John Turturro’s Romance & Cigarettes is somewhere between being admirably brave, extremely amusing and horribly embarassing for everyone concerned, including those in the audience. But then you’re always risking pain when you make a musical, and you can’t say that Turturro doesn’t have creative cojones. A story about infidelity, stifled dreams and floundering family values among working-class types in Queens and Brooklyn, Cigarettes is at least something “different.” And it’s extremely comforting that the actors don’t wail and croon on their own…they do it karaoke-style (i.e., on top of established recordings on the soundtrack). They also indulge in some half-assed dancing here and there. Romance & Cigarettes is mostly kind of awful but at other times it verges on the euphoric. There are grace notes aplenty whenever the great Chris Walken is on-screen, although his song-and-dance number isn’t as knock-down cool as his Fat Boy Slim MTV thing. (I have to say that the older he and I get, the creepier the mutual resemblance.) As clumsy, indie-styled, vaguely painful musicals go, this is way, way better than Dan Mirvish’s Open House…but I guess that’s not saying much. James Gandolfini sings entirely on his own for about two or three bars, and I found this truly spellbinding while it lasted. Susan Sarandon delivers a fairly spirited sing-along with Janis Joplin’s “Piece of My Heart,” and Kate Winslet punches it out pretty well here and there. But if comedy is hard, musicals are an absolute bitch…especially when you’re dealing with people who may love music but don’t have the talent to deliver tunes and dance numbers in a truly first-rate way…even with original soundtracks providing accompaniment. This is a partly sincere but largely satirical movie, and it’s obviously been influenced by the karaoke phenomenon (which is based on the sickening notion that we’re all singing stars waiting to happen, or at least unappreciated for our intensly soulful croonings) as well as efforts like Pennies From Heaven. But this is nothing if not a blue-collar musical, and what this movies mainly proves is that working people should stick to what they know.
Master Builder
Sydney Pollack’s Sketches of Frank Gehry , which I caught yesterday at a public screening at the historic Elgin theatre, is a stirring, hugely likable portrait of the most daring and innovative architect of our time.
As corny as this sounds, Sketches left me with a more vivid feeling of celebration and with more reasons to feel enthused and excited about life than anything I’ve seen so far at this festival.
Director Sydney Pollack, architect Frank Gehry at Saturday afternoon’s cocktail party for Sketches of Frank Gehry in downtown Toronto — 9.10, 6:25 pm.
I knew a few things about Gehry before seeing this film, but not a whole lot. Now I feel like I know a few things. The man is the Pablo Picasso of architects. He’s a risk-taker who lives big and tosses the creative dice all the time and really goes for it. And I now know about his significant creations (the most famous being Disney Hall in downtown Los Angeles and a seaside museum in Bilbao, Spain), how he creates, who he mostly is, where he’s been.
Sketches is more than just a meet-and-understand-Frank-Gehry movie — it’s a contact high.
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It’s a film that lets you into the head of a genius in a very relaxed and plain-spoken way, and it lets you share in the sense of being a person of Gehry’s magnitude — a guy who has created a kingdom out of a supreme confidence in his dreams, but at the same time someone honest enough to admit he doesn’t precisely know what he’s doing much of the time.
This is partly due to Gehry having been very open and unguarded with Pollack as the doc was being shot, and partly due to Pollack having sculpted this film in a way that feels more personal and congenial and relaxed than your typical portrait- of-a-noteworthy-person movie.
And yet Pollack doesn’t relent in passing along all the information we need to know about Gehry. It’s all done with total thoroughness and clarity of purpose.
Gehry’s Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, Spain.
I met and spoke with Gehry and Pollack at a nice cocktail party on Wellington Street late yesterday afternoon, courtesy of publicist Amanda Lundberg. What a pleasure to hang with these guys. I left the party feeling wise and steady and optimistic about everything.
Sketches of Frank Gehry will air on the PBS “American Masters” series in late ’06, but Pollack first wants it to play theatrically. This should happen. I can see this film being an essential “see” with people of a certain stripe, and yet a ten year-old kid could watch it and understand almost everything.
I can only repeat that the film is much more than just a sturdy documentary — it’s a profound turn-on. I’ve looked at Gehry’s buildings and designs — those weirdly bent and sloping pieces of steel and sheet metal and glass and what-have-you — but I never really “saw” them until yesterday.
There’s a wonderful edit right at the beginning of the film, which I won’t spoil by describing in too much detail. Suffice that it takes Gehry’s doodly drawings and brings them into full-metal aliveness in a single stroke.
There’s another delicious moment when Julian Schnabel is asked about Gehry’s press critics, and he refers to them as “flies on the neck of a lion…they’re the sort of people who complain that Robert Duvall’s character in Apocalypse Now is over the top.”
Terry Gilliam, Jodelle Ferland during shooting of Tideland
Just before the Gehry party I saw Terry Gilliam’s Tideland, which everyone I’d spoken to had warned me away from. (One guy told me it’s the worst film of the festival so far; another called it “unreleasable.”) This is why I wanted to see it, frankly. I like seeing films that everyone has trashed because I always seem to find something about them that I like or admire.
But not this time. Tideland feels Gilliam-esque (visually alluring and semi-pastoral at times with a Fisher King-like fetish for dust and grunge and curio clutter) but it was very tough going, for the most part. I’m talking about zero tension, funereal pacing, no engagement in the characters to the point of engendering hostility, a maddening sense of directorial indulgence, etc.
“It is [Gilliam’s] willingness to push his material to the extreme edge that makes him a true original,” says Toronto Film Festival director Piers Handling in the program notes. This signature has also resulted in two critically dumped-on movies in a row (this and The Brothers Grimm.)
Tideland is basically about the fantasy life of a little girl named Jeliza-Rose (Jodelle Ferland), a sire of junkie parents (Jeff Bridges, Jennifer Tilly) who both dead of overdoses, leaving the kid to imagine voices, play with tiny doll heads she wears on the tips of her fingers and explore her imaginings to her heart’s content.
She eventually becomes friends with a moron named Dickens (Brendan Fletcher) and his witch-like sister Dell (Janet McTeer), and now we have three wackos living in their dreams and acting weird for weird’s sake, or for Gillam’s sake…whatever.
During shooting of Tideland.
I really can’t do this, I told myself. I can’t sit through another Terry Gilliam stylistic free-for-all masturbation movie. Others had the same notion. Two guys in front left somewhere around the 45 minute mark. Then another one left, and then another. I’ve seen this domino effect before. People say to themselves, “If all these guys are leaving, this gives me an excuse to leave too.”
I turned to Chicago Tribune critic Mark Caro, who was sitting to my immediate left, but he was toughing it out. I said to myself, “If Caro goes, I go….and I won’t feel as guilty about walking out on a Terry Gilliam movie.” Another guy left. A woman left. Caro was looking around and chuckling at the exodus, but he wouldn’t budge. So I decided to be a man and just do it on my own.
I next went to a warm, family-friendly dinner party thrown by Sony Classics. It was attended by the Capote crew (director Bennett Miller, actors Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Clifton Collins, Jr., and Catherine Keener, screenwriter Dan Futterman), Breakfast on Pluto director Neil Jordan and star Cillian Murphy, Why We Fight director Eugene Jarecki, and The Devil and Daniel Johnston director Jeff Feuerzig, along with the usual pack of journo-critic freeloaders.
Feuerzig was nice about my having thrown water on his film a couple of days ago. He asked me to see the entire film some day, and I promised I would.
What I actually said in my piece was that I don’t care for Johnson’s music, and without that affinity I couldn’t muster any interest in his emotional and psycholo- gical troubles. (Whereas I could when it came to Brian Wilson’s story in I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times because I love Wilson’s music.)
Capote star Phillip Seymour Hoffman (l) and the film’s director Bennett Miller at Sony Classics party at Margaret’s Brasserie — Saturday, 9.10, 7:35 pm.
It felt briefly odd to hear Hoffman speak in his own voice, which is sort of deepish and a tiny bit guttural, rather than his mincing Truman Capote voice, which everyone loves. The crowd at the public screening at the Elgin was obviously eating it up. There was strong laughter here and there. The “Bergdorf’s” line got a big response.
After the Sony thing ended I went to the Brokeback Mountain party and said howdy to Heath Ledger, Terry Gilliam (I didn’t bring up Tideland), producer James Schamus, film journalist Paul Cullum, New York Times reporter Sharon Waxman, the Focus Features publicity team and I forget who else.
Smash-up
It’s a two-bit irony, but there’s no denying it: the professional failure that Orlando Bloom’s character goes through in the opening of Elizabethtown, which is massive and absolute, is not unlike the sense of almost total failure that seems to be enveloping the film and its director-writer Cameron Crowe right now, at the Toronto Film Festival.
Crowe is going to be trimming Elizabethtown down by several minutes, perhaps as much as 15 or 20, but there are so many things in this undisciplined movie that have seemed to so many people at this festival to be terribly wrong, that it seems damn near unfixable.
It could work for some people in the ticket-buying world, but this movie is for all practical purposes finished with the critics and journos who’ve been nothing but supportive of Crowe’s films in the past.
Elizabethtown director-writer Cameron Crowe.
A day and a half has passed since I saw Elizabethtown at Friday evening’s press screening, and I’m still shattered by the half-failure of it. So bummed and turned around, in fact, that I couldn’t summon the courage to attend the Elizabethtown press conference that happened about an hour ago. (It’s now about 12:20 pm.) I thought it would hurt too much to listen to what I was sure would be a display of forced gaeity.
Yeah, half-failure. This is a movie that stabs itself in the chest over and over during the first hour or so, but then it finds itself somewhere near the halfway point and becomes…well, not a movie exactly but a meditation about what it is in life that is joyful and soul-restoring, and which generally keeps us going.
Elizabethtown starts out on a note of futility and plans of bloody suicide, with Orlando Bloom ready to pack it in after a winged running shoe he’s designed has resulted in a loss of nearly a billion dollars.
Then he’s saved, in a way, by news of the death of his father. He forgets about “the plan” and flies to Kentucky to take care of the funeral arrangements. And on the way he meets a plane stewardess (Kirsten Dunst) who’s so oppressively perky and Jean Arthur-ish that…I’m getting ahead of myself and not completing my thought.
Which is this: if you forget about Elizabethtown not working as a real movie — minus most of the disciplines, character shadings and payoffs we’ve seen in Crowe’s previous films — if you forget all that stuff and just go with the meditative flow, it starts to work after the first hour or so.
Orlando Bloom
You can’t really believe in it — the movie is way too un-tethered — but you can sorta roll with it and feel the vibe. I did, at least.
I was not having a miserable time at the end, and some (but not all) of the middle is pretty good. The problem, for me, is in the first hour, and I don’t know where to start, or even if I want to.
It’s not just that the crash-and-burn opening (Bloom saying “I’m okay” over and over, his girlfriend leaving him because he’s failed, every last person in the office eyeballing him) is too Jerry Maguire-ish. It feels completely artificial every step of the way, and keeps hitting you with stuff you can’t help but disbelieve or gag on.
I can’t catalogue everything that falls apart in this section, but for openers Crowe doesn’t tell us why the running shoe has died, or why the company didn’t do any product testing, or why Alec Baldwin, the big boss, would sink $900 million-plus into launching a single line…I didn’t believe a second of it.
When something awful has happened to you, people who know you don’t usually look directly at you. Certainly not in a group situation. They usually avoid eye contact because they don’t want to deal with your pain, because they’re afraid it might be catching.
The suicide stabbing device that Bloom nearly uses on himself seems ridiculous. With all the suicide options out there, who in the world would think of stabbing themselves to death with a big knife tied to a workout contraption?
Kirsten Dunst
There has never been a flight from Seattle to Kentucky in the history of aviation with only one passenger on the plane.
There’s an argument with an Elizabethtown local about what color suit his deceased father should wear — they want brown, Bloom insists on blue. And then there’s a shot of the body in the coffin and Bloom’s father is wearing a suit of…dark gray!
When Orlando Bloom’s character finds out that his father has died and he flies off to the bluegrass state, there’s no real reason for his mom (Susan Sarandon) and sister to not come with him.
Sarandon, we are told, starts taking dance lessons right when she learns of her ex-husband’s death, and a mere four days later she’s found a teacher, had a lesson or two and learned enough to cautiously perform a tap-dance routine in front of the Kentucky family…pretty fast work!
I was in shock. I was in denial. I couldn’t accept that this movie was misfiring as badly as it was. But then, finally, the fog lifted. It’s not that Elizabethtown started being good but that it stopped making me groan, and the movie’s basic theme — what makes us stay in love with life? — started to find its feet.
Dunst, Bloom on Elizabethtown set
Someone has written that “those magical moments that survive in memory from the weakest of Crowe’s works are simply nowhere to be found.” No — the last third is actually pretty good, or at least there’s a way to roll and groove with it. That is, if you follow my instructions.
It starts sometime after the all-night cell phone conversation scene (Bloom and Dunst never recharge their phones, and why should they?), and then it starts to grow and build. I actually liked the final road-trip sequence, which a lot of people have told me they couldn’t stand.
Bloom isn’t great in the role, but he’s not bad. The relentlessly positive perkiness coming out of Dunst starts to wear you down after a while. Bruce McGill, Alec Baldwin and Susan Sarandon are…okay. But nobody kills.
About 70 minutes into the film, a certain high-profile movie guy whom everyone knows got up and left the theatre. (He came back later, he says.) As he left to go out through the right-side tunnel, he very briefly turned and looked at the audience as if to say, “I’m a little bit surprised there are so many you continuing to sit there and watch this thing.”
About ten minutes later two major critics sitting a row in front of me got up and left. I’ve walked out on plenty of films but almost never one directed by a name-brand guy like Crowe. Wait a minute…I just walked out on a Terry Gilliam film yesterday. And I admit to being so miserable watching Martin Scorsese’s Kundun that I shut my eyes and fell asleep. But I was still shocked when I saw those two guys get up and bolt.
I wish there was some way for me to believe this movie isn’t dead, dead…deader than dead. But I really think it is.
The next chapter in the Elizabethtown saga will be upon us when an F.X. Feeney-like savior comes along and says, “No, no…you guys missed it! This movie is brilliant. It’s just that Crowe decided to take a big leap over the usual narrative devices and you guys were too constipated or conservative-minded to get what he was doing!”
I am not that guy, but I say again: forget about Elizabethtown doing what you’d like it to do (i.e., delivering the goods the way Billy Wilder used to) and just wait for the here-are-the-things- that-make-life-worth-living portions, which mostly unfold in the second half.
Grabs
Poster on Yonge Street just south of Bloor.
Brokeback Mountain cast (Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Williams, Anne Hathaway) prior to Saturday afternoon’s press conference — 9.10, 2:38 pm.
Mrs. Henderson Presents director Stephen Frears, producer-star Bob Hoskins at beginning of press conference at Sutton Place hotel — Friday, 9.9, 12:30 pm.
Frank Gehry at Saturday’s post-Elgin-screening party for Sydney Pollack’s Sketches of Frank Gehry
Snapped at Sony Classics party — the sock-wearer was very obliging.
Capote screenwriter Dan Futterman, costar Cliffton Collins, Jr. at Sony Classics party — 9.10, 8:25 pm.
Breakfast on Pluto director Neil Jordan, star Cillian Murphy at Saturday evening’s Sony Classics party.
Sony Classics co-chief Tom Bernard, Capote director Bennett Miller
Elgin theatre, a bit prior to showing of Sketches of Frank Gehry — Saturday, 9.10, 11:55 am
Hurtin’
Friday was a very emotional and in some ways startling day at the Toronto Film Festival, in some ways pleasant and other ways not so.
The biggest heartbreaker and shocker was finally seeing Cameron Crowe’s Elizabethtown. I wish I had the time to get into it this morning but I don’t. I’ll try and tap something out later this afternoon.
I had a lot of reactions to this film that I need to sort through, and while some (half?) are positive or on the positive side…and it really breaks my heart to say this because I regard Cameron as a hugely talented guy and a first-rate hermano, and because I read the Elizabethtown script a year or so ago and was quite touched by it…but dammit, there are also more than a few negatives.
Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal in Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain. (I’m getting a little tired of running this image over and over — I wish I could find some other decent two-shot of these guys.)
I have to also report that the reaction of the critics and journos I spoke to after last night’s screening was, sorry to say, extremely negative. I’m talking walkouts, people washing their hands, shaking their heads, etc. It was shattering for me personally, and I can’t imagine how things must feel from Crowe’s side of the fence.
It was announced before last night’s screening that Crowe is doing a re-edit of the film, and that the final version will be signficantly different than the one everyone was about to see…making it clear that Crowe and Paramount are reeling from the reaction that resulted from the Venice Film Festival showings.
I have to leave for an Ang Lee-James Schamus interview in about 25 minutes, so let’s move on to a less anguished confession, which is that Friday’s penultimate high, far and away, was seeing Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain.
I’d been hearing from friends who saw it at Telluride that it’s an immensely moving film about love denied, but even with this advance preparation I was a bit surprised.
Brokeback Mountain is a tremendously sad film in the finest way imaginable. It’s not a downer but a profound and very touching tragedy, between which there is a very marked difference.
I will no longer feel comfortable calling this (as everyone else has for the last several months) a “gay cowboy” film because it’s good and profound enough creation that calling it that (a fair if blunt description) is like calling Lawrence of Arabia the story of a gay sadomasochistic British adventurer in white robes on a camel.
I’m saying that the carefully rendered heart of this film, along with the artistic conviction and craftsmanship that have combined to push the essence of it through, are much stronger than the nominal subject matter.
Brokeback Mountain is Ang Lee’s most emotionally moving film ever. It is certainly going to be on almost everyone’s ten-best list, and it may well be nominated for Best Picture by the Academy. It is that good, that strong.
I never thought I’d say this because I don’t tend to like (i.e., respond to with comfort or true openness of feeling) gay-guy love stories, but I felt this one…it got through and I let it in.
And apart from the guiding hand of Ang Lee, this happened to a large extent because of Heath Ledger’s tortured inhabiting of Ennis del Mar, the more repressed and tragic of the two lead characters.
Jake Gyllenhaal gives everything he has to the role of Jack Twist, and he nails it as well as anyone could, but Ennis suppresses his feelings more forcefully and fearfully (it’s not just his words that sound like they’re sitting somewhere deep in his stomach and afraid to come out), and his life is therefore much more screwed up than Jack’s as a result, and so he gets you all the more.
Ledger gives the performance of his life in this film. He will win awards, he will get great reviews…his career has been pretty much saved by this film.
And he will almost certainly be nominated for…I don’t know what category they’re going to put him in but they should push for Best Supporting Actor. Who knows if he’ll win or not, but he makes this character and the burden he carries into a searing and poignant thing.
Jammed
I saw three films start-to-finish on the opening day of the Toronto Film Festival, which was yesterday (i.e., Thursday the 8th): Imagine Me and You, Shopgirl, L’Enfer. And their respective grades are a B, a C-minus and an A-minus.
I also toughed my way through about 60% of the wildly overpraised The Devil and Daniel Johnston until I reached the point of sufficient saturation.
Early evening crowd prowling Cumberland Road, a big party street one block north of Bloor — Thursday, 9.8, 7:35 pm.
I also saw out of mild curiosity the last 20 or 25 minutes of The President’s Last Bang, a Korean-made drama about maneuvers surrounding the assassination of President Park Chung-hee.
I’m going to try and set things straight about Johnston a few graphs from now, but first…
Imagine, which Fox Searchlight picked up last week, is a commercially-angled, British-made lesbian love story made for straights and squares. It deals in subtle turns and sometimes bittersweet humor, and it avoids the farcical and steers clear of clichés (for the most part) until the final act.
Is it a great or exceptional film? No, but it’s not half bad for what it is. It’s probably the most accessible and sympathetically-constructed movie about a girl falling for a girl I’ve ever seen. I felt comfortable with the emotionality…I let it in.
Matthew Goode, Piper Parabo in Imagine Me and You
It didn’t make me fume or seethe in my seat, and for someone who had very little use for Four Weddings and a Funeral and wanted to club Love Actually over the head with a tire iron, that’s saying something.
It stars Piper Parabo (Coyote Ugly), Lena Headey (the female lead in Terry Gilliam’s The Brothers Grimm) and Matthew Goode, and the story is basically about Rachel (Perabo) discovering not long after marrying Heck (Goode), a financial trader of some sort, that she’s flipped for Luce (Heady), who runs a London flower shop.
Parts of it are good enough that I was reminded, vaguely, of another London-based story about a person involved in both a gay and hetero romance at the same time — John Schlesinger’s Sunday Bloody Sunday.
