he did 20 or 30 years ago. He’s been on the “over” list for the last ten years or so, but no longer.
I don’t think it’s a stretch to call Find Me Guilty one of the best films ever made by an 80-something director, which, in this light, puts it alongside John Huston’s Prizzi’s Honor and Robert Bresson’s L’Argent. And that’s good company.

Great Oscar Debates

Nobody disagrees with the notion that Oscar campaigning has become a lot like running for the White House, so why not accept this and stage a special annual series of Academy-sponsored debates at the Academy theatres in Beverly Hills and New York?
Not so much in the manner of the big-candidate debates that (usually) happen in a Presidential election year, but those sometimes stirring speeches that are given at the Republican and Democratic nominating conventions by party leaders, political allies and friends.

Well-known filmmakers, industry figures, esteemed film critics and Academy members could get up in front of a mike and explain why they believe this film or that nominee is especially deserving.
The speakers would offer impressions, career histories, political considerations… whatever. The same views that are routinely shared after screenings and at parties, only with more people listening and with a bit more sobriety all around.
The idea would be to cut through the mental-cobweb impressions, through the party chit-chat and the DVDs and the trade ads and the hate rants.
You can argue that there’s no such thing as a Fog of War element in the various Oscar campaigns and discussions, but I think there is. And it seems to me that specific, impassioned, thought-out reasons to vote for this person or that film would sharpen the focus.
Presidential debates are about candidates trying to tell it straight and cut through impressions created by TV ads and prejudices thrown at the voters. Why shouldn’t the same goal at least be attempted in the Oscar realm? The town obsesses over this darn thing for three or four months out of the year and millions are spent on campaigns, so why the hell not?

The Academy could stage the debates over a two- or three-day weekend at the Academy theatre right after the nominations are announced. It could be a weekend-long festival atmosphere type of thing — food, mingling, film clips, and discussion groups along with the various speakers.
Every nominated person or film would be examined and toasted in some detail, and nominees would be forbidden — only friends, colleagues and publicists could do the pitching. And no negative stuff.
Oscar arguments happen left and right online, of course, but there’s something about live dialogue that cuts through the crap. Every time I get into a friendly dust- up with friends about this or that Oscar contender, I come away with a clearer head.
The whispering campaigns (like the one mounted this year against Paradise Now, or the one that went around a few years back about John Nash, the protagonist- hero of A Beautiful Mind) would almost certainly make less of an impression if the “issues” could be fully aired in a live setting.

People don’t fill out their Academy ballots after thinking things through to the bottom like a Yale mathematician — Oscar favorites are usually emotional gut calls. But perspective and examination can’t hurt the process, and a weekend of Great Oscar Debates would shed light on the short films and the sound-editing nominees and other low-profile contenders.
Imagine Roger Ebert stepping up to the mike and delivering a sharp argument for Crash, or Robert Towne offering an eloquent pitch for Capote , or Annette Bening explaining why she was deeply moved by The Constant Gardener, or David Poland or Tony Angelotti going to bat for Munich…whomever.

Les Girls

A big promotional press event for Bill Condon’s Dreamgirls (DreamWorks, 12.22) happened Monday evening in downtown Los Angeles at the Orpheum theatre and in a big black tent behind it, with rain coming down all over like cats and dogs and everyone coping with the damp overcoats, soaked shoes and matted-down hair.
A ’60s-era musical based on the saga of the Supremes, Dreamgirls has Beyonce Knowles, Jamie Foxx, Eddie Murphy, Jennifer Hudson and Anika Noni Rose in the lead roles. Smells like marquee value, but the Broadway show the film is based upon had its big run in the early to mid ’80s, and so DreamWorks is hoping to prime the potential fan base well in advance of the Christmas ’06 release, hence Monday’s gathering and this official site with basic info, a trailer and behind-the- scenes footage.

The first part of Monday’s soiree happened in the tent. Condon, the director-writer, introduced some of his below-the-line creative team to what looked like a couple of hundred press folk assembled in front of a small stage. He then showed a very brief clip of Foxx and two other guys (projected at a too-wide, not-tall-enough aspect ratio) dancing to a number called “Steppin’ to the Bad Side.”
And then everyone was guided out of the tent, into the rain, across the alley and into the Orpheum and seated in the orchestra section. The film has been shooting in this old-time venue for the past few weeks, with another four or five weeks to go. Three or four cameras were preparing to shoot a song-and-dance scene. A couple of dozen crew members were milling around in the front of the stage area.
As soon as everyone got settled Knowles, Hudson and Rose walked out on stage in sparkly red dresses and began to perform “Step Into the Bad Side” again. The real Supremes wouldn’t have gotten close to a number like this in actuality, but it played appealingly on its own terms.
It ended, everyone applauded and Jamie Foxx came out and said a few words about the film, about the energy of it, about how Murphy (who couldn’t be bothered to show up for the event) was “actually excited” about being in the film, etc.
What I saw and heard felt cool. It seemed to provide a bit more in the way of honest feeling than what Chicago gave up, or so I thought as I was drying off and taking it in.

Producer Craig Zadan told USA Today that “neither Phantom of the Opera, Rent nor The Producers went far enough to turn a stage production into a cinematic experience.”
Rent and The Producers, he said, “were loyal to a fault to Broadway audiences.” With the 10-year-old Rent, “they all looked 35 and were playing 18.”
The trick to a successful transfer to the big screen, Meron says, “is to honor the roots but do the movie.”
Condon, who was Oscar-nominated for his Chicago screenplay, is saying that instead of telling the story through song, like the Broadway show did, he’s added straight dialogue. “It is a realistic medium,” he told USA Today. “And Dreamgirls is a very emotional, somewhat gritty story grounded in reality.”
Knowles is playing Deena Jones, the Diana Ross character. Jennifer Hudson is Effie White, the one who gets shafted as their singing group, the Dreams, gets into the tangle of growing stardom, and who winds up singing, “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going.” Anika Noni Rose is Lorrell Robinson. Foxx plays their manager, Curtis Taylor, Jr., and Murphy is superstar James “Thunder” Early, whom the Dreams initially do backup singing for.

After the Orpheum performance was over it was back to the tent for drinks and food and more schmoozing time. Beyonce, Jennifer and Anika strolled around and said hello to everyone, but not Foxx.
Condon was hanging and chatting to the end, and talking with me and Pete Hammond and David Poland and DreamWorks marketing exec Terry Press and some others about what surprises, if any, might happen at the Oscars on Sunday. I said I’m hoping for anything along these lines, no matter who I personally want to win, just to make things exciting.
It was still raining like a bitch when I left. It was coming down as if a movie crew had two or three rain machines going at the same time to make sure my character was as soaked as Treat Williams was in that chasing-down-the-poor-junkie scene in Sidney Lumet’s Prince of the City.

Fine Madnesses

Too much love and success can be a bad thing for movie directors. It can lead to recklessness and ruin. Well, not necessarily. I’m not saying Ang Lee is going to lose his discipline or nice-guyness when and if he wins the Best Director Oscar next Sunday, but there’s at least the threat of this.
Look at the hopelessly over-worshipped Peter Jackson, whose Lord of the Rings trilogy (Oscars, millions, obsequious studio execs) led to the mad-royalty decision to transform King Kong into a three-hour film with a sluggish, borderline deadly 70-minute opening.

Eric von Stroheim (1885 — 1957)

I continue to believe that James Cameron lost his mind (or his nerve, or his will to unscrew tubes and throw paint at the canvas) after the success of Titanic eight years ago. He appears to be on the brink of actually starting a film within the next few months, but the poor guy is still futzing around about which project to do first.
Quentin Tarantino was psychologically done in, I feel, by the huge success of Pulp Fiction in ’94-’95. He stopped hustling, became a party animal, succumbed to some manner of intimidation over the expectations everyone had for his next film, all of which led to the respectable but underwhelming Jackie Brown in ’97.
Michael Cimino surely went mad after the huge success of The Deer Hunter in 1978-79, and from this the gross indulgence that was Heaven’s Gate, his very next film, almost certainly arose.
“At a certain point in their careers — generally right after an enormous popular success — most great movie directors go mad on the potentialities of movies,” Pauline Kael observed in a review of Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1900 when it opened in the States in 1977.
“They leap over their previous work into a dimension beyond the well-crafted dramatic narrative; they make a huge, visionary epic in which they attempt to alter the perceptions of people around the world.”
Today’s directors can’t afford to be as indulgent as the industry allowed them to be in the auteurist playground of the ’70s, and so there’s a lot less flamboyance in the wake of big commercial successes and Oscar crownings.

Peter Jackson

But phenomenal success is still a kind of crippler, I think. It seems to nudge grounded or moderate directors in the direction of fanciful whimsy or big leaps, and if they’re half-mad to begin with they seem to lose it a bit more if they become convinced the world adores them absolutely.
The lesson seems to be that directors can be easily spoiled, like children of a certain age. Keep them on edge, wondering if they’re any good or not, and they’re fine. But beware the pitfalls of love, money, awards, long vacations and relentless kowtowings.
The adulation showered upon Steven Spielberg after Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind almost certainly led to the madhouse atmosphere of 1941 (which some oddball critics, I realize, feel is a work of genius-level choreography).
Orson Welles had a rough time with certain industry heavyweights as a result of making Citizen Kane, only one Oscar award came of it(Best Original Screenplay, which Welles shared with Herman Mankiewicz) and it didn’t make that much money. But he seemed to come away from that film with an arrogant, off-balance attitude that led to his leaving The Magnificent Amberson’s to be edited by RKO editors while he went to South America to shoot a documentary.

James Cameron

Billy Wilder never acted like an indulgent type, but something began to go slightly off in his work after the huge popular successes of Some Like It Hot in 1959 and The Apartment (which also won some Oscars, including Best Picture) in ’60-’61. He wasn’t “over” until Buddy Buddy in ’82, but something about his being a Man of Great Esteem and Accomplishment at the end of the Eisenhower administration didn’t agree with him.
Kael mentioned the madnesses of D.W. Griffith in the wake of Intolerance (1916) and Abel Gance after Napoleon, (1927), and she could have just as easily mentioned the notoriously egoistic behavior of director Eric von Stroheim in the mid 1920s, which led to the excesses of Queen Kelly and his wings being clipped soon after.
Which directors have succumbed to recklnessness (or given a good imitation of same) over the last ten years or so? Please send in names and stories and I’ll update this later tonight.

Losin’ It

I asked for responses yesterday to the “Fine Madnesses” piece, and Francis Coppola in his Apocalyose Now phase was mentioned most often by readers as an example of directorial indulgence. The big runners-up were William Friedkin when he made Sorcerer and the post-Bugsy Barry Levinson.
I disagree about Coppola and Friedkin. Apocalypse was just a brutally hard, financially arduous film to make. If Coppola went through a phase of mad indulgence (“leaping over previous work into a dimension beyond the well-crafted dramatic narrative,” as Pauline Kael once put it), it came with 1982’s One From the Heart. And I’m a huge fan of Sorcerer and see no madness in the way Friedkin shot and cut it.
Here’s a sampling of what came in…

“I’m one of the three people on the planet who liked Barry Levinson’s Toys, but I guess it’s an example of directorial indulgence after Levinson’s success with Bugsy. And of course, Peter Bogdanovich had three hits (The Last Picture Show, What’s Up, Doc?, and Paper Moon) and then three flops (Daisy Miller, At Long Last Love and Nickleodeon).” — Michael Schlesinger
“Steven Soderbergh seems pretty level-headed, but the 2002 combination of Solaris and Full Frontal following the critical praise of Erin Brockovich and Traffic on top of the commercial success of Ocean’s 11 showed some hubris. I don’t think he’s gone around the bend though. And no one can deny that the Wachowski brothers went a little haywire after the success of the first Matrix.” — Chris Lee
“The drops that really interest me are John Hughes and John Landis. Hughes and Landis were some of the first directors whose style and techniques I could easily identify when I was a movie-crazed teen in the 80s, so it was doubly disconcerting when they suddenly crapped out (Landis after The Twilight Zone) or just quit (Hughes).
“There’s also a big ‘personal’ film that bombs. Would a Diner fan who unknowingly watched Toys ever guess it was made by Barry Levinson?” — Neil Harvey
“I’d argue that Peter Jackson crossed the line not after finishing the Lord of the Rings trilogy, but when the first one went over so well. The Fellowship of the Ring is the one with the horse-pills of exposition, but it’s also the shortest and tightest of the series. When it was a huge hit a scored a rack of nominations the pressure was off. The flabby over-confidence of The Return of the King is almost as maddening as it is in King Kong.” — Joe Greenia

Sequel

Promotional item delivered to my home today (Friday, 2.24), sent by friends at Fox publicity

Spark of Goodness

A little over six months ago I wrote that Gavin Hood’s Tsotsi had become “the big stand-out at the end of the Toronto Film Festival.”

A few weeks later Tsotsi was picked up by Miramax and is playing in theatres starting today (2.24). And it seems safe to say now that it’s the most likely winner of the Best Foreign Language Oscar on March 5th…unless a sufficient number of Academy members take leave of their senses and vote for Joyeux Noel.

Gavin Hood, director of Tsotsi (Miramax, 2.24), at the Four Seasons hotel — Tuesday, 2.21, 4:20 pm.

Based on a book by South African playwright Athol Fugard and set in a funky Johannesburg shantytown, Tsotsi (pronounced “Sawt-see”) is about a merciless teenage thug (Presley Chweneyagae) who discovers a small spring of compassion in himself when he starts to care for an infant boy he discovers in the back seat of a car he’s stolen.

Tsotsi‘s basic achievement is that it sells the notion in a believably non-sappy way that sparks of kindness exist in even the worst of us.

I knew Tsotsi would probably connect with general audiences when it won the Toronto Film Festival People’s Choice award, which followed a similar win at the Edinburgh Film Festival a month or two earlier.

But I wasn’t certain until my good Toronto friend Leora Conway saw Tsotsi at a Toronto Film festival screening and “was beaming when she told me about it afterwards,” I wrote, “and said it made her cry at the end.”

Tsotsi may sound sentimental and manipulative, but it’s not. But neither is it sadistic or repellent in some flashy, gun-fetish way. It has a raw authenticity, but not in any kind of derivative City of God way, which speaks well for its director, Gavin Hood.

Tsotsi star Presley Chweneyagae (l.) and Hood outside Toronto’s Sutton Place hotel — Friday, 9.16.05, 8:55 am.

Tsotsi proves that suppressed emotions…the feelings that a blocked-up person would rather not feel but which won’t leave him alone…are always a stronger, more poignant proposition than a film delaing with feelings fully expressed.

Hood told me in Toronto that he’s always been “terrified” of sentimentality and “being mushy” in movies, and says that his mantra during shooting was that “there’s always got to be more going on within a character than what he lets out.”

He said he wanted to use formal compositions and a slower editing style than the one popularized by City of God “because I didn’t want to seem like I was saying ‘me too’…I didn’t want to come in second.”

Hood says he feels more of an affinity with the shooting style of director Walter Salles (The Motorcycle Diaries) and particularly Sales’ Central Station.

I had another sit-down with Hood two days ago (Tuesday, 2.21) at the Four Seasons hotel in Beverly Hills. Here’s a recording of most of it.

The Tsotsi gang

Tsotsi is one of those “it” films. You can feel the focus and the unique energy from the get-go…from Hood’s precise and well-organized direction and the elegant pho- tography to Chweneyagae’s mesmerizing performance as an ice-cold psychopath who now and then devolves into a terrified three-year-old.

It all comes together into something steady and profound. Which is why Hood will almost certainly be handed the prize on 3.5.

I’m thinking of a film about two men in love with each other, but one of them loving a bit less. Their lusts and longings are entirely about women and children are sired, but nothing approaches their feelings for each other. They’re constantly pried apart by social-political concerns and they never quite mesh, but the man who loves a bit more can never quit his feelings. He doesn’t know how, and he hurts badly as a result.

And then one of them is killed by a group of violent men who despise what their victim stands for, and finally the longish movie (lasting over two hours) ends with the survivor lamenting his dear friend’s passing and talking quietly to his ghost.

Peter O’Toole, Richard Burton in publicity still for Peter Glenville’s Becket

The men with unquenchable feelings for each other are played by movie stars in their prime, the movie is funded by a major studio, and come January it is honored with a slew of high-prestige Oscar nominations — Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, and so on. Everybody admires or at least respects it, and the reviews are almost 100% ecstatic.

The movie, of course, is Peter Glenville’s Becket, which came out just shy of 42 years ago. But the element of men in love with each other (in a not-quite-sexual way) was no less pronounced or emotionally intense than the love affair in Brokeback Mountain, except for Becket‘s lack of depicted physical intimacy.

And yet it’s a film in which the lead actors share a bed in the first act, with one of them confiding to the other a few pages earlier that “I can’t bear to think of you in pain.” They argue fiercely during a third-act scene about rejected feelings of love between them, and a disapproving female accuses one of having “an obsession” for the other that is “unhealthy and unnatural.”

In fact, it’s more than a little bit astounding that a movie as “gay” as Becket was released five years before the Stonewall riot and the beginning of the gay rights movement, and that it was made by the stodgy-at-the-time Paramount Pictures, and was performed by two of the era’s most respected actors (Peter O’Toole and Richard Burton), and was patronized by straightlaced audiences who had probably never considered the idea of emotional dignity between homosexual men.

In short, there are a lot of striking similarities between Becket and Brokeback Mountain. So many, in fact, that the stage has been pretty much set by James Schamus and Ang Lee’s western for Becket to enjoy a whole new level of interest on DVD.

But years after plans were first made by MPI Home Video to bring out a loaded Becket disc, complete with a making-of documentary and a commentary track by Peter O’Toole, the chances of it coming out any time soon seem…well, a bit up in the air.

MPI Home Video marketing executive Greg Newman says the DVD will be out “this year,” but his reluctance to speculate about whether he’s speaking of the spring, summer, fall or winter indicates that MPI’s plans are perhaps less than rock-solid. Newman’s vagueness suggests that the Becket DVD, whenever it finally peeks through, may strike when the iron is cold.

Unless, of course, it happens to be released at the same time that Brokeback Mountain comes out on DVD, which will probably be in the late spring or early summer.

I know that no video company would be forecasting an ’06 release of a major title in late January without having formulated some kind of ballpark or target release-date in their heads.
And I can’t imagine Peter O’Toole not having questions about the Becket DVD also, some two years and four months after taping his supplemental interview footage and voice-over commentary for MPI in London, in the fall of ’03.

Becket has been out of circulation for several years due to a rights-and-revenue issue and the family of Jean Anouilh, the French author of the original stage play of “Becket” that Glenville’s film was based upon. Plus the 40 year-old film elements had deteriorated. But a 35mm version was restored about three years ago by the Academy Film Archive, with support from the Film Foundation.

Around the same time (i.e., the summer/fall of ’03), MPI, which has owned the video rights for a long while, began making plans for a DVD release of the film. The revenue issue with the Anouilh family has finally been resolved, I was told by an MPI spokesperson on Monday, but there’s still a measure of uncertainty about anyone seeing a DVD of Becket with a firm date in mind.
I think it’s fair to say that the Illinois-based MPI Home Video is known for being a small-time, not-quite-in-the-hip-groove-of-things outfit, and it seems a shame that a film as good and valuable as Becket should be land-locked with a company of this calibre. Becket is clearly the kind of highly-valued classic that should be released by a toney video company like Criterion or Acorn Media.

I saw Becket on a big screen in the summer of ’04 and again at a UCLA class that I moderated last spring, and it holds up very nicely. Burton is masterful as Thomas Becket, but O’Toole’s performance as King Henry II is one of the most exciting ever seen in a mainstream movie. O’Toole takes your breath away half the time, and the other half he makes you grin with delight.

Nominated for 12 Oscars (but winning only one for Best Adapted Screenplay), Becket isn’t just a touching story about unrequited love but one that manages to dramatize in a recognizable way what it is to experience profound spiritual growth.

It’s a conventional costume drama in some respects, yes, but it’s one of the smartest and most engrossing features ever made in this vein. Directed by Glenville from a screenplay by Edward Anhalt (who adapted Jean Anouilh’s play), photographed by the great Geoffrey Unsworth and edited by Anne V. Coates, Becket feels slightly hemmed in by the conventions of prestige-level filmmaking as they existed in the mid ’60s, but the delivery and the talent levels are tip-top.
MPI has owned the film for several years but contributed nothing to the Academy’s restoration costs (about $125,000, give or take), which were covered by the Film Foundation. The restoration work was handled by Mike Pogorzelski, who provided the print of Becket that was shown at UCLA last March.

Newman told me almost two years ago that MPI got O’Toole to record a commentary track in London in the fall of ’03. The 71 year-old actor talked all through the 2 hour and 29 minute film, Newman said.

“We’re still doing quite a lot of the technical work for the DVD and everything else,” Newman told me in the summer of ’04, “and we’re going to have a hell of an extras package, and these releases take time. I hope that it will come out next year.”

Newman was referring to a 2005 release, which never happened.

“Remember, we’re coming right on the heels of this restoration thing,” Newman said. “It was only finished recently.” When he said this, the restored Becket had been screened in London seven months earlier.

The crux of the restoration was about the original stereo mix of Becket being digitally reconstituted. “That’s what the restoration was mainly about,” I was told in the summer of ’04.
“MPI never invested in the film,” says restoration specialist Robert Harris, who wanted to restore Becket a decade ago. “If the Academy hadn’t done it, those audio tracks would have been trashed. The Academy is an angel here.”

Harris told me that MPI “should pay the Academy back out of their first earnings, because without the Academy’s efforts they wouldn’t have a film to release.”

Nommie Nommie

A hearty yee-haw for the eight nominations that went to Brokeback Mountain this morning. This pretty much certifies that Ang Lee’s film has the Best Picture Oscar in the bag. Someone tell me how this won’t happen.

And a big college yell for Best Picture nominees Capote (as well as Best Actor contender Philip Seymour Hoffman, Best Director hopeful Bennett Miller and Best Adapted Screenplay nominee Dan Futterman), Paul Haggis and Bobby Moresco’s Crash, and George Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck.

The Best Picture nominees: Brokeback Mountain, Capote, Crash, Munich and Good Night, and Good Luck

And a confused head-shake over Munich taking the fifth Best Picture nomination.
I understand the reasoning, I think. Why shouldn’t a movie that appalled a significant portion of film cognoscenti the world over with that ludicrous cross-cutting between Eric Bana schtupping his on-screen wife and a reenactment of the 1972 shoot-out between Black September kidnappers and German police at Munich’s Furstenfeldbruck air base…a film such as this is surely a finer and more worthy achievement than The Constant Gardener, Walk the Line or Match Point.

Three and a half hours ago (around 7 am) I received an e-mail that said “Steven Spielberg says fuck you,” and I guess I deserved that.

But let’s be clear: my comment to Newsday‘s Jon Anderson in late December was that Munich was “dead, dead…deader than dead” as a Best Picture winner. (And that’s still the case today, as everyone well knows.) I asked Anderson to please get this right because I knew that the Academy psychology might give up a Best Picture nomination, despite all the minuses.

Munich helmer Steven Spielberg wouldn’t have been nominated for Best Director without the ingrained Spielberg kowtow sensibility out there. No friggin’ way would Roger Donaldson have been nominated if he’d directed the same Munich now playing in theatres.

Avner (Eric Bana) and Munich-massacre-montage fuck partner watch initial tube coverage of 1972 Munich Olympic Games hostage standoff

But let’s ease up and acknowedge that NBC/Univeral publicists and, yes, Munich water-carrier David Poland managed to sell it for all it was worth…they and other Munich team members pulled it off against great odds. They helped to save Munich from total humiliation. Now go away and don’t come back until the DVD comes out.

The Oscar show ratings on March 5th will be fairly low because the viewing audience for the five Best Picture nominees isn’t that high (so far), but what could the academy have done? Nominate King Kong or Fun With Dick and Jane for Best Picture? It’s going to be a gnarly three or four weeks for ABC’s ad sales team.

A big hand to the Academy for giving George Lucas what-for by not nominating Revenge of the Sith for a special-effects award. It took them a while to stand up and grow a pair, but they finally delivered a referendum on the soullessness of the Star Wars prequels.

And another cheer for their refusal to nominate the thoroughly rancid Sin City in this category, although it should be once again acknowledged that the black-and- white photography in this otherwise pukey film was to-die-for.

Congratulations to the great Terrence Howard for nabbing a Best Actor nomination for his superb performance in Craig Brewer’s Hustle & Flow. It wasn’t that long ago when handicappers were saying he might not have the juice to go all the way (especially after he got re-categorized by the Golden Globes). A proud moment for a good man.

