Here’s a nice downer-head film to look forward to — Sandra Bullock starring as the alcoholic, money-wasting, totally self-destructive and overweight Grace Metalious, the author of the best-selling novel “Peyton Place” that became a hit movie and then a TV series. I read that recent Vanity Fair story about Metalious and it would appear, judging by what actually happened to the poor woman, that the theme of the film is going to be that fame kills. In other words, Metalious couldn’t handle it. Her marriage didn’t last, she blew most of her earnings, she destroyed her reputation as a reliable writer…all of this mainly due to boozing, which led to her death from cirrhosis in 1964, at age 39. Bullock is co-producing with Carol Baum, (Fly Away Home, Father of the Bride) with a script now being written by Naomi Foner (Running on Empty, Bee Season).
The Spirit of Radio
Robert Altman’s A Prairie Home Companion (Picturehouse, 6.9), based on Garrison Keillor’s radio show with a script by Keillor, is a backstage look at the goings-on during the final broadcast of America’s most celebrated radio show.
The film played Friday night (3.10) at the kickoff of South by Southwest in Austin, and Moises Chiullan, author of HE’s “Arthouse Cowboy” column, was in the audience with his video camera. And he’s sent along some thoughts. Which I’ve refined and reshuffled to some extent.
Prairie Home Companion‘s Lindsay Lohan, Meryl Streep, Robert Altman and Woody Harrelson…not at South by Southwest but last month’s Berlin Film Festival
Altman always lets his actors cut loose according to their own whims and improvs, and the word from February’s Berlin Film Festival, where A Prairie Home Companion had its world premiere, is that the cast — Kevin Kline, John C. Reilly, Meryl Streep, Lily Tomlin, Tommy Lee Jones, Woody Harrelson, Garrison Keillor, Lindsay Lohan, Virginia Madsen — has a good time with it.
I’ll get right to Moises in a second, but first a question that’s been bothering me. Why is it for the last several years that the PHC show and Keillor’s name, even, seem to constantly be about finality, signing off, winding down, bidding farewell? What’s wrong with keeping on and putting more wood on the fire? Is this some kind of death trip?
The flm’s highlights, Chiullan says, “include the radiant singing voice of Meryl Streep, the sharp and acerbic one-liners, and the recalling of the golden age of radio throughout the script.”
The narrative “is part radio show, part real, and the structure is unconventional, to say the least. But the combination works.
“The radio setting and the overlapping, Mamet-esque rambling from various characters immediately brought to mind a Mamet play called The Water Engine. That play began as a radio drama and shifted back and forth from the studio to a conventional stage play in much the same way that Keillor’s characters like Guy Noir (Kevin Kline) and the Dangerous Woman (Virginia Madsen) interweave into the lives of these ‘real’ people performing in a fictionalized version of A Prairie Home Companion.
“Altman’s film is conscious of the fact that radio variety programs have been out of style for decades, as this one always has been, but that’s not all of the point here. The film is basically saying that the passion and humor that used to be is not so out-of-touch as some of us might think.
“One of the first striking things about A Prairie Home Companion is the new, animated, and really snazzy Picturehouse logo.
“The film opens in Mickey’s Dining Car, with voice-over narration by Kline’s Guy Noir. Being a longtime listener of the radio show, I was impressed how undistracting it was having another voice saying the lines usually spoken by Keillor.
“John C. Reilly and Woody Harrelson bounce off one another so well it’s remarkable no one has used them together previously. Their song about bad jokes absolutely kills. There were moments of suspension and then uproarious laughter related to duct tape, Descartes, and Texans who ‘talk funny and whose eyes don’t focus.’
Meryl Streep, Lindsay Lohan
“And Streep lights up the whole room. She’s so ‘on’ and ‘in’…and continues to surprise me every time. There isn’t a moment in the film in which I remotely doubted any of her motivation or found her over-the-top.
“Streep and Lily Tomlin are just as well-matched as Harrelson and Reilly. Their interplay and overlap will be the subject of many rewatchings, since there was no way to absorb it all last night through the laughter.
“Maya Rudolph plays the Stage Manager from Noises Off!-type part well, the sensible link in a chain of chaos, and Tommy Lee Jones provides a wonderfully contrasting role compared to that of his recent turn as Pete in The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada.
“Even Lindsay Lohan shows some decent chops as Streep’s dismissive and withdrawn poet-daughter, Lola.
“So much of the film is symbolic and semiotic in its delivery, and it hits the right notes the whole way through, crackling with electric bits of wit and passion throughout.
South by Southwest director Matt Dentler doing the introductions at Friday night’s event (3.10.06)
“Screenwriter Ken LaZebnik was at last night’s screening, and I wish I could have shook his hand or bought him a beer or six. Few films talk about mortality as much as Prairie Home does and end up reaffirming your desire to get up the next day and change the world somehow rather than consider giving up.”
The video footage is of South by Southwest honcho Matt Dentler introducing Reilly and LaZebnik and bringing them to the stage.
The Less Bondy…
…Daniel Craig turns out to be in Casino Royale (Columbia, 11.17), the better for the franchise and movie culture. Okay? It’s an excellent thing that the fans of the old smoothie-type Bond — tuxedos, constant cocksman, shaken-not-stirred — are giving it to Craig for stepping into his shoes. In a way, their scorn is a badge of honor.
Advocates of sticking with old-school models just because they’re old-school models are never worth anyone’s time. They’re like the old-school Communists who tried to unseat Boris Yeltsin….like the people who said no to Elliot Gould’s Philip Marlowe in The Long Goodbye and that only a dick in the Humphrey Bogart mode would do.
Read Ian Fleming’s “Casino Royale” and Craig will pop into your mind. And good for Paul Haggis and Martin Campbell for keeping that ballsy torture scene (no pun intended).
Daniel Craig in a new still from /Casino Royale
Out with the old and in with the new blood, and good for Craig not being quite six feet tall and having blond hair, ice-blue eyes and a boxer’s nose.
I still haven’t thrown out my suggestion for getting rid of 007 producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael Wilson by kidnapping them, flying them to Thailand and keeping them in a deluxe-accomodation prison there for the next 20 years. That aside, Casino Royale has my vote just for the sake of agitating any and all fans of Diamonds are Forever and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.
But the webmaster at Sony should junk that ancient Dr. No “James Bond theme” music that plays when you click on the Casino Royale site. Talk about sending the absolute worst message imaginable.
Marquee Value
It costs time and money, I’m sure, but how technically difficult can it be to show decent, convincing footage of what Times Square looked like in 1955? Whatever it required, it was too much for director Mary Harron when she was assembling The Notorious Bettie Page (Picturehouse, 4.14).
This is one of those technical-obsession pieces that I write every so often, and it shouldn’t be taken as an early volley against Harron’s film. I’m just one of those guys who can’t help cringing when directors of period films get Manhattan movie- theatre marquees wrong. This is Harron’s small but significant botch in the opening seconds of her ’50s-era biopic.
This famous shot of James Dean in Times Square in 1954 uses roughly the same vantage point as the footage used by director Mary Harron in the opening seconds of The Notorious Bettie Page
She starts with black-and-white newsreel footage of Times Square from a high-up perspective with titles proclaiming “New York City, 1955.” Then a second, lower- angled shot of Times Square from an approximate vantage point of 44th Street, looking north on Broadway. And on the left side we can see the marquee of the legendary Astor threatre, which has the names “Cary Grant,” “Myrna Loy” and “Melvyn Douglas” brightly displayed.
Of course, there’s only one film in which these three actors appeared together — Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, which was reviewed by New York Times critic Bosley Crowther on March 26, 1948. In its heyday the Astor was very strictly a first-run venue, which means, obviously, that Harron’s footage was shot in ’48. And that means she has to go stand in the corner and face the wall.
If I hadn’t brought this up maybe 25 or 30 people in the face of the earth might have spotted this mistake — I realize that. This is the sort of nitpicky issue that flabby- bellied movie buffs with no lives get incensed over. (Although I’d like it understood I’m not coping with either one of these traits.)
Thing is, I respected Harron’s last film, American Psycho, in part for how well she captured those late-1980s details, like hot shots talking in expensive restaurants on U.S. Army walkie-talkie four-pound cell phones.
Famous idiot photo titled “Times Square 1942,” with contradictory evidence screaming at you from three theatre marquees.
I was therefore amazed that Harron had managed to duplicate one of the most famous photo-caption blunders in world photographic history. I’m speaking of that stupid photo you can find online by Googling “New York 1942” and then “images.” You know…the one that clearly shows two 1949 films playing side by side — Carol Reed’s The Third Man and William Wellman’s Battleground — at the Astor and the Victoria theatres?
If Harron had wanted to get her footage right, all she needed to do was hire some NYU CG geek to paste fake marquee letters on the Astor marquee spelling out any 1955 release — The Rose Tattoo, East of Eden…whatever. (I could let Harron slide if the substitute film didn’t actually show at the Astor — there’s a limit to this kind of obsessiveness.)
This would have been a simple cut-and-paste job by today’s standards. Harron’s Astor marquee Blandings footage lasts maybe two or three seconds, not long enough for the eye to notice any technically crude touches. It would have been so simple for some kid to come in and fix it with the most rudimentary software on an Apple laptop.
If it’s any comfort to Harron, Billy Crystal made the same error in his HBO Roger Maris-and-Mickey Mantle film 61. He used a snippet of color footage of Times Square with the wrong film, Mutiny on the Bounty, playing at Leow’s State in the summer of 1961, even though this MGM Marlon Brando film opened in November 1962.
East side of Times Square between 46th and 47th Street in 1962
On the other hand, Mike Nichols got it just right in a scene he shot for Carnal Knowledge (1971) showing Jack Nicholson and Ann Margret in the back of a cab moving through Manhattan. Nichols used rear-projection color footage through the cab’s rear window that caught a glimpse of The Four Horseman of the Apocalypse playing at Leow’s State.
An inauspicious peek at a marquee touting this lousy Glenn Ford film, reviewed by Crowther in March 1962, told film buffs exactly when Nicholson and Ann-Marget’s budding romance was happening, and because it didn’t argue with any title cards (which Nichols didn’t use anyway) the shot was perfectly fine.
Brubaker Tribute
Over 450 Brokeback Mountain loyalists under the leadership of the “Ultimate Brokeback Forum” are incensed over last Sunday’s Best Picture defeat, and have managed to fund an ad in Daily Variety that will drive their point home.
Peter Greyson, who has chaired the campaign at the Dave Cullen site, says that over $17,500 dollars has been raised from around the world, and that the full-page ad [see below] will run in Friday’s issue of Daily Variety.
“The circulation people there tell us the issue is already sold out because the demand is so very high,” Greyson just told me (5:21 pm Eastern). “We just hope the people at Focus and all those involved with the film will see our tribute to them. It has been an all-volunteer effort involving over 200 volunteers.”
A friend from the N.Y. Daily News has sent me the page with all the information, links, visuals, comment. The ringleaders besides Greyson and author/journalist Dave Cullen are John Wells and Linda Andrews.
Their ad will basically be an emotional salute to Ang Lee’s film in the manner of the final moments in Stuart Rosenberg’s Brubaker (1980).