Ol Parker, the director-writer of Imagine Me and You, obviously had no interest in rising to the level of this 1971 film, but he exhibits an aptitude for similar delicacies and emotional finessings from time to time.
There’s too much happiness in the finale, and the producers should have dropped the idea of using the Turtles’ “Happy Together” (the `60s pop song that contains the line, “Imagine me and you..I do…I think about you every night…it’s only right…” etc.)
Claire Danes, Steve Martin in Shopgirl
The big-city critics are probably going to tear Imagine apart, but you can’t trust big-city critics when it comes to films like this….you have to open your pores and listen to your small intestines. I don’t know why I just wrote that.
Shopgirl is said to be based on Steve Martin’s dry, somewhat downbeat novella of the same name. It’s not, actually.
Someone at Disney said, “We can’t really do Steve’s book…we have to settle for taking the basic story line and then broadening it out and adding extra moods and colors and beefing up the Jason Schwartzman character so we can get the kids to come see it.”
And then the director, Anand Tucker, decided to add syrupy violin music and splashes of artsy-fartsy digital photography here and there, and the end result is simultaneously too much and not enough. It seems overly fussed with, as if portions of it were re-shot and re-edited. A lot of it feels awkwardly stitched together and tonally lumpy.
If everyone had said, “Let’s make a little movie that’s really based on Steve’s book for next to nothing and worry about pocketing the big paychecks on the next job,” it might have worked…maybe.
It’s basically the story of Mirabelle (Claire Danes), a would-be artist who’s slowly dying of boredom selling gloves at the Beverly Hills branch of Saks Fifth Avenue (i.e., the one in which Winona Ryder was busted for shoplifting). For what it’s worth, Danes gives the film’s best performance by far…but then she’s always good.
The movie spends 15 or 20 minutes setting up her relationship with a poor amplifier technician named Jeremy (Schwartzman) before Ray Porter (Martin) comes into the store and sweeps Mirabelle off her feet with some genteel moves that include lavishing her with nice gifts and paying off her college loan.
You know Danes isn’t going to last with Martin and will end up with Schwartzman, etc., but I wasn’t prepared for the depressing fact that Martin is looking older and puffier than I’d prefer. I don’t know if it’s cosmetic surgery or whatever, but he should try and go back to looking precisely the way he did when he made All of Me, or at least The Spanish Prisoner.
And it’s understandable that Martin’s Ray Porter doesn’t say any sharp zingy lines because he’s this slightly dull guy from Seattle, but it would have been cool regardless if he had been written as a Steve Martin-ish wise-ass.
Danis Tanovic’s No Man’s Land (’01) was a gripping, beautifully composed political film and anti-war statement that ranked alongside Paths of Glory.
Now it’s four years later and Tanovic has delivered L’Enfer (i.e., The Inferno), a dark French family melodrama about dysfunction and woundings being passed along from one generation to the next.
Danis Tanovic
It costars Emmanuelle Beart, Karin Viard, Marie Gillain, Carole Bouquet, Jacques Gamblin and Guillaume Canet.
L’Enfer is extremely well made, beautifully photographed and cut, well cast and perfectly acted. It didn’t rock my world like No Man’s Land did, but it definitely imparts an aura of profound penetration, although in a more intimate vein.
And it has a killer ending. Perhaps not quite as zinger-like as the last five minutes of Woody Allen’s Match Point, but close enough.
Everyone I spoke to after the screening said they liked it, respected it, etc. But I think deep down they were a tiny bit disappointed. I don’t quite understand why I’m having trouble coming up with more flattering things to say about a film I’ve given an A-minus to. I probably just need a few hours to let it rumble around inside.
The Devil and Daniel Johnston is a smartly-made doc about Johnston, a real-life guy famous for being a sensitive genius-level songwriter-performer who peaked in the mid `80s but couldn’t hack the rough and tumble (i.e., getting rejected by girls, etc.) and went into a psychological tailspin.
To me, the guy is/was Brian Wilson, but with one big difference: I’ve worshipped Wilson’s music for decades while Johnston’s music — dinky little woe-is-me, I-hurt-so-bad ditties sung with a whiny voice — doesn’t do a thing for me, or didn’t when I heard them during my anguished exposure to this film.
Daniel Johnston
I’m not saying Johnston’s work doesn’t deserve respect. People who know alternative music better than me think it’s great, or at least that it used to be.
I’m saying that if I’m going to sit through a doc about a guy who went down the rabbit hole adn lost his marbles, I need to be a bit invested by way of the music he made (or is still making). That’s how I got into Don Was’s Brian Wilson doc I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times, which I thoroughly loved.
For what it’s worth, director Jeff Feuerzig knows how to cut and pace and explore a tough subject in a way let’s you see right down to the core. I just didn’t care to spend more than an hour in Johnston’s company.
I’ve known a lot of brilliant nutters who might have been Mozart or Joan of Arc or Isadora Duncan if they hadn’t been mentally unstable or taken too much acid, etc. Sorry, but these stories have been done to death.
Today, 9.9
…is a day for at least five films, two press conferences and one party.
Mrs. Henderson Presents at 9 ayem, and then Tim Burton’s The Corpse Bride, Jesus is Magic, followed by press conferences for Shopgirl and Mrs. Henderson (if I can fit them in), and then screenings of Brokeback Mountain and Elizabethtown.
The party is in honor of Sarah Silverman and Jesus is Magic, starting around 9 or 10 pm.
Grabs
Cumberland Road cafe near Bellair
Ad on Bay Street, north of Bloor.
Cash It
Walk the Line (20th Century Fox, 11.18), a frank, straight-from the-shoulder biopic about the late Johnny Cash, is making a lot of moves right now. It played Telluride last week and will hit the Toronto Film Festival very soon, so I guess it’s time to jump in.
I was cool with it, felt good about it and admired 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 touching the bottom of the pool.
Walk the Line costars Joaquin Phoenix (as Johnny Cash) and Reese Witherspoon (as June Carter)
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, aching emotions right there on the sleeve.
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.
And yet the more I think back upon Walk the Line, the less certain I feel about its chances in the Best Picture competition.
Who cares, right? It is what it is, and let the Academy go twiddle their thumbs. 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.
But 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 in the mid-summer but didn’t touch last week in his review out of Telluride, 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.
Grabs 2
Inside Varsity cinemas, taken right after screening of L’Enfer around 7 pm.
Ditto
Vera Wang store on prince Arthur Ave. near Avenue Road — Thursday, 9.8, 8:10 pm.
Truman Show
I’ve seen Bennett Miller’s Capote (Sony Classics, 9.30) twice now, and I’m afraid I’ve got it bad. I love this film…so much that my reasons for feeling this way are a bit more personal than usual.
Why get into it now, a little more than four weeks before it opens? Because I’m in Toronto and for me, the festival has begun (advance screenings are happening left and right for local press), and because everyone will be giving Capote pats on the back once the festival starts on 9.9 so I might as well pat first.
Phillip Seymour Hoffman as the conflicted, terrier-like Truman Capote in Bennett Miller’s Capote (Sony Classics, 9.30)
I’m taken with Capote partly because it’s about a writer (Truman Capote) and the sometimes horrendously difficult process that goes into creating a first-rate piece of writing, and especially the various seductions and deceptions that all writers need to administer with skill and finesse to get a source to really cough up.
And it’s about how this gamesmanship sometimes leads to emotional conflict and self-doubt and yet, when it pays off, a sense of tremendous satisfaction and even tranquility. I’ve been down this road, and it’s not for the faint of heart.
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But I’m also convinced that Capote is exceptional on its own terms. It’s one of the two or three best films of the year so far — entertaining and also fascinating, quiet and low-key but never boring and frequently riveting, economical but fully stated, and wonderfully confident and relaxed in its own skin.
And it delivers, in Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s performance as Capote, one of the most affecting emotional rides I’ve taken in this or any other year…a ride that’s full of undercurrents and feelings that are almost always in conflict (and which reveal conflict within Capote-the-character), and is about hurting this way and also that way and how these different woundings combine in Truman Capote to form a kind of perfect emotional storm.
It’s finally about a writer initially playing the game but eventually the game turning around and playing him.
Hoffman is right at the top of my list right now — he’s the guy to beat in the Best Actor category. Anyone who’s seen Capote and says he’s not in this position is averse to calling a spade a spade.
I’m not talking about Hoffman doing a first-rate impression of a famously effeminate celebrity author of the ’60s and ’70s. I’m speaking of his ability to make us feel the presence of Capote’s extraordinary talent and sensitivity and arrogance…a self-amused cocky quality born of extraordinary smarts and a feisty temperament that could suddenly veer into aloofness or even cruelty and at other times devolve into childlike vulnerability.
There’s always a sense of at least two and sometimes three or four rivers running through this character at once, all of it vibrating and churning around in Hoffman’s liquidy eyes and, when things get especially difficult, his nearly trembling pinkish- white face, and in the way he walks and gestures and shrieks with laughter at parties, and in the way he occasionally just stands utterly still. It’s an astonishing piece of work.
A friend thinks Hoffman isn’t small enough to play Capote, who was about 5′ 2″. Other naysayers may be heard. There’s a tradition of straight actors portraying flamboyant queens (I’m thinking way back to Cliff Gorman’s performance in William Freidkin’s The Boys in the Band) that hasn’t dated all that well, but Hoffman is doing so much more in this film that the comparison isn’t worth mentioning.
I can’t stop re-running my favorite parts of Hoffman’s performance. There are so many lines and moments, but to describe them would only muck it up. Maybe later…
Truman Capote, Kansas Bureau of Investigation chief Alvin Dewey, and Dewey’s wife Marie in ’60 or ’61.
Capote is fundamentally about “In Cold Blood,” Capote’s groundbreaking non-fiction novel that came out in early ’66.
The book was about the murder of the four members of the Clutter family of Holcomb, Kansas, and their killers, Dick Hickock (Mark Pellegrino) and Perry Smith (Clifton Collins, Jr.). The film is about Capote’s researching and writing of the book, a process that lasted from November 1959 until the summer of ’65, and which pretty much tore Capote to shreds.
The core material has to do with a kind of love affair that happened between Capote and Smith during the death-row interviews conducted by Capote from the time of the murderers’ conviction in early 1960 until the hangings of Smith and Hickock in April ’65. Capote fell in love with Smith because they had shared similar traumatic upbringings (alcoholic mothers, family suicides) and because Smith had certain poetic-artistic aspirations.
“It’s like we grew up in the same house, except one day Perry went out the back door and I went out the front,” Capote tells his longtime friend and confidante Nelle Harper Lee (Catherine Keener), the author of “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
He really feels for Smith…you can see it, feel it…but Capote is scrutinizing enough to step back at every juncture and eyeball his relationship with Smith in literary terms. After persuading Smith to let him read his diaries, Capote tells Lee that this sad, doomed, hugely conflicted man is “a gold mine.”
The fascination is in watching Capote play Smith like a pro while getting more and more caught up with him emotionally. He gets the two killers an attorney following their conviction so he can get their execution delayed so he can get their full story. And then he lies to Smith time and again.
Mark Pellegrino (left, seated) as Dick Hickock and Clifton Collins, Jr., as Perry Smith in Capote.
The real Hickock and Smith, upon their arrival in Kansas in early January after being arrested in Las Vegas, Nevada.
And after he’s gotten most of their story he begins to acknowledge that he wants them executed so his book will have a finale, even though his feelings for Smith have always been, as far as it goes, earnest.
There’s a nice scene when Capote tells Kansas Bureau of Investigation chief Alvin Dewey (Chris Cooper) that he’s decided to call his book “In Cold Blood,” and Dewey says, “Is that a reference to the crime, or the fact that you’re still talking to the killers?”
When their long-delayed death sentences are finally at hand, Capote’s feelings come to a boil. His last meeting with them, moments before the end, is choice. Tears flooding his eyes, Capote tells them both (but particularly Perry), “I did everything I could…I truly did.” Which was true, in a manner of speaking.
I never figured Bennett Miller would direct Capote quite so well. He’s never directed a feature and has mainly confined himself to TV commercials, although he directed a very fine 1998 documentary called The Cruise, a black-and-white portrait of the great Timothy “Speed” Levitch.
To me, Capote feels as controlled and precise, as emotionally on-target and penetrating as any film by Louis Malle. You could run it with Damage and Atlantic City at the Museum of Modern Art, and it would feel like the exact same guy calling the shots.
I was especially taken with Miller’s decision to shoot Capote in widescreen Panavision (2.35 to 1). Stories of this sort — internal, intimate, dialogue-driven — are usually shot in 1.85 to 1 (or on video). Was Miller thinking about creating some kind of visual relationship to Conrad Hall’s widescreen photography in Richard Brooks’ In Cold Blood, even though that 1967 film was shot in black and white?
And a sincere tip of the hat to screenwriter Dan Futterman, who worked on the screenplay for a long time before getting it right. It’s based on Gerald Clarke’s “Capote,” which is probably the best Capote biography.
Futterman has known Miller since they were twelve, and they’ve both known Hoffman since ’84 (i.e., the year Capote died of alcoholism) when they met at a summer theatre program in Saratoga Springs,
Every performance in Capote feels rooted and lived-in…nobody seems to be “acting” in the slightest.
Clifton Collins (previously best known as the gay Mexican assassin in Traffic) is as good as Hoffman. He plays it subdued and far less animated, but he lets you see into Smith’s tormented soul, and I didn’t think once about Robert Blake’s strong performance as Smith in the 1967 film.
Keener’s Lee is restrained and exacting and yet she’s fully “there.” And Cooper’s Dewey delivers just the right mix of gruff Midwestern conservatism and emotional suppleness. (He’s a tiny bit warmer than John Forsythe’s Dewey was in Brooks’ film.) Dewey’s wife Marie, a friendly and sophisticated soul, is warmly and agreeably captured by Amy Ryan. And I love Bob Balaban’s small but succinct performance as former New Yorker editor William Shawn, who was in Capote’s literary corner the whole time.
The lesser lights are Bruce Greenwood, as Capote’s significant other Jack Dunphy, who hasn’t much to say or do, and Mark Pellegrino’s Hickock, who isn’t nearly as emotional or gregarious as Scott Wilson was in the Brooks film, although he seems like more of a killer than Wilson did.
Gravesite in Garden City, Kansas — a mid-sized city to the east of Holcomb.
Photo in June 1960 high-school yearbook.
Capote may not sell as many tickets as Crash did, but it will be astonishing if people of taste or discernment don’t see it and tell their friends, etc. I realize that the number of people who read books, much less those who remember “In Cold Blood” or who remember Capote from his talk-show appearances, is relatively small. But if the word-of-mouth is good…
The challenge to Sony Pictures Classics is to keep the inevitable talk going into Oscar season and keep flogging it with the Academy.
After I send this column off today I’m paying a visit to a bookstore and buying “In Cold Blood” again. I haven’t read it since I wrote a book report about it in my senior year of high school.
Mafia Rules
I have this idea for a piece I’d like to run on Friday. I’m going to need write-in replies sent no later than midday Thursday.
The idea is, if Hollywood were run like the mythological mafia and you, the reader, were the boss of all the families with absolute control, whom in the Hollywood filmmaking game would you decide to whack for the good of the industry?
Not because they’re not nice people or aren’t skilled or have nice smiles, but whom would you eliminate in order to strengthen the industry and discourage bad tendencies, etc.? Remember that being the boss is a lonely job because somebody has to make the tough calls.
“I ask you, Don Corleone, please…spare Michael Bay.”
If I was Don Corleone of Hollywood and Hollywood was a real mafia society, I would put a general preemptive contract on anyone planning to make a film like Love Actually.
I would also put a contract, no offense, out on Johnny Knoxville. Somebody needs to pay for The Dukes of Hazzard, and Seann William Scott gets a temporary pass because he’s trying to redeem himself by making Southland Tales for Richard Kelly.
I would also take out Michael Wilson and Barbara Broccoli, the 007 producers.
I don’t think I need to say this, but I don’t believe in whacking people in the real world. I don’t even like stepping on bugs.
If I were an actual (i.e., actual mythological) mafia don I would build a secret private jailhouse — a maximum security prison out in some remote corner of the world — and then I would kidnap the guys who need to be whacked and send them to this jail, and they’d stay there with three hots and a cot until I died or got whacked myself.
My inspiration for this piece is Anthony Quinn’s Col. Andrea Stavros character in The Guns of Navarone.
David Niven, Gregory peck, Anthony Quinn in poster art for J. Lee Thompson’s The Guns of Navarone.
Quinn, Gregory Peck and David Niven are discussing the fate of Anthony Quayle’s Lucky character, who was broken his leg during a climb, and they’ve come up with two possible scenarios — take him with them on their mission to blow up the guns, or leave him to be found by the Germans.
And Quinn says, “There is, of course, a third option. One bullet now. Better for him, better for the mission.” Quinn is not playing a monster, just a hard-nosed commando.
And I’m channeling this spirit because, as Marlon Brando’s Colonel Kurtz would undoubtedly agree, doing the hard necessary thing is not always an act of kindness.
Hooligans
“After reading your take on Lexi Alexander’s Green Street Hooligans, I felt I had to give you a UK perspective on the movie. I watched what has been re-titled Green Street for UK audiences at a London preview last week.
“To me, and to most of the preview audience I saw the movie with, football hooliganism is old news. It was a hot button issue in the 1980s (when Alan Clarke’s The Firm was made) but since then most of the biggest firms have been busted.
“Thankfully, hooliganism has been mostly stamped out by no-tolerance policing, video surveillance at all games and better intelligence. It still exists, but it has gone underground.
“I grew up in a mainly working class neighborhood in a city called Portsmouth, on the south coast of England. Much like the movie, Portsmouth had a poor football club (although they’ve gotten a lot better) and an infamous firm of football hooligans (the 657 crew). Hooliganism was born out of a culture of binge drinking and violence.
“The idea forward by the movie that these firms only ever targeted their counterparts in rival firms is at best a simplification and at worst a glamorization of what they did.
“Often hooligans would simply pick off hapless away supporters who got lost in a strange city. If Pompey lost a match, hooligans would often run riot through the city vandalizing property and beating up any rival fans they could find, or failing that, anyone who wasn’t white.
“For a good drama about football hooligans, which exposes the hooligan’s links to British neo-nazi groups, I recommend I.D.’ (1995) directed by Philip Davis. I realize that the `stand by your friends whatever’ code that Green Street espouses is appealing, but please don’t confuse this with the mindless thuggery of real football hooliganism.
“I must also take issue with the way you characterize ‘this bizarre world of Brit football fanaticism.’ Football hooligans are not true football fans; they are in it for the violence. If you want a picture of Brit football fanaticism as opposed to hooliganism then check out the original version of Fever Pitch(1997), directed by David Evans.
“As for the movie itself, while the action sequences do have a real energy to them, the flat dialogue scenes in-between fatally hamstring the film. This is best illustrated by the opening scene in Harvard which, as you admit, `isn’t a very convincing beginning,’ and by the clunky scenes in which Matt Buckner (Elijah Wood) is tutored in cockney-rhyming slang. These scenes had the London preview audience chuckling and shaking their heads.
“The other problem is Elijah Wood’s inability to be convincing in his fight scenes. Although his character starts out as useless, after he becomes a seasoned member of the Green Street Elite he is supposed to have toughened up and learned to give and take a punch. However Wood continues to flail around in an embarrassing fashion in all his fight scenes, which may explain the director’s decision to shoot most of his fight in slo-mo (to try and disguise this).
“I agree that Charlie Hunnam is the real star of Green Street. He certainly makes the film watchable. I was surprised to learn that he is British though as I had assumed from the movie that he was Australian. His is a charismatic performance, but his London accent frequently slips into a bizarre almost Aussie accent. I guess your have to have lived in London for a few years in order to pick up on this, but I was wincing in places.
“Alan Clarke’s The Firm is a great film, which I strongly urge you to see. Like Scum it acknowledges the attraction that violence holds for some young men while simultaneously exposing the rotten culture that spawned it.” — Clive Ashenden
“Alan Clarke’s The Firm, which you mentioned in your piece about Green Stret hooligans, is a superb portrait of hooligan life (and probably more relevant, as the `80s were the pinnacles of English football hooliganism), featuring Gary Oldman’s best performance, before he took a liking for expensive scenery.
The U.S. release one-sheet (l.) and the British release version (r.)
“I’m not sure about the Green Street Hooligans flick. During the `70’s and `80s English hooligans were the worst — real scum who killed and maimed across Europe. Since all English clubs were banned following the Heysel tragedy, English football has come a long way, with a more family atmosphere at the grounds and less trouble at matches.