Mixed congratulations, at best, to North Country‘s Frances McDormand….the truly great Frances McDormand…for her Best Supporting Actress nomination. No self- respecting actor wants accolades for playing a blue-collar laborer dying from Lou Gehrig’s disease and saying “fuck you” out of a voice box.

McDormand was nominated because some not-very-hip Academy people decided to think sappy. It’s wrong, wrong, wrong that In Her Shoes costar Shirley MacLaine and The Family Stone‘s Diane Keaton were blown off in this category.

Down the list and firing at will…

It doesn’t seem right that both Walk the Line honcho James Mangold and The Constant Gardener helmer Fernando Meirelles weren’t included among the five Best Director nominees. I understand why History of Violence helmer David Cronenberg didn’t have the votes, but he’s still a world-class artist whose films will play to film lovers 100 years from now.

Best Supporting Actor nominee Jake Gyllenhaal, Best Actor nominee Heath Ledger

Walk the Line‘s Reese Witherspoon will win for Best Actress, but I wish her competition was stronger, and I’m lamenting again that Toni Collette didn’t get her due by receiving a Best Actress nom for In Her Shoes…a performance that was absolutely in the same league as Witherspoon’s, if not above and beyond.

Keira Knightley’s Best Actress nomination for her work in Pride & Prejudice is bizarre, I think. Weird. I saw that film again on an Academy screener earlier this month, and if she weren’t young and beautiful…aaahh, forget it.

Paul Giamatti will probably win the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his Cinderella Man trainer, but hooray for Crash costar Matt Dillon nabbing a nomination in this category. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer, harder-working guy…and for playing a cop with pretty ugly stuff inside.

And cheers to the great William Hurt for winning a nomination for his hilarious, jaw-dropping History of Violence performance.

Cheers to Junebug‘s Amy Adams for taking a Best Supporting Actress nom, even though The Constant Gardener‘s Rachel Weisz is the almost-certain winner.

Best Actor nominee Philip Seymour Hoffman, Best Supporting Actress nominee Catherine Keener

Congrats to Match Point director-writer Woody Allen for his Best Original Screen- play nomination. I thought this might not happen after the Writers Guild blew him off.

The Best Foreign Language Film showdown is between Hany Abu-Assad’s Paradise Now and Gavin Hood’s Tsotsi, but I’m half- presuming that concerns about the recent election of Hamas to run the Palestinian state will adversely affect support for Abu-Assad’s film. Everything cross-pollinates.

March Of The Penguins has long been the presumed favorite in the Best Documentary Feature race, but maybe the start of the Enron trial in Houston will assist its closest competitor, Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room.

And shame once again upon Freida Mock and her documentary nomination committee for failing to even short-list Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man, by far the most critically honored and awarded doc of the year.

Nothing else has me revved right now. I’ll put more stuff in as the day progresses, and I’ll put the final nominations into a final Oscar box later this morning.

Oh, and Hollywood Elsewhere didn’t arise at 5 ayem this morning to tap this piece out because waking at 6 ayem was rigorous enough.

Expanded Balloon

Oscar Balloon ’06 is finally up and running, and the more input and attention the better. Movies that look like they might rate because they’re been (or are being) directed and written by proven top-tier talents…that’s all this is now.

Best Picture: Flags of Our Fathers (DreamWorks); The Departed (Warner Brothers); Babel (Paramount); The Good Shepherd (Universal Pictures); The Good German (Steven Soderbergh); Che (Focus Features); Southland Tales (Universal); Marie Antoinette (Columbia Pictures); The Pursuit of Happyness (Columbia Pictures); Breaking and Entering (The Weinstein Co.); Infamous (Warner Independent); All The King’s Men (Columbia Pictures); A Good Year (20th Century Fox); Stranger Than Fiction (Columbia); I’m Not There: Suppositions on a Film Concerning Dylan (Cinetic Media); Dreamgirls (DreamWorks/Paramount); Running With Scissors (Columbia); World Trade Center (Universal); The Prestige (Touchstone); The Children of Men (Universal); Zodiac (Paramount).

Matt Damon, Martin Scorsese during filming of The Departed

Best Director: Clint Eastwood (Flags of Our Fathers); Anthony Minghella (Breaking and Entering); Martin Scorsese (The Departed); Steven Soderbergh (The Good German, Che); Ridley Scott (A Good Year); Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (Babel); Marc Forster (Stranger Than Fiction); Richard Kelly (Southland Tales); Steve Zaillan (All The King’s Men); Bill Condon (Dreamgirls); Doug McGrath (Infamous); Ryan Murphy (Running With Scissors); Oliver Stone (World Trade Center); Chris Nolan (The Prestige); Alfono Cuaron (The Children of Men).; Todd Haynes (I’m Not There: Suppositions on a Film Concerning Dylan); David Fincher (Zodiac).

Best Actor: Will Smith (The Pursuit of Happyness); Matt Damon (The Good Shepherd); Jude Law (Breaking and Entering); Sean Penn (All The King’s Men); Brad Pitt (Babel).

Best Actress: Anette Bening (Running with Scissors); Nicole Kidman (Fur); Cate Blanchett (The Good German or Babel); Maggie Gyllenhaal (Stranger Than Fiction).

Best Supporting Actor: Jack Nicholson (The Departed); Hugh Grant (American Dreamz); Gael Garcia Bernal (Babel); Albert Finney (A Good Year ); Jamie Foxx (Dreamgirls), Javier Bardem (Che).

Ryan Phillipe (l.) and costars in Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers

Best Supporting Actress: Kate Winslet (All The King’s Men), Sandra Bullock (Infamous)

Best Original Screenplay: Richard Kelly (Southland Tales); Paul Weitz (American Dreamz); Eric Roth (The Good Shepherd); Anthony Minghella (Breaking and Entering).

Best Adapted Screenplay: Sofia Coppola (Marie Antoinette).

Best Feature Documentary: God Grew Tired of Us ((Christopher Dillon Quinn, Tom Walker); Sicko (Michael Moore).

Sure To Be Remembered: Snakes on a Plane (New Line Cinema — director: David Ellis — CAST: Samuel L. Jackson, Nathan Phillips, Benjamin McKenzie).

Grabs

In motion on the Santa Monica Pier merry-go-round — Sunday, 1.29.06, 4:10 pm.

Billboard over Book Soup on Sunset Strip — Saturday, 1.28.06, 9:55 pm.

Posted at pizza joint on Abbot Kinney Blvd. in Venice — Sunday, 1.29.06, 5:15 pm.

Sunday, 1.29.06, 4:12 pm.

Sunday, 1.29.06, 6:45 pm.

Quince…what?

Day after day and hour after hour during the Sundance Film Festival I asked every journalist, distributor and agent I ran into what they’d seen and liked (or half-liked). I must have asked this question 60 or 70 times over the eight days I was up there…
And nobody mentioned Quinceanera, a small-scale drama about sexual tensions vs. Hispanic community values in L.A.’s Echo Park. It was like it didn’t exist…one of those strugglers that sometimes get lost in the shuffle.

I can guess but I don’t precisely know who these guys are, but they’re Quinceanera costars. Possibly Jesse Garcia and Emily Rios.

And yet Wash Westmoreland and Richard Glatzer’s film not only won the Dramatic Grand Jury Prize last night but the Dramatic Audience Award, which hasn’t occured at a Sundance Film Festival since Tony Bui’s Three Seasons took the same two prizes in 1999.
I guess I should spend more time talking to non-pro types and not just my know- it-all friends. It’s probably also fair to say that the other dramatic competition entries — Stay, Sherrybaby, Somebodies, Wristcutters, Stephanie Daley, The Hawk is Dying, Right at Your Door, etc. — all had some kind of drawback or dislike element. (I had no beef with Daley at all — it’s a very respectable and well-made trauma drama.)
That rumor about Bob Berney’s Picturehouse having bought Quinceanera for distribution isn’t true, by the way. Berney told me this morning it’s “a good rumor” but an inaccurate one. He agreed that the buzz about Quinceanera wasn’t very strong during the festival, but said it was apparently a “local” favorite (i.e., among people in the ticket lines).
Since almost no one in journo circles saw it, I suggested an idea this morning to Quinceanera producer Anne Clements, whom I reached via cell phone: offer it for a showing at the Santa Barbara Film Festival (which kicks off on Thursday, 2.2). Festival director Roger Durling told me he might be able to find a loose slot in his schedule if the film were to be made available.

Wash Westmoreland, Richard Glatzer, who co-directed and co-wrote Qinceanera, during the ’06 Sundance Film Festival. (Pic stolen from Indiewire site.)

There was another double winner last night when Christopher Quinn’s God Grew Tired of Us won both the Grand Jury Documentary Prize as well as the Audience Doc Award — another festival first.
The World Cinema Jury Prize for Best Documentary went to Juan Carlos Rulfo’s In The Pit, which Variety‘s Robert Koehler went on about and told me to see. It explores the day-to-day lives of guys building an upper deck to Mexico City’s Periferico freeway.
The World Cinema Dramatic Jury Prize went to Gela Babluani’s 13 Tzameti. The World Cinema Audience Documentary Award was given to Tim Dirdamal’s De Nadie, about a female Central American immigrant making her way from souterhn Mexico into the U.S. And the World Cinema Audience Dramatic Award was given to Toa Fraser’s No. 2.
Here’s the official announcement.

Quince…what?

Day after day and hour after hour during the Sundance Film Festival I asked every journalist, distributor and agent I ran into what they’d seen and liked (or half-liked). I must have asked this question 60 or 70 times over the eight days I was up there…
And nobody mentioned Quinceanera, a small-scale drama about sexual tensions vs. Hispanic community values in L.A.’s Echo Park. It was like it didn’t exist…one of those strugglers that sometimes get lost in the shuffle.

I can guess but I don’t precisely know who these guys are, but they’re Quinceanera costars. Possibly Jesse Garcia and Emily Rios.

And yet Wash Westmoreland and Richard Glatzer’s film not only won the Dramatic Grand Jury Prize last night but the Dramatic Audience Award, which hasn’t occured at a Sundance Film Festival since Tony Bui’s Three Seasons took the same two prizes in 1999.
I guess I should spend more time talking to non-pro types and not just my know- it-all friends. It’s probably also fair to say that the other dramatic competition entries — Stay, Sherrybaby, Somebodies, Wristcutters, Stephanie Daley, The Hawk is Dying, Right at Your Door, etc. — all had some kind of drawback or dislike element. (I had no beef with Daley at all — it’s a very respectable and well-made trauma drama.)
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That rumor about Bob Berney’s Picturehouse having bought Quinceanera for distribution isn’t true, by the way. Berney told me this morning it’s “a good rumor” but an inaccurate one. He agreed that the buzz about Quinceanera wasn’t very strong during the festival, but said it was apparently a “local” favorite (i.e., among people in the ticket lines).
Since almost no one in journo circles saw it, I suggested an idea this morning to Quinceanera producer Anne Clements, whom I reached via cell phone: offer it for a showing at the Santa Barbara Film Festival (which kicks off on Thursday, 2.2). Festival director Roger Durling told me he might be able to find a loose slot in his schedule if the film were to be made available.

Wash Westmoreland, Richard Glatzer, who co-directed and co-wrote Qinceanera, during the ’06 Sundance Film Festival. (Pic stolen from Indiewire site.)

There was another double winner last night when Christopher Quinn’s God Grew Tired of Us won both the Grand Jury Documentary Prize as well as the Audience Doc Award — another festival first.
The World Cinema Jury Prize for Best Documentary went to Juan Carlos Rulfo’s In The Pit, which Variety‘s Robert Koehler went on about and told me to see. It explores the day-to-day lives of guys building an upper deck to Mexico City’s Periferico freeway.
The World Cinema Dramatic Jury Prize went to Gela Babluani’s 13 Tzameti. The World Cinema Audience Documentary Award was given to Tim Dirdamal’s De Nadie, about a female Central American immigrant making her way from souterhn Mexico into the U.S. And the World Cinema Audience Dramatic Award was given to Toa Fraser’s No. 2.
Here’s the official announcement.

Over and Done

The Sundance ’06 awards ceremony happens tomorrow night, and I think we all know what to expect. The jury prizes will most likely reflect elitist attitudes and determinations and be promptly ignored, and the audience awards will mean a lot more to most of those who’ve trudged through this festival over the last seven or eight days.
I’m gone tomorrow so today (Friday, 12.7) is all about last licks — catching not- yet-seen films like Wristcutters: A Love Story, which I’ll probably end up half-liking, Raymond De Felitta’s ‘Tis Autumn: The Search for Jackie Paris, The Ground Truth, In The Pit, and Half Nelson.

Just north of the Treasure Mountain Inn on Park City’s Main Street — Thursday, 1.26, 11:10 pm.

Several good films were shown here, but only about six or seven are are likely to make much of a dent in the real world. If a Sundance film generates a 9.5 Richter reading among festival audiences, you can usually count on half that level of juice coming from sea-level engagements…unless it’s something seriously breakout in the Napoleon Dynamite or Little Miss Sunshine mode.
Most of the industry contingent had fled Park City by late Wednesday, which was kind of welcome. It’s been easier to get into films since then and the traffic congestion around town hasn’t been nearly as bad as it was last weekend. With these and other downshiftings the fest suddenly felt like it used to in the early to mid ’90s, when it seemed more a pure-movie thing and the Paris Hilton virus had yet to manifest.
If you want a smart, no-nonsense rectitation of some of the lessons of Sundance ’06, check out this piece by Hollywood Reporter columnist Anne Thompson. I’m feeling way too whipped to assemble one of these.
A beautiful dense mountain snowfall came down last night. Watching hundreds of thousands of moisture particles floating down from the black Utah sky and the sensation of faintly sprinkled dampness upon my face made it all seem worth it. It’s just hitting me that I may have experienced as many atmospheric epiphanies during this festival as cinematic ones.
Anyway, it’s back to Los Angeles tomorrow and a five or six days of calm (I’m kidding…the Oscar nominations will be announced Tuesday) before starting in with the Santa Barbara Film Festival, which kicks off on Thursday, February 2nd.

Grabs

Factotum star Matt Dillon — Tuesday, 1.24, 3:40 pm. Here’s an interview I did with Dillon and Factotum director-writer Brent Hamer a couple of days ago. I didn’t like it at first because of excessive ambient noise, but I listened again this morning and some of the sentences are discernible. I couldn’t find an official Factotum site but here’s a French one

Houston-based film fan who comes here every year (and also attends the Telluride Film Festival in September) — Thursday, 1.26, 11:45 am.

It’s snowing very heavily right now, but the flakes are so small that somehow the camera can’t “see” them, even though they’re plain as day to the naked eye — Friday, 1.27, 12:50 pm.

Volunteers working the door of Holiday Village cinemas prior to screening of God Grew Tired of Us — Tuesday, 1.24, 4:10 pm.

Whassup Rockers director Larry Clark in Santa Monica a few days before the start of the Sundance Film Festival. For those who didn’t hear the interview I ran with Clark a while back, here it is again.

Alarm-Sounder

Americans are so stoned and spoiled by their Treo 650s and SUV’s and McMan- sions and all the other junkie trappings of Bush-era affluence that they make the aesthetic of Marie Antoinette look like that of St. Francis of Assisi.
They’re so drunk on their lifestyles that they’re willing to kill the planet in order to keep groovin’ on. I wish it were otherwise but I really believe this, and so does George Carlin. That’s why the planet is probably doomed. That’s why…

Al Gore delivering his informative global-warming lecture, which is orchestrated by director Davis Guggenhiem into a gripping, opened-up form in An Inconvenient Truth

I’m sorry. I’m stopping this now. Leftie despair can be as much of a drag as obesity and mental insulation and believing in the Church of Bush, Cheney and Big Oil.
This is a weird way of starting a piece that basically says Al Gore and his new film, An Inconvenient Truth, have given me hope and that everyone should see it. It’s strike-a-match time, and this film is a ray of light. It’s just good straight infor- mation, but if a sizable number of the “drunks” in this country see it…
I’m starting to think that Gore’s entire political career, which culiminated with his run for the White House in 2000, has been about getting people to see and fully consider this slide-show lecture movie about global warming.
An Inconvenient Truth is Gore’s crowning achievement…the summation of his life…the reason he was put on this earth to become a politican and a stirrer-upper and influencer of public opinion.
Because if people see Truth in sufficient numbers, Gore will have done more to save this planet from ruination than anyone in his realm has ever managed.

Al Gore, Robert Redford at some Sundance-type gathering that may have occured before the ’06 festival began

That’s if enough people see it and really take it in…
I saw Davis Guggenheim’s film at a press showing Wednesday afternoon and I can’t get it out of my head. It may not be the most exciting or artful or sensually swoony film of Sundance ’06, but it’s easily the most important.
It hasn’t been acquired but in a perfect synergistic world it ought to be released in April to coincide with the release of Gore’s book of “An Incovenient Truth” (Rodale), which will come out in print and audio form.
An Inconvenient Truth is as enlightening and eye-opening as a “spinach documen- tary” — i.e., very good for you and nutritious — can possibly be.
It’s just a visual opening-up of Gore’s slide show, which the former Presidential candidate and vice-president has been presenting to audiences around the globe for the last I-don’t-know-how-many years. (Gore says in the film that he’s done it about 1,000 times.)

Davis Guggenheim and Al Gore

Gore’s teaching style is folksy, straight and very personable. (It’s too bad he wasn’t half this charming or persuasive during the 2000 Presidential election.) Go to this Gore-sponsored website to research the facts, but set aside the time to go see it when it hits a nearby theatre or DVD store.
Seriously — no other film I’ve seen has spelled out the problem quite so clearly. Everyone on the planet needs to see it…even if they think they know everything there is to know about the harm being done to this planet. And it’s bad…really bad.
But there’s a road beyond the despair that I started this piece with, and Gore’s film is an attempt to show the way.
One more thought, and I’m not just saying this to be a smart-ass: this film is very persuasive, but it would be a tad more so if Gore were a little bit thinner. He’s not Oliver Hardy but he looks very well fed, and the metaphor is obvious. The under- message of An Inconvenient Truth suggests that a new kind of austerity is vital for the earth’s survival, and I feel it would play better if Gore looked like someone who practices more denial.

Dick’s MPAA Flap

Kirby Dick is complaining that the MPAA illegally copied, apparently for internal purposes, a “digital version” of his new film This Film Is Not Yet Rated, which a several journos saw at a press screening yesterday morning and which screens at 9:30 pm tonight at the Sundance Film Festival.
More to the point, Dick got L.A. Times reporter John Horn to do the squawking for him in a piece that ran Wednesday (1.25) called “Avast, Ye Pirates!” It struck me as a thin beef, but it made for good press.

This Film Is Not Yet Rated director Kirby Dick on Park City’s Main Street — Tuesday, 1.24, 4:20 pm.

The dust-up was partly about an issue of secrecy, but what it really boiled down to was one of anger and frustration on the part of Dick and many, many film directors who have long despised what they see as an unfair and highly arbitrary ratings system.
And so Dick has struck back at the MPAA in a nyah-nyah way that he knows will hurt and enrage the ratings and appeals board members — he’s “outed” them.
The MPAA has a policy of keeping the identities of the its Ratings and Classification Board secret. Dick’s position is that filmmakers have the right to know the names of those people on the MPAA ratings board who occasionally slap their films with absurd and restrictive ratings that end up hurting the economic prospects of their films.
Therefore, This Film Is Not Yet Rated is partly about Dick hiring a lesbian private investigator to unmask the identities of the MPAA’s ratings board members, as well the big wheels on the appeals board.
The film tracks the progess of Dick and his investigator (along with the woman’s junior assistant) as they park outside MPAA headquarters in the L.A. suburb of Woodland Hills, write down their license plate numbers, follow them on their way to restaurants and on errands, and in one case sifting through garbage.

By the end of the film the raters are pretty much totally exposed — names, backgrounds, in some cases photos, the ages of their children, and in some instances the kind of cars they drive.
Horn’s story says that Michael Donaldson, a lawyer representing Dick, has written the MPAA and demanded that it “immediately return all copies” of the film in its possession and explain who approved the making of the copy and who within the MPAA has looked at the reproduction.”
Dick recently discovered during a recent conversation with an MPAA lawyer that the MPAA had copied the film from a digital version he submitted on 11.29 for a rating. The MPAA’s copy of Dick’s film was viewed by Dan Glickman, the MPAA’s new president, the MPAA said.
“Dick said that when he asked MPAA lawyer Greg Goeckner what right his organization had to make the copy, Goeckner told him that Dick and his crew had potentially invaded the privacy of the MPAA’s movie raters,” Horn’s story says.
“We made a copy of Kirby’s movie because it had implications for our employees,” said Kori Bernards, the MPAA’s corporate communications vp. She told Horn that Dick’s spying on the MPAA raters led the organization to feel “concerned about the raters and their families,” Bernards said.

MPAA chief Dan Glickman

She said the MPAA’s copy of This Film Is Not Yet Rated is “locked away” and is not being copied or distributed.” She added that the organization was operating lawfully when it copied Dick’s movie, saying that “the courts recognize that parties are entitled to make a copy of a work for use as evidence in possible future proceedings.”
MPAA chief Dan Glickman told AP reporter Dave Germain that normally he doesn’t watch films submitted for ratings but that he viewed most of This Film Is Not Yet Rated — the MPAA’s copied version, apparently — because he “heard they used unusual surveillance techniques to follow our raters around.”
“I decided the privacy of our employees was in jeopardy. I didn’t know if there was some violation of law, maybe, but I thought that was going way too far,” Glickman said.
Dick’s film is a hugely entertaining, sharp-tongued trashing of the MPAA’s absurd and politically lopsided rating calls.
These include the board’s well-known tendency to attach R and NC-17 ratings to films showing scenes of sexual pleasure but allow scenes showing horrific and/or grotesque violence to prretty much skate. The ratrings board is also known for being harder on depictions of gay over hetero sex, and for giving indies a harder time than the majors.
The sage and sometimes very funny talking heads include directors John Waters, Kevin Smith, Todd Solondz, Wayne Kramer, and indie distributors Mark Urman and Bingham Ray.

Grabs

Haskell Wexler, director of Who Needs Sleep?, at the VW Lounge on upper Main Street — Tuesday, 1.24, 3:45 pm.

Anne Heche and a friend/colleague at the after-party for Wim Wenders’ Don’t Come Knocking — Tuesday, 1.14, 11:50 pm. I searched through Heche’s IMDB profile and don’t see a Sundance ’06 film among her credits, so I guess…well, it was nice to say hello.

Non-celebrity on bus heading into town from Kimball Junction

Flannel Pajamas costars Jamie Harrold (I think) and Julianne Nicholson, the film’s director-screenwriter Jeff Lipsky, and costar Justin Kirk — Tuesday, 1.24, 2:19 pm. Roger Ebert has praised this unusual romantic drama, and a woman I spoke to an hour ago has said, ‘Naaah…not for me.” That makes it an absolute must-see.

Picturehouse chief Bob Berney (lower left) during latter stages of party thrown by his company at Zoom on lower Main Street — Tuesday, 1.24, 5:15 pm .

Ashley Judd, star of Joey Lauren Adams’ Come Early Morning, presenting a Women in Film award to Adams — Monday, 1.24, 8:10 pm.

Exterior of Riverhorse Cafe — Tuesday, 1.24, 4:10 pm.

Dining room of Park City’s Riverhorse Cafe during Women in Film party — Monday, 1.23, 7:25 pm.

Documentarian and Entourage costar Adrian Grenier on Main Street outside VW lounge — Tuesday, 1.24, 3:55 pm.

Matt Dillon during our interview about Brent Hamer’s Factotum, the latest and finest Charles Buklowski-inspired film ever made. Dillon’s performance as Bukowski’s alter-ego Henry Chinaski isn’t just more nuanced and naturalistic than Mickey Rourke’s riff on the boozy writer-poet in Barfly and Ben Gazarra’s in Tales of Ordinary Madness — it also exudes an exceptional dignity.

Hanging in one of Park City’s two townie bars.

Depth of Feeling

In real life Roberta Maxwell, the gifted New York actress who’s quietly riveting as Jake Gyllenhaal’s bereaved mom during a four- or five-minute scene near the finale of Brokeback Mountain, barely resembles her emotionally bruised, hardscrabble character.
Her face is pale and plain and vaguely trembling in Ang Lee’s film, and with short, sort-of-mousey red hair. Very much a cowering but compassionate farmer’s wife from Wyoming. But the woman who opened her apartment door at 6 pm on New Year’s Eve was a pert and sophisticated New Yorker in glasses, her blondish-gray hair cut even shorter and her eyes the opposite of morose.

