Will someone at 20th Century Fox please do something to save The Family Stone? Are they planning on at least sneaking it in theatres nationwide on the weekend after next (12.9 to 12.11, which is the weekend before the 12.16 opening)? I’ve tried not to oversell it but it shouldn’t be undervalued either. The Family Stone is one of the cleverest, warmest and most likable films of the holiday season, as well as the best home-for-the-holidays flick ever made. But (and here’s what makes it so fresh and alive) it’s also one of those delightful in-betweeners — not exactly a comedy, not precisely a drama. And yet people keep asking, “Is it a comedy or a drama…which is it?” and I’m really starting to lose it over this. It’s both, genius brains! You know…the way life itself tends to be? I’m also fretting because Stone‘s latest tracking figures haven’t shown signs of improvement. First choice is 1% (which is terrible for a film opening in two weeks’ time…a decent number would be 5 or 6), definite awareness is 24% (it should be in the 30s by this point) and general awareness is at 45 (it should be in the 60s). You can pay some attention to that teaser-trailer that’s been showing for months that suggests the film is some kind of Sarah Jessica Parker-ish relationship comedy…obviously an attempt to grab SJP’s Sex and the City fans. It’s partly that but it’s so much more.
Match Guilt
I’m feel I should be beating the drum more loudly for Woody Allen’s Match Point (DreamWorks, 12.28) because it’s not just his best in a long time, but one of the best of the year. And I need to stop being wimpy about this.
It really is Allen’s darkest and most precisely calibrated film since Crime and Misdemeanors…clean, cruel and ironic as hell.
Scarlett Johansson, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers in Woody Allen’s Match Point
Any film worth its salt has to have thematic clarity. Match Point‘s theme is clear as a friggin’ bell, and with echoes of George Stevens’ A Place in the Sun and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment,” and it boils down to this:
Be smart and vigilant in life, and maybe you’ll get what you want, or what you think you need. But if you want things to really turn out, be lucky.
< ?php include ('/home/hollyw9/public_html/wired'); ?>
People hate this notion because it means our lives are little silver balls whirling around a roulette wheel. Maybe we’ll plop into a red or black slot at the right time, or into an odd or even number at the wrong time…and maybe something amazing or comical or devastating will come of it. Life is cold, man.
If there wasn’t such a herd mentality in this town, if people weren’t so political and equivocal, Match Point could actually be in the mix for Best Picture.
It’s a slightly better film than Good Night, and Good Luck. It’s not as much of a sad and broken-hearted thing as Brokeback Mountain, but it has as much confidence and self-awareness as Walk the Line. And it’s a good five or ten times better than Memoirs of a Geisha.
The Spanish one-sheet, which, if you ask me, has it all over the U.S. version
Let’s be really honest. I’m not ballsy enough to stand up for the Woody all alone, partly because deep down I’m only 90% supportive of Match Point (I have some problems with this and that aspect, but nothing humungous), but I feel bolder with Oscar prognosticators Pete Hammond, Sasha Stone and Eugene Hernandez listing it among their top five.
So I guess I’m like Bobby Kennedy after Eugene McCarthy got 42% of the vote in the 1968 New Hampshire primary against Lyndon Johnson. I’m going, “Uhh, okay …there’s something happening here and I’m joining the insurrectionists.”
Screw the herd mentality and the hell with political and equivocal. The more I think about Match Point, the better it seems. Woody’s easily a Best Original Screenplay contender, and…well, at least that.
I said last May at the Cannes Film Festival that Match Point isn’t quite as good as Woody’s Crimes and Misdemeanors, but it deals the same kind of cards and has its footing in more or less the same philosophical realm.
And I’ve said this three or four times, but the finale kills.
Set in present-day England (mostly London, Match Point is about a tennis instruc- tor namd Chris Wilton (Jonathan Rhys- Meyers) who relationships his way into an upper-crust English family by way of one of his male students, a cheerful smoothie named Tom Hewett (Matthew Goode).
Chris is soon romancing and then marrying Tom’s sister Chloe (Emily Mortimer), but almost-as-quickly getting involved with Tom’s fiance, a struggling American actress named Nola Rice (Scarlett Johansson).
The story essentially turns on the matter of Nola becoming pregnant and insisting that Chris leave his wife for her, and how Chris deals with the pressure of this.
Rhys-Meyers handles his part skillfully and with exactly the right balance between terrible, gut-wrenching guilt and the suggestion of a sociopathic undercurrent. But it’s Johansson, far and away, who gives the finest performance. She seems in possession of a fierce, almost Brando-esque naturalism here. She grabs Allen’s dialogue by the shirt collar and slaps it around.
Match Point feels a bit pat from time to time. The talk feels a little too polite here and there, and certain aspects of the plot feel a bit forced. But that’s Woody these days, and in this instance, in this realm, that’s pretty damn good.
Sense of Gravity
Do today’s African-American actors radiate a graver, weightier aura…a stronger sense of manly conviction than white actors these days? Do they seem more rooted, less whimsical…more dependably earnest?
Or has it always been this way and white-guy columnists like myself are only just waking up to this? Or is the whole idea bogus and agenda-driven?
Would Mekhi Phifer have been better as Ennis del Mar or Jack Twist?
I got started on this theory when a New York-area guy named Richard Szathmary suggested this morning that if two black actors — Mekhi Phifer and Sharif Atkins, say — had played the kissin’ cowboys in Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain (Focus Features, 12.9) that reactions among younger-male heteros might be less squea- mish.
I’m referring to under-25s in both Flyover Country and in the big cities guffawing derisively at the film’s teaser-trailer. (I really hate bringing up this asinine reaction, but I’ve been told about it time and again.)
The feeling is that Atkins and Phifer falling for each other would somehow seem more solemn and steady and take-it-to-the-bank.
That’s how it seems to Szathmary, at least…a guy who hasn’t seen seen Brokeback Mountain but has his suspicions based on the trailer…a notion that there’s something vaguely flakey and untrustworthy about Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger. Something in their eyes, manner…something deep down.
I’ve seen Brokeback and I completely disagree. Ledger and Gyllenhaal totally inhabit their characters and then some, revving their emotional engines to a high pitch.
It wouldn’t have quite worked, in any case, to have a couple of black actors playing sheepherders-for-hire in a film that begins in the early ’60s, given the relatively few people of color known to have worked the open range forty or forty-five years agi, not to mention the conservative-racist mentality of big-time ranchers back then.
Sharif Atkins
And I can’t help wondering if Ang Lee and James Schamus would have been able to find a pair of marquee-worthy black actors if they’d said “Fine, let’s cast it this way.” The machismo factor among African-American actors is thought to be pretty high. Remember Will Smith’s reaction to briefly kissing a guy in Six Degrees of Separation?
But maybe Szathmary is onto something anyway.
The more I think about these guys and whatever that thing is they seem to possess, the more solid this idea seems.
I’m thinking of a list that includes (but certainly isn’t limited to) Terrence Howard, Don Cheadle, Denzel Washington, Mos Def, Jamie Foxx, Samuel L. Jackson, Phifer, Taye Diggs, Ludacris, Delroy Lindo, Bill Duke, Ving Rhames, Atkins, Ice Cube, Lawrence Fishburne, Sean Patrick Thomas, Henry Simmons, Keith Hamilton Cobb.
I could even include even Sean Combs, whom I believed as a death-row inmate in Monster’s Ball, despite his not being much of an actor.
“The American cinema is dominated by commanding black males,” wrote Szathmary. “Men whom one can picture as real men. Guys who don’t whine and have real voices and calmly and capably make their moves and get things done.”
As the risk of sounding like a cultural bubble-dweller or zombie of some kind, there’s something to this view. A feeling that there’s something more dependable and rock-solid about black guys…except when it comes to Martin Lawrence, the dandified Will Smith and that guy who played the sick-fuck Little Ze in City of God.
Jamie Foxx
At the same time the notion that guys with darker skin have it all over guys of European heritage sounds simplistic and dumb-assed.
On the other hand there was a voice inside me that said “cool” when that fast-flurry rumor popped up last year about Colin Salmon being one of the finalists being tapped to play 007.
I could riff some more about about this and call up ten or fifteen producers, agents and casting directors and chew it over with them, but let’s just throw this one out and get some reader reactions.
Joan and Toni
L.A. City Beat film critic Andy Klein came on “Elsewhere Live” last night (i.e., Thursday) to talk about the leading Best Actress contenders, and all the verbal sifting-through led me to realize something I hadn’t quite come to on my own:
The two finest waker-upper female performances of the year are both underdogs. One isn’t being spoken of very much, and the other isn’t even on the map.
I’m speaking of Joan Allen’s alcoholic, emotionally off-balance mother of four girls in Mike Binder’s The Upside of Anger and Toni Collette’s stressed, hurting, buoy- ant Philadelphia attorney in Curtis Hanson’s In Her Shoes.
Kevin Costner, Joan Allen in The Upside of Anger
Allen is sitting on a few Oscar prognosticator “maybe” lists, but not so you’d notice. It’s high time to refresh the browser. There’s an emotional hair-trigger element that Allen gets hold of in Anger that feels almost giddy at times. She’s bracing and sexy, willful and vulnerable and quirky. (And let’s not forget how sublime she was in Sally Potter’s Yes.)
No one anywhere is talking about Collette at all. Obviously people disagree with my feelings about her. Maybe In Her Shoes getting only a 75% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes had its effect, and maybe the underwhelming box office was a factor, or Fox not going to bat for Collette with trade ads…whatever.
I know what exceptional in-the-pocket acting is — I know what it feels like, sounds like — and I know plenty of others who feel this way, and those who’ve dismissed Collette’s performance out-of-hand are just being slackers.
Allen and Collette’s performances are funny, sad, joyful, exuberant. They raise the emotional thermometer and have all kinds of ins and outs, and the plain simple truth is that none of the other supposed contenders (i.e., the ones on everyone’s lists) are in their realm.
I believe this because…
Toni Collette in In Her Shoes
Reason #1: Reese Witherspoon, the presumed front-runner for her fine inhabiting of June Carter in Walk the Line, gives an assured movie-star performance…yes. Her acting is robust and and authentically down-home. She does more with less and is quite radiant and likable, and she sings like an angel. And she’s almost a supporting character (I said “almost”). And she doesn’t have one of those hair- pulling, “look ma, I’m acting” scenes to work with either.
But at the same time Witherspoon isn’t exactly pushing her boundaries or rewriting the book on acting. She’s great but c’mon…
Reason #2: Judi Dench, another presumed front-runner for her playing a spirited upper-class snob in Mrs. Henderson Presents, can do this sort of thing in her sleep. Academy people always kowtow to world-class British actresses when they get hold of a good part, and that’s happening here. Like I said a few weeks ago, Dench “has a pitch-perfect way of delivering zap lines with just the right tone of upper-class indifference, and yet the joke is always on her.” But it’s a performance that’s straight out of her kit bag.
Reason #3: Sarah Jessica Parker is the one who goes through the big character journey in The Family Stone, starting out all rigid and butt-plugged and then evol- ving into somone calmer and more centered. But she’s not in Witherspoon’s class, much less Allen’s or Collette’s (in part because of how her character is written).
Reese Witehspoon in Walk the Line
Reason #4: Charlize Theron gives an impassioned, balls-out, tough-as-nails performance in North Country, but the movie, a fairly solid drama on its own terms, didn’t cause much of a stir when it came out, and people feel a little Charlize-d out from the Monster hoopla of…what was it, two years ago?
Reason #5: This is a non-reason, but I haven’t seen Felicity Huffman playing a man undergoing a gender-switch procedure in Transamerica, so she’s off the table for now.
Reason #6: Keira Knightley doesn’t have that element of a-churning-river-running- through-her…not at all…not in Pride & Prejudice, and not in any performance she’s given in any film so far. It’s vaguely silly that people have even put her on their lists. Just forget it.
Reason #7: Ziyi Zhang is a barely emotive presence in Memoirs of a Geisha. She’s all makeup and porcelain and dropping her gaze to the ground. She’s young and vigorous and great on her feet with a sword, but quiet acting isn’t her game. She may get swept along in the current of all the below-the-line nominations that Geisha is expected to receive, but she doesn’t deliver on her own and that’s a fact.
Charlize Theron in North Country
Reason #8: Claire Danes doesn’t have nearly enough to work with in Shopgirl, and her character’s a bit opaque and the movie’s underwhelming, so forget it.
Reason #9: Gwyneth Paltrow’s daughter-of-Anthony-Hopkins character in Proof is too gloomy and self-involved. That was my reaction, at least — I felt she was too wrapped up in her woe-is-me blanket, and I found that off-putting after a while. The film has its moments and Paltrow’s performance has merit, but it’s a stretch to talk about Oscar contention.
Reason #10: The White Countess is said to have more than a few problems so however good Natasha Richardson may be, a nomination doesn’t seem to be in the cards.
Reason #11: It’s a little early to say anything, but the word around the campfire is that the same equation may apply to notions of Q’orianka Kilcher being singled out for her work in The New World.
I said no other female performance this year was quite in Allen and Collette’s realm. That isn’t entirely accurate if you allow Robin Wright Penn’s brief but startling turn in Rodrigo Garcia’s Nine Lives into the mix.
Wright Penn may not be on-screen long enough to qualify for contention in the Best Supporting Actress category (in people’s heads, I mean) but she’s absolutely mesmerizing in this film. I wrote about it in October (scroll to the bottom of the page).
Jason Isaacs, Robin Wright Penn in Nine Lives
Forget It
Forget that whole Sundance Film Festival ’06 thing I posted in this section a few days ago, and in the main column last Saturday. Almost all of it was wrong and that’s that.
I’ve been reliably persuaded that a good portion of the titles I mentioned won’t be at the festival, and that some weren’t even submitted (!).
Five or six days ago a friend from the festival circuit sent me a document put together by Film Finders called “Tipped for Sundance,” and it had those 22 films listed.
I went for the information because (a) the Film Finders people are known to be fairly well connected on a business affairs level, (b) the document was passed along only a few days before the official announcements (the trades will be running the stories this week), (c) the document “looked” superficially reliable — it had production info history, sales contact info and phone numbers for each film — and (d) the combined reptutations of Film Finders and the guy who sent me the document convinced me the information was probably jake.
And for the most part, it wasn’t.
Fist in the Air
“I finally got a chance to catch Rent yesterday and wanted to let you that your review in your 11.9 column absolutely nailed it. Columbus did a helluva job transferring this thing to the screen and I agree it worked better in many ways than the play.
“Film allows the viewer to peer deep into its characters souls in a way that the stage (for all its vitality) cannot, and Columbus’s choices were excellent. He let the music speak for itself and didn√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢t let his ego or pretensions get in the way of telling the story.
“I can’t help but think that a more auteur-type (Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee were both attached at one time) would be more inclined to put a personal spin on the material, and thus dilute the essence of Larson’s music. The ego-less direction from Columbis lets the source material to shine through.
Rosario Dawson, Adam Pascal in Rent
“Like many others, I find myself caught in a daily grind of trying to move forth and survive in life’s scramble. Rent reminded me of how important prioritization is. When Rosario Dawson sings to Adam Pascal about how ‘life is yours to miss’ …damn, it hit hard.
“Rent reminded me of why I love art and the way it can help affirm why we’re all here.
“I think many critics are down on this thing due to an anti-Columbus bias (which I previously shared), or they just didn’t enjoy the style, music, etc. They’re missing the boat. This film is much better than Chicago and has an emotional immediacy that is heartfelt and pure.
“So three cheers for Rent and your standing-by-what-you-saw review. It’s another reason why I will remain a loyal reader of your column.” — Kyle Fredette
Brokebackers
“In the Twin Cities where I live, the Brokeback Mountain trailer has been getting lots of snickers at cineplexes and Landmark chain theaters alike. I’m no homo- phobe, and I’m a big Ang Lee fan who will be seeing Brokeback the weekend it opens here. But the collective reaction in some of these theaters has been really something.
“People openly laugh at Heath Ledger’s line ‘Why can’t I quit you?’ A very liberal friend of mine has even taken to doing his own impression of Ledger saying that line, to the howls of all of our other friends.
“While Ledger is very talented and deserves more respect than he gets, I think the idea of the star of A Knight’s Tale uttering that line is hitting people as utterly ridiculous. The line is going to be the thing that most people think of when they think of this movie. Watch over the coming months as it becomes a catchphrase.
“I’m looking forward to this movie and I’m sure it will be deserving of/in contention for numerous awards. But I expect it’s going to get quite a beating from the mass culture, in the way The Crying Game did. I hope I can find a showing in a theater on opening weekend that isn’t ruined by laughter.” — Brian Roche
“I am a 20-something woman, and James Shamus is right, as he usually is about these things, that women like me are the target audience for Brokeback Mountain, and I will be there as soon as it opens here in DC.
“But whenever I bring up BBM to any heterosexual male under 30 I just get the ‘independent films are all about gay cowboys eating pudding’ thing from South Park. These men are well-educated and enjoy independent film. And I don’t think there is so much of a cringe factor as one might think for these young-ish men watching two dudes in love. I just do not think that is the problem.
“As much as I love South Park (and personally think that their characterization of independent film is quite funny), I have to blame Matt and Trey for the chortle and giggle factor that I have run into. However, I also think that if these men got their asses into the seats and watched the film I think most of them would enjoy it. But please, take me with a huge grain of salt as I really liked Ang Lee’s The Hulk.” — Haley Aurora
“Okay, message received: Jeffrey Wells is full-steam behind Brokeback Mountain as the film of the year. Groovy. And your worries about a bubba backlash against it, spurred by homophobia, are entirely realistic and well-founded.
“But with respect, is it possible you’re overlooking the other side of the coin here?
“What I mean is, if one is going to be upfront about the fact that there will be people who will skip this movie, dump on this movie, refuse to like or admit liking this movie because of what side they take in the moral debate over gay rights…is it not only fair but simply intellectually honest to also concede that there will be people who will reflexively praise and exalt it, without having seen it because they take the opposite side and want to see a gay-themed movie succeed?
“I’m not accusing you of outright bias. You’ve seen the film, it’s obviously gotten to you in a profound way, and you’re convinced of it’s innate quality. But if it’s going to be fair-game (and I believe it ought to be) to read between the lines of negative reviews and question whether an element of homophobia is clouding the reviewer’s decision, would you not agree that it’s equally fair-game to do the same for the positive reviews?
“Not every critic is going to agree that this is a great or even good film. But how many of them will be, you’ll pardon the expression, bending over backwards to be positive about it for fear of appearing in cahoots with the religious right wackjobs who will probably be trashing it?
“I’m from Massachusetts and am regularly in the social company of various gay, bisexual or otherwise pals. I’ve supported just about every gay rights cause that’s come down the pike. I’m a full-bore enemy of religious fundamentalism in all it’s forms. I want to see a serious gay-themed movie make a mainstream impact to help society grow up a bit over the whole issue…
“And thus far, I think this movie looks like a chore. I’m sorry, but thats the impression I have right now. It’s possible my impressions are wrong, but for trailer-one this has looked to me like a drippy, soap-opera-ish, Titanic/Gone With The Wind/Cold Mountain chick-flick melodrama, and I’m regarding the prospect of seeing it with the same basic feeling you’ve expressed over sitting through the future Harry Potter sequels.
“But when I tell people this at least half of them look back at me in shock, as though I just implied that AIDS was a plague from God or that the Holocaust hadn’t occured. And I’m not seeing this discussed anywhere in the critical press, so far. Instead, the prevailing theme is Brokeback Mountain will be great, and anyone who doesn’t think so is a Christian right homophobe. And frankly, that’s just plain uncool.” — MST Mario
Wells to MST Mario: You contemptible closet-Christian bigot homophobe skeptical Ang Lee-dissing prick!
“Seriously, MST, I hear you and you’ve made some good points, but trust me on these two points: Brokeback Mountain in no way resembles Titanic or Gone With the Wind or anything along those lines. It’s austere, under-stated, and doesn’t try to massage you into feeling anything. Secondly and more importantly, it’s not a gay or gay-themed film. It really isn’t, despite what you may be presuming.
“I program a series of fine-film cinema locations here in Melbourne Australia, and last weekend I held the first public screening of Broekback Mountain in Australia as part of a promotional weekend launching a loyalty card. I attended the screening with my partner after having watched the film at an exhibitor’s screening the week prior.
“I enjoyed the film greatly at the exhib’s screening, perhaps only finding it a little longer than it could have been, but that’s probably my exhibitor’s hat talking. It actually wasn’t until I was driving home that evening that the weight of the film dawned on me and I was left profoundly moved by it. All night I wanted to talk about the film but forbid myself, not wanting to set expectations too high for my partner.