“For those who don’t recall, the Heysel disaster of May 29, 1985, led to the deaths of 39 fans and a five-year blanket ban on English clubs in European football.
“Juventus fans were given tickets adjacent to the Liverpool contingent who began by throwing stones and bottles, then charged the very thin blue line of under-equipped, poorly trained Belgian police. A section of Liverpool followers then stampeded towards the rival fans.
“A retaining wall separating the Liverpool followers from Juventus supporters in sector ‘Z’ collapsed under the pressure and many were crushed or trampled when panicking Juventus fans tried to escape.
“Thirty-nine Italian and Belgian fans died and hundreds were injured.
“I’ve been abroad and in the company of English hooligans. There isn’t a family/loyalty/ love equation going on. They use the cover of football support and rivalry to justify fighting with anyone and everyone who crosses their path. I’ve seen cars packed with holidaying families assaulted by `fans’ for the crime of hooting their horn.
“It’s just a booze-fueled, pack-animal mentality. Nothing more, nothing less.
The lads doing what they know, love and do best in Lexi Alexander’s Green Street Hooligans (Odd Lot, 9.9)
“Do we need another hooligan movie? I think not. No matter how hard any director tries, these films ultimately serve to sate those who wish to glorify and glamourize the worst side of our national sport.” — Dylan Glover, UK.
“The Firm, like a lot of Alan Clarke’s work, was commissioned by the BBC. This is when the Beeb wasn’t afraid to premier new, once-off dramas by Mike Leigh, Ken Loach et al. on a weekly basis and around the time when the broadcaster fell afoul of the establishment with its astonishing Sunday night drama one-two punch of Alan Bleasdale’s The Monocled Mutineer and Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective.
“It’s been a long while since I saw the firm but Gary Oldman’s portrayal of the main protagonist, Bex, really made punters and critics sit up and take notice. Shot on video, there’s little overtly cinematic about The Firm but its status as a cautionary tale of the Thatcher era — moneyed-up working class males in a more feminist-minded era take to soccer hooliganism as proxy warfare — stands unchallenged.
“I recall that The Firm (never released theatrically) played well across ages and interests because it didn’t stint on the violence, its origins or its consequences. Leach/Loach repertory player, Lesley Manville, was also top notch as Bex’s wife. Oldman himself was profoundly influenced by Clarke when he made his directorial debut, The War Zone, and it’s just a shame he’s been unable to find a script of its ilk since them.” — Neil King.
Grabs
Bloor Street facing east, downtown Toronto — Wednesday, 9.1, 11:25 am.
Coming into Toronto on Continental Airlines — Tuesday, 8.30, 12:55 pm.
Adjacent to Metro North train platform in Bethel, Connecticut — Sunday, 8.28, 1:40 pm.
Lexington and 54th — Monday, 8.29, 6:50 pm.
Brill building lobby (reverse angle of shot that ran in last Friday’s column).
Has the ripple effect of the failure of The Island extended to the sales of “Island Puma” shoes that Ewan MacGregor and others wore in the film? I have no hard data to back this up, but I do know that Puma’s of this sort sell for $90 or $100 bucks, and yet these black-and-white Puma’s were being offered on sale last week on 14th Street…these plus another pair for $80.
Change of Season
The winding down of the ’05 summer is fortunate in two respects: it’s getting a tiny bit cooler in the city (there was a transcendent breeze travelling southward down Broadway Monday night around 9:30 pm), and it gives me something to write about during a flat week.
It felt to me like an above-average summer. At the end of each year I always come up with a list of 40 or 45 films that were good, very good or excellent, and here we had a summer providing about 21 first-raters, or just over five per month. (I’m going by the perimeters of May 1st through August 30th.) Not bad for a season that’s thought to be mainly about flotsam and popcorn and yeehaw.
Ralph Fiennes in Fernando Mierelles’ The Constant Gardener (Focus Features, 8.31)
I’ve written enough about the good ones in past columns, so I’m going to have more to say about the problems and irritants. But starting at the top…
GOOD AS IT GOT (in the following order): Hustle & Flow, The Constant Gardener, Cinderella Man, Last Days, Crash, The Beautiful Country, Grizzly Man, Wedding Crashers, Batman Begins, Mad Hot Ballroom, The Beat That My Heart Skipped, The Aristocrats, Broken Flowers, Kingdom of Heaven, The White Diamond, Layer Cake, Cronicas, My Summer of Love, This Divided State, Tell Them Who You Are, War of the Worlds.
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That was the good news, although I’m presuming very few even had the option of seeing The White Diamond, a Werner Herzog doc I wrote about in the June 8 column, or Mark Wexler’s Tell Them Who You Are, a feisty portrait of the director’s relationship with his overbearing dad, the award-winning cinematographer Haskell Wexler.
The lesser films were tedious, grueling or worse. I am one who feels especially dispirited by cheesily commercial films made by directors and writers whom I know are capable of delivering much smarter and craftier stuff, and…well, I guess I should leave Judd Apatow and The 40 Year-Old Virgin alone. (I’ve been warned by readers.)
But this isn’t an obsession thing of mine. It’s a sum-up piece and Virgin has made a big splash, but it’s really not fit to lick the boots of The Wedding Crashers and deserves to be called the SUMMER’S MOST OVER-PRAISED SO-SO COMEDY.
Russell Crowe, Renee Zellwegger in Ron Howard’s Cinderella Man
Just gonna zotz out the rest…
PUTRID, REPUGNANT, MALIGNANT…NOT TO MENTION ONE OF THE MOST BREATHTAKING CAPITULATIONS & SELL-OUTS IN HOLLYWOOD HISTORY BY A TALENTED DIRECTOR WHO KNEW BETTER: Doug Liman’s Mr. and Mrs. Smith, which way too many people gave a pass to with the rationale that it was harmless fluff.
MOST ATTENTION-GETTING WIPEOUT & ACROSS-THE-BOARD CAREER DAMAGER: The Island. The bitch-slapping of Michael Bay may not have been such a bad thing for the guy. The only way Bay is going to do better work (and I know he’s capable of it) is to be woken up from the narcotized pipe dream of being Michael Bay (muscle cars, bimbo girlfriends, parking in handicapped spaces, etc.), and it’s a safe bet that the staggering failure of The Island has made him reconsider his whole program. Producer Walter Parks got slapped around also when he said insufficient star wattage on the part of Island costar Scarlett Johansson was one of the reasons the film tanked; the take-no-guff Johansson fired right back and set him straight.
MOST LOATHSOME BIG-STUDIO RELEASES AFTER PREVIOUS TWO: The Dukes of Hazzard, Star Wars, Episode 3: Revenge of the Sith, Bewitched.
The Beat That My Heart Skipped
SEX SCENES SO BORING AND UNAPPETIZING THAT THOUSANDS OF COUPLES MIGHT HAVE BEEN PERSUADED TO PUT ASIDE SEXUAL ACTIVITY FOR A BRIEF PERIOD: Michael Winterbottom’s 9 Songs.
NOTEWORTHY ON-SCREEN IMPROV: After Kieran O’Brien playfully blindfolds Margo Stilley in 9 Songs, she says, “I can’t see!”
A MOVIE THAT PERSUADED ME TO THINK NEGATIVELY ABOUT A BIRD SPECIES THAT I’VE HAD NOTHING AGAINST MY ENTIRE LIFE: March of the Penguins. You can sing the praises of this doc all you want, but those Emperor penguins spend way too much time trudging across Antarctic wastelands and sitting on unhatched eggs during blizzards. The success of this film was mainly driven by women and old people. Tell me one regular guy you know who went to this thing on his own (or with his regular-guy friends) and came back going, “Amazing!” I don’t want to see any animals suffer, but it would have enlivened things if a few more penguins had been eaten by predators.
AS A LIVE-ACTION DIRECTOR, IT’S TIME TO FACE THE FACT THAT TIM BURTON MAY BE OVER: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
NOT ENOUGH: Monster-in-Law, The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till, Bad News Bears, Dark Water, Asylum, The Chumscrubber, Lila Says , Rize.
Christian Bale in Chris Nolan’s Batman Begins
FLATLINERS: The Longest Yard, Madagascar, Kings and Queen, Lords of Dogtown, Must Love Dogs , Fantastic Four, Stealth, The Brothers Grimm, Heights.
WANTED TO SEE ‘EM, MISSED THE SCREENINGS, COULDN’T SEE FORKING OVER TEN BUCKS, ETC.: Howl’s Moving Castle, High Tension, The Devil’s Rejects, November, Mysterious Skin, Murderball, The Edukators .
WOULDN’T SEE ‘EM AT THE POINT OF A KNIFE: The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants, The Honeymooners, Herbie: Fully Loaded .
NOT HALF BAD: Yes, Red Eye, Four Brothers, Reel Paradise, House of Wax, Dominion: Prequel to The Exorcist, The Great Raid, The Last Mogul , Me and You and Everyone We Know, George A. Romero’s Land of the Dead.
BIGGEST ACTOR BREAKTHROUGHS: Rachel McAdams (The Wedding Crashers, Red Eye), who could wind up doing it all. Terrence Howard (Hustle & Flow, Crash), who deserves a Best Actor nomination hands-down for his Memphis pimp. Vince Vaughn (Wedding Crashers…can’t wait for his tortured deejay movie for director David O. Russell). And Amy Adams (Junebug), although she needs to move beyond that sweet and trusting magnolia-blossom thing.
LEAST INTRIGUING NEW ACTOR (and a possible speed-bump for Clint Eastwood’s Flags of our Fathers): Jesse Bradford , the costar of Heights who, in that film, wore a fixed expression that said, “I’m not really getting what’s going on…I’m not sure what to say or do…maybe if I just stand here long enough looking like a stubble-faced bowling pin with legs, events will sort themselves out.”
Jesse Bradford at Sundance Film Festival, looking a lot less clueless and confused than he does in Heights…so maybe it’s not a terminal problem.
SUMMER’S BIGGEST STOCK-DROPPERS: Tom Cruise and Will Ferrell. Will Cruise ever get back the lustre he had in the wake of Jerry Maguire, or are emperors forever disempowered once the public has seen them without their aura of mystery and velvet robes? When Ferrell came out of the shadows of that bungalow to talk with Owen Wilson in that third-act scene in Wedding Crashers, you could almost hear the film’s energy collapse and an instant consensus form in the audience that he didn’t belong and was way overdoing it. Plus he was ickily unfunny in Bewitched . This sounds incredible for a guy who’s only been a marquee draw since Old School, but he may already be heading downhill.
COLD-SHOULDERED, UNDER-ATTENDED, INSUFFICIENTLY LOVED: Cinderella Man, Kingdom of Heaven, Tell Them Who You Are, My Date With Drew.
Toronto Jam
This year’s Toronto Film Festival (Sept. 8th through 17th) is a big problem in the best way imaginable: there are too many good films to see in only nine days. I gripe about this every time the schedule is announced, but this year is really a bitch.
I’ve come up with 69 films I’d like to see (or in some cases, see again). If I run around like an animal and the screening times mesh perfectly with my column-writing schedule (which never happens) and I don’t get shut out of any films (which happens a lot at this festival), I’ll be able to catch four per day or 36 films.
That means I’m going to have to forget about seeing 33 films that I’d definitely see under free-and-clear circumstances. This means I have to start crossing a lot of ’em off…a tough but necessary task.
Imagine a filmmaker having just finished a film into which he/she has invested every last drop of blood, sweat and tears, only to read some journalist talking about taking a few whiffs and calibrating the angle of the dangle and going, “Naah, I don’t think I’ll see that one.”
I’d like to hear anything from anyone out there because these lists are always changing, but at first glance here’s what’s doing. The films I’d like to see but have doubts about are italicized; keepers (i.e., films most likely to connect with paying audiences because they look commercial or will prove aesthetically exceptional) are boldfaced.
WORLD CINEMA (4): River Queen, director: Vincent Ward. (financing problems, Samantha Morton problems…a sturm und drang movie); Shooting Dogs, director: Michael Caton-Jones (always approach an MCJ film with caution); Le Temps qui reste, director: Francois Ozon (haven’t heard anything to quicken my pulse); Tsotsi, director: Gavin Hood (Athol Fugard source material…being schmoozed into seeing this by Donna Daniels and Emily Lowe.) Keeper total: 0.
Jason Statham in Guy Ritchie’s Revolver
DIALOGUES: TALKING WITH PICTURES (4): Midnight Movies: From the Margin to the Mainstream, director: Stuart Samuels (talked to Samuels in Cannes even though I hadn’t see it…love the subject but I may miss it again); My Dad Is 100 Years Old, director: Guy Maddin (maybe, but The Saddest Music in the World didn’t do it for me); Open City, director: Roberto Rossellini (never seen a decent print, I’d love to see it with a hip crowd, and I’ll probably blow it off); William Eggleston in the Real World director: Michael Almereyda (not feeling it). Keeper total: 0.
DISCOVERY (1): Stoned, director: Stephen Woolley (missed the market screenings in Cannes…I was told it wasn’t so hot…I’d like see it anyway because it’s about the death of Brian Jones). Keeper total: 0.
The White Masai
MASTERS (11): Breakfast on Pluto, director: Neil Jordan (seeing it here Friday); Brokeback Mountain, director: Ang Lee (will someone please arrange an impromptu screening of Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey’s Lonesome Cowboys during the festival?); Bubble, director: Steven Soderbergh (for the last few years Soderbergh has been like Mickey Mantle during one of his slumps…the fans in the stands going, “Hit one out of the park, Mick!” with their fingers crossed); Cache, director: Michael Haneke (missed it in Cannes where it almost won the Palme d’Or…have to see it); L’ Enfant, directors: Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Luc Dardenne (the Palme d’Or winner at last May’s Cannes Film Festival); Free Zone, director: Amos Gitai (saw it in Cannes, wouldn’t mind catching it again… fascinating road movie that takes you through Israel and Jordan…fine Natalie Portman performance…satisfying in a minor key); Iberia, director: Carlos Saura (waiting to hear something); No Direction Home: Bob Dylan, director: Martin Scorsese (how can I miss this?…then again, one wonders what fresh new aspect of Dylan-the-sourpuss can Scorsese be expected to uncover?); Tideland , director: Terry Gilliam (there’s no missing a Gilliam); The Best of Our Times, director: Hsiao-hsien Hou (maybe); and Takeshis, Takeshi Kitano‘s latest about a celebrity confronting a double. Keeper total: 7.
Cameron Diaz in an alleged still from Curtis Hanson’s In her Shoes
MIDNIGHT MADNESS (2): The Great Yokai War, director: Takashi Miike (maybe); Sarah Silverman: Jesus is Magic, director: Liam Lynch (liked her in The Aristocrats…she played the nagging-bitch girlfriend in School of Rock). Keeper total: 0.
REAL TO REEL (6): a/k/a Tommy Chong, director: Josh Gilbert (definite interest so far); A Conversation with Basquiat, director: Tamra Davis (ditto); The Devil and Daniel Johnston, director: Jeff Feuerzig (heard good things when it played Sundance); Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man, director: Lian Lunson (gotta catch this one); Twelve Disciples of Nelson Mandela, director: Thomas Allen Harris (definitely intrigued); and Why We Fight, director: Eugene Jarecki. Keeper total: 3.
Dame Judi Dench in Stephen Frears’ Mrs. Henderson Presents
SPECIAL PRESENTATIONS (18): Art Project: Ghosts of Woodrow, director: Graeme Patterson (waiting to hear something); Bee Season, director: Scott McGehee, David Siegel (Tom Luddy having chosen it to play Telluride Film Festival ought to mean something); Capote, director: Bennett Miller (seeing it in NYC this week); Dave Chappelle’s Block Party, director: Michel Gondry (Chappelle’s flake-out/disappearing act a while back…does that make this film more or less intriguing?); Everything Is Illuminated, director: Liev Schreiber (might see it here); The Notorious Bettie Page, director: Mary Harron (essential for the period trimmings and sexy-photo stuff alone…Harron did an excellent job with American Psycho); Oliver Twist, director: Roman Polanski (can’t blow off Polanski, although I suspect he probably shot his last meaningful wad with The Pianist); Romance & Cigarettes, director: John Turturro (can’t bypass a singing James Gandolfini); Shopgirl, director: Anand Tucker (I’m hearing not great but fairly decent); Sketches of Frank Gehry, director: Sydney Pollack (gotta show respect to Pollack and Gehry); Slow Burn, director: Wayne Beach (waiting); Thank You For Smoking, director: Jason Reitman (sounds a bit obvious, but maybe): Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride, directors: Mike Johnson, Tim Burton (Burton is better with puppets than people, but it looks like The Nightmare before Xmas again); Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, director: Michael Winterbottom (9 Songs didn’t do anything for Winterbottom’s rep, but this is supposed to be fairly good); Trust the Man, director: Bart Freundlich (always approach a Freundlich film with caution); Vers le Sud, director: Laurent Cantet (waiting to hear something); Wah-Wah, director: Richard E. Grant (ditto), The World’s Fastest Indian, director: Roger Donaldson (good buzz from Oz exhbitors about this one during their recent Australian Gold Coast convention, but Donaldson being from New Zealand suggests it should probably be taken with a grain). Keeper total: 10.
Charlize Theron in Niki Caro’s North Country
VIACOM GALAS (15): Dreamer: Inspired by a True Story, dierctor: John Gatins (any movie with the word “dreamer”…holding off for now); Edison, director: David J. Burke (waiting to hear something); Elizabethtown, director: Cameron Crowe (essential); L’ Enfer, director: Danis Tanovic (don’t know anything); A History of Violence, director: David Cronenberg (missed about 20 minutes worth in Cannes when I nodded off…want to see it again anyway); In Her Shoes, director: Curtis Hanson (exhib calls it an above-average chick flick and a little on the “commercial” side…Hanson-as-director means this has to be seen, but a serious film maven must always approach any film starring Cameron Diaz with a certain caution); The Matador, director: Richard Shepard (Sundance buzz was fairly good but nothing spectacular); Mrs. Harris, director: Phyllis Nagy (Bening and Kingsley…essential viewing for these two alone); Mrs. Henderson Presents, director: Stephen Frears (there’s no blowing off a Frears film); The Myth, director: Stanley Tong (skeptical); North Country, director: Niki Caro (return of Whale Rider director is an exciting prospect, but true-life story about a sexually harassed mine-worker sounds like a snooze, even with Charlize Theron in the role); Pride and Prejudice, director: Joe Wright (seeing it in NYC this week); Proof, director: John Madden (seen it, wrote about it); Revolver, director: Guy Ritchie (guarded optimism…post-Swept Away Ritchie requires extreme caution); The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, director: Tommy Lee Jones (fell for it in Cannes, looking to see it again); Walk the Line, director: James Mangold (saw it a few weeks ago, looking to go again just for the enjoyment); Water, director: Deepa Mehta (heard nothing); The White Masai, director: Hermine Huntgeburth (based on autobiographical book by Corinne Hofmann about a European white woman who falls head over heels for a Masai tribesman, blows off her boyfriend, uproots her life, etc.) Keeper total: 9.
Actual Bettie Page (i.e., receiving discipline) and not Gretchen Mol portraying the famous ’50s pin-up girl in Mary Harron’s The Notorious Bettie Page
VISIONS (6): 50 Ways of Saying Fabulous, director: Stewart Main (no hints); L’ Annulaire, director: Diane Bertrand (ditto); Brothers of the Head, directors: Keith Fulton, Louis Pepe (return of the Lost in La Mancha guys); Mary, director: Abel Ferrara (respect must be paid to Abel Ferrara, despite all the crap); The Piano-tuner of Earthquakes, directors: Timothy Quay, Stephen Quay (no hints); Wassup Rockers, director: Larry Clark (no clues). Keeper total: 2.
Add ’em up and at this early stage we’re looking at a grand keeper total of 31. Truth be told, I rarely seem to get to more than 25 or so films during a typical festival, although I’d love to crack 30 this time.
Grabs
Through windows of Dean & Deluca, SE corner of Broadway and Prince — Sunday, 8.21, 8:20 pm.
Only in New York City do you get this kind of stark aesthetic juxtaposition…one of the most beautiful dining-room decoration stores on the planet on the inside, and all kinds of heavy scaffolding and splattered paint and cheap-ass graffiti on the mailboxes outside.
Martin Scorsese, Matt Damon on set of the upcoming The Departed
James Mangold’s Walk the Line won’t be out until 11.18, but the 20th Century Fox marketing team is plugging it like a sonuvabitch. The Johnny Cash biopic has tribute pieces running in this week’s Time and Newsweek (particularly about Joaquin Pheonix and Reese Witherspoon’s performances) and now Fox has wild-posting all over Manhattan construction sites…which is fairly unusual for a film that won’t be opening for another three months.