Roberta Maxwell during the second-to-last scene in Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain

Imagine that! An actress who can not only manipulate her appearance but do a little internal tossing of the emotional salad.
Maxwell isn’t the only Brokeback Mountain actress who supplies a strong dose of hurt — there’s also the excellent Kate Mara and Linda Cardellini as Heath Ledger’s daughter and jilted girlfriend, respectively, on top of Michelle Williams and Anne Hathaway’s lead performances as unhappy wives — but Maxwell makes her mark in what is arguably the film’s penultimate scene.
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It’s obvious that Maxwell’s mom and her scowling homophobic husband (played by the great Peter McRobbie) know what kind of relationship Ledger’s Ennis del Mar had with their son Jack, but her grief-ridden face is full of acceptance and compas- sion when del Mar pays a visit. And all of this hemmed in by fear of her husband’s rattlesnake temperament.
It’s the quiet but devastating interplay between Maxwell, McRobbie and Ledger that increases the film’s sadness to peak strength and sets up the film’s final hit, which comes when Mara tells Ledger she’s getting married to an oil-field worker named Kurt, and then leaves him alone in his trailer with Jack’s shirt hanging in the closet.
In fact, the more you watch Maxwell’s scene (I have a DVD screener of the film), the more clear it becomes that her underperforming of this exquisitely shot den- ouement is the emotional springboard of that last ten- or twelve-minute section. She’s got the whole film in her eyes.

Snapped about six hours before midnight in Maxwell’s Manhattan apartment — 12.31.05, 6:15 pm

And she had only a few hours to make it work.
Maxwell shot her footage in July 2004, not on a set but inside the rundown farm- house seen in the film, which is located about an hour outside Calgary, Alberta, which was a cheaper place to shoot than Wyoming, where most of the film’s story unfolds.
“When I arrived at the set, people were getting ready to leave,” she recalls. “It was the very end of the shoot.”
Jack’s mom is “a lifelong Pentecostal Christian,” says Maxwell. “And in this last scene we see this tension and fear about what she knows her husband feels about this relationship, and about great cruelty and suffering she has endured herself, but she shows compassion to Ennis because she can see Jack was obviously very much loved.”
Maxwell suspects that Brokeback Mountain‘s casting director Avy Kaufman arranged a meeting with director Ang Lee a few months earlier because she had played the mother of Sean Penn’s condemned prisoner in Dead Man Walking (’95) and “so I have a history of sad mothers.”
She sensed during her sit-down with Lee that “we had connected on a level that would make me a very strong competitor [for the part].”

Maxwell, Len Cariou and director Ethan McSweeny during a promotional stint on behalf of a relatively recent Pace University production of “The Persians.”

Brokeback Mountain had been showing to industry and festival audiences since early September, but Maxwell didn’t see it until it opened commercially on December 9th.
“I was really shocked by the scene, by our scene,” she recalls. “The starkness of it…the simplicity. And how [Lee] shot it, like when I put my hand on Heath’s shoul- der. I grabbed my friend sitting next to me. It was so strange, this old hand…I said to myself, is that mine?”
Maxwell began as a child actor in the ’50s, and has done lots of New York theatre, television, TV movies and features.
Her Dead Man Walking performance was, if you ask me, the big standout before Brokeback Mountain. She played the judge in Jonathan Demme’s Philadelphia (i.e., the one administering when Tom Hanks collapsed in court). And she had the lead female role in the 1975 debut stage production of Peter Shaffer’s Equus with costars Anthony Hopkins and Peter Firth. (That’s right…the naked-in-the-stables role.)
Maxwell was told in early October that her performance was special by none other than Annie Proulx, the author of the “Brokeback Mountain” short story that Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana’s screenplay is so closely based upon. The advance review came in the form of a letter, and it brought Maxwell to tears.

Sometime around ’76 or ’77

It reads: “Dear Roberta Maxwell — Just the right touch…the almost-crushed wife of a martinette who under his very nose and in only a few lines about cake and coffee, gets across the message that she knew and understood what Jack meant to Ennis. I don’t know how you did it in so small a compass. With much apprecia- tion, Annie Proulx.”
Maxwell read this to me aloud near the end of our talk. Here’s a recording of about half of it.
She asked last night how I think Brokeback Mountain will do at the Oscars, and when I repeated the conventional wisdom that it’s the Best Picture front-runner, she feigned surprise. I would play it that way if I were her.
Maxwell told the Toronto Star‘s Martin Knelman that she’ll be visiting Los Angeles soon “so I can enjoy the fun of Brokeback being touted for the Oscars. It’s such a special time and such a special film. Why not enjoy it while it lasts?”
If it were my call (and I can’t imagine Focus Features not feeling the same way), Maxwell will wind up sitting next to her costars and Lee and the film’s producer James Schamus and all the others at the Oscar Awards. If there’s anyone apart from the core players who deserves such an honor, it’s Maxwell.
I mean, c’mon, she’s the ninth-inning pinch hitter…the windup, the pitch…thwack!

Snowstorm Grabs

(l. to r.) Subway tracks leading from Marcy Street into Manhattan during height of yesterday afternoon’s very slushy snow storm — 12.31.05, 3:05 pm

Budget-level Chinese restaurant in Chinatown, near corner of Mott and Bayard.

There’s a character in Woody Allen’s What’s Up, Tiger Lily called Wing Fat, played by Susumu Kurobe…and the name was meant as an ethnic goof

Oh-Six Starters

There are four January releases that definitely cut the mustard in my pantry, and two or three with one or two problems but are recommended regardless. So things are starting off reasonably well. For a month known for so-so product, I mean.
The absolute must-see’s are Lajos Koltai’s Fateless (Thinkfilm, 1.6), Eugene Jarecki’s Why We Fight (Sony Pictures Classics, 1.20), Steven Soderbergh’s Bubble (Magnolia, 1.27) and Michael Winterbottom’s Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story (Picturehouse, 1.27).

From Lajos Koltai’s Fateless (and not what it seems to be)

The not-bad-with-reservations in order of preference are Ol Parker’s Imagine Me and You (Fox Searchlight, 1.27), Albert Brooks’ Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World (Warner Bros., 1.20) and Lars von Trier’s Manderlay (IFC Films, 1.27).
I’ve seen some others and can riff a bit about them, but aside from these six or seven we all know what January is about. That is, if you aren’t priveleged or con- nected enough to go to Sundance and you pay to see new movies in your local plex. It’s about feeling vaguely burned.
Or it’s about catching up with Xmas films and watching more DVDs than usual or maybe picking up a book…but the mood that settles over a multiplex in January is rarely expectant, much less electric.
Here’s what I know, have heard or am deducing thus far…
January 6: Fateless is the first near-great film of 2006. The exquisite widescreen framing, desaturated color and exquisite editing make it, to my eyes, the most visually immaculate Holocaust death-camp drama ever made (does that sound right?) as well as one of the most realistic seeming and subtly-rendered in terms of story.
Based on Imre Kertesz’s mostly true-life account, it’s about a young Jewish boy from Budapest who ends up in a concentration camp during World War II and just barely survives. It lacks the story tension and rooting factor of Polanski’s The Pianist, but situations of hunger, despair and the ashy aura of near-death have never been rendered with such remarkable pictorial finesse.

Otherwise, I’ve been told by a young guy I completely trust that Grandma’s Boy is absolutely atrocious. I don’t know about BloodRayne except for the hot babe in the poster. I’ve seen the Hostel trailer and that’s as far as I go. Not a very brave or engaging attitude, I’ll admit. (I generally loathe horror films even though I rather liked Wolf Creek, which so many other critics were deeply offended by.)
January 13: The only one I’ve seen is Laurence Dunmore’s The Libertine (Weinstein Co.) and the less said about it, the better. Johnny Depp is utterly dislikable as a smart but self-destructive Old World asshole named John Wilmot, the second Earl of Rochester. Muddy, desaturated color…gobs of period detail without no discernible spark of life…an almost completely detestable film.
The trailer for Kevin Reynolds’ Tristan & Isolde (20th Century Fox)…oh, no….oh, no….Rufus Sewell is in it. I’m sorry but that tears it. And please…not another swords-and-horses romantic triangle King Arthur– slash-First Knight-type thing. How can studio executives greenlight this stuff and still look at themselves in the mirror?
James Franco (Tristan) is a very fine and charismatic actor who can’t seem to catch a wave, much less a break. (He’s also in Justin Lin’s Annapolis, opening on 1.27.) Sophia Myles, whom I liked in Art School Confidential, is a very intelligent, seemingly passionate actress with a very chubby moon face. Curvy, not-slim actresses are becoming more and more common these days, but there haven’t been any high-wattage moon-faced actresses since the days of Theda Bara.

Misty Wilkins, hot-stuff star of Steven Soderbergh’s Bubble

And zipposky on April’s Shower, Glory Road, Hoodwinked, Last Holiday, On The Outs.
January 20: Eugene Jarecki’s Why We Fight is not just the best film being released on this date but sure to be listed among the year’s (and probably the decade’s) finest also. A brilliantly told history of America’s military industrial complex and war machine. And very well made…well paced…totally blue-chip all the way. John McCain, Gore Vidal, William Kristol, Chalmers Johnson and Richard Perle are among the talking heads.
There are good things — more than a few good things — in Albert Brooks’ Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World (Warner Bros.). It’s dry and disciplined and somewhat amusing here and there, but it has an older guy’s energy levels and — frankly? — not that great a story.
You’d think a movie about what makes Muslims laugh would at least take a stab at answering this question. And it would have worked better if Brooks (playing himself) had somehow managed to visit the real Muslim world (Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, et. al.) instead of India, where most of this film takes place.
India is not where the terrorists are. Call for tech support and a very polite idiot who knows absolutely nothing about how to help you with your problem…that‘s India.

Albert Brooks (l.) in Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World

You know that Underworld: Evolution (Screen Gems), the Underword sequel, is solely about trying to grab a portion of the $100 million earned by the original. With Kate Beckinsdale and Scott Speedman reprising their roles, what are the odds of this being any more that the usual breathy-moldy-sexy CGI vampire-werewolf crap?
The trailer certainly gives every indication it’s a straight programmer and strictly a paycheck movie for the talent. If it rises even a tiny bit above the level of pure bilge I will buy a red rubber enema bag and do the appropriate thing.
Nothing about End of the Spear, Pizza, The Real Dirt on Farmer John.
January 27: Bubble is a minimalist murder tale from Steven Soderbergh, shot on video with non-pro actors. It’s a very clean, creepy and absorbing piece. It’s modest but damn fine within its perimeter. I consider Bubble Soderbergh’s return to form — the first high-grade wow thing he’s done since Traffic.
I wrote during the Toronto Film Festival that “as far as I’m concerned Bubble, a heart-of-proletariat-darkness drama, is reason to pop open the champagne and breathe easy. Soderbergh was falling off the horse repeatedly with Full Frontal, Solaris and the two Ocean‘s movies…but he hunkered down and stayed with the process and that constant-state-of-becoming trip that all artists need to be into, and now he’s back.”

Oh Parker’s Imagine Me and You, which I saw at Toronto, is one of those rotely British romantic confections, although nowhere near as sickening as Love Actually and for the most part a reasonably decent and even (at times) touching thing.
It’s about a woman (Piper Parabo) who falls in love with another woman (Lena Headley) on her wedding day…which leaves her husband Heck (Matthew Goode) confused and out in the cold. It’s formulaic and tidy, although at times I could feel the capability on Parker’s part (if not the willingness) to make a complex adult relationship drama along the lines of John Schlesinger’s Sunday Bloody Sunday.
I didn’t hear a single unkind word about Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story during the Toronto Film Festival, so even though I didn’t see it myself it seems like a reasonably safe call to put it on the recommend list.
It’s basically the bone-dry British funnyman Steve Coogan starring in some kind of smart-ass variation of Karel Reisz’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1982). It’s a film about the making of an historical film — an adaptation of Laurence Stern’s “The Life and Opinions of Tristram Sahndy, Gentlemen” — while at the same time a look at the historical characters as well as the actors portraying them.

Willem Dafoe, Bryce Dallas Howard in Lars von Trier’s Manderlay

After seeing Lars von Trier’s Manderlay in Cannes last May I wrote that “it 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 provocations.
“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.
“The second installment in von Trier’s America trilogy, 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.

Sophia Miles, James Franco in Kevin Reynolds’ Tristan and Isolde

“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 is too similar to Dogville and not similar enough. Despite its slow pace and too-gradual plot development, Dogville had a surprise revelation (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.
“Like Dogville it’s 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.

Eugene Jarecki discussing Why We Fight at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival

Otherwise…
Annapolis isn’t a precise revisiting of An Officer and a Gentleman but it’s obviously on similar turf with the element of boxing thrown in. Annapolis, boxing…Annapolis, boxing. Better Luck Tomorrow helmer Justin Lin is the director, and I should just keep my mouth shut until I see it.
Big Momma’s House 2 can have coitus with itself. Breaking News looks to me like a standard-issue Hong Kong cop thriller, and I’m not vigorous enough to try and figure the real truth of it. Mirage, Nanny McPhee and the IMAX film Roving Mars haven’t yet come into focus.
You don’t have confuse Tristram Shandy with Tristan and Isolde — “Tristram” has two r’s and the movie is fairly jaunty and flip, and the other one is bold-faced sincere.

Grabs

(l. to r.) Occasional Hollywood Elsewhere columnist Dylan Wells, Becca Payne and producer-screenwriter L.M. Kit Carson at Columbia student bar at Broadway and 113th Street — Tuesday, 12.27, 10:15 pm

On IRT Lexington uptown — Saturday, 12.24, 3:10 pm.

Troubador in waiting area for Union Square L line to Brooklyn — Monday, 12.26, 11:25 pm.

$30 jar of ginger orange foam scrub, purchased at Sabon on Spring Street on Sunday, 12.25, 8:40 pm.

Mott Street in Little Italy — Thursday, 12.29, 8:20 pm.

Canal Street near Manhattan Bridge — Thursday, 12.29, 7:15 pm.

Grand Central Station — Tuesday, 12.27, 4:25 pm.

On L train heading to Brooklyn — Tuesday, 1.27, 11:45 pm

What would Nic Cage (or a character played by him), Joan of Arc and Oliver Reed’s “Father Grandier” character in The Devils have in common? Something, I think…unless Neil Labute has decided to re-shuffle the story of The Wicker Man.

Thurday, 12.29, 8:15 pm.

Herzog vs. Huffman

“Thanks for celebrating Werner Herzog, the most amazing director working today. However…
“While I don’t disagree with you and Time‘s Richard Corliss for celebrating his little seen recent, wonderful documentary The White Diamond, I wonder if you were aware just how contrived the film is.
“Recently Herzog was in Seattle for a short festival of some of his recent films and in the q & a session afterwards he explained that pretty much everything said in the interview sessions in the film (particularly from the talkative local man who owned the rooster) was completely scripted.

“Herzog said it in way that made it seem like he would be stunned if anyone could possibly think it was done any other way. He described in detail how he wrote complete speeches for the folks and how they would struggle to deliver them (the speeches are basically based on his conversations with the interviewees and Herzog’s own thoughts).
“If anything, knowing that this is how Herzog constructs his documentaries makes me like them even more. All documentaries are a succession of lies that form a particular person’s greater truth. I am just surprised that Herzog seemed to assume that everyone else was in on the secret.” — Richard Huffman, Seattle, WA.
Werner Herzog replies: “Jeffrey — [Huffman’s] questions about The White Diamond are too simplified. Why would I who postulates a cinema where you can trust your eyes again (Fitzcarraldo) ‘concoct’ elements of his ‘documentaries’?

“My inventions and stylizations aim to penetrate into a deeper truth, whereas Reality TV only pretends to depict the ‘real’ but captures just facts, and not truth.

“I have to be more precise to distinguish between two major issues:

“1. Whenever it comes to visual material, I want audiences to trust their eyes again, like the ship over a mountain (Fitzcarraldo). When I use a digital effect, like at the end of Invincible where the strongman’s kid brother flies away across the ocean: it is so obvious, and so stylized, and embedded in the dialogue that it is no contradiction to what I like to achieve.

“I welcome the recreation of dinosaurs on the screen.

“Equally: everything which constitutes the hardcore identity of a protagonist in my “documentaries” I would not touch (Littlre Dieter Needs to Fly, Grizzlly Man, Wings of Hope, etc.). However, I do invent Dieter’s dreams, and I do stage elements of his character (otherwise not visible), like Dieter opening and closing the door of his home. This is the ecstatic truth of his existence.

“2. Whatever I can do to get beyond the mere facts…to get deeper into a story of a ‘documentary’…to grasp a truth in its ecstatic state, I will do. The story of Graham Dorrington remains untouched, the catastrophy which befell Dieter Plage, the cinematographer, during his maiden flight on board Dorrington’s airship, happened as narrated, yet: I liked a seemingly unimportant side figure, Mark Anthony Jhap so much that I manoeuvred him more and more into the center – or rather epicenter – of the film. The leading character shifts from Dorrington to Mark Anthony, and at the end to Mark Anthony’s splendid rooster.

“The scene where Mark Anthony leads the camera during his foraging trip to the waterfall, watching it through one single drop of water, is completely scripted, and staged, and rehearsed. From off camera I am asking the most insipid New Age question: ‘Mark Anthony, do you see a whole universe in one single drop of water’, and Mark Anthony turns around with a slight smirk on his face, and responds: ‘I cannot hear what you say for the thunder that you are.’ I believe I shot the scene 5 or 6 times until I got the right, almost imperceptible smirk.

“Mark Anthony’s sentence appears verbatim in a previous film, Cobra Verde, delivered by Kinski, and you will hear the same phrase in Rescue Dawn, spoken by Christian Bale.

“What you and your audience also should be aware of is the fact that the drop of water was not water, but glycerin which has better properties for filming. Klaus Scheurich, a very accomplished wildlife cinematographer, shot this drop of ‘water’ with the inverted waterfall caught in it, and this — at first sight — looked like kitsch, but I got hooked to the image, and I was convinced that this waterdrop embedded in an environment of sheer fantasy would assume a different, a higher, an ecstatic quality.

“I think that this delicate line between reality, and fact, and truth needs to be more clearly defined. My Minnesota Declaration (you’ll find it on my website) does this. But what has to be made more clear is: with the onslaught of virtual realities WE HAVE TO RE-DEFINE REALITY: beyond Cinema Verite, beyond the documen- taries we usually see on TV, beyond the terrain which is not solid any longer, as if we were treading on thin ice.” – Werner Herzog

Miller’s Crossing

On Thursday afternoon I hitched across the Williamsburg Bridge (the trains didn’t start running again until Friday morning) and then walked up to East Soho to pay a visit to Capote director Bennett Miller.
The idea was mainly to say hello (we’ve been talking since last summer on the phone) and to take stock of the year-end situation, I suppose. Only we didn’t get down to the latter, in part because I got sidetracked by some very cool Dick-and- Perry photos.

Capote director Bennett Miller — 12.22.05, 5:20 pm

And so I didn’t get into Capote‘s primary year-end issues, which, if you ask me, are (a) a strange deficiency of Best Picture heat and (b) a profoundly agonizing Best Actor stand-off happening right now between Capote‘s Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Brokeback Mountain‘s Heath Ledger.
Why would a guest want to bring up a couple of vaguely bothersome issues to his nice-guy host?
It’s not like the movie is anything but a solid success. But more moviegoers should see it, and Oscar approvals are one way of bringing this about. For this to happen the hard fact is that Capote needs to re-ignite a bit. Okay, so it’s bothersome to say this and I’m sorry…but the game is the game is the game.
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Miller, 38, is a relaxed, friendly, quietly reflective sort who’s into listening as much as making himself heard, which right away sets him apart from a lot of filmmakers I’ve run into. And he lives in a spacious, sparsely furnished sixth-floor loft on Lafay- ette Street that feels instantly soothing to walk into.
The moment I did this I succumbed. I said to myself, “Drop it…it’s the late after- noon and it’s cold outside and it’s almost Christmas…forget the hardball and go with the layback.”
And then about halfway into our talk Miller brought out some copies of Richard Avedon’s contact sheets from that 1960 photo session he did with Truman Capote and Clutter-family slayers Perry Smith and Dick Hickock. Amazing images, all.

Clutter-family killer Perry Smith (l., white shirt) and Truman Capote (r., glasses and jacket) during Richard Avedon photo session sometime in early 1960

The photo session is recreated in Capote, of course, and my first reaction to the Real McCoys was frankly one of surprise. The actual Smith seems much more relaxed and even jovial than the way Clifton Collins, Jr. played him in the film. Much less pensive and guarded.
Mark Pellegrino was a fairly good physical choice to play Hickock in Miller’s film, I suppose, but In Cold Blood director Richard Brooks was, I now realize, being kind to Hickock’s legacy by hiring Scott Wilson to play him in that 1967 film. Look at those strangely slanted eyes. That scowl. That crammed-together, misshapen face (a result of a car accident).
Miller showed me these photos when I mentioned I’d never seen them published anywhere except for a couple of straight-on portrait shots of the killers in an old Life magazine.

The real Richard Hickock, also by Avedon

We talked mostly about the things I’ve always loved about Capote apart from Hoffman’s transcendent performance and the general “all” of it.
Particularly Adam Kimmel’s extraordinary widescreen cinematography, and the suggestions of Andrew Wyeth’s landscapes in the Holcomb, Kansas, portions early on.
And Mychael Danna’s music, which I didn’t really get into until I clicked on the Capote website and started listening to a certain loop from the soundtrack over and over again.
Plus we talked a little bit about technical issues and what the real Holcomb, Kansas, has turned into, and when Miller knew he had gotten it right, and what he and Hoffman might be doing in the future, etc.
A good portion of our chat is here in these installments — part #1 and part #2
If I’d been into stirring the pot, I would have wondered aloud why Capote hasn’t caught any serious Best Picture action thus far. This really should have happened, and I’ve been scratching my head about it for the last couple of months.
It wasn’t that long ago that this exquisitely composed Louis Malle film with a fascinating under-vibe (partly about dread and horror, and partly about deep-down fragile emotion) was all but smothered in praise, starting with its early September debut at the Telluride Film Festival.

12.22.05, 5:23 pm

And there’s no missing the fact that it’s currently the third highest-rated film on the thrown-together Movie City News critics’ ten-best list (behind Good Night, and Good Luck and Brokeback Mountain).
I also would have brought up what I wrote a day or two ago in WIRED, which is that Hoffman was the presumptive Best Actor winner from late August to roughly mid-to-late November until Ledger began surging two or three weeks ago, and how I’m torn by these two performances…torn and divided…and so is everyone else.
It’s going to hurt a little bit no matter which one wins, so let’s hope for a replay of the 1968 Best Actress contest that resulted in a tie when The Lion in Winter‘s Katharine Hepburn and Funny Girl‘s Barbra Streisand both took home trophies.
That would be perfect…that would be really nice. And by suggesting this I feel like I’ve gotten myself off the hook a bit.
I haven’t explained what I meant by calling this article “Miller’s Crossing,” and I guess it’s because last year he was mainly the guy who directed that very cool doc called The Cruise five or six years ago, and post-Capote he’s earned passage into a very high-end realm that few directors have known or enjoyed…and the sky’s the limit from here on.

Kong Badness

I don’t want to start off on the wrong foot here. I’m a fan of Peter Jackson’s King Kong…after the 70-minute mark. A modified fan, I should say, because I’m not over-the-moon about it. I liked the rousing CG stuff and the emotional stirrings during the scenes between Kong (i.e., Andy Serkis) and Naomi Watts…but let’s not get carried away.
The point is that this 187-minute movie is full of bits that drive me up the wall, and now that Kong has run into a slowdown at the box-office and I’ve gotten my Jack- son mea culpa out of the way, it’s okay to be cut him down again. I felt a certain muted admiration for Jackson in early December after I’d first seen Kong, and I have to admit it feels more comfortable and natural being in a bash mode.