“I agree that the film is certainly worthy of a Best Pic nomination as well as a win, but from where I am standing the U.S. is a very conservative place at the moment and I wonder about the film’s box-office performance there and whether it will get the support it will need from the expanse between the east and west coasts.
“Perhaps the old adage that any publicity is good publicity” stands in this case. Who knows? Maybe if Oprah likes it, it’s in with a chance with the women of middle America.
“What I want to ltell you was that when I was at the screening, I found myself surprised by the reaction it received from the audience. Admittedly the cinema is in a very upscale location in the suburbs of Melbourne and the audience was partially made up of film buffs who jumped on the opportunity to see the film 2 months out from local release.
“But there was not a peep from anyone during the film’s more intimate scenes, 80% of the audience sat in their seats during the closing credits and when the film ended I overhead nothing other than quiet comments along the lines of ‘amazing,’ ‘brilliant,’ ‘incredible’ and other assorted superlatives. There were also plenty of tears and gasps during the film’s more shocking moments.
“It’s this reception that has me thinking that regardless of the U.S. reception, the film should find considerable success internationally.” — Kristian Connelly, Film Programmer, Cinema Europa, Traditional & Gold Class Village Cinemas, Australia
“I can understand why you’re on the Brokeback horse, but you better be paying real attention to those snickers in those heartland theaters.
“America is homphobic. To its core. And this is a film — no matter what you feel — about two guys in love. About two guys who have (rather explicit) sex with each other. And no matter how sensitive or how well-made, Brokeback mountain ain’t gonna fly in flyover country.
“And please dump your prejudices and realize that Pride and Prejudice is the kind of lush, middle-brow based-on-a-classic picture that Hollywood just loves to gift with Oscar noms.” — Lewis Beale
Match Guilt
I’m feel I should be beating the drum more loudly for Woody Allen’s Match Point (DreamWorks, 12.25) because it’s not just his best in a long time, but one of the best of the year. And I need to stop being wimpy about this.
It really is Allen’s darkest and most precisely calibrated film since Crime and Misdemeanors…clean, cruel and ironic as hell.
Scarlett Johansson, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers in Woody Allen’s Match Point
Any film worth its salt has to have thematic clarity. Match Point‘s theme is clear as a friggin’ bell, and with echoes of George Stevens’ A Place in the Sun and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment,” and it boils down to this:
Be smart and vigilant in life, and maybe you’ll get what you want, or what you think you need. But if you want things to really turn out, be lucky.
< ?php include ('/home/hollyw9/public_html/wired'); ?>
People hate this notion because it means our lives are little silver balls whirling around a roulette wheel. Maybe we’ll plop into a red or black slot at the right time, or into an odd or even number at the wrong time…and maybe something amazing or comical or devastating will come of it. Life is cold, man.
If there wasn’t such a herd mentality in this town, if people weren’t so political and equivocal, Match Point could actually be in the mix for Best Picture.
It’s a slightly better film than Good Night, and Good Luck. It’s not as much of a sad and broken-hearted thing as Brokeback Mountain, but it has as much confidence and self-awareness as Walk the Line. It’s five or ten times better than Memoirs of a Giesha, and the Munich comparisons will soon be clear.
The Italian one-sheet…right?
Let’s be really honest. I’m not ballsy enough to stand up for the Woody all alone, partly because deep down I’m only 90% supportive of Match Point (I have some problems with this and that aspect, but nothing humungous), but I feel bolder with Oscar prognosticators Pete Hammond, Sasha Stone and Eugene Hernandez listing it among their top five.
So I guess I’m like Bobby Kennedy after Eugene McCarthy got 42% of the vote in the 1968 New Hampshire primary against Lyndon Johnson. I’m going, “Uhh, okay …there’s something happening here and I’m joining the insurrectionists.”
Screw the herd mentality and the hell with political and equivocal. The more I think about Match Point, the better it seems. Woody is easily a Best Original Screen- play contender, and…well, at least that.
I said last May at the Cannes Film Festival that Match Point isn’t quite as good as Woody’s Crimes and Misdemeanors, but it deals the same kind of cards and has its footing in more or less the same philosophical realm.
And I’ve said this three or four times, but the finale kills.
Set in present-day England (mostly London, Match Point is about a tennis instruc- tor namd Chris Wilton (Jonathan Rhys- Meyers) who relationships his way into an upper-crust English family by way of one of his male students, a cheerful smoothie named Tom Hewett (Matthew Goode).
Chris is soon romancing and then marrying Tom’s sister Chloe (Emily Mortimer), but almost-as-quickly getting involved with Tom’s fiance, a struggling American actress named Nola Rice (Scarlett Johansson).
The story essentially turns on the matter of Nola becoming pregnant and insisting that Chris leave his wife for her, and how Chris deals with the pressure of this.
Rhys-Meyers handles his part skillfully and with exactly the right balance between terrible, gut-wrenching guilt and the suggestion of a sociopathic undercurrent. But it’s Johansson, far and away, who gives the finest performance. She seems in possession of a fierce, almost Brando-esque naturalism here. She grabs Allen’s dialogue by the shirt collar and slaps it around.
Match Point feels a bit creaky from time to time. The talk feels a little pat here and there, and certain aspects of the plot feel a wee bit forced. But that’s Woody these days, and in this instance, that’s pretty damn good.
Sense of Gravity
Do today’s African-American actors radiate a graver, weightier aura…a stronger sense of manly conviction than white actors these days? Do they seem more rooted, less whimsical…more dependably earnest?
Or has it always been this way and white-guy columnists like myself are only just waking up to this? Or is the whole idea bogus and agenda-driven?
Would Mekhi Phifer have been better as Ennis del Mar or Jack Twist?
I got started on this theory when a New York-area guy named Richard Szathmary suggested this morning that if two black actors — Mekhi Phifer and Sharif Atkins, say — had played the kissin’ cowboys in Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain (Focus Features, 12.9) that reactions among younger-male heteros might be less squeamish.
I’m referring to under-25s in both Flyover Country and in the big cities guffawing derisively at the film’s teaser-trailer. (I really hate bringing up this asinine reaction, but I’ve been told about it time and again.)
The feeling is that Atkins and Phifer falling for each other would somehow seem solemn and steady and take-it-to-the-bank.
That’s how it seems to Szathmary, at least…a guy who hasn’t seen seen Brokeback Mountain but has his suspicions based on the trailer…a notion that there’s something vaguely flakey and untrustworthy about Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger. Something in their eyes, manner…something deep down.
I’ve seen Brokeback and I completely disagree. Ledger and Gyllenhaal totally inhabit their characters and then some, revving their emotional engines to a high pitch.
It wouldn’t have quite worked, in any case, to have a couple of black actors playing sheepherders-for-hire in a film that begins in the early ’60s, given the relatively few people of color known to have worked the open range forty or forty-five years agi, not to mention the conservative-racist mentality of big-time ranchers back then.
Sharif Atkins
And I can’t help wondering if Ang Lee and James Schamus would have been able to find a pair of marquee-worthy black actors if they’d said “Fine, let’s cast it this way.” The machismo factor among African-American actors is thought to be pretty high. Remember Will Smith’s reaction to briefly kissing a guy in Six Degrees of Separation?
But maybe Szathmary is onto something anyway.
The more I think about these guys and whatever that thing is they seem to possess, the more solid this idea seems.
I’m thinking of a list that includes (but certainly isn’t limited to) Terrence Howard, Don Cheadle, Denzel Washington, Mos Def, Jamie Foxx, Samuel L. Jackson, Phifer, Taye Diggs, Ludacris, Delroy Lindo, Bill Duke, Ving Rhames, Atkins, Ice Cube, Lawrence Fishburne, Sean Patrick Thomas, Henry Simmons, Keith Hamilton Cobb.
I could even include even Sean Combs, whom I believed as a death-row inmate in Monster’s Ball, despite his not being much of an actor.
“The American cinema is dominated by commanding black males,” wrote Szathmary. “Men whom one can picture as real men. Guys who don’t whine and have real voices and calmly and capably make their moves and get things done.”
As the risk of sounding like a cultural bubble-dweller or zombie of some kind, there’s something to this view. A feeling that there’s something more dependable and rock-solid about black guys…except when it comes to Martin Lawrence, the dandified Will Smith and that guy who played the sick-fuck Little Ze in City of God.
Jamie Foxx
At the same time the notion that guys with darker skin have it all over guys of European heritage sounds simplistic and dumb-assed.
On the other hand there was a voice inside me that said “cool” when that fast-flurry rumor popped up last year about Colin Salmon being one of the finalists being tapped to play 007.
I could riff some more about about this and call up ten or fifteen producers, agents and casting directors and chew it over with them, but let’s just throw this one out and get some reader reactions.
Joan and Toni
L.A. City Beat film critic Andy Klein came on “Elsewhere Live” last night (i.e., Thursday) to talk about the leading Best Actress contenders, and all the verbal sifting-through led me to realize something I hadn’t quite come to on my own:
The two finest waker-upper female performances of the year are both underdogs. One isn’t being spoken of very much, and the other isn’t even on the map.
I’m speaking of Joan Allen’s alcoholic, emotionally off-balance mother of four girls in Mike Binder’s The Upside of Anger and Toni Collette’s stressed, hurting, buoy- ant Philadelphia attorney in Curtis Hanson’s In Her Shoes.
Kevin Costner, Joan Allen in The Upside of Anger
Allen is sitting on a few Oscar prognosticator “maybe” lists, but not so you’d notice. It’s high time to refresh the browser. There’s an emotional hair-trigger element that Allen gets hold of in Anger that feels almost giddy at times. She’s bracing and sexy, willful and vulnerable and quirky. (And let’s not forget how sublime she was in Sally Potter’s Yes.)
No one anywhere is talking about Collette at all. Obviously people disagree with my feelings about her. Maybe In Her Shoes getting only a 75% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes had its effect, and maybe the underwhelming box office was a factor, or Fox not going to bat for Collette with trade ads…whatever.
I know what exceptional in-the-pocket acting is — I know what it feels like, sounds like — and I know plenty of others who feel this way, and those who’ve dismissed Collette’s performance out-of-hand are just being slackers.
Allen and Collette’s performances are funny, sad, joyful, exuberant. They raise the emotional thermometer and have all kinds of ins and outs, and the plain simple truth is that none of the other supposed contenders (i.e., the ones on everyone’s lists) are in their realm.
I believe this because…
Toni Collette in In Her Shoes
Reason #1: Reese Witherspoon, the presumed front-runner for her fine inhabiting of June Carter in Walk the Line, gives an assured movie-star performance…yes. Her acting is robust and and authentically down-home. She does more with less and is quite radiant and likable, and she sings like an angel. And she’s almost a supporting character (I said “almost”). And she doesn’t have one of those hair- pulling, “look ma, I’m acting” scenes to work with either.
But at the same time Witherspoon isn’t exactly pushing her boundaries or rewriting the book on acting. She’s great but c’mon…
Reason #2: Judi Dench, another presumed front-runner for her playing a spirited upper-class snob in Mrs. Henderson Presents, can do this sort of thing in her sleep. Academy people always kowtow to world-class British actresses when they get hold of a good part, and that’s happening here. Like I said a few weeks ago, Dench “has a pitch-perfect way of delivering zap lines with just the right tone of upper-class indifference, and yet the joke is always on her.” But it’s a performance that’s straight out of her kit bag.
Reason #3: Sarah Jessica Parker is the one who goes through the big character journey in The Family Stone, starting out all rigid and butt-plugged and then evol- ving into somone calmer and more centered. But she’s not in Witherspoon’s class, much less Allen’s or Collette’s (in part because of how her character is written).
Reese Witehspoon in Walk the Line
Reason #4: Charlize Theron gives an impassioned, balls-out, tough-as-nails performance in North Country, but the movie, a fairly solid drama on its own terms, didn’t cause much of a stir when it came out, and people feel a little Charlize-d out from the Monster hoopla of…what was it, two years ago?
Reason #5: This is a non-reason, but I haven’t seen Felicity Huffman playing a man undergoing a gender-switch procedure in Transamerica, so she’s off the table for now.
Reason #6: Keira Knightley doesn’t have that element of a-churning-river-running- through-her…not at all…not in Pride & Prejudice, and not in any performance she’s given in any film so far. It’s vaguely silly that people have even put her on their lists. Just forget it.
Reason #7: Ziyi Zhang is a barely emotive presence in Memoirs of a Geisha. She’s all makeup and porcelain and dropping her gaze to the ground. She’s young and vigorous and great on her feet with a sword, but quiet acting isn’t her game. She may get swept along in the current of all the below-the-line nominations that Geisha is expected to receive, but she doesn’t deliver on her own and that’s a fact.
Charlize Theron in North Country
Reason #8: Claire Danes doesn’t have nearly enough to work with in Shopgirl, and her character’s a bit opaque and the movie’s underwhelming, so forget it.
Reason #9: Gwyneth Paltrow’s daughter-of-Anthony-Hopkins character in Proof is too gloomy and self-involved. That was my reaction, at least — I felt she was too wrapped up in her woe-is-me blanket, and I found that off-putting after a while. The film has its moments and Paltrow’s performance has merit, but it’s a stretch to talk about Oscar contention.
Reason #10: The White Countess is said to have more than a few problems so however good Natasha Richardson may be, a nomination doesn’t seem to be in the cards.
Reason #11: It’s a little early to say anything, but the word around the campfire is that the same equation may apply to notions of Q’orianka Kilcher being singled out for her work in The New World.
I said no other female performance this year was quite in Allen and Collette’s realm. That isn’t entirely accurate if you allow Robin Wright Penn’s brief but startling turn in Rodrigo Garcia’s Nine Lives into the mix.
Wright Penn may not be on-screen long enough to qualify for contention in the Best Supporting Actress category (in people’s heads, I mean) but she’s absolutely mesmerizing in this film. I wrote about it in October (scroll to the bottom of the page).
Jason Isaacs, Robin Wright Penn in Nine Lives
Forget It
Forget that whole Sundance Film Festival ’06 thing I posted in this section a few days ago, and in the main column last Saturday. Almost all of it was wrong and that’s that.
I’ve been reliably persuaded that a good portion of the titles I mentioned won’t be at the festival, and that some weren’t even submitted (!).
Five or six days ago a friend from the festival circuit sent me a document put together by Film Finders called “Tipped for Sundance,” and it had those 22 films listed.
I went for the information because (a) the Film Finders people are known to be fairly well connected on a business affairs level, (b) the document was passed along only a few days before the official announcements (the trades will be running the stories this week), (c) the document “looked” superficially reliable — it had production info history, sales contact info and phone numbers for each film — and (d) the combined reptutations of Film Finders and the guy who sent me the document convinced me the information was probably jake.
And for the most part, it wasn’t.
Fist in the Air
“I finally got a chance to catch Rent yesterday and wanted to let you that your review in your 11.9 column absolutely nailed it. Columbus did a helluva job transferring this thing to the screen and I agree it worked better in many ways than the play.
“Film allows the viewer to peer deep into its characters souls in a way that the stage (for all its vitality) cannot, and Columbus’s choices were excellent. He let the music speak for itself and didn√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢t let his ego or pretensions get in the way of telling the story.
“I can’t help but think that a more auteur-type (Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee were both attached at one time) would be more inclined to put a personal spin on the material, and thus dilute the essence of Larson’s music. The ego-less direction from Columbis lets the source material to shine through.
Rosario Dawson, Adam Pascal in Rent
“Like many others, I find myself caught in a daily grind of trying to move forth and survive in life’s scramble. Rent reminded me of how important prioritization is. When Rosario Dawson sings to Adam Pascal about how ‘life is yours to miss’ …damn, it hit hard.
“Rent reminded me of why I love art and the way it can help affirm why we’re all here.
“I think many critics are down on this thing due to an anti-Columbus bias (which I previously shared), or they just didn’t enjoy the style, music, etc. They’re missing the boat. This film is much better than Chicago and has an emotional immediacy that is heartfelt and pure.
“So three cheers for Rent and your standing-by-what-you-saw review. It’s another reason why I will remain a loyal reader of your column.” — Kyle Fredette
Brokebackers
“In the Twin Cities where I live, the Brokeback Mountain trailer has been getting lots of snickers at cineplexes and Landmark chain theaters alike. I’m no homo- phobe, and I’m a big Ang Lee fan who will be seeing Brokeback the weekend it opens here. But the collective reaction in some of these theaters has been really something.
“People openly laugh at Heath Ledger’s line ‘Why can’t I quit you?’ A very liberal friend of mine has even taken to doing his own impression of Ledger saying that line, to the howls of all of our other friends.
“While Ledger is very talented and deserves more respect than he gets, I think the idea of the star of A Knight’s Tale uttering that line is hitting people as utterly ridiculous. The line is going to be the thing that most people think of when they think of this movie. Watch over the coming months as it becomes a catchphrase.
“I’m looking forward to this movie and I’m sure it will be deserving of/in contention for numerous awards. But I expect it’s going to get quite a beating from the mass culture, in the way The Crying Game did. I hope I can find a showing in a theater on opening weekend that isn’t ruined by laughter.” — Brian Roche
“I am a 20-something woman, and James Shamus is right, as he usually is about these things, that women like me are the target audience for Brokeback Mountain, and I will be there as soon as it opens here in DC.
“But whenever I bring up BBM to any heterosexual male under 30 I just get the ‘independent films are all about gay cowboys eating pudding’ thing from South Park. These men are well-educated and enjoy independent film. And I don’t think there is so much of a cringe factor as one might think for these young-ish men watching two dudes in love. I just do not think that is the problem.
“As much as I love South Park (and personally think that their characterization of independent film is quite funny), I have to blame Matt and Trey for the chortle and giggle factor that I have run into. However, I also think that if these men got their asses into the seats and watched the film I think most of them would enjoy it. But please, take me with a huge grain of salt as I really liked Ang Lee’s The Hulk.” — Haley Aurora
“Okay, message received: Jeffrey Wells is full-steam behind Brokeback Mountain as the film of the year. Groovy. And your worries about a bubba backlash against it, spurred by homophobia, are entirely realistic and well-founded.
“But with respect, is it possible you’re overlooking the other side of the coin here?
“What I mean is, if one is going to be upfront about the fact that there will be people who will skip this movie, dump on this movie, refuse to like or admit liking this movie because of what side they take in the moral debate over gay rights…is it not only fair but simply intellectually honest to also concede that there will be people who will reflexively praise and exalt it, without having seen it because they take the opposite side and want to see a gay-themed movie succeed?
“I’m not accusing you of outright bias. You’ve seen the film, it’s obviously gotten to you in a profound way, and you’re convinced of it’s innate quality. But if it’s going to be fair-game (and I believe it ought to be) to read between the lines of negative reviews and question whether an element of homophobia is clouding the reviewer’s decision, would you not agree that it’s equally fair-game to do the same for the positive reviews?
“Not every critic is going to agree that this is a great or even good film. But how many of them will be, you’ll pardon the expression, bending over backwards to be positive about it for fear of appearing in cahoots with the religious right wackjobs who will probably be trashing it?
“I’m from Massachusetts and am regularly in the social company of various gay, bisexual or otherwise pals. I’ve supported just about every gay rights cause that’s come down the pike. I’m a full-bore enemy of religious fundamentalism in all it’s forms. I want to see a serious gay-themed movie make a mainstream impact to help society grow up a bit over the whole issue…
“And thus far, I think this movie looks like a chore. I’m sorry, but thats the impression I have right now. It’s possible my impressions are wrong, but for trailer-one this has looked to me like a drippy, soap-opera-ish, Titanic/Gone With The Wind/Cold Mountain chick-flick melodrama, and I’m regarding the prospect of seeing it with the same basic feeling you’ve expressed over sitting through the future Harry Potter sequels.
“But when I tell people this at least half of them look back at me in shock, as though I just implied that AIDS was a plague from God or that the Holocaust hadn’t occured. And I’m not seeing this discussed anywhere in the critical press, so far. Instead, the prevailing theme is Brokeback Mountain will be great, and anyone who doesn’t think so is a Christian right homophobe. And frankly, that’s just plain uncool.” — MST Mario
Wells to MST Mario: You contemptible closet-Christian bigot homophobe skeptical Ang Lee-dissing prick!
“Seriously, MST, I hear you and you’ve made some good points, but trust me on these two points: Brokeback Mountain in no way resembles Titanic or Gone With the Wind or anything along those lines. It’s austere, under-stated, and doesn’t try to massage you into feeling anything. Secondly and more importantly, it’s not a gay or gay-themed film. It really isn’t, despite what you may be presuming.