Journos and industry types know Eamonn Bowles as the president of Magnolia Pictures, but he’s also the head of a kick-butt Iggy Pop-ish bar band called The Martinets. I saw them play last night at the Knitting Factory Tap Bar on Leonard Street (between B’way and Church), and was blown away — they’re really fast, tight and rock-sharp. The sound is raw and catchy and they all play like pros. Bowles sings like a mad banshee and plays electric guitar like a ringin’ a bell. It’s not just the usual bar-band “noise” but crafty, well-shaped material with intellectually pointed lyrics. I asked Bowles if Mark Cuban, the part-owner of Magnolia and a guy who reportedly gets around, has dropped by to catch the act. Bowles said nope.
All the milk that’s about to go bad and turn into cottage cheese, they send it to grocery stores in my Brooklyn neighborhood. I bought this last Sunday. The guarantee said it would be good until 8.25, and the next day all these gross little white globs poured out while I was trying to put milk in my coffee.
Playground at Spring and Mulberry — Sunday, 8.21, 5:45 pm.
Rice to Riches, located on Spring near Mulberry, is a stand-alone store that sells flavored rice puddings. Fantastic tasting, very filling, etc.
Facing south on La Guardia (I think…memory’s a bit hazy) — Sunday, 8.21, 7:15 pm.
Critical Mass
Is there anyone out there looking forward to a slew of 9.11 movies next year?
Okay, maybe “slew” isn’t quite accurate, but there are at least two solid 9/11 features in the pipeline and there’s a third one trying to finalize a script and get rolling, and they’re all funded by major studios. Plus there’s an ABC-TV miniseries and maybe one or two others looking to commemorate (i.e., cash in on) the 5th anniversary of that nightmare, and all but one is slated to open in mid to late ’06.
And if one of these is truly exceptional, people will naturally want to see it. But how much of an appetite is really there for the idea of tripping back to 9.11 time and time again with a bag of popcorn in your lap?
Oliver Stone, Christopher Hitchens, Robert Shaye and others before Alice Tully Hall discussion panel held roughly three weeks after 9/11/01.
Yesterday I asked some friends about the market for these movies and the general mood out there, and their responses are summarized in a story that follows (i.e., the one after the next one). But before you wade into this…
Hasn’t the extensive news and documentary coverage of this nearly four-year-old tragedy already captured the horror and human drama elements pretty thoroughly? What can a movie be expected to bring to the table except to dredge it up all over again with actors and scripted dialogue and CG recreations?
And why are all these 9/11 movies being conceived from the same patriotic and (can I finally say this?) in some ways simple-assed point of view?
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The three tenets of this view are (a) it was an absolutely horrible day, (b) some people responded to the horror with selflessness and amazing heroism, and (c) the Al Qaeda terrorists were motivated solely by the will of Satan, and the U.S. had nothing to do with provoking them in any way, shape or form.
This view is so politically dominant that Oliver Stone, a guy who knows better, not only bailed on trying to make a 9/11 movie that sounds far less rote and much more inquisitive, but agreed to direct what sounds like the biggest mainstream 9.11 sentiment film of them all.
A little over two years ago Stone hired screenwriter John Leone to write a movie about domestic terrorism called Jihad — a thriller that would have depicted the 9/11 horror in the first act but then developed a plot about an attempted nuclear-bombing of Manhattan by a renegade Al Qaeda terrorist.
If there is, as I suspect, limited interest in these films, does this put at least a temporary kibosh on other simmering 9/11 projects? Like, for example, that developing adaptation of 102 Minutes , the best-seller by Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn that focuses on the stories of people who were inside the twin towers that day?
Sony-based producer Mike DeLuca hired Shattered Glass director-writer Billy Ray to turn 102 Minutes into a screenplay last March or thereabouts. DeLuca didn’t comment about Ray’s script, but he wrote this morning and said…
“We don’t consider ourselves in a race, and we strongly feel that we are dealing with an as-yet-untold story about the events of that day in New York, a story that only needs to be told the right way…that to put time pressure on something so delicate and sacred would be a blasphemy, and Sony feels the same way.
“To reduce this subject matter to a race between Hollywood movies is wrong-minded and plain wrong to do. This isn’t some summer nonsense about asteroids coming to earth or the like. This all HAPPENED, and it needs to be treated with RESPECT.
“We’re going to make it when it’s right, and the other films have nothing to do with how and when we arrive at [knowing] when it’s right.”
Okay, sure…but DeLuca and Sony are in a game of providing movies that people will want to pay to see, and when you’re the third theatrical 9/11 movie and with people already writing in the press about matters of taste and how soon is too soon and how much is overkill…
I think there’s only one way DeLuca can win this one, if he winds up making this film, and that’s for the first two films to be generally regarded as pretty good but not great, and for DeLuca’s film to be spellbinding. No matter how you look at it, he’s up against it.
102 Minutes producer Michael Deluca
The two ready-to-go 9/11 features are (a) Oliver Stone and Paramount Pictures’ still-untitled project about the two Port Authority cops who were buried under the rubble of the collapsed World Trade Center towers, and (b) a just-announced feature called Flight 93 for Universal that Paul Greengrass (The Bourne Supremacy, Bloody Sunday) will direct and Working Title’s Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner will produce.
So far Michael Shamberg and Stacy Sher and screenwriter Andrea Berloff are the primary auteurs on the Paramount project. Stone came on as a director-for-hire and is widely presumed to have done so as a career-repair maneuver in the wake of the disastrous reception to Alexander.
Then again, you can bet this film will walk, talk and rumble like any other Oliver Stone film after all is said and done. How can he shoot this thing without delving into the surreal? “Real” was captured by a thousand video cameras that day — a filmmaker worth his salt has no choice but to go someplace else.
The buried-under-rubble project will begin filming in October in New York, and will probably hit screens sometime in late `06.
The Greengrass film is about the hijacked flight that crashed in rural Pennsylvania on 9/11, most likely as a result of passengers overpowering the Al Qaeda hijackers, who intended to slam the jet into a target in Washington, D.C. — either the White House or the Capitol building.
The $15 million film, which will run 90 minutes in “real time” (i.e., the actual time it took the flight to hit Pennsylvania terra firma after takeoff), will begin production on or about October 1st and will wrap before the end of the year. It could be released as early as next summer.
Matt Damon and director Paul Greengrass, apparently (but not necessarily) at the premiere of The Bourne Supremacy, which they both contributed to significantly.
There are three TV projects are in the works, according to Variety, including an ABC miniseries which is starring Harvey Keitel as FBI terrorism expert who was killed in the 9/11 attacks.
And you can bet your bottom dollar than all these projects will wind up saying, in effect, “sad, brave America…a morally decent country attacked by demons..such a godawful day but people were heroes,” etc.
To which anyone would say, yes, yes, it was all that and more, but these impressions have been conveyed over and over in this and that documentary and in tons of books and magazines already.
As one anonymous screenwriter told me on Tuesday, “The 9/11 tragedy has been so overexposed, so written about, so commented upon…but it was five years ago and the national mood has moved so far beyond that.”
In other words, isn’t it time for a bold filmmaker or two to take what happened and move beyond the factual and say something else?
No-Risk Approach
Oliver Stone, one of the few guys out there willing to call a spade a spade, wanted to be that brave filmmaker. Four years ago he had an idea for a drama that would have had 9/11 influences but would have taken things in a more hard-edged, Battle of Algiers-like direction than the rescue movie he’s about to start shooting. But it wasn’t in the cards.
A couple of years ago Stone arranged for a project called Jihad — a thriller about terrorism that used 9/11 merely as a first-act incident — to be written by John Leone (Tough Enough ). Leone is a screenwriter and playwright who’d worked for Stone on a script called Mexico as well one for producer Michael Fitzgerald and Sean Penn.
Leone’s work on Jihad was paid for by Intermedia, the Alexander producers. But then Alexander tanked and Stone’s confidence appeared to weaken. A former associate says, “After Alexander bombed last November, Oliver’s feelings about Jihad were basically, ‘I can’t do this, I’m not going to do this.'”
Stone didn’t return a call I made about this on Tuesday, but on top of his acknowledged suffering about the failure of Alexander he most likely concluded he didn’t have the power to push through a provocative 9/11 film in the wake of the biggest tank of his career, particularly in view of…here I am writing this again…Hollywood’s increasing reluctance to finance films with any kind of pointed political content.
Between other fascinating off-the-cuff thoughts he shared during a panel discussion in Manhattan in early October ’01 about Hollywood practices called “Making Movies That Matter: The Role of Film in the National Debate,” Stone outlined the rough idea for Jihad.
“I’d like to do a movie on terrorism,” Stone said to the packed house. “It would be like The Battle of Algiers in which you’d just go in and show how it works. And it would be a hunt — people looking for them [the terrorists] while they’re about to do this. And perhaps it’s an old formula, but if it were done realistically without the search for the hero, which is often required, if could be a fascinating procedural.
“If it’s well done and real and accurate, you would see the Arab side, you’d see the American side….people will respond and they will go. I don’t buy this thing that everybody just wants to see Zoolander.”
Leone’s script is about “an Al Qaeda guy who is supposed to participate in 9/11 but doesn’t…he misses his assignment and goes on the run. It’s more like a Kubrick comedy about terrorism. It shows exactly how easy it would be to perform a really serious terrorist act…the purpose is to wake people to something out there that’s really dangerous.”
Scene from Gille Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers
Another source familiar with Jihad says it’s about “an Al Qaeda terrorist living in San Diego [and] he’s smuggling a nuclear weapon into the U.S. and planning to blow up New York…it’s a very hard-hitting, very edgy, very political thriller.”
The odd thing is that Stone pretended to be ignorant about this project when I raised my hand and asked about it during a public interview he did with director Rod Lurie at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art last January (or so I recall — it may have been February).
I didn’t know about Leone’s script at the time, but I had heard Stone riff about the Algiers-like thing at the New York discussion and thought it sounded like a cool premise. And Stone said he didn’t remember anything about it and Lurie moved on to the next questioner.
Aristopundits
I asked a bunch of journalist, studio exec, producer and screenwriter pals what kind of interest they sense is out there for a run of 9/11 movies, and whether reliving a real-life nightmare in movie-ish terms is any kind of desirable. And they said…
“Frankly the best 9/11 film to date is The Barbarian Invasions. Why? Because it contained an actual shot from 9/11 — a low-angle, surprisingly close piece of video footage of one of the planes ramming right into one of the towers, quite different from the ones we’re most familiar with.
“The simple fact of the matter is no motion picture recreation can beat 9/11 itself. It’s like preferring ‘Beatlemania’ to the Beatles. Why pay for a recreation after you’ve seen the real thing?
“Of course there’s the option of making Costa-Gavras style drama about the connections between the Bush and Bin Ladin families, but I doubt anyone is interested in that.” — David Ehrenstein, Los Angeles film critic and essayist (L.A. Weekly, et. al.).
“I would say that five years seems to be the threshold for portraying a national tragedy on film. Look to The Deer Hunter, I suppose, or the Manson TV film. The tragedy has to become history in order for it to be exploited. I would say that audiences will allow filmmakers to exploit history, but not tragedy.” — A name-level director-screenwriter who asked for anonymity.
“People don’t want to be toyed with. They don’t want [this tragedy] to be exploited. They don’t want to see Leonardo DiCaprio hanging off the edge of the North Tower.” — Jim Dwyer, New York Times reporter and co-author of 102 Minutes.
“People will pay to see a movie they want to see, regardless of 9/11. Convince them in ads that it is a good movie and you will open. Fail to rise above the `gimmick’ in a way that can be made clear in marketing and people will buy tickets for Fantastic Four II instead. No one NEEDS a 9/11 movie. And any drama in theaters is fortunate to hit the $60 million mark, which has been unfairly held up as a [measure of] failure for Cinderella Man.” — David Poland, Movie City News.
“I think it’ll be like any of the showdowns where people try to produce nearly-identical pictures. Hype will win. The film that has the best hype — looks the best, that has the best pedigree, is sold most confidently by its respective studio — will win. It might coincide with quality and it might not. That’s not really the point.
Producers Michael Shamberg (l.) and Stacy Sher (r.), the duo behind the Oliver Stone buried-under-rubble 9/11 film, flanking Uma Thurman.
“I’m willing to bet that Greengrass and Stone will make very good pictures based on what we know already. Greengrass has proven that he has an eye for this type of material with Bloody Sunday. Shooting that sort of emotionally volatile drama on that airplane… how can that not play well to an audience? He wants to improv, he wants to use a handheld camera… this one sounds like a heck of a movie, no matter what the subject.
“And I think Americans are going to have a powerful emotional response to this in theaters if Greengrass pulls it off. When the Americans rise up and stop the terrorists, you’re going to see people applaud in theaters and yell and get involved.
“Stone’s not making a political picture if he sticks to the script he’s got right now. He’s making a film about ‘the unappreciated heroes,’ which is the exact right move for him to make to help re-establish himself. If he made a kooky conspiracy picture about 9/11, I think the audience would never forgive him. Not yet, anyway.
“It’s way too soon to try and get people angry. Right now, it’s about showing us the faces of the heroes of these tragedies. It’s about trying to make us feel better about the people who were involved.
“I think there’s the chance that audiences will reject the films outright… but I doubt it. If the hype is right, they’ll be there. And that’s what will win this race, and I’m betting on Universal [in this context]. I think they’re better at opening their `big’ pictures that Paramount is, although with things so up in the air at Paramount, it’s hard to tell exactly who will be in charge of selling this one right now.
“It all depends on what they’ve got. If they’ve got a genuinely great angle on the tragedy, something unique and human that they can sell as a visceral event, then I’d say keep going. If it’s just another 9/11 movie, then they need to consider the competition
carefully.” — Drew McWeeny, Aint It Cool News.
“Frankly, I don’t think this is an answerable question. The marketplace decides how much is too much – all else is personal opinion. William Petersen thinks three CSIs is too many but CBS feels otherwise…and so does the viewing public.
“Go back to 1988: Vice Versa bombed, Like Father, Like Son bombed, and then Big opened and became a monster hit. Obviously, #3 wasn’t harmed by the stench of the first two.
“And Deep Impact didn’t hurt Armageddon six weeks later. And the constant stream of lame-brain Ben Stiller comedies hasn’t reached burn-out yet. And so on and so on.
“Thus, each 9/11 film will be judged on its own merits and attended accordingly. If we could predict the future, we wouldn’t be here — we’d be at Hollywood Park. — Major Studio Exec who asked to be nameless.
“I think it is fucking brave to be making these 9/11 movies. And it’s all quality producers making them, which is maybe why they are the top producing guns. Who knows if these movies will do business, but that’s not really the (artistic) point. Remember when no one would make Vietnam movies? Then we got Go Tell the Spartans, Platoon, Deer Hunter and I’m sure others I’m forgetting about that were excellent and provocative.
“Good luck to all of them. I’m proud to know Tim, Eric, Michael and Stacey, and I wish them well. I may not go to the movies as I am still resistant to those images, but I’m sure time will change that.” — Jonathan Dana, producer.
“I’d be very concerned if I had the third of any movie type, be it 9/11 or `a girl and her horse’ or flight thrillers or whatever. I probably wouldn’t make the third movie about this subject, though they all sound cool in their own way.
“Personally, as someone who lost a friend in the WTC, I don’t especially want to spend two hours reliving something that is still more vivid than any movie I’ve ever seen. My guess is the general public is in no rush to see this stuff on screen either. I understand the race between studios in town, but in the big picture (aka ,middle America) I’m not sure the public is clamoring for this stuff at all.
“Also, any 9/11 movie that even has a whiff of liberal bias is going to be torn apart by watchdogs on the right well before it hits theaters. I see a lot of risk in this new subgenre, just on concept alone. Keep in mind [that] most folks go to the movies nowadays to get away from the heavy shit in life. Getting them to shell out $10 bucks to relive the heaviest shit in any of our lifetimes will be tough, in my opinion.” — Another Studio Exec who asked to be nameless.
“As far as I’m concerned, a little goes a long way. To the degree that the unfortunate events of 9/11 have already been exploited to death by the Bush administration, and demeaned beyond belief by print and TV coverage, I don’t look forward to another onslaught.” — Peter Biskind, author, “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls,” “Down and Dirty.”
“Hollywood and indie filmmakers were doing Vietnam movies even when they weren’t overtly or specifically about Vietnam — even when they thought they were avoiding Vietnam, they were somehow acknowledging its effects.
“So far, the most imaginative post-9/11 movies made at the Hollywood level are War Of The Worlds, The Terminal, David Mamet’s Spartan and Zack Snyder’s remake of Dawn of the Dead. None of which is officially ‘about’ 9/11 in any explicit, one-to-one way.
“Which isn’t to say there can’t be any good movies dealing directly and realistically with 9/11, just that sometimes an oblique approach frees a filmmaker’s imagination, freeing him/her to deal with the world in a rawer, more instinctive way, without fear of giving offense.” — Matt Zoller Seitz, critic, New York Press.
Grabs
Picturehouse chief Bob Berney schmoozing it up at a journalist breakfast held at Abbacatto on Tuesday, 8.16. Journalist Sheri Roman is to the left; New York Post critic Lou Lumenick is the guy in the rear with his back turned. (He quickly turned and went over to the serving table for more French toast when he saw me get my camera out.) Berney said that Picturehouse’s The Notorious Bettie Page, directed by Mary Harron and starring Gretchen Mol, will play Toronto
Dick Cavett (r.) being interviewed during appearance at Borders Books at Warner Center on Tuesday evening, 8.16, 6:35 pm, to sign copies of new Shout! Factory DVD “The Dick Cavett Show: Rock Icons.
Michelangelo Antonioni, Jack Nicholson during filming of The Passenger, the 1975 semi-classic that Sony Classics is bringing into theatres prior to a DVD release.
Union Square subway underground, R line downtown — Monday, 8.15, 11:20 pm.
Twin towers of the Time Warner center at Columbus Circle.
There’s always been something really penetrating about this shot, and I’m not just double-entendre-ing. I’m talking about the damp silvery beauty of the tones in this shot…about the indistinct ghostliness of the guy behind the shower curtain and how Janet Leigh seems so vulnerable and yet so exquisite and glistening and shagadelic.
Too Brainy
There’s a reason Jay Chanderasekhar’s Super Troopers (2001) caught on — the absolute go-for-broke, beyond-hope stupidity of the characters. A similar thing worked for the Farrelly’s Dumb and Dumber and, going way back, Bill Pullman’s “Earl Mott” character in Ruthless People
If you really get it, deep-down genetic stupidity can be hilarious. And I don’t mean stupid-but-cool and not cleverly stupid and not uneducated but street smart…I mean, forget-about-it brontosaurus dumb. But you have to go all the way, and that’s what Chanderasekhar didn’t do when he shot The Dukes of Hazzard.
The Dukes of Hazzard costars (l. to r.) Seann William Scott, Johnny Knoxville, Burt Reynolds.
The characters of Bo Duke (Seann William Scott) and his brother Luke (Johnny Knoxville) are garden-variety yeehaws. But they’ve also been given a certain country dignity, and that’s what’s unfunny about this deeply painful film — the effort to try and put these guys over as likable rascals.
They need to be dribbling-saliva stupid but of course, that would be insulting to rural Southern audiences and the fans of the TV series, etc.
I’ll bet anyone a dozen corndogs that the producers (Bruce Berman, Bill Gerber, et. al.) said to Chanderasekhar, “We loved Super Troopers, but a lot of people love the TV series, so don’t make these boys too retarded….right? They’re ballsy guys…not too smart but cool and brash and all that. You know…round `em out a bit.”
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So they made a shit movie that got a 25% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes. And lots of people are going to shell out to see it this weekend. Hooray for Gerber and Chanderasekhar and the rest of the crew.
But Seann William Scott has pushed things right to the limit. He’s played the same spirited moron in 10 or 11 films over the last six years or so, and sooner or later audiences get sick of it and when they finally do you’re over. Scott is lucky…make that very lucky…that Richard Kelly has cast him in a mostly sober part in the currently shooting Southland Tales.
The thing that Jessica Simpson had (describe it any way you like) is now, with the debut of The Dukes of Hazzard, worth a good deal less.
Every critic in the country has gone to town with this thing, but two guys from Arizona — Phil Villarreal of the Arizona Daily Star and Bill Muller of the Arizona Daily Republic — are my favorites.