I’m speaking of the finale when prison convicts start slowly clapping in tribute to Robert Redford’s character, who’s been fired as warden for being too much of a political troublemaker. You may have failed in a political way, the cons are saying, but you’re made of the right stuff and we respect what you did.
Gardener in Nairobi
“More than six months after its U.S. release (and two days before Rachel Weisz took home an Oscar), The Constant Gardener finally opened in Kenya, the country which provided the majority of its locations.
“The Fernando Meirelles film opened to almost no public fanfare, and is now showing on exactly one screen in exactly one theater (alongside Zathura and Derailed), in a Nairobi suburb mostly populated by foreign diplomats and UN workers. It’s unlikely that more than a handful of Kenyans will ever see this movie on the big screen, though it has long been available on pirated DVD from the hawkers downtown.
Rachel Weisz, Ralph Fiennes in fernando Meirelles’ The Constant Gardener
“In late February I was invited to a benefit showing of Gardener with the proceeds going to the Constant Gardener Charity, an organization established by the producers of the film to provide assistance in the form of schools, water tanks and other necessities to impoverished residents of Kibera, the sprawling slum located near the heart of both the city and the film. The main draw of this screening was the presence of Constant Gardener actor Pete Postlethwaite and producer Simon Channing.
“The screening and the reception afterwards were sponsored by the British High Commission, which seems a bit surreal given that the film is a stinging critique of British diplomacy, and one in which the British Foreign Ministry (particularly the BHC in Nairobi) is depicted as aiding and abetting evil. It’s a little like the U.S. Embassy sponsoring a showing of Fahrenheit 9/11.
“I wasn’t at this screening but I would have loved to ask British High Commissioner Adam Wood aif his bosses in London were anything like Bill Nighy’s character.
“I sponsored my own showing of the Gardener DVD at my house last January, with the aid of a borrowed LCD projector. The reviews from my guests, all diplomats and aid workers living in Nairobi, were mixed tending to negative.
Somewhere in this photo is the marquee of the former Cameo Cinema in downtown Nairobi
“The aid workers found the Weisz character profoundly annoying and embarrassingly naive, and the diplomats were unable to swallow the love story. I enjoyed the top-shelf acting talent and the visuals, but having read the book I was disappointed to see that hundreds of pages of plot had been excised, including much of the intrigue involving Big Pharma.
“I guess this is understandable given that Mereilles was trying to avoid a three hour-plus running time, but I thought that this removed much of the book’s suspense and jittery paranoia. Mereilles turned a page-turning global-conspiracy potboiler into an often plodding, reflective character study, perhaps on purpose. And this is coming from someone who was head-over-heels over City of God.
“My other problem with the film is that it falls too easily into the old Hollywood paradigms about Africa. As with movies like Cry Freedom or Out of Africa, the African experience is only palatable to Western audiences if filtered through a well-meaning white protagonist. Actual Africans are relegated to supporting roles with few lines, and are not allowed more than two dimensions: they must play one of four acceptable roles: the desperate victim, the noble martyr, the loyal servant or the corrupt official.
“In The Constant Gardener, which has no major African characters, the only African who really registered with me was the great Kenyan actor Sidede Onyulo (also terrific in Nowhere in Africa), who plays the jaded UN pilot and is gone from the story all too quickly.
“The only Western-produced movies I’ve seen recently in which fully-drawn, articulate, complex African characters are put at the center of their own stories are Dirty Pretty Things and Hotel Rwanda. (Okay, so Don Cheadle’s not exactly African and Chiwetel Ejiofor was born in London.)
“Hope all is well stateside. I’m still in shock over the Crash win. That film was shown on another one of our LCD projector movie-nights showings, and my wife and I couldn’t stand the thing. Much unintentional laughter was had at the expense of that movie’s clumsy dialogue and poorly-drawn characters. Maybe you have to be an Angeleno to appreciate it.” — Peter McKenzie, Nairobi, Kenya.
Different Enough?
There’s a slightly longer “Director’s Cut” DVD of Paul Haggis’s Oscar-winning Crash hitting stores on April 4th. It’s just about three minutes longer than the 112-minute version that played in theatres. Extra dabs, clips and brushstrokes “integrated,” as a Lionsgate spokesperson put it this morning.
The two-disc package will have several deleted scenes and the usual featurettes, etc., but it’s too bad the slightly altered film on the DVD won’t be a little more so. A good 15 or 20 minutes longer, say, or maybe even a Wyatt Earp-sized three-hour cut. All those racist Los Angelenos, all those story strands…why not?
Terrence Howard
Or maybe a shorter, tighter version in the vein of Terrence Malick’s re-released version of The New World, maybe with substituted footage or all the same scenes but more streamlined. There’s no such thing as a film that can’t be just a wee bit improved with the right trims or reshufflings. I could go back to just about any article I’ve ever written and improve it with a few edits…easy.
I called Paul Haggis (through his publicist) to discuss the content of the extra stuff, but no callback. So I tried Bobby Moresco, who shared the Best Original Screen- play Oscar with Haggis two nights ago, and he didn’t get back either. I’m getting a distinct feeling that the 115-minute Crash doesn’t mean much in their world right now.
I get it…I do. Lionsgate suddenly has a Best Picture winner with brand-new earning potental so they’re trying to milk it every which way…fine. And I’m always up for a good milking if the package is right.
But if I’m a food critic and a chef says he’s got a whole new menu he’d like me to try, and it turns out the only thing different is that all the dishes have an extra spoonful of steamed carrots, I’m going to feel disappointed.
A special director’s cut of a well-liked movie means a rethink or a recall of some kind. It’s about having another go. My expectation when this happens is a juicier steak or extra mashed potatoes with gravy…something with calories.
The final cover will obviously tout the Best Picture Oscar triumph — this one was roughed out a few weeks ago
I’m sure the extras on the double-disc Crash will be fine, but the film is the matter at hand.
Sidenote: In looking into this story I noticed that three credible sources — Variety, N.Y. Times and DVD Empire — give three different lengths of the original Crash.
Variety‘s Toronto Film Festival review (September 2004) said Haggis’s film ran 112 minutes, A.O. Scott’s 5.6.05 Times review said it runs 107 minutes, and DVD Empire claims a running time of 122 minutes.
Somebody at DVD Empire probably just hit a “2” key when he was aiming for the “1” but that N.Y. Times estimate is…well, odd.
Happiness
Heavy boozing, smoking and “a walking time bomb” lifestyle brought down Jack Wild, the “artful dodger” of Sir Carol Reed’s Oliver (1968). Wild died of cancer at only 53 years of age.
A Matt Dillon interview by the AP’s Jake Coyle ran on 2.21, and of course — naturally! — the piece manages to refer to Dillon’s City of Ghosts, his directorial debut that I saw and quite admired in March of ’03, in terms of its financial failure instead of how atmospherically pungent and dramatically haunting it was as a film. I described it thusly: “A guy on the lam, a sense of existential flotation, an exotic Southeast Asian locale full of offbeat eccentrics, a running away from one’s self only to be faced with a final ethical reckoning — yup, this is Joseph Conrad territory, all right. Dillon has said repeatedly that the screenplay he wrote with Barry Gifford (Lost Highway, Wild at Heart) was inspired by Conrad’s novels (‘Heart of Darkness’, ‘Lord Jim’). They seem to have taken special inspiration from Carol Reed‘s Outcast of the Islands (1952), another Conrad adaptation in which Trevor Howard gave one of his finest performances as a Jimmy Cremming-like character hiding out in a South Seas paradise, a refugee from a morally compromised past. If this sort of film rings your bell, if you liked Phillip Noyce‘s The Quiet American (which Ghosts resembles in certain ways, particularly regarding Jim Denault’s cinematography, which is in the same league as Chris Doyle‘s), if you love Outcast and that whole ball of wax, City of Ghosts will in no way feel like a burn, and may even get to you like it did me.”
The Producers Guild will choose one of the following five groups of producers to receive their Daryl F. Zanuck award, to be presented on 1.22.06: Brokeback Mountain‘s Diana Ossana and James Schamus; Capote‘s Caroline Baron, William Vince and Michael Ohoven; Crash‘s Paul Haggis and Cathy Shulman; Good Night, and Good Luck‘s Grant Heslov, and Walk the Line‘s James Keach and Cathy Konrad. Conventional wisdom says that Producer’s Guild nominations don’t portend anything in terms of AMPAS Best Picture nominations, but I don’t know. I think they might. Apart from its high ranking with the Movie City News critics picks, has Capote been singled out before this announcement as some kind of finalist in the Best Picture blah-dee-blah? Does the exclusion of Munich or A History of Violence mean anything? No? Sure it does.
Nathan Lane and four chorus-line guys performed a funny spoof, about Brokeback Mountain a la “Oklahoma” on Late Night with David Letterman last week. Funny like skits on the “Carol Burnett Show” used to be in the ’70s. Funny if you just sit back and give in to the lame-itude for the sake of seeming like a good sport. But if you think about where Lane is coming from for more than two or three seconds…no, don’t! Then it won’t be funny. And nobody wants to be a sourpuss and not laugh at a venerated funny guy and Tin Pan Alley legend who happens to be a bit of an asshole. But if you take the skit as Lane’s audition for the Oscar-telecast gig, then I guess it was fairly successful.
My best Christmas moment so far was coming upon those carolers on East 3rd Street a few days ago, but my second best moment (and I’m a little ashamed to admit this) was walking around a Wild Oats store in Norwalk, Connecticut, on Saturday afternoon and hearing this impossibly dippy Paul McCartney song playing and starting to quietly hum along. I’m sorry but those McCartney hooks get me, and I always feel like a sap when I cop to this. I also feel Christmassy when this old Beatles chestnut plays…jeez.
Miller’s Crossing
On Thursday afternoon I hitched across the Williamsburg Bridge (the trains didn’t start running again until Friday morning) and then walked up to East Soho to pay a visit to Capote director Bennett Miller.
The idea was mainly to say hello (we’ve been talking since last summer on the phone) and to take stock of the year-end situation, I suppose. Only we didn’t get down to the latter, in part because I got sidetracked by some very cool Dick-and- Perry photos.
Capote director Bennett Miller — 12.22.05, 5:20 pm
And so I didn’t get into Capote‘s primary year-end issues, which, if you ask me, are (a) a strange deficiency of Best Picture heat and (b) a profoundly agonizing Best Actor stand-off happening right now between Capote‘s Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Brokeback Mountain‘s Heath Ledger.
Why would a guest want to bring up a couple of vaguely bothersome issues to his nice-guy host?
It’s not like the movie is anything but a solid success. But more moviegoers should see it, and Oscar approvals are one way of bringing this about. For this to happen the hard fact is that Capote needs to re-ignite a bit. Okay, so it’s bothersome to say this and I’m sorry…but the game is the game is the game.
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Miller, 38, is a relaxed, friendly, quietly reflective sort who’s into listening as much as making himself heard, which right away sets him apart from a lot of filmmakers I’ve run into. And he lives in a spacious, sparsely furnished sixth-floor loft on Lafay- ette Street that feels instantly soothing to walk into.
The moment I did this I succumbed. I said to myself, “Drop it…it’s the late after- noon and it’s cold outside and it’s almost Christmas…forget the hardball and go with the layback.”
And then about halfway into our talk Miller brought out some copies of Richard Avedon’s contact sheets from that 1960 photo session he did with Truman Capote and Clutter-family slayers Perry Smith and Dick Hickock. Amazing images, all.
