And so begins the rejuvenated, out-of-the-woods, post-hard drive crash, five-pounds-lighter-due-to-stress phase of Hollywood Elsewhere, with only five days to spare before the flight to Cannes. The new hard drive is installed, all the programs are re-installed and running, and pretty much everything is back to normal.
Before anything else I need to give a shout-out to Angelo Moratta, the guy who got me out of this mess more than anyone else. Angelo runs a shop about 50 miles north of Manhattan called Mindtrain Computer Services, and if you’re ever in any kind of serious dutch with your computer you need to call this guy, seriously. He’s got one of those great remote control hookup systems in which you let him see your computer screen and access everything in it, and it’s just like having a house call. Plus Angelo’s got a relaxed and gentle voice (with a slight New Yawk accent), and he never gets riled and always figures it out, whatever the issue is.
Never trust the Geek Squad, never trust the Geek Squad, never trust the Geek Squad. They’re nice guys and they know what they know, but they’re not smart all the way around the track and they charge too much and they take forever. Or the fairly smart guy you spoke to the day before is taking a day off and the other guy who’s half-acquainted with the situation doesn’t come in until 3 pm. Forget ’em, bad news, exasperation time.
The only problem now is that it’s pretty warm outside and fairly stuffy in here, and the Oscar-winning lease holder on this apartment removed the air-conditioner — the one I bought a couple of years ago from the second-hand guy down the street — and put it under a bunch of boxes in an overstuffed hall closet. Do I spend an hour hooking it up (i.e., buying an extension cord and electrical power strip, cutting out a precisely cut slab of cardboard to seal off the window, finding masking tape to make sure it’s nice and tight) or just get down to today’s column items? These are the choices and the terms….and it’s always something.
Toronto Star critic Peter Howell is lamenting the current dominance of one- or two-word bullet movie titles like Next, Vacancy, Fracture, Disturbia, The Invisible and The Condemned. “Whatever happened to movies with evocative titles like The Trouble With Harry, The Man Who Knew Too Much or Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?,” he’s asking.
Howell asked me for a quote about this and posted a portion of what I sent him, but here’s the whole schpiel:
“Hollywood has always kept titles down to two or three words. Occasionally a four-worder like The Guns of Navarone slipped through in the ’60s, but more often not. That said, if some American producer were to remake Shoot The Piano Player today, it would probably be called Piano Man or Chords or something along those lines.
“Hollywood marketers have been on a campaign against marginally high-falutin’-ish titles for a good 25 or 30 years, or roughly since the advent of the mass-market blockbuster movie syndrome, which kicked off with Jaws in ’75 and then Star Wars in ’77.
“Why did Columbia and Taylor Hackford drop the allusive and haunting Out of the Past (’47) in favor of the more macho, two-fisted sounding Against All Odds when they did their 1984 remake ? Four syllables, one word shorter…that was one of the first modern-age dumb-down moves along these lines that I can remember.
“How about Bertrand Tavernier‘s currently shooting In the Electric Mist, with Tommy Lee Jones in the lead role? James Lee Burke‘s original book title is “In The Electric Mist With the Confederate Dead” — a fantastic title. Couldn’t fit on the marquee but wow, what a great choice of words!
“One-word bullet titles are easier to remember for people who haven’t made much of an education, and of course shorter is almost always better in our attention-deprived world, but titles with poetic or allusive qualities are even less in favor now than ever before.
“The reason is because of the under-35 cyber generation is a shorthand generation in more ways than one. The relentless clutter of information and images that pour into our computers and PDAs demands a savage pruning on the part of the reader, video-watcher and movieoger. They speak cyber-ebonic in their text messaging — “r u coming to the party?”, “LOL”, etc. — and this is the kind of language by which they process the world. Marketers, one could argue, are simply following suit.
“I personally prefer Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? to Blade Runner, but that’s just me.”