I especially like Villarreal’s comment, to wit: “Hell, suck the exhaust fumes from a 1969 orange Dodge Charger. But whatever you do, no matter how big a fan you were of the show, do yourself a favor by skipping this movie.”
In The Pudding
Seeing the smartly engaging Proof (Miramax, 9.16) right after The Dukes of Hazzard felt like a spring rainfall washing away toxic chemicals.
Directed by John Madden (Shakespeare in Love), Proof is an earnestly delivered, well-written intellectual drama — you can feel the structural discipline of David Auburn’s play all through it — with a title and theme that doesn’t just apply to mathematics.
I never saw Proof on Broadway but I know of its reputation, and I can understand where all the praise came from.
The film has some weak aspects, okay, but it’s certainly not flawed enough to have justified Miramax’s decision to shelve it last fall, or roughly eight or nine months ago. The research scores weren’t spectacular, I’m told, due to Gwynneth Paltrow’s remote and chilly performance, but it’s obviously an impassioned quality-level thing that will send no one out into the street feeling burned.
Why didn’t Harvey just release it and give it a shot? It’s far from an embarrassment. Smart, well crafted, food for thought. Why taint it by shelving it?
Gwynneth Paltrow, Jake Gyllenhaal in second-act scene from John Madden’s Proof
Madden called this morning and says Proof was pushed aside last year so Miramax could devote more time to pushing Miramax’s two big Oscar contenders, The Aviator and Finding Neverland, and that once the end-of-the-year slot was gone he insisted on a fall ’05 debut rather than a winter or spring opening.
Proof is about the cloistered world of mathematics scholars and a recently passed-away professor named Robert (Anthony Hopkins), once a genius-level pathfinder who lost his grip on sanity when he entered middle age.
The story is about his daughter Catherine (Paltrow) coping with the possibility that she may inherit his insanity, and particularly how to deal with a discovery in a notebook that Robert may have had a late-inning surge of brilliance and come up with a mathematical proof that will re-order everything. Simultaneously urging her forward and pitching woo is a young math student named Hal (Jake Gyllenhaal).
How do you prove love to someone you say you love? By trusting them absolutely, Auburn says. To question them, to ask for rationality or practicality is not love…it’s the lack of faith that ruins a love affair. This may well be true, but there’s a scene between Paltrow and Gyllenhaal in which this view is, I feel, insufficiently felt and invested in.
Paltrow’s Catherine is such a sourpuss, such a “no” person, such a killjoy that you almost want to ally yourself with her tedious sister Claire (Hope Davis), but she’s such a mediocre and unimaginative prig that you can’t help but recoil.
The one you support and identify with the most, of course, is Hal, a hopeful, positive, fully-engaged fellow. This is Gyllenhaal’s most winning character ever. For once — finally! — he’s not playing a withdrawn neurotic wearing a pained, woe-is-me expression.
But we should identify with and want to support Paltrow more — she’s carrying this thing on her back, bearing the burden — and while I found her performance believably lived in and particular and behaviorally convincing for the most part (Paltrow played the role in a play performed in London), I found it hard to really get behind her character. She’s so caught up in her private space, so unwilling to divulge or open up.
Catherine is a bit puzzling. She’s been touched by genius herself, and yet she’s so enmeshed in her neg-head attitude that she can’t summon the pride and force of spirit to at least claim recognition for that which is hers. She decides in act three to withdraw and submit to lethargy and depression rather than stand up for herself because if she accepts her genius, she also accepts the inevitable mental instability that will come later in life.
That’s a tough situation. I suppose I can relate to a woman who might feel reluctant to claim her rightful glory and her place in history out of fear of the burdens of being a genius…but for God’s sake, life is very hard…you might as well accept the glories and take your bows for what you’re good at because you’re certainly not going to escape the difficult stuff.
And yet Catherine is unlike any female character I’ve seen recently in a film. I enjoyed being in her company despite her constant gloomheadedness and general downer shit. (She would get along perfectly with Paul Giamatti’s “Miles” from Sideways.)
Hopkins seems to be phoning in his part of the once-brilliant father. He’s played these complicated living-in-their-head guys so often that it feels like an exercise.
One question that has to be asked is what exactly does coming up with a radical new proof in the realm of mathematics actually mean for the world? What does it have to do with the price of rice? What are the possible practical (or impractical) applications down the road? I realize it’s vital for mathematicians to be probing the bounds of the quantifiable universe, but we all know what the fast-food crowd will be saying.
Paltrow, Anthony Hopkins in Proof
I started thinking about Albert Einstein after seeing Proof, and asking myself how exactly did Einstein’s theory of relativity affect the state of things? He expanded our knowledge of the exact properties of time and light and the ramifications of space travel, and he alerted FDR to the work being done by the Germans on building a nuclear bomb…but what does all this fascinating mumbo jumbo in Proof about breaking ground and pushing the mathematical envelope and re-configuring high-level math concepts really have to do with…well, anything?
In dramatic terms it isn’t all that relatable. People always admire pioneers and anyone exploring new turf, but what Hopkins and Paltrow and Gyllenhaal and their friends are all hopped about feels a little bit mysterious and maybe even a little so-whatty.
I’m not for a moment dismissing higher mathematics, but anyone who sees this film will be hard-pressed to come to a conclusion about what it all boils down to from even a semi-grounded perspective.
Of course, all this stuff I’ve been discussing was probably in the play. So why did Harvey even make this thing if he wanted to reach the people who eat dinner at McDonalds?
Re-Selling Cavett
For me and anyone else who loved watching “The Dick Cavett Show” on ABC from ’69 to ’74, the pleasures of the show were primarily about inquisitiveness, urbanity and cultivation. The idea was to entertain and get ratings, etc., but always with an aura of class.
You could always count on Cavett’s witty humor and his having these intoxicating, extra-brainy conversations with his fascinating guests, who tended to reside above the level of Don Rickles. And then there were the wild incidents (like Lester Maddox walking off the show when Cavett refused to apologize over some blithe remark) that would happen from time to time.
But these aspects of the show are perhaps a bit too challenging for today’s audiences. This, at least, is the decision of a distributor called Shout! Factory, which will be issuing a series of Cavett DVDs over the next five years.
I got wind of this after running into Cavett on Lexington Ave. last Wednesday and we got to talking about Shout’s first DVD package coming out later this month called The Dick Cavett Show: Rock Icons.
David Bowie speaking to Dick Cavett sometime during the his Ziggy Stardust phase, probably in ’73 or thereabouts.
It’s basically footage of ’70s rockers like Janis Joplin, David Bowie, George Harrison, Sly And The Family Stone, Stevie Wonder and others performing on his show, plus some conversation.
The following day (i.e., yesterday) I spoke to Robert Bader of the L.A.-based Shout! Factory. Bader said he’s been watching tapes of the Cavett show for the last 18 months and that he’s looking very much forward to turning on new generations of fans to Cavett’s sublime talent as a celebrity interviewer and late-night wit.
But he said something disturbing as well, which is that after looking at the tapes his conclusion is that Cavett’s literary-cultural shows don’t entertain as well as the others.
On top of which he has to “sell” these shows to the Shout! marketers, so basically they’re putting together packages that are more broadly marketable. Packages, in other words, that will attract people who shop at Target.
The “Rock Icons” collection comes out on August 16th, followed by a collection of Ray Charles shows (three shows, 14 performances of songs) on 9.13, a DVD devoted to guest appearances by John Lennon and Yoko Ono (due in November), and then a “Comedy Icons” package that’ll be out sometime in the first quarter of ’06.
Dick Cavett as he appeared on cover of Time‘s 6.5.72 cover story, published at the apex of his popularity and influence.
Then, if Bader pitches them well and other packages sell decently, we’ll see “Hollywood Legends” (Marlon Brando, et. al.) and “Great Filmmakers” disc sets. Neither of these has been confirmed with the marketing people but Bader is going to push for them.
Which is all well and good, but if you ask any fan about the “Dick Cavett Show,” they’ll all say it was the show’s intellectual and cultural and sometimes political discussions that were the prime signature.
It’s what separated Cavett from Johnny Carson, who, sharp and funny as he was, was always a man of conservative Nebraskan sensibilities and mainstream showbiz tastes. In today’s terms, Carson had the reds and Cavett had the blues. Cavett’s show was a slightly more uptown Charlie Rose with laughs and an audience…a slightly less downscale David Letterman.
Bader says some of the writers and cultural types I’m interested in will be woven into tapes featuring rock stars and guests like Mickey Mantle and John Wayne so all is not lost, but obviously the chances of seeing Cavett DVDs of those famous shows with Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, Truman Capote and other literary types are not high right now.
The Dick Cavett Show “Rock Icons” DVD set, being issued by Shout! on 8.16.
Bader is a smart guy and knows what he’s talking about. He’s also a realist in terms of the marketplace and what he can get the company to release.
“The reality of the present marketplace is not to be dismissed lightly in matters like releasing ‘The Dick Cavett Show’ on DVD,” he says. “We feel that we have an extremely valuable commodity and are carefully working out our releases in order to put out as many sets as possible. I think it would be safe to say that we don’t want to put out a set that sells 5,000 copies right now. We would not get too far into our planned series of releases if that were to happen.”
Bottom line: a beloved late-night showcase of comic wit, urbanity and sophistication in the early ’70s, a show that reflected to some extent the turbulence and cultural upheavals of that era, is being repackaged to modern DVD viewers as…I’m tempted to say as an upscale “Ed Sullivan Show.”
No would argue that mainstream America is a much more conservative and reactionary culture today than it was in the ’70s, and all of that lefty-intellectual New York conversational stuff from the ’70s probably won’t play that well in 2005 Peoria…if in fact it ever did.
We all know that a DVD needs to sell to “red” America if it wants to end up in the black, and the cultural dissolution that has occurred in this country over the last 30 years is not a myth. It may be a clich√É∆í√Ǭ© to say that we were a brighter, more inquisitive, more intellectually alert nation back then…but we were.
I’m glad these DVDs are coming out, but I have to say I’m more than a tiny bit disappointed.
The film industry has produced two Truman Capote movies over the last year or so. The first, Bennett Miller’s Capote (Sony Pictures Classics), will debut at the Toronto Film Festival and hit theatres in late September. Then comes Douglas McGrath’s Have You Heard? (Warner Independent), but not until the fall of ’06.
Obviously there are producers and distributors who are convinced that there’s some kind of decent-sized audience out there that knows and cares about Capote and who he once was.
It therefore seems odd that a celebrated TV talk show that was (a) known for its intellectual edge, (b) had Capote on a few times and (c) is issuing commemorative DVDs of its glory days isn’t, right now, thinking about including the appearances of Capote and other literary types who were grandly associated with this show in its heyday.
In fact, the more I think about it, the more depressing it seems.
“If I put out ten shows with authors as the main guests at the start of our release cycle, I can assure you we’d be in deep trouble,” Bader admits. “You and I might be dying to see Tennessee Williams chat it up with Dick but by and large the public that purchases these things finds Dick’s incoherent chat with Sly Stone infinitely more entertaining.”
Katherine Hepburn during show that Cavett devoted entirely to interviewing her and her alone.
Rainfall
Jacket art for DVD of William Wyler’s Ben-Hur six or seven years ago (l.) and jacket art for upcoming four-disc version (r.). The obvious difference is that arid ancient Judea, where most of the film takes place, has become a much greener place.
Wilson-Flynn
“While I agree that Owen’s a little — make that very — thin-skinned for telling his lawyers to suppress the Butterscotch Stallion T-shirt, I’m not so sure about your question regarding Errol Flynn. He hated not only the phrase ‘in like Flynn’ but every joke that mentioned him. In fact, he hated comedians in general (other than Jimmy Durante, who didn’t do Flynn jokes). I learned all this from his posthumous autobiography, which the publisher entitled…’In Like Flynn.’ Hey, he was dead.” — Kevin Kusinitz, New York, NY.
Wells to Kusinitz: Nope…incorrect. Flynn’s autobiography was called “My Wicked Wicked Ways.” And none of the Flynn biographies I’ve discovered online were called that.
John Lennon vs. Italians
“You wrote in your WIRED item about Don Scardino’s Lennon Broadway show that’s opening on 8.14 that ‘anyone whose name ends with a vowel would probably get John Lennon wrong anyway.’
“Dude, what the fuck is that all about? You’ve been administering a pretty fair amount of vitriol to one contingency or another for quite some time, but really, what are you actually trying to say with that? I’m sure there is some sort of half-cocked generalization to be made about folks whose last name is some sort of pointless pluralization as well, but why make the effort? Focus, dude.” — Brian McIntire.
Wells to Mcintire: I was basically saying that the odds are against a New York-area Italian-American like Don Scardino really and truly understanding who and what John Lennon — a working-class Brit from Liverpool — was deep down. It takes blood to know blood.
Spike Lee made the same point about ten years ago when he argued that Norman Jewison was the wrong guy to direct a biopic about Malcolm X…that a black director like himself felt and understood things about Malcolm X’s life that were beyond Jewison’s ability to see or properly dramatize.
I don’t think Scardino can get Lennon any more than Lennon, when he was alive, could have been expected to write an authentic song about the Italian doo-wop music culture that arose from New York City area in the 1950s.
And by the way, here’s a portion of a news story about the delay of the Lennon show: “When asked about speculation that David Leveaux (Fiddler on the Roof, Nine) was brought in to replace director Don Scardino, a production spokesperson said that Leveaux ‘is a friend of the production and has offered support to Don Scardino and the creative team.'”
The word is that the show is dreadful and will probably close before too long.
Grabs
The new Vanity Fair “50 Greatest Films of All Time” supplement in the Jennifer Aniston issue is rather whore-ish. It’s like an advertising supplement for Turner Classic Movies, which has bought all the advertising. The great film choices are fine (I’ll go with Old School as one of the 50…as some kind of perverse joke) but the writing is totally rote, like something pulled out of a Golden Retriever video catalogue.
I figure it’s okay to say I had lunch at Cafe Boulud on East 76th Street on Wednesday with screenwriter and industry spitballer William Goldman (All The President’s Men, Misery, Marathon Man). We just talked about stuff…nothing for attribution. Nobody…knows…anything.
The formidable Trevor Jett Wells, deep in thought and trying to bang out an assignment for a journalism pre-college course at NYU — Sunday, 7.31, 7:55 pm.
Very cool bar on First Avenue near 3rd or 4th Street.
Lobby of the Carlyle Hotel — Wednesday, 8.3, 2:45 pm.
If you dont know these faces….
Wildposts on 15th Street near 8th Avenue — Tuesday, 8.2, 5:50 pm.
Old snaggle-tooth…fearsome but kinda cute in a brute-beast sort of way.
Owen Wilson telling his attorneys to stop the sale of that
Butterscoth Stallion T-shirt a day or two ago (which I didn’t even hear about until yesterday) is, of course, character-revealing. Wilson sounds very Zen and witty-cerebral in interviews, but he’s obviously thin-skinned about this aspect of his ascension. It’s a very special, very hard-to-achieve thing to become a kind of legend of the boudoir…for people in Oklahoma and Shanghai and Nairobi to assume a certain familiarity with your exploits and talk about you in…okay, in a joshing way, but also as a swordsman deserving a certain respect. How many actors have managed this in Hollywood history besides Errol Flynn? Would Flynn have stopped the sale of “In Like Flynn” T-shirts if there had been a slogan T-shirt market in the 1940s or ’50s? I’m not saying Wilson is “wrong” to want to try and suppress this whole Butterscotch Stallion thing. Maybe I’m under-acknowledging the clownish echoes. I’m saying this kind of notoriety (and really is a kind of flattery, I feel, at the end of the day…I’m really not going into an aloof put-on mode) is rare.
Hot Date
The youngish producers of a little movie called My Date With Drew (DEG, 8.5) — Jon Gunn, Brian Herzlinger, Brett Winn and Kerry David — have gone through an exhilarating ride as well as a cold and lonely one for the last 20 months or so, and it’s all been paradoxical.
All the buyers liked or loved Drew but all but one said no to a theatrical release because they felt it looks and feels too much like reality TV. And yet there’s no question this indie thing plays with 30-and-under audiences, and I mean in a big way.
My Date With Drew producer Jon Gunn, producer-star Brian Herzlinger.
I’ve seen Drew three times with a crowd, and I especially felt the excitement when I saw it a year and a half ago at the Vail Film Festival. Each time it’s made people smile, laugh, tear up, cheer. It’s one of the few films out this year that delivers a genuine emotional high, and when a film works as well as this one does it doesn’t matter what it resembles.
What matters is the heart and soul of it. For most people, the emotional-spiritual stuff is what sells tickets…if they hear the right things from their friends, that is.
There’s no reaching the gorillas who automatically see the latest piece-of-shit studio movie every weekend…Dukes of Hazzard, Stealth, The Island, etc.
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But there’s a whole ‘nother demographic out there…people with the ability to step outside the lab-rat syndrome in selecting films, people with a semblance of focus and inquisitiveness and a touch of emotionality…these are the ones who will presumably get Drew and turn it into something.
This surprisingly disarming 30-and-under date movie finally opens in theatres (in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Dallas) on Friday, and then will fan out from there.
Here are the basic facts, and when I say “facts” I don’t mean impressions and/or opinions that I feel should be regarded as factual because I have this subjective fervor, blah, blah.
Drew is about this amiable, thick-bearded, beagle-eyed guy named Brian Herzlinger who, back in ’03, tried like hell to somehow land a date with Drew Barrymore…with the steady help of Gunn, Winn and David.
Brian’s been a Drew worshipper since he was 6 years old or something, but this is vaguely depressing to some of us so let’s not dwell.
They’ve got only $1100 to invest (which Herzlinger has won on a game show) and 30 days to get the date, since the camera they’re shooting with has been “bought,” in a manner of speaking, at a Circuit City store in Los Angeles that was offering a 30-day, no-questions asked return policy.
So Drew is a ticking-clock thing as well as a docu-comedy, but it gradually grows into something more….although it’s initially hard to see how this will happen, given an implicitly trite (although extremely well edited) blast-off section that sets everything up.
The film shows the crew using their limited Hollywood connections to get to anyone with the slightest relationship to Barrymore, including a cousin, a skin treatment specialist, Corey Feldman (who “went out” with her when she was 10), Charlie’s Angels screenwriter John August and actor Eric Roberts.
At the same time Herzlinger and David repeatedly call Barrymore’s Flower Films to try to persuade her “people” (especially company team-leader and closest Drew confidante Nancy Juvonen) to watch a 30-second trailer about the project, which of course they refuse to do.
This is standard Hollywood blow-off behavior for people who work for big-name celebs — saying no is always easier and less threatening than saying maybe, and keeping would-be invaders out of the inner sanctum and thereby maintaining a sense of cocooned reality is, of course, always the main priority.
All kinds of stuff happens, but the effort finally pays off when the team creates a website and the numbers get bigger and bigger and the smug-heads at Flower Films eventually wake up and pay attention.
To me, at first, Herzlinger seemed like a putz. What semi-intelligent male would come to a conclusion that spending two or three hours (or whatever amount of time it would eat up) with a rich, over-pampered, Hollywood ego princess like Drew Barrymore is worth sinking his heart and soul into? Not to mention all his financial resources?
But guess what? It doesn’t matter. This is not a film about Drew Barrymore. This is a film about gumption, positivism, tenacity, and working with your friends to somehow make your dream come true. It manages to pay off in ways that are largely unexpected and curiously shrewd. It’s a little-engine-that-could movie that sends you out shaking your head with amazement and wearing a big dumb grin.
Without getting too specific, it can be revealed that Barrymore does make an appearance in the film, and it struck me the last time I saw it that My Date with Drew is easily the most emotionally engaging thing she’s appeared in for quite a while.
What was Barrymore’s last half-decent movie? Confessions of a Dangerous Mind? Riding in Cars With Boys? Neither of these films makes her seem as lovable and well-rounded as she is in My Date with Drew. In fact, this $1200 video pic is almost enough to erase memories of the two Charlie’s Angels films. For Barrymore, Drew is a major karma-balancer alongside these lasting abominations.
Naturally, of course…Barrymore hasn’t done a single thing to help promote the Gunn-Herzlinger-Winn-David film.
Before the launching of the Iraq War a certain Fox Searchlight exec declared that Drew is too TV-ish and lacking in real-movie substance to warrant a theatrical run. Maybe she’s right — maybe Drew will fizzle like all the naysayers have predicted all along — but even if it does she and others like her will have still missed the point.
This movie has it where it counts. It delivers an emotional payoff that truly sinks in. See it this weekend and tell me I’m wrong.
Herzlinger, Gunn, Winn and David not only made a nifty little film, but they’ve parlayed its notoriety into the beginnings of industry careers, so good for them and a pat on the back for having the pluck and moxie that anyone needs to make it in this town.