“I program a series of fine-film cinema locations here in Melbourne Australia, and last weekend I held the first public screening of Broekback Mountain in Australia as part of a promotional weekend launching a loyalty card. I attended the screening with my partner after having watched the film at an exhibitor’s screening the week prior.
“I enjoyed the film greatly at the exhib’s screening, perhaps only finding it a little longer than it could have been, but that’s probably my exhibitor’s hat talking. It actually wasn’t until I was driving home that evening that the weight of the film dawned on me and I was left profoundly moved by it. All night I wanted to talk about the film but forbid myself, not wanting to set expectations too high for my partner.
“I agree that the film is certainly worthy of a Best Pic nomination as well as a win, but from where I am standing the U.S. is a very conservative place at the moment and I wonder about the film’s box-office performance there and whether it will get the support it will need from the expanse between the east and west coasts.
“Perhaps the old adage that any publicity is good publicity” stands in this case. Who knows? Maybe if Oprah likes it, it’s in with a chance with the women of middle America.
“What I want to ltell you was that when I was at the screening, I found myself surprised by the reaction it received from the audience. Admittedly the cinema is in a very upscale location in the suburbs of Melbourne and the audience was partially made up of film buffs who jumped on the opportunity to see the film 2 months out from local release.
“But there was not a peep from anyone during the film’s more intimate scenes, 80% of the audience sat in their seats during the closing credits and when the film ended I overhead nothing other than quiet comments along the lines of ‘amazing,’ ‘brilliant,’ ‘incredible’ and other assorted superlatives. There were also plenty of tears and gasps during the film’s more shocking moments.
“It’s this reception that has me thinking that regardless of the U.S. reception, the film should find considerable success internationally.” — Kristian Connelly, Film Programmer, Cinema Europa, Traditional & Gold Class Village Cinemas, Australia
“I can understand why you’re on the Brokeback horse, but you better be paying real attention to those snickers in those heartland theaters.
“America is homphobic. To its core. And this is a film — no matter what you feel — about two guys in love. About two guys who have (rather explicit) sex with each other. And no matter how sensitive or how well-made, Brokeback mountain ain’t gonna fly in flyover country.
“And please dump your prejudices and realize that Pride and Prejudice is the kind of lush, middle-brow based-on-a-classic picture that Hollywood just loves to gift with Oscar noms.” — Lewis Beale
Cowpoke Surge
It’s time to say it straight (and I don’t mean that as a pun): Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain (Focus Features, 12.9) is the movie to beat in the Best Picture race this year.
I’m not saying it will win or lose, but it’s the one film everyone in the country will be talking about over the next five or six weeks and deciding where they stand deep down. And it’s safe to say that a lot of convictions about this film will go far beyond issues of cinematic criteria.
On the brink of a dishonest marriage: Jake Gyllenhaal, Anne Hathaway in Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain (Focus Features, 12.9)
The bottom line is that Brokeback Mountain is the only year-end prestige film that people are weeping over, and that matters. On top of which it has a simple philoso- phical theme (i.e., ignore the pleadings of your heart at your own peril), which all Best Picture winners tend to have.
This is mostly a gut feeling, but I’ve called around a bit and it’s the one film that seems to be truly gathering steam within L.A. and N.Y. screening circles (except for certain conservative harumphers and macho conquistadors) as an enlightened stand-out.
It’s the classiest tearjerker. The most bravely made. The year’s one big deck-re- shuffler. The stand-alone-under-a-lonely-nightscape movie that did something new and head-turning. A film that brought a sense of real compassion and vulnerability to the table, and is sure to goad anyone who sees it into a deeper understanding of what comprises human tragedy.
< ?php include ('/home/hollyw9/public_html/wired'); ?>
I haven’t conducted any kind of scientific poll, but I’m hearing that Academy mem- bers are saying to each other than Brokeback Mountain is an almost-certain Best Picture nominee, which confirms what I’ve long believed would eventually happen anyway.
But I have to acknowledge something else, however reluctantly, which is that there are people out there who are not on the team and never will be.
Brokeback Mountain is at heart an emotionally shielded and heterosexual-attitude piece about two rugged western guys named Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) and En- nis del Mar (Heath Ledger) who fall in love with each other in their early 20s and spend the rest of their lives feeling all screwed up about it.
They both get married and have kids and take a stab at conventional domesticity while continuing to get together for “fishing trips” now and then. But the denial fes- ters and eats away. Ledger’s gruff, emotionally plugged-up cowhand is especially unable to act on his feelings for Twist in any lasting way, and all kinds of bad stuff kicks in down the road.
Brokeback Mountain‘s Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Williams and Anne Hathaway at Toronto Film Festival press conference for the film.
My repeated promises that this film isn’t gay are getting tiresome, but it really and truly isn’t. But those nagging impressions about it being a “gay cowboy” movie aren’t going to go away, and the more recent (and catchy) “gay Gone With the Wind” label is going to stick also.
And I’m afraid…I’ll just spit it out…that homophobia and closet bubba-ism (which is a bigger factor than some of us may realize) are going to start elbowing their way into the Brokeback Mountain conversation over the next several weeks.
I’ve been picking up indications of resistance in letters here and there…just hints and simmerings (following this article is a letter from a 26 year-old Milwaukee guy who’s been picking up a certain vibe when the trailer plays)…but I’m starting to sense there may be more where this comes from.
And I’d be kidding myself if I didn’t admit to the possibility of a subterranean, grumpy-straight-male, anything-but-Brokeback groundswell. If there’s enough heft behind this, there’s a chance that the scales could tip against Lee and producer James Schamus and everyone who loves and supports this film.
The fact that Matt Drudge, a conduit of conservative opinion but also a guy with a very sharp nose for what’s happening in the hinterlands, has run at least two uh-oh items about Brokeback Mountain… this is a significant barometric reading.
Brokeback Mountain director Ang Lee after winning the Golden Lion at last September’s Venice Film Festival
Focus Features wants to take the high road and I understand that, but The Battle of Brokeback Mountain is starting to take shape, and will fundamentlally be about whether people can look beyond their personal agendas and aversions and look into the fundamental truths contained in its story.
The more I consider the competition, the more I’m persuaded that no other film has come close to staking out, much less laying claim to, the emotional turf occupied by Brokeback Mountain.
The issue of whether or not it will gather more support than Steven Spielberg’s Munich, which my ass-teletype and insect-antennae readings keep telling me is going to be received in a couple of weeks’ time as a pretty good film but which has almost no chance of being this year’s Million Dollar Baby, is almost moot at this stage.
How can I say that? What do I know? But just wait.
The older ooh-ahh crowd…the journalists and Academy members who voted or campaigned for Rob Marshall’s Chicago two years ago…seem to be lining up behind Memoirs of a Geisha, and already I can see this emerging as a possible anything-but-Brokeback alternative (although I gag at the thought).
Capote is a sublimely haunted film that gets better every time you re-see it or think back on it. The New World will almost certainly be a compositional stunner (and perhaps more). Crash broke through and found its audience and deserves an industry-wide salute. And The Constant Gardener is thrillingly crafted piece that fuses the emotional and political into a kind of African third-world symphony.
But Brokeback Mountain is the daddy…the one movie with a grip on a profound human truth that we all recognize.
This is what we’re all sitting on…the rumble of mid-November. And the question seems to be whether or not the resistant types out there will summon the char- acter to overcome their macho chortlings about the cornholing-in-the-tent-on-the- fishing-trips, and find the calm and coolness that will allow them to be big-hearted and open-hearted enough to…fuck it…let this film in.
We’re all lonely. We’ve all let chances at happiness slip through our fingers. Life is so damn short it’s not funny. What we feel in our hearts we’d better damn well act upon, or we’ll sure as shit feel the consequences down the road.
Attaboy
Thanks to Buffalo News columnist Greg Connors for giving me and this column a plug in last Monday’s edition.
Milwaukee, Baby
“I’m starting to worry about Brokeback Mountain‘s appeal in Milwaukee and surrounding environs. I live in Milwaukee and we have two Landmark theatres here — the Oriental and the Downer. And the trailer for BBM has been playing for a month or so in front of most films at both theaters, and I’ve seen it about four or five times within that time period.
“Though the audience is pretty typical for an art house/indie theatre, reactions have not been positive. Each time I’ve felt something like confusion, followed by the reali- zation that it’s ‘the gay cowboy movie.’ followed by either snickering or outright laughter. It seems like people don’t know what to make of it.
Landmark’s Oriental theatre in Milwaukee, haven to a group of Brokeback snickerers whose numbers are undetermined.
“I know the people I was at the theatre with snickered. Some had heard of it and some had not. But when they realize that it’s a love story between two cowboys, they laugh…regardless of whether or not they had heard of it.
“Not that I’d know how to sell it any better than Focus has. I hope I’m wrong. I think it looks great and I can’t wait to see it.
“I am 26. I would say that the snickerers in the audiences I’ve seen the trailer with are on the younger side. Maybe younger viewers just aren’t interested in Brokeback Mountain and that’ll be that.” — Paul Doro, Milwaukee, WI.
Another place for chortlers and snickerers to congregate
Young-male aversion to the trailer is mentioned in Sean Smith’s currently-running Newsweek story about Brokeback Mountain.
By way of Smith, producer James Schamus addresses the guys who are laughing at the trailers: ‘If you have a problem with the subject matter, that’s your problem, not mine,’ he says. ‘It would be great if you got over your problem, but I’m not sitting here trying to figure out how to help you with it.’
Smith also reports, “In an early meeting, Schamus told Lee that, from a marketing standpoint, they were making this film for one core audience. ‘Yes, of course,’ Lee said. ‘The gay audience.’ No, Schamus said. ‘Women.'”
Cash It
Editor’s note: I’m re-running the review I ran last September about Walk the Line because it opens tomorrow on Friday, 11.18.]
Walk the Line (20th Century Fox, 11.18) is a frank, straight-from the-shoulder bio- pic about the late Johnny Cash, and I’m cool with it and admire it in most of the ways that usually count.
For above all (and because there are many pleasures in the way it unfolds), Walk the Line is a solid, strongly composed thing — cleanly rendered and always touch- ing the bottom of the pool.
Just as George Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck plays, appropriately, like a live 1950s TV drama, Walk the Line is constructed and delivers like a good Johnny Cash song…no b.s., down to it, hurtin’ feelings, etc.
Walk the Line costars Joaquin Phoenix (as Johnny Cash) and Reese Witherspoon (as June Carter)
It’s easily Mangold’s best film ever, and from the guy who directed Girl Interrupted, the respectable Cop Land, the unsettling Identity, the nicely composed Kate & Leopold and the excellent Heavy, that’s saying something.
And you can definitely take Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon’s performances as Cash and the apple of his eye, June Carter, to the bank. They’re both spot-on…fully believable, living and breathing on their own jazz, and doing their own singing and knocking down any resistance or concerns you might have about either one being able to inhabit or become the real deal.
Phoenix is a lock for a Best Actor nomination, and Witherspoon for a Best Actress nom — no question.
You will not in any way feel burned by this movie, and in many ways it will leave you with a feeling of finely-honed honesty and conviction…isn’t that the bottom line?
Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley, backstage after a show they gave in ’56.
At the same time I have to be dirt straight and say that the story of the film, which can basically be boiled down to “when will Johnny and June finally get married?”, didn’t exactly throttle me.
Walk the Line is very austere and manly, but when you look at it in sections, it’s just a standard showbiz saga progression thing…this happened, that happened, this happened, etc.
But the real reason it might run into trouble with the Academy is one that David Poland alluded to last summer, which is that Walk the Line is a bit too much like Ray…it’s too deja-vu.
Both films tell stories about a famous but flawed musical performer…the boy-born-into-southern-poverty thing, the rural hand-to-mouth upbringing, the sympathetic loving mother, the brother dying in childhood and marking the singer-to-be for life, an early marriage followed by drug abuse and infidelity, the cleanup detox scene, etc.
And frankly? It doesn’t get you emotionally all that much, although it does get you in retrospect because it feels honest and solid and doesn’t flit around. This movie never snickers or leers or tugs at your shirtsleeves — it says it plain, take it or leave it. And that grows on you.
The basic arc of this thing is, when will Johnny Cash attain a state of togetherness and a lack of encumbrance due to this or that gnarly issue (drug problems, marriage to first wife, etc.) to finally win over June Carter and get her to accept his marriage proposals? When will Johnny and June finally get hitched? That’s the basic shot.
It’s not meant as a put-down, but I don’t happen to feel that this or that woman (I don’t care how beautiful or giving or strong-of-spirit she is) can save any man’s life. Happiness can only be self-created — it must come from within.
I understand and respect that Johnny felt differently and needed June like a rose needs rainwater, etc., but I couldn’t empathize.
But I did feel it…that’s the odd thing. I felt a sense of absolute completeness, of bare-boned reality and complexity…in no persistent way did Walk the Line make me feel under-nourished.
Make of this what you will. I obviously can’t figure it out myself, but I’ve tried to be true to the spirit of this film by just saying it and letting the chips fall.
Wham Bam
Cinderella Man re-opens this Friday in a bid to get people to reconsider it for Oscar nomination, and maybe to make a bit more money. The most honest thing I can do is to re-print what I wrote late last May, the morning after seeing it at the AMC Empire on 42nd Street:
It isn’t quite stupendous, but Cinderella Man is honest and earnest and has dignity and heart, and if you don’t respond to it on some deep-down human level there’s probably something you should have inside that’s not there.
It’s easily the best, most emotionally rewarding mainstream flick of the year so far, and that’s not a left-handed way of saying it’s the best application of traditional thematic uplift…although it is that, I suppose.
Russell Crowe as the legendary Jim Braddock, Paul Giamatti as his manager Joe Gould in Ron Howard’s Cinderella Man.
Like Seabiscuit, Cinderella Man is a 1930s Depression saga about a sports figure — an Irish boxer named James Braddock (Russell Crowe) — who was up and flush in the late 20s and then down after the 1929 crash and then fighting badly and presumed to be over…like a lot of people were assuming about themselves and even the country as a whole.
But then Braddock lucked into another chance and made good on it big-time by taking the heavyweight championship title from the formidable Max Baer, who had killed a guy in the ring and maybe another one besides (a delayed response thing), and in so doing struck a chord with working people struggling to make do in that horrible period.
The mythological similarities aside, Cinderella Man has been crafted by director Ron Howard with a good deal more poignancy and grace and laid-back confidence than Gary Ross was able to summon for Seabiscuit.
And Crowe can act circles around the horses who played Seabiscuit, and looks an awful lot like the real Jim Braddock…as far as his weight loss and genetic inheritance and the first-rate makeup allow for, I mean.
Cinderella Man also has the absolutely genius-level Paul Giamatti, who got a round of applause during the closing credits at last night’s all-media screening at Manhattan’s AMC Empire 25.
Let’s say it right here and now — Giamatti is a guaranteed lock for a Best Supporting Actor nomination next year.
It’s way too early to even think about making blanket calls about winners, but given the fact that everyone knows that Giamatti has been burned twice — last year when he wasn’t nominated for Best Actor for Sideways and the year before when the Academy ignored his American Splendor performance — he’s looking like a very heavily favored guy at this stage.
Every movie that connects with audiences says something that everyone including your grandfather recognizes as honest and true. The message of Cinderella Man, simply put, is that there’s nothing like getting heavily and repeatedly kicked in the ass (like having to deal with hopelessness and soup kitchens and bread lines, having no job, being unable to pay the electricity bill, seeing your kids go hungry) to give your life a certain focus.
What did I love about Cinderella Man the most, apart from the story and production designer Wynn Thomas’s convincing `30s milieu and Salvatore Totino’s cinematography and the pitchperfect performances? The fact that Howard hangs back for the most part and doesn’t push the emotional buttons too strongly.
I love that after an establishing prologue of six or seven minutes Howard takes things into a downer struggling mode and keeps them there for a full 45 minutes.
And then when the turnaround stuff finally starts to happen he doesn’t lather it and try and beat you up with it. We know that the story is a classic come-from-behind uplifter and this is why Howard is making the film, etc., but it doesn’t feel as if he’s hustling you. He’s telling a true story, after all, and holding back for the most part and just letting it come together on its own terms.
Okay, he throws in some inspirational Irish music here and there and gives us a few Ron Howard-y touches here and there, but not so you’d really notice.
Over the last few years, and particularly since he got into his 50s, Ron Howard has been getting better and better. A Beautiful Mind, The Missing (an undervalued, tough-as-nails western) and now this…perhaps the best film of his life.
Cinderella Man is longish (two hours and 20 minutes), but it doesn’t feel that way because the attention paid to this and that detail in the early sections totally pays off in the third act. Congratulations to Howard, his partner/producer Brian Grazer, and screenwriters Cliff Hollingsworth and Akiva Goldsman (A Beautiful Mind ) for deciding to let the story takes its time and in so doing imparts a certain confidence.
The climax of the down period comes when the destitute Braddock, desperate to get the power in his family’s cold-water flat turned back on, goes to a bar to beg change from his former cronies and supporters in the boxing game. It’s a painful scene, but it’s real and believable and penetrating as hell.
The five or six fight sequences are exciting and beautifully cut, and I didn’t care if they were as original as Scorsese’s Raging Bull sequences appeared back in `80.
The real Jim Braddock (left) and Max Baer, in snaps taken sometime around 1934 or ’35 or thereabouts.
The big climax, which lasts about 25 or 26 minutes, depicts, of course, Braddock’s fight against the heavyweight champion Max Baer (Craig Bierko). I knew who the winner would be, obviously, but it didn’t matter because the film is so well shot and edited, blah, blah.
Crowe’s performance is an absolute home run. As Braddock’s wife Mae, Renee Zellweger gives her least tedious and off-putting performance since Jerry Maguire. (She almost made me forget about the last Bridget Jones film.)
Bierko’s Baer is a trip and a half. I loved his wild-ass expressions and goofing off in the ring, and how he flips this over in an instant and turns into a beast out for blood.
I loved Bruce McGill’s hard-nosed fight promoter character. McGill nails it every time (Collateral, Matchstick Men, The Insider) and has become one of most dependable character actors around, bar none.
I even found a place in my heart for Paddy Considine’s friend-of-Jim-Braddock character…a political activist-slash-working man….and that’s saying something given my lingering feelings about that “fee-fi-fo-fum” scene in Jim Sheridan’s In America.
War of the Wires
“The question about whether Paramount Home Video should have erased the wires in the just-out DVD of George Pal and Byron Haskin’s War of the Worlds should be simple, but it has somehow become more complex.
“The basis of any serious film restoration is now, and has always been, reference to the original. Not the original negative — the original print.
“With any production, not even specifically special-effects films, the film’s creators had a knowledge of what the shot footage would yield on a final print. Costumes, sets, make-up and special effects devices were all based upon that specific knowledge.
“The problems began in the late 1980s, when Kodak’s newest mastering
and print release stocks for both B & W as well as color emulsions were produced with a much finer grain structure. And make no mistake — that was a good thing.
“It began to combine in the ’90s with newer film-to-tape transfer technologies which enabled a higher resolved record of the film image.
“We saw the earliest problems on what were beautifully rendered laser discs of the Chaplin classics from Image Entertainment. The best people were brought in to go through the elements and oversee the work.
“But here’s where it gets difficult. One might make the assumption that access to an original fine grain master of, let’s say, City Lights or The Circus would be a great thing. And it was.
“But Chaplin had taken that master, and from it created a dupe printing negative from which final release prints would have been struck.
“Chaplin, a master filmmaker, knew precisely what affect optics and grain structure would have on his final product.
“Take away one generation and suddenly we see production artifacts like wires.
“This same thing occurred with 70mm prints of 2001: A opace Odyssey struck on the newer stocks. Because of the higher resolution, the glass holding the revolving pen on the spaceship heading to Clavius could now be easily seen in theatrical projection.
“Although I haven’t seen an original dye transfer print of WotW in decades, I can tell you that the system worked as follows.
“In 1953 Technicolor was using optics which are nowhere near the resolution of today’s scanning devices. This softened the image, yielding a more pleasant, less grainy look to the film.
“The mordant which allowed the liquid dyes to adhere to the blank stock was also slightly different than used later, and allowed a very slight softening of the grain structure.
“The final look of the print was achieved by the optics used in the creation of the printing matrices, the mordant, and the liquid dyes. The image looked perfect and brilliant on screen because of the slightly higher contrast of the Technicolor system which created a higher perceived sharpness — not actual sharpness.
“Taking those three-strip elements today and negating everything that came between them and the final print can yield a final result which is of overall higher resolution than the original prints. Hence the quandary, and there are two camps.
“My belief is that anything that breaks the suspension-of-disbelief
between the film and the audience should be altered to look as it
did, but now within an overall image of higher resolution.