Clutter-family killer Perry Smith (l., white shirt) and Truman Capote (r., glasses and jacket) during Richard Avedon photo session sometime in early 1960
The photo session is recreated in Capote, of course, and my first reaction to the Real McCoys was frankly one of surprise. The actual Smith seems much more relaxed and even jovial than the way Clifton Collins, Jr. played him in the film. Much less pensive and guarded.
Mark Pellegrino was a fairly good physical choice to play Hickock in Miller’s film, I suppose, but In Cold Blood director Richard Brooks was, I now realize, being kind to Hickock’s legacy by hiring Scott Wilson to play him in that 1967 film. Look at those strangely slanted eyes. That scowl. That crammed-together, misshapen face (a result of a car accident).
Miller showed me these photos when I mentioned I’d never seen them published anywhere except for a couple of straight-on portrait shots of the killers in an old Life magazine.
The real Richard Hickock, also by Avedon
We talked mostly about the things I’ve always loved about Capote apart from Hoffman’s transcendent performance and the general “all” of it.
Particularly Adam Kimmel’s extraordinary widescreen cinematography, and the suggestions of Andrew Wyeth’s landscapes in the Holcomb, Kansas, portions early on.
And Mychael Danna’s music, which I didn’t really get into until I clicked on the Capote website and started listening to a certain loop from the soundtrack over and over again.
Plus we talked a little bit about technical issues and what the real Holcomb, Kansas, has turned into, and when Miller knew he had gotten it right, and what he and Hoffman might be doing in the future, etc.
A good portion of our chat is here in these installments — part #1 and part #2
If I’d been into stirring the pot, I would have wondered aloud why Capote hasn’t caught any serious Best Picture action thus far. This really should have happened, and I’ve been scratching my head about it for the last couple of months.
It wasn’t that long ago that this exquisitely composed Louis Malle film with a fascinating under-vibe (partly about dread and horror, and partly about deep-down fragile emotion) was all but smothered in praise, starting with its early September debut at the Telluride Film Festival.
12.22.05, 5:23 pm
And there’s no missing the fact that it’s currently the third highest-rated film on the thrown-together Movie City News critics’ ten-best list (behind Good Night, and Good Luck and Brokeback Mountain).
I also would have brought up what I wrote a day or two ago in WIRED, which is that Hoffman was the presumptive Best Actor winner from late August to roughly mid-to-late November until Ledger began surging two or three weeks ago, and how I’m torn by these two performances…torn and divided…and so is everyone else.
It’s going to hurt a little bit no matter which one wins, so let’s hope for a replay of the 1968 Best Actress contest that resulted in a tie when The Lion in Winter‘s Katharine Hepburn and Funny Girl‘s Barbra Streisand both took home trophies.
That would be perfect…that would be really nice. And by suggesting this I feel like I’ve gotten myself off the hook a bit.
I haven’t explained what I meant by calling this article “Miller’s Crossing,” and I guess it’s because last year he was mainly the guy who directed that very cool doc called The Cruise five or six years ago, and post-Capote he’s earned passage into a very high-end realm that few directors have known or enjoyed…and the sky’s the limit from here on.
Kong Badness
I don’t want to start off on the wrong foot here. I’m a fan of Peter Jackson’s King Kong…after the 70-minute mark. A modified fan, I should say, because I’m not over-the-moon about it. I liked the rousing CG stuff and the emotional stirrings during the scenes between Kong (i.e., Andy Serkis) and Naomi Watts…but let’s not get carried away.
The point is that this 187-minute movie is full of bits that drive me up the wall, and now that Kong has run into a slowdown at the box-office and I’ve gotten my Jack- son mea culpa out of the way, it’s okay to be cut him down again. I felt a certain muted admiration for Jackson in early December after I’d first seen Kong, and I have to admit it feels more comfortable and natural being in a bash mode.
The once-celebrated, now-being-scrutinized Bronto run sequence in Peter Jackson’s King Kong
How do I vaguely detest thee, Kong? Going from the top…
* Jackson should have included an overture of Max Steiner’s music as a soundtrack-only supplement on the front of the film, to be heard in semi-darkness before the Universal logo and the credits come on, etc. This happened when I first saw Kong at the Academy theatre on the evening of Sunday, 12.4, and Steiner played like gangbusters.
* Captain Englehorn is an Idiot, Part 1: The German-born skipper (Thomas Kretschmann) presumably knows Jack Black’s Carl Denham desperately needs a fetching actress to come along on the voyage and presumably wants Denham to succeed so he’ll get fully paid, and yet the first thing he says when he meets Naomi Watt’s Ann Darrow is to express surprise that she “would take such a risk.”
* The ship is pulling out of the harbor and Adrien Brody’s Jack Driscoll is so keen on getting paid that he doesn’t feel the engines rumbling and the ship moving? He doesn’t say anything to the check-writing Denham as the ship is obviously leaving the wharf?
* Captain Englehorn is an Idiot, Part 2: Since he tells Denham that the first check bounced, it can be assumed that he hasn’t been paid a dime. And yet he’s taking his ship and crew on a long and very expensive sea voyage, trusting that a guy he obviously doesn’t trust will cough up later on.
* That ominous music on the soundtrack and that dumb-ass look of alarm on that actor’s face (is it Evan Parke’s or some other guy’s?) when those bottles of chloroform roll out from the animal cage in the ship’s storage area.
The completely idiotic Capt. Englehorn (Thomas Kretschmann, second from left with hat) contemplating the Big Wall
* All of that prolonged bonding crap between Evan Parke and Jamie Bell, and those mentions of Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”…a complete bore and a waste of time.
* Captain Englehorn is an Idiot, Part 3: As they sail the Indian Ocean he tells Denham he’s going to drop him off at the nearest Asian port since he’s just gotten a radio message that there’s a warrant out for Denham’s arrest…which will make certain that Englehorn will never get paid and will be stuck for the cost of the voyage out of his own pocket.
* Captain Englehorn is an Idiot, Part 4: As they approach Skull Island Engle- horn is told that the depth is getting shallower and shallower, and yet he proceeds right ahead and smashes the ship into the rocks.
* The area of Skull Island protected by the big wall is all rock even though the rest of the island is all prehistoric flora…green, fertile, covered in overgrowth. How does that work exactly? I’ll tell you how it works. Jackson and co-screen- writers Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens decided that the villagers live on a barren rocky peninsula.
* The Skull Island natives are ridiculous gargoyles trying to act as deran- ged and bizarre as possible because Jackson told them to do this. (Being unencumbered by matters of taste and restraint allows for all kinds of creative decisions.) I mean, some of the islanders are obviously white New Zealanders with blue or gray eyes and brown-skin makeup, and some look African-American…and it’s all bullshit.
* A Skull Island native is going to pole-vault from the island to Englehorn’s ship in order to abduct Darrow?
* The Skull Islanders are going to use a sophisticated cranking-crane system made of wood and vines and crude rope in order to lower human sacrificial offerings to Kong over the gorge behind the big wall?. Jackson came up with this idiotic contraption because he didn’t want to copy the sacrifice sequence in Merian C. Cooper’s original film too closely…period.
* The more I think about the Bronto run sequence, the more absurd it seems. This bit was cool the first time and I went with it, yes, but there’s no way those guys running under the bellies and legs of the dinosaurs wouldn’t be ketchup.
* Jackson portrays Kyle Chandler’s Bruce Baxter character as a narcissist and a coward in the early stages of the hunt on Skull Island. His defining act is to return to the ship early after chickenheartedly rationalizing that Darrow is almost certainly dead. And yet he switches gears a half-hour later by convincing Englehorn and a few others to return to the treacherous jungle terrain to help Driscoll and the survivors of Kong’s attack, and they arrive just in time to start shooting at the bugs in the pit.
* Jackson’s two snotty references to the 1933 Merian C. Cooper film. He has Darrow and Baxter say the dialogue from a romantic scene in the ’33 film as a way of saying to the audience, “Listen to that hokey dialogue.” And in Denham’s New York stage show in Act Three he recreates the look of Cooper’s Skull Island char- acters and has them do that bent-over Kong sacrifice dance.
There is no inspiration in the context of the film for this — it’s just another indulgent Peter Jackson wank. And he’s clearly making a point that Cooper’s film is hokey and antiquated, and that his is far more on top of it.
And Yet…
A guy named Steve Clark wrote last week insisting that Kong “is not a master- piece but jeez, I guess that very lack of discipline helps push it to greatness. It is a great film partly because it is so out of control, imperfect and undisciplined.
“My friends think I’m retarded. They said it was all ‘too much’ and ‘too long.’ But if this Kong weren’t too much, something would have been seriously amiss. Or at least routine. Though when I say this all I feel are people wincing at me. I feel like Armond White!
“This film is an orgy of excess and if it weren’t three hours long with too much action, it would be a lesser film. It needs to be too much but only in the right way. I think the movie is a bloated, brilliant fucking mess, but it’s a great film.
“Why? Partly because it goes semi-meta toward the end, critiquing itself, replay- ing itself as a horrible Broadway production; it lashes out at the audience for swallowing it whole.
“But most importantly, its corny old controlling idea works wonderfully. The rela- tionship between Naomi Watts and Kong is a heartbreaker. This is Peter Jack- son’s Apocalypse Now…and it’ll be all downhill from here on. (I’m speaking as a fan who thinks the LOTR films are his Godfather trilogy…sorry.)
“Jack Black = psychotically super-indulgent, obsessive filmmaker = Peter Jackson!”
Decision
Tuesday Trek
The only thing stopping me from seeing Terry Zwigoff’s Art School Confidential at an uptown screening room in Manhattan on Tuesday (12.20) was the transit strike…but of course, it didn’t.
I decided to leg it or hitch it, so I started walking from Montrose and Bushwick around 3:45 pm, and I made it to Sony headquarters at Madison Avenue and 55th Street by 5:15 pm…piece of cake.
And then I walked back with two stops and made it home by 9:30 pm. About 140 blocks, give or take. I wouldn’t like it, but I could do this every day.
It was a little over a mile from my place to the Williamsburg bridge. It was brutally cold, in the mid 20s, and at first I was thinking that I might wimp out. But speed- walking kept me warm and I soon got used to it.
A lot of places claim to sell the world’s greatest burgers but Paul’s Burgers, on the east side of 2nd Avenue just south of St. Mark’s Place, is no pretender.
A dozen or so carolers on East 3rd Street near 1st Avenue, around 9 pm. People watching from their open apartment windows cheered when they finished. The group has no name — they’re just neighborhood locals, and they do this every year.
There were no empty cabs so I thumbed a ride because it can be murder walking over a big river with the icy wind and everything. A couple of guys driving a van for a Lower East Side bakery picked me up and dropped me at 1st Avenue and 3rd street. I also caught a ride over the bridge back to Brooklyn around 9 pm.
Crisis brings out the charity in people, and you can’t do better in a crisis than be in the company of New Yorkers.
The first ride put me ahead of schedule so I stopped for a quick one at Paul’s Bur- gers on 2nd Avenue just south of St. Marks Place.
On the way back on East 3rd Street I came upon a group of Christmas carolers singing “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing.” I took some shots and fell instantly in love with these guys. Others were stopping and, I gathered, having the same reaction. It sounds like a holiday cliche to say this, but it was a truly beautiful moment.