Witness
“While on a camping trip last week in Kanaskis Country in Alberta, Canada, my family and I were about to go on a hike around Upper Lake (about an hour away from Calgary) when a guy with a walkie-talkie came running up and politely asked us to move as we were in the shot of a movie they were filming. It turned out that in the middle of the Canadian Rockies we had stumbled onto the outdoor set of a new Robin Williams comedy called RV.
“Williams plays an overworked man who abruptly loads his family into an RV en route to Colorado, hoping they won’t discover he is actually going there to attend a business meeting. It’s being directed by Barry Sonnenfeld. The costars include Jeff Daniels and Curb Your Enthusiasm star Cheryl Hines (i.e., Larry David’s beleaguered wife).
“We asked if we could watch some of the filming and the walkie-talkie said sure. So we took some pictures and now you’re running one that gives away one of the big sight gags!
“We got to see Robin chase his RV down a hill and then watch as it sinks into the lake. W e also got to see him film a dialogue scene right after he gets out of the water. His wife asks him why he needs a $4,000 bike, and he says its because his hips are out of alignment. She then asks if she is happy now because his kids know their dad is a freak.
“They were using 2 RVs. The one parked at the top of the hill and a separate one already sunk in the lake with the back half of it still sticking out of the water rigged with a cable holding it in place. When they filmed the scene the cable was released and the RV started to sink completely under water as Robin chases it. We later saw this one after it was pulled out of the water and it was just a shell with nothing inside.
“Robin looked to be in good shape and was clean shaven. He wore a green shirt and kakhi pants. He and Cheryl both had doubles on the set dressed like them but the doubles just sat around and never got involved. Robin gamely ran into the water numerous times and it was very cold. We got to see Sonnenfeld direct. He was wearing a white cowboy hat and smoking a cigar.
“We took our hike after the crew shut down for the day. Near the top of a mountian there was an open area which my daughter scanned with binoculers, and she saw a grizzly bear was rambling along the top of this ridge, probably looking for berries to eat. It was awesome…. the real reason we went camping.
“It was kind of amusing to think about the cast and crew being driven back to the comfort of their hotels while we headed back to our campsite in the woods.” — Charles Buckner
Larson’s Song
“I don’t see why everyone is blaming director Christopher Columbus in advance for the possible failure of Rent (Columbia, 11.11). I mean, it’s Rent! Sugar bleeds from this thing.
“If you should blame anyone, blame Jonathan Larson, the author and composer. It’s really horrible the way he died and all, but there’s kind of a reason it took him so long to bust through.
“He workshopped it too much and he really didn’t know too many people in the biz so funds and staging were a constant problem.
The cast of Christopher Columbus’s Rent
“Another factor is that the lyrics to most of the songs sound like he wrote them in his diary, like a teenage girl would write during a slumber party…fluff tunes that would make everyone happy and given them something to perform and be forgotten later, but remembered fondly in their later years.
“If Larson had lived, he could have seen the off-Broadway premiere of Rent and had that for comfort. I remember when that play came out — you could not turn on the TV without hearing how he died and the success of Rent.
“There are only two types of people who like Rent: (a) hipster types who listen to bland pop music, and (b) depressed individuals who need a severe pick me up.” — Alfred Ramirez, Fort Worth, Texas.
Herzog
“I’m looking forward to Grizzly Man (Lions Gate, 8/12). Shit, Herzog’s been blowing my mind for almost 30 years, and there are powerful forces at work in any universe in which someone can make a film like “Aguirre” at the age of 29.
“At the same time I’m not buying his Herzogian disingenuousness about not including the audio tape of the bear attack because he’s “not making a snuff film.” First, that negates the definition of “snuff film.” Second, while I haven’t seen the film, I can clearly picture the scene you’ve described: of Herzog listening to the tape on camera, and then telling the owner to burn it.
Grizzly Man director Werner Herzog
“And the way I’m picturing it, at least, this is likely to be every bit as disturbing, albeit in a different and more director-calculated way, than the tape itself. And perhaps more so? I mean, start with ‘less is more’ and go on from there. Of all the possible uses Herzog might have made of this tape in his film, isn’t this the one that seems the most Herzogian? (I promise I will never write, or say, “Herzogian” after this email.)
“To me, the most haunting and disturbing image in Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God was that of the young Spanish noblewoman, dressed in her absurd 16th century finery, walking trance-like into the jungle after she discovers her husband has been assassinated, while a battle rages around her.
“She’s committing suicide — either by wild animal, starvation, or who-knows-what at the hands of the natives — but clearly, SHE DOESN’T CARE, and Herzog simply shows the jungle closing around her. I have pondered the realities of her fate so many, many times since I first saw that film.” — Josh Mooney
Gripe
“What’s with all of the critique of women in the WIRED posts the last couple of times?” — James Kiehl
Wells to Kiehl: Whatsername in the Toronto paper wrote the thing about Jessica Simpson — I just commented on it. And MSNBC’s Eric Lundergaard wrote his piece about sexy women and I just riffed on it…what?
Kiehl to Wells: It doesn’t really seem to be your forte. That Lundergaard article was kinda crappy, but the least you could have done was counter it with five sexy women of your own to prove the point. Just criticizing a critic seems silly, especially when you are a critic yourself.
Wells to Kiehl: I did post a favorite…Anouk Aimee in the ’60s and ’70s!
Kiehl to Wells: Anyhow, don’t you remember when Britney acted like Jessica does now? We loved her.
Wells to Kiehl: I didn’t! She’s a lame-o!
Kiehl to Wells: This is not some seismic shift to the dumb blonde worship. We’ve been there for years. Marilyn Monroe, anyone?
Wells to Kiehl: Monroe played “dumb blonde,” but by the mid ’50s it was evident in her performances and off-screen behavior that she was hurting big-time on a personal level, and that gave her soul. Plus she attended Lee Strasberg’s New York class plus she married Arthur Miller, etc. Monroe was a full meal and a complicated wreck, aching and striving and having breakdowns and all that. Jessica and Britney are little pieces of drug-store candy compared to her.
Grabs
Never Got `Em
The Dukes of Hazzard (Warner Bros., 8.5), a ’70s retro redneck fast-car thrillbillie movie that looks like a lotta fun…the kind of fun that comes from sticking needles in your eyes…will be upon us three weeks from today.
I think it’s entirely fair to assume the worst with films of this type. I mean, look at the trailer already. Get out the chewing tobacco and clothes pins.
Johnny Knoxville, Jessica Simpson, Sean William Scott in The Dukes of Hazzard.
Does anyone see any indications that this might be Starsky and Hutch, a ’70s TV series film that was smartly written and better-than-tolerable for the Ben Stiller- Owen Wilson repartee? Dukes looks common, crude…or am I leaning too much on impressions?
The director is Jay Chandrasekhar (Super Troopers, Club Dread); the costars are Johnny Knoxville, Sean William Scott, Jessica Simpson, Burt Reynolds, Joe Don Baker and Willie Nelson.
I’ll be there because of Simpson’s skimpy outfits but gimme a break with the General Lee flying through the air and all the other crap. And I’m not a reflexive hater of hot-car movies. I loved Gone in 60 Seconds (guiltily) and I bought into The Fast and the Furious.
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I’m encouraged by the tracking reports that a high percentage of urban respondents are marking this one down as a must-to-avoid. Revolt! Go blues!
Reynolds needs the money, I suppose, but it’s a tiny bit ironic he’s in this thing, which is a kind of salute to the redneck films of the mid ’70s to early `80s. Ironic because Reynolds killed his career by making too many of these films with Hal Needham directing.
I don’t remember Joseph Sargent’s White Lightning (’73) as being too bad, but the rest — Stroker Ace, Gator, the three Smokey and the Bandit‘s — were on the painful side.
Redneck movies were born in the early `70s (’72 and ’73, to be exact). They got rolling in the mid `70s, peaked in the late `70s and early `80s, and were pretty much over by ’84.
That was the year when Reynolds burned his once-loyal fans for the last time (i.e., those who were still with him after two previous Needham pics) with a farewell performance as J.J. McLure in The Cannonball Run II. Nobody was better than Reynolds at being smug.
There were two kinds of ’70s redneck films — the high-speed, action-packed, stupid-ass variety about sexy-macho moonshine smugglers always being chased by the fuzz and always with a Daisy Mae girlfriend or two, along with the creepy-pervy ones about city folk running into toothless inbreds in overalls with all kinds of foul things happening, including outdoor pig-squealing anal sex.
The fun redneck movie was pretty much shoved into gear by White Lightning (’73), in which Reynolds first played the stud-smoothy Gator McLusky. He played the character again three years later in Gator.
The creepy kind came into being in ’72 with John Boorman’s Deliverance (which still plays…a brilliant film) and Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left. And the genre still lives today, most recently in the form of Greg McLean’s Wolf Creek.
Hero‘s Salute
There was only one high-velocity ’70s redneck film that was any good, and it wasn’t even a redneck film.
It was a scrappy piece of backwoods Americana about a young guy on the wrong side of the law who went on to become a famous stock-car racer, a movie that was actually loved by critics and was also an unfortunate financial disaster: Lamont Johnson’s The Last American Hero (1973).
For me, this is the super-daddy of redneck movies, the one that got it right with unaffected realism and a kind of dignity by not dealing in the usual cliches and showing respect for its characters, and by being intelligent and tough and vivid with fine acting.
Hero was loosely based on Tom Wolfe’s legendary 1965 Esquire article about one-time moonshine smuggler and stock-car racer Junior Johnson. Wolfe’s piece was called “The Last American Hero is Junior Johnson. Yes!”
The movie is about a guy named Junior Jackson (Jeff Bridges) who’s more or less content to smuggle illegal hooch until he gets pinched and his soul-weary dad (Art Lund) persuades him to think twice, and he eventually uses his car-racing skills to break into stock-car racing.
Geraldine Fitzgerald, Ed Lauter, Gary Busey and Valerie Perrine are among the costars.
There’s no question that Johnson’s film was widely admired (nearly all the serious film critics got behind it, especially Pauline Kael). And its influence in Hollywood circles seems hard to deny, its commercial failure aside, for the simple fact that it was the only backwoods-moonshine movie at the time that was seriously respected for what it was, as opposed to being (nominally) respected for what it earned.
As movies steeped in rural southern culture go, The Last American Hero had roughly the same levels of honesty and sincerity as Coal Miner’s Daughter, which came out in 1980.
Hero stood out for the gritty low-key realism that Johnson and his collaborator Bill Kerby brought to the script. The original Hero screenplay was officially credited to William Roberts, but, as Johnson told me during a brief phone conversation yesterday. “it didn’t have any real people in it,”
The Last American Hero director Lamont Johnson
The Last American Hero wasn’t an art film — it was a punchy thing with a kind of B-movie feeling — but it stood out for its avoidance of easy ironies and from any kind of condescension toward the hardscrabble characters, and for the totally on-target performances.
Articles like Wolfe’s and films like The Last American Hero make me forget about my loathing of red-state attitudes and even lead to affection for the vitality of working-class types and the blue-collar thing. They make me feel like their characters belong to my country. They make me want to eliminate the “Blue State” blue-ribbon logo that I’ve displayed in this column space for nearly a year.
It’s not genuine Americana that I can’t stand — it’s the degraded, stupid-ass, hee-haw stuff peddled by downmarket opportunists and turned into corporate-brand jackoff diversions like The Dukes of Hazzard TV series and motion picture.
What galls me is that most consumers out there don’t even know what genuine backwoods Americana is — they just know the Happy Meal-kind that corporations have sold to them.
The irony is that one of the biggest corporations, Rupert Murdoch’s Newscorp, the owner of 20th Century Fox, isn’t selling The Last American Hero. It isn’t available on DVD, and Fox Home Video, the rights holder, has no plans to put it out.
When I called that division’s public-relations guy on Thursday to ask about possible DVD plans, he asked, “This is ours? It’s a Fox movie?” Yeah, it’s a Fox movie, I said. Fox has the rights. “We produced it?” Yeah, Fox produced it in ’73, and Fox Home Video put it out as a VHS in ’97.
I think I convinced him, but I wrote him back again today to ask if he’d had a chance to ask the higher-ups, and he didn’t respond. But at least I’ve started the awareness thing a little bit. Maybe someone else will pick up the ball.
It would be nice to see this film again along with DVDs of my two other most-wanted ’70s films — Play It As It Lays and The Friends of Eddie Coyle.
Jarmusch
One of the six or seven reasons today’s column went up so late today is because I got hung up with technical issues in trying to prepare a digitally recorded interview for what I hope will be the first of a series of Podcasty-type deals I’m trying to turn into a regular thing.
It’s a recording of an interview I did Thursday, 7.14, with Jim Jarmusch, the writer-director of Focus Features’ Broken Flowers, which will open in theatres on August 5.
Apologies for the long boring rambling intro — I’m re-recording it this morning (Saturday). And all that rumbling background noise you can hear while Jarmusch is speaking…I dont know what that could be. We were sitting in a very quiet back room of an Italian restaurant.
Jim Jarmusch in the back room at Ballato’s, an Italian eatery at 55 East Houston (between Mott and Mulberry) — Thursday, 7.14, 4:45 pm.
Like anything else, it’s going to take a while to get these things down and sounding right.
Anyway, here it is. Thanks to Moises Chiullan, a good guy from Florida State University in Tallahassee, for urging me to do this and doing the sound editing and whatnot.
And I’m highly recommending the restaurant, by the way. It’s called Ballato’s, a kind of old-feeling, late 1940s Godfather-y type place. Visually, I mean. Jarmusch has been going there for years and says the food is wonderful. It’s at 55 East Houston, between Mott and Mulberry.
The late-afternoon light in Ballato’s back room is really beautiful — delicate, diffused.
This is Jarmusch in a nutshell — he told the publicity people to run his press kit biography as lean and pruned down as possible. None of the usual press-kit blather…just list what he does, list the film titles and that’s it.
At Long Last
Lifeboat, the only Alfred Hitchcock movie that hasn’t been restored and/or remastered and put out on DVD, is finally undergoing that process and will be released by Fox Home Video before the end of the year, according to spokesperson Steve Feldstein,
Lifeboat isn’t often recognized as one of Hitchcock’s best films, but for me it’s right up there with Strangers on a Train, Rear Window, North by Northwest, Shadow of a Doubt, Notorious and Vertigo.
I’m astonished that it took Fox Home Video this long to come around. They had it out on laser disc in the early ’90s but the transfer was awful, which always seemed extra-offensive to me given that Glen MacWilliams’ black-and-white photography is exceptionally beautiful with all kinds of moody textures and fog lightings and whatnot.
The Lifeboat team (l. to r., minus Walter Slezak and Canada Lee): Henry Hull, John Hodiak, Hume Cronyn, William Bendix, Heather Angel, Tallulah Bankhead.
Lifeboat is one of the best-written Hitchcock films (script by Ben Hecht, Jo Swerling and John Steinbeck) with whip-smart dialogue that is on-target and feels authentic for its time. It has a certain “written” quality that was par for the course in the early ’40s, but it’s so well shaped and phrased that the theatrical refinement feels right in the pocket.
Tallulah Bankhead, John Hodiak, William Bendix, Hume Cronyn, Walter Slezak, Henry Hull…talk about assurance. Six performances with a certain actorliness (and flamboyance, in Bankhead’s case), but at the same time relatively straight, unaffected and concise. (There are three performances that feel overly sentimental — Heather Angel’s, Canada Lee’s and Mary Anderson’s.)
Lifeboat is easily Hitchcock’s most visually inventive film. He imposed a huge challenge upon himself in having to tell a riveting story and make it all feel vital and visually absorbing despite the entire thing being set in a lifeboat on the North Atlantic, and damned if he didn’t succeed. (Hitchcock even figured a way for his usual cameo appearance to happen.)
It’s an excellent example of how persuasive studio-based photography and 1940s visual effects could be in the hands of the right director. It was all shot on a Hollywood sound stage, but you can really feel the unruly energy of the sea and taste the salt water on your lips. It’s a much more convincing evocation of what it must be like to be afloat and helpless in the middle of a vast ocean than anything you saw in Waterworld.
I’ve been asking the Fox Home Video people off and on for years about when they were finally going to move on a Lifeboat DVD, and they’ve never had any kind of answer. Like all home-video divisions Fox Home Video has seemed, to me, almost Soviet-like in its penchant for secrecy and not being candid about internal workings or plans.
And yet, oddly, South Korea put out a Lifeboat DVD in 2003.
Check out the image of Hodiak and Bankhead on the Korean DVD jacket cover [above]. It’s from a scene in the film, of course (their characters become lovers aboard the lifeboat, although it doesn’t seem to involve anything more than making out), but there’s no missing the allusion. It seems as if Bankhead, who was quite the liberated woman in her time…well, you get the drift.
Grabs
Will Russell Surf?
Would you believe David O. Russell as the director of a big pandering Silver Surfer flick? Does this play even as a radical idea? Can anyone envision an impassioned eccentric like Russell working for a nuts-and-bolts type like Avi Arad?
Consider this interview with Arad, chairman and CEO of Marvel Studios, that ran on MTV.com about ten days ago. In the piece, written by Larry Carroll, Arad is asked who might direct the Surfer flick, which will apparently begin shooting either later this year or early next.
Didn’t Quentin Tarantino speak about writing a Silver Surfer flick back in ’95 or thereabouts? Does anyone remember the Silver Surfer dialogue that Tarantino wrote and Denzel Washington acted in Crimson Tide?
“There is a director who should make Silver Surfer,” Arad answered. “He is mentally committed to it [but] he’s doing another movie now.
“What’s most important to me about this guy, first, is that he’s incredible with visuals,” he added. “But he’s also a spiritual guy, a Zen Buddhist.”
There’s been a rumor out there for two or three weeks that Russell has been talking with Marvel about doing this. And Russell is certainly a Zen Buddhist, and he’s working on a film now — a lower-budgeted thing for Universal about radio talk-show host (Vince Vaughan) who starts taking on the traits of his wack-job callers.
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I rang Russell’s office to check but they’ve all split for the 4th of July holiday. I called Russell on his cell and I think he picked up, but he just said “who is this?” three times and then hung up.
Baz Luhrman had been in the loop to direct this long-delayed effects film, but he is apparently no longer involved….but I don’t really know anything one way or the other. And I don’t even care that much, to be honest.
David O. Russell
It says something about the state of things when the best younger directors directors (Chris Nolan, David O. Russell, Bryan Singer) are all whoring themselves out to make superhero flicks.
The idea of Russell working for the Marvel factory and making a movie for kids and dealing with (how can I put this delicately?) a kind of elevated Menahem Golan mentality is a strange, fascinating prospect.
While Russell got along beautifully with Fox Searchlight and Peter Rice when he did I Heart Huckabees, I wonder how he’ll deal with Fox honcho Tom Rothman and his micromanaging approach to running a studio. Anyway, it’s something to consider over the holiday.
Goodnight Taste
An L.A. acquaintance has seen George Clooney’s Goodnight, and Good Luck (Warner Bros., 10.05), the ’50s drama about Edward R. Murrow vs. Senator Joseph McCarthy, and here’s his report:
“David Strathairn [who plays Murrow] is excellent. And I’d like to allay any fears you might have about him being able to summon Murrow’s authoritative voice. He nails it and then some.
“The film itself is high on atmosphere (especially during the opening scene….cigarettes, pointy glasses and tuxedo clad guests at a dinner reception) and does a very fine job of capturing the feeling of the 50’s.
“Clooney continues the good directorial work he did on Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. His camera is light and mobile, and the art design really showcases the beautiful black-and-white stock.
David Straitharn as Edward R. Murrow in George Clooney’s Goodnight, and Good Luck.
“The film itself is very quick and watchable, though I’m not sure how well it would play with people who don’t already have a real interest in the era of the Red Scare. It’s a bit like a civics lesson.
“I have some quibbles. A scrolling text intro that’s supposed to set up the era is unnecessary; as you watch the film you learn all you need to know about the background.
“It also lacks a certain central structure, and it could use a bit more bite. The enemy is paranoia, really, which doesn’t set Murrow up as the sort of heroic presence he was.
“There’s also an unnecessary scene between Robert Downey, Jr. and Patricia Clarkson [playing a husband and wife working for or in league with CBS] in which Downey is questioning whether they, at CBS, are doing the right thing in taking on McCarthy. It’s better left assumed that there was some self-doubt involved, rather than leaving it to this trite and obvious exchange.
“Overall it’s pretty fun stuff, especially since Strathairn is never less than enthralling. It’s just that it could use a bit more zip.”