“So personally I would remove the wires, as I would remove bad matte lines which can make early effects laughable and stop a film in its tracks, making it look like an antique.” — Robert Harris, the producer-scholar who supervised the legendary photo-chemical restorations of Lawrence of Arabia, Vertigo, Spartacus, Rear Window, etc.
Fatigue Guy
“During my prior life as a Merrill Lynch stock analyst, I was quoted as saying this about Harry Potter fatigue. In the fifth paragraph from the bottom, I mean.
“And I was kind of right — each successive film has done less box office than the previous, but of course the books are still boffo.” — Dave Lichtman
The recently-issued Paramount Home Video DVD of the 1953 War of the Worlds, one of the most beautifully photographed Technicolor movies ever made, looks absolutely breathtaking. This sci-fi classic provides one of the lushest color-baths in Hollywood history and has always looked sumptuous…now it’s heavenly.
But there’s an unfortunate side effect to this clarity. The new DVD (released on 11.1) pretty much ruins the suspension-of-disbelief element because of the way- too-visible wires holding up the Martian spaceships. You can see them repeatedly during scenes of the initial assault against the military…a thicket of blue-tinted wires holding up each one.
You can see the wires in this photo (taken off my own TV) but if you have any kind of recently-manufactured big-ass flat screen, they look much more vivid than indicated here
And there’s no believing it. The wires are much too vivid. Clayton Forrester (Gene Barry) is explaining to General Mann (Les Tremayne) how the Martians keep their bright green ships aloft, that they’re using “some form of electro magnetic force” and “balancing the two poles” and so on, and it’s absurd. The illusion is shot.
The obvious solution is for Paramount Home Video to digitally erase the wires. It would make perfect symmetrical sense. Just as digital technology has made this 1953 film look sharper than ever before, it follows that digital technology needs to recreate the original illusion. The wires weren’t that visible 52 years ago, and they weren’t as visible in Paramount Home Video’s 1999 DVD.
I can’t believe there are people who feel that wire-erasing would be a violation of the original film and are actually arguing against a fix-up, but they’re out there.
One of those naysayers is the highly respected and very bright Glenn Erickson (a.k.a., “DVD Savant”). I’m stunned that a smart guy like Erickson could be so dead friggin’ blind.
“Many scenes [in War of the Worlds] that appeared blurry or poorly composited [before] are now crystal clear,” Erickson said in a review posted 13 days ago. “This means that the forest of fine wires supporting the fighting machines is now more visible than ever, so we can’t have everything.
“There was no CG wire removal in 1953,” he writes, “and it would be detrimental revisionism to change the picture now. Today’s enlightened filmmakers like George Lucas would never do such a thing! So be an adult and learn to live with it.”
Uh-huh. Suppose George Pal and Bryon Haskin couldn’t do anything to hide the wires in their film, and 1953 audiences could therefore see them as clearly as DVD watchers can now? Would Pal and Baskin have just shrugged and told Paramount and the exhibitors, “Sorry, guys… learn to live with it…it’s the best we can do”?
Obviously the new DVD is the provider of “detrimental revisionism” — it’s showing an image that wasn’t meant to be seen.
Obviously, clearly…hello?…erasing the wires will enable audiences of today to suspend their disblief with the same ease that audiences did 52 years ago. You can’t muddy up the image so they can’t be seen, so it’s the only thing to do.
I’m going to be charitable and consider the possibility that Erickson may be over- worked and wasn’t thinking all that clearly when he wrote what he wrote. All is forgiven if he recants.
John Lowry, the head of Lowry Digital who’s done some great clean-up and/or digital restoration work on loads of classic films, was the one hired by Paramount Home Video to clean up War of the Worlds .
Ann Robinson, Gene Barry in War of the Worlds
“Our job is always to serve the wishes of the client…we do what the client says …and we didn’t have orders to clean up the wires,” he says. “Plus we were working on a very tight budget.”
Lowry faced a similar issue when he was doing the digital remastering ofAlfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest. “We were working onthe scene when the crop duster plane crashes into the gas truck,” he recalls, “and there were 25 or 30 frames of that particular shot in which you could see three wires holding up the rather large model of the airplane.
“And I said to myself, my God, too obvious…it spoils the illusion. And I asked myself, what would Hitchcock do? I knew what he would do. Take the wires out of there. So I did, and the Warner Bros. people approved.
“But ever since then we’ve been very attuned to original artistic intent. And with today’s technology, anything that interferes with the story-telling process or which degrades that process, is dead wrong.
“We got rid of the wires on the Mary Poppins DVD, for the Disney people. We asked and they said ‘get rid of them’ but they had the money to do it.
“When we were working on the snake-pit scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark you could see all kinds of reflections in the glass separating Ford from the snakes, and there was a very conscious decision made by Spielberg to take the reflections out.”
I called and e-mailed a few other guys who should have opinions about this story — restoration master Robert Harris, director and War of the Worlds fan Joe Dante (who riffs about the film on one of the DVD’s two audio tracks), and film restoration artist Mike Arick.
I’ll probably add to this story on Monday if any of these guys reply.
Grabs
George Clooney, New York Times editor-writer Lynn Hirschberg during a discussion at theatre #10 in Hollywood’s Arclight theatre complex — Saturday, 11.12.05, 4:35 pm. One piece of news that emerged is that Clooney is looking to direct a film currently being written by Joel and Ethan Coen called Suburbacon. Another is that he’ll direct but won’t act in the upcoming televised re-do of Network. He said it took him only about a month to gain 35 pounds for his role in Syriana. I told him I’d been told prior to seeing it by a critic friend that “Fat Clooney is one of the best [performances] that you’ll see this year”…and he was right.
Sunset Blvd. near Cole, looking east — Saturday, 11.12.05, 2:10 pm.
Pico Blvd. and La Brea Avenue, looking south — Saturday, 11.12.05, 6:40 pm.
In front of Arclight Dome theatre — Saturday, 11.12, 2:05 pm
Looking down on the Arclight lobby — Saturday, 11.12, 3:25 pm
Bring It On
Shoot any kind of outdoor footage of the Middle East (especially in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, et. al.) and you get the same flat terrain…aflame, parched, bleachy…which makes for a kind of atmospheric monotony.
But movies shot there (or which happen there) don’t have to be dull. The Middle East is the dramatic boiling pot of our times. It’s just a matter of going there and absorbing the particulars and pruning them down into something fitting and well- sprung.
U.S. soldier involved in fighting in Falujah in ’04
I’ve recently seen a no-pulse, no-conflict, Waiting-for-Godot Middle East film (Sam Mendes’ Jarhead) and a complex, multi-layered, altogether fascinating one about the pernicious social and political political effects of big oil (Stephen Gaghan’s Syriana)…and leapin’ lizards, talk about a night-and-day response.
I’ll be waiting until 11.23 before running a Syriana review, but it’s obviously a far better film.
Jarhead was so bad and so nothing that it would feel almost refreshing to see a real Middle East war movie — a half-real, half- fictional narrative about the current conflict in Iraq, say. And why not? It’s time.
Hollywood didn’t feel safe about making Vietnam movies until 1978, and the first major Gulf War movie — David O. Russell’s Three Kings — didn’t happen until ’99, or about eight years after the fact. But the concepts of lag-time and the usual “gee, can we get into this?” no longer apply.
The reality of instant digital commnunications means that dramas (or black come- dies) about current military conflicts need to be shot and rescrambled with some urgency. Waiting around won’t do. Immediacy may not be the whole game, but it matters as much as anything else.
Syriana, which Gaghan researched in the Middle East for a full year, is a geo-political spellbinder that doesn’t feel the least bit dated. The story could have happened last summer, or even a year or two from now.
Matt Damon (center) in Stephen Gaghan’s Syriana (Warner Bros, 11.23)
Steven Bochco’s Over There, the first dramatic TV series about an ongoing war, much less one about U.S. troops in Iraq, had its debut on FX last summer. And Hany Abu-Assad’s Paradise Now, a respected film about a couple of would-be Palestinian martyrs, has a ripped-from-right-now quality.
Why not an Iraq War feature right now? Write it, shoot it…sort it out as you go along.
A writer-director of some vision and gumption needs to visit Iraq, get imbedded with the grunts like Gunner Palace‘s Michael Tucker did, soak it up, write it down, find the funding and make a feature film about what’s eally happening in that hell-hole.
Shoot the atmospheric stuff right there, maybe bring some of the cast over…risk it, dodge the bullets, burrow in. And then wrap it, cut it and open it quickly.
If Oliver Stone was the Oliver Stone of the mid to late ’80s, he’d be the guy to do this.
If Italian actor-filmmaker Roberto Benigni (who won a Best Actor and Best Foreign Film Oscar for Life Is Beautiful) can make an Iraqi War film, why can’t Americans?
Benigni just opened a comedy set against the backdrop of the Iraq conflict, althou- gh it was shot in Tunisia. An admired film (if not quite the anti-American rant some of his Italian fans had expected), The Tiger and the Snow opened on 10.14 in Italy and will debut in France in mid-December and probably open here during the first six months of ’06.
Syriana uncertainty: George Clooney’s CIA agent between a rock and hard place
A U.S.-produced drama about the current conflict obviously wouldn’t have to be shot in the streets of Baghdad or Fallujah.
A satisfying film for me would probably have to be something like Syriana or Traffic — a multi-character, five or six-plot-thread piece. I’m not going to try and dream up a story here and now, but it would either need to be a Costa Gavras-type condem- nation piece, or one that shows balanced compassion for U.S. troops as well as Iraqi locals.
Has anyone out there written a script or heard of a good one making the rounds? Is there a military veteran, freelance journalist and/or contract engineer who’s been to Iraq within the last couple of years who’s published stories or recollections on a site that could be made into a good script?
If there’s anything really good that’s been put into script form, or if anyone’s heard of something exceptional making the rounds, please advise.
Aniston Martin
Derailed has been handed a Rotten Tomatoes death sentence — only 19% of the critics approve. But it’s only somewhat bad because of certain hard-to-swallow developments that I won’t divulge. And it’s been well directed by Mikael Halfstrom, and by that I mean it feels solid, assured, nicely shot and well-cut.
Thrillers of this sort often get trashed by critics but supported by paying audiences. An agent told me this morning that Derailed, which opened today, has been doing well in New York theatres.
Like Fatal Attraction and Unfaithful, Derailed is a cautionary thriller about what happens when you cheat on your spouse.
Jennifer Aniston in Mikael Halfstrom’s Derailed
Clive Owen plays a Chicago advertising guy who succumbs to temptation after meeting Jennifer Aniston, a blue-chip financial consultant, on a commuter train. But then they get robbed and assaulted by Vincent Cassel in a seedy hotel room before they get down to it…
I’m not going any further, but Cassel basically becomes Bruno Antony to Owen’s Guy Haines (the two leads in Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train), and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t caught up in all the lever-pulling. It’s far from first-rate, but it’s reasonably decent.
The biggest problem is one that nobody seems to have written about so far, which is the casting of Jennifer Aniston as an adulterer who… well, as a woman who can’t be trusted.
As far as I’m concerned, the believabilty of Aniston as a conniving adultress is about the same as a hypothetical casting of Dean Martin as one of Christ’s disciples in George Stevens’ The Greatest Story Ever Told.
Aniston was a TV actress who deserved a fair shake when she played a cheating housewife in The Good Girl, but she’s since become a tabloid superstar — she’s known worldwide as the nice, emotionally temperate actresss who had her heart broken by Brad Pitt.
Dean Martin
Whatever the real truth and whomever she may actually be, Aniston is the good wife who got fucked over. It’s hard, but the public persona of some actors and actresses is so deeply imbedded that they can’t be absorbed into in certain roles..period.
Frank Sinatra as a priest in The Miracle of the Bells…get outta town.
Or John Wayne as Genghis Khan or, much worse, as a Roman Centurion standing at the foot of the cross while Jesus is dying in The Greatest Story Ever Told and saying, “This was truly the son of God.”
There must be dozens of other head-slappers. Send ’em in, please.
Ten Years and Two Weeks
I’m a Terrence Malick fanatic from way back, and it’s the nostalgia factor more than anything else that has me especially excited about seeing The New World (New Line, 12.25), which Malick wrote and directed.
I’m also one of the only journalists to have any kind of conversation with Malick since he went into his Thomas Pynchon withdrawal about 17 years ago (right after the release of Days of Heaven) and became this gentle phantom-like figure whom journalists couldn’t get to under any circumstance.
In this context speaking to Malick on the phone– which I managed to do on Octo- ber 25, 1995, around 11:35 am — was like snapping a photo of Bigfoot. It was a half-pleasant, half-awkward, quite meaningless conversation, but at least he picked up the phone.
Terrence Malick during filming of The Thin Red Line
Malick had been staying with producer Mike Medavoy, who wound up producing The Thin Red Line, but Medavoy was leaving for Shanghai and Malick would be staying elsewhere, so I called to get a forwarding number.
A cleaning woman answered and said Medavoy was out, but that Malick was nearby. She asked me to hold…
Malick: Hi.
Me: Hi, Terry. This is Jeffrey Wells speaking…
Malick: Hi.
Me: And uhh…I was just talking to Mike last night and he said, uh, you might be leaving today and I wanted to see if I could speak with you about an article I’m researching. It’s for Los Angeles magazine and my editor…he worked on that piece about ten years ago with David Handleman for California magazine. It was called “Absence of Malick.”
Malick: Yeah.
Me: I don’t know if…did you happen to read it?
Malick: No, I…I…uhnn…
Me: Anyway, I’m doing this piece and trying to sort things through here. About what’s going on with…well, to start with, The Thin Red Line and that rumored BAM stage production of “Sansho the Bailiff” and…I’ve wanted to speak with you about it, and now that I’m speaking with you I feel…well, I feel nervous.
Locust arrival scene in Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven
Malick: Don’t be, Jeffrey. It’s not that. I just don’t feel comfortable talking about it yet.
Me: About Red Line, you mean?
Malick: Yeah and…it’s something that has no date, really. It may happen some- time in the indefinite future.
Me: The indefinite future? Uh-huh. So there’s no approximate, long-range plan at all? It’s not even on a low flame?
Malick: I…I’m…uhmm.
Me: I was only thinking, you know…heh-heh… ‘indefinite future.’ You could say the same thing about the sun collapsing and the end of the solar system, heh-heh.
Malick: Uhhmm…
Me: I’m only mentioning this because…well, you may have seen that item in Pre- miere that you said you had this reading of the script with Costner and Lucas Haas and Ethan Hawke.
Malick: We did it just to get a sense of how it flowed.
Me: How did it flow?
Malick: I just don’t feel comfortable talking about it. I appreciate your interest but…
Malick in 1979
Malick: Mike says you’re on the second or third draft, something…it’s a work that’s been through some development and progression, and…
Malick: I….
Malick: I dont want to grill you, Terry. Mike explained the rules and said that grilling you…’that’s the one thing we don’t do’…and I understand that. I had a hope, though, of just discussing movies in general…ones you’ve seen and been impressed by in recent years.
Malick: Well, I appreciate your interest. I guess I do feel uncomfortable talking right now.
Me: I’m just one of…who knows, hundreds of film journalists around the country who regard you as one of the best ever and have watched your films over and over.
Malick: You’re very kind, Jeffrey. I appreciate it and I feel it and it comes to me as very encouraging. But I feel uncomfortable talking about it. I spoke to my brother Chris and he said that you’re just trying to help. And of course I know you’re just trying to do your job.
Me: I was actually just reading about a new laser disc of Days of Heaven that’s coming out, and it’s really something I’m looking forward to because I’ve never seen a print of that film that equalled the first viewing at the Cinema 1 in New York when they showed a 70mm print with six-channel sound, and having a…are you a laser-disc aficionado?
Malick: I’m, uh…not..uh…
Me: Are you…you don’t watch TV? Videos? Do you ever catch movies on tape?
Malick: I’d be happy to talk to you at some later point, Jeffrey.
Me: I know. I understand know what the rules are.
Malick: And someone actually is here, Jeffrey, and I do have to keep an appointment. I would love to, later on…we could talk.
Me: I’ll look forward to it. I understand you’re in town for a few more days.
Malick: Yes, but I really do have to go now.
Me: Because if you have a moment later on, I’d like to run some basic points by you and just go over them one by one, for accuracy’s sake.
Me: I can’t really talk about this. I know what you’re trying to do and it’s not…if you’d try to understand. Chris told me you’d written and that you were trying to help.
Me: Well, I hope you have a good stay. I look forward to chatting again on a more…uhm, relaxed basis.
Malick: Okay, thank you.
Rent Renewal
The advance word on Rent (Columbia, 11.23) for the last few months has been that it’s going to feel slightly dated (being a late ’80s piece about some young AIDS-af- flicted Manhattanites), and Chris Columbus, not the grittiest and most naturalistic of directors, will gloss it up too much, so watch out.
The buzz was wrong. Say it again: the buzz was wrong.
Rosario Dawson, Adam Pascal during “Light My Candle” number in Chris Columbus’s film of Jonathan Larson’s Rent (Columbia, 11.23)
Call me emotionally impressionable, call me unsophisticated, call me a sap…but I saw Rent last night in Santa Monica, and in its vibrant, open-hearted, selling-the- hell-out-of-each-and-every-song-and-dance-number way, it’s a knockout and an ass-whooper and damn near glorious at times.
I didn’t just like it…I felt dazzled, amped, alpha-vibed. I got into each and every song, every character and conflict…I settled back and went with it. People were applauding after almost every song, and the film really does give you a “whoa… this is special” feeling.
Somewhere up there (out there, in there…whatever), Jonathan Larson, the guy who created the play but died in January 1996, just before the stage show opened, is breathing easy.
< ?php include ('/home/hollyw9/public_html/wired'); ?>
Columbus went with almost the entire original cast, and they’re all spot-on. A cer- tain theatricality is inevitable when actors are breaking into song, but everyone plays it down and naturalistic; they don’t project in a playing-to-the-balcony way that throws you out of the piece.
Adam Pascal’s Roger and Anthony Rapp’s Mark are note-perfect. Rosario Daw- son’s singing is surprisingly assured and satisfying, in addition to her usual first- rate emoting. Wilson Jermaine Heredia, Jesse L. Martin, Idina Menzel, Tracie Thoms, Taye Diggs…everyone gets a gold star.
Rent is a slicker, punchier, more revved-up movie musical than Milos Forman’s Hair, which had some of the same elements (kids in New York, in and out of love, looming tragedy). But it’s not that different from the Forman film; it has a similar elan.
I kept saying to myself last night, “What’s wrong with this film?….where’s the mis- calculation? Where’s the gross Chris Columbus saccharine overkill?”…and it just didn’t happen to any bothersome degree.
It may not be hip enough for some of my nyah-nyah, know-it-all critic friends. It may not be Alphabet City enough. It may be, for them, too far removed from the vitality of the original off-Broadway, pre-Broadway show…too much of a Holly- wood-style take on something that may have been a bit sweet or cloying, but which worked because of the Lower East Side funkitude balance-out factor.
Critics said the same thing about Robert Wise’s West Side Story. That overly Oscar-awarded film brought an overly sanitized, sound-stagey quality to the material, wich furthered the loss of the immediacy and excitement of the original B’way play. The dissers of Wise’s film were right. It was too 1961 mainstream.
But Columbus is not Robert Wise. He lived in Manhattan way back when and knew the Lower East Side, he knows the stage show backwards and forwards, he’s pruned it down a bit and has made a film that’s a lot tighter and brighter and a cleaner “sell.”
I saw Rent in ’96 with Jett, who was then about eight, and I remember enjoying the energy and a lot of the songs and feeling a general respect for it…but I wasn’t floored. For me, the film is a better ride.
I don’t want to compare apples and oranges, and I understand that Rent-heads might not agree that it’s “better,” but the film is a cleaner, more easily processed thing, and it delivers a fuller, riper feeling.
The “La Boheme” number
There’s really a lot to be said for being able to hear each and every song lyric. (I digested them only occasionally when I saw the stage version.) And being able to hear each and every voice in the chorus of “Seasons of Love” (and every song after that) provides an amazing high.
Has Columbus made a kicky and colorful c’mon-kids-let’s-put-on-a-show musical? Yeah, kind of…but what’s wrong with that? And what other way could Columbus have gone? Play down the energy, go grimmer, shoot in on Super 16mm, channel Darren Aronofsky or Larry Clark?
Rent is a big-studio movie musical. As I understand it, the idea is to turn people on, attract the fans of the stage show, sell tickets, etc.
It’s not Open City or Paisan or Rocco and his Brothers. It’s a revamp of Puccini’s “La Boheme” with all those primary emotions, catchy thrash-guitar songs, drama- tic condensings, lovers loving and losing each other, tomorrow belongs to no one so go for it today, etc.