Despite an angry studio publicist’s denial, Radar‘s Kim Masters is reporting in a just-up Radar piece that Spider-Man 3 (Columbia, 5.4) has surpassed 1963’s Cleopatra as the most expensive movie ever made. With the enthusiastic go-go support of Sony chairperson Amy Pascal, Sam Raimi‘s third and presumably final Spider-flick cost $350 million, she writes, compared to Cleopatra‘s inflation-adjusted budget of $290 million.
Add a guesstimated $150 million in marketing costs and Spider-Man 3‘s final tally will be $500 million, according to Masters’ calculations.
Spider-Man 3 is pretty much ding-proof — the fanboys are going to break down the doors no matter what — but Masters’ article will muddy the waters. Add this to the so-far tepid reviews and the spreading awareness and/or growing prejudice that revved-up, cranked-up CG extravaganzas are dead-end sits because of their constant war between their two halves (being 50% exciting in an obvious thrill-ride sense and 50% numbing in a sensory-overload sense, which leads to 100% depression by the time the third act rolls around), and the stage is set for U.S. ticket-buyers to go into it with a skeptical, perhaps even bordering-on-sourpuss attitude.
An absurdly expensive movie of this proportion — whether it cost $270 million or $300 million or more — means at the very least that Spider-Man 3 was a huge corporate pig-out for all the major creative players. And now you, Mr. and Mrs. Paycheck, are expected to show up at theatres on May 4th and pay your ten bucks so the machine can keep rolling and all the fat players can go to the trough again and again. Keep it rolling, keep it rolling…support the elite Hollywood profligates! They would be lost without you.
“On the surface, Spider-Man 3 has all the ingredients of a box-office slam dunk — √É‚Äö√Ǭ≠spectacular special effects, an obsessive fan base, and a roster of bankable stars,” Masters writes. “Moreover, its two previous installments have grossed $1.6 billion for the studio.
“Even before filming began in January 2006, [director] Sam Raimi promised to pull out all the stops for his third Spidey film (likely the last he’ll direct in the series). He wasn’t kidding. As production dragged on into late summer (it had been scheduled to conclude in June), stories about the project’s ballooning budget started popping up all over town. But in the end, even the most hyperbolic of observers may have underestimated the final tab.
“Industry insiders claim that Sony spent $350 million or more on production alone. With marketing and promotion factored in, the total price tag will approach half a billion dollars, positioning Spider-Man 3 as the most expensive movie of all time.
“Still reeling from a flurry of bad press on its PlayStation 3 gaming console, Sony isn’t eager to claim this honor. A studio spokesman angrily rejects the $350 million estimate as a ‘complete fabrication,’ insisting that production costs didn’t exceed $270 million. One of the film’s producers, Laura Ziskin, also disputes the higher total, albeit in a less forceful manner. “I refuse to say the [real] number because it makes me choke,” she tells Masters. “Spider-Man 3 was a super- expensive movie — the most expensive film we’ve ever made. But there’s no way you can get to $300 million.”
“Reports of Sony’s record-breaking gamble have created a stir among entertainment insiders, seeming to evoke some combination of schadenfreude and envy. “Those are crazy numbers,” remarks one leading industry figure.
“I don’t think this sets a great [precedent] for any of us,” complains a top executive at a rival studio. “It’s beyond the beyond. The problem isn’t that other studios will now feel liberated to drop $300 million on a movie. The real danger is that it makes the $200 million movie seem not quite so bad. And the risks of that can be absolutely devastating.”
“Noting Sony’s long and storied history of overspending, the head of another studio asks, “Where is the corporate oversight? Who’s demanding accountability? How is it that they’re repeatedly able to conduct themselves in this manner?”
“To be fair, Sony is hardly the only studio spending big bucks on tent-pole projects. Shrek the Third blows into multiplexes two weeks after the new Spidey film, with Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End right behind it. Next come the Fantastic Four sequel and Steve Carell‘s Evan Almighty. Then, on Independence Day weekend, Transformers hits the screen.
“None of these projects was cheap. Indeed, the third installment of Pirates may also sail past the $300 million mark. But in contrast to the Spider-Man series, the second Pirates film outperformed the original and grossed more than a billion dollars. (Spider-Man 2 took in $783 million, or about $40 million less than its predecessor.)