Okay then — a good film with maybe some side issues. Straitharn, at least, seems positioned to pick up some Oscar heat….maybe.
Forever Cronicas
[Here’s a re-working of a January ’05 piece about Sebastian Cordero’s Cronicas. This excellent film is finally opening on 7.8 so why not?]
A creepy investigation piece and a penetrating morality tale about a tabloid TV news team on the trail of a serial child killer, Sebastian Corder’s Cronicas (Palm Pictures, 7.8) is easily one of the year’s best.
And I’m not just throwing that out. This hard haunting little film is right up there with Hustle & Flow, Cinderella Man, Crash, The Beat That My Heart Skipped, The Beautiful Country and Last Days.
John Leguizamo during Cronicas round-table chat at Manhattan’s Regency Hotel — Monday, 6.27, 11:10 am.
Set in a low-income area of Ecuador and 98% Spanish-spoken, it boasts a first-rate cast (John Leguizamo, Damian Alcazar, Leonor Watling, Alfred Molina, Jose Maria Yazpik) and has been produced (or would grandfathered be the more appropriate term?) by Alfonso Cuaron and Guillermo del Toro.
And it shouldn’t be missed by anyone, partly for the impact of the drama itself (which holds onto its ethical focus from beginning to end, and never drops into an excitement-for-excitement’s-sake mode) and because it heralds the arrival of a major new Spanish-language director — 32 year-old Sebastian Cordero.
Cronicas is not about catching the bad guy as much as a study of journalistic corruption.
A series of child murders, all the apparent victim of a serialist called “the monster,” has caught the attention of a three-person news team shooting for a show called “Una Hora con la Verdad” (“An Hour with the Truth”), which is hosted in-studio by Molina’s character.
Jumping right into this cauldron is a hot-shot TV reporter named Manolo Bonilla (Leguizamo), along with his producer (Watling) and cameraman (Jose Maria Yazpik).
And they happen to be right there and shooting when a seemingly decent, soft-spoken salesman named Vinicio Cepeda (Alcazar) accidentally hits and kills a young kid with his truck. This almost gets Cepeda killed by an angry mob.
When Bonilla later visits Cepeda in jail, where he’s awaiting trial for manslaughter, what seems to be a major scoop is dropped into his lap. Cepeda tells Bonilla that he’s met the serial killer and can provide crucial information about him…which he’ll pass along in trade for a sympathetic TV story about the accident, which may lead to his legal exoneration.
Cepeda’s information (or some of it, rather) turns out to be solid, which of course leads Bonilla to decide to keep his scoop from the cops so he can make a big splash. And this is all I’m going to say, except that the movie has a riveting ending that doesn’t leave you alone.
The thrust at the end is that Leguizamo’s character may be just as malicious or threatening as the child-killer he’s trying to get the goods on.
Cronicas was filmed in Babahayo, a capital city of the province of Los Rios, apparently one of Ecaudor’s poorest areas.
After leaving the first screening my 15 year-old son Dylan said, “It’s funny, but it’s like almost all the really good films these days are being made by guys from Mexico and South America.”
And Spain, I added. It’s certainly seemed this way over the past three or four years. It’s always fascinated me how the Movie Gods seem to serendipitously pick certain countries and cultures to produce especially vital and profound films during a given period.
The film industry, in any event, can add Cordero to the south-of-the-border Kool Kat list headed by Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu (21 Grams, Amores Perros), Guillermo del Toro (Hellboy ), Alejandro Amenabar (The Sea Inside), Pedro Almodovar (Bad Education), Fernando Meirelles (City of God), Julio Medem (Sex and Lucia) and Fabiane Beilinsky (Nine Queens).
Grabs
Director-writer James Toback (l.) speaking to Museum of Moving Image director David Schwartz after screening of his 1977 film Fingers and prior to showing of Jacques Audiard’s The Beat That My Heart Skipped — Thursday, 6.30.05, 9:20 pm.
L train heading to Brooklyn — Thursday, 7.1.05, 12:05 am.
Hollywood Elsewhere contributors Rachel Sear, Jett Wells (now working for N.Y. Daily News columnist George Rush) at party for Palm Pictures’ Cronicas — Tuesday, 6.28.05, 10:25 pm.
Graffiti on poster space at Queens subway stop near Kaufman Astoria Studios — Thursday, 6.30.05, 11:35 pm.
The real Domino Harvey, who will be played by Keira Knightley in the forthcoming Tony Scott film Domino (New Line, 8.19). Harvey was found dead last Monday night in her West Hollywood home.
The linkage between Johnny Depp’s Charlie and that other weird guy with light skin who hangs out with kids has again been pointed out by Time magazine. This idea never seemed to get much traction outside of media circles.
Get Estrada
“Thank you, Mr. Wells, for having written a viewpoint of the Russell Crowe telephone incident that makes sense. Should Mr. Crowe have thrown the phone? Of course not, but finally a columnist questions Josh Estrada’s contribution to the incident.
“Does the Mercer hotel go unscathed here? A guest is paying over $3,000 a night for a room and no one gives a hoot that he has no working phone in that room. Yet when he tries to resolve the problem he is met with indifference and ‘whatever.’
“Trust me, sir…I am a seventy-six year old woman, and I would have had some choice words for Mr. Estrada and the Mercer had I been in Mr. Crowe’s position. Does that hotel really expect their guests to come down to the Lobby at 4:30 A.M. to make a phone call?
“Someone should also mention that if Mr. Crowe wanted to hurt Estrada he would have used his fists, he certainly has been well trained to do so in the past year.” — RhodaM41@aol.com
“Celebrities do not rate special attention and respect because they are celebrities. All accounts I’ve read about the incident indicate that it was late and Crowe had been drinking and was being an ass.
“I don’t know when, if ever, you’ve worked in a service job, but having to deal with obnoxious assholes after they’ve spent a night out drinking is highly stressful. That doesn’t excuse Estrada from being unprofessional to a customer, but his inappropriate response would require a reprimand from his supervisor and not being assaulted by a petulant jerk.
“I’m not a fan of frivolous lawsuits, but according to some reports, Estrada was looking for an apology and a handshake and didn’t get one…If the humorless Crowe is going to behave like a spoiled brat then he deserves what he gets. Since juries never want to convict the famous, (unless they’re female and Martha Stewart) then maybe wasting a celebrities time and costing him some money and p.r. is the only way to go to teach them a lesson.” — Michael Zeigler.
“Do you honestly think that Estrada, the concierge at the Mercer, would give Russell Crowe a ‘whatever’ just because he’s some prissy narcissist? Estrada, I mean, and not Crowe. Seems highly doubtful.
“A concierge with that general attitude would have a gig at the Mercer for, oh, about two days tops, if he hadn’t already been weeded out by what I’m sure is a fairly vigorous vetting process at one of the top Soho hotels.
“So Crowe’s paying four grand a night for a suite and he can’t get a call out to his wife to reassure her he’s not in the throes of (a) alcohol poisoning, (b) an orgy, (c) in the clink, or (d) all of the above? Must be a swell marriage. Objection, yer honor! Sustained. Withdrawn.
“I suggest to you that Crowe pushed this guy to the living end over a period of days, but that he, as the concierge at the Mercer, could muster no other retort but the pathetically passive-aggressive ‘Whatever.’
“More to the point, to quote Brando in Larry Grobel’s book, ‘Vas you dere, Charley?’ I’m sure when the tape rolls (ands I hope it’s on Court TV) it’s going to be fascinating. I have many hours under my belt one-on-one with Crowe….not counting the junkets, the press conferences..and the dude’s intimidating, even when he’s trying to be nice. It’s all in the eyes, man.
“And yeah (chuckle) it’s also in the karate-stance he assumes after hurling a couple pieces of bric-a-brac at your head. If I’m Estrada, I’m suing. Or what’s a celebrity for?” — Josh Mooney
“I found your comments on the Russell Crowe phone-throwing incident absolutely amazing. To miss an opportunity to diss Russell Crowe puts you in a class by yourself. Yes, Russell was an idiot in losing his temper but not one person has commented on Estrada’a contribution except you — this incident did not occur in a vacuum.
“Describing Estrada as a ‘…waahh, I’m telling the teacher’ kid aptly describes a 10 year old who grew up to be a celebrity blackmailer.” — Lorraine Shaw.
“Thank you! That has been how I have felt all along. Sure Russell over-reacted. Guess what? He’s human. He has limits of tolerance. If a person is paying $4000 a night for a room he should be able to expect some service from the people working there. Thank you again for saying what I have been feeling.” — Vickie Sherman, Scappoose, Oregon.
Grabs 2
Big fat Roman-empire post office at corner of Eighth Avenue and 34th Street.
Video camera with super-telescopic lens aimed at Central Park West apartment building where Pale Male, the famous Manhattan hawk, was hanging toward the end of last Sunday afternoon.
This guy has been at the Museum of Natural History since I was five or six years old.
The just-concluded Marlon Brando auction at Christie’s brought in $2.3 million. Brando’s annotated Godfather script sold for $312,000. A letter from Godfather author Mario Puzo asking Brando to take the role of Don Corleone sold for $132,000. No word on how much these driver’s licenses went for.
Sunday, 6.26, 4:05 pm.
34th Street looking west from Eighth Avenue — Saturday, 6.25, 4:40 pm.
Pale Male on one of his periodic float-arounds.
Mural in underground lobby of Lincoln Plaza cinemas.
Worlds Apart
“I saw this last night…and I was very happy with the film overall, aside from a few believability issues here and there…nothing worth mentioning. But…
“Spielberg and Co.’s decision midway through the film to have Tom Cruise’s teenage son die added a great deal of emotional heft to the film, and I agree that the groaning of folks at the ending will have nothing to do with the bacterial problems that the aliens experience. That part of the finale is just fine and works wonderfully and pays appropriate tribute to Wells’ original story.
“But when Cruise and Fanning walk into Boston, find Miranda Otto and her entire clan in what looks to be the one neighborhood in all of Boston that wasn’t destroyed, I had to groan….but that was okay because I knew it was coming. No way Spielberg was going to avoid a family reunion of some kind. I could let the mother/daughter cryfest happen…whatever. The mom could have survived since we didn’t last see her running into a field of fire or anything.
“But then Justin Chatwin, the teenage son, runs out to his dad and I had to declare ‘bullshit’ on this movie. I mean come on…the kid was toast! How he managed to survive running into a battlefield that two seconds later was incinerated by alien death rays is utterly ridiculous.
“The worst part of this happy-ass reunion is that Chatwin’s supposed death had been such a refreshingly realistic event in a film where whole families are being dusted left and right. Spielberg had handled his departure in a very sad and abstract way, and when Cruise is insisting to Tim Robbins later on that his son ‘will just meet them in Boston’ it was a horrifyingly sad moment of parental denial that added so much resonance to the film.
“Then that’s all ripped away at the end. I’ve been a big supporter of Spielberg for years, and I’ve always felt he’s been a bit underrated in his efforts on many films, but he and his screenwriters chickened out here and robbed a potential masterpiece of lean mean sci-fiction filmmaking of an honest ending.
“I’ve been pissed off about it all morning. My advice to people is when the alien dies, leave the theater, and make up your own ending.” — Michael Felsher.
“I usually agree with you and could not agree more with you this time
about the endings of Spielberg’s films, and particularly the one used in War of the Worlds. I just saw it, and that ending really takes something MAJOR away from how great it could have been. As it is, I’d say it’s good. But Spielberg always does this with his more scary/thrilling/serious movies.
“Jaws is the worst offender. Having Richard Dreyfuss survive
really took something away from the tone established throughout the movie and steered the film even farther from the book. Think of how much scarier that movie would have been if, like the book, even your fancy shark cage and gadgets do nothing for you? Would we have been really upset if Dreyfuss had been eaten like Quint?
“Spielberg did it again with Saving Private Ryan. Having the old Ryan at the grave with every member of his family lamenting over ‘did I deserve it?’ really took something away from that movie for me and is the only reason why I think The Thin Red Line is better.
“There’s no question that one of the cornerstones of Spielberg’s rep is his tendency to pull some punches that really need to be landed.” — Jason Tanner
“The ending alone knocked the film down from being a problematic but entertaining three-star flick to a mediocre two-star.
“Does Spielberg assume that his audience is so dumb to believe that Cruises kid just somehow managed to survive the wall of fire and brimstone? Like Cruise finding the extra belt of hand grenades just in time to get snagged by the tripod, I found the conclusion an example of very lazy storytelling. More riveting would of been the son risking his life at the end for his dad and sister.
“But no…Spielberg had to have the bullshit happy ending which nobody in my audience except for the women bought.
“The film has one glaring inconsistency. As has been pointed out, the aliens use an electro magnetic pulse to disable all electronic items prior to their first attack. And yet in the first destruction scene we witness a guy operating a camcorder. He’s not just a background character either — Spielberg frames one of his ‘clever’ shots around the device.
“Plus the editing was choppy in parts. Cruise walks into the bathroom covered with human soot and then a cut later is fully cleaned up.
“Why did Dakota Fanning have to scream in every scene? Was it in her contract? Why do all the kids in Spielberg films act the same way in scene after scene? Here you have world destruction and the kids are bickering over how Tom Cruise is a bad dad. It sucks you right out the movie because it’s forced drama. It’s borderline blackface in it’s vulgarity as it’s repeated over and over.” — Michael Meyerotto
“I’m scratching my head over your War of the Worlds review. Isn’t this the kind of review that usually makes you roll your eyes and become somewhat contemptuous? This sounds like one of those ‘if you just turn off your mind and don’t think about it much, it’s great fun’ reviews that you so dislike.
“In fact, your review made it less likely that I’ll go see this. Personally, I just don’t like the idea of giving my money to Spielberg and Cruise for something half-baked — I’m a bit sick of both of them, (especially Cruise), and lately I’ve gotten very particular about how I spend my movie dollar.
“I saw and loved Batman Begins. Before that, the last movie I’d seen was Sin City, and I walked out halfway through. I don’t go to the theater often for a number of reasons. One of them is the kind of movie you described in your WotW piece.
“I’m watching Letterman as I write this, and he just said something that hits home for me. He said, ‘Today was the big opening of War of the Worlds. It’s a film about space aliens that activate these enormous alien pods that have been buried in the earth for millions of … oh, who cares?” — Ray Garton
“The only thing that gets my goat about the movie is that the ending is the only overtly sentimental part of the flick. You had bodies being floated downriver, people turning to dust, someone getting blood sucked out of them and then sprayed over. How did this get a PG-13 again?” — Lee Goettl
“I hate it when you’re wrong about a movie because you infuriate me — but I think I hate it more when you really nail the thing, because I then have to admit you’re right, and that your words and emotions so precise and deserving that you pierce the heart of the matter. And in the case of WotW, you got my feelings exactly, and expressed it better than I could, so fuck you.” — Peter Martin.
“So I kept waiting for this awful, groan-inducing ending of War of the Worlds and it never came. What the hell is everyone bitching about? The final scene isn’t played with even a hint of sap or melodrama. The son is just there. There’s no swelling music cue, no shots of Dad and Lad running to each other, arms outstretched…just a warm smile.
“I think Spielberg — and the audience — earned that moment after sitting through almost two hours of terror, which is what this movie really is. This is one of Stevie’s greatest efforts, right up there with Close Encounters, Jaws and (dare I say it) A.I…speaking of movies with unfairly derided endings.
“And there certainly wasn’t any laughing or booing at the end. But there was plenty of clapping. And this was at an 11:30 a.m. show with half a house…not a psyched, rowdy Friday-night crowd. This movie’s going to score huge with most of America, and the NY/LA film snobs and snotty teenagers be damned.
“Roger Friedman at foxnews.com characterized the reviews as ‘so-so’ and Drudge has been running pretty much only the negative stuff about it. But the truth of the matter is that the flick has been generally well-reviewed, scored well at Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes and got absolute raves from Kenneth Turan and Variety, to name but a few.” — Sean Stangland
Persistence of Crash
Sometime within the next week or two, Paul Haggis’s Crash is going to pass the $50 million mark in theatrical revenue. That’s an extraordinary haul for a film that’s not exactly a downer but is about as divorced from the conventional definition of a feel-good audience hit as you can imagine.
It’s a socially observant thing that ends with a hopeful or balanced view of who and what we are in terms of racial attitudes. It also says that widespread racism has made us all fairly miserable inside the prison of our own skins. And yet people are going for it.
Terrence Howard’s character, a Hollywood filmmaker, during a contemplative, settle-down moment in Crash.
Crash has performed so surprisingly well that year-end awards and Oscar nominations are starting to seem inevitable. The year-end hoopla will be spurred along by the release of the DVD sometime in the early fall, and a limited theatrical re-release aimed at Academy voters sometime in December or perhaps January.
The cultural-political element seems to have caught on also and made Crash into a shorthand term for crude racial pigeonholing, and, in another sense, a recognition that racism is as pernicious as ever.
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Like Oprah Winfrey spokesperson Michelle McIntyre describing Winfrey’s being denied entrance to that Hermes store a few days ago in Paris as “her Crash moment.”
Or Al Sharpton visiting Mexico president Vicente Fox in late May and slipping him a DVD of Crash to watch.
Or recently elected Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villagrosa referring to the film while making a point about racism during an interview last Monday (6.20) on Ted Koppel’s Nightline.
When Crash opened seven weeks ago — on Friday, 5.6 — the commercial expectations were upbeat but modestly so. Lions Gate had acquired it for about $3.3 million at last September’s Toronto Film Festival, and this seemed like an appropriate price. “We thought it would do a minimum of $25 to $30 million,” Lions Gate president Tom Ortenberg recalls.
It’s now in 492 theatres and has taken in over $47 million.
Crash costar Thandie Newton
A sharply written ensemble piece about racial divides in and around Los Angeles, Crash had been generally well reviewed with a 78% Rotten Tomatoes rating, and yet it was panned by some big guns — N.Y. Times lead critic Tony Scott, L.A. Times second-stringer Carina Chocano, Jamie Bernard of the N.Y. Daily News, the Boston Globe‘s Ty Burr.
The reactions were very favorable when I showed Crash at my UCLA Sneak Previews class in early April, which seemed significant in that the class is mainly composed of people in their 40s and 50s, who tend to shy away from push-comes-to-shove dramas.
Crash‘s co-screenwriter Bobby Moresco says he knew something was up when he went to see how the film was performing at a Burbank megaplex during the opening weekend. “It was a show in the middle of the afternoon, there was a long line waiting to get in, and the theatre was 80% filled,” he said.
Moresco noticed the same level of response when he went back the next day — i.e., Sunday afternoon.
“It was obvious to us that we had something,” Ortenberg told me yesterday. “The Friday to Sunday trajectory was very strong, there were great exit polls, and business was very good on the Monday and Tuesday after the first weekend.
“And then week after week, it was clear not only that audiences were discovering Crash, but the picture was becoming a water-cooler movie.”
Crash “is really the perfect Lions Gate film,” he said. “Indie crediblity along with commercial viability.
“We opened up at #4, and yet we stayed in the top five for four weeks. Kingdom of Heaven more than doubled our gross on opening weekend, but by the third weekend we outgrossed them. Clearly we had a film that was affecting people.”
Crash star Don Cheadle, director and cowriter Paul Haggis during filming
My opinion is that it’s working with audiences because it hits hard in showing racial incidents but at the same time leaves you with a sense of balance and even compassion.
Everyone in this sharply written ensemble drama is shown to be a racist or a victim of racism, but they’re also given a balancing trait or shown having a moment of clarity and self recognition. Matt Dillon’s beat cop is depicted as racist pig on one hand, but also a guy capable of heroism when he saves Thandie Newton from that car fire and also a guy who grieves over his ailing father…that kind of thing.
“In many respects today’s movie-marketing world is about cookie-cutter distribution and massive ad budgets and the usual usual,” Ortenberg comments. “And so it’s especially gratifying when you have a film that needs TLC to get through and is benefiting from word of mouth and really taking off on this level.
“If I could single out one person at Lion’s Gate who orchestrated this more than anyone else, it would be (exec vp publicity) Sarah Greenberg,” Ortenberg says.
“Sarah did a text book long-lead critic and opinion-maker screening program where she was able to identify the supporters and champions of the film, and get them to come out visibly for the film in a big way. Ebert and Roeper went with their rave fairly early, about two weeks before the release. David Denby at the New Yorker wrote a great review, and he also hosted a New Yorker screening program showing.
“Unlike some of the others who bid on this film in Toronto, we always saw Crash as a wide release movie.” It opened on 5.6 in about 1800 theatres.