And it’s Rent, after all…butter wouldn’t melt in its mouth.
I’m sorry to differ with the nyah-nyahs, but Columbus has taken these ingredients and made it all sound quadruple-fantastic (be absolutely certain you see Rent in a theatre with a great sound system) and punched it up and brought out the bells and whistles and made a movie musical that really delivers.
Rent creator Jonathan Larson, composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim sometime around ’94 or ’95.
You’ll be more likely to feel this way if you’re a not-very-hip type like myself, or if you’re in the same kind of head-space as those 425 satisfied folks who saw it with me at the Aero theatre. And if you’re in the opposite camp…it’s your call.
Rent is set in 1989 — the stage show was written between 1988 and ’90. The show is basically about the effect that being close to death has upon your basic life atti- tudes. We all know the riff about “the clarity of mind experienced by a man stand- ing on the gallows is wonderful,” etc. That’s all that’s being said here, and that’s obviously a theme that will never lose relevance.
The young-gay-guys-and-urban-drug-users-dropping-like-flies-from-AIDS element isn’t the same today as it was in the early days of the first Bush administration , obviously (and thank fortune)…but this doesn’t date the film — it just places it in a certain cultural context, and that’s nothing to get over.
I know it when something is working. Call it subjective, but I felt it last night and it wasn’t just me.
A guy who loved the off-Broadway stage version said he’s heard it doesn’t work because the actors seem too old. “They’re all supposed to be in their early 20s …the actors all look like they’re 28 or 30,” he told me this morning. That’s bull- shit…they’re young-enough looking. It’s a non-issue.
There are three love relationships in Rent, and only one of them (Adam and Rosa- rio’s) is hetero. We’re really in a gay-friendly season these days, and there’s no watching Rent and missing the notion that we’re all God’s children. The Mel Gibson contingent can go stuff it.
The energy and punch of this show are there all the way through, and the emotion- al specifics of each and every character and situation are clearer and more vivid than they appeared to me when I saw the stage show…whoops, repeating myself.
There will be more to say about Rent in a week or two. Those crab-heads really need to be slapped around.
Columbus did a post-screening q & a with Variety‘s Ian Mohr, and here’s how it sounded. It’s a big fat (probably slow-loading) sound file, but it’s worth a listen.
You’ll hear me ask a couple of questions — one about an angry duet number between Pascal and Rapp that was cut, and another about the “dated” issue, which Columbus answers pretty well.
Silverman Live
I hate the way I sometimes tend to digress during inteviews (i.e., talking about myself rather than the subject). I feel like I’m being fairly precise and down to it when the interview is happening, but I always think otherwise when I listen to the recording because I sound like like a self-obsessed putz.
Times photo of Sarah Silverman, taken at a party last Monday night in Manhattan for her film Jesus Is Magic
That said, if you’re not too sound-filed out by the recording of the Chris Columbus q & a, here’s a recording of my time spent with Sarah Silverman in Boston last Friday afternoon.
The latest Silverman interview, written by New York Times correspondent Marcelle Clements, which went up today, is another good profile, aspiring to the level of the 10.26 New Yorker piece but shorter.
Modern Marketing
You’ll experience a fairly strong disconnect if you (a) read Peter Biskind’s interview with Woody Allen in the December Vanity Fair, and then (b) examine DreamWorks’ newspaper ad in last Sunday’s New York Times on behalf of Allen’s Match Point (opening 12.25, limited).
It’s not like you need a magnifying glass to see Allen’s name, which is right under Penelope Wilton’s, but you do have to kind of lean in and squint. The typeface is obviously less vivid than the one used for the actors’ names.
I can imagine the marketing execs’ memo to the art guys: “Okay, his name has to be in the credits above the title but let’s do what we can to obscure this. Okay? No casual reader of the ad is supposed to see his name. Just so we’re clear on that.”
The reason is that the name “Woody Allen” is a big negative with the under-30s. I don’t want to give this attitude any more respect or attention than I have to, but that’s the equation…”Woody Allen = stay away.”
Match Point may have an effect upon this attitude, but you can’t predict. I just know that under-30 movie tastes are really fascinating at times.
Girl Can’t Help It
There’s no question about Sarah Silverman being some kind of avatar of a new, out-there comic dispensation. She’s had a handle on it for a while…ten years or so, she told me last Friday…but most of us, I’m presuming, are just starting to tune in.
There’s something about that dry, super-perverse delivery of hers…the dingle-dan- gle rhythm of her schpiel…it’s just perfect. I could listen to that reedy chatty voice for hours. And those oh-and-by-the-way-I-was-licking-jelly-off-my-boyfriend’s-penis jokes…not sexy but so sublime.
Comic Sarah Silverman
I go to a comedy club maybe once every couple of years so I obviously don’t have the perspective, but Silverman seems possessed by and onto something extra.
There’s something Lenny Bruce-ian about her. She’s not really jazzy or free assoc- iative and she doesn’t do political humor (not my by my definition of it), but there’s an element of provocation, a kind of maybe-you’re-getting-this-and-maybe-you’re- not-but-maybe-you-should.
It’s all pretty much there in Silverman’s Jesus is Magic (Roadside Attractions, 11.11), a kind of get-acquainted performance film that includes a sassy little musical intro and an occasional staged, out-of-the-theatre short.
Don’t take this the wrong way, but I didn’t laugh that much during Jesus is Magic. Silverman is obviously funny-nervy, but I was too into watching her perform. And for some of us, mind-game humor is more heh-heh than hah-hah.
An online commentator wrote, “Instead of laughing at the content [of her jokes], you laugh at the attitudes she portrays and worry if you should find them funny. You either miss the irony of her comedy or you have to appreciate her genius as an actor, writer, comic, and social critic.”
The heart of Jesus is Magic (a dig at Christian mythology… what will the Mel Gib- son wackos say?) is Sarah doing her sly and very dry little-girl-telling-an-outrage- ously-provocative-joke routine.
Sitting in a dull corporate boardroom on the 16th floor or Boston’s Seaport Hotel — Friday, 11.4.05, 12:35 pm.
There are two sides to her stage manner — Silverman seemingly amused by the discomfort created by her choke-on-it riffs (i.e., a marketing proposal that would exploit the fact that American Airlines was the first to slam into the World Trade Center) and oblivious to her words in a very bright, manipulative-Jewish-girl-who- knows-how-to-push-her-father’s-buttons way.
Listen to these clips. Click on “Nanna.” Consider the way Silverman says. “I’m sorry… alleged Holocaust.” She almost mutters it, like she’s talking under her breath. Which is why it’s funny (to me). If she’d turned up the delivery just a bit, or pushed it in some other direction…
Listen to “St. Christopher Medal” and the kind of dreamy way she says, “I wear this St. Christopher medal sometimes because — I’m Jewish, but my boyfriend is Catholic — it was cute the way he gave it to me. He said if it doesn’t burn through my skin it will protect me.”
Silverman isn’t vulgar or “blue” or gripped by some fiendish rage. She’s sweet, friendly, prim, well-behaved. No element of madness… obviously disciplined…hip and shrewd, but concerned with basic Jewish-girl issues (love, family, being thin) deep down.
Of course, doing interviews with journalists involves a kind of performance.
An excellent profile of Silverman ran in The New Yorker a couple of weeks ago. Written by a poet named Dana Goodyear, it’s called “Quiet Depravity: The Dem- ure Outrages of a Standup Comic”.
“Silverman is thirty-four and coltish,” she writes early on, “with shiny black hair and a china-doll complexion. Her arms are long and her center of gravity is low: she is five feet seven, and moves like a vervet monkey.”
As lame as this sounds, Silverman’s black hair is mesmerizing. I was thinking all through the film how it’s a world unto itself…as black and freshly-shampooed-per- fect as Snow White’s.
“Onstage, she is beguilingly calm,” Goodyear observes. “She speaks clearly and decorously. The persona she has crafted is strangely Pollyanna-ish and utterly absorbed in her own point of view. She presents herself as approachable though deranged, a sort of twisted Gracie Allen, and she never breaks character.
“[Silverman] talks about herself so ingenuously that you can’t tell if she is the most vulnerable woman in the world or the most psychotically well defended. She cross- es boundaries that it would not occur to most people even to have. The more inno- cent and oblivious her delivery, the more outrageous her commentary becomes.”
Hence my interest, fascination, attraction…
A smart guy wrote me after reading in the column that I spoke to her last Friday, and asked about her in-person allure. I replied that “she’s really sweet and earnest in a girly, sitting-around-in-her-sweatpants way…like a lot of smart Jewish girls I’ve known. Endearing, straight-from-the-shoulder, confessional.
Silverman, boyfriend-comedian Jimmy Kimmel
“Okay, she seemed a tad hotter in the concert film than in person, but workout clothes have a way of toning things down. Plus she’s very fair-skinned and freck- ly…but also impish-pretty with lots of sparkle. I liked her right away.
“I loved that she’s not nuts (most comedians seem to live in dark, despairing pla- ces) and that she’s totally into discussing other actors or comedians or movies and doesn’t try to steer things back in her direction, like many actors and actresses do during interviews.”
I asked Silverman at what point did she realize she’d finally refined and gotten hold of her unique comedic voice and attitude. “Sometime around 24, 25,” she replied. Which meant around ’94 or ’95.
At one point she sat side-saddle on the half-sofa, tucking her feet off to the side, up against the arm rest…the exact same position she was sitting in during her reasonably funny Aristocrats interview.
Her boyfriend is comedian Jimmy Kimmel, the amiable, barrel-chested late-night ABC talk-show guy. I told Silverman I like his humor but I can’t stand the elephant- collar shirts he wears. It’s an under-40 GenX guy thing…the influence of the mythic Italian shirt designers of the ’80s never got through. The loyal Silverman told me she had no idea what I was on about when I tried to explain.
Silverman’s next performance is in Rent (Columbia). A guy she ran into recently told her she’s the funniest thing in the film. (Is that a distinction worth noting? It’s a film about kids dealing with AIDS in Manhattan’s Lower East Side in the early ’90s.)
Silverman has a meatier part is Todd Phillips’ School for Scoundrels, a comedy that will costar Billy Bob Thornton, Jon Heder and Michael Clarke Duncan.
I mentioned to Silverman that there’s a 1959 British comedy with the same name. She said she didn’t think so and suugested I might be thinking of School for Scandal. I didn’t push it, but Scoundrels did come out in ’59, and costarred Terry Thomas and Alastair Sim.
I really think it’s important to see Jesus is Magic and know who Silverman is and what she’s on about. She’s an echo chamber of sorts…tethered to certain aspects of our general cultural malaise in the same way that currents running beneath the culture of the mid ’50s are discernible when you look at blurry kinescopes of Sid Ceasar and Imogene Coca.
Tempest Approaching?
“If you’re looking for an angle on The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, you might enjoy this one:
“The promotion and release of the film is going to bring about a red-blue religious wackos vs. the rest of us dust-up. It has the potential to be a moderately big deal, and thus far almost no one in the entertainment press is covering it.
“The series of fairy tales this Narniais based on are generally seen as an old-fashioned Christian parable, i.e., the New Testament rewritten with talking animals and magic standing in for disciples and theology, plus a big talking lion standing in for Jesus.
“The problem is that these days, it’s viewed — incorrectly, I might add — as a kid- targeted endorsement of Passion-style fundamentalism by a lot of the fringe- wacko hardliners, which is a shame and a joke as the theology expressed by the story is exactly the sort of kinder, gentler, more intellectual-and-philosophical brand of Christian thought that the Passion posse so despises.
“These fringe-wacko hardliners are already raring, ready and organized to try and piggyback their agenda onto this film, and Disney has gone so far as to hire special faith-oriented marketing firms to help them assuage concerns that they might ‘secularize’ the material.
“Plus some of the more faith-oriented fans are gearing up to mount what would have to be called a boxoffice holy war between this flick and the Harry Potter franchise, which they view as Narnia‘s pagan upstart enemy.
“Here’s the best part: The fan base will also be at war within itself, as there are basically two camps of heavy-duty Narnia devotees…an even split between those who appreciate it simply as a series of beloved children’s literature and those who want it viewed only as a kind of 700 Club recruiting pamphlet.
“The blood between these two camps is so bad it makes the Original Series/Next Gen split in Star Trek fandom look like a mild family quarrel, and if the Narnia movie makes any kind of notable mainstream splash in theaters it’s gonna be open war right out in the cultural square.
“Mark my words, this is going to be an interesting release no matter how good the flick turns out.” — MSTMario2@aol.com
Wells to Mario: I have to hunker down and do some studying about this. I don’t know anything…zilch.
Grabs
Boston statehouse — Friday, 11.4.05, 8:25 pm.
Sign in front of 2038 pairs of boots arranged in military formation on the Boston Common — Friday, 11.04, 8;40 pm.
Sign placed opposite the Boston Common display of U.S. military boots.
Waiting for the Red Line subway on way back from Long Beach airport — Sunday, 11.6.05, 9:40 pm.
Hollywood Boulevard near corner of Highland — Sunday, 11.6.05, 9:55 pm.
Mannequin inside Boston’s Prudential Center/Copley Square mall — Saturday, 11.5.05, 7:05 pm.
Jarhead Muddle
“I went to dinner and a movie with some friends Saturday night. The local theater didn’t have Capote so we were stuck with a choice between Shopgirl and Jarhead, and we decided on the latter.
“My expectations were low enough that I wasn’t disappointed when it was over; I was more disappointed going in then coming out. But two things struck me upon exiting the theatre.
“First, there are too many kids who treat the experience of watching a war film like it’s “so soooo coool” and “awesome” and exchanging quotes from Full Metal Jacket. Perhaps they would like to experience the ‘pink mist’ as well. At a risk of getting all Howard Beale on you, we are in a war now and kids are getting blown up almost everyday, there’s nothing cool about it, right? We’re in a war now. The audience seemed detached from this.
Jarhead costars Jake Gyllenhaal, Peter Sarsgaard
“Secondly, Jarhead seemed to play mostly as a deadpan postmodern black comedy. I laughed more than anyting else. Another measure was that during pivotal scenes there was a smacking irony, a harsh truth that you would have to either laugh through or become the Troy character.
“When Swoff and Troy are robbed of their kill at the end, it felt to me like dark comedy. The sexual angst was mostly played for yuks even though underneath the ramifications are ugly. Lines like “shooting my gun in celebration being the only time I fired it the entire war” or “that’s Vietnam music, we don’t even get our own music” are what stick in my mind, and they taste of dark humor.
“But I can’t tell if this was the intention of Sam Mendes. Was he boldly and delicately making a black comedy and not telling the execs, or is he just tone deaf? Am I the only one or did you notice this too?” — George Bolanis , Pittsburgh, PA.
Girth
“I dunno…somehow ‘The Fat Clooney’ sounds like the sequel to The Big Lebowski — Mike Mayo
Wells to Mayo: Exactly. Immediate coolness. My want-to-see on Syriana shot up ten-fold after hearing it.
Lifeboat
“Liked that WIRED bit about Hitchcock’s Lifeboat, a film I’ve loved for years. Hitch often gets dismissed as a serious filmmaker because his movies are fun to watch and were, in many cases, clearly commercial.
“It’s become fashionable for guys like Tarantino to bash on Psycho), but Hitchcock had an artistry to his filmmaking and a depth of understanding of the human condition that many of today’s so-called auteurs lack, in my opinion.
“I just saw Rebecca for the first time and was blown away. Even if Selznick did come along and put his own music in, etc., it’s still a visionary work by a filmmaker at the top of his game.” — Michael Goedecke
Choices
“I was reading your most recent comments on why some films that give off what I’d guess you’d call an emotionally burnished quality don’t seem to connect with the audiences in the way that some of us might expect. There’s no single thing that explains this, but I can think of a few.
“First is the inevitable focus on box office, which is one of the few, hard indicators of the ‘success’ of a film, but given the changing nature of entertainment options and methods of consumption, I don’t believe it’s the only, or in some cases, even the primary factor.
“There are many films that I’d like to see in the theater, but if I miss that two- or three-week window when they’re in wide release — either because I was busy or just not in the right frame of mind — than I’ll opt to buy the DVD. I’ve got a decent home theater set-up, and frankly I don’t think my experience watching, say, Hustle & Flow at home is going to be qualitatively different than seeing it in the theater.
Naomi Wattts in King Kong
“I also think you make an unfair distinction between those who might go to see Saw II and those who might prefer to see The Constant Gardener. At least among my particular group of friends, those are overlapping audiences, and going to catch one movie on opening weekend means we’re unlikely to see the other.
“It’s not a sign of lack of interest, but a matter of mood and social dynamics. And frankly, DVDs provide a safety net because there will always be a DVD, and then I can choose where, how, and with whom I want to watch the movie on my own timetable.
“Lastly, whenever anyone points to the disappointing response to Cinderella Man I just have to shake my heard. I can’t pretend to know what was in the hearts and minds of everyone who chose not to see the film, but I know that for me it was contempt borne of familiarity.
“I mean, I’ve seen this story. So. Many. Times. I know every single emotional beat that will be hit, every single turn of the plot screw, the entire shape of the dramatic arc.
Ralph Fiennes in The Constant Gardener
“And it’s simply not interesting, no matter who wrote, directed, or acted in it, unless they can give me something new, deeper, surprising. And the trailer did a great job of telling me that there was absolutely nothing like that in the film. It’s Oscar Model #21A, and frankly it just bores me, and seems to bore most other people I know.
“I also agree with the disinterest in King Kong, mainly because I’m uninterested in the original and all succeeding versions. It’s a personal thing, but I really hate the ‘misunderstood hero as antagonist.’ I’ll still probably go see it with a crowd, but not out of any passion for the material.” — Chris Todd
Widescreen Idiocy
“I saw that photo you ran of the widescreen TV with the extra-wide widescreen image of Batman Begins, and perhaps you’re the idiot here. A 2.35:1 film will still have black bars on a 16:9 TV. 16:9 is 1.78:1, and not 2.35:1.” — Grady Stiles
Wells to Stiles: I know exactly what I’m talking about. Black bars are fine…the point is that the anamorphic 2.35 image in that photo has been squeezed down to what looks like a 3 to 1 or 3.5 to 1 image. It’s a widescreen image for morons who don’t know aspect ratios from their anus. I know aspect ratios dead to rights….go to American Widescreen Museum (http://www.widescreenmuseum.com/) and poke around and learn a thing or two. It’s all there. A very smart and knowledgable site.
Girl Can’t Help It
There’s no question about Sarah Silverman being some kind of avatar of a new, out-there comic dispensation. She’s had a handle on it for a while…ten years or so, she told me last Friday…but most of us, I’m presuming, are just starting to tune in.
There’s something about that dry, super-perverse delivery of hers…the dingle-dan- gle rhythm of her schpiel…it’s just perfect. I could listen to that reedy chatty voice for hours. And those oh-and-by-the-way-I-was-licking-jelly-off-my-boyfriend’s-penis jokes…not sexy but so sublime.
Comic Sarah Silverman
I go to a comedy club maybe once every couple of years so I obviously don’t have the perspective, but Silverman seems possessed by and onto something extra.
There’s something Lenny Bruce-ian about her. She’s not really jazzy or free assoc- iative and she doesn’t do political humor (not my by my definition of it), but there’s an element of provocation, a kind of maybe-you’re-getting-this-and-maybe-you’re- not-but-maybe-you-should.
It’s all pretty much there in Silverman’s Jesus is Magic (Roadside Attractions, 11.11), a kind of get-acquainted performance film that includes a sassy little musical intro and an occasional staged, out-of-the-theatre short.
< ?php include ('/home/hollyw9/public_html/wired'); ?>
Don’t take this the wrong way, but I didn’t laugh that much during Jesus is Magic. Silverman is obviously funny-nervy, but I was too into watching her perform. And for some of us, mind-game humor is more heh-heh than hah-hah.
An online commentator wrote, “Instead of laughing at the content [of her jokes], you laugh at the attitudes she portrays and worry if you should find them funny. You either miss the irony of her comedy or you have to appreciate her genius as an actor, writer, comic, and social critic.”
The heart of Jesus is Magic (a dig at Christian mythology… what will the Mel Gib- son wackos say?) is Sarah doing her sly and very dry little-girl-telling-an-outrage- ously-provocative-joke routine.
Sitting in a dull corporate boardroom on the 16th floor or Boston’s Seaport Hotel — Friday, 11.4.05, 12:35 pm.
There are two sides to her stage manner — Silverman seemingly amused by the discomfort created by her choke-on-it riffs (i.e., a marketing proposal that would exploit the fact that American Airlines was the first to slam into the World Trade Center) and oblivious to her words in a very bright, manipulative-Jewish-girl-who- knows-how-to-push-her-father’s-buttons way.