“Sony’s free-spending ways have been evident ever since the Japanese electronics giant acquired Columbia Pictures in 1989, causing much consternation among competitors who feel pressure to match the studio’s largesse. The first chairmen in the Sony era, Jon Peters and Peter Guber, spent so much money that the studio wound up taking a $3.2 billion write-down. The two were eventually fired, but business continued as usual. In 1996, chairman Mark Canton blew the roof off star salaries by awarding Jim Carrey an unprecedented $20 million for his role in The Cable Guy, a film that disappointed at the box office. Soon after, Canton was also gone.
“To many observers, though, the budget for Spider-Man 3 represents a terrifying new frontier, even for Sony. As other studios try to cut costs, Pascal has continued in Sony’s profligate tradition.
“The only woman currently heading up a major studio, she also happens to be one of the most popular executives in the business,” Masters concludes. “That’s largely because she seems to have a genuine love for movie-making at a time when many of her peers are fixated on the bottom line. ‘Amy’s greatest strength is her intuitive, creative ability,’ says a longtime associate. ‘Her greatest weakness is that she lets that same ability get completely separated from any sense of fiscal restraint.'”
“Hollywood’s marketers have become tremendously efficient at getting their core audience to see their big movies. They don’t need critics for that. But critics have a larger utility: to put films in context, to offer an informed perspective, to educate, outrage, entertain. We’re just trying to do what every other writer is doing: making sense of one part of your world. So, dear reader: If our opinions on a movie don’t coincide, I don’t care, and neither should you. I’m not telling you what to think. I’m just asking that you do think.” — Richard Corliss responding to Peter Bart’s 3.15 Variety column in which he trashed critics for being out of touch with the mob.
That final Corliss sentence is a hoot. The vast majority of moviegoers, of course, aren’t interested in thinking, and anyone who goes around presuming that “thought” is some kind of mass-market intrigue or tonic is truly living on a farway planet Movies are about delivering and receiving emotion — it’s what has always made them a mass art form. “Thought” is for the fringe. People today are mostly into being dumbly wowed (via CG flotsam movies like 300, Pirates of the Caribbean, Spider-Man 3, etc.), or being made to laugh or cry. I hate dumbass CG movies, but I’m just as susceptible as anyone else to the other two. Everyone is. But release a film that hints that a small expenditure of intellectual rigor may be needed to understand or enjoy it, and you automatically lose 90% of your potential audience.
Bart’s column was posted more than month ago, by the way. Shouldn’t there be a statute of limitations on response pieces? Shouldn’t you have to write them within, say, five working days?
Rod Lurie‘s intention to remake Sam Peckinpah‘s 1971 classic Straw Dogs is perhaps the most inspired idea he’s ever had as far as movie-directing material is concerned. Lurie is a bit of a tough guy and a man’s man (as anachronistic as that may sound), and I’m betting that he understands better than most what makes the original Dogs a great (certainly a near-great) work.
The story, based on a book called “The Siege of Trencher’s Farm,” strikes all kinds of primal macho chords, all of them tethered to the territorial imperative (i.e., the defense of one’s wife and home, and the small-town repelling of exotic invaders). I know that I’ve never felt so aroused and “with” the violence in any film as I have with Peckinpah’s original, which costars Dustin Hoffman and Susan George .
At the very least Lurie’s effort will inspire everyone to re-watch and re-assess the original, which is the second or third-best Peckinpah film ever made (after The Wild Bunch and Ride The High Country). The downside, of course, is that Lurie is asking for trouble. The odds are not overwhelming that he’s going to out-point or out-gun Peckinpah’s version (it being so perfectly cast, so beautifully edited, so full of ominous vibes). Lurie might be able to match the original, but any director would have a difficult time making a better film. But I respect Lurie’s courage in deciding to do it anyway.