The once-celebrated, now-being-scrutinized Bronto run sequence in Peter Jackson’s King Kong

How do I vaguely detest thee, Kong? Going from the top…
* Jackson should have included an overture of Max Steiner’s music as a soundtrack-only supplement on the front of the film, to be heard in semi-darkness before the Universal logo and the credits come on, etc. This happened when I first saw Kong at the Academy theatre on the evening of Sunday, 12.4, and Steiner played like gangbusters.
* Captain Englehorn is an Idiot, Part 1: The German-born skipper (Thomas Kretschmann) presumably knows Jack Black’s Carl Denham desperately needs a fetching actress to come along on the voyage and presumably wants Denham to succeed so he’ll get fully paid, and yet the first thing he says when he meets Naomi Watt’s Ann Darrow is to express surprise that she “would take such a risk.”
* The ship is pulling out of the harbor and Adrien Brody’s Jack Driscoll is so keen on getting paid that he doesn’t feel the engines rumbling and the ship moving? He doesn’t say anything to the check-writing Denham as the ship is obviously leaving the wharf?
* Captain Englehorn is an Idiot, Part 2: Since he tells Denham that the first check bounced, it can be assumed that he hasn’t been paid a dime. And yet he’s taking his ship and crew on a long and very expensive sea voyage, trusting that a guy he obviously doesn’t trust will cough up later on.
* That ominous music on the soundtrack and that dumb-ass look of alarm on that actor’s face (is it Evan Parke’s or some other guy’s?) when those bottles of chloroform roll out from the animal cage in the ship’s storage area.

The completely idiotic Capt. Englehorn (Thomas Kretschmann, second from left with hat) contemplating the Big Wall

* All of that prolonged bonding crap between Evan Parke and Jamie Bell, and those mentions of Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”…a complete bore and a waste of time.
* Captain Englehorn is an Idiot, Part 3: As they sail the Indian Ocean he tells Denham he’s going to drop him off at the nearest Asian port since he’s just gotten a radio message that there’s a warrant out for Denham’s arrest…which will make certain that Englehorn will never get paid and will be stuck for the cost of the voyage out of his own pocket.
* Captain Englehorn is an Idiot, Part 4: As they approach Skull Island Engle- horn is told that the depth is getting shallower and shallower, and yet he proceeds right ahead and smashes the ship into the rocks.
* The area of Skull Island protected by the big wall is all rock even though the rest of the island is all prehistoric flora…green, fertile, covered in overgrowth. How does that work exactly? I’ll tell you how it works. Jackson and co-screen- writers Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens decided that the villagers live on a barren rocky peninsula.

* The Skull Island natives are ridiculous gargoyles trying to act as deran- ged and bizarre as possible because Jackson told them to do this. (Being unencumbered by matters of taste and restraint allows for all kinds of creative decisions.) I mean, some of the islanders are obviously white New Zealanders with blue or gray eyes and brown-skin makeup, and some look African-American…and it’s all bullshit.
* A Skull Island native is going to pole-vault from the island to Englehorn’s ship in order to abduct Darrow?
* The Skull Islanders are going to use a sophisticated cranking-crane system made of wood and vines and crude rope in order to lower human sacrificial offerings to Kong over the gorge behind the big wall?. Jackson came up with this idiotic contraption because he didn’t want to copy the sacrifice sequence in Merian C. Cooper’s original film too closely…period.
* The more I think about the Bronto run sequence, the more absurd it seems. This bit was cool the first time and I went with it, yes, but there’s no way those guys running under the bellies and legs of the dinosaurs wouldn’t be ketchup.
* Jackson portrays Kyle Chandler’s Bruce Baxter character as a narcissist and a coward in the early stages of the hunt on Skull Island. His defining act is to return to the ship early after chickenheartedly rationalizing that Darrow is almost certainly dead. And yet he switches gears a half-hour later by convincing Englehorn and a few others to return to the treacherous jungle terrain to help Driscoll and the survivors of Kong’s attack, and they arrive just in time to start shooting at the bugs in the pit.

* Jackson’s two snotty references to the 1933 Merian C. Cooper film. He has Darrow and Baxter say the dialogue from a romantic scene in the ’33 film as a way of saying to the audience, “Listen to that hokey dialogue.” And in Denham’s New York stage show in Act Three he recreates the look of Cooper’s Skull Island char- acters and has them do that bent-over Kong sacrifice dance.
There is no inspiration in the context of the film for this — it’s just another indulgent Peter Jackson wank. And he’s clearly making a point that Cooper’s film is hokey and antiquated, and that his is far more on top of it.

And Yet…

A guy named Steve Clark wrote last week insisting that Kong “is not a master- piece but jeez, I guess that very lack of discipline helps push it to greatness. It is a great film partly because it is so out of control, imperfect and undisciplined.
“My friends think I’m retarded. They said it was all ‘too much’ and ‘too long.’ But if this Kong weren’t too much, something would have been seriously amiss. Or at least routine. Though when I say this all I feel are people wincing at me. I feel like Armond White!

“This film is an orgy of excess and if it weren’t three hours long with too much action, it would be a lesser film. It needs to be too much but only in the right way. I think the movie is a bloated, brilliant fucking mess, but it’s a great film.
“Why? Partly because it goes semi-meta toward the end, critiquing itself, replay- ing itself as a horrible Broadway production; it lashes out at the audience for swallowing it whole.
“But most importantly, its corny old controlling idea works wonderfully. The rela- tionship between Naomi Watts and Kong is a heartbreaker. This is Peter Jack- son’s Apocalypse Now…and it’ll be all downhill from here on. (I’m speaking as a fan who thinks the LOTR films are his Godfather trilogy…sorry.)
“Jack Black = psychotically super-indulgent, obsessive filmmaker = Peter Jackson!”

Decision

Tuesday Trek

The only thing stopping me from seeing Terry Zwigoff’s Art School Confidential at an uptown screening room in Manhattan on Tuesday (12.20) was the transit strike…but of course, it didn’t.
I decided to leg it or hitch it, so I started walking from Montrose and Bushwick around 3:45 pm, and I made it to Sony headquarters at Madison Avenue and 55th Street by 5:15 pm…piece of cake.
And then I walked back with two stops and made it home by 9:30 pm. About 140 blocks, give or take. I wouldn’t like it, but I could do this every day.
It was a little over a mile from my place to the Williamsburg bridge. It was brutally cold, in the mid 20s, and at first I was thinking that I might wimp out. But speed- walking kept me warm and I soon got used to it.

A lot of places claim to sell the world’s greatest burgers but Paul’s Burgers, on the east side of 2nd Avenue just south of St. Mark’s Place, is no pretender.

A dozen or so carolers on East 3rd Street near 1st Avenue, around 9 pm. People watching from their open apartment windows cheered when they finished. The group has no name — they’re just neighborhood locals, and they do this every year.

There were no empty cabs so I thumbed a ride because it can be murder walking over a big river with the icy wind and everything. A couple of guys driving a van for a Lower East Side bakery picked me up and dropped me at 1st Avenue and 3rd street. I also caught a ride over the bridge back to Brooklyn around 9 pm.
Crisis brings out the charity in people, and you can’t do better in a crisis than be in the company of New Yorkers.
The first ride put me ahead of schedule so I stopped for a quick one at Paul’s Bur- gers on 2nd Avenue just south of St. Marks Place.
On the way back on East 3rd Street I came upon a group of Christmas carolers singing “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing.” I took some shots and fell instantly in love with these guys. Others were stopping and, I gathered, having the same reaction. It sounds like a holiday cliche to say this, but it was a truly beautiful moment.

The two guys who picked me up on the Brooklyn side of the Williamsburg Bridge on Tuesday, 12.20.05, around 4:10 pm.

Looking up from northwest corner of Park Avenue and 38th Street — Tuesday, 12.20.05, 4:50 pm.

Big Daddy’s Diner, 239 Park Ave., New York, NY 10017

South-facing facade of Grand Central Station — Tuesday, 12.20.05, 4:45 pm.

Called on the Carpet

The New York Times‘ “Carpetbagger” blogger David Carr ran an item at 8:45 this morning (12.21) titled “Have the Terrorists Won?”
It read, “Munich, which got pounded coming out of the gate, seems to be enjoying a bit of a bounce. The L.A. Times columnist Patrick Goldstein still favors Broke- back, but says that Munich has a shot, in part because people are starting to see the movie instead of just the controversy.”
To which I have two things to say: (1) Munich is a pretty good film that hasn’t a chance because of all the people slamming it for being repetitious and tedious and all the politicos trying to kill it for its views about dealing with terrorism, and (2) Is the Carpetbagger me a “terrorist” and if he is, what the fuck?

I’m guessing that Carr is probably referring to the people who’ve written political attacks on Munich. But on the chance he might have been referring to me, I wrote Carr and said…
“So people taking the pulse of this town and setting their insect antennae to high-sensitivity mode and determining that the general response to Munich will not result in a Best Picture Oscar (and perhaps not even a Best Picture nomination) are ‘terrorists’?
“I get the inference (or I think I do) because you started out with a mention of the Goldstein column, which seemed to mainly address the Hollywood side of the rumpus.
“All I know is that I’m trying to read the situation as clearly as possible. I found Munich to be a pretty good film with a cruddy third act, but more importantly I’ve heard from the get-go that (a) others are less taken with it, (b) some Jewish Academy members are TRULY DOWN ON IT and loathe the political message it’s sending, (c) that the words ‘repetitive’ and ‘self-important’ apply.
“I am also one of many who recoiled in distaste (and continue to recoil in distate) from that obnoxious Time magazine proclamation that Munich, lo and behold, is ‘Spielberg’s Secret Masterpiece.’
“Am I a terrorist-minded observer for — okay, I admit it — chuckling with satisfaction over the news media spectacle of a pseudo-legendary director with a massive ego…a legendary industry figure famous for commanding obeisance gestures from other primates with a mere arching of his eyebrows…being hit and possibly (who knows?) brought down?

Mathieu Kassovitz, Eric Bana in Steven Spielberg’s Munich

“Am I a terrorist at heart because it frankly feels good inside to see Spielberg, a gifted director but also, his few excellent films aside, the most successful hack in Hollywood history…a man of obviously limited intellectual vigor with more money than God being tackled and taken down by guys in the trench? That’s a bad thing?
“We’re living in a very skewed, cynical and twisted world.
“All I am, really, is a man of constant sorrow whose days are sometimes briefly brightened when Munich implodings happen…and they don’t happen enough.
“This reasonably good movie has never been Oscar calibre, not really…and I hate it when people reflexively bend over to smooch Spielberg’s ass.
“Munich is a fairly thoughtful, passably good film that says the right thing, agreed, but in a lot of journalist minds it has been a big presumptive Oscar pick from the get-go because it’s a Steven Spielberg film, because the subject is ‘important’ (i.e., about the fate of Israel), and above all because it’s being released in late December.
“And now there’s a backswing in its favor because people are taking a second look and…what?…feeling sorry for it because ‘terrorists’ have been over-zealous in their attacks?

Geoffrey Rush, Bana

“I guess I can confess the truth now. I’m actually a triple agent working for Univer- sal. The plan all along was to try and create a sympathy backlash for Munich by people like calling a spade a spade and predicting its downfall.
“Like the plan hatched by Marlene Dietrich to save Tyrone Power in Witness for the Prosecution, I told my Universal brown-bag employer (a guy I met after-hours in an underground garage in Century City) just after that disastrous Time cover that the ony way out would be for bloggers like myself to over-play the ‘Munich is toast’ card…only then would industry and media opinion eventually swing back in its favor.”

New Logo

It used to be Lions Gate — now it’s LIONSGATE. The change was announced last week at a pleasant press breakfast held at Lion’s Gate…I mean, LIONSGATE headquarters in Santa Monica.

Kong Shortfall

“I am from Mexico and the King Kong opened here last Friday. I went to see it on Saturday and expected a big line in a theater were you usually have to wait about an hour in line if you want to get a good seat for a tentpole flick. Anyway, I arrived an hour early and only half the seats had been sold, with the theater opening its doors with no line at all about half hour before the movie started.
“Eventually, I have to say, the theater did fill up, but it was kind of weird to see such a big movie performing like this in that theater during opening weekend.
“I’ve been kind of testing friends of mine about their eagerness to see this movie and the consensus is pretty discouraging. Most of my female friends just don’t care about it. And while some guys are certainly excited, most of them said that they would see it because it was the movie for the holidays, meaning that I got a vibe leaning more towards the likes of having to watch the movie instead of just wanting to.” — Pepe Ruiloba

Del Mar Nation

“I agree with your thoughts on Ennis Del Mar-ism. I’ve been and still am to a certain degree guilty of it, staying in a job that I like but not risking failure with something that I love. But I disagree that straight couples or straight people in general won’t be able to relate to this movie.
“The same thing that Ennis Del Mar wasn’t able to overcome in the movie is the same reason I think the general population might not want to see this movie or relate to it. Fear. Fear of the unknown. Fear of caring about or relating to people who engage in acts seen as a sin in the eyes of God.
“But the theme of love is universal. Our search for meaningful relationships is universal. We all do it. Sometimes searching our whole lives. And I’d venture to say that most of us have been in the position of one or both of these characters; loving someone so wholly who couldn’t love you back or being in a relationship with someone who you couldn’t give what they wanted. Everyone has loved. And anyone who denies it is a liar.

“The thing that hit me hardest and what grieved me the most, though, is how legitimate I felt Ennis Del Mar’s fear actually was. The flashback sequence of him as a child seeing what he saw. Living in a time when being gay was kept totally in the closet. Not to mention being in Bumblefuck, Wyoming, where I’m sure there isn’t much if any of a gay community. And being in a place where people STILL aren’t too accepting of that lifestyle.
“My sadness came not because I can personally relate (I’m a straight white male), but because I feel empathy for people who have to live with this kind of conflict. Growing up to believe it’s wrong and yet still feeling it. Feeling such a strong connection for someone but being afraid you’ll be outcast or worse beaten or killed. This shit happens for real. Can we say Matthew Shepard just to name one?
“And it’s not fair. What do I have to deal with being a white, heterosexual, middle-class male? Practically nothing. I can love who I want to. I won’t be judged by the color of my skin or who I choose to have sex with. I won’t be compromised because I’m female. I’m priveleged. But that doesn’t mean I think it’s right and don’t feel or think about the people who aren’t.
“If people can get over their own fears relating to homosexuality and put those aside, and to see the movie for what it really is — a tragic love story — then they can easily relate to the themes in this movie and be moved by it.” — Josh Bihary

“p.s.: I think the Brokeback Mountain numbers speak for themselves and I hope this movie does well and gets the support it deserves come Oscar time. Super high per screen averages over two weekends. $2 million from 69 screens! That’s pretty impressive if you ask me.
“I personally went to see it Sunday evening in Seattle and at the Egyptian theater for the 7pm show the line was literally down the block and around the corner. We went to the other theater it was playing at, the Harvard Exit, and immediately got in line. Within 15 minutes, the line was nearly as long.
“I even saw older folks in line as well. If it can keep this kind of interest up, it will easily make its money back and then some.”

Grabs

Former Hollywood Elsewhere columnist Jett Wells, a senior at Brookline High Schhol, during track meet in indoor Roxbury track stadium — Sunday, 12.18.05, 1:15 pm.

Poinsettias on front porch area of Le Pain Quotidien at Melrose and Westbourne

The great Werner Herzog (Grizzly Man, The White Diamond) during chat at Director’s Guild last Friday, 12.16.05, 12:45 pm.

Regarding Violence

If you’ve seen David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence, you know it’s a philoso- phical double-dealer, and this is what makes it a complex, cut-above film. It’s not just saying violence is a kind of terrible virus — it’s also saying it has a way of turning us on.
When Jack (Ashton Holmes), the son of cafe owner Tom Stall (Viggo Mortenson), defuses a potentially violent encounter with a school bully by sarcastically acknow- ledging the other guy’s alpha male superiority, etc., you admire Jack for being a hip and clever guy.

Viggo Mortenson as small-town nice guy Tom Stall in David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence

But when they meet a second time and Jack, inspired by his father’s having become a hero because he killed a couple of bad guys, wails on the bullies and leaves them bruised and groaning, several people in the theatre (at L.A.’s Grove plex) were clapping and whoo-whooing.
Is there anyone out there who thinks Cronenberg didn’t deliver this scene in just the right way so he would get this reaction?
And of course, the steam that comes hissing out of Edie Stall (Maria Bello) isn’t just about feelings of betrayal.
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Edie is furious, naturally, when she realizes her husband has been lying to her for years about his past. But when she and Tom have that end-of-Act-Two fight and she goes “fuck you, Joey” and walks off and Tom grabs her by the ankle and they do that thing on the stairs (a scene that wasn’t scripted, by the way…it just “hap- pened” when they shot it), it’s obvious that Tom’s killer moves have lit a fire in someone’s furnace.
And yet the violence that has happened has obviously stunned and hurt this family of four. In that haunting final scene, Cronenberg shows us that Jack and his younger sister are willing to forgive and forget as they offer food to Tom, but there’s not much assurance that things will henceforth be fine…Cronenberg leaves us in limbo.

Jack Stall (Ashton Holmes) and the high-school baddies

That’s filmmaking, pally. Lob the ball to the audience in the final frame and let them sort it all out…nice.
One beef with this film: Peter Suschitzky’s cinemography looks like it was soaked in Bolivian coffee during lab processing. I started to wonder if the projector lamp at the Grove’s theatre #1 was dying, but the lamps in the other theatres were fine. The last film I remember being this muddy-looking was Fight Club.

Knockout

I liked so many films in Toronto I was looking forward to trashing two or three upon my return to Los Angeles. So to get things rolling I went to a screening last night (Thursday, 9.22) of Rodrigo Garcia’s Nine Lives (Magnolia) and…shit, another good one.
It’s nine interwoven shorts about women in relationships that aren’t really working, relationships they’d like to be rid of on one level but can’t quite extricate themsel- ves from, and what’s holding them.

Glenn Close, Dakota Fanning in Rodrigo Garcia’s Nine Lives (Magnolia)

Each story is a part-muddle, part-riddle and a fascinating drill into some aroused places in the heart, and five out of the nine are direct hits.
I’ve now seen two dramas over the last week and a half about female turmoil and tough choices, but which operate well beyond the usual chick-flick realm….this and In Her Shoes.
Nine Lives played Sundance last January and then the L.A. Film Festival three months ago…why haven’t I heard anything? Am I alone on this one? I don’t care.
Once again we have a south-of-the-border director — Rodrigo Garcia, a colleague of the great Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu — hitting the ball deep into left-center field and scoring a ground-rule double, if not a triple.
Nine Lives isn’t quite a homer but it’s much better than I expected. It has that same connective-tissue, life-is-short, death-is-just-around-the-corner thing that we’ve all gotten to know through Innaritu’ Amores Perros and 21 Grams.

Nine Lives director-writer Rodrigo Garcia

Neither Innaritu or his screenwriting partner Guillermo Ariagga (who also wrote The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada) have a co-writing credit, but they might as well have. Garcia is clearly coming from the same place…another Mexican heavy- cat soul man.
Garcia’s writing and the acting are exceptional all through it, and there are two pieces in particular about obsessive sexual love that knocked me on the floor.
The best of the two costars Robin Wright Penn and Jason Isaacs. Set entirely in the aisles of an L.A. supermarket, it’s a marvel of tight writing, dancing camera work, perfectly-pitched acting and emotional sizzle.
The other is a fascinating piece about a woman (Amy Brenneman) and her father attending a funeral of a woman who’s committed suicide, and the soon-enough realization that the woman is a former wife of the deceased woman’s deaf husband (William Fichtner), and that their attraction is not only still going on but may have pushed the wife into suicide, and that their feelings are so urgent that Brenneman and Fichtner can’t help finding a private room and closing the door.
I don’t know which of the two is more of a jaw-dropper, but together they’re worth the admission, the popcorn and having to watch the ads before the trailers.
There are at least three other strong entries. About a financially struggling, clearly frustrated 40ish couple (Stephen Dillane, Holly Hunter) visiting a couple (Isaacs again, Molly Parker) they believe to be on a happier, more comfortable plane. About a terrified wife (Kathy Baker) preparing for breast-removal surgery and bitching at her husband (Joe Mantegna) as she works through her feelings. And about a loving mother (Glenn Close) and her young daughter (Dakota Fanning) visiting a graveyard.

Nine Lives costars Robin Wright Penn, Aidan Quinn at last January’s Sundance Film Festival

The cast also includes Elpidia Carillo, Lisa Gay Harden, Ian McShane, Mary Kay Place, Sydney Tamiia Poitier, Aidan Quinn, Miguel Sandoval, Amanda Seyfried and Sissy Spacek.
The other four are decent, good enough, carry the ball, etc. A movie like this is like a relay race. Not every segment can bring the fans to their feet.
Nine Lives will open in Los Angeles and New York on 10.14, and will start fanning out the following week.

Moonlighting

After seeing A History of Violence at the Grove, I went to see Kate Krystowiak’s Aftermath, a 28-minute short that she stars in and wrote the script for, at the Laemmle Fairfax last night (9.24).
An above-average effort, it’s an emotionally upfront piece about a romantically impressionable woman named Sara who suffers an emotional bruising from an attractive young guy who moves into her place. The hurt is a result of your typical modern-asshole-boyfriend tendencies (egotism and an inability to share intimacy, for the most part), but also from Sara’s willingess to turn a blind eye at the get-go.
Aftermath could stand some tightening and re-shuffling here and there (film festi- vals don’t like shorts that aren’t 15 minutes long or less), but the hurt that comes out of Krystowiak’s Sara character feels very real.

Aftermath editor Teresa Bianca Sciortino, star-writer Kate Krystowiak at Guys — Saturday, 9.24, 12:25 am. The film’s director, Jon Palardis, is visible to the left.

There are two things missing: hot sex and empathy for Sara. There’s a revelation near the end that the boyfriend (Charlie Capen) talked about himself incessantly during their first date and didn’t ask Sara a single question….hello? This is the kind of guy a girl might want to rape or have an affair with, but move in with…?
An audience will empathize with the participants in an ill-fated relationship if it’s about fantastic Olympic-level schtupping, but it’s hard to put yourself in the shoes of a character who ignores warning signs as blatant as the one referred to at the end of this film…sorry, but that’s a fact.
Krystowiak has a quality when she’s confident enough to just be still and let what seems like a kind of natural Polish sadness in her leak out. She needs to just “be.” She has a kind of eastern-European, slightly off-pretty soulfulness…and the less she smiles and tries to sell her perkiness, the more this comes through.
Krystowiak needs to be brought out by a director with the chops of a Krzysztof Kieslowski or a Jerzy Skolimowski. She could have nailed Jane Asher’s part in Deep End, or been the sensuous-girlfriend-in-the-TV-screen in Skolimowski’s Moonlighting.
There was an okay after-party at Guys, a bar right between Jerry’s Deli and Dom- inick’s on Beverly near San Vicente. $10 bucks to get in, $10 bucks a drink… fuck…but it’s mostly an outdoor back-patio thing and I’d be lying by omission if I didn’t say that a very high percentage of the women were drop-dead gorgeous.

Where’s the Bite?

The Academy people who will vote for the Best Feature Doc are thought to be into “bite.” Okay…but how does that square with the general feeling that March of the Penguins, a doc so without bite it could be said to be all gums, is favored to win?
And if weren’t for this ice-frosted Waiting-for-Godot movie, the big favorite would probably be Mad Hot Ballroom, and how “bite” is that? Cute fifth-graders learning to dance and romance and grow up…?

Murderball

I know it’s a crying shame that Eugene Jarecki’s Why We Fight, my hands-down choice for the year’s best documentary, is out of the game in part because it aired twice on England’s BBC 4 on 3.23.05.
A brilliant summation on the militant tendencies of U.S. foreign policy over the past 60 years, Why We Fight had a one-week Academy qualifying run in a Marina del Rey theatre last August, and the Academy rulebook states that “no type of tele- vision or internet transmission shall occur at any time prior to the first day of the Qualifying Exhibition”…so that’s that.
I’ve heard that Jarecki has an argument with the Academy…something about a vaguely-worded announcement about a rule-change, which led to a misunder- standing about the allowability of the BBC airing…or some such shit. I called Jarecki four times yesterday to get into it, but he didn’t get back.
On Friday morning I read in a Gregg Kilday piece in the Hollywood Reporter that Why We Fight has also “been ruled ineligible because it has had at least three TV airings in Norway, Sweden and Finland.”
What other docs might wind up nominated? I mean, if you give a shit about this stuff. I’m right on the verge of not caring. It’s also my life, my strife…I shouldn’t admit to this.