The two guys who picked me up on the Brooklyn side of the Williamsburg Bridge on Tuesday, 12.20.05, around 4:10 pm.
Looking up from northwest corner of Park Avenue and 38th Street — Tuesday, 12.20.05, 4:50 pm.
Big Daddy’s Diner, 239 Park Ave., New York, NY 10017
South-facing facade of Grand Central Station — Tuesday, 12.20.05, 4:45 pm.
Called on the Carpet
The New York Times‘ “Carpetbagger” blogger David Carr ran an item at 8:45 this morning (12.21) titled “Have the Terrorists Won?”
It read, “Munich, which got pounded coming out of the gate, seems to be enjoying a bit of a bounce. The L.A. Times columnist Patrick Goldstein still favors Broke- back, but says that Munich has a shot, in part because people are starting to see the movie instead of just the controversy.”
To which I have two things to say: (1) Munich is a pretty good film that hasn’t a chance because of all the people slamming it for being repetitious and tedious and all the politicos trying to kill it for its views about dealing with terrorism, and (2) Is the Carpetbagger me a “terrorist” and if he is, what the fuck?
I’m guessing that Carr is probably referring to the people who’ve written political attacks on Munich. But on the chance he might have been referring to me, I wrote Carr and said…
“So people taking the pulse of this town and setting their insect antennae to high-sensitivity mode and determining that the general response to Munich will not result in a Best Picture Oscar (and perhaps not even a Best Picture nomination) are ‘terrorists’?
“I get the inference (or I think I do) because you started out with a mention of the Goldstein column, which seemed to mainly address the Hollywood side of the rumpus.
“All I know is that I’m trying to read the situation as clearly as possible. I found Munich to be a pretty good film with a cruddy third act, but more importantly I’ve heard from the get-go that (a) others are less taken with it, (b) some Jewish Academy members are TRULY DOWN ON IT and loathe the political message it’s sending, (c) that the words ‘repetitive’ and ‘self-important’ apply.
“I am also one of many who recoiled in distaste (and continue to recoil in distate) from that obnoxious Time magazine proclamation that Munich, lo and behold, is ‘Spielberg’s Secret Masterpiece.’
“Am I a terrorist-minded observer for — okay, I admit it — chuckling with satisfaction over the news media spectacle of a pseudo-legendary director with a massive ego…a legendary industry figure famous for commanding obeisance gestures from other primates with a mere arching of his eyebrows…being hit and possibly (who knows?) brought down?
Mathieu Kassovitz, Eric Bana in Steven Spielberg’s Munich
“Am I a terrorist at heart because it frankly feels good inside to see Spielberg, a gifted director but also, his few excellent films aside, the most successful hack in Hollywood history…a man of obviously limited intellectual vigor with more money than God being tackled and taken down by guys in the trench? That’s a bad thing?
“We’re living in a very skewed, cynical and twisted world.
“All I am, really, is a man of constant sorrow whose days are sometimes briefly brightened when Munich implodings happen…and they don’t happen enough.
“This reasonably good movie has never been Oscar calibre, not really…and I hate it when people reflexively bend over to smooch Spielberg’s ass.
“Munich is a fairly thoughtful, passably good film that says the right thing, agreed, but in a lot of journalist minds it has been a big presumptive Oscar pick from the get-go because it’s a Steven Spielberg film, because the subject is ‘important’ (i.e., about the fate of Israel), and above all because it’s being released in late December.
“And now there’s a backswing in its favor because people are taking a second look and…what?…feeling sorry for it because ‘terrorists’ have been over-zealous in their attacks?
Geoffrey Rush, Bana
“I guess I can confess the truth now. I’m actually a triple agent working for Univer- sal. The plan all along was to try and create a sympathy backlash for Munich by people like calling a spade a spade and predicting its downfall.
“Like the plan hatched by Marlene Dietrich to save Tyrone Power in Witness for the Prosecution, I told my Universal brown-bag employer (a guy I met after-hours in an underground garage in Century City) just after that disastrous Time cover that the ony way out would be for bloggers like myself to over-play the ‘Munich is toast’ card…only then would industry and media opinion eventually swing back in its favor.”
New Logo
It used to be Lions Gate — now it’s LIONSGATE. The change was announced last week at a pleasant press breakfast held at Lion’s Gate…I mean, LIONSGATE headquarters in Santa Monica.
Kong Shortfall
“I am from Mexico and the King Kong opened here last Friday. I went to see it on Saturday and expected a big line in a theater were you usually have to wait about an hour in line if you want to get a good seat for a tentpole flick. Anyway, I arrived an hour early and only half the seats had been sold, with the theater opening its doors with no line at all about half hour before the movie started.
“Eventually, I have to say, the theater did fill up, but it was kind of weird to see such a big movie performing like this in that theater during opening weekend.
“I’ve been kind of testing friends of mine about their eagerness to see this movie and the consensus is pretty discouraging. Most of my female friends just don’t care about it. And while some guys are certainly excited, most of them said that they would see it because it was the movie for the holidays, meaning that I got a vibe leaning more towards the likes of having to watch the movie instead of just wanting to.” — Pepe Ruiloba
Del Mar Nation
“I agree with your thoughts on Ennis Del Mar-ism. I’ve been and still am to a certain degree guilty of it, staying in a job that I like but not risking failure with something that I love. But I disagree that straight couples or straight people in general won’t be able to relate to this movie.
“The same thing that Ennis Del Mar wasn’t able to overcome in the movie is the same reason I think the general population might not want to see this movie or relate to it. Fear. Fear of the unknown. Fear of caring about or relating to people who engage in acts seen as a sin in the eyes of God.
“But the theme of love is universal. Our search for meaningful relationships is universal. We all do it. Sometimes searching our whole lives. And I’d venture to say that most of us have been in the position of one or both of these characters; loving someone so wholly who couldn’t love you back or being in a relationship with someone who you couldn’t give what they wanted. Everyone has loved. And anyone who denies it is a liar.
“The thing that hit me hardest and what grieved me the most, though, is how legitimate I felt Ennis Del Mar’s fear actually was. The flashback sequence of him as a child seeing what he saw. Living in a time when being gay was kept totally in the closet. Not to mention being in Bumblefuck, Wyoming, where I’m sure there isn’t much if any of a gay community. And being in a place where people STILL aren’t too accepting of that lifestyle.
“My sadness came not because I can personally relate (I’m a straight white male), but because I feel empathy for people who have to live with this kind of conflict. Growing up to believe it’s wrong and yet still feeling it. Feeling such a strong connection for someone but being afraid you’ll be outcast or worse beaten or killed. This shit happens for real. Can we say Matthew Shepard just to name one?
“And it’s not fair. What do I have to deal with being a white, heterosexual, middle-class male? Practically nothing. I can love who I want to. I won’t be judged by the color of my skin or who I choose to have sex with. I won’t be compromised because I’m female. I’m priveleged. But that doesn’t mean I think it’s right and don’t feel or think about the people who aren’t.
“If people can get over their own fears relating to homosexuality and put those aside, and to see the movie for what it really is — a tragic love story — then they can easily relate to the themes in this movie and be moved by it.” — Josh Bihary
“p.s.: I think the Brokeback Mountain numbers speak for themselves and I hope this movie does well and gets the support it deserves come Oscar time. Super high per screen averages over two weekends. $2 million from 69 screens! That’s pretty impressive if you ask me.
“I personally went to see it Sunday evening in Seattle and at the Egyptian theater for the 7pm show the line was literally down the block and around the corner. We went to the other theater it was playing at, the Harvard Exit, and immediately got in line. Within 15 minutes, the line was nearly as long.
“I even saw older folks in line as well. If it can keep this kind of interest up, it will easily make its money back and then some.”
Grabs
Former Hollywood Elsewhere columnist Jett Wells, a senior at Brookline High Schhol, during track meet in indoor Roxbury track stadium — Sunday, 12.18.05, 1:15 pm.
Poinsettias on front porch area of Le Pain Quotidien at Melrose and Westbourne
The great Werner Herzog (Grizzly Man, The White Diamond) during chat at Director’s Guild last Friday, 12.16.05, 12:45 pm.
I don’t want to start off on the wrong foot here. I’m a fan of Peter Jackson’s King Kong…after the 70-minute mark. A modified fan, I should say, because I’m not over-the-moon about it. I liked the rousing CG stuff and the emotional stirrings during the scenes between Kong (i.e., Andy Serkis) and Naomi Watts…but let’s not get carried away.
The point is that this 187-minute movie is full of bits that drive me up the wall, and now that Kong has run into a slowdown at the box-office and I’ve gotten my Jack- son mea culpa out of the way, it’s okay to be cut him down again. I felt a certain muted admiration for Jackson in early December after I’d first seen Kong, and I have to admit it feels more comfortable and natural being in a bash mode.
The once-celebrated, now-being-scrutinized Bronto run sequence in Peter Jackson’s King Kong
How do I vaguely detest thee, Kong? Going from the top…
* Jackson should have included an overture of Max Steiner’s music as a soundtrack-only supplement on the front of the film, to be heard in semi-darkness before the Universal logo and the credits come on, etc. This happened when I first saw Kong at the Academy theatre on the evening of Sunday, 12.4, and Steiner played like gangbusters.
* Captain Englehorn is an Idiot, Part 1: The German-born skipper (Thomas Kretschmann) presumably knows Jack Black’s Carl Denham desperately needs a fetching actress to come along on the voyage and presumably wants Denham to succeed so he’ll get fully paid, and yet the first thing he says when he meets Naomi Watt’s Ann Darrow is to express surprise that she “would take such a risk.”
* The ship is pulling out of the harbor and Adrien Brody’s Jack Driscoll is so keen on getting paid that he doesn’t feel the engines rumbling and the ship moving? He doesn’t say anything to the check-writing Denham as the ship is obviously leaving the wharf?
* Captain Englehorn is an Idiot, Part 2: Since he tells Denham that the first check bounced, it can be assumed that he hasn’t been paid a dime. And yet he’s taking his ship and crew on a long and very expensive sea voyage, trusting that a guy he obviously doesn’t trust will cough up later on.
* That ominous music on the soundtrack and that dumb-ass look of alarm on that actor’s face (is it Evan Parke’s or some other guy’s?) when those bottles of chloroform roll out from the animal cage in the ship’s storage area.
The completely idiotic Capt. Englehorn (Thomas Kretschmann, second from left with hat) contemplating the Big Wall
* All of that prolonged bonding crap between Evan Parke and Jamie Bell, and those mentions of Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”…a complete bore and a waste of time.
* Captain Englehorn is an Idiot, Part 3: As they sail the Indian Ocean he tells Denham he’s going to drop him off at the nearest Asian port since he’s just gotten a radio message that there’s a warrant out for Denham’s arrest…which will make certain that Englehorn will never get paid and will be stuck for the cost of the voyage out of his own pocket.
* Captain Englehorn is an Idiot, Part 4: As they approach Skull Island Engle- horn is told that the depth is getting shallower and shallower, and yet he proceeds right ahead and smashes the ship into the rocks.