Not long after Elvis Presley died of a drug overdose in August 1977, the blunt- spoken John Lennon told a reporter that Presley “died in 1958, when he went into the Army.” An honest response to the death of the print version of Premiere magazine, which was revealed today, would be along the same lines: Premiere — the once-ballsy Hollywood magazine that was about nervy, sharp reporting and not upscale fan-mag aesthetics — died in May 1996 when much of the upper-level staff quit over editorial interference.
“You could feel the life forces leaving at that point,” recalls L.A. Times staffer Corie Brown, a former Premiere columnist (“California Suite”) and West Coast editor.
Brown was quick to praise Susan Lyne, now CEO of Martha Stewart Omni, for having launched Premiere in 1987 and running it for eight years, until 1995. “She was the guiding force,” says Brown. “And Chris Connelly was her deputy until she left, and then he took over. They were the two best editors I ever worked for.”
Premiere maintained high writing and editing standards after May ’96, but things were never quite the same. It gradually became a smart, respectably configured fan magazine — above-average writing and reporting (by L.A. Times staffers John Horn and Patrick Goldstein, Christine Spines, Fred Schruers, et. al.) and good film criticism by Glenn Kenny — and yet, in the view of most, a shadow of its former self.
Print publications are getting killed left and right by the internet these days, and that’s what got Premiere in the end. Ad Age‘s Nat ives wrote earlier today that Premiere‘s “paid circulation has declined slowly over the years, from an average of 616,089 in 1995 to 492,498 in the second half of last year, according to Harrington Associates and the Audit Bureau of Circulations.
“Even more ominous,” wrote Ives, “Premiere sold 24.7% fewer ad pages in 2006 than it did the year before, according to the Publishers Information Bureau. Titles and websites focused on celebrity gossip, meanwhile, have continued to gain circulation, making it difficult for older entertainment brands.”
“I do believe that the world has turned to get information online,” said newly- installed Variety columnist Anne Thompson, who was Premiere‘s West Coast editor from July 1996 to June 2002. “And running a monthly film magazine…a costly monthly operation at a time when everything is getting faster and faster….that’s a tough order.”
The online version of Premiere will continue. The print version’s editor, Peter Herbst, is out the door. The April issue will be the final one. A friend of a friend had been working on Premiere‘s “power” issue due in June…forget it. A source in Premiere‘s New York office said “the mood here is pretty frustrated, but this wasn’t completely unexpected.”
Premiere‘s 1996 editorial revolt happened when Hachette Filipacchi CEO David Pecker accepted “the resignation of two top editors, Chris Connelly and Nancy Griffin, and a near rebellion by the staff” (according to a Time magazine report) over the spiking of a “California Suite” column by Corie Brown about “business deals involving Sylvester Stallone and the Planet Hollywood restaurant chain”, which had venture plans at the time with Premiere‘s owner Ron Perelman.
One of the stars of the glory-days Premiere was Slate columnist Kim Masters. The top players in Masters’ era (she worked there from ’87 to ’90, give or take) were Lyne, Connelly, Peter Biskind, Griffin, Brown and John Richardson. (A star-in- the-making was E! columnist Bruce Bibby, who worked as a fact checker during Masters’ time.).
“My first piece was about Ovitz making a big scene at the Palm when some agents had defected from CAA, and Ovitz made a big flap about it, he didn’t want them eating there,” Masters says, “and I remember an editor read it to [then-publisher] Rupert Murdoch, and he laughed at the piece and said it was fantastic.
“That was the golden age of Premiere,” she recalls. “That was when the Power list was created. That was when we coined the term ‘Young Turks’, which I had gotten from doing legal reporting and hearing that term used in law firms. Things were so different in those days….a very different internet-free world.
founder and former Premiere editor Susan Lyne
“I did a big investigation of a Delta Force helicopter crash, in which several people were killed,” she recalls. “An interview piece about Sam Kinison. A great Roger Rabbit piece….I remember sniffing around about the film early on and getting this call from Jeffrey Katzenberg, saying what are you doing to my movie? Premiere was ballsy enough back then to fly me to London [where Roger Rabbit was shooting] when we had no access…they just sent me there and waited for the studio to cave.