Favela Rising

Naturally, obviously, incontestably…Penn Jillette and and Paul Provenza’s The Aristocrats, a doc that people saw and got all over and kept playing and playing, mainly (I think) because it works on at least three different levels, being (a) funny, (b) appalling and yet a surprisingly warm “family film,” and (b) an educational riff about the nature of creativity. It was such an obvious choice I forgot to put it into this piece when I wrote it late yesterday.
I also forgot to mention Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man (Lion’s Gate)…I must have a screw loose. It’s only one of the year’s best films bar none.
Alex Gibney’s Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room…right? Smart, sharp, hard-driving, amusing…important subject, well-reviewed…gotta be there.
And Murderball, of course. Original, intense, fierce…the rumble spreading for the last few months…it’s sunk in to the level where even Academy people are hearing it…Murderball-it.
And Marc Levin’s Protocols of Zion, a 93-minute doc about anti-Semitism and the post-9/11 scattershot blame game.
And David LaChappelle’s Rize, about the South Central dance thing…I guess. I’m not feeling the energy right now, but that’s just me.
A Brazilian doc called Favella Rising might cause a stir. It’s about a onetime drug-dealer named Anderson Sa who evolved into a kind of Malcolm X-like social revolutionary… leading a rebellion against “teenage drug armies and sustained by corrupt police,” blah blah….fine.

Penn and Teller delivering the now-infamous, staggeringly unfunny punch line.

And I’m told that Darwin’s Nightmare could register. A doc on the effect of fishing the predatory Nile perch in Tanzania’s Lake Victoria…hmmm. A metaphor about voracious appetites of all shapes and origins.
If Martin Scorsese’s No Direction Home: Bob Dylan had cared to qualify itself (i.e., by playing in some obscure New York or Los Angeles theatre last March and then going with the PBS airing and DVD release six months later), it would almost certainly be one of the five. This is a film with bite, snap, brass and bazookas.

This Is Bad

I can’t overstate what a besotted, drugged-out feeling it is to be back in Los Angeles…to once again stand on the roof of a certain West Hollywood high-rise and smell the faintly noxious air and gaze out at the milky haze and tell myself, “It’s okay…despair not.”
There is only way to live in this town and that’s to crawl into the cave of your own head and your work, and to feed off screenings and DVDs and the faces and bodies of pretty women, and to savor those special times in which you happen to be in the company of similarly diseased and/or disgruntled persons like myself.

Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood — Tuesday, 9.20, 1:40 pm.

Like, for instance, the amazing Joss Whedon.
I would find it astonishing to find myself in the pasta-and-sauces department of Pavilions and all of a sudden…Whedon! Just standing there in boring clothes like a regular mortal and telling himself, “I can’t eat pasta any more, certainly not in the evening. Face it — those days are over.”
A portion of my L.A. lethargy is indicated by the fact that I’m back to reading Defamer and going “hyeh-hyeh” like Beevis and Butthead. I didn’t go to Defamer once during the Toronto Film Festival, and not all that much when I was living in Brooklyn. I like Defamer — it’s a very well-written thing and a necessary component — but you have to be a little sick in your soul to be into it in the first place.
I could feel the old vibe swirling around me like that banshee from Darby O’Gill and the Little People, so I did the sensible thing and evacuated myself off the roof of the high-rise and made my way over to Tower Records and bought the DVD of No Direction Home: Bob Dylan.
I tried to wangle a freebie from the Paramount Home Video publicist who took Martin Blythe’s place, but she didn’t call back until today. I tried to buy it yesterday at Laser Blazer in the early afternoon, only to be told it had sold out. The Tower Video guys, who had plenty of copies, said it was moving moderately well but nothing to write home about.
I nodded off for about 20 minutes when I saw David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence in Cannes and I didn’t get around to it in Toronto, so tonight I get to absorb the whole thing at the American Cinematheque, more or less alert…down for it.

Looking due north from the roof of a condo building at Alta Loma and Holloway — Tuesday, 9.20, 8:45 am.

That means blowing off the all-media of Flightplan, but sometimes you just have to say no.
I’m a little surprised to be riffing rather indulgently about the stink of Los Angeles seeping back into my bones (that’s a Charles Bukowksi line), and I promise to get back into matters of substance fairly soon.
Except melancholia is a matter of substance if you live here.
I’ve got a screening conflict next Tuesday evening — Tony Scott’s Domino vs. Joss Whedon’s Serenity. Well, not really. I would be squirming a bit if Whedon and I were talking in the pasta-and-sauces aisle right now and he was asking me, “So, are you going?”…but we’re not so I’m cool.
The only thing that gives me concern about Domino is an observation in David Katz’s profile of Keira Knightley in the current issue of Esquire. He says that Domino is “a messy movie, often intentionally, often not.”

Turnaround

For years the notion of Catherine Keener being in this or that film was not, for me, a reason to celebrate. She always seemed to play users, takers, manipulators… usually more pissed off than not.
Not each and every time, but I know this impression started to take hold in the late ’90s. I liked her frustrated actress character in Living in Oblivion back in ’96, but I remember going “whoa” after she played the heartless Maxine in Being John Malkovich.
I forget how many other razor-blade women she played in other films, but it seemed as if there were more than a few.

Capote costar Catherine Keener.

Now I feel rather differently, and all due to Keener’s last four roles — Daniel Day Lewis’s would-be signficant other in The Ballad of Jack and Rose, the quip-smart government agent in The Interpreter, Steve Carell’s sweet, spiritually-centered love interest in The 40 Year-Old Virgin, and Harper Lee, Truman Capote’s patient, all-seeing best friend, in Capote.
The Capote performance ought to result in a Best Supporting Actress nomination. It really and truly should — I can’t imagine anyone saying “no, I disagree” — and not just because Keener is so moving and touching in this role, but because of her image change.
I’m presuming I’m not the only person with this impression. Keener has always been a “good” actress, but now I think of her in terms of who I perceive her to be possibly be, based on an amalgam of the last four roles.
I was thinking of mentioning this during last night’s discussion at the Los Angeles County Museum’s Leo S. Bing Theatre after a screening of Capote, but it seemed too kiss-assy.
Keener, looking great, was sitting there along with her Oscar-worthy cohorts — director Bennett Miller, Philip Seymour Hoffman (a lock for Best Actor), Clifton Collins, Jr. (near-lock for Best Supporting Actor), and screenwriter Dan Futterman (ditto in the Best Adapted Screenplay category).

(l. to r.) Capote screenwriter Dan Futterman, star Philip, costar Clifton Collins, Jr., star Philip Seymour Hoffman, director Bennett Miller, and a portion of costar Catherine Keener at L.A. County Museum’s Leo S. Bing theatre — Tuesday, 9.20, 9:50 pm.

LACMA’s film department head Ian Birnie asked each a single question, and then asked the audience to chime in.
I asked Hoffman and Miller if they had somehow tried to suggest that Hoffman, who’s about 5’10” or so in real life, was closer to Truman Capote’s height of 5’2″. It sure seems this way in the film. They ignored my question, but Miller delivered a good line: “Philip lost 40 pounds and 4 inches for this role.”
I also asked about a little kid whom Capote happens to notice during a brief visit to a grocery store. About three years old, the kid has a toy pistol and does a kind of Diane Arbus-y routine for Capote with two or three grotesque expressions. Miller said this scene was some kind of tribute to Arbus….whatever.
A woman friend who came with me called Capote “one of the best films I’ve ever seen.” It sure as shit is one of the best of the year, a fact expected to be acknow- ledged by the Academy.
Wait a minute…have I said this before?

Shrinking Hoffman

“Since the Capote panelists didn’t answer your question about making Philip Seymour Hoffman appear shorter for his role, I thought I’d offer the following tidbit from our October issue, which offers insights from cinematographer Adam Kimmel:
“‘One overriding concern occupied the filmmakers from start to finish: how to make Hoffman appear as petite as Capote,” it reads. “The actor is 5 or 6 inches taller than the 5’ 2” Capote, and has a broader physique.

Capote

“‘In testing and during our first week of shooting, we learned which combination of wardrobe, lenses and framing would make Phil appear smaller,’ says Kimmel. ‘To help with the illusion, the actors who shared the frame with Hoffman frequently stood on boxes during stationary scenes, or walked on small, elevated platforms during walk-and-talks.
“The first time Capote and Lee see the Clutter farm, they are shown in a wide shot, with their backs to the camera. Keener, who is roughly the same height as Hoffman, is standing on a box that added 4″ to her height.” — Stephen Pizzello, Executive Editor, American Cinematographer.

Dylan/Scorsese

“You hit it with your words on the Dylan documentary. It’s a great portrait of America by Scorsese, an indisputable version of why Dylan had to crash at the end of that period, and a true inspiration for all of us to keep on and to keep on creating (Dylan being a real example of James Joyce’s description of an artist, one who has to live by ‘cunning and exile.’)
“I’ve been lucky to see Dylan perform a lot, from his comeback tour with The Band in ’75 (still one of the best shows ever) to all three nights that he played last Spring here in St. Louis at a small venue. (Lots of people came to that out of curiousity and were stunned by the music — you could see their respect and joy grow throughout those evenings.)

“He’s an endless source of a rock ‘n roll beat and a poetic charge. I have a new favorite lyric – from one of his songs I didn’t know, ‘Up To Me,’ which is covered on a recent tribute album by Roger McGuinn — ‘I’ve only smiled once in 14 months and I didn’t do it consciously.’
“But along with the interviews in No Direction Home, some of his utterances knock me out as well. When questioned why he agreed to appear along with his sacred music in, of all things, a Victoria’s Secret commercial, he reportedly said, ‘Was I not supposed to do that?'” — Joe Hanrahan.

Toronto’s Eleven

I’ve only been coming here since ’98, but it seemed to me like the best Toronto Film Festival ever. Too many good films, too many I didn’t get to see, the energy always there…every day felt like a full deck.
I saw (or re-saw) eleven films here that I know will matter in terms of awards or box-office or causing some kind of a stir over the next thirteen and a half weeks, and that felt fairly bountiful.

Brokeback Mountain costars Heath Ledger, Michelle Williams

I’m just sorry that the festival fathers didn’t re-show some of the favorites this past weekend (like they used to) so I could’ve seen some of the films that I couldn’t get to for whatever reason. Now I won’t get to see Bettie Page until next year…not good.
The goodies, in order of admiration…
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1. Brokeback Mountain: I didn’t expect to be as moved as I was. Not a “gay cowboy” movie, but a film about the costs of love denied and lost. My idea of a profoundly sad film, and obviously a love story of a strikingly original cast… certainly in terms of multiplex movies. Oscar potential: A probable Best Picture candidate (if it doesn’t tank financially). Ditto Ang Lee for Best Director. Heath Ledger, who gives the best performance of his career here, will almost certainly snag a Best Actor nom. Commercial prospects: No telling, although I’d like to say quality sells itself and let it go at that. I know this movie is a kind of break- through, and therefore a marketing challenge as far as the cultural foot-draggers are concerned.
2. No Direction Home: Bob Dylan: An electrifying music-history saga, a powerful American epic and Martin Scorsese’s finest film since My Voyage in Italy. Oscar prospects: It’s not going out theatrically so Oscar doesn’t figure. Commercial potential: The numbers for the doc’s PBS airing on 9.26 and 9.27 should be huge; ditto the sales and rental for the DVD (in stores on Tuesday, 9.20).

The Tsotsi gang

3. Capote: Searing, fascinating drama about a writer who pours his heart out and uses every ploy in the book to produce a groundbreaking novel, but loses his soul in the process. So deft and mature it’s almost like Louis Malle directed it. Oscar prospects: Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s performance as Truman Capote is an absolute lock for a Best Actor nomination, and I really think the film is good enough to be in the running for a Best Picture nomination. Clifton Collins, Jr. deserves a nom for Best Supporting Actor, Bennett Miller for Best Director, and Dan Futterman for Best Adapted Screenplay. Commercial potential: Everyone who’s ever heard the name “Truman Capote” is going to want to see Hoffman. One of those films that every semi-educated soul over the age of 25 or 26 is going to have to see…right?
4. Tsotsi: Emotionally pungent drama about the spiritual awakening of a socio- pathic teenage killer after he finds an infant boy in the back seat of a car he’s stolen. Winner of Toronto Film Festival’s audience award. Oscar prospects: A shoo-in for Best Foreign Language Film (it’s spoken in “Tsotsi-taal,” a mixture of several tongues), but obviously only if it gets picked up right away and pushed into theatres before 12.31. Commercial potential: A toughie…will depend very much on word-of-mouth, reviews, how good the marketing campaign is, etc.
5. A History of Violence: David Cronenberg’s strongest and most commercial film since The Fly. Oscar prospects: Limited, although William Hurt could push through with a Best Supporting Actor nomination. Commerical potential: On the modest side.

Walk the Line director James Mangold (l.), star Joaquin Pheonix

6. In Her Shoes: Best upscale chick flick since Terms of Endearment. Oscar prospects: Forget what Manohla Dargis or Stephanie Zacharek may or may not say about it — the fact that it emotionally connects means Shoes could go all the way and land noms for Best Picture, Best Director (Curtis Hanson), Best Screen- play, Best Actress (Toni Collette), etc. An assured Best Supporting Actress nom for Shirley MacLaine. Commercial potential: Very big, although Fox is going to have to work hard at first to sell it to the women who don’t read reviews, or who move their lips when they do.
7. Walk the Line: Admirably pared-down, ultra-believable Johnny Cash biopic…rooted and steady on its feet. Oscar prospects: Guaranteed Best Actor and Best Actress noms for Joaquin Pheonix and Reese Witherspoon; possible Best Picture and Best Director (James Mangold). Commercial potential: I don’t think it’s going to do what Ray did, but reasonably spirited business seems likely.
8. Thank You for Smoking: Sharp, clever, quippy…lacking in emotional gravitas. Oscar prospects: Not that kind of thing. Commercial potential: Good to pretty good.
9. Mrs. Henderson Presents: Not a massive home run but a very brisk serving of rudely effete British humor in a perky period vein. A lively near-perfect film for the over-30 (or do I really mean over-40?) crowd. Oscar prospects: A better-than- decent chance of Dame Judy Dench landing a Best Actress nomination…if the Weinstein Co. campaigns hard and smart for it. Commercial potential: Rather good.

Why We Fight director Eugene Jarecki during q & a at Cumberland plex during Toronto Film Festival

10. Sketches of Frank Gehry: Sydney Pollack’s doc is a highly intelligent look at an exceptional man, and a profound contact high. Oscar prospects: There’s no theatrical distribution deal, and even if it lands one it may be too late (or so I understand) due to Academy rule about August deadline. Commercial potential: The only viewing opportunity for sure right now is a PBS “American Masters” airing in the fall of ’06.
11. Why We Fight: Eugene Jarecki’s doc about the carrot-and-stick relationship between American interventionism over the decades and the military-industrial complex is utterly fascinating, well-sculpted, and stirring. Oscar prospects: Good potential to figure among the Best Feature Doc nominees. Commercial potential : Good.
As for the rest…
The Modest but Very Welcome Return of Steven Soderbergh: Bubble
Good, Fairly Good, Decent: Mary (dir: Abel Ferrara), Cache (dir: Michael Haneke), Tristram Shandy (dir: Michael Winterbottom…although I’m leaning on the word of trusted sources, as I was shut out of the press screening last Monday), Everything is Illuminated (dir: Liev Schreiber), Imagine Me and You (dir: Ol Parker), L’enfer (dir: Davis Tanovic), Vers le Sud (dir: Laurent Cantet).
Shortfalls: North Country, Stoned, John & Jane, Romance & Cigarettes, Lie With Me.

Capote costars Catherine Keener, Phillip Seymour Hoffman

Near-wipeout: Elizabethtown…but an obit would be premature at this stage, as a re-edit is in the works.
Wipeouts: Tideland, Revolver, Wassup Rockers, The Cabin Movie, Mrs. Harris.
If only the music grabbd me…: The Devil and Daniel Johnston.
Gloob gloob: Shopgirl, The President’s Last Bang, The White Masai, Mistress of Spices, Sorry Haters.
Martyr-Ball: The War Within, Paradise Now
Missed ‘Em: Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man, Iberia, Tristram Shandy, The Matador, Edison, Jesus is Magic, The World’s Fastest Indian, The Proposition, The Notorious Bettie Page, Wah-Wah, Tim Burton’s The Corpse Bride (didn’t care that much about seeing this one), Oliver Twist, Bee Season.

Bad Guy and a Baby

Gavin Hood’s Tsotsi has become the big stand-out at the end of the Toronto Film Festival.
It was first shown on Wednesday night, right opposite the In Her Shoes viewing at Roy Thomson Hall, and by this time many of the top-tier journalists had left town, so there haven’t been a lot of insiders hopping up and down about it. And yet today — Saturday, 9.17 — it won the Toronto Film Festival People’s Choice award.

Tsotsi star Presley Chweneyagae (l.) and the film’s director-writer Gavin Hood outside Toronto’s Sutton Place hotel — Friday, 9.16, 8:55 am.

I also know Tsotsi has aroused the persistent passions of at least one would-be distributor. And that it touched enough people at the recently-wrapped Edinburgh Film Festival to win the Audience Award, along with the Michael Powell award for Best New British Feature.
Even the notoriously hard-nosed critic Len Klady told me early this afternoon, “I hear it’s very good.”
As I waited to see it Thursday afternoon I thought I might be in for another hyper- cut City of God crime-in-the-slums movie, but it was something quite different.
Set in a rancid Johannesburg shantytown, Tsotsi (pronounced “Sawt-see”) is about an ice-cold teenage thug (Presley Chweneyagae) who discovers a small spring of compassion in himself when he starts to care for an infant boy who happens to be in the back seat of a car he’s stolen.
What is this film doing exactly? It’s reminding audiences in a believably non-sappy way there are sparks of kindness in even the worst of us. It’s a rather Christian- minded movie, in a sense.
It may sound sentimental and manipulative, but it’s not. But neither is it sadistic or repellent in some flashy, gun-fetish way. It’s real and unblinking, but it also lets you feel what’s happening. But not too much…just enough.

Tsotsi star Presley Chweneyagae

Emotions suppressed but leaking out anyway…the emotion you’d rather not feel but which won’t leave you the fuck alone…the emotions that you stopped letting in when you were eight or nine but have always been there…conveying these in a film is always a stronger, more poignant thing than having some emotionally healthy actor or actress cry their eyes out or hug everyone to death…please.
I said this in a Wired item posted on Friday morning, and here it is again: unlike Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne’s Palme d’Or-winning L’enfant, which it vaguely resembles, Tsotsi has a potential to snag some decent coin as well as Oscar nominations (Best Foreign-Language Film, Best Actor, etc.), critics awards, Golden Globe awards, etc.
How do I know Tsotsi will sell tickets? Because my good and kindly Toronto friend Leora Conway, who know what she knows but isn’t tremendously knowledgeable or sophisticated about movies, went apeshit after seeing Tsotsi at the Wednesday night premiere…she was beaming when she told me about it afterwards, and said it made her cry at the end.
Bad guys and wailing babies…it’s bound to be the very next phase. Tsotsi, L’enfant and Michael Davis’s Shoot ‘Em Up, the comically violent Don Murphy-New Line movie with Clive Owen as a gun-toting Man of Few Words protecting a baby who’s only a day or two old. Any others?
Wait a minute…I see a TV series in this. A wise-cracking yuppie assassin (think John Cusack) whose girlfriend dies just after giving birth..this hard-assed guy has to juggle diapers and nanny-care while taking care of business. And he’s got a nosey female neighbor who’s secretly hot for him.

Tsotsi costar Terry Pheto as Miriam, a single mom who establishes a bond with Chweneyagae’s street thug.

I had breakfast early this morning with Hood, Tsotsi‘s director and writer (the film is based on a novel by South African playwright Athol Fugard), and Presley Chweneyagae, who plays the title role, at the Sutton Place hotel, and we batted it around some.
Hood said he’s always been “terrified” of sentimentality and “being mushy” in movies, and says that his mantra during shooting was that “there’s always got to be more going on within a character than what he lets out.”
Hood said he wanted to use formal compositions and a slower editing style than the one popularized by City of God “because I didn’t want to seem like I was saying ‘me too’…I didn’t want to come in second.”
Hood says he feels more of an affinity with the shooting style of director Walter Salles (The Motorcycle Diaries) and particularly Sales’ Central Station than he does with City of God director Fernando Meirelles.
The language that Chweneyagae and his costars speak is known as “Tsotsi-taal” (the first word meaning “thug” and the second meaning “language”). It’s a mixture of several tongues including English, Afrikaans, Zulu, Xhosa, Sothu and Tswana.
To qualify for Academy consideration, Tsotsi is opening in South Africa today for one week.

Tsotsi gang (l. to r.): Aap (Kenneth Nkosi), Tsotsi (Presley Chweneyagae), a failed teacher (Mothusi Magano) and Butcher (Zenzo Ngqobe)

Hood showed the finished film to Fugard, 87, at his San Diego home just before the Toronto Film Festival began. Fugard was delighted and wrote that Tsotsi “is everything in my wildest dreams that I hoped it would be…it is far and away the best film that has been made of something I have written [and] it will rank as one of the best films ever to come out of South Africa.
This is one of those “it” films. I could feel the rooted energy from the get-go…from Hood’s hard-edged direction, the elegant photography and Chweneyagae’s mesmerizing performance as an ice-cold psychopath who now and then devolves into a terrified three-year-old. It all coagulates into something steady and whole.
If I know anything about this business, somebody is going to pick this film up fairly soon. But they’ll need to move quickly once they do, so hubba-hubba and chop- chop.

Reasons to Believe

A thought hit me when I was writing my column from Toronto on the evening of 9.11.01, but I didn’t have the brass to write it down.
It was my suspicion that no one in the news media in the coming weeks or months would ever be permitted to explore (or even discuss on a talk show like, say, Chris Matthews’ “Hardball”) what might have motivated the 9.11 attackers to do what they did.
It seemed fairly obvious that the news media were already locked into characterizing the Al Qeada plotters as nothing more or less than harbingers of pure evil, and that allowing for the possibility that United States foreign policy might have had something to do with their anger would simply never be acknowledged.

Not from Eugene Jarecki’s Why We Fight, although it could have been used if Jarecki had so chosen.

Eugene Jarecki’s Why We Fight, which I finally saw Thursday afternoon at Toronto’s Cumberland cineplex, isn’t the first doc to explore why so many people around the world hate our guts, but it’s one of the most precise and persuasive.
This is a cleanly composed, very perceptive explanation of how the American military-industrial complex basically runs everything and everyone, from the U.S. President to the U.S. Congress to the slant of our foreign policy.
Sony Pictures Classics will be releasing Jarecki’s doc in January 2006. It’s already been qualified, I’ve been told, to compete for the best feature-length documentary Oscar.
The news-clip centerpiece, as you might imagine, is former president Dwight D. Eisenhower’s farewell address warning about the influence of the burgeoning military-industrial complex. Jarecki then goes on to show exactly how prophetic Ike was.
This will seem like boilerpate stuff to some, but Jarecki and his sources explain how and why the U.S. decided at the end of World War II to become a permanent roving super-power with the technological ability (if not necessarily the political will) to strike any adversary in any country at any time.

Why We Fight director Eugene Jarecki during q & a following Thursday afternoon’s screening at the Cumberland plex — 9.15, 5:50 pm.

The film’s title is borrowed from a jingoistic Frank Capra doc made during World War II that explained the necessity of defeating Japan and Nazi Germany.
The movie says that for roughly the last 60 years, the U.S. has been led by a basic need for constant military adventurism for the sake of domestic corporate profits, which are then spread around to political supporters in government.
Fight shows how there are four branches of Eisenhower’s complex today — the military, the weapons-making industry, the U.S. Congress and conservative think tanks — and how they all feed into each other.
Gore Vidal is one of Fight‘s talking heads, supplying his view at one point that “we live in the United States of Amnesia.”
But Jarecki is smart enough to stay away from staunch liberals for the most part, speaking mostly to establishment or conservative types such as Sen. John McCain, high-level CIA veteran Chalmers Johnson, William Kristol, Richard Perle, former Lt. Gen. Karen Kwiatkowski and former president Eisenhower’s granddaughter Susan and son John.
Jarecki also talks to the wonderfully candid and articulate Charles Lewis of the Center for Public Integrity, who was more or less the star of Orwell Rolls in His Grave.

Former U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower delivering his farewell speech on 1.17.61.

Why We Fight is also effective when it talks to average-Joe types. The standout in this realm is an ex-cop named Wilton Sekzer, whose son was killed on 9.11 and who came to embrace a very cynical attitude about the foreign policy aims of the Bush administration, not to mention its general lack of candor about same.
Jarecki also interviews a fresh Army recruit named William Solomon, and to a couple of military pilots who dropped the first bombs in the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
On top of everything else, Jarecki is an excellent cinematographer and editor. The movie is persuasive in part because it’s been shot and cut with eye-pleasing expertise.
Eugene is the brother of Capturing the Freidmans director Andrew Jarecki, as well as the half-brother of Nic Jarecki, who made the excellent James Toback doc The Outsider. Having hung with all three, I can say with some authority they’re a clan worthy of Eugene O’Neill.