Crash Larenz Tate, Chris “Ludacris” Bridges.
“I have gotten more calls and e-mails from colleagues…more calls congratulating Lions Gate for picking this movie up and doing well with it,” Ortenberg remarks. “And we always got similar reactions from screening programs around the country.
“Our two worst reviews in the country came from the New York Times and the LA Times . There were naysayers, there always are…but the film really did well at the end of the day.”
The movies that tend to connect are the ones that prompt a sense of basic recognition. I think people are privately acknowledging their feelings of racism when they see Crash. Remember what Randy Newman said a long time ago about us all being rednecks, etc.?
I think people are also responding to the film’s optimistic view of this common failing. It says that we’re flawed, yes, but we’re not that bad, and we’re capable now and then of being noble and kind.
Earnestly
I wrote this up in the WIRED section late last night but I’m feeling emphatic and I don’t care if I’m repeating myself: I was blown away by Fernando Meirelles’ The Constant Gardener (Focus Features, 8.26) at a screening last night, and I found this surprising since I was told a few months ago by a filmmaker in a position to know that it might not be all that much.
As murder mysteries go (and it does fall under this category…sort of), this Focus Features release may be too thoughtful and complex and emotionally subtle to play big with younger audiences, and we all know that Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz are not marquee names. But trust me when I say it’s very high-quality merchandise with a decent shot at year-end awards and Oscar noms.
This is easily the best theatrical adaptation of a John le Carre novel since The Spy Who Came In From The Cold (1966).
Ralph Fiennes, Rachel Weisz in Fernando Meirelles’ The Constant Gardener.
I expected something fairly good, as anyone would from the director of the magnificent City of God, but I didn’t expect The Constant Gardener to be quite this smart and impassioned and as pointedly political.
Why is it that American directors (Oliver Stone and Warren Beatty excepted) never seem to deliver films with hard political content? Meirelles seems to understand this story about poor Africans being exploited by rich drug companies because he’s made a film about poor Brazilians coping with similarly oppressive conditions.
It’s a combination love story and whodunit wrapped inside a realistic political drama that feels as raw and teeming as City of God and then some. Set mostly in Kenya, its about the murder of activist Tessa Quayle (Rachel Weisz ) and the efforts of her mild-mannered diplomat husband Justin Quayle (Ralph Fiennes) to find out why she was killed and who did it.
The only disappointing aspect is the casting of Danny Huston in a supporting role as yet another morally compromised scumbag.
I’m not quite sure why Focus Features is opening this exceptional film in very late August, which is kind of a dumper period. It seems as if October or early November would be a better time to open it, but maybe they know something I don’t.
Here’s the trailer.
Delayed Action
I have to put things on hold for a few hours, but I promise to do what I can to tarnish or call into question the reputation of March of the Penguins (Warner Independent, opening today) when I return.
This French-made nature doc is a bore and a con and I’m not buying it, and neither should you unless you’re a sucker for the general cuteness of penguins. Women love this film but there are times in life when sentimentality must be resisted, and this is one of them.
David Straitharn as legendary CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow in George Clooney’s Good Night and Good Luck.
One of the stories I’m especially cranked about is the apparent intention of Warner Bros. to put George Clooney’s Good Night and Good Luck, a modestly budgeted black-and-white feature about the 1954 battle between CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow (David Straitharn) and the anti-communist demagogue Sen. Joseph McCarthy, into theatres in October or November.
The idea is apparently for the film to play either the Venice or Toronto or New York film festivals, or perhaps all three. I know nothing at all about the quality of Straitharn’s performance, but one presumes he will be quite good in the role. When has Straitharn ever not been exceptional?
I have to cut out in order to attend an NYU Pre-College Orientation class that starts at 2 pm. Jett should be attending this but he’s taking his last two finals at Brookline High School today so I’ll be there with my notepad.
I’ll put up the remaining material tonight and tomorrow morning.
Armond Says…
When New York Press critic Armond White rips into someone, he really goes to town. If I were Nora Ephron I would grab a hard copy of this Bewitched review and frame it and put in on my wall, as a way of showing my friends (and myself) what a good sport I am.
Here’s a photo and here’s the online page link
I’m thinking of something Joseph P. Kennedy once said about his son Robert: “The kid hates like I do.” I don’t think of White as any kind of junior-level presence (quite the contrary), but he does tend to assign notions of almost Biblical-scale evil to certain mainstream filmmakers, and I’ve always found this endearing on a certain level.
Grabs
Wednesday’s Mare photo tweaked by Ken Bell of Graphic Planet.
I’ve thought and thought about what to call this photo, and I’ve finally decided upon “Cement Guy.”
Sign hanging on chain-link fence bordering far eastern barrier of Ground Zero.
Latest in a series of R.O.T. photos. I relate to R.O.T., or rather the spiritual condition alluded to by this acronym.
The Ground Zero crucifix made out of a remaining portion of a steel framework that was part of one of the towers.
Back by popular demand! Many people (okay, guys) have sent in compliments. A director friend told me yesterday he believes this photo deserves to be hung in the Museum of Modern Art. I completely agree.
My hopes were up during the first three or four minutes of Bewitched because it starts out like Bell, Book and Candle, the 1958 film with James Stewart and Kim Novak.
Nicole Kidman, playing a cheerfully perky witch named Isabel Bigelow, says at the beginning that all she wants is to be loved in a normal everyday way by a regular “helpless” boyfriend who needs her. Not to be repetitive, but at this point I leaned over to Bill McCuddy, the Fox News anchor guy who was watching it with me last week, and I said, “This is Bell, Book and Candle.”
James Stewart and Kim Novak on DVD art jacket for Bell, Book and Candle; Novak’s November 1958 Life magazine cover promoting the film.
And almost as soon as I said this, Bewitched dropped this very relatable theme — an oddball exotic woman who wants to have a relationship with a regular schlub — and split itself into six or seven other directions and went all to hell.
It wound up being about personalities and letting Will Ferrell be Will Ferrell and the usual toxic (I think the standard adjective is “bubbly”) amusements that constitute your standard romantic-comedy-made-by-a-big-studio these days. It’s pure fizz, or is that giving the film too much credit?
And for this you can put the blame squarely on director and cowriter Nora Ephron and her cowriter sister Delia Ephron.
So a movie based on a TV comedy series from the `60s and early `70s, about an actual witch who just happens to get hired to play a pretend witch on a brand new remake of the Bewitched TV series. How coincidental is that?
This happens because the star of this new Bewitched series, an empty-cavity asshole actor named Jack Wyatt (Will Ferrell), happens to run into Isabel at Book Soup (the West Hollywood book store) and falls for her right away, partly because she’s beautiful but mainly because she can do that Elizabeth Montgomery/ Samantha nose-wrinkle thing to perfection.
Here I am summarizing a totally inane plotline and hating myself for doing so and determined to stop right now.
The bottom line is that Ferrell is playing such a repulsively insecure twit and a run-at-the-mouth Hollywood phony that you can’t help but lose all feelings of empathy for Kidman’s Isabel because anyone being attracted to a guy with Jack Wyatt’s personality is fairly grotesque.
So with the foundation making no sense the whole thing is a waste of time, and that goes for the efforts of several appealing actors who’ve been given very thin, barely-written parts — Michael Caine, Shirley MacLaine, Jason Schwartzman, Kristin Chenoweth….although I’m sure they were well paid.
The only walk-on role that really comes through is Steve Carrell’s third-act cameo as Paul Lynde’s “Uncle Arthur.” Like I said a few days ago, if only the Ephrons had decided to weave Carrell into the film as a major character, etc.
There is one amazingly funny moment, when Isabel wrinkles her nose and causes a large chandelier to fall upon a character neither she nor we like. Radical! Then we realize the sequence has been one of those cheap-ass fantasy projections that isn’t really happening.
Opposite of radical!
(l. to r.) Elsa Lanchester, Jack Lemmon, Kim Novak, Ernie Kovacs, James Stewart.
The rule used to be if Larry King turned up in a film (i.e., playing himself interviewing one of the fictional characters), it sucked. The same rule applies today if the shamelessly unctuous James Lipton, the Actor’s Studio interviewer, shows up in the same way, which he does in Bewitched.
I need to stop the nitpicking and segue back to Bell, Book and Candle, which the Bewitched TV series was partly based upon (along with that Rene Clair comedy I Married a Witch, with Veronica Lake and Fredric March).
The basic idea behind John van Druten’s original stage play, which was first performed in 1950, was that seemingly weird people (i.e., quirky individualists) are like everyone else in that they want someone to love them in a very soothing and traditional way.
Gillian Holroyd, played by Kim Novak in the Richard Quine-directed film, has her exotic leopard-skin-leotard lifestyle and the power of witchery at her fingertips, and all she wants in the end is a cute stodgy guy in a suit to love her and make her feel the way we all want to feel.
Not a very hip idea, granted, but…well, don’t we? Don’t we all want love and security and spotless kitchens and tidiness, on top of great sex and the other stuff? The most peculiar and aloof among us want this…even if they won’t act on it, much less admit it.
Van Druten’s witches and warlocks living in Greenwich Village are, of course, stand-ins for the beats and bohemians of the late `40s and `50s. Screenwriter Daniel Taradash stayed with the basic metaphor. Novak’s Gillian, Jack Lemmon’s Nicky (Gillian’s goofily irresponsible younger brother), Elsa Lanchester’s Queenie…all of them mildly eccentric, anti-conformist, below-14th-Street types.
Kim Novak and “Piewacket” in Bell, Book and Candle. Was it Candy Darling or Holly Woodlawn who did that terrific imitation of Novak calling for Piewacket (“Pie! Pie!”) in one of those ’70s Paul Morrissey films?
At first Novak just wants to sexually sample the straight-arrow uptown book publisher Shep Henderson, played by James Stewart, which she manages by casting a spell. But then her vulerable side comes through and she falls in love with the guy. And to have and hold him, she is later told by Queenie, she has to give up her witchy powers and become like everyone else.
A metaphor for tedious Eisenhower-era conformity, okay, but also for the process of surrendering certain selfish perogatives and “giving it up” to make a relationship work.
It’s a widely understood theme, which is why Bell, Book and Candle, sappy as it may seem from your basic hipster perspective, is still performed in regional theatre companies today, and why the Columbia Tristar Home Video DVD of the film is still a mildly pleasant thing to sit through. You can feel what Kim Novak is feeling, what she wants. Hokey as it is, the story connects.
Plus it has a tasty supporting performance by Ernie Kovacs as an alcoholic writer. I love that the slurry-voiced, shaggy-haired Kovacs is in the bag for the entire film and is always scrounging around for “a little post-Christmas cheer.” And I love the way he chuckles when a realization hits him.
(There’s an article in how alcoholics in movies used to be reliable comic figures, or even portrayed as lovable because of their alcoholic personalities. Lee Marvin in Cat Ballou , Dudley Moore in Arthur, Arthur O’Connell in Anatomy of a Murder, etc.)
I’m not saying Bell, Book and Candle is a deeply profound thing, but if the Ephron sisters had focused on van Druten instead of swizzle-sticking the formula of an old TV series that was basically about domestic female empowerment (all Samantha has to do is wrinkle her nose and all predators are stopped in their tracks), they would have at least had something.
They would have had an adult love story about a recognizable emotional tendency or current instead of what Bewitched is now, which is nothing.
But if they’d gone this way they couldn’t have used Will Ferrell as the book publisher be cause he can only play insecure boobs, and one of the main reasons they made this film was because Ferrell sells tickets to young men, so they kept Ferrell and booted Bell, Book and Candle and went for the easily identifiable TV series hook and everyone cashed their checks, and this is why almost everything made by a big studio these days stinks.
Scrappy Guys
I first saw Scott Caan’s Dallas 362 during the ’03 Toronto Film Festival, and now it’s finally getting a New York opening this Friday (6.24) at the Village East. It’s played here and there around the country (Ohio, Austin, Los Angeles) and hasn’t exactly caught a wave, but it’s a tangy, smartly written, nicely performed first film.
That’s not damnation with faint praise. I’m just giving it a solid B-plus and saying it’s worth seeing because Caan gets a whole lot of things right. It’s partly a middle-American Mean Streets and partly a dark relationship comedy. It’s got spunk, personality and at times a wack sense of humor, which is nearly enough to take the film across the finish line in itself.
It’s a low-budget male relationship movie, which yanks it out of the running right away as a date movie. And except for a pair of older boomer-aged characters played by Kelly Lynch and Jeff Goldblum, it’s mostly about some fringe-y, wild-ass GenX types with self-destructive behavior patterns. And we all know that demimondes of this sort tend to play best with esoteric DVD renters.
Not surprisingly, and to some extent autobiographically for Caan, Dallas 362 is a dear-dad movie. It contains echoes of the writer-director’s relationship with his father, actor James Caan, although Scott casts himself in a second-lead role and gives the lead to Shawn Hatosy, a squatly-built young actor with Irish skin and small dark-brown eyes that made me think of that Michael Caine line in Get Carter — “piss-holes in the snow.”
Hatosy is better than adequate in Caan’s film, but he doesn’t have star chemistry. Caan, who does — he’s always had an effortlessly grounded macho prescence and a ready-to-pounce intensity — should have played the lead, and Hatosy, good as he is in Rusty’s shoes, should have played Dallas.
It’s interesting that it’s Caan who’s front-and-center in the release poster with Hatosy standing behind him.
Rusty (Hatosy) and Dallas (Caan) are a couple of L.A. guys in their mid 20s who are always getting into bar fights. They keep telling themselves it’s always the other guy’s fault, but they’re obviously into rage. Rusty, who’s slightly more stable than Dallas, is pushed into therapy sessions by his mom, Mary (Kelly Lynch), with an amiable, pot-smoking psychologist named Bob (Jeff Goldbum), who also happens to be her new boyfriend.
For the first 30 to 45 minutes, the movie is mainly about kicking around, chasing girls, meeting this and that edgy character, and getting banged up in pool halls and juke joints at night.
Dallas’s day job is collecting money for a bookie, but he’s working on two plans to rip off rich guys in their homes — one being the bookie he works for, and the other a guy he won’t know anything about until the night of the job.
Rusty, meanwhile, starts getting in touch with his feelings during his therapy sessions with Bob. One revelation is that he’s pining heavily for his dead father, a rodeo rider who died after being gored by a steer, and wants to follow in his footsteps.
Another is his deep kinship with Dallas, whose loyalty and fearlessness makes Rusty feel safe, he says, even though Dallas is obviously pulling him in the direction of chaos.
The going-to-Texas dream has a roadblock in the form of Mary, who doesn’t want to endure another rodeo tragedy and has told Rusty to forget it.
What kind of 24 year-old doesn’t follow his dream because him mom says no? Maybe the kind who hasn’t quite realized what that dream exactly is…yet. But once Rusty achieves clarity on this, he starts edging away from Dallas, who is determined to pull off the two home invasion robberies despite his friend’s disapproval. Rusty is appalled at his friend’s recklessness, in fact, but he decides not to stand in his way either.
The real-life parallels or references? The younger Caan is obviously following in his father’s footsteps, both as an actor and a director,. James Caan was on a very reckless personal streak in the ’80s. He also had a liking when he was younger for outdoorsy macho stuff, including bronco riding, if I remember correctly.
There are some occasional misfiring bits in Dallas 362, but nothing too bothersome. There’s a scene in a diner between Hatosy and a beautiful blonde stranger who walks in with lust (or something very close to that) in her eyes. Rusty tells the blonde he’d like to “save ” her by carrying her away, but can’t right now. Then he leaves without asking for her phone number, or giving her his. What the….?
The opening credit sequence — a series of black-and-white photos portraying Dallas and Rusty’s raucous nighttime adventures — is magnificent.
Bottom line: Dallas 362 is a highly assured debut of a new writer-director with a genuine sense of style. Caan’s dialogue is extraordinary at times, and he gets top-notch performances out of everyone. The result is far better than most of the mainstream pics playing at your local plex. Naturaly, given all this, it’s had some difficulty finding its audience.
Here’s the site .
Grabs
8th Avenue and 22nd Street — Sunday, 6.19, 5:45 pm.
1st Street South facing west from Bedford Avenue — Monday, 6.20, 8:40 pm.
Wendy Chamberlain and James Leet, gracious co-owners of Videology (308 Bedford Ave., Brooklyn, NY 11211), easily the hippest and most refined video store in the Williamsburg area — Monday, 6:20, 8:55 pm.
Hands belonging to a certain widely-admired, acrobat-trained actor born in Bristol, England. Letters on matchbook do not signify the initials of the character he portrays in a certain well-known thriller (from which this closeup still is derived) as much as they allude to the character’s ethical-moral state as the film begins.
Most New Yorkers know this, I’m sure, but this world-famous roller coaster at Coney Island is rather small in scale and a bit of a relic. Riding the damn thing seemed pretty thrilling to me, but my hardcore 15 year-old son Dylan says the Cyclone doesn’t cut it alongside the much scarier rides found in today’s extreme amusement parks. Plus it lasts only two minutes (if that). The fare is $5 bucks — it’s worth $3.
Dies For Our Sins
The long-awaited Criterion Collection DVD of Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar hits the shelves on 6.14, and there’s no excuse for not going out and buying this sucker now and keeping it close for the rest of your life.
This is a great, transcendent film because it conveys and seems to truly inhabit that sense of primal serenity and all-knowingness some call God.
Set in rural France, shot in black and white and released in 1966, Au Hasard Balthazar is about the sad life and death of a donkey.
Balthazar is loved by few (a teenager named Marie, played by Anne Wiazemsky, is his most devoted soul-mate), and is mostly treated with cruelty. This poor saintly animal goes through all kinds of hell and indifference. Beaten, worked to the bone, sold and resold, shat upon.
But as critic Jim Hoberman once wrote, the film’s real concern “is the state of being. Crowned with flowers, spooked by firecrackers, struck without cause, Balthazar bears patient witness to all manner of enigmatic human behavior. This expressionless donkey is the most eloquent of creatures — he is pure existence, and his death, in the movie’s transfixing final sequence, conveys the sorrow that all existence shares.”
I’ve seen Bresson’s masterpiece twice — once a year and a half ago at the Nuart, and once in the late ’70s. I remember after my initial viewing sad and heartbreaking it felt, and how I was so turned around by the idea of a donkey being presented as the bearer of our sins — a mute observer, martyr, sufferer.
If it sounds religious to you, then so be it. I know I felt the presence of “God” (a remnant in my head of some kind of sentimental, lamenting, all-penetrating cosmic heart) in this film very clearly.
Absolute masterpieces don’t come down the pike very often. It was voted one of the 20 greatest films of all time by the critics and filmmakers who voted in 2002’s British Film Institute’s SIGHT AND SOUND poll. Film lovers have been extolling its legend for decades.
Bresson wasn’t into manipulating audiences. He began as a painter and was very conscious of unity and precision. He was into pruning down and purifying his films. He would never fake anything. He’s known for austere camerawork (he always used the same 50mm lens, which most closely replicates how the world seems to the naked eye), eschewing theatricality, and making sure his actors never gave “performances.”
Bresson’s best-known classics besides Balthazar are Diary of a Country Priest and Pickpocket. My second favorite Bresson is L’Argent (’83), his final film, made at the age of 81.
Bresson died five and a half years ago, at age 98. There are several easy-to-find Bresson websites, but here’s one of the more thorough.
More Grabs
I don’t know how good this fabled 8th Avenue seafood restaurant is (but I can guess) — what matters here is how cool it looks from the outside.
Bedford Ave. and South 1st Street, looking east — Monday, 6.20, 8:35 pm.
8th Avenue and 19th Street (or so I recall) — Sunday, 6.19, 5:40 pm
What does it matter when this shot was taken? Who cares? Even the slightly off-focus look I was going for didn’t pan out (too soupy-looking) and I almost didn’t run this as a result. But I like that glare effect from the subway car lights.
Why do people flock to Coney Island? It takes forever to get here by subway (just under an hour from Williamsburg) and believe me, it’s not much when you finally arrive. It feels crampled, provincial, unexciting…a ’60s time-capsule park. You’re ready to scoot fifteen or twenty minutes after you get there. Taken Sunday, 6.19, 2:50 pm.
Dining-car art by Claude Gazier (www.claudegazier.com).
Heralding the upcoming release of Das Comeback, which will open in Germany on 9.8.05. It will open in most other European countries on this day or on 9.9. It will also open around this time in Argentina, where it will be called El Luchador (“The Fighter”), according to a director friend from Buenos Aires.
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Can’t decide which performance is better, although I’ve always leaned toward Tina Vitale, her cynical New Jersey moll behind the...
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- 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...
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