“I remember when John Richardson and I were working on a power list [in ’92 or thereabouts], and we were sitting with Mark Canton in his office at Sony and he was saying, “I make the decisions! I run the show!…and Peter Guber stuck his head in and said, ‘I need you now‘ and Canton got right up and followed him out. And of course, Nancy [Griffin] and I Nancy and I wrote the story that was the origin of Hit and Run,” the 1997 best-seller about how Guber and Jon Peters “took Sony for a ride in Hollywood.”
“It was a good magazine, but that was such a long time ago,” says Masters. “It just went off the radar.”
Nikki Finke is also revealing that the Oscar telecast will kick off with “an inspired piece of CGI trickery.” Shocker! The Oscar show has been opening with inspired pieces of CGI trickery for years, since the Billy Crystal hosting days in the mid ’90s. Wait…has there been a year since ’97 when it hasn’t opened with inspired pieces of CGI trickery?
Sticking to form, host Ellen DeGeneres will reportedly be placed into various scenes (presumably those from Best Picture nominees). Obviously Ellen will be CG’d into royal robes of The Queen, if this is in fact the plan. What else? Jack Nicholson sitting down with Ellen at a back-room table and asking who’s the rat? Ellen clasping a hand grenade to her stomach and blowing her intestines all over the walls of an underground cave, a la Letters From Iwo Jima?
Finke says DeGeneres will be seen dancing with the Happy Feet penguins. (Warner Bros., the producer of both Happy Feet and Ellen’s syndicated series, spent “an enormous amount of money to make this happen,” Finke writes, including hiring Happy Feet director George Miller to coordinate.) Let’s see…have we ever seen a big-name TV star dancing with animated penguins before?
I loved Joe Mantegna and particularly Ron Silver as production execs Bobby Gould and Charlie Fox in the 1988 B’way production of David Mamet‘s Speed-the-Plow, but (this may sound like blather but screw it) I was charmed, aroused and finally knocked flat last night by Jon Tenney (Kyra Sedgwick‘s boyfriend in TNT’s The Closer) and Greg Germann (Talladega Nights, Friends With Money) as they played the same roles in the current Geffen Playhouse production.
Greg Germann, Jon Tenney following Thursday night’s performance in Westwood
Tenney and Germann, real-life single dads and off-stage pals, have a preternatural rhythm going with Mamet’s dialogue that feels like fusion jazz. It seemed faster and more agreeably manic than Mantegna and Silver’s back-and-forth, and definitely funnier. (Germann’s hyper physicality is a constant hoot.) I went to the play with a guarded attitude, having enjoyed but not quite loved the ’88 version. In part because Plow is engaging but not really first-tier Mamet, and because of the after-effect of Madonna’s tolerable-but-far-from-great performance. But the hilarity came through in spades last night, and I left with a different attitude.
My favorite Germann performance before this was the computer geek in ’94’s Clear and Present Danger…no longer. I haven’t seen much of Tenney because I barely watch the tube, but last night was a wake-up.
Calling Alicia Silverstone‘s performance as “Karen” — the office temp who temporarily sidetracks the power-hungry Gould into wanting to make a movie about radiation and the end of the world — better than Madonna’s sounds like damnation with faint praise, so let’s say she’s quite good — snappy, emotionally in tune, alive in the moment — by any yardstick you want to use. (The only weird thing is that she was wearing stockings under jeans in the second scene of Act One.)
Silver, Madonna and Mantegna in ’88 production
There was a q & a with director Randall Arney during an after-party following the show, and the moderator started things off by asking if Speed-the-Plow was a comedy or a tragedy. “David feels it’s a comedy,” said Arney. “A comedy about the end of the world.” No good work is one thing or another, of course. Here’s the great Peter Ustinov explaining his feelings about how all mature dramas and comedies are always a blend of high and low, darkness and light.