Lonesome Town

The energy is down all over the Toronto Film Festival. You can feel it on the street, at the Varsity, in the hotels…it’s over except for locals and stragglers like myself and a few clean-up screenings to get to, like tomorrow’s (9.16) showing of Martin Scorsese’s No Direction Home: Bob Dylan.

Girl Power

It was early Wednesday afternoon, and I was standing in the hallway of the 26th floor of Toronto’s Four Season’s hotel, waiting for my ten-minute quickie with In Her Shoes director Curtis Hanson.
And then a door opened about three feet away and Shoes costar Shirley Maclaine, who owns each and every scene she appears in, peeked out and said hello.
A Fox publicist sitting to MacLaine’s left smiled and nonchalantly said “hey.” I forget how Maclaine replied, but I think she was mainly looking to take a breather.

In Her Shoes star Toni Collette, snapped at Wednesday night’s post-gala party, has shed the weight she gained for the film and is now quite obviously not a brunette, as she is in the film. Director Curtis Hanson, Shirley MacLaine, Cameron Diaz and a bunch of journos (Peter Rainer among them), publicists and agents were also huddling in the VIP area.

The Fox publicist smiled and said, “Shirley, this is Jeffrey Wells, a journalist, and he really likes the film.”
“A man who likes the film…good,” said MacLaine.
The publicist turned slightly in my direction and said, “Tell Shirley what you told me.”
I looked at MacLaine and said, “I think it’s the best chick flick to come along since Terms of Endearment.”
And I know how phony that sounds. People are always tossing around suck-uppy comments at press junkets, but I really haven’t responded this strongly to a film that’s mainly about older and younger women in the same family grappling with heavy emotional life issues since that 1983 James L. Brooks film.
Really…I haven’t. And if I have I can’t think what other film I might be forgetting about.
“That’s good but it’s not a chick flick,” Maclaine said right away. “It’s really about family. Nice meeting you…bye.” And then she closed the door.

In Her Shoes director Curtis Hanson during my ten-minute interview with him at Toronto’s Four Seasons hotel — Wednesday, 9.14, 1:12 pm.

“She’s a bit of a character,” the publicist said. I was thinking to myself, didn’t MacLaine just make a point about a man liking this thing?
Trust me — In Her Shoes is a chick flick. It just happens to be a very good one, and when a particular type of movie is really exceptional that usually means it’s digging deeper and operating with more skill and finesse than other chick flicks that have gone before. And that means it has become more of a plain old good movie than just a chick flick…even though it started out that way.
It was finally time for my ten-minute Curtis Hanson interview. I’ll get into this sometime over the next two or three days, but Curtis was his usual robust and articulate self and I wished we could’ve had…oh, maybe two or three minutes more? Should I shoot the moon and wish for an extra five?
When I was told I would only have ten minutes with Hanson, I coughed and shifted my weight and leaned forward and said, “Ten minutes?” I felt insulted. Why not eight minutes? Why not two? The haiku interview!
I wrote a blurb-sized review of In Her Shoes yesterday for the Wired box. I’ll try and write more this weekend…maybe.

Line Walker

Walk The Line holds up and then some. I liked and respected it after seeing it the first time (i.e., last July), but didn’t quite love it. I saw it again Tuesday morning and while I’m still not 100% wowed by the love story element, I have an even greater respect for how lean and down-to-it and well-assembled this film is.
I’ll say it again for the sake of emphasis: this movie, very neatly, is analogous to a Johnny Cash song — solid and straight, no b.s. or flaky embroidery. And it’s very conceivable it could punch through as a Best Picture nominee because of these attributes alone.

Walk the Line director and co-writer James Mangold (l.) with star Joaquin Phoenix at 20th Century Fox’s post-screening party for Walk the Line — Tuesday, 9.13, 10:10 pm.

Oh, and that item I ran about director James Mangold having allegedly trimmed a bit out of the opening scenes of Walk the Line so it would lessen resemblances to Ray? Bogus. Mangold is telling journalists that the film has been locked for the last four months, and the version I saw this morning in Toronto was precisely the same one I saw in Manhattan, so sorry for briefly muddying the waters.
After seeing four movies today — Walk the Line, the very authentic and unsettling Paradise Now, John & Jane (see review below) and Larry Clark’s lazy, totally masturbatory Wassup Rockers — I strolled over to the Walk the Line party at the Chanel store on the north side of Bloor between Bay and Avenue Road.
The small VIP room was upstairs and very poorly ventilated. No sooner did the Fox publicists wave me into this inner sanctum when Joaquin Phoenix and a friend of his both lit up cigarettes, and you could really smell it.
Daily Mail columnist Baz Bamigboye and I spoke with Phoenix for a few minutes. He’s a nice guy, cool dude. I loved hearing that he hasn’t seen Walk the Line yet, either in a screening room or with an audience, and he has no plans to see it in the foreseeable future. He laughed when he said this, and his laugh has a very slight tone of perversity.

Jane Seymor and husband James Keach, producer and ground-floor instigator of Walk the Line at same after-party — Tuesday, 9.13, 9:55 pm.

I complimented Phoenix on his ultra-realistic fight scene with Mark Wahlberg in The Yards, which is one of the all-time greats. I was surprised to hear that he and Wahlberg didn’t have a stunt guy advising them, but worked out the rollin’ and tumblin’ on their own. They wore knee pads and just told each other, “Okay, I’m gonna hit you and you’re gonna fall down the stairs and then…”, etc.
Mangold, dressed in a tweed jacket and just as warm as I was, was friendly and gracious. I asked him about the film’s best scene, which he wrote, in which Sun records owner Sam Phillips tells Cash and his band during an audition that he doesn’t believe Cash’s signing of a gospel tune, and that he needs to sing some- thing tough and real, etc. Mangold agreed it’s one of the film’s best, and he toasted actor Dallas Roberts, who plays Phillips, for making the scene play as well as it does.
I also spoke to producer James Keach, who knew Cash for several years and tried, with Cash’s approval, to launch his own Cash biopic for a long while before he tied in to the Fox/Mangold/Phoenix project.
Keach and I talked about Cash’s first wife, Vivian, and how the way she’s written and the actress who plays her, Ginnifer Goodwin, makes her seem like the world’s biggest complainer and worst marital partner…a total drag.
What did they get married for? I asked Mangold. Was it sex or…? Mangold said Cash once told him he got married to Vivian because he considered her a dead ringer for Pier Angeli, who was (allegedly) the great love of James Dean’s life.

It doesn’t aspire to high art or try for the sort of emotional engagement that makes you choke up, but Lexi Alexander‘s Green Street Hooligans (Odd Lot, 9.9) is nonetheless a very intense emotional hybrid thing, which is to say a sports movie and a bloody gang-violence movie mashed into one.

The lads doing what they know, love and do best in Lexi Alexander’s Green Street Hooligans (Odd Lot, 9.9)

I don’t know how well this mostly London-based film is going to do in the States given the exotic milieu and the thuggish attitudes (i.e., the world of boozed-up, ultra-violent British soccer fans), but it’s vibrant and original enough to warrant being seen and grappled with. It sure as shit is an experience and an education.

And it’s absolutely a career springboard for British actor Charlie Hunnam, who steals the show with a second-banana performance as a violent, in some ways immature, soccer fan who is nonetheless man enough to bring a sense of balance and compassion to an otherwise loutish lifestyle.
Hunnam starred in Nicholas Nickleby, and was in Cold Mountain, a Katie Holmes thriller called Abandon and the British TV series Queer as Folk, but who noticed? Now this 25 year-old has punched through.

The superficial tag is to call him a younger Brad Pitt with a Brit accent. What matters is that he conveys an inner groundedness and conviction on top of a sense of basic decency that you find yourself recognizing and responding to right away.

Hunnam is not just the star of Green Street Hooligans — he’s a star waiting to happen. Maybe. If he’s lucky and has the right agent and can do an American accent. (There seems to be some question whether or not he appears in Robert Towne’s Ask the Dust, which will debut at the Tellruide Film Festival in a few days). Whatever happens, he’s got it inside.

Charlie Hunnam

Green Street Hooligans is a story about a young American (Elijah Wood) on a visit to London who gets caught up in the violent world of English soccer fandom by joining a “firm,” which is a term for a gang that asserts and defends the honor of a given soccer team by parading around after soccer matches and confronting other firms and kicking their ribs in, or vice versa.

It sounds repulsive and cro-Magnon on one level, but European guys take soccer (which, of course, they call football) very seriously. And a lot of British working- class dudes are extremely furious about…well, I don’t know what precisely but apparently a lack of opportunity within a still-fairly-restrictive social caste system and having to make do with certain economic terms. I’ve been to London a few times and have felt this. The social-rage levels over there are much more intense among the disenfranchised than they are here.

And there are elements that go with being a firm member…tribal love, loyalty, security…that you’re not ever going to find vegging out in front of a computer or a TV, so there’s something to be said for it.
If you’re at all receptive to the values I’m speaking of and you can roll with fairly realistic depictions of street violence, Green Street Hooligans is affecting in a hormonal, territorial way. If it doesn’t exactly speak to Americans where they live in terms of being avid sports fans, it certainly is different and bracing and a movie to kick around and talk about and send your friends to.

Unless, that is, you happen to be one of those absent-sports-gene types who just doesn’t feel it or get it, in which case it may seem too exotic and what-the-hell?

The U.S. release one-sheet (l.) and the British release version (r.)

I’m kind of in this camp (my favorite spectator sports are tennis and baseball), but I get what the film is putting across and I respect the effort and the craft that Alexander and co-screenwriters Dougie Brimson and Josh Shelov have put into making this world come alive.
The German-born Alexander, a late twentysomething who grew up with football fandom and knows this universe fairly well, has made a name for herself with Hooligans and has already gotten a gig out of it — a thriller for Disney called Labor Day.

When you`re watching Hooligans…I’m sorry, Green Street Hooligans …you have to keep telling yourself, “A young woman directed this, a young woman directed this.” But then Alexander is a former World Kickboxing champion who used to scrap with a Mannheim, Germany, firm for three years, so…

Green Street Hooligans won both the grand jury prize and the audience award for best feature at the South by Southwest festival last March, which should indicate something.

(It used the original British title of Hooligans at that Austin venue, and I can’t quite understand why the distributor, Odd Lot Releasing, feels that adding the words Green Street makes the film more appealing to U.S. audiences.)

Wood’s character, a Harvard journalism major named Matt Buckner, is the audience’s tour guide into this bizarre world of Brit football fanaticism. He gets into it by getting kicked out of Harvard only three weeks or so before graduation when his snotty fortunate-son roommate arranges for him to take the rap for cocaine found in their dorm suite.

(This isn’t a very convincing beginning. In Josh Shelov’s original script Matt gets the boot after he and some classmates are accused of having cheated on an exam, and he is specifically ousted because his friends don’t stand up for him — an issue of loyalty that is dealt with later in the film.)

Matt flies from Logan to London to visit his sister Shannon (Claire Forlani), who’s married to a steady-seeming guy with a vaguely pissy attitude named Steve (Marc Warren). But Matt has arrived on a day when Steve is taking Shannon to see Chicago in the West End, so he’s temporarily placed in the care of Steve’s wild-assed brother, Pete (Hunnam).

Suspicious of this wimpy-looking yank, Pete reluctantly takes Matt to his local pub to meet his crew, who are called the GSE — i.e., Green Street Elite, a two-fisted firm devoted to the West Ham soccer…I mean football team.

Matt is regarded with some distance but then wins the respect of the firm when the GSE gets into a street fight with another firm and he throws himself into battle with real ferocity.

I had trouble with watching this at first, with Wood being so small and sensitive-seeming with those big watery eyes of his. But then I understand and sympathize with his having wanted to de-wimpicize and add some machismo to his persona after playing Frodo in the Rings films. (Has there ever been a more dewy-eyed, super-weenyish lead character in a major franchise?)

Trouble arises when a GSE member named Bovver (Leo Gregory) uncovers evidence that suggests (without actually proving) that Matt may be an undercover journalist secretly writing a story about the firm. This leads to all kinds of betrayals and soul-searchings and double-backs, and eventually the GSE gang going up against an especially hated firm whose leader has been nursing a particular rage against Pete’s family for years.

Hunnam again…seemingly two or three years ago.

It’s not hard to step back in the middle of all this and ask yourself, “Why don’t these guys just chill and pull back from this stupid-ass gang attitude that necessitates getting into fights all the time?” It seems so primitive and stupid and unenlightened, etc. I understood the meaning of it and felt it to a certain extent, but it wasn’t exactly coursing through my veins.

Then I read Lexi Alexander’s explanation for the behavior of these guys (who are legion over Europe), and I started to feel it a bit more. As I mentioned earlier, she was part of a firm in Mannheim, Germany, for three years (accepted by the males because of her black belt kick-boxing abilities) and knows the turf.

“Reliable. Protective. Loyal. Consistent. That’s what I remember most about the firm…which was more than you could say about any of our parents,” she writes. “The firm was our family. What we missed at home, we found in each other..in our firm. The riots were about proving our love, because obviously a bunch of guys don’t walk around telling each other, ‘I love you, man.’

“Standing next to your friend when you’re facing thirty guys who want to punch your face in — that’s love.

“Coming back for somebody who fell or was left behind, despite the fact that you’re most likely going to get your ass kicked — that’s love.
“Watching your mates out of the corner of your eye in a fight, and making sure you come to [their] rescue when needed — that’s love.
“Getting arrested and not remembering anyone’s name when the cops question you — that’s love.”

The message of this film, she says, is never abandon a friend when the chips are down.

Green Street Hooligans director Lexi Alexander, star Elijah Wood at Austin’s Draft House after South by Southwest screening last March.

“When your friend is sick, don’t run. When your friend has a crisis, don’t run. When your friend is going through a streak of bad luck, don’t run. When your friend is being treated unjustly, stand behind him/her, or better yet, stand in front. And when you become successful, don’t leave your friends behind.”

That gets me. I know that if I had a dollar for every fair-weather friend I’ve ever had, I could buy a new 100 gig computer. I know I could certainly use a friend or two with a “firm” attitude. Couldn’t we all?
On the other hand, I haven’t punched or even shoved anyone since I was in the seventh grade. And I need my fingers to be agile and unswollen because I have to type all the time. And British blokes can afford to lose a couple of teeth now and then because they have a good national health care system to turn to — I don’t.

There’s a 1988 Gary Oldman film called The Firm (dir: Alan Clarke) that covers the same territory. Here’s the Amazon page for a buyable Alan Clarke DVD package that includes The Firm. I hear it’s strong and worth seeing. Anyone…?

Toronto Feed

“I read your mention about showing caution when it comes to Michael Caton Jones and particularly his Shooting Dogs, which will show at the Toronto Film Festival.
“Well, I saw it in Cannes and it’s very good — a decent, solid drama about the Rwanda massacre of ’94. It’s a fuck-Schindler-Benigni kind of film. No heroes, no innocent little girls, no redemption. And the carnage is great.
“I’ve read ‘A Time for Machetes,’ the Jean Hatzfeld book about the massive killings, and MCJ was pretty precise about a lots of things.

Hugh Dancy, John Hurt in Michael Caton Jones’ Shooting Dogs.

“Otherwise…
“Cronenberg’s History of Violence, as you know, is splendid. This thing grows in your brain (nyuk-nyuk) many days after the screening. I loved it. You have to see it again.
“Free Zone: Crap. Arghh. A cheater. Kiarostami without the ideas, Panahi without the balls. Step aside, you don’t need this.
“Cache: Amazing. Dry, cool, disturbing. Did you saw Haneke’s Code Unknown, which was one of the major influences on the 21 Grams narrative? This thing has the same eerie feeling. It’s funny, it works like a twin film with the Cronenberg piece. Besides, Auteuil and Binoche are the best married couple I ever seen in the screen in years. They just nail the atmosphere of ten-years-of-marriage in a way that Kidman-Cruise-Kubrick never did.
“L’ Enfant: It’s not as good as Rosetta, but…hmmm, I don’t remember anything good as Rosetta, so…nut it’s very good, it’s worth a look and the only problem is the age of the principal actor. I will leave you to discover on your own what I mean by this.” — Daniel Villalobos, Santiago, Chile.

Just Six

“Dunno if you get the Encore cable channels but Stuart Samuels’ Midnight Movies doc, which is playing Toronto, has been airing there all month.
“It’s an interesting movie that I caught late one night, and while I had hoped it would cover a broad spectrum of films it actually focuses on just six films — El Topo, Night of the Living Dead, Eraserhead, Pink Flamingos, The Harder They Come and The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
“While it’s something I enjoyed watching on TV, and I like five of the six movies, I would’ve felt a little let down if I’d seen it in a theater. It’s not bad, it just didn’t tell me much that I didn’t already know. Still, I always enjoy John Waters interviews and this one has plenty.” — Neil Harvey.

Grabs

Thursday, 8.25, 7:50 pm.

Fifth Avenue strollers from various walks of American life and of different faiths and political persuasions contemplating the notion of being gay and up for action — Friday, 8.26, 4:20 pm. I took a series of these photos, and for nearly 30 seconds an older woman and her daughter — tourists, I was fairly certain — who happened to be approaching stood to the side and waited for me to finish. It didn’t occur to them that someone shooting a street scene might be cool with a woman or two walking in front of the camera just as he/she snaps a photo. It could make for a more interesting shot…who knows? But this didn’t occur to them, and so they stood there for almost 30 seconds waiting for me to finish. That’s mainstream America for you. Very polite.

Sixth Avenue and 47th Street, or something like that — 8.25, 5:45 pm.

While speed-marching over to Dolby Screening Room (1350 Ave. of Americas) to see Lord of War — 8.25, 5:42 pm.

Iraqi War 101

“I believe you’re familiar with our Iraq doc Gunner Palace. Last week I devoured your column about the upcoming slate of 9/11 and terror films. It was a needed piece. For me especially, as the theme of reality vs. fiction has been at the top of my mind lately.
“Last May I was invited to a DGA panel discussion where they screened parts of Gunner Palace ‘against’ Iraq-themed episodes of ER and JAG as well as the pilot for Bochco’s Over There. Without going into critic mode, I must say it was surreal to sit in a theater watching fictional scenes from a reality that I was preparing to return to in ten days.
“In the last six months, GP has become something of an Iraq War 101 for creative execs. As you must know, there are at least 10 Iraq projects floating around and development people are looking for interesting takes on Iraq, so every so often we get a call.
“In the beginning I was resistant to the whole idea of fiction — that is, until I had the experience of trying to market a distinct reality to a tabloid nation. We’ve had a fantastic run with GP –I’ve only been home six weeks since January — and the film has been held up as emblematic, but we’ve also been keenly aware of both an audience disconnect and war fatigue.

“However, at the same time, I’ve sensed that the disconnect comes largely from an emotional inability to relate to the subject, a faraway reality, and I’ve perceived a certain hunger to understand the war beyond the rants of pundits.
“Your 9/11 piece raised interesting questions. In regards to this ongoing war, I’ve asked myself, when is soon too soon? Perhaps now is the time — and the public doesn’t need a decade for collective memory to simmer — rather, perhaps there is an urgency to get it right, to tell it like it is.
“I found this Roger Ebert quote the other day:
“‘Whether we are for the war or against it, we all know it is a terribly complicated struggle. There is a desperate need in this country for a film that will depict the war in honest terms.”
“I have not been one for emotional button-pushing, especially about a war that has become all too personal to me, however, as flawed as fiction often is, it has the ability to evoke very real emotions. The Deer Hunter comes to mind. Inaccurate? Without a doubt — down to the last detail — but it captured the emotional essence of an experience. From another war, another time, came The Battle of Algiers — fiction, yes, but a fiction so steeped in reality that it was banned in France. Something to aspire to…no?
“So I surrender to fiction and the urge to at least get it right, to answer Ebert’s call to arms, remembering what a 19 year-old soldier had to say about his experience in GP: ‘For y’all this is just a show, but we live in this movie.” — Mike Tucker

Out There

“Those Walk the Line wildpostings are all over San Francisco too. I saw them the other day and thought, isn’t that opening like months from now? I really like the look of it, and the heavy use of graphics over photos. Seems unorthodox for a biopic.” — Tom Kelly, San Francisco, CA.

Grabs 2

You don’t have to put a caption under every damn photo.

The lobby of the famous Brill building on Broadway and 48th (or is it 49th?) I took this last night around 7:35 pm, just after slipping out of a preview screening of Pride and Prejudice upstairs. A romantic breakup scene in Alexander MacKendrick’s Sweet Smell of Success was filmed right here roughly 48 years ago. Susie Hunsecker (Susan Harrison), terrified sister of ruthless columnist J.J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster), has just called it quits with jazz musician Steve Dallas (Martin Milner). Dallas and his manager Frank D’Angelo (Sam Levene) walk down the hallway and out of the building as a glum-faced Susie leans against the wall near the elevators. As they’re standing outside on Broadway, Milner says to Levene, “Look inside and tell me if she’s still standing there.” Levene looks. “She’s still standing there,” he says.

This newspaper ad on behalf of Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man is apparently aimed at the March of the Penguins crowd. You almost want to pet this guy. Timothy Treadwell, the “star” of Grizzly Man did, in fact, pet a few until one day…

A block or two west of CBGB’s — Sunday, 8.21, 4:40 pm.

Thursday, 8.25, 5:55 pm.

Here They Come…

That Vince Vaughn profile in the current Newsweek doesn’t lie. His performance as a motor-mouthed, totally scheming hound in Wedding Crashers — a very sharp, at times inspired comic romp — is so hilarious at times that it feels off the earth.
I was saying to myself during last night’s press screening, “This is astounding…the great dialogue just keeps blasting away and Vaughn isn’t missing a beat.”

Immaculate deception: Owen Wilson and Vince Vaugh in David Dobkin’s Wedding Crashers

It’s not just Vaughn, of course, but Vaughn and Owen Wilson — also playing a schemer but at the same time the half-soulful counterpoint to Vaughn’s totally sociopathic manipulator — and the banter between them. These guys are a better comic team than Wilson and Ben Stiller. The back-and-forth is fantastic…it’s Martin and Lewis-level.
Vaughn’s comic timing and manic energy make this far and away his best performance since Swingers, and yet he’s so much better here than he was in that 1996 film. It’s Vaughn finding his groove the way Cary Grant kicked into gear when he made The Awful Truth and Bringing Up Baby.
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Vaughn never falters except at the end when the movie makes him go all sappy and sincere. But mostly (and let’s just admit here and now that Crashers doesn’t quite make it all the way around the track) he’s perfect. We’re talking major current here.
Wedding Crashers (New Line, 7.8) stumbles at the close of the second act and doesn’t get its groove back until the very end (it flops around like a goldfish for about 20 minutes), but most of it works. Just because a section of the final act doesn’t play like it should doesn’t mean the first 80% isn’t glorious.

Nobody sings anything in The Wedding Crashers, but the gags and especially the His Girl Friday-on-steroids banter between Vaughn and Wilson is so hilarious and whip-smart that it feels like great music. We’re talking kick-ass dialogue of an exceptionally high order…flip, smarty-pants stuff that doesn’t quit and keeps building and getting funnier.
Plus a reasonably decent stab at romantic sincerity here and there and a very winning, career-making performance by Rachel McAdams.
It’s Vaughn and Wilson (giving the warmest, most fully developed and winning performance of his career…as much of a career-bump thing as his breakout performance in Shanghai Noon was) hitting comic highs that haven’t been felt in a mainstream studio comedy in ages.
It’s the whole concoction — the chemistry between Vaughn and costar Owen Wilson, the wit and attitude in Steve Faber and Bob Fisher’s script (jazzed by Vaughn and Wilson’s on-set improvs), and echoes of not just Meet the Parents but Mike Nichols’ The Graduate.
The Wedding Crashers isn’t as successful as it could be with the sincere emotional stuff, but it does a half-decent job of working with the Graduate scheme of the Three D’s (desire, deception, discovery).