* The area of Skull Island protected by the big wall is all rock even though the rest of the island is all prehistoric flora…green, fertile, covered in overgrowth. How does that work exactly? I’ll tell you how it works. Jackson and co-screen- writers Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens decided that the villagers live on a barren rocky peninsula.
* The Skull Island natives are ridiculous gargoyles trying to act as deran- ged and bizarre as possible because Jackson told them to do this. (Being unencumbered by matters of taste and restraint allows for all kinds of creative decisions.) I mean, some of the islanders are obviously white New Zealanders with blue or gray eyes and brown-skin makeup, and some look African-American…and it’s all bullshit.
* A Skull Island native is going to pole-vault from the island to Englehorn’s ship in order to abduct Darrow?
* The Skull Islanders are going to use a sophisticated cranking-crane system made of wood and vines and crude rope in order to lower human sacrificial offerings to Kong over the gorge behind the big wall?. Jackson came up with this idiotic contraption because he didn’t want to copy the sacrifice sequence in Merian C. Cooper’s original film too closely…period.
* The more I think about the Bronto run sequence, the more absurd it seems. This bit was cool the first time and I went with it, yes, but there’s no way those guys running under the bellies and legs of the dinosaurs wouldn’t be ketchup.
* Jackson portrays Kyle Chandler’s Bruce Baxter character as a narcissist and a coward in the early stages of the hunt on Skull Island. His defining act is to return to the ship early after chickenheartedly rationalizing that Darrow is almost certainly dead. And yet he switches gears a half-hour later by convincing Englehorn and a few others to return to the treacherous jungle terrain to help Driscoll and the survivors of Kong’s attack, and they arrive just in time to start shooting at the bugs in the pit.
* Jackson’s two snotty references to the 1933 Merian C. Cooper film. He has Darrow and Baxter say the dialogue from a romantic scene in the ’33 film as a way of saying to the audience, “Listen to that hokey dialogue.” And in Denham’s New York stage show in Act Three he recreates the look of Cooper’s Skull Island char- acters and has them do that bent-over Kong sacrifice dance.
There is no inspiration in the context of the film for this — it’s just another indulgent Peter Jackson wank. And he’s clearly making a point that Cooper’s film is hokey and antiquated, and that his is far more on top of it.
And Yet…
A guy named Steve Clark wrote last week insisting that Kong “is not a master- piece but jeez, I guess that very lack of discipline helps push it to greatness. It is a great film partly because it is so out of control, imperfect and undisciplined.
“My friends think I’m retarded. They said it was all ‘too much’ and ‘too long.’ But if this Kong weren’t too much, something would have been seriously amiss. Or at least routine. Though when I say this all I feel are people wincing at me. I feel like Armond White!
“This film is an orgy of excess and if it weren’t three hours long with too much action, it would be a lesser film. It needs to be too much but only in the right way. I think the movie is a bloated, brilliant fucking mess, but it’s a great film.
“Why? Partly because it goes semi-meta toward the end, critiquing itself, replay- ing itself as a horrible Broadway production; it lashes out at the audience for swallowing it whole.
“But most importantly, its corny old controlling idea works wonderfully. The rela- tionship between Naomi Watts and Kong is a heartbreaker. This is Peter Jack- son’s Apocalypse Now…and it’ll be all downhill from here on. (I’m speaking as a fan who thinks the LOTR films are his Godfather trilogy…sorry.)
“Jack Black = psychotically super-indulgent, obsessive filmmaker = Peter Jackson!”
Decision
Tuesday Trek
The only thing stopping me from seeing Terry Zwigoff’s Art School Confidential at an uptown screening room in Manhattan on Tuesday (12.20) was the transit strike…but of course, it didn’t.
I decided to leg it or hitch it, so I started walking from Montrose and Bushwick around 3:45 pm, and I made it to Sony headquarters at Madison Avenue and 55th Street by 5:15 pm…piece of cake.
And then I walked back with two stops and made it home by 9:30 pm. About 140 blocks, give or take. I wouldn’t like it, but I could do this every day.
It was a little over a mile from my place to the Williamsburg bridge. It was brutally cold, in the mid 20s, and at first I was thinking that I might wimp out. But speed- walking kept me warm and I soon got used to it.
A lot of places claim to sell the world’s greatest burgers but Paul’s Burgers, on the east side of 2nd Avenue just south of St. Mark’s Place, is no pretender.
A dozen or so carolers on East 3rd Street near 1st Avenue, around 9 pm. People watching from their open apartment windows cheered when they finished. The group has no name — they’re just neighborhood locals, and they do this every year.
There were no empty cabs so I thumbed a ride because it can be murder walking over a big river with the icy wind and everything. A couple of guys driving a van for a Lower East Side bakery picked me up and dropped me at 1st Avenue and 3rd street. I also caught a ride over the bridge back to Brooklyn around 9 pm.
Crisis brings out the charity in people, and you can’t do better in a crisis than be in the company of New Yorkers.
The first ride put me ahead of schedule so I stopped for a quick one at Paul’s Bur- gers on 2nd Avenue just south of St. Marks Place.
On the way back on East 3rd Street I came upon a group of Christmas carolers singing “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing.” I took some shots and fell instantly in love with these guys. Others were stopping and, I gathered, having the same reaction. It sounds like a holiday cliche to say this, but it was a truly beautiful moment.
The two guys who picked me up on the Brooklyn side of the Williamsburg Bridge on Tuesday, 12.20.05, around 4:10 pm.
Looking up from northwest corner of Park Avenue and 38th Street — Tuesday, 12.20.05, 4:50 pm.
Big Daddy’s Diner, 239 Park Ave., New York, NY 10017
South-facing facade of Grand Central Station — Tuesday, 12.20.05, 4:45 pm.
Called on the Carpet
The New York Times‘ “Carpetbagger” blogger David Carr ran an item at 8:45 this morning (12.21) titled “Have the Terrorists Won?”
It read, “Munich, which got pounded coming out of the gate, seems to be enjoying a bit of a bounce. The L.A. Times columnist Patrick Goldstein still favors Broke- back, but says that Munich has a shot, in part because people are starting to see the movie instead of just the controversy.”
To which I have two things to say: (1) Munich is a pretty good film that hasn’t a chance because of all the people slamming it for being repetitious and tedious and all the politicos trying to kill it for its views about dealing with terrorism, and (2) Is the Carpetbagger me a “terrorist” and if he is, what the fuck?
I’m guessing that Carr is probably referring to the people who’ve written political attacks on Munich. But on the chance he might have been referring to me, I wrote Carr and said…
“So people taking the pulse of this town and setting their insect antennae to high-sensitivity mode and determining that the general response to Munich will not result in a Best Picture Oscar (and perhaps not even a Best Picture nomination) are ‘terrorists’?
“I get the inference (or I think I do) because you started out with a mention of the Goldstein column, which seemed to mainly address the Hollywood side of the rumpus.
“All I know is that I’m trying to read the situation as clearly as possible. I found Munich to be a pretty good film with a cruddy third act, but more importantly I’ve heard from the get-go that (a) others are less taken with it, (b) some Jewish Academy members are TRULY DOWN ON IT and loathe the political message it’s sending, (c) that the words ‘repetitive’ and ‘self-important’ apply.
“I am also one of many who recoiled in distaste (and continue to recoil in distate) from that obnoxious Time magazine proclamation that Munich, lo and behold, is ‘Spielberg’s Secret Masterpiece.’
“Am I a terrorist-minded observer for — okay, I admit it — chuckling with satisfaction over the news media spectacle of a pseudo-legendary director with a massive ego…a legendary industry figure famous for commanding obeisance gestures from other primates with a mere arching of his eyebrows…being hit and possibly (who knows?) brought down?
Mathieu Kassovitz, Eric Bana in Steven Spielberg’s Munich
“Am I a terrorist at heart because it frankly feels good inside to see Spielberg, a gifted director but also, his few excellent films aside, the most successful hack in Hollywood history…a man of obviously limited intellectual vigor with more money than God being tackled and taken down by guys in the trench? That’s a bad thing?
“We’re living in a very skewed, cynical and twisted world.
“All I am, really, is a man of constant sorrow whose days are sometimes briefly brightened when Munich implodings happen…and they don’t happen enough.
“This reasonably good movie has never been Oscar calibre, not really…and I hate it when people reflexively bend over to smooch Spielberg’s ass.
“Munich is a fairly thoughtful, passably good film that says the right thing, agreed, but in a lot of journalist minds it has been a big presumptive Oscar pick from the get-go because it’s a Steven Spielberg film, because the subject is ‘important’ (i.e., about the fate of Israel), and above all because it’s being released in late December.
“And now there’s a backswing in its favor because people are taking a second look and…what?…feeling sorry for it because ‘terrorists’ have been over-zealous in their attacks?
Geoffrey Rush, Bana
“I guess I can confess the truth now. I’m actually a triple agent working for Univer- sal. The plan all along was to try and create a sympathy backlash for Munich by people like calling a spade a spade and predicting its downfall.
“Like the plan hatched by Marlene Dietrich to save Tyrone Power in Witness for the Prosecution, I told my Universal brown-bag employer (a guy I met after-hours in an underground garage in Century City) just after that disastrous Time cover that the ony way out would be for bloggers like myself to over-play the ‘Munich is toast’ card…only then would industry and media opinion eventually swing back in its favor.”
New Logo
It used to be Lions Gate — now it’s LIONSGATE. The change was announced last week at a pleasant press breakfast held at Lion’s Gate…I mean, LIONSGATE headquarters in Santa Monica.
Kong Shortfall
“I am from Mexico and the King Kong opened here last Friday. I went to see it on Saturday and expected a big line in a theater were you usually have to wait about an hour in line if you want to get a good seat for a tentpole flick. Anyway, I arrived an hour early and only half the seats had been sold, with the theater opening its doors with no line at all about half hour before the movie started.
“Eventually, I have to say, the theater did fill up, but it was kind of weird to see such a big movie performing like this in that theater during opening weekend.
“I’ve been kind of testing friends of mine about their eagerness to see this movie and the consensus is pretty discouraging. Most of my female friends just don’t care about it. And while some guys are certainly excited, most of them said that they would see it because it was the movie for the holidays, meaning that I got a vibe leaning more towards the likes of having to watch the movie instead of just wanting to.” — Pepe Ruiloba
Del Mar Nation
“I agree with your thoughts on Ennis Del Mar-ism. I’ve been and still am to a certain degree guilty of it, staying in a job that I like but not risking failure with something that I love. But I disagree that straight couples or straight people in general won’t be able to relate to this movie.
“The same thing that Ennis Del Mar wasn’t able to overcome in the movie is the same reason I think the general population might not want to see this movie or relate to it. Fear. Fear of the unknown. Fear of caring about or relating to people who engage in acts seen as a sin in the eyes of God.
“But the theme of love is universal. Our search for meaningful relationships is universal. We all do it. Sometimes searching our whole lives. And I’d venture to say that most of us have been in the position of one or both of these characters; loving someone so wholly who couldn’t love you back or being in a relationship with someone who you couldn’t give what they wanted. Everyone has loved. And anyone who denies it is a liar.
“The thing that hit me hardest and what grieved me the most, though, is how legitimate I felt Ennis Del Mar’s fear actually was. The flashback sequence of him as a child seeing what he saw. Living in a time when being gay was kept totally in the closet. Not to mention being in Bumblefuck, Wyoming, where I’m sure there isn’t much if any of a gay community. And being in a place where people STILL aren’t too accepting of that lifestyle.