You’re not supposed to say this and I’m not “saying” it myself — I’m just asking what people think. I realize there’s something in this that sounds a wee bit racist and lunk-headed, but an industry friend passed along a supposed distributor- exhibitor belief earlier today, which is that African-American audiences go to movies in proportionately bigger numbers on Sunday than other demos do. With every other group moviegoing falls off slightly on the day of rest, but with blacks attendance either holds steady or goes up. I heard this same view from a marketing executive five or six months ago. Both guys said this is backed up by surveys, data, etc. Is this a widely understood, research-verified cultural thing, or is it something else? And if it’s accurate, why does it happen?
Factory Final
I didn’t say very much about Factory Girl when I riffed on it last August (I’d seen an early, far-from-finished cut) — I mostly confined myself to praising Sienna Miller‘s performance as Edie Sedgwick, which I thought (and still think) is a deeply sad, near-perfect communing with the spirit of a proverbial damaged debutante.
Last night I saw a more-or-less complete version of Factory Girl (i.e., almost but not quite the exact same cut that’s opening today in Los Angeles), and guess what? This is a much better film — far more precise and filled in and rounded out — but I liked it a bit more when it was funkier, rawer and less “complete.” Strange but strangely true.
I realize, of course, that the choppier, more instinctual, not-quite-as-layered version that I liked or believed in a tiny bit more wouldn’t play as well with general audien- ces, and I also recognize that the current version is a more finely woven thing. I’m just saying that the old Factory Girl felt less self-conscious — it seemed hipper and more fuck-all Warholian. But no one else saw the August version so none of this matters.
Factory Girl is somewhere between a solid 7.5 and an 8 — it has sufficient dramatic potency, it’s atmospherically convincing and tonally accurate (for the most part), and it’s extremely well acted by the leads. And the rotely cautionary theme that speaks to every nocturnal scenester out there only adds to the brew. Beware of temporary coolness and clubbing around and endlessly shooting the shit with your homies over drinks — it’ll turn you into toast. Stay home more, get into your art, take walks with your dog…invest in yourself and don’t give it away.
There are two significant differences between last night’s Factory Girl and the version I saw five months ago. Miller is still uncannily on-target — she still has Sedgwick’s “fluttery debutante laugh, that mixture of Warholian cool and little-girl terror, the giddy euphoria, the cracked voice,” as I wrote last summer — but Guy Pearce‘s Andy Warhol performance has been beefed up to an extent that he’s no longer a distinct supporting character but a costar. And Hayden Christensen‘s Bob Dylan character (called “Danny Quinn” in the press notes but never called anything by anyone in the film) also seems a bit more assertive and sharply defined.
The old Factory Girl was basically a Sienna show with two strong supporting males. Now it’s become a three-character piece that’s using the myth-cliche of a romantic triangle (partly if not largely based on bullshit but so what?) to provide the dramatic tension.
The story is about gay, ultra-cool Andy — ex-advertising guy who’s made himself into a Manhattan artist legend — fascinated by Edie’s jaded spirit and making her famous for being famous and yet offering nothing solid except a momentary flash of hip notoriety. Taking, studying, gliding along, going with it…and never “there” as any kind of friend, supporter or colleague whatsoever.
Along comes heavycat “Danny” geninely liking Edie for who/what she was — seeing value in her essence — while tagging Andy as a kind of user-taker vampire poseur and trying to rescue Edie from her inevitable fate, which is to be cast aside for the next whatever. And yet realizing in the end that she’s too damaged and off-balance to really stand on her own.
And then Warhol, who’s come to resent Edie for pursuing a “Danny” relationship, throws her over for Nico (of the Velvet Underground), and Edie subsequently gets caught up in drugs and debauch, and ends up dead — the old drug habits — five years later.
Pearce’s Warhol may be grossly simplified compared to the real McCoy, but he’s trippy and absorbing in a darkly downtown sort of way. Half-comic and half demonic, he’s one of the most obliquely cool screen villains I’ve ever spent time with — no exaggeration. His malice and selfishness is cloaked in a kind of hip vacancy (i.e., the standard “oh, wow” Warhol of legend, which wasn’t who the guy really was), but there’s obviously something cold and almost monsterish about him — a guy so damaged and ruthless that he’s forgotten where he put whatever vestiges of common humanity he may have once had.