Listen to these clips. Click on “Nanna.” Consider the way Silverman says. “I’m sorry… alleged Holocaust.” She almost mutters it, like she’s talking under her breath. Which is why it’s funny (to me). If she’d turned up the delivery just a bit, or pushed it in some other direction…
Listen to “St. Christopher Medal” and the kind of dreamy way she says, “I wear this St. Christopher medal sometimes because — I’m Jewish, but my boyfriend is Catholic — it was cute the way he gave it to me. He said if it doesn’t burn through my skin it will protect me.”
Silverman isn’t vulgar or “blue” or gripped by some fiendish rage. She’s sweet, friendly, prim, well-behaved. No element of madness… obviously disciplined…hip and shrewd, but concerned with basic Jewish-girl issues (love, family, being thin) deep down.
Of course, doing interviews with journalists involves a kind of performance.
An excellent profile of Silverman ran in The New Yorker a couple of weeks ago. Written by a poet named Dana Goodyear, it’s called “Quiet Depravity: The Dem- ure Outrages of a Standup Comic”.
“Silverman is thirty-four and coltish,” she writes early on, “with shiny black hair and a china-doll complexion. Her arms are long and her center of gravity is low: she is five feet seven, and moves like a vervet monkey.”
As lame as this sounds, Silverman’s black hair is mesmerizing. I was thinking all through the film how it’s a world unto itself…as black and freshly-shampooed-per- fect as Snow White’s.
“Onstage, she is beguilingly calm,” Goodyear observes. “She speaks clearly and decorously. The persona she has crafted is strangely Pollyanna-ish and utterly absorbed in her own point of view. She presents herself as approachable though deranged, a sort of twisted Gracie Allen, and she never breaks character.
“[Silverman] talks about herself so ingenuously that you can’t tell if she is the most vulnerable woman in the world or the most psychotically well defended. She cross- es boundaries that it would not occur to most people even to have. The more inno- cent and oblivious her delivery, the more outrageous her commentary becomes.”
Hence my interest, fascination, attraction…
A smart guy wrote me after reading in the column that I spoke to her last Friday, and asked about her in-person allure. I replied that “she’s really sweet and earnest in a girly, sitting-around-in-her-sweatpants way…like a lot of smart Jewish girls I’ve known. Endearing, straight-from-the-shoulder, confessional.
Silverman, boyfriend-comedian Jimmy Kimmel
“Okay, she seemed a tad hotter in the concert film than in person, but workout clothes have a way of toning things down. Plus she’s very fair-skinned and freck- ly…but also impish-pretty with lots of sparkle. I liked her right away.
“I loved that she’s not nuts (most comedians seem to live in dark, despairing pla- ces) and that she’s totally into discussing other actors or comedians or movies and doesn’t try to steer things back in her direction, like many actors and actresses do during interviews.”
I asked Silverman at what point did she realize she’d finally refined and gotten hold of her unique comedic voice and attitude. “Sometime around 24, 25,” she replied. Which meant around ’94 or ’95.
At one point she sat side-saddle on the half-sofa, tucking her feet off to the side, up against the arm rest…the exact same position she was sitting in during her reasonably funny Aristocrats interview.
Her boyfriend is comedian Jimmy Kimmel, the amiable, barrel-chested late-night ABC talk-show guy. I told Silverman I like his humor but I can’t stand the elephant- collar shirts he wears. It’s an under-40 GenX guy thing…the influence of the mythic Italian shirt designers of the ’80s never got through. The loyal Silverman told me she had no idea what I was on about when I tried to explain.
Silverman’s next performance is in Rent (Columbia). A guy she ran into recently told her she’s the funniest thing in the film. (Is that a distinction worth noting? It’s a film about kids dealing with AIDS in Manhattan’s Lower East Side in the early ’90s.)
Silverman has a meatier part is Todd Phillips’ School for Scoundrels, a comedy that will costar Billy Bob Thornton, Jon Heder and Michael Clarke Duncan.
I mentioned to Silverman that there’s a 1959 British comedy with the same name. She said she didn’t think so and suugested I might be thinking of School for Scandal. I didn’t push it, but Scoundrels did come out in ’59, and costarred Terry Thomas and Alastair Sim.
I really think it’s important to see Jesus is Magic and know who Silverman is and what she’s on about. She’s an echo chamber of sorts…tethered to certain aspects of our general cultural malaise in the same way that currents running beneath the culture of the mid ’50s are discernible when you look at blurry kinescopes of Sid Ceasar and Imogene Coca.
Tempest Approaching?
“If you’re looking for an angle on The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, you might enjoy this one:
“The promotion and release of the film is going to bring about a red-blue religious wackos vs. the rest of us dust-up. It has the potential to be a moderately big deal, and thus far almost no one in the entertainment press is covering it.
“The series of fairy tales this Narniais based on are generally seen as an old-fashioned Christian parable, i.e., the New Testament rewritten with talking animals and magic standing in for disciples and theology, plus a big talking lion standing in for Jesus.
“The problem is that these days, it’s viewed — incorrectly, I might add — as a kid- targeted endorsement of Passion-style fundamentalism by a lot of the fringe- wacko hardliners, which is a shame and a joke as the theology expressed by the story is exactly the sort of kinder, gentler, more intellectual-and-philosophical brand of Christian thought that the Passion posse so despises.
“These fringe-wacko hardliners are already raring, ready and organized to try and piggyback their agenda onto this film, and Disney has gone so far as to hire special faith-oriented marketing firms to help them assuage concerns that they might ‘secularize’ the material.
“Plus some of the more faith-oriented fans are gearing up to mount what would have to be called a boxoffice holy war between this flick and the Harry Potter franchise, which they view as Narnia‘s pagan upstart enemy.
“Here’s the best part: The fan base will also be at war within itself, as there are basically two camps of heavy-duty Narnia devotees…an even split between those who appreciate it simply as a series of beloved children’s literature and those who want it viewed only as a kind of 700 Club recruiting pamphlet.
“The blood between these two camps is so bad it makes the Original Series/Next Gen split in Star Trek fandom look like a mild family quarrel, and if the Narnia movie makes any kind of notable mainstream splash in theaters it’s gonna be open war right out in the cultural square.
“Mark my words, this is going to be an interesting release no matter how good the flick turns out.” — MSTMario2@aol.com
Wells to Mario: I have to hunker down and do some studying about this. I don’t know anything…zilch.
Grabs
Boston statehouse — Friday, 11.4.05, 8:25 pm.
Sign in front of 2038 pairs of boots arranged in military formation on the Boston Common — Friday, 11.04, 8;40 pm.
Sign placed opposite the Boston Common display of U.S. military boots.
Waiting for the Red Line subway on way back from Long Beach airport — Sunday, 11.6.05, 9:40 pm.
Hollywood Boulevard near corner of Highland — Sunday, 11.6.05, 9:55 pm.
Mannequin inside Boston’s Prudential Center/Copley Square mall — Saturday, 11.5.05, 7:05 pm.
Jarhead Muddle
“I went to dinner and a movie with some friends Saturday night. The local theater didn’t have Capote so we were stuck with a choice between Shopgirl and Jarhead, and we decided on the latter.
“My expectations were low enough that I wasn’t disappointed when it was over; I was more disappointed going in then coming out. But two things struck me upon exiting the theatre.
“First, there are too many kids who treat the experience of watching a war film like it’s “so soooo coool” and “awesome” and exchanging quotes from Full Metal Jacket. Perhaps they would like to experience the ‘pink mist’ as well. At a risk of getting all Howard Beale on you, we are in a war now and kids are getting blown up almost everyday, there’s nothing cool about it, right? We’re in a war now. The audience seemed detached from this.
Jarhead costars Jake Gyllenhaal, Peter Sarsgaard
“Secondly, Jarhead seemed to play mostly as a deadpan postmodern black comedy. I laughed more than anyting else. Another measure was that during pivotal scenes there was a smacking irony, a harsh truth that you would have to either laugh through or become the Troy character.
“When Swoff and Troy are robbed of their kill at the end, it felt to me like dark comedy. The sexual angst was mostly played for yuks even though underneath the ramifications are ugly. Lines like “shooting my gun in celebration being the only time I fired it the entire war” or “that’s Vietnam music, we don’t even get our own music” are what stick in my mind, and they taste of dark humor.
“But I can’t tell if this was the intention of Sam Mendes. Was he boldly and delicately making a black comedy and not telling the execs, or is he just tone deaf? Am I the only one or did you notice this too?” — George Bolanis , Pittsburgh, PA.
Girth
“I dunno…somehow ‘The Fat Clooney’ sounds like the sequel to The Big Lebowski — Mike Mayo
Wells to Mayo: Exactly. Immediate coolness. My want-to-see on Syriana shot up ten-fold after hearing it.
Lifeboat
“Liked that WIRED bit about Hitchcock’s Lifeboat, a film I’ve loved for years. Hitch often gets dismissed as a serious filmmaker because his movies are fun to watch and were, in many cases, clearly commercial.
“It’s become fashionable for guys like Tarantino to bash on Psycho), but Hitchcock had an artistry to his filmmaking and a depth of understanding of the human condition that many of today’s so-called auteurs lack, in my opinion.
“I just saw Rebecca for the first time and was blown away. Even if Selznick did come along and put his own music in, etc., it’s still a visionary work by a filmmaker at the top of his game.” — Michael Goedecke
Choices
“I was reading your most recent comments on why some films that give off what I’d guess you’d call an emotionally burnished quality don’t seem to connect with the audiences in the way that some of us might expect. There’s no single thing that explains this, but I can think of a few.
“First is the inevitable focus on box office, which is one of the few, hard indicators of the ‘success’ of a film, but given the changing nature of entertainment options and methods of consumption, I don’t believe it’s the only, or in some cases, even the primary factor.
“There are many films that I’d like to see in the theater, but if I miss that two- or three-week window when they’re in wide release — either because I was busy or just not in the right frame of mind — than I’ll opt to buy the DVD. I’ve got a decent home theater set-up, and frankly I don’t think my experience watching, say, Hustle & Flow at home is going to be qualitatively different than seeing it in the theater.
Naomi Wattts in King Kong
“I also think you make an unfair distinction between those who might go to see Saw II and those who might prefer to see The Constant Gardener. At least among my particular group of friends, those are overlapping audiences, and going to catch one movie on opening weekend means we’re unlikely to see the other.
“It’s not a sign of lack of interest, but a matter of mood and social dynamics. And frankly, DVDs provide a safety net because there will always be a DVD, and then I can choose where, how, and with whom I want to watch the movie on my own timetable.
“Lastly, whenever anyone points to the disappointing response to Cinderella Man I just have to shake my heard. I can’t pretend to know what was in the hearts and minds of everyone who chose not to see the film, but I know that for me it was contempt borne of familiarity.
“I mean, I’ve seen this story. So. Many. Times. I know every single emotional beat that will be hit, every single turn of the plot screw, the entire shape of the dramatic arc.
Ralph Fiennes in The Constant Gardener
“And it’s simply not interesting, no matter who wrote, directed, or acted in it, unless they can give me something new, deeper, surprising. And the trailer did a great job of telling me that there was absolutely nothing like that in the film. It’s Oscar Model #21A, and frankly it just bores me, and seems to bore most other people I know.
“I also agree with the disinterest in King Kong, mainly because I’m uninterested in the original and all succeeding versions. It’s a personal thing, but I really hate the ‘misunderstood hero as antagonist.’ I’ll still probably go see it with a crowd, but not out of any passion for the material.” — Chris Todd
Widescreen Idiocy
“I saw that photo you ran of the widescreen TV with the extra-wide widescreen image of Batman Begins, and perhaps you’re the idiot here. A 2.35:1 film will still have black bars on a 16:9 TV. 16:9 is 1.78:1, and not 2.35:1.” — Grady Stiles
Wells to Stiles: I know exactly what I’m talking about. Black bars are fine…the point is that the anamorphic 2.35 image in that photo has been squeezed down to what looks like a 3 to 1 or 3.5 to 1 image. It’s a widescreen image for morons who don’t know aspect ratios from their anus. I know aspect ratios dead to rights….go to American Widescreen Museum (http://www.widescreenmuseum.com/) and poke around and learn a thing or two. It’s all there. A very smart and knowledgable site.
Spiritual Sell
Gotta love that Bob Berney marketing audacity. Lay it on the line, sell the movie you have and damn the torpedoes.
I’m referring to Berney’s decision to call a certain heart-warming, Israeli-produced film, which his company, Picturehouse Films, picked up for U.S. distribution a few months ago…a movie that, let’s be honest, very few people other than Orthodox Jews in New York and Florida will want to see no matter what it’s called…a movie that Berney, in his admirably mule-stubborn way, has decided to sell with its orig- inal title, which is…ready?…Ushpizin.
Shuli Rand, star and screenwriter of Ushpizin, enduring a moment of anti-rapture
I would have called it Holy Guests or Bad Company or something like that. Partly because the movie’s about a Jewish Orthodox couple playing host to a couple of ne’er-do-wells during a holiday, but mainly because these titles are more…goy- friendly?
But then I’m not Bob Berney. I’m just this guy typing away inside a modest Brooklyn apartment while Berney sits in regal poobah splendor inside his $17 million Park Avenue triplex, tabulating profits from his offshore investments and making and breaking careers with a slight raising or lowering of his eyebrows…a much-feared and much-envied “big op” renowned for great wisdom and shrewd business judgment.
< ?php include ('/home/hollyw9/public_html/wired'); ?>
Okay, I’m kidding about the triplex and the eyebrows and the offshore investments, but Berney is a smart distributor so maybe he made the right call.
Let’s start with the Ushpizin basics, beginning with the correct pronunciation, which is oosh-peh-zeen.
Directed by Giddi Dar and written by the film’s star, Shuli Rand, Ushizpizin is about a poor Orthodox Jew named Moshe who lives in Jerusalem with his wife Malli and is trying to live by the spirit of the festival of Sukkot…I’m sorry, is this sounding too exotic already?
Moshe’s a nice pudgy middle-aged guy with a long squiggly beard, but he and his chubby wife Malli have no kids and he’s feeling a little bit blue about this and other matters.
And then these two jerky oddballs show up — Eliyahu, an old pal of Moishe’s from his pre-Orthodox, running-around days, and a pal called Yossef. They’re prison convicts on the run from the law, which eventually becomes known by Moshe and Malli, and from this complications ensue.
As with all spiritual fables, the visit by this unruly pair turns out to be a kind of blessing in disguise.
There’s a totally valid analogy between Ushpizin and David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence. You could also say it parallels Michael Mann’s Collateral, which is also about redemption arriving in the form of criminal behavior.
L.A. Daily News critic Bob Strauss, who doesn’t roll over for just anything, has called Ushpizin “one of the best character-based comedies of the year.”
Ushpizin has already played successfully in Israel for about a year. It just opened limited on Friday, 10.28, and is expanding on 11.4 to Philadelphia, Boston, Los Angeles and (I think I have this right) Florida. Basically anywhere there’s a heavy Jewish Orthodox population,okay?
Dar said that even in Israel he was told by distributors to change the title because “a lot of [Israelis] don’t know what it means.” (It means “guests” or “holy guests.”) But when he spoke to Berney about selling the film in the U.S., Berney said “let’s trust in God and keep it…let audiences break their teeth.”
Berney decided to stick with Ushpizin precisely “because it’s exotic. I just thought it made more sense to go with the original Hebrew name.”
Berney acknowledges that the interest in “small outside of New York City, but inside New York City it’s huge. We’re going to take it slowly, obviously playing to the core audience first….evangelicals, other faiths…it’s a film, after all, about belief and a test of faith. And there’s also the arthouse crowd.”
Berney and his wife Jeannie went to a screening of Ushpizin last week at a Brooklyn neighborhood called Borough Park.
“It’s a Hassidic, ultra-Orthodox neighborhood near Coney Island, and it’s really it’s own world. A very concentrated, ultra-Orthodox Hassidic community. It was at a high school auditorium and there were hundreds of people and many of them were coming up to me and telling me they were really pleased…it was mainly a 35 or 40 year-old crowd.”
Gadar agrees that the word “exotic” applies to the title of Ushpizin as well as the film itself, “but the interesting part is that when you cross the line and look at the world from Moshe and Malli’s point of view…you end up finding they’re very much like you.
Official Ushpizin T-shirt, available through official website.
Gadar says he’s “not religious at all” but says, “I think what this movie offers is that it’s a completely authentic movie about faith…teling a story which all faiths and cultures can identify with.”
When Ushpizin played in Isarel last year “everybody …secular, liberals, left- wing…saw it.” America is the first country outside of Israel to have theatrical playdates,he tells me.
“I showed the film to some Muslim people, but I don’t think Muslim countires will allow it to be played in their territories. I would like to show it in Iran…but it’s not that simple to put an Israeli film in Ian or even Egypt. It’s very hard. But the best thing about this movie is that it overcomes politics.”
And the best thing for Berney and Picturehouse Films, obviously, would be for Ushpizin to catch on with the goyim.
Honestly? I might not have gone to see this film if I hadn’t been given a screener. The title seems to be a statement that it isn’t for someone like me. But having seen it, I can say that it’s a film I respect for its heart and spiritual values, and that I feel a certain allegiance because of this.
Sunday Evening
Schiller’s Liquor Bar on Rivington, a couple blocks north of Delancey on Manhattan’s Lower East Side — Sunday, 10.30.05, 8:50 pm.
Ditto, exterior — 9:15 pm
Fuck Yoga, an attitude T-shirt boutique on Ludlow Street — Sunday, 10.30.05, 8:20 pm
Pseudo-hip discount Manhattan hotel…”only” $169 per night.
Walking back to good old ratty Brooklyn across Williamsburg bridge — Sunday, 10.30.05, 10:05 pm
Schiller’s again
Nothing There
If I wanted to just blurt it out and cut to the chase, I could say that Jarhead (Univ- ersal, 11.4) is nothing. But it’s not entirely nothing — it’s the fall’s first major what- the-hell-were-they-thinking? movie, and that ain’t hay. Trust me, it’s going to send tens of thousands of viewers out of theatres and into the street next weekend (it’s tracking…it’ll open) asking themselves this very question.
Oo-rahh…
Based on Anthony Swofford’s first-person account of his experience as a Marine during the 1991 Gulf War, Jarhead was probably pitched to Universal execs as the first GenX war movie…the Nirvana generation’s answer to Full Metal Jacket.
Swofford (Jake Gyllenhaal) arrives at U.S. airbase in Saudi Arabia, ready to whoop ass.
It was probably also sold it as a kind of GenX woe-is-us movie…as a Douglas Coupland-referenced metaphor about feelings of impotence and powerlessness… about Gulf War grunts feeling robbed of immediacy and ground-floor opportunity during their Big Combat Moment.
Or maybe they (Mendes or producers Lucy Fisher or Doug Wick, or all three) sim- ply told Universal they would deliver an honest definitive portrait of what a letdown the Gulf War was for the combatants and how it felt to be bored out of your ass in the desert, and Universal execs listened, looked at each other and said in unison, “Cool, that’ll sell tickets.”
Universal bought the pitch, but Jarhead isn’t a movie. It’s about waiting in your seat for the movie to begin, and then waiting and waiting and eventually saying to yourself, “Oh, shit.” It doesn’t dig in or get down or manage to be any more than what Three Kings was during its first 15 minutes.
My respect for David O. Russell, the director and writer of Three Kings, is very much renewed. Great filmmaker!
Swofford’s book was fairly absorbing (I read about half of it), but the material that would make for a moderately absorbing movie simply isn’t there.
Jarhead is a series of scenes showing Marines being trained to be killers state- side, and then flying to Saudi Arabia in ’91 and waiting to go to battle against Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard troops, and then never quite seeing battle.
And to give things a generically haunting vibe it tells us (by way of narration by Jake Gyllenhaaal, who plays Swofford, or “Swoff”) that a grunt can never forget that rockin’ feeling of having his finger on a trigger. To which you will say…to which your friends will say…to which anyone with a mind will say…”So what?”
Gylennhaal, costar Peter Sarsgaard (r.) in Sam Mendes’ Jarhead
If Jarhead wasn’t a Sam Mendes movie, and wasn’t a big-studio early November release (and hence a presumed Oscar contender on some level)…if it had opened in, say, March or August without a lot of hoopla…it might have been seen for what it is — a nicely textured, maddeningly empty film about grunts coping with boredom, loneliness and disappointment — without people resenting what it isn’t.
It’s not terrible. It’s well made, well acted, convincing, etc. But $1.75 and a movie like Jarhead will get you a bus ticket.