“My sadness came not because I can personally relate (I’m a straight white male), but because I feel empathy for people who have to live with this kind of conflict. Growing up to believe it’s wrong and yet still feeling it. Feeling such a strong connection for someone but being afraid you’ll be outcast or worse beaten or killed. This shit happens for real. Can we say Matthew Shepard just to name one?
“And it’s not fair. What do I have to deal with being a white, heterosexual, middle-class male? Practically nothing. I can love who I want to. I won’t be judged by the color of my skin or who I choose to have sex with. I won’t be compromised because I’m female. I’m priveleged. But that doesn’t mean I think it’s right and don’t feel or think about the people who aren’t.
“If people can get over their own fears relating to homosexuality and put those aside, and to see the movie for what it really is — a tragic love story — then they can easily relate to the themes in this movie and be moved by it.” — Josh Bihary
“p.s.: I think the Brokeback Mountain numbers speak for themselves and I hope this movie does well and gets the support it deserves come Oscar time. Super high per screen averages over two weekends. $2 million from 69 screens! That’s pretty impressive if you ask me.
“I personally went to see it Sunday evening in Seattle and at the Egyptian theater for the 7pm show the line was literally down the block and around the corner. We went to the other theater it was playing at, the Harvard Exit, and immediately got in line. Within 15 minutes, the line was nearly as long.
“I even saw older folks in line as well. If it can keep this kind of interest up, it will easily make its money back and then some.”
Grabs
Former Hollywood Elsewhere columnist Jett Wells, a senior at Brookline High Schhol, during track meet in indoor Roxbury track stadium — Sunday, 12.18.05, 1:15 pm.
Poinsettias on front porch area of Le Pain Quotidien at Melrose and Westbourne
The great Werner Herzog (Grizzly Man, The White Diamond) during chat at Director’s Guild last Friday, 12.16.05, 12:45 pm.
Audio chat will run on Elsewhere Live Thursday evening at 5 pm Pacific, and reside thereafter in the archives.
Munich Shortfall
I’m not trying to be a hard-ass for the sake of being a hard-ass, but I can’t get on the Oscar boat for Steven Spielberg’s Munich (Universal, 12.23).
It’s a pretty good movie, but the Best Picture hoo-hah seems a tiny bit forced given what this film truly is in the light of day. If you ask me those prognosticators who’ve already said “this is it!” are conning themselves.
One of the Black September hostage-takers during the actual 1972 Munich Olympic Games standoff
Directed by Spielberg and written (for the most part) by Tony Kushner and Eric Roth, Munich is a longish (160 minutes), thoughtful drama about Israel’s revenge campaign against the perpetrators of the 1972 Munich Olympic Games killings of Israeli atheletes. It’s strong, meaningful and well-intended…but I don’t get all the jumping up and down.
I’m talking about the proclamations about it being the new Best Picture front-run- ner. It’s in the running, I guess, but it sure as shit is no shoo-in.
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I spoke last night to a guy who’ll be voting this Saturday with the L.A. Film Critics, and we had both just seen Munich and were talking about the Best Picture Oscar contest, and he said, “I don’t know if [Munich] will even get nominated.”
He may have been overly dismissive, okay, but any seasoned film guy making such a statement should give you a hint about what’s going on here.
I felt the euphoric current at the DGA theatre last year after seeing Million Dollar Baby — I was levitating — but nothing like this kicked in last night inside theatre #5 at the AMC Century City.
Munich wants first and foremost to say something earnest about the legacy of political killing. It’s a movie that doesn’t quite cry out for peace, but is clearly asking for it. It connects here and there in short bursts, but it mainly achieves a general mezzo-mezzo effect of “okay, good point, we get it.”
Which is why I don’t get the effusive praise from Time‘s Richard Schickel and Fox 411’s Roger Friedman and what I presume will be an oncoming tide of kiss-assers …the Spielberg kowtow brigade looking to show obeisance before power.
David Poland was more measured in his “Hot Button” reaction on Monday night, but he still believes from a hard-nosed realpolitik standpoint that Munich is the presumptive Best Picture winner, and that’s just wrong. Perhaps not inaccurate, but dead fucking “wrong” because Best Picture Oscars shouldn’t go to good movies that say the right thing, etc. but don’t inspire major passion.
Really exceptional movies always get people deep down in one way or another. They provoke, excite…make you choke up. They almost always deliver some kind of intrigue that usually builds and gains upon reflection. But I was not so moved last night.
I didn’t conduct a poll in theatre #5 but I could “feel the room” as the film unspooled and I’d be surprised if Munich aroused any go-for-broke fervor. But I’ll bet every last critic who saw it last night, if you were to pop the question, would say it’s a “good film” or “very strong” or “important.”
Steven Spielberg conferring with Eric Bana (shades) during last summer’s shooting of Munich
And it is that. Munich is a smart and stirring ride. It’s still with me this morning, still pinging around in my rib cage…and yes, I respect where it’s coming from and how Spielberg has organized the journey, for the most part.
And yes, of course, I agree with and support what Munich is saying about the rotten karma that comes out of any act of murder.
Munich is saying that however well justified or rationalized those revenge killings may have been, the air was still befouled and the spiritual effects upon three of the Mossad team — sensitive Israeli assassins played by Eric Bana, Mathieu Kosso- vitz and Ciaran Hinds — were disturbing and unsettling.
(Honestly? I felt almost relieved that two other guys on the team — Daniel Craig’s character and some older guy — don’t seem to pay the price as much. I don’t know why exactly, but I was vaguely comforted by these two being hardcore enough to just do the friggin’ job sans guilt trips.)
As a man with two sons, as a film critic, as a movie fiend…I side with any movie that says “killing is bad” or “killing others…even those who may deserve to die …will let loose a virus in your soul.”
But Munich rarely rises above the level of being dutiful, thoughtful and morally correct. All it is, really, is a sprawling here-and-there procedural with a gathering sense of moral disquiet. That’s a fine and respectable thing, but it doesn’t exactly set off tremors or firecrackers.
Eric Bana, Geoffrey Rush
Michael Lonsdale (whose performance as the investigator in Fred Zinneman’s The Day of the Jackal is one of my all-time favorites) is the best element in Munich. I also quite enjoyed the performance by Mathieu Almaric (last seen in Kings and Queen) as Lonsdale’s churlish son.
There is hoopla over Munich because it’s on the cover of this week’s Time and because the Best Picture situation is very much in flux and everyone’s looking for another Million Dollar Baby to sweep them off their feet.
I can sense a psychological eagerness to consider an end-of-the-year Spielberg movie about the ethical costs and karma of revenge…about the quandaries facing Jews and anti-Zionists in the Middle East as their conflict persists. Journos are primed because it’s that time of year and this is Spielberg-getting-all-morally- earnest-in-December and because everyone’s been saying “Munich is coming, Munich is coming” since last spring.
And everyone wants to savor Spielberg’s second big-statement movie about what good people have done when Jews have been killed because they’re Jews…killed by haters, racists, Nazis, anti-Zionists.
Oskar Schindler did what he did in Schindler’s List and became known to the audi- ence (as he had to his biographers) as a good, compassionate, peculiar, complex man. And the Mossad team led by Eric Bana are reasonably decent guys who go out and do what they do, and the virus of murder and retribution gets into their hearts and systems and they begin to pay the price.
And poor Eric Bana’s character gets the worst of it because he finds it hard to concentrate on making love to his lusciously sexy wife in their Brooklyn apartment because he can’t get those images and sounds of the massacre at the Munich airport in ’72 out of his head…images and sounds he absorbed from TV coverage because he wasn’t there.
I’m not trying to be a smart-ass, but this bizarre sex scene reminded me a tiny bit of Woody Allen’s Alvy Singer not making love to Carol Kane in Annie Hall because he can’t stop talking about the Kennedy assassination and the Warren Report.
Is Munich profound? Is there anything earth-shaking here? In what way does this film step out and grab you by the shirt collar and say, “Wake up!” In what way does it rock anyone’s world in terms of technique, even?
Okay, it feels in some ways like a ’70s film…but that’s not making me shudder or leap out of my seat as I acknowledge this.
The most riveting portions, as you might expect, are about how the killings of the members and supporters of the Munich operation (the core group was known as “Black September”) are carried out, and what goes wrong. The strongest happen early on — a killing in Rome and then another in Paris, which involves a family man and his daughter.
There’s a particularly effective portion involving a pretty woman at a London hotel who gets briefly involved with Bana and Hinds, and a killing results, and then another killing. I don’t want to spoil but the whole cause-and-effect sequence is both sad and shocking.
Tony Kushner’s script gives each Doubting Thomas character a speech just as he starts crumbling, or just before fate is about to take a hand. There’s a certain wordy literalness going on here that isn’t quite as effective as Spielberg and Kushner would like it to be.
Munich ends in New York City with a long shot of a certain downtown landmark. A friend feels this shot was overdoing things a bit, but at least Spielberg doesn’t go in for a closeup, and the CG image is quite realisitic and haunting.
I have gotten to the point where Janusz Kaminski’s cinematography is starting to blatantly turn me off. He has become the one dp whose work really and truly irri- tates me.
Every film Kaminski has shot for Spielberg — War of the Worlds, The Terminal, Catch Me If You Can, Minority Report, A.I., Saving Private Ryan, Amistad and now Munich — has looked more or less the same to me, regardless of the theme or mood. I’m referring to the Kaminski palette of slightly desaturated color, a slightly misty soft-focus look, starchy white light flooding through windows during daytime scenes, a lack of sharpness, and a bizarre fondness for grain.
I think that calling this film Munich was a little bit of a chickenshit move. It should have simply been called Vengeance . I realize that the “Vengeance” book it’s partly based upon has blemishes against it, but vengeance is what this movie is primarily about, and Spielberg should have just copped to that.
Next Year’s Balloon
Here are some initial calls about next year’s Ocar contenders. I’d like to hear from anyone who’s read the scripts or can pass along versions of the scripts to yours truly…whatever. I just think it’s time to start looking ahead and planning ahead, etc.
Thanks to Canadian correspondent and rabid script-hound Jean-Francois Allaire for starting me on this jag…
Best Picture: The Departed (Warner Brothers); Babel (Paramount); The Good Shepherd (Universal Pictures); Southland Tales (Universal); Marie Antoinette (Columbia Pictures); The Pursuit of Happyness (Columbia Pictures); Breaking and Entering (The Weinstein Co.); All The King’s Men (Columbia Pictures); A Good Year (20th Century Fox); Stranger Than Fiction (Columbia).
Martin Scorsese, Matt Damon on the set of The Departed
Best Director: Steve Zaillan (All The King’s Men); Anthony Minghella (Breaking and Entering); Martin Scorsese (The Departed); Steven Soderbergh (The Good German); Ridley Scott (A Good Year); Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (Babel); Marc Forster (Stranger Than Fiction); Richard Kelly (Southland Tales).
Best Actor: Will Smith (The Pursuit of Happyness); Matt Damon (The Good Shepherd); Jude Law (Breaking and Entering); Sean Penn (All The King’s Men); Brad Pitt (Babel).
Best Actress: Cate Blanchett (The Good German or Babel ); Maggie Gyllenhaal (Stranger Than Fiction)….need more!