I believed Factory Girl‘s atmospheric details; it seemed right to me in all kinds of ways. But I had minor problem with costar Jimmy Fallon‘s hair, which goes from dark brown to light brown-orange in a single early cut. Abrupt hair shifts are never good for anyone in any realm! Harvey Weinstein should spend an extra $30,000 to give Fallon a CGI hair fix.
Edie Sedgwick may not have even slept with Bob Dylan, much less had a raging love affair with him….but “Danny’s” entry into the film does two things: it provides a semi-decent dramatic structure-conflict, and it allows Christensen to deliver the first better-than-decent performance of his life.
I’ve disliked each and every Christensen performance I’ve seen prior to Factory Girl (he’s the reason I can’t bear to watch any portion of the last two Star Wars prequels) but he somehow finds a way into the Dylan attitude and voice, and seems more or less relaxed and centered in it. He has a near-great scene when he’s posing for Warhol’s 16mm camera inside the Factory while looking around and asking if “this is where you paint your cans of beans,” and at the same time clearly implying that Warhol is a selfish prick. For the first time in his brief career, Christensen doesn’t seem to be straining for emotional intensity.
The end credits use some talking-head comments from the late George Plympton and (I think) one of Sedgwick’s brothers to moderately interesting effect, although it feels a wee bit tacked-on and superfluous.
Captain Mauzner’s screenplay feels right when it comes to the attitude dialogue, and the supporting performances from Beth Grant (as Warhol’s Polish mom), Armin Amiri, Mena Suvari and Illeana Douglas (as Diana Vreeland) are agreeable and bump-free. The only one that doesn’t feel quite right is Edward Herrman‘s as a Sedgwick family lawyer — his scenes seem sketchily written and too tidy.
Some faces are so authoritatively creepy they do more than stay in your memory; they seep into your psyche, your bones …little pan flashes of something long buried. This guy — I won’t insult his iconic status by identifying him or mentioning the film he starred in — got so far under my emotional skin when I was a kid that he’ll probably stay with me into my next life.
Every time I see this chilling face I think of how he was described: “The sum of all intelligence”…and then I see those reptile tweezer fingers. It’s not that he’s “scary” — it’s knowing for sure that face will never be erased.
The question is, who else in films has had a truly startling puss — something out- there in either a scary or beautiful or mesmerizing way — that you can’t forget him/ her no matter what, no matter how many years have passed?
One of my all-time favorite faces belongs to the young Trevor Howard in Brief Encounter , followed closely by Holly Hunter‘s in Broadcast Newsm and Bob Mitchum‘s in Out of the Past. There was something close to haunting about Leonardo DiCaprio‘s in The Basketball Diaries and Romeo + Juliet. As spell- blnding as Max Shreck’s face was in Murnau’s Nosferatu, I think Klaus Kinski outdid him in the ’79 Herzog version. John Wayne ‘s weather-beaten, squinty- eyed face in Red River….Anna Magnani ‘s in Open City or Guilietta Masina‘s in La Strada….Adam Sandler ‘s in Reign Over Me (seriously). I could go on for pages.
Reconsidering Lives
I spoke early Wednesday evening with Florian Henckel- Donnersmarck, the 33 year-old director of the gripping, pulverizing German-language thriller The Lives of Others (Sony Pictures Classics), which is all but a dead lock for a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar nomination.
Florian Henckel-Donnersmarck at the Beverly Wilshire hotel — Wednesday, 11.8.06, 6:05 pm.
A huge favorite at the Telluride Film festival and the biggest hit of the Toronto Film festival after Borat, The Lives of Others won’t open in a conventional commercial sense until 2.9.07. L.A. audiences will get an early peek in December, however, when it opens here for a one-week qualifying run. The idea is to qualify it for nom- inations in other categories, as Pedro Almodovar‘s Talk to Her and Roberto Begnini‘s Life is Beautiful managed a few years ago.