The Graduate is about Benjamin Braddock’s desire for the sultry Mrs. Robinson, the deception he has to throw around to pursue his weeks-long affair with her, and the discovery of true love when he meets and falls for Elaine, her classy and soulful daughter. The last act is about Benjamin’s trying to stop Elaine from marrying a sexist arrogant asshole named Carl.
The Wedding Crashers brings a slightly different order to the formula — discovery preceded by desire preceded by deception.
It’s about a likable deceiver (Wilson’s John Beckwith) — a guy who spends all his time crashing weddings with his pal Jeremy (Vaughn) so he can score with emotionally receptive bridesmaids by lying his ass off about everything…whatever works so he can get in their pants.
Emotions thicken when he falls for a very classy and soulful girl (McAdam’s Claire Cleary), a daughter of a powerful man (like Elaine’s attorney dad was). The discovery comes when he realizes he’s in love and absolutely has to prevent her from marrying an arrogant asshole named Sack (Bradley Cooper, who bears a resemblance to Brian Avery, the actor who played “Carl” 38 or 39 years ago).
I don’t want to make too much of the Graduate analogies, but they do exist and The Wedding Crashers is at least trying to fuse sincere emotionality with rollicking humor. Call me an easy lay, but the fact that it’s not too bad during the heartfelt portion (the last 20 minutes or so) strikes me as acceptable.
The bottom line is that most of this film sails above the clouds. I realize the R rating is going to restrict business among kids in the hinterlands, and it may be too hip for the room in the red-state areas and especially among those who thought Meet the Fockers was the schizzle.

Rachel McAdams, giving the most winning and emotionally grounded performance in a romantic comedy in a long time.

The Wedding Crashers is so much sharper and scalpel-ish than Fockers, they’re not even in the same ballpark. I think it’s funnier and a lot hipper than Meet the Parents even.
There’s only one seriously “off” element, and this is elaborated upon in a transcript of a back and forth I had last night with a guy (see below).
This is a great, great guy comedy…it accepts and celebrates the fact that 95% of the time the only way to get rolling with a woman is to give a sincerely tender, bullshit-stuffed performance. And the first two-thirds (or three-quarters or whatever) take you on a ride with a couple of serious pros who know all the ropes and the angles and still get thrown for a loop and are made to suffer for their sins.
And it’s 80% pure pleasure.

Debate

A guy named “Erasmus” wrote last night to say he’d recently seen Wedding Crashers at a screening held by Creative magazine, and that he thinks it may be getting mixed word-of-mouth because of the ending.
“Not true,” I answered him. “This movie really sails for the first two thirds. I was howling. I was in fucking heaven. It loses its way when the guys get busted, yes, but it gets it back at the very end. And those first three-quarters are incandescent.”
And here’s how it went from there….
Erasmus: To be fair the first two acts which would roughly be the first one hour and ten minutes work reasonably well.
Wells: Not “reasonably well”….inspired. When this movie is in the groove it is in the damn groove and three or four times funnier than Meet the Parents when it is. I’m not exaggerating my feelings. It is awesomely funny at times.

Erasmus: In a Hollywood genre-go-lucky way.
Wells: I really think you’re missing it. I think it’s brilliant, wonderful, ecstasy-time during those first two acts.
Erasmus: But the third act falls apart and everyone knows it’s how the audience feels as they walk out of the movie that matters.
Wells: The third act is bit of a fumble, yes. The movie loses the heat when the guys are busted and sent packing. But the end of it works pretty well. It’s not inspired but it’s pretty good. It touches the bottom of the pool.
Erasmus: And then there’s that big-name supporting cameo that totally kills the movie.
Wells: [Name]’s appearance is not a good thing for this film…you’re right. He’s not funny. He’s actually a drag. He’s actually tedious. He’s a monkey wrench…a chemistry killer.
Erasmus: In fact, some people will say, why is this guy is every comedy all the time? They did not need him.
Wells: Correct.
Erasmus: Any other actor but this guy would have been fine.
Wells: Agreed.
Erasmus: And so in a summer filled with many movies with serious third-act problems — War of the Worlds, Bewitched, Mr. and Mrs. Smith — another has been added to the list.

Jane Seymour, Owen Wilson

Wells: You’re not wholly wrong, but the third-act problems are not fatal. They just wound it somewhat.
Erasmus: This movie will still be a hit, despite the stock characters.
Wells: Isla Fisher’s character — the little redhead Vaughn hooks up with — brings a certain freshness to the piece. Rachel McAdam’s character is on the stocky side, fine, but she’s such a good actress she makes her character feel more believable than she’s actually written. Walken is a bit more supple and less obsessive in his father-of-the-bride role than De Niro was.
Erasmus: And a Jane Seymour development that is
started and then dropped right this.
Wells: Why did they do that? Drop her, I mean.
Erasmus: The first two-thirds work. But they had a chance for Meet the Parents-like numbers of $160 million but will get, at the maximum, $80 million.
Wells: I don’t think so. This thing sails so well during the first two thirds, it will be as big as Parents….I think.

Clone Wars

To cover their bases, critics planning to review Michael Bay’s The Island (DreamWorks, 7.22) should probably take a gander at a 1979 low-budget sci-fi flick called Clonus, which came out on DVD last March.
I won’t be seeing The Island until this weekend (it’s sneaking Saturday night) and I haven’t seen Clonus (a.k.a., Parts: The Clonus Horror), but I know they’re both paranoid thrillers about people being cloned by some super-secret government agency.
It’s being widely alleged by a lot of geeks out there (as well as the “movie connections” references for both films on the IMDB) that The Island is a remake of Clonus.

Scarlett Johansson, Ewan McGregor in The Island

Here’s a link to one of the many websites making this claim.
The general view seems to be that the makers of the 26 year-old Clonus — director Robert S. Fiveson, screenwriters Bob Sullivan and Ron Smith — should have received credit or compensation or something.
If the remake allegations have merit (I say “if”), the Island producers and the DreamWorks attorneys probably compared the 1979 film to their about-to-be-filmed screenplay and calculated there was no way the Clonus team could come after them legally.
Clonus, which has apparently been shown on the Sci-Fi Channel and Mystery Science Theater 3000, is about a character named Richard, a resident of some kind of remote micro-managed outpost. Like all the inhabitants of this carefully controlled environment, Richard hopes to be chosen to be sent to a country where everything is ultra-cool and civilized, or something like that.

He eventually discovers that everything about his existence is bogus. He and all of his friends are actually clones whose basic purpose is to provide spare parts for their organic human counterparts. Knowing it’s only a matter of time before this happens, Richard and a fellow clone named Lena attempt an escape to an outside world, blah blah.
The IMDB’s synopsis for The Island reads as follows: “A man (McGregor) goes on the run after he discovers that he is actually a ‘harvested being’ and is being kept along with others in a utopian facility.”
For what it’s worth, if you do a Google search for ‘Clonus’ and ‘The Island’ you’ll get thousands of hits commenting on the similarities.
There’s a difference of opinion about whether Clonus is a moderately worthy little sci-fier or a grade-Z enterprise that sucks eggs. Reader opinions will be considered and possibly posted.

Considering

At the beginning of my so-called journalistic career some 26 years ago, I came up with an idea for a magazine called Nothing.
It was supposed to be a half-serious, half-satiric look at celebrities and media matters and movie culture, etc. It seemed to me back then that the tendency of magazines and newspapers to cover the especially puerile and shallow aspects of entertainment culture was getting more and more pronounced.
I figured it might work if a magazine came out that pretended to play this game along with everyone else but was actually satirizing it on some level. Maybe the idea was a little ahead of its time, but it doesn’t seem to be that now with David Spade planning to host a Comedy Central show that lampoons celebrity and movie coverage on shows like Extra and Access Hollywood.

The idea wouldn’t be to suggest that the people profiled or subjects covered in Nothing are empty in and of themselves, but that everything is seeming more accelerated and vacant, and less and less deserving of even our passing attention.
Nothing is all we have, all we’re left with in the end.
It could be kind of a two-tiered thing, actually — satirical as well as existential commentary. I don’t mean to draw a specific reference, but I guess I was half-thinking about Jean Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness when I thought up the name.
The magazine wouldn’t so much as cast a glance in Sartre’s direction, of course. It would be aimed, I suppose, at the readers of…I don’t know, Radar or Giant…the usual under-40 males with a sense of humor who’ve had a brush with higher education.
I just know that the culture is about as far away from matters of real substance as it’s ever been, and seems to more and more into pointless diversion. And we need more magazines…well, not exactly deploring this but at least pointing it out in some appropriately dry fashion.
This test cover (thrown together by the intrepid Michael R. Felsher, author of the new HE column “Cinema Obscura”) is what it could look like…maybe. I’ve always imagined something a little dryer, a bit more like Harper’s or The Atlantic.

Another idea I came up with 25 years ago is a regular column called “Hollywood Weltschmerz: The Celebrity in Pain.”
Every damn article about every celebrity is always about how great their life is…how productive, creative, exciting, challenging, etc. I’m not imagining a column that would seek to portray celebrities as gloom-heads but something that would attempt to portray hard-driving filmmaking types in mock-bleak terms…kind of like what Art Linson goes for in his books about producing.
Webster’s Online defines “weltschmerz” as “sadness over the evils of the world…an expression of romantic pessimism.”

New Guys

Here are logo headers for some of the new columns that have been going up. Some of the columnists are just getting going and probably won’t hit their stride for a few weeks yet, but when you get a chance….

Will Russell Surf?

Would you believe David O. Russell as the director of a big pandering Silver Surfer flick? Does this play even as a radical idea? Can anyone envision an impassioned eccentric like Russell working for a nuts-and-bolts type like Avi Arad?
Consider this interview with Arad, chairman and CEO of Marvel Studios, that ran on MTV.com about ten days ago. In the piece, written by Larry Carroll, Arad is asked who might direct the Surfer flick, which will apparently begin shooting either later this year or early next.

Didn’t Quentin Tarantino speak about writing a Silver Surfer flick back in ’95 or thereabouts? Does anyone remember the Silver Surfer dialogue that Tarantino wrote and Denzel Washington acted in Crimson Tide?

“There is a director who should make Silver Surfer,” Arad answered. “He is mentally committed to it [but] he’s doing another movie now.
“What’s most important to me about this guy, first, is that he’s incredible with visuals,” he added. “But he’s also a spiritual guy, a Zen Buddhist.”
There’s been a rumor out there for two or three weeks that Russell has been talking with Marvel about doing this. And Russell is certainly a Zen Buddhist, and he’s working on a film now — a lower-budgeted thing for Universal about radio talk-show host (Vince Vaughan) who starts taking on the traits of his wack-job callers.
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I rang Russell’s office to check but they’ve all split for the 4th of July holiday. I called Russell on his cell and I think he picked up, but he just said “who is this?” three times and then hung up.
Baz Luhrman had been in the loop to direct this long-delayed effects film, but he is apparently no longer involved….but I don’t really know anything one way or the other. And I don’t even care that much, to be honest.

David O. Russell

It says something about the state of things when the best younger directors directors (Chris Nolan, David O. Russell, Bryan Singer) are all whoring themselves out to make superhero flicks.
The idea of Russell working for the Marvel factory and making a movie for kids and dealing with (how can I put this delicately?) a kind of elevated Menahem Golan mentality is a strange, fascinating prospect.
While Russell got along beautifully with Fox Searchlight and Peter Rice when he did I Heart Huckabees, I wonder how he’ll deal with Fox honcho Tom Rothman and his micromanaging approach to running a studio. Anyway, it’s something to consider over the holiday.

Goodnight Taste

An L.A. acquaintance has seen George Clooney’s Goodnight, and Good Luck (Warner Bros., 10.05), the ’50s drama about Edward R. Murrow vs. Senator Joseph McCarthy, and here’s his report:
“David Strathairn [who plays Murrow] is excellent. And I’d like to allay any fears you might have about him being able to summon Murrow’s authoritative voice. He nails it and then some.
“The film itself is high on atmosphere (especially during the opening scene….cigarettes, pointy glasses and tuxedo clad guests at a dinner reception) and does a very fine job of capturing the feeling of the 50’s.
“Clooney continues the good directorial work he did on Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. His camera is light and mobile, and the art design really showcases the beautiful black-and-white stock.

David Straitharn as Edward R. Murrow in George Clooney’s Goodnight, and Good Luck.

“The film itself is very quick and watchable, though I’m not sure how well it would play with people who don’t already have a real interest in the era of the Red Scare. It’s a bit like a civics lesson.
“I have some quibbles. A scrolling text intro that’s supposed to set up the era is unnecessary; as you watch the film you learn all you need to know about the background.
“It also lacks a certain central structure, and it could use a bit more bite. The enemy is paranoia, really, which doesn’t set Murrow up as the sort of heroic presence he was.
“There’s also an unnecessary scene between Robert Downey, Jr. and Patricia Clarkson [playing a husband and wife working for or in league with CBS] in which Downey is questioning whether they, at CBS, are doing the right thing in taking on McCarthy. It’s better left assumed that there was some self-doubt involved, rather than leaving it to this trite and obvious exchange.
“Overall it’s pretty fun stuff, especially since Strathairn is never less than enthralling. It’s just that it could use a bit more zip.”
Okay then — a good film with maybe some side issues. Straitharn, at least, seems positioned to pick up some Oscar heat….maybe.

Forever Cronicas

[Here’s a re-working of a January ’05 piece about Sebastian Cordero’s Cronicas. This excellent film is finally opening on 7.8 so why not?]
A creepy investigation piece and a penetrating morality tale about a tabloid TV news team on the trail of a serial child killer, Sebastian Corder’s Cronicas (Palm Pictures, 7.8) is easily one of the year’s best.
And I’m not just throwing that out. This hard haunting little film is right up there with Hustle & Flow, Cinderella Man, Crash, The Beat That My Heart Skipped, The Beautiful Country and Last Days.

John Leguizamo during Cronicas round-table chat at Manhattan’s Regency Hotel — Monday, 6.27, 11:10 am.

Set in a low-income area of Ecuador and 98% Spanish-spoken, it boasts a first-rate cast (John Leguizamo, Damian Alcazar, Leonor Watling, Alfred Molina, Jose Maria Yazpik) and has been produced (or would grandfathered be the more appropriate term?) by Alfonso Cuaron and Guillermo del Toro.
And it shouldn’t be missed by anyone, partly for the impact of the drama itself (which holds onto its ethical focus from beginning to end, and never drops into an excitement-for-excitement’s-sake mode) and because it heralds the arrival of a major new Spanish-language director — 32 year-old Sebastian Cordero.
Cronicas is not about catching the bad guy as much as a study of journalistic corruption.
A series of child murders, all the apparent victim of a serialist called “the monster,” has caught the attention of a three-person news team shooting for a show called “Una Hora con la Verdad” (“An Hour with the Truth”), which is hosted in-studio by Molina’s character.

Jumping right into this cauldron is a hot-shot TV reporter named Manolo Bonilla (Leguizamo), along with his producer (Watling) and cameraman (Jose Maria Yazpik).
And they happen to be right there and shooting when a seemingly decent, soft-spoken salesman named Vinicio Cepeda (Alcazar) accidentally hits and kills a young kid with his truck. This almost gets Cepeda killed by an angry mob.
When Bonilla later visits Cepeda in jail, where he’s awaiting trial for manslaughter, what seems to be a major scoop is dropped into his lap. Cepeda tells Bonilla that he’s met the serial killer and can provide crucial information about him…which he’ll pass along in trade for a sympathetic TV story about the accident, which may lead to his legal exoneration.
Cepeda’s information (or some of it, rather) turns out to be solid, which of course leads Bonilla to decide to keep his scoop from the cops so he can make a big splash. And this is all I’m going to say, except that the movie has a riveting ending that doesn’t leave you alone.
The thrust at the end is that Leguizamo’s character may be just as malicious or threatening as the child-killer he’s trying to get the goods on.

Cronicas was filmed in Babahayo, a capital city of the province of Los Rios, apparently one of Ecaudor’s poorest areas.
After leaving the first screening my 15 year-old son Dylan said, “It’s funny, but it’s like almost all the really good films these days are being made by guys from Mexico and South America.”
And Spain, I added. It’s certainly seemed this way over the past three or four years. It’s always fascinated me how the Movie Gods seem to serendipitously pick certain countries and cultures to produce especially vital and profound films during a given period.
The film industry, in any event, can add Cordero to the south-of-the-border Kool Kat list headed by Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu (21 Grams, Amores Perros), Guillermo del Toro (Hellboy ), Alejandro Amenabar (The Sea Inside), Pedro Almodovar (Bad Education), Fernando Meirelles (City of God), Julio Medem (Sex and Lucia) and Fabiane Beilinsky (Nine Queens).

Grabs

Director-writer James Toback (l.) speaking to Museum of Moving Image director David Schwartz after screening of his 1977 film Fingers and prior to showing of Jacques Audiard’s The Beat That My Heart Skipped — Thursday, 6.30.05, 9:20 pm.

L train heading to Brooklyn — Thursday, 7.1.05, 12:05 am.

Hollywood Elsewhere contributors Rachel Sear, Jett Wells (now working for N.Y. Daily News columnist George Rush) at party for Palm Pictures’ Cronicas — Tuesday, 6.28.05, 10:25 pm.

Graffiti on poster space at Queens subway stop near Kaufman Astoria Studios — Thursday, 6.30.05, 11:35 pm.

The real Domino Harvey, who will be played by Keira Knightley in the forthcoming Tony Scott film Domino (New Line, 8.19). Harvey was found dead last Monday night in her West Hollywood home.

The linkage between Johnny Depp’s Charlie and that other weird guy with light skin who hangs out with kids has again been pointed out by Time magazine. This idea never seemed to get much traction outside of media circles.

Get Estrada

“Thank you, Mr. Wells, for having written a viewpoint of the Russell Crowe telephone incident that makes sense. Should Mr. Crowe have thrown the phone? Of course not, but finally a columnist questions Josh Estrada’s contribution to the incident.
“Does the Mercer hotel go unscathed here? A guest is paying over $3,000 a night for a room and no one gives a hoot that he has no working phone in that room. Yet when he tries to resolve the problem he is met with indifference and ‘whatever.’
“Trust me, sir…I am a seventy-six year old woman, and I would have had some choice words for Mr. Estrada and the Mercer had I been in Mr. Crowe’s position. Does that hotel really expect their guests to come down to the Lobby at 4:30 A.M. to make a phone call?
“Someone should also mention that if Mr. Crowe wanted to hurt Estrada he would have used his fists, he certainly has been well trained to do so in the past year.” — RhodaM41@aol.com

“Celebrities do not rate special attention and respect because they are celebrities. All accounts I’ve read about the incident indicate that it was late and Crowe had been drinking and was being an ass.
“I don’t know when, if ever, you’ve worked in a service job, but having to deal with obnoxious assholes after they’ve spent a night out drinking is highly stressful. That doesn’t excuse Estrada from being unprofessional to a customer, but his inappropriate response would require a reprimand from his supervisor and not being assaulted by a petulant jerk.
“I’m not a fan of frivolous lawsuits, but according to some reports, Estrada was looking for an apology and a handshake and didn’t get one…If the humorless Crowe is going to behave like a spoiled brat then he deserves what he gets. Since juries never want to convict the famous, (unless they’re female and Martha Stewart) then maybe wasting a celebrities time and costing him some money and p.r. is the only way to go to teach them a lesson.” — Michael Zeigler.
“Do you honestly think that Estrada, the concierge at the Mercer, would give Russell Crowe a ‘whatever’ just because he’s some prissy narcissist? Estrada, I mean, and not Crowe. Seems highly doubtful.
“A concierge with that general attitude would have a gig at the Mercer for, oh, about two days tops, if he hadn’t already been weeded out by what I’m sure is a fairly vigorous vetting process at one of the top Soho hotels.
“So Crowe’s paying four grand a night for a suite and he can’t get a call out to his wife to reassure her he’s not in the throes of (a) alcohol poisoning, (b) an orgy, (c) in the clink, or (d) all of the above? Must be a swell marriage. Objection, yer honor! Sustained. Withdrawn.
“I suggest to you that Crowe pushed this guy to the living end over a period of days, but that he, as the concierge at the Mercer, could muster no other retort but the pathetically passive-aggressive ‘Whatever.’

“More to the point, to quote Brando in Larry Grobel’s book, ‘Vas you dere, Charley?’ I’m sure when the tape rolls (ands I hope it’s on Court TV) it’s going to be fascinating. I have many hours under my belt one-on-one with Crowe….not counting the junkets, the press conferences..and the dude’s intimidating, even when he’s trying to be nice. It’s all in the eyes, man.
“And yeah (chuckle) it’s also in the karate-stance he assumes after hurling a couple pieces of bric-a-brac at your head. If I’m Estrada, I’m suing. Or what’s a celebrity for?” — Josh Mooney
“I found your comments on the Russell Crowe phone-throwing incident absolutely amazing. To miss an opportunity to diss Russell Crowe puts you in a class by yourself. Yes, Russell was an idiot in losing his temper but not one person has commented on Estrada’a contribution except you — this incident did not occur in a vacuum.
“Describing Estrada as a ‘…waahh, I’m telling the teacher’ kid aptly describes a 10 year old who grew up to be a celebrity blackmailer.” — Lorraine Shaw.
“Thank you! That has been how I have felt all along. Sure Russell over-reacted. Guess what? He’s human. He has limits of tolerance. If a person is paying $4000 a night for a room he should be able to expect some service from the people working there. Thank you again for saying what I have been feeling.” — Vickie Sherman, Scappoose, Oregon.

Grabs 2

Big fat Roman-empire post office at corner of Eighth Avenue and 34th Street.

Video camera with super-telescopic lens aimed at Central Park West apartment building where Pale Male, the famous Manhattan hawk, was hanging toward the end of last Sunday afternoon.

This guy has been at the Museum of Natural History since I was five or six years old.

The just-concluded Marlon Brando auction at Christie’s brought in $2.3 million. Brando’s annotated Godfather script sold for $312,000. A letter from Godfather author Mario Puzo asking Brando to take the role of Don Corleone sold for $132,000. No word on how much these driver’s licenses went for.

Sunday, 6.26, 4:05 pm.

34th Street looking west from Eighth Avenue — Saturday, 6.25, 4:40 pm.

Pale Male on one of his periodic float-arounds.

Mural in underground lobby of Lincoln Plaza cinemas.

Worlds Apart

“I saw this last night…and I was very happy with the film overall, aside from a few believability issues here and there…nothing worth mentioning. But…
“Spielberg and Co.’s decision midway through the film to have Tom Cruise’s teenage son die added a great deal of emotional heft to the film, and I agree that the groaning of folks at the ending will have nothing to do with the bacterial problems that the aliens experience. That part of the finale is just fine and works wonderfully and pays appropriate tribute to Wells’ original story.
“But when Cruise and Fanning walk into Boston, find Miranda Otto and her entire clan in what looks to be the one neighborhood in all of Boston that wasn’t destroyed, I had to groan….but that was okay because I knew it was coming. No way Spielberg was going to avoid a family reunion of some kind. I could let the mother/daughter cryfest happen…whatever. The mom could have survived since we didn’t last see her running into a field of fire or anything.

“But then Justin Chatwin, the teenage son, runs out to his dad and I had to declare ‘bullshit’ on this movie. I mean come on…the kid was toast! How he managed to survive running into a battlefield that two seconds later was incinerated by alien death rays is utterly ridiculous.
“The worst part of this happy-ass reunion is that Chatwin’s supposed death had been such a refreshingly realistic event in a film where whole families are being dusted left and right. Spielberg had handled his departure in a very sad and abstract way, and when Cruise is insisting to Tim Robbins later on that his son ‘will just meet them in Boston’ it was a horrifyingly sad moment of parental denial that added so much resonance to the film.
“Then that’s all ripped away at the end. I’ve been a big supporter of Spielberg for years, and I’ve always felt he’s been a bit underrated in his efforts on many films, but he and his screenwriters chickened out here and robbed a potential masterpiece of lean mean sci-fiction filmmaking of an honest ending.
“I’ve been pissed off about it all morning. My advice to people is when the alien dies, leave the theater, and make up your own ending.” — Michael Felsher.
“I usually agree with you and could not agree more with you this time
about the endings of Spielberg’s films, and particularly the one used in War of the Worlds. I just saw it, and that ending really takes something MAJOR away from how great it could have been. As it is, I’d say it’s good. But Spielberg always does this with his more scary/thrilling/serious movies.
“Jaws is the worst offender. Having Richard Dreyfuss survive
really took something away from the tone established throughout the movie and steered the film even farther from the book. Think of how much scarier that movie would have been if, like the book, even your fancy shark cage and gadgets do nothing for you? Would we have been really upset if Dreyfuss had been eaten like Quint?