And I’m not going to be sucked into saying what some critics are probably thinking right now, which is, “Whoa…ballsy! A hall-of-mirrors film about nothing happening that actually becomes what it’s about!”
Watch out for any critic who tries this one out on you, because that critic will be totally full of shit.
I was in my local Montrose Avenue grocery store after Monday night’s screening and the counter guy — Hispanic, early 40s, unmarried – asked me about it after spotting the program notes in my hand. “A Gulf war movie…been wanting to see this,” he said. I said, “Well, I don’t know…it’s fairly well made but no fighting.” And he said, “No fighting?”
Not even the genius of Universal marketing honcho Marc Schmuger can save this film.
It’s kind of Full Metal Jacket-y at times, but it mainly resembles that film’s floun- dering middle section. That means no character intrigue or simmering conflict (like Vincent D’Onofrio’s Pvt. Gomer Pyle being slowly tortured into animal madness by F.Lee Ermey’s drill sergeant), and no third-act battle-scene climax or a very young dying enemy soldier lying on the ground and whispering “Shoot me…shoot me!”… and no final ironic statement that comes close to Stanley Kubrick’s grunts singing the Mickey Mouse Club song with the hell-fires of Hue in the background.
It has one big scene toward the end that isn’t really a big scene…it’s kind of a final “sorry, son but this war won’t be happening for you” scene. You start to feel something when it happens but then it’s over and it’s back to the same old blah.
And there’s one really good line that Gyellenhaal says about not wanting to hear Vietnam music (i.e., a cut by The Doors) in the middle of an early `90s desert war.
So Kubrick wins and Mendes loses. (He never had a chance, really.) The British -born director, a good guy, started things off with a bang with American Beauty six years ago, and managed a stirring followup with Road to Perdition, but he didn’t have Connie Hall to punch things up this time and the material was too unfocused and insubstantial…and he failed. Jarhead is the suck.
No Oscar nominations for anyone except cinematographer Roger Deakins. No acting awards or nominations for Jake Gyllenhaal, although he’s pretty good (as far as it goes). No Best Supporting Actor nom for the great Peter Sarsgaard because the script doesn’t let him do or say anything except for a single emotional crackup scene near the end (and it’s nowhere near enough).
Universal will get its first weekend gross and then the word will get out and it’ll be down-the-toilet time.
Okay, it’s well-crafted. Yes, it has a certain high-visual distinction (occasional sur- real or dream-like flourishes) and (I keep mentioning this but there’s nothing else to mention) a streak of apparent honesty in its depiction of what boredom it can be to park your eager-beaver Marine ass in the Arabian desert for months and months, etc.
But the script never grabs hold of anything in the characters and tries to make something happen. Nothing means nothing. “Swoff” is nervous about what his girlfriend may be up to with some guy she says she’s met…who cares? Sars- gaard’s Troy is wired tight and born-to-fight…and that’s it. Jamie Foxx is a sergeant who loves the Corps and doesn’t shrink from handing out discipline…nothing. Chris Cooper gives two pep-rally speeches…showboating.
Marine Sergeant Jamie Foxx (l.) and the guys
There’s no narrative through-line to hitch your wagon to…no sense of gathering force or anything of interest approaching…nothing emotional. A lot of presumed disloyal girlfriend stuff, a little homoeroticism here and there…but it’s all Waiting for Godot-ish. The actors have zip to work with. They do moderately well with what they’ve been given, but moderately well doesn’t cut it during Oscar season.
Deakins’ photography is fine…okay, better than fine…and the CG of the burning oil wells in the third act is my favorite kind of CG, which it to say pretty much invisi- ble.
But a supposed war movie about not fighting a war — about the boring nothing bullshit stuff that happens when soldiers who’ve been trained to kill are just hanging around in the desert with their dicks in their hands…I’m really amazed. Jarhead‘s audacity would be startling if it didn’t feel so inert.
Mondo Kongo
Anyone who’s seen the Lord of the Rings trilogy (or, more to the point, has sat through the extended versions on DVD) knows Peter Jackson has never been into brevity. He couldn’t operate farther from a less-is-more aesthetic if he tried.
Eye-filling visuals, teary emotionalism, portentousness, sets and costumes that are just so, probing closeups, dialogue scenes that go on longer and are more exacting than necessary…Jackson loves to heap it on.
It should therefore come as no surprise that King Kong, his latest film which Universal will open theatrically on 12.14 (or six and a half weeks from today), is going to run three hours, according to a 10.27 story by New York Times reporter Sharon Waxman.
The obvious implication is that Jackson’s Kong is going to be a lot more about Jackson — his brushstrokes, I mean, and the absolute power and perogative he has to throw as much paint at the canvas as he deems fit — than anything else.
It also seems that Jackson’s indulgent streak has most likely overwhelmed any chance of audiences getting to savor a straight, clean re-telling of a classic tale about a dishy blonde and a big heartsick ape.
Take a look at the Kong stills and it’s obvious the film is going to look awesome. They’re clearly mouth-watering. But that aside, all bets are off.
I know how some of you are reading this. I have a case against Jackson and have hated everything he’s done since Heavenly Creatures, blah blah, so anything I say in advance about King Kong is a broken-record “here we go again” deal.
This poster is an unoffical fanboy thing, but thanks anyway to Jeremy Huggins for fixing the spelling of Adrien Brody’s name.
But ask yourselves this: has there ever been a remake of any kind — play, film, televised — that has been judged to be superior because it went on longer and used more words, sets, costumes and tubes of paint than the original leaner version?
I’m not saying this hasn’t ever happened (and I will honestly love it if Jackson outdoes the original in any way…really), but I’m having trouble thinking of an example.
The whole idea in Jackson making this film, according to his own proclamations when he began work on it a couple of years ago, was to pay some kind of tribute to Merian C. Cooper’s 1933 original film. Not in a Gus Van Sant/Psycho way, but to essentially re-do a classic movie…to re-experience and re-deliver to modern audiences what he loved about Kong when he first saw it as a kid on TV.
The project, which has swollen in cost to $207 million dollars, has apparently evolved into something more obsessive than personal.
The 1933 Kong runs 100 minutes, and Jackson is pretty much using the same story and situations, or so I’ve understood all along. So what could the extra 80 minutes be about? Only a few people know, but I’m fairly certain they’re about one thing and one thing only: Jackson’s power to make this film any way he damn well pleases, and about nobody at Universal being able to say boo.
In other words, the extra 80 minutes are about the auteurist “wheee!” factor…the same carte blanche E-ticket that has allowed all powerful directors at the apex of their careers to go for broke.
Given his huge success with the Rings trilogy, Jackson is certainly in no position, contractually or psychologically, to alter his modus operandi. And he’s in no way obliged to listen to anyone else’s opinions, be they practical brass-tacks sugges- tions or what-have-you.
“The film is substantially longer than Universal had anticipated and presents dual obstacles,” Waxman writes. “The extra length has helped increase the budget by a third…while requiring the studio, owned by General Electric, to reach for the kind of long-term audience interest that made hits out of three-hour movies like Titanic and the films in Mr. Jackson’s Rings trilogy.
“Hollywood blockbusters have increasingly relied on big releases that bring in as much as half of their ticket sales on the first weekend. But long films receive far fewer showings per day, and the most successful ones, like Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) by Mr. Jackson, which took in $315 million at the domestic box office for New Line Cinema, have remained in theaters for well over half a year.”
Asked about the length of King Kong, Universal executives told Waxman they saw it “as an advantage in an era when jaded moviegoers are hungering for something extraordinary.
“‘This is a three-hour feast of an event,’ said Marc Shmuger, vice chairman of Universal Pictures. ‘I’ve never come close to seeing an artist working at this level.'”
Waxman notes that “few elements of the film have been seen by the larger public, and even Universal executives saw a finished version of King Kong’s face — with its expressive eyes, broadly fierce nose and mane of computer-generated hair — only in recent days.”
“Expressive eyes”? Is that Waxman talking or something she was told by some other Universal exec? No telling yet, but a Golum-ish, Andy Serkis-ized Kong will be a very tough row to hoe.
“Exhibitors have long complained that very long films make it harder to draw audiences, though in this difficult year at the box office, they have complained louder about not having enough good films to show,” Waxman writes.
No one will be happier than myself if Kong kicks ass. And yet the indications are what they are. Snaggle tooth, Jack Black doing a half-comical spin on Carl Den- ham, three-hour running time, 11th-hour firing of composer Howard Shore, etc.
Talk me out of this. Tell me how I’m reading this the wrong way…I mean, without resorting to the usual you-can’t-see-straight-when-it-comes-to-Peter-Jackson argument.
Grabs
Lounge area on main floor of Algonquin Hotel — Monday, 10.24.05, 10:30 pm.
Tuesday, 10.25, 10:25 pm.
2004 Village Voice cover…never saw it before this week
Marilyn Monroe photo shoot, sometime around ’59 or ’60. (I think.)
Nothing There
If I wanted to just blurt it out and cut to the chase, I could say that Jarhead (Univ- ersal, 11.4) is nothing. But it’s not entirely nothing — it’s the fall’s first major what- the-hell-were-they-thinking? movie, and that ain’t hay. Trust me, it’s going to send tens of thousands of viewers out of theatres and into the street next weekend (it’s tracking…it’ll open) asking themselves this very question.
Oo-rahh…
Based on Anthony Swofford’s first-person account of his experience as a Marine during the 1991 Gulf War, Jarhead was probably pitched to Universal execs as the first GenX war movie…the Nirvana generation’s answer to Full Metal Jacket.
Swofford (Jake Gyllenhaal) arrives at U.S. airbase in Saudi Arabia, ready to whoop ass.
It was probably also sold it as a kind of GenX woe-is-us movie…as a Douglas Coupland-referenced metaphor about feelings of impotence and powerlessness… about Gulf War grunts feeling robbed of immediacy and ground-floor opportunity during their Big Combat Moment.
Or maybe they (Mendes or producers Lucy Fisher or Doug Wick, or all three) sim- ply told Universal they would deliver an honest definitive portrait of what a letdown the Gulf War was for the combatants and how it felt to be bored out of your ass in the desert, and Universal execs listened, looked at each other and said in unison, “Cool, that’ll sell tickets.”
< ?php include ('/home/hollyw9/public_html/wired'); ?>
Universal bought the pitch, but Jarhead isn’t a movie. It’s about waiting in your seat for the movie to begin, and then waiting and waiting and eventually saying to yourself, “Oh, shit.” It doesn’t dig in or get down or manage to be any more than what Three Kings was during its first 15 minutes.
My respect for David O. Russell, the director and writer of Three Kings, is very much renewed. Great filmmaker!
Swofford’s book was fairly absorbing (I read about half of it), but the material that would make for a moderately absorbing movie simply isn’t there.
Jarhead is a series of scenes showing Marines being trained to be killers state- side, and then flying to Saudi Arabia in ’91 and waiting to go to battle against Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard troops, and then never quite seeing battle.
And to give things a generically haunting vibe it tells us (by way of narration by Jake Gyllenhaaal, who plays Swofford, or “Swoff”) that a grunt can never forget that rockin’ feeling of having his finger on a trigger. To which you will say…to which your friends will say…to which anyone with a mind will say…”So what?”
Gylennhaal, costar Peter Sarsgaard (r.) in Sam Mendes’ Jarhead
If Jarhead wasn’t a Sam Mendes movie, and wasn’t a big-studio early November release (and hence a presumed Oscar contender on some level)…if it had opened in, say, March or August without a lot of hoopla…it might have been seen for what it is — a nicely textured, maddeningly empty film about grunts coping with boredom, loneliness and disappointment — without people resenting what it isn’t.
It’s not terrible. It’s well made, well acted, convincing, etc. But $1.75 and a movie like Jarhead will get you a bus ticket.
And I’m not going to be sucked into saying what some critics are probably thinking right now, which is, “Whoa…ballsy! A hall-of-mirrors film about nothing happening that actually becomes what it’s about!”
Watch out for any critic who tries this one out on you, because that critic will be totally full of shit.
I was in my local Montrose Avenue grocery store after Monday night’s screening and the counter guy — Hispanic, early 40s, unmarried – asked me about it after spotting the program notes in my hand. “A Gulf war movie…been wanting to see this,” he said. I said, “Well, I don’t know…it’s fairly well made but no fighting.” And he said, “No fighting?”
Not even the genius of Universal marketing honcho Marc Schmuger can save this film.
It’s kind of Full Metal Jacket-y at times, but it mainly resembles that film’s floun- dering middle section. That means no character intrigue or simmering conflict (like Vincent D’Onofrio’s Pvt. Gomer Pyle being slowly tortured into animal madness by F.Lee Ermey’s drill sergeant), and no third-act battle-scene climax or a very young dying enemy soldier lying on the ground and whispering “Shoot me…shoot me!”… and no final ironic statement that comes close to Stanley Kubrick’s grunts singing the Mickey Mouse Club song with the hell-fires of Hue in the background.
It has one big scene toward the end that isn’t really a big scene…it’s kind of a final “sorry, son but this war won’t be happening for you” scene. You start to feel something when it happens but then it’s over and it’s back to the same old blah.
And there’s one really good line that Gyellenhaal says about not wanting to hear Vietnam music (i.e., a cut by The Doors) in the middle of an early `90s desert war.
So Kubrick wins and Mendes loses. (He never had a chance, really.) The British -born director, a good guy, started things off with a bang with American Beauty six years ago, and managed a stirring followup with Road to Perdition, but he didn’t have Connie Hall to punch things up this time and the material was too unfocused and insubstantial…and he failed. Jarhead is the suck.
No Oscar nominations for anyone except cinematographer Roger Deakins. No acting awards or nominations for Jake Gyllenhaal, although he’s pretty good (as far as it goes). No Best Supporting Actor nom for the great Peter Sarsgaard because the script doesn’t let him do or say anything except for a single emotional crackup scene near the end (and it’s nowhere near enough).
Universal will get its first weekend gross and then the word will get out and it’ll be down-the-toilet time.
Okay, it’s well-crafted. Yes, it has a certain high-visual distinction (occasional sur- real or dream-like flourishes) and (I keep mentioning this but there’s nothing else to mention) a streak of apparent honesty in its depiction of what boredom it can be to park your eager-beaver Marine ass in the Arabian desert for months and months, etc.
But the script never grabs hold of anything in the characters and tries to make something happen. Nothing means nothing. “Swoff” is nervous about what his girlfriend may be up to with some guy she says she’s met…who cares? Sars- gaard’s Troy is wired tight and born-to-fight…and that’s it. Jamie Foxx is a sergeant who loves the Corps and doesn’t shrink from handing out discipline…nothing. Chris Cooper gives two pep-rally speeches…showboating.
Marine Sergeant Jamie Foxx (l.) and the guys
There’s no narrative through-line to hitch your wagon to…no sense of gathering force or anything of interest approaching…nothing emotional. A lot of presumed disloyal girlfriend stuff, a little homoeroticism here and there…but it’s all Waiting for Godot-ish. The actors have zip to work with. They do moderately well with what they’ve been given, but moderately well doesn’t cut it during Oscar season.
Deakins’ photography is fine…okay, better than fine…and the CG of the burning oil wells in the third act is my favorite kind of CG, which it to say pretty much invisi- ble.
But a supposed war movie about not fighting a war — about the boring nothing bullshit stuff that happens when soldiers who’ve been trained to kill are just hanging around in the desert with their dicks in their hands…I’m really amazed. Jarhead‘s audacity would be startling if it didn’t feel so inert.
Mondo Kongo
Anyone who’s seen the Lord of the Rings trilogy (or, more to the point, has sat through the extended versions on DVD) knows Peter Jackson has never been into brevity. He couldn’t operate farther from a less-is-more aesthetic if he tried.
Eye-filling visuals, teary emotionalism, portentousness, sets and costumes that are just so, probing closeups, dialogue scenes that go on longer and are more exacting than necessary…Jackson loves to heap it on.
It should therefore come as no surprise that King Kong, his latest film which Universal will open theatrically on 12.14 (or six and a half weeks from today), is going to run three hours, according to a 10.27 story by New York Times reporter Sharon Waxman.
The obvious implication is that Jackson’s Kong is going to be a lot more about Jackson — his brushstrokes, I mean, and the absolute power and perogative he has to throw as much paint at the canvas as he deems fit — than anything else.
It also seems that Jackson’s indulgent streak has most likely overwhelmed any chance of audiences getting to savor a straight, clean re-telling of a classic tale about a dishy blonde and a big heartsick ape.
Take a look at the Kong stills and it’s obvious the film is going to look awesome. They’re clearly mouth-watering. But that aside, all bets are off.
I know how some of you are reading this. I have a case against Jackson and have hated everything he’s done since Heavenly Creatures, blah blah, so anything I say in advance about King Kong is a broken-record “here we go again” deal.
This poster is an unoffical fanboy thing, but thanks anyway to Jeremy Huggins for fixing the spelling of Adrien Brody’s name.
But ask yourselves this: has there ever been a remake of any kind — play, film, televised — that has been judged to be superior because it went on longer and used more words, sets, costumes and tubes of paint than the original leaner version?
I’m not saying this hasn’t ever happened (and I will honestly love it if Jackson outdoes the original in any way…really), but I’m having trouble thinking of an example.
The whole idea in Jackson making this film, according to his own proclamations when he began work on it a couple of years ago, was to pay some kind of tribute to Merian C. Cooper’s 1933 original film. Not in a Gus Van Sant/Psycho way, but to essentially re-do a classic movie…to re-experience and re-deliver to modern audiences what he loved about Kong when he first saw it as a kid on TV.
The project, which has swollen in cost to $207 million dollars, has apparently evolved into something more obsessive than personal.
The 1933 Kong runs 100 minutes, and Jackson is pretty much using the same story and situations, or so I’ve understood all along. So what could the extra 80 minutes be about? Only a few people know, but I’m fairly certain they’re about one thing and one thing only: Jackson’s power to make this film any way he damn well pleases, and about nobody at Universal being able to say boo.
In other words, the extra 80 minutes are about the auteurist “wheee!” factor…the same carte blanche E-ticket that has allowed all powerful directors at the apex of their careers to go for broke.
Given his huge success with the Rings trilogy, Jackson is certainly in no position, contractually or psychologically, to alter his modus operandi. And he’s in no way obliged to listen to anyone else’s opinions, be they practical brass-tacks sugges- tions or what-have-you.
“The film is substantially longer than Universal had anticipated and presents dual obstacles,” Waxman writes. “The extra length has helped increase the budget by a third…while requiring the studio, owned by General Electric, to reach for the kind of long-term audience interest that made hits out of three-hour movies like Titanic and the films in Mr. Jackson’s Rings trilogy.
“Hollywood blockbusters have increasingly relied on big releases that bring in as much as half of their ticket sales on the first weekend. But long films receive far fewer showings per day, and the most successful ones, like Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) by Mr. Jackson, which took in $315 million at the domestic box office for New Line Cinema, have remained in theaters for well over half a year.”
Asked about the length of King Kong, Universal executives told Waxman they saw it “as an advantage in an era when jaded moviegoers are hungering for something extraordinary.
“‘This is a three-hour feast of an event,’ said Marc Shmuger, vice chairman of Universal Pictures. ‘I’ve never come close to seeing an artist working at this level.'”
Waxman notes that “few elements of the film have been seen by the larger public, and even Universal executives saw a finished version of King Kong’s face — with its expressive eyes, broadly fierce nose and mane of computer-generated hair — only in recent days.”
“Expressive eyes”? Is that Waxman talking or something she was told by some other Universal exec? No telling yet, but a Golum-ish, Andy Serkis-ized Kong will be a very tough row to hoe.
“Exhibitors have long complained that very long films make it harder to draw audiences, though in this difficult year at the box office, they have complained louder about not having enough good films to show,” Waxman writes.
No one will be happier than myself if Kong kicks ass. And yet the indications are what they are. Snaggle tooth, Jack Black doing a half-comical spin on Carl Den- ham, three-hour running time, 11th-hour firing of composer Howard Shore, etc.
Talk me out of this. Tell me how I’m reading this the wrong way…I mean, without resorting to the usual you-can’t-see-straight-when-it-comes-to-Peter-Jackson argument.
Implied
That European poster for Steven Spielberg’s Munich (Universal, 12.23) confirms what I wrote about this film last March, which is that it’s not going to be about killing the Palestinian perpetrators of the 1972 Munich Olympic Games massacre as much as the feelings of guilt and futility that are the inevitable dividend of any such act.
Munich, which will star Eric Bana and Daniel Craig, is about a revenge operation planned and executed by Mossad, or Israel’s CIA. And, I gather, the moral and ethical mucky-muck that resulted. The script is by New York playwright Tony Kushner (Angels in America).