The Lives of Others is one of the most penetrating German-made “heart” films I’ve ever seen — the love story is tender and impassioned and ripely erotic — but it’s also a riveting drama about political terror.
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I always tell people Lives has four selling points: (a) it’s a first-rate political thriller and a well-sculptured drama, (b) the story isn’t predictable, and it delivers strong arresting emotion at pretty much every turn, (c) it’s sexy as all get out (largely due to costar Martina Gedek, best known on these shores for her Mostly Martha role) and (d) it runs 2 hours and 17 minutes with credits, and yet it feels like maybe 100, 110 minutes at the most.
It’s a gray and dispiriting film now and then, but with a touching “up” element at the finale. It’s a political thriller with real compassion — a movie about spying and paranoia and the worst aspects of Socialist bloc rigidity and bureacratic thuggery, and yet one that delivers a metaphor that says even the worst of us can move towards openness and a lessening of hate and suspicion. Ugliness needn’t rule.
Sebastian Koch, Martina Gedek
It’s about the turning of a bad guy — a Stasi secret policeman (Ulrich Muhe) who’s first seen as a bloodless and fiendish bureaucrat, but whose determination to spy upon and mangle the lives of a playwright (Sebastian Koch) and his actress wife (Gedek) for the sake of career advancement gradually weakens and erodes, and then flips over into something else entirely.
“It’s so easy to make a cynical film,” Henckel-Donnersmarck said early in our chat. “To write or play an unlikable part is easier still. But to write or play someone postive…a positive character…is much harder. Any kind of film with a message of hope, to convey that emotion…to deliver that is a real challenge.
“A film that empowers you is very important to me. Even if it’s painting a positive image just be painting a shadow. if ‘what’s next’ question dies in a viewer’s head …that makes a film drag. People always have to be asking “what’s next?”..you have to keep people awake in that respect, and that means you always have to keep surprising them.”
Set in Berlin, the story mostly takes place in 1984 and ’85, although it jumps to ’89 (the year the Berlin Wall came down) and then to ’91 and ’93. During the 50-year history of the German Democratic Republic (’49 to ’89), the thugs who held the reins of power kept the citizenry in line through a network of secret police called the “Stasi”, an army of 200,000 bureaucrats and informers whose goal was “to know everything.”
Captain Gerd Wiesler (Muhe) is a highly placed Stasi officer who is prodded by a superior, Lieutenant Colonel Anton Grubitz (Ulrich Tukur), to dig up anything negative he can on a famous playwright named Georg Dreyman (Koch) and his actress wife, Christa-Maria Sieland (Gedeck).
At first the suspicions are baseless — Freyman is a dedicated socialist who believes in the GDR. But his loyalties evolve when he discovers that his wife has been pressured into a sexual relationship with a government bigwig, and especially after a theatrical director pal commits suicide due to despondency over his being blacklisted and prevented from working. Eventually Wiesler, who has had their apartment thoroughly bugged, has evidence that Wiesler is working to undermine the state.
And yet his immersion in the lives of this playwright and his actress wife leads, ironically, to a gradual bonding process — a feeling of identification and sympathy for the couple as human beings, artists…people he’d like to know and perhaps share passions with, despite his constricted personality and shadowy Stasi ways. He knows he’s not in their league and probably not worthy of their friendship, but he feels what he feels regardless.
Others won 7 Lola Awards (Germany’s equivalent of the Oscar) — for Best Film, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Actor (Muhe), Best Supporting Actor (Ulrich Tukur) and Best Production Design.
Ulrich Muhe in The Lives of Others
Here’s the shorter first portion of our conversation and the longer second portion. It includes questions and comments from producer and longtime friend Victoria Wisdom, who’d met Henckel-Donnersmarck the night before.
Florian is definitely the tallest first-rate director I’ve ever spoken to — he’s 6’9″. He said he’s looking to direct a U.S.-funded film next, although he’s a ways from deciding what that will be. He’ll be in Los Angeles for the next few days. He said something about returning for the one-week December opening and then again in January to promote the early February opening.
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