Best Supporrting Actor: Jack Nicholson (The Departed); Hugh Grant (American Dreamz); Gael Garcia Bernal (Babel); Albert Finney (A Good Year); Jamie Foxx (Dreamgirls)
Best Supporting Actress: Zip…anyone?
Best Original Screenplay: Richard Kelly (Southland Tales); Paul Weitz (American Dreamz); Eric Roth (The Good Shepherd); Anthony Minghella (Breaking and Entering).
Best Adapted Screenplay : Sofia Coppola (Marie Antoinette).
Rundown
The first high-profile award announcements will come this Saturday afternoon from the Los Angeles Film Critics, with the final calls starting to leak out sometime around 1 pm or 2 pm.
The National Board of Review — that odd-smelling, Manhattan-based, awards- dispensing group made up of mostly weirdos and wackos (with the noteworthy exception of respected Columbia film professor and scholar Annette Insdorf) would have been first — i.e., today — but the group has delayed their announcements until next Monday, 12.12, due to some omissions on their initially mailed-out ballot.
On the same day the New York Film Critics Circle will announce their picks (expected a final decision around 1 pm Eastern), and since the NYFCC is roughly eight or nine times more respected than the National Board of Review (or is that eighty or ninety times?), the likelihood is that reporters and Oscar assesors will pay even less attention to the NBR winners than usual.
The very next day (Tuesday, 12.13) the Golden Globe nominations will be announced. These noms will be a very big moment for Diane Keaton and The Family Stone…I hope, I hope. And let’s hope that Terrence Howard (Hustle & Flow), bless him, hangs in there as a Best Actor in a Drama nominee.
I don’t have the dates for all the other critics groups but many of them will start to weigh in next week also, or very soon after. Critics groups from Boston, San Francisco, Chicago, Miami, San Diego, Seattle, etc.
Then it’s Christmas and New Year’s and the annual depression and suicide surge that happens ever year, and then…well, here’s the schedule:
* Writers Guild of America and Producers Guild nominations: Wednesday, 1.4.06
* Screen Actors Guild and Directors Guild nominations: Thursday, 1.5.06.
* BFCA Awards: Monday, 1.9.06
* Golden Globe Awards: Monday, 1.16.06
* Directors Guild Awards: Saturday, 1.28.06
* Screen Actors Guild awards: Sunday, 1.29.06
* Academy Award nominations: Tuesday, 1.31.06
* Writers Guild Awards: Saturday, 2.4.06
* BAFTA Awards: Sunday, 2.19.06
* Independent Spirit Awards: Saturday, 3.4.06
* Academy Awards telecast: Sunday, 3.5.06
* Rest Period: March through late June-slash-early July ’06
* Campaigning Strategizing for 2006 Awards (i.e., 2007 Academy Awards) commences and long-term expectations begin to come into focus: Early to Mid-July 2006.
Rumble in the Jungle
I saw King Kong for the second time Monday morning (12.5), and I feel the same way I did after my first viewing Sunday night. About 110 minutes of this three-hour film (i.e., the last two-thirds) are rock ‘n’ roll and worth double the ticket price. And the finale is genuinely touching.
After Sunday night’s screening at the Academy theatre I called the better parts of this monkey movie “damned exciting in an emotional, giddily absurd, logic-free adrenalized way.”
And then I offered a limited apology to its creator, Peter Jackson. “You aren’t that bad, bro,” I said. “You got a few things right this time. The movie is going to lift audiences out of their seats. And I need to say ‘I’m sorry’ for bashing you so much because you’ve almost whacked the ball out of the park this time.”
Almost, I say.
King Kong is too lumpy and draggy during the first hour or so to be called exquisite or masterful, but there’s no denying that it wails from the 70-minute mark until the big weepy finale at the three-hour mark. Monkey die, everybody cry.
The emotional support comes from the current between Kong and Naomi Watts, who is pretty much the soul of the film. I was concerned that the tender eye-rap- port between them would be too much, but it isn’t. It’s relatively restrained and subtle and full of feeling.
And Andy Serkis’ Kong performance doesn’t play like any kind of “Gollum Kong” (which I fretted about a year and a half ago in this space), and in fact he creates something surprisingly life-like, or do I mean ape-like?
The good ship Kong starts out with a spirited montage (scored with a classic Al Jolson tune called “I’m Sittin’ On Top of the World”) that shows what Depression- era 1933 New York City probably looked and felt like on the streets. The recrea- tions of this bygone Manhattan are awesome, immaculate…CGI illusion at its most profound.
So the first ten or so minutes are fine, but then things start to get lunky and pokey and meandering, and the dialogue becomes increasingly stiff and speechy, and before you know it Kong is close to crashing on the rocks and suffering a gash in the hull.
It’s very touch-and-go from roughly the 10 to the 65- or 70-minute mark. I was shifting in my seat and going “uh-oh.” But things take off once Kong snatches Watts, and the energy stays high and mighty from there to the finale.
You can break Kong down into three sections…
(a) The draggy 70-minute first act, which is all New York set-up, character exposi- tion, the long sea voyage to Skull Island, tedious philosophizing and no action to speak of;
(b) the breathtaking, nearly 70-minute Skull Island rumble-in-the-jungle section, including the breathtaking dino-run sequence (an absolute instant classic that’s likely to drive most of the repeat business in and of itself), Kong vs. the T-Rex trio, and the icky spider-and-insect pit sequence;
(c) the 42 or 43-minute New York finale with Kong on-stage, breaking the chrome- steel chains and escaping, trashing Manhattan, finding Watts, and facing planes and fate atop the Empire State building.
If I were a 14 year-old kid talking to friends about all of us seeing Kong a second or third time, I would suggest that everyone try to slip into the theatre after the first hour because who wants to sit through all that talky crap again?
Kong isn’t better than Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures because it’s almost entirely about enthusiasm and has almost nothing to do with restraint (bad word!), but it’s still the most thoroughly pulse-pumping, rousingly kick-ass film Jackson’s ever delivered, and respect needs to be paid.
And I mean especially by someone who’s been bashing the pud out of Jackson for the last four years or so, calling him an indulgent (and overly indulged), excessive, paint-splattering “wheeeeee!” director all this time.
Make no mistake — Kong shows Jackson is still all of these things. But Kong is a movie with a big heart and a stupidly exuberant joie de cinema coarsing through its veins…during the second and third acts, I mean.
And even though Jackson has gone way beyond the point where he’s able to show minimal respect for physics and could-this-happen? issues of logic and probability …a point from which he’ll never return…he manages such amazing visual feats and surges once the film takes off that all objections are moot. Even if some of the action scenes are cartoonishly wham-bam and ridiculous.
Life-size Kong model currently sitting in Manthatan’s Times Square
I’ll get into this a bit more later in the week, but I felt I had to cop to the fact that Jackson has hit one deep into center-left field.
Jack Black’s Carl Denham isn’t at all bad (he’s mouthy and slimy, but he doesn’t reach for outright comedy), Adrien Brody inhabits the playwright-hero to sensitive perfection, and Kong’s snaggle tooth is glimpsed only a few times and a non-issue.
Sometime next week I’m going to run a list of things in King Kong that make little or no sense (and it’s a long list), but right now it’s simply time to acknowledge that the parts of the film that get your blood racing and your emotions worked up work really well.
[Incidentally: I wrote last night that King Kong starts with an overture taken from Max Steiner’s original score for the 1933 film. However, I learned today [Monday] that Steiner’s overture was played before the presentation of Jackson’s film as a mood-setter by the people in the projection department at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences theatre, so it isn’t attached to the film and won’t be heard by regular audiences. That’s a shame.]
Remember This
Norman Lloyd, 90, is in only three scenes in In Her Shoes and is on-screen maybe seven or eight minutes, but his performance is one of the most poignant notes in a film that’s got more than a few of them.
It’s not one of those burn-through-the-screen performances (along the lines of, say, Beatrice Straight’s fight-with-Bill-Holden scene in Network). It’s more like a coaxer. You can sense Lloyd’s intellectual energy and zest for life despite his character’s withered state, and you can feel and admire the tenderness he shows to Maggie …tenderness mixed in with a little classroom discipline.
(l. to. r.) Cameron Diaz and Norman Lloyd, playing “the Professor,” considering the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop in In Her Shoes
He plays a sightless retired college professor who prods Diaz’s Maggie character, who is dyslexic and can’t read a billboard slogan without stumbling, into reading poetry to him — specifically a poem about loss and emotional guardedness by Elizabeth Bishop.
At first Maggie is reluctant, then she agrees to read to him…slowly, almost pain- fully…I have a dyslexic friend and she doesn’t read this slowly…but she gradually improves.
Then Lloyd prods her into explaining what she thinks of the poem. She tries to duck this, but Lloyd — using skills he’s picked up during a lifetime of teaching — won’t let her.
This isn’t just the heart of the scene — it’s a pivotal scene in the film. It’s the moment when Maggie turns the corner and starts taking steps to be someone a little better…because she starts believing in her ability to see through to the core of things, and in the first-time-ever notion that she has a lot more to develop and uncover within herself.
I know how cliched it sounds to say a character “turns a corner” and so on, but sometimes these moments happen in life. You just have to be able to hear the little voice in the back of your head that says, “You’ve taken a small step…you’ve just moved along.”
Norman Lloyd in his living room of his Brentwood home — Tuesday, 9.27, 5:45 pm.
I said Lloyd was in three scenes — he’s really in five.
There’s a brief scene near the end of the film in which Diaz and Lloyd’s grandson — a doctor — talk about him and then how Lloyd has spoken about her. Lloyd is “there,” so to speak, and like Bishop’s poem, the subtext is loss.
In the film’s final minutes Diaz reads another poem — this one by e.e. cummings — and this time with more confidence and feeling. And Lloyd is there again.
It’s funny, but I feel as if I’ve known Lloyd all my life via his performance in Alfred Hitchcock’s Saboteur, and now, in my mind (and everyone else’s, I’ll bet, once the film opens), he’s back again and on the map.
I’m not going into some Hollywood journalist suck-up routine when I say Lloyd ought to be handed a Best Supporting Actor nomination. He’s really earned it. It’s hard enough to make an impact like this with a fully-rounded part, but with only one scene to work with…well.
I called him yesterday morning and did a quick interview, and then I drove over to his place in Brentwood in the late afternoon to snap a couple of photos.
I want to be just like Norman Lloyd when I’m almost 91. He’s done everything, been everywhere and knows (or knew) everyone. And he’s healthy and spirited with the intellectual vigor of a well-educated 37 year-old.
Lloyd has been acting since the `30s and producing since the `50s. He’s been directed on-stage by Orson Welles (in “Julius Caesar” and “Shoemaker’s Holiday”) and Elia Kazan, and on film by Hitchcock twice (Spellbound was the other film), and Jean Renoir (The Southerner), Charlie Chaplin (Limelight), Peter Weir (Dead Poet’s Society) and Martin Scorsese (The Age of Innocence).
He lives on a quiet sycamore-lined street in a beautiful ranch-style home, in front of which horses go clop-clopping by in the late afternoon. He was born in New Jersey and grew up talking like one of the Dead End kids, but since the ’30s he’s spoken with a refined mid-Atlantic accent (learned at the hand of acting teacher Eva Le Gallienne). He drives a beautiful black Jaguar and has a doormat with a quote from Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night.”