The guy in the poster is sitting in a hotel room and holding a piece and obviously experiencing a moment of spiritual doubt of some kind. He’s not wondering what TV show to watch.
European one-sheet for Steven Spielberg’s Munich
Munich will be Spielberg’s second major-league feature having to do with lethal aggression against Jews, the first being Schindler’s List, and he knows this latest effort will be compared to his 1993 Oscar winner, so he’s got to…you know…make it complex, high-minded, morally probing.
The theme, I’m guessing, will be something along the lines of “if we all keep taking an eye for an eye, pretty soon the world will be blind.” This line comes from a 1986 TV movie called Sword of Gabriel, which was based on the same true-life story the Spielberg-Kushner film is apparently about.
Two athletes were killed during a hostage-taking and stand-off situation with German authorities at Munich’s Olympic village. Nine more were killed by a grenade blast at Munich’s Furstenfeldbruck airport when authorities tried to shoot it out with the terrorists.
I haven’t read Kushner’s script, but one of the film’s vantage points is that of “Committee X,” a high-ranking group of Israeli officials, chaired by Israeli premiere Golda Meir and Defense Minister Mosha Dayan, and the assassination campaign they ordered Mossad to carry out — to murder every strategist and supporter known to have in some way supported Black September’s Munich operation.
A member of Black September standing on balcony of Israeli athletes’ condo in Munich’s Olympic Village during September 1972 hostage stand-off.
The operation was known in some circles as Operation Wrath of God.
The idea behind the campaign, which was known as the kidon (Hebrew for bayonet) and run by senior Mossad agent Mike Harrari, was to strike terror in the hearts and minds of the plotters. It was primarily for the sake of revenge, I’m sure, but also to try and psychologically deter similar operations.
Mossad started with a list of 11 names, but the people they wound up killing numbered 18, by one count.
Harrari’s plan was to be absolutely precise and avoid collateral damage, and yet people who had nothing to do with the Munich killings — a Moroccan waiter, a Russian KGB agent, an Arab-looking bodyguard in Gibraltar, three Arab-looking guys who made the mistake of pulling out guns during a raid in Switzerland — died at the hands of the kidon killers. Seven in all.
Snob Aesthetics
My favorite flip-through book last summer was David Kamp and Steven Daly’s “The Rock Snob’s Dictionary” (Broadway Books), an incisive and tidy sum-up guide about the who, what and wherefores of elitist rock-music savoring.
And now I’m into “The Film Snob’s Dictionary,” which I scored an advance copy of last week. It’s less of an education than “Rock Snobs” — I’m obviously much more familiar with the turf — but I’m having just as good a time with the knowingness and wit and concise prose style.
“The Film Snob’s Dictionary” won’t be out until February ’06 (to tie in with seasonal Oscar frenzy), but I don’t think I’m blurbing it too early. You’ll be reading advance items and friendly mentions come November-December, and…I don’t know…time seems to whiz by faster and faster these days…torrents of information surging at hurricane-speed.
The authors are the Manhattan-based Kamp, a longtime Vanity Fair writer and sometime contributor to GQ, and another New York journo named Lawrence Levi, who first met Kamp when they worked together at Spy in…I think it was the late ’80s or early ’90s, when Graydon Carter was the editor.
Snobs are always hovering around any field of creative endeavor, and most of them are usually fringe wannabe types (i.e., producers, financial patrons, hangers-on) covering some insecurity.
Film Snobs are mostly fringe types also, but a certain number can be found among journalists and critics. Naturally, I exclude myself. I have this delusional idea that I’m an anti-snob, man-of-the-people type. The truth is that I know my stuff and feel no empathy for lowbrow ignorance, and I always go into fits when people refuse to support a film I know is intelligent, well-honed and suffused with honest emotion.
So maybe I’m a bit snobby, although for the sake of balance I try to ground myself in my middle-class, rubbing-shoulders-with-prole-types background. And I think Bollywood films are for the birds.
And yet I couldn’t help laughing when I read this line from the opening graph of “An Introductory Note by the Authors”:
“The Film Snob fairly revels, in fact, in the notion that The Public Is Stupid and Ineducable, which is what sets him apart from the more benevolent Film Buff — the effervescent, Scorsese-style enthusiast who delights in introducing novitiates to The Bicycle Thief and Powell-Pressburger films.”
I know film-snob attitudes quite well, or at least what it is to feel grossly insecure about not knowing enough about movies and therefore lacking the chops to qualify as a snob.
I felt this way when I first came to New York in the late ’70s to try and make it as a film journalist. I was acutely aware that I didn’t have the seasoning and the film knowledge to even stand in the same vicinity as the big New York guns of the time (Pauline Kael, Andrew Sarris, Stuart Byron, etc.), and it caused me no shortage of anguish.
This was compounded by the fact that writing articles at the time was doubly difficult because I couldn’t relax and just write what I knew and felt on my own terms.
Pauline Kael
I finally got past all this, partly out of a realization that certain elite critics lived on the planet Neptune. I came to realize that although they knew what they knew and had a brilliant way of saying it, their views weren’t any better than mine…although my respect for the elites and worshipping their prose all those years (as well as boning up on venerated critics like Andre Bazin, Otis Ferguson, Manny Farber, Dwight McDonald, James Agee, et. al.) had a cumulative effect.
I wrote last summer that I especially enjoyed “The Rock Snob’s Dictionary” because “it’s so exquisitely written. Every sentence is a Hope diamond, chiseled and honed and phrased to perfection with just the right seasoning of know-it-all attitude…aimed, naturally, at the snobs who initially created it.” The same goes with the new volume. It’s an immaculate, whip-smart read.
One difference is that “The Film Snob’s Dictionary” runs 114 pages, or 36 pages shorter than “The Rock Snob’s Dictionary.” I would have preferred a few more snob obsessions being thrown in (film snobbery encompasses a vast universe and at least 85 years of film history) …but since it’s aimed at people who don’t know this world at all, I guess the idea was to avoid getting too anal-particular.
Another difference is that knowing the film world as I do, a lot of what’s in the book is back-of-the-hand familiar. But I’m sure rock aficionados felt the same way last summer.
New York Press critic Armond White
The intro piece is pretty good…
“The Film Snob’s stance is one of proprietary knowingness — the pleasure he takes in movies derives not only from the sensory experience of watching them, but also from knowing more about them than you do, and from zealously guarding this knowledge from the cheesy, Julia Roberts-loving masses, who have no right whatsoever to be fluent in the works of Samuel (White Dog) Fuller and Andrei (the original Solaris) Tarkovsky.”
The graph about the public being Stupid and Ineducable follows, and then…
“The Film Snob’s Dictionary seeks to redress the knowledge gap between Snobs and non-Snobs, so that normal, nonsociopathic, movie-loving people may (a) become privy to some of the good stuff that Film Snobs zealously hoard for themselves; and (b) avoid or approach cautiously the vast quantities of iffy or downright crappy material that Snobs embrace in the name of Snobbery.
“This second service is especially valuable, because the Film Snob’s taste is willfully perverse, glorifying drecky Hong Kong martial-arts flicks and such misunderstood works of genius as Mike Judge’s Office Space and Michael Mann’s Heat for no rational reason whatsoever.”
(I read the preceding graph Sunday night to L.A. City Beat film critic Andy Klein, who isn’t a snob but surely knows his stuff as well as Jim Hoberman or Armond White. Klein laughed and said, “Obviously they’re trying to get a rise out of critics,” etc. He also declared that Heat, Office Space and, one inferred, a selection of his favorite Hong Kong chop-socky flicks “are all great.”)
“The authors of this book, in compiling its entries, have sought to strike the right balance between intellectual curiosity and Snob madness, so that the reader will feel less intimidated about renting a genuinely entertaining film such as Fritz Lang’s M just because it is ‘German Expressionist,’ but liberated from the burden of ever having to watch a Peter Greenaway film.”
The intro also says that “readers knowledgable about film will notice the conspicuous absence from The Film Snob’s Dictionary, apart from passing references, of such titans of foreign cinema as Federico Fellini (8 1/2), Ingmar Bergman (The Seventh Seal), Akira Kurosawa (The Seven Samurai), and Satyajit Ray (the “Apu” trilogy).
“The Film Snob may indeed know a fair amount about these filmmakers (Fellini in particular, given that his movies’ soundtracks were often composed by Snob cause celebre Nino Rota), but he generally scoffs at them, deeming them to be mere name-drops for bourgeois losers wishing to seem cultured. Watching a Bergman film is so PBS tote-bag, so Mom-and-Dad-on-a-date-in-college, so baguettes-and- Chardonnay.
“The Snob prides himself on his populist, un-arty taste, favoring, for example, the soapy, over-emotive schlock of India’s Bombay-based `Bollywood’ film industry over the artful, nuanced films of the Calcutta-born Ray, and the Spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Leone and Corbucci over anything Fellini ever made. It’s a reverse Snobbery more powerful than the Snobbery it’s rebelling against.”
New York Observer critic Andrew Sarris
There are something like 250 capsule mentions. As noted earlier, there could probably be another 100 or so more if Kamp and Levi wanted to bulk up. Some of these have appeared in two past issues of Vanity Fair, and there’s a site that quoted a few of them in ’04, so it doesn’t seem like much of a spoiler to excerpt a few more.
The eight entries I’m running deal solely with critics and film magazines/sites. If it were my book I would have mentioned other Neptuners (B. Ruby Rich, Jim Hoberman, Ray Pride, Armond White, Robert Koehler, Emanuel Levy) — each of whom, it could be argued, are fascinating in their authority-exuding quirkiness.
There’s certainly no slight in saying these people should have been included. Film Snobbery is an excusable neurotic outgrowth of being an extra-passionate Film Buff, and every Neptuner I’ve mentioned in this graph is a fine writer and respected scholar, so let’s not have any arched backs.
Anyway…
Farber, Manny: Beloved alter kocker film critic emeritus, now working as a a painter in Southern California. Preceding his friend Pauline Kael by more than a decade as a nonconformist thinker about movies, Farber got his start writing reviews for The New Republic in the 1940s and proved as comfortable decon- structing Tex Avery cartoons and Don Siegel genre exercises as he was evaluating the French New Wave and Rainer Werner Fassbinder — in effect, inventing the prevailing critic vogue for high thought on low entertainment. A big influence of Snob-revered Jonathan Rosenbaum, Farber, more than Kael or Andrew Sarris, is the name to drop for instant Crit Snob credibility.
Retired film critic Manny Farber
Film Comment. Smug, aggressively elitist bimonthly magazine published by the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Where Snobs go to read (or write) dithery articles about Bollywood and despairing critiques of popular cinema.
Film Threat. Surprisingly buoyant, unsmug Web ‘zine devoed to independent film. Where Snobs go to read fulsome appreciations of Sam Raimi and interviews with such Queens of the B’s as Debbie Rochon and Tina Krause.
Katz, Ephraim. Industrious Israeli-born film nerd who, in the 1970s, single- handedly undertook the task of compiling an encyclopedia of film. Published in 1979, after years of work, Katz’s The Film Encyclopedia quickly established itself as the definitive film reference for both Snobs who need to know what a “friction head” is (it’s a kind of tripod head that ensures smooth camera movement) and laypersons who can’t keep Linda Darnell straight from Joan Blondell. Katz died in 1992, and successive, expanded editions of the Film Encyclopedia have been produced by his proteges, though hard-core Snobs take issue with some of the cuts that were made from Katz’s original, and keep the ’79 edition around.
Kael, Pauline. Revered film critic (1919-2001) whose work, most of which appeared in The New Yorker, stood out for its bracing, provocative prose and its author’s loony, nonsensical taste; no one was smarter and more cogent about Cary Grant’s career and Steve Spielberg’s early films, yet no one was more reckless in overpraising grim 1970s murk and unbearably blowsy female performances (e.g., Elizabeth Taylor in X, Y & Zee; Karen Black in Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean; Bette Midler in Big Business). A tiny woman, Kael nevertheless inspired fear in her legions of movie-critic acolytes (known as “Paulettes”), full-grown men and women who tremulously sought her unforthcoming approval and pilgrimaged to her home in the Berkshires in the vain hope of being anointed her heir apparent.
Snob-favored New York Times critic Dave Kehr, flanked by two Russians with four-syllable last names
Kehr, Dave. Third- or possibly fourth-string New York Times movie critic. Though often relegated to reviewing DVD releases, he is preferred by Snobs over A.O. Scott, Manohla Dargis and Stephen Holden.
Rosenbaum, Jonathan. Industrious but mirthless film critic for the Chicago Reader; one of the few important film writers of the post-Kael era. Given to chiding fellow Snobs about their ignorance of the Iranian New Wave.
Sarris, Andrew. Brooklyn-born film critic and theorist known for popularizing the Auteur Theory, and for arousing the ire of Pauline Kael with his totemic 1968 book The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929 — 1968, in which he categorized directors by preference, prompting Kael to deride him, to his face, as a “list queen.” His gentlemanly, hypeless prose has remained consistent since 1960, when he began writing for the Village Voice. Married to the fellow film-critster Molly Haskell, Sarris now plies his trade for the New York Observer and as a trainee Snob-admired lecturer at Columbia University.
Reminder to Kamp and Levi: Montgomery Clift got drunk and slammed his car into that telephone pole in May, 1956. And the cool thing about Todd A-O in the 1950s wasn’t just the 70mm format — it was mainly the 30-frame-per-second rate of photography and projection (even though it was viewable in the big-city roadshow engagements of only two films — Oklahoma! and Around the World in 80 Days).
“The Film Snob’s Dictonary” is an essential, highly educational read for non- snobs, and snobs will have to buy a copy just to keep it on their bookshelves… something to leaf through and reflect upon as a kind of cautionary text.
Montgomery Clift
Grabs
Lounge area on main floor of Algonquin Hotel — Monday, 10.24.05, 10:30 pm.
Tuesday, 10.25, 10:25 pm.
2004 Village Voice cover…never saw it before this week
Marilyn Monroe photo shoot, sometime around ’59 or ’60. (I think.)
In Glenn Whipp’s interview piece with Jodie Foster, she relates a story about seeing March of the Penguins with her two kids at a Sunday noontime matinee and getting into an argument with a woman who went “beserk” because one of her kids was talking in the usual piercing way that little kids talk and disturbing the vibe. “One son’s older, so he was quiet all the time, but my little one says things like, ‘Is that the baby? Is he carrying the egg?'” Foster relates. “And I’m trying to keep him quiet, but he’s not screaming or anything. He’s just asking questions, and kids don’t know how to talk quietly really. And this woman in front of me is just beserk. She started with the shushing from the get-go. ‘Fine. You can shush forever.” And then she starts yelling at me. Finally, I just turn into the most perfect police officer where I was whispering, ‘You know, you’re really disturbing everybody, and I think it would be a good idea if you moved if you’re not happy.’ It almost came to blows. I’m pretty sure I did say something offensive at some point, something like, ‘Well, you’re awfully young to be that bitter.'” I understand, I’ve been there, I went through it for years, but except for Foster’s contention that her adversary “lost her mind,” I’m afraid I have no choice but to side with beserko-lady. If your kids are yapping and you can’t keep them quiet, you have to leave the theatre. You have to respect that others paid the ten bucks to see the movie and that your kid is messing with their experience and that’s that…no two ways… Sunday matinee or not.
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.
< ?php include ('/home/hollyw9/public_html/wired'); ?>
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.
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.
< ?php include ('/home/hollyw9/public_html/wired'); ?>
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?
Grabs
Billboard above Viper Room — Tuesday, 9.20, 10:50 pm.
Another depressing landscape.
Self-explanatory — Tuesday, 9.20, 10:45 pm.
Aboard Northwest Airlines #1411, Memphis to Los Angeles — Monday, 9.19, 5:50 pm.
Kings
“I’ve seen Steve Zallian’s All The King’s Men, and it felt to me like a very mature, richly adult political drama that carries considerable end-of-year pedigree.
“Major kudos, first and foremost, to Zallian for his subtle way of telling a story. All too often in telling convoluted, multilayered stories of this kind, filmmakers rely on excessive exposition to make sure that anyone can follow the plot without having to pay too much attention.
“Zallian goes the other route — details and plot twists are implied rather than explained, and this technique affords the film much more credibility.
Jude Law, Sean Penn in Steven Zallian’s All The King’s Men
“Performances are strong all around, though Tony Soprano.. er, James Gandolfini struggles a bit with his Southern accent.
“There are two leads, Sean Penn’s Willie Stark — a wildly passionate and utterly corrupted Southern governor — and Jude Law as a tortured and crestfallen reporter named Jack Burden.
“Penn seems to be a much stronger contender for your Best Actor Oscar balloon. He delivers exactly what Academy voters are thought to love, giving a bombastic, almost Pacino-esque performance. And yet I would be much more excited to see Law’s performance be rewarded come awards season.
“And Zallian’s camera work compliments his sophisticated script nicely.
“What was shown was a work in progress (visually grainy, using pieces of the musical scores from Fargo and The Shawshanbk Redemption, to be sure, but one that shows significant promise.” — John McGilicutty
Down by Whedon
“In response to your Wired item about Joss Whedon, my first advice to you is this: as you prepare to rip or praise him in whatever fashion you intend, remember to tread very, very lightly.
“The man’s fan base is as rabid as that for any geek property out there, and if you do decide to trash him, you should be prepared for hate mail on the level of whatever Star Wars or Lord of the Rings flaming you’ve received over the years.
“Now, that being said, the idea of ‘getting’ Whedon is not something you will be able to do from just watching Serenity. It’s an impossibility.
From Joss Whedon’s Serenity
“The film is a continuation of a TV show that only a small but very devoted group of people watched in its original incarnation and more discovered later on DVD. Whedon’s appeal cannot and will not be understood by those coming to the film cold which, I feel, will kill it financially. If it does manage to catch on beyond the fan base, then great. But I don’t think anybody, beyond his most ardent followers, is expecting much.
“As for critics and columnists (like yourself) who are coming to the film cold, I fear that the response will be mixed to negative, as they will be reviewing the film on its own merits and not as a part of the larger whole. There is nothing wrong with this — it is their job. The best thing I can say to them and you is please, go easy.
“Serenity is a gift to Whedon’s fans, to provide closure on a TV series that they watched and enjoyed and which was snatched from them far too soon. I feel that a theatrical film was absolutely the wrong way to go on this, and that the property would have been much better off in a miniseries or TV movie on the Sci-Fi channel, in hopes of finding a new TV life.
“But Universal is taking a chance on Whedon and I truly hope that it works out for them.
“As for ‘getting’ Whedon, there’s really not much to get beyond the fact that the man has produced some great, great television (Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spinoff Angel).
Serenity creator Joss Whedon
“His appeal can be gleaned from the fact that he takes high-concept approaches to well-worn genre shows (in Firefly’s case, the space opera and the western), fills them with sparkling wit and humor, and populates them with real, fully-dimensional characters that think and feel and hurt, where actions have real consequences and tragedy doesn’t always beget triumph.
“For years, Whedon managed to do the impossible in creating TV that didn’t take itself too seriously while, at the same time, taking itself absolutely seriously. He elevated genre television in the same way that David Chase elevated dramatic television with The Sopranos. This is what his fans reacted to, and why they continue to follow him into whatever avenue he chooses to pursue. I proudly count myself among them.
“Jeff, I don’t see you as the kind of person who will see Serenity, and rush out to pick up any of Whedon’s TV work on DVD, but this is really the only way to understand his appeal. The movie itself won’t do it. Just don’t judge the man on this film alone (or his spotty film record thus far). It’s not fair to him or to the fans that respect him.” — Mark of Boston, Mass.
East side of Broadway and 44th street, looking north — February 1963.
- All Hail Tom White, Taciturn Hero of “Killers of the Flower Moon”
Roughly two months ago a very early draft of Eric Roth‘s screenplay for Killers of the Flower Moon (dated 2.20.17,...
More » - Dead-End Insanity of “Nomadland”
Frances McDormand‘s Fern was strong but mule-stubborn and at the end of the day self-destructive, and this stunted psychology led...
More » - Mia Farrow’s Best Performances?
Can’t decide which performance is better, although I’ve always leaned toward Tina Vitale, her cynical New Jersey moll behind the...
More »
- Hedren’s 94th
Two days ago (1.19) a Facebook tribute congratulated Tippi Hedren for having reached her 94th year (blow out the candles!)...
More » - Criminal Protagonists
A friend suggested a list of the Ten Best American Crime Flicks of the ‘70s. By which he meant films...
More » - “‘Moby-Dick’ on Horseback”
I’ve never been able to give myself over to Sam Peckinpah’s Major Dundee, a 1965 Civil War–era western, and I’ve...
More »