“Spielberg did it again with Saving Private Ryan. Having the old Ryan at the grave with every member of his family lamenting over ‘did I deserve it?’ really took something away from that movie for me and is the only reason why I think The Thin Red Line is better.
“There’s no question that one of the cornerstones of Spielberg’s rep is his tendency to pull some punches that really need to be landed.” — Jason Tanner
“The ending alone knocked the film down from being a problematic but entertaining three-star flick to a mediocre two-star.
“Does Spielberg assume that his audience is so dumb to believe that Cruises kid just somehow managed to survive the wall of fire and brimstone? Like Cruise finding the extra belt of hand grenades just in time to get snagged by the tripod, I found the conclusion an example of very lazy storytelling. More riveting would of been the son risking his life at the end for his dad and sister.
“But no…Spielberg had to have the bullshit happy ending which nobody in my audience except for the women bought.
“The film has one glaring inconsistency. As has been pointed out, the aliens use an electro magnetic pulse to disable all electronic items prior to their first attack. And yet in the first destruction scene we witness a guy operating a camcorder. He’s not just a background character either — Spielberg frames one of his ‘clever’ shots around the device.
“Plus the editing was choppy in parts. Cruise walks into the bathroom covered with human soot and then a cut later is fully cleaned up.

“Why did Dakota Fanning have to scream in every scene? Was it in her contract? Why do all the kids in Spielberg films act the same way in scene after scene? Here you have world destruction and the kids are bickering over how Tom Cruise is a bad dad. It sucks you right out the movie because it’s forced drama. It’s borderline blackface in it’s vulgarity as it’s repeated over and over.” — Michael Meyerotto
“I’m scratching my head over your War of the Worlds review. Isn’t this the kind of review that usually makes you roll your eyes and become somewhat contemptuous? This sounds like one of those ‘if you just turn off your mind and don’t think about it much, it’s great fun’ reviews that you so dislike.
“In fact, your review made it less likely that I’ll go see this. Personally, I just don’t like the idea of giving my money to Spielberg and Cruise for something half-baked — I’m a bit sick of both of them, (especially Cruise), and lately I’ve gotten very particular about how I spend my movie dollar.
“I saw and loved Batman Begins. Before that, the last movie I’d seen was Sin City, and I walked out halfway through. I don’t go to the theater often for a number of reasons. One of them is the kind of movie you described in your WotW piece.
“I’m watching Letterman as I write this, and he just said something that hits home for me. He said, ‘Today was the big opening of War of the Worlds. It’s a film about space aliens that activate these enormous alien pods that have been buried in the earth for millions of … oh, who cares?” — Ray Garton
“The only thing that gets my goat about the movie is that the ending is the only overtly sentimental part of the flick. You had bodies being floated downriver, people turning to dust, someone getting blood sucked out of them and then sprayed over. How did this get a PG-13 again?” — Lee Goettl
“I hate it when you’re wrong about a movie because you infuriate me — but I think I hate it more when you really nail the thing, because I then have to admit you’re right, and that your words and emotions so precise and deserving that you pierce the heart of the matter. And in the case of WotW, you got my feelings exactly, and expressed it better than I could, so fuck you.” — Peter Martin.

“So I kept waiting for this awful, groan-inducing ending of War of the Worlds and it never came. What the hell is everyone bitching about? The final scene isn’t played with even a hint of sap or melodrama. The son is just there. There’s no swelling music cue, no shots of Dad and Lad running to each other, arms outstretched…just a warm smile.
“I think Spielberg — and the audience — earned that moment after sitting through almost two hours of terror, which is what this movie really is. This is one of Stevie’s greatest efforts, right up there with Close Encounters, Jaws and (dare I say it) A.I…speaking of movies with unfairly derided endings.
“And there certainly wasn’t any laughing or booing at the end. But there was plenty of clapping. And this was at an 11:30 a.m. show with half a house…not a psyched, rowdy Friday-night crowd. This movie’s going to score huge with most of America, and the NY/LA film snobs and snotty teenagers be damned.
“Roger Friedman at foxnews.com characterized the reviews as ‘so-so’ and Drudge has been running pretty much only the negative stuff about it. But the truth of the matter is that the flick has been generally well-reviewed, scored well at Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes and got absolute raves from Kenneth Turan and Variety, to name but a few.” — Sean Stangland

Romances between immensely attractive, super-successful movie stars don’t last for all kinds of reasons. I won’t go into all the usual factors but one thing that really throws a monkeywrench into these relationships is when their children — i.e., the movies they make together — turn out badly.
The Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie alliance is toast. I don’t actually know if they’re “with” each other and it’s none of my damn business anyway, but they’re in Mr. and Mrs. Smith together and if my observation has any validity they’re doomed as a couple because their child is a rank embarrassment…thoughtless, pointlessly prettified, emotionally neutered.

Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie in Mr. and Mrs. Smith

It’s Charlie’s Angels 2 bad, Xanadu bad, Hook bad, Howard the Duck bad. It’s soulless, unfunny (except for some of costar Vince Vaughn’s lines), bombastic, totally sterile and inhuman. Did I leave out hateful?

I don’t want to go over the top here so let me take a breath and step back for a minute or two and collect myself. (Beat.) Okay, I’ve done that…fine. I’m calm. I’m breathing easy. This movie has cancer of the soul. It made my skin crawl.

But it’s tracking really well and 20th Century Fox is going to get a very big opening weekend out of it, and then the word will go out and the public will do whatever. I’m told that the $110 million-plus tab was fronted by New Regency Pictures so Fox probably won’t be hurt that badly.

Mr.and Mrs. Smith might even turn a modest profit. (I just winced after writing that.) I told a friend at Fox News this morning what I think and he replied, “Really? I’ve heard good word of mouth.” And the Hollywood Reporter‘s Michael Rechtshaffen is calling it “a blast” and “explosively funny.” There’s really no accounting for taste.

Rechtstaffen says that Pitt and Jolie “expertly [toss] off the type of well-sharpened banter that was the domain of Gable and Lombard and Tracy and Hepburn, [and] make one swell combative couple.” Forget the banter. The only thing these two have going for each other in this film is the fact that they’re attractive and well photographed.

What happened here? Doug Liman, the director, is one of the hippest and brightest guys working in the big leagues right now. I’m a fan from way back (loved Swingers, adored Go, really liked The Bourne Identity) and I’m just in shock about this.

Remember that wild Las Vegas car chase in Go? Fantastic and funny, beautifully staged and edited…and there isn’t a shred of the same cleverness or whoopee humor in any of the Smith action sequences.

That Matt Damon car-chase sequence through the streets (and over the sidewalks and down the stone staircases) of Paris in The Bourne Identity? It was nearly a classic, right up there with the John Frankenheimer Paris chase sequence in Ronin…and that old Bourne magic vanishes when the Smiths hit the road.

I’m speaking of a freeway car-chase shootout in the third act that reminded me of the highly-touted freeway blastaway in The Matrix Reloaded, which wasn’t that great in retrospect.

Don’t studio execs understand that without a fresh idea or subversive attitude of some kind that sequences filled with bullets and velocity and crashing metal are numbing and infuriating, not to mention totally over?

Doug Liman during shooting of The Bourne Identity.

I’m referring to the Fox and New Regency executives who rode herd on this because Mr. and Mrs. Smith feels a lot more like their film than Liman’s. I know that Liman was very precise and exacting on the set, but this movie is an almost total perversion of everything the words “a Doug Liman film” have meant to me over the last eight or nine years, so I’m figuring studio muscling had to be at least part of the equation…right?

If it wasn’t then I don’t know what to think. I’m stunned.

Ludicrous isn’t the word for the basic idea, which is that John Smith (Pitt) and his wife Jane (Jolie) are both highly skilled assassins who’ve kept their professions hidden from each other and so both are totally clueless until fate intervenes.

The only way to run with this set-up is to accept it as a metaphor. A look at a marriage gone dry in a soulless, money-obsessed culture, and how a typical fast-lane couple manages to renew their desire for each other and fall back in love again.

They accomplish this feat by trying to kill each other. It gets them hot and bothered and re-arouses their libidos.

The problem is that the metaphor isn’t developed or played with to any degree. The internals barely register. You don’t given a damn about Pitt or Jolie’s hearts or souls, much less their marriage, because the film is so invested in gloss and hardware and terrific clothes and one stupendously dull video-game action sequence after another.

Angelina Jolie

Except, that is, for some marital-therapy sessions between Pitt and Jolie that Liman uses as bookends. (I’m guessing these were from the post-principal additional photography shoots, thrown in to humanize their relationship.) Their rapport in this footage feels loose and less constrained in a semi-improvised, Soderbergh-y way. It’s the only thing Pitt and Jolie do in this film that feels the least bit engaging.

I really can’t believe this Rechtshaffen review. He calls it “adult-skewing.” He says “it could have easily been a Hitchcock vehicle.” The “bottom line” tagline above his review says it’s “The Bourne Identity meets The War of the Roses.”

If you want a less obliging, more hard-nosed opinion, consider Todd McCarthy’s
5.29 review in Variety.

If you want a really good film about married-to-each-other assassins, go rent John Huston’s Prizzi’s Honor.

Kelly’s Return

I wrote a piece last March about Donnie Darko director Richard Kelly for the print version of Radar, which had its newsstand debut in mid May. Here’s the article off the Radar site.
Most of what I originally wrote never saw print because Radar wanted the piece tight and quick. The Radar guys are doing a good job. They’ve assembled an attractive, well-designed read, and the online component has been getting some media attention lately, but I figure it can’t hurt to run the Kelly piece in its original form:
In less than two hours, Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko went from being the most buzzed-about new film at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival to something of a disappointment. As far as a good number of buyers and journalists sitting in the audience at Park City’s Eccles theatre were concerned, that is. Lights down, lights up…thud.

Richard Kelly, director-writer of Donnie Darko and the forthcoming Southland tales, snapped at the West Hollywood location of Le Pain Quotidien on 3.17.05

Then Darko tanked in theatres when it opened ten months later, and the 26 year-old Kelly (just four years out of USC film school) began his jail sentence in hell.
“I went into a long period of depression,” he says. “2001 was a pretty miserable year. 2002 was nearly as bad. I felt like my career was sliding off the edge of the coast.”
Darko is about a schizophrenic high school kid (Jake Gyllenhaal) who sees into the future while coping with the attentions of a tall phantom rabbit with silver teeth. It gets the loneliness of being a smart perceptive kid living on his own wavelength…which is probably why (eureka!) Darko eventually caught on as an under-30 cult flick. (The DVD has made $10 million, and the director’s cut, re-released into theatres last summer and out on DVD last February, has taken in about $4.7 million.)
Sometime last fall, after three years of being a what’s-your-name-again? director whose projects couldn’t get financing, the fog lifted.
The word got around that Kelly had a pulse again because his script for Domino (New Line, 8.3) — a smartly aggressive action piece that Tony Scott was directing about the real-life Domino Harvey (Keira Knightley), a Beverly Hills model who became a bounty hunter — whupped ass.
It also began to seep through that Kelly’s long-planned Southland Tales — a futuristic, darkly comic, vaguely musical L.A. fantasia — had solved its funding problems and was preparing to shoot in July.

Darko star Jake Gyllenhaal, Kelly during filming in ’00.

It was Darko`s dispiriting reception that led Kelly to write Southland Tales “at the height of my depression,” in the spring and summer of ’01. It was about anger and frustration, but also wanting to put together “something really epic, a big tapestry about Los Angeles…given my state of mind at the time, it was bound to be subversive.”
Scott (Man on Fire, Top Gun) became a fan of Tales after reading it in ’02, and translated this enthusiasm into an insistence that Kelly write the Domino script.
Getting this gig “certainly helped my career,” says Kelly, but the tide really turned when a British distribution executive named Ben Roberts, who had distributed Darko in the U.K. before getting hired to run Universal International, “fought really hard” to persuade Universal Pictures to greenlight Southland Tales for $15 million.
A key reason Tales was able to get rolling, according to Kelly’s producer Scott McKittrick, was the commitment of actors like Dwayne Johnson (a.k.a., “the Rock”), Seann William Scott and Sara Michelle Gellar to lower their fees, which was largely about their admiration for Darko.
Kevin Smith, who did the voice-over commentary with Kelly on the Darko DVD, is playing a legless Iraqi War veteran.
Tales is set in Los Angeles of 2008, over the 4th of July weekend. It’s partly about the loneliness of life in L.A. and trying to hustle a living in the entertainment industry, and partly about coming political chaos — the action occurs in the wake of political hysteria that has turned the country into an ultra-surveilled police state.
Kelly says some of the music will be composed by Moby. (The film’s website has a quote from Perry Farrell, which seems to indicate he’s also part of the mix.) He also warns against anyone looking for any kind of traditional break-into-song scheme.
“If you don’t like musicals there’s no way this will fall into the category of offense,” he says. “When people see it they’ll go `Hmm…that’s subtle.’ In the end, I may be the only human being on earth who actually considers it to be a musical.”

An early visualization of the police-state atmosphere in Southland Tales.

Kelly, who turned 30 on 3.28, is Irish-looking — fair skin, freckles — and has an easy-going manner. He calls himself “an aging frat guy who likes to go out and have a good time.” But when he puts on his filmmaker’s cap he becomes the Sorcerer’s Apprentice and a different mentality comes through.
It’s not like Kelly is against commercial films, but so far the indications are that he’s into satiric, subversive, sci-fi mindblower-type stuff …and come what will of it. His current passion is for Philip K. Dick (the author of “Blade Runner” and “I Can Remember It For You Wholesale,” which became Total Recall) and, as Southland Tales shows, the whole illuminate-the-present-by-showing-a-twisted-future thing.
The son of a NASA engineer, Kelly was born and raised near Richmond, Virginia. His talent at drawing and painting got him into art studies at USC, but he transferred to film studies when art courses drove him crazy.
Kelly might be lonely and a bit of a dweeb at heart (like all writers…don’t get him started on women). He talks like a grounded adult and seems to know about focus and discipline. But ask him a question and he digresses and meanders. (You have to keep going back and ask it repeatedly — he’ll eventually cough up an answer.)
Becoming famous “has certainly helped me get more dates with women,” he comments. “All the sorority girls at USC thought I was interesting but kind of dark and weird. They were more into the guys from Orange County who were going to be stockbrokers. I got made fun of a lot for being a cinema student, and after a while it started to get to me. I started to doubt myself, and writing Darko was my response to that self-doubt.
Kelly isn’t all about ominous heavy-osity. He once made an “aggressively stupid” frat-boy movie in film school — a Super 8 effort called The Vomiteer.

Jake Gyllenhaal, Jena Malone in Donnie Darko

“It was just me being an idiot frat guy with a fraternity brother…being that guy, a guy who can’t stop vomiting, and he’s isolated because of that. It was a ridiculously stupid short film…it was basically about me trying stage to really good puke scenes. We found different ways of using the hose and having it come out of his mouth.”
But his next student film, The Goodbye Place, was more serious and ambitiously filmed, and when it was done and shown to his fellow students, Kelly knew (or at least began to believe) that he had the makings of real filmmaker.
USC’s film school “is a very cutthroat environment,” he recalls. “If your film sucks, you’re going to hear that. Everyone goes to USC thinking they’re going to be the next George Lucas, and when they get there they realize it’s a lot harder. But after I showed this film at the end of my junior year, I got an overwhelming feedback. The instructors were giving me pats on the back.”
Kelly’s favorite films of all time, he says, are two Kubricks — 2001: A Space Odyssey and “the masterpiece, one of the most profound films ever made,” Barry Lyndon.
Kelly’s most recent gun-for-hire gig was writing a screenplay for a $100 million, special-effects-heavy World War II film about the sinking of the USS Indianapolis, based on Doug Stanton’s “In Harm’s Way.”
The Warner Bros. production would be about the torpedoing of the famed U.S. destroyer in July 1945, as well as the horrible five-day ordeal that roughly 900 sailors went through in the water while waiting to be rescued. Over 300 were eaten by sharks, and only 317 survived. Kelly calls it “the tightest thing I’ve ever written.”

Painting depicting the rescue of the survivors of the sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis in July, 1945.

Because of the 317 men who lived, Kelly has titled his WWII script Optimistic. Does this suggest a basic philosophy? There’s a temptation to presume that.
Attention: For a taste of the mood and some of the musical inclinations of Southland Tales, check out the very cool website that Kelly has been developing and constantly adding to over the last few months.

Batman Shutout

Devin Gordon’s recent, very glowing Newsweek article got me excited about seeing Chris Nolan’s Batman Begins (Warner Bros., 6.15), and then I was invited to see it last night (Thursday, 6.2) at 7 pm.
But my friend at Warner Bros. assumed I knew where the screening room was and I didn’t, and I couldn’t find the damn thing and now I’ll have to wait until Monday night’s showing.
First I went to the old Warner Bros. headquarters at 75 Rockefeller Plaza, which is where Warner Bros. used to have a screening room when I was living here and starting out 25 years ago. No go, and the guy at the desk didn’t have a clue where it might be.

The bicycle rickshaw guy who peddled me over to Columbus Circle, taken on our way up Sixth Avenue — Thursday, 6.2.05, 7:12 pm.

I kept asking and pleading, and then another lobby security guy in a blue sports jacket finally said, “Columbus Circle!”
It was 7:05 pm…shit! I sprinted over to Sixth Ave. but there were no cabs, so I took one of those coolie bicycle cabs — 20 bills! — up Sixth and over to Columbus Circle, and it was kinda cool riding in one of those things. These coolie cabs can really maneuver around traffic and make good time. But I felt badly for the driver when we hit the slight uphill grade going west on Central Park South. The poor guy was huffing and puffing and sweating like a dog.
The guy dropped me off and I finally found the Warner headquarters on the side of the building but again, no go. Screening? Who? Batman? What?
By this time it was 7:25 pm and I knew the game was over. As I stood in the lobby Larry King walked in and some well-tended middle-aged woman came up to him and went “Lahrry!” and gave him a hug and an air-kiss. This only made me feel worse, for some reason.
I walked outside and sat down on some kind of shiny knee-high chrome sculpture…dejected, depressed and faintly pissed.

And So It Starts

A guy named Chuck Rudolph wrote Wednesday with a beef about my Cinderella Man review, and I responded to him point for point. Here’s how it went down:
“I just read your piece on Cinderella Man shortly after reading a review by one of the best critics out there (and one on your temp turf), Matt Seitz of the New York Press.
“I thought your piece did a fair job of summing up what you found to be the film’s perks without grandstanding or overselling, yet I couldn’t help but wonder why you seemed content to skim the surface and never get into the real meat of the film.
“Cinderella Man is obviously going to be considered a serious film by a lot of people, so why not treat it as such with a sharper review?”

Russell Crowe (left) as Jim Braddock in Cinderella Man.

Wells to Rudolph: I got into the meat that is there, as presented and assembled by Howard. I don’t think he made a feel-good movie about the Depression. I think he made a movie about a guy who got focused and motivated by life kicking him and his family in the ass. I relate to this. This is how it works sometimes. This is how it worked with Jim Braddock.
Ron Howard’s films will always be indictable for attempting to stir the emotions in ways that are not in synch with the aesthetics of raw unvarnished realism. Matt isn’t wrong in saying what he’s said, but it’s just a way of looking at this thing. It’s not the only way. You should go to see it before spouting off.
Rudolph: You write that Braddock lucked into his underdog run…
Wells: He did, pretty much.
Rudolph: “And that suggests his second chance at a boxing career ran no deeper than such.”
Wells: As Tennessee Williams once wrote, “Sometimes there’s God…so quickly!”
Rudolph: “You go on about the performances (and you’re probably right about Giamatti), but you seem disinterested in the nature of the characters that are being performed and what they represent in the film’s scheme. (Paddy Considine is of so little importance his character is really called “friend-of-Jim Braddock”?)
Wells: Considine’s character is a representation of the leftist social ferment that was brewing back then. Big fucking deal. It’s okay that he’s there, it’s another thread in the weave, but I’m not going to disgress into a big political thing because of this character.

Rudolph: Overall you seem to be playing down the fact that this is a Ron Howard movie (‘a few Ron Howard-y touches here and there, but not so you’d really notice’) because you know what that entails but you fell for it anyway: manipulative bullshit.
Wells: It’s manipulative, but it’s not bullshit. It is recognizably real in terms of facts, emotionality, behavior. The story is based on truth.
Rudolph: “I may be oversimplifying but as someone who through experience has come to more or less believe in the auteur theory (by way of Truffaut, recently reprinted in the Jules and Jim DVD), and the statement that ‘I don’t believe in good and bad films. I believe in good and bad directors.’ There’s nothing in your piece that indicates, no matter how much you want to talk about Howard not pushing the buttons too much, that this is anything other than a Ron Howard movie, i.e. a movie that glosses over facts and ignores reality in order to make his subject more audience-friendly.”
Wells: I don’t doubt that Howard has ignored something (or some things) in Braddock’s story. And so fucking what? Everybody cuts and prunes and shapes in order to achieve the end that they’re after. Elia Kazan chopped out two thirds of Steinbeck’s East of Eden to make the movie that he made. Does that mean he’s a manipulative bullshitter?
Rudolph: “Who cares about the emotional buttons when Howard so easily manipulates deeper themes to sell his audience lies about themselves and this country?”
Wells: Howard will always sugar-coat (but not as much as he used to) and romanticize and fiddle around with things in order to make what he wants to come out, come out. This is not a criminal offense.
Rudolph: “Maybe you think he does a good job of examining the social conditions of Braddock’s life and makes a fair case for him as an honest underdog champion, but then why not talk about it in your review?”

The real Jim Braddock (left) and Max Baer, in snaps taken sometime around 1934 or ’35 or thereabouts.

Wells: He does a fairly decent job of depicting the social conditions. It didn’t seem deceptive or dishonest to me. I recognized the Depression milieu he created as more or less the same Depression milieu I’ve been absorbing through books, movies, articles and documentaries since I was ten or twelve years old. I used to hate Ron Howard and his overly massaged and commercial approach to moviemaking, but he’s a much better, significantly more honest filmmaker now. He’s not making Far and Away here.
Rudolph: “What’s sticks out to me in Seitz’s review is the line ‘the movie encourages us (just as the Depression-era media encouraged fight fans) to view Braddock as an emblem of the common man’s aspirations.’ What that’s saying is that Howard is hustling audiences with this movie just like fight promoters hustled crowds back during the Depression.
Wells: Is Matt saying that the people who identified with Braddock and fell for the come-from-behind legend were being sold a bill of goods and were suckers? That the real Braddock story was…what?….less difficult or more layered than the ones we’re shown in the film, or the one that was conveyed to the masses by newspaper writers back in the early to mid ’30s? If this is the case, okay. The reality probably was blurred to some extent. But this doesn’t invalidate the central theme of the film, which is that when life puts your feet to the fire and really clobbers you two or three times, you can either get going and fight back…or you can fold your tent and become a drunk or whatever.
Rudolph: I would hope that a contemporary film about this subject would have the intelligence to at the very least acknowledge this symmetry, but knowing Howard’s track record it seems doubtful that Seitz is off-base here, and your review more or less confirms that for me — the film didn’t have you looking any deeper than the superficiality Howard was shoving down your throat, and that you’re praising him for doing it in such a mild-mannered fashion only speaks to the insidiousness of his touch. You sound like one of the people who got hustled, and you’re happy about it.

Russell Crowe as the legendary Jim Braddock, Paul Giamatti as his manager Joe Gould in Ron Howard’s Cinderella Man.

Wells: I am content that what Howard showed me was a reasonable facsimile of life (and particular lives) back then. I recognized what I saw as a reasonably accurate depiction of a lot of things, both sociologically specific and metaphorical and spiritual and what-have-you. I don’t feel the hate about this film that I’ve felt about Howard’s films in the past. I hate crapola in all its forms. I don’t feel this way about Cinderella Man.
Rudolph: “I guess I’m just disappointed that you seemed to have been suckered by the film. Your nose for bullshit is usually pretty strong and you not too long ago even coined the incredibly perceptive term “ape cage” in your ’05 preview (which my friends and I have been using ever since to describe movies like, well, Cinderella Man)…but this review makes it sound like you’ve fallen into that very demographic.”
Wells: It’s a stirring, compassionate film. It does not shovel what I could call bullshit. It massages things to tell a kind of truth that has a basic validity. Ron Howard and Ken Loach live on different planets. Frankly? I like the post-Apollo 13 Howard for his filmmaking chops and tendencies better than I do Loach.
I know — that makes me an idiot. But Ken Loach is not God. He’s just a middle-aged British guy who feels and sees things a certain way, and has drawn certain conclusions and put them into his films. Fine. That doesn’t make him the Dalai Lama.

No explanation or relation to anything in today’s column, but this happens to be one of the more alluring snaps I’ve ever taken. And not just that. I can seriously see this photo hanging on a gallery wall some day. It’s got something. Maybe because it was taken in a kitchen.

Interior of the Brooklyn-based office of Hollywood Elsewhere — Tuesday, 5.31, 4:40 pm.