And he plays tennis well enough to have competed two months ago in the finals of the DGA tennis tournament. (His doubles partner is 45 years younger.)
Last year Limelight Editions published Lloyd’s autobiography called “Stages: Of Life in Theatre, Film and Television.”
He was told about the In Her Shoes part by his agent, Merritt Blake, and went down to meet with Curtis Hanson and producer Carol Fenolen.
Lloyd (lower left) and Robert Cummings during finale in Alfred Hitchcock’s Saboteur
“I don’t ‘read’ for parts,” says Lloyd. “I myself have produced a great deal. I was one of Alfred Hitchcock’s producers on his TV show in the `50s, and I know that a radio actor back in the 1930s could read marvellously well on an audition because he was trained to read quickly, whereas other actors who might have been better in the long run sometimes couldn’t read as well.
“Anyway, my point is that at the end of our conversation Curtis said, `You have worked with the greatest directors in the history of this business’…which is true. And that was the extent of our meeting. I was told I had the part the next day.”
I told Lloyd I thought his performance was enhanced — intensified — by the fact that his character’s sightless eyes are always trained on the ceiling when he speaks with Diaz.
“You have uttered an amazing truth about acting,” he replied. “It is a wonderful thing when you’re acting and you eliminate one sense…sight, hearing, something. It makes it more powerful. I didn’t play the character as a sick man. To be without sight added to the voice, to the presence.”
His scenes with Diaz were shot over two or three days in a hospital in Arcadia. Like many of his generation he takes a straightforward approach to acting. His motto is “just say the words.”
There’s a beautiful drawing of Lloyd’s wife Peggy on the living room wall near his front door. The artist is Don Bachardy, and it was drawn 32 years ago…just as Lloyd’s wife had learned of the death of Pablo Picasso, whom she deeply admired and which accounts, he says, for her sad expression.
“My wife is 92,” Lloyd confides. “We’ve been married 69 years, and she tells everyone she robbed the cradle.”
What’s Lloyd been doing all these years to have lived so long and still be so alert and in such good shape?
“I eat a steak or two every week, although I don’t make a steady diet of that,” he replies. “No shellfish. I gave up smoking in 1943. I’ve played tennis all my life. For years I rode a bicycle here but with the traffic and everything I’ve given that up.
“The positive thing is that I was young in the Depression era, and the Depression people had more of a positive attitude about things. Now there’s a cynical thing in the air…I don’t see that same positiveness.”
Lloyd wrote an afterword to a 2004 Signet Classics Penguin paperback that contains four Shaw plays….’Candida,’ ‘Mrs. Warren’s Profession,’ ‘Arms and the Man’ and `Man and Superman.’ “I’m still tied in with Shaw,” he says, “although he did become bitter, like Mark Twain, about the human race.”
Cameron Diaz, Norman Lloyd at In Her Shoes post-premiere party at Spago of Beverly Hills — Wednesday, 9.28, 11:40 pm.
I was certain that Lloyd would be unusual and inquisitive enough to be an internet expert, but no. He is, however, a “careful” newspaper reader. As a favor I agreed to print out a copy of this column and give it to him at Wednesday night’s (9.28) In Her Shoes after-party.
Does he ever get recognized in public? “Of late not so much,” he says. “I was recognized in the `40s after Saboteur came out, and in the ’80s occasionally because of my part in St. Elsewhere (i.e., “Dr. Auschlander”), which I did every week for six years.
“But just the other day I was in a Chinese restaurant — VIP Harbor Seafood at the corner of Wilshire and Barrington — and six guys from 20th Century Fox who had just seen the film…they all came over to congratulate.”
Plays High, Sold Low
In Her Shoes may or may not be appearing to handicappers as an awards-level thing. I don’t care to argue this point, but every so often there’s a disconnect between my views and those of jaded ivory-tower elites that just staggers me.
On the other hand, if I hadn’t yet seen it and had come upon Liz Smith’s rave on the film’s website, I might have a moment of pause. Smith guarantees “you will laugh and cry in equal measure because this is simply a wonderful film…one of the best in years” — fine.
(l. to. r.) Variety screening series host Pete Hammond, In Her Shoes star Toni Collette, and director Curtis Hanson during post-screenign q & a at Hollywood’s Arclight — Monday, 9.26, 9:50 pm.
But then she raves, “When you see a movie that looks this good from the get-go, you just know you’re in for a terrific time.” I know what Smith is trying to say, but “looks” aren’t worth a damn in the eyes of Sri Vishnu, and a promise of cosmetic attractiveness usually implies a lack of inner character.
Trust me, In Her Shoes is much better than this.
I know the film has been working on an emotional level at the screenings I’ve attended, and so does 20th Century Fox or they wouldn’t be giving it another nationwide sneak this weekend…the movie sells itself.
The cynical view is that they’re doing two sneaks in a row because they can’t figure out how to get the word out otherwise, as indicated by the fact that it opens in less than two weeks and it isn’t really tracking. (Although that may change with Thurs- day’s tracking report, which will reflect last weekend’s sneak.)
I think year-end critics awards will help. I know Oscar watchers will be surprised if Toni Collette doesn’t catch on as a Best Actress contender; ditto Shirley MacLaine for Best Supporting Actress.
And if you ask me Norman Lloyd’s brief but elegant turn as a blind and bedridden hospital patient easily warrants a Best Supporting Actor nom.
The Diaz-only “teaser” one-sheet for In Her Shoes (l.) and the far less visible Collette-Diaz version that gives both plus Shirley Maclaine a shared aboe-the-title billing
Lloyd has been acting and producing all his life (he had an ongoing role as a staff doctor on St. Elsewhere in the `80s), but his In Her Shoes turn is the charm. His gentle, sharp-witted ex-college professor — a performance that takes off and comes in for a landing in the space of a single scene — is the most memorable thing he’s done since Frank Fry in Saboteur (’42). It’s a comeback after 63 years.
For the first 40 minutes or so, Cameron Diaz doesn’t seem to be doing much more than playing her standard ditz-babe, but once she arrives in Florida and hooks up with MacLaine things start to improve. Then she meets up with Lloyd and performs her best scene in the film, and does herself proud.
But there’s no washing away the stain of The Sweetest Thing and the two Charlie’s Angels films. In my heart and mind those three were abominations…war crimes. Granted, there’s a balance factor from Diaz’s work in Vanilla Sky, Any Given Sunday and There’s Something About Mary, but any and all McG associations must be condemned in perpetuity.
The only other thing throwing me is that Fox is still using that one-sheet with just Diaz alone on their official site. Once again, big studio marketers are selling an idea they think will put arses in seats (hey, girls-who-buy-In Touch-and-Us in the supermarket…another giggly-ditzoid Cameron Diaz film!) instead of selling the movie they have.
Diaz, Shirley Maclaine
I was under the impression that the Diaz one-sheet was just a teaser poster and that the real In Her Shoes one-sheet (with Collette and Diaz pictured side-by-side, and their names along with MacLaine’s sharing above-the-title space) was the keeper.
Diaz is the one they paid $15 million-plus to star in this movie, and nobody really knows Collette, etc., but I still don’t get it. This is a really good sister movie…a heart movie…and Fox seems to be trying to dissuade people who like this sort of thing (including sophisticated filmgoers) from putting this film on the top of their lists.
Then again I’m told that last weekend’s sneak was well attended, and reactions have been very good. This is primarily a woman’s film, and naturally Fox is going to pitch to the core constituency.
“You like the picture, fine…and men may like it,” a marketing guy told me this morning. “But women love it.”
In the hands of Gary David Goldberg (Must Love Dogs), Roger Kumble (The Sweetest Thing), Audrey Wells (Under the Tuscan Sun) or the evil McG, In Her Shoes would have almost certainly been a lesser thing.
Toni Collette, Curtis Hanson and Cameron Diaz preparing to shoot a first-act, out-on-the-town scene
But Fox went with Curtis Hanson, and that decision — combined with Susannah Grant’s way-above-average chick-flick script (based on the novel by Jennifer Weiner) — has made a big difference.
Hanson has brought the same sureness of tone, knack for economical story-telling and clarity of presentation evident in 8 Mile, Wonder Boys and L.A. Confidential to this thing. It’s a film that’s been expertly finessed and perfectly music-cued and made to feel emotionally grounded.
And the point is made again — it’s the singer, not the song.
Regarding Violence
If you’ve seen David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence, you know it’s a philosophical double-dealer, and this is what makes it a complex, cut-above film. It’s not just saying violence is a kind of terrible virus — it’s also saying it has a way of turning us on.
When Jack (Ashton Holmes), the son of cafe owner Tom Stall (Viggo Mortenson), defuses a potentially violent encounter with a school bully by sarcastically acknow- ledging the other guy’s alpha male superiority, etc., you admire Jack for being a hip and clever guy.
Viggo Mortenson as small-town nice guy Tom Stall in David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence
But when they meet a second time and Jack, inspired by his father’s having become a hero because he killed a couple of bad guys, wails on the bullies and leaves them bruised and groaning, several people in the theatre (at L.A.’s Grove plex) were clapping and whoo-whooing.
Is there anyone out there who thinks Cronenberg didn’t deliver this scene in just the right way so he would get this reaction?
And of course, the steam that comes hissing out of Edie Stall (Maria Bello) isn’t just about feelings of betrayal.
Edie is furious, naturally, when she realizes her husband has been lying to her for years about his past. But when she and Tom have that end-of-Act-Two fight and she goes “fuck you, Joey” and walks off and Tom grabs her by the ankle and they do that thing on the stairs (a scene that wasn’t scripted, by the way…it just “happened” when they shot it), it’s obvious that Tom’s killer moves have lit a fire in Edie’s furnace.
Jack Stall (Ashton Holmes) and the high-school baddies
And yet the violence that has happened has obviously stunned and hurt this family of four. In that haunting final scene, Cronenberg shows us that Jack and his younger sister are willing to forgive and forget as they offer food to Tom, but there’s not much assurance that things will henceforth be fine…Cronenberg leaves us in limbo.
That’s filmmaking, pally. Lob the ball to the audience in the final frame and let them sort it all out…nice.
One beef with this film: Peter Suschitzky’s cinemography looks like it was soaked in Bolivian coffee during lab processing. I started to wonder if the projector lamp at the Grove’s theatre #1 was dying, but the lamps in the other theatres were fine. The last film I remember being this muddy-looking was Fight Club.
Grabs
Waiting in a very long line of cars trying to get onto the Fox lot for Tuesday night’s screening of Domino — 9.27, 7:25 pm.
Wilshire and Brockton on Sunday, 9.25, 4:50 pm…following a long bike ride from Brentwood to Venice and back, which I was very glad to do because it caused me to re-realize how much nicer, cleaner and more aesthetically pleasant Santa Monica and Venice are than the shittier areas of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Okay, so the spiritual element isn’t as vibrant here as it is in New York City, but the women are dishier and the leaves are bigger and more plentiful, and the sea smells better standing on the beach in Santa Monica than it does in Far Rockaway
Taken from the vantage point of the Beverly Hills Public Library on Santa Monica Blvd., and looking northeast — Sunday, 9/25, 6:15 pm.
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.
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